The battle between the MPAA and related industry bodies and piracy has been a long one not likely to end any time soon. In a report the Motion Picture Association of America made public today, Google and other search engines were accused of helping facilitate piracy by providing links to copyrighted content for non-piracy related […]
Netflix has to be one of the most popular video streaming services around nowadays, which means the company needs to stay on top of what its viewers want to watch on its service. What better way to learn what people want to watch online than through checking piracy statistics in order to determine what shows they should buy? (more…)
Netflix Considers Piracy Stats Prior To Purchasing Shows original content from Ubergizmo. 
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The media industry has had a long and adversarial relationship with piracy, and Netflix, who provides legitimate streaming access to content, is no different. So it sounds ironic, and yet at the same time almost unexpected, that Netflix indirectly benefits from piracy by helping it choose which shows to buy. As Netflix begins making its […]
The hardest part of beating piracy is finding a way to compete with free. Netflix does it by making things dumb easy, that and purposefully picking up shows that are popular with pirates.
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By its own account, the RIAA will submit 30 million link takedown requests to Google this week. Google will ultimately comply with most of them, but the RIAA wants more. Now Google’s fighting back against censorship with data.
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It’s a new school year, which means it’s time for the bright-eyed youth of our fine country to move into their dorm rooms, fire up their laptops, and take advantage of the blazing-fast, weapons-grade campus Internet to torrent the movies and music they missed over the summer. Which colleges and universities have the biggest BitTorrent habit?
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Late last month, a failure to negotiate fees between Time Warner Cable and CBS resulted in the first company dropping the latter one from its service in many markets, causing about 3 million people to lose access to the network. Although a truce was offered earlier this month, the spat continues, and in its wake […]
The six-strike copyright system was leaked and talked about at length for many months, delayed once, and eventually launched back in February of this year. With it comes a series of warnings and eventual punishment on the behalf of many big-name ISPs for those caught pirating. Now sources have come forward to the folks over […]
The Copyright Alert System, more popularly known as the “six strikes” policy, hasn’t exactly received a warm welcome thanks to the disciplinary measures it calls for (like throttled connection speeds). According to Variety, Comcast is currently developing a new way of dealing with piracy that’s arguably less punitive than CAS. In the proposed system, users that have been flagged for illegal downloads via peer-to-peer file sharing services like BitTorrent would be provided with links to legal means of accessing the same content through Comcast’s own Xfinity service or third party providers like Amazon. Unlike CAS, this system doesn’t seem to focus on penalties so much as it would gently nudge subscribers towards legal options. While it’s not likely that the program is intended to replace CAS, it could potentially signal a shift away from an unpopular policy. Though little information is known about Comcast’s plans at this time, we’ll keep you posted as we learn more.
Filed under: Internet
Source: Variety
Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.
Some of the following, for legal reasons, may or may not be fictional.
My first modem was a 300-baud Apple-Cat II. It was an expansion card for the Apple II and simply plugged into a phone line. It was, simply put, a bad-ass piece of technology that turned me into a total digital delinquent. While my parents thought I was innocently learning to code BBSes (bulletin board systems) I was actually learning how to get things for free and paving the way for software pirates, phone phreaks and straight-up frauds of the future.
The Apple-Cat II could connect to other Apple-Cat IIs at 1200 baud, which made file transfers pretty quick for the time. This meant we could trade entire games in about an hour. We’d log into bulletin board systems, share lists of things we had and set up times to dial one another to trade games. Usually a barter would take place — your Aztec for my Hard Hat Mack. It was a lot like trading baseball cards, I imagine.
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