Pornographers have decided its time to close ranks with the entertainment cartels after being their scapegoats for so long.
According XBIZ.COM “adult industry members have announced the formation of the global anti-piracy agency, a non-profit trade organisation dedicated to combating content theft, from illegally downloaded internet content to illegally reproduced DVD’s”.
XBIZ.COM says “initial funding has been provided by Sureflixx Digital Distribution INC parent company of gay distribution network Maleflixx”.
“This is really in recognition of a problem that everyone is aware of and is affecting everyone in the industry” according to G.A.P.A interim executive director Caryn Goldberg.
According to a story, the adult industry, producers, distributors, retailers, cable operators, VOD and mobile providers loses nearly $2 billion a year in revenue. This left Goldberg declaring, that “we’re not talking so much about a guy that downloads a couple of videos illegally, although that is a problem. It’s the all the file-sharing services. Look what the recording industry did to Napster. It’s gross infringements, like file-sharing and bittorrent”
The recording industry indeed was responsible for the closure of napster.
According to XBIZ.COM, Goldberg is currently running a one-woman operation and is looking to staff up within the next few weeks adding that this organization is dedicated to the industry as a whole. “We’re here and I’d say that we’ll be in full operation by September, that’s when you’ll really see some action from us.” Goldberg said
Porn stars lobbying Washington politicians. Well they may be a chance that they already know them from personal standpoint.
Fred Reichert, Allofmp3.com watcher checks in from Holland, he was the one who at the start of the year accurately prophesied the demise of the Russian site that was hated and despised by both the entertainment cartels and the Bush Administration. He is now wondering, who left the back door open? As the memory of Allofmp3.com does much more than just lingers on despite it being gone.
They news about the shutting down of Allofmp3 and its successor MP3Sparks will more than please the Russian authorities. However, were they responsible for this? In addition, if so, why did Allofmp3 leave the back door to their servers open?
The Alltunes application is still working as before according to reports from the Allofmp3 FAQ at Museekster.com. Alltunes is a ‘third party’ download manager for the presently defunct Allofmp3 website. You can still order and download music using your Allofmp3 login, pass and, of course, your existing Allofmp3 balance as soon as you have Alltunes installed.
The Allofmp3 server which allows you to get your music in just about any format and bitrate still delivers despite even the unsurpassed online coding. You can even top-up your account with a Master Card if you are lucky. However, this does not work for all accounts for some strange reason. Users who get a link to Chronopay as payment processor end up at a dead end because that link is dead. However, the lucky ones are those who get a link to eCentru for handling the payment as they are able to get more credit to continue downloading.
The fact that all the other Russian MP3 sites remain untouched and new sites keep showing up all over like scavengers trying to rip the remains of the supposedly-defunct Allofmp3 is another thing that makes action by the Russian authorities unlikely.
The Pirate Bay is again under attack from Hollywood, its long time nemesis. This time around, Hollywood is utilizing its political influence to pressure Sweden’s elected and appointed authorities into a stage ultimately pointed at shutting down The Pirate Bay.
Hollywood is using child pornography as its weapon against The Pirate Bay in this instance. Major studios have exhausted every tactic, up to and including making outrageous claims, using Swedish police in raids and seizing computer equipment in an effort to kill the site. With a strategy that’s extremely successful in the United States in particular, Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney have turned to one of their favorite tactic, which is raising the issue of child pornography. Politicians ‘friendly’ to Hollywood use the specter of kiddie’s porn as an excuse to try to close down sites that studios don’t like. Those same politicians also use it to introduce vested interested legislation. In the name of corporate profits, the impossibly wealthy corporate movie clan tries to hold back the tide when they become terrified by a handful of people with limited resources that operates an online indexing site. The studios take it for granted that they can snap their fingers and have national police forces, funded by taxpayers, immediately placed at their disposal similar to their counterparts in the music industry, dominated by EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US).
They’ve been able to turn a wholly civil concept, copyright infringement, into a new crime, file sharing, and through the mainstream media, elevate it to the level of rape and murder using propaganda techniques refined by Nazis during World War II.
According to a post on Sweden’s Pirate Party site, “this Friday, it became known that the Swedish Police Board will shut down The Pirate Bay, the popular file sharing site, by classifying it as a pornography site in the block list that Swedish Internet Providers respect”.
Traffic shaping, bandwidth throttling, and now “traffic prioritization.” To different ISPs, these terminologies mean different things. To the P2P end user it means the same – “my download speeds aren’t as fast as they used to be!” It’s a contentious issue that gripped the ISP and file-sharing community, leading to a technological arms race to control the destiny of bandwidth.<br /><br />To counter traffic shaping, many BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 clients have incorporated protocol encryption, which masks the type of traffic traversing a network. This has met with a level of success, as some customers have claimed the technique works, while others continue to have problems. Of course, this depends on the end user’s ISP and how aggressively traffic is shaped. Some ISP customers complain their BitTorrent traffic is reduced to a trickle, while other customers hardly notice a difference. <br />
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The latter is what Westnet, an Australian ISP, is hoping its P2P customers will experience. In an announcement made on <a href=http://westnetblog.com.au/ target=_blank>Westnet’s blog</a>, the ISP announced publicly that it has been “prioritizing” P2P traffic for over a year. <br />
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“Westnet has been trialing some traffic prioritisation tools on our network over the past year with very positive results. As a result, we will continue to use the tools on an ongoing basis.”<br />
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Westnet’s motivation for “prioritizing” bandwidth stems from the launch of other high consumption protocols such as “online gaming, web browsing, e-mail and VOIP”, as they claim P2P may negatively impact the latency of such applications.<br />
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So has Westnet begun clamping down on the bandwidth allotted to P2P? Not exactly. Westnet points out that the amount of bandwidth allotted to P2P in most circumstance has not changed. The allotted bandwidth slated to P2P is dynamically altered only when other high capacity protocols such as VoIP challenges the total bandwidth of the ISP’s network.<br />
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In other words, for arguments sake let’s assume that Westnet’s total bandwidth capacity is 100 megabits. On a normal day, 60 megabits is used for P2P (BitTorrent, Ares, eMule, etc.) 20 megabits is used for web browsing, 10 megabits for online gaming, 5 megabits for email, and remaining 5 megabits for VoIP. Then one day, an unusually large number of Westnet customers decide to play World of Warcraft. What usually only consumed 10 megabits now consumes 30 megabits. P2P users would then see their allotment decrease to accommodate the online gamers. Once they’re finished however, bandwidth levels for P2P are restored to normal.<br />
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The reaction on the <a href=http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=769331&p=1 target=_blank>Whirlpool forums</a> has been largely supportive, as consumers have stated they haven’t noticed any difference in their download speeds for the year prioritization has been tested – although some were suspect that Westnet took a year to divulge this information. Interestingly enough, according to representatives of Westnet, only P2P traffic is being prioritized. However oddly, Westnet’s traffic prioritization doesn’t include Skype or Joost as P2P traffic.<br />
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As BitTorrent is the king of bandwidth consumption, it’s likely this protocol is the real target of this ongoing initiative. Westnet concludes that the “benefits of traffic prioritization” will be brought to other Australian states in the near future. At the end of the day, P2P users can at least be thankful Westnet isn’t shaping file-sharing traffic.<br><br>
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Planning to publicly allow users to watch the new Harry Potter movie or other TV Shows without charge? Then you better to keep your service hushed up. YouTVpc and Peekvid who both offer their users to watch streaming TV shows and movies without charge are being nailed down by MPAA.
The founders of YouTVpc gave an interview to Wall Street Journal and just yesterday MPAA breathed down its neck and filed a lawsuit of online copyright infringement. YouTVpc and Peekvid have linked to other sites outside US in providing their users with endless free of charge streaming TV shows and movies.
MPAA claimed that the major studios experienced a terrible loss of more than $7 billion in 2005 although this fact is not proven.
“Sites like YouTVpc and Peekvid contribute to and profit from massive copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organizing, and indexing links to infringing content found on the Internet that consumers can then view on-demand by visiting these sites,”
“YouTVpc and Peekvid rely on advertisers to maintain their illegal websites and they profit handsomely from a seemingly endless stream of third-party advertising pitches.
Peekvid - whose servers are located in San Antonio, Texas - averages over 53,000 unique users per day who view over 184,000 pages of content. YouTVpc – whose servers are located in Scottsdale, Arizona - averages more than 6,000 unique daily visitors who view over 21,000 pages of content per day.
In addition to advertising revenues, operators of YouTVpc solicit monetary donations through a “Donations†tab on the website that allows users to make financial contributions through PayPal.com.”
Dan Glickman, MPAA leader, also went further that big studios such as Time Warner, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney are being attacked unrelentingly by such sites. It’s not their own pockets that those big studios are thinking, it is also the sake of their support workers.
The entertainment industries have quite a long history when it comes to hammering other companies who could potentially disrupt their competitive advantage. One of the grey areas that they seem to permanently target is file sharing. Needless to say that several businesses have gone extinct thanks to the relentless lawsuits, however the numbers of new companies keep growing as illustrated by these quotes.
“The Internet’s graveyard is deep with companies that have been sued out of business by the entertainment industry. I think the prevailing sense is that they are winning the battles but losing the war. Despite the lawsuits, there is more file sharing than ever.”
“We are rooting out those who enable copyright infringement on the Internet. We will continue to take such actions against sites that are profiting from the theft of other people’s creative works…Our strategy is to go after people committing copyright theft on the Internet at all levels.”
“The lawsuits are little more than ’scare tactics’. The MPAA is using legal muscle to scare people but really they are the ones who are afraid. They fear technology but technology always prevails.”
The first quote is from Fred Von Lohmann who is the advocate for EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), while the second is from Hollywood MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the third is a retaliation statement from Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay co founder. The PirateBay was also a target of MPAA.
“Seven years after a judge ordered Napster to halt music swapping, online piracy continues to thrive. Some estimates hold that the large video and music files passing back and forth over the Internet chew up more than a third of the Web’s bandwidth. Meanwhile, the movie industry is following in the footsteps of the record companies by waging prolonged legal battles.”
In accordance to these lawsuits, TorrentSpy who previously said that it will never monitor users’ activities now follow the safe road by logging its users’ activities following a successful lawsuit from MPAA. MPAA used bribery as its last resort in bringing TorrentSpy down. Dean Garfield, MPAA’s legal director of affair, have promised informant US$15,000 for stealing TorrentSpy information.
“Dean Garfield expressly told the informant, on behalf of the MPAA, regarding the information that he requested, “We don’t care how you get it.” He assured the informant, when the informant expressed concerns about potential liability for obtaining or providing such information to the MPAA, that the MPAA would protect the informant from any liability for obtaining or providing such information.”
Isohunt has traveled the same route taking the cue from TorrentSpy by establishing FileRights, which is a filtering service designed to please the big entertainment industries. These advances have brought worry to the people that the ‘scare’ tactics, as quoted by Peter Sunde above, do really work in scaring the companies.
As quoted from this press release, EMI has signed a deal with Snocap to sell DRM (Digital Right Management) free high quality MP3s. This deal will enables songs download of several artists and will become another form of distribution rather than traditional online stores.
“Artists whose tracks will be available via SNOCAP MyStores at launch include 30 Seconds to Mars, The Almost, Ryland Angel, The Bird and The Bee, KORN, Joe Lovano, Dean Martin, MIMs, Relient K, Saosin, TobyMac and Yellowcard,” says EMI.
It’s time to get familiar with the Snocap widgets as they will be displayed on the EMI artists’ websites. Although the number of artists is still few, you can bet that there will be more to come very soon. EMI’s Blue Note record will also collaborate in this project by featuring SNOCAP MyStores in its front page.
And you can bet that the recording giant will also utilize the power of social book marking by enabling blogs and other third party sites to put the widgets on their site. Although this seems like an encouraging development EMI and other big recording companies need to learn about appreciating their customers.
Accompanied by Warner Music, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, they have barraged the customers with potential lawsuit in order to get their products sold. But at least EMI have taken the first step, let’s see whether the rest will follow suit.
Nine Inch Nail’s lead man Trent Reznor made news recently with this quote when being interviewed by a reporter with
Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper.
A few weeks earlier, while browsing a rack at a CD store Reznor was angered to see the groups new album “Year Zero” retailing for $29. So when the reporter asked what he thought about file sharing and the high prices of CDs, he went off - “…I steal music too, I’m not gonna say I don’t”.
Reznor did say he doesn’t like the idea people get their music for free, but also lays most of the blame on the record labels greed and the ridiculous prices. You can read the entire interview on his blog. While I’m not sure I’d agree 100% with Trent, you have to give him credit for saying what he believes.
A few days later he confronted a sales guys during a industry party and asks him why his CDs are 8 dollars more than some other’s, to which the sales guy replies that NIN has a “…core audience that’s gonna buy whatever we put out, so we can charge more for that.”. That’s when Reznor REALLY goes off - “That’s the most insulting thing I’ve heard. I’ve garnered a core audience that you feel it’s OK to rip off? F— you”.
Given the choice, the record labels would insist you buy a full album when you may only want one song. And the only download sites authorized by the RIAA use proprietary software that keeps you from playing your legally purchased music on different systems.
P2P file sharing networks allow users to freely download music and many users end up purchasing the songs they like without paying for the filler tracks. We hope the record labels catch on and that P2P file sharing helps bring about a change in the way the major labels distribute music in the future.
The RIAA have chosen Linux as their operating system, it’s ironic because Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) are renowned for being a totally anti-independent organization. They detest anything that involves competition or openness yet have moved to Linux, the world’s most used open source operating system!
The RIAA attempted to move their website to 2.2.3 Red Hat last week (www.riaa.com) but the move did not run too well and the site was down for over 5 hours.
I find it quite funny that when you click on the homepage it says “Welcome to RIAA”, this is the American copyright police, you’d swear you were entering France or something “Welcome to France” or “Welcome to England”, but oh no!
The RIAA are also moving their DNS to Mindshift Technologies in an unscheduled Endeavour, they are moving from smaller company (Tomorrow’s Solutions Today) whom they had been with for a number of years. A number of domains apart from the .com domain though have failed to be moved over to Mindshift, so it seems a few problems have been occurring over at the RIAA at the moment.
In all fairness to TST they have been doing a pretty swell job over the past number of years, the RIAA website has to be one the most attacked websites on the net, repulsed by many for obvious reasons!
It still leaves us with one question however, why are they moving from a company that had done such a good job? Probably because the sue frenzy RIAA found a problem with the provider however it would be much funnier if the hosting provider was kicking the RIAA’s butt onto the lawn for a chang
“We are rooting out those who enable copyright infringement on the Internet. We will continue to take such actions against sites that are profiting from the theft of other people’s creative works…Our strategy is to go after people committing copyright theft on the Internet at all levels.”
“Artists whose tracks will be available via SNOCAP MyStores at launch include 30 Seconds to Mars, The Almost, Ryland Angel, The Bird and The Bee, KORN, Joe Lovano, Dean Martin, MIMs, Relient K, Saosin, TobyMac and Yellowcard,” says EMI.