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It turns out that movie theaters are very sensitive to bootlegging (filming a movie in a theater with a camera so that you can then sell the movie or post it on YouTube). Therefore, there are strict laws against filming in theaters. For example: UNAUTHORIZED RECORDINGS IN THEATRES In the U.S., there are laws against [...]
A new way of looking at the world – “An emerging set of tools is making it easier than ever to track and compile all sorts of “data” and display it in a way that’s relatively easy to understand…” How to Use a Cyclotron Particle Accelerator to Fight Cancer – And you thought MRI machines [...]
Hey, guess what? It appears that software piracy is becoming a thing of the past! That’s pretty cool, right? We have cloud computing to thank for that, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Parrella. Elinor Mills at CNET attended Symantec’s Norton Cyber Crime Day, where she heard him speak and wrote about it late last week.
The reasons why are pretty simple: Software developers (developers, developers, developers — sorry, I still can’t help it. Thanks, Mr. Balmer) are switching to a downloadable software model. So there are fewer discs that can be copied. And with IT services heading toward cloud computing, people won’t need to install much software on their computers at all. Again, fewer hard copies of software to be pirated.
But, as you may expect, there’s a downside. Isn’t there always?
Parrella feels that the concentration of software in data centers means those facilities will be the most likely targets of attack in years to come.
I thought maybe I should mention that France is taking steps toward plummeting us into a new extragovernmental reality where big business acts as law enforcement against copyright pirates.
Just a few years ago, people who traded music and movies illegally tended to be savvy users who populated bit torrent sites and newsgroups. That’s changed dramatically…
According to the BBC, the Swedish courts will hand down a verdict on Friday in the copyright lawsuit filed against the torrent tracking site called The Pirate Bay. But this lawsuit isn’t just about copyright laws — it’s about how the Web functions. Throughout the trial, The Pirate Bay’s defense has been to maintain that the site doesn’t host any material under copyright. The site only tracks torrents, giving the site’s users an easy way to find files and download them. In that sense, The Pirate Bay is really just a specialized search engine.
The torrent file protocol has a bad rap because of piracy but that’s not the main reason torrents exist. Torrents make it easier to distribute large files across networks. The initial file is called a seed. Computers that contact the server hosting the seed are called peers. As peers begin to download the seed, they make the file available for others to download.
While Web sites around the world indulged in traditional shenanigans in observance of April Fools, executives at 20th Century Fox weren’t so much as cracking a smile. That’s because someone managed to upload a copy of the unreleased (and unfinished) film “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” to a Web site. Movie pirates pounced on the opportunity to view the film a month before its official release.
Digital Rights Management — or DRM — is a method through which content providers attempt to prevent consumers from distributing content without the approval of content providers. Learn more about the DRM controversy in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.
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