HBO’s fantasy saga premiere of the third season of Game of Thrones broke more torrenting records last night than the bells on Khal Drogo’s braid, the gold in the Lannister coffers, and the number of wildlings swarming into the Seven Kingdoms. Now that I’ve impressed you with my Game of Thrones knowledge, here are some actual numbers.

Hundreds of thousands of people illegally downloaded the show last night, breaking the record for the largest BitTorrent swarm in history, according to TorrentFreak.

“Never before has there been a torrent with so many people sharing a file at the same time, more than 160,000 simultaneous peers,” TorrentFreak founder and editor-in-chief “Ernesto” wrote.

Current estimates show that the episode has already been downloaded over a million times. Last year, the popular fantasy HBO series was the most pirated TV show of 2012, with 4.28 million downloads for a single episode. Despite these staggering numbers, director David Petrarca is unconcerned. He said that pirated consumption only fuels the “cultural buzz” surrounding Game of Thrones and makes the show even more popular and pervasive.

Game of Thrones is certainly popular in the tech community, which has some crossover with lovers of fantasy fiction. You can’t throw a stone in SOMA without hearing whispers of “winter is coming,” and it is perfectly appropriate to refer to huskies as “direwolves.” Granted, when you mention you watch the show to people outside of this community, say to your mother during a Passover Sedar, it is not uncommon for them to be shocked and appalled that you would tune in to a show that espouses rape, violence, and explicit sexual content and make you feel shamed over your matzoh (this is purely a theoretical situation).

Certainly, the entertainment and buzz contribute to the high rates of piracy. However, the legal way to watch involves an expensive subscription to HBO, which involves an expensive subscription to cable, and those who aren’t real-world Lannisters (or even Lords), must resort to illegal methods to get their GOT fix. That said, HBO still has plenty of paying viewers. Sunday’s premiere attracted 4.4 million viewers last night, up 13 percent over last year’s premiere.

HBO has been hinting at making its content more accessible to common folk through its on-demand streaming service HBO Go. At a premiere event last month, HBO’s chief executive Richard Plepler said there was a possibility of selling standalone access to HBO Go as part of a bundled broadband subscription plan.

Until then, legions of fans will continue to illegally watch as the battle for control of the Seven Kingdoms unfolds. Resistance is as futile as stabbing a Whitewalker.

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, Texas — Kim Dotcom is the poster child for why the current set of copyright laws have gone horribly wrong, so naturally he made his way to the South by Southwest interactive show — sort of.

Dotcom is currently being prosecuted by multiple governments, including the U.S. which is trying to extradite him over his role in facilitating piracy and copyright theft through now shuttered cloud locker service Megaupload. So since he can’t  just hop a plane to the States for a quick keynote, Dotcom decided to answer questions via a Skype video call that was projected on a large screen at the event.

If you could get over the fact that Dotcom’s face was basically the only thing you could see floating around above interviewer Charles Graeber of Wired (think Zordon from Power Rangers or the Wizard from Wizard of Oz, except more German) and the constantly spotty connection, the conversation itself was a fairly decent overview of most of the stuff you’ve already heard.

“Let’s not forget, the White House agreed with SOPA. SOPA was going to be the gift to Hollywood for helping the president win the election,” Dotcom said. “When that didn’t happen, they needed a backup plan, and that was Megaupload.”

Dotcom said he still plans to sue both the U.S. government as well as the  major movie studio who helped treat civil law violations like copyright infringement as if they were criminal charges, (having explained that the U.S. can’t extradite a criminal on civil charges alone, so they engineer new reasons.)

Other Dotcom shared during the spotty video call:

• Mega is moving full steam ahead, with 3.5 million users, over 200 million files uploaded, and more than 80 third-party developers using its API.
• Dotcom doesn’t believe the U.S. will attack him with drones, but he does expect it to use them to spy on him.
• The artist-specific cloud media digital store/service for artists, MegaBox, should be released in another six months.
• He’s OK with you making a movie about his life story and screwing him on royalties by uploading pirated copies to the web.
• Supposedly, Dotcom still has a relationship with most of the artists from his MegaVideo (but he only mentioned Swiss Beatz).

VentureBeat photo/Tom Cheredar

The Pirate Bay has decided to take virtual asylum in North Korea, a country with a tyrannical leader who permits very few civil liberties to those that live there.

The Pirate Bay is an organization with a long history of facing prosecution for its role in helping people commit acts of piracy via torrent files, and it’s not been easy for it to find willing hosts to keep its website online. Last week, Sweden booted the organization from the country. And until recently, the Norwegian Pirate Party had been supplying bandwidth to keep the site running, but it has since caved to legal pressure from several major media companies that were threatening copyright violation lawsuits. However, the site is still up and running, and now we’re hearing who’s allegedly helping out.

Today, Pirate Bay leaders confirmed that North Korea was now being operated/accessed by servers located within North Korea — a move the group calls  “truly an ironic situation.”

The organization also seems to ignore North Korea’s views on personal freedoms. In an official statement, the group writes:

“We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in Korea is a first step of this country’s changing view of access to information. It’s a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do. In that way, TPB and Korea might have a special bond. We will do our best to influence the Korean leaders to also let their own population use our service, and to make sure that we can help improve the situation in any way we can. When someone is reaching out to make things better, it’s also ones duty to grab their hand.”

The move is interesting because, unlike most of the other countries The Pirate Bay has sought asylum in — North Korea doesn’t have very many friends. World governments don’t like the country for a variety of reasons, with the most glaring issue being its testing of nuclear weapons. Human rights groups don’t like country because of the aforementioned lack of civil liberties and its tyranny its citizens face. And now, it seems Hollywood has a new reason to hate North Korea.

At the same time, the very idea that North Korea would have the resources necessary to host The Pirate Bay is a bit of a stretch. The entire “confirmation” on the organization’s blog could be just another elaborate joke. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. Why not get your biggest political opponents (Hollywood) to start targeting a country that has a horrible track record for Internet freedom?

Also, several people have already pointed out that The Pirate Bay is actually being hosted in Germany, but made to look like its coming from North Korea.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Do you know much money Hollywood loses every time you download a screenshot from The Hobbit?

Probably nothing, but that isn’t preventing Warner Bros. Studios from going after Android apps like “Hobbit 3D Wallpaper HD,” which it says infringes on its copyrights.

And Warner Bros. isn’t alone. Companies like Marvel, Sony, and Viacom are all bombarding Google and Apple with claims that their app stores house dozens of apps with illegal content, as Reuters reports.

This is the new, scary face of piracy, right?

Going after tiny wallpaper apps is obviously pretty silly, but for Hollywood, the apps mean more than just lost income: They represent the new, mostly uncertain frontier for copyright infringement. And Hollywood is just starting to understand it.

Apparently, plenty of apps like “MovieTube” and “Full Classic Movies” are out there, and these offer links to dozens of full-length pirated films. Now, chances are these apps are just one-way tickets to Virusville and offer no movies at all, but Hollywood doesn’t care: They must be destroyed.

“With the rise of the second screen comes a new band of villains who pose a serious threat to the entertainment industry’s move to mobile,” Reggie Pierce, the CEO of mobile copyright protector IP Lasso, told Reuters.

But mobile piracy is in its infancy now — if it exists at all — because of one main factor: Data plans. Unless you’re one of the increasingly few people with unlimited data plans, chances are that you’re going to wait until you get home to download that illegal copy of Flight. (Though you probably shouldn’t at all because Flight was terrible.)

Photo:  Flickr/Uncle Catherine

Comcast is already has a reputation as being one of the worst companies in America, and now it wants to become one of the most annoying.

As a part of the industry’s new “six strikes” antipiracy system, Comcast will hijack suspected pirates’ web browsers with a persistent pop-pop notification, preventing them from accessing the Internet until they change their ways. (Comcast calls it a “mitigation measure.”)

Comcast says the browser hijacking will only go into effect after customers fail to respond to multiple previous Copyright Alerts like the one to the right. This means that no one should be surprised when Comcast cuts them off.

“If a consumer fails to respond to several Copyright Alerts, Comcast will place a persistent alert in any web browser under that account until the account holder contacts Comcast’s Customer Security Assurance professionals to discuss and help resolve the matter,” Comcast says.

Fortunately, Comcast says that it will never use the system to terminate accounts, nor does it affect so-called essential services like VOIP (because web browsing isn’t an “essential service,” it seems).

Still, false positives could be a problem. As with anything involving IP addresses and piracy, this sort of thing is an inexact science: While Comcast knows which customer is attached to which IP address, the same can’t be said for copyright holders, who have a track record of suing dead people, grandmas, and people who don’t even have computers.

That should, of course, horrify you if you’re Comcast customer, which — let’s be honest — is a bad enough status as it is.

2012 was a major year for the music industry — and not just because Snoop Dogg changed his name.

First, consider a report released today by market research firm NPD, which says that peer-to-peer music sharing dropped 17 percent last year. The study, which surveyed over 5,000 people, found that 40 percent of respondents said they were illegally downloading less music — or had stopped entirely.

Why? Because free and legal channels like Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora have become so useful that people don’t feel the need to download music anymore, much less pirate it.

But let’s not ignore another reality: The music industry’s attacks on services like Limewire (remember Limewire?) and Megaupload have also played a part in piracy’s decline. Twenty percent of respondents said they stopped downloading music because their favorite source had been taken down or because the spyware and virus factor had become too much to handle.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), NPD’s report comes on the same day that the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said that the music industry’s revenue grew .3 percent last year. Obviously, that’s not a significant increase, but it is the first one the music industry has seen since 1999. So while it’s not a major something, it is something. 

But NPD senior vice president Russ Crupnick says that there were many factors that went into the music industry’s slight turnaround last year.

“Whenever you see an industry growing, it’s probably due to a lot of factors — the music itself, better discovery tools, and even the retail environment. They all contribute to the health of industry, and streaming is one important component,” he told me.

Both reports remind me of a 2011 quote from Gabe Newell, the cofounder of video game publisher Valve, who knows a thing or two about being in an industry ravaged by piracy.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates

Newell was, of course, talking about people pirating games, but considering today’s news, he could have just as easily been taking about music piracy as well.

The Pirate Bay has run out of luck in Sweden, where the Swedish Pirate Party has been providing hosting for the popular file-swapping site. Due to legal threats and general harassment from a local antipiracy group, the site is now being hosted in Norway and Spain.

The antipiracy group in question is the Rights Alliance, which “stated that they intended to bring legal action against The Pirate Party and individual representatives of the party if the party did not cease to provide The Pirate Bay with Internet access on the 26th of February at the latest,” according to a statement from the Swedish Pirate Party.

Party leader Anna Troberg is quoted in the same statement as saying that the specific threats against the party and individuals involved took a heavy emotional toll both on the organization and its commitment to hosting The Pirate Bay.

“It is somewhat odd to realize that your political engagement can come at such a high cost in Sweden in the year 2013,” Troberg said. “I am therefore very happy that the anonymous heroes of The Pirate Bay very early on decided to help The Pirate Party out of the difficult situation.”

The Pirate Bay will now get its connection to the Internet from two newly formed sister organizations to the Swedish group: the Norwegian Pirate Party and the Catalonian Pirate Party (in Spain). The two-headed nature of the hosting situation has even given rise to a new metaphor and moniker for the site: The Hydra Bay.

From the Pirate Bay’s latest blog post:

“A typical Whac-A-Mole machine consists of a large, waist-level cabinet with five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole and the machinery necessary to move it up and down. Once the game starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, thereby adding to the player’s score. The quicker this is done the higher the final score will be.

Current score: 0″

“This is … the first time we are going to show two [hosting locations] at the same time,” a Pirate Bay rep said to TorrentFreak today.

“It will be interesting to see who is now blamed for hosting TPB. In the end, maybe the anti-Interneterians will understand that they can’t win a fight when they have the people against them.”

And as for the Rights Alliance, Troberg said the Swedish Pirate Party will be filing a police report against the group for “unlawful coercion” regarding its work with and for TPB. TPB, interestingly enough, filed a similar report in Finnland earlier this month.

“The Pirate Party’s mission is not to produce martyrs for the copyright industry,” she said. “Our mission is to create long-term political change that ensures that the copyright industry in the future will not be allowed to threaten companies, organizations and individuals into silence with our common judicial system as a weapon.”

While a lot of people are fighting to take it down, The Pirate Bay is somehow still alive. But it’s not immortal.

Czech Pirate Party member Karel Bílek knows it, and he offers concerned pirates a solution: Preserve The Pirate Bay by downloading all of the site’s two million magnet links, which Bílek has compiled for the second time. 

The result of Bílek’s efforts comes in two forms — a 76MB archive full of just magnet links and a larger, more interesting 631MB file that includes extra data like descriptions, file sizes, and comments.

The Pirate Bay’s torrent numbers continue to climb.

Bílek says that someone could use all that data to reconstruct The Pirate Bay if it was brought down.

More interesting than Bílek’s data, however, are the insights it gives. Besides creating an extensive (albeit somewhat outdated) replica of The Pirate Bay, the data also shows that the site continues to grow even as multiple entities across multiple contents fight to take it down.

But while The Pirate Bay is growing, most of its user activity is disproportionately focused on the newest files. Assuming Bílek’s data is correct, more than 75 percent of torrents have fewer than four seeders, making them largely useless for downloading.

As a self-professed pirate, Bílek probably hates the idea that The Pirate Bay could someday disappear, but his data could ensure it never does.

Photo:Shutterstock

That might sound a little futuristic — and utopian or dystopic, depending on which side of the intellectual property debate you stand on — but it’s already happening.

Wired Magazine caught 3DLT, a marketplace for 3D designs, stocking and selling designs for 3D printed objects that it did not own, and did not have the rights to re-sell. 3DLT sells STLs, which are essentially documents in the Standard Tessellation Language which many 3D printers use to create objects. Essentially, they are programs or recipes for building physical things.

The only problem?

The products 3DLT were selling belonged to Nervous System, a “generative design studio” that writes “computer programs … to create unique and affordable art, jewelry, and housewares.”

3DLT’s website

Oops.

3DLT has since apologized for the snafu, saying that the site is in beta, and the products and images portrayed on the site “were being used as placeholders and were not approved for use.” In addition, while the products shown were unapproved, the actual downloads were not 3D designs but random zip files, which makes the company’s statement fairly credible. (I could not reach CEO Pablo Arellano Jr for comment.)

But the incident does highlight some of the interesting challenges of the future.

What happens to designs when anyone can copy them? Will there be a marketplace for “bootleg” 3D designs that quasi-legal companies operate on the fringes of the law? Will 3D printers have to contain copyright enforcement technology that watches what you do in your home and ensures you only print approved, licensed designs? (And only one of them, unless you pay more.) Will governments force 3D printing companies to install spyware that ensures people don’t print weapons?

The answer to a lot of those questions is yes, and it’s happening already.

The Pirate Bay already has a category for 3D printed objects, what they call “physibles.” People on the cutting edge are making guns, or trying to, with 3D printers. And the fabulous unlimited world of 3D potential is already being limited by legislation.

All of which makes 3DLT’s slogan ever so much more ironic. “Finally, you can get exactly what you want,” the site proclaims on its new buyers page.

Life used to be so simple in the good old days when piracy was simply about movies or software.

Image credit: Nervous System

Well, it looks like Kim Dotcom’s Mega, the cloud storage service and successor to the now defunct Megaupload, could be facing its first big legal problem. And it’s happening less than two weeks after launching to the public.

A new “collaborative” search engine, called Mega-Search.me, recently went online, and it allows Mega’s 1 million users to share the files they’ve uploaded to their own personal cloud lockers. It works by allowing people to add links to the files stored in their Mega account. Those links can then be searched publicly and downloaded by anyone. You can also vote on each submitted link, view the number of downloads for each file, and more.

The problem with Mega-Search.me is that most of the files are illegally pirated music, movies, TV shows, and software — not to mention lots of pornography. It’s worth noting that there is an “infringement” button linking to Mega’s policy that’s prominently featured on Mega-Search.me’s top navigation bar, for whatever that’s worth (which is likely nothing).

Mega is supposed to be a cloud storage site that’s so unbelievably secure that Mega’s management team can’t even determine what’s hosted in each user’s account. That conveniently allows Mega to claim ignorance when authorities accuse it of facilitating piracy.

It’s likely the creators of Mega-Search.me aren’t directly affiliated with Dotcom or Mega, but that doesn’t mean Mega is off the hook. First of all, Mega-Search.me shows that Mega is being used for illegal purposes. And while Mega may not feel like it has a responsibility to police its users to make sure they’re not uploading pirated files, the fact that it’s allowing users to access those files publicly on a site like Mega-Search.me definitely does obligate Mega to remove them.

It’ll be interesting to see how Mega responds to the situation. If the service wants to be respected as a legitimate business venture, it will avoid supporting Mega-Search.me and figure out how to prevent this type of situation from happening in the future. If it doesn’t, then Mega could easily become the next nut for authorities to crack.

Via TechCrunch

Piracy is a sensitive issue in video games, and it’s not going anywhere. Early this month, hacker Neimod found a way to enable custom code on the Nintendo 3DS, which could make the nearly 2-year-old handheld victim to homebrew software and the illegal copying of games. Developers are in a huff, but the mindset of pirates hasn’t changed: If they can hack it, it’s theirs to play with.

Jools Watsham of Renegade Kid, the developer of Mutant Mudds on 3DS, responded with a threat of his own: “If piracy gets bad on the 3DS, we will have no choice but to stop supporting the platform with new games,” he wrote on his blog.

Could piracy really ruin the 3DS’s future? What is the full scope of consequences? And if it is dangerous, what can we — gamers, developers, and publishers — do to prevent it?

Piracy harms sales, which can cripple developers

Watsham argues that piracy has a clear negative impact. In the same blog post, he cited the success of his studio’s mature-rated DS game Dementium: The Ward — which sold over 100,000 copies worldwide — but pointed to rampant piracy as a reason why sales of Dementium II fell to half that.

“Some say that piracy leads to more game sales, claiming that it enables players to try before they buy,” he wrote. “Bullshit. The percentage of people who will spend money on a game that they already got for free is surely very small — especially with so many ‘free’ games already in the market.”

For a small developer, that kind of effect on sales can be crippling. Watsham is hoping that Nintendo can fight pirates with its system updates for the 3DS, but the more developers lose sales to piracy, the harder it is for them to thrive.

“Game developers and publishers, particularly the smaller ones, may suffer the most as they depend on the legitimate sales of their games in order to survive,” Nintendo told GamesBeat. It’s legitimate sales, not theoretical sales when piracy is accounted for, that matter to a company’s health.

It’s not just about sales — it’s about diversity

“Many developers rely on funding from publishers,” Watsham told us. “If publishers are worried about piracy, they will limit the number of original games they release.”

That’s not the case with licensed games, which are based on movie tie-ins or brands that appeal to a large audience mostly consisting of casual players, who wouldn’t typically pirate games, says Watsham.

“Original games, on the other hand, are riskier as they cannot rely on avid fans of an existing brand for the majority of their sales,” he said.

If we want the industry landscape to be creatively diverse, gamers need to support the developers of new intellectual properties by purchasing copies of their games, not resorting to piracy. Sales matter — that’s why we have so many Assassin’s Creeds and Halos — and bigger, proven franchises are safer bets for publishers. But piracy is a much bigger issue for publishers when dealing with games from smaller studios, where the guaranteed return is already much less significant.

“The issue is with the publisher’s perception of how piracy will affect sales and where they want to invest their money,” said Watsham.

Neil Sorens, the creative director at Zen Studios (the maker of 3DS games like Zen Pinball 3D and 3D Solitaire), agreed that a big downside of piracy is seeing less of the games people like to play.

“Before Steam came along, PC role-playing games and turn-based strategy games had become almost extinct because the threat of piracy rightly or wrongly led publishers to conclude that these games were not worth the investment,” Sorens told GamesBeat. “Now we see a similar shift in investment into essentially piracy-free mobile and social games that rely on in-app purchases for revenue. Unfortunately, it’s very rare that one of these games will provide the game experience I am looking for.”

Peter Ong, the cofounder and creative director at DreamRift (Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion for 3DS), expanded on this concept — where companies might favor the popularity of a game’s license or previously successful designs over “the risk of innovation and experimentation”:

“If a publisher or developer thinks that a certain type of audience is most likely to forgo purchasing in favor of piracy, it only makes business sense to tailor the game’s design away from that group,” he told us.

So casual and mainstream buyers, for example, might be less in touch with gaming and wouldn’t typically know how to go about acquiring pirated games.

“This translates to a situation where the type of game that is [made will be the one] perceived to be best received by nonenthusiast gamers,” he said, echoing what Watsham said. “It doesn’t matter whether the theoretical example of mainstream buyers being less likely to pirate games is true” as long as the perception exists.

Publishers respond negatively to piracy in other ways

French publisher Ubisoft instituted aggressive digital rights management (DRM) policies in 2010 that forced gamers to connect to an online service. You couldn’t play games like Assassin’s Creed II for PC offline, and you couldn’t sell them used, either. Disconnect while playing and you would even lose saved progress.

Ubisoft altered this policy in 2011 because its stance hurt fans more than it hurt pirates. The people who had bought the games were the ones suffering.

Tyrone Rodriguez, the founder of developer Nicalis (Cave Story on WiiWare, DSiWare, and 3DS), believes that developers are just as responsible for their fans as publishers are. He disagrees with Watsham that piracy could put an end to support of the 3DS.

“Regardless of piracy, we plan to continue supporting the 3DS and other major consoles,” he told GamesBeat. “The 3DS hacking so early in the lifecycle is disappointing, but it’s an issue that’s not going away. Why punish players who actually support us by buying, playing, and enjoying the games we develop by giving up?

“We as developers shouldn’t allow the concept of digital theft [to] distract or deter us from making more games. How do I know someone who illegally downloads a game would actually ever purchase it? I don’t. It’s a problem that is difficult to quantify.”

That doesn’t mean Rodriguez believes piracy isn’t a real problem. “Is it harmful for the game industry? Of course. However, piracy is probably less damaging to our industry than selling games for 99 cents and expecting to subsist.”

But Ong pointed out a potential hitch — that piracy forces developers’ and publishers’ hands when it comes to their freedom in choosing how to distribute a game, depending on what price they think would be most effective.

“Piracy is indefensible,” he said, “because it means that the maker doesn’t have [the] opportunity to choose the distribution price/strategy — even giving it away for free — and instead is forced to deliver their product into a market where distribution has to occur to some extent for free, regardless of what the maker thinks.”

Customers need ‘to have faith in their purchases’

Watsham suggested that while developers and publishers might not be able to do anything to reduce piracy, a good way of restoring gamers’ loyalty would be to take advantage of modern technologies and implement better digital stores and other conveniences.

“Regarding digitally downloaded games, which seems to be the inevitable future of all video games,” said Watsham, “digital stores need to offer a service to players that make them feel comfortable and confident that the games they have purchased can be easily transferred to different devices and/or redownloaded if their device has been lost, damaged, or stolen. Again, it comes down to providing a service that is at least as good if not better than those offered of illegal ROM or torrent sites.

“I realize this creates a new set of issues and complexities in order for the stores to handle such a service, but in the end, this is what the customer wants and needs — to have faith in their purchases.”

Some, like Sorens, think that publishers and developers have already shown as much goodwill and generosity as possible.

“I think that the industry has already done basically everything it can in terms of improving convenience,” he said. “Offering steep discounts, making DRM more palatable by offering compelling online-only features behind that DRM, going after the real hackers and criminals rather than the downloaders, and so on.”

He added, “I don’t see any common ground or motivations that would allow pirates and developers to work together. If we make something free, pirates have no reason to touch it. If we charge money for something, then it’s obviously necessary to make our business model work, and pirates undermine that model by making it free.”

Is a better future possible?

Maybe the answer to how we can end piracy for good is to seek a way to work together as developers, publishers, and gamers. In 2009, Carlos Bordeu of ACE Team appealed to file-sharers of its first-person fighting game Zeno Clash, asking torrenters to consider buying the game so it could “continue making games like this.”

He wrote, “We cannot do anything to stop piracy of the game — and honestly don’t intend to do so — but if you are downloading because you wish to try before you buy, I would ask that you purchase the game, and support the independent game development scene, if you enjoy it. We plan on updating Zeno Clash with [downloadable content] and continuing support for the game long after it’s [sic] release.”

Bordeu also promised that a demo would be available soon so that prospective buyers could try the game legally and for free, and ACE Team delivered. And interestingly, responses were positive.

“We honestly think that ‘converting’ the people who download the game into buyers is a much better strategy than trying to fight them,” Bordeu told TorrentFreak. “We are also improving the original game, so it will include features and content that people who download the game will probably miss.”

But not everyone wants to chance piracy, and it remains a serious issue.

“If piracy becomes as rampant on 3DS as it was on the DS, we won’t be making 3DS games,” said Sorens of behalf of Zen Studios. “Our games are relatively niche and low-margin, and even a relatively small percentage of sales lost to piracy would make the opportunity cost of developing 3DS games too steep.”

DreamRift’s Peter Ong dismissed the often-used rationale that piracy is a fair way to evaluate a game before purchasing it.

“There was in fact a time when information and access to games one had not yet purchased — or that hadn’t been released yet — was quite limited,” he said. “However, as modern methods of information-sharing have developed, the ways in which we can access a game prior to purchase have greatly increased and continue to do so.”

Ong mentioned the abundance of high-resolution screenshots and direct-feed videos that you can stream through your computer as well as developer interviews, social media, behind-the-scenes footage, media events, demos, open and closed betas, and — perhaps most damning of all — prompt review coverage.

“Our options for researching games before buying them is only getting better and better,” he said. “With the plethora of modern methods for experiencing games prepurchase, the question begging to be asked of piracy advocates is, how much more do you need to make fully informed decision to buy a game? Will it ever be enough, short of playing through the whole game without buying it?”

We attempted to contact Neimod and another 3DS hacker, Yellows8, about these issues but received no response.

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So what does this mean for us? Well, one major benefit some gamers are happy about is the ability to finally remove the 3DS’s pesky region locking, which prevents us from playing imported copies of Japanese games, for example. And while that is definitely something to be excited about (Bravely Default: Flying Fairy, anyone?), many gamers won’t stop there.

Whether we like to admit it or not, piracy hurts the industry, and smaller game devs and publishers suffer more than their billion-dollar-budget big brothers. Renegade Kid’s Jools Watsham, the developer of the very cool Mutant Mudds on the 3DS eShop, had this to say about it:

Piracy on the Nintendo DS crippled the DS retail market, especially in Europe. We’ll never know how/if Dementium II landed in as many hands as the first game, Dementium: The Ward, due to the rampant piracy at the time. Dementium: The Ward sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide, which is a great success for an original mature-rated title on the DS. Recorded sales of Dementium II are less than half that. We’ll never truly know why that was so, but many seem to believe that piracy had a lot to do with it.

If piracy gets bad on the 3DS, we will have no choice but to stop supporting the platform with new games. Some say that piracy leads to more game sales, claiming that it enables players to try before they buy. Bullshit. The percentage of people who will spend money on a game that they already got for free is surely very small — especially with so many “free” games already in the market. The line between what should/should not be free is getting very blurry.

While many gamers who pirate games will take up a “damn the man” stance, convincing themselves that they are getting back at big-name companies that charge an arm and a leg for on-disc downloadable content and such, this statement gives us an idea about how piracy affects the little guys.

Let me just climb down from my high horse here for a moment. Years ago, a friend and I hacked our PSPs in order to play Japanese titles before they came out in the U.S. Yes, I pirated a few games, but in all honesty, they were games I eventually purchased once they released overseas. My friend, on the other hand, would download ISOs as they were made available — gigs and gigs of games that he never finished. I didn’t see why he had created such a huge backlog for himself. I hate to use anecdotal evidence to support my argument here, but I’ve read about publishers and developers who choose not to release games in the U.S. because theirs have been pirated too much.

So where does that leave us? Piracy can prevent some great games from being localized, and it can hurt small game devs and publishers. Sure, lots of gamers like to try before they buy, which speaks to the importance of demos. I for one think that for a handheld like the 3DS, which is in a constant battle to keep third-party developers as it is, would likely suffer from its hardware being hacked. Sure, more 3DS units might sell, but what about software? Especially that of smaller developers?

What do you think?

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Microsoft’s giveaway of a free Windows Media Center upgrade may have a curious side effect: allowing pirates to pick up a free copy of Windows 8 Pro direct from Microsoft itself.

The Media Center upgrade, which Microsoft is offering through January 31, 2013, includes Microsoft’s tools for watching and recording live TV. However, applying the upgrade has an unintended side effect: It permanently activates the copy of Windows 8 that you’ve applied it to.

That provides a neat workaround for pirates who exploit a weakness in Microsoft’s Key Management Service (KMS) to get temporary access to copies of Windows 8. Normally, KMS provides a way for corporate IT people to activate copies of Windows on a local network without having to make each PC contact Microsoft directly for authentication during the install process, but it has also given rise to pirate KMS servers, which hand out activation keys over the Internet. With KMS, you need to re-activate Windows every 180 days, making this sort of piracy rather limited in effectiveness.

However, the Media Center upgrade reportedly works even on KMS-authorized installations of Windows, turning KMS-hacked PCs into permanently-authenticated copies of Windows.

We haven’t been able to verify the effectiveness of this hack, we don’t know for sure that it works, and we, of course, we don’t recommend it — piracy is illegal. Details first popped up on Reddit, where commenters were quick to spot the 2006 article in which Bill Gates said, regarding Chinese Windows pirates, “As long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours.”

Stephen Hall at Windows Wave pointed out the exploit to us, and reports that Windows Wave has been able to confirm that it works.

It seems that Kim Dotcom is already having problems with the next version of his Megaupload site, Me.ga.

Dotcom’s cloud service Megaupload was shut down back in January by U.S. and New Zealand authorities due to allegedly enabling copyright infringement. Last week he revealed plans to revamp the cloud locker service under the Me.ga domain name, citing that a .com domain would easily be seized by U.S. authorities without substantial proof of wrongdoing.

However, the Communications Minister of Gabon, the African country that operates the .ga top-level domain, said he has no intention of allowing Dotcom to use the country as a safe haven for copyright infringement violations and plans to suspend it, according to TorrentFreak.

And if that weren’t enough, a group of hackers calling themselves “Omega” have taken over the Me.ga domain and have threatened to sell it to Dotcom’s adversaries. The group said its members are “true pirates” and told TorrentFreak that Dotcom “is a megalomaniac with lawyers … here to take advantage of us all, the nobodies, (and) the artists he wants to profit from.”

Dotcom has stated that Me.ga will launch as planned using a backup domain, which hasn’t yet been revealed.

A study has found that music fans who use peer-to-peer file sharing services actually purchase more music, on average, than those who stay completely legit.

The study by the American Assembly, a nonpartisan public policy think tank housed at Columbia University, found that file sharers purchase around 30 percent more music than non-file sharers. File sharers also have much larger music collections, naturally, with a big boost to their libraries provided by files they’ve downloaded without buying.

The study is merely the latest to confirm what proponents of P2P file sharing have been claiming all along: People who use P2P technologies are actually the music industry’s biggest fans.

Instead, however, the music industry, led by the RIAA, has spent over a decade hounding P2P sites out of existence and prosecuting its biggest fans for sharing files illegally.

And let’s not mince words: File-sharing is generally considered a violation of copyright law, and the courts have been inclined to pass severe financial penalties on those convicted of filesharing. The RIAA claims that it takes these tactics to help offset piracy, which it claims costs the industry billions of dollars annually.

But it’s not hard to see an alternate universe in these charts: one in which the music industry learned to overlook these petty copyright crimes and found ways to turn its biggest fans into even bigger customers.

Via Torrentfreak

Microsoft recently sent out a string of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) infringement notices that requested URLs from the Huffington Post, Washington Post, Wikipedia, and the U.S. Government to be removed from Google’s search engine results.

The infringement notices were aimed at preventing unauthorized distribution of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Beta. The list of 65 websites, documented by ChillingEffects, contains several erroneous examples of URLs  (from the BBC, Buzzfeed, CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch, RealClearPolitics, Rotten Tomatoes, ScienceDirect, and others) that are clearly not violating Microsoft’s copyrights. And as TorrentFreak points out, half the URLs listed have nothing to do with Windows 8.

Part of the reason for these mistaken infringement claims is the automated system Microsoft uses to monitor the web for infringement and send notices to sites like Google as well as the party allegedly responsible for violating the copyright. Clearly, Microsoft has a flawed process.

When Google deems a URL in violation of a copyright, it removes it from search results and replaces it with a message explaining why it’s been taken down as well as documentation of the takedown notice. Those URLs get removed from results until the original website owner disputes them. Some call this a passive form of censorship, even though it’s somewhat easy to restore wrongly removed results.

Microsoft has a history of sending out a large number copyright infringement notices. In fact, the most recent Google Transparency Report shows Microsoft as the top submitter of takedown requests. Microsoft might want to revise its process. Otherwise, it could help make a case for new laws that punish companies that wrongly send out takedown notices.

“Craiglist was an innovator at one time,” says 3taps chief executive Greg Kidd. “But time has moved on, and the concept of what the open web is today has evolved.”

Craiglist, the massive online classifieds site where the internet is still 1997, has had a wildly tumultuous 2012.

In June Craigslist blocked a third-party service, PadMapper, from scraping its apartment rental listings and presenting them in a more 2012 way. Then in July, when PadMapper found a “legally kosher” way to access Craigslist postings via 3taps (which essentially sucked the data right out of Google), Craiglist sued PadMapper and 3taps … and then bizarrely amended its terms of service, telling users they were not permitted to cross-post their sales items anywhere else on the internet.

Effectively, Craigslist was claiming complete and total copyright of its users’ content.

That died its inevitable death in early August, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation — on whose advisory board Craigslist founder Craig Newmark sits – got involved. Since that strategy failed, Craiglist went thermonuclear on all content scrapers, blocking all search engines from accessing the site.

At which point, you might think, it would just be easier to play nicely with others. But the core question remains: Who owns the data in Craigslist listings?

“Public facts are public property,” says Kidd, who is also an advisor at Square and was a first-round investor in Twitter. “Our view is that facts are protected by the First Amendment.”

Facts, of course, are not copyrightable, at least according the U.S. Supreme Court. That means no one can copyright the fact that Hitler lost World War II, or that you’ve got a slightly-used sofa for sale for just $299, no tax, no refunds.

And if that’s the case, says Kidd, how can Craigslist “own” its users’ listings? Kidd cites James Boyle from the Center for Public Domain at Duke University, who says that a Craigslist-style view on facts and copyright would “break the internet.” And not just 3taps, either. Giants like Google would also be affected.

“People seem to feel that scraping is a bad word,” says Kidd, referring to the often ethically controversial practice of electronically capturing data on other organizations’ websites. “But Google’s whole model is based on scraping.”

He doesn’t see any law, Kidd told me, that says Google can do it but no one else. And he has a real problem with Craigslist deciding who is a search engine and who isn’t.

So 3taps is suing Craigslist to force the courts to define what is public and what is private, and what can be copyrighted. In addition, 3taps will be suing Craigslist under the Sherman Antitrust Act, claiming that Craigslist is a monopoly acting in monopolistic ways to reduce competition in the marketplace.

“You can bully people that aren’t well-resourced,” says Kidd. “But that only works until it doesn’t work.”

He’s had no contact with Craigslist — and, despite repeated requests on this occasion and others, Craigslist has not responded to VentureBeat’s attempts to get its perspective — saying it refuses to talk to anyone.

“I don’t know what goes on in their heads,” Kidd told me. “I just wish they’d stop suing everyone else.”

photo credit: jox. via photopin cc

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First, New Zealand’s prime minister John Key admitted that Kiwi spooks (yes, the tiny island nation has an intelligence agency) bugged Dotcom and his Megaupload associates. It’s the equivalent of the CIA investigating Twitter’s Jack Dorsey: the intelligence agency is barred by law from spying on the country’s own citizens. And, the revelation bolsters Dotcom’s long-time argument that his current legal troubles are a well-organized witchhunt conducted by the highest levels of multiple governments.

The second bit of good news is that Key is announcing an inquiry into the illegal wiretapping, which is sure to shed unwelcome light onto how New Zealand law enforcement and spies got so buddy-buddy with U.S. agencies in the pursuit of Megaupload.

Predictably, Dotcom was more than happy at the news:

I welcome the inquiry by @JohnKeyPM into unlawful acts by the GCSB. Please extend the inquiry to cover the entire Crown Law Mega case.

—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 24, 2012

It’s just the latest in a ridiculously botched police investigation and take-down of Megaupload that started with a massive commando-style raid on Dotcom’s house, as if he was a drug lord or terrorist, continued with illegal searches, and has seen the judge overseeing Dotcom’s extradition recuse himself and step down.

That extradition is now scheduled for March 23 — next year — and meanwhile, Megaupload is rising from the ashes: just three days ago Dotcom announced that Megaupload will be reborn with an entirely new codebase, which is already 90 percent complete:

Quick update on the new Mega: Code 90% done. Servers on the way. Lawyers, Partners & Investors ready. Be patient. It's coming.

—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 22, 2012

The entire case has been a disaster for New Zealand law enforcement, which has been seen both siding with powerful American commercial interests against a local hero and ferociously incompetent, bungling to the point of committing multiple illegal acts.

That has been music to Dotcom’s ears, as he paints himself as a persecuted revolutionary and patron of the people.

And, if I had to render a guess, I’d say this news makes any chance of extraditing Dotcom and trying him in the U.S. very, very slim.

The French video game publisher Ubisoft hasn’t engendered a lot of goodwill with PC gamers over the years because of its aggressive digital rights management (DRM) policies. But the company made some big changes a year ago, and it wants gamers to understand that it is playing nicer these days.

“We realized we haven’t always been clear and consistent about communicating what our DRM policy was in the past, and that has led to a bunch of misunderstandings,” said Chris Early, vice president of digital publishing, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Ubisoft’s past policies have created a firestorm of abuse from angry users, both pirates and legitimate customers.

But some observers haven’t noticed yet that Ubisoft has made changes at all, and consumers have a long memory. But Early said the company instituted a big change in June, 2011, with respect to how it implements DRM in PC games. Since then, Ubisoft’s packaged good PC products require a one-time online activation, and then they can be played offline. If you buy the games from Ubisoft online, the games are authenticated at that time. If you play multiplayer sessions or if you play free-to-play games, you have to log in online. Authentication takes place during each session.

“The key date is June 2011,” Early said. “Everything since then is based on our current practice. Every game coming forward is based on that policy, and old games that came before that date are being switched over to that policy. It was originally much more of the stick approach. Now it is much more of the carrot.”

The new policy does a better job of staying out of the way of legitimate and loyal players who just want to enjoy the game.

In 2006, Ubisoft tried to implement the StarForce copy protection technology, but it ran into compatibility issues, and customer complaints led to its disuse. Then,  in January 2010, Ubisoft unveiled an online services platform which required users to log into an online service and remain connected while playing Ubisoft PC games. That meant they couldn’t play the games offline and they couldn’t resell their titles on the used game market. Technical problems accompanied the policy. If you were disconnected while playing, your saved game progress was lost in titles like Assassin’s Creed 2 for the PC. Ubisoft stood out in the industry for being aggressive. Angry users responded with denial-of-service attacks and other protests against the company.

“That, combined with challenges we had with uPlay hardware at the time, made for a pretty poor user experience for a couple of games,” Early said. “Listening to consumers, we then removed the DRM requirements for the games, and by June 2011 had this policy in place going forward.”

Accordingly, the negative feedback is lower these days, except when Ubisoft has some hiccups with the technology. (A Google researcher reported a flaw in Ubisoft’s DRM recently, but the company fixed it and said it had no incidents related to that flaw).

He added, “There were enough online components to those games that we mistakenly believe the earlier policy would not be an imposition for players. That was not the case. Players wanted to be able to play in an online and offline mode. They didn’t want to be online all the time to play.”

The earlier policy also limited the number of times a player could install the game Anno 2070 to just three. But if you installed a new graphics card, it would use up one of the installations and require you to reinstall that game. Ubisoft had to correct that again.

“Listening to our customers, we don’t have that as a limit anymore,” Early said.

The point of DRM in the first place is to establish with the consumer that they are getting value when they buy a Ubisoft game, and they should pay for that value, Early said. It helps stop piracy, which can be very high in the PC market. By emphasizing the “carrot” rather than the “stick,” Ubisoft is making use of alternatives that could help reduce piracy and generate more revenue at the same time. For instance, free-to-play games like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Online open that franchise up to more territories where it isn’t feasible to sell a $60 Ghost Recon Future Soldier game.

“You can participate in a wider variety of services and content or choose a different business model,” Early said. “That allows access to games at a variety of different price points. We can reach a wider variety of people around the world. You can get to our games in more places without pirating them.”

Part of the reason why Ubisoft is the target of piracy is that its games are good.

“If we made terrible games, we wouldn’t have to worry about it at all,” Early said. “The more popular the game is, the more people want to play it wherever they are. As an industry, we need to talk about piracy. At the time when we took a very aggressive stance, we realized it impacted our customers more than it impacted our pirates.”

Ubisoft has also created its uPlay PC game client. That brings together PC game functions together, including a game library. It has social features like chat and leaderboards. It has rewards across platforms and an offline action mode. It has integrated saves, a shopping function, free-to-play games, and a general overall Ubisoft destination. Ubisoft has some rental systems that it supports, but in general it believes users should pay for their games. With online passes, players can reactivate a portion of the multiplayer play with a small fee from the secondary user. That view makes sense because multiplayer play requires Ubisoft to invest money in ongoing support for multiplayer operations, Early said.

“We don’t have excessive complaints about that,” Early said. “In that case, we were not the trailblazer. [EA was]“

There isn’t a consistent view on used games across the industry. But as free-to-play games expand, the used game market isn’t necessarily as relevant anymore, Early said. He didn’t have a comment on what the new game consoles being launched in the future will have as far as DRM policies go. If the platform owners change their policies, you can bet the topic will come up again.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Unfortunately, the major television network is in Australia.

News.com.au is reporting that ABC — that would be the Australian Broadcasting Network — will be featuring new Dr. Who episodes online at ABC iView a week before they are actually aired on television. Showtimes will be just hours after UK airtimes, specifically in an attempt to reduce piracy.

While piracy is wrong, an ABC spokesperson told News.com.au, “The fact that it is happening is indicative that as broadcasters we are not meeting demand for a segment of the population.”

Finally, some sense of reason from a large public broadcaster! Not only will episodes be available online, they will also be available on ABC’s iPhone apps.

This is something Americans might wish stateside network NBC had learned prior to the recent London 2012 Olympic games, in which the digital laggard broadcaster did precisely the opposite: hold all content delivery to a schedule that suited it, not the public — and certainly not the techie, affluent emerging market of cord-cutters. Which, of course, drove people to watch the Olympics online in ways which, while perhaps not exactly qualifying as piracy, certainly did not drive any revenue to NBC.

All TV is moving online.

More correctly, perhaps, all video content is moving online — which is one reason Google just shuttered its TV ad group. The sooner large American networks grasp that reality in their bones, the quicker they can disrupt themselves. It may not be comfortable, and it will not be easy. But the nastier alternative, of course, is that someone else will disrupt them.

Image credit: BBC

After being arrested this past weekend in Cambodia, The Pirate Bay cofounder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg will be deported by Cambodian officials.

“We will deport him based on our immigration law,” police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told Reuters.

Because Sweden and Cambodia have no extradition treaty, it is unclear if Warg will be deported directly back to Sweden or will end up in another country. “We just know we will deport him,” Chantharith said. “As to which country, that would be up to the Swedish side.”

It’s reasonable to assume he will quickly be sent back to Sweden to serve his time and face more than $3.5 million in damages.

As VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell noted this weekend, Warg (also known by online alias Anakata) has been in big legal trouble since 2006, when Swedish police first raided The Pirate Bay, a popular torrent site, for copyright violations. Warg was eventually sentenced to a 12-month prison sentence that was supposed to start in January, but he evaded the police.

While The Pirate Bay remains the target of legal action, it is still up and running.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg photo via Nicolas Vigier/Flickr

What’s the price of piracy? For convicted British fraudster Anton Vickerman, it’s four years of his life.

That’s the sentence Vickerman got at the Newcastle crown court today for creating SurfTheChannel, a website that linked to both legal and illegal video content. Vickerman received the sentence on two counts of conspiracy to defraud by facilitating copyright infringement.

If the “conspiracy to defraud” charge sounds vague to you, then join the club. The charge refers to two or more parties (in this case, Vickerman and his wife) working together to defraud a victim.

SurfTheChannel creator Anton Vickerman

Similar conspiracy charges were used to unsuccessfully convict Alan Ellis, the founder of music sharing site OiNK. This, some suspected, would make it difficult to convict Vickerman as well.

That’s because, like OiNK, SurfTheChannel didn’t actually host the video content it featured, instead linking to other sites that did. (One of these sites was MegaVideo, whose founder Kim Dotcom is also in hot water over piracy concerns.)

Not that Vickerman wasn’t making a mint off his efforts: According to some estimates, the site was generating over $50,000 (£35,000) in advertising revenue a month. That’s no small change for a site that just linked to content.

With the conviction, groups like the the U.K.’s Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) aim to send a clear message that the “we don’t host the content” defense isn’t much of a defense at all.

“This case conclusively shows that running a website that deliberately sets out to direct users to illegal copies of films and TV shows will result in a criminal conviction and a long jail sentence,” said FACT director Kieron Sharp.

And Vickerman — well, he’ll be surfing the channel from prison. 

Pirate image: Vectorportal

Legally troubled Megaupload creator Kim Dotcom will launch his new music-focused venture, Megabox, this year, he said early Monday morning on Twitter.

Dotcom has been vigorously fighting government charges related to copyright infringement charges since January. His incredibly popular file-sharing service Megaupload was shut down by U.S. and New Zealand authorities as part of a massive sting operation against sites that allegedly enabled copyright infringement. A recent video shows the absurdly forceful raid performed on Dotcom’s house as part of the sting.

Despite being in the middle of a legal case that could end up with Dotcom in prison, he is still working hard to open a new disruptive web-based music service. Megabox will “allow artists to sell their creations direct to consumers, allowing artists to keep 90% of earnings,” Dotcom wrote in a December guest post to TorrentFreak. You can see a photo teaser of the service above.

On top of launching a new music service, Dotcom is cooking up something else. On Twitter, he indicated that something people have been waiting for is coming and will be “better” and “faster”. He writes:

I know what you are all waiting for. It’s coming. This year. Promise. Bigger. Better. Faster. 100% Safe & Unstoppable.

The tweet suggests Megaupload will relaunch this year as well, but we’ve got no details except for the tweet. No doubt the consistently vocal Dotcom will let the world know when his service hits the web.

Megabox photo: Kim Dotcom/Instagram

Google’s waters are about to become a bit more unfriendly to pirates.

The search giant announced today that it’s tweaking its algorithm to reflect a new variable: copyright takedown notices. Now, if Google notices that a website has been a big copyright offender, the site could get bumped down in Google search results.

Google gets a lot of requests from Hollywood and the record industry to remove copyright-infringing content from its search listings. According to Google vice president Amit Singhal, the company received 4.3 million notices in the last month alone — so copyright holders are clearly stepping up their game.

Google, however, would rather do things its own way, which is why the company is making this shift in its most important product.

While the move is sure to have an effect on piracy, Google’s focus isn’t on pirates at all. The company says the more important result is that users get the information they want quicker and with less fuss. Clamping down on piracy, it says, is just a side effect of that.

The move will also make it harder for copyright holders to argue that Google isn’t doing enough to target the bad guys, which certainly helps things as well. In a statement to AllThingsD, Recording Industry Association of America CEO Cary Sherman praised the decision, calling it “an important step in the right direction.”

Kim Dotcom, whose file-hosting service Megaupload was shut down by the New Zealand and U.S. governments for copyright infringement at the beginning of the year, has had plenty to say about the case until now. But as he awaits news about extradition to the U.S. from New Zealand, he’s become unusually quiet.

I’m wondering if his silence is due to the fact that the judge who was overseeing his extradition case to the U.S. has stepped down — presumably making Dotcom’s future a bit more tremulous.

The New Zealand Herald is reporting that Judge David Harvey, who was overseeing the extradition case, has removed himself after voicing his opinions on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement that could be expanded to make circumventing a DVD’s region code illegal. And for those of you who don’t know what region codes are, they are codes that allow certain DVDs to work only within certain countries to limit piracy.

Harvey, who previously looked favorably on Dotcom, referred to the U.S. as the enemy for its part in upholding silly matters of copyright law internationally. In this instance, it had to do with DVD region codes, but obviously those comments could paint him as biased in the case, which is why he decided to step down.

“Under TPP and the American Digital Millennium copyright provisions you will not be able to do that, that will be prohibited… if you do you will be a criminal – that’s what will happen,” Harvey said, adding, “We have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S.”

Harvey was previously responsible for reinstating Dotcom’s Internet access based on good behavior. He also allowed him to visit a recording studio to finish his politically charged hip-hop album, as VentureBeat previously reported back in April.

Photo illustration: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

Blocking torrent sharing website The Pirate Bay at the ISP-level isn’t having a negative effect on piracy of digital media, according to a new report by the BBC.

In April, the U.K.’s high court ordered all Internet service providers within the country to block the Pirate Bay in an effort to stop its customers from illegally downloading music, movies, TV shows, and software. The ruling forced several ISPs to block the website, including Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2, Virgin Media, and BT — despite critics warning that it wouldn’t actually do much to stop piracy.

Now, at least one major U.K.-based ISP is showing signs that peer-to-peer file sharing activity levels have returned to normal about a week after the URL blocks went into effect, according to the BBC’s report, which cites an unnamed source at the ISP.

Advocates of the Pirate Bay’s block, such as British recording industry group BPI, stand by their support, regardless of the seemingly lack of evidence that it’s actually keeping piracy levels down.

And if the URL blocking doesn’t have a direct correlation with declining piracy levels, then basically the practice (of blocking a site) looks like little more than censorship carried out at the whim of corporate interests.

Photo via Uncle Cathrine/Flickr

A New Zealand judge has pushed back the extradition of Megaupload kingpin Kim Dotcom to March 2013, a move that will give him more time to prepare for an eventual trial in the U.S.

Dotcom’s contentious extradition hearing was scheduled for Aug. 6, but several legal issues gave New Zealand pause. Essentially, aspects of the police raid on Dotcom’s home were illegal, as was cloning the hard drives of Dotcom’s 135 computers.

Dotcom has become a bit of an Internet folk hero as of late and now is acting as a larger-than-life figure fighting overreaching government charges related to copyright. His file-sharing service Megaupload was shut down in January by U.S. and New Zealand authorities as part of a massive sting operation against sites that enabled copyright infringement. Dotcom has now even attracted the support of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who says the case against Dotcom is “weak.”

The upcoming extradition hearing in August was looking like a tough battle for Dotcom, as U.S. authorities wanted to give him just a single 40-page document out of 22 million e-mails to prepare for his hearing. The U.S. argued that Dotcom did not need to see all the evidence against him before he faced trial in U.S. courts.

Now Dotcom will have more time to prepare for his extradition hearing in 2013, and perhaps he’ll be able to find a way to see all the evidence against him before that time.

U.S. authorities want to give alleged Megaupload kingpin Kim Dotcom access to just a single 40-page document out of 22 million e-mails before his extradition hearing, according to Stuff.co.nz.

Dotcom has become a bit of an Internet folk hero as of late and now is acting as a larger-than-life figure fighting overreaching government charges. His file-sharing service Megaupload was shut down in January by U.S. and New Zealand authorities as part of a massive sting operation against sites that enabled copyright infringement. The two governments had Dotcom arrested, seized his assets (illegally, according to a judge), and filed an extradition request to have him sent to the U.S. from New Zealand. Since that time, he has attracted the support of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who says the case against Dotcom is “weak.”

Now the FBI does not want to give Dotcom access to its large stores of evidence before his Aug. 6 extradition hearing. Instead, it wants to provide him and his team with a 40-page document that summarizes 22 million e-mails that the U.S. is using as evidence. The U.S. argues that Dotcom does not need to see all the evidence against him before he faces trial in U.S. courts.

Dotcom’s legal team said disclosure of all the evidence against Dotcom is necessary to defend him during the extradition hearing. Without all the evidence, his lawyers said, they would have “their hands tied behind their backs.”

Dotcom recently blamed U.S. Vice President Joe Biden for having authorities target Megaupload. He also blames MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) president and former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd.

Next up in the case, a U.S. court will hear a motion from Dotcom’s lawyers on July 27 to dismiss all of his charges, according to New Zealand’s Times Live. We don’t expect anything to come of it.

Kim Dotcom photo illustration: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

Say what you will about ridiculous Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, but the way authorities went about prosecuting him was sloppy and (in part) illegal. Dotcom is understandably angry, and now he has someone to direct all that anger towards: Vice President Joe Biden.

Cloud-locker and file sharing service Megaupload was shut down in January by U.S. and New Zealand authorities as part of a massive sting operation against websites that facilitated copyright infringement or piracy. The governments, which claim that the site was responsible for pirating over $500 million worth of digital content, had Dotcom arrested and seized many of his assets, including his $4.3 million home. The U.S. government filed an extradition request for Dotcom, who lives in New Zealand, which has yet to be resolved.

Dotcom told TorrentFreak today that Biden is responsible for having authorities target Megaupload under direction by MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) president and former U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd. A case against Megaupload was discussed at the White House in June 2011 during a meeting that included several international figures and movie studio representatives, according to one of Dotcom’s unnamed informants.

“After we received information from an insider, we scanned the White House visitor logs for all meetings of Chris Dodd and studio bosses with Joe Biden and Obama,” Dotcom said, noting that the logs are publicly available on the White House’s official website. “It is interesting that a man by the name of Mike Ellis of MPA Asia, an extradition expert and former superintendent of the Hong Kong police, was also at a meeting with Dodd, all studio bosses, and Joe Biden. The same Mike Ellis met with the Minister of Justice Simon Power in New Zealand.”

So, Dotcom knows when, where, and who met to discuss how best to take down Megaupload. He also apparently knows that Biden was the one suggesting a plan of action regarding Megaupload’s take down to the attorney general. Congratulations, Mr. Dotcom, you’ve solved … well, nothing. Yet, he does promise to reveal more “at the appropriate time.”

“The whole Mega case is quite the political thriller,” Dotcom said. Yes, a “political thriller” much in the same way an awesomely bad movie is.

I could debate Biden’s view points on piracy for several paragraphs, but I won’t. That said, I have no doubt that Biden was involved with the Megaupload case in some shape or form. He’s got a long history of advocating for harsher digital piracy laws and has gone on record saying that digital goods are no different from physical goods in the entertainment business. But when it comes to his involvement with the Megaupload case, he really can’t be held accountable for anything. He’s got opinions about how to stop piracy, and the people who run the government probably asked for his advice, or at the very least listened to whatever he had to say.

The other thing that strikes me as odd about Dotcom’s “investigation” is that he’s trying to gather dirt against a group of business leaders and politicians who aren’t hiding their opinions about piracy. Of course they’re biased toward taking Megaupload down. They all think the site is guilty.

And while it’s certainly amusing to watch him play the New Zealand version of Sherlock Holmes, his best bet for coming out on top is to continue exploiting the government’s missteps. For example, the disregard for keeping Megaupload user data (found on third-party servers) as incriminating evidence, the illegal search/seizure of his property, and the lack of due process prior to Megaupload’s shut down.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Just days after its beta launch, torrent-to-Dropbox startup Boxopus has been banned from Dropbox‘s API over concerns that it would encourage copyright abuse, TorrentFreak reports.

Boxopus’ purpose was to use Dropbox’s API to anonymously add torrent downloads to a Dropbox account. It’s pretty clever idea, and it didn’t even require a Bittorrent client to make it work. But Dropbox apparently did not like being associated with torrents, which are often used to pirate of media. In my first Boxopus article, I even called it a “pirate’s dream come true.”

A Dropbox engineer reportedly sent the following note to Boxopus, per TorrentFreak:

It’s come to our attention that latest Boxopus features could be perceived as encouraging users to violate copyright using Dropbox. Violating copyright is against our terms of service, so we are terminating your app’s API access. Once your access is revoked, any API calls your app makes will fail.

The creators of Boxopus were blindsided by Dropbox’s decision because it claims Dropbox approved an alpha version of its app only a few weeks before the public launch and that it follows all DMCA protocols. The five-man Boxopus team claims that it put in three months of work and a $30,000 investment into the product, time and money that will be wiped away with its banning from the Dropbox API.

If Boxopus’ claims are true and Dropbox did approve an alpha version of the app, this would be a cold and harsh move toward its development community.

Dropbox did not immediately get back to us with further comment.

Photo credit: Gow27/Shutterstock