piracy

For the past decade, one of the most important debates raging in the tech industry is on the topic of piracy. Some people say that it should be stopped with the help of lawsuits and others suggest it can only be done by being slightly nicer by forcing people to pay for media. But whatever happened to the common sense route? Surely it has been espoused before and some even follow it. Why are some organizations so far behind?

As Amazon has proven, allowing people to do what they want actually works in an environment where they can easily get the same song elsewhere for free. In other words, why fight city hall when all you really need to do is agree?

Believe it or not, there is a way to almost entirely wipe out piracy once and for all. No, it's not by suing those responsible or forcing people into situations. Instead, it's by giving us what we want in a nice package for an affordable price. Does that sound so hard?… Read more

With discontent still festering over Comcast's admitted slowing of file-sharing uploads, the cable industry's chief on Thursday set out to do a little damage control.

Kyle McSlarrow, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, said he's "amused" that in all the coverage of the Comcast-BitTorrent spat, no one's talking about the cable industry's role in getting high-speed Internet service to millions of American households and, by extension, enabling online applications and services to take off.

"One of the ironies is that most of these applications depended on cable's rollout of … Read more

Gefen is adding hard-drive encryption to its High-Definition Personal Video Recorder to ensure that it won't become an easy avenue for video piracy. Doing so will bring the product into line with other commercially available set-top recorders and DVRs, all of which encrypt video recordings to ensure they won't be played back outside of the device.

The addition of encryption follows a dialogue with CNET that was initiated after the Gefen HD PVR was highlighted on Zatznotfunny. Blogger Dave Zatz noted that the Gefen was a unique product: not only did it have HDMI inputs--a usually unseen … Read more

Add Japan to the ranks of countries cracking down on illegal file sharing over the Internet. The Yomiuri Shimbun is reporting that the country's four Internet providers agreed to disconnect Internet connections "of users found to repeatedly use Winny and other file-sharing programs to illegally copy gaming software and music."

The four organizations include the Telecom Service Association and the Telecommunications Carriers Association. About 1,000 major and smaller domestic providers belong to the four associations, which means the measure would become the first countermeasure against Winny-using rights-violators used by the whole provider industry.

They organizations plan … Read more

Apple SDK announcement http://www.news.com/one-more-thing/ http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/06/live-from-apples-iphone-press-conference/

The Vista Capable mess: Intel pushes, Microsoft bends http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080305-the-vista-capable-debacle-intel-pushes-microsoft-bends.html

Internet Explorer 8: Crash, Restart, Crash http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Internet_Explorer_8_Crash_Restart_Crash_14848.html

Acid3 Test unleashed, murders every current browser http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=10975

Whistle-blower: Feds Have a high-speed backdoor into wireless carrier http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/whistleblower-f.html

Piracy caused by poor choice http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-caused-by-poor-choice-080305/

MIPI ISP filter conflict (Thanks Luke from Melbourne!) http://steve.blogs.exetel.com.au/index.php?/archives/79-MIPI.html… Read more

With Jeff Bakalar on Valentine's Day workout recovery, Dan Frommer of Silicon Alley Insider fame joins us in studio to talk about Microsoft's after school special program to stop kids from pirating, the Xbox 360's high failure rate, plus Indiana Jones 4's trailer hits the Interwebs, and please...oh please for the love of God...do not see Jumper.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

You've got to hand it to Microsoft. It's in it for the looonnnngggg haul.

Take, for example, its commitment to help teenagers understand the importance of respecting intellectual property (read: giving Microsoft more money). It just put out a survey showing that when kids understand the rules of copyright, they're "less likely to download illegally."

It also created a cute website that shows kids just how much fun it is to respect intellectual property. Hurray! That's where I'm going to be hanging out on Friday night.

The one thing it didn't explain … Read more

Editor's note: This blog was updated at 6:58 a.m. PST Tuesday to add a link to the report.

WASHINGTON--The Bush administration witnessed a "record" uptick in intellectual property-related investigations and prosecutions last year, according to a new government report released Monday.

During the 2007 fiscal year, the U.S. Department of Justice filed 217 of those cases--up 7 percent from the 204 cases lodged in 2006 and 33 percent from the 169 such cases in 2005--according to the report (PDF) produced by the National Intellectual Property Law Enforcement Coordination Council. The NIPLECC, as it's … Read more