piracy

The lawyers for Kim DotCom and MegaUpload continue to rack up court victories in New Zealand.

One of the country's courts has ordered the United States to turn over evidence it says it has that proves DotCom committed criminal acts of piracy. The U.S. Attorney's office has accused DotCom, founder of the cloud-storage service, of operating MegaUpload as a criminal enterprise.

U.S. officials say that MegaUpload made over $175 million by enabling users to store pirated digital media, including movies, music, and software on the company's servers. They accuse him of encouraging the looting and … Read more

In the continuing fight against copyright infringement, U.K. authorities sentenced the owner of Surfthechannel.com to four years in prison today.

Anton Vickerman, 38, who founded Surfthechannel -- a Web site that offered users links to streaming pirated material -- was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to facilitate copyright infringement, according to the Guardian. The sentencing came after an eight-week trial in June.

The way Surfthechannel worked was it let users search for movies or TV shows and then provided them with a list of links to both legal and pirated material. Essentially, the site acted like a … Read more

Three key Demonoid domains are now up for sale, less than two weeks after the BitTorrent site was taken down in a coordinated effort.

The Ukraine-based site was taken offline earlier this month apparently when local authorities contacted its Internet service provider, Colocall, and forced the ISP to shut down the service's servers. Demonoid was among the Web sites included in the U.S. government's "Notorious Markets List," which was created to identify "markets, including those on the Internet, which exemplify the problem of marketplaces dealing in infringing goods and helping sustain global piracy." … Read more

Google denies that its new copyright-policing policy won't affect Google-owned YouTube as it does other Web sites, despite the fact that YouTube has been known to play host to illegally posted copyrighted material.

The new policy, announced yesterday, knocks sites down in search results if Google receives a lot of "valid copyright removal notices" involving content on those sites.

But Search Engine Land reports that flagging supposedly illegal content on most sites involves using an online process that starts on a page labeled "Removing Content From Google," whereas flagging content on YouTube involves using the … Read more

Google announced on the company's blog today that sites that generate too many take-down notices will find themselves pushed down in the search rankings. Takedown notices are the documents that owners of copyrighted material file in order to request the deletion of unauthorized copies of their work from Web sites.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Web site owners must remove unauthorized files once they've received a legitimate takedown notice. … Read more

Google search will be less welcoming to sites accused by copyright owners of piracy.

On the company's blog, Google outlined a new measure designed at penalizing sites that generate too many complaints from copyright owners.

"We will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site," Google said in the blog post. "Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results."

This appears to be among the most significant antipiracy measures Google has ever adopted. The company'… Read more

Anonymous has promised to bring down its wrath on the Ukrainian government after authorities were said to have taken down the file-sharing site Demonoid last week.

"Last week, our generous green friend, the Demonoid, was met with a state sponsored Distributed Denial of Service attack...These illegal actions were then followed up with a raid by Ukraine authorities," the hacking group wrote in a blog post on AnonPR yesterday. "In retaliation for your criminal acts against us and the free flow of information, we have already begun an operation against those responsible. Lazers are already being fired.&… Read more

On August 1, a vitriolic, hysterical mob of authors mistook e-book lending Web site Lendink for a piracy clearinghouse, rallying a terribly mistaken call to action. 

The site remains offline today as details emerge revealing just how wrong these authors were -- and how unrepentant some of them still are.

Lendink was a hobby site put together by disabled army vet Dale Porter, who created a person-to-person e-mail request system where e-book fans could find out about lend-enabled books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and contact each other to arrange loans on titles they wanted to read.

Borrowing … Read more

The Korea Customs Service (KCS) has uncovered what it believes is a piracy ring dedicated to copying Nintendo games and creating bootleg cartridges to sell online.

According to the Korea Herald, 25 people were involved in the ring, including 15 online shopping mall managers. The KCS believes the individuals have sold at least 90,000 pirated games and cartridges worth approximately 100 billion won ($87.2 million).

Advertised as "100 percent authentic" with a "perfect after-sales service", the ring is thought to have distributed illegal copies of Nintendo DS games alongside R4, DSTT and DSTTi -- … Read more