TorrentFreak Email Update |
- MegaUpload Founder Again Denied Bail, High Court Appeal Launched
- Anti-Piracy Warnings Have No Effect on iTunes Sales
- The Pirate Bay Wants You To Really Download A Car
| MegaUpload Founder Again Denied Bail, High Court Appeal Launched Posted: 25 Jan 2012 12:55 AM PST
Dotcom, who along with several of his employees was raided by armed police in helicopters the day before, is wanted in the United States on racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering charges. The hearing was adjourned until Monday this week with Judge David McNaughton delivering his decision this morning at the North Shore District Court. Noting the scale of the charges against Dotcom and his considerable resources, Judge McNaughton said he that he had no doubt that fleeing New Zealand could be real possibility for the MegaUpload founder. Judge McNaughton said that if Dotcom could somehow make his way to his birthplace of Germany, extradition would prove impossible since the country has no such agreement with the United States. Essentially agreeing with prosecutor Anne Toohey, who had described Dotcom as a “significant” flight risk, Judge McNaughton denied the 38-year-old bail and remanded him in custody until 22nd February. Dotcom’s lawyer, Paul Davison, QC, said that decision would be immediately appealed to the High Court. “We were hopeful that the judge would accept our intentions and our arguments and see that there was no risk whatsoever of Kim Dotcom seeking to leave New Zealand. “All of his assets have been frozen, all of his resources have been taken,” he said as he left court today. “He’s living here with his wife and family, he has no intention whatsoever of endeavoring to leave New Zealand.” Also appearing in Court today were Dotcom’s alleged co-conspirators Bram van der Kolk, 29, Finn Batato, 38, and Mathias Ortmann, 40. In a hearing following Mr Dotcom’s, the lawyer representing the three men, Guy Foley, said his clients did not enjoy the same resources as the MegaUpload founder. Foley said that in the absence of a guilty verdict there should be a presumption of innocence. He described Batato, as a “fair player” who denies involvement in the alleged conspiracy. Prosecutor Anne Toohey described Batato as a series flight risk who, in common with Dotcom, could seek to flee to Germany. In defense of der Kolk, Foley described him as a family man who had a wife and child in New Zealand. He added that it was troubling that in evidence submitted to the court the FBI had supplied a photograph of someone else. Ortmann, said Foley, is “decent, modest, honest and reliable” man who would not flee. Prosecutor Toohey said as a German national, fleeing there was a real possibility. The decision on whether to grant bail to der Kolk, Batato and Ortmann will be delivered tomorrow. Source: MegaUpload Founder Again Denied Bail, High Court Appeal Launched
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| Anti-Piracy Warnings Have No Effect on iTunes Sales Posted: 24 Jan 2012 01:59 PM PST The majority of the reports and press releases put out by the music industry in the past several years can be summarized in a few words: "Piracy is evil and we lose a lot of money because of it." Even today, when more music is being sold than ever before, the RIAA, IFPI and other music groups still lobby hard for draconian measures to curb piracy. Whether it’s SOPA, PIPA or similar legislation as currently being presented in Finland and Ireland, the music industry begs governments to help them out. One of the countries where these lobbying efforts have paid off is France, where Internet users are now monitored by the state and disconnected if they are caught pirating three times. The big question is whether this law, which costs 11 million euros a year, has any effect at all. Yes, says the music industry, backing up their claim with a non-peer reviewed academic study. Last week some of the results were already teased to the press, and yesterday they were presented to the public, coinciding with the publication of this year's Digital Music Report published by IFPI. We decided to take a look at the two reports, and the only reasonable conclusion we can make is that France’s three-strikes anti-piracy law is not having ANY affect at all. Let’s start off with how IFPI summarizes the results in their report. “The analysis found that French iTunes sales saw a significant uplift at exactly the period when awareness of Hadopi was at its highest, in Spring 2009, when the law was being debated in the National Assembly.” This is bogus. The researchers don’t conclude this at all. There is no uplift in sales reported. What the researchers found is that in France, compared to five other European countries, more music was sold through iTunes. Looking at the graph below (from the report), it’s clear that the “uplift” in France before Hadopi was introduced (March 2009) is actually much sharper than the two years after. French iTunes sales vs control group vs Google trend
Another quote from the IFPI report: “This effect was maintained throughout the period studied. French iTunes sales were 22.5 per cent higher for singles and 25 per cent higher for digital albums than they would have been, on average, in the absence of Hadopi.” This is interesting, and indeed pretty much what the researchers conclude. However, as long-time followers of Hadopi and other anti-piracy laws, this conclusion doesn’t feel right. The huge increase in sales reported by the researchers is based on the alleged impact Hadopi had in the year and a half before it went into effect, not after The following footnote from the researchers is also quite revealing. “We also estimated the model for the 6 months before and after September 2010, as this was the first month that HADOPI began sending out first notices. In this case, the resulting coefficient was close to zero and statistically insignificant.” Indeed, when the three-strikes warnings were actually sent out, there was no effect on iTunes sales compared to the control countries. This is unusual, because you would expect that the hundreds of thousands of warnings that went out would have had more of an impact than the ‘news’ that this could happen in the future. In addition, if we look at the search trends for Hadopi and The Pirate Bay we don’t see a drop in interest for the latter, suggesting that the interest for pirated goods remained stable. Hadopi vs Pirate Bay
The researchers, however, are convinced that their findings are the result of the “potential implementation” of Hadopi. We find this strange. Could there be an alternative explanation? Let’s have a guess. At the same time Hadopi was introduced (early 2009) there was a lot of buzz around Spotify in several of the countries that were used as a control group in this study. Could it be that Spotify resulted in relatively less iTunes sales in countries like UK and Spain than in France? This could potentially explain all of the findings reported in the study. And that’s probably just one of the many alternative explanations. Whatever the case, concluding that expensive privacy-invading legislation such as the French Hadopi is boosting sales is going way too far. Source: Anti-Piracy Warnings Have No Effect on iTunes Sales
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| The Pirate Bay Wants You To Really Download A Car Posted: 24 Jan 2012 08:27 AM PST
But if you told him back then that you could deliver that letter before he could saddle his horse, he would suspect that either witchcraft or alcohol were at play. In the 20th and 21st centuries we became more open to the notion that amazing things can be achieved without magic, but occasionally we still fall short in our predictions for the future. Downloading digital media is so last decade now, even your grandmother can do it, but just a handful of years ago “You wouldn’t download a car” gained traction, a lighthearted meme that took the notion of Internet file-sharing to an intentionally ridiculous level. Several years later, however, it’s not looking quite so outrageous. Soon, the interest in digital files will take a new direction, not because they transform into music, movies or books, but because they will possess the ‘genetic’ code for physical objects. “We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles,” says The Pirate Bay as they announce a new 3D printing section of their site. “Data objects are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years,” they add. Although free sneakers in two decades sounds intriguing, creating physical objects from digital files is a reality now, as pointed out by 3D printing site Shapeways. “Being able to download product files is not new, Shapeways has had downloadable models for years, as has Thingiverse and Google Warehouse, but let’s see how this affects the 3D printing IP debate,” the company says on its blog in response to the TPB announcement. That’s right. The ever-looming copyright bogeyman, just waiting to throw his spanner in the 3D printer works. In the future, however, instead of Hollywood taking action against 3D object pirates (although Paramount did actually do that in 2011), they could well be outnumbered by just about every major product manufacturer in the world – possibly even some 3D printer manufacturers themselves, since they can already print themselves. But as pointed out by The Pirate Bay, there are huge potential benefits to be had. “No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labor. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one,” they conclude. So, when the writers at TorrentFreak are (more) old and gray, the children of today’s readers might be browsing The Pirate Bay III wondering which car to download. Or, as the coincidentally relevant (slightly NSFW) SOPA protest song embedded below suggests, even a boat. Or a cow. Copyright wars? You ain’t seen nothing, baby. Source: The Pirate Bay Wants You To Really Download A Car
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