The latest Futurama movie, Bender’s Game, is released in a few days and as usual it’s already on BitTorrent. However, Matt Groening has included a nice extra on the DVD – a pretty amusing parody on one of the classic anti-piracy messages.

Anyone who watched The Simpsons Movie will have noticed Bart in the intro chalking his famous blackboard with the words “I will not illegally download this movie”. Matt Groening seems to appreciate the comedy anti-piracy message as his latest movie, ‘Futurama: Bender’s Game‘, also includes some mockery of file-sharers or, on closer inspection, possibly some encouragement. Whatever the intention, it is pretty funny.

The movie, the third in the Futurama series and due for release in a few days time, has already leaked to BitTorrent. This is nothing new, but hidden away in the DVD extras is a parody of the infamous movie industry anti-piracy ad, which was previously parodied by the IT Crowd.

Entitled ‘Downloading Often Is Terrible’ or D.O. I.T for short, the animated advert follows the familiar “You wouldn’t steal…” structure, but with more unusual content. Whatever the ad suggests that Bender wouldn’t steal or do, is followed up by Bender doing just that, starting with “You wouldn’t steal a spaceship”, which of course, Bender would, along with lots of other amusing things.

Although Bender is stealing physical objects in his 2D animated world, lots of people disagree with the use of the word ’steal’ to describe the act of copyright infringement. Australian lawyer Brendan Scott certainly doesn’t believe it. When someone downloads movies or music illegally, they make a copy, he argues. The original is still there, and legally speaking nothing is stolen. Scott concludes: “To use the infringement-as-stealing meme demonstrates something of a lack of respect for language and consequently a lack of respect for the people to whom you are speaking.”

But maybe Bender himself provides the truth. The copyright lobbies often paint the fight against piracy as a “matter of life and death” so it seems fitting to utilize the phrase to illustrate the chasm between stealing and copying. Having watched the clip and noted the final stolen item produced from Bender’s chest, I immediately thought about where that came from, the state of the gentleman in question, and where I could find him for a chat.

Because if anyone in the world knows the difference between copying and stealing, it’s got to be him. Or Lucy Liu’s milliner. Enjoy the clip.

If you go back 3 months on YouTube, it appears that even this parody got leaked ahead of time. Cammed too, you couldn’t make it up.

Post from: TorrentFreak

The Chinese government has stepped in and banned 10 video sites, while giving warnings to 17 others. The sites were accused of ‘regulations violations’ ranging from running a service without authorization, through to displaying violent or horrific content. None of the charges relate to piracy, even though one of the sites is China’s biggest eDonkey indexing site.

The West would dearly love China to clamp down on Internet piracy, so when 10 video sites were recently banned by the Chinese government and 17 others were issued with warnings, it looked like some progress may have been made. It wasn’t to be.

According to a report from Xinhuanet, China’s State Administration of Radio Film and Television has taken action against 17 sites it claims violated various regulations, including the publishing of horrific, violent or pornographic content, and operating a video site without proper approval. None of the sites appeared to have been warned or shuttered due to piracy issues.

One of the sites that has been warned, VeryCD, is China’s largest eDonkey indexing site. In operation for around 5 years, it claims to link to more than 30 terabytes of data. VeryCD also operates a service known as MP3! which aims to be the world’s largest index of MP3 files, which would understandably attract some copyright action.

However, a visit to VeryCD appears to show the site pretty much intact and packed with links to the latest movies, music, games and software. So, it appears the site was warned, rather than banned. Details are scarce, what might it have been warned about if it is not related to copyright infringement?

Of course, pornographic content is available on eDonkey, that is one option. Another possibility lies in the list of complaints about the various sites – there is one which reads “spreading video programs that violate national regulations”. VeryCD actually created their own version of eMule, which has been downloaded more than 30 million times. Could that be the cause of the warning?

Whatever the problem, unusually for a file-sharing site, it wasn’t piracy.

Via SHD

Post from: TorrentFreak

Pirate Bay co-founders Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij gave a keynote speech at the Hack In The Box Security Conference 2008, entitled “How to dismantle a billion dollar industry – as a hobby.” The two discuss how The Pirate Bay grew to be the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, and some of the challenges they face today.

At the Hack in the Box conference, held in Malaysia, Peter and Fredrik gave a talk this morning, where they offered some background information on how the site became the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, in a relatively short period of time.

The two, who just turned 30, have a long history of copyright infringement which started back in the ’80’s, with Peter cracking Amiga games and Fredrik copying Commodore64 software. At the time they had never heard of copyright infringement, they were just doing what everybody else did. To the amusement of the audience, Peter said he didn’t think piracy was ‘wrong’ when he was a kid, but now that he’s an adult, he knows it’s not.

Years later, in 2003, they got involved in founding Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy), a pro-piracy organization that was created in response to anti-Piratbyrån. The goal of Piratbyrån was to start a debate on copyright issues, and how they affect society. Until then, most press in Sweden would simply take everything anti-Piratbyrån said for granted.

In the years to come, Piratbyrån started several pro-piracy projects, and the most influential is without a doubt the founding of The Pirate Bay on November 21, 2003. “We needed to have a filesharing network in Sweden, because there was none,” Peter said. “At this time there was one big torrent site, which was called Suprnova, but they mainly had international content. We and Piratbyrån wanted more Swedish and Scandinavian content. So we started a big library, and that is The Pirate Bay.”

Fredrik, who ran one of the earlier versions of the tracker on his laptop, explained that when The Pirate Bay went live, it was hosted in South America. “The Pirate Bay originally started out in Mexico, on a Mexican server where Anakata, the third guy of The Pirate Bay was working at the time,” he said. Anakata hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for, but it was soon overloaded since the site grew so rapidly.

The Pirate Bay was initially available in Swedish language only. However, after a year they found out that, although their site was initially targeted at Scandinavians, over 80% of the users came from other parts of the world. In fact, one of the most popular torrents was a Swedish language course. Because of increasing worldwide popularity, The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages.

The popularity of the site didn’t go unnoticed in Hollywood. Like many other BitTorrent sites, The Pirate Bay also received several takedown notices. However, the way they responded to these was quite unique and some have become news stories in themselves. Threats from the entertainment industry didn’t stop at sending letters. In true Hollywood style, The Pirate Bay admins soon saw private investigators watching their every move.

“They’ve sent private investigators after us, which is really stupid if you do something online,” Peter said. “What are they going to find, that we are sitting behind our computers?” Fredrik added: “I guess the private investigator that went after me in Gothenburg got to see a lot of good bars, a lot of late nights, but probably not a lot of evidence gathering.” Peter then noted that someone from the IFPI was actually at the conference, “still trying to find out what we’re doing.”

Eventually The Pirate Bay got raided, following pressure from Hollywood and the USA. Fredrik recalls the day vividly: “I got a phone call like 10am in the morning, it was Anakata.” He told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office, and asked him to get down to the colocation facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence’, although none of it, whatever it was, was related to The Pirate Bay.

As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized that the problems might be linked to their tracker, so he initiated a full backup of the site. At the colocation facility there were 65 police, some in civilian clothing. Fredrik asked them: “Who are you? What are you doing here?” To which they responded, “Who are YOU? What are you doing here?” After questions back and forth, Fredrik eventually told them his name, and a police officer said, “Oh, we’ve been looking for you.”

During the subsequent questioning, the Pirate Bay trio gave up very little information. Anakata quickly confessed to his crime – of killing the Swedish prime minister when he was 2 years old, but that was all they got. It is up to the court to decide whether the Pirate Bay founders are operating illegally or not. Until then, The Pirate Bay is still up and running, stronger than ever.

As always, there are a lot of plans for the future, and Peter and Fredrik briefly discussed some. One of the most interesting plans is to encrypt tracker connections, so anti-piracy organizations can’t spy on their users. We will probably hear more about that in the future. The keynote speech by Peter and Fredrik was streamed from a mobile phone last night, and we embedded the recording below. The sound quality is far from optimal, but it’s watchable. The talk starts at 13m 00s

Post from: TorrentFreak