Tag: MPAA

The Motion Picture Association of America has taken down 12 U.S. torrent sites in its latest round of anti-piracy complaints, with the help of Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN. The names of the sites haven't been released, but 12 of them were U.S.-based, and 39 were in other countries around the world. The takedowns happened through the standard route of filing copyright complaints with ...

In what will surely become a landmark case -- or at least a massive thorn in the MPAA and RIAA's clubbed, pygmy feet -- a judge has ruled that bypassing DRM via hacking, reverse engineering or any other means is not in itself illegal. The case itself ruled that General Electric, in using hacked security dongles to repair some uninterruptible power supplies produced by another company, did not ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/30/mpaa-crackdown-pirate-streaming-movies-sites/'; The MPAA is at it again, going after movie pirates. This time, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is helping out the movie industry, and they've seized nine different domains: Movies-links.TV, nowmovies.com, thepiratecity.org, filespump.com, planetmoviez.com, zml.org, ...

Pirates unite! Earlier this week, we reported that The Pirate Bay had to change ISPs in response to a legal challenge from the MPAA in a German court. Well, the site is up and running again after migrating to its new provider ... the Swedish Pirate Party. That's right, The Pirate Bay's biggest political supporter is now its ISP. Talk about a hands-on approach to policy! In an interview with ...

By this point in The Pirate Bay's history, nobody should be surprised when it goes down to relocate its servers or respond to new legal problems. It's down again today, while its lawyers review the latest threat from Hollywood movie studios. The studios successfully got an injunction against the popular torrent site in the Regional Court of Hamburg (Germany). The injunction ordered The Pirate Bay ...

I'm sure you're sick of reading about April Fools' Day jokes, but this is one prank with a serious message. Russian Torrent site Vertor, tired of anti-piracy groups trying to shut them down, sent a most unusual package to six of its biggest opponents, including the MPAA. What was inside? Condoms! They were Russian Vizit Overture flavored condoms (in mint, banana and strawberry!) with an ...

As reported earlier today on Public Knowledge, Congress passed the broadband stimulus package without an amendment proposed to allow deep packet inspection to catch, among other things, copyright violators. The amendment, which was put forth by Senator Feinstein from California, would allow ISPs to exercise "reasonable network management," to keep tabs on what you're downloading. While the ...

As DownloadSquad gears up for "Download Like a Pirate Day" this Friday, it appears as though our friends from the MPAA and the boys on Capitol Hill are also hard at work. The U.S. Senate appears ready to give Bill S. 3325 - the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act of 2008 - the green light as early as today. A quick look at this article by Alex Curtis and this open letter from twelve ...

In case you needed another reason to look over your shoulder when uploading or downloading illegal copies of music or movies, it's not just the movie studios and record labels tracking you anymore. AT&T has begun working with content owners to keep pirated media off of its network, making AT&T the first major ISP to take a hands on approach to anti-piracy efforts. AT&T may have started ...

You know those numbers that could change the world? No, not the ones on Lost, the HD-DVD key code that could lead to the end of Digg as we know it. Well, the sixteen hexadecimal digits are just numbers when it comes right down to it. And you can do all sorts of things with numbers, like use them as a basis for web-colors and make them into a pretty picture that may or may not be illegal to share ...

Well, who would have seen that coming? Apparently the Motion Picture Association isn't particularly happy about BackupHDDVD, a tool developed by the hackers over at the doom9 forum that decrypts AACS encryption on HD DVDs. The MPAA sent a notice to SourceForge, asking them to take down all the files related to the program, and SourceForge complied. That's not to say that you can't find the files ...

Hollywood and the MPAA are pretty serious about stopping the spread of pirated movies via Bittorrent and other P2P clients. Unfortunately, it appears they're losing the battle through a hole their first line of defense: Public Perception. According to a new research study, most Americans see downloading movies rather than buying them as tantamount to a "minor parking violation." Only 40 percent ...

If you go to Grokster.com you're greeted by the familiar old Grokster logo, and something new: "The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal." The message continues with the slightly disingenuous "There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them," and finally, a ...