In this episode, I speak with Tom Galvin, CEO of Digital Citizens Alliance, about piracy of creative works and DCA’s latest report, issued this month in collaboration with the research group White Bullet. The report, entitled Breaking Bad(s): How Advertiser-Supported Piracy Helps Fuel a Booming Multi-Billion Dollar Illegal Market, reveals that piracy is a highly profitable criminal enterprise and is ...

Andrew Orlowski reports at The Register that last week Google quietly suspended its legal action to “muzzle” an investigation by Mississippi Attorney General Hood into whether or not the search giant was abiding by the terms of its 2012, non-prosecutorial settlement with the government over illegal online sales of prescription drugs.  Any explanation of Google’s change in strategy or the ...

If a man overhears two women at the local coffee house advocating some point of view he doesn’t like and he then announces out loud that he hopes someone rapes and kills them, the management will toss him out on the street.  In such a scenario, patrons will applaud the ejection, and nobody in his right mind will suggest that ...

View image | gettyimages.com I imagine most people, whether they’re users of pirate sites or not, haven’t paid much attention to the growing number of safety warnings associating content theft with identity theft and related crimes against consumers.  For one thing, the whole idea of media piracy itself has, for too long, enjoyed undeserved credibility as a so-called victimless crime ...

No matter who or what is behind the hack on Sony Pictures, it’s really bad.  The lead theory, though it begs many questions, is that the North Korean government initiated the attack and subsequent mass data dump of sensitive information along with five unreleased feature films.  The rationale I heard proposed this morning on NPR is that the attack might ...

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