The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that among the 2023 recipients of the EFF Award (formerly the Pioneer Award), it will honor Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Asanova Elbakyan this September. The Russian-based Sci-Hub is an enterprise-scale pirate site specifically built to host scientific papers about which the EFF states: Through Sci-Hub, Elbakyan has strived to shatter academic publishing’s monopoly-like mechanisms in ...
Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA) released a new report yesterday with the eye-popping statistic that 72% of Americans who subscribe to pirate media sites experience incidences of credit card fraud compared to 18% prevalence of credit card fraud among those who do not subscribe to pirate sites. These data are based on a survey of 2,030 Americans, of which 1 in ...
I know I’m arriving late to this party. It’s almost Thanksgiving, but it was back on November 3 that two Russian nationals—Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakov—were arrested in Argentina at the request of the United States on charges of criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud, and money laundering. Concurrent with the arrests, authorities seized 241 domains controlled by the book piracy ...
Apropos my recent response to the EFF’s standard policy of shrugging at online piracy, I want to highlight one paragraph from the post to which I replied. Katherine Trendacosta wrote: From the fever-pitch moral panic of the early 2000s, discussions about “piracy” disappeared from pop culture for about a decade. It’s come back, both from the side explaining why and the side that wants ...
Welp (as the kids say), it looks like Katherine Trendacosta of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found an old PowerPoint deck from 2012 and used it to write a new post ominously titled Hollywood’s Insistence on New Draconian Copyright Rules Is Not About Protecting Artists. Typical of the EFF playbook, Trendacosta devotes an entire post maligning the motion picture industry ...
