Jenna Wortham, technology writer for The New York Times, offers this article in which she questions the illegality of IP theft online. Titled, The Unrepentant Bootlegger, Wortham begins with a description of what some may consider an unjustifiably heavy-handed raid by DHS officers in the arrest of Hana Beshara, a co-founder of the illegal media site NinjaVideo, shut down in 2009. ...
I’ve lost count at this point how many times and ways I’ve rejected the premise that piracy is a consumer-driven response to claims of scarcity in the market, especially in the United States; but now KPMG has released the results of a study of motion pictures and television programs that rebuts such pro-piracy claims with actual data. You can read the ...
This time last year, I had the opportunity to talk to Dr. David Price of London-based NetNames shortly after they released a report on the scale and scope of media piracy worldwide. Presently, Dr. Price is in Washington DC where, along with collaborator Tom Galvin of the Digital Citizens Alliance, he officially released a new report on piracy, this one ...
People like to tell themselves and others that piracy of entertainment media is a victimless crime, by which they typically mean that their one little download of a major motion picture doesn’t hurt anyone when the studio that produced said picture is making millions. I’ve assailed this fallacy in more than a few posts, but a report released today by ...
Following the loss of Robin Williams, my kids were in the mood to re-watch Disney’s Aladdin. We thought we had a VHS copy of the film, but I bet mine is not the only household with a few VHS jackets containing the wrong tapes inside. (See kids, this is why we put things back…) Anyway, not so much with the ...
