Currently offers “Life,” the “Bionic Woman,” “30 Rock,” “The Office,” “Friday Night Lights,” and “Heroes.” NBC Direct, which is still in beta, has begun offering free full episode downloads of several popular NBC shows. The list of available shows currently includes: “Life,” the “Bionic Woman,” “30 Rock,” “The Office,” “Friday Night Lights,” and “Heroes.” More [...]

Priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers instead of the cash flow of large corporations. Recent comments by the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s federal investigations agency and questions of copyright theft about its intellectual property enforcement priorities prove once and [...]

Gives the Feds authority to file civil lawsuits on behalf of copyright holders, leaving the RIAA and MPAA free to sit back and collect the checks for damages. As we all know, the MPAA and RIAA have many friends in the corridors of our nation’s capitol. They’ve been able to inject their priorities into everything [...]

Is taking PayPal donations to help pay for the legal costs of defending himself in court following his arrest by UK authorities for suspected illegal music distribution. It was almost 3 weeks ago that British police arrested a 24yo UK man named Alan Ellis on suspicion of being the one behind OiNK, the BitTorrent community’s [...]

Disgruntled kid apparently thought a shared web server wasn’t big enough for the both of them. I was unpleasantly surprised this morning to find that “the RIAA” had sent me a warning letter from [email protected] for being a registered user of the new What.CD BitTorrent tracker site. I immediately figured it had to be fake, [...]

One of our users forwarded us this confusing email “from the RIAA” this morning: From: [email protected] Date: November 12, 2007 5:43:09 AM EST To: ****@gmail.com Subject: Music Piracy Reply-To: [email protected] Dear registered user of the site What.cd, We have recently been investigating the activities of the users of the site http://www.what.cd/ and we have found [...]

This time it may be for good – at least in Canada that is. It was about a month and a half ago that Demonoid was shut down due to apparent pressure by the Canadian Recording Industry Association(CRIA). The site reappeared a few days later, but was forced to begin blocking Canadian visitors. Now it [...]

Seems like the AllofMP3 has a cousin, and I’m sure the MPAA is none too happy. After years of seemingly undue pressure from the RIAA and its contacts at the WTO, AllofMP3 was shut down some time ago despite the fact that it fully complied with Russian copyright laws and paid the standard 15% Russian [...]

Will make proposed ISP content filtering meaningless. In an interview with the BBC a few weeks ago, Lord Triesman, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, said intellectual property theft would no longer be tolerated in the UK. He then called on ISPs to take a "more activist role" in the problem of [...]

Points to the results of a telephone survey conducted last year where 57% of file-sharers said they didn’t buy downloaded material. This past Monday I discussed a study surprisingly commissioned by Industry Canada, a ministry of the Canadian federal government, that is the most extensive surveying to date of the Canadian population on music purchasing [...]

File-sharing sci-fi fans get an early taste of the upcoming made for TV movie. For you “Battlestar Galactica” fans out there who are having a hard time waiting for April 2008 and season 4 to roll around, I ran across an interesting pre-release DVD the other day on BitTorrent and figured that I’d share the [...]

Add Sympatico to the growing list of ISP’s blocking P2P traffic. In response to consumer complaints posted in the company’s official forum, Canadian ISP Bell Sympatico has admitted that it uses bandwidth throttling technologies to impose limitations on P2P and file-sharing services during peak hours. This revelation is further evidence that net neutrality is eroding. [...]

Life will certainly go on, but for users of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker site, the lack of the world’s premier DVD ripper will make things a little more difficult, and I’m sure the MPAA doesn’t mind this at all. aXXo, BitTorrent’s reigning king of DvDrips, has apparently decided to no longer upload content to [...]

New study says that 62% of global downloaders of “In Rainbows” chose to pay nothing, suggesting that perhaps a majority of music consumers feel that digital recorded music should be free and is not worth paying for. Comscore, a consumer behavior research group, has released the results of a new study measuring online sales of [...]

A new tracker search engine is in town, and it’s certain to make finding content even easier. CompleTorrent is the latest and greatest BitTorrent tracker search engine to grace the BitTorrent community, and the indexing of 101 sites immediately catapults it to the leader of the pack. We all have our favorite public tracker search [...]

Most extensive surveying to date of the Canadian population on music purchasing habits concludes that there is a positive correlation between file-sharing and CD sales. The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada is a a newly commissioned study by Industry Canada, a ministry of [...]

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) wants to ratchet up the fight against illegal file-sharing, even comparing it to child pornography to stress the need for action. I’ve mentioned before how the UK govt wants ISPs to crack down on illegal file-sharing, but now it seems that the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) wants it [...]

Forgets that TV content is already being beamed into the homes of cable TV subscribers unlike music. This past weekend Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal’s chief executive, warned that Apple’s iTunes was undermining the ability of "traditional" media companies to sell their content online at profitable rates, and he urged them to take a stand. Zucker [...]