news.buyenne.com

Hollywood's reluctance to accept new technology may be the reason why top films keep on getting pirated.

It's become a tradition every awards season, that the year's top movies, some still yet to hit cinemas, are leaked online via DVD screeners sent to award voters. Many in the industry are already asking for a more secure way to get films to voters.

But according to a Variety report, Hollywood's fear of new technology and ironically, it's fear of piracy is why studios haven't adopted a more secure method to deliver the latest films to voters.

That more secure method would see the use of digital distribution, via a closed and secure ecosystem.

Despite the fact that sending a DVD via the mail, a DVD that can be taken, misplaced and shared, is far from a secure solution, studio execs have not warmed up to the idea of digital mainly because they fear there are piracy risks associated, despite being told that such a digital system would be 99% piracy proof.

Studios executives even worry about how many devices a digital screener can be viewed on for each voter - worried that too many devices could lead to piracy, despite the fact that a DVD screener can be viewed and shared much easier (and if said screener is uploaded online, the "too many devices" could turn into "unlimited number of devices").

Piracy aside, the other major issue is how to ensure voters are watching films in the way they were intended - not on smartphone screens or 7" tablets - something that could affect the vote. However, there is no guarantee that DVD screeners aren't being watched on small screeen laptops instead of on home theater screens, if they're being watched at all.

But it seems it's only a matter of time before the move to digital occurs, not because Hollywood has started to embrace new technology, but only because old technology can no longer be trusted upon, as this awards season has proven so costly.

Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Over the years many people have put their necks on the line to defend what they believe to be right. Sadly, when things get out of control, some have even paid with their lives.

While copyright struggles are important, they are rarely a matter of life and death. Nevertheless, there are those who are prepared to make big sacrifices to defend citizens’ rights to communicate freely online. Activists come in all shapes and sizes but within the file-sharing landscape few have been more daring than the world’s various Pirate parties.

Both the Swedish and UK Pirate parties have stepped up to defend and support The Pirate Bay in recent years and both have lived to tell the tale. However, members of the Czech Pirate Party are now staring down the barrel of a gun with their future at stake.

As reported earlier this week, the party is being prosecuted by the police for running TV piracy site Sledujuserialy.cz (translated: I Watch TV Series). However, while most site operators try to avoid trouble, the chief of the party’s International Department says this conflict with the law was intentional.

“The original idea to create the web page came from outside. However, the former owners were threatened by ČPU (Czech Anti-Piracy Union) so they agreed to transfer control to us, since our party was ready to face the fight with ČPU,” Mikuláš Ferjenčík informs TF.

“We took patronage over the website in January 2013 in order to achieve a precedent similar to the Svensson case, so our original intention was to initiate such a reaction.”

And a reaction is what the party got.

On Thursday 21st January the Czech pirates were officially notified that their party will be prosecuted in criminal court for running the site. They’re keen to point out that the site carried no copyrighted content on its servers but instead linked to TV series via embedded links.

“Our intention is to create a precedent clearly confirming that a link is not a crime. No one shall be persecuted for referring to other’s web sites,” Ferjenčík says.

“Until now, mainly physical persons were criminalized by the Anti-Piracy Union. Their [targets’] positions were unfair since they often had no money to pay lawyers, so they often had to accept unfair extrajudicial settlements.

“We are capable of covering the necessary costs and we would like to publicly show that the Anti-Piracy Union’s legal position is not strong enough for such behavior.”

Ferjenčík informs TF that while the site’s domain was registered to the party, the identity of its administrators is being protected. So, in this case no individual is being targeted by the Anti-Piracy Union and no-one is going to jail. However, the party’s actions could have serious consequences if it all goes wrong.

“We might have to ‘refund the losses’ (estimated to 5.5 millions CZK, around 200 thousand EUR). It is also possible that the Pirate Party could be dissolved as a legal entity. Fortunately, no physical person is in danger of being punished in any way,” Ferjenčík explains.

Despite the risks the party feels entirely justified in the position it has taken and stands by its decision to defend the hyperlink.

“Linking cannot be criminalized otherwise one would have to criminalize services like Google or Facebook and many others. It would break the Internet as we know it and it would result in huge damage to the whole economy,” Ferjenčík says.

Of course, the Pirate Party is a political entity and the current case will also have the effect of thrusting it into the spotlight. The timing couldn’t be better.

“The timing is very advantageous for us, since there will be regional elections during October 2016,” Ferjenčík concludes.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Asus is expanding its VivoMini line of tiny desktop computers with a new model that focuses on, well… expansion. The VivoMini VC65 line of computers are small computers with Intel Skylake processors and support for up to four 2.5 inch hard drives or storage state drives. Asus showcased these new systems at the Consumer Electronics […]

Asus VivoMini VC65 mini PC supports four 2.5 inch storage drives is a post from: Liliputing

Auf einem Weltraumbahnhof in New Mexico experimentiert Google mit solarbetriebenen Drohnen. Diese sollen sogar Millimeterwellen zur Datenübertragung im 5G-Standard nutzen. (Drohne, Google)

Die erste Spur einer Datenautobahn für Satelliten ist gelegt. Von Baikonur aus startete eine Relaisstation erfolgreich zu ihrer geostationären Umlaufbahn. (Satelliten, Technologie)

Der Leiter der NSA-Elitehacker TAO erklärt bei einem seiner seltenen öffentlichen Auftritte, wie man als Netzwerk-Admin seinem Team das Leben schwermacht. (NSA, Firefox)

Last December, Aurous developer Andrew Sampson settled his legal dispute with the RIAA for a massive $3 million, according to the legal paperwork.

The legal trouble also affected another popular project Sampson ran, the torrent search engine Strike. While it was not specifically mentioned in the settlement agreement the Florida-based developer decided to pull the plug on this project too.

While the site has been offline for weeks, interest in the project hardly waned. Sampson informs TorrentFreak that over a million visitors still landed on the site, which served pages cached by CloudFlare. In addition, many external services called on the site’s defunct API.

This prompted the developer to make the code available for others, releasing it under an open source license.

“I don’t want to leave thousands of developers hanging; the API received over 25,000,000 unique requests a month, not to mention the millions of unique users we received every month,” Sampson tells us.

“I wanted to leave something, it may not be the prettiest thing, but the least I can do is extend an olive branch and give people a small tool set for hosting their own search engines.”

With the code anyone can set up a custom torrent search engine, replicating the Strike service. The only thing that’s missing are the actual torrent scrapers. After consulting his lawyers, Sampson decided not to make those public.

The past few weeks have been rough for the developer, who says he suffered mentally from his run-in with the RIAA.

“After dealing with this lawsuit I’m a bit taxed mentally, I hit a really low point for a while, depression kind of overwhelmed me, I lost a decade long friendship, a lot of my savings, I just became kind of bitter and angry,” Sampson notes.

However, he’s slowly starting to get a grip on reality again and is looking forward to working on new projects. While he still has a healthy interest in P2P and BitTorrent, he will stay away from anything remotely infringing.

“I’d much rather focus my energy on work and building open source tools that don’t cross grey lines. It is a lot less stressful and feels great.”

The release of Strike’s source code offers the developer the closure he needs, so he can move on to other things.

Currently he’s working on a new project called Ulterius. This is an open source C# based framework that allows users to manage windows based systems from any HTML5 enabled browser.

“I received a lot of support from the community during this, I can only hope they like what I make next. I’m 20 years old, so I’m just getting started,” he concludes.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.