Author: Digital Digest | Latest News

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 12th September 2015 are in. The Age of Adaline was the week's best selling new release, but came second on the top 10 chart behind last week's number one, Mad Max: Fury Road.

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here

The infamous Swedish police raid that took down The Pirate Bay last year apparently never happened, according to the TPB team.

Swedish police raided the Nacka station datacenter, a Cold War era nuclear proof bunker turned into a secure hosting facility, in early December last year. Quickly following the raid, The Pirate Bay went offline, and most believed at that time that the police raid had successfully taken down the world's most popular pirate site. Worse yet, many feared private data were now in the possession of authorities.

Over the next couple of months, The Pirate Bay website was updated with cryptic clues, and it wasn't until nearly three months later that the Pirate Bay returned. And even then, many people believed that what returned wasn't the same as what was there before, despite there being zero data loss present.

And it's only until now that the TPB team has revealed just exactly what happened. Speaking to TorrentFreak, the TPB team says that the raid only took out one TPB server (crew.thepiratebay.org) which was used by moderators for private communications, and the take-down itself did not affect TPB operations at all.

The crew server did contain data that TPB felt could compromise the website, and coupled with the arrest of one moderator, the team decided to move cloud providers as a precaution. This necessitated the site going down, but the unexpected difficulty in moving to a different provider and the subsequent code re-write to fix these issues for good meant that the downtime was a lot longer than planned.

And the cryptic messages on the TPB front page? According to the TPB team, it was simply a bit of fun, to fuel the crazy conspiracy theories surrounding the site's downtime.

As for why it has taken so long for all of this information to be revealed, the TPB team says that this too was precautionary, to ensure nothing was compromised, especially when it came to the moderators. This was also why the site's moderators were kept in the dark about the site's relaunch in February, and moderator functions were disabled in the relaunched site.

The Xbox One and PS4 are currently locked in an epic battle for the hard earned money of gamers, with the PS4 currently winning handsomely. And things might get even harder for the Xbox One this upcoming holiday shopping season according to none other than Xbox boss Phil Spencer.

Speaking to IGN, Spencer says that he fully expects Sony to give the PS4 a price cut in the coming months, something that he says should be happening based on what's happened in the past.

"I fully expect they [PlayStation] will drop price. When I think about the playbook they've used in the past, we feel good about the plans we have in place going forward in the holiday. If history tells, then we'll see a price drop from them coming," says Spencer.

The plans that Spencer refers to would be the Xbox One's big exclusive line-up for the holidays, including new titles in the Halo, Forza, Tomb Raider and Gears of War franchises.

Even if Spencer's prediction proves to be true the the PS4 gets a price cut, Spencer thinks this won't necessarily be bad news for Xbox.

"It's great for gamers when price competition happens. We saw that last holiday, and we saw crazy sales numbers on all of the consoles," he said.

From New Zealand's three-strikes to France's three-strikes, read this and other news stories for the week ending 20 September 2015

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A report has been released on France's controversial "three-strikes" anti-piracy law to commemorate the five year anniversary of the law's introduction.

Dubbed Hadopi, named so after the agency responsible for managing the regime, the law was one of the first so-called "three-strikes" laws introduced anywhere around the world. Under the regime, users' Internet activities were monitored and are warned if they were found to be downloading infringing content. Upon the third time infringing activity was found, the action against the user was elevated, either to a fine or even disconnection.

Not all infringing activities were monitored under the regime, with the priority being placed on BitTorrent downloads - direct downloads and the increasingly popular streaming methods are not monitored.

When the Sarkozy government was elected out of office, the incoming government decided to review Hadopi. Hadopi was subsequently modified to no longer disconnect users, opting for fines instead.

This week, Hadopi turns five and to commemorate, the HADOPI agency has released statistics showing the full effect of the law.

In the 60 months covered by the stats, over 5.4 million infringement notices were sent out, or nearly 100,000 notices were month. 

These next set of figures, however, would be ones often cited by industry heavyweights when it comes to defending the effectiveness of Hadopi.

Only 10% of those warned the first time continued to download and were warned a second time. And only 2,900 users out of 5.4 million, or 0.57%, continued to download to receive a third strike.

This would seem to suggest that the warnings were effective in stopping downloaders, even if most of these third strikes did not lead to any fines or persecutions.

However, as revealed by Hadopi recently, the agency only had resources to process around 50% of all reported infractions every month, meaning many potential second and third strikes went unnoticed. 

Furthermore, users who received warnings may simply have switched to one of the numerous other download or streaming methods that Hadopi does not monitor, or use a VPN service to mask their online identity.

Regardless of the effect Hadopi had on users' download habits, all signs suggest that it didn't really have a profound effect on revenue, which would have been the whole point of stopping piracy.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 5th September 2015 are in. The release of A-lister Mad Max: Fury Road has finally helped to break the recent trend of poor Blu-ray results.

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here

New Zealand's controversial three-strikes anti-piracy laws are too expensive, says copyright holders who originally lobbied for the regime to be implemented.

As a result, only a single copyright complaint has been filed with the tribunal in charge of overseeing the regime for the entirety of 2015, down from four last year.

The problem, from a rights-holder perspective, are the fees involved in sending warnings. It costs $25 for send one warning, and with three strikes required before further action can be taken, it means a cost of $75, plus an additional $200 after the third strike to file the actual complaint. With hundreds of thousands of downloaders, this would lead to a very expensive way to stop piracy, with the costs being even higher than the actual damage pirates are causing to the industry.

Even pirates that have received three warnings can still pirate content by using an alternative download method that the regime cannot track, or by using VPN services.

Recorded Music NZ general counsel Kristin Bowman spoke to New Zealand's Stuff and explained why the group has stopped pursuing punishments for downloaders.

"We haven’t got rid of [piracy] as the regime, unfortunately, is too costly. It’s really disappointing," Bowman says.

"Every time we send a notice it costs us $25. We would love to do 1000 of those a week, but we just can’t afford it."

From a new app that's the Spotify for music piracy, to a new feature that won't be coming to Netflix, read this and other news stories for the week ending 13 September 2015

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A new piece of free software is to make music piracy as easy as using Spotify, has been dubbed the "Popcorn Time" for music.

Popcorn Time helped to make movie and TV piracy as easy to use as watching Netflix, and it has sent shock-waves through the movie and TV piracy scene. Its huge popularity has rights-holders scrambling to react, and even Netflix has come out to suggest that Popcorn Time is a serious threat.

There now promises to be a new piece of software that does the same for music. Meet Aurous, from the developer of the Stike torrent search engine, which promises to give users a Spotify like experience, except with unlimited streaming and download, and all powered via torrent uploads.

Aurous, available in alpha form in coming weeks, is made by developer Andrew Sampson, who was in the news earlier in the year for having his PayPal account blocked.

In effect, Aurous is not just a BitTorrent client, but each client is also a P2P search engine, powered by the Strike search engine. The software is also made with a decentralized design, making it incredibly difficult for rights-holders to shut down its usage.

Sampson promises that by the time the alpha version is available in early October, users will be able to search and download practically any song they can think of. The software will be free to download, but may be ad-supported, and will be available on all major platforms including Windows, Mac, Linux Android and iOS.