It all started when a Spanish coder called ‘DarkAlex’ managed to modify the PSP default firmware to run custom codes which he programmed. This started an era, where gamers could do a lot more with their PSP then ever before. Soon , they figured out how to run ISO images of the UMDs on the PSP. Gamers soon started cloning PSP games and sharing it on the internet.
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These sites are arguably the most influential commentators with news and views on piracy, P2P, digital media, DRM, Usenet, IP and filesharing …
It is not at all surprising that the film industry’s key players are thrilled to collectively cite movie piracy as being the “industry’s greatest menace“. However, there are two major problems with this argument.
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As much as we here love TechCrunch, it is rare for them to publish an article on digital media or piracy without a reference to their 2007 party-line that music should be free (Orli Yakuel’s recent Guide to Music on the Web being a notable exception).
Hard-bundling old media offerings with new is one of the most daft market developments we have seen and arguably does nothing to combat digital piracy.
What does it look like? It typically involves some radically new and innovative digital service being available exclusively to users who also have some legacy old-school die-in-a-ditch service.
Every now and then we get a nudge from our readers bemoaning the fixation of piracy commentators on the music and movie industries. In light of our commitment to all things piracy in digital media, it would be remiss of us to pass comment on the state of play in entertainment software (or what most of us call gaming) piracy.
A few months ago we stumbled across a brilliant article from TweakGuide’s Koroush Ghazi titled PC Game Piracy Examined which to this day remains one of the best opinion pieces available regarding game piracy.
Last week, Jeremie Zimmerman of La Quadrature du Net appeared in Business Week saying that “File-sharing is unstoppable anyway. The real question will be about how to use it to find new ways of funding creation. All conservative and repressive measures are bound to fail.”
There was one arguably non-conservative idea on piracy that received a shredding a year or so ago when Trent Reznor repeated the concept originally touted by Pink Floyd’s Peter Jenner: piracy is unstoppable so content is best monetized by bundling it with internet access.
It is odd that the views on digital media piracy are so amazingly polarized: folks that pirate are either the scourge of the earth threatening to destroy creative media OR the liberators of information and entertainment from the clutches of their tightfisted masters.
As foolish as this is, so too are the measures that seek to combat piracy by treating everyone the same way.
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Rarely does a news item relating to piracy go by without some industry representative exasperating that they cannot compete with piracy because it is free.
Not true – and many lessons can be drawn from industries unrelated to piracy… Read More»
Founders of The Pirate Bay have been handed their arguably severe sentences upon being found guilty in the piracy spectrial held in Sweden.
The initial prosecution arguments looked flaky at best and did much to support the view that the industry at large is technologically challenged. However they turned their performance around sufficiently to impress the court. Read More»
