Studios win $111 million judgment against TorrentSpy.com

The six major Hollywood studios have won a $111 million judgment for copyright infringement against the shut-down file-sharing Web site TorrentSpy.com.

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Sniffer Dogs Uncover 50,000 Pirated DVDs

Two trained Labradors have sniffed out 50,000 bootleg DVDs in their third success since being deployed last month in Malaysia's mounting anti-movie piracy crackdown, a senior official said Tuesday.

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The city wifi system that was 'shut down by the MPAA' two weeks ago is back up. The Coshocton County courthouse based Wi-Fi system is up and running again after it was taken offline due to a single copyright infringement notice.

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The battle over your home entertainment equipment is heating up again and the time to make your voice heard is now. Hollywood wants the Federal Communications Commission to grant the studios permission to engage in so-called "Selectable Output Control," or SOC for short.

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Top reps from Time Warner Cable and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association have met with the FCC to back the MPAA's bid for selectable output control.

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The RIAA have finally declared DRM dead for music, according to all-things-BitTorrent weblog TorrentFreak.

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The MPAA has previously been critical of the negative effect it says BitTorrent has on the movie industry, but a recent experiment in a Norwegian movie theater shows that it might actually be of use to them.

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The music industry does like to insist that filesharing - aka illegal downloading - is killing the industry: that every one of the millions of music files downloaded each day counts as a "lost" sale, which if only it could somehow have been prevented would put stunning amounts of …

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Peer-to-peer developer Vuze has commissioned a study that finds BitTorrent users actually spend more money on movies than the general Internet population does—they just don't spend it online. Vuze's CEO blames high prices and DRM.

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Pro-copyright lobbyists and anti-piracy outfits have a clear idea of what is needed to manipulate the minds of the younger generations.

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The behavior of the RIAA/MPAA during the last decade has been nothing short of a schoolyard bully who has the teacher in his pocket.

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If it was up to the MPAA, every website with links to copyright infringing files would be banned from the Internet.

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The Pirate Bay defendants wanted to know why they were being prosecuted while Google was not, even though Google also indexes .torrent files. A new site called "Pirate Google" tries to make the same point; we speak with the site's anonymous creator.

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Hollywood's major film and television studios on Tuesday began a new push to educate U.S. lawmakers about the entertainment industry by touting job creation in the recession and media's global trade surplus.

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A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.

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A FoxNews.com journalist got himself into serious hot water over the weekend after he published a review of an illegally downloaded copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine ahead of its 1 May release.

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This week several scary stories surfaced about how the MPAA and RIAA are negotiating with ISPs on how to deal with copyright infringers.

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As the online battle against file-sharers heats up with governments and ISPs forced into the arena, those opposed to being monitored are investigating counter-measures.

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Despite whatever problems exist in the current MPAA ratings system (for a mildly entertaining if screechy treatise on the subject, check out the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated), these days you generally know what you're getting into, content-wise, when you enter a movie,  …

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For almost ten years now I have argued that digital rights management has little to do with piracy, but that is instead a carefully plotted ruse to undercut fair use and then create new revenue streams where there were previously none.

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Have you checked out Monty Python's YouTube channel? It's got a selection of their brilliant (as always) clips, and it's got links to buy their DVDs on Amazon. As those crazy Monty Python dudes put it,

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You remember me. You bought the film rights to my novel Jennifer Government, for Steve Soderbergh and George Clooney. Didn't work out, but that's not your fault. These things happen. I hope we can work again some day. That's not why I'm writing.

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"Graduated response" isn't just for music; Ars has learned that the Motion Picture Association of America has been having similar discussions with US ISPs for some time and has already been involved in trial projects.

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Following the banks and the car companies, the movie industry might be the next to be hit by the economic downturn.

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Here, the MPAA is advocating for a number of things, the most problematic of which is a "three strikes" internet termination policy. This would require ISPs to terminate customers' internet accounts upon a rights-holder's repeat allegation of copyright ingfringement.

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Tim Jones of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good commentary on the news that the MPAA has asked Obama to spy on the entire Internet, and to establish a system where being accused of copyright infringement would result in loss of your Internet connection (and your VoI …

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The paper, (.pdf) posted this week, comes as the incoming 44th president will be charged with nominating the nation's first copyright czar as part of legislation lawmakers approved months ago.

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