piracy

In its effort to calculate direct loss from piracy taking into account economic multipliers AFACT approached for help to Oxford Economics and Ipsos MediaCT.

Thus, the results of the study released by AFACT (the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft), the multipliers mean that piracy sucks $A1.37 billion out of the Australian economy.

Direct effects made up $A575 million, the study claims, including $A225 million attributed to “secondary piracy”, in which an individual either “views or borrows” pirated material.

This week a senior government official reported that China has arrested over 4,000 people for violating intellectual property rights (IPR) since November and will enforce tougher punishments to combat the "rampant" problem.

At a news conference Tuesday, Gao Feng, deputy director of the Ministry of Public Security's Economic Crimes Investigation Bureau, said that his agency had uncovered more than 2,000 cases since China launched a six-month campaign to beef up enforcement of intellectual property rights last November.

On Monday the US lawmakers proposed a legislation that, if adopted, would give the Justice Department the power to seek U.S. court orders against piracy websites anywhere in the world, and shut them down through the sites’ domain registration. The bill supported by both parties will be known as the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. For a long time the recording industry and movie studios have been calling for such kind of regulatory system.

As it became known, Saturday the Motion Picture Association of America web site, MPAA.org, was attacked by pirates enraged by an escalation in anti-piracy efforts.

The web sites of the lobbying arm of the major Hollywood studios and AiPlex Software, a company the MPAA hired to target sites where piracy was rampant, were brought down for much of the day.

While Intel confirmed that its HDCP master key indeed leaked to the Internet the chip maker is not worried over the possible pirate use of the key. The company says it will sue anyone who does it.

“There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers,” said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for the company, which developed HDCP. “Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.”

The record studio of Taylor Swift was forced to release the first single of the star’s upcoming album 12 days ahead of schedule on Wednesday soon after a pirated version appeared online.

Big Machine Records said in a statement that the MP3 file of "Mine" was "low-quality," and it wanted fans to hear the single in its proper form via iTunes and country radio. It was not immediately known who was responsible for the leak.

The schedule for Swift's third album, "Speak Now," remains unchanged. It will come on October 25.

Hollywood is getting more optimistic about its future revenues after a period of losses suffered due to copyright infringement and pirated content downloaded by the so-called Napster generation. The optimism comes from the new trends set by a younger community of users who show willingness to pay for digital content.

Following the US businesses estimation that revealed businesses lose billions of dollars each year to piracy and counterfeiting of items, including films, music and consumer goods, Vice President Joe Biden announced Tuesday, the US plans to target foreign websites in anti-piracy push. 

Moreover, US businesses also accused the illegal trade of hundreds of thousands of lost US jobs.

As expected Chinese court supported their local company Baidu in a copyright infringement case launched against the largest search engine in the Celestial Empire by Universal Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Hong Kong and Warner Music Hong Kong in early 2008.

The Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court cleared Baidu of piracy ruling that the search engine had not broken rules by linking to music downloads that infringe copyright.

The IFPI said it was very disappointed with the ruling. Another site called Sohu was also cleared, the IFPI said.

 A citizen of Denmark Henrik Anderson decided to check the force of the copyright laws in the country and copied some DVDs anyway, a whole bunch of them. Having uploaded the contents of 100 discs to his computer (for personal use), he's asking to be arrested.

 Piracy is not only a barrier for the work of foreign media companies in China, it also stands to stifle innovation by the country's own dynamic Internet industry, Charles Zhang, chief executive of Sohu.com, one of the China's oldest Web companies, said at a China Internet conference in Beijing on Monday.