I’m not sure if you’ve been paying attention or not, or perhaps don’t even care. If you don’t care, you might want to start paying attention, because at some point recent changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make you pay for your own content multiple times.

With the recent changes software companies are being told they can’t produce software that would let consumers make copies of the DVD’s they’ve already purchased. You might think that makes sense, but have you ever copied a CD so you and your spouse, or kids could listen to the same CD in each …read more

We have all heard of the Pirate Bay, the bit torrent search engine site. It was sued by some biggies of the MPAA like MGM Pictures and Sony BMG, and the case began its trial yesterday in the Stockholm district court.\r\n\r\nA police investigation took place way back in 2006 and the current trial is considered a consequence. The trial is being closely observed by the world because its judgment has the power to determine the future of the Internet regarding copyright infringement laws and rethink where cyber law stands.\r\n\r\nThe Pirate Bay is a Swedish site that facilitates users by providing …read more

For the first time, Symantec Corp. publicly released a detailed report of its findings about the “Underground Economy” (cyberworld) through its observations between July 2007 and June 2008. Though this report was released nearly two months ago, I came across it only now.
Read the Symantec Report on the Underground Economy or listen to the corresponding Symantec podcast by Zulfikar Ramzan, the Security Technology & Response Technical Director.
Symantec estimates the value of total advertised goods on the underground servers as up to $276 Million and this figure is from only the underground they had access to. Mr. Ramzan said in the …read more

When we were busy preparing for the new year celebrations, Secret Santa was hard at work in bringing Windows 7 to the world earlier than Microsoft. How it all happened is still a mystery but a “Genuine Image” of Microsoft Windows 7 Beta 1 Build 7000 has been on the Internet since the 26th Dec of last year.
Since then there has been a great buzz and its availability has soared thanks to the BitTorrents sites. I expect this buzz to increase tremendously in the coming few days once the New Year celebrations come to an end. The last time I …read more

There have been posts circulating the blogosphere about a couple of add-ons recently: Pirates of the Amazon and IMDB Pirated Version. I believe they are a bad thing to have come during particularly bad times.
Pirates of Amazon is a Firefox add-on. Whenever a user visits a media page in Amazon (movies, TV shows, games, music), the add-on gives alternate torrent links from where the same product can be illegally downloaded for free.
IMDB Pirate Version is another general script that crossreferences titles on IMDB allowing users to search directly from the imdb page for subtitles, torrents and http (rapidshare,megaupload, and other …read more