Plex Cracks Down on Media Server ‘Hacks’
Plex is a multifunctional media software and service that allows users to easily access all of their entertainment in one place. Whether movies, music, TV shows, or photos, Plex can organize and index, making the content ready to stream on a wide variety of supported devices. Plex can be used for curating home videos or enriching purchased media with metadata, for example, which can be stored on the media server. In addition, the...
German ISPs Block Romslab Due to Widespread Game Piracy
Three years ago, German Internet providers agreed to voluntarily block the most egregious pirate sites. The ISPs teamed up with copyright holders and launched the “Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet” (CUII), which is now responsible for handing down blocking ‘orders’. While CUII doesn’t rely on court judgments, there is some form of oversight. When copyright holders report a pirate site, a review committee first checks...
Piracy Shield 2: Just When IPTV Pirates Thought it Was Safe
New law passed in Italy last year gave powerful football rightsholders and broadcasters a blank slate to implement a blocking system seen nowhere else in Europe. No laborious court processes, no judicial oversight, and unlike the ISPs compelled by law to implement their blocking instructions, no financial penalties for getting things wrong either. Whether these freedoms contributed towards the laundry list of errors, PR blunders,...
Redfox Disappearance Puts a Spotlight on Defiant StreamFab
More than a decade ago, decryption licensing outfit AACS began to crack down on DVD and Blu-Ray ripping software. Founded by Disney, Warner Bros, Intel, and Microsoft, among others, the licensing outfit put legal pressure on the makers of AnyDVD and DVDFab, which were the key players at the time. AACS eventually booked a legal victory against DVDFab in a US court, but that did little to stop the operation. Pressure on AnyDVD’s parent...
Google “Profits From Pirated Textbooks” Publishers’ Lawsuit Claims
After years of criticism from rightsholders, punctuated by incremental but significant adjustments to limit the appearance of pirated content in search results, Google is no longer continuously painted as siding with the enemy. Of course, Google has always argued it never did. The company’s search engine acts as an indexer of content, content placed on the internet by others, Google reminded frustrated rightsholders. In response to...
Cheaper Prices Reduce Indirect Visits to Pirate Sites, Research Finds
Most people know all too well that downloading and sharing pirated content is against the law. Nonetheless, millions do so daily. There’s no denying that piracy affects legal sales to some degree. That said, piracy is a complicated phenomenon and the reported effects are not always straightforward. Instead of trying to quantify the prospected losses in yet another study, researchers from Georgia Tech, Chapman University, and Carnegie...
