A certain amount of error is inevitable in any activation and registration system, but those numbers were clearly too high when Windows Genuine Advantage first rolled out. Microsoft WGA director Alex Kochis tacitly acknowledged that fact, pointing out that “we’ve made major strides in the accuracy of the program”.
The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth—sometimes more during peak hours. While these “power users” are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load.
Owners of non-genuine copies of Windows XP will get a black background instead of their wallpaper every hour, as well as a translucent watermark, as part of new efforts by Microsoft to deter piracy of its products.
TorrentFreak is reporting that “Atlantis” was the most pirated television show for the week of of Aug. 17-24, unseating the Olympics opening ceremony and “Weeds” as the most popular show downloaded by BitTorrent users. (SyFy Portal points out that downloading shows through unofficial means is illegal, and does cost studios.)
Griffin’s most intriguing idea, and one he’s been pitching for some time now, is a voluntary, blanket music license; essentially, bringing the collection society model to end users. In this model, consumers would pay royalties into a pot (by paying an extra monthly fee to their ISPs, for instance) and would then have access to all the music from all the labels that participate in the scheme.
Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced the bill in June, calling it a “made-in-Canada” solution to online piracy. But critics responded that the bill was a carbon copy of the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and have created a Facebook group called Fair Copyright for Canada that boasts 90,000 members.
A few days ago I posted a simple question on my blog. “Why do people pirate my games?”. It was an honest attempt to get real answers to an important question. I submitted the bog entry to a number of places. The response was massive.
The study by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, which represents music rights holders, and Big Champagne, an online media measurement company, found that legal downloads of the Radiohead album, which was released on a pay-as-you-want basis, were far exceeded by illegal torrent downloads of the album.
When we reported about the leak of a BuckCherry track last week, and specifically the band’s response to it, we hinted that this could be a covert form of self-promotion. Indeed, after a few days of research we found out that the track wasn’t leaked by pirates, but by Josh Klemme, the manager of the band.
When it comes to its antipiracy efforts, Apple generally doesn’t like to raise a ruckus. However, pirates in China and the country’s lax stance on the matter might force chief executive Steve Jobs to turn up the volume.