pirates

A new survey has found that people who regularly download pirated material spend more money on legitimate downloads than individuals who don't download pirated material. The same survey also revealed that about one in every four downloads breaches ... copyright in some way. The survey was carried out by a media company working for Ofcom, the United Kingdom's equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The researchers spoke to a total of 21,745 Britons over the course of a year. (Source: bbc.co.uk ) The figures are all based on survey responses rather than actual activity data, so ... (view more)

A Microsoft special offer has unintentionally made it much easier for software pirates to run bogus copies of Windows 8. But the loophole works only for particularly determined pirates. The loophole centers around the way Windows users activate ... their software. Each copy of Windows has a unique "key," which Microsoft checks to ensure the software copy is valid and not already in use by another registered owner. If the software's key passes these checks, the software copy is activated. Without activation within a certain period, Windows will begin to severely limit its functionality, mostly to ... (view more)

A Russian company says its "Pirate Pay" project can eliminate online piracy by blocking web users from sharing files via the BitTorrent system. The people behind Pirate Pay (not to be confused with The Pirate Bay) came up with an alternative method ... of combating illegal file-sharing via BitTorrent. To help them get started, they received $100,000 from Microsoft. The first major test of the Pirate Pay system involved attempting to block distribution of a Russian movie titled "Vysotsky: Thank God, I'm Alive". Pirate Pay says it managed to block 44,845 illegal downloads of that film in ... (view more)