UPDATED: BT blocks the Pirate Bay from mobile broadband customers

piratebay.jpg

Anyone considering mobile broadband might want to rethink their decision today, after BT announced that it would henceforth be blocking access to the Pirate Bay for its mobile broadband customers. The company states that it’s in “compliance with a new UK voluntary code”.

BT’s mobile broadband is based on Vodafone’s network and it’s being claimed that the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) – who were responsible for a block on Wikipedia earlier this year – are behind the move. Apparently Orange, O2, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Vodafone and 3 have also all agreed to participate.

The move comes after the Pirate Bay’s administrators were convinced of assisting the making available of copyrighted content and sentenced to a year in prison. The four are appealing the decision, though I argue that I don’t think it’ll make the blindest bit of difference.

What we really don’t want, though, is an unelected, non-governmental organization like the IWF deciding what content we’re allowed to consume online. As OnlineFandom points out, many Swedish labels have found ways to gain considerable commercial benefit out of The Pirate Bay, sharing content on it with full permission. Why should Brits miss out on that?

(via Tech Radar)

Why the Pirate Bay verdict means sod-all for downloaders

pirate-bay-three.jpg

The RIAA, BPI, IFPI, MPAA and a million other acronyms, all greeted the Swedish court’s verdict against the Pirate Bay on Friday with the utmost of glee. I have no doubt that parties were held, and major label record execs probably had an excellent weekend, but there was one little thing in their reactions that interested me.

“There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that.”

Those are the words of John Kennedy, chairman of the IFPI. I’ve picked them out because they illustrate wonderfully why the major record labels in their current state are still absolutely clueless about how filesharing works.

Trying to chop of the head of the file-sharing Hydra is utterly futile. It’s the world’s most massive game of whack-a-mole where it takes years for the copyright owners to swing the hammer and it takes hours for moles to pop up and down.

The pointlessness of the fight is illustrated wonderfully by the Pirate Bay’s statement today that they’re going to appeal. An appeal means that (until it’s complete) the court’s judgement is essentially worthless. It can’t be used as precedent.

That appeal will take several years and thanks to the speed at which innovation occurs in the filesharing community, by the time it’s complete The Pirate Bay will likely be a footnote in history. There’ll be another massive source of copyrighted content. The difference is that it’ll probably be legitimate.

In an interview today, Spotify’s UK head, Jon Mitchell, said that his company isn’t bothered about Last.fm, iTunes or any other download platforms. What it’s really competing against is piracy.

What Spotify knows, that the major labels still haven’t figured out, is that price is only one factor in the war for consumer’s ears. Catalogue, ease of use and speed are also incredibly important. Until Spotify came along, there was nothing that could touch filesharing networks for all four of those factors.

What Spotify did was to attack file-sharing on all four of those fronts. Spotify is free and it has the largest catalogue of any legitimate digital music service, so it’s as close as possible to piracy on that front. It’s also considerably easier for non-techy people to understand than Bittorrentm, which can, frankly, be quite confusing to newbies.

Lastly, it’s far quicker to start up Spotify, search and hit play than it is to go to The Pirate Bay, get the torrent, then hope there’s people seeding it, then wait for people to download before finally being able to play tracks. Consumers want software that just gets out of their way and lets them do what they want to do. File-sharing most certainly isn’t that.

The moment that a company comes along doing the same thing for TV shows and movies, piracy figures for those types of content will drop massively. The iPlayer is a great start, but it needs content from every network, every producer and every country.

What will eventually defeat piracy is a shift in people’s habits to access over ownership. If you can get content whenever you want, in whatever format you want, then you don’t need a copy sitting on your hard drive. That makes it much easier to deliver advertising along with the content, so greater revenues are possible for companies offering streaming.

It’ll require a mindset change among consumers, and a roll-out of mobile access to services that trust the user with a decent-size cache for use when out of signal range, but all of those are definitely within reach of the average consumer before a Pirate Bay appeal could ever be concluded.

The Pirate Bay verdict means nothing for record companies because the site stays up. It means nothing for the Pirate Bay’s administrators, because they’re appealing the verdict and so they’ll be stuck in legal limbo for years.

Lastly, it doesn’t mean anything for the general public, the downloaders, because they’re all slowly moving to services that offer access, rather than ownership. Companies that help facilitate that change will be the ones that I’ll be betting on in the next few years.

Pirate Bay: "We will not pay any fines!"

tpb-holloway.jpg

Ever defiant, the Pirate Bay has resolutely stated in a blog post on its website that it won’t be paying any fines. The post, titled “TPB FTW”, explains how the administrators of the site will be appealing Friday’s court decision, which will take another two to three years:

“You, our beloved users, know that this little speedbump on the information super highway is nothing more than just, a little bump. Todays verdict has already been appealed by us and will be taken to the next level of court (and that will take another 2 or 3 years!)”

The site also pleads with its users not to send them any donations. They provide a list of things to do if you want to support the site:

* Seed those torrents a little bit more than you usually do!
* Buy a t-shirt and show the world where your sympathy is.
* If you live in Europe, vote in the election for the EU parliament in June.
* Continue to build the internets! Start more bittorrent sites, blog more, start your own lobby group, create, remix, mash up and continue to grow more heads on this amazing hydra that we know as the internets!
* Do not be afraid of using the network. Invite your friends to this and other file sharing systems. Calm people down if they’re upset. We need to stay united.

Meanwhile, protests erupted in several Swedish cities over the court’s decision. 1,000 people turned up in Stockholm insisting that the ruling be overturned. The leader of the protest, Malin Littorin-Ferm, said:

“We young people have a whole platform on the Internet, where we have all our social contacts — it is there that we live. The state is trying to control the Internet and, by extension, our private lives,”

The generation that live ‘on the internet’ are going to become more and more important, because for them, the rules of everything – just starting with attitudes to copyright – are completely different.

(via TheNextWeb)

Pirate Bay founders jailed and fined, vow to continue

pirate-bay-trial-live-twitter-feeds.jpg

It’s taken two months to get here, and now a Swedish court has jailed the four men responsible for The Pirate Bay for one year.

Despite the fact that The Pirate Bay’s servers don’t host any copyright material themselves, merely acting as a gateway for users to torrent material from others’ machines, the court has ruled that they must also pay £2.4m in damages.

A representative of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), John Kennedy, said that, “There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that.”…

eBay floating Skype IPO – grab yourself a stake in VoIP!

skype-logo.jpg

If this month’s news of Skype all over mobile phones of the world got you thinking how hot the VoIP company is right now, then you might be pleased to hear that eBay is letting the communications service loose on the stock market with an IPO all of its own.

Skype generated a cool $551 million in revenue in 2008 and, although they are beginning to run into the old market saturation problem, it doesn’t take a genius to see it’s all about the services they’ll be offering in the future rather the number of accounts.

So, if you think the future is sky blue, then you might want to set aside some cash for next year. Buy low in 2008, sell high peaking some time around 2013. That’s my completely inexperienced and entirely non-culpable piece of financial advice for the day.

Press Release

S2 Skypephone Review:

Yahoo! to go for a further round of lay offs

yahoo.jpg

Yahoo! looks to be continuing it’s slow slide into total meltdown with rumours of a third round of lay offs within the last 12 months.

An insider told the NYT that cuts could come as quickly as next week and there’s every reason to think that the next one will be well in excess of 1,000 jobs with the first thousand leaving in early 2008 and a further 1,400 at the end of last year.

Yahoo! still gets 500 million or so eyes over its pages each and every month but, with the internet still booming, it’s the growth where they’re missing out. While Google was out buying Blogger and YouTube, Yahoo! missed opportunities to pick up Facebook and last year had to spend an awful lot of resources in talks with Microsoft. The offer from Gates, Ballmer & Sons will be starting to look very good right about now.

EU rejects 'three strikes' approach to filesharing

three-strikes.jpg

The EU has voted overwhelmingly in favour of a report that heavily criticises the ‘three-strikes’ law implemented in Frace that would kick filesharers off the internet after being caught downloading copyrighted content three times.

It’s been massively unpopular with everyone except the content industries, with ISPs in particular fighting against having to cut off their own customers. Greek MEP Stavros Lambrinidis fought back against the idea too, with his report being overwhelming voted in – 481 votes in favor, 25 against and 21 abstentions.

Whether or not this will force France to back down is yet to be seen. Sarkozy doesn’t have a great track record of obeying the EU parliament. Still, it should lessen the pressure on Irish ISPs who are being forced by their content industries to enact similar rules.

(via TorrentFreak)

Pirate Bay to offer improved annonymity to bit torrent users

the-pirate-bay-logo.jpg

As the Pirate Bay trial comes to its conclusion, bit torrent has once again been dragged, kicking and screaming into the light. The defendants of the case could spend their time worrying about the outcome, but instead they’ve channeled their efforts into adding more protection to keep the long arm of the law away from those who use the service for nefarious purposes. They’ve developed a new service called IPREDATOR, which promises to be better at keeping users’ details a secret than current VPN services.

The service is currently in private beta, and will be gradually rolled out to all users some time around April 1st. The significance of the date isn’t thanks to April Fool’s Day, but because that’s the date when Sweden’s contraversial new Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) come into effect, which grant copyright holders more rights to get their hands on file sharers’ details. You’ve got to hand it to the Pirate Bay – they’ve got a lot of chutspa.

Batteries to charge up in less than 20 secs

fast-batteries.jpg

I always thought that a whole new battery technology would be the way to enhance our mobile power supply experience of techno-gadgetry, but it turns out it’s going to be good old Li-ion all along. Apparently, we’ve been doing it wrong all this time and that we’ll have one that can charge up in less than 20 seconds in two to three years’ time.

We know this because a crack team of battery bods at MIT has already…

Last.fm wades into YouTube music video row

lastfm_logo.jpg

In our discussion yesterday about the barney that’s erupted between YouTube and the Performing Rights Society(which collects cash for songwriters), I mentioned Pandora’s exit from the UK market due to hefty PRS fees.

Well, now Last.fm has weighed into the debate with its own take on things. Founder Martin Stiksel says that both sides need to find a resolution – and quick – before less-than-legal alternatives take hold. Stiksel wants cheaper and “less complicated” licenses as a result:

“It is a fundamental problem that we have been facing in that online music licensing is getting more complicated and more expensive. We pay each time one users listens to a song or watches a clip and, while that is more accurate because it makes sure the more popular songs get paid more, it is also very expensive. Terrestial radio pays a fixed minimum and that works out a lot cheaper – we have to find commercially workable rates otherwise illegal services will win and take over.”

Last.fm currently relies heavily on YouTube for its video content, so it has a vested interest in keeping the service going. The service has Last.tv in the works for the future, though, as a way of serving personalized music television to people. That could be interesting when it happens.

PRS and Google are due to meet over the next few days to see if they can find a resolution to the crisis.

Last.fm (via BBC)