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Saturday, December 27th, 2014
| Time | Event |
| 10:21a | Sony About to Get Sued For Pirating Music in The Interview
The comedy, which depicts the violent death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, made headlines worldwide when the so-called Guardians of Peace hacking group threatened Sony if it was released. Facing what amounted to a “terrorist” threat, theaters all around the U.S. backed away from showing The Interview in the week leading up to Christmas. After pulling the movie completely, Sony had a change of heart and on Christmas Eve released the music online via YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Live. Predictably the movie was quickly gobbled up by pirates, with the latest figures suggesting that in just two days the movie has been downloaded 1.5 million times. But while Sony deals with rampant piracy issues at one end, it’s now facing copyright infringement allegations of its own. According to new claims, Sony used copyrighted music in The Interview without permission and without compensating an artist. Yoon Mi-rae (real name Natasha Shanta Reid) is a US-born hip hop and R&B singer who currently releases music on the Feel Ghood Music label. In January 2013 as part of MFBTY (My Fans Better Than Yours), the 33-year-old hit the number 1 spot in the Korean Music Charts and in September reached the same heights on Billboard’s Kpop Hot 100 list with her song ‘Touch Love’. But while these recognitions were achieved by fans buying her music, she’s now in the spotlight for not getting paid for her work. It appears that Yoon Mi-rae was in negotiations with Sony to have her track ‘Pay Day’ appear in The Interview. Even though no agreement was reached, Sony used the music anyway. “There were initial discussions for using ‘Pay Day‘ in the movie, but at some point, the discussions ceased and we assumed that it would not follow through,” Feel Ghood Music says. “However, after the movie was released, we learned that the track had been used without permission, legal procedure, or contracts.” Sony, who are already facing a world of pain following the hacking and near destruction of their IT systems in recent weeks, will now face a copyright infringement lawsuit over the unauthorized use of the ironically named ‘Pay Day’. “We will be taking legal action against Sony Pictures as well as DFSB, the agency that had been carrying out the discussion regarding the use of the track,” the label says. It seems unlikely that this lawsuit will result in a messy legal battle. The huge publicity the movie has enjoyed in the past few weeks will virtually guarantee decent sales for Sony, even without lucrative box office revenues. Yoon Mi-rae should not only be able to secure a piece of that but also raise her profile in a way that would not have been possible had Sony paid her in the first instance. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
| 7:07p | Hundreds of Pirate Bay Copies Emerge, Is The Hydra Alive?
A few days ago The Pirate Bay showed signs of life again when the domain name started waving a pirate flag. While this created plenty of mystery, there are still no torrents to be found on the site. For now, it’s Pirate Bay supporters carrying the Kopimi spirit and keeping the “Hydra” seemingly alive and kicking. Chop one head off and new ones will grow back, making the beast stronger and stronger. This week, most of the Pirate Bay copies have been growing from Isohunt.to’s OpenBay project. Thus far nearly 400 Pirate Bay clones have launched and the people behind the initiative say that OpenBay is currently the most popular project on developer platform GitHub. “Since it’s launch The Open Bay has drawn a lot of attention. As a result it’s placed as #1 on GitHub. During recent weeks 372 Open Bays have been created,” the Isohunt.to team inform us. “Our current goal is to not only make it open source, but eventually provide a fully decentralized torrent database for the community,” they add. Although Isohunt told us that they’re not in contact with TPB, the Pirate Bay crew appears to appreciate the efforts. After all, the pirate flag that’s waving on the official Pirate Bay domain comes from OpenBay. Isohunt.to is happy with this support and is now calling on developers to improve and expand the code, to support bigger and better torrent sites. “We’re glad that the original ThePirateBay founders are supporting us waving the pirate flag and the hash tag #CodeOpenBay. We hope that the community will step in and the new era will begin,” Isohunt.to tells us.  The question is, however, whether or not copies are going to be good enough. When Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde talked about the Hydra concept 7.5 years ago he wasn’t referring to copies, but entirely new sites with their own communities. “Start up your own torrent sites, make the Internet the hydra it is and needs to be. If there’s hundreds of sites, they can’t all be shut down,” he said, pointing out that the torrent community was relying too heavily on TPB. Seen through this lens, the hundreds of TPB copies that sprang up in recent days are pretty much useless. That is, until they become thriving communities of their own. Simply having a copy of the torrent listings isn’t going to be good enough. Sticking with the Hydra mythology, if Pirate Bay copies are new heads then they’re on top of a dead beast for now. In this flawed analogy the Pirate Bay raid didn’t just cut off a head, it killed the beast itself. The Pirate Bay’s real value were the uploaders and moderators, and these can’t simply be copied. The real Hydra is something much broader. It is the entire BitTorrent ecosystem where The Pirate Bay was just one of the many heads, living alongside other popular torrent sites. Only time can tell whether this Hydra is indeed alive and kicking. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
The way things are panning out, the Sony movie The Interview is on course to become one of the most controversial movies of all time.
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