Sony America senior VP of marketing Peter Dille, has spoken out today about the rampant piracy attached to the PSP handheld, saying that over 50 million units have been “compromised.”
“I’m convinced and we’re convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP,” Dille said. “It’s been a problem that the industry has to address together; it’s one that I think the industry takes very seriously, but we need to do something to address this because it’s criminal what’s going on, quite frankly.
“It’s not good for us, but it’s not good for the development community. We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it’s frankly sickening. We are spending a lot of time talking about how we can deal with that problem.”
Dille says that older hardware units are the most problematic but hopes that upcoming blockbuster titles such as Assassin’s Creed and MotorStorm should help struggling software sales.
“Those numbers are correct,” he added, speaking of the 50 million units figure. “There’s a lot of hardware out there; toothpaste is out of the tube. We’re not going to get that hardware back into the toothpaste container.
“I’m not naive, but I do think that most people are inherently honest. We learned a lot from the music business, and it became so easy and so common to download illegal music - everyone was doing it. It’s almost like people lost sight with the fact that, well, ‘If everyone’s doing it, then it can’t be that bad.’
[More]>>
Result for: bittorrent sites
One of the largest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, TorrentValley.com, has been shut down in a raid by Bulgarian authorities. The so-called Cyber Crime Unit got tipped off by the Bulgarian Association of Musical Producers (BAMP).
“Torrentvalley was a major international source of copyright infringing material. This site was a gate towards more than 5 000 torrent-trackers from all over the world. The decisive action by the authorities shows that Bulgaria is no haven for copyright abuse in Internet and makes efforts to protect the rights of those involved in the creative industries,” said the BAMP representative Ina Kileva.
The press release by IFPI estimates that TorrentValley aided the distribution of more than one million copyright infringing files.
This is not the first time Bulgarian authorities have acted against BitTorrent sites. In 2006 police arrested the admin of Arenabg.com, who was soon released due to lack of evidence.
Result for: bittorrent sites
Chinese Internet censorship is hardly something new, but lately it seems the country has targeted BitTorrent sites. Last week, users in China reported that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, Pirate Bay and isoHunt were redirecting to Chinese search site Baidu.com. China recently started to ban 10 video sharing sites for “regulations violations” and the eDonkey indexing site VeryCD received warnings shortly before being re-directed to Baidu.com.
The domain hijacks continued for a few days until they were seemingly lifted. Official explanation for the outage is a “DNS error”, yet that is very improbable as it seemed to affect the P2P sites exclusively which are hosted all across the world. DNS errors wouldn’t explain why they were all linked to another (the same) site either.
Of course, its far more likely that the block was intentional. The only question is whether it was because of piracy or because of some content that could be gotten from any of the sites was specifically targeted by the government.
