Speaking at a seminar for the Cinema Expo this week, Paramount Pictures COO Fred Huntsberry said that average Joe unauthorized movie downloaders are no longer Hollywood’s biggest threat, with that spot being taken by “Cyberlockers,” illegal subscription services.
Huntsberry says cyberlockers are usually run by mobs in foreign nations, which download hot pirated films, then sell them to the public in unlimited streaming for as low as $5 a month for a subscription.
“Cyberlockers now represent the preferred method by which consumers are enjoying pirated content,” says the COO, via Reuters.
Cyberlocker businesses normally operate from Russia, Ukraine, Colombia and Germany, and most sties even have ads from such big-time names like Netflix, KFC and Samsung, which have unwittingly been placed there.
“Sometimes these sites look better than the legitimate sites,” adds Huntsberry. “That’s the irony.”
Huntsberry warned that users of cyberlockers risk having their credit card information stolen.
Result for: Downloader
The Big 4 record label EMI sued Bluebeat.com this week, claiming the site is selling unauthorized digital copies of the Beatles albums.
The site sells each track for $0.25 but EMI says they have “not authorized content to be sold on Bluebeat.com.”
Bluebeat garnered the attention of the label and curious downloaders because the Beatles tracks have never been officially been digitized, and certainly would not sell for 25 cents when all other tracks on iTunes sell for $1.
Perhaps just as notably, Bluebeat allows for free streaming of some tracks, including those by the Beatles.
Bluebeat, in their defense, say that they actually own the tracks and the copyrights for those tracks. What? MRT, the parent company behind Bluebeat, says they ran the Beatles tracks through psycho-acoustic simulation and added new pictures to the MP3s, thus making them completely new pieces of media. Media of which they own the copyrights for.
For those confused, (everyone), “Psychoacoustic simulations are a synthetic creation of that series of sounds which best expresses the way I believe a particular melody should be heard as a live performance,” says MRT CEO Hank Risan.
Today, a federal judge has ruled in favor of EMI and granted the label a temporary restraining order against Bluebeat and MRT. Judge Walter almost immediately agreed that Bluebeat was not selling new tracks, just copyrighted materials run through “psycho-acoustic simulation.”
The judge also tore apart their other argument of having all new “audio visual work” by saying (via Ars): “However, as one court obviously pointed out. [Defendant] cannot invalidate the copyright of an independent and preexisting sound recording, simply by incorporating that sound recording into an audiovisual work.’”
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Result for: Downloader
Nintendo has decided that the Internet Channel - the Wii’s Opera Internet browser - should be free to all users. Up until now, Nintendo charged users (expect for lucky early downloaders) 500 Wii Points to download the browser.
The company has also decided to offer a free NES game to anybody who did spend a few dollars to buy the Internet web browser for the console. A version of the Opera-based browser is also available for the Nintendo DS console to provide Internet access on the handheld.
Besides being able to access the Internet now for free (if you have a wireless connection, of course), more users can now also try out streaming some music, video or Internet streams to the Wii console with TVersity.
