According to a GamePolitics report, Activision has sued at least six US-based video game pirates since 2007 and has won each case so far.
The report says Shawn Guse agreed to pay $100,000 USD to settle his suit, after he was accused of “reproducing and distributing copies of Call of Duty 3 for the Wii and Xbox 360.” Another man, Chris Hyman, settled his case in a similar fashion, but for $25,000 USD. He was accused of reproducing and distributing copies of CoD3 for the Wii and Tony Hawk’s Project 8 for the Xbox 360.
The other cases worked the same, with George Laflin settling for $100,000, Kenneth Madden paying the same amount and finally Maryanne Leach settling for $1000 USD. The final case, against James Strickland is still ongoing.
Making the cases more confusing however, is that GamePolitics has updated their original article with a comment from an Activision lawyer. “While we don’t comment on litigation involving clients, we can advise you that we have never filed any litigation against a file-sharer on behalf of Activision.” The amount the defendants settled for is surprisingly high as well.
We will keep you updated.
Result for: Piggy
Even YouTube’s most enthusiastic fans (like Michael Wesch, whose Anthropology of YouTube video we mentioned recently) tend to overlook one very disappointing fact — you can’t easily save videos to your hard drive.Luckily it turns out that, while YouTube certainly doesn’t make it easy, it is in fact possible to download and save videos for offline viewing. In fact, there’s a whole cottage industry of developers building tools that allow you to download YouTube videos.
Lifehacker points us to YouTube File Hack, which can be used as either a standalone application or from Internet Explorer via a menu item that offers to download YouTube videos. I took it for a spin this morning and it does indeed work. Now I have my very own copy of skateboarding dog lovingly preserved for all eternity.
While YouTube File Hack is the easiest tool I’ve tested for IE users, it isn’t the only means of grabbing a YouTube movie.Safari users have it easy, just open up Activity Monitor and double click the actual video file. Safari will happily download an FLV for you. Firefox users can check out Lifehacker’s Better YouTube extension which uses Greasemonkey script to insert a “download this video” link next to every YouTube movie.
There are several other Firefox plugin out there, as well as a few other standalone apps. If you have a favorite method be sure to let us know.
Result for: Piggy
Download YouTube videos - The videos from online viral video hosting and sharing sites such as YouTube and Google Video are not downloadable.
The video will be streaming directly to the embedded player on the web page, without any downloadable link to save the video locally for offline viewing or for transferring/synchronizing to portable media player.
Javimoya’s Video Downloader
Javimoya’s Video Downloader helps you to download online videos directly to your computer, right from the web page itself, without any installation, and works in all operating system and computer. What Video Downloader does is, it extracts the hidden links to the media files that embedded in the HTML code, and displays the downloadable links for you to download YouTube videos.
All you need to do is just select the video site’s tab, input the URL of the video (appears on the address bar of the web page where video will play on it) which you want to download into the text box, and then just follow the download instructions.
Video Downloader supports a lot of video hosting sites, including major video sharing sites such as YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, IFILM and Dailymotion, plus (some still in working) Angry Alien, ArtistDirect, Blastro, Blennus, Blip.tv, Bofunk, Bolt, Break.com, Castpost, DevilDucky, FindVideos, Free Video Blog, Grinvi, Grouper, LuluTV, Midis.biz, Music.com, MusicVideoCodes.info, MySpace Video Code, PcPlanets, Pixparty, Putfile, REVVER, Sharkle, StreetFire, That Video Site, The One Network, VideoCodes4U, VideoCodesWorld, VideoCodeZone, vidiLife, VIDNET.com, Vimeo, vSocial, Web62.com and ZippyVideos.
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