In April we reported that the U.S. Copyright Group had filed lawsuits against 50,000 pirates, each alleged of downloading a number of films including “Steam Experiment,” “Far Cry,” “Uncross the Stars,” “Gray Man” and “Call of the Wild 3D.”
The Group has now demanded that Time Warner Cable, one of the largest ISPs in the U.S., hand over the identity of 2000 alleged pirates, and Time Warner has declined, saying it is too expensive, and “exceeds their current staffing capabilities.”
The ISP says it would cost them about $45 USD each to send out the info on all the requests.
“Time Warner Cable does not have enough employees to respond to these requests. In a typical month, the company receives an average of 567 IP lookup requests, nearly all of them coming from law enforcement. These lookup requests involve everything from suicide threats to child abduction to terrorist activity,” each of which takes “immediate priority” over copyright infringement cases.
The ISP’s Subpoena Compliance team is currently only a five-man team and in addition to the “priority” requests, they can handle 28 non-critical subpoenas per month. The U.S. Copyright Group has so far asked for 809, just this month.
Result for: pirates
According to the latest Business Software Alliance (BSA) report, pirates cost software companies over $50 billion USD in 2009, with Asian nations accounting for a large amount of those losses.
Despite increases in anti-piracy efforts, 43 percent of all software being used on computers right now is pirated, up from 41 percent in 2008, reads the report.
Globally, losses mounted to $51.4 billion, with a whopping $16.5 billion coming from the Asia-Pacific region.
Overall, the BSA says the increase in piracy is thanks to the strong growth of PC owners in India, China and Brazil.
Victor Lim, a VP at IDC (which jointly carried out the study with the BSA) says that despite pirates software rates falling in 54 nations, it rose or stayed neutral in 57. Piracy rate in the Asia-Pacific territories was 59 percent, meaning that of of the 900 million pieces of commercial software installed in 2009, 530 million were unlicensed.
“This study makes clear that while efforts to bring down piracy levels in the Asia-Pacific are enjoying some success, dollar losses at over 16.5 billion (dollars) remain the highest in the world,” adds Jeffrey Hardee, BSA’s vice president and regional director. “This is unacceptable and there is still much to be done to engage governments, businesses and consumers on the risks and impact of software piracy.”
Some of the piracy rates for individual nations were shocking, especially in Eastern Europe were nations like Georgia, Moldova and Armenia all had over 90 percent. On the other end, the United States was the lowest on the list, at 20 percent, with Japan and Australia not far behind.
Result for: pirates
While I will be linking to the full and comprehensive article Slyck has written on the matter, it appears that ACS:Law, the firm known for accusing game pirates in the UK has threatened to sue the file sharing information forum Slyck.com.
The threat demands that Slyck remove three forum threads that exist for members to discuss their ongoing litigation with ACS: Law and just generally go over the current UK laws against alleged file sharers. The three forum threads have a total of 10,000 posts.
ACS: Law gave Slyck three days to take down the threads or face a lawsuit in the UK. However, because the site is based in the U.S. and is protected from defamation verdicts in other nations, they have refused to remove any content.
Slyck’s article is very long but worth a read, especially if you are an in the UK: Wank Plan Goes Wrong: ACS:Law Threatens Slyck.com With a Lawsuit
