piracy

Piracy may be a debated topic in some contexts and regions but there's no escaping the fact that it is illegal in many countries. You may argue all you want against capitalism, fair use, ownership, and other factors but when you're running a large streaming service for pirated content and earning millions from it, it's not really a matter of fighting for the little folk anymore. Perhaps knowing that the gig is up, two men from Las Vegas have pleaded guilty to being part of the country's biggest pirated streaming operation, trying to make a deal for a lesser sentence than they would have been given if convicted.

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Apple's once-innocuous enterprise certificates have been in the news a lot lately. First it was revealed that both Facebook and Google were using enterprise certificates to deliver data-collecting apps to iPhone users. Apple offers those enterprise certificates so businesses can test apps internally without having to publish them to the App Store first, so obviously, the way Facebook and Google were using them doesn't really line up with their intended purpose.

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When media talk about privacy, pirates, and piracy groups, they often paint a picture of a united community working towards a common goal to thwart laws and unleash content, sharing tools and links to pirated content among themselves. They often fail to demonstrate how even that community is slightly fractured, split along lines of self-imposed principles and guidelines that not everybody agrees with. Nowhere has that fragmentation become more evident than in the latest and biggest leak to happen since Game of Thrones Season 7. Super Smash Bros Ultimate has leaked barely two weeks before its launch and not all pirates are happy about it.

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Back in July, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against the owners of two popular ROM sites: LoveROMs.com and LoveRETRO.co. Almost immediately, those sites were taken down as Nintendo sought damages that could have potentially totaled as much as $100 million. The two parties in the lawsuit have reached a settlement, and though Nintendo won't be taking home as much as it was originally seeking, it's still receiving a not-insignificant amount of money.

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AT&T is about to crackdown on repeat pirates and the result will leave some scrambling for a new provider. According to insiders that have spoken up, the company plans to soon cut off the service of customers who have repeatedly downloaded copyrighted content despite at least nine past warnings to stop. More than a dozen customers will reportedly be notified of the service banhammer in coming days.

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Sony has sued a California man accused of selling jailbroken PlayStation 4 consoles online. The lawsuit alleges that defendant Eric Scales was selling jailbroken PS4s preloaded with pirated games using auction website eBay. The lawsuit also points toward a website that allegedly belongs to the defendant where he is alleged to offer jailbreaking services.

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A new report claims that video piracy is again rising, this likely due to the increasing fragmentation of the streaming video market. Whereas Netflix once dominated the streaming option, content is increasingly split up and distributed among various separate streaming products, forcing customers to either pay for multiple different products or resort to pirated downloads for certain content.

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Downloading ROMs of classic games is something a lot of gamers do, much to the distress and frustration of the companies who own the rights to those games. Nintendo in particular has historically taken a hard line against ROM downloads and the sites that make them possible, and it shows no sign of letting up. The company has filed a lawsuit against two massive ROM sites, and if the it gets what it's asking for, the damages could be immense.

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The Nintendo Switch is one of the most innovative gaming consoles to launch of late but, like any gaming device, it isn’t immune to one of the entertainment industry’s biggest problem: piracy. Many companies have tried different methods of fighting or discouraging piracy, often at the expense of inconveniencing legit users. Nintendo, however, may have come up with a nearly foolproof method that would ban such pirates from playing games online or even ban them from Nintendo Network for good.

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Google has stripped autocomplete searches featuring the term "Kodi" from its search engine in an effort to address piracy associated with the software. Though Kodi itself is not a piracy tool, it has become associated with add-ons that make it easy to find pirated content, causing the general public to associate it with illegally uploaded videos and music.

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Piracy is a problem that has hounded the entertainment and software industry for decades and there doesn’t seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel yet. Different people have different opinions on how to cut or at least curb it and tools have come and gone with mixed effectiveness. One software maker, however, may have gone a bit too far in its quest stop a pirate. Popular slight sim maker Flight Sim Labs admitted to shipping an installer that included a tool that, under very specific circumstances, would collect a specific user’s passwords stored on Google Chrome and send them back to the company.

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For as long as consoles have been around, people have been hacking them. Nintendo in particular has a long and storied history with hackers, especially with its more modern consoles. Healthy homebrew scenes popped up around the Wii, DS, and 3DS, and now that the Switch is on the scene, hackers have turned their attention to it.

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