piracy

Torrent and piracy websites are in a difficult situation when it comes to raising money. The more they grow in popularity, the bigger the costs of operation get, but they can't exactly depend on advertising revenue to survive. While donations via Bitcoin have been the preferred option for some time now, it appears The Pirate Bay may be moving to a more direct method for generating funds: using visitor's CPU cycles to mine digital currency.

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Long before YouTube Red was a thing, many casual pirates filled their MP3 players with music ripped from YouTube videos. Though the earliest methods of getting this audio were cumbersome, websites quickly appeared online that made the process as simple as providing a YouTube URL and clicking a download button. The most popular of these websites is being shut down for good.

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While most indie game developers would prefer that players didn't pirate their titles, the three-person team calling itself Acid Wizard Studio have done things a bit differently. They've taken their recently released horror game Darkwood and put it up for free on the popular torrent site Pirate Bay, all without any DRM. The reason? They simply want everyone who's interested to play their game, even if they can't afford it.

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Four individuals have been arrested in India over allegedly leaking a new episode of Game of Thrones. According to a statement from local police, these individuals were in possession of official credentials that gave them access to the new episode. The group is said to have worked for an entertainment company located in Mumbai that would provide access to the episode once it aired in the country.

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One of the most popular television shows is also one of the most pirated television shows: Game of Thrones. The series has been marred by piracy in various ways throughout its life, not the least of which was the major leak that resulted in a handful of episodes hitting torrents networks before airing on HBO. Now that the seventh and final season is underway, HBO is in overdrive trying to protect its property, and it has its sights set on pirates.

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In a bizarre turn of events, at least in light of the company's anti-piracy actions, Google Search shows users the best torrenting websites in a single, convenient scrolling set of cards. These cards appear at the top of Google Search when users query 'best torrenting/torrent sites,' and they include things like isoHunt, Demonoid, The Pirate Bay, and more.

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Fame does have a price, as the Kodi, formerly XBMC, community is now finding out the hard way. The popularity of cord-cutting and set-top boxes led to the popularity of the open source Kodi home theater platform, which, in turn, lead to explosion of third-party add-ons. Not all add-ons, however, are created equal and some of them carry some legal liability. The worst case scenario did happen and one such add-on has been sued, causing other add-ons to quickly abandon ship before matter got worse.

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The recently released adventure-puzzle game Rime has brought light to the subject of DRM and anti-piracy software this last week. Shortly after release, those playing the PC version began complaining about noticeable performance issues with the game as a result of the Denuvo software, which checks to make sure the DRM is still intact. Rime's makers then promised to remove the software if it was cracked. Now, only five days later, they're keeping their word.

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Smurfs 2 might not be a memorable film, but it would probably go down in history in a notorious way. And not through any fault of its own, mind you. Almost comically, the film will be remembered in the piracy scene as the first title to have an Ultra HD, some would (incorrectly) call it 4K, copy ripped from a supposedly tightly protected UHD Blu-Ray Disc. In other words, the age of UHD BR piracy might be at hand.

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The upcoming fifth season of the show Orange is the New Black isn't due to premiere on Netflix until June 9th, but most of the episodes have already been leaked online. A hacker by the name of "TheDarkOverlord" has taken responsibility for the leak, claiming to have stolen the episodes from a third-party production vendor. The first episode appeared online early Saturday, with the following nine released to torrent sites shortly after when ransom demands failed to be met.

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The Recording Industry Association of America, more commonly known as the RIAA, is tired of the ‘antiquated’ process that is DMCA takedown requests. Both the RIAA and a total of 14 other groups have formally expressed their distaste for such takedowns, likening it to a game of whack-a-mole in which every request quickly results in a new listing for the same pirated content after the original is pulled. Instead, this collective wants to see ISPs filter out pirated content directly.

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The days of content software receiving notices of copyright infringement from their internet service providers are about to come to an end. The Center for Copyright Information announced today that it's killing off its Copyright Alert System, which began seeing use four years ago. The system would send a number of warnings to consumers when ISPs, studios, and artists detected copyright infringement through P2P file sharing, with different punishments envisioned depending on how many warnings a person had received.

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