Gearfuse

Fuck the system! Break it down! That’s what a lot of people are chanting today after it was discovered last night that the judge in the landmark Pirate Bay trial is a member of several pro-copyright lobby groups that are in cahoots with the entertainment industry. Judge Tomas Norström belongs to the Swedish Association of Copyright, Swedish Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property, oversees the .SE domain name and then some.

As messed up as this is, the groups this judge belongs to are not only legitimate, they’re something a person of law would become involved with. Now due to members of the entertainment industry belonging to these groups as well, it’s easy to see how Judge Tomas may have been persuaded. Either way, a retrial would be good for everyone in this situation.

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See that? That’s not a smile. Four members of the popular Bit Torrent site The Pirate Bay were convicted in a court of assisting in “making copyright content available.” Found guilty, they’ll now spend up to a year in prison for their crimes and must pay $3.6 million in fines to various companies. TorrentFreak has the whole scoop but this is a landmark piracy case that will surely change how careful people are online…

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Sucks to be Coldplay, especially when you’re getting your ass sued by Joe Satriani over alleged copyright infringement. Satriani claims that Coldplay’s hit single, Viva La Vida, uses “substantial original portions” of his song If I Could Fly from 2004. Ouch.

It’s not looking good for Coldplay, either. I mean, when your own front man has been quoted in the past, saying this:

We’re definitely good, but I don’t think you can say we’re that original. I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists.”

It’s certainly not helping their cause. Take a gander at this video and let us know what you think. Is this copyright infringement or just strange coincidence?

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You’ve heard the terrible news about Muxtape being shutdown by the RIAA and now you’ve got no way of discovering new music. Guess it’s back to the ol’ 90210 iPod. On the RIAA’s official site, it claims that Muxtape had been evading the RIAA for a little while, which lead it to the killing blow which was a cease and desist order.

No worries, folks. Just like everything on the internet, when one site is taken down for illegal acts another is erected in it’s place for the same purpose. The majority of Muxtape users are moving to 8tracks where you can mix together 8 tracks with no more than two tracks by the same artist – all for the purpose of listening and sharing. It’s great to be back infringing copyrighted music material that the RIAA tries so desperately hard to abolish. Epic fail.

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Last month, we spoke about the World of Warcraft bot program Glider and how Blizzard is taking legal action against the developers. Now it’s seeking an injunction against making the program open source. Sound odd? It might, but it’s a smart move.

You see, Blizzard has to protect both copyrights and intellectual property. Glider infringes upon both and the creators of the bot, frightened from a huge lawsuit, could easily release the code so that their special project will live on forever. Blizzard knows this and isn’t having any of that crap and thus, they’re asking the courts to prevent Glider from going open source. Some are up in arms over the fact that Blizzard might gain control and/or ownership of someone else’s code. I say you get what you get for messing with a multi-billion dollar cash cow.

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Yahoo announced that it’s shutting down its DRM servers as of September 30, 2008. Anyone whose turned over hard cash towards Yahoo Music will lose the ability to recover it or transfer it to a new PC. Further proving DRM’s worthlessness, Yahoo even had the nerve to tell its customers to burn CDs and re-rip the tracks they bought, before the chance is over. Haven’t we learned anything from old DRM techniques?

Shame on you, Yahoo. I purchase music that I rightfully own and you’re not going to make it available to me? There’s a word for that: theft. Isn’t DRM supposed to be beneficial? It’s like Communism, it sounds great on paper, then it’s executed poorly. DRM only makes things harder for legal users. Legal users are the most important users of all, and Yahoo just fucked them in the ass. What’s it going to take to have proper DRM that benefits the user? A CD that self-destructs after it is copied.

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Sometime in March, Blizzard filed a class action lawsuit against Michael Donnelly, the creator of the MMO Glider program, which performs key tasks in the game automatically, such as fighting and looting. Well, Blizzard “pwned” the shit out of the software bot’s creator, claiming it infringes the company’s copyright and potentially damages the game.

Donnelly says his tool does not infringe Blizzard’s copyright because his software makes no copy of the WoW game client software. However, Blizzard has said the tool infringes copyright because it copies the game into RAM in order to avoid detection by anti-cheat software. Well, the judge sided with Blizzard, claiming that copying the game into RAM is an unauthorized copy. Epic fail.

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You know how China is a land of freedom in terms of copyright laws, with all those small brands copying Nokia phones and iPhones with the sole consequence of making (good) money. Now how about a big brand copying another big brand, this time being staged in the land of Japan? Jump for more drama.

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This is no April’s fool joke, but the above picture shows a real product label of a device named PS3 that is made in the mysterious country of Koera. Strangely enough there is also an IMEI code. Jump to find out more.

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