Gearfuse

The ever elusive Pirate Bay seems to have slipped through the legal system again. After only a brief 3 hour lapse in service the torrent hosting site is back up, and branding the same typical attitude we’ve all come to expect from the company.

Pirate Bay made a statement on their blog which makes a lot of sense and might help some of you uninformed peeps decode the inner workings of torrent sites in general:

TPB can be compared to the organisation that builds the roads for cars to drive on. The ISP can be compared to the organisation that creates the asphalt for the roads. The ISPs ISP can be compared to the organisation that creates the tools needed to the asphalt to be created. You would normally not sue that organisation if a car speeds.

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I have to hand it to Macheist for really upping the ante this year. Normally, they’ll give away 10 or so solid applications for OS X in a bundle for around $20 to $50. This holiday season, you won’t be paying jack shit. Macheist has a Mac Giving Tree that gives out applications as presents. A few are currently available, with more on Christmas Day. If you’re a Macintosh owner, I suggest heading over and getting on top of that.

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Back in May, we talked about Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and how the Blu-ray release would include BD-Live Internet-enabled extras and features. After viewing the above picture, it looks like you’ll have to read through 57 pages of Terms of Use before you can access your content. Who has time for that? Certainly not a mother with hyperactive children on her hands. Way to go, Disney.

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At long last, Nintendo has taken legal action towards companies developing and distributing DS pirating tools, such as the R5 or R4. Nintendo, backed by 54 game software companies including Capcom, SNK, Taito, Tecmo and Square Enix are filing a lawsuit with the Tokyo District Court against companies that profit from Nintendo’s losses.

Nintendo stated that this piracy, “is causing severe damage to our company and software makers, and this is something that we cannot possibly overlook.”

Overlooking it for the past four years was a bad idea, Nintendo. Maybe if you cranked out more drinking games, people wouldn’t find the need to steal your software. To be fair, it is easier to download games from home than to drive to your local retail store. Pirates are lazy.

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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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Comparing to Nokia, LG is doing a far better job in handling illegal “replicas”. That is, they act before the replicas had the chance to become popular, before their own product starts selling, and most importantly before they have to hire a law firm. Across the Easter weekend LG has issued a warning letter to shops in Hong Kong warning them from carrying the SHINE clone (a clone from a mainland Chinese company), the shops were so freaked out and removed the stock so fast that we didn’t even have the chance to figure out what they’re called, how they looked like. If Nokia is Nokir, does that make LG Shine Shinier? –Sam Chan

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