TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Australia Breeds More Pirates by Locking Up Game of Thrones
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 02/03/14
- Sony Claims Hulu is Hosting a Pirated TV-Show
| Australia Breeds More Pirates by Locking Up Game of Thrones Posted: 03 Feb 2014 03:44 AM PST One of the main reasons why people turn to piracy is the lack of legal alternatives. This is in part why Australia has such high piracy rates for TV-shows, Game of Thrones included. Last year the popular HBO show broke several piracy records and with roughly 10 percent, a healthy chunk of the downloads came from Down Under. This spring the fourth season of Game of Thrones will debut and there’s a good chance that Australia will be on top of the piracy charts again. Pay TV company Foxtel has announced the signing of an exclusive deal with HBO, which allows it to completely lock up Game of Thrones. This means that fans of the show will only be able to watch it legally when they purchase a subscription. Last year, Game of Thrones was available in iTunes a day after its Foxtel premiere. With the upcoming season, however, iTunes and other services won’t have the show at all, much to the disappointment of Game of Thrones fans. The only option for people without a Foxtel subscription is to pirate the show instead. The popular TV- torrent distribution group EZTV doesn’t understand why Foxtel wants to decrease availability, and is anticipating a healthy visitor boost later this year. “We are ready to help out those Australians who are unable to afford the expensive subscriptions that are forced upon them by these monopoly based companies,” EZTV’s Novaking tells TF. “Even for those who are happy to pay we provide more flexibility and a better viewing experience,” he adds. The high piracy rates of Game of Thrones made headlines all over the world last year. In Australia for example, the Ambassador of the United States of America got involved in the discussion, complaining about this "plain theft" by Australians. According to him, the lack of legal options would only be temporary. "Many companies today are working on how to deliver their products flexibly enough to meet the lifestyle and expectations of online consumers. But while they are working out the kinks, we shouldn't be doing something that hurts people who work in the entertainment industry," the Ambassador said. However, since Foxtel has chosen to decrease instead of increase availability next year, things are not going to change anytime soon. Not in a positive way at least. Of course, Foxtel and HBO know very well that their deal is going to increase local piracy rates. They prefer more exclusiveness over less piracy, hoping that it will earn them more revenue. Whether breeding pirates is a good strategy in the long run has yet to be seen. In any case, there is little doubt that millions of people will fire up their BitTorrent clients this spring, instead of watching the show through legal channels. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.    | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 02/03/14 Posted: 03 Feb 2014 12:10 AM PST
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is the most downloaded movie this week. The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.   | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sony Claims Hulu is Hosting a Pirated TV-Show Posted: 02 Feb 2014 12:50 PM PST
During the past month alone copyright holders asked Google to remove 24,322,084 URLs from its search results. Unfortunately, not all of these requests are legitimate. This week we stumbled upon a recent takedown request that was sent by the Spanish division of Sony Pictures Television. The notice lists several links to the Fox’ show “Almost Human,” which they distribute locally. Most of the links do indeed point to pirated content, but Sony also requests the takedown of a perfectly legal episode on Hulu, claiming it infringes on their copyrights.  While we could be witnessing a feud between Sony and Fox here, it’s more likely that the takedown request is the result of a failing DMCA bot. A pretty big failure though, as it means that people will no longer be able to find a legitimate copy of the show through Google. Sony is not the only rightsholder to target Hulu either. Last month 4K Media sent takedown notices for two non-infringing ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ series on Hulu. MPI Media Group also joined the Hulu censorship frenzy as it wants Google to remove the TV-series ‘Dark Shadows.’ Luckily for Sony and the others Google is determined to prevent abuse and mistakes by catching the errors before the URLs are removed. But for every error that’s caught, dozens will probably slip through. "We still do our best to catch errors or abuse so we don't mistakenly disable access to non-infringing material. Google continues to put substantial resources into improving and streamlining this process, including into identifying erroneous and abusive takedowns, and deterring abuse," Google told us previously. Preventing mistakes such as the ones above isn’t exactly rocket science. The search engine most likely works with a whitelist of non-infringing sites, something copyright holders could easily implement in their takedown systems. But of course it’s more convenient for them when Google does all the hard work. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.   | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Day in and day out copyright holders send hundreds of thousands of DMCA takedown notices to Google, hoping to make pirated movies and music harder to find.| You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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