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Entries Tagged as 'piracy'

File Sharing is Now a Religion – Kopimism

January 4th, 2012 · piracy

Earlier this week the govt of Sweden formally recognized the Church of Kopimism as a religion, finally displacing Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as the most unusual religious group in the world.

This church was founded in 2010 by  Isak Gerson, a philosophy student. Isak is such a religious file-sharer that he decided to form a group to recognize and protect his beliefs. He then petitioned Sweden to accept Kopimism as a religion. It took 3 attempts, but they finally did.

As of last week, Kopimism is a religion in Sweden. I’m not sure what value there is in this, Kopimism’s 3 thousand plus practitioners now have it.

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Basque Novelist Discovers She’s Being Pirated, Threatens to Quit Writing

December 20th, 2011 · piracy

From the cutting off your nose to site your face dept…

The Guardian is reporting tonight that Lucía Etxebarria, an award winning novelist, has announced that she’s going to quit writing. She posted the following update on her Facebook page. The original was in Spanish, so this is actually a translated version: “Given that I have today discovered that more illegal copies of my book have been downloaded than I have sold, I am announcing officially that I will not publish another book for a long time.”

Normally I would regret an author giving up writing, but not in this case. Etxebarria might complain about piracy, but she is also neglecting to do anything to stop it. She is a perfect example of why most pirates are frustrated customers.

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University Study Finds the Obvious Cause of Piracy – Frustrated Customers

November 30th, 2011 · opinion, piracy

There’s an interesting post on The Hill blog today. It’s written by a couple professors from Carnegie Mellon University, and it rehashes several papers that they released in past couple years. (A brief look at one author’s CV reveals that they’ve written a number of papers on piracy.)

Nevertheless, our research suggests that Hollywood is leaving money on the table — and is in turn failing to address a root cause of piracy — by preserving its separate release windows. Based on our analysis of seven large nations, we find that in most countries, every week customers have to wait before they can buy a DVD translates into, on average, 1.8 percent lower DVD sales. Given that good-quality pirated versions are available close to 14 weeks before the legal versions, the losses can be in the millions of dollars. Not surprisingly, a 14-week delay also translates to a 70 percent increase in pirated movie downloads in those countries.

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Wiley to Follow in RIAA Footsteps – Now Suing Ebook Pirates

October 31st, 2011 · piracy

When I was at the conference last week someone told be that the publishing industry had learned from the mistakes of the recording industry and that publishers wouldn’t follow the same route of alienating readers. Today I have the misfortune to report that at least one publisher haven’t learned anything.

John Wiley, a technical and educational publisher, filed suit in federal court last week against 27 John Doe ebook pirates (PDF). These dastardly villains were all caught using a bittorrent client to pirate a Wiley “For Dummies” ebook on 18 and 19 October 2011. Let’s hope they get the electric chair.

This suit is laughable on multiple levels. Where shall I begin?

First, the cover at right belongs to a real book published by Wiley, which is itself worthy of comment about being hoist by their own petard. But I digress.

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Textbook Pirates Launch new Co-op Service

September 27th, 2011 · opinion, piracy

Well, the inevitable has happened. An organized group of textbook pirates going by the name of Library Pirate have come up with a new way to reduce the cost of buying textbooks. Give them the funds to buy the digital textbooks you need and they will return the favor by releasing a DRM free copy for everyone to download.

They’re calling it “Hire-a-Pirate”. What’s most interesting about the new service is that it specifically targets digital textbook rentals, not purchased one. I get the feeling that they are particularly irked by the expiration.

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The Hamstersoft & calibre GPL issues have been resolved

August 26th, 2011 · piracy, software news

This is a repeat of a post that I know I already wrote. Unfortunately, it seems to have vanished.

A couple weeks ago I posted about the Hamstersoft Ebook Converter. While the app may have been extremely popular, there was also a problem with it. The Hamstersoft Ebook Converter was based on code copied from calibre, only the Hamstersoft developers neglected to follow all the license requirements.

The issue has been resolved,  so it doesn’t really matter. But Hamstersoft  were supposed  have released a complete set of source code for their app; this was required under GPL. Hamstersoft did finally release the source code about a week ago.

 

 

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Harlequin manga now available on the Nook

August 19th, 2011 · hardware news, piracy

Digital Manga Publishing announced Friday that they had converted and uploaded to the NookStore the first set of manga from Harlequin KK, the Japanese subsidiary of the romance publisher.

I bet you didn’t know they had any, did you? (It was news to me.)

There are 20 titles available in 2 editions, with all titles priced at $6. DMP have some serious work into converting for both the 7″ LCD screen of the NookColor and the 6″ E-ink screen of the NookTouch.

Harlequin KK was launched in Tokyo in 1988. Since then they have translated hundreds of their novels for the Japanese-language market, and in 2001 they started adapting some of the novels into manga. The manga was then re-released in 2009 in English and other languages so they could be sold outside Japan. So each of these manga is in effect a triply translated book. First it was translated to Japanese, then to a visual form, and then back to English.

These titles are also available through the Nook apps as well as direct from the DMP ebookstore at emanga.com.

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Hamstersoft Ebook Converter rips off calibre

August 13th, 2011 · piracy

A hot new ebook converter popped up just over a month ago, and it turns out there’s a problem with it.

Hamstersoft was hailed by all the tech blogs as this great new way to covert ebooks from one format to another. It had a simple interface, foolproof operation, and a lot of enthusiastic users.

Unfortunately, the Hamstersoft Ebook Converter is also a pretty egregious example of copyright infringement. According to John Schember (a calibre contributor) the Hamstersoft Ebook Converter uses large chunks of code from the calibre ebook library app and doesn’t comply with certain GPL (GNU General Public License) conditions.

Update: Hamstersoft has taken down the ebook converter and promised to comply with the GPL. let’s see what happens.

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Pariah Burke is a slimy pirate

June 19th, 2011 · piracy

I’ve recently noticed that a particular aggregator blog has stepped over the line into piracy.

When I first came across WorkFlow:Epub last year, the site copied excerpts of content posted elsewhere. It was run by a man named Pariah Burke, and I discovered it because I was being copied. I didn’t really mind, except for the fact that the excerpts taken from my blog looked like crap. If they had looked okay I probably would not have bothered to ask Mr. Burke to take them down.

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Walter Jon Williams calls on pirates to provide his digital backlist

May 15th, 2011 · piracy

The SF author Walter Jon Williams is jumping on the ebook bandwagon and he needs your help. He;s looking for decent scanned copies of his out-of-print backlist, and he’s hoping you can provide them.

So I’m willing to trade. Should any of you volunteer to provide scans of Days of Atonement, Angel Station, and Knight Moves, that lucky individual will get a signed, personalized copy of the WJW book of his or her choice (assuming I actually have a copy, of course). Plus, whatever book you scan will spend digital eternity with your name in it, along with my eternal thanks. Sound good?

This isn’t the first author to seek his backlist on the torrents, but this is the first time that I recall someone inviting his fans to submit pirated copies. It’s something of a surprise.

via his blog

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