Hollywood and the federal government have partnered to create updated and even more annoying anti-piracy warnings that will be included in new home-release DVDs and Blu-ray discs beginning this week, the government said Tuesday.</p><p>

The new warnings now have three scary logos intended to deter those who might violate copyright law by making a back-up copy, ripping a movie to a tablet-friendly file, uploading it to a peer-to-peer network or <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/nyregion/at-92-movie-bootlegger-is-soldiers-hero.html%3Fpagewanted%3Dall">make illegal copies to send to military service members in Iraq</a>.

Someone should do a study of how pointlessly bad ideas promulgate. Quite possibly these are simply there for legal reasons - so that in prosecutions there is no defence that "I didn't see the warning". Still as backward as a window tax, though. (Thanks @rquick for the link.)

Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage.

Nothing to do with it opening simultaneously on multiple screens worldwide and preventing the opportunity to make pirate copies? Apparently not, because a low-quality camcordered version appeared a week before the official release, and was then downloaded half a million times.

Here's how he started his blast:

Last week at our debate, I talked about the essential unfairness that my friend and colleague Levon Helm had to continue to tour at the age of 70 with throat cancer in order to pay his medical bills. On Thursday, Levon died and I am filled with unbelievable sadness. I am sad not just for Levon's wife and daughter, but sad that you could be so condescending to offer "to make right what the music industry did to the members of The Band." It wasn't the music industry that created Levon's plight; it was people like you celebrating Pirate Bay and Kim Dotcom - bloodsuckers who made millions off the hard work of musicians and filmmakers.

It is a hell of a blast. (Thanks @pauljreynolds for the link.)

Oh to be fly on the wall at that banquet.

From February 22nd and earlier in some cases, release groups including ASAP, BAJSKORV, C4TV, D2V, DiVERGE, FTP, KYR, LMAO, LOL, MOMENTUM, SYS, TLA and YesTV began releasing TV shows in the new format. Out went Xvid and avi, in came x264 and MP4.

The scene is set. (By the way, calling them "release groups" is clever spin. Makes it sound like the TV episodes are being kept in cages too small to turn around in.)

However, while the release groups want to move with the times, there are many people consuming their content who either don’t or can’t. In the main, people seem disappointed because their standalone Xvid compatible DVD players won’t play the new releases.

Some of the reactions are polite enough, but show a misunderstanding of how the system works…

At worst, some of the comments show an embarrassing sense of entitlement and an attitude that those downloading for free are actually “customers” of these release groups and as such deserve to be treated better.

An "embarrassing sense of entitlement" among people illicitly downloading content for free? We're shocked, <em>shocked</em>.

Marco Arment:

We often try to fight problems by yelling at them instead of accepting the reality of what people do, from controversial national legislation to passive-aggressive office signs. Such efforts usually fail, often with a lot of collateral damage, much like Prohibition and the ongoing "war" on "drugs".

And, more recently (and with much less human damage), media piracy.

Big media publishers think they're <em>right</em> to keep fighting piracy <a href="http://www.marco.org/2012/01/20/the-next-sopa">at any cost</a> because they think it's costing them a lot of potential sales.

It is, but not as many as they think, and not for the reasons they think.

Intelligent, and well-argued.

Ihnatko rebuts the arguments used by The Oatmeal over how if you can't get it legally now, well damn, you'll get it illegally now:

I’m reminded of a Louis CK joke. I’m going to clean up a little because I’m not Louis CK and this isn’t a live comedy stage. It really wouldn’t come across the same way otherwise.

“I’m totally opposed to stealing an Xbox. Unless Microsoft sets a price for them that I don’t want to pay, or there’s a new model in a warehouse somewhere and it won’t ship to stores for another few weeks. Because what else am I going to do? Not have that Xbox? That’s no solution!”

The world does not OWE you Season 1 of “Game Of Thrones” in the form you want it at the moment you want it at the price you want to pay for it. If it’s not available under 100% your terms, you have the free-and-clear option of not having it.

By the time you read this, it's gone viral.

Here is the press summary from the ECJ on the judgment, which we will post if and when we find it.

Importing ruling from the European Court of Justice:

The owner of an online social network cannot be obliged to install a general filtering system, covering all its users, in order to prevent the unlawful use of musical and audio-visual work

Founder and chief executive of Stack Exchange, Joel Spolsky, with some sensible reflections post PIPA and SOPA. This is starting to feel too cogent and organised for the internet:

The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us... then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, "OK, compromise," and gets half of what they want. That's not the way to win... that's the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.

The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws.

Respected investor Fred Wilson prepares for the long fight over PIPA. Back to the drawing board for the proposed legislation - but will the content and tech industries get around the same table?

"Grooveshark attorneys are now exerting heavy legal pressure on Digital Music News, with the goal of outing a very problematic whistleblower.  Just this weekend, our offices received a mountain of subpoena paperwork from Grooveshark attorneys McPherson Rane LLC, a Los Angeles-based firm headed by celebrity lawyer Ed McPherson.  The aggressive and broad-reaching subpoena is designed to force the disclosure of the identity of the anonymous whistleblower".

That would be the commenter who alleged last October that Grooveshark employees are assigned a predetermined amount of material to upload - perhaps illicitly - to the site. If something "known" gets removed from the site, the commenter said, the internal task is to re-upload it. Digital Music News is resisting. Grooveshark, meanwhile, is being sued by all the major record companies.

Top Google lawyer David Drummond:

Fighting online piracy is extremely important. We are investing a lot of time and money in that fight. Last year alone we acted on copyright takedown notices for more than 5 million webpages and invested more than $60 million in the fight against ads appearing on bad sites. And we think there is more that can be done here—like targeted and focused steps to cut off the money supply to foreign pirate sites. If you cut off the money flow, you cut the incentive to steal.

"In the entire discussion, I've seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There's no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?"

"As 2011 comes to an end, we follow up our most pirated TV-shows chart by taking a look at the most pirated movies of the year. Fast Five comes out on top, and aside from other usual suspects such as box office hits Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and The Hangover, the list also includes a few surprising entries and some notable absentees."

Well, if you assume that the people doing the downloading are in their mid- to late-teens, then the list makes complete sense. The "surprising absentees" are Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Transformers Dark of the Moon. The surprising thing is that anyone ever went to see either, surely.

"One of the talking points we've been hearing about SOPA from the lobbyists pushing to get it approved is that the majority of Americans are in favor of the bill, because they want to "protect" intellectual property or jobs. This has never made much sense, since SOPA doesn't protect jobs at all. It destroys them, by hindering one of the few parts of our economy that has been creating jobs -- new and small businesses, particularly in the tech community."

SOPA = "Stop Online Piracy Act". In the US, of course.

Rupert Goodwins turns his gimlet eye onto the Business Software Alliance: "The BSA also says that its survey shows that more than 70% of people agree with it about not being naughty, and blames the disparity on lack of education and enforcement. If we all knew it was wrong, and if we all got caught if we copied software, then that $59bn ["lost to piracy] would magically appear in the bank accounts of Microsoft et al, and the world would be a better place. <br />
"I disagree. Furthermore, I detect a hidden and most praiseworthy agenda behind the BSA's thesis."

This seems a scaled up version of the speculative invoicing scheme mastered by ACS:Law – although these alleged filesharers apparently settle for $2,500 each on average.

"Most of today's key video game outlets - Game, HMV, Amazon - and even some supermarkets (Tesco) buy and then resell used games from customers. Game publishers have developed a number of initiatives to counter-attack this, the most popular being EA's Online Pass, which bundles a free code with new games that can be redeemed to enable multiplayer or receive downloadable content. Whoever buys the game second hand won't get a free code, which means they'll have to buy a replica online for around $10.<br />
"Why do game publishers and developers not like second-hand game sales? Because they don't get any money for the transaction - the shop reaps all the rewards."<br />
<br />
Yes, but customers like the price.

"The operators of LimeWire agreed to pay record companies $105 million, ending a federal trial over copyright infringement damages owed by the once popular but now defunct file-sharing service."

"An IP address on its own cannot be used to identify who has carried out activity on computer networks, a US judge has ruled. Judge Harold Baker, a federal judge in Illinois, denied a copyright holder the right to force internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over the address details of their subscribers."

"I do not know whether or to what extent piracy is responsible for my declining income. I suspect that the internet and the transition from print books to ebooks has more to do with it than piracy does. But I also suspect that piracy has a non-trivial impact, too.<br />
"But beyond the non-quantifiable financial impacts, I can report that, to me, the piracy of my books is profoundly discouraging. When my Ruby book came out in 2008 I was sad to discover that pirated copies were available within a week or so of the book's release. When my jQuery pocket reference came out earlier this year, I was shocked to discover that Google was giving the ebook download sites higher placement than reviews of the book. And now JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is out.. Google will suggest those illegal downloads to anyone who tries to research the book (see the screenshot). I've worked really hard on this book, and I've got to say that this just feels like a kick in the gut."