Mygazines made a splash a few months ago by launching a service that lets you read your favorite magazines online - without paying. The plan might have worked if the company had, I don't know, partnered with magazine publishers to make free ad-supported versions of the magazine available. But that's not what happened. Instead, Mygazines encouraged users to scan their own magazines and upload them to share with others.

Flash forward a few months and Mygazines is no more. A visit to the company's homepage shows a message saying that the service has gone under due to "monetary reasons and the state of the global economy." Because that's what did it in. The global economy. Not a flawed business model that was incurring the wrath of publishers.

[via Wired]

Watch carefully.. I'm about to talk like a pirate.

Arrh. Avast. Shiver me.. oh forget it.

It's officially "Talk Like a Pirate Day" the world over. Talking like a pirate is kinda lame. It's been done. It's so 2004. Since we've had it up to here with co-workers and their clever attempts to recreate a pirate past that never was a cute or cuddly as the fantasy pirates of today, we decided to go a different direction.

Welcome to Download Squad's "Download Like a Pirate Day". It's just like that other day except, well, lot's and lots better. We'll keep you fat and happy throughout the day with ways to download your fill, even ways to feel like a pirate without breaking any copyrights.

Check out some of our recent posts on burning up your bandwidth and watch throughout the day for more great ideas to keep you downloading like a pirate.

As DownloadSquad gears up for "Download Like a Pirate Day" this Friday, it appears as though our friends from the MPAA and the boys on Capitol Hill are also hard at work. The U.S. Senate appears ready to give Bill S. 3325 - the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act of 2008 - the green light as early as today.

A quick look at this article by Alex Curtis and this open letter from twelve different advocacy groups will provide some insight into the proposed bill.

Why should you care? Well, for starters, S. 3325 would allow the Department of Justice to sue offenders in civil court. That's a bad thing. A really bad thing.

First, it means taxpayers are footing the bill while the DOJ does MPAA dirty work. Not good. Second, defendants are guaranteed free legal representation. Third, there only has to be a "preponderance of evidence," which is not nearly the same as "beyond a reasonable doubt." As a kicker, it looks as though fines for violation would be doubled.

Over at OpenCongress there appears to be a lot of buzz about this one (64 blog posts and growing), and rightfully so.

Holy crap. The MPAA has filed 30,000 suits over the past five years. Do you really want to pick up the tab?

For the truly interested, you can view the bill's text here. Read up, and then call your Senator. You can use Cause Caller to contact members of the Senate Judiciary, find and call your own senator, or send a fax.

[via BoingBoing]

The age-old battle of copyright and artist freedom keeps clanging away in the distance, and are we any better off than we were when DAT machines were castrated in the 80's? I read a report this morning about a UK band called "Show of Hands" who claims they are dependent upon so-called pirates who download their music and share it with friends. This isn't much different than Trent Reznor making his music freely available online (and my wife reports the show here in town didn't look any smaller than the ones in the 90's -- possibly even bigger since Reznor has a new legion of fans younger than us). But the music industry sticks by the mantra "a download is a lost sale, and that is theft." Or, as TorrentFreak puts it, "there is no such animal as 'piracy as promotion.'"

Oh really? This sad, antiquated logic continues to do one thing and one thing only: bolster sales of the top-paid performers while creating a chilling effect on artists who would love innovative promotion but fear free samples will incur the wrath of the mighty RIAA, or worse. It's one thing to send the FBI after some poor schlub who leaks some Guns N' Roses tracks, or sue the bejeebes out of hundreds of college kids, but it's quite another to threaten fair trade when artists (who own their own content, thank you) decide to market in ways they see fit.

The only ray of sunshine could be recent rulings regarding Creative Commons which might allow savvy artists to provide music in the manner they see fit, without the RIAA calling fans of the artists a bunch of pirates. Arrr, matey. At the end of the day there has to be some middle ground, but it's a pity the RIAA and other enforcement agencies see the world in black and white and tend to pull their concepts of ownership from the days when TV's were also monochromatic.

Microsoft is starting to roll out a new version of its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) software for Windows XP Pro, which the company describes as the "most pirated edition of Windows XP." WGA is the software Microsoft uses to detect versions of Windows using fake or stolen license keys.

If you're running Windows XP Pro, you'll probably receive the new version through Windows Update soon. If you just can't wait to find out if your operating system passes the test, you can also visit the direct download page.

The new version of WGA will work much like the anti-piracy software implemented in Windows Vista. Your PC will not be immediately disabled if it fails the WGA check. Rather when you login you'll see a black desktop background instead of your background of choice. You can change the background, but every 60 minutes it will reset itself to black.

There will also be a warning notice that you cannot make go away unless you enter a valid Windows license key.

[via ZDNet]

Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager for the open-source Open Office project, says software piracy also hurts the open-source community, and though it can be argued that open-source is bad for innovation, most of us love the open source community. So does the occasional pirated piece of software really hurt our beloved open source projects?

Suarez-Potts thinks it's bad for everyone including the open source community since pirated software theoretically takes "customers" away from open source projects. For example, a college student may never end up downloading Open Office since he copied Microsoft Office from a friend, but that's not to say it hurts the money-makers like Microsoft at all. A little bit of piracy helps to establish big company's products as "the standard", hurting open source projects even more and making it harder for them to get their foot into a user's door.

Now we'd like to pose a question: Like the college student used in the example above, does pirating software generally prevent you from trying Open Source software or would you have put the cash down anyway even if you couldn't get it for free?

DDoS attacks are hardly unusual. A site says something controversial that gets under the wrong person's skin, and it's not long before they get flooded with enough requests to knock out their servers temporarily. When an attack happened over the weekend at the popular webshow site Revision3 , they started to wonder what they had to done provoke it. Now Rev3 has found the source of the attack, and that's raising even more questions. Rev3 was hit by MediaDefender, the self-described "leading provider of anti-piracy solutions in the emerging Internet-Piracy-Prevention industry."

Rev3? Piracy? They're a site that produces original shows! Why would some kind of draconian piracy-enforcement have a bone to pick with them? Turns out that the attack was targeted at Revision3's BitTorrent ports. They've been using BitTorrent, a popular peer-to-peer sharing protocol, to push their shows out to the public more quickly and cheaply through a distributed model. It's good for business, good for their fans, and nothing at all like piracy.

Rev3 talked to MediaDefender and discovered that the anti-piracy company had been covertly using the Rev3 BitTorrent tracker to move its own files, quite without the knowledge of Revision3. The attack happened when Rev3 caught on and blocked MediaDefender's torrent traffic. This apparently caused the MediaDefender servers to go completely nuts with attempts to reconnect -- over 8,000 a second -- and took down the entire Revision3 infrastructure, including the servers for all their video content, their advertising, and their internal email.

MediaDefender claims it didn't intend to attack Revision3, but as for using Rev3's resources for their own torrents, it's going to be hard to call that an accident. Rev3 has involved the FBI at this point, and it looks like MediaDefender is going to have some explaining to do. Also this seems like a happy enough ending, we can't help wondering whether there are hidden MediaDefender torrents lurking on the servers of any other legitimate services.

It's hard to keep a good (or bad) pirate down. Just like Captain Hook, Jack Sparrow, or Patchy the Pirate, popular BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay seems to have at least nine lives. In a completely unsurprising move, Swedish authorities have filed charges against the founders of the site, claiming they have facilitated the P2P transfers of copyrighted files, which you know, is true.

Sure, the four defendants could certainly be found guilty. But here's the thing: the site isn't going anywhere. Once it became clear that prosecution was imminent in 2006, the Pirate Bay moved its servers outside of Sweden, meaning that country's government doesn't have the authority to shut them down. In fact, the people who run the site claim they don't even know where the servers are at this point.

Of course, even if authorities in Sweden, the US, or any other country concerned with copyright law could shut down the Pirate Bay, there are plenty of other BitTorrent tracking services out there. And because of the decentralized nature of BitTorrent file transfers, there's virtually no way to eliminate all illegal file transfers.

On the other hand, people used to say the same thing about digital music transfers. And while people certainly still trade copyrighted music files, Apple, Amazon, and other companies have made it easier to buy your music online than to steal it. Wouldn't it be nice if copyright holders focus on providing users with good reasons to pay for movies and software rather than spending time and money going after pirates.

How's this for a sales pitch? We know you've got a pirated copy of our software. We're willing to turn a blind eye to the fact that you shouldn't have it in the first place, and allow you to get an official license and ongoing customer support. But you'll have to pay us for both the license and the support. Isn't that better than free?

Essentially that's what Microsoft is saying with its new Get Genuine Windows Agreement. Basically, the company is trying to turn people who are using their software into customers, which isn't unreasonable. Microsoft estimates that 35% of the software installed on computers around the world is counterfeit or stolen. We're just not entirely clear on why a person or company using pirated software would take Microsoft up on the offer.

It's also worth noting that Windows Vista sales haven't been so hot. Microsoft has extended its sales plans for Windows XP, and the Genuine Windows Agreement program might be another way to keep people paying for software, even if they're not so much upgrading as legitimizing.

Musician Prince (at least that's what we think we're supposed to call him these days) plans to sue internet sites including eBay, YouTube, and The Pirate Bay for illegally distributing his music. Because that's why people aren't buying his CDs anymore. It has nothing to do with the fact that he's a bit over the hill as musicians go or that his eccentric ways might be a bit offputing. Nope. It's piracy.

Prince argues that the sites aren't doing everything they can to prevent piracy. After all, his representatives point out, if YouTube can effectively keep pornography off its site, how hard can it be to remove user-uploaded Prince videos? He may have a point there.

Meanwhile, another musician, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame has a different message for his fans. Speaking in China, Reznor suggested that he'd rather have fans in that country download songs illegally than pay for pirated CDs. Of course the best option is to buy a legal copy of the CD, he says, but Reznor admits that's not always easy for music fans in China.

We wonder which musician the record industry is more likely to support.

Although Microsoft claims that Windows Vista sales in China are better than previously reported, the company has reduced the price of its latest operating system in order to spur sales.

On Wednseday, the company has cut the price of Windows Vista Home Baisc to just under $66 US dollars, which is about 1/3rd the price it had been selling for. The price of Windows Vista Home Premium has also received a 50% price cut. It now retails for about $120 US.

Any way you look at it, the new prices make it a lot cheaper to buy legal copies of Windows Vista in China than in the US. But it's still hard to compete with free, or next to it. China has long been a hotbed of software piracy, and word on the street is that you can pick up a copy of Windows Vista for about a buck.

With piracy enforcement becoming a major issue worldwide, and the focus being on frightening the living daylights out of anyone with a p2p client, a reasonable person might assume that the number of illegal downloads would be decreasing. Apparently the Brits aren't reasonable people.

According to Torrent Freak, the British are downloading music at an unprecedented pace, and show no signs of slowing down. "Asked to look into the future to predict next year's downloading habits, 18% of those asked said they were likely to download more often, up from 8% in 2006 and just 6% in 2005. 41% said they would download the same next year while an identical number said they would download less."

During the last week, highly anticipated fall TV pilots have made their way on to Bittorrent trackers in record numbers. Shows like NBC's "Bionic Woman," ABC's "Pushing Daisies," The CW's "Reaper" are popping up like wildflowers, and network executives are tight-lipped about the matter.

According to TV Week, "Network representatives expressed surprise that the full-length pilots were on the Web and alerted their studio partners. Some said they were anticipating that critic and industry screener copies would leak eventually as smattering of fall pilots have found their way online during the past few years. All networks contacted declined official comment."

[via Digg]

The RIAA may be coming around in the slightest way from its strategy of suing fans, customers and grandmothers. Piracy has grown, not shrunk, since the RIAA legal assault on families began, with recent numbers indicating that 7.2 million households download music illegitimately.

According to TG Daily, an RIAA spokesman said, "What is the most important anti-piracy strategy is aggressive licensing and offering great legal alternatives. That is what our member companies obviously do and our job is to complement that, which is the most important thing to do to win over fans."

At least someone in power is starting to see that suing all your customers and fans isn't a great way to do business.

The FBI and Chinese officials have seized more than 290,000 CDs with pirated software in a crackdown on groups in China and the US who were making and distributing the discs around the world. 25 people were arrested in the sting.

The CDs have an estimated value of $500 million, with software titles from companies including Microsoft and Symantec. Of course, if you do the math, officials are estimating that the the average disc was worth $1724.13, which just goes to show that the numbers are often somewhat inflated in these operations.

And of course the "retail value" of the software is often based on estimated losses from the companies who make the software, not on how much the bootleg versions will sell for. Sure, some of those who purchase pirated software would buy the legal version if bootleg discs weren't available, but that's not true for everyone.

This is not an endorsement of piracy. Those who create useful or fun software deserve to be compensated for it. All we're saying is you have to take these numbers with a grain of salt.