TF. Hi Hannah! How old are you?

- I’m 10 in 12 days

TF. When did you first start using the internet to get music?

- My cousin showed me YouTube and then LimeWire and I was like “whoa cool!”

TF. What was cool about it?

- Because you can put anything in and it will come up and you don’t actually pay for it. Well you have to pay for the internet and LimeWire comes with the internet but you have to pay for that so LimeWire isn’t really free.

TF. So you’re sure that it’s ok to copy it? What do you think about copying?

- I suppose it’s not ok to copy but people copied it off her site so she just copies theirs. It’s like, you’re copying my t-shirt so i’m copying you on shoes.

TF. Ok, so a bit like copying school work?….Hmm….ok, let’s talk about copying on the computer again. When you started using LimeWire, did anyone ever mention that if you did certain things you might be breaking some laws?

- Why would they put it [music] on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?

TF. Do you think its legal or illegal to copy a CD or DVD?

- Some men right, they sell you a DVD at the market but when you get home it doesn’t play, that’s illegal.

TF. Why is it illegal?

- Duh!! Because they tell you it works and when you get it home it’s rubbish and jumps in the middle and its a waste of money!

Read more at TorrentFreak

I am not sure if this is a true interview actually because it kinda sounds a little too ignorant to me. But then again, it’s a 10 year old.

The point that she mentioned about paying for the internet is quite legit. I know of someone who got the internet just to download illegal music. That time he was convinced that music is free in the internet because there is no cost in making the CD. He thinks he is paying electricity and internet bills for it so it’s okay he feels.

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XEDO Holocaust

And just in case you don’t know what is Odex:

In Singapore, the piracy of Japanese animation has gotten quite a bit of press coverage. I know many people downloading anime. One of the local anime distributers, Odex, decided to start demanding payment from people who download from sources such as BitTorrent. While they’re generally and lawful to pursue this matter, their approach is not favorable among the local anime community.

They demanded a monetary settlement from the downloaders of about $3000 which they claim is the fees that were spent on issuing the lawsuit. Such bullying tactics has caused several to boycott Odex products. I looked at Odex products at HMV feeling disgusted by their ways. To worsen matters, ISP Singnet and Starhub revealed their subscriber details.

But as the Odex saga is coming to an end, it’s interesting to watch the supposedly good guys turn bad and hated all around town. Odex didn’t do anything wrong when they start whining people are downloading their anime. It’s the all suing thing that just sucks. I think there’s plenty to learn from this. Don’t be overly righteous. And be more sensitive to what you say in forums.

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Here’s what they have to say:

We’re back!

Suprnova has been down for some years due to some heavy pressure from the copyright lobby. The former owner sloncek donated suprnova to The Pirate Bay – and as you know, we like to kick ass and bow for noone!

We were going to keep this site a secret until we had finished it, but of course it leaked, that’s how internet works. So now that the word is out, we’re releasing it!

Please consider these first weeks/months as a beta test. Since we love all you guys and gals so much we decided to keep it an open beta test. That means, please behave, don’t complaint to much and if you discover any weird bugs or problems, let us know.

Some of you have also already discovered our new forum, Suprbay! Which is a joint forum for both Suprnova and The Pirate Bay. Discuss movies, music, love and whatever with your fellow pirates.

Finally, some words for non-internet loving companies: This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.

y’arr!

These days, it’s almost as if pirate camp’s playing a bad joke on intellectual property supporters. SuprNova’s return would most certainly upset the RIAA, the MPAA and AA batteries. It would be interesting to watch how the anti-piracy guys would react to this. The Pirate Bay’s resilience has been admirable. Let’s watch this closely.

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We predicted an RIAA landslide, but they only managed a 53.8% majority over Halliburton’s 46.2%.

The message is clear. The internet cares deeply about being able to download music illegally.

read more | digg story

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I think you get a pirated Borat with a much better packaging.

read more | digg story

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Watch the video at YouTube.com.

We should be using CDs at least these days anyway. :p

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**BitTorrent May Prove Too Good to Quash**

BitTorrent is different. This free, open-source program offers a spyware- and nuisance-free installation. And while it is certainly handy for downloading movies and other copyrighted material for free, it’s also increasingly used to distribute software and entertainment legally.

This makes BitTorrent not only a fascinating test case for legal experts, but it also looks a lot like the logical fusion of peer-to-peer file-sharing and traditional downloading. It’s too robust to stamp out with lawsuits, but too effective not to adopt for commercial use.

…the Motion Picture Association of America is less than thrilled about that particular use. It has taken tracker sites to court for their role in pointing users to movie downloads. As part of one settlement, it took over one such site, LokiTorrent.com, and turned it into an online billboard warning users of the legal risks they faced.

BitTorrent hasn’t been the most approachable program ever, but the 4.0 version released Tuesday offers a far cleaner interface: Simple play/pause buttons start and stop downloads, while a slider control regulates your uploading bandwidth.

The MPAA may be able to drive BitTorrent movie downloads into what (David) Green [MPAA's vice president for technology and new media] called “the dark corners of the Internet,” but this program isn’t going to go away. It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web.

Read more at Yahoo! News

So you see, BitTorrent doesn’t go away. There are too many trackers out there. It would cost too much money to trace everyone down. Perhaps the US government can do what they’re best in – like, er, investing on anti-terrorism features or something.

Why not take advantage of BitTorrent. Distribute more legal software with it. Software can be several CDs huge, just distribute it through BitTorrent.

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There are websites that provide legal downloads. This is not one of them.

This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures. The illegal downloading of motion pictures robs thousands of honest, hard-working people of their livelihood, and stifles creativity. Illegally downloading movies from sites such as these without proper authorization violates the law, is theft, and is not anonymous. Stealing movies leaves a trail. The only way not to get caught is to stop.

(A notice now replaces the LokiTorrent web site and it doesn’t seem as if the webmaster added it.)

It’s another sad day for the P2P (Peer-to-peer) world. Another BitTorrent site is down – LokiTorrent this time. Before that, it was Suprnova that went burst. I wasn’t surprised that LokiTorrent fall though. But I am surprised that it’s so fast.

Previously, LokiTorrent accepted donations to fight against the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), I guess it’s quite useless now – they lost. I wonder how many BitTorrent sites are the MPAA going to pull down before they grow tired of the whole thing.

I suggest everyone to stop downloading the damn movies and just spend a couple of bucks to rent DVDs. They’re much safer. Even buying pirated DVDs from Malaysia seemed safer. Hey, even shoplifting seemed to be a better deal.

Court: Hollywood gets P2P giant’s server logs

A Dallas federal court has ordered file-swapping site LokiTorrent.com to shut down and provide Hollywood lawyers with access to its full server logs, including data that could expose hundreds of thousands of people to copyright lawsuits.

The Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that it had won a quick court victory against LokiTorrent, and was launching a new round of actions against other online piracy hubs. The data provided by the onetime file-swapping hub would provide “a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities,” the trade group said.

Hard numbers on the site’s traffic are hard to come by. However, according to researchers at the Delft University of Technology, LokiTorrent was responsible for more than 800,000 downloads in the month of October alone.

MPAA executives said the information could “quite possibly” lead to lawsuits against individuals.

“This should give us information about LokiTorrent visitors who were involved in flagrant piracy of filmed entertainment,” said John Malcom, director of worldwide piracy operations for the MPAA. “We are going to look at all the information…and decide what the appropriate action is to take.”

Source: CNET News.com, by John Borland

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.torrent files contains hash information and instructions for the BitTorrent client to download the files. BitTorrent is a P2P network.

Suprnova.org goes offline for good

A message on Suprnova.org, which describes itself as the Universal Bit Torrent Source, said that it is “closing down for good” in the way that “we all know it”.
It won’t host or track any torrent links either, and the lads and lasses said they’ve tried everything to stay up.

The message said they’ve tried everything, including mirrors, including everything but it’s a “sad day” for them.

You can read the message here.

There has been quite a bit of Bit Torrent stuff going on in the last week, but our Bulgarian correspondent hasn’t been around to report it. Sorry ’bout that.

Source: The Inquirer

Yes, it’s gone.

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This is what that is left in my post:

You can get pirated software from Smart Play Trading, or rather Smart Play Illegal Trading.

It’s so advance now. They have a PC there. Choose the game you want and the copy the game into an Imation CD-R for you using Nero Burning Rom. I believe that is pirated too. You just have to wait for less than 5 minutes and it’s done. It costs SG$4.00! An Imation CD-R costs less than SG$0.40 [buy a lot]!!

You can find illegal items from Smart Play Trading, at Blk 154 Bukit Batok Street 11 #01-310 Singapore 650154. You can call them at (+65)64251976 and fax them at (+65)65606443. Pirated Playstation and Playstation 2 games can be found there. The computer in the shop has full of those. I think they even store their CD-images into a DVD! I think the person in charged is David Wee. I am sure the local law enforcement will find their shop very interesting.

Enjoy your day. This post is amended and shortened on Sunday, March 14, 2004 on 11:16 PM, Singapore Time.

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I secretly owned one of the SPEED compilation albums called “Dear Friend 1″. It’s one of the two compilation albums released moments before their split. The second album was cleverly titled “Dear Friends 2″.

I really liked that album of mine, but I didn’t share with anybody. Nobody suspect I was listening to this type of music as I listen to English music mainly.

Enough of that, so Yong Liang offered to lend me the album. I’m quite surprised because no one offered to lend me their CDs before, lol. Then he told me it’s copy-controlled.

Great. Can’t copy. [He previously asked if I want him to burn a copy for me, I turned him down as I prefer it in WMA format, my portable CD player reads WMA.] I announced to him that I have my ways to get it ripped into my computer.

My method:

# Place the copy-controlled CD into scorching hot water.
# Put a teaspoon of pepper and 2 tablespoons of Tabasco sauce.
# Stir well and put some strawberries inside.
# Put everything in the oven and set the oven at 200 degree Celsius for 20 minutes.
# Remove it from oven and it’s ready to serve to the CD drive’s tray.

Anyway, I didn’t do my method, I just popped the disc in my CD drive and Windows Media Player (WMP) just popped up. I commanded WMP to search for the names of the tracks. The search is successful, WMP auto-fills in the names and even the composer too.

I clicked on the “Copy Music” button. I was in for a surprise.

Not that WMP explode [boom!] or something.. It copied! There was no message whatsoever, it just copied. So much for a copy-controlled CD.

The same thing happened for the Blue CD – Guilty. It supposed to be copy-controlled but I did a CD-to-CD Copy and the CD worked fine. The same thing happened to 5566’s new album, I copied and ripped. It allowed me to. [I am not into Blue or 5566, it's my brother.. I want more Shiina Ringo.]

So what’s this copy-protection about, can anyone tell me?

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Adam Moss, who is a freshman in management information system, downloaded 52 movies while participating in distribution through Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

MPAA then contacted K-State, who provides internet access and shares liability for its Internet users’ actions.

A representative came and deleted Moss’ files as well as obtained his log files, which are proof the movies were present and now are deleted. Moss also was required to write a letter of apology to the MPAA. His punishment from K-State was having his Internet taken away until the end of the year. [I will mourn for my Internet if it happens to me.]

“I told everyone on the floor that got movies from me to delete them. I told other kids not to do it,” he said. “People are looking for people like me. On top of that, they also took log files saying these are the people that actually downloaded from me and going after them. It’s a huge chain reaction,” said Moss.

And says who IRC is not targeting. Many of my friends thought so. For your information, I used to [keyword: used to] share around 50 gigabytes worth of anime in IRC. Although anime is not exactly the type of stuff the MPAA is after, it’s better to be safe than to be sorry.

The actual reason that I stop distributing in that I am tired of it, I am tired of leechers [people who only download, and not share].

This people are trying to be on the safe side. They’re thinking “I download but I don’t share, the RIAA and MPAA is not going to target me”. For that kind of selfish thought, no anime for them. I get pissed off when I see downloaders sharing their empty folders.

Now I use the BitTorrent protocol, which forces everyone to share. No share, you no get thing. Share, you good, you get thing.

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As you have probably known, the music industry has turned its big legal guns on Internet music-swappers – including a 12-year-old Upper West Side girl who thought downloading songs was fun.

Brianna LaHara said she was frightened to learn she was among the hundreds of people sued yesterday by giant music companies in federal courts around the country. She’s the first of 261 defendants to settle their lawsuits with the association. Brianna LaHara agreed Tuesday to pay US$2,000, or about $2 per song she allegedly shared.

“I got really scared. My stomach is all turning,” Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment on West 84th Street where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother.

She’s not the only one who downloaded, so why pick her?

“We are taking each individual on a case-by-case basis,” said Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spokeswoman Amy Weiss.

Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, said the civil lawsuits were filed against “major offenders” who made available an average of 1,000 copyright song files. The RIAA said it was pleased with the settlement. There are 260 cases still pending.

“Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation,” said Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s president. “But when your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action.”

Record companies blame illegal music file-trading for a 31% fall in compact disc sales since mid-2000.

Brianna and the others sued yesterday under federal copyright law could face penalties of up to $150,000 per song, but the RIAA has already settled some cases for as little as $3,000.

Count herself lucky, at the same time unlucky.

There’s one thing for sure – she’s got lots of supporters. The Brianna Project has been launched to help pay back the US$2,000 by donation from the public. The last time I checked, The Brianna Project collected US$1,603.

By the way, did you know she’s an honors student. I guess she can kiss her honors goodbye. She will forever be known as “The girl who downloaded music illegally”. It’s sad isn’t it? RIAA just destroyed her life.

This article is compiled by me. My sources are from New York Post, FoxNews, The Brianna Project and CNN.

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