collateral damage

The internet is a great tool to alert politicians to all the dangers of this treaty, just as the internet was a tool to mobilize people against the SOPA and PIPA bills in the US.

For any lobby to be effective, however, it must be fact based. Misinformed criticism helps those supporting ACTA.

One of the more interesting things over the past few months is just how mainstream copyright issues have suddenly become.

In the wake of the MegaUpload shutdown many of the site’s users have complained about the personal files that were lost as collateral damage.

In October 2011, a court in Finland ordered local ISP Elisa to block The Pirate Bay to stop copyright infringement among its subscribers.

Today, the blockade - which covers many domains and IP addresses - took effect, but behind the scenes there is an effort to unblock the site and render the court order useless.

Meanwhile there is already collateral damage - the court order has succeeded in blocking a domain linking to Electronic Frontier Finland.

NY Times media columnist David Carr -- who it should be known has been a critic of "free" economics in the past -- has put up an interesting new column explaining why even those who are vehemently against copyright infringement should be concerned about SOPA and the unintended consequences it will cause for the internet.

On June 11th 2011, Europe witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history.

The popular movie streaming portal Kino.to was shut down and a dozen people connected to the site were arrested.

As collateral damage, several file-hosting services connected to Kino.to also went down.

We've seen similar scams for a few years now, but with the French three strikes administrators, Hadopi, sending out 650,000 first strike notices, it should come as no surprise that the scammers have jumped in to

In recent months hundreds of thousands of people have been accused of downloading and sharing copyrighted material on BitTorrent, often in cases related to adult content.

In July, millions of Indians discovered they could not access their favorite file-sharing sites including popular hosters such as Mediafire, MegaUpload and Hotfile.

The chaos came about because movie studio Reliance Entertainment had obtained a court order from the Indian High Court which restrained many Internet services providers from offering, even indirectly, a pirate copy of the movie Singham.

One of the main motivations for people to download and stream TV-shows from unauthorized sources is availability.

If fans can’t get a show through legal channels they turn to pirated alternatives.

This is one of the reasons why Hulu drastically decreased TV-show piracy in the U.S.

Viewers are happy with the legal streaming option it offers them, but not all studios see that as a success.