A bit of technology

Yep, the Swedish Appeal Court found Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström guilty of “contributory copyright infringement” and handed down prison sentences ranging from 4 to 10 months plus damages of more than $6.5 million in total.

This is a quote from TorrentFreak and I consider you to go there to read details. TPB guys will be appealing at the Supreme Court and I wish them luck.

They are right, this is a political trial, Sweden just sucks US cocks. Very sad...

Once upon a time DRM (digital rights management) was called copy protection. But DRM "word" is a much fancier, right? But let's move to the topic (:

Ubisoft added a new type of DRM to its games recently. They thought that if players would require constant Internet access then their protection will be unbreakable. Cracking scene loled a lot and cracked both Ubisoft's games with new DRM in one day. The problem? Well... Currently authentication servers are down and legal users are screwed. Yet pirates are enjoying playing games without ANY problems. Oh, irony!

This fact just proves my point of view that DRM is only limiting legal users. It does NOT protect from piracy. It has NEGATIVE impact on LEGAL users. And it forces users to pirate. And of course DRM protected content costs additional money - protection is not cheap. Why not lower prices and strip off any protection? Pros are obvious and clearly visible:

• More people will be able to buy your content for lesser price and your revenue from one copy will be exactly the same.
• Software will be much more stable because one layer of issues is stripped off.
• Your users will be happy without all the glitches caused by DRM.
• You will save money on paying to DRM developers.

Here in Latvia we have an organization which "fight" for artists' rights called AKKA/LAA. They are analogous to american RIAA/MPAA. And now they are dismissed by their own wish. And this is GREAT! Because people working in this agency were not correct (let me be polite) to artists and end-users. Basically they were taking all the money to themselfes simply because no one signed contracts with them. Just imagine - you have a caffee and a band. You want to play your own music in your own caffee. And guess what? You needed to pay to AKKA/LAA! For fucking what?

At last! They do not exist anymore!

I would like to congratulate Piratpartiet with getting a seat in EU parliament! I hope it will make our world better!

And if you still does not known anything about that, read The Register article on the matter.

As you may remember Sweden now has a new law called IPRED, which will send internet end-users involved in piracy directly to jail without affecting service providers. So many users were worried and guys from The Pirate Bay created a special VPN named IPREDator to protect those who wants protection.

But TPB are not the only ones who care about end-users. Earlier this month Bahnhof, a Swedish internet service provider, has begun deleting customer identification information in order to prevent it from being used as evidence against its customers. And now Tele2, one of the largest ISPs in Sweden, joins Bahnhof.

The good thing about such decision from ISPs is that in some countries businesses do really care about their image and their customers. Yes, they want to earn more money with such policies, but instead of threating their users, like ISPs do in other countries (google for it!) they protect their clients. Tele2 and Bahnhof - you are great!