Mininova's been working on a copyright filter for a while, but with the stakes so artificially high, it would need to be almost perfect to make operating the site worthwhile. This means that Mininova will either A.) Become the premier torrent indexer for Linux ISOs and public domain FLAC music, or B.) die.*

With two major torrent sites all but snuffed out in the last few weeks, there are only a few decent alternatives left. Although if you're of a hardier type, there's always Usenet. [Torrentfreak]

*Spoiler: It's B.

Yates was working at the Burbank distribution company hired to cut promo reels for talk shows when he made a copy of the DVD and uploaded it to the internet. Of course, he blamed his grandmother.

When confronted, Yates accused co-workers and Paramount employees of putting the contraband copy on the Internet. But videotaped footage showed Yates making the unauthorized copy of "The Love Guru" at work before leaving the building and then going into his car, Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik M. Silber said. Yates subsequently blamed his grandmother, saying that he showed the movie at her birthday party and she then gave it away to a cousin who gave it to a friend who was the former roommate of the man who is believed to have uploaded the movie, but has not yet been charged. In his plea agreement, Yates confessed to making a copy of the comedy and later distributing it to others.

A true american hero! Keep fighting that good fight! [WSJ via Gawker]

The decision has taken a ton of twists and turns—even after the jury had decided what Thomas had done was in fact illegal filesharing, the punishment wasn't at all clear. Originally she was to be fined for over 1,700 songs, which was then whittled down to 24 "representative" songs, and the per song fine has shot up from the initial $750 (the legal minimum) to the current $80,000.

Apparently Thomas "gasped" when the number was read out loud. We don't blame her, although our reaction was more fist-shaking and muttering about old white men in suits than sheer surprise.

The ordeal isn't over, of course—Thomas will appeal the decision and it'll probably be heard by a few more judicial levels before any final say is had. Jammie, we're pulling for you. Stand tall. Or sit down, it's easier to steal music that way. [Ars Technica]

After explaining to the carrier how outrageous that is, he was made an offer: They'd knock the bill down to what it cost them in bandwidth. Unfortunately for Alberto, they claimed their cost was still $17,000.

Alberto called in to one of those cable news network shows about money where the host wears headphones and yells at the viewer for half an hour and neglected to mention the carrier's name, but we can't see any way a 700MB file would cost $17,000 in bandwidth fees. There's a lesson in all this: If you're going abroad, buy a roaming plan. Or at least tell us the name of the carrier so we can complain more effectively. [CNN via Ars Technica]

Under the plan, the music and movie industries would have been empowered to analyze the downloads of individual Internet users to root out instances of piracy, and to report violations to a newly created agency. The agency was to send warning letters to violators; after the third letter, the Internet service provider would have been required to sever service.

The voting down of the bill is seen as a big loss for President Sarkozy, who promises to have a revised version of the bill ready in the coming weeks. [NY Times]

The two main arguments that the prosecution made were that the folks behind The Pirate Bay were responsible for allowing piracy to happen and that they're organized and rich.

As to the first point, prosecutor Hakan Roswall said that "a person who is holding someone's coat while they assault someone else is complicit in the crime."

And the prosecution repeatedly claimed that the people behind The Pirate Bay were pulling in $1 million per year via ads, a claim the defense has roundly denied. Peter Sunde says that the "prosecution claims 64 adspaces on TPB. But there's two to four. And they count the earned money on number of adspaces." More to the point, he says this of the prosecutor: "The old bastard's crazy." Glad they're keeping things civil!

Tomorrow, the defense makes its closing argument, and then this whole circus comes to a close. The prosecution is gunning for one year of jailtime, so we'll see what happens. [Ars Technica]

The feed, provided by the Courtroom View Network, will cover every thrilling up and down of the case, which involves the RIAA suing BU student Joe Tenenbaum and others. The RIAA opposed the live broadcast, which the judge found pretty strange seeing that this entire campaign of lawsuits was designed to scare people away from downloading.

In any case, the hearing is set for 2pm on January 22nd, so mark your calendars for hot courtroom action, LIVE! [Threat Level]

Essentially, the system localizes peer-to-peer file sharing. Right now, when you hop on a torrent, you download and upload data from and to people all over the world. It's quite inefficient. P4P prioritizes peers who are on your local ISP network, making downloads both much faster and much more efficient.

The system relies on iTrackers being installed on ISPs networks. The more networks that run iTrackers, the better the P4P system will run and the faster the speeds will be. Comcast is pushing to make the iTrackers an Internet Engineering Task Force standard, which would help the spread and use of the software greatly.

They want this because this is an actual win/win situation in the file-sharing front. P2P users get better speeds and Comcast gets less load on their backbone. Group hug, y'all! [Ars Technica]

Last week, while visiting Criterion Collection headquarters to observe their transition to Blu-ray, I brought up the subject of digital downloads. To my surprise, they let slip a little detail that sheds light on how a master disc maker like Criterion will manage in an all-download future.

As we've seen, even "HD" digital downloads are far from the quality of Blu-ray, so there's a hesitance to offer up their restorations in a format that doesn't live up to their very high standards. Lee Kline, Criterion's Technical Director says "I would be depressed if we just went from standard-def DVDs to standard-def downloads."

David Phillips, who works in DVD development at Criterion, explained further:

When you're talking about a dual-layer Blu-ray disc, you're talking about 50GB of data. Now, a lot of our films might not necessarily take up all that space, but even if they're taking up 25GB on a single layer disc, you're still talking about a heck of a lot of data to download. Now, the way that broadband infrastructure is in this country, any films you're downloading aren't going to have the data rate or resolution of Blu-ray.


When you work on the mastering part of it and the restoration and you see how good that image looks, it's really hard to say, OK, we're going to squash this down to the point where it'll fit through everybody's pipe.

However, according to Kline, digital downloads are on Criterion's radar.

We're pretty close to figuring out what we want to do with downloading, and I think our new website will cover that, which you'll see in a few months. I don't want to give any details yet, but we're not dismissing that as a viable option right now. But until it's faster and we're sure that we're going to give people a download that works in an acceptable amount of time, we'll go there when we need to go there. We're not scared of it, but we're also not ready to do it yet.


There'll be some sort of downloading and some sort of information regarding… OK, I'm going to stop, I'm giving away too much.

My guess is that there will be downloading of some sort, but it may or may not be full films. Who knows? Maybe it will be short scenes from classic movies, shown at higher-than-ever-before bitrates.

Would you be interested in downloading Criterion's restorations even if the quality wasn't that great? Or does that kind of go against everything that Criterion is about?

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[Wired via Ars Technica]

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it's kinda like the DS system with WIFI both subscription and points are supported, and your account is tied to your zune furthermore, once you download a song of the to go marketplace, you can then send them to other once you have synched back with your PC, copying your downloaded files back to your HD, when it becomes a normal downloaded song.

This is all rumor so far, but what do you guys think? Bonus shot after the jump.

– Jason Chen

Of course, this insanity isn't about to be hooked up to your house anytime soon, but just knowing that they've figured out how to do it means that eventually, at some point, people will probably have speeds similar to this when they connect to the Internet. Hell, even 1/10th of that speed would be totally bananas overkill. But I'd take it, oh yes, I would take it. –Adam Frucci

PR Newswire [via Broadband Reports]

In fact, pirated copies of movies and TV shows are often available in HD, in their original 16x9 format. Not so with a TV show or movie from iTunes: its sides are chopped off in 4x3, and it's not available in HD. Doesn't this remind you of the days of Napster, when there was no other way to legally download music? Legal video downloading is having a hard time keeping up. That's what the writer of the-ish.com/blog noticed as he compared one against the other:

Sounds to me like legality, and even the convenience of auto-downloads, are having a hard time competing with pirating. But what it really comes down to for me is this: If i get LESS INFORMATION from my legal purchase, if i cant even get widescreen (much less HD) then why should i be purchasing instead of pirating?

iTunes versus Pirating (Digg mirror) [the-ish.com/blog, via Digg]

Movielink, Warner Bros., Verbatim, and Roxio are all on board to support this end-to-end Qflix system. To burn at home, you'll have to buy Qflix-enabled burners (or update your current firmware), Qflix-enabled blank discs, and use Qflix-enabled software.

One good outcome of this is that you can potentially head to store kiosks and burn old or obscure movies that aren't widely distributed because of their limited appeal. – Jason Chen

Studios okay users burning CSS-encrypted movies, but special media is required [Ars Technica]

It's not just Apple's store that's falling. The entire online download industry has been either flat or declining for three straight quarters. Ouch. That doesn't bode well for Microsoft's newest entry into the market either. But with numbers saying that median households make only three digital downloads a year, no wonder sales are looking grim.

Of course, the numbers are only valid until June '06, so there may be a seasonal uptick in Holiday shopping and gifting that picks up the entire industry. We'll have to wait until next year to find out. – Jason Chen

iTunes sales 'collapsing' [The Register]

Image via Defective by Design

Go online to xbox.com and register a new gamertag with an email address not associated with any previous account. Then make sure you set your country to either Japan or America—perhaps making one tag for each. Then when that's done, go on your Xbox 360 and choose "recover gamertag" to grab the info from this tag onto your 360. Now you can see all the Japanese games you've been missing out on. – Jason Chen

Bypass the Xbox 360 country lock [Sagn]

Sony's also said that the PlayStation 3 would be ideal in being a download service hub for the PSP as well as being a gaming console. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. – Jason Chen

PSP something something PS3 something something [Nikkeibp via Gamesindustry]