P2P Talk?

The Federal Court in Australia has ordered a man from Queensland to pay Nintendo the equivalent of $1.3m in damages after he uploaded the Wii version of New Super Mario Bros. to the Internet in late 2009.

James Burt, a 34 year-old manager at games retailer Electronics Boutique, admitted uploading the game on November 6th, a week before its commercial release in Australia.

In a statement the Japanese games giant said it used a range of forensic techniques to track down the uploader and on 23rd November obtained a Federal Court search order. This was used to locate and seize items from Burt’s property in Sinnamon Park, Queensland, to be used in evidence in the case against him.

As part of the investigation, Burt was also ordered to allow access using his passwords to social networking sites, email accounts and other websites he had used.

Australia traditionally lags behind the United States and Japan when it comes to media releases, but with the release of New Super Mario Bros. for the Wii the reverse was true, leading Nintendo to refer to the leak as a “global issue”.

“This legal proceeding was commenced to protect the creative rights and innovation of game developers, and to combat the growing international problem of Internet piracy,” the company said in a statement.

The game was a sure fire hit on BitTorrent. Data collected by TorrentFreak indicated that by December 27th 2009, the game had been downloaded 1,150,000 times.

Nevertheless, the game was still a huge commercial success. The game sold in excess of 10 million units in its first 2 months on sale – that’s 1 in 6 of all Wii gamers buying a copy – making it the fastest-selling single-platform game ever.

It’s unclear how Mr Burt will be able to pay this huge amount in damages. His salary at Electronics Boutique is unlikely to cover it – if he still has a job there.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Unfunded adware accusations propagated by Symantec threaten to undermine the credibility of popular music subscription service Kazaa

Kazaa, now a legitimate online music subscription service that offers users access to an extensive database of licensed songs for a monthly subscription fee is still having difficulties in shedding its past reputation, shadowed by copyright related lawsuits and promotion of adware containing software.

Not long ago, Kazaa once again attracted suspicions on itself, this time from the company Symantec, which labeled the service’s desktop client application as high-risk adware. The questionable accusations weren’t well received by Brilliant Digital Entertainment, now in charge of operating Kazaa, which issued a special notice aimed at reassuring its costumers that the claims weren’t true.

According to Kazaa officials, Symantec’s security software has misidentified its desktop client as being high-risk not once, but twice over the course of a few weeks. The company’s representatives have all reasons to be upset, as Symantec’s accusations are tainting Kazaa’s public image, causing customers to turn away from the music subscription service.

The erroneous response from Symantec was apparently triggered by the files used for promoting advertisements as part of Kazaa’s music plug-in application, which the company claims to be risk-free. Kazaa supports the idea that like most anti-virus companies out there, Symantec favors an overzealous approach in its effort to unmask and pursue online piracy, approach that lures it into the trap of submitting false accusations following any suspicions of illegitimate activity, without proper factual investigation.

Kazaa brought the Spotify case into the picture, also wrongfully accused by Symantec of supporting high-risk applications. Following the incident, Symantec had to admit its mistake and later apologize on Twitter. Judging by this precedent, chances are Symantec will soon decide to also withdraw its claims against Kazaa and face the consequences of committing yet another error.

The 2008 Summer Olympics were a huge hit online, both through legal and illegal channels. NBC streamed a record breaking 2,200 hours of live video to the delight of millions of people, but strangely enough this year the network will limit its live coverage to hockey and curling.

An NBC representative explained that the network will only cover the highlights because people “are not dying to watch lots of long-form content on a 13-inch screen.” However, at the same time NBC contradicts itself by announcing that it will do all it can to prevent people from accessing unauthorized live feeds or downloads of Olympic broadcasts.

While NBC doesn’t believe there is much demand for live coverage, it will do all it can to prevent the ‘few’ people who do from downloading or streaming the events online. “Our aim is to make access to pirated material inconvenient, low quality and hard to find,” said Rick Cotton, NBC’s Executive Vice President commenting on their Olympic mission.

Once again one of the major entertainment industry outfits has got it entirely wrong. If NBC really wants to prevent piracy they have to offer at least some sort of alternative. Cutting 2,200 hours of live web coverage back to just a few hundred is certainly not going to help in stopping piracy.

NBC reportedly has teamed up with Ustream and Justin.tv, two popular live streaming sites, to use filtering schemes in order to prevent illegal broadcasts. However, it is inevitable that they won’t be able to stop them all since there are dozens of live streaming sites. Preventing torrents from being uploaded will turn out to be even more problematic for the network.

During the Beijing Olympics two years ago, The International Olympic Committee (IOC) asked for “assistance” from the Swedish government with preventing video clips from the Olympics in Beijing being shared via The Pirate Bay. This didn’t help much and during the weeks that followed millions of people continued to download broadcasts of Olympic events.

We assume that in the coming weeks most events will again appear online, despite NBC’s efforts to prevent the Olympics from being pirated.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Following a day’s delay due to cloudy weather, space shuttle Endeavour launched successfully early Monday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle, which launched at 4:14 a.m. EST, is carrying a new module and an attached cupola for the International Space Station. “What a beautiful launch we had this morning… the orbiter performed extremely well,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for space operations, during the postlaunch news conference. “This is a great start to a very complicated mission.”

IBM on Monday launched a one-two punch with its new Power7 processors, which the company claims have twice the performance of the Power6 line but consume less power. These processors power IBM’s Unix servers, four new models of which were also unveiled Monday in a move that might strengthen IBM’s position in the Unix server market. The Power7 uses a 45 nanometer process. Each Power7 processor has up to eight cores and four threads per core. That’s four times the maximum number of cores and eight times the number of threads per chip as the Power6.