According to a study conducted by DeepField Networks, as pointed out by BGR.com, while the Megaupload takedown did have an impact on global web traffic, it did little-to-nothing to stem file-sharing traffic, web traffic that’s often looked at as the acts of copyrighted content pirates.

DeepField’s study is revealing on a number of levels, including explaining the amount of web traffic Megaupload accounted for:

As the largest file sharing service on the Internet, MegaUpload downloads represented 30-40% of all file sharing. In the space of an hour, Internet traffic globally plummeted by an astounding 2-3%. Press releases heralded a major blow to the theft of intellectual property.

That being said, whatever chilling effect the Megaupload takedown had was only temporary, if at all:

The main impact of the MegaUpload takedown?

Well, file sharing has not gone away. It did not even decrease much in North America.

Mainly, file sharing became staggeringly less efficient. Instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links.

So that’s why Lamar Smith was so adamant about SOPA only targeting foreign sites. Clearly, he knew the Megaupload takedown was coming, and as a result, foreign web entities would fill the hole — almost immediately — that a seized Megaupload left behind.

DeepField also offers graphics to back up their findings:

Remember eMule and Kazaa?

Did the law enforcement agencies — backed by politicians who have been bought and paid for by the entertainment industry — actually think this would stem the piracy tide they are trying so hard to fight? Or was this a case similar to the drug busts of old? Something like what the Christian Science Monitor pointed out while reporting on a drug raid in Mexico:

Mexico seizes 105 tons of marijuana in Tijuana. Does it matter?

Considering DeepField’s findings, this kind of headline easily fits the Megaupload takedown and the overall impact it had on file-sharing piracy.

The focus of the study is on lag times between U.S. release and foreign release. The study found that longer gaps between a movie’s release in America and its release in foreign countries led to increased piracy in those countries, and correspondingly lower box office sales. The study estimates that pre-release piracy impacted foreign box office sales by as much as 7%
In the U.S., however, box office sales were not impacted by piracy at all. The study concludes that the impact of piracy is driven primarily by the lack of legal availability of content in foreign markets.

The study was conducted by economists Brett Danaher and Joel Waldfogel. Danaher is an assistant professor of economics at Wellesley College. Waldfogel is a professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. The paper is currently under peer review preparatory to publication in an academic journal. Here is the abstract:

Hollywood films are generally released first in the United States and then later abroad, with some variation in lags across films and countries. With the growth in movie piracy since the appearance of BitTorrent in 2003, films have become available through illegal piracy immediately after release in the US, while they are not available for legal viewing abroad until their foreign premieres in each country. We make use of this variation in international release lags to ask whether longer lags – which facilitate more local pre-release piracy – depress theatrical box office receipts, particularly after the widespread adoption of BitTorrent. We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects. This relationship is much stronger in contexts where piracy is more prevalent: after BitTorrent’s adoption and in heavily-pirated genres. Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy.

Some entertainment companies are already becoming aware of the losses caused by delaying international releases. The BBC network in recent years has begun airing some of their most popular shows (e.g., Doctor Who and The Graham Norton Show) on BBC America on the same day that they air in the UK.

DeepField Networks posted a study on their blog titled, “File Sharing in the Post MegaUpload Era.” They say that file sharing traffic collapsed on January 18, the day that MegaUpload was shut down and its founder arrested.

They say that MegaUpload downloads represented about 30 to 40 percent of all file sharing. In the span of an hour, global Internet traffic dropped by a huge 3 percent. The copyright industry saw it as a great day for them and a bad day for pirates everywhere.

To preface, the study found that piracy has not decreased. No big surprise there. Pirates just moved to other services. They always have and they always will.

The study is far more interesting than that, however, as it sought to map the infrastructure behind file sharing. They say that the general consensus is that file sharing is spread across the entirety of the Internet where everybody is involved in the business of piracy.

The fact of the matter is that file sharing is located in a centralized part of the Internet. There may be hundreds of file sharing sites, but they all pull from the same six Web sites that drive over 80 percent of all file-sharing traffic.

They found that on January 18, before MegaUpload was taken down, MegaVideo was pushing 34 percent of all file sharing traffic. Most of that traffic was locally hosted in the United States on the servers in Virginia.

For comparison, they looked at file-sharing traffic on January 19. File-sharing traffic did not decrease, it just moved elsewhere. Sites like Putlocker saw a massive jump in their file-sharing traffic.

They conclude that the MegaUpload take down did nothing to combat piracy. All it did was force massive amounts of data to now be transferred from Europe over “expensive transatlantic links.”

Coelho, the best-selling author of The Alchemist and Brida, has been unwavering with his opposition to SOPA, calling it “a REAL DANGER that will affect the whole planet.” Many people, politicians and anti-SOPA advocates alike, have made similar statements but Coelho went one step further in order to prove his point: he wants you to pirate all of his books.

Seriously. Go download them. He really wants you to.

In a post on his blog, Coelho opined about the controversial anti-piracy law and argued that the proliferation of artist content, even if it does have a copyright, is never a bad thing. “The more often we hear a song on the radio,” he wrote, “the keener we are to buy the CD. It’s the same with literature. The more people ‘pirate’ a book, the better.”

Coelho makes a solid point that eviscerates the argument that piracy is harming entertainers: anybody who has ever entertained the notion or even been able to call themselves an artist at any point in their life was pursing that interest out of passion, not monetary compensation. Most people, while it does sound pretentious, can understand that. Well, the philistines won’t but, then again, the philistines are the ones writing SOPA bills in the first place.

Still, artists gotta eat, and Coelho is aware that they need some kind of compensation for their works. However, he doesn’t believe that piracy is what stands in the way of artists getting paid. He related a personal anecdote in this blog:

In 1999, when I was first published in Russia ( with a print- run of 3,000), the country was suffering a severe paper shortage. By chance, I discovered a ‘ pirate’ edition of The Alchemist and posted it on my web page.
An year later, when the crisis was resolved, I sold 10,000 copies of the print edition.
By 2002, I had sold a million copies in Russia, and I have now sold over 12 million.

When I traveled across Russia by train, I met several people who told me that they had first discovered my work through the ‘ pirated’ edition I posted on my website. Nowadays, I run a ‘Pirate Coelho’ website, giving links to any books of mine that are available on P2P sites.
And my sales continue to grow — nearly 140 million copies world wide.

He uses the anecdote to illustrate how pirating can actually help an artist become successful. “A good idea doesn’t need protection,” he wrote.

In a way, Coelho’s pro-piracy argument isn’t terribly different than the relationship that authors and libraries have enjoyed since, well, since always. They’ve managed to successfully coexist with no detriment to the artists’ well-being; in fact, I’d hazard the guess that libraries have been instrumental in fostering many authors who, without the free and available access to literature, might never have become writers in the first place.

So what say you of Coelho’s argument? Does piracy actually benefit an artist by permitting copyrighted material like books and music to proliferate through the hands of the masses at literally zero cost? Do you think people actually go out and financially support artists after getting their wares for free if they like what they’ve read/heard/watched/etc.? Comment below with your opinions.

That’s because Tom Brady, the chosen one, the man with the golden arm, Jesus Christ with a trendy haircut and a pair of Uggs – that Tom Brady, is nothing but a lowly pirate like the rest of us.

Media week at the Super Bowl involves a lot of talking. The result of all of that talking is that Tom Brady admitted to watching the Green Bay Packers beat the Pittsburgh Steelers on a *gasp* illegal streaming site!

The exact quote:

Last year, I was rehabbing my foot in Costa Rica watching the game on an illegal Super Bowl website and now I’m actually playing in the game, so it’s pretty cool.

Now, the NFL isn’t too keen on the whole streaming TV sites thing and are pretty protective of their copyrights (see SOPA support). But this just proves that when you can’t get the product (here, a game) through normal means, even Tom Brady will find it somewhere on the interwebs.

On Thursday, the DOJ seized numerous streaming sites, including firstrowsports.tv, soccerlive.net and more. This was the first time that .TV sites have been targeted in a DOJ takedown operation.

For many, however, those streaming sites won’t be necessary this year. For the first time, the NFL is allowing the big game to be streamed by “legitimate” means. The live stream starts at 2pm on Sunday at NBC’s Super bowl site.

Although the Super Bowl is now being streamed with the blessing of the NFL, we can look at the implications of Tom Brady’s little admission. What about all the other NFL games over the course of the regular season that don’t receive special streaming allowances. If the NFL’s golden boy feels justified in streaming a game when he can’t watch it through normal means, it’s gotta be alright for your average Joe to follow suit.

[Via Yahoo Sports]

TorrentFreak broke the story that Ukranian feds have taken down popular sharing site Ex.ua. The site was reported to have millions of users. Several international companies like Microsoft, Graphisoft and Adobe filed complaints against the service which led to raid today after a six-month criminal investigation.

A spokesperson for the authorities confirmed that 200 servers were taken, holding a mind-blowing 6 petabytes of data. For those just joining us, that’s 6,000 terabytes of data.

Sixteen employees were taken into custody for questioning. It’s unclear if any arrests have been made, but the authorities did confirm that the site was run by a Latvian citizen.

Ex.ua was similar to MegaUpload, which was taken down just two weeks ago, but TorrentFreak points out a few key differences. Ex.ua allowed users to search for content on their site in categories like ‘MP3’ and ‘Video,’ MegaUpload did not.

The RIAA labeled Ex.ua as a “pirate haven” in 2010 in a complaint filed with the U.S. Trade Representative. Their main beef was that the Web site allowed users to directly search for content.

The operators of the site face up to five years in prison if found guilty.

Reuters is reporting that just like with MegaUpload, the Internet has not taken the news of the take down softly.

Ukrainians bombarded government Web sites with DDoS attacks that took down the president’s Web site alongside the Web site for the Interior Ministry.

A government spokesperson confirmed that the Web sites had been attacked. They also confirmed that the call to attack government Web sites was being spread over social networks “in the name of supporting file-sharing Web sites that do not observe copyright laws.”

The attack does not appear to be an officially sanctioned Anonymous attack, but just bitter users of the Web site. The hashtag #OpExua returns little results as well.

At the Dive Into Media conference today, Neil Young spoke on music piracy and music quality. He detailed his solution to audio quality and his relationship with Steve Jobs.

Speaking first on the MP3 format, Young said that digital formats are convenient, but they sound lousy. He said that his goal is to “rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years.” He blames the digital age for the degradation of music quality.

Modern digital formats sound great on my phone and I have no problem with it. Young, however, rightly points out that the digital encoding only captures a small percent of the musical data in a master recording.

Young doesn’t hate digital formats, far from it. He just feels that the “digital age” has caused people to choose between quality and convenience. “They shouldn’t have to make that choice,” Young said.

The solution is hardware that can play audio files that preserve more of the data present in the original recordings according to Young. He isn’t making that solution though. He’s leaving the heavy lifting to “some rich guy” like Steve Jobs.

Speaking of Jobs, Young says that he was a “pioneer of digital music, and his legacy is tremendous.” He says that Jobs listened to vinyl at home after a day’s work. If Jobs were to live long enough as Young has, he’s sure that Jobs would have found a solution.

He then moved onto record companies and whether or not they’re obsolete:

“What I like about record companies is that they present and nurture artists. That doesn’t exist on iTunes, it doesn’t exist on Amazon. That’s what a record company does, and that’s why I like my record company. People look at record companies like they’re obsolete, but there’s a lot of soul in there — a lot of people who care about music, and that’s very important.”

He then said that artists that complain about record companies should go it alone and become indie artists.

At the end of the talk, he tackled the sensitive issue of piracy:

“Piracy is new radio. That’s how music gets around.”

Part of that successl, according to Rovio CEO Mikael Hed, can be traced to learning from the music industry’s mistakes.

Speaking at the Midem conference in Cannes on Monday, Hed had this to say:

We have some issues with piracy, not only in apps, but also especially in the consumer products. There is tons and tons of merchandise out there, especially in Asia, which is not officially licensed products.

We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy.

Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day

Basically Hed said that they employ the strategy that says piracy = exposure. If you’re confident in the product, you can be confident that as more people experience it, profits will increase. One theory is that is something is good enough, people will want to pay money for it. Another says that creating fans of your product, even through piracy, can lead to eventual business somewhere down the road.

And to Hed, this has something to do with thinking about customers as “fans” as opposed to users – something the music industry actually got right:

We took something from the music industry, which was to stop treating the customers as users, and start treating them as fans. We do that today: we talk about how many fans we have. If we lose that fanbase, our business is done, but if we can grow that fanbase, our business will grow.

Of course, saying that the music industry mishandled the topic of piracy doesn’t stop Hed from speculating about ways that Angry Birds can work with them in the future. He feels that Angry Birds has become an official “channel” for content – and that can be leveraged to form partnerships with the industry.

What do you think about Hed’s approach to piracy. Can piracy really lead to more business in the end? Let us know in the comments.

Over two-thirds of likely U.S. voters (67%) responded that they viewed the downloading of content without paying for it as theft. Fifteen percent weren’t sure, and 18% said it was not. In that case, a law designed to curb online piracy should be a good thing, right? Not so, according to the survey. While most agree that piracy is theft, even more respondents – 71% – answered that they felt that internet censorship was a greater threat than piracy.

This survey suggests that voters agree with what SOPA’s opponents have been saying all along: piracy is bad, and something should be done about it, but neither SOPA nor PIPA is the something that should be done. A good anti-piracy solution is necessary, but censoring the internet is not the way to go about it.

In his latest tweet, he mentions the phone hacking scandal, and of course copyright stealing: