Aslan raised a few savvy eyebrows last week when they claimed that 25,000 people had downloaded their new covers album Uncase’d through Bittorrent sites in the six weeks since release through their label EMI.
As outlined in a press release, the band had discovered that Uncase’d had performed poorly against their previous albums and after some quick searches on the web, deduced that this is all down to people downloading the album through Bittorrent sites.
Billy McGuinness of Aslan appeared on Pat Kenny and Phantom FM last week to talk about the situation and claimed that as a result of this, along with the the decline of live music and album sales have left the band needing to reassess their future.
What if McGuinness was genuinely mistaken though? Establishing true facts and figures from illegal download sites is a particularly hard thing to quantify at the best of times and it’s easy to get wrong so how did they arrive at such a large number? Continue Reading..»
The four men on trial from the BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay for breaching copyright law have been found guilty and face one year in prison and a $905,000 fine each. The reaction to the news from the invested parties has been as interesting as the case itself. Ironically, the verdict itself was leaked to the accused an hour before the official verdict prompting Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of the convicted four to tweet “Stay calm – Nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing what so ever. This is just a theater for the media.“
Continue Reading..»
The Pirate Bay on trial: Four men are accused of helping millions of internet users download copyrighted material. The industry has called on internet service providers to censor such websites.
Last week the trial involving four men accused of helping millions of users download movies, games, software and music through their site The Pirate Bay begun in Stockholm. Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Carl Lundström face up to two years in prison, damages of €10 million and a €115,000 fine for facilitating the distribution of copyrighted material.
The trial dubbed “spectrial”, as the defendants considered it a spectacle, has not gone according to the IFPI’s (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) plans thus far. Half of the charges against the men were dropped as the prosecutors fumbled on defining The Pirate Bay as the source of the Bittorrent files (The Pirate Bay’s computer servers never actually hosted any copyright-infringing files) and the defendants have been gaining notoriety by using their Twitter accounts to ridicule the case ranging from expressing boredom (“#spectrial is so boring. It’s sleepy”) to joy at their supposed winning of the case (“EPIC WINNING LOL”).
