The red envelope of Netflix continues its global expansion with official word that the service will be coming to Spain in January 2012. The move was confirmed by Pedro Perez of FAPAE, the Spanish Spanish producers association. Netflix has caught fire in many territories throughout North and Central America, but faces an uphill battle in Spain, a country famous for high levels of piracy.
Netflix and its all-consuming thirst for bandwidth may get a lot of the headlines these days, but don't make the mistake of thinking illegal P2P file sharing is dead. Hop onto one of the big name torrent sites and you'll find a veritable ocean of available titles being seeded by a whole heck of a lot of people. But just because the media's forgotten about file sharers doesn't mean the lawyers have; in fact, over 200,000 pirates have found themselves slapped with a lawsuit since the beginning of 2010.
Brace yourself for this one, it might come as a shock to the system. Ready for it? It turns out that copyright lawyers might not qualify as role models for how the ones they're suing should conduct themselves. Okay, so maybe you're not astonished to learn that copyright lawyers may lack a little something in the morals department, but what is surprising is how blatant at least one high profile lawyer holds a double standard for copyright law.
Fox just doesn't seem to get it. Around a week after Netflix's price hike sent irate customers into the arms of its competitors – like Hulu, which Fox has a stake in – the network announced, in a very customer UNfriendly move, that people who don't subscribe to cable, Dish Network or Hulu Plus would soon have to endure an eight-day delay between the time a show airs and the time it appears online. Customers didn't get angry, but they're just going to shrug their shoulders and go back to picking up Family Guy on P2P networks, anyways.
BitTorrent is a great way to move large royalty free files around the web, but it’s also a great way to get sued if you happen to stumble upon the wrong link. Since 2010 close to 200,000 people in the US have been sent 
The best laughs in the country aren't found in comedy clubs or celebrity-filled roasts; if you want to really put the "L" in ROFL, you need to turn towards the court system. In today's humor-filled disposition, a store owner accused of selling illegal copies of DVDs says no, sir, he wasn't selling copyrighted DVDs – that's illegal, after all. He was actually giving the movies away for free, you see, and his customers were forking over $5 "donations" for the DVD cases.
It might seem like the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is on a wild goose chase if it 
While so-called “three strikes laws” have been passed in several countries to kick those repeatedly accused of copyright infringement off the Internet, Cnet is reporting that some US ISPs are not waiting for the government to impose such a system. Several companies including Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon are reportedly deep in talks with entertainment companies to establish tough punishments for alleged file sharers. 
While the traditional image of pirates is pretty cool, we're actually a little scared of them in real life, what with all the murder and pillaging. We think the US Government misunderstood our cries for justice, though. Rather than banning eyepatches and shoulder-bound parrots, the "Protect IP Act" bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier today gives the Justice Department extensive – and some may say excessive – powers to shut down websites that host copyright-infringing materials. It would need to pass a full Senate vote before becoming law.
Conventional “wisdom” says consoles are a land of milk, honey, and Firefly never being canceled while PC is a piracy ridden hive of scum and villainy. And let's not dance around the facts here: we'd all be a lot better off if pirates took a cue from Fable III and traded in their horns for halos. That said, the game's lead combat designer isn't convinced that consoles are any better off.
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