The Pirate Bay Will Promote the Winners

Within the past few months, not only anti-piracy outfits have been hunting The Pirate Bay. The entertainment industry strongly believes that the website is just a group of pirates who are doing nothing else than downloading illegal content. However, the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world is proving different by announcing a contest to promote indie artists.

Frequent users of the tracker might have noticed that the pirates sometimes replace their front page logo with others, either linking to interesting political news about online censorship or to some independent artists they like. Now The Pirate Bay decided to improve this feature and asked everyone to send them an email and tell them what they have and where they want it to be shown.
Using their front page, The Pirate Bay is going to promote musicians, film companies, comedians, and others. The contest page, called The Promo Bay, encourages people around the globe to send their submissions, by sending a logo of their online resource and its link. The tracker will then link to the selected submission’s page and post their logo to its own front page.
In other words, the entire idea is that the pirates will allow their creative users to borrow the TPB’s homepage for a couple days, in a few countries. The front page will show their logo that will lead to the Bandcamp, YouTube channel or site. According to The Pirate Bay, there are too many undiscovered musicians out there while there’s too much crap flooding the top charts. Thus they provide everyone a chance to be discovered by the world. The rules of the contest are easy: The Pirate Bay addressed some cautionary words for people who want to submit logos and links, saying that on their website, the applicants must have their songs or videos or anything else available for download or streaming.
The BitTorrent tracker is OK with people trying to sell CDs and shirts if they want to, but the entire idea of the contest is not just about making them rich. The rules demand that the participants offer easy access to their works, without any conditions such as likes on Facebook to be able to listen. The pirates believe that public should be offered a simple and easy play button for the musicians’ works.
This move is considered worldwide as one of the many steps which could encourage more and more content creators to accept digital distribution and other alternative methods to promote their works. Tech.li pointed out that The Pirate Bay received about 5.000 entries.

MegaUpload Trial May Never Happen

The US authorities were told that the criminal charges against MegaUpload’s owner Kim Dotcom may never get to trial in their country: according to New Zealand judge, the efforts of American authorities to extradite Kim are fruitless.

Liam O’Grady, the federal judge, has commented at a hearing over the cyberlocker’s content, saying that he frankly didn’t know whether they were ever going to have a trial in that matter. In fact, the American authorities have failed to formally serve New Zealand’s court of law with criminal papers, as the local media points out.

Meanwhile, Kim Dotcom’s attorneys explain that this new development may shelf the extradition case. Indeed, this wasn’t the first time that paperwork mistakes were made – New Zealand’s authorities seized the MegaUpload’s owner’s property without giving proper notice. Although this error was formally corrected a few days ago, the issue of serving papers to extradite Kim in the United States is just another embarrassing error. The federals’ lack of service meant the cyberlocker was “kind of hanging out there”, according to the judge.

Kim Dotcom’s attorneys claim that the FBI haven’t done this just because they can’t. MegaUpload’s lawyers do not believe that the service can be served in a criminal matter as it isn’t located within the jurisdiction of the United States at the first place. They confirm that a key defense against extradition was the claim by the owner of the service and others that they were charged with offenses that weren’t covered by the law on extradition.

In response, prosecutor Jay Prabhu told during Virginia court hearing that it might not matter, because Kim Dotcom owned 68% of MegaUpload. Meanwhile, there are still legal negotiations being held about returning jewelry and personal effects belonging to Dotcom’s wife.

ACTA in America and Europe

ACTA is an international treaty meant to enforce existing copyright legislation on a broader scale. The agreement itself is regarded by many as an offense to people’s democratic rights, because it bypasses all existing laws related to your privacy online, while lacking any meaningful input from national parliaments or their citizens.

Last October, U.S. Trade Ambassador signed the treaty during a ceremony in Tokyo. Since 2008, the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office has been trying to convince the people that the treaty was initially negotiated as a “sole executive agreement” under the President’s power to conclude agreements over issues delegated to the President which won’t need the Congress’ review or approval. However, this kind of thinking was criticized by famous U.S. Constitutional Law professors and the Electronic Frontier Foundation on several occasions. In addition, Senator Ron Wyden also raised a number of problems in his letter to the President. He pointed out that the statement by the U.S. Trade Ambassador actually confuses the issue by conflating two separate steps of the process needed for binding the United States to international agreements, the first of them being entry, and the second – implementation. Although it may be possible for the country to enforce the treaty, once validly entered, without legislation, if it doesn’t imply any change in U.S. law, the ACTA’s executive branch still doesn’t have constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement that covers issues being delegated by the Constitution to Congress’ authority, absent congressional approval.

If the agreement is regarded as a treaty, it would need the approval of 2/3 of the Senate to be ratified. A suggestion to negotiate the treaty as a sole executive agreement can be regarded as an act of abusing power.

This February the Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted a FOIA request to the county’s State Department, seeking a copy of the “Circular 175” memorandum for the treaty, and the accompanying Memo of Law, which generally includes a discussion and justification of the designation of the suggested agreement.

Taking all this into account, you should understand that ACTA is still a matter of huge importance for both America and other European countries involved into negotiations.

Piracy Religion Crossed into America

21st century has shown a few cargo cults whose believers were people looking for god in the form of technology. On top of them you will find Apple, with its worship of Steve Jobs and its swirling queues around sacred places of worship (apparently, Apple stores).

Nevertheless, a new religion is now rising up to challenge Apple in its own latte belt. The talk is about the Swedish “online piracy religion”, which is now seeking official recognition in America. Calling itself “Kopimism”, the religion says that any act of copying data is sacred and therefore can’t be limited by any human legislation.

It was introduced back in 2010 to a 19-year-old philosophy student named Isak Gerson. Unlike other religions that have crucifixes, Kopimism holds Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V as sacred symbols. As for the name of the religion, it was inspired from a mistranslation of 1 Corinthians 11:1, “Copy me, my brothers, just as I copy Christ himself”. Actually, the original verse really says “follow me” instead of “copy me”, but it seems that Koptics haven’t read the rival religion’s texts.

Meanwhile, Kopimism has already set branches in eighteen counties, and has recently been registered in Illinois, USA. The American branch of the church is now doing its best to get federal recognition and tax status.

This may appear a bit tricky, provided that the United States is considered by many the home of the Great Satan of Kopism – pro-copyright industry. Entertainment industry is the key persecutor of all pirates, and the religion believes that if it had its way, all pirates would have been crucified in public places.

The American branch is led by Christopher Carmean, a student at the University of Chicago. He has told the local media that almost 500 people have already registered in his church, while 30 of them are already actively participating in congregations. Although there haven’t appeared to be any martyrdoms, it’s still early days yet.

Although the religions usually need a founder (most preferably if he or she dies while carrying his or her mission), and even Apple is still leading the pack on that one, Kopimism doesn’t have any.

In the European Union, the Pope is the biggest enemy of Kopism, claiming that this religion was a send up of religion, of copyright and of the government to register such an outfit as religious.

নকিয়াকে টপকে শীর্ষে স্যামসাং

সম্প্রতি স্ট্র্যাটিজি অ্যানালিটিক্স জানিয়েছে, প্রথমবারের মতো বিশ্বের সবচেয়ে বেশি মোবাইল ফোন বিক্রি করে নকিয়াকে টপকে গেছে দক্ষিণ কোরিয়ান কোম্পানি স্যামসাং। খবর রয়টার্স-এর।

সূত্র জানিয়েছে, নকিয়া টানা ১৪ বছর শীর্ষস্থানীয় হ্যান্ডসেট প্রস্তুতকারকের স্থানে থাকলেও সম্প্রতি স্যামসাং ওই স্থানটি দখল করে নিয়েছে। গত তিন মাসের হিসেবে স্যামসাং মোবাইল বিক্রি হয়েছে ৯ কোটিরও বেশি। এতে পুরো বিশ্বের মোবাইল ফোন মার্কেটের ২৫.৪ শতাংশই চলে গেছে স্যামসাং-এর হাতে।

অন্যদিকে এই সময়ে নকিয়া বিক্রি করেছে ৮ কোটির কিছু বেশি মোবাইল ফোন। তাদের শেয়ার ছিল ২২.৫ শতাংশ। একইসঙ্গে গ্লোবাল মোবাইল ফোন মার্কেটে অ্যাপলের শেয়ার ৯.৫ শতাংশ বলে জানিয়েছে স্ট্র্যাটিজি অ্যানালিটিক্স।