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Yet again, 'Game of Thrones' is the world's most pirated TV show
For the fourth year in a row, Game of Thrones has won the dubious honor of being the world's most pirated TV show. The annual study, carried out by TorrentFreak, reveals that an estimated 14.4 million people snaffled HBO's opus this year. By comparison, only 6.9 million people wanted to watch second-placed The Walking Dead and 4.4 million catching The Big Bang Theory. The easy explanation for all of this is that HBO is a pricey pay-cable channel where access is expensive, while AMC and CBS are far easier to access.
Enfour shares more details about app piracy
A few days ago, we wrote about the story of Enfour, an app developer that's specialized in a bunch of dictionary apps, who recently tried to shame pirates of their apps over Twitter, in a plan that caught too many legitimate users and didn't end up so great. Ars Technica went to chat to Enfour about the problem, and got a little more context on the issue and how Enfour is fighting it. First of all, it turns out the problem wasn't merely that Enfour was targeting iPhone jailbreakers -- the company does realize that lots of "legitimate" iPhone users do jailbreak their devices. Instead, the company is trying to figure out a way to nail down pirates outside of the standard Objective-C code that apps are created with. They're trying to watch core system files and Apple's own verification files, to see when those are tampered with and the app is pirated. Unfortunately, says Enfour, some old code that shouldn't have been run did get run, and that's what caused the false positives to appear in the Twitter shaming. Enfour has revised its anti-piracy policy completely, and while it will continue to fight pirates, Twitter shaming probably won't be part of the deal any more. You can't really blame Enfour for fighting people who it believes have stolen its software. Piracy is certainly a problem on the App Store, and even a process that should be completely legit, in-app purchases, is riddled with less-than-legitimate users grabbing content and in-app currency that they have not paid for. Of course developers need to fight piracy, because it can directly attack the livelihoods that allow them to make apps for us in the first place. But it's an ongoing battle -- for every antipiracy measure that developers come up with and put in place, there's often a go-around method for pirates out there to circumvent it with.
Microsoft asks state lawmakers to make domestic companies pay for foreign firms' software piracy
Microsoft's pirated software police have been going after companies abroad for years, but getting those far-away folks into US courtrooms isn't easy. What is easy, however, is suing the folks in your own back yard -- which is why Microsoft is lobbying to get laws passed in several states that'll put US businesses on the hook for the pirating ways of their foreign suppliers. For example, if a manufacturer uses pirated software in the "manufacture, distribution, marketing, or sales" of products sold in Washington, Microsoft could sue the vendor of those products and get an injunction to stop the goods from being sold. So Washington widget retailers would be liable for the piracy of their foreign widget manufacturers, even if the illicit act was merely creating the sales invoice on a counterfeit copy of Word. The Washington state Senate and House have already approved different versions of the bill, and the legislature is in the process of merging the two together for final approval. Louisiana passed a similar law last year, and analogous bills have been proposed in Oregon and several other states as well. Numerous companies -- including Dell, IBM, Intel, and HP -- oppose the laws, as they see them giving Microsoft the power to not only drag them into court, but also futz with their supply chains. (There's bound to be some counterfeit software being used in Shenzhen, right?) As Microsoft's latest anti-piracy scheme unfolds, there should be plenty more legislative action to come. Evidently the crew in Redmond doesn't see piracy as a problem to be fixed by lowering prices.
1UP urges us to buy, not steal
1UP reports that Final Fantasy XII is being illegally distributed via bit torrent, with multiple bit torrent user comments confirming that the torrents house playable English versions of Square Enix's RPG. In response to the alleged leak, the site has issued the following PSA:"Forgetting that pirating is a criminal activity, 'Final Fantasy XII' is supposed to be an absolutely incredible RPG -- we strongly encourage gamers to wait a few more weeks for the real game to properly reward Square Enix for their labored work."We can't think of a better way to put it. Keep it real right, y'all!
