3 Count: April Fools

This is daily column on Plagiarism Today where the site brings you three of the days biggest, most important copyright and plagiarism news links. If you want to offer your feedback on the column, use the contact form or just follow me on Twitter at @plagiarismtoday.

1: Warner Bros. Acquires The Pirate Bay

We’re doing a round up of the best copyright-related April Fool’s jokes from the Web yesterday and today’s first link comes to us directly from the Bittorrent superstars, The Pirate Bay. Yesterday they announced, jokingly that movie studio and record company Warner Brothers had bought them out, letting The Pirate Bay “Benefit from its global reach and technology leadership to deliver a more comprehensive entertainment experience for our users and to create new opportunities for our partners.”

Obviously, this was a joke, funny considering the role Warner Brothers played in The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden.

2: Weird Al Wiki

Taking a page from my list of potential jokes from last year, as well as many other sites before that, a popular Weird Al wiki posted a fake takedown page saying, “Hey guys, bad news, weird al’s [sic] record company sued us for publishing this information without Al’s permission. It looks like this wiki will be gone for a while. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Strangely, the joke page is still up though we are well into April 2nd, but other pages on the site are unaffected by the fake takedown.

3: Comcast acquires BitTorrent for $53bn

Finally today, The Register played a copyright-related prank of its own claiming that U.S. ISP Comcast had purchased bittorrent for 53 billion dollars and had shut it down. The Register claimed that, “Last week, the big-name American ISP told the world it would find a way of managing its cable network without discriminating against BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer traffic. But the fix has come much sooner than expected.”

In the article, Comcast went on to say that purchasing Bittorrent was “Their cheapest alternative” and hinted that the company plans to “purchase Apple and IBM, with an eye on destroying both iChat and Lotus Notes.”

There was also a very humorous discussion about literally poisoning Bittorrent users at the end of the article.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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