3 Count: The Streaming Bay

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1: The Pirate Bay Now uses Torrents Time to Let You Stream All its Movies and TV Shows

First off today, Emil Protalinski at VentureBeat reports that, late last week, The Pirate Bay adopted Torrents Time, a browser-based plugin that enables users to stream movies and TV shows easily via BitTorrent

The service, which is still in beta, is featured on the pages for its individual torrents with the the option to “Stream It!”. Users who do not have Torrents Time installed will be prompted to download it before progressing. Once installed, the video will stream in the browser with availability to be played on a TV via Chromecast and Apple Airplay.

The project is based on Popcorn Time, a controversial “Netflix for BitTorrent” application, the original of which was shuttered by copyright holders. However, the project has continued on as an open source application, which helped make Torrents Time possible.

2: MTN Accused of Selling ‘Unlicensed Music’

Next up today, Gareth Van Zyl at Fin24 reports that, in South Africa, mobile phone network MTN has been accused of not paying royalties to composers on music it sells through various services, including CallerTunez, its caller tone service.

The allegations come from the royalty collecting society Capasso (Composers Authors and Publishers Association), which claims that MTN has not paid their invoice for 2014 and has not reported their usage for 2015. MTN denies the allegations but Capasso says that the company has a history of partial and missed payments when it comes to songwriter royalties.

Currently, Capasso claims that MTN owes just under R1m ($62,000) in unpaid royalties. Capasso did not say if it was planning on taking the dispute to court but did say that, in their view, MTN is currently selling unlicensed music.

3: ​Pirate Group Suspends New Cracks to Measure Impact on Sales

Finally today, Andy at Torrentfreak reports that the video game cracking group 3DM has announced that they will be taking at least a one year hiatus to see if their departure will have any impact on the sales of single-player games.

The group previously made it into the news for being unable to crack the recent game Just Cause 3, describing the Denuvo anti-tamper technology as being nearly unbreakable. The game, which was released December 1st, still has not appeared online in cracked form.

However, in their statement 3DM did not mention Denuvo or their frustrations with it, instead, they pitched the hiatus as a means to see if genuine sales grow with their absence. They also said that they will “actively deal with” attempts by others to post cracks onto their forums.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will 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.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.