3 Count: Frozen Loot

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: Sweden to freeze guilty Pirates’ loot

First off today, Sweden’s debt collection agency has sent an order to the four Pirate Bay admins to pay the first 12 million kronor of the damages the court says they owe. As part of this, they’ve put in an order for their assets to be frozen and the banks of the four men said that they will cooperate, doing so on Wednesday.

The admins, found guilty in the controversial trial earlier this year, owe a combined total of 30 million kronor, or about $3.75 million dollars. However, of the four men, only one, Carl Lundström, has the assets to pay for the judgment and, since the four men have to pay the judgment together, he may be forced to foot the entire bill.

The case is currently under appeal and may be sent back to the district court due to an alleged conflict of interest on the part of the trial judge.

2: Vulnerability Renders MPAA/RIAA Copyright Warnings Useless

Next up, BayTSP is a company that tracks bittorrent downloads and sends warnings to file sharers on behalf of copyright holders. However, a recently-discovered vulnerability in their warning system has called the usefulness of those notices into question.

The problem with the system is two-fold. First, anyone can send out a fake notice from BayTSP due to a vulnerability that allows anyone to inject code into their site. Second, anyone, including those who the notice was not intended for, can fill out the compliance form and close the case. In fact, it is easy to find a slew of compliance forms to fill out simply by performing a Google search.

According to Torrentfreak, these vulnerabilities make the system useless though BayTSP, obviously, disagrees. However, BayTSP says that it is looking into the problems and hopes to have them fixed soon.

3: New study reveals extent of PC software piracy worldwide

Finally today, a new study by the Business Software Alliance estimates that 41% of all software installed in the world is pirated. This is up from 38% just one year ago.

Though the piracy rates in most countries went down over that period of time, the study says that increased PC shipments to countries the BSA considers high-piracy, namely China and India, explains the rise in overall piracy.

The country with the lowest estiamted piracy rate was the U.S., with an approximately 20% rate, along with Japan, New Zealand, and Luxembourg in the same range.

The study also esimates that a 10 point reduction in piracy could create 600,000 new jobs worldwide and an estiamted $50.2 billion in lost revenue (if it assumed that every pirated copy is a lost sale).

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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