Google has made great strides with Android, and a ton of developers have flocked to the growing mobile platform. Not everything is rosy, though. One major concern among developers is that piracy levels are very high on the platform.

Google is of course not oblivious to this and recently announced plans to combat piracy with DRM methods that app developers can include in their apps. But there is one problem that is arguably much more problematic for Android developers when it comes to getting paid for their apps, and it isn’t getting nearly as much attention as we think it should.

Read more

In the past few weeks, there have been some major shifts in the BitTorrent community which have had a resounding impact on the larger world of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. They’ve led to some of the largest BitTorrent sites completely changing focus, or figuring out smarter ways to continue sharing files illegally.

Meanwhile, Adobe announced a massively interesting inclusion in their upcoming Flash player 10.1 update – a seemingly innocuous version number that is adding some world-changing P2P technology to Flash video streaming.

I’d like to discuss these opposing trends of illegal versus more legitimate uses of P2P technology, and what they ultimately mean for how we use the Web.

Read more

Software piracy has been around basically since the inception of software, and copy protection methods almost as long, so today’s discussions around DRM really isn’t anything new. All the way back in 1976, a certain Bill Gates wrote an open letter to a computer hobbyist club complaining that “most of you steal your software.” Back in those days, however, even he considered copy protection to just be in the way and wasn’t an advocate for it.

There has been a huge number of more or less creative methods to prevent people from making illegal copies of games and other software, but the ones we think are the most interesting (and amusing to look back at) are the ones involving actual physical extras, frequently used in the 80′s and early 90′s. Here are a few gems from that era.

Read more

Yesterday, a new anti-piracy law went live in Sweden. The result was an immediate 30% drop in Sweden’s Internet traffic.

The combined traffic passing through Sweden’s Internet Exchange Points usually peaks around 160 Gbit/s, but on Wednesday it peaked at around 110 Gbit/s. That’s a huge drop in traffic, and is presumably a direct result of less file sharing taking place.

Read more

Mininova, one of the largest torrent listing sites (for BitTorrent clients) may be a victim of its own popularity. The website has had recurring performance problems, likely due to a very high number of visitors. This month alone they have already clocked 23 hours and 11 minutes of downtime. The low point was in August, [...]

Read more