Navin, who stays involved with BitTorrent as a board member, will start a new venture with a couple of friends including YouTube’s Steve Chen. Their goal is to support new tech startups in the San Fransisco area, and provide them with office space where they can work on their ideas.

His position as president of BitTorrent never held Navin back much. With quotes such as “iTunes DRM Inspires People to Pirate Content,” he was very clear about his attitude towards digital rights management for example. Still, he often found himself in an awkward position, where he had to please the average BitTorrent user, but also the big Hollywood studios.

Now Navin has quit his job at BitTorrent Inc, we decided to do an exit interview, hoping he can speak a little more freely. “My BitTorrent tenure certainly didn’t feel like four years,” was the first thing Navin told TorrentFreak. “But time flies when working among good people, world-changing ideas, and great fun! What attracted me to BitTorrent in the first place, and what is still inspiring to this day, is its ability to provide people true digital freedom.”

Indeed, the BitTorrent protocol provides freedom, but that is also why the entertainment industry is hesitant to adopt it. They don’t want freedom for consumers, but they do want to maintain their cash flow. Nevertheless, one way or another, BitTorrent provides the entertainment industry with a whole new set of tools, something with which Navin seems to agree.

“For its direct and indirect benefits, I believe BitTorrent sits among the handful of important technology breakthroughs such as the printing press, broadcasting, and the Internet itself. Why? Today’s publishing technology – like blogs, BitTorrent, and video sharing sites for example – quite directly forge a level playing field for creativity,” Navin said.

“Indirectly, these tools force large media companies to realize that there is no longer scarcity or a stranglehold on distribution that locks people out of self-expression. Anyone can speak to the world in any format, without filters. Freedom of Speech has never been so available to the masses. How these large corporations respond to this fundamental realization will benefit many many millions of people–creators and consumers alike.”

Navin hits the nail on the head here. BitTorrent is a great technology with a lot of potential. The thing the entertainment industry has to do, is find a way to leverage it. Listening to consumers instead of trying to shut them up would be a good place to start. The Internet has put the consumer in control, and it’s time for the copyright holders to realize this. Or as Navin puts it:

“The free flow of information and entertainment over the Internet doesn’t diminish the relevance of high value, professional entertainment at all. It does force the publishers to be more quality conscious (make fewer flops, and more hits). And the great cardinal sin in this era would be to withhold your content in exclusive deals or to be too precious with your creation. Now’s the time to be more promiscuous with your distribution strategy than before: be everywhere at once, wherever there are eyeballs you can count.”

“In the previous era, there was a lot of forgiveness when 3 or 4 companies owned every road to the consumer. Publishers could produce a crap movie or TV show and get away with it. But when there are millions of ways to get to the user, or in other words, millions of “channels” to choose from, the best entertainment presented in the most frictionless format always wins.”

So, Navin argues that piracy leads to less crap. The entertainment business now has to make stuff people actually want to listen to or watch. Unfortunately for them, it is getting harder and harder to influence and direct consumers to see things the way they want to. Information is more free than ever before and consumers have a choice now, and that will not go away. It’s up to Hollywood to take the next step, and compete with piracy.

Original URL: http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-leads-to-less-crap-says-bittorrent-co-founder-081109/

Unless Vista was properly activated, it would drop into “reduced functionality mode”, in which the only thing you could do with it was access the Internet in order to complete online activation — or buy a valid product key.

In Service Pack 1, the behavior was changed so that the operating system would still operate, but the background turned black and nagging boxes warned you that you “might be a victim of software piracy”.

Now, Microsoft is going to bring this “feature” to Windows XP Professional with a new version of the Windows Genuine Advantage. From the WGA blog:

With this update to WGA Notifications in Windows XP, we’ve implemented a couple of related features that draw on the notifications experience we designed for Windows Vista SP1. After installing this version of WGA Notifications on a copy of Windows XP that fails the validation, most users will discover on their next logon that their desktop has changed to a plain black background from whatever was there previously.

The desktop background can be reset to anything else in the usual ways, but every 60 minutes it will change back to the plain black background. This will continue to happen until that copy of Windows is genuine.

Also, the user will see the addition of what we call the “persistent desktop notification.” This notification is similar to a watermark but works a bit differently. The image appears over the system tray and is non-interactive in the sense that you can’t click on it or do anything to it.

This update will come only to XP Pro users, since Microsoft says that’s the most-pirated version of XP. If you use XP Home or Media Center Edition, you won’t get this new release of WGA. It will take several months before all XP Pro users have the new WGA.

Blog author Alex Kochis claims this is something XP users actually want:

. . . Our research has clearly shown that customers value the ability of Windows to alert them when they may have software that is not genuine, but they also want the ability to stay up to date with the least effort required on their part. . . .

OK, Alex, if you say so . . .

While I don’t think users of activated, valid copies of XP Pro will care much about this, it could become an issue if WGA malfunctions, as it has in the past. If Microsoft’s WGA servers mistakenly report a valid copy as being not genuine, XP Pro users aren’t likely to “value” this feature all that much.

Original URL: http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2008/08/got_a_pirated_copy_of_xp_expect_to_be_nagged.html

A flat on Teesside and several properties in Amsterdam were raided as part of an Interpol investigation into the members-only website OiNK.

The UK-run site has leaked 60 major pre-release albums this year alone, said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

A 24-year-old man from Middlesbrough was arrested on Tuesday morning.

‘Extremely lucrative’
The IT worker was led from his home in the town’s Grange Road and is being questioned on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law.

At the same time his employer – a large multi-national company – and his father’s home were also raided.

A Cleveland Police spokesman said: “This extremely lucrative and creative scheme consisted of a private file-sharing website being set up. Membership was by invitation only.

“The site allowed the uploading and downloading of pre-release music and media to thousands of members.”

An IFPI spokesman said: “Once an album had been posted on the OiNK website, the users that download that music then passed the content to other websites, forums and blogs, where multiple copies were made.

“Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found further down the illegal online supply chain.”

The site’s servers, based in Amsterdam, were seized in a series of raids last week.

It followed a two-year investigation by music industry bodies the IFPI and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

Original URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/7057812.stm

BitTorrent described the new BitTorrent DNA product in a statement as “the ideal solution for publishers seeking ways to overcome the obstacles associated with centralized content delivery, such as slow downloads, choppy video streams, and inefficient use of network infrastructure.” The inaugural client for the new content delivery network (CDN) is online video start-up Brightcove, which powers a number of large companies’ broadband media operations.

BitTorrent DNA will be used to “accelerate” the delivery of the video hosted on Brightcove’s platform.

With the rise of online video and large-scale media downloads, content delivery has become a crowded niche in the market. BitTorrent DNA will square off with industry leaders like Akamai Technologies–the force behind CBS’ video distribution network as well as a host of others. BitTorrent is hoping, however, that its massive following (150 million downloads of its client, according to the company) will help give it an edge.

In addition, the peer-to-peer format has become increasingly popular in the streaming video space, with recent entries like Joost and Babelgum touting P2P technology as the backbone for their professional-quality video content.

In February, BitTorrent announced that it was creating a digital download store that would use that robust user base as a way to legally transfer large movies, games and other files. The company has also forged alliances with major movie studios for legal film downloads.

Meanwhile, the exhaustive battle over online piracy wages on.

Original URL: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9793357-7.html

“I want people to know that they are being sued based on hacked, spoofed computers. They should still fight back in these cases,” Jammie Thomas, 30, said in a telephone interview moments ago. “I have to pay for somebody else’s actions.”

Thomas, a single mother of two from Brainerd, Minnesota, is among the 20,000-plus individuals the Recording Industry Association of America has sued in the past four years. She was found liable for 24 songs and ordered to pay $9,250 per track in penalties. She faced fines as high as $3.6 million.

Her case was the first to go to trial, while the bulk of them have settled and others are pending.

When the verdict was read, she said she became “disgusted because I didn’t do this.”

She said she would not settle the case before trial. “I wasn’t going to pay for something I didn’t do,” she said. She and her attorney, Brian Toder, are mulling whether to appeal the judgment.

The RIAA put on evidence that the internet protocol address and cable modem account linked to her internet service provider was sharing some 1,700 files on the Kazaa program on Feb. 21, 2005. Thomas was logged in to Kazaa using the name Tereastarr, jurors found.

Thomas uses Tereastarr on her e-mail accounts, for online shopping, on MySpace, and even with an online dating service.

When asked if she was going to buy any new music, she said “I don’t have any money for that.”

The Native American woman works as an administrator at a local tribe and said she would worry about the financial implications of paying the judgment “when I cross that bridge.”

Original URL: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/riaa_trial/index.html

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday on behalf of the major studios, seeks to shutter cinematube.net and ssupload.com from further infringing on the copyrights of the MPAA members.

The sites feature links to hundreds of titles, including such recent releases as “Resident Evil: Extinction,” “The Brave One” and “Good Luck Chuck.”

A “Who Is” domain search of the sites indicate both are registered as private, meaning the information on ownership and administrative contacts are not disclosed.

The domain search also indicated cinematube.net’s servers are located in Malaysia. The site averages more than 24,000 unique users each day who view more than 85,000 pages of content.

Servers for ssupload.com are located in Arizona and average 55,000 unique daily visitors who view more than 190,000 pages of content per day.

“We are putting illegal Web operators on notice that they are not above the law and will face serious consequences for their activities,” said John Malcolm, executive vp and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations at the MPAA.

The MPAA estimates that the industry lost $18.2 billion in 2005.

Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070929/tc_nm/piracy_dc