The MPAA may be gearing up for an RIAA-inspired assault on US colleges and universities. Last week the group announced its support for the "Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act (2007)," and MPAA head Dan Glickman said that his organization would work with school administrators to put an end to movie piracy on campuses, which Glickman says costs the industry $500 million annually.

Most telling, the group has heard the call of Representative Howard Berman and has compiled a list of the most piracy-ridden schools in higher education.

The MPAA is very active in recruiting America's youth for their war on piracy. The deadline for the their anti-piracy propaganda contest just passed. SIFE Students from all over America spent weeks filming mind numbing anti-piracy PSAs, resulting in some really bad, but hilarious clips.

Piracy is the greatest obstacle the film industry currently faces, according to MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman. "We remain committed to educating students, parents and all consumers to aggressively tackle the threat of piracy," he said.

Some of the PSAs created by these students are indeed aggressive and horrific instead of educational.

As part of its new initiative to convince universities to turn over the names of students suspected of copyright infringement (more on that soon), the RIAA has launched its P2Plawsuits.com website, which, in a deliciously ironic twist, had previously hosted all sorts of ads for dodgy P2P clients.

On the site, students whose universities have agreed to turn over student names to the RIAA and users whose ISPs have agreed to turn over subscriber names to the RIAA can apply for a settlement by entering their case number, and even pay their settlement online, which the RIAA promises will be represent "a substantial discount" from what they would have had to settle for before this campaign launched.

The new process is a response to the RIAA's frustration with our legal system, which requires the organization to use the IP address of a suspected infringer to subpoena ISPs or universities for the name of the suspected infringer, after which settlement talks usually begin.

BitTorrent joined the masses of legal video download services yesterday with offerings from five movie studios and a handful of TV networks.

When a user signs up for the service, he or she enters a credit card and billing information so that purchases can be made quickly and seamlessly. However, when I went to purchase a movie (my first selection was Lady in the Water), BitTorrent refused to believe that I lived in the US, despite the fact that my IP geolocates to the Chicago area.

Trying to ferret out why BitTorrent would not allow me to download movies in Chicago, I tried to use my Mac. Somehow, despite the fact that my IP was still the same (behind the same firewall), BitTorrent all of the sudden decided that I was in the right country. Although the files cannot be played on a Mac, BitTorrent was happy to accept my money anyway and reminded me that I would only be able to play my movie in Windows.

Due to DRM restrictions, BitTorrent specifies that the files require Windows Media Player 10 or higher in order to play the files. I tried to open my protected .wmv file in WMP11, and was met with a curiously vague error message saying that there was a "problem playing the file".

Attempts to open the file on another PC as well as upgrade WMP however I could were fruitless. This file was not opening. Determined to get something to open, I purchased another video from BitTorrent—this time, a TV episode.

Once I authorized, I thought I was on my way to video watching nirvana, but that was not the case. As it turns out, the file's usage rights were "not yet valid," according to WMP. Unfortunately, the file's properties were no more descriptive as to when the usage rights would become available.

Our initial experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, and guess what the culprit is once again? DRM. Why the DRM failed to work on 50% of our purchases is not clear, but whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable.

A new study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.

Analyzing data from the final four months of 2002, the researchers estimated that P2P affected no more than 0.7% of sales in that timeframe.

"Using detailed records of transfers of digital music files, we find that file sharing has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample," the study reports. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero."

Dozens of users have written in to inform us that ISOHunt, one of the Internet's largest BitTorrent trackers, has been taken offline by its ISP.

The MPAA and RIAA began a legal campaign against ISOHunt and other similar sites early last year. Many of the targeted sites immediately folded, but ISOHunt remained open -- and immensely popular. While the folks at ISOHunt claim the - - AA's were responsible for the takedown, there's been no independent confirmation that it wasn't just ISP incompetence or technical difficulty.

Update: Looks like they've settled on Cogent as their new provider, and are slowly getting back online.

The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD.

This release follows the announcement, less than a month ago, that the copy protection on HD DVD had been bypassed by an anonymous programmer known only as Muslix64. The open-source program to implement this was called BackupHDDVD and was released in a manner designed to put the onus of cracking on the user, not the software.

Muslix64 and others involved in BackupHDDVD are deliberately not exposing the actual method by which the keys have been obtained. This is partly to protect themselves from legal repercussions, but also to ensure that whatever "hole" that is being exploited remains unpatched.

Aa most of you interweb-savvy thieving pirates will be well aware, mighty industry bullies such as the MPAA are well suspected for sticking up fake torrents onto torrent indexers to catch out would-be downloaders.

Torrentfreak reports that almost all of these legally dodgy servers are located in Southern California and Las Vegas. The tricksy servers are easy to track for those in the know thanks to certain patterns, says torrentfreak, such as the content of the trackers and the amount of torrent seeds on the files.

A btjunkie admin says that the industry bigwigs alter the trackers to make sure that the downloaded content either stalls at near-completion, for example at 90 per cent, or the file will just be a big old blank mess. It's certainly professional work, says the anonymous btjunkie admin: "That's a lot of servers to set up and it takes some expertise to set up in the manner that they did it." The admin goes on to say, suspiciously, that "I don't think I really need to say who would spend money on something like this."

Some servers to be on the look out for, should you be one of those downloading sorts, are hostnames such as 101tracker.dhcp.biz, aplustorrents.qhigh.com, bitnova.squirly.info, bittorment.ocry.com and pirate-trakkrz.leet.la, warns torrentfreak. These hostnames can all be traced back to the very same IP ranges, says the site.

It's reckoned by one torrentfreak reader that the IP ranges belong to Media Defender which is a company hired by copyright owners to keep track of piratey IP addresses.

Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy the 550 square metre principality of Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation'.

The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy the self-declared sovereign nation. Outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country, The Pirate Bays believes it could safely run the world's largest 'bit torrent tracker'.

Last year the Pirate Bay was closed down after raids by the Swedish police, and although it returned to a new Swedish server after a short stay in the Netherlands, the Motion Picture Ass. of America, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and the US government have all lobbied for The Pirate Bay's closure.

Sealand's royal family, Prince Roy and Princess Joan Bates and their son Prince Michael, Prince Regent, who set up the principality 40 years ago, are willing to sell the platform for £65m.

"If we do not get enough money required to buy the micronation of Sealand, we will try to buy another small island somwhere and claim it as our own country (prices start from $50,000)," the Swedish organisation says.

The latest film in the British spy series is already circulating on the Internet and on illegal DVDs available on the streets of London.

The movie premiered in London on November 14 and went on general release in some countries the following day.

A first version was freely available online on November 17, which apparently came from Russia, was filmed on a camcorder over the heads of a cinema audience and had poor quality sound.

"In the face of this international conspiracy, Bond is really up against it," said David Price, Envisional's head of piracy intelligence.

"There are now several million active digital pirates. Many of them are ordinary families that have got into the habit of downloading the latest episodes of American television hits."

"And they don't have any qualms about using file sharing networks to copy new movies without paying."