When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups who specialize in obtaining media – music, videos, games, and software – before their official sale date and then racing against one another to release the material for free. Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy is the first scholarly research book about this underground subculture, which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers (“topsites") in the mid- to late-1990s. The “Scene," as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations. The term “Warez" itself refers to pirated media, a derivative of “software." Taking a deep dive in the documentary evidence produced by the Scene itself, Warez describes the operations and infrastructures an underground culture with its own norms and rules of participation, its own forms of sociality, and its own artistic forms. Even though forms of digital piracy are often framed within ideological terms of equal access to knowledge and culture, Eve uncovers in the Warez Scene a culture of competitive ranking and one-upmanship that is at odds with the often communalist interpretations of piracy. Broad in scope and novel in its approach, Warez is indispensible reading for anyone interested in recent developments in digital culture, access to knowledge and culture, and the infrastructures that support our digital age.

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Engaging the thematic issues of the Web as a space where magic, metaphor, and power converge, the chapters cover such subjects as The Web and Corporate Media Systems, Conspiracy Theories and the Web; The Economy of Cyberpromotion, The Bias of the Web, The Web and Issues of Gender, and so on.

The complex world of online piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing is skillfully condensed into an easy-to-understand guide that provides insight into the criminal justice approach to illegal file sharing, while offering guidance to parents and students who have concerns about potential legal action in response to file-sharing activities. While the actual impact of digital piracy is nearly impossible to precisely calculate, the threat of financial damage from illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing to the world's highest-grossing entertainment firms (and even entire industries!) has garnered attention from government, industry, and academic leaders and criminal justice professionals. Oftentimes, those providing access to computers and file sharing capabilities-parents, schools, libraries-don't know about or understand these activities and, therefore, put themselves and their families at risk for criminal and civil prosecution. This work describes the technological, legal, social, and ethical facets of illegal peer-to-peer file sharing. Geared toward parents, teachers, librarians, students, and any other computer user engaged in file sharing, this book will help readers to understand all forms of traditional and digital copyright violations of protected music, movies, and software. To date over 18,000 P2P users have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Most of these users have been college students and parents of high-school students. While word of these law suits are spreading, and many parents fear that their children may be using a family computer to illegally download and share copyrighted works, few supervising adults have the technical knowledge needed to determine whether and to what extent pirating may be occurring via a computer and Internet connection they are legally responsible for. Additionally, while P2P networks are filled with millions of users with billions of copyrighted files, few users understand the ways in which they are illegally using computers and other mobile electronic devices to download protected content. While describing both technical and social issues, this book primarily focuses on the social aspects of illegal file sharing, and provides technical concepts at a general level. Fisk skillfully condenses the complex nature of file sharing systems into an easy-to-understand guide, provides insight into the criminal justice approach to illegal file sharing, and offers guidance to parents and students who have concerns about potential legal action in response to file sharing activities.

Until recently, issues of intellectual property were relegated to the experts—attorneys, legal scholars, rightsholders, and technology developers who wrangled over interpretations and enforcement of copyright, patent, and trademark protections. But in today's knowledge-based economy, intellectual property protection has taken on fundamentally new proportions, as a subject of urgency for businesses (whose survival depends on protection of their intangible assets) and as a subject of cultural importance that grabs front-page headlines (as the controversy over Napster and high-profile revelations of plagiarism, for example, have illustrated). This landmark set of essays brings new clarity to the issues, as societies around the world grapple with the intricacies and complexities of intellectual property, and its impact on business, law, policy, and culture. Featuring insights from leading scholars and practitioners, Intellectual Property and Information Wealth provides rigorous analysis, historical context, and emerging practical applications from the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Volume 1 focuses on protections to novels, films, sound recordings, computer programs, and other creative products, and covers such issues as authorship, duration of copyright, fair use of copyrighted materials, and the implications of the Internet and peer-to-peer file sharing. Volume 2 explains the fundamental protections to inventors of devices, mechanical processes, chemical compounds, and other inventions, and examines such issues as the scope and limits of patent protection, research exemptions and infringement, IP in the software and biotech industries, and trade secrets. Volume 3 looks at the protections to distinctive symbols and signs, including brand names and unique product designs, and features chapters on consumer protection, trademark and the first amendment, brand licensing, publicity and cultural images, and domain names. Volume 4 takes the discussion to the global level, addressing a wide range of issues, including not only enforcement of IP protections across borders, but also their implications for international trade and investment, economic development, human rights, and public health.

Fraud and piracy of products and ideas have become common in the early twenty-first century, as opportunities to commit them expand, and technology makes fraud and piracy easy to carry out. In Combating Piracy: Intellectual Property Theft and Fraud, Jay S. Albanese and his contributors provide new analyses of intellectual property theft and how perpetrators innovate and adapt in response to shifting opportunities.The cases described here illustrate the wide-ranging nature of the activity and the spectrum of persons involved in piracy of intellectual property. Intellectual property theft includes stolen copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents, which represent the creative work of individuals for which others cannot claim credit. The distributors of books, movies, music, and other forms of intellectual property pay for this right, and those who distribute this work without compensation to its creator effectively hijack or "pirate" that property without the owner's or distributor's permission. The problem has grown to the point where most software in many parts of the world is pirated. The World Health Organization estimates that 10 percent of all pharmaceuticals available worldwide are counterfeit.Such widespread fraud illustrates the global reach of the problem and the need for international remedies that include changed attitudes, public education, increasing the likelihood of apprehension, and reducing available opportunities. The contributors show that piracy is a form of fraud, a form of organized crime, a white-collar crime, a criminal activity with causes we can isolate and prevent, and a global problem. This book examines each of these perspectives to determine how they contribute to our understanding of the issues involved.

Content protection and digital rights management (DRM) are fields that receive a lot of attention: content owners require systems that protect and maximize their revenues; consumers want backwards compatibility, while they fear that content owners will spy on their viewing habits; and academics are afraid that DRM may be a barrier to knowledge sharing. DRM technologies have a poor reputation and are not yet trusted. This book describes the key aspects of content protection and DRM systems, the objective being to demystify the technology and techniques. In the first part of the book, the author builds the foundations, with sections that cover the rationale for protecting digital video content; video piracy; current toolboxes that employ cryptography, watermarking, tamper resistance, and rights expression languages; different ways to model video content protection; and DRM. In the second part, he describes the main existing deployed solutions, including video ecosystems; how video is protected in broadcasting; descriptions of DRM systems, such as Microsoft's DRM and Apple’s FairPlay; techniques for protecting prerecorded content distributed using DVDs or Blu-ray; and future methods used to protect content within the home network. The final part of the book looks towards future research topics, and the key problem of interoperability. While the book focuses on protecting video content, the DRM principles and technologies described are also used to protect many other types of content, such as ebooks, documents and games. The book will be of value to industrial researchers and engineers developing related technologies, academics and students in information security, cryptography and media systems, and engaged consumers.

Hack Proofing Your Network

As society continues to rely heavily on technological tools for facilitating business, e-commerce, banking, and communication, among other applications, there has been a significant rise in criminals seeking to exploit these tools for their nefarious gain. Countries all over the world are seeing substantial increases in identity theft and cyberattacks, as well as illicit transactions, including drug trafficking and human trafficking, being made through the dark web internet. Sex offenders and murderers explore unconventional methods of finding and contacting their victims through Facebook, Instagram, popular dating sites, etc., while pedophiles rely on these channels to obtain information and photographs of children, which are shared on hidden community sites. As criminals continue to harness technological advancements that are outpacing legal and ethical standards, law enforcement and government officials are faced with the challenge of devising new and alternative strategies to identify and apprehend criminals to preserve the safety of society. The Encyclopedia of Criminal Activities and the Deep Web is a three-volume set that includes comprehensive articles covering multidisciplinary research and expert insights provided by hundreds of leading researchers from 30 countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Finland, South Korea, Malaysia, and more. This comprehensive encyclopedia provides the most diverse findings and new methodologies for monitoring and regulating the use of online tools as well as hidden areas of the internet, including the deep and dark web. Highlighting a wide range of topics such as cyberbullying, online hate speech, and hacktivism, this book will offer strategies for the prediction and prevention of online criminal activity and examine methods for safeguarding internet users and their data from being tracked or stalked. Due to the techniques and extensive knowledge discussed in this publication it is an invaluable addition for academic and corporate libraries as well as a critical resource for policy makers, law enforcement officials, forensic scientists, criminologists, sociologists, victim advocates, cybersecurity analysts, lawmakers, government officials, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, and students within this field of study.