Ratification of the controversial ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) has been suspended by the European Commission after widespread protests on the streets of European cities.

ACTA, the brainchild of US entertainment conglomerates, had been designed to force countries to take harsher measures to enforce copyright, including the introduction of graduated response, ISP monitoring and website blocking.

With the US signing on to the treaty that it lobbied for, the attention turned on the EU members to ratify the treaty - all 27 member countries must ratify the treaty in order for the entire EU to the party to the treaty.

But with mass protests on the streets of Prague, Warsaw, London by Internet activists and civil rights campaigners worried ACTA would bring about an unprecedented level of surveillance not seen since the Cold War days, and stifle free speech, all in the name of helping US corporations.

A recent study found that the delay of new movie and TV show releases in Europe, compared to the US, is driving most of the movie industry's losses, not piracy.

But for ACTA, the fight for (and against) it is not over. While the European Commission's back down is a sign that they've acknowledged the political difficulty in ratifying ACTA, the majority of EU member countries, including the UK, has already signed the treaty. The EU will now refer the matter to Europe's highest court to see if the treaty violates fundamental rights of EU citizens.

The Pirate Bay may soon be filtered by UK ISPs in the same way Usenet website Newzbin2 was blocked in November of last year.

The music industry, representing major US labels, brought the case to the UK High Court asking for a legal opinion that will force ISPs to block visits to The Pirate Bay, and earlier in the week, the court ruled that the website has been committing copyright infringement.

This paves the way for the website to be blocked for UK visitors, after a similar decision was handed down for the website Newzbin, a ruliung that was later used to force British ISP BT to block the defunct website's successor, Newzbin2, using filter primarily designed to combat child pornography.

The actual effectiveness of the website block, however, has been put in doubt recently with the operators of Newzbin2 boldly claiming that 93% of BT's users are still accessing the website with ease, thanks to an anti-blocking software tool that was released shortly after Newzbin2's implementation of the filtering.

The High Court is expected to rule in June as to whether to force ISPs to put a similar block on The Pirate Bay.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 11th February 2012 is in. The Blu-ray exclusive re-release of Lady and the Tramp was the best selling new Blu-ray release for the week, and being Blu-ray exclusive, it helped Blu-ray market share rise to the highest since mid November. That's not to discount the effect of the second placed The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, which sold in large numbers on Blu-ray, even if the DVD edition sold much more.

This allowed the week to be a rare one - one which actually had a higher revenue than the same week a year ago, for both DVD and Blu-ray.

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here

Since the start of February, The Pirate Bay has automatically redirected visitors to its new domain name, ThePirateBay.se. The abandoning of the .org domain name comes after recent seizures by US law enforcement agencies of US owned domain names, including .com .net and .org. 

But the move has come under attack by the RIAA's (Record Industry Association of America) Vice President Mitch Glazier, calling the move an attempt by the website, described as an "online bazaar of every conceivable U.S. copyrighted work", to "escape U.S. laws."

Continuing the tirade against The Pirate Bay, Glazier didn't hold back any of the punches. "It is motivated by its brazen philosophy of thumbing its nose at the basic rights of America’s creators. It is, in a phrase, one of the worst of the worst," Glazier said, before categorizing TPB as one of many "foreign rogue sites that steal American jobs."

Critics have already attacked the RIAA, and the MPAA for taking advantage of people's xenophobia by continuing use phrases like "foreign rogue sites" and "American jobs", despite piracy being a global problem, and one that is fueled by American downloaders, as well as people from overseas.

Glazier concluded by calling for more action against web piracy, to "address this blatant theft before more damage is done to our economy and the creative community"

But in an editorial published on TorrentFreak, 'Winston' from The Pirate Bay responded to these charges, and calls the RIAA "delusional".

Attacking the copyright lobby's continued use of the term "theft", Winston argues that stealing and copying are in fact two very different acts. "If someone steals something, you don’t have it anymore. If you copy it, both have it," Winston writes.

As for the charges of "escaping US laws", Winston says that since The Pirate Bay is not affiliated with the US in any way, it should not be held liable under US law in any case. And recent EU rulings have stated that blocking The Pirate Bay may in fact be an illegal form of censorship, with Winston asking whether the RIAA's views on "illegal censorship" and whether the lobby group supports such drastic measures.

And finally, Winston chides Glazier for mentioning "the creative community": " You’re not a community, you’re a coalition of some of the richest companies in the world. And the only thing you seem to be creative with is your accounting procedures."

New charges have been levied against file hosting service Megaupload, as the government revealed that $50 million dollars worth of Megaupload assets have been seized so far.

Megaupload was ordered to be shut down by federal prosecutors in late January after allegations were made by the entertainment industry against the website. Seven members of the website were indicted, and five arrested on charges of racketeering and money laundering, as well as criminal copyright infringement, including charges against the website's founder, Kim DotCom.

The new charges claim that Megaupload misled rights holder in regards to the removal of copyrighted content, often only removing one link to the file, when Megaupload was aware that other links existed.

Authorities also revealed that $50 million dollars in Megaupload assets have been seized so far, including DotCom's car collection and personal items. The government estimates the damage to rights holders at more than half a billion dollars, from the 66 million users the site had (including nearly 6 million uploaders).

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has attacked a proposal to grant a legal exemption for DVD ripping, saying it will lead to consumers having less "options". 

Every three years, the Library of Congress, specifically the US Copyright Office, seeks public consultation on exemptions that should be made to existing copyright laws. The exemptions allows copyright laws to remain versatile in an age where the fluidity of content means static copyright laws could hurt the public's ability to access content.

For this latest consultation process, public interest group Public Knowledge (PK) asked for DVD ripping (the removal of DVD CSS copy protection, to be precise) to be exempt from the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), after a similar exemption was made for CD ripping back in 2006. The DMCA, as it stands right now, makes the circumvention of digital copy protection, such as the DVD CSS scheme found on commercial DVDs, illegal, regardless of how "flimsy" the copy protection scheme is (having being broken way back in the year 2000, with little effort).

PK's argument for an exemption on DVD ripping centers on the increasing availability of portable media devices, such as the iPad, and the need for consumers to be able to "space shift" their DVDs onto these new platforms.

However, the MPAA has hit back, saying that "It is clear that access controls have increased consumers' options with respect to motion pictures in digital formats."

In other words, the MPAA believes copy protection, DRM and access controls such as region locking has actually increased the consumer's option to re-buy the same content over and over again, one for each platform. By making DVD ripping legal, the MPAA argues that the business model built around re-selling the same content again and again may no longer exist, and as such, consumers will have fewer "options".

But PK says the fact that consumers have to re-pay for the same movie multiple times is exactly why DVD ripping should be made legal. PK also argues that many movies that are available on DVD are not available on any of these "options", and that MPAA members has been active in removing content from these alternative services. For example, many Digital Copies that come with DVD or Blu-ray releases are often set to expire a year after the release of the title.

The US Copyright Office has also received a request for an exemption to game console jailbreaking. The request was made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which asks for the exemption to be made on the grounds that a similar exemption was made for smartphone jailbreaking 3 years ago.

The UK Government’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has seized music blog RnBXclusive, and has put up a message on the website threatening to send anyone who downloaded music from the website to 10 years in prison.

RnBXclusive provided links to songs and releases for R&B/hip hop fans, although it does carry a lot of its own original content in terms of news and commentary on the music scene.

If past seizures are any indication, SOCA made the seizure based solely on "evidence" provided by the music industry. The evidence usually exaggerates claims of loss and allegations of criminal activity. In fact, some of the one-sided evidence was so bad, that it actually helped the defendants walk free, which was exactly what happened in the government's cases against BitTorrent community FileSoup, and music download website OiNK.

And much like the OiNK seizure, users of the site were threatened along with the operators. Disturbingly, visitors to RnBXclusive.com are now presented with a screen that shows their IP address and the warning of "an unlimited fine" and "a maximum penalty of up to 10 years". It also shows a threatening message featuring phrases that looks as if it was written by the music industry:

SOCA has the capability to monitor and investigate you, and can inform your internet service provider of these infringements.

You may be liable for prosecution and the fact that you have received this message does not preclude you from prosecution.

As a result of illegal downloads young, emerging artists may have had their careers damaged. If you have illegally downloaded music you will have damaged the future of the music industry.

Fans of RnBXclusive are already attacking the claims that "emerging artists may have had their careers damaged", by suggesting that RnBXclusive was doing exactly the opposite, helping new artists get discovered. 

"This couldn't be more incorrect! There are countless artists that I've discovered through this website and later supported!", said one users on RnBXclusive's official Facebook page, "I, like many, have discovered artists through their website that I otherwise wouldn't have" posted another user.

A little more than a year ago, similar websites were seized in the US as part of Operation In Our Sites. One of those seized domains, DaJaz1, was only returned back to its rightful owner a whole year later, after authorities failed to prove they had a case to seize the domain name. DaJaz1's operators claimed that many of the songs they made available to download were leaked to them directly by the artists, for promotional purposes. The website has since been used as an example of an unlawful seizure of a lawful website, with due process conveniently ignored at the insistence of content holders.

Many theorized at the time of DaJaz1's seizure that the music industry was more worried about artists bypassing the major labels to promote their songs via blogs like DaJaz1, and hence showing the major label's increasing irrelevance in the age of the Internet, than any actual efforts to prevent copyright infringement.  

Mel from DaJaz1's sees parallels between the take-down of RnBXclusive and his website. "I guess the UK doesn’t believe in due process either," he posted on the DaJaz1 blog.

The Pirate Bay will be removing most of its torrent files by the end of this month, but despite this, the business of downloading will continue as usual.

Due to recent law enforcement actions against BitTorrent and download websites, plus the decision by the Swedish Supreme Court to reject appeals of fines and prison sentences handed down to the founders of the website, The Pirate Bay will remove all hosted .torrent files for any torrents that have more than 10 peers.

But users will still be able to download thanks to advances in BitTorrent technology in recent years, most notably the introduction of "Magnetic Links". These links, which includes an unique hash code that identifies the torrent you're trying to download, tell your BitTorrent client all the information it needs to download the actual .torrent file from users who are already sharing the same torrent. And it's all done using the DHT (Distributed Hash Table) technique, which does everything in a decentralised away so it does not rely on the existence of trackers, for example.

In other words, Magnet Links is a link that lets your BitTorrent client download .torrent files from the "swarm", and it can do everything that a .torrent file can do. But unlike a .torrent file, nothing needs to be hosted, and you never need to worry about the broken link to a .torrent file. The only downside is that downloads take a little bit longer to get started (but once they do, there's no speed difference between this and regular BitTorrent).

While it's probably a little naive to suggest that not hosting .torrent files would make The Pirate Bay a little safer from authorities (after all, they're still hosting .torrent files, for torrents with less than 10 peers), but it will make The Pirate Bay more resilient to take-downs. The reduced number of .torrent files, and the disk space/bandwidth savings this provides will make The Pirate Bay more portable, which will allow more global mirrors, and make it easier to move around from web host to web host (as it avoids the authorities).

It may even be possible to offer a downloadable version of The Pirate Bay, with a users last6 week managing to produce a USB thumb drive copy of The Pirate Bay that's only 90MB large, thanks to the use of Magnet Links instead of .torrent files. Not surprisingly, the "portable" version of The Pirate Bay is downloadable, via Magnet Links, from The Pirate Bay.

These new technical advances will surely make future law enforcement actions against websites such as The Pirate Bay much harder. Just this week, a new BitTorrent client called Tribler was released by researchers at Delft University that makes BitTorrent file sharing stoppable only if you "take the Internet down".

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 4th February 2012 is in. Drive was the best selling new Blu-ray release for the week, in a week with several new releases, although none were really big successes at the box office.

Also new was the 50th anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, which did very well on Blu-ray with 71% market share.

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here

With content holders suing file sharers, and websites that enable file sharing, a new file sharing software client has been released that could spell an end to any measures designed to stop file sharing online.

The new software, called Tribler, has been developed by researchers Delft University of Technology and it aims to remove the few centralised areas that existing client, such as BitTorrent, still rely on.

For BitTorrent based downloads, a dedicated "indexer" website to host the .torrent files, as well as centralised trackers, may needed to allow downloads. These two targets have long been easy prey for anti-piracy firms, although despite efforts around the world, the largest torrent indexer currently existing, The Pirate Bay, still remains fully operational.

In recent years, the use of centralised trackers has also diminished, with decentralised DHT (distributed hash table) replacing them as a way for file sharers to communicate with each other. Even the use of .torrent file has decreased thanks to the introduction of magnet links which gather the information needed to start downloads from other peers. These have been technical responses to law enforcement actions take against websites such as Mininova, and well known trackers.

Tribler aims to take this a step further, by removing any need for a centralised service or website, and still allow file sharers to share files even if all trackers, torrents and the websites that allows users to search for torrents, have been removed or shut down.

Even the need for torrent search engines have been replaced with a Wikipedia like system, that allows users to weed out bad downloads, and to provide real descriptions, comments and reviews for downloads, all within the Tribler client.

This, in effect, makes Tribler unstoppable by law enforcement agencies, or via any technical means. "The only way to take it down is to take The Internet down," said the head of the Tribler project, Dr. Pouwelse.

And to make Tribler itself difficult to take down, the software carries an open source license, so even if the original Tribler gets taken down, new versions based on the source code can still be developed.

But for file sharers, the danger remains that anti-piracy firms can still extract IP addresses from leechers, and use it to sue individuals or to extract pre-trial settlement fees. Only through the use of a VPN, or other encryption methods, can the user hide his or her IP address and still be able to download. A totally anonymous, and free, file sharing client remains the next, and possibly the last, hurdle to making piracy truly unstoppable. 

Tribler is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, here.

A new study has found that International box office losses are more to do with release windows, than BitTorrent.

The new paper, titled 'Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales', was written by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College, and it set out to look for any links between the availability of pre-release piracy via BitTorrent networks, and the effect it has on movie box office.

This relationship has long been taken for granted, especially by the MPAA, Hollywood's anti-piracy lobbyists. And at first glance, the relationship seems to be supported by data the researchers founds.

"Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy," the study found.

However, when it came to the same situation in the US, the data did not support the same conclusions. "We do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent," the report said.

In other words, because pre-release piracy does not seem to cause box office losses in the US, but it does cause a 7% decrease in international markets, the researchers conclude that there must there must be some other factor in play. 

And that factor, the researchers say, is international release windows - the delay between releasing films in the US and elsewhere. "We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects." the study finds, before finally concluding that "we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy".

In other words, the researchers are finding that box office losses are more to do with delayed releases overseas, than BitTorrent usage, and the longer the release window, the higher the losses. 

So while the movie industry is within its rights to want to deter online piracy, perhaps it would better serve the industry to look in-house first to find ways to increase revenue.

The CEO of TuneCore says that iTunes Match is creating "magic money" for rightsholders, and has already created an extra $10,000 "out of thin air" for the company.

iTunes Match, first announced in June and launched only recently, is an ambitious new service launched by Apple that aims to find a new solution to the web piracy problem. Instead of punishing those who download music illegally, iTunes Match "rewards" those users by turning their ill-gotten MP3s to legitimate iTunes tracks, all for the small fee of $25 per year. The new tracks are then made available in the cloud, ready for listening on a variety of Apple devices. The more a track is being "downloaded", the more the rightsholders will receive as a share of the $25 fee.

Surprisingly, Apple received the music industry's trick of approval for the new service, as the music industry would now be getting a share of the subscription fee, for downloads that they normally wouldn't have gotten anything for.

And that, says Jeff Price, CEO of TuneCore, is the key. "A person has a song on her computer hard drive. She clicks on the song and plays it. No one is getting paid," Price says before adding, "The same person pays iTunes $25 for iMatch. She now clicks on the same song and plays it through her iMatch service. Copyright holders get paid. Same action, same song, one makes money for the copyright holder, and one does not. This is found money that the copyright holders would never have gotten otherwise."

TuneCore is an online broker of music licensing rights, and works artists to get their tracks listed with the likes of Amazon and iTunes. And from iTunes Match, TuneCore has already received its first royalty cheque, to the tune of $10,000 for the first two month. It may not be much, but as Price explains "Well, before you were getting zero, now you are getting something."

Having successfully fought off several lawsuits, both in the US and elsewhere, perhaps the biggest legal victory for file hosting company RapidShare was the removal of the firm's name from the RIAA and MPAA's "notorious markets" list.

The RIAA and MPAA compiles a list of "notorious markets" for piracy every year, and having made the list in 2010, but subsequently being removed from the list in 2011, RapidShare may now hold the answers for an industry that is increasingly feeling the heat of recent law enforcement action.

A few weeks ago, file hosting Megaupload was shuttered by federal prosecutors, with its owners and operators arrested in an international operation. Since then, many file hosting websites has either closed shop, or have begun mass deletions of files suspected of containing infringing content.

But for the most part, RapidShare has remained calm in the face of calamity for the industry, and speaking to TorrentFreak, RapidShare attorney Daniel Raimer explains how RapidShare is managing to continue providing a valuable upload service to users, but still remain on the right side of the law.

Raimer explains that two major strategies exists behind RapidShare's "legalization": education, and pro-active enforcement. 

"We decided to increase our efforts to explain what RapidShare really stands for and how we are spearheading the industry’s efforts to combat copyright infringements," Raimer explained, before adding "The fact that we were not included in the 2011 list is a result of these educational efforts" 

And to help explain what RapidShare "stands for", RapidShare took a leaf from the RIAA and MPAA's playbook and employed the services of top Washington lobbying firm, Dutko.

The education continues not only in words, but also in action, to tell major content holders that RapidShare wasn't solely in business just to make money off piracy, a charge that the US government has labelled at Megaupload. Raimer explains that by not having a rewards program which rewards either uploaders for uploading popular content (like the one offered by Hotfile, currently being sued by the MPAA), or to reward those that can bring in heavy downloaders willing to pay to download more (as in the case of Megaupload), RapidShare can avoid the legal scrutiny currently being faced by its rivals.

With the message out that RapidShare is not in the business to make money off piracy, the second major strategy RapidShare employs is in the pro-active removal of infringing content. Not only does RapidShare have a well-staffed anti-abuse department, that aims to process DMCA and other takedown notices in an efficient manner, Raimer also revealed that RapidShare has its own crawler that actively seeks out links to pirated content hosted on their website, and after verifying it is indeed infringing content, removes them without the content holders even getting involved.

"We have developed a crawling technology that is constantly watching Internet forums, message boards and warez blogs for information about copyright infringement taking place on our system. The information collected by our software is then being evaluated, verified and processed by our anti-abuse department," added Raimer. 

And all of this, Raimer believes, is what has put RapidShare in the RIAA/MPAA's good book, at least for now. While copyrighted content still exists on RapidShare's servers, Raimer believes that content holders are "realistic" about the unreasonable tasks of ensuring the service isn't being abused at all. "... they (rightsholders) know that there are limits as to what a reputable hosting service can do without hurting its legitimate customer base," concluded Raimer.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 28th January 2012 is in. Real Steel was the best selling new Blu-ray release, but the Blu-ray exclusive Paranormal Activity 3 also helped to push Blu-ray revenue higher for the week, at the expense of DVD sales.

Paramount's decision to release Paranormal Activity 3 as a timed Blu-ray exclusive, taking a page out of Disney's playbook, may turn out to be a major milestone for the Blu-ray format. If more studios do the same, then we could see DVD consigned as a "second class" format - although looking at revenue figures, the "Blu-ray exclusive" route might have reduced the amount of money the title might have made had it been available on DVD too - the lack of a combo version that comes in DVD packaging and hence gets displayed amongst the DVD shelves, something Disney always does with its timed exclusives, might have been a contributor.

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 21st January 2012 is in. The Ides of March was the best selling new release of the week, with two other new releases, but none were what you would call A-list, at least according to each's box office takings.  

The weekly Blu-ray market share percentage fell to the lowest since September 2011, largely due to the real best seller of the week (when you combine both DVD and Blu-ray sales), Courageous, not doing all that well on Blu-ray. 

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here.

Steam is currently the most popular digital gaming distribution platform, and for good reason. The Steam sales are events worth waiting for, and gamers can take advantage of all the value-added features of the Steam platform, such as the ability to easily take screenshots, in-game web browsing (handy for looking up walkthroughs), and achievements. Steam is so popular that even other digital gaming sales platforms frequently list "Steamworks" (the name for games that are activated on Steam) as a feature, even if Steam is probably their biggest competitor. 

But there is also another side of Steam that gamers are less enthusiastic about, and the darker side is best exemplified by the recent story of Russian gamer gimperial.

Last week, Steam banned gimperial's Steam account for no apparent reason. gimperial's account included no less than 250 games, valued at more than $1,500, but all he could find out from Steam was that he had violated Steam's term of services, and that would be that.

But as most Steam games are tied to a your Steam account, losing access to your account means losing access to your games. Even if you have Steam enabled games downloaded to your hard-drive, you would not be able to play them without having a valid Steam account. Only the DRM-free games, and those that don't use the full features of Steam (ie. they're standalone games or use another gaming platform such as EA's Origin) would continue to work after your Steam account is banned

And as Steam's normal policy is to not divulge the reason for the ban, and with no telephone support, it's a incredibly difficult task to get any sort of answer from the company regarding bans (although to be fair, many of the bans are probably warranted). 

While gimperial's story has an eventual "happy" ending, and he got his account back, but only after intervention from gaming site Rock, Paper Shotgun and from wider media attention. Other gamers may be less lucky.

So for all the great things Steam brings, at the end of the day, it is just another form of DRM. A value-added DRM that is mostly invisible for your average gamer and brings great benefits, but one that could be incredibly damaging if you end up like the unfortunately gimperial.

Ubisoft's infamous DRM strikes again next week, as Ubisoft's planned transition of their online service infrastructure means that most of their games won't work online. Unfortunately, due to their draconian DRM, some of their games won't work offline either.

Ubisoft's plan to move away from a third-party provider, to their own facility, may be well intentioned - designed to improve services, but due to the way the Ubi DRM works, in that even some offline/single player games require a constant Internet connection, this means that a half dozen games will simply not work during the transition.

Ubisoft lists the games affected, and more than half a dozen games, including Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell Conviction and Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2, are listed as being totally unplayable during the transition. For the other games, "The Online features of all games that are not mentioned above will be impacted during the transition, Offline modes will not be impacted," Ubisoft noted.

Ubisoft introduced a stronger form of DRM in order to prevent piracy, although most of their heavily protected games do eventually get cracked and are readily available online at the usual piracy haunts. 

But in a bitter twist of irony, gamers that use the pirated version of Ubisoft's games won't be affected during this "blackout".

A new report says that far from being on the verge of disaster, due to the web piracy problem, the entertainment industry has never had it better.

The new report, titled The Sky Is Rising, takes a closer look at the business and creative side of the entertainment industry, and instead of the doom and gloom often portrayed by industry lobby groups such as the MPAA and RIAA, the last few years have been a boom time for creativity, and for revenue.

With an infographic summarising the details of the report, it found that the entertainment industry, which includes books, video games, music and movies, has grown 50% in the last decade.

For example, the video game industry has grown almost four fold since the early 2000's. For books, despite the deep recession, revenue is up compared to 2008, and the number of books being produced has skyrocketed in the last decade.

And despite constant protests from the music industry, the value of the industry has grown 27% from 2005 to 2010, with artists now getting a larger share of the revenue pie.

Similarly, the movie industry has had a couple of great years, with revenue up 24% from 2006 to 2010, and global TV/Film spending up by more than $100 billion in the last decade, the so called decade of piracy. And despite dire warnings from the MPAA about less films being produced due to web piracy, the number of films produced worldwide has actually increased by 317% from 1995 to 2009.

But with more choices and more content than ever for consumers to consume, there will inevitably be winners and losers, as consumers also change the way they consume content. The industries that cannot keep up with the consumer might still find themselves on the losing side of probably the greatest boom for the entertainment industry in history.

The studio responsible for the global hit, Angry Birds, says piracy is not thing that concerns them, and that it may actually help generate revenue.

Pointing to the music industry as an example of "what not to do" when it comes to dealing with the web piracy problem, Rovio's chief executive Mikael Hed warned of the "futile" attempts to sue web pirates, because pirates are not necessarily harming the Angry Birds brand.

"We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy," said Hed.

But if piracy can help build the Angry Birds brand, to get more people to be interested in the game, whether they paid for it or not, then it's not something that should be fought. "Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day," added Hed.

But Hed says that there are also lessons to learn from the music business, and the important distinction between "customers" and "fans". "We took something from the music industry, which was to stop treating the customers as users, and start treating them as fans. We do that today: we talk about how many fans we have. If we lose that fanbase, our business is done, but if we can grow that fanbase, our business will grow."