The Morganelli Group

I just received this in my inbox from a tipster.. (thanks) Continue Reading…

Just thought it was comical to see the pirates complaining about not being able to download our client’s copyrighted works.  Here are a few happy customers…

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In what has become a very common practice, another Usenet provider is increasing their retention.

First, what is retention?  Retention is the amount of days a Usenet provider holds content or posts.  For example, a user uploaded today the latest version of a Linux distro.  It will remain on their servers for XXXX days.  XXXX being the number of days retention.

Currently, the leader in retention is Giganews.  They currently have  Continue Reading…

We wanted to dedicate this edition to The Artists Bill of Rights.  We really like what stand for and just recently started following them on twitter.  We are looking forward to talking with them about what we could do for them.

For this report we are looking at the “Album of the Year” and “Best New Artist”.  Like previous reports, the number in brackets is the number of pirated works we found on Usenet.

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This is a Usenet Piracy Report based on the the WWE.  While searching for the Oscar report one of my staff memebers mentioned that he stumbled upon the WWE, not sure how since they are not linked but I’m glad he did.  I then decided to have him  drill down into our archives to get a number of instances that the WWE was pirated.

I was shocked with yesterdays findings on the Oscars and we are still not done with them.  Look for a follow up on that later this week.  Here are our findings for the WWE….

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We wanted to start picking a few subjects and doing piracy reports regarding Usenet.

For the first report, we decided on the Oscars.  The awards are coming up fast so we thought it would be perfect timing.  We will break down the title and then in [ ]‘s at the end are the number of pirated reports currently posted on Usenet.

The following films have been nominated for Best Picture along with a piracy count:
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Yesterday at my son’s Pinewood derby, I met Senator Toomey. We spoke indepth about SOPA and PIPA and the effects of filtering. He was very responsive and seemed to enjoy the conversation.  I did not want to bother him to much but wanted to shake his hand and talk to him about what we do at the Morganelli Group.  He did share a contact in Washington to talk more about the topic.

Today came news that both SOPA and PIPA have been withdrawn.  I doubt that even if it would have passed it would have affected Usenet.  The way Usenet was designed really makes it impervious to these kinds of laws.

Usenet was originally created to distribute text content encoded in the 7-bit ASCII character set. With the help of programs that encode 8-bit values into ASCII, it became practical to distribute binary files as content. Binary posts, due to their size and often-dubious copyright status, were in time restricted to specific newsgroups, making it easier for administrators to allow or disallow the traffic.

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I spoke with Don over at Xbiz.com about doing an interview or guest post on their site.  He asked us to write up a paragraph or two about how we felt it would go.  I figured I would do an actual press release with the info.

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Usenet Piracy is growing at a tremendous rate. If you were to ask 10 normal people where piracy is most prevelant their reply with be bittorrent. While bittorrent continues to be a major cause for alarm an old resource is slowly slipping to the number one position. Its Usenet! Thats right, the 30 year old system that was created before the actual World Wide Web is rearing its head. Usenet has always been there, lurking in the shadows. In fact, the first rule of Usenet is.. “You don’t talk about about Usenet”. I am hear to do just that, talk about Usenet.

Facts:

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I was browsing the RIAA’s site this morning and came across an interesting statistic.

[RIAA Site Clip]

While downloading one song may not feel that serious of a crime, the accumulative impact of millions of songs downloaded illegally – and without any compensation to all the people who helped to create that song and bring it to fans – is devastating.  One credible study by the Institute for Policy Innovation pegs the ANNUAL harm at $12.5 billion dollars in losses to the U.S. economy as well as more than 70,000 lost jobs and $2 billion in lost wages to American workers.

[END RIAA Site Clip] Link

Those are staggering numbers and we all need to take it serious.  We have always been of firm belief that if you remove the content, the indexing sites will be crippled.  There are legal ways to have the links removed and that is one one area that we specialize in.  Not only do we do that, we also get content removed which is a huge benefit.  If there is no content, 10 million people could link to it, however, there will be nothing on the other side of that link.  Its a simple math equation, 10,000,000 x 0 = 0