Lawyers representing a group of music composers from the 20th century have accused Apple of being “recklessly indifferent or willfully blind” to the actions of a company that operates a “massive music piracy operation” on iTunes.
One of the easiest ways to pirate movies and TV shows is back just in time for the great stay-at-home coronavirus quarantine party of 2020.
Popcorn Time, the legendary app that was basically a Netflix for privacy, announced its return Tuesday on Twitter, saying its newest build, called “Love in the Time of Corona Version 0.4,” is available for download.
Grab it while you can.
Apple is often criticized for its strict App Store guidelines that prevent all kinds of titles from being approved. But the state of the Windows Store proves strict guidelines are a necessity.
Microsoft’s marketplace is currently littered with apps that allow users to illegally stream movies and TV shows for free. There’s also a range of titles that provide access to pirated music.
A worrying flaw uncovered in Google Chrome makes it even easier for pirates to download movies and TV shows from the web. Google was made aware of the issue a month ago, but the company is yet to release an update that fixes it.
Oh, the irony! Just days after Kanye West threatened legal action against The Pirate Bay for offering his latest album, The Life of Pablo, the self-proclaimed genius has been caught browsing the site for music-production software.
App developers are fighting what seems like a losing battle against software pirates, but some of them are finding new ways to deter users from downloading their latest titles illegally.
Noodlecake, the publisher behind games like Super Stickman Golf and Mikey Shorts, has created the ultimate troll for those who choose not to pay for its newest game: a pirate version that’s impossible to beat.
In news that is likely to cause all manner of headaches around Hollywood, Popcorn Time — the streaming torrent service often described as “Netflix for pirates” — is now easier to access than ever, thanks to a new website.
But how long will it last?
Popcorn Time, the app for Mac and jailbroken iOS devices that allows you to stream movie and television torrents from the cloud, has often been heralded as “Netflix for pirates,” thanks to its easy-to-use interface and huge selection of content. Turns out that’s enough for Netflix to consider Popcorn Time a direct competitor.
One of the biggest reasons why many app developers continue to snub Android is piracy. The platform’s “open” approach, which allows applications to be downloaded from third-party sources and installed manually, makes it incredibly easy for users to circumvent Google Play and obtain paid apps completely free.
Piracy on Android is so rampant right now that just 5 percent of installs of Monument Valley — one of the best mobile games of 2014, which is currently priced at $3.99 in the Play Store — have actually been paid for.
Popcorn Time, the desktop app that acts as a Netflix for pirated content, has been resurrected by torrent site YTS.
Speaking with website TorrentFreak, YTS developer Jduncanato claimed that the (still legally dubious) service is in a better position from a copyright position because it’s built on their API:
There are bound to be teething problems as Google Glass rolls out to users. Back in October last year, Cult of Android reported on the Glass user given a ticket for “driving with monitor visible to driver.”
Now we have the not dissimilar case of a theater-goer removed from a screening for alleged piracy.
The viewer in question was watching Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit with his wife at an AMC movie theater in Columbus, Ohio, when he was roughly removed from the screening by Department of Homeland Security officials.
While Apple’s iLife and iWork software suites are considerably cheaper than competing products from rival companies, there’s still a bunch of people who would rather download them illegally than have to fork out the $20 fee for each app. And believe it or not, those who do will get a free upgrade to the latest versions direct from Apple.
When the Cupertino company pushed out its latest OS X apps following the iPad event earlier this week, anyone who had already installed the apps on their Mac was entitled to the latest version for free — even if the were using trial software, or they had downloaded the apps illegally.
Apple knows this, and it says it wasn’t just a bug. It also accepts that it’s easy to pirate its software — but it would rather trust you not to than implement some cumbersome anti-piracy feature.
Almost half of the top 50 apps on iPad are unavailable or have not been optimized for competing devices that run Google’s Android operating system. That’s according to a new report from Canalys, which believes Google should be doing more to encourage top developers to build high-quality tablet apps for its platform.
UPDATE: Lucky Frame has provided us with some updated stats: Gentlemen! now has over 6,000 players on Android, with just 50 paid downloads.
Gentlemen!, a brand new title from Scottish development studio Lucky Frame, made its debut on Android and iOS last week. It’s been a pretty big success so far, with plenty of acclaim from reviewers, a mention in a British newspaper, and thousands of players worldwide.
But it’s not all good news for Lucky Frame. You see, only 20 of the players on Android actually paid Gentlemen!’s $4.99 price tag, the company revealed to Cult of Android.
The other 3,000 stole it.
Adobe’s entire new Creative Cloud suite has already been cracked, and it appears to be just as easy to do as it was for the old non-cloud version. Crackers have already made the tools available, just days after the official release.
We’ve heard before that piracy is just killing Android developers. It’s such a wide scale problem that some devs are finding little incentive, between piracy and fragmentation, to actually release their games on Android.
Sadly, the problem doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Another developer has just released details on the massive problem they are having on Android with app piracy. How bad is it? Piracy on Android outnumbers iOS piracy by fourteen to one. Woof!
It was only yesterday that we found out that music streaming apps like Spotify and Rdio are helping kill music piracy, as the music industry reported that global revenue rose in 2012 for the first time in 13 years.
Well, according to a different report that crunched some serious numbers, Apple’s iTunes Store played a big part in the music industry’s growth, by accounting for 60 percent of global digital music revenues.
Too cheap to actually buy Tweetbot, Tapbot’s awesome Twitter app for iPhone, iPad and Mac? Are you pirating it despite the fact that it only costs a couple bucks, and Tweetbot has a limited number of tokens that it can distribute before Twitter says they can’t sell their client anymore?
Well, Tweetbot’s not going to force you to do anything, but they have started autofilling the Tweet box in its iOS app to publically broadcast that they are no-good, dirty pirates.
Hackulous has announced that it has shut down Installous, the one-stop shop for “cracked” or pirated apps and games on iOS. The team blames “stagnant” forums and the difficulty in moderating them as the reason behind its decision to kill the service, which will undoubtedly be a huge victory against iOS software piracy. At least for now.
Hunted Cow released its new iOS game, Battle Dungeon, in the App Store less than a week ago, and the title has already been pulled. Why? Rampant piracy. The number of illegitimate users put such a strain on the game’s servers that Hunted Cow was forced to shut it down.
The RPG-like strategy game allowed users to play with each other and compete in leader boards, upgrade characters, etc. It’s a sad day for the game’s paying users.
After nearly a decade, my iTunes library weighs in at almost ninety-four gigabytes. A lot of serious music nerds would sneeze derisively at that, but it still represents over 13,000 songs that would take me, from start to finish, a full 48 days to listen to back to back.
I’d be lying if I said most of these had been acquired legally. Most of these albums were acquired on Bittorrent in my twenties. Many more were ripped from CDs lent to me by friends and family, or slurped up from Usenet to satisfy my obscure yet surface-thin musical fixations. Some were purchased through iTunes or other sources online, but truthfully, if you stripped everything out of my iTunes library that I’d acquired legally, I’d probably have a digital music library that could fit on a first generation iPod.
Over the course of the last two years, though, something interesting has happened. I’ve grown a conscience. These days, all of the music I listen to is listened to legally. But iTunes not only has no part in it. In fact, for the past two years, my iTunes library has just been collecting dust: a graveyard to the music piracy of my youth.
I’m ashamed of it. I want to try to explain things. Both why I started pirating music, why I stopped, and how, in fits and starts, being a music pirate helped transform me into someone who cared enough about music to buy it.
Not long go, we reported to you that the FPS Dead Trigger had given up the fight and gone free on Android, due to an “unbelievably high” piracy rate. Today, it appears that Madfinger Games, the developers behind Dead Trigger have given in and made the game free on iOS as well.
If you thought the iOS App Store had issues with piracy, think again. The Google Play store, home to over 500,000 Android apps, is in a much worse position. Apparently, piracy on the Android platform is such an issue that developers are, in a sense, beginning to give up.
The developers behind Dead Trigger, an FPS available on both Android and iOS, have decided to give up the fight, and are now making the popular game completely free on Google Play, due to the outrageous piracy.
If you live outside the U.S and UK, you’ll find that the easiest and quickest way to get your favorite TV shows onto your iPad is via BitTorrent. But until now, you had to do some heavy post-download processing to make the XVID files play on your iPad, or at least use third-party software to play it.
Now, many BitTorrent groups have switched to the x264 MP4 format for most new releases. That’s good news for iPad and Apple TV users, but there’s even more entertainment to be had from this story: The BitTorrent pirates are crowing about the switch and even threatening to boycott the downloads.
Yes, you read that right. Pirates are threatening to boycott illegal TV show downloads.
Apple has begun an attack on App Store piracy. The popular resource for cracked iOS apps known as Apptrackr recently said that Apple has begun sending large amounts of takedown notices, thereby forcing Apptrackr to relocate many of its servers and implement more steps for its users to avoid legal ramifications.
In a note to users of Installous, a Cydia app for downloading and installing pirated apps from the App Store, Apptrackr frontman “dissident” explains Apple’s attempts at crippling the piracy service and how Apptrackr supporters can help keep the resource running.
