Piracy

California ports are going green. In a speech at the 28th World Ports Conference on Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the city's port is at the forefront of pushing for clean energy alternatives and reducing pollution. The conference, which kicked off Tuesday in Los Angeles, attracted port officials from around the world to discuss issues such as climate change, piracy and other problems affecting ships and the ports where they dock. Greening ports was at the top of many minds.

California ports are going green. In a speech at the 28th World Ports Conference on Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the city's port is at the forefront of pushing for clean energy alternatives and reducing pollution. The conference, which kicked off Tuesday in Los Angeles, attracted port officials from around the world to discuss issues such as climate change, piracy and other problems affecting ships and the ports where they dock. Greening ports was at the top of many minds.

Like countless other dreamers, Johnny Ray Gasca came to Hollywood with a screenplay to pitch and a list of moguls to schmooze. Unlike most of the others, he quickly grabbed the movie industry's attention -- but maybe not quite the way he had in mind. Gasca, a Bronx native and convicted felon, is believed to be the first person charged in federal court with violating copyright laws by videotaping movies at pre-release screenings.

In one of the stranger plot twists in Hollywood, BitTorrent Inc., the technology company whose name was once synonymous in the creative community with Internet piracy, is now doing business with the film industry. The San Francisco company is partnering with Cinedigm, a leading Los Angeles distributor of independent films across digital platforms, to promote its newest release, "Arthur Newman," starring Colin Firth and Emily Blunt. Starting Monday, BitTorrent will help promote the film by inviting the 170 million users of its software - which helps facilitate the transfer of large data files - to watch the first seven minutes of the film prior to its theatrical release Friday.

When it comes to doing business in China, Hollywood is well acquainted with the perils of piracy. Now it appears that architects must also be wary of unlicensed copying while in that country. Architect Zaha Hadid is reportedly dealing with a pirated design being built in the inland city of Chongqing. The copied structure may be completed before the original in the Beijing area is finished, according to Germany's Der Spiegel.  Hadid designed the Wangjing Soho, scheduled to be completed in 2014, according to the London architect's official website.

Re "Pirates show range and daring," Nov. 18 It is obvious that Adm. Michael G. Mullen's Navy can't handle the pirates in the Indian Ocean. As much as the U.S. is mostly unwelcome as a world policeman, here is an excellent example of where we might do some good. It makes no difference whose ship is pirated. Piracy is an offense against all on the high seas. Maybe with the new administration, we will get a military that doesn't make excuses for why taxpayers carry the burden of fleets capable of destroying life on Earth many times over but are impotent to track and destroy perhaps several hundred criminals, in light boats with small arms, on the open sea. Ron Sydney Anaheim

While much of the nation's capital has been engrossed in the debate over unemployment, taxes and spending, lobbyists representing a huge swath of the U.S. economy have been battling over proposals to combat foreign websites dedicated to piracy. The Senate plans to take up its version soon, despite the lack of consensus about how to rein in pirate sites without censoring legitimate speech or stifling innovation. That would be a mistake. The bills - the PROTECT IP Act (S 968) in the Senate, the Stop Online Piracy Act (HR 3261)

Wikipedia went dark for a day. Google hid its logo under a black shroud. And hundreds of other websites darkened their pages temporarily in a massive, coordinated protest against a pair of bills that would step up enforcement of copyrights and trademarks. Wednesday's demonstration provoked such an intense backlash against the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (better known as PIPA and SOPA) that by the end of the week, more than 100 lawmakers had declared their opposition and both bills had been placed on hold.

The World Trade Organization has largely sided with the United States in a dispute with China over product piracy, according to official documents released Monday. The ruling, which confirms an interim decision in October, takes Washington one step closer to being able to seek compensation from China for the billions of dollars that U.S. companies say they lose through piracy each year.

The USC Annenberg Innovation Lab offered the entertainment industry some good news and some bad news this week. In the latest in a series of reports on advertising supported online piracy, the lab says that two major distributors of ads online -- Google and OpenX -- have "significantly reduced the number of infringing sites they are placing ads on. " In response, however, smaller ad networks have rushed in to fill the gap, the report says....

SAN FRANCISCO - The escalating cyber attacks on corporate and government computers have provided a rare opportunity for bipartisan legislation to address the problem. But rather than sailing through Congress, the latest cyber security legislation is exposing a fault line in the tech industry. On one side stand some of tech's biggest companies, such as Intel Corp., Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp., which are pressing for more government action. On the other side are thousands of smaller tech firms and privacy activists who have launched online protests to raise the alarm over a bill they say harms privacy and civil liberties.

The third season premiere of "Game of Thrones" did very well for HBO, with 6.7 million subscribers tuning into the program during the multiple airings Sunday night. However, the program broke another kind of record this week, with people who presumably don't subscribe to HBO. The episode, "Valar Dohaeris," broke records for simultaneous illegal downloads through BitTorrent and other sites, according to the new site TorrentFreak . With over a million downloads already, and a record 160,000 simultaneous users sharing the files, the "Game of Thrones" season premiere is on record for having the largest "swarm" of users ever downloading the program at once.

After the coffee. Before yet another flight back to Los Angeles. The Skinny: I've said it before and I'll say it again. AMC's "The Walking Dead" could have worked on broadcast TV. The show has very little sex and language issues, and the gore could be toned down a little without losing anything. Last night's episode was very powerful and had a great closing song by Jamie N. Commons. OK, done plugging. Monday's headlines include the box office recap, a look at how NBCUniversal is battling piracy and a piece on whether "Oz: The Great and Powerful" will find streets paved with gold.

This week the entertainment industry finally is getting a version of something it has been craving since the original Napster transformed online piracy into a mass-market phenomenon: a new Copyright Alert System that turns Internet service providers into anti-piracy enforcers. It's not as powerful as the major record companies and Hollywood studios have proposed, and it ignores many sources of bootlegged music and movie files online. But it's a start. And if the industry's assumptions are correct, it could make a dent in the problem.

The USC Annenberg Innovation Lab offered the entertainment industry some good news and some bad news this week. In the latest in a series of reports on advertising supported online piracy, the lab says that two major distributors of ads online -- Google and OpenX -- have "significantly reduced the number of infringing sites they are placing ads on. " In response, however, smaller ad networks have rushed in to fill the gap, the report says....

Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., two Internet companies that have long cultivated relationships in Hollywood, are nevertheless placing ads on sites that feature pirated movies, TV shows and music, a new report says. USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab ranked Google and Yahoo among the top 10 advertising networks that support major piracy sites around the world, based on the lab's analysis of online ads that receive the most copyright infringement notices. Google took issue with the report's findings, calling its conclusion "mistaken.

A federal judge in Virginia threw out piracy charges against six Somali nationals Tuesday, saying prosecutors had failed to prove that an April attack on a Navy ship off Africa was piracy "as defined by the law of nations. " But U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson allowed the prosecution to go forward against the men on seven lesser charges. Convictions on the piracy allegations could have brought mandatory life sentences without parole. Defense attorneys had argued that their clients were not guilty of piracy because they had made no attempt to rob or board the ship.

The Motion Picture Assn. of America's fight against movie piracy has gone to the dogs. The organization told Agence France-Presse that British customs authorities have trained two Labrador retrievers to sniff out counterfeit DVDs. They are working at the Federal Express operation at Stansted Airport, near London. The dogs were trained over eight months to identify DVDs that may be in boxes, envelopes or other packaging, Agence France-Presse reported.

When it comes to doing business in China, Hollywood is well acquainted with the perils of piracy. Now it appears that architects must also be wary of unlicensed copying while in that country. Architect Zaha Hadid is reportedly dealing with a pirated design being built in the inland city of Chongqing. The copied structure may be completed before the original in the Beijing area is finished, according to Germany's Der Spiegel.  Hadid designed the Wangjing Soho, scheduled to be completed in 2014, according to the London architect's official website.

Media and entertainment companies doing business in China can expect double-digit growth in the world's most populous nation but must be prepared to overcome a number of regulatory and piracy issues, according to a report released Wednesday. The “Spotlight on China” study, prepared by Ernst & Young, was released to coincide with the accounting firm's media and entertainment conference in Shanghai. The report estimates that China's media and entertainment industry will grow at a 17% annual rate between 2010 and 2015, significantly faster than the country's economy overall.