Canipre is a Canadian company that helps runs anti-piracy campaigns, and is helping Voltage Pictures in their efforts to extort money out of pirates using settlement-o-matic mass lawsuits. They've most recently been helping Voltage target easier marks like Canadian ISP TekSavvy. As such, it's interesting to note that this week a company so concerned about propriety has been accused of using other people's photos on their website without proper attribution. "Our collective goal is not to sue everybody...but to change the sense of entitlement that people have, regarding Internet-based theft of property," Canipre Director Barry Logan stated in a recent interview.

Back in February, after more than a year of delays, the entertainment and most major ISPs launched their "six strikes" anti-piracy initiative. The program integrates warning letters with graduated response punishments that range from being temporarily blocked off from the Internet to having your connection throttled.

BitTorrent has been absurdly sensitive about how people might confuse the protocol Cohen created and the business he's trying to create, with the fact that it has been used for years for piracy. Yesterday I noted how the company won't even let BitTorrent proxy and VPN services like TorGuard advertise within the BitTorrent client, fearing it might be seen as supporting piracy.

As the entertainment industry and ISPs launch their new six strikes plan, more and more users are fleeing to BitTorrent VPN and proxy services like Torguard or BTguard in order to avoid the prying eyes of their ISPs. Meanwhile, Bram Cohen's BitTorrent, which for years has been trying unsuccessfully to monetize his invention, is looking to distance itself from such services.

Efforts in several countries to block user access to the Pirate Bay haven't gone particularly well, in large part thanks to the fact that users are simply using proxies and VPNs to access the website and its linked content. According to Torrent Freak, around 8% of the traffic hitting the controversial website is now via proxied IP addresses, a percentage the website argues could be potentially higher. "The 8% is just what goes through the dedicated IP-address, a lot of proxies use the site’s domain name instead," a Pirate Bay spokesman tells Torrent Freak. There has also been an uptick in VPN services in the States, as users hide from the entertainment industry's new six strikes initiative.

Torrent Freak directs our attention to the fact that for the first time, a Comcast user has been sued three different times for one download of an animated film. "Plaintiff’s technical monitoring personnel failed to notice the repeat entries of the identical IP address after sorting and filtering and filed 3 different federal lawsuits," the John Doe writes in his own defense. "This calls into question their accuracy in managing their cases properly." Torrent Freak and the plaintiff speculate that he was sued three times in the hopes nobody would notice, thereby increasing the chance of getting a subpoena from at least one of the three Judges. Instead, all three cases landed on the desk of one Judge.

Over the years we've seen the entertainment industry try to float the idea of a "piracy tax" several times. They've long dreamed of a fee levied on top of already-high broadband bills that would go to the entertainment industry -- just because -- whether you pirate content or not.

As a private company, Cox Communications is one of the few companies that refused to participate in the entertainment industry's "six strikes" anti-piracy initiative. However, the company has taken things into their own hands, telling Torrent Freak that they're running an anti-piracy program of their own.

In order to get everyone on board the entertainment industry's recently-launched "six strikes" anti-piracy initiative, the entertainment industry-run group behind the program (the Center for Copyright Information) repeatedly stated that data collection from the program wouldn't be used for lawsuits. While the MPAA and RIAA so far haven't requested that data, that hasn't stopped copyright trolls from doing so.

The return of "Game of Thrones" to HBO broke all manner of records Sunday night, both traditional and otherwise. The show posted a viewership of 4.4 million, and including the two replays of 6.7 million -- breaking previous records for the show.

BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen has been trying to monetize his creation for the better part of the decade, and while the man may have somewhat revolutionized file delivery, efforts to build a legal business model around the technology have seen mixed results (yet a seventeen year old this week sold a news reading app to Yahoo for $30 million). Cohen's initial efforts at monetization of his creation began with the now-defunct BitTorrent store, which floundered in 2007 due to a clunky GUI, DRM, and games that came with complimentary spyware.

Porn copyright troll Prenda Law has apparently run afoul of one very tough Judge. We've previously noted how Prenda has been trying to scare broadband users into settling with the company en masse after they've been tracked downloading copyrighted porn films.

Techdirt directs our attention to the fact that one of the companies behind tracking copyright violations for the new six strikes anti-piracy initiative has been falsely flagging video game mods as copyrighted content. MarkMonitor/Dtecnet are responsible for generating user violation alerts under the new Copyright Alert System (CAS) launched last week.

Despite carriers being a bit mute earlier this week with the launch of the entertainment industry's new six strikes anti-piracy initiative, each participant is slowly now outlying how their respective plans will work. Verizon throttles repeat offenders to 256 kbps.

Comcast has now put information on their implementation of six strikes online. According to the nation's largest broadband company, their version of the program will involve a persistent nagging pop up that continues to alert the user after the fourth warning.

Yesterday we noted that despite the copyright industry's new "six strikes" anti-piracy campaign launch, just one ISP had bothered to put anything about the plan on their website. AT&T sent us a statement justifying their lack of website information by saying they intend to communicate directly with impacted users.

Despite yesterday's launch of the entertainment industry's new six strikes anti-piracy initiative yesterday, just one of the supposed participating ISPs has listed any information on the plan on their websites. Only Verizon even acknowledges the plan exists online, and even then fails to specify what speed offenders get throttled to (256 kbps). Time Warner Cable was the only ISP to be very clear with us about the plan previously, but like Comcast, Cablevision, and AT&T -- offers no online details. Details are important because enforcement varies by ISP, yet the majority of the plan specifics made available to consumers has come from leaks. ISPs clearly aren't thrilled by the PR impact of the plan, and/or they remain concerned about liability from their participation in it.

As noted yesterday morning, the entertainment industry and most of the largest ISPs have officially kicked off their "six strikes" initiative starting today, using various methods ranging from temporary click through alerts to throttling to try and scare off pirates. A blog post by the Center for Copyright Information, the entertainment-industry run outfit tasked with operating the system, confirms that the system is indeed going live this week. The CCI's Jill Lessner had this to say about "beginning of the implementation phase" of the Copyright Alert System (CAS):Surely that includes educating consumers on fair use rights? If you're using a member ISP that's involved in this effort, I'd be curious to hear if your ISP's FAQ and support material has been adequately updated to educate you about the new systems that are in place. I'm also of course interested in hearing experiences from people who navigate the new warning system.

For years the music and film industries have been pushing to have broadband users disconnected from the Internet as the final penalty after repeated warnings for copyright violations. Those efforts have run into repeated problems not only thanks to heavy resistance from ISPs unwilling to lose paying customers but in the courts, where the lifetime or year-long loss of broadband is seen as excessive punishment.

A new Google-funded survey out of Columbia University (pdf, via Ars Technica) unsurprisingly finds that those who pirate also tend to buy the most content. Despite the RIAA having a hard time admitting this fact, that pirates are the industry's best customers is something that has repeatedly been shown to be true in studies -- over and over and over again.