While Hollywood talks about the billions of dollars in lost revenue it loses from piracy it seems that its employees have a different philosophy. According to this TorrentFreak report - using data from BitTorrent monitoring company Scaneye - employees of major studios love downloading movies, TV shows and video games.

Canadian internet service provider TekSavvy has found itself in the crosshairs of U.S.-based movie studio Voltage Pictures LLC. The ISP announced on Monday that it had received a request on behalf of the studio to provide subscriber information on "a couple thousand" of its users that the studio alleges have downloaded or shared such films as The Whistleblower, Balls to the Wall, Fire with Fire, and others.

In an interesting conversation with Eurogamer Hotline Miami publisher Digital Devolver reveals how much the gruesome indie action game has sold to date, how much it has been pirated and the shock at just how popular his little indie game has become.

Project manager Graeme Struthers Hotline Miami has sold 130,000 copies since launch seven weeks ago. While he was happy about those numbers, Struthers said that PC piracy has had a serious impact on sales.

The incoming chairman of a key House of Representatives committee is bad news for those worried about internet freedom and great news for the RIAA and MPAA. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia) was elected head of the House Judiciary committee this week, and seems to be even more enthusiastic about supporting Hollywood and the music industry than the previous chairman Lamar Smith.

It looks like the whole "Six Strikes" plan concocted by MPAA, RIAA and six internet service providers in the United States has been pushed back yet again. The system was supposed to be deployed this summer and would issue warnings and - upon occasion - punishments to those suspected of committing copyright infringement on the Internet. This week the group in charge of that system, the Center for Copyright Information, announced that the ISPs involved were not ready to start sending out those warnings just yet, citing Hurricane Sandy as one of the main reasons for the delay.

Prenda Law is one of the law firms involved in ongoing mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US. They represent a number of adult entertainment companies, but their tactics are so repulsive and rude that they stand out among the pack of firms around the world hoping to collect settlements from alleged infringers. With the aim of squeezing a settlement from a target the firm has engaged in such behavior as calling people at home urging them to pay up.

Teasing an upcoming interview with Hotline Miami co-creator Jonatan Söderström, VG247 offers tidbits on the developer's positions on piracy and making games "just for money." Recently made headlines when he offered support to players who had pirated his game over on Pirate's Bay.

First he talks about why he makes games:

Last week we wrote a story about how the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) had named Stroz Friedberg to be its "impartial and independent technology expert" to review claims of copyright infringement as part of the new "Six Strikes" enforcement rules. The "Six Strikes" system was agreed upon by the MPAA, RIAA, and five major ISPs but one of the core tenets was that it would have an independent body to investigate the validity of claims of copyright infringement against file-sharers.

Jonatan Soderstrom, one of the co-creators of the popular indie PC game Hotline Miami, apparently noticed a thread over on The Pirate Bay complaining about bugs in his game. So what does he do? He joins in and promises a patch!. Yes, Soderstrom offers support even to people who pirated his game. From the thread (uncovered by PC Gamer):

Until now France's Hadopi system only took claims from the recording and movie industry, but apparently a new partner is about to join in on the action. According to French publication PCInpact (by way of TorrentFreak), next year France's Hadopi agency will get strong backing from the video game industry in the country.

Having found victory in getting The Pirate Bay blocked in the United Kingdom, BPI (the trade and lobby group representing the music industry in the UK) is looking to get even more Torrent sites blocked in the region. According to the BBC, six UK ISPs including BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk, received letters from the BPI asking them to block three torrent sites: Kickass Torrents, H33t and Fenopy.

41-year-old Justin Success Brooks of the United Kingdom found out the hard way that it's not a good idea to mess with the folks at Nintendo. He has been charged with the "fraudulent sale of counterfeit Nintendo games," according to a report in the Croydon Guardian. Brooks was caught red-handed in an investigation conducted by Nintendo and the UK Interactive Entertainment association.

A Federal Judge has sentenced 36-year old Sang Jin Kim to 40 months in prison and ordered him to forfeit more than $400,000 in assets. Prosecutors charged Kim with criminal copyright infringement in November of 2011 and seized the domains 82movie.com and 007disk.com. Prosecutors claimed that Kim ran an online piracy empire through his Washington-based company World Multimedia Group Inc. The sites offered pirated versions of popular movies, Korean TV shows, software and video games, according to prosecutors.

Illegal file-sharers beware: there's a new sheriff in town and its name is whoever your service provider happens to be... AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and other Internet service providers are about to launch a copyright alert system to curtail illegal peer-to-peer file sharing of copyrighted material "over the next several weeks," according to Jill Lesser, the executive director of the Center for Copyright Information.

Over the weekend pictures and forum threads started to illustrate that players had somehow gotten their hands on early copies of Halo 4 - which isn't set for release until November 6th. Microsoft was obviously not very pleased with this news and promised that it would conduct an investigation into the early leaks of the game and would do so in conjunction with law enforcement.

Two weeks ago New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security revealed that the government had illegally spied on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. Specifically he said in his report that the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) carried out illegal surveillance on Dotcom, because the agency is only allowed to carry out that kind of action against foreign targets. When the news became public, New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key apologized to Dotcom.

After the parties involved in the Megaupload case failed on multiple occasions to negotiate some way to relinquish legitimate and legal data to Megaupload users left in the lurch, a Federal judge has agreed to hold a hearing on the matter. The one caveat is that the parties involved must come up with a format and the judge has not set a definitive date. Still it's forward motion in a situation that has been stalled by trade groups like the MPAA and the U.S. government.

Last year the movie industry anti-piracy group ACAPOR delivered boxes full of IP-addresses that they alleged had engaged in illegal file-sharing to the Attorney General’s Office of Portugal. The group wanted the AG's office to act against these 2,000 alleged pirates, saying that they were doing anything they could to "alert the government to the very serious situation in the entertainment industry." Fast-forward to the present day and the AG has a decision that the group is not too pleased with..

The latest firmware update to Nintendo's 3DS hand-held gaming system has blocked the use of flash carts on the system, according to this Destructoid report. A firmware update, which was released last week for Nintendo's handheld has blocked flash carts on the system, according to a forum post on a device manufacturer's website.

On Monday New Zealand prime minister John Key revealed that he has ordered an investigation into what he calls "unlawful interception of certain individuals by the Government Communications Security Bureau" related to illegal bugging of Kim Dotcom. Some of that surveillance led to Kim Dotcom’s arrest in January. The investigation throws another monkey wrench in the U.S. government's attempt to extradite the Megaupload file-sharing site to face various charges.

Manchester is the "piracy capitol" of the United Kingdom, according to a new study released exclusively by the BBC. The research found that there were more illegal downloads per person in that city than any other in the country. Manchester was followed by Nottingham and Southampton.

The data comes from monitoring service Musicmetric, who came to the conclusion that UK users illegally shared over 40 million albums and singles in the first half of this year.

Watch the full BBC report to your left.

The battle over returning legitimate files and data stored on Megaupload's servers has hit a brick wall leaving anyone who made the mistake of storing important data there uncertain about whether they will ever get it back. Megaupload’s 1103 servers are gathering dust at Carpathia Hosting in the United States and Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken tells TorrentFreak that, despite best efforts, efforts are stalled.

It looks like it might be hard for rights holders in various entertainment industries to sue individuals who have open Wi-Fi networks for copyright infringement done by guests, if the following court case is any indication. A California man whose open network was allegedly used to download a copyrighted video cannot be sued, according to a ruling by a federal judge.

The complaint filed in April of this year alleged that Hatfield was negligent because he didn't secure his network, and therefore liable.

Google has completely removed the infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay from its autocomplete results, meaning that users who type the search in will have to implicitly type "The Pirate Bay" without any suggestions from Google.

The change is meant to quell complaints from rightsholders who have long held that Google is an accomplice in directing users to domains strongly associated with illegal filesharing and copyright infringement. Google began the process of suppressing and censoring links to pirated material in its instant and auto-complete tools last year.

While the agency running Hadopi (the three-strikes copyright infringement enforcement system that disconnects repeat offenders from the Internet) is defending itself in the face of threats to drastically cut its funding by the French government, some new data shows that Hadopi produces plenty of notices but very few disconnections or court cases. While we have no idea how much it costs to send out millions of notices, the system seems to be effective in making people stop sharing illegal files - even if it might be only temporary.

You may remember that the newly elected French president said recently that it might not fund the country's Hadopi agency. Hadopi, in case you'd forgotten is a copyright protection enforcement regime that uses a "three-strikes" policy that disconnects repeat offenders from the internet. President Francois Hollande hinted during his campaign that he might reform the agency to make it less repressive and more cooperative. Later in August he said that he would be scaling back funding for it. Now Hadopi is fighting back against the notion of having its resources clipped.

While the three-strikes-rule may be considered a good idea by most rightsholders, ISP's say that they end up paying the lion's share of the costs associated with such systems. According to this TorrentFreak report, ISPs in New Zealand claim that they end up paying upwards of 76 percent of the costs.

The Cambodian government will cooperate in the deportation of Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, who was arrested in the country last week for not showing up to serve his jail sentence for copyright infringement in Sweden.

At the beginning of this year as law enforcement agencies in New Zealand, the U.S., and Hong Kong worked together to shut down Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's file-sharing empire, it seized just about every asset the charismatic NZ resident owned - including all of his money. This naturally made it tough for Dotcom to pay his legal fees.

But a judgment today by the High Court in Auckland, New Zealand will give Dotcom some relief.

The FBI is cracking down on several sites this week that it says have engaged in facilitating Android app piracy. The Department of Justice has seized and locked down the applanet.net, appbucket.net, and snappzmarket.com domains and placed a warning on the sites in question.