Edward Snowden’s personal email provider Lavabit has shuttered its email service, active immediately. Instead of complying with government orders, the email service provider ended all email service on Thursday and is continuing the fight in appeals court. Further, the company is under federal gag orders, presumably from US secret courts, to remain silent on the details.

Here is the posted message from Lavabit’s CEO Ladar Levison detailing the decision:

My Fellow Users,

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on—the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests. Read more

Norwegian research company Ipsos has released a new report, which has found that digital piracy is on the decline. The report looked at the illegal downloading of music, movies and TV shows from 2008 to 2012, and found a significant decrease in activity.

According to the report, in 2008 around 1.2 billion songs were illegally shared but by 2012 that number was down to 210 million. The report also found that in 2008 125 million movies and 135 million TV shows were copied without permission. Those figures had dropped to 65 million movies and 55 million TV shows by 2012.

The report suggests that this decline is not about stricter laws against piracy, but is a result of media companies offering consumers affordable ways to pay for content. For instance, the report found that 47% of respondents, about 1.7 million people, use music streaming services like Spotify and Wimp. Remarkably, 54% of these people are premium members, paying for ad-free access. (Via TorrentFreak).

The HBO adaptation of George RR Martin‘s Game of Thrones series has been named the Most Pirated TV Show of the Season by TorrentFreak.

The website counted an estimated 5,200,000 downloads per single episode on public BitTorrent trackers, compared to the 5,500,000 estimated viewers for an episode on HBO. The real piracy numbers are hard to calculate as online storage lockers and other services are also used by pirates. Here’s more from TorrentFreak:

The achievement comes as no surprise since the show has broken two piracy records in a few weeks …. many of the people connected to the show saw it as a compliment rather than a major threat that needs to be dealt with. The most outspoken position was taken by David Petrarca, the show’s director, who noted that unauthorized downloads actually do more good than harm.

Hacking is undoubtedly illegal for civilians, but how does it stack up against rape? According the highly public Steubenville rape case, “hacktivists” can actually get more jail time than rapists. By hacking into social media accounts to obtain tweets, videos, and Instagram photos, Anonymous hacktivist Deric Lostutter could face up to 10 years in federal prison. Since the convicted rapists were minors they will hardly face their maximum sentencing of two years. Witnesses and those who covered up the crime will not be facing any jail time.

Given the barrage of controversy from the NSA, Wikileaks, and Anonymous, what kind of message is the judicial system sending to the American Public? Hacking is legal so long as it’s government sanctioned, but if it’s not you’re better off raping?

A group of software pirates in China have created a fake iOS app store online. The store is called KuaiYong.

It was previously available as a Windows app that let users install pirated software on an iPhone or an iPad without jailbreaking it. Now it is a full fledged website.

TechinAsia has the story: “The 7659 ‘store’ is full of pirated iOS apps and games available for free. While the content is nothing new – it was previously embedded in the Kuaiyong PC app – it makes the renegade startup more accessible to potential new users who can browse the available apps in their web browser. If you choose to download one of the iOS apps or games from the 7659 site, it actually downloads the Kuaiyong PC app if you don’t have it already.”

Making content available digitally and participating in anti-piracy policy is the best way to fight back against illegal downloading which despite rumors, does harm sales. This is according to Michael D. Smith, professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University.

In a presentation at the Digital Book World Conference in New York today, Smith argued against three myths that he said permeate the discussion on illegal downloading. The first is that piracy doesn’t harm sales, which he said is not true. “Piracy harms sales,” he said, claiming that while 3 studies have been published suggesting that piracy doesn’t hurt sales, 25 others have shown that piracy is bad for sales. ”There are options to use legitimate distribution channels to convince people who have stolen your content to buy it,” he added.

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Not happy with a Columbia University study that found that people who download music illegally buy more music than other consumers, the RIAA hired NPD Group to counter these findings.

The NPD Group found that while people who share music files do tend to buy more music than others, it is not safe to conclude that illegal downloading leads to music sales. The RIAA explains on its blog: “Some commentary has misleadingly reported that people who use P2P services like BitTorrent buy more music than non-users, implying that there’s some sort of causation.  In reality, the comparison is unfair – what it’s comparing is people who are interested in music with people who might not be interested at all.”

Here is more of the analysis from the NPD Group: “The average P2P user spent $90 per capita on music in 2004- now they spend $42 (CDs, downloads, subscriptions). This was during the same period when the number of files illegally downloaded per capita was rising.

Still, other studies and content creators argue that free content leads to an increase in digital sales. What do you think? (Via Torrent Freak).

Traffic to Bit Torrent sites was up 40 percent in North America during the first half of this year,  according to a new report from Sandvine. The report found that upstream to Bit Torrent sites represents 36.8 percent of Web traffic. To put this in perspective, Skype and NetFlix combined represent a little more than 10 percent of upstream traffic.

However the “Global Internet Phenomena Report 2H 2012“ report points out, “the application continues to exhibit a steady downward trend in overall traffic share, declining to 10.31% of total peak traffic from being 11.30% a half a year ago.” Still app developers should be concerned about traffic to Bit Torrent sites, as the distribution of illegal copies of copyrighted apps can be a problem on these sites. (In fact, in 2012 the Department of Justice launched its first investigation into app piracy.) Read more

Infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay has moved its digital activities into a cloud-based model. They announced the news with a surreal blog post.

You can read the site’s complete post below, but here’s an excerpt: “Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours.”

TorrentFreak has more about the mechanics of the move. Can The Pirate Bay avoid legal challenges by hosting piracy in the cloud?

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Nintendo’s next gaming console is still a couple months away from release, but gamers’ joy at the sophisticated tech and gameplay is already being tempered by bad news.

Nintendo has confirmed the accuracy of a leaked internal doc. Just like on past Nintendo gaming consoles, the Wii U will have region locks which will block players from buying games sold in other parts and playing them on Wii U consoles sold in the US. Read more