ElcomSoft is a privately owned software company headquartered in Moscow, Russia. Since its establishment in 1990, the company has been working on computer security programs, with the main focus on password and system recovery software.
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a 2003 science fiction book, the first novel by Canadian author and digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow. Concurrent with its publication by Tor Books, Doctorow released the entire text of the novel under a Creative Commons noncommercial license on his website, allowing the whole text of the book to be freely read and distributed without needing any further permission from him or his publisher.
Tor Books is the primary imprint of Tor Publishing Group, a publishing company based in New York City. It primarily publishes science fiction and fantasy titles.
isoHunt was an online torrent files index and repository, where visitors could browse, search, download or upload torrents of various digital content of mostly entertainment nature. The website was taken down in October 2013 as a result of a legal action from the MPAA; by the end of October 2013 however, two sites with content presumably mirrored from isohunt.com were reported in media. One of them – isohunt.to – became a de facto replacement of the original site. It is not associated in any way with the old staff or owners of the site, and is to be understood as a separate continuation.
Alice Taylor is a British entrepreneur. She is founder of MakieLab, an "'entertainment playspace for young people' that will invite users to download and print 3D dolls and accessories."
Little Brother is a novel by Cory Doctorow, published by Tor Books. It was released on April 29, 2008. The novel is about four teenagers in San Francisco who, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and BART system, defend themselves against the Department of Homeland Security's attacks on the Bill of Rights. The novel is available for free on the author's website under a Creative Commons license, keeping it accessible and remixable to all.
Andrew "bunnie" Huang is an American researcher and hacker, who holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering from MIT and is the author of the freely available 2003 book Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering. As of 2012 he resides in Singapore. Huang is a member of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, and a resident advisor and mentor to hardware startups at HAX, an early stage hardware accelerator and venture capital firm.
Ray Gun Revival (RGR) was a webzine of space opera and golden age science fiction. The first issue was published in July 2006. Founded by Johne Cook, L. S. King, and Paul Christian Glenn, who call themselves "Overlords", RGR was inspired in part by the Deep Magic PDF e-zine. Some of the same contributors who worked with Deep Magic now work with RGR. It features short stories and serials, and is known for its lavish, science-fiction-themed cover art.
Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) such as access control technologies can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies govern the use, modification, and distribution of copyrighted works, as well as systems that enforce these policies within devices.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of online services for copyright infringement by their users.
TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard is a 2013 Swedish documentary film directed and produced by Simon Klose. It focuses on the lives of the three founders of The Pirate Bay – Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm – and the Pirate Bay trial. Filming began sometime in 2008, and concluded on 28 February 2012.
Noisebridge is an anarchistic hackerspace located in San Francisco, inspired by European hackerspaces Metalab and c-base in Berlin. It is a registered non-profit California corporation, with IRS 501(c)(3) charitable status. It describes itself as "a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and learning," and outside of its headquarters forms a wider community around the world. It was organized in 2007 and has had permanent facilities since 2008.
KickassTorrents was a website that provided a directory for torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It was founded in 2008 and by November 2014, KAT became the most visited BitTorrent directory in the world, overtaking The Pirate Bay, according to the site's Alexa ranking. KAT went offline on 20 July 2016 when the domain was seized by the U.S. government. The site's proxy servers were shut down by its staff at the same time.
Pirate Cinema is a novel by Cory Doctorow. It was released in October 2012. The novel is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license and is available free on the author's website.
The Rapture of the Nerds is a 2012 novel by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. It was released on September 4, 2012 through Tor Books and as an ebook, DRM free, under the CC BY-NC-ND. The book can also be downloaded for free.
Julia Schramm is a German politician and publicist. From April to October 2012, she was a member of the federal executive of the Pirate Party. She left the party in 2014 and joined the Left in 2016.
Darryl Cunningham is a British author and cartoonist who has written the books Science Tales, Psychiatric Tales, The Age of Selfishness and Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful.
ZeroNet is a decentralized web-like network of peer-to-peer users, created by Tamas Kocsis in 2015, programming for the network was based in Budapest, Hungary; is built in Python; and is fully open source. Instead of having an IP address, sites are identified by a public key. The private key allows the owner of a site to sign and publish changes, which propagate through the network. Sites can be accessed through an ordinary web browser when using the ZeroNet application, which acts as a local webhost for such pages. In addition to using bitcoin cryptography, ZeroNet uses trackers from the BitTorrent network to negotiate connections between peers. ZeroNet is not anonymous by default, but it supports routing traffic through the Tor network.
YouTube copyright strike is a copyright policing practice used by YouTube for the purpose of managing copyright infringement and complying with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the basis for the design of the YouTube copyright strike system. For YouTube to retain DMCA safe harbor protection, it must respond to copyright infringement claims with a notice and take down process. YouTube's own practice is to issue a "YouTube copyright strike" on the user accused of copyright infringement. When a YouTube user gets hit with a copyright strike, they will be required to watch a warning video about the rules of copyright and take trivia questions about the danger of copyright. When a YouTube user has three copyright strikes, YouTube terminates that user's YouTube channel, including any associated channels that the user have, removes all of their videos from that user's YouTube channel, and prohibits that user from creating another YouTube channel.
