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The BBC is reporting that a UK campaign aimed to crack down on game piracy is targetting completely innocent people.

Citing a story in Which? Computing magazine, the BBC reports that Atari had accused an elderly couple from Scotland, Gill and Ken Murdoch, who disputed the claim saying they had never played a video game in their lives. The accusations were apparently based on an analysis of IP addresses and submitted by law firm Davenport Lyons, which was hired by Atari and other game firms to start prosecuting illegal file-sharers. In the case of the Murdochs, a letter was sent giving them the chance to pay £500 ($819) compensation or face a court case.

The couple told Which magazine:

“We do not have, and have never had, any computer game or sharing software. We did not even know what ‘peer to peer’ was until we received the letter.”

Apparently, they’re not the only ones either. The BBC spoke with Michael Coyle, an intellectual property solicitor with law firm Lawdit, who claimed more and more people are being wrongly identified as illegal file-sharers. He is already pursuing 70 cases of people who claim to be wrongly accused of piracy and says more are coming.

Most likely, this is a result of a strategy Pirate Bay uses to lead investigators up a virtual garden path. What they do is insert random IP addresses of users, some of who may not even know what file sharing is, to the list of people downloading files.

Clever enough, but hopefully this won’t lead to actual prosecutions of innocent people.

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Microsoft has announced today that they will be announcing MS Office for the web late next year; seriously, it is an announcement for an announcement! Those kinds of things used to be called vapor, intended to freeze the market, but somehow my rudimentary Physics knowledge precludes me from accepting vapor-induced-freeze, so that can’t possibly be it.

(Sorry! We do respect Microsoft a lot, but I could not resist that one. A more “serious” take by my colleague Rodrigo appears below!)

It’s getting kind of lonely out here as an independent blogging startup. In May Ars Technica was picked up by Wired. Today Kara Swisher and Marshall Kirkpatrick report that blog network Paid Content’s parent company ContentNext Media is being acquired by The Guardian Group for $30 million or more, including earnout.

Paid Content is led by CEO Nathan Richardson, and was founded in 2002 by former journalist Rafat Ali. The company operates a number of blogs and holds regular events.

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The Pirate Bay may get all the headlines, but BitTorrent directory Mininova continues to grow. Stats from the site above (some are public, some via a non-published link) show the site is quickly racing towards 5 billion downloads after having only passed 4 billion February 18.

On comparison, Mininova comes out ahead on traffic. The Pirate Bay doesn’t offer a download figure, only concurrent users, with the site having passed the 10 million user mark in January. Both Alexa and comScore rank Mininova in front of The Pirate Bay, Alexa ranks The Pirate Bay at 101 to Minivova’s 52. comScore records over 30 million monthly page views for Mininova to Pirate Bay’s 24 million.

The break down of what is being downloaded is interesting. Video (movies and TV) make up 60% of the downloads on Mininova vs 19.55% for music. TV Shows are the most popular category at 38.7%; if we presume the music industry is broken based on illegal downloading, wouldn’t the demand for TV shows also demonstrate that the TV business is in trouble as well, even as services like Hulu try to offer a legal alternative?

One thing that can be taken away from these stats: that BitTorrent isn’t going away, its general usage and acceptance in the community is accelerating despite attempts by the RIAA and others to harass users.

(thanks to Ashley Smith for the tip)

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“Machine Listening” is the idea that computers can be programmed to interpret audio signals the same way humans do. This means that they can tell when a song belongs to the blues genre rather than techno. And they can detect musical characteristics like tempos, transition types, and harmonies.

The technology has some obvious practical uses. It could be used to compile collections of music with the same sound or with similarities to the music someone already knows they like. Applications could also be designed to create the perfect mixtapes, with songs picked and ordered in just the right ways.

The Echo Nest is a company that’s bringing machine listening to Web 2.0. It was founded by two MIT PhD students and is supported by a government grant. Today, the company releases the first of several “Musical Brain” APIs intended to improve three main aspects of music-related web services: search, recommendations, and interactivity.

The first API, which focuses on signature analysis and is being released through Mashery, can be used to retrieve an XML file with information about a particular song. A proof of concept website called This is my jam has been set up to demonstrate its capabilities. Load up a few of your favorite artists and it will automatically arrange songs from them in an order deemed most suitable given their audio characteristics.

The Echo Nest will lend all of its APIs to non-commercial projects for free, but it will charge commercial sites with a usage fee. The company plans on showcasing a website for each of its APIs, but it doesn’t currently have any plans to create a consumer destination of its own with the tech.

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A search for “pirate bay” on Yahoo no longer turns up a link to the controversial BitTorrent search engine. It appears that Yahoo has decided to filter the site from its search results. Clear references to the site appear in Yahoo’s drop-down search assistant, but when you click on those, you still don’t get the right result. (Update: At least this is my experience searching from New York City. Some readers in different locations are reporting in comments that the site comes up for them in Yahoo searches. If Yahoo would like to clear this up, they’ve got my e-mail).

Is Yahoo complying with a legal request from the media companies trying to shut down the Pirate Bay, or is its search engine just getting worse?

Google, Ask, and Windows Live Search had no trouble finding the Pirate Bay as their first result for the same term. But maybe their lawyers are taking the day off.

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Nearly two years after Swedish police raided the offices of The Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent search engine, prosecutors in that country are finally ready to bring the site’s founders to court. But the Pirate Bay founders don’t seem particularly worried. They are not even hiring their own lawyers. Instead, they are letting the Swedish government pay their legal fees (although, maybe that’s teh way the legal system works there). The WSJ has the details (no subscription required for this one). Excerpt:

Based on evidence collected in a 2006 raid on the offices of The Pirate Bay, Swedish prosecutors say that by the end of January they expect to charge the individuals who operate the file-sharing service with conspiracy to breach copyrights.

The Pirate Bay’s operators say they are expecting the charges and will prepare their defense with the aid of government-funded lawyers for a trial later this year. “We’re not worried,” says Fredrik Neij, a Pirate Bay co-founder. “We think the law is on our side.”

The Pirate Bay’s operators say they have been followed in recent weeks by camera-toting private detectives in foreign-registered cars. In September, they filed a police complaint claiming that MediaDefender, a U.S. counterpiracy company, had been hired by several Hollywood studios and music companies to hack into their site and shut it down.

MediaDefender, which itself was hacked by a shadowy group last year, denies the accusation. “We’re a reputable public company,” says Chief Executive Randy Saaf. “We’re not going to be doing hacking. That’s silly.”

Oh yeah, that would never happen. Private investigators working for big corporations would never do something like that. But wasn’t MediaDefender the name of a third-rate super hero who couldn’t get into the Hall of Justice?

The Pirate Bay

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Update: Erick is liveblogging the event.

The speculation over Amazon’s new ebook gadget, called the Kindle, ends on Monday afternoon during a special Amazon press conference in New York. Newsweek’s Steven Levy claims to have had the device for weeks and wrote a glowing seven page cover story review of the Kindle this weekend. He finds no fault with the device (every journalist who had the iPhone in their hands prior to launch thought that device was pretty perfect, too).

The Kindle isn’t the most elegant looking gadget ever created (in fact it looks like it came out of the 70’s), but it packs an impressive list of features and could finally bring ebooks mainstream. That’s something Sony couldn’t accomplish with its much more elegant Sony Reader.

The reason Sony failed? Perhaps because their device requires syncing with a computer to download content. That’s the Kindle’s killer feature - cellular and (probably) wireless internet access that will let users download content directly to the device from the Internet. And the cellular connectivity, which generally costs $60 or more per month, will be included with the device for free says a source close to the company.

Kindle users will also be able to browse the web, and Amazon is offering access to some blogs for a monthly subscription fee (some bloggers are wondering why Amazon is charging for this).

The Kindle will cost $100 more than the $300 it takes to get a Sony Reader. It uses the same screen technology - E Ink - as the Sony Reader. that means the display will be viewable in full sunlight and uses very little power.

Amazon isn’t supporting the industry’s open standard around eBooks. Instead they are using their own proprietary format from Mobipocket, a company they acquired in 2005.

More details will emerge tomorrow (and lots and lots of photos) during the press conference. Erick will be live blogging the event.

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Can't see the video? Click here

Advertising has gotten a lot more complicated since the early days of the internet. There are hundreds of ad networks out there. With targeting being the name of the game, efficiently allocating your ad space to visitors is nearly impossible. In response, automated ad optimization engines have started up to help manage these advertising complexities. Using one seems like a no-brainer for publishers concerned about making the most of their advertising. Advertising rates change too quickly over time and the complexity of serving the right ads to your different demographics is simply too hard to handle by hand, particularly on websites with large footprints.

There are several engines out there already, including YieldBuild and The Rubicon Project. Now TechCrunch 40 finalist Pubmatic is hosting a contest to draw more publishers to their platform. Every month, the two publishers who see the greatest gains using Pubmatic will receive thousands in free advertising on top “web 2.0 web sites” (i.e. blogs). The amount is still unknown because they are still finalizing the sites they are advertising on. You can sign up for the program here.

PubMatic’s ad optimization engine is similar to YieldBuild and the Rubicon project. Unlike these earlier two, Pubmatic is actually live with 1,300 sites and open to anyone else. The engine serves as a meta ad server that serves the highest revenue ad network for each visitor given the time, geographic, demographic, and layout aspects of your site. It currently supports ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Value Click. They also provide them with a central dashboard to track all their ad networks and ad configurations. Below you’ll find more information from their TechCrunch 40 video.

Pubmatic has already picked the November winners WinCustomize and BikerOrNot, which they claim have seen over 100% increases in their ad revenue since using PubMatic. YeildBuild and The Rubicon Project have boasted similar increases for their publishers. To a degree, it all just depends on how poorly monetized your site was to start. However, Pubmatic is looking for sensible successes from fairly well trafficked sites and will double check your previous monetization metrics to ensure the increase in revenue is real.

PubMatic

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Rubicon Project

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The New York Times is reporting that both Amazon and Google are entering the eBook business this year, joining Sony and others who already have products (the image to the right is Sony’s Reader).

The new Amazon product and service will be called The Kindle and will compete directly with Sony. Google will begin charging users to read the full text of some of the books they have indexed.

Amazon: The Kindle

The Kindle will be a device to read books - black and white screen, internet connectivity via EVDO and a keyboard to take notes and surf the web. The device, which will cost $400-$500, will interact with an ebook service run by Amazon.

The fact that the device can access books without being separately connected to a computer will be a big selling point over Sony Reader, which sells for $300. The Kindle will also be able to surf the web and users will also be able to read newspapers, magazines, etc.

I’ve had a chance to test the Sony Reader on a number of occasions and found it to be a great way to read books, although the content selection wasn’t great. The Kindle will also use E Ink technology for displaying content. It’s great for reading text in all light conditions but does not display video or other animation.

Amazon isn’t supporting the industry’s open standard around eBooks. Instead they are using their own proprietary format from Mobipocket, a company they acquired in 2005

Like the iPod, the key driver of sales of the device won’t be the depth of content available on the associated service, but the availability of pirated, free content on BitTorrent and other P2P networks. eBooks are coming, but they’re not here yet.

Google

Google isn’t getting into the device business. Instead, they will start charging users to view some full text books that they’ve indexed, although this is separate from the Google Book Search Library Project. No word on whether Google is sharing revenue with publishers.

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A link on the front page of Digg means tens of thousands of visitors to your site, so it’s no surprise that people are setting up systems to game it. The newest attempt is called Spike the Vote. It’s easy to wag your finger at them and say “shame on you,” but Digg is going to have to deal with threats like this if the content on its front page is going to mean anything.

You may remember a site called User/Submitter, profiled at Read/Write Web earlier this month, that lets site publishers pay the service and other users for Diggs. That service wasn’t able to prevent users from getting their accounts disabled and it shut down a few weeks ago. It attempted to reopen last week, but is still not accepting new URL submissions. Humorously, User/Submitter could be seriously undercut by Spike the Vote if both sites end up going to market.

Digg gamers often say that they are only trying to respond to the flaws in Digg - to urge the site to shore up its shortcomings. The more strident those arguments are from people building systems to profit from cheating sites like Digg - the harder they are to take seriously. Digg has its problems but it’s hard to imagine that people like this would prefer those problems be solved instead of persisting so they can profit

Spike the Vote claims to be “a bulletproof way to cheat Digg.” Instead of payment changing hands, users will submit their URLs to the system and everyone participating will receive a list of stories to Digg. 80% of those stories will be randomly selected from Digg, the other 20% will be the stories submitted for gaming by Spike the Vote users. This is intended as a way to ensure anonymity for participants.

Spike the Vote is accepting account requests and says it will launch once there are 1000 registered users. After registering for an account the site says “to help speed up the process, please blog about how to rig Digg. Thank you.” That’s certainly not what I intend to do.

There’s obviously money in social media - so it’s only to be expected that people will set aside concerns of integrity and fairness in order to get some of that money. From the now venture funded PayPerPost to these even more questionable ways to cheat Digg to the Edelman/Walmart blog with insufficient disclosure widely discussed last week - don’t expect to see this stuff come to an end any time soon. We can only hope that the general public will acknowledge the difference between the shady and legitimate sides of the new economy as it spreads through society at large. The lines aren’t always clear, but I like Digg and don’t want to see it over run with paid and scammed stories.

Will Spike the Vote take off, take down Digg or suffer the apparent fate of User/Submitter? It’s hard to say, I guess we’ll have to see once the site gets 1000 registered users.

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Tags: Techcrunch, Web2.0, Digg, SpikeTheVote, User/Submitter, cheating, gaming