Bram van der Kolk, the lead programmer at MegaUpload, is out on bail today. The 29-year-old had a hearing in the North Shore District Court before Judge Pippa Sinclair, who sorted out what the bail conditions should be before his release.

U.S. Government Prosecutor Anne Toohey argued that der Kolk would try to set up a MegaUpload replacement as soon as he was out of jail. His lawyer, Guy Foley, called the prosecution's argument ridiculous because he would remain under heavy FBI surveillance.

Indie developer Jeff Vogel (whose Spiderweb Software studio recently released Avadon: The Black Fortress) writes an interesting article for GamaSutra today explaining his philosophy on the most effective method for dealing with piracy. The thrust of his argument is that players will pay for easy-to-pirate games because it makes them feel good about supporting a developer.

According to TorrentFreak one file-sharing site isn't going to wait around to be shut down by some government somewhere. Instead its founder is saying goodbye with a new welcome message on the site:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked all parties involved in the MegaUpload criminal case to halt any plans to delete or otherwise dispose of data hosted on severs once leased by file-hosting services. With its assets frozen and its operators in jail, MegaUpload is unable to pay for storage of the data.

The Pirate Bay founders are going to jail, after failing to get an appeal hearing before a Swedish court. Sweden’s Supreme Court announced this morning that it will not hear an appeal by The Pirate Bay’s founders Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström. That means that fines and jail time these men faced from lower courts in the country will be upheld.

Is the entertainment industry really losing all kinds of money due to the illicit practice of downloading copyrighted material? Not so much, notes a paper called "The Sky is Rising" (PDF).

Those who have data on MegaUpload and were concerned that it might get deleted on Thursday by the companies that facilitate the site's storage get some good news this morning - the data has been given a slight extension. And on a related note, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has begun a campaign this week to get "innocent users" of MegaUpload’s service to get in touch with them to explore possible legal measures for retrieving their data. MegaUpload’s online storage service was shut down by U.S. law enforcement earlier this month.

While some publishers and developers spend a lot of time railing against the evils of file-sharing and piracy, Rovio is not one of those companies. The Angry Birds creator says that piracy can actually bring new business to companies.

Speaking at the Midem conference in Cannes, Rovio Mobile CEO Mikael Hed said that piracy can actually can create good results.

Two prominent internet service providers in the Netherlands say that they will not block customer access to the infamous The Pirate Bay web site based on the threats of an anti-piracy group. Two weeks ago the Hollywood backed anti-piracy outfit BREIN won a major victory when the Court of The Hague ruled that Ziggo and XS4ALL have to block access to The Pirate Bay. The two companies are the largest ISPs in the Netherlands.

Federal prosecutors have told the Associated Press that data from MegaUpload could be deleted as soon as Thursday, according to a report in CBS. This is particularly bad news for anyone that was using the service to back up files. Contrary to popular belief MegaUpload was used for other things besides sharing illegal files...

The internet certainly isn’t wanting for videos that focus on the particulars of why legislation like SOPA and PIPA are unmitigated piles of horse dung.  Heck, this week’s Extra Credits episode is just such a video.

But if you’d like to see something a little different, check out the latest Game OverThinker episode in which Bob Chipman, better known as MovieBob over at The Escapist, forecasts what our post-SOPA futures might look like.

Paradox Entertainment CEO and co-owner Fred Wester thinks that digital rights management schemes are a waste of money, a hassle to users, and usually implemented to appease a CEO or Board of directors that thinks it somehow stops piracy.

Hackers under auspices of the AntiSec group claimed responsibility for hacking OnGuardOnline.gov, the U.S. federal government's online security website, in protest of various internet-related legislation including ACTA, SOPA and PIPA. OnGuardOnline.gov is managed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in cooperation with 14 other agencies.

Story time!

Last month, musician Dan Bull rapped his thoughts about SOPA in a YouTube video called SOPA Cabana (you should watch it.  It’s really well done).  This video went viral and racked up over a million views.  As it happens, it was through this video that most people discovered Dan’s second album, Face, which he offered for free on Megaupload.

Yeah, I think you see where this is going.

An attack on multiple government web sites in Poland by hacktivist group Anonymous has made the Polish government rethink its position on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the negotiated-in-secret anti-piracy framework. (ACTA) is a treaty that would institute international standards regarding intellectual property protection enforcement. In October of last year the U.S., Japan, Australia, Canada, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea agreed to move forward with the proposal during a meeting in Tokyo.

PIPA’s been having a rough day.

After yesterday’s protest, scores of congressmembers have withdrawn their support for the bill, its sponsor is considering editing out the search engine provisions, and now, according to Politico’s unnamed sources, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (pictured) “won't whip Democratic votes” for the much-maligned bill.

Politico reports that Protect IP Act (PIPA) lead sponsor Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) are in discussions to remove the search engine provisions from the bill. Leahy is reportedly working with the Arizona Senator to hammer out a "manager’s amendment" prior to the bill's floor vote scheduled for next Tuesday. A Leahy spokeswoman confirmed with Politico that the two senators have "authorized their staffs to discuss a manager’s amendment."

There has been plenty of talk on how bad bills like SOPA and PIPA are, but no discussion about what can be done about piracy. Piracy is a real problem - but the breadth and depth of that problem has never been accurately documented by the entertainment industry, which use estimates based on lost sales as the basis for their claims.

CD Projekt, the oft-admired developer and publisher known for The Witcher series and its cool stance on offering DRM-free products to its customers, fell from the community's grace in December. A story surfaced that the company was using a copyright trolling law firm in Germany to send demand letters to people who had been identified as having illegally downloaded The Witcher 2. The company said at the time that it did this because, while it was all for offering its products without copyright protection, it did not support its games being pirated.

As we mentioned in an earlier story, Marcus Persson has a pretty pragmatic view of piracy, and a recent tweet confirms that attitude. When a Twitter follower asked the developer of Minecraft if he could get a free account to the game instead of resorting to piracy, Notch told him to simply pirate it. From Twitter: 

Those who use jailbroken iPhones and enjoy pirating software are in for a rude awakening as Apple uses the DMCA to take out a frequently used service - Apptrackr. According to Apptrackr developer "Dissident," Apple has sent what he calls "huge takedown notices" to cut off access to pirated apps found through the software. Apptrackr has decided to move the physical location of its servers outside the United States to get around Apple's legal maneuvers and is also employing a form of redirection to avoid "direct" links to infringing content.

Another day, another group of government officials pushing anti-piracy laws while they are blissfully unaware that their staffers are downloading stolen games, movies and other forms of entertainment. This time out it's the Canadian Conservative majority government. Recently the ruling party in Canada introduced the Canadian Copyright Modernization Act Bill C-11, which would criminalize the act of software circumventing - including the making available to the public software or techniques used to circumvent digital rights management software locks.

TorrentFreak released its annual tally of the most pirated games of the year via BitTorrent. The numbers are not all that shocking. Crysis 2 was named the most pirated game of 2011 on the PC platform, beating out the likes of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 with 3,650,000 and 3,510,000 downloads respectively. Interest among pirates in the Xbox 360 version of Crysis 2 was relatively low, with the game not even registering in the top five.

Last month the American Assembly, a non-partisan public policy forum associated with Columbia University, released a paper titled "Copyright Infringement and Enforcement in the US." That paper came to the conclusion that 15 percent of U.S. file-sharers hide their IP-addresses using proxies and virtual private networks. Researchers, who conducted 2,303 telephone interviews, also found that roughly half of all adults could be branded as pirates.

While lawmakers are arguing over SOPA and Protect IP - two bills that could change the way the Internet works in order to fight piracy - it seems that many staffers on Capitol Hill are spending a lot of time downloading movies, TV shows, music, games and books via BitTorrent. According to a report from TorrentFreak over 800 IP's that originate from Capitol Hill are at the BitTorrent trough, even as they write laws against illegal downloading and file-sharing.

TorrentFreak has released its list of the most used search terms on BitTorrent in 2011. The results might surprise some - particularly rights holders who see most file-sharers as dirty, unwashed masses who spend all day stealing. The list, which offers the top 50 most used search terms, has three choices at the top spot that don't even refer to a copyrighted work. 

The Dutch Parliament has come to the conclusion (once again) that downloading movies and music for personal use should be considered fair use and not be punishable by law. Despite this, some in the current government have been trying to find a solution to deal with piracy problems and have pushed for a new bill to make it unlawful across the board. This has made for some interesting political theater, but it's going to be a tough fight for those that want to change things in the region.

A software developer who goes by the nickname of "T Rizk," who thinks Congress will make the wrong decision on the SOPA anti-piracy bill, has decided to create a work-around before the bill ever becomes law. That work-around is a Firefox plug-in that he has named "DeSOPA." It basically unblocks sites like The Pirate Bay by reverting the blocked site back to its raw IP address.

The RIAA has given Google bad marks for its fight against piracy in 2011, according to this Ars Technica report. One year ago Google made several promises to combat piracy on various web sites and the RIAA's report card says that those promises have not been met with swift action or progress.

It must be tough to push hard for bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP when your employees or members are downloading illegal files. According to a report on TorrentFreak, someone from both Homeland Security and the RIAA (the trade group that represents the music industry) have been downloading popular music. The IP addresses associated with these groups were unearthed on YouHaveDownloaded.com, a site that databases the IP's and downloads of Torrent users.