DigitMemo.com

Tiffany, the world’s second-biggest luxury jeweler, said eBay is a “rat’s nest” for counterfeiting and urged a judge to rule that the biggest online auctioneer was liable for infringement.

Tiffany assailed eBay in a legal brief submitted Dec. 7 to U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan in Manhattan, as the companies await his ruling in a trademark infringement trial. EBay said in its brief that it’s a “model citizen” in the fight against counterfeiting.

At issue is whether eBay must pay damages for failing to make adequate efforts to block sales of counterfeit silver jewelry. New York-based Tiffany and other retailers claim online sales of counterfeit clothes, bags and jewelry cost them about $30 billion a year.

Click for more on Tiffany: eBay is Rat’s Nest for Counterfeiting »

Microsoft is to withdraw an anti-piracy tool from Windows Vista, which disables the operating system when invoked, following customer complaints.

The so-called “kill switch” is designed to prevent users with illegal copies of Vista from using certain features.

But the tool has suffered from glitches since it was introduced with many Windows users claiming that legal copies of Vista had been disabled.

Click for more on ‘Kill switch’ dropped from Vista in SP1 »

Piracy rates are lower because it’s harder

Microsoft said Monday that it’s seeing piracy rates for Windows Vista that are half those of Windows XP.

Now cynical me wanted to write this up as “even pirates prefer XP two to one over Vista,” but that wouldn’t be fair. In reality, the decline in piracy rates is largely due to the fact that Vista is much tougher to fake than XP.

“Piracy rates are lower because it’s harder,” Microsoft Vice President Mike Sievert said in an interview Monday.

Click for more on Microsoft: Vista piracy rate is half that of XP »

She has been ordered to pay statutory damages of $220,000 or $9250 per song.

30-year-old Jammie Thomas lost big in the nation’s jury decision for a file sharing case.  The single mother of two was found liable in sharing 24 songs from six record companies and has been ordered to pay statutory damages of $220,000 or $9250 per song.

Click for more on Single mother loses big in music piracy case »

Users of illegitimate versions of Windows XP Pro must pledge to use only genuine Microsoft software going forward and agree to have their software infrastructure audited

Under the plan, called Get Genuine Windows Agreement, software resellers can offer to their business customers a volume licensing contract that will allow them to replace fake or “mislicensed” copies of Windows XP Professional with legitimate versions.

Click for more on Microsoft Offers Licenses For Fake Windows XP Copies »

Demonoid.com has allegedly been taken offline by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA).

Both the tracker and the website have been unresponsive for nearly 24 hours now. As of now it is still unsure what exactly happened, but the popular Dutch news site nu.nl reports that the CRIA is responsible for the downtime.

Click for more on Demonoid Torrent Tracker Shut Down by CRIA »

A mod chipping company called Team Symbiote has apparently created an application for owners of its Wii mod chip that enables the console to play back DVDs.

This may not be the first mod to enable DVD playback, but since Nintendo still hasn’t got around to providing the console with playback capabilities, we thought it’d be worth bringing it up again. Nintendo, how about hurrying up and making it so normal people don’t have to buy dodgy chips to play a DVD or two on their console?

Click for more on DVD playback enabled on mod-chipped Wiis »

StartForce, the used-to-be-popular copy protection system, seems to get some market in China after other big game companies, like Ubisoft, EA, dump it to avoid damage to customers’ PC and potential lawsuit.

A new game title, The Legend of Swordsman & Fairy 4, released on August 2007 in both Taiwan and Mainland China, uses Starforce 5.0 Pro as anti-pirate system. The new Starforce 5.0 includes online activation and the traditional “key disk” verification. On the first day of release, the activating demand is so high that the authentication server was crashed and offline for 24 hours. However, 10 days later, a “patch”, let users bypass the online verification procedure appeared, also with a detailed guide on burning the “key disk” using standard CDR and CD-Writer. Thus the new StarForce 5.0 is completely defeated(again).

This also becomes another case that pirated versions work better than original, since the online system has a ridiculous 10 activations/per year limitation. Also, a paid user has reported that the new StarForce broken the optical driver in his Thinkpad T61 Laptop and was out of warranty since CSR claimed this as solely user’s fault as StarForce was a known malware.