In the ever increasingly complex world of company buyouts, Snapfish announced on Monday their purchase of Motionbox, a video platform for families and friends to share their memories online. To make things even more complex, this actually comes shortly after Motionb0x acquired the highly successful personal video blogging service Viddyou in October. While this may seem like a bold move for Snapfish, which deals mostly in printing and sharing photographs, it is upon closer inspection, a natural evolution for the company (which was bought out by computer giant HP in 2005). What Snapfish has realized is that even though photos are important ways to store and share memories, it’s no secret that with the dwindling cost of high end cameras and a veritable bevy of software to edit them with, that people have begun to turn to video as their main way of sharing memories with loved ones.  At the same time, not everyone wants that video to be seen by thousands of complete strangers on sites like YouTube and Facebook, which is one of the biggest reasons for Motionbox’s existence. This same idea also held a lot of promise as an upgrade to Snapfish’s service, so HP naturally decided to join the fray by buying the already developed technology of Motionbox.

As for the site itself, HP says the “current Motionbox site” will remain open until August 10, after which the service will be moved over to Snapfish.com. Unfortunately this means that for users of  Motionbox, their videos will need to be downloaded from the site before it moves over to Snapfish. Thankfully, for this trouble, Snapfish is giving Motionbox Premium members a free year of Snapfish’s video service.

For years, computer pirating was a fast and lucrative business. A business which was seemingly untouchable by both anti-piracy software and by law. However, it seems if Hollywood distribution companies have their say on it, the fast paced business of pirating could change into a long and drawn out legal battle.

Just recently, an injunction was granted to several Hollywood movie studios prohibiting the popular Pirate Bay website from connecting to the internet. Curiously, this came only a month after Warner Bros. Studios placed an ad looking for a student intern who could infiltrate torrent sites and create bots that sniff out media in which Warner Bros. and NBC Universal holds the copyrights. Even more interesting is the fact that they were willing to pay the intern $26,000, showing just how much these companies feel they are losing to torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay.

When this event happened, many websites felt that Warner Bros. had become a “Big Brother” to the freedom of the internet and especially torrent websites. The argument is that sharing websites are actually legal as long as they are not sharing materials that have copyrights. As a result, by having the ability to shut down these sites, Warner Bros. is going against the freedom and openness that has defined the internet. Of course, the problem is that many of these sharing sites are not exactly legal. Instead, they are offering hundreds of thousands of torrents of copyright materials such as movies, music, and software that have cracks and serial numbers included. This is the very source of the rub for the companies that produce these materials, as they feel they are losing money from potential buyers of their products. Even more frustrating for these companies is that it is also incredibly hard to prove any wrongdoing as almost all of the files in question are hosted over a multitude of personal computers. Read the rest of this entry »

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