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FINDINGS from Rightscorp, a provider of monetisation services for artists and holders of copyrighted intellectual property (IP), suggest that content piracy is in fact not declining and is still a very serious ongoing threat to copyright owners. They estimated that over 2 billion units of movies were shared in 2013. Music consumption on file sharing networks grew from 2.7 billion digital songs in 2010 to 8.3 billion digital songs shared in 2013 - about 74% of total digital music. Rightscorp forecasts a 40% increase in peer-to-peer file sharing by 2018, which includes 11.9 billion songs and over 3 billion movies illegally downloaded.

FOLLOWING its online release on 25 December and limited theatrical release on Christmas Day, controversial comedy film The Interview has become available on a number of pirate websites, with some 900,000 torrent users downloading the title in the following 24 hours. Sony Pictures made the movie available for rental and purchase online for US consumers on YouTube, Google Play, Microsoft Xbox Video and on its own dedicated website www.seetheinterview.com for $5.99. Using data sourced from piracy tracking specialist Excipio, variety.com reports that The Interview was downloaded by 904,237 clients worldwide on 25 December following its uploading to a range of file-sharing services.

ULTRAVIOLET, the industry-backed cloud-based movie access platform, ends the year with more than 20 million registered accounts - up 33% from 15 million registered accounts in 2013, according to the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem. More than 15% of US households use UltraViolet. The platform, launched in 2011 as a service to drive sales of physical and digital media, increased registered accounts by 1 million since the end of September. Some 14,500 movies and TV programmes are UV-compatible, feeding 100 million transactions to date.

MILLENNIATA Inc. of American Fork, Utah, makers of the M-Disc, and Corel Corporation of Ottawa, Canada, a leading developer of video editing and computer software, have joined the One-Blue Blu-ray Disc product licensing programme as licensees. Millenniata signed the Registration Agreement for BD-R and/or BD-RE Disc