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Oh let the laughter ensue raucously on this one folks. Seriously how ridiculously stupid do you have to be to not only steal music from the very people you are suppose to be representing, and protecting, but then to get caught doing it. It all started back in 2006 when Dutch performer Melchior Rietveldt was approached by the anti-piracy group BREIN to write a score for an anti-piracy video which he was led to believe would only be shown a a local arts festival. Well it turns out that his music found its way on a large number of retail...

PIRATES were arrested in the Seychelles – thanks to the Royal Marines. It happened after a Spanish trawler sent out a mayday call saying they were being attacked by a gang of seven. The marines, who were on the Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s Fort Victoria, flew in a ­helicopter to the ­fishermen’s aid. They fired warning shots at the Somali pirates, who were arrested. Lieutenant Alastair Thompson said: “The operation was superbly ­co-ordinated.” On Monday the supply ship, patrolling about 420 nautical miles from the Seychelles, received information that a Spanish fishing vessel had come under attack from a group of...

ROME — An Italian navy ship on Saturday came to the aid of a merchant vessel released by Somali pirates after over seven months in captivity, with news reports saying a ransom was dropped from a small plane. ... The 225-metre (738-foot) vessel belonging to Naples-based Perseveranza had been on its way from Brazil to Iran with a cargo of soybeans when it was seized by pirates off the coast of Oman on April 21 and taken back to Somalia. "In five or six days the crew will probably be back in Italy," Carlo Miccio, a representative of Perseveranza, told...

As the U.S. House Judiciary Committee prepares for its hearing the morning on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), hundreds of web sites and activists are trying to bring attention to the bill with American Censorship Day. Protestors of SOPA have a long uphill battle, if the testimony in today's committee meeting is any indication. The witness list for the hearing on SOPA, scheduled for this morning at 10 a.m. EST, seems decidedly comprised of witnesses in favor of the new bill. Of the witnesses, only Katherine Oyama, Policy Counsel from Google seems likely to testify against the bill. SOPA...

A Glimpse Of The Future Under SOPA: Warner Bros. Admits It Filed Many False Takedown Notices from the is-this-what-we-want? dept While entertainment industry execs still continue to pretend that it's obvious when things are infringing, they continually ignore the very real concerns raised by many of us about SOPA/PROTECT IP/ICE seizures. The concern isn't about taking down the infringing content. It's about the overreach of these efforts, and how it can and will be used to take down other, legal content. This is not some hypothetical scenario. We hear about bogus DMCA notices being issued all the time, and...

An oil tanker seized by pirates off the coast of the Niger Delta last week has been released, officials in Nigeria say. The vessel -- the MT Halifax -- was attacked near the oil city of Port Harcourt. The crew of 25, mainly Filipinos, were said to be safe and accounted for. The area has seen an increase in the number of hijackings of tankers as pirates target oil shipments moving out of Nigeria. In most cases the cargo of fuel is taken off before the ship and crew are released unharmed - unlike in Somalia where crews and their...

TAIPEI — The crew of a Taiwanese fishing vessel fought against armed Somali pirates to retake their ship after it was hijacked off East Africa, Taiwan authorities said Sunday. The 290-tonne Chin Yi Wen with a crew of 28, including nine Chinese, eight Filipinos, six Indonesians and five Vietnamese, had been out of contact since Friday, the foreign ministry said. But the crew managed to overwhelm the six armed pirates and retake control of their ship. ... The Somali pirates fell into the sea, Tsay said, quoting the fishing boat owner, adding that details of the saga and the fate...

(Reuters) - Somali pirates freed the Liberian-flagged container ship MV PANAMA seized last December after receiving a $7 million ransom on Tuesday, pirates holding the ship told Reuters. ... "We received the agreed ransom of $7 million early in the morning after long negotiations. Now we have abandoned the ship and it is sailing away safely," a pirate who gave his name as Abdi told Reuters.

A 2006 Bonny Eagle graduate who joined the Navy right out of high school found himself amid a dramatic piracy rescue last month off the coast of Yemen. Hollis native Lucas Alderette, an electronics technician serving aboard the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, said a pre-dawn alarm led to the rescue of the crew of the Brillante Virtuoso, an oil tanker that had been attacked by pirates in the Gulf of Aden and set ablaze on July 6. "When we showed up, it was of course still very dark out, but the tanker was easily visible because large sections were...

Max Hardberger, a maritime repo man who recovers stolen ships from lawless Caribbean ports, has set his sights on the notorious Somali pirates 'I don’t know why I like Haiti so much,’ Max Hardberger says, as we battle and swerve through the choking dust and chaos of Port-au-Prince traffic. 'The Haitian people are wonderful, sure, but sometimes they do bad things, especially when they get in mobs, and the country is obviously frustrating. One thing I do like is that it’s lawless here, which makes it much easier for me to operate.’ Hardberger is a 62-year-old adventurer from Louisiana who...

Piracy in the Indian Ocean is hampering the efforts of climate change researchers to the point where they have had to call in the Australian Navy. Pirate activity off the coast of Somalia has increased dramatically over recent years, so much so that a quarter of the Indian Ocean is now considered a "no-go" area. ... "They're ranging so far up from Somalia that we're having difficulties getting instruments into that area so it's a good quarter of the Indian Ocean [that] is a no-go area. Dr Thresher says research vessels have been pursued by pirates on a number of...

Japan has confirmed its ships will be back in the Southern Ocean this year to continue its whaling program. After an early withdrawal from last summer's so-called scientific whale hunt in the region, Japan told the International Whaling Commission meeting in the Channel Islands that it will return this year. Australia has rejected Japan's request for greater protection against activists. The anti-whaling activist group Sea Shepherd has confirmed that it too will continue its pursuit and return to the Southern Ocean.

* Payments technically breach sanctions, say U.N. officials * Britain, United States say al Shabaab are terrorists * Pirates say forced to deal with militants * UK shipping says ransoms only way to rescue hostages NAIROBI, July 6 (Reuters) - Ransoms paid to Somali pirates to free merchant vessels are ending up in the hands of Islamist militants, laying shipping groups open to accusations of breaching international sanctions, U.N. officials told Reuters. John Steed, the principal military adviser to the U.N. special envoy to Somalia and head of the envoy's counter-piracy unit, said links between armed pirate gangs and Somalia's...

MOGADISHU, Somalia – A Somali court on Saturday sentenced three British nationals, an American and two Kenyans to at least 10 years in prison each for bringing millions of dollars intended for pirate ransom into the country. Two of the defendants were sentenced to 15 years in prison and a $15,000 fine, said Somali Information Ministry spokesman Abdifitah Abdinur. The other defendants were sentenced to 10 years and a $10,000 fine. The men were arrested in Mogadishu last month after their planes were found to be carrying millions of dollars in cash. A Somali official previously said the planes are...

Three Britons have been arrested in Somalia after a $3.6m ransom drop to release two vessels from pirates went wrong, according to diplomats. The Foreign Office confirmed the arrests on Friday, three days after they were seized. “We are aware of the arrest of three British nationals in Somalia. We are in touch with their employer,” it said, without identifying the company. ... The senior western diplomat said two planes, intended for Galkacyo, a contested town on the edge of northern Somalia’s semi-autonomous region of Puntland, were intercepted at Mogadishu airport, the Somali capital, where fierce fighting with al-Shabaab Islamist...

(AP) BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese general's call for land attacks on Somali pirate strongholds is being seen by analysts as another sign of the armed forces' growing assertiveness, even if the proposal is unlikely to result in action. Speaking at a news conference Wednesday in Washington, Gen. Chen Bingde said he believes land bases must be assaulted in order to eradicate piracy. "I think that for our counter-piracy campaigns to be effective, we should probably move beyond the ocean and crush their bases on the land," Chen said, adding that those funding and organizing piracy must be targeted along...

NEWS RELEASE DATE: MAY 2, 2011 LOCATION: PARAMUS, NEW JERSEY, U.S.A. CONTACT: PASTOR JOE SMAHA email: smahajoseph@yahoo.com SUBJECT: CHRISTIAN & MISSIONARY ALLIANCE SUES LOCAL CHURCH TO SEIZE ITS $1.2 MILLION PROPERTY AND BANK ACCOUNT BY FORCE

ARLINGTON, Va.--The Office of Naval Research (ONR) intends to launch on May 16 a new Internet wargame, recruiting a community of more than 1,000 players to collaborate on solving real-world problems facing the Navy. Scheduled to run for three weeks, the Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) exercise will recruit online players from across the government to suggest ways of combating piracy off the coast of Somalia. “MMOWGLI is an online game designed to find and collectively grow breakthrough ideas to some of the Navy's most complex problems--those 21st-century threats that demand new forms of collaboration and truly...

Pirate attacks quadrupled in the first three months of this year, as compared to the same time last year, several piracy experts said, and there have been four attacks in the last few days, prompting calls for Western powers to take a tougher stand against the threat. The most recent attacks were unsuccessful, but they shows the pirates still pose a serious threat despite improved patrols in the Gulf of Yemen. Pirates are now using hijacked “motherships” to do their dirty work, the European Union Naval Force in Somalia said. This makes them more powerful in two ways: They can...

MOGADISHU, Somalia, April 26 (UPI) -- International naval forces are expected to step up operations against Somali pirates but private security companies are seeking to provide armed escorts for merchant ships to counter the pirates' expansion into the Indian Ocean. The leading British insurer Jardine Lloyd Thompson is organizing a fleet of 18 gunboats to shepherd convoys of vessels across the Gulf of Aden, which runs into Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, vital trading and oil routes now under increasing threat. ... Although business sources say much of the funds to finance the program have been secured, the CEP has...