![\"Copyright\"](\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/copyright.gif\" "\\"Copyright\\"")
<\/p>\nNot a lot of news this week, which\u00a0might be related to the Labor Day holiday in the US. Or\u00a0the fact that the\u00a0quota for\u00a0news stories might have all been used up (during the the very busy) last\u00a0week.<\/p>\n
So this won’t take long at all, I suppose …<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/pirate_party_logo.png\"){kind=logo}
<\/a>The Norwegian Pirate Party is ready to counter the country’s new censorship regime<\/p><\/div>\n
Norway has started blocking The Pirate Bay, but they’ve chosen to do it on the DNS level, which makes bypassing the filter as easy as changing\u00a0from your ISP’s DNS servers to a public one (like the ones from Google<\/a>\u00a0– this is probably recommended even if you’re not subject to draconian censorship regimes, from performance, reliability and security points of view). And to make users aware of how easy it is to ignore this latest misguided censorship effort, the Norwegian Pirate Party has launched their own public DNS server<\/a>.<\/p>\n Okay, I admit, this isn’t the most enticing of news stories. But I was scraping the bottom of the barrel, and this story about rights-holders pursuing an utterly futile course of action that sets a dangerous precedent at the same time as having no positive consequences for anybody involved, was the best I could do this week.<\/p>\n That was until yesterday, when I glanced upon this story\u00a0about a new app called Aurous that’s set to make music piracy as easy as Spotify<\/a>. Not that Spotify is hard to use, and of course, you can use it without paying – but it’s also not as perfect as it could be, with not all\u00a0songs being available and no offline\/download mode unless you pay. This is what Aurous promises to\u00a0make up, that and to also be pain in the ass for the music industry.<\/p>\n Aurous wants to make music piracy easier than using Spotify<\/p><\/div>\n The early alpha versions of Aurous, available on pretty much all the major platforms including mobile ones, is still lacking many of the features that makes Spotify really cool – like discovery and radios, so from a usability perspective, Spotify does still have a few cards up its sleeve, even for the free version.<\/p>\n And there’s the “good enough” factor to consider. While Spotify may not be perfect, it might be “good enough” for most people to not have to bother going down the piracy route, even with something as easy to use as Aurous. The same cannot be said for movies and TV shows – as good as Netflix is, it just doesn’t\u00a0have most of things you want to watch. This is why Popcorn Time, a similar concept\u00a0except for video content, is such a hit and such a disruptive force for the industry, whereas Aurous may never achieve the same effect (and notoriety).<\/p>\n Speaking of offline\/download mode, and following last week story about Amazon Prime adding this feature to its streaming service, Netflix has responded this week by confirming that they’re not considering adding the same feature<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n