Following a report yesterday that an anti-piracy company has been sending out emails asking that people pay a $10 fine after allegedly being caught sharing copyright material, we decided to take a closer look. Isn't this tiny fine a good idea? Isn't paying $10 literally 300 times better than paying $3000 to other companies in the same area?
A woman has been left shocked by a settlement letter demanding 6,000 euros after her connection was used for 10 minutes of unauthorized file-sharing. She insists that anti-piracy group TTVK (CIAPC), who are currently trying to get The Pirate Bay blocked in Finland, are refusing to listen to her pleas.
In response to increasing legal actions and surveillance of Internet traffic, more and more file-sharers are choosing to hide their identities online. New data gathered through telephone interviews with thousands of adults reveals that in the US 15 percent of all file-sharers take measures to hide their IP-address. Some VPN and proxy providers have doubled their customer base in 2011, and this upward trend is bound to continue in the coming year.
A 15 year-old from Sweden is facing prosecution after sharing movies online. The boy was tracked on file-sharing networks by so-far unnamed "international" film companies. While his alleged actions are clearly illegal, this kind of legal action against a teenager makes little sense and is a PR failure ready to happen.
A 15 year-old schoolboy with a taste for BitTorrent went to trial yesterday after downloading and sharing 24 Hollywood movies. The case, however, has a worrying twist. Rather than being hunted down online by an anti-piracy company, the teenager was turned over to the police by the head teacher at his school. The prosecutor says he had no choice but to take action.
There are three new cases filed by porn production firm Patrick Collins. Perhaps those representing Patrick Collins have taken heed from the plethora of recent legal decisions that have firmly balked at the idea of mass lawsuits. Instead, Patrick Collins only alleged copyright infringement against 10 does in each case, each of which was filed on April 1.
Uploading is the key, isn't it? If P2P litigators couldn't actually upload anything from your computer, they wouldn't have much of a case. The mere act of downloading doesn't get anyone in trouble, since the intermediary would have to pull off the near-impossible stunt of being situated between the source and your computer to capture the action - not to mention the minor caveat that downloading isn't distribution. Regardless, since the nature of BitTorrent requires uploading, as opposed to the download nature of Usenet, we continue to have a steady stream of alleged infringers.
As the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits continue to pile up in U.S. courts, more stories of what appear to be wrongfully accused persons hit mainstream media. A 70 year-old retired widow from San Francisco falls into this category. The grandma was recently 'caught' sharing porn on BitTorrent and was offered a $3,400 settlement, or the option to risk a $150,000 fine in a full court case.
After a major copyright settlement case featuring The Expendables was found to be fatally flawed last month, United States Copyright Group and client Nu Image dropped the case. Now, sidestepping an uncooperative judge in Columbia, the team are hoping to get more joy from one of his counterparts in Maryland, but they still haven't learned their lesson. Tests by TorrentFreak reveal that 98% of 4,165 potential defendants in the case are being sued in the wrong jurisdiction.
As UK communications watchdog Ofcom considers if website blocking is actually feasible, an insider at government meetings has said that the mechanism is the favored approach to dealing with illicit file-sharing. In the hope that the plans get the go ahead, the entertainment industries have already prepared a list of 100 sites that they would like to see blocked by ISPs.
The French authority responsible for administering the country's anti-filesharing operations reports that it has now sent out more than 736,000 "first strike" and 62,000 "second strike" infringement warnings, with a total of 165 Internet account holders now on their third and final strike. Meanwhile, a report set to be published by IFPI next week will suggest that Hadopi is a success that has contributed to a 22.5% increase in purchases from iTunes.
The world's largest P2P legal imbroglio has been downgraded, with 90 per cent of the file sharers caught up in the Hurt Locker downloading case dismissed.
It's nice to have a huge pile of John Does to sue. Some will fight, others will acquiesce. Those who acquiesce are a gold mine - they're so shit scared of a multi-million dollar copyright lawsuit they'll settle for a few grand to make the whole nightmare go away. It's probably extortion at some level, at least at the moral level, but it's a dirty job and someone has to do it, like WeFightPiracy.com or the US Copyright Group.
A massive list of 23,322 U.S. Internet users are expected to receive a settlement letter in which they are accused of illegally downloading The Expendables on BitTorrent. The defendants are part of the largest file-sharing related lawsuit in history, through which the film studio Nu Image hopes to recoup tens of millions of dollars.
What was once touted as the biggest file-sharing lawsuit in history has now been decimated following a decision from the U.S. District Court of Columbia. Judge Robert Wilkins ruled that well over 99 percent of the original 23,322 alleged infringers can not be chased down by the makers of The Expendables because they fall outside of the court's jurisdiction.
The avalanche of mass-lawsuits in the United States that target BitTorrent users has reached a new milestone. Since last year, more than 200,000 people have been sued for allegedly sharing copyrighted material online, and this number continues to expand at a rapid pace. Added up, the potential profit from the so-called pay-up-or-else scheme runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
A federal court has slashed the verdict in an infamous file-sharing case from $1.5 million to 'just' $54,000. U.S. District Judge Michael Davis branded an earlier jury decision in favor of the RIAA and against Jammie Thomas-Rasset as "appalling." Judge Davis has now overruled a jury three times in this case. The RIAA are reportedly unhappy with the verdict and are considering their options.
Today, lawyer Andrew Crossley from the now defunct ACS:Law faced the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal over his disastrous foray into 'speculative invoicing' -- the chasing down of alleged file-sharers with the sole aim of receiving cash settlements. In a surprising turn-around from previous displays of bravado, Crossley contested only one of the seven charges against him.
Former ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley has been fined by the Information Commissioner's Office for allowing the details of around 6,000 Internet users to be leaked onto the Internet. However, since Crossley has pleaded poverty his £200,000 fine was reduced to £1,000. Interesting, particularly since TorrentFreak has seen documents which show Crossley as jointly owning a house worth £750,000.
An advertising network has been found not guilty of copyright infringement for serving ads to a site offering links to unauthorized copies of ebooks. The case, brought by Elsevier and 'For Dummies' publisher Wiley & Sons, sought to find the Chitika ad network liable for contributory infringement, even though it produced no evidence of direct infringement, or that the network had knowledge of the e-book site's allegedly infringing behavior.
Reddit users, emboldened by their efforts to get Go Daddy to drop its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, want to use their newfound political momentum to force a sitting senator out of office. The campaign, dubbed "Operation Cork Screw," hopes to oust Senator Bob Corker, one of 40 co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act, the Senate version of SOPA.
In a move that seems in response to the shuttering of MegaUpload last week, UK and Hong Kong-based file storage site FileSonic removed all file sharing capabilities over the weekend.
Although the ink is barely dry on the order forcing ISP BT to block the Newzbin2 Usenet indexing site, the MPA isn't wasting its momentum. Through its UK proxy the Federation Against Copyright Theft, Hollywood has taken another Usenet indexing site offline, and for its owner the situation doesn't look good.
The "Amateur Allure" series is a popular adult video series produced by Hard Drive Productions. Like many other pornography producers, or at least some of them, Hard Drive Productions has enlisted the help of WeFightPiracy.com, a P2P litigation firm designed to provide an alternative means of collecting revenue for movie producers.
Google is taking an inconsistent stance on allowing apps that enable music piracy via smartphones to remain available in its Android Market. The muddled position comes just as Google readies its launch of a Google music store.
Anonymous has sure been quiet lately, but today's federal bust of Megaupload riled 'em up good: a retaliatory strike against DoJ.gov has left it completely dead.
Two of Bulgaria's largest torrent sites have been raided by the country's organized crime unit. The sites, which served in excess of three quarters of a million members, had been established for several years. Three locations were raided and two site admins, one just 17-years-old, were arrested.
After court action in Denmark ended with the country's major Internet service providers blocking The Pirate Bay, copyright holders now have a new target in their sights. An anti-piracy group say they have sent an urgent letter to a court demanding that Grooveshark should be subjected to an ISP DNS blockade, an action which would take the site offline in Denmark.
Anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån say police have arrested "an elite pirate" in Sweden. The man in his thirties is claimed to be an administrator of multiple 'Scene' servers carrying as many as 7,000 movies to which around 100 people had access. The man is said to have denied the charges but the prosecutor says his crimes could earn him a jail sentence.
Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN says it will pursue a similar strategy to its counterparts in the United States and UK by pressuring payment processors like PayPal to stop doing business with file-sharing sites. But BREIN says the processors must go further. Either they can voluntarily hand over the names of the admins behind the site accounts, or they will go to court and sue them into submission.
As the United States recoils in horror at the rapid acceleration of so-called 'speculative invoicing' schemes designed to force cash from alleged file-sharers, over in Europe the Germans are showing how it's really done. According to information published by Germany's Internet industry association, rightsholders there are targeting 300,000 alleged file-sharers every month — a staggering 3.6 million a year.
An investigator who worked for the anti-piracy outfit behind Finland's Pirate Bay ISP blockage and two file-sharing cases where defendants collected huge fines, has been speaking of his lack of training at the organization. The man also says that he was so uncomfortable with the heavy modification of file-sharing related witness statements he created for the police, in the end he refused to sign them.
A pair of lawyers who were responsible for the introduction of so-called Speculative Invoicing into the UK, have both been found guilty of professional misconduct by a tribunal. Among other charges, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal found that the pair from law firm Davenport Lyons knowingly targeted innocent people. They now face a range of sanctions from monetary penalties through to being disbarred.
The United States Copyright Group (USCG) has dropped another mass-lawsuit they filed earlier against 1,951 BitTorrent users. The dismissal comes just a week after the lawyers dismissed their 'The Expendables' case and suggests they are retreating. The question is, however, whether this signals the end of trouble for the defendants or whether the lawyers will re-file their cases in smaller batches.
Anti-piracy lawyer John Steele is without doubt one of the most active proponents of the pay-up-or-else settlement scheme in the United States. In less than a year he filed more than 80 mass-lawsuits for his clients, targeting thousands of alleged BitTorrent users. Nevertheless it appears that Steele himself can be awarded the pirate label, since he's blatantly ripped of the work of a competitor.
When tens of thousands of people are sued for alleged copyright infringement all at once, there are bound to be some unfortunate targets and plenty of collateral damage. Earlier this year an adult movie studio sued a blind man and now the makers of The Hurt Locker have taken it one step further — by sending their lawyers after a dead person.
Undeterred by a stream of negative PR from recent Wikileaks revelations, the anti-piracy lobby machine once again scored favorable headlines in Australia today. In its push to get ISPs onboard for a three-strikes system to warn copyright infringers, lobby group IPAF released a study that reveals how immensely effective this would be. However, the entire press release is a cheap marketing trick with mispresented research results that actually prove the opposite.
Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has been subjected to a major DDoS attack which has taken its website offline. The Hollywood-backed group has been making a number of enemies with its actions in The Netherlands so the range of culprits is quite large. Nevertheless, BREIN chief Tim Kuik says he thinks he knows who is behind it.
The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed the earlier decision of a U.S. District Court in the long-running file-sharing case between Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Boston student Joel Tenenbaum. The appeal court ruled that District Court should not have considered constitutional matters. Instead, it could have reduced the amount of damages awarded and given Sony a chance to request a new trial.
Patently Apple is reporting that Apple has created a new peer-to-peer (P2P) technology which will, apparently, revolutionise the way we share data. The new technology works by utilising a "unique magnetic compass and encoded supersonic tone methodology" which Apple claims will "allow you to share information on your iPhone easily with other devices like your iMac, MacBook or stereo system."
Apple's iTunes is being sued by Korvel Sutton, a member of the former rap group Pretty Boy Gangsters. The lawsuit filed at the U.S. District Court in California lists ten compilation albums being sold through iTunes that include copyrighted tracks from Pretty Boy Gangsters. All tracks are being sold without Sutton's permission and to date he has received no compensation or royalties.
Every month thousands of people are sued for allegedly sharing copyrighted material on BitTorrent. Many of the accused claim to be innocent, and point their finger at someone else who may have used their Internet connection to share the file. But does this mean they're off the hook? Lawyer Nicholas Ranallo believes so.
The alleged operators of one of France's most popular file-sharing links forums have been arrested. The site, known as Liberty Land, had been in operation since 2009 and had 800,000 members. It provided links to a wide variety of material including movies, music and software. Three men, aged between 25 and 30, now face jail sentences of up to 5 years and fines of $700,000.
When anti-piracy outfits and Big Media speak out against file-sharing they often claim to be standing up for the interests of the artists. However, a new survey among nearly 4,000 artists has revealed that nearly a quarter are pirating the works of fellow artists. Contrary to popular belief among higher level execs in the entertainment industry, the younger generation of artists believe that file-sharing helps them to gain an audience.
A coalition of artists has joined eccentric billionaire and FilmOn founder Alki David in a new class action lawsuit against CNET and CBS Interactive. The complaint filed at a federal court in Los Angeles claims that through websites like Download.com, these companies have willingly profited from popularizing online copyright infringements. The artists want the CBS chiefs to be held accountable for "soliciting such widespread theft."
With more than 300,000 tracks and 50,000 albums published since its inception, the music publishing website Jamendo holds one the greatest libraries of free music online. A great success story that is in part powered by BitTorrent. From the start the site embraced P2P downloads to save resources and because artists and fans appreciated it.
In mid-2009, South Korea made the pioneering move of implementing a 3 strikes style regime for dealing with illicit file-sharing. As statistics become available for the first time, authorities have conducted one of the biggest piracy crackdowns involving so-called cyberlocker sites. The Ministry of Culture says that 19 of the country's top services were targeted which together served up to 4 million users.
Following an ultimatum set by AFACT, Australian ISPs have until the close of business today to comply with veiled threats from the big Hollywood studios to help them tackle online piracy, or else. As one ISP confirms it won't respond to threats, another is trying to form a coalition to fend off the movie companies. Pirate Party Australia describes the moves by Hollywood as "extortion".
Last Monday, Sydney Morning Herald published an article in which they quoted Australian anti-piracy group MIPI saying that although they support "mitigation measures" for dealing with alleged file-sharers, "such measures would not include termination of internet accounts." In a new press release, MIPI have accused Sydney Morning Herald of publishing misleading information. Not so, say SMH.
Five of Australia's largest ISPs have today put forward a detailed proposal to deal with the issue of illicit file-sharing. The paper proposes the implementation of a warning letter process, but unlike the 3 strikes-style regime in neighboring New Zealand, would not include an Internet disconnection sanction. Instead, rightsholders would head back to the legal system to punish persistent infringers.
Following a six month investigation initiated by international tech companies including Microsoft, Graphisoft and Adobe, Ukrainian authorities have shut down the popular file-hosting site Ex.ua. The police confiscated 200 servers on which more than 6,000 terabytes of data was stored. The Ex.ua raids follow less than two weeks after US authorities ordered the shutdown of another file-hosting service, MegaUpload.
A court has overturned a 2010 ruling which said that blocking The Pirate Bay at the ISP level was "disproportionate". The Antwerp Court of Appeal sided with the Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation in their quest to force two ISPs to block subscriber access to the world's most famous torrent site. Belgacom and Telenet must now implement a DNS blockade of the site within 14 days or face fines.
At the beginning of 2011 two administrators of FileSoup — the longest standing BitTorrent community — had their case dropped by the authorities and were free men once again. But that was not the end of the story for one of the admins. In his quest for justice, Steve Lanning appealed the unsatisfactory police investigation by filing more than 50 complaints, and is claiming that the police are covering up many mistakes.
New data published by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that on the average day Netflix and BitTorrent are responsible for 40 percent of all Internet traffic in North America. During peak hours Netflix accounts for a third of all download traffic, while BitTorrent is credited for nearly half of all upload traffic during the busiest time of the day.
Less than a week after her investiture ceremony, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell laid down a landmark verdict that will make it easy for copyright holders to send cash demands to people they suspect of copyright infringement. Many people called the decision into doubt, and the revelation that Judge Howell previously worked as an RIAA lobbyist and as the Managing Director of a pirate-chasing outfit hints at a conflict of interest.
A 70-year-old retired widow from San Francisco who was accused of sharing a porn movie on BitTorrent has seen the case against her dropped. The woman, who went to the press after being threatened by a notorious anti-piracy law firm, was told that they targeted her by mistake. In what appears to be an attempt at diverting attention away from the damaging and embarrassing truth, the law firm claims it has now found the 'real' infringer.
BitTorrent Inc. has released a major update of their mainline client. After introducing Apps about a year ago, the latest beta version of the popular client now adds 'personal content channels.' These channels function as small social networks that allow users to easily share content with a group of friends. An interesting concept, but also one that may eventually come at a cost.
To make BitTorrent appeal to an even wider audience, uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. has released a brand new BitTorrent client today. Codenamed Chrysalis, the new piece of software is aimed at novice BitTorrent users who are generally overwhelmed by the traditional interface of uTorrent and the mainline client. In the months to come Chrysalis will replace BitTorrent's mainline client.
The BitTorrent (and some eDonkey2000) lawsuit parade is heating up. Nearly 900 such copyright lawsuits were filed in April, and nearly 1,500 were filed in March. It should be noted that for March, a bulk of the lawsuits surround the VPR Internationale v Does 1-1017 case (which is currently sitting idle as it's tied up in procedure). February had over 2,000 lawsuits, but the bulk of those belong to Openmind Solutions, Inc. v. Does 1-2925 (another case tied up in procedure). The point being, many more smaller cases are being filed, often times suing no more that 10-50 individuals.
BitTorrent has released the first premium version of its compact file sharing client, uTorrent. And so, if you're happy to accept the $24.95 annual subscription, then you, too, can unlock a pile of high-end additional features.
Anyone who understands The Pirate Bay, BitTorrent and the viral nature of file-sharing will appreciate just how difficult it is to have content taken down. So what can you do when previously private explicit photos of you appear online? For one young lady it seems that no effort was too big or too costly, as court papers from this fascinating case reveal.
Data published by the Google-backed Measurement Lab gives a unique insight into the BitTorrent throttling practices of ISPs all over the world. It reveals that Comcast was slowing down nearly half of all BitTorrent traffic in the U.S. early 2008, but only 3% last year. In Canada, Rogers has the worst track record as it systematically throttles more than three-quarters of all BitTorrent traffic.
A new Internet traffic trends report released by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that BitTorrent traffic is on the rise globally. More than half of all upstream traffic during peak hours in North America and Europe now comes from BitTorrent. The report further signals that the shutdown of LimeWire killed traffic generated by the Gnutella P2P network.
Each and every day hundreds of millions of people scour their favorite BitTorrent search engines for content to download. But what are all these people looking for? Today we present the BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2011, a list of the 50 most searched for phrases and keywords on one of the most used public BitTorrent indexes during the past year.
GroupM, one of the world's leading advertising companies, has compiled a blacklist of more than 2,000 URLs in an attempt to prevent its clients' ads from appearing on pirate websites. The blacklist includes many of the usual suspects such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, but it also features many perfectly legitimate websites including Archive.org and BitTorrent Inc's site.
A Pirate Bay user who said he uploaded a comedy movie because he had nothing to do, must now pay a large sum of money to a rightsholder funded anti-piracy group. The man, who was raided back in 2010, admitted uploading a DVD screener of a comedy movie for fun, an act that has turned out rather less amusing than he had hoped.
Botnets, those networks of computers infected with bots (little pieces of code that allow a computer to be manipulated from an outside source) have increasingly of late come under attack by law enforcement agencies as it's become apparent that criminals are using them to steal personal information such as credit card numbers and pins. But, as the centrally based botnets go down, new peer to peer (P2P) botnets are cropping up to replace them.
Following the High Court ruling ordering UK ISP BT to block Usenet indexing site Newzbin2, it was only a matter of time before that momentum was capitalized upon by the movie and music industries. Today a coalition of companies led by the BPI demanded that BT also block The Pirate Bay, either voluntarily or by consenting to a court order.
The Dutch copyright organization BREIN and Usenet provider News-Service are wrapping up their case in the Netherlands. After achieving victory against the Usenet community FTD, which allowed community members to index the location of content on the newsgroups, BREIN is looking for closure against News-Service Europe. Although the arguments concluded last year, this legal action marks the second major newsgroup provider that finds itself in court - the first being Giganews versus litigant Perfect 10.
Five large U.S. broadband providers will warn subscribers of illegal file sharing detected on their accounts under a new agreement with members of the entertainment industry, the groups announced Thursday.
A few days ago an Italian court ordered all ISPs to block subscriber access to BTjunkie, leaving hundreds of thousands of Italians with the task of finding a new torrent site. Or perhaps not? Just hours after the news was made public, a brand new and ad-free proxy site was launched. The site allows Italians to browse an uncensored web and access BTjunkie, as well as another popular blocked site, The Pirate Bay.
A pair of lawyers who were responsible for the introduction of so-called Speculative Invoicing into the UK have been fined and banned from practising for 3 months. Davenport Lyons partner David Gore and former partner Brian Miller will each have to pay a £20,000 fine and interim costs of £150,000.
With increasing lobbying efforts from the entertainment industry against BitTorrent sites and users, we wondered whether these companies hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others. After some initial skimming we've discovered BitTorrent pirates at nearly every major entertainment industry company in the US.
A pivotal case that could mean the end of many mass-BitTorrent lawsuits is currently ongoing in a Virginia federal court. Labeling the pay-up-or-else scheme as a "shake down," the judge wants to know why he should allow copyright holders to massively coerce people into paying huge cash settlements. Realizing the importance of the case, a fellow anti-piracy law firm has now joined in to protect its livelihood.
A new dimension was just added to the ongoing stream of BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. A Canadian BitTorrent user has been ordered to pay $60,000 by a U.S. District Court judge. The Calgary resident, who did not defend himself, was ordered to pay the damages for sharing two films on an adult-oriented BitTorrent tracker.
Canadian authorities are warning Internet users to be vigilant following the emergence of a file-sharing settlement scam operation. West Vancouver police, who have now issued an official fraud warning, say that seniors have been receiving letters claiming they have been caught downloading a range of porn titles. Unsurprisingly, the letters come with an offer to settle for thousands of dollars.
While most of the major entertainment industry companies wage war against BitTorrent sites, the Songwriters Association of Canada prefers to embrace file-sharing. Speaking with TorrentFreak, vice president Jean-Robert Bisaillon says that the Internet has revived the music business. Sharing music is part of people's nature and the songwriters want to legalize file-sharing, while compensating the artists whose works are shared.
Previously confidential documents detailing Universal Music's meetings with the former UK government over the Digital Economy Act are revealing a whole lot more than the pair intended. Blacked-out sections now uncovered show that Universal believed that ISPs could spy on their users and hand over information to rightsholders in order for them to sue.
Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs. To make matters even worse, a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.
European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes delivered an inspiring speech at the Forum d'Avignon this weekend. The Commissioner noted that the current path of increased enforcement as put forward by the copyright monopoly is not the right one.
The Belgian music royalty collecting agency SABAM has once again stepped up to enforce their strict copyright regime. After collecting money for fake artists and forgetting to pay out to real ones, they are now targeting truck drivers who listen to music in their cabs without an appropriate license.
A German law firm has started an auction to sell the unpaid settlements of 70,000 alleged file-sharers to the highest bidder. The 'debt' belongs to people who thus far failed to settle with a copyright holder, and would be worth 90 million euros if recouped entirely.
Since the beginning of 2010, a whopping 200,000 BitTorrent users have been sued in mass file-sharing lawsuits by copyright trolls, according to TorrentFreak.
In an unusual move, British Telecom has been ordered by a judge to block access to a web site that's been known to offer links of pirated copies of movies. The BBC reports that BT will use filters to keep its users from accessing the web site, Newzbin 2. It's the first time in the UK that a judge has ordered an ISP to keep its users from being able to browse to a specific web site. In his ruling this week the judge stated that he made his decision because "BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright."
A group of music labels currently taking action against The Pirate Bay in Finland have pulled off something anti-piracy groups in other countries have been dreaming of. Following file-sharing complaints filed earlier this year, a court has now issued orders for the ISPs of three subscribers to disconnect them from the Internet.
During the last couple of weeks a heated debate has sprung up around the claimed massive music piracy of a relatively unknown band. One Soul Thrust currently have just 176 followers on Twitter yet according to their manager the group is being destroyed by the pirating masses who have, to date, downloaded their debut album 100,000 times. With the CRIA apparently supporting the band's position, it's time to investigate.
The Italian police division tasked with handling cybercrime cases has announced it has shut down several file-sharing websites. The sites, which were connected by ownership, offered links to torrents and files hosted on cyberlocker services and indexed more than 31,000 illicit items including movies, music, TV show, games and software.
An anti-piracy group say they have monitored decreased usage of cyberlockers that withdrew their rewards programs in the wake of the Megaupload shutdown and increases for those that maintained them. What is required now, the Hollywood-backed group says, is a “burden of proof reversal” which would require hosts to prove that their businesses are not built on piracy, or face being held liable.
In the wake of last week's Megaupload shutdown, some of the biggest names in the market are taking drastic action. During the last 48 hours many sites have completely withdrawn their systems for paying uploaders when their files are shared with others, but one of the most dramatic moves came first from Filesonic and today Fileserve. Both services now forbid people from downloading any files they didn't upload themselves.
Following the example of OpenBitTorrent, another major BitTorrent tracker has now abandoned the resource-intensive TCP protocol. 1337x switched to a UDP-only tracker a few days ago after several hosting providers kicked the tracker out for the "broadcast storm" that resulted from the millions of connections BitTorrent users were making.
Starting in a few months, millions of online 'pirates' will be monitored as part of an agreement between the MPAA, RIAA and all major U.S. Internet providers. Alleged infringers will be notified about their misbehavior, and repeat offenders will eventually be punished. Thus far the details on the operation have been very slim, but TorrentFreak has learned that unlike in France, the U.S. database of Internet pirates will be decentralized.
The company founded by Shawn Fanning - who named it after his close-crop haircut, apparently - when his peer-to-peer file-sharing app of the same name took off, is no more.
Was the Digital Economy Act always going to be implemented? The latest revelations in the Act's complex two year history shows that it was always going to happen, and that public consultation on the matter was just a sham.
Miramax CEO Mike Lang and Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos gave a keynote talk at the MIPCOM conference. The two discussed the challenges they face in the continuously changing digital world. Both agreed that piracy is not much of an issue as long as you give consumers what they want. Digital monopolies, such as Apple's dominance in the music industry, are a far bigger threat.
Have you ever wanted to share terabytes of data in public, or just a few gigabytes with a select group of friends? With Diglo you can, totally free. The site is a mashup between a social network, a file-hosting site and a media search engine, allowing its users to share, search and download files all in one place.
For the past 24 hours the hugely popular MegaUpload file-hosting service has been rendered inaccessible across many countries around the world. With the United States government 'Cyber Monday' domain seizures fresh in everyone's mind, fingerpointing has been directed at the U.S. authorities.
A U.S. federal court has ruled that the domain seizure of sports streaming site Rojadirecta does not violate the First Amendment, and has refused to hand the domain back to its Spanish owner. The order stands in conflict with previous Supreme Court rulings and doesn't deliver much hope to other website owners who operate under U.S. controlled domain names.
Almost 90 per cent of operators now charge for data by volume, but billing by content is growing, with free access to social networking and partner sites becoming commonplace.
The controversial PROTECT IP Act unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee today. When the PROTECT IP Act becomes law U.S. authorities and copyright holders will have the power to seize domains, block websites and censor search engines to prevent copyright infringements. Introduced just two weeks ago, the bill now heads over to the Senate for further consideration and another vote.
A release group blamed for a Hollywood boycott of all early release movies in Hungary has been raided by the authorities. Dramatic footage shows armed and masked police raiding home addresses and a datacenter said to be connected to CiNEDUB, a release group which provided worldwide high-profile cam releases. Hidden panels for hard drives, a shotgun, evidence of cocaine use and piles of money complete the Hollywood-style video.
Since its release in May this year, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings has sold over a million copies worldwide. Unfortunately, though, the game has also been plagued by piracy. But for the makers this isn't much of a problem since they are making money on both sides, by getting paid by regular customers and demanding hefty cash settlements from those who (they claim) dared to pirate the game.
There's a big ruling coming out of the Netherlands against one of the biggest newsgroup providers. A dutch court ruled against the Dutch based provider News-Service to remove all binary content, sans the regular non-binary content. If they fail to do so, News-Service may face a 50.000 Euro per day fine. This is by far one of the striking decisions against a Usenet provider since the community site FTD was forced to remove its indexing links. You can read the press release on this here.
Traditionally, The Netherlands has been one of the most lenient countries when it comes to the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet, but this will change if the Government gets to implement their new plans. Under new legislation downloading of copyrighted movies and music will become outlawed. The lawmakers claim that this change is needed to crack down on 'pirate sites'.
Despite claims that freedom of expression is at stake, today a pair of ISPs have been ordered to block The Pirate Bay. Following a demand from Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, the Court of The Hague ruled that Ziggo, the largest ISP in the Netherlands, and competitor XS4ALL have to block subscriber access to the world's most famous torrent site. XS4ALL say they are "bitterly disappointed", noting that fundamental rights have been traded for "commercial interests".
The New Zealand government has outraged Internet users by rushing through a new anti-P2P copyright bill under cover of an emergency session of parliament.
After failing last year in its attempt to force a local Internet service provider to block online piracy, a major record label is now taking on a much bigger opponent. Yesterday, EMI Records filed a lawsuit against the Irish state for not fulfilling its obligations under European law which would otherwise allow for the "blocking, diverting or interrupting of internet communications" which breach copyright law.
The European Parliament has adopted a resolution which criticizes domain name seizures of "infringing" websites by US authorities. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger "the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication." With this stance the European Parliament joins an ever-growing list of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act .
A long-running dispute over whether an ISP can be forced to hand over the details of one of its customers to an anti-piracy group is now with the EU after courts in Sweden couldn't decide. Now the EU's Advocate General has delivered his assessment which is being described as "a victory for freedom" by the Pirate Party's MEP. But that, according to the Advocate General, all depends on ISPs' intentions when they store information on their subscribers.
The European Greens have released a landmark position paper that should guide their policies on copyright in the digital era. The overall theme is a reduction of the copyright monopoly to the benefit of consumers. Among other things the Greens want to legalize file-sharing for personal use, ban DRM entirely and restrict the copyright term to five years.
As US authorities continue with Operation in Our Sites, putting pressure on file-sharing services and seizing their domains, for some it is all to easy to champion a heroic fight back against these "forces of evil". But for the admins of one site targeted by ICE and DHS, the thought of being extradited to the US is a step too far. What started off as fun was turning into something else. Today they announce that "enough is enough."
EZTV is arguably one of the largest BitTorrent communities, so any downtime immediately leads to all kinds of horror stories about raids and seizures. This is especially true when the downtime coincides with the start of the new TV-season. However, the site's users can rest assured as the site will make a comeback soon after its hardware issues are out of the way.
A computer worm originally targeted at members of social networks has been updated to spread using BitTorrent. Known as Koobface, the malware uses compromised computers to build a peer-to-peer botnet and was originally spread via Facebook messages that linked to its code. Now its developers have given it the ability to obtain and distribute its payload using BitTorrent. But don't panic...
John Wiley and Sons, one of the world's largest book publishers, is continuing its efforts to crack down on BitTorrent piracy. The company filed a new mass-lawsuit this month, targeting dozens of John Does who allegedly shared Wiley titles online. Talking to TorrentFreak, the publisher states that it's not their intention to litigate against individuals, but to settle and educate instead.
For the fist time, a federal appellate court has been asked to consider the appropriateness of the damages being sought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against individual copyright infringers.
In the past several months, U.S. authorities have seized several domain names that were allegedly facilitating copyright infringement, and yesterday U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced the first arrest. The 32-year-old Texan Bryan McCarthy was arrested and has been charged with criminal copyright infringement. Meanwhile, the site associated with these criminal charges remains active.
US authorities have initiated the largest round of domain name seizures yet as part of their continued crackdown on counterfeit and piracy-related websites. With just a few days to go until "Cyber Monday" more than 100 domain names have been taken over by the feds to protect the commercial interests of US companies.
During the last 24 hours Homeland Security seized another domain and put up the copyright infringement notice but now a quite unusual picture is forming. Allegedly an anti-vaccine blogger and claimed "batshit" conspiracy theorist with plenty of enemies had his server hacked and filled with illegal material. This appears to have resulted in his domain being seized for copyright infringement.
A 58-year-old grandmother who earlier this month became the first person to be convicted of criminal file-sharing offenses in Scotland, has been handed three years probation. The grandmother and auxiliary nurse, who confessed to making available music files during her participation on a Direct Connect sharing hub, will also have to attend compulsory therapy sessions.
In the last year thousands of alleged copyright infringers have fallen prey to the dubious litigation practices of a handful of lawyers. Many of the accused are not guilty, but the cleverly constructed scheme leads them to believe that they have no other option than to pay up. One desperate defendant is now threatened with a $150,00 fine for allegedly downloading an adult film concealed as classical music.
Following an investigation into the legality of a 3 strikes-style anti-filesharing mechanism operated by Irish ISP Eircom, the country's Data Protection Commissioner has now ordered the practice to be brought to a halt on privacy grounds.
The administrators of two file-sharing sites have been sentenced to fines and a year in jail for linking to copyright works. Breaking a long run of operators being acquitted for similar activities, a Spanish court decided that the act of linking constituted a for-profit "public communication". The lawyer for one of the defendants has denounced the decision, saying that it can only be understood in "political terms".
After a legal process lasting more than 7 years, the creator of Japan's most popular P2P file-sharing application has finally been cleared by the country's Supreme Court. After his initial arrest in 2004 on copyright infringement grounds, the former university researcher has been on a roller coaster ride of convictions, fines, and appeals. Now, barring a dispute on rare technical grounds, his ordeal is over.
An American science fiction writer is trying to get his hard-copy out-of-print books online and to that end he's actually using illicit sources to build his stock of eBooks. However, he thinks that some of his books are so obscure that pirates have overlooked them, and he's offering a prize to anyone that can provide them. TorrentFreak has found one, anyone up for the rest of the challenge?
Since the recording industry is one of the key supporters of the pending SOPA legislation in the United States, it seems fitting that its opponents should use the medium of song to make their counter argument. Following previous musical escapades in support of file-sharing, Internet and gaming culture, today UK activist artist Dan Bull sharpens his lyrical bayonet and plunges it deep into SOPA's heart.
A teenager who appears to have taken his protest against an anti-piracy law a little too far will find himself in court tomorrow. The 18-year-old allegedly posted a video on YouTube protesting the legislation just passed by New Zealand. In it he claimed that websites would be hacked and that explosives had been planted in government buildings.
A few days ago the independent film "The Inner Room" ended up on BitTorrent. Where some filmmakers would see such an event as a threat, for producer Mark Diestler it's quite the opposite. For months he had waited for pirates to pick the movie up, and now it's out he's seeing the film gain additional exposure. For the first time his movie has jumped into the top 250 as listed by IMDb's movie meter.
Lawyers defending a file-sharing site say a new legal victory provides final confirmation that sites providing links to copyright works act lawfully in Spain. In a complaint filed during 2009, SGAE claimed that Index-web.com violated its rights but in yet another blow to the music rights group and Spain's Ley Sinde anti-filesharing law, this week a court disagreed.
The Helsinki District Court has ordered the Finnish ISP Elisa to block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. The ISP has to block the domain names and IP-addresses of the world's most-visited torrent site before the end of next month or face a 100,000 euro fine. Elisa described the court order as vague and ineffective, and has announced that it will appeal the decision.
A man from Scotland has become the first in the country to be convicted of an offense related to the unauthorized recording of movies in a cinema. The 25-year-old recorded several films with a mobile phone secured within a Heath Robinson-style cloth enclosure and, crucially, got caught uploading them to the Internet for profit.
The first case (63 Does) alleges that the accused illegally uploaded the FTV flick "Allie", while the other case alleges the distribution of "Tiffany".
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In the wake of last month's win for ISP iiNet in its legal battle with Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group AFACT, the Internet Industry Association announced today it will begin work immediately on a code of conduct for ISPs and other Internet companies. The aim of the code will be to help clarify the legal rights and responsibilities of a connected range of providers including ISPs, search engines, hosts and social media sites.
There are good ideas and bad ideas for making money online. Some of these ideas are simple, make a web admin a few hundred bucks a month and everyone is happy. There are more aggressive ideas, such as selling out of production (or simply never produced) DVDs online - an idea that defies conventional wisdom in light of the massive and escalating online copyright wars. Twentieth Century Fox is now actively pursuing such websites that sell unauthorized DVDs online. But what kind of DVDs you ask?
Sending DMCA takedown notices in bulk has become increasingly fashionable during recent years but thanks to the database at Chilling Effects, we are able to see who is sending what to whom. As concerns mount over the amount of checking carried out before items are taken down, it appears that Fox has managed to get Google to delist DMCA complaints on Chilling Effects, which were originally sent by Fox themselves and submitted to Chilling Effects by Google.
It's been a week since Fox stopped offering free access to its TV-shows the day after they air on television. The TV-studio took this drastic step in the hope of getting more people to watch their shows live and thus make more revenue. TV-viewers, however, are outraged by the decision and have massively turned to pirated sources to watch their favorite shows.
Starting October last year French Internet users have been receiving letters as part of the three-strikes system built-in to the controversial Hadopi anti-piracy legislation. This week the agency responsible for the warnings gave out details on the scope of the operation. In the last 9 months 18 Million file-sharers were tracked, but due to limited capacity 'only' 470,000 warnings were sent out to first-time offenders.
The French government has temporarily suspended its reliance on the company designated to monitor file-sharing networks for copyright scofflaws following reports that a hack on its servers may have leaked sensitive information.
Following a weekend security breach at Trident Media Guard, the outfit spearheading data collection for France's 3 strikes anti-piracy drive, the country's HADOPI agency has severed interconnection with the company. This means that, pending an enquiry, French file-sharers are no longer being tracked, a major embarrassment for the government.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy is a man who has championed some of the most aggressive anti-piracy legislation in Europe. But today it's revealed that the occupants of his very own office and home are responsible for a nice selection of pirate downloads using BitTorrent. Three strikes? Those with access to the Presidential Palace's IP addresses have already doubled that quota.
Philip Rosedale, the founder (and still chairman) of the company that made Second Life, is back with a new company in the hot consumer-to-consumer commerce space that TaskRabbit and Gigwalk are making popular. Coffee and Power is his creation. It is a little different from the other entries in this space, but conceptually not too far afield.
Last week file-sharing site Megaupload found itself at the center of a huge controversy. After some of the world's leading artists endorsed its service, Universal Music forced the song offline and was met with widespread accusations of censorship.
After LimeWire was shut down last year FrostWire took over as the leading file-sharing application on the Gnutella network. But this didn't last long. Today FrostWire announces that it will leave Gnutella entirely and focus on BitTorrent instead. This decision may very well signal the end of the once-mighty Gnutella network, while existing BitTorrent networks will only grow stronger.
In the copyright case brought against Usenet provider in the United States by Perfect 10, Judge Marilyn L. Huff of California's US District Court granted Giganews' request for an extension to review the case against them. Usenet newsgroups providers have long enjoyed safe harbor thanks to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), as do all ISPs in the United States. Will this lawsuit rock the foundations of the DMCA, or will Giganews emerge victorious?
The Cybernorms research group at Sweden's Lund University partnered with The Pirate Bay earlier this year to carry out the largest survey among file-sharers in history. 75,000 people from all over the world participated in the study, and today the researchers revealed some of the initial results. Girls don't fancy The Pirate Bay, most pirates download movies, and they are increasingly worried about their anonymity.
During a speech on Wednesday, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said that proposals from both the U.S. and British governments to block access to file-sharing websites would threaten freedom of speech. Google, he said, is opposed to such measures and will fight them, presumably in court, if necessary.
Earlier this year Google launched a piracy blacklist and began filtering keywords from its Instant and Autocomplete services. A necessary measure to counter online copyright infringement according to the search giant, but not everyone agrees. To partially undo Google's censorship efforts, the "MAFIAA Fire" team has now released the "Gee! No evil!" Firefox add-on.
Last week the Italian authorities moved against the general purpose proxy site proxyitalia.com because it could be used by Italians to access BTjunkie and The Pirate Bay. Their goal was to prevent Italians from secretly accessing these torrent sites, but this plan backfired. BTjunkie's owner quickly launched a new proxy, one that will be much harder to crack. This time the Italian authorities have to censor Google's App Engine to stop it.
Since April 2010, French music rights and anti-piracy group SNEP has been engaged in legal action against Google. SNEP felt that Google should censor search terms such as torrent, RapidShare and MegaUpload. Having been decided once already in Google's favor the case went to an appeal. This week the Court of Appeal decided that Google can't be forced to filter.
A trio of organizations representing the movie, cinema and TV industries have gone to court in France in an attempt to force Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and the country's ISPs to block several streaming sites. The groups, which represent hundreds of video-related companies such as Paramount and Sony, want streaming sites blocked to Internet subscribers and delisted from search engines.
As the phenomena of blocking file-sharing sites continues to spread around the world, the government of Indonesia is tackling the issue from two directions. Alongside an announcement confirming that ISP blocks will be put in place against some of the most popular file-hosting services, record labels are also being told they need to reduce prices in order to deter piracy.
Last month, Grooveshark's music app was removed from the Android Marketplace by Google at the request of the RIAA. Following claim and counterclaim about Grooveshark's legality or otherwise, the company has announced that if necessary they will take their fight to court and to Congress. "Let's set the record straight," they insist. "There is nothing illegal about what Grooveshark offers to consumers."
In a lawsuit filed last week, Universal Music made the devastating claim that bosses and other workers at Grooveshark personally uploaded many thousands of infringing tracks to the service. Through their General Counsel, Grooveshark has now bitten back, pouring scorn on the "blatantly false" basis of Universal's claims and their alleged tactic of tipping off the press about the lawsuit before informing Grooveshark.
This morning millions of Internet users in Germany have woken to find their online music listening options reduced. Music streaming service Grooveshark has self-censored in the country, citing "unreasonably high" licensing costs imposed by local music rights collections group GEMA. In other news, Grooveshark is now trying to unmask the 'whistleblower' who recently landed them in so much legal trouble with the major labels.
As both sides in the forthcoming Universal Music versus Grooveshark copyright infringement lawsuit prepare to do battle, a warning shot has been sounded across the bows of the currently anonymous individual whose comments set off the legal chain reaction.
A guilty verdict has been handed down in Sweden's largest-ever personal file-sharing trial. The 58-year-old female defendant avoided a jail sentence for sharing more than 45,000 songs online but now faces probation, a fine equivalent to 50 days pay, plus the costs of her defense. Pirate Part leader Anna Troberg described the verdict as "tragic".
Last year Hollywood's Motion Picture Association (MPA) went to court seeking an injunction against UK ISP BT in order to force them to block Newzbin2, the resurrected version of the original Newzbin Usenet indexer. This week the MPA are back at the High Court again as they attempt to force BT to use their child abuse filter to block Newzbin2.
Following a hearing in London's High Court, leading UK ISP BT will be forced to block subscriber access to Usenet indexing site Newzbin2. Under the banner of the MPA, the leading Hollywood studios successfully argued that by letting the site continue unabated their interests would be severely damaged. The decision, the first of its kind in the UK, increases the pressure on other ISPs.
The BitTorrent-powered VODO network has released what is arguably its highest-quality film to date. 'A Lonely Place For Dying', with Hollywood star James Cromwell as Executive Producer, prefers the BitTorrent community over Hollywood's own funding mechanisms and debuts online before making its way to various movie theaters. A new distribution model is born.
Best-selling book author Joe Quirk is suing Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures because they allegedly ripped off the story from one of his books for their upcoming action movie Premium Rush. The author claims that the entire plot and several scenes were purposely copied from his book The Ultimate Rush, and he demands damages as well as a boycott of the film's premiere.
As the entertainment industries eye the apparent emerging threat of so-called cyberlocker online storage sites, it was inevitable that at some point they would pick a fight with one of them. That unlucky target is Florida-based Hotfile and although it has chosen to settle lawsuits in the past, the company appears to be standing strong and has filed a motion to dismiss.
In their ongoing battle with the MPAA, the Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile has suffered a major loss. A federal court has ordered Hotfile to disclose user data, the identities and revenues of their top affiliates, and financial information on the company itself. District Court Judge Adalberto Jordan argued that the MPAA needs this info to prove that Hotfile is promoting and profiting from copyright infringement.
The Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile has sued Warner Bros. for fraud and abuse. Hotfile accuses the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don't hold the copyrights to, including open source software. Among other things, Hotfile is looking for damages to compensate the company for the losses they suffered.
In April 2011, the FBI raided the apartment of a Screen Actor's Guild member suspected of uploading several pre-release screeners of Hollywood blockbusters to The Pirate Bay. The man, an actor, has now agreed to plead guilty and potentially faces three years in prison. There were claims he could've been connected to a release group but as his amateurish online actions show, nothing could be further from the truth.
Copyright holders and anti-piracy companies have been dealt a blow in their attempts to monitor and track down student file-sharers in Norway. Following a decision by the Data Inspectorate, universities will not be allowed to spy on the online activities of their students and data gathered for network maintenance purposes will kept well away from rightsholders and lawyers.
The record-breaking lawsuit, filed by the makers of The Hurt Locker against 24,583 alleged BitTorrent users, has come to an end. Although this appears to be good news for the defendants, the lawyers representing the movie studio are continuing with their cash demands. During recent months the lawyers engaged in dubious behavior, asking people to settle with them after they were dismissed from the lawsuit, and targeting people who were never included to begin with.
After targeting tens of thousands of U.S. Internet users alleged to have downloaded and shared the Oscar-winning movie The Hurt Locker, the movie's makers have expanded their settlement business into new territory. Three Canadian ISPs have now been ordered by a court to hand over the personal details of their subscribers to Voltage Pictures.
After being honored with an Oscar for best motion picture last year, the makers of The Hurt Locker have now also secured the award for the biggest file-sharing lawsuit the world has ever witnessed. By targeting at least 24,583 alleged BitTorrent users, Voltage Pictures hopes to recoup millions of dollars in settlements to compensate the studio for piracy-related losses.
The IFPI has told Google it must try harder with its copyright enforcement activities. In its patronizing teacher/student style "Report Card", the music industry group says the search giant profits from digital piracy, puts up barriers to make life difficult for rightsholders, engages in destructive rhetoric and raises alarmist, self-serving criticism to any legislative proposal designed to thwart infringement.
When trying to obtain elusive evidence to help formulate a legal strategy, most organizations tend to go through the court system. IFPI, the international music industry group, has just done it rather differently. When they needed a torrent site's data recently they just called up their host, implied they might sue and then simply picked up the hard drives. Case in point, the Internet's 10th biggest torrent site, LimeTorrents.
With all the excitement of last week's dual hardware launches out of the way, it's back to business for the IGN UK team. Which means Alex is being his usual snarky self, and Martin is out rifling through the bins outside.
According to growing reports coming out of India, users of several large Internet service providers can no longer access some of the world's largest file-hosting sites. On apparent order from the Indian government, RapidShare, MegaUpload, MediaFile, HotFile and many more are all being blocked at the ISP level.
An organization which claims to protect the rights of Indie labels across 25 different countries is squeezing what is left of LimeWire for millions of dollars. Merlin BV, which represents more than 12,000 indie labels worldwide, is suing LimeWire and owner Mark Gorton after the company failed to pay compensation following its May 2011 out-of-court settlement with the RIAA.
Earlier this year convicted movie cammer Timothy Epifan filed a lawsuit against Somerset County police and the MPAA for arresting him with deadly force and breaking his leg. The case is still ongoing, but Epifan has struck a deal with the Hollywood group meaning that the MPAA has been dropped from the lawsuit.
Police in three European countries have carried out an operation to disrupt two scene release groups said to be responsible for pre-releasing thousands of movies onto the Internet. The action, which focused on datacenters and home addresses across Germany, Switzerland and Hungary, targeted the leaders and equipment of CRUCiAL and iNSPiRED.
As the war of words over PROTECT IP and SOPA ignites the Internet, the MPAA has issued a reminder that "opponents" of past copyright laws have been wrong before. But while some fears over 1998's DMCA and 2005's Grokster ruling didn't come to pass, some things are absolutely guaranteed. If the entertainment industries don't get their way -- or even if they do -- they'll be back for more. Again and again.
What began as an attempt to restrain foreign piracy on the Internet has morphed into a domestic "kill switch" on First Amendment freedom in the fastest-growing corner of the marketplace of ideas.
Following last year's failed High Court bid to force an ISP to adopt a 3 strikes-style regime to deal with pirates, the Big Four record labels are set to get their way through a change in the law. If adopted, proposals published yesterday by the Irish government would allow copyright holders to hold ISPs liable for infringements and take out injunctions against them.
As part of a file-sharing investigation, in 2010 authorities tracked an IP address to a house in Sweden. After a night playing video games a blurry-eyed house sitter answered the early morning call only to be welcomed by the police. They weren't looking for him, but the owner who was abroad. Sometimes, however, you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
An advisor to the European Court of Justice has said that an ISP involved in a long-running file-sharing dispute cannot be forced to block or filter copyright-infringing files at the behest of copyright holders. Such an action would amount to an invasion of customers' privacy and violate rights guaranteed under EU law.
As New Zealand braces itself following the introduction of a 3 strikes-style scheme for dealing with online copyright infringement, the CEO of one of the country's largest ISPs has slammed the legislation. TelstraClear chief Allan Freeth says that punishing consumers isn't the answer and that business models requiring new legislation in order to function are flawed and need to be changed.
Following its recent court victory over Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group AFACT, Internet service provider iiNet has been hard at work thinking of ways the issue of illicit file-sharing can be dealt with. Today it has presented a framework which includes the creation of an independent body to overlook a system of detection, warnings and punishments.
Disconnecting alleged copyright infringers after three warnings is the ideal anti-piracy strategy if we believe the assertions of the entertainment industries. But how effective are such graduated response policies in the eyes of the public? Not very, according to a survey from the UK Internet provider BE Broadband. The survey reveals that only 6 percent of file-sharers will reduce or stop swapping files online.
Following complaints from two of the country's largest ISPs, last month the High Court began its judicial review of the Digital Economy Act, the legislation put in place in the UK to deal with illicit file-sharing. Today the High Court almost completely rejected the challenge by BT and TalkTalk, with the ISPs winning only a slight concession on costs.
Today the European Commission published the responses to a public consultation on Europe's anti-piracy directive IPRED. As expected, there is a huge divide between the copyright holders on the one hand, and Internet providers, academics and citizens on the other. The latter fiercely oppose the draconian measures that IPRED introduces, claiming it threatens basic human rights while stifling innovation.
Italy is taking its crusade against BitTorrent sites to an unprecedented level. The authorities have moved against the general purpose proxy site proxyitalia.com because it could be used by Italians to access BTjunkie and The Pirate Bay. Following this logic they will also have to censor thousands of other proxy sites and ban all VPN services, or shut down the Internet entirely.
The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized today after he failed to appear at the Court of Appeal. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, did not appear at the appeal trial last year because he was hospitalized in Cambodia and later went missing. The Court of Appeal has now decided to finalize the initial verdict of one year jail time and a fine of $1.1 million.
The long-running and controversial file-sharing case of Joel Tenenbaum was back in court yesterday, this time in Boston before the First Circuit Court of Appeal. The issue at stake is the exact amount Tenenbaum will have to pay following his admittance in 2009 that he illegally shared music on the Internet. It currently stands at $67,500, having been slashed last year from a staggering $675,000. Joel says it should be more like $30.
P2P litigators are still trying their best to ramshackle BitTorrent lawsuits en masse through the legal system. While at one point the likes of the US Copyright Group (the litigators representing Far Cry, The Hurt Locker) and the Adult Copyright Group (various adult titles) seemed almost invincible, mowing down every challenge to their pursuit of providing an alternative revenue stream to their clients. Slowly this pursuit unraveled, leading to several landmarks decisions that determined these P2P litigators could not lump thousands of individuals from various jurisdictions into one case.
In an ongoing BitTorrent lawsuit of particular interest, in which the plaintiff's lawyer has already refused to comply with a court order demanding to know how much money is being made from settlements, a judge has now dismissed all but one of the defendants. This welcome news for more than 5,000 John Does is further augmented by a wave of criticism from the presiding judge who clearly understands "copyright-troll" style lawsuits.
In a New Zealand court today, a judge delayed the decision to grant or deny bail to Kim Dotcom, the larger than life founder of Megaupload.com. The prosecutor said that since multi-millionaire Dotcom had multiple identities, four dozen credit cards and a history of "fleeing criminal charges" he represented a flight risk "on the extreme end of the scale". In the meantime, two other site operators were arrested in Europe.
Back in March the Russian Justice Ministry turned down the Pirate Party's attempt to officially register. The decision was made because the authorities feel that the word 'pirate' could be connected with criminal acts. Now a Moscow judge has backed that decision, leading the party to decide on a new name.
Welcome to Just Show Me on Tecca TV, where we show you tips and tricks for getting the most out of the gadgets in your life. In today's episode we'll show you how to use three great travel apps for your Android phone.
The Department of Justice has filed a brief siding with the RIAA in its civil case against the file-sharing student Joel Tenenbaum.The RIAA is protesting a demand from the student’s legal team, who want the court to reduce the massive $675,000 fine on due process grounds, to the minimum statutory damages of $750 per song.
Security vendor Kaspersky has announced it will withdraw its membership of the Business Software Alliance (BSA) over the group's support of SOPA. The Russian company, which is famous for its anti-virus products, says the pending legislation will hurt both innovation and consumers. In protest, Kaspersky will end its association with the BSA on January 1st 2012.
Katz.cd, one of the largest direct download and torrent link directories on the Internet, appears to have been taken over by hackers. As a result the site's visitors are now being redirected to a dubious pay-to-download site. How long the 'downtime' will last is unclear at the moment, but all signs suggest that something serious is going on.
The recent developments around domain name seizures by the U.S. authorities has prompted another major torrent site to move to a new domain as a precaution. KickassTorrents, one of the most visited torrent sites on the Internet, has announced it will soon replace its .com domain name with the Philippine extension .ph.
Europe just witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to. More than a dozen people connected to the site were arrested after police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses and data centers. Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services.
In a beautiful twist of irony, New Zealand parliament member Melissa Lee has been caught in a copyright quagmire. It turns out that just hours before she spoke out in support of the controversial new copyright law being rushed through parliament, she tweeted how pleased she was with a compilation of K-Pop songs a friend copied for her.
A new report published by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research discovered some BitTorrent trends worth sharing. During a 2-year period the researchers monitored an unprecedented sample of 500,000 people in 169 countries. Aside from showing that BitTorrent users download more and more data, the report also finds that large ISPs including Comcast are actually making money off BitTorrent traffic.
A prominent lawyer involved in the ever-growing pay-up-or-else anti-filesharing schemes in the United States has been admonished and punished by a judge. Evan Stone had asked the whether he could contact ISPs in order to discover the identities of alleged file-sharers, but the court said he'd have to wait. Stone ignored the court but was ultimately found out, which resulted in him picking up a $10,000 fine.
Last month a lawyer was ordered by a judge to reveal how much money he has received from threatening to sue alleged BitTorrent users. The lawyer, Ira M. Siegel, missed the court's deadline and even then failed to answer fully as required. After describing the EFF as a group wanting "freedom from the tyranny of having to pay for content," his eventual response began with a surprising attack on an anti-copyright troll blogger.
A 29-year-old man from California has pleaded guilty to his role in a long-running warez-scene release group and now faces up to 5 years in jail. The group, called OSC, ran from 2002 until 2007 and was responsible for the pre-release of the Kanye West album Graduation. It's connections to ex-members of the previously busted group, Rabid Neurosis, appeared to prove fatal.
A letter sent on behalf of 21 pro-copyright outfits including the Motion Picture Association and IFPI shows how the European Parliament is being urged to sign the controversial ACTA anti-piracy agreement. The backroom lobbying effort document, which came into TorrentFreak's possession, reveals how the organizations ask Parliament not to wait for a response from the European Court of Justice but simply sign "with no further delays."
This week GigaOm's NewTeeVee published a piece pointing out that in harsh economic climates people may decide to download movies for free instead of going to the theater or viewing them via VOD. The MPAA weren't happy with the article, to the point where they managed to get GigaOm's permission to publish a retaliatory guest post. Some didn't like that, but I say: "Well done GigaOm!"
Mark Gorton and Lime Wire pocketed millions by enabling people to obtain songs online without paying for them. Now, Gorton and his company could end up paying damages of over $1 billion.
In the midst of their jury trial, the company behind the defunct LimeWire client and the RIAA settled their dispute out of court. Limewire will pay $105 million to compensate the major music labels for damages suffered. A moment of justice for the music industry, but not necessarily for the artists. The recouped money is destined for reinvestment in new anti-piracy efforts and will not be used to compensate any artists.
Now accused of uploading more than 1,000 movies, a major uploader at one of the world's oldest BitTorrent sites was arrested at his home last month. Worryingly, the prosecutor in the case has just revealed that tracking the man was simple since he made no effort to hide his IP address, which was both residential and static. Is it now a sign of madness to even go online without some kind of protection?
Trident Media Guard, the company entrusted by the French government to monitor file-sharing networks for copyright infringement, recently had some of their tools leaked onto the Internet following a security breach. Now researchers have published an analysis, with claims that an auto-update feature makes TMG's servers vulnerable to remote code injection and execution.
After anti-piracy investigators somehow managed to obtain a full copy of their site logs several years ago, a married couple behind the now defunct Interfilm BitTorrent tracker have finally been charged for their role in running the site. The Moscow pair face claims they cost movie companies a staggering $1.25 billion. Fines and possible jail sentences of up to six years await them.
BitTorrent copyright lawsuits are back — well, they never really disappeared. But P2P litigators have been trying all types of creative methods to get around the big problem of jurisdiction. The latest method attempted to use class-action law against thousands of alleged BitTorrent users — the results of which remain to be seen. In the meantime, P2P litigators from WeFightPiracy.com, on behalf of Hard Drive Productions, are approaching adult oriented movie distribution on BitTorrent the old fashioned way, but with a twist.
Leading figures in the music and movie industries have rallied against the manufacturer of a home entertainment hub. The Freebox server-based system from a French ISP provides Blu-Ray, games and home network playback of media, but the included torrent client has drawn the ire of music and movie bosses, who are now demanding that the feature is removed.
MediaGet, an all-in-one BitTorrent client developed in Russia, has become increasingly popular recently. Despite being just one year young the BitTorrent client has already been downloaded more than 18 million times. At the moment the majority of its users come from Ukraine and Russia, but the MediaGet developers have translated the client and are ready to conquer the West.
While last week’s shutdown of MegaUpload is of huge interest in itself, but a wave of aftershocks and side-effects are proving equally fascinating to watch. In addition to causing all sorts of problems for legitimate users of file-sharing services, there is no avoiding the fact that certain elements of the piracy scene are in a mess. But amazingly, still the beat goes on.
As last week's arrest of Megaupload owner Kim Dotcom emphasized, the main character in the SOPA/PIPA debate is the foreign 'thief'. He's everywhere--robbing Americans of their creativity, jobs, and money. Worse, he's enjoying himself. As the Chamber of Commerce put it: "The criminals behind these sites are laughing all the way to the bank, stealing the best of American creativity and innovation at the expense of our jobs and consumers."
Yesterday, the Internet staged a black-out to protest two anti-piracy bills making their way through Congress. Today, a site allegedly devoted to piracy is blacked out, but against its will. The feds shuttered Megaupload Thursday, and arrested four of its top employees in New Zealand, accusing them of running a massive piracy ring.
Megaupload users have gotten at least a two-week reprieve during which the file-sharing company says it hopes their files and other stored data can be retrieved, not deleted.
During an appearance in court today, his third in less than a week, Kim Dotcom was informed that bail had been denied. The judge rejected the MegaUpload founder's bid for freedom while he awaits extradition to the US and remanded him in custody until late February. Three other alleged co-conspirators will learn of their fate tomorrow.
File-hosting service Megaupload has told TorrentFreak that it will sue Universal for wrongfully taking down its content from YouTube. Universal took action Friday to remove a Megaupload-produced pop video which featured leading artists singing the cyberlocker service's praises.
In their 18-page response filing at the US District Court for Northern Californian earlier this month, not once did Universal Music say why they forced YouTube to remove Megaupload's Mega Song. Since that's what the dispute between the two companies is all about, that was a pretty strange event. In a new filing, Megaupload makes it clear that it isn't going to be brushed aside. The cyberlocker wants answers, and it will dig deep to get them.
MegaUpload has received a letter from the US Attorney informing the company that data uploaded by its users may be destroyed before the end of the week. The looming wipe-out is the result of MegaUpload's lack of funds to pay for the servers. Behind the scenes, MegaUpload is hoping to convince the US Government that it's in the best interest of everyone involved to allow users to access their data, at least temporarily.
A week ago today, Megaupload's now-famous Mega Song was on its way to becoming a viral hit, only to be cut down from YouTube by a Universal Music takedown demand. Following the filing of a Megaupload lawsuit the song is back online, but Universal are standing firm. You can't touch us on DMCA grounds, the label says in a new filing, adding it can take down any material, even if it doesn't infringe their rights.
File-hosting services all around the world will have looked on in horror yesterday as MegaUpload, one of the world's largest cyberlocker services, was taken apart by the FBI. Foreign citizens were arrested in foreign lands and at least $50 million in assets seized. So what exactly prompted this action? TorrentFreak read every word of the 72-page indictment so you don't have to, and we were surprised by its contents.
Content-sharing Internet service Megaupload.com has lost the help of one of the best-known U.S. defense lawyers as it begins to fight charges of copyright infringement, a person familiar with the matter said.
In the epic fight between P2P litigators and the file-sharing community are the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). They are the link between copyright enforcement and the customers that litigators like the US Copyright Group want to pursue. It's only with the cooperation on part of the ISP that P2P litigators can find the personally identifiable information that will allow them to collect money. Most ISPs are happy to go along with P2P litigator's subpoenas for information — but there are holdouts: Time Warner, and a small South Dakotan ISP called Midcontinent Communications.
NFC devices are to get an optional open mailbox into which messages and requests can be dropped by other NFC devices, hopefully leading to cross-platform P2P applications.
There's lots of unauthorized porn distribution to cover and not very much jurisprudence to go around. But that's why they have joinder in lawsuits, right? Lump enough defendants together so you get several dozen defendants for the price of one. And the lawsuits keep on coming — after a February slowdown, April and May have turned out to be quite prolific. In the last two days, Liberty Media, producer of the adult gay film "Down on the Farm" is churning out numerous lawsuits. Let's take a look at the last few days:
The Swedish Film Institute (SFI) is in the middle of a crisis after an anti-piracy company revealed that it had tracked several leaked movies on The Pirate Bay back to its servers. Desperate to deflect the accusations, today the SFI made a long statement. It turned out to be a perfect illustration that allegations of piracy based on an IP address and nothing else, simply must be backed up by something more solid.
As the dozens of mass-lawsuits against BitTorrent users move through the U.S. courts, lawyers are slowly optimizing their strategies. This week an interesting case was filed at the Southern California District Court, as the movie studio Liberty Media filed a lawsuit against a BitTorrent swarm, "Swarm of November 16, 2010? to be precise.
A film studio is taking extreme steps to try and stop its latest movie from being pirated online. Reliance Entertainment has obtained a court order which restrains thousands of ISPs and websites from making available their film Bodyguard, a move which the company believes will reduce piracy by 60%. A similar but less broad effort last month is reported to have cut file-sharing by 40%.
Two brothers from Brisbane, Australia who operated the popular private BitTorrent tracker MovieX have barely escaped a jail sentence. The two were arrested late 2008 for facilitating copyright infringement and both pleaded guilty. Speaking to TorrentFreak, one of the sentenced brothers says he regrets his wrongdoings, but also wants to refute many of the false claims that are currently being spread by the media.
The music storage locker service MP3tunes has scored a big win in its lengthy battle against EMI. U.S. District Judge William Pauley ruled that MP3tunes did not promote copyright infringement and that the service qualifies for "safe harbor" protection under the DMCA. The landmark verdict is good news for other cloud storage services offered by Dropbox, Grooveshark and Amazon.
In a bizarre yet brilliant example of how messed up the current copyright restrictions are, six major movie studios have filed a new lawsuit against the quasi DVD-rental outfit Zediva. Under the flag of the MPAA, the studios label the new business as a "sham," because it uses a clever way to bypass a licensing roadblock.
In their ongoing battle with file-hosting service Hotfile, five MPAA studios have asked the court to disallow Hotfile access to information on their anti-piracy strategies. While drawing an analogy between copyright infringement and drug trafficking, the MPAA studios ask the court to handle their anti-piracy documents as trade secrets to prevent 'pirates' from getting even more sophisticated than they already are.
According to a disclosure report, the MPAA spent $400,000 lobbying a wide range of US government departments in the first quarter of 2011 including the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the Vice President's Office. Issues on the table include so-called "rogue sites" including RapidShare, streaming, graduated response (3 strikes) and domain seizures.
During the last year Netflix managed to outgrow BitTorrent in terms of the amount of US Internet traffic it generates. A promising finding for Hollywood as it shows that there's an overwhelming interest for the legal movie streaming service. At TorrentFreak we wondered what might happen if all US BitTorrent users made the switch to Netflix, and the results of this exploration are quite intriguing.
In its appeal against the file-sharing mom Jammie Thomas, the RIAA has asked the court to reinstate a massive fine which U.S. District Judge Michael Davis previously slashed because it was "monstrous and shocking." The music group argues that awards as high as $1.5 million for sharing 24 songs are appropriate and constitutional. In their appeal, the RIAA is joined by the MPAA who also want to overthrow the standing verdict.
An internal MPAA fact-sheet obtained by TorrentFreak shows that the movie industry is preparing a full-frontal attack on the business model of what they call "rogue cyberlockers". The document summarizes how these file-hosting sites offer affiliates cash in return for signing up new premium members. According to the MPAA these practices facilitate mass-copyright infringement.
The MPAA has submitted a new list of "notorious websites" to the Office of the US Trade Representative, sites that are all in danger of becoming the target of planned U.S. legislation. The list contains the most-visited torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, file-hosting and linking sites such as MegaUpload, and Russia's Facebook equivalent, VKontakte. Interestingly, file-hosting service RapidShare is absent from the filing.
A breakthrough coalition of the MPAA, RIAA and other copyright holders have signed an agreement with AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon to curb piracy. Under the agreement the ISPs agree to send "copyright alerts" to subscribers whose Internet connections are used for copyright infringement. Repeated offenders will not be disconnected from the Internet, but could be slowed down instead.
A partnership between the RIAA, MPAA and the major ISPs, which would see the latter taking action against infringing customers, has been confirmed. If final agreement is reached — a point believed to be as close as next month — ISPs including AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon will begin taking increasingly severe measures against pirating customers.
Over the years many pro-copyright groups have lobbied extensively for harsher anti-piracy legislation. In Europe, this task may now become a little easier, as a former music industry lobbyist has been appointed as the head of a unit that deals with copyright and enforcement issues at the European Commission. Among other things, the former IFPI employee will be tasked with pushing through the ACTA trade agreement.
The Pirate Bay is at the center of a new lawsuit filed at the District Court in Helsinki, Finland. Music industry representatives have filed suit against one of the major Internet Service Providers in the country, demanding that it blocks subscriber access to the BitTorrent site. The Pirate Bay is currently one of the most visited websites in Finland.
A new report looking into online music consumption habits shows that since 2009 the number of people who pirate music has dropped by 25 percent in Sweden. The sharp decrease coincides with a massive interest for the music streaming service Spotify. One of the main reasons why people switch to legal services is the wider range of material they can find there.
A London-based music label and a German music magazine are having an escalating high-profile row over two leaked albums. Ninja Tunes have publicly accused Backspin magazine of leaking promos sent to them earlier this month, accusations the magazine aggressively denies. So who leaked what and when? TorrentFreak takes a look.
Belgian music royalty collecting agency Sabam has once again stepped up to enforce their strict copyright regime. Today the group announced that it will bill Internet providers for allowing subscribers to play and download copyrighted songs.
In a massive operation, Spanish music rights and anti-piracy groups SGAE and SDAE have been raided by more than 50 police officers and tax officials. Operation Saga is the culmination of a two-year investigation into embezzlement, fraud, and misappropriation of funds, the latter connected to SGAE and SDAE collecting money on behalf of artists and spending it with companies they have interests in. The president of SGAE was among 9 people arrested.
According to a new report on Net Neutrality, users of mobile broadband services who hope that all of their Internet traffic will be prioritized equally will be disappointed. While much traffic is left unhindered, the report from the organization responsible for Sweden's.
Is solving the copyright "wars" really so difficult? New traffic research shows that Netflix has overtaken Bittorrent as America's favourite internet application, knocking http into third place. "P2P is here to stay," note the authors in Sandvine's Global Internet Report, Spring 2011 edition, which shows that demand for legal, paid-for stuff is the single biggest internet traffic trend.
According to Albert Einstein the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Adult media company Perfect 10 see it rather differently. Having sued Google, RapidShare, Microsoft, MegaUpload, Mastercard and Visa without success thus far, they now have Usenet service provider Giganews in their crosshairs.
TorrentFreak will soon cease to exist because of new legislation being considered by the Obama administration, a prominent music industry expert has announced. But we're in good company. Music streaming service Grooveshark and the RIAA-approved iMesh will have to go too, and news sites like Wired, Techdirt and Slashdot will have to change their tune drastically so as not to upset the battered music industry.
Today marks the start of P2P network monitoring for New Zealand's "3 strikes" anti-filesharing legislation. As the government is criticized for not launching their official information resource until next week, a Reddit user claims to be using a government network to share Miley Cyrus movies. As an ISP account holder itself, will the government get hit with the 3 strikes ban-hammer?
The New Zealand government has surprised the public and even some MPs by moving to rush through its controversial 3 strikes-style legislation today. The new measures will allow for users to be disconnected from the Internet for up to 6 months, based on infringement claims from copyright holders.
Even with SOPA and PIPA tabled for now, there remains considerable pressure on suspect websites, that in the eyes of the entertainment industry, remain a bane of their existence. One such site, of course, is Newzbin.com, who is now in a position where they need to change to Newzbin.es because of such pressure. Here's the latest from Newzbin.com...
Newzbin2, the site chosen by Hollywood to be their UK web-blocking guinea-pig, has revealed some of their forward plans. Within weeks the Usenet indexing site will not only dump its .COM domain, but also look towards the creation of both VPN and cyberlocker services.
This week the MPA's lawyers were in the High Court claiming that Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 costs them millions of pounds due to illegal movie downloads. To this end they want BT to block the site but the ISP is refusing. BT says that by complying it would open the floodgates for hundreds of other site-blocking requests. Now, for the first time this week, Newzbin2's owners speak out.
As many already know, Newzbin2 is a venerable Usenet indexing/search engine site that has been around, in one iteration or another, for over 5 years. After an initial shutdown a few years back, it returned under new management. Many wondered if it would be able to further the technological accomplishments of its predecessor, or merely lay idle. Well in response to a potential blockage that threatens the ability of UK residents to access this site, Newzbin2 has developed an app to combat this potential threat.
Last week, Usenet indexer Newzbin2 delivered on their promise of delivering a mechanism to circumvent the court-ordered blocking measures set to hit their site in the weeks to come. After releasing a second version of their encryption software in just three days and an OSX version in under a week, the site's operators now say they are prepared to adapt their client to help other blocked sites stay online.
Usenet indexing site Newzbin2, who are no strangers to the issue of court-ordered website blocking, have made an interesting addition to the software tool they released last month. From today their anti-censorship client now includes a feature to bypass DNS blocking not only on Newzbin2, but on the world's most famous torrent site, The Pirate Bay.
Today, UK ISP BT and representatives from the MPA will appear at the High Court to thrash out the final stage of the ground-breaking web-blocking case against Newzbin2. But in a surprise last-minute move, a David and Goliath battle seems to be on the cards. A Newzbin2 user has stepped up to defend his site by intervening in the blocking process, and is reportedly already being bullied by his Hollywood opponents with threats of bankruptcy.
UK Internet service provider BT didn't need the flexibility of a full 14 days to begin their censorship of Usenet indexing site Newzbin2. According to an administrator at the site the court-ordered blockade has already begun, with subscribers to the ISP getting an "Error -- site blocked" message when they try to access.
Five people connected to the video streaming and download site NinjaVideo have been indicted by a grand jury on copyright infringement and conspiracy charges. All will stand trial in a U.S. District Court. The authorities hold the defendants responsible for providing access to unauthorized movies and TV-shows between 2008 and 2010, which allegedly earned the site more than $500,000.
According to a report in the New York Times, more than 300 FBI agents have carried out raids which have "wiped out 50 percent" of the illicit recording industry in the United States. The move follows scathing criticism of music piracy from one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, who in support of calls for new legislation compared it to counterfeiting $100 bills or rustling cattle.
Politics make strange bedfellows, the old saw goes. And it doesn't get any stranger than Internet companies such as Google and Facebook, which liberals dominate, joining with the tea party on policy issues. But that's what's happening on a copyright bill, The Hill reports.
Defending the right to run an open wireless network, an accused BitTorrent user has written to a court explaining that his actions do not constitute a crime. The Doe further highlighted how mass-BitTorrent lawsuits are used to harass Internet users based on shoddy evidence. The anti-piracy lawyers in question suspect foul play, and claim the letter was not sent by one of the Does, but by a pro-piracy organization.
ICE director John Morton has confirmed that the seizure of domain names that are alleged to be promoting copyright infringement will continue in the coming years. In a statement before the U.S. House of Representatives, Morton said that "Operation In Our Sites" will continue through and beyond 2011. In addition and contrary to popular belief, Morton claimed that the seizures "respect free speech" and "provide due process."
A man has been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations agents in connection with streaming live sporting events over the Internet. The 19-year-old allegedly ran HQ-Streams.com and HQ-Streams.net, domains that were previously seized by ICE as part of Operation in Our Sites.
Last month it was revealed that the UK-based admin of TVShack.net is fighting an extradition request filed by the US government. The site's domain was seized as part of Operation in Our Sites but according to new comments from ICE, more individuals could now be sought by US authorities. Cutting through jurisdictional issues, ICE say they only need to show one thing to seek extradition of an admin — that his or her 'pirate' site has a .COM or .NET domain.
Anti-piracy group RettighedsAlliancen say they have been busy recently tracking down piracy 'masterminds'. After busting who they claim is the leader of a huge movie piracy group, last week they had the police detain a less likely target -- a 19-year-old law student who runs a file-sharing blog. RettighedsAlliancen say that guides on his site showed readers how to break the law, an act serious enough to involve the police.
Google, Amazon, Dropbox and VMWare are on the receiving end of a law suit brought by former P2Ptards who claim that cloud products from the big companies infringe their peer-sharing patents.
In a little over two months time, the long-awaited horror movie The Tunnel will receive its world premiere. Rather than a traditional theatrical release, the movie — which is set in abandoned real-life tunnels under Sydney, Australia — will make its debut online for free with BitTorrent. Simultaneously it will be released on physical DVD, to be distributed by Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures.
The copyright owners of the Paris Hilton sex tape 'One Night in Paris' filed a lawsuit in January against 843 individuals they accused of sharing the now-infamous movie via BitTorrent. Their lawyer has now been told that he may engage in "immediate discovery" in order to find out the identities of the John Doe defendants. Are you worried that your name might be on the list? How about a $500 game of lawsuit Russian roulette? Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
Millions of BitTorrent users can breathe a sigh of relief today. The patent lawsuit against BitTorrent Inc., the makers of uTorrent and the BitTorrent Mainline client, has been dropped. Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network voluntarily dismissed the case against BitTorrent Inc., which it orginally accused of violating a file-sharing related patent.
When talking about piracy the entertainment industry and politicians often use the term "theft." This is a huge problem according to the Swedish sociologist of law Stefan Larsson. In his thesis "Metaphors and Norms -- Understanding Copyright Law in a Digital Society," he explains that these metaphors are in part keeping the wide gap between people's norms and the law intact.
The "piracy is stealing" argument raises its head in the media every week and is on the lips of anti-piracy outfits and copyright holders every day. To them, every unauthorized copy is a lost sale and another small dent in the company spreadsheet which, when added to a million others, will destroy it bit by bit. To the maker of Minecraft, however, its an opportunity. Piracy is theft? You must be kidding. Lost sales? They don't exist.
In May, FilmOn founder Alki David and a group of artists sued CNET's Download.com and parent company CBS. The copyright holders accused the CBS-owned websites of several copyright-related offenses for their role in distributing LimeWire and other P2P software. This week the artists dropped their case, threatening to replace it with an even bigger case in the near future.
A Spanish judge came to an interesting conclusion in a case dealing with a seller of pirated copies. According to the judge the defendant doesn't have to pay compensation to the rightsholders because it is not possible to determine to what extent piracy actually decreases sales. On the contrary, the judge suggests that piracy may even boost sales.
One of the biggest sites on the Internet devoted to pirated software cannot be accessed by a number of Internet users at the moment. Engadget reports that some Comcast users are reporting that they have been unable to access the Pirate Bay BitTorrent-based file sharing web site. However, the current situation is looking like it may not actually be Comcast's fault. The report adds that customers that use other internet access providers have also been unable to access the site today.
Yesterday both the Swedish Pirate Party and The Pirate Bay disappeared from the Internet causing concern among their users. While they have both now returned, it appears that the Party downtime was caused by the unauthorized use of their servers "for commercial purposes", something which is expressly forbidden.
At the end of September 2010 three of the four defendants in the Pirate Bay case arrived at the Court of Appeal in Stockholm. The fourth defendant, Gottfrid Svartholm, was nowhere to be seen. The appeal continued without him, with his hearing and sentencing to be conducted at a later date. Now Swedish media are reporting that the Court cannot set a date for Gottfrid's hearing because he has disappeared.
Sweden's Prosecutor General believes that the founders of The Pirate Bay have already had enough opportunities to prove their innocence. The defendants want to take their case all the way to the Supreme Court but the Prosecutor says that there is no reason to prolong proceedings. Site co-founder Peter Sunde tells TorrentFreak there are still complex issues to be dealt with and that the Supreme Court is the perfect venue.
Norway's Ministry of Culture has just proposed legislative changes designed to further crack down on illicit file-sharing. In addition to smoothing the way for Internet users to be monitored more easily by rightsholders, amendments have been tabled which would order file-sharing sites to be blocked at the ISP level. Top of the list, The Pirate Bay.
Following a police investigation and raid, a man who shared just one album using BitTorrent has been fined and ordered to pay a settlement to rights holders. The 34-year-old, who made his upload using The Pirate Bay, will have to sacrifice ten days' worth of his salary and pay a total of around 900 euros so that rightsholders don't take him to court.
In what appears to be a memo sent to ISPs by the regulator of Internet industries in Malaysia, all service providers have been ordered to completely block various file-sharing sites including The Pirate Bay, MegaVideo and other hosting services. The move follows an April statement by the country's Prime Minister in which he promised his administration would never censor the Internet.
Following an investigation into the online sharing of a new movie, Serbia's High-Tech crime unit has swooped on an apartment in the capital Belgrade where they arrested a 51-year-old man. Following interrogation and an apparent confession, in just one day a judge has ruled the man can be detained in jail for 30 days. The Pirate Party are now calling for protests today.
Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party in Sweden, has earned a spot in Foreign Policy's prestigious list of Top 100 Global Thinkers. Falkvinge is in good company, listed among many key figures in the Arab Spring and world leaders such as Barack Obama and Angela Merkel. Foreign Policy describes 2011 as the year where Falkvinge's ideas about transparency, Internet privacy and copyright law are gaining in popularity.
In a deliberately provocative move the Czech Pirate Party has launched not one but two movie download portals. The sites, which offer links but don't host any infringing material themselves, are being launched to protest the plight of a high school student facing a 5 million euro damages claim for linking to copyright works.
This morning German police confiscated the servers of the Pirate Party, currently the sixth largest political party in Germany. Details of the raid are still scarce, but initial information indicates that the raid was targeted at a service running on the Party's servers. The timing is unfortunate with the Pirate Party participating in the upcoming election in Bremen this Sunday.
The ever-rising costs of textbooks is an unavoidable nightmare for many students and hot-topic to those who see the system as corrupt. Now, a site with a mission to dismantle what they say amounts to a publishing monopoly has come up with another solution to bring cheap and free textbooks to students. The publishers are going to hate it but the site doesn't care. They insist that it's students that are being abused by publishers, not the other way round.
In anticipation of the Academy Awards ceremony last week, Belarusian TV viewers were treated to some previous Oscar-awarded movies. One of the films that Belarus' National State Television decided to air was last year's best picture The Hurt Locker. However, the channel managers apparently didn't go through all the proper licensing channels, electing to show a copy that had been downloaded from the BitTorrent site Interfilm.ru instead.
This summer raids and arrests in several European countries took out several prominent websites. Aside from the main target, movie streaming links portal Kino.to, the raids also affected several file-hosting sites including Duckload.com. Initially one person escaped the wrath of the police, but the authorities now report that after a five-month search they have arrested the fugitive, who they claim was also connected to two of the Kino.to replacements that sprung up recently.
Police in two countries have coordinated to close down a 30,000 torrent private BitTorrent tracker. The operation, which spanned Sweden and Germany, closed down XNT.nu, a site which had risen through the ashes of other sites shut down by authorities in 2009. Police have arrested two suspected administrators and seized the site's server.
In 2010, Russian authorities seized the domain of the country's biggest BitTorrent tracker, Torrents.ru, in copyright related action. Now, just over a year later, police have swooped on its sister site, Pornolab — Russia's biggest porn tracker — and seized its servers. With the recent demise of two other huge adult trackers, it's possible that Pornolab was the largest adult torrent site in the world.
Just yesterday we reported on the US Copyright Group's misfortune in DC District Court, where the judge presiding in the case slammed the P2P litigation group for wasting time and questionable jurisdictional issues surrounding the 23,000+ defendants. The message sent by the courts appears to be consolidating: such a large collection of John Does defendants per case is unacceptable. Yet today we report 3 massive lawsuits totaling 9,105 defendants. Let's break it down.
In late April, Ukrainian authorities shut down Pornolab, the largest adult BitTorrent tracker in the world. Ostensibly the action was taken due to the site breaking strict laws designed to limit access to porn by minors, but a Russian pornstar has suggested otherwise. He claims that it was his complaints that led to the site going down not just once, but twice.
Internet censorship is a hot topic in 2011, but also one that reveals the disturbing double-standards of politicians and governments around the world. This week U.S. Senator Dick Durbin sent China's largest search engine a letter asking them to stop censoring their search results. A noble attempt, but at the same time U.S. politicians are encouraging Google to censor piracy related terms from their search results.
A privacy activist plans to ask for a judicial review of British prosecutors' decision not to bring a case against BT and the online advertising company Phorm for running secret trials of a system that monitored peoples' Internet use without their consent.
All around the world Hollywood is influencing politics and law enforcement, mainly through local anti-piracy groups. Aside from lobbying, they also employ private investigators to track down and bust copyright infringers. Today, one of them spills the beans. Gavin "Tex" Warren reveals how he was instructed to boost statistics, link piracy to drug trafficking, and manipulate the police in order to secure more interest for the war on piracy.
In 2007, the admin of a private BitTorrent tracker was arrested after Portuguese law enforcement targeted his site and closed it down. Overturning an earlier decision by a lower court, the Lisbon Court of Appeal has now decided that the admin will face a full trial for his actions. In the meantime the site continues, albeit under another name.
As the United States heads off firmly down the domain seizures route, other countries around the world are also considering how best to deal with the issue of online piracy. Blocking sites via the web's DNS system has been high on the agenda but doubts exist over its effectiveness. A suggestion coming out of Europe this week would mean that malware filtering in web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome would do the dirty work.
IMSLP, the largest public domain music library on the Internet, has just suffered a damaging attack on the site's infrastructure. In a wrongful action over a single 90 year-old classical piece by Rachmaninoff, the UK's Music Publishers Association convinced registrar GoDaddy to seize IMSLP's domain name, which took the site completely offline.
It's common knowledge that the entertainment industry is lobbying extensively in Washington to get tougher copyright laws adopted. In a counter-move the file-hosting company RapidShare has hired lobbyists of its own. TorrentFreak got a chance to talk to RapidShare's general counsel Daniel Raimer, to find out what their main motives are and how open Washington is to their message.
Earlier this year U.S. lawmakers proposed a draconian anti-piracy legislation known as the PROTECT IP Act. When the proposal becomes law, U.S. authorities and copyright holders will have the power to seize domains, block websites and censor search engines to prevent copyright infringements. But file-hosting service RapidShare have a lot to lose by its introduction and are now spending a great deal of money countering the views of pro-copyright lobbyists.
During March, Sumerian Records boss Ash Avildsen made the news on a couple of piracy-related occasions. First, he orchestrated a hoax to trick BitTorrent users into downloading a fake band promo, then later got serious with a YouTube broadside against music piracy. As Sumerian gets ready to launch their own music store, TorrentFreak has discovered that they have Long John Silver's skeleton in the closet.
Voltage Pictures, the makers of The Hurt Locker, have voluntarily dismissed around 90% of the defendants from their record-breaking lawsuit against alleged file-sharers. More than 2,300 Does remain in the suit and are currently unidentified, but several others have now been named. Read on to find out which IP addresses remain in, which are out, and who has been named.
In the wake of the UN report which described disconnecting citizens from the Internet as a breach of human rights, an anti-piracy group has made a somewhat surprising statement. Music Industry Piracy Investigations, which acts for dozens of labels including the Big Four, today said that while they support measures for dealing with infringement, that does not include "termination of Internet accounts."
According to reports, movie release group IMAGiNE have been busted and their private BitTorrent tracker taken offline. The leader of release group EP1C, who declared war on IMAGiNE earlier in the year, told TorrentFreak that nine individuals were arrested following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement "joint operation."
Researchers from the Tribler project at Delft University of Technology are proposing a new set of rules that should significantly improve the download speeds of many BitTorrent users. The new "Superior Seeding Standard" implemented in the latest release of the Tribler BitTorrent client is inspired by the ratio-enforcement policies at private tracker communities, but doesn't discriminate against people with low bandwidth connections.
Despite not owning a computer or even a router, a retired woman has been ordered by a court to pay compensation to a movie company. The woman had been pursued by a rightsholder who claimed she had illegally shared a violent movie about hooligans on the Internet, but the fact that she didn't even have an email address proved of little interest to the court. Guilty until proven innocent is the formula in Germany.
In July a federal court slashed the verdict in the infamous RIAA v Jamie Thomas file-sharing case from $1.5 million to 'just' $54,000. The RIAA were said to be unhappy with the verdict and now just a month later they have confirmed their appeal. The music industry group are appealing on three grounds. If successful the case could go to a third trial.
Mitch Bainwol is out as chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the four largest record labels.
The Recording Industry Association of America and the Authors Guild don't normally have much in common, but fresh salvos from both groups underline their continued resistance to modern forms of product distribution -- even when said stubbornness harms the consumers who keep both groups in business.
You may not have heard of ReDigi, the used digital music store that's putting some re-sale value into people's old downloads, but the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certainly has. And they're_not too pleased.
MegaUpload is currently being portrayed by the MPAA and RIAA as one of the world's leading rogue sites. But top music stars including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West disagree and are giving the site their full support in a brand new song.
Although the major label members of the RIAA publicly ended their file-sharing settlement schemes in the United States, surprisingly they are continuing with a similar project elsewhere. Using the same IP address-based evidence, Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner are sending out controversial cash settlement demands in Germany where recipients have little alternative than to pay up.
In the ongoing mass-BitTorrent lawsuits, last month U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell laid down a landmark verdict in favor of copyright holders. The verdict was widely publicized, but put in doubt after it was uncovered that the Judge was a former RIAA lobbyist. This critique appears to have had an effect. In two new orders in the same cases, Howell has now backpedaled on her earlier stance.
The RIAA is continuing to put pressure on torrent sites. This week the music group went after the torrent indexer TorrentHound. The RIAA obtained a subpoena at the U.S. District Court of Columbia and has asked the whois privacy service WhoisGuard to hand over the IP-address, email and all other identifying information related to the account holder.
This tweet from the RIAA's Senior Vice President of Communications is just about the most asinine thing we've read all day. Way to totally trivialize an issue that millions of people care passionately about.
If you live in Tennessee and share your login credentials for Netflix, watch out. The Associated Press is reporting that State lawmakers in the home to country music have passed a bill that would make it illegal to share login credentials. The measure was originally designed to prevent thieves from selling login credentials in bulk for services such as Netflix, iTunes, and Rhapsody.
For years BitTorrent sites have remained untouched by the RIAA's legal battles, but recent court filings indicate that this may change. After settling their dispute with LimeWire earlier this year the RIAA is now targeting several BitTorrent indexers. The record industry group has filed a complaint at the U.S. District Court of Columbia and has obtained subpoenas to reveal the identities of individuals behind three large torrent sites.
As part of a criminal investigation the RIAA has filed a declaration at a federal court in California to obtain the personal details of one of YouTube's users. Through the legal action against YouTube, the RIAA hopes to find out more about the person who uploaded a recording of Britney Spears' concert at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas a few weeks ago.
The music industry wants LimeWire to pay up to $75 trillion in damages after losing a copyright infringement claim. That's right . . . $75 trillion. Manhattan federal Judge Kimba Wood has labeled this request "absurd."
Attempts by the content industry to pass legislation like the Protect IP Act are the greatest threat to technology innovation, a senior US Senator told delegates at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.
A few days ago we reported that no less than 6 IP-addresses registered to the RIAA had been busted for downloading copyrighted material. Quite a shocker to everyone -- including the music industry group apparently -- as they are now using a defense previously attempted by many alleged file-sharers. It wasn't members of RIAA staff who downloaded these files, the RIAA insists, it was a mysterious third party vendor who unknowingly smeared the group's good name.
Cloud-music services have received a lot of attention over the past year and are supposed to represent the next phase in music retail. But looking at music sales from the past five years, it may be hard to understand why.
Lime Wire, the company that helped people obtain perhaps billions of songs illegally, is close to forking over a "significant" amount of money to settle a copyright suit filed against it by the Recording Industry Association of America, sources close to the discussions told CNET.
Under Italian government legislation, telecommunications agency AGCOM will have to take responsibility for dealing with Internet content deemed illicit by entertainment companies. To that end, AGCOM is about to give itself the power to remove content and block websites without the need for any legal process. According to free software guru Richard Stallman, Italians should use "what's left of their democracy" to oppose such measures.
Depending on where you live, and which ISP you use for Internet access, you may be having your connection throttled. Typically if throttling is in place it targets specific types of traffic such as peer-to-peer (P2P) as it unfortunately gets associated with piracy while forgetting all the legitimate services that take advantage of it.
The recognition of the Pirate Party in a US state might have been considered the last obstacle to overcome before widespread acceptance of the movement as a viable political force. Yet there might be another country more obstinate than the US when it comes to registering political parties, and that's Russia.
Some of the world's biggest record labels have failed in their attempt to sue a file-sharing developer for copyright infringements carried out by users of his software. During a 2009 trial, Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner had demanded 13 million euros in compensation from Pablo Soto, the creator of the Blubster, Piolet and Manolito P2P sharing applications. A court has now ruled that Soto's technology is "completely neutral".
Researchers have uncovered a major security flaw which allows outsiders to link a Skype account to a user's download activity on BitTorrent. The exploit works without the knowledge of the victims and also allows outsiders to see the travel patterns of Skype users. The vulnerability opens the door for scammers to blackmail or defraud Internet users, the researchers say, and thus far Skype has shown no interested in releasing a fix.
This week it was widely reported that a 58-year-old grandmother from Scotland had become the first person in the country to be convicted of file-sharing offences. Today, David Cook from Burrows Bussin Solicitors, a law firm which has defended individuals in the OiNK and FileSoup BitTorrent cases, voices his concern at the ongoing rights-holder led persecution of those least able to defend themselves.
Last week the Australian press referred to a study that claimed piracy was causing the local economy $900 million in losses, yet the report was carefully hidden from the public. After pressure from multiple sides the report has now finally been published, revealing significant flaws. The report appears to be nothing more that a direct translation of a bogus piracy study that aimed to mislead EU legislators last year.
Today, Judge Birss QC authorized UK law firm ACS:Law to be pursued for "wasted costs" in connection with their controversial attempts to squeeze cash settlements from alleged file-sharers. The judge slammed the firm, describing owner Andrew Crossley of engaging in improper conduct that has brought the legal profession into disrepute.
When it comes to sharing files, there are a number of options available to you. If you want to share files with someone nearby, it may make sense to pop them on a USB drive and physically deliver them. For smaller files it is possible to make use of email, but things get trickier when larger files are involved.
The founder of file-sharing company Lime Wire agreed on Thursday to pay $105 million to the Recording Industry Association of America to settle a 5-year-old copyright case. Sure, that's a lot, but consider that the settlement figure is equal to only 7 percent of the $1.4 billion the RIAA sought.
The administrator of a file-sharing related site has seen his sentence upheld by the Court of Appeal. The man, who was arrested back in 2007, operated a site which didn't offer links but provided users with hints on keywords which would help them find movies and TV shows. He has received a one year suspended sentence, fined 3,000 euros and ordered to pay 130,000 euros ($185,000) in damages.
China has long been a major hotspot for software piracy. Efforts to track unlicensed software use, however, are giving companies a chance to find the offenders and turn them into customers. Or in some cases, targets for lawsuits.
The House Manager's Amendment to the pending House Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) fixed the major legitimate problems with the original bill, effectively isolating the small but extremely vociferous minority of SOPA opponents who are either commercially or politically vested in sustaining a piracy-tolerant Internet model.
A production company founder and member of the Spanish Film Academy has been arrested on suspicion of leaking pre-release movies to file-sharing networks. Manuel Sirgo, a previous award winner, was detained along with two of his staff after movies which had been accessed using a special account registered to him appeared online.
A brand new BitTorrent-related project entered Mozilla's MoJo contest this week. Named SPARKD, the P2P-powered video streaming platform promises the public a novel anti-censorship tool. It's intended to give citizen journalists the ability to avoid censorship and stream video to millions of people anonymously, but the underlying library of tools might have other interesting use-cases for the P2P community too.
Spotify has denied claims it has inked deals with the major Hollywood studios ahead of an expansion into video on demand. Daniel Ek rubbished the report, by Michael Arrington of rumour site TechCrunch, that Spotify had deals in place with four studios.
For years the music industry has seen P2P technology as the single biggest threat, claiming that file-sharers are responsible for billions of dollars in losses. However, P2P technology is also part of the music industry's future. One of the major revelations in the music business, the streaming service Spotify, is actually one of the largest file-sharing networks on the Internet.
After it was revealed that games developer CD Projekt had been sending cash settlement letters to Internet users based on flimsy IP address-based anti-piracy evidence, this week the company decided to end their campaign. Today TorrentFreak reveals the names of many other famous games companies conducting almost identical operations -- "Send us cash settlements," they tell their targets, "...or else..."
Prominent sports streaming site Rojadirecta has asked a U.S. judge to return its domain names. The company behind the site, Puerto 80, said that its property was wrongfully taken during the third phase of ICE and Homeland Security's 'Operation in Our Sites', an action which has severely damaged its legitimate business.
After a process lasting more than three years, a man from Sweden has finally been prosecuted for his role in the operations of Student Bay, a site dedicated to the sharing of textbooks. Despite prosecution attempts to link a Pirate Bay founder to the site, the 23-year-old is the only person in the spotlight. An apology requested by The Pirate Bay for wrongful accusations appears to have gone unfulfilled.
A court ruling has not only sharply reduced the amount of compensation rightsholders can expect from Danish file-sharing cases, but has also drawn a line on evidential standards. To accurately claim their losses in future, rightsholders will have to gain physical access to an infringer's computer. A leading lawyer in the field says the costs will prove prohibitively expensive.
The Swiss government has ruled that downloading pirated copies of films, music and videogames for personal use will remain legal because it is of not detrimental to copyright owners.
In the US lawmakers are currently discussing legislation that could take out The Pirate Bay, or disable access to it. In several other countries such as Italy, Finland and Belgium, courts have already ordered Internet Providers to block their users' access to the site.
A French Court of Appeal has just upheld the sentencing of an administrator of two BitTorrent-related sites. Despite no evidence being presented that money was made from the sites through advertising as claimed — or even that any infringements had occurred — the admin now faces a $29,000 payout. Bizarrely, the Court decided that having the word 'torrent' in his sites' URLs showed that he knew about infringements.
One of the UK's largest ISPs has today launched a new set of network-level security features aimed at protecting subscribers' children and their computers. While reports of HomeSafe's ability to block access to viruses, pornography and violent content has been widespread today, it also has another trick up its sleeve — the blocking of BitTorrent and other file-sharing sites.
The popular cloud gaming service OnLive has been active in the U.S. for more than a year, and last week it launched in the U.K. OnLive works by rendering and storing games on remote servers, which are then streamed to users' computers or TVs. It appears though, that not all ISPs were prepared for the launch as P2P throttling systems also make it impossible to play OnLive games.
We discussed Microsoft's renewed interest in purchasing Yahoo, HTC's abortive attempt to buy S3, hackers didn't destroy a water pump, whether Apple's making a TV, Kinect for Windows, China leapfrogs US as largest smart phone market, and more.
On April 4th, the First Circuit will hear oral argument on the appeals of Joel Tenenbaum, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the U.S. Department of Justice. All three parties appealed after the trial judge reduced a $675,000 jury verdict for sharing 30 songs down to $67,500. The only issues remaining on appeal regard the propriety of such an award for the conduct.
Over the last year a handful of lawyers have sued close to two hundred thousand alleged BitTorrent users in the United States. Many of these cases were launched by so-called "copyright trolls" who have re-engineered piracy into a healthy revenue stream. Today, we reveal a critical part of this legal bullying by taking a closer look at a settlement proposal sent out by John Steele, one of the most active anti-piracy lawyers around.
The potential effects of both PROTECT IP and the E-PARASITES legislations have been the subject of intense speculation in recent times. One side insists they will damage piracy and little else, opponents say they will only succeed in killing the Internet. But there are other potential casualties in all this -- the poor anti-piracy companies and their copyright troll allies.
While mass settlement lawsuits filed against alleged BitTorrent users have the potential to bring in millions in revenue, recent rulings in US District courts are going to severely cut into potential profits. Has the tide turned? It looks like a distinct possibility.
The ever-growing avalanche of lawsuits against BitTorrent users in the United States may have reached a turning point. The makers of The Expendables have voluntarily dismissed their case against 23,322 alleged BitTorrent users who they accused of illegally downloading and sharing their film. This means that the once-largest BitTorrent lawsuit ever is finally over, and it could signal the beginning of the end for the entire scheme.
According to Cnet's Greg Sandoval, internet service providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon are working with media groups such as the RIAA and MPAA to adopt stricter anti-piracy policies which gradually increase the consequences for illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted material.
Antipiratbyrån (Anti-Piracy Bureau, APB) regularly makes headlines for its work against file-sharers in Sweden. Now, APB lawyer Sara Lindbäck has given an interview where she speaks about piracy, the MPAA, The Pirate Bay, and the level of secrecy APB adopts to protect those working for it. This group manages to conduct its business with zero turnover and not a single employee (or snitch) on the books.
Showing how futile Internet censorship can be, The Pirate Bay has registered a new domain name to allow Belgian users to access the site and bypass a recent court order. For just a few dollars, The Pirate Bay should now be fully accessible in the future, and the site has already started redirecting Belgian users to their new home.
Over on Techdirt, Mike Masnick has pointed out the mother of all ironies: The Pirate Bay, one of the largest outlets of copyright infringement, would be immune to the takedown tendrils of the imminently incoming Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
The Pirate Bay has just launched a new survey in collaboration with the Cybernorms research group at Sweden's Lund University. As part of a sociology study they hope to find out more about the motivations people have to share files, with the ultimate goal of influencing and shaping more sensible laws regarding copyright issues and the Internet in general.
Hollywood and the major music labels frequently describe The Pirate Bay as a piracy haven that ruins their businesses. On the other side, however, there are many independent artists who would like nothing more than to be featured prominently on the world's largest torrent site. For the latter group The Pirate Bay team have just released a new platform where artists can have their content promoted on the site's homepage, free of charge.
Despite continuous pressure from the entertainment industries, The Pirate Bay isn't planning to cease its operations anytime soon. Instead, the crew ordered 10 shiny new servers which just arrived at a datacenter located in a Swedish mountain complex. With the new hardware the site should be more redundant, reducing possible downtime to a minimum.
In October 2011, a court in Finland ordered local ISP Elisa to block The Pirate Bay to stop copyright infringement among its subscribers. Today, the blockade — which covers many domains and IP addresses — took effect, but behind the scenes there is an effort to unblock the site and render the court order useless. Meanwhile there is already collateral damage — the court order has succeeded in blocking a domain linking to Electronic Frontier Finland.
The Pirate Bay achieved a new milestone today. Just a few minutes ago the 5 millionth user created an account at the most-visited BitTorrent site on the Internet. Despite efforts from the entertainment industries that have tried to shut the site down for half a decade, The Pirate Bay keeps expanding. Let's see how they got there.
New data from the largest ever survey among file-sharers shows that the majority of users on The Pirate Bay value their anonymity online, but only a relatively small group take measures to guarantee their privacy. The use of VPNs and proxies is most common among North American and African users, while people from Central and South America care the least about appearing anonymous online.
You wouldn't download a car, the Internet meme predicted. But if The Pirate Bay has its way that action will be a reality in the years to come. In preparation for this world-changing day, the world's biggest torrent site has just premiered a new section containing the plans for physical items that can be downloaded then printed out. Today its a plastic pirate ship, but one tomorrow in a decade or two it may well be a car.
Talks on implementing a Europe-wide firewall to censor and block 'illicit' websites has caused concern among many Internet users in recent weeks, and today one of the targeted sites has joined the discussion. Quoting one of Churchill's most famous speeches, The Pirate Bay team is rallying the public to defend the free Internet and end the threat posed by the entertainment industries' copyright lobby.
Today, exactly five years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. At the time the entertainment industries hoped that this would silence the deviant BitTorrent site for good, but in hindsight we can conclude that they had actually awakened a monster. The raid and the ongoing battle that later unfolded reads like a script for an upcoming Hollywood blockbuster.
Supporters of the pending PIPA/SOPA anti-piracy bills often use The Pirate Bay as a prime example of a website that can be taken out under the new legislation. But is that really the case? The Pirate Bay team has been silent on the issue, until now. As it turns out, the people behind the popular torrent site don't believe the laws will do much to stop them, but they do fear for the future of the Internet.
The Pirate Bay was made famous by its stand for unfettered file sharing, through torrents, and its fight to save the open internet. In a month, thepiratebay.org will remove all torrent files from its site in favor of magnet links. This is a step towards what The Pirate Bay calls a "new future" of file sharing, consisting of true peer-to-peer sharing without the use of trackers.
We see it everywhere. Corporations are trying to take control over our communications tools, citing copyright concerns. Frequently, they are assisted by hapless politicians, who are also aspiring for the same control, citing terrorist concerns or some other McCarthyist scareword of the day. We should see this in perspective of the revolts happening right now in the Arab world.
The same RIAA that makes examples out of ordinary folks by suing them for millions of dollars for file sharing? Turns out someone there's been pirating full seasons of Dexter. Nine million dollars worth.
After the ACS:Law debacle, one might think that potential claimants would be deterred from taking legal action against alleged file-sharers in the UK, or at least learned lessons. Alas, no. His Honour Judge Birss QC, the judge who brought ACS:Law's scheme to its knees, now has to deal with three cases filed on behalf of a UK porn outfit who, in common with the doomed law firm, tried to back out at the last minute.
As we reported yesterday, avoiding BitTorrent litigation involves avoiding personally identifiable information from falling into the hands of P2P litigators. In the latest update to the US Copyright Group lawsuits, the firm responsible for launching tens of thousands of copyright complaints updated the court on the "Cornered" lawsuit.
After a pair of unsuccessful attempts at making Aussie ISP iiNet responsible for the copyright infringing activities of their users, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft is refusing to give in. The Hollywood-backed group is now taking its case to the High Court, claiming that two of the three judges in the appeal did not apply legal tests correctly.
Despite having booked and paid for their booth at Gamex, Sweden's largest gaming exhibition, the Pirate Party have been excluded from the action this week. The party, who say they were nagged for 2 to 3 months to book for the event, were this week informed they were too controversial and no longer welcome.
The Tor network is a great service for those who wish to browse the Internet anonymously and uncensored. Unfortunately, however, there are still people who abuse the network's resources by running their BitTorrent downloads over Tor servers. As a result, these servers are bombarded with DMCA notices, which in some cases may lead to them being disconnected.
BitTorrent is a great way to share large files with friends, family or even complete strangers, but it's not always as convenient as it should be. Even though BitTorrent is more than a decade old there's no site where users can simply dump torrents and get a fancy URL in return, so they can share with others. Until now that is, because the newly launched Tors.in just filled that gap.
A report that pump-primes the idea that Australia is a nation of inveterate pirates is starting to unravel, with a report on TorrentFreak questioning the bona fides of the report's author.
Piratetorrents.nu, formerly one of Sweden's largest private BitTorrent communities, has shut down fearing the authorities may come after them. The abrupt decision comes a few weeks after police in Sweden and Germany raided the XNT.nu BitTorrent tracker and arrested two of the alleged operators of the site.
Despite protestations that merely linking to copyright material isn't an offense in the UK, a judge has today ruled that the UK-based ex-administrator of the TVShack video linking website can be extradited to the US to face copyright infringement charges. Richard O'Dwyer, 23, has never set foot in United States but now faces being used as a 'guinea pig' for US copyright law.
A judicial review of the extradition arrangements between the United States and United Kingdom has concluded that the procedures are not biased in favor of the United States. The announcement is not only bad news for alleged Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon but also for Richard O'Dywer, the former operator of the TVShack linking website. He is now pinning his hopes on a November court hearing.
Three weeks ago the 23-year-old UK-based administrator of a TV show and movie links site was arrested by police. The site, believed to be TVShack.bz, sprang up after the US government seized the domains of TVShack.net and TVShack.cc as part of Operation in Our Sites. Following his detention in the UK's largest prison, the admin is now fighting his extradition to the U.S. with the help of Gary McKinnon's lawyer.
As part of Operation in Our Sites, in mid-2010 the US government seized the domain name of TVShack.net. The site was operated by 23-year-old UK-based student Richard O'Dwyer who is now subject to extradition proceedings. Today his mother speaks out, detailing the trauma the family is going through and asking that people help Richard by signing a petition in the hope that he can face justice at home, not thousands of miles away across the Atlantic.
While MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom will remain in custody for at least another month, two indicted members of the so-called "Mega Conspiracy" were granted bail this morning. Their privacy, however, will have to wait. On top of the revelation that the FBI monitored Skype calls as far back as 2007, officials are now assessing whether the defendant's homes are suitable for "electronic monitoring".
Two more staffers from the now-defunct NinjaVideo streaming movie portal have pleaded guilty for their roles in helping to the run the site. Ninja's uploader supervisor and the site's so-called "head of security" both face a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. An arrest warrant for a key uploader located in Greece has also been issued.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' tops the chart this week, followed by 'The Rum Diary'. 'The Descendants' completes the top three.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, 'Special Forces' tops the chart this week, followed by 'In time'. 'Seeking Justice' completes the top three.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, 'Johnny English Reborn' tops the chart this week, followed by 'War Horse'. 'Real Steel' completes the top three.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, 'Real Steel' tops the chart this week, followed by 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'. 'Cowboys and Aliens' completes the top three.
As 2011 comes to an end, we follow up our most pirated TV-shows chart by taking a look at the most pirated movies of the year. Fast Five comes out on top, and aside from other usual suspects such as box office hits Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and The Hangover, the list also includes a few surprising entries and some notable absentees.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, 'The Inbetweeners Movie' tops the chart this week, followed by 'The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption'. 'Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol' completes the top three.
Last month the MPAA and RIAA made a deal with all the major Internet providers in the United States to systematically hunt down file-sharers. The new "Copyright Alerts" system will directly affect millions of Internet users, but thus far the participating parties have refused to disclose which monitoring company will act as anti-piracy detectives. It's time for the big reveal.
US authorities have seized the domain of the hugely popular sports streaming and P2P download site Rojadirecta. The site, which is one of the most visited sites on the Internet, lost its .org domain which now redirects to a notice from DOJ/ICE. Rojadirecta is an unusual target because two courts in Spain have ruled that the site operates legally, and other than the .org domain the site has no links to the US.
The U.S. Government is determined to put an end to online piracy. In an attempt to give copyright holders and the authorities all the tools required to disable access to so-called rogue sites, lawmakers will soon introduce the PROTECT IP Act. Through domain seizures, ISP blockades, search engine censorship, and cutting funding of allegedly copyright infringing websites, the bill takes Internet censorship to the next level.
Plans to block websites alleged to facilitate copyright infringement are to be dropped by the UK government. The announcement was made by Business secretary Vince Cable following a review by communications regulator OFCOM which found that blocking provisions in the Digital Economy Act would not be effective. Nevertheless, website blocking will be attempted, just by other means.
Yesterday the UK government announced that following a report from regulator OFCOM, plans to block alleged copyright-infringing websites would be dropped. However, there was a second report where OFCOM detailed ways of keeping the costs of Digital Economy Act infringement appeals down. The document carried the usual redactions but TorrentFreak has put on its X-ray vision for your viewing pleasure.
UK users of the popular Fileserve file-hosting service are currently unable to download any files as the site is being blocked by the Internet Watch Foundation. Since early this week the blacklist, which aims to disable access to sexual child abuse content, has been preventing users from accessing their personal files and downloading those uploaded by others. Fileserve expects the issue to persist for at least a couple of days.
Following a High Court ruling in July, UK Internet service provider BT now has just 14 days to carry out a full subscriber access block of Usenet indexing site Newzbin2. While the ruling will be seen as a victory for the major Hollywood studios behind the action, BT will have to pick up the bill for enforcing the block. The blocking order is flexible in order to reduce the effect of any countermeasures employed by Newzbin2.
According to a report set to be adopted today by the UN's Human Rights Council, anti-filesharing provisions such as those outlined in the UK's Digital Economy Act are disproportionate and should be repealed. The provisions, which include disconnecting Internet users for violating the rights of the music and movie industries, breach human rights, the report concludes.
Court papers filed in one of the mass-lawsuits against BitTorrent users reveal some interesting facts. In an attempt to justify suing dozens of people at once, the attorney claims that this is a practical issue. Apparently the copyright holder has decided to throw out a lot of cases, because the defendants have died, are political or public figures, employed by the army, or part of a covert police operation.
After a decade in the dark the unreleased David Bowie album 'Toy' has just hit BitTorrent. Bowie is reportedly "livid" at the leak but his fans, who have expressed themselves in hundreds of postings, appear to be universally delighted. TorrentFreak tracked down the leaker to discover his motivations and learned that this controversial release was made to deliberately sabotage commercial pirates.
Thousands of accused BitTorrent downloaders — including those of The Hurt Locker — can breathe a sigh of relief as their cases have been dropped. In what can be described as a major victory for those targeted, the complicated nature of these mass-lawsuits has forced the copyright holders to dump nearly all the defendants and rethink their strategy. Slowly, it appears that the US Copyright Group's campaign to turn piracy into profit is crumbling.
The US Government has classified some of the largest websites on the Internet as examples of sites which sustain global piracy. The list released by the United States Trade Representative draws exclusively on input from rightsholders. It includes popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, file-hosting service Megaupload and Russia's leading social network VKontakte.
Today we have some good news for the major record labels. The renowned market research group NPD has found that close to half of all Americans who were pirating music via P2P applications a year ago, have reportedly stopped doing so. As a result the number of US music pirates decreased by 12 million. NPD attributes this unprecedented shift to the LimeWire shutdown, but we fear that it wont have any effect on record label revenues.
uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. just announced that the BitTorrent Mainline client and uTorrent have hit the milestone of 150 million monthly users. Together both clients increased their user base by more than 50 percent compared to last year, and the end of this surge is not yet in sight.
BitTorrent Inc., the makers of uTorrent and the BitTorrent Mainline client, have been sued for infringement of a file-sharing related patent. According to the complaint, the BitTorrent clients infringe on the rights of San Francisco-based company Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network. The company demands compensation and if the court agrees, this case could have a disastrous impact on the BitTorrent landscape.
The uTorrent development team officially released the long-awaited version 3.0 Beta of their popular BitTorrent client today. In what can be described as the most significant iteration ever released, uTorrent 3.0 introduces torrent ratings, comments, streaming and various other new features. With this release uTorrent hopes to appeal both to novices and long time BitTorrent users.
The free version of uTorrent just came out with a new stable release that adds a media player and support for external devices such as smart phones and game consoles. On the same day, BitTorrent Inc. also made their paid client uTorrent Plus available to the public.
BitTorrent Inc. just confirmed to TorrentFreak that their popular uTorrent client has just broken the magical milestone of 100 million active monthly users. This makes uTorrent the most used BitTorrent client around, and it also shows that BitTorrent as a means to download has become more mainstream than ever before.
The uTorrent development team officially released version 3.0 of their popular application today. The milestone release adds many new features including torrent ratings, comments, streaming, and drag-and-drop sharing. One of the main goals is to appeal more to novice BitTorrent users, who often drop out after using uTorrent only once or twice.
Fresh data on the market share of BitTorrent clients shows that uTorrent remains the client of choice for most BitTorrent users in the West. A sample of more than half a million unique peers further shows that Transmission is gaining ground, while the once so popular BitComet client slowly fades away.
For the first time ever uTorrent users can now pay for their favorite BitTorrent client. BitTorrent Inc. just put a pre-order for the "Plus" version of uTorrent online for $24.95 a year. The official release is scheduled to come out before the holidays.
BitTorrent has seen a lot of success with its free-to-use and tiny client going by the name of uTorrent. It's many people's software of choice for handling torrent downloads, and with the recent release of version 3.0 the development team added remote access, video streaming, chat, and a ratings system to name but a few of the new features.
How do you improve the fastest and most popular BitTorrent client in the world? This is a question that BitTorrent, the company, has been tackling with its uTorrent client over the last couple of years. The ability to rate and comment on torrents, drag-and-drop sharing, remote management via uTorrent Remote, the App Studio, and addition of many independent and creative commons content partners have all made uTorrent an excellent and free tool that goes well beyond straight-up, pedal-to-the-metal torrenting. uTorrent now has over 100 million monthly users as a result.
The uTorrent team is working on a paid version of the leading BitTorrent client that will enable users to convert videos and transfer files to external devices. Branded uTorrent Plus, the extended uTorrent client will be be released to the public this coming fall. uTorrent's parent company BitTorrent Inc. hopes the Plus version will bring in some extra revenue, but considering the target audience it is expected to 'suffer' from piracy as well.
Downloading copyright material without the permission of rightsholders is often portrayed as a heinous crime and treated as such by many judges across the United States. But what is an appropriate punishment for this apparently increasingly wicked act? Multi-million dollar fines? Jail? For one sixteen year-old girl using file-sharing software KaZaA, it was a savage beating, delivered by the leather belt of her father, Judge William Adams. And it was all caught on camera.
Last month it became clear that an alleged Lulzsec member who had carried out attacks on various organizations including Sony and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, had used an 'anonymous' VPN service supplied by HideMyAss. According to documents obtained by TorrentFreak, VPN providers worried by the bad publicity are now considering data sharing to combat 'fraudsters'.
Andrew Crossley's fortunes keep turning for the worse. After his long battle with Internet piracy ended in disaster, Andrew Crossley was chased out of the P2P litigation business. But that hasn't stopped those pursued by Andrew Crossley from organizing and fighting back. Under Ralli Solicitors, defendants once accused of copyright infringement have filed 'wasted costs' action against Crossley, looking to have their legal costs of defending themselves reimbursed.
Hollywood movie studio Warner Bros. has admitted to a federal court that it removed files from the file-hosting site Hotfile without owning the copyrights. Some of the false takedowns were the result of failing filtering software but Warner also admitted that one of its employees deleted Open Source software that could speed up downloads.
The copyright infringement lawsuit filed by FilmOn founder Alki David against CNET's Download.com has brought to light an interesting fact. In their complaint, plaintiffs allege that CNET profited from copyright infringement as the site was the main distributer of LimeWire. Although CNET's liability is far from proven, it is certainly worth noting that Warner Music director Shelby Bonnie was also CNET's CEO at the time LimeWire got sued.
In our weekly focus on BitTorrent lawsuits, we once again bring you the latest wrapup of all the copyright actions filed against alleged copyright infringers. There's no earth shattering revelations from this past week, however, a significant number of John Does were sued - 543 in total. Let's break it down.
It was a busy week for P2P litigators, who in total filed 14 copyright complaints against nearly 14,000 alleged BitTorrent users. But in the same breath, we can report that just because these cases are being filed like wildfire, they can also be shot down just as easily. Last week, the Nude Nuns case against 5,865 alleged infringers was dropped. In addition, the judge in The Expendables case has frozen the discovery phase against nearly 23,000 John Does, after giving the US Copyright Group a verbal lashing on the slow pace of progress.
Perhaps it's the quiet before the storm. Since we've begun our weekly BitTorrent lawsuit update, we've typically reported in excess of several hundred individuals being sued in one shot. This isn't the case today, as "only" 21 Does were sued within the last week. Let's take a look.
Although massive BitTorrent lawsuits that encompass thousands of individuals no longer appears to be in fashion with P2P litigators, hundreds of new John Does are being sued for copyright infringement in several cases throughout the country. There's nothing particularly unusual about these new cases, although Steele-Law comprises a majority of the cases (233 of 385 belong to Steele). Even with the restriction on mass lawsuits, it seems P2P litigators are still cumulatively suing tremendous amounts of individuals...
Andrew and Paul discuss the just launched Amazon Kindle Fire. Andrew gives a quick demo of the device. How does it stack up against the review and other tablets? And what about the Silk browser Amazon boasted about at it's announcement, does it live up to the hype?
One of the founders of the world's largest music-dedicated private torrent site has quit. WhatMan, sysop at What.CD, the spiritual successor to the now-defunct and legendary OiNK BitTorrent tracker, says that having spare time is a luxury of the past. With some major achievements behind him, he will long be remembered in the BitTorrent community.
PROTECT-IP, the Digital Economy Act, site blocking, domain seizures and 3 strikes regimes. The list of techniques used to thwart online file-sharing seems to grow every month. But how effective are they really? The overuse of these anti-piracy medications is breeding new strains of powerful file-sharers, resistant to even the most powerful of digital antibiotics.
Last week uTorrent rolled out the first Beta version of their 3.0 release. Among other things, uTorrent 3.0 allows users to rate and comment on the torrents they're downloading. It's a feature that many people have requested, but for the more privacy conscious user, it also begs the question where these comments and ratings are stored.
Last month it became apparent that not all VPN providers live up to their marketing after an alleged member of Lulzsec was tracked down after using a supposedly anonymous service from HideMyAss. We wanted to know which VPN providers take privacy extremely seriously so we asked many of the leading providers two very straightforward questions. Their responses will be of interest to anyone concerned with anonymity issues.
In recent weeks we discovered BitTorrent pirates at the RIAA, Sony, Fox, Universal and even law-abiding organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security. By now it should be clear that people are using BitTorrent pretty much everywhere, and not only for lawful downloads.
Just as quickly as one file-sharing solution bites the dust, another steps in to take its place. In the wake of LimeWire's demise we take a look at Groovejaar, a downloading software client which takes the only real weakness of streaming music service Grooveshark and turns it into its strength — fully downloadable high-quality MP3s in an instant.
Tomorrow is "Dump Go Daddy Day", not that many of you waited, based on your comments. For those considering to show their outrage at the registrar for active SOPA support (since withdrawn), it might be helpful to see what others are doing, where they're taking domains and exact reasoning for kicking Go Daddy down the hill.
A diplomatic cable leaked by Wikileaks reveals that entertainment industry groups and law enforcement combined their efforts to infiltrate Warez Scene topsites. One of the strategies they discuss during a 2009 meeting is to have an informant leak music before the official release date, to gain trust of the site's operator and gain access to the highly secured Scene servers.
Today, UK media regulators launched ParentPort, a website which will allow parents to complain more easily about TV shows, adverts, products and Internet sites which they believe are inappropriate for their children. As part of the deal four leading ISPs will offer a porn-filtering service when new customers sign-up. But will file-sharing sites be censored too?
CD Projekt RED have abandoned their misguided pay-up-or-else anti-piracy scheme. Initially a hit with fans due to their rejection of experience-killing DRM, the company fell from grace when it was revealed that in common with other companies with less of a reputation to maintain, they had chosen one of the most controversial methods of extracting money from the public.
In 2009 an unfinished copy of the latest in the X-Men movie series hit the Internet. The controversy was unprecedented and as expected the leak has since been thoroughly milked by Hollywood, who even referencing it in a failed case against a BitTorrent tracker. As the claimed original uploader now officially pleads guilty, he faces seeing out 2011 in jail. But after months of FBI investigations, unsurprisingly, no one else faces any charges.
The administrator of a growing private BitTorrent tracker is reporting that he has been raided by the authorities. The admin of XtremeSpeeds says that he was questioned on suspicion of being involved with leading P2P release group IMAGiNE. While the investigation is underway, XtremeSpeeds will remain offline.
The world's largest recording labels have joined forces in Japan to sue a site which enables users to download material from YouTube. Universal, EMI, Sony, Warner and more than 25 other labels are seeking almost $3 million in damages and the closure of TubeFire, a site which converts the streaming-only experience of YouTube into music and videos to be enjoyed on any device, anytime.
YouTube describes its Content-ID anti-piracy filter as a state-of-the-art technology, but those who look closely can see that in some cases it creates a huge mess. The system invites swindlers to claim copyright on other people's videos and make money off them through ads. It automatically assigns thousands of videos to people who don't hold the copyrights, and its take-down process appears to be hugely biased towards copyright holders.
A popular indie zombie-style RPG game has been taken offline due to an unofficial feature made available in a cracked copy. The developers of the game say that they usually turn a blind eye to piracy since it could have benefits for their project, but when pirates keep using their servers to get updates instead of using BitTorrent, they had to make a stand.