TorrentFreak

Yesterday, police in 14 countries around Europe coordinated in raids against so-called Warez Scene topsites. Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, Czech Republic and Hungary all saw action. With the help of Scene insiders and other sources, today we try to piece together what happened, including which sites were hit and which ones got away.

Police in up to 14 countries around Europe have coordinated to carry out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. Locations in The Netherlands, Czech Republic and Hungary were targeted but Sweden appears to have borne the brunt of the action. Seven locations including PRQ, which hosts WikiLeaks, have been raided.

Last month, outspoken manager of U2 Paul McGuinness penned a piece titled “How to Save The Music Industry”. Among other things, McGuinness suggested that ISPs were unlikely to help the music industry in their battle against illegal file-sharing since they are the ones benefiting from the “multi-billion dollar bonanza” it has generated. UK ISP Entanet are not happy.

According to yet another leaked draft of the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), participating countries will no longer be obliged to impose secondary liability on Internet Service Providers for copyright infringements carried out by their customers. Other harsh measures to counter copyright infringement are still in place.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Robin Hood’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Iron Man 2′. ‘The Expendables’ completes the top three.

In recent years, technical anti-piracy enforcement has taken a less aggressive approach to that previously demonstrated by the infamous MediaDefender. But now, according to a company being hired to protect Bollywood blockbusters, if BitTorrent sites don’t cooperate by taking down torrents when asked, they will have denial of service attacks launched against them and material taken down by force.

Inspired by their flagship site The Pirate Bay, file-sharers across Sweden continue to share files using the BitTorrent protocol largely unhindered and unconcerned by possible legal action. Those that choose to use certain other methods are not quite so safe, as police arrest yet another man for sharing large quantities of files.

The RIAA may have given up on lawsuits targeting P2P users, but other companies have stepped into their shoes. There are many ways to detect P2P users and collect evidence of their behaviors for use in lawsuits. The simplest way needs nothing more than a BitTorrent client.

With over 10 million customers, Netflix is a huge player in the online DVD rental business in the United States. Aside from sending out DVDs by mail, customers can also stream movies directly to a wide variety of devices. Despite these services, there are still plenty of people who cancel their accounts. Just for the record, Netflix wants to know through a survey if they are perhaps ‘pirates’.

Earlier this year BitTorrent Inc. promised they would release a Linux client this summer, and today they are one step closer to achieving that goal. The company just released uTorrent Server for Linux, a daemonizable 32-bit binary of the uTorrent core, suited to those familiar with running programs from the command line. A full Linux client is expected to follow in the coming weeks.

A large scale cyber attack which took down cable, telephone, cellular and satellite networks in Washington for around 15 minutes has been blamed on a female Russian hacker. According to the show Covert Affairs, she is a member of Piratbyrån, the founding group behind The Pirate Bay. The group are somewhat unsuccessfully trying to play down any real-life link to the supposedly fictional claims.