In an unexpected move, the Swedish Minister of Culture said in a speech that she’s happy with the sentences handed out to the defendants in the Pirate Bay trial. Her comments on an ongoing court case go too far, and are probably unconstitutional according to critics. Music industry insiders, on the other hand, cheered during her speech.
TV-shows are some of the most wanted files on BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people sharing?
The request from four major record labels to fine the Pirate Bay operators for every day the site remains up and running was declined by the Swedish District Court today. Contrary to what the labels had requested, the court said it wants to hear the defendants before it will take any action.
In a recent court battle, among other things L’Oreal argued that eBay could prevent the sale of counterfeit items through its site and was therefore jointly liable for offenses committed by its users. The UK High Court disagreed and ruled in eBay’s favor. We take a look at the case through a BitTorrent prism.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent. A new R5 release of ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’.
The chief of Lithuania’s main anti-piracy outfit has a mountain to climb in dealing with piracy – online penetration is at almost 100% and closing torrent sites is no cakewalk. After announcing plans for a crackdown, people suggested collecting money to have him killed but this hatred is nothing new. An earlier plot aimed to blow him up.
In February TechCrunch rumored that Last.fm had ratted out its users to the RIAA. Now they have another source claiming data was shared with the music industry group, including IP addresses. Without going into the validity of these allegations, we’d like to point out that this data is completely useless to the RIAA, from a legal point of view.
With millions of page views a day, torrent sites are a great outlet for spammers and scammers. Most recently, The Pirate Bay suffered from a spam flood. Thousands of spam comments posted on the site promised to speed up BitTorrent downloads to unrealistic heights, while installing an aggressive adware bundle.
Pro-copyright lobbyists and anti-piracy outfits have a clear idea of what is needed to manipulate the minds of the younger generations. The MPAA most famously handed out a “merit patch in respecting copyright” to LA Boy Scouts, and now the Copyright Alliance has entered US classrooms in an attempt to educate today’s youth about the benefits of copyright.
FeedMyTorrents, a site which published handy RSS feeds for downloading TV-shows using BitTorrent, has closed its doors for the last time. The site went down earlier this year due to financial difficulties but following legal threats, has now closed down for good.
The European elections are only two weeks away, and Pirate Party candidates vie for seats in different countries. We speak with some of them, starting with Andreas Popp, lead candidate for the German Piraten Partei.
