Joel Tenenbaum has lost his trial against the RIAA and was ordered to pay $22,500 for each of the 30 songs he shared via Kazaa. Tenenbaum, who pleaded guilty to downloading and sharing files earlier this week, will be left paying off the $675,000 to the music labels for the rest of his life.
Global Gaming Factory (GGF), the company planning to acquire The Pirate Bay, has received a bid of $10 million from John Fanning, the former Napster CEO and uncle of its founder, Shawn. Other interested parties have contacted GGF in recent weeks, but thus far, they have all had their multi-million dollar offers rejected.
Lawyers from FIMI (Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana) and FPM (Federation against Musical Piracy) say they will sue Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm in Italy, seeking damages in excess of 1 million euros. Their lawyer told TorrentFreak that so far, the prospective defendants have had no official notification.
The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has won its court case against The Pirate Bay. The Amsterdam court today ruled that the site must cease all operations in The Netherlands within 10 days, or else pay penalties of 30,000 euros ($42,300) a person, per day.
Today, the verdict in the court case between the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN and The Pirate Bay is due. Being one of the defendants, Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde is interested in the outcome of the case, and asked the court for a copy. However, the court refused to do so and told Sunde that he should ask BREIN instead.
Despite the departure of ex-Grokster CEO Wayne Rosso and mounting doubts that Global Gaming Factory can raise funding to purchase and then legalize The Pirate Bay, the company is adamant. GGF CEO Hans Pandeya says everything is on schedule, the investors are in place and the purchase will go ahead on August 27th.
In our ‘behind the scenes’ series TorrentFreak tries to peel away some of the mystery surrounding BitTorrent sites and the people who run them. This time we feature the workspace of isoHunt founder Gary Fung, who also shares some details and photographs of the site’s server rack.
TNT Village, Italy’s most prominent torrent site has been compromised by hackers. Intimate details of the site’s operations including 50,000 usernames, passwords and email addresses have been leaked out onto the Internet. The site has taken precautionary measures but concerned users should change their passwords immediately.
In a few days time Global Gaming Factory is supposed to have gathered millions of dollars in funding so they can acquire The Pirate Bay. But according to Wayne Rosso, the former CEO of Grokster who was involved with GGF recently, this is unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is giving GGF a week before they cancel the deal.
Today more than ten major movie companies issued a subpoena to the Stockholm District Court demanding it put an end to the activities of The Pirate Bay. The companies, including Disney, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Sony, NBC and Paramount also want the court to force the site’s ISP to shut down the site.
If the major record labels are to believed, they lose millions of dollars due to YouTube pirates. But is this really the case? While anti-piracy outfits try to have all infringing music taken offline or have the audio on pirated YouTube clips disabled, the band Barcelona responded with a video thanking a video uploader for using their song.
