The mass lawsuits against alleged BitTorrent users in the United States that have been keeping the courts busy over the past several months are turning into a roller-coaster ride. Last week thousands of defendants celebrated a victory when they had their cases dropped, but just a few days later a…
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.
As reported in our News Bits article earlier this week, the UK government is considering introducing a system to have websites which provide or facilitate access to copyright infringing material blocked by ISPs. The music and movie industries have already created a wishlist of 100 sites they would like blocked,…
A new paper published by the American economist Joel Waldfogel shows that music piracy hasn't hurt the creation of new music as the RIAA, IFPI and other industry representatives have often claimed. Instead, music has democratized in recent years with the balance of power shifting from the monopoly of the…
Following in the footsteps of The Pirate Bay, another major torrent site went down as well. H33t has been unresponsive for a few hours now. TorrentFreak contacted the owner of the site for more details on the situation, but he has yet to reply. As usual, we expect that the…
Yes, The Pirate Bay is down at the moment. No, there’s no reason to panic. Every time The Pirate Bay suffers a few minutes for downtime, thousands of people start to worry that something awful has happened to their beloved site. Luckily, this is usually not the case. The fear…
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…
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…