Piracy Monitoring and Settlement Firm Goes Public

Rightscorp, a Santa Monica-based firm that uses DMCA requests to demand piracy settlements from U.S. Internet subscribers, just announced its alternative public offering. The company, which has Warner Bros. as one of its most prominent clients, hopes to recoup some of the $2.3 billion it claims is currently lost through…

Site Blocking on the Agenda for Fresh Aussie Anti-Piracy Action

There are fresh calls today for entertainment companies and Australian Internet service providers to reboot their stalled online piracy mitigation talks. Attorney-General George Brandis is driving the initiative and has written to the interested parties requesting their participation in a series of urgent roundtable discussions. It comes as no surprise…

Torrent Site Admin Who Turned Pigsty into Datacenter Jailed for a Year

The former administrator of a 65,000 member private BitTorrent tracker who earned money from site donations without declaring it as income has been sentenced. The 35-year-old, a farmer who alleged spent some of the money on converting a pigsty into a datacenter, said that he believed his site was legal…

MPAA Reports Notorious Pirate Sites to U.S. Government

The MPAA has informed the U.S. Government about several piracy-promoting websites it would like to be dealt with in the near future. The list includes major torrent sites, file-hosting services, but also Russia’s popular social network VKontakte. Interestingly, the movie industry group also prematurely reports that Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid…

Russian Facebook Not Responsible For Users’ Pirate Music Uploads

Russia's largest social network has been cleared of copyright infringement charges by a court in St. Petersburg. A lawsuit brought by a famous local records label alleged that VKontakte should be held liable for music piracy carried out by its users. However a judge ruled that there was no way…

Comcast, Verizon and Co. Want to Stop Mass Piracy Lawsuits

Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Cox are hoping to protect their customers from the unfair practices of various copyright trolls. The ISPs are appealing a district court decision ordering them to reveal the identities of 1,058 subscribers accused of pirating movies, with the goal of ending these mass BitTorrent…