Police assisted by the Federation Against Copyright Theft showed up in large numbers to arrest an alleged movie pirate in the UK this week. Armed with an emergency search warrant issued out of hours by a judge, five undercover police vehicles containing detectives and FACT officers were deployed to arrest a 24-year-old said to have recorded the movie Fast and Furious 6.
This week a new “anonymous” BitTorrent client was released to the public. TrafficPrivacy allows users to hide their IP-address directly from within their client, at the price of a standard proxy or VPN service. The TrafficPrivacy team says its main goal is to provide an all-in-one anonymity solution for a less tech savvy audience.
A law firm hoping to secure the identities of Internet users who allegedly shared copyright material without permission is likely to find itself in a sticky situation today. The firm has reportedly approached ISPs in Australia with demands that they hand over subscribers’ details, but according to their own published literature the company has little faith in IP address-based evidence.
In a new lawsuit Voltage Pictures, the company behind The Hurt Locker, say they have not only tracked down a “prolific proponent” of widespread BitTorrent piracy, but have identified him as a practicing attorney based in Portland, Oregon. The defendant, who describes himself as an expert in two martial arts, is said to have infringed copyright in at least 66 different copyright works. The lawsuit is littered with controversial claims that attempt to paint the attorney in the worst possible light.
Kim Dotcom has announced that he is the inventor of the so-called two-step authentication system and has a patent to prove it. The Megaupload founder says the security mechanism, which has just been introduced by Twitter, is being used by U.S. companies more than a billion times every week without permission. Dotcom says he doesn’t want to sue, but might if the likes of Google and Facebook don’t help fund his legal battle with the U.S. Government.
To mark the occasion of 20 million URL takedown notices sent to Google by RIAA member companies, the organization has complained that search engines still aren’t doing enough to reduce the piracy problem. The RIAA says it is using a bucket to deal with “an ocean of illegal downloading”, one in which content is replaced and re-indexed in a never-ending loop. Notice and takedown procedures aren’t fit for today’s reality and must be revised, the music group argues.
New tax records reveal that the RIAA has made heavy employee cuts after revenue dropped to a new low. Over the past two years the major record labels have cut back their membership dues from $33.6 to $23.6 million. RIAA staff plunged from 107 to 60 workers in the same period. The IRS filing further shows that the music industry group paid $250,000 to the six strikes anti-piracy system.
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Left Quote“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship.
Peter Sunde Left Quote
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