The latter group has not been very successful in convincing the big labels to change their anti-piracy strategies, but when MC Hammer says STOP they will have to listen.

In a recent interview Hammer commented on the industry’s struggle with piracy and the future of music in the digital age. In Hammer’s view, the RIAA’s legal battles against file-sharers have only alienated buying customers. ”The approach that the music industry took to fight piracy was the wrong strategy,” he said.

Aside from going after individuals, the entertainment industries have also targeted ISPs, for enabling their customers to pirate. The most prominent case at the moment is that of AFACT against iiNet, where the anti-piracy group wants the Aussie ISP to disconnect repeat infringers.

Using a murder and gun analogy to appeal to his fellow rappers, Hammer argues that AFACT is going after the wrong party by targeting the ISP.

”When there is a murder done with the gun, do they go back to the guy who sold the gun at the store and arrest him? No they don’t. They arrest the person who did it. So in this particular case, somebody is stealing content using the freeway. You can’t go back and sue the construction men,” Hammer said.

In addition to calling for a stop to the legal battles, Hammer thinks the music labels should focus more on digital content instead of trying to sell plastic to a generation of people that have never even owned a standalone CD player.

‘Digital files are no doubt not just the future, but the present. I think that it’s [the CD format] on its last legs, it’s on an artificial respirator,” Hammer commented.

“I don’t know what would turn them on about having to go through that terrible exercise of trying to open the packaging – it’s unbelievable when you’re trying to open a CD, right? You need a box cutter … it’s a tough deal to get it open. And once you get it open … you go and upload it to your computer,” Hammer added.

Hammer has a fair point there. Digital sales are breaking records year after year in terms of revenue generated, while the decline in physical CD sales is more likely to be a sign of the times rather than a side-effect of music piracy.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The main problem is that most people just don’t understand what DHT is, what it does, and how it works. Not really a surprise since the documentation and even the Wikipedia page are filled with technical jargon, and no simple explanation.  Without that basic understanding confusion is inevitable. We did explain DHT in our jargon piece back in 2006 but after 3 years, we decide to cover it again.

The easiest way to think about DHT is to imagine it as a form of ’super tracker’, in some ways a lot like WinMX and Kazaa of old. A large ad-hoc network of peers pass on information requests about torrents without a central server, meaning no control or single point of failure. No information about the contents or even the names of torrents are passed around, making this legal and hard to shut down.

Myth: You must turn off DHT when you use private trackers.

Wrong — There is an element to a torrent that is called the ‘private flag’. It’s a small flag that marks to a client that the torrent is ‘private’ and disables any method of sharing peers (including DHT), except via the tracker. This flag also changes the hash, so peers on a non-flagged torrent could not connect to a flagged torrent in any case. Most private torrent sites check for the flag, and add it if missing when the torrent is initially uploaded to their site.

Myth: Certain clients leak DHT data and should be avoided.

Wrong (with one exception) — There are always going to be people that want control. When it comes to torrent sites (especially the private ones) they like to express their control through lists of clients you can and can’t use (a form of DRM) and sometimes give reasons to support this. An example would be this statement from a staff member at a private tracker:

Not all torrent clients respect the private flag. But if you are using a client like Vuze, uTorrent or similar if the private flag is on (set by the tracker) the DHT, peer exchange settings etc are ignored. However, if you are using something like BitComet, BitLord or their ilk they ignore the private flag so if you have DHT etc enabled it is going to be enabled no matter what.

This statement is completely false. All torrent clients that support DHT respect the flag. The flag is set by the torrent file, not the tracker (although the tracker can add the flag to the file, it’s still set by the torrent), and BitComet does NOT ignore the flag. The one exception is a single build of BitComet (0.60) that was available for 2 weeks at the end of 2005, and even then, was a fallback only if the tracker was unable to be contacted for a 30minute period. Bitlord is unable to leak to DHT, as it doesn’t use DHT at all.

If you see staff making claims like this, it’s a good indication that the staff is clueless, which might be an idea to leave that tracker. If they can’t get the basics right who knows when else is wrong. Of course, we ask those claiming other clients leak to let us know so we can test it.

Myth: You can be tracked by DHT / AntiP2P groups use DHT to find you

Unlikely — It’s much easier and simpler to use the tracker. Blocklists, used on your client and on the trackers, are generally ineffective and easily circumvented through the use of residential connections. Last year’s University of Washington study showed that they will send letters just based on tracker info.

Myth: DHT slows your system down

Generally not true — It can slow down your connection depending mainly on network hardware. The actual data used in running DHT is low, generally less than 1kilobyte a second. Some routers and modems, however, can have problems with DHT causing lockups and restarts if they run out of ram. This mostly happens with lower spec ‘home’ equipment (such as older Belkins, Netgears and D-links), or telco-provided hardware.

Myth: You need to connect to a tracker, before you can use DHT

Wrong — When DHT is enabled (certainly in uTorrent) it connects to a bootstrap node (such as router.utorrent.com or router.bittorrent.com for mainline, or dht.aelitis.com for Vuze) and uses that to enter the DHT ’swarm’. It’s handed a set of DHT nodes and uses that to build up a small group of connected nodes. Those nodes are then used to get peers. No tracker is required at any time.

Myth: When enabled, it sends usage data back to [insert company]

Wrong — This is another case of people not knowing what they’re talking about. Generally they’re misinterpreting the bootstrap node connection for their client.

When the demonoid tracker was finally resurrected last year, many of it’s torrents were still active thanks mainly to DHT. DHT with Peer Exchange (PEX) is a very powerful addition to the torrenting world, and allows torrents to stay active, irrespective of the trackers stability or even existence. Also, Azureus/Vuze users, despite having their own DHT system, can join in using a mainline DHT plugin.

Should you use DHT? Not if you only use private trackers, but if you use public ones and your network hardware can cope, then yes. It can help reduce tracker load. If you have a question about DHT not answered here, then again, let us know.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It would seem that wherever Peter Mandelson goes, controversy soon follows. He’s resigned from the British cabinet twice before over allegations of improprieties, so he’s just the sort of person qualified to head up the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) (or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) as it was renamed in June).

The timing is seen as suspicious by some, coming just days after he took a holiday with David Geffen. A government source told The Times “Until the past week Mandelson had shown little personal interest in the Digital Britain agenda. Suddenly Peter returned from holiday and effectively issued this edict that the regulation needs to be tougher.”

The proposal, released in a statement by the BIS today says that waiting to see how the previous recommendation – of seeing how things were going over the next few years, with technological measures to come into force by 2012 – were going to be too slow. As such, they want to push forward with the measures, even if unnecessary, as they make clear:

Previously, it had been proposed that Ofcom would undergo a detailed process in order to ascertain that technical measures were required. With this approach, the earliest that measures could come into play was during 2012. The Government has now reached the view that, if action was deemed necessary, this might be too long to wait given the pressure put on the creative industries by piracy. The new ideas outlined today would potentially allow action to be taken earlier. (emphasis added)

Of course, if action is NOT deemed necessary, if the facts to back up the claims can’t be found for instance, then much of the legislation requested by the copyright industries will not go ahead. That evidence would be hard to find, since at least two separate examinations of content industry figures have shown little to no impact on box office movie sales, or music sales. This may be why there is the sudden push for the legislation, based again on a claim of need, rather than facts.

The ISPs are up in arms about this as well, with Talktalk’s Andrew Heaney telling the BBC: “Disconnecting alleged offenders will be futile given that it is relatively easy for determined file-sharers to mask their identity or their activity to avoid detection.” They are rightly concerned with disconnecting the wrong people, based either on mis-identification by investigators, or the use of open/inadequately secured wifi spots.

The music industry is enthusiastic though, with the BPI happy. “Digital piracy is a serious problem and a real threat to the UK’s creative industries,” it said in a statement to the BBC, while yet again failing to release any data to back up their claims. “The solution to the piracy problem must be effective, proportionate and dissuasive,” it then says, omitting that these proposals are none of these, just as the 1865 Locomotive Act was not effective, proportionate or dissuasive to the take-up of the personal motor vehicle, or in protecting the railway and equine-based industries from the progress of technology.

Meanwhile, as one commenter indicates in a comment on the Digital Britain site, more people will be joining the UK Pirate Party, although the party currently says it’s experiencing only a slight increase in membership. Its members, however, are livid.

Stephen Timms, minister for Digital Britain also made the following statement: “We’ve been listening carefully to responses to the consultation this far, and it’s become clear there are widespread concerns that the plans as they stand could delay action, impacting unfairly upon rights holders. So we look forward to hearing views on our new ideas, which along with those already received, will help us determine the best way to tackle this complex challenge.”

Clearly he hasn’t been listening to the comments made by 6 million file-sharers in the UK, but there’s no harm in making him more aware. The consultation is open until September. So there’s still time to make your voice heard, but please, keep it civil and factual – even if the Content Industry can’t manage the second.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Back in May the music industry plaintiffs – Universal, EMI, Sony and Warner – indicated they’d had enough and through their lawyer Peter Danowsky, applied to the court requesting it starts imposing additional fines on three of the defendants – Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi – for as long as they continue to infringe their copyrights. In addition the plaintiffs demanded that the Pirate Bay’s ISP ‘Black Internet’ stopped providing services to The Pirate Bay.

Now just a couple of months after the record labels handed in their request, it’s the turn of the movie and TV industry to join in.

Today a whole batch of companies including Columbia, Disney, NBC, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner are suing the same three individuals in Stockholm, demanding that the court stops the site from continuing to infringe their copyrights. In common with the music industry action, they also name The Pirate Bay’s bandwidth supplier, Black Internet AB.

Through their legal representative Monique Wadsted, the group named over 100 movies and TV shows they claim the site infringes copyright on, including Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, 24, X-Men Origins:Wolverine, Batman, Watchmen and Harry Potter.

“It’s another day in the whole soap opera of TPB,” Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. “They’re suing us in Stockholm where none of us live.”

But the problems with the action don’t end there. After also incorrectly stating that the site is running on the Hypercube software, the movie companies seem to have a problem with their perception of who owns the site. The Pirate Bay hasn’t been owned by the three since 2006, when it was acquired by Seychelles-based company Reservella.

“They’re suing us over something which we don’t own,” Peter told us. “I think the most funny part of the whole suit is that they just write: ‘Reservella is a company run by Fredrik Neij – out of 40 pages of paper that’s all they have to say, and it’s so wrong. They have no paperwork to back it up even,” he told us.

Peter is of the belief that the music and movie industries are well aware that the site is being sold and simply want to make that as difficult as possible.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Many have feared the sale would mean the death of half the world’s torrents, that BitTorrent would possibly come to a grinding halt. However, this is the Internet, the place where data flows at mindblowing speeds over vast areas, where the individual is empowered beyond anything previously imagined. A place where even the mighty Pirate Bay can be copied, cloned and replaced in an instant.

In a new move, right now every .torrent file downloaded from The Pirate Bay not only includes the announce URL of their own tracker (that will presumably be turned off after the sale), but also the announce URL of the newly launched OpenBitTorrent tracker.

When asked about the development, Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that they have always been willing to support open initiatives such as the OBT tracker, projects that make BitTorrent a little more redundant.

The addition of the new announce URL means that even if The Pirate Bay tracker goes down, all torrents downloaded from now on will continue to work by using the OpenBitTorrent tracker.

But of course that’s just a small part of the problem. A more pressing issue is preserving the archive of torrents that are already there on TPB – if the site gets sold and someone presses the wrong button they could be lost forever. Sure there are other fragmented places where some of them can be obtained, but no definitive archive.

But there will be shortly. Cliff Haerden, a web hosting provider from Belgium, contacted TorrentFreak with his video which shows a technique for making offline copies of all The Pirate Bay’s torrents – or indeed the torrents from any other accessible website. Cliff told TorrentFreak that after three night’s work he already has 730,000 of TPB’s torrents.

It’s inevitable that all of the torrents will turn up on BitTorrent at some point, then every BitTorrent user can have their own personal copy of The Pirate Bay archive.

Just don’t try to sell them for $7.8m, they aren’t worth that much without the domain name.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Instead of notifying its customers that they have received a letter from a copyright holder, with the claim that their IP-address is associated with illegal downloading – Karoo customers are immediately disconnected without any prior warning. As we reported last year, Karoo doesn’t even allow users to have an open router.

Andrea Robinson is one of the Karoo customers who was accused of downloading illegally, Terminator Salvation in her case. She lost her Internet connection and the only option she has to get her Internet access reinstated is by signing a form sent to her by Karoo, which says she admits guilt.

“The form basically said ‘if I admit my guilt you’ll reconnect me’. So I didn’t sign it and walked out. I’m still not reconnected,” she told the BBC. With Karoo being the only ISP in her neighborhood she is now left with no Internet, and clueless what to do about it. According to the BBC she is not the only one, as there are similar cases at Karoo dating two years back.

In the United States there is one ISP that employs a similar strategy – Cox. When Cox receives a takedown request from a copyright holder, it will disconnect the customer associated with the IP-address, if they don’t admit to being guilty. If a customer receives three takedown requests their Internet is cut off entirely.

The real problem with Karoo and Cox’s methods lies in the fact that they act upon accusations made by anti-piracy organizations who employ evidence gathering methods that are shoddy, to say the least.

In the UK, the BBC consumer show Watchdog revealed how easy it is to point the finger (and pull the plug) on the wrong person. For Karoo this means that these wrongfully accused customers will lose their Internet access, unless they admit to an offense they were not involved in.

Since Karoo is the one and only Internet provider in the area, some will feel that they have no alternative, and they will sign the “guilty” form just to get back online. The anti-piracy groups must be proud of Karoo and their reckless tactics but the ISP should stop to consider the future. Monopolies don’t last forever and the Internet has a long memory.

Update: After today’s reports Karoo decided to change their policy. Instead of disconnecting alleged pirates directly, they will operate a a three strikes and you are out rule.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

After its transformation into a pirate tracking outfit Nexicon launched its Getamnesty program which offers copyright holders a chance to turn piracy into profit. They cleverly circumvent privacy protection laws by using ISPs to forward settlement requests for various copyright holders to alleged infringers. One of their most successful partner programs is the Payartists website which is a misleading name to say the least.

The money collected through Payartists is not going to any artists at all. The only artist they collect ’settlements’ for on the site is Frank Zappa, and he passed away in 1993. All the settlement money collected now goes to The Zappa Family Trust which is headed by Zappa’s widow.

Most recently a new Nexicon franchise emerged, as the ‘Video Protection Alliance’ (VPA) has teamed up with several porn studios to track down and force settlements from alleged copyright infringers. The methods they use are very similar to Getamnesty and Payartists and are designed to get cash payments from illicit file-sharers without even having to first find out who they are.

The process is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other filesharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share the work of their clients. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer.

Thus far, this is very similar to the warning letters that the movie and music studios have been sending out for years. However, there is one big difference. The emails sent out by Nexicon to alleged infringers contain veiled threats of legal action if they don’t choose to settle within 10 days.

In their email they write that “it may be beneficial to settle this matter without the need of costly and time-consuming litigation.”

If you don’t settle they are “prepared to pursue every available remedy including damages, recovery of attorney’s fees, costs and any and all other claims that may be available to it in a lawsuit filed against you.” To make it even more scary, they point out that ISPs might cut your Internet connection if you don’t comply.

In the FAQ on the VPA website it is noted that consulting a lawyers is an option, but it would be a rather silly thing to do since it will cost more than the settlement itself. “It is likely that the cost incurred to retain a lawyer will exceed the settlement amount offered.”

Indeed, the settlements are rather cheap compared to the fine that was handed out to Jammie Thomas recently. The settlement offer for an adult movie is close to the retail price of a DVD and for a single Frank Zappa track you’ll pay $10. In comparison, Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay $80,000 per song.

However, because of these low fees and the use of threatening language we cannot help mentioning the word ‘extortion’ once more. Even if they handle with the best intentions they should adjust their tracking software to be more accurate. We confirmed at least one case where they sent a settlement offer to the wrong person, and we’re pretty sure that this is not the only mistake they’ve made (here’s another one).

Still, even people wrongfully accused of sharing [insert obscene porn title here] may be inclined to pay a few bucks rather than risk being taken to court. The threats are worrying enough for some people to pay for an offense they didn’t commit. But there might be an even easier way out.

Unsurprisingly, very little happens when the threats are ignored. A Manhattan College employee dealing with DMCA notices wrote recently. “We have not passed the settlement info on to the students linked with the allegedly infringing IP address and have not had any follow up notices from them.”

This aside, we are not aware of any legal action taken by any of Nexicon’s partners to back up their threats. To the best of our knowledge they don’t even have a proper license to act as private investigators which is a felony in several US states and renders the ‘evidence’ they have in their spreadsheets useless.

Our advice, if you get a settlement offer from one of Nexicon’s partners please forward it to your spam folder – after forwarding it to us first of course.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

With 99.9% of the districts counted the Pirates have 7.1 percent of the votes, beating several established parties. This means that the Pirate Party will get at least one, but most likely two of the 18 (+2) available seats Sweden has at the European Parliament.

When we asked Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge about the outcome, he told TorrentFreak: “We’ve felt the wind blow in our sails. We’ve seen the polls prior to the election. But to stand here, today, and see the figures coming up on that screen… What do you want me to say? I’ll say anything”

“Together, we have today changed the landscape of European politics. No matter how this night ends, we have changed it,” Falkvinge said. “This feels wonderful. The citizens have understood it’s time to make a difference. The older politicians have taken apart young peoples’ lifestyle, bit by bit. We do not accept that the authorities’ mass-surveillance,” he added.

The turnout at the elections is 43 percent, a little higher than the at the 2004 elections. This would mean that roughly 200,000 Swedes have voted for the Pirate Party. This is a huge increase compared to the national elections of 2006 where the party got 34,918 votes.

Both national and international press have gathered in Stockholm where the Pirate Party is celebrating its landmark victory.

At least partially, The Pirate Party puts its increased popularity down to harsh copyright laws and the recent conviction of the people behind The Pirate Bay. After the Pirate Bay verdict, Pirate Party membership more than tripled and they now have over 48,000 registered members, more than the total number of votes they received in 2006.

With their presence in Brussels, the Pirate Party hopes to reduce the abuses of power and copyright at the hands of the entertainment industries, and make those activities illegal instead. On the other hand they hope to legalize file-sharing for personal use.

“It’s great fun to be a pirate right now”, Christian Engström, Vice Chairman of the Pirate Party told the press when he arrived.

Update: Sweden has 20 seats, but until the Lisbon treaty passes only 18 with voting rights. This means that the Pirate Party will have 2 seats.

Update: In Germany the Pirate Party got approximately 1 percent of the votes, not enough for a seat in the European Parliament. Andreas Popp, lead candidate for the German Pirate Party is pleased and told TorrentFreak: “This was the first time, we ran for the European elections. And although many voters have hardly known us, we got a great result. This shows, that many citizens identify themselves with our goals. I want to thank all people who supported us, we could not have done that without them. We have fulfilled our minimal goal of 0,5%. Now we can start up for real!”

Update: Here’s a feature article on the election night and outcome.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Just recently Pontén received a letter from the Swedish tax authority (Skatteverket) informing him that his request for a change in his personal details had been accepted, which came as quite a surprise since he had made no such request.

From May 29th 2009, said the letter, 43 year-old Henrik Pontén would have his name changed and become known as Pirate Pontén, undoubtedly to the high amusement of millions of file-sharers.

“The pirate movement have previously tried threats and when that doesn’t work, they do this,” Pontén told Aftonbladet.

Labeling the name change as a “silly” act, Pontén remains determined to press on and get his original name back. “This only makes me more convinced that I’m right,” he said. “The pirate movement often speaks about the importance of personal integrity, but the name change violates my integrity.”

Pontén and others like him around the world are continuing to discover that most people in opposition to their plans have access to a keyboard and the Internet and that is all they need to do their tiny part in annoying those that set out to annoy them. One person alone can cause enough damage, multiply this by thousands or millions and the whole situation can become entirely unmanageable.

Pirate Bay users will tell you that they have grown used to Pontén and his activities against them. Equally Pontén says he has grown used to piracy advocates harassing him in return.

“The way I see it, there is a campaign against anyone who disagrees with the piracy movement,” notes Pontén. “They are trying to restrict our freedom of speech. Previously they have tried threats, now they are trying other methods,” he added.

Pontén told Aftonbladet that the Pirate Party should distance themselves from this type of threat and harassment, although why they should be required to do so is not clear. There is absolutely no suggestion that the Pirate Party was involved in changing Pontén’s name but nevertheless, vice chairman Christian Engström felt compelled to comment;

“To poke fun at the opposition is perfectly ok, but this kind of conduct is just bad form. We distance ourselves from threats and trouble-making. It does not benefit the party,” he said.

Interestingly, no identity check is carried out in Sweden for name change applications, the person concerned just receives a letter to inform the change has been carried out.

Ingegerd Widell, head of the registry at Skatteverket, said that Pirate Pontén will get his original name back in due course.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“Send an email as you munch a warm bagel. Read the news as you sip a latte. It’s a nice alternative to the office, isn’t it?” they write.

Well, not if you’re writing for TorrentFreak since our site is blocked, and we’re not the only site affected. The uTorrent website is also inaccessible, as well as the Wikipedia entry for BitTorrent and even Legaltorrents. Vuze.com on the other hand is not blocked. It all seems to be a bit arbitrary.

For some reason TorrentFreak is blocked by many web-filters. In the past we’ve contacted a university that decided to block us and asked the person responsible for the filter for an explanation. We were told that our site was wrongfully categorized as a hacking/warez site, and the university was kind enough to take us off their ban list. However, the issues with Panera Bread are a little different.

Panera Bread uses SonicWALL’s filtering solutions and when running a check on their database we see that (unlike others) TorrentFreak is correctly labeled as a “news and media” website. So, the people at Panera Bread either added TorrentFreak to their custom ban list, or implemented a keyword filter which is also supported by the SonicWALL system.

Could it be that they block all sites with the keyword ‘torrent’ in the url? It’s beginning to look like that is indeed the case. All Google searches with the word ‘torrent’ in it are blocked by Panera Bread and it is impossible to download any .torrent files. Linuxtracker is not blocked, however, the torrent listing on the site (with the word torrent in the url) is again inaccessible.

It turns out that every website with ‘torrent’ in the url is blocked, the “reason for restriction” always being “Administrative Custom List settings”. It gets even worse though. A quick search on Amazon for (legal) products that have “torrent” in the URL results in yet another list on accessible pages.

* The LEGO toy of the Torrent spaceship from Star Wars.
* A backpack named “High Sierra Torrent 70 Hydration Pack.”
* Book author “Ann Torrent” wont sell anything through Panera Bread.
* And a whole list of book titles that include the word “torrent.”

Of course we fully understand that Panera doesn’t want users of their free WiFi hotspots to download massive amounts of data with BitTorrent, and since it’s their network they can impose as many restrictions as they like. However, there must be a more sophisticated method to achieve their goals than to ban everything ‘torrent’, including the dictionary entry.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

We don’t make (much) music here at the Free Software Foundation, so it’s natural for people to wonder why the FSF has been standing up for individuals targeted by lawsuits launched by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Most recently we filed an *amicus curiae* brief in the case of *Sony BMG Music Entertainment, et al. v. Joel Tenenbaum* showing the RIAA’s theory of statutory damage awards to be unconstitutional.

Some would prefer that we refrain from fighting these lawsuits, suggesting that they are a distraction from the FSF’s core charter. But opposing them is actually an important part of our mission to support free software. First, these lawsuits represent a concerted attempt to rewrite copyright law in a way that threatens to undermine the ultimate goals of the free software movement. Second, a vocal minority in the entertainment industry uses these lawsuits as warrants to justify DRM technology and other measures to monitor and control the flow of information over the internet. Third, if unopposed, these lawsuits create a culture in which people are afraid to share, presuming sharing to be theft.

In their response to our brief, the RIAA says, “The FSF is not a neutral friend of the Court. Rather, FSF is an organization dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, and modifying computer programs, classic intellectual property, much like the sound recordings at issue in this case [*sic*].” It’s unclear what legal aim the RIAA lawyers from the firms of Holme Roberts & Owen and Dwyer & Collora think they are accomplishing with this attack. Having an interest in the outcome of a case is the reason organizations file such briefs. William Rehnquist defined *amicus curiae* as, “a phrase that literally means ‘friend of the court’ — someone who is not a party to the litigation, but who believes that the court’s decision may affect its interest.”

But here, it is the public’s interest that we are defending, not our own. While we don’t agree — as the RIAA claims — that we are more “virulent” than an organization that intimidates everyone from the elderly to college students to the severely disabled into either paying “settlement” money or facing the crushing expenses of defending against unwarranted prosecution in faraway jurisdictions, the RIAA is correct that the FSF does have a position on copyright. Although we are primarily concerned not with music, but with how software can be made and shared so as to benefit and empower everyone, neither are the impacts of the RIAA’s actions restricted to the distribution of music. Their lawsuits are a deliberate campaign to rewrite copyright law through the courts. They are attempting to set precedents which will affect all works governed by copyright law, including software.

The RIAA, which in its litigation campaign represents exclusively EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and their affiliates, would like to change copyright to be an ordinary physical property right. Through these lawsuits, they seek to establish near exclusive permanent control over each and every use of the recordings their members distribute, expanding the power of copyright owners to include things which are not part of the existing body of law, and extracting financial penalties from the largely defenseless individuals accused of disobeying them.

But copyright is not and was not intended to be a right like this. In fact, copyright requires that the public give up some of its rights, such as to free speech and free association, in order to promote another of its fundamental interests — progress in the sciences and useful arts. In “Misinterpreting Copyright,” FSF president Richard Stallman draws an analogy between this tradeoff and government procurement. When doing any kind of purchasing necessary to do the public’s work, the government seeks (if imperfectly) to minimize the amount of taxpayer money spent to obtain the needed goods. This means paying a price that suppliers will find acceptable, while avoiding being gouged by those suppliers who may claim that the goods are worth a lot more than they really are. When the U.S. Navy was accused of paying Lockheed $640 per toilet seat for some of its aircraft, people were understandably outraged, because the government had squandered the public’s money.

In the case of copyright, it’s the public’s freedom that the government is spending, to obtain in return for the public scientific and cultural goods. Right now, governments are squandering this freedom. They are spending far too much and getting far too little in return. Plenty of authors and artists are telling the government that works can and will be made without such expenditure. The international free software movement has been proving this for many years now, having successfully produced a fully functional operating system in GNU/Linux that can be freely used, shared and improved upon by anyone who wants to do so; and more recently there have been people doing similar things in encyclopedias, textbooks, and the world of the arts (including music).

Previously, because the required equipment was large and expensive, normal readers and listeners did not have the means to easily make copies. Restrictive copyright did not negatively affect them. But now, because so many more people do have the ability to easily exercise this freedom, the burden imposed by copyright restrictions on our society has become unacceptably heavy. Even while these restrictions have become more burdensome, they have become less necessary — with the cost of publishing so much lower now, less incentive is required. Instead of acknowledging this, the government has been taking the side of those who, out of greed akin to selling us $640 toilet seats, see an opportunity to freeze what should be a contingent and evolving bargain into a permanent and natural right for themselves, expanding ownership powers under copyright law far beyond its current and historical borders.

In the U.S., the new administration continues to side against the public. Vice President Joe Biden recently spoke at a MPAA luncheon. He adopted the entertainment industry’s loaded “piracy” language, saying, “It’s pure theft.” Biden also assured the MPAA that President Obama would find the “right” copyright czar. His attitude is not surprising, given his past eagerness as a senator to sponsor and support RIAA-backed legislation. He was, after all, one of four U.S. senators invited to a champagne celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) hosted by the MPAA, RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance. Obama himself has already appointed Tom Perrelli and Donald Verrilli, both former lead attorneys for the RIAA, to be associate and deputy associate attorney general.

If we are going to achieve sane copyright law, we have to avoid confusing this institutionalization of corporate greed with “art.” In fact, it seems most artists disagree with the RIAA. Sony artists reportedly earn a tiny $0.045 for each song sold on iTunes, and most of them will never receive even that much from Sony. As one example among many, singer Courtney Love answers the charge of piracy by saying: “What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it. I’m not talking about Napster-type software. I’m talking about major label recording contracts.”

The RIAA doesn’t stop at manipulating copyright law to gouge artists and the public. They also use their lawsuits as leverage to argue for control over any technology that could be used to distribute music. For example, they have pushed to require all wireless access points to be encrypted and closed, to restrict technologies like BitTorrent and other forms of peer-to-peer distribution, to impose bandwidth caps on home internet users, and to monitor traffic through service providers. Such efforts directly hurt free software. Because free software authors around the world work by collaboration, they rely on open distribution networks to move software, data, and conversation around. In particular, peer-to-peer technologies make this easier and cheaper for people with less bandwidth, and so are a powerful means of boosting grassroots free software distribution and development efforts.

The RIAA further attacks free software when they use these filesharing cases as ammunition to advocate DRM under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It was the RIAA that attacked Princeton scientist Ed Felten for wanting to publish useful mathematical information, because this generally useful information might possibly be used to decrypt their specific DRM scheme. Sony saw no problem with secretly installing a rootkit on users’ computers, to facilitate spying on them and blocking certain activities. These efforts to turn computers against their users and to restrict technical information are on-face incompatible with free software. If we allow the RIAA to win outrageous damages in these lawsuits, then we are letting them manufacture evidence of losses due to illegal copying, which they will then use to demand from Congress more control over our technology.

Among both the government and the public, the RIAA lawsuits create a culture which frames these issues in terms that make it harder for free software to succeed, by creating a culture that fears sharing. This leads to confusion like the recent case of a schoolteacher who assumed that a student handing out GNU/Linux discs in class was breaking the law. One can hardly blame her for having this impression when the RIAA lawsuits and propaganda thoroughly permeate the news media, encouraging everyone to assume that sharing is wrong unless they are told otherwise.

The RIAA’s framing of the issue as “intellectual property” is another key way they foster this fear. They cite our opposition to this concept in their reply to our brief, and they are correct. The use of “intellectual property” language threatens to undermine the free software movement. The term lumps together disparate concepts like copyright, patents, and trademarks, which are legally distinct. The RIAA would like to lump them together because doing so increases the size of the gouge they can extract. By drawing an analogy with physical property, they erase the actual histories behind these specific areas of law and rationalize the obscene damages they are demanding. It skews discussion of the issues involved so that good solutions can’t be found, and if it is used in place of a clear discussion about copyright in the arena of music then people will accept it when discussing software as well.

The bottom line is that for art and software alike, sane copyright law should facilitate and promote sharing so that everyone can benefit from what is produced, and participate meaningfully in making it. For software, the easiest way to share is to put source code in the public domain, and not require any End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) or patent licenses. Anyone can then study and use the software, make changes to it, and redistribute changed versions to anyone they want. However, this leaves the door open for other people to use copyright law to make some changes to that software and strip away the freedom, redistributing their version without the freedoms that were originally there. Copyright law allows people to play middleman like this, intercepting works that are intended to be free and turning them into proprietary programs to control users.

To ensure that software written to be free remains free, the FSF uses a copyright license called the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL says that anyone is free to use, copy, change, and distribute modified versions of the software to which it is attached — as long as they pass on those same freedoms to whomever else they give the software. The GPL can do this because copyright law gives copyright holders the authority to outline those terms. Instead of using that authority to make copying illegal, the FSF uses that authority to make it illegal to make copying illegal.

Despite this, the FSF will continue working to reduce the power of copyright restrictions by fighting these lawsuits, filing briefs in specific cases, and collecting contributions to the RIAA Expert Witness Fund. We do not intend to shoot ourselves in the foot by supporting proposals to reduce the scope of copyright that would weaken the way the GPL protects freedom without simultaneously weakening the way companies like Microsoft and Apple use it as a weapon to take away freedom. But neither will we support the RIAA’s expansive approach to empowering copyright owners at the public’s expense on the grounds that it would make the GPL “stronger.” We will not accept losing the GPL as an effective shield unless as part of a plan that we could be confident would make software generally free. But neither will we confuse it with the end goal, which is a world where people are not called criminals when they want to see what the software on their computer is actually doing, or to share a copy with their neighbors, or to improve it and share their improvements.

Executives like Rolf Schmidt-Holtz of Sony Music Entertainment should get the message and back off. Although they claimed in December that they would stop filing lawsuits against individuals, the RIAA filed 62 more in the month of April alone. Citizens are tired of watching their governments squander their freedom to enrich this handful of corporations, and they are tired of being intimidated. We will continue our work to support this opposition to the War on Sharing, and to restore or replace copyright law for its intended purpose — progress in science and the arts, for everyone.

CC-BY-ND

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

There have been many cases where bands and music labels have been publicly vocal about the fact that their album has been heavily pirated. Complaining that their business has been torn apart, most of them appear to ignore the link between accumulating many unauthorized downloads and the retail success of their product. Short and sweet – if your product is good, thousands will buy it. If your product is good, thousands will pirate it too – the two scenarios go hand in hand.

One band who thought that evil pirates were taking all their money are Sweden-based Stockholm Stoner. In a recent interview picked up by brokep of The Pirate Bay, the band explained that since releasing their album on January 21st this year, they had sold a pretty-unimpressive 379 copies.

Apparently, however, their music is a smash hit on BitTorrent, racking up an impressive 80,000 downloads. This ratio of legal to unauthorized downloads seems unprecedented and the band were quick to express their dismay. While noting that they aren’t specifically against P2P networks, the band said it “would be fun” to get paid for their work and that “adults must understand that they can not steal,” while saying that the Internet should be filtered – “..the Chinese can do it after all,” they said.

But this is the Internet, and not everything is how it seems. What could be worse than getting pirated 210 copies to every one sold? How about… not getting pirated at all? Unfortunately for the band the download stats for their album were gathered from entirely the wrong place, via scammy links on a torrent meta search engine. As can be seen from this search for Stockholm Stoner, the site shows many thousands of downloads. They are fake – you can type anything in that search box and the site will return ’stats’.

Rather than being relieved, I can’t help but think that having found out that they’re not popular with pirates after all, the band would be hugely disappointed. Searching in the usual places, TorrentFreak couldn’t find any significant downloads of this band at all. Better to be popular and downloaded, than not downloaded at all, surely?

Another artist who claims to be hugely popular with pirates is Indiana “The Internet Police Are Coming” Gregg. In an interview with the BBC, Gregg claimed that one of her albums had been downloaded 250,000 times – a figure we found just too outrageous to be taken seriously, with our own calculations indicating this assessment was inflated by around 240,000 downloads.

Using the publicity from her spat with The Pirate Bay to great effect, Gregg went on to create Kerchoonz – a site paid for by £250,000 of public money where people could download and listen to music for free. Trying to convert ‘pirates-with-morals’ to the site, every listen or download would result in the artists getting paid, emphasized Gregg.

Indiana Gregg herself is touting her own music on the site and is actually the #4 artist in the Kerchoonz ‘Top 100′ list. Since she’s so popular with pirates (250,000 downloads remember?) she must be tearing it up on Kerchoonz. Wrong. Current stats indicate that her tracks have been streamed 1180 times and downloaded just 310 times. Presuming she’s getting paid at the same rates as the other artists on the site, Gregg netted $2 for this effort, which is exactly $2 more than she accused The Pirate Bay of giving her.

Overall it seems that getting heavily pirated is an indication of success, and a pointer that good money is to be made at retail – The Dark Knight was pirated at least a million times but has already made over $1 billion dollars worldwide.

If no-one wants to pirate your music or download it for free, don’t expect to be able to sell it either. Come back pirates, the music industry needs you.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Considering that the legislation received almost universal opposition from anyone not in the music business, it came as no surprise that the parties involved couldn’t come to an agreement. Prime Minister John Key announced that the law would be delayed while a solution is found, noting that they may have to change the law in order to reach one.

But according to Campbell Smith, CEO of RIANZ (New Zealand’s answer to the RIAA) everyone complaining about the legislation is wrong and the music industry is right. Writing in The New Zealand Herald, Smith says that despite the ‘fact’ that the industry has “transformed its business models”, unlicensed music on the Internet is proving a disincentive to those looking to sell music online.

Smith says that the music industry has been working hard to find “proportionate and reasonable solutions” to tackle illicit file-sharing. Noting that in some countries labels take legal action against those uploading music, Smith says that Section 92A “is a better solution for everyone,” although don’t be surprised if that “everyone” is limited to those in the music industry.

Smith says that after looking long and hard for a solution to the ‘problem’, the industry realized that ISPs are in a “unique position to help us protect creative content online,” and feels that it’s the government’s responsibility to force these negotiations on the ISPs, despite the fact that the ISPs aren’t happy about it at all. Seems everyone has a responsibility to the music industry – like it or not.

Turning to what he describes as “sensational propaganda” surrounding Section 92A in the press recently, Smith says that if the law was half as bad as is being reported, he would vote against it himself. Now that would be a sensation.

Going on to the tracking mechanics, he explained that the process of catching an infringer is simple. The labels will log on to public file-sharing ’sites’ and log the IP addresses of people uploading large amounts of copyright infringing material and report them to their ISP. Further details of how the entire system would operate can be found here.

From a BitTorrent perspective, it will not be as easy to track people sharing vast amounts of music as it is with applications such as LimeWire, since there is no ’shared folder’. It’s doubtful that the labels will be as selective as they are suggesting, though. Many of the infringement notices being sent out in the UK right now are for just one track and if the labels are pinning all of their hopes on this new system, expect there to be lots and lots of them in New Zealand too.

Smith says that consumers need to be reassured that what is being done is “efficient and proportionate” but it’s difficult to see why any ‘consumer’ should appreciate the fact that privately owned businesses should have a veto over their continued Internet access, or feel that such action is “proportionate”.

Content creators do have the right to protect their work, as much is written in law, but threats and disconnections aren’t going to work. Not only are the public annoyed at the actions of the music industry, but ISPs are being dragged into this ‘war’ too. Expect things to get even more messy.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Apparently, Fredrik (TiAMO) got the site back up from inside the courtroom. “I fixed the Pirate Bay from inside the courtroom just minutes ago. The site is back online,” he told blogger Oscar Swartz.

First to appear is Fredrik Neij’s lawyer, Jonas Nilsson. He said that the technology behind TPB is completely legal and Fredrik never had the intention to violate anyones copyrights – his main interest was the technology at the site and he was a technician there.

Nilsson went on to say that it has not been established that the bulk of the material accessible via TPB is copyrighted and it has not been shown that any of the material has been exploited commercially. Nilsson says there are grounds to dismiss the indictment. These are i) the operations of TPB are permissible under the law, ii) there is a certain amount of uncertainty as to the technical aspects of the case against TPB and iii) there are serious shortcomings in the investigation against the four.

Nilsson again argued that TPB operates legally in every sense. The site is open in nature and it is the the site’s users that decide what content TPB tracks and this is not a decision made by the operators. Every site in the world could link to copyright material, he argued. This is not a TPB problem, this is a worldwide Internet problem, he noted.

Neither has it been shown that Fredrik made any money from the site argued Nilsson. There was some advertising revenue generated by the site, he said, but this went to cover the site’s operating costs.

Turning to the accusations that the staff of TPB had an attitude problem, Nilsson says that everyone has a right to their own opinion and just because the site is named the way it is, it does not indicate anything in particular. The site, he said, offers only a passive search function.

Nilsson believes that the indictment against Fredrik Neij should be dismissed because he knew nothing about any of the torrent files referenced in the case against him. Furthermore, he says there is no evidence that Neij encouraged anyone to commit a crime.

Going on to attack the technical evidence against his client, Nilsson said that it doesn’t hold up. It is not clear that Fredrik made any of the works available, there is no evidence which indicates any time for the alleged offenses and there is no proof that TPB’s trackers were used for such – the screenshots just aren’t enough.

There is no evidence indicating who did any uploading and it has not been shown that the individuals doing so had even committed any offense in their own jurisdictions. Furthermore, the Prosecution has not shown how any of the individuals are connected to TPB, and he mostly talks about ‘The Pirate Bay’ as a whole – which isn’t sufficient in a criminal trial as individuals must be referenced.

Turning to the damages brought against his client, Nilsson said the recording industry has simply calculated itself what it believes the damages should be, and at no point has any independent or objective data been presented to the court. Furthermore, since they have not proven that Fredrik was connected to any of the copyright works, the damages claim against him should be dismissed.

The court then took a short break.

Next to make his arguments was Ola Salomonsson, representing Gottfrid Svartholm. He said that he has seen no proof that TPB indexes mostly copyright content and it seems that the only person who bothered to collect such data was Peter Sunde, and he reported 80% of indexed material as non-copyrighted. The Prosecution didn’t bother to collect any data on this issue, he said, and therefore cannot claim the opposite to be true.

Salomonsson said that the Prosecution never tried to contact any of the seeders on the site, who the Prosecution allege that the four must have had contact with. There is no proof that TPB’s tracker was used in any of the infringements highlighted in the case, he added.

Going on, Salomonsson spoke about Gottfrid’s comments yesterday when he called the Roswall “a crazy bastard” for the way he calculated the damages. This comment was because the Prosecutor has his sums wrong, he said, noting that while the Prosecutor claims there are 64 adverts on TPB, there are really just 4. Salomonsson said the revenue is closer 700,000 kroner rather than the millions claimed. Furthermore, he says that the advert deal shown to the court many times never actually came about, so therefore it should not be accepted as evidence.

Salomonsson said Gottfrid always believed that TPB operates legally. He said the site had never been issued with any injunctions ordering it to stop its activities.

Referring to the testimony of Roger Wallis, he said it had embarrassed the plaintiffs and put a big question mark over the massive damages they are claiming from the defendants and that common sense says that any claim must be drastically reduced. Speaking of a possible jail sentence, Salmonsson said that such a result does not feel right at all.

The court took a short break and returned with Peter Althin, Peter Sunde’s lawyer. He opened by saying that this has been a difficult trial for everyone involved and that when there are developments in technology, the establishment reacts against them.

Turning to the huge claimed damages, Althin said there is no proven link between material being downloaded from the Internet and any lost sales, so therefore calls for all the damages claims to be dismissed. Furthermore, he said that all of the ‘evidence’ produced by the Prosecution in respect of the damages claim was not collated independently and therefore wasn’t an objective assessment. He went on to say that since Peter had committed no crimes, there should be no claims for damages against his client.

As for the way the Prosecution dealt with witness Roger Wallis, Althin said it was at the least highly insulting. Instead of attacking Wallis’ arguments, he said the Prosecution chose to launch personal attacks against him. Calling the attacks against Wallis “pathetic”, Althin said he would do everything he could to restore Wallis’ reputation.

Althin told the court that Peter Sunde is just the spokesman of TPB and did not hold the position in the site that the Prosecution claim. Althin said that the Prosecution skipped quickly over talk about Peter at the summing up yesterday for this very reason, indicating a lack of confidence in their own claims.

Althin said that just because Peter knows the other defendants, it does not follow that he committed any crime and just because he gave some advice as to the running of the site, the same stands. “If I call Saab [motor company] and tell them to paint their cars green so they sell more, I have no responsibility for Saab,” he said.

Referring to the contested advertising agreement, Althin said that references were made to Founder 1 (Fredrik) and Founder 2 (Gottfrid). There is no reference to Peter. He added that Peter was not even originally a suspect in the case and his client has never made any money from being on the site. He called for the case against his client to be dismissed.

The court then took a short break and returned with Per E Samuelson, lawyer for Carl Lundström. Samuelson opened by saying that during the case the Prosecution missed the main key point – Is The Pirate Bay legal or not? He said that all four defendants should be acquitted since the Prosecution failed to issue individual charges as is required in a criminal case. Everything the Prosecution has described has been about the operations of TPB as a whole, not the individuals.

He went on to say that TPB was not unique and it has a lot in common with many other sites, which makes the judgment in this case very important, maybe of entire EU significance. Samuelson said the service provided by TPB is a legal one but due to the ‘blind’ nature of the site, it can be open to misuse and any such activity is carried out by the site’s users, not the defendants.

Echoing comments by Peter Althin, Samuelson said that when new technology appears it can be difficult to “see the wood for the trees”. He said that just because something may have been used by people for illicit purposes, should that mean that there should be an attack on the infrastructure as a result? It’s like taking legal action against car manufacturers for the problems experienced on the roads, he said.

While stressing that operations at TPB are entirely legal, Samuelson said that there had been a lot of politics involved in the trial and he urged everyone in the Court to try to ignore these aspects.

Turning to the allegations that his defendant assisted others in committing crimes, Samuelson said that there had to be a recorded major crime in the first instance. He said it seems that no-one is aware of when any alleged offenses were committed and furthermore, no-one knows who committed them. There can be no charge of aiding and abetting when the accused have had no contact and do not even know the person who committed an offense. Samuelson used some information from previous cases to prove his point.

Samuelsson went on saying that he didn’t really understand all the technology that is involved when he first started on the case, but that it is essential to this case. It is a case against an infrastructure that is used to share files, many of which are legal, he argued. He hoped the judge would realize this.

Without mentioning King Kong Samuelsson told that the accused have to be aware of the main crimes in order to be convicted, referring to the 33 copyrighted files that the defendants allegedly helped to make available. However, witness Kristoffer Schollin stated last week that the accused can’t possibly be aware of every download on the site.

According to Samuelsson the prosecutor was pressured to take action against TPB by the music and movie industry.

Next, Samuelsson goes on to describe his client as a businessman who is only vaguely connected to TPB. One of his customers (PRQ) hosted the site, but his client didn’t own the site, nor was he involved in maintaining or coding it. That the prosecutor want to hold Lundstom accountable for the 33 downloads seems to be far fetched according to the lawyer. Moreover, Carl Lundstrom stopped doing business with TPB when his lawyer warned him that the activities may be illegal.

After a short break all the lawyers and defendants went through their expense claims. Fredrik Neij claimed compensation for a plane ticket to Thailand which he couldn’t cancel and thus will cost more for him to book now. The others claimed their expenses as well.

The court further announced that the verdict is due on April 17 and ended the trial.

This is a developing story, please check back for updates

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Tobias Andersson was briefly questioned about the speech Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) gave after the TPB raid in 2006. Andersson told the court that he wrote the speech for Neij, since speech writing isn’t Neij’s thing. Andersson’s appearance was over in a few minutes and by 9:15 John Kennedy was testifying in English, through a Swedish translator.

IFPI’s John Kennedy confirmed he was the CEO of IFPI and summarized his duties there, noting the group has 1500 members worldwide and it’s main aims were to ‘improve’ copyright laws through government lobbying and fight piracy around the world since “piracy has done immense damage to the music industry.” Kennedy says that IFPI takes up strategic litigation against various targets worldwide.

Kennedy said that for a long time the industry sold its product in physical form (and experienced a limited piracy problem) but with the advent of digital music this situation has grown worse, with some claiming that copyright didn’t even exist in the digital world. He noted that the main sets of previous litigation were in the US (Grokster) and Australia (Kazaa).

Kennedy then said how pleased the music industry was with the legal wins against these two companies and in the wake of their demise, The Pirate Bay took their chance to develop their business. Kennedy said he first heard of TPB in 2004 and it was quickly becoming the #1 source of illegal music and this was damaging to the industry.

Kennedy noted the transition to digital music was a great threat to them, and although more music is currently being consumed than ever before, “less is being paid for than ever before.” If music is available for free, says Kennedy, many people find that temptation too much to resist and new business models can’t flourish.

The discussion then moved to the claim for damages. Kennedy said the claims were “justified and maybe even conservative, since the damage is immense.” Talk moved to the link between the cost of downloading legally and the claim for damages. Kennedy said that for the industry, CDs were more profitable than digital downloads are today.

He said that artists, studio producers, songwriters, music publishers, studio staff and the marketing and promotion people all have get paid and the music industry spends more money than most other industries on R&D. It invests 20% of its revenue on finding new artists and although some suggest that this isn’t needed in the Internet age, they are wrong said Kennedy.

Kennedy went on to explain that music marketing is designed to take effect in “Week One” of an album’s release and in an ideal world a new release would chart at #1 and would reach its sales targets in that first week. But if products are made available on Pirate Bay during that time he said, “then purchases are taken out of the market and because of the illegal use of music, the legal use of music under-performs and in some countries that can have a dramatic effect.”

Kennedy was asked about CD sales in the last 10 years. He said they dropped from $27 billion to $18 billion. He said that the Top 10 CDs in 2001 sold 69 million units and the Top 10 CDs in 2008 sold 46 million units. 9 years ago the #1 record sold 13 million units but in 2008, Coldplay sold half of that.

Kennedy was asked what impact legal downloads have on these figures, but he denied they made up the difference. The music industry has always relied on young people for sales he said, and these same people have got used to using illegal sites. “Many legitimate sites have struggled to compete with free. It’s impossible to compete with free,” said Kennedy.

When put to him that some claim that illegal downloading promotes sales, Kennedy labeled this as old-fashioned thinking and said that people don’t think this way anymore. When asked about P2P providing live performance promotion, Kennedy said that every single live performance success is linked to a previously successful recording career/sales.

When asked about the differences between TPB and Google, Kennedy said there is no comparison. “We talk to Google all the time about preventing piracy. If you go to Google and type in Coldplay you get 40 million results – press stories, legal Coldplay music, review, appraisals of concerts/records. If you go to Pirate Bay you will get less than 1000 results, all of which give you access to illegal music or videos. Unfortunately The Pirate Bay does what it says in its description and its main aim is to make available unauthorized material. It filters fake material, it authorizes, it induces.”

Kennedy says TPB threat is growing all the time. “They are proud of this with their statistics – there are 22 million users, 1 million visitors each day, 1.6 million .torrent files and they say they are responsible for 55% of BitTorrent traffic. They pride themselves on the quality of what they deliver.”

When questioned about the IFPI’s 10X damages multiplier for pre-release material, Kennedy felt this was fair considering the damage it does to the launch of a product. Kennedy says they have teams of experts monitoring the Internet everyday for piracy.

He went on to say that people who download music from TPB spend much less on music than they would otherwise and if they didn’t get it for free they would buy it. “It is common sense, if they couldn’t get it for free they would buy it and when we ask them, they confirm that.”

When asked if downloaders have less money than others, Kennedy said that younger people have the money but just don’t spend it on music anymore. Kennedy said that the reduction in sales in the music industry is directly attributable to illegal downloading.

When asked about scientific research on the issue, Kennedy said that of several reports, only one said there was no causal link between file-sharing and lost sales – all the rest say there is. Discussion of certain reports on the issue took place, with defense lawyers questioning Kennedy on the details of the reports.

The defense lawyers pointed out that in one of the reports Kennedy refers to, lesser known artists appear to be downloaded a lot on TPB but Kennedy said although he is 56 years old, he recognizes nearly all of the artists in the TPB Top 100 list.

Carl Lundstrom’s lawyer asked about the profit on the industry’s $18bn turnover from 2008. “Terrible,” Kennedy replied. Of the big players “..only one company is making a profit.” Kennedy was pushed, if he knows the turnover, why doesn’t he know the profit. He said it was difficult to say.

He was also asked how much of this $18bn turnover is used to fight piracy, Kennedy said there are three main areas of expenditure. Funding the RIAA in US, IFPI globally and more local groups such as IFPI (Sweden). They all have budgets and a large proportion of this is used to fight piracy.

The global amount used by IFPI on lobbying and fighting piracy is £75 million.

Kennedy said he qualified as a lawyer since the 70’s but hasn’t practiced recently. He was asked if he understood BitTorrent. Kennedy said he did, but in “very vague terms.” When the defense lawyers asked more detailed questions, about uTorrent for instance, Kennedy said he’d heard of it but had no idea of the details. It was very clear he knew nothing about any remotely technical issues.

Kennedy was asked if IFPI has taken any action against the actual sharers of the music made available via TPB, as detailed in this case. He said he couldn’t say and didn’t know who these individuals are. He then admitted to not knowing how The Pirate Bay works so the defense lawyers put it to him – if you don’t understand how TPB works, how can you say they are to blame? Again he was pressed why he took no action against the actual sharers but he said he didn’t know and admitted “It’s probably unlikely we took action.”

Kennedy was asked why they haven’t sued Google the same way as TPB. He said that Google said they would partner IFPI in fighting piracy and he has a team of 10 people working with Google every day, and if Google hadn’t announced they were a partner, IFPI would have sued them too.

When pressed on the earlier reports that Kennedy referred to, the defense lawyers wanted to know if IFPI had commissioned any of them. Kennedy said he didn’t know.

The court then took a morning break.

After the break the hearings continued as Bertil Sandgren, a board member of the Swedish film institute took the stand. He was asked to explain what he knows about file-sharing, and told the court that he knew that some movies leak on filesharing networks before they premiere, that there is no copy protection on these files and that there are even subtitles available.

The court then asked to keep the questions relevant to the damages that are claimed. Sandgren went on to say that he believes that the impact of file-sharing on the movie industry started in 2002/2003. He claimed that there is statistical evidence that illegal file-sharing has affected the number of seats sold per film. In Sweden, the ticket sales between 2002-2006 have fallen by 31%, Sandgren explained.

“The reason for this drop is that the number of premieres have increased but sales have decreased. File-sharing has somewhat made the market thinner. The difference between number of sold tickets on average has dropped 10,000 per film per year. That equals between 800,000 and 1,000,000 SEK per film,” Sandgren said.

Sandgren further told that the damages they claim are based on a fictitious license fee. They have calculated the total number of movie downloads in a year, and use the film’s market share (4% for the movie “Mastermind”) to come up with the total number of downloaders . “If there were 1 million downloaders in total, it’s probable that 4% downloaded Mastermind,” Sandgren said. “Of those, 28,5% were downloaded from TPB. That gives 12000.”

After his explanation of how the damages are calculated, the defense lawyers questioned Sandgren. Most of their questions focused on the link between downloading and the decline in ticket sales. According to the defense lawyers there is research showing this link is not that straightforward, while stressing that 2008 has been the best year for the Swedish movie industry ever. Sandgren said that he didn’t want to comment on factors underlying the success year.

Around noon the court took a lunch break.

After lunch Per Sundin, CEO of Universal Music and Louis Werner of IFPI Sweden were questioned. Again, most questions dealt with the amount of damages the entertainment industry suffered, with the defense questioning whether the figures presented by the entertainment industry are justified. Werner told how music sales declined in 2002 and 2003, but as blogger Anna Troberg points out, IFPI’s own data seems to contradict this statement. Illegal file-sharing was the main reason of the loss in sales in recent years Werner stated.

When Per Sundin was asked whether the decline is sales could be fully attributed to illegal filesharing, he said yes. Sundin went even further and claimed that 50% of the loss in sales the music industry has suffered can be linked to The Pirate Bay. He had to admit, however, that he has no evidence to back these claims up. “It is what they see and experience every day,” Sundin said.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde and Universal Music CEO Per Sundin bumped into each other after the hearings. Peter just Twittered “I just played the angry game with Per Sundin, Universal. Always fun at #spectrial! Oh, and I won of course.”

At 16:00 the court decided to end the hearings for today.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities. Even worse, the BitTorrent site was ordered to hand these logs over to the MPAA. TorrentSpy owner Justin Bunnel didn’t want to give up the privacy of the site’s users, and decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US instead. In March 2008 he went further still, taking the decision to shut down completely.

“We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the TorrentSpy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008,” Bunnel wrote in a message to users of the site. A month after this decision the case against the MPAA was terminated and his company was ordered to pay a $110 million fine, which it has now appealed.

TorrentSpy’s lawyer, Ira Rothken, told CNET News, “We’re arguing the court was wrong in procedures and wrong in judgment. In a one-hour hearing regarding discovery issues, the court terminated the case and didn’t give TorrentSpy a trial. We believe the court was wrong and abused its discretion. We believe the court ordered TorrentSpy to do things that was in violation of the site’s privacy policy and we believe that the tension between the court’s discovery orders and user-privacy rights is an important issue on appeal.”

The MPAA wont be too happy that TorrentSpy hasn’t given up the fight yet. At the time, MPAA’s Dan Glickman was very pleased with the outcome of the case, as he said: “The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the studios and demonstrates that such pirate sites will not be allowed to continue to operate without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders.”

With the appeal, filed at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, TorrentSpy aim to overturn this earlier judgment, and restore hope for other BitTorrent site owners in the US.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In the meantime, the understandable uncertainty at the site is causing problems. Administrators aside, on most sites it’s the uploaders that take most of the risks and these have been moving away from MovieX, with some leaving to share on a site started by ex-staff. But it’s not just the threat of diminishing content causing problems, they can be overcome as memories fade. There is the old demon too – money.

After the arrrests, one of the claims against the site was that those running it were making money. A statement said that AUS$54,000 (US $35,000) had been seized, with the implication this substantial amount was generated on the site via member’s ‘VIP Donations’, which gave access to direct-download material.

After the arrests, the site reappeared in just a few days. The police and anti-piracy agencies made a point of not naming the site in their press releases, which indicates they had some idea this would happen. Despite the quick revival, the site’s finances were in turmoil but according to claims being made by the new administrators, a UK-based user stepped forward to help handle the donations in future.

Two days ago MovieX disappeared, only to reappear yesterday with yet more gloom. The site hadn’t been busted again, but the person alleged to have been responsible for donations, known as VIPxXx, had deleted himself from the MovieX database. It seemed a strange move, until it was discovered that he had also made a charge back on all the server bills previously collected and paid in his name. MovieX administration strongly believe he has stolen the money.

MovieX claim to have discovered the real identity of VIPxXx and have his photograph, various personal details and IP address on the site’s temporary homepage. TorrentFreak contacted his alleged girlfriend but as yet we have had no response.

An administrator at MovieX told TorrentFreak, “The site will be back. We are working on getting the servers back online as we speak.”

He also told us that there is something that MovieX members can do to help. “We are asking all our VIP members who have paid to PayPal account shooting.shared@gmail.com (PayPal name: Ali Sar) to make a dispute for unauthorized payment,” while going on to apologize for the downtime.

It is hoped that the funds will be returned to MovieX and that will be the end of the matter.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One of its victims, who got the trojan from downloading a torrent from The Pirate Bay, contacted TorrentFreak. He told us: “I didn’t follow the well established rules of downloading. It was a file with a low number of seeds, many leechers and no comments. I’ve downloaded the file and didn’t visit the torrent page again to view if there were any negative comments.”

It turned out that the trojan originated from a keygen supplied with a copy of pirated software. Instead of generating a key, it modified the hosts file of the computer so that it redirects The Pirate Bay, Suprbay (The Pirate Bay forums) and Mininova to 127.0.0.1, which means that the sites never load.

Aside from blocking the three sites in question, the trojan caused popups and even played a sound file saying that “downloading is wrong”. The bad torrent was removed from The Pirate Bay soon after users commented that the key generator didn’t work, but it is safe to assume that this is not the first and only attempt to spread a trojan like this one.

The question remains, who is behind this? While some might argue that the MPAA, RIAA or other anti-piracy advocates might be the source, we think it more likely that the attack originates from a relatively innocent prankster targeting pirates.

The good news is that it is fairly easy to fix, manually removing the entries from the hosts file solves the problem. “Overall a bad experience, but the computer is fine now,” the affected user told us. Advice and tips about the Windows Hosts file can be found here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

When we broke the news on 18 November we noted that things would be very different this time, particularly when the frailties of the evidence gathering were exposed by the wrongful accusation of innocent parties.

It didn’t take long. On 29 November The Guardian reported that a couple in their sixties were horrified that they had been wrongfully accused of illegally sharing the gay porn movie Army Fuckers.

Many people have commented on these developments, and now it’s the turn of a sex writer. Placed by Forbes in their Web Celeb 25 and named by Wired in their Faces of Innovation 2008, Violet Blue is, amongst seemingly a million other things, sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a best seling author. She also lectures cyber-law classes at UC Berkeley and is a Geek Entertainment TV reporter.

Writing in her blog, Violet Blue headlines her article “The New Face of Porn Racketeering?” Pointing out that this isn’t just any old porn, but “a Nazi gay male hardcore flick”, she goes on:

It’s sort of like if someone came up to you on the street and said, ‘hey I think you slandered me in a way that could be really embarrassing to you if anyone found out — but if you give me a couple hundred bucks, I won’t take you to court [where you’d lose even more money].’

Having enjoyed the work of writer Roald Dahl in both written and TV form (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and the genius of Tales of the Unexpected), Violet’s description of how she sees this operation reminded me again of something i’d mused upon earlier.

In 1987, Playboy published a short story by Dahl, entitled The Bookseller. The story features a gentleman called William Buggage who ran a rare book shop in London with his secretary Miss Tottle. Their business model was a little unconventional. Every day the pair read the newspaper obituaries looking for the deaths of married men who had left a wife behind. Armed with this information, they would send invoices to the grieving widows demanding payment for books their husbands had supposedly ordered. The books contained European hardcore pornography and ’sexual deviance’. Rather than face the ruination and humiliation of being named in court or the press, the widows would quietly pay up.

Those familiar with Dahl’s work will know that this master story teller is famous for the ‘twists’ revealed at the end of his stories, and The Bookseller is no different. In the end, Mr Buggage and Miss Tottle were found out when they tried to get money from a widow who revealed that her husband – far from quietly titillating himself with porn – was in fact, blind.

While most people acknowledge that Davenport Lyons have made some pretty big mistakes, no-one is suggesting that they or their clients simply make things up. However, for every set of allegations they get right (around 50% admit infringement and pay up), they absolutely get some wrong. They wouldn’t have expected that their allegations of sharing Atari’s Race 07 would’ve landed on the mat of a pair of pensioners and we will see if they choose to withdraw the allegations that the other pair of pensioners shared Army Fuckers. At the moment they find themselves in the position of the blind man – in receipt of a sordid accusation against them and absolutely no way of defending themselves.

In a statement to The Guardian, Davenport Lyons said: “We allow ample opportunity for the recipient to respond, and if they have done nothing wrong they have no reason to be concerned.”

The truth is much less straightforward. No matter how people defend themselves in the face of these allegations, Davenport Lyons continually argue that they are right, and the accused is wrong. When I pointed out the Dahl story to someone involved in the cases, this was the reply, which is an adaptation of a real response to those who try to plead their innocence:

It’s a shame for Mr. Buggage and Miss Tottle they didn’t have the knowledge and expertise of messrs Davenport Lyons. They could have easily argued in that case that “it is irrelevant for the purposes of our clients evidence how the European books of pornography and sexual deviance (”the Work”) came to be acquired in your blind late husband’s name. What our client’s evidence shows is that the Work was made available from an Internet connection registered in your late blind husband’s name on a certain date and time”

But while there are certain similarities with Dahl’s story, one point appears entirely mirrored. While the widows in The Bookseller pay up to avoid appearing in the press, those wrongfully accused by Davenport Lyons are going to the press for protection. Those that don’t have age on their side don’t find the going quite so easy.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Recently their efforts to make money from alleged pirates was picked up by the mainstream press, because an elderly couple was incorrectly accused by them of pirating an Atari game, Test Drive Unlimited. It is of course a stereotype to think that people over fifty don’t play games, but with the help of consumer magazine, Which? Computing, the lawyers were forced to drop the case.

If anything, this suggests that the evidence they gather for use against alleged sharers is not as strong as it should be. In fact, this is not the first time that a case has dropped before it went to court. Apparently, the lawyers that represent the various copyright holders will only make their case when they have a sure win – that is, when the defendants fail to show up. Others who dig in their heels and refuse to pay learn that the consequences aren’t nearly as bad as the law firm would have everyone believe.

Meanwhile, thousands of UK citizens are receiving letters in which they are accused of downloading music, games or more recently, adult entertainment. In these letters, they are asked to pay a few hundred pounds, or else they are threatened with the prospect of being dragged through court, where the fine – if the law firm is to be believed – will be multiplied several times over.

There aren’t any precise figure on how many alleged pirates have paid up, but based on earlier comments from the law firm itself, it’s believed to be between 40 and 60%. It’s not unthinkable that some copyright owners are making more from this type of pirate-chasing than they do from sales of their actual products. Quite an innovative business model actually, especially since in many cases it guarantees a revenue stream for sub-standard products that otherwise simply wouldn’t sell.

But now, according to The Register, computer game manufacturer Atari has had enough, as they have canceled their collaboration with Davenport Lyons and Logistep. Exactly why is open to speculation, but it is difficult to find a single positive article about the activities of these companies, particularly when recent and rather more potentially embarrassing actions are taken into consideration. It’s not surprising that they choose to distance themselves from the operation.

In a comment to El Reg, Atari said that it will “always retain and reserve the right to protect our intellectual property from illegal copying and piracy.” An interesting comment, since cashing in on alleged piracy happens after the offense, and has nothing to do with protection. However, this statement seems more of an attempt to show that this withdrawal doesn’t indicate that Atari is going soft on piracy.

Of course, copyright holders have every right to protect their material, or even make up for the losses they claim to suffer. Whether it is the right thing to do is questionable though, especially when the tactics are as aggressive as they are in these cases.

The complete lack of transparency in respect of the evidence gathering techniques just makes matters worse, and every negative aspect is compounded when people like Simon Davies of Privacy International speak about facets of the operation in very unfavorable terms. “This is appalling, it breaches a number of fundamental human rights,” he said. “They risk bringing the law into disrepute – just because lawyers can do something it doesn’t mean that they should.”

A great example of where copyright has gone wrong has emerged recently. In a leaked contract between DigiProtect (copyright protection outfit) and Evil Angel (content producer), the copyright was actually transferred in order for DigiProtect to make it available on filesharing networks.

“LICENSOR grants DIGIPROTECT the exclusive right to make the movies listed in Appendix 1 worldwide available to the public via remote computer networks, so-called peer-2-peer and internet file sharing networks such as e-Donkey, Kazaa, Bitorrent, etc. for the duration of this agreement.”

So, DigiProtect makes the files available to cash in on the people who attempt to download the files, but not to protect their intellectual property in a way copyright law was put in place for. In fact, this has nothing to do with copyright protection, they are simply exploiting the system. Probably a good thing that Atari got out before it all falls apart.

The question now is how are the other publishers feeling now that Atari has had enough? Since they are based in the UK, the focus now falls on CodeMasters, who are still pursuing people over Colin McRae Dirt, but does the return on the project cancel out the mountains of bad PR it generates? Time will tell.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.