The code of practice identifies several types of content that could be harmful to children, and encourages ISPs to filter these type of sites. Among the filtered content are gambling sites, pornographic material and hacking tutorials. BitTorrent or other file-sharing related sites are not blocked according to the code. It is not clear why The Pirate bay ended up on the block list, but the most plausible reason seems to be their diverse adult torrent collection.

The code doesn’t allow any sexually explicit material, legal or not, and The Pirate Bay does offer ‘links’ to such content, although it doesn’t carry any itself – sound familiar?

The reason why the code is specifically aimed at mobile providers is the increase in mobile devices youngsters have access to without oversight. All sites that have an ‘over 18′ status are included and all access to these sites is simply blocked. Customers who want to lift the block to one of the sites may do so by contacting customer service.

This is not the first time that The Pirate Bay, for one reason or another, has been blocked by Internet service providers. We’ve seen similar things happen in Italy, Turkey, Denmark and several other countries. However, this is the first time that the reason for the blockade is not copyright related.

Whether or not the code will prevent minors from seeing too much flesh is up for debate, but although the comparison between Google and The Pirate Bay has been a hot one this week, one thing is certain – there is a hell of a lot more porn to be found via a Google image search than is to be found on The Pirate Bay.

Failing that there’s always daddy’s porn mags to fall back on – quick, board up the newsstand.

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

If you have received a letter from lawyers Davenport Lyons (or indeed any other law-firm operating the same business model) accusing you of illegally sharing games, videos or music, this article will provide serious food for thought and give you the tools and knowledge to make your voice heard at a government level. It is unacceptable that people are being wrongfully accused. We believe that your names and addresses should not have been handed over to these lawyers in the first place, and that you should not have received a threatening letter.

This is a guest post from Michael Coyle of Lawdit Solicitors who is currently defending many of those accused in the Dream Pinball, Colin McRae Dirt, Call of Juarez and more recently, the various porn titles cases brought by DigiProtect in the UK. (Intros, links, editing and letter template added by TorrentFreak/Penumbra)

Alleged File-Sharers: Why the Information Commissioner Has Let You Down

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is a non-departmental public body reporting directly to Parliament. It is the office dealing with the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 and the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 in England and Wales.

UK ISPs were ordered earlier this year [and in 2007] by the High Court to disclose information relating to its customer’s data, based on information provided to them by amongst others, video games companies. The information sought was based on the customer’s IP address. Pursuant to CPR 31.18, lawyers applied for an order that the ISPs disclose the full name, postal address and telephone number of the subscriber of each of the IP addresses supplied.

The game plan was to match each IP address with an individual and write to them with a hefty threatening letter and a request for £500-600. If this sum was not paid, court action was threatened, costing tens of thousands of pounds. It all seemed fairly conclusive. The ISPs complied and the Lawyers [Davenport Lyons] commenced the enormous task of writing to over (so we understand) 25,000 potential infringers.

However it was only when responses started to flood in – many in their hundreds to Lawdit Solicitors – did it become clear that while IP addresses could reveal a name and real-life address, it did not reveal the culprit. It proved very little. It certainly did not prove that any copyright infringement had taken place, far from it. Only by inspecting the hard drive of the customer’s computer could you do this. If there were any other evidence to sit alongside the IP address, for example a user name or password of the file sharing software you could sympathize with the rights holder.

But to rely on the IP address alone is wholly disproportionate and has resulted in untold misery to many thousands of individuals. This whole affair sums up in my view how little the Information Commissioner (IC) is really concerned with an individual’s data. I am not aware of any publicly quoted concerns from the IC about this issue and he has remained silent as the forums and bulletin boards crackle with the indignation and invasion of individual’s data. You cannot blame the ISPs. As a Court Order was in place, why would an ISP go out on a limb for a few thousand customers?

But the IC ought to have been keeping a watchful eye out and at the very least issue a press release to offer individuals some comfort. The silence is even more deafening in that on 29 January 2008, the ECJ held that Community law does not require member states to oblige ISPs to disclose details of suspected file-sharers to enable a copyright owner to bring civil proceedings.

Personal data is protected generally in the EU by virtue of the EC Directive on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data (95/46/EC) (Data Protection Directive). Member states may provide exemptions to protection in order to conduct criminal investigations or safeguard national or public security or to protect the rights and freedom of others (Article 13(1), Data Protection Directive).

In the UK such an exception can be found under section 35 (1) of the Data Protection Act 1998 which provides that ‘Personal data are exempt from the non-disclosure provisions where the disclosure is required by or under any enactment, by any rule of law or by the order of a court.’ This exemption does not contain any further considerations for a Data Controller before making a disclosure in these circumstances.

The EC Directive on the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector (2002/58/EC) (E-Privacy Directive) provides that national authorities may only lift the protection of data privacy in order to safeguard national or public security or to conduct investigations into criminal offences or the unauthorised use of an electronic communications system, where this is a “necessary, appropriate and proportionate measure” (Article 15(1), E-Privacy Directive).

The ECJ reached its conclusion(.pdf) following a Spanish case concerning Telefonica. The Juzgado de lo Mercantil No 5 de Madrid decided to stay the proceedings and referred the following question to the Court for a preliminary ruling:

Does Community law, specifically Articles 15(2) and 18 of Directive [2000/31], Article 8(1) and (2) of Directive [2001/29], Article 8 of Directive [2004/48] and Articles 17(2) and 47 of the Charter permit Member States to limit to the context of a criminal investigation or to safeguard public security and national defence, thus excluding civil proceedings, the duty of operators of electronic communications networks and services, providers of access to telecommunications networks and providers of data storage services to retain and make available connection and traffic data generated by the communications established during the supply of an information society service?

The ECJ, responded that the answer must be that Directives 2000/31, 2001/29, 2004/48 and 2002/58 do not oblige Member States to ensure effective protection of copyright in the context of civil proceedings to communicate personal data. A fair balance needs to be struck between the various fundamental rights and in particular the principle of proportionality. In Advocate General Kokott’s opinion she considered that it was compatible with Community law for member states to exclude operators of electronic communications networks and services from having to make available personal data relating to connection and traffic information in the context of a civil, as distinct from criminal, action.

While the decision is not binding on the ECJ it will generally follow the Advocate General’s opinion. For the vast majority if not all of the 25,000 recipients, this decision ought to have been interpreted as a request for information relating to a non criminal offence (i.e. any copying/file-sharing was non-commercial) and the request for the personal data ought to have been refused.

If you have received a letter accusing you of illicit file-sharing and you are innocent then please write to the Information Commissioner with your story and complain that the release of your personal data was a breach of the Data Protection Act 1998, while urging them to carry out a review of all subsequent releases.

The Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF.

For your convenience, a TorrentFreak reader Penumbra has created this template in order to streamline the complaints procedure: (Link)

Update: You may petition the government online by following this link.

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

The second half of today’s hearing (pdf link) started with a number of network and technological experts telling us about the Internet, its history, and its makeup. Of main contention was the line between acceptable, and unacceptable traffic management.

Wise things were said, and the panelists made some good points about the unfairness of the traffic management tools that Comcast uses. There was emphasis on the TCP reset, which means that a few seconds after you connect to someone in a BitTorrent swarm, a peer reset message (RST flag) is sent by Comcast and the upload immediately stops.

Richard Bennett (co-inventor of the twisted-pair system for ethernet, and its protocol, 1BASE5) targeted those opposed to any sort of traffic management in his opening statement saying, “if we can’t control network management, we’ll have to shut down the internet”. David Clark, of the MIT computer science lab, opened by saying that ISPs can either see enemies, or they can see partners, and suggesting that right now, they see the former. He, like almost all the panelists, called the current usage of Sandvine technology ‘troubling’, and said that the user should pick the Quality of Service (QoS) level, not an ISP.

Daniel Weitzner, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Decentralized Information Group summed up bad traffic management with: “Maybe it’s a bit like the old adage about pornography ‘I know it when I see it’. In this case I know what Comcast is doing is in the camp of unreasonable. These are techniques that hackers would use to deny service to any application on the web, very similar in that regard. It might be interesting to hold a panel of security experts to talk about those kind of mechanisms, I’m certainly not one. But, forging data on the internet is probably outside of the realm of reasonable, and any standards body would deem it to be.”

However, one of the most succinct criticisms of Comcast’s actions came from Prof. David Reed, of MIT’s Media Lab, who suggested that any ISP that didn’t follow the standard solutions evolved over the last 30 years should not advertise themselves as an Internet provider, but instead as a company “offering selective access to portions of the net only”, a description many of Comcast’s customers will probably agree with.

The FCC questioner continued the panel discussion, and pointed out that one of the problems might be that there is no actual data on how busy the network was, something that, from his point of view, would be helpful in determining whether the TCP resets are a unreasonable form of network management or not.

One of the panelists (sorry, they all sound the same) immediately replied to this by pointing out that congestion was not important. He compared the TCP reset to a conversation between two people where a third party – who pretends to be one of the persons engaged in the conversation – says “Stop, this conversation is over”. He added: “I find it uncomfortable that someone in the middle is creating a message to you that appears to come from me, I have a lot of trouble with that.”

At the beginning of the hearing FCC chairman Kevin Martin said that they were willing to step in if needed. Let’s hope they will. Feel free to file a comment if you want to let the FCC know what you think of Comcast’s haxxor skills. A video of the hearing will be available within two days.

Stay tuned.

Update: Apparently Comcast has paid people to attend the hearing to keep concerned citizens out.

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

Despite the differences these four guys sometimes have, they all believe that no other P2P protocol performs better than BitTorrent at the moment. However, there’s no doubt that there will be changes in the future.

“Technology is always evolving and I have little doubt that 5 or 10 years from now we will be using a different protocol” says Justin from TorrentSpy. Peter (aka Brokep) from The Pirate Bay also thinks new protocols will take over eventually. “There will be other alternatives,” he said “Not necessarily ours but others will come.” Niek from mininova has more faith in BitTorrent but expects that the protocol will evolve rapidly, an opinion shared by Gary from IsoHunt.

Most of the admins also predict that mainstream production companies will eventually embrace BitTorrent and P2P and some of them hope to play an active role in the transition from old to new media distribution. Below you can read the full responses to the question I asked them: What do you think the future holds for BitTorrent and your website?

Niek from Mininova

I’m sure that we’ll see quite a few changes in the P2P landscape during the next couple of years.

From a business perspective, I notice that content producers recognize more and more the advantages of P2P distribution models (see e.g. the Pariah Island case). We all know that DRM is close-to-death, and major studios are now rethinking their business models, which is a good thing. We’d like to see Mininova play a major role in this shift, so stay tuned for some related announcements the coming weeks :)

Looking at the technical side of things, I expect that the BitTorrent protocol will evolve rapidly. See for example (audio and video) streaming, which is already possible and supported by several clients. Other interesting developments are BT-capable chips and TOR-like functionality. New protocols (like the one proposed by The Pirate Bay) might arise, but only time will tell whether these will substitute BitTorrent. Personally, I think BitTorrent can go a long way with some extensions and modifications.

Having said that, Mininova’s only focus won’t be BitTorrent: when the “next big thing” arises, we’ll definitely consider backing it.

Justin from TorrentSpy

I don’t really concern myself with the future of BitTorrent the protocol but I do care about peer-to-peer as a technology platform. Technology is always evolving and I have little doubt that 5 or 10 years from now we will be using a different protocol. However I firmly believe that the use of peer-to-peer for everything from data transfer to shared CPU power will take the Internet to the next level.

If we look at TV you will already see this trend. Media use in our society is transitioning from someone else deciding what you want (push) to something that allows what you want, when you want it (pull). Right now you turn the TV on at 8pm to watch your favorite show or skip channels until you stumble across something interesting. The future is a demand system where you can buy and watch an episode the network has “released” any time you want. Tivo is a first step in this direction.

Surprising as it may seem, this can be done pretty easily today, but is tied up in complex licensing schemes, conflicts between producers and distributors, and a wide array of selfish interests. Unfortunately many companies use their power and influence to halt and punish innovations they cannot think of ways to make money with. The monopolies tried to stop the VHS, DVD, and MP3 player, but thankfully failed when they took it to Court. Now Imagine for a second all the amazing products they did manage to squash…

Gary from IsoHunt

With so much momentum of content behind BitTorrent, I don’t see it going away anytime soon. Unless there’s a far superior and open protocol that is superior to BitTorrent in efficiency and convenience, for which BitTorrent is pretty hard to beat, I see we’ll like have new developments by extending the existing BitTorrent protocol. Although Bram Cohen talked about Merkle trees as a major revision in improving BitTorrent, and that didn’t go anywhere (at least not in open source). When BitTorrent Inc. do significant enough closed source changes to the protocol, BitTorrent will fork or new open protocols will rise.

For future of BitTorrent sites and IsoHunt, I’ve always been an advocate of open and public access. The more sites try to go underground, the more reasons the authority think there’s something dark at work and more they will take sites down by force – Oink and other private trackers for example. I’ve been blogging about P2P and its economic sense/legitimate use cases for a while (latest one on independent music), and I believe that’s what will give BitTorrent continued adoption and acceptance as a de-facto protocol and internet standard. It’s like the WWW: if people didn’t use the early web for other purposes than for porn (which was prolific in the web’s early days), the governments might have a different view and regulations on the internet now. It’s not what copyright infringement or “piracy” may be occurring, on P2P, BitTorrent or the internet. It’s what new use cases we nurture that benefits both end users and content producers, that will correct the stigma behind P2P and BitTorrent and accelerate their acceptance. Development on isoHunt and our other sites will for sure be done with this in mind.

Peter aka Brokep from The Pirate Bay

First of all, I don’t think it’s easy to predict the future. But I do think that it’s very important to be very promiscuous when it comes to the protocols we use. BitTorrent is currently the best but this might change. There will be other alternatives, not necessarily ours but others will come.

In five years things are probably very different from today, technology wise and politically. The latter thing is the biggest issue, not the technology. I would foresee that streaming is bigger and the companies still try to frame their users to use their locked down systems, maybe not DRM but rather streamed with their clients (like the BT DNA system) which will contain other copyright protection scams.

What do you think?

It’s great to hear the opinions and predictions of the leading BitTorrent admins, but what do you think the future of BitTorrent will be? Will we be all using a new protocol 5 years from now, will BitTorrent sites change, will TV and movie producers embrace BitTorrent?

Let us know!

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

First of all the Swedish anti-piracy lobby groups. They stated at an official meeting in Stockholm that child porn could be used for anti-piracy issues. Most people will probably agree that child porn is sick, but using it to filter the Internet is just disgusting. They should devote their time to catch people who upload that stuff instead. Or are they so desperate that they are uploading it themselves, so they have an argument to shut The Pirate Bay down? Let’s hope not.

The second key player in The Pirate Bay conspiracy is Stefan Kronquist, who works for the IT-crime section at the State criminal police department. According to TPB admin brokep, Steven is the person in charge of the Pirate Bay case. Brokep adds: “Stefan is probably mad at us for me fighting with them over the Kopimi.com filter entry they admitted blocking wrongfully”.

Last but not least, Thomas Bodström, a former Minister of Justice who’s known (and hated) for his plans to turn Sweden into an Orwellian state. Bodström was held responsible for the Pirate Bay raid last year, after the US gently pressured him into taking action. “He really hates us and wants to shut us down,” says Brokep. “When the election last year was held we even put up a logo with his face on The Pirate Bay in order to celebrate that he was in the losing side of the election and was no longer a minister”.

It now turns out that this former Minister is closely involved with Internet filtering. As Brokep mentions: “He went on to become the chairman of the board for the group ECPAT, a non-governmental organization that works together with the police in order to control child porn online, one of the big friends over at the child porn department and also one of the big contributors to the child porn filter. Is this just a coincidence? He has personal grudges, political grudges and power to control this.”

It now seems that these three key players are teaming up in yet another attempt to take The Pirate Bay out of business Sweden. Brave men, but smart?

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

TorrentFreak: When did you first learn about BitTorrent?

Niek: I guess that was somewhere back in 2003. Rob, one of the other Mininova staff members, pointed me to a new kind of P2P protocol, named BitTorrent, and soon thereafter I became a regular visitor of websites like Torrentse.cx, Lokitorrents.com, Bytemonsoon.com and of course Suprnova.org. Those websites are all dead now (the first two disappeared suddenly after running a successful donation round…), but they have to be credited for setting the first steps in building a torrent search engine.

TorrentFreak: When and why did you decide to start mininova?

Niek: That was back in December 2004. Andrej decided to take Suprnova down, which was a very popular torrent website at that time (although not as popular as the top-3 BitTorrent sites individually nowadays). As one of the regular visitors of Suprnova (and a programmer myself), I decided to code a new torrent search engine. Erik, Jos, Matthijs and Rob joined me, and we released the first public version of Mininova on January 15, 2005. My poor DSL line couldn’t handle the bandwidth the site was generating, but luckily Gottfrid of ThePirateBay offered us a hosting account. Well, the site got way too popular, so we had to look for a new hosting place. We temporarily moved to Gary of isoHunt, but it didn’t took long before we got our own set of servers. Since that time, Mininova have seen continuous growth in both popularity and content.

TorrentFreak: Did you ever expected that the site would be such a great success?

Niek: No, definitely not. Of course we hoped that Mininova would become a success, but not of this magnitude. Who would have thought that Mininova would become more than two times as popular as Suprnova was on its peak days?

TorrentFreak: What do you think the future will bring for BitTorrent, and BitTorrent sites?

Niek: In the previous years we’ve seen additions like DHT, encryption and other enhancements to the BitTorrent protocol. I think we’ll see some other nice enhancements in the future (maybe TCP/UDP hole punching?). Also, BitTorrent sites keep innovating new features, and I’m happy to see we’re (one of) the leader(s) in this area.

TorrentFreak: Are there any future plans or developments you want to share with our readers?

Niek: We just released our new site with many new features, but we’re already planning and prototyping new features for the next version. Of course we’re always open for feature requests, so in case anybody got a great idea: please mail us :)

TorrentFreak: What keeps mininova in the air?

Niek: This is our current server setup:

Our staff consists of 5 administrators: Erik, Jos, Matthijs, Rob and I. And of course we couldn’t be anywhere without our dedicated group of moderators!

TorrentFreak: Do you get a lot of DMCA takedown notices? And how do you handle these?

Niek: I think we get on average 2 or 3 removal requests per day. We handle these with care according to our copyright policy. I’m happy to say we’ve never had any problems in this area.

TorrentFreak: What makes mininova stand out compared to other BitTorrent sites?

Niek: The simplicity, the speed, the no-nonsense design and functionality. And of course the new features, which we keep inventing, to improve usability. I guess we also have quite a few users due to our family safe policy, we don’t allow any pornographic torrents on our site.

TorrentFreak: What are you doing when you’re not working on mininova?

Niek: Keeping a website of this size running requires quite some time. But in my spare time I’m socializing with friends, studying, hanging out in the pub, and all the other kind of things guys of my age tend to do ;)

TorrentFreak: Anything to add?

Niek: Thanks for the interview; I really appreciate the time you take to run TorrentFreak. I think it’s a good addition to the (not always very objective) journalism on torrent sites.

TorrentFreak: Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions.

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