However, for the paranoid movie industry the UK does provide somewhat of a unique worry. While the incidence of cams coming from Britain is particularly insignificant, there is no such thing as an “illegally cammed movie” in the country, because, believe it or not, camming a movie is not illegal.

Earlier this year, boss of Vue Cinemas Tim Richards wrote about his dilemma.

“We call the police and the police aren’t interested,” said Richards. “So we ask (the pirates) to leave and they leave typically with their cameras and sometimes with their film intact.”

With the law about as much use as a chocolate teapot, cinema chains are resorting to implementing their own “laws” to stop the virtually non-existent cammers and, just like enforced DRM, all they do is annoy paying customers.

Jeremy Nicholas describes himself as “an award winning TV and radio broadcaster, after dinner speaker, compere and media trainer.” Like many of us, he also enjoys a good movie.

After work on Wednesday this week, Jeremy went to watch the new Bruce Willis movie at a cinema belonging to Cineworld, the UK’s second largest multiplex chain. Like most people on his way home, Jeremy had items on his person that enable him to do his job – one of them was a Sony laptop, an item too expensive to risk leaving in the car, particularly since it contained his current work projects, “plus some half baked book ideas.”

Because he had his laptop with him, Cineworld refused him entry.

Jeremy pointed out that his laptop has no camera feature, or additional hardware to record movies. Then, as if it is any of their damn business, cinema staff then enquired why he had bought it to the cinema at all. He duly explained he was on his way home from work.

Cinema staff then conceded Jeremy could be let in, but only if they could take his laptop from him. However, the cinema offered no receipt for the hardware, so Jeremy declined.

“So despite them treating customers with suspicion, as though were are all bootleggers, we have to trust them to get our equipment back,” said Jeremy.

“I was looking forward to watching the new Bruce Willis film. I wondered what Bruce would do under pressure,” he continued. “I wasn’t wearing a white vest, but decided I wasn’t standing for any nonsense and called for the manager. After a short time a small boy appeared. Sorry I said, I want to see the manager.”

But the small boy was the manager, who told Jeremy that they were acting on new “guidelines” from FACT – the MPAA-funded Federation Against Copyright Theft, which advised banning laptops.

Although the manager said Jeremy could go in with his laptop after all, a query was raised over his cellphone which did have the ability to record a movie. He could take it in, he was told, as long as he had no intentions to cam Bruce Willis with it.

“Not the most rigorous interrogation and one that a determined bootlegger probably could have passed,” said Jeremy.

And then, just to show how ridiculous this ban is, Jeremy said as he was being questioned, a number of suspects customers walked past with handbags and rucksacks, any of which could’ve contained recording equipment.

But Jeremy enjoyed the movie in the end.

“‘Surrogates’ is about a future world where people have been replaced by robots. Everything ran smoothly for a while, but in the end it all went wrong because the robots were efficient but lacked humanity. Cineworld should show this to their staff as a training movie. (As long as none of them try and record it),” Jeremy concludes.

Perhaps it’s time for Cineworld to remove the statement below from their website:

Founded in 1995, our philosophy has been to provide a modern, clean environment that makes “cinema going” a pleasurable experience, which in turn encourages frequent return visits.

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

Earlier this month, blogger Aldor Nini (who also works for anti-piracy solutions company Easycom) wrote an independent article that was published on BuildBlog.de.

The post titled “UseNeXT: Legitimate downloading of pirated movies” gave a highly detailed account of UseNeXT’s operations, along with information on how the service operates in respect of pirated movie content. For anyone interested in the company or Usenet in general (and can take the anti-piracy objective and language with a pinch of salt), it is a must-read – but not without controversy.

As many people who have written potentially negative pieces or forum posts about UseNeXT will confirm, the company is very quick to notice such items, and in this case the reaction was no different.

Within two days the author and publisher of the post received “pre-litigation” letters from UseNeXT’s lawyers, ordering it to censor certain claims made in the article. UseNeXT says that they received information that the article had been sent to an employee at Warner Bros and are insisting that claims made within are erroneous and will negatively affect UseNeXT’s public image.

Article author Aldor Nini gave TorrentFreak a list of claims made in the article which he says are being disputed by UseNeXT’s lawyers;

The article claims that:

Undeterred, Nini says that he stands by his claims. “The comments are correct and true,” he told TorrentFreak, “and we’re looking forward to proving that!”

Nini also points out a section about free-speech on UseNeXT’s website, translated from German below;

“Everyone has the right to gain knowledge as well as to make public and disseminate, in written and spoken, his word by using the UseNeXT service. Nobody should be afraid to be discriminated due to his religious or political position by using the Usenet.”

Nini says that he believes that this is a great statement that should apply to everyone. Therefore his article will stand uncensored on both Usenet and the web.

TorrentFreak will monitor the situation closely and report on further developments and (possible) threats against ourselves.

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

Lily has managed to capture the imaginations of both sides – people are talking about this issue and that is always a good thing.

Debate, discussion and hopefully understanding will bring this file-sharing ‘war’ to an end one day but in the meantime let’s not forget what this is ultimately all about – the music. We all love it and that’s why you’ll love this too;

“After Lily’s hectic week I’ve made a pro-filesharing song and video calling her up on a few of the claims she’s made,” UK musician Dan Bull explains to TorrentFreak.

“I’ve also tried to outline some of the main moral arguments for filesharing in the lyrics. Hope you enjoy, and hope the readers do too.”

The song is brilliant in my opinion, and, ironically I suppose, i’d like to give Dan some money for his work, he deserves it. Let’s hope this song gets to Internet #1 this weekend and he reaps the benefit. Now if I can just get the chorus out of my head…..

…or if you prefer, download the MP3 here.

Dan’s MySpace page can be found here and his album ‘Safe’ is available from FreshNut but can also be downloaded digitally from iTunes, Amazon and Napster.

You can grab it free of charge here or using Mininova.

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

“For what it is worth, I am of the view that the unchecked proliferation of illegal downloading [even on a 'non-commercial' basis] will have a seriously detrimental effect on musicians, and particularly young musicians and those composers who are not performing artists,” Sir Elton John just wrote to the UK government.

Similar to the other artists who spoke out in favor of the new plans, Sir Elton John pays little attention to the fact that the new legislation will be targeted at their own fans. People who love music and demand access to unlimited music for a fair price.

The music industry has declared war against their main source of revenue. Instead of finding ways to please the changing demands of music fans in the digital era, they have chosen to defend their old models and punish the fans instead.

To make things even more absurd, implementing anti-piracy plans proposed by the government will cost ISPs almost twice as much as the total losses that are (allegedly) suffered by the music industry.

Luckily there is also a group of artist that is more in touch with their fans. United in the Featured Artist Coalition, musicians including Robbie Williams, Billy Bragg, Radiohead, Iron Maiden and Travis have spoken out against disconnecting file-sharers because it will be ineffective, without solving the real problem.

“The Featured Artists Coalition is opposed to copyright infringement, but we recognise that, if technology allows people to access music for free, they will take advantage. The next generation of music fans may no longer want to pay for music, but they are still hungry to hear it. The challenge to the industry is to find ways to monetise their behaviour,” they say.

The Coalition, heavily criticized by Lily Allen, further say that the music industry is trying to blame ISPs for a ‘problem’ that is not as easily solved as it would first appear. According to one of its prominent members Billy Bragg, the labels fear new business models because they might lose their distribution monopoly.

John Elton clearly thinks otherwise, and he is right on time with his comments. The UK consultation on Lord Mandelson’s plans ends next week, after which the government will decide what steps to take to combat the unauthorized downloading of copyrighted files online.

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

“The Internet is a wonderful tool that is delivering benefits to increasing numbers of Australian families but the Government wants to find ways to make it safer, particularly for children. This report will assist the Government to deliver on its election commitment to create a safer online environment,” he said.

Ostensibly to protect children online, ISP filtering is just one part of the Australian government’s increasingly costly plan, but it has been roundly criticized for its projected lack of effectiveness.

Additionally there had been concerns that in trying to create a system to filter out material on the Internet, eventually such a system could be used by the “back door” to target copyright infringement issues too.

However, in March 2009 documents which appeared to be the ACMA-maintaned website blacklist leaked onto the Internet. From a list of more than 2,400 sites, just 2 torrent sites were included so maybe blocking torrent sites was never on the agenda.

Interestingly, Stephen Conroy now says that blocking or filtering P2P traffic was never a government target, even though many people were under the impression that it was.

According to a new report this morning, Senator Ludlam of the Greens said that Conroy had previously indicated that P2P filtering technology existed and would be trialled as part of the overall filtering plans.

In response and accusing Ludlam of misleading the public, yesterday Senator Conroy said, “..there has never been a suggestion by this government that peer-to-peer traffic would or could be blocked by our filter.”

Senator Ludlam said Conroy was “moving the goalposts” and that the whole filtering plan was misguided and had riled Internet users.

In reponse, Conroy’s office said that when he said P2P filtering had never been considered by the government, he was referring to “the mandatory part of the filter proposal.” ISP filtering would be an option for ISPs to consider and they could put forward their own proposals if they choose.

Blocking websites is not going to be an effective solution against the menace of child abuse. It is the individuals who operate and frequent such sites that need to be targeted and punished to the full extent of the law but due to a serious lack of funding, these misguided filtering “solutions” will always seem attractive to those who simply don’t understand how easily they are circumvented.

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

Unfortunately, users of Torrent.kg found their favorite site inaccessible at the end of last week when a message in Russian appeared on its homepage. “For reasons beyond our control the site is temporarily suspended. The administration hopes for a speedy solution to all problems. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

Of course, P2P users in the west would probably be suspicious that an unexplained torrent site shutdown could be linked to copyright issues, but for those from Kyrgyzstan this would be a fairly unusual event. However, those suspicions would prove correct – Torrent.kg had been shut down by the police.

A staff member at the site confirmed that the police had indeed closed down the site by confiscating the servers. The police said that on Monday they were due to conduct an examination of the seized hardware but as of yet the site remains down, even though a temporary forum is now available for concerned users.

The site’s owner seems confident that the site will return fairly soon and is asking the userbase not to remove any torrents they have in their clients so as not to damage the health of the tracker.

TorrentFreak caught up with Tolkun Umaraliev, a blogger from Kyrgyzstan who expressed doubt that the closure of Torrent.kg would make any meaningful impact on availability of pirate material in the country.

“Piracy cannot be stopped in Kyrgyzstan, because people – consumers – do not really know what piracy is, and that it is illegal. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, our market has been filled with underground VHS cassettes of Hollywood movies poorly translated into Russian and underground audio cassettes of western singers. And their prices were reasonable – consumers could afford them,” he told us.

Interestingly, Tolkun explained that Kyrgyzstan was introduced to pirated products long before legal options were available.

“It was several years after the fall of the Iron Curtain that licensed products came to our markets. But they were so expensive that people continued buying illegal copies. And until recently the state has not been taking any firm steps in fighting piracy in Kyrgyzstan.”

But just as in the west, the authorities shut one site down and other, more resilient ones appear. Kyrgyzstan now has its own version of OpenBitTorrent.

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

BREIN says that FTD operates illegally but the Usenet community and its specialist IT lawyer, Arnoud Engelfriet of Ictrecht law firm vigorously deny this and are now taking legal action the Dutch anti-piracy outfit. The background to the case can be found in our earlier article, and a more detailed report on the action against BREIN here.

Yesterday, while BREIN’s site was still supposedly out of action following an alleged (or Hoaxed) DDoS attack from Pirate Bay fans, it published a further report about FTD, which was hidden on its site away from easy public viewing. Strangely the same page at the time of writing is password protected and the report unavailable, but we have a copy and translation.

Entitled ‘BREIN Demands Closure of FTD’, the anti-piracy outfit went on to say that if FTD does not close it will require a penalty of 50,000 euros ($70,000) per day against the service, in addition to compensation and full reimbursement of costs. BREIN said that FTD “organizes and promotes” Usenet content, most of which is illegal.

BREIN then refers to earlier discussions it had with FTD, noting that it asked FTD to cease its “structural use of illegal content” in early 2009. The two sides had entered discussions to see if they could iron out their difficulties. Following on, FTD pro-actively modified how they operate to ensure that there could be no doubt as to their legality.

“After we made the changes, we got complete radio silence from BREIN. No confirmation, no rejection, nothing,” Arnoud explained. “Only after several days we found out what BREIN thought – but only by reading the online news. That was a huge disappointment.”

The news saw BREIN declare that FTD was a criminal operation in an article titled “You do not pay for it, it’s unlawful” and this led to FTD taking legal action against BREIN to try to clear their name by having their operation declared legal by a court. Now BREIN is counter-claiming against FTD.

Tim Kuik from BREIN now says that it is clear that FTD “continued their abuses unabated” and that the modifications they made were only made to hide the “true nature” of the site.

“It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Kuik. “FTD earn money with a system that exists by virtue of the huge supply of illegal content to Usenet.” Mirroring the disappointment felt at FTD, Kuik added: “It is disappointing but illustrates that BREIN’s outstretched hand has been cut off.”

So what exactly does this claim for 50,000 euros per day mean for FTD? Lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet told TorrentFreak that BREIN did not ask the court for damages. Legally they are barred from asking for damages – article 3:305a of the Dutch Civil Code says that an organization that represents the interests of a certain group can never ask for damages. They asked instead for a penal sum of 50k euros if FTD were ordered by the court to shut down but it refused.

“The idea is that a court can order you to shut down but you can ignore the court,” said Arnoud. “With the penal sum, you risk that the court will then sell your house or seize other assets. In principle that’s legal, but the amount is of course ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous also sums up my view of the BREIN counterclaim. Instead of addressing any of the points we raised, they simply repeat their standard rhetoric. Nowhere is the distinction made between uploading works and telling people that someone has uploaded a work for (legal) download. And downloading illegal uploads is legal in the Netherlands,” notes Arnoud.

“BREIN is not known for its careful handling of the truth,” he added. “They are a propaganda organization after all.”

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

The results of the survey clearly showed that avid file-sharers would rather hide their identities than stop downloading. And indeed, more and more BitTorrent users are seeking ways to protect their privacy online, rendering all the newly proposed anti-piracy laws useless.

TorrentPrivacy, BitBlinder and The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator are just a few examples of services launched in the past year, targeted at concerned BitTorrent users. The goal of these and other anonymity applications is clear; hide the IP-address of the file-sharer so he can’t be tracked down while swapping files.

Currently in beta, The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator uses the same tech platform as the VPN service Relakks. For a few dollars a month it routes all your traffic through its servers, hiding your IP address. Ipredator is currently limited to 3000 users but according to the Pirate Bay team there are another 180,000 users on the waiting list, eager to join.

Running a VPN network for hundreds of thousands of hungry BitTorrent users will prove to be quite a challenge. The infrastructure and bandwidth required by a service targeted at file-sharers is significant, not to mention costly. This undoubtedly leads to problems.

The aforementioned Relakks saw its subscriptions double in just a month when the controversial Ipred law came into effect in Sweden this April. This surge in subscriptions led to to major problems with support and updates according to Relakks’s chairman Jan Erik Fiske.

Unlike more traditional VPN services, BitBlinder recently introduced a free solution. Instead of routing the traffic through a central server BitBlinder passes it on through multiple peers. Each peer in the chain only knows the IP address of the next person in the chain, not the original requester/sender.

A few days after its launch BitBlinder had signed up more than 30,000 new users. Right now registrations are temporarily closed to make sure everything runs smoothly for those already using the service, and while they iron out bugs. “We want to make sure it works, and is secure for everyone,” Josh Albrecht, one of the creators of BitBlinder told TorrentFreak.

Because of the increasing interest in anonymity, the Swedish ISP Alltele decided to offer a free service to conceal the IP-addresses of its customers. According to Alltele’s CEO Ola Norberg thousands of users have downloaded the application, which nearly killed the server it was running on.

These examples clearly show that the scare tactics of the entertainment industry are not going to work. There is no doubt that with every new anti-piracy initiative introduced, more and more users will find their way to one of the many anonymizing services out there.

Instead of stopping the pirates in their tracks the entertainment industry has simply inspired a new ‘industry’ worth millions of dollars.

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

The artist’s anti-piracy plan with a message is so simple, it’s brilliant. Infringe on Pirate Bay’s copyrights by using TPB artwork, logos and graphics to make their own T-shirts carrying anti-Pirate Bay messages. These are to be sold through a website, which looks remarkably like the Pirate Bay homepage, since all the graphics and layout are naturally copied from there. I’m sure TiAMO, brokep and Anakata are incandescent with rage right now.

Surprisingly, this pretty hypocritical operation has a spokesman, well-known Ireland-based music industry publicist Stephen Anderson.

“There’s a human cost to Pirate Bay’s activities,” said Anderson in a recent interview. “Jobs are being lost, mortgages defaulted on, kids pulled out of school – the consequences are widespread. We’re calling on the entire creative industry – whether it be media, retail, record companies, studios, distributors, publishers or artists themselves – to unleash the bats by embedding one of our logos on their MySpace, Bebo, Facebook or website pages. We want to bring people at every level of the industry on board right up to your U2s and Metallica, and expose Pirate Bay for what they are – common thieves.”

In the next part of the interview, things got a little confusing. Rather than just a single “artist” being behind this genius plan as the earlier poster suggested, Anderson speaks of a much bigger operation. So who is behind it?

“An international coalition of executives and bands who want the concept to be floated and discussed before revealing themselves,” says Anderson. Very wise indeed, since the whole thing is a joke, funny in parts, tragic in others. On the one hand the whole thing looks like the efforts of one man in a bedroom trying to cash in on T Shirt money, but according to their publicist it’s the seeds of some international movement. Who knows who deep this goes?

Anyway, clicking almost any link on the homepage (i’ll come back to this later) returns this page;

Here T-shirts are sold, virtually identical to the ones available from TPB, except – and here’s the genius idea – they are all dramatically cheaper. According to the artist’s friend, he’s “virtually giving them away” just to spite Pirate Bay. Anderson probably has a deeper, more worrying explanation.

But sadly the plan falls apart on several levels. First of all, the Pirate Bay don’t give a damn if someone infringes on their copyrights. In fact Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that he has sent an email to the people who run the site, pointing them to some high-quality logos they can use for their shirts.

Second, all these T-shirts carry an anti-Pirate Bay message, hardly something your average geek is likely to wear or buy and to be honest, I can’t see many artists wearing them either. Thirdly, not only are these poorly ‘designed’ but the messages on them turn out to be unintentionally hilarious too.

I mentioned earlier that not all links on the homepage go to the anti-Pirate Bay T-shirt buying page. Ironically, since the entire aim of the site is to deprive Pirate Bay of billions in T-shirt money (or raise worldwide awareness of how bad The Pirate Bay is, depending on who you believe), it hardly seems fitting that the link that says “TPB T-shirts” on the fake site doesn’t in fact point to their T-Shirt sales pages, but actually to the official Pirate Bay T-shirt page on Bytelove.com. So in this context and to finish up, let’s have a look at a couple of the anti-TPB shirts.

Unleash The Bats can be found here. Hurry up before its hacked into oblivion.

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

The current wording of the proposals have strong opposition in Brazil and an online petition against the legislation has more than 148,000 signatures. There has even been opposition from other politicians, with the secretary of legislative affairs Peter Abramovay commenting, “This surveillance could turn everyone on the Internet into a criminal. The Internet is a space of freedom par excellence, and should not be a place of fear,” he said.

However, the senator pushing for the legislation should look closer to home, since an investigation by Congressoemfoco has turned up something of significant interest on the Brazilian senate’s intranet, which runs counter to their mission statement shown below;

To provide and manage solutions for information technology and communications for the Senate, and improve work processes, contributing to the excellence and ethics fulfillment of its institutional role for the benefit of Brazilian society

To Congressoemfoco’s surprise, what they discovered on the government servers was a small mountain of copyrighted movies, music and games in several folders. These folders are available to the Senate’s staff and the senators themselves, including Eduardo Azeredo, the senator pushing for tough legislation against pirates.

Accessing the material proved easy enough. Anyone on the network could make a few clicks to get access to the folders. One of them around 6.4Gb in size contained music from Nelly Furtado through to albums by Megadeth, along with Brazilian acts and more well known groups such as Pink Floyd. Other folders included many top-rated PC games. Movies didn’t escape either, with Hollywood movies such as Iron Man, a DVD screener copy of Gran Torino and Happy Feet, all available for download by those running the country.

Once the government found out about this situation, they took steps to remedy it, promising an ‘internal investigation’ although sources suggest that this will likely amount to little more than a quick band-aid application.

“A network with more than ten thousand users is not easy [to monitor],” they said.

Thanks Luiz

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

Interestingly, the bands and artists, including Advance Patrol, were never informed that they were to feature in the trial. Even worse, Advance Patrol feels that they were abused by the labels, as they are using BitTorrent themselves, and encourage their fans to do the same.

“We never asked to be plaintiffs in this case,” Gonza from Advance Patrol explains. “They used us as scapegoats in a fight in which we don’t wish to participate. We refuse to be used in a war against our fans.”

Gonza further explains that the people who download and share the band’s music are some of their most dedicated fans, not some criminals. To show how wrong the music industry was in targeting The Pirate Bay, they have decided to share their latest album “El Futuro” for free.

The Pirate Bay crew is delighted with Advance Patrol’s statement. “In the case against us the music industry used many artists without asking them first. The cooperation between us and Advance Patrol shows that not all of those who were plaintiffs wanted to be a part of the Spectrial circus.”

“Earlier we’ve seen the hip hop artist Max Peezay drop out of the trial proceedings, and when we’ve spoken to other artists they were upset as well. This shows that artists really like the internet, and of course – we love them right back,” we were told.

More and more artists are speaking out against the harsh anti-piracy efforts of the music industry lobby and the alienating effect it has on fans. Several top artists including Robbie Williams, Radiohead, Iron Maiden and Travis even founded their own lobby group, the Featured Artists Coalition – to stand up for their own rights and those of their fans.

Advance Patrol’s latest album can be downloaded via The Pirate Bay, and they encourage everyone to share it with as many people as possible.

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

The most recent intervention by the coalition of artists concerns the call by entertainment industry lobby groups for so called ‘three-strikes’ legislation, to disconnect repeat copyright infringers. Again, the copyright lobby has been acting on its own and without asking for input from the very artists they claim to represent.

“Not for the first time, we at the Featured Artist Coalition are forced to question whether the record industry is representing the best interests of artists in calling for such measures,” UK musician Billy Bragg writes in an article for the Guardian, dealing with the topic. According to Bragg the music industry is trying to blame ISPs for a ‘problem’ that is not as easily solved as it would first appear.

“Never mind that this is a shameful attempt to pass responsibility on to another sector of industry, the question remains whether or not such measures will have the desired effect. Technology has so far stayed ahead of enforcement. Any unauthorised filesharers who fear being caught out can simply encrypt their exchanges,” Bragg writes.

He further claims that it is sometimes hard for fans to find DRM-free music anywhere else than on file-sharing networks. The demands of music fans have changed with the emergence of the Internet, but the music industry has failed to offer decent alternatives thus far.

“The Featured Artist Coalition is opposed to copyright infringement, but we recognise that, if technology allows people to access music for free, they will take advantage. The next generation of music fans may no longer want to pay for music, but they are still hungry to hear it. The challenge to the industry is to find ways to monetise their behaviour.”

“Clearly, some form of P2P subscription service is the way forward, if only because it provides the most convenient way for consumers to access music,” Bragg argues.

Eventually the labels might have to give up the distribution component that has been at the core of their business for years on end. This paints an uncertain future for the labels and that might be one of the main reasons why they are so resistant. Or to put it in Bragg’s words;

“Yet for the major labels, the success of such an initiative would mean the end of their control over the distribution of music. Is this the real reason why they seem determined to do everything they can to clip the wings of the fledgling digital industry before it can fly?”

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

Although the case is under appeal, the claims are legitimate since they apply to the civil part of the verdict. If you don’t pay your bill, or if you have a sentence against you that requires you to pay damages, the Swedish Enforcement Authority has the authority to take what you have in order to settle the debt. They can claim salary, real estate, and other valuable property in order to collect the money.

The Enforcement Authority has reviewed the request and notified the defendants on the demands from each of the various clients represented by the Danowsky firm. The damages have to be paid in Euros and on the notification (pdf) different amounts are listed for each of the record labels, including Sony Music, Warner, EMI and Universal Music.

The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that the defendants have issued a counterclaim, arguing that the labels shouldn’t be allowed to request damages via The Enforcement Authority at this stage. Whether or not this counterclaim will prove successful, it is unlikely that they will get much from Peter. “If I would have money I would rather burn everything I owned,” he said earlier.

Interestingly, the law firm that sent out these notices may soon have its very own cash flow problem. Someone started a website asking people to send really small amounts of money to Danowsky & Partners, and then request a refund citing a wrong payment.

The law firm will be obliged to file these transfers, and all the accounting will be a costly process, especially when thousands of requests come in at the same time. Then, if the law firm refuses to pay, they can simply inform the The Enforcement Authority and have them go after the money instead. Oh the irony.

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

The 5 minute segment focused on an MPAA funded study by a group called the RAND corporation. The study – which was widely criticized early last month – is back with a new coat of paint. This time though, it’s being broadcast to the movie-going British public with the appearance of solid fact, and has addressed none of the questions we brought up just after the study was released.

Perhaps the choice of interviewees might shed some light on ‘why?’ a bit better.

* Keiron Sharp – Director General, Federation Against Copyright Theft.
* John Woodward – CEO, UK Film Council.
* Gregory Treverton – Director of RAND, the study’s authors.
* Callum McDougall – Executive Producer for Quantum of Solace.

This selection seems to be a bit one sided to say the least. If you’re wondering what’s so special about the last name, it might be because you didn’t go to see that film at the cinema. Just before the film was played, a short advert voiced by Quantum star Daniel Craig, talked about how “piracy was costing people jobs”.

McDougall also gave a speech last winter to a UK copyright industry lobby group saying how the industry will fall “like a house of cards” if downloading continues at current levels. This same group, the Industry Trust for IP Awareness, tried to push much the same message on terrorism and piracy almost 5 years ago.

One of our readers was angered by the bias of the segment and wrote a complaint to the BBC. After a few weeks of waiting a reply came back from BBC Complaints, and it was none too satisfying.

Thank you for your e-mail regarding ‘Film 2009 with Jonathan Ross’ as broadcast on 31 March.

I note you felt the report on this programme about copyright theft wasn’t adequately balanced as it only featured interviews with people from the film industry. I appreciate you felt we allowed a distorted view of this issue to be portrayed and note you have strong views regarding this matter.

This report focused in on a legitimate problem for both the film industry and the authorities as they try to tackle what is an ever increasing and profitable criminal activity. We feel the report outlined the laws surrounding the issue of film piracy adequately and that the interviewees from the film industry were entirely appropriate people to comment on the problem.

Impartiality is the cornerstone of all our output, and we feel this report was fully balanced in it’s coverage of copyright theft. Nevertheless I appreciate our audience has a wide range of opinions and inevitably this means that not every viewer will agree with the content of every programme we broadcast. We know all our editorial decisions are subjective and we’d never expect our audience to agree with every decision we make.

With this in mind that I’d like to take this opportunity to assure you that I’ve recorded your comments, including that you believe this topic deserves a more in depth investigation, onto our audience log. This is an internal daily report of audience feedback which is circulated to many BBC staff including senior management, producers and channel controllers.

The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.

Thanks again for contacting us.

Regards

Liam Boyle
BBC Complaints

Of course, there’s also a fine piece of irony in this show. The preceding segment was about a film called ‘The Boat That Rocked‘, a film about a 60’s pirate radio station. The irony is that it’s written and directed by one Richard Curtis. The same Richard Curtis that last year co-signed a letter to The Times urging ISPs to stop piracy.

It seems it’s only ok to profit from piracy, if you’re making a film about it.

UPDATE: The video of the segment is now available.

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

“We noticed that you, through the activities with swedvdr.org, similarly engaged in copyright infringement of several works whose rights belong to our principals. You are hereby requested to immediately take the necessary measures to prevent the ongoing incursions,” wrote Antipiratbyrån in an email to the operator of the Swedvdr BitTorrent tracker.

The demands are as follows:

- Delete all Torrent files from swedvdr.org referring to copyrighted works.
- Take steps to prevent future uploads to swedvdr.org of torrent files.
- Take measures to prevent the ability to upload or download torrents.

The email from the anti-piracy office of course ends with a threat. “Unless your contribution to the incursions have stopped by 29th April 2009, we have advised our clients to take legal action against you,” they write.

While Swedvdr did indeed comply with the request to shut down the site, TTi, another popular private tracker announced that it will only post torrents with consent from the copyright holders from now on. “TTi will only concentrate on bands/artists that want to spread their material on the Internet and are waiting for a record contract,” TTi staff announced.

“Because of all the turbulence and insecurity about whether it’s okay to run a tracker or not, we have now decided to go full out on bands that want to be discovered through the Internet. We of course realize that many of you are disappointed about this suggestion, but we have decided that this is the best for the future of TTi,” they add.

Closing the site is not an option according to TTi staff.

It came as no surprise that Antipiratbyrån was going to use the TPB verdict to their advantage. Their counterpart in The Netherlands, BREIN, has been doing the same thing for years. Ironically, this will only mean that The Pirate Bay will see an increase in visitors.

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

Researchers from the Tribler P2P team at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, took an in depth look at the ‘ratio economy’ at various private BitTorrent trackers. Interestingly, they found some striking similarities between this virtual economy and some of the recent events in the global financial system.

In the paper, the researchers looked into the BitTorrent share ratios of members of a private TV-torrent tracker. They found that the current ratio system is heavily skewed towards a small group of people with a lot of upload capacity, often armed with seedboxes. These greedy ‘rich peers’ take away a disproportional of the available upload ‘credit’ so that new peers, or poorer ones have trouble keeping their ratio above the required figure.

In addition, several variations of swarm populations were simulated to see what their effect is on the users’ share ratios. Overall, the researchers found evidence of a credit crunch in the current ratio tracking schemes currently employed by most private BitTorrent trackers. Even when everyone has similar bandwidth limits this credit shortage still occurs.

“We discovered a strange phenomenon in existing private BitTorrent communities,” Dr. Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. “Lack of credit is hampering performance. We have been able to reproduce this effect in a simulator to further understand it. It has many similarities with the credit crunch where the greasing oil of the world economy is drying out.”

“Lack of credit makes for bankrupt states and poorly functioning BitTorrent communities,” Pouwelse added. While it is unlikely that the trackers will collapse from it, the paper indeed shows that the current emphasis on share ratios is not fair to all members of the community.

Previously, Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol has spoken out against share ratios. “A better approach would be to not count it against people when they download from heavily overseeded torrents. Or to just not use total upload/download ratios at all, or if you do only make them advisory and not a source of banning,” he said at the time.

There are indeed hundreds of alternatives to the current ratio calculation, and most of them will indeed guarantee a healthier sharing environment (less favorable towards ‘rich peers’). In the paper, the researchers show that a ’seeding bonus’ where peers get more credits for their uploads may help and others have suggested to use the total seeding time instead of the upload/download ratio.

While the paper presents some interesting findings, it doesn’t say much about download speeds on private trackers, which tend to be much higher than on public trackers. The parallels with our collapsing financial system are interesting, and with the only difference that a ‘bailout’ or ‘bonus’ would actually help the poor peers on private BitTorrent trackers, we can’t be too sure if that’s also going to work in the real world.

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

Around the same time there was an election in New Zealand and a major change in government, with the then-ruling Labour Party losing out to the National Party. One of those losers was the bill’s champion, Judith Tizard.

With a change of government comes a change in views, and late last month New Zealand Prime Minister John Key announced that the law would be delayed until a workable solution is found.

For many thousands of Kiwi’s, however, disconnection upon accusation is already a reality. One ISP, WorldXChange, has already implemented a Secton92-esque policy for its customer base; one it claims might actually be more draconian.

According to the New Zealand Herald, WorldXChange, which has approximately 20,000 customers, has already initiated their own version of ‘3 strikes and you’re out”. The Herald spoke with a WorldXChange customer who said their connection was terminated last year after an allegation of copyright infringement was made to Xnet (WorldXChange’s broadband service). After contacting customer services, they learned that their connection had been terminated because the ISP had received an allegation that the customer’s IP was linked to file-sharing that infringed copyright.

“They said that they’d reinstate my Internet, but that if they got one more [accusation] it would be cut off permanently – two strikes, you are out.”

A spokesperson for WorldXChange confirmed that such a policy was in place, but said it was 3 strikes, not 2. However, WorldXChange will not be terminating commercial customers in this manner, only residential ones – undoubtedly because residential customers are less likely to sue WorldXChange than a commercial concern, who could easily have their business turned upside down by an unwarranted disconnection.

It might be a a different story if media-groups (and their enforcement contractors) could be trusted to make accurate, well researched claims when it comes to allegations of infringement, but we all know that is not always the case.

Meanwhile, the debate amongst other NZ ISPs has stalled with the withdrawal of TelstraClear (NZ’s second biggest telecom company) from talks regarding Section92, stating it doesn’t want to harm customers. The law has generated intense debate all over New Zealand and now has an uncertain future. If the law is repealed, or struck down though, it is entirely possible that Xnet’s policy will stay in effect, at least until the sound of customers flocking to their competitors – voluntarily or after being ‘terminated’ – gets too much to bear.

On a lighter note though, WorldXChange does seem to have mastered irony. WorldXChange states on the ‘about us‘ section of their website “To us, the key stakeholders are our customers”. Meanwhile Xnet has a package aimed squarely at bandwidth-hungry BitTorrent users.

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

While the added search is not a particular good way to find torrents, its addition to the site is an interesting move by BitTorrent Inc. Not so long ago, uTorrent removed the search boxes to sites like Mininova and isoHunt from their client, as per requests from copyright holders. However, since BitTorrent Inc. closed its video store, there is now no need to please Hollywood and they are free to link to torrent sites again.

Last December we reported that BitTorrent.com added a torrent search engine that works with Ask.com, and uTorrent.com now follows with a Google powered search engine. Neither site hosts any files, they simply act as a meta-search engine. Below is an example of a search for aXXo on uTorrent. Ironically, the Google ad that appears here links to a uTorrent scam site.

Google-powered search engines are nothing new, though. There are a few dozen sites that use Google’s coop program, such as TorrentScoop. All these sites display ads from Google’s Adsense program, ads that are not allowed on ‘regular’ torrent sites because they would violate Google’s terms of service. In fact, a few weeks ago isoHunt lost their Google ad feed which ran through Ask because some advertisers complained.

Double standard or not, the search engine on uTorrent’s homepage is bound to get some decent traffic. Let’s hope that they will keep an eye on the scammy ads though, we know from experience that it requires continuous attention.

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

A project started by a coder named ‘SaladFork’, Crackulous was officially only available to a limited number of individuals, but it quickly gained notoriety as it makes the process of cracking software ridiculously easy. The successor to the more fiddly xCrack script, Crackulous is now being developed by ‘Angel’ and has a full GUI. All people have to do is buy an app from Apple and click a button, it’s that easy.

Although the software package was publicly released just hours ago, the source for this version (0.9) isn’t yet available. Crackulous is set to be released as open source software so that many people can contribute to its development, with original dev SaladFork commenting, “I’ve filled the source code heavily with comments explaining exactly what it’s doing and how it’s doing it. My hope is that Crackulous can be a learning resource for all the prospective iPhone developers out there, and will be able to revolutionize the cracking scene by producing a standard for application quality and functionality that can easily be reproduced to great effect.”

Currently a few people are reporting that they are experiencing difficulty getting the release to run, while others have no problems. There are also a couple of minor acknowleged bugs, but these are expected to be fixed shortly.

There was a hint of irony during November 2008 as the future of Crackulous was put in doubt. An early version of the software leaked out and SaladFork retaliated by threatening to cancel the entire project saying, “I personally think this leak is absolutely disgusting, and downright insulting.”

The latest version of Crackulous is now officially available from the Hackulous Cydia Repo. Expect it to become one of the most downloaded iPhone apps ever and, of course, Crackulous is free of charge. Let the app-avalanche begin – it could be a difficult one to stop.

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

For the 2009 Oscars, 26 movies were nominated. In alphabetical order they are: Australia, Bolt, Changeling, Defiance, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, Frozen River, Happy-Go-Lucky, In Bruges, Hellboy II, Iron Man, Kung Fu Panda, Milk, Rachel Getting Married, Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, The Duchess, The Reader, The Visitor, The Wrestler, Tropic Thunder, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Wall-E and Wanted.

Of these 26 movies, 25 were available online by yesterday’s nomination day – only Rachel Getting Married made the date piracy-free. An MPAA-worrying 23 of these were downloadable in either DVD Screener or Retail DVD format (Region 5 included). In the past months many of the nominees appeared in our weekly download charts, with The Dark Knight as the absolute winner topping 7 million downloads in 2008.

Of course, the MPAA is always keen to point to the ‘evils’ of camcorder piracy and has clamped down heavily on this in recent years. However, it doesn’t seem able to deal effectively with its own internal issues. Of the 26 nominated films, 20 were distributed to Oscar voters in DVD Screener format. Many of them leaked onto the web, with the exceptions countable on one hand.

In 2003 the MPAA temporarily banned Oscar screeners to prevent them from leaking, but this decision was eventually reversed. Since then, the industry has touted technical solutions such as Cinea to protect their content, but for various reasons it hasn’t stopped the leaks. This year the average time from DVD Screeners being delivered to voters and subsequently leaking out to the web, was just 6 days.

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