Yesterday Ellis stated that he had initially hosted the tracker in his bedroom while studying at Teesside University, and used the coding experience to develop his skills in order to bring future employment possibilities.

Today more details became available, which appear to show that Ellis believed that he operated his site within the law.

While it’s impossible to say what goes on inside another person’s head, when it comes to the law the average BitTorrent site admin or keen BitTorrent user will be mostly tuned into the requirements of copyright and violations of copyright law. In basic terms relating to this case, the unauthorized copying and/or distribution of copyright works, both illegal under UK copyright law.

BitTorrent trackers such as OiNK do not distribute, store or duplicate copyright works, so when Ellis said yesterday that he viewed what he did as similar to how the post office or telephone company operates, i.e directing other people’s data (illegal or not), he clearly believes that type of operation is permissible under copyright law. Indeed, unlike in other jurisdictions, there is no offense of ‘facilitation’ under UK copyright law.

“I didn’t think the site was abusing the copyrights,” he said, and in the above context he was right. But if OiNK wasn’t abusing copyrights, that responsibility must fall elsewhere – at the feet of the site’s members.

“If these people chose to download music and in doing so were breaking the law, then that was their responsibility, not mine,” Ellis told the Court. “I never saw that I was responsible for them downloading music.”

While Ellis can’t be held responsible for what others do on his site, he was candid when it came to admitting that he made use of some of the material indexed by the tracker. Ellis told the Court that he spent a lot of money buying music, but had used file-sharing as a mechanism to discover new artists.

“From my experience if I download music and I like it, I would go out and buy it. I understood most people to have that view,” he explained.

According to Gazette Live, Ellis also told the Court that he responded “out of good will” to takedown requests received from the infamous Web Sheriff anti-piracy company on behalf of rights holders.

So, if OiNK didn’t break copyright law by not transferring, copying or storing copyright works, and there is no offense of facilitation of the same under UK law, why was the site shut down and why is this trial taking place?

Maybe because the BPI and IFPI knew that copyright infringement charges wouldn’t stick, they instead guided the police down another route, that of Conspiracy to Defraud.

Ellis denies that charge and the case continues.

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

The new year starts without The Pirate Bay tracker, which was closed in November, and also without Mininova, which saw its site being censored and stripped down by a Dutch court. To counter these losses, several public tracker-only services have made a comeback along with multiple torrent-only storage sites.

Where do we go from here? Let’s make some predictions.

Prediction 1: The Pirate Bay will cease to offer torrent links

After closing its tracker in 2009, The Pirate Bay will further evolve by removing all torrents from its index in the new year. The site will be reduced to a BitTorrent platform that no longer stores torrent files. Users will still be able to submit torrents through a third party service such as Torrage, but instead of linking to these torrent files, The Pirate Bay will list only Magnet links.

During the second half of 2010, The Pirate Bay four will appear before the Appeal Court. They will be found ‘not guilty’ and walk away free. Shortly after this victory in court, Pirate Bay’s YouTube killer The Video Bay will be released to the public.

Prediction 2: A BitTorrent client will be dragged to court

In 2009, the entertainment industry and authorities took legal action against various BitTorrent users and numerous sites. They left BitTorrent clients alone, but this will change in the new year. A coalition of copyright holders will file a lawsuit against one of the major BitTorrent clients, in an attempt to stop the ever increasing piracy rate.

The copyright holders will argue that BitTorrent clients play a vital role in downloading and uploading copyrighted files, and that the software is assisting in copyright infringement. They will demand that the torrent client implements a filtering mechanism to prevent users from downloading movies, music or games without the permission of the copyright holder.

Prediction 3: More people will use BitTorrent anonymously

2010 is the year where copyright holders gain more control over the Internet. Three-strikes legislation will be rolled out in various countries and global trade agreements such as ACTA will result in humongous fines for casual downloaders.

As a result of this newly founded Internet police state, millions of BitTorrent users will take measures to hide their identities online. By the end of the year, a quarter of all BitTorrent users will use a VPN service or similar anonymity software, with another quarter looking to do so in the following 12 months. This will make new legislation ineffective, and lead to further lobbying by the entertainment industry for even harsher anti-piracy measures.

This cycle will repeat itself until the entertainment industry decides to innovate.

Prediction 4: BitTorrent (live) streaming will take off

Advances in technology and growing broadband penetration have brought us to a point where BitTorrent-powered streaming solutions have become reality. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen is working on a streaming implementation and experiments have shown that it is possible to stream high definition content.

In the second half of 2010, the first BitTorrent-powered YouTube competitors will be launched. These new BitTorrent sites will mainly offer streams of pirated movies and TV-shows. Live BitTorrent streaming will gain worldwide traction during the 2010 soccer world cup in South Africa. In the second half of the year, commercial implementations will follow, allowing broadcasters to stream live content at zero cost.

Prediction 5: uTorrent will become a resource hog

In 2010, uTorrent will be transformed from a lightweight BitTorrent application into a media portal similar to its nemesis, Vuze. Unlike Vuze, BitTorrent Inc. will continue to offer a lightweight uTorrent version for the the people who don’t want to make this switch, preventing a revolt among conservative uTorrent users.

The new uTorrent will be a resource hog, featuring a full blown search engine, video conversion, iTunes integration and a video player. The browser interface will allow uTorrent to be put on set-top boxes, which opens up the possibility for BitTorrent Inc. to reopen a new and improved version of their video store that can be easily hooked up to TVs.

Due to the changes, uTorrent will obviously have to remove its tagline ‘a (very) tiny BitTorrent client.’

—–

Happy new year to all of you from TorrentFreak. Let us know what your predictions are for 2010 in the comments below. We will feature the best on our side-blog FreakBits during the coming days.

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

By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was already tracking a million peers and more than 60,000 torrent files. Around the same time the founders also became aware that it wasn’t just Scandinavians showing an interest in their site. Because of increasing worldwide popularity, The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages from then on.

This change was much appreciated by the site’s non-Swedish speaking users, but hated by anti-piracy outfits. They saw the tracker as a serious threat, and in response launched a dozen lawsuits to have it removed from the Internet. Today, while nearing the end of the decade, The Pirate Bay has changed its homepage back to its 2003 look, Swedish only.

Despite all the legal trouble, the buyout soap and the decision to close the tracker, The Pirate Bay website is still around at the end of the decade. According to the Pirate Bay team, they are not yet ready to give up or throw in the towel.

“We believe that we have changed something. Not just us, but all of us. The Pirate Bay has always been something extra. We didn’t just wanna run another tracker. We wanted it to mean something. And you our users have helped us with that. The history of the bay is still being written, it’s way too early for a conclusion,” The Pirate Bay team writes.

“2010 has no room for boring debates about old worn out values that old rotting industries try to shove down your throats. 2010 will be the year of the hydra. Let thousands of new exciting projects emerge,” they add.

The past has indeed shown that with every setback the Hydra grows stronger. More new sites and trackers will emerge in the new year while old favorites fade in the background.

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

Watching ‘Twilight: New Moon’ would be an experience she’d never forget.

Camera in hand, Tumpach took pictures of her family before the movie began and recorded her relatives singing “Happy Birthday”. She also turned the camera towards the big screen, snagging small portions of adverts, previews and short sections of the movie – 4 minutes in all – accompanied by her own amateur voice-over.

Then a theater robot worker saw what was going on, immediately recalled their MPAA programming and decided that evil had been done. Tumpach was taken to theater managers who identified her as a professional and criminal pirate. Eventually she was handed over to the police who sympathized with her situation. “They were so nice to me,” Tumpach said.

Despite this, the managers insisted on pressing charges. Tumpach spent two nights in jail, charged with criminally recording a motion picture, before being released pending a court appearance.

“We were just messing around,” she said. “Everyone is so surprised it got this far.”

Hearing of her plight, Tumpach received support from an unlikely corner – Twilight: New Moon director Chris Weitz.

“Needless to say, the case seems to me terribly unfair and I would like to do what I can to address this,” Weitz wrote in an email.

Whether or not this pressure made any difference is unclear, but Tumpach left a courtroom a free woman today, the charge against her dismissed after prosecutors decided not to pursue the case.

“She’s traumatized by this,” said her attorney Dominick Dolci. “This is the worst event of her life and she wants to put it behind her.”

Her other attorney, Howard Kavenow, added: “This was nothing more than a birthday party where photos were being taken. It’s nonsense.”

Samantha Tumpach will not now face three years in jail, no thanks to the heartless and completely idiotic theater managers who tried to ruin her life.

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

In December 2004, the demise of the mighty Suprnova left a meteor crater in the fledgling BitTorrent landscape. This gaping hole was soon filled by the dozens of new sites that emerged to fulfil the public’s increasing demands for torrents. Mininova became the most successful of all.

Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.

With increased popularity also came numerous complaints from copyright holders, who saw their intellectual property being shared by users of the site. For years Mininova has complied with these takedown requests, but earlier this year the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN decided to take the torrent site to court nonetheless, demanding that the operators proactively filter torrents pointing to copyrighted material.

The case went to court in June and a few weeks later the verdict was announced. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.

To avoid having to pay these penalties, the Mininova team saw no other option than to disable access to all torrents except those that were uploaded to their content distribution platform. This means that only approved uploaders can share torrents through the site for now.

During the last few months, Mininova has extensively tested several filtering techniques, but none of these proved 100% effective. “It’s very unfortunate that we’re forced to take this action, but we saw no other option,” Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak.

Mininova still hasn’t decided yet whether they will appeal the verdict, Niek further told TorrentFreak. They have appealed the verdict pro-forma, which gives the company more time to decide whether they will indeed continue with the appeal. As it looks now, a successful appeal is the only option for Mininova to bring all torrents back.

In the meantime the Mininova team will focus on other projects besides Mininova, as well as growing the number of users for their content distribution platform.

The implications of Mininova’s decision will have a huge impact on the BitTorrent community. The millions of Mininova users and uploaders have to look for a new home, but perhaps even more importantly, Mininova had the largest collection of user-submitted torrents that were used by dozens of smaller torrent indexers.

More information on the consequences and background of Mininova’s decision will be addressed in a follow up article.

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

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

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

Nevertheless, Uggla insisted that Spotify is a fantastic service with a great range of music to sample. However, he felt that the fact he wasn’t getting paid was the fault of the major labels involved in the project (Sony BMG bought 5.8% of Spotify for 2,935 Euros, Universal Music got 4.8% for 2,446 euros, Warner Music paid 1,957 Euros for 3.8% and EMI pocketed 1.9% for an investment of 980 Euros), claiming that he “earned as much in six months as a BUSKER could earn in a day.”

As the dust settled on the story, many non-Swedish readers were saying “Magnus who?” and wondering if this artist’s lack of mainstream popularity was the real reason behind him earning virtually nothing. But what about big artists? What about really, really big artists with huge international appeal. Say, an artist like Lady Gaga, who has sold more than 4 million albums and shifted in excess of 20 million paid digital downloads?

According to a report today, Lady Gaga’s track “Poker Face” was one of the most popular tracks during a five month period on Spotify and was played more than a million times. So how much money does she get paid by STIM (the Swedish Performing Rights Society) for this massive achievement?

SEK 1150 – that’s around $167 or roughly 113 Euros.

Commenting on the story, Douglas Léon, better known as Swedish rapper Dogge Doggelito, said he was dismayed.

“It is totally sick. We musicians have no rights, you may not charge [for music] anymore,” adding that Lady Gaga could’ve earned more driving an illegal taxi-cab.

Swedish artist, music producer and philosopher Alexander Bard, however, said that this payment was better than Lady Gaga would have achieved from her music being available via The Pirate Bay, noting that the amount was “…more than zero.”

Technically Bard is absolutely right, but let’s be honest – Lady Gaga would blow the money she earned from STIM in a 20 minute hotel mini-bar bender. Looking at the overall downloads, let’s face it, per track she earned pretty much near to nothing from both services.

While Spotify is to be commended for having the guts to try something new, for providing a truly wonderful service and for having achieved such a lot technically in a such a short space of time, one can’t help but wonder if it is ever going to bring in decent money for the artists.

After all, aren’t these the very people the music industry continually holds up as the important ones to encourage, nurture and support?

Lady Gaga’s example shows that Spotify’s business model needs some work, and the labels seem to agree on this. The US launch of the service has been delayed earlier this week, allegedly because of concerns about Spotify’s ability to upgrade free users to paid customers.

“We think Spotify is a great service but they’re going to have to convince us they can convert enough people from free to paid subscriptions to make it worth our while,” one label told the Financial Times. “As an ad-supported service the economics don’t work at all.”

Despite the startup troubles for Spotify the reviews from users, many of which were avid file-sharers, are still extremely positive. The service recently launched an iPhone app that allows users to play the tracks on the go, with or without an Internet connection, which many saw as the missing link. Now all they have to do is come up with a plan to actually make money.

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

“The idea is to sell USB drives using this brand,” said Sandryds Handel spokesman Bengt Wessborg.

“We saw that it was not already allocated to someone else. It was not registered.”

The company went on to register an almost exact copy of the logo, differing only slightly in color and lacking a capital letter on the word ‘Bay’. The move was accepted by PRV, Sweden’s Patent and Registration Office.

Ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde was not happy with the move.

“They [Sandryds] knew that [the logo] was not owned or created by them and they [registered the logo] to attain a position of power against The Pirate Bay,” he wrote in an email protest to PRV.

After earlier saying that they were prepared to strike a deal with The Pirate Bay over the logo, that offer appears to have come to pass. Following discussions with Sunde, Sandryds have now backtracked and agreed to de-register the trademark. But they don’t come away empty-handed.

Company spokesman Bengt Wessborg told SR they are happy with their achievement, having secured permission to use the Pirate Bay logo on a new product.

“We have had permission from The Pirate Bay to sell a media player with the logo on,” said Wessborg.

Although the mechanism by which Sandryds achieved this permission was more than a little dubious, admittedly the choice of end-product to display the logo seems the perfect fit.

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

However, despite the shunning of the multi-colored approach of the above, among those millions of Internet users for whom BitTorrent has become a way of life, or those technology reporters who have written so much about the site, the logo employed by The Pirate Bay is also very recognizable indeed. The ship emblem, with its sails featuring the outline of a cassette tape-and-crossbones, has been reproduced millions of times on countless numbers of websites and products.

The Pirate Bay, in line with their sharing ethos, has always allowed people to use the logo free of charge and even makes the artwork publicly available in usable, scalable formats to ease its reproduction, some of which were used to create fan tattoos. But that is still not enough for some greedy individuals.

Today news broke that a private Swedish company, noticing that the logo had no commercial protection, took the opportunity to hijack it. The outfit, Sandryds Handel AB, have officially registered the emblem as their own with the authorities, with the intention of commercially exploiting it.

While admitting they have absolutely nothing to do with The Pirate Bay, in a radio interview Sandryds Handel spokesman Bengt Wessborg defended his company’s action.

“The idea is to sell USB drives using this brand,” he told SR. “We saw that it was not already allocated to someone else. It was not registered,” he added.

A spokesman for Sweden’s Patent and Registration Office said that they were unable to find that any rights to the logo were held by The Pirate Bay, therefore they were able to allocate them to Sandryds.

The logo registered by the company is very slightly different in color to that of the original Pirate Bay design, with ‘The Pirate Bay’ written as “The Piratebay”.

Commenting on the news, ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: “It will be turned over quite easily, it’s a preliminary registration that is being ‘tested’,” adding that while anyone can use the logo for any purpose they like, they may not take any action which limits the way other people can use it.

Peter says he wrote to Sandryds, and they replied telling him “…that they were amazed themselves and just wanted to try.”

TorrentFreak asked if The Pirate Bay is going to try and get the logo back, and we were told that they would try to get the decision by the patent office anulled, adding that the registration wasn’t legal and is therefore prohibited by law.

“It’s a person at the registration office that has made an error – willingly or not, we’re not sure,” they added.

“It would be nice if they liked it,” said the Sandryds spokesman in a statement. “But we may perhaps enter into dialogue with them if needed,” he added.

Needless to say, certain Pirate Bay supporters will not “like” this hijacking at all, and offering discussions over the reappropriation of an emblem they already see as their own will be tantamount to waving a red rag at a bull.

History shows us what happens to outfits who take negative actions against The Pirate Bay, so on past experience, if Sandryds Handel hope to keep doing business on the web in any meaningful way, they may want to quickly reassess their position.

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

With no legal basis, ISPs were extremely reluctant to comply, so government-mandated talks on the issue came to an end. On this particular battle, at least for the time being, the Coalition had to concede defeat, but they weren’t about to give up on the war.

Since it could not force sanctions on the end users, the Coalition – which includes the likes of Promusicae and SGAE – began to focus on Spain’s BitTorrent sites. In his first public appearance as Coalition president, Aldo Olcese noted there were 200 of them, up from 70 in just a few months.

However, as we mentioned in our earlier report, the Coalition’s ability to deal with these sites in the current climate is limited. Spanish courts have ruled time and again that if profits aren’t made directly from copyright infringements, BitTorrent sites are perfectly legal. Add this to the Chief Prosecutor’s May 2006 official instruction that effectively decriminalized non-commercial file-sharing, and the Coalition have an even steeper mountain to climb.

According to a new report, yesterday the names of the 200 sites were handed to the Spanish industry minister following the presentation of a report called Parasites’ Business (video below in Spanish), which was made jointly by the Coalition and CoPeerRight, who claim to be the world’s ‘premier’ anti-piracy company.

Coalition president Olcese pointed out the difficulties his group faces, describing Spain as a “piracy paradise” with “no legal, civil or administrative measures in place to combat this problem.”

CoPeerRight then gave a presentation based on its own research which it says shows that the average Spanish pirate web site can earn an absolutely astonishing €1.5 million ($2.2 million) a year in revenue, this based on an average of 150,000 users each, with some of them drawing 4 million unique visitors in a single month.

However, as we highlighted earlier, pure BitTorrent and other similar ‘linking’ sites do not profit directly from infringements, which means they are entirely legal. The Coalition hopes to be instrumental in changing this position.

Last week the Spanish government announced the creation of a commission to consider legislation to deal with the issue of copyright infringement. Coalition president Olcese told Billboard that he believes “there is a correlation between the setting up of this commission, with the fact the Spain’s assumes the six-month presidency of the European Union next January 1, and with the improved relationship between the leaders of the Spanish and U.S. governments”.

Indeed, earlier this year a very impatient US government growing tired with what it sees as a total lack of inaction on the issue, said that part of Spain’s “priority action” to decrease online piracy should include an agreement between ISPs and copyright holders to prevent infringing content being available on the Internet – code for “3 strikes”, a measure that not even the US has implemented.

While that option has disappeared, last week saw Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero make his first visit to the White House in his six years in office – the first by a Spanish leader since the country’s 2004 Iraq pullout, an event which didn’t go down well with the US. Zapatero is now offering to assist with the closure of Guantanamo Bay, a sign that relations are beginning to warm.

It seems now that the only savior of the Coalition and its partners will be a change in the law, but Coalition president Olcese couldn’t resist mixing up terms in order to create the impression that the 200 BitTorrent sites are currently illegal.

“We gave the government last April our proposals to establish an official register of legal Web sites and act against illegal sites. When we meet the commission, we shall reiterate our position,” he said.

Illegal is not the same as unauthorized or unofficial, as much as the Coalition would like it to be so.

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

For now the verdict has been put on hold by BREIN, allowing the three defendants to appeal. Nevertheless, because of the legal issues between the two parties, an encounter between the head of BREIN, Tim Kuik and Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm that took place at Hacking at Random (HAR) this Friday was a rather interesting one.

Tim Kuik participated in a panel discussion on copyright laws and the future of media distribution at HAR, and halfway through he was standing face to face with Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Svartholm, who had been following the discussion in the audience, took the opportunity to confront Kuik with some of the allegations he made.

Svartholm started by asking if BREIN actually has any evidence that The Pirate Bay is making ‘a lot’ of money from distributing copyrighted works, as they claim. “Can you please tell me where that profit is, because i’d like some of it,” he asked, which resulted in applause and cheers from the audience.

“You tell me, you’re here, somebody paid for your trip,” Kuik quickly replied in an attempt to turn things around, implying that Svartholm must have used Pirate Bay revenue to make his way over to The Netherlands.

Svartholm, who currently works as a software programmer in Asia where he earns his living, then replied, “I paid for this trip by developing computer software for my customers,” which was again followed by applause from the audience.

Kuik found his argument crushed so reverted back to the earlier question about profits. “Everybody knows, including yourself, that you’re selling advertising space on your website, and people pay you for that,” he said.

Kuik went on to say that a Swedish investigative journalist found that The Pirate Bay made hundreds of thousands of kroner every year. To some this may sound like an impressive figure, but 300,000 kroner ($40,000) may not even be enough to cover the hardware and bandwidth costs, so it doesn’t prove that there’s any profit.

From Kuik’s responses it seems that BREIN has no evidence at all that The Pirate Bay is as profitable as they claim it is, so Svartholm went on to ask Kuik about the defamation lawsuit that the former Pirate Bay founders started against him and his organization.

The head of BREIN is being sued by TPB in Sweden for defamation, after Kuik claimed that the Pirate Bay founders were responsible for an alleged DDoS attack on BREIN’s website. In Sweden, Kuik is now facing up to two years in prison, and Svartholm wanted to know if he plans to show up.

In his reply, Kuik denied that he ever attributed the DDoS attacks to the people behind the Pirate Bay, but he said that it was a coincidence that their website was hit right after the case against TPB was announced to the press. Svartholm of course questioned Kuik’s denial, but he never saw his original question answered.

In the end, Kuik never answered any of the questions posed by Svartholm, but the face to face standoff between two people at the extreme ends of the copyright debate was an interesting one nonetheless. After the panel discussion, Tim Kuik and Gottfrid Svartholm set their differences aside for a brief moment, as they posed for the cameras.

The video of the HAR panel discussion is available in OGG and on Vimeo (Gottfrid at 30:20).

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

Needless to say, all significant changes to uTorrent affect millions of users and the entire BitTorrent infrastructure. With the release of its 2.0 Beta the client introduces breakthrough changes that offer a helping hand to its users, ISPs and most of all – tracker owners.

In comparison to HTTP trackers, UDP trackers use less resources and put less strain on their servers. Since almost all public trackers now have a UDP variant, it can save tracker owners a lot of hardware and thus money.

Using UDP is generally a good idea to bring down load on popular trackers,” said uTorrent developer Arvid Norberg when commenting on the implementation of the newly added feature. “We want uTorrent to be a good citizen and not hammer trackers.”

“Hopefully client support will be wide spread enough at some point, so that trackers that currently spend 99% of their capacity on misbehaving clients flooding it with HTTP requests can turn that off,” Norberg added.

Although Norberg’s comments suggest that uTorrent is one of the first to implement UDP tracker support, they are in fact quite late to the party. Vuze, BitComet, Deluge, KTorrent and rTorrent are just a few of the clients that have implemented this feature already.

However, with its massive market share uTorrent is the one that really makes a difference, and this new feature will be welcomed by all major BitTorrent tracker operators. The benefits of UDP trackers will not go unnoticed by users either since they do not interfere with HTTP traffic, meaning that associated web-browsing slowdowns will be a thing of the past.

Aside from smoother web-browsing, users will notice a few other changes in uTorrent 2.0. For starters the new speed guide is a welcome addition. By using Google’s measurement lab servers, uTorrent users can now test their connection speed and let the client automatically pick the best settings based on the results.

Unfortunately Google’s lab servers are all located in the US, which makes the results less accurate for uTorrent users in other parts of the world. The uTorrent team hopes that they can provide optimal results for these users at a later stage. “We anticipate that the server coverage will improve and cover other continents better in the future,” Norberg commented.

With the 2.0 Beta, uTorrent also enjoys several improvements to its uTP support, which makes the client more network aware hoping to decrease the load for ISPs as well. uTP support can be enabled or disabled at the user’s request.

The new Beta has something in store for everyone, and although users are free to play around with it, we should note that this is not a stable release and that bugs and unexpected crashes are possible. The latest release as well as a feedback thread can be found at the uTorrent forums.

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

Not everyone in the music business agrees with this assessment though. When the indie rock band Barcelona saw one of its latest tracks featured in a viral video with nearly a million views, they responded quite differently. They claim that the clip below actually boosted their album sales and concert visits.

So, instead of demanding that YouTube pull the video, the band posted a response to the ‘Kuroshio Sea’ video on the site, thanking their new found fans and the uploader who posted the original video.

“We’re so flattered to learn that it features one of our songs called Please Don’t Go,” Barcelona’s lead singer Brian Fennell says in the video response.

“We want to let you know that it’s been affirming in the last week to watch in the iTunes store a correlation with the sales of our record ‘Absolutes’, growing in the rock charts as a result of having the song placed in the video,” drummer Rhett Stonelake added.

Aside from the boost in record sales, the band says that they’ve also met some new fans who came to their concerts after seeing the video on YouTube. It is a great way of promoting music online, especially when it’s coupled to a great video.

Unfortunately for most artists, anti-piracy outfits such as the RIAA, BPI and IFPI are increasingly policing YouTube to get all copyrighted music taken off the site. One such artist to suffer recently is the unfortunate Calvin Harris, who clashed with the music industry lobby group BPI.

“IT’S MY FUCKING SONG YOU ABSOLUTE BASTARDS,” Harris wrote on Twitter when he found out that YouTube had removed a clip he uploaded himself, following a copyright complaint from the BPI.

“FUCK YOU ‘The BPI’ what have you ever done for anybody you useless shower of cunts,” he added. As if that wasn’t enough Harris labeled the BPI the “worst organization to ever walk the earth” and their online employees “massive retards.”

Like many other artists, Harris just wants his music to be heard, and he believes that putting a clip on YouTube might in fact introduce new people to his music. If people like what they hear, they might even buy his album or visit his gigs, much like what happened with Barcelona.

YouTube is free promotion for bands and artists, it has the potential to drive revenue instead of killing it. It is time for the major labels and anti-piracy outfits to listen to the artists for once, and perhaps ask them if they actually want to have their content removed or not.

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

Aside from punishing actual file-sharers, the bill allows the courts to take measures against people who have done no sharing, but are accused simply because they are the one paying the ISP bill. If the court decides that an account holder is guilty of “negligence” – by somehow allowing others to file-share on their connection – it is within a judge’s power to issue a fine up to 1,500 euros along with a 4 week disconnection.

Now, according to Le Monde, some French hackers have come together to throw confusion into the mix, so that punishing these individuals is not a straightforward or guaranteed accurate procedure.

A hacker known only as ‘N’ says he has developed some software known as ‘Hadopi Router’, a term first penned by bloggers who devised the concept. ‘N’, who is said to have previously worked manufacturing routers, says he and a few friends wrote ‘Hadopi Router’ in order to prove that the evidence gathered by the Hadopi agency is unreliable.

“It locates Wi-Fi networks in the neighborhood, then begins to crack all their passwords,” says ‘N’. “Once we have the keys, we can create a virtual access point,” which in basic terms means using the Internet connection without the account holder’s knowledge.

‘N’ says that if an ‘owned’ router has its password changed, the system automatically switches to another Wi-Fi signal in the neighborhood and starts to attack the new password.

Additionally, ‘N’ claims that with Hadopi Router it is possible to monitor activity on the cracked networks but one of his accomplices called ‘V’ says they have no bad intentions.

“We just want to release our software and allow everyone to understand that the technical data used by the Hadopi agency to accuse people will not be reliable. Because of us, the judges will not be able to say that they weren’t aware of that.”

‘N’ says he is already imagining a more ambitious strategy to distribute many dozens of modified routers to a community in order to create a “mini-network”, superimposed over existing ones.

Of course, many wireless routers already have either a complete lack of security or weak WEP encryption enabled, making them sitting ducks for drive-by infringements or less casual ones conducted by neighbors within range.

An IP address does not necessarily identify an individual, in fact one could argue that in many instances these days it doesn’t even identify a computer but merely a gateway to a sub network, behind which could be any number of individuals not linked in any way to a bill payer.

Time will tell how French judges will rule in these “negligence” cases, especially when they have just 5 minutes to do so.

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.

On the issue of standards of evidence, all responses received considered on their merit. We expect there to be differences in opinions and in information respondents choose to submit in support of their position. However we do not rely solely on such submissions or a single information source when deciding policy. …We use a range of sources to enable us to cross check and investigate claims to develop our own understanding and arrive at our own conclusions. We would always seek to collaborate or cross-check key points of information. Additionally if a party deliberately provided false information they would risk losing all credibility within Government on future consultations or discussions.

Just as a guide, here are some clear mistakes and ‘distortions’ in the submissions provided to the BERR, that we hope they have taken into account.

1 The estimated figures.

Estimated loss figures are commonplace, usually expressed as “in [year], [group] lost [amount] due to piracy”. However, in just about every case, such figures are estimated, based on a set of unlikely assumptions and figures which will maximize the claimed loss. In addition, no supporting data or the methodology used to determine the figure is ever given, even if requested. If the basis for determining the figure can not be clearly expressed, it should bring into question the validity of the claim made from it.

A prime example of the unreliability of these unsupported figures came in January 2008, when the MPAA admitted that at least one figure in their often-quoted LEK study was three times the intended figure (and who knows what the actual figure is). No independent determination of the accuracy of this revised figure can be made, as the data behind it still has not been published.

2 The echo-chamber

In one of the more curious aspects of the way the copyright industry conducts itself, companies are members of multiple groups. Sometimes these groups are a further part of other groups. For instance, ‘Television Against Piracy’ contains members from US studios. These same studios are members of the MPAA, that also filed a response. The MPA(A) is also a member of the ‘Alliance Against Intellectual Property Theft’ which filed the same brief as the British Video Association. These last two also have some of their members submit individual reports. The same is as true for the ISPs as for the rightsholder organizations. Counting responses from organizations that are represented multiple times, gives increased weight to their opinions in contrast to those that played fair and didn’t attempt to swamp the process with shell organizations like a two-bit tax-evader.

3 Redefinition of terms

Terms like “copyright theft” and “illicit P2P” are designed to give preconceptions to the reader, in much the same way the term ‘Intellectual Property’ has come to be used in recent times to encompass copyright patent and trademark law. The only time “copyright theft” can make sense, however, is for the copyright itself to be taken from its owner, rather that the right be infringed. Illicit P2P also does not exist, as the technology is legal, as is the use of it. It is only in certain circumstances that it is found to be in violation of the law, and then only after the specific case has been judged so via the judicial process. Similarly, the “graduated response” (apart from being illegal under European law) system promoted by several respondents should be more accurately termed ‘The Because We Say So response‘.

There are also technical redefinings of terms. One response (BVA/AAIPT) talks of 18,000 Nintendo Wii and 14,000 XBox ‘game files’. However, assuming the files were in the standard scene release format (multipart rars) at only 50 rars per game, that takes the Wii total down to 360, and XBox titles down to 280. Many games are split into more than 50 parts, dropping this down more. In this case, by redefining a segment of a file as a separate file, the impact of the statement can be vastly increased.

4 Illegal Activities

This should be a no-brainer. No activity is illegal until so decided, either in a court of law or by the accused admitting guilt on that particular occasion. Absent either of these, there is no illegality under the British system of presumption of innocence. The impetus for this consultation stems from the pleas to circumvent this basic system of justice by companies that want to gain rewards without any increased cost.

5 Technological filtering doesn’t work

As we saw first-hand with Comcast, attempts to disrupt a protocol can have unintended consequences. One of the respondents is a company that provides filtering systems, but the ineffectiveness of their system with the dominant P2P was described here a year ago. The filtering even of static streaming content using such systems has also taken a blow in the US with the ruling that such systems must consider context; something no technological system can do. The BBC response also underscored the futility of filtering based on file name, at the end of their contribution, where a screenshot shows a hit for Duffy, in a search for Dr Who.

6 Greater term of copyright requires greater expense for protection

With the worldwide continued copyright extensions over the past decades, the number of works that have to be protected will also increase. Thus the trade-off for increased royalty payments is the increased costs to protect these works generating the payments. In the same way that increasing a factory’s storage time of finished products requires a larger warehouse, the cost increase that comes from it is thus the responsibility of the person responsible for the increase, in this case the rights holders.

7 Rights holders are not creators

Throughout the submissions the assumption that “rights holders = creators” is often made. In some it is stated. However in very few circumstances are the rights holders actually the creative talent. In most cases they operate almost like a bank and a distribution center in one, providing financing and assistance to distribute the product, but not actually involved in the creative process itself. Were the “rights-holders” to cease, alternate sources of financing can and would be sought, as would different ways to distribute the finished product. While the quality of the product may not be the same, creativity will not come to a screeching halt and new methods to do similar things cheaply may be created – spurring innovation in that way.

8 These claims are not new

Many of the claims made are not new. With each new leap of technology the ‘creative industries’ make similar claims; the new technology will end the business and should be regulated, or outlawed, or control should be handed over. It has happened with the VCR, Cable-TV, Radio, even player pianos and the phonograph. Despite these regular (every 20 years or so) prophecies of doom, it has yet to pass. Usually common sense prevails, and the businesses adapt and flourish.

These eight points might be common sense to our regular readers, but the question will be if they have been considered at all by those responsible for the Digital Britain report. We shall shortly see.

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

Inevitably the song leaked onto P2P networks before its official release. Normally, the leak of any other song would be met with relative silence since it’s such a common event these days, but Italy’s answer to the RIAA, (FIMI, the Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana) decided to take advantage of the delicate nature of the leak to rally public opinion against file-sharing. They claimed that people were downloading the song instead of giving to charity, something which we seriously doubted in our earlier report.

Nevertheless, FIMI decided that the leak was so odious that it should be reported to Guardia di Finanza, an Italian police force dealing with everything from smuggling, money laundering through to copyright violations. FIMI claims that the leak has already cost the charity 1 million euros but provides no evidence of this.

So, to find the people responsible for the leak, Guardia di Finanza launched Operation Jackal and it hasn’t taken long to get some results. It’s now being reported that three individuals have been tracked down after uploading the track to various file-hosting sites and distributing it via an unnamed Direct Connect hub. The arrests were made in Rome and Milan.

At a press conference, Luca Vespignani, secretary general of the Federation Against Music Piracy said that they reported the leak to the police after they noticed “dozens of illegal download every day.”

FIMI president Enzo Mazza commented, “Whoever put this song on the file-sharing networks has done something evil and knowingly damaging the [fund-raising] initiative.”

As we noted previously, giving to charity is a voluntary act, done from the heart. Those that give to charity do so of their own free will and don’t avoid doing that, for instance, by downloading a song for free. To suggest otherwise is to misunderstand why people donate in the first place.

Donations to the fund can still be made here.

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.

These results are not unique to Canada either. A few weeks ago a Spanish survey found pretty much the same results (pdf). Of the thousands of Internet users questioned, more than half admitted using file-sharing software regularly. In fact, 28% said they use it every day. Only 1% of the respondents saw downloading copyrighted files as criminal behavior, while 43% said that the development of P2P networks should be promoted.

The results of these two reports clearly show that public opinion is changing in favor of P2P users. So how did this happen? Could it be that the Internet has changed the way we interact with digital media? Unlike 10 years ago, people are now used to unlimited access to all kinds of information, much of it thanks to Google. The Internet allows people to access an unlimited library of information, and at an increasing rate people demand the same experience for TV, music and other forms of digital information, as the studies show.

Meanwhile, entertainment industry lobbyists do all they can to get tougher copyright laws in place, and to get repeated copyright infringers disconnected by their ISPs. They argue that filesharing is hurting content creators, even though research indicates that the opposite might actually be true. So what’s going on here? Could it be that the bosses at the record labels and movie companies are trying to slow down innovation simply because they want to preserve their old business models?

The people who actually create the movies and music want their content to be shared, only the large corporations behind it are too afraid to move on. Lobby groups such as the MPAA and the RIAA represent the distributors of movies and music, NOT the creators. They even pay politicians to support their cause by voting for or against laws so that legislation is made with their interests in mind. Is that moral? When some of the most successful musicians start their own lobby group to take on the record labels for their alleged extortion practices, there’s clearly something wrong.

So should sharing copyrighted material be legalized? Not per se, but the entertainment industry should focus on monetizing filesharing networks instead of bringing them down. The Internet has drastically changed the way people consume music and other forms of entertainment. Every piece of information is only a few clicks away, and people demand the same for their music and other types of media. There are no boundaries anymore. 15 years ago it was unthinkable that someone could have access to millions of songs, on demand. Now, this has become reality, but the music industry is still hesitant to offer such a service.

The answer really is to compete with piracy. Right now most of the online music services don’t offer a very good experience or are simply too expensive. Most of them still include some form of DRM, no unlimited access, or a limited library. “All you can eat” plans are the future though, either for a small fee or ad supported. If it’s done right, the motivation to download something illegally will simply disappear, at least for the majority of the people. This aside, it is likely to generate more revenue for the artist and labels. Everybody wins.

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