When asked about the purpose of the memo in 2006, party spokesperson Peter Eriksson said: “Our aim is to make laws in line with the new technologies. The other option is to pretend that you can go on like you always have, although it’s practically impossible. Reality has changed.”

One of the driving forces behind the recent “I Wouldn’t Steal” campaign from the European Green parties was the Swedish politician Carl Schlyter, and his initiative seems to have spurred others in the party to join the debate. Earlier this week, an editorial was published in two local Swedish newspapers. It was titled “Filesharing is not theft” and was written by Akko Karlsson, member of the Swedish Green Party’s executive board.

In the editorial, Akko argued that filesharing can’t be compared to theft, as theft is when someone takes away the possibility for another person to use something, whereas filesharing only creates a new copy without erasing the original.

“For me, this is a generation issue,” said Akko Karlsson when TorrentFreak asked her why she decided to write the editorial. “You should always endorse the new technologies’ possibilities.”

In her editorial, Akko criticizes the entertainment industry’s failing to enter the information age with working business models:

“You could argue that filesharing hinders some people from earning as much money as they would have if filesharing was not possible. But now it is possible, the technology is there, and then the industry needs to find new ways of handling it. They’ve had the chance to work on new ways for 10 years but haven’t come up with much else than silly trailers that say filesharing is theft. [...] When new technology emerges, it’s not necessarily it that must be adapted to the old ways. Sometimes, the industry itself must adapt.”

Akko further told TorrentFreak that she’s convinced that filesharing, copyright and integrity will be important issues for Green Party in the 2009 elections for the European Parliament and the 2010 elections in Sweden.

“Because there is also the democratic aspect of this,” she says, “There are so many people under repressive regimes for whom filesharing and the Internet is the link to the rest of the world that inspires, gives hope and makes it endurable to fight for human rights and democracy. The state’s control system is expanding. We used to heavily criticize the intrusions of privacy and control systems in place behind the Iron Curtain, but now we are building this ourselves.”

In Swedish old media, there’s currently a heated argument against filesharing, with novelists like Liza Marklund and Jan Guillou using every inch of their weekly columns in Swedish newspapers to lobby for tougher measures. With the trial against The Pirate Bay coming up, the debate has sunk even deeper in the trenches. In this climate, for politicians to step up to the plate with sound arguments why filesharing should be legalized seems like a bold move.

But Akko Karlsson is not alone.

On January 31, an editorial was published in Gothenburg’s daily newspaper. It was written by Green Party’s Lage Rahm, member of Parliament, party spokesperson on IT issues and substitute member on The Committee on Industry and Trade. On the subject of the ongoing case against The Pirate Bay, he called for reason when it comes to impose tougher measures on filesharing:

“Not only is the struggle [to end illegal filesharing] doomed to fail, it also creates a risk that filesharing on the Internet becomes anonymized and encrypted. An increased availability of untraceable networks will make it harder to fight organized crime.”

As an example, Lage Rahm put forward the bust of a pedophile ring with more than 700 suspects in 33 countries last year. This was done by tracking chatrooms, downloaded photos and e-mail.

“Most people realize that the police and copyright interest groups are fighting against windmills. [...] Convicting sentences against The Pirate Bay would have merely marginal effects on the scope of illegal filesharing. More severe is that the hunt will lead to an increased interest for absolute anonymity among Sweden’s approximately 1 million filesharers. Their activity will move to untraceable darknets.”

He focused on the dangers of Internet communities going underground and concluded:

“New technologies mean we as legislators are faced with an entirely new reality. Tougher measures against filesharing means risking the police’s possibilities of fighting child pornography and organized crime. It is worrying that the Minister of Justice doesn’t seem to realize this. For The Green Party, this is one of the main arguments of legalizing non-commercial downloading. [...] The Minister of Justice should leave to the industry to clear up the mess they have made for themselves. Judicial resources should be diverted to fight severe online criminality instead of hunting filesharing sixteen-year-olds.”

So, what does this all mean for the European filesharer? Well, one thing is sure, political parties that actually have power are taking a pro-filesharing stance. A sign that things are moving forward, slowly, but in the right direction.

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

The Swedish police are doing an exhibition about online crime, and somehow thought that it was a good idea to include The Pirate Bay. Strange, because the Pirate Bay case hasn’t even gone to court yet. Nevertheless, the police decided to put them on display anyway, together with convicted pedophiles and cyber-criminals.

Brokep, one of the founders of the popular BitTorrent tracker couldn’t believe it when he read the news: “There’s no trial. No conviction. TPB has done nothing wrong. And still, the police think it’s OK to show off the site together with convicted pedophiles and other nasty scum. And without asking permission from anyone involved with the site,” he writes on his weblog. Brokep decided to contact the organizers of the exhibition, who admitted that they were wrong, and immediately removed all material about The Pirate Bay.

This is not the first time Brokep has fired back at the Swedish authorities, and certainly not the first time they’ve made a mistake, as Brokep sums up at least 10 other “mistakes” in his blog post.

A few months ago we wrote about the alleged conspiracy against The Pirate Bay. One of the Bay’s biggest enemies seems to be Bodström, Minister of Justice in Sweden. He is the person who was held responsible for the Pirate Bay raid last year, after the US gently pressured him into taking action.

This is probably not the last clash The Pirate Bay will have with the Swedish authorities, but let’s hope they will at least obey the law next time, and not judge people before they are actually convicted of a crime. Questions will surely be raised about the negative effect these type of actions are having on The Pirate Bay crew’s chances for a fair trial. Stay tuned…

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

Happy New Year!

The quotes…

The MPAA after they were caught infringing the copyright of Patrick Robin’s blogging software “Forest Blog”:

“The blog was only ever used for testing purposes.”

BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin on iTunes DRM:

“iTunes DRM Inspires People to Pirate Content.”

The Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm about his favorite anti-piracy organization:

“The MPAA can most accurately be described as rabid, obsessed lunatics.”

Mediadefender CEO Randy Saaf when we found out about Miivi:

“This is really fucked.”

Mark Cuban to Bram Cohen, in a rant about the new BitTorrent movie store:

“But where are they ? Not just the customers Bram. The content? I searched for Prison Break. Lots of torrents. None of them Legal. Is this what Fox had in mind when they signed up with you?”

President Basescu (Romanian President) on copyright infringement:

“Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world … Ten years ago, it was an investment in Romania’s friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.”

Shaw, Canadian ISP gives advise on how to configure BitTorrent:

“Set the KB/s LAN max upload speed [0:unlimited] value to 1.”

MPAA’s Dean Garfield about Pirate Party politicians:

“There’s nothing about what the Pirate Bay does or what the Pirate Party does that is legitimate.”

P2P virus to its victims:

“Ah, I see you are using P2P again……if you don’t stop within 0.5 seconds, i’m going to kill you!”

Scener about Feds that try to stop the Scene:

“No matter how hard the Feds try to stop the scene there are always people smarter than them out there. What they should be doing is leaving us to it and catching pedophiles, rapists and psychopathic killers rather than wasting resources on a few geeks.”

The Pirate Bay about the Caribbean pirate Jack Sparrow:

“Hollywood is trying to ridicule us pirates by portraying us as crazy but sympathetic adventurers. Not far from the truth, but in the 21st century real pirates are riding other torrents than that of the ocean”

BitTorrent admin about Leaseweb:

“It looks like we’re not going to be very safe anymore on Leaseweb, we are putting backups in place on another location, just in case.”

Demonoid explains why they were offline for almost a week, and moved from The Netherlands to Canada:

“We had a system problem which will force us to restore everything from backup. The disks are pretty much empty right now and until we are able to upload the backup and set up everything up, we have to close down.”

IsoHunt’s Gary to Brokep from The Pirate Bay:

“You are either illiterate and don’t check the frontpage of sites you are pointing fingers at, or you are a communist. Or both. What makes you think you have rights to content you didn’t produce? People’s rights vs. copyright holders’ rights? Please. I will laugh at you when you are marked a terrorist and US armies hunt you down. Not that I like the whole anti-terrorist thing from the US but I digress.”

Marnie stern about her BitTorrent addiction:

“Since I’ve been here I have downloaded…I mean I feel I’m going to jail, well, I discovered the torrent, but I feel I’ve downloaded, I would say, honestly 40 or 50 movies, which I hear isn’t that bad, you know, for jail. But I mean, because I’ve pretty much been staying in the studio and a little bit with Zach [Hill], I have all of this time to just sit….”

MPA to “Christmas” movie Pirates:

“We can say this to all the pirates out there: you’d better watch out, you’d better not try”

Pirate Bay admin Brokep on US politics:

“The US government is losing popularity every day in Europe, and people don’t want to see us give in to them.”

NiN’s Trent Reznor about OiNK after it was raided:

“I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted.”

TorrentSpy’s Justing Bunnel on the power of the entertainment industry:

“Unfortunately many companies use their power and influence to halt and punish innovations they cannot think of ways to make money with. The monopolies tried to stop the VHS, DVD, and MP3 player, but thankfully failed when they took it to Court. Now Imagine for a second all the amazing products they did manage to squash…”

Dave Peters, frontman of “Throwdown” on supporting musicians:

“If you wanna really support a band, “steal” their album….help bury the label….and buy a tshirt when you show up at their show and sing every word.”

“A former music buyer writes to the CRIA:

“The music industry itself needs to recognize that they are to blame for sagging record sales. For years, they have been marketing recycled crap, and people are getting tired of it.”

Comcast to its customers:

“Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent.”

(but we do slow it down)

Researchers on the effect of filesharing on CD sales:

“We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.”

Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the Canadian police on piracy:

“Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted. It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it,” he added.

TorrentFreak council in an open letter to the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN:

“Your “news release” is peppered with inaccurate information, calculated to mislead and intimidate the millions of legitimate users of the many peer-to-peer filesharing services that are in common use throughout the world.”

50 Cent on filesharing:

“What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.”

Eric Wilkinson, the producer of the independent film “The Man from Earth”, wrote an email to RLSlog in which he thanks them for the free promotion they gave him:

“In the future, I will not complain about file sharing. When I make my next picture, I just may upload the movie on the net myself!”

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

Recently, TorrentFreak published a translation of an interview between a journalist and a member of the German warez Scene. Although the article was well received, it generated quite a lot of controversy. Some readers felt that the questions should’ve probed deeper, others that the responses could’ve been more informative. Some questioned how much the Scener really knew while others even questioned his authenticity. At TorrentFreak we try to write interesting articles but we also listen to our readers when you say you want to see something.

To that end, we conducted our own interview with an established ‘Scener’ – and we asked him those questions we believe our readers would’ve asked him.

The Interview

There are many ideas of what ‘The Scene’ is. Some people say it’s a place, others say it’s a collection of people, some say it’s a combination of both. Can you tell us about your definition of ‘The Scene’, how it operates and the kind of people involved?

For me like many others it’s a place to go and chill with your friends, not unlike the current craze of social networking. It also represents the core fundamentals of the internet – the net should be free – and not governed. If I had to put a location or a name for the scene I would say its a haven for Geeks (sometimes arrogant with their extreme talent), enthusiasts, people who need to feel part of something and people who like a challenge and like to be kept on their toes. I suppose its full of criminals but not in the true sense of the word. What I mean by this is people who like a challenge, who get a buzz or a hit from breaking these so called laws, being hunted by and keeping one step ahead of authority. It’s also a place where the `Geek` rules all. He is not frightened by the big guy who plays football, the boxer down the road or the bullies at school because he knows he has the power to take the access away. Once you have been given access and trust, to have it taken away can be devastating for some. Same as money I guess – I suppose it’s all about power.

Some people believe that the ‘true’ Scene has its roots many years in the past. When did you become aware of its existence, how long after this did you become a member and what were the events that lead up to your joining?

The `true` scene goes back to the early 80’s, some think it goes beyond that. Unfortunately the groups of old have all grown up, had kids and now have nice jobs at the companies they used to pirate !!!!! (ironic or what?). In relative terms I could be called a newbie Scener, having only been in it a little over 10 years. My scene started with some hacking and infiltration which led me to meet some people, who in turn put me into the scene. Once I was involved I gave up hacking and cracking as it is generally frowned upon in the `true scene`, plus you don’t want to get caught for something stupid if you are doing bigger and badder things !!!

The Scene is viewed by many as almost mythical, only for the chosen few. What were your first impressions and experiences of being involved and how did they compare to your preconceptions?

The scene can be seen as a magical place where a lot of information is available and you get consumed by the amount of stuff you can lay your hands on. It can also be a dark place with a lot of people ready to screw you over for some access to somewhere or someone or starting a rumor simply because they don’t like you. This can be damaging. You see a lot of Release groups doing this to make the other group look bad and in my opinion, it’s pointless but thats just my opinion! My first impression of the scene was an overwhelming desire to download the entire internet! I suppose for me, who didn’t have a lot growing up, I felt I had hit the jackpot but as you soon realize, nothing comes for free.

How long was it before you felt you’d gained the trust of the other members and how did this manifest itself?

Personally I don’t trust anyone. You can only ever rely on yourself in the scene and in real life. It’s more true in the scene because no-one has any honor for so called friends (they will all sell you out to save their own skin) so the best bet is to protect yourself in anyway possible, so they never have information about you they can use for whatever they may need.

Being involved in the Scene in certain countries can lead to your arrest. Were you briefed about security before making contact with the servers and if so, what measures were you advised to take?

I always knew the risks when I entered the scene. I had a shady life growing up being dodgy and wheeling and dealing, so I suppose it came naturally to me to be alert and paranoid. For me it was natural evolution to take crime from the streets to the world of computers and the internet. I was already fairly versed in security from my exploiting days so I just researched the new protocols a bit more and took some steps to ensure i was more protected. I switched from Windows based computers to Unix, encrypted everything on every piece of hardware, turned off all logging, changed my irc/email frequently, always connected through proxies when checking email and used dynamic IP addresses as much as possible. For instance, to boot up and logon to my main computer you need 10 different passwords to get through the various layers of encryption and security I have in place and no-one on earth is going to break those!

I feel quite secure and at the touch of a command I can format the whole lot and write zero’s to the data drives so no-one can ever retrieve data from them. A lot of `topsites` are like this (maybe not as paranoid as me – but thats what has kept me from prison or the hint of it), but they certainly are clever and paranoid about getting caught.

Without warez release groups, the Scene would have little content to offer. Did you ever hold a position in a group, what did that entail and how did it affect your standing in the group and the Scene as a whole?

I did and still do hold a position in one of the top groups in the scene obviously naming it is stupid so I won’t! To be honest I don’t know if my fellow members would like or dislike this interview. Being an affiliate (a release group) certainly ups your standing in the scene but a lot of my friends in the scene don’t know who i am affiliated with or what groups I work with/for. It’s better this way.

Most people are aware that Scene access means easy access to warez. What range of material is available, who supplies it and where does it come from?

There are so many releases in the scene, maybe 2000 a day ranging from games, movies, TV shows, mp3, anime, dvd, music videos, wii, xbox, xbox360, ps3, pda, psp, docs, ebooks, comics and every type of porn you can imagine! All of these are available in pretty much any language or subs are available.

The stuff comes from anywhere people can get their hands on it. Most of the pre-release stuff will come from a silver or a screening of a film, the TV shows are usually `capped` from an HDTV station or a DSR link. The TV series as a DVDrip will probably be bought from a shop or ebay, then ripped into whatever format that group releases in. They will then sell the original DVD at say a flea market or ebay or something or take it back to the shop to trade for the next release or a refund.

Can you tell us about the structure of the Scene, it’s hierarchy, expected etiquette and the politics involved?

There isn’t really a hierarchy in the scene. There is a council for releasing standards kind of like the w3c a list of people or groups who all virtually sign a document saying “this is how we should release a film or whatever” it describes codec types, packing methods, what the nfo should state, what languages are allowed and how it should be tagged. The people who write these so called guidelines are generally considered to be the best at what they do, i.e if you looked at the game release guidelines then the best game crackers would be writing the guides between them, and agreeing. Next is the part that makes me laugh – if your release doesn’t adhere to these guides or say its slightly out of synch or has missing info or whatever you get whats called a `Nuke` – which is like a bad merit and states the release shouldn’t be downloaded as it’s basically crap. While I agree with this in principle what is strange to me is this; the scene is around because of people’s disregard for laws and antiestablishmentarianism, yet they have a set of rules to govern it! Madness!!

Some of these `Nukes` are bullshit nukes, i.e nothing wrong with the release, just some group having a war or some kiddie with nuke access being a dick, so I rarely take notice of them. There are a hell of a lot of politics in the Scene, mostly due to paranoia. For instance, if you use P2P or use or even help torrents, you will get banned. On some sites if you don’t use a bouncer to hide your address you’ll get banned and so on and so on.

In recent years there appeared to be a conflict between members of the Scene and certain elements of the BitTorrent community, especially certain trackers who offer Scene-releases just a few minutes after the Topsites do. What are your thoughts on P2P and BitTorrent releasers such as aXXo?

Personally I don’t like P2P/BitTorrent as it gives unwanted press to a small scene and it makes piracy real in the eyes of the law. My personal view is “so what?” if a few geeky kids want to swap a few movies and a few applications around, they probably don’t have the money to buy them anyway. With stuff like operating systems – Microsoft for example, it’s so buggy that who in their right mind would want to pay for it? I mean, would you pay for a dud microwave? I know I wouldn’t.

I think if the torrent / p2p community was locked down a bit more and they had to do work to get the releases it would stop a lot of this warring. For me, I work hard to be in the scene and I feel my downloads are justified by the work I do on the releases my group makes. But P2P doesn’t have to do that work because it is already done – but thats just my view. I don’t think that P2P or torrents will ever stop getting it’s releases from the Scene, so I feel the war is pointless. In my opinion, if a known torrent group is operating , the topsites should (and do) make a group ban on that particular group, but not all sites adhere to this – due to no-one actually knowing how many sites there really are in the world.

Most file-sharers don’t hear accurate information about the Scene because good sources are few and far between. Do you have anything further to tell us about this fascinating subject?

No matter how hard the Feds try to stop the scene there are always people smarter than them out there. What they should be doing is leaving us to it and catching pedophiles, rapists and psychopathic killers rather than wasting resources on a few geeks.

The scene spreads deep into businesses, software houses, record companies, cinema owners, application houses and websites and I think once you start to uncover it, it starts to become a big tangled mess (same as the internet really!). As it evolves – as all things do – i’m sure that it will become more secure and disappear deeper into the underground.

Do you have one final message for our readers?

Yes! About people who sell the warez that we release; This is WRONG and should never be done!

Thank you for taking the time to speak to TorrentFreak. Stay safe.

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

Not long ago the BBC said that BitTorrent aids terrorists and pedophiles, but the Hindustan Times obviously doesn’t agree. BitTorrent gives you freedom! A quote from the article:

If you have a BitTorrent client installed on your PC, you basically know what this is about. And if you dont have a client, then it’s time to be zapped. Bit torrent gives you freedom. You no longer pay for the music, movies, TV Series, books, software and games that you download. Interested? Just Google “Bit Torrent” and figure it out. Once you got it, here’s what you should download…

Don’t believe it? Check out this scanned version of the article.

At this moment India already has a higher percentage of BitTorrent users than the US and the UK, and this article might give it a little boost.

The Hindustan Times (via)

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

Today, legal implementations of BitTorrent are not new anymore. The BBC, Sky and NTL are using BitTorrent to spread movies and TV-shows. The MPAA signed an agreement with BitTorrent to fight “illegal” filesharing. Allpeers, a BitTorrent extension for the popular browser Firefox just received a huge sum of money. BitTorrent inc. is even opening its own online video store.

The legal opportunities are endless. People might want to focus on that instead of blaming a tool for things that might be illegal somewhere.

Like Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, an OECD economist in its IT division states

“Peer-to-peer technology will be among the essential components of everyday communication … chilling its legal use is like being against the steam engine in the 19th century,” said .

Even Adrian Strain, a spokesman for the music industry’s lobbying group, the IFPI said

“Everyone agrees that P2P is a fantastic technology but we will have to see whether it can be successfully converted into a legitimate and commercially viable business model,”.

So stop suing and get to work!

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

The edition of Newsnight in question led to a lot of critique, and today Adam Livingstone Newsnight’s Ubergeek tried to calm things down and made a public apology.

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We’re very, very sorry.

Good to hear some wise words after all

Link to torrent (non terrorists only)

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