He rose to fame in the wider BitTorrent community when in early 2008 a Danish court ordered the ISP Tele2 to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay.

In response, the Pirate Bay team created a site in his name, TheJesperBay, which contained information and code allowing Tele2 users to evade the block.

Not only did Bay have a site named after him, Copenhagen’s ‘Pirate Cinema‘ even briefly changed their name in his honor.

But after many cat and mouse games with his opponents, Jesper Bay has just announced he will quit as IFPI Denmark’s director and spokesman at the end of January.

“I’ve been here six and a half years and think that maybe it’s time to try something else,” he told Computerworld.

Although Bay’s job has been very demanding with an understandably high workload and lots of pressure, he says that’s not the reason for his departure – he just feels he’s been in the position long enough. Bay admits that at times, things have been tough.

“Sometimes it may have been frustrating to be in a role where you know you have right on your side, but it is very difficult to penetrate with the message, because there are so many other interests at stake in the ongoing debate,” he conceded.

Bay went on to criticize the media’s coverage of the battle between online pirates and the recording industry.

“We are continuing to experience relatively sensible people at relatively reasonable media outlets, writing completely what suits them. And very often very poorly researched,” he said.

Noting that the issue of piracy and copyright is a hot one at the moment, largely due to the fact that there is so much at stake for the many parties involved, he accepts that while the industry has not won the war, they have won several battles.

Conceding in late 2008 that Denmark would not see the introduction of “3 strikes” for music file-sharers must have been one of the more bitter pills to swallow.

Bay explained that part of his job has been to refine the debate surrounding these issues, and extend it beyond combating piracy to include discussion of new business models and the way forward in a digital world.

But despite his upcoming departure, Bay says he has nothing lined up and will just take some time off to assess his future. He insists, however, that he has not received a better offer of employment from the pirates.

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

Despite this, there will also be labels that perform badly for unrelated reasons. How convenient is it then, to blame evil file-sharers for your disappointing results. The Finnish hard rock label Lion Music is doing just that, with rather dramatic consequences.

Because of all the stealing and looting by Internet pirates, the label has decided not to sign any new acts until politicians have found a remedy.

“We are NOT able to sign more artists. No demos or masters you send us will be considered for release. We will NOT listen to any mp3 files or check out your websites and we will NOT respond to questions regarding releasing your album,” the label’s bosses write on their website.

“The illegal file sharing on the net is killing independent music. We are sorry about this situation but we are sure you are aware of what is going on,” the dramatic rant continues.

“Our demo policy will not change before our politicians have stopped the P2P sites. Illegal file sharing is not just about stealing from rich major companies. It is about killing independent music and making it impossible for many great musicians to have a chance to release albums and have a musical career even as a part time job.”

“Next time you consider downloading an album for free or adding new torrents please think of the impact you are having on the artists – would you like it if we came into your home and stole your pay check?”

The label’s bosses then go on to show various statistics of how many times the albums of their artists were pirated though an unnamed BitTorrent site, arguing that these downloads are responsible for their disappointing results.

To add to the drama the label has asked their musicians to write up their thoughts on piracy in a section called “The Murder of Music.”

One of the artists that penned up his thoughts on piracy is guitar hero Borislav Mitic. Mitic is just as gentle in his commentary as the label’s bosses.

“Just because you CAN download music for free today on the Internet doesn’t mean you SHOULD,” he writes. “You CAN also beat up an old lady on the street and steal her pension from her wallet … but somebody CAN beat you up too and do the same to you. Would you like this?”

According to Borislav, illegal downloading will lead to a “society of filthy, wild savages.” To those people who dare to continue stealing through BitTorrent sites he adds, “the blood will be on your hands…”

Those who have the courage to read the rest of the artist entries will be amazed at the hostile tone towards the readers, who they assume are pirates.

Don’t get us wrong. Despite research that points in the opposite direction, it could be that piracy is hurting the sales of Lion Music. But even if this was true, their way of bringing the message across is not going to help their cause, it will only alienate the fans.

A label taking completely the opposite stance, embracing both file-sharing and their fans, is Thorny Bleeder Records, who have just released the second volume of their free download series. Entitled Get Thorny 2, the album features new music from seventeen independent Canadian artists. (link to torrent on Mininova)

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

LokiTorrent

Born in early 2004, LokiTorrent grew from comparative humble beginnings, especially when compared to the mighty Suprnova. However, as a recipient of one of the growing number of cease and desist letters sent out by the MPAA, LokiTorrent found its fame.

In mid-December 2004, as the MPAA was yet to formally identify the site’s owner, a ‘John Doe’ lawsuit was filed against the operators of LokiTorrent. Rather than caving into the threats as other BitTorrent and eDonkey services already had, the site’s operator, the then 28 year-old Ed Webber (aka ‘Lowkee’), took a rather more aggressive stance.

Webber refused to comply with the MPAA’s demands, which went down an absolute storm with many in the BitTorrent community, who believed that their very existence was under threat. If Lowkee was prepared to fight, so were they. The battle lines were drawn.

This rallying of support reached fever pitch, with the site’s membership swelling to almost 700,000 users and Webber receiving donations in record time and in record amounts. Within a short period of time around $43,000 was collected to go to war with the MPAA.

Then something something suspicious came to light. Webber was trying to sell the LokiTorrent domain name on Sedo. The community was not pleased – in fact it went absolutely nuts.

Under huge pressure, on January 27th Webber made an announcement saying that he put the domain up for sale because he was curious as to its worth, noting that for $75k he’d sell it and simply move to a new domain. Selling the entire site, he said, would never happen. The Sedo listing suggested otherwise, with Webber offering the full source code and email addresses of the members.

So what about the donations thus far? Were they safe?

“As for the legal fund.. if I were going to run off, I would have already. That money is for the lawsuit, as stated. Only those who would run off with the money thought we would,” said Webber in an announcement.

Around two weeks later the site disappeared, replaced by the MPAA’s infamous ‘You Can Click But You Can’t Hide’ campaign artwork. None of the donated money was handed back and although the existence of a lawsuit was later confirmed, there was no fight.

Webber’s attorney, Charles S. Baker, said parts of LokiTorrent’s operations were defensible in court, particular since Webber had already offered to remove links to pirated movies. But it wasn’t to be.

According to court documents, Webber was eventually ordered to pay the MPAA $1m in damages and hand over all of the user data held on the LokiTorrent servers. There is no evidence he paid a cent. Webber also claimed that all of the donations were swallowed up by legal fees, few believed him, and it would be a long time before BitTorrent users dug deep again.

EliteTorrents

Despite the misery surrounding the LokiTorrent closure, other sites continued to blossom, although the emphasis switched to the relatively more underground scene of invitation-only trackers.

With around 130,000 members, EliteTorrents was one of the most prominent torrent sites in the growing, but still fairly undeveloped, private tracker scene. With its good staff and strong community, for many Elite was the site to be seen at.

On June 25th 2005, it all came crashing down in a huge and unprecedented fireball.

Despite many thousands of torrents being uploaded during the site’s lifetime, a single release – a pre-release version of Star Wars: Episode 3 – attracted the interest of the FBI, who shut down the site and arrested the admins and uploaders.

Several of them served substantial jail sentences, a punishment previously unheard of in BitTorrent history.

In 2006, Scott McCausland pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of criminal copyright infringement for his uploading of Star Wars: Episode III. He received jail time and home confinement.

Fellow site admin Grant Stanley, then aged 23, pleaded guilty to the same offenses as Scott and received the same sentence with the addition of a $3,000 fine. Other admins and uploaders who were found guilty included Sam Kuonen, then aged 24, 22 year old Scott D. Harvanek, An Duc Do, aged 25, and Daniel Dove.

Before the EliteTorrents shutdown, while many BitTorrent trackers were hosted in the United States most had been pressured to leave, largely due to MPAA pressure. Right up until the introduction of the Family Entertainment Act – the criminal legislation used to justify FBI involvement and shutter the site – action against torrent sites would have taken place in the civil domain. The law governing the distribution of pre-release movies changed that perception forever.

The aggressive action against both LokiTorrent and EliteTorrents ensured that no-one, especially a US citizen, would ever openly place a big movie BitTorrent tracker on US soil again. Only search engines such as isoHunt and TorrentSpy would dare to stay, but eventually, even they would have to leave.

While United States-based BitTorrent trackers had plenty of drama in 2005, during the next two years Europe would become the next theater in the ever-increasing war on copyright infringement.

More dramatic shutdowns will follow later this week in Part 2

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

Those who take a few minutes to browse through the site will discover all kinds of other neat features. One of the latest additions to the site is the option to download files directly, through partner site httpTorrents.

The integration with httpTorrents gives users the option to download the files directly without having to use a BitTorrent client. Music tracks can also be streamed directly from the site itself. The service works in a similar way to most other files hosting services such as Rapidshare, but only works with torrents and doesn’t allow users to upload files themselves.

The owner of the site told TorrentFreak that direct http downloads may be useful to users who have restricted access to BitTorrent, such as those whose ISP or firewall blocks or slows down transfers. There are currently 4000 files available as a direct download, but this number is growing rapidly.

KickassTorrents’ users can submit a request for files that are not yet available as direct downloads. “If someone clicks on the http download button at KickassTorrents and the file is not available yet, it places it in the request queue at httpTorrents. Only popular torrents are downloaded during the beta stage,” TorrentFreak was told by the site’s owner.

“KickassTorrents and httpTorrents are not directly connected. However we use their API to get hashes of the torrents available for the direct download,” the owner said, adding that if the beta tests are successful this API will also be available to other torrent sites.

Everyone can use httpTorrents, but in the future the download speed and number of simultaneous downloads will be limited for free users. Those who want to use it more than occasionally will have the option to sign up for a premium account without restrictions.

Since the service is actually hosting files (on an external CDN) it might run into complaints from copyright holders. The owner of the site told TorrentFreak that he’s not too worried about the legal implications, and hopes that a takedown policy will prevent the site from running into trouble.

It will be interesting to see how the service develops in the future, and we will definitely be keeping a close eye on it. Although direct downloads may be preferred in some cases, for those looking for (free) high speed downloads, BitTorrent probably remains the best solution.

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

Just over a month has passed since the first stable public release of the software and PeerBlock has now managed to clock up more than 100,000 downloads. To mark this milestone, TorrentFreak caught up with Mark from the project for the lowdown.

Mark told us that the creation of PeerBlock was inspired by him upgrading his PC from 32 to 64 bit in order to utilize 6gb of RAM. Everything worked fine – until he tried to get PeerGuardian (another IP blocker) to work.

Having hacked away and jumped through hoops to get around driver-signing it would still only work half the time and often crashed without warning. As a software engineer who has worked in the commercial sector for more than 13 years, Mark – who admits to being “an arrogant bastard who truly believes he can do just about anything better than just about anybody,” decided he could find a solution. It was “put up or shut up time,” he told TorrentFreak.

Noticing that the PeerGuardian code was open-source but hadn’t been touched for a couple of years, Mark contacted another developer who had the same thing in mind, but having heard nothing back, he went at it alone.

“I started setting up a Sourceforge.net project for it so we could get free source-control, but they took too long to set it up for me so I instead created a project over at Google Code where it was ready within minutes,” he told us.

Having heard from a few people who were interested in helping out with the development side – “night_stalker_z” who’d earlier started trying to hack the PG2 code into shape, “DarC” / “DisCoStu” who wanted to help out with fixing up the installer, XhmikosR who rewrote the installer, and some testers, things moved forward.

After facing troubles due to the lack of a “signed driver” for 64-bit versions of Vista (which resulted in Mark having to set up a registered company before they were allowed to buy a $230 code-signing certificate), a couple of blogs wrote articles on PeerBlock which attracted some much-needed publicity to the project. This resulted in 10,000 downloads in just one weekend.

“We’re still getting donations from people and we now have enough to pay for next year’s annual code-signing certificate, and we’re saving up to be able to rent our own VPS with full root access etc, upon which we’ll be able to build a ‘real’ online-update system, a custom web-app to tie our forums/issue-tracker/website all together, and some other neat things,” Mark explains.

The first stable release of PeerBlock came out on September 27th, and as of November 5th had clocked up an impressive 100,000 downloads. The site now receives up to 7,000 visitors each day.

Aside from fixing one or two bugs, the team has lots of new features planned for PeerBlock. Anyone that has tried to surf the web with a blocklist in place will know how painful that can be, so PeerBlock will have some new features which allow the “whitelisting” of certain apps, such as a browser, the creation of a proxy server to let users configure PeerBlock to listen on certain ports, possibly an integral “AdMuncher” style ad-blocking feature on a per URL basis (as opposed to just an IP-address), and an encrypted chat feature.

TorrentFreak asked Mark why users should choose PeerBlock over the competition.

“Well, first off we need to ask ‘Who IS the competition?’ The only ones I’m really aware of are: Protowall by the folks over at Bluetack which is closed-source and I don’t believe was ever updated for Vista, and Outpost Firewall, which is closed-source and basically just a hack add-on to a more professional firewall product,” he responded, while noting that uTorrent’s built-in IP-filtering feature only handles one manually-updated list.

“We protect your entire machine, and give you the option to try out any P2P app you want – this freedom of choice is a very important thing, I think. And since it does everything automatically, including list-updates, it’s one less thing to think about,” he added.

Another important question relates to the blocklists that have to be used in conjunction with PeerBlock in order for it to block anything.

He told TorrentFreak that he’s a big fan of iblocklist, who serve up a staggering 10TB of blocklists every month for free. The site doesn’t create the lists, but does offer those from Bluetack, including the Level1 list (renamed to ‘P2P’ in PG2/PeerBlock, which contains both Gov and Anti-P2P IP-addresses) and others.

Mark admits that even in a best case scenario, the available blocklists aren’t 100% effective. That said, there have been studies which show that using blocklists along with software such as PeerBlock can help speed up downloads, but no-one knows how many of the potential “bad IPs” are covered by currently available blocklists.

P2P aside, Mark says there has been feedback to suggest that PeerBlock discovered a Conficker infection on a user’s machine that their anti-virus programs missed, and can also stop ads appearing in browsers that lack in-built blocking.

One other exciting thing for the future of PeerBlock is porting it to the Mac. Mark says they’re saving all the donations for additional development and this is the most-requested request right now.

Users of PeerBlock are encouraged to give as much feedback as possible to Mark’s team, via their forums, IRC (#peerblock on freenode.net) or email.

PeerBlock can be downloaded here.

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

Continuing first from yesterday’s proceedings, ITnews reported an exchange between iiNet CEO Michael Malone and movie industry barrister Tony Bannon, over Malone’s understanding of BitTorrent.

Malone told the court that while he had an understanding of the protocol, he had never used uTorrent, the client used earlier by Bannon to give the court a technical demonstration. Bannon’s demo used iiNet’s own tracker (an installation of RivetTracker) which it has used to distributed several press releases which all relate to the trial.

It is difficult to see where Bannon was going with his questioning, but it began with an admittance by Malone that the torrent files were intended to be used by people with access to a BitTorrent client. Malone then denied that the releases were specifically targeted at iiNet customers, noting that anyone can access them

Under further questioning regarding the inclusion of a note in the torrent files dialogue box indicating the files were non-pirated, Malone reiterated that while he had an understanding of the BitTorrent protocol, he did not have experience of the client used by Bannon

Then, with an apparent deafness towards Malone’s perfectly clear response, and demonstrating an apparent ignorance between a BitTorrent client and the BitTorrent protocol, Bannon sought to press Malone into admitting to his 400,000 customers that he didn’t understand BitTorrent.

Again, Malone stated that he didn’t know how to put a comment on a torrent file, but Bannon persisted in trying to get Malone to admit that he knows how uTorrent 1.8.4 works, but Malone said he’d never used it. There could, however, be people in iiNet who had, he conceded.

Bannon then said that in the last 24 hours the torrent file functionality for the press releases had been removed. Malone said that if it had, he certainly hadn’t requested it, asking Bannon how he was attempting to access the Internet, suggesting that a firewall in the court was stopping the transfer.

TorrentFreak’s checks show a single seeder on each torrent and each one worked absolutely perfectly.

Moving on to iiNet’s handling of copyright infringement allegations, iTWire reports that Bannon tried to paint a picture that iiNet’s policy of forwarding AFACT notices to the police was little more than a cynical attempt to pretend that they were dealing with them, when in fact they were not.

For the umpteenth time in this case, Malone said that he was under no obligation to act on mere allegations from AFACT which were not backed up by a court order.

“AFACT was telling us to disconnect customers without further ado,” said Malone. “The question is, what should we do when confronted with illegal activity? And our response is, report it to the proper authorities.”

While iiNet said it had always been policy to forward the notices to the police, ITWire notes that evidence emerged that the company had sent notifications twice, although there was no indication of how many infringement notices were in each batch.

Yesterday Malone said that the evidence provided by tracking company DtecNet’s investigation was “compelling” and should be reviewed by a third party and the courts. In the face of this statement, Bannon asked Malone why he had not taken action based on AFACT’s allegations.

“This is a right,” said Malone, “not an obligation of iiNet.”

These days arguments in favor of anti-piracy action seem almost incomplete with the obligatory reference to child pornography, as we heard in yesterday’s propaganda piece from CBS. This case is no different.

Bannon put it to Malone that if the evidence provided was “compelling” and Malone had received “compelling evidence” that an iiNet customer was accessing child porn, would the company allow the user to do so “day after day?”

Of course, any allegations of this nature would involve the police, and the police or the courts would do the investigation, get the proper paperwork and order iiNet to comply, which they naturally would. Malone said that on mere AFACT allegations of civil infringement (as apposed to an infinitely more serious and jailable criminal offense), such action would not be permitted.

Bannone then pressured Malone to admit that “…you’re happy to tell your customers this from the witness box,” that iiNet will not disconnect subscribers for infringing copyright.

At this point one has to wonder if Bannon is deaf or just plain stubborn. It is absolutely crystal clear to anyone following these proceedings that yes, iiNet will disconnect customers for copyright infringement, providing there has been due process and a court has ruled that disconnection is appropriate.

The case continues tomorrow.

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

Previously the international music industry has taken legal action to order various ISPs in several countries to block The Pirate Bay, but to our knowledge none have offered to help block BitTorrent sites voluntarily – until now.

Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse which operates the ISP TalkTalk, said the company would introduce a cinema-style ratings system for web content.

Aside from the self-explanatory 18 rating, there will be two others. Parents setting their connection to U and 14 will trigger a pornography and gambling filter, but they will also have the power to ban file-sharing and BitTorrent sites too.

“This is something that we are going to do anyway, as a service to our customers,” Dunstone told FT. “But through doing it we can also help the content industry by blacklisting sites that have BitTorrent files on them,” he added.

It’s not difficult to see how a system like this might prove attractive to the music industry if used in conjunction with the proposed “3 strikes” mechanism. Customers receiving an industry warning after their account is flagged as sharing illicit files could then have the immediate option to switch on this ISP-level firewall to thwart their kids.

But like all ’solutions’, for the tech-savvy they’re just another problem to be solved.

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

Just a few short months ago, Ernesto and I were toiling for hours and hours every day, neglecting our regular jobs (yes, we’re only part-timers on TorrentFreak and FreakBits) to ensure that our readers had every conceivable detail of the Spectrial, every nugget of information from every source we could find.

No translation was too much trouble, no mountain of RSS too time consuming and no live feed in a foreign language too daunting to decrypt, in order for us to bring the facts of this important case to the world.

On the whole, people were happy that we did so. But things have changed.

The outcome of the Spectrial was open – the defendants could’ve walked away free men, or, as we were all soon to learn, be punished far beyond what any of us expected. Nevertheless, throughout there was hope for a victory – a triumph for the file-sharing masses, a beacon of encouragement for the millions of BitTorrent users.

Because of these hopes and optimism, no-one minded the wall to wall blanket coverage and few complained that every movement of the trial was relayed in high detail.

But now I sense that even amongst the faithful, the hope has gone. People are resigned to the likely reality that rather than the proposed purchase by Global Gaming Factory signaling a new dawn for the site, it really signals the end of The Pirate Bay. Why would anyone from the community enthusiastically read about that?

Rather than being greeted as the savior of the world’s largest tracker, GGF are increasingly seen as an irrelevance. If you believe all the hype, they will soon buy and “legalize” the site, part the oceans, turn lead into gold, feed the users and the music and movie industries, and line their shareholders’ pockets, all with the BitTorrent equivalent of five loaves and two fishes.

Unfortunately for GGF, on the whole the BitTorrent community either doesn’t believe them or in increasingly large numbers, simply couldn’t give a damn.

Whatever GGF does with The Pirate Bay is open to speculation (god, please, no more you say…) but let’s face it – it aint gonna be The Pirate Bay that we know any longer. If anything it will be a largely unrecognizable site whose owners are in bed with the entertainment industries – the very people that have been trying to kill the site for all these years. The same opposition that, on the whole, has united the masses in support for The Pirate Bay.

No longer will people be able to go to the GGF Bay to download yesterday’s TV show or the latest cam of a Hollywood movie. No more will people be able to download the frankly mind-boggling array of other media indexed by the world’s largest tracker or just about any song they fancy – i’ll stake my (ever dwindling) pension on it. Things will have to change, drastically, and that’s the last thing the current users want.

And this is why I believe people have lost interest. Whatever GGF have up their wizard’s sleeve and no matter the magic promised to spurt forth from Hans Pandeya’s wand after the 27th, we aren’t talking about The Pirate Bay any more, merely its domain name. We certainly aren’t talking about The Pirate Bay mentality and definitely not its spirit.

No Gottfrid, no Fredrik, no Peter. No fun publicity stunts.

No flipping the bird to the **AAs – everyone has to be on their best behavior now. Forget anarchy – stand in line nicely and do as you’re told, a lot of money rests on the success of this project and there must be order for the shareholders. Things have to make financial sense now, with all the fun that entails.

The only thing that will remain are the legal threats, and I can’t imagine GGF handling those in the traditional Pirate Bay way – can you?

But yesterday, when I started writing this little opinion piece, something happened. Yet another Pirate Bay story broke – the Swedish authorities had effectively shut down the site. And guess what? Interest in The Pirate Bay peaked again, many of the reader comments expressed those familiar warm feelings towards the site and indeed, towards news about the site.

Momentarily the proposed sale to GGF was forgotten, with the majority of onlookers as enthusiastic as ever. Once again there was unity. But sadly, it’s unlikely to last, because its highly probable that the next piece we write about The Pirate Bay will be about the sale and as explained, most people don’t want to know about it.

So, when the inevitable happens and, as TorrentFreak, we have little choice but to grit our teeth and cover what is happening with the sale, spare a thought for us. We read dozens of these articles every day so that you don’t have to.

Normal service will be resumed around here as soon as possible – just don’t expect anything like normality if GGF acquires The Pirate Bay.

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

Targets of the scam receive an unsolicited email purporting to come from notorious anti-piracy company MediaDefender. The email, which is simply addressed “Dear User!” claims the individual has been monitored on any of several torrent sites while engaging in anything from copyright infringement, through to simply browsing the sites.

Of course, citing MediaDefender is a nonsense, since that company doesn’t get involved in anti-piracy warning letters – its specialty was spoofing on BitTorrent networks.

Additionally, most of the sites listed don’t even operate a tracker, so committing any type of copyright infringements on them is almost impossible. Here is the body of the email;

Dear User!

Your recent internet activity was logged on the following sites:

* Btjunkie
* SumoTorrent
* isoHunt
* Btscene
* Mininova
* Fenopy
* Monova
* Yotoshi
* GetInvites
* Btmon

hxxp://XXXXX.net/report_78478XX.exe (XX added by TorrentFreak)

We have a report about the copyrighted movies, music, softwares you downloaded or searched on these webpages. We strongly advise you to stop any future activities regarding the downloading of illegal content or you can expect prosecution by 17 U.S.C.512,1201?1205,1301?1332; 28 U.S.C. 4001 laws.

Sincerely,

MediaDefender Inc.

So what is this scam all about? Attached to the email is a logfile which supposedly provides additional information about the user’s infringements, but of course this is a lie – the log is really a virus.

This type of scam is nothing new – the same type of thing has been tried before, probably by the same people. However, this time the virus is different. Here is the report, courtesy of ThreatExpert;

Threat characteristics of ZBot – a banking trojan that disables firewall, steals sensitive financial data (credit card numbers, online banking login details), makes screen snapshots, downloads additional components, and provides a hacker with the remote access to the compromised system. Creates a startup registry entry. Contains characteristics of an identified security risk.

Savvy Internet users will hopefully realize the email is a scam fairly quickly, but hardened file-sharers should smell a rat even earlier due to the omission of demands for money.

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

Litago milk features a cow on the packaging so not wanting to break with tradition, Tine invited the public to enter their own cow designs. Once all entries were received voting began – the winning cow will become the new Litago logo – no bull.

Here are the finalists, they are very amoosing.

According to reports, the cow in first place right now – the Opera Browser Cow – could have been put there by supporters or even (gasp) employees of the Norwegian browser company. An udderly scandalous allegation, especially when the steaks are this high.

But take a closer look at the design in second place right now. That’s right, just as expected, it’s a Pirate Bay-inspired cow. With green arrows on it.

“What we are really talking about here is Litago with a Pirate bay logo, submitted by a someone who loves to drink milk and loves to download torrents,” say IT-Avisen, “but perhaps has less love for Tøndel and intellectual property law.”

But of course, Tine has a few safeguards to ensure that no Pirate Bay logo gets anywhere near their bottles and packaging. The final decision will be made by a panel of farmers judges – selected by Tine.

Moo.

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

Maybe, just maybe, in future our answers will be different. Allow us to introduce BitBlinder, a new and free cross-platform (Mac support coming soon) open source project which not only claims to make anonymous BitTorrent transfers a reality but also hides your IP address while browsing the web. Its functionality also extends to the bypassing of some web filters and in the future will be compatible with more applications, such as email, IRC and instant messaging clients.

Although anonymity with the previously-mentioned TOR is good, using it for torrents is a big no – it’s too slow and the operators of the network do not appreciate it. BitBlinder was born to solve the problems that TOR couldn’t. TorrentFreak caught up with Josh Albrecht, one of the creators of BitBlinder, for the lowdown.

“BitBlinder is an attempt to address the aforementioned issues with Tor – we want to make online anonymity fast, usable, and ubiquitous to the point that organizations give up on spying and filtering us,” Josh told TorrentFreak. “BitBlinder is actually built on much of the same technology as Tor, though we have a completely separate network.”

The anonymity itself is provided by BitBlinder’s own P2P network, inside which everyone is required to contribute their own bandwidth to proxy other users’ data. The diagram below shows a standard user setup, without anonymity;

As seen in the diagram below, your request for data using BitBlinder is passed encrypted 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.

Since decent BitTorrent-capable anonymity services cost money these days, how can BitBlinder offer the same for free? The key is to think of it as operating a little like a private BitTorrent tracker.

In order to maintain a good ratio on a private tracker, at a minimum you need to upload the same amount of data as you downloaded. With BitBlinder there is a similar system – in order to get the service for free you have to proxy X GB of data for other people inside the swarm if you want to share X GB of anonymized data. In common with some new accounts on private trackers, BitBlinder accounts come pre-loaded with some free credit to get the user going – 2GB to be precise. If anyone prefers not to be bound by ratio rules in the future, just like on many private trackers it will also be possible to buy ‘upload credit’ to use BitBlinder, but there is no reason why people can’t use it for free, as long as they share their bandwidth as detailed above.

At this point some readers will be asking how it’s possible for no-one to know what’s going on inside the BitBlinder swarm, yet somehow BitBlinder manages anonymity ratio tracking. It is possible though, and for those interested to learn about the micro-payment system BitBlinder’s is based on, further (highly technical) reading can be found here (pdf).

Of course, since traffic is sent from your PC to others in the BitBlinder swarm before reaching its destination in order to anonymize it, it won’t be as quick as regular non-anonymous BitTorrent use, but Josh told us speeds should be respectable and in any event, much faster than TOR. Indeed, within a few seconds of starting a ‘Steal This Film’ torrent from The Pirate Bay, we experienced speeds in excess of 2Mbit/s, which is massively faster than my previous experiences of BitTorrent over TOR.

For Windows users the BitBlinder package comes in a 17mb installer. The torrent client is a custom version of BitTornado and although it doesn’t have all the features of say uTorrent, more features will be added as time goes by. The bundled anonymous browser is naturally built on Firefox.

Josh told us that the BitBlinder network could be made to work with uTorrent or another browser such as Internet Explorer but unfortunately both applications are closed source, which means that it’s impossible to be certain that all data will be sent through other users (proxies) in the BitBlinder swarm and not directly to the Internet. For the same reasons, Flash is unavailable in the bundled version of Firefox.

Another trick up BitBlinder’s sleeve is the development of techniques to bypass web filters.

“BitTorrent encryption is pretty good at avoiding ISP level restrictions but it doesn’t do much for things like avoiding university or corporate firewalls. One of Tor’s goals is to circumvent the Great Firewall of China and we hope to make BitBlinder even better,” explained Josh. “Filters generally work by either blocking ports, a certain IP address, or by inspecting the traffic itself for specific protocols. We’re working hard to make BitBlinder effective against all three of these methods, but we still have some work to do on these features, so results may vary.”

Since BitBlinder has an anonymous browser, it should prove useful if you don’t want your employer knowing what you’re doing on Facebook or other social networks, for example. Indeed, if these sites are blocked it’s possible to use the BitBlinder network to access them. Of course, the anonymity would also be useful for signing up to and using the HTTP element of a torrent site.

Inevitably there are some issues with an anonymity system such as BitBlinder, and they parallel those experienced by users of TOR. Any traffic generated inside the BitBlinder network eventually needs to escape to the wider Internet. In order to facilitate this, some users need to act as an exit point. In basic terms, this means that an exit node operator’s IP address will be associated with the traffic leaving the network.

Before panic sets in, this is not necessarily bad news. Acting as an exit node provides the operator with plausible deniability, since they will have no idea what data is passing through. It would also be difficult to say if the data leaving that PC had originated from there or elsewhere, extending the deniability of their own traffic too. And it’s not as if that user’s IP address wasn’t perfectly visible already before BitBlinder came along.

For most users, however, opting to act as a beginning or middle proxy in the BitBlinder network means that no-one outside can see any traffic emanating from their PC and the good news is that this internal traffic still adds upload/download credit to the user’s account.

Time will tell if BitBlinder lives up to its dreams (and everyone else’s) but from what we’ve seen so far in the beta version, things are looking very promising indeed. That said, remember folks this is a beta and it is likely people will uncover bugs so please be patient and consider allowing the app to send crash reports, it will help the team a lot.

BitBlinder can be downloaded here – don’t forget to register and please read the instructions on how to forward ports etc, it will be good for your ratio.

New users should note that invite codes will be sent out at a controlled rate. Early adopters will be able to register fairly quickly but as more and more people apply, the longer the wait will become. This is merely to ensure a healthy network with an adequate number of quality proxies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In what appears to be a new marketing campaign by fast food giant Burger King, the company likens its cheeseburgers to piracy. A scan of a promotional flyer sent to TorrentFreak says that BK’s burgers are just like downloading music from the Internet, but better because they’re “legal”.

Maybe i’m getting old, but I can’t in any way see how cheeseburgers are like downloading music off the Internet. That said, if BK want to complete the analogy, I want their burgers leaked to file-sharing sites before their promotion starts, available 24/7 via The Pirate Bay, I want to be able to share this food with my friends (and them with their friends) without ever taking my hands off my ‘copy’. And I want my burger for free, if you don’t mind.

Here’s your chance to “Have It Your Way®”. If any creative souls out there think they could create a better (preferably funnier) flyer for Burger King on the same theme, or feel they could tenuously refer to burgers (or anything else) in a campaign to promote file-sharing, feel free to send them to me on enigmax[@]torrentfreak.com and i’ll link the best into this post.

Update: Reader Entries

The Burger Bay by Matt
BK Longwinded by Zacqary Adam Green
The New BitTorrent Deal by Basil
The BK Yummy by Wally
Like Eating a Cheeseburger, Only Free by Ascense
Ours Are Cheesy by =M=
Tell The Internet by Jason
Extortion, But Legal by Xentar
Burger Download byQuagmire_Jr

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

Today, Friday April 17, the court issued its decision: article continuously updated

“The court has found that by using Pirate Bay’s services there has been file-sharing of music, films and computer games to the extent the prosecutor has stated in his case,” said the district court. “This file-sharing constitutes an unlawful transfer to the public of copyrighted performances.”

Peter Sunde (born September 13, 1978) alias ‘brokep’:

Verdict: Guilty – 1 year in prison, damages to pay: $905,000

Peter Althin, brokep’s lawyer said, “I spoke to Peter and he wasn’t very surprised. A journalist he’d spoken to knew an hour before it was public that all four would be convicted. The verdict was leaked from the court. I have to think about what effects that can have on the sentence. It is unacceptable that the court is leaking.”

Fredrik Neij (born April 27, 1978) alias ‘TiAMO’:

Verdict: Guilty – 1 year in prison, damages to pay: $905,000

Similar to the other defendants, Fredrik Neij was not present to hear the verdict. He currently lives in Thailand from where he manages The Pirate Bay’s servers.

Gottfrid Svartholm (October 17, 1984) alias ‘Anakata’:

Verdict: Guilty – 1 year in prison, damages to pay: $905,000

Anakata’s lawyer Ola Salomonsson said, “We’re appealing. It’s very surprising that the court has chosen to treat the accused as a team.”

Carl Lundström (born April 13, 1960)

Verdict: Guilty – 1 year in prison, damages to pay: $905,000

Carl Lundström’s verdict came as a surprise to most people since he was only remotely related to The Pirate Bay. His lawyer Per E Samuelsson announced that he has already sent in his appeal and the others are expected to follow soon.

The court said that the four defendants worked as a team, were aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy and assisted the infringements. It categorized the infringements as ’severe’. The judge said that the users of The Pirate Bay committed the first offense by sharing files and the four assisted this.

It appears that the court chose to not take any of the technical details into account and only judged based on intent. They find it clear that the intention of the defendants is to facilitate sharing of copyrighted works and based their verdict on this.

While the court did not agree with the plaintiff’s exaggerated estimates of losses, it still set the damages at 30 million SEK ($3,620,000). This a hugely significant amount and the court has ordered that the four should pay this amount between them.

The judge also stated that the usage of BitTorrent at The Pirate Bay is illegal. Rest assured, other torrent sites hosted in Sweden will be keeping a close eye on developments.

The defense put it to the judge that he had folded under intense political pressure. The judge denied this stating that the court made its decision based on the case presented.

At one point the judge was asked if he was concerned for his personal safety after handing down this decision. The judge said he hadn’t received any harassment and was quite surprised at the question.

While the judge won’t be getting any flowers for this verdict, Roger Wallis who spoke in favor of The Pirate Bay at their trial and received a mountain of floral tributes in return, noted, “This will cause a flood of court cases. Against all the ISPs. Because if these guys assisted in copyright infringements, then the ISPs also did. This will have huge consequences. The entire development of broadband may be stalled.”

Peter Sunde characterized the verdict as ‘unreal’ and said that he didn’t expect the jail sentence. He briefly spoke with Fredrik and Gottfrid and all were surprised with this outcome. In response to the fines Peter said: “We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay if we could. If I would have money I would rather burn everything I owned.”

Sunde has already explained that this decision does not mean the end of the line in this case. There will be an appeal which means we are still far away from the ultimate decision – possibly years away. Any appeal from either side must be submitted to Sweden’s higher Court by 9th May 2009.

Rasmus Fleischer, one of the founders of Piratbyrån commented, “The sentence has no formal consequence and no juridical value. We chose to treat the trial as a theater play and as such it’s been far better than we ever could have believed.”

As for the fate of the site, Peter has already promised that The Pirate Bay will continue. The site itself was never on trial, only the four individuals listed above.

This is a breaking news story, please check back frequently for updates.

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

In the meantime, according to a report, one of the servers originally confiscated by the police in the 2006 Pirate Bay raid is set to become a museum piece.

Sweden’s National Museum of Science and Technology has announced it has bought the server for 2,000 kronor ($243). It will be displayed in a section of the museum dedicated to machines and inventions that have changed people’s lives.

In other Pirate Bay news, film director and producer Simon Klose previously announced he was making a documentary about the site entitled “TPB-AFK”. The movie, which is being made by Klose from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, is scheduled to be finished in five years. When it’s released, Klose hopes that it will be heavily pirated but of course, pirates don’t operate on other people’s release schedules.

Impatient at having to wait years for a release, someone sneaked a CAM into an early screening and released the footage onto the Internet. The damning footage, which shows the crew working out how much money they have earned from the site, is available below.

More Pirate Bay updates as we get them…

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

In addition, the artists are unhappy with the fact that the labels, represented by lobby groups such as the RIAA and IFPI, are pushing for anti-piracy legislation without consulting the artists they claim to represent. Fans are unnecessarily portrayed as criminals according to some.

Now, in the case of Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum versus the RIAA, Radiohead has indicated that they will testify against the RIAA. Tenenbaum’s troubles started in 2003 when he rejected an offer to settle with the RIAA for $500. After a few more settlement attempts and legal quibbles, the case eventually went to court.

In court Joel is assisted by ‘hippy head‘ Professor Charles Nesson, and his law students. TorrentFreak contacted Tenenbaum’s legal team, who confirmed that they indeed spoke to Radiohead. “We met with Radiohead’s manager two weeks ago here at Harvard Law School. Professor Nesson walked away with the impression that their manager agreed to do so,” we were told.

Despite the criticism of Professor Charles Nesson’s work ethics and handling on the case thus far, it would be good to see well respected musicians such as Radiohead testify in favor of an accused file-sharer. Most of the time we don’t hear from the artists directly, only from their representatives, so their views are very welcome.

Recently, the effects of ‘illegal’ file-sharing on music sales were discussed during the Pirate Bay trial. Here, Professor and media researcher Roger Wallis told the court that his research has shown that there is no relationship between the decline of album sales and file-sharing. After his testimony, Wallis’ wife was overwhelmed with flowers as the public warmed to her husband and the opinion he expressed in court.

We can’t rule out the possibility that Radiohead might be after some floral tributes of its own, but even more than that they’d love to put one in the eye of the money obsessed record labels.

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

The Pirate Bay trial started on February 16 with lots of press coverage, protesting pirates and people handing out free candy. As the days went by, plenty of information was presented by both the prosecution and defense.

So which elements are most relevant, and which side is ahead in the polls?

On day two of the trial the prosecutor announced that half of the charges against the four defendants had been dropped. The prosecutor couldn’t prove that the .torrent files that were submitted as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay’s tracker, and he had to let go of all charges that accused the Pirate Bay folks of ‘assisting copyright infringement’.

What remained is the claim that they were ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Armed with several screenshots of web pages and torrents downloading films and music albums, the prosecution argued that this was indeed the case. The torrent files hosted on The Pirate Bay allow people to download and share copyrighted material – period – they argued.

The crucial part here of course is whether the defendants actually ‘assisted’ in making any files available, this will eventually be up to the judge to decide. The prosecution has shown that there are indeed torrent files hosted on The Pirate Bay, and that some of these indirectly link to copyrighted material. However, whether the defendants are assisting in making copyright content available remains doubtful.

The defense has argued that they are not ‘assisting’, and dragged a giant primate into court to prove it. On the third day of the trial Carl Lundström’s lawyer, Per E Samuelsson pointed out that the prosecution failed to prove that Lundström had been involved in any transfers of any copyrighted material. This became known as the now famous King Kong defense.

“The admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong,” Samuelsson told the court.

“According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström has personally interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia,” the lawyer added.

During the days that followed both sides tried to strengthen their case, but not much that was actually related to the ‘assisting in making available’ charges that are central to the case. The prosecution brought in more screenshots and some actual torrent files as evidence, and tried to get a better grip on the Pirate Bay’s anarchic ‘management’ structure.

The defense on the other hand, argued that there are many ways to share torrent files online. By playing a video in court they showed that The Pirate Bay is just one of many torrent trackers, and a tiny part of the download chain. One of the witnesses, Kristoffer Schollin from Gothenburg University, told the court that the Pirate Bay is an “open database” of .torrent files which he described as simply an advanced type of hyperlink.

In addition to detailing the charges, there was further debate on the damages claims from last week. While music and movie industry insiders claimed that piracy was responsible for a large part of the decline in sales of their respective industries, media professor Wallis told the court that the file-sharing is actually beneficial to the entertainment industry.

It is now up to the judge to review all the information presented by both parties and decide whether the defendants are guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’.

If the decision was based purely on a big win via the media during the trial, there can be no question that The Pirate Bay won a decisive victory and proved to be even more popular than ever expected. However, as it stands, it’s difficult to find anyone – no matter where their preferences lie – who is willing to step out and say who they believe is going to prevail in the case overall.

What is pretty much certain is that this won’t end with the verdict that is due on April 17. No matter what the outcome it seems unthinkable that either side will accept a defeat. An appeal seems almost inevitable.

Stay tuned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The court then took a short break.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a developing story, please check back for updates

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

Håkan Roswall

Roswall began his statement by saying that Swedish law covers the alleged offenses because The Pirate Bay’s servers were located in Sweden at the time. He also said that people accessing TPB from other countries were breaking the law in Sweden too. As for TPB being classed as a ’service provider’ to get ‘common carrier’ status, Roswall doesn’t believe that it should and therefore there is no need to seek the opinion of the European Court of Justice on the matter. The defense disagreed.

Roswall said he is not asking the court to rule on the legality of BitTorrent itself, but rather what the defendants did with the technology. Turning to the TPB’s tracker, Roswall said that it was a vital part of the infrastructure. He said that the Supreme Court already previously ruled that someone running a BBS (Bulletin Board) could be found guilty of assisting copyright infringement and that TPB should be viewed in this light.

Turning to the defendants, Roswall said that Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm already admitted their part in the running of TPB. He said Fredrik’s role was technical and he also registered the TPB domain name, while Gottfrid also handled technical issues including the programming of the tracker and some billing duties.

Roswall doesn’t believe Peter Sunde’s line that he is just the site’s spokesman. He said that Peter is deeply involved with the site, referring to claims Peter configured load balancers for the site and noted that advertiser Daniel Oded communicated with Fredrik and Gottfrid through Peter. Roswall said that this was a sign Peter was co-ordinating some operations. He also said that Peter helped to design and develop the site and had contact with some advertisers.

Roswall referred to Carl Lundström as the financier of the site and pointed to various emails where Lundström communicated with the others about the legality of the operation. While the defense said this was a good thing – that the site wanted to remain within the law – the prosecution are using this to say that Lundström was behind everything. Roswall also said that the claims that Fredrik worked for free in order to get services for TPB from Lundström was simply made up to help their case.

Next the site’s finances were discussed by Roswall. Damages are easy to calculate he said, by simply referring to the site’s own download statistics. In an attempt to quantify how much money TPB made, he used his own best guesses based on how much he thought the ads on the site cost multiplied by an estimated number of impressions. He came to the conclusion that TPB turned over some 11.6 million kroner. After a few more calculations, Roswall declared the site made at least 5 million kroner, and probably more like 10 million, to which Gottfrid responded, “Where is my ten million, please, I want it, where is it?”

Earlier in the case, the defense asked why the Prosecution did not try to track down the actual infringers/seeders of the works mentioned in the trial. Roswall notes that this was impossible since their identities were protected under Swedish law. However, now that IPRED has been passed, tracking people will be much easier in future.

Roswall called for a confiscation of TPB hardware, noting that the chances of the site infringing again are high. He based this on the fact that TPB was up and running just 3 days after the original police raids. He finished by demanding jail for all four defendants.

“I believe that the correct punishment is a year in prison and that is what I ask from the judge in this case,” he said.

Gottfrid Swartholm comments

During one of the cigarette breaks, defendant Gottfrid Swartholm didn’t seem to be impressed by the prosecutor’s claim. “I’m surprised that the crazy old man didn’t exaggerate more! I’d counted on him demanding two years in prison but it only was one!”

Peter Danowsky for the IFPI

Next up to make his closing statement was Peter Danowsky of the IFPI. He began by saying that the trial is not about file-sharing technology, but about how it is used to infringe copyright. The goal is to find out whether or not the defendants have broken the law, and if so, what their punishment should be. Danowsky said he knew that there are other sites that engage in similar practices, but said that these are irrelevant to this case.

Comparing TPB to Google doesn’t make any sense according to Danowsky, because Google is working with the rights holders to prevent piracy. TPB on the other hand constantly mocks rights holders. Danowsky further added that the number of [torrent files linking to] copyrighted works on TPB is much greater than the prosecutor decided to bring in as evidence.

Danowsky went on to state that TPB offers a service that is very similar to that offered by legal online music stores. However, TPB doesn’t charge for the music and keeps the advertizing revenue to themselves instead of compensating the rights holders. Neij, Svartholm, Sunde and Lundström have contributed to copyright infringement according to Danowsky, and the record labels have to be compensated for the losses they have caused – in sales and in goodwill.

The testimony of media Professor Roger Wallis, who stated that the entertainment industry doesn’t suffer any losses from piracy, is debatable Danowsky said. Instead, he puts more trust in the record company executives he consulted in the past. “Wallis’ 30 percent guest professorship at KTH provides about as much credibility as something on par with a newspaper editorial,” said Danowsky.

He further said that physical piracy is exactly the same as illicit file-sharing according to the music industry lawyer, it is simply utilizing newer technology.

Danowsky went on to note that TPB was founded by the Pirate Bureau, an organization that has only one purpose: “Not to respect copyright.” Next, Danowsky stressed that TPB is a commercial operation and he mentioned some previous court rulings related to file sharing, including the Finreactor case. After that the court took a lunch break.

Henrik Pontén from Antipiratbyrån

After the lunch break Henrik Pontén makes his final plea, which is short compared to Danowsky. Pontén claims that the defendants clearly knew that what they were doing was illegal, and that they could have expected prison sentences. He further said that TPB clearly operates as a business, making money from advertising revenue.

The damages claim should cover the loss in revenue for the entertainment industry, as well as the damage in goodwill that the site has caused, Pontén noted. He continued saying that imprisonment is needed in order to stop TPB from operating, and said that a conviction will deter others from infringing copyright.

The police can’t possibly go after all TPB’s users and the defendants are therefore responsible for the whole damage claim, he argued, adding that they are free to claim money from their users. “It’s easy to come in contact with the users by leaving a message in the comments field,” Pontén said ending his closing statement.

Monique Wadsted for the movie companies

Finally Monique Wadsted took the stand for her closing comments. She said that the defendants are not as innocent as they claim to be and said that what they do is even worse than individuals who share copyrighted material. The made money off their file sharing platform while ignoring the copyright holders, she said.

Wadsted also mentioned other filesharing related cases in Scandinavia, and according to prosecutor Håkan Roswall these cases are relevant because the copyright laws in the different countries are very similar.

Neij, Sunde and Swartholm play different roles, Wadsted acknowledged, but they were all aware that there were [links to] copyrighted material hosted on the site. Peter Sunde, who claims to be the spokesperson, nothing more, has intended to sell to statistics from The Pirate bay, and it is clear that he knew about the copyrighted material since he he proposed to introduce “TV shows” category, Wadsted added.

Wadsted called for a “very significant” prison sentence because the dependents were aware of their criminal acts and made money from it. She also feared that they will simply continue to operate the site if they’re not punished properly.

“They have made more than 10 million crowns in revenue during one year [during the period the charges relate to]. And they continue to run the operation in spite of being convicted in other countries. Furthermore, they spit on the rights holders and tell them to go to hell,” Wadsted said.

They should have a tangible prison sentence. There is no reason to make any difference between them in the sentence. They are all guilty of severe infringements,” she added. Wadsted ended by rationalizing the damages they request. She said that the entertainment industry representatives are not “bloodthirsty beasts” but that the compensation they ask for is only fair.

The trial will continue tomorrow with the closing statements of the defense.

Developing story…

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

He was heavily attacked by industry lawyers Danowsky, Pontén and Wadsted who did everything they could to discredit and slander his reputation. When Wallis was asked whether he wanted to be reimbursed for travel expenses etc, he light-heartedly suggested sending some flowers to his wife.

His statement was picked up by the large audience listening in to the live audio from the trial and flowers soon began arriving at the Wallis’ house.

Roger’s wife, Görel Wallis, wasn’t surprised by her husband’s whim in court:

“We have been married for 38 years. He proposed half an hour after we met and I said maybe. After a day, he had convinced me”, she said.

At a local flower store in Stockholm they had received 100 orders by 20.30 last night. Owner Kristian Skald said that two nearby stores had received an equal amount of orders.

“Last delivery was 33 bouquets Thursday night. There will be more to come on Friday,” the owner of the flower shop commented.

Today, Friday, the couple celebrates their wedding day anniversary and on Saturday it’s Görel’s birthday. Roger Wallis feels she is worth all the flowers she gets.

“She was very worried before the trial. They questioned my competence and that made her very sad. She hadn’t slept for two days,” Roger said.

A web page has been set up that collects what has been given so far, complete with an ever-growing stack of CDs that show how many sales the music-industry has lost by slandering the Professor.

Thus far, in an amazing show of generosity from a section of society labeled by the music industry as ‘thieves’, more than 4100 Euros worth of flowers, chocolate and gifts have been sent to the couple.

The Wallis’ soon ran out of vases for the flowers but Görel knows that sharing is caring and will distribute the flowers to all residents in their apartment building.

“We will make sure it will be beautiful here.”

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