The latter group has not been very successful in convincing the big labels to change their anti-piracy strategies, but when MC Hammer says STOP they will have to listen.

In a recent interview Hammer commented on the industry’s struggle with piracy and the future of music in the digital age. In Hammer’s view, the RIAA’s legal battles against file-sharers have only alienated buying customers. ”The approach that the music industry took to fight piracy was the wrong strategy,” he said.

Aside from going after individuals, the entertainment industries have also targeted ISPs, for enabling their customers to pirate. The most prominent case at the moment is that of AFACT against iiNet, where the anti-piracy group wants the Aussie ISP to disconnect repeat infringers.

Using a murder and gun analogy to appeal to his fellow rappers, Hammer argues that AFACT is going after the wrong party by targeting the ISP.

”When there is a murder done with the gun, do they go back to the guy who sold the gun at the store and arrest him? No they don’t. They arrest the person who did it. So in this particular case, somebody is stealing content using the freeway. You can’t go back and sue the construction men,” Hammer said.

In addition to calling for a stop to the legal battles, Hammer thinks the music labels should focus more on digital content instead of trying to sell plastic to a generation of people that have never even owned a standalone CD player.

‘Digital files are no doubt not just the future, but the present. I think that it’s [the CD format] on its last legs, it’s on an artificial respirator,” Hammer commented.

“I don’t know what would turn them on about having to go through that terrible exercise of trying to open the packaging – it’s unbelievable when you’re trying to open a CD, right? You need a box cutter … it’s a tough deal to get it open. And once you get it open … you go and upload it to your computer,” Hammer added.

Hammer has a fair point there. Digital sales are breaking records year after year in terms of revenue generated, while the decline in physical CD sales is more likely to be a sign of the times rather than a side-effect of music piracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DL then wrote to the individuals demanding several hundred pounds to make the threat of a lawsuit disappear. Some paid up, but many did not, and the only cases DL took to court were against those who didn’t defend themselves.

Generating revenue from porn proves controversial

Then the law firm overplayed its hand and got into bed with DigiProtect, the German piracy exploitation outfit with a catalog of hardcore porn titles to its name. The rights were signed over to the company by the copyright holders so that DigiProtect could use them to generate revenue – lots and lots of revenue.

After mountains of bad publicity, DL withdrew from this business model. In May this year, the exact same scheme reappeared with UK lawyers ACS:Law. TorrentFreak asked company owner Andrew Crossley about the connections between ACS and DL – his reply: “NONE”. However, it was crystal clear that there were many links, not least that staff from DL were now working at ACS:Law directly on these cases – known cyber-squatter Terence Tsang as one example.

We’ve known all along that if those threatened put up a spirited defense and refused to be cowed they were never taken to court, but we had no proof as to the mechanism employed. Then, out of nowhere, months ago someone from inside either Davenport Lyons or DigiProtect leaked lots of sensitive documents to German news outlet Gulli.

Having remained secret until now, the documents made very interesting reading and along with a helping hand from TorrentFreak and armed with the leaked personal details and email addresses of some of the letter recipients, Firebird77 at Gulli was able to confirm the authenticity of the documents.

Document 1 – Ranking alleged infringers in order to decide who to pursue

The first document reveals how the targets are ranked based on an estimation of how likely it is that they will pay up. Each alleged infringer has their details filled in on a form (download here from WikiLeaks). The document shows that despite the claims that an IP address alone is irrefutable evidence of an infringement and will lead to being taken to court, the reality is rather different.

Letter recipients are given a ranking based on many parameters. Does the law firm want to continue to pursue the person? What are the chances of success? A zero would mean “no action” up to ten which would mean the respondent is ripe for maximum pressure. One letter recipient hired Michael Coyle at Lawdit Solicitors to defend him and this earned him a “three”.

One part of the form is entitled “Circumstances” and this is a very surprising section indeed. Despite the “fact” that the law firms supposedly already have solid evidence of infringement that they say will lead to court action if recipients don’t comply, the section seems to show that they make their decisions on who to pursue based on the recipients’ personal circumstances.

One circumstance is labeled “impecuniosity”, i.e the letter recipient is flat broke. Another is whether the recipient is on state benefits – this is expected to be proven by way of copies of benefit books and/or letters. TorrentFreak has evidence that one gentleman was asked to prove that he was indeed disabled in order to make the claims go away. Other circumstances include whether the recipient is a pensioner, a student or a child.

One other circumstance is an eyebrow-raising “out of jurisdiction” (no rightful claim could be made the against the recipient) along with whether or not the individual was aware of that fact.

The form also lists possible defenses that recipients rely on, including the breach of their wireless router, a virus infected PC, not being at home when the infringement occurred, no knowledge of infringement or the possibility that someone else in the location carried out the infringement.

Document 2 – Letter from lawyer Dr Kornmeier from Kornmeier & Partner to Brian Miller at Davenport Lyons

The 14 page document (download from WikiLeaks) details the agreement DigiProtect enters into with rights holders in order to exploit their copyrights for profit.

Included is a section which confirms that the original rights holders sign over the rights to DigiProtect so that they are legally allowed to make the works (hardcore porn movies) publicly available on P2P networks such as BitTorrent. Dr Kornmeier asks: “Does this constitute any problem under UK law?”

According to page 2 of the letter, when the recipient of these letters pay up, the spoils are divided up as follows – 51% to DigiProtect, 37.5% to Davenport Lyons and 11% to DigiRights Solutions. The remaining pages detail the exact business arrangement along with a list of the hundreds of porn movies covered by the agreement.

TorrentFreak discussed the documents with staff at the excellent BeingThreatened.com, a site set up to support and inform those targeted by Davenport Lyons and ACS:Law in the UK.

“These documents confirm what we have long suspected,” they told us. “This scheme is not about getting justice for the rightsholders at all; it is there to fill the pockets of companies like DigiProtect by exploiting many innocent people. Everyone with an IP address has reason to be worried about becoming a victim of these exploitative practices, whether they use P2P networks or not.”

Indeed, John Stagliano, boss of porn company Evil Angel which also worked with DigiProtect, admitted to earning less than £50 from each infringement and told the BBC the scheme “…was completely misrepresented” to him.

Uk consumer magazine Which? earlier reported Davenport Lyons to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority for alleged “bullying”. It will be interesting to see how these documents develop that case.

Thus far just two documents have been made public. Stay tuned for further updates.

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

Ink was downloaded more than 400,000 times last week and ended up in fourth place in our weekly chart of most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, where Zombieland occupied the top spot.

Zombieland co-writer Rhett Reese has been following our most pirated movies chart as well, and thus the online success of his film. “Zombieland currently the most pirated movie on bit torrent. Over one million downloads and counting,” he tweeted a few hours ago.

However, unlike the makers of Ink, Reese is not pleased with this achievement, claiming that this piracy disaster may very well prevent a Zombieland sequel from being shot. “Beyond depressing. This greatly affects the likelihood of a Zombieland 2,” he wrote.

Reese’s comments are the classic Hollywood response we wrote about yesterday. Piracy is causing billions of dollars in lost revenue and prevents new movies from being funded, is the doomsday scenario they often paint. But is there any truth in this hunch, or is it just another Hollywood performance? Facts seem to support the latter.

More piracy is not necessarily linked with a drop in box office grosses or DVD sales. ‘The Dark Knight’, which was the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent in 2008 sold millions of DVDs, and grossed a record breaking billion dollars in cinemas worldwide. But what about Zombieland?

The Hollywood Insider wrote that the movie is “alive and kicking” at the box office, putting its success down in part to “strong word-of-mouth”. The release also marks the most successful debut of Woody Harrelson’s career, hitting the No.1 spot and taking $9.4m on its first day and a worldwide $84m to date – all this on a production budget of less than $24m.

Zombieland grossed more than $60.8 million in 17 days, even surpassing the remake of the Dawn of the Dead to become the top-grossing zombie film in history. That does not really sound like something that will prevent a sequel to us.

On the contrary, if anything success on BitTorrent has a direct relation with success at the box office. Since unauthorized ripped versions of virtually all movies appear on the Internet nowadays, it would be a really bad sign if no pirate would want to download it.

But of course, Reese and others could still argue that they would have made even more money if there was no piracy. There are no hard facts to refute this, but with the box office revenue steadily increasing since P2P file-sharing became mainstream, it has to be doubted as well. The same can be said for the claim that less films receive funding.

As many independent filmmakers have already experienced, BitTorrent and the Internet in general can be a boon to the film industry. Instead of seeing it as a threat Hollywood might want to embrace it before it’s too late.

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

The case continued Friday in the Federal Court, with iiNet’s chief regulatory officer, Steve Dalby, taking the stand following his first appearance Thursday afternoon.

Yesterday, Dalby recalled having difficulty in understanding some of the terminology utilized by AFACT in the infringement notice spreadsheets it submitted to iiNet.

Dalby told AFACT barrister Tony Bannon that iiNet had told AFACT there was an issue with some items being unclear in the spreadsheets.

“There was no legend associated with this spreadsheet. I had to make an assumption. We asked AFACT for more information,” ITNews quotes Dalby as saying.

Bannon then criticized Dalby for not being specific and expecting AFACT to guess at which terms were not understood, but Dalby pointed out that he expected AFACT to contact the ISP for clarification.

Further discussion took place on the issue of IP addresses and how iiNet allocates them to customers. Time and again, Dalby explained that IP addresses are allocated to a customer account and they do not necessarily represent any particular computer that the customer may use.

In what is becoming a recurring theme, today Dalby told the court that iiNet had no intention of forwarding AFACT’s copyright infringement notices to its customers purely on their allegations.

“Our position was that we should not be doing AFACT’s work,” said Dalby. “If we had received authorization by way of court order, that would have changed our position.”

AFACT went on to tender a draft e-security code of practice from the Internet Industry Association (IIA) created earlier this year. It proposes that in future, ISPs could contact, and maybe even disconnect subscribers, who have malware-ridden computers which negatively affect networks. Despite Justice Cowdroy indicating that its relevance was peripheral to the case and wouldn’t but much use when he comes to make his decision, it was allowed.

Dalby said he believed that iiNet had not been involved in the draft and he was personally unfamiliar with it. CW reports that he had been quoted on the issue in the media, but Dalby said that it was a regular occurrence for the press to call him to comment on issues he was not yet familiar with, and in this particular case his comments were “neutral and non-committal”.

In September we reported that Australia’s Internet Industry Association (IIA) felt it had something to offer these court proceedings. IIA applied to be amicus curiae, a ‘friend of the court’, but AFACT objected, insisting the group would not be impartial and would favor iiNet.

The decision on whether this will be allowed or not has been delayed until next week.

In an indication that AFACT still objects to an IIA appearance, Bannon said that “….there’s a conceivable possibility they don’t want to add anything other than to say ‘hear, hear’,” apparently to the amusement of the court.

AFACT barristers are scheduled to make their closing statements next Monday afternoon.

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

This level of coverage is a great accomplishment for a new torrent site, but the fun didn’t last very long. Those who took a closer look at the site could easily see that TaffyBox was simply using the resources of another torrent site, BTjunkie, without informing the site’s founder.

Needless to say, the BTjunkie team was not amused when they found out and they responded by preventing TaffyBox from accessing the site’s backend. As a result, the newly launched site no longer functions.

“Sites like TaffyBox drain costly resources without putting into the pot. Most sites that utilize our backend reciprocate and when they don’t we ban them,” the founder of BTjunkie told TorrentFreak. “He just ripped off the site and stripped the ads,” he added.

The disconnection which rendered TaffyBox useless didn’t go unnoticed by Jake who runs the site. Just minutes after BTjunkie disallowed the newcomer from using their resources he offered to link back to BTjunkie, but unfortunately for him that is not enough to earn a reprieve.

BTjunkie’s founder explained to TorrentFreak that those who want to use the search have to link to the site’s download page instead of hotlinking the torrents. “You would think the least he would do is put some reference to BTjunkie, not wait until I cut him off and offer to add one link,” he added.

What happened to TaffyBox is probably a good lesson for all the people that want to use existing torrent indexers to create their own torrent search engine. Sites like BTjunkie don’t see any problems in sharing some of their resources, as long as they get something in return. After all, BitTorrent is all about reciprocity.

Update: TaffyBox switched to The Pirate Day and seems to be working again.

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

The main problem is that most people just don’t understand what DHT is, what it does, and how it works. Not really a surprise since the documentation and even the Wikipedia page are filled with technical jargon, and no simple explanation.  Without that basic understanding confusion is inevitable. We did explain DHT in our jargon piece back in 2006 but after 3 years, we decide to cover it again.

The easiest way to think about DHT is to imagine it as a form of ’super tracker’, in some ways a lot like WinMX and Kazaa of old. A large ad-hoc network of peers pass on information requests about torrents without a central server, meaning no control or single point of failure. No information about the contents or even the names of torrents are passed around, making this legal and hard to shut down.

Myth: You must turn off DHT when you use private trackers.

Wrong — There is an element to a torrent that is called the ‘private flag’. It’s a small flag that marks to a client that the torrent is ‘private’ and disables any method of sharing peers (including DHT), except via the tracker. This flag also changes the hash, so peers on a non-flagged torrent could not connect to a flagged torrent in any case. Most private torrent sites check for the flag, and add it if missing when the torrent is initially uploaded to their site.

Myth: Certain clients leak DHT data and should be avoided.

Wrong (with one exception) — There are always going to be people that want control. When it comes to torrent sites (especially the private ones) they like to express their control through lists of clients you can and can’t use (a form of DRM) and sometimes give reasons to support this. An example would be this statement from a staff member at a private tracker:

Not all torrent clients respect the private flag. But if you are using a client like Vuze, uTorrent or similar if the private flag is on (set by the tracker) the DHT, peer exchange settings etc are ignored. However, if you are using something like BitComet, BitLord or their ilk they ignore the private flag so if you have DHT etc enabled it is going to be enabled no matter what.

This statement is completely false. All torrent clients that support DHT respect the flag. The flag is set by the torrent file, not the tracker (although the tracker can add the flag to the file, it’s still set by the torrent), and BitComet does NOT ignore the flag. The one exception is a single build of BitComet (0.60) that was available for 2 weeks at the end of 2005, and even then, was a fallback only if the tracker was unable to be contacted for a 30minute period. Bitlord is unable to leak to DHT, as it doesn’t use DHT at all.

If you see staff making claims like this, it’s a good indication that the staff is clueless, which might be an idea to leave that tracker. If they can’t get the basics right who knows when else is wrong. Of course, we ask those claiming other clients leak to let us know so we can test it.

Myth: You can be tracked by DHT / AntiP2P groups use DHT to find you

Unlikely — It’s much easier and simpler to use the tracker. Blocklists, used on your client and on the trackers, are generally ineffective and easily circumvented through the use of residential connections. Last year’s University of Washington study showed that they will send letters just based on tracker info.

Myth: DHT slows your system down

Generally not true — It can slow down your connection depending mainly on network hardware. The actual data used in running DHT is low, generally less than 1kilobyte a second. Some routers and modems, however, can have problems with DHT causing lockups and restarts if they run out of ram. This mostly happens with lower spec ‘home’ equipment (such as older Belkins, Netgears and D-links), or telco-provided hardware.

Myth: You need to connect to a tracker, before you can use DHT

Wrong — When DHT is enabled (certainly in uTorrent) it connects to a bootstrap node (such as router.utorrent.com or router.bittorrent.com for mainline, or dht.aelitis.com for Vuze) and uses that to enter the DHT ’swarm’. It’s handed a set of DHT nodes and uses that to build up a small group of connected nodes. Those nodes are then used to get peers. No tracker is required at any time.

Myth: When enabled, it sends usage data back to [insert company]

Wrong — This is another case of people not knowing what they’re talking about. Generally they’re misinterpreting the bootstrap node connection for their client.

When the demonoid tracker was finally resurrected last year, many of it’s torrents were still active thanks mainly to DHT. DHT with Peer Exchange (PEX) is a very powerful addition to the torrenting world, and allows torrents to stay active, irrespective of the trackers stability or even existence. Also, Azureus/Vuze users, despite having their own DHT system, can join in using a mainline DHT plugin.

Should you use DHT? Not if you only use private trackers, but if you use public ones and your network hardware can cope, then yes. It can help reduce tracker load. If you have a question about DHT not answered here, then again, let us know.

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

One major site that has showed an acute aversion to saying just about anything to outsiders is Demonoid. This semi-private site has nevertheless made the news dozens of times, most recently due to its recent downtime, as reported here on TorrentFreak.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” said Demonoid in a statement six weeks ago, warning that downtime could run to “…days maybe, until we can change the power circuit.”

However, TorrentFreak has received possibly conflicting information from Demonoid’s host, Colocall in Ukraine, who said in a statement: “There were no problems with power supply at the location where Demonoid servers are hosted.”

While information about Demonoid is always scarce, information coming out of Colocall is a rarity too, since the company has previously refused to speak with journalists about their most infamous customer. That’s why it was of great interest when Ukrainian blogger Pavel Golubovskiy contacted TorrentFreak to say he had netted an interview with Colocall. Here is a translation of the questions related to Demonoid;

Why did you choose to host Demonoid?

The customer came to us and ordered a particular service. For us it wasn’t a political decision, Demonoid is an ordinary client for us.

What exactly do you host, the inferno.demonoid.com tracker?

They brought their servers, which are now located in our data center. We don’t know what information is stored there – we do not have access to this information. These servers are supported remotely by Demonoid technical staff.

Is there a way to contact the Demonoid admins?

They will not answer you. Many people want to contact them – journalists, fans, police, local authorities from different countries. But the Demonoid admins have a very selective approach to e-mail correspondence. When the police wanted to contact them, I specifically warned the admins that they had to respond to this request.

So the police already inquired about Demonoid?

Well, our local authorities are interested in Demonoid all the time. Rightholders associations are constantly trying to put pressure on us, including pressure with the help of Ukrainian authorities. We redirect them to the admins, but do not interfere or try to negotiate.

Are they putting any serious pressure on you?

It sounds strange, but Ukraine is still a jural state. Therefore IFPI’s personal opinion is just that, their personal opinion, despite the fact that the budgets of the IFPI participants are comparable to the budget of the Ukraine.

Aren’t you afraid that there can be a similar situation with Demonoid’s servers as there was with Infostore.org site? [famous Ukrainian file-sharing site, its servers were confiscated by police about a year ago]

As a hosting-provider we take such risks into account. This can happen not only with Demonoid, but with any client. We do not control what information is stored on servers, anybody can buy our hosting service.

Anti-pirates and the media-lobby are now trying to shift all the responsibility for file-sharing onto Internet providers, so that providers will have to monitor user activities. Will this affect hosting providers too?

We have such laws in draft in our parliament periodically. But the Ukrainian law “On communication” is clear about this: providers are not responsible for what their customers do. And the fact that rights holders want to change that is their personal opinion, they are not legislative bodies. Let them buy a parliament member and lobby for such law, then we will observe this law. But until then they are nobody to us, and we are nobody for them too.

About a month ago Demonoid reported technical problems. Due to those problems all data for the last several months has vanished. In an attempt to recover from these problems the site went offline. Do you know what happened?

Some time ago several of their hard-drives crashed. But that was several months ago and we don’t know what was the reason of recent problems.

According to their admins, the man who can restore the tracker is not available. Are they speaking about some Colocall programmer?

No, all the technical support of servers is performed remotely. They aren’t speaking about one of our specialists.

Torrentfreak wrote about the president of Lithuanian antipirates, who demanded the closure of access to Demonoid. He said that it is very hard to even make contact with you. Have you spoken with him?

Yes, someone called us. We just could not speak with him: from the start of the conversation he immediately began to threaten us, he was absolutely non-constructive. We sent him to the court and have said that if he brings the court’s decision, we will be happy to execute it, because we observe all Ukrainian laws. Until then we are not going to speak with him.

Access to Demonoid is blocked for several countries including Ukraine. Is this your initiative or the tracker’s decision?

It is the tracker’s policy, not our initiative. I think this is due to DDoS-attacks.

Are there any DDoS-attacks aiming at Demonoid?

Yes, there are many large and serious DDoS-attacks. But they are always the problem of every hosting provider. We have learned how to neutralize them, so such attacks have almost no effect on Demonoid’s operations. And, incidentally, Demonoid isn’t the only site to be attacked: during the last election we hosted the server of the central election commission committee, it was constantly under DDoS-attacks.

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

The researchers surveyed a few hundred undergraduate students who were asked if they would buy the single “Right Round” from rapper Flo Rida for X amount of money. The price tag for the song was based on the last two digits of their social security number, ranging from 0 to 98 cents. The regular 99 cent price was excluded.

The students further had to indicate the likelihood of being faced by a lawsuit from the RIAA and what the expected settlement costs would be. On top of this, they were asked to fill out a morality questionnaire along with questions regarding their download behavior, all anonymously.

With this data in hand the researchers were able to draw some interesting conclusions.

First of all, they found that the students who were said to have pirated their latest track, were willing to pay less for the “Right Round” song. For every $0.01 students were willing to pay more, the likelihood decreased that their last song was pirated by 0.3%.

Even though the researchers claim that this means that pirates are cheapskates, it could also mean that pirates don’t like the song “Right Round” from rapper Flo Rida that much. Perhaps they have different music tastes?

Taste aside, the researchers conclude that dropping the price of a single track to $0.63 would decrease piracy by 50%.

Besides the pricing issue, the study also showed that pirates (compared to non-pirates) think the chance of getting sued by the RIAA is relatively small, and that the settlement fees are lower. The usual conclusion from this data would be that pirates are well informed since their guesses were closer to the real answer, but the researchers twist it somewhat different.

“If the goal of the RIAA was solely to deter piracy, it should not have abandoned its policy of suing the people it caught pirating digital music,” they write, referring to RIAA’s promises to stop mass-lawsuits against copyright infringers.

The latest insight from the study is that those who indicated that they had pirated their latest addition to their music library scored lower on the morality ‘proxy’ scale. However, the researchers note that the mean and modal respondents score very high on morality, which basically means that pirates are more normal (morality wise) than those who pay for music.

To summarize, the study makes it look like pirates are immoral cheapskates, but all it really suggests is that the music industry should lower the price of downloads if they want to sell more music and increase their net profit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Jeremy enjoyed the movie in the end.

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

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

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

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

The appeal is scheduled to start in November and will be handled by three judges. As with the initial trial, controversy surrounds the appointment of the judges in question. According to defense lawyer Per E Samuelsson, two of them could be susceptible to bias.

One of the judges, Ulrika Ihrfelt, has been a member of the Swedish Copyright Association (SFU). The second controversial judge, Christina Boutz, is a member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property (SFIR).

A few weeks ago Samuelsson submitted his complaints to the Court of Appeal, but failed to get the desired result. The Court ruled that the connections of the two judges to the various pro-copyright groups will not influence their judgment.

Samuelsson did not agree with the verdict of the Appeal Court and announced that he will take the bias question to the Supreme Court, and possible delay the appeal schedule.

“There is obviously a possibility that the Supreme Court says no quickly, but it would be strange,” Samuelsson commented, adding that it will probably mean that the current trial planning will be delayed.

The defense team had previously requested the trial to be postponed because of personal reasons, but this request was denied last week. Now, with the question of bias being tested by the Supreme Court, they may get what they want after all.

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

But the high costs involved are not the only problem the Internet providers are worried about. In a recent blog post, Andrew Heaney, Executive Director of Strategy and Regulation of the ISP TalkTalk points out that the new legislation will not only lead to numerous wrongful accusations, but it also violates human rights.

“It would put in place a principle of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ that contradicts fundamental human rights. But moreover the proposals will be totally unworkable – and today we’ve proved why,” Heaney writes.

To show how easily people might get disconnected for ‘crimes’ they did not commit, one of their Internet security experts went out to a residential road to see how many unsecured Wi-Fi connections he could run into. It didn’t take long for him to find several unsecured connections from which he could easily download whatever files he wanted to.

Under the new law, these unsecured hotspots could earn their unsuspecting owners a temporary Internet disconnection, and that’s not a good thing according to TalkTalk. “It is absurd to make people, in effect, legally responsible for the traffic on their internet connections and require them to prevent any unauthorised traffic,” Heaney says.

“TalkTalk acknowledges that there is a problem with illegal filesharing and that solutions must be found. First and foremost the content industry must develop new business models to make content more easily available and more affordable,” he adds.

So, instead of trying to overcome the piracy problem by flawed legislation, the entertainment industries should focus on innovation and develop new business models that will convert pirates to paying customers.

Until that happens, TalkTalk will do everything in its power to prevent the current plans from being signed into law. “We will continue to strongly resist any approach that does not protect the innocent,” Heaney concludes.

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

Last Friday we reported that The Pirate Bay was forced to move outside of Sweden, and that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker had found a new home in the Ukraine. Unfortunately this was a short-lived solution, with TPB now moving to Cyberbunker.

CyberBunker is located in a former military nuclear warfare bunker in The Netherlands. The facility was built by NATO in the 50s to survive a nuclear war, but after the nuclear threats were over it was sold to its current owners. The bunker is now used as a webhosting data center.

The bunker is equipped with Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) shielding and Nuclear/Biological/Chemical (NBC) air filtration to guarantee that the servers they host stay up no matter what happens. As of this week it is also the new home of The Pirate Bay.

According to Sven Kamphuis, one of the owners of CB3ROB/Cyberbunker, there were some initial troubles with setting up The Pirate Bay in its new location as several carriers refused to pass on the relay information after they received threats from the entertainment industry led by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

Despite these troubles the site is now accessible again in most locations, and Cyberbunker will continue to host the site and does not intend to cave in to the threats of the entertainment industry.

“I don’t expect BREIN to do pretty much anything at this point. The last conversation we had with them was about some mp3 site they wanted to have shut down somewhere in 2001/2002. It took around 3 hours at 2am at night and the end result was that both parties agreed not to agree,” Kamphuis told TorrentFreak.

Whether The Pirate Bay is actually located in one of the server racks at the bunker or another hideout was not confirmed.

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

The studios – Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises, Inc. and the Seven Network (all under the umbrella of AFACT) – claim that iiNet knew about the copyright infringements of its subscribers, yet did nothing about them.

The case, officially known as Roadshow Films Pty Ltd ACN 100 746 870 & Ors v iiNet Ltd ACN 068 628 937, is particularly serious, since its outcome could determine if ISPs can be held liable for the infringing actions of its customers.

Earlier, AFACT investigators claimed to have recorded around 100,000 copyright infringements carried out by iiNet’s customers using BitTorrent.

For the benefit of the court proceedings, AFACT presented just under 30,000 sample infringements covering 86 copyright works, including two Batman movies, Spiderman 3, Happy Feet, Pirates of the Caribbean and TV shows The Simpsons, Family Guy, Bones and Heroes.

The Angelina Jolie movie Wanted was the title claimed to be most infringed by iiNet’s subscribers, with Will Smith’s Hancock coming in second place. Both clocked up more than 1,000 instances of alleged infringement.

“By making those films available in those 29,914 instances, iiNet customers invited any and every user of the freely available BitTorrent software program to download any and every part of those infringing copies,” said an AFACT lawyer. He then went on to speculate that the 29,914 figure would have to be multiplied many times to get the overall picture of the making available carried out by iiNet’s customers.

AFACT claimed that it had sent information about these infringements to the ISP and demanded that iiNet disconnect the culprits, but the ISP did nothing.

AFACT barrister Tony Bannon also said that iiNet failed to enforce its own user agreement, which includes a clause prohibiting its users from using the service for illegal activities.

Bannon went on to argue that iiNet benefits from piracy since illegal downloaders use a lot of bandwidth and the more they use, the more the ISP makes. He said that disconnecting them would mean that iiNet would lose a customer, something the ISP wishes to avoid, hence the lack of action.

It’s always been somewhat of a mystery why AFACT chose to single out iiNet for legal action, particularly since all other ISPs in Australia have been operating on a similar basis. However, when iiNet made an earlier request to include as evidence how other ISPs responded to AFACT complaints, it was denied.

However, after Bannon gave a video presentation of AFACT’s investigator downloading Batman Begins using BitTorrent, Justice Cowdroy then asked if he could be shown other ISPs said to be facilitating file-sharing.

“Can you show me, Mr Bannon, how many other internet providers are providing the same sorts of information? What other ones right now are doing this?” he said, noting that that iiNet had appeared just four times.

Bannon could not recall the names of the other ISPs and the judge indicated he would be keen to see a live BitTorrent demonstration, rather than just a recorded demo.

The case continues. The defense will present its case later this week.

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

“The lesson of iTunes and Spotify is that what people want is ease of use and convenience and cheapness. And you only have to look at the decrease there has been in filesharing since the increase in popularity of Spotify.
“You only have to look at the number of people who came off illegal filesharing when iTunes came out to know that filesharing isn’t the answer, it’s not the future, it’s not valuable of itself – it’s a technology that currently is being used to circumvent the law.”

However, his words, as reported by the Birmingham Post, lack a certain ring of truth. For example, let’s take the claim that file-sharing decreased after Spotify gained popularity. While we agree that the service has the potential to convert many music pirates, its effect on the overall volume of file-sharing is simply not there.

The Pirate Bay informed TorrentFreak that traffic from the UK is still growing, at an average of around 1% per month. Mininova likewise has seen a 15% growth, of 7 million unique visitors a month, from 38.6 million in September 2008, to 45.6 million in August of 2009. Clearly Spotify hasn’t decreased much. Strike 1.

More worrying though is the claim that file-sharing technology is not valuable. For one, Spotify itself is based on file-sharing technology, with the brain behind the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent as one of its main developers. That aside, the state-funded BBC is involved in various BitTorrent-based projects, and the technology chiefs there believe that P2P TV has a future, and many independent artists are already putting it to use.

Over the past few years, we’ve brought you dozens of stories about people being enabled by the technology, from independent artists, to filmmakers (large and small) and even large corporations that can now effectively distribute data without incredible bandwidth outlay. File-sharing technology is very valuable to those people, Strike 2 for the MP from Birmingham.

That brings us to another statement Simon made, with Yahoo reporting him as saying that whilst it is illegal, there is currently no anti-piracy legislation. Those that have read our stories about Davenport Lyons, and ACS (and the thousands they have targeted) know there is indeed legislation. So too does Alan Ellis, and the Oink uploaders who were sentenced earlier this year. For Mr Simon, that’s strike 3.

It’s just lucky for him that no-one’s proposed a law where if an MP has gone on the record and made 3 basic factual errors, his parliamentary benefits should be cut off or throttled.

Mr Simon was contacted for comment, but did not reply at time of press

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

In a reply to our criticism Lily wrote the following blog entry in which she entirely missed the point we tried to make.

“I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS [sic] THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN , HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSIITE I ACQUIRED THE PIECE FROM.”

Judging from her response it is “quite obvious” that Lily doesn’t have a clue about copyright. Lily seems to argue that we accused her of plagiarism, but we only meant to point out that she infringed on Techdirt’s copyright by copy/pasting their article without attribution.

Also, this is not the only infringement on her blog. While she’s trying to point out how much damage ‘pirates’ do to the music industry she blatantly infringed the copyrights of a number of newspapers by posting scanned articles.

To make things even more absurd Techdirt discovered that Lily is pirating music herself by offering some unauthorized mixtapes (tape 1 and tape 2) on her website LilyAllenMusic.com. The tracklist of one of the mixtapes reveals a list of no less than 19 unauthorized tracks. This means the RIAA can easily sue her for millions.

Please Lily, explain to us why it is okay for you to copy, paste and pirate others work, while you label people who do the same as thieves? Are we missing something here, or do you really think that copyright is limited to your own music?

What about the poor people working at the newspapers who might lose their job because you are pasting scanned articles online? Not to mention the poor artists that ended up on your mixtape who’s lives are ruined because of your selfish actions.

Update: Lily Allen killed her weblog and career.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday, speaking with the UK’s The Mirror, John Petter, boss of ISP BT’s consumer division, said that measures to tackle Internet piracy will be costly.

Noting that ISP profit margins are already small, Petter said he fears that the process could cost ISPs a staggering £365m a year.

However, according to Jupiter Reseach, whose figures the BPI uses when trying to convince others how much money they lose, the British music industry will lose £200m worth of business to online piracy in 2009.

If the BPI’s ‘losses’ figures are to be believed (and we have to go along with the ridiculous premise of 1 download = 1 lost sale in order to do so), saving £200m worth of business will end up costing ISPs almost double that amount.

“Their [music industry] claims are melodramatic and assume people would buy all the music that is illegally downloaded, which is nonsense,” said Petter, adding that laws are already in place to deal with illicit file-sharing, but the industry doesn’t want to use those particular ones because it would hurt their public image.

Petter’s final point is possibly the most important one. He believes that the war against file-sharing will lead to a technological arms race as Internet users find new ways to hide their activities.

Indeed, by spending a measly £3.00 per month on a cheapo VPN service from the likes of SwissVPN, it’s possible for any user to tunnel right out of the UK and no-one in the country will have a clue what they are doing on their connection. Not the BPI, not ISPs, not the government.

That’s around 10p per day to defeat a £1m a day system that isn’t even in place yet. Something doesn’t add up.

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

The debut post on the blog includes a criticism of 50 Cent, who just a couple of weeks ago had the temerity to suggest that piracy and file-sharing are all part of marketing music.

However, aside from the critique of Fiddy, the rest of the blog post – put there by Lilly herself – is someone else’s work. Arrr mateys, Long John Allen lifted the entire post from another site – Techdirt.com – effectively pirating the work of the one and only Mike Masnick.

“I think it’s wonderful that Lilly Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy — or should I say ‘pirate’? — the entire post,” Mike told TorrentFreak on hearing the shocking news.

“The fact that she is trying to claim that such copying is bad, while doing it herself suggests something of a double standard, unfortunately. Also, for someone so concerned about the impact of ‘piracy’ I’m quite surprised that she neither credited nor linked to our post. Apparently, what she says and how she acts are somewhat different. Still, Lilly, glad we could help you make a point… even if it wasn’t the one you thought you were making,” Mike added.

Mike holds no grudges of course, neither is he pressing for Lilly to be disconnected from the Internet. He says he is more than happy for Lilly to carry on using his work, but wonders if he can now post Lilly’s music on his site without giving her any credit.

Lilly, here is our take on the whole situation. In isolation we don’t think your copyright infringement is a big deal at all and neither does Mike, but in the arena of this debate it’s still quite important. Infringing copyright these days is so easy to do, most people manage it every day in one way or another, and you are clearly no different. You probably didn’t mean any harm or even given it a second thought, but it takes only a few clicks to be labeled a pirate these days I’m afraid.

The next thing you know you’ve got God-knows-who accusing you in public of being an evil copyright infringer and telling you the sky’s falling in. Oh, you’re on your first strike now by the way. A couple more and it’ll be off to Ofcom for disconnection for you young lady. Or rather, no, you won’t, since it’s only music rightholders who will be ‘protected’ under this legislation you want so badly.

But measured by your colleague James Blunt’s standards, just because file-sharing copy/pasting is “easy to do, and has become accepted by many,” that doesn’t make it OK to rip off someone else’s work. Many thousands of people will read and enjoy Mike’s work on your blog and he won’t get paid a penny. He’s probably sleeping in cardboard box right now.

But let’s not get things out of proportion. Pop over for a chat Lilly, and we’ll try to broker a private music-for-article copyright trade-off with Mike – before he decides to buy Peter Mandelson lunch instead.

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

Black Internet was forced to disconnect TPB from the Internet or face large financial penalties. While the ISP had little choice but to comply with the disconnection order, it was soon back online with a new ISP.

Yesterday Black Internet said it would appeal the decision of the Stockholm district court, stating that the decision goes much further than The Pirate Bay. “Either we sort this out now or we will sit here in a few years time and wonder where the Internet went,” said CEO Victor Moller.

The company is hoping that other ISPs will join it by contributing to Open Internet, a foundation “to promote freedom of expression on the Internet through advocacy and by paying the costs for parties that would otherwise find it difficult to pursue a lawsuit.”

One company that will sympathize with Black Internet and might consider becoming a supporter of Open Internet, is the new bandwidth supplier to The Pirate Bay.

“It took just 20 minutes before the Hollywood companies telephoned the new host who took over operation of The Pirate Bay,” said Patrik from an ISP connected to the new TPB bandwidth supplier.

Although Patrik knows the people behind The Pirate Bay, he is not a direct supplier of bandwidth to the site. He provides bandwidth to another company who in turn supplies it to TPB.

“She [representative from Hollywood] was bitching a bit and asked me to see if I would turn off the bandwidth directly, or receive a court order instead,” said Patrik.

Patrik went on to say that he is compliant with existing laws and as long as that is the case, he will continue to supply the bandwidth. But what if the new suppliers are targeted in the same way as Black Internet – will they fight?

“It depends on the possibilities,” says Patrik. “I am a small company so I do not have the resources to run for long, but there are certainly others who want to,” he says.

Anyone wishing to donate to the Open Internet fund which will help Black Internet and others to fight in future, can do so via PayPal to donations@openinternet.se.

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