Today, van der Kolk was back in the North Shore District Court before Judge Pippa Sinclair who considered what bail conditions should be set before finally releasing the 29-year-old.

Prosecutor Anne Toohey, the lawyer representing the US government, argued that as the site’s lead programmer, der Kolk was the most likely to try and set up a Megaupload replacement.

Lawyer for der Kolk, Guy Foley, said that was ridiculous, especially given the heavy surveillance his client would be subjected to by the FBI on his release.

Toohey said there was a risk that der Kolk would get in contact with his co-accused in the so-called “Mega Conspiracy” of which there are seven in total. Four are currently in New Zealand and three are in other countries – two of those are still at large.

Foley argued that der Kolk must be at least granted permission to speak with two of his co-accused in New Zealand since they all share the same lawyer and need to communicate in order to mount a defense.

Judge Sinclair decided that the networking expert could indeed be released but under strict conditions. First, der Kolk would be denied Internet access which means that his bail location and anyone living there may not have any devices with online access. Additionally, police were authorized to continuously monitor der Kolk’s ability to get online.

Der Kolk was also banned from speaking with any of his co-accused overseas, although he was given permission to speak with those currently held in New Zealand for the reasons outlined by Foley.

Finn Batato, the 38-year-old from Germany whose bail was granted in principle during January but delayed pending an assessment of his bail address, was also in court today.

The address given by Batato was the residence of Kim Dotcom’s wife, Mona, but she had not yet submitted the required paperwork due to illness. Batato’s hearing will now take place tomorrow.

Meanwhile, a smaller house located alongside ‘Dotcom Mansion’ was seized today by authorities. Dotcom’s heavily pregnant wife and their three children will be allowed to stay in the £3.6m property, at least for now.

Kim Dotcom is scheduled to appear in court February 22nd.

Source: Megaupload Founder’s Home Seized, Co-Defendant Bailed

Just like Google-owned YouTube, RapidShare has been sued for the actions of its users and just like the video giant, has prevailed in court.

But despite the fact that in May 2010 the District Court of California ruled that RapidShare could not be held liable for the actions of its users (after all, RapidShare isn’t uploading the content and always responds to takedown requests), in November that very same year the company had an unwelcome surprise.

In a response to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative, the RIAA submitted their list of foreign “notorious markets”. RapidShare was included but strangely, just one year later in 2011′s submission, the file-hosting company had been removed.

So how does a site go from being reported as supposedly one of the world’s worst infringers to being given a tacit clean bill of health?

RapidShare attorney Daniel Raimer tells TorrentFreak that their twin approach was to change the negative perception of the company and show, contrary to some rightsholder claims, how the file-hoster really cares about copyright protection.

“We decided to increase our efforts to explain what RapidShare really stands for and how we are spearheading the industry’s efforts to combat copyright infringements,” says Raimer.

In December 2010 it became clear that RapidShare would be taking these efforts right to the very top when the company hired Washington-based lobbying firm Dutko. Their mission:

“Develop and implement a coordinated government affairs/public relations program for RapidShare targeted at Congress, the Administration and the media to help counter negative attacks on the company from U.S. copyright interests.”

Time would show this was money well spent. One year later and the pressure was off.

“The fact that we were not included in the 2011 list is a result of these educational efforts,” Raimer explains.

But does the simple hiring of a lobbying firm guarantee success for a file-sharing site and enable it to avoid a Megaupload-style doomsday scenario? Well, not quite. Convincing rightsholders that protecting their interests is also part of the plan seems equally important.

So, through the prism of the Megaupload takedown and some of the accusations leveled at that site, TorrentFreak asked Daniel Raimer exactly what RapidShare has been doing to show the RIAA and MPAA it means business.

One controversial area is cyberlockers paying users on the amount of times their content gets downloaded, with a German anti-piracy group suggesting recently that good rewards only really come from uploading infringing content. Is it possible to run a “clean” rewards program?

“As you know, RapidShare does not have a rewards program, and the reason for this is pretty simple: we don’t want to be dragged into discussions about ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ rewards programs. What we want are customers, who appreciate our service and who are willing to pay for it, rather than customers who want to be paid themselves,” says Raimer.

“For more than five years, we have never had any serious outages; we try to establish industry leadership by fighting for privacy and against filtering on an international level.

“There are probably some people out there who don’t care about all that and who are just looking for a service that is paying them for uploading their files. Those people are obviously not the type of customers that we want, which is why they shouldn’t use RapidShare in the first place,” he adds.

Recently, Raimer has gone on record stating that service providers have a ‘moral’ responsibility to do more in the fight against piracy and that RapidShare is being more proactive than some of its competitors. So what exactly is the company doing to satisfy both the law and its own “moral” obligations?

Raimer told us that RapidShare has a well-staffed anti-abuse department that acts quickly on infringement notices and terminates the accounts of users who get caught violating copyrights three times. All fairly standard stuff for a company of RapidShare’s standing, but what about going beyond the call of duty?

Surprisingly, Raimer informs us that their abuse department has another job – to proactively search the Internet for potential infringements occurring on RapidShare’s service.

“We have developed a crawling technology that is constantly watching Internet forums, message boards and warez blogs for information about copyright infringement taking place on our system. The information collected by our software is then being evaluated, verified and processed by our anti-abuse department,” Raimer explains.

“Unfortunately, I cannot tell you any details about how this software works, but what I can tell you is that it is pretty sophisticated and that it is able to break most of the countermeasures that warez sites are using against automatic read-outs.”

This highly proactive anti-piracy stance is certainly intriguing, but will it lead to more friendly terms with rightsholders or will they see it as a chance to keep coming back for yet more concessions?

“I have once heard the sentence that some rightsholders try to create a perpetual motion machine, meaning that they will continue to come up with new demands regardless of what we do. This may certainly be true for some rightsholders who believe that the problem isn’t solved for as long as a single copy of their works can be found on the Internet,” says Raimer.

“Fortunately, most rightsholders turn out to be pretty realistic. Obviously, it is in their interest to protect their business and their copyrights, but they know that there are limits as to what a reputable hosting service can do without hurting its legitimate customer base,” he concludes.

For RapidShare, not hurting legitimate customers means respecting their privacy and not checking over their files. This ultimately means that although the company goes further than the law requires in some areas, RapidShare rejects proactive entertainment industry filtering requests, the Holy Grail of cyberlocker copyright enforcement.

RapidShare is certainly showing all the hallmarks of a responsible file-hosting service that meets its obligations under the law, and those it has set for itself on “moral” grounds. Only time will tell whether rightsholders view the company’s efforts as a strength, a weakness to be exploited, or a standard with which to beat other cyberlocker services about the head.

Source: RapidShare: From “Notorious Market” To Proactive Piracy Eliminator

We knew that dozens of police swooped on the location in helicopters and we knew they were armed. But what is even more unbelievable is that some of them were from the Special Tactics Group, New Zealand’s elite counter-terrorist force.

STG, nicknamed “Super Tough Guys”, train with the country’s Special Air Force and are sent in to deal with the most violent of offenders. Yet no one in the Dotcom household had any record of violence. Indeed, their main target was a man suspected of online copyright infringement – a computer related offense.

Wayne Tempero, Dotcom’s bodyguard, told 3Newz that the police were armed with assault rifles and sidearms – STG are known to use M4A3 carbines and Glock pistols. Tempero explained that two firearms were held in Dotcom mansion – two shotguns, both his, legal, fully licensed and locked away in safes.

At 06:45 Tempero was woken by a “horrendous noise” and after dressing and running outside he was confronted by a huge cloud of dust being kicked up a helicopter hovering just above the ground.

Tempero, wearing just a t-shirt and track pants with his hands held up, and was ordered by a flak jacket wearing armed officer to lie on the floor. Tempero said that the noise of the helicopter and doors being smashed elsewhere on the property was so loud that if the police did identify themselves, he didn’t hear them.

The armed police went into the indoor play area which had 3 kids inside – one aged 3, one 4 and another 15 months, together with their Filipino nannies. From there they proceeded to one of the nannies’ rooms, kicked the door down and demanded to know if she had any firearms – or bombs.

Tempero said he asked the nanny twice if she was sure they asked if she had bombs – she said she was. “Maybe that’s the kind of thing that Filipino nannies do,” Tempero said.

Outside people were being handcuffed and put on the floor. Two security guards, Tempero himself and the Filipino staff, were placed next to a van containing barking dogs.

Meanwhile the police had gone upstairs and were trying to smash down the door to Kim Dotcom’s quarters. Tempero said Dotcom’s wife tried to give them the security code but they weren’t interested and told her to go downstairs.

Police smashed down three doors to get to Kim and when Tempero was allowed back upstairs, six officers with sledgehammers and a circular saw were trying to smash into what they thought was Dotcom’s hiding place. It was in fact a broken service elevator/dumb waiter (below).

Dotcom had actually followed a prearranged plan formulated by his bodyguard which involved him hiding in the “Red Room” to ensure his safety. Tempero was asked what would have happened if a couple of police had simply turned up and asked for Dotcom to come down.

“He would have complied with everything, we would have sat at the large table, he would’ve probably offered them breakfast and he would have complied with everything,” Tempero said.

“Would he have done anything to destroy the hard drive, to take down Megaupload?” 3Newz asked. “Certainly not, why would he? He would be destroying his defense,” Tempero responded.

Despite the massive police and apparent counter-terrorist operation against him, Dotcom was in the Red Room alone for more than half an hour.

“If Kim had a Doomsday setup where he could delete his harddrive or takedown Megaupload, would there have been sufficient time for him to do that had that been his intention?” questioned 3Newz.

“He could’ve done that within seconds,” said Tempero.

There can be little doubt that Kim Dotcom and the other operators of Megaupload are accused of serious crimes and ultimately a court will decide if they are innocent or guilty. But whatever the scale of the alleged offenses, these are ‘white collar’ issues – computer matters – and whatever he may or may not have done, Kim Dotcom is not a terrorist and has never been accused of being one.

Here’s the excellent 3Newz video report. It’s over 10 minutes long but worth the time.

Judging by the 3Newz reporter’s tone, he’s struggling to see the connection between the alleged offenses and the response by the authorities. And he isn’t the only one.

Source: Elite Anti-Terror Police Went After Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom

Hard Drive Productions sent one such letter to Liuxia Wong last year, claiming that her IP address had been used to share “Amateur Allure Jen” on BitTorrent.

Wong was told by the porn outfit she could be sued for $150,000, but for ‘just’ $3,400 the whole thing could be made to go away. Many might have chosen to settle at this point, but this California resident bit back and went on the offensive.

As noted by FightCopyrightTrolls, Wong hired Steven Yuen, an experienced IP litigator from the EFF’s subpoena defense list, to go after Hard Drive Productions. It could turn out to be a fascinating case.

In a lawsuit filed at the end of January, Wong says that she did not download the work in question and goes on to attack Hard Drive on a number of fronts including harassment.

Hard Drive report the alleged infringement as taking place March 28th 2011, but Wong says the movie in question wasn’t officially registered until April 22nd 2011. The letters, therefore, “were designed to coerce her into settling the case despite the absence of any facts supporting liability against her.”

The lawsuit further claims that in their letter to Wong, Hard Drive insist that the California resident would be liable for infringement even if her router was unsecured and someone else carried out the act without her knowledge. Wong’s suit dismisses that assertion as “erroneous”.

But perhaps most interestingly, Wong is challenging the notion that Hard Drive can own the copyright to its own work – indeed, that porn can be copyrighted at all.

“Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress: ‘To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” the lawsuit details, adding:

“Early Circuit law in California held that obscene works did not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and thus cannot be protected by copyright.”

The lawsuit goes on to state that Hard Drive’s work does not fulfill the above criteria and in fact depicts obscene and criminal acts.

Wong is asking the court to issue an order declaring that not only is she not liable to Hard Drive for infringement, but that the company’s movie is not copyrightable and is illegal due to Hard Drive engaging in “solicitation, conspiracy to commit prostitution, pimping and/or pandering,” during its production.

Finally, a couple of interesting BitTorrent-related points are also raised in the suit. The first is that Hard Drive did not mitigate alleged damages since the company failed to use the DMCA to have monitored torrents taken down. The second involves the company hired by Hard Drive to do the monitoring.

“….Hard Drive…authorized its work to be distributed by its non-California licensed private investigators, who are in violation of California Business and Professions Code…while they were distributing and participating in the distribution of the work, and/or that Hard Drive is guilty of unclean hands due to its and/or its agents’ operation and use of honeypots, and/or the use of a third-party’s services as honeypots,” the suit adds.

In a sea of carbon copy BitTorrent mass-lawsuits, this case shines out as one to watch.

Gov.uscourts.cand.250725.4.0

Source: You Can’t Copyright Porn, Harassed BitTorrent Defendant Insists

Having never seen anything like it before, James (as we shall call him for now) became hooked, and quickly began to display a trait inherent in many addicted file-sharers.

“I simply couldn’t get enough,” he told TorrentFreak. “It was more fun downloading and sharing the stuff with all my friends then actually using it or playing the actual games.”

Having become inspired by these simple beginnings, James began chatting with other like-minded people on warez sites and ICQ, going on to share warez via PUBS, FTP-enabled servers conveniently left open by companies with more bandwidth than security sense.

Sharing files wasn’t a simple process back then and James took exception when Napster began dumbing down the process.

“We hated it, simply despised it because it made a mockery of the hard work we put in to obtain all these different warez,” he recalls.

But despite these early bad feelings towards Napster, the future would eventually see James become a facilitator of even easier ways of downloading. Not for just his friends, but for more than a hundred thousand people.

After working his way up to become one of the top members on the GraveyardFXP warez board, James says he became a moderator of DelusionalFXP. It was there, on their IRC channel, that he would meet people whose new project would suck him in and change his life forever. At some point along the line, ‘James’ became better known to his peers as StonyVision, and he was invited to join a new project being set up by, among others, a fellow pirate known as Sk0t.

Under Sk0t’s leadership, a torrent site called Elite Torrents was taking shape and preparing itself for an eventual membership of some 130,000 active users. It would also become the only US-based BitTorrent tracker ever to be busted by the FBI and ICE.

After he’d installed BitComet and began sharing content in February 2004, staff on Elite noticed something very appealing about StonyVision – his impressive upload capability. StonyVision told us he’d “followed instructions” on how to use two instead of the regular one modem his cable connection usually allowed, which gave him business-standard upload speeds. When you’re delivering content on BitTorrent, upload bandwidth is king, and Elite wanted some of Stony’s.

But as file-sharers are often heard to complain, you can never have enough bandwidth, so Stony acquired a 100mbit server at The Planet in Texas and began seeding his files from there. Once around 150 of Elite’s users had grabbed his latest release he’d begin releasing his next torrent, usually the very latest movies. His performance eventually meant that he became a member of staff, later going on to organize other Elite Torrents uploaders.

Of course, StonyVision needed content to share and he wasted no time in getting it directly from source – The Scene. He’d gained access to this elite network through his contacts at DelusionalFXP and ended up adding his own server to something called T.O.P. or “Tower of Power” – 53 dedicated 100mbit servers acting as a single giant RAID FTP piracy site. But still Stony needed more.

“At that point I was on four or five top sites, and my main interest was always movies. I loved movies and still do,” Stony explained. “Since my server was tied up I ended up renting two more, one to race with and another for seeding content on Elite Torrents.”

In common with his more old-school peers, Stony saw himself as something of a Robin Hood, “taking from the rich and giving to Average Joe”, and reveled in the positive feedback left by up to 130,000 Elite Torrents users.

But the environment in the United States had become increasingly unfriendly towards The Scene. The FBI and DoJ’s Operation Fastlink was underway and there was a growing fear that torrent sites would be targeted next. Stony sensed the tension and stepped down from the site’s staff around April 2005. He was 19-years-old – and too late.

Elite Torrents and its operators were already being watched and no amount of IP-address obfuscation would prove effective in hiding Stony or his fellow staffers on the site.

“Truth be told I did hide my IP and was the hardest one to find but [the FBI] used the Patriot Act and came up with an asinine amount of money lost to these companies and the movie industry and labeled me as a possible domestic terrorist who was conspiring to commit copyright infringement,” Stony explains.

“I woke up to banging on the door over and over, the dogs started barking. I got up thinking who’s the asshole banging on my door at 6am? Next thing I know there’s 10+ FBI agents in my house. I started laughing at first – I thought it was a joke – until the reality sunk in.”

It was 25th May 2005 and Operation D-Elite, which was to claim several admins and staff members at Elite Torrents, was underway.

“That was the day of days, I was in total and utter dismay and couldn’t even wrap my head around what had happened. I had no clue what was happening to the others. I lawyered up immediately which in itself is a funny story. I opened up the Yellow Pages, looked under ‘lawyer’ and there it was – an ad with a firm that had dealt with computer crime.

“I think I need a lawyer,” Stony told the gentleman on the other end who inquired “Why?”

“Well, the FBI had just raided my house along with a group they called ICE,” Stony responded.

A few awkward seconds of silence was followed by: “How fast can you get here?”

What came next was mountains of litigation and Stony being told to expect the worst – 5 years in prison. The pressure proved too much and Stony went off the rails, turning to alcohol.

In December 2006 he would learn his fate for the uploading of 53 movies, 6 pieces of software and 10 video games. The government demanded a prison sentence in order to deter others from infringement. To Stony’s huge relief, they didn’t get their way.

“Luckily for me I had the most liberal federal judge there was at the time. I was given a fine of $3,500, 6 months house arrest, community service and 3 years probation in which I was not allowed to touch a computer. I had somehow escaped doing time and the U.S attorney was furious.”

But despite avoiding prison, Stony says that he’s still paid a price.

“It’s been the bane of my existence and yet made me who I am. I continued on a self destructive path for quite some time doing crazy things, still working out, getting in bar fights. Truth be told I’ve been to hell and back, stared the devil in the face with its trillions of dollars of influence (RIAA, MPAA) and laughed and walked away.”

Stony says that confessing to a double felony on job applications hinders him, but the support of a new woman in his life has helped tremendously. So how are things today?

“I of course no longer pirate anything anymore as I’m sure I’m still on numerous watch lists. Its simply fun to look every now and again,” says Stony.

“My story isn’t one of inspiration but one of caution. It could happen to anyone out there. I know people are thinking ‘nah, not me’, but that’s what I thought too and now here we are.”

Stony told us that he recently got back online again with his own computer and was inspired by the huge anti-SOPA and PIPA campaigns.

“Thanks to everyone who spoke out on Internet blackout day. It really did give me goosebumps to see people finally stand up and be heard,” he concludes.

Sk0t’s story and those of his fellow operators and uploaders can be found here and here.

Source: Busted By The FBI: The Life Of An Elite Teen BitTorrent Uploader

Dotcom has been held in custody since dozens of police raided his Coatesville mansion last month following a lengthy FBI investigation.

During the day-long hearing before Justice Asher, Dotcom’s lawyer, Paul Davison QC, appealed a decision by Judge McNaughton in the Auckland District Court last week which denied the 38-year-old German national bail.

Judge McNaughton had concluded that with all his resources, Dotcom posed a “significant” flight risk.

The defense said that Dotcom has several health-related conditions – one of which is thought to be diabetes – which cannot be properly dealt in prison, adding that the Megaupload founder wanted to be able to spend time with his wife who is currently carrying twins.

Just because Dotcom had access to a helicopter and private jet, Davison added, it did not follow that he would seek to use them to flee the country.

When it was Dotcom’s turn to take the stand he told the Court that during his high-profile arrest last month, police had assaulted him after finding him in a secure panic-room known as the “Red Room”.

“I was punched in the face, I was kicked down on the floor,” Dotcom said. “One guy was standing on my hand so my nail was ruptured and my hand was bleeding, it was quite aggressive.”

Dotcom also told of how that during his time in prison he had received “funny visits”, phone calls and contacts from people he had never heard of including a succession of women wanting to be his friend.

One unsolicited telephone call claimed he was a prosecutor who in return for receiving some money would help Dotcom get bail

“I immediately said ‘absolutely not’ and I gave the number to the officer,” Dotcom said.

Another, the court was told, was said to be an expert document forger.

“If people were to approach me and to offer such a service, I would tell them to go to hell,” Dotcom said. “I have no desire to run away.”

But lawyer for the United States government, Anne Toohey, said that the chances of the New Zealand resident fleeing were too high, a point on which the court eventually agreed.

Describing Dotcom as “an extreme flight risk”, Justice Asher again denied bail. Dotcom is set to appear in court again on February 22nd for an extradition hearing.

Source: Megaupload Founder Accuses Police of Assault, Denied Bail Again

“I should write a book about doing business in Hong Kong, that’s how good it is. People there leave you alone and they are happy for your success,” he added.

But leaving him alone wasn’t on the agenda of the Hong Kong authorities. In a triumphant January statement they revealed how they had worked with the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to “smash a transnational cyberlocker syndicate” – aka Megaupload.

The commitment from Hong Kong Customs was significant. Not only did they invest a year’s worth of investigative manpower, but also supplied 100 officers from their various copyright enforcement divisions to carry out raids on the company.

According to an FT report, authorities there are set to go even further. Later this year, Hong Kong Customs will set up an “electronic crime investigation” center after being called on by media companies to pay closer attention to other cyberlocker-type services operating locally.

The announcement is likely to further unsettle several other file-hosting services that have a presence in the territory such as Filesonic.com, Uploading.com, Uploaded.to, zshare.net, Filepost.com and Hulkshare.com.

Just a couple of days after the Megaupload raids, Filesonic – one of the top 10 file-sharing sites on the Internet – reacted by disabling all 3rd party sharing.

Like Megaupload before it, Filesonic blocks all local IP addresses, presumably in an attempt to avoid local difficulties. But although there is no suggestion that Filesonic has done anything wrong, this type of blockade alone will not ensure it has a quiet life.

Hong Kong authorities described the motivation behind Megaupload’s IP block as “a bid to hinder investigation by law enforcement agencies.” Filesonic told FT that they have “a zero tolerance” approach to piracy.

Uploaded.to, another site with Hong Kong links, reacted to the Megaupload raids by blocking all visitors from the United States. Others have disabled their affiliate programs or taken other measures.

“Targeting the organized and transnational nature of IP infringing activities in the wake of technology development, the Hong Kong Customs will continue to monitor the situation and co-operate with the IPR industry and overseas law enforcement agencies so as to suppress infringing activities effectively,” HK Customs said in a statement.

Whether Customs will follow-up with further action remains to be seen, but in the meantime an Eastern chill is certainly blowing through cyberlocker land.

Source: Megaupload: Hong Kong Mulls Copyright Crackdown

Unsurprisingly, the entertainment and anti-piracy companies behind the long-running case are celebrating and planning for the future.

“The rule of law has spoken and this is a defining moment in the lengthy discussion of copyright on the Internet,” says Henrik Pontén, lawyer at Antipiratbyrån.

“The Supreme Court has made clear to all involved in copyright violations, including those that provide them with Internet connections, must now assume their responsibilities.”

Local Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said that the final verdict against the defendants in the Pirate Bay case sends a clear signal – those who operate illegal file-sharing services or provide them with Swedish Internet access face prison and substantial damages.

“I assume that the first thing that will happen is that those who continue to operate small or large illegal file-sharing services or provide Internet access to such will voluntarily cease their activities today,” says Wadsted.

Antipiratbyrån say that those who don’t will have to face the consequences.

“With the support of the sentence, Antipiratbyrån will act against the nearly 150 illegal file-sharing services that have a Swedish connection. Legal action will be taken against all that contribute to crime in different ways,” Pontén concludes.

Following the original TPB “guilty” verdict in 2009, Antipiratbyrån tried a similar a tactic when it contacted many sites and ordered them to close. Some did, but most didn’t.

There are indeed dozens of file-sharing sites that are either operated by Swedes, are hosted in Sweden, utilize Swedish bandwidth in some way, or have Swedish domains. Whether or not they will heed this latest warning remains to be seen.

Source: Pirate Bay Verdict SignalsThreat Of Huge New Anti-Piracy Campaign

The Megaupload indictment focused on several issues including alleged payments of cash rewards to known uploaders of infringing material. This prompted some rival services to cancel their affiliate/reward programs altogether and even end 3rd party downloads (Note: Fileserve have since re-enabled sharing).

Last week, TorrentFreak noted that traffic to many rival sites had increased following Megaupload’s demise – including sites like RapidShare that have no rewards program.

Today, however, German anti-piracy outfit GVU said that sites that have removed their rewards programs are now on a downward trend, while those that have maintained them are doing better than ever before.

GVU, which carried out the investigation preceding the record-setting raids on Kino.to last year, note that some linking sites are now removing links to sites that have no rewards programs and replacing them with those that do. The existence of rewards, the group suggests, means that more content is posted, ensuring traffic – and revenue – for both the linking sites and cyberlockers.

While it is fair to say that in some instances the existence of rewards can encourage infringement, GVU are now using this background to call for a review of cyberlocker and hosting provider liability, and are calling for a “reverse burden of proof” to be applied.

“In Germany, Service Providers are (at first) not liable for copyright infringements in content which is uploaded by third persons,” Otto Freiherr Grote of the Wilde Beuger & Solmecke law firm told TorrentFreak this morning.

“But the GVU now demands a reversal of this principle, at least for those filehosters which reward uploaders for uploading very popular files,” Grote adds.

GVU Director Dr. Matthias Leonardy says that while there is authorized content being stored and delivered by hosting services, much of the mass volume consists of unauthorized movies, TV shows and games, and it is this content that draws the bulk of the traffic and generates the revenue.

“Therefore, a file hosting provider must be aware that it promotes this through commission payments to those uploading pirated copies,” Leonardy notes.

On this basis, what Leonardy wants is a review of liability for those file-hosting services offering rewards programs.

It should not be the responsibility of rightsholders and authorities to show that such programs are being abused by infringers [such as is being claimed in the Megaupload indictment], Leornardy says, but the opposite – cyberlockers should be forced to prove that their businesses aren’t based on piracy in order to avoid liability. How this can be achieved remains to be seen.

The German legal system is no stranger to these apparent reverse burdens of proof when it comes to file-sharing cases. Domestic Internet users are responsible for infringements that happened via their accounts, whether they carried them out or not.

Source: Cyberlocker Burden of Proof Should Be Reversed, Anti-Piracy Group Says

It was a significant event – PureTNA had in excess of 1,329,500 members, a tally equaled by Empornium. The reasons for their shutdown remain unconfirmed.

While their members were understandably disappointed, they knew that with a flick of the wrist they would soon be enjoying themselves again on an alternative site. One of the top choices at the time – Cheggit.net.

Cheggit was created back in 2006 by ex-staff and users from Empornium who were disappointed with a controversial takeover by advertising outfit TargetPoint. Cheggit lived on until just a few days ago, when it disappeared. Now it’s back, but the news isn’t good – the end is here for Cheggit.

“Back in December ’11, when I embarked on a ‘bold new vision’ for the site, I thought we could change the site and make everything just work,” says Cheggit’s admin. “But as time went on, it just wasn’t feasible to do that and be in compliance.”

The site’s operator says that taking the decision to close the site wasn’t easy and took several weeks. But unlike some sites that simply close up, say nothing, and leave their communities high and dry, Cheggit’s admin told site members that the tracker is bowing out with an orderly exit for their benefit.

“I wanted to give the community a chance to exchange info and keep hooked up if you wanted to. That’s right….regardless of what you might think, this was done for the community.”

“Best decision? Who knows. But I do know that it isn’t the worst thing that could have happened. I’ve been at this far longer than I care to admit, and it would have sucked to just lop it off,” he notes adding, “As much as this may suck, it doesn’t suck near as much as just going away.”

Cheggit’s admin also assures its users that the shutdown has nothing to do with the FBI, MPAA or ICE, and isn’t a veiled attempt at “a ponzi scheme to relaunch Megaupload.”

It’s been a hard 12 months for adult torrent sites. In April 2011, Pornolab, the world’s largest porn tracker, had its servers seized by Ukranian authorities, but eventually made a comeback.

Source: Cheggit, Long Standing Adult BitTorrent Site, Calls It Quits

But what came next was unprecedented, a dramatic reaction in cyberlocker land that took out vast libraries of digital content and capacity. The perception of the established ground rules had been changed, without the passing of a single new law.

FBI, arrests by huge numbers of police, enormous cash and asset seizures overseas, reward program scrutiny, knowledge of payouts to persistent uploaders of infringing content. Extradition. These are things that changed the game.

“If the US government can come for Kim Dotcom it can happen to almost anyone,” a file-hosting operator told TorrentFreak on condition of anonymity. “I’m trying to think of everything I did possibly wrong in the last 3 years and worrying about that and the next 3 years also, if we even have that long.”

For many hosting sites it was time to react – quickly.

Earlier this week we documented the drastic actions taken by services such as Filesonic and Fileserve who shut down all 3rd party sharing and, like many others, closed down their affiliate payout programs. Later we showed how file-hosting competitors such as 4shared, Rapidshare and Hotfile had grown as users hunted for spare capacity.

In the space of a week and the MegaUpload shutdown aside, huge libraries of both legitimate and pirated material were wiped out as filehost after filehost deleted an impossible-to-calculate number of files and closed down thousands of suspected infringing accounts.

And this is where it gets quite interesting.

For more than half a decade Hollywood and the recording industry have spent millions of dollars not so much on actually eliminating illegal content, but getting rid of links to content such as those found on BitTorrent.

But this week, without a single cease and desist being sent, cyberlockers across the globe not only self-deleted vast quantities of files, but in doing so made millions of links across thousands of ‘linking sites’ completely useless too.

For the operators of these linking sites and their uploaders, this week has been very hard work indeed. For some sites it was all too much and the shutters have simply come down.

The problem, it seems, is money. While there is money to be made in torrent sites, the content sharers there are largely altruistic. The cyberlocker scene is more complex and incestuous, with revenue being generated in a handful of basic ways on both legal and illegal content.

Through reward programs, uploaders get paid on the number of times people subsequently download content. Equally, ‘release’ sites can upload the content themselves and get paid like a regular uploader when people download. Reward programs are important for cyberlockers too since they attract customers away from competitors and also give them an incentive to supply content.

Release sites and warez forums send users to cyberlockers to get content and when they get there they are faced with a choice. Download a little, relatively slowly but for free, or pay for a premium account and get lots as quickly as possible. In many cases choosing the first option means that cyberlockers also make more money from advertising.

When various sites shut their rewards programs this week, those uploading purely for the money were hit hard. In fact, many who had cash mounting up in their accounts lost it all – some cyberlockers simply kept the accrued money. While the ‘victims’ were livid, those who hate financially motivated ‘sharing’ commented that justice had been served.

But while it’s clear that some uploaders, often young and in less well-off countries, are ‘sharing’ small time for a few bucks, for some the reward payouts are more important. For many release sites, those rewards pay the server bills.

“We needed the payout and when [filehost name redacted on request] shut down sharing we were all but finished,” one admin of a release site told TorrentFreak. “90% of our content was hosted there. Then they deleted all our files and closed the account. They won’t even speak with us about it. A whole year’s work gone. We shut at the end of the month.”

But like worker ants whose nest has just been smashed apart by angry humans, others are utterly unfazed and just want to know which hosts are still paying out. Despite the climate of fear, quite a few hosts say they are and it’s evident from the links being posted on release blogs that the upload-for-cash crew have noticed them quickly.

Things, however, are still in a state of flux. Some of the filehosts still paying out appear to be offering tiered reward systems with just about every country in the world getting a reasonable deal but with the United States right at the very bottom.

Another interesting rumor, which at the time of writing we have been unable to confirm, is that one of the filehosts who banned 3rd party downloads earlier this week is now re-enabling them. This is something to look out for. Without 3rd party links being operational users are extremely unlikely to sign up for a premium account and this is where the cyberlockers can make good money.

So finally, one has to ask whether the MegaUpload shutdown has damaged the Internet piracy infrastructure. Providing an answer is not easy.

The amount of material coming online has not really reduced – content feeding from ‘The Scene’ is business as usual. Torrent sites are watching on closely, but the public ones tend not to host content, their users do. Cyberlockers are in a mess, but already recovering. Release sites are continuing, albeit with a reduced number of multiple links to the same content.

Perhaps the best test is whether it’s now very hard or impossible to find and download popular content. Not even close.

Source: Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land

Although Newzbin2 anticipated the result and had already prepared circumvention software to enable BT users to carry on using the site, it still has a key vulnerability – its US-seizable .COM domain. According to the site’s operators, that weakness is now being addressed.

“Newzbin is leaving the American Internet. In a couple of weeks we will cease to use the newzbin.com domain and move to newzbin2.es,” says the site’s Mr White.

“We regret the need to do this but, thanks to the retards in the US Government and the MPA, a ‘.com’ address is no longer viable. Really, any domain controlled by the US government proxy Verisign isn’t viable.”

No exact date has been given for the switch but it will be during the next few weeks. For “legal reasons” the old .COM domain, which Newzbin2′s operators say is currently rented from a 3rd party, will not redirect or even provide a link to the new Spanish domain.

During 2012 it’s expected that the site’s unblocking tool will see wider use as other ISPs are also expected to begin blocking Newzbin2. But according to the site, thus far censorship has had the opposite effect.

“I can’t give exact figures but an executive summary would be that, from our Apache logs, traffic grew steadily over 2011 with a big spike about the time we were blocked; down a little since then, but still at higher levels than ever before,” Mr White told TorrentFreak.

“Overall the MPA’s web blocking has had something of a Streisand Effect on our traffic levels. It seems that they are driving users to us. Our best friend is our worst enemy,” he notes.

Nevertheless, Newzbin2′s operators aren’t simply cruising. Mr White told TorrentFreak that they intend to use the trust they’ve built up in the community to launch a secure VPN service which will not only allow anonymous Internet use, but will also defeat site-blocking measures.

But surprisingly, especially given the astonishing MegaUpload-related developments of the last week, they also intend to launch a cyberlocker service.

“Our reaction to Megaupload and the fallout was twofold. On the one level this is a very important case because if New Zealand extradite Dotcom to the US, which is where the smart money is I reckon, it will be a fascinating exhibition of the MPA’s legal strategy against cyberlockers. It may be the feds prosecuting but we all know that the MPA’s hand is up their puppet ass,” says Mr White.

“The shame for Dotcom was only that he didn’t spend his money on politicians & cops rather than godawful pink Cadillacs. And how INTERESTING that the FBI have shown publicly that they really can backdoor Skype,” he added.

Mr White described the ensuing pandemonium in the cyberlocker market as “like a herd of elephants being frightened by bees” and advised site operators who have done nothing wrong to “man up and show some spine.”

Newzbin2 assure us that their forthcoming service will be “legal from the ground up” but predict their service will receive “sniping from the malodorous content dinosaurs.”

In an uncertain world and even more uncertain cyberlocker market, that last prediction is probably the most certain we’ve heard all week.

Source: Newzbin Dumps .COM, Promises VPN & Cyberlocker Services

Judge David McNaughton said that the scale of the charges against the MegaUpload founder combined with his significant resources meant that there was a significant risk he could flee, possibly to his birthplace, Germany.

In a later hearing at the same location, lawyer Guy Foley argued that Dotcom’s alleged co-conspirators – Bram van der Kolk, 29, Finn Batato, 38, and Mathias Ortmann, 40 – are of good character and deserved bail.

This morning Judge McNaughton handed down his decision. He granted bail to both Dutch national Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato from Germany, but denied bail to Ortmann due to financial concerns.

According to Stuff, the FBI’s records show that Ortmann made around $14.5 million from the company between 2005 and 2010, and an additional $3 million in 2011. His accounts, however, show $20.2 million, some $3.5 million more. Ortmann’s lawyer has until tomorrow to come up with an explanation.

Yesterday, Guy Foley described programmer and networking expert Bram van der Kolk as a family man and today his wife Asia expressed relief that he would be coming home.

“I’m just glad my husband is going to be able to play with our baby again,” she said.

Although the Judge granted the pair bail, he ordered them detained for a further week so that their homes could be assessed for surveillance equipment suitability. It’s becoming ever more clear that being monitored is nothing new for these MegaUpload employees.

The US Department of Justice’s indictment showed that the operators of MegaUpload had been subjected to monitoring over the past several years, but a piece of evidence presented in court yesterday revealed not only how far back, but just how deep that surveillance went.

Documents produced by the FBI reportedly show the details of a 2007 Skype conversation between Bram van der Kolk and Mathias Ortmann where they mulled a situation where Kim Dotcom might run off with “the money”.

Although no context was provided by the FBI, Van der Kolk allegedly described the situation with Dotcom more than 4 years ago as “a bit risky” but with Ortmann offering assurances that since Dotcom was “operationally dependent” on the pair he could not “sneak away with the money.”

“What if the shit really hits the fan? Would he take the last little bit of money and take off? He’s good at that,” Van der Kolk replied.

“True,” said Ortmann, “But with his spending nowadays he will attempt to get the shit off the fan, and that’s what he needs us for.”

Dotcom will remain in custody until at least 22nd February.

Source: Two MegaUpload Ops Bailed, But Government Wants Surveillance

Dotcom, who along with several of his employees was raided by armed police in helicopters the day before, is wanted in the United States on racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering charges.

The hearing was adjourned until Monday this week with Judge David McNaughton delivering his decision this morning at the North Shore District Court.

Noting the scale of the charges against Dotcom and his considerable resources, Judge McNaughton said he that he had no doubt that fleeing New Zealand could be real possibility for the MegaUpload founder.

Judge McNaughton said that if Dotcom could somehow make his way to his birthplace of Germany, extradition would prove impossible since the country has no such agreement with the United States.

Essentially agreeing with prosecutor Anne Toohey, who had described Dotcom as a “significant” flight risk, Judge McNaughton denied the 38-year-old bail and remanded him in custody until 22nd February.

Dotcom’s lawyer, Paul Davison, QC, said that decision would be immediately appealed to the High Court.

“We were hopeful that the judge would accept our intentions and our arguments and see that there was no risk whatsoever of Kim Dotcom seeking to leave New Zealand.

“All of his assets have been frozen, all of his resources have been taken,” he said as he left court today.

“He’s living here with his wife and family, he has no intention whatsoever of endeavoring to leave New Zealand.”

Also appearing in Court today were Dotcom’s alleged co-conspirators Bram van der Kolk, 29, Finn Batato, 38, and Mathias Ortmann, 40.

In a hearing following Mr Dotcom’s, the lawyer representing the three men, Guy Foley, said his clients did not enjoy the same resources as the MegaUpload founder. Foley said that in the absence of a guilty verdict there should be a presumption of innocence.

He described Batato, as a “fair player” who denies involvement in the alleged conspiracy. Prosecutor Anne Toohey described Batato as a series flight risk who, in common with Dotcom, could seek to flee to Germany.

In defense of der Kolk, Foley described him as a family man who had a wife and child in New Zealand. He added that it was troubling that in evidence submitted to the court the FBI had supplied a photograph of someone else.

Ortmann, said Foley, is “decent, modest, honest and reliable” man who would not flee. Prosecutor Toohey said as a German national, fleeing there was a real possibility.

The decision on whether to grant bail to der Kolk, Batato and Ortmann will be delivered tomorrow.

Source: MegaUpload Founder Again Denied Bail, High Court Appeal Launched

But if you told him back then that you could deliver that letter before he could saddle his horse, he would suspect that either witchcraft or alcohol were at play.

In the 20th and 21st centuries we became more open to the notion that amazing things can be achieved without magic, but occasionally we still fall short in our predictions for the future.

Downloading digital media is so last decade now, even your grandmother can do it, but just a handful of years ago “You wouldn’t download a car” gained traction, a lighthearted meme that took the notion of Internet file-sharing to an intentionally ridiculous level. Several years later, however, it’s not looking quite so outrageous.

Soon, the interest in digital files will take a new direction, not because they transform into music, movies or books, but because they will possess the ‘genetic’ code for physical objects.

“We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles,” says The Pirate Bay as they announce a new 3D printing section of their site.

“Data objects are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years,” they add.

Although free sneakers in two decades sounds intriguing, creating physical objects from digital files is a reality now, as pointed out by 3D printing site Shapeways.

“Being able to download product files is not new, Shapeways has had downloadable models for years, as has Thingiverse and Google Warehouse, but let’s see how this affects the 3D printing IP debate,” the company says on its blog in response to the TPB announcement.

That’s right. The ever-looming copyright bogeyman, just waiting to throw his spanner in the 3D printer works.

In the future, however, instead of Hollywood taking action against 3D object pirates (although Paramount did actually do that in 2011), they could well be outnumbered by just about every major product manufacturer in the world – possibly even some 3D printer manufacturers themselves, since they can already print themselves.

But as pointed out by The Pirate Bay, there are huge potential benefits to be had.

“No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labor. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one,” they conclude.

So, when the writers at TorrentFreak are (more) old and gray, the children of today’s readers might be browsing The Pirate Bay III wondering which car to download. Or, as the coincidentally relevant (slightly NSFW) SOPA protest song embedded below suggests, even a boat. Or a cow.

Copyright wars? You ain’t seen nothing, baby.

Source: The Pirate Bay Wants You To Really Download A Car

Over the past 48 to 72 hours, the operators of many prominent cyberlocker services have been taking unprecedented actions that can not simply be explained away by mere coincidence. The details in the Megaupload indictment clearly have some players in the file-hosting world spooked.

One of the key allegations is that between 2005 and mid 2011, Megaupload ran a program that rewarded users for uploading infringing material. A cited internal email allegedly shows staff members discussing cash payments going to people uploading “full popular DVD rips” and “software with keygenerators (Warez)”.

Although Megaupload stopped paying out rewards in July 2011, that didn’t stop the site from getting raided. Other cyberlocker services are clearly hoping they will be more lucky.

Last evening Filesonic, a top 10 player in the file-sharing world with a billion pageviews a month, not only withdrew its affiliate rewards program, but also banned any third parties downloading files. Simply put, users can now only download files from the service that they uploaded themselves.

But according to reports, there’s no guarantee of that. Account owners report that their files are being mass deleted, that’s if their entire account hasn’t been banned already.

Fileserve, another leading player, also ended its affiliate program this weekend. Additionally, this morning TorrentFreak received news that Fileserve has now joined Filesonic in banning all 3rd party downloads.

Other users of Fileserve are experiencing an even further degraded level of service. Reports describe mass deletion of their uploads and the banning of accounts on apparent ‘Terms of Service’ violations.

As previously reported, Uploaded.to banned all US IP addresses in what appears to be an effort to distance itself from US jurisdiction. Its affiliate program is still listed as operational but the same cannot be said about those run by some of its competitors.

VideoBB and VideoZer have both reportedly closed their rewards program and according to reports have also been mass deleting accounts and huge numbers of files.

Other sites closing their affiliate programs and/or deleting accounts/files include FileJungle, UploadStation and FilePost.

Do you know of other file-hosts/cyberlockers taking similar action? Send us your stories and screenshots to the usual address.

Update: Smaller host UploadBox calls it quits. “All files will be deleted on January 30th. Feel free to download the files you store with UploadBox until this date.”

Update2: Another host, x7.to, shuts down.

Update 3: TorrentFreak has seen evidence that on request PayPal is refunding cash paid to Filesonic over the weekend.

Update 4: FileJungle and UploadStation have disabled all 3rd party downloads.

Update 5: 4shared cancels affiilate program.

Source: Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action

Dotcom, who was raided by 76 armed police in helicopters the day before, is wanted in the United States alongside other key MegaUpload employees on racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering charges.

Today, he reappeared in court again. Dotcom denied charges of copyright infringement and money laundering and said that he was the victim of a campaign to paint him in the worst possible light.

Dotcom’s lawyer, Paul Davison, told the hearing at the North Shore District Court in Auckland that his client merely ran a site offering online storage for Internet users and had not been involved in any criminal activity. Dotcom’s height and significant frame would only reduce the chances his client would abscond from bail, Davison insisted.

“He is not the sort of person who will pass unnoticed through our customs and immigration lines and controls,” Davison told the court.

The prosecution, pointing to nearly four dozen credit cards found when Dotcom was arrested, said that Dotcom’s significant financial resources meant that fleeing was a real possibility. But despite Davison’s assurances that Dotcom is merely a collector of credit cards, most of which had expired, Prosecutor Anne Toohey persisted.

Dotcom’s resources, multiple identities, multiple passports, and past history of fleeing criminal charges placed him as a flight risk “at the extreme end of the scale,” she said.

Judge David McNaughton said that due to the complex nature of the case he would delay his decision.

On the other side of the world, two other Megaupload operatives have been arrested in Europe. Although currently unnamed, they are believed to be Julius Bencko, 35, Mega’s graphics designer from Slovakia and Andrus Nomm, 32, programmer and head of the development from Estonia.

In the meantime, an immigration scandal is forming around Dotcom’s New Zealand residency. This week authorities there confirmed that it had taken Dotcom’s colorful past into consideration before giving him permanent residency in 2010 – but only after he’d invested NZ$10 million in government bonds.

“The Immigration Act allows for discretion to be exercised in certain cases. In this particular case Immigration NZ weighed the character issue and any associated risk to New Zealand against potential benefits to New Zealand,” the Immigration Service said in a statement at the weekend. Residency was eventually granted to Dotcom under the “investor plus” category.

Judge David McNaughton will deliver his decision on bail no later than Wednesday.

Source: Judge Delays Megaupload Bail Decision, More Site Operators Arrested

According to a shock announcement by the site, all file-sharing functionality has now been disabled, leaving current users only with access to files that they have personally uploaded. Many hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of links all around the web have now been rendered useless, at least temporarily.

But the bad news for the site’s users doesn’t end there. In the last few hours, before file-sharing was disabled, Filesonic also ended its rewards program, meaning that uploaders to the site no longer earn money when people download their files. A moot point perhaps, since no-one will be downloading files anyway.

However, there is the matter of what will happen to the reward money that was sitting in uploader’s accounts before the rewards program was discontinued. Will it be paid out, or will it simply disappear? Many users fear the latter.

While there has been no official explanation from the site as to why the above actions were taken, all eyes are turned towards events of the last week – the closure of Megaupload and the arrest of its founder and management team.

Like Megaupload, Filesonic appears to be based in Hong Kong and it’s clear that the authorities there already worked with the US government to shut down Kim Dotcom’s operations and seize his assets there. Filesonic is also believed to have some US-based servers.

In December, Filesonic announced it had partnered with Vobile, a provider of content identification services. All uploads to the service were said to be being checked for copyright infringement before users were able to share them publicly, although it is unclear if this system was ever implemented by the site.

The events of the last week have turned the cyberlocker world upside down and there is quite literally panic among users and site operators. Stay tuned for our detailed report tomorrow – the Megaupload takedown appears to be a game-changer.

Source: Filesonic Kills File-Sharing Service After MegaUpload Arrests

NinjaVideo, at the time one of the Internet’s most popular video portals, was one of the first targets in the now-famous and ongoing Operation in Our Sites.

Five people connected to NinjaVideo were arrested and in September 2011 they were indicted by a federal grand jury. After pleading guilty on September 23rd, yesterday one of the site’s founders was sentenced in Alexandria, Va..

Matthew David Howard Smith, known online as Dead1ne, received 14 months in prison for his activities at Ninja. U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga also ordered Smith to serve two years of supervised release.

Of the total $505,000 said to have been collected by NinjaVideo in ad revenue and donations since its creation in February 2008, Smith is said to have received $172,387. The court ordered Smith to repay this amount and forfeit five financial accounts and previously-seized sundry computer equipment.

When compared to the punishment handed out to NinjaVideo co-founder Hana Beshara earlier this month, Smith was treated relatively leniently. Beshara, known online as ‘Phara’, was sentenced to 22 months in prison followed by 2 years of probation, 500 hours of community service and ordered to repay nearly $210,000.

In contrast to Beshara, 23-year-old Smith appears to have caused the authorities much less of a headache since his guilty plea. After her sentencing, the hugely outspoken 30-year-old Beshara posted comments to Facebook which suggested she had no regrets. The outburst incensed the authorities and she was rushed directly to a local prison to begin her sentence.

Three former operators of NinjaVideo are yet to be sentenced including 34-year-old Joshua David Evans (known online as Wadswerth), 33-year-old Jeremy Lynn Andrew (known online as htrdfrk), and 28-year-old Justin A. Dedemko (known online as Afr1ka). All face a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine when they are sentenced in the coming months.

Zoi Mertzanis of Greece, known online as “Tik”, is accused of being one the site’s most active uploaders. A warrant is outstanding for his arrest.

Source: Second NinjaVideo Admin Jailed For Copyright Infringement

While the timing came as a huge post-SOPA protest surprise, the fact the site was targeted was not – for many months there have been rumblings behind the scenes that something might be “done” about MegaUpload. Nevertheless, the manner in which the action was taken and the language used by the authorities in doing so was utterly unprecedented.

So the key question this morning is this – What made MegaUpload a rogue site which deserved to be completely dismantled and its key staff arrested? The answers lie in the 72-page indictment and show just how the authorities (with the massive assistance of the MPAA, no doubt) framed Mega’s activities in such a way as to strip it of any protection under the DMCA.

In the U.S., online service providers are eligible for safe harbor under the DMCA from copyright infringement suits by meeting certain criteria. However, the indictment states that member of the “Mega Conspiracy” (capital M, capital C no less) do not meet these criteria because…

…they are willfully infringing copyrights themselves on these systems; have actual knowledge that the materials on their systems are infringing (or alternatively know facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent); receive a financial benefit directly attributable to copyright-infringing activity where the provider can control that activity; and have not removed, or disabled access to, known copyright infringing material from servers they control.

Let’s cover the last point first – the apparent non-removal of known copyright material from MegaUpload’s servers. First, a little background on how MegaUpload’s user uploading system worked because this is absolutely crucial to the case against the site.

Mega had developed a system whereby files set to be uploaded by users were hashed in order to discover if a copy of the file already exists on the Mega servers. If a file existed, the user did not have to upload his copy and was simply given a unique URL in order to access the content in future. What this meant in practice is that there could be countless URLs ‘owned’ by various users but which all pointed to the same file.

Megaupload’s “Abuse Tool” to which major copyright holders were given access, enabled the removal of links to infringing works hosted on MegaUpload’s servers. However, the indictment claims that it “did not actually function as a DMCA compliance tool as the copyright owners were led to believe.” And here’s why.

The indictment claims that when a copyright holder issued a takedown notice for content referenced by its URL, only the URL was taken down, not the content to which it pointed. So although the URL in question would report that it had been removed and would no longer resolve to infringing material, URLs issued to others would remain operational.

Furthermore, the indictment states that although MegaUpload staff (referred to as Members of the Conspiracy) discussed how they could automatically remove child pornography from their systems given a specific hash value, the same standards weren’t applied to complained-about copyright works.

In June 2010, it appears that MegaUpload was subjected to a something of a test by the authorities. The company was informed, pursuant to a criminal search warrant from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that thirty-nine infringing movies were being stored on their servers at Carpathia Hosting in the Eastern District of Virginia.

“A member of the Mega Conspiracy informed several of his co-conspirators at that time that he located the named files using internal searches of their systems. As of November 18, 2011, more than a year later, thirty-six of the thirty-nine infringing motion pictures were still being stored on the servers controlled by the Mega Conspiracy,” the indictment reads.

The paperworks goes on to accuse MegaUpload of running a program between September 2005 and July 2011 which rewarded users for uploading infringing material.

A citation from an internal MegaUpload email from February 2007 entitled “reward payments” claims to show that at least two key staff members knew that cash payments were being paid to users who uploaded infringing material including “full popular DVD rips” and “software with keygenerators (Warez)”.

Then the indictment starts to throw up some very interesting questions, specifically how the authorities managed to get hold of not just one but many of MegaUpload’s internal company emails (dating back to 2006) to use in the case against them.

It’s certainly possible that the authorities were monitoring MegaUpload’s correspondence but there are also at least two mentions in the indictment of an unnamed person described as “an unindicted co-conspirator”. While prosecutors sometimes use this term to describe people who have been excluded from an indictment on evidentiary concerns, they also use it to describe individuals who have been granted immunity from prosecution.

In any event, these emails are being heavily relied upon since many appear to indicate a knowledge among staff that copyright works were held on the company’s servers. Here’s a sample:

An email from 2006 claims to show how MegaUpload attempted to download large amounts of content from YouTube and appeared by April that year to have obtained 30% of the site’s content. A follow up email in 2007 claimed that “Kim [MegaUpload's founder] really wants to copy Youtube one to one.”

An email from August 2006 titled “lol” contained a screenshot of a MegaUpload download page showing a cracked copy of CD burning software Alcohol 120%.

Other correspondence quoted in the indictment appears to show key staff members sending each other links to copyright works hosted on MegaUpload.

One contained 100 MegaUpload links to content by recording artist Armin Van Buuren. Another, allegedly sent in December 2006 by Kim Dotcom to another staff member, carried a link to a music file hosted on a MegaUpload server entitled “05-50_cent_feat._mobb_deep-nah-c4.mp3”. No context for the sending of these links is given in the indictment.

Other emails show staff asking each other to help locate copies of infringing content including TV series The Sopranos and Seinfeld, and music from a band called Grand Archives. Again, no context is offered in the indictment.

An email sent in July 2008 shows a key staff member reporting an earlier conversation with another entitled “funny chat-log.”

“We have a funny business . . . modern days pirates,” the exchange begins. “We’re not
pirates,” came the reply. “We’re just providing shipping services to pirates.”

But aside from exchanging links to copyright works, the indictment claims that key staff members also uploaded material themselves including a TV show from the BBC and a copy of the movie Taken.

The indictment lists several other examples which are supposed to demonstrate that the admins of MegaUpload knew that their service was being used for the storage and distribution of illegal material.

Emails from customers are cited where they complain that for various reasons they’re unable to watch named copyrighted works. Others ask how to find pirate movies on Mega and are told to go to sites that index Mega-hosted material, such as the ThePirateCity.org, a site seized as part of Operation in Our Sites.

On at least two occasions the indictment reports key MegaUpload staff discussing TorrentFreak articles on seizure operations being carried out by the US authorities.

In one email, Kim Dotcom reportedly stated: “This is a serious threat to our business. Please look into this and see how we can protect ourselfs [sic],” adding, “Should we move our domain to another country, Canada or even HK?”

The indictment separately lists several movies being distributed from MegaUpload’s servers in the United States, all of which were not yet commercially available. There is no indication, however, that MegaUpload’s operators knew they were there.

On face value it would seem that in a handful of cited instances staff at the company did indeed link each other to copyright works, but when the massive scale of the MegaUpload operation is set beside them, their significance is put into a different perspective.

The issue of not taking down content is a fascinating one. MegaUpload is not on its own when it hashes content then allows users to access already-stored versions of the same files. Nevertheless, will taking down a specific URL and not the content itself be enough to appease the courts?

Finally, and despite the assertions of the MPAA, RIAA and the authorities, MegaUpload carried a huge amount of non-infringing content, giving the service itself “substantial non-infringing users”. Nevertheless, all content has now been seized, leaving millions of people and companies without their personal data.

Cyberlocker services and potential startups all around the world will be watching this case like hawks. Seismic doesn’t really come close.

Source: MegaUpload: What Made It a Rogue Site Worthy of Destruction?

Dotcom, a 37-year-old German citizen with joint New Zealand and Hong Kong residency, appeared alongside three other MegaUpload employees – site co-founder Mathias Ortmann, 40, chief marketing officer Finn Batato, 38, and programmer and networking expert Bram van der Kolk, 29.

The hearing in an Auckland district court heard how local police had been working with US authorities since 2011 culminating in raids yesterday on ten private and business locations. Among them was Kim’s residence, Dotcom Mansion, and what happened there resembles something from a movie.

New Zealand police sent 76 officers, some armed, to raid the property which reportedly housed 15 individuals including bodyguards, security staff, women and children.

“Police arrived in two marked police helicopters. Despite our staff clearly identifying themselves, Mr Dotcom retreated into the house and activated a number of electronic locking mechanisms,” Detective Inspector Grant Wormald told the court.

“While police neutralized these locks he then further barricaded himself into a safe room within the house which officers had to cut their way into,” Wormald added.

At the hearing, the first step to being extradited to the United States, all four defendants were denied bail and are due to reappear at another hearing next Monday. Police say there are no intentions of trying the defendants under local laws.

“This particular type of action around internet copyright infringement is a first in New Zealand in terms of an overseas person being attempted to be extradited to the United States,” said Intellectual Property Lawyer Rick Shera, as quoted by TVNZ.

Three other defendants – a German, a Slovakian and an Estonian – all remain at large.

Source: MegaUpload Founder Denied Bail At Extradition Hearing

Their so-called “three strikes” or “graduated response” scheme would see Internet account holders receive an official warning should their IP addresses be linked to uploads of infringing material on file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent.

Hadopi, the agency tasked with administering the system, started sending out the initial warnings in October 2010 and has periodically provided stats on how many first, second and third strike notices have been issued.

Using the latest available data, PC Inpact‘s Marc Rees has created some graphs showing the progression of the scheme since the delivery of those first warnings some 15 to 16 months ago.

The first chart above shows that as of November 2011, 736,000 “first strike” emails had been delivered to Internet subscribers. Hadopi president Marie-Françoise Marais previously reported that September had seen the agency send out its 650,000th notice.

Chart two shows the number of “second strike” notices sent to Internet subscribers. Rather than via email, these are delivered to individuals by traditional recorded delivery mail. The latest data shows that 62,000 of these notices were delivered to November 2011, up from just under 20,600 delivered by July 2011 and 44,000 by September 2011.

The third graphic shows the number of Internet account holders being held responsible for a total of three online copyright infringements. As of November 2011, 165 subscribers were on their third and final strike, up from 60 citizens two months earlier in September.

But the big question, however, is whether the warnings are causing the French to swap a file-sharing habit for one which involves spending money with official outlets. Next week the big labels will support a study which claims that is indeed happening.

According to Numerama, next Monday the IFPI will publish a study which will apparently show that during the last 18 months the Hadopi environment has led to a 22.5% increase in purchases from iTunes and an extra 13.8 million euros for the French market. We’ll certainly be taking a closer look at these figures when they become available.

In September 2011 it was revealed that Hadopi asked the French Ministry of Culture for 12 million euros to finance its operations in 2012. It was granted 11 million euros.

Source: 165 French File-Sharers Now On 3rd Strike, “iTunes Up 22.5%”

Rather than being presented with the usual page from where almost any music in the world can be found, local users were instead greeted with the following message:

Due to unreasonably high operating costs, the notice reads, Grooveshark is now inaccessible from Germany.

“We will miss you! You can write to us. We hope to come back one day,” it continues. “If you want to reduce the operating costs for both providers and Grooveshark, you can send a polite message to GEMA.”

GEMA is the local music rights collections organization in Germany and according to its own stats has 64,000 members and represents more than 2 million rights holders.

The organization has a history of licensing disputes, most visibly when it started blocking videos on YouTube in order to achieve a deal on its terms with the Google-owned company.

The unpopular move was even met with criticism from prominent music industry players, including CEO of Sony Music, Edgar Berger, who suggested that members of GEMA’s supervisory board had not yet arrived in the digital era.

“We want to see streaming services like Vevo and Spotify in the German market. [These platforms] must not be blocked by GEMA any longer,” he said. “Artists and music companies are losing sales in the millions.”

Nevertheless, it’s unlikely that Berger will apply the same sentiments to Grooveshark’s plight. All the major labels – Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI – are suing Grooveshark over copyright infringement or royalty issues in the United States.

That legal process was stepped up this week when Grooveshark sent a reportedly aggressive and broad-reaching subpoena to Digital Music News in an attempt to unmask a supposed whistleblower whose allegations form the basis of Universal’s copyright infringement lawsuit against the music streamer.

On its German page, Grooveshark concludes its German departure message by suggesting that users test out the local Simfy music service as an alternative, but many will simply head over to Google and type “US proxy” instead.

Source: Grooveshark Blocks German Users Over Licensing Costs

After spending years on various educational campaigns, none of which worked, a new plan was put into motion. It involved monitoring P2P networks for infringements, unmasking the perpetrators, and then threatening to sue unless a large ‘fine’ or settlement was paid.

Although the RIAA stopped its settlement actions against US citizens some time ago, the fallout from the campaign is still felt today, with cases ongoing against Jammie Thomas and Joel Tenenbaum. However, while those Stateside are no longer targets for the RIAA’s so-called “sue-em-all” campaign, the same cannot be said of citizens in Europe.

In common with their counterparts in the gaming industry, the major labels – Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner – are all actively sending out cash settlement demands to alleged file-sharers.

For the past several years, 2011 included, the labels have been pursuing cash settlements from German Internet users for the alleged sharing of music from dozens of major stars artists. A small sample is shown below:

Universal

Amy Winehouse, Blink 182, Bon Jovi, Eminem, Florence And The Machine, Jamiroquai, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Take That, The Black Eyed Peas, The Rolling Stones.

Settlement amount demanded: 1,200 euros

Sony

AC/DC, Alexandra Burke, Alica Keys, Avril Lavigne, Backstreet Boys, Beyonce, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Foo Fighters, Kasabian, Kesha, Kings of Leon, Leona Lewis, Michael Jackson, Ozzy Osbourne, Pink, Pitbull, R. Kelly, Shakira, The Strokes.

Settlement amount demanded: Up to 950 euros

EMI

Bryan Ferry, Coldplay, David Guetta, Depeche Mode, Good Charlotte, Gorillaz, Katy Perry, Snoop Dogg, U2

Settlement amount demanded: Up to 1,200 euros

Warner

Of the four labels, Warner appears to be least active, particularly when chasing settlements on behalf of major acts. Warner’s activities appear to be limited to local artists of limited international appeal.

Settlement amount demanded: Up to 1,200 euros

Although these labels are playing a major part in the settlement business, they are not doing so in isolation. Dozens of other labels are acting in their own right including RoadRunner Records, Ministry of Sound and Pink Floyd Music.

As previously reported, getting payments from Internet users in Germany is trivial since the law there requires the accused to prove their innocence (rather than rightsholders prove guilt) and holds account holders responsible for the actions of others.

So, despite their recent protestations in response to findings from YouHaveDownloaded, the RIAA would be found liable had they been judged by German standards.

Although hundreds of thousands of people are currently being targeted for settlements in the United States for sharing adult titles, currently the major labels and movie studios there aren’t pursuing the strategy locally. That, however, could all change at the flick of a switch.

Source: RIAA Labels Demand Cash from Alleged BitTorrent Pirates

But bad publicity and intense controversy greeted the law firm and its owner Andrew Crossley at every turn and eventually the company went bust. Today, Crossley faced the ultimate shame as a lawyer, by appearing before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT).

Despite previous displays of stubborn bravado, according to ‘Speculative Invoicing’ expert Will Gilmour who was in court today, Crossley disputed only one of the seven charges against him.

Firstly, the charge that he allowed his independence to be compromised and acted in a manner contrary to the best interests of his clients – ironically the copyright holders on whose behalf he extracted cash settlements from the public – was not contested.

Crossley, whose disastrous foray into this controversial work was laid bare when his company documents were leaked onto the web in 2010, lodged no dispute against claims that he acted in a way that was likely to diminish the trust the public places in him or in the legal profession.

The fourth accusation, that Crossley “Entered into arrangements to receive contingency fees for work done in prosecuting or defending contentious proceedings before the Courts of England and Wales except as permitted by statute or the common law” was also met with acceptance from the lawyer.

Furthermore, Crossley did not contest that he acted where there was a “conflict of interest in circumstances not permitted, in particular because there was a conflict with those of his clients,” nor that he “used his position as a Solicitor to take or attempt to take unfair advantage of other persons being recipients of letters of claim either for his own benefit or for the benefit of his clients.”

The only point contested by Crossley related to an SRA/SDT accusation that he acted improperly in connection with data breaches from ACS:Law’s website during 2010. Crossley pointed the finger at the company’s web host for allegedly leaving a backup of the lawfirm’s data in a publicly accessible area.

In their decision announced just a few moments ago, the Tribunal suspended Crossley from operating as a lawyer for 2 years and ordered him to pay costs of £77,000. While opponents had hoped for a permanent ban, the lengthy suspension will be seen as a huge black mark against his reputation.

Also revealed in the hearing was the personal cost to the now-suspended lawyer. In addition to being unable to find work since the revelations against him, Crossley remains bankrupt and has split from his partner of 15 years.

Source: ACS:Law Anti-Piracy Lawyer Suspended For 2 Years

As highlighted dozens of times before, companies making these accusations rely on weak IP address-only evidence and use their legal teams to intimidate their targets into paying up – guilty or not.

CD Projekt wisely moved to protect their hard-earned image and relationships with both the gaming press and their customer base, but quite rightly noted a few weeks ago that they were not the only companies sending out these letters demanding cash.

So, addressing concerns that CD Projekt might have been unfairly singled out, TorrentFreak decided to dig deep into the archives of various resources including legal firms, campaign groups and the account holders themselves, to find out which other games companies – either directly or through local distributors – have been generating revenue from cash settlement schemes in recent years.

We discovered that not only are new games being targeted but older ones too, possibly to bring in extra cash from games well past their sell-by date when it comes to generating profit from more conventional sources.

Atari, the distributor of the original The Witcher, pulled out of chasing alleged file-sharers in the UK several years ago, but like many of their competitors simply transferred their settlement businesses to Germany. Atari has been sending settlement demands of several hundred euros for several of its titles including Alone in the Dark, Test Drive Unlimited and 2011′s Test Drive Unlimited 2.

Survival horror fans might be interested to know that distributor Koch Media has been sucking the blood from alleged sharers of the Techland game Dead Island. Tales of Monkey Island distributor DAEDALIC Entertainment are doing the same for publisher Lucas Arts.

Those who prefer a good stealthy RPG might be surprised to know that alleged sharers of Eidos/Square Enix’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution are being crept up on and told to pay-up-or-else to the tune of 800 euros by local distributor Koch Media, as are those accused of obtaining Dungeon Siege III (800 euros on this baby) and Final Fantasy games for free.

Codemasters, another company that first tried the UK and then took their settlement work elsewhere, originally pursued alleged file-sharers over their Colin McRae Dirt game.

But having gotten bored with sending out letters for F1 2010, they are currently sending cash demands of 800 euros over their latest off-road installment, DiRT 3.

Ending the racing theme, RaceOn (BitComposer) and Nail’d (Techland) complete the grid.

Holy settlement letter Batman! The Eidos/Square Enix/Warner title Batman: Arkham Asylum has been the subject of an unknown number of cash settlement letters sent out in Germany.

If you like your adventures a little more open, Eidos/Square are back again, asking for several hundred euros from ISP account holders connected to Just Cause 2 downloads. The duo come in again on the 3rd person settlement front with Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, closely followed by the Prison Break: The Conspiracy action/adventure from Koch Media (yet again).

Tactical shooter fans might be concerned by the scattergun approach taken by (and here they are again) Codemasters when they ask for 800 euros in connection with their game Operation Flashpoint Red River. The same goes for Ubisoft when they send out letters to claimed Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six:Vegas downloaders.

First person shooters are always enjoyable, but being put in the crosshairs for allegedly sharing Painkiller addons Painkiller:Resurrection and Painkiller:Redemption can’t be much fun, especially when there’s a 300 euro headshot at the end of it destined for local distributor Koch Media.

Finally, if simulators are more your thing, stand by for a realism overload. Airline Tycoon 2 and Tropico 3 and 4 (Kalypso Media), Cities XL 2012 (dtp entertainment), City Bus Simulator/Simulator Gold (Aerosoft), Airbus X (Aerosoft), and Agrar Simulator 2011 (Koch Media), are all keeping it super-real with multi-hundred euro settlement demands.

The bad news is that the above sample is just the tip of the iceberg – dozens of devs and distributors of lesser known games are sending out these letters demanding anything from 300 to more than 1000 euros to make cases go away. But despite there being many games companies at the end of these settlement chains, three local names – Koch Media, dtp entertainment AG and Kalypso Media GmbH – appear more than any other.

It would be great if the companies listed above followed CD Projekt’s example and reconsidered their support for these horrible settlement letters. If any gaming publications would like to see the full list of games companies engaged in these schemes, feel free to contact us and we’ll happily send them over.

Source: Square Enix, Eidos & Other Game Giants All Demand Cash From Pirates

The case was eventually adjourned, with accusations from Richard’s lawyer Ben Cooper that US authorities were unfairly trying to gain the upper hand through unreasonable delays. Nevertheless, all parties were back in court today to hear the judge’s ruling.

“There are said to be direct consequences of criminal activity by Richard O’Dwyer in the USA albeit by him never leaving the north of England,” District Judge Quentin Purdy said in his ruling. “Such a state of affairs does not demand a trial here if the competent UK authorities decline to act and does, in my judgment, permit one in the USA.”

“I reject all challenges advanced to this request. No bars or other challenge being raised or found, I send the case to the Secretary of State,” he concluded.

Richard’s most vocal supporter, his mother Julia, voiced her despair and continued with her criticism of the UK’s extradition treaty with the US.

“If [the US authorities] want to prosecute something they will. There’s no safeguards here for British citizens,” she said.

The Judge did not have the “technical brains to know about the whole thing,” she noted, adding: “That guy just lives and breathes extradition.”

Ben Cooper described Richard as an extradition and copyright law “guinea pig”, adding that he would launch an appeal.

Source: TVShack Admin Can Be Extradited To US, Judge Rules

TorrentFreak wasn’t really surprised by the statement. CD Projekt had done exactly the same before with the first installment of The Witcher.

“Mark our words, CD Projekt aren’t going to get an easy ride with this,” we predicted back then. But would they carry it through?

While trawling through endless Germany-based lawsuits in connection with another issue, the answer was right there – documents which showed that CD Projekt were sending so-called pay-up-or-else letters to alleged pirates demanding more than 900 euros per time. So, early December 2011, we reported what we’d found.

Response to the news was mixed. Some thought it was OK to chase down pirates but soon it became clear that this company, who had built up so much goodwill with impressive games and a refreshing attitude to DRM, risked damaging their hard-earned reputation with people they needed onside – the gaming press and their readers.

One of CD Projekt’s most vocal opponents (TF aside) were RockPaperShotgun, who proceeded to give the company a pretty hard time over their actions. Their arguments are well-worn, centering on the potential of accusing the innocent with disproportionate actions. But now, just a couple of months later, it is all over.

“In early December, [a TorrentFreak] article was published about a law firm acting on behalf of CD Projekt RED, contacting individuals who had downloaded The Witcher 2 illegally and seeking financial compensation for copyright infringement,” says CD Projekt’s Marcin Iwinski in a statement sent to RPS. “The news about our decision to combat piracy directly, instead of with DRM, spread quickly and with it came a number of concerns from the community.”

“Repeatedly, gamers just like you have said that our methods might wrongly accuse people who have never violated our copyright and expressed serious concern about our actions,” Iwinski adds.

“Being part of a community is a give-and-take process. We only succeed because you have faith in us, and we have worked hard over the years to build up that trust. We were sorry to see that many gamers felt that our actions didn’t respect the faith that they have put into CD Projekt RED.

“Our fans always have been and remain our greatest concern, and we pride ourselves on the fact that you all know that we listen to you and take your opinions to heart. While we are confident that no one who legally owns one of our games has been required to compensate us for copyright infringement, we value our fans, our supporters, and our community too highly to take the chance that we might ever falsely accuse even one individual.

“So we’ve decided that we will immediately cease identifying and contacting pirates,” Iwinski writes.

The full statement can be found here and is important on a number of fronts, all previously outlined in great detail.

But perhaps the most refreshing thing is the tone of the announcement. Look, let’s be under no illusions, the decision to abandon this ill-fated scheme is a commercial one, but CD Projekt did not tow the typically corporate line with a carefully sanitized release saying that their scheme had simply run its course, they actually listened to and then addressed the concerns of their fans.

For those already targeted by the scheme it’s too late, but the company can now move forward doing what they do best – making great games without needless distractions.

Oh, and for the other games companies doing the same in Germany but currently flying under the radar – we know who you are and we’re coming for you next, so you might want to get your retaliation in first, it’s easier in the long run.

Source: Witcher 2 Devs Abandon Games Piracy Shakedown

The case had been brought by the major labels (headed by EMI) against local ISP UPC in an attempt to force it to block Internet piracy.

“It is not surprising that the legislative response laid down in our country in the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, at a time when this problem was not perceived to be as threatening to the creative and retail economy as it has become in 2010, has made no proper provision for the blocking, diverting or interrupting of internet communications intent on breaching copyright,” Justice Charleton’s judgment began.

The Judge noted that by not having this legislative mechanism in place, Ireland is non-compliant with its obligations under European law.

To address this situation and to appease the labels, late 2011 the government promised to publish an order early this year that would allow rightsholders to go to court to prevent the country’s ISPs from supplying a service which could provide access to infringing sites.

But despite the promises from Ireland’s Minister of State for Enterprise, EMI – who previously threatened to sue the state if they didn’t take the action promised in the previous paragraph – seem to have run out of patience before January even completes its second week.

Yesterday, EMI Records (Ireland) filed a lawsuit against the Irish state for failure to correctly implement certain provisions of EU copyright law.

Lawyer and lecturer at University College Dublin, TJ McIntyre, believes that the labels will rely on a principle under which damages against a state are possible if three conditions are met.

“First, that the result prescribed by the directive should entail the grant of rights to individuals; secondly, that it should be possible to identify the content of those rights on the basis of the provisions of the directive,” he writes.

McIntyre adds that the third condition, that there should be a “causal link” between the breach of the State’s obligation and the losses suffered by (in this case) the labels, could prove problematic.

“Establishing a causal link between Irish law and filesharing will be difficult, particularly given the evidence from elsewhere that blocking is ineffective,” he concludes.

Site blocking could be a last resort for the record labels. Following an investigation into the legality of a 3 strikes-style regime operated by Irish ISP Eircom, in December the country’s Data Protection Commissioner ordered the practice to be brought to a halt on privacy grounds.

Source: EMI Sues Irish State For Not Implementing Piracy Blocking Provisions

To help avoid a damaging legal precedent, Ziggo was joined in the case by rival ISP XS4ALL. Initially the partnership was successful. The Court of The Hague decided that blocking all customer access to The Pirate Bay was a step too far. BREIN, refusing to give in, launched a full trial.

During November last year that case was heard before the Court of The Hague. BREIN argued that it would be trivial for the ISPs to initiate a block of The Pirate Bay, while the ISPs stated that doing so could compromise the security of their networks, threaten freedom of expression, and would ultimately prove ineffective.

BREIN countered by insisting they have rights too – copyrights – and that the reason the ISPs don’t want to block TPB is because they profit by selling bandwidth to users so they can access it.

Today, the Court of the Hague delivered its verdict – and it’s victory for BREIN.

The Court noted that approximately 30% of Ziggo subscribers and 4.5% of XS4ALL subscribers use The Pirate Bay to share unauthorized media. Downloading copyright material is currently legal in the Netherlands but uploading is not, so due to the two-way nature of BitTorrent it is deemed that those customers are infringing copyright.

While the Court noted that an ISP blockade against The Pirate Bay would also prevent subscribers with legitimate business from accessing the site, it said that the legal offerings available there are not only limited, but also available from other sites. Preventing a large number of copyright infringements trumps the availability of a more limited supply of legal content, the Court noted.

Furthermore, the Court concluded that in granting an injunction to block The Pirate Bay it would only be preventing access to a site already subject to a court order which forced its operators to block access to Internet users in the Netherlands. That order was previously issued by the Amsterdam Court but was ignored by the site’s operators.

Spokesperson for XS4ALL, Niels Huijbregts, said the company is “bitterly disappointed” by the decision, noting that fundamental rights had been traded for “commercial interests”.

The ISPs have ten days in which to initiate the blockade – failure to do so will result in fines of 10,000 euros per day.

Update: BREIN says it will ask other Dutch ISPs to block The Pirate Bay as well.

Update: XS4ALL says it will appeal the verdict.

Update: Ziggo will also appeal.

Source: Dutch ISPs Ordered To Block The Pirate Bay

Whilst at University in 2008, AMP’s phone was either lost or stolen. Shortly after the images it contained appeared on an unnamed file-hosting service and these were linked by someone to her Facebook account. Although Facebook removed them, it was clear that the situation was developing – into blackmail.

AMP was contacted personally on Facebook and her fathers business public relations team were “threatened and blackmailed” over the existence of images. Then, the genie was let out of the bottle.

During November 2008, the images were uploaded “to a Swedish website that hosts files known as ‘BitTorrent’ files,” court papers reveal. Although not mentioned by name, the revelation that AMP legal’s team couldn’t get the site to respond to DMCA takedowns points the finger towards The Pirate Bay.

Making matters worse, AMP’s real name had been added to the BitTorrent filenames, meaning that the torrents were the first results if anyone typed in her name on the leading search engines. So this extraordinary battle was on – could it really be possible to take this content down?

For the purposes of the action, it was presumed that people most interested in downloading the photos would, in common with AMP, reside in the UK. Therefore, if a court could be convinced to issue an order declaring that the distribution of the material is illegal, then any seeder could be served and ordered to cease his or her activity. If every seeder could be attacked this way, then the torrent would simply die.

While it might be expected that the claimant claimed copyright in ‘the work’ and attempted to take it down that way, instead she sought an injunction “to preserve the right to respect for her private and family life” under the Human Rights Act 1998.

The High Court noted that although under the Human Rights Act citizens have “the right to receive and impart information without interference”, the rights of BitTorrent users to “download the digital photographic images using the BitTorrent protocol and to disseminate them by seeding them” had to be balanced against the privacy rights of the claimant.

AMP was ultimately successful in obtaining an injunction in respect of her privacy and under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, with the Court deciding that anyone seeding the image files on BitTorrent within its jurisdiction would be committing an offense.

“There is therefore a good arguable case that the conduct of disseminating the digital photographic images amounts to harassment of the Claimant under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and that this is a case where it is appropriate to grant an injunction,” the Hon. Mr Justice Ramsey wrote in his decision.

As far as we are aware, this is the first case of its type where BitTorrent users are expressly forbidden by a court injunction from sharing specific material. But the big question remains – has it been successful?

AMP’s name is secret, the filenames are secret, and the court reinforces the confidentiality of both sets of information by expressly including them in the court order – revealing them would also be an offense. Since we don’t know either we can’t search for them, but it’s likely that the torrents still exist. Whether they have any seeders is key, but any within the jurisdiction of the court should beware.

According to Andrew Murray, Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, AMP’s lawyer will track down seeders in England and Wales (and anywhere in the EU thanks to a European Arrest Warrant) via their ISPs using CPR 31.17, not a Norwich Pharmacol order which is usually the preferred method in such cases.

Reading this case it is clear that AMP and/or her father and family were prepared to spend a large sum of money pursuing this action. Exactly how much is unclear but from the files appearing on, presumably, The Pirate Bay, it has taken 3 years to reach the point where seeding them is covered by an injunction.

Effective? We have no way of saying. But 10/10 for persistence and ingenuity.

Source: BitTorrent Seeders Harrass Blackmail Victim, High Court Rules

Officers from the National Directorate for Combating Organized Crime said they raided a total of three locations in the western city of Pernik, the central northern city of Gabrovo and the capital Sofia. The aim: stop the illegal distribution of music and movies.

Although not directly named in yesterday’s Interior Ministry announcement, the action was targeted at P2PBG and Elit-BG, sites with combined userbases of at least 750,000 members.

P2PBG alone had more than 600K members but the exact userbase of Elit-Bg is unclear since a database issue last year caused them to ‘lose’ 200K members. Nevertheless, their popularity placed them in the country’s top 5 most popular torrent sites.

The authorities say that they have arrested two individuals, allegedly the sites’ owners. According to the Interior Ministry, one of them is “a minor”. TorrentFreak is informed that he is a teenager, just 17-years-old.

While computer equipment and other hardware is said to have been seized, that does not appear to include site hardware. Both sites remain up on the same host located outside the country in Germany. Access to their trackers, however, has been disabled.

A notice on P2PBG declares: “Access to the torrent section is disabled for all users. Please save your angry comments.”

The Interior Ministry described the raids as “another successful operation” in the Ministry of Culture’s overall plan to crack down on copyright infringement.

Source: Anti-Mafia Unit Raids Large Torrent Sites, Arrests 17-Year-Old Admin

The groups demanded that local ISP Elisa should be forced to protect the copyrights of their members by stopping their subscribers accessing The Pirate Bay. Initially Elisa refused, described the blocking demands as “unreasonable”, but a subsequent court order left them with no choice.

On October 26th 2011, the District Court of Helsinki ordered Elisa to block a range of domains and IP addresses associated with The Pirate Bay. Although Elisa has contested the decision by filing with the Helsinki Court of Appeal, in the meantime they have to comply.

Today, Elisa has confirmed it has begun blocking the domains and IP addresses listed below:

thepiratebay.org, www.thepiratebay.org, depiraatbaai.be, www.depiraatbaai.be, piratebay.am, www.piratebay.am, piratebay.net, www.piratebay.net, www.piratebay.no, piratebay.no, piratebay.se, www.piratebay.se, suprnova.com, www.suprnova.com, themusicbay.com, www.themusicbay.com, themusicbay.net, www.themusicbay.net, themusicbay.org, www.themusicbay.org, thepiratebay.am,www.thepiratebay.am, www.thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.gl, www.thepiratebay.gl, thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.se, thepiratebay.se, www.piraattilahti.fi, piraattilahti.fi, thepiratepay.org.nyud.net

IP addresses to be blocked:

194.71.107.15
194.71.107.19
194.71.107.18

“During the war between Finland and Russia some Swedes decided to help Finland. They said ‘The Finnish cause is ours’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak, signaling their intention to circumvent the block.

“TPB originates from Sweden, so TPB will see the Finnish cause as its own. Only this time, it’s against the copyright Russians,” he concluded.

And it appears the battle for the ’cause’ has already begun. The last domain in the list certainly piqued our interest and not only because it includes a typo. The nyud.net domain belongs to the peer-to-peer based Coral CDN service which links to IP-addresses all over the world, which is generally a good tool to make blocked sites accessible again.

Ironically enough, the domain in question reveals a very easy way to bypass The Pirate Bay blockade in Finland. Just use one of the alternative domains associated with The Pirate Bay, add nyud.net (e.g. depiraatbaai.be.nyud.net) and the most resilient torrent site becomes accessible again in Finland.

“While this block can temporarily stop the basic filesharer from using The Pirate Bay, we already see a surge of interest in blocking technology, censorship, net neutrality, copyright legislation and court practice in the media,” Joonas Mäkinen of Finland’s Pirate Party told TorrentFreak.

“This probably ends up being beneficial to filesharing and shows the blocking attempts to be counter-productive. Side-effects will be that the more blocks there are, the more workarounds people learn. This could severely hinder solving important crimes in the future,” he concludes.

Party secretary Harri Kivistö shares these concerns.

“These blocks are nothing. People adapt, as they’ve always done. They learn to use new methods, they discover new websites, they circumvent,” he told TorrentFreak. “Loads of money are thrown into lobbying and legal action and nothing else is accomplished but limitations to civil rights and preliminary structures for a police state.”

Interestingly there is another domain in the list which does not link to The Pirate Bay at all.

Anyone (Elisa customers excluded) clicking piraattilahti.fi will see that the domain is not linked to the world’s most resilient torrent site at all, but digital rights group EFFI – Electronic Frontier Finland.

“The decision from Helsinki Administrative Office for Enforcement was quite surprising considering the decision SABAM v. Scarlet from The Court of Justice of the European Union and the fact that the decision itself is currently under appeal,” Ville Oksanen, lawyer and researcher at Aalto University told TorrentFreak.

“It’s hard to see why the enforcement has to start before the matter is finally resolved – especially considering that the given decision is quite ineffective , e.g. it misses www.thepiratebay.ee and all the different proxy and open DNS-services. Even more ironically, one of blocked the addresses actually is a forward to www.effi.org, which is ‘the Finnish version’ of Electronic Frontier Foundation,” he concludes.

In the last hour we’ve learned that there are even more blocking circumvention options coming soon meaning that this cat and mouse game could go on forever.

Update (January 11): Elisa updated the list of blocked domains and removed the piraattilahti.fi domains.

“The enforcement order was narrowed so that the removal of domain names www.piraattilahti.fi and piraattilahti.fi have been canceled in Elisa’s network,” the ISP states.

Source: The Pirate Bay Shows Futility of Domain and DNS Blocks

The Church’s creator, philosophy student Isak Gerson, told TorrentFreak that he hoped the development would encourage people to be more open about the fact they are practicing Kopimists.

“There’s still a legal stigma around copying for many,” he told us. “A lot of people still worry about going to jail when copying and remixing. I hope in the name of Kopimi that this will change.”

One group that will hope the opposite is true are the long-time Kopimism rivals at the MPAA. But according to The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, an employee of the movie industry group actually provided the inspiration for the original Kopimism movement to be transformed into a full-blown religion.

“In an interview in 2007 or 2008 (I believe, not sure about the date) the Swedish lawyer for the MPAA, Monique Wadsted, got a question about her views on the people advocating file sharing,” Sunde explains.

“It’s just a few people, very loud. They’re a cult. They call themselves Kopimists,” Wadsted responded.

Wadsted, who participated in the prosecution during The Pirate Bay trial, had previous experience with cults having represented the Church of Scientology in a copyright case. Little did she know that the seeds of inspiration had just been planted and were about to turn “a cult” into something more.

“It made me think that it might be of benefits to look at what we do as a religious movement,” says Sunde. “One of the fun things working with The Pirate Bay has always been that we’ve started lots of fun crazy projects. Some work, some (most) fail. I started researching what kind of angle it would give us if we registered a religion.”

Interestingly, Sunde says that in Sweden its possible for anyone to create a religion as long as they’re organized – the actual content of a religion is not examined. But it was the fact that religions enjoy more protection than political groups that piqued Sunde’s interest most.

Nevertheless, several years passed before the idea for a copying church were turned into reality by Isak Gerson, who at just 19-years-old has already gained more exposure for his new faith than many other religions achieve in a lifetime. Even the Catholic church have noticed but perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re not impressed.

“It’s crazy and seems like a send up of religion, a send up of copyright and a send up of the government to register such a body as religious,” says Bishop Peter Ingham, head of the Catholic Diocese of Wollongong in Australia.

“There should be some measuring stick against what you call religion,” he said. “In my mind, if religion has nothing to do with God — or what people perceive to be God — then it’s a sham. It looks like it’s just a way of getting around the law of piracy and copyright. How could a religion promote illegal activity?”

The Missionary Church of Kopimism has no requirements for its congregation to break the law, but Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge does raise an interesting issue – that of religious confession.

“Conversations with preachers of official religions acting on official duty are privileged conversations, meaning they can’t be eavesdropped on or forced as evidence; a priest can even go to jail for inadvertently disclosing something that was said under the privileged conversation of confession,” he explains.

“In the case of this religion, the preachers are defined as the ones facilitating holy copying (and remixing). Translated to nerdspeak, that means the communications between operators of trackers/hubs and the people who partake in the sacrament of copying now carries confessional status, by and large making it illegal and impossible to collect as evidence in a trial,” Falkvinge continues.

“That brings a whole boatload of interesting legal ramifications with regards to evidence collection and trying to persecute the worshipers of holy copying and remixing, doesn’t it?”

Source: MPAA Lawyer Inspired File-Sharing Religion, Catholic Bishop Unhappy

Five people connected to NinjaVideo were arrested but it took until September 2011 for them to be indicted by a federal grand jury. One of those indicted was site co-founder Hana Beshara.

Later that month, Beshara – known online by her pseudonym Phara, and referred to by NinjaVideo members as their “Queen” – pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Beshara admitted her role in the founding of NinjaVideo during February 2008 and confessed to negotiating agreements with online advertisers. In total the site is said to have generated revenue and donations totaling around $500,000. Of this amount, Beshara admitted personally receiving around $200,000.

Today, 30-year-old Beshara was sentenced. For crimes of conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement, she was sentenced to 22 months in prison followed by 2 years probation and 500 hours of community service. She will have to repay the money she made from the site, a total of $209,826.95, and forfeit financial accounts and computer equipment.

“Hana’s lawyer was happy with the sentence,” a source close to NinjaVideo told TorrentFreak.

“Judge Trenga rarely gives the max penalty like some judges do. He was clearly unhappy with her being unremorseful but Hana does not separate her accomplishments in building the community with the crime,” the source added.

“Beshara had several character witness letters and made a statement to the court. The judge recognized that she is a capable, intelligent woman who created a high quality site.”

Last year, NinjaVideo co-founder and coder Matthew Smith (known online as Dead1ne) also pleaded guilty to conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement and was due to be sentenced December 2011. A delay means the 23-year old will be sentenced at a later date.

Joshua David Evans (known online as Wadswerth), 34, of North Bend, Wash. previously pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of criminal copyright infringement relating to the release of the movie Iron Man 2 before its commercial premiere.

Jeremy Lynn Andrew (known online as htrdfrk), a 33-year-old of Eugene, Ore. pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy.

Justin A. Dedemko (known online as Afr1ka), 28, of Brooklyn, N.Y was responsible for uploading content to NinjaVideo and marketing the site. He previously admitted receiving just over $58,000 from site revenue and will pay restitution in that amount.

All face a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine when they are sentenced in the coming months. Beshara’s relatively lenient sentence (considering the maximum available) is an indication that their sentences are likely to be no more than 2 years.

A fifth defendant in the case, Zoi Mertzanis of Greece, known online as “Tik”, is accused of being one the site’s most active uploaders. A warrant is outstanding for his arrest.

Source: NinjaVideo Founder Sentenced To 22 Months in Prison

More than 100 leaked cables showed that the US had helped draft new Spanish copyright legislation and had heavily influenced the decisions of both the government and opposition.

Now, another diplomatic leak has revealed how the US voiced its anger towards outgoing President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero last month upon realizing that his government was unlikely to pass the US-drafted Sinde (site blocking) Law before leaving office.

In a letter dated December 12th and sent by US Ambassador Alan D. Solomont to the Spanish Prime Minister’s office, the US expressed “deep concern” over the failure to implement the SOPA-style censorship law.

“The government has unfortunately failed to finish the job for political reasons, to the detriment of the reputation and economy of Spain,” read the letter obtained by El Pais.

Racing against the clock in the final days of the government, Solomont had one last push.

“I encourage the Government of Spain to implement the Sinde Law immediately to safeguard the reputation of Spain as an innovative country that does what it says it will, and as a country that breeds confidence,” he wrote.

But along with the pleas came the stick.

In the letter, which was also sent to Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde after whom the law is named, Solomont noted that Spain is already on the Special 301, the annual report prepared by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) detailing ‘trade barriers’ based on intellectual property issues.

Solomont’s threat was that should Spain not pass the Sinde Law (described by some as the Spanish SOPA) then the country would be degraded further and placed on the Priority Watch List. This serious step would mean that Spain was in breach of trade agreements and could be subjected to a range of “retaliatory actions”.

In the event Zapatero’s government left office without passing the law, but the incoming Partido Popular (People’s Party) were quickly pressured by the US to take the necessary action.

In another media leak it’s now been revealed that American Chamber of Commerce in Spain chief Jaime Malet wrote a cautionary letter to incoming Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy. He warned of the potential flight of foreign investment from Spain and urged him to take action on the protection of intellectual property once in office.

“[The law's] lack of approval before the elections has been a blow to the country’s seriousness in this matter of such importance,” said Malet, while urging Rajoy to “to retrieve the consensus reached.”

Rajoy’s government quickly responded and fully implemented the legislation within 10 days of taking office.

Source: US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law

Today, Purewal published another on the same subject in the online edition of Edge, which in my opinion is the most intelligent games publication ever committed to paper. As a fanatical gamer, former 8bit games coder, and proud owner of the publication’s issue 1 from 1993, I felt compelled to respond.

“By far the most emotive argument that is often proffered is that CD Projekt are blackmailing people by saying ‘Pay up… OR ELSE!’ and thereby are removing access to justice and denying due process and so forth. Sadly, from a legal perspective, the case seems to be slightly different,” wrote Wrigley in the initial piece.

“…if you haven’t downloaded The Witcher 2 illegally and CD Projekt cannot prove that you have then actually the entire process won’t cost you a single penny,” he added.

What we have here is someone who writes clearly with an undoubted understanding of the mechanics, but also seems to lack specific experience in a practical boots-on-the-ground sense.

Here at TorrentFreak we aren’t lawyers, but we have spoken intimately with dozens of people targeted in similar actions and for them to deal with court-bound accusations effectively they need lawyers, and they cost lots of money. It is not enough to say “oh, well, you’ll get the money back when you win”, because many of these people don’t have the money in the first instance.

In any event, why should innocent people be dragged through hell for months on the word of a faceless and largely unaccountable anti-piracy company? Well let’s not worry right now, since Gamer/Law seems to think that proving innocence is easy.

“It should first be noted that if CD Projekt do take you to court, they have to prove that you downloaded the game [TF note: It's uploading, not downloading], the only thing that you will ever have to try to prove is that their proof is wrong. This could actually be easier than anticipated, as IP tracing is far from a reliable source of evidence,” writes Wrigley.

However, proving innocence in the legal arena chosen by CD Projekt is not easy at all. After first hiring a UK law firm where the lawyers carrying out their pay-up-or-else scheme were later severely disciplined for their activities, CD Projekt shifted their enterprise to Germany to claim money from alleged file-sharers there.

And getting convictions in Germany is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Just recently a Retired, Computerless Woman was fined there for pirating a ‘hooligan’ movie. Her lawyer, Christian Solmecke, with law firm Wilde Beuger Solmecke, outlined her desperate situation to TorrentFreak.

“Normally the copyright holder has to prove who did the copyright infringement. As this is hard for him – because he has no chance to look into a thousand houses – the courts in Germany alleviate this burden of proof,” he explained.

Proving a negative was ultimately impossible for the woman and she had to pay 650 euros to the claimant. This is the environment CD Projekt know they are working in and they will be making nice profits from settlements because after hiring a lawyer at their own expense, people learn that they cannot win in court.

The rest of the initial Gamer/Law post had many other issues, but we don’t have all day and there is a more pressing issue – a fresh ‘open letter’ just published in the online edition of my beloved Edge.

“In case you hadn’t guessed, this is a letter to those folks who oppose developers taking legal action against people who download and play their games without paying. Hello,” begins Jas Purewal.

I’m going to ignore the exclusive nature of this invite and consider it directed at me, since as the title of this piece points out, you don’t have to support piracy to detest these hateful schemes.

Purewal lists several reasons people put forward as to why game devs shouldn’t chase down alleged pirates. His first two points – Technological Reasons and Evidential Reasons – are shown separately but in reality they are utterly intertwined. Here are some observations of our own on the same points:

1. CD Projekt refuse point-blank to reveal who their anti-piracy company is (let alone allow anyone a look at their systems) and as we can see from the ‘hooligan’ case listed above, in their chosen territory, Germany, conveniently there is a reverse burden of proof. In that case the court didn’t even examine the technical evidence. But for a moment, let’s pretend that CD Projekt’s impossible claim of 100% accuracy is real….

2. In previous UK cases, after initial harvesting IP address ‘evidence’ was shifted from company to company, from format to format, with no safeguards and no checks. IP addresses were even copied/transposed by hand (often incorrectly), and the wrong account names were attached to outgoing letters. Trust us, in these case humans can screw anything up, and they have done so in the past, royally.

3. CD Projekt’s ‘perfect’ anti-piracy contractor sends an IP address and a timestamp to the ISP of the alleged pirate and they match it to the correct subscriber – well, sometimes they do. There were several proven cases in the UK where ISPs identified the wrong subscriber and in a huge number of cases couldn’t identify the subscriber at all, which is hardly confidence inspiring.

Only last year, Irish ISP Eircom incorrectly identified 300 account holders as Internet pirates, despite them allegedly receiving the correct information from an anti-piracy company. CD Projekt can not claim to have a complete chain of accurate evidence because they are quite simply not in control of all of it.

Worryingly, Purewal (a UK lawyer) also rolls out the tired notion that it is an account holder’s responsibility to protect his own Internet connection, along with the implication that the person is then responsible for the actions of others. In previous UK cases that didn’t wash with the courts but wait – that is the case in Germany where CD Projekt is looking for settlements. Rest assured, they know that – why do you think they gave up on the UK?

Purewal goes on to give a 5/10 credibility mark to “The ‘little old lady’ reason”, that sending scary letters only scares people. Well, of course they do. The claimants have to give the impression that the end result of not settling is legal action or no-one will hand over their money, but as we know, these companies rarely go to court unless it’s an open and shut case. Like they all are in Germany.

Since CD Projekt’s actions are Purewal’s cited reason for his open letter, let’s end with them.

The company says they’re taking this action to reduce piracy, but the only reason the wider world knew about their lawsuits is because TorrentFreak wrote about them. If we had written something else that day, people would still not know, and if they don’t know they can’t ever be deterred from piracy.

But if people do know, they won’t get caught, and if they don’t get caught they can’t get a $1,000 invoice. Without one of those, CD Projekt don’t get paid.

What we have here is a business model – a complaint filing machine that generates around $1000 a time, split between a law firm, the anti-piracy company and CD Projekt, and the more letters sent out, the better it is for everyone. There are no outward checks, there’s no accountability and absolutely no compassion or understanding for those wrongfully accused through hidden incompetence.

This is why I, a prolific games player and games buyer of more than three decades standing, say that you don’t have to support piracy to hate bullying, intimidation, and abuse of position.

But, most importantly, the reason why games companies shouldn’t embark on these schemes is a lot more simple. They will ruin their hard-earned image and do nothing – NOTHING – to reduce piracy.

Source: You Don’t Have To Support Piracy To Hate Bullying & Extortion

Those pointing to China as an example of how bad things can get should now focus a little closer to the west, on the outskirts of Europe to be precise.

From January 6th, Belarus, which became independent in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, will begin severely restricting what its citizens can do on the Internet. New legislation requires that anyone doing business in the country may only utilize fully local Internet domains when carrying out their activities online.

As highlighted by the Law Library of Congress, this means that it will become illegal for locals to use a site such as Amazon.com, which has no official Belarusian presence. Indeed, browsing any website outside the country will be punishable with fines of up to $125.

The initial decree, issued in February 2010 by President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, requires the compulsory registration of all web sites which must then be hosted in the country.

The potential damage to the Belarus economy and their growth from online trade will be significant. According to Alexa, some of the world’s biggest sites are listed in the country’s Top 20 most-visited list including Google, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia, all of which have .com domains and US hosting. Indeed, only two sites in the Belarusian Top 10 currently appear to be ‘legal’ for local access.

Additionally, the legislation will also hold Internet providers, such as cafés providing wifi, responsible for the actions of their customers if they are found to be using foreign sites. The same responsibilities lie with home Internet subscribers who share their connections with others.

The suggestion is that such providers, commercial or domestic, will have to monitor for foreign website use and report the findings to authorities. The legislation also ensures there is plenty of data to hand over. As a minimum, ISPs and webhosts will be required to record the names and passport details of customers, along with their domain names, a description of their site’s activities and IP addresses allocated.

So for now, even Google’s Belarusian variant Google.by seems to fall outside the legal reach of citizens of Belarus, hosted as it is in the United States. Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia have further problems, since the .BY variants of their domains have been registered by other entities.

Interestingly, while Belarus National State Television has previously aired pirated movies such as The Hurt Locker, they won’t now be able to grab them from foreign torrent sites as they did in the past. RUTracker, one of Russia’s largest torrent sites, is Belarus’ 20th most-popular site. However, it too has a non .BY domain and is hosted abroad, rendering it off limits to locals.

Torrents.by will be doing lots of business soon though – hosted and registered in Belarus.

Source: Belarus Bans Browsing of All Foreign Websites

This state of affairs led to huge pressure on Spain from the United States, and behind closed doors the two countries drafted new laws in preparation for a time when Spain was ready to clamp down on file-sharing. That time has come.

After taking power in mid-December, Spain’s incoming Partido Popular (People’s Party) government has now fully approved their pending Sustainable Economy Law (LES), legislation designed to stop Spanish Internet users from accessing file-sharing sites.

Deputy Prime Minister Maria Soraya Saenz de Santamaria announced at a press conference that the so-called Sinde Law, named after outgoing Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde, will now be fully implemented.

The legislation, which will give the authorities the power to swiftly close file-sharing sites or have them blocked at the ISP level, was actually passed by the Spanish Parliament in February 2011, but the former government failed to enact a supporting regulatory framework and it has laid dormant since.

In her speech, Santamaria said that the new law’s objective was “to protect against the plundering of intellectual property rights” and to ensure that Spain “joined the international standard in the fight against online piracy.”

The decision on whether to shutter or block file-sharing sites will sit with the Intellectual Property Committee. This panel will have the power to take action against those providing illegal content and entities providing infrastructure, all within 10 days of a complaint by rightsholders.

Source: Website Blocking Law Implemented By New Spanish Government

Using the tools at YouHaveDownloaded, Perrier found six illegal downloads including a cam copy of the movie Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys.

But while six downloads are easily ignored, bigger things were around the corner for the French government. The country’s Ministry of Culture has quite an online presence and are allocated more than 65,000 IP addresses. Perrier and friends scanned them all and found 250 government IP addresses that were used to share the latest movies, music, video games and even adult titles during the last two months.

Instead of keeping their collective heads down, the government has now issued a press release refuting the allegations.

“The Management Information Systems Department ensures strict use of computers in its fleet,” the Ministry of Culture said in a statement quoted by Numerama.

“The configuration of the network prevents connections to peer-to-peer networks, which excludes any possibility of using such networks for illegal downloading,” the Ministry added, while offering assurances that “internal audits” are now underway.

The statements here appear somewhat conflicting. On the one hand illegal downloads are apparently impossible, but on the other the Ministry has seen fit to commission an audit. They don’t sound confident, that’s for sure.

Interestingly, thanks to YouHaveDownloaded the debate on the accuracy and usefulness of IP addresses evidence has been stimulated. Unsurprisingly, though, the French government doesn’t dismiss the usefulness of IP address evidence completely. When they’re the ones collecting it, it can be relied on. When others harvest it, the data loses its value.

“The processes used by the site youhavedownloaded.com can in no way be compared with the methodology employed by TMG,” says the Ministry. Trident Media Guard is the company that collects evidence for France’s 3-strikes ‘HADOPI’ law. In common with all similar companies, their systems are secret and not open for scrutiny.

“The findings of this process can not therefore call into question the process established by the HADOPI, particularly in regard to the reliability of the findings derived from an IP address. As a result, all of these allegations appear unfounded,” the Ministry concludes.

One of the main problems with IP address-based evidence is what happens when someone is wrongfully accused. There is no simple way of refuting the claims and it’s down to the defendant to prove their innocence.

It’s all well and good for the Ministry of Culture to say “it’s impossible to share files from our IP addresses” but will that standard of rebuttal be acceptable coming from the man in the street faced with an accusation from HADOPI? Hardly.

So, if the Ministry of Culture is completely innocent let’s see them held to their own standards. Let them show their citizens how proving a negative, that something didn’t happen, is done. They’re not going to find that easy, even with their limitless resources.

Update: Canada’s parliament also has piracy issues.

Source: Zut Alors! French Government Deny BitTorrent Piracy Allegations

“There is nothing new about the techniques of domain blocking used to target criminals in the Stop Online Piracy Act,” the MPAA’s Paul Hortenstine wrote.

“They are currently used to protect consumers and combat all kinds of harmful behavior including spam, phishing, malware, viruses, copyright infringement and other forms of Internet crime,” he added.

But anyone with an understanding of the file-sharing space during the last decade will know that what SOPA domain blocking will actually bring is a whole lot more phishing, scams, malware and viruses. And here’s why.

Once SOPA kicks in, millions of people will suddenly lose access to potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of websites. Since people generally do not like being restricted online, particularly when they are stopped from doing something they were previously allowed to partake in, the market for circumvention solutions, such as VPNs, will go into overdrive.

Unusually, Hortenstine references a recent one in his article – the MAFIAAFire Firefox plug in. Even more surprisingly, its inclusion in the blog post actually shows the tool in a positive light, in an attempt to show that domain blocking workarounds don’t always have to “break the Internet”.

Indeed, the client created by Newzbin2 to nullify ISP blocks in the UK also achieves its purpose without breaking the Internet, but already we are witnessing the start of a trend – third party software being made available to counter a growing problem – web censorship.

Now, we’re pretty sure that the MAFIAAFire and Newzbin2 people can be trusted not to stab web users in the back, but what will happen as soon as sites start getting censored under SOPA is that software created by Gods-knows-who will come onto the market with grand promises of re-enabling access to sites.

Some of these new breeds of tools will do as they say and will definitely come with fairly innocent adware to generate some revenue for their creators. Many, however, will screw over anyone who dares to install them. Malware, scamware, viruses and phishing attacks will all play their part. These practices have been happening to a certain extent in the file-sharing space for a decade already, but domain censorship will give the conmen a much-needed boost.

Contrary to claims that domain blocking won’t affect trust in the Internet, users seeking to legitimately access domains that have done no wrong (DaJaZ1 anyone?) or that are entirely legal in their own countries outside the United States, will be redirected to sites that look just like the previously blocked ones, but with nefarious tricks up their sleeves.

There are already many ‘fake’ sites around, such as those trying to pass themselves off as The Pirate Bay, but since they aren’t the real deal the amount of traffic they currently get is limited. Should the real Pirate Bay disappear from Google, these fake sites will appear at the top of the search giant’s results, and pull in a hell of a lot of money. Real Pirate Bay is free to use, these others require credit cards.

There is a huge mess just waiting to happen and if SOPA passes we won’t have to wait long to experience it. The Internet may not completely break, but it won’t be a safer place, that’s guaranteed.

Source: Domain Blocking Will Encourage Yet More Fraud and Scams

The basis for the takedown has never been clear. While YouTube clearly indicated that UMG had taken the Mega Song down on copyright grounds, Universal later added that it had a deal with YouTube to take down content even if it doesn’t infringe their rights. This, the company says, allows it to sidestep any claims Megaupload makes against it under the DMCA.

Notably, though, Universal has never said exactly why it had the video taken down. Soon, however, it may have to.

In a new Megaupload court filing made available to TorrentFreak today, the file-hosting service makes it clear that it will go to considerable lengths to find out exactly what has been going on at Universal, YouTube, Vimeo and other entities involved in the Mega Song takedown.

“In its opposition to the [Temporary Restraining Order], UMG did not even attempt to defend the legitimacy of its false claims to ownership of the Megaupload Video,” states the Megaupload filing. The cyberlocker adds that UMG made several assertions which now require clarification for the case to proceed correctly.

The first UMG claim is that Megaupload sued the wrong UMG ‘entity’. They say that UMG Recordings is the correct entity since they are the ones dealing with YouTube and other video hosting services.

Second, Megaupload wants to get to the bottom of UMG’s claim that the takedown request it filed with YouTube was not made under the DMCA, but as part of a private historical agreement the label has with YouTube.

The third UMG claim is that they had nothing to do with takedowns of the Mega Song carried out at other video hosting sites such as Vimeo.

Bemoaning the fact that none of UMG’s claims have been backed up by evidence or witnesses, Megaupload says it now needs facts to move forward.

“Megaupload therefore respectfully requests that the Court grant it leave to take limited but essential written discovery…regarding the UMG Entities’ private dealings with service providers regarding the takedowns of the Megaupload Video and the identity and authority of the persons or entities who requested the takedowns,” the company writes.

“Without such information, Megaupload will be unable to determine which UMG entity instructed YouTube to remove the Megaupload Video; which other, non-UMG persons may have so instructed YouTube; and on whose behalf, on what grounds, and under what authority the removal was sought.

“In addition, as UMG has denied sending notices itself to other service providers, subpoenas to any such providers who took down the video is the appropriate means to determine the party doing so,” the filing adds.

There can be little doubt that keeping the Megaupload name in the news is something that Universal should have anticipated when they took the Mega Song down. Right now, if the aim was to shut Megaupload up and dampen their campaign, they have failed. At the time of writing the standard and HD versions of the song have close to 13.7 million combined views on YouTube.

But perhaps even worse, Universal appear to have enabled an arch enemy to take the moral high-ground in their ‘rogue site’ propaganda war and that’s why this discovery process will be so interesting.

Do Universal have an ace up their sleeve, or was the Mega Song takedown simply a terribly ill-conceived, knee-jerk, and solely destructive action? We’ll all find out soon enough.

Source: Megaupload to Universal: You’ve Got Some Explaining To Do

For the third time this year, Reliance have persuaded India’s High Court to track the responsibility for preventing copyright infringement of their movies right back to the country’s Internet service providers.

The ISPs have taken the legal threats seriously. Since Christmas Eve, Internet users trying to access many torrent sites including BTjunkie and cyberlocker services such as Megaupload have been greeted with a message stating that “This site has been blocked” along with a note reporting – “Copyright Reliance Entertainment, All Rights Reserved.”

Reliance told TOI that the blockade was put in place to stop piracy of the company’s latest release, the movie Don 2. However, the company isn’t just having specific torrents or URLs blacklisted, they have succeeded in getting entire domains blocked, SOPA-style. Indeed, their justification could have been written by SOPA proponents.

“All websites like Megaupload and Filesonic are located out of India and such sites rampantly promote online piracy. In fact, steps such as the John Doe order are the only step that we copyright owners are left with,” said Reliance spokesman Sanjay Tandon.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first ISPs to respond to the blocking demand was Reliance Communications (Rcom), a situation bemoaned by legitimate cyberlocker customers.

“Since Friday morning I can’t access any file-hosting websites. Not all web users are pirates. We share legitimate files through websites like Megaupload and Filesonic. Like photographs we have clicked. Blocking of websites is ridiculous,” said Gaurav Shukla, Reliance Broadband customer and editor of news portal AndroidOS.

Commenting on the censorship, Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak that the effects of these blocks are usually resolved in a week, but while they stand they give the company a chance to do some analysis.

“For us the India block is a great opportunity to see how users respond. In India we have one of the highest installation rates of our Megakey application. It gives users direct access to our servers. The Megakey instantly cures any kind of ISP or DNS blockade and always finds the fastest route to our servers,” Kim adds.

While there is little Reliance Entertainment could have done about the leak of a telesync (camcorded, direct audio) version of Don 2, they have only themselves to blame for the almost perfect DVD screener copy currently doing the rounds online.

Stats collected by TorrentFreak suggest that in total the movie has been downloaded around 150,000 times on BitTorrent alone – it’s currently hovering around in the Top 15 most popular torrents on The Pirate Bay. Whether this amounts to a “success” for Reliance is a matter for them.

It’s worth noting that if all entertainment companies in India took this same action for all of their releases, it would be possible to have all ‘infringing’ sites blocked on a rolling and permanent basis. Considering the SOPA debate during the last few months, that unnerving eventuality will sound worryingly familiar.

Source: Court Order Blocks BitTorrent, Megaupload and More

These days Moore is better known as Skrillex, and since taking his current form in 2008 he’s been going from strength to strength. Last year he released his debut EP, My Name is Skrillex, as a free download and he hasn’t looked back.

He’s currently nominated for no less than six Grammys including Best New Artist, Best Dance Recording and Best Dance/Electronica Album. Everyone seems to love Skrill’ and today his fans will love him even more.

After delivering his much anticipated new album Bangarang this week, Skrillex reached out to fans both rich and poor, and trashed the mainstream recording industry mantra that “file-sharing is evil”.

“Happy holidays just like I promised,” said Skrillex on his Facebook page. “Just like I always say, go pirate it if you don’t have the money, I just want you to have it.”

“You can buy it here, either way i’ll love you,” he concludes.

Quite how long Skrillex will be able to deliver this crowd-pleasing attitude is unclear. He’s signed to Big Beat Records, an Atlantic Records subsidiary which in turn is owned by Warner Music. Hopefully, though, Skrillex will be left alone to do his thing, and here’s why he should be.

Modern electronic music, and by that I mean material from the last 25 years, has drawn its lifeblood from piracy. Sampling, cut-and-paste, mixtape and more recently file-sharing cultures have ensured that artists like Skrillex can hit the mainstream, gain a huge fanbase, get Grammy nominated and yet still give stuff away for free. And make money.

But perhaps more importantly in these turbulent times, this kind of approach gains the respect of fans, regardless of how deep their pockets are today. And tomorrow, one way or another, they will spend. If they actually enjoy doing that, the rest is easy.

Source: Skrillex: Happy Holidays! Pirate My Music, I’ll Still Love You

Inspired by the principles behind the Freenet network, the Winny application attempted to make its users anonymous and although this was largely achieved, flaws were later exploited by police and copyright holders.

Kaneko always insisted that his software was not designed with copyright infringement in mind, but that did not stop him being targeted by the police. During May 2004, Kaneko was arrested by the High-tech Crime Taskforce of the Kyoto Prefectural Police on suspicion of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.

After being released on bail the next month, the case against him started in September 2004 at the Kyoto District Court. During December 2006 he was found guilty of assisting in the copyright violations of Winny users and sentenced to pay a fine equivalent to $19,200.

Kaneko went on to appeal the decision and in October 2009 the Osaka High Court overturned the decision on the basis that Kaneko had never promoted Winny for illegal uses. This time the prosecution lodged an appeal, which took the case to the highest court in the land.

This week, Japan’s Supreme Court delivered its ruling on the case. The decision of the Osaka High Court was upheld and after 7 long years Kaneko was finally cleared of all charges.

Although there was one dissenting voice, the majority of a panel of five judges agreed that it could not be proven that Kaneko, now 41, had ever intended to promote violations of copyright law by the use of Winny. The decision on whether to break the law lay with users of the software, the judges noted.

Under current law prosecutors can still appeal the decision on technical grounds but assessments in the Japanese media suggest the ruling will stand.

The case has been closely watched by technology advocates who feared that a decision against Kaneko could have resulted in a chilling effect on software innovation. Such was the concern, a domain set up by the development community days after Kaneko’s 2004 arrest received a million hits and raised $100,000 for his defense in just 24 hours.

In the end the Supreme Court’s ruling was in tune with similar decisions around the world. As long as products aren’t marketed for infringing uses, their creators stay within the law.

Source: File-Sharing App Creator Not Guilty of Copyright Infringement

At 09:10 during a cold January morning in 2010, the defendant in the case says she was tucked up in bed. A movie copyright holder, however, insists the retired single woman was illegally sharing files on the Internet.

The settlement letter sent to the woman by the copyright holder stated clearly that on January 4th she’d been using the eDonkey network to share a violent film about hooligans. For this offense she must pay compensation of around 650 euros or face court, they said.

Like so many claims of this nature, the accusation was problematic. Although she previously subscribed to a 2-year Internet and telephone package, six months earlier the woman had sold her computer and didn’t even maintain an email address. After refuting the allegations of the rightsholder, the case went to court.

The Munich District Court handled the case, and heard evidence that not only is the woman computerless, she lives alone and doesn’t possess a wireless router either. How the alleged offense could have been carried out even by a third party remains a mystery.

Nevertheless, none of the above protestations were of interest to the court. Despite the fact that the copyright holder and/or their tracking company could have made errors, or that the woman’s ISP could have identified her account incorrectly, none of these avenues were examined.

“Normally the copyright holder has to prove who did the copyright infringement. As this is hard for him – because he has no chance to look into thousand houses – the courts in Germany alleviate this burden of proof,” explains Christian Solmecke, a lawyer with Wilde Beuger Solmecke, the law firm that defended the woman.

Solmecke told TorrentFreak that initially all a copyright holder has to do is show that a protected work has been traded via a specific IP-address, then the accused has to prove their innocence.

“In the next step the defendant has to prove, that neither he nor anyone else who had access to his internet account did the copyright infringement. In my opinion our client has proved that fact. If you have no computer and no W-LAN, there has to be a failure in the backtracking of the IP-address,” he added.

The bottom line in Germany is that account holders are responsible for everything that happens on their account and if they can’t prove their innocence, they are found guilty. The woman must now pay just over 650 euros in damages to the copyright holder.

There can be little doubt that German law is tipped heavily in the favor of rightsholders. Little surprise then that Germany is without doubt the worst place in the world for pay-up-or-else-schemes. So how often are people wrongly accused?

“Every second person tells me, that he or she appears to be wrongfully accused,” says Solmecke. “Some of them lie even to their lawyer but most of them tell the truth. From my point of view, there has to be a big mistake in some of the different backtracking-systems.”

So for now the formula for rightsholders seems incredibly simple.

IP address. Accusation. Profit.

Source: Retired, Computerless Woman Fined For Pirating ‘Hooligan’ Movie

One Year Later: Google’s Report Card on Making Copyright Work Better Online is the embarrassingly patronizing title of a new report from the IFPI detailing Google’s progress on copyright infringement issues over the past 12 months. Unsurprisingly the whole thing reads like a school report, with the IFPI setting out what Google should have achieved and then noting what ‘grade’ the search engine actually achieved in each task.

“While Google has taken some modest steps to deal with copyright infringement online, the promises made by Google remain unfulfilled,” the report begins.

“Despite its steps, the simple fact is that Google continues to both (i) receive financial benefits from sites and applications that engage in piracy and (ii) place artificial road blocks in rights holder efforts to protect their content online, contrary to the DMCA.”

The report notes that Google made a promise to act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours and is commended for exceeding that. Nevertheless, a company capable of returning search results “in nanoseconds” should be doing better, IFPI suggests. Furthermore, the music group states that Google has put a limit on the number of infringement reports that can be filed each day that “do not scale to the scope of piracy online.”

Google is also criticized for not adequately screening apps for compatibility with the music industry’s interests before allowing them onto the Android Marketplace, and then profiting from them in the period before they are taken down.

Surprisingly, given the recent and wrongful Mega Song takedown, IFPI criticizes Google for giving users the right to issue copyright claim counter notices without them “having a clear understanding” of the rights issues involved.

“We find it disturbing that Google admonishes rights holders to ensure their claim is valid and warns them about penalties for false claims, but fails to hold the average user to similar standards. Is that neutral, or is that tipping the scales in a manner that benefits Googles bottom line?” the report asks.

On the issue of censorship of its AutoComplete feature it’s noted that some progress has been made but, no surprise, Google needs to do better. “For example, when “lady gaga mp3″ is typed into the search bar, Autocomplete directs a user to choose “lady gaga mp3 free” or “lady gaga mp3 download,” results that lead to illegal sites,” IFPI complains.

Referencing Google’s AdSense program, IFPI says that Google should proactively screen all sites to which it serves ads to ensure they aren’t “pirate sites,” a truly massive and almost impossible task given that music licensing is IFPI members’ responsibility and area of specialty, not Google’s.

The search engine is also criticized for not prioritizing “authorized” over “unauthorized” sites in its search results. Google’s YouTube doesn’t avoid criticism either.

“Increasingly, music-oriented videos posted on YouTube include links to download the sound recording associated with the video illegally. This is in violation of YouTube’s own policies. In addition, YouTube hosts videos explaining how to game the Content ID system and how to rip the audio content to create an MP3 file from a music video,” the report notes.

Overall, Google is told that it must do better if it is to meet the standards required by the music industry. However, what is also clear from the language in the report is that improved results will only lead to demands for even greater “grades” next year.

The school report ends with Google getting admonished for its negative attitude in class.

“While professing to agree that copyright infringement is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, Google raises alarmist, self-serving criticism to any legislative proposal to deter or thwart rampant copyright infringement,” notes the report (pdf).

“Google should stop engaging in destructive rhetoric and come to the table with constructive proposals to address this problem,” it concludes.

There’s no doubt that Google has its faults, but treating the company as if it is the one engaging in rampant copyright infringement can’t be a sustainable tactic. Admonishing and patronizing it in public won’t help either.

Source: IFPI and RIAA Patronize Google With Anti-Piracy “Report Card”

His solo, label-less productions have amassed nearly 6 million views and in the last month alone (on the gaming topics of Assassins Creed, Skyrim and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto V) have been viewed more than 2 million times.

Following on from his 2010 track “Death of ACTA“, today Dan releases his second track targeting copyright legislation, this time homing in on the pending SOPA bill in the United States.

“As an internet geek, a musician, and a non-evil person, SOPA is abhorrent on several fronts,” Dan told TorrentFreak. “It threatens the future of the internet, which is something far more valuable both commercially and socially than the entertainment industry ever has been, or ever will be.”

Dan recognizes that everything we do is influenced by something else, and richer cultural landscapes can be achieved through remixes, mashups and sharing.

“Creativity is all about interpreting and re-imagining what you see and hear around you. The idea that creativity exists in some kind of vacuum, and that you’re not a real artist unless you can make something ‘completely original’ is not only stupid, it contradicts the most fundamental axioms of how the universe works,” he adds.

“Thirdly, the internet is an amazing new forum for free speech and holding those in power to account. The idea that governments and even private corporations can police the internet and decide what people on a global scale are allowed to say and hear is tyrannical.”

In his new track (titled ‘SOPA Cabana’) the story is told from the perspective of an old man in a post-SOPA future, looking back fondly at the days when the internet was free. The song comes complete with a crowd-sourced video and input from Dan’s fans who join with him in opposing SOPA.

“After I finished writing the song, I put a post on my Facebook wall asking people to take photographs of themselves presenting lines from the song. The response was phenomenal, and I ended up with far more volunteers than I could include in the video,” Dan told TorrentFreak.

“People from all around the world wanted to share in the creative process, for free, and to me that demonstrates the best of what the Internet is about. I hope it comes across as a great example of precisely what SOPA will destroy – free speech, free culture and a free internet,” Dan concludes.

Enjoy the track.

Source: File-Sharing Darling Dan Bull Publishes Anti-SOPA Rap

Born in 1979, Soto had been in the computer business since he was 16 years old and had created several file-sharing applications including Blubster (the so-called “Spanish Napster”) Piolet and Manolito.

But the record companies claimed that Soto designed the software with the express intent of providing a platform for Internet users to download and share music for free, a situation they describe as “unfair competition.” Pablo was also accused of creating file-sharing applications in order to profit from infringements of the plaintiffs’ copyrights.

Following a 2009 trial and several years of litigation, Madrid Commercial Court No. 4 has now delivered its verdict. It rejected the compensation demands of the labels and ruled in favor of the developer, declaring that his technology is “totally neutral.”

“An analogy would be like if we created a private group of friends to share some information, photographs for example,” the judge wrote in his ruling. “But you can not then blame the developer [if people chose to share copyright material], since the only thing he has done is connect the friends.”

The court also rejected the claims of unfair competition, noting that Soto isn’t in the business of making and marketing records, and the plaintiffs aren’t in the file-sharing business.

“We are extremely grateful to the court for finding not only in our favor, but in favor of justice, innovation and in equal access to digital distribution,” said Pablo Soto, founder and CEO of MP2P Technologies. “The copyright conglomerates would like to stifle innovation but today’s significant ruling against this tactic echoes around the globe.”

In an interview with 20minutos.es, Soto extended thanks to his lawyers Javier de la Cueva and David Bravo and noted that although delighted with the outcome (“I feel like i’ve crossed the Gobi desert with no water”), both he and his company have been deeply affected by the litigation.

“I had a company with eight years of work behind it but following the lawsuit I had to reduce staff by more than a half,” said Soto. “The funding was reduced to zero, no-one wanted to invest in a company being sued for 13 million euros.”

Aside from the generalities of the complaint, the case has been controversial since the start. In preparation for filing suit the labels went as far as to hire a private detective who turned up at Pablo’s offices masquerading as a customer. Using a hidden camera the detective took photographic ‘evidence’ which later turned up in court filings.

Promusicae president Antonio Guisasola said the decision will be appealed and expressed hope that in future the new Spanish government would take “resolute action” against people like Soto.

Source: “Spanish Napster” Victorious As Court Rejects Major Label Copyright Case

Eircom announced in December 2010 that it would be “proceeding with implementation of the protocol which could result in the suspension and ultimately disconnection of broadband service for those customers who deliberately and persistently infringe copyright,” but by October 2010 things we already going wrong. Due to a mix up, Eircom sent out around 300 warning letters to completely innocent subscribers.

This huge error ushered in the involvement of Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) and a wider investigation into the legality of the entire three strikes system. Now, according to a report, that decision is in and for the music industry it’s the worst possible news. The DPC has ordered a complete halt to the practice on privacy grounds.

“Now both the courts and the official DPC are beginning to realize the fundamental right of people to access the Internet, and not to be monitored while they do so,” says lawyer TJ McIntyre of Digital Rights Ireland.

But before free-flow-of-information proponents get too excited, the news is countered this morning by a sobering report which says that if file-sharers can’t be cut off from the Internet, then file-sharing websites shall be made forcibly unavailable to them.

According to The Irish Times, Minister of State for Enterprise Seán Sherlock will publish an order early 2012 that will allow rightsholders to go to court to prevent the country’s ISPs from supplying their subscribers’ access to infringing site. What actually defines an infringing site remains to be seen.

The action comes in response to threats from recording label EMI, which said it would take legal action against the country if the government there failed to take action. In response the Department of Enterprise, Innovation and Jobs wrote back to EMI confirming the order would be published and entered into law next month.

The move follows legal action by IRMA against ISP UPC, which ended in 2010 with Mr Justice Peter Charleton acknowledging that recording companies were being harmed by Internet piracy but that current law did not provide for blocking injunctions.

Source: File-Sharing 3 Strikes Killed in Ireland, Government Promises Site Blocking