In recent weeks, however, worry about the future has increased drastically among the owners of some of the largest torrent sites. Yesterday, BTjunkie closed its doors for good, and TorrentFreak has learned that at least two other sites in the top 10 have toyed with the same idea.

“There have been talks of shutting our site down, even before BTjunkie did it,” one admin told TorrentFreak on condition of anonymity.

The aggressive actions against MegaUpload – site founder Kim Dotcom was raided by an anti-terrorist squad last month – are frequently mentioned as cause for concern. So much so that several people involved with one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet have already dropped out.

“A couple guys on the staff decided not to be involved anymore with the site after the MegaUpload incident,” the admin told us.

The fact that a German citizen can be arrested in New Zealand upon request from the US authorities signaled that regardless of local laws, people connected to file-sharing sites have become a global target.

“It’s turning into a witch hunt. It is worrying,” said the admin.

The thoughts of this admin are shared by one of the owners of another major torrent site, who told TorrentFreak in private that shutting down has crossed his mind on several occasions.

Things have become more and more complicated in recent weeks. Even those who are as cooperative as possible with copyright holders, by swiftly responding to DMCA takedown requests for example, can’t be entirely sure that they won’t become the next target.

On the other side, however, there are also those who continue undeterred, such as isoHunt.com owner Gary Fung, who is battling in court with the music and movie industries.

“After 6 years of 2 civil lawsuits with MPAA and CRIA, we are still here. None of these events is really new to us. From Lokitorrent to Suprnova, we’ve seen sites we index come and go. And as long as the Free Internet exists, sharing will endure. As will isoHunt,” he says.

Ironically enough, isoHunt’s ongoing legal battle might be what keeps Fung relatively safe. If the authorities planned to launch a criminal investigation against a torrent site it would be strange to pick one that is already involved in a civil lawsuit with a copyright holder.

Besides not being worried about the future, isoHunt’s owner is going on the offensive and is urging the entertainment industries to embrace technology, instead if fighting it.

“Perhaps more than ever, I wish the content industries will wake up to the fact you can’t fight technological progress, that battles maybe won, the war is already lost. Unless Content really starts working with technology to accelerate spread of culture, as the Internet has naturalized it. And make more money than ever in the process,” Fung says.

“Because so-called piracy enabled by the Internet and media consumption is not a zero-sum game, a download does not equal a lost sale, and what pirates really want is not necessarily free as in beer, but free as in speech and convenience.”

isoHunt’s determination to continue operating is shared by Extratorrent‘s admin Sam, whose site became the 5th largest torrent site after BTjunkie folded.

“What happened with MegaUpload is not at all good for the torrent world, but I would say it is impossible to stop the unstoppable. After all, if one site is shut down, a hundred new sites will open,” Sam told TorrentFreak, adding, “We have no plans to shut down,we will continue running as usual.”

Another site that’s not going anywhere is The Pirate Bay, the largest torrent site of all. Although its founders are now very close to serving jail time, the site itself will remain online. In the coming weeks The Pirate Bay will replace .torrent files with magnet links, which makes the site more portable and resilient.

The above shows that the end of BitTorrent is not near, but it’s hard to ignore the changing climate. People who previously saw no problems with running a torrent site are now reconsidering their position. The exact fallout, and whether there will be any newcomers to fill the gaping hole BTjunkie left, will become apparent in the coming months.

Source: Is BitTorrent Done? Major Torrent Sites Consider Shutting Down

Leading up to the Super Bowl this weekend, a total of 307 domain names were seized, 16 of which provided access to online streams of popular sporting events.

Commenting on the actions, ICE Director John Morton was quick to declare victory, but perhaps this came a little too soon. Firstrow, one of the largest sites which had several of its domains taken over by the US government, is not planning to give up the ‘battle’ anytime soon.

Quickly after its firstrow.tv, firstrowsports.tv, firstrowsports.net and firstrowsports.com domains were seized, the service was operating as normal under a new domain – Firstrowsports.eu. Talking to TorrentFreak, one of the owners said that the US has stepped out of line by simply taking away their property.

“The US has prided itself on their ‘innocent before proven guilty’ mantra, yet is clearly hypocritical when it comes to this,” the Firstrow co-owner told us. “Numerous times the US has seized domains, before the defendants have been proven guilty in a court of law.”

“What is the point of trying to approve SOPA and PIPA if they do the same without these laws,” he questioned, referring to the pending US bills that would make it even easier to seize allegedly infringing domains.

The response of Firstrow stands in sharp contrast with that of ICE Director John Morton yesterday.

“In sports, players must abide by rules of the game, and in life, individuals must follow the laws of the land. Our message is simple: abiding by intellectual property rights laws is not optional; it’s the law,” Morton said.

This comment forms the base of the dispute. What is the law of the land? The people who operate Firstrow don’t live in the US, and neither are their servers located there. In fact, Firstrow says that their site is perfectly legal where they are based, so they will continue business as usual.

“Since we don’t live in a third-world country here, the courts decide if something is illegal not the entertainment industry lobbies. We will continue until a court decides that the site is illegal, but for now we’ve seen three court decisions on this matter that say it is not.”

Firstrow’s co-owner is referring to the court cases in Spain, where sites that merely link to copyrighted works have been declared legal. Rojadirecta, a site very similar to Firstrow, won in Spanish courts twice.

In the US, however, things work differently. Two operators of streaming sites have already been arrested and await criminal trials. And if the domains are linked to foreigners, the US believes it has the authority to take them over if they are deemed to infringe copyrights.

This stance has raised eyebrows among foreign governments. A few months ago the European Parliament adopted a resolution which criticized US domain name seizures. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.”

Yesterday’s actions show that the US authorities are not impressed by the international critique, just as Firstrow refuses to change course after yet another domain seizure. Firstrow says ICE is wasting its time and continues to provide access to sports fans all across the world, who are otherwise unable to see their beloved games.

“ICE must have a lot of spare time if they can waste it on these domain seizures,” Firstrow’s co-owner says. “They should invest time in the real important stuff , instead of chasing people who have no other option than to watch a sports game for free.”

Source: Seized Sports Streaming Site Makes a Blazing Comeback

“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

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

Founded in 2009, the file-hosting site allowed users to share files up to 50 gigabytes. Unlike similar services, Ex.ua was completely free to use. The site made money from advertisements and didn’t offer a paid subscription.

Because the site was widely used to share copyrighted files, several international companies including Microsoft, Graphisoft and Adobe filed complaints against the service. After a six month criminal investigation, this resulted in the shutdown of Ex.ua today.

A spokesperson for the authorities confirmed that the service was targeted and said that 200 servers were taken, holding a massive 6,000 terabytes of data.

In addition, sixteen employees were taken in for questioning. At the time of writing it is unclear how many arrests have been made, if any. The authorities did confirm that the site was run by a Latvian citizen.

While Ex.ua has some similarities to MegaUpload and other file-hosting sites, it was also crucially different in several aspects. Ex.ua allowed users to search for files and browse categories such as “MP3″ and “Video,” which is quite uncommon for a cyberlocker.

In 2010, the RIAA reported Ex.ua to the Office of the US Trade Representative, branding it a “pirate haven.” Among other things the RIAA highlighted that users of the site could not only upload, but also search for files on the site.

“This is the largest service in Ukraine and the vast majority of the Internet users in Ukraine use the site to download music and film content. None of the content made available on the site has been authorised by the copyright owners and the site operators are unresponsive to takedown notices as a result there are thousands of music titles available on the site,” the music group wrote at the time.

If found guilty, the operators of the site face up to five years in prison.

Breaking story.

Source: Authorities Shut Down Ukraine’s Largest File-Sharing Site Ex.ua

As of today, the case is still ongoing.

In 2009, a jury found Tenenbaum guilty of “willful infringement” and awarded damages mounting to $675,000. A year later this amount was reduced by 90% when Judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the penalty was excessive and unconstitutional. In 2011 this decision that was reversed after a new hearing at the Court of Appeals.

In yet another appeal, Tenenbaum’s legal team, headed by Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, is asking the court to reduce the $22,500 fine per song to the minimum statutory damages of $750 per song. This request is made on due process grounds.

As expected, the RIAA doesn’t agree with the request and presented its arguments to the court last Friday. But they were not alone – on the same day the Department of Justice also filed a brief with the court, backing the RIAA’s vision on the case.

In a 26-page filing the Department of Justice makes the argument that previous cases, as cited by Tenenbaum’s legal team, do not apply in this instance. It concludes that the due process grounds are not relevant yet and that the damages therefore shouldn’t be reduced before the case continues.

The due process question should only be answered when the court decides that the jury’s award of $22,500 per song is not excessive, according to the Departement of Justice.

“The only circumstance in which the Court can reach Defendant’s due process challenge at this time is if the Court first determines the jury’s statutory damages award is not excessive under the common law remittitur standard. The United States, therefore, does not believe it is necessary at this juncture to address the merits of Defendant’s constitutional claim,” the DoJ writes.

Although this is not the first time the Justice Department has become involved in an RIAA civil case, it remains unclear why they chose to intervene this time. What we do know is that the authorities are very up-to-date with the legal proceedings, as five former RIAA lawyers are now employed by the Department of Justice.

Whether these connections between the Justice Department and the RIAA have increased the likelihood of the authorities getting involved is hard to say. However, it is clear that Tenenbaum and his legal team are up against some serious resistance, and that the US authorities don’t want the student to get off that easily..

To be continued, indefinitely.

Source: Justice Department Backs RIAA Against Pirating Student

Today we can add a VP at one of the major RIAA labels to this list, which is quite unique and yet another game changer.

Speaking for himself, EMI’s VP of Urban Promotions Craig Davis said that the two pending anti-piracy bills are not the way to move forward.

“Personally, I feel that the method they’re using is incorrect. All it will do is cause headaches and issues for everyone,” Davis noted.

While the EMI VP opposes PIPA and SOPA, he does admit that piracy is a problem. However, Davis thinks that the problem can be better solved from within the music industry itself. In other words, the key to solving piracy isn’t legislation, but innovation.

“I do believe that a person should be compensated for their work. I feel that piracy is a big issue, and things like Spotify will assist in combating this problem,” he said.

Reiterating this point, the EMI VP refers to comments that were recently made by Gabe Newell. The Valve co-founder said that piracy is a service issue – once you give people what they want it will mostly disappear.

“Gabe Newell is correct, it’s a service issue not an issue of money. Sales have gone up from sales concerts and merchandise, it’s obvious that our fans still love music. We’re just not giving them their music in an easier way,” Davis noted.

Adding to the above, Davis also commented negatively on DRM in a separate question that he was asked on Reddit.

“Personally I’m not happy with the way DRM is right now. We need to re-evaluate technology to find a better way to give you music,” he wrote.

Davis’ take on the piracy problem stands in clear contrast with the policy of the RIAA, who tend to prefer the repressive approach over innovation. Defining piracy as a service issue, however, is in line with the things we, and many others with us, have been saying for years.

People are happy to pay as long as they get what they want.

This is also illustrated by the fact that people are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for premium access to file-hosting sites, often to download content that’s not available at all legally, or only in inferior quality. In recent years the music industry has caught up quite a bit by removing DRM and launching services like Spotify. But the movie industry is lagging behind, especially outside the US.

Implementing harsh anti-piracy laws and disconnecting file-sharers from the Internet doesn’t change the mismatch between what the public wants and what the industry offers. Improving availability, quality and other service issues can probably make a much bigger impact.

It’s good to see that some people in the industry are well aware of this, but we doubt that the RIAA would make itself obsolete by agreeing.

Source: EMI Boss Opposes SOPA, Says Piracy is a Service Issue

Even today, when more music is being sold than ever before, the RIAA, IFPI and other music groups still lobby hard for draconian measures to curb piracy. Whether it’s SOPA, PIPA or similar legislation as currently being presented in Finland and Ireland, the music industry begs governments to help them out.

One of the countries where these lobbying efforts have paid off is France, where Internet users are now monitored by the state and disconnected if they are caught pirating three times. The big question is whether this law, which costs 11 million euros a year, has any effect at all.

Yes, says the music industry, backing up their claim with a non-peer reviewed academic study. Last week some of the results were already teased to the press, and yesterday they were presented to the public, coinciding with the publication of this year’s Digital Music Report published by IFPI.

We decided to take a look at the two reports, and the only reasonable conclusion we can make is that France’s three-strikes anti-piracy law is not having ANY affect at all. Let’s start off with how IFPI summarizes the results in their report.

“The analysis found that French iTunes sales saw a significant uplift at exactly the period when awareness of Hadopi was at its highest, in Spring 2009, when the law was being debated in the National Assembly.”

This is bogus. The researchers don’t conclude this at all. There is no uplift in sales reported. What the researchers found is that in France, compared to five other European countries, more music was sold through iTunes. Looking at the graph below (from the report), it’s clear that the “uplift” in France before Hadopi was introduced (March 2009) is actually much sharper than the two years after.

Another quote from the IFPI report:

“This effect was maintained throughout the period studied. French iTunes sales were 22.5 per cent higher for singles and 25 per cent higher for digital albums than they would have been, on average, in the absence of Hadopi.”

This is interesting, and indeed pretty much what the researchers conclude. However, as long-time followers of Hadopi and other anti-piracy laws, this conclusion doesn’t feel right. The huge increase in sales reported by the researchers is based on the alleged impact Hadopi had in the year and a half before it went into effect, not after

The following footnote from the researchers is also quite revealing.

“We also estimated the model for the 6 months before and after September 2010, as this was the first month that HADOPI began sending out first notices. In this case, the resulting coefficient was close to zero and statistically insignificant.”

Indeed, when the three-strikes warnings were actually sent out, there was no effect on iTunes sales compared to the control countries. This is unusual, because you would expect that the hundreds of thousands of warnings that went out would have had more of an impact than the ‘news’ that this could happen in the future.

In addition, if we look at the search trends for Hadopi and The Pirate Bay we don’t see a drop in interest for the latter, suggesting that the interest for pirated goods remained stable.

The researchers, however, are convinced that their findings are the result of the “potential implementation” of Hadopi. We find this strange. Could there be an alternative explanation? Let’s have a guess.

At the same time Hadopi was introduced (early 2009) there was a lot of buzz around Spotify in several of the countries that were used as a control group in this study. Could it be that Spotify resulted in relatively less iTunes sales in countries like UK and Spain than in France? This could potentially explain all of the findings reported in the study. And that’s probably just one of the many alternative explanations.

Whatever the case, concluding that expensive privacy-invading legislation such as the French Hadopi is boosting sales is going way too far.

Source: Anti-Piracy Warnings Have No Effect on iTunes Sales

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

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent

First, MPAA CEO Chris Dodd described the blackouts of Wikipedia, Reddit and others as corporate PR stunts which manipulated and exploited the sites’ users.

“Some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns,” Dodd said.

Then, a few days later when many lawmakers had already dropped their support for the anti-piracy bills, the MPAA’s comments turned even more grim. Talking to Fox News, the MPAA’s boss threatened to stop contributing to politicians who don’t back legislation designed to protect Hollywood.

“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,” Dodd said.

Although it’s no secret that the movie industry has a powerful lobby in Washington, explicitly admitting that bribery is one of the tactics the MPAA uses to have their way wasn’t well received by the public. A few hours ago a White house petition was started to investigate Chris Dodd and the MPAA for alleged bribery.

“This is an open admission of bribery and a threat designed to provoke a specific policy goal. This is a brazen flouting of the ‘above the law’ status people of Dodd’s position and wealth enjoy,” the petition reads.

“We demand justice. Investigate this blatant bribery and indict every person, especially government officials and lawmakers, who is involved.”

In just a few hours the petition amassed more than 5,000 votes and this number is increasing rapidly. As a former Senator, Chris Dodd has many friends in Washington so it’s unclear whether the petition will accomplish anything, but if the numbers grow big enough the White House won’t be able to ignore it either.

The MPAA’s response to the PIPA and SOPA opposition this week is a sign that they might be losing control in Washington. At the very least, they are starting to lose their patience and become frustrated, which may not help their cause at this point.

Source: White House Petitioned to Investigate MPAA Bribery

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?

By 3pm Washington time millions of people had already voiced their concerns. Google just reported that more than 4 million people signed the petition on their site, and the EFF says that 250,000 people sent messages to Congress through their site. These are just two examples of the many initiatives currently being organized.

The big question is, of course, whether this wave of protest is having any effect. The answer is an unequivocal YES.

Not only have Senators’ websites been knocked offline due to the massive flow of traffic, but quite a few initial backers of the bills are having second thoughts.

Below is a list of PIPA and SOPA co-sponsors who have now dropped their support for the pending legislation. They are joined by more than a dozen lawmakers who didn’t sponsor the bills, but have now stated on the record that they are not planning to vote in favor. Some even decided to black out their own site.

Senator Marco Rubio was one of the first to de-list as a PIPA co-sponsor today, stating:

“Earlier this year, this bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and without controversy. Since then, we’ve heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet. Congress should listen and avoid rushing through a bill that could have many unintended consequences. “

“Therefore, I have decided to withdraw my support for the Protect IP Act. Furthermore, I encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush the bill to the floor. Instead, we should take more time to address the concerns raised by all sides, and come up with new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet.”

Initial PIPA backer Senator Roy Blunt drops out saying:

“While I believed the bill still needed much work, I cosponsored the Senate version of the Protect IP Act because I support the original intent of this bill – to protect against the piracy of lawful content. Upon passage of this bill through committee, Senate Judiciary Republicans strongly stated that there were substantive issues in this legislation that had to be addressed before it moved forward. I agree with that sentiment. ”

“The right to free speech is one of the most basic foundations that makes our nation great, and I strongly oppose sanctioning Americans’ right to free speech in any medium – including over the internet. I continue to believe that we can come to a solution that will cut off the revenue sources for foreign websites dedicated to counterfeiting and piracy that steal American jobs, hurt the economy, and harm consumers. But the Protect IP Act is flawed as it stands today, and I cannot support it moving forward.”

Senator Mark Kirk also decided that it is a good idea to withdraw his support. He said:

“Freedom of speech is an inalienable right granted to each and every American, and the Internet has become the primary tool with which we utilize this right. The Internet empowers Americans to learn, create, innovate, and express their views. While we should protect American intellectual property, consumer safety and human rights, we should do so in a manner that specifically targets criminal activity. This extreme measure stifles First Amendment rights and Internet innovation. I stand with those who stand for freedom and oppose PROTECT IP, S.968, in its current form.”

Senator Orrin Hatch followed, and is no longer a co-sponsor of PIPA either. He said:

“After listening to the concerns on both sides of the debate over the PROTECT IP Act, it is simply not ready for prime time and both sides must continue working together to find a better path forward”

“Rushing something with such potential for far-reaching consequences is something I cannot support and that’s why I will not only vote against moving the bill forward next week but also remove my cosponsorship of the bill. Given the legitimate vocal concerns, it is imperative that we take a step back to allow everyone to come together and find a reasonable solution.”

Senator John Boozman is no longer backing PIPA, he stated:

“I will have my name removed as a co-sponsor of the bill and plan to vote against it if Majority Leader Reid brings it to the floor in its current form.”

“The PROTECT IP Act seeks to address an issue that is of vital importance to the future of intellectual property rights in the modern era. However, the concerns regarding the unintended consequences of this particular bill are legitimate. Therefore, we should not rush to pass this bill, rather we should be working to find another solution so that the epidemic of online piracy is addressed in a manner that ensures innovation and free speech is protected. I have confidence that we can do this, but not as the PROTECT IP Act stands today”

SOPA also lost two of its co-sponsors. Politico reports that Representatives Ben Quayle and Lee Terry have quietly withdrawn their support for the House bill.

The various protests are still ongoing and it wouldn’t be a surprise if the list above is already outdated by the end of the day.

Although these first signs are positive, it doesn’t necessarily mean that PIPA or SOPA are now off the table. There are still many sponsors and supporters left. Both bills are still on their way to be passed in Congress, but with a little less support than before.

Source: SOPA / PIPA Co-Sponsors Drop Like Flies As Millions Protest

Could this pattern be broken today?

Judging by the scope of today’s protests it’s now or never. In the coming hours hundreds of millions of Internet users will be confronted with blacked out pages and similar “strikes” in opposition to the PIPA and SOPA bills, and if enough people take action the people in Washington may just listen.

The first signs are positive, but there’s still a long way to go. Here’s how YOU (corporate pawns) can help:

- Tell Congress you oppose PIPA/SOPA.

- Not in the US? Email the State Department.

- Call your Senator.

- Leave your computer and visit a Senator.

- Discuss, share and inform others about the bills.

For those who are wondering, TorrentFreak is not going dark. Our purpose has always been to inform the public, whether it’s the latest news or a call to action like this article. We believe we can contribute and achieve more by keeping the site online than to black out completely. That said, we are alerting all visitors to take action through the excellent censorship script put together by FAT LAB.

To save an impression of today for future generations, we’ve listed below a few of the many protest pages being run today. Did we miss a good one? Paste a link in the comment section and attach a screenshot!

Google

Google has blocked its logo to protest PIPA/SOPA and added a link to a resource page where people can take action.

Demonoid

Demonoid, one of the largest BitTorrent communities, is going dark completely, with a nice spotlight effect.

Firefox

Firefox users will be welcomed with a dark themed default home page today, alerting people about the looming PIPA/SOPA threats.

Reddit

The online community Reddit will point the public to a resource site where they can take action.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia will be completely inaccessible for 24 hours, except the pages about censorship, PIPA and SOPA, of course.

WordPress

WordPress is joining the protest as well, and has decided to censor itself today.

Minecraft

Minecraft is protesting as well, but in red with the tagline “PIPA & SOPA, How About NOPA.”

Source: Historic: The Internet Protests Anti-Piracy Bills

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

Despite this lack of action, the RIAA sees BitTorrent sites as the main source of music piracy. In their most recent submission to the US Trade Representative (USTR) last November, they claimed BitTorrent “is responsible for approximately 50% of the industry’s global P2P piracy problem.”

One of the sites reported to the USTR is TorrentHound, and this week the RIAA put the wheels in motion to find out who is operating the torrent site. The music group obtained a subpoena from the U.S. District Court of Columbia and has ordered Namecheap’s WhoisGuard service to hand over all identifying information they have on the owner of the domain.

“We believe your service is hosting the above-referenced domain name on its network. This website associated with this domain name offers direct links to files containing sound recordings for other users to download by such artists as Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, Coldplay, Madonna and Kanye West,” the RIAA writes in a letter to Whoisguard.com.

“As stated in the attached subpoena, you are required to disclose to the RIAA information sufficient to identify the infringer. This would include the individual’s IP-address and e-mail address,” the RIAA adds.

Interestingly, the identification request is not for the actual torrent site TorrentHound.com, which is registered through Katz, but for TorrentHound.net. The latter domain redirected to the .com site in the past, but it currently points to an entirely different site.

Despite the non-infringing nature of TorrentHound.net, WhoisGuard is expected to hand over the domain owner’s details.

In their Service Agreement they specifically mention that all personal information will be revealed when it’s “necessary to comply with any applicable laws, government rules or requirements, subpoenas, court orders or requests of law enforcement.”

The question remains, however, what the RIAA is planning to do with the information. Are they preparing to strike on torrent sites in the US? Last summer the music group also requested the personal information of the domain owners of three other torrent sites – LimeTorrents, BitSnoop and Monova – but thus far no notable action has been taken against the owners.

TorrentFreak contacted the RIAA for a comment, but we have yet to receive a response.

Source: RIAA Orders WhoisGuard to Identify Torrent Site Owner

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

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

A few days ago Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff wrote an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune. In the column the Attorney General stresses how important it is for Congress to pass the SOPA and PIPA bills. The MPAA is delighted with the support and praised it in a blog post yesterday.

“Shurtleff effectively hammers the point that Google, Yahoo and others have spent millions trying to distort – that states which allow rogue websites to operate unfettered will experience massive revenue reduction and job loss,” the MPAA writes.

The Attorney General’s statements do indeed bolster what the MPAA and other pro-copyright groups have said all along. By itself this is not unusual, but when we examined the article in more detail we began to notice that many of the sentences that are passed off as Shurtleff’s work actually look very familiar.

Could it be that the column was partly written by the MPAA?

We say yes. To back up this claim we will highlight a few sentences from the Attorney General’s article, and compare them with those previously delivered by the MPAA and affiliated pro-copyright groups.

The first sentence that caught our attention is: “It will take a strong, sustained effort to stop Internet thieves and profiteers.”

Strong words, but also familiar ones. In fact, former MPAA President Bob Pisano uttered exactly the same words in 2010 when he congratulated the Senate Judiciary Committee with unanimously approving the COICA bill, the predecessor to SOPA and PIPA.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg really. Here’s another example.

“Congress can make a significant contribution to that effort with legislation to strengthen law enforcement tools. In the interests of American citizens and businesses, it is time for Congress to enact rogue sites legislation.”

The sentence above is copied from a pro-COICA column (bottom paragraph) written by Mike McCurry, co-chairman of the pro-copyright outfit Arts+Labs. At the time, McCurry’s piece was praised by pro-copyright lobby groups and in his writing McCurry also uses the previously mentioned sentence from the MPAA’s former president.

But there’s more. The column from McCurry, which is often quoted by the MPAA and affiliated groups such as FightOnlineTheft, displays more similarities with the article published by Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.

For example: “[Rogue sites legislation] cut off foreign pirates and counterfeiters from the U.S. market and deprives them of what they want most — our money. By disrupting the business models of these online criminals, this legislation would make it less profitable and more difficult for those who wish to engage in blatant intellectual property theft.”

Now compare that to this quote from McCurry’s MPAA-inspired column which is nearly identical, far beyond what can be called a coincidence.

The Attorney General was also directly inspired by the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, a Chamber of Commerce outfit that belongs to the same pro-copyright clique.

Compare: “[rogue sites] represent the worst of the worst infringers on the Internet, are a threat to our economic security and they have no place in a legitimate online market.”

..to this quote (PDF) “[rogue sites] represent the worst of the worst on the Internet, and have no place in a legitimate online market.” And the list goes on.

Although we can’t say with certainty that Attorney General Mark Shurtleff was fed by the MPAA directly, it is obvious that the article wasn’t written by him. It’s a collection of ripped off sentences that can be directly traced back to the MPAA and affiliated groups.

This is quite a concern coming from someone who is supposed to be objective, especially considering that this Attorney General will have the exclusive power to grant requests for domain seizures and DNS blockades if SOPA or PIPA passes. The way we see it now, this Attorney General is clearly in the pockets of the pro-copyright lobby.

Holmes Wilson of the citizen rights group Fight for The Future agrees with this assessment.

“This is a reminder that SOPA/PIPA—the language, the money behind it, and the arguments used to justify it— are coming straight from the same place: the copyright industry,” he told TorrentFreak. “It’s possible that they’re turning up the heat in Utah in response to the meetings Utah residents have scheduled with Utah Senator Mike Lee.”

Unfortunately this isn’t an isolated incident. A lot of seemingly independent groups that recently supported PIPA and SOPA use the exact same language that appears to be fed to them by a single source.

Just Google the sentence “Criminals have turned to the Internet, abusing its virtually unlimited distribution opportunities,” and you’ll see that it was used in pro- SOPA/PIPA letters by the National Governors Association, Public Safety and First Responder Groups and others. Letters that were coincidentally all highlighted on the MPAA blog.

The more we dig, the more we find…

Source: ‘Rogue’ Attorney General Spreads MPAA-Fed SOPA Propaganda

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

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

One of the most prominent sites that has rallied against the bills is the largest online community Reddit. The site’s users have organized various successful protests, which led domain registrar GoDaddy to drop its support for the bill. But the site itself also actively encouraged its users to speak out against SOPA and PIPA on several occasions.

For the site’s staff, taking a political stand is very much a matter of self-preservation. Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin recently said that the bill would “almost certainly mean the end” of the popular site.

Strong words, but First Amendment lawyer and Internet policy expert Marvin Ammori tells TorrentFreak that it’s certainly not far-fetched. While some SOPA and PIPA supporters say that Reddit is safe because the bills only target foreign sites, Ammori disagrees.

The former law professor says that thousands of US businesses, large and small, may be hit by the bills if they pass Congress. Ammori explains his views in a recent article where he lists three scenarios under which American websites could be targeted.

“Reddit is most likely to be illegal under the second category as anti-circumvention,” Ammori tells us. This means that should The Pirate Bay be declared illegal under the new laws, any US-based site or service that talks about gaining access to the site via the various loopholes, breaks the law as well.

“Any tool that helps anyone circumvent the bills’ remedies are illegal. Since the bills’ remedies include domain-name breaking and removal from search engines, any American sites that permit you to search for, or find, The Pirate Bay’s new domain name is potentially liable for circumvention,” Ammori reasons.

“I think if the community posts an article and votes for an article that helps people get to a targeted site, perhaps by listing the target site’s IP-address or new domain name, then Reddit itself might be ‘a product or service designed or marketed for the circumvention or bypassing of measures’. The copyright industry might argue that Reddit’s products (links) are designed or marketed by Reddit or by users ‘in concert with’ Reddit.”

Reading the above it’s clear that the current language of the bills could indeed have far-reaching consequences. Not just for Reddit, but for every site or service that relies on user-based input. Perhaps even for TorrentFreak, should we report on how people are making tools that can circumvent SOPA and PIPA.

And what about VPN providers? Or TOR? The list of potential targets goes on and on.

Supporters of the bill have pointed out that these fears are not justified, and they promise that the bills will only be used to take out the bad apples. But if that’s really the case, wouldn’t it be a good idea to draft the law in a way that makes it absolutely clear that only rogue sites are at risk? Just a thought.

Source: How SOPA Can Kill Reddit and Many Other US Sites

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

Take a deep breath…

January

After pressure from the entertainment industries, Google started to censor piracy-related keywords from its instant and autocomplete services. Keywords such as ‘torrent,’ ‘BitTorrent’ and ‘RapidShare’ were excluded from the start, and later in the year Google added a wide range of new terms including ‘The Pirate Bay.’

Despite these efforts the RIAA remained dissatisfied, patronizing the search engine with a could-do-much-better “Report Card” in December.

The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that entered the US during 2010 reached a new milestone in 2011 with the 100,000th person being sued for alleged copyright infringement. In January alone several prominent lawsuits were added. Anime distributor Funimation announced a lawsuit against 1337 alleged BitTorrent downloaders, and the rights holders of “The Expendables” and Paris Hilton sex tape did the same.

One alleged BitTorrent user paid a mysterious settlement of $250,000.

There was also positive news from the UK, when so-called Speculative Invoicing schemes there came to an end, at least for a few months. ACS:Law, the law firm that had terrorized untold thousands of alleged file-sharers in the UK, quit the anti-piracy business and went into bankruptcy a while later. ACS:Law’s Andrew Crossley was honored with the title of “Internet Villain” of the year and will now face the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal in early 2012.

Two lawyers who were responsible for introducing Speculative Invoicing to the UK were fined and banned from practicing for 3 months. David Gore and former partner Brian Miller of the law firm Davenport Lyons were each told to pay a £20,000 fine and interim costs of £150,000 for their professional misconduct.

Meanwhile, RapidShare and Megaupload fought back against entertainment industry propaganda.

February

Early February, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized several domains belonging to major sports streaming sites. One of the websites was Rojadirecta, an unusual target because two courts in Spain previously ruled that the site operates legally. Rojadirecta appealed the seizure but thus far without result.

In response to domain seizures many people voiced concern that they may be unconstitutional. US Senator Ron Wyden feared that the seizures could stifle free speech, and this indeed turned out to be the case as the US government shut down 84,000 websites by mistake late February.

In Australia, the Federal Court dismissed the movie industry’s appeal against a 2010 ruling which found that Internet service provider iiNet is not responsible for copyright infringements carried out by its file-sharing customers. This decision was appealed once more and is now with the High Court.

Oh, and despite rampant piracy Hollywood box office grosses worldwide surpassed the magic $30 billion mark for the first time in history.

March

Following the February seizure of several domains belonging to major sports streaming sites, the feds arrested the operator of Channelsurfing.net in March. The 32-year-old Texan Bryan McCarthy was taken into custody on suspicion of criminal copyright infringement. In November, McCarthy was indicted on several copyright related charges. Awaiting his trial, the psychologically-troubled operator pleaded not guilty on all counts.

In the same month President Obama’s “IP Czar” Victoria Espinel laid the foundations for PIPA and SOPA, calling on Congress to make changes in order to make it easier to clamp down on copyright infringement. Among the recommendations were calls to turn streaming into a felony alongside authority to wiretap in copyright cases. Music industry expert, book author and Grammy winner Moses Avalon welcomed the plans, which he declared would signal the end of TorrentFreak.

In the ongoing mass BitTorrent lawsuits, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell laid down a landmark verdict that would make it easy for copyright holders – the makers of The Hurt Locker in particular – to send cash demands to people they suspect of copyright infringement. The fact that Howell previously worked as an RIAA lobbyist and as the Managing Director of a pirate-chasing outfit led to suggestions of a conflict of interest.

Meanwhile in Belarus, a pirated copy of The Hurt Locker aired on national TV.

April

In April, worries about the US domain seizures prompted another major torrent site to move to a new domain as a precaution. KickassTorrents, one of the most visited torrent sites on the Internet, replaced its .com domain name with the Philippine extension .ph.

At the same time a group called MAFIAAFire coded a browser plugin to make these type of domain transitions go more smoothly by automatically redirecting users to these new homes. The release went viral and in the following months more than 200,000 people installed the add-on. ICE wasn’t happy with this and asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. However, Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.

An Italian court ordered all ISPs to block subscriber access to BTjunkie, leaving hundreds of thousands of Italians with the task of finding a new torrent site. At least, that was the plan. Just hours after the news was made public, a brand new and ad-free proxy site was launched. The site allowed Italians to browse an uncensored web and access BTjunkie, as well as another popular blocked site, The Pirate Bay.

May

In May, US lawmakers introduced the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), a bill that delivers a wide range of censorship tools authorities and copyright holders can use to quash websites they claim are facilitating copyright infringement. It is basically a revamped and worsened version of the controversial COICA proposal which had to be resubmitted after its enaction failed last year. Two weeks after its introduction, the Senate’s Judicial Committee unanimously approved the bill and it now awaits the senate vote.

In the same week as PIPA was introduced, three U.S. Senators presented the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, a bill that would make streaming unauthorized music, movies and TV-shows a felony. The bill is said to address a gap in current legislation where streaming is not considered a criminal offense.

The popular video streaming site “Fast Pass TV” was shut down following the arrest of one of the site’s alleged operators. The site itself didn’t host any copyrighted content but indexed videos hosted on third-party sites.

In the US the controversial mass-BitTorrent lawsuits continued. Early May the makers of the Expendables set a record when they sued 23,322 people at once, but this record was broken a few weeks later when The Hurt Locker lawsuit was updated to include 24,583 alleged BitTorrent users. Both cases were dismissed a few months later.

In another mass-BitTorrent lawsuit – VPR Internationale v. Does 1-1017- Judge Harold Baker denied a Canadian adult film company permission to subpoena ISPs for the personal information connected to the IP-addresses of their subscribers. The reason? IP-addresses are not people, and especially in ‘adult entertainment’ cases this could obstruct a ‘fair’ legal process.

US authorities resumed “Operation In Our Sites” and seized several domain names associated with copyright infringement or counterfeit related crimes. Among the new targets were two sites that linked to copyrighted films hosted on third-party streaming sites such as megavideo.com and veoh.com.

Oh, and in the midst of all the censorship talk The Pirate Bay moved their severs to a secret mountain complex after Comcast offered help to fix a network issue.

June

A report from the UN’s Human Rights Council labeled Internet access a human right, arguing that laws which allow for the disconnection of Internet users are disproportionate and should be repealed.

Richard O’Dwyer, the 23-year-old UK-based administrator of a TV show and movie links site was arrested by police. Following his detention in the UK’s largest prison, the admin continued fighting his extradition to the U.S.

On June 11th 2011, Europe witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history. The popular movie streaming portal Kino.to was shut down and a dozen people connected to the site were arrested.

As collateral damage, several file-hosting services connected to Kino.to also went down. Several people went on trial for their part in the site’s operation and the main admin was sentenced to three years in prison. Interestingly, a report published after the raids revealed that Kino.to’s users were actually the movie industry’s best customers.

—

Part 2 covering the second half of 2011 can be found here.

Source: 2011: Piracy Wars and Internet Censorship

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

Unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places, from the palace of the French President, via the Church of God, to the RIAA.

Although we don’t plan to go on forever trawling the archives, we felt that there was at least one place that warranted further investigation – the U.S. House of Representatives. Since it’s the birthplace of the pending SOPA bill, we wondered how many of the employees there have engaged in unauthorized copying.

The answer is yet again unambiguous – they pirate a lot.

In total we found more than 800 IP-addresses assigned to the U.S. House of Representatives from where content has been shared on BitTorrent. After a closer inspection it quickly became clear the House isn’t just using it for legitimate downloads either, quite the opposite.

Below we’ll list a few of the 800 hits we found on YouHaveDownloaded, which in turn represent just a fraction of total downloads since the site only tracks a limited percentage of total BitTorrent traffic. Again, this is real and confirmed data that is just as good as the evidence used by the RIAA when they sued tens of thousands of people for file-sharing.

Something that immediately caught our eye are the self-help books that are downloaded in the House. “Crucial Conversations- Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High,” for example, may indeed be of interest to the political elite in the United States. And “How to Answer Hard Interview Questions And Everything Else You Need to Know to Get the Job You Want” may be helpful for those who aspire to higher positions.

Books tend to be popular in the House because we found quite a few more, including “Do Not Open – An Encyclopedia of the World’s Best-Kept Secrets” and “How Things Work Encyclopedia”. But of course the people at the heart of democracy are also downloading familiar content such as Windows 7, popular TV-shows and movies.

And there was another category we ran into more than we would have wanted too. It appears that aside from self-help books, House employees are also into adult themed self-help videos. We’ll list one of the least explicit here below, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Although the above is interesting, as the House is the place where lawmakers are currently trying to push though SOPA, this revelation might actually help their cause. If even people at the House are “stealing” content, we really need SOPA to counter it, they may say.

The question is though, whether SOPA will be able to break the habits of millions of Americans, as there will always be alternatives available. And even if it manages to put a dent in the current piracy rates, is that really worth it considering the potential damage SOPA can do to the open Internet and legal businesses?

Let’s see if “Crucial Conversations – Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High” has some advice….

Source: While Drafting SOPA, the U.S. House Harbors BitTorrent Pirates

This is an interesting approach from a company that earned a lot of credit by releasing DRM-free games. CD Projekt doesn’t want to bug legitimate consumers with DRM, but for some reason they don’t see it as a problem that their piracy witch-hunt will undoubtedly lead to accusing people who haven’t downloaded the game at all.

How easy things can go wrong once again became apparent this week, as a retired woman who doesn’t own a computer or even a router was ordered by the court to pay a hefty fine for downloading a Hooligan movie.

But perhaps we’re wrong. Could it be that CD Projekt has some super-secret technology that magically allows them to identify real people instead of IP-addresses? A comment CD Projekt’s Michal Nowakowski gave to PC Gamerlast week suggests that this is indeed the case.

“We’re addressing only 100% confirmed piracy cases that are 100% possible to prove,” Nowakowski said.

“We are not worried about tracking the wrong people. As this is the trade secret of the company working on this, I cannot share it. However, we investigated the subject before we decided on this move, and we are aware of some past complications.”

The previous complications Nowakowski refers to are the many wrongful accusations that were widely published in the media after the notorious file-sharing lawyers Davenport Lyons started sending out settlement letters to people who allegedly downloaded The Witcher. But this is no longer a concern according to Nowakowski.

“The method used here is targeting only 100% confirmed piracy cases. No innocent person was targeted with the letter so far. At least we have not received any information as of now which would indicate something like that,” he said.

That’s great news of course, if only it were true. The reality is that CD Projekt is making bogus claims. It is by definition impossible to know that the right people are being targeted and there are still many complications that come with the scheme.

Although there are measures that can be taken to improve the quality of the evidence, such as confirming that a certain IP-address is actually sending data, it’s still a fact that an IP-address doesn’t identify a person. The game may have been downloaded by a neighbor over an unsecured WiFi-network for example.

The only identifying evidence CD Projekt can have is an IP-address and a time-stamp, so it is impossible to know with 100% accuracy that the right person is targeted.

While it may be safe to assume that most of the letters do indeed go to the right household, claiming that it’s possible to identify pirates with 100% accuracy is bogus. On the contrary, when you target thousands of people with these pay-up-or-else letters you can be 100% sure that there will be wrongful accusations.

If CD Projekt is not willing to accept that their anti-piracy scheme comes with collateral damage then it would be better if they drop out.

DRM is bad, but demanding cash from people who have never even heard of The Witcher 2 isn’t the best PR for a company either.

Source: The Witcher 2 Devs Defend Pirate Witch-Hunt With Bogus Accuracy Claims

The list is based solely on input from lobby groups including the RIAA and MPAA, who submitted their recommendations a few weeks ago. While the USTR admits that the list is not meant to reflect legal violations, the websites mentioned in the report “merit further investigation” for their alleged infringing behavior.

“These are marketplaces that have been the subject of enforcement action or that may merit further investigation for possible intellectual property rights infringements. The scale and popularity of these markets can cause economic harm to U.S. and other IP right holders,” the report reads.

As in previous reports, the largest category of allegedly infringing sites are BitTorrent related. The USTR points out that BitTorrent can also be used for lawful purposes, but it lists The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, BTJunkie, Kat.ph and Torrentz.eu as examples of possibly unlawful sites.

“Despite the criminal conviction of its founders, the Sweden-based ThePirateBay continues to facilitate the download of unauthorized content. ThePirateBay recently ranked among the top 100 websites in both global and U.S. traffic, according to Alexa.com,” the report explains TPB’s inclusion.

Aside from the BitTorrent indexes and search engines above, USTR also lists several BitTorrent trackers that may be investigated further. The report highlights the Russian based Rutracker, Demonoid, and the Bulgarian tracker Zamunda.

The USTR also zooms in on two of the world’s largest file-hosting services, Megaupload and Putlocker. This pushes Megaupload into the spotlight for the second time this month, after a public endorsement by a wide range of celebrity stars resulted in a YouTube takedown scandal and a subsequent lawsuit last week.

According to the USTR, Megaupload is highlighted as an alleged piracy haven because it “allows for the unauthorized distribution of protected content through subscriptions and reward schemes to popular uploaders.”

Finally, USTR’s decision to include the Russian Facebook competitor Vkontakte is also noteworthy. Not only because it’s a social network, but also because VKontakte spokesman Vladislav Tsypluhin recently noted that the company’s copyright problems are in the past after a deal was made with the USTR.

“We have an arrangement with the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, they will check our copyright compliance, and then we will be excluded from the list of pirate sites,” Tsypluhin said.

The RIAA and MPAA were quick to praise the USTR for their contribution. However, the list raises questions, as it brands businesses as rogue piracy havens solely based on input from entertainment industry lobby groups. Even sites that have cooperated with the USTR for months remain highlighted.

This is worrying, not least because the U.S. Government will grant these lobbying groups more control over the internet if the SOPA and PIPA bills pass next year.

Source: US Government Targets The Pirate Bay, Megaupload and Others

To our surprise, we found out that even IP-addresses registered to the RIAA were showing unauthorized downloads of movies, TV-shows and software.

This curiosity was quickly picked up by other news outlets to whom the RIAA gave a rather interesting explanation. Apparently these file-sharing transactions weren’t carried out by RIAA staffers, but by a third party who’s using the RIAA IP-addresses to share and distribute files online.

“Those partial IP addresses are similar to block addresses assigned to RIAA. However, those addresses are used by a third party vendor to serve up our public Web site,” a spokesperson told CNET, adding, “As I said earlier, they are not used by RIAA staff to access the Internet.”

This is all a bit confusing. First of all, the addresses are not similar, they are simply assigned to the RIAA. Everyone can look that up here, or here.

Secondly, while we are prepared to believe that RIAA staff didn’t download these files, we are left wondering what mysterious third party did. Also, is it even allowed by the official registry to register a range of IP-addresses to your private organization, and then allow others to use these IPs?

Also, just as a bit of friendly advice, it’s generally not a good idea to let others use your organization’s addresses to browse the internet. This time it’s “just” copyrighted material up for debate, but who knows what else they may be sharing online.

Considering the RIAA’s past of suing tens of thousands of file-sharers for copyright infringement, the excuse is perhaps even more embarrassing than taking full responsibility. When some of the 20,000 plus people who were sued by the RIAA over the years used the “someone else did it” excuse this was shrugged off by the music group’s lawyers. Can these people have their money back now? We doubt it.

Elsewhere, Henrik Chulu from the Free Culture blog discovered that someone at the infamous Johan Schlüter law firm downloaded the Danish movie ‘Dirch’. But Maria Fredenslund from anti-piracy group RettighedsAliancen had their excuse ready.

“We’re working for right holders, who obviously have given us permission to collect their material online as part of an investigative work,” she told Comon.dk in response.

Notably, Sarkozy is staying quiet and not attempting to justify any infringements carried out in his name. Perhaps a case of least said, soonest mended…

Source: RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP-Addresses

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”

Increasingly, many tech companies and websites are supporting the opposition’s camp. One of the websites that has backed anti-SOPA efforts from the start is the social news community Reddit, and yesterday the site’s General Manager Erik Martin said he fears Reddit may cease to exist if the bill passes.

“If SOPA passes in anything like its current form, it would almost certainly mean the end of Reddit. It may not happen overnight, but we have a very small staff (~11, mostly engineers), and even dealing with DMCA stuff is a big burden for us,” Martin writes in a comment under his username “hueypriest.”

“SOPA would make running Reddit near impossible. And we have access to great lawyers through our parent company. I can’t imagine how smaller sites without those kind of resources could even attempt a go at it if SOPA passes.”

One of the problems for Reddit is that the site deals with millions of users and thousands of sub-communities, many of which link to copyrighted material. This content can range from photographers’ copyrighted images, copyrighted clips on YouTube, through to copyrighted movies hosted on a third-party site.

Right now Reddit is protected by the DMCA’s safe harbor provision which only requires Reddit to take down content if copyright holders ask them to, but SOPA can change this liability when a site is deemed to “facilitate copyright infringement.”

Because the definitions and terminology in the bill are so vague, passing SOPA in its current form poses a threat to all user-generated sites online, and many other websites too.

One of the users on Reddit rightfully commented that SOPA would mainly target foreign rogue sites, which would mean that Reddit isn’t at risk. However, Reddit’s general manager disagrees with this view arguing that the bill’s implications are much broader.

“You are correct that this is the stated goal of the bill, which has been clarified under the manager’s amendment. However, the analysis from experts in press and various experts we have consulted independently is that there is way too much room for US sites like Reddit to be targeted,” Martin writes.

“It doesn’t matter what they say the bill is for, the language is far too vague and far too easy for various parties to use it beyond the stated goals. Given our experience with DMCA, it’s a safe assumption that various rights holders will use SOPA in such a way that US companies like reddit are impacted.”

Indeed, SOPA also has a direct effect on US sites as they can become liable for linking to so-called rogue websites. Unless the definitions are made more clear virtually every site on the Internet can become a target, for example by linking to The Pirate Bay in a news article.

Opponents of SOPA argue that these and other issues are not worth risking, especially when it’s still unclear what impact online piracy really has on the entertainment industries. A better way to tackle the piracy problem could be to focus on the availability of affordable on-demand services. Netflix and Spotify have shown that people are often willing to pay for entertainment if they get the chance.

Source: SOPA Will Mean The End of Reddit, Says General Manager

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

In response to the article many readers commented that they indeed saw a few familiar downloads, and they are not alone.

YouHaveDownloaded currently lists information on more than 50 million users. Although this is only a fraction of all public BitTorrent downloads, it shows that in pretty much every major organization people are pirating content.

Earlier this week we already showed that there are BitTorrent pirates at Sony, Universal and Fox. A few days later it was revealed that torrents are being downloaded in the palace of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and today we can add the RIAA and the Department of Homeland Security to the list.

After carefully checking all the IP-addresses of the RIAA we found 6 unique addresses from where copyrighted material was shared. Aside from recent music albums from Jay-Z and Kanye West – which may have been downloaded for research purposes – RIAA staff also pirated the first five seasons of Dexter, an episode of Law and Order SVU, and a pirated audio converter and MP3 tagger.

RIAA staff have a taste for crime dramas.

And of course some handy audio tools.

All in all, quite an astonishing revelation for an outfit that wants to disconnect copyright infringers from the Internet.

Another prominent organization that has been in the news for their tough actions against online piracy is the Department of Homeland Security. In recent months they have seized domain names of hundreds of sites accused of facilitating counterfeiting and piracy, including the torrent search engine Torrent-Finder.

By now it probably comes as no surprise that staff at the Department of Homeland Security are also using BitTorrent. In fact, we found more than 900 unique IP-addresses at the Government organization through which copyrighted files were downloaded.

Since Homeland Security employs more than 200,000 people the finding is hardly a surprise. However, this and the other revelations show that BitTorrent is being used everywhere, from government agencies to even the most outspoken anti-piracy outfits.

For now at least, since the RIAA has lobbied hard for a nationwide piracy monitoring system much like YouHaveDownloaded.

In a few months millions of online ‘pirates’ will be monitored as part of an agreement between the MPAA, RIAA and all major U.S. Internet providers. Alleged infringers will be notified about their misbehavior, and repeat offenders will eventually be punished.

But will the RIAA be punished too?

Update: RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP- Addresses

Source: RIAA and Homeland Security Caught Downloading Torrents

The outfit that brought the actions is known as Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC). Better known locally as TTVK, this anti-piracy group also successfully forced Finnish ISP Elisa to block The Pirate Bay.

TTVK also track individual file-sharers in pursuit of cash settlements but according to one of their employees who worked in anti-piracy tracking, he had less than optimum confidence in their operations.

MikroPC quotes a statement given to the police by Jaakko Nurmela, a man who worked at TTVK as a file-sharing investigator.

“I did not receive all the training I asked for,” said Nurmela, adding that he couldn’t be sure if the results being produced by the company’s surveillance software were correct. As highlighted in yesterday’s report, innocent people have been wrongfully accused.

Furthermore, Nurmela said he refused to sign a witness statement on behalf of the anti-piracy group because its lawyers interfered with his statement so much he felt that in the end it was no longer his testimony.

“Originally it was supposed to be a nearly 50-page report, where the whole thing was to be described and explained,” said Nurmela. “What I wrote was my opinion, but the main structure and all additions, modifications and edits came from [TTVK Managing Director] Antti Kotilainen and [TTVK lawyer] Jaana Pihkala. In fact, I felt that it was no longer my statement anymore, so I refused to sign it.”

Nurmela also gave some insight into how investigators like him gain access to private Direct Connect sharing hubs similar to the ones ran by the two men at the start of this article.

Usually hubs like these will insist that new members are only accepted if they are prepared to share lots of their own material too. The theory here is two fold – 1) that the range of material available on the hub will increase and 2) people sharing illicit files will also get themselves into trouble should they be an undercover investigator.

Nurmela was clearly concerned about his personal exposure in this respect and asked TTVK to get him written permission to share copyrighted files in order to do his undercover work. None was forthcoming and he was simply told to go ahead and no cases against him would ever enter a courtroom.

So here was a man sharing huge numbers of files on a criminal scale, with a private company telling him not to worry since basically they control who does and who doesn’t potentially face jail and huge fines. Joonas Mäkinen of Finland’s Pirate Party isn’t impressed with Nurmela’s revelations.

“I can say that it is extremely interesting – and unforgivable – that the people who so vigorously watch after copyright infringements on the internet with the mandate of collecting organisations, the entertainment industry and thus indirectly that of the artists and creators, are doing this while lacking understanding of the very technology they are supposed to be using,” Mäkinen told TorrentFreak.

TTVK counter by noting that anyone wrongfully accused has the right to complain and they will see to it that an investigation is launched.

“It is good to hear that TTVK does in fact have some sort of process to handle totally misdirected cases but that doesn’t take away one of the main problems that a private organization is obtaining the personal information of internet users,” Mäkinen concludes.

Source: Anti-Piracy Investigator Bemoans Lack of Training, Meddling By Lawyers

Last week the major publisher picked up the pace by filing another mass-lawsuit, yet again targeting those sharing the “For Dummies” series online. The complaint lists 36 IP-addresses through which the defendants downloaded and shared titles including “Hacking for Dummies,” “Vegetable Gardening for Dummies” and “Cooking Basics for Dummies.”

In nearly all BitTorrent lawsuits that have been filed in the US, the copyright holders do not intend to file individual cases. Instead, they want to obtain the identities of account holders behind IP addresses so they can send a settlement claim ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

TorrentFreak got in touch with the book publisher to find out if their end game is any different. It appears not.

“Our intention is to stop the infringement and let individuals know that they are violating the law and depriving the creators of the works of rightful compensation. Our preference is to educate, settle, and prevent further infringement,” Wiley’s attorney William Dunnegan told us.

Aside from a settlement, Wiley also hopes the legal action will deter others from engaging in the same behavior. This is the same approach the RIAA took when it got involved in mass-lawsuits years ago.

Although the strategy works in theory, the problem is that the evidence the company holds against file-sharers will never be tested in court. This is an issue, because due to faulty evidence many people have been wrongfully accused of sharing copyrighted works on BitTorrent. When tested, the evidence can turn out to be untrustworthy.

In a past RIAA court case experts described the evidence gathering techniques “as factually erroneous”, “unprofessional” and “borderline incompetent.” In addition, academics have shown that due to shoddy technique even a network printer can be accused of sharing copyrighted files on BitTorrent.

Wiley’s attorney is aware of the critique, but says they do everything they can to prevent screw-ups.

“We understand that the ISP account holder may not be the actual downloader. That’s why we will do due diligence after we receive the information from the ISP,” Dunnegan told us. The lawyer didn’t want to elaborate on what steps are taken but said that they “have a flexible approach depending on the situation.”

Thus far things are going smoothly for the book publisher in court. In their first case District Court Judge William Pauley recently ordered that Wiley can send subpoenas to the ISPs of the defendants, which means that the first settlement letters should go out soon.

Source: ‘For Dummies’ Publisher Sues BitTorrent Users to “Educate and Settle”

Those provisions include Internet disconnections for persistent pirates, and as of October this year 60 French Internet subscribers were on their third and final strike.

This morning, however, we’re left wondering if Sarkozy, his family and French ministers will be able to answer any emails in the months to come.

As reported to TorrentFreak this morning by Nicolas Perrier of Nikopik, people using IP addresses allocated to the Élysée Palace (62.160.71.0 – 62.160.71.255) have been very naughty indeed.

According to data from YouHaveDownloaded.com, a range of downloads have been actioned from the Palace including a cam copy of Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys. The latter was actually a lossless FLAC rip, but as one might expect, only the best quality will do for the Palace.

In total six infringing downloads were tracked back to Sarkozy’s residence, double the country’s three-strike limit.

It’s been an embarrassing few days for some not-so-secret users of BitTorrent. The IP addresses of several entertainment companies were reported as connected to allegedly infringing activity earlier this week using the same methods.

But while the reports from YouHaveDownloaded certainly have discussion value, it is worth noting that their data collection methods are just as untested as those employed by many private anti-piracy companies and their notoriously secretive ‘proprietary software’. The difference is, however, YHD aren’t using their data for the filing of lawsuits and getting people cut off from the Internet.

BitTorrent users are increasingly aware that their activities are public – those that monitor them for the purposes of punitive responses should experience the same standard. Finally, on the subject of equality, any predictions on odds for the Palace being disconnected for piracy? Save your money folks, some bets are a lost cause.

Source: French President’s Residence ‘Busted’ For BitTorrent Piracy

Two individuals from Finland have just learned this the hard way. Their cases, relating to offenses carried out in 2007 when they operated a pair of Direct Connect hubs, have just been concluded and to say their punishments are harsh is an understatement.

A 36-year-old man was sentence to four months in prison accompanied by a huge 326,734 euro ($432,955) rightsholder compensation bill, and a 22-year-old received one of 220,077 euros ($291,625). Both appear to have been treated in court as file-sharing site operators (the former stood accused of operating a 130TB hub) even though setting up and managing a Direct Connect hub requires no website and is easy as running a piece of software on a home machine.

The original complaint against the men was brought by the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC). Known locally as TTVK, this anti-piracy group is currently trying to make life difficult for The Pirate Bay.

But tracking large-scale file-sharers and hounding huge torrent site operators is not the only anti-piracy technique currently being employed by CIAPC. According to a MikroPC report (Finnish), they are also pursuing the average Internet user for cash settlements too, sometimes in error.

One individual told the site that his wife had received a letter from CIAPC stating that she had been caught sharing 5,000 songs online and was being given two options – settle for cash or face the case going to court. Upon investigation, however, the allegation proved problematic.

The IP address identified by CIAPC had been passed to the supposed infringer’s ISP, which by coincidence happened to be Elisa, the service provider that was recently forced by CIAPC to block The Pirate Bay. Elisa used their databases to match the IP address to a subscriber, but something went wrong. One theory is that the IP address had been recently transferred to a new customer, but in any event the wrong person was issued with a cash demand.

CIAPC’s Executive Director, Antti Kotilainen, insists that this type of error is rare.

“In 99 per cent of cases, people acknowledge on receipt of the letter that they have distributed files illegally. If there is uncertainty the issue is investigated,” he explains.

Kotilainen says that cash settlement letters are only sent out to around 100 Internet users per year but the settlement demands can be huge, ranging from a few thousand euros to tens of thousands. Larger cases are handed to the police and as demonstrated by the cases of the two men above, although rare the punishments can be extremely harsh.

Source: Two File-Sharers Fined Total of $725,000, Others Asked To Pay Thousands

According to the makers of the game, DRM only hurts people who buy the game, not those who download the pirated versions where the DRM has been stripped.

“Yes, it is then hard to crack, but you start messing with the operation system, the game runs much slower and – for a group of legal gamers – it will not run at all. None of these solutions really work, so why not abandon it altogether?” CD Projekt’s CEO Marcin Iwinski explained recently.

In the same interview the CEO also said that despite selling over a million DRM-free games, many people still pirated it. According to his own accounting some 4,5 million copies were shared on BitTorrent alone. Although this is a few million more than TorrentFreak’s tracking systems report, there have indeed been lots of downloads of the game.

However, for CD Projekt this is not necessarily a bad thing as they had plans all along to cash in on piracy.

“Yes we will track illegal file-sharing hoping people will find the game good enough to actually change their mind and be willing to pay for it,” CD Projekt’s Agnieszka Szostak told us earlier.

Although this initially sounded quite reasonable, away from the spotlight the company followed in the footsteps of so-called copyright trolls, by signing up for a so-called “pay-up-or-else” scheme. CD Projekt hired a law firm and torrent monitoring company to track those who illegally downloaded and shared the game, and has been sending them hefty cash settlement proposals.

The price CD Projekt is asking through their lawyers is slightly higher than what gamers have to pay in stores, to say the least. Over the past several months thousands of alleged BitTorrent users in Germany were asked to cough up 911,80 euros ($1230) to pay off their apparent debt to the company.

As is often the case, these mass settlement schemes do not exist without collateral damage. Aside from targeting many people who indeed downloaded and shared the game without paying, CD Projekt’s lawyers are also wrongfully accusing people who have never even heard of the game.

After all, an IP-address doesn’t identify a person, and Wi-Fi piggybacking is not unusual. But CD Projekt, who don’t want to bug legitimate consumers with DRM, apparently take this collateral damage for granted.

The company, however, is no stranger to the business model which a US federal judge recently described as a shakedown. In 2008, large numbers of Internet users started receiving letters from notorious file-sharing lawyers Davenport Lyons in the UK demanding cash settlements. Among those letters were demands for payment on an Atari-published game with a familiar title – The Witcher.

At the time the actions were widely criticized in the UK by consumer rights groups and the media, mainly because of the many wrongful accusations. Despite this critique, CD Projekt continues to pursue BitTorrent users in Germany, probably because it earns them good money.

Source: DRM-Free Witcher 2 Cashes in On BitTorrent Pirates

Their complaint centered on a pair of movie-focused release groups known as CRUCiAL and iNSPiRED. Following their creations in 2008 and 2006 respectively, GVU claimed that together the groups had released as many as 2,600 DVD and Blu-ray ripped movies online, many of them in advance of their street dates.

The GVU now say their investigation has borne fruit, with the initiation late last month of an international police operation against the leaders of the groups.

Under the control of police headquarters in Frankfurt, on November 29th raids were carried out against several private homes in Germany and computer datacenters in Switzerland and Hungary.

GVU said that pinning the groups’ servers down had proven problematic, since they had been supplied through resellers and rented under false names. Nevertheless, a 180TB Swiss server and a 30TB Hungarian server were both seized along with various computers and hard drives from locations in Germany.

According to the GVU complaint, CRUCiAL were responsible for running the server and obtaining source material from, among other places, two other Scene groups based in the United States.

Back home in Germany, the group was affiliated with 10 other groups who released the same movies online in different file formats.

The GVU investigation is said to have concluded that CRUCiAL were the source of the first DVD-quality Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince leak which had been ripped from a forensically-watermarked copy intended for Scandinavia. GVU say the DVD was physically stolen from an Austrian pressing plant at the behest of CRUCiAL’s leader. Copies of the movie then reportedly turned up on Kino.to, the now-defunct streaming movie portal raided earlier this year.

According to Scene records, both groups stopped releasing in an official capacity in 2010, iNSPiRED in May, CRUCiAL in September, with the former handing the ‘rights’ to their TV show releases to a pair of other groups. Both these new groups made their latest releases just today.

Source: International Police Operation Targets Movie Piracy Release Groups

Some of the most sought after publications are those hunted by students since the paper-based textbooks they are forced to buy in order to conduct their education are notoriously (some would say artificially) costly.

Inevitably, though, where there’s a cost to be cut, pirates have a cutlass, and in March 2008 a new website called Student Bay appeared, aimed at making students’ lives less expensive.

“In Sweden, education is claimed to be free of charge. Despite this students are forced every term to spend thousands of kronor on books necessary for their education,” the site owners said in their launch press release.

“Student Bay does not publish the course books as a whole, rather we divide them up in chapters, so that one can download them for personal use,” they continued.

While having reservations about the site’s legal status, the Swedish National Union of Students said they thought Student Bay had every chance of becoming successful, adding that the fact that the site exists should be a signal to publishers that they need to do more in the digital domain.

The Swedish Association of Educational Publishers, FSL, were less enthusiastic and said that the development of a market place should not be driven by criminal activity.

Since the site had things in common with another very famous file-sharing site – not least its name and logo – it wasn’t long before Student Bay attracted the wrong sort of attention. Within days of the site appearing online people began making connections to The Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm (aka Anakata). He publicly denied having anything to do with running of the site.

During December 2008 the Swedish Association for Educational Writers (SLFF) finally reported Student Bay to the police but despite his denial, prosecutors confirmed that Svartholm remained a target in the investigation along with another individual.

“The funny part is that [SLFF] also decided to press charges against Anakata because they claim he is part of this site,” Pirate Bay said in a statement. “We don’t really know why. Our suspicion is that this is because Anakata used to run the ISP which hosts The Student Bay.” Student Bay had indeed been hosted at PRQ, a so-called “bullet-proof” host previously owned by Svartholm.

But while Pirate Bay is free for anyone to use, Student Bay was not. Users not uploading material to the site were required to subscribe via a $3.00 premium SMS to access content, much of which was stored on file-hosting sites such as RapidShare. Pirate Bay openly disapproved of the approach and said that they hoped Student Bay would remove the requirement as it was against Pirate Bay “ideals”.

It isn’t clear if Student Bay fulfilled the request to go completely free but under pressure the site closed in May 2009.

Yesterday, nearly 3 years after the initial complaint, prosecutor Frederick Ingblad confirmed that a 23-year-old man has been prosecuted for founding and running Student Bay. He is charged with violating and assisting in breaches of copyright law between August 2008 and May 2009, and charged with “regularly receiving and assimilating payments” from site users, which appear to total around $8,000.

Gottfrid Svartholm is mentioned nowhere in the complaint and earlier requests from The Pirate Bay for a formal apology for the wrongful accusations appear to have gone unanswered. Meanwhile, attempts at breaking the textbook monopoly continue.

Source: Student Bay Admin Prosecuted in Sweden

Others maintain that they are absolutely necessary to protect the livelihoods of the world’s creative industries, and without them the world would be a worse place.

Whatever the belief held, proponents and opponents alike are nevertheless intrigued by what happens behind the closed doors of anti-piracy groups, particularly when viewed through the prism of their press announcements.

Just this week Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Chairman & CEO Cary Sherman commented on the White House launch of a new awareness campaign along with PSAs designed to alert the US public to the apparent perils of piracy.

“As a community still plagued by the rampant theft of our work, we have seen firsthand the devastating effects this theft can have on the lives of hard-working, passionate musicians, songwriters, producers and countless others,” said Sherman.

While the RIAA’s support of this type of campaign is nothing new, the last decade witnessed a much more controversial way of spreading the anti-piracy message – massive legal action which saw the music group settle with thousands of individuals for millions of dollars and sue a few unfortunate souls to within an inch of their lives for millions of dollars each.

As the RIAA previously told TorrentFreak, that legal campaign was designed to attract attention after PSAs previously run by the group were shown to make “little difference”. But there are also other techniques available to the RIAA to tip the market in their favor.

During November, Tennessean.com ran an article titled Music Row spent $4 million on lobbying in 3 months in which they state that the industry’s focus on lobbying “comes after the music industry’s use of a tactic, now almost universally acknowledged as a failure, in which it filed lawsuits against individuals accused of illegally downloading songs to stop piracy.”

So a failure then? Absolutely not, says the RIAA in a just-published response.

“Our legal efforts served as an essential educational tool: Fans know far more now about copyright laws and the legal consequences of stealing music than ever before. Before initiating lawsuits in 2003, only 35 percent of people knew file-sharing on P2P was illegal; afterward, awareness grew to 70 percent,” writes RIAA Director of Communications Liz Kennedy.

“Where there was virtually no legal digital market before the lawsuits, today the market exceeds $3 billion annually, and revenue from online platforms will comprise more than 50 percent of total industry revenues this year,” she continues adding that doing nothing would have meant illegal downloading would have “skyrocketed further”.

The RIAA’s conclusion is shown in the title of the piece – RIAA largely succeeds in goal of bringing piracy under control – but that seems scarcely compatible with Sherman’s comments that the industry is being subjected to rampant theft, unless “controlled rampant theft” is something the RIAA associates with a successful outcome to an anti-piracy campaign.

While Sherman may be offering support to the new PSA’s issued by the government, it’s clear that from previous comments the RIAA have little faith in them. The sue-em-all campaign certainly raised awareness, but it hasn’t negated the need for millions to be spent on lobbying, most recently in support of PROTECT IP and SOPA.

And here’s the thing. There are few people outside the music industry (maybe even inside) who think that suing customers turned out to be a particularly clever thing to do. Similar numbers are supportive of the industry’s championing of SOPA. All of this only adds credibility to the arguments of those who say that anti-piracy groups do a hateful and cynical job, and achieve little else other than generate negativity.

Worryingly, this is a view widely held by the ‘Internet Generation’ who are the ones expected to forget the past and utilize RIAA-sanctioned music services in the future. The cry of F*** THE RIAA didn’t exist before the lawsuits and it will take a long time to forget – support of draconian SOPA-style legislation only succeeds in prolonging the memories.

Of course, the RIAA will always justify their worth, characterizing questionable former campaigns as a success but noting that there is a new crisis in the piracy war that means they’re needed more than ever before.

However, all is not lost, because the RIAA already have the solution. I’ll leave you with Liz Kennedy’s words from The Tennessean which show that rather than throwing millions at lawyers and lobbying, maybe the RIAA should spend some time getting advice from Valve and Steam, and learning how influencing the public is really done.

“To be clear, no legal efforts are a panacea,” says Kennedy, “compelling legal consumption options are the most important.”

Source: RIAA: Piracy is “Under Control” But Wait – “Rampant Theft” Continues

As witnessed through the recent media storms surrounding SOPA and PROTECT IP in the United States, proposed measures are becoming ever more drastic, often targeting the financial and business infrastructures of so-called rogue sites, the exact definition of which remains unclear.

According to their Hadopi anti-piracy agency, France will be the latest country to travel down a similar controversial route.

“The knowledge gained through the successful deployment of the flexible [3 strikes] response and technical, legal and economic experiments carried out by the Hadopi, today allow us to initiate a new stage in the protection of copyright on the Internet,” the agency said in an announcement.

Hadopi says that many sites have used the natural evolution of technologies to offer direct download (DDL) and streaming portals which “specialize in the massive exploitation of illegal content” from which huge profits are generated.

“It is now time to enter an active phase of struggle against this behavior,” says Hadopi.

What will now follow is a consultation period involving those likely to be affected by the strategy. These will include the cyberlocker and DDL sites themselves, Internet service providers, banking and payment providers, plus advertising networks.

The discussions will also investigate the limits of existing legislative tools and propose amendments should they be found lacking.

Guillaume Champeau of Numerama, a news site at the forefront of French online issues, informs TorrentFreak that Hadopi’s plans are currently unclear, but have serious potential. An existing provision in the so-called Hadopi law says that rights holders can get a judge to pass a ruling on emergency measures that can help to fight piracy.

“It is an extremely broad provision – the broadest I know in French law – which could lead to an infinity of measures: filtering, domain names foreclosures, payments prohibition, etc,” says Champeau.

“It has no limit but the imagination of rights holders, and does not require that the impacted websites defend themselves. So I guess it is very close to the Protect-IP Act. The Hadopi will probably push a slight rewriting of the law, so that it can go before the court to use this provision itself, when today it is only available only to rights holders.”

At this stage Hadopi are promising that the upcoming discussions will be “conducted in a transparent and open manner” and hopes to report significant progress on all matters by the end of the first quarter 2012.

Source: France Attacks Finances of Cyberlocker and Streaming Sites

IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, with support from Finnish anti-piracy group Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC), filed a lawsuit yesterday in the Helsinki District Court against the administrators of The Pirate Bay.

The admins, whoever and wherever they may be, are ordered to stop facilitating the unauthorized distribution of music and pay compensation to IFPI and CIAPC-affiliated rightsholders for the damages they have allegedly caused through their website.

This latest action follows an October decision from the Helsinki District Court which ordered Finnish ISP Elisa to block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay or face fines. But while Elisa takes that decision to the Court of Appeal, IFPI is piling the pressure onto other Internet service providers.

Yesterday the music industry group filed applications in Helsinki and Vantaa to force two further ISPs, Sonera and DNA, to block their customers from accessing TPB. According to IFPI, when combined the subscribers of all three ISPs make up 80% of the total broadband market in Finland.

“This type of inhibition has yielded good results, eg in Italy, where the The Pirate Bay’s popularity has decreased significantly,” said CIAPC’s Executive Director, Antti Kotilainen.

Lauri Rechardt, chief executive of IFPI Finland, said the purpose of this latest action is to hit the “underground economy” and support the increasing uptake of authorized services.

Source: IFPI Sues Pirate Bay Admins in Finland, Demands Further ISP Blocks

Google users searching for terms like “torrent”, “BitTorrent” and “RapidShare” will notice that no suggestions and search results appear before they type the full word. As a consequence, there’s sharp decrease in Google searches for these terms.

Initially only a handful of “piracy-related” terms were censored, but a recent update to the blacklist includes nearly all the top file-sharing websites.

Searches referring to torrent sites such as “thepiratebay,” “the pirate bay,” “isohunt,” “torrentreactor,” “btjunkie,” “kickasstorrents,” “sumotorrent,” “btmon,” “extratorrent” and many others are now excluded from ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘. Interestingly, the full url “thepiratebay.org” is still offered as a suggestion.

The new list further includes several cyberlocker websites that were perviously left unfiltered, such as “4shared,” “filesonic” and “fileserve.” Although Google doesn’t censor the content of the websites in question, the Google searches for the affected terms drop significantly as can be seen below.

By voluntarily censoring parts of their search services, Google is trying to keep on friendly terms with copyright holders. The downside to this is that they put perfectly legitimate companies such as BitTorrent Inc and RapidShare at a disadvantage.

There is currently no clear definition of what Google considers to be piracy-inducing, but Google claims that the blacklist helps to reduce online piracy.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online,” Google spokesman Mistique Cano previously told TorrentFreak.

“This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference,” Cano added.

How positive this difference really is, of course depends on who you ask. IsoHunt owner Gary Fung told TorrentFreak that Google is going down a dangerous path.

“It’s a lot more subtle than the censorship attempts made possible by the pending PROTECT IP and SOPA bills, but it’s still censorship and it starts small. Google is increasingly becoming a self-righteous Big Brother of the Web. So much for ‘Do no evil’,” Fung told us.

A Pirate Bay insider also told TorrentFreak that Google doesn’t live up up to its famous motto.

“”It’s just another step towards censoring their search engine altogether – without a legal basis. We’re also wondering why this happens at almost the same time as they’ve released Google Music – a service where they sell music which in some cases might be found on The Pirate Bay,” he added.

Despite criticism from the public and the businesses affected by their blacklist, Google has said that it will continue to expand its piracy filter. The big question is, where will they draw the line?

Source: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

The man, known online as Kefissos, stands accused of being connected to the ‘After Dark’ release group and responsible for the illegal uploading of hundreds of movies. Although it’s not certain they belong to the man, accounts in the name of Kefissos can be found on several leading torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, and many of the movies indexed have Danish connections.

But RettighedsAlliancen’s work this month had only just begun.

On Tuesday last week, as usual 19-year-old law student Halfdan Timm was studying at the University of Aarhus. Half a mile away the occupants of an unmarked Ford Mondeo car were unsuccessfully trying to track Halfdan down at his apartment. A little later during a break in his lectures Halfdan was confronted by police officers.

“I was given two options,” Halfdan explains. “Either I could go quietly with the two policemen, or I could be arrested and ‘do it the hard way’.”

Halfdan told TorrentFreak that he was under suspicion of “piratkopiering” (piracy-copying), and that the police had a search warrant for his apartment.

Not wanting to make life difficult, Halfdan chose the easy way and took the police to his home. Once there the police asked him if he had anything to show them in advance of their search. Halfdan pointed to his desktop computer containing downloaded songs and informed them that he had a collection of 50 downloaded movies burned on DVD.

“One policeman in rubber gloves then began a very careful examination. Sofa pillows, broom closet, refrigerator, my dirty underwear, the rest of my wardrobe, my entire bedroom, under my bed, toilet and even my roommate’s room – even though he has nothing to do with the case,” Halfdan adds.

Then the discussion moved on to the 40,000-member NextGen site, a private BitTorrent tracker founded in February 2010. NextGen is also home to Sublime, a group supplying local subtitles for all the latest Hollywood movies.

“At first, they tried to figure out whether I was leading the tracker, searching for hidden equipment in the apartment, but when they realized that wasn’t the case, they tried to get as much information as possible about the actual owners.”

Halfdan doesn’t deny being a member of the site and admits he has downloaded movies and music, but according to comments made to Politiken by RettighedsAlliancen chief Maria Fredenslund, Halfdan is a file-sharing “mastermind”.

“By mastermind we mean one who stands behind file-sharing services,” she said. “We came across him in connection with our investigations and have notified the police.”

Halfdan puts the “mastermind” label down to simple stupidity but believes he may have been targeted for another reason – running a file-sharing related blog.

GratisFilm.info was founded by Halfdan in February 2011 and contains posts covering issues such as staying anonymous online (Halfdan notes the irony) and using seedboxes.

“It’s quite an idealistic cause for me, as I believe being anonymous online is (should be) a human right,” Halfdan told TorrentFreak.

“On the site, I guide on how to stay anonymous, gain access to The Pirate Bay even though it’s blocked in Denmark, but also about more ‘common’ subjects like new South Park episodes, the forthcoming Google Music, who Anonymous (the group) is and so on. Pretty much everything I find interesting. I believe using the police is [RettighedsAlliancen's] way of shutting me down.”

GratisFilm also carries reviews on a handful of BitTorrent sites, including NextGen. In early October, Halfdan interviewed the site’s owner, a fact he discussed with the police. This, he believes, has led some to believe he has a personal relationship with the site’s owner.

Halfdan’s assertion, that he was targeted because of his negativity towards anti-piracy companies, is rejected by RettighedsAlliancen, but they are clearly unimpressed with some of his articles.

“I was not aware that he criticized RettighedsAlliancen,” said Maria Fredenslund.

“But we can see that he teaches others to break the law and conceal themselves on the net. He is one of those who deliberately break the law. We believe that this was something that was so serious that it should be handled by the police.”

So are the police taking the matter seriously?

“The officers told me even they thought this was a waste of time, and that they could use their day better than driving around the whole day to pick up 50 movies and a computer,” Halfdan told us.

“I’m very surprised that the police went in on the case at all, but it does say quite a bit that they waited 3 months [after the initial complaint] to move, and that it’ll take at least 6 months before they start investigating my computer. This has a very, very low priority for them.”

Troels Møller, Piratgruppen spokesman and co-founder of internet think-tank Bitbureauet, is clearly outraged at this latest entertainment industry response to the file-sharing issue, describing it as completely disproportionate.

“Just as I thought Antipiratgruppen was becoming a bit more reasonable lately, they show their evil face from the old days again – the days of threat letters and blackmail,” he told TorrentFreak. “They were ransacking his apartment and searching through his dirty clothes! All this for copying some stuff on the internet? Where are the proportions? Is this really how the entertainment industry wants to treat its fans and customers?”

“What strikes me most about this case though, is that Maria Fredenslund apparently thinks that people should be arrested for teaching others how to use the internet anonymously. I would like to point out that this is not illegal! They don’t care about privacy or freedom of expression. In fact, they appear to be outright enemies of these fundamental rights.”

“Denmark is quickly becoming a frightening and shameful example to the rest of the world on how not to handle the filesharing ‘problem’,” Troels concludes.

Source: “Pirate Blogger” Law Student Raided By Police For File-Sharing Articles

The conclusion drawn by Fripp was that getting unauthorized music taken down from Grooveshark is next to impossible, and that even when music is taken down, it simply reappears. Grooveshark SVP Paul Geller eventually acknowledged mistakes had been made, but also criticized Fripp’s attempts at “doctoring” details of discussions between the band and the company concerning the takedowns.

But on the same day, October 17th, a comment claiming to come from a Grooveshark employee appeared on DMN with alleged details of how the company operates.

“We are assigned a predetermined ammount [sic] of weekly uploads to the system and get a small extra bonus if we manage to go above that (not easy). The assignments are assumed as direct orders from the top to the bottom, we don’t just volunteer to ‘enhance’ the Grooveshark database,” the posting began.

“All search results are monitored and when something is tagged as ‘not available’, it get’s [sic] queued up to our lists for upload. You have to visualize the database in two general sections: ‘known’ stuff and ‘undiscovered/indie/underground’. The ‘known’ stuff is taken care internally by uploads. Only for the ‘undiscovered’ stuff are the users involved as explained in some posts above,” it added.

If the previous paragraphs weren’t enough, then came the killer.

“Practically speaking, there is not much need for users to upload a major label album since we already take care of this on a daily basis.”

According to a CNET report, UMG have taken a keen interest in the anonymous post, going as far as to cite it in a freshly-filed lawsuit that contains claims which if proven true, have the potential to destroy Grooveshark at a stroke.

“[The business records of Escape Media Group, Grooveshark's parent company] establish unequivocally that the sound recordings illegally copied by Escape’s executives and employees include thousands of well known sound recordings owned by UMG,” write Universal’s lawyers in the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

Of course, if Grooveshark’s employees have indeed been uploading music to the service, the company’s DMCA ‘safe harbor’ protection is dead in the water. But anonymous Internet postings aside, just how sure are UMG that Grooveshark staff really did upload infringing material? Apparently, very sure indeed.

Last year, Universal filed a complaint in New York County Court against Escape Media Group containing claims that Grooveshark was providing “free access to UMG’s pre-1972 recordings.” As part of that process Universal was forced to hand over a database containing details on music uploads to the Grooveshark system. Items in there clearly piqued the interest of UMG.

The new complaint filed yesterday states that Grooveshark CEO Samuel Tarantino personally uploaded at least 1,791 copyrighted songs to the Grooveshark system, Senior Vice President Paul Geller 3,453, and Vice President Benjamin Westermann-Clark more than 4,600 illicit tracks.

Although it is unclear how many of these are covered by UMG copyrights, in total the label says that more than 100,000 tracks were illegally uploaded by Grooveshark employees. At $150,000 per infringement, by anyone’s calculations that is a staggering amount of money.

This has been a bad week for Grooveshark. Earlier, anti-piracy group RettighedsAlliancen, who are better known by their former name Antipiratgruppen, revealed they had sent an urgent demand to the Danish “bailiff court” (known locally as Fogedretten) to have the country’s ISPs block the site.

Source: “Grooveshark Bosses Uploaded Music” Say Universal In Massive Lawsuit

One Swedish site called TTi (otherwise known as The Internationals) had been running since 2005 relatively trouble-free but decided that  enough was enough.

“TTi will only concentrate on bands/artists that want to spread their material on the Internet and are waiting for a record contract,” TTi staff announced.

Raids against TTi took place this week in two locations, Växjö and Borås, and are said to have resulted in the arrest of two people and the seizure of three servers including the site’s tracker and another housing community data. While the identity of the man arrested in Borås hasn’t yet been revealed, the individual from Växjö has.

Patrik Lagerman is the owner of web-hosting outfit Patrikweb, a company which gained worldwide attention for becoming involved in bandwidth supply to The Pirate Bay after a court injunction cut off its supplies in August 2009.

It appears that Lagerman was sucked into this current case in December last year when he received a call from Antipiratbyrån who asked him to stop supplying bandwidth to TTi.

“I said I wanted to see a court order to shut down the client,” said Lagerman, the same response he gave to Antipiratbyrån in 2009 when they asked him to cut off Pirate Bay’s supplies.

Then everything went quiet for nearly a year, until the silence was broken this week.

On Tuesday morning at 06:30, Lagerman was woken by five police officers, arrested, and taken for questioning which lasted several hours. But during the evening he was back online and venting his anger among the web-hosting community.

“Trying to prosecute the hosting provider for assisting [in infringement] shows just how stupid they are,” said Lagerman, while highlighting that the same prosecutor is also behind the unsettling case of a 15-year-old file-sharer.

“Right now, just wait and see what happens, but police and prosecutors are so fucking grossly incompetent that handling things correctly or in a good way does not work with them,” Lagerman added. “Ten cops to get 3 servers, if anything it should be a crime to manage resources like this.”

Lagerman believes that as an ISP and without being served with a court order, the law is on his side, even when hosting a site like TTi.

“It is not my responsibility to interpret and decide if something is legal or not, I do not even have a legal right to do so. Swedish law is also clear, you are always innocent until the court has spoken, and a ruling is final.

“For this basic principle you can not be prosecuted for abetting a crime before the main offense is pending before the court establishing that there even is a crime,” he added.

Lagerman says he will now pursue Antipiratbyrån for falsely reporting him for a crime he didn’t commit and on the basis that they say he is involved in TTi’s ‘crimes’, extends the same principle to the police and prosecutor.

“The prosecutor in the case is now guilty of aiding and abetting [a false accusation from Antipiratbyrån] and the police are also guilty of aiding and abetting a false accusation,” he concludes.

Source: Police Raid BitTorrent Tracker…and Arrest its Hosting Provider

Despite fierce criticism from the public, legal experts and civil liberties groups, taking control of domain names is now one of the measures included in the pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), legislation designed to give copyright holders more tools to protect their rights against foreign sites.

Opposition to SOPA has been swelling in recent days, and today the European Parliament adds its voice by heavily criticizing the domain seizures that are part of it.

A resolution on the EU-US Summit that will be held later this month stresses “the need to protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names.”

If SOPA does indeed become law the US would be able to shut down domains worldwide, as long as they are somehow managed by US companies. This includes the popular .com, .org and .net domains, and thus has the potential to affect many large websites belonging to companies in EU member states.

This can lead to problematic situations.

During one of the seizure rounds earlier this year, US authorities took the domain name Rojadirecta, which belongs to the Spanish company Puerto 80. The site in question had been declared legal in Spain by two courts, but it only took a simple warrant for ICE to take it offline.

Puerto 80 is currently involved in a legal battle in the US to get their domain back, and has reportedly suffered significant losses in traffic and revenue from their streaming portal.

If SOPA passes and these seizures become common practice, thousands of companies will face the threat of losing their domains.

The RIAA and MPAA for example pointed out that they consider the Russian social networking site VKontakte and the Chinese media portal Xunlei as potential targets. These two companies employ hundreds, if not thousands of people, and both are even considering going public on the American stock exchange.

By adopting a resolution against domains seizures the European Parliament recognizes the dangerous precedent the pending SOPA legislation would set, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if more foreign criticism follows.

No country should have the ability to simply take over international domain names, and surely the US would feel the same if this plan was put in motion by a foreign country. Or as some 60 press freedom and human rights advocate groups put it in their letter to the US representatives:

“This is as unacceptable to the international community as it would be if a foreign country were to impose similar measures on the United States.”

Source: EU Adopts Resolution Against US Domain Seizures

Aside from making streaming of copyrighted content a felony, the pending bill aims to make it easier to put sites that facilitate copyright infringement out of business.

Should SOPA become law authorities and copyright holders will have a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. Aside from domain seizures, they can demand that search engines remove ‘rogue sites’ from their results, order ISPs to block these domains, and cut off their payments providers.

One of the problems with the legislation is that the definition of such infringing sites is open to interpretation. Today we can reveal which sites are on the hit list of the RIAA, and it comes as no surprise that all the major BitTorrent sites are prominently featured.

The RIAA was kind enough to send TorrentFreak a copy of their latest overview of “notorious” websites that was sent to the Office of the US Trade Representative (the MPAA submitted theirs earlier). We were asked not to share the letter in full, but below is a rundown of some of the most prominent sites that are mentioned.

“RIAA members are excited about the potential of the internet and other communication technologies to provide an efficient means of distribution to music lovers globally. Regrettably, this potential remains largely unrealized—mired in a morass of piracy,” the letter addressed to the USTR reads.

The RIAA hopes that their list of sites will help the government to focus their anti-piracy efforts, and in a way it can be viewed as a priority “hit list” should SOPA become law. If it was up to the music group, this list would include all prominent BitTorrent sites.

“P2P file-sharing remains a huge problem for the record industry. BitTorrent, a P2P filesharing protocol, is responsible for approximately 50% of the industry’s global P2P piracy problem and in some international markets the figure is as high as 90%. BitTorrent sites and services, across the board, are high priority pirate markets,” the RIAA writes.

Based on visitor count, the number of pirated music files that are linked, and the sites’ failure to take steps to address the massive piracy problem, they arrive at the following list:

Under SOPA, all the above domains could be put out of business without due process, the only requirement is that the Attorney General has to sign off on it.

Aside from BitTorrent sites the RIAA also wants cyberlockers such as Megaupload, Filesonic and 4shared to be dealt with, as well as the search engine FilesTube, and the forum Warez-BB.org. And there is more.

The RIAA points out that there are also several foreign sites that have copyright infringing “features” such as Russia’s main social networking site VKontakte and the Chinese search engine Sougou.

“In some sense, services such as Russia’s VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, and China’s Sougou and Xunlei are the most reprehensible of actors given that they want to appear as legitimate actors, and have functions unrelated to piracy, yet operate network services that include features that intentionally and effectively induce infringement,” the RIAA explains.

This last example shows that the definition of infringing sites can become very subjective down the line. It only requires a little creative writing to make half of the websites on the Internet appear as a rogue site, and thus eligible to be shut down.

Aside from the copyright issues, there is a broader international censorship issue at stake here. SOPA would grant U.S. authorities to seize the .com domains of Russia and China’s top tech companies with a strike of the pen. We doubt that these countries will be very pleased with that – just imagine how the U.S. would react if the opposite was true…

That would mean war.

Source: RIAA Wants To Shutter Torrent Sites, And More