The raid on Dotcom’s Coatesville mansion was requested by United States authorities who are now trying to extradite the Megaupload founder and several of his colleagues.

Despite protests from Dotcom about the legitimacy of the search warrants, the raid was found to be legal earlier this year. However, that doesn’t mean that all seized property was taken legitimately, and can be kept from the New Zealand-based entrepreneur.

Today the New Zealand Court of Appeal ruled that clones of the seized electronic devices that were seized without authorization should be returned to Dotcom and his co-defendants “as soon as reasonably practicable.”

Last month the prosecution explained that the data hadn’t yet been handed over because some of it was encrypted, making it impossible for police to verify and investigate its contents.

In its ruling today, the Court of Appeal respects this hesitation but noted that all non-encrypted data should be returned. The rest can follow after the defendants give up their encryption passwords to two nominated police officers.

Previously the Court of Appeal ruled that police crossed a line when they shared cloned data with the United States. In a reference, today’s order prohibits the two police officers from revealing the encryption passwords with others.

“[...] in particular to any representative of the government of the United States of America,” the verdict reads.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

BitTorrent Sync is a lightweight backup tool that eliminates this drawback, and it’s much faster too.

The functionality of the Sync application is comparable to most cloud-based sync tools, except for the fact that there’s no cloud involved. Users simply share their files across their own devices, or the devices of people they share files with.

Since its launch the application has built a steady user base of millions of users who already transferred a mind-boggling amount of data.

“Since the initial Alpha launch of Sync a little over a year ago, we’ve now hit over 10 million total user installs and have transferred over 80 Petabytes of data,” BitTorrent Inc’s Erik Pounds notes.

Today marks another big step in the development of Sync. With the release of version 1.4 users are now able to share files and folders more easily, by simply sending someone a URL. Previously, people had to exchange encryption keys which seemed more complicated.

People who receive a Sync URL will be directed to a download page where they are prompted to install Sync, if it isn’t already, and start downloading files right away.

Sync offers a wide variety of sharing options. Users have complete control over where their data is going and how it is used. This includes setting read/write permissions and the option to give access to approved devices only.

“Sync gives you full ownership over your data. With no third parties involved in storing or arbitrating your data, you know exactly where your files go,” Pounds explains.

In addition to the easier sharing options and various other improvements, the latest release also has a completely redesigned interface.

For those who are interested, the latest version of BitTorrent Sync is now available for download here, completely free of charge.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

KickassTorrents, operating from the Kickass.to domain, has millions of visitors per day.

Starting a few hours ago, many of these visitors noticed that their beloved torrent site isn’t working properly.

Those who try to access the site now get a blank page instead of the usual overview of popular torrents. The same is true for Kickass’ proxy sites.

At the moment it’s unclear what’s causing this issue. While some users fear the worst, the most likely explanation is that it’s a technical problem that will be fixed relatively quickly.

TorrentFreak asked the Kickass.to team for more information on the outage, but we have yet to hear back. We will update this article when more information becomes available.

Update: Nothing to worry about. Kickass informs us that they are doing some maintenance. The site should be back in an hour or so.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Last week Reuters reported that a jury had found MP3tunes and its associated search engine Sideload.com guilty of copyright infringement.

Sideload was one of the first sites that searched external file-hosting services such as RapidShare. Initially MP3tunes won a summary judgment in its favor, but that was overturned by last week’s ruling.

Yesterday the final verdict on the damages was handed down and, as expected, MP3tunes and its founder were ordered to pay millions. The exact amount isn’t absolutely clear, but EMI lawyer Luke Platzer estimates it to be around $41 million, including $7.5 million in punitive damages.

In total there were 2,100 copyrights at issue in the case, some of which were associated with major artists including The Beatles, Coldplay and David Bowie.

But even after seven years, the case isn’t over just yet. According to a Reuters report, Robertson’s lawyer has plans to file an appeal.

Founded in 2005, MP3tunes was one of the first “cyberlocker” sites, long before Dropbox and others came around. The site eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2012, in part due to the legal bills it had to pay.

“EMI spent an estimated $10 million dollars with multiple law firms to arm their attack against MP3tunes in an attempt to thwart unlicensed personal lockers. They know it’s difficult if not impossible for startups to fight long costly legal battles,” Robertson wrote at the time.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The first big crackdown followed in February 2013, when police carried out searches on 124 locations and arrested 27 people suspected of sharing music, movies, TV shows, games and software without permission.

Now, almost exactly a year later, authorities have been flexing their muscles again, this time in pursuit of those sharing videos online.

According to Anime News Network, between February 25-27 police raided 123 locations across the country searching for 24 anime pirates using sharing software including Cabos, Share, Perfect Dark and the infamous Winny.

As of last Friday, police had arrested 19 suspects including a 51-year-old company man said to have uploaded several anime videos without permission.

Although P2P file-sharing use is reportedly on a downward trend, figures released last year by the Recording Industry Association of Japan suggested that the country’s tough legislation had done nothing to boost music sales.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Luckily, this happened only once, and most downtime has a less dramatic cause.

When the site’s not responding someone probably tripped over a cable, or they’re working on software upgrades, replacing hardware or facing another technical difficulty.

Earlier this week The Pirate Bay was down for a few hours for maintenance, and this time it’s probably nothing too serious either.

TorrentFreak has reached out to The Pirate Bay team and we will update this article when we hear back from them. Since it’s Saturday evening, this may take a while.

Stay tuned.

Update: The Pirate Bay is back, nothing too serious.

Update February 27: The Pirate Bay is having some issues again, shouldn’t take long.

Update March 4: The Pirate Bay is down again.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Thor: The Dark World is the most downloaded movie for the third week in a row.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated 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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Pretty much all sites of a respectable size are targeted on occasion by unknown sources, and today several large sites appear to be hit.

TV-torrent group EZTV told TF that they are dealing with a serious flood of unwanted connections, which renders the site unavailable.

EZTV has currently no indication when the site will return, but they will do all they can to solve the issues as soon as possible.

Around the same time as EZTV’s problems started, KickassTorrents went down too. TorrentFreak asked the Kickass.to team for more information on the outage, but we have yet to hear back.

Whether KickassTorrents’ problems are also DDoS related is unsure at the moment. At the time of writing the site’s DNS servers are not resolving to an IP-address either.

As if that’s not enough, Extratorrent ran into trouble as well. Earlier today the site had some downtime, but a cached version is currently being served through Cloudflare.

We will update this article when more information becomes available.

Update: EZTV has returned, KickassTorrents is still having problems.

Update: Extratorrent is having issues again and released the following statement.

Update: Kickass.to appears to be coming back slowly. The KickassTorrent’s team confirmed to TorrentFreak that they have been dealing with a series of DDoS attacks.

Update: EZTV is down again.

“Extratorrent servers are under strong DDOS attack right now… We are trying to resolve issues. Sorry for inconvenience. Your support is highly appreciated.”

Kickass.to unreachable

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Massachusetts Pirate Party – one of the few that has managed to negotiate the US’s labyrinthine laws to become registered – is allowed to collect Bitcoin donations.

A few days ago the Pirates received a response back from the Director of the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF).

“A political committee can accept contributions in Bitcoins,” it said, marking a strong positive for the use of the cryptocurrency. However, the Bitcoin blessing is not without its share of restrictions.

As with any other donation, Bitcoins can only come from a US citizen or permanent resident and there is an annual limit of $500 per person.

In addition, within five days the Bitcoins have to be converted into US dollars “through a high-volume public Bitcoin exchange open to transactions in the US.”

Another restriction is that the Pirate Party cannot spend the Bitcoins themselves. In this, it’s considered no different from stocks and shares.

Perhaps less favored by potential Bitcoin donors is the requirement to have an accurate name and residential address for every donation. This is somewhat of a blow for its advocates, but standard procedure for political contributions.

Now that the approval is in, the Massachusetts Pirate Party aim to be ready to accept donations in Bitcoin within the next two weeks.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The site’s Facebook page claims the issues are due to an ISP blockade. However, this is unlikely to explain the worldwide outage unless they are referring to the site’s own hosting provider or domain registrar.

“Can’t load Extratorrent.CC ? Some ISPs blocked the website and restricted access to EXTRATIORRENT.CC domain name. We trying to resolve it!,” the status message reads.

TorrentFreak has asked ExtraTorrent staff for some additional details, but we have yet to hear back from them.

For now the site’s IP-addresses, such as http://195.144.21.16/, are still up and running. Various ExtraTorrent proxy sites, including extratorrentlive.com, work just fine too.

From what we have seen so far ExtraTorrent’s issues appear to be DNS related. The site has updated its nameservers today, but at the time of writing the domain name is not resolving to an IP-address.

Considering that the servers remain operational, it’s probably only a matter of time before the extratorrent.cc domain, or a new alternative, is back up.

Update: After roughly half a day the ExtraTorrent domain is working again. There are still some issues as the static files such as images are not loading everywhere.

Update: ET informed us that they had issues with their hosting provider. They switched DNS but that doesn’t propagate immediately, hence the downtime issues.

- image credit

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.