TorrentFreak

Carl Lundström, one of the persons convicted in The Pirate Bay trial, will not be going to jail for his role in the operations of The Pirate Bay. The millionaire, who gave the site a crucial helping hand with hardware and other services in its early days, was sentenced to four months in prison but will now spend that time in a Swedish apartment. He will be electronically monitored and allowed to leave in order to attend a government-arranged job.

A Higher Regional Court in Germany has ruled that file-hosting service RapidShare must proactively filter thousands of files uploaded by its users. The Court confirmed three separate verdicts by a lower court, in cases that were started by book publishers and a music rights group. RapidShare has yet to decide whether it will appeal the verdicts, and informs TorrentFreak that there’s also positive news to report.

Richard O’Dwyer, the UK-based ex-administrator of the video linking website TVShack will be extradited to the US to face copyright infringement charges. Despite public outrage Home Secretary Theresa May approved the extradition order today. The 23-year-old student has never visited United States, but now faces several years in a US prison.

More than half a decade after Swedish police officers first raided The Pirate Bay, there is talk that a second police raid against the world’s most famous torrent site is in the planning. The Pirate Bay team has learned that local authorities have acquired warrants to take action against the site, and expect that both servers and the new .se domain name may be targeted soon.

The EFF has filed a brief in the dispute between the cyberlocker Hotfile and Warner Bros, where the latter is accused of taking down content they don’t hold the copyrights to. The EFF argues that Warner Bros. is stifling online speech by denying Hotfile users to access to legitimate content. The movie studio’s claim that they are not responsible for mistakes made by a computer, but this is not a valid defense according to the group.

Authorities in the United States have put in an official request to extradite Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and the three other suspects in the “Mega Conspiracy.” While the request doesn’t come as a surprise, the prosecutors waited till the official deadline last Friday before filing the paperwork. It will take a while before the fate of the accused is decided, as the first extradition hearing is planned for August.

After being granted bail last week, Kim Dotcom went home to spend some quality time with his family. The Megaupload founder had been in prison for little over a month after his arrest in January. Upset at the decision to grant Dotcom freedom, the US Government, argued yesterday in an appeal hearing that he should be put back in jail. Today they failed in that attempt and Dotcom remains a free man – at least for now.