TorrentFreak

Having outstayed its welcome in Germany, a company is bringing its legal strategy against file-sharers to the UK. Its first targets are 500 P2P users who illegally distributed a game according to the company, even though many of the victims never even heard of the game in question. All Filesharers receive a letter in which they are urged to settle the case for a relatively small sum of money. So who are the accusers and what quality of evidence do they hold?

Just two days after TorrentFreak reported that a clampdown on file-sharing in Italy was looming, reports suggest that police raids have closed down a major DirectConnect hub, netting equipment and the network’s major uploaders.

There is a statement you’ll often see on p2p forums, and in IRC channels. It usually comes in a discussion about “getting caught” or “letters been sent” and it goes something like “the safest thing is to join a private site. The other oft-proposed solution, blocklists, has been discussed before. Are private sites any safer though?

After a Court ruled that downloading films, music or software is not criminal if done for no profit, the Italian Vice Prime Minister said that the government will no longer turn a blind eye and declared that there will be a crackdown on sites hosted in the country.

BitTorrent Inc. has plans to launch a free, ad-supported TV-network by the end of this year. It will hereby be in direct competition with Joost and online video services like YouTube. It is unsure if BitTorrent’s current partners like Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox will also make their content available for the BitTorrent TV-network.

May 2006 saw the admin of one of Bulgaria’s largest BitTorrent trackers arrested by the police, accused of putting links to over 20 million copyright works on the internet. Despite the fact he has been released, the Bulgarian Interior Ministry has now ordered all ISP’s to block access to the torrent site.

It is doubtful that the term “intellectual property” is still applicable to the majority of the Hollywood productions, especially the intellectual part. So, is piracy still intellectual property theft if the property is not a product of the intellect? Great cartoon by Clay Bennett