TorrentFreak

Following a tip from the MPAA the feds arrested four members of the prominent BitTorrent release group IMAGiNE in 2011. All pleaded guilty earlier this year and yesterday one of the group’s leaders was sentenced to a 40 month prison term, the largest file-sharing punishment in U.S. history. A fifth member of the IMAGiNE group, not included in the indictment, pleaded guilty on the same day and will be sentenced next year.

A group of adult movie companies is suing Verizon for failing to hand over the personal details of alleged BitTorrent pirates. The provider systematically refuses to comply with court-ordered subpoenas and the copyright holders see these actions as more than just an attempt to protect its customers. According to the them, Verizon’s objections are in bad faith as the Internet provider is profiting from BitTorrent infringements at the expense of lower-tier ISPs.

A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.

In 2010, individuals from the now-defunct NinjaVideo site stored copyright-infringing videos on the servers of Megaupload. These subsequently came to the attention of the FBI who were conducting an investigation into NinjaVideo and its operators. As a result Megaupload was served with a criminal search warrant requiring it to hand over information to the authorities, but in a cruel twist Megaupload’s cooperation and a desire not to destroy evidence is now being used as evidence against it.

A ruling handed down yesterday by Germany’s highest court represents a blow to rightsholders in their quest to clamp down on illicit file-sharing. The court ruled that the parents of a teenager who had made available more than 1,100 songs on file-sharing networks can not be held responsible for their son’s infringements, nor be required to monitor or hinder his online activities.

Following the ACS:Law ‘speculative invoicing’ debacle the last thing the UK needs right now is an influx of similar copyright trolls pressuring Internet users in order to extract cash settlements. In order to reduce the chances of that happening on a large scale, the Open Rights Group say they intend to intervene in a case currently being taken to appeal by a movie company. Success for ORG would be great news, but they need your help to pull it off.

Billionaire Alki David and a number of recording artists have not given up on their copyright infringement battle with CNET’s Download.com. Continuing with their allegations that Download.com induced piracy, the coalition have asked a court to issue a sweeping injunction, one that would ban all BitTorrent client downloads from the popular software download portal. Even an article published by CNET about the band Counting Crows legally distributing their music on BitTorrent is painted in a bad light