TorrentFreak

The man who said he would buy The Pirate Bay and turn it into a legal service faced legal action when he was accused of trying to manipulate stock prices. Hans Pandeya was said to have made misleading statements in order to boost shares in his company, a situation that led the co-founder of Napster and the founder of the Grokster P2P service to testify against him. But now, with the court throwing out all but one of the charges against him, Pandeya is free to continue his business life.

Kim Dotcom and his associates have chalked up another win in their New Zealand extradition battle. Last year High Court judge Justice Helen Winkelmann gave Dotcom permission to sue GCSB, the Kiwi spy agency, for illegally spying on him on behalf of the FBI. The ruling was challenged by the Attorney-General but today the Court of Appeal announced that compensation can indeed be sought from GCSB. The downside is that access to evidence will again be restricted.

Kim Dotcom and his associates have lost a key battle in their extradition fight against the United States. On two earlier occasions, including once in the High Court, Dotcom’s legal team successfully argued they were entitled to examine mountains of evidence held by U.S. authorities. But those rulings were overturned this morning when the Court of Appeal said that the U.S. would be allowed to present a summary case after all. Dotcom says he’ll take an appeal to the Supreme Court.

The former operator of a popular file-hosting site has been heavily fined by a court in Germany. The man, who is the former admin of Uploaded.to, was found guilty of offenses related to the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content. The court fined him a total of 144,000 euros ($188,000) but due to other key matters in the case the important issue of service provider liability for third party actions wasn’t tested.

Within days the UK music industry will head back to the High Court with demands that the country’s leading Internet service providers should begin blocking three of the world’s largest torrent sites. Today, the owner of one of them describes the action as an attack on file-sharers and questions whether the process will be as straightforward as the one previously carried out against The Pirate Bay.

CBS and CNET do not have to stop distributing BitTorrent clients and other file-sharing software. A California court has denied the request for a preliminary injunction from a group of artists, who accused the companies of facilitating piracy. According to the judge there is no indication that CBS and CNET will purposefully encourage copyright infringement in the future, and a ban would needlessly silence “public discussion of P2P technologies.”

A panel of prominent scholars and academics have added their voices to an important case that was referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The paper published by the European Copyright Society aims to answer the question of whether publishing a hyperlink to content amounts to a communication to the public and therefore a breach of the creator’s copyright under European law.