TorrentFreak

A mass lawsuit against 2,165 alleged downloaders of ‘Conan The Barbarian’ was filed at the United States District Court for the District of Maryland last Friday. Through this legal action movie studio Nu Image hopes to collect millions of dollars in settlement fees. Details of the case reveal that the lawyers have learned from past mistakes, increasing the risk for those accused of copyright infringement.

Thousands of people who have been sued for downloading movies can breathe a sigh of relief, for now at least. A Florida judge has stopped 27 mass-BitTorrent lawsuits because the attorney for the copyright holders appears to be unlicensed. The cases are likely to be dismissed and the plaintiffs will not be allowed to demand settlements from the accused file-sharers.

A group of more than 30 rightsholders have won their case targeted against Grooveshark in Denmark. A court agreed that both the streaming music service and its users infringe recording label copyrights and granted an injunction forcing an ISP to initiate a block of the service. The anti-piracy group behind the action hopes that other ISPs will now follow suit.

The censorship of The Pirate Bay, which is slowly spreading to ISPs all around Europe, is designed to reduce the availability of unauthorized media, but the site also allows artists without a corporation-backed delivery mechanism to self publish to the world. However, since blockades are a blunt instrument, their work is being wiped out too. On this basis, the legality of a recent Pirate Bay blockade is now being questioned.

The Swedish Government wants to implement a change in the law which has the potential to make Sweden one of the toughest countries in the world to share files. Currently file-sharer identities can only be obtained following crimes worthy of a prison sentence, but if the authorities have their way the threshold will be lowered to include any offenses which could lead to a fine.

The book download portal Library.nu and cyberlocker ifile.it appear to have ‘shut down’ voluntarily after a coalition of book publishers managed to get an injunction against the two sites. According to the complaint, the sites offered users access to 400,000 e-books and made more than $11 million in revenue in the process.

The co-founder of Megaupload has been freed on bail by a judge in New Zealand. Mathias Ortmann will be the subject of strict conditions including no Internet access. The US will now rely on a United Nations treaty to extradite the Mega team. Separately, it was revealed that the FBI remotely monitored last month’s raids and congratulated New Zealand police on their work.