TorrentFreak

Four individuals behind a so-called “scene topsite” used by the popular release groups MEDiEVAL and DoNE have been sentenced for copyright infringement offenses. Three of the men, described as IT professionals working for Internet service providers, hid their servers within the infrastructure of an Internet service provider. Despite managing to delete evidence after a tip-off, they received suspended prison sentences of between four and six months. A fourth man was fined for aiding and abetting.

It’s not uncommon for content producers to go crazy when they discover their work is being made available via The Pirate Bay. But while the big movie and music studios think the answer is to legislate and then sue everyone into submission, there is another way. Games developer Jonatan Söderström aka Catcus went into the comments section of The Pirate Bay and started giving free customer support to pirates. Has this Swede gone mad or does it just make better sense in the long run?

In probably the most outrageous protest yet against piracy, an author has ripped off her clothes in front of a government palace. Brazilian writer Vanessa de Oliveira shocked the citizens of Lima, Peru, with nearly everything she has. “I’m doing this for my book so it is not pirated anymore anywhere in the world,” the redhead said, adding that her latest publication is based on her experiences bedding nearly 5,000 men.

It was revealed Friday that the Oron cyberlocker service agreed last month to hand over the full details of users alleged to have breached an adult studio’s copyright. Many observers pledged never to use the service again, branding Oron ‘snitches’ and the lowest of the low. But snitching in the anti-piracy world is nothing new, it’s just that we tend not to hear about it. Just how the snitches like it.

Sites selling cheap MP3s have been around for many years and the music industry has long complained that they operate illegally. In Russia, where many originate, they see the legal angle somewhat differently, arguing that on home soil they are entirely legal. Whatever the truth, some of these sites appear to have interesting ‘wholesale’ suppliers.

Today, exactly six years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. At the time the entertainment industries hoped that this would silence the deviant BitTorrent site for good, but in hindsight we can conclude that they had actually awakened a monster. The raid and the ongoing battle that later unfolded reads like a script for an upcoming Hollywood blockbuster. The Pirate Bay team have already coined an appropriate title: Pirate Independence Day.

During the first half of the last decade, people downloading movies from the Internet would very often be looking for the same things as they are now. They wanted movies that were only available officially in theaters but not only that, they wanted them in the absolute finest quality. There was one group that met all of these requirements, a group so influential that the FBI mounted a massive operation to catch them. That group was called Centropy.