Their case involves former members of now-defunct file-sharing links forum Dancing Jesus. The site was taken down in 2011 following an investigation carried out by the BPI and IFPI, with assistance from the US Department of Homeland Security.

Two people were arrested by City of London Police, the owner of the site and the forum’s top uploader. Homeland Security assisted UK police by seizing a Dancing Jesus server hosted in the United States.

The trial, which began on October 6, took place at Newcastle Crown Court. One defendant, site owner and admin Kane Robinson of South Shields, had already pleaded guilty to illegally distributing music back in January 2014.

Richard Graham, the site’s alleged top uploader, went into the trial with a “not guilty” plea, but after evidence was presented in court earlier this week the Leicestershire man changed his plea to guilty.

“The guilty verdict confirms that posting illegal online links to music is a criminal offense which economically harms musicians and the labels that support them,” said David Wood, Director of BPI’s Copyright Protection Unit.

“Pre-release piracy, in particular, robs musicians of artistic control, leaving them with no say in when and how their music – which has taken blood, sweat and tears to produce – is released.

The case is significant in a number of ways, not least the scale of online infringement connected to the pair’s guilty plea. Add in the fact that Dancing Jesus was particularly well-known as a venue to obtain pre-release content and this becomes the most important UK music industry case since the failed 2010 prosecution of the infamous OiNK BitTorrent tracker.

Graham and Robinson will be sentenced under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Their fate will be determined by Judge Sherwin early next month.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Aside from the efforts of the City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), one of the recurring themes is the decision by the Hollywood-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft to privately prosecute high-profile cases themselves.

The most notable case, that involving SurfTheChannel’s Anton Vickerman, resulted in a four-year jail sentence, one that’s cited in cease and desist notices regularly served on file-sharing site admins in the UK. More recently, FACT took the decision to initiate a private prosecution against Philip Danks, a West-Midlands based man known for camming and distributing Fast and Furious 6 while it was still in cinemas.

It now appears that following FACT’s lead, the BPI will also take a privately investigated and prosecuted case to criminal trial this month.

The case involves the now-defunct file-sharing forum known as Dancing Jesus. The site was taken down in 2011 following a investigation carried out by the BPI and IFPI, with assistance from the US Department of Homeland Security.

At the time two people were arrested by City of London Police – the site’s alleged administrator and an individual said to be one of the site’s top uploaders. Homeland Security assisted with the case by seizing Dancing Jesus’s server in the United States.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, the BPI confirmed that the trial is going ahead in October.

“A trial is scheduled to take place at Newcastle Crown Court this month regarding the illegal distribution of music via an internet forum site called Dancing Jesus,” a spokesperson said.

“It is a private prosecution being brought by the BPI following an initial joint investigation by BPI and the IFPI, with assistance from the US Department of Homeland Security. One defendant in the case has already pleaded guilty to illegally distributing music and will be sentenced at the end of the trial.”

While the precise details of the case will come out at trial, Dancing Jesus was perhaps best known for providing links to pre-release music content. TorrentFreak contacted the site’s former admin for comment but at the time of publication we’ve yet to receive a response.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Fung signed a $110 million settlement with the MPAA and planned to shut down the site Tuesday night as stipulated in the agreement with the movie studios.

The unexpected settlement took many of the site’s users by surprise, and yesterday we reported that a group of “rogue archivists” was working on a full backup to preserve a piece of Internet history. Unfortunately for them, isoHunt’s founder didn’t think that this was a very good idea.

A few hours after the news broke, isoHunt took down the server where the torrents were stored. By early Monday morning the entire site had been replaced with a farewell note to the site’s visitors.

“This is it. We are shutting down isoHunt services a little early,” Fung wrote.

IsoHunt’s owner explained that the early exit was a direct response to ArchiveTeam’s backup attempt, but it’s unclear if it was his own decision or whether the MPAA’s lawyers pushed for it.

“I’m told there was this Internet archival team that wants to make historical copy of our .torrent files, I’m honored that people think our site is worthy of historical preservation, but the truth is about 95% of those .torrent files can be found off Google regardless and mostly have been indexed from other BitTorrent sites in the first place,” Fung notes.

Fung is right and of course all isoHunt torrents are also backed up by the torrent cache services Torrage and Zoink. However, all other metadata and comments appear to be gone for good. The ArchiveTeam managed to grab 242 gigabytes of data, but most is still missing.

ArchiveTeam’s ‘joepie91′ told TorrentFreak that the main goal of the backup was not to copy the torrents, but all the metadata surrounding it including user comments and file-info. He is nonetheless proud of what the team of volunteers got done in such a short time-span.

“I’m disappointed to see that we didn’t manage to archive all of isoHunt, of course, but I am quite happy to see how many people helped out, and what kind of a result it has had – 29 million IDs checked in some two days is still incredible,” joepie91 says.

This partial backup will be posted on the Internet archive in the near future and announced on the #archiveteam IRC channel.

“One last but quite important remark I want to make, is that I think Gary might have misunderstood the purpose of the archiving project; he basically states that “the .torrent files can be found elsewhere too” – but this completely misses the point, being the archiving of the metadata *around* those torrents, such as user comments. These cannot be replicated from other sources…

Fung, meanwhile, used the early shutdown to deliver a “proper send-off” to the people who’ve used his site for many years.

“It’s been an adventure in the last 10.5 years working on isoHunt, a privilege working with some of the smartest guys I’ve worked with, and my life won’t be the same without it. For what I’m working on next, please look up my blog on Google and follow me there.

“Because as the Terminator would say with a German accent, ‘I’ll be backkk’,” Fung said, before Rickrolling the already distressed users….

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

One that did was called OiNK, a closed-door community that to many was the greatest music-focused torrent community the Internet had ever seen. Launched in May 2004 by Englishman Alan Ellis, OiNK became synonymous with quality. The site indexed every style of music imaginable and prided itself on bitrates that commercial music stores found hard to beat.

As a result OiNK peaked at more than 180,000 members and received celebrity endorsements including one from Nine Inch Nails star Trent Reznor who said it was the world’s greatest record store. But the site’s achievements would not go unpunished and in 2007 Ellis was arrested and the site was shutdown, yet another victim of a music industry campaign to stymie the spread of unauthorized content.

Following a trial in which Ellis was accused of defrauding the music industry, in early 2010 came a verdict of “not guilty” and he walked from court a free man. For the site itself, shuttered and its members dispersed more than two years earlier, the story was over.

But now more than three years on there are some interesting noises coming from the former home of the Pink Palace, where cute avatars were mandatory and a curly-tailed farmyard animal adorned the front page.

Visitors to any of OiNK’s former domains are today greeted with a monochromatic picture of London’s Battersea power station. Look closely and a tiny cartoon pig can be seen flying between the iconic chimneys above an invitation to sign up and a prompt to never forget the events of October 23 2007. Click ahead and a more familiar feel returns.

So what does the site have in store?

TorrentFreak spoke with the current owner of the OiNK domains – Oink.me.uk and Oink.cd – who confirmed a relaunch and told us that a different approach could be expected this time round.

“I’ll let you know that a different route is being taken at this time to continue the site’s legacy in a legal format,” TorrentFreak was informed.

So what can users of the new OiNK expect? A clue can be found on the main page where interested artists are invited to leave their details. The final item on the short questionnaire is perhaps the most telling.

David Cook, specialist cyber crime solicitor at Pannone who successfully defended one of Oink’s uploaders in 2010, says that an OiNK return has the potential to be a plus for artists, depending on the execution.

“A method for an unsigned artist uploading their music to the site and receiving remuneration from the adverts on the site would sound like an innovative idea. Having said that, details are sketchy to say the least. I just hope that the OiNK story is not sullied by what comes next, as happened for Napster,” Cook said.

TorrentFreak also spoke with former OiNK owner Alan Ellis who thanked us for our contact but said that having sold the domains a few years ago, the project is now someone else’s baby.

At this stage it seems unlikely that OiNK will return to its former private tracker glory but there are signs that it will maintain its focus on music, quite possibly with an emphasis on the development of independent artists. Maybe the site will get one last shot at annoying the major labels after all.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

However, after four-and-a-half years of operation it all came to an end. On November 28, 2009, site members were informed that there were “pending legal issues” and with immediate effect the site would shut down.

What followed was an information vacuum. No one from the site made a public statement until TorrentFreak published an interview with an ex-admin of SceneTorrents at end of May 2011. The details of his story came as little surprise.

Police had arrived at “Feeling’s” house some 18 months earlier at 6am on November 27, 2009, accompanied by operatives from the Hollywood-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft. FACT had become more active in recent times, building cases against TV-Links and another torrent site, FileSoup.

“The police handcuffed me and arrested me for copyright theft and money laundering,” Feeling explained.

Down at the police station a familiar picture began to emerge. FACT, not the police, were running the show. They had carried out the investigation against SceneTorrents and the police were there merely as support, despite this being a criminal case with “six figure” sums allegedly at stake.

After being released, Feeling was told to answer bail in February 2010. Just two days before that date, police informed him that they were still waiting for a response from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) on how to proceed. A new bail date was set for May 2010. That date was also canceled, as was a subsequent one arranged for July.

Feeling was told that by early 2011 things should be progressing but the year came – and went – with no decision from the CPS. However, in February of that year the Crown Prosecution Service were forced to drop the case against FileSoup. A sign of positive things to come?

As it turns out – yes.

Some three-and-a-half years after the original raids, TorrentFreak has learned of a significant development. According to sources close to the case, during the past month the police made the decision to drop all charges (criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to defraud, money laundering) against both Feeling and a second individual who was arrested on the same day in 2009.

Intrigued as to how this conclusion was reached, TorrentFreak fired off questions to both FACT and lawyer David Cook, who we believed to have been defending at least one of the SceneTorrents admins.

Cook successfully defeated prosecutions in previous cases against both FileSoup and OiNK and was part of the pro-bono defense team acting for Richard O’Dwyer. He often chats about tech and copyright issues via Twitter but on this occasion declined to comment.

FACT did respond, however, initially questioning why we were interested in such an old case. We pointed out that we knew that in recent weeks the police had dropped the case but FACT said that both Feeling and the second defendant had instead been handed police cautions which “usually” means admitting guilt.

TorrentFreak is informed by sources very close to the investigation that neither admitted guilt and the police simply chose not to take matters further. So why has such a big case collapsed yet again?

A definitive answer to that is a matter for the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, but one only has to look at earlier cases to see a repeating pattern of problematic behaviors.

FACT, a privately-owned commercial organization, conducted the investigations against both FileSoup and SceneTorrents and were later given possession of computer equipment and evidence seized when both sites were raided. This made them not only the alleged victim in the case, but also the prosecutor and expert witness.

Furthermore, TorrentFreak is informed that FACT’s presence on the sites (apparently at times in an “agent provocateur” role) and other evidential issues combined to play a role in the undermining of both cases, ultimately contributing to the decision by the Crown not to pursue the case.

With City of London Police now threatening torrent sites around the globe claiming that crimes are being carried out in the UK, one has to wonder what lessons have been learned from the cases of FileSoup and now SceneTorrents.

Considering four years have passed, with a successful prosecution of SurfTheChannel in the meantime, one has to presume that the answer to that is “quite a few.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

All this time the BitTorrent site has relied on banner advertisements and has never accepted money from the public.

There was the Sealand money drive, and occasionally The Pirate Bay encouraged users to spend money on pirate swag or their affiliated VPN service, but direct donations were never an option.

This changed today. The Pirate Bay is now listing a Bitcoin address in the footer of all its webpages. While there are no instructions attached to the string of alphanumeric characters, it is assumed that the torrent site is inviting the public to share some wealth.

Using Bitcoin makes sense for the mysterious and privacy concerned Pirate Bay operators. After all, the crypto-currency can’t be seized by the authorities, nor is it easy to find out who is keeping the bounty.

All Bitcoin transactions go from one anonymous peer to another and don’t require a middleman, much like BitTorrent.

Thus far the silent donation drive appears to be a great success. In just over a day 73 transactions were transferred into Pirate Bay’s purse, adding up to a healthy 5.56 BTC. At the current exchange rate this is good for $700 but this can vary quite a bit from hour to hour.

The fact that all donations are visible for the rest of the world is perhaps also one of the major drawbacks. The Pirate Bay appears to be using just one address for now, which makes it very easy for the public to track the billions of dollars that may come in.

For now, however, this doesn’t seem to bother The Pirate Bay too much.

Update: EZTV (and ezRSS) has also added Bitcoin donations. A trend is emerging.

Update: Standalone trackers OpenBittorrent, PublicBitTorrent and istole have added a Bitcoin address as well. Torrent storage caches Zoink and Torrage have joined in as well.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There’s no indication how long the outage will last or what is causing it.

Despite the site’s domain name the problems are not related to the Italian crackdown we reported earlier today.

ezRSS and the torrent storage cache Zoink appear to be suffering from the same issue and are down as well.

The outage doesn’t mean that there are no new releases coming out. As always, the leading TV-torrent distribution group continues to post torrents on The Pirate Bay and various other sites.

TorrentFreak contacted EZTV for additional information and we’ll update this post when we get a response.

Update: back in action…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Over the years several BitTorrent admins have been the victims of extortion attempts which threaten that unless a particular course of action is taken or even payments made, bad things will happen. Of course, due to the nature of their operations site admins have very few places to turn if the going gets rough, which makes them almost perfect victims.

In some cases the threats are hollow and thankfully come to nothing, but at times they are real and when admins refuse to comply they can lose use of their sites following Distributed Denial of Service attacks. On other occasions sites are attacked on a whim or simply for “fun”.

During the past 24 hours four private BitTorrent trackers including What.cd, IPTorrents, HDBits.org and SceneAccess have all been hit with these kinds of attacks. The latter pair appear to be recovering but the two really big ones are still suffering.

IPTorrents is a huge private tracker with traffic levels approaching those currently being enjoyed by Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz. Canada-based What.cd needs little introduction as the world’s largest music tracker, a title it inherited from the now-defunct OiNK.

The attacks against the sites are being launched by an old adversary of What.cd. The individual, who calls himself Zeiko Anonymous, is a character that entered the news in November 2012 when a spat he had with What.cd staff spilled over into a public dispute.

What.cd refused to give into Zeiko’s demands and in return the mystery individual DDoSd the site, but Zeiko didn’t stop there. During the days that followed other sites were also attacked including The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 1337x, BitSnoop, Fenopy, TorrentPortal, BroadcastTheNet, PassThePopcorn and HDBits. Breaking the torrent site theme, Zeiko also went after RLSlog.

This time around there is no sign of any fresh dispute with the sites being attacked although last week Zeiko welcomed 2013 on his Twitter account with the announcement “LETS KILL PIRACY!!”

The question now is whether these latest attacks are an isolated incident or a prelude to something bigger. That question remains unanswered, at least for now.

So apart from internal tweaks, what can sites do to mitigate DDoS attacks? Some choose to use the services of a company like CloudFlare who claim to be able to handle even the most aggressive of attacks. However, using CloudFlare on torrent sites isn’t quite as straightforward as one might expect.

Last year TorrentFreak obtained emails sent by CloudFlare to the owner of a Pirate Bay proxy site which contained complaints from rightsholders claiming that the site supported by CloudFlare was offering access to infringing content.

There’s not much new there of course except that in addition to offering DDoS protection, CloudFlare is often used to shield the true location of a website from prying eyes. However, when a complaint is received from rightsholders CloudFlare tells its customers this:

We’ve provided the name of the web hosting provider which hosts your server as we are required to do by law.

So while DDoS protection might be available, privacy is undone in an instant. Despite several attempts, CloudFlare ignored TorrentFreak’s request for comment.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

At the moment there’s no indication how long the outage will last.

ezRSS, Istole.it and the torrent storage cache Zoink are suffering from the same problems and are down as well.

The downtime doesn’t mean that there are no new releases coming out.

As always, the leading TV-torrent distribution group continues to post torrents on The Pirate Bay and various other sites.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The website was a thorn in the side of the UK and US entertainment industries who went to extremes to bring the site down. Among other things, the MPAA and FACT hired an undercover agent to gain access to the defendants’ house under false pretenses.

The case eventually went to trial in May and today a judge at Newcastle Crown Court sentenced 38-year old site owner Anton Vickerman to four years imprisonment. Vickerman’s wife faced the same charges but was found not guilty in June.

Today’s sentencing marks the first time that the owner of a linking website has been found guilty of conspiring to defraud the entertainment industry.

A previous attempt at making the same charge stick against the owner of the OiNK BitTorrent tracker failed during 2010.

Although SurfTheChannel did not store any copyrighted material itself, the site did organize links to copyrighted streams on third-party sites. According to the prosecution, the website was making at least £35,000 a month.

The UK Pirate Party is deeply concerned by the sentencing.

“The way this issue was investigated, prosecuted and the resulting sentence are, deeply concerning, inappropriate and disproportionate given the activities that Anton Vickerman was engaged in. A four year prison sentence is twice the maximum that could have been handed down if Vickers had been charged with online copyright infringement,” party leader Loz Kaye says.

“As we have said before, this was not a case brought using copyright law. The interest groups involved couldn’t present a case of copyright infringement and decided to press for the use of the common law offence of “conspiracy to defraud”. This offence is incredibly controversial in English law as it criminalises conduct by two or more parties that would not be criminal when performed by an individual,” he added.

The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), the local anti-piracy group which played an essential role in the investigation, is delighted on the other hand.

“This case conclusively shows that running a website that deliberately sets out to direct users to illegal copies of films and TV shows will result in a criminal conviction and a long jail sentence,” FACT Director General Kieron Sharp says.

“The sentencing indicates the severity of the offenses committed and the sophistication of [Vickerman's] criminal enterprise and should send a very strong message to those running similar sites that they can be found, arrested and end up in prison.”

The MPAA previously noted that it would use the sentencing of Vickerman to support the extradition process of TVShack owner Richard O’Dwyer. While the two sites were indeed comparable, the crucial difference is that O’Dwyer is not charged with fraud but copyright infringement.

That said, the sentencing today definitely spells trouble for UK-based website owners who operate similar streaming sites.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.