And then they move ahead with a bill that does the exact opposite.

To wit: In Sweden, in the week after the European Elections, a temporary and controversial wiretapping bill was made permanent. It may look like a coincidence. Then again, Peter Sunde, the spokesperson of the Pirate Bay, was arrested in the same week.

That’s another coincidence, just as when the Appeals Court hearings for The Pirate Bay mock trial which were slated for the week right after an election. And there was another coincidence when the evaluation of the illegal Data Retention Directive was to be presented right after the elections, rather than facing the music and abolishing it once it was declared illegal.

There are many more examples.

And then those career politicians usher more warm words over the activists for liberty – people who are personally responsible for you and me having some of our liberties we wouldn’t have otherwise. Let’s name a few of them.

Assange. Brown. Svartholm-Warg. Hammond. Sunde. Manning.

All of these have provided exemplary transparency and resistance to power grabs by overreaching and shameless governments. Each and every one of us owes a significant amount of liberty to each of these individuals. They also have another thing in common: They are all confined to a small room, their freedom of movement gone, their liberty shackled.

There are many more who find it impossible to return to their home country after such exemplary civic duty. Snowden. Appelbaum. Many anonymous people who have chosen to leave. The list just goes on.

Activism just isn’t enough. The fate of our best and brightest activists can be seen right here. As an activity, on its own, it’s not producing the necessary results. Not on its own.

It’s at this point that we need to look closer at the behavior of career politicians.

It’s important to realize that the first problem that a career politician tries to solve is how to get elected. The second problem a career politician tries to solve is how to get re-elected. Whatever comes in third place is so far behind the first two that it’ll never really surface.

In short, unless you threaten politicians’ jobs over their dismantling of liberty, they’ll not notice in the slightest but just smile at your proposals, praise you for engaging in civic society, kiss some babies, and then introduce more surveillance.

That’s why activism for liberty remains extremely necessary. That’s also why activism remains not sufficient. We absolutely, positively need to put politicians’ jobs on the line over Orwelling the world we live in.

That’s why the Pirate Party chose the political route, putting Orwellian politicians’ jobs on the line. But the party as a movement can’t function without tens of thousands of activists who also help in the common cause.

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

With our findings we compiled a report of VPN providers that due to their setup were unable to link their outbound IP addresses with user accounts. Ever since we have received countless emails demanding an update.

Update: New 2014 update is out.

It’s taken a long time but today we bring the first installment in a series of posts highlighting VPN services that take privacy seriously. Our first article focuses on anonymity and a later installment will highlight file-sharing aspects and possible limitations.

We tried to ask direct questions that left VPN service providers with little room for maneuver. Providers who didn’t answer our questions directly, didn’t answer at all, or completely failed by logging everything, were simply left out. Sadly this meant that quite a few were disregarded.

This year we also asked more questions, which are as follows:

1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP-address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold?

2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?

3. In the event you receive a DMCA takedown notice or European equivalent, how are these handled?

4. Which payment systems do you operate and how are these linked to individual user accounts?

The list of VPN providers is a tiny sample of the thousands out there today and is not comprehensive by any means. VPN Providers not covered this time around will be added during the coming weeks. All responses listed below are in the words of VPN services themselves and the order of the list does not carry any meaning.

Private Internet Access

1. We absolutely do not maintain any VPN logs of any kind. We utilize shared IP addresses rather than dynamic or static IPs, so it is not possible to match a user to an external IP. These are some of the many solutions we have implemented to enable the strongest levels of anonymity amongst VPN services.

2. Our company currently operates out of the United States with gigabit gateways in the US, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Romania. We chose the US, since it is one of the few countries without a mandatory data retention law. We will not share any information with third parties without a valid court order. With that said, it is impossible to match a user to any activity on our system since we utilize shared IPs and maintain absolutely no logs.

3. We are in compliance with DMCA as all companies, world-wide, must be. We have proprietary technology and an experienced legal team which allows us to comply without any risk to our users.

4. We accept many payment methods directly, including PayPal, CC, Google, Amazon, Bitcoin, Liberty Reserve, OKPay, and CashU. Further, we would like to encourage our users to use an anonymous e-mail and pay with Bitcoins to ensure even higher levels of anonymity should it be required. We only store the minimal information required to provide customers refunds.

Private Internet Access website

BTGuard

1. We do not keep any logs whatsoever.

2. The jurisdiction is Canada. Since we do not have log files, we have no information to share. We do not communicate with any third parties. The only event we would even communicate with a third-party is if we received a court order. We would then be forced to notify them we have no information. This has not happened yet.

3. We do not have any open incoming ports, so it’s not possible for us to “takedown” any broadcasting content.

4. At the moment we only accept Paypal and Bitcoin. We have plans to accept alternative credit card processing in the near future.

BTguard website (with discounts)

Torguard

1. TorGuard doesn’t store IP’s or time stamps on our VPN/proxy servers, not even for a second. It’s impossible to match what is not there. Since some people tend to misbehave when using a VPN , this raises the obvious question: how do we maintain a fast, abuse-free network? If even our network engineer can’t back track the abuser by IP, then how do we stop it?

Through packet level filtering at the firewall it’s possible to apply rules to an entire shared server, blocking the abuse immediately. For example, let’s say someone decides to use TorGuard to unlawfully promote their Ugg boots business (spam). In order for us to block this one individual, we simply implement new firewall rules, effectively blocking the abused protocol for everyone on that VPN server. Since there are no user logs to go by, we handle abuse per server, not per user.

2. TorGuard recently went through some corporate restructuring and has now moved its parent company to Nevis, West Indies. Our company abides by all International laws and data regulations imposed within our legal jurisdiction. We don’t share any information with anyone regarding our network or its users and won’t even consider communicating with a 3rd party unless they’ve first obtained adequate representation within our legal jurisdiction. Only in the event of an official court ordered ruling would we be forced to hand over blank hard drives. There’s nothing to hand over but an operating system.

3. TorGuard complies immediately (24 hours or less) with all DMCA takedown notices. Since it’s impossible for us to locate which user on the server is actually responsible for the violation, we block the infringing protocol in its entirety, whatever it may be – Kazaa, HTTP, Jabber, Citrix, Bittorrent, FTP, Gnucleus, eDonkey2000, etc. This ensures the content in violation is immediately removed from that server and no longer active on our network.

4. We accept all forms of credit card, Visa, Amex, Mastercard, Discover, PayPal , Google Checkout and Bitcoins. We also accept anonymous payments through our pre-paid PIN system. These pre-paid service PIN numbers can be purchased from one of our participating online resellers and redeemed during checkout on our website.

Our client billing area and VPN/Proxy user auth servers are two completely separate systems. This is to ensure the privacy and securities of our customer’s accounts are upheld at all times. While the customer’s chosen payment method will be linked to the client billing area login, this information is kept completely separate from their VPN/Proxy network. In this way, it’s virtually impossible to “connect the dots” of a paying customer with that of someone who is using the servers. This can become a pain for clients as they are required to remember two sets of logins/passwords, but trust us – it’s in the best interest of security.

TorGuard website

(Use the promo / coupon code TorrentFreak to get a 20% discount at Torguard.

TorrentPrivacy

1. We don’t store any logs, it’s impossible to track users’ activity through our VPN.

2. Our company is based on Seychelles. We do not disclose any information to 3rd parties and this can be done only in case of a certain lawsuit filed against our company.

3. If we receive a notice about DMCA infringement, our team of lawyers solves it immediately without any blocking of servers or protocols. We don’t store any content on our servers, users are anonymous, so, there are no problems with it. We promise our customers that they will not have problems with the DMCA.

4. PayPal and CommerceGate.

TorrentPrivacy website

IPVanish

1. IPVanish has a no-log policy. We keep no traffic logs.

2. IPVanish is headquartered in the US and thus operates under US law.

3. We do not host content of any kind and have nothing to take down or remove.

4. We currently accept all major credit cards, PayPal and UltimatePay (which includes 85 different payment methods from 190 countries). UltimatePay also provides many anonymous cash payment options like Western Union, Alipay, Skrill and PaySafeCard.

IPVanish website

Privacy.io

1) We do not keep any logs on our servers. Neither us nor 3rd parties are able to match IPs to a username.

2) Privacy IO is an Australian Registered business. Under no circumstances will we provide any 3rd party information about our users. We are unable to comply with DMCA or equivalent as we have no access or power to do anything about it. As we keep no logs we can not link it to a user to apply said request. If the law attempts to make us do such things, we will move our business to a location where that can not occur, and if that fails we will close up shop before we provide any information.

3) See answer to question 2

4) At present we only accept PayPal and CC (processed by PayPal), but we are looking into alternative types of payments. We go out of our way to make sure that PayPal transactions are not linked to the users, we generate a unique key per transaction to verify payment for the account is made, and then nuke that unique key.

Privacy.io website

VikingVPN

1) We do not log any user activity at all. We don’t know what IP addresses our own users connect from. We have a shared IP address for our users, further increasing their anonymity We also generate false traffic.

2) We currently operate out of the United States. The United States does not have any mandatory data retention laws, which allows us not to log anything. If we receive a valid warrant, we will turn over all required records, that we have available; we don’t have any records available, because we don’t log anything.

3) DMCA notices have some legal requirements that basically make them not apply to us. We don’t host any content at all, we only provide bandwidth. Also, a DMCA notice requires the notifier to positively identify an infringing individual – which is impossible given our security model. Basically, it’s impossible to send us a valid DMCA notice.

4) We’re just getting started, so we’re currently simply taking credit cards. Accepting bitcoin is a near term goal for us. We’d also like to start accepting really exotic forms of payment like cash.

VikingVPN website

Anonine

1. We store a users E-mail and username, that´s it. This means that we do not store, or have access to, any traffic logs of any kind. By traffic logs we mean, any kind of data that has the potential to, directly or indirectly, match a users original ip or identity with one of our IPs.

2. It is important to remember that we do not store any traffic logs, and therefore it would be physically impossible for us to hand something like that over to a 3rd party. This, next to the encryption, is the core of the entire anonymity aspect of the service. This is possible by the fact that we operate under Swedish jurisdiction and Swedish law.

3. Our no logging policy has never really caused us any trouble since we never have received any official requests to hand over any traffic logs.

4. We accept credit card payments through Paypal and Payson. For Swedish users we also accept payments through sms and phone. We do not store data from these services. However, each of these services store various types and amounts of data related to the payment, and the payment only, which we do have access to. This is what allows us to perform refunds, or to provide adequate support services etc.

Anonine website

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

This applies strongly to those copyright industry lobbyists who make a living dismantling our freedoms of speech, assembly, and opinion.

One of the more obscene arguments from the copyright industry lobby is that people who facilitate unlicensed manufacturing of culture and knowledge – breaking the copyright monopoly in the process – make money from facilitating this process, through ads and the like. At the same time, the people of the copyright industry lobby – the Dutch Tim Kuik, the Swedish Henrik Pontén, the Danish “child-porn-is-great” Johan Schlüter (yes, he said that), you all know your local antagonists – are raking in money themselves on introducing censorship, tracking and wiretapping, while somehow claiming it is immoral to do so for those who spread knowledge and culture to humanity. It is sickening, really.

We know that we are winning, only that it takes an enormous amount of time to shift the overall direction of society. We come from the Internet, we’re used to changing the world in a weekend of coding. The nightmare with today’s copyright and patent monopoly laws is that they have their origin in Industrial Protectionism (IP) in the United States directed against Japanese cars in the mid-1970s.

Yes, the anti-liberty, anti-market, and anti-humanity forces have been working for 40 years to take us where we are today. We’ve been making great strides in the past decade, but it’s going to take much more work – not to mention endurance – to save the world from a surveillance society nightmare where the copyright industry determines what we get to know, see, and learn.

The copyright industry has long been working in collusion with the wiretapping industry – the FRA, NSA, GCHQ, etc. – to get laws that enable more tracking, more wiretapping, and more surveillance. This, after all, is the only way the copyright monopoly can be preserved: by eliminating private communications as a concept. But we can turn the tide. Just look at the tipping point in public opinion brought about by Edward Snowden’s leaks, not to mention the outrage from affected politicians.

When activists fought software patent monopolies in Europe just under a decade ago, many of them burned out in the process and suffered from what can only be described as a post-traumatic stress disorder, even though the good side won the legislative process. (Which was immediately ignored by software patent monopoly lawyers, for which they should be sent to prison, but that’s a separate topic.)

That victory night, the activists met with the fell-funded corporate lobbyists where the activists had won, and the lobbyists smiled professionally, raised their glasses, and said “see you in another two years”. The corporate anti-liberty lobbyists, particularly from the copyright industry, will simply never stop. That’s why we need to strike at the root of the problem and work long-term, rather than thinking that a reduction or two in the scope of these monopolies will fix everything.

Christian Engström, one of the activists in that battle who is now an elected Member of the European Parliament, has a particularly good quote: “If you’re getting bitter and burnt out and feel you need to take a break from activism, that is always the right thing to do. There will always be something to do when you come back; you never need to worry about the world running out of evil while you’re away.”

Fortunately, there are small things that each of us can do every day that doesn’t require the exhausting effort of writing long articles or reading complex reports. When hundreds of thousands of people do these small things, it has a tremendous effect:

- Share articles with your social network on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Two kinds of articles are particularly valuable – those that expose the copyright industry’s bottomless cynicism, and those that propose a better alternative.

- Use correct language, and if you have the energy, call people out who don’t. Every time you say “copyright monopoly” instead of just “copyright”, it makes a difference. Every time you say “manufacturing their own copies” and reject “stealing movies”, it makes a difference. Every time you point out that people are manufacturing their own copies using their own property entirely, it makes a difference. Every time you point out that we never determined our freedoms of speech and expression based on who gets to make a profit or not, it makes a difference. See my previous TorrentFreak column on Language Matters.

These two simple actions, when done by tens of thousands, have an immense impact – and can be done even if you’re tired and bitter of fighting what seems like an uphill battle.

I write more about this kind of swarm intelligence in my book Swarmwise, which you can download for free, by the way. If you want more arguments against the copyright monopoly, I recommend the book “The Case for Copyright Reform”, also available for free.

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

In recent months Google has made a few overtures, such as doctoring its auto-complete feature to take out terms that could potentially direct users to infringing content. More recently the search giant changed its algorithm to push allegedly infringing sites down its rankings.

But while all this is going on Google is being bombarded with requests from rightsholders to remove links from its search that point to allegedly infringing material hosted on other sites. The task has grown massively to the point where the company now produces its Transparency Report to show who asks for what content to be taken down.

During the last few days we’ve been taking a look at the report from a new angle and have discovered that some of the world’s largest record labels and anti-piracy companies are not bothering to check if takedown notices they are sending are valid. Indeed, we have discovered dozens of takedown reports being sent demanding the removal of links to content that simply doesn’t exist.

Unless you’ve been living on Mars during 2012 you’ll know that in January this year Megaupload was taken down by U.S. authorities. In the space of a few hours the entire site was completely wiped out and the news made dozens of headlines that continue to break to this day.

But while seemingly everyone knows that Megaupload no longer exists, the likes of IFPI, BPI, Sony, Warner, Universal, EMI, The Publisher’s Association, Microsoft, and adult company Vivid (to name a few) are absolutely oblivious. To this very day these companies are sending takedown demands to Google ordering the company to remove links to content on Megaupload.com that hasn’t existed, at the least, for almost nine months.

And what about Demonoid, the semi-private BitTorrent tracker that went down in a cloud of smoke and controversy during the first week of August? Well, according to EMI, the BPI, Microsoft and several other anti-piracy companies, the site is alive and well. Takedown requests are being filed with Google by companies such as these on a daily basis, all for content that isn’t online.

Unbelievably the same holds for BTjunkie, the BitTorrent indexing site that closed its doors in February this year. Ever since the major record labels and anti-piracy companies have been ordering Google to remove links to a completely dead site.

Sadly it doesn’t end there. In the first days of August the Oron cyberlocker disappeared after their legal fight with adult studio Liberty Media. But apparently The Publishers Association, the BPI, Universal, Sony, EMI – the list goes on and on – didn’t notice. Right up until today all of these companies have been ordering Google to take down links to content that doesn’t exist.

While it would be unfair to complain too much about the takedown requests still being sent for the now-defunct FileSonic (it’s only been down for just over a week), sending DMCA takedowns for content on Megaupload nine months after its demise is just ridiculous.

What this shows is that anti-piracy companies aren’t even bothering to check content anymore – they’re simply searching Google, firing off notices without a second thought, and then expecting the search giant to clean up the mess.

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

After a fiery start, with Liberty Media’s lawyer Marc Randazza describing Oron as ‘criminals’ who do not qualify for safe harbor under the DMCA, earlier this month a judge forced a settlement in the case. Oron will now have to pay Liberty Media at least $550,000.

But despite the ruling this is not the end of the road for the case. Last week Oron asked the court to unfreeze its assets over and above the $550K judgment plus $200K in attorney’s fees and costs. Oron said that $750K could remain in its US PayPal account and there was no reason to freeze any more of its funds.

“Oron desires to file a post-judgment motion or motions in this Court, and if necessary an appeal in the Ninth Circuit. Oron requests that the Court stay execution on its judgment until after Oron’s post-judgment motions can be decided and after Oron has the opportunity to ask the Ninth Circuit to stay execution on the judgment,” the file-hoster’s lawyers wrote.

Oron’s lawyers also asked the court to consider a second option whereby $200K of the company’s funds would be released to pay for post-judgment motions and an appeal.

Almost immediately Liberty Media’s lawyers objected, noting that simply asking for $200K isn’t enough, a detailed breakdown is required. Furthermore, Oron still had not fulfilled its standing obligation to provide a detailed account of its worldwide assets, the studio argued.

The Oron service has been offline for some time now with no sign that it will return. Liberty Media lawyer Marc Randazza argued that lack of funds is not to blame and it is Oron that has caused the demise of its own service. Access to money, he argues, is something that Oron has in spades.

“[Oron] has nearly three million dollars in gold stashed away. Presumably, if the Defendant needed money to run its business, it would liquidate or sell a portion of this bullion. It could presumably do the same to pay legal fees,” Randazza wrote. “However, if it did so, it would be spending funds that were not traceable, and as a practical matter, were not likely to be seized.”

“This is presumably why the funds are laundered in this manner,” he continued. “First the funds are collected through PayPal, then wired to Hong Kong, then converted to gold, and then they are stashed away, free from the eyes of judgment creditors and other authorities. In this case, Oron only wants to spend the money that it most easily stands to lose in this very case. Even if it were not sitting on nearly three million United States dollars in gold, Oron’s troubles would be self-inflicted.”

The collapse of Oron is down to the company itself, Randazza argued, going on to suggest that its demise is “part of an overall scheme to try to manufacture an additional dispute.” In support, Randazza filed with the court a copy of an email sent to him by a tipster providing information on Oron and its alleged owner. In the email it’s claimed that Oron’s operators deliberately killed their service in order to show “loss of business” in court.

“Their servers with data are still in LeaseWeb data center,” the tipster explained, adding that the owner of Oron is also behind another site, NovaFile.com.

The email signed off with an apparently futile request to remain anonymous – while the tipster’s email address was redacted, his full name wasn’t.

“Oron has nine known accounts and a stash of gold bars. Nevertheless, Oron believes that this Court should only Order disbursements from the one U.S.-based account, the one account where this Court’s jurisdiction can have immediate effect,” Randazza concludes. “If Oron needs $200,000, then it should use, or borrow against, the three million dollars worth of gold bars it has stashed away.”

The battle continues…..

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

It needs to be necessary – the law being made needs to address a real (or at least perceived) problem.

It needs to be effective – the law being made needs to solve the targeted problem, if enacted.

It needs to be proportionate – the law being made must not create worse problems than the one being solved.

Let’s see how these legislative quality criteria measure up against the different copyright monopolies, shall we?

There are four parts of the copyright monopoly. To begin with, you have two commercial monopolies, those on duplication on fixation of a work and of performance/broadcast of a work. Sadly, these two are treated quite differently in law, but are indistinguishable with the advent of the internet – which is why you see stupid legal constructs that try to assert that there is some kind of server-side difference between streaming media and downloaded media. (Hint: there isn’t.)

Going out on a limb and assuming that these two monopolies can be reconciled into a general commercial “remote duplication” monopoly, is it necessary, effective, and proportionate?

Whether it is necessary depends on your point of view – and above all, what problem you are trying to solve by writing the copyright monopoly into law (or keeping it there). You will hear as many justifications for the copyright monopoly as you hear copyright monopoly advocates. Originally, it was enacted on May 4, 1557 in order to stifle political dissent, when Queen “Bloody” Mary persecuted Protestants and wanted control of subversive pamphlets. That justification would hardly fly today.

Would such a unified commercial monopoly be effective, then? Well, that again depends on your original justification. If the idea is to allow artists to make money – well, 99.98% of artists never see a cent in royalty under the current copyright monopoly system, so the effectiveness can be… disputed, to express ourselves with a slight understatement. On the other hand, if the idea is to legislatively lock in a market for obsolete middlemen, then it is most certainly effective.

But where the commercial unified and imagined “remote duplication” monopoly falls is on proportionality. Any digital channel that can be (and is) used for private communications can also be used to transfer works that are under the copyright monopoly. Therefore, enforcement of the monopoly needs abolishment of the postal secret: you can’t sort legal from illegal without looking at it first, which breaks the postal secret.

A commercial monopoly that breaks the postal secret, a fundamental right and a fundamental liberty, is clearly disproportional.

So let’s take a look at the two other monopolies in the copyright monopoly umbrella – the so-called moral rights.

The first moral right is the right for an artist to prevent a performance of the work that violates the integrity of the artist or the work. I fail to see what problem this law tries to solve. Surely an artist could object to a development of his or her work – but that’s what art is: its beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the pen of the artist. No artist gets to own the perception of his or her art after it has been released. What problem, what real problem, is this law – this monopoly – trying to solve?

The second moral right is the right for artists to be associated with his or her work. This right carries significant social support – so much support, in fact, that the social penalties for violating this association are severe, and significantly harsher than any laws upholding this monopoly.

After all, if you plagiarise part of a thesis in academia, you get fired from the profession for life. A €100 fine is hardly going to make a difference in that context. Thus, while the norm carries public support, adding a €100 fine to the social penalty does absolutely nothing and is unnecessary.

In summarizing, the copyright monopoly rates abysmally in terms of legislative quality. It has no place in our laws if quality is a virtue for legislators, and it should be – for legislators as for every craft – but the monopoly needs to be dismantled gradually due to its infiltration everywhere.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Book Falkvinge as speaker?

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

Liberty Media’s lawyer Marc Randazza went in with all guns blazing, describing Oron as ‘criminals’ who do not qualify for safe harbor under the DMCA. Oron’s funds were frozen but despite a small part later being released, it became clear that the service would have difficulty continuing without access to much, much more.

In early July it became apparent that the companies had been attempting to reach a settlement, details of which were leaked online following a poor redaction of court documents.

There was a significant gap between what Liberty asked for and what Oron were prepared to give. However, while Oron insisted no final agreement had been reached, Liberty felt that at some point a deal had been struck and went on to ask the court to enforce the terms. Yesterday the court did just that.

“There is nothing in the Settlement Letter that indicates that Defendant did not intend to be presently bound by the proposed terms or that a future writing was required,” U.S. District Court Judge Gloria M. Navarro wrote in her ruling.

“The requirement for the Plaintiff’s attorney to sign and return indicates that the parties do agree that all these terms are acceptable and binding. If this was only a proposal of terms there probably would not be a requirement for Plaintiff’s counsel to sign and return.”

Judge Navarro went on to find that the settlement negotiations between Oron and Liberty did amount to an enforceable contract.

“The Settlement Letter written by Defendant was an offer, accepted by Plaintiff when its counsel signed the letter. There was a meeting of the minds as to all material terms on July 5, 2012, when Plaintiff agreed that the settlement would include dismissal with prejudice of [alleged owner and operator of Oron] Mr. Bochenko,” Judge Navarro wrote.

“There settlement includes valuable consideration on the part of both Plaintiff and Defendant. In this case, the Court can compel compliance because there are no uncertain material terms that remain. Accordingly, the Court grants Plaintiff’s Motion to Enforce Settlement.”

That settlement is detailed in court papers as follows:

1. Oron pays Liberty Media $550,000.
. . .
8. Once payment is received by both parties, both proceedings in NV and HK will be
dismissed with prejudice, and in the event that Oron breaks any part of the deal, the
claims may be reinstated via arbitration after a 30 day “notice and cure” period.
. . .
12. Liberty agree to announce publicly that after a careful review of the facts they
believe Oron is protected by the DMCA safe harbor and that a review of the actual files
shows that there never was any child porn on Oron’s site.
. . .
14. Liberty will immediately, once the terms of the agreement are agreed to issue a
letter asking that the HK bank accounts be unfrozen allowing the payment to the
Randazza Trust and then to [former Oron webhosting provider] Leaseweb as well as send a letter to Leaseweb asking them to allow Oron ten (10) days to pay as the settlement of the matter is imminent.

There are at least 19 points to the settlement agreement so as can be seen from the numbering scheme on the items above a significant number are missing from court papers. As previously revealed, Oron were prepared to hand over the identities of its allegedly copyright infringing customers to Liberty and help the studio take legal action against them.

But while the enforcement of the settlement allows Oron to continue with its business in theory, problems remain. Firstly, Oron’s parent company accounts are still frozen, “in order to satisfy any fee award, which may be sought by Plaintiff, but which must be brought within thirty (30) days of this Order.”

Furthermore, as a cyberlocker Oron is currently doing no business at all. The site disappeared from the Internet several days ago, ostensibly to move to a new host, but it is yet to reappear or post any advisory on its homepage.

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

Oron could not be found via any Google searches, which of course led to the question of whether the site was being censored.

Interestingly it was, but not by Google. Oron had censored itself by blocking the search engine from indexing its site.

But in addition to this self-imposed search blackout, during the last 24 hours finding Oron has progressed from mildly tricky to plain impossible.

Without any warning Oron has completely disappeared from the Internet.

The site carries no message and the domains don’t work, but apparently Oron will return at some point after it has completed some major maintenance.

“At this time we are in the process of moving Oron.com to another hosting provider,” an email obtained by TorrentFreak reads.

“As soon as we finish this process we will post a notification on our site. We would like to apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you.”

Oron has been under increasing pressure recently, particularly due to a lawsuit brought by adult movie studio Liberty Media.

In response to that suit the court froze Oron’s assets and then denied them access to funds to pay LeaseWeb, their host at the time. Whether LeaseWeb have been paid or not remains unclear but it seems almost certain that Oron are now heading for a new home.

TorrentFreak has received information from two different sources who both claim to know why Oron has chosen to move its infrastructure. As yet we’ve been unable to back up the claims – we’ll report back when we can.

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

But when his captor lays it on the line, explaining in graphic detail what will follow should his non-compliance continue, his response is valiant. He spits in his tormentor’s face and laughs out loud, accepting his fate and resigning himself to history.

Well, that’s for the movies and in the cold light of day, on lesser matters than saving an entire nation or the life of a loved one, human responses are rarely so honorable.

On Friday it was revealed that file-hosting service Oron had agreed in principle to settle a lawsuit with adult studio Liberty Media. Part of that deal was to not only hand over alleged copyright infringers, but also help with their prosecution.

There was almost universal shock and outrage at this news, but why anyone should be surprised at Oron’s actions is well, a bit of a surprise really. Snitching on pirates has been going on for as long as someone has been interested in punishing them. So what motivates people to turn informant?

In Oron’s case the motivation appears to be straightforward self-preservation. With a potentially ruinous lawsuit hanging over their head, this file-locker has chosen to feed a small number of customers to the hungry copyright lions at Liberty Media. But if you think Oron are alone, think again.

In March we reported that the UFC had taken down Greenfeedz, a site offering illicit streams of UFC events. But as part of the arrangement it now transpires that Greenfeedz handed over the personal details over people who merely viewed UFC events via the site. Fifteen of those are now being hunted down in Zuffa, LLC v. DOES 1-15

Skin-saving is a common theme with file-sharing informants. Although he was only hired as a coder for streaming links site SurfTheChannel, in 2011 Boston resident Brendan DeBeasi soon found himself facing a charge of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and with it a five year prison sentence and $250,000 fine.

In the end he never served a day, instead preferring to work out a deal with the authorities to testify against the operators of SurfTheChannel.

But for every case like this we hear about, there a potentially dozens more. Remember EliteTorrents, the first BitTorrent site to be raided in the United States and its admins and uploaders jailed? FBI documents handed to TorrentFreak by a reader researching the case appear to show that someone very close to the site was working with the MPAA as early as February 15th, weeks before the FBI received the official complaint on March 1st and months before the actual raid.

Who the person was and why they did what they did remains a mystery, but it’s quite possible they were under pressure to save their own skin. But there are other motivations for turning informant too.

The UK’s Federation Against Software Theft runs a so-called “grass hotline” where people can inform on their companies for using under licensed software. FAST rely on two human traits to gather information on targets – greed (informants can get paid) and the lust for revenge. Reportedly, FAST snitches are often ex-employees with a grudge.

And grudges are dangerous things, particularly in the world of private BitTorrent trackers. On two occasions last month TorrentFreak was approached by clearly angry individuals who asked us to report on alleged wrong doing at a pair of trackers, one very small, one very large. The motivation obviously wasn’t money or to save the person’s skin, it was born out of conflict and desire to do damage.

But whether it’s to make money, save money, avoid lawsuits, avoid prison or execute revenge, people are prepared to inform on file-sharers. So don’t be too surprised when you hear about it again – and again.

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

The rhetoric in court filings has been harsh, with Liberty Media’s lawyer Marc Randazza openly referring to Oron as ‘criminals’ who do not qualify for safe harbor under the DMCA.

After having their funds in the US frozen, Oron unsuccessfully tried to have several hundred thousand dollars released, ostensibly to pay for their legal battles and hosting. A judge agreed to release $100,000 but no more, leading Liberty Media to warn Oron users that the file-hoster could collapse.

But for all the rhetoric and public aggression, more considered discussions were going on behind the scenes last month.

It is already a matter of record that Liberty Media asked Oron for $500,000 to settle the case and that Oron rejected the amount as “unreasonable”. But the negotiations between the two companies went much further than straightforward cash offers – much, much further.

TorrentFreak has learned that on June 23rd Oron offered Liberty Media $50,000, some ten times less than was originally demanded. In addition, Oron said that should an agreement be reached it could become particularly helpful towards the adult studio.

After a request from Liberty, Oron said it could indeed take “both strong and bold measures to keep Liberty Media content off of its servers” by giving Liberty direct and “unfettered” deletion access to its systems.

Then, in order to generate revenue, removed copyright-infringing content could be substituted for links pointing to locations where people could buy official product from Liberty instead.

“Oron will receive no income from such links until Liberty has recouped gross income of $400,000 after which Liberty shall pay to Oron 50% of its profits from said links,” Oron suggested.

There is nothing particularly surprising in the above since similar systems are operated at other file-hosting sites. But this is where things begin to escalate.

Oron also offered to “permanently ban, by email address, PayPal account, IP address or any other reasonable and robust metric, any user who is the subject of even a single Liberty Media takedown notice.” Any user flagged as infringing Liberty’s copyrights would also have their payments frozen by Oron.

Then, in a wakeup call to anyone who thinks that cyberlockers offer almost bulletproof security, at Liberty Media’s request Oron confirmed that should a settlement deal be reached, the company could offer the following:

Oron will assist Liberty in identification and civil prosecution of any parties who have been using Oron to distribute Liberty’s copyrighted material, including but not be limited to, full disclosure of IP addresses, banking information, emails and any other information that may assist in Liberty in such prosecution.

Finally, and to wrap the whole deal up in a neat bow, Oron accepted Liberty Media’s offer to provide “some public relations help for Oron in order to minimize the chance of other lawsuits being brought against it” by stating, contrary to earlier assertions, that Oron does deserve safe harbor under the DMCA after all.

Liberty Media’s offer was dated June 22 and Oron’s counter offer was dated June 23 with a June 25 deadline. General agreement was evident on all major issues except the cash offer. Whether their differences on that point will kill the whole deal remains to be seen.

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