China blocks thousands of websites on political and social grounds and web blocking of torrent and other file-sharing sites is becoming a regular occurrence around Europe.

While much of this censorship is carried out locally, countries sometimes look beyond their borders for the technological know-how to black out parts of the web.

A report published last month by Citizen Lab revealed that a Canadian filtering company called Netsweeper had been helping the Pakistan Telecommunications Company Ltd to achieve just that. PTCL is a dominant ISP owned by the Pakistani government so censorship tends to follow their ideals.

The report, titled ‘O Pakistan, We Stand on Guard for Thee’, found that in addition to employing Netsweeper’s technology, Pakistan had also been using DNS tampering techniques to render sites inaccessible.

“Netsweeper technology is being implemented in Pakistan on PTCL for the purposes of political and social filtering, including websites relating to human rights, sensitive religious topics, and independent media,” the report explained.

Thousands of sites are blocked in the country, many on pornographic, religious or moral grounds. In the past Twitter and Facebook have been banned, and YouTube was blocked following the “Innocence of Muslims” controversy.

Some of this censorship is actually welcomed by Pakistani citizens, as can seen by comments on Twitter yesterday which expressed jealousy over the UK’s proposal to wipe out all porn online.

Today, however, a new wave of bannings has citizens outraged. They might put up with porn being taken underground, but wiping out the world’s leading torrent sites is another matter.

Earlier today subscribers of PTCL began reporting that sites including The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, Torrentz, ExtraTorrent and even Mininova are now being blocked by their Internet service provider.

While some users reported that their private torrent sites are still accessible, there are reports that private tracker TorrentLeech has also been banned. Isohunt apparently remains accessible along with many Pirate Bay and Kickass proxy sites.

A subject of a previous banning due to Netsweeper classifying it as porn, Tumblr is now being blocked again.

In a move that’s extremely likely to wind up the Anons, there are reports that 4Chan.org has also been blocked. Why that site fell victim to the censors is unclear, but it could be any one of at least a dozen reasons.

Finally, another casualty of the crackdown is the website of Richard Dawkins, who was informed of the block earlier today on Twitter and responded with a retweet.

Again, there’s been no confirmation as to why Dawkins has been targeted, but his stance towards to religion is likely to have played its part. The world-famous atheist has had a couple of disputes with religious groups in Pakistan in the past, most recently when his Foundation for Reason & Science petitioned Facebook to restore a Pakistani Atheist page after religious groups complained about its content.

Update: 24 hours later and the torrent sites have been unblocked but the bans on 4Chan and Richard Dawkins remain.

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

Following an earlier court ruling ordering two of the country’s largest ISPs to block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, the Court ordered a further five ISPs to block TPB IP addresses and 20 domain names Thursday. The Court then went on to make a decision that was perhaps even more controversial than the first.

The Dutch Pirate Party had been running a proxy service to facilitate access to the now-blocked Pirate Bay, but following pressure from anti-piracy group BREIN their activities were outlawed this week by the Court. The Pirate Party was ordered to shutdown its reverse proxy indefinitely and block Pirate Bay domains and IP-addresses from its generic proxy.

However, in a decision that raised eyebrows, Judge Chris Hensen also banned the Party from using their own website to list the locations of other websites that allow the public to circumvent the blockade.

This decision by Henson – which some observers believe amounts to a curtailment of freedom of speech – is not the first the Judge has made of this nature. In 2010, movie studio Eyeworks won its lawsuit against Dutch Usenet community FTD. In that verdict, Judge Hensen ruled that by allowing users to talk about a copyrighted movie’s location on Usenet, FTD was effectively publishing the movie as if they had actually hosted it on their own servers.

After the ruling it transpired that Judge Henson and Dirk Visser, the lawyer for the movie studio, had a closer relationship than had been expected. Visser, who also represented BREIN in their victory over Mininova, had been running courses for copyright specialists where Judge Hensen was once one of the teachers.

Of course, now Judge Hensen has delivered a similar ruling, his connections with Visser are being re-examined, not least by Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge who is absolutely scathing.

“This is truly mind-boggling: not only was the plaintiff and judge personally and closely acquainted, the plaintiff in a controversial copyright monopoly case was running a commercial anti-piracy outfit together with the judge in the case,” Falkvinge writes.

“Money was involved. Commercial interest was involved. The judge was, as it appears from this brochure for the quite expensive course, getting money. From the plaintiff. Shortly after the case. In a directly related matter. That makes the judge not only corrupt, but textbook corrupt,” Falkvinge adds.

Claims of bias have hounded many big copyright-related cases in recent years, but for whatever reason have never gained any traction. In 2009 following the conviction of the founders of The Pirate Bay, it was revealed that two of the four judges set to hear their appeal were members of pro-copyright groups. The Supreme Court eventually decided that this would not affect their judgment.

The year before it was revealed that police officer Jim Keyzer, the leader and key witness in the initial Pirate Bay investigation, had been recently employed by Warner Bros, one of the plaintiffs in the case. The controversy deepened when it was discovered that his employment with the studio was only temporary – he later returned to the police to head up an IT Crime unit.

This so-called revolving door phenomenon has raised its head time and again in the past couple of years. In March 2011, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell – a former RIAA lobbyist and anti-piracy company boss – delivered a helpful ruling for potential copyright trolls.

Then later that month it was revealed that a former music industry lobbyist had been appointed head of a unit dealing with copyright and enforcement issues at the European Commission.

During early May commenting on the case against Megaupload, law Professor Eric Goldman bemoaned “the revolving door between government and the content industry.”

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

The site was never involved in any legal action, and to keep it this way the site’s operators decided to shut the site down for good today. The following message was posted on the BTjunkie homepage a few minutes ago:

“This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”

Talking to TorrentFreak, BTjunkie’s founder said that the legal actions against other file-sharing sites such as MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in making the difficult decision. Witnessing all the trouble colleagues got into was cause for a lot of worry and stress, and those will now belong to the past.

That said, BTjunkie’s owner still thinks there might be a future for other BitTorrent sites.

“I really do hope so, the war is far from over for sure,” he told TorrentFreak.

While BTjunkie was never targeted directly by copyright holders, the site was reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR) November last year. Both the RIAA and MPAA listed the torrent index as a ‘rogue’ site that facilitated mass copyright infringement.

BTjunkie is also one of the search terms censored by Google because it’s piracy related, alongside The Pirate Bay, RapidShare, uTorrent and others.

As a result of the decision to shut down BTjunkie, one of the top 5 torrent sites with dozens of millions of users a month is no more. Judging from previous shutdowns like that of TorrentSpy and Mininova, users will quickly find a new home at one of the many alternatives.

Nonetheless, it’s the end of an era.

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

Although the name NSE might not ring a bell with many people, it is the largest usenet provider in Europe and has many high-profile resellers such as Usenext.

Through the court BREIN demanded that the NSE delete all infringing content from its servers, and six weeks ago the Court of Amsterdam sided with the copyright holders.

In an attempt to keep their service operational, NSE asked the Court to put the execution of the verdict on hold while the Usenet provider appealed its case, but this week that request was denied. As a result NSE was forced to shut down its services.

“This means that we are forced to cease our operations with immediate effect,” NSE said in a statement.

Despite the setback the Usenet provider will persist with its appeal, not least because the landmark verdict could have disastrous consequences for other Usenet providers.

“For reasons of principle, News-Service.com will not accept the verdict and has lodged an appeal,” NSE announced.

The verdict of the Amsterdam Court is very similar to the one that decimated BitTorrent site Mininova two years ago. It requires NSE to finding a way to identify and delete all copyrighted files from its servers, which is practically impossible.

Aside from threatening many other Usenet providers, a similar judgement would also mean the end of file-hosting sites such as Megaupload, and other cloud storage services including Dropbox. All these services remove copyrighted files when they are asked to, but policing their own servers proactively may prove to be impossible.

BREIN is nevertheless delighted with the verdict of the court. “It is a breakthrough step to further dismantle the availability of illegal content on Usenet,” director Tim Kuik said previously.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if BREIN now waves this verdict in the face of other Usenet providers, in the hope of shutting them down. Using this same tactic BREIN has already managed to pull hundreds of (small) torrent sites offline in the Netherlands.

TorrentFreak contacted NSE to ask what the decision means for their resellers and whether they have plans to “go abroad” in some shape or form. We will update this article when a response comes in.

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

The group demanded that the Usenet provider delete all infringing content from its servers, and today the Court of Amsterdam sided with the copyright holders.

In an unprecedented verdict the court ruled that NSE has to remove all copyrighted content within four weeks, or pay 50,000 euros ($68,000) in fines per day. The court states that NSE willingly facilitates copyright infringement through its services.

NSE argued that are simply transmitting content, much like an Internet provider does. However, the court rejected this defense, adding that a notice and takedown procedure is insufficient to protect the rightsholders.

The decision could have far-reaching consequences for many other Internet services, starting with NSE resellers such as Binverse and Usenext..

“We are very disappointed with the Court’s verdict. It is technically as well as economically unfeasible to check the contents of the 15 to 20 million messages that are exchanged on a daily basis. Added to which, there is no automated way of checking whether Usenet messages contain copyrighted material or whether permission has been obtained for the distribution of such material,” NSE CEO Patrick Schreurs said in a comment.

“We see no way of complying with this verdict. Furthermore, the verdict endangers our very existence as a company, and is thus a threat to Usenet itself, as the facilitation of Usenet services has become impossible on the grounds of this verdict. The exchange of messages by means of this oldest of Internet services has de facto become impossible,” he adds.

The Usenet provider is currently considering whether it should appeal the decision.

BREIN is delighted with the verdict of the court, which is very similar to the one that signaled the end of the BitTorrent site Mininova two years ago.

“It is a breakthrough step to further dismantle the availability of illegal content on Usenet,” director Tim Kuik responded.

There is little doubt that the verdict of the Amsterdam Court is going to have a huge impact on the Usenet market, and the question has to be asked where it will stop. Could file-hosting services like MegaUpload and RapidShare be next? And what about other cloud hosting services such as Dropbox?

For now, however, NSE is faced with the impossible task of finding a way to identify and delete all copyrighted files from its servers.

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

4shared, the largest English language file-sharing site, is serving 2.5 billion pageviews alone every month, and this number is increasing rapidly.

Below we have compiled a list of the top 10 largest (general purpose) file-sharing sites on the Internet, based on measurements by Google. What stands out immediately is that 8 of the 10 sites are related to cyberlockers, and only 2 are BitTorrent sites.

This picture is quite different from the landscape 5 years ago when BitTorrent sites dominated the file-sharing space. Early 2007 Mininova was the first BitTorrent site to earn a place among the top 100 most-visited sites on the Internet, and soon thereafter they were joined by The Pirate Bay.

In the years that followed BitTorrent sites continued to dominate, but in the background cyberlockers were catching up, and catching up fast. Where most BitTorrent sites were seeing moderate growth, several new cyberlockers saw their traffic surge. In the last year many cyberlocker sites have outgrown The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and other popular torrent sites.

Below is the full list of sites based on Google’s ranking. We have to note though that several site owners in this list told TorrentFreak that the monthly pageviews and unique visitors are hugely underestimated. The Pirate Bay for example claims 1,500,000,000 pageviews, which is more than double the Google estimate. Other sites report similar ‘downgrades,’ so overall the ranking would still hold.

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

In keeping with a company of its stature, GroupM is very diligent when it comes to the placement of their clients’ ads. To ensure ‘legit’ advertising placements, this week GroupM introduced a blacklist designed to prevent its clients’ ads from appearing on websites that distribute illegally obtained content.

“We’re serious about combating piracy and protecting our clients’ intellectual property as forcefully as we possibly can,” said GroupM North America CEO Rob Norman in the press release.

“Pirate sites are known to ‘domain hop,’ so we need to keep on top of the latest list of identified offenders as best as we possibly can in order to enforce this new policy to its fullest effect,” Norman added.

Indeed, companies that maintain a blacklist have to be on top of it, and compile the list with the utmost care. The last thing they want is to miss a potential pirate site, or indeed the opposite – include websites that don’t offer or link to unauthorized downloads at all.

GroupM was kind enough to share the full list of 2279 domains with TorrentFreak, so we could see for ourselves how accurate their list is. As we suspected, there’s still a lot of work to do for the advertising giant.

Among the ‘pirate’ websites that are currently listed we find the non-profit digital library Archive.org, which isn’t particularly known for offloading warez. Also listed is the website of BitTorrent Inc., the San Francisco based company which only offers its own software for download.

Neither of the above sites carry advertising at the moment, which limits the effects of the blacklist, but they are undoubtedly unhappy being branded as pirates.

“BitTorrent is simply a technology company that enables people to efficiently move large files over the Internet. We don’t distribute unauthorized content, though we do work with many independent artists to help distribute their works,” BitTorrent Inc’s Senior Director of Marketing Allison Wagda told TorrentFreak.

Aside from Archive.org and BitTorrent.com there are various other websites in the list which don’t offer or even link to copyrighted material. The file-sharing clients Frostwire, Emule, BitTornado, SoulSeek and Acquisition for example, the IRC client mIRC and the ‘legal’ torrent search engines Mininova, Publicdomaintorrents and YouTorrent.com.

Other websites that are not directly linked to piracy are the Russian Facebook Vkontakte, the video portal Suprnova.org and the Linux distro site Tuxdistro.com.

And then there are many file-hosting services such as RapidShare, YouSendit and the late Drop.io that are in the grey area to say the least. All are banned from serving ads. Those who take a good look at the list will see many websites that are not necessarily linked to copyright infringement, but are included nonetheless.

GroupM’s failed effort to compile a completely accurate anti-piracy blacklist once again shows the problem with these types of censorship; the collateral damage. Although one can certainly make a case for blocking many of the listed sites, it also puts several obviously non-infringing sites in the same corner.

Although there are problems, rather than hide behind a veil of secrecy, GroupM has been bold enough to allow their list into the open, a level of transparency rarely seen in these instances. GroupM was asked to comment on our findings, and we will add their response to the article when it comes in.

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

“I spent a day like a thief, locked in their cells filled with shit and even showered on the walls,” said Blackistef at the time. “A hole in the ground for a toilet (which you can not flush) and a single concrete bench.”

“There was an indescribable smell; the guys wrote their name on the walls with shit mixed with the remains of prison food. Even the SPCA [Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] cages are cleaner and more humane!” he continued.

A year later in June 2009, Blackistef lost his case and was ordered by a court to pay SACEM 17,000 euros ($24,500) in damages plus costs. In addition Blackistef was given a four month suspended jail sentence. He immediately appealed the decision.

The Court of Appeal heard the case last month and upheld the decision of the original court, handing down the jail sentence plus damages and costs totalling some 20,000 euros ($29,000).

The Court rejected Blackistef’s defense that as a service provider or intermediary he should not be held responsible for material posted by users provided he complied with takedown requests. Instead the court took into account their belief that Blackistef had “knowledge of wrongful acts.”

Blackistef has since listed a number of important points from the trial, notably that claims from SACEM that he was making money from advertising on the site were incorrect. The banner ads complained about by SACEM were actually member signatures and the site had no advertising income at all. But perhaps more worrying are the revelations from court papers just obtained by French news outlet Numerama.

“The decision gives the impression of having been guided more by the desire to punish a state of mind, rather than by the strict application of the law or a rigorous analysis of the allegations,” editor Guillaume Champeau explains.

The papers include a statement from the Court which declares that “..the names of these sites [when they include the word 'torrent'] encourage illegal activity. Torrent sites are accessed by users of the BitTorrent protocol which has a main, if not unique purpose, of enabling downloading of copyright protected works.”

In a nutshell, having the word “torrent” in a domain name can be reason enough to presume bad intentions.

In respect of meta-search engine Torrent-public-center.com, the Court said that since it searched other sites such as Mininova, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, this search engine was one dedicated to “unlawful downloading”.

Furthermore, Champeau notes that the Court was unable to establish from the evidence provided by SACEM that any unlawful downloads had occurred as a result of the sites’ existence.

Instead the Court decided to be rather more general in stating that Blackistef “created Internet sites contributing to the underground economy” and his actions “contributed to the destabilization of the economy of artistic creation” and must therefore be punished.

“The court clearly sided with SACEM with this ruling, ignoring all the defendant arguments,” Champeau told TorrentFreak. “It either did not fully understand the facts and misinterpreted the law that should have applied at least for the search engine part, or the court did it on purpose because it wanted the man sentenced so that it wouldn’t create a void other sites could enter into.”

Nevertheless, Blackistef says he has no money left to continue fighting SACEM and has now accepted his fate.

“The term ‘justice is for the rich’ is unfortunately not a myth,” he concludes.

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

The group was responsible for the demise of the once largest torrent site Mininova, achieved a conviction against the Pirate Bay founders, and more recently expanded its track record with a victory against one of the largest Usenet communities on the Internet.

All the above was accomplished even though the actual downloading of copyrighted movies and music for personal use is completely legal in BREIN’s home country. In the Netherlands only the uploading part of file-sharing is punishable by law, but if new plans from the Government are adopted this may soon change.

Today, State Secretary of Security and Justice Fred Teeven announced that the Government wants to modernize current copyright law. One of the most drastic changes put forward in the new plans is that in addition to uploading, downloading of all copyrighted material will also be outlawed.

In addition to a complete ban on the sharing of copyrighted material, the new copyright plans will also get rid of the “copy-levy” on blank CDs and DVDs. This levy, ranging from $0.20 to $0.87 per piece, was put in place to compensate rights holders for the films and music that were copied for personal use.

The State Secretary notes that the changes related to file-sharing will not mean that the Government will actively prosecute individual downloaders, but stresses that they are needed to get “pirate websites” blocked by Internet service providers. At the moment this is impossible. Last year BREIN sued two of the largest Dutch ISPs, requesting that they should block their customers’ access to The Pirate Bay, but the attempt failed.

State Secretary Teeven emphasizes that The Pirate Bay is one of the main targets, although he misspells the website url in his official letter, pointing to piratebay.org instead. According to the State Secretary, The Pirate Bay is “a major resource of illegal material” which should be blocked by ISPs.

Although applicable to all citizens, the new law is specifically aimed at the blocking of illegal websites. There will be no three-strikes rules as proposed in other countries, and the Government will not chase individual file-sharers.

In a response to the news, BREIN confirmed that it will not go after individual file-sharers in the future either. Their prime targets are the websites that facilitate copyright infringement, not their users.

Aside from toughening the law, the new plans also include ‘protections’ for the privacy of file-sharers. One of the key points is that the rights holders can only claim the personal details of an alleged infringer if that person shared copyrighted material on a massive scale. This would prevent the pay-up-or-else settlement schemes that are currently ongoing in the United States.

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

In the years that followed BitTorrent sites continued to dominate, but in the background cyberlockers were catching up, and catching up fast. One of the most popular sites of this nature has always been RapidShare. But although RapidShare has always been as least as popular as BitTorrent sites, there were relatively few competitors.

This situation changed in the last two years though. Where most BitTorrent sites were seeing moderate growth, several new cyberlockers saw their traffic surge. In the last year the number of cyberlocker sites that have outgrown The Pirate Bay in terms of traffic has expanded to five, and that’s just the beginning.

Megaupload, Hotfile, 4Shared, Mediafire and RapidShare are all listed in the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet before The Pirate Bay, and newcomers such as Fileserve are eager to do the same. It is worth noting and exemplary of the growing trend that half of these sites are younger than 2 years.

This dominant position of cyberlockers hasn’t gone unnoticed to the outside world. In a report (pdf) published by MarkMonitor today it is concluded that RapidShare is the leading ‘digital piracy’ site with over 13 billion yearly visitors, followed by Megaupload with close to 5 billion visits.

Although the traffic estimates are off by a few million, and while even larger cyberlockers such as Mediafire were overlooked, the report does signal that one-click hosting sites have definitely outgrown BitTorrent sites. Of course website visits say little about the data traffic these sites generate, but we assume that they are a good competitor in this area too.

The changes in file-sharing trends have not gone unnoticed to the owners of torrent sites, and several are carefully exploring their options to start their own cyberlockers or cyberlocker search engines. This is most likely where the growth lies in the coming years and thus where money can be made.

What’s worth noting, however, is that the rise of cyberlockers is not actually hurting the traffic of BitTorrent sites. Instead the rise of cyberlockers coexists next to the moderate growth of BitTorrent sites for now. It will be interesting to see how these two match up in the years to come.

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