As a result, during the past several years many file-sharers were targeted by anti-piracy groups looking to send a message to the masses. And with government providing additional funding, increasingly police became involved in joint operations.

After a period of dealing with smaller cases, Swedish police have just charged a man for illegally making available large amounts of copyrighted material. According to their intellectual property division, the suspect “intentionally or by gross negligence” unlawfully made films available on 2,250 occasions.

The police add that the individual acted “in consultation or concert with other persons, supplied, installed, programmed, maintained, funded and otherwise administered and managed” the file-sharing network from where the infringements were carried out.

The charges are the result of an investigation initially carried out by Rights Alliance, the anti-piracy group previously known as Antipiratbyran. It’s been revealed they’re representing six major studios in the case, so the usual Hollywood giants will be directly involved.

Few additional details have been made public but after contacting lawyer Henrik Pontén at Rights Alliance, TorrentFreak has learned that the charges relate to a raid carried out in 2010 against “The Scene”, the collection of servers and individuals which inhabit the top of the so-called piracy pyramid.

The case involves a so-called ‘topsite’ known as ‘Devil’ which at the time was claimed to carry between 200 and 250 terabytes of media. During the raid, which according to Scene sources took place December 15, 2010, police seized a dozen servers and detained one person.

In press releases following the police action it was claimed that the man was responsible for the unauthorized distribution of “tens of thousands” of mainly Hollywood movies. Those estimates appear to have been rounded down.

An element of the case that remains a mystery for now surrounds the prosecution’s current claims that the man made the movies available “to the public”. Topsites tend not to deliberately distribute movies outside of their immediate circles for security reasons.

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

Carl Lundström’s sentence was quickly served but there was a months-long delay before Gottfrid Svartholm could be removed from Cambodia and placed in Swedish detention. It took even longer to trace and detain Peter Sunde.

More than two years had passed when the former Pirate Bay spokesman was eventually captured on May 31, 2014, the eight year anniversary of the 2006 raid on the infamous site. A special police unit dedicated to tracking down fugitives found Sunde on a farm in Skåne, Sweden.

Sunde is now detained in Västervik Norra, the prison originally allocated to him in 2012. Converted from a hospital over the past nine years, in 2012 the facility had 262 inmates and 250 staff. Sunde feels that the establishment is an inappropriate venue for his incarceration.

In a letter recently sent to the probation board, Sunde asks to be removed to a location more in keeping with his offenses.

“I hereby appeal the placement decision regarding the institution I am in. I believe that the safety class is too high for the crime I have been convicted of,” Sunde writes.

Sweden prisons are split into three security categories. Category One is reserved for the most dangerous of prisoners. Category Two covers the majority of the country’s closed prisons, while Category Three contains trusted prisoners who are believed to pose the lowest risk.

Sunde was found guilty of non-violent copyright-related offenses which means he should pose little to no risk to the public. On this basis Sunde believes he should be transferred to a Category Three prison, specifically Tygelsjö, which is close to his family. He says there is no risk of him trying to escape.

Health issues also feature prominently in Sunde’s plea to the authorities.

“I’m suffering tremendously – socially, physically as well as psychologically – by the shortcomings of Västervik,” he explains.

Those shortcomings include problems with food. While Sunde has described himself as a vegetarian, on occasions he has expressed a clear preference for vegan food. It’s not clear where the diet in Västervik falls short, but Sunde says he’s suffering to the point of going hungry. The 35-year-old reports that in the last four weeks he’s lost 11 pounds (5kgs).

While Sunde evaded capture for two years, that time didn’t go to waste. Before running for the European Parliament with the Finnish Pirate Party this year, Sunde invested in several tech-focused startups including the micro-donation service Flattr and the NSA-proof messenger app Heml.is.

While those operations are likely to continue in his absence, Sunde’s incarceration has already led to issues with a historic domain. Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) was the group behind the founding of The Pirate Bay and although it disbanded in 2010, Sunde remained the person responsible for administering Piratbyran.org. That domain now has issues which Sunde clearly can’t solve, although others are currently trying.

In the meantime, Fredrik Neij – who is also required to serve a Pirate Bay-related 10 month prison sentence – remains a fugitive and currently resides in Asia.

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

Problems had been building for more than two years. Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance (Antipiratbyran) had built up an interest in Sparvar, a site directed at a largely Swedish audience. In early 2012 following action against a private site known as Swepiracy, Rights Alliance warned that Sparvar was on their list of targets.

Until this week, however, Sparvar had been hosted in Canada with Montreal-based Netelligent Hosting Services. For some time it had been presumed that hosting a torrent site is Canada is legal, a notion that was recently backed up by Netelligent president Mohamed Salamé.

“[As] long as there are no violations of our [acceptable use policy], we take no actions against torrent sites which are still legal in Canada,” Salamé told TF.

Nevertheless, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) still took action against Sparvar. How did this come to pass?

A source familiar with the case who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity told TorrentFreak that Netelligent was served with a data preservation order by the RCMP who were working together with authorities in Sweden.

In the first instance Netelligent were gagged from informing their client about the investigation, presumably so that no data could be tampered with. Netelligent was then sent a hard drive by the RCMP for the purposes of making a copy of the Sparvar server. This was to be handed over to their authorities.

We’re led to believe that Netelligent put up a fight to protect their customer’s privacy but in the end they were left with no choice but to comply with the orders. And here’s why.

MLAT, or Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty agreements, enable countries to gather, share and exchange information in order to enforce the law. Since 2001, Canada has had an MLAT with Sweden and since there was a criminal investigation underway in Sweden against Sparvar, Canada and Netelligent were legally obligated to provide assistance in the case.

So what does this mean for other sites hosted in Canada? Well, according to our source anyone running a site should be aware of the countries that Canada has MLAT agreements with, just in case another country decides to launch a case.

Those countries can be found here but they include everyone from the United States to Australia, from China to Russia, and many countries across Europe including the UK, Netherlands, Spain, Poland, France and Italy.

Finally, our source informs us that while cooperation in criminal cases has obviously been requested before, to the extent of his knowledge this is the first time that a torrent site has been a target.

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

Dreamfilm.nu is a tiny site by any standards. This torrent-focused project, not to to be confused with Dreamfilm.se, one of the country’s largest streaming sites, is today ranked by Alexa as the 2,794,493rd most popular domain in the world. The Pirate Bay this is definitely not.

Dreamfilm’s size is further underlined by the fact it was being run not from a dedicated webhost, but from a home Internet connection in Sweden. Nevertheless, this relative minnow with just over 900 Facebook likes managed to attract the attention of some of the world’s biggest entertainment companies.

Last Thursday at 7:00am, a total of eight Swedish police officers raided the home of the Dreamfilm admin, who calls himself “Napster”.

“When I asked to see the search warrant I was told in response: ‘This is not a Hollywood movie’,” Napster explained.

Police did not have endless server racks to seize. Dreamfilm.nu was being run on a home computer and once that was taken away, the site came to an end.

“The computer is currently seized and therefore Dreamfilm is down,” he added.

The complaint against the site was initiated by Rights Alliance, the anti-piracy group previously known as Antipiratbyran. The organization told police that the site was offering torrents to 25 movies, three of which were pre-release.

“The site is the Pirate Bay in miniature,” Rights Alliance lawyer Sara Lindebäck told Nyheter24.

Prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson said that the man who was raided confessed to being the Dreamfilm admin, but maintained that his site was completely legal.

“The suspect has admitted that he has been running this site, but says that he has not done anything punishable, Rasmusson said.

In response, the 23-year-old clarified his position, maintaining that no illegal content had ever touched his server. It didn’t even store torrent files, only linked to them.

“It’s hopeless for the police to take a search engine so seriously, confiscate my stuff, and put me in detention for around eight hours. They can stare at the server until their eyes start to bleed, dreamfilm.nu has never committed a crime and therefore there is nothing to download,” he said.

“Dreamfilm.nu is a SEARCH ENGINE like Google . Google gets its information automatically using bots / spiders while Dreamfilm.nu must retrieve information manually and store it in a database.”

While Napster’s fate will be revealed in due course, other longer-standing Swedish cases have been progressing to their closing stages in recent weeks.

Last week the suspected operator of Tankaner.com was prosecuted for copyright infringement related to the illegal distribution of 32 movies in 2012 and 2013. Prosecutor Fredrik Inglad added that since there were ads on the site, he would be pushing for a prison sentence.

Earlier this month, four men were prosecuted for copyright infringement related to the unlawful distribution of 28 Hollywood and local movies in 2009 and 2010. The men, all in their forties, are suspected of being the operators of the warez-scene servers known as ‘Darkside‘. The men admit to having downloaded movies but deny distribution.

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

The latest involves two men who were arrested way back in 2011. They are the suspected operators of a private tracker called eXcelleNT, or XNT.nu as it was publicly known. The site launched in 2010 and in its first year accumulated some 17,000 users who between them uploaded around 30,000 torrents.

Among those torrents were copyrighted Hollywood movies and TV shows, something which triggered an investigation by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån. In May 2011, police in Borlänge, Sweden, arrested one of the men, moving on to Stockholm where they arrested another. Computers were seized locally, plus XNT’s server in Germany.

The men were soon released, leaving them to speculate on their fate.

“Since we haven’t heard much from the police after being released, much of the information in this post is speculations,” one of the men wrote on the XNT blog.

“Anyhow, we’ll have to assume that the police is running an investigation. Since they confiscated almost 10 computers in this bust it’s probably going to take a while. For the time being, we are living life as usual. Minus all the tracker stuff of course.”

It did indeed take a while. Yesterday, almost three years after the raids, prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad announced that the men had been prosecuted and would be heading to court.

“This is one of the largest cases in terms of number of films distributed,” Ingblad told the Siren news agency.

The case, which received support from German authorities, centers around the unauthorized distribution of some 1,050 movies between March and May 2011, including content owned by Warner Bros. and Disney.

The men, now aged 23 and 24, face fines or potential jail sentences when they appear later in the year. Both are believed to have offered some level of confession.

In December 2012 it was reported that a man suspected of being an active XNT user was acquitted of copyright offenses after police were unable to decrypt his hard drive.

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

The latest signs relate to Tankafetast, Sweden’s #2 torrent site and the 95th most popular site in the country according to Alexa. The site, second only to The Pirate Bay, specializes in movies and TV shows and has been an anti-piracy target for some time. With a motto of “We shall never surrender!” one gets a flavor of how that’s gone so far.

On October 1, 2012, PRQ, a webhost previously owned by Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, disappeared offline after Swedish police raided the facility. Many file-sharing sites went offline and it was later confirmed that Tankafetast was the prime target.

Just three weeks later it was back online, taunting the authorities and nemesis Henrik Pontén at copyright protection outfit Antipiratbyrån (Rights Alliance).

In April 2013 yet more action was taken against the site, with the arrest of one of the site’s admins. Yet again the site remained intact and online.

And now, according to the site’s operators, Rights Alliance and local authorities have had another go at shutting Tankafetast down.

“Once again, we fell victim to a Rights Alliance (Anti-Piracy Office) ploy to shut down TankaFetast! Our data centers have been raided,” the site’s operators report.

It appears that a continuing investigation led authorities to a location from where they believed Tankafetast was operating. While the raid last week may have unearthed something, the site was fully prepared for the event.

“Instead of sitting and waiting to see what the authorities want us to do we can move just anywhere to our other servers located abroad. Once again we will rise up again!” the site’s operators said.

And, a few initial problems aside, Tankafetast returned online this weekend. [Update: site has some stability issues]

“We’re going nowhere Rights Alliance, believe it!” the site declared.

Interestingly there was no announcement of action against Tankafetast last week from Rights Alliance or the police. Both are usually fairly quick to inform the press of their achievements but there are no reports from either. TorrentFreak contacted lawyer Henrik Pontén for comment but we have received no response.

It is certainly possible that the raid on the Tankafetast datacenter was expected to fail. Last Thursday a site operator revealed that the 2012 raid on PRQ didn’t net the site, just a gateway.

“We had some old empty dusty boxes with PRQ a few years ago but that was merely a proxy. When police got them there was nothing left in them anyway, since the memory was cleared for the least outside risk,” he revealed.

While in the ‘old days’ torrent site admins simply crossed their fingers and perhaps wore garlic to fend off attacks, it’s becoming clear that these days site setups are being hardened in preparation for what many believe to be an increasingly likely event. But these systems cost money and that has to be made somehow. Intrusive advertising is one way, according to Tankafetast.

“It is precisely because of pop-under advertising that we have been able to have servers around the world. Here you get a really good example. When one goes down we just move to another. The advertising that many find annoying saves us in situations like this,” they conclude.

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

The then 25-year-old was a moderator and uploader and between April 2008 and November 2011 allegedly obtained huge quantities of content from the warez scene and shared the titles with the site’s users.

The investigation, carried out by anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyran (now Rights Alliance), involved the uploading of 518 movies and TV shows. The case concluded in the Västmanlands District Court last month.

Rightsholders dubbed the man Sweden’s “worst ever” individual movie pirate and for that the prosecution demanded at least one year in jail.

The district court has now handed down its verdict and while an immediate custodial sentence is off the table, the damages award is huge by any standards.

This morning the court ordered the now 28-year-old to pay $652,000 in damages for the unauthorized distribution of just one of the movies in the case. For the other 517 the man was handed a suspended jail sentence and ordered to complete 160 hours of community service.

In comments to TorrentFreak, Rights Alliance lawyer Henrik Pontén says that the damages award is the largest ever for a Swedish movie.

“[The $652,000] refers to compensation and is equal to what the man would have paid if he had bought a license to distribute the movie for free downloads,” Pontén explains.

“The man also has to pay damages for other losses such as disturbing the market and goodwill losses. This shows what damages are caused to the creators and rights holders by the illegal file-sharing of one movie.”

Needless to say the Pirate Party are outraged by the decision, which exceeds the $150,000 per title statutory damages possible in the United States, a territory infamous for its tough infringement penalties.

“To receive such a harsh penalty for doing something carried out by millions of Swedes shows how outdated our legislation is. The only way forward is a radical reform of copyright law that allows for the sharing of culture,” says Gustav Nipe, chairman of the Young Pirates.

But before any overhaul can take place, Rights Alliance have their eyes on other targets.

“In the future a number of criminal cases are up for trial and damages will be brought forward for one or several movies,” Pontén concludes.

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

Seven years later in February 2011 the site announced it would close. News from the site suggested it had been targeted by a DDoS attack and alongside had suffered a catastrophic hardware disaster. Perhaps coincidentally, just a week before the site’s closure a Swebits user was arrested at his home following an investigation carried out by anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyran (now Rights Alliance).

It transpired that the then 25-year-old was a moderator on Swebits and between April 2008 and November 2011 had allegedly shared huge quantities of content with the site’s users. The prosecution in the case insisted that he had uploaded many thousands of movies and TV shows after obtaining them from so-called ‘topsites’ affiliated with the warez scene.

The final case, which involved the uploading of 518 titles, concluded yesterday afternoon in the Västmanlands District Court after being reduced to ‘just’ 517 titles on a technicality.

“A film was dropped [from the case] because the statute of limitations expired,” explained prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson.

However, out of the significant remainder the defendant confessed to just 13 of the charges, the number of titles Antipiratbyran / Rights Alliance said they downloaded directly from the man and later tested. As more than 500 titles remained untested, the former Swebits moderator believes he is innocent of those charges.

Despite the reduction and counterclaim, Rasmusson said that never before had a court dealt with someone who had uploaded so many movies and TV shows online. In what is generally seen as an aggravating factor, the court heard that many of the uploads took place before the products were officially available on DVD.

Although more than 500 titles were involved in the trial, it appears only one producer is seeking damages from the now 28-year-old. Nevertheless, they are substantial.

Represented by infamous pirate-hunter Henrik Pontén of Rights Alliance, Nordisk Film AS are trying to recover more than a million dollars in damages after their title “Buried Alive” was released onto the Internet two days before its official DVD release.

According to the prosecutor, a request for a custodial sentence will be the likely outcome.

“I will probably insist on imprisonment,” he concludes.

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

It’s common for sites to be run by people employed in the computing industry or by those still in education and hoping to get into that area in the future. However, a case brought to a conclusion yesterday is probably the first in which the accused was a farmer.

The case, brought by Antipiratbyran and the IFPI, dates back to December 2011 and claims that the defendant, a man from Sweden, was responsible for administering the PowerBits private BitTorrent tracker between 2007 and 2009.

As is so often the case, the plaintiffs in the case claimed that PowerBits was a “commercial file-sharing service” and its admin “regularly received and assimilated payments from the users.”

Those payments took the form of donations from PowerBits users but were framed as direct payment for illegal content by the anti-piracy companies. Making matters worse, the tax authorities said the income had been generated in the course of running an Internet business and as such was both undeclared and untaxed.

In June 2012 the Varberg District Court accepted that the then 34-year-old hadn’t uploaded content himself but had indeed assisted in the copyright infringements of PowerBits users. He was also found guilty of tax and accounting offenses relating to the income generated from the site.

The case went to appeal and yesterday the decision was handed down.

A Court of Appeal judge upheld the earlier ruling and found the now 35-year-old guilty of aiding in copyright infringement. He was also found guilty of accounting fraud and was sentenced to one year in jail.

In addition to the custodial sentence the man was told to pay almost $62,000 against an undeclared income of $126,600 generated from the 65,000 member site during 2007 and 2008, some of which was spent converting a pigsty into a datacenter.

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

So who could have imagined then that after its birth five years ago today (during the glory years of The Pirate Bay no less) Spotify would develop into a hugely successful consumer product that has not only proven popular with music lovers around the world, but with pirates past and present.

Against the odds, Spotify has gone beyond turning many dedicated file-sharers into revenue-generating customers, it has made them happy ones too.

Earlier this year Spotify revealed it had signed up 24 million users worldwide, 18 million to the ad-supported service and 6 million to a paid subscription. But as revealed by company founder Daniel Ek, even greater goals are being eyed.

“My goal is to not just convert the 24 million into buying a subscription,” Ek said. “My goal is to get 1 billion using streaming services rather than a piracy service.”

But during the early days in Spotify’s Swedish homeland, a problem persisted. By failing to respond to customer needs a content availability vacuum had formed, and it came as no surprise to Spotify’s Scandinavia CEO Jonathan Forster that sites like The Pirate Bay were thriving.

“It is a society that loves music and when the internet exploded it was no surprise that it took place in Sweden. In the absence of a legal service, people used whatever was available,” Forster told Metro today.

But despite a huge customer base in waiting and a dream of luring people away from unauthorized sources en masse, Spotify faced problems with the labels.

“When I started at Spotify and realized that we really had not even talked to any of the majors, I felt that this would be difficult,” Forster explains.

So Spotify embarked on a mission to convince the record companies that making their catalogs available on an ad-supported basis would be the way to go. However – and perhaps unsurprisingly given the track records of some of their countrymen before them – they were instead treated as if they were creating a piracy service of their own.

“[The labels] were very polite, but utterly amazed at what we wanted to do,” Forster recalls. “In their eyes we were just a bunch of Swedes who wanted to take their music and give it away for free. We were no different than the people behind the Pirate Bay for them.”

But Spotify refused to give in and two years later the company netted its first license agreements and is now promoted heavily by the labels. According to Rasmus Fleischer, former Piratbyran member and author of award-wining thesis “The music’s political economy,” some of Spotify’s success in Sweden can be attributed to the entertainment companies’ legal victories against The Pirate Bay and the streaming service’s reputation for stirring things up.

“On a symbolic level, it was incredibly significant,” Fleischer says. “The history of Spotify has been built in the Swedish press and media as a rebel company that has rebelled against an outdated recording industry.”

The art of rebellion against the entertainment industries was perfected by The Pirate Bay during the last decade and as a result the site made itself some dangerous rivals. But interestingly while the most powerful forces in the world have failed to take it down, it’s companies like Spotify that could end up becoming its most serious adversary yet.

That, however, will rely on the company maintaining its rebellious streak, positive image and excellent product at a fair price. It will be interesting to see if it can keep that up.

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