The initiative, known as The Promo Bay, attracted 10,000 applications in a matter of months, and has exposed dozens of artists to hundreds of millions of views, at zero cost to them.

Many bands have been featured to date, but the group currently featured on the front page could be one of the best ‘fits’ to date.

Dubioza Kolektiv are an already successful band that have been selling records and playing festivals all around Europe for the past 11 years. Their views on the music industry are a great match for The Pirate Bay.

“We live in a fast changing world and the music industry is really struggling to maintain the monopolistic role they’ve enjoyed for decades,” Dubioza bass player Vedran Mujagić told TorrentFreak.

“They perceive this freedom of expression and ability to share culture and knowledge in the digital age as a major threat to their profits and they employ really ugly methods in trying to suppress these practices.”

The seven piece group, who hail from Bosnia and Herzegovina and promote their style as a fusion of hip-hop, reggae, dub and rock, are currently front and center on The Promo Bay with a track from their new EP, and things are working out perfectly.

“We sent the video of our song ‘No Escape (from Balkans)’ and our new EP ‘Happy Machine’ to Pirate Bay and now the video has been on the TPB homepage for a little more than 48 hours. It resulted in big traffic and more than 200,000 views of our video on YouTube – and it keeps growing,” Vedran reveals.

“This was really great because the song and Dubioza Kolektiv got exposed to people who would otherwise might never have heard of the band – from Siberia to South Africa. Reactions and comments have been really positive so far.”

But while ‘No Escape‘ has captured the big views so far, the second track from the EP has been flying under the radar. It’s an infectious ska-influenced romp that was written with the jailed founders of The Pirate Bay in mind.

“Free.mp3 (The Pirate Bay Song) is dedicated to founders of thepiratebay.org website,” the band reveals. “Gottfrid Svartholm Warg a.k.a. Anakata and who is currently being held in solitary confinement and is facing six-year prison sentence in Denmark and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi a.k.a. brokep who is incarcerated in Sweden.”

The track, which is upbeat, cheerful and extremely catchy, begins with a couple of BitTorrent terms and recounts how file-sharing scares the music industry.

Lines including ‘We don’t give a shit about a copyright law we take it from the rich and give it to the poor’ give way to Games of Thrones downloads and name checks for Kim Dotcom, Barack Obama and Wikileaks.

“We admire enthusiasts like people from The Pirate Bay, people like Edward Snowden, people from Wikileaks – who are fighting big corporations and governments – not for profit but because they believe in these ideals, even at the price of their own personal freedoms. It is always inspiring to see people who are finding the way to outsmart the system,” Vedran says.

Dubioza say they aim to deliver positivity “that hits you like a blast of fresh air” and they’ve certainly hit the mark with their attitudes towards file-sharing. Both the new EP and their entire discography have been uploaded in their name on the The Pirate Bay in the past few days and are mirrored on sites including KickassTorrents.

Those enjoying the style and the band’s ethos can join them on tour for the rest of the month.

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

While most people might presume that seclusion, boredom and a bland diet are an inevitable outcome of incarceration, other unexpected events are perhaps the ones that carry the most impact with the public. This week presented one such occasion.

After being seriously ill for some time, Peter’s father sadly passed away but due to decisions at his high-security prison, Peter was warned he would be attending the funeral in handcuffs. The sad news, reported by Peter’s brother Mats Kolmisoppi, struck a chord with thousands of supporters this week, even a group of Hollywood workers.

With the funeral now having taken place, Mats has taken time out to update Peter’s supporters on how things went. For once, the news is good.

“Many thanks for all the support and attention for my brother and my family’s situation,” he wrote on Facebook.

“Yesterday we buried our father. A nice and quiet affair. Peter was eligible to carry the coffin and attend the memorial service. The guards were respectful and kept in the background,” Mats reports.

“That does not change the fact that he spent the last week living with the threat that handcuffs could be put to use. But we are thankful that he did not have to endure such humiliation.”

Why the prison system chose to treat Peter and his family with compassion isn’t clear – thus far all comment on his case has been declined. But Mats is thankful for those who offered public support and any effect that had on the decision.

“Maybe Peter did not have to [appear handcuffed] because of all the attention surrounding the case that you helped to create. Me, my brother and my family are deeply grateful. All credit to you,” he wrote.

But while Peter’s week has turned out better than expected, Mats says he hopes the spotlight will remain focused on a flawed system.

“I hope for change, that institutions should be required to answer, that a regulator with real powers to change the system is set up. And that transparency will continue to increase,” he concludes.

Peter Sunde has less than 50 days left of his sentence for Pirate Bay-related copyright infringement offenses.

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

Despite being accused of non-violent crimes, Peter is being held in a high-security unit and without concern for his dietary needs. As a result he’s literally wasting away.

Following the tragic death of his father who recently succumbed to a long-standing set of illnesses, the week delivered yet more bad news. Although the prison would allow him to attend the funeral, Peter was told he could expect to carry his father’s coffin wearing handcuffs.

Understandably the news provoked much outrage. Why would a non-violent and now-frail man with with just a few days left on his sentence try to escape from not one but two prison guards? As that improbable situation was discussed among supporters online, a much less traditional support group were asking the same questions.

Hollywood director Lexi Alexander has been a vocal supporter of Peter and earlier this year broke with the usual Tinseltown position by calling for his release.

While her outspoken approach is uncharacteristic of a Hollywood worker, it may come as a surprise that she is definitely not on her own. During recent weeks the director and actress, who has several movies under her belt, called for other like-minded individuals in Hollywood to make themselves known.

The result was the publication a few minutes ago of a video dedicated to the uncuffing, release and support of Peter Sunde.

“We created this video in solidarity with Peter as he attends his father’s funeral today,” Alexander told TorrentFreak.

“Originally I had planned to do this over the next few weeks, but when I heard about Peter’s father’s death yesterday, we scrambled and got it together within a few hours.”

While a few of the people in the video have understandably chosen to remain anonymous, others have been very happy to show their faces. With the famous Hollywood sign in the background, first up, Julie Bush.

“Julie Bush was pro-piracy before I even knew what file-sharing meant,” Alexander told TF. “She used to be a writer on the show Sons of Anarchy and now she’s writing a major property for Universal Studios: Robert Ludlum’s The Sigma Protocol.”

Bush has written on a number of occasions about Hollywood’s “dumb” approach to piracy.

“Many showrunners and executives I know not only pirate stuff all the time but also privately endorse the idea that piracy is good for the industry, a great way to advertise, and essential to building a healthy audience,” she explained last year.

The gentleman holding up the sign calling for the un-cuffing of Peter is actor Ross McCall. He appeared in Band of Brothers, Alexander’s movies Green Street and Green Street 2, before moving on to star in TV series including Crash, White Collar and Luther.

“The pretty blonde [0m 53s] is producer Catrin Cooper. Very outspoken about her opposition to criminalizing file-sharing,” Alexander continues. Cooper has worked in several roles on movies including Casino Royale, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Batman Begins.

“The guy with ‘Free Peter Sunde’ on his shirt is a writer and actor named Edward DeRuiter, one of his movies was just released last month,” Alexander adds.

“Then there’s Brent Weichsel, who against my advice decided to put his name and union on the sign. He’s Local 600 Camera Assistant.”

It’s quite something and particularly brave for these individuals to put their name to the support of someone described by studio bosses as someone intent on the ruination of the industry. That said, and as clearly pointed out on one of the signs held up in the video, Hollywood workers are not only writers and directors, they’re also humans too.

The video, which features writers and authors, directors, producers, a screenwriter, a cinematographer, an engineer and a dialect coach, is embedded below and available on Lexi’s blog.

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

During the final day of May 2014, a two-year hunt came to its conclusion. A special Swedish police unit tasked with tracking down fugitives carried out a raid at a farm in Skåne, a rural area near Malmö, Sweden.

Despite continued protestations that he had committed no crimes, Sunde was transferred to the high-security Västervik Norra prison to begin an eight-month sentence. A month later Sunde applied to be moved to a lower security unit, a place more in keeping with his alleged white-collar crimes. His application was rejected.

With his release date now less than 50 days away, Sunde should have reason to be looking to the future, but instead a family tragedy has marked his final weeks in prison. After succumbing to a long illness, Sunde’s father has passed away. The event has prompted Peter’s brother, Mats Kolmisoppi, to speak out for the first time on the Pirate Bay founder’s imprisonment conditions.

“I have deliberately said very little about what happened to my brother, Peter Sunde, the last few months. Partly because he can speak for himself and does not have difficulty being heard, even though he sits in a prison with a high safety rating in Västervik,” Mats wrote on Facebook.

The problem, Mats says, is with a system that has forgotten that its job is to support offenders in order to ensure that they never return to prison.

That system has deemed that despite his non-violent crimes, Sunde should be detained in a high-security prison, a placement that was allocated to him even before a guilty verdict had been passed down and in spite of an official assessment that he presented a non-existent violence or escape risk.

As a result, Sunde has paid the price. After a continued struggle with the food provided, Mats Kolmisoppi reports that his brother has now lost 13kgs in weight. When a smiling head of department visited Sunde to deliver information on his earlier transfer request he was told: “I have good news for you Peter, your application is rejected.”

Kolmisoppi documents a long list of systematic and casual cruelties such as these, but few are as disturbing as the one he now reports.

For some time Peter and Mats’ father had been seriously ill. This summer he ended up in hospital with a catalog of issues including suspected cancer in his remaining lung. While persistent applications to see his father failed, Peter was eventually granted permission to make a hospital visit. Mats’ says that he and Peter discussed when to say goodbye to their father – they decided that should be at the funeral.

Shortly after, Peter and Mat’s father passed away. Coinciding with an incident at the prison which resulted in heightened security measures, this meant more bad news for Peter. While he would be allowed to attend the funeral, two guards would accompany him – but on the condition that he remains handcuffed.

“But I will carry my father’s coffin,” Mats’ reports Peter as saying.

“You can not count on it,” the guards responded. “You will be wearing handcuffs.”

Peter is a non-violent prisoner accused of copyright infringement offenses who at 13kgs lighter in weight represents an even lower risk of flight than his 50 days left in custody might suggest. And while there will be those in the entertainment industries who argue he deserves his punishment, the effects of his custody spread well beyond the former file-sharing site spokesman.

“As the Swedish criminal system is designed it punishes not only my brother. It punishes me, it punishes my now dead father, it punishes my mother, my family, my relatives and my friends,” Mats’ writes.

While these sad events cannot be undone, Peter is at least likely to receive a warm reception following his release. He is undoubtedly bright and has a future, as his work with micro-donation service Flattr and the NSA-proof messenger app Heml.is has shown. Indeed, he already appears to have plans. And with all the vegan food he can eat less than two months away, November can’t come soon enough.

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

Instead they decided to target ISPs, companies that are responsive to legal threats in most corners of the world. In time, court orders rendered The Pirate Bay and similar sites blocked, but not for long. Proxy sites enabling access to the world’s largest torrent indexes soon began to thrive, but their time would also come.

The biggest proxy battle anywhere on the planet is taking place in the UK, a country where it’s become almost a formality to have sites blocked at the ISP level. Today we can report that yet another silent round of blockades are being put in place.

One of the main targets is PirateProxy, an extremely popular proxy service that’s particularly well known in the UK. The site was previously accessible at PirateProxy.net but moved to a new domain earlier in the year after its domain was blocked.

The site switched to PirateProxy.in during April and successfully maintained its traffic. As can be seen from the Alexa chart below, PirateProxy is the 125th most popular domain in the entire country, an impressive feat for a site that offers nothing but a Pirate Bay block workaround.

Notable too is the site’s placing in Ireland, where The Pirate Bay is also blocked by ISPs. As of this morning PirateProxy was the country’s 131st most-popular domain.

However, visitors to the site through the major UK ISPs are now beginning to see the familiar “domain blocked” message. The example from Virgin Media, which confirms the existence of a court order, is shown below.

Also under attack are the various proxy services available through Come.in, a portal which facilitates access to a wide range of torrent and other similar sites blocked by numerous European ISPs.

In addition to sundry others, at the moment the site’s PirateBay, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent, YTS/YIFY, TorrentReactor, BitSnoop and 1337x proxies are being subjected to UK blockades.

This is the second time this year that multiple Come.in proxies have been targeted by rightsholders. Back in June its EZTV and YTS proxies were blocked in the UK but were re-established by the site’s operators who vowed to keep putting up new services to maintain service.

While blocking proxies continues to be a key weapon of choice, proxies with UK-based operators have greater concerns. As reported in August, City of London police’s PIPCU unit arrested the operator of Immunicity and several other proxies.

According to a police response to a Freedom of Information request obtained by TorrentFreak, he now stands accused of a wide range of crimes including breaches of the Serious Crime Act 2007, Possession of Articles for Use in Fraud, Making or Supplying Articles for use in Frauds and money laundering.

While plenty of proxies still exist (including several which rotate at the bottom of The Pirate Bay homepage under ‘proxy’), others aren’t doing so well.

Visitors to sites including TorrentProxies, Torrenticity, FenopyReverse, FirstRowProxy, GetPirate, H33tUnblock, KatProxy, LivePirate, Metricity, ProxyCentral, KickassUnblock and YifyProxy are greeted with a message from PIPCU that the domains are under police investigation.

Finally, and despite efforts by the BBC to have all VPN users labeled as pirates, use of such services to evade blockades and enable geo-unblocking continues.

The BPI, PirateProxy and Come.in were not immediately available for comments but we’ll update this report when they arrive.

Update: The operator of PirateProxy informs us that a new domain is up and operational at PirateProxy.bz

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

However, when someone in Hollywood does break ranks, it’s always worth listening to what they have to say.

Just recently movie director Lexi Alexander has been shaking things up with comments not only supporting jailed Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde, but also those that blame studio bosses for leaks of movies such as The Expendables 3.

Today Alexander has delivered perhaps her most controversial revelation yet, news which suggests that direct leverage of piracy helped a major network get its own streaming services off the ground with much reduced costs.

The report comes from a contact of Alexander’s working in the industry. She’s keeping his identity a secret so as not to jeopardize his career, but his revelations are quite an eye opener.

“Many years ago, I was employed at one of the Major Networks in an R&D capacity. What our team was tasked with was figuring out how to build streaming networks. Building a parallel to the broadcast networks where a program could be digitized and then never go back to the analog world again,” he told Alexander.

“[W]hen you’re working at the level of a network, there’s too much to be done by hand, and you have to design systems. For digitizing. Transcoding. Asset management. Dealing with different audio mixes. Subtitles. Error correction. Multi-bit rate streaming for a wide variety of clients. Evolving formats and containers.”

Clearly the job of transitioning to the digital domain presented significant challenges that needed to be overcome. However, R&D workers needed experience to solve these problems and according to the insider that was obtained in a most unorthodox fashion.

“We were all pirates. I’m not saying we leaked material to the internet – nobody was that crazy. But everyone illegally downloaded media. We traded tips on our setups, best practices, the most efficient tools and workflows. Everyone was downloading illegally. The VPs. The head of content security. EVERYONE.”

Of course, any major expenditure such as creating new networks would have to be passed off by the powers that be, something that could take years. But while those holding the purse-strings were deep in thought, time wasn’t being wasted down in R&D. In the pirate world, experiments were taking place.

“We honed our skills, our design ideas, our workflow concepts in illegal waters. So when we finally got the greenlight to build something, we knew what we were doing. We were fluent,” the insider said.

This unofficial training led to huge savings for the network, slashing R&D costs while bringing products more quickly to market. Alexander’s contact notes that these savings as a result of piracy are a far cry from the losses Hollywood prefers to talk about.

“So when I look at all the complaints about piracy costing corporations billions of dollars, all I can think about is the billions of free R&D the corporations have received from the pirate economy. Of all the money and resources we were not given by our bosses, which led us to solve problems with the tools that were available to us,” he concludes.

Finally, it appears that Lexi Alexander isn’t done yet. She’s now inviting others to come forward with their own anonymous “anti-piracy hypocrisy stories”. Better get the popcorn, this could get interesting.

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

It wasn’t easy to meet Peter in prison. Initially, his request for the approval of my visit was rejected, as have been requests on behalf of other friends. It was only when he read up on the regulations and filed a complaint – pointing out my status as an elected representative of the European Parliament – that my visit was approved.

He tells me that this is par for the course in prison. “If you don’t constantly insist upon your rights, you will be denied them”. Repeatedly, he had to remind the guards that they’re not allowed to open confidential mail he receives from journalists. His alleged right to an education or occupation during his jail time in practice amounted to being given a beginners’ Spanish book.

“Prison is a bit like copyright,” Peter remarks. In both areas, there is a lack of transparency and the people in power profit from the fact that the average person doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the issue. That opens the door to misuse and corruption.

Few people feel directly affected by these systems (even though a lot of Internet users commit copyright infringements, many don’t even realize that they are breaking laws and suffer no repercussions). Hence it is difficult to get traditional politics to change even the most blatant injustices that these systems produce. I ask him whether his imprisonment has changed his political views.

“It has confirmed them,” he replies. “I knew the system was broken before, but now I know to what extent.”

“The worst thing is the boredom”, Peter informs me when I ask him about life in prison. He gives an account of his daily routine: “I have soy yoghurt and muesli for breakfast, which I was recently allowed to buy from my own money, as the prison doesn’t offer any vegan food.”

That is followed by one hour of exercise – walking around the yard in circles – and sometimes the chance to play ping-pong or visit the prison library in the afternoon, before Peter is locked in his cell for the night. The only other distraction comes from the dozens of letters Peter receives every day.

Not all the books that his friends and supporters send make their way to him – they are screened for “inappropriate content” first. Other items that arrive in the mail, such as vegan candy, won’t be handed out to him until after his release, “but at least the prison has to catalog every single thing you send me, which pisses them off,” Peter says with a wink.

While his notoriety mostly comes from his role in founding the Pirate Bay, Peter has been critical of the platform’s development for a long time and has been focusing his energy on other projects.

“There should be 10,000 Pirate Bays by now!” he exclaims. “The Internet was built as a decentralized network, but ironically it is increasingly encouraging centralization. Because The Pirate Bay has been around for 11 years now, almost all other torrent sites started relying on it as a backbone. We created a single point of failure and the development of file sharing technology got stuck.”

In Peter’s eyes, the Pirate Bay has run its course and turned into a commercial enterprise that has little to do with the values it was founded on. Nowadays, the most important battles for an open Internet take place elsewhere, he says, noting that the trend towards centralization is not limited to file sharing.

Facebook alone has turned into its own little walled-garden version of the Internet that a lot of users would be content using without access to the wider Net. At the same time, services from Google to Wikipedia are working on distribution deals that make their services available to people without real Internet access.

One step to counter this trend towards centralization could be data portability, the right to take all one’s personal data from a service such as Facebook and bring it along to a competitor. The right to data portability is part of the proposed European data protection regulation that is currently stuck in negotiations among the EU member states.

“Having data portability would be a great step forward, but it’s not enough. Portability is meaningless without competition.” Peter says.

“As activists and entrepreneurs, we need to challenge monopolies. We need to build a Pirate social network that is interoperable with Facebook. Or build competition to small monopolies before they get bought up by the big players in the field. Political activism in parliaments, as the Pirate Party pursues it, is important, but needs to be combined with economic disruptions.

“The Internet won’t change fundamentally in the next two years, but in the long-term, the effects of the decisions we take today can be dramatic.”

According to Peter, establishing net neutrality, especially on mobile networks, will be one of the crucial fights. The Internet may have started out as a non-commercial space, but is entirely ruled by business arguments nowadays, and without net neutrality, large corporations will be able to strengthen their monopolies and stifle innovation. A pushback will be needed from small enterprises as well as civil society – but those groups struggle to be heard in political debates as they often lack the financial resources for large-scale lobbying efforts.

Although Peter is visibly affected by his imprisonment and talks about struggling with depression, he has not stopped making plans for the future. “Things will get easier once I get out. I’ve been a fugitive for two years and could hardly go to conferences or would have to show up unannounced.”

Once his eight month sentence has come to an end, Peter wants to get back to activism. When I ask about his upcoming projects, he starts grinning and tells me to be patient.

“All I can say now is that I’m brimming with ideas and that one of my main goals will be to develop ethical ways of funding activism. You often need money to change things. But most ways of acquiring it require you to compromise on your ideals. We can do better than that.”

Peter is now hoping for his prison sentence to eventually be transformed into house arrest, which would allow him to see his critically ill father and spend less time in isolation. Whether that happens will largely depend on whether the Swedish state will continue to view a file-sharing activist as a serious threat to the public. In a society where the majority of young people routinely break copyright law simply by sharing culture, that view seems entirely unsustainable.

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

Sunde was transferred to Västervik Norra, the high security prison facility where he is serving the eight-month jail sentence that was handed down in 2012.

Despite the sentencing Sunde has always maintained his innocence. He utilized all legal means at his disposal to fight back, and emphasized that his role in The Pirate Bay didn’t warrant being branded a criminal.

This view is shared by many people including Julia Reda, the new Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Pirate Party. Reda will be visiting Sunde in prison later today to send her support, and points out that he shouldn’t be there in the first place.

“I am visiting Peter Sunde in prison today to express my support. The unnecessarily harsh sentence he was given illustrates that our justice system has completely lost touch with digital culture,” Reda says.

“The tactic of draconian deterrence against file sharing has failed!” she adds.

During her visit the MEP also plans to ask Sunde about his conditions. The Pirate Bay founder previously requested a transfer to a lower security facility as he was losing weight and coping with psychological issues due to his circumstances.

Sunde’s sentencing is a result of a failed witch hunt against online piracy, Reda argues. Instead of embracing those who explore new technologies and business models, authorities have wrongly opted to crack down on people such as Sunde.

The MEP believes that the focus shouldn’t be on deterrence, with authorities doing more to encourage and assist content creators to develop business models that can compete with piracy.

Reda notes that several founders of file-sharing services have become successful entrepreneurs. The developers behind Kazaa later brought Skype and Rdio, and Napster’s Sean Parker served as the first president of Facebook.

Sunde is also a digital pioneer, and actively involved in several startups including the micro-donation service Flattr and the encrypted chat application Heml.is. His contributions to these projects have been halted now, which is not the right way to go according to the MEP.

“I am saddened by the fact that Sweden has chosen to jail this digital pioneer in an attempt to make an example of him,” she says.

We hope to have more details of the MEP’s visit and Sunde’s outlook on the future later this week.

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

But Alexander is no ordinary person or director. Instead of towing the usual line by decrying piracy as a scourge, the 39-year-old recently noted that several studies have found that piracy has actually benefited movie profits. For a movie worker this is a controversial stance to take, but rather than back off, Alexander only seems motivated to continue her abrasive approach.

In new comments Alexander takes aim at Hollywood, this time referencing the recent leak of The Expendables 3. She doesn’t condone the leak, but instead looks at possible reasons why it ended up online.

“The piracy issue makes me want to tear my hair out at times. I do not understand how so many of my filmmaker colleagues have bought into this MPAA propaganda. Recently these think tanks and organizations have popped up which are not officially associated with the MPAA, but definitely on their payroll,” Alexander begins.

“But okay, you want to be mad at the kid in Sweden or Australia for uploading your movie? Go for it. Oh wait, in cases like Expendables 3 it’s actually someone here in Hollywood leaking it,” she notes.

The idea that The Expendables 3 leaked directly from Hollywood is not new. Pristine copies like these simply aren’t available on the streets unless an insider has had a hand in it somehow, whether that interaction was intentional or otherwise.

In some instances the motivation to leak, Alexander suggests, could be borne out of a desire to get even. Assistants to the higher-ups are often treated badly, so more consideration should be given to what they might do in return, the director notes.

“It’s kind of like going to a restaurant and thinking twice about insulting the waiter or busboy because you’re afraid of what they’ll put in the food before they bring it back,” Alexander explains.

“Imagine those famously abusive directors, producers or stars (#notall….) having to tone down the abuse, otherwise LOUD EVENT MOVIE # 5 will show up on The Pirate Bay with a little note that says: ‘Don’t bother seeing this in the theater. Everybody above the line was a monster to us’.”

The thought that leaks might happen as a type of personal revenge is in itself the stuff of a Hollywood plot. However, just as it’s unlikely that a story about a movie leak would ever make the silver screen, Hollywood insiders involved in them also tend to escape criticism.

In fact, history shows us that the *actual* leakers, whether that’s an assistant with a grudge or otherwise, are rarely – if ever – paraded around in public as criminals. That honor is usually reserved for the first uploaders and/or their ‘pirate’ allies. Still, Alexander feels it would be wise to keep those close to home in a good frame of mind.

“Maybe the MPAA should drop some of their $$ on PSAs about the danger of abusing assistants: ‘If you kick me everyday, your film will land on Pirate Bay’,” she warns.

Finally, in a move likely to further annoy the Hollywood brass, Alexander presents a “hypothetical” mechanism through which abused assistants could beat the bullies.

“I’m not suggesting anything, but hypothetically, if there were an anonymous address people could send not-yet-released movie DVDs to, so someone else could upload them without a chance of it being backtracked to the source, then a whole bunch of abused and mistreated assistants wouldn’t be defenseless anymore,” she concludes.

Due to the hugely controversial nature of her comments its difficult to judge how serious Alexander is with her suggestions. But, whatever the case, it’s safe to say that she’s one of a kind and likely to continue rocking the boat in future.

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

Sunde’s destination was Västervik Norra, the prison allocated to him following the finalizing of his jail sentence in 2012.

The first few days and weeks of Sunde’s imprisonment went silently under the media radar, but by the end of June the former Pirate Bay spokesman was making his voice heard on his prison conditions.

Sunde has been both vegetarian and vegan, a dietary choice that has proven difficult during his incarceration. In a letter to authorities he complained that due to his needs not being met, his weight had plummeted 11 pounds (5kgs) in just four weeks.

It’s not clear whether that complaint resulted in any positive action, but just a month later Sunde is making his displeasure known once more, this time over his religious rights.

Four years ago a group of self-confessed pirates began a mission to have their beliefs recognized as a religion in Sweden. The Church of Kopimism – which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – eventually prevailed and in 2012 was officially approved by the authorities.

Just recently Sunde tried to exercise his right to meet with a representative of his chosen religion, but was met with prison red tape in response.

“The board of spiritual care (NAV) doesn’t have any representative for the Kopimist faith with whom they cooperate and therefore the Prison and Probation Service should provide permission for electronic contact with representatives from the Kopimist faith to believers,” Sunde wrote in his letter to authorities.

Whether this complaint will result in physical or even virtual access to a Kopimist priest is not yet clear. However, since Kopimism is an official religion, the authorities may have little choice but to comply. This throws up an interesting privacy-related question that Sunde himself mused over some two-and-a-half years ago.

“In some religions…there’s a Seal of Confession – which means that when you talk to a priest in the congregation, the priest has to keep what you say confidential. This is respected in some countries as law, where the courts can not make the priest testify against the individual,” Sunde said in 2012.

“This is probably the thing that I love the most with Kopimism as a religion – we can have yet another form of P2P communication – Priest2Priest. With no legal right for anyone to listen in to the conversation perhaps.”

It seems highly unlikely that Sunde will be allowed an online “encrypted confession” with a Kopimism “priest” anytime soon, but The Church of Kopimism’s legal status could throw up some headaches and dilemmas for the authorities as they try to process Peter’s complaint.

Not that he intended that, of course.

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