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.

On occasion, however, usually as a result of a court case, the veil is lifted and the general public is given a taste of the kind of subterfuge employed by those operating the servers behind The Scene, the so-called ‘Topsites’. A 2012 case in Finland provided one such intriguing example.

It involved a topsite known as Hayabusa / Rainbow (HBR / RBW), which was used by famous movie and TV show release groups including MEDiEVAL and DoNE. The topsite only had about 50 members and was reportedly kept running by just four individuals. How they did so was fascinating.

Three of the men, who worked for a pair of Finnish Internet service providers, were employed in positions that enabled them to not only run but hide the site. The site’s servers were installed by employees of Saunalahti, a company owned by Finnish ISP Elisa. The topsite itself was run from the IP address of a man from Helsinki, who worked for Elisa and had access to their fastest fiber connections.

Then the really clever bit. As employees of Elisa the topsite operators were able to modify the ISP’s network monitoring software in order to hide the existence of their topsite. Unfortunately, however, the police were already on their trail following claims that they had illegally distributed copies of movies including The Bourne Ultimatum, Spiderman 3 and Ratatouille. Despite receiving a timely tip-off, the operators were eventually arrested.

During a 2012 trial at the Espoon District Court the site operators stood trial for copyright infringement offenses. Three were handed suspended jail sentences ranging between four and six months and ordered to pay compensation. A fourth received a fine equivalent to 60 days pay.

That said, things could have been worse. Rightsholders had originally demanded 70,000 euros, so a compensation award of 1,000 euros against the soon-to-be-jailed operators was a relative drop in the ocean. However, the entertainment companies behind the action, headed by anti-piracy group CIAPC/TTVK, aired their dissatisfaction by taking the case to appeal.

This week the Helsinki Court of Appeal handed down its decision and it’s yet more bad news for the site operators. The court increased the amount awarded by the district court from 1,000 euros to 22,000 euros.

“The District Court had sentenced three operators to pay about 1000 euros as compensation for the right holders. The Court of Appeals regarded this as a remarkably low amount of compensation with regard to the specific features of the case,” CIAPC Deputy Director Jaana Pihkala informs TorrentFreak.

Although the amount was considered low, fortunately for the defendants the rightsholders’ claim for more than 72,000 euros was not accepted in its entirety.

“One of the facts that the Court took into consideration as lowering the amount of compensation was that the operators had limited possibilities to control how much the works were copied,” Jaana explains.

The Court of Appeal also said that the claim, which was based on items to be found in the physical domain (DVDs etc), did not directly relate to items which had been electronically created and distributed in the online world. Lower cost of production and distribution meant a lower damages award.

While overturning the District Court’s ruling on compensation, other issues relating to the original sentencing remained untouched as the prison sentences of the defendants were not appealed by the entertainment companies.

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.

The actual situation is nowhere near as bad as some would like to make out, but every now and again something happens to remind us that it is very possible for something nasty to slip through the net.

On February 12, 2013 a new warez group appeared calling themselves MeGaHeRTZ. Their first release was BurnAware Professional v6.0 plus a patch to remove the software’s protection. Over the months that followed the group released a lot of noteworthy products such as SmartFTP, DVDFab, FlashFXP, Incredimail, Traktor and hundreds more, each with the obligatory ‘freebie’ patch.

Tomorrow the group will have been operating for a full nine months and during that time their releases have spread to every corner of the Internet. However, far from merely wanting to do downloaders a favor, MeGaHeRTZ have been playing a little dirty.

Over the weekend a notice spread around the warez scene which detailed how one individual became alarmed by unusual firewall activity after he had installed, ironically, a MeGaHeRTZ release of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Pro.

The problem reportedly came from patch that MeGaHeRTZ supplied with the release which attempted to send out traffic on port 25, a port commonly used to send email. The same individual who found the strange activity then ran the patch through a debugger and to his alarm found that it was harvesting information from the host machine.

The data being gathered from infected machines includes the username, computer name/drive serial obtained from the Windows API, and the host machine’s IP address. This information is then packaged up and sent off to any of three predetermined email addresses, all of which have account names containing some variation of the MeGaHeRTZ group name.

Further tests were carried out on several other MeGaHeRTZ releases and they were all found to carry similar mechanisms for pulling data from host machines and funneling it back to the release group.

Quite what MeGaHeRTZ intend to do with the data is unclear but it appears that as an active release group they are now finished, at least under their current identity. On Saturday the warez scene took action to ‘nuke’ every MeGaHeRTZ release, which means they won’t be allowed to release anymore.

Revealing malware in scene releases is a very unusual occurrence and malicious content is usually added at a later stage by third parties. Still, the damage has now been done. MeGaHeRTZ releases are now all over the Internet and there is nothing that anyone can do to get them back. Avoidance is the only solution now.

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

The site made the news when reporters in Germany were subjected to a criminal complaint by publishers who objected to the site being named.

With that complaint withdrawn, TorBoox indicated they were about to take radical action to shake up the ebook market by hurting Amazon. The idea was quite complex, but essentially involved offering all-you-can-eat books to the public for a flat fee – a Spotify for ebooks with eyes on legitimacy.

However, with 1.2 million ebook downloads per day things couldn’t continue the way they were. TorBoox implemented a paywall and asked users for 3.33 euros per month to try and pay for the servers. Around a third of the site’s users left, but according to the site’s operator things went better than expected.

“Every user had to pay € 10.00 with Paysafecard (which is the minimal amount at the stores). We were in need of about € 500 per month but got much, much more. The money we were in need of we got in a few hours. Ordinary German citizens of any age and background went to the petrol stations and asked for a coupon that has no other imaginable purpose than an illegal one,” TorBoox operator Spiegelbest informs TorrentFreak.

“We could easily have deactivated the monthly payments from the start. Just the newcomers would have contributed much more money than we would have needed for books and servers. The initial payment would have be sufficient for a year long membership – at least. My concept was to spend the money before asking for new payments.”

But while things were taking off, they were also getting out of hand.

“I saw the amounts of money steeply rising to five-digit [euro] amounts from the start. And without a lot of imagination a six-digit number of euros will be reached by the middle of November,” Spiegelbest explains.

“If you look at a currency like Bitcoin you can handle it this way or that way. A steep rise in the value of Bitcoins lately helped to tear down any remaining caution and reluctance. A decent and reasonable ending to all this money accumulation became more and more out of sight.”

Running alongside this somewhat unusual financial crisis was TorBoox’s quest for legitimacy and things weren’t looking good there either.

“We tried to get into contact with ‘Börsenverein’ which is the organization of German Publishers. We tried to keep our titles safe from any other site to have something to offer. For us and for me it would have been okay if the people get their books with a legal low-cost flatrate – I am not illegal by principle. But we were ignored completely,” Spiegelbest reveals.

With too much money at hand and no deal with the publishers, Spiegelbest quit TorBoox as an operator.

What will happen with TorBoox now remains uncertain, but TorrentFreak is informed that the archives of TorBoox have been obtained unknown individuals, possibly members of the warez scene. As a result, sometime during today, November 3, TorBoox’s archives – 43,000 ebooks – will flood onto the Internet for the free-of-charge enjoyment of all. An announcement of some kind is expected to be published on Avaxhome.ws during the evening.

“This archive does not belong to TorBoox. It comes from all the sources surrounding it,” a source close to the forthcoming leak told TorrentFreak.

“Sources go back to the early days of scanning. TorBoox was just like a magnet. If anyone has a right to get the archive it is the poeople having done all the work on it in the last year. But even those people didn’t have access to the archive which is very odd indeed and rather paranoic. The operators themselves did not do much work other than keeping the archive locked away.”

Whether the publishers will consider the above developments as good or bad news is a matter for them, but if Spiegelbest is to be believed there is a real demand for a Spotify-for-books, if it comes at the right price. Food for thought.

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

Today, however, the owner of a file-sharing discussion forum confirmed that his site was actually a pirate honeypot, setup with the aim of gathering otherwise confidential information on uploaders, file-hosts and web companies involved in the piracy ecosystem. Adding insult to injury, that site and the admin’s services have been acquired by a U.S.-based anti-piracy company.

WDF, real name unknown, is the founder of UploaderTalk.com, a web forum designed to attract individuals who like to make money from uploading files to file-hosting sites. Part of the idea is that they join the site and interact with others with similar aims, such as representatives from file-hosting sites touting their affiliate schemes.

UploaderTalk was founded pretty much a year ago today after WDF was banned from a similar but much larger site called WJunction, probably the largest uploader/file-hosting hangout anywhere on the web.

However, WDF wasn’t any old member. After joining up to WJunction in September 2011, WDF later became a moderator then super moderator on the site, meaning that he had access to a lot of private information such as email and IP addresses. The implications for file-hosting sites and uploaders hardly need to be pointed out.

It’s not clear why WDF was eventually removed from WJunction but there was clearly some kind of falling out. Shortly after WDF’s departure around 12 months ago internal leaks of information from WJunction were published on the web, ostensibly from some kind of third party hack.

UploaderTalk reported on these leaks regularly including the November 2012 revelations by Robert King of the StopFileLockers anti-piracy campaign which claimed to contain the identities of WJunction’s owners and backers.

UT, as UploaderTalk became known, was never destined to challenge WJunction as the leading site of its kind. However, in addition to its regular readers, over the past 12 months the site gathered nearly 1,000 fully signed up members of the uploading and file-hosting community. For them today’s announcement will be an unpleasant one.

“UT is now closed. UT was set up for a number of reasons. But mostly to be a sounding board, proof of concept.[.].and to collect data,” WDF said in a statement today.

“That’s right the biggest swerve ever. I, WDF, work for the anti-piracy people! I have collected information on many of you. I collected info on file hosts, web hosts, websites.”

The official announcement from WDF confirmed what many people have suspected for some time – that WDF had been playing on both sides of the fence.

“How is it I was able to protect some sites and people? Because I was working for the other side!” WDF said.

“How is it I knew so many things? Well think about it, I suckered shitloads of you. I built a history, got the trust of some very important people in the warez scene collecting information and data all the time.”

It’s unclear what WDF intends to do with the information obtained so far but for now it has to be presumed that he will be sharing it with his new employer, NukePiracy LLC, a company registered on October 2013 in Nashville, Tennessee.

“So what happens now? I am already working with a different ID, a new persona, and still collecting data. You never know who I will be or where I will turn up. I work for Nuke Piracy now, this is very bad for anyone profiting from piracy,” WDF concludes.

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

Of course, when the Internet took off things changed massively. Free software became available to anyone willing to persevere, not just those with access to a private BBS. Applications for just about any purpose were uploaded to the Internet thick and fast and as a result manufacturers had to think even more about their copy protection mechanisms.

But while software houses were applying anti-piracy measures to their products, plenty of groups were at work stripping them out and sharing DRM-free versions with close friends and associates online. Inevitably though, so-called “cracked” software leaked out, meaning that pretty much everyone could gain access to zero cost software, often on the day of release – 0day as it’s known.

Created way back in 1999, one such group was LineZer0. More commonly known by the characters Lz0, the group has operated for an incredible 14 years and to say they have been prolific would be a massive understatement.

During that time Lz0 has delivered an incredible 30,000 software and games releases for desktop machines and handhelds (including iPhone and iPad), each designed to be enjoyed only by the reclusive ‘warez’ scene.

“We do not wish for our releases to be widely spread across web boards, P2P networks and the like. While we do know that occurs we strongly urge people to not share these titles at such places,” Lz0 stated in their releases. Few took any notice.

Typing the term ‘Lz0′ into any search engine or torrent site reveals endless streams of cracked software from hundreds of companies, for anyone to download and enjoy, for free. But for Lz0 and their countless fans, the final curtain came down prematurely yesterday.

Over the weekend someone in the warez scene released information that was obtained as part of a security breach against Lz0 in 2009. While assuring people that much of the data was related to closed sites and individuals who have since left the piracy scene, Lz0 felt it had no option other than to close down the group and retire completely.

“We’ve shared a long and fun road, and we’re sad that this is how it ends,” Lz0 said in a statement.

The group confirmed that the names Lz0 and Lz0PDA will be put completely to rest – no one will ever be able to genuinely use those tags again. Additionally, hundreds of software companies will be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief, at least until other groups take up the slack. But annoying companies was never LzO’s stated aim.

“Our releases are made to make sure that the end-user is able to fully test a title before going into a purchase as well as give the end-user an opportunity to make backup copies of titles he or she already owns,” the group said. “Please do respect our stance on this and make sure that you buy the required licenses upon deciding to buy the product. Respect the software authors that have put time, money and effort into creating the title you now have in your hand.”

Finally, for some the joy of cracked software was not the tools themselves, but the entertainment value of the additional items groups like Lz0 packaged with their releases. For many – piracy dramas aside – the kind of music and graphics illustrated below provided the most intoxicating mix.

Lz0: 1999-2013

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