A long-running dispute over whether an ISP can be forced to hand over the details of one of its customers to an anti-piracy group is now with the EU after courts in Sweden couldn’t decide. Now the EU’s Advocate General has delivered his assessment which is being described as “a victory for freedom” by the Pirate Party’s MEP. But that, according to the Advocate General, all depends on ISPs’ intentions when they store information on their subscribers.
This week an operation led by a powerful anti-piracy group closed down a 6-year-old BitTorrent tracker. The site had already been targeted following the verdict in the original Pirate Bay trial, but had quickly announced their intentions to go 100% legal. This week, however, people said to be behind the site were arrested. Most surprisingly, one of them was the owner of the company supplying them bandwidth.
Anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån say police have arrested “an elite pirate” in Sweden. The man in his thirties is claimed to be an administrator of multiple ‘Scene’ servers carrying as many as 7,000 movies to which around 100 people had access. The man is said to have denied the charges but the prosecutor says his crimes could earn him a jail sentence.
Swebits, one of Sweden’s largest BitTorrent communities, has ceased its activities with immediate effect. While the site’s founders cite a DDoS attack, hardware problems and a lack of donations as the reason for the closure, the Swedish authorities and local anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyran link it to the arrest of a prominent uploader a few days ago.
Acting on information provided by an anti-piracy group, Swedish police have carried out raids and taken down at least one warez scene topsite. Items seized include at least a dozen computers and servers containing a conservative 200 terabytes of media, mainly Hollywood movies. As other sites get sucked into the fallout, the recriminations and finger-pointing have begun.
Sweden’s highest court has rejected an application by an anti-piracy group which would force an ISP to hand over the identity of a file-sharing site operator. Antipiratbyrån wants TeliaSonera to reveal who is behind the SweTorrents BitTorrent tracker but the ISP has refused and taken its case all the way to the Supreme Court. That Court has now decided that the final decision lies with the European Court.
Antipiratbyrån (Anti-Piracy Bureau, APB) regularly makes headlines for its work against file-sharers in Sweden. Now, APB lawyer Sara Lindbäck has given an interview where she speaks about piracy, the MPAA, The Pirate Bay, and the level of secrecy APB adopts to protect those working for it. This group manages to conduct its business with zero turnover and not a single employee (or snitch) on the books.
