For Swepiracy, a private BitTorrent tracker founded in 2006, it’s now too late. On Thursday, police in Sweden and the Netherlands swooped on the 30,000 member site after it was accused by the authorities of being one of the most important locations when it comes to illegally distributing Swedish films.

Anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån said that the tracker’s operators had ignored warnings to close down and instead took measures to protect themselves. The site’s servers were in the Netherlands, but police there assisted their Swedish counterparts and took the site down.

This is not the first time that Swepiracy has been taken offline. Following a similar torrent site crackdown following the “guilty” verdict in the Pirate Bay trial in April 2009, Swepiracy disappeared for a few weeks, but reappeared before the month was out.

Now, Antipiratbyrån say they will take the operators of Swepiracy to court and seek damages “according to The Pirate Bay model.” They also warn that other sites – including The Internationals (which was recently closed down only to later reappear) and famous private tracker Scene Access – are next if they don’t comply.

Also this week, police in Gothenburg carried out a raid against an individual they say is suspected of widespread file-sharing on The Pirate Bay and another local site, Shareitall. The man denied the charges and was subsequently released.

Other Swedish-based sites have already had enough. This week the admins of eBook-focused site Bibliotik.org closed down the site of their own free will.

“Bibliotik has shutdown all operations. We are no longer able to assume the risks involved. The staff would like to apologize for the sudden (but necessary) decision and thank everyone that participated and made Bibliotik such a great place for so long. We love you guys!” they said in an announcement.

Earlier this week, Sweden’s number 2 torrent site Tankafetast shut down after its operators decided that enough was enough. At the time, Antipiratbyran confirmed they had threatened the site with legal action. However, just days later, the site has changed owners and is now back online.

Update March 1st: Bibliotik say they are moving to a new datacenter and will soon be back online

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

This first test of IPRED was designed to get the personal identifying details of a subscriber who allegedly stored more than 2000 audio books on his server, 27 of which breached the publishers’ copyrights.

In June 2009 the court ordered ISP ePhone to hand over the personal details of the individual. However, ePhone protested and took the case to the court of appeal which overturned the decision and sent the case to the Supreme Court.

So could IPRED, the law created to enable copyright holders to more easily chase down copyright infringers, be used for its intended purpose? Sweden’s Supreme Court said that only the European Court of Justice could decide. Yesterday, Advocate General Niilo Jääskinen gave his advice on the matter and it was a victory for privacy which could deliver a fatal blow to IPRED, but one to which Internet service providers hold the key.

Jääskinen’s statement concluded that while no EU Directive ­ exists which prevents copyright owners requesting personal information on file-sharers from ISPs under IPRED, the data being stored by ISPs must have originally been stored for the purpose in order to be subsequently released.

“It is a victory for freedom. Although it is difficult to interpret, it is very good news,” says Christian Engstrom, MEP for the Pirate Party. “Internet service providers collect customer data to manage their operations, not to bust suspected file sharers as the copyright mafia want them to do.”

But speaking with Expressen, pro-copyright advocate Per Strömbäck says that the Supreme Court asked the ECJ only one question – Is there any conflict between the EU data retention directive and the Swedish IPRED-law? – and the response to that was a clear “no”. Further discussion on the reasons why data was originally stored was an error by the Advocate General, he believes.

Pirate Party’s Engstrom says the advice by the Advocate will mean that it will still be OK for the ISPs to disclose information to police and prosecutors in criminal cases, just not to private companies, adding that “the justice system has more important ­ things to do than to track down teenagers who listen to music.”

Indeed, ePhone’s original objection to IPRED was that it would give surveillance powers to private companies where that should be an issue for the police, so they will be pleased with the advice. Needless to say, ePhone did not store customer information for the purposes of handing it over to Antipiratbyrån.

But for now, as the advice from the Advocate General is digested by the ECJ before heading back to Sweden’s Supreme Court, increasingly Antipiratbyrån are doing just fine without help from IPRED. By conducting their activities alongside the police – who already have the necessary powers to get information from ISPs – they are getting the information they want anyway, just in other ways.

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

One Swedish site called TTi (otherwise known as The Internationals) had been running since 2005 relatively trouble-free but decided that  enough was enough.

“TTi will only concentrate on bands/artists that want to spread their material on the Internet and are waiting for a record contract,” TTi staff announced.

Raids against TTi took place this week in two locations, Växjö and Borås, and are said to have resulted in the arrest of two people and the seizure of three servers including the site’s tracker and another housing community data. While the identity of the man arrested in Borås hasn’t yet been revealed, the individual from Växjö has.

Patrik Lagerman is the owner of web-hosting outfit Patrikweb, a company which gained worldwide attention for becoming involved in bandwidth supply to The Pirate Bay after a court injunction cut off its supplies in August 2009.

It appears that Lagerman was sucked into this current case in December last year when he received a call from Antipiratbyrån who asked him to stop supplying bandwidth to TTi.

“I said I wanted to see a court order to shut down the client,” said Lagerman, the same response he gave to Antipiratbyrån in 2009 when they asked him to cut off Pirate Bay’s supplies.

Then everything went quiet for nearly a year, until the silence was broken this week.

On Tuesday morning at 06:30, Lagerman was woken by five police officers, arrested, and taken for questioning which lasted several hours. But during the evening he was back online and venting his anger among the web-hosting community.

“Trying to prosecute the hosting provider for assisting [in infringement] shows just how stupid they are,” said Lagerman, while highlighting that the same prosecutor is also behind the unsettling case of a 15-year-old file-sharer.

“Right now, just wait and see what happens, but police and prosecutors are so fucking grossly incompetent that handling things correctly or in a good way does not work with them,” Lagerman added. “Ten cops to get 3 servers, if anything it should be a crime to manage resources like this.”

Lagerman believes that as an ISP and without being served with a court order, the law is on his side, even when hosting a site like TTi.

“It is not my responsibility to interpret and decide if something is legal or not, I do not even have a legal right to do so. Swedish law is also clear, you are always innocent until the court has spoken, and a ruling is final.

“For this basic principle you can not be prosecuted for abetting a crime before the main offense is pending before the court establishing that there even is a crime,” he added.

Lagerman says he will now pursue Antipiratbyrån for falsely reporting him for a crime he didn’t commit and on the basis that they say he is involved in TTi’s ‘crimes’, extends the same principle to the police and prosecutor.

“The prosecutor in the case is now guilty of aiding and abetting [a false accusation from Antipiratbyrån] and the police are also guilty of aiding and abetting a false accusation,” he concludes.

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

Yesterday, APB’s Henrik Pontén announced that following an investigation by his organization, last Friday police swooped on a man they believe to be a significant player in the so-called warez Scene.

“He is one of the elite pirates,” Pontén said. “It is good that the police have a broad focus in their work and can act against the advanced and illegal sources of BitTorrent users.”

The man, who is said to be around 30 years old, was arrested in the small city of Gävle by local police and specialists from Sweden’s anti-piracy unit.

“It was a major crackdown,” said Paul Pintér, Coordinator at the Intellectual Property Crime Department at Stockholm police.

Initial reports claimed that the man was the administrator of servers known in the Scene as ATHF which are said to host as many as 8,300 movies, TV shows and games. While access to the servers was naturally exclusive (APB reports that around 100 people had access), it is from servers like these that the wider file-sharing community obtains much of its material.

Frederick Ingblad from the Prosecutors Office said that the early allegations against the man “had been strengthened” following the examination of seized computer hardware.

“There were nearly 7000 films stored,” Ingblad said, adding that many films had been distributed either before or shortly after their premiere.

“In this case the offense involves so many movies that conviction could result in a prison sentence,” Ingblad added.

Throughout his interview the man is believed to have denied the charges.

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

But yesterday, instead of being welcomed by the usual list of freshly uploaded content, visitors to Swebits found an unexpected and ominous message posted on the site’s homepage.

“As we all know everything has a beginning and an end. This is the end of Swebits. During the last day there has been a lot of speculation, some with hope and some with less hope,” Swebits staff informed the site’s users.

The notice went on to explain that the site had suffered a major DDoS attack and hardware failure last weekend, problems that are too time consuming and costly to fix. In addition, the site had a lack of donations recently, which according to the staff is a signal that the users don’t want the site to survive.

“It’s been a pleasure to be a part of Swebits and being able to influence Sweden’s best tracker. We know that it will be hard to fill the void that Swebits will leave after closing, but it isn’t impossible to replace it. Take care, whatever happens in the future,” they add.

However, this official message doesn’t take away all the speculation among users. Indeed, there appears to be an additional motive ignored by the announcements.

Today, the Swedish authorities and local anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyran revealed that someone close to the site was arrested last week. The 25-year old man, who allegedly was a major uploader to Swebits, had his house raided and was later arrested by the police.

The man reportedly uploaded more than 1000 films to the site during a two week period last fall, and the authorities say he confessed his involvement during interrogations. The man is portrayed by the authorities as a central figure in the community and they link the closure of the site to his arrest.

The number of films the man allegedly shared in just two weeks appears to be unrealistically high, but the prosecution seem confident in that claim. “This person is suspected of having made the original uploads and then sharing out the works via torrent files,” prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson commented.

“Previously, we have focused us on the ‘scene, but now we have directed our focus to individual BitTorrent users,” said Henrik Ponten of Antipiratbyran in a comment. Interestingly enough the arrested man was ‘outed’ by the scene in the past, which might have tipped off the anti-piracy outfit.

This is not the first time that Swebits has shut down. In 2008 the site’s users were also led to believe that the site had ceased operating, but at the time it was a stunt to promote the revamped design that launched hours later.

This time, however, all signs suggest that Swebits wont be returning anytime soon, not in its current form at least. What role the arrest played in the shutdown is impossible to say without an official confirmation, but we have to assume that it caused concerns among the site’s staff members.

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

Following a lengthy investigation by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, during the last 48 hours Swedish police acted on their evidence and moved in on at least one ‘topsite’.

The site, which supposedly carried between 200 and 250 terabytes of media, was known as ‘Devil’. During the raids police seized a dozen servers and other computers and detained one person.

The individual, who is believed to have been handed over to Antipiratbyrån for questioning, is accused of being the operator of ‘Devil’. He is blamed for the distribution of “tens of thousands” of mainly Hollywood movies.

In what appeared to be a security response to news of the bust, other topsites started going down in Sweden and at least one other major European country.

Elements of two other topsites with links to ‘Devil’ known as Secu and Tomte (250 terabytes combined) have also been affected but so as not to compromise our sources, we will refrain from going into further detail as to why at this stage.

Suffice to say that some fairly important movie release groups (particularly Swedish ones) were connected to the sites and their activities will have been disrupted, at least temporarily.

Within the Scene the recriminations have begun, with fingers pointed at individuals and groups who are suspected of having caused the security lapse which led to the busts. Not unexpectedly, the accusations appear to be focused on Scene members who are also connected with P2P sharing groups, a frowned upon activity but one that is nevertheless widespread.

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

Later that year the Court announced its decision in favor of the anti-piracy group and ordered TeliaSonera to hand over the personal details of the person alleged to be behind the SweTorrents tracker.

TeliaSonera launched an appeal against the decision but in May 2010 the Court of Appeal upheld the District Court’s ruling. Failure to comply with this decision would result in a 750,000 kronor ($109,000) fine. Nevertheless, TeliaSonera were not prepared to accept the decision and immediately appealed and took the case to the highest court in the land.

Sweden’s Supreme Court has now ruled that the final decision in the case lies with the European Court in Luxembourg, a decision that might take several years to arrive.

The root of the complexity in this case lies with Sweden’s IPRED legislation. Both Antipiratbyrån and the lower courts believe that ISPs have an obligation to hand over to rightsholders identities of customers implicated in copyright infringement cases.

On the other hand, TeliaSonera insists that all ISPs have a long-standing and fundamental obligation to protect customer privacy which precedes the introduction of IPRED, while noting conflicts between IPRED and the EU data retention directive which has not yet been implemented in Swedish law.

The introduction of IPRED was expected to make it easier to track down file-sharers, but thus far the opposite is true at some ISPs. Since there is nothing in the country’s Electronic Communications Law that instructs ISPs to store information about the IP addresses they allocate to their customers, some ISPs have stopped storing this data to protect the privacy of their customers.

The decision by the European Court in the SweTorrents case is likely to be some time coming, and in the meantime ISPs will be free to continue deleting data, at least until the data-retention directive ‘loophole’ is closed.

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

Indeed, the now-disbanded Piratbyrån (Piracy Bureau) was founded to counter Antipiratbyrån’s anti-piracy message, something completed on an epic scale with their most famous creation – The Pirate Bay.

Like many anti-piracy groups, APB has lawyers at the helm and few are more famous than Henrik Pontén, a man loved so much in pirate circles that he became officially renamed by admirers.

But not even the seemingly ubiquitous Pirate Pontén can do all the work on his own. In an interview, APB lawyer Sara Lindbäck has been revealing a little more about the organization and its work against file-sharing in Sweden.

Naturally, one of the first subjects covered was the recently completed appeal of The Pirate Bay founders. The decision in the appeal will be handed down later this month, but how does Lindbäck feel it will go?

“What we see is that The Pirate Bay has been convicted in several other countries around Europe,” she explains. “I would be surprised if they are not convicted in Sweden.”

However, Lindbäck cautions that there is a problem with infringements on the web because even with verdicts in hand, they still carry on.

“It is a dilemma with Internet crime that I believe we must review,” she adds.

APB has very close ties with Hollywood and shares their desire for total Pirate Bay destruction, but while Lindbäck admits that the entities share information, she refuses to comment when asked if APB is funded by the studios.

But the secrecy doesn’t stop there. Lindbäck also refuses to reveal how many people work for APB or anything about their finances. Indeed, according to Nyteknik.se, APB is simply a business association, which for tax purposes has a turnover of zero and no employees.

Lindbäck says that it is necessary to maintain a level of secrecy over APB’s operations in order to protect those working for it.

“I have not been exposed to the same [amount of abuse] as my colleague Henrik Pontén,” she reveals. Other than hate-mail, she wouldn’t be drawn further on the kind of things people do to get under APB’s skin in case that encourages more attacks.

No one would dispute that in Sweden, APB are a deeply unpopular group, perhaps because they work against such a large proportion of a population which has come to believe that file-sharing is a fundamental right.

“In Sweden, 1.1 million people constantly file-share pirated movies,” Lindbäck explains.

In a country of just over 9.2 million, that’s one potential enemy in every crowd of ten people nationwide, but move into the city with a group of men with their teens a decade behind them, things get worse.

“The typical illegal file sharer is a 30-year-old urban man with a slightly higher salary than average,” says Lindbäck.

But it’s not just APB’s general anti-piracy stance that has opponents so angry, its techniques have generated quite a lot of controversy too. While it’s known that APB has informers on file-sharing sites, there have been allegations that not all of them are willing.

A source who previously worked in law enforcement claimed earlier this year that APB had been tracking down teenage file-sharers and threatening them with reprisals unless they snitch on their friends and hand over information on the sites they use. It’s also been claimed that APB coerced FTP passwords out of server users in order to conduct their investigations.

“There is no basis to these claims,” Lindbäck insists. “None of the complaints have led anywhere.”

With no end in site to either The Pirate Bay, the Scene, or file-sharing in general, the work of Antipiratbyrån will continue for the foreseeable future. Expect to hear lots more from them, but don’t expect much more transparency.

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

In the ongoing Internet conflict between file-sharers and pro-copyright groups, there are many fighting fronts. While much diplomatic pressure is exerted to create new laws and tighten up existing ones, other elements are using those laws to take down file-sharing sites and threaten ISPs. On the Internet itself, anti-piracy groups work largely covertly, spying on users and file-sharing sites and services alike, gathering intelligence on a daily basis.

Since it is largely unseen, this type of anti-piracy activity remains somewhat of a mystery. How do the movie and music industries gain access to the most exclusive private trackers and FTP sites? How do they gather evidence on both site operators and site content for months without being detected? Perhaps of even more interest is how they manage to gather personal information on users of those sites.

Antipiratbyrån (APB) regularly make the pages of TorrentFreak since it is one of the most active online anti-piracy groups. It has been effective in its investigations against individual file-sharers and has managed to infiltrate a number of exclusive piracy hangouts. How it did this has largely remained a mystery but according to a report from Sweden, some of that information is being obtained by old fashioned blackmail.

From a source who has previously worked in law enforcement and also in the private sector, news outlet Nyheter24 has now revealed that APB have been tracking down teenage file-sharers and threatening them with reprisals unless they snitch on their friends and hand over information on the sites they use.

Citing a situation which happened a few years ago, the source explains how APB received a tip that people were sharing files via a research institute FTP server. APB allegedly contacted a known file-sharing employee at the location and threatened the individual with reprisals unless they handed over information and helped with their investigation. APB subsequently used the employee’s login to access the server.

APB later threatened to take the case to court unless material on the FTP server was deleted. Fighting back, the research institute threatened to report APB for hacking. In the end a settlement between the two sides was reached in private and no further action was taken.

On a very similar theme, just recently Swedish prosecutor Björn Ericson announced that there would be no investigation into the activities of APB despite allegations that they had gained unauthorized access to another FTP server, this time in the ongoing ePhone case.

“There was not enough concrete information about a specific crime,” concluded Ericson.

While anti-piracy groups and copyright holders aren’t immune to the law, they do work to less strict guidelines than the police do when they conduct an inquiry into a criminal case. Their quest to manipulate individuals through fear is a common strategy.

Last year, representatives from several indie music labels infiltrated a private BitTorrent tracker with the aim of gathering information on both users and admins and using that data to force it to close down. One member, who had uploaded a lot of music to the site, was befriended by the infiltrators and over a period of several months was persuaded to part with sensitive information on site staff and other users. Armed with that information the label workers later revealed themselves to the site’s admin, along with a threat – close down or else. They quickly learned that two can play that game.

With assistance from moderators at other sites, the tracker’s staff used the huge amounts of data they held on the infiltrators, from email addresses through to several pages of IP addresses, to hunt down their adversaries on other sites. There they found the same users happily downloading movies, software and TV shows, along with plenty of incriminating forum posts and in one case, a home address. That address led to a phone number, which led to an unexpected late-night phone call.

Blackmail, it seems, can cut both ways.

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

Soon after IPRED became law in 2009, five book publishers aided by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån handed a request to a local court for information on the owner of an FTP-server that allegedly stored more than 2000 audio books, a couple of dozen of which breached their copyrights.

There was a problem though. The FTP-server was private and password protected so the audio books it contained could never been made available to the general public. Nevertheless, in June 2009 the court ordered ISP ePhone to hand over the details of the person behind the server.

ePhone protested that the publishers who filed the lawsuit had not been able to prove that anyone other than Antipiratbyrån had ever accessed the server which contained 27 allegedly infringing audio books. The court of appeal agreed with ePhone that there was no proof the books had been made available to the public or anyone else for that matter.

That case is now with Sweden’s Supreme Court which has asked the two sides to consider whether it might be necessary to request that the European Court issue a preliminary ruling, but in the meantime something else needed to be cleared up.

If the FTP-server was private, how did Antipiratbyrån ever gain access to it in order to gather the evidence to put its case together? For many onlookers the answer to that question was simple – Antipiratbyrån must have illegally hacked into the server.

However much those in the file-sharing community would love for this to be proven true and Antipiratbyrån’s name dragged through the mud, it seems those hopes are over. Prosecutor Björn Ericson has announced that there will be no investigation into the notorious anti-piracy group despite many allegations made about them to the police.

“We have received reports of intruders. They were unclear so we supplemented them with interviews with those who notified us. But there are ways to get the data and they need not be criminal in nature. There is not enough concrete information about a specific crime,” said Ericson.

So how did Antipiratbyrån get access to the server? In all probability we’ll never know. In arriving at his decision to drop the case, the prosecutor did not ask the anti-piracy group how they gained access. Of course, they had no incentive to tell.

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