A man caught sharing dozens of music tracks on the Internet who initially collected a tiny fine had his case go to appeal. The end result was a bad one. The 26 year-old from Sweden had previously been monitored sharing 44 tracks via a Direct Connect sharing hub during the summer of 2009. He later [...]
A 58-year-old grandmother who earlier this month became the first person to be convicted of criminal file-sharing offenses in Scotland, has been handed three years probation. The grandmother and auxiliary nurse, who confessed to making available music files during her participation on a Direct Connect sharing hub, will also have to attend compulsory therapy sessions.
An IFPI-affiliated anti-piracy group has announced that it has gathered evidence on dozens of file-sharers and will shortly hand it to the police. The group says it will hand over the results of its investigation into large scale file-sharers to the authorities this month and warns that the law allows those convicted to be jailed for up to 4 years.
Since early February there have been nine raids against file-sharers across Sweden. Those in the spotlight were targeted because they shared relatively large amounts of music on small file-sharing networks. But were these people really a major threat to the music industry or are the millions sharing on BitTorrent proving too hard a target?
The Finnish Pirate Party has condemned a massive claim for damages against the operator of a file-sharing hub. The individual is facing a claim of 3.6m euros ($5.4m) from an anti-piracy group, this despite claims that there is no evidence of any specific infringements, merely high bandwidth usage on the individual’s ISP account.
Hackers have taken revenge on the music industry after Romania’s first convicted file-sharer was given a heavy fine. The industry said they had selected the individual at random, but hackers responded rather less randomly by causing the music industry website to blocked as malicious by both Google and Firefox.
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