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 went to the District Court for that offense and was fined 2,000 kronor (apprx $300).

In its reasoning the Court found that the offense was very minor and had not led to any economic loss to the plaintiffs in the case – the four big music labels.

However, the prosecutor did not agree. He felt that in light of the earlier conviction of the Pirate Bay founders, the man should face a heavier sentence, even prison, and insisted on the case going to appeal.

That appeal has now been heard and for the 26 year-old things didn’t go well.

The Court of Appeal found that although the man’s initial sharing was small, it created a significant risk of music being spread further. The Court did acknowledge that the man had no aggravating financial motive so ruled out prison but handed down a larger fine.

The original fine was boosted from 2,000 kronor (apprx $300) to 13,000 kronor (apprx $2000), more than 6 times the original amount.

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Muir, an auxiliary nurse, was said to have amassed a collection of media including some 7,493 music files and 24,243 karaoke files which she made available via an unnamed Direct Connect hub. Sources at the BPI and IFPI, who conducted the initial investigation into Muir’s activities, placed a ‘market value’ on her collection of £54,792.

Following Muir’s conviction, Ayr Sheriff Court deferred sentencing in order to obtain a psychological report following claims that Muir suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a condition which causes her to hoard, in this case music files.

Today the decision on sentencing was handed down.

The court Sheriff stated he had been advised by the crown that it was the first case of its
kind to be heard in the country.

Muir had faced 10 criminal charges but pleaded guilty to only one of sharing music but
“not to any extent”.

“Ms Muir did not make any money. What she did was not commercial,” said the Sheriff. “She is a first offender so imprisonment would not be beneficial.”

Muir was put on probation for 3 years and ordered to attend mandatory cognitive therapy treatment sessions for her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She will return to court Tuesday 30th August for a probation report.

“It is indicative of the concern felt for Ms Muir that the Court considered reports from three different experts regarding her mental health,” David Cook from Burrows Bussin Solicitors told TorrentFreak. “Although the psychological treatment sessions that she is obliged to attend will probably be of benefit to her, the entry on her criminal record will definitely not be.”

Cook, whose law firm previously successfully defended a 17-year-old alleged uploader to the now-defunct music tracker OiNK, and a 56-year-old administrator of the BitTorrent forum, FileSoup, says that IFPI and BPI have again targeted someone with little chance of adequately defending complex and time-consuming allegations.

“Alarmingly, this was not a commercial enterprise and Muir was not alleged to have made any money from these offences. She must be considered to have minimal culpability compared to others in the file-sharing chain. Yet again, the industry have chosen to pursue someone remarkable only by virtue of their vulnerability,” Cook concludes.

Today’s sentencing is the final chapter in a case which stretches back more than 3 years. The initial investigation into Muir’s activities began in late 2007/early 2008 and was carried out by the BPI and IFPI. Their evidence and a formal complaint was handed over to Strathclyde police, who later obtained a search warrant to seize evidence in raid against Muir’s address in June 2008.

As was revealed in her trial, Muir had to “make available” many thousands of tracks in order to gain enough status to be allowed access to the Direct Connect hub in question. The same would be true of the music industry investigators. It is perhaps food for thought that the some of the very files made available within the sharing hub – including those shared by Muir – were actually supplied by the music industry.

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

One of those methods is known as Direct Connect, a hub-based ‘shared folder’ type system. Direct Connect hubs are more difficult to access than regular torrent sites but once in, users tend to share their entire collections, be they music or movie based. The index of all this material is shared between the users of the hub to show what is available and files can be accessed whenever the ‘owner’ of them is online. They can prove an absolute gold mine of data.

Unfortunately, as some users of Direct Connect in Sweden have discovered in recent months, proving large scale infringement against them is much easier than with BitTorrent. This has led to a number of arrests.

While Sweden has long been considered a relative hotbed for Direct Connect hubs, according to AIMR (Asociatia Industriei Muzicale din Romania) – Romania’s answer to the RIAA – their country is leading the world when it comes to Direct Connect.

According to information just released, this month parent group IFPI monitored a total of 913 active active hubs in Romania. In second place came Italy with 526, ahead of France, Russia, Hungary, Sweden, Finland and Poland. The United States came in at 10th place with just 143.

AIMR says that Romanian Direct Connect hubs have around 75,000 users at any one time, peaking to around 100,000 in the evenings and at the weekends. While these numbers may seems fairly low, the amounts being shared aren’t, with AIMR reporting that around 17,000 TB of data is being made available.

Since users generally only get hub access if they are prepared to offer media to the pool themselves, it means that nearly everyone is a significant provider of music and movies and therefore quite a big target for anti-piracy groups, especially when compared to BitTorrent users.

To this end, following an investigation in June, AIMR said it collected evidence against 40 ‘large scale’ users of Direct Connect hubs. In AIMR terms, this means people sharing more than 5,000 music tracks.

“In general, this means those who have shared more than 20 gigabytes of music, who have a constant presence online and are repeat users,” said AIMR’s Valeria Constantine in a statement.

“We identify them by IP address and then go to the police and each ISP to trace them to their homes. If it is proven that they uploaded music illegally then court proceedings can be initiated,” she added. “The whole process can take over a year.”

AIMR says it will send its evidence to the Fraud Investigation Service divisions of several police departments during July.

For those convicted of breaches of Art. 139, Legea Nr. 8/ 1996 (Article 139, Law no. 8 of 1996), there is a potential for harsh penalties – a maximum of 4 years in jail – but it’s unlikely anyone will be punished to that extent.

Last year saw the first case against a Romanian music file-sharer ending in the accused having to pay compensation of around $3,000 to AIMR. A second case this year ended in a similar manner.

AIMR hasn’t always successfully followed up on its anti-piracy warnings though. Following fears that The Pirate Bay might disappear after being bought by Hans Pandeya’s Global Gaming Factory, a complete copy of the site’s databases appeared online. BTArena created a clone of The Pirate Bay and was immediately threatened by AIMR with legal action. That site remains online today.

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

Five different locations including Gothenburg, Docksta, Handen and Upplands Väsby were targeted, resulting in the arrest of a 28 year-old man believed to be a Direct Connect hub operator. Several others, all accused of copyright infringement offenses carried out via the hub, were questioned and had their equipment confiscated.

At the end of last week the police conducted more raids, targeting the alleged operator of a Direct Connect hub in Motala and a user in Örebro who reportedly later admitted making available 6,500 tracks via the hub.

Two days ago the police struck again, this time against an individual in Ronneby suspected of sharing around 6,000 tracks via a hub. According to the police, there is now an investigation underway against a university network.

Yesterday saw continued action with the ninth raid in little over a week. This time the location was Kista where the police seized a computer and questioned an individual who allegedly admitted making available around 7,500 files.

These raids throw up an interesting question.

While BitTorrent users could be sharing a limited amount of material with tens of thousands of others in a very public and open setting, the relatively reclusive DC user is admittedly often sharing a lot but within a very much user-limited environment. One could argue that the average DC user contributes far less when it comes to the spreading of copyright material.

But as we have learned, unlike their BitTorrent counterparts they are much more at risk of receiving a visit from the police. So why is that?

File-sharing researcher Daniel Westman told NT that proving mass infringement in order to get the police involved is difficult with BitTorrent, but with Direct Connect it’s a much more simple affair.

“The DC technology allows the police to see everything that the user makes available and there may be thousands of files,” he explains.

Furthermore, for prosecutors to be interested in these cases there will need to be hard evidence available. Unlike in some civil cases, an IP-address and a few spreadsheets isn’t going to be enough.

“The judgments we’ve seen so far also show that it is not enough to simply track a particular subscriber, but you will probably have to also do a search and examination of his computer,” says Westman.

“Conducting a search requires a certain seriousness of crime and that severity can be difficult to prove with BitTorrent,” he concludes.

Thus far, no Swedish BitTorrent user has attracted the attention of the police but although IFPI lawyer Magnus Mårtensson accepts that getting evidence against BitTorrent users is more complicated, he says it’s not impossible.

“We will act even against users of BitTorrent in the future. We are looking right now on how best to collect evidence against BitTorrent users,” he explained.

In the meantime, actions against DC users are likely to continue, with Henrik Rasmusson at the Prosecutors Office promising more raids in “winter and spring.”

Ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde says that some good will come out of these raids, as people become more interested in sharing mechanisms that move away from small private groups, and on to those enabling sharing with everyone on the Internet.

“They do not realize it, but they are only driving more people to The Pirate Bay,” he concludes.

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

The claim, which originates from 2007, comes from Finnish anti-piracy group CIAPC (Copyright Information & Anti-Piracy Centre) and is leveled at the operator of a hub known as BAWD Rinkeli. The man, who lives in Espoo, Finland, says that he set up the server to chat with other Internet users and no copyright material ever passed through the hub.

The anti-piracy group, which is working on behalf of Teosto (a performance rights organization that collects royalties on behalf of songwriters and composers in Finland) and IFPI, is demanding huge compensation direct from the 34 year old.

“With such extreme demands the antipirates do not even intend to get any money”, the Pirate Party told Piraattiliitto: “Their only intention is to destroy the life of the accused so that he will serve as a warning example for others.”

The Pirate Party goes on to say that the anti-piracy group has not been able to provide any evidence of wrong-doing via the hub. Instead they point to the man’s large bandwidth consumption on his private broadband connection as “evidence” of infringement.

“CIAPC bases its claims solely on the bandwidth consumption of the accused. They have not been able to point out any specific infringements,” says the Party. “With such information, how can they even claim to have suffered millions in losses when the international scientific community has not been able to show any such losses even after a much more careful analysis?”

The leader of the Party, Pasi Palmulehto, says that he has personal experience of running a Direct Connect hub and notes that evidence of bandwidth consumption alone means nothing. The man’s claimed bandwidth utilization of 1 Mbit/s is easily achieved by social communications alone, says Palmulehto.

No file-sharing is carried out directly from a Direct Connect hub, which in very basic terms operate in a similar way to a torrent site, in that any file-sharing activity would be carried out from user to user. All Direct Connect hubs operate in this fashion, with users making folders and their contents available to other users for sharing. Although it is possible for a hub operator to also share files, this is denied.

“No one can claim compensation for what others have done,” the man told Finnish media.

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

The copyright to those files was held by members of Uniunea Productorilor de Fonograme din România (UPFR) – a music industry outfit much like the RIAA.

UPFR denies they took the large amount the user was sharing into consideration when pursuing the case, but when the individual was ordered to pay the equivalent of a $4,100 fine this week, it had clearly been taken into account. At the end of 2008, the average monthly income in Romania was just $450.

These symbolic prosecutions have become the hallmark of the music industry and it’s hoped this case will have a deterrent effect on the country’s hundreds of thousands of file-sharers, but that seems unlikely. The same approach hasn’t worked elsewhere and although this lone case has dragged on for 2 years already, it will be quickly forgotten.

Those annoyed at the handing down of a heavy fine took rather less time to issue their punishment. In common with similar traditions all over the world, the UPFR music industry website was targeted by hackers in a revenge attack. It’s not clear exactly what they did to it, but their actions caused the domain to become blocked as a malicious site by both Google and Firefox, which seems kinda fitting.

thanks bssv/cigraphics

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