In 2005, an associate of TorrentSpy, Robert Anderson, ‘changed sides’ after an internal dispute and decided to work with the MPAA instead, gathering evidence against the BitTorrent site.

The man configured the TorrentSpy mail server to copy and forward all of the site’s email to his own Gmail account. He later sold the 34 pages of information to the MPAA for around $15,000 but later relented and went back to work with the torrent site, telling them what he knew. The same man also spied on The Pirate Bay.

The EFF had filed a brief with the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that federal wiretap laws protect emails from interception while they are stored on the mail servers that work to transmit them. However, the federal district court ruled that because the emails were momentarily stored on the server during the delivery process, under the Wiretap Act they were not technically intercepted. The ruling itself only applies to the 9th District, but could have relevance at other courts in the US.

In its friend-of-the-court brief, the EFF states this ruling is incorrect and must be reviewed, since it could allow the government to spy on other people’s emails in the future, without the need for a court order.

“The district court’s decision, if upheld, would have dangerous repercussions far beyond this single case,” Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston at the EFF said. “That court opinion — holding that the secret and unauthorized copying and forwarding of emails while they pass through an email server is not an illegal interception of those emails — threatens to wholly eviscerate federal privacy protections against Internet wiretapping and to authorize the government to conduct similar email surveillance without getting a wiretapping order from a judge.”

It appears that, as long as emails aren’t actually intercepted en-route, it could be legal for the government to request that an ISP copies an individual’s emails after they arrive on the mail server. This would not be classed as a breach of wiretap laws, which is a worryingly easy circumvention of vital privacy laws according to the EFF.

The EFF asks the Court to vacate the district court decision, and and rule that the MPAA hacker did “intercept” email communication from TorrentSpy owner Justin Bunnell. The full amicus brief can be viewed here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Regardless, Comcast is not the only ISP that is throttling. As was revealed in the stats from Project Glasnost, Cox is also throttling heavily. So, while some are popping the champagne corks over this victory, others are still working hard to keep our ISP’s honest, and ensure that their customers are getting what they paid for.

The latest of these, is a project called Switzerland by the EFF. Still in very early alpha, it’s an attempt to not just detect sandvineing by an ISP, but other forms of throttling as well. Unlike Glasnost, which uses a central server and known torrent streams to detect activities from the ISP interfering, this will use a more decentralised method, where peers running Switzerland swap information about the packets they send to other Switzerland users, in encrypted data packets sent via a central server. In effect, it’s a checksum of torrent activity sent via a 3rd party. As Peter Eckersley, staff technologist for the EFF, and developer of Switzerland puts it “Alice and Bob are exchanging packets, they connect to a neutral server (Switzerland) to arbitrate between their different views of the packets”.

When asked why the EFF started this project, and why they believe a neutral network is important, he told TorrentFreak: “There were several reasons why we started the Test Your ISP project, and designed and built Switzerland. One reason was pragmatic: we were trying to run systematic tests of the interference that Comcast was deploying against P2P networks, and we decided that the only sensible way to do that was to build an automated sensor network. So we set about doing that.”

“The bigger picture, of course, is that without transparency the Internet won’t remain the amazing open and innovative thing that it has been,” Eckersley says. “And EFF’s mission is to make sure that the Internet stays open and innovative. We need to shine lights into the dark corners of the network, and make sure that ISPs aren’t setting themselves up in some control room and saying “protocol A okay, but protocol B doesn’t fit with our business plans, so let’s give it second-class treatment or stop it from working entirely.”

Some might worry that the client might open up people to being monitored by anti-p2p companies or other undesirables, using the system as another method of verification, but there is really no way around it. The simplest method to avoid that is, in Peters words, “avoid exchanging copyrighted files between Switzerland clients. The copyright risks are probably lower if you run your own Switzerland server, but it’s still going to keep logs.”

The question of what the FCC will do about these other ISPs and their traffic management is one to ponder. Our inquiries on this matter have been acknowledged, but not replied to at the time of publication.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The proposal is supposed to secure the pensions of long forgotten artists. In a statement, McCreevy said “I am not talking about featured artists like Cliff Richard or Charles Aznavour. I am talking about the thousands of anonymous session musicians who contributed to sound recordings in the late fifties and sixties. They will no longer get airplay royalties from their recordings. But these royalties are often their sole pension.”

According to the Financial Times, the proposal could come up to vote as early as this Wednesday, July 16th. Also up for discussion would be a plan to split up rights societies by the antitrust arm of the commission, potentially making rights societies compete against each other for the rights to collect royalties from artists.

While this would certainly be a better way to curb their less than philanthropic actions, if it comes at the cost of greater copyright, is it that beneficial to the 500 million citizens of Europe? There is a glimmer of hope though. Two commissioners are opposed to the extension plan; telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding and commissioner Antonio Tajan.

The copyright extension plans met initial scorn back when they were first announced in February, with groups like the Open Rights Group and the EFF launching a petition to have it blocked, as well as a website to deal with the issue. Nevertheless, McCreevy kept on going, and the proposal is now ready to be voted on.

McCreevy himself has his pension already planned from a former partnership in a chartered accountancy firm (and he has been in politics since 1977, so he clearly planned early). It is left to wonder then why he feels the need to legislate some sort of speciality pension for artists. If they decide to stop work at 25, why should they be paid for it past 75? If that has been their only source of income, why could they not have done as the hundreds of millions of other EU citizens, myself included, and planned for their retirement?

Commissioner McCreevy had not replied to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Dear friends and supporters,

The Shareaza Development Team would like to extend our thanks to all of you for your contributions towards our Legal Defense Fund. As you will remember, our project’s identity was appropriated late last year by the recording industry funded Discordia Ltd. shell company and handed over to the recording industry “approved” iMesh for commercial exploitation.

To that end, we are today announcing that we have legal representation and will be contesting the trademark application on our name and identity taken out by Discordia Ltd. After that, we’ll be looking to get our old domain back from the people who threatened, bullied and intimidated the team member holding it on the project’s behalf and who are now using as the gateway to their deceptive business model.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Software Freedom Law Centre, the EFF and Richard Stallman for their help and assistance in this unfortunate matter and also for their recognition of this new threat being faced by free software projects the world over.

If you’d like to help us in our fight to regain control of our identity, we welcome all donations to our Legal Defense Fund. You can use our ChipIn account here to donate safely.

So will this all be long, drawn out and very boring? Quite possibly. Are we going to sit back, lick our wounds and wait for the lawyers to sort it all out?

Heck no!

In fact, The Shareaza Development team is also announcing today that we’ve started work on Shareaza 3.0. Put simply, we’re not going to let the identity thieves slow us down at all.

Shareaza 3.0 will be a significant milestone in Shareaza’s long history. For a start we’re switching to the brand new QT 4.4 application development framework. This will allow us a lot more flexibility for a redesign of Shareaza’s network core, making the current Gnutella, Gnutella2 and ED2K networks more modular. We’re also getting rid of the deprecated MFC code to make 3.0 more plug-in friendly and many of the existing features our users know and love will also be re-built with portability in mind.

The even bigger news is that we’re scrapping our current implementation of BitTorrent and will be using the libtorrent libraries as our base for torrent support in the 3.0 release. Shareaza’s BitTorrent implementation is long overdue for a revamp and while many of it’s features were revolutionary at the time (Shareaza was the first client to experiment with decentralized torrents for example) the development team realizes that its time to bring BT support into line with the modern torrent scene.

Developers with some spare time and a desire to get their hands dirty playing with the new QT 4.4 on an existing code base are welcome to stop by our developers IRC channel for a chat.

Once again, we send our thanks all the Shareaza users and supporters out there and invite Discordia, iMesh and the recording industry monopoly to drop the trademark application and return our domain name before you embarrass yourselves any further. We’re fighting back!

Inquiries can be made via our forums here

Kind regards,

Shareaza Community

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Support the battle! Donate and send a letter (or more) to Congress.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Barlow was the songwriter of “The Grateful Dead”, advising its fans to share. He’s also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Here’s what Barlow has to say about the MPAA:

“These are aging industries run by aging men, and they’re up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices.”

Barlow continues:

If I were to encounter Dan Glickman on the street and we were to have a civilised conversation about this subject, which would be a long shot, I’d tell him to relax.

I’d tell him to spend less of the resources of his industry on fighting the inevitable and more on learning about the conditions that they find themselves in and recognising the opportunities, which I think are vast and very encouraging. But they can’t get to those opportunities until they quit trying to stop progress.

He goes on:

“But you know the problem is – the bad news is that you’re up against a dedicated foe that is younger and smarter that you are and will be alive when you’re dead. You’re 55 years old and these kids are 17 and they’re just smarter than you. So you’re gonna lose that one.

But the good news is that you guys are mean sons of bitches and you’ve been figuring out ways of ripping off audiences and artists for centuries….. “

Read more, and Dan Glickmans comments over here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

A great initiative, if you support it, sign it. If the EFF reaches their target of 100.000 signatures they will deliver the petition to the Senate and House Commerce and Judiciary Commitees. Here’s a snippet from the petition:

We condemn the RIAA’s choice to force the family of a 12 year-old girl to forfeit $2,000 – money that could have gone to feed, clothe and educate this honor student. We stand with the retirees, parents, children and others who have been caught in the RIAA’s line of fire.

Sign It

And if you have a little money left you might want to donate a dollar (or more) to Patti Santangelo. Patti is the New York working mother with five children who’s decided to fight the RIAA in court.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.