Using a mod like this means that no offense of distribution could have been carried out. Indeed, as we pointed out in our earlier report, the stats from her client showed no evidence of uploading, despite an uptime of 924 days.

The lawyers who sent the cease and desist (and a demand for 700 euros) didn’t withdraw the claims after she protested her innocence, so she took advice, went to court and filed suit against the rightsholder.

Unfortunately the judge in the case has no idea about IT issues and wants to have an independent witness examine the software used by anti-piracy tracking company Media Protector. Experts don’t come cheap and this one is set to cost 5,000 euros.

This is believed to be the first time that a neutral expert witness has had the opportunity to examine the software of an anti-piracy company in Germany. So, together with filesharing lawyer Dr. Wachs, Verein gegen den Abmahnwahn e.V and Initiative Abmahnwahn-Dreipage, our friends at news site Gulli have started a donation drive to raise the funds.

Lawyer Dr. Wachs has kindly given the woman 3,000 euros towards the expert but a further 2,000 must be raised via donations. Hopefully this amount can be achieved as engaging the skills of the expert witness will provide a golden opportunity to see exactly how these systems operate and have their shortcoming revealed in court.

Anyone wishing to contribute can do so here (bank details at bottom of article)

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

The Coalition quickly backtracked, suggesting they would accept some type of throttling instead, but that fell largely on deaf ears too. Then new Coalition president Aldo Olcese said that the solution would be to go after the country’s 200 torrent sites instead, but this could also prove problematic. Time and again Spanish courts have ruled that sites that link to infringing content are not illegal, providing profits aren’t made directly from any infringement.

But of course, wealthy operations like SGAE aren’t put off by such rulings and instead go after eDonkey and BitTorrent sites privately, often demanding that they are forced to close via injunction in advance of a full court hearing to assess their legality.

One such case involves the eD2K link site elrincondejesus.com. On May 13th the site received a complaint from none other than every Spanish sharing site’s nemesis, SGAE. Alleging Elrincondejesus “abused” its members copyrights, the site’s owner was summoned to appear in court on June 5th.

At this hearing various things would be discussed, but SGAE hoped to get an early decision to suspend the operations of Elrincondejesus immediately, in advance of the full hearing which would happen at a later date.

On his site, the owner commented: “As you know Elrincondejesus.com never had advertising (or has now). I’m innocent and the only thing that I have done is provided links to other sites, like thousands of search engines in the world.”

There would be a month long wait for the court’s decision but today it came.

The judge dismissed SGAE’s request for an immediate shutdown of Elrincondejesus.

“P2P networks, as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, do not violate, in principle, any right protected by Intellectual Property Law,” said Raul N. García Orejudo, a judge in Barcelona. Although some activities are barred, those do not concern P2P he said, noting that there has to be a presumption of innocence.

Speaking with Elmundo.es, attorney Carlos Almeida-Sanchez said: “This is the first time a court clearly states that P2P itself does not violate any rights.”

On possible infringements of the Intellectual Property Act, the court said:

“Adding a work or video recording to Emule, that has previously been converted to a compatible computer file, is not an act of reproduction,” adding that “Copying is not a profitable use, or collective use [such as broadcasting in a store], as these two terms refer to the subsequent use made of the work once downloaded, after the copy.”

Additionally, the Intellectual Property Act describes distribution as needing something tangible, as in distribution via a website for example, which in this case (as it’s P2P) does not exist.

However, the court order recognizes the possibility that public distribution may have occurred but this is difficult to prove, since any sharing could’ve taken place with just one person.

The full trial will take place at a later date.

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

Back in 2006 the police, who were conducting a search linked to an unrelated fraud case, stumbled across the man’s sizable pirate media collection which included 12,591 MP3 files, 426 movies, 16 full TV-series and dozens of items of pirated software.

During the April hearing the retired IT expert said in his defense that it took him a whole year to accumulate the collection by using eMule on the eD2k network, but it was intended for private, not commercial use. He also told the court that he believed he had been acting within the law.

Unfortunately for the man, the legal system wasn’t sympathetic. A court in Vannes has just handed him a 2 month suspended jail sentence coupled with 33,000 euro (apprx $46,200) in damages.

Lawyers for 19 plaintiffs including the National Federation of Film Distributors, Sony, Paramount, Sacem and SCPP demanded between 1 and 2 euros compensation for each illicit MP3 and between 7 and 12.50 euros for each movie. It is believed that SCPP will collect the largest share of around 17,000 euros.

In a statement the man’s lawyer said: “There is stuff like this on all kids’ computers right now,” while pointing out that many of the files had been downloaded by the defendant’s children.

In January 2007, a court in Nantes also sentenced a file-sharer to two months suspended prison sentence for being caught in possession of 400 downloaded movies.

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

The report is based on data supplied by BigChampagne and PC Pitstop. BigChampagne is a company that tracks online media, it also provides provides Billboard online music charts. PC Pitstop gathers data by “inspecting” the computers of users that try their free online virus / spyware scanners. The data used in this report are collected from Windows registry and table entries of 1.5 million PC’s through these online diagnostic tests performed by PC Pitstop.

The results. The percentages in the table indicate the install base of the P2P applications:

In the report we further read that the once almighty “Kazaa family” is now only installed on 1.3% PCs. Newcomers like FrostWire and Pando are included in the report for the fist time with a 0.2% and 0.3% install rate respectively.

As said before, the usability of these figures are doubtful. Here are a few concerns. First of all, install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it. So the report can’t say much about the popularity of a filesharing network or application. They do not make these claims, but the way the data is presented is a bit misleading, to say the least.

For example, uTorrent is by far the most used BitTorrent client. Over 50% of the peers in an average BitTorrent swarm use uTorrent. It could be that uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline are installed on almost an equal number of PCs, but that the BitTorrent mainline client is hardly ever used. For instance, novices may start with the mainline client, but move on to better BitTorrent clients later on.

Another remarkable point is the uTorrent data collection for this report. uTorrent doesn’t install itself, and even the installer doesn’t use the Windows registry. So how did they come up with these statistics on uTorrent then?

It is also funny to see mIRC in the top 10 of most installed filesharing application because it is so much more than this. Most people I know use mIRC for other purposes than sharing files.

The concerns raised here show that “power” is not always in numbers. They might have collected data from millions of users, but is this really valuable if you have no idea if they actually use the application? A survey among 10.000 users where you actually ask if, and how often they use these applications is probably more useful.

And on a final note, people who want to read the report, but don’t want to pay $195 might want to try Google’s backdoor. Doubtful statistics, doubtful security.

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

The new version has the option of only connecting to clients that support this feature but it has the option of connecting to all clients as well.

Protocol obfuscation has been the most requested feature by eMule users for several months. It has been reported that Brasil Telecom has been aggressively throttling traffic generated by eMule. This has made eMule practically unusable for thousands of Brazilian’s and although NeoMule, an eMule mod, added protocol obfuscation several months ago it only partially alleviated the problem.

NeoMule users represent a very small percentage of the ed2k network and although their protocol obfuscation feature works well, it only works if the users it connects to are also using NeoMule.

Recently, more and more ISP’s have began throttling P2P protocols. Numerous ISP’s have targeted the BitTorrent protocol and in response Azureus, BitComet and uTorrent have implemented protocol encryption.

Overall, their protocol encryption feature has been effective but Allot Communications claims that they have developed technology that allows ISP’s to specifically target and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic.

It’s clear that eMule’s protocol obfuscation feature will be well received by the eMule community but it remains to be seen how long it will take for ISP’s to figure out a way to throttle eMule’s traffic once again.

p2pnet

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

Domingo criticized “panic” generated by the Police with this operation and stated:

only a Judge can sentence what is illicit or not, not the Police, neither the General Society of Authors and Editors (SGAE) nor a minister”

The police report claims that 350.000.000 illegal files are shared per year in Spain.

The president of the AI accused the Police to facilitate information that is practically impossible to confirm, and invited to the police show some proof.

The following sites were named in the police report:

naiadadonkey.com, indicedonkey.com, ps2rip.net, emule24horas.com, emule24horas.net, emule24horas.org, mp3-descargas.com, exeemspain.com, portalvcd.com, pctorrent.com, pctorrent.net, pctorrent.org, pctracker.com, pctrecord.com, tododatos.com, spanishare.com, comunidadspanishare.com

link (Spanish)

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