Two men, both aged 29, are alleged to have shared copyright infringing files. The police seized their computers and other equipment in the city of Skövde, according to an Aftonbladet report.

Fredrik Ingblad, the prosecutor assigned to the case said in a response to the arrests, “The two people in Sweden are suspected of having been part of an international network that have made a large amount of movies available.” When the prosecutor refers to an ‘international network’ he means the Scene. So far he has provided no information on how many files were shared.

In addition to sharing copyrighted works, the two are also suspected of operating a so called ‘rip box’, a high powered computer where movies can be quickly decoded and ripped into the appropriate format.

The prosecutor further said that the case was part of an international police operation against illegal file-sharing, codenamed Operation Carbonite. The operation is headed by Europol and law enforcement agencies from the USA, UK, The Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden are involved.

The two were questioned at a local police station, but at this point it is not known how they responded to the accusations. They will be questioned further, and if IFPI operating manager Lars Gustafsson is to be believed, this is only one of many file-sharing related cases this year.

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

A new survey, conducted by the The National Research Institute of Legal Policy, looked into the unlawful behavior of Finnish 9th grade youngsters, including their illicit downloading habits. Among other things, the results show that 6% of the 15 year olds smoke marijuana or hash, 11% has participated in a fight and 15% admits they have stolen something from their school.

Unsurprisingly, the most common type of illegal behavior among the group is (illegal) downloading. An overwhelming majority of the surveyed kids (69%) admitted that they have downloaded copyrighted material in the past year. Even more so, 29% reported that they use filesharing applications to download music and movies illegally, every day. However, it is worth pointing out that while bullying, stealing and vandalism might be considered a crime and therefore warrant the attention of the police, personal-use file-sharing is a civil infringement, and does not.

The Finnish news article which reported on the survey resulted in an massive response from readers. A spokesperson from the Finnish pro-piracy group Piraattiliitto told TorrentFreak: “There is an almost unanimous call from the readers to legalize private filesharing. The overwhelming change in the national opinion from anti-piracy to pro-piracy is somewhat surprising, even for us at Piraattiliitto.”

The Finnish copyright lobby on the other hand, says it is ‘alarmed’ at the outcome of the survey. It wants to see new laws that would allow copyright holders to force ISPs to pass their threatening emails to the alleged filesharing customers. The consensus among the readers, however, seems to be that, instead of turning millions of people (including 69% of 15 year-old kids in Finland) into law-breakers, copyright laws should be changed to allow casual piracy.

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

It must have felt like an attack from behind when the RIAA heard that they lost its only major court victory, with a mistrial being declared in Capitol V Thomas. Making things worse, the Department of Justice, viewed by some to be the bully’s trusted lieutenant, turned on the content industries by soundly criticizing a bill aiming to increase copyright and patent enforcement powers.

The Thomas case is now a proverbial millstone around the neck of the RIAA. At first it looks impressive, and gives a frightening impression to anyone that thinks to challenge them, but now it’s starting to drag them down. Not only was the decision in the case thrown out, the statement by the judge in support of the mistrial reads like a critique of the legal arguments put forward by the RIAA over the last 5 years.

Yet, the millstone around the neck is not just in the refuting of legal arguments. It also extends to the excessive damages that were awarded in the first trial. The $9250 per infringement has been argued to be so far past constitutional restrictions on excessive punishments, that it has brought it into public attention. Because of this, it may end up reducing the maximum amount of damages and fines that can be awarded, which may also undermine the settlement encouragement (or ‘pay instead of fight’) strategy. The end of the judge’s order says it all:

While the Court does not discount Plaintiffs’ claim that, cumulatively, illegal downloading has far-reaching effects on their businesses, the damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs – the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000 – more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs. While the Copyright Act was intended to permit statutory damages that are larger than the simple cost of the infringed works in order to make infringing a far less attractive alternative than legitimately purchasing the songs, surely damages that are more than one hundred times the cost of the works would serve as a sufficient deterrent.

While 24 songs is more like two CDs (than the three the court states), that damages should go from 4000x losses (assuming 3CDs) to 100x, means that the $222,000 would be more like $5,550. That’s quite a difference. The same could be applied to amounts demanded in pre-trial settlements, where the RIAA has often asked too much. The court’s math is far more reasonable, despite being calculated using retail CD prices, which have all manner of mark-ups and distribution costs that are not relevant to digital music included. A digital download doesn’t have to pay for the CD blank and doesn’t have to pay for transportation to the store. There are no printing costs or middlemen profit. The court gives an estimated cost of $2.25 per track, the actual cost for a download is more than seven times less than that.

Of course, other arguments, ranging from definition semantics, to trying to use criminal law as precedent, were denied as well. Some of these arguments were novel, others seemed like desperation.

The other news from Wednesday didn’t help either, especially in the muddling of civil and criminal enforcement of copyright. The Department of Justice sent a letter to Senators Leahy and Specter over the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act (EIPRA) of 2008, which passed through the Senate judiciary committee last week. It stated that the Departments of Justice and Commerce had ’strong and significant concerns’ with portions of the act. In short, they said they didn’t want to be used as free lawyers for the entertainment industry, and also felt that the position of an ‘Anti-Piracy Czar’ would be, surprisingly, unconstitutional. When even the US Justice department, which has seemed indifferent to the US Constitution in recent years, uses it as an excuse to oppose new powers, it could be likened to rats leaving a sinking ship.

Of course, the past week hasn’t been only bad news for the RIAA and its members, it’s been bad press for them too. On Monday, they elected to proceed to a jury trial in Maverick V Harper, with a date set for November. The RIAA were unwilling to accept a $200/infringement settlement offered by the judge. In taking the offer, they would have had a win, but at a lower amount, and left the potential for innocent infringement defenses. However, with the Thomas mistrial ruling two days later, negating any precedent they hoped to point to, and undermining some of the possible defenses, it may seem they have gambled on a treble-or-nothing bet.

The case in question centers around 38 songs, although only 6 were downloaded by MediaSentry. What can make this case interesting is that MediaSentry may be in violation of the law, regarding Texas based investigators, and that the age of the defendant – Whitney Harper was 16 when the infringements allegedly occurred – make an innocent infringement defence possible. Attacking a young girl for actions in her teens may not play well with a jury.

All in all, a bad week for the RIAA, and it may only be the first of many. We may never know if the article written by New York based attorney Ray Backerman did anything to to bring about a closer examination of the RIAA’s cases. Nor can it be overlooked that Wednesdays are not the RIAA’s best days – exactly a week before the Thomas and DOJ setbacks, they set themselves up as targets of ridicule by suing Beckerman. They accused him of allegedly doing what they have been repeatedly accused of doing – irony indeed. Many people are doubtless wondering what excitement October 1st will bring.

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

In theory this is a great idea. However, P4P requires collaboration between the developers of filesharing clients and ISPs, which might be a problem. Indeed, most P2P companies TorrentFreak talked to are not that excited about the initiative, but they wont say that out loud, and play along for the time being.

There might even be a darker side to the project, as the P4P working group includes some prominent members of the entertainment industry and well known anti-piracy lobbyists. Besides that, we argue that it is likely that the technology might slow down transfers of people who are on ISPs that don’t end up supporting the technology, raising serious Net Neutrality issues.

Let’s start off by looking at the mission statement of the P4P working group, which was founded last year. One of the key objectives of the group, quoted from their official mission statement (pdf) is as follows (emphasis added).

[to] Determine, validate, and encourage the adoption of methods for ISPs and P2P software distributors to work together to enable and support consumer service improvements as P2P adoption and resultant traffic evolves while protecting the intellectual property (IP) of participating entities

It might of course be that the P4P group included this objective to cover their asses. However, we have our doubts. For now, the technical specs give no reason to believe that the new technology will support piracy filters or other anti-piracy measures. But, when you consider that the MPAA, NBC Universal and several other representatives from the entertainment industry are members of the working group, this might very well be suggested in the next phase of the project.

One might wonder, why is the MPAA involved in all this? Obviously their agenda is to stop copyright infringement, so we have no reason to believe that they will try to steer P4P in this direction as well. This would not be a big surprise really. The P4P working group was founded by The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), a collaboration of the entertainment industry, ISPs and P2P companies. The purpose of the DCIA is clear, as we can read on their website (emphasis added):

Our number one priority clearly is the elimination of copyright infringement and, because DCIA advocates the commercial development of distributed computing (as opposed for example to trying to stop it), our key strategy centers on proliferating legitimate commercial services to displace unauthorized media file sharing currently being conducted by consumers on a massive scale.

This shows the P4P working group from a whole other perspective doesn’t it? We have no doubt that the researchers involved in this have the best of intentions, and that they really want to develop a new technology that benefits P2P users and ISPs. We also believe, however, that the MPAA and other rights holders who are part of the project, will push their agenda forward sooner of later.

The DCIA collaboration is an initiative from Hollywood’s big shots and several of the larger technology corporations. Back in 2002, both sides got together and decided that it would be a good idea to start a working group to keep an eye on future technological developments. Below, we quote a paragraph from one of the original letters (pdf) discussing the matter, signed by the CEOs of the MPAA, Walt Disney, Sony Pictures, AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, Viacom and News America (emphasis added).

We thus propose the establishment of a new high level working group, independent or as part of an existing process, to find technical measures that limit unauthorized peer-to-peer trafficking in movies, music and other entertainment content.

And so the DCIA was born, which later started the P4P workgroup. We will leave it up to the readers to decide whether this is a serious threat or not, we will find out sooner or later anyway.

There is one other “dark” aspect of P4P we want to mention though, something that hasn’t been reported elsewhere, even though it can have some very negative consequences for P2P users.

By looking at the latest P4P research report, we come to the conclusion that P4P might slow down the downloads of people who use non-P4P clients, or those who are on an ISP that doesn’t support P4P. This is because P4P users will be more likely to share with local peers, while regular P2P users share with everyone (note that both can be in the same swarm). This goes against Net Neutrality principles, although this depends on how one defines Net Neutrality.

Since P4P prioritizes local traffic, P4P users will share less with users who do not use the technology. This will affect both the upload and the download side, but the data in the report seems to suggest that the give and take ratio is worse when P4P is enabled, so they take more from other ISPs (relatively) than they give back (mild leeching). This is most likely facilitated by the fact that upload speeds tend to be slower than download speeds.

Let’s conclude by saying that the researchers from Yale University and The University of Washington came up with a promising technology that could potentially speed up P2P downloads, at least for some users. Getting ISPs and filesharing developers to embrace this new technology will not be easy though. ISPs will sure be motivated, as it will save them money. However, we’re not so sure that BitTorrent client developers (and others) will adopt it so easily, since it might degrade performance on non P4P ISPs.

The largest threat (as usual) might come from the anti-piracy lobby, as they will probably push for content filters or other anti-piracy measures. They haven’t done this so far, but to us this seems to be inevitable.

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

Let’s imagine for a moment that these anti-piracy tracking companies operate 100% flawless systems (I know, I know…) That they have opened up their systems for scrutiny, and that they can correctly identify an infringing IP address 100% of the time. Surely if we reached this point, there can be no further dispute? Well, not quite. Although the identification of an infringing IP address should be possible, in the absence of spy cameras it is absolutely impossible to identify the user sitting at the keyboard at the time of the alleged infringement. Add a wireless router into the mix and the infringer on the network could be just about anyone within its range. Add an unsecured wireless router in a densely populated area, and it’s happy hour at lawsuit hotel.

However, this doesn’t put off lawyers from sending out compensation claims as they only target the bill payer. Since the UK law firm Davenport Lyons are leading the chasing of alleged file-sharers in the UK, we’ll look at their cases. Davenport acknowledge in their compensation-demanding letters that the bill payer may not be responsible for the infringement – but nevertheless, that doesn’t stop them from threatening them anyway. So what happens when a bill payer is accused of an infringement he knows he did not commit?

Recently, we covered the story of a German case where the Regional Court in Frankfurt declared that if an infringement takes place on a wireless network, it is the responsibility of the infringer, not the network owner. Of course, for Davenport Lyons this was quite a problem due to the fact that for over a year now they’ve been saying that German law would be echoed in the UK, and that wireless network owners would be found liable for activities carried out on them.

Now, Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with prominent law firm Pinsent Masons (the company behind the well respected Out-Law.com) has confirmed what we’ve suspected all along – that a UK court would not hold the bill payer responsible if it’s clear they weren’t responsible for the infringement:

“The onus is on the party bringing the action to convince the court on a balance of probabilities that the person being sued is responsible for the infringement,” he said. “The legal wrong isn’t that you left your network open, it’s the file-sharing.”

In a civil case in the UK, this phrase “balance of probabilities” is very important and roughly means “is it likely the defendant carried out the act, based on the evidence provided?” It’s worth noting that higher levels of proof (as in a criminal case) are not required, as Robertson notes: “The trouble is, if you use the Wi-Fi defense, absent of any computer evidence to back either party’s case, the judge might simply think that you’re lying. That’s one reason why you’re asking for trouble by leaving your Wi-Fi network open to the world.”

Noting Robertsons comments, in preparing a wireless defense, evidence from a router showing that others have accessed the device (multiple MAC addresses in the logs, for example) could prove vital in tipping the scales in the favor of the defendant. Presuming that the case ever gets to court, that is. There isn’t any requirement to hand this evidence over beforehand, but indicating that it could be produced in court would be helpful. As Logistep provide their data to the court in spreadsheet format, that should also suffice when offering evidence in defense.

Information received by TorrentFreak further indicates that some of those who have robustly denied Davenport’s allegations, have found the law firm backing down. Now it appears that in some cases they seem to be backing down when faced with a strong “wireless defense”. This is quite a turning point since up to now, Davenport have insisted the bill payer is always responsible for what happens on his connection. Interestingly, according to documents shown to us, Davenport state that although they won’t take any further action now, they would take action if the user’s IP address is seen infringing in the future, and that proceedings would be made against the bill payer for failing to secure the network against 3rd party access. Back to Mr Robertson’s comments:

The legal wrong isn’t that you left your network open, it’s the file-sharing.

Moving on…..

The dangers of mounting a weak or non-genuine “wireless defense” were outlined earlier by Mr Robinson, so this is a clearly a very serious issue. However, there are also other areas where infringement could’ve been carried out by someone other than the bill payer, not from outside but from within the family unit – by children for instance. Out-Law has kindly clarified the position in the UK:

“Both Scots law and English law provide that a parent generally is not liable for the actions of their child, and that a civil judgment is as binding on a child as it is on an adult. There are, though, some circumstances in which a parent can become responsible for the child’s actions. That can happen when a child causes injury to others or where a parent has previously authorised or subsequently ratified the child’s unlawful act.”

There is little doubt that at least some of the people accused by Davenport have committed some sort of infringement. Equally we have seen lots of evidence that shows that many have not. Many bill payers are wrongfully accused due to the actions of others and since the Logistep tracking company (and others like them) won’t open up their software to outside scrutiny, it’s impossible to say how many others are being wrongfully accused simply through errors in the system.

Whatever the truth, one wrong accusation is 100% unacceptable.

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

Technology has made it easier for everyone to enjoy, and share music. The Internet has changed the way people interact with music. Sites like OiNK made it easy to find and share virtually every piece of music ever produced. Services like last.fm made it easy to discover new artists and interact with other fans.

Music might be more popular than ever among today’s youth. Indeed, the survey shows that the vast majority of the younger generation owns an MP3 player nowadays, including up to 93% of 14-17 year olds. If people had to pick three items to take with them to a desert island, 73% would take their music collection.

For most participants these music collections are acquired illegally, as the study shows that 63% – nearly two-thirds of the respondents – use filesharing services to download copyrighted music. On average they download 53 tracks a month, but some of the heavy downloaders say they download up to 5,000 tracks a month.

The average MP3 collection contains 1,770 tracks but some contained as many as
75,000. The average size of the music collection does not differ among age groups but there is a huge different in the proportion of pirated vs. paid music. The younger participants, aged 14-17, indicated that over 60% of their collection consisted of pirated music, compared to 13% for the age group 25 and up.

The survey also explored whether people would be interested in paid filesharing services that offer licensed tracks. Of all the participants, 73% said they would be interested in such a service and that figure went up to 80% for the people who already use filesharing services.

The respondents indicated that they are most interested in “download to own” services, streaming services are less popular with only 35% expressing an interest. The study further shows that people would continue to buy CDs and visit concerts if they were allowed to share legally, mostly because they want to support certain artists.

British Music Right Concludes from their survey: “There is a terrific opportunity for the music industry to grasp right now. This survey shows just how much respondents love and value music, and
highlights that a significant amount of that value is currently unmonetised.”

We couldn’t agree more with this conclusion, as we have said time and time again. The Internet and filesharing technologies make it possible to make production (of the copies) and distribution costs disappear, yet the prices still don’t change. Why? Because the industry insists on clinging onto its old business models.

The music industry should focus on monetizing filesharing networks instead of bringing them down. Sharing is a good thing and there are tons of possibilities to profit from it.

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

“To many of us in the Left Party, file sharing is something positive in the same obvious way that public libraries are,” the motion read, going on to describe the general opinion on file sharing in Sweden.

In addition, the motion stated that the various measures taken for trying to stop file sharing, such as big brother-like surveillance, or arbitrary sentences against individuals, are unacceptable.

The Pirate Bay, the main reason why piracy is such a hot topic in Sweden, was also mentioned in the motion. “The farce that is the ongoing legal procedures against The Pirate Bay also shows how legal security is in risk of being compromised by those trying to enforce the current ban on file sharing,” it read.

The motion concluded that legalizing piracy is the solution, and that the Left Party should take a stand for opening the possibilities to make copies for personal use.

The congress was split on the issue, and debate was heated before the vote on Sunday, but when the vote was taken it fell in favour of the motion legalizing file sharing.

“We obviously want to be the cultural workers’ party in the future, but legislation which makes the majority of the adult population criminals must be changed,” Elise Norberg Pilhem of the party’s board said.

Today, only a few hours after The Left Party’s new stance on file sharing, another initiative in the same direction was presented from across the aisle. The Swedish Center Party – the third largest party in Sweden, currently in government with four cabinet ministers, has called for an improvement in current copyright legislation.

Earlier this year the party had no success in convincing their colleagues in the government coalition to legalize non-commercial file sharing. Today, the party demands a complete oversight of the copyright legislation, and the appointment of a commission to investigate how a new copyright law could be constructed.

We now see a younger generation questioning copyright more and more, and with that there will be demands for updated copyright legislation. We need a legislation that is accepted by as many as possible, says Annie Johansson, the Center Party’s spokesperson on copyright.

It looks like things are changing for the better in Sweden.

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

IFPI proudly announced their new campaign a few weeks ago, writing: “The campaign comes as millions of people take advantage of the explosion of new ways of accessing music digitally, but still lack clarity on safety and legal issues, on finding legitimate sites, on the basics of copyright and on how to unpick the jargon of digital music.”

IFPI has always been concerned with the safety of children, and on pro-music.org they maintain a list of download stores that are ’safe’ to use. I was of course curious about these legal stores, and since i’m from the Netherlands, I decided to give the Dutch legal stores a try. This turned out to be an interesting experiment.

To my surprise, the first 4 sites on the list were all gone, some had quit, and others redirected to websites that didn’t sell any music. Even worse, commodore.nl -the first site on the list- served ads for a scam site that sells filesharing software.

I finally got something that looked like a music store when I got to the fifth link, dance-tunes. However, when I searched for the latest Radiohead album, nothing came up. The site only has a few mp3s, and nothing of my choice.

The journey continued, and with sixth site, download.nl, I finally found some good music. Interestingly however, the songs I found were not for sale. Instead, I was advised to download LimeWire, Shareaza and Kazaa Lite. This may indeed sound a little confusing, but the IFPI apparently wants kids to use filesharing software after all.

So, to sum up my legal music experiment. I tried the first 6 sites advised by IFPI, 4 didn’t sell any music, the fifth only listed a few songs, and the sixth website I tried advised me to install LimeWire or Kazaa. It gets even worse further down the list where the kids end up at sites that sell hardcore adult movies.

Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media said about the new campaign: “The new guide is a very good example of an initiative that offers simple, practical advice to parents and teachers to keep young people safe and legal while enjoying music on the Internet.

I guess she didn’t try it herself.

Screenshot of a music “store” promoted by IFPI

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

Younger artists that broke through in the era of filesharing are more positive and see it as something that actually helps their career. One of the artists said: “Where I am now, filesharing is positive and makes good PR. If I were to get bigger, I believe it would affect me negatively.”

There are older artists who think that filesharing could benefit them, one of them noted: “You can look upon filesharing as a way of promotion, a way of putting new stuff out there.”

One of the Swedish artists who definitely profited from file-sharing is the Swedish glam rock band “Lamont”. The band was featured on on The Pirate Bay frontpage last year. Not without success, over 100,000 people downloaded their album in less than 24 hours, numbers that other artists can only dream of.

At the time Brokep told TorrentFreak that they love to support bands who are willing to share their music using BitTorrent. And indeed, a little later The Pirate Bay supported Familjen, which resulted in a Grammy win for the band.

Perhaps these might be two extreme examples, but there is ample evidence that most artists actually profit from filesharing, even without The Pirate Bay.

The survey further found, and this might also come as a shock to the record labels, that a majority of the artists, 59%, admit to having downloaded copyrighted music themselves.

Although nearly half of the respondents had a favorable opinion towards filesharing, 58% of the artists still think that that sharing copyrighted material should be illegal.

One of the artists was rooting for a pirate crackdown, as he said: “My wish is that the punishment will be harder and that it will become easier to catch filesharers. I think all musicians should go to parliament and grab those politicians.”

The survey further showed that a majority of the participants in the survey are angry at the record companies. One of the musicians said: “For 50 years, the sole purpose of record companies has been trying to grab as much money away from the artists as possible. Now, suddenly they’ve become some kind of interest group for the artists and that’s not true.”

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

We in the music industry have shown ourselves unable to follow in this change. Some of us have even waged war against those the music is recorded for , the listeners. The rift between producers and consumers has never been bigger. “The truth is that Internet has provided us with a fantastic grey scale of possibilities! Instead of fighting back we ought to obtain learning from the daily newspaper and the computer game industries. They early realized the superiority of the internet and developed new services there.

This sounds like music to our ears. We’ve said it over and over again here at TorrentFreak, The Internet has changed the way people interact with music. Music is more accessible, more popular and cheaper to distribute. Record labels should embrace filesharing and compete with piracy instead of fighting it, and it seems like that these Swedish labels understand that.

TorrentFreak spoke with Henrik von Euler of Flora & Fauna, one of the labels participating in the initiative. We asked him what he thinks the greatest benefits of filesharing are: “Well the first thing is pretty obvious, that you can reach much larger audiences more quickly,” he said. “You bypass many of the existing power-structures and communicate directly with the listeners. It is also a very direct medium where the step from production to consumption is extremely short which is good for creativity I think. In the old days you could have an album ready and have to wait like a year or so to have it released and now you can have your music up online the same day you get the master.”

Henrik told us that he has “no beef” with The Pirate Bay, but he admits that filesharing also has its downsides. “On a personal note I find it hard to choose what to listen to”, he told us “The vast number of sites, bands etc makes me feel stressed out, like I’m always missing something. Speed and accessibility is good because it is fast and accessible but also bad because everything turns more superficial and volatile.”

Henrik was also quite clear about the lawsuits that the RIAA has started agianst music fans: “It’s insane. It can only have bad consequences. I don’t see how they can think antagonizing the listeners will help them secure any of their much desired income.”

“This is great”, says Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party Piratpartiet. “There are creative people who think ahead. These are labels constructing a new business model. The old dinosaurs lobby politicians, sue to the left and to the right and try to control the internet. There is room for the services of a label, few musicians want to do everything themselves. But the labels must serve their musicians and their fans, not the other way around. These new labels have understood that. The future belongs to them.”

The role of the record labels will change in the future, but not entirely according to Henrik von Euler, “I think the role of the label has started to change long ago. It moves towards a more creative role much more like the art curator or such like. And also, just because artists CAN do everything themselves from production to promotion, administration etc doesn’t mean that they actually want to.”

“On another note,” says Henrik “I must add that this is hopefully the last time I will answer questions about filesharing, good or bad. It is there! Live with it. Love it, hate it, I don’t care. But please don’t for a second think that it will go away or that you can solve it like it is a problem.

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

Let’s get a couple of things straight ,

1. This proposal was a draft consultation green paper, defined as “a proposal without any commitment to action.” The government receives many of these on a daily basis. They are like junk mail at Number 10 Downing Street. The Prime Minister’s toilet paper is more important than most green papers, and both are usually filed in the same place.

2. This proposal is totally and completely unworkable in the real world. ISPs will not accept liability for the contents of packets (nor should they), and it would be impossible for them to open and check if every single download and upload was legal or not without the entire Internet grinding to halt. This isn’t in the best interests of the government, the ISPs or the voters. Banning customers and exposing yourself to billions in liability isn’t a good business strategy. Criminalizing six million citizens and inconveniencing the rest is not a vote winner.

3. It would be impossible to tell the difference between illegal downloading and legal activities such as downloading software patches, using torrents to share stuff legally, playing online video games, using VoIP, photo sharing, telecommuting, and many others. The resistance from the private sector would be as strong as it would from the general public.

4. The very idea of this goes against the ruling of the European Court, which says EU member states are not obligated to disclose personal information about suspected file sharers. It would also fly in the face of Article 10 of the European freedom of expression laws, which gives every European the “freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”

5. WiFi piggybacking and encrypted packets make it impossible to tell who is downloading what in the first place. These techniques are only getting more sophisticated, while for the most part, the content industries collectively remain as dumb as a box of hair.

So in summary:

Insert Toilet Flushing Sound FX Here

This idea makes as much sense as trying to ban people from singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to each other over the telephone network, or burning down libraries to protect the publishing industry. But what’s frightening about such ideas is that they are still taken seriously all over the world by powerful decision makers in government and industry who have absolutely no clue about how the Internet actually works, or the damage such laws could do to democracy.

Before there is any more discussion about this, the music and film companies need to definitively prove illegal downloads cost them millions of dollars in lost revenues. CD sales are falling because nobody uses them anymore, and Hollywood is in rude health despite the pirates. There should be no more talk about changing laws and spending tax payer’s money on this ‘problem’ until someone proves there really is one.

Furthermore, if there is a problem, tax payers shouldn’t have to pony up in the first place. The content industries need to stop braying at governments to protect inefficient business models and look at the real solution that’s been staring them in the face for ten years.

For those who are interested, my book: “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism” is out now through Free Press, , and probably soon on a BitTorrent tracker near you ;).

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

All of the kids raised their hands. The host of the show explained that they had to use the blurred vision because they didn’t want to show the faces of these criminal kids.

Then, the host went on to present a survey performed by Swedish youth Internet community Lunarstorm, where 14000 users, 8 to 14 years old, had been asked about their downloading habits. In the survey, 60% of the surveyed kids said they download “sometimes” or “often”. The host then asked two girls (who, we must assume, are part of another class than the one shown before, otherwise, why blur them in the first place?) if they thought it was strange that something that so many kids do, is actually illegal.

“It’s so common. You don’t really think about it,” said one of the girls. Next to answer was a boy who said “Well, most people just download music and put it in their iPods.”

Now the host, in her most tutorial voice, explained that musicians and filmmakers want to get paid for their work, so the courts and the police are working hard to stop the criminals from downloading. Back in the computer classroom, she asked the girls again: Is it really ok to download other peoples work? “Not really,” said the girls. “When someone releases an album they want to be paid for it, so they get angry if you download for free,” said the boy.

The clip ended with the host saying that the law clearly states that you are not permitted to share content that otherwise costs money to buy or rent, and that it is forbidden to download from The Pirate Bay.

A conversation in the studio then took place with one of the hosts explaining why it is forbidden to download: “The copyright law says that everybody who has created film, music and such must get paid for their work.” And: “If you are under 15, you cannot go to jail or be fined if you download, but I think you really need to remember that this is illegal and that the police are watching this now.”

Anything to take with us from this piece of kids propaganda? Well, upon being questioned by the reporter on what is needed to make people pay for their content, one of the girls answered:

“If everything was a bit cheaper to buy, you would save less money when you download,” a wise lesson.

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

Apparently hacking is not a problem for the Prince of Sealand, and Gary McKinnon is welcome to come in even though the United States is accusing him of perpetrating the “biggest military computer hack of all time.” This extraordinary news was made public earlier this week on the Infosec security conference where Mckinnon was one of the members of a ‘hackers panel’.

It is absurd of course, especially because Sealand’s webhosting company HavenCo has no no regulations concerning copyright, while malicious hacking is explicitly prohibited. Perhaps they’re just trying to get some more publicity?

In other news, The Pirate bay is finalizing it’s search for their very own Pirate island, and we will hear more about this in the next weeks. It’s not going to be Sealand, but who wants that pile of rust and concrete anyway?

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

Bram Cohen: I really enjoy making products which I personally want to use, and like to empower people to do things they couldn’t do without BitTorrent’s efficiency and reliability. I also enjoy working with my team. We’ve recruited a really talented group of engineers from the P2P community and the tech industry, as well as some of the best business people in Silicon Valley. Together, we’re taking BitTorrent to new heights while still remaining true to our original goal of delivering content to the masses.

TorrentFreak: How do you see the future of BitTorrent Inc, what will its core business be?

Bram Cohen: We have two core businesses. We have a content delivery service to power websites which have downloadable and streaming objects on them, and we also have an entertainment destination at BitTorrent.com which will allow consumers to both publish and download high-quality digital content. Professional publishers have licensed over 5,000 downloadable video, music and game files, some of which will be free, and some for rent or purchase. We expect our network to be very prominent and an extension of our well-known brand.

TorrentFreak: Are there still “puzzles” that need to be solved to improve the BitTorrent protocol?

Bram Cohen: I had lunch with Vint Cerf at Google last week, and we discussed this at length. BitTorrent is a mature protocol at this point, but there are still a number of interesting things to work on. For example, improving tit for tat, making seeding optimizations for enterprise use, and trying to figure out if there’s any good use for error correcting codes. Regarding that last one, it turns out that there are, but most of the academic work has been barking up the wrong tree. We also have a great testing environment built, so we can test the impact of protocol extensions on real, live swarms, which is critical when making enhancements that benefit the BitTorrent community at large.

TorrentFreak: More and more ISPs have started to throttle BitTorrent traffic. How do you feel about this, especially related to the upcoming BitTorrent video store?

Bram Cohen: ISPs have historically thought that all P2P traffic is illegal, which most definitely is not the case today. Identifying traffic as BitTorrent versus http is a very poor proxy for determining legal versus illegal. Even more so as content creators have begun using our self-publishing service to distribute their own work and major studios have signed up because they recognize the enormous potential of BitTorrent as a sales channel.

Legal traffic is growing within the P2P ecosystem and piracy also travels with HTTP and FTP in high volumes. ISPs have to invest in making their networks better and faster rather than stifling applications which consumers use and love. That’s just bad marketing and customer service, especially given the competition which exists in the broadband industry and consumer focus on network neutrality. For instance, in Japan and Korea, consumers currently enjoy true all-you-can eat symmetric fiber-to-the-home at 100 mbps. That’s a great environment for P2P development to make the Web a truly powerful medium for on-demand media, with broadcast economics. Of course, it also leads to the question: Why is the United States two generations behind?

TorrentFreak: What would you advise BitTorrent users to do, when they find out that their ISP is throttling BitTorrent traffic?

Bram Cohen: Switch. Competition is the best thing for the consumer. If you’ve got a couple of options, try the alternatives. If you have no alternatives or both alternatives suck, call customer service. And call them a lot. It turns out that angry customers are more expensive to ISPs than providing unadulterated access to popular applications and websites.

TorrentFreak: The mainline client now supports encryption, but there are no settings to control this (correct me if I’m wrong). Does this mean that the client encrypts all transfers?

Bram Cohen: No. The mainline client accepts incoming encrypted connections, but makes unencrypted outgoing connections by default. We added support for that primarily for our users in unfriendly ISP environments. As I’ve said before, protocol encryption is at best a temporary hack around ISP rate limiting, until identification techniques are put in place which use transfer patterns rather than packet inspection to identify traffic. There are better approaches to evade traffic shaping, although we’re still trying to work productively with ISPs, who own the network after all. But if we can’t find a way to work together to provide a better experience for BitTorrent users, then the arms race will begin.

TorrentFreak: You said before that you’re not a big fan of encryption. What would you suggest as an alternative?

Bram Cohen: I say just leave things in the clear, and try to use caching technology to improve the ISP network. Or better yet, ISPs should lay more fiber and build bigger pipes.

The so-called ‘encryption’ of BitTorrent traffic isn’t really encryption, it’s obfuscation. It provides no anonymity whatsoever, and only temporarily evades traffic shaping. There are better approaches to obfuscation, and I’ve got a great team of engineers who are quite eager to fight that battle, but I’m hoping that everything can be resolved amicably without getting into a serious arms race.

TorrentFreak: What was the main reason behind the acquisition of uTorrent?

Bram Cohen: uTorrent has both an impressively clean codebase and large user community, although we were already working on our own C++ implementation. Moving forward, you’ll see announcements related to BitTorrent being embedded on silicon and on non-PC hardware thanks to the new C codebase we have (based on uTorrent and our protocol extensions).

TorrentFreak: Are their plans to remove any of the present features uTorrent has?

Bram Cohen: No, uTorrent users are quite happy with it, and we wish to keep things that way. In fact, be on the lookout for a Mac and Unix port, which we have the resources to do thanks to the size of our engineering team.

TorrentFreak: What will happen to the mainline client in the future?

Bram Cohen: Our mainline extensions and uTorrent’s will converge. However, we are still committed to offering an open source BitTorrent reference implementation.

TorrentFreak: Will the uTorrent client be integrated into the BitTorrent Video Store?

Bram Cohen: We’re going to launch our entertainment network with support for whichever BitTorrent client the user wishes to install.

TorrentFreak: Can you give us any details on the pricing of the products in the BitTorrent Video Store, and the quality of the video files?

Bram Cohen: We haven’t announced any firm pricing yet. The video quality will be the best possible with the available codecs. In addition to being a “store,” our site will be a destination for publishing and discovering digital entertainment, and will have plenty of free files in addition to the pay ones.

TorrentFreak: You said before that some of the content from the video store will be “protected” by Windows DRM. What is your personal view on DRM, do you see other, more user friendly alternatives?

Bram Cohen: Right now most of our content partners are insisting on DRM for the content we’re making available. It’s causing an awful lot of headaches, but we’re trying to minimize the impact on user experience and support.

TorrentFreak: Over the past year we’ve heard quite a lot of rumors about the arrangement between BitTorrent and the MPAA. Can you tell a little more about the nature of this agreement?

Bram Cohen: We support keeping copyright infringing material off of our site, and have deals with most of the MPAA member companies to make their content available through our entertainment network. The MPAA is actually a lot less of a hive mind than many people think. We’ve had to negotiate individually with each member company regarding business deals. We don’t currently have any investment from any of them.

TorrentFreak: Several other BitTorrent sites like mininova.org and torrentspy.com have the exact same policy, and remove infringing material whenever they are asked to. Though, they are often seen as the bad guys. The MPAA even sued torrentspy and isohunt, and refuses to start a dialogue, while they index the same torrents and bittorrent.com does. What’s your opinion about this?

Bram Cohen: It’s easy to make the mistake that thinking the exact letter of the law is all that matters in such situations. I have no legal opinion of what mininova and torrentspy are doing, since I’m not familiar with the exact details. But being antagonistic will result in predictable outcomes, regardless of how well defended one thinks one is legally.

TorrentFreak: Due to the arrangement with the MPAA most people might think that most of the content they search for on bittorrent.com is legal. However bittorrent.com does index a lot of copyrighted work. Don’t you think this might confuse some of the users of the site?

Bram Cohen: We’re cooperating to get copyrighted work out of our search index, and when our new site launches, much more emphasis will be placed on the self-published and licensed content within our own index, instead of the general Web search.

TorrentFreak: In March the MPAA urged the Swedish government to take down the site because it is linking to infringing material. bittorrent.com indexes the torrents from thepiratebay.org , a site that is often referred to as “Pirate Heaven”. Has the MPAA ever asked BitTorrent Inc to stop indexing The Pirate Bay?

Bram Cohen: The focus of takedown notices has primarily been on particular pieces of content, not so much where they came from.

TorrentFreak: Is there a future for BitTorrent in the development of streaming online content. For example, would it be possible for video streaming sites like YouTube to use (a modified version of) BitTorrent?

Bram Cohen: Yes, we’ve developed a streaming version of BitTorrent. Stay tuned for more details around the middle of this year.

TorrentFreak: BitTorrent is slowly starting to replace the video recorder, especially among younger people. Popular episodes of TV shows like LOST are downloaded (illegally) more than 500,000 times in just one week over BitTorrent. These figures clearly show the potential that BitTorrent has, and it’s an indication that TV as we know it is about to change. Do you think BitTorrent Inc can play a role in the future of TV? And what kind of product or business model do you think could compete with these pirated shows?

Bram Cohen: Our new site will launch with thousands of movies and TV shows, so yes, we clearly have a role in the future of video. As far as competing with the piracy experience, the better consumer experience we provide, the less people will feel the need to rely on piracy. To do that, we’ll be providing an extensive and valuable catalog of content at a good price. In the future, we’ll expand into free, ad-supported content as an integral part of our site. We’re also going to give independent publishers a platform to distribute, promote, and ultimately sell their own content as part of that experience.

TorrentFreak: If you look back at the past 5 years, what is the thing you’re most proud of?

Bram Cohen: Looking back at the past 5 years, I can still say that I’m proud of getting BitTorrent to work in the first place. When I first started working on it, nobody knew whether it was possible to overcome all the logistical problems of handling a flash crowd. It was challenging, but not only did I get it to work at all, but got it to work extremely efficiently. More recently, I’m proud of being part of the team that has worked hard to convince content publishers and enterprise businesses that unlike other p2p architectures, BitTorrent is a legitimate and incredibly powerful tool for content delivery.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions!

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

As usual, the Adobe products will only be filtered out if the user has chosen to block copyrighted material during installation by checking the ‘Enable Content Filtering’ option.

According to the company, such deals are being signed in hope that fewer consumers will be sued for using the program. They say this is “a significant step toward a positive relationship with software producers and means a safer peer-to-peer process for LimeWire users.”

The company has clearly been trying to go legit, but at the same time not charge users for anything but the Pro version. This became apparent when they added a pop-up message that notified users that a license for the song/file they were downloading could not be found and asked them if they were sure they wanted to download it anyway.

LimeWire was sued by the RIAA earlier this year after the company announced that it was planning to integrate BitTorrent support in the program. The RIAA demanded $150,000 per song “wilfully uploaded.” This did not stop them from going ahead and implementing it anyway.

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

According the research, only 14 percent of Canadians have downloaded music from P2P networks in the last 12 months. This is down from 15 percent last year. The percentage has been steadily decreasing over the past few years. It was at its height in 2002 and 2003 at 21 percent, then went down to 19 percent in 2004.

To dwell a wee bit longer in the stats, the demographic that had the highest filesharing activity was the young one. 39 percent of 12-17 year olds downloaded in the past 12 months, in comparison to 3 percent of those over the age of 46.

The RIAA’s Canadian arm, the CRIA commissioned a survey earlier this year that focused on the percentage of people that had ever used filesharing services at all. This number was clearly misleading as a whooping 69 percent of the 12-17 year olds and 64 percent of 18-25 year olds had tried using one or more of the many services at some point of time, but hadn’t necessarily kept using them. Therefore the CPCC’s figures seem to contradict the CRIA’s and quite clearly prove that filesharing is declining in Canada, even though certain parties would like to believe otherwise.

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

At first glance the data seems to be pretty accurate are not very accurate, and it gives a good impression of what’s hot at the moment. The charts are based on the total number of seeds and peers.

Currently topping the charts in the Video section are The Davinci Code and Slither, and in the TV section the first season of Prison Break and the second season of Lost.

Mark Ghuneim, C.E.O. and founder of Wiredset LLC said that “Wiredset’s unique charts allow entertainment companies to better understand the reality of media asset trading”

However, the same charts might be very informative to pirates as well, but he obviously didn’t mention that.

Have a look.

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

Earlier this month a 29 year old man was fined $2200 for uploading a movie, but he was discharged by the appeal court because there was not enough evidence that the man actually uploaded the film from his computer.

It is unknown whether the convicted filesharers will appeal. They might have a case since these rulings often lack a sufficient amount of technical evidence.

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

The professors are from the Centre for Technology and Society, a part of the prestigious Brazilian think-tank Fundação Getulio Vargas.

The reason for barring those professors entry could be that the organisation they are a part of, the Centre for Technology and Society, has prepared a manifesto that proposes to “amend” Brazilian copyright law. The IFPI probably didn’t want them around while they announced their new round of lawsuits where they try to catch another 8,000 alleged file sharers. Makes sense doesn’t it?

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry or the IFPI (official website) represents almost 1500 record companies in 75 countries and has announced similar anti-piracy campaigns in the past.

The official explanation for barring the profs was that the seating room could only hold 40 people. The funny thing is however that there were already 50 people in the room! So, they asked if they could stand and at least listen to the debate. Apparently, there wasn’t even room for standing. What really adds the cherry to this tropical sundae of suspicious behaviour is the fact that the professors were officially invited and given permission to participate.

Later on it was discovered from various news agencies including Reuters and the AP that it was in fact a lie and that there was ample seating available in the room.

A petition has been started to support the manifesto prepared by the Professors’ organisation. If you’re interested, you might want to have a look it at here (scroll down for the English version).

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

The present ruling makes it hard for the anti-piracy lobby in Sweden to get someone fined in future cases since it’s hard to get technical evidence, and the police are not allowed to conduct a house search for filesharing crimes.

Christian Engström of the Swedish Pirate Party was happy with the outcome and told The Local

“It is obviously good that the court is careful with its evidence and it is important that the lower courts take note of that. But the judgment doesn’t really mean much for file sharing as such. And our basic point is of course that it is absurd that someone should even be tried for making culture available to others”.

Hip Hip Hora…

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