Like all respected anti-piracy organizations, LANVA holds accounts at all the popular private torrent trackers, including LinkoManija. For a long time their account remained inactive, but this week LANVA claimed a small victory as it reported the IP-addresses of 106 users of the site to the police.

According to the anti-piracy outfit, the reported users were caught sharing a copy of the newly released Windows 7 Ultimate operating system. As evidence the self-proclaimed investigators submitted a screenshot of peers listed by uTorrent.

The owner of LinkoManija was not impressed by LANVA’s actions. “Anyone can copy a peer list, but it doesn’t prove that anyone downloaded the full file or actually uploaded anything,” Kestas told TorrentFreak. “It can’t be used as serious evidence,” he added.

LANVA disagrees and hopes that the police will track down the identities of the accused infringers. If this happens the users will face fines of up to several hundred dollars, plus additional damages Microsoft’s lawyers may call for.

In a response the owner of LinkoManija has reported LANVA to the police. People who are affiliated with an anti-piracy group are not allowed to use LinkoManija according to the site’s disclaimer, and Kestas has asked the police find out whether LANVA broke the law.

“We contacted the police and asked them to investigate how LANVA obtained the information, because we did not give them permission,” Kestas told TorrentFreak. The police informed him that they would look into the case.

If any of the reported users faces legal action, Kestas says he will help them out with legal support. “We told our users that we will be fighting for them if they get in trouble, because it’s a fight for the freedom of us all,” he said. “Our users are our strength,” he added.

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

Of course, a country with plenty of ‘pirates’ has to have its own anti-piracy organization, and Lithuania is no different. The local anti-piracy outfit goes by the name ANVA, an acronym for ‘Antipiracines Veiklos Asociacija’. Their main targets are the local BitTorrent sites, which they have announced they will sue for millions in damages.

To use the word ‘Lithuania’ in a Lithuanian organization’s name requires government approval. Recently, ANVA changed its name to LANVA, after they succeeded in getting this authorization. This seal of approval may give the organization more credibility, but there is a small problem. They forgot to register the domain lanva.lt when they changed their name. Before, they were using anva.lt, but while they did make a new logo with the L included, registering a new domain didn’t come to mind.

Usually, mistakes like this can be easily overcome by paying a certain amount of money to the person who was smart enough to register the domain, but not this time. Kestas Ermanas, the owner of one of the largest BitTorrent sites in Lithuania, registered the domain as soon as he found out about the name change, and he is not planning to hand it over to his arch rival.

The domain Kestas bought currently displays the following message: “This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the Internet and the future.”

LANVA has scheduled an emergency meeting next Thursday to discuss what they can do to get the lanva.lt domain in their possession. The chances that they will get the domain through a dispute are very slim though. There have been several cases in Lithuania where large companies sued owners of domain names, and they lost every single time.

This is not the first time that an anti-piracy organization has had a domain dispute with a BitTorrent site. October last year The Pirate Bay got hold of the domain name of IFPI, under which they wanted to launch the “International Federation of Pirate Interests.” The case was later lost by The Pirate Bay, but the fact that they acquired it in the first place is yet another example of the tech illiteracy of these organizations.

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