Posts Tagged ‘Legal’

Hindustan Times Promotes “Piracy”

One of India’s leading newspapers “The Hindustan Times” published an article on BitTorrent. They point their readers to the top-torrent-sites, and list some of the top torrents.
Not long ago the BBC said that BitTorrent aids terrorists and pedophiles, but the Hindustan Times obviously doesn’t agree. BitTorrent gives you freedom! A quote from the article:
If [...]

More BitTorrent Sites Going Down

BREIN did it again. The Dutch anti-piracy organization forced TorrentIt and NLexperience to go offline. Although BREIN has no legal power, threatening with lawsuits and high fines seems to be an effective strategy to take the smaller BitTorrent sites down.

Piratebay: You Cease and Desist!

The Piratebay is known for their hilarious responses to legal threats. They recently added a response to linotype’s cease and desist request. Linotype is a German company that sells fonts, so you can probably guess the piratebay response to that.

Brein takes down more Torrent Sites

During the past two weeks the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN forced 6 (small) torrent sites to stop their services. Brein is known for its intimidating techniques, and is successful in taking down sites, mostly set up by hobbyists.

More (of the same) Filesharing Lawsuits in Europe

Today the IFPI announced a new wave of lawsuits (2000) in Europe. But how new is this wave? It seems like they keep suing the same people over and over again. If you compare today’s press release with the one they put out last year you will see that in both cases they sued a “German judge”, a “British Councilor” and a “French Chef”. What a coincidence!

Is BitTorrent Inc. messing with the MPAA?

In November 2005 BitTorrent and the MPAA announced that they were going to cooperate in the “war against piracy”. The agreement was called a “historic event” and a “major breakthrough”. But now, 4 months later BitTorrent.com is still indexing pirated movies and other copyrighted material.

Two years in prison for downloading a movie

Germany just agreed on a new law that makes it possible to put downloaders behind bars for two years. This is if you use the movie for personal use, commercial downloaders face up to five years in prison. Germany is considered to be one of the leading filesharing counties in Europe so this law will [...]

Niteshdw to settle and Isohunt to fight the MPAA

It’s almost a month after the MPAA targeted 5 of the bigger torrent sites. In the meanwhile Isohunt has been planning to fight the MPAA and is currently raising money to do so. Niteshdw on the other hand doesn’t have the money to fight and tries to settle without taking too much damage.
The official [...]

Torrentspy lost their TV and Movie directory

Torrentspy, one of the biggest torrent sites out there “lost” their TV and Movie directory. This obviously makes it harder for people to browse through the torrent listing and find the files they want. The categories in question are replaced by a more general “video” directory. And categories like DVD-screener, Telecine and Cam are totally gone.

Biggest Dutch Torrentsite forced to go down.

Brein, the Dutch anti-piracy organization has taken down 6 dutch torrentsites. Among these sites is Dutchnova, a torrentsite with 25.000 members. Brein gave the sites a choice: admit you infringe copyright and give us all the information about your members or we will sue you. These threatening and intimidating talk seems to work, although Brein [...]

Star Wreck owes its Success to BitTorrent

Star Wreck, a movie directed by Timo Vuorensola backed up by a crew of independent film makers became a great success thanks to BitTorrent. The Star Trek parody, released under a Creative Commons lisence has been downloaded millions of times. The movie became Finland’s most popular movie within just a couple of months, and is [...]