The group was responsible for the demise of the once largest torrent site Mininova, achieved a conviction against the Pirate Bay founders, and more recently expanded its track record with a victory against one of the largest Usenet communities on the Internet.

All the above was accomplished even though the actual downloading of copyrighted movies and music for personal use is completely legal in BREIN’s home country. In the Netherlands only the uploading part of file-sharing is punishable by law, but if new plans from the Government are adopted this may soon change.

Today, State Secretary of Security and Justice Fred Teeven announced that the Government wants to modernize current copyright law. One of the most drastic changes put forward in the new plans is that in addition to uploading, downloading of all copyrighted material will also be outlawed.

In addition to a complete ban on the sharing of copyrighted material, the new copyright plans will also get rid of the “copy-levy” on blank CDs and DVDs. This levy, ranging from $0.20 to $0.87 per piece, was put in place to compensate rights holders for the films and music that were copied for personal use.

The State Secretary notes that the changes related to file-sharing will not mean that the Government will actively prosecute individual downloaders, but stresses that they are needed to get “pirate websites” blocked by Internet service providers. At the moment this is impossible. Last year BREIN sued two of the largest Dutch ISPs, requesting that they should block their customers’ access to The Pirate Bay, but the attempt failed.

State Secretary Teeven emphasizes that The Pirate Bay is one of the main targets, although he misspells the website url in his official letter, pointing to piratebay.org instead. According to the State Secretary, The Pirate Bay is “a major resource of illegal material” which should be blocked by ISPs.

Although applicable to all citizens, the new law is specifically aimed at the blocking of illegal websites. There will be no three-strikes rules as proposed in other countries, and the Government will not chase individual file-sharers.

In a response to the news, BREIN confirmed that it will not go after individual file-sharers in the future either. Their prime targets are the websites that facilitate copyright infringement, not their users.

Aside from toughening the law, the new plans also include ‘protections’ for the privacy of file-sharers. One of the key points is that the rights holders can only claim the personal details of an alleged infringer if that person shared copyrighted material on a massive scale. This would prevent the pay-up-or-else settlement schemes that are currently ongoing in the United States.

Source: Dutch Government To Outlaw File-Sharing and Block The Pirate Bay

These sort of problem – when users in one geographical location can access a site when others can’t – is usually down to DNS issues which generally resolve themselves in a short time. However, in the case of Demonoid, this doesn’t appear to offer the answer.

According to reports we’ve received, when users from the Netherlands try to access Demonoid all they get is a blank white page. However, should they try to access the site using a proxy or VPN making the visitor appear they are not from the Netherlands, the user can now gain access. The block happens on all the major ISPs, and are persistent.

Canadians, having been previously blocked, remain unblocked, presumably after Demonoid fell out of range of the CRIA. However, more recently reports indicate that not only are Dutch users blocked from Demonoid, but in an unlikely scenario, Brazilians appear to be blocked too. So what could be at the bottom of this?

There could be some purely technical issues with the web, but as time goes on, this seems less and less likely. It is of course possible that Demonoid itself has some technical problems, having reported that the site had a few bugs to be ironed out around 9 days ago or so. If this is the case, there will be lots of relieved people around.

It’s also possible that there is a legal angle to these blocks, after all this type of action by Demonoid isn’t new in its quest to stay within the law. Around 12 months ago Demonoid blocked Dutch users for a while, as the pressure from BREIN increased quietly behind the scenes, and then later on very publicly blocked millions of Canadians following pressure from the CRIA, only to unblock them again after moving to ‘safer’ Ukraine-based hosting.

But, if Ukraine is ‘safe’ as a host country, why block the Netherlands, and why block Brazil of all places? As it turns out there is a Demonoid/Brazil link, in that the Demonoid.com domain has a protected WHOIS provided by the Brazilian-based Neurocube.com, which in turn is hosted in the Netherlands at Demonoid’s old host, LeaseWeb. And of course, Netherlands-based anti-piracy group BREIN aren’t the biggest supporters of Demonoid either – and have lots of resources – but whether or not they still hold anything over the site in order to force a block of an entire country is a matter of speculation.

In the absence of any announcement from the new admin of Demonoid (which seems incredibly unlikely), it’s some users of Demonoid who asked us to find out why they can’t access the site. Unfortunately, we don’t have the answer for them right now, maybe they will become more clear in the future.

In the meantime, please keep us updated in the comments with access reports from your country and we’ll try to keep people updated on the position for Dutch and Brazilian Demonoid fans. If you can or cannot access Demonoid, we’d like to hear from you.

Source: Reports: Demonoid Blocking Countries

Over the past years BREIN managed to shut down 131 sites that offered links to copyrighted content. Most of these sites were smaller BitTorrent sites, hosted on free hosting accounts or on a server box connected to a private DSL line.

You might wonder why BREIN is only picking on these smaller guys? Well, the answer is pretty simple, their intimidation tactics will not impress the larger torrent sites. Most of the larger BitTorrent sites and trackers have decent lawyers, and so far BREIN doesn’t have a strong case in court because BitTorrent sites are simply NOT illegal in The Netherlands.

Source: Another Dutch Torrent Site Taken Down

Aufero is everything you’d want in a media centre. Here’s a list of features.

It lets you:

• manage any existing media you have.
• create a “wish list” of videos you would like to watch, and then have those videos automatically downloaded once they become available.
• view trailers, reviews and previews, and download torrents related to them.
• manually download torrents you feed it.
• seamlessly playback videos in an array of formats on your Xbox 360 (not just WMVs).
• receive “subtle notifications” on your screen after something on your wish list has been found, downloaded, unpacked, indexed and moved into your library.
• receive e-mail notifications of relevant events when you’re not in front of your TV.
• Lastly, Aufero is simple to use and tries to increase the “wife appeal” by making it easy for less tech-savvy people to make use of.

Best of all, it sounds like the developer is planning to release Aufero under an open source license. I think Microsoft should be thanking him, because he’s just created a worthy Windows-based competitor to the AppleTV. Sadly, there’s almost no chance of that happening. For his own “protection”, the developer isn’t disclosing anything about himself, not even his name. All we know is that he (or she?) is Dutch.

Aufero is not yet available for download, as it’s in the early alpha testing phase. If you look at some of the screenshots, this is made obvious by the current UI, which is rather unpolished. But the developer stresses that it’s not complete yet.



Source: Integrating BitTorrent in Vista Media Centre

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