A Swiss court has ruled that an anti-piracy tracking company can continue monitoring the public on the Internet. The court said that the need to fight illicit file-sharers outweighs the need to protect an individual’s privacy on the Internet, and that the ends justified the means.
A Spanish performing rights organisation has already fallen foul of the courts for the way it has collected evidence in royalties disputes. Yet, despite being punished for breaking the law in the past, it is unrepentant and says it will continue to do business in that way.
This week, ISPs agreed to work with the BPI to reduce file-sharing in the UK. When someone gets ‘caught’ the ISPs will send out a warning, 100% based on music industry provided ‘evidence’. Not even the ISPs know if the claims of the BPI are true, so the evidence is totally unchallenged, a perfect position for the music industry.
Despite public protests both online and on the streets of Stockholm, the Swedish parliament has voted in favor of a new “wiretapping” law which invades the privacy of its citizens by allowing the government to monitor web traffic and phone calls, without the need for court orders or similar authorization.
The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has ruled that the identities of file-sharers must remain private and can no longer be revealed to media companies who accuse them of copyright infringement. In future, only those accused of ‘heavy’ crimes such as murder, child pornography or kidnapping will be revealed.
Starting today, TorrentSpy blocks all searches from US visitors and redirects them to a privacy statement. TorrentSpy is caught up in a lawsuit in which the MPAA demands that TorrentSpy hands over all user info stored in “random access memory” (RAM).
A large Polish pay-torrent site by the name of Torrenty.org recklessly exposed the IP addresses of its users, most of whom are thought to be sharing copyrighted files.
The German Pirate Party was founded yesterday in Berlin. The goals of the German Pirate Party are similar to those of their sister parties: decriminalizing filesharing, copyright reform, sensible patents, and privacy protection, to name a few.
Johan Linander, a member of the Swedish parliament for the Center Party writes that a new law, based on EU directives, has been proposed by the Ministry of Justice. This law makes it possible for “copyright holders” to demand customer info tied to IP addresses that allegedly infringe copyright.
We all know that “copyright holders” means [...]
One thing that has emerged as a concept in the Swedish blogosphere over the last two years is the Bodström society. It obviously derives from the Swedish justice minister Thomas Bodström. The term relates to a society that is going in an Orwellian direction towards more and more monitoring of its citizens, often in a deceitful way.
