That victory was short-lived. The Supreme Court subsequently decided that sites such as The Pirate Bay can indeed be blocked on the basis they are engaging in illegal behavior. This decision opened up fresh action against another torrent site, BTjunkie. The public prosecutor described BTJunkie as one of the most prominent havens for pirated media and in April a court ordered all Italian ISPs to block the site.

But of course, legal action takes time and as was shown in the first ruling against The Pirate Bay, sometimes a positive outcome for copyright holders can transform into periods of concern. To avoid such distractions in the future, the Italian government and its telecoms agency have a cunning plan.

Under recent government legislation telecommunications agency AGCOM is now required to adopt measures to deal with sites and content deemed illicit by the entertainment industries. AGCOM want to make that particular job as simple as possible by awarding themselves the most powerful tool available – the ability to remove content and block websites without a single court, judge or legal process getting in the way.

AGCOM will be able to take offending sites and content offline within 48 hours. Sites affected by the measures will have 5 days to lodge an appeal.

Tomorrow, July 6th, AGCOM will vote on the resolution which will grant the agency the controversial powers detailed above. It will do so in the face of intense opposition from many in the Internet community, who see the lack of judicial oversight as a sign that abuses of power and unwarranted censorship will follow. Among the dissenters is free software guru Richard Stallman.

“I believe that this an attempt by copyright owners to skip the legal system to attack sites and services that they consider a threat to their interests,” says Stallman in an interview with Italy’s Espresso.

“The new system, directed by AGCOM rather than by a court with due process, will accelerate decisions against alleged illegal internet content: this is why the copyright industry wants it. But, being a short and quick way, it will probably trample the rights of users.”

Stallman goes on to state that dissenting voices have been wrongfully silenced in the past following spurious claims of copyright infringement, and that under AGCOM’s proposals collateral damage is inevitable.

“I do not think it is possible to avoid censorship against innocent sites. But even if it were possible, it would be wrong. Why would we hinder users who want to share content?”

But does Stallman believe the right to share trumps the rights of the entertainment industries?

“I reject the term ‘copyright protection’ associated with what the industry is doing now,” Stallman explains.

“Copyright should serve to protect the art and artists. The current system, however, is only in the interests of publishers and delivers only crumbs to almost all of the artists. I propose a system to fund artists directly, based on their popularity, with taxes to give fair compensation [such as from a blank media levy].”

Various campaigns are underway to protest AGCOM’s proposals. The activists of Anonymous are taking the usual direct action by way of ‘Operation Italian Internet Freedom’ and a DDoS on the currently unavailable AGCOM website.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Dear friends and supporters,

The Shareaza Development Team would like to extend our thanks to all of you for your contributions towards our Legal Defense Fund. As you will remember, our project’s identity was appropriated late last year by the recording industry funded Discordia Ltd. shell company and handed over to the recording industry “approved” iMesh for commercial exploitation.

To that end, we are today announcing that we have legal representation and will be contesting the trademark application on our name and identity taken out by Discordia Ltd. After that, we’ll be looking to get our old domain back from the people who threatened, bullied and intimidated the team member holding it on the project’s behalf and who are now using as the gateway to their deceptive business model.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Software Freedom Law Centre, the EFF and Richard Stallman for their help and assistance in this unfortunate matter and also for their recognition of this new threat being faced by free software projects the world over.

If you’d like to help us in our fight to regain control of our identity, we welcome all donations to our Legal Defense Fund. You can use our ChipIn account here to donate safely.

So will this all be long, drawn out and very boring? Quite possibly. Are we going to sit back, lick our wounds and wait for the lawyers to sort it all out?

Heck no!

In fact, The Shareaza Development team is also announcing today that we’ve started work on Shareaza 3.0. Put simply, we’re not going to let the identity thieves slow us down at all.

Shareaza 3.0 will be a significant milestone in Shareaza’s long history. For a start we’re switching to the brand new QT 4.4 application development framework. This will allow us a lot more flexibility for a redesign of Shareaza’s network core, making the current Gnutella, Gnutella2 and ED2K networks more modular. We’re also getting rid of the deprecated MFC code to make 3.0 more plug-in friendly and many of the existing features our users know and love will also be re-built with portability in mind.

The even bigger news is that we’re scrapping our current implementation of BitTorrent and will be using the libtorrent libraries as our base for torrent support in the 3.0 release. Shareaza’s BitTorrent implementation is long overdue for a revamp and while many of it’s features were revolutionary at the time (Shareaza was the first client to experiment with decentralized torrents for example) the development team realizes that its time to bring BT support into line with the modern torrent scene.

Developers with some spare time and a desire to get their hands dirty playing with the new QT 4.4 on an existing code base are welcome to stop by our developers IRC channel for a chat.

Once again, we send our thanks all the Shareaza users and supporters out there and invite Discordia, iMesh and the recording industry monopoly to drop the trademark application and return our domain name before you embarrass yourselves any further. We’re fighting back!

Inquiries can be made via our forums here

Kind regards,

Shareaza Community

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.