StudentBay began with a promise to bring free textbooks to students all over Sweden but before the end of the year the Swedish Association for Educational Writers (SLFF) had reported the site to the police.

SLFF insisted that Gottfrid Svartholm was directly connected to the site, but in reality the only connection was through PRQ, a web host previously owned by the Pirate Bay co-founder.

By May 2009 Student Bay was no more and last December, more than 3 years after the original complaint, prosecutor Frederick Ingblad announced that a 23-year-old man had been prosecuted for founding and running the site.

But although charged with violating and assisting in breaches of copyright law, and receiving payments from site users, in April this year he was cleared by the Södertörn District Court.

The defendant, a web-designer, admitted that he was contracted to work on the site but denied running it. The District Court agreed that there was no evidence to suggest that he had, and acquitted him.

But the prosecution weren’t satisfied and the Court of Appeal has been hearing the case.

The man told the Court that in 2008 he had been asked by one of his customers to help design a website. By way of payment he would receive a commission based on how busy the site became. During 2008 and 2009 that amount reached a total of around 52,000 kronor ($7930).

He added that since he was just a web designer with no control over user actions or any content being shared, he didn’t feel that he could be held liable. While the District Court shared that reasoning, the Court of Appeal did not.

Yesterday the now 24-year-old was convicted for assisting in copyright infringement and aiding attempted violations of copyright law. The Court ruled that despite only being a designer, he must’ve known that the true purpose of StudentBay was to infringe the copyrights of the book companies.

The man received probation and was ordered to complete 75 hours unpaid work. He must also pay 42,000 kronor ($6405) in damages. The money he made from the site was confiscated.

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

Both have dozens of millions of users every day, and they also share the wrath of the entertainment industries. But, that’s generally where comparisons stop.

The founders of the new startup Netkups thought this was odd. Why not incorporate the two technologies and make a new hybrid file-sharing service? Why not allow people to upload files and share them through direct links and torrents?

There is indeed nothing that prevents both platforms from being combined and so Netkups was born.

“The hybrid model is a win-win situation,” Netkups founder Adrian told TorrentFreak.

“In our case, we can save on bandwidth charges and enable a faster growth, while we guarantee that the file is seeded by us as long as it is downloadable. At the same time, users can enjoy the benefits of torrent files and download as many files as they want, using part of our bandwidth and bandwidth from other users.”

In common with most cyberlockers, Netkups has no built-in search engine. Users can upload files up to 1 gigabyte for free, and share them with friends or co-workers, or keep them private. If users choose to share the files, these can be downloaded for free from Netkups’ servers with a speed limit of 300 kBs.

And there’s more. Since Netkups also creates a torrent file, people can also use that to download without speed restrictions. All free of charge. For the uploader there’s an added advantage that Netkups will always seed the torrent file in question, so they don’t have to.

Adding a torrent also means that the files will remain available even if the Netkups site ceases to exist. The torrent files created by Netkups use public trackers so they can be easily uploaded to external torrent sites as well.

Sites that operate file-sharing services need to be cautious of copyright infringement issues, and Netkups are no exception. After the Megaupload shutdown in particular, the site’s operators are smart enough to make sure that they’re not breaking any laws.

“We’d be fools not to worry about that. That’s why we have a serious DMCA policy, as well as a serious legal agreement. That said, we watch out for censorship and abuses of any kind. ”

Netkups’ founder told TorrentFreak that copyright holders have to file proper DMCA requests to take content down, and that they are wary of automated censorship requests with huge lists of allegedly infringing links.

“People might not like seeing some things published, but that doesn’t mean all files should be removed. We care about everyone’s rights – not just users, not just creators.”

The Netkups service has been running stable for a few weeks and the site’s founder welcomes people to check it out. While there’s a premium package available with added benefits, the site can be used for free with limited restrictions.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, Netkups is not the only cyberlocker that has BitTorrent support.

4shared also allows users to download files through torrents. However, 4shared appears to log the IP-addresses of downloaders to prevent sharing on external sites.

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

It is of course not clear what this all means, but without an official message from the Demonoid team, speculation has started. Could it be that the site has found a new host, and preparing a return? Many former Demonoid members are secretly hoping that this is indeed the case.

Last December, Deimos, the founder and main admin of what used to be one of the most popular BitTorrent trackers, posted a message on the Subdemon forums on the possibility of a return. At the time he wrote: “Money is an issue, but the real problem at the moment is finding a suitable place to host the website. There has been no luck there. And there’s some personal stuff I need to take care of that takes most of my time at the moment, and that does not help.”

For those who forgot, here is a recap of what has happened so far. The trouble for Demonoid started back in June, when the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN started to put pressure on Demonoid and their ISP, Leaseweb. Deimos decided that the Netherlands wasn’t the safe haven it used to be and he to moved the site to Canada, which resulted in a few days of downtime.

Deimos never really told the administrators or members of the site exactly what was happening. Initially, most members assumed that there was some hardware failure, but after a few days it became clear that Demonoid was more or less forced to move. Maybe there could have been hardware failures too, who knows, but the outcome was the same – Canada here we come.

Relocating the servers to Canada initially solved the problems, but, by the end of September Deimos took Demonoid offline for the second time. Again, nobody knew what was going on until we found out that the CRIA was responsible for the downtime, which was later confirmed by Deimos. It turned out that Canada wasn’t the best choice after all.

After 5 days of downtime the site returned, now blocking all traffic from Canadian users in an attempt to calm down the CRIA. At first it looked like the storm was finally over, but on November 9th Demonoid’s users were welcomed by a disappointing message on the frontpage explaining that the CRIA was indeed responsible for the downtime.

So will Demonoid ever return? The fact that the tracker is back online, in a different location seems to suggest that there is something happening.

Update: February 20, tracker offline again after 3 days uptime.

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

The new design is not complete yet, but a Beta version is up and running.

The new features include:

The purpose of the Beta site is to give an impression of what the new design will look like. Some sections, like the ‘advanced search’ are not working yet according to the Mininova Blog.

It will probably take a couple of weeks before the new design will go “live”.

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