In a twin assault, the Web Sheriff anti-piracy outfit is looking to recruit Swedish group ABBA to fight against The (Evil) Pirate Bay, and at the same time launching legal action on behalf of The Village People. Please note Mr Sheriff, they sang “In the Navy” – they don’t really have one.
The battle between the IFPI and the Pirate Bay continues. A Danish court ruled in favor of the IFPI, and ordered the Danish ISP “Tele2″ (DMT2-Tele2) to block all access to the popular BitTorrent tracker. The Pirate Bay, currently ranked 28th in the list of most visited sites in Denmark, is working on countermeasures.
The Swedish prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall has announced the charges against four individuals involved with The Pirate Bay. The four, aged 23 to 37, are being charged with “assisting copyright infringement” of 4 software applications, 9 films and 22 music tracks.
In an few hours from now The Pirate Bay team will probably be charged with aiding or facilitating copyright infringement. If they are found guilty, they could receive sentences of up to 2 years in prison, but the site will remain online, no matter what.
Today, The Pirate Bay reached another milestone, as they broke the 1 million torrents and 10 million peers barrier. The largest BitTorrent tracker just keeps growing and growing, and there is no sign that this will be put to a halt soon.
The Pirate Bay recently featured in an exhibition about online crime, run by the Swedish police – even before their trial has begun. Pirate Bay’s Brokep has had enough of being the punch bag of the Swedish authorities: “It’s slander,” he says “Authorities are not allowed to engage in political opinionation.”
Hollywood had hoped otherwise, but it has been a good year for The Pirate Bay, despite all the legal hassles. Most impressive is the explosive growth in number of torrents and peers that are using the Pirate Bay tracker.
The Pirate Bay is encouraging its users to vote for Familjen, an independent artists who is nominated for a Swedish Grammy. They are using the power of peers to break with the tradition of music cartels that reward their own artists, and to annoy the IFPI of course.
BitTorrent is by far the most popular way to transfer large files over the Internet, but where will it be five years from now? To get some answers to this question TorrentFreak asked the admins of Mininova, The Pirate Bay, IsoHunt and TorrentSpy what they think the future holds for BitTorrent and their websites.
Prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall announced that he plans to press charges against 5 people involved with The Pirate Bay before January 31, 2008. The 5 are suspected of facilitating copyright infringement.
Sometime during the last 24 hours there was a mass deletion of aXXo torrents from The Pirate Bay’s tracker. It appears that a dispute between aXXo and The Pirate Bay about how to best handle alleged MPAA torrent meddling got way out of hand – with aXXo deleting lots of his torrents and leaving The Pirate Bay.
