TorrentFreak

Wikileaks loves to share secret documents and pirates are all for sharing culture, but can these movements share voters in the upcoming Australian elections to ensure at least one of them gets elected?

The upcoming Pirate Bay documentary TPB AFK will highlight some under-reported details about the connection between the BitTorrent site and Wikileaks. Among other things, Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was credited for his involvement in getting the “Collateral Murder” video out to the public. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former spokesman of WikiLeaks, further recalls travelling to Sweden with Julian Assange to pay server fees . A meeting he will not forget anytime soon.

A recently leaked confidential diplomatic cable has revealed that not only is the United States government unhappy with the level of intellectual property rights enforcement carried out by Russia, but also that the reverse is true. Russia’s Deputy Minister of Economic Development said that not only do U.S. sites continue to offer pirated Russian movies, but that YouTube and Google should be shut down for not respecting local laws.

We’ve covered the landmark court battle between the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and the Aussie ISP iiNet in great detail here at TorrentFreak. AFACT wants to hold iiNet responsible for the copyright infringing activities of their users, but they have been unsuccessful thus far. Interestingly enough, a Wikileaks cable that was just released [...]

P2P intelligence company Tiversa is claiming to have evidence which proves that Wikileaks got some of their materials of file-sharing networks such as KaZaA and LimeWire. “WikiLeaks is doing searches themselves on file-sharing networks,” Chief Executive Officer Robert Boback told Bloomberg. Tiversa says it spotted several searches on P2P networks that were specifically targeted at [...]

A teenager was arrested yesterday on suspicion of being involved with the Anonymous’ Operation Payback. The operation orchestrated DDoS attacks on anti-piracy targets in the last months, and more recently against those who obstructed Wikileaks’ work. Sources have informed TorrentFreak that the arrestee is one of the IRC-operators of Anonymous, known under the nickname Jeroenz0r.

A yet to be released cable from the US Embassy in Stockholm will reveal that the United States Government was very concerned about file-sharing related issues in Sweden. The US Embassy actively worked with the Swedish authorities to reduce file-sharing related threats, which included The Pirate Bay which was raided in 2006 following US pressure.