October 2012 and the labels were back for more, this time asking six ISPs (BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk) to begin blocking three more leading BitTorrent sites under Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.

None of the ISPs offered to voluntarily block the sites without a court order, but none of them expressed a willingness to contest the industry’s demands either. This meant that the inevitable court hearing would be a streamlined affair resulting in success for the music industry. A little while ago that came to pass.

This morning the High Court in London ordered the country’s leading Internet service providers to begin blocking Kickass Torrents, H33T and Fenopy, a decision welcomed by the BPI.

“The growth of digital music in the UK is held back by a raft of illegal businesses commercially exploiting music online without permission,” said chief executive Geoff Taylor.

“Blocking illegal sites helps ensure that the legal digital market can grow and labels can continue to sign and develop new talent.”

The Open Rights Group, who noted that the interests of Internet users and the general public were absent from today’s ruling, said that site censorship is not the solution to the issue of piracy.

“Blocking is an extreme response, which will encourage new forms of distributed infringement. The BPI and others should be mindful that their tactics may have the opposite effect to their intention, by legitimizing and promoting resistance to their actions,” said ORG’s Jim Killock.

“We are concerned that these orders are not protecting speech, are overblocking forums and discussion, and are prone to error as the actual block lists are private.”

The UK Pirate Party, who were recently forced by the BPI to close down their Pirate Bay proxy service, said that the UK had “handed power over what we see on the internet to corporate lobbyists.”

Speaking with TorrentFreak at the weekend, the owner of H33T described the BPI as “dishonest, capitalism at its most cynical,” and predicted that this blocking demand won’t be the last.

“We can expect this and more evil from the BPI, who are still rich on the wealth plundered over decades from exploited artists,” he said.

New information suggests that this prediction may indeed prove to be accurate.

Earlier this month we reported that RLSlog, one of the web’s largest ‘release blog’ sites, had withdrawn links to movies following threats from Hollywood. We have since learned that the law firm handling the case for the studios told RLSlog that they had already reported the site to the High Court with a view to having it blocked by the country’s largest ISPs.

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

The new legislation, which kicked in October 1 2012, stated that those knowingly downloading copyright infringing material could face a two-year jail sentence or a fine of 2 million yen ($21,640). Existing legislation against uploaders of copyright content already provided for penalties of up to 10 years in prison and a 10 million yen ($108,202) fine.

The Japanese public hadn’t witnessed any large scale enforcement action since the law’s introduction nearly five months ago but all that changed a few days ago.

The National Police Agency’s Cybercrime Project and rightsholders including the Recording Industry Association of Japan have just revealed the results of an intensive three day anti-piracy crackdown.

The police say that they carried out raids on 124 locations in all 47 regions of Japan, to date arresting a total of 27 people for breaches of copyright law. The items being shared and/or downloaded unlawfully include movies, music, TV shows, games and business software.

The Recording Industry Association of Japan confirmed that at least two of the arrests related to their products. The first concerned a 41-year-old who had allegedly uploaded music using the file-sharing software ‘Share’ and the second involved a 42-year-old who allegedly uploaded a video clip using the same tool.

The MPA-affiliated Japan and International Motion Picture Copyright Association (JIMCA) say that a 40-year-old man was arrested February 19 for allegedly uploading copyrighted movies using the P2P software ‘Share’. An earlier raid netted the hardware pictured below.

In addition to the above, several other rights organizations were involved in reporting the remaining alleged infringers to the police. They are the Association of Copyright for Computer Software (ACCS), General Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPAJ), Japan Video Software Association (JVA), General Institute of Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

While this is the first large coordinated action since the new legislation passed October 1, Japanese police have also conducted smaller operations against alleged file-sharers. They include

• A man arrested for uploading English teaching materials (October 15)
• Three men arrested for uploading video games using WinMX (October 16)
• A man arrested for uploading word processing software to a cloud site (October 22)

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

Uploaded.to was born sometime in 2006 as the one-click file-hosting market began to develop. For the time it offered a generous upload maximum of 250mb per file and by the end of 2007 was selling premium accounts and offering uploaders four euros for each uploaded file downloaded 1,000 times.

The site now exists under new ownership at Uploaded.net but the historical activities and fate of the site’s former operator following a criminal trial are now being reported.

In addition to controlling Uploaded.to, the man also operated a second linking site called DC Remix. When the original rightsholder complaint was filed in 2007, Uploaded had around 400,000 hits a day and DC Remix around 80,000 members.

Due to shared ownership and the fact that DC Remix published links to copyright works stored on Uploaded.to, this was not a simple case of the operator of a file-hosting site being held liable for the infringing actions of his users.

Rasch Legal reports that the sites were in “technical cooperation” in order to provide a system for the illegal distribution of music. DC Remix encouraged its users to upload pirated music to Uploaded.to, profited from those who subsequently bought premium accounts on the file-hoster, and generating money throughout from advertising.

During the trial the District Court in Munich found that the rewards program operated by Uploaded.to incentivized users to upload infringing material, by paying out more to those who generated the most subsequent downloads.

The court found the man, known by the name Deniz C, guilty of commercial copyright infringement and sentenced him to pay 360 day fines of 400 euros each, to a total of 144,000 euros ($188,000).

The site operator accepted his sentence in principle but is reported to have appealed the 400 euro amount, arguing he had a net income of just 7,300 euros. However, the original amount was considered reasonable following the discovery of photographs on Facebook depicting the now Swiss resident in a luxury apartment overlooking a lake, wearing an expensive watch, and alongside his Lamborghini.

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

Since the system only covers BitTorrent-like public transfers, streaming and direct download sites are an attractive option for Internet users wishing to avoid its clutches. But despite the Hadopi anti-piracy agency declaring last year that there had been “a clear downward trend in illegal P2P downloads” but no “massive transfer in forms of use to streaming technologies or direct downloads”, there is still interest in these mechanisms.

French news outlet PCInpact has directed TorrentFreak to a new report published by Hadopi which proposes draconian messages to force streaming and Direct Download (DDL) sites to comply with the law.

“Some Internet sites, streaming services and direct download sites are specialized in the massive exploitation of illegal content from which they make profits for their own benefit,” the Hadopi writes. “This report, showing the state of the ecosystem of illegal streaming and direct downloads, explores different ways to fight against the massive exploitation of illegal content.”

The report, put together by Mireille Imbert-Quaretta, President at the Commission for the Protection of Rights (Commission de Protection des Droits), covers a wide range of anti-piracy techniques, some well-trodden and others more fresh.

Hadopi has always claimed that “three strikes” is primarily an educational effort and in combating streaming and direct downloads the agency begins with the same approach. Internet users should be educated about the “dangers” of obtaining media via these mechanisms through warning messages sent by Hadopi.

Aiming to push the sites themselves towards YouTube-levels of copyright compliance, Hadopi would like them to implement content recognition and filtering technologies utilizing fingerprints supplied by rightsholders. These systems could be used to completely remove content or restrict user access based on location.

However, the report goes much further by suggesting that if site operators refuse to sign filtering agreements with rightsholders and illicit content repeatedly appears, they could be subjected to a strikes-style system of their own.

“In the event that it would not be possible to reach an agreement because of the apparent unwillingness of the platform hosting the reported content [to comply with the law], the public authority may decide to correct the behavior of the platform through an alert procedure,” Numerama reports.

Suggested punishments for sites are varied, including reporting them to search engines for delisting. Google has already taken steps to remove French sites including AlloStreaming from its index in the past.

In addition, sites could be reported to a judge in order to begin a domain blocking process. Once blocked by IP and DNS, Hadopi wants to have the power to ensure that domains (and any subsequent mirrors) remain blocked. Outright domain seizures are also a possibility.

Also, in a move that mirrors more recent anti-piracy activity involving PayPal and certain credit cards, Hadopi wants to hit operators in the pocket by targeting the financial intermediaries of sites subjected to the copyright alerts procedure. This could include suspension or termination of payments but if financial partners refuse to cooperate, Hadopi suggests it could take the matter to court.

Finally, and adding momentum to initiatives underway in the United States, Hadopi wants to strangle advertising to sites subjected to the alerts procedure.

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

For this reason The Pirate Bay has been hosted in many countries over the years, hopping across borders when one country or another became intolerant to its activities. As legal and political pressure mounted on the site its options narrowed further, with the threat of police raids eventually forcing even more drastic countermeasures.

For a while now the site’s true location has been unknown, hidden away in a far-off cloud and identifiable only by the connections it makes with the outside world. However, the site has to come up for air somewhere and for the last three years the site has received its Internet connectivity from Scandinavia, courtesy of the Swedish Pirate Party.

With the actual site located who-knows-where, last week the Pirate Party received the call they had been expecting. Local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance told the pirates and other Internet companies further up the chain that continuing to work with The Pirate Bay beyond Tuesday 26 would result in legal action.

Rights Alliance have the backing of the world’s largest movie and music companies and fighting them in court would be a huge burden for the Swedish Pirate Party, one that would sap their resources and divert them from their mission. So, reluctantly, the Swedish pirates have now stopped hosting The Pirate Bay, but not before a new plan was put into action.

Sometime earlier today the ropes connecting the Pirate Bay galleon to the shores of Sweden were cut and the ship sailed away into the sunset. And then, as if by magic, it split into two parts and docked in two brand new ports.

With a seamless transition The Pirate Bay is now being serviced by the pirate parties of Norway and Catalunya.

“TPB did of course have lots of backup transit lined up for ages. This is however the first time we are going to show two at the same time,” The Pirate Bay’s Winona told TorrentFreak.

“It will be interesting to see who is now blamed for hosting TPB. In the end, maybe the anti-interneterians will understand that they can’t win a fight when they have the people against them.”

The decision to choose Norway and Spain as locations for The Pirate Bay is perhaps best viewed through the prism of recent court action in the former and a complete lack of action in the latter.

Following initial pressure and a court case in 2009, the IFPI and several movie studios failed to force local ISP Telenor to block The Pirate Bay. Their 2010 appeal was also rejected when the court found that there was no legal basis to force Telenor to block the site. While that ruling on ISP liability will be of some comfort to the Norwegian pirates, the position could change if the law is amended.

But of course there’s a backup – Spain.

Despite introducing new legislation after the US threatened to place it on a trade blacklist, Spain currently offers a favorable environment for file-sharing sites.

Last April and just a month after the so-called Sinde Law went live, the Spanish Ministry of Culture revealed that the Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual (Copyright Commission) had received dozens of site closure requests from rightsholders. However, according to the Intellectual Property Alliance, little has been done in response.

“To date, only two websites have closed in response to complaints submitted to the IP Commission by IIPA’s member affiliates, and those websites closed voluntarily,” the IIPA wrote in a recent submission to the USTR.

“As of yet the IP Commission has not once made use of its authority to request a judicial writ from the Administrative Court to order the closure of a single infringing website or service. Meanwhile, IIPA is aware of at least 80 complaints that remain outstanding. More than ever, websites providing or linking to illegal content can be secure in the knowledge that takedown measures are nonexistent and result in no consequences,” they add.

Spain also offers other benefits to a site like The Pirate Bay since under current law file-sharing linking sites are not explicitly illegal. Also of interest is an IIPA complaint that Spain’s e-commerce laws do not make it clear that infringement notices are an effective means of providing ISPs with knowledge that infringement is occurring on their services.

Which is just as well, since The Pirate Bay may well attract quite a few of those.

Update: Comment from Swedish Pirate Party Leader Anna Troberg

“It is wonderful to be able to pass on the baton to two sister parties. It is testament to the pirate movement’s maturity and strength. We help each other and work with our sight set firmly on the future. Today, there are more than sixty different Pirate Parties all around the world. Every cut connection to The Pirate Bay will generate two new connections.

“You always have to chose your battles wisely,” Troberg adds. “It would be crazy to enter a game where the rules are decided by the other team. The Pirate Party’s mission is not to produce martyrs for the copyright industry. Our mission is to create longterm political change that ensures that the copyright industry in the future will not be allowed to threaten companies, organisations and individuals into silence with our common judicial system as a weapon.”

Update 2: The party may issue a police complaint.

“The Pirate Party has a board meeting in a few days. I will recommend the board to file a police report against the Rights Alliance for unlawful coercion,” Troberg says. “It is important to determine precisely how forgiving the system is to those who try to abuse the judicial system to silence others.”

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

On the back of this success, in October 2012 music industry group BPI tried its hand again, this time asking six ISPs (BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk) to begin blocking three more leading BitTorrent sites.

According to the Open Rights Group, next week the music industry will get a hearing in the High Court during which they will ask for a blockade on Kickass Torrents, H33t and Fenopy.

ORG describe website blocking as “an extreme response” and say the hearings between a judge, ISPs and rightsholders do not sufficiently represent the needs of the Internet user.

Speaking with TorrentFreak the admin of one of the affected sites goes much further, slamming both the censorship approach and business ethic of the BPI.

“All anyone needs to know about the BPI is their 80′s slogan: ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’. The BPI are dishonest, capitalism at its most cynical, most hated by music fans and artists alike,” the admin of H33T says.

“We can expect this and more evil from the BPI, who are still rich on the wealth plundered over decades from exploited artists. To call the BPI arrogant when they claim to represent artists does not fully describe the depth of their corruption, they represent only themselves, a zombie remuneration vehicle for executive salaries to maximize the gold they extract from music production. Same situation as with the bankers, the BPI stinks the whole place up,” he adds.

The admin says that an attack on H33T, currently the 10th most popular torrent site in the world, is designed to maintain control for the BPI.

“Attacking H33T is an attack on sharers, that is the real BPI agenda. The BPI and their MAFIAA masters are playing for control of consumption of digital media in the UK. Independent networks of people freely sharing content is a challenge to their broken business model.

“This latest court action is well described by the Roman senator and historian Tacitus: ‘The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws’. We are fighting for freedom, not independence, we want autonomy to make our own decisions, we want freedom of choice,” he adds.

H33T’s owner also questions whether this time around the court will be so quick to rubber stamp the BPI’s demands. In both of the UK’s previous blocking cases against Newzbin2 and The Pirate Bay there had been previous rulings that deemed the sites to be illegal. That is not the case with H33T, KickassTorrents or Fenopy.

Also muddying the waters is that unlike The Pirate Bay the sites in question all respond to DMCA-style takedown notices, although H33T does place certain conditions on cooperation.

Its owner says that a High Court summary judgment in favor of the BPI and without third party input would also deny a debate on notice and takedown processes.

“A summary judgment against the sites to enact a ban would deny any argument based upon the validity of DMCA style takedown procedures outside of the USA and the issue of the attribution of costs.

“In the absence of a proven complaint against the sites of facilitation or other involvement in the breach of copyright regulation, a ban on sites amounts to a judgement that a reasonable takedown procedure is no protection against a complainant and the matter of attribution of costs is ultimately to be borne by the network service provider. This summary judgment would have far reaching implications for the industry as a whole,” he concludes.

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

The first and most remote casualty was the bandwidth supply coming from Swedish ISP Portlane. They provided Internet connectivity to a company called Serious Tubes, who in turn supplied the Pirate Party. In order to keep their supplier out of the upcoming battle, mid-week Serious Tubes routed their traffic around Portlane.

With Portlane out of the equation and bandwidth clearly coming from elsewhere, Serious Tubes continue to supply the Pirate Party who in turn continue to supply The Pirate Bay. The site remains up and tomorrow the Pirate Party are hosting a demonstration for citizens to show their support for the effort.

“Given that Rights Alliance threatens to drag the Pirate Party and individual representatives of the party to court for giving Pirate Bay Internet access, a demonstration has been organized for this Saturday to support the party and free society,” says party leader Anna Troberg.

The demo will take place in the Citizen Square (Medborgarplatsen) in Stockholm at 14:00 with Anna Troberg and Member of the European Parliament Christian Engström as speakers.

“This is primarily a democracy and freedom of speech issue, not a file sharing issue,” Troberg explains.

“It’s not fair for private companies on their own authority to dictate how and where we communicate with each other based on their own economic interests. It is in fact a threat to the open society. It is not fair for these companies to indulge in an organized extortion racket without ever meeting resistance.”

Despite recognizing a clear threat to the free and open Internet, Troberg says it’s quite remarkable that the entities with a real interest in this battle’s outcome (and the financial clout to influence it) are remaining so passive.

“Where are the major ISPs? Those with real financial muscle to take on a lawsuit? Why do the poor individual file sharers stand alone against the copyright industry’s Henchmen? Why do they have no interest in helping the only political party that stands up for their right to deliver Internet without being exposed to threats? Why do they do nothing?” Troberg questions.

Last year when the BPI threatened the UK Pirate Party over its Pirate Bay proxy, it quickly became clear that industry group was not only threatening the party, but the individuals involved with its operations.

The BPI bristled at the notion that they were being personally vindictive and insisted that since the UK Pirate Party is not a “legal personality” they had no choice but to target its members.

Whatever the motivations behind the tactics, the Swedish Pirate Party now face similar issues.

“Since [the threats] arrived I and several members of the Pirate Party have had to talk to our families about how we will be able to handle our lives if it turns out that our political commitment might potentially cost us both months apart and our economic security for the foreseeable future. How does one have such a conversation? I do not know. I just know that NO ONE should have to have such conversations in Sweden 2013,” Troberg says.

So what will the outcome be next Tuesday? Will the party choose to fight the world’s largest entertainment companies in court, even with the almost inevitable outcome of the side with the largest bank balance coming out the victor?

This morning TorrentFreak was informed that nothing has yet been decided and that the announcement will go to the wire next week. Whatever the outcome a fight is promised, whether that’s inside or outside court.

“On February 26, I will tell the Rights Alliance that the Pirate Party is picking up their thrown glove. If we choose to fight in the courts or outside the courts remains to be seen,” Troberg says.

“Regardless, we are not going to let them win by walkover.”

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

The party, which has long stood for the same free sharing of information ideals as The Pirate Bay, agreed to begin supplying bandwidth to the site. For three years the arrangement went along just fine, but now there is a serious challenge to the status quo.

This Tuesday the Pirate Party announced that they had received legal threats from the Swedish Rights Alliance. Stop serving TPB with Internet connectivity, they ordered, or face legal action in a week. But can the party be held liable as a traditional host might?

Yesterday, in an attempt to illustrate the relationship the party has with the site, former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde described the technical setup and how it differs from a regular hosting arrangement.

“There is no question of the Pirate Party being a final destination for The Pirate Bay, but rather a stretch of road. [The party's systems] store no data, there is no data in them. Everything is in cables only temporarily,” he wrote.

But despite the technical differences between hosting and simply pushing data around, the threats from Rights Alliance persist.

Serious Tubes, the company that sells bandwidth to the Pirate Party, also received similar threats from Rights Alliance. They were ordered to stop providing bandwidth to the Pirate Party and must now consider their position and reveal their intentions by next Tuesday, February 26.

But not content with moving at least two steps up the bandwidth chain with legal threats, new information has revealed that Rights Alliance have taken things even further by threatening to sue Portlane, the Swedish Internet provider that supplies Serious Tubes with bandwidth.

To underline just how detached this situation has become, picture this. The Pirate Bay (hosted who-knows-where) is connected directly (or maybe indirectly) to the Pirate Party. In turn the party are connected to Serious Tubes, who in turn are connected to Portlane. So what we have here is the supplier of the supplier of the supplier of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay coming under legal threat. That’s quite a chain.

Nevertheless, indications are that the long chain of intermediaries, all of which act as “mere conduits” as far as Internet connectivity is concerned, are taking the threats fairly seriously.

A little while ago Cluez, a member of the Pirate Party’s admin group, told TorrentFreak via party founder Rick Falkvinge that Portlane are no longer involved in the supply chain to Pirate Bay.

“Serious Tubes routed past Portlane on their own initiative, because of a threat against Portlane, as to not put Portlane in unnecessary trouble,” he confirmed.

But before readers begin frantically opening new tabs to check that The Pirate Bay is still alive, rest assured that panic is not required. Measures are already in place to safeguard the site’s uptime.

“Obviously, Serious Tubes (and Pirate Party) are now getting their bandwidth from elsewhere,” comments Rasmus Fleischer, one of the founders of Piratbyrån, the group that founded The Pirate Bay.

“No one should think that TPB will stand or fall solely with the Pirate Party supply.”

It’s clear that The Pirate Bay are well prepared for these kinds of attacks on their infrastructure, as the lack of downtime shows. Furthermore, when their entire site can be squeezed onto the smallest of USB sticks, reappearance in new locations is possible in a matter of minutes.

TorrentFreak contacted Portlane for an official comment but we are yet to receive a response.

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

Through these reports we can look at copyright claims and the actions taken by Google, which overwhelmingly follow the US DMCA to the letter. Today, however, we look at an instance where the search engine appears to be going quite a bit further.

Movie2K is a site dedicated to indexing streaming movies and TV shows. Its indexes are huge and with as little as two clicks mountains of premium content – including movies still in theaters – will play in an embedded window.

To give an idea of how big the site is, Alexa ranks Movie2K as the 240th most popular site in the world but on a local level things are even more impressive. In Germany, for example, the site is ranked 19th, making it more popular than Twitter, Amazon, Apple, PayPal and Microsoft.

However, Movie2K is struggling to correct what it sees as an injustice. In March 2012, Paramount Pictures sent a copyright complaint to Google asking it to remove from its search listings two links to the movie Transformers: Dark of the Moons. However, while one was a specific URL, the other was Movie2K’s homepage.

As a result, for nearly a year Movie2K’s homepage has been absent from Google search results, despite requests to have it reinstated.

“We have received and reviewed your message. At this time, Google has decided not to take action based on our policies concerning content removal and reinstatement,” the search engine told Movie2K in April 2012.

During the months that followed Movie2K kept up their efforts but despite the Transformers movie not being listed on the site’s homepage or present at the URL listed in the DMCA complaint, Google still refuse to reinstate the site’s homepage to its listings.

“Thanks for reaching out to us. We have received and reviewed your DMCA counter notice. At this time, Google has decided not to take action based on our policies concerning content removal and reinstatement. We encourage you to review [link] for more information about the DMCA,” the company wrote in a recent email.

Google add that should Movie2K remove the allegedly infringing content from their entire site (the Transformers movie in question is currently available on another URL) and promise not to put it back, then Movie2K can let them know.

What appears to be happening in this particular instance is that when asked to remove a specific link Google responded as they are required to under the law. However, faced with a URL removal by Movie2K but a subsequent relisting of the content on another URL, Google considers the content as still up, a major problem if the URL is the site’s main page.

Movie2K admin Terry believes that Google is hinting at an even more aggressive solution to becoming re-listed.

“So they want us to remove all links which are somehow copyright infringement, that’s the only way we can have our index back listed on their search engine,” Terry told TorrentFreak. “That might happen to every other site, to thepiratebay, to mega.co.nz.”

But considering the infringement issues many content providers have with the site, is Google justified in issuing tough demands to Movie2K before reinstating its listing?

“If Google wants to filter all websites with infringing links, then they will need to do the same with a lot of sites in the world, especially with our competition like 1channel.ch and kinox.to since they all have copyright infringing material on their homepages,” Terry says.

The Movie2K admin concludes by saying that Google’s efforts against infringement are not only hurting his site but are actually boosting the chances of Internet users being harmed by malicious content.

“Delisting has a terrible effect. If you compare our Alexa stats we are still growing, but a lot of people aren’t able to find our site on Google and are instead diverted to malicious and virus infected websites,” Terry says.

“The bad guys have recognized that our website index is not listed on Google and are trying to make profit from their sites with similar names that appear in the results instead. Google knows that but they don´t care and in this case they are supporting such malicious and virus infected websites.”

While the rightsholders whose content is linked from Movie2K will be wholly unsympathetic to the site’s plight, this situation further highlights how Google is being forever drawn into the copyright debate. The decisions it makes have to strike a balance between the interests of many parties including those of rightsholders, site owners and the general public, not to mention their own.

Google received 14,380,699 takedown requests last month and is apparently struggling to keep up with demand, to the point where it has been forced to limit the number of complaints copyright holders can file. Rightsholders argue that this problem can be solved immediately if Google simply delists offenders’ sites.

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

The portals, which included ItalianShare, MusicShare, FilmShare and ItalianSexy, had the same Naples-based owner, a 49-year-old man known online as Tex Willer.

The sites, of which ItalianShare was the largest, had more than 300,000 users and carried in excess of 31,000 links to movies, music, TV shows, software and games indexed on BitTorrent, cyberlockers and eDonkey networks. The value placed on that content by police was a cool 32 million euros.

In July 2012 the GdF announced that they had placed the sites’ admin under arrest after investigators found that he had made an estimated 580,000 euros through advertising and donations, and by selling site userbase access to advertisers. He also created fake invoices to the tune of 100,000 euros and evaded 83,000 euros in taxes on the way.

Enzo Mazza, president of Italian anti-piracy group FIMI, told TorrentFreak that the case was of great importance due to the detailed investigation of the site’s finances.

“For the first time the Fiscal police did a very sophisticated analysis of the economics behind an infringing site using the standard procedure they are using for the money laundering investigation,” Mazza explained.

And now the case is all over, with a quite shocking outcome for the 49-year-old.

Italy’s Prefetto di Salerno has now ordered the man to pay a fine of 6.4 million euros ($8.56m), the largest penalty ever handed down in an Italian copyright-related case. We asked FIMI’s Enzo Mazza what made the case worthy of such a large fine.

“The Italian copyright law provides for additional administrative fines based on the number of works illegally distributed. Due to the enormous amount of products the fine became so huge,” Mazza explains.

Of course 6.4 million euros is indeed a huge amount, so what if the man is unable to pay?

“He will be prosecuted by the tax authority,” Mazza concludes.

The news comes on the back of other recent anti-piracy action in Italy which saw authorities order ISP blockades against BitTorrent sites TorrentReactor and Torrents.net. The sites responded by launching proxies to circumvent the ban. The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents are also subject to similar blocks in the region.

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