The 28-year-old former operator of a French-based torrent site has been ordered to serve a year in jail and pay a five million euro fine. A moderator received a four-month suspended sentence. Somewhat unusually, four regular users of the site were tracked down by their IP addresses. They too received custodial sentences.
TorrentHound has decided to shut down its popular torrent site, voluntarily. "Finito," the site's founder informed us in a brief message. Following the demise of KickassTorrents and Torrentz, the surprise shutdown means that three of the ten most visited torrent sites at the beginning of the year are now offline.
Today, the European Commission published its long-awaited proposal to modernize the EU's copyright law. Among other things, it will require online services to install mandatory piracy filters. While the Commission intends to strengthen the position of copyright holders, opponents warn that it will do more harm than good.
The UK Government's Digital Economy Bill has moved a step closer to becoming law after its second reading in Parliament. With unanimous support, the current two-year maximum custodial sentence for online piracy is almost certain to increase to a decade. However, the reading also covered other familiar ground - pressure on Google to do something about piracy.
Today we bring you the next episode of the Steal This Show podcast, discussing the latest file-sharing and copyright trends and news. In this episode we talk to returning guest Holmes Wilson, co-founder of Fight For The Future.
Advertising network JuicyAds has told a California federal court that it's not responsible for pirate sites that use its service to generate revenue. The case is the first where an ad-company stands accused of aiding pirate sites, which has been a major complaint from entertainment industry insiders in recent years.
Research commissioned by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has found that half of 16 to 24-year-olds use stream ripping tools to copy music from sites like YouTube. The industry group says that the problem has grown so much that in volume terms it has overtaken downloading from 'pirate' sites.
Google has released a new and improved version of its Copyright Transparency Report. The revamped report makes it easier to get insights into over a billion reported URLs. Among other things, Google now specifies how many URLs it does not remove and why, highlighting various cases of DMCA abuse.