Their efforts caused immediate controversy when it was discovered that the campaign site, which depicted a Pirate Bay-style ship sinking into the sea, had been constructed with components ripped from The Pirate Bay itself. To use a turn of phrase preferred by the copyright industries, it was a product of “stolen” content.

This apparent double standard caused headlines around the world which only intensified after The Pirate Bay mockingly threatened to sue, CIAPC said bring it on, and the whole thing ended up in police threats.

A couple of months on and the entertainment industry anti-piracy group have just revealed how pleased they are with the results of their efforts.

“The publicity campaign exceeded CIAPC’s expectations. In less than two months we have received visits from an average of 5,000 people a day, a total of more than 200,000 unique visitors,” CIAPC reveal.

But interestingly and despite its reported success, CIAPC say they have taken the decision to terminate the campaign and replace it with another. The image below shows their new effort.

CIAPC say their ‘movie poster’ is designed to sum up the past few months of news – illegal pirate sites profiting from advertising revenue and running away more often due to mounting problems – although the picture seems to depict a laptop with the screen broken away.

Nevertheless, The Pirate Bay has indeed had more problems than most. The site, its former owners, affiliated connectivity providers and ISPs providing user access to the torrent site have lost countless court battles in recent years. It’s been one disappointment after another.

But while none of these setbacks can be denied, it is also evident that The Pirate Bay is operating in a new mode and mindset, where court battles, endless paperwork and propaganda campaigns against them do little to change the position on the ground. The site is up, running and doing the same work as it always has done.

So the arguments continue, largely around whether the efforts against the world’s most famous torrent site are damaging to the extent the anti-piracy groups claim.

CIAPC say that following their successful legal action to have the site blocked by local ISPs Elisa, TeliaSonera and DNA, between January 2012 and January 2013 visitors to The Pirate Bay from Finland were reduced by a massive 81%.

This figure is an interesting one. The three ISPs now blocking TPB have a market share of around 80%, so on face value CIAPC are sort of telling the truth, but it’s not the whole truth.

TorrentFreak spoke to The Pirate Bay who told us that direct traffic to the site from Finland did indeed drop significantly. CIAPC, however, are deliberately missing out other problematic factors. The Pirate Bay spokesman told us that many Finns have probably switched to using proxy sites.

So how many might that be? Precise figures are unavailable, but the graph below shows the times during last year when Finnish Google users became most interested in the search term “pirate bay proxy”. It will come as no surprise that Elisa implemented their block in January and the other ISPs began blocking mid year.

These are just searches though, so how many are successful in getting through?

According to stats from Alexa, ThePirateBay.se is the 111th most popular domain in Finland. To compare, Vimeo is 109th, YouPorn is 144th, Torrentz is 146th and isoHunt 169th, none of which are blocked.

There can be little doubt that Finns are getting through in large numbers. If they aren’t and 80% of the problem really has been removed, surely we can expect The Pirate Bay to fall out of the headlines as a significant problem for the entertainment companies in Finland.

Yeah, kun lehmät lentävät….

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

In Finland, a new procedure, passed last year might bring a radical change to the copyright law. The secret is public participation.

There is some history of public participation schemes in several countries already. The US government has the White House petition site where proposals that reach a certain level of support get an official response.

While that’s led to a quick (and amusing) reply on issues like building a Death Star, it wasn’t exactly useful when the public was outraged at MPAA head Chris Dodd’s insinuations of corruption when SOPA/PIPA failed last year.

The situation in Finland is a bit better than that, and more in line with the liquid feedback systems proposed by – and in use with – a number of Pirate Parties.

A recent modification of the national Constitution allows for citizens to make legislative proposals for the Parliament to vote on, providing it gets 50,000 supporters within 6 months. A private initiative, called Open Ministry was then formed to help discuss and collect signatures. Now the first real test of the system is coming with a new Copyright proposal.

Termed ‘To Make Sense of the Copyright Act’, the proposal (in Finnish) takes aim at modern changes in copyright law, and with the 2006 modification in particular, Lex Karpela. Included in the proposal are reducing penalties, increasing fair use, and easing the ability for people to make their own copies of items they already own (for format shifting, or backups)

According to the DailyDot, it was one of the most commented on, and best rated of the proposals on the Open Ministry site. At the time of writing, the proposal, which has been going for two days, has already gathered over 7% of its target, giving it an estimated success date of Feb 18th.

Part of the success might be due to the outrage the Finnish copyright laws generated when it was revealed that a police unit raided a 9yo girl and confiscated her Winnie the Pooh laptop after an allegation of sharing. The matter was eventually settled with the child’s father paying 300 euro to the anti-piracy company CIAPC.

Of course, even if the proposal reaches the goal, there’s no guarantee that the Parliament will accede to its contents. However, any proposal that makes it that far will probably get strong consideration, given that it has to have direct support of more than 1% of the voting public. As we saw in the US a year ago, sometimes sufficient public outcry can drown out even the most determined lobbying.

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

Anti-piracy group CIAPC (known locally as TTVK) said they’d tracked the man’s Internet account to the unlawful sharing of a single music album by local artist Chisu. To stop matters progressing further all he had to do was pay a settlement of 600 euros and sign a non-disclosure document.

However, he chose not to pay and true to their word, last Tuesday CIAPC escalated the matter. The police turned up at Aki Nylund’s house and upon discovering that the man’s 9-year-old daughter (now 10) had done the sharing, confiscated her Winnie the Pooh laptop.

“I got the feeling that there had been people from the MAFIA demanding money at the door,” Nylund explained.

There was outcry. Everyone from the girl’s father, the artist in question, the general public, and even Finland’s Minister of Culture had complaints to make about the heavy-handed and disproportionate action.

General feeling was that this mess could be an opportunity for a more sensible look at copyright enforcement, but today those hopes have been pushed aside.

The father of the now-10-year-old has agreed to pay a cash settlement to CIAPC of 300 euros, exactly half the original demand.

“We are very happy,” says CIAPC chief Antti Kotilainen. “In a way, we just continued the original negotiations from where we left off.”

In return CIAPC have withdrawn their request for a pre-trial investigation and the police have closed the file.

“We reversed the call for an investigation because we reached an agreement with the girl’s father,” Kotilainen said.

While Aki Nylund will be glad that the case is closed and his daughter’s property will soon be returned, the payment of a cash settlement effectively puts this case back to square one.

Little wonder that CIAPC are pleased with the outcome. Over a single instance of petty file-sharing their demand for cash has been satisfied, via the use of the police and public purse, and despite the outcry.

With this victory under their belt CIAPC will almost certainly be back with more cash demands in the future. Alternatively, we could see them insist that the government seriously considers a three-strikes style infringement system. This settlement has almost guaranteed that.

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

Ok, the event was hardly comparable to the military-style raid at the Dotcom mansion, but it was still an example of a disproportionate show of force by the police at the behest of copyright holders.

Of course, while Dotcom’s children were undoubtedly affected by the action at their home in January, they weren’t the prime targets. In contrast and quite unbelievably, in this week’s debacle the unlucky daughter of Finland’s Aki Nylund was. But despite being a common-sense disaster, this week’s screw-up could be some of the best news we’ve had all year. And here’s why.

If the police targeted the admins of one of the biggest torrent sites in the world this week or rounded up some heavy pre-releasers or similar, people might complain but it would hardly come as a surprise. The writing has been on the wall for a long time in that respect and the backlash from the public would be almost non-existent.

But in what kind of parallel universe does a professional, western police force think it’s appropriate, proportionate and a good use of tax-payers’ money to send officers to a citizen’s home for a petty file-sharing issue, one involving the downloading of a single music album?

And worse still, Finland’s police were only called in to deal with the issue when the father of the child refused to pay a cash demand of 600 euros sent by anti-piracy outfit CIAPC on behalf of Warner Music for what amounts to, at most, a civil offense. Rightsholders should be able to protect their interests, but using the police – and the public purse – to enforce an unofficial ‘debt’? This just gets better.

But before we go any further, we should acknowledge the correct assumption by those attempting to protect the police that when the officers arrived at the house they had no idea that they would be targeting a child. Agreed, they had absolutely no clue. What they did have was ‘evidence’ collected by an anti-piracy group based on a simple IP address.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect example of just how useful this ‘evidence’ is.

If the evidence could actually identify an infringer it would seem likely that CIAPC would’ve seen the face of a 9-year-old child and thrown their 600 euro claim in the trash. Yes, anti-piracy groups do rely on a certain amount of public fear to make their strategies work, but we’ve spoken to CIAPC a number of times and they don’t seem evil. This is the kind of publicity they can do without.

And they’re not on their own.

Chisu, the artist cast into the middle of the scandal, has been forced to defend herself after she faced accusations that she was somehow involved in targeting the child. She wasn’t – and this has been confirmed by her label Warner Music – but she herself said that she doesn’t need this kind of attention and felt compelled to offer an apology to her young fans.

Of course, groups like CIAPC and others like them are trying to positively influence the younger generation. With their taste for popular music they are the customers of tomorrow, but scaring them into submission isn’t going to work.

Interestingly, one of the toughest companies in the world when it comes to IP enforcement is Disney and it was revealed this week that our 9-year-old pirate had a taste for their products. However, when her Winnie the Pooh laptop was taken away by police on Tuesday for analysis, the Disney imagery was associated not only with the joy of children, but with corporate (and by extension) state bullying.

So, all in all, especially considering the upset endured by the little girl and her family, this week’s events have been a disaster for the copyright lobby in Finland.

Almost universally the cash demands made to the girl’s father are being viewed as MAFIA-like extortion tactics. Furthermore, the fact that CIAPC can get the police to jump over a single album download has the Finnish public looking on in disbelief. Officers’ time could be spent on much more serious issues, surely?

Additionally, IP address evidence has been shown to be as flimsy as ever – unless of course CIAPC magically knew they were targeting a child and in which case they fully deserve the ‘bully’ label bandied around this week. One of these scenarios is true, and it’s a loss / loss situation for the copyright lobby whichever way you cut it.

Finally, the artist who was being ‘protected’ by this action has seen her reputation damaged by it instead. Aside from scaring little girls, and using the police for a small and private matter, this is perhaps the biggest travesty of all.

Add this all together and what you have here is a 9-year-old martyr who doesn’t know how important she is. She’s sad today because she doesn’t have a laptop, but tomorrow is another day and her suffering will not be in vain.

Because the public are angry, politicians will be nervous too, and uncooperative politicians are bad news for tougher copyright law. But in the short term anyone sent a “pay-up-or-else” letter from CIAPC (if they even dare to send any more) will be thinking long and hard about paying. The chances of the police coming next time must be slimmer than last week.

And the fact that they will be able to thank a child for that is why this is some of the best news all year.

Update: According to her father, some kind person has gifted Julietta (that’s the girl’s name) with a brand new MacBook Pro.

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

The message in the US from mainstream rightsholders is designed to be educational, but more aggressive companies carry out the same process but with a sting in the tail – a request for cash-settlement to make potential lawsuits go away.

One such request for cash landed on the doorstep of an Internet account holder in Finland during the spring. Known locally as TTVK, Finnish anti-piracy group CIAPC sent the man a letter informing him that his account had been traced back to an incidence of online file-sharing.

To stop matters progressing further the man was advised to pay a settlement of 600 euros, sign a non-disclosure document, and move on with his life. He chose not to give in to the demands of CIAPC and this week things escalated as promised.

Tuesday morning the doorbell of the family home rang around 8am and the man, who works in the hospitality sector, had quite a shock. Police were at his door with a search warrant authorizing the hunt for evidence connected to illicit file-sharing.

Surprisingly, the man isn’t a previously unknown Kim Dotcom-related “co-conspirator”, nor does he run a warez site or BitTorrent tracker. He is, however, guilty of having a 9-year-old daughter with a taste for pop music.

Having failed in her quest to put enough money in her piggy bank to buy the latest album from local multi-platinum-selling songstress Chisu, in 2011 she turned to the Internet, first via Google and then The Pirate Bay.

The girl’s father said the resulting downloads didn’t work so the following day they went to the store to buy music. Nevertheless, this week’s police visit shows that CIAPC mean business, no matter how young the targets or whether or not they also buy music.

In concluding their search, the police confiscated the girl’s file-sharing weapon of choice – her Winnie The Pooh laptop – and according to her father offered some final words.

“It would have been easier for all concerned if you had paid the compensation,” the police advised

“I got the feeling that there had been people from the MAFIA demanding money at the door,” the girl’s father explained.

“At that point my jaw hit the floor and I wasn’t sure if I was awake or dreaming. So the investigator suggested, between the lines, that I empty my wallet and keep my family in hunger for the next two weeks so that they could get rid of the case? What the f––… is this how it goes? I could evade justice murder by skipping Christmas this year?”

“We have not done anything wrong with my daughter. If adults do not always know how to use a computer and the web, how can you assume that children or the elderly – or a 9-year-old girl – knows what they are doing at any given time online?

“This is the pinnacle of absurdity. I can see artists are in a position, but this requires education and information, not resource-consuming lawsuits,” he added.

Electronic Frontier Finland say that this week’s developments are an indication of just how far copyright enforcements issues have progressed in Finland.

“It is not in anyone’s interest, that in the name of the copyright, little girls are being harassed. This shows poor judgment, and consideration from TTVK and from the police,” vice chairman Ville Oksanen said in a statement.

However, there are signs that support might come from an unexpected corner. In a statement the artist in question – Chisu – said that she doesn’t want to sue anyone and that no artist needs this kind of media attention. Indeed, the criticism of the move on her Facebook page is fierce.

“I hope that the matter will be resolved soon and sorry to my 9-year-old girls,” Chisu wrote, pointing them to this free link to her music on Spotify.

Joonas Mäkinen of Finland’s Pirate Party welcomes Chisu’s comments but bemoans artists’ apparent lack of power to get anything done.

“It is sad to see how even the big artists have no idea what CIAPC / TTVK is doing in their name. And the worst part is that even after learning about this, like Chisu did just now and took part in the discussion on Facebook, they can’t stop it since all copyright protection and monitoring is centralized,” Mäkinen told TorrentFreak.

“I hope all musicians realize that the fan hunt that involves confiscating laptops and signing deals that require you to be silent about the payments are severely hurting the image of copyright and creators. Authors of works should actively rise up to say NO to what CIAPC/TTVK is doing if they wish to keep their fans,” he concludes.

CIAPC confirmed that the case against the 9-year-old is only the latest in a line of attempted settlements. Last fall a total of 28 Internet account holders settled with CIAPC, but of course we haven’t heard of the cases due to the confidentiality agreements recipients are required to sign.

Updated to correct attribution of comment to Joonas Mäkinen

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

Technologies such as VHS and more recently home hard disc recorders went some way to bridging the accessibility gap but these days customers increasingly want everything “on demand”, at a time and place of their choosing, not one dictated by a TV company.

To fill this gap in the market, some ISPs such as Elisa and TeliaSonera in Finland are offering their subscribers personal cloud storage. As a TV show is aired it is recorded to the customer’s cloud account, ready to be watched over the Internet at a more convenient time.

The ISPs and their subscribers appear to be happy with the convenience of the services but perhaps unsurprisingly they are now coming under attack from rightsholders.

CIAPC, the anti-piracy group that successfully forced ISPs such as Elisa, TeliaSonera and DNA (around 80% of the Finnish Internet market) to block The Pirate Bay, insists these services are illegal and should be shut down.

“Storage services for TV shows are currently offered by around twenty companies, including major Internet service providers such as Elisa and TeliaSonera,” CIAPC explain. “None of the companies have licenses for the services. This is significant, because the issue concerns around 100 million euros worth of commercial services.”

CIAPC say they wrote to the companies advising them that their services breach copyright law and ordering them to be shut down, but thus far the warnings have gone unheeded. So this week CIAPC reiterated their threats that if the services remain operational, legal action will follow.

“None of the service providers has complied with the requirement of the ban. It appears that a legal solution needs to be considered,” says CIAPC managing director Antti Kotilainen.

The timing of the threats appears to be linked to an announcement last week that the operators of TVkaista, a company offering similar services, had been charged for illegally offering the content of several TV companies without permission.

TVkaista’s CEO and technical director are accused of copyright and intellectual property offenses plus aggravated fraud. The company’s legal adviser is charged with criminal copyright offenses and copyright fraud.

The accused all protest their innocence. They insist that their service is legal under current law which grants their customers a fair use exception for private copying of TV shows for personal use.

The service offered by TVkaista is, however, slightly different to that being offered by Elisa and TeliaSonera. TVkaista records all programs and stores them for a few weeks whether customers ask for them or not. The other services only record TV shows on demand.

CIAPC say that the Copyright Act only permits users to save content such as TV shows, movies and music locally within the home, and these cloud services don’t fit that description.

None of the ISPs are expected to give in without a fight.

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

The outfit that brought the actions is known as Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC). Better known locally as TTVK, this anti-piracy group also successfully forced Finnish ISP Elisa to block The Pirate Bay.

TTVK also track individual file-sharers in pursuit of cash settlements but according to one of their employees who worked in anti-piracy tracking, he had less than optimum confidence in their operations.

MikroPC quotes a statement given to the police by Jaakko Nurmela, a man who worked at TTVK as a file-sharing investigator.

“I did not receive all the training I asked for,” said Nurmela, adding that he couldn’t be sure if the results being produced by the company’s surveillance software were correct. As highlighted in yesterday’s report, innocent people have been wrongfully accused.

Furthermore, Nurmela said he refused to sign a witness statement on behalf of the anti-piracy group because its lawyers interfered with his statement so much he felt that in the end it was no longer his testimony.

“Originally it was supposed to be a nearly 50-page report, where the whole thing was to be described and explained,” said Nurmela. “What I wrote was my opinion, but the main structure and all additions, modifications and edits came from [TTVK Managing Director] Antti Kotilainen and [TTVK lawyer] Jaana Pihkala. In fact, I felt that it was no longer my statement anymore, so I refused to sign it.”

Nurmela also gave some insight into how investigators like him gain access to private Direct Connect sharing hubs similar to the ones ran by the two men at the start of this article.

Usually hubs like these will insist that new members are only accepted if they are prepared to share lots of their own material too. The theory here is two fold – 1) that the range of material available on the hub will increase and 2) people sharing illicit files will also get themselves into trouble should they be an undercover investigator.

Nurmela was clearly concerned about his personal exposure in this respect and asked TTVK to get him written permission to share copyrighted files in order to do his undercover work. None was forthcoming and he was simply told to go ahead and no cases against him would ever enter a courtroom.

So here was a man sharing huge numbers of files on a criminal scale, with a private company telling him not to worry since basically they control who does and who doesn’t potentially face jail and huge fines. Joonas Mäkinen of Finland’s Pirate Party isn’t impressed with Nurmela’s revelations.

“I can say that it is extremely interesting – and unforgivable – that the people who so vigorously watch after copyright infringements on the internet with the mandate of collecting organisations, the entertainment industry and thus indirectly that of the artists and creators, are doing this while lacking understanding of the very technology they are supposed to be using,” Mäkinen told TorrentFreak.

TTVK counter by noting that anyone wrongfully accused has the right to complain and they will see to it that an investigation is launched.

“It is good to hear that TTVK does in fact have some sort of process to handle totally misdirected cases but that doesn’t take away one of the main problems that a private organization is obtaining the personal information of internet users,” Mäkinen concludes.

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

According to a Piraattiliitto report, the Copyright Information and Anti-piracy Centre (CIAPC) in Finland has used a copyright law which came into force January 1st 2006, to have a file-sharer disconnected from the Internet. However, this drastic action – which is thought to be the first anti-piracy related disconnection in Europe – comes with additional controversy. This wasn’t some kid sharing files from his bedroom on a residential connection, this was a government employee using a government internet connection to share music videos.

In true disproportionate anti-piracy style, this fact didn’t stop CIAPC from getting the government connection severed via the Ahvenanmaan District Court. According to CIAPC the connection, operated by the ISP Ã…lands Datakommunikation, was being used by the Provincial Government of Ã…land. It is unclear if this action caused any disruption to legitimate government business but it’s probably safe to say that it didn’t help it in any way.

Ã…land Executive Niklas Karlman said of the incident: “As an employer, we must ensure that employees do not engage in illegal activities. We are taking steps to raise awareness among our employees. We are aware of this threat to our security.”

According to the report, the Finnish copyright lobby ‘sneaked’ the disconnection sanction into copyright law without the legislators hearing the opinions of any independent legal or technical experts. The process has been harshly criticized by Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFI). EFFI vice chairman Ville Oksanen characterizes the legislation process “one of the dirtiest he has ever seen”.

The action also goes directly against the European Parliament who, this April, condemned state plans to authorize the disconnection of suspected file-sharers from the Internet. European Parliament said that disconnecting petty file-sharers would be “conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness”.

It seems that even government activity can be disrupted these days in the name of copyright enforcement.

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