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.

They have the fallout from the planned sale to Global Gaming Factory to contend with, a new lawsuit initiated by US movie studios, and yesterday they lost a Dutch court case in their absence. From that action they now face the prospect of huge fines in The Netherlands if they don’t disable that country’s access to their site within 10 days.

Today brings news of yet another upcoming lawsuit against Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm, even though they say they disposed of The Pirate Bay a little over 3 years ago.

Italy’s FIMI (Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana) and FPM (Federation against Musical Piracy) say they will be suing the three and seeking damages in excess of 1 million euros.

In August 2008, The Pirate Bay was made inaccessible in Italy after ISPs were ordered to block its domain. However, The Pirate Bay appealed and eventually won the court case. In October the Court of Bergamo ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement. The case is now awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court of Appeal.

This new Italian legal action is based on evidence collected during The Pirate Bay proceedings in Bergamo last year – evidence which, incidentally, was supplied by FIMI to the prosecutor in the first instance.

Referring to the planned sale of TPB to GGF and their basis of claim, President of FIMI, Enzo Mazza, said: “The claim is also based on the principle that by selling the site to others, the founders have confirmed that the whole illegal operation of The Pirate Bay was to make a profit and it is therefore unacceptable that someone can take the money and then escape without repairing the damage.”

Peter Sunde’s Italian lawyers, Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Paolo Micozzi, told TorrentFreak that under Italian law, an entity seeking compensation for damages, when there is an ongoing criminal indictment, could either file a civil action outside of the proceedings (i.e, a normal civil action for damages), or bring his claim for damages within the criminal procedure as a damaged party.

“In any case, nothing has been notified to us (as lawyers of Peter Sunde) so far,” Gallus told TorrentFreak. “I gather they have announced their intentions before starting the procedure.”

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

Now FPM is claiming that a “major offensive” is underway against what it describes as “new forms of illegal file-sharing.” The group is claiming that it has successfully removed from the Internet more than 30,000 links to unauthorized music, which together generated 10 million illicit downloads.

Singling out Mininova as the single biggest host of links on its hitlist, FPM claims to have successfully ordered the torrent site to remove more than 20,000 torrents. Another 10,000 items were removed from online storage sites including Rapidshare and MegaUpload. FPM says that it will now work to have further infringing links removed on a daily basis.

In further action against file-sharing services, FPM claims to have shuttered a further 12 eD2K and Direct Connect servers although no further details have been made available.

Interestingly, Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer was not aware of FPM’s takedown bombardment. He told TorrentFreak that they haven’t received any emails from FPM. So, unless FPM was sending the requests from a different email address not associated with its domain, their claim might be a bit overstated.

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

Inevitably the song leaked onto P2P networks before its official release. Normally, the leak of any other song would be met with relative silence since it’s such a common event these days, but Italy’s answer to the RIAA, (FIMI, the Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana) decided to take advantage of the delicate nature of the leak to rally public opinion against file-sharing. They claimed that people were downloading the song instead of giving to charity, something which we seriously doubted in our earlier report.

Nevertheless, FIMI decided that the leak was so odious that it should be reported to Guardia di Finanza, an Italian police force dealing with everything from smuggling, money laundering through to copyright violations. FIMI claims that the leak has already cost the charity 1 million euros but provides no evidence of this.

So, to find the people responsible for the leak, Guardia di Finanza launched Operation Jackal and it hasn’t taken long to get some results. It’s now being reported that three individuals have been tracked down after uploading the track to various file-hosting sites and distributing it via an unnamed Direct Connect hub. The arrests were made in Rome and Milan.

At a press conference, Luca Vespignani, secretary general of the Federation Against Music Piracy said that they reported the leak to the police after they noticed “dozens of illegal download every day.”

FIMI president Enzo Mazza commented, “Whoever put this song on the file-sharing networks has done something evil and knowingly damaging the [fund-raising] initiative.”

As we noted previously, giving to charity is a voluntary act, done from the heart. Those that give to charity do so of their own free will and don’t avoid doing that, for instance, by downloading a song for free. To suggest otherwise is to misunderstand why people donate in the first place.

Donations to the fund can still be made here.

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

There can be little doubt, considering the already-massive effort underway to help those affected, that the song will sell as quickly as it can be put into stores and that the result will be that much-needed funds will reach those that need it most. However, elements of the Italian music industry simply couldn’t resist getting in a strike against P2P, when the opportunity arose to do so.

Domani 21/4.09, like any (every) other song, already made its way on to P2P networks and Italy’s answer to the RIAA has wasted no time in taking advantage. FIMI, the Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana, represents around 2,500 companies producing and distributing music in Italy and has been quick to condemn the leak, claiming that file-sharers are downloading the song while essentially trying to avoid giving money to charity, something which I find a little hard to believe.

People who want to give to charity and help a good cause, do so. Those that don’t want to give have made their choice too but of course there is clearly some propaganda value in claiming otherwise. We’ve all heard the untruth “one download equals one lost sale” but this is probably the first time i’ve heard “one download equals one less donation to charity”.

“There are thousands of copies of the song and video made available on P2P networks with tens of thousands of illegal downloads every day,” said the secretary general of Federation Against Music Piracy, Luca Vespignani. In an attempt at escalation, Vespignani says he has reported the situation to Italy’s Guardia di Finanza. “In this case, the damage goes beyond just music piracy, it is damaging a charity,” he said.

Meanwhile, moving west to Spain, aggressive copyright group Spanish General Society of Authors and Editors has been up to its old tricks again and it clearly doesn’t mind ‘damaging a charity’. In December last year we reported how SGAE illegally gatecrashed a wedding in order to gather evidence that the event was avoiding copyright fees due to them. For their trouble, SGAE was fined around $82,000 but now the group has sunk to a new low.

Juanma López Fenoy is a very sick young man who suffers from a degenerative brain disease called Alexander Syndrome. In order to raise money so that Juanma can go to the US to receive treatment, a charity concert was organized, with artists waiving their fees to perform. The concert took place April 25 and raised €56,000 ($75,000) through ticket sales.

Of course, SGAE wanted their piece of the pie – a 10% piece to be exact – in order to cover their copyright fees. After complaints were made against SGAE, the group issued a statement saying that its actions were entirely consistent with copyright laws, which don’t allow anyone to get away with not paying the fees. However, when SGAE’s stance became known publicly, the opposition to their lack of compassion grew too loud for them to ignore.

SGAE issued a statement, saying that although it would still take its 10%, it would make an equivalent voluntary donation back to the fund, effectively canceling it out.

Better late than never, but if SGAE wanted to make a charitable donation it would’ve been in better taste to have done it willingly, rather than under pressure. Here at TorrentFreak we have faith that people are still donating to the earthquake fund willingly too, P2P downloads or not, and they don’t need to be demonized or put under pressure by some copyright group to do so.

Details about making donations can be found here.

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