So, when the Swedish Pirate Party found out that their local intelligence agency FRA was helping the NSA to spy on Russian leaders, something had to be done.

Turning the tables on the spying agency, three members of the Swedish Pirate Party’s youth division drove up to FRA’s headquarters yesterday, hoping they could find out more about the agency’s secretive plans.

“No politician or FRA executive wants to tell the public what they actually are doing. So we thought that we need to do a bit of signal intelligence ourselves,” Gustav Nipe, Chairman of Young Pirate tells TorrentFreak.

Armed with a large antenna the Pirates parked their purple van a few meters outside the FRA building. However, before they could set up their surveillance rig armed guards came rushing in to put a stop to their plans.

The ‘spies’ were held for 45 minutes while their vehicle was searched, with the guards filming every minute detail. The pirates were eventually released, but not before they were warned that any attempt to activate their equipment would lead to their arrest.

Looking back, the Young Pirate chairman is surprised that they were approached this aggressively, as they were not trespassing or carrying out any other type of illegal activity. “Everybody is allowed to scan the air for signals in Sweden,” Nipe tells TorrentFreak.

“It’s clear that FRA have something to hide, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent armed guards at us,” he adds.

The Pirates hope that their actions have at least helped to raise public awareness about the secret surveillance practices, and the fact that those who are responsible refuse to explain what they are doing, and why.

“It is up to us citizens to try to find out what is going on. Who and what is FRA spying on? Our constitution states that all public power emanates from the people, but when we are not entrusted to know what is done with this power, we need to seek the answers ourselves,” Nipe concludes.

Perhaps a drone may come in handy next time? That worked pretty well for the German Pirate Party.

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

However, while going after individuals sharing an album or two on BitTorrent usually amounts to an endless and expensive task, music labels are very happy to make exceptions. One of the industry’s pet hates are album pre-releases, and for those they are prepared to commit significant resources.

One such case concluded yesterday dates back to early June 2011 when a copy of Beyonce’s album ’4′ appeared online more than two weeks ahead of its official launch. An investigation carried out by the IFPI and anti-piracy company DtecNet (now MarkMonitor) led them to an IP address registered to a woman in Gothenburg. It was later established, however, that she was not the only one with access to her Internet account.

Also using her wireless connection was a neighbor, a then 47-year-old man. IFPI and Sony Music Entertainment said he uploaded the album to the Internet during June 8 2011, 16 days before the album’s June 24 launch.

Revelations that the man worked in the industry as a DJ and music producer added interest to the case, however it later became clear that he was not the source of the original leak. Torrent site records show the album was uploaded at least the day before but that didn’t matter to prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson, who stated that a pre-release is still a pre-release, no matter who released it first.

In interviews with the police the man protested his innocence, stating that he only believed he had been downloading the album for personal use, something he believed was permissible in Sweden.

“I had no idea when the Beyoncé album would be released, these days it’s almost impossible to know when the release takes place,” he explained. “If I downloaded the album illegally from a site such as The Pirate Bay, I would not have had a clue that it was a pre-release of the record or not.”

Of course, since BitTorrent is a two-way protocol he necessarily became an uploader too, something which exposed him as a pre-releaser of the album, despite his protests.

Earlier this month the man went to court for a two-day trial, with the now 48-year-old standing accused of breaches of copyright law. Hanging in the background was a huge $233,000 damages claim from Sony Entertainment, who said that the leak had not only damaged its marketing strategy and sales revenues, but had also hurt its relationship with Beyonce whose reputation had been damaged.

After much drama and deliberation, yesterday the sentence was handed down. The man was found guilty of copyright infringement but the verdict was hardly the scary affair the IFPI and Sony had hoped for.

In the event the court rejected imprisonment and handed down punishment based on the ‘day-fine’ system, which ranks the severity of the offense (in this case 80) and then multiplying that by the defendant’s daily income minus certain expenses.

Grand total – $1,200.

“They tried to make an example of me to intimidate both Swedish and foreign citizens,” said the 30 year veteran of the music industry. “Given that Swedish taxpayers have had to pay for this it smells a little bad.”

De-escalating matters further, it’s also believed that Sony has withdrawn its claim for damages. If true, that suggests that the music industry’s switch to chasing down BitTorrent users has proven just as time-consuming, costly and ineffective as observers believed it would.

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

It is this type of copyright infringement that receives the most attention, largely due to the complaints made by the big corporations that produce and distribute this content. Their influence causes those in power around the world to sit up and listen, which often leads to a tightening of legislation.

Despite all the efforts, however, this year the world’s most infamous torrent site, The Pirate Bay, celebrates its ten-year anniversary. But while it carries on business as usual, Internet users are being subjected to increasingly tough copyright regimes, such as $150,000 fines for sharing a single song in the United States through to the increasing likelihood of arrest for those sharing more than personal-use levels of content in Sweden.

Sweden’s local Pirate Party has battled these developments for years and today, marking a decade of The Pirate Bay, they’ve demonstrated that copyright infringement is not restricted to the sharing of music and movies and that anyone – even those charged with running the country – can easily break the law at the click of a button.

The party has been doing some research on the online activities of Sweden’s IT Minister, Anna-Karin Hatt, and have discovered that the 40-year-old has not been 100% successful when it comes to absolute respect for copyright law.

Singling out Hatt’s Instagram account as an example, the party notes that the minister has posted copyrighted Calvin and Hobbes cartoons plus the artwork for several motion pictures including The Lord of the Rings, The Da Vinci Code, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

“When not even the Swedish IT Minister complies with copyright law online, one can hardly expect ordinary Internet users to feel compelled to follow such an outdated law,” says party legislative spokesperson Torbjörn Wester.

To underline their point that breaking copyright law is extremely simple these days, the Pirate Party have today reported Minister Hatt to the police, just as music and movie studios do when they find people infringing their copyrights. Wester doesn’t believe anything will come of the complaint.

“Resourceful companies and prominent politicians have not much to fear [when breaking copyright] while the police are chasing down file-sharing adolescents,” Wester says.

But of course, the Pirate Party do not want Hatt or indeed anyone else prosecuted for such a ridiculously small ‘crime’. They want to decriminalize all non-commercial sharing of “culture and knowledge”, so that citizens – Hatt included – can share a music file or indeed a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon online without fear of repercussions.

“The government and Parliament have made it impossible to live a modern life and be active on the Internet without being a criminal,” Wester concludes.

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

In 2010 a then 25-year old a man was house-sitting for a friend when early one morning he was confronted by police officers looking for the property owner. The police decided to inspect his computer and found that he was sharing 57 movies through uTorrent.

The police decided to report this accidental discovery to both the prosecutor and copyright holders. The authorities took up the case and the man was found guilty of downloading the films from The Pirate Bay and TorrentBytes. In the initial court case the man received a 6,000 kronor ($920) fine, and after an appeal last week this was increased to 8,000 kronor ($1,200).

However, that still didn’t please the prosecution office, who now want the Supreme Court to take on the case. According to the authorities the prolific file-sharer shouldn’t get away with just a fine – they want to see the man jailed.

“In this case, it is important to set the bar high for other similar file-sharing cases in the future,” My Hedström of the prosecutor’s office told Swedish Radio in a comment.

The prison sentence is not only needed to deter this man from pirating more films, but also to make it possible to hunt down similar offenders in the future. When file-sharing is punished with a jail sentence then the police will have more anti-piracy tools to take on similar cases in the future.

“A prison sentence is needed for the police and prosecutors investigating this type of crime. They will have more powers when the crime leads to imprisonment. For example, they can then do a house search or request certain information, which is not possible when the offense is punished by a fine,” Hedström added.

According to the prosecutor’s office the current laws allow prison sentences for non-commercial file-sharers. Since this is the first case in Sweden against a BitTorrent pirate they are aiming high, to have a favorable precedent put in place.

Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party in Sweden, believes that the man should have never been convicted. However, he also notes that the two lower courts have thus far rejected the call for jail time, which is positive.

“The sad state is that somebody was convicted at all in a criminal court for sharing culture with his fellow humans. This should never have happened”, Falkvinge tells TorrentFreak.

“The good news is that the sentence – no jail – means that it’s illegal for police to bust into homes with a warrant, so no evidence can be collected for future cases of this non-crime. Thus, I have high hope that the cases currently under investigation will be the last ones.”

If the Supreme Court takes on the case it will be a pivotal one for Swedish file-sharers. Should the authorities get their way they could soon raid the homes of pirating BitTorrent users and throw them in jail. If the current verdict stands then their homes will be safe and a fine will be the toughest sentence available.

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

The labels are impressed with Sweden’s performance and are now called upon by counterparts worldwide to tell the story of how they pulled off this feat in the spiritual home of The Pirate Bay.

But despite this great performance the pressure mounts. Attacks on file-sharers and operators of file-sharing sites are a regular occurrence in this Scandinavian country of 9.5 million, even though the population is clearly supporting the entertainment industry.

Earlier this week, charges against a prolific torrent site uploader were made public and today there’s news of another significant arrest against an administrator of Tankefetast, Sweden’s #2 torrent site.

The admin, known online as Freke, was raided by police on Monday at 06:30.

“Come with me to the police station or accept the consequences,” the police told Freke, as reported by his girlfriend. Barely awake, Freke was taken away by a waiting police car.

“They put me in a room where I had to wait to be questioned,” Freke said following his release.

“I asked them to get me my lawyer, which they suggested that I did not have to, but I insisted. When the lawyer arrived after an hour or so they started to ask the questions,” he adds.

Reporting on Freke’s release from custody, Tankafetast staff confirmed that the admin had indeed been arrested due to his connections with the site. However, they note that his arrest was unusual since no evidence was seized during the raid.

When Sweden’s Nyheter24 asked prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson for comment, he declined.

This week’s arrest marks another setback for Tankafetast. During the early days of October 2012 police raided PRQ, a so-called “bulletproof” webhost previously owned by Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm. It was later revealed that Tankafetast was the primary target.

The site disappeared offline but just three weeks later it was back and making a point of taunting local anti-piracy groups with a new clothing range and the hiring of local cinemas.

But despite their obvious dislike of groups such as Rättighetsalliansen (Rights Alliance, previously Antipiratbyran), Tankafetast have gone public with their defense of the police.

“They’re just contractors and in such cases commissioned by other agencies / authorities. It’s like when the carpenter comes to my home to build a patio for me,” the site notes on their Facebook page.

“There are politicians who create laws together with the officials who work in government and so on. This is where the need for change is the priority. Please do not pick on the police when they do their job,” they add.

“We are and will remain here,” the site’s operators conclude.

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

At the end of February 2011 the site announced its shock closure. The official line was that the site had suffered a DDoS attack and hardware disaster from which it could not recover, but behind the scenes something more sinister was afoot.

Around a week before the site’s closure an investigation carried out by anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyran reached a climax when authorities arrested man at his home in Sweden. The 25-year-old was reportedly a moderator on Swebits and between April 2008 and November 2011 had shared huge quantities of content with the site’s users.

According to reports at the time the man uploaded as many as 1,000 movies and TV shows after obtaining the video from so-called ‘topsites’ affiliated with the lively warez scene.

“Previously, we have focused us on The Scene, but now we have directed our focus to individual BitTorrent users,” said Henrik Ponten of Antipiratbyran.

Traditionally ‘Scene’ members have proven harder to catch, but apparently the capture of this individual came about much more easily. Friction between the man and members of The Scene led to his identity being made public online, but prosecutor Henrik Rassmusson has since revealed that the uploader’s static IP address was easily traced back to an ISP.

This relaxed attitude to security has now lead to the man becoming the most prolific BitTorrent uploader ever to be arrested and charged, anywhere in the world. That’s despite prosecutors downgrading their original estimates by 50% to ‘just’ 500 movies and TV shows in the charges just announced.

“It is the largest legal case in which an individual has uploaded movies. There is a precedent, but it is only about 60 films,” says Rassmusson.

There’s no doubt that there have been more prolific uploaders in the BitTorrent scene, but most continue their activities without repercussion. That seems unlikely to be the case here.

“My understanding is that the damages can be expected to be very large for this type of activity, in terms of volume of uploaded material,” Rasmusson adds.

“I think it’s about prison level, and I will likely push for a prison sentence.”

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

With a view towards improving performance within the realm of intellectual property rights enforcement, with the assistance of rightsholders the National Police Board (Rikspolisstyrelsen) has carried out a review of its current position.

According to their report, ‘Police authorities handling cases on IPR violations’, police inspectors met with representatives from from “virtually all” rightsholders affected by the file-sharing of their products online.

The rightsholders told the police that although the situation has improved since the appointment of special prosecutors three years ago, they still face capacity problems when it comes to reporting infringement offenses.

Currently they are able to report only a small number of detected instances of infringement to the police but believe that if the police were better equipped, “significantly more crimes” could be reported.

Rightsholders also complained that response times are simply too long. Once a matter is reported to the police there can be a long delay before they take enforcement action such as searches or raids. There were also complaints that rightholders can spend a lot of money on investigations only to face a lack of response from the authorities.

There are further problems when it comes to technical ability. Rightsholders believe that police forensic IT investigations are not of a sufficiently high quality.

“There is also a lack of technical competence of the investigators, leading to poorer quality
capacity in interrogations,” the police report (pdf).

Other complaints center around how police systems and personnel are structured and organized, and a perceived lack of leaders empowered to make quick decisions on cases pre-trial.

The inspectors left the rightsholder meetings with proposals that more investigators, police officers, forensic staff and civilians should be employed and trained to tackle the issues.

The police have just published their report which proposes the creation of a single central group focused on the protection of intellectual property in order to tackle crime in an area which is said to be “developing rapidly”, especially in technological terms.

“Such a group should consist of a head, investigators, administrative assistance and designated IT forensic staff linked to the group. With the current starting point it is reasonable for the group to consists of around 20 people,” the police report, adding that links with the prosecutor should be improved.

“Intellectual property investigations are often very extensive and complicated. A collective group would facilitate prioritization of cases and also facilitate contact with prosecutors and external parties, such as plaintiffs, international authorities and agencies,” they conclude.

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

The site, the now-defunct private BitTorrent tracker PowerBits.org, is described as a site which allowed users to upload torrent links with the intention of making copyright material available to the public. Among those who provided evidence in the case were Antipiratbyran and IFPI. The sample set of infringements included nine music albums and ten films.

PowerBits was further described as “a commercial file-sharing service” in the sense that the admin “regularly received and assimilated payments from the users.” These payments appear to be what most private torrent sites call “donations” although it’s clear that the authorities did not consider them gifts.

When TorrentFreak spoke with Henrik Pontén of Antipiratbyran about the case he framed the site’s operations as a business, an opinion apparently shared by the Swedish tax authorities. They considered PowerBits to be an Internet business that generated “significant revenues” and on this basis went on to accuse the administrator of failing to fulfill his accounting obligations and avoiding tens of thousands of dollars in taxes.

The Varberg district court heard yesterday that through PowerBits the now 34-year-old former admin had helped to make at least 2,000 copyright protected works available to the public without rightsholder permission.

Although the Court found that the defendant had not directly made available any of the works himself, he was found guilty of assisting in the copyright infringements of the site’s users.

The man was also found guilty of accounting and tax offenses, having allegedly generated nearly $207,000 from PowerBits without declaring the income. A request to confiscate almost $54,000 was denied.

He was sentenced to one year in prison and banned from running a business for three years.

“In addition to PowerBits, there are a number of similar Swedish illegal services with identical business ideas,” Henrik Pontén of Antipiratbyran told TorrentFreak. “The services often have a technical argument when they explain why their business model is legal. So far this has not been successful and those responsible for The Pirate Bay and PowerBits have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms.”

Swedish sites that refuse to close down are being reported to the police, Pontén adds.

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

This status did not go unnoticed by the world’s leading entertainment companies. Their response for the past several years has been to lobby, threaten and otherwise coerce Sweden’s government into taking tougher action against file-sharing sites and file-sharers themselves, and not without result.

In addition to raiding The Pirate Bay and sentencing its founders to jail, Swedish authorities have spent the last few years going after file-sharers who share many thousands of files at once. In theory these multiple infringements can result in a prison sentence, so on this basis the police are allowed to obtain file-sharers’ identities from ISPs.

However, if the Swedish government has its way, in future downloading a single movie could be enough for the authorities and copyright holders to come knocking.

The issue surrounds a proposed change in the law which would allow police and prosecutors to obtain the identity of individual, even though their alleged offense is only deemed serious enough to warrant a fine.

Although the proposed changes to Sweden’s Electronic Communications Act (LEK) are ostensibly being proposed to target fine-punishable offenses such as child grooming or even bullying, their scope would encompass petty file-sharing too.

“I would no longer need to make a preliminary assessment of the criminality of the offense I am investigating. If I have an IP address, can I request information about who is the subscriber, regardless of the seriousness of the offense,” says Henrik Rasmussen, a prosecutor specializing in copyright infringement.

“Of course, a violation of copyright law has been committed even if you just download a movie from a source that is not lawful. The risk then of course is that even those people will be contacted by the police, be interrogated, prosecuted and convicted,” Rasmusson adds.

While the proposed legislative change would not give police the power to search the homes of suspected file-sharers for these minor offenses, Rasmusson says there are other ways to get the evidence needed to prosecute.

“We can also call people in for questioning and it has happened several times before that when people have to face certain facts they admit the offense. We might use that on a larger scale,” Rasmusson adds.

Founder of the first Pirate Party, Rick Falkvinge, told TorrentFreak that the proposals demonstrate the Swedish government’s continued “lapdoggery” towards the United States.

“This was point nine in a cable from the US Embassy regarding a checklist the US had given to the Swedish government to avoid trade sanctions from the United States.

“It is also remarkable how far beyond ’1984′-level surveillance this takes us when combined with the Data Retention Directive. In that dystopic novel, if the government didn’t see you doing something bad at the moment you did it, you were safe. With this law and Data Retention, the government gets the ability to rewind and play back if they missed your dissenting actions the first time.

“Our civil liberties are crumbling, and we’re venturing into very dangerous territory,” Falkvinge concludes.

Patrik Hiselius, a lawyer at ISP Telia Sonera, told SvD that it is important to find a balance between law enforcement, privacy and cost, and that combating file-sharing through legislation is not the answer.

“Put down the attempts to constantly find repressive means to the problem,” Hiselius advises, adding: “The way to curb file sharing is to provide better legal alternatives.”

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

This has meant that in recent years the focus has fallen on users and operators of Direct Connect hubs where a ‘shared folder’ arrangement makes it easy to identify people sharing dozens or indeed tens of thousands of files at once, an offense considered sufficiently serious by the authorities.

This week a Swedish court delivered its verdict on the case of an alleged illegal file-sharer. The case was unusual in a number of ways, not least because it featured the first person in the country ever to be accused of multiple infringements using BitTorrent.

The case in hand, presented by prosecutor Frederick Ingblad and plaintiffs including 20th Century Fox, Sony and Paramount (assisted by Universal, Warner and Disney), stated that a man had illegally shared at least 60 movies using BitTorrent.

The offenses were said to have occurred after the man downloaded torrents from two sites – The Pirate Bay and TorrentBytes. The defendant appears to have admitted to everything he was accused of but offered some items in mitigation.

In his defense the man said that where possible he would download an item but remove it from his torrent client as soon as it began to seed so as to minimize the amount of uploading, i.e unauthorized sharing with others. This behavior had seen the man banned from TorrentBytes, a private tracker that requires its users to maintain a good sharing ratio. Furthermore, the defendant said he had limited his upload bandwidth so he could play online games while he downloaded.

None of the above paragraph could have been easily refuted by the prosecution following a remote online investigation. However, they had possession of the defendant’s computer, an unusual situation for a BitTorrent sharer, and the reason they had it was down to sheer bad luck on the defendant’s part.

In 2010, the defendant was house-sitting for a friend, watering plants and feeding fish. Answering an early morning knock at the door he was faced by five police officers who were looking for the property owner on an unrelated matter.

Despite having no initial interest in the house sitter, police decided to seize his computer. An examination revealed a uTorrent client loaded with torrents and dozens of movies. This fact was reported to the prosecutor and various movie studio copyright holders and the decision was made to press charges.

If the now 25-year-old had indeed removed his torrents as he had claimed then things might have turned out differently, but he didn’t and the court found him guilty of the willful copyright infringement of 60 movies between February 2010 and December 2010.

The court, however, did not consider the offenses to be serious enough to warrant a prison sentence so instead imposed a fine of 6000 kronor – approximately $900.

Prosecutor Frederick Ingblad expressed his deep displeasure at the decision saying that the offenses were tantamount to “going into a store every week for a year and shoplifting” and should not have been considered as a single act. Ingblad has until February 29th to appeal. He is expected to do so.

In the meantime, most BitTorrent users in Sweden can rest easy – as long as they stay in possession of their own hardware that is.

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