Established in 1998, Agava is one of Russia’s top 5 web hosting companies employing around 300 people. Last night, police investigators arrived at a datacenter where Agava has some of its operations.

The investigators had a self-awarded warrant which allowed them to conduct a search in order to retrieve evidence located on servers used by Agava client iFolder.ru, a large file-hosting service and Russia’s 51st most-visited site

The police had been working on an investigation into an individual who used iFolder to upload child pornography a while ago. The person was caught by the police, but investigators wanted to search to see if he had uploaded more material.

Agava employees offered their full co-operation in assisting them to find the data in question. However, the police turned down the offer and insisted they were going to seize all of Agava’s servers, more than 100 in total, and waited for several hours for a vehicle to come and collect them.

In the end the mass seizure did not take place but police did cut the power and seal them all off. Some of those affected are Agava’s primary DNS servers, but fortunately their secondary units were unaffected.

“Agava considers this unprecedented event as putting in jeopardy and dimming the future of every business in RuNet,” said the company in an announcement. “We are determined to challenge and overcome the excessive and destructive actions we encountered, to protect our customer’s interests. We thank our clients in advance for their patience, and for media and other support they provide us with.”

Even though the police have stated they have no problem with iFolder continuing its operations, the investigation has rendered the site completely non-operational. On a normal day, 180,000 people upload or download from the service resulting in 1.5 million pageviews. Total users per month is around 4.3m.

This action against iFolder follows the unilateral decision to seize the domain name of Russia’s biggest torrent site, Torrents.ru.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The entertainment industry is known to commission reports and research that hugely benefit their lobbying practices. A new report, “Building a Digital Economy” was released yesterday. This report investigates the impact of piracy on Europe’s creative sector and was paid for by the same industry.

As expected, the reports paint a disastrous picture. In just 5 years from now the total number of lost jobs in Europe could grow to 1.2 million and the lost revenue for the industry may skyrocket to €240 billion in the same time frame. The report was quickly praised by anti-piracy outfits including the BPI and IFPI who will use it in their political lobbying efforts.

Of course, those who took the time to take a good look at the report will have seen that there are many assumptions and statistical tricks that led to these outrageous claims. We will discuss a few of them below and show that depending on what sources are used, one could come to entirely different conclusions.

- The report suggests that there’s a direct correlation between Internet traffic growth and lost jobs. That is, the more traffic that is generated on the Internet, the more money will be lost. This correlation is 1 according to the report, which assumes that all growth in Internet traffic will increase piracy at the same rate.

- The report makes another bogus assumption by stating that more traffic will mean more piracy and thus more lost revenue. It does not account for the fact that people might consume higher quality files which are greater in file-size. All projections are based on bandwidth and not the number of pirated goods.

- The report cites some academic literature which suggests that piracy leads to a decrease in sales. Studies that reported the opposite or a null-effect were carefully left out. This bias defines the entire outcome of the report. If they used studies that found a positive effect they would have found that piracy would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the years to come.

- The report uses fixed substitution rates. They assume that 10 downloaded albums results in one lost sale and this figure is not adjusted for the projected increase in piracy. One would think that the public’s budget for entertainment is limited and that the substitution rate would go down as piracy goes up.

- Related to the previous point, if the industry did indeed lose over €240 billion in revenue by 2015, consumers would have a lot of extra cash to spend. Depending on where this money was spent it might create more jobs than the entertainment industry claims it is losing. As a report commissioned by the Dutch Government showed last year, the overall effect of piracy on the economy might actually be positive.

- It gets even more ridiculous when we take a closer look at the claims. In the UK consumers spent €6.3 on audiovisual products. If the projected trends continued, the ‘lost’ revenue because of piracy would exceed the actual revenue, meaning that the music and movie industries would end up having to pay people for pirating their products.

- Lastly, the researchers seem to have trouble putting a decent report together as they messed up the legend of one of the critical figures. In this figure the bars for “file-sharing” and “global Internet traffic” are switched around. This makes us skeptical about the other statistics that are published in the report.

We can go on for a while listing the many implausibilities and research failures but we have to draw a line somewhere. Unfortunately, most news outlets won’t take the time to read through the report, meaning that these figures will be re-posted without questioning the source.

Both the UK Pirate Party and the Open Rights Group have responded to the report criticizing its one-sidedness and propagandistic nature.

“I am fed up of hearing corporate propaganda being deployed in order to justify intrusions on our rights to freedom of speech, privacy and to a fair trial,” Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said in a comment on the report.

“The claimed losses of £1200 per household in the UK are clearly ludicrous. I certainly don’t know anyone who has an extra £1200 in their pockets thanks to piracy,” Pirate Party UK leader Andrew Robinson added.

The entertainment industry lobby, however, has already managed to get support from various politicians in the EU Parliament and will continue to use the report to justify their call for tougher measures against online piracy. We can only hope that the majority of them will see through the misleading setup and bogus numbers.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Following a court case initiated by the IFPI, in February 2008 a Danish judge ruled that ISP Tele2 had to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The music group had successfully argued that that Tele2 was assisting in mass copyright infringement by providing its subscribers access to the tracker.

Sebastian Gjerding, spokesperson for Piratgruppen, a pro-piracy lobby whose goals include the reformation of copyright law, was outraged by the news.

“The verdict is absurd. It will block access for Danish users to the world’s largest distributor of culture and knowledge – copyrighted or not,” he told TorrentFreak. “It’s true that you can access copyrighted material through The Pirate Bay, as you can with Google or Rapidshare. Should they be blocked as well?”

Very quickly controversy hit the ruling when it was revealed that Kristian Løkkegaard, the only expert witness in the case, was previously employed by the Johan Schlüter Law Firm who worked with the IFPI on anti-piracy cases.

Nevertheless, later in 2008 the Eastern High Court upheld the ruling. Tele2 said they would fight on and in April 2009 a Danish appeals body accepted a petition from Telenor to take the case to the Supreme Court.

“We are pleased that we now have the opportunity to find out whether it is Internet Service Providers’ responsibility to ensure the closure of a website,” said Telenor’s regulatory chief Nicholai Kramer Pfeiffer.

The same question has just been clarified to the north of Denmark in Norway, where the courts gave two clear decisions that there is no legal basis under Norwegian law for ISPs to block The Pirate Bay.

The answer to the Danish question is not far away now, as a date has just been tabled for the Supreme Court hearing. Three hours have been set aside to hear the case on 20 May 2010 starting at 9:00am.

Unusually for this type of hearing both sides will be present in person and the public will be allowed to view proceedings although seating is limited.

A final decision is expected to be handed down around a week later.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Half a decade ago ‘maVen‘ was one of the most active movie release groups on the Internet, known for distributing high quality ‘Telesync‘ versions of major blockbuster titles. In the summer of 2006 ‘maVen’ releases suddenly halted, and it later became apparent that the FBI had caught one of its key members.

An FBI investigation into ‘maVen’ had been running for some time and was handed to the Canadian Police in April 2006. A few months later Geremi Adam was arrested after he allegedly recorded the movies “How to Eat Fried Worms” and “Invincible” at a Montreal movie theater.

They seized his laptop and other equipment and later released him, only for him to be arrested again at another theater just a month later. According to the police, Adam had been selling copies of movies on the Internet using the alias ‘maVen,’ which were then re-sold on the web and the streets.

Following Adam’s arrest came a 14 month wait as the police combed computer systems and equipment looking for evidence to convict him. The FBI had labeled him the ‘World Leader’ in Internet piracy and his case went before court several months later.

Today the verdict came in, and the Court sentenced Adam to two and a half months in prison – the prosecution had demanded four. The defense lawyer had argued for community service because Adam suffers from depression and a troubled childhood, but despite these arguments, the Court decided to opt for a prison sentence.

As of today there are still dozens of ‘maVen’ releases available on BitTorrent, although most of these files have no active downloaders anymore.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In early February reviews of hot new streaming TV site TVGorge.com started appearing.

“If you’re outside of the US and sick of not being able to see good TV online or just tired of waiting for Hulu to get your favorite shows, you’ll want to check out TVGorge and its huge archive of shows,” wrote Lifehacker.

“The amount – and quality – of the content on TVGorge is nothing short of impressive,” wrote TechCrunch. “All episodes from all eight seasons of 24 are on there, for instance, in addition to dozens of episodes of shows like Californication, 30 Rock, Heroes, Lost, CSI, Mad Men, Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, and so on. I counted 128 TV shows on the site.”

TVGorge was an indexing service and didn’t carry any material on its own servers. The site’s engine found sources for new TV episodes stored on other sites and either embedded or linked to the videos found. Users flagged broken links and also added their own links to TV shows.

The videos available via TVGorge came with no geo-lockouts, meaning that anyone worldwide could enjoy them without being bugged by “this show is not available in your area” type messages.

In total TVGorge linked to approximately 5500 episodes, 10,000 embedded videos, offered 60,000 external links, and reached 3 million people a month.

While nearly every review of the site was positive, most contained an element of doubt. Is TVGorge actually legal? Could it survive longer term? The general consensus was ‘no’ and ‘no’. Although it could be argued that the answer to the first question is still possibly up for debate, the latter proved fairly accurate.

Around a week ago, TorrentFreak received information that TVGorge was being threatened with legal action. At that stage the site was still fully operational, but very quickly the situation changed. We are now able to confirm that TVGorge was ordered to cease and desist by the MPAA on behalf of the companies they represent.

“TVGorge has recently been advised to remove all of our indexed content,” said the site’s operators in a statement.

“We understand content owners have a need to protect their content and we can only hope they take the initiative to provide easy access to all of their great TV shows at an international level. If anything, hopefully we have shown them that people are desperately looking for a place to watch their favourite TV shows.”

The site’s operators are remaining upbeat and say they will continue to index streaming sources for the TV shows they list, but of course, these will now link to authorized sources instead with the same restrictions that drove people to sites like TVGorge in the first place.

Nevertheless, TVGorge won’t stagnate. The site will take on a new shape by becoming a TV guide featuring breaking news, forums, episode guides, TV schedules, show and episode reviews and linking to or embedding authorized sources from around the world.

Although TVGorge’s legal woes may be over, TorrentFreak has been informed that many other streaming sites are also currently the subject of legal threats and unwanted attention.

Considering the seriousness of the situation it would be irresponsible for us to publish the information we have been given without absolute confirmation, but we are told that in one particular case in a European country, a police investigation is underway against a major site. We asked the site and its host questions, particularly since the news we received corresponded directly with some site downtime, but the responses we received were generally pretty vague.

It may well be that their hands are tied. Time will tell.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

China is no stranger to Internet censorship. The country’s Great Firewall includes many well known sites, but up until now BitTorrent sites have never been blocked.

There was a short blocking incident two years ago when Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay were hijacked and redirected to the leading Chinese search engine, Baidu. However, this issue was solved in a matter of days without an official explanation.

In the years that followed the Chinese government mainly targeted local BitTorrent sites, leaving the previously mentioned sites unharmed. According to reports from isoHunt’s owner Gary Fung, this tolerant stance might have changed as visits from China to isoHunt have plunged dramatically.

The drop in traffic is so significant that any technical difficulties have to be ruled out. Last Saturday, isoHunt had only 1,349 visitors from China compared to 131,362 the week before, a massive 99% decrease.

Despite the signs that this ban of isoHunt is intentional, there hasn’t been any official word from the Chinese authorities on the situation. Whether it has anything to do with the recent P2P site crackdown in China, where the authorities shut down hundreds of local sites including some of the biggest BitTorrent trackers, is unknown.

IsoHunt owner Gary Fung told TorrentFreak that he recommends that Chinese users who want to continue using the site should access it through a foreign proxy. Gary said that China was never a huge source of traffic for his site, but sees the ban as a “big deal” for the ongoing net censorship debate.

Although China’s authorities are not known for their democratic principles, speaking out against the ban might help. “China has flipflopped between site bans, so putting on pressure and people voicing opinions do matter,” Gary added, referring to China’s previous banning and unbanning of websites such as Wikipedia.

The Pirate Bay, BTjunkie and all the other major foreign BitTorrent sites are unaffected and remain accessible in China. For now.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Last year LANVA reported the IP-addresses of 106 users of the country’s largest BitTorrent site to the police. The anti-piracy group claimed that the site’s users were sharing a copy of the Windows 7 Ultimate operating system and took action on behalf of Microsoft without notifying the software company.

The self-proclaimed investigators evidence consisted of a screenshot of peers as listed by uTorrent. The evidence was gathered in conjunction with a local police officer, but none of the parties involved was authorized to conduct an investigation of this kind.

LANVA nevertheless took one of the 106 users to court, hoping to set a favorable precedent that would allow them to go after other alleged copyright infringers. The case went before the courts and the verdict handed down today was not the one the anti-piracy outfit had hoped for.

Citing faulty evidence, the District Court judge closed the case and fully acquitted the sole defendant Sergej Bernotas. The judge stated that LANVA had no right to collect and use the information they gathered. In addition, the judge ruled that such evidence gathering techniques have to be approved before they can be used.

For now, uTorrent and for that matter all other BitTorrent clients remain uncertified as proper evidence collection tools. To be used as such, the developers would also have to give their approval, something that obviously didn’t happen in this case.

At the court hearing it also became clear that the police officer involved had no IT experience and simply carried out what LANVA told him to. When the policeman was asked what tools he used to gather evidence he replied “a computer” resulting in laughs from the audience.

Aside from the action against several LinkoManija users, the alleged operator of the site is also facing legal action from LANVA and Microsoft. In January software giant Microsoft sued the alleged operator, demanding $43 million from the defendant and his company for assisting in the illegal distribution of Office 2003 and 2007.

The case against the operator is still ongoing, but today’s ruling makes it unlikely that LANVA will be successful in pursuing the site’s users. The anti-piracy outfit does have the option to appeal, but if they do the case won’t be heard before the coming winter.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Despite many rulings which have declared file-sharing sites legal if they don’t profit directly from copyright infringements, in recent years its become something of a custom in Spain for music rights groups to attempt to close down sites in advance of a full hearing to assess their legality.

One such case involves eDonkey link site elrincondejesus.com and although fairly low profile worldwide, the site will now start to set headlines.

Back in May last year, site and bar owner Jesus Guerra received a complaint from music group SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores) which alleged the site abused the copyrights of its members.

In a June court appearance, SGAE hoped to get an early injunction to shut Elrincondejesus immediately in advance of a full hearing which would happen at a later date. Guerra protested that his site is legal, carries no advertising and simply provides links like any other search engine.

Judge Raul N. García Orejudo threw out the request for an immediate closure of the site in July, declaring: “P2P networks, as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, do not violate, in principle, any right protected by Intellectual Property Law.”

Now the full case has been heard and the outcome is nothing short of a disaster for SGAE.

In order to assess if there had been a breach of Spain’s Intellectual Property Act, the court had to decide if simply providing links to copyrighted works was the same as making those works available to the public. Judge Raul N. García Orejudo decided that offering an index of links and/or linking to copyright material is not the same as distribution and noted that under current law there is nothing which prohibits such sites from operating.

In making his decision the judge also looked at the finances of the site. He said the site was not a business since the operator of Elrincondejesus made no direct or indirect profits from its operation. Apparently on a roll after confirming non-profit file-sharing sites are legal, he gave users of those sites a nice surprise too.

“P2P networks are mere conduits for the transmission of data between Internet users, and on this basis they do not infringe rights protected by Intellectual Property laws,” he declared. Therefore, if an individual uses P2P networks like eDonkey or BitTorrent to obtain copyright material for non-profit reasons, the act is completely legal.

The outcome of this case is such bad news for SGAE it’s expected they will appeal the decision. Or get the law changed. Or both.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

This week there are two newcomers in the top 10. Oscar winner The Hurt locker is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One of the most significant changes in the new uTorrent is uTP, the ‘micro transfer protocol’. UTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be more network-friendly than its predecessor.

With uTP, uTorrent has become more network aware as it will throttle itself if congestion is detected in the network. The uTorrent teams hopes this improvement will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic, while its users should see less interference with other local applications.

The effectiveness of uTP is still being debated, but some people in the BitTorrent community have noticed another issue. According to some owners of private BitTorrent trackers, uTorrent is no longer playing fair. Since uTorrent users are the only ones using the new protocol, uTorrent favors its own kind over other clients.

This means that when connecting to other clients, uTorrent users will give preference to other uTorrent users, behavior that some have characterized as unfair. As a result, several private BitTorrent trackers have refused to put the newer uTorrent releases on their whitelists, effectively banning the client and forcing their users to stick with the older versions.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management admits that the tracker owners have a point, but says that it is very hard to innovate without having to face such technical downsides. “This is part of the challenge of innovation... but hopefully a challenge we’ll overcome,” Morris told TorrentFreak.

“We’re well aware of these discussions and have been very receptive to the feedback we have received. uTP is being constantly tuned and like any advanced technology on the internet there are edge cases where there’s room for improvement,” Morris adds.

BitTorrent Inc. has opened up the specifications of the uTP protocol and hosted a conference in their San Fransisco offices a few weeks ago to discuss uTP in detail with developers of some of the most popular Bittorrent clients. According to Morris, other popular client developers have shown interest in implementing uTP into their own applications.

Widespread support for the new protocol would of course be the easiest way to get rid of the unfairness allegations, but uTorrent’s major competitor Vuze has no plans to support uTP in the short term. On the other hand, Vuze doesn’t believe the unfairness will result in a noticeable disadvantage for its users.

“In terms of speed, we do not buy-in to the ‘threat’ cited by some, claiming that uTP can result in slower downloads for non-uTP clients due to uTP clients favoring each other during the torrent cold start phase,” Olivier Chalouhi, CTO told TorrentFreak.

Vuze is keeping a close eye on how uTP evolves and will consider adding it to their own client as the technology matures. For now Vuze will continue to work on their own congestion solutions and speed improvements. They have already added UDP transfer support, but not as the primary protocol.

“Vuze added support for UDP transport a few years ago, as a fallback for when TCP connection attempts fail. To date, Vuze chose not to implement UDP as a first-class protocol, as we consciously wanted to avoid claims of a Vuze-specific protocol bias, which we do not believe serves the BitTorrent community at large,” Chalouhi said.

Whether uTorrent’s choice to push uTP forward results in any significant disadvantages for users of other clients is still open for debate. BitTorrent Inc. is, however, committed to play fair and will make the necessary adjustments where needed.

Thus far, only a few private trackers have decided to ban uTorrent and there are currently no signs that it will spread out to more.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In March 2009 the IFPI and several local movie studios began threatening Telenor, Norway’s largest ISP. Block your customers from accessing The Pirate Bay, they demanded, or we will take legal action and get the courts to force you.

Telenor refused to comply and was taken to court. In November 2009 the verdict was handed down – the courts decided that the ISP had no obligation to block the world’s most infamous torrent site.

The IFPI wasn’t about to give in so easily, with their lawyer Marte Thorsby insisting the court had ruled incorrectly. Music performing rights outfit, TONO, confirmed the case would go to an appeal.

In early February the Borgarting Court of Appeal announced that the appeal had been rejected as there was no basis under Norwegian law for the claim. IFPI and TONO said they would consider their options, i.e make a decision as to whether or not they would take the case to the Supreme Court.

Yesterday, in a surprise announcement – it’s not like the entertainment industries to give in so easily – IFPI and TONO said they will not take their appeal to Norway’s highest court.

“We wanted to get a legal clarification on whether under Norwegian law it is possible to order ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay,” said TONO in a statement. “Now we have two clear decisions that there is no legal authority under Norwegian law for such blocking requirements.”

Following the November ruling, TONO said that it was possible that the authorities had not implemented the EU Copyright Directive properly in 2005, a line they continue to stand by.

“We interpret both [court] decisions as suggesting that questions have been raised about whether the EU Copyright Directive was adequately implemented in Norwegian law,” TONO added.

Marte Thorsby of the IFPI said that continuing with legal action would be a waste of time and money, and joined TONO in their calls for clearer legislation.

“The Court of Appeal wrote in its ruling that the limits of complicit liability are unclear, and we expect that the ongoing revision of the Copyright Act will close this legal ‘hole’,” said Thorsby.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

While BitTorrent’s Oscar went to District 9, the Academy members chose The Hurt Locker as the best picture of 2009. As was the case with most previous Oscar winners, the film’s overwhelming win encouraged many BitTorrent users to fire up their download client to see what all the fuzz is about.

The day after the award show ‘the hurt locker’ was the most typed in search phrase on BitTorrent, with ‘hurt locker’ ending up in ninth place. This increased demand was also reflected in the download numbers which skyrocketed. Since its win at the Oscars the film has been downloaded well over a million times.

Interestingly, The Hurt Locker was already available online in high quality for more than a year, and months before it premiered in movie theaters in the United States. The film’s screener leaked in February of last year, but it has never generated as many downloads as it did this week. Thanks to the Oscar boost, the total number of Hurt Locker downloads on BitTorrent are now nearing 10 million.

The sudden rise in demand is of course not limited to BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. A film that does well on BitTorrent is usually doing well at the box-office or in the movie stores too, and indeed, DVD sales for The Hurt Locker went up at an equal rate.

This week the DVD topped the bestseller list at the online retailer Amazon and Director of Sky Box Office, Ian Lewis, reports a “significant increase” in demand on its Sky Box pay-per-view service. Similarly, the number of theaters playing the film is doubling this weekend to accommodate the ‘Oscar Bounce.’

The Hurt Locker was not the only Oscar winner to see a boost in unauthorized downloads after last Sunday. Crazy Heart, The Blind Side and Precious and Up saw a similar but less pronounced upswing.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Film Distributors’ Association (FDA) is the trade body for UK theatrical film distributors. As a member of the UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), FDA is also engaged on-going initiatives to combat film piracy.

FDA president and Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire producer (Lord) David Puttnam recently gave a keynote speech where he called for new measures to be taken against Internet piracy.

One option is the increasingly common targeting of children, with Puttnam suggesting that the concept of intellectual property needs to be “embedded inextricably into the school curriculum.” Children need to be taught that if they want movies in new ways and formats they have to pay for them, he added.

Puttnam said that the FDA-sponsored project to get this information into schools is well underway, with one in five primary schools (that’s 5 to 11 year-olds) having been serviced by the charity set up to distribute pro-movie and pro-copyright information.

While it may be beneficial to educate young people about what copyright is, there are a problem areas. First and foremost is where this information is coming from, i.e interested parties. Since the focus of this information will be aimed at ‘protecting’ its members, in order to maintain a balance, who will tell the children about the drawbacks of restrictive copyright?

Second, we all know that children are like sponges, soaking up information at an amazing rate with an amazing capacity for learning, but should copyright really be taught to the detriment of other subjects in an already intensely crowded curriculum?

Will a 7 year-old really be able to grasp the huge complexities of even basic copyright law? Will he or she be expected to know the difference between, let’s say, the BBC-provided iPlayer service and the dozens of unauthorized sites providing movies and TV shows at the click of a button? Even adults have difficulty telling the difference.

But in the main, will kids care? If an interview we conducted in 2007 is anything to go by, probably not.

Even now, more than 2 years later, although the kid we interviewed is much more aware of what is ‘right and ‘wrong’, she still has no problem with clicking a link and getting media for free. She told me recently that she doesn’t care about how it got there, only that it is. She strongly sees the back issues as not her problem. It’s difficult to blame her – how would we react if some guy in a suit tried to burden us with this stuff at 12 years old?

Along with the educational element to his organization’s work against piracy, Puttnam says he believes that the Digital Economy Bill lacks teeth and more pressure needs to be brought against ISPs.

“One of the mistakes made is allowing the ISPs to pretend they are not part of a retail chain,” said Puttnam. “If you or I wanted to open a chemist shop we would have to pay attention to health and safety and the nature of the products that we sold. We couldn’t just serve anyone, for instance.”

Of course, ISPs are responsible for the product they sell, but they sell bandwidth over which other companies sell products or provide services for which they are responsible.

Continuing the emotive ‘chemist’ analogy, although legally there is a requirement for them to sell safe products, they cannot be held responsible, say, if some pharmaceutical giant makes a huge error and packs poison inside a paracetamol package. Is the pharmacist really expected to open every packet of every medicine he sells checking for something dangerous inside? So why should ISPs be expected to do the same?

In his speech, Puttnam also called for a change in legislation to outlaw the use of camcorders in UK cinemas, something which is currently entirely legal. Despite this legal status, it didn’t stop the FDA from convincing UK charity CrimeStoppers last year to partner in a campaign to encourage the public to be vigilant and help prevent camcording.

Although Puttnam’s speech had its faults, he is absolutely, unequivocally right about one thing. Film content must be made available legally online “in ways consumers want, and at prices they can afford” in order to discourage the use of illicit file-sharing.

This should be the number one priority of the movie and music industries.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

For years the entertainment industry has been lobbying for tougher measures against online piracy. In France this has resulted in the implementation of a ‘three strikes and you’re offline’ regime and many other countries are considering similar measures.

Thus far the United States Government has kept relatively quiet on this issue, but that doesn’t mean that such plans are not being discussed behind close doors.

According to Ari Emanuel, a famous Hollywood talent agent and the model for the character Ari Gold in the hit series Entourage, Hollywood lobbyists are working hard to convince President Obama and others to ram through similar legislation in the United States.

“We are in the midst of talking to the president and some attorney generals and [we are] trying to implement a three strikes and you’re out rule,” Emanuel said, while adding that this issue would most likely result in a “fight with ISPs”.

At this point it is impossible to assess the exact nature of these talks, but since Ari Emanuel is the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, there is no doubt that these talks are taken seriously. President Obama, who vouched to decrease the power of lobbyists in Washington, is not turning a deaf ear to this one for now.

Before even considering the implementation of a three-strikes model, United States lawmakers might want to take a good look at what’s happening in France. Unlike earlier projections that up to 95% of the file-sharers could stop downloading copyrighted content, the piracy rate has actually increased in the face of the new law.

The entertainment industry, nevertheless, continues to push legislation as the solution to online piracy, while ignoring their own role in the creation of the problem.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In April 2009, all four defendants in the Pirate Bay trial were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and a fines of $905,000 each. The defense didn’t accept the decision, and went on to file for an appeal.

Their appeal is now expected to head to the Court of Appeal on 28 September 2010. Nine days have been allocated in all, and the last is due on 15 October.

The dates are not fixed in stone and could be changed if the plaintiffs or defendants have any objections, which even at this early stage seems to be the case.

Peter Sunde has already taken note that the provisional date is penciled-in for after the Swedish parliamentary elections which take place on 19 September 2010.

Sunde says that the four are only available for an appeal before the elections, commenting: “Who said this case is NOT political?”

If the appeal was heard before the elections, there would be a very real chance that an affirmation of the original conviction could turn into a major political issue in Sweden. Following the conviction of the ‘four’ in 2009, the Pirate Party received 7.1% of the vote in the European Parliament elections, receiving more votes from those under 30 than any other party in Sweden.

(Question of Bias? – What about the Supreme Court appeal on the judges? :S )

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-allowed-to-take-bias-claims-to-supreme-court-091209/

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Although it wasn’t yet evident, December 2009 appeared to mark the beginning of an effort to shut down the Greek BitTorrent scene. The Society for the Protection of Audiovisual Works (EPOE) conducted an investigation and moved in conjunction with the police to carry out the first action of its type against a BitTorrent site in the country.

The 285,000 member Greek-Fun.com carried around 14,000 torrents linking to music, domestic and international movies, software and computers games. Around 5,500 of these torrents are believed to have linked to material in the EPOE repertoire. As is usual with these cases, EPOE were quick to point to the financing of the site as an indication of criminal behavior. Like many private torrent sites, Greek-Fun offered benefits to users who donated to keep the site running although the admins denied profiteering.

In the end at least one administrator of the site, believed to be in his early 30’s, was arrested and several people were questioned with investigators linking site email addresses to Facebook accounts for evidence. EPOE said the site caused it 1.8m euros in damages.

As the bad news about Greek-Fun spread, Greece’s largest private tracker – the huge 898,000 member Gamato.info – also unexpectedly went down, officially due to “technical problems”. Whatever the reason, as can be seen by the graph below, the result was a massive drop in Greek Internet traffic. Gamato remained down for several weeks, only opening again during the first few days of February 2010.

Today, however, the site is down again, and the news is not good.

ELAS (Greek police) are engaged in an on-going operation to round up the administrators of the site. Already there are reports of 3 arrests in Athens (the capital and one of the world’s oldest cities) and 3 in Thessaloniki (Greece’s 2nd largest city). A soldier, a musician and a confectioner are among those arrested.

New information suggests that ELAS have alerted Interpol to arrest two further admins who are apparently reside outside the country. TorrentFreak has learned that they are located in The Netherlands and are being called “the brains” behind the site. The Gamato servers are also located there although it’s unclear at this stage if there is a connection.

“We host a lot of different sites and do not keep tabs on our clients as long as they comply with our Terms of Service, which includes confirming to the Dutch law,” Gamato’s host told TorrentFreak, adding: “As far as we and our legal counsel can see, this is the case with the site mentioned by you.”

It’s believed that police are looking for 11 individuals in total. Thus far, 27 hard drives, five laptops and more than 600 DVDs have been seized.

According to the police, file-sharing on Gamato was responsible for 80% of online piracy in Greece, with EPOE calculating its losses at the hands of the tracker at a staggering 1 billion euros.

Although Gamato was a private torrent site, it didn’t follow the usual format. It wasn’t “invite-only” – anyone could signup – and although sharing ratios were counted there were no punishments or rewards for the amounts shared. Furthermore, unlike Greek-Fun, Gamato did not accept donations from users.

The Society for the Protection of Audiovisual Works (EPOE) shot to fame in 2008 when virtually every site offering user-generated Greek subtitles (fansubs) for English language movies and TV shows became recipients of its legal threats. Within a very short time sites including greektvsubs.gr, subtitles.gr, greeksubs, subs4u.gr and apsubs.com had either closed down or removed all subtitles.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

For years the RIAA and other copyright holders have been sending copyright infringement notices to ISPs, requesting they forward them to their customers. ISPs including Comcast have always kindly complied with these requests, but remained a neutral party.

It therefore came as a surprise when we found out that three major US ISPs – Comcast, Cox and Warner Cable – have been funding research which aims to help copyright holders track down and gather evidence against BitTorrent pirates more efficiently.

Unlike most of the ‘passive’ BitTorrent tracking tools that are in fashion today, BitStalker uses an ‘active’ method through which they can actually prove that the BitTorrent client associated with an IP-address is sharing files. Where the passive methods wrongfully accuse 1 in 10 downloaders, BitStalker promises to avoid such false positives.

The researchers who developed BitStalker further claim (pdf) that their tool is much more effective than the current competition, as it would allow copyright holders to get information on 20 million BitTorrent users for a bargain price of $12.40. What remains unclear, however, is why three large ISPs are interested in funding this project.

It is no secret that the RIAA has been pushing Comcast, Cox and other ISPs to take stricter measures against copyright infringers, including the ultimate sanction of terminating customers’ Internet access. However, thus far the ISPs have largely maintained their neutral position as information carriers.

Whether the funding of BitStalker’s research is a signal that this may change is open for speculation. Another argument for ISPs to join could be that they want to protect their customers from receiving copyright infringement notices in error.

Regarding the BitStalker method of tracking BitTorrent users, we can say that it is not as revolutionary as the researchers portray it. TorrentFreak spoke to several people who are currently operating the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet and none of them was impressed by BitStalker’s technology.

If BitStalker is indeed implemented the large scale monitoring will have to be executed from thousands of IP-addresses. Most trackers have rules in place so that one single IP-address will be banned from the tracker if it connects to too many torrents.

Similarly, if BitStalker was put on a cloud service like the research suggests, it wouldn’t take long before these IP-ranges would appear in block-lists, rendering BitStalker useless.

If we add to this that BitStalker’s active BitTorrent tracking method will require users to be ‘connectible’, which a large percentage of users aren’t, this means that it will result in many false negatives. The researchers report that they could only connect to less than half of all available peers, which might be caused in the main by the connectability issue.

Whatever the motivations are for Comcast and the other ISPs to fund this project, the good news is that less people will be accused of uploading something they haven’t. Whether BitStalker will really be that more efficient depends on one’s definition of efficiency. For now, we doubt that it will result in a global BitTorrent crackdown.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

UseNeXT is a brand operated by Munich and London-based company, Aviteo Ltd. UseNeXT is one of the most popular Usenet services around today and has traditionally advertised extensively within the BitTorrent community and on many torrent sites.

On 19 December 2006, performing rights group GEMA, which handles the copyrights of more than 1 million rightsholders worldwide, filed for an injunction against UseNeXT. GEMA had earlier leveled accusations at UseNeXT’s advertising in which it said, among other things, the company claimed to offer 1 million MP3s through its service.

“[UseNeXT] advertised its fee-based access with unambiguous references to illegal exchange platforms. In particular it publicized the anonymity, speed and security of access to contents available on Usenet,” GEMA said in a statement, adding: “On top of that, the service also offers special, perfected search software that makes it easier to locate and manage musical works and other contents protected by copyright.”

On 18 January 2007, the Hamburg District Court issued a preliminary injunction against UseNeXT’s operators, which included instructions for it to change the way in which it advertised its product and barring it from providing musical works from GEMA’s repertoire. UseNeXT objected to the decision and disputed that it had ever encouraged subscribers to download copyright works, arguing that its use of the terms ‘unfiltered’ and ‘anonymous’ related to features inherent in the Usenet system.

On 17 February 2010, the Hamburg District Court handed down a preliminary injunction against UseNeXT which bars the service from offering a sample 100 musical works to which GEMA administers the copyright. The injunction also states that UseNeXT must go further than simply modifying its advertising in order to protect GEMA’s copyrights.

Although not necessarily liable for infringements, the Court said that Usenet providers would have to take responsibility for the services and environments they provide.

In a statement, GEMA said that the Court of Hamburg’s decision represents expanded liabilities for Usenet providers which go further than regulating their approach to advertising, but also apply when modified advertising proves insufficient to protect rights holders.

“The adoption of the preliminary injunction is a success in our commitment to the protection of copyright,” said Dr. Harald Heker, Chief Executive Officer of GEMA. “Second, the ruling also represents a further important step towards a comprehensive responsibility of the Usenet service operator for its offer.”

At this stage it’s unclear how UseNeXT will choose to comply with the injunction. Unlike services such as Rapidshare that operate their own servers and actually store content, UseNeXT are a reseller of the Highwinds Usenet service. UseNeXT does not store any content, Highwinds do.

UseNeXT used to offer a search engine and software interface to access Usenet, so conceivably something could’ve been implemented there to bar access to the GEMA titles mentioned in the injunction. However, recent changes to their service means they are no longer offering those solutions but suggesting the use of 3rd party software, with one particular solution from Tangysoft up front.

Nevertheless, the Court said that UseNeXT is responsible for the service it’s re-selling so the company will have to find an answer somehow. Many Usenet providers are already working with rights holders to automate the removal of content, so solutions are available. How quickly and comprehensively UseNeXT acts will remain to be seen.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

September last year saw the passing of France’s controversial three-strikes ‘Hadopi’ law which allows the music industry to track down repeated copyright infringers with the ultimate goal of decreasing the country’s piracy rate.

Under the new law alleged copyright infringers will be reported to a judge once they have received three warnings. The judge will then review the case and hand down any one of a range of penalties, from fines through to severing the Internet connection of the infringer.

Proponents of the new law claimed that the law would convince millions of people to stop downloading copyrighted content through file-sharing networks. Most critics, however, doubted the effectiveness of the system and pointed out that there are many ways to circumvent the law.

A new study published by the University of Rennes shows that the critics are indeed right. The researchers looked into the habits of downloaders before and after the law was implemented. They found that instead of reducing piracy levels, the piracy rate actually went up by 3%.

This increase in piracy shows that the French are not changing their downloading habits much, despite the tougher legislation. There is, however, an interesting shift in the sources people use to download copyrighted movies and music. At an increasing rate the French are using streaming services along with file-hosting ‘cyberlockers’ such as Rapidshare and Megaupload.

These services are not covered by the Hadopi law and therefore ’safe’ to use. Conversely, usage of P2P services such as BitTorrent dropped from 17.1 percent to 14.6 percent between September and December last year. Overall the research seems to suggest that the looming disconnection threat has changed how and where people get pirated content, while the piracy rate itself increased.

Another remarkable statistic uncovered by the researchers is that half of all P2P users who download copyrighted content also buy digital content online. This means that if these users were disconnected from the Internet under the new law, the music industry would lose customers and thus revenue.

The overall message put forward by the research seems to be that it is hard to deter people from copyright infringement when there are plenty of alternatives to bypass the legislation. This does not only hold for the French case but can also be applied to the UK and other countries where tougher anti-piracy laws are implemented.

The answer to the increasing piracy rates worldwide is not legislation. Instead, the entertainment industry may accomplish much more by innovating and expanding their online business so that it meets the demands of today’s digital consumers.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

2009 was a breakthrough year for the Pirate Party movement. With more than 7 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party secured two seats in the European Parliament.

A few weeks later, the Pirates in Germany entered the local Parliament after a member of another party switched sides.

In 2010 the Pirate Parties hope to continue this hot streak, especially during the Swedish national elections later this year. However, Sweden is not the only country where a Pirate Party will end up at the ballot. In the UK the local Pirate Party hopes to compete as well and the Dutch party has now decided to do the same.

In recent months there has been a lot of political debate regarding Dutch copyright law which currently allows people to download copyrighted movies and music for personal use. Several established parties have shown interest in criminalizing file-sharers, something the Pirate Party hopes to avoid.

Instead, the Pirates would like to shorten the copyright term to 5 years and legalize sharing of all copyrighted material on the Internet. Tim Kuik, head honcho at the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, is not afraid of politically organized pirates and described the Party’s plans as short sighted and unrealistic.

Samir Allioui, Chairman of the Pirate Party, told TorrentFreak that he’s very happy with Kuik’s negative comments. “He gives people a good reason to vote for us,” he said, referring to the negative view that most people have of BREIN.

If elected, the party will do everything it can to stop abuses of copyright, promote Net Neutrality and push for patent reform. The party is further committed to increasing transparency, strengthening fundamental rights and protecting privacy.

Despite the enthusiasm of the party’s members, there is still a long way to go before they can actually compete in the election on June 9th. One of the biggest hurdles is the requirement to deposit a sum of 12,000 euros, a barrier which is meant to prevent too many parties from entering the election.

Samir is confident that they will be able to raise the money in the weeks to come. He encourages all sympathizers to become a member of the Party and help to get the Pirate Party on the ballot.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.