It’s been a long time coming, but at last TONO, a Norwegian royalty collecting group founded back in 1928, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) have given up their bid to force Norwegian ISP Telenor to prevent subscribers from being able to access BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay.

The affair first began in earnest last March when Telenor refused to block the Pirate Bay, reminding the copyright holders that “ISPs are not complicit in the actions of its customers on the Internet.”

Then in November the country’s Norway’s Asker and Bærum District Court ruled in favor of Telenor, finding that it is not illegally contributing to any copyright violations by The Pirate Bay and that there is subsequently no legal basis for forcing it to block the site.

“Telenor and other Internet providers, including private companies, may have to do an evaluation on whether an Internet page or service shall be blocked or not,” read the ruling. “This is an evaluation normally assigned to the authorities, and in the court’s view, today’s situation makes it unnatural to assign such responsibility to private companies.”

Fast forward to a few days ago and copyright holders have decided to abandon their plans, opting not to appeal the case before the Supreme Court.

It is “needless to appeal further,” reads a joint press release.

“We wanted to get a legal clarification on whether the under Norwegian law (it) is possible to order the internet providers to block access to The Pirate Bay,” said TONOs Director Cato Strøm. “Now we have two clear decisions that there is no legal authority in the Norwegian law for such blocking requirements. Both of us intend to forward the matter to legislators.”

Now that copyright holders have their legal clarification BitTorrent users in Norway can breathe easier, not that there isn’t a billion ways to circumvent any site blocking technology, but it’s just that who wants the seconds worth of hassle right?

The game of whac-a-mole continues.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

A new torrent has been uploaded to U2Torrents.com.

Torrent: 5754
Title: 2001-08-21 Earl's Court, London -- By Request --
Size: 759.96 MB
Category: Elevation
Uploaded by: drewwerd

Description
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is for acrobat269. All other shows from this date are either banned or not on the tracker anymore.

-Elevation London 3rd Night-

2001-08-21
London
England

Taper : Unknow
Source : Cdr > .cda > dbpowerAmp > .flacf (normal compression)


Setlist:

Cd1

01. Elevation
02. Beautiful Day
03. Until The End Of The World
04. New Year's Day
05. Kite
06. Gone
07. New York
08. 11 O'clock Tick Tock
09. Sunday Bloody Sunday
10. Wake Up Dead Man
11. In A Little While
12. Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of
13. Stay (Faraway,So Close!)

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Cd2

01. Bad / 40
02. Where The Streets Have No Name
03. Mysterious Ways
04. The Fly
05. Bullet The Blue Sky
06. With Or Without You
07. One
08. When Will I See You Again / Walk On


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can use the URL below to download the torrent (you may have to login).

http://u2torrents.com/torrents-details.php?id=5754&hit=1

Take care!

Live U2
_________________________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer: Please do not reply to this email account it is NOT monitored.
Please visit the U2torrents.com Help section at http://www.u2torrents.com/help/ for helpful information or to Ask a Question.

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.

Ca n'est pas un bon mois pour les chasseurs de P2Pistes. Après la relaxe d'un éditeur de site de liens P2P espagnols, c'est en Lithuanie que des ayants droit se sont cassés les dents devant les tribunaux. La LANVA, un organisme de lutte contre le piratage lithuanien, avait souhaité poursuivre un utilisateur du tracker BitTorrent LinkoManija.net, très populaire au pays. L'homme était accusé d'avoir partagé sans autorisation une copie de Windows 7 Ultimate, mais le juge a préféré l'acquiter devant l'absence de preuve.

When we talk about file-sharing, there’s a whole spectrum of issues that usually get mixed up or treated as one when they’re really very different things.

Is it OK to borrow an audio CD I just bought? Is it OK to play it to some friends at a party? Can I convert it into MP3 files or make a copy? Is it fine if I put it in a shared folder of a P2P application such as eMule?

At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got creators of P2P apps, owners of link sites (sites that generally don’t actually host any content, they just link to content that resides elsewhere) and torrent trackers.

Sometimes, you’ll hear that all of the above are illegal. Often, extreme examples such as “listening a CD with a friend” will be laughed at (well of course you can do that) but when it comes to creating a simple backup copy, it’ll be called a gray zone or even declared illegal.

Very rarely you’ll hear a court decide that linking to copyrighted material is OK, but this is exactly how Spanish judge Raul N. García Orejudo ruled in a case of Spanish music collector society SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores) vs. Jesus Guerra, owner of link site www.elrincondejesus.com.

Do judge Raul’s arguments make sense? You bet they do. First, he denied SGAE’s request to shut down Guerra’s site in June, saying that “P2P networks, as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, do not violate, in principle, any right protected by Intellectual Property Law.”

Now, he decided that “offering an index of links and/or linking to copyright material is not the same as distribution.” His decision was largely based on the fact that Guerra doesn’t make any direct or indirect profits off the site.

Without going into the moral side of the story, it’s obvious that there’s not a very big difference between a site like www.elrincondejesus.com and Google. And if you start going that road, you end up with weird legal precedents, such as the recent decision by an Italian court, which found Google Italy execs guilty over an offensive video Google had failed to remove from its index.

There’s no doubt that SGAE will appeal the decision. But this ruling once again shows that not everything is as black and white in the world of file-sharing as the recording industry would have you believe.

Tags: file sharing, link sites, p2p, Spain

Filed under: Utilities, P2P

uTorrent banned by private trackers for "not playing fair" originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Avec la sortie de la version 2.0 du logiciel le 25 janvier dernier, uTorrent lançait par la même occasion une nouvelle fonctionnalité très prometteuse, le Micro Transport Protocol (µTP). Sur le papier, µTP avait un objectif simple : gérer plus efficacement les données échangées avec les autres utilisateurs, sans pour autant affecter la session Internet (navigation web, communication Skype, jeu en ligne...). Ainsi, le logiciel était censé prévenir la congestion des réseaux, en réduisant le débit du téléchargement si nécessaire.

The Pirate Bay appeal finally has a tentative autumn 2010 date set for the founders of the infamous BitTorrent tracker website....

Offloading malware protection to the cloud