Best MP3 Music

Archive for November, 2009

In June 2005 when the now-famous Grokster decision was handed down, initial reaction was almost unanimous. The Internet was alive with this historic defeat – Grokster had been savaged by the Supreme Court, lost their case in the biggest possible way and would have to shut down. No other outfit would dare get involved in file-sharing again, was the knee-jerk assumption, since this case proved it was illegal.

In reality, the truth proved somewhat different.

No one could argue Grokster had been defeated, but the consequences for file-sharing were limited. The real impact was that providers of file-sharing services could now be held liable if it could be shown that they promoted their products for infringing purposes. Careful advertising was all that was required. Furthermore, the decision only affected the United States. Considering the epic scale of the case and the supposed victory, the results were far from devastating.

And now, 4 years later, Mininova, another file-sharing giant that rode on the crest of the BitTorrent wave since the Grokster verdict, has effectively been forced to close down the vast majority of its site, prompting many to feel that BitTorrent is heading for its twilight years.

However, with careful consideration, it may just be possible to create another Mininova that avoids its namesake’s fate, since the court’s decision was not solely related to the existence of links to infringing content, i.e the .torrent files.

The DMCA is widely known in BitTorrent circles. It is the US copyright act (but accepted by many indexers and trackers regardless of location) which many sites quote when offering to take down torrents that link to infringing content. “If you’re the content owner, let us know,” they say, “..and we’ll take down torrents that link to your works.” Complying with so-called ‘DMCA takedown requests’ is widely accepted as a way to stay within the law.

Although Mininova operated such a system, comments by the site’s staff on their forums called their commitment to it into doubt. There are many samples given in the court’s decision, here are just a few. It’s worth noting that many of them date back to 2005, when users, staff and site admins would have been much more relaxed.

“May have been just a take down request (…) i’d say just re upload it (…) thanks for sharing” (posted by site moderator)

“Thanks for reporting, I deleted the fake version and uploaded the correct one” (posted by site admin)

“I made a mistake of downloading a shareware version of Monopoly Jr. only to find out it only allows you to play it for 15 minutes and then it becomes useless,” said a user. “Check the site, it’s there now” (posted by site admin).

Mininova also took pride in their efforts to proactively filter fake files (including in the decision are comments by staff who admit to downloading material to check if it is indeed as labeled), viruses, malware, pornographic and drug-related material, but this seems to have backfired by the corresponding lack of commitment to proactively filter copyright content in the same manner.

The site also carried some very specific categories for its torrents. Not just ‘movies’ or ‘TV’, but also sections such as “CSI” and “Desperate Housewives” which are widely known to be copyright works. One section highlighted in the decision was labeled ‘Disney’. The court decided that since so little Disney material is copyright-free, the section could have little other use than to infringe.

Mininova has never denied making profits (it is a company after all) and the court ruled that the site encouraged and profited “from infringements of copyrights and related rights of the holders represented by Brein.”

To see things from a different perspective, TorrentFreak has been discussing the closure of Mininova with Aldor Nini at digital distribution and anti-piracy solutions company, Easycom, who has been following the case closely.

Interestingly, Aldor informs us that 8 out of 10 torrents on Mininova were not covered by the BREIN lawsuit, which makes us wonder if the site could’ve stayed alive if the other 2 out of 10 were removed before the court’s hand was forced.

“We are very sorry to see a platform like Mininova shut down millions of torrent files,” he told TorrentFreak. “Based on our research we have found out that only 21% of the content was infringing rights of content owners for content used in the proceedings by BREIN. This 21% could probably be the most popular files on the platform, but we cannot confirm this for sure.”

“However, Mininova’s decision to completely remove everything was to 100% conform with what the judge has ruled. A 100% working filter was requested, and the removal of all non moderated user submitted torrents is the only 100% filter available nowadays,” he told us.

In a similar way that file-sharing applications similar to Grokster’s continue to flourish post the ‘big’ 2005 verdict, torrent sites can follow suit, if they are prepared to adapt.

“We do not think that this judgment will directly apply to other torrent portals at all,” Aldor told us, “but rather the way Mininova was operated as a torrent portal.”

Aldor has some interesting thoughts on how torrent sites can continue, without making the same mistakes as Mininova. He argues that torrent sites should behave neutrally, meaning that if they remove fake and spam comments they should filter copyrighted content too.

Based on Aldor’s reasoning, it seems another option is for sites to switch to user-based moderation, where content is automatically removed after a fixed number of downvotes. The bottom line is that the site’s operators (or moderators) should stay neutral.

Further suggestions are to take the takedown procedure seriously and make it easy to use. Sites should notify users that copyrights are to be respected and refrain from using specific categories (such as Disney). Again, based on the basis that site staff should stay neutral, user submitted tags should be fine.

Other more problematic ideas are the increased co-operation with content owners and to “stop thinking in black and white” – surely great advice for both sides and ultimately, the only long term solution.

Not making any profit or donating part of the site’s income to innovative music artists and film makers, and steering clear of scammy advertisers could be further plus points.

Aldor concludes that the lessons are there to be learned from Mininova’s demise.

“The next torrent portals, which will cover the next millions of torrent files, will hopefully learn from this situation. All in all Mininova’s partial shut-down will not influence the worldwide BitTorrent activity, it has just set up the rules for the successors of Mininova.”

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

Tech N9ne is not afraid to be different.

In fact, he’s built a career out of being rap’s lone gunman. He doesn’t adhere to industry notions of what an artist “should be” or “should do.” Functioning completely outside the system, Tech continues recording music and releasing it via his own Strange

This week there are three newcomers in the top 10 including ‘The Twilight Saga: New Moon,’ which is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.

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.

In the face of a massive and sustained legal onslaught orchestrated by the combined might of the global music and movie industries, one might have expected The Pirate Bay to fold up and die.

Yet as we sit here on the brink of December 2009, the site remains open. No other site in BitTorrent history has ever weathered so many storms, so many obstacles and so many setbacks, but still prevailed.

When threatened in an aggressive manner, most torrent sites show a little bravado but ultimately comply with the shutdown requests. Not so The Pirate Bay.

The huge raid back in 2006 resulted in the loss of masses of equipment, and this alone would’ve been sufficient to break the will of a lesser site. But within days the site was back online, and since then has hopped around various hosts and countries, evading every attempt to mortally wound it.

Earlier this year the 2006 raid bore its fruit, with the founders of the site being found guilty, given huge fines and ordered to spend time in jail. But even this development didn’t deter the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker. With appeals pending, hope remains.

Not even the promised financial penalties could cripple the site or its operators. Could the authorities find any assets belonging to the founders? Not a chance. Even the site had been handed over to new owners, Seychelles-based Reservella.

Threatening the site’s host would also prove useless, as the company is owned by Fredrik Neij. But eventually the authorities took direct action, by threatening the site’s indirect bandwidth supplier with fines if they continued to supply it with a connection to the Internet.

So down the site went yet again. True to form, back it came again within hours with a new ISP. Within 20 minutes that company was threatened by Hollywood. Losing that host, TPB set sail for the east and soon came back online. Again.

However, the site’s enemies were already hatching another plan.

After TPB relocated some of its operations to Ukraine, in October Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN found another chink in the armor. Traffic to the site was routed through The Netherlands via Nforce, a LeaseWeb customer. Nforce quickly complied with BREIN’s threats, and The Pirate Bay went down yet again – very temporarily of course.

Then at the end of October the Stockholm District Court delivered what should’ve been a killer blow, banning Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij from operating the site on pain of $71,000 in fines for non-compliance. But even this decision is proving toothless.

The Pirate Bay is no longer located in Sweden (and no longer runs a tracker), which causes a problem for the Swedish courts. As for the human flesh and bones included in the decision, they are proving just as elusive.

While both individuals are appealing the decision, both deny running the site anymore, having handed it over to others. Furthermore, Fredrik – aka TiAMO – lives in Thailand and has done for some time. Gottfrid – aka Anakata – can be found sleeping all day and operating his computers all night in the jungles of Cambodia. The locations of the pair clearly present a slight jurisdiction problem for the Swedish decision.

“I am wondering if Swedish law has the power to issue a prohibition or penalty against a website in another country and my adopted acts in another country with a website that does not exist in Sweden,” said Fredrik this week, commenting on the situation.

So, while the site is effectively banned in Sweden, it is not located in Sweden. However, because it no longer operates a tracker of its own it is much less responsible for the infringements of others than it was before. This potentially paves the way for the ban on the site to be lifted.

Furthermore, while the founders are banned from running the site in Sweden, they say they no longer run it. But in any event, neither of them live in Sweden.

In the meantime, the site remains up. Quite what the next move will be by the anti-piracy groups is open to speculation, but historically, one thing seems almost certain – The Pirate Bay will respond and refuse to be cowed.

One day it will disappear, of that there can be little doubt, but it will be at a time and a place of their choosing, not one dictated by their adversaries.

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

Good times lie ahead for the companies that gather information on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. In the US, the MPAA and RIAA are negotiating with ISPs on how to deal with alleged copyright infringers, and in the UK citizens could lose their Internet access for this alleged offense if overall levels of file-sharing aren’t reduced to meet government targets.

While the evidence gathering techniques differ from agency to agency, they all have one thing in common. None of them can provide proof that the account holder has actually committed copyright infringement. In fact, some anti-piracy outfits cannot even prove that the IP-address they have on file was used in an actual file transfer, although they claim otherwise.

The Video Protection Alliance’ (VPA) belongs to the latter group. Instead of simply warning the alleged infringers, they take it one step further and actually ask for cash to settle immediately on behalf of the copyright holder, a known extortion-like technique that is also used by spammers.

The process used by VPA and others is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other file-sharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share their clients’ copyright works. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer.

“Someone using this account has engaged in illegal copying or distribution (downloading or uploading) of [title],” the VPA writes in one copyright/settlement notice, adding: “The information in this notification is accurate.”

But is it really accurate? We beg to differ and we’re certainly not the only ones.

As outlined in an elaborate article posted on on Freedom to Tinker earlier this week, the VPA does not verify whether the IP-address is actually uploading or downloading content. They simply take it from the swarm list reported by the tracker.

This is wrong for several reasons. First of all, some trackers are known to insert random IP-addresses into swarm reports to provide plausible deniability. Secondly, anyone can easily create a url that would put someone in the swarm list when it’s clicked. This link can be posted everywhere on the Internet and it wouldn’t even require the recipient to have a BitTorrent client installed.

Of course, this information is nothing new to people who are familiar with these anti-piracy evidence gathering techniques. Last year researchers from the University of Washington revealed the same flaws, but outfits such as VPA apparently don’t see the need to back up their claims with solid evidence.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of these notices are sent out every year, some of which include cash requests to settle the case. Even worse perhaps, in countries that adopt three-strike legislation millions face the threat of being disconnected by their ISP, based on shoddy and unverified evidence, and without judicial oversight.

Unfortunately, the outfits that collect the evidence for the copyright holders are not very open about the techniques they use. When the RIAA’s evidence was disputed (pdf) in court earlier this year they decided to drop the case and settle with prejudice for $0.00. How convenient.

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

SceneTorrents (ScT) has been a respected and well-connected private BitTorrent tracker for more than four years. An invite for the tracker was hard to find, but the lucky few that did get in had little to complain about, until today that is.

A few hours ago ScT put up a sad and unexpected announcement for its 20,000 members, as the site’s operators have decided to close the site for good tomorrow. Thus far the staff refuses to comment on the reason for the shutdown, which has resulted in widespread rumors among the site’s users.

Some rumors say that the end of ScT may be related to the raid of a topsite in The Netherlands earlier this week. According to the Dutch news site Tweakers, the ‘ranked’ topsite LOOP had its servers raided in Amsterdam, where 40 terabytes of data was stored. LOOP was (supposedly) one of SceneTorrent’s main content provider according to insiders.

According to other rumors, the shutdown could be a planned operation instead of a response to the raided topsite. In the last weeks the site has encouraged its members to donate, offering double rewards for those who pay up, allegedly raking in as much as $10,000.

Thus far both rumors remain unconfirmed, and the same is true for an eBay auction of the site that went up a few hours ago. Since the staff of the site is not talking, it will probably remain unknown why the site will close its doors now, or what their underlying motivation is.

Update: FSF published a short chat with ScT owner ‘Feeling’ who confirmed that the shutdown is not a hoax.

Update: A new staff message claims that the shutdown is due to legal issues.

By now most of you already know that ScT will be going offline permanently.

However, due to pending legal issues, we are not at liberty to speak freely about why we’ve chosen to take down the site.
Members of our staff were arrested and will be undergoing the entire length of the judicial process.
Obviously, in the case of criminal proceedings, it would be downright foolish to comment any further on the situation;

Please bear this in mind and wish them the best of luck.

There have been several theories as to where the donation money (of the recent months) has gone. We’d like to take this opportunity to put all skepticism to rest.
The money was used to purchase new hardware that would ensure our spot as the fastest tracker on the net.
You are free to perform whatever calculations you feel necessary, but in doing so it should become very clear that running a site of this stature costs money.
We feel the overwhelming cynicism is just a product of bad timing compounded with general frustration caused by the current situation.

We sincerely hope that you’ve enjoyed being a part of our wonderful community over the past 4 1/2 years.
We’ve certainly enjoyed our members letting us be of service. We’ve always felt our user base played an equally important role in making SceneTorrents.org a model environment in the torrent world.

The staff would also like to express their gratitude to fellow trackers for their support in such a chaotic time. Several well known communities have voluntarily opened their doors, and have offered our former users a new home. We appreciate the courtesy and acknowledge the steps being taken to move forward collectively as a community. Your assistance does not go unrecognized.

//ScT Staff

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

During September 2008, isoHunt founder Gary Fung grew tired of the threats from the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA). Instead of waiting for the CRIA to take action against him, Fung took the unusual step of suing the music industry outfit, seeking confirmation that the site’s operations are legal.

“This is our preemptive strike with a narrowly defined petition for Declaratory Relief that we do not infringe, in anticipation they are going to file their own lawsuit that we do infringe (their copyright),” Fung told TorrentFreak at the time.

In March 2009, isoHunt and the CRIA appeared in court where the judge ruled that the issues in question were too complex and consequences too far-reaching not to move to a full trial. This decision was appealed by isoHunt, but without result, meaning that isoHunt has to go through the costly process of a full trial.

This week, isoHunt’s founder continued his crusade and filed the statement of claim (pdf) with the Supreme Court. The document describes the functionality of the search engines he operates (isoHunt and sister sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis) and asks the court to declare that these do not violate Canadian copyright law.

Despite the worsening copyright climate in other parts of the world, Fung remains confident that Canadian law is on his side. “I have high hopes for Canadian copyright laws and its courts to not make the mistakes that have been made elsewhere in the world. We must fight the increasing noise we are drowned in, that file sharing is stealing,” he said.

“As for CRIA and member record labels, if you come to your sense of reason, I would love to talk to you outside of court. The ball you’ve dropped on us is back to you,” Fung concludes.

After the partial shutdown of Mininova yesterday, isoHunt is now the second largest torrent site around in terms of traffic, trailing only behind The Pirate Bay. However, all of Fung’s torrent sites combined draw more traffic than any other torrent site around. Aside from the three torrent sites mentioned in the case and despite the legal troubles, Fung recently launched Hexagon, a new ‘social‘ BitTorrent site.

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

When Lily Allen inflamed the UK, and indeed, much of the Internet with her views on piracy a couple of months ago, it was difficult to see who could come along and create more controversy on the issue. But of course, Britain has a secret weapon – Peter Mandelson.

Lord Mandelson, or ‘Mandy’ to those speaking of him affectionately, has truly set the cat among the pigeons with his Digital Economy Bill, pleasing almost no-one apart from Big Music and Big Movies, and alienating everyone from most of the ISPs in the country through to millions of Internet users.

In protest, ISP TalkTalk is running the Don’t Disconnect Us campaign, which is gathering great momentum after being endorsed by Stephen Fry earlier this week, and hopefully will receive yet another boost with the help of some catchy music and cutting lyrics.

Yes, just when you thought it was safe after ‘Dear Lily’ – musician Dan Bull is back, this time with a new track – ‘Dear Mandy’.

“I’ve just recorded and uploaded a new video, aimed at Peter Mandelson, and getting people to sign the petition against his three strikes bill,” Dan told TorrentFreak.

“The most worrying part of the Bill is that Mandy has given himself the power to create new legislation as he pleases, meaning he can pretty much do whatever he wants to people he suspects of copyright infringement,” added Dan, echoing the autocracy fears outlined by the Liberal Democrats last week.

“This is one of the most serious threats to privacy and presumption of innocence in the UK for a long time. I would urge people who are concerned about this to contact their MPs, and sign the petition, Dan concluded.

Here is Dan’s great new track – ‘Dear Mandy’ – and UK citizens, don’t forget to sign the petition!

Readers interested in hearing more about Dan can jump over to our side-blog over at FreakBits where we have published an interview.

Dan’s MySpace page can be found here and his album ‘Safe’ is available from FreshNut but can also be downloaded digitally from iTunes, Amazon, Napster and all good file-sharing networks.

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

With an impressive 175,820,430 visits and close to a billion page views in the last 30 days, Mininova set a record that they will be unable to break in the near future. Last August a Dutch court ruled that Mininova had to remove all links to ‘infringing’ torrent files, with disastrous consequences.

Since it is technically unfeasible to pre-approve or filter every potentially infringing torrent file, the Mininova team decided to throw in the towel and only allow torrents to be submitted by approved uploaders. This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all.

Thankfully, there are still plenty of alternatives for those BitTorrent users who are looking for the latest Ubuntu, OpenSUSE or Fedora release.

Below we provide a random list of public torrent sites that are still open, but there are of course hundreds more sites we could have included. If your personal favorite is missing, feel free to post it in the comments below – preferably with your reasons why it should be included in any upcoming lists.

1. Torrentzap

2. Vertor

3. ExtraTorrent

4. KickassTorrents

5. BTjunkie

5. Monova

7. isoHunt

8. yourBitTorrent

9. The Pirate Bay

10. ShareReactor

Update: The owner of Monova, told TorrentFreak that he has reserved all Mininova usernames for people who want to make the switch to his site. The account names can be claimed here. Also, we replaced some sites in the original top 10 because they went down or started to serve trojans,or viruses.

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

Mininova’s decision to delete all infringing torrents from its index marks the end of an era that started five years ago.

In December 2004, the demise of the mighty Suprnova left a meteor crater in the fledgling BitTorrent landscape. This gaping hole was soon filled by the dozens of new sites that emerged to fulfil the public’s increasing demands for torrents. Mininova became the most successful of all.

Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.

With increased popularity also came numerous complaints from copyright holders, who saw their intellectual property being shared by users of the site. For years Mininova has complied with these takedown requests, but earlier this year the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN decided to take the torrent site to court nonetheless, demanding that the operators proactively filter torrents pointing to copyrighted material.

The case went to court in June and a few weeks later the verdict was announced. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.

To avoid having to pay these penalties, the Mininova team saw no other option than to disable access to all torrents except those that were uploaded to their content distribution platform. This means that only approved uploaders can share torrents through the site for now.

During the last few months, Mininova has extensively tested several filtering techniques, but none of these proved 100% effective. “It’s very unfortunate that we’re forced to take this action, but we saw no other option,” Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak.

Mininova still hasn’t decided yet whether they will appeal the verdict, Niek further told TorrentFreak. They have appealed the verdict pro-forma, which gives the company more time to decide whether they will indeed continue with the appeal. As it looks now, a successful appeal is the only option for Mininova to bring all torrents back.

In the meantime the Mininova team will focus on other projects besides Mininova, as well as growing the number of users for their content distribution platform.

The implications of Mininova’s decision will have a huge impact on the BitTorrent community. The millions of Mininova users and uploaders have to look for a new home, but perhaps even more importantly, Mininova had the largest collection of user-submitted torrents that were used by dozens of smaller torrent indexers.

More information on the consequences and background of Mininova’s decision will be addressed in a follow up article.

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

The copyright infringement case of AFACT – representing several Hollywood studios – and Aussie ISP iiNet (multiple links to all our earlier coverage can be found here, here, here, here and here) is set to conclude today.

Lead barrister for AFACT, Tony Bannon, continued with his aggressive approach to this case by issuing warnings to Australia’s Internet service providers on the issue of copyright infringement.

He said that iiNet and other ISPs who don’t want to handle copyright infringement notices (such as those issued by his clients) are happy to take money from their subscribers, but are shirking their responsibilities. The solution to this, he said, was for them to shut down.

“They [ISPs] provide a facility that is able to be used for copyright infringement purposes. If they don’t like having to deal with copyright notices then they should get out of the business,” he said, as quoted by ITNews.

This reluctance to deal with infringement notices at the behest of the studios has been one of the main points of contention in the case. The studios feel that iiNet should hand infringement notices to their customers and even disconnect them, while iiNet feels that it has no obligation to do so under the law, particularly when acting on the unverified evidence of a 3rd party.

Bannon went on to say that iiNet had made zero effort to deal with even a small percentage of the alleged infringements on their network, commenting: “…they say they can’t send a single notice to anybody, it’s like saying they can’t stop physical violence happening to the person next to them because there’s physical violence happening all around the world.”

Bannon said he believed that terminating a customer or two on allegations of infringement would have sent out a clear message to other potential infringers. But of course, iiNet knows that if they complied with that request the studios would be back saying “you did it there, why can’t you do it here…here….here….here…..”

Bannon went on to say that while iiNet denied it had any control over BitTorrent clients and the potential for users to operate them for infringing purposes, it did have the power to render the software useless.

“But if the user isn’t online there’s nothing the BitTorrent client can do to infringe,” Bannon told the court.

For its part, iiNet sits firmly behind Section 112E of the copyright act:

A person (including a carrier or carriage service provider) who provides facilities for making, or facilitating the making of, a communication is not taken to have authorised any infringement of copyright in an audio visual item merely because another person uses the facilities so provided to do something the right to do which is included in the copyright.

Earlier the Internet Industry Association (IIA) had applied to contribute to the case as amicus curiae, or ‘friend of the court’. Justice Cowdroy decided today that the industry group would have little to add to the case, since the issues it planned to raise had already been covered in detail by iiNet, mostly concerning the ISP’s commitments under the Copyright Act and Telecommunications Act 1997.

Earlier this week at their annual general meeting, iiNet boss Michael Malone gave company shareholders some painful news. The costs of defending the AFACT case had amounted to $4m AUD (approx $3.7m US).

The court proceedings are scheduled to conclude today, but the verdict will not be issued for several months.

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

Ninja Assassin is the most choptastic movie of the year.

From the awesomely gory action scenes to the insanely kinetic acrobatics, James McTeigue’s action epic possesses a distinct rhythm. That rhythm drives everything from Rain’s quick and bloody snipes to the full-on combat sequences. Given the

For regular readers of TorrentFreak, this fresh news can hardly come as a surprise. The supposed anti-piracy scheme originally pioneered in the UK in conjunction with lawyers Davenport Lyons rolls on, but now in the hands of ACS:Law and their partners DigiProtect.

Although there is an insistence that the project is aimed at reducing piracy, in reality piracy is the scheme’s lifeblood, providing healthy profits for all concerned, except the original rightsholders that is.

On November 19th at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, ACS:Law made NPO (Norwich Pharmacal Order) applications in order to force ISPs to hand over the names and addresses of subscribers the company claims infringed their client’s rights.

The NPO’s related to approximately 25,000 IP addresses harvested from UK ISP BT’s subscriber base and a further 5,000 from various other ISPs, covering approximately 291 movie titles.

Present at the hearing before Chief Master Winegarten (CMW) were Andrew Crossley and Terence Tsang from ACS:Law, representatives from UK ISP BT and three representatives from consumer outfit Which?, who previously made official complaints regarding the conduct of Davenport Lyons. Also present were two individuals previously wrongly accused, who are regulars at the support site BeingThreatened.com.

Before the hearing began, CMW noted that he had received letters of complaint from the public about the scheme. As reported to TorrentFreak by those present, during the hearing Andrew Crossley made some interesting comments.

After CMW expressed interest in what happens to an accused infringer after the court order is granted and a letter sent, Crossley said that his company was not suggesting that the recipient is definitely guilty in all cases, but the Internet account holder who receives the letter could perhaps help them to identify the person who had actually carried out the infringement.

It is worth noting that ISP account holders are not liable for copyright infringement carried out on his/her connection if a) they did not carry it out themselves or b) did not authorize any infringement. If they did neither they can simply write back to ACS:Law explaining that the accusation against them has been made in error.

Furthermore, if the account holder does not know who did carry out the infringement, they should state in their reply that is the case. It is then up to ACS:Law to find the real infringer based on their evidence they hold. This is impossible for them without the account holder pointing the finger.

In justifying his application for the court order, Crossley said that they do it because “businesses are failing, jobs are being lost,” while citing dubious IFPI statistics (95% of all music is pirated) to justify his case.

CMW asked Crossley how long the scheme would continue for, who replied “…for as long as P2P file-sharing continues Master.”

Another NPO was applied for by ACS:Law on behalf of a new-comer to the scheme, a company called Media C.A.T. Ltd.

Little is known about them and their website is currently suspended, but searches reveal that the company is involved in the premium SMS market – one page states “Premium Rate Telephone Riches – How To Make £500 A Week” – quite what they have to do copyright holders and anti-piracy is unclear. It does appear, however, that their Managing Director Lee Bowden has previous links to Andrew Crossley and, just like him, will be in this for the money.

When CMW asked why rightsholders were dealing with Media C.A.T and not directly with DigiProtect, Crossley said that “[Media C.A.T] happen to operate in the UK…dealing with UK companies…”

In referring to the scheme ACS:Law and DigiProtect operate in respect of these hardcore porn titles, Crossley tried to suggest that they were doing a public service by helping to prevent the sharing of restricted movies on P2P.

CMW responded by noting that “[this is] not a moral crusade” and that in his opinion, ACS:Law and DigiProtect were doing this “…because you want the money.”

Recipients of past and future letters are invited to view the excellent BeingThreatened website, whose users provided invaluable help in compiling this report.

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

by Human Nature

by Tori Amos

by Pitbull