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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.

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 file-sharing 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 file-sharing site in the country.

The 285,000 member Greek-Fun.com carried around 14,000 links to music, domestic and international movies, software and computers games. Around 5,500 of these 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 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.

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.

In the hope of dismantling BitTorrent’s flagship The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy outfit BREIN took three of the site’s founders to court this summer. BREIN won the case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were ordered to prevent Dutch users from accessing the site, a decision appealed in October without luck.

In its verdict the Court ruled that the three defendants had to remove a list of torrents from The Pirate Bay that link to copyrighted works. The three defendants and the site itself were not found guilty of copyright infringement, but according to the Court, The Pirate Bay assists in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.

The Court gave the defendants until March 1 to remove a list of infringing torrents and to block Dutch users from accessing parts of the site where (.torrent) links to copyrighted files can be downloaded. If the three did not comply they would face penalties of 3,000 euros per person, per day.

This ultimatum passed today and thus far no changes have been made to The Pirate Bay. Dutch users can still access all parts of the site and from the looks of it no torrent files have been removed. To the three defendants this comes as no surprise because they always claimed that they have no control over the site anymore.

Peter Sunde, former Pirate Bay spokesman and one of the defendants in this case, told TorrentFreak last week that he doubted that anything would change. Sunde also repeated what was said in Court by their lawyers. The three defendants are no longer in charge of The Pirate Bay and can’t comply with the Court order even if they wanted to.

For BREIN, who celebrated the verdict as a grand victory, The Pirate Bay’s continued operation in The Netherlands is likely to be received as a huge setback. TorrentFreak contacted BREIN director Tim Kuik for a response to the news but we haven’t heard back from him at time of publication.

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay remains the most popular BitTorrent site in The Netherlands where the site is listed in the top 50 of most visited sites on the Internet, beating Microsoft’s search engine Bing.com.

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

Much like Google, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt are search engines that aim to index information posted on the Internet and make it findable to their users.

Google’s YouTube shows even more similarities to torrent sites as it allows users to submit content, with the only difference being that YouTube actually hosts the uploaded files whereas torrent sites only link to content indirectly through .torrent files.

In the last year, three of the largest torrent sites – The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt – were all taken to court by copyright holders for assisting in copyright infringement, and all three sites lost their cases to some degree. Strangely enough Google has never said a word about these cases other than to distance themselves from The Pirate Bay team after they were sentenced.

Despite this attempt at demarcation, three Google employees are now in a very similar position as the aforementioned torrent site operators. An Italian court just handed out suspended jail sentences to three Google employees for ‘allowing’ users to upload a video that invaded the privacy of a third person.

The three employees were not aware of the upload before they were notified by the police, but they made it possible, much like they make it possible to upload copyrighted content. The similarities with torrent search engines are striking.

It is needless to say that Google is not amused by the court ruling. While the company kept its mouth shut in response to the legal actions surrounding the torrent search engines, they now speak of an attack on “the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.”

“Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming,” Google’s Matt Sucherman wrote in a blog post yesterday.

This response from Google does indeed seem logical, and we can easily apply the same reasoning to sites that index and host .torrent files. The operators of torrent sites and video sites can’t possibly verify and screen the content of all uploaded files. This is something the site’s users should be held accountable for.

This doesn’t mean of course that the site’s operators should ignore the law. The Pirate Bay for example has always been very responsive to requests from the police concerning illegal material linked to by the site. IsoHunt goes even further as it actively works together with copyright holders and Mininova even allowed copyright holders to prevent infringing torrents from being re-uploaded in the future.

According to Google such policies should be good enough to operate a site like YouTube without running into legal trouble.

“European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy,” Sucherman writes.

So here we have Google in a similar position as most torrent sites are in. Although the Italian verdict is outrageous the obvious upside is that unlike the torrent sites, Google has the financial power to successfully fight the verdict. According to former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, Google got what it deserved.

“It’s good that someone takes on Google for a change. Let them take the heat for once – and let them make sure that other sites that they’ve previously had no problem filtering, that basically do the same as them, don’t end up in this shit the next time,” Sunde told TorrentFreak.

“I think it’s good that time has finally caught up Google. Maybe now we have a level playing field here. They have to take the fight as well. Previously they only said nice things about how important the Internet was, and then ignored all of the things going on. Even supporting them – China for instance,” he added.

“A big player like Google has the financial muscles to fight this thing. And we all know that Italy is just full of rules made by Berlusconi, for Berlusconi,” Sunde said, adding, “That fascist needs to go.”

Google has indeed committed itself, and said it “will vigorously appeal this decision.” The whole case revolves around the question of whether or not the operators of media portals and search engines should be held accountable for the actions of their users.

In recent months Italian courts have clearly answered positively to this question. They have opened the door for a nationwide block of file-sharing sites and with yesterday’s decision file and video hosting sites are not safe any longer either. So the next question is, can Google secure a safe haven for torrent sites?

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

Earlier this month it was celebrations all round for the operators of Aussie ISP iiNet, as they successfully defended a Hollywood movie studio legal onslaught directed by AFACT, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.

Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises, Inc. and the Seven Network took iiNet to court, claiming that the ISP did nothing to stop its customers from sharing copyright media via BitTorrent and was therefore liable for their infringements.

Judge Justice Dennis Cowdroy disagreed, and handed a huge victory to iiNet.

Today marked the deadline for AFACT to appeal the decision and as expected, they did just that.

In a statement the anti-piracy group said there were good grounds to appeal a judgment which it is dramatically claiming has left an “unworkable environment for content creators and content providers and represents a serious threat to Australia’s digital economy.”

AFACT boss Neil Gane said the judgment conflicted with established copyright law in Australia.

“The court found large scale copyright infringements, that iiNet knew they were
occurring, that iiNet had the contractual and technical capacity to stop them and iiNet did nothing about them,” he said. “In line with previous case law, this would have amounted to authorization of copyright infringement.”

Gane went on to state that the ruling rendered so-called ’safe harbor’ provisions of copyright ineffective. “If this decision stands, the ISPs have all the protection without any of the responsibility,” he said.

AFACT’s appeal, filed with the Fedral Court today, consists of 15 areas where they believe Justice Cowdroy got it wrong. An analysis of the appeal grounds can be found here.

Chief of iiNet, Michael Malone, said Justice Cowdroy’s judgment was unequivocal and the company is confident the Court will stand by its original ruling, noting that more legal proceedings will not provide a solution.

“It is more than disappointing and frustrating that the studios have chosen this unproductive path,” Mr Malone said in a statement. “This legal case has not stopped one illegal download and further legal appeals will not stop piracy.

“The studios themselves admitted during the court hearings that making content freely and cheaply available online was an effective way to combat piracy. People are crying out to access the studios materials, so much so some are prepared to steal it. A more effective approach would be for the studios to make their content more readily and cheaply available online,” notes Malone.

Upon losing the original trial, AFACT was ordered to pay iiNet’s legal costs, revealed to be $5.7 million ($5.08 million USD). Earlier this week AFACT said it will return to court in order to avoid paying some of the costs.

The appeal hearing for the original case is likely be held this year and according to iiNet’s Michael Malone, it should take up significantly fewer days than first time around.

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

On February 4th 2010, several large book publishers filed a lawsuit against file-hosting site, RapidShare. The plaintiffs, Bedford, Freeman & Worth and Macmillan, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, The McGraw-Hill Companies and Pearson, are large suppliers of textbooks.

The lawsuit cited 148 titles to which the publishers own the copyright, and demanded that RapidShare stop user-uploaded electronic versions of the same being made available to the public via their file-hosting service.

On February 10th 2010, the District Court in Hamburg handed down a preliminary ruling against RapidShare which ordered that by February 17th the company must stop the book titles named in the lawsuit being made available on their website.

The Court ruled that RapidShare must monitor user uploads to ensure that none of the book titles are put onto their servers and go on to ensure that the public never gains access to copies that somehow slip through this filtering.

According to Inside Higher Ed, every time a prohibited book named in the injunction is made available on RapidShare it could cost the company up to 250,000 euros ($339,000) or even earn company bosses 2 years in jail.

“This ruling is an important step forward. Not only does it affirm that file-sharing copyrighted content without permission is against the law, but it attaches a hefty financial punishment to the host, in this case Rapidshare, for noncompliance,” said Tom Allen, CEO of the Association of American Publishers. “Consider this a shot across the bow for others who attempt to profit from the theft of copyrighted works online,” he added.

While there is little doubt that copyright material is indeed available via RapidShare, a press release by the book publishers oversteps the mark a little by stating that the company “encourages the unauthorized uploading of content with a variety of reward programs.” While RapidShare could be accused of many things, openly encouraging its customers to upload pirate material is not one of them.

This is not the first time that RapidShare has been ordered to filter content. In 2009, the Regional Court in Hamburg ruled that the company must pro-actively filter around 5,000 music tracks from music industry group GEMA’s catalog to prevent them being made available to the public.

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

In 2008, the New Zealand Government proposed new legislation to deal with illicit file-sharing. Section92A was the subject of widespread protests which eventually caused the Government to scrap their plans and go back to the the drawing board in order to remove the “guilty upon accusation” elements.

Today, Commerce Minister Simon Power will introduce The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill which will repeal Section 92A and replace it with a modified regime intended to reduce illegal file sharing.

“The major feature is the three-notice process, which educates the public about illegal file sharing and provides effective methods for copyright owners to enforce their copyright,” says Power. “It ensures that file sharers are given adequate warnings that unauthorised sharing of copyright works is illegal.”

Despite the more-gently named “three notice” regime (versus the more commonly used “3 strikes” term) the effects are the same. The bill will enable copyright owners to claim damages and make requests for the Internet subscriptions of infringers to be suspended.

That said, the element most criticized in Section92A was the lack of a right to reply to an accusation, and that appears to have been addressed. The Bill will extend the jurisdiction of the country’s Copyright Tribunal, which will hear both sides of the argument and will be empowered to rule on cases of alleged infringement.

“It’s important that account holders are given a reasonable time to stop infringing before enforcement takes place. The bill prescribes timeframes so account holders have the opportunity to address illegal file sharing activity occurring on their internet connection before enforcement action is taken,” says Mr Power for the Government, adding, “They will also have the chance to challenge notices and may request hearings at the Copyright Tribunal to contest infringement claims.

Yesterday it was revealed that Peter Dengate-Thrush, a lawyer specializing in Internet and IP law, has been appointed to the three-person Copyright Tribunal.

Dengate-Thrush, who was legal advisor to InternetNZ for 3 years and is the chairman of Internet policy-making body ICANN, will serve on the Tribunal for five years.

“I straddle both camps, in that I have got a history of involvement in developing internet institutions, practices and rules and also my daily practice is as an intellectual property barrister,” he said in a recent interview.

“I make my living out of advising trademark owners and copyright owners and fully appreciate the consequences of infringements. These are bad things for the economy, communities, inventors and creators of good ideas.”

The Tribunal will be able to fine persistent infringers up to $15,000 ($10,539 USD) with the exact amount linked to damages alleged to have been suffered by the copyright owners. It will also be able to order the suspension of Internet accounts for six months.

“[There] will come a time when disconnecting them [repeat infringers] for a period is the right thing,” added Dengate-Thrush.

While welcoming most of the amendments, InternetNZ, the group which oversees the Internet in New Zealand, says the account suspension clause needs to go.

“The only major flaw remaining in the legislation is that its provision for the suspension of people’s Internet accounts. Internet users would simply start a new account at another ISP,” says Policy Director Jordan Carter.

“While suspension would require an order of the District Court, it is still unworkable and unnecessary. InternetNZ will argue strongly that suspension be deleted by the Select Committee.”

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

Early 2006, the MPAA issued a complaint against isoHunt and its sister site Torrentbox, claiming that owner Gary Fung operated file-sharing services and profited from copyright infringement.

The lengthy legal procedure that followed came to a temporary end December last year, when a US Federal Court in California ruled that isoHunt was indeed guilty of violating US copyright law. Since the circumstances of the case were so similar to earlier ones involving Napster and Grokster, the judge decided there was no need to have a full trial and instead granted a summary judgment against isoHunt.

That was not the end of the case though. Last month at the status conference the judge opened the door for an interlocutory appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Before we appeal however, we must undergo injunction motions and that’s what we are doing now,” Gary Fung told TorrentFreak.

The MPAA has already filed its injunction and suggested that isoHunt should filter its search results based on generic keywords that may be used to describe copyrighted titles. In a response isoHunt has filed an injunction stating that such a feature is a bad idea for several reasons.

“The Plaintiffs’ [MPAA studios] proposed injunction and its keyword type filter, in our view, raises serious issues on the balance between freedom of speech, fair use and copyright protectionism. Such a keyword filter is also impossible to implement if it’s to have any sort of precision, nor can it avoid conflict with free use cases, free commerce, or extra-territorial law,” Fung said.

“If it were actually to be mandated and put into operation, plaintiffs’ proposed filter would make Swiss cheese out of the dictionary,” isoHunt’s lawyer Ira Rothken writes in the injunction, arguing that a keyword filter would also censor a lot of legal content.

“If a new TV show title is based on a popular phrase that is already in the name of an amateur film or Linux program, distribution of the film or program will be blocked,” the lawyer added.

Instead of filtering isoHunt proposes to use a Lite version of isoHunt instead, a version of the site that no longer contains any of the red flags for inducement that were found at Summary Judgment. In other words, the ‘lite’ version of the site is no different than search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, except that it’s limited to torrent files.

“Should the Court accept a version of isoHunt Lite during the injunction phase, it may become the required interface for our US users,” Gary Fung told TorrentFreak.

It is noted in the injunction that Google and Yahoo! and other search engines can serve as torrent search engines also, and that most of the files that can be found via isoHunt are indexed by these other search engines as well. Gary Fung even conducted a test on a sample of torrent files to prove this point.

“This test shows that 95% of the torrent files indexed on isoHunt are equally available through the main search engines,” isoHunt’s lawyer writes to the court.

With the Lite version of isoHunt Gary Fung hopes to prevent the site’s closure in the US. If the Court somehow rules that it’s still violating copyright law, one has to wonder what implications this has for Google, Yahoo! and other search engines.

The case continues.

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

Earlier this month, the Federal Court in Australia ruled in favor of ISP iiNet following a copyright infringement case brought by AFACT, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.

The studios it represents, Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises, Inc. and the Seven Network took legal action against iiNet, claiming that the ISP did nothing to stop its customers from sharing copyright media via BitTorrent.

As part of the defeat, AFACT was ordered to pay iiNet’s legal costs, recently revealed to be a staggering $5.7 million ($5.08 million USD). Despite the ruling, AFACT says it will now return to court to avoid paying some of the costs. The anti-piracy group says that even though the final verdict went against them, elements of the trial went in their favor, so they believe they should not have to pay iiNet for defending those parts.

One area of claim was highlighted by AFACT spokesperson Rebecca Tabakoff, who said that early on in the trial iiNet conceded that its customers did indeed share copyright material, despite earlier claims they did not.

“[iiNet] spent a lot of time in the lead up to the trial not conceding that their customers had infringed copyright. The judge awarded all costs against applicants but iiNet was not successful on all fronts,” she explained.

Tabakoff indicated that AFACT would present other arguments to see if costs could be recouped elsewhere.

iiNet managing director Michael Malone believes that since AFACT lost the case, they should pay the costs.

“We didn’t ask to be sued. They came to us and sued us and they lost, so I don’t see why we should be paying any of their legal expenses,” Malone told ZDNet.

Malone says that money spent on legal action would be better off spent serving customers better.

“I look at the amount of money we have spent on litigation, and no doubt there would have been a lot more [spent] by the studios. Think of what that could have been spent on if it was applied to online content instead.”

This attempt by AFACT to challenge the instruction to pay iiNet’s legal costs will be heard on February 25th, the same day by which it must appeal the original ruling in order to take it to the High Court.

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

In 2008, the latest Batman movie ‘The Dark Knight’ became a massive hit, setting a one-day box office record of $66.4 million on its opening day and taking $996,500,000 by the end of the year.

Of course, Warner worked hard to hinder piracy, even handing out night-vision goggles in Australia to thwart cammers. Over in the United States, however, much lower-tech means were used to identify an individual attempting to record the movie.

The movie industry already had their eye on the East Glenn Movie Theater in Lee’s Summit since they believed an illicit copy of the Will Smith movie ‘Hancock’ had previously been recorded there. After noticing a man wearing a long winter coat in the summer, on July 18 on-site MPAA investigators grew suspicious that he was up to no good.

They confronted 42 year-old Robert L. Henderson, seized his video camera and called the police who arrived shortly later and arrested him.

Henderson’s camera was found to contain footage of The Dark Knight, Hell Boy 2 and The Chronicles of Narnia – Prince Caspian. While conducting a search of his home, police found several computers and 1,240 counterfeit DVDs.

On October 7th 2009, Henderson pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Fernando J. Gaitan to criminal copyright infringement under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act 2005 – the same legislation that sent the EliteTorrents admins and uploaders to prison.

Last week, Judge Gaitan ordered Henderson to serve 24 months in federal prison along with 3 years probation for recording the movie. In addition he must pay $24,738 in fines – $19.95 for each of the pirate movies seized from his home.

“The theft of films by camcording is a serious threat to the health of the motion picture industry and the 2.4 million Americans it employs,” said Mike Robinson, Sr. Vice President of Content Protection at the MPAA. “This is an appropriate sentence for a very serious crime, and we hope it will serve as a warning to would-be movie thieves that they will face severe consequences for engaging in these activities.”

Despite all the efforts, The Dark Knight still leaked online in cam and other formats and went on to become the most-pirated movie of 2008 with 7,030,000 downloads on BitTorrent alone.

The US is extremely tough on ‘cammers’ these days, an attitude which isn’t shared by the Australians. Recently an 88 year-old man who tried to record Avatar wasn’t arrested, but allowed to carry on watching the movie.

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

On April 17th of last year, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available.’ The District Court sentenced the defendants to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000 each.

For most of the people involved the verdict didn’t come as a surprise as it had already leaked out. The night before the sentences were read out in court, a journalist had already informed one of the defendants that they would be found guilty.

“Really, it’s a bit LOL,” Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde said at the time, after he was informed about the leak from the Court. “It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.”

The District Court itself didn’t take the leak as lightly as Sunde and announced that it would ask the police to thoroughly investigate the case. “It is extremely serious,” District Court’s chief Lena Berke said in a comment. “This is a breach of confidentiality.”

In the months that followed the source of the leak was investigated, but without conclusive results. During the investigation it became apparent that the leak originated from the District Court but because of weak computer security it could not be traced back to a single suspect and the investigation has now been closed.

The source of the leak didn’t leave any physical traces behind and the Court doesn’t log screen activity, which left the police with very little evidence. “You can’t go any further if you can’t catch a person with his fingers in the cookie jar. It’s not easy,” Commissioner Per-Erik Bergner commented.

The District Court will take measures to prevent such confidentiality breaches in the future by installing a new computer system with better logging capabilities. This system is expected to be installed as early as April or May.

The Pirate Bay defendants will get to appeal their case in a few months. No official date has been set for the hearing, but it’s not expected before the summer.

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

While conducting their usual monitoring of file-sharing networks, anti-piracy outfit Antipiratgruppen noticed that a user with a Danish IP address was uploading a screener copy of the Anders Matthesen movie ‘Black Balls’ via The Pirate Bay.

Antipiratgruppen collected evidence and asked a court to force TDC, the man’s ISP, to reveal his identity and home address. The court complied.

Armed with a warrant and a representative from the court, last week Antipiratgruppen carried out a raid on the man’s Herning home to gather evidence of his alleged offenses.

Maria Fredenslund, lawyer with Antipiratgruppen, was keen to emphasize the significance of the raid.

“We are waiting for the IT expert’s report on yesterday’s action, but there is no doubt that he is behind massive violations of copyright. We found and seized several hard drives, web server, etc. so it will take time to go through it all. The case is a good example of how a case which at first glance seemed modest, in fact, is about massive piracy. At least in Denmark,” she said in a statement.

Although Fredenslund said that they presume the man’s hard drives were filled with copyright content which made it a “very big case”, she also noted that the man in his 20’s had to her knowledge only violated movie copyrights online four or five times. A quick look at the user’s Pirate Bay account seems to confirm he has uploaded a handful of movies and a small number of music torrents.

Fredenslund told Danish media that Antipiratgruppen secured an injunction against the man so if he continues to share files he can be punished. Speaking of the man with DR.dk, she said that her group doesn’t intend to “sue him to hell” since they are “nice people”, but will need to see the volume of files traded in order to calculate the compensation required.

In November 2009, Antipiratgruppen announced that after losing several court cases they had largely given up on trying to get illegal file-sharers convicted, mainly due to their inability to gather solid evidence.

Indeed, the Danish courts have ruled several times that in terms of evidence, an IP-address alone is insufficient to prove guilt. However, the new tactic is to label people like this screener uploader and torrent site operators as “big fish” in order to get a warrant to seize physical evidence.

Fredenslund said that because this man was the first to make Black Balls available on the Internet, Antipiratgruppen had considered this as an aggravating factor which justified their action.

Equally, the recent raid on the operator of the EliteBits BitTorrent tracker was targeted at “traffickers”, she explained.

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

During the last two years, Sweden has created a number of posts with responsibility for dealing with violations of intellectual property. In 2010 the resources dedicated by the authorities to this seemingly unwinnable battle are set to increase.

In the spring a new task force will go into operation dealing with file-sharing and other intellectual property violations.

The new unit will consist of nine specially trained investigators forming three groups operating out of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, working under Paul Pinter, Stockholm County Police’s National Coordinator in the Intellectual Property Crime division.

The team will also consist of two prosecutors, Frederick Ingblad and Henrik Rasmusson who were both involved in the nine recent raids against Direct Connect users.

Pinter, who previously worked as a computer crime and forensics investigator with the Stockholm County Police, said that the idea is to streamline law enforcement in this area. His role will be to act as coordinator between the various investigators and locations.

“The idea is that groups should only focus on his own territory, but it should also be able to operate nationally. In the case of raids this may facilitate a certain degree of coordination,” he told SvD.se.

Due to the distributed nature of the Internet and its users, Pinter said that nationwide collaboration will become increasingly important.

“In the case of such fraud, so much of that takes place over the Internet. It is difficult to know where a crime will fall and it’s possible to be spread too thinly over many places,” he adds.

Swedish media are reporting that the chances of getting away with illicit file-sharing are set to decrease as a result of this new unit’s work. From a current position of virtually zero that shouldn’t be a particularly difficult task, but as pointed out this week by file-sharing researcher Daniel Westman, getting enough evidence to raid a BitTorrent user can be very tricky. Expect Direct Connect users to stay in the spotlight.

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

When news broke that TV-Links.co.uk had been raided by police and admin Dave Rock arrested, it was met with a certain element of disbelief. TV-Links was not a warez or torrent site, but one which linked to videos hosted on sites like YouTube. It carried absolutely zero illicit content.

This major detail wasn’t of much concern to the UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), whose investigation along with Trading Standards later came to involve the police.

Rather than go after giants like YouTube, Google Video, Veoh and DailyMotion who actually hosted the content, FACT built a case against the operators of TV-Links, David Rock – aka ‘Sin’ – and site partner David Overton who was raided 5 months later.

Dave Rock later explained that it would’ve been an easy task for FACT to track him down, since he never made any attempts at secrecy.

“To be honest I didn’t really attempt to hide my ID, as under UK Law linking to another site isn’t illegal, so I didn’t see the need,” he told TorrentFreak in a November 2008 interview.

There was confusion as to the basis for the initial raid, with FACT citing “offenses relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the Internet” – an offense that doesn’t even exist under UK law – with Trading Standards and the police referring to “supplying property with a registered trade mark without permission.”

After a long wait the official allegations became Conspiracy to Defraud and breaches of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act. Similar fraud allegations were leveled at Alan Ellis, the ex-admin of OiNK.

More than 2 years of waiting later, in January 2010 the TV-Links case went to court. On the 19th January 2010 the operators of TV-Links – represented by Morgan Rose Solicitors, counsel William Clegg QC and Alex Stein for David Rock, and Ian Bridge for David Overton – raised preliminary points of law and asked for the proceedings to be dismissed.

This week Judge Ticehurst gave his judgment, announcing that TV-Links had won their case. He ruled in detail for the first time in a Crown Court in relation to Section 17 of the European Commerce Directive 2000, stating that Section 17 indeed applied and afforded TV-Links a complete defense in criminal proceedings in England and Wales for their linking to other web sites. In a nutshell and to coin a familiar phrase, the site was deemed a mere conduit of information.

The Judge also ruled that the allegations under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act failed because there was no evidence that TV-Links made available to the public the films and shows they linked to. There is no appeal available to FACT against this ruling.

The Judge noted that FACT had not applied the Attorney General’s guidelines when deciding to prosecute the defendants with Conspiracy to Defraud.

Morgan Rose Solicitors also represented OiNK owner Alan Ellis in January 2010, successfully defending a Conspiracy to Defraud charge. In OiNK’s case there was no ruling on the e-commerce directive, but Mr Ellis was unanimously acquitted, the jury finding him not guilty.

Both cases cost the public purse a large amount of money and even though FACT ran a private prosecution, it is the tax payer which picks up the bill for both the defense and prosecution costs.

The Court of Appeal has twice stated in games console mod-chip cases (R v Gilham and R v Higgs) that cases involving complicated issues of copyright law ought not to be tried before a jury but should instead be dealt with in Chancery where specialist judges can try these cases more efficiently and grant an injunction if required.

Although TV-Links triumphed in the end, there were many obstacles to overcome. In late 2008 after Dave’s TorrentFreak interview, the defendants were served with a financial restraining order under Proceeds of Crime legislation. This meant that the necessary funds required to mount a full defense against the MPAA-funded FACT were simply unavailable. But things came good in the end.

“In the process of successfully obtaining a court order to discharge the Restraint Order against the defendants, a copy of the agreement came to light. Had the Restraint Order remained in place it would have severely hamstrung David Rock in presenting his defense – under legal aid Representation Order it would not have been possible to appoint Mr Clegg QC, who was outstanding,” TV-Links’ legal team told TorrentFreak.

“I’d just like to thank Simon Rose from Morgan Rose Solicitors, William Clegg QC, Alex Stein and Ian Bridge for the positive result,” Dave Rock told TorrentFreak, as he moves to put the last two traumatic years behind him.

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

Founded in May 2005, Torrent.is was home to around 26,500 active users before the site was forced to go offline. The site only allowed Icelandic IPs to connect to the tracker and it was by far the largest and most famous private BitTorrent tracker in Iceland.

The local anti-piracy lobby had also started to take notice of the BitTorrent tracker’s growing popularity and decided to take legal action. During November 2007, Svavar Kjarrval, the owner of the tracker, received a preliminary injunction which left him no other choice than to shut down the site.

While the majority of BitTorrent tracker owners would have given up when confronted with legal action, Svavar decided to put up a fight. “I’m going to fight this as far as I possibly can. The general public seems to be on our side,” he told TorrentFreak at the time, and he kept his word.

What followed was a lengthy legal battle that was fought in two rounds. In the first round Torrent.is came out as the winner at both the District Court and the Supreme Court. However, the local equivalent of the RIAA (STEF) simply started a new case based on new claims, so the whole circus started from scratch.

STEF claimed that Torrent.is was violating copyright law and the case went before the District Court again. The Icelandic tracker again came out victorious, but the legal bullying didn’t stop there and STEF took the case to the Supreme Court hoping for a win.

Today the Supreme Court delivered its verdict, announcing Torrent.is had been found guilty. The owner of the site was ordered to pay legal fees of $3,350 and refrain from opening the site to the public.

Svavar informed TorrentFreak that this negative outcome marks the end of a seemingly endless legal battle. Although he is disappointed in the verdict, Svavar said that he simply cannot afford to appeal the case due to a lack of money.

It is expected that the outcome of this case will be used to bolster European anti-piracy outfits to pursue legal action against other BitTorrent trackers. In Iceland, Svavar thinks it will mean that file-sharers will increasingly go underground, if it has any effect at all.

“The battle might be lost but the file-sharing war has not ended,” Svavar concluded.

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