The prosecutor and police announced that Paul Epifan, 23, and his younger brother Timothy Epifan, 21, had both been charged with theft by deception. Paul Epifan was also charged with pirating the movie.

According to the police on Friday July 10th at around 11:00am, detectives from the very serious-sounding Somerset County Prosecutor’s Major Crimes Squad and detectives from the Manville Police Department received information that the brothers were inside Reading Cinema Movie Theatre in Manville, camming the Bruno movie.

As the brothers left the cinema, detectives stopped them and announced that the par were under arrest. Paul Epifan complied without a struggle, but according to the prosecutor Timothy fled and was pursued by police.

During the chase it’s alleged that Timothy pulled a recording device from his waistband and attempted to delete its contents. Then according to the police at least, Timothy then sustained a broken leg when he attempted to “cross between two police vehicles”, causing him to collide with one of them. There is no mention of any police cars “colliding” with him.

On top of his other alleged crimes, Timothy Epifan was also charged with resisting arrest. The pair will appear in court at a later date.

Post from: TorrentFreak

For years The Pirate Bay’s users have been able to share files without censorship or charges, but this is all about to change. Rosso said that under the new management, the 3.7 million Pirate Bay users (or whatever userbase remains) will have to pay a monthly fee to access the site.

The money collected from user subscriptions and advertising revenue will then be used to pay off the copyright holders. The exact monthly fee is yet to be decided, but Rosso did confirm that the more files people share, the lower it will be.

“The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero,” Rosso told Cnet. “The user is in control.”

In addition, GGF hopes to cut deals with ISPs. “We hope to introduce a new BitTorrent technology that will optimize ISP traffic,” Rosso said. “We can save ISPs up to 80 percent of their resources. Half of the Internet traffic is file sharing and half of that traffic is Pirate Bay.”

Rosso conveniently fails to mention that a Pirate Bay where users have to pay for access will not be generating much traffic at all, so this part of GGF’s business model has to be rethought. BitTorrent does not depend on The Pirate Bay, and new trackers have already lined up to take over its job.

Details about the actual acquisition of The Pirate Bay are still scarce. Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that GGF will get the domain names for thepiratebay (under all the tlds they exist) and a copy of the code and the database. If all goes well the transfer of ownership will take place at the end of July.

GGF has to raise $7.8 million in funding in order to buy the site. After that, the share holders - who’ve seen a drop in the stock price after the announced buy-out - have to vote in favor of the deal.

Post from: TorrentFreak

So how would Mashboxx work? According to Rosso the application would work like many other P2P clients of the day. Users would be able to search for, upload and download tracks but also buy WMA-encoded and fingerprinted music tracks for around $1 each, all while employing Shawn Fanning’s SnoCap technology. Those tracks, it was claimed, could then be legally distributed to other users on the network, utilizing the buyer’s upload bandwidth.

But it wasn’t to be. Three years later the Mashboxx site is in the same condition as it was in 2006 when the last press release went up announcing that EMI had “agreed to make its entire catalog of digital recordings available to Mashboxx, a legal peer-to-peer (P2P) service currently in development.” Another casualty of P2P that never even got off the ground, Mashboxx was rumored to have died due to lack of investment.

But now in 2009, Wayne Rosso is back in what appears to be somewhat similar circumstances. Like almost everyone, when the news broke that GGF would buy The Pirate Bay and turn it into a legitimate service, Rosso says he was pessimistic. “Those poor bastards have no idea what they’re in for,” he recalls.

But then, two days after the announcement, Rosso’s phone rang. On the other end was none other than GGF CEO Hans Pandeya. At first Rosso says he couldn’t grasp what Hans is trying to accomplish but now he does and describes the plans as “pretty ingenious”. It’s fairly well-known by now that Pandeya plans to harness New Pirate Bay users’ bandwidth and computing resources in order to subsidize their media consumption costs.

“Long story short, I am now working with Hans to facilitate the model and helping to make the Pirate Bay site legit,” says Rosso. “So Jaws is back. And I’m sure a lot of people won’t be so thrilled about that!”

So now, in a replay of events in 2004/2006, Rosso is meeting with content providers and “big players” in the international music scene in order to make New TPB’s future a little more certain. And here’s the thing - according to Rosso every one of them has been supportive. He even goes as far as to say they are “excited” at the proposition.

“They see that it could really work. I left a label meeting Tuesday unlike any I have ever had. They were fantastic!” says Rosso.

An enthusiastic Rosso says he is working with people he describes as “real partners” who will not tie up him and GGF “in Gordian knots that would drive all the users away.”

It remains to be seen if the current users will subscribe to even testing the New Pirate Bay, but Rosso is characteristically enthusiastic and optimistic, to levels not seen since, well, 2004.

Praising the attitude of his music industry partners, Rosso concludes: “It was truly incredible and exciting and when the time is right I will go out of my way to give these guys the credit that they deserve, because, together, we’re going where no mortals have ever traveled.”

Time will tell if the result is sci-fi, or just sigh.

Post from: TorrentFreak

This April five book publishers handed a request to a local court for information on the owner of an FTP-server that allegedly stored more than 2000 audio books. Although it was a private server and the audio books couldn’t have been made available to the public, the court ordered the ISP Ephone to hand over the details of the person behind the IP address.

Ephone refused to comply, instead deciding to take the case to the Appeal Court. Interestingly, the company decided to follow up the case based on feedback from its customers through an online poll on its website.

In total, over 20,000 visitors voted on the question of whether or not the company should appeal or not. The results didn’t leave room for much doubt. A massive 99% of the respondents were in favor of appealing, and some even offered to cover a part of the court costs.

Ephone’s CEO Bo Wigstrand said the company’s management had discussed their options internally, but what they really needed was input from their customers. “That was what finally led to our decision,” Wigstrand explained.

Besides the support from customers and the public, Ephone’s appeal is also backed by Swedish Member of Parliament Karl Sigfrid, who previously asked his ISP to delete all personal information linked to his IP-address to prevent him being chased down by copyright holders.

According to Ephone the evidence that the copyright holders had presented in the book case was incomplete and insufficient. It mainly consisted of screenshots and log files, Ephone’s lawyer said. Weak evidence aside, CEO Bo Wigstrand said that his company has to do all it can to protect the privacy of its customers.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Last year the chief of ISP iiNet Michael Malone labeled Conroy as “the worst Communications Minister we’ve had in the 15 years since the [Internet] industry has existed,” and this year the ISP pulled out of filtering trials, saying the filter would not work.

But criticism of Conroy don’t stop there. The proposed filtering system championed by Conroy - ostensibly for the protection of minors - isn’t even supported by those whose interests it claims to protect.

Last week Save the Children, Civil Liberties Australia and the National Children’s and Youth Law Center urged the government to abandon plans for Conroy’s filter saying that it will neither protect children from viewing explicit material, nor stop child pornography from being distributed. Let’s hope Conroy listens to these groups, because he doesn’t seem to listen to anyone else who says his plans are going nowhere.

Last night Senator Conroy unveiled a report entitled Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions while promising the government will “facilitate development of an appropriate solution to the issue of unauthorised file sharing”.

So what kind of imaginative, creative, pioneering ideas and solutions are available for Conroy to nurture and facilitate? From the report;

One solution proposed by copyright owners is a “three strikes” or “graduated response” proposal under which copyright owners would work together with ISPs to identify the ISP’s customers who are suspected of unauthorised file sharing and the ISP would then send a notice on behalf of the copyright owner to that customer advising of this allegation. After multiple notices, a series of escalated steps could be taken with respect to the customer’s account.

The “copyright owners” who submitted this proposal includes anti-piracy group AFACT, currently engaged in hugely expensive legal action against prominent ISP iiNet, blaming it for the copyright-infringing activities of its customers.

Good luck to Conroy in “facilitating” meaningful discussions between these outfits in the future. Their relationship must be at an all-time low already, and getting lower with every dollar-sapping court appearance in these difficult financial times.

But it’s not just the entertainment industry’s relationship with ISPs that’s proving problematic when attempting to find a “solution” to the piracy issue, it appears that ISPs have no time for Conroy either. Last week the Senator was awarded the accolade of “Internet Villain of the Year” by ISPs at the 11th annual Internet Industry Awards, even beating France’s President Sarkozy to the title.

Solving the piracy “problem” is hugely difficult and complex and will only be made more so by the already faltering relationships between parties who appear to have little respect for each other, even before the process begins.

The full report can be downloaded here (.pdf)

Post from: TorrentFreak

We have to admit that the usefulness of the service escaped us when we first discovered the project. So, we contacted Michael Nutt, one of the people running the project to find out what it’s all about.

“It is an attempt to make torrents more resilient,” Michael told TorrentFreak. “The difference is that you no longer need an indexing site to host your torrent file. Many forums will allow uploading images but not other types of files.”

Hiding a torrent file inside an image is easy enough. Just select a torrent file stored on your local hard drive and Hid.im will take care the rest. The only limit to the service is that the size of the torrent file cannot exceed 250KB.

Once the torrent is converted you can easily share it via image hosting services or social networking sites that don’t allow the uploading of .torrent files.

People on the receiving end can decode the images and get the original .torrent file through a Firefox extension or bookmarklet. The code is entirely open source and Michael Nutt told us that they are hoping for people to contribute to it by creating additional decoders supported by other browsers.

The idea of converting torrents into images is not entirely new. Stegtorrent is an application that has been around for a few years already and does something similar. However, unlike Stegtorrent Hid.im is web-based and doesn’t require users to install any software.

Although we’re not really sure how useful Hid.im is for the average BitTorrent user, it does come in handy for those places where torrents are prohibited.

Post from: TorrentFreak

After outrage in the Internet community coupled with resistance by ISPs led to a failure to reach agreement in the allocated period, Prime Minister John Key announced that the law would be have to be delayed. In the end not even a delay would be enough to reach consensus and it was announced that Section 92A of the Copyright Act 1994 would not come into force on 27 March as scheduled, but instead would be amended to address areas of concern.

Prime Minister Key set Minister of Commerce Simon Power to work on a replacement and today he put those proposals to the cabinet.

The main development is that ISPs will no longer be expected to perform the role of ‘Copyright Cops’ for the entertainment industries. Instead, that role will be performed by New Zealand’s Copyright Tribunal which at least at this early stage appears to offer those accused some kind of due process via an independent body.

The bad news is that the fraught with difficulty and disproportionate response of disconnections - aka ‘3 Strikes’ - is still on the table. The new framework is proposed as follows;

Step 1: In the event that a copyright holder records an infringement of its rights by an Internet user (unauthorized uploading), they will be required to send an initial infringement notice to the corresponding ISP. Once the account holder is identified by matching the alleged infringing IP-address with customer records, the initial infringement notice will be passed to him or her, via the ISP.

Step 2: Should there be another infringement, the above process would be repeated but this time the account holder would also receive a ‘Cease and Desist’ notice. At this point an account holder would have the opportunity to respond to copyright holders.

Step 3: If after issuing a Cease and Desist notice infringements continue, the copyright holders can then apply to the Copyright Tribunal to require the corresponding ISP to hand over the personal details of the account holder. Interestingly copyright holders can already achieve something similar, simply by going directly to the courts.

Step 4: At this stage copyright holders are free to issue a complaint with the Copyright Tribunal, who will in turn notify the account holder that an additional complaint has been made against him or her. The account holder is then given the opportunity to put their side of the story and move to mediation. In this instance costs would be shared and a government-approved mediator would be provided. Should this step fail the Copyright Tribunal would decide from a range of penalties such as fines or ultimately, disconnection.

Of course, the above is not without its issues.

Right now New Zealand’s Copyright Tribunal, a body operating under the Ministry of Justice is a small concern used to dealing with smaller, more manageable copyright disputes. Indeed, currently it has only three part-time staff. It’s going to need more resources if it’s to deal with these cases effectively.

However, Matthew Holloway from The Creative Freedom Foundation believes the tribunal system could be workable;

“It’s not necessarily an unsolvable problem. It could make sense to initially restrict the number of complaints by dealing only with certain scales of infringement. The scale could be adjusted in time. This would be similar to the approach within Canada where the police have said that certain small scales of infringement won’t be investigated because they simply don’t have the resources.”

The discussion document for the amended Section 92a will be open for submissions until August 7.

Post from: TorrentFreak

isoHunt founder Gary Fung is not intimidated by the movie industry scare tactics that started back in 2006, and he is willing to fight until the end. “I’m doing this for the future,” Fung said recently, while explaining that isoHunt is not much different than search engines like Google.

“When we talk about copyright we should be more forward thinking. It is a huge issue for the culture. The current state of copyright might not be the future state. And there’s increasing adoption of BitTorrent, even by large media. That is a glimpse of the future,” Fung commented.

The MPAA has a totally different view on the matter, and sees torrent sites as commercial operations with the sole intention of cashing in on copyright infringement. Steven Fabrizio, the MPAA lawyer who also represented the RIAA in their case against Napster is very clear about MPAA’s battle plan.

It is not so much about taking the site offline, the ultimate goal is to scare those who operate BitTorrent sites by pursuing exorbitant damages. In their case against TorrentSpy they continued to push for damages in court even though the site had been taken down, and now they are coming for a piece of the next torrent site.

isoHunt has no plans to discontinue its operations voluntarily, but should they lose in court against the MPAA and ordered to pay a fine, Fabrizio promises that the movie industry lobby will do everything it can to come and collect.

Fabrizio is well aware that Fung wont be able to pay millions if isoHunt ends up losing, but the MPAA is patient. “The judgment doesn’t go away. If Gary Fung creates a legitimate website, we’ll be there. If he sells that company for $100 million, we’ll be there. For the rest of his life we’ll be able to pursue that judgment,” the MPAA lawyer told the Financial Post.

The comments made by the MPAA lawyer and their dealing with the cases against TorrentSpy and isoHunt almost suggests that this is a personal vendetta of the entertainment industry lobby.

In the case of TorrentSpy the MPAA is indeed keeping its word for now. TorrentSpy owner Justin Bunnell was ordered to pay a $110 million fine last year after the court terminated the case against the movie industry. This decision is currently under appeal but the MPAA has already started pursuing the awarded damages.

In isoHunt’s case a ruling has yet to be made so all the talk about damages is purely hypothetical. We hope that isoHunt scores a victory, but it is not an easy battle in a country where lobbyists and Hollywood funded politicians are in power.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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.

Post from: TorrentFreak

A self-proclaimed Internet and digital addict, Fry claims to have owned the second ever Mac sold in the UK and has joked that he has owned every smart phone available today. Indeed, he recently wowed Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson by showing him a pretty unusual use for his iPhone. Fry even has more than 500,000 Twitter followers.

So, unlike many who speak about Internet issues, there is a good chance that Stephen Fry actually knows what he’s talking about. Yesterday, to an audience gathered for the iTunes Festival in London’s Camden Town, he was a little more honest than most would’ve expected on the issue of illicit downloading, even if just hours before he revealed that he was finding his appearance unnerving, admitting, “I haven’t the least idea what I’m going to say.”

But it came good in the end. In a speech about copyright and the future of music introduced by Stuff’s editor-in-chief Tom Dunmore, Fry poured scorn on the music industry for attacking the public in file-sharing cases. “Making an example of ordinary people is the stupidest thing the record industry can do,” he said.

Noting a problem that was earlier outlined here on TorrentFreak, Fry said the Digital Britain report did not represent the views of the public, but those of “industry insiders” instead.

While Fry is pragmatic about the piracy situation, he’s not a supporter of large-scale infringers, described by him as those who download on an “industrial scale”. When asked how he felt about his own media output being pirated, Fry said: “I’m against cynical bootlegging but I work in a very molly coddled, overpaid business.”

But unsurprisingly for a clued-up digital native in 2009, there are some kinds of piracy that Fry isn’t completely against. He told the audience at London’s Roundhouse that he is a BitTorrent user himself and has grabbed episodes of 24 using the protocol.

Interestingly, he went on to reveal that he had also downloaded the season finale of House, the hit US show which stars the comedian most known for partnering Fry, Hugh Laurie.

However - and drawing a somewhat interesting analogy - Fry said that in the end, illegal downloaders may well feel a little guilty over grabbing something without paying for it. “Most of us feel guilt when we masturbate,” he said, “even though we live in 2009.”

Appearing a little concerned that his slightly pro-piracy stance might be misinterpreted, Fry then appeared on his beloved Twitter. “Well, finished my bit. Hope I’m not misunderstood. Such a pity if I get misrepresented as a ‘help yourself and be a pirate’ advocate.”

Not at all Stephen. The fact is there could be as many as 6 million people in the UK doing exactly as you are doing, largely because there still isn’t an attractive, workable, widespread and convenient legal alternative. You set the example. You buy lots of media and download too, which proves that participating in one doesn’t exclude you from the other.

Pirates are customers too. Even famous ones.

Post from: TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay’s prominence has been the Achilles’ heel of BitTorrent. If the tracker should fail today, hundreds of thousands of torrents would begin to slow down significantly or stop working entirely. With the upcoming sale of The Pirate Bay this weakness has become even more salient.

Good and stable alternatives are needed, and luckily some of the leading figures in the BitTorrent community realize this. Last week we already reported on OpenBitTorrent, a free service that is already tracking 1,828,973 torrents for more than 20 million peers.

Still, replacing one tracker with another wont add much redundancy. The founder of BTjunkie and another major torrent sites came to the same conclusion and decided to launch a tracker of their own - PublicBitTorrent. Similar to OBT, PublicBT uses the Beerware licensed Opentracker software.

“Me and others felt that too much of BitTorrent tracking relies on one group and we would like to share some of that responsibility,” BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak. “If anything were to happen to TPB, hundreds of thousands of torrents that are only tracked by TPB could be lost,” he added.

PublicBT has just launched, and although the site was almost entirely copied (without authorization) from the OBT website, it is operated independently. To get the ball rolling all torrents on BTjunkie will soon be updated with the new OBT and PBT trackers, BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak.

Operating a standalone BitTorrent tracker, especially one that tracks millions of peers, can be a costly project but is a prerequisite for the BitTorrent ecosystem. It’s good to see that more BitTorrent site admins stepping up to take responsibility.

Post from: TorrentFreak

By paying both the copyright holders and file-sharers the company aims to satisfy both parties while cashing in on lucrative advertising deals.

Investors in the company responded positive to the news and the share price went up by 200% just hours after the plans were made public. GGF’s CEO appeared in every major news outlet, and although his plans were not very concrete, he predicted he could generate half a billion dollars in ad revenue per year.

However, after the media hype passed a lot of unanswered questions about the company’s exact business model remained unanswered. Possibly related, the shareholders lost faith as well and earlier this week the share price dropped below where it was before the Pirate Bay buy-out was announced.

At the Stockholm stock exchange GGF’s acquisition of The Pirate Bay raised some suspicions of insider trading. A week before the deal was made public the equity marketplace Aktietorget had shut down trading in GGF because the stock price was increasing rapidly without any solid explanation.

“There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked,” Peter Gönczi, executive vice president of Aktietorget said in a comment. This obviously didn’t do the image of the company or the value of its shares any good.

Whether or not GGF will be able to come up with a viable business model is still uncertain at this point. However, their first priority is to get the funding needed to make the acquisition, while convincing the shareholders that it’s a good deal.

Post from: TorrentFreak

The lab’s launch was held at a local movie theater where the film “Carved” by Jonas Rejman was projected, with consent from the copyright holder of course. To our knowledge this is a digital streaming world premiere for BitTorrent, and one that shows how the technology can actually help digital cinema and independent filmmakers.

Many independently produced films never make it onto the big screen simply because the costs involved are too high. At the moment most digital movies are distributed “over land” on hard disks costing up to $2000 for each copy. BitTorrent has the power to change this outdated distribution method and get smaller budget films onto the big screen.

The Far North Living Lab’s experiment shows that it’s even possible to stream movies if the connection is good enough, but Dr. Njål Borch, a senior researcher involved in the project added that downloading the film beforehand is probably a better option.

For this test run the researchers did not use a real-life BitTorrent swarm, since that would make it pretty much impossible to get the 19mbit/s download speed required to stream the film onto the big screen.

“We didn’t use a publicly available torrent, as not many would put out those kind of bitrates,” Borch told TorrentFreak. “We seeded it from our own computers including some local seeds in order to get the speed up, but we’re currently upgrading the connection to the cinema to a 1 Gig fiber optic cable that will allow us to perform these kind of experiments with no local seeds.”

The lab’s next stunt will be to stream a live concert to the city of Beijing as well as a few selected rural areas. “We want to participate in the world even though we are physically placed way beyond what most people find inhabitable,” Dr. Borch said. “We’re not afraid of the future, the Internet will not kill creativity. Quite on the contrary - we are very exited!”

We only hope that this excitement will get the movie industry interested, so BitTorrent can actually be used for what it’s intended - promoting unlimited creativity. The MPAA will probably be scared to death though, since it allows independent filmmakers to compete with large budget blockbuster productions.

Post from: TorrentFreak

IFPI and representatives from the movie industry argue that Telenor is willingly infringing copyright by allowing its customers to access the prominent BitTorrent tracker, but Telenor disagrees with this assessment. In a public announcement today Telenor explains why.

“If Telenor were considered complicit in any illegal activities online, we would have to block access to websites and customers on any suspicion of illegal activity. Telenor would then act as some sort of private police or private censorship authority, which would be very worrisome in light of important issues such as freedom of speech,” Telenor writes.

Blocking websites upon request from the entertainment industry is “unacceptable” according to Telenor. The ISP agrees that piracy is a problem and they don’t support customers who engage in these activities, but they are refusing to censor the Internet without a court order.

“Instead of demanding that Internet providers censor the Internet and monitor the content that’s transferred, Telenor believes that the best way to decrease illegal file sharing is to put more effort into making legally downloadable content available.”

The entertainment industries should find ways to monetize legal content in a way that satisfies both the copyright holders and customer. Blocking access to websites instead would “violate principles which constitute important prerequisites for any democracy”.

It is good to see that an ISP like Telenor is willing to go to court to protect their rights and those of their customers, instead of taking the easy route and giving to the wishes of the copyright lobby. Telenor rightfully emphasizes that the entertainment industry should focus on the source of the problem by developing legal alternatives that satisfy the need of their customers, a position also held by EU Commissioner Viviane Reding.

Even if IFPI wins in court, blocking The Pirate Bay is not going to be very effective. There are several ways to get around it and thousands of other BitTorrent sites. On top of that, the new owners of the site plan to get rid of all the copyrighted content indexed by the site.

Post from: TorrentFreak

On the one hand many copyright holders are virtually unmovable, steadfast in their belief that file-sharers are little more than thieves, undermining their livelihoods and stealing bread from their children’s mouths. The firm belief that they are dealing with criminals explains the draconian policies of the music and movie industry, they say.

On the other hand are millions upon millions of Internet users, desperate for their media fix in the most convenient forms, with as few restrictions as possible. Every download is not a lost sale, they say, indeed free downloads may even boost sales and treating file-sharers like criminals achieves nothing, with many declaring they will never stop downloading, never stop sharing.

Many champion disconnections for alleged pirates, while others say that access to the Internet and the information it provides is a fundamental right.

In the end, something will have to give.

In her speech to the Ludwig Erhard Lecture yesterday in Brussels, EU Commissioner for Telecoms and Media Viviane Reding joined the debate, focusing on the need for reconciliation between the almost warring factions.

Explaining that her number one priority is to make access to digital media easier and more attractive, Reding said this would drive the take-up of high speed Internet in Europe. However, the fact that both sides are reluctant to see the world from the perspective of the other, progress is being held back.

“While many right holders insist that every unauthorised download from the Internet is a violation of intellectual property rights and therefore illegal or even criminal, others stress that access to the Internet is a crucial fundamental right,” Reding explained.

“Let me be clear on this: Both sides are right. The drama is that after long and often fruitless battles, both camps have now dug themselves in their positions, without any signs of opening from either side.”

Of course, these entrenched positions do little to further the possibility of some kind of willing reconciliation, with many in the file-sharing community more determined than ever to preserve their activities and nurture their beloved hobby, often in a particularly proud way, a point not lost on Reding.

“In the meantime, Internet piracy appears to become more and more ’sexy’, in particular for the digital natives already, the young generation of intense Internet users between 16 and 24,” she told the lecture.

Noting that this age group should become the “foundation of our digital economy, of new innovation and new growth opportunities,” Reding outlined the difficulties in bringing the sides together. Quoting Eurostat figures, she claimed that 60% of 16-24 year-olds have downloaded audiovisual content from the Internet in recent months without paying. “And 28% state that they would not be willing to pay,” she added.

These figures, according to Reding, are indicative of the limitations of the present system;

“It is necessary to penalize those who are breaking the law. But are there really enough attractive and consumer-friendly legal offers on the market?” she mused, hitting on one of the biggest complaints from media consumers.

Highlighting the perceived gap between ’suits’ and citizens, Reding questioned if the current legal system for dealing with copyright meets the expectations of the younger, more tech-savvy Internet generation;

“Have we considered all alternative options to repression? Have we really looked at the issue through the eyes of a 16 year old? Or only from the perspective of law professors who grew up in the Gutenberg Age? In my view, growing Internet piracy is a vote of no-confidence in existing business models and legal solutions. It should be a wake-up call for policy-makers.”

Ask many on the file-sharing side of the debate and they will agree with Reding when she says that something must be done and done quickly too. If the media companies don’t make access to online media easier and more attractive “we could lose a whole generation as supporters of artistic creation and legal use of digital services. Economically, socially, and culturally, this would be a tragedy,” she said.

“Digital Europe can only be built with content creators on board,” Reding told the lecture, “and with the generation of digital natives as interested users and innovative consumers.”

In the end, people will have to talk. When all is said and done, legal action and disconnections will not solve this mess. Scaring people into becoming a customer is not a sustainable business model. In the end - just like flowing water - people will find the easiest route to the destination they require. It is up to the entertainment companies to ensure that the route Internet users take to media is via their door, and not to that of the nearest torrent site.

When that will be is anyone’s guess. My guess is no time soon.

Post from: TorrentFreak

The committee concluded that downloading should be criminalized once the entertainment industry has come up with sufficient legal alternatives. Worryingly, the report also included some factual errors about Mininova that could potentially hurt the BitTorrent site in its ongoing court case against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

Among other things, the parliamentarians wrote that in common with The Pirate Bay, Mininova doesn’t allow copyright holders to remove torrents from the site upon request. In fact, Mininova has a full notice and take down system. In response to these and other statements, Mininova demanded a public rectification from the Dutch parliament.

“We demand that the spreading of false information related to Mininova will be stopped. In addition, we demand that the working group removes the name Mininova from the report and places a rectification on the website of the Dutch parliament and in several national newspapers,” Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer said.

“We take this very seriously,” Erik Dubbelboer said. “If these demands are not met, we’ll consider to take legal steps,” he added, in order to emphasize that their demands should not be taken lightly.

Legal threats or not, the committee announced today that it does not intend to rectify their earlier statements, even though they admit to having made a mistake.

The committee of the Dutch Parliament has, however, changed the original report based on (some of) Mininova’s complaints. Initially it stated that the torrent site had no “notice and takedown” policy to handle the complaints of copyright holders, but this has been corrected in an updated version.

In the updated version of the report the committee also added that Mininova’s “notice and takedown” system is not sufficient, even though it follows European law. Arda Gerkens, the head of the parliamentary committee said that Mininova’s copyright policy is not very efficient, since Mininova demands that rights holders send the full urls of the torrents they’d like to see removed.

This minor correction is of course far from what Mininova had demanded and they are not satisfied with the committee’s handling of their complaint. Mininova is currently discussing with their lawyers if and what legal action they are going to take against the Dutch Government.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Aside from punishing actual file-sharers, the bill allows the courts to take measures against people who have done no sharing, but are accused simply because they are the one paying the ISP bill. If the court decides that an account holder is guilty of “negligence” - by somehow allowing others to file-share on their connection - it is within a judge’s power to issue a fine up to 1,500 euros along with a 4 week disconnection.

Now, according to Le Monde, some French hackers have come together to throw confusion into the mix, so that punishing these individuals is not a straightforward or guaranteed accurate procedure.

A hacker known only as ‘N’ says he has developed some software known as ‘Hadopi Router’, a term first penned by bloggers who devised the concept. ‘N’, who is said to have previously worked manufacturing routers, says he and a few friends wrote ‘Hadopi Router’ in order to prove that the evidence gathered by the Hadopi agency is unreliable.

“It locates Wi-Fi networks in the neighborhood, then begins to crack all their passwords,” says ‘N’. “Once we have the keys, we can create a virtual access point,” which in basic terms means using the Internet connection without the account holder’s knowledge.

‘N’ says that if an ‘owned’ router has its password changed, the system automatically switches to another Wi-Fi signal in the neighborhood and starts to attack the new password.

Additionally, ‘N’ claims that with Hadopi Router it is possible to monitor activity on the cracked networks but one of his accomplices called ‘V’ says they have no bad intentions.

“We just want to release our software and allow everyone to understand that the technical data used by the Hadopi agency to accuse people will not be reliable. Because of us, the judges will not be able to say that they weren’t aware of that.”

‘N’ says he is already imagining a more ambitious strategy to distribute many dozens of modified routers to a community in order to create a “mini-network”, superimposed over existing ones.

Of course, many wireless routers already have either a complete lack of security or weak WEP encryption enabled, making them sitting ducks for drive-by infringements or less casual ones conducted by neighbors within range.

An IP address does not necessarily identify an individual, in fact one could argue that in many instances these days it doesn’t even identify a computer but merely a gateway to a sub network, behind which could be any number of individuals not linked in any way to a bill payer.

Time will tell how French judges will rule in these “negligence” cases, especially when they have just 5 minutes to do so.

Post from: TorrentFreak

BDE doesn’t want to limit their service to music downloads though, and they recently introduced a groundbreaking new feature.

According to the press release issued yesterday they are about to “shake up the online media industry.” Their masterplan? They will implement new technology that will allow their users to share photos, videos and even documents with each other.

This announcement is indeed quite a shocker. However, the press release has more surprises in it, such as the following product endorsement (or warning) by a ‘web hacker’ named Jonathan James.

“Jonathan James, Web Hacker spoke of the endless possibilities the software provides to the Kazaa community. “They are going to come at you like they came at ‘tereastarr,’” the press release reads.

First of all, it is kind of strange to include an endorsement from a seemingly unknown hacker in a press release. This aside, the statement doesn’t make much sense at all to those who have never heard of ‘tereastarr,’ and even less sense to those who do.

As P2P blog points out, ‘tereastarr’ was the Kazaa username of Jammie Thomas who was slapped with a $1.92 million verdict in her case against the RIAA last month. Thomas had been found guilty of sharing 24 songs using Kazaa, and was fined $80,000 per track.

Not really the sort of person you want to refer to in a press-release to ‘promote’ a product, unless you want to imply that the people who use your legal service might face such fines as well. The strangeness doesn’t stop there though.

The quote attributed to Jonathan James is in fact a quote from Jammie Thomas’ lawyer Joe Sibley who used the one-liner in her trial.

To make things even more disturbing, the web hacker Jonathan James most likely refers to Jonathan Joseph James, a convicted NASA hacker who ended his own life last year at the age of 24. Again, not an ideal person to quote and a particularly unhelpful image to paint when promoting a product.

The sentence has now been removed from the original press release indicating that Kazaa indeed regrets publishing this fabricated and insulting quote. Nevertheless, it can still be found online on several sites that copied the original release.

So what happened here? Did Kazaa think it was funny to put the names of Thomas and James in its press release? Have they lost their minds completely? We sincerely hope that this wasn’t intentional and that they’ve been pranked by some wannabe PR-agency.

Post from: TorrentFreak

They had taken a similar stance to that of the European Parliament, deeming the proposed “3 strikes” regime for dealing with illicit file-sharers unconstitutional. They said that individuals must have a fair trial and striking an individual from the Internet is something only a judge can do after a hearing.

So now in modified form the bill is back. Moving the decision to disconnect file-sharers away from the Hadopi agency to the courts, the new version of the law addresses the objections of the Constitutional Council by presenting “3 strikes” cases to a judge, who will fast-track decisions in around 5 minutes per case.

The new structure is as follows. When an individual is warned about an infringement for a third time, the Hadopi agency will report the offender to a judge. After a hearing the judge will have the power to cut the individual off from the Internet, issue a fine of up to 300,000 euros, or even hand out a 2 year jail sentence.

ISP account holders who find themselves accused over the infringements of a 3rd party could be found guilty of “negligence”, risking a maximum 1,500 euro fine and a 4 week disconnection.

The revamped bill was adopted today by the French Senate and in the next few weeks will head to the National Assembly for its adoption.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Wesley - the main character in the book - is just an average kid but this quickly changes when danger is afoot. Wesley has a talking ‘tracker watch’ that is able to tap into the power of TorrentSphere when needed, and transform him into TorrentBoy.

In the new TorrentBoy book called “Pirates Attack!” TorrentBoy and his crazy speech impeded teddy bear Crash must defend the world against all evil and save the day once again.

According to MCM, the first TorrentBoy book has been a great success, mostly thanks to the kind reception within the torrent community. “Since it appeared on TorrentFreak, it’s been downloaded tens of thousands of times, making it one of my most successful titles to date,” he told us.

“I’d also like to mention that, contrary to popular opinion, torrent fans aren’t at all averse to donating actual money to the things they enjoy. They just want to be treated with respect,” MCM adds.

The first chapter of the second book is written by Chris Keyes, who hooked up with MCM through an earlier TorrentFreak article. Together, they will release a new chapter of the latest book every week.

“We’re serializing the story, and I can guarantee it’s worth a read, for kids and adults alike,” MCM told TorrentFreak. “I didn’t intend this to be a series explicitly about BitTorrent, but if that’s where the community wants to bring it, I’m ready to roll,” MCM said.

The latest TorrentBoy chapter “Pirates Attack!” was released yesterday and a new chapter will be published every Tuesday for another 16 weeks, totally free.

Post from: TorrentFreak