When three years of discussions yielded no results, in November 2008 Hollywood movie studios under the banner of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) sued local ISP iiNet. AFACT hoped that through legal action all ISPs could be held responsible for copyright infringements carried out by their customers.

In April 2012 the case came to a close, Hollywood lost, and it was back to the drawing board alongside fresh hopes for peaceful settlement.

Ever since, intermittent negotiations have continued between the ISPs and rightsholders, in the hope that the former would agree to implement some kind of graduated response/warning system on behalf of the latter in order to positively influence the behavior of pirating customers.

Last December, iiNet withdrew from the talks, declaring they’d had enough of dealing with rightsholders who refuse to make official content available at a reasonable price.

And now, six months later, with no further talks having taken place since, it seems the whole initiative has ground to a halt. David Epstein, chief of ISP Optus, told The Australian that his company could now back iiNet’s stance.

“We support a co-operative resolution to the issue but this requires general consensus among players and like treatment of any participant in a trial. We have not yet seen a model that enables this,” he said.

Despite voices to the contrary, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) said that the talks hadn’t been abandoned and hope remains that an agreement can be reached. After suing iiNet and failing, they have few options left.

Source: Internet Piracy Warning Notice Talks Grind to a Halt

In 2009, French anti-piracy group ALPA launched an investigation into Infernio Advitam, a 10,000 member file-sharing focused forum.

ALPA later filed a complaint with the police after discovering the site was making available more than 1,500 movies without permission.

According to a Numerama report, that case has now reached its conclusion with the Criminal Court of Caen handing down a six month jail sentence to the site’s operator.

In addition the admin will have to pay 8,000 euros in fines but damages, likely to be substantial, are yet to be agreed.

ALPA say the admin made around 25,000 euros from donations but the plaintiffs in the case – Fox, Columbia, Disney, Paramount, Universal Studios and Tristar – will expect much more.

Source: File-Sharing Forum Admin Jailed For Six Months

BitTorrent Sync is a new tool that allows users to securely sync folders across multiple devices using the BitTorrent protocol. It’s a Dropbox-like tool but without cloud storage, and with no limit on file-sizes it’s proving a hit.

“To date, more than a petabyte of anonymous data has been synced between BitTorrent Sync users. A petabyte!” BitTorrent Inc just announced.

“To put that into context, the Internet Archive, one of the world wide web’s largest repositories of media, houses 10 petabytes of data. Sync is massive. And it’s growing. Over 70 terabytes of anonymous data are synced daily.”

For those users wondering how BitTorrent Inc knows how much is being shared, the company offers the following reassurances:

“Sync was built for secure sharing. While we have general statistics about the app, we don’t have any access to private information.

“The client reports back anonymous usage statistics in the same way our other clients do. Sync uses this call to check if there’s a new build available. This call also contains some anonymous statistics that allow us to understand how Sync performs, and how it’s being used; data transferred directly, through relay, size of folders, and number of files synced.

“This is the only information we collect, and we left it open intentionally – so that people could see the data we’re collecting. That way, it can be easily verified that we don’t have access to any private information,” the company concludes.

Now, if only there was an iOS version in the works…..

Source: BitTorrent Sync Clocks Up a Petabyte of Data Transfers in Two Weeks

The 33-year old Jens R operated the BitTorrent site between 2005 and 2008, and was found guilt of copyright infringement related charges.

According to the court the site was highly profit driven, with the owner earning tens of thousands of euros per month.

The sentence has yet to be made final, but Jens R was taken into custody after the court hearing because he is believed to be a flight risk.

Torrent.to, meanwhile, is still up and running.

Source: Former Torrent.to Owner Jailed For 46 Months

The creators of the “Keyboard Cat” and “Nyan Cat” memes have files a lawsuit in a federal court in California, claiming damages for the unauthorized use of their creations.

In the suit the plaintiffs mention that Warner Bros. has a history of protecting their own WB logo meme, and now the tables have turned.

“The “WB” logo also is a meme, even though it is only two letters inside 25 the outline of a shield. Of course, WB employs an army of lawyers who use trademark and copyright law to zealously protect its intellectual property, including its logo,” they write in the complaint.

“Yet, for the past three years, WB, along with game developer 5th, have knowingly and intentionally infringed plaintiffs’ copyrights and trademarks by using “Nyan Cat” and Patso’s image in WB’s top selling “Scribblenauts” games,” they add.

The meme creators demand that Warner Bros. and 5th no longer use their trademarks and request damages to compensate their losses.

Source: Warner Bros. Sued For “Stealing” Internet Memes

1Channel.ch is one of the most popular streaming portals on the Internet. The site is ranked the 293rd most-visited website according to Alexa with millions of pageviews every single day.

However, over the past 24/36 hours, things haven’t been going to plan.

The site usually operates from the Swiss-based 1Channel.ch domain but for the past day at least and at the time of writing it remains completely non-functional.

The site’s operator has given no detailed explanation for the outage in response to our request for comment, but did offer the following announcement.

“We are having some issues with the 1channel.ch domain, please use letmewatchthis.ch domain in the mean time,” the site said.

LetMeWatchThis was the site’s former name, a brand which still appears on the site today.

Source: 1Channel.ch Causes Panic With Mystery Domain Failure

Pretty much every month we find strange, unusual, incompetent or downright weird takedown requests online, but it’s very rare that we find notices issued against our own domain.

Nevertheless it does happen, and today is one such special occasion.

April 1st we ran a story titled ‘Game of Thrones Pirates Break BitTorrent Swarm Record’ in which we explained, unsurprisingly, that a torrent swarm record had been broken after the new series of Game of Thrones premiered.

Unfortunately, anti-piracy company Entura International, who work on behalf of the BBC, think that the article infringes on the BBC’s copyrights.

Without contacting TorrentFreak first, the UK outfit went straight to Google in an attempt to have one of our URLs deindexed because they claim it infringes copyrights on an episode of Doctor Who. You can see the takedown notice on ChillingEffects here.

Luckily Entura appear to have botched the URL (which looks like it came from Twitter), so thankfully Google didn’t take down the link.

However, as can be seen here on TorrentFreak’s Google Transparency listing, we also have other issues to deal with.

At the end of April, French anti-piracy company SCPP asked Google to deindex a total of four TorrentFreak pages but because the notice is still to be filed on ChillingEffects, we don’t yet know what the problem is. We suspect that SCPP also made a careless mistake, but time will tell.

Thanks to Google and ChillingEffects, we shouldn’t have to wait too long to find out.

Source: BBC Thinks TorrentFreak is a Doctor Who Game of Thrones Pirate

These sites allow people to bypass IPS blockades, but when the original site goes down the proxy goes with it.

TorrentMirrors aims to solve this problem. The creators released so-called hybrid proxies that also function as a fully working mirror in case the original torrent site becomes unavailable due to technical difficulties.

TorrentMirrors currently has mirrors for The Pirate Bay, Extratorrent, KAT and isoHunt.

“The torrentmirror family of sites are not just proxy sites, they are also caching mirrors,” TorrentMirrors explains on its site.

“This means that if the target site becomes completely unavailable, the proxy will remain accessible for all cached content.”

“This also reduces load on the sites themselves and pages should load quicker than a conventional proxy. The proxies also have DNS bypassing which allows the target site to remain browsable through the proxy even if target domain’s DNS is changed or down.”

TorrentMirrors told TorrentFreak that they insert their own ads into the mirrors to cover server costs.

Source: TorrentMirrors Keeps Torrent Sites Alive While They’re Down

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations is the driving force behind Operation in Our Sites, an initiative that has seen dozens of domain names seized by the U.S. Government since 2010.

While file-sharing related domains have been seized on a number of occasions, more recently the emphasis has switched to sites connected to the sale of physical counterfeit products.

Last Friday, HSI special agents moved to seize 10 domains said to be involved in the distribution of counterfeit cycling products.

“The seizure of these domain names is an important tool in HSI’s continuing efforts to protect the consumer from sub-par and dangerous goods,” said Brian M. Moskowitz, the special agent in charge of HSI Houston.

“HSI special agents are also committed to protecting the rights of businesses that play by the rules so that they can remain competitive and support our economy.”

In addition to the domain name seizures, HSI targeted the site’s PayPal accounts said to contain more than $90,000.

Source: Homeland Security Investigations Seize Domains and PayPal Accounts

Rupesh Jaiswal, 28 and Tinu Sharma, 25, are said to be members of a P2P release group known as Yamraj who were responsible for camming local and Hollywood movies and distributing them on and offline.

According to a spokesman from Indore police headquarters, authorities received a tip from a legal officer with the MPA who advised that movies were being cammed in Indore movie theaters and later distributed.

“Subsequently, the crime branch was pressed into action to crack the case. Acting on a specific tip off, the duo running the shoot and selling pirated movie racket, were arrested on Monday,” he said.

According to local media, the pair rented 1TB of cloud storage with European company OVH and granted access to contacts so they could download the latest movies.

Source: Movie Camming P2P Release Group Busted in India

In several countries World Intellectual Property Day is used by pro-copyright groups to educate the public that strong copyright protections are needed.

China took it one step further and the local authorities seized the opportunity to take out a large piracy hub.

Siluhd.com, a website dedicated to HD video, was shut down by local police and 9 employees including the company’s CEO were arrested.

On the same day another prominent Chinese video site went offline. Yyets.com, listed among the 250 most visited websites in China, has put up a message stating that it’s temporarily closed. Interestingly, the site still works through www.yyets.com.

In the United States the Government uses World Intellectual Property Day to celebrate last years successful counterfeiting crackdowns. In addition the authorities teamed up with the MPAA to launch a new anti-piracy PSA, coming soon to a theater near you.

Happy World Intellectual Property Day!

Source: Piracy Raids and Arrests Color “World IP Day”

A few hours after the switch TPB’s SSL certificate was revoked, showing an ominous red warning screen to those who browse the site over https.

“Secure Connection Failed. An error occurred during a connection to thepiratebay.is. Peer’s Certificate has been revoked.”

Some wondered whether this could be a new tactic by the entertainment industry to target the BitTorrent site, but reality is less exciting.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that it’s merely an administrative issue which should be resolved soon.

Source: Pirate Bay’s SSL Certificate is Revoked

According to a note posted on the site’s homepage DailyTvTorrents was kicked out by its hosting provider.

The owner says he’s currently too busy to find a new home.

“Sorry guys, our hosting provider kicked us out so we have to be offline for now. I’m very busy nowadays and I don’t have time to look for a new place.”

With 4944 shows, 46866 episodes and 163060 torrents the site was one of the largest TV-indexes.

Source: DailyTvTorrents Kicked Out By Hosting Provider

Because of this change several proxy sites, including the popular pirateproxy.net, are now unreachable or seemingly blocked by some Internet providers.

The same happened when The Pirate Bay switched to the Greenland based .GL domains earlier this month.

It is expected that all proxies will function normally again after the owners make some required changes in the proxy setup.

The main issue appears to be that some proxies use the .se domain instead of the 194.71.107.80 IP-address to proxy the site.

Source: Pirate Bay Proxies Go “Down” After Domain Change

The pair, snared under New Zealand’s so-called ‘Skynet’ law, accepted that their three young children had infringed copyright on tracks by the Black Keys and Owl City.

The ISP account holder had received two previous warnings about illegal file-sharing but triggering a third when the Owl City track Good Times was shared “by mistake.”

According to Stuff, the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (Rianz) requested a $1627 (US$1376) compensation.

However, the Copyright Tribunal ordered a penalty of just $317 (US$268) after refusing to award damages for subsequent infringements carried out by other BitTorrent users following the initial uploads.

The case is the sixth to go all the way to the Tribunal and the first in which sharing was blamed on children.

Source: Three Pirate Kids Land Parents With File-Sharing Bill

In mid-January, a year to the day since his creation Megaupload was destroyed by U.S. authorities, Kim Dotcom and friends launched Mega.co.nz.

This new file-hosting venture went off with a bang, gaining not only massive news coverage but also a fresh, growing and largely impressed userbase. A month after its launch Mega had more than three million members and is still growing today.

Just about two weeks after the Mega launch, a group of iOS hackers calling themselves the Evad3rs team released the Evasi0n jailbreak for iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPad Mini, iPod Touch) running iOS 6.0 and 6.1. In less than a week more than seven million people had used the tool and by mid March that had increased to a massive 18 million.

Now, around three months after the launch of both projects, it’s interesting to see how much they are relying on each other. Along with Box and RapidShare, Evad3rs chose Mega.co.nz to host the (completely legal) Evasi0n jailbreak files. It’s been a fruitful, albeit unofficial, partnership.

According to Alexa, Evasi0n.com is currently supplying 5.63% of Mega.co.nz’s web traffic. The only referrer to send more traffic is Google with 6.46%, two places ahead of Facebook sending 5.17%.

On the flipside Mega.co.nz also feeds Evasi0n.com. Of all Evasi0n.com users, 8.35% had visited Mega.co.nz directly before. Google is Evasi0n’s number one referrer with 15.77%.

Finally, while we’re on the subject of webstats, as pointed out by a user on Twitter today, in just a matter of months Mega.co.nz has grown from nothing to become the third most-visited .co.nz domain.

Quite an achievement.

Source: Apple Jailbreakers Love Kim Dotcom’s Mega

A recent modification of the national Constitution allows for citizens to make legislative proposals for the Parliament to vote on, providing it gets 50,000 supporters within 6 months.

One of the proposals that has submitted since calls for a fairer copyright law.

Termed ‘To Make Sense of the Copyright Act’, the proposal wants to reduce penalties for copyright infringement, increase fair use, and ease the ability for people to make copies of items they already own (for format shifting, or backups).

During the first three months little over 27,000 people have supported the initiative, and to get more people to sign up several websites are participating in a SOPA-style Internet blackout today.

“The idea is to follow the model that was in use in the US where companies take part in campaigning when there is an injustice. So the blackout day is a chance for Finnish companies to speak out against this far-reaching copyright law,” Joonas Pekkanen of the Open Ministry said in a comment.

Among the participating websites are Afterdawn, FinDance and ja Ylilauta and many others. Finnish citizens can support the proposal here.

Source: Finnish Websites Go Dark to Support a Fair Copyright Law

Last week we reported on some unusual developments at the CHDBits BitTorrent tracker. The site, for reasons best explained by them, decided to implement some of the most crazy members rules we’ve ever seen. You can read about them here.

While many hoped the site would have a change of heart and soften its stance a little, it seems that they have done entirely the opposite.

In what they are describing as their “year end assessment”, members are now required to jump through a series of hoops starting May 1 and running until June 30, 2013.

The requirements (pasted below) seem to fly in the face of the freedoms supposedly offered by file-sharing. Why people want to exercise this much control is beyond comprehension.

If this is the future of torrents, the mass exodus to iTunes et al is just around the corner.

(Here are the ‘assessment’ rules, copied from the site.)

————————————————————————————————–

Year end assessment is just around the corner. It will be carried out from 1st of May till 30st of June, 2013.

1) Target: members between “Peasant” and “Crazy User” class (both inclusive) whom registered before 1/1/2013.

2) Period: from 1/5/2013 12am till 30/6/2013 11:59pm (61 days).

3) Requirement: Users should increase the following figures accordingly during this period:

i) increase upload amount by 45GB
ii) increase download amount by 45GB (excluding promotional/free/discount torrent)
iii) increase bonus point by 3000 point.

* You should meet and maintain these three criteria till the end of assessment period.

4) Members not affected by this assessment:

i) donators
ii) “insane user” class and above
iii) members with 15TB upload (or more) OR 600k bonus (or more) before the assessment begins

5) To prevent members from failing the test due to excessive bonus point spent during the assessment period, the bonus point exchange system will be unavailable from 1st of May 12am till 15th of June 11:59pm. Only “10GB upload” (and below) button is available for use from 16th onwards till the end of assessment. The exchange system will resume its normal operation from 1st of July onwards.

6) You are wholly responsible for your own action and any consequences thereof.

B) Result of the assessment will be announced on 1st of July, 2013. Please refer to “announcement” board.

c) remarks:

1) You’re required to go thru and fulfill the assessment’s requirement if there’s a “progress indicator” on the main page of the site.

2) Parked account is NOT exempted from the assessment. You’re required to unpark and join the assessment if your user level / stat meets the criteria.

3) again, rule “a) 4) iii)” above refers to net increment during the assessment period.

example： On the 1st of May 2013, 12am, your amount of upload =600G，download=400G and bonus point=20000。 By 1st of July 2013 12am, you upload should be ≥645G，download ≥445G and bonus ≥23000。

d) CHDBits admin team reserves the right of final interpretation of all the rules of this assessment.

Source: BitTorrent Tracker Has Yet Another Go at Scaring Away Members

Today, the band released the first single “God Is Dead?” which was also posted on the official Black Sabbath YouTube channel.

This modern technology gives fans to check out the song before buying it. At least, that was the idea.

The video is currently featured prominently on YouTube, but those who try to play it will see that Universal Music Group pulled it down.

Perhaps the record wasn’t too happy with the single after all? Or is it yet another example of a copyright holder shooting itself in the foot with a bogus takedown request?

Probably the latter.

Source: Universal Music Takes Down Black Sabbath’s Official YouTube Video

While many groups and individuals contributed to the eventual downfall of ACS:Law and its infamous owner Andrew Crossley, it was Judge Colin Birss QC who had the pleasure of seeing the outfit take its dying breaths in a final series of embarrassing court hearings.

In 2011, as Crossley was collecting the Internet Services Providers’ Association’s award for Villain of the Year, Judge Birss was nominated as Hero of the Year for his stand against ACS:Law. He didn’t win, but today he has an even greater accolade.

“The Queen has been pleased to approve the appointment of His Honour Judge Colin Ian Birss, Q.C., to be a Justice of the High Court with effect from 13 May 2013 on the elevation of Mr. Justice Briggs to the Court of Appeal,” reports the Ministry of Justice.

Congratulations Judge Birss, well deserved.

Source: Judge Who Ended UK Anti-Piracy Lawyer’s Scheme Appointed to High Court

“These box office receipt numbers grew because admissions jumped by 6%,” Dodd explained.

“Yes, 2012 was a truly great year at the movies! And I believe the summer blockbusters being previewed this week will contribute to a highly successful 2013.”

Then, in a recurring theme underlining the movie industry’s recent overtures to the tech sector, Dodd said that Hollywood and and Silicon Valley have a lot more in common than most people realize.

“Not only do we work closely with tech companies to create and promote our films; we are ourselves tech companies,” Dodd said. “We celebrate innovation through the world’s most cutting-edge content, and we embrace technology as critical to the success of the creators in our community.”

But despite the success of 2012 and the beauty of technology, Dodd went on to paint a darker and more cautious picture than last year’s optimistic results appear to support.

“Of course, technology can be abused especially by cybercriminals,” he said.

“Stopping content theft must be a top priority to all of us. Especially when you consider that in some instances blockbuster films have been downloaded illegally hundreds of thousands of times, harming not only the producers, but you, the exhibitors as well,” Dodd cautioned.

“The good news is that we are making progress, building inroads with tech companies, and working closely with ISPs, ad bureaus, payment processors and Internet hosting providers. And thanks to NATO and your vigilance, the incidence of illegal camcording in theaters is down 50% since 2007.”

Then, in an attack on those who associate free access to online content with right to free speech, Dodd offered the following.

“Too many people still coat the pill of content theft in chocolate. Free speech, they say, gives them the right to consume and enjoy our content for free, that creative artists and ordinary working people spent years developing, producing and exhibiting.

“This fallacy must be aggressively challenged and countered by everyone in our industry. If we allow for two centuries of copyright law and respect for intellectual property to be undermined and unenforced, the consequences on innovation in this country — not just for Hollywood, film makers, studios and cinemas, but for our entire economy, will be devastating,” he warned.

“We, and you, must underscore the message that business, government, and ordinary citizens must work together to ensure that the Internet works for everyone, and that intellectual property is respected and protected.”

Source: MPAA Chief: Aggressively Challenge Notion That Free Speech = Free Content

Today Will.i.am appears to be in trouble.

A few hours ago he released his track “Let’s go” on YouTube. A track that sounds an awful lot like Arty and Mat Zo’s ‘Rebound’.

On Twitter Arty says that the rights were never cleared and that the sample was taken from the master file.

Record label Anjunabeats says it’s looking into the matter, while the other end of the dispute remains silent for now.

It looks like this is a lawsuit waiting to happen, which will probably be settled in a few days for a bag of cash.

For those who are interested in the intriguing world of sampling and remixing, “RiP: A remix manifesto” is a must-see.

Source: Will.i.am Accused of Stealing Arty and Mat Zo’s ‘Rebound’