Slashdot Mirror

concertina226 writes with sad news for Swedish pirates. Quoting the article: "The Swedish Supreme Court will not hear an appeal from the founders of The Pirate Bay against prison sentences and fines imposed by the Swedish Court of Appeals, the court said on Wednesday. Over a year ago, the Court of Appeals sentenced Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundström to 10 months, eight months, and four months of jail time, respectively. The court also said they must collectively pay a 46 million kronor (£4.3 million) fine." The Pirate Bay has issued a response: "With this said, we hear news from our old admins that they have received a verdict in Sweden. Our 3 friends and blood brothers have been sentenced to prison. This might sound worse than it is. Since no one of them no longer lives in Sweden, they won't go to jail. They are as free today as they were yesterday."
Update: 02/01 15:15 GMT by U L :Reader think_nix helpfully copied the Pirate Bay response in a comment for those who cannot access the site.

judgecorp writes "Two Dutch ISPs have complied with a demand to block the Pirate Bay, but KPN and T-Mobile are refusing to block the site." Torrent Freak has a bit more info. T-Mobile at least seems to imply they would respond to a court order, and are merely refusing to take down sites at the request of a private entity.

New submitter advid.net writes "According to the Associated Press, user data from the recently-closed file-hosting site Megaupload could be destroyed as soon as Thursday. Apparently Megaupload paid another company to actually store the data. 'But Megaupload attorney Ira Rothken said Sunday that the government has frozen its money. A letter filed in the case Friday by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said storage companies Carpathia Hosting Inc. and Cogent Communications Group Inc. may begin deleting data Thursday. ... The letter said the government copied some data from the servers but did not physically take them. It said that now that it has executed its search warrants, it has no right to access the data. The servers are controlled by Carpathia and Cogent and issues about the future of the data must be resolved with them, prosecutors said." There's also been talk of a lawsuit against the FBI over users' lost files.

The copyright battles going on right now are not all about SOPA, PIPA, or even the wider-reaching ACTA: suraj.sun snips thus from TorrentFreak: "At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites. ... If the copyright industry had their way, Google and other search engines would no longer link to sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. In a detailed proposal handed out during a meeting with Google, Yahoo and Bing, various copyright holders made their demands clear. The document, which describes a government-overlooked 'Voluntary Code of Practice' for search engines, was not intended for public consumption but the Open Rights Group obtained it through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request."

New submitter Elenor writes with this story (excerpted) from TorrentFreak, another nugget gleaned from the cables made public by WikiLeaks: "The Canberra Wikileaks cables have revealed that the U.S. Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers. Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate." The cable describes no overt action on the part of the American embassy, but the wording is telling: "Mike Ellis, the Singapore-based President for Asia Pacific of the Motion Picture Association ... said MPAA did not see any role for Embassy at this time, but wanted to keep us informed."

New submitter libertyernie writes "Although FileSonic has disabled sharing and Uploaded.to has blocked access to the U.S., the CEO of Texas-based MediaFire is not concerned about government action against his company. 'We don't have a business built on copyright infringement,' says Derek Labian. 'Like many other cloud-based sharing services like Box.net and Dropbox, we're a legitimate business targeting professionals.'"

bs0d3 writes "Not so long ago, a legal video was taken down by repetitive DMCA requests to YouTube. In response, Megaupload filed a lawsuit against Universal Music. This past week, Megaupload was raided by U.S. authorities and forced offline, which is costing Megaupload millions of dollars in damage. Today; while employees are in U.S. custody, Megaupload has mysteriously dropped their lawsuit against Universal Music."

MrSeb writes "Megaupload's shutdown poses an interesting question: What happens to all the files that were stored on the servers? XDA-Developers, for example, has more than 200,000 links to Megaupload — and this morning, they're all broken, with very little hope of them returning. What happens if a similar service, like Dropbox, gets shut down — either through bankruptcy, or federal take-down? Will you be given a chance to download your files, or helped to migrate them to another similar service? What about data stored on enterprise services like Azure or AWS — are they more safe?" And if you're interested, the full indictment against Megaupload is now available.

An anonymous reader tips news that The Pirate Bay is making a move away from .torrent files in favor of 'magnet links.' On Thursday the site made magnet links the default, and TorrentFreak reports that they'll stop serving .torrent files altogether in about a month. "The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a 'magnet site' is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site. Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future."

New submitter swinferno writes "After recent successes in Finland, Italy and Belgium, the Dutch Copyright protection organization BREIN has obtained a verdict that forces two major ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay domains and gives them the right to submit future domains/IP addresses to be blocked in the future without court order."

Apotekaren writes "The Finnish ISP Elisa has been forced to block several domains leading to the infamous torrent-tracker site The Pirate Bay following a court case initiated by IFPI Finland... The Helsinki District Court ruled in favor of IFPI Finland in October, but the ISP resisted implementing the block until today because of the terms of the block not being specific enough. The ISP is calling the block 'temporary' and is appealing the court decision." Analysis from Torrent Freak shows that the block is probably easily circumvented.

SharkLaser writes "In a leaked letter sent to Spain's outgoing President, the US ambassador warned that if Spain didn't pass SOPA-like file-sharing site blocking law, Spain would risk being put into United States trade blocklist. United States government interference in Spain's intellectual property laws have been suspected for a long time, and now the recent leaks of diplomatic cables confirm this. Apart from the cables leaked earlier, now another cable dated December 12th says U.S. expresses 'deep concern' over the failure to implement SOPA-style censorship law in the country. 'The government has unfortunately failed to finish the job for political reasons, to the detriment of the reputation and economy of Spain,' read the letter. Racing against the clock in the final days of the government, Solomont had one last push. 'I encourage the Government of Spain to implement the Sinde Law immediately to safeguard the reputation of Spain as an innovative country that does what it says it will, and as a country that breeds confidence,' he wrote."

bs0d3 writes "Kopimism is now an official religion in Sweden. Kopimi beliefs originated with the Swedish group called Piratbyran who believed that everything should be shared freely online without restrictions from copyright. Leader Isak Gerson, has recently had some disagreements with the Swedish Pirate Party where many people disagree with all religions." Here's the official website for the "Missionary Church of Kopimism."

Sir Mal Fet writes "In a very polemic move by the Spanish parliament, the infamous 'Sinde' law, already discussed here, was implemented on December 31st. Albeit modified from their original version, the law will allow the Spanish government to request ISPs to summarily close a website due to copyright infringement (English translation). If the ISP refuses, then it's passed to court where a judge can order the website closed. It seems it's one good, one bad over there. The law is in public consult until March, and No Les Votes, a Spanish organization that opposes the law, has already started a campaign to boycott it (English translation)."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Atlantic reports that one developer who doesn't have much faith in Congress making the right decision on anti-piracy legislation has already built a workaround for the impending censorship measures being considered, and called it DeSOPA. Since SOPA would block specific domain names (e.g. www.thepiratebay.com) of allegedly infringing sites, T Rizk's Firefox add-on allows you to revert to the bare internet protocol (IP) address (e.g. 194.71.107.15) which takes you to the same place. 'It could be that a few members of Congress are just not tech savvy and don't understand that it is technically not going to work, at all,' says T Rizk. 'So here's some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote SOPA down.' Another group called 'MAFIAAFire' decided to respond when Homeland Security's ICE unit started seizing domain names, by coding a browser add-on to redirect the affected websites to their new domains. More than 200,000 people have already installed the add-on. ICE wasn't happy, and asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Atlantic reports that one developer who doesn't have much faith in Congress making the right decision on anti-piracy legislation has already built a workaround for the impending censorship measures being considered, and called it DeSOPA. Since SOPA would block specific domain names (e.g. www.thepiratebay.com) of allegedly infringing sites, T Rizk's Firefox add-on allows you to revert to the bare internet protocol (IP) address (e.g. 194.71.107.15) which takes you to the same place. 'It could be that a few members of Congress are just not tech savvy and don't understand that it is technically not going to work, at all,' says T Rizk. 'So here's some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote SOPA down.' Another group called 'MAFIAAFire' decided to respond when Homeland Security's ICE unit started seizing domain names, by coding a browser add-on to redirect the affected websites to their new domains. More than 200,000 people have already installed the add-on. ICE wasn't happy, and asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet."

2phar writes "The Irish Government is 'to publish an order early in the new year to allow music publishers, film producers and other parties to go to court to prevent ISPs from allowing their customers access to "pirate" websites.' The government has 'written to music publisher EMI Ireland confirming the order will be published and incorporated into existing legislation in January ... EMI Ireland recently warned the Government that it would take legal action against the State if the Government did not address the problem.'" This is a response to a ruling that Eircom's current "three strikes" rules were illegal due to privacy issues.

New submitter Bad_Feeling sends in a followup to the story we discussed on Monday about a new site that scanned a few popular torrent trackers and linked torrents to IP addresses. The folks at TorrentFreak decided to check IP addresses belonging to major companies in the entertainment industry and published lists of pirated files from several, including Fox, Sony, and NBC Universal. Of course, they used the information to make a slightly different point than the industry usually does: "By highlighting the above our intention is not to get anyone into trouble, and for that reason we masked out the end of the IP addresses to avoid a witch hunt. An IP address is not a person, IP addresses can be shared among many people, and anyone can be behind a keyboard at any given time."

New submitter TheSHAD0W writes "Several well-known artists, including P. Diddy, Will.I.Am, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West produced a song in support of the site Megaupload, recently targeted by law enforcement as a 'rogue site.' The music video was gaining popularity — until YouTube received a takedown notice from Universal Media Group, claiming it violated their copyrights."

New submitter TheSHAD0W writes "Several well-known artists, including P. Diddy, Will.I.Am, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West produced a song in support of the site Megaupload, recently targeted by law enforcement as a 'rogue site.' The music video was gaining popularity — until YouTube received a takedown notice from Universal Media Group, claiming it violated their copyrights."

New submitter TheSHAD0W writes "Several well-known artists, including P. Diddy, Will.I.Am, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West produced a song in support of the site Megaupload, recently targeted by law enforcement as a 'rogue site.' The music video was gaining popularity — until YouTube received a takedown notice from Universal Media Group, claiming it violated their copyrights."

First time accepted submitter Cmdrm writes with an article about Kaspersky Lab quitting the BSA over their (now lukewarm) support of SOPA. From the press release: "Kaspersky Lab would like to clarify that the company did not participate in the elaboration or discussion of the SOPA initiative and does not support it. Moreover, the company believes that the SOPA initiative might actually be counter-productive for the public interest, and decided to discontinue its membership in the BSA as of January 1, 2012.'"

SharkLaser writes "Homeland Security's ICE unit has just started another phase of Operation In Our Sites. Last week the seized sites were selling counterfeit goods, but this time the list consists solely of movie download sites. ICE has now seized the domains of 11 Korean movie download portals. This is first time Operation In Our Sites has been expanded to include sites targeting non-U.S. nationals and non-English sites. ICE has since added a message in Korean to the seized sites. Interestingly, while the sites were in Korean, the domain names are all connected to a Seattle-based company World Multimedia Group, Inc."

wasimkadak writes "One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet, and — since last year — the government has been wondering what to do about it. This week their response was published, and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products."

An anonymous reader writes "The DoJ and ICE have once again taken up the banner of anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting by seizing over 130 domains allegedly involved in those activities. TorrentFreak points out that this newest digital raid happened just before 'Cyber Monday,' a time when consumers are encouraged to do a bunch of online shopping. From the article: 'Compared to previous seizure rounds, there are also some notable differences to report. This time the action appears to be limited to sites that directly charge visitors for their services. Most of the domains are linked to the selling of counterfeit clothing (e.g. 17nflshop.com), and at least one (autocd.com) sold pirated auto software. Last year several sites were taken down because they allowed their users to access free music and movie downloads, and these were followed by several streaming services a few months later. No similar sites have been reported in the current round.'"

New submitter Azmodan sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "Ubisoft is known for laying the blame for many problems on the unauthorized downloading of its games. Stanislas Mettra, creative director of the upcoming game I Am Alive, confirms this once again by saying that the decision not to release a PC version is a direct result of widespread game piracy. However, those who look beyond the propaganda will see that there appears to be more to the story than that." Another Ubisoft employee made similar comments about upcoming Ghost Recon games. Regarding Ghost Recon Online being free-to-play: "We are giving away most of the content for free because there’s no barrier to entry. To the users that are traditionally playing the game by getting it through Pirate Bay, we said, 'Okay, go ahead guys. This is what you’re asking for. We’ve listened to you – we’re giving you this experience. It’s easy to download, there’s no DRM that will pollute your experience.'" Regarding Future Soldier having no PC version: "When we started Ghost Recon Online we were thinking about Ghost Recon: Future Solider; having something ported in the classical way without any deep development, because we know that 95% of our consumers will pirate the game. So we said okay, we have to change our mind."

First time accepted submitter genjix writes "In a few weeks Amelia Andersdotter will be the second Pirate Party member to take a seat at the European Parliament in Brussels. The 24-year-old Swede was voted in more than two years ago, but due to bureaucratic quibbles her official appointment was delayed. TorrentFreak catches up with the soon-to-be youngest MEP to hear about her plans and expectations."

TheNextCorner writes "Remember how the Stop Online Piracy Act would make streaming of copyrighted material a felony? Many of these lawmakers actually stream copyrighted videos on their websites." However, that's not the whole story. according to a followup at Ars Technica to the tweeted claims about streaming and SOPA. From which: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation tweeted the post, and it was re-tweeted more than 100 times. So are the sponsors of SOPA hypocrites? We're not fans of SOPA, so we'd love to have this story check out. But we're also a news site, so we contacted James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at New York Law School, (and judging from his tweets, not a SOPA supporter) to get his expert opinion."

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "The biggest misperception about [the Stop Online Piracy Act] is that it is somehow unprecedented or extraordinary. It is not. SOPA represents just the latest example of copyright law defined and controlled not by the government but by private entities. Copyright owners will deploy SOPA in the same way they have behaved in the past: to extend out their rights. They will disrupt sites that do not infringe a copyright, interfere with fair uses of copyrighted works, and take other steps that evade the limits that the Copyright Act sets on a copyright owner's actual rights."

itwbennett writes "In a court case between Hotfile.com and Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers admitted they sent takedown orders for thousands of files they didn't own or control. Using an automated takedown tool provided by Hotfile, Warner Brothers used automated software crawlers based on keywords to generate legal takedown orders. This is akin to not holding the Post Office liable for what people mail, or the phone companies liable for what people say. But the flip side is that hosters must remove files when receiving a legal takedown notice from the copyright holder — even when the copyright holders themselves don't know what material they actually own."

esocid writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "Despite having booked and paid for their booth at Gamex, Sweden's largest gaming exhibition, the Pirate Party have been excluded from the action this week. The party, who say they were nagged for 2 to 3 months to book for the event, were this week informed they were too controversial and no longer welcome. ... [Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg] says that after the sales people from the exhibition pursued the party for months to participate, they decided to book and pay for a booth. ... 'I thought it was a bit strange, but in the afternoon, the pieces fell into place when the fair manager, Bear Wengse, phoned me and kindly, but firmly, announced that the Pirate Party was no longer welcome at the fair.' Wengse informed Troberg that the exhibition is a meeting place and not a venue for political conflict and the party's presence could cause problems, particularly since some of their work "could be perceived as criminal."'"

First time accepted submitter jonathan1979 writes "Dutch anti-piracy authority BREIN has caused the largest European usenet provider, News-Service.com, to immediately terminate its services as they felt they could not live up to the court order served earlier."

First time accepted submitter jonathan1979 writes "Dutch anti-piracy authority BREIN has caused the largest European usenet provider, News-Service.com, to immediately terminate its services as they felt they could not live up to the court order served earlier."

Mightee sends in this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized today after he failed to appear at the Court of Appeal. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, did not appear at the appeal trial last year because he was hospitalized in Cambodia and later went missing. The Court of Appeal has now decided to finalize the initial verdict of one year jail time and a fine of $1.1 million."

tlhIngan writes "Miramax CEO Mike Lang has admitted to what we all suspected. The biggest worry is a distribution monopoly, not piracy. They saw what happened to the music industry with iTunes, and vowed to not lose control and be at the mercy of Apple or whoever becomes the dominant distributor. From the article: 'Lang, whose company today debuts the Blu-Ray version of the cult classic Pulp Fiction, emphasized that people don’t necessarily want to pirate, as long as they get what they want. “Innovate or die,” should be the motive of entertainment industry companies, where it’s key to listen to customers.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Torrent Freak has an interesting interview with a former private investigator who was hired to track people who pirated software and movies. He relates some of the tactics used to make evidence more appealing to police, the media and lawmakers. He said, 'We discussed the formula for extrapolating the potential street value earnings of "laboratories" and we were instructed to count all blank discs in our seizure figures as if they were potential product. Mr. Gane also explained that the increased loss approximation figures were derived from all forms of impacts on decreasing cinema patronage right through to the farmer who grows the corn for popping.' Regarding the head of AFACT, the article notes, 'Gane understood that the media was an essential tool towards AFACT's goal of getting tougher copyright legislation in place. And for this purpose, it was a good idea to bend the truth a bit.'"

dutchwhizzman writes "Amsterdam-based Usenet wholesale provider News Service Europe has been mandated by a court to remove all copyright-infringing content on their servers, or face severe financial penalties. Dutch copyright organization BREIN has won a court case making the Usenet provider responsible for the content posted on platforms other than their own. Could this be the end of Usenet as we know it, or will an appeal be won by NSE? Why didn't the judge make the provider that allowed the posts responsible? Why didn't the judge honor the 'cancel message' procedure that technically exists in the NNTP protocol?"

dartttt writes "Indie game company tinyBuild Games, who released a platformer called No Time To Explain recently, uploaded their own game to the Pirate Bay. However, there's a key difference between the game they uploaded and the version you can purchase: the game characters wear pirate hats, and everything else has a pirate theme. One of the company's founders, Alex Nichiporchik, said, '[S]ome people are going to torrent it either way, we might as well make something funny out of it. ... You can’t really stop piracy, all you can do is make it work for you and/or provide something that people actually want to pay for. For us this is humor, we like making people laugh.'"

schwit1 writes with a piece in Torrent Freak about ongoing litigation between Hotfile and a few movie studios. From the article: "Hotfile has sued Warner Bros. for fraud and abuse. Hotfile accuses the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don't hold the copyrights to, including open source software. Among other things, Hotfile is looking for damages to compensate the company for the losses they suffered." Near the end of the article it is mentioned that files taken down by the tool were replaced with links to legally procure similar works from Warner Bros.

ge7 writes "A recently leaked confidential diplomatic cable reveals Russia's growing interest in shutting down copyright infringing websites. 'Russia's Deputy Minister of Economic Development said that not only do U.S. sites continue to offer pirated Russian movies, but that YouTube and Google should be shut down for not respecting local laws'. The U.S. government has previously attacked torrent and link sites hosted elsewhere in the world, extradited foreign nationals for piracy and provided training on how to shut down piracy websites. 'Voskresenskiy went on to state that, in his opinion, no country in the world is prepared to fight Internet piracy. He argued that all existing laws, including laws in the U.S., are antiquated and do not address new technological trends. As an example, [Voskresenskiy] stated that YouTube and Google (as YouTube's owner) should be shut down because they do not conform to current Russian IPR laws. He admitted that this was not feasible, but continued to emphasize that these entities need to follow local laws, even if the laws are outdated,' the cable adds."

ge7 writes "A recently leaked confidential diplomatic cable reveals Russia's growing interest in shutting down copyright infringing websites. 'Russia's Deputy Minister of Economic Development said that not only do U.S. sites continue to offer pirated Russian movies, but that YouTube and Google should be shut down for not respecting local laws'. The U.S. government has previously attacked torrent and link sites hosted elsewhere in the world, extradited foreign nationals for piracy and provided training on how to shut down piracy websites. 'Voskresenskiy went on to state that, in his opinion, no country in the world is prepared to fight Internet piracy. He argued that all existing laws, including laws in the U.S., are antiquated and do not address new technological trends. As an example, [Voskresenskiy] stated that YouTube and Google (as YouTube's owner) should be shut down because they do not conform to current Russian IPR laws. He admitted that this was not feasible, but continued to emphasize that these entities need to follow local laws, even if the laws are outdated,' the cable adds."

ge7 writes "A recently leaked confidential diplomatic cable reveals Russia's growing interest in shutting down copyright infringing websites. 'Russia's Deputy Minister of Economic Development said that not only do U.S. sites continue to offer pirated Russian movies, but that YouTube and Google should be shut down for not respecting local laws'. The U.S. government has previously attacked torrent and link sites hosted elsewhere in the world, extradited foreign nationals for piracy and provided training on how to shut down piracy websites. 'Voskresenskiy went on to state that, in his opinion, no country in the world is prepared to fight Internet piracy. He argued that all existing laws, including laws in the U.S., are antiquated and do not address new technological trends. As an example, [Voskresenskiy] stated that YouTube and Google (as YouTube's owner) should be shut down because they do not conform to current Russian IPR laws. He admitted that this was not feasible, but continued to emphasize that these entities need to follow local laws, even if the laws are outdated,' the cable adds."

bs0d3 writes "Instead of waking up to a regular alarm clock, TalkO'Clock will let others help you get out of bed. The service allows you to choose whether you want to be called by a male or a female stranger, and it has a robot – CallO'Bot – lined up in case no one is available at the time you have to wake up. All completely anonymous of course." Not sure why this is better than your phone alarm, but if you're starving for human contact this might not be a bad option.

Since last year we've been following the story of how domains are being seized by the U.S. government for allegedly facilitating online piracy. The seizures received a legal challenge back in June from the owners of one such site, and now a U.S. federal court has returned a ruling in the matter: "District Court Judge Paul Crotty decided to deny Puerto 80's request, which means the domain will remain in the hands of the U.S. Government. The Judge argues that seizing Rojadirecta's .com and .org domains does not violate the First Amendment of the Constitution. 'Puerto 80's First Amendment argument fails,' the Judge writes. 'Puerto 80 alleges that, in seizing the domain names, the Government has suppressed the content in the "forums" on its websites, which may be accessed by clicking a link in the upper left of the home page. The main purpose of the Rojadirecta websites, however, is to catalog links to the copyrighted athletic events — any argument to the contrary is clearly disingenuous.' The judge further ruled that the claimed 32% decline in traffic and the subsequent harm to Puerto 80s business is not an issue as visitors can still access the site through foreign domains. Puerto 80's argument, that users may not be aware of these alternatives, was simply waived."

An anonymous reader writes "A new study (abstract) published at the annual ACM Foundations of Digital Games conference by researchers from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Waterloo explores the magnitude of game piracy on public BitTorrent trackers. The researchers tracked 173 new game releases over a three-month period and found that these were downloaded by 12.7 million unique peers. They further show that the number of downloads on BitTorrent can be predicted by the scores of game reviewers. Overall the current paper gives a seemingly robust overview of the state of game piracy on BitTorrent. Although the results may not be all that surprising, it's certainly refreshing to see a decent report on BitTorrent statistics every now and then."

asto21 writes "Previously, representatives from the Finnish music industry filed a lawsuit against Elisa, one of the country's largest ISPs, demanding that it should block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. In a reply filed at the district court, Elisa has refused to comply, describing the blocking demands as unreasonable."

An anonymous reader writes "The first part of A Lonely Place For Dying is available on VODO while the filmmakers are getting ready for a theatrical run in early 2012. Viewers are asked to donate if they like what they see and if enough cash is raised they will be able to watch the film again on the big screen. In return for their contributions, donors are receiving digital downloads or credits in the upcoming release, you can even become an Executive Producer and get your name listed on IMDB. This is a brave move challenging Hollywood and their traditional 'release windows.'" "Indie" in this case definitely does not mean a Grade Z student film; James Cromwell knows his crime drama. The movie is being released serially, and BitTorrent donations are to be used to "complete a theatrical mix of the motion picture, create a digital cinema package, and get everything else ready to position the film in U.S. movie theaters."

ktetch-pirate writes "On this day, 10 years ago, Bram Cohen released the first bittorrent client to the public. Most P2P protocols have had a rapid rise and then a drop-off as the subsequent 'best thing' has come out, but after 10 years, nothing has bested bittorrent, and it still remains king of the P2P castle. Just when will it be replaced?"

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a story at Torrentfreak: "Entertainment industry lobby groups often describe file-sharers as thieves who refuse to pay for any type of digital content. But not everyone agrees with this view. Swedish telecom giant Ericsson sees copyright abuse as the underlying cause of the piracy problem. In a brilliant article, Rene Summer, Director of Government and Industry Relations at Ericsson, explains how copyright holders themselves actually breed pirates by clinging to outdated business methods. The most vocal rightsholder groups would ideally turn the Internet into a virtual police state, and at the other end of the spectrum there are groups that want to abolish copyright entirely.'"

fysdt writes with a TorrentFreak story that starts: "Google has pulled one of the most popular torrent download managers from the Android Market because of policy violations. Before Google booted the application, Transdroid had been available for two years and amassed 400,000 users during that time. Thus far Google hasn't specified what the exact nature of Transdoid's violations are, but it's not unlikely that they relate to copyright infringement."