Slashdot Mirror

dutchwhizzman writes "Bittorrent and uTorrent have been sued for using certain techniques in their clients and the bittorrent protocol. From the article it appears technologies are being used that were submitted in a 1999 patent that was subsequently approved in 2007. This itself is not uncommon, but given the technologies involved, HTTP could very well be prior art, or it could violate at least part of the same protocol."

freedumb2000 writes "Europe just witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to. More than a dozen people connected to the site were arrested after police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses and data centers. Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services."

An anonymous reader writes "While most of the rest of the world keeps ratcheting up copyright laws by increasing enforcement and terms, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev appears to be going in the other direction. He's now proposing that Russia build Creative Commons-style open and free licenses directly into Russian copyright law. This comes just a few days after he also chided other G8 leaders for their antiquated views on copyright."

zrbyte writes "TorrentFreak reports on the latest developments in the french Hadopi saga. 'The private company entrusted to carry out file-sharing network monitoring for the French government has been hacked. Trident Media Guard, which is responsible for gathering data for so-called 3 strikes warnings was hacked and now has some of its data out in the wild, an event which has the potential to upset the operation of Hadopi.' TMG temporarily suspended the gathering of data on file-sharers while they investigated the breach, later claiming that the attack was on 'an unprotected test server with no confidential data.'"

zrbyte writes "TorrentFreak reports on the latest developments in the french Hadopi saga. 'The private company entrusted to carry out file-sharing network monitoring for the French government has been hacked. Trident Media Guard, which is responsible for gathering data for so-called 3 strikes warnings was hacked and now has some of its data out in the wild, an event which has the potential to upset the operation of Hadopi.' TMG temporarily suspended the gathering of data on file-sharers while they investigated the breach, later claiming that the attack was on 'an unprotected test server with no confidential data.'"

zrbyte writes "TorrentFreak reports on the latest developments in the french Hadopi saga. 'The private company entrusted to carry out file-sharing network monitoring for the French government has been hacked. Trident Media Guard, which is responsible for gathering data for so-called 3 strikes warnings was hacked and now has some of its data out in the wild, an event which has the potential to upset the operation of Hadopi.' TMG temporarily suspended the gathering of data on file-sharers while they investigated the breach, later claiming that the attack was on 'an unprotected test server with no confidential data.'"

MoldySpore writes "When Zediva burst onto the streaming scene earlier this year, they managed to do something nobody else was doing. Navigating around the copyright law, they found a way to stream rental movies not currently available on other services, because they were still inside the DVD sales window, and filled a role not currently part of the competitions' services. The service grants a 'rental' of the physical movie to the user, who is then able to stream it over the internet, usually with the option to re-rent after being played. By having it be a rental service, they were able to avoid some of the legalese associated with streaming movies outside of that sales window. Needless to say the MPAA was not pleased. But instead of making nice with the MPAA, Zediva has decided to fight back in the form of expensive legal heavy-hitters from 'elite San Francisco law firm Durie Tangri,' which has forced the MPAA to hire their own team of expensive legal ninjas. Zediva argues what most technologically informed people would when looking at this service: that they are essentially a rental service who are renting physical media, and providing the DVD player and a very long cable to the renter's TV."

MoldySpore writes "When Zediva burst onto the streaming scene earlier this year, they managed to do something nobody else was doing. Navigating around the copyright law, they found a way to stream rental movies not currently available on other services, because they were still inside the DVD sales window, and filled a role not currently part of the competitions' services. The service grants a 'rental' of the physical movie to the user, who is then able to stream it over the internet, usually with the option to re-rent after being played. By having it be a rental service, they were able to avoid some of the legalese associated with streaming movies outside of that sales window. Needless to say the MPAA was not pleased. But instead of making nice with the MPAA, Zediva has decided to fight back in the form of expensive legal heavy-hitters from 'elite San Francisco law firm Durie Tangri,' which has forced the MPAA to hire their own team of expensive legal ninjas. Zediva argues what most technologically informed people would when looking at this service: that they are essentially a rental service who are renting physical media, and providing the DVD player and a very long cable to the renter's TV."

MagusSlurpy writes "Far from blocking The Pirate Bay, Comcast was just one of several ISPs on which TPB was unreachable today. Comcast reached out to the torrent site, and its engineers provided technical support, eventually determining that the connectivity issues stemmed from a reverse path filtering issue at an intermediate ISP, Serious Tubes Networks."

AffidavitDonda writes with this excerpt from Torrentfreak: "A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US may spell the end of the 'pay-up-or-else-schemes' that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person. Among other things, Judge Baker cited a recent child porn case where the US authorities raided the wrong people, because the real offenders were piggybacking on their Wi-Fi connections. Using this example, the judge claims that several of the defendants in VPR's case may have nothing to do with the alleged offense either. ... Baker concludes by saying that his Court is not supporting a 'fishing expedition' for subscribers' details if there is no evidence that it has jurisdiction over the defendants."

nloop writes "A group of file-sharers in Sweden have requested that their religion, Kopimism, be officially recognized in Sweden. Although this status has been denied once in the past the struggle for religious freedom from persecution continues. Aside from deeming CTRL+C CTRL+V as sacred symbols other beliefs include the flow of information being ethically right and closed source software being 'akin to slavery.'"

netsukeninja writes "The New Zealand government has surprised the public and even some MPs by moving to rush through its controversial 3 strikes-style legislation today. The new measures will allow for users to be disconnected from the Internet for up to 6 months, based on infringement claims from copyright holders."

ktetch-pirate writes "Operation In Our Sites, a US Government-led domain seizure action to deal with piracy, is pretty much a failure. TorrentFreak has examined a significant number of sites that have gone on pretty much unhindered, despite the seizures. Already some questions have been asked about the constitutionality of the seizures, and the evidence used as justification, but it seems the end results weren't as good as boasted either."

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Last week, Washington, DC federal judge Beryl Howell ruled on three mass file-sharing lawsuits. Judges in Texas, West Virginia, and Illinois had all ruled recently that such lawsuits were defective in various ways, but Howell gave her cases the green light; attorneys could use the federal courts to sue thousands of people at once and then issue mass subpoenas to Internet providers. Beryl Howell isn't the only judge to believe this, but her important ruling is especially interesting because of Howell's previous work: lobbying for the recording industry during the time period when the RIAA was engaged in its own campaign of mass lawsuits against individuals. The news, first reported in a piece at TorrentFreak, nicely illustrates the revolving door between government and industry."

TheyreNotTheir writes "In a little over two months time, the long-awaited horror movie The Tunnel will receive its world premiere. Rather than a traditional theatrical release, the movie – which is set in abandoned real-life tunnels under Sydney, Australia – will make its debut online for free with BitTorrent. Simultaneously it will be released on physical DVD, to be distributed by Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures."

SonicSpike writes "In a case against a New York website owner, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is claiming that merely linking to copyrighted material is a crime. DHS, along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seized Brian McCarthy's domain, channelsurfing.net, in late January. The site has now been replaced with a government warning: 'This domain has been seized by ICE — Homeland Security Investigations, Special Agent in Charge, New York Office.' The advocacy group Demand Progress has claimed that McCarthy never reproduced copyrighted material, and that his website simply linked to other sites. A criminal complaint obtained by the group seems to acknowledge that agents knew that McCarthy was running a 'linking website.' While the criminal complaint alleges that McCarthy did engage in the 'reproduction and distribution' of copyrighted material, it is never clear that he actually reproduced any of the specified broadcasts." McCarthy was arrested last week. Relatedly, TorrentFreak has posted a list of reasons why these domain name seizures are unconstitutional.

Chaonici writes "When a Swedish citizen identified as Ryan heard about US movie studio Liberty Media's plan to get copyright infringers to confess and voluntarily pay up, he couldn't stop himself from sending them a satirical email promising that he will pay 'from the pot of gold I got at the leprechaun at the end of the rainbow', regardless of scathing criticism of the studio from his unicorn. However, despite his location, the jesting nature of the email, and his insistence that he has never downloaded anything for which the studio is suing, Liberty Media's lawyers have taken the 'confession' seriously, and have issued a subpoena to Google for personal information related to Ryan's Gmail account. In a phone call, the legal team affirmed their determination to 'hunt him down, all the way to Sweden if need be.'"

Chaonici writes "When a Swedish citizen identified as Ryan heard about US movie studio Liberty Media's plan to get copyright infringers to confess and voluntarily pay up, he couldn't stop himself from sending them a satirical email promising that he will pay 'from the pot of gold I got at the leprechaun at the end of the rainbow', regardless of scathing criticism of the studio from his unicorn. However, despite his location, the jesting nature of the email, and his insistence that he has never downloaded anything for which the studio is suing, Liberty Media's lawyers have taken the 'confession' seriously, and have issued a subpoena to Google for personal information related to Ryan's Gmail account. In a phone call, the legal team affirmed their determination to 'hunt him down, all the way to Sweden if need be.'"

Chaonici writes "Last Friday, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seized ten websites accused of selling counterfeit goods or trafficking in child pornography. However, in the process, about 84,000 unrelated websites were taken offline when the government mistakenly seized the domain of a large DNS provider, FreeDNS. By now, the mistake has been corrected and most of the websites' domains again point to the sites themselves, rather than an intimidating domain seizure image. In a press release, the DHS praised themselves for taking down those ten websites, but completely failed to acknowledge their massive blunder."

Chaonici writes "Last Friday, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seized ten websites accused of selling counterfeit goods or trafficking in child pornography. However, in the process, about 84,000 unrelated websites were taken offline when the government mistakenly seized the domain of a large DNS provider, FreeDNS. By now, the mistake has been corrected and most of the websites' domains again point to the sites themselves, rather than an intimidating domain seizure image. In a press release, the DHS praised themselves for taking down those ten websites, but completely failed to acknowledge their massive blunder."

An anonymous reader writes "The avalanche of copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States, mainly against BitTorrent users, are about to hit a dubious milestone. In total 99,924 defendants have been sued in the last 12 months, and new cases are being filed at a rapid rate. Adult companies in particular have embraced the profitable pay-up-or-else scheme where tens of millions of dollars are at stake." Though, as other readers point out, both judges and cable companies are getting tired of the endless subpoenas in P2P porn cases.

An anonymous reader writes "A new study seems to confirm what a lot of the Slashdot crowd thinks, and the opposite of what the **AAs say: 'A prestigious economics think-tank of the Japanese government has published a study which concludes that online piracy of anime shows actually increases sales of DVDs. The conclusion stands in sharp contrast with the entertainment industry's claims that "illicit" downloading is leading to billions of dollars in losses worldwide. It also puts the increased anti-piracy efforts of the anime industry in doubt.' More specifically, '(1) YouTube viewing does not negatively affect DVD rentals, and it appears to help raise DVD sales; and (2) although Winny [a popular P2P program in Japan] file sharing negatively affects DVD rentals, it does not affect DVD sales.'"

Chaonici writes "Operation In Our Sites, a US initiative to crack down on websites related to online copyright infringement, appears to be ongoing. Rojadirecta is a site that links to (but does not host) broadcasts of major sporting events, including soccer matches. It is highly popular in Spain, where it has prevailed twice in court after its legal status was challenged. However, US authorities have now seized the .org domain of the website without notifying the site's owner or its web host, GoDaddy. Rojadirecta can still be accessed through .com, .es, .me, and .in domains, which are not controlled by the US, but rojadirecta.org currently redirects to this well-known image."

Chaonici writes "Operation In Our Sites, a US initiative to crack down on websites related to online copyright infringement, appears to be ongoing. Rojadirecta is a site that links to (but does not host) broadcasts of major sporting events, including soccer matches. It is highly popular in Spain, where it has prevailed twice in court after its legal status was challenged. However, US authorities have now seized the .org domain of the website without notifying the site's owner or its web host, GoDaddy. Rojadirecta can still be accessed through .com, .es, .me, and .in domains, which are not controlled by the US, but rojadirecta.org currently redirects to this well-known image."

Chaonici writes "A few weeks ago, Google promised that, on behalf of the entertainment industries, they would begin filtering 'piracy related' terms from their search system. Now, TorrentFreak reports that Google has lived up to their promise, and certain keywords (such as 'bittorrent' and 'rapidshare') will no longer produce results with the Autocomplete or Instant Search features. The standard search feature, however, continues to display results as normal. Simon Morris of BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare, and Jamie King (the founder of Vodo) are critical of the change, pointing out the many legitimate uses of popular file-sharing technology."

innocent_white_lamb writes "Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., EMI Music Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. have agreed to pay songwriters and music publishers $47.5 million in damages for copyright infringement and overdue royalties to settle a class action lawsuit. 'The 2008 class action alleges that the record companies "exploited" music owners by reproducing and selling in excess of 300,000 song titles without securing licenses from the copyright owners and/or without paying the associated royalty payments. The record companies knowingly did so and kept a so-called "pending list" of unlicensed reproductions, setting aside $50 million for the issue, if it ever arose, court filings suggest.'"

ktetch-pirate writes "Five years to the day after he created the first Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge has stepped down as leader of Piratpartiet, the Swedish Pirate Party. The announcement was made in a webcast with Falkvinge and his deputy Anna Troberg, with Troberg taking on his duties effective immediately."

Torrentfreak reports that after calculating download frequency for pirated copies of popular video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops has won the dubious honor of being the most pirated game of 2010. The PC version of the game was torrented roughly 4,270,000 times, and the Xbox 360 version was downloaded an additional 930,000 times. (The most pirated Wii game was Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Dante's Inferno somehow managed to accrue the most downloads of Xbox 360 games.) Fortunately for Activision, the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players have racked up over 600,000,000 man-hours of play time since the game's launch in early November.

Sockatume writes "The first eight ACS:Law cases have reached the courts, and have already fallen on their face. The law firm hit the headlines when it demanded money from tens of thousands of Britons for illegal file sharing, threatening legal action. It seems its bark was worse than its legal bite, as default judgments have been refused in six of the cases for such egregious errors as attempting to make a claim when one is not even the copyright holder. Two of the cases were found in default as the defendants had failed to respond, but not on the merits of ACS:Law's case."

Many readers have sent in an update to yesterday's story about the Department of Homeland Security's seizure of torrent-finder.com, a domain they believe to be involved in online piracy. As it turns out, this was just one of dozens of websites that were targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "In announcing that operation, John T. Morton, the assistant secretary of ICE, and representatives of the Motion Picture Association of America called it a long-term effort against online piracy, and said that suspected criminals would be pursued anywhere in the world. 'American business is under assault from counterfeiters and pirates every day, seven days a week,' Mr. Morton said. 'Criminals are stealing American ideas and products and distributing them over the Internet.'" The TorrentFreak article we discussed yesterday has been updated with a list of the blocked sites.

Voulnet writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "This morning, visitors to the Torrent-Finder.com site are greeted with an ominous graphic which indicates that ICE has seized the site's domain. 'My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!' the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning. 'I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy, I noticed the DNS had changed. GoDaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,' he explained. Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner."

adonoman writes "A 25-year-old Winnipeg businessman is the first Pirate Party of Canada candidate to run for federal election. At the same time, the US and UK pirate parties have put out an open letter to Anonymous requesting that they cease Operation Payback's DDOS attacks and focus on taking a legal route to fix intellectual property law."

hcs_$reboot writes with a snippet from TechDirt (citing TorrentFreak): "Over in Sweden, it appears that a guy has been fined for linking to an online broadcast of a hockey game. We've heard stories of people getting in trouble merely for linking to unauthorized content, but this story is even more ridiculous. The guy wasn't linking to unauthorized content. He was linking to an online video feed from the official broadcaster, Canal Plus. The issue was that Canal Plus was apparently technically incompetent in how they set up the feeds, and never intended to make the feeds public."

An anonymous reader excerpts from an article at TorrentFreak: "Georgia's Valdosta State University has updated its network with software that can pinpoint students who use P2P software. The university is committed to stop file-sharing on its network even if that results in prison sentences for students. Offenders will be disciplined by the school and then handed over to the police, the university has announced." School policy is one thing ("don't use file-sharing software on our resource-constrained network, or we may kick you off"), but I suspect the police wouldn't appreciate the task of sorting out legal from illegal use of widespread, essentially neutral software tools. Update: 11/15 18:27 GMT by T : Reader (and VSU alumnus) Matt Baker contacted the school; he reports that the school's IT director Joe Newton in response flatly denied the claims in the TorrentFreak article, and says the school hasn't installed such P2P tracking software, and doesn't hand students over the police, and says instead "I cannot foresee that we would ever do so." Thanks, Matt.

Slayer Silver Wolf writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "'On October 26 the remaining LimeWire developers were forced to shut down the company's servers and modify remote settings in the filesharing client to try to harm the Gnutella network. They were then laid off. Shortly after, a horde of piratical monkeys climbed aboard the abandoned ship, mended its sails, polished its cannons, and released it free to the community.' And so, LimeWire Pirate Edition (LPE) was born. Based on the LimeWire 5.6 beta that was briefly released earlier this year and then withdrawn when Lime Wire LLC lost its lawsuit, LPE is now in the wild. In many ways, it is better than the version killed by the RIAA."

palmerj3 writes "It is almost four years ago that The Pirate Bay announced they wanted to buy the micronation of Sealand, so they could host their site without having to bother about copyright law — an ambitious plan that turned out to be unaffordable. This week, Pirate Parties worldwide started brainstorming about a similarly ambitious plan. Instead of founding their own nation, they want to shoot a torrent site into orbit."

An anonymous reader writes "A film set to be released for free via BitTorrent has been denied a listing in the Internet Movie Database. The Tunnel is currently in production and despite pleas from the makers, IMDb won't allow it on their site. The creators of this horror movie believe that because they have shunned an official distributor and chosen a BitTorrent model instead, this has put them at a disadvantage with the Amazon-owned site."

Khyber writes "A recent DDoS attack against a UK-based anti-pirating firm, ACS:Law, has resulted in a large backup archive of the server contents being made available for download, [and this archive] is now being hosted by the Pirate Bay. Within this archive are e-mails from Andrew Crossley basically admitting that he is running a scam job, sending out thousands of frivolous legal threats on the premise that a percentage pay up immediately to avoid legal hassles."

Andorin writes "Suddenlink, a United States ISP that serves nineteen states, has implemented a three-strikes policy. Subscribers who receive three DMCA takedown notices are disconnected without compensation for a period of six months. According to TorrentFreak, the takedown notices do not have to be substantiated in court, which effectively means that subscribers can be disconnected based on mere accusations. In justifying the policy, Suddenlink turns to an obscure provision of their Terms of Service, but also claims that they are required by the DMCA to disconnect repeat offenders."

mykos writes with an excerpt from TorrentFreak that says the automated enforcement of France's three-strikes law known as Hadopi is now coming into effect: "The scope of the operation is mind boggling. The copyright holders will start relatively 'slowly' with 10,000 IP-addresses a day, but within weeks this number is expected to go up to 150,000 IP-addresses per day according to official reports. The Internet providers will be tasked with identifying the alleged infringers' names, addresses, emails and phone numbers. If they fail to do so within 8 days they risk a fine of 1,500 euros per day for every unidentified IP-address. To put this into perspective, a United States judge ruled recently that the ISP Time Warner only has to give up 28 IP-addresses a month (1 per day) to copyright holders because of the immense workload the identifications would cause."

pickens writes "TorrentFreak reports that with 95 percent of the votes counted, it is clear that the Pirate Party will not enter the Swedish Parliament. The Party is currently stuck at about 1 percent of the total vote, nowhere near the 4 percent threshold it needs. This means that neither WikiLeaks nor The Pirate Bay will be hosted under Parliamentary immunity and the Party won't get the chance to legalize non-commercial file-sharing or criminalize 'copyright abuse' as they planned. 'The Swedish Pirate Party did its best election campaign ever. We had more media, more articles, more debates, more handed-out flyers than ever. Unfortunately, the wind was not in our sails this time, as it was with the European elections,' says party leader Rick Falkvinge. The party will now have to wait four more years before they have another shot at entering the Swedish Parliament. 'Each generation must reconquer democracy,' adds Falkvinge. 'Nobody said it was going to be an easy fight.'"

ACKyushu writes "Say what you like about 4chan; when they want something done, it gets done. Following a call to arms yesterday, the masses inhabiting the anonymous 4chan boards have carried out a huge assault on a pair of anti-piracy enemies. The website of Aiplex Software, the anti-piracy outfit which has been DDoSing torrent sites recently, fell victim to a DDoS itself. They were joined in the Internet wasteland by the MPAA's website, which also fell to a huge and sustained attack."

An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak has shed some light on the dark practice of installing stealth-mode P2P clients during game downloads and using unsuspecting gamers' PCs as 'bandwidth slaves.' The clients operate in the background and largely go unnoticed until problems arise that are caused by overactive uploading/seeding. While the Akamai NetSession Interface and Pando Media Booster are specifically called out, there appear to be other offenders as indicated in the comments left by TorrentFreak readers. A publisher called Solid State Networks is putting out a call for an industry-wide 'best practices' effort to promote transparency, control and privacy on behalf of gamers who are otherwise being abused for their bandwidth without their consent."

An anonymous reader writes "This week TPB got a very unusual e-mail. It was a 'Notice of Ridiculous Activity' from a company that had found one of its apps cracked and listed as a torrent on TPB. The app in question is called Memoires, developed by Coding Robots. Memoires is marketed as the easiest way to keep a journal on your Mac. It costs $29.99 to buy after you've enjoyed a 30-day free trial. That, of course, didn't stop someone from cracking the software and making it available for free as a torrent. Dmitry Chestnykh, founder of Coding Robots, noticed the cracked torrent and decided to download it to see what had been done. After using it, he was upset — not because the cracked version was available, but because the cracker (named Minamoto) had done such a bad job of cracking it. The best section of the e-mail has to be this: 'I demand that you don't remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minamoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the[sic] better crack to be made, so that it doesn't cripple the user experience of my beautiful program.'"

oskii writes "During his visit to the the Swedish capital Stockholm, Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange has struck a deal with the local Pirate Party. The party, which participates in the national elections next month, will host several new Wikileaks servers to protect freedom of press and help the whistleblower site to carry out its operation."

baronvoncarson and a few other readers sent in the unconfirmed report that the Russian torrent site TorrentReactor had bought the Russian town of Gar for $148,000, on the condition that the town rename itself Torrentreactor.net. Torrent Freak notes circumspectly that TorrentReactor has been known in the past for — how best to put this? — publicity stunts and hoaxes. And Torrent Freak at the time of writing had no confirmation from any Russian authority that the purported cash-for-renaming deal is genuine. Here is the announcement on TorrentReactor's site, which contains this explanation of how Gar was chosen: "We've picked a few thousands of godforsaken places around the world that are close to operating nuclear reactors to make a connection to the name of our company. The list was numbered and a random number was picked by a generator. The number 377 was a lucky one for Gar village. We think it was a good choice since Gar citizens are very kind and generous people." The whole (purported) transaction is reminiscent of the dot-com boom, when in 1999 the not-yet-launched Half.com offered $100,000 to a small town, Halfway, Oregon, if it would rename itself for the company. It did. The record is vague as to whether the money was ever actually paid, as Half.com was acquired by eBay just over a year later.

omarlittle writes "The US Copyright Group — a company owned by intellectual property lawyers, which has been in the news for threatening downloaders of the movie Hurt Locker — has apparently stolen their site from a competitor. At one point, even the competitor's phone number and copyright statement were copied word for word on USCG's 'settlement' website. The competitor is reportedly going to send a Cease & Desist."

Caledfwlch writes with a followup to news we discussed a couple days ago about a study that found only 0.3% of torrents to be legal. (A further 11% was described as "ambiguous.") TorrentFreak looked more deeply into the study and found a number of flaws, suggesting that the researchers' data may have been pulled from a bogus tracker. Quoting: "Here's where the researchers make total fools out of themselves. In their answer to the question they refer to a table of the top 10 most seeded torrents. ... the most seeded file was uploaded nearly two years ago (The Incredible Hulk) and has a massive 1,112,628 seeders. The torrent in 10th place is not doing bad either with 277,043 seeds. All false data. We're not sure where these numbers originate from but the best seeded torrent at the moment only has 13,739 seeders; that's 1% of what the study reports. Also, the fact that the release is nearly two years old should have sounded some alarm bells. It appears that the researchers have pulled data from a bogus tracker, and it wouldn't be a big surprise if all the torrents in their top 10 are actually fake." They also take a cursory look at isoHunt, finding that 1.5% of torrent files come from Jamendo alone, "a site that publishes only Creative Commons licensed music."

Caledfwlch writes with a followup to news we discussed a couple days ago about a study that found only 0.3% of torrents to be legal. (A further 11% was described as "ambiguous.") TorrentFreak looked more deeply into the study and found a number of flaws, suggesting that the researchers' data may have been pulled from a bogus tracker. Quoting: "Here's where the researchers make total fools out of themselves. In their answer to the question they refer to a table of the top 10 most seeded torrents. ... the most seeded file was uploaded nearly two years ago (The Incredible Hulk) and has a massive 1,112,628 seeders. The torrent in 10th place is not doing bad either with 277,043 seeds. All false data. We're not sure where these numbers originate from but the best seeded torrent at the moment only has 13,739 seeders; that's 1% of what the study reports. Also, the fact that the release is nearly two years old should have sounded some alarm bells. It appears that the researchers have pulled data from a bogus tracker, and it wouldn't be a big surprise if all the torrents in their top 10 are actually fake." They also take a cursory look at isoHunt, finding that 1.5% of torrent files come from Jamendo alone, "a site that publishes only Creative Commons licensed music."

WillDraven writes "Torrentfreak is reporting that the Swedish Pirate Party has launched an ISP. Starting with 100 residents in a housing organization in the city of Lund, Pirate ISP hopes to gain 5% of the market in Lund before spreading to other markets. Headed by longtime Pirate Party member Gustav Nipe (video interview in English), the company aims to provide Internet service with the sort of guarantees one would expect from the Pirate Party. Most notable are the promises to keep no logs of subscriber activity and thus to provide no data to law enforcement or private corporations."