European Piracy Crackdowns

DigitumDei writes "The British Phonographic Industry has been busy over the last half year. Their recent success which netted them £50,000 in out of court settlements is certainly not going to be the end of it with the UK courts forcing 6 ISP's to release information on a further 31 file sharers. The ISPs have 14 days to comply. And once located will be offered the opporunity to settle out of court. 'We would particularly advise parents to check what their children are doing on the internet and make sure that they are not breaking the law by filesharing illegally,' said Geoff Taylor, BPI General Counsel." And in other news, the oldest and largest ISP in Sweden, Bahnnof was the subject of a raid that netted what looks to be the biggest results in Europe ever; as well papper writes "The Swedish organization Antipiratbyrån, which has nothing to do with Swedish goverment, recently got hacked. This was both revenge for and an attempt to stop similair raids like the one who took place this friday, against the ISP Banhof. During the raid several FTP-servers were seized. On the hacked site the responsible group, AUH, posts some private e-mails about an alleged informer and makes threats to release more information and of course there is the mandatory braging. The site is located at Antripiratbyran with a mirror elsewhere and a translated verison also online (although it seems unreachable at the moment). "

Comments

It is not all dark...

[Pig Hogger]

A man in Rodez, France has been cleared (in French, sorry, use the fish) Of piracy charges; the court determined that since he did not mass redistribute the movies he downloaded, he was not guilty of what the movie studio accused him. Furthermore, the court said that given the copy-tax people pay on media and computers, they are entitled to private copy, JUST AS THE LAW ALLOWS.

Re:Boycott

[LocoMan]

Yeah, the last 100 slashdot boycotts really worked... ;)

Anyway, if you really plan on doing this (and getting enough people to do it), then be sure to really let them know why you aren't buying their stuff... otherwise you'll just give them ammo (hey, sales are lowering, that's because of piracy, we need more lawsuits!!!)

Oh hell...

[NickeB]

That's bahnhof, not bahnnof or banhof.

I'm a bit split at how to take this. APB (Translated: "The bureau of anti-piracy") is using illegal methods and a lot of money to track down and convict pirates. I believe we all agree that APB generally sucks. Right?

But defacing the website to publish information about private citizens is in my view worse. There's currently several campaigns going on which aims at terrorizing Pontus Pontén (chief asshat of the APB) by sending hate SMS, e-mail, snailmail. His own kids have gotten several death threats for fucks sake. What kind of message does that send?
There have also been several attempts to break into the APB locales, in at least one case using heavy tools.

APB uses methods thate are questionable to say the least, but this response will only strenghten the public view that pirates are evil anarchists that ought to be hung.

Sweden is a democracy, and we have freedom of speech. I'd like to encourage everyone to protest openly.

Has the RIAA or the MPAA ever provoked this kind of responses?

Beyond "piracy"

[eddy]

I'm sure this will all end up the same old discussion all over again, but this case with Bahnhof actually goes beyond "piracy", it's a question of judicial security.

What seems to have happened is this; APB (these are an umbrella org. for Sony and the other big giants) went to a court to get a warrant to search against Bahnhof. They listed the material they were after; Lisa Miskovsky, Kylie, Peter Jöback, Rebecka Törnqvist, Santana, The Ark, Totta Näslund(!!) and Ulf Lundell were some of the artists they mentioned. Anyhow...

They went in, shut the company down for the whole day (no one was allowed to use their computers for the rest of the day -- you can imagine how easy it is to run an ISP when you're not allowed to touch a computer) and found, they say, nothing of the material they used to get their warrant. Nothing!

Now, they did find other material, which they tipped off the police about (seeing as that would have to become a criminal case) the servers.

Now the question is; is it now basically acceptable to lie or just make up material for the search warrant? Should a consortium of large companies be allowed to put a million SEK in escrow, and then shut down another company while looking for anything illegal?

I don't think I've adequatly expressed all the problems (and known details) here, but this is big.

Swedes should look here (JO-anmälan) and here ("Piratjaktens Faror -- Om balansen mellan personlig integritet, rättssäkerhet och upphovsrätt")

Re:Boycott

[JaredOfEuropa]

Appenrently they have the right break in and look through other peoples stuff if they think there are some "pirated" things there.

No they don't, and some ISPs refuse to play ball. Apparently worldwide anti-piracy organisations are stepping up their efforts, and in the Netherlands, BREIN (our own anti-piracy org) has started to send out cease-and-desist letters to ISPs, with the request (demand, more like) to forward the letter to their customers whose IP address appears on the list of known filesharers. At least one ISP, XS4All, has replied along the lines of: "We are not an extension of anti-piracy orgs, and we will not forward any letters for them or release customer information to them, without a court order".