European Pirates Arrested in Massive Police Operation

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."

Comments

Re:Summary incomplete

[think_nix]

Copying and pasting the first paragraphn is 1) misleading 2) an extremely poor way to do a SUMMARY. This is what is missing "GVU states that Kino.to was working closely with the sites that hosted the copyrighted films, and that they profited from commercial partnerships with these companies."

So it was not a SIMPLE linking as the first paragraph make seem to believe.

Good point. Also stated in these articles here: (sorry could not find anything in english) http://heise.de/-1257486/ and http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,767375,00.html/

Basically what was stated is that not only was kino.to taken down but also the filehosting and portal sites behind it. The people running these sites (kino.to and others) are not explicitly being charged for linking copyrighted material(ASFAIK this is still somewhat of a grayzone in Germany) But rather for building an organized criminal organization. If prosecuted in a German criminal court this could lead to a 5 year jail sentence.

Re:Download and raw DVD tax

[Opportunist]

We got that joke running here as well (as do most countries afaik). The gag in it all is the combination of various little bits that make the whole "media tax" very fishy.

1. Allegedly, the reason for that levy on blank media is that you, the consumer, will use them to record copyrighted material, e.g. by making a copy of a record on a blank tape, or in today's word, a copy of the DVD that you borrowed from a friend. Our law even has a section that explicitly allows you to borrow legally bought media from personal friends (nobody on the internet is your friend, btw, that's established in court, so any internet sources are not part of the deal) and create a copy of it for your personal use.

2. Every single commercial DVD and BluRay (that would be subject to the grounds established in the first bullet point) now comes with copy protection.

3. The law now explicitly also disallows circumventing protection of any sort.

Question for 100: How am I supposed to execute my right to a copy if copy protection prevents me from copying and I must not disable this protection (even if it's trivial)?