Pirate Releases

This May, five men and one woman were arrested for sharing music on OiNK. The suspects were taken in for questioning, and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints.

Two months later, two of the six alleged uploaders were released from further investigation, but (at least) two of the remaining four have been charged today. The alleged uploaders were charged with copyright infringement for uploading one CD. The “conspiracy to defraud” accusations vanished, as they were not mentioned.

The case(s) will be heard in two weeks at a Magistrates Court, after which there is a possibility that it will be passed onto a Crown court. TorrentFreak had the chance to talk to one of the charged uploaders. “I think it’s a sledgehammer to crack a walnut,” he said. The alleged uploader is convinced that he is being used to set an example.

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This Blog Is Found In The Forums As Well - (1) Posts

During 2005, Federal Agents assisted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), first infiltrated and then shutdown EliteTorrents, a BitTorrent tracker with more than 130,000 members. In a May they took down the server and left this message, which was viewed more than 500,000 times in the week following the raid.

Daniel Dove, one of the arrested administrators of the Elitetorrents tracker initially opted for a ‘not guilty’ plea, but his gamble didn’t pay off. The jury was told that Dove was responsible for managing and recruiting the crucial ‘uploaders’ on the site (original seeders) and that he also operated a server which was used to distribute pirate material.

The jury believed this version of events and found Dove guilty on one count each of conspiracy and felony copyright infringement. Today, Dove has was sentenced to 18 months in prison, three years of supervised release and a $20,000 fine.

Dove is the only administrator of Elitetorrents to plead “not guilty”. In 2006, Scott McCausland pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of criminal copyright infringement for his uploading of Star Wars: Episode III.

McCausland received jail time and home confinement and on his release told TorrentFreak: “After 5 months in prison, and another 5 months on home confinement, I have just one obstacle left: my 1.5 years left of probation.”

Fellow site admin Grant Stanley, then aged 23, pleaded guilty to the same offenses as Scott and received the same sentence with the addition of a $3,000 fine. Other admins and uploaders who pleaded guilty include Sam Kuonen, then aged 24, 22 year old Scott D. Harvanek and An Duc Do, aged 25.

Dove’s sentence is the eighth resulting from Operation D-Elite but this federal crackdown didn’t end up causing a decrease in overall private BitTorrent tracker availability. Instead, soon after the raids the Elitetorrents members spread out to other trackers, the major difference is that most of them are now hosted outside the US.

Source

The CRIA is known for taking on BitTorrent sites. In the past year they have threatened Demonoid and other BitTorrent sites, and taken legal action against QuebecTorrent. Now, they have set their sights on isoHunt, one of the largest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, but this might just backfire.

In May 2008, isoHunt received a Cease and Desist letter from the CRIA, in which they demanded that isoHunt founder Gary Fung should take the site offline. If Fung didn’t comply, the CRIA said it would pursue legal action, and demand $20,000 for each sound recording the site has infringed.

A similar tactic worked against Demonoid, but the isoHunt founder didn’t back down so easily. “We have since tried to come to an understanding, but just as with the MPAA in the US, they ignored our offers of cooperation by the take down of .torrent links to their content files, so long as they provide sufficient identification,” Gary Fung told TorrentFreak.

Fung has pointed out that, like most other BitTorrent sites, isoHunt has a Copyright Policy, and takes down .torrent files when they receive an appropriate request. The CRIA simply ignored this, even though they have sent correct takedown notices to isoHunt before (and isoHunt complied), and continued to threaten with legal action.

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Increasingly people are using BitTorrent to download their favorite TV-shows. The rise of unauthorized downloading of TV-shows is a signal that customers want something that is not available through other channels. It’s more about availability than the fact that it’s free and should be viewed as an opportunity, not a threat.

The millions of online viewers are catching up with the TV viewers, and are now a significant part of the show’s overall fanbase. Jesse Alexander, the executive producer of the popular TV-shows ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lost’ told TorrentFreak in an interview that his shows actually benefited from BitTorrent, because fans don’t have to miss a show, and often inspire others to watch.

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Source TF

Earlier this week, researchers from Yale University and The University of Washington presented the latest findings from their P4P research. P4P is a new technology that could make any filesharing application (including BitTorrent) cheaper for ISPs, as it tries to connect to local peers as much as possible. Local traffic is cheaper for ISPs and reduces the load on the network. In addition, P4P enabled filesharing clients will download files faster than regular clients.

In theory this is a great idea. However, P4P requires collaboration between the developers of filesharing clients and ISPs, which might be a problem. Indeed, most P2P companies TorrentFreak talked to are not that excited about the initiative, but they wont say that out loud, and play along for the time being.

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Yesterday, The Pirate Bay filed an appeal against the decree that forced Italian ISPs to block the BitTorrent tracker. Pirate Bay’s lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi are convinced that they have a strong case. “The decree can be defined as ‘original’ or ‘creative’ at best” they told TorrentFreak.

The Pirate Bay administrators are accused of making copyrighted material available on the Internet for commercial purposes. Giovanni and Francesco told us that this is a strange accusation, considering the nature of the site. “…even the judge who issued the decree states that no infringing material is hosted on The Pirate Bay, which provides just a tracker search engine,” they told us.

“The judge tries to ‘create’ a sort of contributory infringement accusation against The Pirate Bay,” the lawyers explained. It is alleged that the tracker and the search engine are absolutely necessary for the users to “search and locate the content on single computers”. That’s not all, the judge goes even further by stating that the name of the site, ‘The Pirate Bay’, signals intent to infringe copyright.

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Reports about the new and upcoming legal P2P service “Playlouder” are all over the news - again. Just like three years ago, Playlouder co-founder Paul Sanders manages to generate buzz for his legalized filesharing service. “We are confident that we will have something quite good to announce in the next couple of months,” he said, claiming that his company made a deal with one of the top ISPs in the UK.

The idea is simple; Playlouder plans to offer subscribers of one of the larger ISPs in the UK a service that will allow them to pirate as much music as they want, for a flat fee. Customers will be allowed to use the BitTorrent sites and filesharing applications they are used to. Through Deep Packet Inspection, Playlouder will check what tracks you download, so they can pay the rights holder accordingly.

The idea of creating a service where users can use BitTorrent sites without having to worry about legal repercussions is interesting. However, despite 5 years of development, the Playlouder team is overlooking some of the most basic features of file-sharing, which will render the service useless. Playlouder will allow its subscribers to download content from BitTorrent, but they won’t allow them to share the files with others who do not use the service. This restriction is needed because they want to prevent copyright infringement, but it causes a few problems too.

Thou shalt share

The number one rule for BitTorrent users is: Share. If you don’t share - upload files to others - your download speeds will reduce dramatically. This means that it could take hours instead of minutes to download an album from your favorite BitTorrent site. What Playlouder will offer is a highly degraded version of BitTorrent, and subscribers will not be able to get the great download speeds they are so accustomed to.
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