As part of a new initiative cracking down on Internet piracy and counterfeiting, yesterday the U.S. government took action against nine web portals suspected of streaming of first-run movies. Not only were domain names targeted, but assets seized from bank, PayPal and other accounts. One site, NinjaVideo, was warned by TorrentFreak months ago they were being watched.
BitAudit is by far the most elaborate tool to track communications between BitTorrent users we’ve seen to date. Although its creator built the application to give BitTorrent users insight into the inner workings of the protocol and the public nature of it, anti-piracy outfits might use it as inspiration to update their own tracking systems which are usually pretty weak.
Last month one of three injunctions obtained by Hollywood lawyers required that Swedish ISP Black Internet must stop providing access to the world’s most famous BitTorrent site. The provider has just complied with the court order and in turn became the first in Sweden to cut their customers off from the site. Whether this opens the floodgates for other ISP blocks remains to be seen.
After failing to shut down The Pirate Bay, the movie industry in The Netherlands has been trying to find other ways of limiting access to the site. Earlier they began threatening an ISP with court action unless it blocked access to the site. Now one of the ISP’s rivals is joining the fight against anti-piracy group BREIN in the hope of avoiding an undemocratic precedent.
As soon as Sweden’s IPRED legislation was passed, Antipiratbyrån working on behalf of several book publishers somehow managed to gain access to a private FTP server containing audio books. That copyright case involving ISP ePhone is with the Supreme Court but allegations that the anti-piracy group illegally hacked into the server to gather evidence persist in the background.
As one of the pioneers of a ’3 strikes’ mechanism for dealing with P2P piracy, France is moving closer to its full implementation. In order to warn and punish alleged file-sharers, it will first be necessary to monitor them whilst engaged in infringement. The scope of that monitoring has just been confirmed.
The on-going fight against file-sharing link sites in Spain is turning into a farce. Despite many rulings which state that the sites break no laws, still anti-piracy groups waste their money pursuing them. As yet another site is cleared of wrong doing, a lawyer who speaks out for civil rights on the Internet is clear on the piracy issue – either join the revolution, or perish.
A recent copyright takedown notice from the UK’s BPI revealed that the music group has been demanding that Google take down links not just to precise URLs where music is hosted on cyberlockers, but rather more generally referencing the entire site. Now it appears that IFPI, the BPI’s big brother, is trying a similar strategy, this time with The Pirate Bay.
This week Swedish police arrested three individuals on suspicion of copyright infringements. The trio are suspected of having connections to ‘Scene’ warez servers known as ‘Darkside’. According to anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, the servers carried huge amounts of data making the case the biggest so far in Sweden, and possibly in Europe.
Through co-ordinated raids across the country, Hungarian police have attempted to decimate the country’s BitTorrent scene. Following the deployment of many officers, dozens of servers were seized and many of the country’s trackers shut down, including the prominent 900,000 peer ‘ncore’ tracker. An ISP, university and many seedboxes were also targeted.
