Prominent sports streaming site Rojadirecta has asked a U.S. judge to return its domain names. The company behind the site, Puerto 80, said that its property was wrongfully taken during the third phase of ICE and Homeland Security’s ‘Operation in Our Sites’, an action which has severely damaged its legitimate business.
Source: Streaming Site Rolls Out Lawyers To Fight Domain Seizure
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.
Source: Kino.to Raided In Massive Police Operation, Admins Arrested
During the last 24 hours Homeland Security seized another domain and put up the copyright infringement notice but now a quite unusual picture is forming. Allegedly an anti-vaccine blogger and claimed “batshit” conspiracy theorist with plenty of enemies had his server hacked and filled with illegal material. This appears to have resulted in his domain being seized for copyright infringement.
Source: Updated: Feds Seize New Domain, Add To “Batshit” Conspiracy Theories
Earlier this year Google started censoring various ‘piracy-related’ keywords from its Instant and Autocomplete services, and this list of forbidden words was updated recently. Although Google understand that there is no silver bullet that can stop online copyright infringement, the search giant told TorrentFreak that the steps they’ve taken could help to decrease piracy.
Over the last year a handful of lawyers have sued close to two hundred thousand alleged BitTorrent users in the United States. Many of these cases were launched by so-called “copyright trolls” who have re-engineered piracy into a healthy revenue stream. Today, we reveal a critical part of this legal bullying by taking a closer look at a settlement proposal sent out by John Steele, one of the most active anti-piracy lawyers around.
In the wake of the UN report which described disconnecting citizens from the Internet as a breach of human rights, an anti-piracy group has made a somewhat surprising statement. Music Industry Piracy Investigations, which acts for dozens of labels including the Big Four, today said that while they support measures for dealing with infringement, that does not include “termination of Internet accounts.”
Source: Recording Industry Steps Back From Piracy Disconnections
According to a report set to be adopted today by the UN’s Human Rights Council, anti-filesharing provisions such as those outlined in the UK’s Digital Economy Act are disproportionate and should be repealed. The provisions, which include disconnecting Internet users for violating the rights of the music and movie industries, breach human rights, the report concludes.
Source: UN: Disconnecting File-Sharers Breaches Human Rights
A French Court of Appeal has just upheld the sentencing of an administrator of two BitTorrent-related sites. Despite no evidence being presented that money was made from the sites through advertising as claimed – or even that any infringements had occurred – the admin now faces a $29,000 payout. Bizarrely, the Court decided that having the word ‘torrent’ in his sites’ URLs showed that he knew about infringements.
Source: ‘Torrent’ Becomes A Dirty Word As Site Admin Fined $29,000
Starting last year U.S. courts have been bombarded with lawsuits against tens of thousands of file-sharers. Among the copyright holders claiming damages are a few well-known names, but the vast majority of the cases concern more obscure content. As time passes by more and more copyright trolls join in, and in some cases copyright holders are now suing people for files that were deliberately mislabeled, lulling unsuspecting individuals in.
As the United States recoils in horror at the rapid acceleration of so-called ‘speculative invoicing’ schemes designed to force cash from alleged file-sharers, over in Europe the Germans are showing how it’s really done. According to information published by Germany’s Internet industry association, rightsholders there are targeting 300,000 alleged file-sharers every month – a staggering 3.6 million a year.
Source: Anti-Piracy Groups Send 3.6 Million File-Sharing Cash Demands
