In September 2013, UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced the appointment of Mike Weatherley MP as his brand new advisor on intellectual property matters.

As the founder of Parliament’s Rock the House competition and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Intellectual Property Group launched in 2003 to raise awareness and rally against copyright and related infringement, Weatherley seemed like the ideal candidate.

The then 56-year-old quickly offered his support to the recently formed Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit and promised to assist the government to focus on anti-piracy enforcement issues aimed at protecting the creative industries.

By December of 2013, Weatherley was making it clear that ISPs should be held responsible for their customers’ infringing downloads and just weeks later suggested jail sentences for persistent file-sharers. Greater accountability for companies such as Google became a recurring theme in the MP’s work.

But while Weatherley has made quite an impact in his unpaid position, his role as a Conservative Member of Parliament will come to an end in the first quarter of 2015. In an announcement today Weatherley confirmed that he will not be standing at next year’s General Election.

Noting the enjoyment he’s had serving the people of his constituency in the south of England, Weatherley also touched on his role as Cameron’s IP advisor.

“Over the past year, I have taken immense pride in serving as your Intellectual Property Adviser. I am sure that you will agree that we have made huge steps towards really getting politicians and industry talking – which is key to making the most of our country’s wealth of creative talent,” the MP told the Prime Minister.

If Weatherley keeps to his own predictions then he will step down as an MP before May 2015 but he also hints that he would like to remain involved in government IP matters.

“It would be a privilege to continue offering my assistance in this regard,” he told David Cameron.

Interestingly, local media is reporting that Weatherley is believed to be returning to the creative industries. The 57-year-old was formerly the European vice-president of the Motion Picture Licensing Company and also worked as the finance director of record producer Pete Waterman’s empire.

A revolving door situation, where Weatherley heads out of government into a position with a large entertainment group, hardly seems out of the question given his history, but for solid information the world will have to wait. In the meantime his work in government will continue, with some of his time devoted to the industry he’ll soon be re-joining.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In February 2012, Sweden’s Supreme Court determined that the sentences handed out to The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström would stand.

Carl Lundström’s sentence was quickly served but there was a months-long delay before Gottfrid Svartholm could be removed from Cambodia and placed in Swedish detention. It took even longer to trace and detain Peter Sunde.

More than two years had passed when the former Pirate Bay spokesman was eventually captured on May 31, 2014, the eight year anniversary of the 2006 raid on the infamous site. A special police unit dedicated to tracking down fugitives found Sunde on a farm in Skåne, Sweden.

Sunde is now detained in Västervik Norra, the prison originally allocated to him in 2012. Converted from a hospital over the past nine years, in 2012 the facility had 262 inmates and 250 staff. Sunde feels that the establishment is an inappropriate venue for his incarceration.

In a letter recently sent to the probation board, Sunde asks to be removed to a location more in keeping with his offenses.

“I hereby appeal the placement decision regarding the institution I am in. I believe that the safety class is too high for the crime I have been convicted of,” Sunde writes.

Sweden prisons are split into three security categories. Category One is reserved for the most dangerous of prisoners. Category Two covers the majority of the country’s closed prisons, while Category Three contains trusted prisoners who are believed to pose the lowest risk.

Sunde was found guilty of non-violent copyright-related offenses which means he should pose little to no risk to the public. On this basis Sunde believes he should be transferred to a Category Three prison, specifically Tygelsjö, which is close to his family. He says there is no risk of him trying to escape.

Health issues also feature prominently in Sunde’s plea to the authorities.

“I’m suffering tremendously – socially, physically as well as psychologically – by the shortcomings of Västervik,” he explains.

Those shortcomings include problems with food. While Sunde has described himself as a vegetarian, on occasions he has expressed a clear preference for vegan food. It’s not clear where the diet in Västervik falls short, but Sunde says he’s suffering to the point of going hungry. The 35-year-old reports that in the last four weeks he’s lost 11 pounds (5kgs).

While Sunde evaded capture for two years, that time didn’t go to waste. Before running for the European Parliament with the Finnish Pirate Party this year, Sunde invested in several tech-focused startups including the micro-donation service Flattr and the NSA-proof messenger app Heml.is.

While those operations are likely to continue in his absence, Sunde’s incarceration has already led to issues with a historic domain. Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) was the group behind the founding of The Pirate Bay and although it disbanded in 2010, Sunde remained the person responsible for administering Piratbyran.org. That domain now has issues which Sunde clearly can’t solve, although others are currently trying.

In the meantime, Fredrik Neij – who is also required to serve a Pirate Bay-related 10 month prison sentence – remains a fugitive and currently resides in Asia.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Internet filters are now on the political agenda in many countries around the world. While China and Iran are frontrunners for political censorship, the UK is leading the way when it comes to porn and other content deemed unsuitable for children.

In addition to the mobile restrictions that have been in place for years already, last summer Prime Minister David Cameron announced a default filter for all Internet connections. This means that UK Internet subscribers are now required to opt-in if they want to view ‘adult’ content online.

These default filters have led to many instances in which perfectly legitimate sites can no longer be accessed. This very website, for example, was inaccessible on Sky Broadband after it was categorized as a “file-sharing” site. The false positive was eventually corrected after the BBC started asking questions, but that didn’t solve the underlying problem.

In an attempt to make it easier to spot overblocking the Open Rights Group (ORG) has today launched a new site. The embedded tool runs probes on all the major broadband and mobile filters of UK ISPs, and allows people to check which sites are blocked and where.

The first results are quite scary. A review of the 100,000 most-popular sites on the Internet reveals that 20% are blocked by at least one of the filtering systems.

“We’ve been surprised to find the default filtering settings are blocking around a fifth of the Alexa top 100k websites. That’s a lot more than porn, which accounts for around 4% of that list,” ORG’s Executive Director Jim Killock informs TorrentFreak.

The list of blocked domains includes many legitimate sites that aren’t necessarily harmful to children. TalkTalk file-sharing filter, for example, blocks websites including bittorrent.com and utorrent.com. TorrentFreak also appears to be listed in this category and is blocked as well.

Linuxtracker, which offers free downloads of perfectly legitimate software, is blocked by Sky, TalkTalk and Three’s filters, while the blocked.org.uk tool itself is off-limits on BT, EE and Virgin Media.

Perhaps even worse, the BT and TalkTalk filters also categorize social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as potentially dangerous to children, and the same applies to Reddit. All these sites are inaccessible if the social networking category of the Kids Safe filter is on.

Reddit is blocked as well

With the new tool ORG hopes to provide more insight into what these filters do and how many sites they block. The ISPs themselves have thus far failed to reveal the scope of their filters.

“People need to know what filters are, and what they block. They need to know they are inaccurate, and also disrupt people’s businesses and speech,” Killock tells TF.

“If people feel they need them, that is their right, but they should at least know they’re very flawed technology that won’t protect them very much, but will also be likely to cause them problems. In short, they are a bit rubbish,” he adds.

The current results of the tool are based on various filtering levels. This means that the list of blocked sites will be even longer when the strongest settings are used.

It’s worth noting that all ISPs allow account holders to turn filters off or allow certain sites to be unblocked. However, many people may not even be aware that this option exists, or won’t want to unblock porn just to get access to file-sharing software if these are lumped together.

The results of ORG’s new tool show that what started as a “porn filter” has turned into something much bigger. Under the guise of “protecting the children” tens of thousands of sites are now caught up in overbroad filters, which is a worrying development to say the least.

Update: TalkTalk clarified that the file-sharing (with TorrentFreak included) and social networking filters are not enabled by default on their system.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

During the raid more than two years ago on his now-famous mansion, police in New Zealand seized 135 computers and drives belonging to Kim Dotcom.

In May 2012 during a hearing at Auckland’s High Court, lawyer Paul Davison QC demanded access to the data stored on the confiscated equipment, arguing that without it Dotcom could not mount a proper defense.

The FBI objected to the request due to some of the data being encrypted. However, Dotcom refused to hand over the decryption passwords unless the court guaranteed him access to the data. At this point it was revealed that despite assurances from the court to the contrary, New Zealand police had already sent copies of the data to U.S. authorities.

In May 2014, Davison was back in court arguing that New Zealand police should release copies of the data from the seized computers and drives, reiterating the claim that without the information Dotcom could not get a fair trial. The High Court previously ruled that the Megaupload founder could have copies, on the condition he handed over the encryption keys.

But while Dotcom subsequently agreed to hand over the passwords, that was on the condition that New Zealand police would not hand them over to U.S. authorities. Dotcom also said he couldn’t remember the passwords after all but may be able to do so if he gained access to prompt files contained on the drives.

The police agreed to give Dotcom access to the prompts but with the quid pro quo that the revealed passwords could be passed onto the United States, contrary to Dotcom’s wishes.

Today Justice Winkelmann ruled that if the police do indeed obtain the codes, they must not hand them over to the FBI. Reason being, the copies of the computers and drives should never have been sent to the United States in the first place.

While the ruling is a plus for Dotcom, the entrepreneur today expressed suspicion over whether the FBI even need the encryption codes.

“NZ Police is not allowed to provide my encryption password to the FBI,” he wrote on Twitter, adding, “As if they don’t have it already.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

While most people watch World Cup matches through licensed broadcasters, there is also a large group of people who resort to unauthorized sources.

These so-called “pirate” streams are available through dozens of sites, including Firstrow and Rojadirecta, which generate a lot of traffic during popular sporting events.

Before the World Cup started FIFA reached out to several of these sites, asking their operators to make sure that content is removed as soon as possible. Despite these requests, there are still plenty of illegal streams available for each game.

Content protection firm Viaccess-Orca, one of the companies that monitors these unauthorized broadcasts, is also tasked with sending takedown notices for some of the matches. The company informs TorrentFreak that up to last Friday they have sent 2,000 takedown notices to various sites.

One of the problems with live events is that takedown requests only have an effect when they are processed before the match ends. According to David Leporini, Viaccess-Orca Executive Vice President of Marketing, Products and Security, the linking sites have been rather cooperative on this front.

“The success rate varies per content platform but overall we manage to get 35 percent of the streaming links disabled before the game ends. I think this is a great success rate, especially compared to direct download sites,” Leporini informs us.

A success rate of 35% is pretty decent indeed, considering that the notices have to be sent and processed in a very small time frame. Also, the process is further complicated because many sites don’t publish the links to the streams until a few minutes before the game starts.

The content protection company also targets traditional social media sites where links to live streams are posted. Here, the success rate was the best at Facebook where half of all infringing links were taken down before the game ended.

“For the first ten days we have sent around 150 takedown notices to Facebook and Twitter pages. Among all content platforms notified, we measured a success rate of about 51% for link removals from Facebook pages.”

While Viaccess-Orca’s efforts may limit the availability of pirated live streams, there are still hundreds of thousands of people getting through. The company estimates that between 100,000 and 500,000 people tune in to an average game. Up until last week, Belgium versus Russia was the most-watched match with 471,541 unauthorized viewers.

Belgium vs. Russia streaming locations

Viaccess-Orca can measure part of the audience directly though P2P streaming services such as Sopcast and Acestream. This also allows the company to see from what location people are watching. As the overview above shows, Belgium vs. Russia was particularly popular in Europe and Asia.

The remainder of the streams go through centralized streaming services, with Hdcast and Iguide being the most frequently used. Rojadirecta and Wiziwig are the sites where Viaccess-Orca found the most infringing links.

Looking ahead, the content protection firm expects that the number of viewers per match will continue to increase, as will the enforcement actions.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.