Most people in the UK may not have realized it, but every time they backed up an MP3 or made a copy of a CD or DVD for personal use, they were breaking the law.

Starting today this is no longer the case for disabled people, thanks to a revision of copyright law that just went into effect. Disabled citizens can now copy and publish copyrighted material if there’s no commercial alternative available.

“Disabled people and disability groups can now make accessible copies of copyright material (eg music, film, books) when no commercial alternative exists,” the Government announced today.

Previously the Government also said that all private copying for personal use would be legal starting in June, but this has apparently been delayed pending Parliament approval.

However, following a thorough inspection of local copyright legislation the UK Government has already committed to change current laws in favor of consumers.

“Copyright law is being changed to allow you to make personal copies of media you have bought, for private purposes such as format shifting or backup,” the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) previously announced.

“The changes will mean that you will be able to copy a book or film you have purchased for one device onto another without infringing copyright.”

In other words, people will be free to rip CDs and DVDs or backup their MP3s to an online storage provider, without risking legal trouble. The Government emphasizes, however, that it is still not allowed to share these personal copies with the rest of the world.

“You will be permitted to make personal copies to any device that you own, or a personal online storage medium, such as a private cloud. However, it will be illegal to give other people access to the copies you have made,” the IPO explains.

It is no secret that several entertainment industry groups are wary of the new copying regulation. However, before implementing the changes the Government carefully researched the economic impact for copyright holders, concluding it to be minimal.

On the other end of the spectrum, it’s expected that the technology sector will greatly benefit from the newly gained freedom. The revised copying rules are expected to generate an additional £31 million in revenue per year. This money will come from consumers who use services and products to assist their copying needs.

“This measure will benefit technology firms by removing barriers and costs and improving entry to technology markets which rely on consumers being able to make private copies,” the IPO predicts.

Besides new private copying rights, the upcoming amendments will also broaden people’s fair use rights. For example, people no longer have to ask permission to quote from or parody the work of others, such as a news report or a book, as long as it’s “fair dealing” and the source is recognized.

A complete overview of the changes, and how they apply to the public, are summarized in a handy guide published by the UK Intellectual Property Office.

Update: This article initially stated that the general private copying restrictions were also lifted, as announced previously and still listed in the consumer guide. However, these still have to be approved by Parliament. The article has been updated accordingly.

TorrentFreak asked IPO to clarify the confusion and we will post the response here when it comes in.

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

While new file-sharing sites appear on a regular basis, it’s reasonably rare for fresh torrent sites to fill a niche in an effective and public fashion. PublicHD was a site that bucked that trend, in part by delivering focused content rather than simply making existing material searchable.

From a standing start, during the last quarter of 2012 PublicHD’s popularity skyrocketed. Concentrating on movie rips at the higher end of the quality spectrum, PublicHD grew steadily throughout 2013, a trend that continued – blips aside – into the first few months of this year.

Then yesterday, without warning, PublicHD simply disappeared and into today the site is still inaccessible via its main Swedish domain, .EU alternative, or official proxy. There has been no official announcement or explanation. Needless to say, currently there are plenty of worried users.

Of course, sites go offline for technical reasons all the time, and it may yet transpire that PublicHD has had some serious technical issues. The signs, however, are less than encouraging. The first logical places for users to check for status updates are PublicHD’s Twitter and Facebook accounts but just like the main site, they have completely disappeared.

Since PublicHD is, as its name suggests, a public site, its activities can be seen not only on its own domain but on other torrent sites too. For example, The Pirate Bay has a user account by the name of DibyaTPB, which is believed to be a PublicHD auto-uploading bot. After making hundreds of releases and rarely if ever having a break, yesterday DibyaTPB fell silent, indicating that the site is indeed completely offline.

Furthermore, BOZX, another Pirate Bay account associated with PublicHD, also went quiet on Saturday. And, after 19,199 uploads, the corresponding account for BOZX on KickassTorrents was silenced too. At some point, it’s not clear when, the account was also renamed.

The disappearance of PublicHD is even more puzzling given that earlier this month the site’s operators were planning new and bigger things.

“Soon we are a going to have a makeover and a brand new PublicHD with tons of new features and stronger security system,” they said in an announcement.

It’s certainly feasible that the upgrades are underway now, but why that would go hand in hand with PublicHD’s decision to disappear themselves from social media thus keeping their users entirely in the dark makes little sense.

Rightsholders have issued a steady stream of complaints against PublicHD to Google since late 2012 but since the start of 2014 the number being processed has steadily increased, with April and May being the most active months in the site’s history.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Non-Stop is the most downloaded movie this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(5)	Non-Stop	7.2 / trailer
2	(6)	The Lego Movie	8.2 / trailer
3	(8)	Oculus	6.9 / trailer
4	(…)	X-Men: Days of Future Past (CAM)	8.5 / trailer
5	(1)	3 Days To kill	6.2 / trailer
6	(2)	Godzilla (CAM)	7.3 / trailer
7	(3)	RoboCop	6.5 / trailer
8	(7)	Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Cam/TS)	8.3 / trailer
9	(…)	Drive Hard	4.3 / trailer
10	(…)	13 Sins	6.2 / trailer

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

It can be very educational to watch the behavior of career politicians. They frequently have opinions about individual activists and activist movements. You can hear them praising the efforts to change society and participate in the democratic process, in the media, in articles, and in person.

And then they move ahead with a bill that does the exact opposite.

To wit: In Sweden, in the week after the European Elections, a temporary and controversial wiretapping bill was made permanent. It may look like a coincidence. Then again, Peter Sunde, the spokesperson of the Pirate Bay, was arrested in the same week.

That’s another coincidence, just as when the Appeals Court hearings for The Pirate Bay mock trial which were slated for the week right after an election. And there was another coincidence when the evaluation of the illegal Data Retention Directive was to be presented right after the elections, rather than facing the music and abolishing it once it was declared illegal.

There are many more examples.

And then those career politicians usher more warm words over the activists for liberty – people who are personally responsible for you and me having some of our liberties we wouldn’t have otherwise. Let’s name a few of them.

Assange. Brown. Svartholm-Warg. Hammond. Sunde. Manning.

All of these have provided exemplary transparency and resistance to power grabs by overreaching and shameless governments. Each and every one of us owes a significant amount of liberty to each of these individuals. They also have another thing in common: They are all confined to a small room, their freedom of movement gone, their liberty shackled.

There are many more who find it impossible to return to their home country after such exemplary civic duty. Snowden. Appelbaum. Many anonymous people who have chosen to leave. The list just goes on.

Activism just isn’t enough. The fate of our best and brightest activists can be seen right here. As an activity, on its own, it’s not producing the necessary results. Not on its own.

It’s at this point that we need to look closer at the behavior of career politicians.

It’s important to realize that the first problem that a career politician tries to solve is how to get elected. The second problem a career politician tries to solve is how to get re-elected. Whatever comes in third place is so far behind the first two that it’ll never really surface.

In short, unless you threaten politicians’ jobs over their dismantling of liberty, they’ll not notice in the slightest but just smile at your proposals, praise you for engaging in civic society, kiss some babies, and then introduce more surveillance.

That’s why activism for liberty remains extremely necessary. That’s also why activism remains not sufficient. We absolutely, positively need to put politicians’ jobs on the line over Orwelling the world we live in.

That’s why the Pirate Party chose the political route, putting Orwellian politicians’ jobs on the line. But the party as a movement can’t function without tens of thousands of activists who also help in the common cause.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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

While it’s no secret that some pirate games releases contain malware, during the past few days a more unusual story has been doing the rounds.

According to a GameCrastinate report, this week thousands of BitTorrent users inadvertently became infected with Bitcoin-mining malware.

The problem apparently stemmed back to a leaked PC version of the much-anticipated game Watch Dogs from Ubisoft Montreal. While there was never any suggestion that the company had anything to do with it, the assumption has been that whoever leaked the game thought they could make a few dollars by installing the trojan on pirates’ machines.

While there appears to be very little hard proof that the trojan ever existed or indeed spread on the suggested scale, the idea that tens or even hundreds of thousands of computers could be hijacked to generate mountains of dollars for a third-party gained a lot of traction in the press.

The idea of a sneaky trojan install is likely to annoy just about everyone, but what if a similar process could be put to a more creative and authorized use? What if a developer allowed his game to be shared online for free but in return installed a Bitcoin miner on downloaders’ machines to generate revenue to pay for the software?

That question was emailed to TorrentFreak this week and while we had our doubts over the idea’s viability, it could be pretty cool if it somehow came to pass. We promised to find out whether this was a crazy idea or a flash of genius.

Last year, Ars Technica bought a dedicated miner for $274 capable of magically churning out around $20 in bitcoin every day. Sure it gobbled up $100 a year in electricity, but as a financial prospect it was a pretty safe bet.

Gamers tend not to own dedicated mining hardware, but people playing a game like Watch Dogs more often that not will have rather juicy graphics cards on board which could be coaxed into a bit of mining. Question is, would they be up to the task?

Roger Ver, an angel investor in several Bitcoin startups including Blockchain.info, BitcoinStore and BitPay, has been referred to in the press as the Bitcoin Jesus. In his opinion, could the “Watch Dog hackers” who sparked this story make much money with their illegal trojan?

“It depends a lot on the hardware of the machines, but to the hacker, it is all profit since he doesn’t have to pay for any of the hardware or electricity costs,” Ver told TF.

So with free money for the hackers established, we come back to the key question: could a Bitcoin miner installed with the permission of the downloader generate enough fractions of a single bitcoin on a single machine to keep the developer happy, in Watch Dogs’ case, to the tune of around $60? Ver was quick to disappoint.

“This isn’t viable any longer,” he told us. “There are so many people mining bitcoins using specialized ASIC hardware that a home computer isn’t very effective any more.”

So the idea of mining Bitcoin in order to generate revenue from people who can’t or won’t pay for their games is a no-go? It appears so.

“A few years ago, coinlab.com was trying to do this, but I don’t think this is practical any more due to the difficulty in mining bitcoin,” Ver concludes.

Back to the drawing board then….

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