This week people from all across Europe chose their representatives for the European Parliament.

In more than a dozen countries local Pirate Parties were also present at the ballots, with serious ambitions.

During the last elections in 2009 the Pirate Party surprised friend and foe by gaining two seats at the European Parliament. This year they hoped to equal or improve upon that success, but the goal proved out of reach.

The final results show that the German Pirate Party is certain of a seat, with 1.4% of the total vote. This means that 27-year-old Julia Reda will represent the Pirates in Brussels during the next five years.

In the Czech Republic the Pirate Party came awfully close too. They achieved 4.78% of the total vote where 5% was needed, just 3,337 votes short of a seat in Brussels. The party has announced that it will appeal the 5% barrier.

In Sweden, where it all started, the Pirate Party managed 2.2% of the total vote. That’s down from 7.1% during the previous European Election and not enough for a continued stay in Brussels for the Swedish Pirates.

In Luxembourg the Pirate Party did very well with 4.23% of the total vote. However, this doesn’t translate into a seat since the country only has six seats available. The result does mean that the party will receive funding from Europe during the years to come, which was an aim they had shared with us two weeks ago.

In all the other countries where Pirates were on the ballot the achievements are also below the threshold for a seat.

This includes Finland where Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde participated. Sunde is the most popular Pirate there, but the party only managed 0.7% of the vote, not enough for him to be elected.

While many had hoped for at least two seats, or more, the German seat is still quite an impressive achievement.

When the Swedish Pirate Party entered the European Parliament five years ago most people thought it was a fluke. However, the Pirates managed to stay in Brussels, supported by the votes of close to a million people all across Europe.

This sentiment is shared by Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party. “As a movement, we went from two seats to one, being ridiculously close to three seats,” Falkvinge tells TorrentFreak.

“Still, there’s no points for a near-hit in any game. The most important thing was that there would be Pirates in the European Parliament after this election day, and we achieved that. The story continues, and there’s representation on the inside,” he adds.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

3 Days to kill 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	(3)	3 Days To kill	6.2 / trailer
2	(…)	Godzilla (CAM)	7.3 / trailer
3	(1)	RoboCop	6.5 / trailer
4	(2)	Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit	6.3 / trailer
5	(…)	Non-Stop	7.2 / trailer
6	(8)	The Lego Movie	8.2 / trailer
7	(5)	Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Cam/TS)	8.3 / trailer
8	(…)	Oculus	6.9 / trailer
9	(6)	The Monuments Men	6.2 / trailer
10	(4)	Tarzan	4.6 / trailer

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

In just a few days time the controversial Copyright Alert System (CAS) will have been operational for 15 months.

A cornerstone of the system sees the major labels and movie studios sending notices of infringement to ISPs which they in turn forward to their subscribers. Records of these notices are then held in a database, which copyright holders in the six-strike scheme may subsequently use in legal action, if they feel that is appropriate.

“The Content Owner Representatives [MPAA / RIAA] or any other member of the Participating Content Owners Group may use such reports or data as the basis for seeking a Subscriber’s identity through a subpoena or order or other lawful process,” the agreement reads.

Trouble is, any data on file is at risk of being accessed by a third party if they can convince a judge they have good reason to obtain it. And that’s exactly what the largest filer of copyright complaints in the United States is now attempting to do.

Malibu Media is well-known as a filer of many lawsuits against alleged file-sharers. Indeed, earlier this week the company was featured in an article which confirmed its status as the most prolific filer of copyright lawsuits in the entire United States.

In a case which has been documented by FightCopyrightTrolls since its initial February 2013 filing, Malibu has been struggling to pin an infringement on Kelley Tashiro, a middle-aged female nurse from Indianapolis. Faced with an uphill battle, Malibu has now turned to Tashiro’s ISP, Comcast, to find out what information it holds on her.

Perhaps inevitably, Malibu is attempting to find out whether or not the IP address allocated to Tashiro has ever been subject to infringement allegations by other copyright holders. In addition to details of any DMCA notices forwarded, Malibu has asked a judge to order the release of data being held as part of the Copyright Alerts System.

“DMCA notices and six strike notices are relevant because these notices may prove a pattern of infringement or notice that infringement is occurring or both,” Malibu writes in its motion.

In an indication of just how desperate Malibu has become, the company also wants details of Tashiro’s bandwidth consumption, as if that somehow indicates whether she is an infringer or not.

“Bandwidth usage is relevant because people who are heavy BitTorrent users use significantly more bandwidth than normal internet users,” the company’s sweeping generalization reads.

In summary, Malibu points out to the court that without this and other items of information from Comcast they have no chance of winning the case, another indication of how flimsy IP address-only evidence is now being viewed.

Whether Comcast will comply or not remains to be seen. A similar case in April 2013 which demanded information from Verizon was subsequently dropped.

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

Every week Google processes millions of DMCA takedown requests, submitted by copyright holders from all over the world.

In most cases the requests are legitimate, but every now and then they also target pages that don’t link to pirated content. As a result some websites have their URLs removed from Google in error, which in turn leads to a decrease in visitors.

This has now happened to Rapidgator.net, one of the largest file-hostings sites on the Internet. For the past few weeks the site has had nearly all its URLs de-listed, including its homepage.

The request responsible for this overbroad censorship was issued by the Publishers Association, a UK-based trade group. Aside from the Rapidgator URLs, the takedown notice in question lists several other pages that have nothing to do with their copyrighted works.

Hoping to get its URLs restored Rapidgator submitted a counter-notification to Google, but several weeks have passed since and the problem remains. TorrentFreak spoke with Rapidgator operator Mike, who is concerned about the lack of response and the ease at which sites can be removed from Google.

“With the procedure Google has in place now any website can be de-listed by anybody,” Mike says.

“When Google receives a DMCA notice they remove URLs within a day, but if you want to have them restored it can take weeks or months. We think that they should restore URLs in the same timeframe as the original removals,” he adds.

Rapidgator’s operator understand that Google can’t process every URL manually due to the massive amount of DMCA notices. However, he believes that they could at least flag requests to remove the homepages of websites so these can be manually verified.

This isn’t the first time that Rapidgator has lost nearly all its listings in Google. The same thing happened late last year and on that occasion it also took several weeks before Google took action, leading to a dip in search traffic for the site.

TorrentFreak asked Google for a comment on the counter-notification process but the company couldn’t say anything about the number of requests it receives, or what the average response time is.

For Rapidgator there’s no other option than to wait until Google responds to its inquiry. In the meantime, only five Rapidgator pages remain indexed by Google.

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

A few hours ago we reported that City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) managed to shutter FileCrop, a popular file-hosting search engine.

FileCrop wasn’t the only site that disappeared. The same happened to the sports streaming portal Cricfree.tv, which is a fairly popular site with millions of visitors a month.

However, Cricfree didn’t stay down for long. The owner of the site quickly put up a new domain, Cricfree.eu, and after a few hours the site was up and running again.

TorrentFreak talked to the Cricfree owner who told us that the police nor his registrar reached out to him about the issue.

“They never alerted me that they were going to suspend the domain. I only received a few emails from the anti-piracy outfit FACT, but I didn’t think these were serious,” he says.

It remains unclear how the police was able to seize the domain. Previously they’ve contacted several registrars with a request to suspend several piracy related domain names, and it is likely that this happened here as well.

Cricfree’s domain name registrar is Internet.bs and the owner is hoping to get the domain name back, since the domain name was “seized” without a proper court order.

For now, however, the site will continue to operate on cricfree.eu and skysport.tv, where traffic is picking up again according to the owner.

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