In 2012 Sweden’s Supreme Court announced its decision not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running criminal case against the founders of The Pirate Bay.

This meant that the previously determined jail sentences and fines handed out to Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström would stand.

Both Svartholm and Lundström have completed their jail sentences, but Peter Sunde decided not to give up without a fight. First he submitted his case to the European Court of Human Rights (EHCR), and after that was rejected he tried again at the Swedish Supreme Court this year.

A childhood friend of Sunde took on the case as part of his legal training, helped by several law professors. Despite an earlier rejection by the Supreme Court, the legal team believed that there was a good chance the case would be re-opened based on recent EU rulings and regulations.

Today, however, the Supreme Court announced that it will not re-open the case. According to Swedish Radio the Court ruled that there is no new information that requires them to revisit their earlier decision.

TorrentFreak spoke to Peter Sunde, who isn’t really surprised by the outcome. His friend felt that justice would be served, but he never got his hopes up too high.

“It doesn’t affect me that much, it’s just more evidence that Sweden has no intention to follow the law or EU-regulations at all,” Sunde said.

Sunde will now continue working on several of his startups, including the NSA-proof messenger app Heml.is, for which he raised more than $150,000 through a crowd-funding campaign.

In addition, Sunde is also one of the Finnish Pirate Party candidates for the European Parliament elections later this week. If he is elected, Sunde hopes to do something about the negative effects of copyright law in Europe, something he is personally familiar with.

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

Day in and day out dozens of millions of people use BitTorrent to share files online. Most of these transfers are coordinated by public trackers such as OpenBitTorrent, but torrents also work without trackers thanks to Mainline DHT.

The BitTorrent Mainline DHT creates a network of users through which people can find peers sharing the same file. This makes the BitTorrent ecosystem more stable, especially since public trackers tend to go offline every now and then.

Since it was first introduced nearly a decade ago the BitTorrent DHT has been growing steadily. However, this changed last week when researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology noticed a dramatic increase in peers.

“Since 2010, the DHT size has been relatively stable. It grew from 6 million to around 10 million, but that’s it,” says Konrad Jünemann, researcher of the Decentralized Systems and Network Services research group.

“This suddenly changed last week we saw a sudden increase in participating peers. I double checked our measurement engine, but everything seems to be fine, so the DHT was indeed growing,” he adds.

As it turns out, the number of peers in the DHT had more than doubled in a few days. The graph below shows this surge in peers as observed by the German research group.

Initially the researchers were clueless about the sudden increase. There were a few possible explanations, such as malware distributors using the network, or changes in a popular BitTorrent client for example. After contacting several developers, they learned that the latter was the most plausible option.

Arvid Norberg, one of the developers of BitTorrent’s uTorrent client, explained that a recent change in client may have resulted in a bug which resulted in “flapping” node IDs.

“We have some indications that this is caused by an issue in our node-ID function. We have had a mechanism to tie the node ID to one’s external IP address. We’ve had this feature for a while but made some tweaks to it recently,” Norberg wrote on a mailing list.

If this is indeed the case, then it could cause serious performance issues for the DHT, as people would get IP-addresses that are no longer online. Currently, however, there is no evidence that this is indeed the case.

TorrentFreak asked BitTorrent Inc. for more details early this week, but this far our inquiries remained unanswered. The same is true for a bug report from a user in the support forums.

Perhaps the mystery will be solved in the days to come.

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

Over the years video game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment has released many popular titles including World of Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft.

As is the case with most games there is always a small subgroup of players who are happy to deceive their opponents to get an edge. Through hacks and cheats these players are able to dominate the competition with minimal effort.

In an attempt to stamp out this type of abuse, this week Blizzard filed a lawsuit against the programmers behind the popular Starcraft II “ValiantChaos MapHack.” While the true motive for the suit has no connection to piracy, most of the alleged charges are related to copyright infringement.

In a complaint filed at a federal court in California, Blizzard notes that the cheat ruins the fun for other players. The true identities of the programmers who make and sell the hack are unknown at this point but Blizzard wants them to stop distributing the software.

“The hacks and cheats made available by Defendants, including a product known as the ‘ValiantChaos MapHack’, modify the StarCraft II online game experience, to the detriment of legitimate StarCraft II users, and thus to Blizzard itself,” the complaint reads.

“Defendants create and sell their unlawful software products with the knowledge that they are facilitating and promoting users to infringe Blizzard’s copyrights, to breach their contracts with Blizzard, and to otherwise violate Blizzard’s rights.”

The complaint lists several counts of copyright infringement for using Blizzard’s work without permission, as well as breach of contract for violating the game’s terms of use.

At the time of writing the ValiantChaos MapHack remains for sale online. Users can buy the hack by joining the forum, and paying a “donation” of $62.50 for access to the VIP section of the site. The hack has been available for a few years already and during this time has generated tens of thousands of dollars in sales.

Blizzard doesn’t mention the sales aspect extensively, but focuses on how these cheats devalue the game. This causes serious harm to the the company, Blizzard says, as it results in less sales of StarCraft II add-ons and expansions.

“Among other things, Defendants irreparably harm the ability of Blizzard’s legitimate customers to enjoy and participate in the competitive online experience of StarCraft II. That, in turn, causes users to grow dissatisfied with the game, lose interest in the game, and communicate that dissatisfaction,” Blizzard informs the court.

“This results in lost sales of the game and/or ‘add-on’ packs and expansions thereto, as well as harm to Blizzard’s reputation, the value of its game, and other harms to Blizzard,” the company adds.

Blizzard asks the court to issue an injunction against the maker of the hack, which among other things would prevent them from distributing the software. In addition, they demand damages for the copyright infringements carried out by the programmers and their users, which add up to millions of dollars.

Although Blizzard emphasizes that users of the cheat are also copyright infringers, there’s no indication that they will target individual users. Instead, it appears that the company is mostly interested in making the cheating software unavailable.

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

Complying with elements of the DMCA and its European equivalents is an important measure in the operations of many thousands of websites. Not being held liable for infringements carried out by users has allowed entrepreneurs to develop countless user-generated content projects.

For many rightsholders, however, the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA and similar legislation are being abused by ‘pirate’ sites. While these sites take down content when asked thereby gaining protection, they are also accused of turning a blind eye to large-scale infringing content elsewhere on their indexes.

In Russia, rightsholders say they face similar problems, even though the country introduced tough anti-piracy legislation in 2013.

Following a legitimate complaint, current law allows for content to be blocked at the ISP level if site operators fail to respond to takedown requests in a timely manner. However, many sites – including popular torrent sites indexing huge amounts of infringing content – have been complying with the notices as required, thus avoiding punitive measures. The government now wants to close this loophole.

Amendments to copyright law being prepared by a working group at the Ministry of Communications foresee a regime in which sites can be blocked by court order, even if they comply with takedown notices.

“Unscrupulous illegal sites should be blocked entirely,” Ministry of Communications deputy Alexei Volin told Izvestia.

According to experts familiar with the discussions, rightsholders want the government to introduce the concept of a “malicious site”. However, the puzzle faced by the Ministry is the development of criteria which will enable it to classify sites into pirate and non-pirate categories.

One option is to classify a site as pirate when it violates copyright and distributes content for profit. Rightsholders say they want either element alone to be enough.

Other amendments under consideration would see site owners and hosting providers forced to restrict access not only to copyright-infringing content, but also to “information necessary to obtain it using the Internet,” a clear reference to torrents.

But according to Irina Levova, director at the Strategic Internet Projects Research Institute, this amendment goes too far.

“The wording in the law is incorrect,” Leva says. “Under it falls even ordinary hyperlinks, including those that are placed in search engines. We believe that this phrase should be abolished.”

But according to Leonid Agronov, general director of the National Federation of the Music Industry, hosting actual content or links to it amounts to the same problem.

“The business of a torrent tracker is not very different from the business of any site that hosts pirated content,” Agronov says. “They all offer access to content in exchange for viewing ads or paying for higher download speeds. For us, the rights holders, these sites are indistinguishable, regardless of their technical features.”

The amendments are set to be presented to the government on Friday.

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

BitTorrent trackers are no strangers to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Pretty much all sites of a respectable size are targeted on occasion by unknown sources.

In most cases these attacks don’t last too long, but every now and then they get more serious. For example, in recent weeks several French torrent sites have had to deal with a serious flood of unwanted connections, rendering the sites and trackers in question unavailable.

The Morocco-based provider Genious Communications hosts several of the affected torrent sites, including smartorrent.com and cpasbien.pe. To find out more TorrentFreak contacted CEO Hamza Aboulfeth, who told us that the attacks come in all shapes and sizes.

“The biggest attack was on smartorrent.com where we had over 30 Gbit/s which gave us no choice but nullroute the IP at the moment of the attack,” Aboulfeth says.

The attacks range from common HTTP floods to UDP and SYN flood attacks and huge botnets. As a result, Genious has migrated several clients over to a specialized DDoS protection setup.

“We have our own professional DDoS protection system so we had to move some of our clients to it, the rest just moved to Cloudflare where they offer decent protection for a reasonable price,” Aboulfeth says.

The biggest challenge is to mitigate the attacks on trackers as these are not dealing with regular HTTP requests, but so far the company has managed to take the edge off the assaults.

The attacks started a few weeks ago and have been continuing ever since at varying intensities. They are all targeted at several of Genious Communications’ file-sharing related clients, but the identities of the individuals behind them remains a mystery.

Aboulfeth hasn’t heard of any cash demands, which excludes the extortion scheme several other sites were subjected to earlier this year. According to the CEO, it’s most likely that competitors or an anti-piracy group are behind the attacks.

“I think the attacks are most likely coming from competitors or some copyright agency,” Aboulfeth says.

“One common thing is they are all French torrent websites, and I know for a fact that I have been contacted by someone hosted somewhere else claiming that one of our clients is attacking him, and of course my client is denying that,” he adds.

In the long term the sites have no other option than to make sure that they can cope with the DDoS attacks. In most cases they eventually pass, without their victims ever knowing what their purpose was.

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