The MPA’s historical case against Usenet indexing site Newzbin was important on several levels, not least that it encompassed the first successful High Court injunction to have a site blocked at the ISP level.

It all began with a complaint from the studios in 2008, followed in 2009 by legal action. A year later Newzbin was found guilty of copyright infringement and soon collapsed under its £230,000 ($386,300) debt to the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

Shortly after and without a penny paid to the MPA, the site resurrected in the form of Newzbin2, an act which further infuriated the studios. Eventually Newzbin2 also shut down, partly because receiving money from users had became impossible after the MPA sued Kthxbai Ltd, the site’s payment processor.

And here’s why the case refused to die.

In 2012 it was revealed that Kthxbai’s sole director was David Harris, a barrister who defended Newzbin in the site’s original trial but had stepped down when it was discovered that he was actually the owner of Newzbin.

Not only did the MPA then go after Kthxbai and Harris, they also targeted the NZB Foundation, a Panamanian company that owned Harris’ home, and Motors for Movies Limited, a company that owned Harris’ McLaren car.

The MPA said that the £230,000 they were owed from the original Newzbin case was hidden away in these offshore companies. Harris denied that, adding that the NZB Foundation was a legitimate entity created with copyright reform and Usenet R&D in mind.

Furthermore, the MPA said that Harris and former Newzbin operator Chris Elsworth were behind the transfer of source code and databases from the collapsed Newzbin 1 to new kid on the block, Newzbin 2. Thickening the mix further still, the MPA claimed that Harris was none other than Mr White, the shadowy operator/spokesman of the Newzbin2 site.

But despite the big allegations the MPA’s first major bite against Harris and the offshore companies came to nothing. Last year a judge in the High Court ruled that the the studios were not entitled to the profits Newzbin2 had generated from piracy.

Following this ruling, Harris says that Newzbin 1′s Chris Elsworth settled with the studios (Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner, Paramount, Disney and Columbia), providing them with behind-the-scenes evidence in the process.

“Elsworth was once a co-defendant but cut a deal with the MPA on grounds he provide evidence against me,” Harris told TF.

The MPA were clearly going to run to the bitter end with their case and today they reached their goal. In a judgment handed down a few moments ago, David Harris was found liable for the copyright infringing acts of both Newzbin1 and Newzbin2, as well as conspiring to injure the interests of the Hollywood studios by unlawful means.

As a result, Harris is ordered to pay £1.3m ($2.2m) by May 30, 2014.

“I’m naturally very disappointed with the judgment of the High Court if not entirely surprised. I am examining grounds of appeal and I maintain that I have done nothing wrong,” Harris tells TorrentFreak.

“The verdict was based on secret IRC conversation logs produced by Chris Elsworth, the previous operator of Newzbin1. Elsworth was once a co-defendant but who betrayed me to cut a deal with the MPA. I maintain those logs were tampered with.”

Harris said that when he took over Newzbin1 his intention was to transform it into a service that was no longer “wildly unlawful” but one that would still be attractive to users. He also stands by his actions in processing payments for Newzbin2.

“Notwithstanding the judgment of the court it remains my view that Newzbin2 operated lawfully as did my own payment company which took Newzbin2 subscription payments. I am fully convinced I was legally and morally entitled to act as I did,” Harris explains.

Despite the big ruling against him, Harris says he remains committed to the ideals of Newzbin and still has plans for the site’s former users.

“I intend to rebuild that community and to develop services for them; but given the consistent history of legal defeats we’ve had those services will have to be carefully designed, with good independent legal advice, to ensure that there are no future legal risks to me,” he concludes.

One project Harris previously outlined was a NSA/GCHQ proof email service. Further announcements on that front will be published on Harris’ blog and Twitter.

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

One of the core pillars of academic research is sharing. By letting other researchers know what you do, ideas are criticized, improved upon and extended.

Unfortunately it’s not always easy for academics to share their work. Most of the top publications are being monetized by major publishers, which means that they are locked behind a paywall that’s not open to the public.

To make their work easier to access, many researchers host copies of their work on their personal profiles, usually hosted by their university. Interestingly, however, this usually means that they are committing copyright infringement.

This is because most of the top publications ask the authors, who work for free, to sign away all their copyrights if they want their paper to be published.

While many journals allow this type of limited non-commercial infringement by the authors, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) clearly doesn’t. The professional association publishes dozens of journals and during the past few weeks began a crack down on “pirating” researchers.

The publisher has hired the piracy protection firm Digimarc to police the internet for articles that are posted in the wild. As a result, universities all across the globe were targeted with takedown notices, which were also sent to Google in some cases.

The list of rogue researchers is long, and includes professors from MIT, Stanford, Northwestern University, University of Washington, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Madison and many international universities.

In the takedown notices Digimarc writes that the publisher has authorized their company “to send DMCA Takedown notices to infringers that illegally post or sell ASCE content.” In other words, ASCE is branding their own authors as pirates because they’re sharing the own work. Below is an example of a takedown notice for a paper written by Ronaldo Borja, Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford.

ASCE takedown notice

In this case the article is still available on the Stanford website, and Google has also refused to take it out of their search results. The same is true for articles published on the websites of MIT and UC Berkeley. However, there are other universities which have indeed disabled access to the articles in question.

Several articles posted on the websites of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Texas have disappeared, for example. University of Michigan Professor Radoslaw Michalowski also removed an article that was linked from his list of publications.

The question remains whether ASCE is wise to target their own authors, and the universities who pay them. After all, the publisher relies on these very people to keep its journals filled. In any case, it’s a sad state of affairs for these researchers to put years of hard work into their articles, only to be told they can’t share them with the world.

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

After taking the Internet by storm earlier this year, Popcorn Time needs very little introduction. The subject of dozens of news articles, this application massively simplifies the viewing of videos online via a Netflix-style interface.

Even after several controversies, including the retirement of both the original team and the developers who subsequently took over the project, the software lives on in various forms.

One of the more successful variants, known as Cuevana Storm, is less known in English-speaking regions since it’s presented in Spanish. However, several users in Germany are now dealing with issues arising from its use.

Yesterday, German lawfirm GGR Law reported that three of its clients had received demands for cash settlements from the Waldorf Frommer law firm based on allegations of copyright infringement. However, during discussions all of the recipients insisted that they had never installed a BitTorrent client on their machines. Instead they had used only streaming services.

The use of unauthorized streaming sites came to the forefront in Germany during December 2013 when users of the RedTube site suddenly started receiving settlement demands from the U & C lawfirm. That provoked a government announcement in January this year that viewing pirated streams is not illegal.

So are these latest settlement demands for 815 euros each just another attempt at illegally extorting cash following legal stream views?

Firstly and importantly, the letter recipients believed that the content in question had been accessed via streaming – certainly, nothing had been accessed via BitTorrent. However, this is where the confusion lies.

While the interfaces of Cuevana Storm / Popcorn time give the impression of server-to-client streaming (like YouTube), both have BitTorrent under the hood. This means that while streaming video to the inbuilt player, content is also being uploaded to other users, just as it would in any regular BitTorrent swarm.

“In the warnings from the Waldorf Frommer law firm, Cuevana.tv isn´t mentioned. Also it is not stated that this is a streaming warning letter,” GGR lawyer Tobias Röttger told TorrentFreak.

“The warning letter is the classic standard file-sharing warning letter, which the law firm Waldorf Frommer has used for some time. The culprit was accused of uploading the file via BitTorrent. I suspect that Waldorf Frommer don´t know that the download was made over Cuevana.tv.”

The above illustrates why it is extremely important for people to have at least a cursory understanding of how software on their machine operates. Streaming video server-to-client or server-to-web browser is either legal or at the least non-detectable in most Western countries. Uploading content to others without permission is generally illegal.

For some the difference between the two will only be discovered after receiving a fine for hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars.

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

The Pirate Bay is without doubt one of the most censored websites on the Internet.

Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and this list continues to expand.

Today, news broke that the French Civil Society of Phonographic Producers has filed for an injunction to prevent ISPs from providing access to The Pirate Bay website and more than hundred of its dedicated proxy sites.

NextINpact reports that the music association, backed by the major movie studios, filed a request in February. The French Internet providers Bouygues, Free, Orange and SFR have since been informed about the court proceedings.

The complaint is based on a provision of the Hadopi law which allows copyright holders to request measures from third-party services to prevent or stop copyright infringements.

Previously, a similar request resulted in a court order requiring Google to censor the search terms ‘Torrent’, ‘RapidShare’ and ‘Megaupload’ from its Instant and Autocomplete services. The court argued that Google indirectly facilitates copyright infringement by failing to filter these terms.

Late last year another court order required Google, Bing and Yahoo to remove 16 video streaming sites from their search results on similar grounds. For now, it is still unclear whether the current legal action to block The Pirate Bay is only targeted at Internet providers, or if search engines are covered as well.

The music labels have clearly learned from the blocking efforts in other countries, where proxy sites quickly picked up the slack. The record labels hope to prevent this from happening in France by listing all the Pirate Bay proxies they could find. Of course, it only takes one uncensored proxy to bypass the measures.

Whether the French blockade, if granted, will be successful remains to be seen. There are still plenty of alternatives and circumvention tools available. This includes TPB’s own PirateBrowser which has been downloaded millions of times since its release last summer.

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

If one would like to gauge the opinions of the world’s leading entertainment companies on Canadian attitudes towards BitTorrent sites, one only needs to look at this year’s International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) submission to the USTR.

“It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Canada remains a magnet for sites whose well-understood raison d’être is to facilitate and enable massive unauthorized downloading of pirated versions of feature films, TV shows, recorded music, entertainment software, and other copyright materials,” the IIPA wrote.

These claims are actually the tip of a very large iceberg. It’s indeed true that some large public torrent sites are at least partly hosted on Canadian soil but mildly under the radar are also dozens of private tracker communities, many of which have happily operated from Canada for many, many years.

The overall impression is that Canada is one of the safest countries in which to put a file-sharing site, but developments yesterday cast a shadow over that notion.

With 10,000 members, Sparvar.org (Sparrows) was a reasonably sized private site. Aimed largely at a Swedish audience, Sparvar had enjoyed Canadian hosting on an IP address belonging to Montreal-based Netelligent Hosting Services, a company that has welcomed many similar sites in the past. Sometime in the past 24 hours, however, Sparvar disappeared from the Internet.

Netelligent servers

Soon after a rumor began circulating that Sparvar had been raided by the police. That version of events has now been confirmed by Scandinavian anti-piracy outfit Rights Alliance.

Update: Netelligent confirm action against Sparvar’s server, but deny any raid took place. See update below.

“Police in Canada have seized a server belonging to the illegal file-sharing service sparvar.org. Sparrows was a secret service with some 10 000 registered members. The server was located in Canada, but the activity was directed mainly against Sweden,” the anti-piracy group says.

“Behind the complaint stands Rights Alliance which has long been monitoring and documenting this business. The investigation is continuing with a focus on identifying the perpetrators. The seized server will be analyzed.”

The action against Sparvar shows that Rights Alliance have long memories. More than two years ago following their action against private site Swepiracy, Rights Alliance warned of further action to come, specifically naming Sparvar as a target.

That the group can conduct its work across borders, especially into Canada where it was believed there was a more torrent friendly environment, will come as a surprise to the many other sites hosted there under similar circumstances.

Canada has been paying more attention to IP issues in recent years, enacting the Copyright Modernization Act in 2012 and subsequently introducing a bill designed to strengthen IP enforcement. Following these efforts the United States shifted Canada from the Priority Watch List to the standard Watch List in this year’s Special 301 Report. How much further Canada is prepared to go remains to be seen.

Update: TorrentFreak has been informed by Netelligent president Mohamed Salamé that the police action against Sparvar was carried out in an orderly cooperative fashion with authorities and was not the product of a raid.

“The fact of the matter is we are a datacenter hosting all sorts of customers downstream from us. And as long as there are no violations of our AUP, we take no actions against torrent sites which are still legal in Canada,” Salamé explains.

“We also don’t get ‘raids’ as we have a very professional relationship with all agencies on the federal and provincial level to address the issues. And by professional relationship I mean that we do not just give out information or hardware just because they are law agencies. We make sure their requests are legitimate and that they have subpoenas, court orders, or warrants before complying with any of their demands.”

A separate source familiar with the case informs TorrentFreak that contrary to claims by Rights Alliance, no hardware was seized. It appears that a server was indeed cloned but that was in response to an official order to preserve data following a request by Swedish and Canadian authorities.

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