Last year following a failed appeal to the Supreme Court in Sweden, Gottfrid Svartholm was extradited to Denmark. There he stands accused of hacking into computers belonging to IT company CSC.

The nature of the Pirate Bay founder’s detention has been highly controversial. His reputation as a master hacker led authorities to treat him with fear, placing him in solitary confinement, severely restricting his interaction with other inmates and limiting his access to books. Magazines sent in from outside were also off-limits, since prison authorities feared they may contain encrypted messages.

These extraordinary conditions prompted the creation of a petition by the Free Anakata Campaign. After a gentle start the protest gathered momentum hitting 50,000 and then 100,000 signatures. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Gottfrid’s mother Kristina said that the petition had put tremendous pressure on the authorities, leading them to ease her son’s book restrictions and interactions with other inmates.

After exceeding 106,000 signatures the petition was delivered to the Danish government yesterday. The Danish Pirate Party had the honor of handing it over to Minister of Justice Karen Hækkerup.

The Internet petition, which reached 106,538 signatures, was printed out onto 2,600 sheets of paper and presented to the minister in a box covered in pirate wrapping paper.

“In my eyes he is in solitary confinement for no reason. I mean, he is being treated worse than a serial killer,” said Rolf Bjerre from the Pirate Party after the handover.

DR.DK legal correspondent Claus Buhr said that Svartholm’s adverse conditions are a product of the authorities’ lack of experience of dealing with someone with the Swede’s capabilities.

“If he was a killer or suspected of drug crime, they are accustomed to those kind of suspects and know what they’re capable of. However, a possible super-hacker is someone the Danish police very rarely have to deal with,” Buhr said.

“This is probably the reason why he is being held under the strictest lock and key, simply because it’s not fully understood what he can do, and whether he’s able to get information in and out of jail.”

Even though Gottfrid has been held in Denmark for more than five months, the investigation against him is still underway with no immediate end in sight. In the meantime he’s being allowed just one hour a day outside and a single controlled visit with his mother, who travels from Sweden to Denmark each week to see him.

The case is expected to go to trial in the early days of September 2014 and it’s hoped the petition will ease his conditions before then.

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

Back in January, Quentin Tarantino discovered that a copy of an unreleased screenplay to potential future movie The Hateful Eight had been made available to the public without his permission. He’d shared the document with six individuals and either one of them – or someone linked to them – had leaked it.

Shortly after dozens of news articles appeared online, news site Gawker reported that following a “temper tantrum” Tarantino had decided that he would no longer make a Hateful Eight movie. The next day The Wrap reported it had obtained a copy of the script and within hours it was being made available by the AnonFiles.com file-hosting site. From there it appeared on Scribd.com, viewable to millions of visitors.

But while people would have to find the script themselves if they were interested, Gawker later made the process significantly easier by publishing an article titled “Here is the Leaked Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight Script” containing links to both AnonFiles and Scribd. Gawker refused to take down the links when asked, although both AnonFiles and Scribd both removed the file.

Through his legal team an enraged Tarantino accused Gawker of encouraging copyright infringement, but Gawker fought back saying that in the course of its reporting the links were protected under “fair use” doctrine. On January 27, Tarantino’s lawyers filed a complaint alleging copyright infringement against 10 ‘Doe’ defendants and contributory copyright infringement against Gawker.

Yesterday, however, the lawsuit received a substantial setback.

In order for a defendant to be found liable for contributory copyright infringement there must first be evidence of direct infringement carried out by others. In other words, to proceed against Gawker, Tarantino’s lawyers needed to show that visitors to Gawker’s site who read the article in question actually clicked the links to AnonFiles or Scribd and went on to commit direct infringement on the script.

“However, nowhere in these paragraphs or anywhere else in the Complaint does Plaintiff allege a single act of direct infringement committed by any member of the general public that would support Plaintiff’s claim for contributory infringement. Instead, Plaintiff merely speculates that some direct infringement must have taken place,” wrote U.S. District Judge John F. Walter in his ruling.

Adding more problems for Tarantino, the Judge said that even if there were allegations that individuals had accessed the links in the Gawker article in order to read the script, that would still not support Tarantino’s claim for contributory infringement. Citing a previous case involving adult magazine publisher Perfect 10, Judge Walter said that simply viewing the script would not be enough.

“Even if Plaintiff alleged that individuals accessed the links contained in Defendant’s article in order to read Plaintiff’s script, such an allegation would still not support Plaintiff’s contributory infringement claim against Defendant. Simply viewing a copy of allegedly infringing work on one’s own computer does not constitute the direct infringement necessary to support Plaintiff’s contributory infringement claim,” the Judge wrote.

“In addition, based on the allegations of the Complaint, there can be little doubt that Plaintiff has a strong claim for direct infringement against Doe 1, a/k/a AnonFiles.com. However, Plaintiff has not alleged and it is highly unlikely that Plaintiff will be able to plead facts demonstrating that Defendant somehow induced, caused, or materially contributed to the infringing conduct by publishing a link to the screenplay after it was wrongfully posted on AnonFiles.com.”

In light of the above, Gawker’s ‘fair use’ defense was not addressed.

“The Court concludes that the fair use arguments, albeit persuasive and potentially dispositive, are premature and the Court declines to consider those arguments until Plaintiff has had an opportunity to demonstrate that he can state a viable claim for contributory copyright infringement,” the decision reads.

While round one goes to Gawker, Tarantino’s legal team now has until May 1 to submit its amended complaint and stage a comeback.

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

Last week, just two months after the USTR published its 2013 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets, a Chinese online video company hoped to please local and US authorities by ditching its pirate reputation.

Shenzhen QVOD Technology, the company behind Kuaibo.com, made the 2013 USTR report and also incurred the displeasure of the Chinese with its alleged facilitation of online piracy. Aiming to make amends, a few days ago the company announced that it would block piracy in its software tools and invest in licensed content.

By yesterday, however, Kuaibo/QVOD’s overtures were being brushed aside when police in Shenzhen raided its offices. The photograph below, published by 91shouce.com, claims to show the raid in progress.

Details on what happened during the raid are unclear, but local news reports suggest that police isolated employees and told them not to use phones or computers.

In a statement the company rejected claims that people had been arrested and equipment seized, adding that it was operating as usual.

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

Well over two years have passed since Megaupload was taken offline, and the U.S. Government still hasn’t found a way to serve the Hong Kong based company.

During all this time the Hong Kong authorities have kept Megaupload’s assets locked up, as part of a restraint order the U.S. Government had demanded.

In a move to unfreeze these assets, Megaupload has now filed an application in a Hong Kong court. Through this application Megaupload wants the local Department of Justice to set aside the restraint order.

According to Megaupload, the company should no longer be held hostage based on an order that was issued after a seemingly unlawful request by U.S. authorities. The restraint order has basically shut down the company by freezing all its bank accounts and other assets.

Among other things, Megaupload says it wants to use the assets to reunite former users with the personal files they lost access to after the raid.

“Over two years later, the US DOJ has yet to serve Megaupload or initiate substantive criminal proceedings against it, trapping Megaupload in a state of criminal limbo,” Megaupload’s global litigation counsel Ira Rothken says in a comment.

“During that time, the restraint order has prevented Megaupload from conducting business or paying bandwidth expenses needed to return cloud storage data to users. Needless to say, Megaupload and its cloud storage users have been severely prejudiced by the US Department of Justice’s conduct,” he adds.

Megaupload believes that the restraint order was issued unlawfully, in part because the U.S. Government failed to disclose how the Hong Kong company would be served.

“As further argued in Megaupload’s application, the US DOJ’s inability to prosecute Megaupload over this long period of time is grounds to discharge the injunction independent from the US Department of Justice’s nondisclosure,” Rothken says.

To back up its request, Megaupload has submitted affidavits from two criminal law experts. Richard Davis, who is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and member of the Watergate Prosecution Force, and Stanford Law School professor Robert Weisberg.

Earlier today, the High Court of Hong Kong ordered the local Department of Justice to respond to Megaupload’s allegation. This response has to be filed early June, after which the court will decide on the issue.

If Megaupload wins its case the door will be open for a multi-billion dollar civil claim. Megaupload was previously valued at two billion dollars and before the raid was planning a listing on the U.S. stock market.

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

If one had to single out a current TV show that is most-often related with Internet piracy it would have to be Game of Thrones. The show has been shared by millions of people and just last week broke yet another swarm record with 193,418 simultaneous sharers.

There has been much discussion over HBO’s stance to this massive piracy. Last year, HBO programming president Michael Lombardo described the unauthorized downloading as “a compliment“, a statement that was followed up by plans to smarten up release schedules.

The theory at HBO parent Time Warner is that while piracy is largely undesirable, it helps to generate buzz and reduces advertising expenditure. The company also believes that when fans enthuse over Game of Thrones it’s excellent word-of-mouth promotion, so that makes today’s news even more unusual.

The developing situation involves fan site ScreenCapped.net. The site hosts user-uploaded screenshots of popular movies and TV shows which its users transform into fan-created artwork. The piece below is based on the The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

The site has a pretty large archive of screenshots from dozens of movies and TV shows, which until recently included HBO’s Game of Thrones and True Blood. But in a surprise move HBO has now accused the site of engaging in copyright infringement and ordered it to remove screenshots of these key titles. Screenshots from both shows no longer appear on the site.

Worried at the implications of the HBO DMCA notice, a petition has been launched on Change.org in support of the site and requesting that HBO reconsiders its move. In the petition, which at the time of writing has already received more than 2,000 signatures, ScreenCapped operator Raina Stephens lays out her request to HBO’s anti-piracy director Jake Snyder.

“The fans and staff of Screencapped.net ask that you remove the DMCA against Screencapped.net so that the site may continue to provide HBO fans with high quality screencaps for non-profit use,” Stephens writes.

Users of the site have been expressing their disappointment on Change.org.

“Come on, guys. You’re going to slap a DMCA claim on ONE site out of HUNDREDS for hosting screen captures?! It’s not like they’re hosting downloads of your episodes!” user Mandi S writes.

“Drop the claim so I can get my favorite screencap gallery back! How do you think we fan artists make those amazing arts that you KNOW you love. Get real and drop the suit, PLEASE.”

Another user, Alessia Colognesi from Italy, questions whether the move makes financial sense to HBO.

“It’s ludicrous to think that watching/having screencaps will take away from the income of money that you might have. The only reasons why screencaps exist is to let creative people share their love for something making graphics, designs and such; and that’s a good thing because that way other people can take a look at a show and maybe start watching it. Go do something better with your time,” Colognesi concludes.

While the precise motivation behind the takedown remains unclear, it’s difficult to argue with the two key points above. ScreenCapped isn’t offering the actual shows for download and discouraging fans from getting even more invested in a show via innocuous-looking screenshots seems to run counter to Time Warner/HBO’s “buzz is good” plan.

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