In 2008, Universal, Sony, EMI, Warner and “Spanish RIAA” Promusicae (Productores de Música de España) joined forces to sue MP2P Technologies, a company created by Pablo Soto, the brains behind Blubster, the “Spanish Napster” file-sharing software.

The record companies said that Soto had designed his Blubster, Piolet and Manolito software with the intent of providing a platform for users to pirate music while he generated profit. This, the labels said, amounted to unfair competition in the market. Soto should pay them 13 million euros ($18m) in damages, the labels argued.

Following years of litigation, in 2011 a Madrid court handed defeat to the labels by declaring Soto’s technology neutral. While his users may have infringed copyright, Soto was not responsible for that, the court said. Furthermore, since Soto wasn’t in the record business and the labels weren’t in the file-sharing business, the unfair competition claim was also dismissed.

After investing so much time in the case, the labels weren’t prepared to concede defeat. The case went to the Madrid Court of Appeals which has just made its decision public. It’s a decisive win for Soto and a big loss for the labels.

“[Soto's] activity is not only neutral, and perfectly legal, moreover it is protected by article 38 of our Constitution,” the Court wrote in its ruling.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Soto says that the Court saw no problem with sharing technology and discovered no plan “to sink or unbalance the recording industry” or obstruct the development of its business.

“The court affirmed — yet again — that [the creation of sharing technologies] is not an act of looting, unfair competition or unfair benefit from others’ effort,” Soto informs TF.

The Spaniard, who has been developing software since he was 16 years old, adds that the win is not only good news for him, but also for others seeking to innovate.

“This clears the path for more opportunities to bring leading edge technologies to the marketplace and no longer be distracted by misguided legal tactics from the copyright conglomerates. We really appreciate and thank our loyal following, especially among the readers at TorrentFreak.”

Soto’s lawyer, David Bravo, who described the ruling as having a “very strong foundation”, said developers will now be able to go about their business free from “inventive legal interpretations that define the very creator of a file-sharing tool as the responsible of copyright infringement.”

In celebration of the victory, Soto has released a brand new version of his Blubster software, for the first time powered by BitTorrent.

“While we have continued innovating with Torrents.fm, we can now also focus once again on further creating and offering advanced P2P technology across our other networks with this new version of Blubster just launched today,” Soto told TF.

Traditionally Windows only, Blubster will soon debut on both Linux and Mac.

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

In common with many other countries around the world, downloading music and movies is hugely popular in the Netherlands. Surveys estimate that a third of the population downloads copyrighted content without paying for it.

Contrary to most other countries, however, downloading and copying movies and music for personal use is not punishable by law. In return, the Dutch compensate rightsholders through a “piracy levy” on writable media, hard drives and electronic devices with storage capacity, including smartphones.

In a landmark ruling, the European Court of Justice has declared this system unlawful. The case was brought by several electronics stores and manufacturers, whose products were made more expensive because of the levy.

In its judgment the Court held that the levy system is a threat to the internal market and that it puts copyright holders at an unfair disadvantage.

“If Member States were free to adopt legislation permitting, inter alia, reproductions for private use to be made from an unlawful source, the result of that would clearly be detrimental to the proper functioning of the internal market,” the Court noted in a briefing on the verdict today.

“Similarly, the objective of proper support for the dissemination of culture may not be achieved by sacrificing strict protection of copyright or by tolerating illegal forms of distribution of counterfeited or pirated works.”

As a result the Court ruled that the Dutch system, in which people are permitted to copy files from pirated sources, can not be tolerated.

The Court believes that “legalizing” file-sharing encourages the distribution of counterfeit and pirated works. In addition, it explains that the system poses “an unfair disadvantage to the copyright holders.”

The Court further notes that the Dutch system also punishes those who buy their digital movies and music from authorized sources, as they also pay the piracy levy on the devices and media they record them to.

“All users are indirectly penalized since they necessarily contribute towards the compensation payable for the harm caused by private reproductions made from an unlawful source. Users consequently find themselves required to bear an additional, non-negligible cost in order to be able to make private copies,” the Court notes.

Today’s judgment is also likely to affect other European countries with similar systems, such as Switzerland where downloading pirated works for personal use is also permitted.

Ironically, copyright holders may be worse off if the Netherlands does indeed outlaw downloading pirated material. This would result in millions of euros in lost revenue through the piracy levy, which may be hard to match by an increase in legal sales, if there’s any increase at all.

Update: The Dutch Government confirmed to Tweakers that downloading copyrighted material for personal use is no longer allowed, effective immediately.

The Government also clarified that in general offenses will be prosecuted through civil cases, not criminal ones. We have updated this article accordingly.

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

In recent years many academics have researched the link between Internet piracy and the revenues of the major music labels, with varying results. Some have concluded that there is no adverse impact of piracy on sales, others argue that there’s a moderate negative relation.

While the music industry and many researchers seek answers in the piracy realm, other drastic changes are too often ignored. The availability of free on-demand music through legal services such as YouTube for example.

Researchers from Fairfield University and the University of Colorado have started to fill this gap with a new study. In their working paper the researchers examine the effect of Warner Music’s 2009 YouTube blackout on the record label’s album sales.

At the time, Warner pulled all their music from the video hosting service due to a licensing dispute. The researchers use this event to compare the sales of Warner’s artists listed in the Billboard Album 200, to those from labels that still had their videos on YouTube.

The results are intriguing, to say the least. After controlling for several variables, such as music genre and album specific characteristics, they found that Warner’s top artists sold many more albums during the blackout.

“We showed that the removal of content from YouTube had a causal impact on album sales by upwards of on average 10,000 units per week for top albums,” the paper reads.

According to the researchers, these results indicate that YouTube doesn’t always serve as a promotional tool as many claim, certainly not for the top artists.

“While a great deal has been said about the potential role of these service in promoting and discovering new artists and music, our results cast some doubt on this widely believed notion, at least with regards to top selling albums [...], they write.

The researchers estimate that for the top albums the total in lost sales because of YouTube equals roughly $1 million per year. This is a significant percentage of the label’s total revenue.

It is hard to say, however, that YouTube is hurting overall revenue, as the advertising revenue it receives from Google also brings in a significant sum of money.

The results, which are largely driven by the top selling albums, suggest that there is no promotional effect of YouTube on album sales. In addition, there is no effect on Google searches for the artists in question either. In other words, YouTube doesn’t mainly hurt album sales.

“Our findings suggest that sales displacement effect can be real without a promotional effect. That is, the people listening on YouTube appear to be, to some extent people who would know about this album anyway, but may not buy it because of YouTube,” the researchers conclude.

The findings are interesting for a variety of reasons. Although they don’t prove that YouTube costs the music industry more than it brings in, it clearly shows that there are more factors that can explain people’s shift in music buying habits than piracy alone.

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

Speaking with TorrentFreak late last week, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) clarified the stages behind Operation Creative, an ongoing campaign aimed at disrupting the activities of unauthorized content sites.

“At the first instance of a website being identified, evidenced and confirmed as providing copyright infringing content, the site owner is contacted by officers at the PIPCU and offered the opportunity to engage with the police, to correct their behavior and to begin to operate legitimately,” a spokesperson explained.

“In the contact sent to the website owners PIPCU clearly states that if a website fails to comply and engage with the police, then a variety of other tactical options may be used including; contacting the domain registrar to seek suspension of the site, disrupting advertising revenue and advert replacement.”

But while disruption is clearly on the agenda, the police can also rely on the traditional investigation and arrest process. Earlier this week, that’s exactly what they did.

Sometime on Monday morning, detectives from PIPCU carried out an arrest of a 26-year-old man in the UK. He was detained in York, England, a city located around four hours drive from PIPCU’s base in the City of London.

The man was arrested on suspicion of operating a number of streaming-related domains.

At the time of writing PIPCU has not responded to our requests for comment [Update: PIPCU comment below], but TF has discovered that earlier this week sports streaming domains BoxingGuru.co.uk, boxingguru.eu, boxingguru.tv and nutjob.eu were all suspended.

The sites currently redirect to a page carrying a statement indicating they are under investigation for online copyright infringement. Police have not yet publicly linked their closure with the arrest on Monday.

The logos of four key Operation Creative partners – BPI, FACT, IFPI and The Publishers Association – are displayed on the page although it seems highly likely that FACT were behind the recommendation to investigate the sites closed down this week.

All domains with ‘boxing’ in their titles linked to the world’s biggest boxing events. This would have put the sites on a collision course with FACT members including British Sky Broadcasting, BT Sport and cable provider Virgin Media, all of which generate revenue from that market.

Nutjob.eu linked to streams of a variety of sporting events including soccer, putting the site firmly in the cross-hairs of the powerful Premier League. Other links would certainly have proven unpopular with the NHL, NBA and ESPN.

While the sites certainly embedded videos and provided links to unauthorized content hosted elsewhere, their operator has always maintained he has nothing to do with placing the content online. Whether that holds true – or even if the police care at this stage – will be revealed as the investigation unfolds.

FACT did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

Update: “A 26 year old man was arrested on Monday 7 April by detectives from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) in York, on suspicion of hosting a number of websites allowing people to illegally stream TV and films,” a PIPCU spokesperson told TF.

“A number of websites have been suspended and the suspect was taken to a local police station for questioning. The investigation is ongoing.”

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

Unless you’ve had an Internet outage lasting a month, news of the Popcorn Time app will have appeared on your screen on several occasions. It dramatically burst onto the scene in March and stirred up a huge controversy, but just a handful of weeks later it was abandoned by its creators.

Being open source the project was easy for others to pick up but without the original GetPopCornTi.me URL it was always going to be difficult for new project leaders to immediately show they were the ‘real deal’.

Nevertheless, today there are two main Popcorn Time replacements, both of which call themselves Popcorn Time. To get some clarity, TorrentFreak caught up with the people behind both projects to find out about their plans. For simplicity’s sake we’ll refer to them by their current URLs – popcorn-time.tv and time4popcorn.eu.

Popcorn-Time.tv

Popcorn-Time.tv’s website has the same look and feel as the original Popcorn Time and offers four version of the software – Windows and Mac plus Linux 32 and 64 bit. Everything is open source and the project page can be found on Github. So where did this group originate?

“Our project started right after the original devs abandoned their project,” a Popcorn-Time.tv dev told TorrentFreak.

“I happened to be working on a new feature on a fork at that moment. When the devs closed their project, people started asking what should be happening and I pointed them to my repository where I was working on fixing everything. I end up being the most-used fork after a few hours.”

Shortly after another dev who had worked on the original Popcorn Time project agreed to merge his ongoing fork with what would soon become Popcorn-Time.tv. Together they released three new versions of Popcorn Time – 0.2.6, 0.2.7 and 0.2.8, the current version.

“A few days ago, however, the other developer went missing, the main repository and its website were shutdown as well. So I then set up a new organization (popcorn-org) and a new website (popcorn-time.tv) to keep going,” the Popcorn-Time.tv dev explained.

“In the general picture I would say we fit as the original Popcorn Time continuation. We haven’t added many features yet since we are working on getting everything more stable and usable by everyone. TV series and more are planned for the next month.”

Popcorn-Time.tv also informs TF that work is underway to allow their software to save downloaded movies for later viewing and that an upcoming rewrite and release of version 0.3.0 in around two weeks will sport a new UI.

Sneak preview: New Popcorn-Time UI

Add Chromecast and multi-torrent tracker support on top and things are looking exciting for this version of the infamous software.

Time4Popcorn.eu

Although it has a similar feel, Time4Popcorn.eu’s website differs slightly from the original. It is less complex and carries just a single version (Windows) of the Popcorn Time software. Which version isn’t clear since its been repackaged by the site and currently the source is private.

However, speaking with TF the Time4Popcorn.eu team made it clear they have big plans, both on the feature front and in transparency terms.

“We are all Popcorn Time users, and when the original project was taken down it was clear to us that we would not let this technology die, and without hesitation we took the files and put them online for download,” Time4Popcorn.eu explain.

“The great response from the users and the amount of downloads a day made us very excited and we decided to invest our time in improving and preserving Popcorn Time.”

The people behind this version say they are the owners of file-sharing websites with millions of visitors a day. With their experience they want to ensure Popcorn Time stays online “forever.”

“Our knowledge in that field will help us to better understand what the users want and need to enjoy more of Popcorn Time,” they add.

So what next for Time4Popcorn.eu? Big things, apparently, including an imminent mobile version.

“At this very moment, we are working around the clock on the Android version of Popcorn Time and hoping to release it in the next two weeks,” the team reveal.

And, for those worried about the current closed-source, things will change on that front too. Once the mobile version is complete the source code will be published on Github and the community will be invited to help with its development.

“We will also publish our brand new release of the desktop version that will include seeding of the downloaded torrent (the current version does not seed the torrent!), a much faster torrent client and a new video player that will give us the ability to show not only MP4 videos, but all kinds of video formats that will increase the amounts of available torrents,” they add.

The team says that this version will also go open source on the day of release.

“For now, we are not doing anything besides staying up all night and developing this great app,” they conclude.

Conclusion

Having more than one version of one piece of software is certainly not ideal since it’s confusing for users, but at the moment the versions detailed above appear to be key to keeping the Popcorn Time dream alive. Which will win the battle (if they even see it that way) remains to be seen, but of course there’s aways a chance that a merger could be on the cards, if minds meet at the appropriate moment.

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