While there are undoubtedly file-sharing sites in existence operated as individuals’ sole source of income, many sites are run as side-projects by people in full-time employment elsewhere.

It’s common for sites to be run by people employed in the computing industry or by those still in education and hoping to get into that area in the future. However, a case brought to a conclusion yesterday is probably the first in which the accused was a farmer.

The case, brought by Antipiratbyran and the IFPI, dates back to December 2011 and claims that the defendant, a man from Sweden, was responsible for administering the PowerBits private BitTorrent tracker between 2007 and 2009.

As is so often the case, the plaintiffs in the case claimed that PowerBits was a “commercial file-sharing service” and its admin “regularly received and assimilated payments from the users.”

Those payments took the form of donations from PowerBits users but were framed as direct payment for illegal content by the anti-piracy companies. Making matters worse, the tax authorities said the income had been generated in the course of running an Internet business and as such was both undeclared and untaxed.

In June 2012 the Varberg District Court accepted that the then 34-year-old hadn’t uploaded content himself but had indeed assisted in the copyright infringements of PowerBits users. He was also found guilty of tax and accounting offenses relating to the income generated from the site.

The case went to appeal and yesterday the decision was handed down.

A Court of Appeal judge upheld the earlier ruling and found the now 35-year-old guilty of aiding in copyright infringement. He was also found guilty of accounting fraud and was sentenced to one year in jail.

In addition to the custodial sentence the man was told to pay almost $62,000 against an undeclared income of $126,600 generated from the 65,000 member site during 2007 and 2008, some of which was spent converting a pigsty into a datacenter.

Source: Torrent Site Admin Who Turned Pigsty into Datacenter Jailed for a Year

Responding to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), yesterday the MPAA submitted a new list of “notorious markets.”

In its latest filing the MPAA targets a wide variety of websites which they claim are promoting illegal distribution of movies and TV-shows, with declining incomes and lost jobs in the movie industry as a result.

“Copyright theft is not a victimless crime. The criminals who profit from the most notorious markets throughout the world threaten the very heart of our industry and in doing so they threaten the livelihoods of the people who give it life,” the MPAA writes.

According to the movie industry group, in recent years the piracy landscape has become more fragmented and harder to deal with, as torrent sites, cyberlockers, streaming sites and linking sites continue to gain ground.

“Today the online market has further fragmented and content thieves are taking advantage of new online technologies, with streaming sites and cyberlockers representing a growing share of unlawful conduct.”

“Moreover, a secondary market has arisen in the form of ‘linking sites’, which are professional-looking sites that facilitate content theft by indexing stolen movie and television content hosted on other sites.

Despite these challenges the movie studios are also glad to report one of their recent successes, the takedown of isoHunt.com. Nevertheless, there are still many other sites that remain a problem for the group.

Below is the full list of ‘rogue’ sites and their suspected location as defined by the MPAA in its USTR filing.

BitTorrent / P2P sites:

- ExtraTorrent.com (Ukraine)
- Kickass.to (Canada)
- RuTracker.org (Russia)
- ThePirateBay.sx (Sweden)
- Torrentz.eu (Canada)
- Xunlei.com (China)
- Kuaibo.com (China)

Download/streaming:

- Extabit.com (Netherlands)
- Netload.in (Germany)
- Nowvideo.sx (Netherlands)
- Putlocker.com (United Kingdom)
- Rapidgator.net (Russia)
- Uploaded.net (Netherlands)
- VK.com (Russia)

Linking sites:

- Cuevana.tv (Argentina)
- Primewire.ag (Estonia)
- Filmesonlinegratis.net (Brazil)
- Free-tv-video-online.me (Czech Republic)
- Megafilmeshd.net (Brazil)
- Movie4k.to (Romania)
- Seriesyonkis.com (Spain)
- Solarmovie.eu (Latvia)
- Telona.org (Sweden)
- Yyets.com (China)

Usenet:

- Usenext.com (Germany)

The MPAA provides a short description for every site listed but doesn’t detail why these sites are considered “rogue” while others aren’t. Additionally, some of their other claims are not always accurate.

For example, the MPAA claims that Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm has been extradited to Denmark where he was supposedly sentenced following hacking related charges.

“In 2012, one of the site’s co-founders was found guilty on hacking charges in Sweden after his extradition from Cambodia. He was then extradited to Denmark and sentenced for similar charges in 2013,” MPAA writes.

However, Gottfrid is still in a Swedish prison and filed for an appeal at the Supreme Court this week. He hasn’t even left for Denmark, let alone been tried and sentenced.

Similarly, the MPAA suggests that Pirate Bay’s PirateBrowser is linking to websites that are actually hosted on the Tor network, which is not what it does.

“ThePirateBay.sx promoted its tenth year as an index website by releasing the PirateBrowser, a self-contained portable web browser with preset bookmarks to BitTorrent websites hosted on the TOR network,” MPAA notes.

In a few weeks the US Trade Representative will use the submissions of the MPAA and other interested parties to make up its final list of piracy havens. The U.S. Government will then alert the countries where these sites are operating from, hoping that the local authorities take action.

Source: MPAA Reports Notorious Pirate Sites to U.S. Government

VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, is a huge operation with upwards of 45 million daily users. Thanks to its file-hosting features it’s also one of the world’s largest unauthorized repositories of copyright music.

As a result the site has drawn criticism from record companies around the world and earlier this year was sued by a local label.

In June 2013, Studia Soyuz claimed that VKontakte was infringing its copyrights on more than 60 tracks and should therefore pay damages of 4,575,000 rubles ($144,000) to the label. The case has now been concluded and it didn’t go well for the company.

According to a statement on the website of the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and Leningrad, Soyuz were left high and dry after the court held that Vkontakte could not be held responsible for its users’ infringements.

The Court did recognize that VKontakte’s users had posted several dozen Soyuz-owned tracks to the file-sharing network but noted that none of VKontakte’s operators were directly involved in the “downloading, recording or dissemination” of the music detailed in the lawsuit. As a mere communications platform, VKontakte could not be held liable for its users’ actions provided it took action to remove unauthorized content once informed.

The judgment also considered some of the practicalities of holding the social network liable for the many hundreds of millions of actions carried out by its users every single day.

The Court recognized that it would be impossible to monitor all of the submissions to the site and accepted that assessing whether those submissions were also copyright-infringing would be beyond VKontakte’s abilities. Some artists, Soyuz’s included, had previously uploaded their own songs to the social network.

As a result the Court concluded that if any copyright infringing activity had taken place it would be the responsibility of the users who carried it out and VKontakte could not be held liable.

While the decision will be welcomed by the social networking site, it is believed that VKontakte may soon become a useful ally of the music industry.

Earlier this year the site’s founder said that talks were underway with Universal, Warner and Sony with a view to making their content available to the site’s users as part of a licensing deal.

Any positive agreement along those lines would be welcome by the United States Trade Representative, who previously labeled VKontakte a “rogue site.”

Source: Russian Facebook Not Responsible For Users’ Pirate Music Uploads

In recent years hundreds of thousands of Internet subscribers have been sued for downloading copyrighted material in the United States, but not a single case has gone to trial.

Most of the defendants are sued in bulk, with copyright holders joining hundreds or thousands of alleged copyright-infringing IP-addresses in a single complaint. The rightsholders then ask the court to grant a subpoena to identify the account holders behind the IPs, who are then approached with settlement requests of a few thousand dollars.

After an initial avalanche of mass piracy lawsuits in 2010 and 2011, federal courts in several districts ruled that these cases should be restricted to one defendant each. Last year several ISPs asked for a similar ruling in the District of Columbia, but without success.

Judge Beryl Howell ruled against the Internet providers and granted the adult movie company AF Holdings the right to obtain the personal details of more than 1000 Internet users suspected of downloading their works using BitTorrent.

The adult film studio and its controversial law firm Prenda celebrated the verdict as a huge win, since many other judges had previously rejected joining so many defendants in one lawsuit. Adding to the controversy, Judge Howell told the ISPs who joined the case that they were not doing enough to stop online piracy.

The ISPs were disappointed with the ruling and Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Cox filed an appeal hoping to reverse it. The case has been lingering for a few months but yesterday the ISPs filed their latest brief.

The providers argue that the request for customer information is not supported by good cause, as previous cases have shown that AF Holdings has no intention of actually serving the defendants. “In 118 multi-Doe actions filed by Plaintiff’s counsel during a two-year period, none has resulted in a defendant being named and served,” they write.

In addition, the ISPs note that the adult studio is only attempting to generate as many settlements as it can, at the lowest cost without knowing whether the defendant is actually the person who downloaded the copyrighted work.

“Plaintiff’s primary purpose in seeking the personal information for hundreds or thousands of Internet subscribers per lawsuit is to extract payments without conducting any investigation into whether the subscriber — rather than another person using the subscriber’s Internet connection — is indeed responsible for accessing Plaintiff’s film without paying for it.”

The ISPs continue by citing several similar cases in which judges ruled that joining so many defendants in one case is not allowed. If the current verdict is upheld, they fear that the District of Columbia will become a “unique venue” for copyright holders to “gain the Doe defendants’ personal information and coerce payment from them”

Finally, the ISPs mention the controversial nature of the law firm Prenda, who were recently punished in court for their mob-like tactics. Among other things they note that Prenda’s principals used The Pirate Bay as a honeypot, relied on fictitious persons as clients, and submitted fake documents in support of their lawsuits.

“In the wake of these revelations, virtually all of Prenda Law’s multi-Doe cases have been dismissed or transformed into investigations into misconduct by AF Holdings’ principals and counsel. Yet, incredibly, Plaintiff derides the ISPs for objecting ‘with an air of moral superiority’ to Plaintiff’s ongoing efforts to extract personal subscriber information from them,” the brief notes.

The ISPs tell the court that this “lack of candor” should be addressed, and they ask the judge to throw out the case, or reduce the number of defendants from 1,058 to just one.

It’s good to see that Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Cox are attempting to protect their subscribers. Of course it’s in their own interests, but it also helps to minimize the profitability of these classic copyright troll lawsuits.

Source: Comcast, Verizon and Co. Want to Stop Mass Piracy Lawsuits

From a region where online file-sharing has traditionally thrived, Scandinavia has become an area more focused than many on the issue of online piracy.

As the spiritual home of The Pirate Bay, Sweden in particular has long been associated with free-and-easy attitudes to infringement and as a result dozens of sites were founded in the site’s wake. This eventually prompted a more organized approach to dealing with operators of file-sharing sites and now that model is being eyed by others in the region.

Writing today in Jyllands-Posten, RettighedsAlliancen’s (Rights Alliance) Maria Fredenslund says that in the face of rampant illegal downloading the time has come to subject Danish Internet pirates to stiffer penalties via a dedicated anti-piracy task force, such as the ones in place in both Sweden and London.

“A special unit that works consistently with intellectual property crime would be a marked improvement on the current situation. Such a facility would enable police and prosecutors to build the relevant skills through their daily operational work with intellectual property cases,” Fredenslund writes.

“Experiences from abroad, such as the special IP unit in Sweden that has been a conspicuous success, show us that a task force will strengthen copyright holders and weaken the criminal masterminds. This is supported by the fact that the number of convictions has increased significantly over a very short period of time.”

Fredenslund says that a dedicated force would free regular police from having to start from scratch each time a new case arises and would ensure that police resources are used in a more efficient manner than is currently the case. But apparently there are other problems too.

In a separate article published by veteran Danish anti-piracy lawfirm Johan Schlüter, it seems that Rights Alliance have grown weary of committing large resources to anti-piracy investigations only to have them ruined when police didn’t handle the complaint in a way the anti-piracy organization would have liked.

“When we at Rights Alliance choose to report a case to the police, it follows years of exploration and work. Notification is always done on the basis .[..] that a person or company is behind the extensive distribution of illegal products, typically for profit,” the company explained.

“Unfortunately, what we have seen repeatedly is that the police choose to call and inquire about these suspicions before steps have been taken towards a preservation of evidence. Such calls obviously give suspects an opportunity to deny the accusations and eliminate all kinds of evidence. That leaves Rights Alliance with a bad case and many hours of wasted work.”

However, there are now clear signs that the Danish authorities are ready to progress on the issue. In July the Attorney-General said there would be a strengthening of responses to piracy and last month further discussions with Danish rightsholders took place. Whether the proposals will be enough for the entertainment companies remains to be seen, but history tells us that a mutually satisfactory solution is unlikely.

Source: Anti-Piracy Group Seeks Sweden-Style File-Sharing Crackdown