Last week a Polish court ruled that Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents, can be extradited to the United States.

The decision came as a disappointment to the defense and lead counsel Ira Rothken informs TorrentFreak that they are planning to appeal the initial verdict.

Rothken just returned from a trip to Warsaw, where he met with Vaulin for the first time since his arrest last summer. Before last week he was not allowed to meet with his US counsel, so this represents a small breakthrough.

The alleged KickassTorrents owner still suffers back pain and is currently being treated in prison, where Vaulin and his counsel spoke extensively about the merits of the case as well as potential human rights violations.

“Artem is presumed innocent and the failure to provide him with bail in a novel copyright case on mere torrent files, which is an alleged non-violent crime, violates his human rights,” Rothken says.

“Artem’s incarceration makes it so he can’t meaningfully participate in his defense in a complex Internet copyright case where logically he needs access to the Internet to assist his global legal team.”

KickassTorrents’ defense team is now aiming for a positive outcome in Poland’s appellate court, as well as a win at the European Court of Human Rights.

The Human Rights case will also be, in part, based on the unprecedented punishment the alleged KAT owner faces.

The US indictment mentions over a billion dollars in alleged damage to the entertainment industries and suggests that Vaulin is liable for the criminal infringements of millions of KickassTorrent users.

Each separate offense amounts to several years in prison, bringing the total to a potential sentence of millions of years, which is unprecedented and a record even for the US, Rothken argues.

In addition to the Human Rights complaint, which is still being drafted, the defense has a motion pending in the U.S. where the defense urged the Illinois District Court to dismiss the indictment.

In February, Rothken argued that the case should be dropped since there’s no proof of actual criminal copyright infringement. The US prosecutor disagreed, however, describing KickassTorrents as a piracy haven that made millions of dollars per year.

Earlier this week the prosecution informed the Court about the Polish extradition ruling, but the defense swiftly countered that this should not impact the U.S. decision.

“We are hopeful that the United States Court will promptly rule on the pending motion to dismiss the indictment. We believe the indictment is defective and the motion to dismiss will be granted,” Rothken tells TorrentFreak.

“We also believe if the indictment is found defective then the US extradition request in Poland based on a defective and thus unreliable indictment should fail as a matter of law,” he adds.

As the above shows, the case continues on multiple fronts during the weeks to come. Despite the initial setback in Poland, the defense team remains confident about a positive outcome.

For their part, the US hopes that the extradition will go ahead and that the alleged KickassTorrents operator will argue his case during a trial in the United States.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Like many other countries around the world, downloading music and movies is hugely popular in the Netherlands.

In part, the popularity was facilitated by the fact that downloading pirated music had long been legal under local law.

This tolerant stance towards online piracy changed in 2014 when the European Court of Justice ruled it to be unlawful. As a result, the Dutch Government quickly outlawed unauthorized downloading.

Despite the legislative change piracy rates remain high, much to the frustration of the local entertainment industries. Dutch filmmakers and distributors previously accused the Government of not doing enough to counter piracy, while threatening legal action.

Last year the Dutch Government denied these allegations, noting that the filmmakers could go after downloaders directly if they want to recoup their losses. However, they are not backing down.

On Tuesday a group of film and TV show companies issued a summons announcing their legal action, NRC reports. Through the court they hope to hold the Government liable, and if that’s the case, a separate damages procedure will likely follow.

“The producers could have a good chance,” says lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, who specializes in Internet issues. The lawyer added that the film companies “must be able to demonstrate that they have suffered financial loss.”

Fellow lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet agrees but notes that it might be tricky to calculate the scale of the damages since a pirate download doesn’t directly translate to a lost sale.

In any case, the claimed compensation will be substantial. Last year film industry group VPSO already asked for 1.2 billion euros ($1.27 billion) in damages for piracy losses that were allegedly suffered since 2004.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

This January it was revealed that after much build-up, UK ISPs and the movie and music industries had finally reached a deal to send infringment notices to allegedly pirating subscribers.

The copyright alerts program is part of the larger Creative Content UK (CCUK) initiative, which includes various PR campaigns targeted at the public and classrooms.

The notices themselves (detailed here) are completely non-aggressive, with an aim to educate rather than bully consumers. However, according to a new survey just completed by UK-based broadband comparison website Broadband Genie, progress may be difficult to come by.

The survey involved 2,047 respondents, comprised of both Broadband Genie customers and general Internet users, split roughly 50/50 male and female, the vast majority (94%) aged between 18 and 64 years old. Respondents were asked about the notice scheme and piracy in general.

Overall, a worrying 72% said that they believe that the scheme won’t achieve its aim of stopping people from accessing or sharing copyrighted content.

While ‘stopping’ piracy entirely is a fairly dramatic goal (the program would quietly settle for an all-round reduction), three-quarters of respondents already having no faith in the scheme is significant. So what, if anything, might persuade Internet users to stop pirating content?

Again, the survey offers a pretty bleak outlook. A stubborn 29% believe that nothing can be done, which sounds about right in this context. Worryingly, however, just over a fifth of respondents felt that legal action would do the trick. The same amount (22%) felt that losing a broadband connection might stop the pirates.

While the chart above indicates that a fifth of respondents believe that cheaper content is the solution to fighting piracy, an unbalanced six-out-of-ten agreed that the cost of using genuine sites and services is the main reason why people pirate in the first place.

Surprisingly, just 13% said that easy access to copyrighted content on pirate networks was the main factor, with an even lower 10% citing limited access to genuine content on official platforms. Just 9% blamed delayed release dates for fueling piracy.

Some curious responses are also evident when Broadband Genie asked respondents whether they believed certain activities are illegal. While around three-quarters of respondents said that downloading and/or sharing content without permission is illegal, almost four in ten said that simply using P2P networks such as BitTorrent falls foul of the law.

Of perhaps even greater concern is that 35% identified Spotify, Netflix and Amazon account sharing as an illegal activity. A quarter felt that streaming movies, TV or sports from an unauthorized website is illegal (it probably isn’t) while 11% said that no method of obtaining content without paying for it is against the law.

A final point of worry for Creative Content UK is the visibility of the alerts program itself. Despite boasting a TV appearance, a campaign video on YouTube, some classroom lessons, dozens of news headlines, plus thousands of notices, more than eight-out-of-ten respondents (82%) said that before the survey they had never even heard of the initiative.

Of course, the program is only targeted at the relatively small subset of people who share files but with no data being published by the scheme, it’s difficult to say whether the campaign is reaching its target audience.

That being said, Broadband Genie informs TorrentFreak that 3.5% of respondents (around 70 people) claimed to have received a notice or know someone who had, albeit with certain caveats.

“[N]early half of those said the notice was in error due to incorrect details, their belief that the content or provider was legal or a lack of knowledge about any file sharing having taken place,” the company reports.

This number sounds quite high to us and the company concedes that respondents may have confused the current notice program with earlier ISP correspondence. Nevertheless, notices are definitely going out to subscribers, and people’s social networks are very broad these days. With those variables the figures might hold weight, particularly when considering potential volumes of notices.

The notice system is believed to have launched in the last few days of January and ISPs are reportedly sending around 48,000 notices per week (2.5m notices per year). The survey took place between 17th February and 6th March.

So, if launched at anything like full speed, a maximum of around 250,000 notices could have gone out up until the first week of March. Again, it’s important to note that no hard data is available so it’s impossible to be accurate, but volumes could be quite high.

The full report from Broadband Genie can be found here.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Perfect 10 was an adult entertainment magazine that also operated a subscription website featuring images of women.

At some point, however, the company decided that there was potentially more money to be made from suing companies than getting the public to pay for its photos.

Over the years the company developed an increasingly aggressive anti-piracy policy, filing lawsuits against any company it felt had infringed upon its rights. After suing Google and Amazon, the company went after MasterCard and Visa. It even took legal against hosting providers such as LeaseWeb and OVH.

While the company wasn’t always successful, the commodity fueling these suits were cash settlements in several cases. In time, Perfect 10 became better known as a copyright troll than a publisher and in 2011, the company added Usenet provider Giganews to its target list. The effort failed spectacularly.

In November 2014, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found that Giganews was not liable for the infringing activities of its users. Perfect 10 was ordered to pay Giganews $5.6m in attorney’s fees and costs.

The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit subsequently had little good to say about Perfect 10. The company failed again, losing the appeal and facing potential liquidation.

Now, Giganews is turning the tables on Perfect 10 in the most devastating and ironic way imaginable. After making a business out of using its intellectual property assets to intimidate technology companies, Perfect 10 is now set to lose all of those assets in order to settle Giganews’ bills.

“We are excited to announce that the United States District Court for the Central District of California has granted Giganews’ motion to appoint a receiver to carry out a levy on all of Perfect 10’s intellectual property,” Giganews says.

That intellectual property includes (but is not limited to) all of Perfect 10’s domain names, all of its copyrights, and all of its trademarks. In light of more than a decade of aggressive troll-like litigation, it’s the ultimate insult to Perfect 10. Some might argue it’s the most fitting conclusion.

Giganews says that the receiver will now begin the process of liquidating the intellectual property. All proceeds will go towards satisfying Giganews’ $5.6 million attorney’s fees judgment that was awarded by the California court back in 2015.

“We won victory after victory over the course of the case, prevailing on every claim and obtaining the attorney’s fees award, culminating in a unanimous victory before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in January 2017. That ruling upheld early rulings of three separate federal judges in favor of Giganews,” the company says.

The victory over Perfect 10 is undoubtedly an important one but it remains to be seen whether the former publisher’s assets will be worth anything like the $5.6m they need to realize. Nevertheless, for Giganews CEO and Co-Founder Ron Yokubaitis, putting a troll out of action is still a good result.

“We are determined to collect 100% of what is owed to us by Perfect 10 from this cowardly and frivolous lawsuit,” Yokubaitis says.

“This is a big win for Usenet and for user platforms over the entire open Internet. This ruling will now put a copyright troll out of business and free up the courts from baseless lawsuits.”

Giganews’ says that anyone interested in purchasing Perfect 10’s intellectual property can contact its litigation counsel at Fenwick & West.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Last September, the European Commission published its long-awaited proposal to modernize EU copyright law. Among other things, it will require online services to do more to fight piracy.

Specifically, Article 13 of the proposed Copyright Directive requires online services to monitor and filter pirated content, in collaboration with rightsholders.

This means that online services, which deal with large volumes of user-uploaded content, must use fingerprinting or other detection mechanisms to block copyright infringing files, similar to YouTube’s Content-ID system.

The Commission stresses that the changes are needed to support copyright holders. However, many legal scholars, digital activists, and members of the public worry that they will violate the rights of regular Internet users.

They believe that mandatory filters largely ignore established case law and human rights. Even the European Commission’s own Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection agrees that the proposal is incompatible with existing regulation.

In an organized protest against the planned legislation, the Dutch digital rights organization Bits of Freedom have launched the “Save The Meme” campaign, calling for the deleting of the problematic Article 13 from the current proposal.

The campaign site notes that mandatory copyright filters can’t accurately detect whether something’s a parody, meme or a real infringement. As a result, people may see their legitimate uploads being ‘censored’ by these measures, with little recourse or protection.

Through the campaign website, EU citizens can call their MEPs to voice their concerns about the filtering proposal. With a handy “MEP Roulette” tool, people are able to call random representatives, free of charge, asking them to reconsider the plan.

MEP Roulette

“Save The Meme” is already starting to gain traction in political circles, with Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda one of its top supporters. While Reda also appears in the MEP Roulette tool, as a Pirate she’s is already well aware of the risks.

The Pirate Party MEP is already a vocal critic of the piracy filters and last week a study commissioned by her identified several fundamental legal problems with the proposal.

The proposed legislation still has to pass through several reviews before it is voted on by the EU Parliament. Unless there are any changes, it’s expected that the protests and associated memes will continue, unfiltered.

Save The Meme

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.