When the Pirate Bay launched over a decade ago the entertainment industry was blown away by the pirates’ utter disrespect for copyright.

The site’s founders argued that people have the right to watch what they want whenever they please, and in a way this attitude acted as a catalyst for many of the legal services we have today.

Fast forward a few years and another industry is facing massive pushback from the Internet.

Growing tired with a constant stream of invasive and annoying ads on many websites, millions of people are now using ad-blockers to clean up their web-browsing experience.

This has led to frustration among publishers and advertising companies who somehow feel that they are entitled to dictate what people get to see. Some even go as far as equating it to “piracy,” as ad blockers take away ad-views and thus income for publishers and ad-vendors.

However, like the entertainment industry before them, advertisers and publishers can’t complain their way back to the pre-adblock era. They should interpret the rise of adblocking as an important signal and adapt their businesses accordingly.

And this is where a familiar name comes in.

Today, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde announces that his micropayment service Flattr is teaming up with Adblock Plus. Their new service, Flattr Plus, allows publishers to generate revenue directly from readers instead of forcing ads upon them.

Flattr Plus is built on the existing micropayment platform that was launched in 2010. Through a new browser add-on it allows users to automatically share money with website owners when an ad is blocked.

“For us it’s super important to show that we’re not generation free, but generation sustainability. I think Flattr has been that way all the time and it’s obvious that Adblock Plus has kind of also been thinking about a good open web,” Sunde informs TorrentFreak.

Those who equate ad blocking to piracy should move on, and try to come up with better monetization models themselves. Advertising on the Internet is not sustainable in its current form, at least not for everyone.

“I think it’s funny how people compare that to piracy – especially since I have been part of that discussion for forever,” Sunde says.

“The media industry seems to think everything is piracy. Then again, it’s hard for them to complain about Flattr Plus, because it contains a solution for exactly the thing they’re complaining about and haven’t fixed themselves,” he adds.

That said, Sunde sees some parallels between Flattr Plus and The Pirate Bay. Both are about sharing information, but this time the creators are compensated.

“Flattr is for me just an extension to the same thinking that I’ve had with The Pirate Bay – information needs to be spread, we need to share information but we also need to fix that missing link of supporting people. And now, finally, we’ll have the user base size to fix that!”

Whether the partnership between Flattr and Adblock Plus will be as disruptive as The Pirate Bay has yet to be seen, but it will certainly cause some waves.

Announcing Flattr Plus

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

Assisted by police in France and the Netherlands, in the summer of 2012 the FBI took down three unauthorized Android app stores.

Appbucket, Applanet and SnappzMarket all had their domains seized in a first of its kind operation. Several men were arrested and over the past four years have been slowly pleading guilty to various copyright infringement charges.

According to the Department of Justice, two more can now be added to the list.

Before his 16th birthday Aaron Blake Buckley launched Applanet, a service dedicated to the sharing of Android software. After being raided in 2012, Buckley attempted to crowdfund a defense against the U.S. government in 2014.

Now a 22-year-old, Buckley has just pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and to one count of criminal copyright infringement before U.S. District Judge Timothy C. Batten Sr. of the Northern District of Georgia.

Co-conspirator Gary Edwin Sharp II, 29, of Uxbridge, Massachusetts, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement in January.

“According to statements made in court, the conspirators identified themselves as members of the Applanet Group,” the DoJ said in a statement.

“From May 2010 through August 2012, they conspired to reproduce and distribute more than four million copies of copyrighted Android apps through the Applanet alternative online market without permission from the victim copyright owners, who would otherwise sell copies of the apps on legitimate online markets for a fee.”

In addition to his role within Applanet, Sharp also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement as the leader of SnappzMarket. Sharp admitted that along with two other members the group conspired to distribute more than a million pirate Android apps worth $1.7m.

Overall, the groups are said to have distributed Android apps with a retail value in excess of $17 million.

The guilty pleas come on the heels of several others (1,2) since the raids in 2012. Buckley and Sharp will be sentenced in August.

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

With The Pirate Bay no longer the world’s most popular torrent site, attentions are increasingly turning to KickassTorrents (KAT).

Currently the most visited torrent index on the planet, KAT is also one of the most-blocked sites on the Internet and the focus of legal action in increasing numbers of countries. With cases pending as far away as Australia, the latest European addition to the list is Finland.

A decision just handed down by the Market Court, a specialist venue hearing IP, competition and market law disputes, compels a total of seven Internet service providers to begin blocking KAT. They include the three largest providers DNA, Elisa and TeliaSonera Finland plus Anvia, Kaisanet, Lounea and MPY Palvelut.

The decision follows June 2015 amendments to copyright law that allow sites which are run by people who conceal their identities and are “clearly” set up to infringe copyright to be blocked at the ISP level.

But despite the important ruling, rightsholders are disappointed that the mechanism of blocking requested in the original application has been diluted by the Court. Although ISPs will be expected to block KickassTorrents’ URLs there will be no obligation to block the site’s IP addresses.

“Unfortunately the Market Court granted the rightsholders behind the initial application a considerably more limited blocking order, which in the rightsholders’ view will make the blocking partially ineffective,” says Jaana Pihkala, Executive Director at the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC).

CIAPC says it will take time to consider the decision and may in time seek an opinion from the Supreme Court.

Once the KAT blockade is put in place it’s expected that users of the site will either try to circumvent the ban with VPNs and/or proxies or will simply migrate to other sites. That will likely trigger more applications to the court in which rightsholders will seek to block even more domains. As the UK example shows, that is likely to descend into a seemingly never-ending game of whac-a-mole.

The Pirate Bay is already blocked in Finland following a process that dates back to May 2011 when the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC) and music industry group IFPI filed a lawsuit at the District Court.

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

In recent years many anti-piracy initiatives have emerged and in several countries so-called “graduated response” schemes have been implemented.

France is seen as the pioneer of so-called “three strikes” anti-piracy legislation, in which repeated file-sharing offenders face fines of up to 1,500 euros.

Since 2010 the French Hadopi agency has handed out millions of warning notices. A few thousand account holders received more than three notices, of which a few hundred of the worst cases were referred for prosecution.

Copyright holders around the world have cited Hadopi as one of the success stories, hoping to establish similar legislation elsewhere. However, in France the law hasn’t been without controversy and in a total surprise the lower house of the French Parliament has now voted in favor of killing it.

Interestingly, the vote late last week went down under quite unusual circumstances.

In a nearly empty chamber, the French National Assembly voted to end the Hadopi institution and law in 2022, Next Inpact reports. What’s noteworthy is that only 7 of the 577 Members of Parliament were present at the vote, and the amendment passed with four in favor and three against.

The decision goes against the will of the sitting Government, which failed to have enough members present at the vote. While it’s being seen as quite an embarrassment, the amendment still has to pass the senate, which seems unlikely without Government support.

The ‘coup,’ orchestrated by the Green party has caused quite a media stir, not least because French President François Hollande called for the end of Hadopi before his election, a position he later retracted.

“Related Greens” MP Isabelle Attard says that it’s time to end the “schizophrenic” behavior of the Government on the matter. “A choice has to be made at some point. We can’t call out Hadopi as useless and, years later, still let it linger on,” she says.

While it’s doubtful that the amendment means the definite end of Hadopi, it certainly puts it back on the political agenda. Whether this will lead to actual change will become apparent in the future.

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

With infrastructure often spread around the world and multiple domains in backup, shutting down access to torrent and streaming sites can be a complex affair. Even when national legal systems provide the necessary tools, the process can be extremely drawn out, not to mention ineffective.

The case of The Pirate Bay provides a perfect example. Deemed illegal just about everywhere, the site has remained online despite the efforts of law enforcement, countless legal professionals, and courts around the globe. The world’s most notorious torrent site doesn’t play by the rules, a point certainly not lost on Paul Pintér, Sweden’s national coordinator for IP enforcement.

Pintér, previously a computer crime and forensics investigator with the Stockholm County Police, has headed up a specialist anti-piracy unit since 2010. He feels that the police need more powers to shut down sites such as The Pirate Bay.

In a memorandum submitted to the Government, Pintér says that websites that violate copyright or trademark law should be blocked by Internet service providers. Furthermore, while preliminary investigations are underway, domain names should be seized by the authorities.

“They commit crimes, they should be removed from the Internet. I see it as an additional tool to combat piracy,” Pintér told IDG.

Pintér understands the problems only too well. The process to seize The Pirate Bay’s .SE domain has dragged on since 2013 and now sits with the court of appeal. A decision was due this week but Punkt SE (IIS), the organization responsible for Sweden’s top level .SE domain, informs TorrentFreak that the decision has been delayed again.

“If we have a site selling counterfeit clothing or an illegal streaming site, and you can seize its domain during the investigation, it is gone during that time. It is a good preventive measure if nothing else,” Pintér says.

Being able to quickly seize a ‘pirate’ domain would certainly be an asset to the police but there are those who will question whether that would trample due process. Pintér suggests that wouldn’t be the case.

“I want the law to be technology neutral. We carry out seizures in many, many other cases, everything from computers to money,” Pintér says.

Nevertheless, adjustments would have to be made. In his memorandum to the government Pintér calls for changes in the law that would allow police to seize not only tangible items such as physical property, but also intangible items such as domain names.

Furthermore, rather than relying on entertainment industry companies to take their own legal action, Pintér would like amendments to the law that would allow copyright or trademark infringing sites to be blocked by ISPs.

“I’m not talking about blocking everything. I’m talking about sites that contain criminal material. I don’t see a difference between child pornography, copyright infringement or trademark infringement – for me it is a crime,” Pintér concludes.

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