Compared to many other countries around the world, pirating movies and TV-shows is hugely popular in the Netherlands.

Up to a third of the population is estimated to download and stream copyrighted content without paying for it.

This high percentage is not surprising as the Netherlands has traditionally been a relative safe haven for pirates. Downloading movies without permission was not punishable by law until last year when the European Court of Justice spoke out against the tolerant stance.

As a result the Dutch Government quickly outlawed unauthorized downloading. However, breaking the habits of a large section of the population will take more than that and local piracy rates still remains high.

This prompted Dutch filmmakers’ association SEKAM to hold the Government responsible and demand compensation for the piracy losses they claim to have suffered.

FD reports that SEKAM submitted their claim to the Ministry of Security and Justice earlier this year. The request was denied but the filmmakers intend to press on. They maintain that their demands are legitimate and want the Government to compensate them for 10 years of piracy damages.

SEKAM lawyer Bas Le Poole points out that despite the new ban on illegal downloading, not much has changed. Piracy is still rampant and there haven’t been any prosecutions of individual downloaders.

This stance is shared by film producer San Fu Maltha. He notes that the Government has actually encouraged the public to pirate, costing the industry millions in revenue.

“Downloading pirated movies has only been outlawed recently in the Netherlands. Previously, the Government not only tolerated but even encouraged illegal downloading. As a result the industry has been severely damaged”

Critics often argue that the film industry itself can do more to counter piracy by making sure that content is widely available for a decent price. Maltha admits that improvements can be made on the supply side but adds that this should coincide with stronger enforcement.

“The Government has already decided that consumers should not be prosecuted. I understand that it’s not a popular move and electoral suicide, but they shouldn’t rule it out,” he says.

SEKAM is now calling for an accurate estimate of the damages the industry has suffered. Determining this is hard, but the association points to a recent Considerati study which estimated the losses at 78 million euros per year.

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

Earlier this month, news of an upcoming piece of music software began to cause waves.

Centered around a media player supporting a wide array of audio formats, Aurous will leverage content on the BitTorrent network and other web sources to bring a Spotify-like experience to users.

With its clean and tidy interface, it’s no wonder that Aurous has already been likened to a “Popcorn Time for music”, a branding that could yet prove to be both blessing and curse in equal amounts, depending on one’s perspective.

The software, which TF tested in pre-alpha, is not yet available to the public but that hasn’t stopped anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp jumping into the fray with both feet. Last Friday the troubled company issued a press release, claiming to have a solution to the threat supposedly posed by Aurous.

Highlighting the decentralized approach taken by developer Andrew Sampson, Rightscorp warned potential customers that Aurous could not be dealt with by regular means. Monetizing piracy will be their only chance, the company argued.

“Aurous’ technology will be unaffected by take-down notices, site blocking and will not use Pirate Bay or any domain names that can be blocked,” the company warned.

“It will distribute the music search metadata via the peer-to-peer networks, allowing the ability to stream large amounts of free music illegally and providing a very easy-to-use interface to the BitTorrent network.”

Rightscorp CEO Christopher Sabec added that there is a “lot of concern” over the impending Aurous launch but noted that his company can provide a solution.

“The Aurous app allows for access to a large amount of free music, acting like a Spotify, however, offering zero payments to the rightsholder,” Sabec said.

“Rightscorp’s ability to get individual seeders to stop seeding will be the only scalable way to stop this next explosion of free music,” he added.

TorrentFreak asked Sampson to comment on Rightscorp’s announcement and the somewhat irritated developer responded.

“Rightscorp has no idea how our technology works, nor our plans at protecting right holders from copyright infringement and giving copyright holders the tools for managing their content, monetizing and/or protecting work their work,” he told TF.

“We announced earlier through Twitter [well before the Rightscorp announcement] that we will be creating a content-id system and DMCA portal so we can ensure Aurous does not infringe on anyone’s copyrights. Because this system is still so premature in its development, we can’t give more details, however, we can assure you Rightscorp is wrong.”

Sampson insists that first and foremost Aurous is a music player, albeit one with search engines that leverage existing APIs from “completely legal and licensed services” backed up by the power of P2P.

“The P2P portion of Aurous is nothing more than a comprehensive and cached list of these searches so results can be delivered faster to users as spoken about in our tech blog. While you can search across P2P, it is not a default option, our P2P search option is there for hard to find copy-left content, but in that regard, is still a search engine.”

Sampson feels that by announcing an anti-piracy solution for a product that hasn’t even been released yet Rightscorp has jumped the gun somewhat. However, the likelihood that this is almost certainly an attempt to grab publicity isn’t lost on the developer.

“The fear mongering by Rightscorp is nothing more than babble and attempts to garner clients to ‘protect’ them from our application which hasn’t even been released,” Sampson says.

“Maybe Rightscorp should read this piece. A French economist predicted the current state of music 40 years ago. The music industry is killing itself. We live in a world were licensed material can be streamed close to 200,000,000 times from Spotify and the writer for that song receives a pitiful $5,600.

“But according to many studies, sells are still at an all time high. Aurous is here to change the music industry for the better,” Sampson concludes.

This isn’t the first time that Rightscorp has attempted to ride on the tails of a ‘new’ sharing phenomenon. Late August the company launch its Popcorn Time ‘mitigation service’ but in reality its offering was the same old model with a new coat of promotional paint.

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

Gottfrid Svartholm, also known as Anakata, was a founding member of The Pirate Bay and played a key role during the site’s early years.

He has spent the last three years in prisons in Sweden and Denmark, for a variety of offenses. Last month his prison time in Denmark ended and after serving a final month in Sweden he is now a free man.

At this time Gottfrid and his family prefer not to make any public statements, which is understandable considering all that’s happened, but his mother just confirmed the good news.

His release marks the end of a tough time with several consecutive setbacks.

It all started in 2011 when Gottfrid received a one-year prison sentence for his involvement with the notorious site, which he initially avoided.

September 2012 he was arrested by Cambodian police in Phnom Penh, the city where he had been living for several years. A few days later he was transferred to Sweden to serve his sentence, but that was only the start.

Soon after his release the Pirate Bay founder was accused of several hacking and fraud offenses.

The case went to trial in 2013 and Gottfrid was subsequently found guilty of hacking, aggravated fraud and attempted aggravated fraud, which resulted in a two-year prison sentence. The Pirate Bay founder always maintained his innocence and went on to appeal the verdict.

The Appeal Court agreed in part and cleared Gottfrid of hacking the Nordea bank. The court still found him guilty of hacking IT company Logica but decided to reduce his sentence from two years to one.

While he was serving the Swedish hacking sentence Denmark also went after Gottfrid. Despite public protests and an appeal to the Supreme Court in Sweden, he was extradited during the fall of 2013 and held in solitary confinement for weeks on end.

In Denmark the Pirate Bay founder stood accused of hacking into the mainframe computers of IT company CSC. Gottfrid denied these allegations and during trial he pointed out that Sweden previously acquitted him of a similar offense.

Despite the “not guilty” plea and expert witness testimonies in his favor, Gottfrid was sentenced to another 3.5 years in prison, which was affirmed following an appeal to the High Court.

As in many other countries, well-behaved convicts only have to serve part of their sentence in Denmark so Gottfrid was released last month.

That’s also when the latest setback was announced. Shortly after his release he was arrested again to serve one remaining month of his hacking sentence in Sweden.

Today Gottfrid is truly a free man again. While prison wasn’t easy for him and his family, the future is finally looking a bit brighter.

Over the past years Gottfrid has received a lot of support from the public, but first and foremost from his mother Kristina, who stood beside him every step of the way and always was kind enough to answer questions and have her son’s voice heard outside of prison.

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

As the extradition hearing of Kim Dotcom and his former Megaupload colleagues enters a second week, a lawyer acting for the United States government has continued to make the case against the Internet entrepreneur and co-defendants Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk.

With Dotcom and friends due to have their right of reply later in proceedings, thus far media attention has been focused on a totally one-sided version of events. Today that pattern continued, with Christine Gordon QC focusing on the rewards scheme operated by Megaupload between 2006 and 2011.

Just like YouTube does today, Megaupload rewarded users whose videos were downloaded thousands of times. However, the U.S. suggests that Dotcom and his colleagues were well aware that the users that brought the most traffic to the site – and earned the most in rewards – did so by uploading infringing content.

A user known only as “TH” is reported to have been paid more than $50,000 in rewards between 2006 and 2011, despite his sharing being in the spotlight of copyright holders.

“So far TH has provided us 18 million download pageviews [and] US$112,257 premium sales to users who have downloaded at least 15 of his files,” Mathias Ortmann wrote to Kim Dotcom in 2007.

However, the company also received a significant number of copyright complaints against “TH” – 1,200 in all – which were processed by Bram van der Kolk. According to the lawyer, Megaupload failed to terminate the user’s account, instead offering him additional server space. In a 2008, another conversation centered around whether infringers should continue to get paid.

“Growth is mainly based on infringement anyway,” Van der Kolk said via Skype.

“What if we modulate our tolerance according to sales triggered?” Ortmann responded.

According to NZHerald, 77% of Megaupload’s members had received at least one takedown notice against their accounts, with 56% receiving 10 or more. Even today, however, single strikes against user accounts are tolerated by YouTube, for example, while users of some of the main ISPs in the United States have amassed dozens of infringement notices without being terminated.

During the summer of 2011, Megaupload discontinued its rewards program, a move that proved unpopular with the site’s uploaders. According to U.S., Dotcom then took the opportunity to contact PayPal with complaints about his competitors who continued to “illegally” pay such bonuses to their users.

“They pay everyone no matter if the files are pirated or not and they have NO repeat infringer policy, and they are using Paypal to pay infringers,” Dotcom wrote.

In court today, Christine Gordon pointed out that Megaupload had run a similar program for more than half a decade.

“They describe the payments as illegal but Megaupload had done that for six years,” she said.

While Dotcom and associates will eventually enjoy a full right to reply, lawyer Ron Mansfield raised objections against the U.S. citing evidence from users such as “TH” who have allegedly provided evidence against Dotcom while being allowed to remain anonymous.

“I’m just inquiring whether the US is prepared to identify the users so we are at least in the position of knowing who the users are and making some inquiry in relation to these conversations,” he said.

“In my submission it’s unfair that the identities of relevant parties are being withheld.”

Today’s evidence comes on the heels of revelations during last Friday’s session in which conversations between Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk suggested that the pair knew the company might get into trouble over rewards.

“That’s the big flaw in the rewards program: we are making profit off more than 90 per cent infringing files,” Van der Kolk said.

The hearing is expected to continue for another three weeks.

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

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

Tomorrowland is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(10)	Tomorrowland	6.6 / trailer
2	(…)	Terminator Genisys	6.8 / trailer
3	(…)	San Andreas	6.2 / trailer
4	(1)	Avengers: Age of Ultron	7.8 / trailer
5	(2)	Minions (Webrip)	6.7 / trailer
6	(…)	Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (HDRip)	7.7 / trailer
7	(3)	Mad Max: Fury Road	8.4 / trailer
8	(4)	Vacation (Subbed WEBRip)	6.3 / trailer
9	(…)	Magic Mike XXL	5.9 / trailer
10	(7)	Fantastic Four (Subbed HDrip)	4.0 / trailer

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