Following an investigation carried out by the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), police in Northern Ireland raided a Londonderry home in May 2011.

They were searching for Paul Mahoney, the operator of streaming links site FastPassTV and discussion and linking forum BedroomMedia. Police arrested Mahoney while seizing computer equipment and cash totaling £83,000.

After being charged in February 2015, Mahoney pleaded not guilty. Several months later, however, he had a change of heart.

At a June hearing the 30-year-old pleaded guilty to all four charges against him including allowing the public to view copyrighted movies without rightsholder permission, conspiracy, and generating up to £300,000 in advertising revenue.

During a pre-sentence hearing last month, Judge Philip Babington was told by the prosecution that Mahoney could have cost the movie industry £120 million.

Mahoney appeared at Londonderry Crown Court this morning at 11:00am for sentencing and it’s bad news for the partially sighted man. The Court sentenced Mahoney to four years in prison, two of which will be spent on license.

“These offenses represent offending which undoubtedly put at risk very many millions of pounds as far as the greater entertainment industry was concerned,” Judge Philip Babington said.

“Offending such as this affects everyone in society at the end of the day although primarily the interests of those involved in film production, the results of which we all enjoy.”

Judge Babington said that Mahoney had put together “a very sophisticated scheme” which had allowed people to “view films on very many millions of occasions for nothing” while generating money from advertising.

He added that he had been left with no other alternative than to pass a custodial sentence “to show that behavior of this nature does not go unpunished.”

FACT Director General Kieron Sharp said that the case was an important one.

“Committing crime using the Internet is viewed by some as being less serious than more ‘traditional’ offending, which is particularly true of film and television piracy. This prosecution and sentence show that you cannot hide behind the supposed anonymity of the cyber world and that you will be identified, caught and convicted,” Sharp said.

PSNI investigating officer Detective Constable Yolande Healey said that Mahoney had been operating his sites for years.

“He thought he could collect substantial amounts of advertising revenue from his site and distance himself from the actual hosting of an illicit copy of a film by using unrelated third party websites,” Healey said.

“From his bedroom in Carnhill, Mahony thought he could make money from advertisers who were attracted by the volume of traffic from across the world on his website. He thought his form of cyber-crime was untouchable. He was wrong. Working with partner agencies, police will investigate any reports of criminality online.”

Breaking news story, more as we have it

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

On September 21, 2015, Kim Dotcom and his fellow co-accused are scheduled to appear before the courts in New Zealand to face their extradition battle with U.S. authorities.

The U.S. government wants Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato tried on multiple charges relating to their Megaupload website, including copyright infringement, conspiracy, money laundering and racketeering.

The hearing, set to take place in just 13 days time, has already been rescheduled 10 times. However, each time it has neared Dotcom and his former business partners have filed successful appeals on various grounds, collectively achieving delays which have put the hearing back by years.

Now, in a new claim to the Court of Appeals, Dotcom and his co-accused are claiming that due to the actions of the U.S. they are being denied a fair trial.

According to lawyers for the defense (Finn Batato excluded – he was present at the hearing but had no lawyer) the confiscation of their clients’ funds means that they are unable to pay for expert witnesses outside New Zealand.

Grant Illingworth QC, lawyer for van der Kolk and Ortman, said that while United States authorities have allowed some seized funds to be released for defense purposes in New Zealand, those funds are not available for use overseas.

“The issue at the heart of this appeal is primarily of natural justice. The US asserts it has confiscated property and can enforce that worldwide,” Illingworth said.

No funding outside New Zealand means the defendants don’t have the means to pay for experts in US copyright law, a vital requirement if they are to mount a robust defense.

“We can’t become instant experts in US copyright law and US criminal law,” Illingworth said. “We need help from expert witnesses and we’re being denied that opportunity.”

The funds required hardly amount to small change. According to Dotcom’s lawyer Ron Mansfield QC those legal costs could rise to $500,000 but could be easily funded by tens of millions of dollars currently seized in both New Zealand and Hong Kong.

Appearing on behalf of U.S. authorities, Christine Gordon QC countered by stating that in fact no funds are needed. She said that the New Zealand extradition court hasn’t been asked to make any findings based on U.S. law so on that basis no specialist overseas legal expertise will be required.

Nevertheless, the defense asked the Court of Appeal for a further postponement of the hearing amounting to a few months.

Justices John Wild, John Fogarty and Jillian Mallon reserved their decision, with Justice Wild noting that they had been “presented with an impossible task” given the scale of the case and the short time before the hearing is due to begin.

“We aren’t sure what we are going to do,” Justice Wild said. “But we are going to do something.”

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

Early last Thursday morning the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) were again mobilizing against online piracy.

Following a joint investigation with licensing outfit PRS for Music, officers from PIPCU and Merseyside police raided an address in Everton, Liverpool. Their target was a 38-year-old man believed to be involved in the unlawful distribution of music online.

In addition to uploading the UK’s Top 40 Singles to various torrent sites each week, police said the man also ran his own website offering ‘acapella’ audio tracks. Police further added that the man generated “significant” advertising revenue from his endeavors while possibly costing the industry “millions” in lost revenue.

A tip received by TF indicated that the man was connected to several accounts on the world’s major torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents. We can now reveal that the accounts were registered in the name of ‘OldSkoolScouse’. For those outside the UK, the term ‘scouse’ refers to the accent found primarily in and around the Liverpool area.

As shown in the KickassTorrents screenshot above, the profile links to a domain – www.oldskoolscouse.co.uk. Up until last Friday (the day after the raid) the domain linked to another site, www.deejayportal.com, which was billed as the “Number #1 community and resource, for DJs & Producers.”

As can be seen from the image below, DeeJayPortal featured acapella tracks as described by the police.

It remains unclear how many users each domain had, but in the bigger picture the numbers are very small indeed. At its height DeeJayPortal appears to have barely scraped the world’s top 200,000 most popular sites while OldSkoolScouse is currently outside the top three million.

Both domains went down last Friday, as did the OldSkoolScouse Twitter account and Facebook page. As illustrated below, the former regularly announced torrent uploads of the UK Top 40 to DeeJayPortal.

Yet again it appears that the arrest last week was a case of rightsholders and police targeting low-hanging fruit. Using widely available research tools we were able to quickly uncover important names plus associated addresses, both email and physical. It seems likely that he made close to no effort to conceal his identity.

Due to being in the police spotlight it will come as little surprise that there was no weekly upload of the UK’s Top 40 most-popular tracks from OldSkoolScouse last Friday, something which probably disappointed the releaser’s fans. However, any upset would have been very temporary indeed.

As shown below, at least four other releases of exactly the same content were widely available on public torrent sites within hours of the UK chart results being announced last Friday, meaning the impact on availability was almost non-existent.

However, perhaps of more interest to the police and rightsholders is the impact the arrest will have on the public’s perception of how risky it is to engage in online piracy in the UK. Certainly, more people are being arrested in the UK file-sharing scene than in the United States currently, quite a surprise considering the aggressive anti-piracy stance usually taken in the U.S.

Finally, it will be really interesting to see if the arrest last week will conclude with a case going to court. PIPCU have made many arrest announcements connected to online piracy in the past two years, yet to our knowledge not one person has gone to trial.

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

Last week Norway became the latest country to block access to The Pirate Bay.

A local court ordered Internet providers to block users’ access to several large ‘pirate’ websites in the hope that it will decrease online copyright infringement.

The local Pirate Party is now vigorously protesting the ruling and has decided to fight back. Since the sites will be blocked on the DNS level the party is countering by providing their own DNS servers.

“We want a free and open Internet for everyone. The copyright industry’s fight for control over culture has put us in a situation where this is no longer the case in Norway,” Pirate Party co-chairman Øystein Middelthun tells TF.

“The censorship is easy to bypass, by simply changing your name server, so we decided to practice what we preach and offer such a service to all those affected by the problem,” he adds.

Indeed, since the sites’ IP-addresses are not blocked the blockade can be easily circumvented by changing the DNS settings on one’s device or computer. The Pirate Party is not the only company offering alternative DNS, OpenDNS and Google have a similar service.

The Pirate Party’s DNS has added benefits though, as it supports additional Top Level Domains including .geek or .pirate, and the Namecoin based .bit. In addition, it operates from Norway with minimal logging to guarantee users’ privacy.

The Pirates note that the order will have minimal effect on people’s sharing habits. However, Middelthun is concerned about the slippery slope, where companies and the authorities get to dictate what people are allowed to see online.

“The blocking order is yet another sad step down the road towards the dystopic world imagined by George Orwell. At the same time it achieves absolutely nothing of what the plaintiffs are hoping for,” he tells TF.

“The dangerous thing about it is that it sets a precedent. It is easy to imagine how the scope could be expanded to include other websites somehow considered immoral, and while the current technical implementation is easy to circumvent, hardening it is equally easy once society has accepted censorship in the first place,” Middelthun adds.

The DNS service is not limited to Norwegians. Everyone who wants an unfiltered DNS service is welcome to use it.

Previously the UK Pirate Party ran into trouble when they launched a Pirate Bay proxy in response to a local blockade. The Norwegian Pirates don’t expect that their DNS will be targeted, but if it does they are prepared to fight back.

“Running a public DNS service is fully legal, so we do not expect any legal trouble. A scenario to consider is if the copyright industry, or surveillance hungry politicians, started pushing for strictly regulating DNS- and/or VPN-services,” Middelthun says.

“If this scenario came true, we will fight it with everything in our power. It is paramount that the Internet remains free, or society would suffer greatly,” he concludes.

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

This week we have five newcomers in our chart.

Minions 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	(8)	Minions (HDRip)	6.7 / trailer
2	(2)	Mad Max: Fury Road	8.4 / trailer
3	(4)	Self/less	6.5 / trailer
4	(1)	Avengers: Age of Ultron (Web-DL)	7.8 / trailer
5	(3)	San Andreas (Web-DL)	6.4 / trailer
6	(…)	Straight Outta Compton (Subbed HDRip)	8.3 / trailer
7	(7)	Southpaw (HDrip)	7.8 / trailer
8	(…)	Welcome Back (DVDscr)	5.1 / trailer
9	(…)	Entourage (HDrip)	7.0 / trailer
10	(9)	Terminator Genisys (Subbed HDTV rip)	7.0 / trailer

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