After tracking down hundreds of Internet pirates over the years, a case that came to a head at the turn of the decade was shaping up to be one of the most important for anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån (now Rights Alliance).

More often focused on lower-hanging fruit, Antipiratbyrån had their eyes on the “warez scene”, the people and infrastructure at the very top of the so-called “piracy pyramid” from where content trickles down to the masses.

In 2010 and following a lengthy investigation by Antipiratbyrån, police raided a topsite known as ‘Devil’. Topsites are top-secret, high-speed servers used by piracy release groups and their affiliates for storing and distributing unauthorized copyrighted content. When Devil went down dozens of servers were seized, together containing an estimated 250 terabytes of pirate content.

One man was also arrested but it took until 2014 for him to be charged with unlawfully making content available “intentionally or by gross negligence.”

According to police the 50-something year old man from Väsby, Sweden, acted “in consultation or in concert with other persons, supplied, installed, programmed, maintained, funded and otherwise administered and managed” the Devil file-sharing network. Before its shutdown, Devil was reported to service around 200 elite members.

Considering Antipiratbyrån’s links with the movie industry it came as no surprise that the charges included the unlawful making available of 2,250 mainly Hollywood movies. According to the prosecutor, those numbers made the case a record breaker.

“We have not prosecuted for this many movies in the past. There are many movies and large data set,” prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad commented earlier. “It is also the largest analysis of computers ever made in an individual case.”

Given the scale of the case it was expected that punishments would be equally harsh but things did not play out that way.

Despite admitting that he operated servers at his home and in central Stockholm and the court acknowledging that rightsholders had suffered great damage, the man has just been sentenced to probation and 160 hours of community service.

According to Mitti.se, two key elements appear to have kept the man’s punishment down. Firstly, he cooperated with police in the investigation. Secondly – and this is a feature in many file-sharing prosecutions – the case simply dragged on for too long.

“It is worrying that the bottleneck at the police has affected the sentence,” says Sara Lindbäck of Rights Alliance.

Defense lawyer Henrik Olsson Lilja says that he’s pleased his client has avoided jail but adds that no decision has yet been made on any appeal. That being said, an end to the criminal case doesn’t necessarily mean the matter is completely over.

Last year Rights Alliance indicated that the six main studios behind the prosecution might initiate a civil action against the man and demand between $673,400 and $2.69m per title infringed, albeit on a smaller sample-sized selection of the 2,250 movies involved in the case.

No announcement has been made on that front and Rights Alliance did not respond to our requests for comment.

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

Fredrik Neij, one of The Pirate Bay’s co-founders, was released early May after serving a 10-month prison sentence for his involvement with the site.

He has since returned to his home in Laos, where he’s picking up his life again. Speaking with TF, Fredrik says that he didn’t miss computers or the Internet as much as he’d expected.

What Fredrik missed the most about being ‘disconnected’ was instant access to news, information and entertainment. Instead of having access to the latest movies and TV-series without interruptions, he was forced to watch broadcast TV.

“Watching broadcast TV again for the first time in roughly 12 years was gruesome. I don’t know how people stand the commercial breaks without going insane,” Fredrik tells TorrentFreak.

However, the Pirate Bay co-founder also admits that quite a bit of progress has been made in recent years. In part, Hollywood and the video entertainment industry made these changes to give consumers something they would otherwise get on sites such as The Pirate Bay.

“I saw a lot of things that probably would not have existed without The Pirate Bay, like every channel having their own streaming services, and the short time between US premiere and it being aired on networks worldwide, usually just a few days or a week,” Fredrik says.

Netflix is a prime example of a video streaming service that has become a great success. But from a Pirate Bay user perspective there is still plenty of room for improvement.

For example, people should be able to get all their video entertainment at one service, instead of having to use a dozen or so. Similarly, blocking access to potential customers based on their location is an outdated business model that has to go.

“While I think all the new streaming services are great, if they want to take on piracy for real, they need to combine all services behind a common pay-wall so you don’t need several accounts to follow your favorite shows,” Fredrik notes.

“They also really need to address the geo-blocking problems and provide global availability of the all content at the same price. Until big media makes it as easy or easier to get all your media in one place no matter where you live, there will be a need for sites like TPB.”

Of course, The Pirate Bay doesn’t use any geo-blocking tools and the site also has a content library that beats any legal service. Because of this, TPB’s co-founder believes that the site will remain popular for a while.

Now that Fredrik’s back home he can catch up on Doctor Who and Archer again. He’s also closely following Pirate Bay related developments, last year’s raid in particular.

“Back when I ran things it only took three days to get back up from a raid. The new team took a good 6 weeks, but they have been doing a good job on TPB these last few years, and eventually restored the site to its former glory,” Fredrik says.

And even if the police managed to take the site down again, new Pirate Bays will take over as long as the demand is there.

“Even if TPB is permanently shutdown, the December raid shows that there will always be sites ready to fill the void. One again showing that meeting consumer demand is far more effective than trying to enforce lobby-bought laws with no support among the general public,” Fredrik concludes.

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

While BitTorrent remains the most used peer-to-peer method of obtaining video content online, for the past several years the availability of cheap bandwidth has provided users with additional options.

Closely associated with sites such as YouTube, streaming is now one of the most popular ways of viewing content. Thanks to a player embedded in a webpage no special skills are required. As a result, streaming sites have popped up all over the web, with a sizable proportion dedicated to copyrighted content.

However, to be really useful all of this content needs to be findable and that’s where sites such as Project Free TV (PFTV) stepped in. Indexing popular content from all around the web, PFTV presented TV and movie content to the masses in an easily navigated interface with hit shows such as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead just a click away.

As a result of its attention to detail, comprehensive database and a loyal following, PFTV grew to become one of the most popular sites of its kind. Its popularity attracted the attention of copyright holders too, with Hollywood having the site blocked in the UK during November 2013.

Last evening, however, it all came to an end. Instead of its familiar yellow, orange and purple homepage, PFTV now displays a single word: “Goodbye”

Since Project Free TV had become the go-to place for millions of TV fans, the site’s users were quick to react, with dozens taking to Twitter to express their disappointment.

But for many it is the site’s content discovery features that will be most missed.

“What I loved about Project Free TV was the aggregating feature of their daily TV show list,” a former user explains.

“While not a complete representation by far it had most of the shows I was interested in and introduced me to many excellent British and Australian shows I did not know of as well as plenty of new shows from the US I wasn’t aware of due to practically not ever seeing commercials for them on broadcast or cable.”

While most people enjoyed the site via its web presence, Project Free TV was also a massive hit with users of Kodi/XBMC. Thanks to a third party plugin located at TVaddons.ag, PFTV’s library could be enjoyed from within the software. Users now experience errors instead.

“It’s sad to see them go, our community is definitely in shock. However, it’s good to see that they closed while still on the top of their game, on their own terms,” a senior developer at TVAddons told TorrentFreak.

“There are a lot of other sites offering similar services and I’m confident that users who were dedicated supporters of Project Free TV will likely find a new home elsewhere in the coming days.”

Users searching for PFTV using Google will already find plenty of sites using the Project Free TV name but most are clones with reduced functionality. At best, those claiming to be the real deal aren’t being straight while others appear to be more interested in serving up malicious advertising than providing a decent service.

Project Free TV’s operator did not respond to our requests for comment.

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

Due to complicated licensing agreements many movies and TV-series are only available online in a few selected countries, often for a limited period.

The movie studios often restrict broadcasters and streaming services to make content widely available, a practice which the European Commission wants to stop.

Today the European Commission sent a statement of objections to Sky UK and six large US film studios: Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount Pictures, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros.

The Commission believes that the geo-restrictions the parties agreed upon are violating EU competition rules.

“European consumers want to watch the pay-TV channels of their choice regardless of where they live or travel in the EU,” says Margrethe Vestager, EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy.

“Our investigation shows that they cannot do this today, also because licensing agreements between the major film studios and Sky UK do not allow consumers in other EU countries to access Sky’s UK and Irish pay-TV services, via satellite or online.”

Under European rules consumers should be able to access the services of Sky and other service providers regardless of where they are located. At the moment, most online services block access to content based on the country people are located, something Sky and the movie studios also agreed on.

The geo-blocking practices are a thorn in the side of the European Commission who now hope to abolish these restrictions altogether.

In parallel to the antitrust investigation the EU’s governing body adopted the new Digital Single Market Strategy earlier this year. One of the main pillars of the new strategy is to provide consumers and businesses with better access to digital goods and services.

The Commission plans “to end unjustified geo-blocking,” which it describes as “a discriminatory practice used for commercial reasons.”

“I want to see every consumer getting the best deals and every business accessing the widest market – wherever they are in Europe,” Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said at the time.

Sky UK and the six major studios will now have to respond to the concerns. The current statement of objections is only the start of the antitrust investigation, a final decision will take at least several months.

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

Following intense pressure from local and international entertainment companies, on August 1, 2013 Russia introduced a brand new anti-piracy law.

Initially covering only movies, the law allowed websites offering ‘pirate’ content to be blocked by local ISPs if they fail to respond to complaints. Late November 2014 the law was further amended to include all copyrighted content except images.

The legislation has been used dozens of times to threaten unresponsive sites with blocking at the ISP level, but in many cases operators have complied to ensure they keep off Russia’s blocklist. Surprisingly the world’s largest user-generated content site YouTube today finds itself perilously close to becoming a new addition.

The problem dates back several months when TV shows owned by TNT-network appeared on the site without authorization. In April, YouTube received requests from local telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor to delete the content and apparently responded in a timely manner.

However, fresh monitoring carried out by Roskomnadzor this month reportedly found almost 140 links to the same content, an event that prompted the watchdog to initiate the start of the blocking procedure.

“On the application of the right holder ‘TNT-Teleset’ and in accordance with a decision of the Moscow City Court from April 7, 2015, tentative interim measures of protection of the exclusive rights to [two TV series] have been implemented against social networking website YouTube.com,” Roskomnadzor announced.

“Notification with a request to remove the unlawfully placed materials has been repeatedly directed at the administration of the Internet resource. Currently, access to the illegal videos has not been limited.”

For YouTube, the clock is now ticking. Roskomnadzor is alerting Russian users that on Monday July 27 YouTube pages will be added to Russia’s national register of copyright violators. However, due to the way blocking is sometimes implemented, Roskomnadzor warns that for some the entire site may be rendered inaccessible.

“The video hosting site has a huge audience, and for some users the resource could become completely unavailable,” Roskomnadzor’s Vadim Ampelonsky told local media.

“The administration of YouTube has always responded to our needs and removed illegal content. But in [this case] this hasn’t happened for reasons that aren’t apparent to us. We very much hope that we will not have to put YouTube on the blocklist registry.”

It’s unclear why YouTube hasn’t responded to the requests of Roskomnadzor. The company is usually responsive to complaints and it should be trivial to add the TV shows in question to its ContentID system so that uploads of the same can be spotted in the future. But in any event, YouTube has just days to respond before the banhammer falls.

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