The pro-copyright lobbies are the best organised in the world. Second only to the tobacco lobby. They gather up employees and contractors and tell them real people and real internet users are bad people who want to harm them.

When I was in the Parliament, I was at one time visited by a young mother of two who wondered why I was trying to put her children without food or education on the streets. She was a script-writer for tax-payer-financed French-German TV station ARTE.

Even if I understand that her wages don’t come from copyright licenses, even indirectly, and even if she appeared not to have thought of that, it was uncomfortable to be accused of harming someone else’s children.

Had I not been 10 years younger than her, and convinced that there are ways for her to make money that don’t include destroying the internet or putting file-sharers out of their homes, I may have opted to change my political opinion because of her heartfelt accusation.

Many individuals like her are currently visiting our legislators. Many politicians are presently being accused of harming children should they consider progressive copyright proposals.

What these politicians aren’t hearing, are the stories of those people who get cease-and-desist letters, get sued, or put through criminal trials or get handed damages so large they can’t reasonably be paid off in a life-time by a single individual. They’re not hearing the stories of those who’ve built networks for millions of Europeans where, for want of better words, cultural affinity arises.

File-sharing and peer-to-peer culture, like no other culture in modern times, has created a common cultural base in Europe. Although I hope that even without my idealistic formulation of these matters, you’re all convinced copyright at least somehow needs to change.

Politics too often gets stuck in the realm of the possible. It is possible that a 35-year-old mother could have her income impacted by a legislative reform that in no way influences her employer. It is not possible, but real, that many individuals in the European Union every year are caused heavy, even impossible, costs due to file-sharing trials and cease-and-desist letters.

It is not possible, but real, that copyright laws are increasingly forcing technology companies to innovate to the disadvantage of the freedom of the users.

The European Parliament needs to be taken back down to reality, and away from the realm of possible dangers before June 16th.

If you are presently in the European Union, or if you can reach out people in the European Union, in any way at all: this is the time to ask them to contact their representatives in the European Parliament. Tell the Members about yourselves, your lives, your children and the world in which you want to live. Give them a taste of the reality which exists away from the speculative possibilities of professional lobbies.

Whenever we’re too tired or too scared to tell our politicians what is important, whoever has the resources will weave them stories of realms of possibilities instead. The future of copyright, and of all of the Internet, is too important to leave in the hands of such story-tellers.

Go to copywrongs.eu and figure out the specific demands you want to place to your MEP, but remember – your biggest asset is that you’re real, and the lobby stories mostly aren’t.

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About The Author

Amelia Andersdotter represented the Swedish Pirate Party in the European Parliament between December 2011 and July 2014. She’s an expert on topics related to the Internet, intellectual property and IT-policy.

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

As the spiritual home of The Pirate Bay and the birthplace of some of the world’s most hardcore file-sharers, Sweden has definitely earned its place in the history books. If Swedes can be converted to legal offerings, just about anyone can, one might argue.

A new study just published by the Film and TV Industry Cooperation Committee (FTVS) in collaboration with research company Novus reveals some interesting trends on local media consumption habits.

Covering both legal and illegal services, the survey is based on 1,003 interviews carried out between Feb 27 and March 9 2015 among citizens aged 16 to 79-years-old.

Legal and illegal consumption

On the legal TV and movie consumption front, Sweden appears to be doing well. A decent 71% of respondents said they buy services such as Netflix and HBO, with a quarter using such services every day and 35% watching several times each week.

In comparison, 29% of all respondents admitted to using illegal services to watch film and television. Perhaps unsurprisingly the activity is most prevalent among the young, with 60% of 16 to 29-year-olds confessing to using pirate sites.

The survey found that around 280 million movies and TV shows are watched illegally in Sweden each year, with respondents indicating they would have paid for around a third of those if illegal services weren’t available.

With torrents extremely popular around Europe, it’s interesting to note that downloading of content is now taking second place to online streaming. The survey found that 19% of respondents stream content illegally, while 17% download. When users engage in both streaming and downloading, streaming is the more popular activity.

The study notes that dual users (those that use both legal and illegal services) watch every third movie or TV show illegally, an average of four films and seven TV shows every month.

Attitudes

The survey also polled respondents on their attitudes to piracy. Six out of ten respondents said they think that using ‘pirate’ sites to watch movies and TV shows is “wrong”. Four out of ten agreed, but previously used these services anyway.

On the thorny question of what to do about piracy, respondents were asked what they thought would be the best solution.

Somewhat conveniently for an anti-piracy focused report, 43% of respondents indicated that ISPs should play a part in reducing the numbers of user visiting illegal services, with 24% opting for site blocking measures and 19% suggesting a warning notice scheme.

However, when it comes to the heavy hand of the law, a minority of respondents show an interest. Just 10% believe that boosting law enforcement and judicial resources will solve the problem while a tiny 4% think that harsher punishments will bring results.

Commenting on the report, Per Strömbäck of FTVS says that the situation in Sweden is far from satisfactory.

“There is a common misconception that piracy is less of a problem today because we have a wide range of legal options. On the contrary, the problem of illegal services is greater than ever,” Strömbäck says.

“The situation is not sustainable. For us to be able to continue to produce, distribute and show films and TV audiences want to see and pay for, we need a functioning digital market and measures to stop the illegal competition.”

With site blocking firmly on the agenda in Sweden, entertainment industry groups will be pinning their hopes on success in the courts since there is clearly no appetite for punishing the public.

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

With millions of regular visitors RARBG is one of the most popular torrent sites on the Internet.

Like most sites of its size, RARBG also has a Facebook presence where it keeps its users informed about the latest developments, including new features and the occasional outage.

However, a few hours ago RARBG’s official Facebook page suddenly disappeared.

Initially, the operator assumed that there was some kind of error, but after logging into Facebook he was presented with the following message.

“We have disabled or removed access to the following content you posted on Facebook because we received a report from a third party that the content infringes their copyright(s).”

TF spoke with the operator of the torrent site who informed us that they were careful not to link to any infringing material. In fact, until now they have never received any copyright complaints from Facebook.

According to RARBG, Facebook simply took a copyright holder complaint for granted without any further investigation.

“Once again Facebook proved that they are not fighting for freedom of speech and they will bend over to any company that makes any copyright complaint without even taking the time to send a warning or properly investigate the issue,” RARBG’s admin says.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has shut down a torrent site fanpage. Previously, the same happened to The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and ExtraTorrent.

For RARBG the removal was the last straw. The torrent site doesn’t plan to make a new Facebook page just to risk starting all over again a few months from now, so will simply be a little less social instead.

Update: Limetorrents informed us that Facebook also deleted their page, which had tens of thousands of fans.

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

Last month the long running lawsuit between the RIAA and Grooveshark came to an end. However, within days a new site was launched aiming to take its place.

The RIAA wasn’t happy with this development and quickly obtained a restraining order, preventing domain registrars and hosting companies from offering their services to the site.

This was somewhat effective, as Namecheap quickly suspended the original domain name. However, not all parties were as cooperative.

Popular CDN-service CloudFlare refused to take action on the basis that it is not “aiding and abetting” piracy. The RIAA disagreed and asked New York District Court Judge Alison Nathan to rule on the matter.

In an order (pdf) just published, Judge Nathan agrees with the music group.

CloudFlare argued that they were not bound to the restraining order since they were not in “active concert or participation” due to the automated nature of its services. In addition, the company countered that even if it disconnected Grooveshark, the site would still be accessible.

In her order Nathan notes that she finds neither argument persuasive. The fact that CloudFlare is aware of the infringements and provides services that help the public to easily access the infringing site, shows otherwise.

“Connecting internet users to grooveshark.li in this manner benefits Defendants and quite fundamentally assists them in violating the injunction because, without it, users would not be able to connect to Defendants’ site unless they knew the specific IP address for the site,” Judge Nathan writes.

“Beyond the authoritative domain name server, CloudFlare also provides additional services that it describes as improving the performance of the grooveshark.li site,” she adds.

The argument that the ‘new’ Grooveshark will still be around after CloudFlare suspends the account was found to be irrelevant. A third-party can still be bound by a restraining order even if terminating its services doesn’t render a website inaccessible.

“… just because another third party could aid and abet the Defendants in violating the injunction does not mean that CloudFlare is not doing so,” the order reads.

Finally, the Judge agrees that there may be other services that are not covered by the order. However, in this case CloudFlare is directly facilitating Grooveshark, with specific knowledge of the accounts that are responsible.

For CloudFlare the ruling comes as a disappointment, opening the door for a slew of similar requests. The CDN has several of the largest pirate sites as clients, including The Pirate Bay, which is now a relatively easy target.

At the time of writing Grooveshark.li is no longer accessible, suggesting that CloudFlare has already complied with the order.

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

For years the global entertainment industries have bemoaned the state of Spanish market. Rampant online piracy meant that the country was regularly described as a piracy haven and its Internet generation a bunch of common thieves.

Struggling economy aside, part of the problem in Spain (particularly on the video front) has been the lack of decent legal alternatives. Back in August 2011, rumors spread that Netflix was about to launch in the country after successes in the U.S. and Canada, but that never came to pass.

Instead, just months later Spain was told by the United States that it would end up on a trade blacklist if it didn’t reel in piracy. In the years that followed the country did what it could to comply and earlier this year ordered the blocking of The Pirate Bay.

Now, four years after its first attempt at breaking into the country, Netflix has confirmed it will launch in Spain later this year. Speaking in an interview with Spanish publication El Mundo, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says he’s excited for the launch which he believes will be one of the company’s best so far.

“I think Spain will be one of our most successful countries. There is a high rate of Internet connectivity and a population that is accustomed to the use of electronic commerce and that has shown signs of being interested in our product. We are very optimistic,” Hastings says.

But of course, piracy is a big part of the puzzle. Tech-savvy Spaniards have a long history of using every conceivable file-sharing system to grab content, in some cases a full decade before official vendors turned up in their country. However, the Netflix CEO isn’t fazed by the piracy problem. In fact, the company probably has a lot to be grateful for.

“Well, you can call it a problem, but the truth is that [piracy] has also created a public that is now used to viewing content on the Internet,” Hastings says.

He has a point. Pirates certainly have a clearer idea of what to expect from an online service so for many the switch could be fairly seamless. However, Hastings believes that on the convenience front, Netflix could even beat the pirates at their own game.

“We offer a simpler and more immediate alternative to finding a torrent,” Hastings says.

“In Holland we had a similar situation. That too was a country with a high rate of piracy. And the same thing happened in Canada. In both countries we are a successful service.”

Somewhat refreshingly (and in contrast to the claims of most entertainment companies) Netflix isn’t scared of competing against ‘free’ either.

“We can think of this as the bottled water business. Tap water can be drunk and is free, but there is still a public that demands bottled water,” Hastings says.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the service set to launch in Spain later this year won’t be the ‘full fat’ version consumers elsewhere (in varying degrees) are accustomed to. There will be a lot of content, but Hastings says that subscribers should expect a line up similar to that offered previously during the launch of the service in France and Germany.

“In each country we have to start with a smaller catalog and begin to expand gradually as the number of registered users grows. In the UK, for example, we now have a fairly extensive catalog of TV series and movies after three years of activity there,” Hastings explains.

“Our offering is expansive in Latin America too, but it is much easier to negotiate and acquire rights when you buy for a large subscriber base as we now have in the United States.”

Only time will tell if the arrival of Netflix will begin to turn the piracy tide in Spain. For a cash-strapped nation with high unemployment every penny counts, but at an expected eight euros per month, Netflix should be within reach of a significant number of households.

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