It all began on Tuesday 2nd February. Following investigations carried out by music industry group IFPI, Swedish police carried out raids on individuals said to be sharing between 9,000 and 17,000 music tracks.

Five different locations including Gothenburg, Docksta, Handen and Upplands Väsby were targeted, resulting in the arrest of a 28 year-old man believed to be a Direct Connect hub operator. Several others, all accused of copyright infringement offenses carried out via the hub, were questioned and had their equipment confiscated.

At the end of last week the police conducted more raids, targeting the alleged operator of a Direct Connect hub in Motala and a user in Örebro who reportedly later admitted making available 6,500 tracks via the hub.

Two days ago the police struck again, this time against an individual in Ronneby suspected of sharing around 6,000 tracks via a hub. According to the police, there is now an investigation underway against a university network.

Yesterday saw continued action with the ninth raid in little over a week. This time the location was Kista where the police seized a computer and questioned an individual who allegedly admitted making available around 7,500 files.

These raids throw up an interesting question.

While BitTorrent users could be sharing a limited amount of material with tens of thousands of others in a very public and open setting, the relatively reclusive DC user is admittedly often sharing a lot but within a very much user-limited environment. One could argue that the average DC user contributes far less when it comes to the spreading of copyright material.

But as we have learned, unlike their BitTorrent counterparts they are much more at risk of receiving a visit from the police. So why is that?

File-sharing researcher Daniel Westman told NT that proving mass infringement in order to get the police involved is difficult with BitTorrent, but with Direct Connect it’s a much more simple affair.

“The DC technology allows the police to see everything that the user makes available and there may be thousands of files,” he explains.

Furthermore, for prosecutors to be interested in these cases there will need to be hard evidence available. Unlike in some civil cases, an IP-address and a few spreadsheets isn’t going to be enough.

“The judgments we’ve seen so far also show that it is not enough to simply track a particular subscriber, but you will probably have to also do a search and examination of his computer,” says Westman.

“Conducting a search requires a certain seriousness of crime and that severity can be difficult to prove with BitTorrent,” he concludes.

Thus far, no Swedish BitTorrent user has attracted the attention of the police but although IFPI lawyer Magnus Mårtensson accepts that getting evidence against BitTorrent users is more complicated, he says it’s not impossible.

“We will act even against users of BitTorrent in the future. We are looking right now on how best to collect evidence against BitTorrent users,” he explained.

In the meantime, actions against DC users are likely to continue, with Henrik Rasmusson at the Prosecutors Office promising more raids in “winter and spring.”

Ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde says that some good will come out of these raids, as people become more interested in sharing mechanisms that move away from small private groups, and on to those enabling sharing with everyone on the Internet.

“They do not realize it, but they are only driving more people to The Pirate Bay,” he concludes.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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Yet again it appears that the music industry in Sweden has used the country’s IPRED legislation to force the police to take action against illicit file-sharers.

Speaking with Swedish Radio, Lars Gustafsson, chief executive of IFPI Sweden, said that recently his group had made 20 complaints against illicit file-sharers, but only five were considered to be on a large enough scale to warrant the police taking action.

The alleged large-scale file-sharers, suspected of making available between 9,000 and 17,000 music tracks each, were raided by police yesterday.

Five different locations including Gothenburg, Docksta, Handen and Upplands Väsby were targeted, resulting in the arrest of a 28 year-old man believed to be the hub owner. According to prosecutor Frederick Ingblad, the man accepted some responsibility but denied the charges.

The others, all accused of copyright infringement offenses, had their equipment confiscated. Ingblad reports that thus far, two have admitted making music available through the hub.

“This business is still too large. There are so many new and good options there is really no reason anymore for people to steal music,” IFPI’s Lars Gustafsson told DN.

Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Party, was critical of the raids, and of the IPRED legislation which made them possible.

“When the police go in and take people’s private computers because they have shared music, it’s completely wrong,” he said.

“Record companies are running with the same argument that publishers did when libraries came into being. They warned that no one would continue to write books if it was possible to borrow them for free.”

Sweden continues to be one of the most popular countries in the world when it comes to sharing via Direct Connect. Its users are a perfect target for the IFPI, since individuals tend to share their entire music collection in one place, which makes proving large-scale infringement a breeze.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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Yesterday, a “line by line examination” of Britain’s Digital Economy Bill took place during the first sitting of the House of Lords committee stage.

There are 74 proposed amendments to the Bill.

In terms of file-sharing, amendments are suggested to the section which obliges ISPs to inform their customers that an infringement has taken place via their account.

In addition to informing subscribers who have allegedly infringed themselves or subscribers who allow another individual to use their account to infringe, the following category is proposed:

“..infringement of the owner’s copyright appears to have taken place through peer-to-peer filesharing networks on a subscriber’s IP address;”

This means that all copyright infringements that occur on an IP-address will be attributed to the person who pays for the account.

As pointed out by PaidContent, this addition is “sure to rile campaigners who protest that IP numbers do not correspond to identity.”

However, another amendment asks for the removal of the clause which allows action to be taken against subscribers whose connection was used to infringe copyright by someone other than the subscriber.

Amendment 52, proposed by Lord Lucas, states that the copyright infringement reports sent to ISPs by rights holders should also set out “the value of the infringement on the basis described in the initial obligations.”

This is an interesting one. When an anti-piracy company working on behalf of the music and movie industries track an infringement, it is only possible for them to track a single infringement, for example, the uploading of one track, movie, or part thereof. It is impossible for them to prove any additional infringement took place, i.e uploading the same to others.

This means that not only will the reported loss per infringement be very low, but it could also force the rightsholders to claim that an upload to the anti-piracy company equates to a lost sale.

Amendment 71 from Lord Whitty asks for the section below to be completely removed;

…the number and nature of copyright infringement reports relating to the subscriber may be taken into account for the purposes of any technical measures.

Should the amendment be accepted, this suggests that taking technical measures (3 strikes, throttling) on the basis that a subscriber has been ‘caught’ multiple times, will be disallowed.

There are also amendments tabled to change a number of instances where the term “infringement” should be changed to read “infringement allegations”.

The next sitting of the committee stage will be heard January 12th.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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OiNK was considered by many to be the finest BitTorrent music tracker the world has ever seen.

The private site tracked hundreds and thousands of torrents linking to the finest recordings from virtually every musical genre. With millions of peers, it was more popular than many public trackers.

The site was shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement in October 2007, based on intel provided by two music industry lobby organizations, the IFPI and the BPI. The police arrested Alan Ellis, the founder of the site, and months later several uploaders were arrested as well.

Four of the uploaders pleaded guilty at Teesside Crown Court in December 2008, where they were all charged with copyright infringement offenses. The four were later sentenced to community service and fines.

The trial of one remaining uploader, Matthew Wyatt, and founder Alan Ellis was pushed back and started today at Middlesbrough Crown Court. Due to a press boycott of the previous court hearings, there was no information available on the reasons for the delay.

What we do know is that Ellis has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the music industry for his role in the OiNK tracker.

During the first day of his trial little has happened. The case has been adjourned until tomorrow when the jury will be assigned. There is still a reporting ban in place on three specific issues, but the trial can and will be reported on.

We will cover the rest of the trial, which is expected to end next week, in the coming days.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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Good times lie ahead for the companies that gather information on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. In the US, the MPAA and RIAA are negotiating with ISPs on how to deal with alleged copyright infringers, and in the UK citizens could lose their Internet access for this alleged offense if overall levels of file-sharing aren’t reduced to meet government targets.

While the evidence gathering techniques differ from agency to agency, they all have one thing in common. None of them can provide proof that the account holder has actually committed copyright infringement. In fact, some anti-piracy outfits cannot even prove that the IP-address they have on file was used in an actual file transfer, although they claim otherwise.

The Video Protection Alliance’ (VPA) belongs to the latter group. Instead of simply warning the alleged infringers, they take it one step further and actually ask for cash to settle immediately on behalf of the copyright holder, a known extortion-like technique that is also used by spammers.

The process used by VPA and others is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other file-sharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share their clients’ copyright works. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer.

“Someone using this account has engaged in illegal copying or distribution (downloading or uploading) of [title],” the VPA writes in one copyright/settlement notice, adding: “The information in this notification is accurate.”

But is it really accurate? We beg to differ and we’re certainly not the only ones.

As outlined in an elaborate article posted on on Freedom to Tinker earlier this week, the VPA does not verify whether the IP-address is actually uploading or downloading content. They simply take it from the swarm list reported by the tracker.

This is wrong for several reasons. First of all, some trackers are known to insert random IP-addresses into swarm reports to provide plausible deniability. Secondly, anyone can easily create a url that would put someone in the swarm list when it’s clicked. This link can be posted everywhere on the Internet and it wouldn’t even require the recipient to have a BitTorrent client installed.

Of course, this information is nothing new to people who are familiar with these anti-piracy evidence gathering techniques. Last year researchers from the University of Washington revealed the same flaws, but outfits such as VPA apparently don’t see the need to back up their claims with solid evidence.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of these notices are sent out every year, some of which include cash requests to settle the case. Even worse perhaps, in countries that adopt three-strike legislation millions face the threat of being disconnected by their ISP, based on shoddy and unverified evidence, and without judicial oversight.

Unfortunately, the outfits that collect the evidence for the copyright holders are not very open about the techniques they use. When the RIAA’s evidence was disputed (pdf) in court earlier this year they decided to drop the case and settle with prejudice for $0.00. How convenient.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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Sponsored by Novell, openSUSE is a free and Open Source operating system, based on Linux. Following in the footsteps of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE recently decided to include Transmission as the default BitTorrent client.

However, the addition of Transmission to openSUSE was not straightforward. Since Transmission comes with DHT support – a technology that helps BitTorrent users to find peers – Novell thought that the application could possibly make openSUSE liable for copyright infringement under German law.

In order to avoid legal problems, Novell and openSUSE therefore decided to ship the operating system with a DHT-less version of Transmission while they tried to work out a solution with their lawyer.

“This month’s new release of their openSUSE Linux distro now ships with Transmission as the default BitTorrent client, but with DHT support removed at compile-time due to perceived German legal risks,” Transmission developer Charles Kerr told TorrentFreak.

After discussion with Novell’s German lawyer, it was agreed to include Transmission with DHT in future releases, but with an added popup informing users that they should only use the BitTorrent client for legal transfers. This means that the next openSUSE release will include a fully-functional BitTorrent client.

Charles Kerr told TorrentFreak that he is happy with the outcome, especially since Transmission will also add support for Magnet links in their upcoming 1.8 release.

“Magnet links are much more useful when DHT is available, so I’m glad it will be included in the next openSUSE release,” he said, adding that openSUSE have been very helpful and communicative, which is why there’s a better resolution in the works for the next openSUSE release.

Still, one can’t help but wonder if Novell had legitimate concerns, or was maybe a little paranoid in handling the DHT issue. That said, if BitTorrent indeed comes to rely more on trackerless torrents and DHT in the future, could BitTorrent clients potentially become a target for the entertainment industry?

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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After we found out that Lily Allen copied an article from Techdirt without attribution or permission to prove why copyright infringement is wring, we called her a hypocrite. Even celebrity guru Perez Hilton agreed with this assessment, and it seems that Lily is more hypocrite than we could have ever imagined.

In a reply to our criticism Lily wrote the following blog entry in which she entirely missed the point we tried to make.

“I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS [sic] THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN , HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSIITE I ACQUIRED THE PIECE FROM.”

Judging from here response it is “quite obvious” that Lily doesn’t have a clue about copyright. Lily seems to argue that we accused her of plagiarism, but we only meant to point out that she infringed on Techdirt’s copyright by copy/pasting their article without attribution.

Also, this is not the only infringement on her blog. While she’s trying to point out how much damage ‘pirates’ do to the music industry she blatantly infringed the copyrights of a number of newspapers by posting scanned articles.

To make things even more absurd Techdirt discovered that Lily is pirating music herself by offering some unauthorized mixtapes (tape 1 and tape 2) on her website LilyAllenMusic.com. The tracklist of one of the mixtapes reveals a list of no less than 19 unauthorized tracks. This means the RIAA can easily sue her for millions.

Please Lily, explain to us why it is okay for you to copy, paste and pirate others work, while you label people who do the same as thieves? Are we missing something here, or do you really think that copyright is limited to your own music?

What about the poor people working at the newspapers who might lose their job because you are pasting scanned articles online? Not to mention the poor artists that ended up on your mixtape who’s lives are ruined because of your selfish actions.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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