We’ve covered some of the more exotic ways people can be tracked or monitored in the past (including some that don’t work) but the lawsuits, abandoned by the record industry as bad for business, have been adopted by a group of lawyers who don’t let a little hypocrisy stand in their way.

There’s a lot of misinformation about which companies and agencies can do what, and how they do it. People claim industry groups or random companies can search and send out letters at random, whereas the reality is the investigator must be authorized or they could be deemed guilty of copyright infringement themselves.

There’s also a lot of confusion about exactly how evidence is collected, with people sometimes believing that it can only be collected from corporate networks, or that private trackers are safe because investigators can’t share and so would be banned for their ratio. Much of this is untrue and these beliefs can make it easier to collect evidence.

The easiest way of all is to simply collect information from trackers. It’s an easy and quick way to do it, although as was revealed 2 years ago, it’s often quite inaccurate.

The next simplest way, which provides lots of data, is just to join a swarm and monitor. Some people believe that clients doing this will stand out, as modified clients will behave differently. The reality is that clients don’t have to be monitored at all.

Researcher Andrew Norton produced this video explaining how a vanilla µTorrent client can be used to identify and log peers without any modification or abnormal behavior.

The raw data shown in the video – all that’s needed for a lawsuit or allegation under most 3-strikes laws – is nothing more than basic communication data. However, it’s critical to note that this data, while it is evidence of activity, is NOT evidence of infringement in many cases.

We can’t testify that this is the method used by any company – they’re notoriously tight-lipped about their methods – but it’s quite possible that it’s being used and sold on as a very high priced service to customers. Selling simple and not always accurate or effective methods for thousands of dollars a week was revealed to be a key method of MediaDefender. Anyone reading this and intending to hire such companies would be advised to ask for a demonstration of their detection system first-hand.

It should, however, come as yet another wakeup call to those using blocklist-based software. Without any way to identify a client using this method, there’s no way to add its IP to the list. In fact, the public availability of block-list contents means it’s extremely easy to avoid being on them.

On the other hand VPNs, proxies and seedboxes will provide some protection, but the only real solution is to press for the peer-review of anti-P2P companies and their methods, but that doesn’t look like it will come any time soon.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Several admins of the site had their computers seized during the raid and some of them were even jailed for a night. Although the site never returned, the legal proceedings against the people involved would carry on for several years, becoming the largest BitTorrent-related case in terms of the number of people involved.

In separate cases both individual users and administrators of the site were charged with copyright related offenses. The prosecutor chose 24 users who had posted both torrents and shared high volumes of data, claiming criminal copyright infringement. All except one were found guilt and had to pay several thousand euros in damages and fines.

In addition to the users, 32 admins of the site were also charged. The term admin was used loosely here since some were merely moderators of the forums. Of the 32 ‘admins’, 21 were eventually convicted in the District Court. These convictions ranged from assisting copyright infringement to direct copyright infringement.

What followed were several appeals, with the cases of some of the defendants going all the way to the Supreme Court on claims that they were not guilty.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court found seven of the Finreactor admins guilty of assisting in copyright infringement. The defendants claimed that they should be found not guilty because Finractor’s users were responsible for sharing the files. The Court disagreed arguing that their role in the Finreactor network, which allowed others to share copyrighted works, was essential.

The Supreme Court sentenced the seven admins to pay 680,000 euros in damages, which will be shared among a few dozen copyright holders who joined the case. This sentence is significantly higher than the 420,000 euro fine which was handed out to the admins by the Court of Appeal in 2008.

The verdict sets a dangerous precedent according to the Finnish Pirate Party. It means that operators of web-portals could be held responsible for what their users do, which puts the people behind thousands of other sites, including YouTube, at risk.

“The Finreactor verdict is a disturbing interpretation of the liability of service providers for what users are doing, and it contradicts the principle that the postman is not responsible for the package he or she delivers,” said Pirate Party chairman Pasi Palmu Lehto. “The Supreme Court’s decision makes it very unclear what kind of services can be developed and when operators are responsible for what users are doing.”

The Supreme Court decision against the Finreactor admins came one day before Finland made a broadband connection a fundamental right of its citizens. As of today, every Fin has the right to at least a 1 Mbps Internet connection, one that they should use wisely.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Gary Fung, the owner of isoHunt, was ordered to start censoring the site’s search engine based on a list of thousands of keywords provided by the MPAA, or cease its operations entirely in the U.S. Thus far little has changed. The Lite version of isoHunt remains accessible and unfiltered to U.S. visitors while isoHunt and the MPAA battle in court against both the legitimacy and usability of the proposed filter.

IsoHunt has decided to appeal the injunction and this week both parties filed their motions with the court. In his support for the motion, Gary Fung argues that the list of generic keywords provided by the MPAA is unworkable and he accuses the movie studios of wanting to obtain control over BitTorrent.

“In my opinion, which I have expressed publicly, plaintiffs, MPAA and the Entertainment Industry are seeking not just to ‘stop copyright infringement’ but to obtain control over BitTorrent technology so that only their partners or those that conform to their demands for limiting access will have practical use of the technology,” Gary Fung told the Court.

Fung backs up his statement with the argument that keywords such as ’10′, ’21′, ‘Birth’, ‘Cars’, ‘Dad’, ‘Dave’, ‘Firefox’ and ‘Soldier’ would result in significant collateral damage with a keyword filter. It might make movie titles unavailable, but also a lot of public domain, GPL and Creative Commons works.

The MPAA has been asked by District Court Judge Wilson to supplement their titles list with more specificity, but apart from adding a few hundred more titles to the modified list, the defendants say it still lacks information which would allow isoHunt to filter effectively. Ideally, they would like to see a list of torrent hashes of alleged infringing material.

IsoHunt’s lawyer Ira Rothken further notes that the court failed to address the freedom of speech issues that are involved in this case. Fung himself likens the filter to the Great Firewall of China, where a similar keyword filter is used to censor the Internet.

“I find it absurd that we are required to keyword filter which ironically all search engines in countries like China are required to do due to political censorship, but isoHunt would be the only search engine serving traffic to US users required to do similar filtering..,” Fung wrote to the court.

These censorship and freedom of speech issues aside, isoHunt’s owner says that keeping the injunction would do serious harm to the site’s traffic and thus his business. IsoHunt has already seen a 50% drop in visitors from the U.S. after it switched to the Lite version.

“Since isoHunt switched to the Lite interface in compliance with concerns raised and publicized in the Summary Judgment, we have seen a 50% drop in US traffic and I am concerned that if a stay is not issued there will be no way to unring the bell on lost traffic,’ Fung wrote.

With both parties having presented their arguments, the District Court of California has now to decide whether the permanent injunction will stay in place or not. This decision will be a crucial one to the future of isoHunt and possibly other BitTorrent sites. Gary Fung has always said that a keyword filter is out of the question and that he would rather shut the site down in the US.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

After being pulled offline by a complaint from Universal Music in April, the site moved to a new host in The Netherlands. Initially it seemed that this move had ended the trouble but it turned out to be just a temporary reprieve.

“Shut down again, although we never hosted any files or copyrighted data on our server. Our site is strictly informative,” a message just posted at the site’s home page reads.

TorrentFreak spoke with RLSLOG founder Martin who told us that he’s working on getting the site back online as soon as possible, the first step being the discovery of a suitable hosting provider. After being thrown out by a German and Dutch host, he will now try his luck elsewhere.

The current hosting company refused to forward the actual complaint to RLSLOG, so it is unknown who is behind the request. Martin was told by the webhost that the “German government” and a local anti-piracy organization are responsible, but he has been unable to verify these claims.

RLSLOG has been targeted by rights holders several times over the last year. Previously, Web Sheriff sent a complaint to RLSLOG’s former host who then took the site offline and a few weeks ago Universal Music also managed to take the site offline.

RLSLOG, however, sees no wrong in what it does as the site does not host any copyrighted files on its servers. Although the site appears to operate in a gray area when it comes to copyright, a website doesn’t have to store any copyrighted files in order to be seen as a copyright infringement facilitator by the courts.

The court cases against isoHunt, Mininova and The Pirate Bay have shown that linking to files can be enough to be found guilty of, or liable for, infringements. As we’ve said before, RLSLOG might actually have an even worse case since the ‘links’ are selected and published by the site’s editors.

Thus far RLSLOG’s problems are only limited to finding a host that would allow the site to operate despite any complaints that might roll in. If everything goes well, the site should be back online in a matter of days.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The first step of the scheme has now been officially initiated as a complaint against 5,000 ‘unidentified’ BitTorrent users was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. If the court approves, the ISPs of the alleged infringers will be ordered to hand over the personal information of the users associated with the IP-addresses.

All infringers that are identified will then be kindly asked to settle the dispute, or face further legal action. In the UK these schemes have been highly criticized by the public, consumer organizations and politicians because of the intimidating tactics and lack of solid evidence.

In the U.S. this particular case has not gone unnoticed either and it generated many headlines before an official complaint was filed. Although the U.S. Copyright Group say that 75% of ISPs are cooperating, most of the bigger ISPs remain skeptical, with Time Warner publicly resisting U.S. Copyright Group’s demands.

The U.S. Copyright Group, on its turn, went on to accuse Time Warner of inducing copyright infringement because of the refusal to expose its users. The group claims that Time Warner’s refusal to cooperate is a publicity stunt to gain the favor of consumers concerned about their privacy.

Then again, the U.S. Copyright Group is not totally open about its intentions either. Although they say it is their intention to sue individuals who do not pay, in reality that eventuality is impossible to maintain on any scale. Their aim will be to scare as many people as possible into paying, perhaps backed up with legal action against a tiny minority to prove a point.

The real winner in this soap opera is in fact the U.S. Copyright Group. As we reported before, the ‘pay up or else’ scheme is not only lucrative for the rights holders, who get only 30 percent of the settlement money. The remaining 70 percent goes to the U.S Copyright Group and its anti-piracy partners.

Ca-Ching!

We encourage people who receive a settlement request to contact us, so we can look at the details and possibly assist in countering the threats of which many more are expected to be sent out in the months to come.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The case went on in the years that followed and two months ago the US District Court of California proposed a permanent injunction that would require isoHunt to maintain a list of banned keywords and remove torrents that match items found on it. This injunction has now become final, meaning that the site has to start filtering or close down in the US.

IsoHunt owner Gary Fung earlier told TorrentFreak that he has no faith in a filtering mechanism either. He said that such a measure “raises serious issues on the balance between freedom of speech, fair use and copyright protectionism,” as it would also filter out many torrent files that are in the public domain, or distributed with the consent of copyright holders.

Last month isoHunt chose to redirect all United States visitors to a Lite version of its website in a final attempt to prevent the search engine from having to close, but this was not enough according to the Court.

The verdict does not necessarily mean that isoHunt will be unavailable in other parts of the world. Gary Fung earlier told TorrentFreak that the ultimate measure would be to block access to visitors from the United States, which would also be sufficient to comply with the Court’s demands.

IsoHunt is not the first torrent site that has been put out of business in the United States by the MPAA. In the summer of 2007 a federal judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities and these were to be handed over to the MPAA.

In a response to this decision, TorrentSpy decided to block access to all US visitors instead which led to a huge drop in traffic. In 2008 TorrentSpy, once the largest torrent site on the Internet, closed its doors for good after it was ordered to pay a 110 million dollar fine.

Fung has to comply with the temporary injunction withing a day. The permanent injunction also holds for isoHunt’s sister sites TorrentBox, Podtropolis and Ed2k-it.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

While the major BitTorrent sites were in Hollywood’s spotlights as the major source of copyright infringement, Usenet sites such as Newzbin remained untouched.

This changed, however, when the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the MPAA’s big brother, sent a threatening letter to the site’s operators in 2008.

This letter was followed by an official announcement of a lawsuit against the Usenet indexer early 2009. The case eventually went to the High Court in February of this year where Newzbin was found liable for copyright infringement.

The court ordered the company that operates the site to stop indexing movies and TV shows to which the Hollywood studios own the copyrights. In addition, Newzbin was told to pay court costs for the MPA, which apparently bankrupted their operation.

“Regrettably the Newzbin website has to close as a result of the legal action against us,” the site’s visitors can now read on Newzbin’s homepage.

The Usenet indexer is linking to a blog post which has additional details on Newzbin’s troubles.

“Apparently Newzbin has been put into administration yesterday because it couldn’t pay its debts. Word is that they owe the MPA £230,000 just in interim costs, and that’s without a full costs ruling or a decision on damages. Apparently they also owe a software development house over £500k,” it reads.

Thus far we haven’t been able to verify the legitimacy of these claims with the Newzbin team, but since the post is linked on the homepage we assume it holds some truth. We will update this article when we find out more.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The ten day trial started off with a small victory for the accused. On the second day the prosecutor announced that half of the charges against the four defendants had been dropped. The prosecutor couldn’t prove that the .torrent files that were submitted as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay’s tracker and therefore had to drop all charges of ‘assisting copyright infringement’.

What remained was the claim that the Pirate Bay folks were ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. In the days that followed the defendants’ lawyers nullified the ‘assisting’ part by arguing that there was no link between the accused and users who download copyrighted material. The prosecution, on the other hand, argued the opposite and brought in screenshots of websites and torrent files as evidence.

On April 17th 2009, the verdict was announced and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. The court sentenced each of the defendants to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000.

Immediately after the verdict the defendants announced they would appeal. In the weeks that followed the news came out that the judge who delivered the verdict had ties to several pro-copyright organizations. Following this news the defendants’ lawyers decided to file for a retrial, but this request was denied.

While awaiting the appeal that is currently scheduled to take place during the summer of 2010, The Pirate Bay continued to operate. Despite efforts from the entertainment industry to shut it down the site is now bigger than ever before. At the time of writing The Pirate Bay has 4,349,457 signed up members, growing by 105 members during the time taken to write this article.

This doesn’t mean that nothing has changed though. In the months following the verdict there were plans for the site to be sold to a gaming company who wanted to transform it into a BitTorrent-powered media store. The takeover plans dominated the news for months but the deal eventually went bust in the fall of last year.

Around the same time, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay were told by the court that they could no longer be involved in the daily operations of the site. This didn’t change much either because the two had already said that they were no longer involved in its operation. All this time, The Pirate Bay continued to serve torrents to the public.

Last November, The Pirate Bay decided to close down its tracker. According to The Pirate Bay team, BitTorrent has evolved up to a point where trackers are no longer needed. “We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time, adding that they might even stop serving torrents in the future.

Since November, The Pirate Bay has continued without a tracker, with its website gaining more and more users month after month. This relative calm is expected to last for a few more months until the appeal trial starts. When that happens, The Pirate Bay will have close to 5 million registered users, which is 4 million more than when the legal troubles began.

Article from: TorrentFreak, in the morning.

The case has been dragging on ever since and last week a Californian court proposed a permanent injunction that would require isoHunt to maintain a list of banned keywords and remove torrents that match items found on it.

Fung has always been very outspoken about having to filter content from his site based on keywords, saying that such a measure is too extreme. Today, in an attempt to avert having to filter content, isoHunt is redirecting US visitors to a Lite version of the site to deal with claims of induced copyright infringement.

“Although we bring this new search engine to you with a burden from the lawsuit brought by the MPAA, we hope you understand the reason why we are making this change. It is to address concerns Judge Wilson has over inducing copyright infringement in the US,” Fung writes in an announcement.

“To protest the possibility we may be required by US law in upcoming injunction to keyword filter for US users, we have redirected isohunt.com to isohunt.hk to demonstrate the similarity to a certain other popular search engine also required to censor in China,” isoHunts owner adds.

The Lite version of the site shows users a big search box similar to the design of other search engines including Google. Unlike the present site where users can browse through various torrent categories, the lite version should not induce copyright infringement any more than other search engines. Through this change isoHunt hopes to prevent having to filter its search results.

With the Lite version of isoHunt, Gary Fung hopes to prevent the site’s closure in the US, which he prefers over a keyword filter. If the court somehow rules that it’s still violating copyright law, one has to wonder what implications this has for Google, Yahoo! and other search engines.

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

The proposed keyword filter is a suggestion from the movie studios that was taken over by the court. Last year, a Dutch court ordered fellow torrent site Mininova to install a similar measure. The operators of Mininova found it technically unfeasible to pre-approve or filter every potentially infringing torrent file, so restricted their torrent offerings to uploads made by approved users instead.

IsoHunt owner Gary Fung has no faith in a filtering mechanism either. He previously told TorrentFreak that such a measure “raises serious issues on the balance between freedom of speech, fair use and copyright protectionism,” as it would also filter out many torrent files that are in the public domain, or distributed with the consent of copyright holders.

It has to be noted that the court’s suggestion is not yet a final order. Fung told TorrentFreak that he will certainly be objecting to the proposal. Instead of a keyword filter Fung has prepared a ‘lite’ version of isoHunt that would address the judge’s concern on inducing copyright infringement.

The lite version of the site is nothing more than a big search box similar to other search engines such as Google. Unlike the present site where users can browse through various torrent categories, the lite version should not induce copyright infringement any more than other search engines, Fung reasons.

Whether or not the court will accept this lite version, it is unlikely that isoHunt will start to actively filter content from the site in the future. The ultimate measure would be to block access to visitors from the United States, which would also be sufficient to comply with the court’s demands.

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