CyberLaw Blog

Archive for the ‘Bittorent’ Category

Your Quick Reference Guide to Current US BitTorrent Lawsuits: “If the dizzying array of movie producers, lawsuits, and law firms has your head spinning, don’t worry you’re not alone. We’ve put together a chart with all kinds of great info that will help you find information quick. Need to know what jurisdiction the Hurt Locker lawsuit is taking place in? What about the name of the Judge overseeing the Debbie Does Dallas litigation? It’s all right here, and hopefully will provide some good, quick insight into the nearly 20,000 John Does accused of copyright infringement.”

(Via Slyck.com File-Sharing News And Information.)

Hustler Targets 635 BitTorrent Users: “Just when you thought 20,000+ BitTorrent lawsuits wasn’t enough, 635 more are piled on. In a new round of lawsuits, LFP Internet Group (originally Larry Flynt Publications) filed their copyright complaint against the unnamed defendants for sharing the adult film ‘Barely Legal School Girls #6′. The complaint was filed in federal district court in Dallas Texas by Evan Stone, the same lawyer working on the Lucas Entertainment lawsuits.”

(Via Slyck.com File-Sharing News And Information.)

German Porn Producer Files 670 New BitTorrent Lawsuits: “There’s a secret war against alleged BitTorrent infringers going on that’s beginning to compare in scope with the USCG lawsuits. This pursuit, however, doesn’t focus on independent or artsy fartsy movies – these lawsuits are focused on adult movies allegedly shared via the BitTorrent protocol. Filed in US District Court in Dallas, 670 John Doe lawsuits were filed by Evan Stone on behalf of Mick Haig Productions, who own the copyright to the adult German film Der Gute Onkel.”

(Via Slyck.com File-Sharing News And Information.)

Hurt Locker Makers To Sue Thousands of BitTorrent Users | TorrentFreak

Written by Ernesto on May 12, 2010

The makers of the Oscar-winning movie Hurt Locker have joined a very lucrative ‘pay up or else’ scheme that will target tens of thousands of U.S. BitTorrent users. The massive lawsuit is expected to be filed in the coming days and if ISPs cooperate, suspected downloaders will receive a settlement letter in the weeks to come.

The Hurt Locker has been a great success on BitTorrent, before and after its Oscar triumph. The film’s screener leaked in February of last year, months before it premiered in movie theaters in the United States. However, the demand on BitTorrent went up significantly after it was chosen as the Best Picture of 2009

The day after the award show ‘the hurt locker’ was the most typed in search phrase on BitTorrent, with ‘hurt locker’ ending up in ninth place. This increased demand was also reflected in the download numbers which skyrocketed. Since its win at the Oscars the film has been downloaded more than three million times, totaling well over 10 million downloads.

Despite the recognition from Academy members and the huge success among downloaders, the U.S box office revenue has been relatively low at $16.4 million. In an attempt to increase the film’s revenue its makers will threaten to sue thousands of BitTorrent users who have illegally downloaded (and therefore uploaded/distributed) a copy in recent months.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Hurt Locker team has signed up for the services of the U.S. Copyright Group, who will launch a mass lawsuit targeted at tens of thousands of Hurt Locker sharers. The lawsuit is expected to be filed this week and will ask U.S. ISPs to reveal the account owners linked to the IP-addresses that shared the movie on BitTorrent.

The U.S. Copyright Group announced its mass litigation scheme in March, when it targeted thousands who allegedly infringed copyright on several indie film titles. All infringers that have been identified were kindly asked to settle the dispute, or face further legal action. It is expected, however, that the scope of this new round of letters will be much greater due to the high demand for the Hurt Locker on BitTorrent.

‘You can guess that relative to the films we’ve pursued already, the order of magnitude is much higher with Hurt Locker,’ said Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer at the U.S. Copyright Group. Dunlap also said that 75 percent of ISPs have cooperated thus far and that 40% of the BitTorrent users that were targeted early this year have already settled.

Although U.S. Copyright Group say it is their intent 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.

As we reported earlier, 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.

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 UK House of Lords they have been labeled a scam, and the lawyers operating them accused of ‘harassment, bullying and intrusion’ and ‘legal blackmail.’ We expect that the U.S. equivalent will also meet great opposition.

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

Illicit File-Sharing and Streaming of TV Shows Increases: “

Following the introduction of Sweden’s IPRED anti-piracy legislation on April 1st last year, the country saw a huge 30% drop in Internet traffic. Many attributed this fall to Internet users become scared that they would be caught downloading and sharing copyright material.

Several months later in November 2009, TorrentFreak looked at some Netnod data which seemed to indicate that not only had Swedish traffic levels returned to pre-IPRED levels, but actually surpassed them.

Traffic levels naturally increase year-on-year anyway, so it was difficult to be certain that that this boost was related to recovering levels of online piracy. However, new research just published by a consultancy firm seems to suggest that accessing illicit material online is indeed on the increase.

Mediavision bills itself an independent consultancy firm specializing in analyzing consumer behavior within the sphere of digital media. Its clients include media groups, TV channels, advertisers and production companies.

In its just published 2009 fourth quarter report, the company reveals that it detected an increase in the downloading of TV shows during the autumn of that year. In the 15 to 74 year-old bracket, 1.4 million Internet users engaged in that activity.

In the 15 to 24 year old group, 0.5 million used illicit streaming services to access both movies and TV shows, a method which Mediavision believes is becoming more sought after. 20% of the respondents in this age group admitted using them.

The company further says that 60% of 15 to 24 year-olds are estimated to have consumed illicit media online via various means in the fourth quarter of 2009, versus 40% of the 15 to 74 year-olds. This figure is the same as that reported by Mediavision before IPRED was introduced.

Overall, the company says it believes that the accessing of illicit movies and TV shows via the web has recovered at least to pre-IPRED levels, maybe slightly higher.

Jens Heron at Mediavision says that the piracy situation with TV shows would improve if foreign TV shows and other international became more readily available, at a time and place of the consumers’ choosing.

‘Our analysis shows that consumers increasingly want to decide for themselves when to watch and from which screen. Unfortunately, many have become adept at circumventing the IPRED legislation. The way to remedy this, in addition to legislation, is, of course, by offering great legal alternatives,’ he added.

Indeed, as earlier reported, around 10% of Swedes aged between 15 and 25 are taking measures to neutralize IPRED, with as many as 500,000 others in the country following suit. Måns Svensson, PhD in Sociology of Law in Lund, estimated that 6 to 7 percent of all Swedes could now be hiding themselves online.

(Via TorrentFreak.)

UK BitTorrent admin acquitted on fraud charge: “

Happy as a pig in sh*t

Updated Alan Ellis, the former admin of music BitTorrent tracker OiNK, was acquitted of conspiracy to defraud by a Middlesbrough court today.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Christmas Blues for isoHunt – Liable for Inducing Copyright Infringement: “A California court has granted Columbia Pictures a summary judgment against Gary Fung, the owner and administrator of isoHunt.com, TorrentBox.com, ed2k-it.com and Podtropolis.com. In the summary judgment, Judge Stephen Wilson found little different in Gary Fung’s operation from other products such as Napster, Grokster or Usenet.com. The court found that Gary Fung was liable for inducing copyright infringement.”

(Via Slyck.com File-Sharing News And Information.)

Rough Week for the BitTorrent Community – SceneTorrents Closes: “Every few years, the file-sharing community goes under a series of significant changes that truly alters the landscape. Two of the 3 major BitTorrent websites, The Pirate Bay and Mininova, have fundamentally changed the way they do business in the last two weeks. The Pirate Bay is no longer running the world’s largest tracker, and Mininova is no longer indexing one of the largest collections of torrent files. And for good measure, the popular private BitTorrent site SceneTorrents is no longer online.”

(Via Slyck.com File-Sharing News And Information.)

isoHunt: Last Stand in Canada: “The Pirate Bay and Mininova are still around, but crippling legal pressure has gutted Mininova’s index. Similar legal pressure and technological necessity forced The Pirate Bay to shut their tracker network down. There’s a lot going on, and it may all come down to isoHunt to hold the line.”

(Via Slyck.com File-Sharing News And Information.)

The Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down for Good: “

In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. It soon became one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, coordinating the downloads of more than 25 million peers at its height.

Despite this success, The Pirate Bay operators today decided to pull the plug and close down the tracker permanently. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has made trackers redundant they say, as BitTorrent downloads work well with trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX.

‘Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,’ the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.

Aside from this shutdown, there is also another major development quietly under discussion.

TorrentFreak has learned that behind the scenes the Pirate Bay operators are talking to other BitTorrent site owners to encourage them to follow suit and completely ditch torrents in the future. BitTorrent has reached a point where trackers and torrents are no longer needed to download files successfully. Supported by all of the major BitTorrent clients, DHT and PEX can handle the transfers and Magnet links can largely replace traditional torrent files.

‘We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT+PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,’ a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

Switching to trackerless and torrentless downloading on public BitTorrent sites does indeed seem to be an option. Previously, many people thought that BitTorrent would collapse if a dominant tracker like the Pirate Bay went down, but this doomsday scenario never unfolded. In fact, the recent downtime of the tracker did not slow down or stop many transfers, as DHT and PEX seamlessly took over.

Those BitTorrent users who don’t want to go trackerless just yet can of course still use OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent, or indeed one of the many other alternative trackers currently available.

Whether or not The Pirate Bay and others will move away from torrent files in the future, the closure of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is nevertheless a milestone in the history of the Internet. Starting today, the Pirate Bay has changed its tagline from ‘The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker’ to ‘The world’s most resilient (magnetic) BitTorrent site.’

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

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(Via TorrentFreak.)