Never far from the headlines, both The Pirate Bay and MediaDefender clashed once again, with the Swedish outfit making allegations against MediaDefenders clients. These claims, reported to the Swedish police, focus on general cybercriminal activities committed against the popular torrent site, by Scandinavian subsidiaries of many major media conglomerates
A blog post on the site by administrator brokep states that they have been going through the emails from the recent MediaDefender leak, and have obtained proof, from them, that they are being targeted by several companies. Ten companies in total have been reported to the police, the post goes on to say, for charges of infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming.
“We’ve been tracing spam back to them for at least over a year, ” said Pirate Bay Administrator brokep. “We’ve tried talking to MD for quite a while. Finally they called back yesterday but was not willing to talk about us having to report their clients to the police for breaking the laws they’ve broken. Now we see no other alternative but to report these incidents, as they don’t seem to stop and as they are really serious crimes they commit.”
He also gives a nod to the huge community of fan out there, “we’ve had help from irc’ers going through all the emails from MD.” It seems that the Pirate Bay, should be called the ‘Hydra Bay’, as each time it takes a hit, it comes back stronger than before. The ten companies reported to the police, are:
* Atari Nordic AB
* Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
* Emi Music Sweden AB
* Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
* Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
* Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB
* Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
* Ubisoft Sweden AB
* Universal Music Group Sweden AB
* Universal Pictures Nordic AB
Just more ongoing revelations that have resulted from what we quite rightly called “The biggest Ever BitTorrent Leak”…
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Legal, Torrent | No Comments »
Starting today, TorrentSpy blocks all searches from US visitors and redirects them to a privacy statement. TorrentSpy is caught up in a lawsuit in which the MPAA demands that TorrentSpy hands over all user info stored in “random access memory” (RAM).
This service denial seems to be a preventative measure to protect their users, when US users try to search on TorrentSpy they now get this message:
Sorry, but because you are located in the USA you cannot use the search features of the Torrentspy.com website.Torrentspy’s decision to stop accepting US visitors was NOT compelled by any Court but rather an uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparent tension between US and European Union privacy laws.
At this point it is still unclear whether the search redirect will be temporary or permanent, TorrentSpy owner Justin was not available to comment at this point. Over 15% of TorrentSpy’s visitors are US residents, shutting them down for good will be a disaster for the site.
TorrentSpy currently does not log any user data, but if the court decides that they have to hand over all information stored in RAM, this would be a huge blow to Internet privacy. The MPAA reasons that all IPs, downloaded .torrent files, dates and other user info are temporarily stored in RAM for a few milliseconds and demands that TorrentSpy logs this info and hands it over to the MPAA. Basically they are demanding that TorrentSpy should keep server logs (pdf link).
TorrentSpy lawyer Ira Rothken is determined to fight this but said in a statement about the case: “The odds favor the copyright owners, copyright law in this country is Draconian and dramatically skewed on the owner’s side”.
Everything TorrentSpy does also applies to other search engines according to the TorrentSpy defense. Last year, when the case started, Rothken said “It [TorrentSpy] cannot be held ‘tertiary’ liable for visitors’ conduct that occurs away from its web search engine”. TorrentSpy claims it did nothing illegal and suggested the MPAA should sue Google.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Torrent | No Comments »
Fabled BitTorrent site SuprNova.org will soon be back online. The one-time darling of the BitTorrent scene will be resurrected by none other than… The Pirate Bay. Yet while file-sharing fans cheer everywhere, we wonder if this game of cat and mouse isn’t about more than just resurrecting an icon of days passed. If reports are to be believed, The Pirate Bay is raking in millions of dollars each year, and SuprNova’s rebirth could mean even more booty for them.
SuprNova was launched in 2000 by Andrej Preston, a Slovenian teenager. The popular BitTorrent tracker was shuttered in 2004 after a legal net began to close around the site, and its founder decided to play it safe. The domain has been in limbo for some time but has now been transferred to The Pirate Bay ownership, who have plans to relaunch it but have not set a date.
News of the impending relaunch first surfaced at TorrentFreak and Slyck.com, and Slyck talked to Preston about why he was giving up the site. As it turns out, Preston is heading to film school in the US and doesn’t want to be associated with the site. Despite this, he’s concerned that the site retain its community focus, and The Pirate Bay has apparently pledged to do just that.
Given that The Pirate Bay already operates a tremendously busy site, why the interest in bringing back SuprNova? Given the fame of the old site, it is still a popular “brand” that resonates with P2P users. It’s a chance to draw even more traffic to Pirate Bay properties, pillaging even more gold from advertisers who are paying up to get their slogans in front of millions of eyeballs, even if they are in the virtual bay of “pirates.”
Nevertheless, talking with News.com, Pirate Bay cofounder Peter Sunde said that the resurrection of SuprNova is all about making a point: you can’t keep a good file-sharing site down. “We want to send a finger to the ones who try to stop sites like (SuprNova and The Pirate Bay),” he said. “It’s not right to close them down and this is proof that you can’t. I think this is the first time in history that any closed file-sharing site has returned, and that’s just awesome for us to be part of.”
The money won’t hurt, either. A series of articles in Swedish newspapers last year revealed connections between The Pirate Bay and Swiss and Israeli firms (English translation), and suggested that the company was pulling in a significant amount of cash from lucrative ad deals, in excess of $100,000 per month in Sweden alone.
Of course, those financial details stem from an ad sales rep and may not reflect anything but what a sales guy claims (although The Pirate Bay does have both advertising and an astounding amount of traffic). That may not matter to the MPAA and its allies, though, who have only to point to point in the direction of the thriving Pirate Bay when they’re looking to make arguments about the commercial aspects of the dark underbelly of file sharing.
Unlike its early days, though, the new SuprNova will likely have deep pockets to fund a defense or evasive action, should it need to. If not, the there will be that much more booty to share among the crew, or perhaps to make another run at buying something Sealand-esque.
The Pirate Bay managed to survive a broadside attack on its operations last year, despite US involvement. But the US has also seen recent successes in its whack-a-mole war with AllOfMP3, and the Bush administration isn’t particularly shy about tossing its weight around under the auspices of trade policy and negotiation. Don’t be too surprised when the US renews its attempts to thwart the organization. Then we’ll see if Sunde is ultimately right when he says that you can’t stop The Pirate Bay.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Torrent | No Comments »
