Oh boy oh boy oh boy! It has been a while hasn't it? Wow, I'd better blow the dust off this thing! Certainly much of earth-shattering importance has gone on in such a long time--after all, two trials of very important bit torent sites ended and had to change the fundamentals of their sites, and another went offline for months! Huge happenings! This will be way more than thirty minutes, so strap in tight for all the huge shockwaves that have shaken the piracy movement to its core!

Let's start with the pirate bay. Last we left this story, those damned dirty criminal hippies (TM) were preparing for the fight of their life against the Angels Of Commerce (AOC) which was going forward as smoothly and normally and as cut-and-dried as you'd expect any anti-piracy trial to be at this point, which you can read about above. (Oh, yeah, funny story about that--six days before the trial they had to take one of the laymen out, because it was discovered that he was working for the IFPI this entire time! Awkward for them! I bet they were shocked and apalled when someone told them.) Well... last April... at the end of a 9-day trial... the offenders were found guilty of (one of) the charges they were accused, sentenced to a year in prison, and fined a whole fourth of the compensation demanded from the IFPI! Why? 'Cause that's what you get when you mess with the motherfucking IFPI. That's right. Those Pirate Bay sons of bitches had the audacity of being accessories to crimes that are so incideous, no... crimes have been... cited... yet... and wont' ever. The verdict, naturally, became a very hot story on their blog. On their website. Which was still up. The IFPI soon noticed this, however, and a month later got around to suing their ISP to take them right the fuck offline. This trial rapidly picked up steam after two and a half months or so when the MPAA joined the battle, and not-quite-a-month-after-this the court ruled that the pirate bay must stop making these works available. YEAH! Copyright holders 2, copyright stealers 0! In yo face. That site went right down! ...For about three hours, until the bay found a new ISP. But they brought it down again! a month and a half later. For a day. Because those bastards weren't going to take this lying down. They were gonna make some money again and gonna fight! I refer here of course to the Pirate bay... also to the IFPI. Apparently, after having their own prosecuting attorney dismiss half the charges on the second day of the trial, they felt it had been improperly run. Maybe they were right! After all, they did introduce new evidence on the 4th and 5th days of the trial without first notifying the court or defense team, a tactic which many Matlock episodes have informed me is illegal in most major time zones. Oh, yeah, they also felt that they needed more money, on account of all songs on the Pirate Bay being worth 10 times as much as they would be if downloaded off of amazon due to them being on the pirate bay. As I'm no law professor, I'll not try to untangle that part; I wouldn't want to get it wrong. Also the judge sat on several of the same pro-IP boards that the prosecutors did. As did the judge they sent the appeal review to. As did one of the three judges on the jury they sent the review of the appeal review to. Apparently this isn't biased, though, according to that very group of people, consisting also of 2 laymen, one of whom worked for... the music industry! We at way-fucking-more-than-30-seconds Of Bittorrent-Related Info Productions (R) (C. 2009 the aforementioned) will keep you posted when the new trial begins... Q2 2010! This should take place around the same time as the formal hearing on whether or not to have a formal hearing on whether or not to speak very harshly to the Sweedish Cultural minister about her having the gaul to say she had an opinion on something. Man, I'm *so* happy that could *never* happen here! Those crazy Sweeds. Hah hah! America: FUCK YEAH

Onto oink! As previously referred earlier in this topic (dated sometime in September of 2008, if I recall correctly) the trial of Alan Ellis, site founder, was still ongoing from October of 2007, with the date for a hearing on whether or not there would be another hearing having been postponed four times due to a lack of evidence. Well I was shocked to discover that, in my absence, the whole damn trial happened! Boy were they quick, too; not a month after the first hearing, the trial was referred to the Crown court, where it... was adjourned for a month and a half... and then another month... then three months... then two more months... then another four months... and finished a whole eleven days ago! Phew! It's like I'm reporting on the pirate bay or something, man, talk about old news. Anyway, the court unanimously found that Alan was... wait for it... not attempting to defraud the music industry! The other four members charged in the case were not nearly so lucky; after a plea of guilt, three of these poor heroes were sentenced to the maximum extent of the law: 110 hours of community service and court costs. The one remaining was charged to the maximum maximum extent of the law, this plus a fine of 500 pounds. But this fight is not over! As of this moment, the BPI is seriously, seriously considering taking civil action. This serves as a warning to all you lawbreakers. Justice will prevail!

Onto demonoid! After this semiprivate tracker went down due to data loss and then continued to stay down for several months due to continuing technical glitches like the owner of the backup being an immature child and throwing the hard drive out the window like a giant fucking mongoloid retard, the site returned like some sort of unstoppable... JUGGERNAUT! And now anyone can use it. I guess they decided that having no ratio requirements and their torrents available all over the place to anyone who wants was being too elitist.

Oh yeah and there was something about mininova deciding out of nowhere to delete all the copyrighted torrents, making them the least visited site on the internet. Whatever, this post's too long and my girlfriend wants sex, fuck you guys I'm outta here.

This has been Lysander makes fun of people what oh yeah I'm just on the computer yes dear I'm coming dear just gotta finish this sentence just one more fucking sentence alright fine I'm done! Gosh. Women, eh?

Dude, if that's thirty seconds, I'm a marmocet.

Anyway.

[quote]In June the Swedish parliament passed a controversial surveillance law that gives authorities a mandate to read all email and listen in on all phone calls without warrant or court order.[/quote]

That, I'm afraid, is not news. Most western nations have this legal loophole where any of your data can be read without a warrant or court order; back when digital laws were being drawn up, some major stupidity (intentional or otherwise) on the part of lawmakers meant that data was divided into two classes: live data, and historical data.

Historical data is available without court order (IE, SMS messages); live data requires a court order (IE, phone calls).

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as live data as defined by the law. As soon as your email leaves your computer and goes to your email provider - indeed, most likely before it even reaches your chosen provider - it is disassembled and reassembled (probably numerous times) and thus becomes "historical data" at each node it passes through.

In effect, this means that ANY data transferred across the internet is ALWAYS historical data, and thus is available to law enforcement agencies without court order. This has already been highlighted in several low-profile court cases in the UK, which naturally the media have largely not bothered to report on.

Unfortunately, this is why anything you do not wish law enforcement to read - such as things which are PRIVATE - should ideally be encrypted, with the encryption key -physically- shared between the sender and receiver prior to transmission.

This does, however, completely negate the value of the internet as a theatre of free speech.

Sad, but true.

Whoa, holy *crap* there's been a lot of news! Fasten your seatbelts kids, this is gonna take a whiled...

In June the Swedish parliament passed a controversial surveillance law that gives authorities a mandate to read all email and listen in on all phone calls without warrant or court order. Google and former public telecoms company Telia moved their servers out of Sweden. Belgium says it will sue Sweden since Belgian citizens may be wiretapped without any apparent reason. Anne Ramberg, secretary-general of the Swedish Bar Association, has called for challenges to the law in Swedish and European courts. Active party members resigned in protest; meanwhile the people responsible for the legislation have made statements such as “It would be best for everyone if the debate would calm down” and calling bloggers “spirited amateurs". 6.6 million emails were sent to Parliament through an online petition. Göran Petterson of the Moderate Party wrote on his blog: “Email is a great way to communicate with my voters but then you can’t do like Expressen has done now. […] Now, normal emails from the citizens are drowning in these.” One member of parlament wrote a very angry letter to another one for voting against the bill; after his email was leaked to the press by another party colleague, he was later heard on a recorded phone-call exclaiming that his secrecy of correspondence had been broken and that it was “Gestapo methods”.

Sorry, sorry, booorrriiinggg stuff I know. Okay, does anybody here remember that cop I was talking about, in the last post, who was working for Warner Brothers at the same time as he's being the lead police investigator for the case Warner Brothers is bringing against the Pirate Bay? The guy that Warner denied having ever employed until after the Pirate Bay filed criminal bribery charges? It's okay if you don't, I'll wait for you to scroll.

All caught up? awesome, fantastic--the prosecutor has decided that there is no reason to think that a crime has been committed by anybody employed by the police. So, there will be no investigation. Of course, with no investigation, kinda hard to find any evidence? But still, you know, great. I can sleep so much easier now knowing that this business has all been straightened out.

Next up: the hacker who the MPAA paid 15,000 dollars to to read private emails between the admins of the Pirate Bay and Torrent Spy! I suppose there's no reason to think a crime was committed here either? Apparently so, as the court ruled in the case of TorrentSpy that the hacker... somehow... did not, officially, technically, really, intercept those unauthorized emails under the wiretapp act.

This is all runnup to the actual trial, which will not begin until next year, though arrests were made almost a year ago. The reason? Well, yaknow... took longer than expected to find those pesky claims for damages! ^___^;; God only knows what the problem was, since I could find the exact numbers with a google search that takes less than ten seconds, and I make less than a thousand dollars a month and have no vested interest in the case.

So the main event is still to come, and will likely center around this issue: if it's possible to get hundreds of DMCA takedown notices sent to your laser printer, is the MPAA's evidence really ready to be submitted in court? We shall soon see. A user of the eD2K network has received a 700 euro compensation claim for allegedly uploading a movie and some adult material in October 2007. This is despite the fact that the aledged infringer operated a version of eMule modified to never upload, having never been reset, showing an opperating time of almost a thousand days and 0 files uploaded.

Based entirely on this and similarly shoddy evidence from the phonographic industry, six major British ISPs have agreed to issue over a hundred and eighty thousand letters to aledged copyright infringers. France has gone further, allowing the entertainment industry to disconnect aledged infringers after the second warning. But that's not to say that the UK is being idle! Far from it--they've already brought four default judgements against aledged copyright infringers, because they never bothered to show up to court. The other fourty or fifty or so who've been threatened with huge lawsuits have refused to settle... and been left alone. Let's see what the ratio ends up being for the next 25,000 people they intend to go after!
Meanwhile, the owner of the oink bittorrent tracker and four other indeviduals connected to the case are having their bails extended, for the fifth time. There used to be six people charged but two have been released from the investigation. As for the rest, The police are nine months and counting past the date they promised to reveal anyone a list of actual... like... charges. The new bail date is less than a week from today, however, so i'm sure they're getting right on it! By "it'" I of course mean requisitioning pens to sign the forms re-re-re-re-re-reextending bail. Might as well go for the round half dozen!

If all of this talk of takedown notices, lawsuits and arrests is having its intended effect of scaring the poop out of you, you can head on over to http://www.torrentprivacy.com/?id=start which, for a nominal fee, will encrypt your bit torrent traffic so that no one can see, or shape it.

Of course, there's little point in using bit torrent or any sort of "pirate" services at all anymore... not when the content creators start doing it for you! One inovative UBISoft employee got around the problem of Direct2Drive's DRM-modification clashing with Rainbow Six's patches by uploading a no-CD crack created by a piracy group to the company's help and support site. Hey... if it works...!

In other news, Comcast is facing a nationwide class-action lawsuit on behalf of filesharers everywhere for their misleading advertisements and disruption of bit torrent trafic. Though the damanges have yet to be quantified, they are expected to exceed 5 million dollars. Comcast's response to being forced by the FCC to stop slowing down bit torrent is to slow down everybody, by throttling users at peak times, threatening to disconnect users who exceed a 250GB bandwidth cap more than once, and instituting metered pricing structures.

Of course Comcast always had a cap, you just didn't know what it was. So it's good of them to actually, yaknow, disclose to their subscribers just what will get them forced off their service for using it too much--a progressive new concept Qwest has yet to implament! Instead, you are redirected to an "excessive use" page and forced to accept a new user agreement before you can go to any other website. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. The new agreement allows them to terminate your service for exceeding the cap a second time, as well as "limmetting your use in any way we se fit." Though they don't say just what the cap is, they do inform you that transferring over 3GB or downloading more than 40 MP3s a month is considered abnormal.

By the way, if you're worried about your ISP throttling your trafic, check out the alpha project "Switzerland", available at http://www.eff.org/testyourisp/switzerland to see if they are or not.

Elsewhere in the world, Ittally has mandated that ISPs block the Pirate Bay. They have done so, with limmetted success; the site has since jumped 10 slots higher on Alexa in the country and the site is reporting substancially increased trafic, but some ISPs have managed to successfully stop many from getting to the website... redirecting them, instead, to the IFPI. Interesting that the police can mandate that traffic from one site be re-routed to a competitor's site... seems more embarrassing, really, for a country that is trying to deny that it is a fascist nationstate. Still, considering that the block was put in place because the site was, supposedly, "making copyrighted material available for commercial purposes," I expect the block will be reversed in short order unless the PB decides to make people pay to play.

This has been... Lysander's tri-monthly roundup of P2P-related newses! Please enjoy the pretzels and hot dogs on the buffet cart to your ight as you exit.

I do.

Artists do it all the time. (which should tell you something.)

Aditionally, I've gone to amazon review pages for CDs that had the SunCOMM DRM on them and seen a whole lot of old people complaining about how it fucked up their computers and they resented the RIAA treating them like criminals for having done nothing.

This thread was way too long and boring to read, so I'll just offer a two-bit opinion only tangentially related to the subject, which is this:

I know people who are for the legalization of weed who do never, personally, smoke it.

But I don't know anyone who bitches about the RIAA and whatever who don't steal music.

Well I am kind of pissed that they are using the fact that people are breaking the law to extort people out of everything they own, yeah. Especially since none of that goes to the poor artsts whos' rights they cry about in the press. Most of all though I just find the entire situation so goddamned amusing that they're taking perfect cases they couldn't ask more from, and fucking up at every possile aspect.

If thats a 30 second run down, apparently I AM retarded.

Anyhow break it down for me. Whats the cause here?
You are mad cause the Movies and Music people dont want you stealing their crap? Or you are mad cause they are entrapping people?

I am not! Should I be, now? Totally? What is this? Do go on!

[quote="Lysander"]What, me? What are you talking about? All of this news has taken place over the last month or so. I am wounded by your accusations.[/quote]

Also, Lysander, if you're not on Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list, you totally should be.

Bruce

What, me? What are you talking about? All of this news has taken place over the last month or so. I am wounded by your accusations.

Wait, is this the same post that was posted 2-3 years ago where I said it should be reposted every so often? Because, date aside, I remember this post. You have posted this same thing before, sir, and I demand restitution.

My vision is agencies like the MPAA and the RIAA as having thier fingers plugged into a huge dam that has already eroded all around the edges. As long as there are two computers hooked up the content shall be moved, there is no stopping it.


THE
VISIONARY
AARDVARK

A Swedish hip-hop artist who the IFPI used as leverage in their legal battle against The Pirate Bay wants nothing to do with the case. Without consultation, the IFPI were claiming damages on his behalf. AWESOME. I've been waiting for something like that for YEARS. The fact that they don't even own the rights to his music is just a particularly suptuous cherry on this cake, it's nice to know that the IFPI has grown used to owning absolutely everybody.

Speaking of that case, it turns out that not one, but TWO key players in it work for Warner Brother's. One of them, a former police officer, is going to go right back to being that after this six-month temp job of his closes. Nothing suspicious about that, nosirreeeebob! The other person working for them, their ONLY "expert" witness, worked for two years at a law firm that lists the IFPI as a client and who currently works at an antipiracy organization. This information is of course... nowhere to be found in the court documents, even though it's a legal requirement. Even the fuckin' lawyer representing the Pirate Bay's ISP had no idea. Hmm... maybe Michael Jackson will have better luck suing them.

What is this lawsuit about? Well, it appears that the MPAA is demanding lost revvinue from the pirate bay for the movies Harry Potter, Syriana, The Pink Panther and Walk the Line, as well as the first 13 episodes of Prison Break. MPAA demands $37 for each download. For Harry Potter, $43 and for the first season of Prison Break $68. So... it costs about 4 dollars on amazon unbox, but if you get it from a torrent site, it's magically worth 40? Nice markup, fuckbrains. I still dont' get why they're only asking for judgement against a small handful of movies when tons of them are pirated every day but I guess this is why I'm not a high priced lawyer. Speaking of high priced lawyers: when Monique Wadsted, MPAA’s lawyer and a talkshow host, was asked whether the MPAA really thinks every download is a lost sale, she said: “We don’t know that, but the copyright law doesn’t care about that. It says that if you have downloaded something illegally, you must pay regardless, if you would’ve bought it or not.” Wadsted expects the worst now she has announced the claims: “I know that they have an increased interest in my person and that they try to ridicule me. I also count on having my computer hacked. As a business lawyer, I’m not used to these kinds of reactions.” A lawyer is unused to outraged friends of the people or companies she prosecutes against wanting revenge... uh huh... sure.

Okay, let's move to another famous tracker case! Cleveland police initially stated that the charges against Oink site founder Alan Ellis would be announced December 2007, but this was soon postponed for two months due to a lack of evidence. They did return OiNK’s servers though, after they erased the hard drives. In February the bail date was extended for the second time, only to be moved for a third time back to July. Maybe they're holding out for him forgeting to pay the bills on his cell phone they're inexplicably keeping in police custody. I hear those unauthorized data charges can be expensive!

At the end of 2005 a small-time bit torrent tracker owner was served with a CD notice, had his site taken down by a process server, and was fired from his new job. More than two years have passed and he has heard nothing new. “The last thing I had was a letter from the lawyers with a copy of a motion for a default [judgment]." The hearing in question would have been around the middle of December 2005. “I haven’t even received anything from the court about that hearing – which I should have done – so I am sceptical as to whether or not it actually went ahead” Fair enough! Why bother, really, after the guy lost his job? This is the same industry that's been quoted as saying "“It doesn’t matter if we win or lose, we will still bankrupt you.”

Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media: “The new guide is a very good example of an initiative that offers simple, practical advice to parents and teachers to keep young people safe and legal while enjoying music on the Internet." I tried the first 6 sites advised by IFPI. 4 didn’t sell any music, the fifth only listed a few songs, and the sixth website I tried advised me to install LimeWire or Kazaa. Interesting! It gets even worse further down the list where the kids end up at sites that sell hardcore pornography, although that phrase will no doubt raise the hits on this thread thanks to the load of people googling "hardcore Harry Potter kid porn prison break Michael Jackson lawyer fuckbrains." So everything evens out, in the end.

In an interview with the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine, Virgin Media’s CEO Neil Berkett - who joined the Board just a few days ago - said “This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks,” He added that Virgin was already in the process of doing deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers. Berkett then turned on the BBC and their iPlayer service, telling them - and other public broadcasters like them - that if they don’t pay a premium their service would be put into “bus lanes”. LOL, nice. I really do have to appreciate that kind of sincerity. At least this guy's up front and honest about the fact that he's a giant douche who has no interest in upholding the rights of his customers. Unlike their American counterparts, Comcast, who after filling the FCC hearing room with their own employees to keep the public out decided that they needed one more ace in the hole. Hense, a blatant lie to the government, claiming that they only filtered traffic at peak times when they in fact filter all the time and are continuing to do so. Incidentally, Cox is also jumping on the filter BT bandwagon; subscribers, take note.

My thoughts on net nutrality aside, I fail to see the use in making new laws to appease people who are breaking existing laws with impunity. If hiring out Media Defender to create new video sharing sites with the soul purpose of ensnaring copyright violaters wasn't bad enough, we now have proof that they were also DDOSing bit torrent providers... and apparently it doesn't seem to matter if it's content that they own or not, or even if it's content being distributed legally or illegally. Revision3, a somewhat popular webcast network that distributes its files through bit torrent, noticed that there were a whole crapload of files on their network that weren't theirs. These were in fact Media Defender fakes that were abusing R3's tracker for their own profit in an attempt to make their files get higher search results. Deauthorizing these files caused Media Defender to respond by flooding their servers with syn packets, taking down everything up to and including their internal email server. Media Defender's response was to, again, lie, claiming that there was only one request every three hours; the truth being closer to eight thousand requests a second. MD? We'll see your ass in court.

This has been, Lysander's 30 second roundup of the filesharing world! Thank you for your patronage.