TorrentFreak Email Update |
- World’s First Pirate ISP Launches In Sweden
- Fansubbing Site Fakes ICE Bust To Protest Media Reporting
- Dutch ISPs Don’t Have to Censor The Pirate Bay
| World’s First Pirate ISP Launches In Sweden Posted: 20 Jul 2010 03:08 AM PDT The Swedish Pirate Party, who are at the forefront of anti-copyright lobbying in Sweden, are planning to shake up the country's ISP market. After taking over the supply of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, Piratpartiet will now partner in the launch of Pirate ISP, a new broadband service that will offer anonymity to customers and provide financial support to the Party.
Now the Party have made another interesting announcement. Together with technology partners, they will enter the broadband market with Pirate ISP, a new service designed to deliver consumer Internet in line with the Pirate Party’s ideals. Gustav Nipe, student of economics, long-standing Pirate Party member and CEO of Pirate ISP told TorrentFreak that Pirate ISP is based on the hacker ontology. “If you see something and you think it’s broken you build a patch and fix it. With that as a reference point we are launching an ISP. This is one way to tackle the big brother society.” “The Pirate ISP is needed in different ways. One is to compete with other ISPs, let them fight more for our internet. If they don’t behave there will always be someone else taking their share,” Nipe added. Aside from the competition angle, Gustav Nipe told TorrentFreak that the Pirate ISP will maximize privacy for all its customers. Operated by ViaEuropa – the company behind the iPredator anonymity service – Pirate ISP users will remain anonymous. The service began beta testing in the city of Lund yesterday with around 100 residents of LKF, a housing organization whose aim is to provide quality accommodations at a reasonable cost. After the first two weeks of testing, the initial expansion aim is to take 5% of the market in Lund and then set up in further locations around Sweden. This is a reasonable aim according to Nipe, who told TorrentFreak that they start small so they can assure quality service to all their customers. At the Hacknight conference in Malmö yesterday, Nipe further said that they will not allow the Swedish Government to monitor Pirate ISP users and will refuse to retain logs. He warned that any attempt to force it to do otherwise will result in a constitutional issue. Nipe was also clear on how Pirate ISP would respond to outside interference, in particular that from the United States. “They can bring on whatever they have, we will refuse to follow there. We don’t agree with what they are saying and we don’t agree with the laws they are making so if they have an issue with us, then we will have an issue – but that’s it.” For most potential Pirate ISP customers who intend to use the service to file-share, the immediate threats will come from closer to home, primarily from Henrik Pontén at Svenska Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau. Nipe said they are prepared to deal with this challenge. “It would be a pity to reveal all the tricks that we have, so we will save those for later. But we have ways to ensure that no customer should have to get a sad letter home from Henrik Pontén.” For his part, yesterday Pontén seemed unimpressed. “Our investigations have focused on people with much higher safety. The question has been asked a thousand times before,” he said. “When the police come calling, they must disclose the information.” It seems that the wider Swedish public won’t have long to wait to discover if Pirate ISP can live up to its promises. According to Nipe they will roll out big in Sweden at the end of this summer. Article from: TorrentFreak. |
| Fansubbing Site Fakes ICE Bust To Protest Media Reporting Posted: 19 Jul 2010 01:35 PM PDT Following the recent scares in the United States after the authorities took down and seized the domains of several sites connected to the streaming of movies and TV shows, TorrentFreak received news that a popular fansubbing site had also been taken down. Legendas.TV, a target of earlier anti-piracy action, recently displayed a message saying it had been taken down by ICE, but all was not as it seemed. At the end of last month as part of "Operation In Our Sites", U.S. authorities targeted nine domains that were linked to the offering of first-run movies without consent from the copyright holders. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also helped seize assets from 15 bank, PayPal, investment and other advertising accounts. Four residential search warrants were also executed. It’s fair to say the action ruffled a few feathers. Two days ago an email from a TorrentFreak reader contained information that suggested that famous Brazilian subtitle site Legendas.TV may have also been targeted as it was displaying the ICE ‘seized’ warning as pictured below. Trouble at Legendas.TV?However, within a short time the notice had gone and the site appeared to be operating as normal. Was it in trouble? Had it been targeted by the U.S. Government but survived the attack? It turns out the notice was put there as a hoax, but a hoax with a message. On February 1st 2009, action by Brazil's IFPI and MPA-affiliated Antipirataria Association Cinema and Música (APCM) caused the Legendas.TV site to be taken down. APCM, which represents the interests of Universal, Warner, SonyBMG, Disney, Paramount, Fox and others, forced the site offline by threatening SoftLayer, the datacenter where the site was hosted. Just a few days ago APCM were in action again by assisting an operation to shut down Brazil-Series.com, a prominent Brazilian site which indexed TV shows on file-sharing networks and one-click hosters. Following an APCM investigation, police arrested ‘Cesar’, the 24 year-old Peruvian student owner of Brazil-Series, along with his girlfriend. A police statement said the pair would be reported for breaking copyright law with an intention to profit from infringements. They argued that this is justified due to the site taking donations and displaying adverts. When notifying the media, APCM made a number of claims. Some, such as the site had 800,000 users per month and offered links to shows such as House, Friends and Big Bang Theory, seemed nothing out of the ordinary. However, some of the reporting in the media annoyed Legendas who decided to do something about it. Legendas.TV“APCM told the news/media that they [owners of Brazil-Series] are criminals and got rich, contribute to drug traffic, and shit. Clearly this is a lie, and probably a way to intimidate other sites,” a Legendas spokesman told TorrentFreak. “So we faked that we got taken down to show people that the media publishes everything without knowledge and with wrong and assymetric information, and if one day they try to catch us, people shouldn’t believe in what they will say.” The story of the Legendas ‘takedown’ was duly reported in Brazilian media although some publications jumped to the wrong conclusion that it was the work of hackers rather than the U.S. authorities. Since last year’s takedown, Legendas has been going strong and will soon launch its new site design. Article from: TorrentFreak. |
| Dutch ISPs Don’t Have to Censor The Pirate Bay Posted: 19 Jul 2010 06:57 AM PDT A Dutch court has ruled that two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands don't have block customer access to The Pirate Bay. According to the court, there is no evidence that the majority of the ISPs' users are infringing copyright through The Pirate Bay, so a block would not be justified.
Because the operators of the site fail to take the site offline in The Netherlands, BREIN has extended its focus to Internet providers. This tactic has been pioneered successfully in both Italy and Denmark, but today The Hague’s Court decided that The Pirate Bay wont be blocked in The Netherlands. BREIN wanted the largest ISP in The Netherlands, Ziggo, to implement a DNS and IP address block of The Pirate Bay, with any future domain names and IP addresses of the site to be blocked within 24 hours of notification by BREIN. The Court, however, argued that blocking all customer access to The Pirate Bay goes too far. The Court ruled that there is no evidence that the majority of the customers are using The Pirate Bay to infringe copyright. If BREIN wants to stop the actions of individual customers it has to go after them separately. Blocking the entire Pirate Bay site is unjustified in this case, the Court concluded. BREIN initially started a case against the ISP Ziggo, but rival XS4ALL joined to avoid a legal precedent which could have negative implications for the basic principles of the Internet. The company argued that if the case was lost, the ruling could have far-reaching consequences for both ISPs and Internet users. With the present verdict the tide seems to be turning in Europe. In recent years both Italian and Danish providers were ordered to censor The Pirate Bay. However, in the last two weeks courts have ruled in favor of the ISPs in Belgium and The Netherlands. Two weeks ago, BREIN’s counterpart in Belgium lost its case where it requested local ISPs to restrict user access to The Pirate Bay. A judge at the Antwerp Commercial Court rejected the blocking demands and labeled them "disproportionate", similar to today’s verdict in The Netherlands. Despite having lost this preliminary case, BREIN is expected to go ahead with a full trial against Ziggo. The anti-piracy outfit sees an ISP block as the only option left to stop The Pirate Bay. The verdicts they won against the site’s operators aren’t worth much since ‘the world’s most resilient torrent site’ is still very much alive in The Netherlands. “It is unacceptable that The Pirate Bay and its administrators would walk free by hiding in Thailand and Cambodia and ignoring judgments,” BREIN chief Tim Kuik commented. “We’re not going to let this go. We have started a full trial against Ziggo and XS4ALL, but we will also appeal against today’s controversial ruling by the judge.” Article from: TorrentFreak. |
To defend the rights of BitTorrent users worldwide, the Swedish Pirate Party 
Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has been successful in court against the alleged operators of The Pirate Bay, but despite several court orders the site is still accessible to the public.| You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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