Tuesday, February 22, 2011

TorrentFreak Email Update

TorrentFreak Email Update

BREIN Seizes Warez Servers, Owners Seize Them Back, May Sue

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 04:34 AM PST

In their on-going quest to rid the Internet of evil pirates, in January anti-piracy group BREIN made a particularly impressive announcement.

Hitting at the top of the so-called piracy pyramid, BREIN had taken down the Swan warez Scene topsite. Formerly known as ATS, Swan operated from several servers and reportedly carried more than 200 terabytes of data.

Although the site naturally had connections to a variety of Scene groups, the action taken by BREIN wasn’t aided by the police or a court so none of the individuals involved are facing legal action.

However, this lack of an official legal process rang a couple of loud alarm bells given developments in the case. BREIN boss Tim Kuik admitted that his organization had somehow acquired the Swan servers from hosting provider WorldStream, who in turn weren’t in a position to simply give other people’s equipment to a third party.

Nevertheless, both BREIN and WorldStream defended their positions, positions which have now come back to bite them.

It later transpired that the servers were owned by Alejandra Transporte SA, a small South American hosting provider that had nothing to do with the topsite and as an ISP had no knowledge of what its equipment was being used for.

Acting on behalf of Alejandra Transporte, lawyers Solv Advocaten in The Netherlands have been taking legal action to force BREIN to hand back their client’s equipment, and yesterday those measures bore fruit. Following authorization from the Court of Haarlem, bayliffs seized the servers back from BREIN.

“BREIN took the property of my client (8 high end servers) without any court order or warrant. Also, BREIN states to have gained access to the servers. On these servers [business and private material] is stored,” Milica Antic of Solv Advocaten told TorrentFreak.

“Since my client is a hosting provider, also content of third parties (the customers of my client) is on these servers. This is a breach of privacy, to say the least.”

WorldStream, the server host and a private company, handed BREIN the servers voluntarily. As noted by Milica Antic to us in conversation this morning, BREIN is also a private organization and has no special legal or investigative authority. Nevertheless, the pair reached an agreement and BREIN took the servers away whilst refusing to reveal their location.

At the time of the seizure, BREIN boss Tim Kuik told TorrentFreak that his organization “exerts the rights and civil enforcement remedies of copyright holders” which “includes seizure of servers used for infringements.”

Solv Advocaten see things very differently and are stating that by seizing the property of another without having permission from a judge, BREIN is guilty of vigilantism.

Earlier, Tim Kuik said that if the owner of the servers wanted them back they could step forward but pointed out that this may have its drawbacks – BREIN could seek to hold them liable for the activities that took place on the servers.

However, Solv Advocaten insist that as a hosting provider Alejandra Transporte does not know what content it hosts for its clients and is therefore not liable. Indeed, in this case BREIN themselves could become the hunted.

“If we commence further proceedings against BREIN it will be on basis of breach of property rights and breach of privacy,” Milica Antic concluded.

Update: “Two members of Dutch Parliament have asked the Minister of Justice questions about this matter,” Milica Antic has just informed TorrentFreak. “They are particularly concerned about the fact that BREIN has gained access to the servers on which the business and private administration of my client is stored.”

TorrentFreak

And BitTorrent’s Oscar Goes To…

Posted: 21 Feb 2011 01:32 PM PST

oscar torrentsThis coming Sunday, Hollywood’s biggest stars will walk the red carpet into the Kodak Theater for the Academy Awards ceremony.

In anticipation of the glamorous Oscar night, we enter the dark side of the movie business to find out which of the nominees in the Best Picture category gets the vote from BitTorrent users. In other words, which of the nominated films was downloaded the most on BitTorrent.

After crunching the numbers, taken from thousands of publicly available torrents, this awards race turned out to be an easy win for Inception. With a staggering 13,780,000 downloads Christopher Nolan’s movie was the clear winner.

The runners up for Best Picture based on the number of downloads are The Social Network and Toy Story 3 with 8,630,000 and 6,620,000 downloads respectively. Although these numbers are interesting, we have to note that the comparison is affected by release dates. Not all of the nominated films were released on BitTorrent at the same time, resulting in a bias towards older releases.

That said, there is a strong indication that Inception would remain the favored Oscar nominee among BitTorrent users if they were allowed to vote for a movie.

BitTorrent indexer BTarena has been running an Oscar poll for the last three years where visitors can vote for their Oscar favorites across various categories. In this poll, which went live just a few days ago, Inception is also in the lead with 33 percent, followed by 127 Hours and Toy Story with 12 percent each.

Aside from picking the Best Picture, BTarena visitors can also pick their favorites in the other categories. Currently, James Franco (127 Hours) is leading the Best Actor category while Natalie Portman (Black Swan) is leading as the Best Actress with half of all votes.

The founder of BTarena told TorrentFreak that he decided to start the Oscar torrents project after the OscarTorrents site went down in 2007. “Oscar winners should be voted on BitTorrent too, right? Not only by a few Hollywood people,” he said.

The big question, however, is what all these downloads and votes are actually worth. Except for the bragging rights, they seem to hold little predictive value.

Last year, half of the voting visitors of BTarena chose Avatar as their favorite, while the Academy members picked The Hurt Locker. In terms of downloads District 9 was the big winner on BitTorrent in 2010, so Nolan and the Inception crew shouldn’t get too excited.

In terms of Box Office revenue Inception has little to complain about though. With $823,576,195 in worldwide revenues the millions of downloads on BitTorrent didn’t get in the way of a healthy profit.

TorrentFreak

BREIN Uses Court Win As Leverage To Wipe Out Usenet Sites

Posted: 21 Feb 2011 05:25 AM PST

Netherlands-based anti-piracy group BREIN is one of the few entities worldwide that spends significant amounts of time directly trying to force the closure of file-sharing connected sites. The group uses its resources to gain legal precedents and then hits ISPs over the head with them in order to force the shuttering of ‘infringing’ domains.

BREIN is now reporting that it has just forced the closure of 11 Usenet-related sites with a combined membership in excess of 900,000. As usual the Netherlands based outfit has refrained from formally naming its targets on its website in order to starve them of publicity should they choose to bounce back with new hosts. However, at least eight sites – nzbkingdom.net, Twilightnzb.com, Furiousnzb.net, Shreknzb.com, Team-Casanova.com, Crosspost.nl, Cobra-team.nl and FTAClub.net – are displaying messages which indicate interference from BREIN.

According to Webwereld, Dutch Binaries Program remains up but has ceased reporting the location of unauthorized content on Usenet. Other sites listed as affected include Movie2b and D4D.

The closures come hot on the heels of BREIN’s victory against the 500,000 member FTD Usenet portal earlier this month. Although FTD didn’t host or even link to any copyrighted material, after a prolonged legal battle a court ruled that the site was illegal because just 13 FTD members from more than half a million not only reported the location of infringing files on the worldwide Usenet system, but also uploaded them there. FTD will shut down March 1st.

However, despite the overall defeat for FTD, the court proceedings showed that the site didn’t breach copyrights, that the overwhelming percentage of its users acted legally and that the ‘spotting’ (reporting the location) of copyright material is also within the law.

So, the big question is this. When BREIN waved the FTD verdict at these sites and/or their hosts in order to force closure or compliance, had they previously gathered evidence to prove that members of these sites had been uploading content to Usenet?

TorrentFreak posed this very question to BREIN boss Tim Kuik this morning but we have yet to receive a response. However, for lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet, who has intimate knowledge of the law in this area through his connections with FTD, things aren’t so cut and dried.

“BREIN is using the FTD verdict to threaten other sites into closing. Even though the verdict clearly said downloading is legal and ‘facilitating’ downloading is legal as well, BREIN is now saying that sites that provide NZB files are facilitating illegal downloading,” he explained.

“This is a gross misrepresentation of what the verdict was actually about. Unfortunately it’s typical for BREIN to present their own view rather than the facts in order to force sites offline.”

The verdict in the FTD case clarified some points of law in The Netherlands, including the legality of downloading material even if from an illegal source. The court also concluded that facilitating downloading, even when this is done from an illegal source, cannot be unlawful.

Nevertheless, when an intimidating Hollywood proxy comes knocking on your door, shutting down is clearly an option being favored by many.

TorrentFreak
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