Pirate Bay hit with legal action
113363
The men behind one of the most popular file-sharing sites in the world are charged copyright offences.
42834
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is following the Recording Industry Association of Americaâs (RIAA) footsteps by filing lawsuits against BitTorrent clients.
415061
The Motion Picture Association of America has escalated its hunt for Internet movie pirates with the filing of several lawsuits against individuals the MPAA says are distributing pirated movies.
25961
The Motion Picture Association of America is retargeting its legal battle against file swappers by launching attacks against the server operators behind the BitTorrent and eDonkey services.
379150
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is being given a taste of its own medicine by peer-to-peer (P2P) company Altnet, which has launched a civil suit against the trade body alleging patent infringement.
54402
Blog: The Pirate Bay, a site accused of encouraging copyright violations, said Swedish authorities were preparing to accuse the site of distributing porn. Site operators suspect this was just the latest attempt to close them down.
308257
Online auction giant eBay has been slow to respond to concerns about pirated software being sold there, prompting the Software &amp; Information Industry Association (SIIA)&#160;to file nine lawsuits against eBay-based software sellers, an SIIA official said.The SIIA believes it is necessary to file the lawsuits because eBay has been largely uncooperative in cracking down on software piracy, said Keith Kupferschmid, senior vice president of the trade group&#39;s antipiracy division.&quot;We haven&#39;t had very much success in getting [eBay] to work with us,&quot; he said.SIIA has asked eBay to stop &quot;buy it now&quot; and one-day auctions for software, but eBay has not complied, Kupferschmid said. In many cases, sellers offering pirated software are looking to sell it quickly, he said. SIIA also asked eBay if the trade group could buy banner advertisements warning about piracy when a user is looking at software, but the auction site declined, Kupferschmid added. &quot;We shouldn&#39;t have to do that,&quot; he said. &quot;eBay should do that themselves.&quot;Two eBay spokespeople didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for comments on SIIA&#39;s position.The lawsuits, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, are the largest round the SIIA has filed since launching its auction-site antipiracy program two years ago, the trade group said in a news release. Seven of the lawsuits were filed Wednesday, the SIIA said. Two others were filed two weeks ago. Most of the lawsuits target eBay sellers of Abobe PhotoShop CS3; one of the lawsuits targets a seller of several Symantec software packages.The defendants are from Texas, California, Washington state, Illinois, and New Jersey.&quot;SIIA has declared war against those who continue to sell pirated software on auction sites such as eBay,&quot; Kupferschmid said. &quot;Our goal is to give illegal software sellers a rude awakening so that unsuspecting software buyers and legitimate sellers are protected. For too long, auction sellers have been able to sell pirated software while risking only the removal of their auction.&quot;Since launching its Auction Litigation Program about two years ago, SIIA has filed about 20 lawsuits, not including the nine from the last two weeks, Kupferschmid said. The SIIA has won about six of those lawsuits in court, but in every case, the lawsuits have resulted in the seller stopping unauthorized sales of software, he said.&quot;Ultimately, they have stopped selling the illegal software, and that&#39;s what we&#39;re trying to do here,&quot; he said.
630161
One of Denmark&#39;s largest ISPs is considering fighting a court order to shut off its subscribers&#39; access to The Pirate Bay, the&#160;embattled file-sharing search engine.Tele2 was ordered to shut off access last week after the court concluded The Pirate Bay facilitates the trading of copyright material without the permission of rights holders, according to a translation by the Danish Pirate Party, a digital rights activist group.Tele2 complied, but plans to meet on Monday with other telecommunications companies on whether it should&#160;challenge the ruling, said Nicholai Pfeiffer, chief of regulations for Tele2, on Wednesday. So far, other Danish ISPs (Internet service providers) have not shut off access.&quot;In this case, we think it is needed to have a clarification of the legal grounds, and that is why we are discussing this with the other companies,&quot; Pfeiffer said.The court&#39;s ruling was hailed by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which along with other industry groups, are lobbying governments to force ISPs to undertake stronger measures against piracy, such as content filtering.This latest legal move in Denmark has a precedent. Last year, a Danish court order ISPs within the country to block AllofMP3.com, the Russia-based Web site that sold albums for download well below market prices. The ISPs complied. Record industry groups charged the site was a fraud and was not paying royalties for the music it sold.But concerns abound over whether ISPs should be forced to take responsibility for content that goes across their networks. In a statement released Wednesday, Tele2 said that discussions over copyright issues should take place between those who have the rights to the content and those who are hosting it, not network operators.The situation in Denmark is just the latest fracas involving The Pirate Bay, which is based in Sweden. Last week, Swedish authorities charged four people affiliated with the BitTorrent search engine for facilitating copyright violations.The Pirate Bay&#39;s owners say they do not host illegal content on their servers but merely allow people to find torrents, or small information files that coordinate the download of content from computers around the world via P-to-P (peer-to-peer) sharing. After a police raid, the site&#39;s servers are now located outside of Sweden.The Pirate Bay quickly moved this week to restore service to Tele2 subscribers by setting up a new Web site. Tele2 subscribers who trying to visit The Pirate Bay can go to The Jesper Bay , according to the TorrentFreak blog . The site gives instructions on how to get access to The Pirate Bay.(Rune Pedersen of Computerworld Denmark contributed to this report.)&#160;
742067
The company's antipiracy software adds a "yellow state" for times when it just can't tell if software is genuine.Image: A 'maybe pirate'
238187
Latest round of legal action targets users of a variety of services, including eDonkey.
631870
It's a freedom of speech thing A Swedish company owned by the founders of controversial torrent tracker site The Pirate Bay is hosting a site that defends paedophilia.â¦
446227
Slammed for touting unavailable but unlicensed content
145340
The Motion Picture Association of America&#39;s (MPAA) campaign against movie piracy has taken another turn after it confirmed it was suing two chip makers.
82427
But look to lawsuit stick rather than iTunes carrot for the cause
116557
The Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA) has been suing people left, right and centre for illegal downloading, but now theyâve taken a more positive action toward supporting legit downloading services.
451687
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has won a lawsuit against the operators of&#160;TorrentSpy.com, with the judge ruling in favor of the MPAA because the Web site operators tampered with evidence.In a ruling that could have implications for the privacy of Web site users, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, ruled that TorrentSpy has infringed MPAA copyrights in a default judgment against the operators of the site.Cooper, in a ruling made public Monday, agreed with the MPAA that defendants Justin Bunnell, Forrest Parker, Wes Parker and Valence Media had destroyed evidence after another judge had ordered them to keep server logs, user IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and other information. TorrentSpy billed itself as a central location to find files distributed on BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) networks.The defendants&#39; conduct was &quot;obstreperous,&quot; Cooper wrote in her decision. &quot;They have engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence and have provided false testimony under oath in a effort to hide evidence of such destruction,&quot; she wrote.TorrentSpy had located its servers in the Netherlands and argued that Dutch law protected them from having to turn over server logs and other information. In May, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Chooljian ruled that TorrentSpy must preserve server data logs held in random access memory, or RAM.That decision was widely criticized as being an unreasonable standard because information held in RAM is temporary, but Cooper, in her new ruling, said TorrentSpy destroyed or altered several types of evidence, including user IP addresses, discussion forum postings about the trading of movies and moderator identities. &quot;A substantial number of items of evidence have been destroyed,&quot; she wrote. &quot;Defendants were on notice that this information would be of importance in this case.&quot;TorrentSpy&#39;s lawyer Ira Rothken said his client had concerns about protecting users&#39; privacy. TorrentSpy will appeal Cooper&#39;s decision, he said.&quot;It&#39;s not a ruling on the merits of the case,&quot; he said. &quot;One person&#39;s willful destruction of evidence is another person&#39;s willful attempt to comply with customer privacy policies.&quot;The ruling, if it stands, could expose private information about Web site users in many civil lawsuits, Rothken added. &quot;This doesn&#39;t apply only to TorrentSpy, but to anyone who operates a Web site,&quot; he said.A ruling on damages in case will happen at a later date.The MPAA, which filed the case against TorrentSpy in February 2006, applauded Cooper&#39;s ruling. &quot;The court&#39;s decision ... sends a potent message to future defendants that this egregious behavior will not be tolerated by the judicial system,&quot; John Malcolm, the MPAA&#39;s executive vice president and director of worldwide antipiracy operations, said in a statement. &quot;The sole purpose of TorrentSpy and sites like it is to facilitate and promote the unlawful dissemination of copyrighted content. TorrentSpy is a one-stop shop for copyright infringement.&quot;
221760
InfoWorld - Swedish prosecutors have until Thursday to file charges against The Pirate Bay, one of the most widely used search engines for locating music and movies on the Internet.