Today an appeals court helped the RIAA extort $222,000 from Jammie Thomas-Rasset for distributing 24 songs on the internet. The original verdict called for a preposterous penalty of $1.92 million. Sure, this new amount of just under $9,000 a song is lower, but ugh, it’s still absurd and horrible. More »
Google has recently introduced a number of anti-piracy measures to discourage users from looking up pirated content online. While the search giant hasn’t removed the indexes of piracy sites from its search results, it is taking steps to ensure that minimum traffic gets routed to piracy sites through its search results. For instance, it recently started downranking piracy sites in Google Search.
The latest in the list of such measures is to include Pirate Bay domains in its censorship list. Pirate Bay is one of the most popular torrent sites which is used to find pirated content. Google has now expanded its Autocomplete censorship list so that Pirate Bay domains no longer show up in the autocomplete options. (more…)
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Android is designed for piracy, developer says, Google adds more words to its list of piracy related terms,
Back in January, Google bowed down to corporate monoliths and started censoring “piracy-related searches” containing terms like BitTorrent, torrent, RapidShare, etc, so that they won’t appear on Google’s autocomplete and instant search results. Looks like The Pirate Bay is the latest to be added to the list. TorrentFreak points out what you can see in the screecap above: “Piratebay” no longer returns quick results related to the embattled service’s domain. [TorrentFreak via The Next Web] More »
One of the four defendants in a case facing The Pirate Bay off against several major entertainment companies, founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, was deported this week from Cambodia to rest in the hands of Swedish authorities. Warg was arrested on the 2nd of September from his rented apartment in Cambodia by Cambodian police at the request of Sweden and was sent to Sweden, arriving on a Thai Airways Flight on Monday night. Sweden and Cambodia had no extradition treaty in place between one another at the time of the incident, so the push was made as an immigration violation so that it could be handled without a hearing in court.
Cambodian officials were presented legal documents on the copyright infringement case against Warg several days after his official arrest. Police spokesman Kirth Chantharith noted that the papers were presented after the arrest, after which the transport of Warg was able to begin. Warg and three Pirate Bay colleagues owed major entertainment companies 30 million kronor – aka $3.6 million USD – back when they had their first sentence in 2009.
The Pirate Bay crew were set to spend one year in prison as well as paying the initial amount. They appealed, suggesting that The Pirate Bay doesn’t actually host any media that’s protected under copyright itself, instead acting as a forum through which people can use their own technology to do as they wish. Warg failed to appear at an appeal hearing for the case in 2010 due to what his defense attorney suggested was an illness.
The appeal resulted in reduced prison sentences (between 4 and 10 months) but a raised amount in damages to 46 million kronor – aka $6.5 million USD. Warg’s final sentence is not yet known. This case has resulted in several “payback” hacking incidents from groups such as NullCrew. Stay tuned as this case continues and the future of The Pirate Bay is decided!
[via Washington Post]
Pirate Bay founder deported by Cambodia to Swedish authorities is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was recently scooped up by Cambodian authorities in Phenom Penh at the request of the Swedish government. Just yesterday Cambodia agreed to send him back to Sweden to serve his year-long jail sentence for creating the Pirate Bay. Turns out the Swedes might have paid HUGE for Cambodia’s cooperation. More »
Anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or ebooks using a BitTorrent client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright-enforcement authorities within three hours of doing so. So say computer scientists who placed a fake pirate server online—and very quickly found monitoring systems checking out who was taking what from the servers. More »
The war on filesharing has stepped up a notch, with Cambodian police arresting a co-founder of notorious site The Pirate Bay on the instruction of Swedish investigators. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was held after failing to report for his year-long jail sentence as ruled in February, with a spokesperson in Cambodia confirming to AFP that while there is no extradition treaty in place with Sweden, “we’ll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case.”
“[Warg’s] arrest was made at the request of the Swedish government for a crime related to information technology” spokesman Kirth Chantharith said. Cambodian authorities are now waiting for further information from the Swedish government, having detained Warg in Phnom Penh on Thursday last week.
The Pirate Bay co-founder failed to attend an appeal hearing earlier in 2012, and in his absence the Swedish court upheld his original 12 month jail sentence. Warg also saw no reduction in his fine, unlike three other men from the site who attended appeals. His lawyer claimed he was too ill to appear in court.
Despite ongoing legal action and attempts by some ISPs to block access to subscribers to The Pirate Bay, the actual impact on file-sharing has been minimal. A report from July suggested that, although blocks were in place and saw a dip in traffic for a week, after that point it returned to normal levels.
[via The Guardian]
Pirate Bay co-founder arrested for jail sentence no-show is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Watch out pirates, you may not be as anonymous as you think, especially if you upload to the Pirate Bay. Researchers have recently published a tool that lets you get all kinds of data, including location, about some of the most prolific accounts. More »
Oh poor, poor Grooveshark. Not long after surprisingly making its way back to the Android Market Google Play store, the streaming service’s Android application appears to be long gone yet again. If you’ll recall, the music app was pulled from Mountain View’s shop a few months back; this due to many claims from labels which suggested Grooveshark was allowing users to download tunes at no cost. Still, mum’s the word on why the app has been nixed out of Google Play this time around — especially after the service announced it had worked closely with the Android maker to get the official app reinstalled. For what it’s worth, however, word on the internet is the application can still be installed via the Grooveshark site, but we’ll have to leave that dicey decision up to you.
Filed under: Software
Grooveshark app nowhere to be found, suddenly disappears from Google Play again originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 31 Aug 2012 22:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
In 2001 I downloaded five songs by a now-defunct “folk rock duo” from the internet. The band was obscure, its albums not stocked at the small-town music stores nearby or the Walmart 25 minutes up Route 1. iTunes didn’t exist yet. Amazon was still a bookstore. So I fired up LimeWire and snapped them up for free. More »
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
