The Pirate Bay has been hit with yet another blow after an Irish court has ordered six internet service providers in the country to block access to The Pirate Bay. The court order was sparked by complaints from four music labels that the file-sharing website was hosting copyrighted content. The music labels claim that ISPs
On January 8, we reported that Xiang Li had plead guilty in what was being called the most successful copyright criminal prosecution to ever take place. The pirate ran website Crack99.com, as well as some lesser known domains, which sold copyrighted software at discounted rates. While originally word had it he faced a possible 5
The Pirate Bay has been the brunt of most legal battles dealing with piracy over the last few years, but apparently that isn’t stopping the website from remaining incredibly popular. The torrent tracker has surpassed 4shared, Mediafire, and other popular file-sharing websites to become the world’s largest once again.
According to TorrentFreak, The Pirate Bay is back on top, mostly thanks to the demise of several popular one-click download sites (a.k.a. cyberlockers), like Megaupload. A little less than two years ago, the piracy landscape was vastly different at the time, with bittorrent straggling behind one-click download sites. The Pirate Bay was ranked sixth back then.
The last couple of years has seen major changes in the file-sharing landscape, with big changes in the rankings. Along with The Pirate Bay jumping six spots up to first, Mediafire comes in second after finishing fourth two years ago. 4shared, which had the top spot back then, is now sitting in fourth place. Torrentz.eu is now up to sixth, up from ninth place in 2011.
Furthermore, six file-sharing sites made the top ten this year that weren’t in the top ten back in 2011. These sites include Kickass Torrents, Uploaded, isoHunt, PutLocker, ExtraTorrent, and Rapidgator. Of course, this list only consists of public trackers and cyberlockers. Private trackers have gained in popularity significantly over the past couple of years, so many users may have switched by now.
[via TorrentFreak]
The Pirate Bay becomes world’s largest file-sharing website is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
It looks like The Pirate Bay has set sail for another country, and a country none of us would have expected. North Korea has taken The Pirate Bay in, and has even offered it virtual asylum. It was only last week when The Pirate Bay was forced from its home in Sweden due to the threats the Swedish Pirate Party received from a local anti-piracy group. TPB was then provided shelter in both Norway and Spain.
It turns out that The Pirate Bay was actually in talks with North Korea for a little while. An insider from TPB stated, “We’ve been in talks with them for about two weeks, since they opened access for foreigners to use 3G in the country.” While TPB isn’t exactly situating itself in North Korea, it will be using North Korea’s network to provide its services to the rest of the world.
This comes only a few days after Norway was forced to let go of The Pirate Bay. The pirate party in Norway began receiving threats from local anti-piracy groups to shut down its services, similar to what Sweden’s Pirate Party had to face. By being offered virtual asylum by North Korea, it will be very interesting to see what anti-piracy groups will due in attempt to shut down the site again.
The Pirate Bay, and many others, believe that this is a truly ironic, seeing as the United States is known as a place of freedom and North Korea is known as the opposite. TPB hopes that it will bond with North Korea, and maybe someday convince the government to allow its people to utilizes its full services. This is an interesting turn of events, and we’d love to see how this new relationship will turn out for The Pirate Bay.
[via Torrent Freak]
Pirate Bay flees to North Korea for freedom’s sake is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
The Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag posters that were leaked yesterday turned out to be promotional materials for the next Assassin’s Creed game now that Ubisoft has confirmed the game by releasing its official box art.
The box art image released by Ubisoft shows the new Assassin that we could expect to be featured in the game on the front and is equipped with a ton of weaponry. We can see he has three guns attached to him, a cutlass and, of course, the iconic Assassin’s Creed hidden dagger located on his right forearm. In the background, we can see the Assassin is aboard a pirate ship, which would lead us to believe he is, indeed, a pirate assassin. Take that, ninjas! (more…)
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: YouTube For iOS Gets Send To TV Feature With Xbox 360, PS3, Smart TV Support, Ouya Shipping To Kickstarter Supporters On March 28,
A federal court in Illinois has handed down the largest fine ever levied against a file sharer in a BitTorrent piracy case. The judgment was placed against defendant Kywan Fisher and orders the man to pay $1.5 million to an adult film company called Flava Works. The man was found guilty of sharing 10 of the company’s films via BitTorrent.
The massive fine was reached through a penalty of $150,000 per movie, which is the maximum amount of damages possible under current US copyright law. Movie studios are expected to use this case as the stick to coax other alleged file sharers to settle out-of-court. Fisher and several other defendants were sued by Flava Works for sharing the company’s films.
All defendants in the case had paid accounts with the Flava Works website. The movie company was able to prove that the people shared movies from their accounts because each film the defendants viewed and shared was tagged with a specific piece of code linking the movie to their account. Flava Works was able to prove that movies directly downloaded and shared by Fisher were shared thousands of times.
The films Fisher shared were downloaded at least 3449 times. Apparently, Fisher didn’t bother to mount a defense, whether that means he didn’t show up in court or was trying to represent himself is unknown. This case will certainly set a precedent for the other defendants in the remaining court case where Fisher was known as defendant 11.
“Given the materials submitted by Plaintiff in support of its motion and in light of the absence of any objection by Defendant, Plaintiff’s motion for entry of default against defendant 11 is granted. Judgment is entered in favor of the Plaintiff Flava Works, Inc., and against the Defendant Kywan Fisher in the amount of One Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars ($1,500,000.00),” the judgment reads.
[via TorrentFreak]
BitTorrent porn sharer hit with whacky $1.5 million fine is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Google has been dogged by claims that it facilitates the piracy of content through its search results pretty much since day one. Starting next week, the web giant will be taking a much more aggressive approach to sites hosting pirated material by downranking frequent offenders. The new results algorithm will take into account the number of valid copyright notices received against a site and penalize them appropriately in the rankings. Google says that this will allow consumers to more readily find legitimate sources of content such as Hulu and Spotify, but it’s hard not to see the move as one intended to appease studios, content producers and government officials that routinely threaten to hammer companies like Google with lawsuits and restrictive legislation. Mountain View was also quick to highlight how responsive it’s been to industry concerns — citing the fact that it receives and processes more copyright complaints in a day than it did in all of 2009 combined. For more details, hit up the source link.
Update: The MPAA has issued the following statement from Michael O’Leary, Senior Executive Vice President for Global Policy and External Affairs, in response to Google’s move:
We are optimistic that Google’s actions will help steer consumers to the myriad legitimate ways for them to access movies and TV shows online, and away from the rogue cyberlockers, peer-to-peer sites, and other outlaw enterprises that steal the hard work of creators across the globe. We will be watching this development closely – the devil is always in the details – and look forward to Google taking further steps to ensure that its services favor legitimate businesses and creators, not thieves.
Filed under: Internet
Google to downrank sites hit by valid copyright claims originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Google has been fighting in French courts against the music industry group SNEP. Google has been hit with a setback in its legal battle with the French Supreme Court ruling that Google can be required to censor the search terms Torrent, RapidShare, and Megaupload. According to the courts, Google indirectly helps copyright infringement by failing to filter these specific search terms.
Google’s legal case is now headed to an appeals court for a final ruling. The case has been going on since early 2010 when SNEP filed suit against Google to force the company to filter certain terms from its Instant and Autocomplete features. SNEP has argued during the case that Google is facilitating piracy by not filtering those search terms, allowing searchers to find torrents and the two named websites.
The French court has recognized that Google is not accountable for any of the copyright infringement that takes place on other websites. However, the court does say that Google has a responsibility to make it more difficult for the public to find unauthorized content. The court and the music industry association believes that by filtering those search terms Google could help prevent future copyright infringement.
[via TorrentFreak]
French courts may force Google to censor terms Torrent, RapidShare, and Megaupload is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Desk case PC mods have lit up our radar before, but a modder by the name of Pirate — who’s no stranger to us — has dropped the typical glass and metal enclosure for medium-density fiberboard. Though the material choice was an effort to avoid buying a new desk, it created a need for a robust cooling system. Five fans (three exhaust, two intake), a radiator and a liquid-cooling system keep the rig at roughly 88 F (31 C) with ambient temperatures hovering around 79 F (26 C). As for horsepower, the workstation features a Core-i5-2000k processor and a Radeon HD 7950 graphics card sporting a water cooling block on an Asus Gene IV microATX motherboard. Visuals are piped to three displays in an Eyefinity configuration that are held by a modded ergonomic stand. Pictures of the build process in excruciating detail await you at the source.
Custom PC desk / case combo ditches glass, metal for wood originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Jun 2012 02:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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