Germans Downloaded ‘Illegally’14 Million E-books Last Year

August 31, 2011 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Downloads, Legal P2P News & Issues

The association against copyright infringement (GVU) has recently commissioned a new study to prove the high rates of piracy related to e-books. According to the survey conducted by The Society for Consumer Research (GfK), Germans downloaded and uploaded without permission 14 million e-books in 2010.

However, according to reports from the publishing industry show that of the entire book market e-books account for very little (about 0.5 percent).

10,000 people were included in the survey which says that of the 23 million e-books downloaded in Germany in 2010, around 14 million were pirated copies, most of them belonging to specialist literature used by students, such as medical textbooks from major publishers like Springer or Thieme.

While the GfK didn’t use the term ‘illegal’ in their final assessment, saying “We never make a judgement on that,” the whole point for the GVU was to use especially that word. The group counted all downloads as illegal if those participating in the survey said they used “file-sharing networks, hosting services, private websites, blogs, forums, ftp-servers, or newsgroups” to download those ebooks.

Also according to the study, 64 percent of people buying e-books (and spending an average of €10.40 on each book) are men.

Tags: ebooks, file-sharing

French Law Puts Filesharing and Manslaughter in the Same Pot

August 31, 2011 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Legal P2P News & Issues

In the wake of new debates over the severity of filesharing penalties enforced in many European countries, French news site Numerama has published a comparison list between penalties for copyright infringement acts and penalties for other offenses.

What triggered this comparison was a recent conviction in Sweden and the idea was to check what other crimes are punished similarly to filesharing – if the latter can get someone to be sentenced to 3 years in prison, for what other offenses could someone receive either an equal sentence or less? (the results concern the French law)

Below there’s a list of the offenses punishable in terms of jail time similarly to copyright infringement (as posted by Zeropaid):

Manslaughter

Repeatedly sending death threats on a transfixed medium

Conducting biomedical procedures on someone without the consent of the patient

Theft

Breach of trust

Some forms of obstruction of justice

Below there’s also an interesting list with crimes which if you commit get you less time in jail than if you were an illegal filesharer:

Sexual exhibition in a public place

Harassment in order to obtain sexual favors

The desecration of a corpse in a cemetery/attacking a corpse

Third party identity theft

The abandonment of a child/infant

Making sexual advances to a minor whether electronically or otherwise (if the minor is 15 years old or younger)

Destruction of other people’s property

Serious offenses related to animal abuse

To be honest, the lists above speak for themselves and the story they tell is that of a f**ked up system where human life and the need to protect copyrights are placed at the same level; as Zeropaid comments:

“In any event, I think for French people, this really does put into perspective how high the penalties are for infringement. The day we start placing intellectual property on a higher level of value than life itself is the day I think society needs to seriously re-look at our values.”

Tags: copyright infringement, file-sharing, legal

First Time Video Resumes Massive BitTorrent Lawsuit

August 30, 2011 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Legal P2P News & Issues

Nevada-based adult movie company First Time Video was allowed to carry on with its legal hunt for filesharers who used BitTorrent to illegally upload and download its content, the adult industry news site xbiz.com reports.

In 2010 First Time Video took legal action against 500 John Does infringers and subpoenaed ISPs in an attempt to find out the identities of the copyright violators. When the ISPs served its users, 21 of them moved to quash, four moved to dismiss and eight moved to sever, xbiz says.

Last week U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo ditched the remaining motions ruling that the quash motions did not request the kind of privileged information which the federal rules or the Constitution protect. “Anonymous speech does not enjoy absolute protection. Indeed, copyright infringement is not protected by the First Amendment,” he added.

In his decision the Castillo also pointed out that “a BitTorrent user may be express himself or herself through the files selected and made available to others in a manner that may be entitled to First Amendment protection,” according to the 23-page ruling.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act provided the grounds for the defendants’ motion; under the act “a person or entity providing an electronic communication service to the public shall not knowingly divulge the contents of a communication.”

According to Castillo, although “the putative defendants’ First Amendment right to anonymous speech on the internet is implicated,” the “courts have consistently held that Internet subscribers do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their subscriber information, as they have already conveyed such information to their ISPs.”

The defendants’ plea that the subpoenas would subject them to undue burden was also dismissed by the court which stipulated that a new attempt to sever by the defendants can be filed at a later date.

Tags: anti-piracy, BitTorrent, copyright infringement, file-sharing, legal

Bayfiles: Legitimate File-Sharing Service Created by Pirate Bay Founders

August 30, 2011 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services

A new project from the founders of The Pirate Bay has taken everybody by surprise: a new online platform which apparently complies with the copyright law.

Filesharers can use Bayfiles, the newly launched website, to upload and store content which anyone can access.

“Storage and transfers on Bayfiles also preserve users’ privacy. And another advantage is that users can be sure that content stays up, which is important for personal backups. It also guarantees that other personal files such as your MP3 collection are always accessible, so users are able to stream it live to any device,” Pirate Bay founder Fredrik Neij told TorrentFreak.

The names behind the project are Neij and Peter Sunde, who established a Hong Kong-based company, Bayfiles Limited, to operate the file-sharing service, which, according to them, will not generate any copyright infringement issue.

Neij pointed out how the BitTorrent peer-to-peer technology also used by the most targeted filesharing site ever – The Pirate Bay – is now rather unreliable due to the correlated efforts of the industry and ISPs to find methods and system to block or filter BitTorrent traffic.

Bayfiles promises to prevent copyright protected content from being spread online but also promises to stay loyal to the goal of offering a simple and efficient way of sharing files; it also states that repeat infringers may have their accounts disabled whether or not the alleged copyright infringement can be proved.

Back in April 2009, all four men behind TPB, Sunde, Neij, Carl Lundström and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg were convicted by the Stockholm District Court of facilitating copyright infringement acts. While initially all of them were sentenced to one year in prison and fined a total of 30 million kronor as damage compensation, last year in November, their prison sentences were reduced by an appeals court. Neij was given 10 months in jail, Sunde eight months and Lundström four.

The reduction of the prison time was compensated by an increase of the damage fines to 46 million kronor (about $6.57 million).

Tags: BitTorrent, file sharing sites, file-sharing, The Pirate Bay

Top 10 Most Downloaded Movies on BitTorrent

August 29, 2011 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Downloads, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services, Movies, MP3, Digital Audio & Games, Tops

TorrentFreak has published the data they collected with the top 10 most shared movies on BitTorrent for the week ended August 28. All the films included in this chart are DVDrips (unless mentioned otherwise).

‘Fast Five’ took the lead this week, pushing ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’ down to # 2. Newcomer ‘Thor’ entered the chart on third place.

This week’s list features four new entries.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
1	(2)	Fast Five	7.6/trailer
2	(1)	Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides	6.8/trailer
3	(…)	Thor	7.4/trailer
4	(…)	Friends with Benefits	6.8/trailer
5	(4)	Rise of the Planet of the Apes (TS)	8.0/trailer
6	(3)	Bad Teacher (R5)	6.3/trailer
7	(5)	Source Code	7.7/trailer
8	(8)	Your Highness	6.8/trailer
9	(10)	4.3.2.1	5.8/trailer
10	(…)	Never Back Down	5.3/trailer