Archive for the ‘Yo Ho Ho’ Category

Court Refuses to Shutter Tracker Linked to Pirate Bay

picture-66A Stockholm court is refusing to order a Swedish internet provider to cut off a site the studios claim is The Pirate Bay’s new torrent tracker.

The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious filesharing website, announced two weeks ago it was abandoning its tracker, which had been the world’s largest — and a magnet for litigation — for years. The move was prompted by the emergence of DHT and PEX technologies, which allow peers to locate one another without a tracker, the site’s operators wrote.

Hollywood lawyers, however, claim that the Pirate Bay’s tracker is alive and well and still being used under a different domain, OpenBitTorrent — which was originally registered to Fredik Neij, one of the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay.

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It’s Alive! Hollywood Claims Pirate Bay Tracker Lives

picture-52Did The Pirate Bay really shutter its tracker, as claimed on Tuesday?

The Motion Picture Association doesn’t think so.

Hollywood’s overseas lobbying organization claims OpenBitTorrent, billed as an independent “open tracker project,” was actually established by one of The Pirate Bay’s founders.

“OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,” Hollywood attorney Monique Wadsted told Swedish media.

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Swedish Retailer Lets Go of Pirate Bay Logo

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The Swedish online retailer that trademarked a near replica of The Pirate Bay’s iconic logo has agreed to withdraw registration of what has become an enduring symbol of online piracy, Swedish media reported Wednesday.

The move by Sandryds Handel came two days after Peter Sunde, one of The Pirate Bay co-founders, complained to Sweden’s Patent and Registration Office.

The Pirate Bay, now 6 years old, has always left the mark in the public domain, to which it has been returned — meaning anybody can market the symbol.

Sandryds Handel said Monday it was going to place the logo on USB sticks. The company told Swedish media that it would market a “media player” affixed with the logo.

The development comes a day after The Pirate Bay announced it was decommissioning the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker and instead would push copyright files of movies, music, games and software by DHT and PEX technologies.

Pending appeal, the Pirate Bay’s four co-founders each face a year in prison and millions in fines after their April convictions in a Stockholm court for facilitating copyright infringement.

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Pirate Bay Retires World’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker

Operators of The Pirate Bay shuttered the site’s BitTorrent tracker on Tuesday, six years after it was founded.

Trackers — the servers that bootstrap each BitTorrent download — are no longer necessary with enhancements like DHT and PEX that allow peers to locate one another without accessing a central server, site operators wrote in the Bay’s blog.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down!” reads the announcement. “It’s the end of an era.”

“This is what we consider to be the future,” the Bay wrote. “Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon.”

The changeover, first reported by TorrentFreak, does not decommission Sweden’s The Pirate Bay, whose four co-founders face a year in prison for facilitating copyright infringement. The site continues to host and index torrent files in a more streamlined fashion. But with its tracker gone, The Pirate Bay is no longer computationally involved in each downloader’s transaction.

Speculation in the Swedish press suggests that the change might be related to an October decision by a court in that country requiring the site to either shut down, or remove all unauthorized copyrighted works. The Stockholm district court said two of the site’s four co-founders, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Fredrik Neij would be fined up to $73,000 if the Bay failed to comply.

On appeal, Svartholm Warg recently argued that the proposed $73,000 fine should be nullified if the tracker is shut down, according to Swedish media.

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Swedish Retailer Pirates the Pirate Bay Logo

picture-49A Swedish online clothing and tech retailer has assumed ownership of The Pirate Bay’s logo and plans to market the iconic pirate ship – with a cassette-tape image and crossbones — on USB sticks.

The company, Sandryds Handel, registered the logo with Sweden’s Patent and Registration Office. The Pirate Bay founders, who face a year in prison pending the outcome of their criminal appeal for facilitating copyright infringement, had never registered the mark and have always allowed it to be reproduced.

At least one of the four Pirate Bay founders didn’t think the changeover was amusing, saying the image should remain in the public domain. It’s worth noting that The Pirate Bay’s disdain for private ownership of intellectual property doesn’t extend to its domain name, which it agreed to sell for about $8 million, in a deal that now looks all but dead.

Peter Sunde, one of the four convicted Pirate Bay co-founders, told TorrentFreak that that the Bay would challenge the intellectual property office’s decision to grant control of the image’s rights to Sandryds Handel.

“They took it from the public … and turned it into their logo that they control,” Sunde added on Twitter Monday. “It’s a publicly owned logo.”

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Judge in Pirate Bay Appeal Removed for Bias

picture-176The Pirate Bay saga took another twist Tuesday as one of the appellate judges set to hear the appeal of the co-founders’ criminal copyright convictions was removed over concerns of bias.

The Swedish judge in question, Fredrik Niemela, owns an unstated number of stock options in the music streaming service, Spotify, which has content deals with members of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Oddly, the content industry asked the Svea Court of Appeal to remove Niemela from the three-judge panel ahead of next month’s hearing. The industry said it wanted to ensure a fair hearing for the co-founders of the 5-year-old site who were convicted and sentenced to a year in jail for facilitating copyright infringement. The industry, however, fought calls for a mistrial amid allegations of judicial misconduct at the trial level.

The latest development comes as the fate of the co-founders remain in a liberty-limbo of sorts following their April convictions for running the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker. They remain free pending appeal.

The case was brought by the Swedish government and content industry in what best could be described as a joint criminal and civil proceeding.

Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström are the guilty parties.

The site’s future is also locked in the netherworld — as its proposed $8 million sale to Global Gaming Factory of Sweden remains stalled amid allegations that the announced purchase was a ruse to increase GGF’s penny stock price. We’ve suggested all along that the deal made no sense, that GGF had slim to no odds of converting millions of file sharers into legitimate, paying customers.

What’s more, adding drama to the ever-mutating Pirate Bay saga, a Stockholm lower court has ordered Sweden’s leading ISP to shutter The Pirate Bay, which lead to The Pirate Bay altering is DNS hosting service and going back online after a brief interruption.

In a statement Tuesday, meanwhile, the court of appeal said the disqualified judge is a “product developer” at Spotify. All said, the court concluded that the financial interests of the judge and Spotify “constitute grounds for questioning his impartiality.”

Still, the appeals court was untroubled by the lower-court judge who rendered the April convictions. He also had ties to various pro-copyright groups. But the court said Swedish trial court judges had a fundamental right to associate with whatever groups that fit their fancy.

However, there’s more. When the appellate court was reviewing whether the lower court judge was biased, the appeals court removed one of its judges for bias because of her membership in pro-copyright groups.

We didn’t make this up.

Hot nod: TorrentFreak

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Vote: What’s Next for The Pirate Bay?

viagraThursday’s de-listing from a Swedish stock exchange of The Pirate Bay’s corporate suitor is likely to scuttle the planned $8.5 million purchase of the world’s most notorious BitTorrent site.

The removal of GGF from the AktieTorget exchange was based, in large part, on the exchange’s findings that the Swedish company’s CEO, Hans Pandeya, never had the financing to go through with the deal, and was just trying to manipulate the company’s penny stock prices.

That leaves the proprietors of the 5-year-old Pirate Bay without an obvious exit strategy at a time of unrelenting legal pressure. The four co-founders were convicted last April on charges of facilitating copyright infringement. Their year-long prison sentences have been stayed pending appeal, but a Swedish judge has already issued an order aimed at closing the site. For now that order has been frustrated by Pirate Bay’s technical countermeasures, but can the cat-and-mouse game really last forever?

The Pirate Bay crew’s previously stated commitment to operate forever as an outlet for free content was exposed as an illusion when they made the GGF deal. So what happens now? Your guess is as good as ours. We’ve come up with some predictions below. Vote on what you think the site’s future holds, or submit your own predictions if you have a better idea for the future of Sweden’s file sharing supersite.

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Pirate Bay Purchase Sinking

picture-83The company planning to purchase The Pirate Bay was de-listed from a Swedish stock exchange Thursday on allegations that it duped investors and regulators in the $8.5 million deal.

Threat Level has repeatedly questioned Global Gaming Factory’s intentions of turning the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker into a legitimate, pay-to-play site. Now, exchange AktieTorget permanently barred the Swedish-based software concern, casting doubt on how company chief Hans Pandeya would pay for the Bay.

Most investors (if there were any) backed out, and Pandeya promised to use his majority stake, or perhaps issue new shares, to shore up financing. Authorities are also iinvestigating possible insider trading ahead of this summer’s announcement of the pending deal.

Among other things, AktieTorget said the company, in essence, lied to the public that it ever had financing or a pending deal to license content on one of the world’s most visited sites — apparently in a bid to manipulate the penny stock’s price.

Pandeya, however, continues to maintain the deal would go through within weeks even as his own personal possessions are being repossessed because of tax troubles. In an e-mail to Threat Level, he said “The acquisition will go through.”

He added that he will sue the exchange and denied the exchange’s findings.

“I will take legal action against AktieTorget as well in the coming weeks. It is a pity that several years have to be spent in courts on a small caps list that trembles with terror and panics when it meets the unknown, but that is part of the treatment a Big Brother society needs,” he said.

Meanwhile, BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, is still up and running, despite a court ordering it shuttered following the copyright convictions of its four founders.

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Shareholders Approve Pirate Bay Purchase

picture-41As expected, The Pirate Bay moved a step closer Thursday to being sold to a Swedish-based software concern that hopes to turn the world’s notorious BitTorrent tracker into a legitimate, pay-to-play site.

Global Gaming Factory shareholders approved the $8.5 million transaction Thursday, four months after The Pirate Bay’s four co-founders were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement. Within weeks, the site is expected to become a subscription-based service, although no major content providers have agreed to license their wares.

The sale, which is expected to be largely funded via Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming’s chief executive, is one of two major blows to the illicit file sharing scene. On Wednesday, Dutch-based Mininova, which many believed would become one of the main alternatives to a legitimate Pirate Bay, was ordered by a European court to remove all its copyrighted material or face millions in fines.

Still, concerns remain over Global Gaming’s ability to remain solvent or perhaps even complete the deal. The AktieTorget, the Swedish-based exchange where the company is listed, is examining whether to delist the company amid allegations of insider trading ahead of the deal’s initial announcement weeks ago.

Pandeya and other board members are the main shareholders, and Pandeya promised to sell some of his holdings to help shore up the deal.

The Pirate Bay, as of 9:30 a.m. PDT, appeared operational for file sharers to hijack movies, games, software and music for free — despite a court order demanding it be shuttered. The Pirate Bay’s four co-founders each face a year in prison, but remain free pending appeal. The Pirate Bay’s domain still remains under the control of Fredrik Neij, one of the 5-year-old site’s founders.

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Court Castrates Mininova, The Pirate Bay Alternative

picture-38BitTorrent file sharing suffered another setback on a global scale Wednesday when a Dutch court ordered Pirate Bay rival, Mininova, to remove all its copyrighted works or face millions of dollars in fines.

The decision by the Utrecht District Court comes a day ahead of the planned sale of The Pirate Bay to a Swedish software concern that hopes to transform the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker into a pay-to-play site for content.

It was the second legal setback for the illicit file sharing scene since April, when the founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement and ordered to spend a year each in prison pending appeal. The ruling against Mininova and its millions of users is likely to bolster content owners’ resolve to use the courts to protect their interests.

Mininova was seen by many as an alternative to The Pirate Bay. But recently, under legal threats Mininova began removing content upon receiving takedown notices.

The lawsuit against Mininova by Stichting Brein, a Dutch copyright group, also underscores that Europe, once viewed as a copyright scofflaw haven, is no longer tolerating rampant copyright infringement on such a massive scale.

The case is also important because, with last year’s death of TorrentSpy, there are no U.S. torrent trackers even though the U.S. courts have never ruled squarely on the merits whether hosting a BitTorrent tracker or index is unlawful.

Testing those boundaries is isoHunt, a Canadian index being sued by the Motion Picture Association of America in a Los Angeles federal court. That case has been pending nearly three years. IsoHunt, another popular alternative to the The Pirate Bay, removes several hundred listings from its BitTorrent index each week upon requests from copyright owners.

Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer said in an e-mailed statement to Threat Level that the site’s operators were surprised by the decision, given that Mininova removes content upon request.

“We are obviously not satisfied with this ruling. The result of this ruling for Mininova is that we have to re-evaluate our business operations. At this time, we cannot determine what this will actually entail or imply. We will have to examine the verdict thoroughly first. We are considering to appeal this judgment.”

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