TorrentFreak

Some of the world’s largest web companies have come together to establish a set of self-regulating best practices to deal with the issue of infringing sites within their advertising networks. Google, Microsoft, AOL & Yahoo and other ad companies say that they will start accepting DMCA-style notices from rightsholders against adverts that appear alongside infringing content.

Following the introduction of restrictions against file-sharing services, Mastercard and Visa have reportedly started to take action against VPN providers. This week, Swedish payment provider Payson cut access to anonymizing services after being ordered to do so by the credit card companies. VPN provider iPredator is one of the affected customers and founder Peter Sunde says that they are considering legal action to get the service unblocked.

Following news earlier this month that UK police had begun sending threatening letters to torrent site operators, today the government has announced the creation of a brand new unit dedicated to cracking down on intellectual property offenses. The Intellectual Property Crime Unit at the City of London Police will be funded with £2.5m of public funds and is set to launch in September, targeted those said to be illegally profiteering on the back of content creators’ work.

Aggressive new anti-piracy legislation that allows for sites to be rapidly blocked by ISPs upon allegations of copyright infringement passed through its final two readings in Russia’s State Duma today. Lawmakers fast-tracked the controversial legislation despite intense opposition from Google and Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine. Following upper house and presidential approval, the law is expected to come into effect on August 1.

Following a trial spanning two weeks, the Stockholm District Court has just handed down its sentence in the Gottfrid Svartholm hacking case. The 28-year-old was found guilty of hacking into Logica, a company carrying out work for local tax authorities, and sentenced to two years in jail. Another man, said to be his accomplice, was sentenced to probation.

Megaupload’s former hosting provider Leaseweb has deleted all Megaupload user data from 690 servers without warning. Petabytes of data and backups, mostly from European users, are now lost forever. Kim Dotcom is outraged by the scandal and says this is what the U.S. Government was hoping would happen all along. “I’m furious about this betrayal, and extremely sad,” Dotcom tells TorrentFreak.

A few moments ago KickassTorrents disappeared from the Internet prompting the usual flurry of worried emails. While these instances of downtime are usually down to minor technical issues that tend to sort themselves out, there are signs that something a little more serious might be underway. Details are sketchy but at the moment it appears that the site’s KAT.ph domain is being replaced with a new one, KickAss.to.