It looks like Brazil may be the country to watch if you're interested in much more consumer-friendly copyright laws.

As that country goes through a copyright reform process, among the proposals is one that would create fines not just for infringing, but also for hindering fair use and the public domain. Also, there is a big push underway, with widespread support — even from some artists groups — to legalize file sharing in exchange for a small price (~$1.74/month) on your broadband connection.

It seems that one reason why Brazil may be doing it this way is because of the massive success the Brazilian musical genre techno-brega has had by embracing file sharing as a way to promote new works, and making money through other avenues, like live shows.

The idea was advanced by a coalition of 28 academic, educational, consumer, musical and digital cultural organizations who have called on the government to legalize file-sharing through a blanket licensing system.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Salt' tops the chart this week, followed by 'Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time'. 'The Twilight Saga: Eclipse' completes the top three.

This week there are five newcomers in the list. The recently released R5 rip of Salt is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending August 22, 2010

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Salt (R5)	6.7 / trailer
2	(…)	Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time	6.9 / trailer
3	(…)	The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (DVDscr)	4.6 / trailer
4	(1)	Centurion	6.6 / trailer
5	(4)	Sex and the City 2	3.9 / trailer
6	(…)	The Expendables (TS)	7.6 / trailer
7	(2)	Ong Bak 3	7.2 / trailer
8	(7)	Toy Story 3 (TC)	9.0 / trailer
9	(…)	The Last Song	3.7 / trailer
10	(9)	Date Night	6.6 / trailer

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The "next generation of P2P lawsuits" might have begun according to a coalition of professors, scholars, and practitioners specialized in technology and copyright issues who submitted on Thursday to the US Supreme Court an Amici Curiae brief through which they ask the court to consider the "innocent infringer" defense in the case of Whitney Harper.

Back in 2004 Whitney was identified by the copyright monitoring company MediaSentry as a copyright infringer who was illegally sharing 544 songs using p2p network KaZaA. She was at that time sixteen years old. Warner Brothers, Sony BMG, Maverick Recording Co., UMG Recordings, and Arista Records wasted no time and took Harper's father to court in the Western District of Texas for violation of the Copyright Act of 1976. The record labels demanded minimum statutory damages of $750 for each song.

While Whitney Harper admitted to using KaZaA, she said she was not aware of breaking any laws, and that she believed KaZaA was "similar to online radio stations." Initially the district court agreed with this "innocent infringer" defense, but it got overturned in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The group of professors who advocate the "innocent infringer" defense is led by digital copyright reformer Professor Charles Nesson.

If the Supreme Court eventually allows this type of defense in copyright infringement cases, file-sharers could still be liable for violating the copyright law, but they would risk fines of only $200 per infringement rather than the current minimum of $750.

In their appeal, the labels used the argument of copyright warnings displayed on physical CDs which they consider as sufficient in terms of making people aware against illegal downloading – "one need only have access to some CD and see that the recording is subject to copyright."

The brief on the other hand argues that "Copyright notices on album covers in record stores are no substitute. To a person viewing an Internet file in cyberspace who genuinely does not know or have reason to know that file is copyrighted, they provide neither actual notice nor reasonable notice of copyright. They provide no basis for disregarding Harper's state of mind in downloading digital files. Not all music is copyrighted, and from the viewpoint of the music downloader on the Internet, copyright-restricted files often appear to be no different from noncopyrighted files."

This Wednesday a security blog reported that several rogue sites are in operation which aim to pull in people who were aiming to reach The Pirate Bay, but accidentally entered the URL with typos. While this kind of activity is nothing new, there is a more interesting detail being overlooked. One of the companies behind the scheme is trying to register the Pirate Bay trademark in the United States.

For as long as illicit file-sharing has been around there have been entrepreneurs targeting those out for a free lunch – or a free movie or song. Since many thousands of people new to the downloading game are aware that what they are doing could land them in a little hot water, these individuals are perfect targets for scammers.

Rogue file-sharing sites have been flourishing for years and keeping up with them all is an impossible task. What most of them have in common though is that generally users don’t get what they expected from their visit. In some cases they do get what they want but end up paying, often quite high prices too through shady small print or confusing terms and conditions.

These days more often than not they get what they were looking for but also get something unexpected on top – such as some nasty malware.

Since victims are visiting the file-sharing equivalent of a clip joint, in many cases they find themselves with no legal recourse, meaning these sites run and run.

There are probably a dozen methods of pulling people into these sites, but the main technique is to utilize established file-sharing brands and themes. There are hundreds of scammy sites with ‘MP3 download’ in the title and countless others which play on the LimeWire, BitTorrent and eDonkey/eMule brands.

Yesterday the Sunbelt Blog reported on a scam, actually several different scams, which in part target two very well known brands, eMule and The Pirate Bay. The method of drawing people in relies on them typing in The Pirate Bay’s domain name incorrectly. A small typo here or there takes the victim to a fake domain which results in them downloading a piece of malware. All pretty standard stuff for file-sharing scammers.

However, while researching the companies and individuals behind the dozen or so domains, one particular name stood out. Several of the domains are registered to a company called Pioneer Enterprises and many have their true owners obscured by a privacy service. But a few, and indeed others not listed by Sunbelt, are registered to one Craig Pratka of Yaphank, New York.

Pratka appears to be behind a company called BladeBook, LLC which is the registrant of dozens of other domains. Nothing particularly unusual about that except that BladeBook seem to be branching out into a new area – trademarks.

June 30th 2009 was a pretty exciting day. Sweden’s Global Gaming Factory shocked the world by announcing that it would buy The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million in the hope that it could turn the site into a cash cow.

This event didn’t go unnoticed by BladeBook, LLC. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Pratka filed a U.S. federal trademark registration for PirateBay (Serial 77770964) on that same day, later going on to file registration for PiratesBay for good measure.

While both of those applications have now expired with the statement “Abandoned” others are in the pipeline.

On Thursday May 6th 2010, BladeBook filed trademark registrations for Pirate Bay (Serial 85032017) and Pirates Bay (Serial 85032022). The description given by BladeBook for ‘their’ business is as follows;

Provision of telecommunications access and links to computer databases, computer networks and the Internet, namely, providing users online access via a website to third party websites featuring downloadable audio-visual media content in the nature of full-length, partial-length, and clips from motion pictures, television programming, sports events, videos, music videos, music, and interactive games. FIRST USE: 20020611. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20070111

Last year Sweden-based Englishman and alcohol entrepreneur Colin Scragg registered The Pirate Bay (Serial 77787908) so that he could put the site’s famous logo on bottles of rum. That registration is now listed as “opposition pending”.

At the time of publication, Craig Pratka has not responded to our requests for comment.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Centurion' tops the chart this week, followed by 'Ong Bak 3'. 'Salt' completes the top three.

This week there are three newcomers in the list. Centurion is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending August 15, 2010

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Centurion	6.6 / trailer
2	(…)	Ong Bak 3	7.2 / trailer
3	(3)	Salt (TS)	6.7 / trailer
4	(2)	Sex and the City 2	3.9 / trailer
5	(…)	Black Death	7.0 / trailer
6	(5)	Inception (CAM)	9.3 / trailer
7	(7)	Toy Story 3 (TC)	9.0 / trailer
8	(1)	Tekken	6.0 / trailer
9	(6)	Date Night	6.6 / trailer
10	(8)	The Ghost Writer	7.8 / trailer

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Pirate Bay co-founder and former spokesperson Peter Sunde gave a talk at the Campus Party 2010, where he went over the site's history and how it became the number one enemy of Hollywood and the music industry. Aside from reminiscing about some classic pranks and the famous raid on The Pirate Bay's servers, Peter said that he hoped the site would be soon replaced by something better, as it really sucks.

At the Campus Party 2010 held in Mexico, a bare-footed Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde offered some background information on how the site became the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker in a relatively short period of time.

Sunde discussed in detail how they responded to threats from copyright holders, mockings that can be read in detail in the Pirate Bay’s legal section.

Aside from responses to takedown notices, The Pirate Bay crew has pulled off other ludicrous pranks, such as scooping the domain of IFPI to found the International Federation of Pirate Interests.

There is of course also a downside to all the hilarity as Hollywood and the music industry, helped by the US Government, managed to convince Swedish authorities to raid the site’s servers back in 2006. The raid eventually led to a criminal trial where Sunde and three others were sentenced to a year in prison, a verdict that will be appealed later this year.

For those who haven’t seen Sunde’s previous public performances, the talk gives a good overview of what motivated a group of friends to maintain a file-sharing platform that has become a major threat to the entertainment industry.

Towards the end of the talk Sunde, who is no longer associated with the site, gives his thoughts on the future of the BitTorrent giant. Here, he reiterates what he has said before. The Pirate Bay has served its purpose, and it’s time for something new to take its place.

“The Pirate Bay should die, really. Nobody works on The Pirate Bay, it’s just there and it works all the time. And it’s still growing,” Sunde said. “If you see the site, nothing has happened in five years and still more and more users are using it, which is bad.”

“We need some form of new technology. So, that’s kind of the future for The Pirate Bay, hopefully dying, and being replaced with something better of course, because the Pirate Bay really sucks,” he adds.

It is hard to disagree with Sunde here. Although The Pirate Bay has played a major role in popularizing BitTorrent, the site itself has brought few innovations recently, aside from installing pop-under ads maybe.

The fact that it’s still the largest torrent site shows how strong the brand is, but in its current form it is hard to imagine that the site will still be as big as it is now in a few years. Whether another torrent site takes over, or even a new technology, an era is about to end.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Recently accused of copyright infringement, LimeWire requested a jury trial in a separate lawsuit filed by music publishers which represent the four most important record companies, Warner, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd.’s EMI Group and Sony Corp.’s Sony Music Entertainment, but also smaller independent labels.

“Thousands upon thousands of American songwriters have been harmed by the illegal activities of Lime Wire,” wrote emphatically in an email David Israelite, the president of the National Music Publishers. “We look forward to their day in court,” he added.

Back in May U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood ruled that the popular file sharing service was guilty for inducing copyright infringement on 30 recordings by enabling p2p users to make them available online without any license from the music industry. After one month publishers filed a lawsuit against LimeWire.

“They seek to claim copyright or intellectual property rights as to works that are in the public domain and therefore not protected,” Tonia Ouellette Klausner, one of LimeWire’s lawyers, underlined in one of the 23 defenses listed in today’s filing.

Wood set a January trial to establish the amount of money LimeWire should pay as damage compensation but the file sharing service also risk being permanently shut down and its founder, as record labels hope and push for, Mark Gorton could have his assets frozen.

The cases are as follows: the publishers’ case – EMI April Music Inc. v. Lime Wire LLC, 10-04695, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan) and the labels’ case is Arista Records LLC v. Lime Wire LLC, 06-05936, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

TorrentReactor, listed among the five most popular torrent sites on the Internet, has surprised friends and foes by acquiring a small town in central Russia. The town formerly known as Gar has reportedly been bought for the equivalent of $148,000 and was quickly renamed after the Russian-based torrent site.

The last time a torrent site attempted to buy some land, the plan miserably failed. Early 2007 The Pirate Bay launched its ‘Buy Sealand” campaign. The plan was to raise enough money so they could buy the micronation of Sealand and offer “high-speed Internet access, no copyright laws and VIP accounts to The Pirate Bay.”

Within a few weeks the campaign raised some $20,000 from potential citizens, but this wasn’t enough. Sealand turned out not to be an option as it was prized at 750 million euros, which equals to nearly one billion US dollars. Other alternatives were considered but most islands lacked a proper Internet connection.

Now, three years later the Russian based torrent site Torrentreactor has reportedly bought some land of their own, without any help or funding from the outside. TorrentReactor founder Alex informed TorrentFreak about the peculiar move which puts the torrent site on the map in rural Russia.

The town of Gar, founded in 1958 by a religious group connected to the Russian Orthodox Church, was bought for 4.5 million rubles ($148,000 or 115,000Eur). Gar is located in the center of Russia and has only 214 inhabitants who make a living from selling home-grown vegetables in a nearby town.

With the financial injection from TorrentReactor the people of Gar (now the people of TorrentReactor) will be able to get connected to the Internet. Right now, there are only three computers available in the entire town, and just one is connected to the Internet via a dial-up connection.

“Most of it will be split among villagers and the rest will be used to re-equip the local school, repair roads, purchase agricultural equipment and machinery. Also torrentreactor.net company decided to pay for broadband Internet connection in the settlement which will result in about 900,000 rubles ($30,000) because there are no networks nearby,” TorrentReactor says.

Although some might see it as a vanity buy, or an overly expensive marketing campaign, the TorrentReactor team stresses that the humanitarian motive came first.

“We realize it’s just a drop in the ocean comparing to the amount of money needed to help thousands of other villages. But we at least do something to support complete strangers. We are proud that we are able to do so and hope we will be proud of this in the future,” the TorrentReactor team said.

According to TorrentReactor the local authorities were skeptical about the deal at first, but they went ahead with it after the right price was negotiated. TorrentFreak contacted the Tomsk authorities for a comment on the unusual deal, but thus far they are yet to respond.

Because we were unable to verify the deal from both ends, we have to inform our readers that TorrentReactor is known to carry out pranks and ludicrous actions. Earlier this year their partner site shipped condoms to the RIAA, MPAA and various other anti-piracy outfits, informing them that their bullying tactics are not appreciated.

Although the condom action was verified and legit, TorrentReactor’s latest announcement has not yet been officially confirmed by Russian authorities. TorrentFreak readers who live in the area or have more information are encouraged to get in touch with us to provide additional details.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

In 2007 Radiohead sent a shockwave through the music industry by allowing fans to download their new 'self-released' album 'In Rainbows' for whatever price they wanted to pay, including nothing. Fast-forward three years and the RIAA and IFPI are sending takedown notices to people who share that album online. What happened?

After sitting out their contact with EMI, Radiohead self-released their latest album ‘In Rainbows’ and gave fans the option to download it for the price they felt comfortable paying. Not only was this one of the best promotional campaigns of the last decade, it also brought in serious money.

Radiohead said that the scheme made more money online than all of their other albums combined. The band was obviously proud that they had bypassed the major labels successfully. In the years that followed the band members lobbied for more rights for artists, and less power for the labels.

Last year, Radiohead and several other well known artists formed a lobby group with the aim of ending the extortion-like practices of record labels and allowing artists to gain more control over their own work. The artists were unhappy with the fact that the labels, represented by lobby groups such as the RIAA and IFPI, push their anti-piracy agenda without consulting the artists they claim to represent.

Going after fans is not the solution to the problems the industry is facing, they argued.

Considering the above, it came as a surprise to us when we found out that the RIAA and IFPI are still taking anti-piracy measures on behalf of Radiohead. Both the RIAA and IFPI have been sending out takedown notices to Google (RIAA, IFPI), urging it to disable blogger accounts and filter search results where Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ is offered for free. What went wrong here?

Although some people think that the ‘In Rainbows’ album is still available for free, the free offer really only lasted a few months. After that, the revolutionary ‘pay-what-you-want’ model was traded in for traditional licensing schemes with major labels.

The download versions of the album are still self-released, but for the physical copies Radiohead teamed up with record labels such as Warner and Sony. Because of these deals, major record labels now have the ‘rights’ to a piece of ‘In Rainbows’ and they are using this power to take down copies that are distributed online without their authorization.

It is of course ironic that an album that was once seen as the next step towards a new business model in the music industry, is now heavily protected by industry anti-piracy bodies. On the other hand, it is doubtful if the takedown requests are actually legitimate because the labels have the rights to physical distribution, not digital.

TorrentFreak contacted a Radiohead representative to discuss RIAA and IFPI practices but they declined to comment. Still, with all the sensible comments the band’s members have made about sharing in the past, we assume that they don’t approve of the tactics employed by the RIAA and IFPI. Or do they?

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘The Ghost Writer' tops the chart for the second week in row, followed by 'Operation Endgame'. 'Inception' completes the top three.

This week there are four newcomers including the special p2p release of The Yes Men Fix The World. The Ghost Writer is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending July 25, 2010

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(4)	The Ghost Writer	7.8 / trailer
2	(…)	Operation Endgame	6.6 / trailer
3	(…)	Inception (CAM)	9.3 / trailer
4	(…)	Diary of a Wimpy Kid	6.1 / trailer
5	(1)	Clash Of The Titans	6.0 / trailer
6	(…)	The Yes Men Fix The World	7.5 / trailer
7	(2)	Death At A Funeral	4.8 / trailer
8	(7)	The A-Team (R5)	7.5 / trailer
9	(3)	Repo Men	6.2 / trailer
10	(10)	The Bounty Hunter	5.1 / trailer

Article from: TorrentFreak.