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Monday, November 17th, 2014
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| 7:50a | Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 11/17/14
Guardians of the Galaxy is the most downloaded movie. The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 9:16a | Dotcom Faces Jail Following Application to Revoke Bail
Last week it was revealed that his New Zealand legal team had backed out of their arrangement to defend the Megaupload founder. High-profile Queen’s Counsel Paul Davison, QC, and Simpson Grierson, one of New Zealand’s biggest lawfirms, decided to pull out, a decision that could prove pivotal in the entrepreneur getting a fair trial. It’s also transpires that lawyer Fletcher Pilditch, who was defending Dotcom colleague Finn Batato, has also withdrawn his services from the case. And back in the Auckland District Court today, things got even worse. A full report on developments isn’t possible due to a news blackout, but Crown Prosecutor Christine Gordon told the Court that an application had been made to have Dotcom’s bail revoked after an apparent breach of conditions. That application, the details of which are shrouded in secrecy, will be heard next Monday. Should it be granted, Dotcom could soon be back behind bars in New Zealand. In the meantime, apparently considering him a flight risk, Judge Nevin Dawson has taken the decision to clamp down on Dotcom’s movements ahead of next week’s hearing. In addition to banning him from using his helicopter, Dotcom is forbidden from using boats and undertaking any travel whatsoever by sea. He must stay within 80km (50 miles) of his home and report to police every single day, rather than his previous weekly check-ins. The development is yet another obstacle for Dotcom ahead of his looming 2015 extradition battle. The withdrawal of Paul Davison QC and Simson Grier was revealed today to be the decision of the lawyers, not Dotcom, with the former informing the Court that there was no intention to disrupt the case. Nevertheless, that is the immediate effect. While Dotcom and legal team chief Ira Rothken say they are in talks with other lawfirms. the scale of the case means this is no ordinary problem and one that might even prove impossible to overcome. “Suffice to say that even over the last few days, we have spoken to some of the other top firms in New Zealand,” Rothken said. “We’ve also spoken to some QCs. It’s a very difficult situation in the sense that these firms will have to look through about 100 meters of legacy files.” One interested firm said it would need 120 days just to look over the case to see they can help, a serious problem when the extradition hearing is scheduled for February and has taken 18 months to prepare. Today the Crown said it was prepared to give Dotcom an extra month by postponing the hearing until March, but that was overruled by the Judge who said that it would now take place in early June. This morning Dotcom said he will not be giving up. “This year was a total disaster. I have taken many punches. But I won’t break. I will keep going through this hell for my kids. Count on it,” Dotcom said. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1:36p | ISP Provides Free VPN to Protect Customer Privacy
The Directive required Internet service providers and other telecommunications companies to log data on the activities of their subscribers, including who they communicate with and at what times, plus other identifying information such as IP addresses. One of the first companies to react to the decision was Swedish ISP Bahnhof. The ISP has a reputation for objecting to what it sees as breaches of customer privacy, so did not hesitate following the Court’s announcement. “Bahnhof stops all data storage with immediate effect. In addition, we will delete the information that was already saved,” Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung said. However, at the end of last month Swedish telecoms regulator PTS ordered Bahnhof to start storing communications data again under local data retention laws, warning the ISP that non-compliance would result in hefty fines. At the time Karlung promised a “Plan B” to skirt the order, and today the details of that have emerged. “One week remains before PTS requires a fine of five million krona ($676,500) from Bahnhof, as the company has not yet begun to store customer traffic data. Therefore, Bahnhof has chosen to activate ‘Plan B’,” Karlung announced today. The plan involves Bahnhof reactivating data storage on November 24 as required. However, the ISP will thwart the collection of meaningful data by providing every customer with access to an anonymizing VPN service free of charge. “The EU Court of Justice has held that it is a human right for people not to have their traffic data stored. We therefore believe that the time is ripe for VPN services become popular,” Karlung says. The service, called LEX Integrity, is a no-logging provider so it will be impossible for any entity to get useful information about its users. “The EU Court of Justice has issued a ruling that the previous government chose to ignore, and the current government has been silent for so long that we are starting to lose patience,” Karlung adds. “So now Bahnhof will resolve the situation in a responsible manner, namely by solving the whole problem. We will start to store data, but at exactly the same time we will make data storage meaningless.” The VPN service will become active next Monday. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 4:41p | KickassTorrents Moves to Kickass.so Domain Name
Over the years KAT has moved from domain to domain on a few occasions, to evade law enforcement and pressure from the entertainment industries. Most recently the site had been operating from the Kickass.to domain. Starting today however, the site is serving its pages from the Somalian TLD Kickass.so. Wondering whether the site may have run into issues with the .to registry we contacted the KAT team for further details. “It’s just annual domain rotation,” we were told in a brief reply. An additional announcement posted on the site today assures the site’s users that there is nothing to worry about. “We are moving to kickass.so now. As you know we change our domain regularly. Nothing more has been changed for you, so don’t worry, you can use Kickass as usually, it’s automatically redirected,” the KAT team writes. Intended or not, the domain change will have some consequences on the anti-piracy front. For example, the site will become accessible again in most countries where it has been blocked previously. In addition all the URLs that were blocked by Google through DMCA notices, more than 1.6 million, will become accessible again under the new domain. This also means that Google’s new downranking algorithm will be bypassed, at least temporarily. In recent weeks KAT has lost a significant amount of traffic due to Google’s new anti-piracy measure, so intended or not, that may be an extra incentive to keep the yearly domain rotations going. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 9:55p | Giganews Not Liable for Pirating Usenet Customers, Court Rules
Over the past several years the company has targeted a dozen high-profile companies including Google, Amazon, Yandex, MasterCard, Visa, RapidShare, Giganews and Depositfiles. Aside from a few private settlements the company has yet to score its first victory in court. The company was confident that this would happen in their prolonged battle with Usenet provider Giganews, but late last week these hopes were shattered. On Friday the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled on several motions (1, 2, 3) regarding Giganews’ liability for copyright infringement, as well as the nature of its DMCA takedown process. In its order the court confirms that there is no evidence that Giganews is directly involved in any infringing practices. “A claim for direct copyright liability demands evidence that the defendant had a direct hand in causing the infringement. The undisputed evidence before the Court, however, demonstrates that Defendants had no direct causal role in the alleged infringement,” the order reads. According to the Court, Perfect 10 confuses direct and indirect copyright infringement, as the company has presented no evidence that Giganews employees are engaged in distributing pirated content. Furthermore, claims of indirect copyright infringement also failed. The Court didn’t accept that Giganews is liable for the alleged copyright infringements of its users, as there is no proof that the company enjoyed direct financial benefit from any Perfect 10 images its subscribers may have distributed. “[T]he ‘direct financial benefit’ requirement demands more than evidence that customers were ‘drawn’ to Giganews to obtain access to infringing material in general. Perfect 10 must prove with competent evidence that at least some of Giganews’ customers were ‘drawn’ to Giganews’ services, in part, to obtain access to infringing Perfect 10 material.” “This action is a specific lawsuit by a specific plaintiff against a specific defendant about specific copyrighted images; it is not a lawsuit against copyright infringement in general on the Usenet,” the order adds. In addition to their infringement claims Perfect 10 also argued that Giganews didn’t respond properly to takedown requests. While the court doesn’t dispute that proper takedown notices would give Giganews actual knowledge of infringements, the publisher’s notices were not proper. Instead of listing message-IDs that could identify specific content, Perfect 10 sent in screenshots of a newsreader window, instructing Giganew “to conduct searches of specific names within certain newsgroups” and remove all results that were returned “on a certain date.” These notices do not comply with the DMCA’s standards, the court argues. All in all the orders mean that Giganews is not liable for the infringements Perfect 10 claimed, and as a result the company can put the case to rest after three years. However, as noted by Techdirt, it’s unlikely that Perfect 10 will stop its legal campaigns anytime soon. Just this summer the company initiated a new suit against hosting service OVH, who thanks to Giganews now have some additional ammunition to fight back. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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