The Pirate Party did not only manage to continue its presence in the European Parliament by having German Pirate Julia Reda elected. It also secured the politically important role of rapporteur on copyright reform. High expectations for a long overdue upheaval of the status quo in the political debates on copyright were warranted.

But in Julia Reda’s draft report on copyright reform from Monday January 19, there is little to nothing in it that can be considered as a fulfillment of those expectations.

Her proposals for a new European copyright can be summarized as ”more of the same”. She wants the European Union to make a regulation, which means directly applicable at the member state level. This regulation, she suggests, can contain all of the current bits of copyright. This is by itself useful, especially for American technology companies that want to repeat their US successes and are confronted with a European market that is highly fragmented by its wildly disparate copyright laws.

Half of her report deals with the consequences of making a regulation. Of course, exceptions and limitations will be harmonized if the European law is directly applicable in all the member states. What people were requesting were broader exceptions and limitations and a re-assessment of the copyright framework and legal certainty for the benefit of individuals. Instead they’re getting benefits for corporations. What Julia proposes is to maintain things in their present state, while making it more difficult for individuals to influence local laws.

Part of the report deals with Julia’s admiration for the European Court of Justice rulings in the Svensson (hyperlinking), Best Water International (embedded videos) and Vlaams Belang (parody) cases. Respecting the judiciary is good, but not reform-friendly. The political mission outside of pure constitutional law is setting the framework for the judiciary, not to follow its lead.

Another sixth of the report – most of the progressive bits – deals with database rights. Julia does not, however, propose to change database rights. It’s in equal measure tragic and deceptive: she’s tricking people into believing she wants something, but she’s not giving herself the political space to accomplish that thing. Expecting us to cheer for her, no doubt, while she’s gutting the opportunity for realizing the hopes she inspires.

Even the European Commission has set a higher standard for themselves than this. It has acknowledged since 2009 that there is a problem with the substance of copyright. Their 2013 copyright consultation, it acknowledges, indicates that citizens, consumers and a large number of other actors experience problems with both the economic justice and the principles of copyright. De facto, Julia Reda is more conservative than the European Commission, and this is a massive problem for representative democracy.

While the Commission acknowledges remixing and transformative uses are important to a large number of users, Julia ”notices with interest” that remixing occurs. She praises the level of balancing between rightsholders’ interests that the European copyright laws achieve. The Commission acknowledges instead that neither citizens or authors feel that such a balance exists. Is she making anyone happy?

The only proposal which makes even remote sense are two paragraphs on technological protection measures. In the cybersecurity spirit of the European Parliament established in its NSA resolution of 2014, she suggests not to put blackboxes in consumer IT products. So we have a copyright-friendly, cyber-security inspired German trying to impose a Brussels-made statist policy on 507 millions citizens of Europe which leaves stuff more or less the same. Angela Merkel could not have done it better had she tried.

—

About The Author

Amelia Andersdotter represented the Swedish Pirate Party in the European Parliament between December 2011 and July 2014. She’s an expert on topics related to the Internet, intellectual property and IT-policy.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.

On November 2009 The Pirate Bay announced that it would shut down its tracker for good.

Trackers were outdated according to the site’s owners. Instead, they encouraged BitTorrent users to rely on DHT, PEX and other trackerless technologies.

Despite the fact that the tracker is no longer functional, many old and some new torrents still include the tracker.thepiratebay.org announce address.

While the tracker hasn’t responded to these calls for five years, for some server admins it has now risen from the dead.

Starting early January hundreds of websites have been plagued by traffic from China. While the exact reason remains unclear, it appears that the Great Firewall of China may be in part causing the problems.

Due to a reconfiguration the Pirate Bay domain is being linked to random IP-addresses. This problem applies to various censored sites, but the thousands of connections per second coming from tracker.thepiratebay.org stand out for most people.

It is no secret that BitTorrent users can easily DDoS websites if the tracker address points to the wrong IP, but we haven’t witnessed something of this magnitude before.

Below is a graph Craig Hockenberry posted of a DDoS on his server where the number of requests peaked at 52 Mbps per second, with torrent announces being the most common source.

The suspicion that Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have something to do with the problems seems plausible. Querying Chinese DNS servers returns many seemingly random IP-addresses that change all the time.

In other words, requests to the dead Pirate Bay trackers are sent to seemingly random servers, and none of these have anything to do with the notorious torrent site.

Johannes Ullrich, CTO of SANS Internet Storm Center, came to a similar conclusion and many of his readers reported problems of the same nature.

“We also get a lot of this type of traffic for the last 2 weeks. At moments it causes a total DoS for our webserver. Most of the traffic has thepiratebay as hostname in the http request, but we also see akamai, edgecdn and some more obscure and explicit sites passing in our logs,” Arjan says.

“I work in the banking sector in the UK. We started to see this traffic hit our web servers just before the new year and it has continued since, but thankfully not on a harmful scale. We’ve seen various sites in the host header, including thepiratebay, facebook, googlevideo – all of which appear to be restricted within China,” Anonymous adds.

And the list goes on and on.

Over the past several days reports have come from all over the place, all describing the same problem. Thus far, most server admins have decided to filter out Chinese traffic, which eases the load. But the underlying problem persists.

For now the true origin of the zombie DDoSes remains unknown, but hopefully those responsible will soon realize the crippling mistake they’ve made, and put Pirate Bay’s tracker back in the ground.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.

For more than a decade copyright holders around the world have been doing their best to extract money from those who download content without permission. The RIAA were probably the pioneers but today it’s the adult industry making the most noise.

Porn is a convenient weapon in this landscape. Few people want their adult content viewing habits to be made public so the chances of targets paying up following an unauthorized download are anecdotally higher than for regular entertainment content.

Out to make as much money as possible, this assumption wasn’t lost on a group of adult business ‘entrepreneurs’ based in Sweden.

Operating out of the region of Skåne, two years ago the individuals began sending threatening communications to people they claimed had downloaded pornographic content from sites without permission. The websites in question were all operated by the men.

In total around 4,000 people all over Sweden received ‘invoices’ for alleged illegal downloads. Each were warned that if they failed to pay the amounts stipulated they would be reported to the police and their activities made public.

While some people paid, others decided to take action. According to SR.se, police received 1,000 complaints from members of the public ranging from 10-year-old children to pensioners.

After an investigation the police began to view the case as criminally motivated. As a result this week six men went on trial in the Malmö district court accused of generating around $240,000 via extortion and blackmail. During a break in proceedings one of the accused defended his actions.

“If people are stealing and taking things that do not belong to them they must face the consequences. It also applies to porn,” said Dennies Pettersson, one of the main defendants in the case.

In an article published in Nyheter24 this week, former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde said he hopes the men get convicted but wonders if the type of content involved affected the way the case was being handled.

“What I think is interesting and worth a little thought is how the situation would be if it were not porn but possibly pop music or Hollywood movies that had been downloaded? Who would’ve been the deceiver in the state’s eyes in that situation?” Sunde asks.

Due to the numbers of victims to be heard and its complexity (the investigation documents run to 20,000 pages) the Malmö district court has set aside a whole month to handle the case.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.

Little over a decade ago Apple revolutionized the music industry with its iTunes store, allowing people to purchase digital copies of their favorite music.

With iTunes, Apple offered pirates a legal option, but the company still sees value in “sharing” music and other media with friends and family.

In fact, the company was just awarded a patent that makes it possible to license P2P sharing.

Titled “decoupling rights in a digital content unit from download” the patent describes a system where users can freely share music and videos with each other. Instead of getting the actual file from iTunes or other stores, users would only need to obtain a license.

Once licensed these files can be shared freely across one’s own devices, with friends, family or even complete strangers.

According to Apple such a system has several benefits. Among other things, reduced bandwidth and other overhead costs. This may result in a separate and cheaper price tier for those users who only have to license a media file.

“This reduction in operating expenses may facilitate a two-tier pricing structure. For example, the digital content store may charge a first price to users who download a digital content unit from the store and a second price to users who authorize a digital content unit without downloading the unit,” the patent reads.

This price reduction may then make it more interesting to share files legally, thereby reducing traditional forms of piracy.

“This may encourage users to trade or copy digital content units as well as authorize these copies. Such sharing may, in turn, reduce piracy or illegal copying..,” Apple argues.

While “legalized P2P sharing” may sound appealing, in theory it’s actually quite restrictive. The idea introduces a new layer of content protection which means that the files in question can only be played on “trusted client software.”

This means that transferring files between devices is only possible if these support Apple’s licensing scheme. That’s actually a step backwards from the DRM-free music that’s sold in most stores today.

It’s unclear whether Apple has any plans to use the P2P licensing technology in the wild. The original idea is a bit dated, but perhaps Apple can think of some less restrictive implementations of their newly obtained patent.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.

The first major raid on The Pirate Bay took place on May 31 2006 in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a dramatic affair, with dozens of police involved, hardware seized and individuals arrested.

But while authorities previously shut down the ‘Bay in a blaze of glory while pressing the maximum publicity button (most probably to send a signal to the United States), this time around things were markedly different. Announcements, when they arrived, were much more considered – vague even.

“There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law,” read a statement from Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP enforcement.

It seems likely that the more modest tone was the product of 12 years of virtual humiliation at the hands of the world’s most arrogant torrent site. Big announcements of raids and permanent closures are hard to retract when a site returns in 72 hours as it did following the raids in 2006.

This time around the raid was confirmed as taking place in a datacenter located in Nacka outside Stockholm, but very few details have been made available since. However, according to new information, police left no stone unturned to ensure that The Pirate Bay was properly taken down.

A witness to the raid has now confirmed that more than 10 officers turned up at the datacenter which, rather dramatically, is itself embedded into the side of a mountain just outside the capital.

Alongside regular law enforcement officials were a forensics team tasked with securing all available related digital evidence on site. Previously prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad said the investigation into the site would take months and now it’s becoming clear why that’s the case.

To ensure no piece of evidence was left behind, on December 9, 2014 the officers present seized around 50 servers under suspicion of being connected to The Pirate Bay. That’s somewhat more than the 21 virtual servers the site previously claimed to operate.

According to a source familiar with events last month, police not only took away servers that had been live at the time of the raid, but they also gained access to the datacenter’s storage rooms. From there officers seized old equipment, just in case any of it had been used to operate The Pirate Bay.

While shutting down the site was the main goal of the police, evidence is now being sifted through as part of a criminal investigation. Earlier this month prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad confirmed that the process would like take months to complete.

With that underway, speculation continues as to whether The Pirate Bay will ever return. Various hints and suggestions have been appearing on the site’s temporary homepage but as yet not a single torrent or magnet link has been indexed.

Nevertheless, the site remains massively popular. Understandably ThePirateBay.se took a massive hit in traffic when it stopped offering content in December but against all the odds the site is still attracting millions of visitors. According to Alexa, the site is still the 159th most-trafficked in the world.

Finally, as reported earlier this week, the site’s homepage was recently hosted in Moldova but protected by Cloudflare. While the anti-DDoS service is still in place, the site does not appear to be operational from its earlier IP address.

On the move already? Only eight days to find out…….

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.