March 10th, 2010
UseNeXT is a brand operated by Munich and London-based company, Aviteo Ltd. UseNeXT is one of the most popular Usenet services around today and has traditionally advertised extensively within the BitTorrent community and on many torrent sites.
On 19 December 2006, performing rights group GEMA, which handles the copyrights of more than 1 million rightsholders worldwide, filed for an injunction against UseNeXT. GEMA had earlier leveled accusations at UseNeXT’s advertising in which it said, among other things, the company claimed to offer 1 million MP3s through its service.
“[UseNeXT] advertised its fee-based access with unambiguous references to illegal exchange platforms. In particular it publicized the anonymity, speed and security of access to contents available on Usenet,” GEMA said in a statement, adding: “On top of that, the service also offers special, perfected search software that makes it easier to locate and manage musical works and other contents protected by copyright.”
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Tags: legal, Usenet, usenext
Posted in P2P News, Usenet | 102 Comments »
March 1st, 2010
In the hope of dismantling BitTorrent’s flagship The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy outfit BREIN took three of the site’s founders to court this summer. BREIN won the case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were ordered to prevent Dutch users from accessing the site, a decision appealed in October without luck.
In its verdict the Court ruled that the three defendants had to remove a list of torrents from The Pirate Bay that link to copyrighted works. The three defendants and the site itself were not found guilty of copyright infringement, but according to the Court, The Pirate Bay assists in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.
The Court gave the defendants until March 1 to remove a list of infringing torrents and to block Dutch users from accessing parts of the site where (.torrent) links to copyrighted files can be downloaded. If the three did not comply they would face penalties of 3,000 euros per person, per day.
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Tags: brein, legal, sites, thepiratebay
Posted in P2P News, Torrent Sites | 441 Comments »
February 28th, 2010
On February 18, 2010, RU-Center, Russia’s largest domain name registrar and web-hosting provider, pulled the plug on the Torrents.ru domain name, suspending it with immediate effect and leaving 4 million users and 1 million torrents homeless.
A representative from RU-Center confirmed that the domain was blocked on the orders of the Investigative Division of the regional prosecutor’s office in Chertanovo district, Moscow, but at that time could not disclose the reasons.
Subsequently it was revealed that the seizing of the domain was due to violation of Article 146 of the Criminal Code – “Illegal use of objects of copyright or related rights, as well as acquisition, storage, transportation of counterfeit copies of works or phonograms for sale, committed on a large scale”.
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Tags: legal, shutdown, torrents.ru
Posted in P2P News, Torrent Sites | 68 Comments »
February 27th, 2010
Much like Google, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt are search engines that aim to index information posted on the Internet and make it findable to their users.
Google’s YouTube shows even more similarities to torrent sites as it allows users to submit content, with the only difference being that YouTube actually hosts the uploaded files whereas torrent sites only link to content indirectly through .torrent files.
In the last year, three of the largest torrent sites – The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt – were all taken to court by copyright holders for assisting in copyright infringement, and all three sites lost their cases to some degree. Strangely enough Google has never said a word about these cases other than to distance themselves from The Pirate Bay team after they were sentenced.
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Tags: google, italy, prison, thepiratebay
Posted in P2P News, Security | 157 Comments »
