Posts Tagged ‘legal’

The Pirate Bay Torrents Remain Online Despite Court Order

Monday, 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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Torrents.ru Fights Back After Domain Seizure

Sunday, 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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US Government Consults Public On Illegal File-Sharing

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act was one of the last pieces of legislation passed by President Bush back in 2008. The purpose of the act is to toughen current anti-piracy measures.

Among other things the act calls for harsher punishments, the creation of a dedicated FBI anti-piracy unit and a copyright czar who reports directly to the White House. Last year President Obama appointed Victoria Espinel as the new copyright czar and she is now going full steam ahead with the new anti-piracy plans.

For these new plans Espinel is now looking for comments and input from the United States public. Although this might come across as an open and transparent process, the czar already seems to have made up her mind, indicated by the leading nature of the questions.
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Suspended Sentence for 4,200 Song, 270 Movie File-Sharer

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Following police raids in 2004, it eventually took 4 years to find Christian Riesen, the admin of eDonkey site ShareReactor, guilty of copyright infringement. After all that time and effort, he was ordered to pay a fine of just $4,200.

Up until now, Swiss citizens – perhaps using sites such as that operated by Riesen – have had a fairly easy ride since it is considered legal for Internet users in the country to download copyright material without the permission of rights holders.

Uploading, on the other hand, is a different story.
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