As part of a campaign called ‘Operation In Our Sites,’ the government has already illegally seized the domains of nine movie streaming sites.
According to an insider source at TorrentFreak, ICANN took control of the domains and then handed them to the government– in clear violation of domain owner rights.

The government was poised to seize The Pirate Bay’s domain as well as MegaUpload.com, but changed its mind at the last minute for some unknown reason.
This does not mean these sites are safe, however. As Professor Pouwelse of the Delft University of Technology put it, “Hollywood lawyers have discovered the soft underbelly of piracy.”

ICANN has declined to comment on the matter.

Many of Hungary’s BitTorrent sites are now down. The largest, Ncore, has nearly 900,000 peers. The Pirate Bay, which has servers in Hungary, shut down its Hungarian operations after receiving a warning. One of the main targets of the raid, Bithumen, is still operating from Germany.

The video above shows some of the servers police seized. Hungary undertook two similar raids in 2007 and 2009

Whether or not the company actually has the money to buy the name is questionable. At the time of its 2009 end-of-year report filing, the company only had $946 (yes, $946) in cash. BMS is adamant about the purchase, however, claiming it will use the domain, “to launch a paid for service with licensed content based on next generation filesharing technology.”

Keep on working on that next generation file sharing technology. My guess is BMS is full of hot air and nothing will come of this.

Source | Domain Incite

Codenamed “Murder,” the project involves transforming Twitter’s servers into BitTorrent distribution clients. User bandwidth is not be utilized, but rather, one seed server distributes files between thousands of other servers owned by the company. This drastically increases the speed at which code updates can be performed.

According to Twitter engineer Ryan King, the new system has already been in place for several months. It’s great to see companies utilize technology like BitTorrent in such innovative ways.

Source | Data Center Knowledge

Ultimately, if a year passes without a cease of pirating activities, Ofcom would have the authority to order ISPs to cap the user’s Internet usage. The film and music industries around the world has long called for stricter measures to stop piracy, particularly with the advent of BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing system without any centralized servers. The law still has to pass through Parliament, and there will undoubtedly be serious concerns about privacy.

This move is part of a larger £200 million plan being initiated to connect everyone in the UK to high-speed Internet access by 2012. In the United States, bandwidth capping has been met with staunch opposition, forcing service providers to change their planned restrictions. A law is now moving through U.S. Congress that would place regulations on capping. France has announced plans to completely ban Internet pirates from access after three offenses. In Sweeden, owners of the popular torrent sharing site The Pirate Bay were convicted of copyright infringement and sentenced to prison, pending appeal.

Source: Wall Street Journal
Photo: Flickr

The action came as a shock because private websites are not usually targeted by authorities. SnowTigers had more than 250,000 members, many of whom supported the site financially. The BitTorrent portal mostly offered music and movies.

BitTorrent is a popular method of content distribution. Sites like SnowTigers don’t actually host pirated material, but host what’s called a torrent file. Just a few kilobytes in the size, the file connects the downloader to other BitTorrent users with the same piece of content. Opening up the file in a BitTorrent client links them to these file sharers.

Multiple downloaders are needed, and at least one of them, known as a seeder, must have the entire file downloaded. The group will them anonymously exchange bits and pieces of the content. The downloader’s client will automatically assemble these pieces into the finished product. Popular torrents will often have thousands of downloaders and hundreds of seeders.

This method allows you to essentially download the beginning, middle, and end of a file all at the same time rather than be limited to starting from the beginning and slowly working your way to the end.

BitTorrent’s speed and anonymous nature have made it the most popular file transfer protocol for pirates, but in recent years governments have severely cracked down on torrent portals.

In April, the owners of the world’s largest torrent site, The Pirate Bay, were sentenced to one year in prison for facilitating copyright infringement. They also collectively received a £80,000 fine. The site is still up and running, however.

Source: ZeroPaid
Photo: Flickr

News of the conviction of four people responsible for The Pirate Bay file-sharing site spread quickly, and the IFPI, an international affiliate of the RIAA, is now targeting web hosting providers who host file sharing web sites.

The web hosts, they argue, are accountable for content and should shut down the file sharing sites, despite the fact that the sites in question do not illegally distribute music.

The IFPI’s actions raise new questions about privacy and how involved a web hosting provider should be in the daily activities of their clients. Web hosting providers do not generally monitor their clients, unless there are specific terms of service violations or activity that would cause harm to the servers.

DCP Networks, the company responsible for providing hosting services to TorrentBytes, one of the larger BitTorrent sites, reportedly received a letter from the IFPI, requesting them to shut down the site.

IFPI lawyer Magnus Mårtensson told DN.se that the letter received by DCP Networks is not something strange or unusual. IFPI has contacted several other hosting providers and site owners Mårtensson said. What they aim to do here is extend the (yet to be appealed) verdict of “assisting copyright infringement” and apply it to hosting providers as well.

It remains to be seen whether there will be any legal basis for the IFPI claims, but their letters to web hosting providers might be enough to convince some to reject any clients with torrent tracking web sites.

Source: DN.se via Torrent Freak
Photo: Flickr