“Forum administrators are not responsible for content written by users. The files placed here by users are only for promotional purposes. After 24 hours you must delete all files downloaded from this forum,”

This was on the front page of the site before it was taken off the web on February 12, 2010 by Polish officials.  This disclaimer obviously didn’t deter or help calm the worries of Polish anti piracy groups when raiding the homes of the three individuals and arresting them.  Amongst the seized material were 6 computers, and 150 CD which apparently were thought to have copyrighten material.  The official sentence for copyrighted material in Poland is up to 5 years in jail, where the 16 year old was detained for the longest amount of time, and will have his case conducted in a family court system.

It comes to no surprise that the most ridiculous and radical actions always tend to come from the piracy world.  With more and more people being arrested and sued for substantial amounts of money for downloading or sharing “copywriter” material is in of itself a drastic over statement of how we as a social beings see such “crimes” as piracy, and how the actions taken upon by law enforcement compare to more serious crimes like acts of violence and drugs.

Read the full story on: TorrentFreak.com

Story By: Chris Hemstreet

Torrent sites and users being sued is anything but new.  Every day new legal actions are taken on by large corporations, mainly in the music and movie industry against torrent sites, as well as their users.  In recent news, Microsoft sued Lithuanian BitTorrent Site, LinkoManija for $43 Million dollars for supposed illegally torrented versions of Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007.  Kestas Ermanas, owner and operator of the BitTorrent site, which is the 3rd most visited site in the country said,

“that Microsoft’s move surprised him, as the company has never sent a torrent takedown request to the popular BitTorrent tracker. We informed them that we wanted to cooperate with them, they just had to give us the links to the infringing torrent files, Kestas said, adding they never wrote back to us.” According to torrent site, TorrentFreak.com

These actions taken on by Microsoft are but one of many of the endless amounts of allegations against torrent sites and users for “illegally” downloading and distributing “copy written material”  Its amazing how often and how much a company can sue not only the torrent providers, but the innocent users of the torrent sites for ridiculous amounts of money that have no basis on any kind of facts or statistics on how much the files were even downloaded.  Courts need to realize that taking on cases for an inevitable piracy laws are starting to hurt the industries more than they think they are “helping”.  And in the end, just making users of the music, movies, software, ect not want to give the multi billion dollar companies more money than they already have to control their industry further.

With changing times in technology, music in general, and the way bands are generating income there are still two ways to think about piracy.  The big entertainment companies have one side and cutting edge thinkers such as Radiohead, NIN, Moby, and others have the other side.  Entertainment companies complaining about piracy cutting down their sales by saying torrenting decreases the amount of sales artists are making, thus paying the artists less for their pieces of artwork.  However on the other side, bands that are seeing the direction of the music industry know that digital downloads and music becoming “free” is the way of the future.  They might not have all the answers to the music industry now or in the future, but they are trying and that’s what counts.  ‘Digital files are no doubt not just the future, but the present. I think that it’s [the CD format] on its last legs, it’s on an artificial respirator,” Hip Hop icon MC Hammer commented to Torrent Freak.  With more and more bands jumping on the “free” or close to free band wagon, the history and future of the music industry as well as the entertainment industry as a whole have to look at more than just numbers.  To say that the decline in the music industry is solely the “fault” of piracy is absurd.  ”Digital sales are breaking records year after year in terms of revenue generated, while the decline in physical CD sales is more likely to be a sign of the times rather than a side-effect of music piracy.”  All it takes is bands to come out and become creative when trying to generate income.  Whether its giving away their album for free, or viral marketing, the future of the music industry and the entertainment industry is yet to be determined, however it is my hope as well as the hopes of many that the artists and consumers shape the way they want their industry to run and operate.

Possible Fortunes in Piracy

With piracy changing the way that any company producing a product in digital form are doing business, head of companies are anything but scared to step forward and announce how “upset” or “disappointed” they are with the turn out, and how piracy is ruining their company and the prospects of future projects.  The recent movie Zombieland was a blockbuster hit when it hit the theaters the 2nd of October.  However with recent torrent activity, ripped versions of the movie ended up on torrent sites, and led it to become on of Torrent Freaks top 10 downloaded movies.  The creator of Zombieland had this to say to Torrent Freak, “However, unlike the makers of Ink, Reese is not pleased with this achievement, claiming that this piracy disaster may very well prevent a Zombieland sequel from being shot. “Beyond depressing. This greatly affects the likelihood of a Zombieland 2.”

However, while there is a never ending supply of people in the industry that think this way about piracy, there are a group of people out there that embrace piracy, and in doing so have seemed to come out on top.  The recently released movie Ink ended up on Torrent Freaks Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent at number 4.  Having over 400,000 people downloading and sharing the movie in the first week of its release, gave the movie unforeseen media and hype about the movie leading to increased revenue at the box office.  The creators of the film say that they have “embraced the piracy” and are “just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.”  With more unknown and less hyped movies gaining momentum through torrent sites, it seems to be doing some good, in an industry where piracy is looked at as evil.  One has to think about relaying this thought process to other forms of media, such as the current music crisis.  Recent examples such as Radiohead’s newest release, In Rainbows, was released free on the web and accepted donations, and because of this the record did better than anyone could have expected.  Having 1.2 million visitors on the Radiohead’s page in the first day of the release, and having 38% of visitors pay for the album when it was offered for any price, even for free.  We all have to take time and look at the changing of technology, and the changing of times and realize that nothing is going to stay the same forever.  The music industry as well as the movie industry have to change the way they do business, because the world around them is changing.  There is money to be made in piracy, we just need creative open minded thinkers to show us how.

Anonymous Users

With technology improving constantly, anti piracy groups are coming up with new ways to try and limit the amount of people torrenting illegally.  Tracking isp addresses, contacting service providers to cut off internet to people using torrents, sending out collections for copyright material, are but just a few of the actions groups like the RIAA are using to try to discourage piracy when it comes to copyright material.  Pirates on the other hand are taking the initiative to stay anonymous says Torrent Freak.  VPN’s are a new service provided to pirates looking to stay anonymous from the outside world, letting pirates connect to the internet while hiding their IP address to make finding those users almost impossible.  VPN’s are sprouting up constantly, some requiring subscription fees, other supplies free accounts such as Itshidden.com, a free VPN site that allows users to make an account for free and then upgrade depending on how much you download.  Fees for these sites vary, however $10 a month seems to be the average monthly amount to make your internet downloading completely anonymous.  According to Torrent Freak, over 100,000 users have already signed up for an account on multiple VPN sites showing anti piracy groups that pirates are actually willing to spend up to $120 dollars a year per user for unlimited access to downloadable material.  12 million dollars isn’t a small amount of money taking into consideration that there are a lot more than 100,000 users downloading illegal copyright material, just goes to show you pirates are not as cheap as they look, they just seem to like the idea of infinite downloads to anything on the web at any time.

DtecNet, Honest or Bias?

How is it that an Riaa anti piracy partner thats sole job is to “fight against piracy” and cant even get their facts straight about what torrents are or how they work?  This writer has no idea.  Recent paper published by Riaa’s European anti piracy partner DtecNet, “makes several false claims, draw bogus conclusions and report inaccurate statistics. Bogus reports from anti-piracy companies are nothing new, but this is definitely one of the worst we’ve ever seen thus far.”  According to TorrentFreak.com.  This isn’t the first time that false accusations and false statistics have been over exaggerated by anti piracy groups, however this is the first time the facts have been so skewed and contorted to meet the obvious conclusions anti piracy groups such as the Riaa are looking for.  ”Companies such as DtecNet are earning millions of dollars from the entertainment industry thanks to their piracy tracking activities and the business intelligence they claim to offer.”  False statistics, improvised graphs and numbers, it looks like the anti piracy groups are making their claims regardless of the actual facts.  If this continues not only will the idea of piracy be extremely over exaggerated but false information is never the appropriate solution to solving a “problem” according to the people who stand to lose the most from piracy.  Think for yourself and look up actual facts, then make your own conclusion.

RIAA, Protecting Itself or Artists?

According to the torrent news site Torrent Freak, Amsterdam court ruled today, Oct 22 that the torrent site, The Pirate Bay has to remove certain torrents from its site that infringes on copyrights, as well as blocking the entire Danish community from certain parts of the site exposing “illegal copyright material”.  Danish copyright protection group BRINE brought the suit to the court in its continued effort to eliminate piracy.  The Pirate Bay has three months to take off the copyright material posed forth by BRINE or fees of up to $7500 dollars per day per person who downloads the material will be forced upon the torrent sites owners.  The actions taken by BRINE and the RIAA to try and “protect” copyrights are ridiculous, using scape goats like The Pirate Bay and Mini nova as well as the much acclaimed torrent site Napster as the evils of piracy.  While this is occurring numerous innocent people are being arrested and fined absurd amounts of money for “damages” from illegally downloaded content from the web.  Its unfair to treat individuals harshly because your trying to make an example out of them.  Its not hard to find the lawsuits brought to everyday people by the RIAA, simply type in RIAA Lawsuits in google and page after page of lawsuits and sites pertaining to lawsuits with the RIAA are evident.  The accusations against students however is becoming harsh.  A recent Cornell paper, the Cornell Sun posted an article about 16 Cornell students being fined by the RIAA for “copyright infringement damages”.  Is it right for these accusations to keep arising until the term “intellectual content” is figured out?  Or are we going to help the industry move on and realize that with changing technology, businesses have to adapt in order to stay competitive, that choice is up to you as the reader.

Piracy

According to the acclaimed torrent news site, Torrentfreak.com says that not only is torrenting not a bad thing, but can provide more profits than legal downloads can, up to 150X as much in fact.  How is this possible you might ask?  The German anti-piracy outfit DigiRights Solutions (DRS) just released a document that shows how some copyright holders could make millions off of.  DRS has software that it uses to track down the IPS address of illegal torrenters and sends them bills for their infringements, usually for the value of a couple hundred dollars.  As apposed to purchasing the albums legally through ITunes or other distribution sites, copyright holders stand to make up to 150X the profits per illegally downloaded file instead of the usual .99 cent download fee per song.  DRS takes 80% of the received payment for damages and leaves 20% for the copyright holder.  Why 80% you might ask?  Costs of doing business, attorney costs, IT costs, and other fees.  Not fair?  Not cool?  This writer agrees with you, however the exploitation of a few to try and discourage others from doing the inevitable downloading of files via the internet.