The Great Geek Manual News

Just minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.

While only a few weeks ago, it seems like an eternity since the trial of The Pirate Bay Four ended and the court retired to consider its verdict. The prosecution claimed that the four defendants were ‘assisting in making copyright content available’ and demanded millions of dollars in damages. The defense did not agree, and all pleaded not guilty - backed up by the inimitable King Kong defense.

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Source: Torrent Freak

Internet traffic in Sweden fell by 33% as the country’s new anti-piracy law came into effect, reports suggest.

Sweden’s new policy - the Local IPRED law - allows copyright holders to force internet service providers (ISP) to reveal details of users sharing files.

According to figures released by the government statistics agency - Statistics Sweden - 8% of the entire population use peer-to-peer sharing.

Popular BitTorrent sharing site, The Pirate Bay, is also based in Sweden.

The new law, which is based on the European Union’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), allows copyright holders to obtain a court order forcing ISPs to provide the IP addresses identifying which computers have been sharing copyrighted material.

Figures from Netnod, a Swedish firm that measures internet traffic in and out of the country, suggest traffic fell from an average of 120Gbps to 80Gbps on the day the new law came into effect.

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Source: The BBC

While discussing a softer approach to anti-piracy PSAs in the UK, the president of Universal Pictures noted that campaigning needs to evolve and carry an “appropriate message” for today. Noting that piracy is going out of fashion, he says that ISPs will be held accountable - like those who run brothels and drug houses.

The movie industry’s new approach to delivering the anti-piracy message in the UK seems notably more subtle than in previous attempts and is much less up-front in dealing with the issue of piracy directly. Instead of attempting to insult would-be pirates, it looks to instill a sense of responsibility in the viewer, reminding him or her that handing over their hard earned money ensures Hollywood can make quality movies. In order to prove it, they show what the 1975 classic ‘Jaws’ would’ve looked like, had it been starved of money at the hands of pirates.

In a recent interview, Eddie Cunningham, president of Universal Pictures International said, “Your campaigning needs to evolve over time and have an appropriate message for today,” while denying that previous more-flashy campaigns had failed to deter piracy.

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Source: Torrent Freak

The FBI are investigating the online leak of an almost finished copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a month before the film’s cinema release.

The Hugh Jackman film was downloaded an estimated several 100,000 times from file sharing websites on Tuesday.

20th Century Fox confirmed the copy had now been removed and the FBI informed.

The studio behind Wolverine stated: “The source of the initial leak and any subsequent postings will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

“The courts have handed down significant criminal sentences for such acts” the studio noted.

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Source: The BBC

Ars sits down with “Billion Dollar Charlie” Nesson, the Harvard Law professor who’s taking on the RIAA in federal court. Winning his case would be great, but Nesson’s thinking even bigger. He wants nothing less than a national, Internet-enabled conversation about copyright and damages in the digital age.

Charlie Nesson isn’t one for small gestures—the Harvard law professor is known as “Billion Dollar Charlie,” after all, and he was one of the lead lawyers in the famous industrial dumping case that became the book (and then the movie) A Civil Action. So when he took on the defense of a 25-year old Boston University physics grad student who was accused of sharing copyrighted music online, the case suddenly promised to be more than usually interesting. It has not disappointed so far.

But it has also seemed like a bit of a circus, what with attempts to depose lawyers from the other side, the filing of official apologies, motions on webcasting the trial, threats of judicial sanctions, and Nesson’s desire to record everything—including typically-private lawyer-to-lawyer conference calls. Things grew strange enough that even noted RIAA scourge Ray Beckerman wrote, “To you law students and young lawyers out there; please don’t think you can learn anything from this case. Just ignore everything you are seeing from both sides. I have seen more bizarre filings from both sides’ lawyers than I would imagine possible.”

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Source: Ars Technica

The author the Harry Potter series has already “triumphed over small online publisher Steven Vander Ark,” p2pnet posted in September, 2008

Now she’s after Scribd.com, a popular free site for reading books online.

She and fellow authors Aravind Adiga and Ken Follett (big, but not JKR) have been “shocked” by the news their latest books are available to on Scribd, says The Guardian.

“We built a technology that’s broken all barriers to traditional publishing and in the process also built one of the largest readerships in the world,” says Scribd.

Not if I can help it, says Rowling.

Sci-fi author Christopher Priest is also featured on Scribd, says The Guardian.

According to him, authors are under the same threat as Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, the principal members of the multi-billion-dollar corporate music industry who claim they’re being “devastated” by filesharing, forcing them to sue the people who keep them in business.

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Source: P2P Net

PirateBay’s IPREDator is a new P2P anonymizer designed to cloak the actions of downloaders and keep file logs and IP addresses hidden from the authorities.

The IPredator, which sounds more like a ballistic missile or an alien trophy hunter - has been unleashed just in time to coincide with new Swedish anti-piracy laws, due to launch next week.

According to Torrent Freak, the IPREDator launch has been designed to coinicide with the introduction of Swedish laws that could make it much easier for copyright enforcement organisations to force sites to cough up the personal details of alleged file downloaders.

The service is currently only available in beta mode to a small group of 500 subscribers, but PirateBay are expecting to expand the service.

The anonymity service, designed to work like existing VPN services, will charge international subscribers the small fee of $6 euros a month, for the knowlegde that their downloading actions will be extremely difficult to trace.

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Source: iT News

Half of all British kids use file sharing networks to trade music, according to a new study by the UK-based security company GSS. Most of these kids were aware of the fact that The Pirate Bay isn’t quite the same as iTunes, according to a GSS press release:

“When questioned about the legalities of downloading music, nearly all of the children understood that there were legal and illegal methods that could be used to download music. Over half admitted to using P2P software to download music illegally rather than using programs such as iTunes.”

Of course, research like this is usually somewhat self-serving: GSS is making its money by helping corporate customers to secure their networks, and the company believes that music-trading teens are the newest danger for corporate IT security.

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Source: P2P Blog

While the Pirate Bay was on trial in Sweden, music industry lobbyists were pressuring ISPs in Ireland and Norway to block access to the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker. Last week, the Irish ISP Eircom stated that they don’t plan to do so without a court order, and the Norwegian Internet provider Telenor has followed suit.

Ragnar Kårhus of Telenor said that they follow the law, and not the demands of the music industry. He doesn’t see what law would require them to block sites. “This would be the same as demanding that the postal service should open all letters, and decide which ones should be delivered,” he says.

Previously, a Danish judge ruled last year that Tele2 had to block its users from accessing The Pirate Bay. IFPI argued that Tele2 was assisting in mass copyright infringement, and that access to the site therefore had to be blocked. IFPI is now using this decision in an attempt to force ISPs in other countries to do the same.

However, Kårhus points out that there is a huge difference between the situation in Norway and Denmark. There is no court ruling in Norway, he argued, and a letter from the rights holders is not sufficient. “It is important that these kind of decisions should be made after handling in the judicial system - namely the police and a court of law,” Kårhus said.

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Source: Torrent Freak

Camcorder piracy - which occurs when moviegoers bring a camcorder into a theater to record a movie from the screen - is a rapidly growing illegal activity. In the US, camcorder piracy has been illegal since 2005, when the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act banned the use of recording devices in theaters. Nevertheless, according to the Motion Picture Association, camcorder piracy causes an annual loss of $6.1 billion to the movie industry.

In an attempt to deter camcorder piracy, researchers have been developing watermarking techniques that embed a secret message into a movie indicating when and where the movie was shown. Once the movie is posted on the Internet, this secret message can be extracted to reveal the movie theater and showtime, and the theater can implement additional surveillance to deter piracy. However, these watermarking techniques cannot identify the recording location in the theater.

Now, a newly proposed position estimation system can use an audio watermarked signal embedded into a movie soundtrack to estimate the camcorder’s location in a theater to within half a meter - basically down to a specific seat. Yuta Nakashima, Ryuki Tachibana, and Noboru Babaguchi of Osaka University have developed the new technique, and their results will be published in an upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

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Source: Phys Org

Today, The Pirate Bay trial will probably come to an end, but not before the defendants’ lawyers have their final say. All four lawyers call for their clients to be acquitted on various grounds, while offering caution to the court to ignore the politic aspects of the trial.

As The Pirate Bay returns after being offline all night due to hardware issues, the lawyers of defendants Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Swartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström present their closing statements to the court.

First to appear is Fredrik Neij’s lawyer, Jonas Nilsson. He said that the technology behind TPB is completely legal and Fredrik never had the intention to violate anyones copyrights - his main interest was the technology at the site and he was a technician there.

Nilsson went on to say that it has not been established that the bulk of the material accessible via TPB is copyrighted and it has not been shown that any of the material has been exploited commercially. Nilsson says there are grounds to dismiss the indictment. These are i) the operations of TPB are permissible under the law, ii) there is a certain amount of uncertainty as to the technical aspects of the case against TPB and iii) there are serious shortcomings in the investigation against the four.

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Source: Torrent Freak

On 9 June, BBC commentator Bill Thompson wrote a critique of a joint venture between the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) and Virgin Media to write to customers whose net connection may have been used to download unlicensed content. Here, BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor responds to his comments.

Bill Thompson’s critique of the new education campaign we have launched with Virgin Media was a good illustration of why such a campaign is needed: in drawing misleading analogies between illegal file sharing and taping programmes off the TV he shows that even “experts” get it wrong sometimes.

It’s good that he recognises that the future for consumers, internet service providers (ISPs), and the music community is in developing even more new licensed download services. But it’s naive at best to think licensed music services can prosper without action being taken against illegal downloading.

Indeed it’s Mr Thompson, rather than music companies, who is stuck in the past.

Music companies are radically re-inventing their business models in response to changes in how music fans want to access music online. Yet Mr Thompson’s digital utopianism clings to an implausible and dated belief that the internet will be an endless free lunch.

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Source: The BBC

As an employee of global music giant EMI Per Erik Johansen felt the need to toe the company line when it came to the prickly subject of file sharing and illegal downloads.

At one time during his tenure as an EMI director, he was the target of a major backlash against the company which was at the forefront of an ill-fated attempt to infect retail music CDs with draconian copy protection.

When, in 2004, five thousand people lobbied EMI to remove the annoying DRM from CDs they had purchased in good faith, and were not able to back up in accordance with fair usage laws, Johansen was quoted as saying, “I have neither the desire nor the ability to give out discs without copy protection,” insisting that, of the 400,000 hobbled CDs sold, only 28 people had complained.

Now freed from the corporate shackles, Johansen is far more pragmatic about the way the music industry should be working.

Speaking to Swedish mag Dagbladet he says he now believes that files sharing does not amount to theft and thinks that the ongoing fight against piracy is useless.

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Source: iT News

A new technique has been developed for detecting and tracking illegal content transferred using the BitTorrent file-trading protocol. According to its creators, the approach can monitor networks without interrupting the flow of data and provides investigators with hard evidence of illicit file transfers.

Contraband files might include pirated movies, music, or software, and even child pornography. When the tool detects such a file, it keeps a record of the network addresses involved for later analysis, says Major Karl Schrader, who led the work at the Air Force Institute of Technology, in Kettering, OH.

The use of peer-to-peer (P2P) software and of the BitTorrent protocol in particular have increased steadily over recent years. In fact, for many Internet service providers (ISPs), the vast majority of Internet traffic now consists of P2P transfers.

ISPs are generally only interested in detecting this type of traffic in order to control, or “throttle,” it and free up bandwidth for other uses. However, this approach reveals nothing about the contents of each transfer, says Schrader. A handful of network-monitoring tools can identify specific BitTorrent files, but the process is generally slow, since the contents of each file have to be examined. The time that this takes also increases exponentially as the number of files that need to be scanned grows.

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Source: Technology Review