Europe just witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to. More than a dozen people connected to the site were arrested after police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses and data centers. Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services.
During the last 24 hours Homeland Security seized another domain and put up the copyright infringement notice but now a quite unusual picture is forming. Allegedly an anti-vaccine blogger and claimed “batshit” conspiracy theorist with plenty of enemies had his server hacked and filled with illegal material. This appears to have resulted in his domain being seized for copyright infringement.
Earlier this year Google started censoring various ‘piracy-related’ keywords from its Instant and Autocomplete services, and this list of forbidden words was updated recently. Although Google understand that there is no silver bullet that can stop online copyright infringement, the search giant told TorrentFreak that the steps they’ve taken could help to decrease piracy.
Over the last year a handful of lawyers have sued close to two hundred thousand alleged BitTorrent users in the United States. Many of these cases were launched by so-called “copyright trolls” who have re-engineered piracy into a healthy revenue stream. Today, we reveal a critical part of this legal bullying by taking a closer look at a settlement proposal sent out by John Steele, one of the most active anti-piracy lawyers around.
In the wake of the UN report which described disconnecting citizens from the Internet as a breach of human rights, an anti-piracy group has made a somewhat surprising statement. Music Industry Piracy Investigations, which acts for dozens of labels including the Big Four, today said that while they support measures for dealing with infringement, that does not include “termination of Internet accounts.”
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘The Hangover II’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Unknown’. ‘Hall Pass’ completes the top three.
For years the top record label executives have been claiming that it’s impossible to compete with free, but YouTube is proving them wrong. With billions of views every month the major record labels are making millions by sharing their music for free. For many people YouTube takes away the incentive to ‘pirate,’ but at the same time it may also cannibalise legal music sales.
Below are TorrentFreak's most discussed articles of the past month. Join the discussion if you like.
Left QuoteGoogle already showed it will censor for the highest bidder - China Inc. springs to mind. Now it is doing it for MPAA & Co.
Jamie King - Vodo Founder Left Quote
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