Searching for Pirate

This week an operation led by a powerful anti-piracy group closed down a 6-year-old BitTorrent tracker. The site had already been targeted following the verdict in the original Pirate Bay trial, but had quickly announced their intentions to go 100% legal. This week, however, people said to be behind the site were arrested. Most surprisingly, one of them was the owner of the company supplying them bandwidth.

In a few weeks Amelia Andersdotter will be the second Pirate Party member to take a seat at the European Parliament in Brussels. The 24-year-old Swede was voted in more than two years ago, but due to bureaucratic quibbles her official appointment was delayed. TorrentFreak catches up with the soon-to-be youngest MEP to hear about her plans and expectations.

Anti-piracy group RettighedsAlliancen say they have been busy recently tracking down piracy �masterminds’. After busting who they claim is the leader of a huge movie piracy group, last week they had the police detain a less likely target – a 19-year-old law student who runs a file-sharing blog. RettighedsAlliancen say that guides on his site showed readers how to break the law, an act serious enough to involve the police.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, �Cowboys and Aliens’ tops the chart this week, followed by �Conan the Barbarian’. �Killer Elite’ completes the top three.

Efforts to censor the Internet are increasing in the Western world. In the US lawmakers are currently discussing legislation (SOPA/PIPA) that could take out The Pirate Bay, or disable access to it. In several other countries such as Italy, Finland and Belgium, courts have already ordered Internet Providers to block their users’ access to the site. Demonstrating the futility of these efforts, a small group of developers today releases a browser add-on called “The Pirate Bay Dancing

After a process lasting more than three years, a man from Sweden has finally been prosecuted for his role in the operations of Student Bay, a site dedicated to the sharing of textbooks. Despite prosecution attempts to link a Pirate Bay founder to the site, the 23-year-old is the only person in the spotlight. An apology requested by The Pirate Bay for wrongful accusations appears to have gone unfulfilled.

After a court ordered two of the largest Belgian Internet service providers to prevent their users accessing The Pirate Bay, the local anti-piracy outfit is now urging other ISPs to do the same. Internet providers who refuse to give in to this request within 10 days will be taken to court, a threatening letter explains. The blackmailing tactic seems to have worked, as one of the smaller ISPs has already disabled access to The Pirate Bay.

With increasing lobbying efforts from the entertainment industry against BitTorrent sites and users, we wondered whether these companies hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others. After some initial skimming we’ve discovered BitTorrent pirates at nearly every major entertainment industry company in the US, including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fox Entertainment and NBC Universal. Busted.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy is a man who has championed some of the most aggressive anti-piracy legislation in Europe. But today it's revealed that the occupants of his very own office and home are responsible for a nice selection of pirate downloads using BitTorrent. Three strikes? Those with access to the Presidential Palace's IP addresses have already doubled that quota.

An investigator who worked for the anti-piracy outfit behind Finland’s Pirate Bay ISP blockage and two file-sharing cases where defendants collected huge fines, has been speaking of his lack of training at the organization. The man also says that he was so uncomfortable with the heavy modification of file-sharing related witness statements he created for the police, in the end he refused to sign them.