Pending the outcome of a civil action taken by several entertainment companies including Disney, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Sony, NBC and Paramount, on 24th August Stockholm’s district court ordered aggressive action to remove The Pirate Bay from the Internet.

The court ordered the site’s bandwidth supplier, Black Internet, to disconnect the site from the Internet or face penalties of 500,000 kronor ($70,600). The ISP complied immediately – it had no choice if they were to comply with the law.

The Pirate Bay was quickly back up with a new bandwidth supplier but now several Swedish political parties are being openly critical of the law used to threaten Black Internet with fines as punishment for failing to stop the actions of others. The politicians are now calling for a change in the law.

Camilla Lindberg, who sits in parliament for the Liberal Party, told SR.se that she believes that in this case, threatening an ISP with damages is taking things too far.

“To silence an operator, I think this is outrageous. We need to review the law and we need a proper investigation,” she said.

The Green Party, Left Party and Center Party are also critical over the way the law was applied.

Johan Linander, spokesperson for the Center Party who also sits in the parliamentary Justice Committee noted that for other breaches of law, it is up to ISPs to decide whether to shut down its customers or not, “but in terms of copyright, there is a kind of censorship with the help of this penalty,” he said.

Other politicians, including Social Democrat Justice Minister Thomas Bodstrom who sponsored the 2005 law, and the Conservatives, are refusing to comment since the criminal case of The Pirate Bay is still ongoing.

Christian Democrat Otto von Arnold told Sveriges Radio that he felt that the courts had done the right thing.

Whether or not the law is flawed or needs to be amended doesn’t change the fact that the court action has done little to change the reality on the ground. The Pirate Bay is online and although a little unstable initially, is now reporting tracking nearly 23,000,000 peers.

via torrentfreak.com

µMonitor is a handy iPhone application that allows users to control their uTorrent client on the go. After putting months of hard work into getting the software ready for a public release, the developer Claudio was told by Apple that everything related to BitTorrent has been banned from their App Store.

“We’ve reviewed µMonitor and determined that we cannot post this version of your application to the App Store at this time because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store,” Apple wrote to the developer after a 4 month review process.

This is not the first time that Apple has excluded a BitTorrent-related product from its store. In May they also banned an application designed to remotely-control the Transmission BitTorrent client for the same reasons outlined above.

Interestingly Apple has no problem allowing Usenet related applications in their store. myNZB for example is an application that is available from the App Store although it’s similar in functionality to the BitTorrent apps that were rejected.

Despite Apple’s blockade, there is still a way to get µMonitor on your iPhone. Instead of throwing months of hard work overboard, µMonitor’s developer has recently decided to bypass the Apps Store and make the application available to ‘jailbroken’ iPhone users from the Cydia repository.

Thanks to Apple, uTorrent users who want to control their torrent via an iPhone application have no other option than to jailbreak their phone. Detailed instructions on how to get µMonitor working on your phone can be found on Claudio’s website.

via torrentfreak.com

Radiohead.com

Radiohead are no strangers to BitTorrent after the well-documented pay-what-you-like “In Rainbows” album unofficially racked up many thousands of downloads using the protocol.

Late last week the band’s BitTorrent link was revitalized after a new Radiohead track leaked onto the Internet. After this advance release of “These Are My Twisted Words,” rumors began to grow that Radiohead themselves might be behind the ‘leak’.

Speculation grew on the back of comments made by Thom Yorke of the band to The Believer: “We’ve actually got a good plan, but I can’t tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off. But we’ve got this great idea for putting things out”.

Today, on the band’s Dead Air Space blog, Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar and keyboard) seems to solve the mystery:

So here’s a new song, called ‘These Are My Twisted Words’.

We’ve been recording for a while, and this was one of the first we finished.
We’re pretty proud of it.

There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practicing, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.

At the bottom of the post are two links to downloads, one directly from Waste and the other the original torrent uploaded to Mininova a few days ago. In fact, it was uploaded twice.

An enthusiastic commenter on Mininova exclaims: “OMFG! This torrent is being redirected from the radiohead official store, so there’s no album, just this song finished, this is very edgy, i mean thom yorke is way ahead from any other artist, at least we know he’s not doing his music to get some profit, at least not anymore, this is history being made, again, GREAT!”

Sounds like the first of many happy listeners.

Mininova is happy with Radiohead’s move also. The site’s co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak: “It’s great to see that artists use Mininova to distribute and promote their content for free. We encourage everyone to do this, which is why we provide our Content Distribution service.”

Radiohead uploaded the torrent the old fashioned way though, seeding it themselves. Apparently they are well aware of the latest developments in the BitTorrent community, as they used the newly founded OpenBitTorrent tracker.

via torrentfreak.com

Two months ago BREIN decided to take the Pirate Bay founders to court, hoping to get the BitTorrent tracker shut down in The Netherlands. BREIN won the civil case two weeks ago, and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde were ordered to block Dutch visitors within 10 days or face thousands of euros each day in penalties.

For now the verdict has been put on hold by BREIN, allowing the three defendants to appeal. Nevertheless, because of the legal issues between the two parties, an encounter between the head of BREIN, Tim Kuik and Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm that took place at Hacking at Random (HAR) this Friday was a rather interesting one.

Tim Kuik participated in a panel discussion on copyright laws and the future of media distribution at HAR, and halfway through he was standing face to face with Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Svartholm, who had been following the discussion in the audience, took the opportunity to confront Kuik with some of the allegations he made.

Svartholm started by asking if BREIN actually has any evidence that The Pirate Bay is making ‘a lot’ of money from distributing copyrighted works, as they claim. “Can you please tell me where that profit is, because i’d like some of it,” he asked, which resulted in applause and cheers from the audience.

“You tell me, you’re here, somebody paid for your trip,” Kuik quickly replied in an attempt to turn things around, implying that Svartholm must have used Pirate Bay revenue to make his way over to The Netherlands.

Svartholm, who currently works as a software programmer in Asia where he earns his living, then replied, “I paid for this trip by developing computer software for my customers,” which was again followed by applause from the audience.

Kuik found his argument crushed so reverted back to the earlier question about profits. “Everybody knows, including yourself, that you’re selling advertising space on your website, and people pay you for that,” he said.

Kuik went on to say that a Swedish investigative journalist found that The Pirate Bay made hundreds of thousands of kroner every year. To some this may sound like an impressive figure, but 300,000 kroner ($40,000) may not even be enough to cover the hardware and bandwidth costs, so it doesn’t prove that there’s any profit.

From Kuik’s responses it seems that BREIN has no evidence at all that The Pirate Bay is as profitable as they claim it is, so Svartholm went on to ask Kuik about the defamation lawsuit that the former Pirate Bay founders started against him and his organization.

The head of BREIN is being sued by TPB in Sweden for defamation, after Kuik claimed that the Pirate Bay founders were responsible for an alleged DDoS attack on BREIN’s website. In Sweden, Kuik is now facing up to two years in prison, and Svartholm wanted to know if he plans to show up.

In his reply, Kuik denied that he ever attributed the DDoS attacks to the people behind the Pirate Bay, but he said that it was a coincidence that their website was hit right after the case against TPB was announced to the press. Svartholm of course questioned Kuik’s denial, but he never saw his original question answered.

In the end, Kuik never answered any of the questions posed by Svartholm, but the face to face standoff between two people at the extreme ends of the copyright debate was an interesting one nonetheless. After the panel discussion, Tim Kuik and Gottfrid Svartholm set their differences aside for a brief moment, as they posed for the cameras.

The video of the HAR panel discussion is available in OGG and on Vimeo (Gottfrid at 30:20).

Tim Kuik (BREIN) and Gottfrid Svartholm (The Pirate Bay) credit: Reinoud Van Leeuwen

via torrentfreak.com

Pirate Party UK

In June the Swedish Pirate Party shocked its critics and secured a seat in the European Parliament, with no less than 7.1 percent of the vote. The Pirates received more votes from those under 30 than any other party in Sweden, which went beyond all expectations.

This achievement motivated supporters of the Party’s ideals in other countries to become active as well. Last month the Swiss Pirate Party was founded and the Canadians are mobilizing too. In the UK the local Pirate Party hasn’t been sitting still either, quite the opposite.

Today the Pirate Party UK announced that they are officially registered at the Electoral Commission. The paperwork is done and all the bureaucracy has been dealt with, so now the party’s biggest challenge is to increase its membership.

“Now the party can really start. It’s time for us to tell the world that we exist, to recruit members, raise funds and gear up to fight the General Election,” Pirate Party Chairman, Andrew Robinson told TorrentFreak. “The officers and web team have built the framework that the party needs to get going, now it’s time for the public to make things happen,” he added.

Increasingly the UK copyright lobby is pushing politicians, ISPs and law enforcement to take action against those accused of copyright infringement. If anywhere, a Party devoted to protecting online privacy and weeding out copyright abuse is much needed in Britain. However, they can’t do much without the help of actively involved members.

“Join the party, tell the media about the party, tell your friends about the party, take part in policy and news debates on the forum, join our Facebook group, donate or set up a regular payment to provide financial support, set up a branch in your constituency, school or workplace,” Robinson suggests, emphasizing that the success of Britain’s newest party depends on its members.

All over the world the Pirate Party movement is growing, with new parties being founded every month. For those who want to get involved locally, a full list of all the parties can be found at Pirate Party International.

Pirate Party UK Campaign Poster

via TorrentFreak.com