country
maVen Gets 2.5 months in Prison
First Canadian to be sentenced under country’s new anti-CAM law. If you’ve been a member of the P2P world for at least a few years then you’re well aware of the illustrious body of work compiled by the infamous Canadian Gérémi Adam, 28yo, better known as maVen. He was well known for producing some of the highest quality CAMs around.
Continue reading »Canadian MP Introduces $75(?) iPod Tax
Charlie Angus proposes amendments to the Copyright Act that “will ensure that artists are getting paid for their work, and that consumers aren’t criminalized for moving their legally-obtained music from one format to another.” The so-called “iPod tax” is resurfacing in Canada with news that New Democratic Party MP Charlie Angus has introduced a a pair of proposals to amend the country’s Copyright Act. One would extend the Private Copying Levy, first established back in 1997, to portable media players like iPods. Specifically, C-499 says the tax will cover any “device that contains a permanently embedded data storage medium, including solid state or hard disk, designed, manufactured and advertised for the purpose of copying sound recordings, excluding any prescribed kind of recording device.” This would finally give consumers some much needed control over legally purchased products while simultaneously opening up a new revenue stream for artists in the downloading age.
Continue reading »China’s Great Firewall Blocks IsoHunt
China adheres to its policy of restricting access to file-sharing sites, having recently added the Canada-based BitTorrent site IsoHunt to the country’s infamous Great Firewall. Since the order has entered in effect, the number of IsoHunt Chinese visitors has spiraled down dramatically, with site reports indicating a 99% drop in traffic. According to experts, the statistically registered decrease in traffic is so pronounced that any technical difficulties have to be excluded from the overall picture.
Continue reading »Music Biz Gives Up Trying to Block Pirate Bay in Norway
Had been trying to force Norwegian ISP Telenor to prevent customer from being able to access BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay. It’s been a long time coming, but at last TONO , a Norwegian royalty collecting group founded back in 1928, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) have given up their bid to force Norwegian ISP Telenor to prevent subscribers from being able to access BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay. The affair first began in earnest last March when Telenor refused to block the Pirate Bay, reminding the copyright holders that “ISPs are not complicit in the actions of its customers on the Internet.” Then in November the country’s Norway’s Asker and Bærum District Court ruled in favor of Telenor , finding that it is not illegally contributing to any copyright violations by The Pirate Bay and that there is subsequently no legal basis for forcing it to block the site.
Continue reading »Court Acquits BitTorrent User Citing Faulty Evidence
Last year LANVA reported the IP-addresses of 106 users of the country’s largest BitTorrent site to the police. The anti-piracy group claimed that the site’s users were sharing a copy of the Windows 7 Ultimate operating system and took action on behalf of Microsoft without notifying the software company. The self-proclaimed investigators evidence consisted of a screenshot of peers as listed by uTorrent.
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