Intellectual Property Rights Holders Association Blog

The oldest BitTorrent site, FileSoup, has recently been targeted by police as well as anti-piracy officers. FilesSoups owner was arrested and further denied his phone call and legal representation for more than seven hours. His warrant was gained on July 27 and was backed up by the MPAA-funded UK anti-piracy group FACT. A raid on his home was then conducted. He was subsequently charged with Suspicion of downloading copyrighted movies.

The owner of FileSoup, known as The Geeker, said “I asked them [police] while still at home if I could contact a member of my family so that someone could come and make sure my dog was catered for, they said that I couldn’t. On the way to the police station I asked if they could contact someone to take care of the dog or if I could make a phone call, they again said I could not,”

FileSoup was founded in 2003 and is considered one of the original torrent sites. Although keeping a low profile, the site has built a solid reputation, and had survived the other popular torrent site, the Pirate Bay.

The warrant was issued under Section 109 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988. It allows the gathering of any evidence related to the illegal file distribution or file-sharing of copyright films. Although FileSoup has never hosted any copyright material, it has links to metadata which links to material hosted elsewhere.

To date, FileSoup still remains operable.

Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neg and Gottfrid Svatholm are being sued by the lawyers from Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana (FIMI) and Federation against Music Piracy (FPM) in Italy. The organizations are seeking damages of over 1 million euro. Nevertheless, the lawyer of the three has explained that there has been no official notification.

After the fallout between of the planned sale to Global Gaming Factory, this lawsuit is the last thing the Pirate Bay was looking to become involved with; along with the loss of a Dutch Court case. The Pirate Bay was then handed the ruling that fines would be imposed in the Netherlands if they did not disable the country’s access to the site within ten days.

In August 2008, the Pirate Bay was made inaccessible in Italy after internet service providers decided to block this domain; nevertheless, the Pirate Bay appealed and won the case. Then in October, the Court of Bergamo ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement. The current Italian lawsuit is being based on evidence which was collected during this Bergamo case.

The President of FIMI, Enzo Mazza, stated, “The claim is also based on the principle that by selling the site to others, the founders have confirmed that the whole illegal operation of The Pirate Bay was to make a profit and it is therefore unacceptable that someone can take the money and then escape without repairing the damage.”

In July, more than ten major movie companies, including Disney, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Sony, NBC, and Paramount, issued a subpoena to the Stockholm District Court requiring that the Pirate Bay halt its activities. All of these studios would like the courts to force these internet service providers to shut the site down.

Nevertheless, the Pirate Bay continues to function normally; further continuing the ongoing battle, which may take years to settle. In May, the music industry’s plaintiffs, which include Universal, EMI, Sony, and Warner, made clear that they were unhappy with their current attorney, Peter Danowsky, and applied to the court requesting it start additional fines on three of the defendants, Fredrik Neij, Goddfrid Svatholm Warg, and Petere Sunde Kolmisoppi, for as long as the studio’s copyrights are being infringed. Now the movie industry is asking for the support of the television industry as well.

Companies which include Columbia, Disney, NBC, Paramount, Sony, 20^th Century Fox, Universal and Warner are suing the Pirate Bay’s owners asking the court to cease copyright infringement. They also have in common with the music industry taking action against the Pirate Bay’s bandwidth supplier, Black Internet AB.

Included in the movies and television shows listed which infringes on copyrights are Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, Watchmen, and Harry Potter. These shows were named through their legal representative, Monique Wadsted.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the file-sharing web sites Pirate Bay and Kazaa made attempts to launch as legal music download sites after the copyright infringement charges both are facing. Hans Pandeya, the CEO of the Swedish company Global Gaming Factory (GGF) explained that his company would acquire the Pirate Bay for nearly $8 million. However, the site would now be subscribed to by users and would be a “give and take” model.

This model would work by having content providers and copyright owners being paid for user uploads, and subscribers might work off subscription fees by sharing content, or by lending PC storage capacities.

Nevertheless, this week, Ricardo Dijkstra, attorney for the GGF announced that GGF would only purchase the Pirate Bay if it could be turned into a legitimate business. He said the business would depend on “whether those assets can be used in a legal manner.” GGF was named along with the Pirate Bay in a civil lawsuit and wants to currently emphasize that they presently do not have control over the BitTorrent site.

Kazaa has now managed to break free of any legal woes. Although they were brought down along with Napster in 2006, they now have become a legitimate business and users can now download unlimited music for $19.98 per month.

The Ex-CEO of Grokster and the creator of Mashboxx, the world’s first licensed person to person service is now said to be working with Pirate Bay buyers. Mashboxx, was said to be a revolutionary licensed P2P service that was supposed to come out by 2006 and never did. It was supposed to work the same as any P2P service and users would search, upload, and download tracks but also purchase WMA-encoded and fingerprinted music tracks for about $1.

However, this site was never launched and is currently in its same condition which it was in 2006. However, Wayne Rosso, the Ex-Ceo is back to what he was years ago. When news came that GGF would purchase The Pirate Bay and make it a legitimate service, Rosso claims that this service would fail.

Two days after this announcement, Rosso received a call from Hans Pandaya, the CEO of GGF. Rosso claimed that at first he did not understand what Pandaya was attempting to accomplish, but after consideration decided to be on board. Rosso claimed “Long story short, I am now working with Hans to facilitate the model and helping to make the Pirate Bay site legit.”

The Recording Industry Association of America has announced that it will cease the suing of individuals who downloaded music without paying. The RIAA will now pressure Internet Service Providers to protect copyrights.

Due to the increasing unpopularity of the Association for the punishment of over 35,000 individuals has made decided to go with this decision instead. In most of the cases, those individuals have been college students and minors—often the types of people who are least able to afford hefty fines.

According to Wire, John McCain believed he was a used by the Republican National Committee for a commercial using a Jackson Brown song without permission. Nevertheless, he is still being held accountable, and Los Angeles federal judge, R. Gary Klausner, did not believe his testimony regarding this matter. In February, the judge refused to remove McCain’s name from the lawsuit for violating the right’s to Brown’s “Running on Empty” popular song. According to McCain, “I was not involved all in any way in the writing creation, production, distribution, or dissemination of the video, nor do I have any knowledge whatsoever of how this video was written, created, produced or disseminated or who was involved in any aspect of the writing, creation, production, distribution or dissemination of the video. I was completely unaware that this video even existed until I was informed of it after this lawsuit was filed.” Last August, the commercial was showcased on YouTube to criticize Obama’s energy policy and the song was purchased on iTunes. Brown believes that the commercial falsely suggested he endorsed McCain and the Republican Party.

According to Wired, a federal jury found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable in June in the nation’s only RIAA file-sharing case to go to trial. Thomas-Rasset is said have infringed upon 24 songs and has charged her almost nearly $2 million. Unfortunately for Thomas-Rasset, this trial occurs just two years after the judge claimed a mistrial; in this trial she was ordered to pay around $220,000. Nevertheless, Thomas-Rasset chose to have a new trial instead of settling like the thousands of other users the RIAA has sued or threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Problems were encountered when she testified; claiming that her children may have utilized her computer for the purpose of file-sharing on Kazaa. In her previous trial, she claimed a file-sharing hack hijacked her WiFi connection; although she did not own a WiFi router.

According to Commerce Times, Tim Reynolds, an attorney for the RIAA, explained to jurors that the record companies would prove that Thomas-Rasset, illegally shared songs on the Kazaa network. He claimed that because of women like Thomas-Rasset, this illegal downloading has cost the music industry not only billions of dollars but has also been responsible for thousands of lost jobs. Once again, Thomas-Rasset claims that she did not share files illegally. Her defense attorney, Kiwi Camara, counters that the record companies cannot prove that she shared files illegally. In fact, he called her “one of the industry’s best customers, with a collect of over 200 CDs.”

Earlier this month, the Recording Association of America (RIAA) won a copyright infringement suit against Usenet.com  The lawsuit, which was filed on October 12, 2007, had the RIAA claiming  that Usernet newsgroups contain “millions of copyrighted sound recordings.”   Although Usenet is currently named as the sole defendent, RIAA could in turn possibly sue hundreds of universities, Internet service providers, and other newsgroup archives.  Usenet is a site that lets newsgropus users share documents, music, and other files.  The site works differently than that of many file-sharing sites.  It stores content on servers and makes it available on-demand,  rather than the typical peer-to-peer architecture usually utilized.  According to the RIAA, the decision for the Association exemplifiesthe “courts recognizing the value of copyrighted music and taking action against companies and individuals who are engaging in wide-scale infringement.”  The ruling comes as the RIAA is shifting away from its longtime strategy of targeting individuals suspected of sharing music files online. Instead, the organization is going after companies that make such copyright violations possible.  The RIAA is initiating a new strategy which asks internet service providers to join a voluntary anti-piracy direction which would include the internet service providers passing along RIAA copyright infringement notices to subscribers.  If the notices are repeatedly ignored by the user, the user would therefore face having their service reduced or suspended before a possible lawsuit.

The founders of the Pirate Bay recently launched Video Bay, a video-sharing site.  The launch of this site came the same day when the controversial Pirate Bay site was sold to a Swedish software company.  Global Gaming Factory, located out of Sweden, purchased the Pirate Bay website for nearly $8 million.  This news comes recently after the Pirate Bay’s three founders and investor were found guilty of assisting in copyright infringement and ordered to pay a collective fine of nearly $4 million as well as being sentenced to a year in prison.  The founders appealed this judgment and were denied.  Pirate Bay has more than 20 million users and although does not store any copyrighted material, streams its content through its BitTorrent file-sharing technology.  
The new owner of the site is considering utilizing a new model by compensating content providers.  Global Gaming Factory said “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for the content that is downloaded via the site.”  The Video Bay site is comparable to that of Google’s YouTube and comes with the warning “Don’t expect anything to work at all.”  The site offers a variety of music videos and television clips.