If you’ve used BitTorrent to snag unauthorized copies of independent films you should be interested in the arguments unfolding in Wednesday in federal court in Washington, DC. At issue is a mass-litigation campaign, in which the fledgling US Copyright Group is suing about 15,000 users whose IP addresses were detected harvesting films like Steam Experiment, Far Cry, Uncross the Stars, Gray Man and Call of the Wild 3D . Several digital rights... 

LimeWire was found liable of copyright infringement Tuesday in a decision that threatens to financially devastate the New York company behind the file-sharing application. In a 4-year-old case brought by The Recording Industry Association of America, U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood ruled that LimeWire’s users commit a “ substantial amount of copyright infringement ” (.pdf) and that the Lime Group, the company behind the... 

Sweden’s Supreme Court said Wednesday that two of the three judges set to preside over The Pirate Bay’s copyright conviction appeal are not biased, despite their membership in pro-copyright groups. The decision clears the way for expected oral arguments sometime this fall before a three-judge appellate panel weighing last year’s criminal and civil convictions of The Pirate Bay’s four co-founders, Swedish radio reports... 

A new malware scam is trying to dupe BitTorrent users into coughing up serious cash for illegally downloading copyrighted material. The code displays a box with the message “Warning! Piracy detected!” and opens a web page purportedly run by a Swiss company “committed to promoting the cultural and economic benefits of copyright.” The fake company, the ICCP Foundation, also claims to be backed by the Recording Industry... 

A federal appeals court Tuesday rejected the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to sanction Comcast for interfering with peer-to-peer traffic, reversing the commission’s first attempt to enforce network neutrality. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated (.pdf) the agency’s 2008 decision ordering  Philadelphia-based Comcast to stop hampering the peer-to-peer service BitTorrent as a... 

Warning to pirates: you’re no longer safe downloading movies that nobody ever heard of. A consortium of independent filmmakers has launched an RIAA-style mass-litigation campaign, suing thousands of individual BitTorrent users whose IP addresses were detected feeding and seeding films like  Steam Experiment , Far Cry , Uncross the Stars , Gray Man and Call of the Wild 3D . “There’s two-way liability here with BitTorrrent,”... 

A U.S. judge is ordering one of the world’s leading BitTorrent search engines to remove all infringing content, a decision Isohunt’s operator said Tuesday likely would shutter the site with 30 million unique monthly visitors. The injunction targeting Isohunt follows similar rulings against competing pirate sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay , although the Bay has thus far eluded compliance. Last year, a federal court sided with... 

A British jury on Friday cleared former Oink admin Allan Ellis of conspiracy to defraud the music industry for running one of the world’s strangest music file-sharing services with some 200,000 members Operators of the so-called Pink Palace banned low-quality sound files, enforced strict usage rules and mandated that all users’ avatars be “cute” — even taking pains to define exactly what made an avatar appropriately... 

The operator of a popular BitTorrent search site said Monday he will likely challenge last week’s landmark decision by a U.S. judge declaring such sites unlawful and no different from conventional peer-to-peer piracy services. “We do think from our preliminary review there are a number of issues for appeal,” said Ira Rothken, attorney for torrent search engine ISO Hunt , the defendant in the case. The long-awaited decision,... 

A Stockholm court is refusing to order a Swedish internet provider to cut off a site the studios claim is The Pirate Bay’s new torrent tracker. The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious filesharing website, announced two weeks ago it was abandoning its tracker , which had been the world’s largest — and a magnet for litigation — for years. The move was prompted by the emergence…  Read More →