TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Music Industry Demands Pirate Bay Blockade in France
- Canadian Police Raid BitTorrent Tracker, Confiscate Server
- Encrypted Internet Traffic Surges in a Year, Research Shows
| Music Industry Demands Pirate Bay Blockade in France Posted: 15 May 2014 02:43 AM PDT
Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and this list continues to expand. Today, news broke that the French Civil Society of Phonographic Producers has filed for an injunction to prevent ISPs from providing access to The Pirate Bay website and more than hundred of its dedicated proxy sites. NextINpact reports that the music association, backed by the major movie studios, filed a request in February. The French Internet providers Bouygues, Free, Orange and SFR have since been informed about the court proceedings. The complaint is based on a provision of the Hadopi law which allows copyright holders to request measures from third-party services to prevent or stop copyright infringements. Previously, a similar request resulted in a court order requiring Google to censor the search terms ‘Torrent’, ‘RapidShare’ and ‘Megaupload’ from its Instant and Autocomplete services. The court argued that Google indirectly facilitates copyright infringement by failing to filter these terms. Late last year another court order required Google, Bing and Yahoo to remove 16 video streaming sites from their search results on similar grounds. For now, it is still unclear whether the current legal action to block The Pirate Bay is only targeted at Internet providers, or if search engines are covered as well. The music labels have clearly learned from the blocking efforts in other countries, where proxy sites quickly picked up the slack. The record labels hope to prevent this from happening in France by listing all the Pirate Bay proxies they could find. Of course, it only takes one uncensored proxy to bypass the measures. Whether the French blockade, if granted, will be successful remains to be seen. There are still plenty of alternatives and circumvention tools available. This includes TPB’s own PirateBrowser which has been downloaded millions of times since its release last summer. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
| Canadian Police Raid BitTorrent Tracker, Confiscate Server Posted: 14 May 2014 11:47 AM PDT
"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Canada remains a magnet for sites whose well-understood raison d'être is to facilitate and enable massive unauthorized downloading of pirated versions of feature films, TV shows, recorded music, entertainment software, and other copyright materials," the IIPA wrote. These claims are actually the tip of a very large iceberg. It’s indeed true that some large public torrent sites are at least partly hosted on Canadian soil but mildly under the radar are also dozens of private tracker communities, many of which have happily operated from Canada for many, many years. The overall impression is that Canada is one of the safest countries in which to put a file-sharing site, but developments yesterday cast a shadow over that notion. With 10,000 members, Sparvar.org (Sparrows) was a reasonably sized private site. Aimed largely at a Swedish audience, Sparvar had enjoyed Canadian hosting on an IP address belonging to Montreal-based Netelligent Hosting Services, a company that has welcomed many similar sites in the past. Sometime in the past 24 hours, however, Sparvar disappeared from the Internet. Netelligent servers
Soon after a rumor began circulating that Sparvar had been raided by the police. That version of events has now been confirmed by Scandinavian anti-piracy outfit Rights Alliance. “Police in Canada have seized a server belonging to the illegal file-sharing service sparvar.org. Sparrows was a secret service with some 10 000 registered members. The server was located in Canada, but the activity was directed mainly against Sweden,” the anti-piracy group says. “Behind the complaint stands Rights Alliance which has long been monitoring and documenting this business. The investigation is continuing with a focus on identifying the perpetrators. The seized server will be analyzed.” The raid against Sparvar shows that Rights Alliance have long memories. More than two years ago following their action against private site Swepiracy, Rights Alliance warned of further action to come, specifically naming Sparvar as a target. That the group can conduct its work across borders, especially into Canada where it was believed there was a more torrent friendly environment, will come as a surprise to the many other sites hosted there under similar circumstances. Canada has been paying more attention to IP issues in recent years, enacting the Copyright Modernization Act in 2012 and subsequently introducing a bill designed to strengthen IP enforcement. Following these efforts the United States shifted Canada from the Priority Watch List to the standard Watch List in this year’s Special 301 Report. How much further Canada is prepared to go remains to be seen. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
| Encrypted Internet Traffic Surges in a Year, Research Shows Posted: 14 May 2014 07:37 AM PDT
A new report published by Sandvine this morning sheds light on the most recent developments. As in previous years, the trend is one of BitTorrent losing its share of peak Internet traffic in the U.S. while continuing to grow in Europe. However, there is a far more interesting trend hidden in the report, something which the traffic management company itself appears to have missed entirely. Comparing this year’s data to that of last year reveals that encrypted Internet traffic is booming. The change is most pronounced in Europe where the percentage of encrypted Internet traffic during peak hours quadrupled from a measly 1.47% to 6.10% in a year. Since overall Internet traffic increased as well, the increase is even greater for the absolute bandwidth that’s consumed.  In North America the percentage of encrypted Internet traffic during peak hours increased as well, from 2.29% early last year to 3.80% this year. Keeping in mind that absolute Internet traffic increases between 20% and 40% each year the bandwidth consumed by encrypted traffic doubled in this period.  The increase in encrypted traffic is a global phenomenon. In Latin America the share of bandwidth consumed by SSL shot up from 1.80% to 10.37% in a year. Also, a similar pattern emerges on mobile networks, where encrypted traffic is also booming. The changes in encrypted traffic can be directly linked to the surveillance revelations of Edward Snowden. As a result, the number of users of VPN services and other anonymizers increased sharply. In addition, Google and other web services turned on SSL by default. In previous years we revealed a similar trend among BitTorrent users, who increasingly searched for options to hide their download footprints in response to anti-piracy measures. A survey among Pirate Bay users, for example, revealed that 70% utilize a VPN or proxy, or are interested in doing so in the future. It will be interesting to see how these trends develop in the years to come. In any case, it’s clear that Internet services and their users are becoming more aware of their privacy online, which is generally a good development. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
If one would like to gauge the opinions of the world’s leading entertainment companies on Canadian attitudes towards BitTorrent sites, one only needs to look at this year’s International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) submission to the USTR.
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