Consumers may be tightening their belts, but that reduction apparently hasn’t affected DVD sales just yet. In fact, spending on DVDs and Blu-ray discs during the first half of 2008 showed a slight increase over the same period a year ago, according to data collected by Home Media Magazine. Spending on rentals rose even more, indicating that perhaps part of consumers’ money-saving efforts involve cozying up to a movie at home for entertainment instead of heading out for a night on the town—or downloading from the Internet.

Home Media found that sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs rose from $6.8 billion in early 2007 to $6.87 billion in the first half of this year—a modest increase of 1.1 percent. This number appears to coincide with “studio reports” saying that unit sales were also up 1.1 percent to 412.3 million discs in the first half of 2008, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Rentals increased by 2.6 percent, from $3.7 billion to $3.9 billion.

Analysts seem to think that these numbers also serve as proof that downloading—legal or illegal—is not hurting DVD sales as much as Doomsdayers would like to think.

The MPAA must be celebrating. According to the BitTorrent news site Slyck.com, the Department of Justice is proclaiming their first P2P criminal copyright conviction, against an Elite Torrents administrator.

The press release notes, ‘The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of a small group of Elite Torrents members known as “Uploaders,” who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group. At sentencing, which is scheduled for Sept. 9, 2008, Dove faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.’

In response to Sweden’s new wiretapping law, The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has announced the tracker’s intention to offer encryption services to its users.

According to the Local, Sweden’s surveillance law, which passed on Thursday of this week, allows the government to monitor all incoming and outgoing transmissions in the name of national security.

Although The Pirate Bay’s lobbying efforts against the bill were unsuccessful, the tracker still has a few cards left to play. According to Sunde, The Pirate Bay will roll out an encryption option this week.
“Many people have asked me what we’re planning to do,” Peter writes in his blog “- and the answer is “A lot!”. We’re going to help out in any way we can with fighting the law. This week we’re going to add SSL to The Pirate Bay. We’re also going to help out making a website about easy encryption - both for your hard drives and your net traffic. As some people know, we’re running a system for VPN-tunnels already and we’re going to lower the price for that as well and open it up for international users as well.”

The level of protection offered likely varies on the individual’s geographical location. Since The Pirate Bay isn’t actually situated in Sweden, a user in the United States isn’t impacted by the law. However for the concerned user living in Sweden, the new SSL feature will offer some security against the perceived threat.

Wikileaks has the full text of a memo concerning the dread Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a draft treaty that does away with those pesky public trade-negotiations at the United Nations (with participation from citizens’ groups and public interest groups) in favor of secret, closed-door meetings where entertainment industry giants get to give marching orders to governments in private.

It’s some pretty crazy reading — among other things, ACTA will outlaw P2P (even when used to share works that are legally available, like my books), and crack down on things like region-free DVD players. All of this is taking place out of the public eye, presumably with the intention of presenting it as a fait accompli just as the ink is drying on the treaty.

Honestly, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the entertainment industry is an existential threat to the idea of free speech, open tools, and an open communications network.

Wikileaks has revealed that the United States is plotting a ‘Pirate Bay killing’ multi-lateral trade agreement, called ‘ACTA,’ with the EU, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland and New Zealand.

“The proposal includes clauses designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of copyrighted information exchange on the Internet, which would also affect transparency sites such as Wikileaks. The Wikileaks document details provisions that would impose strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods. If adopted, the treaty would impose a strong, top-down enforcement regime imposing new cooperation requirements upon Internet service providers, including perfunctory disclosure of customer information, as well as measures restricting the use of online privacy tools.”

In response to the legal battle a new open-source project called Cubit may save the file sharing network. Cubit is an Azureus plugin that provides decentralized approximate keyword search of torrents in the network.

Comcast Corp.’s interference with Internet traffic has prompted a federal investigation and is at the center of calls for “Net Neutrality” laws, but another U.S. cable company appears to be doing the same thing without drawing scrutiny.

A study released Thursday found conclusive signs that file-sharing attempts by subscribers of Cox Communications were blocked, along with customers at Comcast and Singapore’s StarHub.

Of the 788 Comcast subscribers who participated in the study, 62 percent had their connections blocked. At Cox, 54 percent of subscribers examined were blocked, according to Krishna Gummadi at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbruecken, Germany. The institute examined the network connections of 8,175 Internet subscribers around the world.

TorrentSpy bit the dust only weeks ago, shuttering its peer-to-peer file-sharing site. Now a federal judge has ordered the company to pay the Motion Picture Association of America $110 million for infringement of thousands of copyrighted film and TV shows.

In a four-page final ruling issued Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper entered the multimillion-dollar judgment against TorrentSpy parent company Valence Media for willfully inducing, contributing and vicariously allowing copyright infringement on its Web site.

Cooper also issued a permanent injunction against the Web site, which shut down March 24.

The MPAA, which represents the Hollywood studios, filed suit against TorrentSpy in February 2006, claiming that the site’s torrent files were illegally uploaded.

Whether the MPAA will collect the $110 million from TorrentSpy remains to be seen. Court records show that Valence and TorrentSpy principles Justin Bunnell and Wes Parker have filed for bankruptcy.

A Swedish policeman who helped investigate The Pirate Bay is now working for Warners Brothers, one of the big-name film companies that helped drive the investigation and is now a plaintiff in the pending court case against the swashbuckling P2P file sharing site.

As reported in Swedish by the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan and in English by The Local, this policeman took his job with Warner several months after the preliminary Pirate Bay investigation was completed, but he’s scheduled to appear as a witness when the case goes to trial.

“The question is how long this was under consideration. If it was under consideration at the time of the investigation then it is a scandal,” said Peter Althin, a lawyer defending the four men behind The Pirate Bay, including Peter Althin.

“This is a judicial scandal,” Sunde said. “Talk about a conflict of interests.”

According to Althin, if it turns out the policeman discussed a job with Warner Brothers before the investigation played out, Warner and its fellow plaintiffs would have to ditch their court finding and start all over again.

In a Manhattan case, Warner v. Berry, the RIAA sued a man who lives in a homeless shelter, leaving a copy of the summons and complaint not at the homeless shelter, but at an apartment the man had occupied in better times, and had long since vacated.

The RIAA’s lawyers were threatened with sanctions by the Magistrate Judge in the case, for making misleading representations to the Court which the Magistrate felt were intentional. The District Judge, however, disagreed with imposing sanctions, giving the RIAA’s lawyers ‘as officers of the Court the benefit of the doubt,’ and instead concluded — in his 6-page opinion — that the RIAA’s lawyers were just being ’sloppy’ and had not made the misstatements for an improper purpose.

A little over a year ago, TorrentSpy.com was still the most visited BitTorrent site, but times have changed. After an expensive two year battle with the MPAA, TorrentSpy decided to throw in the towel and the site has now shut down permanently.

torrentspyTorrentSpy is no more, Justin Bunnell, the founder of the site writes: “We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the TorrentSpy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.”

The main reason for the shutdown is the ongoing legal battle with the MPAA, which started February 2006. “We now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown,” Justin writes.

Whilst one site may have closed its doors thanks to the MPAA, after continuous legal pressure, another has prevailed today in court. Torrent.is has won in court over the Association of film rights-holder in Iceland (SMÁÍS)

torrent icelandThe case is a study in classic big business bullying. Like similar cases in the US, SMÁÍS complained to the court about alleged copyright infringement activities on the BitTorrent site, and got a preliminary injunction, blocking the site.

However, justice works swifter in Iceland than it does in the US, and after only 4 months, the case has been to court.

The decision, however, was as surprising as it was swift. Instead of deciding for or against the defendants, the court simply dismissed the case. It is likely, however, that the plaintiffs will appeal the decision to the Icelandic ‘Supreme Court’ (Hæstiréttur).

The verdict, (available in Icelandic here) seems to hinge on the fact that under Icelandic laws, searching for files, or providing accessibility to them, is legal, as long as the files provided by the service are not themselves copyrighted. Torrent files, are not themselves copyrighted, but are instead metadata – data about data- describing copyrighted material, as indeed are reviews.

Vuze Inc., a California-based company that provides a popular file-sharing program, is giving its users a tool to help figure out if their Internet service provider is interfering with their traffic.

The Associated Press last year confirmed user reports that Comcast Corp., the country’s largest cable company, was secretly disrupting some file-sharing by its subscribers. The company has acknowledged to the practice and said it’s necessary to curb traffic that would otherwise slow down Internet speeds for other subscribers.

The “plug-in” Vuze made available as a free download last weekend looks for “reset packets,” the tool Comcast uses to break off some connections with computers trying to download files from Comcast subscribers, Vuze said Wednesday.

The plug-in works with Vuze’s main application, Azureus, which is based on the BitTorrent file-sharing technology. If the user allows it, the plug-in will send data back to Vuze, which will collect information about ISPs that are interfering with their subscribers’ traffic.

Palo Alto-based Vuze said Azureus has been downloaded 20 million times, and an average of 1.3 million users are using at any one time.