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.

A Seattle man has been sentenced to more than four years in prison in what prosecutors say was the first federal case against someone using file-sharing software to steal identities.

Gregory Kopiloff, 35, was sentenced Monday to 51 months in prison, according to a report in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Kopiloff pleaded guilty in November to mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, and accessing a protected computer without authorization to further fraud. Kopiloff used programs such as LimeWire to gain access to personal information in tax returns, credit reports, bank statements, and student financial-aid applications of more than 50 people, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He then used the information to buy and resell more than $73,000 in merchandise, the release said.

Swedish courts will soon be able to force the country’s Internet providers to produce information on suspected file-sharers in a move to crackdown on piracy, the culture and justice ministers said Friday.

File-sharing can be traced by tracking the IP addresses of the computers that download or distribute a file.

“We need to … stand up for musicians, authors, filmmakers and all other copyright owners so that they have the right to their own material,” Justice Minister Beatrice Ask and Culture Minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth wrote in a joint opinion piece published in the Svenska Dagbladet daily.

The ministers said they will move ahead with the proposal this spring.

“Courts … shall be able to demand an Internet provider to give the copyright owner information about who had a certain IP address when it was used for infringement on the Internet,” they said.

Sweden has long been criticized as a safe haven for online piracy because the popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay is based there.

A woman who claims the recording industry’s anti-music piracy campaign threatens and intimidates innocent people has filed a new complaint accusing record companies of racketeering, fraud and illegal spying.

Tanya Andersen originally sued the Recording Industry Association of America after RIAA representatives threatened to interrogate her young daughter if she didn’t pay thousands of dollars for music she downloaded from somebody else.

Her amended complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Portland seeks national class-action status for other people allegedly victimized by the industry’s anti-piracy campaign and the company it hired, MediaSentry.

The new lawsuit claims accuses the industry and MediaSentry of spying “by unlicensed, unregistered and uncertified private investigators” who “have illegally entered the hard drives of tens of thousands of private American citizens” in violation of laws “in virtually every state in the country.”

The information was used to file “sham” lawsuits intended only as intimidation to further the anti-piracy campaign, the lawsuit said.

Lory Lybeck, the attorney for the Beaverton woman, said the lawsuit is partly aimed at forcing the industry to reveal how extensive the spying had become.

Peer-to-peer file sharing, the primary vehicle for online piracy, has been as unpopular with Internet service providers as it has been popular with users.

Providers have banned, blocked or slowed peer-to-peer traffic in their efforts to keep the flood of music, video, games and software from overwhelming their networks. But Verizon Communications Inc. has broken ranks with the industry and is set to announce Friday that it plans to help its users share files faster - at least those who do it legally.

With researchers at Yale University and a group of companies that make file-sharing software, Verizon collaborated to enable faster downloads for consumers and lower costs for participating ISPs.

File-sharing accounts for one-third of all Internet traffic, according to Arbor Networks, a maker of traffic-management equipment, and some estimates are higher.

At a conference in New York, the Verizon group will present test results showing that when an ISP cooperates with a file-sharing software maker they can speed downloads an average of 60 percent - though collaboration boosted some downloads six-fold on fast Internet connections.

“This test signifies a turning point in the history of peer-to-peer technology and ISPs,” said Robert Levitan, chief executive of file-sharing company Pando Networks Inc. “It will definitely show ISPs that the problem is not peer-to-peer technology, the problem is how you deploy it. It is possible to deploy P2P to their advantage.”

In P2P systems, users download files from one another, usually at the same time they’re uploading files to other users. The original Napster was a P2P system, as are the KaZaa and BitTorrent systems in current use.

One of the problems for ISPs has been that file-sharing networks connect users more or less at random around the globe - so a U.S. file-sharer may simultaneously download files from Greece and Japan and upload to users in Belgium and Argentina. This long-distance carriage is expensive for ISPs.

Verizon shared details about the structure of its network with the researchers and Pando in the “P4P Working Group,” created last summer, and they together created a system that connected users not randomly, but to other users close by.

The man notorious for cracking the DVD code, and Apple’s FairPlay DRM, is looking to make a legitimate business out of his expertise.

Beginning Tuesday, the first product from his company DoubleTwist Ventures, will enter open beta. Called DoubleTwist, it’s a free desktop client that essentially allows any kind of music, photo, or video file to be shared between a long list of portable media players, and through Web-based social networks.

Instead of iTunes songs only being able to play on iTunes or videos taken with an Nokia N95 remaining locked on the phone, DoubleTwist software allows for dragging, dropping, and syncing of different media formats no matter the device.

The idea, according to DoubleTwist founder and CEO Monique Farantzos, is that media files should be more like e-mail. It shouldn’t matter what service you create the file in, or on what type of hardware, it all should work together seamlessly, she says.

Farantzos recruited DVD Jon, or Jon Lech Johansen, and the two have been working with about 10 others for the past eight months on the DoubleTwist software. Johansen says DoubleTwist allows him to bring the success he’s found to a wider audience.

“It’s one opportunity to write something for your Web site for use by a couple thousand geeks,” he said in an interview. But with DoubleTwist, the idea is to hide all the complexity of making easy transfers of files from the user so that even non-techie types will understand. “The goal is to make something your parents can use,” he said.

Several BitTorrent developers have joined forces to propose a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs. This new form of encryption will be implemented in BitTorrent clients including uTorrent, so Comcast subscribers are free to share again.

Comcast Corp. told the Federal Communications Commission in formal comments Tuesday that hampering some file-sharing by its subscribers was a justifiable way to keep Web traffic flowing for everyone.

The comments are the fullest accounting yet of how Comcast manages its network.

Comcast’s network management is the subject of formal complaints to the FCC from consumer groups and law professors.

The groups say Comcast has breached the principle, known as “‘Net Neutrality,” of treating all Internet traffic equally. They also say the company was hampering movie downloading services because they might compete with Comcast’s cable TV business.

Comcast says it must curb some file-sharing traffic because some subscribers would otherwise hog the cables with their uploads and slow traffic in their neighborhood.

The company - the country’s second-largest Internet service provider - also said it was justified in using “reset” packets to break off communications between two computers.

Comcast sometimes inserts these packets in the data stream to kill a file-sharing session. The move “fools” each computer into believing the other computer wants to end the connection.

The return addresses of Comcast’s packets indicate they’re from one of the file-sharing computers when they are in fact from Comcast.