UK Will Order More ISPs To Block The Pirate Bay

The BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), the voice of the British recorded music bizz, is reported to make desperate efforts of extending its Internet-blocking policy about The Pirate Bay onto other largest broadband providers, including TalkTalk, Virgin Media, Sky, O2, and Orange.

The British Recorded Music Industry outfit officially demanded BT to block access to the “rogue” website known as The Pirate Bay – the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker. This may invoke the MPA against BT case – a well-known and debatable lawsuit which managed to set a precedent in the fight against piracy thanks to the court’s decision to order BT to block access to Newzbin service.

As if it wasn’t enough, now the music industry, with the help of multiple industry trade outfits, wishes that BT would voluntarily restrict access to The Pirate Bay website without court injunction. Meanwhile, if the Internet service provider fails to comply with the requirement, it’s likely that the British Recorded Music Industry would seek justice in the court of law by obtaining the required injunction.

Taking into account the fact that the current censorship system should be extended onto other Internet service providers as well, the anti-piracy outfit has now extended its main objective, that of blacklisting The Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker, to all of major broadband providers of the United Kingdom. The outfit issued a statement, saying that it is engaging in further dialogue with the Internet service provider BT on this issue. The organization also admitted that it has written to the UK’s other largest broadband providers – Virgin Media, O2, Orange, Sky, and TalkTalk – to ask them to block access to the BitTorrent tracker. Now the outfit is waiting for their responses.

UK MPAA Pressuring ISPs To Block File-Sharing Services

Recently, BT – one of the largest broadband providers in the country – has been forced to block the famous file-sharing site Newzbin2. However, the story doesn’t seem to be coming to an end with the court ruling: while the service keeps struggling by developing more and more way to circumvent the ban, two other UK’s Internet service providers, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, feel the pressure from the UK’s Motion Picture Association to block the news site as well.

Just a week ago MPA, a large movie industry watchdog, has sent TalkTalk and Virgin Media letters saying that the outfit would obtain the court orders demanding to impose the block and asked such an order would be opposed in some way, according to the local media reports.

As for the recipients of the letters, both of the Internet service providers admitted that they will comply to such blocking order if the court rules so. In the interview regarding this issue, Virgin Media explained that the company believed such deterrents should be accompanied by really compelling legal alternatives, like their agreement with the largest online streaming service Spotify that provided their consumers access to the copyrighted material at the reasonable price. As for TalkTalk, this broadband provider was noticed to fight against the introduction of the UK’s copyright legislation (Digital Economy Act), which imposed very strict anti-piracy rules.

This decision followed the story of the BPI (the British Phonographic Industry) demanding BT to prevent its subscribers from accessing the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, pointing at the Newzbin2 ruling as a precedent.

Sony Criticized For Lack Of Cybersecurity

The recent hack at Sony has left customers angry and security experts wondering why the company didn’t make basic fixes to its stricken cybersecurity program.

Late last week the hackers managed to compromise a massive amount of users’ personal data from Sony Pictures’ site using a simple technique. Security experts pointed out that the leak indicated how poorly Sony protected its users’ information: its security was bypassed by a simple attack method. The experts say that any website worth its salt should be able to withstand attacks of this kind. Considering that Lulz Security effortlessly managed to steal a massive amount of personal data of over 1,000,000 Sony users, the hackers must be lining up to give Sony a kicking.

Meanwhile, Sony CEO acknowledged the latest intrusion last Friday, claiming that the company had taken steps to protect against further security breaches. In addition, Sony was reported to retain a team of experts tasked to conduct the forensic analysis of the attack. However, Sony didn’t detail what specific action was taken to prevent future intrusion.

Lulz Security uploaded the stolen data to The Pirate Bay to prove that Sony stored its users’ passwords in a simple text file, which can only be called “disgraceful and insecure”.

Affected users blame Sony for allowing the intruders compromise their personal data, saying that such attitude showed little respect to the customers. Moreover, the company even failed to notify the users about the breach, which occurred several days ago.

Experts of the Cyber Consequences Unit of the United States, a research group engaged in monitoring online threats, were emphatic when asked whether people’s passwords could be stored unencrypted: they simply replied: “Never”. Passwords should always be hashed, so the companies should use some kind of encryption. U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit’s experts, who have been critical of the company’s security earlier, claimed that it needed to revise the methods used to safeguard the users’ personal information. Both Sony customers and security experts recommend the company to press the reset button on their cybersecurity program before another breach happens.

The Pirate Bay Sued By Finnish Record Labels

The largest BitTorrent tracker site in the world The Pirate Bay has been sued again. Now the plaintiffs are more than twenty record labels from Finland, desperately attempting to halt piracy in their country. The petition to block The Pirate Bay was sent by the country's Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center on behalf of the IFPI.

Finnish pro-copyright outfit, which claims its goal is to ensure favorable operational conditions for the recording industry in the country, represents 23 record labels that launched a lawsuit at the Helsinki District Court. Like other similar outfits, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in Finland required the court to order telecommunications company called Elisa to deny access to a popular Swedish site providing Internet users with access to copyrighted content like music, films, and other material. The representative of the IFPI claimed that a legitimate online market can’t develop in country if infringing services like The Pirate Bay are allowed to go on with their operations.

In response, the Internet service provider argued that it doesn't condone piracy in the Internet, and refused to block access to The Pirate Bay unless the court orders it to do so.

Founded 8 years ago, the BitTorrent tracker allows millions of people to share copyrighted content through BitTorrent technology, or P2P links offered on the website. Two years ago, the website founders were fined and sentenced to prison for copyright infringement, but The Pirate Bay is still operational. However, the members of the service are still being pursued.

For example, recently the Denmark judge ruled that the website member nicknamed Icenfire should pay over $35,000 in damages for movie upload. The movie in question was Anders Matthesen’s comedy of 2009, “Black balls”, which was released on Blu-ray in the country, but the United States and Canada never saw the movie in the stores. The fine included the cost of the violation itself ($28,000) and associated court costs ($7,500). The individual was singled out by a Danish pro-copyright group, which claimed he was the original uploader. The outfit had raided his home in Denmark back in February, right after the routine analysis revealed the unauthorized upload

The Pirate Bay Tops 5 Million Registered Users

The Pirate Bay achieved a new milestone today. Just a few minutes ago the 5 millionth user created an account at the most-visited BitTorrent site on the Internet. Despite efforts from the entertainment industries that have tried to shut the site down for half a decade, The Pirate Bay keeps expanding. Let’s see how they got there.

May 31, 2006, only two years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in the outskirts of Stockholm. The officers were tasked with shutting down the largest threat to the entertainment industry at the time – The Pirate Bay’s servers.

In the months leading up to the raid the US Government threatened to put Sweden on the WTO’s black list if they refused to deal with the Pirate Bay problem. Even the MPAA was involved, with John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA, writing a letter to Sweden’s Secretary of State in which he stated, “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

The pressure worked and The Pirate Bay’s servers went down, but to the disappointment of the entertainment industries this only lasted for three days. Instead of calling it quits The Pirate Bay founders fought back, and in an ironic twist all the attention from the press due to legal troubles helped grow the site to what it is today – the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet. Apparently it’s easier to overthrow governments than to take a website down.

At the time of the raid The Pirate Bay had only a few hundred thousand registered users, but with the spotlight on the deviant Swedes, the user count soon skyrocketed. At the start of July 2006 the site broke the magical milestone of one million registered users, and that was just the beginning.

Today, despite numerous court cases, blocking attempts by ISPs and two full trials at the Stockholm Court, The Pirate Bay has welcomed its 5 millionth user. Quite a remarkable achievement for a site that doesn’t even require registration to download. Day in and day out, a few thousand new users sign up for an account at the most-visited BitTorrent site.

There is of course also a downside to the ever growing list of users, as the site’s popularity also makes it a huge target for spammers who want to pass off their fake torrents pointing to malware. TorrentFreak talked to one of the Pirate Bay moderators, who said that indeed hundreds of ‘spam’ accounts and fake uploads have to be deleted every day.

Needless to say, without the moderator team the site would become pretty much be unusable in a matter of days. Yes, The Pirate Bay also has several algorithms to spot the obvious spammers, but even after this first screening hundreds of torrents have to be removed manually.

The current moderator team exists of about 40 people, half of which are full moderators and the other half so-called ‘helpers’. Together these people remove numerous fake torrents and spam accounts every day, abiding to a strict take-down policy that does not cover copyrighted material.

The big question is whether the site will live to welcome its 10 millionth user in a few years from now. The community and moderators – who all work for free – is certainly large enough, but the pressure from the entertainment industry on ISPs and governments is ever increasing. But then again, this never stopped The Pirate Bay before.

The Pirate Bay Launched Threatening Site

The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay is known for being a thorn in the side of the entertainment industry for a while. Nevertheless, it hinted that things still can take a turn for the worse. The matter is a new project launched by the TPB crew, titled “The Music Bay”, and promising that the music industry now has a great reason to be very, very afraid.

First of all, it was several years ago that The Pirate Bay registered a domain which hasn’t been very active thus far – themusicbay.org. Actually, when it was launched, there were plans to develop the most efficient music-sharing software ever. However, the plans were put aside because some other projects were more important.

Nevertheless, the domain didn’t fall into oblivion, as recently rumors started to circle that this domain name might be put to use after all. Although at the moment it is setup to serve ads for TPB site, as soon as this spring The Music Bay could be hosting a great surprise for the entertainment industry.

For example, the currently active subdomain fear.themusicbay.org is now containing a hint that something is “coming soon”. However, The Pirate Bay operators are reluctant to reveal any specific details about the site. At the same time, their intentions are quite obvious, considering their words related to the record labels. Precisely, they said that the industry can’t even imagine what is going to be rolled out in the near future. Although the industry has been complaining bitterly about piracy for years, now they have a real reason to be scared. The only thing The Pirate Bay crew released is that “it is going to be a special surprise for the IFPI’s birthday”. Perhaps, even a festival will be organized in Rome, where IFPI was born. IFPI, by the way, is the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, founded under Italian fascist government of Benito Mussolini in April of 1933.

No more details have been released by The Pirate Bay, so it will be not just a big surprise for the music industry, but for everyone, including us. As for now, all the rumors and comments can be interpreted in many ways – without any information on the oncoming project, it can only be treated now as a mere domain name, registered and used for the sole purpose of threatening the already paranoid record labels.