Friday, the Sweden court issued its verdict against the Pirate Bay. Peter Sunde (brokep), Fredrik Neij (TiAMO), Gottfrid Svartholm (Anakata) and Carl Lundström have been sentenced to one year of jail and 900K$ each. They already send to appeal.

The judge estimated that the first offenders were The Pirate Bay’s users but that the four defendants assisted the users to do the infringements. The verdict leaked out the court several hours before its actual official announcement. The police investigates this breach of confidentiality.

Nevertheless, The Pirate Bay is still online. There is even no visible sign or clue about the verdict. it is not the case of some other tracker sites such as Nordicbits, Powerbits, Piratebits, MP3nerds and Wolfbits which went off line. They feared prosecution.

Some Pirate Bay supporters have organized a DDOS attack against IFPI site as retaliation. We may expect other such actions in the coming days.

A few days before the examination of French law that should launch the graduated response, the pirate bay has announced a riposte. The pirate bay launches a new service. Here is their description:

IPREDator is a network service that makes people online more anonymous using a VPN. it costs about 5 EUR a month and we store no traffic data.
our service is right now in a beta stage. we hope it will be released for the public before 1st of April. sign up now to start using it as soon as we’re stable.
the network is under our control. not theirs.

In other words, only authorized users will be allowed in the VPN and the transferred data are fully encrypted. This means that the HADOPI could not know that a member of ipredator is exchanging illegal data.

The main question is how many people will be ready to spend 5€ per month? Furthermore, if successful then the Pirate bay will have created one of the largest VPN infrastructure.

In any case, the graduated response will probably generate several actions

• Movement towards encryption
• Apparition of private protected small P2P networks with private trackers
• Poisoning by the tracker sites of their tracker lists

In February 2006, the French blockbuster “Les Bronzés 3” was released on P2P in DVD quality at the same time than the theatrical release. The audience still reached 10 millions of entries.

Unfortunately, forensics allowed to trace back the leakage. It incriminated three employees of French broadcaster (and the producer of the movie) TF1.

They were sued in court together with three persons, using pseudos Darkpingoo, H2o and Vb2n who posted the movie on Freenet, by the producers and some actors. They asked several millions € in damages. The main argument was that the sales of DVDs did not reach the million. Usually, such blockbuster is expected to reach 2 millions of sold DVDs.

The judge showed clemency. The infringers will have to pay 27,000€ in damages and have been given a one-month suspended prison sentence.

Monday 5 January 2009: RIAA’s spokersperson Jonathan LAMY has officially confirmed that RIAA does not anymore use the services of MediaSentry. He informed that RIAA uses a Danish company DtecNet.

Many reasons may have driven this decision. It seems that the way the supposed infringing IP address were collected may not sustain the non repudiation of illegal sharing. This is an extremely tough issue. How do you legally prove (in an efficient way) that the peer really shared illegal content? MediaSentry was also using techniques to spoil (For an overview, see Fighting piracy in Security Newsletter #11). These techniques are somewhat controversial. This summer, a leakage of emails of MediaDefender, a competitor of MediaDefender, shaded some lights on the types of thwarting techniques. Furthermore, some mails described the results of competitive intelligence on MediaSentry. In other words, MediaDefender’s story generated very bad reputation for the sector. Is MediaSentry a collateral victim of MediaDefender’s leakage?

The toolbox of DectNet, at least as announced on their site, does only offer non controversial techniques: Cease and Desist Letter, Litigation Tools and Evidence, Prerelease Monitoring, and statistics. In other words, they do not announce any throttling or poisoning techniques, only monitoring tools. Far less controversial.

Does it mean a change in RIAA’s strategy? I doubt. It is probably a good communication movement. RIAA will continue to track illegal downloading, send Cease and Desist Letters, and sue infringers. RIAA will not sponsor any borderline activity (at least not openly :Wink: )

Michael Moore, the brilliant provocative essayist, wanted to provide for free his latest documentary “Slacker Uprising.” Thus, he offered it on the Net at http://www.slackeruprising.com/. Unfortunately, the download does only work for US and Canadian citizens. Michael Moore does only hold rights for US Canada, but not for the rest of the world.

Without surprise, soon “Slacker Uprising” was available on P2P sites. Rumors claimed that the leakage was perhaps not unintentional. In a recent interview for TorrentFreak, he seems to confirm the rumors. In any case, Michael Moore is happy of these torrents.

This is not a surprise. If your objective is to denounce a problem (as claimed by Michael Moore), then your goal is to get the largest audience possible (and not to make the largest earning possible). Then P2P is a channel of distribution that you must not avoid. P2P offers both a large audience and a defense against censorship.

Would Emile Zola have made a video version of his famous “J’accuse” and distributed over YouTube and BitTorrent?