Studios, FBI Teach Swedish Cops to Hunt File Sharers
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The FBI and the MPAA, with the Swedish antipiracy organization Antipiratbyren, are training Swedish law enforcement officers in copyright and piracy matters.
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Swedish prosecutor hopes to crash party The Pirate Bay thumbed its nose at the authorities again this weekend, claiming it now has more peers worldwide than there are people in its home turf of Sweden.â¦
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Organizers of the Cinequest Film Festival have turned to file-sharing in an effort to attract a broader array of participants.
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LOS ANGELES - Movie studios have expanded their fight against illegal downloading, suing more than 100 US and European-based computer services that transmit movie files across Internet file-sharing networks.
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(InfoWorld) - Swedish police are expected to decide later this week whether a criminal case is warranted against 10 major music and movie companies over their alleged efforts to disrupt the Pirate Bay, one of the largest file-sharing search engines. If Swedish police decide to pursue a criminal complaint, the Pirate Bay will be spared the time and expense of pursuing its own civil suit against the companies, Peter Sunde, one of a small circle of volunteers in Sweden that runs the Web site, said on Tuesday. The Pirate Bay, with an estimated two million daily users, is a search engine for torrents, or small files used to trade content between computers via a peer-to-peer (P-to-P) network. Media companies say the site is used mainly to enable the illegal trading of copyright files and have sought its closure. But the Pirate Bay struck back last Friday, filing a criminal complaint in Sweden against content companies that hired MediaDefender, a company that specializes in disrupting P-to-P networks. The Pirate Bay alleges that MediaDefender attacked its operations by distributing fake torrent files and other methods. It is charging the media companies, which include the Swedish subsidiaries of Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, with infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, and other hacking and spamming offenses, according to its blog. The complaint followed the damaging release of thousands of internal MediaDefender e-mails, which described in part how the company tries to foil file-sharing services. MediaDefender uses a software program that sets up fake user accounts and then distributes fake torrent files, which are designed to reduce the volume of copyright files being traded, Sunde said. The source code for that software, as well as the internal e-mails, are now being widely circulating on file-sharing networks. The software can read "captchas," the strings of distorted numbers and letters designed to ensure that real people are using a Web site rather than an automated program. The Pirate Bay says it matched IP (Internet protocol) addresses for some of the fake torrents to some of the internal e-mails, providing compelling evidence that MediaDefender was sending out fake torrents, according to Sunde. The Pirate Bay blacklists IP addresses associated with fake torrents and also shares those lists with other torrent search engines, Sunde said. "We are very proactive when it comes to spam handling, but it's still a problem when they [MediaDefender] do it," he said. Despite complaints from media and content companies, the Pirate Bay has continued to operate in Sweden. In May 2006, Swedish police seized at least 25 servers after a raid on five locations, but have yet to file charges. Swedish prosecutors have until Oct. 1 to file a criminal case, but Sunde said he expects the government attorneys to file for an extension. Sunde maintains that the Pirate Bay is just a search engine and doesn't actually store any files, merely directing users to where files are located. "We are quite sure the Pirate Bay is legal in Sweden," said Sunde, who is based in Malmo, in the south of Sweden, and also runs a Web site consulting business. As a precaution against future police action, Sunde said he knows the location of only one of the 40 or so servers currently powering the Pirate Bay. Some of those servers are now in countries outside of Sweden, he said. Â
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The Swedish authorities seek new powers to spy on any e-mail or phone call into or out of the country.
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The hunt for teenage geeks who illegally download music has moved across the pond, blokes. Only this time, the culprits are a wee bit older.
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WASHINGTON -- The FBI seized computers, software, and equipment as part of an investigation into illegal sharing of copyrighted movies, music, and games over an Internet ''peer-to-peer&quot; network, Attorney General John Ashcroft said yesterday.
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Brad Willman was installing networking equipment out of an emergency van in British Columbia when a policeman showed up and asked for him. Willman knew the officer from a case he was involved with a couple of years earlier, so he didn&#39;t worry -- until he arrived at the police station and was introduced to a couple of U.S. cops.The visit marked the end of Willman&#39;s version of vigilante justice.A Trojan Horse Used For GoodIt was 2000, and Willman was 19. He had spent the last few years surreptitiously distributing a Trojan horse program to more than 1,000 people to try to uncover child-porn activities. All told, Willman said his work sent around 70 people to prison.But then Willman stumbled on a prominent California judge. He discovered that Ronald Kline, at the time a superior court judge in Orange County, had a big collection of child porn and a diary on his PC indicating he was planning to try to seduce young boys. The high-profile case put an end to Willman&#39;s career as a crime-fighter.&quot;Oh, I knew it was illegal,&quot; Willman said in a recent phone&#160;interview. &quot;But I really didn&#39;t care. I felt if I&#39;m helping a few people in the process, cool.&quot; Until Kline, Willman had managed to stay anonymous.The Origins of the ProgramWillman didn&#39;t initially set out to chase child pornographers. He started out developing a program designed to compete with pcAnywhere, Symantec&#39;s software that lets users access computers remotely.But then, while discussing programming on various newsgroups, he had a conversation with a Canadian man who offered his six-year-old daughter to Willman.&quot;That was an awkward scenario,&quot; Willman says, putting it mildly.Willman quickly contacted the police, who were able to prosecute the Edmonton man, he said.&quot;He&#39;s more or less what altered my mind from competing with pcAnywhere to making a Trojan to see who else is doing this,&quot; he said.Willman used the work he&#39;d already developed on the program to trick suspected pedophiles into unknowingly downloading the software so that he could get proof from their computers.How Willman Used the Trojan HorseWillman would visit child-porn newsgroups and post his program as a file that looked like it contained a photo. In order to avoid suspicion, Willman built in an additional feature. When the program launched without opening a photo, he designed it so that the first time it loaded it would display any photo from the directory to the user.After someone downloaded the software, Willman could look through their files remotely for illicit documents or photos.Once he found damning information, he&#39;d copy and share it with various child-porn watchdog groups, who could then pursue the perpetrators.Everything changed when Kline downloaded the Trojan and Willman found damning evidence on the judge&#39;s computer.Willman passed the information on to one of the watchdog groups as usual and figured that was that -- until the day the police showed up while he was at work.The police from the U.S. told him that they found him through correspondence sent from his computer to one of the watchdog groups.While the police were initially friendly because Willman was able to give them additional information on Kline, they later told him that if he does any more hacking, ever, they&#39;ll arrest him. Willman signed an agreement that he wouldn&#39;t hack and that he wouldn&#39;t have anything to do with child porn.Legal Barriers to Willman&#39;s VigilantismVarious state and federal laws in the U.S. criminalize unauthorized access to computers, said Jeff Neuburger, an attorney specializing in technology at Thelen Reid Brown Raysman &amp; Steiner, an international law firm based in New York City. If Willman hadn&#39;t agreed to the deal with the police, he could have been charged with violating state or federal laws. But even in that case, so long as he didn&#39;t set foot in the U.S., it would have been difficult for American authorities to prosecute him, Neuburger said.He&#39;s seeing more and more cases like Willman&#39;s, where people are using the Internet to accomplish good, but sometimes with questionable means. &quot;In the U.S., prosecutors are careful not to let something like this go without sending a message that what the person did was wrong,&quot; he said. &quot;But they may not aggressively seek a severe sentence or punishment.&quot;One problem with vigilante work like Willman&#39;s is that someone might make a mistake and affect innocent people, Neuburger warned. HadWillman wrongly accused someone, he could have faced much bigger legal problems. &quot;It&#39;s a dangerous thing,&quot; he said.Retiring the TrojanHis days in the spotlight behind him, Willman, now 27, lives with his parents in Langley, B.C., where he does phone tech support for a small cable company. He does computer repair on the side and dreams of becoming a computer security researcher.As for Kline, he was sentenced earlier this year to 27 months in prison, a sentence that Willman called &quot;reasonable.&quot;Once in a while, Willman still gets a request from someone asking for his help in busting someone involved with child porn. He can only refer them to the watchdog groups he was familiar with.&quot;I would like to help these people get their kids in a better position, but I can&#39;t because the type of research I&#39;d have to do is stuff I&#39;m not allowed to do anymore,&quot; he said.Even though Willman knew his actions were illegal, he didn&#39;t consider the consequences. &quot;I thought I covered my tracks pretty well,&quot; he said.&quot;And I did until the Judge Kline thing. I didn&#39;t really think I&#39;d get busted.&quot;
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WASHINGTON - Federal agents seized computers and software Wednesday as part of an investigation targeting an Internet network used to illegally share copyrighted music, movies, software and games, Attorney General John Ashcroft said.    The case marks the first federal criminal copyright action taken against a peer-to-peer, or P2P, network in which users can access files directly from the hard drives of fellow users' computers...
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The maker of software to thwart unauthorized online file-sharing has obtained technology that can scan video files and block computer users from making copies.
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US federal agents raided five locations in what authorities described as the first criminal enforcement action targeting copyright piracy of films, music and software on peer-to-peer networks.
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By TOBI COHEN  TORONTO (CP) - Police forces around the world spend fortunes trolling for and arresting Internet predators and educating parents, teens and children about cyber-safety.
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The Pirate Bay's days are increasingly looking numbered as Sweden will move this week to press charges against its owners for copyright infringement.
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Messages tell purported plans of MediaDefender, hired to ferret out file-sharing violations.
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The men behind one of the most popular file-sharing sites in the world are charged copyright offences.
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A firm run by a notorious Norwegian hacker offers software to make sharing music and films easier.