In 2004, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN took down the once large ed2K link site ShareConnector, which had aided in finding files (or parts of files) on the eDonkey2000 network with software such as eMule.
The site came back in 2006 but in 2007, the admin Adi was taken to trial and acquitted of any complicity to criminal copyright infringement. After that, the site went down and now remains as a host for eDonkey and other tutorials.
Interestingly today however, Adi added a blog post saying that BREIN is back to appeal the 2007 case, and a court case is upcoming.
Says the post:
Recently, I got a letter from the Department of Justice, stating that they want a re-trial which they desperately lost back in July 24 2007.
I’m really surprised that they want another shot at trying to make us look as criminals. Nobody expected the DoJ to go for an appeal after an embarrassing defeat 2 years ago.
The defendants are to appear proforma on 22 September 2009 in The Hague. On 18 November 2009 the re-trial should take place. Both ShareConnector and Releases4u (dutch ed2k site we are not affiliated with but was hosted on our ISP) including the former ShareConnector host are to appear in court.
This has nothing to do with the recent civil case against BREIN, where I went for an appeal. That appeal should take place within a few months as well.
So this year is really packed with lawsuits for me with hopefully some conclusive results about the legality of eD2k indexing sites in the Netherlands. After the illegal raids by FIOD-ECD who didn’t do any research and blindly followed BREIN back in December 2004, it took years with the criminal court which made so many blunders and now finally this chapter can be closed with the DoJ and civil appeal approaching us.
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Result for: criminals
During a speech to Silicon Valley executives at the Tech Museum of Innovation, Attorney General Michael Mukasey warned that the “enormous” profits made from counterfeiting and piracy is flowing into the hands of terrorists and terrorist organizations.
Mukasey added that the “economy and national security of the United States are increasingly threatened by violations involving copyrighted software code, patented inventions and trademarked properties.”
Terrorists are starting to perform more like organized crime and are increasingly using piracy and counterfeiting money to fund their operations, Mukasey says.
The Attorney General also noted that his department was now giving more resources to prosecuting intellectual property crimes, which has led to a 40 percent increase in IP cases since 2005.
“Criminal syndicates, and in some cases even terrorist groups, view IP crime as a lucrative business and see it as a low-risk way to fund other activities,” Mukasey said. “A primary goal of our IP enforcement mission is to show these criminals that they’re wrong.”
Result for: criminals
The MPAA has announced that is suing the infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay for $15.4 million USD citing “damages suffered” from 4 movies and 13 TV episodes uploaded to the tracker.
The movies in question are “Harry Potter 5″, “Syriana”, “The Pink Panther” and “Walk the Line” and all 13 episodes are from the hit show “Prison Break”. The MPAA is demanding $37 USD for each download of “Syriana”, “The Pink Panther” and “Walk the Line”, $43 USD for Harry Potter and $68 for Prison Break.
The Pink Panther was downloaded 49,593 times by Pirate Bay users, making it the most popular, while Syriana was the least popular with 3,679 downloads, according to MAQS, the law firm which is representing the MPAA in the case.
Brokep, a TPB admin, had this to say about the matter; “They know they are losing, and try to make us look like big criminals by adding some zeros to a claim for a made-up crime.”
“The worst thing is that I lost 100 kronor on a bet on the number they would come up with,” Brokep added. “And, it sucks that they didn’t claim more than for Napster and the other sites. It’s cooler to break the record.”
When an MPAA lawyer was asked whether she really believed every download was equivalent of a lost sale, she replied, “We don’t know that, but the copyright law doesn’t care about that. It says that if you have downloaded something illegally, you must pay regardless, if you would’ve bought it or not.”
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