Pirate Bay co-founder to be deported from Cambodia

One of the Pirate Bay founders may actually serve jail time after being arrested in Cambodia. Officials there say they are prepared to deport him, though they can’t confirm if and how he will wind up in his native Sweden.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was among four men convicted of copyright offenses by a Swedish court in 2009 over their Pirate Bay site and sentenced to a year in jail. They were also ordered to pay heavy damages to entertainment companies alongside the site’s financier.


The men did not attend their original trial and were out of the country at the time. In 2010, the other three founders took the case to appeal. Their convictions were upheld but their jail terms reduced to between four and 10 months while their court fines were increased. They were later refused permission to take the case to Sweden’s Supreme Court.

Svartholm Warg did not appear at the appeal, claiming ill-health. That meant his case was put on hold until last October when his time limit for appeal ran out and the original sentence became binding.

Cambodian officials announced yesterday that Svartholm Warg was arrested in the country on Thursday by officers executing an international arrest warrant on behalf of Sweden. Svartholm Warg appears to have been living in the country since 2008.

A police spokesman confirmed today that Svartholm Warg will be deported under Cambodian law which allows it to force foreigners with a criminal conviction out of the country. However, the spokesman said it is up to Sweden to decide where he will be sent. The matter is somewhat complicated by Cambodia and Sweden not having an extradition treaty.

I’d like to report whether Svartholm Warg or his colleagues have commented on the Pirate Bay site’s blog, but I live in the United Kingdom where the entire site is blocked by ISPs under a court order. What a joke.

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Joel Tenenbaum pays for music piracy

Joel Tenenbaum, one of the few people caught sharing copyrighted content online who decided not to pay up to make it all go away, has been told to, well, pay up.

According to BBC News, in 2005 Joel Tenenbaum, then 16-years-old, was accused of file-sharing and hit with a fine of $5,250 for seven songs. He offered $500 but was declined. In 2007 the case went to court for the first time. Damages of $675,000 were eventually awarded to the music labels who sued Tenenbaum for the 31 songs he now admitted to having downloaded, but he requested a new jury trial.


Today that request was denied, with District Court Judge Rya Zobel affirming the penalty. The judge also saw fit to add an extra verbal admonishment, stating in the judgment [PDF link], “There was ample evidence of willfulness and the need for deterrence based on Tenenbaum’s blatant contempt of warnings and apparent disregard for the consequences of his actions. In spite of the overwhelming evidence from which the jury could conclude that Tenenbaum’s activities were willful, the award of $22,500 per infringement not only was at the low end of the range – only 15% of the statutory maximum – for willful infringement, but was below the statutory maximum for non-willful infringement.” Well, that makes it OK then, I guess.

Should Tenenbaum have stopped doing what he was doing when he was warned against it? Yes, of course. But does that continued infringement on copyrights, willful or otherwise, justify such a huge cash amount in damages? Most right-thinking people would say no. It doesn’t matter that it’s a lot less than the maximum that could have been awarded, it’s still too much for the crime that has been committed.

The maximum is absolutely ludicrous, as Tenenbaum would have been hit with a bill for several million dollars had the jury truly taken against him. But $675,000 is still a sum of money that means Tenenbaum will be in debt for the rest of his life, barring some miraculous lottery win. And all for downloading and distributing just 31 songs.

The RIAA sees this as a glorious victory, but what does it really achieve? Tenenbaum has had his life ruined, but the money is small change to those organizations who’ll (eventually, some day, maybe) receive it. And I can guarantee this verdict won’t do a thing to put anyone else off sharing content online. It just makes the RIAA look bad, and the record companies look greedy and incompetent. Victory!

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German law firm to name and shame “porn downloaders

A law firm in Germany is to begin publicly naming Internet users it believes have infringed copyright by sharing hardcore pornography without permission. A company insider says Urmann will start by targeting those users most likely to be embarrassed by such publicity, though officially its denying that claim.

Urmann mirrors the tactics of law firms in other countries by writing to alleged copyright offenders and asking for a settlement fee to avoid court action. In this case the fee is €650 euros (approx US$815.)


Whether the recipients have genuinely breached copyright isn’t clear. In similar situations in other countries, large numbers of the recipients deny the claims. That’s prompted suggestions that law firms are unlikely to proceed with legal action and are simply relying on a proportion of recipients being frightened enough to pay up.

Urmann now says that from 1 September it will begin publishing details of some of the people on its list of alleged offenders. This list could have as many as 150,000 people on it.

Some reports quoting an insider suggested that the firm would prioritize customers whose IP addresses corresponded to a church, police station or an embassy of a Middle East country: all workplaces where being publicly linked to hardcore porn would be a particular embarrassment.

The company has said this isn’t the case and it will instead prioritize those people accused of downloading the most content.

The legalities of such a tactic are unclear. Urmann believes it is legal because of a German court ruling that said law firms to publish the names of their clients’ opponents as a promotional tactics. However, that seems to be designed more for dealing with corporations (“Hire us because we took on Megacorp!”) and might not hold up for naming private individuals.

There’s also the question of what happens if the company falsely names somebody who hasn’t downloaded any material, which sounds like a recipe for a defamation suit.

In practical terms, Urmann may only be able to carry out its naming and shaming for a few people and hope that puts fear into the rest. Once it does publicly name somebody, they’ve got much less incentive to pay up rather than sit back and wait to be sued.

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Piracy site owner jailed despite hosting no content

For many years operators of questionable video content sites assumed they are untouchable if they don’t actually host any copyright-infringing material. That assumption has proved incorrect in several countries, with theUnited Kingdomthe latest example.

Anton Vickerman, who operated the website surfthechannel.com, has received a four year jail term after a private prosecution. He was not convicted of copyright infringement itself, but rather conspiracy to defraud.


Sufthechannel was a directory of links to online videos, some of which were entirely legitimate while others infringed copyright. Vickerman made an estimated £250,000 (US$400,000) a year from selling advertising on the site.

Police raided Vickerman’s home in 2009 but did not press charges. However, they were controversially accompanied on the raid by members of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), a media industry body. FACT was allowed access to Vickerman’s computer despite the police dropping the case.

FACT launched a private prosecution against Vickerman that led to his conviction. His wife was charged with the same offense but found not guilty. The director general of FACT said “This case conclusively shows that running a website that deliberately sets out to direct users to illegal copies of films and TV shows will result in a criminal conviction and a long jail sentence”

The verdict came as a surprise to many given that the same “conspiracy to defraud” charge failed to gain convictions in at least two similar high-profile cases where sites linked to videos rather than hosting it. The charge is designed to cover cases of fraud that could otherwise slip through legal loopholes, though there have been previous concerns that it could see people convicted of behavior that is not criminal.

The sentence itself has also raised eyebrows. Had Vickerman been convicted of copyright infringement, the maximum sentence he could have received would have been two years.

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Streaming music helps Warners’ bottom line

Warner Music Group recently revealed its financial figures for the last quarter, and surprise, surprise, streaming music services are a growing source of income. And they’re only going to become a bigger piece of the pie from here on in.

The music industry was the first of the major content producers to be hit by the emergence of the Internet as a source for shared and sharing media files. It didn’t know how to react to this sudden threat to its business, and flopped around trying to make examples of certain websites and certain individuals in the hopes of scaring off everyone else. That didn’t work out so well.


It has now become clear that the music industry should have plowed all its time and effort into increasing the range of legal options open to consumers. If they had done so earlier then things would be much rosier for all concerned right now. It took the industry a long time to embrace these other options, especially streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora, but it finally gave in and accepted the inevitable.

Now, as the figures clearly show, the music industry is getting rewarded for its gamble, with Warner Music Group claiming 25 percent of its digital revenues from streaming services. This works out to around $54 million, roughly 8 percent of Warners’ total revenues for the period. This does include YouTube, but even so the numbers being touted are impressive.

The bottom line is that the way people consume music is changing. Less of us are buying CDs in stores, but a growing number of us are choosing to either purchase whole albums or individual tracks in digital formats, or listening to music legally on demand through subscription-based offerings such as Spotify or Rdio.

And then there is file-sharing, which will always exist no matter how much money and energy is wasted trying to curtail it. Give consumers fair legal options and they will likely take them. Those that don’t aren’t worth worrying about.

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Filesharing site Demonoid in triple turmoil

As with Pirate Bay, it may always be too early to declare filesharing site Demonoid completely deal. But the site is currently unavailable and its operators have suffered three significant blows.

The first came last week when the site was knocked offline by a “massive” distributed denial of service attack. Who was behind the attack remains unclear: the motivation would be with law enforcement activities, though officially at least this isn’t the type of tactic normally associated with official bodies.


The site itself was physically located in Ukraine. It’s now confirmed that the second blow for the site came when the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs asked ColoCall to close down the site following contact from Interpol.

ColoCall says it complied with the request and allowed officials to take a copy of all data on the server for evidence purposes. It says it gave Demonoid several warning in the past that it had received complaints and might have to close the site.

The third strike comes with the news that Mexican authorities are engaged in a criminal investigation involving the operators of the site, one of whom is believed to have been based in Mexico at one point. One person has previously been arrested in Monterrey in relation to the site. Since the site closure, it’s emerged that it was this investigation that triggered the Interpol alert and in turn the Ukrainian shutdown.

There appears to be a political element to the events behind the shutdown. It doesn’t appear that Demonoid broke any laws within Ukraine itself and it made a point of blocking residents of the country from accessing the site. However, the Ukrainian government appears to have taken the tough stance to help shake the image of Eastern Europe as a harbor for piracy, most likely with the aim of boosting trade relations with the United States.

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