His journey throughout all of this probably started off as a humble employee, working at Frances broadcaster, TF1. He probably had no idea that one day, he’d be the centre of a major political debate that the whole world is watching at the time.

Then, the HADOPI law debate came up. Three strikes and your out for copyright infringement online. At the time, the proposal would have no judicial oversight whatsoever – not to mention being forced to pay your subscription fee even though you have been, well, banned from the internet. You’re name would be added to a blacklist so you can’t subscribe with another provider and the amount of time you were disconnected, at the time, was still being determined.

Not surprisingly, the law was just about as controversial then as it is now. For Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim at the time, he wasn’t exactly too keen on the law either. So, while at work, he sent an e-mail to his member of parliament to express his personal opposition to the “three strikes” law. His member of parliament’s office, who also happened to be part of the governing party, UMP, then forwarded the e-mail to the minister of culture who then forwarded the e-mail to his employer, TF1. Bourreau-Guggenheim boss then hauled him into his office where he was showed a copy of his e-mail before he was fired for “strategic differences”

His story hit several major French newspapers. He went from just a side-line employee to a front-line borderline celebrity who is against the French three strikes law. The story has since caused political waves.

Now, it seems, a new development has happened in this case. French newspaper, Le Monde, is reporting (Google Translation) that Bourreau-Guggenheim is suing his former employer, TF1, for discrimination. His lawsuit is based on article 225-2 of the penal code which addresses “violations of human dignity”.

The punishment for such a violation is up to three years in prison and a 45,000 euro fine. That article specifically deals with an employment dismissal based on a political viewpoint.

Le Monde makes an additional interesting point:

By revealing the affair in its issue of May 7, Libération had quoted from the letter explicitly refers to mail sent to Ms. de Panafieu. Including this clarification: “This correspondence was received through the office of the Minister of Culture, which has posed address the same day the company TF1. A path to strong symbolic resonance, given the suspicions about the relationship between power and sarkozyste audiovisual group, whose main shareholder, Martin Bouygues, is the near the head of state.

Another part of the article says:

It is true that the case has already made much noise but it has needed to add: wrangling in the Assembly, where the former Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, has been strongly implicated by the opposition; sanction against the member of his Cabinet who had transferred to the TF1 mail received from Ms. de Panafieu (Le Monde, 12 May).

Now committed criminal in a long process, Mr. Bourreau Guggenheim-must adapt to circumstances. To live this matter without further destroying his career. Say they have had “some contact with elected representatives of the opposition, which (l ‘) were invited to participate in debates on Hadopi”, the former part of TF1 should also “reassure (the) future employers” when is invited to an interview. TF1 who denounced “positions (…) radical expressed publicly,” he defends himself on these two points: “I am loyal, I have nothing being published at TF1. And I am not an extremist free download.”

At this point in time, it’s not hard to see this as a no win situation for the UMP of France, not to mention TF1 who is neck deep in this political fiasco as well. It would appear that Bourreau-Guggenheim has a number of additional options should things go sour for him including referring to the European Court of Human Rights. Though one can only imagine how much additional political damage that would cause for the government who is not only intending on pushing through the three strikes law at all cost, but also changing around the French court system and giving judges only approximately 5 minutes to rule on each disconnection.

This case about a French employee fired for opposing the three strikes law, unfortunately for TF1 and the UMP, isn’t going to go away any time soon.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

So what can you do in five minutes? Order pizza. Walk up and down a shorter street. Flip through all the channels on your TV and conclude there’s nothing to watch. Read through this article. Now, you can add, if you’re a French citizen, have your internet connection cut off by a judge. There’s a new version of the HADOPI, or, three strikes law, out and it seems details are emerging on just how the government plans to deal with alleged file-sharers while still having their day in court.

According to Futurezone (Google translation), in order for the 50,000 cases to be had each year specifically geared toward enforcing the three strikes law, the French judicial system will hire 109 new employees, including 26 more judges. Each case is suppose to take about 45 minutes of work, but each judge will be given only 5 minutes to handle each case on average.

Futurezone notes that the European Union did essentially prevent the three strikes law from passing in any country within the union, and, indeed, there were even legal threats from at least one member of the European Union if France were to enforce their three strikes law.

“We’ll have to wait and see whether French politicians are still eager to support the bill with this price tag attached. France wouldn’t be the first country to drop Three Strikes because it’s simply too expensive.” Janko Roettgers commented on p2p-blog, “British regulators estimated earlier this year that implementing Three Strikes would cost about 2.5 million GBP per year. The UK government eventually abandoned the idea of Three Strikes and is now favoring solutions that would require less oversight.”

This isn’t the only thing happening in Britain of course. Users in Britain are also stepping forward and saying that they are being sued for copyright infringement of material they have never even heard of before. This does raise the question of the validity of targeting someone via IP address in the first place. There are some resemblances to the French three strikes law promising to prosecute 50,000 users and the Dream Pinball case that has recently resurfaced. A large number of users are being targeted for copyright infringement while there hasn’t been much discussion on what happens if someone is wrongly accused. Of course, when it comes to the three strikes law, there’s plenty of criticisms against the law to go around from when the bill was proposed to when it was passed to now. Not the copyright industry minds because they’re getting what they want and a playing card to use when they pressure other countries to adopt similar anti-file-sharing laws.

“The Pirate Party opposes and condemns the contents of this new bill,” The French Pirate Party said on their website (Google translation), “which is once again a few special interests at the expense of the general interest of citizens.”

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

One of the founders of The Pirate Bay suggested that one could buy a share in The Pirate Bay, but were people buying shares a little too early? That’s what Aktietorget is trying to find out after the stocks for the buyer, Global Gaming Factory, went up before the announcement of the acquisition.

All this is according to Swedish news site, The Swedish Wire. There were comments that if the sale didn’t go through, then the site would then revert back to the original owners. From the report:

“There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked”, said Peter Gönczi, executive vice president at Aktietorget, to business daily Dagens Industri.

Consequently, Peter Gönczi will start an investigation to see if the trading rules have been despoiled.

If the acquisition is completed, Aktietorget might start a further investigation since The Pirate Bay is suspected of committing criminal actions. In April Stockholm’s district court sentenced Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström each to a year in jail and ordered them to pay damages of 30 million kronor (€2.72 million, $3.56 million dollars) to the movie and recording industry. The verdict has been appealed to a higher court.

“Aktietorget wants to make sure that the companies that are traded on the list are managing legitimate businesses”, Peter Gönczi said to Dagens Industri.

Here’s an interesting question in all of this. What if the sale was halted and the infamous BitTorrent website was reverted back to the owners? Certainly, this would pose as an interesting problem for the founders on the PR front. Users already know that the admins intended on selling the site – something that didn’t sit well for many users. All this is on top of the legal implications of the site since the admins did say that they intended on filing charges against the Swedish legal system in the European Court of Human Rights right before the sale. This was the result of a three judge panel deciding that the admins cannot appeal the decision that the original judge wasn’t biased.

One thing is for sure, this latest tangle could dramatically complicate things for the admins of The Pirate Bay. Not really something an exhausted team would want at this point in time.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

Let’s back up here for a moment. An IP address can be found on a P2P network. A great example is BitTorrent where one merely has to jump into a swarm using Azureus or uTorrent and check out the seeders and leachers in the swarm to find an IP address.

Technicalities aside, why can’t that IP address be used as evidence? That’s actually relatively straight forward – you can’t tie that IP address to a person as reasonable proof. What an IP can reveal in some countries is whoever pays the bills for the internet access to which that IP address belongs to. That doesn’t make that person immediately guilty of copyright infringement because of what can happen with an internet subscription.

Does this person live alone? Or, like countless people, do they share that connection with someone else? What if it was a family in question? Numerous cases have shown that it’s frequently not the owner of the IP address, but someone else using the connection at the time.

On top of that, what about Wifi? The use of Wifi is on the rise and numerous people do lack the technical expertise to encrypt their connection. That means anyone with a Wifi enabled laptop can use that connection. Few would dispute that unauthorized WiFi use can be bad in densely populated places. Even if the connection is encrypted, tech savvy individuals can find ways of bypassing the encryption via simple hacking methods such as a dictionary attack (all the possible words in a dictionary are fed through until one word works)

These are just two reasonably possible ways that the owner of a given IP address would not be guilty of copyright infringement. There are plenty of other ways that an IP address can bring on false accusations and there have been false accusations in the past.

The BBC points out that Which?, a magazine, has researched the subject and have found 20 people stepping forward to proclaim their innocence to copyright infringement accusations.

These cases come from the over 6,000 legal threats sent out demanding £665 from last year. If that rings a bell for many observers, it should because it stems from the infamous Dream Pinball lawsuits. Among the 20 users that came forward, many of them say that they have never even heard of the game before. From the BBC report:

Some 6,000 letters have been sent out by law firm ACS Law, on behalf of firms such as Reality Pump and Topware Interactive, who are the copyright owners of video games Two Worlds and Dream Pinball respectively.

The government is keen to crack down on pirates, and the recently published Digital Britain report said that they could be pursued through the courts.

“The government is basically calling for a crackdown on illegal file-sharers, which is fair enough, but we’ve got serious concerns about the process which identifies alleged file-sharers and we believe that innocent people are being accused,” said Sarah Kidner, editor of Which? Computing.

The IP addresses of alleged file-sharers are initially obtained by anti-piracy firm Logistep which uses software that monitors file-sharing sites.

While the Internet Service Provider Association said that the legal process is flawed, it brings up an even greater question even though Daven Port Lyon dropped the cases because of an investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. What should happen when someone files a false copyright infringement claim? Shouldn’t there be repercussions to guard against such things as we are clearly seeing here?

If one sends a few hundred, let along thousands as seen in the Dream Pinball fiasco, what guarantees each and every one of those legal threats are going to be targeting the correct individuals? If there’s no repercussions from filing a false notice, what’s to stop the copyright industry from suing every single identifiable IP address (0.0.0.0 – 255.255.255.255) and just dropping the cases for those who can use financial means to legally fight back? One wonders what the definition of a shakedown is if these kinds of actions aren’t. This isn’t even touching the kind of legal overhead that would result in the already strained judicial systems in many countries around the world.

This is not to say these questions are necessarily new. As we’ve noted, these questions have been raised before countless times throughout the years. They are nothing new, yet, the same questions are either being raised or need to be raised. Sending 10,000 legal threats may sound like a good deterrent on paper, but when someone is falsely accused, that’s not just an anomaly, that’s potentially ruining someone’s life unnecessarily.

This is just another example on why it is absolutely critical to have protections against false claims. Not just paying out a few hundred dollars, but fully compensating people who have been falsely accused is what is important and making it feasible for victims to carry through with it.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

A user uploaded several clips of the copyright debate that took place on BNN. BNN then found out about the clips being uploaded to YouTube and issued a complaint and had the clips taken down. That caused the user to post accusations on a blog that the network is actively trying to censor the copyright debate. Quite the accusations. Is it true? Rose Noonan, the Sales Coordinator of BNN told ZeroPaid, no.

“BNN is certainly not trying to censor or silence the Canadian copyright debate – or any other topic.” Noonan told ZeroPaid.

So, if it wasn’t censorship, then what was it?

“The removal of BNN clips took place because the clips were posted without permission.” Noonan explained. She continued, “This is the only reason. The material was produced by, and is owned by BNN – Business News Network.”

The blogger making these accusations said that there was evidence that suggested that the only clips that were being removed were copyright debate related.

“When it became evident that numerous unauthorized BNN clips were posted on Youtube, a request was made that they remove all of the clips. This process involves finding each individual URL and sending them to Youtube to request that they be taken down. Attempts were made to find all the clips, but if there are still some there, that is an indication that a few may have been overlooked. There was never any intention to target clips of any topic.” Noonan said.

“In total,” Noonan said, “over 193 BNN clips were removed from Youtube – less than 3% of these clips were related to copyright. They were clips covering numerous topics and certainly not limited to copyright issues or anything else.”

Now that we received the other side of the story, a more probable explanation can be made. In instances in the past regarding other copyright infringement notices on YouTube where multiple clips are taken down, it’s possible that for the side of copyright owners to merely see it as just taking down unauthorized material from multiple sources. Meanwhile, on the other side of the infringement notice, the incident is much more personal. The notice is directed at you, as a user, in particular and can give off the impression that this take down was directed at you specifically – and when it’s political in nature, it can be very easy to take that take down notice as merely a case of a big faceless corporation trying to remove important debates from the public because of certain viewpoints – even though in this case, that wasn’t the case.

This case for BNN is easily a political mine field given thepolitically sensitive nature of copyright. One of the major arguments in the copyright debate is, in fact, that copyright can be used as a tool for censoring free speech. How does a copyright holder try to take down copyrighted material when the subject of that video is copyright in the first place? Did the take down indirectly affect free speech? Technically speaking, yes, there is a grain of truth to be had here. Ultimately speaking, the larger accusation that BNN wants to cover up or censor any debate in particular isn’t necessarily true. The take downs related to copyright were a tiny part of a larger round of take downs by the network with no debate targeting in mind.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

The manifesto of the Pirate Party of Canada is in the works, the current members are trying to figure out how to bring awareness, and general internal organization is taking place, but all good things start somewhere. After a few years of discussions on the Pirate Party International website, there are signs that the Pirate Party of Canada is now forming. A website has been set up (including forums) and it’s not hard to see that they are in need of some helping hands.

In Sweden, the Pirate Party stands for privacy, a halt to online censorship, doing away with medical patents and legalizing file-sharing. No surprise that this movement has taken off elsewhere in the world.

We asked the Pirate Party of Canada what all was happening and were able to get a response.

“Your guess that there is some internal organizing going on is 100% accurate,” Daynes told ZeroPaid when asked if there was internal organization taking place, “at this moment in time that is one of our main concerns”

“however,” he added, “membership is still a pressing concern.”

There’s been plenty of issues happening in Canada that the Pirate Party could gain support from. The biggest reason one might join the Pirate Party is if Canadians are fed up with what has happened on the Copyright file. With the Liberals Bill C-60 and the Conservatives Bill C-61, it seems as though neither of the biggest parties haven’t, in practise, been too user friendly. Added to this is the recent comments by the current public safety minister Peter Van Loan during an episode of Search Engine. The minister suggested (direct link to MP3) said that users have no expectation of privacy online and that, in spite of the courts cited by Jesse Brown, suggested that real name, address and telephone number doesn’t count as personal information.

Added to this was recent comments made by the Liberal party which said that Canada needs to immediately reform copyright laws to “combat” the “scourge” of piracy and ratify WIPO. Those comments were followed up by follow-up comments which suggested that merely stating this merely marks interest on the copyright file.

While the Pirate Party of Canada is still a ways of from becoming an officially registered party, it won’t hurt the party to gain a few new interested individuals to help them out reach that goal of becoming an officially registered party in the future a little faster.

To help, you can join the Pirate Party of Canada forum.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

This past Tuesday was a sad day of sorts for the BitTorrent community after Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay announced it was sailing into safer waters and going legit.

Global Gaming Factory X AB (GGF) bought the site for over $16 million USD in cash and stock and said it plans to use the Pirate Bay to launch “new business models” that will ensure copyright holders are fairly compensated.

A bit cryptic about what this means before, GGF Ceo Hans Pandeya is now shedding some light on the subject.

“We are going to set up a system where the file-sharer actually makes money,” he told the BBC. He says the only way you can the problem is to “make something more attractive.”

Paying Bittorrent users to seed or share content is definitely “more attractive” I must admit.

Pandeya also said he plans to harness the power of BitTorrent via the Pirate Bay to reduce network traffic strain on ISPs.

“Let’s say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site – which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP – we can take that song and put it out on P2P,” he says. “The copyright holder still gets paid, the users still get their file, the ISP doesn’t have a million people all grabbing a file and – for the users who share that song – a payment for putting that file on the P2P network.”

He figures that by “helping” ISPs reduce the traffic burden content distribution often places on their networks that they might be willing to then compensate GGF for its assistance.

“We’ve been working with ISPs for over a year and we can cut their costs – when the system becomes overloaded – by 90%,” he added. “All ISPs have this problem and it is one we can fix.”

It’s still too early to tell how successful GGF will be, but it’ll certainly be entertaining to watch nonetheless. Paying people to seed content is a must if they expect anybody to make content available on the Pirate Bay. The only question will be if they can create a viable system and whether or not the amount GGF’s willing to pay is enough to sway users to donate their bandwidth and HDD space.

In my opinion I think it’s just not feasible. It inevitably comes down to what the entertainment industry’s demands are. We have yet to see a viable on-demand movie service and I don’t think the Pirate Bay is the ship the MPAA’s been waiting to sail in and make it available. Copyright holders are what’s key to the future of the Pirate Bay.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

A few weeks ago we mentioned how the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) had taken AT&T to court arguing that phone ringtones are a “performance to the public” under the Copyright Act and that it must be compensated accordingly.

“AT&T is directly liable for the public performance of ringtones,” reads the initial court submission. “When a ringtone rings in ‘public,’ it is undeniably a ‘public performance’ as those terms are defined in the Copyright Act.”

ASCAP argues phone carriers must pay additional royalties or face legal liability for contributing to what they claim is cell phone users’ copyright infringement. In an amicus brief filed Wednesday, EFF points out that copyright law does not reach public performances “without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage” — clearly the case with cell phone ringtones. If phone users are not infringing copyright law, then mobile phone service providers are not contributing to any infringement.

The case is now being tried in a New York federal court, at which yesterday the EFF urged the court to reject these bogus copyright claims that could ultimately raise costs for consumers, jeopardize consumer rights, and curtail new technological innovation.

“This is an outlandish argument from ASCAP,” said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. “Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law if they forget to silence their phones in a restaurant? Under this reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copyright violation for you to play your car radio with the window down!”

ASCAP has responded by saying that it does not plan to charge mobile phone users, just mobile phone service providers. But if ASCAP prevails, consumers could find themselves targeted by other copyright owners for “public performances.” Worse, these wrongheaded legal claims cast a shadow over innovators who are building gadgets that help consumers get the most from their copyright privileges.

“Because it is legal for consumers to play music in public, it’s also legal for my mobile phone carrier to sell me a ringtone and a phone to do it,” said von Lohmann. “Otherwise it would be illegal to sell all kinds of technologies that help us enjoy our fair use, first sale, and other copyright privileges.”

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

OneSwarm, the darknet BitTorrent-based application that was released this past February by researchers at the University of Washington, has now released version 0.6.2 that adds several new features, most important among them being support for community servers.

Community servers are a new and improved method for importing friends into your private OneSwarm community. Each community server publishes a feed of new friends, which after subscribing to OneSwarm will notify you when new friends are available or old friends have expired. Unlike individually added friends, friends imported from a community server are marked as limited (so they can’t see your file list) and have chat disabled (so they can’t send you spam).

“Community servers address a longstanding challenge in web-of-trust style P2P sharing: key distribution,” reads  a press release. “Instead of needing to manually exchange public keys, community servers allow users to outsource key management by subscribing to a ‘feed’ of keys from a trusted source. Think private trackers on steroids.”

One of the drawbacks to darknet applications has always been the limited size of the community. You can only add so many friends manually and so the type and amount of content shared within the community suffers as a result. Community server support and friend feeds help to address that problem and make for a healthy swarm of peers.

New features in version 0.6.2:

• Support for community servers
• A friends table that enables multi-friend operations, sorting by ratio, last date connected, etc.
• Rebuilt web UI with GWT 1.6
• Friend groups
• Remote access now permits saving files to the local machine

I had a chance to catch up with Michael Piatek, one of the reserachers behind OneSwarm, and who was kind enough to answer a few questions.

How has OneSwarm been received by your peers and members of the file-sharing community?

We’ve received a fairly positive response to OneSwarm. In roughly 5 months since our initial release, we’ve observed hundreds of thousands of downloads and tens of thousands of active weekly users. Our forum is fairly active, and a few intrepid users have set up community sites for different localities (e.g., Sweden: http://oneswarm.co.cc/ and France: https://forum.oneswarm-fr.net )

One of the most popular uses of all of these message boards is for key exchange. To maintain secure connections, both endpoints of a OneSwarm connection need to know the cryptographic keys of one another. In OneSwarm 0.6.2, we’ve introduced software support to make key exchange easier. Users can subscribe to a feed of public keys from a community server, making the maintenance of a set of friends automatic for members of private sharing communities, or users who simply want the privacy associated with a mixnet composed of a large set of random users.

Already, in the few days that the community server has been publicly available, several public servers have already emerged (and we’re aware of at least a few private ones in operation as well).

What kind of other features are you currently working on that you can mention?

Since the majority of our users are outside of english-speaking countries, one of the things we’re planning in the short term is better support for translation and localization. Aside from that, we’re planning improvements that will make OneSwarm easier to integrate into existing websites. One of the benefits of our web-based interface is that we can make it pretty straightforward for website operators to integrate OneSwarm into their sites. Just like operators can write a snippet of Javascript that embeds a YouTube video in a page, we’d like to provide similar support to detect if a client is running OneSwarm, but can fall back on other distribution mechanisms otherwise.

Anything else you’d like to mention?

We’re always interested in engaging with the broader community. If you, your readers, or anyone else has any ideas about how to improve the software, what features we should be working on, etc. do let us know (via email, twitter, or our forum). Thanks!

_________________________

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Screencasts

OneSwarm overview	Remote access

DOWNLOAD ONESWARM

“While others claim to have huge download limits,” UseNet.com says, “we deliver unheard of download limits and incredible access to two huge geographically diverse server farms. But huge download limits are of no use if you can not get the material you are searching for.”

Things might change after this legal blow.

“This action arises out of allegations of widespread infringement of copyrights in sound
recordings owned by Plaintiffs…”the decision states (source contains built-in-browser version), “copies of which are available for download by accessing a network of computers called the USENET through services provided by Defendants Usenet.com, Inc.”

The court document continues, “Defendants’ cross-motion for summary judgment argues that they are entitled to the safe harbor protections of § 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). All parties filed numerous additional motions to exclude certain testimony, as well as voluminous evidentiary objections. Plaintiffs opine that their motion for terminating sanctions alleges discovery abuse sufficient to require that I strike the Defendants’ answer and enter a default judgment in their favor (“Terminating Sanctions Motion”). For the reasons set forth below, Plaintiffs’ Terminating Sanctions Motion is granted to the extent discussed in this opinion, though not in its entirety; Plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment is granted with respect to all claims; and Defendants’ motion”

More excerpts:

Copyright infringement via services:

There can be no dispute that Defendants’ services were used overwhelmingly for copyright infringement. Indeed, Plaintiffs’ expert has testified that, based on a statistical analysis, over 94% of all content files offered in music-related binary newsgroups previously carried by Defendant UCI were found to be infringing or highly likely to be infringing.

Moreover, not only is there rampant copyright infringement of musical works occurring on Defendants’ service in general, but there is direct undisputed evidence that Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings have been distributed and downloaded in violation of their copyrights.5 First, Plaintiffs’ evidence shows that both Plaintiffs’ forensic investigators and Defendants’ own former employees confirmed downloads of digital music files of Plaintiffs’ sound recordings from Defendants’ service.

Selling a service for the purpose of copyright infringement (A mistake made by Grokster):

The record in this case is replete with instances of Defendants and their employees specifically engendering copyright infringement and targeting infringement-minded users to become subscribers of Defendants’ service. First, Defendants’ own former employees have testified that their marketing department specifically targeted young people familiar with other file-sharing programs and suggested they try Defendants’ services “as a safe alternative to peer-to-peer file sharing programs that were getting shut down” due to copyright infringement lawsuits and resulting injunctions.

Wiping hard drives:

Based on the revelation of this new evidence, Plaintiffs promptly filed a motion to compel
production of responsive documents stored on Defendants’ employee hard drives, and requested an extension of the discovery period. A hearing was held before Magistrate Judge Katz on October 27, 2008 to address Plaintiffs’ motion and Defendants’ failure to produce discovery. At this hearing, Defendants’ counsel acknowledged for the first time that he was in possession of seven computer hard drives that had belonged to Defendants’ employees (the “Seven Hard Drives”). October 27, 2008 Hearing Transcript (“Oct. Tr.”) at 13:9-22. Initially, Defendants conceded that four of the Seven Hard Drives had had their contents deleted or “wiped” and suggested they would produce documents from the remaining three drives.

The court concluded that appropriate damage awards would be determined by Magistrate Judge Katz.

This default judgement could easily be seen as a major blow to UseNet service providers. For years, it was indeed common knowledge amongst those in the know that UseNet is practically immune from trouble. The defendants argued that they were under the safe harbour provisions of the DMCA, but the court didn’t buy it.

Because of all this, the once seemingly invulnerable service of UseNet, at least for inside the United States, isn’t so invulnerable anymore. Given that so few actions against UseNet have been taken, many might still see UseNet as a safe alternative compared to other alternatives, but for UseNet services in the United States, this case could spell trouble for the rest of the existing services on US soil.

Still, there’s been no known case, at least to our knowledge, that a UseNet user was ever busted for copyright infringement using UseNet, but it might be a little more tricky to connect to UseNet if other US based UseNet services start folding in a similar fashion to when an NZB site was targeted by the MPAA (many others voluntarily shuttered in response).

Regardless of what happens in the long run, this could be seen as the biggest blow to the UseNet network – legally speaking – to date.

[Hat tip: Ray Beckerman]

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.