Updated at 11:20 p.m. PDT with comment from target of attack.
Correction at 9:30 a.m. PDT, May 13: This post initially mischaracterized Radiotjanst, which is a state-owned company responsible for collecting licensing fees for Swedish public service television. And it misnamed a team leader at the enforcement authority Kronofogdemyndigheten. His name is Fredrik Eriksson.
High bank fees and a considerable amount of extra bookkeeping work. That's the potential burden facing Peter Danowsky, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers in the landmark Pirate Bay case, due to a scheme to deplete his law firm's bank account.
Danowsky represented the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and several record companies in the trial, and he now seems to be the target of some kind of revenge plan.
The plan surfaced on the Web site internetavgift.se recently and has already been dubbed "DDo$" for Distributed Denial of Dollars. That's a reference to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which deluge a Web server with simultaneous requests from multiple computers.
In this case, Danowsky's law firm's account at the Nordea bank is being targeted. The site internetavgift.se--it's unclear who runs it--is challenging people to send 1 Swedish krona (about 13 cents) to the account. The site instructs participants to cite "purchase of media" as a payment reference, and the plan is making its way around Twitter and blogs.
The scheme may turn out to be expensive for Danowsky's firm--or at least that's what the tricksters hope. According to the bank's rules (PDF in Swedish) companies can receive up to 1,000 payments a year for free. Further incoming payments will be charged 1.70 kronor (about 21 cents) each.
However, according to the law, each transaction, free or not, has to be entered in the law firm's books, which implies a lot of manpower.
In addition, Danowsky theoretically might end up having to refund every single payment. According to internetavgift.se, Swedish law requires the immediate refund of payments that have been made inaccurately, which each person having sent money can later claim. The site suggests that participants go that route, presumably to create even more work for Danowsky's firm.
Danowsky told CNET News he thinks harassment is the likely intention.
"A number of small amounts have been deposited in our account and the names of those who have made the deposits appear on the payment notice. We still haven't taken any action, but a police report...is possible," Danowsky said.
Peter Danowsky
The Web site points out that the money has nothing to do with the $3.8 million in damages the four defendants have been sentenced to pay. It says instead that it's a new fee to be paid by anyone who uses the Internet--"internetavgift" means Internet fee, though no such fee exists.
Probably not coincidentally, the design of the internetavgift.se Web site copies that of Radiotjanst, a state-owned company responsible for collecting licensing fees for Swedish public service television. Radiotjanst was not a party in the Pirate Bay litigation.
Though it is unknown who is behind the so-called DDo$, the domain name internetavgift.se is registered by "svarth3024-00001" suggesting that one of the four defendants sentenced, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, might be responsible.
It's not clear how many people, if any, have followed the instructions and sent money to the firm.
Meanwhile, Swedish authorities are now moving to collect the damages from the four defendants. The sentence has been appealed by all four defendants but until the Swedish High Court of Justice has made its decision, the damages are to be paid.
"We will start to look for assets on Wednesday if no money has been paid by then. Money in a bank account is an asset, and if we find it we will seize it," Fredrik Eriksson, a team leader at the enforcement authority Kronofogdemyndigheten, told Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.
According to the newspaper, defendant Peter Sunde, spokesman for The Pirate Bay, has already put his payment form for damages in the shredder, saying "I don't have this money."
The only defendant who seems to have any considerable assets is Carl Lundström, who has offered technical services and infrastructure to The Pirate Bay. According to Per E. Samuelsson, Lundström's defense lawyer, he might end up having to pay the whole amount as the damages are to be paid in "solidarity."
The French National Assembly ignored a vote last week by the European Parliament and approved its "Création et Internet" three-strikes bill on Tuesday.
The measure supported by French President Nicolas Sarkozy punishes digital pirates by suspending Internet service if they are caught illegally sharing copyrighted material. The vote comes a little more than a month after the same government body rejected the proposal.
It seems the vote by the French Assembly is in direct opposition to the European Parliament, which last week passed a measure prohibiting EU governments from terminating a user's Internet access without a court order. The European Parliament also adopted an amendment that said, "Internet access is a fundamental right such as the freedom of expression and the freedom to access information."
The bill passed in France's National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament, by a narrow margin of 296 to 233. The legislation essentially creates a new government agency known as HADOPI (the Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des droits sur Internet), which will be tasked with sending notices to illegal file sharers.
The way it would work is that suspected offenders would receive two warnings about their illegal activities and on the third suspected offense, their Internet access would be cut off for anywhere from two months to a year. Users will also be put on a "three-strikes" blacklist so that they can't sign up for service from another ISP.
The legislation has proven to be quite controversial in France and throughout the world. It is considered one of the most aggressive digital antipiracy regulations out there, which has helped it win the support of the music and movie industries.
But consumer and free speech advocates have opposed the passage of such legislation, arguing that it denies accused Internet pirates the right to challenge the government's charges in court. Opponents of the legislation also fear that it will pave the way for governments to violate its citizens' personal privacy rights.
The bill had been expected to pass the General Assembly in France in early April, but Socialists, who opposed the measure, rallied at the last moment, and surprisingly defeated the measure.
It was reintroduced to the assembly in late April and was debated and discussed until the vote Tuesday.
Even though the entertainment industry for years has lobbied for more active policing of the Internet, France is one of the only countries to put together such stringent legislation. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, have not introduced strict legislation yet, but instead are encouraging partnerships between ISPs and the entertainment industry to fight piracy.
At least one major ISP in the U.S., AT&T, has already agreed to work with the music industry by sending notices to consumers suspected of illegally distributing copyrighted content. And in the U.K., ISPs have agreed to help the entertainment industry fight piracy in lieu of new legislation.
But other countries, such as Sweden are also taking a heavy handed approach to fighting digital piracy. France's strict piracy legislation comes less than a month after a Swedish court found the founders of the peer-to-peer site The Pirate Bay guilty of infringing copyright. The four defendants were each sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay 30 million Swedish kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to copyright holders. The Pirate Bay has already been mentioned as one of the sites that could be easily taken out under the new French law.
Having just made it through a high-profile trial in their native Sweden, four men closely associated with The Pirate Bay may now have to face justice in Italy.
IDG is reporting that that country is now considering initiating its own prosecution of Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström for alleged violations of Italy's copyright law. This would be the first criminal prosecution against the four Pirate Bay players outside their home nation.
On April 17, the four defendants were found guilty of having made copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site, one of the most visited BitTorrent destinations in the world. All four were sentenced to a year in prison, and the group was fined the equivalent of $3.6 million.
The news stirred outrage and disbelief among fans, while those at big entertainment companies rejoiced. The defendants says they have filed an appeal.
In August of last year, as part of a crackdown of BitTorrent sites in Italy, Internet service providers there were ordered to block access to the Pirate Bay site. The Pirate Bay appealed the block and eventually won the court case.
But following the Swedish trial, according to IDG, at least one group representing Italian copyright holders is already expressing optimism that the outcome of the landmark Swedish case could benefit prosecutors in subsequent litigation.
"An acquittal in Sweden could have created difficulties for the Italian prosecution," Enzo Mazza, president of the Italian Music Industry Federation (FIMI), told IDG." The guilty verdict will strengthen the hand of the prosecutor in Italy."
But lawyers for Pirate Bay spokesman Sunde told the site TorrentFreak that Mazza might be expressing optimism prematurely.
"The Italian case has many different peculiarities, starting with jurisdiction issues, which make the Swedish decision much less relevant than it could seem at first glance," Francesco Paolo Micozzi and Giovanni Battista Gallus said. In addition, they added, "every decision is based on its own evidence, and in the Italian case the trial is yet to start."
Italian prosecutors will reportedly decide within the next few months whether they will proceed with legal action against the Pirate Bay four. We will of course keep you posted.
Gordon Brown, Britain's prime minister, is backing efforts by copyright holders to combat digital piracy and protect premium content on the Web, according to reports.
"We need to support the creation and availability of high-quality content," Brown said Friday as he addressed an audience at the Digital Britain Summit in London, according to a report on news site BrandRepublic.com. "We will support the legal framework that enables the private sector to create content."
According to other sites covering the summit, Gordon didn't outline plans on how his government intended to do that.
The blog Music Ally reported that Brown may be unwilling to support a "three strikes," approach. This is the term used to describe when Internet service providers issue written warnings to customers accused of multiple copyright violations. Under some three-strikes plans, ISPs have the option of cutting off Internet access to chronic offenders.
France recently voted down a law that would have made it mandatory for ISPs to follow a three-strikes plan. France's President, Nicolas Sarkozy, is expected to bring the legislation back for another vote.
Brown made his comments on the day four men connected to The Pirate Bay, a Web site accused of being a favorite tool for online pirates, were found guilty of having made 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site.
Swedish police on Friday reported making a major Internet piracy bust.
Authorities said they seized computer equipment belonging to a Stockholm-area man whom they suspected of violating local copyright law. The police, who carried out the raid on February 9, only disclosed the news Friday.
"We made a bust. A server and computers have been taken and are being analyzed now," said Mats Johansson, a precinct commander in Stockholm, told CNET News in an interview.
Johansson said the man, whose identity was not disclosed, was questioned and subsequently released. He is now the target of an investigation by government prosecutors.
The seized server contained 65 terabytes of digital data, consisting of films, TV series, computer programs, and the music equivalent of 16,000 movies, according to the Antipiracy Agency, an organization based in Sweden that's supported by a consortium of film and game organizations to fight Internet piracy.
The server was located in Brandbergen, south of Stockholm, the Swedish capital. The police raid took place just before the individuals behind The Pirate Bay Web site went to court to defend themselves against charges of helping millions of Internet users illegally download copyright-protected movies, music, and computer software.
The Pirate Bay has not been accused of being behind the site. Still, Peter Sunde, a spokesperson for the file-sharing site, said in an interview with the Swedish news site SvD.se that he did not believe the claims made by the Antipiracy Agency, which described the Stockholm arrest as the biggest digital copyright bust in the nation's history.
"More than 800,000 people have uploaded files to Pirate Bay, so I do not believe it is the source of the entire problem," Sunde told SVD.se. "But it is possible that it is a significant source."
The Antipiracy Agency claimed that the server was part of the Nordic FTP ring called "Sunnydale," comprising 10 servers. After the bust, the ring went down and could not be accessed online.
The Antipiracy Agency said that despite the site's high security, it was able to secure the evidence it needed, which it then turned over to police.
"The well-organized pirates on the scene seemed to have overestimated their ability to hide their identity and location, but the bust showed that we could find the responsible entity," Henrik Ponten, a lawyer who works for the Swedish Antipiracy Agency, said in a statement released to the press.
Attempts by CNET to reach The Pirate Bay for comment Friday were unsuccessful.
- prev
- 1
- next
