‘IP Man’ BitTorrent Users Targeted in New Lawsuit

Anti-filesharing lawyer Evan Stone has filed yet another lawsuit on behalf of anime company Funimation.

According to court documents, Stone’s new targets will be individuals who downloaded and shared the movie The Legend Is Born: IP Man.

The law suit, which lists 1,427 John Does, was filed in the Eastern District of Texas Court and demands $150,000 in damages from each individual for infringements which took place between May 13th and May 26th on BitTorrent.

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Source: ‘IP Man’ BitTorrent Users Targeted in New Lawsuit

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Breaking: Duke Nukem Forever Leaked To BitTorrent

Well it’s been an almost never-ending decade-long wait, but come June 14th, Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) will get its worldwide release.

Inevitably though, there has been a big underground push to break that release date embargo.

A little over an hour ago that push was complete with the game leaking to BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks, a full 7 days in advance of the planned launch.

Dozens of fake files claiming to be DNF have been going up for the last two weeks, but this release by Scene group ‘Complex’ is absolutely the real deal.

While this particular writer is a very keen games buyer, this leak and the subsequent reviews could conceivably result in a lost sale for publishers Take-Two Interactive and 2K Games.

Why? Because the limited distribution demo of the game seemed to show that rather than the huge blockbuster we’ve all been hoping for, DNF could be a very big let down indeed.

This leak is early enough to warn people off if the game’s a dud, but for all the Duke fans out there, hopefully the reverse is true.

Source: Breaking: Duke Nukem Forever Leaked To BitTorrent

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133,242 BitTorrent Users Sued In the U.S.

The mass-lawsuits against thousands of alleged P2P users in the U.S. continue to make headlines, even in mainstream news outlets.

Yesterday, CNN wrote an excellent feature on the ongoing cases that some have described as extortion. Although the article itself provides a good overview, the title is a bit off.

“50,000 BitTorrent users sued for alleged illegal downloads,” the CNN article claims, but in reality it’s more than 130,000.

Below are some statistics for the U.S. cases that started last year.

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* The first case was filed January 8 2010 on behalf of Worldwide Film Entertainment and targeted 749 alleged downloaders of The Gray Man. This case was dismissed a few months later.

* 203 cases have been filed in total, most of them dealing with adult content.

* 164 cases are still active.

* 182,078 “Does” were targeted initially, and 133,701 are still at risk (133,242 BitTorrent and 459 ed2k).

* Anti-piracy lawyer John Steele is most active and has filed more than 60 cases.

* Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver (The U.S. Copyright Group) has sued most defendants, more than 90,000.

* The largest case is that of The Hurt Locker, with 24,583 defendants.

* The largest settlement paid to a copyright holder is $250,000.

Source: 133,242 BitTorrent Users Sued In the U.S.

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iiNet BitTorrent Piracy Case Goes Back to Court

The landmark court battle between the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft and the Aussie ISP iiNet will continue at The High Court.

After previous unsuccessful attempts at making iiNet responsible for the copyright infringing activities of their users, AFACT is still refusing to give in.

As reported in March, the Hollywood-backed group is taking its case to the High Court, claiming that two of the three judges in the appeal did not apply legal tests correctly.

The Australian reports the appeal may start as soon as September:

“The High Court has confirmed the date as the earliest of two it has set aside to hear the studios argue for special leave to challenge a Federal Appeal Court’s decision in February, which saw Perth-headquartered ISP iiNet narrowly avoid a ruling that it authorised its customers to infringe copyright online.”

“If the hearing doesn’t go ahead on August 12 the court has set aside September 2 as an alternative date.”

Source: iiNet BitTorrent Piracy Case Goes Back to Court

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What’s The Best VPN / Proxy for BitTorrent?

Privacy is important on the Internet, and BitTorrent users are certainly not excluded.

Already, hundreds of thousands of BitTorrent users have decided to hide their IP-address to the public, and more are joining every day.

Some use specialized BitTorrent proxies and VPNs like BTGuard, but there are many other options.

Unfortunately, however, not all VPNs are very BitTorrent friendly.

In fact, some explicitly prohibit the use of file-sharing software.

So my question to all anonymous TorrentFreak users is: What VPN / Proxy are you using? And is it any good?

Other suggestions, questions and comments are welcome too.

Source: What’s The Best VPN / Proxy for BitTorrent?

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