According to TorrentFreak, The Pirate Bay is back on top, mostly thanks to the demise of several popular one-click download sites (a.k.a. cyberlockers), like Megaupload. A little less than two years ago, the piracy landscape was vastly different at the time, with bittorrent straggling behind one-click download sites. The Pirate Bay was ranked sixth back then.

The last couple of years has seen major changes in the file-sharing landscape, with big changes in the rankings. Along with The Pirate Bay jumping six spots up to first, Mediafire comes in second after finishing fourth two years ago. 4shared, which had the top spot back then, is now sitting in fourth place. Torrentz.eu is now up to sixth, up from ninth place in 2011.

Furthermore, six file-sharing sites made the top ten this year that weren’t in the top ten back in 2011. These sites include Kickass Torrents, Uploaded, isoHunt, PutLocker, ExtraTorrent, and Rapidgator. Of course, this list only consists of public trackers and cyberlockers. Private trackers have gained in popularity significantly over the past couple of years, so many users may have switched by now.

[via TorrentFreak]

UPDATE: Courtesy of The Pirate Bay itself, this news announcement was a complete hoax. Have a peek at the real story in our March 5th report.

It turns out that The Pirate Bay was actually in talks with North Korea for a little while. An insider from TPB stated, “We’ve been in talks with them for about two weeks, since they opened access for foreigners to use 3G in the country.” While TPB isn’t exactly situating itself in North Korea, it will be using North Korea’s network to provide its services to the rest of the world.

This comes only a few days after Norway was forced to let go of The Pirate Bay. The pirate party in Norway began receiving threats from local anti-piracy groups to shut down its services, similar to what Sweden’s Pirate Party had to face. By being offered virtual asylum by North Korea, it will be very interesting to see what anti-piracy groups will due in attempt to shut down the site again.

The Pirate Bay, and many others, believe that this is a truly ironic, seeing as the United States is known as a place of freedom and North Korea is known as the opposite. TPB hopes that it will bond with North Korea, and maybe someday convince the government to allow its people to utilizes its full services. This is an interesting turn of events, and we’d love to see how this new relationship will turn out for The Pirate Bay.

[via Torrent Freak]

The Swedish Pirate Party reluctantly let go of The Pirate Bay because the legal battles would be too damaging on the party’s limited resources. But of course, The Pirate Bay isn’t one to go down so easily. The Pirate Bay is now being serviced by two new pirate parties located in Norway and Catalonia. Anna Troberg, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, stated, “It is wonderful to be able to pass on the baton to two sister parties. It is testament to the pirate movement’s maturity and strength.”

The pirate parties in both Norway and Catalonia will join together and form what will now be called “The Hydra Bay”. The Pirate Bay, however, stated that this isn’t a permanent move on their part, but more of a vacation, and that there will be major “under-the-hood” changes to the site coming soon. The Pirate Bay stated in a Facebook post, “Let’s just say that it will change a lot of things for a lot of people. When the bomb goes off, remember that we did it with love in our hearts and with hope of humanity. We believe we can change the world by doing this.”

Despite all of the legal threats against The Pirate Bay, it still has the support of many pirates all around the world. Troberg stated that The Pirate Party will be holding a board meeting in a few days, where she will recommend that the board “file a police report against the Rights Alliance for unlawful coercion.” She continued with, “It is important to determine precisely how forgiving the system is to those who try to abuse the judicial system to silence others.”

[via Torrent Freak]

The massive fine was reached through a penalty of $150,000 per movie, which is the maximum amount of damages possible under current US copyright law. Movie studios are expected to use this case as the stick to coax other alleged file sharers to settle out-of-court. Fisher and several other defendants were sued by Flava Works for sharing the company’s films.

All defendants in the case had paid accounts with the Flava Works website. The movie company was able to prove that the people shared movies from their accounts because each film the defendants viewed and shared was tagged with a specific piece of code linking the movie to their account. Flava Works was able to prove that movies directly downloaded and shared by Fisher were shared thousands of times.

The films Fisher shared were downloaded at least 3449 times. Apparently, Fisher didn’t bother to mount a defense, whether that means he didn’t show up in court or was trying to represent himself is unknown. This case will certainly set a precedent for the other defendants in the remaining court case where Fisher was known as defendant 11.

“Given the materials submitted by Plaintiff in support of its motion and in light of the absence of any objection by Defendant, Plaintiff’s motion for entry of default against defendant 11 is granted. Judgment is entered in favor of the Plaintiff Flava Works, Inc., and against the Defendant Kywan Fisher in the amount of One Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars ($1,500,000.00),” the judgment reads.

[via TorrentFreak]

Google’s legal case is now headed to an appeals court for a final ruling. The case has been going on since early 2010 when SNEP filed suit against Google to force the company to filter certain terms from its Instant and Autocomplete features. SNEP has argued during the case that Google is facilitating piracy by not filtering those search terms, allowing searchers to find torrents and the two named websites.

The French court has recognized that Google is not accountable for any of the copyright infringement that takes place on other websites. However, the court does say that Google has a responsibility to make it more difficult for the public to find unauthorized content. The court and the music industry association believes that by filtering those search terms Google could help prevent future copyright infringement.

[via TorrentFreak]

The movie company previously sued 24,583 people for alleged infringement at the same time. The case went on for close to two years, and we never found out exactly how many of those people settled with the company. Voltage Pictures filed the new suit in Florida against another 2514 unnamed defendants accusing all of them of downloading The Hurt Locker.

The suit was filed in an attempt to get a subpoena to order ISPs to reveal the identities of the people who the company believes downloaded the movie illegally. If the movie company can obtain the names of the downloaders, it will apparently seek somewhere around $3000 from each one of them. All of those subscribers are on Charter Communications.

[via Torrentfreak]

The MPAA has noted that while it doesn’t necessarily mind if Carpathia turns the servers off, it is objecting to any transfer of the data. According to the MPAA, any transfer of data could result in a relaunch of the Megaupload website. According to the MPAA, it has learned that Carpathia plans to sell the data back to Megaupload.com with all film and TV content intact.

The MPAA claims ownership of much of the content on the Megaupload servers and believes the distribution of the material by sale or transfer would be a violation of rights. The MPAA fears that the only reason Megaupload and the co-defendants would offer to purchase 25,000 servers from Carpathia that host their data would be to put themselves in the position to relaunch Megaupload in the future.

[via Hollywood Reporter]

It sounds as if the website was a place to hire pirates and hackers. According to Gibling, NDS funded the expansion of his website and later had him distribute pay-TV codes from its rival. The distributed codes allowed consumers to access ITV Digital programming without paying. NDS admits to hiring Gibling, but claims, he was merely a consultant used to inform on hackers.

ITV Digital went bankrupt in 2002 citing piracy of its smartcards as a major reason for its failure. ITV’s former CTO, Simon Dore, claims that piracy was the “killer blow” for the company. Gibling maintains that the codes offered on the Thoic site originated from NDS. Gibling says that the website was his in name only, that it truly belonged to NDS.

Gibling said, “Everything that was in the closed area of Thoic was totally accessed by any of the NDS representatives.” He continued, “It was NDS. It was their baby and it started to become more their baby as they fashioned it to their own design.”

[via BBC]

The problem is that many of these users have legitimate files on the service that they can no longer access. Dotcom says that he, and his legal team are working to get the website reinstated to allow users to retrieve their legitimate files and take them elsewhere. Megaupload has been talking with the Department of Justice in the United States to get users access to their data.

One interesting thing that has come out of the fight to get files back up and open to users has been Megaupload claiming that it has discovered a number of site users that were from the US government. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is working on behalf of users of Megaupload that have legitimate personal files saved on the service to get their data back. The EFF is right now simply identifying people who have lost files and keeping track of them while Megaupload appeals to the Department of Justice to open the site back up.

Dotcom said, “Guess what – we found a large number of Mega accounts from US Government officials including the Department of Justice and the US Senate.”

“I hope we will soon have permission to give them and the rest of our users access to their files,” Dotcom told us.

[via TorrentFreak]

The New Zealand law firm handling the case for the US government is Crown Law. The legal team had 45 days to file the extradition paperwork after the raid on Kim Dotcom’s home. A Crown Law spokesperson has now confirmed that the extradition paperwork has been filed today in the North Shore District Court handling the case.

The United States continues to claim that Dotcom, and his associates operated a private empire violating international copyright laws to the tune of $500 million. The four men face multiple charges, including conspiring to commit racketeering, conspiring to commit money laundering, copyright infringement, and of aiding and abetting copyright infringement. The extradition hearing will be held in August.

[via NZHerald]

Co-accused partners Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato and Ortmann will be allowed to live at Kolk’s Auckland home under strict rules such as a complete ban on Internet access. Megaupload’s founder Kim Dotcom remains the only person from the organization still behind bars. The United States authorities pursuing this case are intending on relying on United Nations treaties aimed at taking down international organized crime so that they might extradite all of the New Zealand-based Megaupload members to the USA to be tried once more – these members are being called part of an international “Mega Conspiracy.”

The lawyer working on behalf of the United States in this case has stated that the extradition treaty will have no copyright offenses tied to it. Instead offenses linked to trans-national crime covered by the country’s Extradition Act will be used to lift the Megaupload leaders from the country. According to New Zealands Police “Ten One” magazine, US authorities have already congratulated local police on the raids they did on Megaupload leaders homes last month. The FBI monitored events from their command center in Washington, one of these FBI members being Detective Superintendent Mike Pannett:

“Feedback on the New Zealand operation has been extremely positive from our international law enforcement partners including the FBI and the US Department of Justice.” – Pannett

These forces included “dozens of heavily armed police – some from elite anti-terrorist divisions” all arresting the operators of Megaupload in waves last month.

The three founders were able to get their initial prison terms reduced in length during their legal battle, but the fines and prison terms that have been previously determined will stand. The Swedish Supreme Court announced today that it was denying the trio’s final appeal. The prison terms for the three men will be as follows; Peter Sunde will serve an eight-month term in prison. Fredrik Neij will serve a 10-month prison sentence, and Carl Lundström will spend four months behind bars.

The men will all share in paying $6.8 million fine for damages. A fourth co-founder named Gottfrid Svartholm has also been part of the legal drama. He missed a hearing due to medical conditions, and then failed to show up at a subsequent hearing. This led the court to rule that his previous prison term of one year and his share the damages would stand and be made permanent. It’s worth noting that in the Swedish legal system, it’s apparently common for the courts to reduce sentences in cases over five years old by as much as 12 months, in this case that would mean none of the men would go to prison.

[via Torrentfreak]