Court Refuses to Shutter Tracker Linked to Pirate Bay: Via Threat Level.

A Stockholm court is refusing to order a Swedish internet provider to cut off a site the studios claim is The Pirate Bay’s new torrent tracker.

The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious filesharing website, announced two weeks ago it was abandoning its tracker, which had been the world’s largest — and a magnet for litigation — for years. The move was prompted by the emergence of DHT and PEX technologies, which allow peers to locate one another without a tracker, the site’s operators wrote.

Hollywood lawyers, however, claim that the Pirate Bay’s tracker is alive and well and still being used under a different domain, OpenBitTorrent — which was originally registered to Fredik Neij, one of the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay. [ Read more ... ]

It’s Alive! Hollywood Claims Pirate Bay Tracker Lives: Via Threat Level.

Did The Pirate Bay really shutter its tracker, as claimed on Tuesday?

The Motion Picture Association doesn’t think so.

Hollywood’s overseas lobbying organization claims OpenBitTorrent, billed as an independent “open tracker project,” was actually established by one of The Pirate Bay’s founders.

“OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,” Hollywood attorney Monique Wadsted told Swedish media.

Wadsted, TorrentFreak notes, said the tracker’s domain was originally registered by Fredrik Neij, one of the four Pirate Bay co-founders.

On its website, OpenBitTorrent denies it’s The Pirate Bay’s tracker: [ Read more ... ]

Court Castrates Mininova, The Pirate Bay Alternative: Via Threat Level.

BitTorrent file sharing suffered another setback on a global scale Wednesday when a Dutch-based court ordered Pirate Bay rival – Mininova — to remove all its copyrighted works or face millions of dollars in fines.

The decision by the Utrecht District Court comes a day ahead of the planned sale of The Pirate Bay to a Swedish software concern that hopes to transform the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker into a pay-to-play site for content.

It was the second legal setback for the illicit file sharing scene since April, when the founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement and ordered to spend a year each in prison pending appeal. The ruling against Mininova and its millions of users is likely to bolster content owners’ resolve to use the courts to protect their interests. [ Read more ... ]