British visitors to copyright-infringing websites will start to see warnings from the police in the place of banner adverts for Usenet and VPNs, in the latest phase of Operation Creative.
The Pirate Bay’s PirateBrowser, a tool that allows people to bypass ISP filtering and access blocked websites, is a great success. The Firefox and Tor-based software eliminates the need to use a proxy site and has already been downloaded more than 1,000,000 times. Currently around 0.5% of all Pirate Bay visitors use PirateBrowser to access the infamous torrent site.
The newly founded Intellectual Property Crime Unit of the City of London Police has scored its first victories. Several domain names of major torrent sites have been suspended by their registrars following an urgent request from the unit. SumoTorrent and MisterTorrent lost control over their domains and ExtraTorrent had its .com domain suspended. Not all registrars are caving in that easily though, as easyDNS is refusing to comply and sees the requests as abuse of power.
Veoh was a YouTube-like site, funded by Hollywood insiders like Michael Eisner, but who got sued by Universal Music Group, claiming copyright infringement (using more or less the same theories used by Viacom against YouTube)
Richard O’Dwyer, the UK-based ex-administrator of the video linking website TVShack, will not be extradited to the US to face…