P2P

An illegal file-sharer who distributed a record-breaking 45,000 songs online over a peer-to-peer (P2P) network has been found guilty by a court in Sweden, in a judgment dubbed "tragic" by Swedish Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg.

The trial concerns the largest number of copyright infringements ever considered by a Swedish court, but 58-year-old woman managed to avoid jail. Instead, the court yesterday fined her 16,000 kronor (around £1,600) - equivalent to 50 days' pay - plus the costs of her defence, and sentenced her to probation.

Italy is taking its crusade against BitTorrent sites to an unprecedented level. The authorities have moved against the general purpose proxy site proxyitalia.com because it could be used by Italians to access BTjunkie and The Pirate Bay. Following this logic they will also have to censor thousands of other proxy sites and ban all VPN services, or shut down the Internet entirely.

After an Italian court ordered all ISPs to block The Pirate Bay in 2008, this year the authorities shifted their focus to making BTjunkie unavailable too.

Top five box office hits downloaded 1.4 million times last year

Internet research company Envisional has revealed that illegal downloading of films in the UK grew nearly 30% in five years, according to a report by the BBC. Such illegal downloading of films is estimate to cost hundreds of millions to the film industry as well as thousands of job losses.

The administrator of a file-sharing related site has seen his sentence upheld by the Court of Appeal. The man, who was arrested back in 2007, operated a site which didn’t offer links but provided users with hints on keywords which would help them find movies and TV shows. He has received a one year suspended sentence, fined 3,000 euros and ordered to pay 130,000 euros ($185,000) in damages.