Month: June 2016

In 2013, anti-piracy prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad filed a motion targeting two of The Pirate Bay’s oldest domains, ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se.

Ingblad filed a complaint against Punkt SE (IIS), the organization responsible for Sweden’s top-level .SE domain, arguing that since The Pirate Bay is an illegal site the domains are tools used to infringe copyright. On this basis they should be suspended, Ingblad said.

The case was heard in April 2015 and a month later the Stockholm District Court ruled that The Pirate Bay should forfeit both ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se.

The case went to the Court of Appeal and last month the ruling of the District Court was upheld.

But as is so often the case with Pirate Bay legal action, the show isn’t over yet. Following the ruling, site co-founder Fredrik Neij indicated he would take an appeal to the Supreme Court. That has now been filed.

“Fredrik Neij moves that the Supreme Court, by the modification and elimination of the District Court and Court of Appeal’s decision, should reject the prosecutor’s request for Fredrik Neij’s forfeiture to the right of the domain names piratebay.se and thepiratebay.se,” Neij’s lawyer Jonas Nilsson writes in a translation sent to TF.

The situation is somewhat complex. In 2012, Neij transferred the domains to a person named Supavadee Trakunroek. However, the Court of Appeal found that transaction to be mere ‘paperwork’ and that in real terms Neij had retained control of the domains.

With that in mind the question remained – should the domains be ‘seized’ from Neij or from IIS, the organization responsible for Sweden’s top-level .SE domain?

The Court found that domain names should be considered a type of intellectual property, property that is owned by the person or organization that purchased the domain. Therefore, in this case IIS is not the owner of the Pirate Bay domains, Neij is.

It is this aspect of the ruling that Fredrik Neij is now appealing to the Supreme Court.

“Fredrik Neij argues that the District Court and the Court of Appeal wrongly concluded that a domain name is a type of intellectual property that can be confiscated in accordance with copyright law,” his appeal reads.

With the appeal now filed it is up to the Supreme Court to decide whether to take the case. Domains used for illegal activity have been seized in Sweden before, but none have been fought as actively as this one.

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is operating from the .org domain it began with, all those years ago.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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What do you think they're using all those neurons for? (credit: Flickr user Teddy Llovet)

Birds are smart. They use tools, engage in social learning, plan for the future, and do a variety of other things that were once thought to be exclusively the stuff of primates. But hundreds of millions of years of evolution separate mammals and birds, and structurally, their brains look very distinct. Plus there's the whole size thing. If you look at a bird's head, it's clear that there's not a whole lot of space for mental hardware in it. So how do the birds manage with smaller brains?

While other studies have tackled a lot of the structural differences, a new one released this week in PNAS shows that, to some extent, size doesn't matter. Its authors show that birds pack neurons into their brains at densities well above densities in mammals' brains, putting some relatively compact bird brains into the same realm as those of primates when it comes to total cell counts.

And the funny thing is, we probably should have known this was the case.

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Google is bringing Android apps to Chromebooks, and the first model to support the feature is the Asus Chromebook Flip.

Soon you’ll be able to run Android apps on the Acer Chromebook R11, Google Chromebook Pixel (2015 model) and many other recent Chrome OS devices.

But Google is starting with the Chromebook Flip and the company has released Chrome OS 53 dev channel for the laptop, complete with support for Android apps and the Google Play Store.

Continue reading Closer look at Android apps on a Chromebook (video) at Liliputing.

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