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A court has ordered The Pirate Bay's Swedish domains to be confiscated in a decision that will most likely be appealed again.

The Svea Court of Appeal upheld a ruling by the Stockholm District Court in 2015 that ordered to seizure of both of The Pirate Bay's .se domain names. The earlier ruling established that both domains needed to be seized due to violations of the country's copyright laws, but that IIS.se, the organization responsible for managing .se domain names, was held not responsible for any offences. The prosecutor in that case, Fredrik Ingblad, appealed the decision, but the original verdict was upheld this week.

This means that while IIS is not legally liable, it still has to seize and suspend the Pirate Bay domains, something both ISS and Ingblad agree need to occur.

But even this relatively straight forward court order could turn out to be more complicated than it seems, as according to one of the Pirate Bay's founders, the court has yet to establish the ownership of the domain names.

Both domains are held in the name of Fredrik Neij, one of the piracy site's co-founders, but speaking to TorrentFreak, Neik denies ownership of the domain names, and categorically denies having any more involvement in the website.

"I will appeal on the grounds that I do not own the domain and that I did not commit copyright infringement as I am not involved with the site anymore," Neij told TorrentFreak.

Despite the court order, both .se domains remain active, and thepiratebay.se domain name is still pointing to the main Pirate Bay website.

All over the world, hundreds of researchers are looking into the effects of piracy and copyright legislation.

These studies are interesting from an academic point of view, but they are also crucially important for stakeholders who lobby lawmakers for change.

Hollywood’s MPAA is one of the groups with a vested interest. The organization often uses research to argue their case, and actively criticizes studies that are not in line with their agenda.

In addition, the MPAA is also actively funding research in this area. Most notably, the group sent multiple gifts to Carnegie Mellon’s “Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics” (IDEA), which researches various piracy related topics.

As mentioned previously, MPAA contributed $100,000 to the program in 2012, which was bumped to $912,000 a year later. And it doesn’t stop there.

The organization’s most recent tax filing which appeared online this week shows that they sent another gift in 2014, worth a cool $1,000,000. This is the largest donation the MPAA made during the year, and a significant chunk of their $72 million yearly revenue.

MPAA’s gift

The continued support suggests that the movie industry group is happy with the results IDEA has achieved so far. The research program resulted in the publication of several high quality peer-reviewed papers in recent years, which largely fall in line with the industry’s agenda.

For example, an IDEA paper recently showed that pirate site blockades boost the use of legal services such as Netflix, and a previous paper found that search engines can help to diminish online piracy.

However, the researchers stress that the gift is unrestricted, which means that in no way does it influence the results of their work.

IDEA co-director Rahul Telang informs TorrentFreak that the gift is used to hire researchers and pay for research materials. It is not tied to a particular project.

“The funding allows us to hire research scientists, post-docs, PhD students and masters students for our projects. Many projects are data intensive that require either purchase of expensive data or collection of data which is time consuming,” Telang says.

Telang couldn’t say how much the entire budget for IDEA is, or what gifts it received from the MPAA after 2014.

“Exact funding amount is a bit tricky since the university takes a pot of money as overhead before we can get to use the money. Plus other funding goes up and down,” he says.

In addition to funding IDEA, the MPAA also supports other academic researchers on a smaller scale. Two years ago the group started a grants program inviting academics to pitch their research proposals.

Researchers were offered a $20,000 grant for projects that address various piracy related topics, including the impact of copyright law and the effectiveness of notice and takedown regimes.

The above clearly shows that Hollywood sees academic research as a valuable tool, and indeed, it has cited various studies in its recent lobbying efforts.

Of course it has to be said that MPAA is not the only industry group that finances research. Various companies from the other side of the table, such as Google, do exactly the same.

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

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Wer beim deutschsprachigen Netflix angemeldet ist und etwa in Frankreich seine Serien schauen will, kann das bisher legal nicht. Das soll sich jetzt innerhalb der EU ändern - allerdings haben die EU-Vertreter eine Hintertür eingebaut. (Verbraucherschutz, Internet)

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Mit Flexcase sollen nicht nur Inhalte eines Smartphones auf einem zusätzlichen E-Paper-Bildschirm angezeigt, sondern auch ganz neue Eingabemöglichkeiten geschaffen werden. Auf dem zusätzlichen Bildschirm können nicht nur einfach weitere Inhalte angezeigt werden. (E-Paper, Smartphone)

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Samsung may have launched more smartwatches than just about any other company I’m aware of to date. But the company isn’t putting all its wearable eggs into one basket.

The company is launching a new activity tracker called the Charm in Korea, Italy, France, and Russia.

The Samsung Charm is smaller than the company’s smartwatches, offers up to 14 days of battery life from a tiny 17 mAh battery, and comes in three color options: gold, black, and “rose quartz,” which most of us would probably call pink.

Continue reading Samsung launches Charm fitness band (in select markets) at Liliputing.

Nach einem erfolgreichen Einspruch hat ein Berufungsgericht in Schweden erneut entschieden, dass die Torrent-Seite The Pirate Bay ihre schwedischen Haupt-Domains verliert. Neuer Eigentümer wird der schwedische Staat. (Pirate Bay, Internet)