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| Download Site Founder Receives 4.5 Year Jail Sentence, Forfeits $4.7m Posted: 15 Jun 2012 03:14 AM PDT In June 2011, the biggest ever operation aimed at tackling online movie piracy took place in Europe. The target for police in Germany, Spain, France, and the Netherlands was movie-streaming portal Kino.to and its affiliates. More than a dozen people were arrested and since then various individuals have been brought to justice. The latest to face punishment is the site’s founder. Known only as Dirk B due to German privacy laws which protect the identities of suspected criminals, the 39-year-old faced an extended stay in prison after prosecutors requested an 11 year sentence.  However, after cooperating with authorities and confessing to a sample 1.1 million instances of copyright infringement and being responsible for a file-hosting service linked to Kino.to, the court decided to hand down a much reduced sentence. According to Deutsche Welle, District Court judge Karsten Nickel described the case as the “most serious” copyright breach ever to come before the courts in Germany. He went on to hand Dirk B a 4.5 year jail sentence. The prosecution said that the operators of Kino.to generated huge profits through advertising and so-called “subscription trap” schemes. As part of his plea bargain, Dirk B agreed to hand over around $4.7m of the claimed $8m he made in revenue through his Spanish advertising company. Dirk B is the 6th person to be sentenced in the Kino.to case. In December 2011, 33-year-old web designer Marcus V. was handed 2.5 years in prison for his role in the site. A week later 27-year-old Martin S. – reportedly the main admin of Kino.to and brother-in-law of Dirk B. – received a 3 year sentence. Later in December an unemployed IT assistant received 1 year 9 months probation after he confessed to uploading pirate movies and TV shows to Kino.to servers between June 2009 to July 2011. A week later a 47-year-old server operator was sentenced to 3 years and 5 months in prison after being found guilty of storing more than 10,700 movies for paid subscription access. In April this year, Kino.to’s 29-year-old lead programmer was sentenced to three years and ten months in prison. Source: Download Site Founder Receives 4.5 Year Jail Sentence, Forfeits $4.7m
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| Warez Download Site OneDDL Calls It Quits Citing Legal Concerns Posted: 14 Jun 2012 10:36 AM PDT
Of course, in January the cyberlocker market had a rude awakening in the form of the Megaupload raids, and ever since the release scene has been shuffling around and reorganizing. Several file-hosting sites decided to call it quits and with their demise many so-called indexing ‘release’ sites couldn’t find the strength to carry on. Some, however, such as the hugely popular Rlslog.net, carried on regardless but in the last 24 hours perhaps the biggest indexing/release site casualty of 2012 has been announced. OneDDL, a site that in one form or another has been around for the past seven years, has decided to call it quits. The announcement comes as quite a surprise, since only 24 hours ago the site was still posting popular US TV shows and movies. The fact that it did so regularly has not been lost on the studios. The site has operated two domains (OneDDL.com and OneDDL.eu) since Google started logging rightsholder takedown requests against the site in May 2011. During that time Google has received 544 takedowns, of which 356 came from NBC Universal.  Although OneDDL have offered no concrete information, between the lines of their shutdown statement reads a familiar story. “The legality of websites, such as ours, has always been a rather grey area. I had believed that this ambiguity would work to our advantage and originally, that is what lawyers told us (yes, we went to see lawyers),” says the site owner. “Lately however, the landscape has changed, and it appears the grey is gradually becoming black and white, unfortunately not in our favour.” OneDDL’s owner continues by stating that the site always operated within the law by responding to takedown requests from copyright holders, but that even that couldn’t save the site. “For some people, this is simply not enough,” he adds. When contacted by TorrentFreak, the site’s owner would not be drawn on the exact reasons for the shutdown. As usual though, the Internet rumor mill is churning with stories of the site being “under investigation” and threats from US entertainment companies and their UK proxies. We have been unable to confirm any of the claims. What seems completely certain is that from a downloading perspective OneDDL is no more. That has saddened the site’s considerable userbase – Alexa has OneDDL ranked as the 4,419th most popular site in the world – but perhaps inevitably the main discussion point in the site’s goodbye statement has quickly turned from farewells into where to find OneDDL alternatives. Source: Warez Download Site OneDDL Calls It Quits Citing Legal Concerns
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