New research commissioned by the Australasian Performing Right Association reveals that Australian file-sharers are more affluent and better educated than their non-downloading counterparts. One in three Aussie Internet pirates earn more than $100,000 and one in four enjoyed a university education. The results further confirm that pirates tend to be relatively young, with 44% of file-sharers under 30 years of age.

» via TorrentFreak

France finally put an end to the most extreme measure of its famous “three strikes” anti-piracy regime: no one will face being cut off from the Internet.

The law is better known by its French acronym, Hadopi. In the last few years under the law, the Hadopi agency famously set up a system with graduating levels of warnings and fines. The threat of being cut off entirely from the Internet was the highest degree, but that penalty was never actually put into place.

“Getting rid of the cut-offs and those damned winged elephants is a good thing. They’re very costly,” Joe McNamee, of European Digital Rights, quipped to Ars.

» via ars technica

BitTorrent today released folder syncing software that replicates files across multiple computers using the same peer-to-peer file sharing technology that powers BitTorrent clients.

The free BitTorrent Sync application is labeled as being in the alpha stage, so it’s not necessarily ready for prime-time, but it is publicly available for download and working as advertised on my home network.

» via ars technica

In what is being described as the biggest domain crackdown since US Homeland Security seized more than 70 domains in 2010, Italy has targeted more than two dozen BitTorrent, cyberlocker and other file-sharing sites. The Public Prosecutor of Rome has ordered the blocking of Rapidgator, Uploaded, BitShare, NowVideo, VideoPremium and many others, warning that he will progress the action internationally in order to properly seize their domains.

» via TorrentFreak

The operator of the popular file-sharing service isoHunt is demanding a federal appeals court grant it a jury trial, two weeks after the court declared it a massive copyright scofflaw and said it’s on the hook for what could be millions of dollars in damages payable to Hollywood studios.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Gary Fung and said the Motion Picture Association of America automatically won on the merits of the case, without a trial. The decision marked the first time a federal appeals court had ruled against a BitTorrent search engine.

» via Wired

With a million downloads on BitTorrent in less than a day, the season premiere of Game of Thrones is breaking records on multiple fronts. Never before has there been a torrent with so many people sharing a file at the same time, more than 160,000 simultaneous peers. Data gathered by TorrentFreak further shows that Australia has the highest piracy rate of the popular download destinations, while London tops the list of pirate cities.

» via TorrentFreak

The Multimedia Messaging Service is not an illicit file-sharing protocol, a federal appeals court ruled, setting aside Monday a complaint from an MMS-greeting-card supplier that claimed the nation’s largest telecoms helped consumers infringe via MMS texting.

Luvdarts, which produces greeting-card style messages with text, graphics, video and musical materials that it creates and licenses, claimed Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and Verizon should have prevented the illegal distribution of its proprietary text messages.

» via Wired

Torrent search site IsoHunt has lost its appeal against Hollywood movie studios to have keyword filters removed from its results.

The court battle between the torrent indexing site and the Motion Picture Association of America’s member studios has resulted in the former losing its appeal to remove an injunction that forces the Web site to filter its search results.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday upheld a 2010 ruling that stated the site does not qualify for safe harbor under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The site’s founder, Gary Fung, allegedly had “red flag” knowledge of copyright infringements taking place through the site — in particular, by interacting with users.

» via CNET

The Supreme Court has turned away an appeal from a Minnesota woman who has been ordered to pay record companies $222,000 for the unauthorized downloading of copyrighted music.

The justices did not comment Monday in letting stand the judgment against Jammie Thomas-Rasset of Brainerd, Minn. She claimed in court papers that the ordered payment was excessive.

» via Yahoo! News

A United Kingdom judge ruled Thursday that Virgin Media, BSkyB, BT, and other British telcos must block access to BitTorrent sites Fenopy, Kickass Torrents, and H33T.com.

In a written decision, Judge Richard Arnold said that these sites enable copyright infringement “on an industrial scale.” Last year, another British court ruled that The Pirate Bay must be blocked because it allows for significant copyright infringement.

However, a recent study from a UK-based music industry analysis firm confirms what we’ve long-suspected: its data shows that blocking sites that enable unauthorized downloads does little to impact actual piracy.

» via ars technica