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Shutdown of large torrents site in Russia for allegedly distributing illegal content. Not read in detail.

A German court has granted an injunction against torrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB) brought against it by Hollywood film studios. The injunction means that TPB's bandwidth provider cannot connect it to internet servers, meaning it is unavailable. Of course, getting one torrent site shut down is just the tip of the iceberg - there are thousands of torrent sites out there and many may originate in countries where the service providers or site owners can't be prosecuted. TPB originates in Sweden. In 2009, TPB's four founders were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay a $US3.6million fine.

The Dutch Anti-Piracy organisation BREIN has run out of options to try to shut down bit torrent websites and therefore has asked Internet provider Ziggo to block Torrent website ThePirateBay. Ziggo made clear that they are for 'open internet' and do not think they are responsible because they are just an intermediate.

The head of new media for Middle East broadcaster and news service Al Jazeera has poured cold water on the much-hyped role of Twitter as the technology that started grass-roots revolution in Iran. Despite the US government's moves to prevent scheduled maintenance of the site to enabled Iranians to "Tweet out" to the world about the election, it seems a torrent of on-the-ground Tweets simply doesn't add up. After analyzing information about the alleged Iranian-based Tweeters, just 6 accounts could be verified as actually being on the ground.

A group of independent film producers have initiated court actions against over 20,000 Bit Torrent users, through an organisation of their own design, a group of lawyers known as the U.S Copyright Group. This group are demanding users to either defend themselves in court or alternatively, to settle outside of court for downloading particular movie titles. Most accused will settle to avoid the costs of litigation. Actions such as this are worrying as may give rise to a standard in which large numbers of corporates, not only in film but in all types of media, may start bringing forth unrelenting actions against individual users- holding them personally accountable. This is problematic (amongst a variety of reasons) that in the identification process through IP addresses is not 100% accurate, leaving room to wrongly accuse some users.

Voltage pictures, production company of the oscar winning movie, The Hurt Locker has joined with the US copyright group filed thousands of lawsuits against people who have downloaded the movie through torrent sites. Magnitude of this is much larger than any prior legal action taken before for illegally downloaded movies.