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Pirate Bay says it was 'persecuted for beliefs of freedom' but analysts say site is still likely being routed through Europe

The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing site that was ejected from Sweden last week, claimed to have set up shop in North Korea on Monday.

The Pirate Bay is a popular site that hosts links to torrented material, though a separate program is required to download the links' content. This function puts the Pirate Bay in a legal grey area in most countries though it has been the subject of many lawsuits.

The Copyright Alert System (CAS) was devised by a coalition of internet service providers (ISPs), content owners and the US government to curb illegal downloading by alerting "casual infringers" when illegal filesharing is detected on their IP address

Initially, the alerts are intended to be educational. They tell the customer what happened and how they can prevent it from happening again. If pirating continues to happen through the IP address, users will receive the message again, followed by messages that ask them to confirm they have seen the alerts. The fifth and sixth alert are called mitigation alerts and will temporarily slow users' internet speeds, depending on the ISP.

CAS has also been criticized because the person who audited the MarkMonitor software to ensure that it fairly identifies copyright violations is a former lobbyist for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), one of the industry groups fronting money for system.

A Year After the Closing of Megaupload, a File-Sharing Tycoon Opens a New Site

Kim Dotcom opened his new file-storage Web site to the public — one year to the minute after the police raided the mansion he rents in New Zealand.

Megaupload

Smartphones are "emasculating" – at least according to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, who explained his view while addressing an audience wearing a computer headset that made him look slightly like a technological pirate.

Brin suggested that the way people today use their smartphones was unappealing.

"When we started Google 15 years ago," Brin said, "my vision was that information would come to you as you need it. You wouldn't have to search query at all."

Cinema staff are being incentivised with cash rewards in the fight against theatrical piracy. Thirteen ushers from across the UK have already been given sums of up to £700, adding up to a sum of thousands of pounds, as rewards for identifying potential pirates at screenings of Skyfall, Ted, The Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit.

The initiative is funded by UK film distributors via the Film Distributors' Association and has been running since 2006.

We want to show the world that we are innovators. We want to show the world that cloud storage has a right to exist. And, of course, when you launch something like this, you can expect some controversy. The content industry is going to react really emotionally about this. The US government will probably try and destroy the new business … you've got to stand up against that, and fight that, and I'm doing that … I will not allow them to chill me."

Megaupload was created initially as a service that allows you to send large files because email attachments had limitations … and that's still the case today. The popularity and initial growth was all around that. This was never set up with the intent to be some kind of piracy haven. If the US government says that we are a mega-conspiracy, a mafia that has created this kind of thing to be a criminal network of pirates, they're completely wrong … for them it was about shutting it down and dealing with it later on the fly. They are hacking the legal system."

Kim Dotcom, founder of the banned Megaupload filesharing site, has announced a new version called Mega designed to sidestep the American laws under which he is being prosecuted for £175m worth of alleged online piracy, racketeering and money laundering.

The site would not use US-based hosting companies as partners in order to avoid being shut down by US authorities, Dotcom said.

Megaupload was shut down in January 2012 when New Zealand police helicopters swooped into Dotcom's mansion outside Auckland to seize computers and other evidence at the request of US authorities.

Nearly half of the internet users surveyed incorrectly said they thought it was legal to upload commercially produced media to a file-sharing website

Internet users unaware of illegal downloading

Internet users are unwittingly turning into online pirates over confusion about what constitutes illegal downloading.