Unnamed 53-year-old made at least £230,000 from artificially generated plays of hundreds of tracks

A Danish man has been sentenced to prison in a “historic” case after being found guilty of fraudulently profiting from royalties on hundreds of tracks on music streaming sites.

In the country’s first case of its kind, the 53-year-old man from East Jutland, whom the Danish press has decided not to name, was convicted on Thursday of making at least 2m Danish kroner (£229,676) from artificially generated streams of “several hundred” music tracks.

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Lawmakers say they’re on the warpath because TikTok’s owner is a national security threat. Some users think the app has become a hub for progressive activism

Tick tock, tick tock … that’s the sound of time running out for Gen Z’s favourite app. On Wednesday the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill would require the TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the social media platform or get banned in the US. It’s not clear whether the bill would pass in the Senate. However, the White House has said it supports the legislation. All in all, things don’t look great for TikTok.

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UK, Germany, Netherlands, Norway and Denmark have failed to align oil and gas policies with Paris pledges, say campaigners

None of the big oil and gas producers surrounding the North Sea plan to stop drilling soon enough to meet the 1.5C (2.7F) global heating target, a report has found.

The five countries – the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark – have failed to align their oil and gas policies with their climate promises under the Paris agreement, according to the campaign group Oil Change International.

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Sanjay Shah accused of scam that enabled companies he controlled to fraudulently claim tax refunds

A British hedge fund trader accused of defrauding Danish tax authorities in a billion-pound scam has gone on trial in Copenhagen, with the government hoping to recover the money in the blockbuster case.

Sanjay Shah, who was arrested in June 2022 in Dubai where he was living, is accused of running a 9bn krone (£1.03bn) scam that enabled companies he controlled to fraudulently claim Danish tax refunds between 2012 and 2015.

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Campaigners say decision against Danish Crown, Europe’s largest pork producer, sends resounding message

Europe’s largest pork producer misled customers with its “climate-controlled pork” campaign, Denmark’s high court has ruled in the country’s first climate lawsuit.

Campaigners argued that Danish Crown greenwashed its meat with round, pink stickers on its packaging that said pigs were “climate-controlled”, along with a marketing campaign that claimed its pork was “more climate-friendly than you think”.

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Nordic children are out in nature for hours a day – and they top rankings in both education and happiness. So here are seven parenting tips I’ve picked up along the way…

I knew I was in trouble the day my pre-schooler came home smelling of woodsmoke and told me he’d been practising “knife skills”. When his twin siblings requested a saw for their second birthday, I realised I’d crossed the Rubicon: I’d become an accidental mother of Vikings. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I relocated from London to Denmark, carefree and childless, but despite planning on staying just a year I’m still here a decade and three children later. So I have skin in the Viking game. And Nordic children do things differently. They eat differently, learn differently, play, dress, even sleep differently – with babies left to nap outside in their prams in sub-zero temperatures. They sing, fight, climb, fall and get up again. They are out in nature for hours a day – despite the fact that the weather’s terrible (we’re talking Mordor from October to March).

Nordics seldom come across as happy-go-lucky – preferring “scheduled fun” to anything approaching spontaneity. And yet… Nordic countries regularly top Unicef rankings in terms of happiness, education and equality with the highest rates of wellbeing, globally. Some aspects of their parenting can be applied wherever you are, while others can act as inspiration. So here are a few things I’ve learned about how to raise a Viking.

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At the height of the online file-sharing boom, the phrase ‘Sharing is Caring’ was a reminder that peer-to-peer file-sharing systems lived or died on the availability of upload bandwidth. Its presentation allowed it to be about much more than that.

The ‘give to get’ philosophy forms part of the BitTorrent protocol even today, but Sharing is Caring was a phrase that could influence human behavior, to the benefit of the wider file-sharing movement, with no suggestion of pressure.

Sharing is Caring implied that by freely sharing whatever content file-sharers had at their disposal, downloaders would know that otherwise anonymous uploaders actually cared about them . If everyone felt that way, everyone could show that they cared too . It was simply a case of sharing the content other people had shared with them , with others in need of the same content ; karma and piracy in perfect harmony.

Counterargument: Sharing Isn’t Caring

While that may have been an unlikely piece of utopia for as long as it lasted, rightsholders viewed sharing rather differently. Well known for his work at the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau, Antipiratbyrån, Henrik Pontén – who sadly passed away in 2020 – often signed off emails to TorrentFreak with, “Remember, Sharing is Caring.”

In the context of what was said in the body of those emails, the real message was clear: people should care about creators too.

In much the same way that Antipiratbyrån had its name reappropriated by rival group Piratbyrån (The Pirate Bureau), the phrase ‘Sharing is Caring’ would later be repurposed by Danish anti-piracy group RettighedsAlliancen (Rights Alliance).

Share With Care

Around 2012, agreements between rightsholders and YouTube, which allowed the former to more easily remove infringing content from the latter, prompted discussions in Denmark on how similar arrangements with other service providers could help to fight piracy.

Facilitated by Denmark’s Ministry of Culture, a series of meetings attended by Rights Alliance, various rightsholders, ISPs, Google, Microsoft, and payment providers, concluded with the signing of a Code of Conduct.

Signatories committed to making the internet a safer, better place, based on respect for copyright and the promotion of legal products. In September 2014, members of the Telecommunications Industry Association in Denmark (TI) signed a Code of Conduct that ensured pirate site blocking applications, filed by Rights Alliance against a single ISP, would be implemented voluntarily by all ISP members of TI.

To this background and following development work by the Rights Alliance, the Danish Ministry of Culture, the Danish Consumer Council, and ISPs, a new anti-piracy education campaign was born. To find out what Share With Care had to offer, members of the public simply needed to visit a blocked pirate domain and let their ISP handle the rest.

The image above is a translated version of the anti-piracy splash screen that still greets customers of Danish ISP DKTV a decade later.

In general terms, little seems to have changed over the years. It’s still possible to search for movies and TV shows on a platform called FilmFinder which informs visitors where content can be watched or purchased legally. The same applies to eBooks and Denmark-focused new outlets but for less obvious reasons, items of genuine furniture .

A Decade of Share With Care

In a statement this week, Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund said that much has changed since the launch of Share With Care a decade ago.

“The 10 years with Share With Care show how far we have come today in the vision of a regulated internet, where we can block illegal content and guide users along the way,” Fredenslund said.

“With the collaboration around blocking and behavioral regulation measures such as FilmFinder, we in Denmark have shown the way to protect content through measures that regulate both content and consumption. With the permanent extension of Share With Care, we look forward to taking the effect of the collaboration to new heights in the coming years.”

A Decade of Blocking Statistics

Rights Alliance also released a small amount of data related to the pirate site blocking measures carried out by the country’s ISPs over the last decade.

“Over the years, the Share With Care collaboration has resulted in 2,217 blocked websites,” Rights Alliance notes.

As far as we can determine, blocked websites seems more likely to mean blocked domains in this instance.

The blue section above represents websites subject to court-ordered blocking measures, around 250 according to the chart. The much larger green section represents mirror sites, proxies and other platforms that appeared after court-ordered blocking of a specific domain, to circumvent blocking measures.

Since these domains are blocked by ISPs voluntarily, we can conclude that the vast majority of domains blocked in Denmark for copyright reasons, are handled on an administrative, company-to-company basis.

Current State of Blocking

No other blocking data was made available this week but TorrentFreak was able to review the latest blocking list issued to ISPs. At the time of writing it contains 892 domains, the majority of which do indeed appear related to circumvention efforts.

For example, the list contains four basic domains for YTS, probably the most visited torrent site in the world right now. The site’s main domain, yts.mx, is obviously a target and the same goes for the other three. Four other domains, including yts.movie and yts.pm, appear to be non-functional, while another 30 refer to sub-domains on unblocking portals such as Unblocklit, Proxybit, and Unblockproject.

Other sites for which circumvention domains also dominate include The Pirate Bay, TorrentDownloads, Torlock, and well, the list goes on. Two unexpected domains on the list include konsumenttestargruppen.com, which according to reports was used for scams , and a very long URL that allows users to access The Pirate Bay’s onion domain, without having to install Tor.

While Rights Alliance is certainly in favor of site blocking, some believe that meddling with DNS is a step too far. Others believe that nobody should have the right to dictate which sites are available, and which ones are not.

Whether intentional, accidental, or simply a quirk of translating Danish to English, isn’t entirely clear. Whatever the reason, local ISP DTKV operates its blocking page on a sub-domain of its main site (dktv.dk) using the Danish word ‘censur’ or ‘censorship’ in English.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Over the past few years, increased enforcement by players in both the private and public sectors has made Denmark one of the riskiest places in Europe for pirate site operators and prolific file-sharers.

Relentless pushback from local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance and its partnership with Denmark’s Special Crime Unit (National enhed for Særlig Kriminalitet (NSK)) has led to many site closures, arrests, and subsequent prosecutions.

The most recent reported conviction saw a 37-year-old man receive a 60-day suspended prison sentence in September for pirating more than a thousand works through local BitTorrent trackers.

In connection with this and other successes over the past few years, last month Rights Alliance revealed that Thomas Heldrup, the anti-piracy group’s Head of Content Protection & Enforcement, had been running an undercover operation in piracy circles since 2016.

Fears of Infiltration

Concerns that a site might have a spy on board certainly aren’t unusual; for many site operators, however, it’s the kind of thing that only ever happens to someone else , usually those perceived to be less careful than them. In some cases that might be true but
Denmark’s distinguishing features as a country may introduce complications.

A relatively small population and a language rarely spoken outside Denmark’s borders, presents an increased chance of local piracy communities overlapping. Combine that with a shared reliance on locally attractive content and one site’s security issues risk becoming a much broader problem, as the last couple of years appear to show.

Until recently, however, there were few signs to suggest those at the top of the so-called ‘ Piracy Pyramid ‘ may also have become targets in Denmark. Nevertheless, some of those with connections to Scene entities are starting to ask questions.

47-Year-Old Arrested in Denmark

In a statement last week, Denmark’s National Unit for Special Crime (NSK) announced that as part of a long-running investigation, a man was arrested on November 22 and then charged with copyright infringement offenses.

NSK said its officers searched the home of a 47-year-old man in South Zealand (Sydsjælland) and seized IT equipment in connection with illegal file-sharing and “copyright infringement of a particularly serious nature.”

“The case is about an organized network that has illegally shared extremely large quantities of films and TV series via file sharing services,” said NSK Police Commissioner Anders-Emil Nøhr Kelbæk.

While noting that NSK had no further information to offer at this time, Kelbæk said he was pleased that NSK had arrested another suspect believed to have played a ‘significant role’ in the unnamed network.

At Least Five Arrests Thus Far

Last week’s arrest was only the latest in a series of arrests carried out as part of the same long-running NSK investigation into the illegal distribution of movies and TV shows.

In late August, NSK arrested four people on suspicion of sharing “extremely large quantities” of movies and TV shows. NSK raided addresses in South-West Jutland, North Zealand and Bornholmand. A 43-year old was arrested at the last location, but it’s claimed he lives elsewhere. In common with last week’s arrest, all were charged on suspicion of “particularly serious” copyright infringement offenses.

In an almost identical statement to that issued last week, Commissioner Anders-Emil Nøhr Kelbæk said the case was about “an organized network that shares extremely large amounts of data, presumably in the form of films and series.”

Does Available Information Really Indicate a ‘Scene’ Bust?

TorrentFreak sources report concerns that last week’s arrest may be linked to Scene groups. Terminology used by NSK doesn’t instantly rule that out and does seem to suggest something potentially more significant than other arrests over the past few years.

According to NSK, the August arrests took place on August 28, 2023. Using information in Scene release databases we looked for Danish Scene groups and/or groups that were releasing Denmark-focused content before that date but then made no releases afterward; while that wouldn’t provide conclusive proof that a group had been targeted, the method has proven useful in the past. Findings as follows:

⦿ Nordic blu-ray release group (including Danish) paused Aug 13, restarted Oct 16. Nothing since
⦿ TV show release group paused Aug 28 to Sep 1 but continued as normal
⦿ At least one TV show group made dozens of releases on Aug 28 suggesting little ‘panic’ on that date

While activity late August suggests nothing especially out of the ordinary, activity since the arrest last week stands in contrast.

Notable Danish content release group inactivity since November 22 arrest as follows:

⦿ ‘HYGGE’ | TV shows | 550+ releases since March 23 | Last release Nov 23, 2023 07:43:39
⦿ ‘HiVE’ | TV shows | 650+ releases since March 23 | Last release Nov 23, 2023 05:03:52
⦿ ‘DKiDS’ | TV shows | 3000+ release since March 23 | Last release Nov 21, 2023 10:34:50
⦿ ‘DANES’ | TV shows | 640+ releases since May 23 | Last release Nov 22, 2023 08:13:21
⦿ ‘JYSK’ | TV shows | 520+ releases since March 23 | Last release Nov 23, 2023 08:20:39

TF is informed that some groups may have gone dark simply out of an abundance of caution. That may or may not include all or none of the above. It’s also possible that the groups have nothing to release. Furthermore, there are many other global groups with no obvious links to Danish content or Denmark that also stopped releasing on November 21. The reasons for this are unknown but holidays in the United States may play a role.

In an information vacuum, rumors are extremely common but if the authorities and/or Rights Alliance used intelligence obtained in other operations to infiltrate Scene groups or their affiliates, it wouldn’t be a surprise. It wouldn’t be surprise to hear that any group downtime was directly linked to turkey and/or alcohol consumption either but in any event, the next couple of weeks should prove informative.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

A government program is using demolition and relocation to remake neighborhoods with immigrants, poverty or crime.