The Pirate Bay crew had already essentially been disbanded, the site dissected, and its remnants sold to a somewhat dubious company that simply wants to turn the site's visitors into little P2P cash cows. So an announcement today over at the official Pirate Bay blog that they're officially shutting down the site's tracker probably surprises nobody. According to the site, they're not shutting the site down however -- they'll still annoy the entertainment industry by going trackerless and using the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for file distribution:According to the site, with the use of a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), downtime and outages should be less of a problem. According to a follow up report at Torrent Freak, the site owners are apparently trying to convince other BitTorrent portals to ditch torrents entirely and decentralize, perpetuating the entertainment industry's game of whack a mole. Sweden's The Legal has more on how this impacts the site founders' court case.

Earlier this week we reported how a free, tiny (1,000 feet total) municipal Wi-Fi network in Ohio was forced to shut down after an MPAA legal warning. A network user had apparently transferred a file copyrighted by Sony Pictures, and instead of risking a costly legal fight, the network decided to simply shut down.

Verizon already forwards copyright notices to customers who are tagged by the entertainment industry's intelligence-gathering organizations, but they don't disclose the customer who was actually using the IP address at the time the infringement occurred. In a move that signals a ramp-up in their cooperation with the entertainment industry, CNET cites inside sources at Verizon who say the company is about to launch a new letter notification campaign in cooperation with the RIAA.

Techdirt directs our attention to the fact that a free Wi-Fi network in Ohio was shut down completely after just one user was found to be uploading a copyrighted file. According to the Coshocton Tribune, Sony Pictures Entertainment sent a copyright complaint to the network operator, who in turn decided to shut the entire network down. Safe harbor protections should have given the county the right to at least keep the network operational while they investigated the culprit, and shutting the entire network down seems absurd -- but perhaps the local government didn't want the legal hassle. Instead of admitting the move was excessive, the MPAA of course takes the opportunity to preach about the evils of piracy to the Tribune.

The entertainment industry would really like ISPs to play content police, booting P2P users from their networks. But given ISPs don't want to take on the added expense and liability for an effort that might not work anyway, the entertainment industry will try to pass laws forcing them to.

Torrent Freak explores how the latest version of the popular uTorrent BitTorrent client is slightly more intelligent, detecting network congestion and adjusting its behavior in order to compensate. uTP is designed to be more network friendly, measuring the time a packet takes to get from peer A to peer B, detecting problems, then throttling speed (usually upload) to help compensate. "This means that the new uTorrent will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic in their networks," says TorrentFreak, something we're sure BitTorrent hopes is the case, but which doesn't necessarily make it true. The uTP 2.0 beta client is currently being tested by "a couple of hundred thousand people," according to BitTorrent's VP of Product Management Simon Morris.

ISPs aren't the only ones against the UK's new plan to kick repeat offenders off of the Internet. Techdirt notes that Britain's law enforcement and intelligence agencies are coming out against the proposed "three strikes" idea, arguing that it would make tracking criminals more difficult.

In the past few weeks, two different Internet traffic studies from Cisco and Arbor networks have indicated that P2P's overall Internet capacity consumption is down. Or more accurately, that P2P's slice of the Internet capacity pie is starting to be dwarved by quickly growing video consumption. Cisco's study (which we covered yesterday) pretty clearly indicates this relativity, but Arbor's indicated that P2P traffic had "declined dramatically, leading to reports that P2P was "dying." Of course GigaOM (via Techdirt) notes this relativity, but there's something else in the piece that seems more pertinent:In other words, Arbor indicates that as ISPs crack down harder on P2P use, more P2P users are using encryption and as such can't be tracked. That would seem to suggest the numbers may not only be relative -- they may be completely wrong.

In the UK, the government is still working toward the entertainment industry's goal of booting heavy P2P users off of the Internet, should they be caught transferring pirated material three times. As we've covered at length, this is a bad idea for a number of reasons.

France lawmakers have again passed a proposal that would boot pirates off of the Internet after three offenses. Previous efforts to pass such legislation were struck down by the French constitutional court, which ruled that assumption of guilt and the termination of Internet connectivity violated French citizen rights. The new proposal contains a "fast track" system that would give a Judge all of five minutes to determine a broadband user's guilt or innocence before moving on to the next case. The new law now simply has to gain approval from a small committee from both houses of parliament, but will also need to pass muster with the French constitutional courts.

While the entertainment industry dreams of booting heavy P2P users from ISP networks (ignoring the fact these are potential customers), ISPs don't want the extra cost of playing content babysitter. ISPs like citing a 2008 UK study that claims 72% of P2P users would stop with just a warning, or a similar 2009 study that puts that number closer to 64%.

Yesterday the ISP for the Pirate Bay, adhering to a Swedish court order, pulled the plug on the popular BitTorrent website -- though it wasn't long before the website found a new provider and came back online. Black Internet, The Pirate Bay's former ISP, now says they've had their network sabotaged, but while the timing's suspicious, there's no evidence connecting the two events -- yet. Meanwhile, it appears unlikely that the $4 million the site's founders are supposed to pay will ever actually see collection, while Sweden launches an official criminal probe into the website's sale.

In April, founders of the popular BitTorrent search site The Pirate Bay were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement. In June, the folks behind the website announced they'd be selling the website to a Swedish company that hopes, probably unrealistically, to turn the site's userbase into some kind of sustainable business model. As of today the website appears to be down, after Stockholm’s district court pressured the site's provider to yank the website offline. According to TorrentFreak the website has found a new provider but DNS information may not yet be updated for many. Meanwhile, new questions have popped up surrounding the legitimacy of the website's new owners, the "Global Gaming Factory."

As noted back in July, even if popular Bit Torrent website The Pirate Pay dies a slow death under new ownership, the site itself will simply be copied and replaced by a slew of alternative sites -- continuing the game of whack a mole between the entertainment industry and P2P pirates. Torrent Freak notes that just days before the website gets acquired by new owners, there's now a 21.3 gigabyte copy of the website and a record of all 873,671 torrent files hosted on its servers (obviously not to be confused with the terabytes-worth of content this data points to).

Last month we explored how Comcast and Sandvine's network management technology continues to evolve. Unlike Comcast's last system, which throttled upstream traffic for all users regardless of consumption, this new system identifies customers and throttles back consumption only if they're on a congested node -- and they're a particular reason why.

Last month the Pirate Bay founders surprised a lot of people by announcing that the popular Torrent site would be sold to a Swedish company named the Global Gaming Factory (GGF). Two weeks ago, Wayne Rosso, ex-CEO of Grokster came on board and began telling the press he wanted to start charging access to the website and harness user computer power in an effort to make money. According to Torrent Freak you can forget all of that, because the deal is all but dead. Rosso has already quit his position out of frustration at GGF’s CEO, and it looks like the funding won't be available to complete the deal.

When the Pirate Bay announced late last month that the popular BitTorrent portal would be purchased, the new owners raised eyebrows by announcing they'd like to "introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site." That's well, uh -- interesting for a website that has spent the last few years laughing at legal threats with their Swedish middle finger securely raised to the entire content industry and their lawyers.

This week new owner Wayne Rosso (of Grokster fame) tells CNET his plans for the Pirate Bay involve customers paying the website a small fee in order to trade content, with the Pirate Bay striking distribution deals with both the entertainment industry and individual ISPs. story continues..

France's Constitutional Council recently gutted the country's new three strikes law, which would have forced ISPs to kick heavy P2P users from the Internet. According to the Council, preventing users from accessing the Internet was an excessive punishment, given broadband services are quickly becoming a utility for many.

Sweden's new Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) anti-piracy law gives copyright holders in Sweden the ability to force ISPs in the country to hand over the names and addresses of users who transmit pirated material. Except Swedish broadband ISPs Bahnhof and All Tele started deleting consumer IP data, rendering the law somewhat useless. After posting a consumer survey, Swedish ISP Ephone is listening to their customers, and appealing a court order demanding they hand over the IP addresses of P2P users. Ephone was the first Swedish ISP taken to court under the new IPRED law, and faces fines of 750,000 kronor ($95,000) for not complying.

As noted, Minnesota mom Jammie Thomas was recently found guilty of copyright infringement for sharing songs via P2P, and was fined $1.9 million dollars ($80,000 per song). Quickly after the verdict, the Electronic Frontier Foundation questioned whether the extremely high damages were constitutional, citing past instances where the Supreme Court ruled against disproportionate damage awards intended to "send a message." As had been expected, Thomas's lawyer yesterday requested a new trial because "grossly excessive" punitive awards have been ruled unconstitutional in the past. Thomas is also expected to file an appeal.