And those domains that were shut down without having SOPA already written into law? The huge bulk of them related to non-official NFL Jerseys.

The story about the Jersey takedown operation is here at Torrentfreak.

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Now Jagadish of Aiplex sends me this threatening letter, accusing me of causing defamation to his company and causing his company to suffer losses due to damages and threats from hackers. Honestly, I never knew I had such awesome power by using hyperlinks to stories others have written!

From: Aiplex AntiPiracy [mailto:antipiracy@aiplex.com]
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2011 4:53 AM
To: dr.jones@belch.com
Cc: Girish; Mahesh R
Subject: Request

This has reference to the below article on your webpage, we kindly request you to deactivate the link as the article is defaming the company’s image & its prospects. It was mis-interpreted by the news agency which was blown out of proportion by some of the pirates across the globe. And subsequently we have to face damages/threats from the pirates & undergo immense losses due to their attack on our servers/websites etc.

Although, we did declare that we are not involved in any of those activities as published in the article, we still have to face the consequences for reasons unknown.

Below is the link for your reference:

http://www.belch.com/blog/category/movies/page/3/

We kindly request you to deactivate at the earliest possible please.

Appreciate your help on this matter.

Jagadish
Support Operations
Aiplex Software Pvt. Ltd.
No. 2943/E, 1st floor, Opp Maruthi Mandir,
Service Road, Vijayanagar,
Bangalore – 560 040
Ph : +91 80 23305411 / 12 / 13
Email : antipiracy@aiplex.com
Website : www.aiplex.com

To which I responded:

Please stop DDoSing me you evil bastards!

Now I get the following response from a lawyer for aiplex, who I’m sure has belch.com in the sites of his nefarious DDoS botnet:

I did clarify that we are not into such unscrupulous activity pls understand that it was a mis-interpretation by a news agency.
Anyways, it is your prerogative to keep it active or disable the link.
U have a nice weekend Patrick.
Best,
Girish Kumar N
Managing Director
Aiplex Software Pvt. Ltd.
Bangalore
Ph : +91 80 23305411 / 12 / 13
Mb : +91 98451 28280
Email : girish@aiplex.com
Website : www.aiplex.com

Confidentiality & Non-Disclosure Warning: This message is intended for the exclusive use of the person or entity to which it is addressed. It may contain information that is confidential/privileged, and must be treated as such. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying or making a decision in reliance of its content is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message by error, please, destroy the message and kindly notify us immediately. Inappropriate/unauthorized use of the information shall be dealt with the applicable confidentiality and non-disclosure laws. Please note that while we scan all e-mails for viruses we cannot guarantee that any e-mail is virus-free and accept no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this email.

I snort loudly, by the way, for every lawyer who sends out a clear text email with a retarded non disclosure warning appended to it. I can disclose anything I want, and I dare anyone to find a law that says posting something like this is a breach of any confidentiality laws.

Who is the Girish Kumar who is spending so much time emailing me? This guy pictured here. The story from theAge in Australia describes further how Girish Kumar was bragging about launching DoS attacks against websites that link to movie downloads.

Anyways, I finally responded:

Wait a minute. Are you accusing me of defamation or not? Am I causing you to suffer damages and threats because of hackers or not? Your email seemed to imply this, and my own legal team will need clarification. And of course, I expect if I don’t comply you will immediately DDOS me, right? That’s what you guys do, right? Send threats and then strong arm/abuse people to bow to your every demand to remove links? So even if you talk about piracy its as bad as committing piracy because now you are going to wreak havoc on my internets page because I linked to a story about you guys running huge DDOS operations against pirates?

Lets see what they say next! In the mean time, Girish has joined other legal scholars who have decided to send me threatening emails. At least this one’s not a clown.

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So far they have evacuated the Outer Banks, Virginia Beach and other areas. I know three days isn’t much time for a warning, but I really hope we don’t have to see anyone pushing anyone through flooded streets on the news again. So Baltimore, Newport News and Harlem, please head toward the mountains, okay?

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That’s London Bridge, looking at the north bank of the Thames. This shot was taken right next to the replica of Francis Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, that circumvented the globe, pictured below.

And, here is a panorama of the site. And yes, I was certainly drinking a few delicious English ales at the time.

This post gets the pirate tag because Drake died after attempting to take San Juan, Puerto Rico from the Spanish.

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From NatGeo here:

(the sword) was found amid the North Carolina wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the flagship of the infamous 18th-century pirate.

Since 1997, archaeologists have been excavating the Queen Anne’s Revenge. The sword hilt—found in pieces but reassembled for this picture—is among their latest finds and was revealed to the public this month.

After running aground on a sandbar in 1718 near the town of Beaufort, the ship was abandoned but likely remained intact and partly above water for as long as a year before collapsing and disintegrating.

“In any event,” he said, “the pirates would have had ample opportunity to take anything that they thought valuable.” The newfound hilt may have been left behind because it was unwanted, or it may have been inaccessible.

Blackbeard’s brief career as a pirate lasted only about two years, but during that time he became one of history’s most feared outlaws. Operating in the West Indies and off the coast of colonial America, he struck terror into the hearts of commercial ships’ captains and once held the entire city of Charleston, South Carolina, hostage.

This one man, Ed Teach, aka Blackbeard, once blockaded an entire port city with just the help of his merry band of cutthroats.

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From Wired here:

Three of the admins behind The Pirate Bay are all still guilty, a Swedish appeals court decided on Friday, but their jail time has been reduced. Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom’s prison sentences have all been reduced from the original one year to between 4 and 10 months each, though the trade-off is an increase in damages that they must pay to the music and movie industries.

The Swedish district court found four of the Pirate Bay members guilty of assisting copyright infringement in April of 2009, despite the fact that the site never hosted any of the files being shared. The four were sentenced to a year in prison each plus a shared 30 million kronor fine ($4.26 million at today’s conversion rates).

Now, three of the four will be able to get out of jail early—but their shared fine has been bumped up to 46 million kroner (just over $6.5 million). That’s still lower than the 117 million kronor fine initially sought by content owners, but definitely nothing to sneeze at.

And Sunde is still being defiant, planning to appeal to the Supreme court. Do you think they will be able to ask torrent users to help them pay their fine? That would be like they had bought the music after all, but I somehow don’t think anyone will donate money to help them out.

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Brian writes:

Security weaknesses in the hugely popular file-sharing Web site thepiratebay.org have exposed the user names, e-mail and Internet addresses of more than 4 million Pirate Bay users, according to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.com.

An Argentinian hacker named Ch Russo said he and two of his associates discovered multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities that let them into the user database for the site. Armed with this access, the hackers had the ability to create, delete, modify or view all user information, including the number and name of file trackers or torrents uploaded by users.

Russo maintains that at no time did he or his associates alter or delete information in The Pirate Bay database. But he acknowledges that they did briefly consider how much this access and information would be worth to anti-piracy companies employed by entertainment industry lobbying groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), each of which has assiduously sought to sink The Pirate Bay on grounds that the network facilitates copyright infringement.

Actually, if the information was obtained illegally, it would be worthless to the MPAA and RIAA since that information would not be allowed to be used in court. But that would be absolutely hilarious to turn the tables on the data thieves. He should have uploaded the entire database to Wikileaks, but wait, you can’t do that since that site’s submission process is still broken.

Of course, all of the users of PirateBay download and upload only legitimate files, and never pirated material, right? The Pirates have been scuppered.

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From the Telegraph here:

Five Somali men have protested that they were shark fisherman not pirates despite being intercepted off Somalia’s coast after attacking a Dutch vessel with rocket launchers and assault rifles.

Europe’s first modern trial for the 17th century crime of “sea robbery” has opened in Rotterdam amid protestations of innocence from the accused.

The men, facing jail terms of nine to 12 years, are accused of attacking and attempting to hijack the Samanyolu, a Dutch Antilles-flagged ship, while it was sailing in the Gulf of Aden in January 2009.

Farah Ahmed Yusuf, 25, accused the cargo ship of attacking the Somalis after engine failure had forced them to abandon their shark fishing expedition and seek help.

“The intention was to fish,” he said.

“As we came closer, we put our hands in the air. While we had our hands in the air, they shot at us. They attacked us.”

Seems like a pretty light sentence for something like this too. European justice is way too nice.

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From the AP here:

Following high level complaints about “imperfections” in international law, Russia announced Tuesday that captured Somali pirates “have all died.” A Russian official claimed that 10 pirates seized by Russian special forces aboard an oil tanker last week were quickly freed but then died on their way back to the Somali coast.

They did not elaborate on how the pirates died, deepening a mystery that has prompted speculation the pirates were executed by commandos who had freed a Russian oil tanker seized in waters 500 miles (800 kilometers) east of Somalia’s coast.

“They could not reach the coast and, apparently, have all died,” the official said.

Russian officials have said one of the 11 pirates was killed during a gunbattle when the Russian special forces stormed the tanker on Thursday. The others, some said to have been wounded, were brought aboard a Russian destroyer.

Officials initially said they would be taken to Russia for trial, but the Defense Ministry said Friday they’d been released because of “imperfections” in international law. The statement was met with skepticism, especially in light of a comment made by the Russian president.

“We’ll have to do what our forefathers did when they met the pirates” until the international community comes up with a legal way of prosecuting them, Dmitry Medvedev said on the day the ship was stormed.

I’m pretty sure that International law dictates that you can kill pirates if they attack you. Nice to see that Russia aren’t pussies who worry about what the International community thinks of them. And I’m pretty sure they don’t take kindly to illegal immigrants either, but you don’t hear about folks protesting them do you?

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But what I want you to notice is where all of the pirates are: Along the coasts of Islamic countries- Along Thailand, the Indian coast, the Arabian Peninsula, and of course along the Ivory Coast and Ethiopian waters. There are pirate problems in Morocco too.

Leftist Indians along Peru and Ecuador’s coasts are clearly marked along with one outpost in the Caribbean, which must be Jack Sparrow or Venezuelans.

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