After months of waiting, the Ipredator anonymity service from the founders of The Pirate Bay has finally opened its doors to the public. For 5 euros a month users can now hide all their Internet traffic, including torrent downloads, from third party outfits who might want to spy on their downloading habits.


In the last year, pressure from the entertainment industries on ISPs and governments to crack down on copyright infringers has steadily increased, resulting in ISPs sending out mass copyright warnings. This, of course, is coupled with the looming specter of three-strikes legislation aimed at disconnecting copyright infringers.

File-sharers on the other hand haven’t been sitting still either, as many have chosen to negate these initiatives by going anonymous.

Users of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks have increasingly turned to solutions that hide their identities from the outside world, rendering these new anti-piracy initiatives useless. The IPREDator service from the founders of The Pirate Bay opened up to the public this week, and is undoubtedly the most talked about

The Netherlands-based file-sharing website Mininova has removed all torrents that enabled users to download copyright-protected material. The move follows a ruling in a Netherlands district court three months ago ordering the firm to remove links to illegal content.

The court said that Mininova's notice and take down policy was insufficient to keep it operating within the law.

The news is the latest in an ongoing campaign against file-sharing sites.

The European Parliament has approved the controversial Telecoms Package, which means that internet users can be disconnected for illegal file-sharing if their guilt can be proved.

The new laws were scheduled to be passed months ago but had been held up by attempts by some countries to enshrine internet access as a “human right” within the regulation. That would have impeded plans by the French and UK governments to sever illegal file-sharers’ internet connections.

Since European ministers reached a compromise this month, the law has been passed and national regulators have until May next year to implement the regulation.

Is Sweden, the only country to have sent a member of the Pirate Party to the European Parliament, finally giving up its swashbuckling ways?
When Sweden's IPRED anti-piracy law went into effect earlier this year, Internet traffic across the country plummeted overnight—a sign that P2P users, fearing exposure at last, were abandoning their existing copyright infringement tools. The Pirate Bay defendants were found guilty by a Swedish court earlier this year, and the site's ISP are now under assault by the music and movie industries.