Lithuanian court rules in favour of BitTorrent user

This article is also available in:
Deutsch: [Litauisches Gericht urteilt zugunsten eines BitTorrent-Nutzers | http://www.unwatched.org/node/1797]

A Lithuanian District Court has recently ruled against the anti-piracy
organisation LANVA in a case against a user of the BitTorrent tracker
LinkoManija.net.

Last year, LANVA accused 106 users of LinkoManija.net of sharing
Windows 7 Ultimate and brought one of them to court, which has now
decided in favour of the defendant due to faulty evidence. The evidence
gathered by LANVA consisted of a screenshot of a list of peers as available
on uTorrent and the court considered uTorrent was not a certified evidence
gathering tool.

As none of parties involved was authorised for such an investigation and
therefore the judge stated that LANVA had no right to collect and use the
gathered information. The court also ruled that the techniques for such kind
of evidence had to be approved prior to the use.

Aside from this case, LANVA together with Microsoft sued the alleged
operator of LinkoManija.net in January 2010 demanding about 32 million euro
from the defendant Kestas Ermanas and his company for facilitating the
illegal distribution of Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007.

The case is ongoing and the assets of Kestas Ermanas and his company had
been seized and the associated bank accounts frozen, but the website is
functional. It appears however that the defendant had operated the site only
until the end of 2009. Kestas also stated that Microsoft had never sent them
a proper takedown request. “We informed them that we wanted to cooperate
with them, they just had to give us the links to the infringing torrent
files,” said Kestas who added that “they never wrote back to us.”

Following the recent outcome of LANVA case, it is doubtful whether the
second case would be successful either. LANVA can appeal the decision but
even if they do it, the case will be heard in about a year’s time.

Court Acquits BitTorrent User Citing Faulty Evidence (15.03.2010)
http://torrentfreak.com:80/court-acquits-bittorrent-user-citing-faulty-evidence-100315/

Anti-Piracy Group Reports Torrent Site Users to the Police (8.11.2009)
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-reports-torrent-site-users-to-the-police-091108/

Microsoft Sues Prominent BitTorrent Tracker For $43m (27.01.2010)
http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-sues-prominent-bittorrent-tracker-100127/