While lawmakers are arguing over SOPA and Protect IP - two bills that could change the way the Internet works in order to fight piracy - it seems that many staffers on Capitol Hill are spending a lot of time downloading movies, TV shows, music, games and books via BitTorrent. According to a report from TorrentFreak over 800 IP's that originate from Capitol Hill are at the BitTorrent trough, even as they write laws against illegal downloading and file-sharing.

TorrentFreak has released its list of the most used search terms on BitTorrent in 2011. The results might surprise some - particularly rights holders who see most file-sharers as dirty, unwashed masses who spend all day stealing. The list, which offers the top 50 most used search terms, has three choices at the top spot that don't even refer to a copyrighted work. 

The Dutch Parliament has come to the conclusion (once again) that downloading movies and music for personal use should be considered fair use and not be punishable by law. Despite this, some in the current government have been trying to find a solution to deal with piracy problems and have pushed for a new bill to make it unlawful across the board. This has made for some interesting political theater, but it's going to be a tough fight for those that want to change things in the region.

It must be tough to push hard for bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP when your employees or members are downloading illegal files. According to a report on TorrentFreak, someone from both Homeland Security and the RIAA (the trade group that represents the music industry) have been downloading popular music. The IP addresses associated with these groups were unearthed on YouHaveDownloaded.com, a site that databases the IP's and downloads of Torrent users.

UK service provider Sky is the second company compelled by legal actions from Motion Picture Association to block site Newzbin. The MPA hopes that this will keep Sky customers from accessing the site. Earlier this year service provider BT was compelled to block the site after a court order, and the MPA has vowed to force other service providers in the UK like TalkTalk and Virgin Media. Newzbin's members-only pages provide links to pirated films and music, but they don’t actually host any pirated content.

As members of Congress fight amongst themselves about SOPA in committee today, one site is outing proponents of the bill for illegally downloading copyrighted material. This is according to YouHaveDownloaded.com, which tracks IP addresses that use BitTorrent sites.  With those IP addresses in hand, the site then matches them with a list of files that have been downloaded.

A TorrentFreak report asserts that CD Projekt has hired a law firm in Germany to go after those who downloaded DRM-free copies of The Witcher 2 - even as it extolled the virtues of its games being DRM-free. CD Projekt was not available for comment at the time of this writing due to the late hour in its home country of Poland - but we hope to bring you an official response to this story as soon as it becomes available.

A new report by the Swiss government comes to the conclusion that file-sharing is not a significant problem and that existing Swiss law is sufficient enough. Swiss law allows for downloading copyrighted content for personal use. The report studied and rejected three proposed changes to Swiss law when it come to file-sharing: a three-strike law similar to France's, Internet filtering to block sites that traffic in copyrighted files, and collective licensing regime that would impose a fee on all Swiss internet users that would in turn allow for unlimited file-sharing.

The Witcher 2 developer CD Projekt RED estimates that 4.5 million copies of its action-RPG have been pirated. The game has sold 1 million copies through various channels. Speaking to PC Gamer, CEO and co-founder Marcin Iwinski said that the number is also a conservative number.

Left-leaning political blog DailyKOS joins the editorial pages of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times in opposition of the House's Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate's Protect IP Act. In a post titled "Congress is close to destroying the internet (no hyperbole)," DailyKOS says that it is not hyperbole when they say that lawmakers, big Pharmaceutical companies, and the recording, and movie industries are out to destroy the internet.

While Americans were enjoying Thanksgiving last Thursday Australia's Internet service providers held a meeting to come to a consensus on how to deal with illegal file-sharing in the country.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is taking up arms against the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and they want your help to do it. The advocacy that supports internet rights and freedom of speech online says that these new bills are "a threatening sequel to last year's COICA Internet censorship bill" and that this legislation "invites Internet security risks, threatens online speech, and hampers Internet innovation."

The Texas family court judge who was shown whipping his teenage daughter in a YouTube video has been suspended by the Texas Supreme Court. The seven and a half minute video was from a 2004 incident. It showed Judge William Adams viciously beating his daughter with a belt because she downloaded illegal music and games from the Internet. In rendering its decision, the court did not detail the reason for the order of suspension that was made public Tuesday.

According to a new report on Net Neutrality from Sweden users of mobile broadband services will be sad to hear that not all of their traffic is being treated fairly. While most internet traffic is left unhindered, a report from the organization responsible for Sweden’s .SE national domain reveals that some operators have been systematically slowing down BitTorrent transfers, while others are blocking them altogether.

Illegal downloads of game software has increased in the United Kingdom, according to new data released by research firm Envisional. The firm claims that "illicit game downloads" in the UK climbed 20 percent over the last five years and that the five top games of 2010 were illegally accessed online almost one million times. The firm did not name the five games it claimed were downloaded millions of times.

In the summer of this year law enforcement agencies in several European countries conducted raids and made arrests related to movie streaming links portal Kino.to and file-hosting sites such as Duckload.com. Duckload lost 400 servers to police, worth more than 2 million dollars in total. While police managed to nab most of the targets they were looking for one man managed to escape apprehension. The net has finally fallen on that man. After five months of evading police the man known believed to be Tim C has been arrested in Germany.

This week British Telecom (BT) began a court ordered block of Newzbin 2. Newzbin 2 is a members-only site which aggregates “illegally copied material" commonly shared in Usenet discussion forums. The site is being blocked thanks to the legal actions of the Motion Picture Association, who managed to get a UK court to block the site. The MPA describes Newzbin as a "criminal organization whose business model is based on wholesale copyright infringement". Newzbin likely has a similar opinion of the MPA and organizations like it.

A Texas Family Court judge is now under investigation by the state's top law enforcement agency - the Texas Rangers - after a video surfaced of him beating his 16-year-old daughter Hillary Adams for downloading music and games from the Internet. The video was shot in 2004, but someone claiming to be his daughter posted the video on YouTube on October 27. The Aransas County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams was running for re-election.

File-sharing software company FrostWire has settled its dispute with the Federal Trade Commission and called the agency's complaint against them as the best bug report the company has ever gotten. The FTC filed a complaint against FrostWire in federal court saying that it was disregarding the privacy of its users by making freshly downloaded files in the program publicly shared when completed by default. But the FrostWire team approached the court case in a way most companies wouldn't.

A new report published by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research claims that BitTorrent users may actually make ISP's money. For two years researchers monitored a sample of 500,000 people in 169 countries. They found that (aside from showing that BitTorrent users downloaded an increasingly large amount of data) large ISPs including Comcast are actually making money off BitTorrent traffic. The goal of the research was to determine the impact of BitTorrent usage on networks, in terms of traffic and the costs.

Taking a cue from North American lawmakers, politicians in the United Kingdom are planning on creating laws to deal with supposed illegal streaming of copyrighted content. The warning came from UK Communications Minister Ed Vaizey in a speech at the Intellect Consumer Electronics in London. In that speech Vaizey said that a "voluntary code of practice" being drawn up by US ISPs and content owners might be a "game-changer" in other countries. And by other countries, he means his country.

"If people are streaming live football without permission we should look at ways we can stop them," he said. "People have the right to earn money from content they create."

While he remained silent on what was decided or discussed at last week's meeting between ISPs and content providers to discuss website blocking, he did say that what is going on in the United States is "leading the way."

Earlier this month a report from the United Nations condemned the use of "three strikes" rules that inevitably lead to file-sharers being disconnected from the Internet for a period of time. The report said that Internet access is a basic right of every man and that taking that right away is a human rights violation.

Last Friday several countries agreed with that report's findings and formerly endorsed it. Last week Sweden made remarks before the UN Human Rights Council that endorsed the bulk of the report's findings, including the harsh criticism of three strikes rules. The surprise was that the statement was signed by 40 other countries including the United States, Canada, Sweden, Brazil, India, Japan, Poland, Turkey, and even New Zealand.

The United Kingdom and France, who have "three strikes" laws on the books to deal with file-sharers, did not sign the statement.

The United Nations adopted a report today that says that disconnecting file-sharers from the Internet is a violation of human rights. The Report of the Special Rapporteur was published in May. The report focused on the protection of freedom of opinion and expression, and moves by various governments to take away an individual’s Internet access.

"While blocking and filtering measures deny users access to specific content on the Internet, States have also taken measures to cut off access to the Internet entirely," read the report.

The report goes on to say that various anti-file-sharing laws violate international law:

The new head of the U.S. Copyright Office says that illegal video streaming should be a felony. The new Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante spent her first day testifying at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, giving her approval to the IP Enforcement Czar’s recommendation that the government should stop treating illegal streaming offenses as "unauthorized performances" and start classifying it as a serious crime, or "unauthorized reproductions and distributions." The White House backs the IP Czar's recommendations. This would turn illegal streaming into a felony - up from a less serious misdemeanor charge.

Pallante said the following before the House Judiciary Committee hearing:

While some judges are perfectly content to listen to arguments from lawyers representing the entertainment industry that are far-fetched and convoluted, it seems that a growing number of federal judges are getting tired of the modus operandi of firms involving thousands of defendants who lawsuit filers don't even have real names for. One federal judge has had enough of the John Doe filings in his court.

On May 4 attorney John Steele filed a case on behalf of New York-based Boy Racer, a niche porn company, over alleged file-sharing of its film L.A. Pink. The case was randomly assigned to Judge Milton Shadur out of the Illinois District court. Two days later Steele, apparently seeing the weakness in the case, decided to ask for a dismissal. This rubbed the judge the wrong way and he let the attorney know in the strongest terms possible.

The judge issued a memorandum order that opened with the following:

From the this-is-probably-a-conflict-of-interest-department comes a story from TorrentFreak on U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell. Apparently, before she was a U.S. District Court judge, Howell was a Recording Industry Association of America lobbyist and helped with the DMCA.

Howell’s resume shows that she is very familiar with U.S. copyright laws. In fact, she may have helped write some of them. She served as General Counsel of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and helped draft several prominent intellectual property protection laws, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Deterrence Act and the No Electronic Theft Act - according to TorrentFreak.

TorrentFreak says that a new report about the costs of piracy to various industries is overblown and in some cases an outright manipulation of numbers. Reports on piracy do tend to be overblown, or at the very least hard to substantiate because they tend to contain a lot of industry estimates. In other words, it is a lot harder to track the activities of pirates and file-sharers than it is to track sales. Hell, the games industry cannot even accurately track digital sales because it doesn't have the full access it needs (they are at least working on it, according to NPD and UKIE).

According to a report on UK-based Computer & Video Games, Epic Games and People Can Fly's Bulletstorm has been leaked onto Torrent sites around the world this morning. According to the site, full beta code of the game for Xbox 360 is being downloaded from file-sharers and played - according to online chatter from pirates.

While this is not an uncommon occurrence ahead of a world-wide game release, it is probably disconcerting to the game’s developers and publishing partner EA. Earlier this week Crysis 2 and Killzone 3 were leaked to file-sharing sites.

Get the real thing next week. Bulletstorm is due for release for Xbox 360, Windows PC, and PS3 February 22 in North America and February 25 in Europe.

The Recording Industry Association of America and its partners at the International Intellectual Property Alliance recently submitted their ‘piracy watchlist’ recommendations to the Office of the US Trade Representative. The RIAA pointed to two countries as being the worst of the worst when it comes to intellectual property theft: Spain and our comrades to the north - Canada.

This is particularly interesting because this week Spain passed a tough new law to combat piracy. The Sinde law (nicknamed for its sponsor) is aimed at shutting down file-sharing sites that traffic in illegal downloads. Even though the public and some in the Spanish movie industry opposed the law, it will become the rule of the land by summer, says TorrentFreak. But the RIAA claims this is just a baby step and that even more needs to be done to combat theft.

A case started by porn king Larry Flynt that targeted thousands of John Doe defendants has been tossed out of court, creating a potential problem for lawyers representing the entertainment industry's fight against file-sharers. Last year Larry Flynt Publications filed lawsuits against thousands of anonymous defendants for a porn parody film called "This Ain't Avatar XXX." The problem for lawyers representing the company was that ISP Time Warner was reticent to reveal the real identities of the IP owners lawyers had obtained. Without those real names, it was next to impossible to find out who exactly was illegally downloading and sharing the film.