The UK Intellectual Property Office, a government agency which advises the creative industries on copyright, has been hit by the ongoing Operation Payback denial of service campaign run by file-sharing activists.
The IPO’s site is currently offline, after more than a day of denial of service attacks co-ordinated by Operation Payback, a group which denies charges of vandalism, and claims to be an organised protest against “the reign of extreme pro-copyright” organisations. The weekend has also seen attacks against copyprotected.com, a site run by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Gene Simmons, bass player in 70s rock band Kiss.
In September, Payback launched a high-profile attack against ACS:Law, a firm already facing criticism for issuing letters which request copyright payments from users believed to have downloaded and shared content illegally, resulting in ACS:Law’s email files being published, and revealing apparent breaches of data protection rules at the firm. BT also appears to have passed customer details to ACS:Law, unencrypted.
The current wave of attacks has increased in sophistication. The copyprotected.com site was hit by a DNS cache poisoning attack, instead of the simple denial of service attacks which the campaign has used previously.
Last week saw a setback for music industry copyright enforcement, as an Irish judge ruled that disconnecting file-sharers may breach EU law.
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