Month: February 2016

Erste Chips im Labor, Testmuster für Partner im Frühling: Micron kommt mit dem neuen GDDR5X-Videospeicher gut voran, der Hersteller hat die ersten Muster in den eigenen Laboren. Ab Sommer 2016 möchte der Hersteller 1-GByte-Speicher in Serie produzieren. (Micron, Grafikhardware)

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The company behind the movie Dallas Buyers Club (DBC) is known not only for making movies, but also by its ancillary business of chasing down alleged Internet pirates in order to force a cash settlement from them.

In several countries the company has been collecting hundreds to thousands of dollars from each of their ‘Joe Public’ targets but its efforts to do so in Australia have been beset with problems.

Through its legal representatives Dallas Buyers Club have now admitted that their battle to obtain the identities of more than 4,700 Aussie Internet subscribers is over.

Michael Bradley, the managing partner of DBC LLC law firm Marque Lawyers, told iTNews that tomorrow’s deadline for DBC to make a further application to the court would pass without a submission.

“It’s certainly a disappointing outcome for [Dallas Buyers Club]. It doesn’t do anything to mitigate the infringement that’s going on – it’s not a particularly satisfactory outcome from that point of view,” Bradley said.

But for those familiar with these cases, mitigating infringement is not the primary aim of DBC.

The company wanted to extract settlements from 4,726 Internet account holders but due to its activities elsewhere, Justice Perram was suspicious that the movie outfit would engage in so-called “speculative invoicing”.

To stop that from happening the Judge ordered the payment of a huge AUS$600,000 bond but the company decided not to pay. Ultimately, Dallas Buyers Club failed to convince the court that it would restrain its activities and keep promises not to demand high settlements from Internet account holders.

While the development is a huge blow to DBC and a significant win for Internet subscribers in Australia, it doesn’t necessarily restrain other companies from attempting to sue alleged pirates in the future.

“That might happen. But if the circumstances and the context of that are close to this one, then you’d expect the same outcome,” Bradley said.

Another element that significantly hampered DBC was the fact that it was based overseas, hence the large bond requirement set by the court. Bradley told iTNews that Australia-based rightsholders might face fewer obstacles.

“I suppose if a distributor who was local wanted to have a try, then they presumably wouldn’t face the same difficulty with security. You might get a different outcome,” he added.

Bradley also suggests that if rightsholders went after individual infringers one at a time then there probably wouldn’t be so much scrutiny by the courts. But of course, DBC is in the business of getting large settlements from large numbers of people, so that approach probably wouldn’t make much sense from a commercial standpoint.

And make no mistake. This was a purely commercial exercise and when the sums didn’t add up, DBC decided to throw in the towel. Whether they will continue their efforts elsewhere will remain to be seen but new territories have the potential to cause new problems, so sticking to what they know could be the most likely course of action.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Es wäre ein wichtiger Schritt hin zu einem Flash-freien Netz. Google will bei seinem Werbedienst Doubleclick künftig auf Flash-basierte Werbemittel verzichten. Bereits im Sommer 2016 soll es losgehen, doch es gibt eine Ausnahme. (Flash, Google)

Opera wird chinesisch. Das Angebot für den kleinen Browser-Hersteller kommt von mehreren Investoren, darunter auch ein bekanntes chinesisches IT-Sicherheitsunternehmen. (Opera, Browser)

LGs kommendes Top-Smartphone wird ein Display haben, das immer eingeschaltet bleibt. Das G5-Display informiert dann über Benachrichtigungen und anstehende Aufgaben. (LG G5, Smartphone)

In recent months Portuguese Internet providers have started to block hundreds of websites that allegedly link to copyright infringing content.

The voluntary blocking regime was formalized last summer through an agreement between several parties including the Ministry of Culture and the Association of Telecommunication Operators.

The agreement allows copyright holders to add new pirate sites without any intervention or oversight from a court, something which has now led to some unusual blocks in recent weeks.

Aside from barring sites on questionable grounds, it appears that a simple typo can also get a website blocked. A few days ago a local news site spotted that one of the blocked domains is Forummaximus.net, which didn’t even exist at the time it was added.

Copyright holders were probably trying to block Forum-maximus.net, with a hyphen, but somewhere in the process someone made a mistake.

Forummaximus.net Not registered (image via)

As a result, Portugal’s blocklist included a domain that wasn’t even registered at the time. After the news broke someone eventually registered the URL, but without any infringing purposes it seems.

Still, visitors who try to reach the newly registered domain get the following error message (translated):

“The site that you’re trying to reach was blocked due to an order from the Regulator Agency.”

At the time of writing the correct site has been blocked as well, but the ‘typo’ error has yet to be corrected.

In this case the collateral damage is limited. However, it’s worrying that the lack of oversight from a court or third party organization can result in non-existent domain names being blocked.

It’s a fine example of how slippery the blocking slope can get.

TorrentFreak has reached out to local anti-piracy group MAPINET, who investigate the sites that are reported, to find out more about what went wrong. Thus far we haven’t heard back.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Für die kommenden Notebook-SoCs vom Typ Bristol Ridge plant AMD hohe Frequenzen: Verglichen mit Carrizo sollen sie von 2 auf 3 GHz steigen - ohne dabei die Leistungsaufnahme zu erhöhen. (Prozessor, AMD)

Microsoft hat ein umfangreiches Update für Windows 10 veröffentlicht - abseits der Insider Builds. Mit der aktuellen Version werden viele lästige Fehler korrigiert und Microsoft reicht bislang vermisste Informationen zu den Windows-10-Versionen nach. (Windows 10, Microsoft)

Im kommenden OS X 10.11.4 wird die Notizen-App von Apple in der Lage sein, Daten von Evernote zu importieren. So kann der Anwender komplett von Evernote auf Apples Lösung umsteigen. (OS X 10.11, Apple)