Month: May 2016

The controversy over the prevalence of copyrighted material appearing online without rightsholder permission has ramped up to new levels this year, with a somewhat predictable twist.

Apparently in no position to tackle the hundreds of ‘pirate’ sites online today, organizations including the MPAA and RIAA have turned almost entirely on Google, complaining that the search giant does little to stop infringing content appearing in its results.

With the recent Copyright Office DMCA efficacy consultation ringing in everyone’s ears, fresh attacks on Google are conveyed on an almost daily via friendly blogs run by industry supporters. Meanwhile, Google continues to silently process millions of takedown requests every week, precisely none of which relate to infringements carried out by the company.

But as the public criticism of Google mounts, what is less well reported is how impressively the company continues to deal with the abuses of the DMCA carried out by hundreds if not thousands of copyright holders and their hopeless automated bots. Case in point, recent attacks on the BBC.

As one of the world’s most famous and responsible broadcasters the BBC takes copyright infringement and indeed all aspects of the law extremely seriously. However, according to a whole bunch of copyright holders the company’s website is a hive of infringement.

As illustrated in the image below, the BBC has recently been subjected to a wave of copyright infringement allegations from several copyright holders, none of which appear to have any merit.

One of the worst blunders comes from Indian anti-piracy outfit Markscan who on their homepage refer to themselves as a “knowledge partner” of the MPAA.

In a notice sent to Google aiming to protect the rightsholders behind the 2016 Paris ePrix (electric Formula E racing) Markscan demanded the takedown of several hundred links supposedly showing the event live without a license.

Unfortunately the company’s bots fingered the wrong suspect, first trying to take down the BBC iPlayer version of BBC News and later the BBC’s flagship entertainment channel, BBC1.

We didn’t examine in detail all 574 links sent by Markscan but the Yahoo one shown above is also bogus. Furthermore, most of the links appear to reference live streams of the Paris race which took place on April 23, 2016. The notice wasn’t sent until the day after, long after the race had finished. Overall, Google rejected 97% of the Markscan claims.

But the fun doesn’t end there. Waves of notices sent by anti-piracy outfit Topple Track targeted the BBC late March, each informing Google that the broadcaster is infringing on the rights of recording labels. One demanded the takedown of 38 BBC pages, another 40 pages, and sundry others in between.

What all of these takedowns have in common is that they’re all bogus, they’re all abuses of the DMCA, and every single one was somehow spotted by Google and rejected. As outlined earlier, copyright holders are often extremely critical of Google but it appears that far from accepting every notice coming in, Google is actually taking the time to do the right thing and is regularly saving copyright holders from each other.

Some argue that the relatively small percentage of incorrect notices sent is hardly worth mentioning in the overall scheme of things, but when they are your URLs being removed from search, things take on a different light. Thanks to Google’s vigilance BBC iPlayer remains in its indexes, no doubt the Corporation will be grateful for that.

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

Bei einem iTunes-Nutzer verschwanden auf einen Schlag rund 120 GByte an Musikdateien - und Apple weiß auch eine Woche später noch nicht, warum. Trotzdem soll in der kommenden Woche ein Update mit Sicherungsmaßnahmen erscheinen. (iTunes, Apple)

From futile anti-piracy attempts to one man's answer to Game of Thrones piracy, read the news roundup for the week ending 15 May 2016

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Keine Polaris-Technik, sondern vorerst bekannte Modelle unter anderem Namen: AMDs neue Radeon M400 basieren auf den Tonga-, Bonaire- und Oland-Chips. Die alte Pitcairn-GPU fällt weg. (Grafikhardware, AMD)

A court has ordered The Pirate Bay's Swedish domains to be confiscated in a decision that will most likely be appealed again.

The Svea Court of Appeal upheld a ruling by the Stockholm District Court in 2015 that ordered to seizure of both of The Pirate Bay's .se domain names. The earlier ruling established that both domains needed to be seized due to violations of the country's copyright laws, but that IIS.se, the organization responsible for managing .se domain names, was held not responsible for any offences. The prosecutor in that case, Fredrik Ingblad, appealed the decision, but the original verdict was upheld this week.

This means that while IIS is not legally liable, it still has to seize and suspend the Pirate Bay domains, something both ISS and Ingblad agree need to occur.

But even this relatively straight forward court order could turn out to be more complicated than it seems, as according to one of the Pirate Bay's founders, the court has yet to establish the ownership of the domain names.

Both domains are held in the name of Fredrik Neij, one of the piracy site's co-founders, but speaking to TorrentFreak, Neik denies ownership of the domain names, and categorically denies having any more involvement in the website.

"I will appeal on the grounds that I do not own the domain and that I did not commit copyright infringement as I am not involved with the site anymore," Neij told TorrentFreak.

Despite the court order, both .se domains remain active, and thepiratebay.se domain name is still pointing to the main Pirate Bay website.

All over the world, hundreds of researchers are looking into the effects of piracy and copyright legislation.

These studies are interesting from an academic point of view, but they are also crucially important for stakeholders who lobby lawmakers for change.

Hollywood’s MPAA is one of the groups with a vested interest. The organization often uses research to argue their case, and actively criticizes studies that are not in line with their agenda.

In addition, the MPAA is also actively funding research in this area. Most notably, the group sent multiple gifts to Carnegie Mellon’s “Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics” (IDEA), which researches various piracy related topics.

As mentioned previously, MPAA contributed $100,000 to the program in 2012, which was bumped to $912,000 a year later. And it doesn’t stop there.

The organization’s most recent tax filing which appeared online this week shows that they sent another gift in 2014, worth a cool $1,000,000. This is the largest donation the MPAA made during the year, and a significant chunk of their $72 million yearly revenue.

MPAA’s gift

The continued support suggests that the movie industry group is happy with the results IDEA has achieved so far. The research program resulted in the publication of several high quality peer-reviewed papers in recent years, which largely fall in line with the industry’s agenda.

For example, an IDEA paper recently showed that pirate site blockades boost the use of legal services such as Netflix, and a previous paper found that search engines can help to diminish online piracy.

However, the researchers stress that the gift is unrestricted, which means that in no way does it influence the results of their work.

IDEA co-director Rahul Telang informs TorrentFreak that the gift is used to hire researchers and pay for research materials. It is not tied to a particular project.

“The funding allows us to hire research scientists, post-docs, PhD students and masters students for our projects. Many projects are data intensive that require either purchase of expensive data or collection of data which is time consuming,” Telang says.

Telang couldn’t say how much the entire budget for IDEA is, or what gifts it received from the MPAA after 2014.

“Exact funding amount is a bit tricky since the university takes a pot of money as overhead before we can get to use the money. Plus other funding goes up and down,” he says.

In addition to funding IDEA, the MPAA also supports other academic researchers on a smaller scale. Two years ago the group started a grants program inviting academics to pitch their research proposals.

Researchers were offered a $20,000 grant for projects that address various piracy related topics, including the impact of copyright law and the effectiveness of notice and takedown regimes.

The above clearly shows that Hollywood sees academic research as a valuable tool, and indeed, it has cited various studies in its recent lobbying efforts.

Of course it has to be said that MPAA is not the only industry group that finances research. Various companies from the other side of the table, such as Google, do exactly the same.

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

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Wer beim deutschsprachigen Netflix angemeldet ist und etwa in Frankreich seine Serien schauen will, kann das bisher legal nicht. Das soll sich jetzt innerhalb der EU ändern - allerdings haben die EU-Vertreter eine Hintertür eingebaut. (Verbraucherschutz, Internet)

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