Month: July 2016

In case readers missed it, copyright holders are very unhappy with YouTube. In recent months the site has developed into a battleground over the DMCA and the entertainment industries’ war with Google, with the record labels making most of the noise.

This week it was the MPAA’s turn to put more pressure on the site, this time by linking to an article published by filmmaker and anti-piracy advocate Ellen Seidler. As can be seen below, it implores YouTube to clean up its act.

"Time for YouTube to get serious about cleaning up all the junk, spam and malware files on its site" https://t.co/DsTwh3GYv7 @voxindie

— MPAA (@MPAA) July 7, 2016

The piece by Seidler is an interesting one, in that it criticizes YouTube for allowing people to upload fake movies that lead people to scammy sites.

In the unlikely event readers haven’t seen them, these fake movies are easily found by typing the name of almost any mainstream film into YouTube’s search box and adding the words “full movie”.

Once accessed, the videos nearly always instruct users to ‘click the link’ below the video to access the full movie. These links rarely, if ever, lead to anything good, and especially not the movie people expect.

While Seidler’s post expresses concern over the dubious sites that YouTube users are sent to, it seems likely that her post is more broadly aimed at chipping away at YouTube’s credibility and reputation. Little doubt that the MPAA’s retweet had that in mind too.

However, taking a step back reveals a much more complex picture.

Seidler correctly notes that these fakes pollute YouTube’s results but she also reports a secondary problem – it makes her anti-piracy work much harder.

“When I search for copies of my film using my Content ID account, I have to wade through dozens of these fake uploads,” Seidler complains.

“Removing them is an incredibly time-consuming task as it seems YouTube has purposely chosen to make the Content ID dashboard as inconvenient as possible for users.”

Of course, this situation is bad for people like Seidler who are trying to protect their content but consider for a moment the tremendous negative effect on pirates.

For many years people were able to type a movie title into YouTube, filter out all clips less than 20 minutes long, and more often than not come up with a decent copy of the movie in question.

Well, no more.

Today, YouTube’s search results are a horrible place to attempt ‘full movie’ piracy and that’s mostly down to the ‘full movie’ scammers.

If anything, one might think that Hollywood would be at least marginally grateful for third-parties infecting would-be pirates with malware or getting them stuck in horrible subscription traps. That’s quality piracy deterrence right there.

Instead, Seidler suggests ways that YouTube could clean up its site, perhaps by detecting and removing these fakes with ContentID. Pirates would certainly appreciate that, but YouTube isn’t likely to oblige.

Proactively removing content in that manner would only invite calls for YouTube do the same for copyrighted content. Before long, the same calls would go out to Google in general, with big implications for its search business.

So for now, both Seidler and would-be pirates are going to have to put up with these fake movie operations. Anti-piracy people will have to figure it out for themselves, but the best advice for regular users is to never click on the links in ‘fake movie’ YouTube descriptions.

Finally, Seidler raises the question of who is behind these scams. One of the outfits she names is TzarMedia.com, a site that has hundreds of negative online reviews.

The rabbit hole seems very, very deep on this one but there seems to be a recurring theme for those with an urge to investigate further. It looks messy, really messy.

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

Beim autonomen Fahren muss der Autopilot unter Umständen moralische Entscheidungen treffen - etwa, wenn sich ein Unfall nicht vermeiden lässt, über die Wahl des Schadens. Nun soll eine Ethik-Kommission unter Vorsitz eines ehemaligen Verfassungsrichters solche Fragen klären. (Autonomes Fahren, Technologie)

Bis zu 4.000 Euro für die Anschaffung eines Elektroautos - aber kaum Interesse: In den ersten Tagen sind kaum Anträge für die Elektroprämie eingegangen. Am besten verkauft sich bislang der Renault ZOE, die Modelle eines deutschen Herstellers folgen auf den Plätzen zwei und drei. (Elektroauto, Internet)

Die Telekom und Huawei probieren ein LTE-Paket aus, das die Spektrum-Effizienz, Zuverlässigkeit und Reichweite der Car-to-Car-Kommunikation verbessern soll. Testfeld ist die A9. Einen Standard gibt es noch nicht. (Huawei, Telekom)

From free to subscription, legal options are winning the war against piracy - read this and other news stories in our news roundup for the week ending 10 July 2016

Continue reading ...

Die Powershot G7 X II ist Canons zweite Kompaktkamera mit 1-Zoll-Sensor. Die erste Version konnte uns nicht recht überzeugen. Ob die neue Generation das ändert, klären wir im Test. (Digitalkamera, DSLR)

Der Apple Store am Berliner Kurfürstendamm ist am Samstagnachmittag geräumt worden, weil Unbekannte eine silbrige Flüssigkeit auf den Tischen und ausgestellten Geräten verteilt hatten. Um was es sich handelt, ist nicht genau bekannt, die Beteiligten sprechen von Gallium. (Apple Store, Apple)

Gaming can be an expensive hobby. The latest Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo game consoles costs hundreds of dollars, and gaming PCs can easily cost several times as much.

Over the past few years a number of companies have tried to shake things up by launching micro-consoles which are typically smaller, cheaper, and less powerful than a PS4, Xbox 360, or most PCs. Results have been mixed at best.

The much-hyped Ouya was a flop.

Continue reading Emtec GEM Box review (micro-console with GameFly streaming support) at Liliputing.

Last year Wikileaks published a searchable database of the emails and documents that were exposed following the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack.

Journalists had already picked out the most juicy details during the months before, but Wikileaks opened it up to the public.

This also allowed search engines such as Google to index all leaked emails, which made them even more widely accessible.

At Sony they were not happy with the exposé and one of the company’s top executives recently decided to take action.

A few days ago Daniel Yankelevits, Senior Vice President Legal Affairs at Sony Pictures, sent a DMCA takedown request to Google asking the search engine to censor Wikileaks’ archive of the hacked emails.

Interestingly, this request appears to be personally motivated, as the only email highlighted is about Mr. Yankelevits himself.

Google search for Daniel Yankelevits

In the email, the human resources department informs the company’s chief counsel Leah Weil that Yankelevits’ salary will increase from $320,000 to $330,000, as his contract allows.

“Daniel’s contract provides for a discretionary annual increase on 3/1 and compensation has come back with a recommendation of 3.1% taking him from $320,000 to $330,000,” the email reads, asking Weil if she approves.

Sony Pictures’ VP of Legal Affairs is not happy that his salary details are now out in the open. Not least because it appears at the top of Google’s search results for his name.

While the desire to have this email scrubbed from the Internet is easily understood, using a copyright claim to achieve this is questionable.

First of all, the reason for the takedown request is that “it’s not right,” which is a rather meager motivation for the Senior Vice President Legal Affairs of such a large company.

“My salary is in Google due to Sony Hack wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/103755 please remove the above on your results page. It’s not right,” it reads.

Secondly, the DMCA notice itself is inaccurate and incomplete.

Technically, the takedown request asks Google to remove the homepage of the leaked email archive, claiming that the email published by Wikileaks is the original content. In other words, even if Google did comply the email discussing the salary would remain online.

What raises the most eyebrows, however, is that the request is personally motivated and has very little to do with copyright. Yankelevits is neither the sender nor the recipient of the email, so even if copyright was an issue, the fact that his salary was exposed is totally irrelevant.

While Sony Pictures Entertainment is listed as the “copyright holder” in the DMCA notice, it’s unknown whether the company is aware of the takedown attempt.

Ironically, the takedown request is only destined to make matters worse for the Sony Pictures’ legal executive. Google has refused to remove the email, so instead of covering it up, Yankelevits has put a big spotlight on his salary. A classic example of the Streisand Effect.

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

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments