Month: November 2016

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Amazon muss etliche Eltern für von ihren Kindern getätigte In-App-Käufe entschädigen. Das entschied ein Gericht und lehnte eine Auszahlung in Form von Gutscheinen ausdrücklich ab. (Amazon, FTC)

Der Elektronikhersteller LG will in Europa stärker auftreten. Dabei soll Deutschland eine wichtige Rolle spielen. Die Südkoreaner verlegen derzeit ihre Europa-Firmenzentrale in den Raum Frankfurt. Der Umzug ist eine große Herausforderung. (LG, Elektroauto)

From an unwanted milestone to a needed but missing license, read the news roundup for the week ending November 13, 2016

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Week in and week out copyright holders scour the Internet to detect and report millions of alleged infringements.

They report these links to Google and other services, with requests to take them offline.

Unfortunately, not all of these allegations are correct. Over the years, we have written dozens of articles on DMCA takedown abuse and mistakes. While these usually focus on other sites, we are sometimes targeted as well.

For example, a few days ago Estonian Theatrical Distribution tried to have two Torrentfreak.com URLs removed from Google’s search results.

The outfit in question owns the local distribution rights for the Dreamworks’ movie Trolls and indirectly accused us of spreading pirated copies.

Of course, reality is a bit more nuanced. If we take a look at the reported URLs it’s immediately clear that they’re not infringing at all. In fact, they’re not even about the movie in question.

As can be seen below, one of the “infringing” links points to a news report about the Swedish invasion of copyright trolls that was canceled last week. The other link is harmless as well, referencing our archive of “copyright trolls” articles.

The takedown notice

Apparently mentioning the word “trolls” in a news article can put you at risk of being scrapped from Google’s search results. Needless to say, these type of mistakes are quite worrisome.

And it’s not the only mistake they’ve made. The same notice also lists a link to a Boxtrolls torrent. While this may be pointing to infringing content, it’s an entirely different movie that’s accidentally targeted for using the word trolls.

Luckily for us, we have Google on our side.

The company wisely decided not to take any action and has kept our content in its search results. However, it’s easy to see how a mistake like this get missed in the millions of reports that come in every week.

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

Vorerst gibt es nur einen Preis und weiterhin kein Lieferdatum für HPs Lap Dock für das Elite X3. Mit dem Zubehör soll das Windows-Mobile-Smartphone zu einem vollwertigen Notebook mutieren. Eigentlich sollte das Dock schon seit Monaten verkauft werden. (Windows-Mobile-Smartphone, Smartphone)

Seit etlichen Monaten finden auf Amazons Webseite Betrugsversuche statt. Teure Elektroartikel werden zu einem Bruchteil des normalen Preises angeboten. Wer bezahlt, ist sein Geld los. Mittlerweile werden auch bestehende Marketplace-Konten gehackt. (Amazon, Onlineshop)

Love to collect cute USB stuffs? Firebox has a new cute flash drive and USB hub that will fit to your need of cutesy. They call it the USB Toaster Hub and Drives, where there are 4 funny looking bread flash drives that will fit into the Toaster USB hub. Heck, they even have their […]

At TorrentFreak we have no interest in reporting on politics, except when it’s relevant to copyright issues.

After the surprising victory of Donald Trump earlier this week, several people asked what this would mean for the country’s stance on piracy and copyright enforcement in general.

While we would love to dissect the issue in detail, there are no concrete policy proposals yet. Neither Trump nor Clinton have gone into detail over the past few months.

So what do we know?

It’s not a secret that Donald Trump made some rather dubious remarks during his election campaign. For example, he suggested that it might be worth considering whether to “close up” the Internet over terrorist threats.

Extreme or not, we believe that extrapolating these kinds of one-liners into copyright policy proposals goes a bit far, to say the least.

A concrete promise Trump has made on copyright issues came a few hours after his election victory. The president-elect vowed to end foreign trade abuses with help from the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), which keeps a close eye on pirate sites.

“I will direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately,” Trump said.

This is tough language. Still, the promise is hardly any different from the general policy that’s been in place over the past several years. After all, identifying and addressing foreign trade abuses is one of the key goals of the USTR.

Also, it’s worth keeping in mind that Trump is not on his own. He needs Congress to steer the country in a new direction, and it may not always be easy to reach consensus.

Trump may very well have a pro-copyright agenda. But would that really change anything? Let’s review some of the copyright-related developments that took place under President Obama’s reign.

– The Department of Homeland Security seized dozens of domain names of alleged copyright infringing websites, leading to various constitutional complaints.

– The Government had to give back some of the seized domains and accidentally took down 84,000 websites.

– President Obama’s IP-Czar laid the groundwork for the controversial SOPA and PIPA bills, which were close to becoming law.

– The Obama administration urged the Supreme Court to keep high staturory damages for copyright infringement intact to deter pirates.

– The U.S. Government tried to have UK student Richard O’Dwyer extradited for operating a linking site.

– The Department of Justice started major criminal prosecutions against the operators of Megaupload and KickassTorrents.

– Several U.S. site owners and other pirates were sent to jail, serving multiple years for copyright infringements.

And the list goes on and on.

Of course things can easily get more extreme, but thus far there haven’t been any concrete signs of that happening.

Ironically, one of Trump’s main promises is to end the TPP trade agreement, which digital rights activists widely condemned for its draconian copyright plans. So that’s definitely not a pro-copyright move.

This article is not an attempt to defend or critisize Trump. However, we do try to break away from all the one-sided and sensationalist analyses by trying to put things in perspective.

Perhaps it’s a good idea to take a step back and just wait and see. There will be plenty of policy proposals during the coming years, just as we’ve seen under Obama. If the Trump administration goes after The Pirate Bay, that would not be a change of course…

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

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