Month: February 2020

Das Smithsonian Institute hat 2,8 Millionen Abbildungen seiner Sammlung in 2D und 3D auf einer Open-Access-Plattform veröffentlicht. Mit der fortlaufenden Digitalisierung sollen weitere folgen. (Open Access, Internet)

Das Carbon 1 Mk II ist ein Smartphone aus echter Kohlenstofffaser und entsprechend leicht sowie robust. Der Hersteller Carbon Mobile aus Berlin will das Gerät behutsam auf den Markt bringen und langfristig in Deutschland produzieren. Der erste Eindruck ist gut, sowohl vom Smartphone als auch vom Geschäftskonzept. Ein Hands-on von Tobias Költzsch (Smartphone, Android)

The online porn industry is rather diverse but there is only one company leading the charge, that’s Mindgeek.

The company, formerly known as Manwin, owns the most visited adult website on the planet, Pornhub, and is also the driving force behind YouPorn, Redtube, Tube8, Xtube, and dozens of other sites.

With Pornhub, in particular, the company has made news headlines in mainstream media. The informative yearly interest insights, April fools jokes, and even its environmental campaign have been widely covered.

The company’s open and casual image is generally well appreciated. However, Mindgeek and its many daughter companies also have another side. They tend to be very protective of their copyrights.

Mindgeek subsidiary MG Premium, for example, has more than 10,000 works registered at the US copyright office. To prevent these from being shared without permission, the company has sent over a quarter billion takedown requests to Google alone.

More recently, Pornhub’s sister company expanded its copyright enforcement efforts in another area. In addition to sending takedown notices, it also started going after people who allegedly shared its videos through BitTorrent.

This campaign was recently highlighted by Swedish Internet provider Bahnhof, which keeps a close eye on copyright trolling efforts in the Scandinavian country.

A search through public Swedish court records reveals that MG Premium obtained eight applications to identify the account holders behind 16,594 IP-addresses. The company uses this information to approach these alleged pirates with a settlement offer.

A copy of a settlement request, shown below, shows that the account holder is offered a settlement of 7,000 Swedish Krona ($722) for “filesharing of an erotic movie”. Considering the number involved, this is a potential multi-million dollar enforcement campaign.

While some may have indeed shared the infringing content, the letters also target people who are not directly involved. After all, Internet connections are often shared with other members of a household or are open to the public at large.

Bahnhof, which is one of the few ISPs that doesn’t share the personal information of its customers, sees the practice as blackmail. It believes that the company chooses this tactic to generate some extra profits.

Mindgeek, for its part, says that the Swedish legal campaign is intended to help reduce piracy. The initiative just started and the company will evaluate the results in the near future to see what steps it will take next.

“MindGeek, through its exclusive content subsidiary MG Premium, seeks to protect thousands of its copyrighted audiovisual works from blatant infringement. MG Premium is constantly testing and evaluating methods of reducing the extent to which its works are pirated,” Mindgeek’s Michael Willis says.

“At different times, these methods can result in targeting website operators, vendors supporting such operators, and in certain cases, end users who are taking advantage of, or sharing pirated works,” he adds.

The initiative in Sweden is similarly intended to help reduce piracy. It is very recent, and thus not necessarily an integrated or long term strategy. The results will be evaluated in the coming months, which will help determine the next course of action.

It is worth noting that Mindgeek’s empire is broader than adult sites alone. The company has dozens of subsidiaries, including AppAtomic, which is the driving force behind the VPN service VPNHub.

VPNHub, like many other VPN services, doesn’t keep any logs of IP-address assignments. Ironically, this means that MG Premium has no means to identify pirates who use the service. Then again, Mindgeek wins either way, as the VPN business can be quite lucrative too.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

BMW hat ein erstes offizielles Bild des noch stark verkleideten Elektroautos Concept i4 vorgestellt. Das Fahrzeug soll auf dem Genfer Automobilsalon vorgestellt werden und eine Reichweite von rund 600 km aufweisen. Es erinnert an den BMW 4er Gran Coupé. (BMW, Technologie)

Das Tesla Model Y erscheint früher als ursprünglich geplant. Die ersten Kunden werden die Fahrzeuge bald erhalten, wie zahlreiche Nutzer auf Twitter meldeten. (Tesla, Technologie)

Die Fujifilm X-T4 ist die neue Systemkamera des japanischen Herstellers. Sie verfügt über einen beweglich aufgehängten Sensor mit 26 Megapixeln und kann mit einem größeren Akku mehr Aufnahmen machen. (Fujifilm, Digitalkamera)

Total süß, aber auch ganz schön schwierig: In Ori and the Will of the Wisps von Microsoft müssen sich Spieler schon im ersten Teil auf knifflige Sprung- und Rätselaufgaben einstellen. Beim Anspielen hat Golem.de trotzdem sehr viel Spaß gehabt - dank spannender Neuerungen. Von Peter Steinlechner (Angespielt, Microsoft)

Das Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) hat einen Forderungskatalog für die Sicherheit und Langlebigkeit von Smartphones veröffentlicht. So werden Sicherheitsupdates für mindestens fünf Jahre verlangt. Damit soll ein öffentlicher Diskurs angestoßen werden. (BSI, Smartphone)

Bei Walt Disney endet eine Ära: Der langjährige Vorstandschef Bob Iger tritt mit sofortiger Wirkung zurück. Nachfolger wird Disney-Manager Bob Chapek, der zuletzt für die Vergnügungspark-Sparte zuständig gewesen ist. Die Wahl Chapeks wirft Fragen auf. (Disney, Streaming)

Reddit is without doubt one of the most visited sites on the Internet.

The community-oriented platform has “subreddits” dedicated to pretty much every topic you can think of. These result in a constant stream of discussions and links, all generated by the site’s users.

While most links remain within the boundaries of the law, on occasion users share copyright-infringing material. This means that, as required by law, Reddit also has to process a steady stream of takedown requests from rightsholders.

To give the public insight into the process and volume, Reddit started publishing a transparency report in 2014. At the time, the company received roughly one takedown notice every other day of which more than half were rejected. However, times have changed.

In the most recent report, published a few hours ago, the company states that it received 34,989 copyright notices last year, which resulted in 124,247 pieces of content being removed. This is a five-fold increase compared to the year before and 20 times more than in 2017.

“The content Reddit removed for copyright infringement in 2019 amounted to around a 500% increase from the 26,234 pieces of content removed in 2018, and increased by over 2000% from the 4,352 pieces of content removed in 2017,” Reddit writes.

For the first time, Reddit also reports how many users and subreddits were removed from the platform on copyright grounds. This typically happens when they are classified as repeat copyright infringers.

“Sometimes a repeat infringement problem is limited to one user and we close just that user’s account. Other times, the problem pervades a whole subreddit community and we close the subreddit,” Reddit explains.

In 2019, Reddit removed 283 users following repeat copyright complaints and 137 subreddits were taken down under this policy. This includes the popular mmastreams subreddit, which we reported on previously.

While the number of takedown notices and removed content has increased dramatically, Reddit also rejected a significant number of complaints. Last year, the site decided not to remove 46,427 pieces of content, which is roughly 27 percent of the total volume.

The reasons to reject takedown requests vary. The vast majority were duplicate requests, but Reddit also refused takedowns because an entire subreddit was targeted, or simply because no infringement was found.

Reddit reports that one copyright holder retracted a takedown notice. In addition, the site received seven counternotices from users who disputed a claim, after which three items were restored.

All in all the transparency report shows that the number of takedown notices is skyrocketing. While this might be a sign that more copyright infringement is taking place, it’s also very likely that rightsholders are paying more attention to the site now.

It’s noteworthy that some of the language used in Reddit’s report has been updated as well. In the first transparency report the site wrote that “links do not generally infringe copyright” as they link to content on external websites. That mention is no longer present.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.