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Usenet Provider and BREIN Continue Battle Over Piracy Keyword Filter

The legal dispute between Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group BREIN and Usenet provider News-Service.com will continue after a Dutch court delayed its decision over a requested piracy filter. The court wants both parties to answer detailed questions about the efficacy and costs associated with such a filtering mechanism.

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

In 2009, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, representing the movie and music industries, took News-Service Europe (NSE) – one of Europe’s largest Usenet providers – to court.

BREIN stated that NSE should delete all infringing content from its servers, and in 2011 the Court of Amsterdam sided with the copyright holders.

In its initial verdict the Court concluded that NSE willingly facilitated copyright infringement through its services. As a result the company was ordered to remove all copyrighted content and filter future posts for possible copyright infringements.

Responding to the verdict the Usenet provider said that it was economically unfeasible to filter all messages. The company therefore saw no other option than to shut down its services while the appeal was pending.

In 2014 the appeals court issued an interlocutory judgment ruling that NSE does not facilitate copyright infringement as long as it maintains a procedure through which copyright holders can send unlimited takedown notices.

Whether the Usenet provider could also be ordered to employ a keyword filter was something to be decided at a later date. This week the Court issued its second judgment, but while both parties had hoped for more clarity, the Court pushed a final decision back once more.

Instead, the Court is now questioning whether both parties are still willing to take the case forward, as NSE already ceased its services several years ago. If they continue, both parties will have to split the legal costs as the case will have no clear winner.

In addition, the Court is asking both parties to provide expert witnesses who can answer several outstanding questions regarding a keyword filtering mechanism.

Among other things the Court would like to know if a keyword filter is technically feasible (NSE says it is not) and what costs and resources would have to be invested to employ such measures.

The Usenet provider is disappointed with another delay, but former CFO Wierd Bonthuis is happy that the court didn’t rule against the company.

“I am pleased that the Court of Appeal has finalised its conclusion that News-Service Europe did not act unlawfully,” Bonthuis says.

“However, it is painful that we must now conclude that this means it has been established that in 2011 BREIN wrongfully forced News-Service Europe to cease its activities.”

For its part, BREIN stresses that the Court made it clear that Usenet services must maintain a proper takedown procedure, and possible more.

“Even if a Usenet provider is seen as a neutral intermediary, they still need to have an effective takedown procedure and take appropriate additional measures to curb the massive infringements,” says BREIN director Tim Kuik.

According to BREIN, services that “thrive on illegality” prefer not to take any effective measures against copyright infringement as that would hurt their business.

Neither party has commented on the future of the case, but considering the lengthy legal history it’s likely that they would both want to take it all the way.

While the Usenet provider doesn’t plan to relaunch its services in the future, a final decision on keyword filtering could have broad implications for similar services in the Netherlands and abroad.

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

Android-Verbreitung: Marshmallow-Verteilung verdoppelt sich

Verglichen mit dem Vormonat kann sich der Anteil der Smartphones und Tablets mit Android 6.0 alias Marshmallow fast verdoppeln – wie bereits beim vorigen Monatswechsel. Im Verhältnis betrachtet bleibt die Verbreitung der aktuellen Android-Version aber gering. (Android, Smartphone)

Verglichen mit dem Vormonat kann sich der Anteil der Smartphones und Tablets mit Android 6.0 alias Marshmallow fast verdoppeln - wie bereits beim vorigen Monatswechsel. Im Verhältnis betrachtet bleibt die Verbreitung der aktuellen Android-Version aber gering. (Android, Smartphone)

Google: Spezielles Android-Update für Nexus 5X

Speziell für das Nexus 5X hat Google ein Update veröffentlicht, mit dem lästige Fehler beseitigt werden sollen. Nach der Aktualisierung soll es keine lästigen Wartezeiten bei der Nutzung mehr geben. Mittlerweile ist das Nexus 5X zu angemessenen Preisen zu haben. (Nexus 5X, Smartphone)

Let’s Encrypt: 1 Million freie Zertifikate und ein paar Probleme

Let’s Encrypt wächst rasant – nach wenigen Monaten gibt es bereits eine Million Zertifikate. Doch in der Betaphase gibt es nach wie vor einige Probleme und Beschränkungen. (Let’s Encrypt, Firefox)

Let's Encrypt wächst rasant - nach wenigen Monaten gibt es bereits eine Million Zertifikate. Doch in der Betaphase gibt es nach wie vor einige Probleme und Beschränkungen. (Let's Encrypt, Firefox)

Exynos 8890 im Test: Samsungs S7-SoC drosselt kaum

Samsungs neuer Exynos-Chip 8890 im Galaxy S7 ist technisch spannend: Darin stecken selbst entwickelte Mongoose-CPU-Kerne, von denen sich zwei entweder besonders hoch takten oder abschalten. In Benchmarks schneidet der Exynos ähnlich ab wie der Snapdragon 820. (Exynos, Smartphone)

Microsoft: Neues Sammel-Update für alle Windows-10-Nutzer

Microsoft hat für alle Anwender von Windows 10 ein neues Sammel-Update veröffentlicht. Es behebt eine Reihe von Fehlern, damit das Betriebssystem allgemein zuverlässiger arbeitet. Außerdem wird eine Reihe von Sicherheitslücken mit dem Update geschlossen. (Windows 10, Microsoft)

Maersk: Tankschiff erhält auf See Post per Drohne

Die Reederei Maersk Tankers hat nach eigenen Angaben ein Tankschiff das erste Mal mit einer Drohne aus der Luft versorgt. Das Unternehmen will künftig viel Geld mit dieser Liefermethode sparen. Auch andere Unternehmen wollen Drohnen als Paketboten einsetzen. (Drohne, Technologie)

Patentantrag: Ford will das autonome Auto zum Kino machen

Was machen die Insassen eines autonom fahrenden Autos? Einer Idee von Ford zufolge vertreiben sie sich die Zeit mit einem Film. Die Leinwand verdeckt dabei die Windschutzscheibe und verschwindet bei Bedarf im Dach des Autos. (Auto, GreenIT)

China is building a big data plaform for “precrime”

Using online profile and movements, government aims to catch “terrorists” in advance.

It's "precrime" meets "thoughtcrime." China is using its substantial surveillance apparatus as the basis for a "unified information environment" that will allow authorities to profile individual citizens based upon their online behaviors, financial transactions, where they go, and who they see. The authorities are watching for deviations from the norm that might indicate someone is involved in suspicious activity. And they're doing it with a hand from technology pioneered in the US.

As Defense One's Patrick Tucker reports, the Chinese government is leveraging "predictive policing" capabilities that have been used by US law enforcement, and it has funded research into machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies to identify human faces in surveillance video. The Chinese government has also used this technology to create a "Situation-Aware Public Security Evaluation (SAPE) platform" that predicts "security events" based on surveillance data, which includes anything from actual terrorist attacks to large gatherings of people.

The Chinese government has plenty of data to feed into such systems. China invested heavily in building its surveillance capabilities in major cities over the past five years, with spending on "domestic security and stability" surpassing China's defense budget—and turning the country into the biggest market for security technology. And in December, China's government gained a new tool in surveillance: anti-terrorism laws giving the government even more surveillance powers, and requiring any technology companies doing business in China to provide assistance in that surveillance.

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Six months in, Google’s apps still don’t fully support iOS 9

Docs, YouTube, and others are continuously updated but aren’t good iPad citizens.

iPad Pro support, yes. Full-fledged iOS 9 support, not so much. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Google updated its Docs and Sheets productivity apps on Tuesday to support the iPad Pro's larger screen resolution. As you might recall from our iPad Pro review, iOS apps that don't properly support Apple's guidelines for resolution-independent apps will look stretched out and slightly blurry on an iPad Pro, much like an iPhone 5 app would look larger and blurry on an iPhone 6.

The problem, as pointed out by MacStories and elsewhere, is that the apps still don't support the Split View multitasking features Apple introduced in iOS 9 when it was announced in June and released in September. This is especially noticeable because productivity apps are the best fit for Split View multitasking—it just makes it easier to grab text and other data from one place and paste it down in another place when your apps are side-by-side. And it's not just Docs and Sheets that still haven't gone all-in on iOS 9. Few of Google's apps support Split View, and the YouTube app doesn't support the Picture-in-Picture multitasking mode either.

Google Chrome picked up iPad multitasking support back in October, so it's not as though Google doesn't recognize the benefits of the feature (the company is also taking advantage of new iOS 9 features to make the browser faster and more stable). It's just that Drive, YouTube, Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Inbox, and others, despite being actively maintained and updated with some frequency, still aren't supporting features that Microsoft and other big companies have already gotten behind. And as nice as it is to be able to use first-party Google apps with Google's services on the iPad, this sort of thing is frustrating for people who want to use their iPad or iPad Pro as their primary computing device.

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