Author: Andy

Running a site offering or even linking to pirated movies and TV shows can be a hazardous occupation. It attracts the attention of copyright holders, the police, and in some cases even governments. For those running them these perils represent an occupational hazard.

But what if a site creates its own content and distributes that online, should that be a crime? That question is about to be answered in a unique case featuring fan-populated subtitling site Undertexter.se.

For ten years Undertexter (‘subtitles’ in Swedish) provided a somewhat useful service. Faced with what they perceived as a dearth of subtitling in local language, members of the site made their own translated subtitles for movies and TV shows. These were made available to all via the site.

However, in the summer of 2013 everything came crashing down. Under pressure from powerful Hollywood-based movie companies, police raided the site and seized its servers.

“The people who work on the site don’t consider their own interpretation of dialog to be something illegal, especially when we’re handing out these interpretations for free,” site founder Eugen Archy said at the time.

The authorities firmly disagreed, Archy was arrested, and the investigation into his site continued. Now, almost three years later, the Undertexter founder has been prosecuted for distributing infringing subtitles.

“I have indicted the person I say is behind the site Undertexter.se which made the dialogue from 74 films available to the public,” says prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson.

Of particular interest is the nature of the 74 movies referenced by the prosecution. Rather than tackle all of the subtitles on the site, the prosecution appears to have hand-picked a few dozen that gives them the strongest case, i.e those that relate to movies that weren’t commercially available in Sweden at the time.

The underlying suggestion is that those who created the subtitles either managed to legally view them in other regions or more likely carried out their translation work from pirate copies available online. Also, since the majority of Undertexter’s traffic came from Sweden, it’s likely that users of the site married the subtitles up with pirate copies.

Archy does not deny that he founded and operated the site, nor does he refute claims that he made some money from his activities, largely through on-site advertising. However, he does believe that offering fan-created subtitles is not a crime.

Unsurprisingly, Rasmusson strongly disagrees and even suggests that a prison sentence could be a possible outcome of this prosecution.

“This particular type of case, with pirate subtitles for pirate movies, has not been tried before. But the scale is at such a level that the penalty does not stop at fines, but imprisonment. It could be a suspended sentence,” Rasmusson says.

Soon it will be up to the court to decide whether distributing fan-created subtitles is a crime in Sweden. Experts have already weighed in on the case with Sanna Wolk, an associate professor of civil law at Uppsala University, noting that the devil could be in the detail.

“The core issue is whether the lyrics count as independent works or pure translations. If they follow the script, it’s a copyright violation to distribute them without permission, but if they’re self-published, it is not,” Wolk noted earlier.

“It is difficult to say where the exact line is. Subtitles need to be considered on their own merits to make an assessment.”

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

The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT)is the most aggressive private anti-piracy group currently operating in the UK.

In recent years the organization has been responsible for investigating dozens of alleged pirates and has secured many convictions, largely on behalf of its movie and TV industry partners.

Now, however, FACT faces a somewhat uncertain future after the Motion Picture Association, the movie industry outfit that supplies FACT with half of its funding, decided to pull its support for the anti-piracy group.

The MPA, which represents the interests of Disney, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros, has recently advised FACT that it intends to terminate its 30-year long relationship by not renewing its membership when it expires in six months’ time.

Speaking with Screen Daily, MPA Europe president Stan McCoy explained that local funding for FACT had been withdrawn in favor of financing larger regional hubs with a wider remit.

The relevant regional office dealing with the UK is the MPA’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) in Brussels which aims to provide “a nimble local presence and a direct relationship with local law enforcement.”

McCoy acknowledged FACT’s efforts over the last three decades but said that the changing nature of piracy, including the shift away from physical to online infringement, requires “a more flexible approach” than the one currently in place.

“We live in a world now where a piracy website can have its nexus in Sweden one day, then move in a few months to Eastern Europe, then to Thailand, or it can operate in all three of those jurisdictions at once,” McCoy said.

For FACT the withdrawal of the MPA and by extension the major studios is a massive blow. The MPA currently provides FACT with around 50% of its funding, leaving the balance to made up a range of partners including the UK Cinema Association, the Film Distributors’ Association, the Premier League, and broadcasters including ITV.

FACT confirmed that its MPA funding is being withdrawn and is said to be considering its options. In the meantime, however, it’s unlikely that the UK will become a care-free piracy zone. The MPA says it intends to continue its work protecting copyright in the UK which will include the pursuit of more site-blocking injunctions and increased cooperation with the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

That being said, it will be interesting to see how this situation plays out. FACT provided “boots on the ground” for the studios in the UK and undertook investigations against pirates that in some cases the police were reluctant to take on and in others carry through to a prosecution. Abandoning that local touch could be risky strategy for the MPA, but only time will tell.

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

For many years Australia has been labeled a hotbed of Internet piracy. Faced with high prices, a dearth of choice, and legal products arriving months after their debut elsewhere, millions of Aussies have turned unofficial sources.

As a result, Australia has found itself in the spotlight of both local and international rightsholders who claim that their industry is hemorrhaging millions due to people downloading via torrent, streaming and other file-sharing services.

While the latter mechanisms are more difficult to police, those obtaining media via torrents are relatively easy to track so with this in mind, rightsholders have been placing local Internet service providers under pressure to cooperate in a so-called three-strikes anti-piracy scheme.

In the early days cooperation was not forthcoming so in order to force compliance, movie companies decided to sue ISP iiNet. That action failed in 2012, leaving entertainment companies to re-build bridges and deal with matters on a friendly basis. Years of on/off negotiations ensued, more recently with government involvement.

Late last year it looked almost certain that a “three strikes” style scheme would be implemented, with pirates being monitored by copyright holders and notified of their behavior via escalating ISP warning notices, with legal action being the final step. But earlier this year it was revealed the whole project was in peril, entirely on the issue of costs.

Now it’s been officially confirmed that the project has been shelved. In a joint letter to the Australian Media and Communications Authority, the Communications Alliance and Foxtel (on behalf of rightsholders) state that it had “not proved possible to reach agreement on how to apportion all of the costs” for the scheme.

In all the years of intermittent discussion on “three strikes” costs have always been an issue. Agreement has been reached in other regions, the US for example, but Australia appears to have a unique set of problems.

According to a CNET report, Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton says that while agreement had been reached on who would foot the bill in the majority of areas, “the sticking point was processing costs.”

These costs are reportedly associated with preparing the notices, contacting alleged pirates and dealing with the inevitable flood of telephone calls from unhappy customers. These type of costs are entirely associated with actions the ISPs would be required to carry out themselves, which suggests that the providers have continued to stand their ground, much as they have for many years.

Earlier this year Village Roadshow co-chief Graham Burke bemoaned the manual warning system under discussion, complaining that the labor-intense mechanism would churn out notices at a cost of $16 to $20 each. “You might as well give people a DVD,” he said. But even with automation the ISPs are predicting extremely high costs.

“It is possible to largely automate it, but that’s quite an expensive undertaking,” says John Stanton. “We’ve had ISPs run a ruler over how much it would cost…and it was in the multiple millions.”

So what now for the Aussie downloading problem? Well, it appears that for at least a year not much will happen. With copyright trolls seemingly running for the hills it will be up to legal alternatives to try and persuade consumers they’re a more attractive proposition. They won’t have to go that alone, however.

“We are going to be mounting a massive campaign to reinforce the fact (to the public) that piracy is not a victimless crime and we have to continue to provide content in a timely way and at affordable prices,” Graham Burke said.

And of course the specter of site blocking is still on the horizon and possibly just months away. The music industry may have temporarily suspended its case against KickassTorrents but other cases involving The Pirate Bay are running full steam ahead and will almost certainly conclude before the end of the year. The Kickass case will conclude shortly after.

As for three-strikes, that will be subject to a review in April 2017 but given that agreement over costs hasn’t been reached in close to a decade, another year seems unlikely to make much of a difference.

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

Despite an enduring reputation for doing little to protect copyright online, in recent years the Russian government has passed tough legislation aimed at tackling so-called ‘pirate’ sites.

One of the most controversial additions was the introduction of a new law in 2013 which allowed entertainment industry companies to take cases to the Moscow City Court with a view to having non-compliant sites blocked at the ISP level. Sites that fail to respond to takedown demands are then given just 72 hours to do so, with a total (reversible) blockade the most aggressive outcome.

In 2015, Russia upped the pressure with the introduction of a new mechanism aimed at reducing instances of pirate site reoffending. Sites that have two cases brought against them and are found to be infringing now face a total lifetime block, a fate suffered by major torrent site RuTracker six months ago.

But like many other jurisdictions, Russia immediately discovered that after sites are blocked pirates remain determined to continue using them. As a result dozens of proxy and mirror sites have sprung up to facilitate access, reducing the efficacy of ISP blocks and frustrating copyright holders.

Earlier this year it was proposed that proxies and mirrors should be considered extensions of permanently blocked sites so that they can be quickly blocked and now there are hopes they can be rendered harder to find too.

In a draft bill just published by the Ministry of Communications these are described as “derivative sites” that feature a similar name and “completely or partially copy the information available on the original sites.” The bill tries to cover all angles by noting that “derivative sites” may also redirect users to blocked sites, provide services or information from blocked sites, or even translate blocked sites into other languages.

Furthermore, the bill also proposes that search engines including Google and Russian market leader Yandex will be required to remove links to sites that are setup to facilitate access to permanently blocked sites. Copyright holders will be given the opportunity to report such sites to search engines with an expectation that within three days they will cease providing links to those sites in their search results.

All services are covered, whether proxies or mirrors, but the bill also envisions going much further than just the sites themselves.

In an earlier case a web-blockade monitoring site was itself earmarked for blocking after providing tips on how to circumvent court-ordered blockades. With legislative amendments, Russia now intends to render the provision of circumvention advice a punishable offense.

If the bill is passed platforms offering circumvention advice directly will be subject to penalties ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 rubles ($45-$75) for “entrepreneurial individuals” operating outside a legal entity, up to 100,000 rubles ($1,492) for legal entities.

Furthermore, the draft proposes that any services offering circumvention advice should also be removed from Google and other providers’ search listings via the mechanism detailed above.

The bill is still at the draft stage which means it could be subject to change but it seems likely that pressure to reduce access to workarounds of all kinds will continue through its path to final approval.

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

For readers unfamiliar with her work, Ellen Seidler is a multi-talented filmmaker, journalist, lecturer and photographer based in the United States. She is also one of the web’s most outspoken critics of online piracy.

Seidler’s crusade began following the release of her movie “And Then Came Lola” in 2010 which, along with every other movie ever, was pirated online. It’s clear from her posts on Vox Indie that this was a turning point and her motivation to highlight piracy’s harms at every opportunity.

This week Seidler published a piece titled ‘BOGUS fair use claims hurt creators already victimized by piracy‘ in which she continued her full frontal assault on Google/YouTube and its users, something that has become a feature of her writing in recent times.

“There was a lot of talk about fair use and takedown abuse at last week’s U.S. Copyright Office Section 512 roundtables in San Francisco. Many of those who spoke, bemoaned how poor, innocent uploaders were victimized, time after time, by malicious DMCA takedowns,” Seidler wrote.

“It’s a tried and true talking point, convenient, but disingenuous all the same. Some of us, myself included, tried to make the point that creators, whose work is routinely (and massively stolen), are often (doubly) victimized by malicious fair use claims.”

Although not mentioned directly, it’s likely that Seidler was referencing efforts by groups such as Fight For The Future and Channel Awesome to ensure that fair use is protected following any revision of the DMCA. They were at the discussions last week doing just that and to suggest those kinds of efforts are disingenuous is pretty unfair. But lets rewind.

As explained in her article, Seidler’s problem stems from the fact that some of YouTube’s users are uploading copyright-infringing content (in this case a full movie whose creator Seidler represents) and making it available via the platform. In this instance YouTube’s own ContentID system flagged the work correctly and the video was blocked. However, that wasn’t the end of the story.

“This YouTube user didn’t seem to think the rights holder had the right to block the full, infringing copy and promptly disputed the block,” Seidler wrote.

“Approval from copyright holder is not required,” the user reportedly wrote in a counter-notice. “It is fair use under copyright law. I don’t need to explain.”

Needless to say, this wrongful claim of fair use had Seidler seeing red.

“Despite all the testimony at last week’s roundtable about fair use and how copyright holders seek out to punish those who claim it using malicious takedowns, it’s worth pointing out, yet again, that for every legit ‘fair use’ claim, there are also false, and rather malicious, abuses of that defense. It’s a fact conveniently overlooked by the anti-copyright apologists,” she wrote.

The above paragraph is somewhat frustrating. People wanting to exercise their legal right to fair use absolutely have a right to protest when they fear that right is under threat. Furthermore, people making fair use claims on a full movie have no connection with those using snippets of content for commentary, parody, criticism or news reporting purposes. That being said, Seidler definitely has a point.

Someone uploading a full movie to YouTube and then claiming ‘fair use’ absent of any of the defining features should not be allowed to do so without repercussions. If fair use is worth protecting then it stands to reason that supporters should not allow it to be abused. There’s little doubt that people claiming fair use in these circumstances hurt the cause.

So here’s a proposal. If we are to protect the sanctity of fair use then abusers need to be held to account, that means that people uploading full movies to YouTube and then filing for bogus fair use protection should have a strike put against their account and eventually terminated from the site.

In return, those who file bogus copyright claims against those who have a legitimate fair use defense should be held to exactly the same standards. File an erroneous claim against a legitimate video, get a strike against your Content ID account. Do it several more times, lose the right to file copyright complaints on YouTube.

Of course, this proposal is never likely to be accepted by the entertainment industries since they all screw up regularly and that would put them in a position of not being able to protect their works. While that would be unfortunate, the exercise illustrates a point.

Protecting content such as that published on Channel Awesome, for example, is just as important as protecting content pushed out by the studios. Therefore, if we are to deal with abuses of the DMCA and fair use then the same rules simply must apply to everyone – no exceptions.

Strikes on one side must be matched by strikes on the other. Deal?

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

There are hundreds of ‘pirate’ sites on the Internet today, most of them run by groups who choose to remain in the shadows. Identities are prized pieces of information in the torrent and streaming worlds and they’re extremely tightly guarded.

There are exceptions of course. The original people behind The Pirate Bay are well known public figures and the same can be said of Gary Fung of isoHunt, for example. In general, however, people tend to distance themselves from piracy in case groups like the MPAA and RIAA decide to pounce.

That being said, apparently there are those who really couldn’t give a damn.

Established in 2005, Connect Communications is one of the largest Internet service providers in Karachi, Pakistan, and they are proud of it.

“Connect Communications offer state of the art broadband connection to your home on ethernet with trunk network on Optical Fiber. Now you can take full advantage of Gigabit Network for your various network utilities,” the company says.

“Our Residential Broadband access gives you the ultimate high speed Internet experience with download speeds up to 100Mbps. Download a full length movie in under 10 minutes or take advantage of our DoDear services such as playing online games at Connect’s game arena or downloading movies and music.”

Of course, many ISPs offer downloads but Connect’s DoDear service really goes the extra mile. It’s advertised on the company’s main page, as shown in the screenshot below (bottom right).

After accessing the DoDear portal one can immediately see this is no ordinary ISP service. On the main page lists of TV shows and movies appear alongside torrent-site like categories such as software, games, movies, videos and music. Clicking the movie tab removes all lingering thoughts that this might be a legitimate service.

With released and unreleased movies on the left and links to the uTorrent and BitTorrent clients plus VLC media player on the right, it soon becomes clear that Connect Communications are running a fully-fledged pirate site. And to make things easier for pirates, DoDear even allows users to filter movies by cam, telesync (TS), screener and master (DVDrip).

Software pirates are well catered for too. DoDear has several hundred applications for download, all neatly arranged with cover art for each title. The site also has plenty of games which are conveniently split into genres such as racing, action, adventure, shooting and sports.

Another factor which will be quite alien to torrent site users is the fact that DoDear is publicly recruiting for people to help run their portal.

“At dodear we are always seeking talented, creative and innovative professionals. If you’re the one with a passion for learning and exploring yourself and having the enthusiasm for proving youself then we can provide a fair value to you,” the service notes in its ‘careers‘ section.

This somewhat bizarre situation probably gives a flavor of why the United States Trade Representative considers Pakistan to be a piracy problem. Interestingly, however, the United States downgraded the threat last month, apparently because progress is being made.

“USTR is moving Pakistan from the Priority Watch List to the Watch List in 2016 with an [out of cycle review] due to the Government of Pakistan’s significant efforts to implement key provisions of the Intellectual Property Organization of Pakistan Act of 2012 and the newfound determination with which Pakistan has approached IPR over the past 12 months,” the USTR said in its latest Special 301 Report (pdf).

For the curious, the DoDear pirate portal can be found here although people looking to download will be disappointed. Torrent links are blocked for non-Connect Communications customers.

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

Just when you think you’ve seen every ridiculous example of a bogus DMCA-style takedown, another steps up to take the crown. This week’s abomination comes courtesy of Fox and it’s an absolute disaster.

In last Sunday’s episode of Family Guy titled “Run, Chris, Run“, Peter and Cleveland play the 1980s classic Nintendo video game Double Dribble. Peter doesn’t play fair though and exploits a glitch in the game that allows his player to shoot a three-point goal every time. The clip is available on YouTube.

Perhaps surprisingly the game glitch is absolutely genuine and was documented in a video that was uploaded to YouTube by a user called ‘sw1tched’ back in February 2009.

“This is an automatic shot my brothers and I found on the NES Double Dribble back in the 80’s when it was released. I know others know this also, but as long as you release at the right point it is automatic. The half court shot I took at the end goes in 80% of the time, but i didn’t want to keep recording….HAHA,” sw1tched wrote.

Interestingly the clip that was uploaded by sw1tched was the exact same clip that appeared in the Family Guy episode on Sunday. So, unless Fox managed to duplicate the gameplay precisely, Fox must’ve taken the clip from YouTube.

Whether Fox can do that and legally show the clip in an episode is a matter for the experts to argue but what followed next was patently absurd. Shortly after the Family Guy episode aired, Fox filed a complaint with YouTube and took down the Double Dribble video game clip on copyright grounds. (mirror Daily Motion)

Faced with yet another example of a blatantly wrongful takedown, TorrentFreak spoke with Fight for the Future CTO Jeff Lyon. Coincidentally he’d just watched the episode in question.

“It’s most likely that this is just another example of YouTube’s Content ID system automatically taking down a video without regard to actual copyright ownership and fair use. As soon as FOX broadcast that Family Guy episode, their robots started taking down any footage that appeared to be reposted from the show — and in this case they took down the footage they stole from an independent creator,” Lyon says.

“The problem with an automated DMCA takedown system is that robots can never know the difference between fair use and copyright infringement. It is not hyperbolic to call this mass censorship,” he continues.

“Instead of copyright holders having to prove a video is infringing, their scanning software can take it down automatically, and then it falls on the creator to prove they had a right to post it. Creators are discouraged from filing counter-notices to stand up for their work, facing lost revenue and permanent bans from online platforms. This erodes fair use and free speech on the Internet.”

The entire situation is indeed bewildering and utterly ridiculous. The original Double Dribble game came out in 1987, some 12 years before the very first episode of Family Guy aired in 1999. The clip of the glitch was uploaded by sw1tched more than seven years ago. Then somehow Fox came along, copied it, put it into their TV show, claimed copyright on it, and then nuked the original clip from the Internet.

You couldn’t make it up. Nor would you want to.

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

Last month, members of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and Australasian collecting society APRA AMCOS teamed up to file the music industry’s first ‘pirate’ site blocking application Down Under.

Filed at the Federal Court under section 115A of the Copyright Act 1968, member labels Universal Music, Warner Music, Sony Music and J Albert & Son demanded that leading torrent site KickassTorrents (KAT) should be blocked by the country’s ISPs.

“Online infringement continues to be a major threat to the sustainability of the Australian music industry. Illegal offshore sites like Kickass Torrents show a complete disrespect for music creators and the value of music,” said Jenny Morris OAM, Chair of the APRA Board.

But now, exactly one month later, the case has been temporarily suspended in an effort to cut down on costs. The problem lies with two other key cases already underway in Australia, both of which involve similar requests to block ‘pirate’ sites. All three are likely to become bogged down with the same problems.

The first involves a case brought by TV giant Foxtel which targets The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and TorrentHound. The second features the movie division of Village Roadshow, Roadshow Films, taking on streaming portal Solarmovie.

In those cases ISPs including TPG (including subsidiary iiNet), Optus, Telstra and M2 say they don’t intend to oppose the studios’ requests for a blockade. However, there is a dispute over who will pay for the blocks to be put in place. The ISPs feel they are innocent parties and shouldn’t be forced to finance the operation, the studios disagree. There is also a dispute over how the blocks will be carried out from a technical perspective.

With these problems in mind, the record labels appeared in court yesterday with a request for their case against KickassTorrents to be suspended until after the other cases have been settled. The labels see little point in going over the same ground in parallel and feel that agreement in the other cases will provide a template for theirs.

“Given that the form of relief is a major component of the dispute between Roadshow and Foxtel and the ISPs, and there’s been a considerable amount of time spent between the applicants and respondents negotiating forms of orders and final relief in an attempt to standardize the forms of order sought by the applications,” counsel for the music industry said.

“We propose deferral of consideration of the relief elements for this proceeding until after determination of the Foxtel and Roadshow applications.”

A delay, which would save time and money, was also endorsed by the Internet service providers.

“We want to minimize the costs that are expended. In that light it’s certainly prudent to come back after that other hearing,” Optus counsel said.

Justice Katzmann agreed to the delay and ordered a case management hearing for July 11 to take place after the film studios’ hearing next month. A final hearing will take place in October following a judgment in the film studios’ cases.

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

Earlier this year the U.S. Government ran a public consultation to evaluate the effectiveness of the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provisions. These include issues such as ‘notice and takedown’ plus short-comings and abuses that arise from the current system.

In the final days of the consultation Fight for the Future (FFTF) and popular YouTube channel Channel Awesome launched a campaign urging the public to get involved. What followed was a massive response to the U.S. Copyright Office coordinated via the associated TakedownAbuse site. But that was just the beginning.

Thanks to the huge support FFTF and Channel Awesome (CA) were able to convince the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) to give them seats at the table in a series of closed-door meetings on DMCA reforms held in San Francisco last week. Jeff Lyon (FFTF) and Mike Michaud (CA) attended and they report that discussion was heavily skewed in favor of copyright owners.

“Unfortunately, the hearings appeared to be rigged against the public interest, and unless we step up our game, it’s looking very likely that the USCO will make the DMCA even worse, with major giveaways to the copyright industry that put SOPA-style restrictions on independent content creators,” Lyon reports.

The FFTF CEO says that while Google, EFF and Mozilla were in attendance (pdf), they were outnumbered by pro-copyright groups including the MPAA, RIAA, Copyright Alliance (who previously labeled FFTF’s campaign participants as “zombies“), Creative Future, Disney, Paramount and NBCUniversal.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Lyon says that one of the key copyright industry demands is for a “take down, stay down” system which would require platform owners to proactively police user-uploaded content.

“I can say for sure that there was overwhelming consensus in favor of ‘take down, stay down’ from members of the discussions affiliated with the copyright industry,” Lyon says.

“The idea is that once a copyright holder files a DMCA takedown for a particular piece of content, for example a music clip, it should then become the responsibility of the website operator to proactively scan everything uploaded by users and block that content from being posted in the future.”

Lyon says that this would effectively eliminate a user’s right to file a counter-notice, since they would be unable to post any content with a copyright claim against it, even in a fair use situation.

“Being unable to post copyrighted content also means users would be less able to sue copyright holders to assert a fair use right, since the content would be blocked by the website, instead of being taken down by a legal claim made by the copyright holder,” he explains.

TorrentFreak asked Lyon if copyright holders had made any suggestions on how such a complex system could work in practice. Apparently some feel it is Google’s problem.

“Keith Kupfershmid of Copyright Alliance said something to the effect of ‘I’m not a techie, but if they can make self driving cars, they can surely figure out how to keep copyrighted material from being posted,” he said.

However, also in attendance was Tony Rodriguez of anti-piracy outfit Digimarc. Lyon says that Rodriguez suggested that his company has the ability to deal with the job.

“It was strongly implied that Digimarc’s scanning technology could be adapted for use by website owners to comply with staydown requirements. I think Digimarc is practically salivating at the prospect of being in control over a government-mandated copyright protection racket, where they can serve both copyright holders and website owners who are held hostage by new staydown rules,” he explained.

“Overall the attitude was that it should be the tech industry’s problem to figure out how to do it and pay for it. Nobody had a good answer for determining fair use scenarios programmatically.”

While physically outnumbered by copyright holders, Google senior copyright counsel Fred von Lohman agreed with Jeff Lyon that content filtering technology is extremely expensive and burdensome for website owners to develop, noting that Google had spent over $40 million and deployed 100 software engineers to develop its Content ID system. Others weighed in too.

“One of the best points was made by Daphne Keller from Stanford Law,” Lyon says.

“She backed up my and von Lohman’s claims that content scanning systems are generally expensive, but added that good content scanning algorithms that could protect fair use rights will be very expensive. Thus if sites are required to implement content scanning, they will be incentivized to use cheap options that would err on the side of filtering out lawful content and fair use.”

Interestingly, sitting right next to Lyon in one of the sessions was MPAA attorney Dean Marks. He appeared to have SOPA on his mind.

“After some light-hearted joking banter with the regulators, the MPAA attorney suggested new legislation to take down entire websites (aka SOPA) for suspected copyright infringement,” Lyon explains.

“He spoke briefly and near the end of the meeting, so it was really almost in passing. He did not get into specifics about overseas websites [per SOPA], only mentioned that torrent sites only exist to spread pirated material and should be taken down completely.”

Overall, Lyon says he gets the impression that rather like with the SOPA debate, these DMCA discussions are being framed as “copyright industry vs. tech industry”, something which undermines the public interest. Nevertheless, FFTF and groups including EFF are putting up a fight.

“The general public is more affected by the DMCA than they even know. Copyright holders are abusing the process to censor negative reviews and commentary from the Internet. Creators are discouraged from fighting back, facing lost revenue and permanent bans from online platforms,” Lyon says.

“The sheer number of copyright holders at the meetings allowed them to push the discussions toward their ‘take down, stay down’ agenda, and they repeatedly tried to discredit nearly 100,000 comments sent by the public calling them out for mass censorship and abuse of the existing DMCA takedown rules. The copyright industry is clearly engaging in a massive lobbying effort to bring new SOPA-style legislation back in front of Congress.”

FFTF acknowledge that their opponents are powerful lobbying forces but they believe they have the tools and the public backing to put up a fight.

“We’ve beat them before and we can do it again. The copyright industry was blindsided by nearly 100,000 comments sent to the Copyright Office in the span of one day. When the next round of public commenting opens up, we will be ready, and our voices will be impossible to ignore,” Lyon concludes.

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

According to the world’s leading entertainment industry companies, piracy continues to run riot on the Internet. Movies, TV shows, music and software are downloaded in their millions every day, with most anti-piracy measures a mere band-aid.

As a result companies have sprung up to take advantage of this situation, with U.S.-based Rightscorp a prime example. Rightscorp sends DMCA notices to ISPs in the hope they’ll forward them to their pirating customers. Attached to each one is a demand for around $30 to make a supposed lawsuit go away.

While Rightscorp were originally less offensive than some of the larger copyright trolls in the United States, it didn’t take long for their “speeding ticket” type model to start developing into lawsuits, against both regular users and even Internet service providers such as Cox Communications.

Unfortunately for the company this aggression doesn’t appear to be paying off. Rightscorp has never made a profit and in 2015 had its worst year yet after turning in a net loss of $3.5m. The first three months of 2016 are not only worse, but can best be described as dismal.

In its latest quarterly report Rightscorp says that during the three months ended March 31, 2016, the company generated just $68,283 in revenue. To put that into perspective, in the same period last year the company pulled in $307,904. That’s a decrease of $239,621 or 78%.

So what justification does Rightscorp give for losing eight-tenths of its business? Well, as per its 2015 summary the company’s explanation is somewhat vague so we’ll have to read between the lines.

Reason A: Changes in the filesharing software intended to defeat detection of copyrights being illegally distributed

Seemingly deliberately cryptic, this seems to reference file-sharers hiding their online activities, probably though the use of VPNs, proxies and other anonymous technologies.

Reason B: Less forwarding of the Company’s notices by ISPs

If ISPs really are forwarding less notices, Rightscorp are in serious trouble. The company relies on this mechanism to reach alleged file-sharers and if it cannot do that, its business model lies in tatters.

Reason C: The shutting down of some filesharing network infrastructure.

Again, the company gives no details, but it’s certainly possible that the demise of several large torrent trackers during the year made Rightscorp’s job of harvesting IP addresses a lot more difficult since they now have to rely more on BitTorrent’s DHT (1,2).

TF spoke with someone who was close to one of the largest now-defunct trackers who gave us his theory.

“With enough requests, you could find every IP address sharing a torrent via a tracker. Not so with DHT,” he explained. “You could do it with DHT but it would take days, by which time most people have already drive-by-downloaded the file and stopped seeding.”

Since Rightscorp deals mainly with small music downloads the time people spend on a torrent is already much shorter than for movies. It therefore makes sense that the expanded amount of time to track them via DHT could be hurting the company.

Of course, falling revenues are not only a problem for Rightscorp, they’re also a problem for the company’s copyright holder partners. Rightscorp pays out 50% of the revenues it collects to record companies such as BMG, but no one will be getting rich after the first three months of 2016.

“For the three months ended March 31, 2016 we accrued $49,142 due to copyright holders. For the three months ended March 31, 2015 we accrued $153,952 to copyright holders,” the company says.

That decrease of 68% is a pretty poor result, particularly since Rightscorp struggles to maintain even five major clients. Even if the profits were split equally that would be just over $3,000 per month each. With smaller clients on board too, that amount diminishes even further.

But of course that’s not the full picture, Rightscorp has lots of costs too. In the first three months of the year legal fees amounted to $127,617, wages and related charges topped $303,000, with sundry other costs building to a grand total of $961,105.

As a result the company recorded a net loss of $784,180 during the past three months. At this rate the company will lose another $3.1m this year, unless it can stop people from hiding with VPNs, force ISPs to cooperate more, or find a better way to harvest IP addresses.

None seem likely at this point.

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