Author: Andy

After signing up to Spotify several years ago one of my first tasks was to begin hand-crafting playlists of the thousands of 1980s and 1990s dance tracks I had previously bought on vinyl.

Once lovingly stacked and indexed in a spare room, these much-loved relics of a bygone era are now gathering dust in the attic, probably never to be played again. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Slowly but surely, tracks have been disappearing from my Spotify playlists with no explanation, including a rare Prodigy remix of a Praga Khan track that finally triggered me to sign up to Spotify in the first place. If Spotify had that they must have everything, I assured myself at the time.

While the disappearance of some music from the service is to be expected, it doesn’t make it any less of a disappointment when it happens. It also undermines confidence in the product. After all, if one had bought the track instead of streaming it, it would still be here today. It’s a situation that’s familiar to The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde who in a new interview with Germany’s FutureZone recalls similar experiences.

“I stopped using Spotify when suddenly overnight several titles disappeared from my playlist because the licenses for them were revoked. Someone else had decided which music I could listen to and which I could not. I had no backup, so I lost the music. I do not want that,” Sunde says.

To hear that Peter Sunde (by all accounts one of the world’s most infamous pirates) had placed his trust and his money with a legitimate content provider indicates that at its core Spotify had something good to offer. After all, it’s hardly an argument that Sunde was unable to obtain the music from elsewhere.

But what is perhaps most remarkable is that Sunde actually patronized a service which at its very core is the complete opposite of what The Pirate Bay stood for. Forget for a moment the notion of paying or not paying for media, that’s a distraction.

What the Pirate Bay did was empower its users to participate in a somewhat decentralized communications infrastructure which allowed them to build archives of music, movies, TV shows and software in their own homes. Not only did they ‘own’ that content but much more importantly they exercised complete, physical control over it. Licenses getting revoked? Not a chance.

For all their great qualities (and they have them by the bucket load), Spotify and other streaming services such as Netflix offer something quite different – total centralization and a complete lack of user control over the content they’re buying renting.

“When we look at the development of Netflix it is exactly the same as a Spotify for movies,” Sunde says. “What streaming has done is centralize the ownership of culture.”

And of course Sunde is absolutely right. At any point Spotify, Netflix and any other streaming service has the power to remove content, modify it, restrict access to it geographically or – heaven forbid – go bankrupt, shut down, and deny access to it altogether.

However unlikely, it is possible that people invested in these services could be blasted back to a world without music and movies in an instant, should economic (or Internet disaster) circumstances dictate it. Unless people have physical access to that content they are done. Sunde wonders whether people will continue to put up with this scenario in the future.

“Maybe in five years time we’ll have a new file-sharing fight because anyone who uses these services will consider that while having access to the content is good, it is not so great having no control and actually owning none of it,” Sunde says.

So the big question remains: what can be done about it?

In keeping with Sunde’s previous assertion that he believes that torrent technology has stagnated, the Pirate Bay co-founder doesn’t really offer much hope for those inclined to obtain their content from unofficial sources.

“I have more interesting things to do. One can not eat indefinitely a cake. It may be the best cake in the world, but at some point you have to throw up,” he says.

“I do not know how to fight it. Perhaps with better streaming piracy.”

With that an unlikely prospect, at least in music, legitimate streaming consumption will continue to grow, and with it the pitfalls of borrowing rather than buying music.

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

The UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) is probably best known for activities aimed at tracking down the operators of pirate sites and the release groups who frequent them.

Financed by the film industry, over the years FACT has forged partnerships with law enforcement agencies, including the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). But while in many instances FACT’s work is reactive, the group also works in precautionary roles.

In addition to preventing individuals from recording movies in theaters, for example, FACT also runs an accreditation system that aims to hold businesses providing services to the movie and TV sector to a set of high standards. The overall aim is to protect the intellectual property owned by FACT’s members.

The latest company to achieve FACT certification is Microsoft with its cloud computing platform Azure. Launched in 2010, Azure provides PaaS (Platform as a service) and along with Amazon Web Services is considered a market leader in Iaas (Infrastructure as a service).

“Microsoft is quite familiar with global anti-piracy efforts, and we believe that extending this attention to our customers’ environments is just as important as safeguarding our own intellectual property,” says Alice Rison, Senior Director, Microsoft Azure.

“That’s why I’m excited to announce Azure’s certification by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), making Azure the first public cloud to gain this accreditation.”

To get a flavor of what FACT is trying to achieve with its certification system one only has to look at the list of companies that have already gone through the process.

There are currently 110 businesses with FACT accreditation, such as those offering subtitling services. These might not immediately sound like piracy hotspots but TV shows have been leaked at this point in the chain before, such as the high-profile pre-release of several Doctor Who episodes in 2014.

Others, such as companies and hotels involved in pre-release screenings of movies present more obvious security holes, as do those providing courier, logistics, transport and storage services. All of these processes have been exploited in the past to get pre-release content onto the Internet and now FACT is determined to regulate them all.

A handful are a little more obscure. Alchemy Metals Ltd proudly display its FACT accreditation online, noting that the company utilizes “a variety of methods to ensure your sensitive product has been damaged beyond repair and re-use.” Precisely what Alchemy Metals destroys for the industry is unclear, but operations similar to theirs have been previously been used for the “granulation” of seized computer and video games hardware.

The inclusion of registered charity His Church on the accredited list is also of interest. That organization take counterfeit clothing, DVDs, CDs and other items and removes the illegal branding. These items are then shipped abroad for re-use, thus avoiding landfill.

For Microsoft, however, it is all about keeping those involved in the movie making and distribution process safe from hackers, pirates and other ne’er do wells. Accreditation means an independent security survey and both physical and digital tests, to include security of buildings, alarms systems and CCTV, access control systems, digital security, audit trails plus staff vetting.

All of this combined establishes whether an organization meets the high standards set by FACT partners such as Universal, Disney, Sony, The Premier League and TV giant BSkyB.

“The FACT certification is yet another demonstration of the investments we’re making in not only ensuring the security of your data, but in gaining your trust as a business partner,” says Microsoft’s Alice Rison.

Of course, all of this comes at a cost. The FACT Certification Fee for each UK site is £2,100 per year. For those outside the UK the fee is the same, plus travel and accommodation expenses.

Earlier this year Microsoft met the standards required by the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) cloud security guidelines. More details of the MPAA’s Content Security Model can be found here.

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

After years of attempting to clamp down on piracy in 2015 entertainment industry companies in Australia finally had progress to report.

New legislation passed in the summer allowed copyright holders to apply to the Federal Court to have infringing sites blocked at the ISP level.

While previous applications have been made on behalf of the movie and TV industries, until now the music sector has remained quiet. That changed today when members of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and Australasian collecting society APRA AMCOS teamed up to file their first application.

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

Citing a government comment that KAT and others like it are the “worst of the worst” who exploit the “creativity of others” without giving anything back, the industry groups claim that millions of dollars are being made in illegal advertising revenues.

“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.

“Australian music fans already have access – for free if they choose – to the world’s repertoire of music via more than 20 legitimate licensed online music services. Blocking access to sites like Kickass Torrents is all about supporting those services and allowing the writers whose songs are available on them to be paid for their work.”

In addition to blocking KickassTorrents the labels have also applied to have related proxy sites blocked. This means that quick workarounds will be more tricky for the casual pirate. It’s a strategy already employed in the UK and one which has become a feature of two other cases previously filed by the audio-visual industries in Australia.

Those cases feature the movie division of Village Roadshow, Roadshow Films, taking on streaming portal Solarmovie. TV giant Foxtel is targeting The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and TorrentHound.

Due to the sheer number of proxies, mirrors and clones that are facilitating access to those sites, the studios had to contact 61 third-party sites to inform them of the action. None responded. No numbers have yet been published but there are dozens of KickassTorrents variants so a similar process will have to be undertaken in this case too.

Also potentially muddying the waters is KickassTorrents’ claim that they take down copyright-infringing content following complaints from rightsholders.

The site’s users will be familiar with thousands of torrents disappearing from the platform but whether that will be enough to differentiate it under section 115a from a site whose “primary purpose to infringe” is unlikely in a non-adversarial process.

“Last year ARIA welcomed the Federal Government’s passing of section 115A as a critical element in supporting the legitimate digital content market in Australia,” said ARIA CEO Dan Rosen.

“ARIA and its members believe that this case will be an important step to ensure Australians are accessing their music from sites which contribute to our local industry, so that we can continue investing in talent to make the music we all love.”

The video cases are due back in court during early May following discussions with ISPs over the technicalities of blocking. While those negotiations appear to have been somewhat drawn out, future cases should prove much smoother to handle.

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

With the recent Copyright Office consultation on the efficacy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ringing in the ears of many significant stakeholders, we’re informed that much is at stake in the online marketplace.

What began with opinions from a wide range of interested parties has now morphed into a battle of opposing forces, with annoyed copyright holders leading the charge on one side and Google and its supporters on the other.

Despite engaging in no infringement itself and doing everything the law requires, on a daily basis Google is now being described as the world’s greatest piracy facilitator. It’s getting pretty ugly.

The latest to weigh-in with a controversial opinion is veteran film producer Avi Lerner. Perhaps best known for bringing The Expendables trilogy to the silver screen, Lerner is pulling no punches when it comes to the blame game. In fact, he’s taken it right to the very top.

“The government, the president, is such a coward. He’s scared of Google so we are losing millions,” he told AFP.

As the founder of production companies Nu Image and Millennium Films, Lerner is of course no stranger to piracy. In 2014, a pristine copy of The Expendables 3 was leaked onto the Internet, much to the company’s dismay.

While police in the UK arrested two men in connection with the leak later that year, followed by a third in 2015, thus far no culprits have surfaced in the United States. So, in the absence of a direct bogeyman, Google – and the President – will have to do.

“It’s a major problem and it’s something that I don’t know if anyone can stop, because the government, the president, Congress are all scared of Google,” Lerner said.

The film producer says he feels that Google has no incentive to stop piracy because it generates revenue from it, but this kind of blame game is nothing new and largely misses the point. All piracy takes place outside Google’s ecosystem and would continue even if Google disappeared into thin air. Still, Lerner thinks he has the solution.

“They should tell Google to stop piracy. They should make a law that anyone helping piracy — and not helping to stop piracy — should go to jail or get penalized or whatever,” he said.

It’s not clear whether Lerner was just angry when he made these comments or whether he really doesn’t understand how the whole piracy thing works, but the notion of throwing people in jail for simply not helping to stop piracy is certainly food for thought.

Only time will tell if that kind of punishment should also extend to the President himself but he’ll be long out of office before anything (if anything) is done to tune-up the DMCA. Jailing Google executives is presumably much more distant on the horizon.

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

Last month it was revealed that an individual in the “entertainment business” had prevented a UK tabloid newspaper from printing details of his extramarital affairs.

Referred to in court papers by the initials PJS (not his real initials), the reportedly “well known” individual is said to had some kind of “three-way sexual encounter” with another couple more than four years ago. This, while being married to his partner, YMA, also in the entertainment business.

The third-party couple (referred to as AB and CD) approached the UK’s Sun on Sunday newspaper in January this year and revealed details of their encounter with PJS. The paper then contacted PJS’s lawyer, at which point a legal battle ensued.

On January 18, lawyers for PJS and YMA applied for an order against Sun on Sunday preventing it from printing the story. The High Court rejected the demand but did hand down an interim order blocking publication while the pair filed an appeal (pdf)

The Court of Appeal subsequently ruled that the Sun on Sunday cannot publish the story because the entertainer had an expectation that his sexual encounters should remain a private matter. Inevitably, however, there are plenty of people who believe it should not.

The Sun on Sunday is determined to publish the story whenever it can but in the meantime the celebrity couple have been named countless times on social media and in dozens of press articles, including in Scotland, Europe, the United States and Canada.

So what, if anything, can be done about that? According to a BBC report citing Desmond Browne QC, the lawyer for PJS, “remarkable efforts” are taking place to remove the story from Twitter and Google. That can now be confirmed, at least in respect of the latter.

Usually dealing with the business of having copyright-infringing content taken down from the Internet, UK-based copyright takedown outfit Web Sheriff is well known in file-sharing circles. However, the company has also branched out to offer a number of additional services, including “Privacy Protection – reputation management.”

These activities rarely come into the public eye but it appears that Web Sheriff has recently been negotiating with Google to have sensitive content removed from its indexes. The matter in question can be found in the search giant’s Transparency Report where it’s listed under a fairly obvious heading.

As can be seen from the image above, Web Sheriff targeted 174 URLs in two batches, one on April 4 and the other on April 11. In total the anti-piracy outfit sent seven notices to Google but interestingly the search giant has taken no action on the overwhelming majority.

Why Google has taken no action is unclear but it’s possible that as an overseas company Google may not feel bound to remove the links. It’s also possible that the complaint was filed with Google as a copyright request and therefore does not meet the criteria for removal.

In any event, most links are now reaching “content not found” pages on various news resources, so there’s probably very little for Google to remove. This raises another topical point.

While Google is often portrayed as being able to do a lot to stop infringing (or in this case sensitive) content being made available via its search engine, it’s a lot more effective to have content taken down at the source. It seems likely that Web Sheriff has being doing just that and on the whole appears to have done a pretty good job.

But of course the big question is whether it was all worth it.

While news outlets are now waiting for a judgment set to be handed down Monday which could allow them to name the couple, their names are already all over the Internet. What started off as a story that would probably have been forgotten in a few days, has now transformed into a battle of international interest that has already failed in its key aim.

In the meantime, those who have ignored the injunction have been feeling the heat. A blogger who named the pair online says he’s been threatened by the entertainer’s legal team but doesn’t really care.

“It’s a massive Streisand effect. Now I am fielding calls from European tabloids,” he said.

“I told [PJS’s legal team] to take it where the sun doesn’t shine. There’s no bricks and mortar in the UK, there’s no printing press in the UK, there’s no server in the UK.”

The all-important hearing will be heard in open court on Monday after Lord Justice Jackson ruled that the case addresses matters of public interest.

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

While movies, music and TV show downloading grabs most of the headlines, a growing subset of Internet pirates like to obtain eBooks online for free.

With the growth of dedicated readers such as Kindle and eBook-capable hardware such as iPads, tablets and smartphones, eBooks are easily downloaded from torrent and file-hosting sites in a few seconds and consumed on the go.

One site where eBooks are particularly easy to find is Russian social networking platform vKontakte. The site often appears in searches for popular book titles and downloads are mostly direct and speedy. For this reason vKontakte has found itself embroiled in various copyright-related disputes.

Now, however, there are signs that the platform is taking steps to do something about the phenomenon.

According to a report coming out of Russia, vKontakte has introduced a system that not only takes content down following rightsholder complaints, but also stops that same content becoming available for download in the future. Users are reportedly able to upload previously-flagged content but it is not made available for download.

At the moment vKontakte is refusing to comment on the reports but according to Izvestia the existence of the system has been confirmed by both rightsholders and operators of social network-based eBook communities.

Any user of vKontakte is allowed to upload eBooks in a range of formats and embed these in their pages. These can then be downloaded directly from vKontakte’s servers. However, according to the report there are increasing problems with content disappearing, with VK reporting that files have been deleted following requests from copyright holders.

Interestingly the development is having an impact externally too, with a prominent anti-piracy outfit reporting a shift in availability.

“We have noticed that our monitoring service is sending fewer claims [to VK] and we are now analyzing the cause to discover the reason,” says Maxim Ryabyko, Director General of the Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPO).

Back in February, AZAPO reported vKontakte to the Moscow City Court after the platform allegedly failed to take solid measures to protect copyright. AZAPO’s aim was to force the social network into negotiations.

“Our goal is to urge vKontakte to adequately interact with the book industry,” Ryabyko said at the time.

What has prompted the disappearance of books from the platform remains unclear but Ryabyko says that he doesn’t rule out a link between recent developments and AZAPO’s legal action against vKontakte. Another possibility is that some kind of deal has been reached with book owners.

Last year publishers offered several opportunities for VK to monetize content on its platform, including via an all-you-can-eat subscription model. Other offers included an ad-supported mechanism and a partner program, which would see samples of books diverting to publisher platforms.

It is not clear whether these offers were attractive to VK but if pirate content is disappearing from the site, publishers will be happy.

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

GoldenEye International are one of the small handful of companies engaged in so-called “copyright troll” activities in the UK.

Unlike thousands of other companies who try to have infringing content removed from the Internet, Golden Eye simply leaves it there while monitoring those who dare to download and share it.

For several years the company has been targeting subscribers in the UK and has recently sent out a new wave of threat letters. TorrentFreak has been in touch with many letter recipients, all of them customers of UK Internet service provider Sky.

The demands all relate to the alleged downloading and sharing of various pornographic movie titles owned by Ben Dover Productions, Immoral Productions, Third World Media, Echo Alpha and Harmony Films.

The High Court order through which GoldenEye (GEIL) obtained the users’ personal details is dated August 2015 but in some cases the alleged offenses date back to 2014 which in many cases makes it difficult to identify who might have been responsible.

Indeed, this is a problem faced by several letter recipients interviewed by TorrentFreak. While a minority accept that GEIL’s allegations are true, others are vigorously denying them.

Several insist that due to the number of people who have free access to their home connections it’s all but impossible to know who the infringer was back in 2014/2015, if there even was one.

But perhaps more worrying is what happens when people choose to engage Golden Eye themselves.

“In order to elicit a speedy response we recommend email as the most efficient communication,” GoldenEye says in its threat letter.

While email is indeed efficient, convenient and cheap for GoldenEye (a company obviously keen to keep its costs down), exchanges seen by TorrentFreak indicate a complete unwillingness for them to accept what they are being told.

In some instances letter recipients tell GoldenEye that not only did they not download or share anything illegally, but they haven’t allowed anyone else to do so either. The company effectively ignores these protestations and insists that its evidence was assessed by independent experts.

Interestingly, however, the reportedly independent experts are Tobias Fieser and Patrick Paige, men that are up to their necks in similar trolling activities in other parts of the world, with the latter previously being described in less than favorable terms.

Of course, no evidence has been actually tested by the court but most people corresponding with GEIL don’t know that. It’s worth noting that even if the evidence had been tested and it was guaranteed accurate, GEIL only have the bill payer’s name and if he or she didn’t do it, GEIL have a problem.

“It’s important to understand that the copyright owner can only take action against the person who actually committed the infringement. This may not be you,” the UK government told letter recipients in advice last week.

Worryingly, TorrentFreak has seen other correspondence that indicates that once letter recipients engage in discussion with GoldenEye via email, the porn outfit uses the opportunity to obtain more information, information that it did not have in the first instance. This is often known as a ‘fishing expedition’ and copyright trolls love them.

For example, some people have informed GEIL that they have left their router insecured so that friends and family can easily access the Internet when they visit. GEIL then want to know the names and addresses of these people so they can be pursued. Recipients are under no obligation to help with these inquiries but because of the legal threats, some feel obliged to comply.

Furthermore, others who have mentioned having an unsecured WiFi have been met with questions about the make and model of their router. Quite why GoldenEye need this information is uncertain but it’s almost certain that any information provided will somehow be used against the recipient.

The common theme throughout, however, is that whatever people tell GoldenEye in an email, the company either ignores or has a canned response for. The company sends PDF files back to people who email them with a defense and these are all template responses going over the same things time and again. It is clear that people aren’t being treated as individuals and that the process is being automated wherever possible.

With all this in mind people should consider whether email really is the best way to handle a claim from GoldenEye International. Granted, responses from the company are often quite quick, but this encourages people to respond quickly too, often without adequate consideration before doing so.

Resources: Speculative Invoicing Handbook, How to Deal with a File-Sharing Threat, hire a lawyer.

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

The issue of removing infringing content and links from the Internet is perhaps the hottest topic in copyright today, with a U.S. Copyright Office consultation generating opinions from stakeholders of all kinds.

The aim of the consultation is to measure whether the DMCA is fit for purpose or whether it needs to be tweaked to handle an Internet that has developed massively in the past twenty years. Generally speaking, copyright holders want the DMCA tightened up dramatically, with many calling for regime that would see pirate content being taken down and remaining down forever.

While in some respects its easy to have sympathy with that stance, copyright holders can’t be trusted to get it right all of the time. In fact, sometimes mistakes are made that are so absurd that they deserve highlighting in public.

HarperCollins, Random House, Simon and Schuster, Reed Elsevier, Scholastic and J.K.Rowling’s Pottermore are some of the most recognizable publishers in the world and like many in their position, all have a bit of a piracy problem. Every year through their anti-piracy partners they send millions of takedown notices directly to ‘pirate’ sites and to Google, who are expected to take down content on demand.

It’s fortunate that Google does not do so without due consideration. It’s also fortunate that there’s no takedown-and-staydown system in place.

Pottermore is a digital publishing and e-commerce platform from J.K. Rowling, the author of the world famous Harry Potter series. Through anti-piracy company Digimarc the company has sent more than 260,000 takedown notices to Google with the majority raising few alarm bells. Recently, however, something appears to have gone terribly wrong.

On March 8, Pottermore sent a notice to Google complaining that several sites were infringing on the rights of, among other things, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Inexplicably, one of those complaints was leveled at J.K. Rowling’s own page on Wikipedia. The same mistake was made again on April 1.

Fortunately Google refused to remove the page but Pottermore were undeterred and later that day sent an even worse notice that targeted a further 20 Wikipedia pages.

In addition to targeting several pages dedicated to Harry Potter movies, soundtracks and videos games, the notice casts its net far and wide with demands to remove pages detailing ancient Egyptian literature, ethnic groups in Central America, the attacks of 9-11, IEC standards, U.S. soldier Joshua Casteel and the NATO phonetic alphabet.

But Pottermore aren’t the only ones contributing to this Wikipedia mess. In early March, HarperCollins sent notices to Google, again through Digimarc, aiming to protect its own content. Instead, however, the company put its name to a whole bunch of bogus takedowns.

Instead of protecting the book ‘The Longest Trip Home’, the publisher tried to takedown the Wikipedia pages for Beverley Hills 90210 and Silver Spring, Maryland. Shortly after another notice targeted Wikipedia pages on the topics of BitTorrent, Carson in California, and the identity of Mexican Americans.

We won’t detail every single request here but there are dozen of bogus claims against Wikipedia, all of which Google (fortunately) denied. Those interested can find them in Google’s report where dozens are listed as rejected..

Simon and Schuster don’t have much to brag about either. In an effort to protect a handful of books they also targeted Wikipedia on dozens of occasions. With no apparent checking mechanism in place we can see the kinds of abuses shown below.

Poor Janice Galloway is actually a Simon and Schuster author, yet they want her Wikipedia page removed. Heaven knows what copyright crimes the speed limits in Romania have committed.

Finally, a couple of choice takedowns, the first from Reed Elsevier. In an effort to protect Mandell, Douglas, and Bennett’s Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, the publisher attempted to takedown the Wikipedia page detailing Mega, the file-hosting site previously associated with Kim Dotcom.

And Random House must have a real grudge against deceased U.S. writer Gore Vidal. On several occasions the company ordered Google to remove his Wikipedia page and links to his books, despite them being his publisher.

Takedown and staydown? Perhaps copyright holders want to think this through…..

The full catalog of Wikipedia takedown abuses can be found here.

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

MPAA chairman and CEO Chris Dodd made his fifth keynote speech at CinemaCon yesterday, pouring buckets of cold water on the idea that piracy is somehow threatening the very existence of the movie industry.

“I’m proud to say that the state of our industry has never been stronger,” the former U.S. senator said.

Indeed. Yesterday the MPAA released its latest Theatrical Market Statistics Report which revealed that global box office revenues reached $38.3 billion in 2015, up 5% on 2014’s total. The United States and Canada turned in $11.1 billion with international box office revenues hitting $27.2 billion.

“To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the movies has been greatly exaggerated,” Dodd said.

Exaggeration was the name of the game four years ago during the SOPA debate, when one might have been forgiven for believing that Hollywood’s very existence was hanging by a thread. But now, according to the MPAA itself, things could hardly be better, with 708 films released in 2015 and those released by MPAA members up 8% on the previous year.

Almost 70% of the U.S./Canada population (235.3 million people) went to the cinema at least once in 2015, a 2% increase over 2014. Frequent movie goers who attended at least once a month accounted for 49% of all tickets sold in the same region. Indeed, the number of tickets purchased by everyone from hardcore fans to the very casual viewer increased last year.

But despite the impressive numbers (full report – pdf), the MPAA insists that piracy is still a problem. According to Dodd the box office would be more healthy to the tune of $1.5 billion if piracy could be brought under control.

There are plenty of theories on how that can be achieved, including making content more readily available to the consumer. The plan currently making the most noise along those lines is being touted by Napster co-founder Sean Parker, whose Screening Room project hopes to bring first-run movies into the home via a set-top box.

While at first this might sound like a recipe for spoiling record box office revenues, Screening Room has a trick up its sleeve. Customers prepared to pay the required $50 to watch at home would get two tickets to watch the movie in the cinema, which could either boost or at least maintain box office attendance.

Nevertheless, those in the movie screening business are less optimistic. Last month The Art House Convergence (AHC), a cinema group representing 600 theaters, said it “strongly opposes” the plan and warned that it would only fuel torrent sites and piracy.

Interestingly, however, Chris Dodd told reporters yesterday that the MPAA would meet with the people behind Screening Room.

“I want to hear what they have to say,” Dodd said.

Reading between the lines though, it seems unlikely that the MPAA is seriously thinking of signing on the dotted line. In his speech yesterday Dodd repeatedly underlined the unique experience offered by a theatrical screening.

“Despite the noisy suggestions otherwise, the cinema provides a unique and powerful experience that just cannot be re-created,” he said. One of his colleagues made things even more clear.

“I assure you, we are not going to let a third party or middleman come between [the studio and the cinema owners],” Warner Bros. Entertainment Chief Executive Kevin Tsujihara said during his presentation.

And those cinema owners have been vocal too. As reported by the LA Times, National Assn. of Theatre Owners chief John Fithian yesterday described Screening Room as a “big distraction” from the great results published by the MPAA, noting that “it’s up to the exhibitors and the distributors to decide the future of [release] windows.”

Interestingly, however, Fithian acknowledged that there may be some room for change.

“More sophisticated window modeling may be needed for the growing success of a modern movie industry,” he said.

Parker, standing by.

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

YouTube has grown into the world’s leading video and music service and has partnerships with thousands of artists and other publishers around the globe. While many are happy with the revenue they’re generating from the Google-owned platform, others are not.

According to various sources, Universal’s deal with YouTube has already expired and deals in place with the likes of Sony and Warner will time out later this year. As a result the major recording labels are in negotiations with YouTube and are demanding better rates than the ones they currently describe in disparaging terms.

So if the RIAA can negotiate decent deals with the likes of Apple Music and TIDAL, why does it continue to have problems with Google’s YouTube? To put it bluntly the labels believe that YouTube is gaming the system and unsurprisingly it all comes down to the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA.

While YouTube quickly responds to takedown notices sent by the labels, the RIAA says the platform is laden with unlicensed music uploaded users and as the law currently stands all it can do is keep taking it down. That’s something they do through gritted teeth.

In an interview with Recode, RIAA chief Cary Sherman was asked why following the Viacom case the labels don’t accept the current legal position. He pulls no punches.

“We accept the inevitability of death. It doesn’t mean we have to like it,” he says.

Describing the DMCA as “dysfunctional”, Sherman says that the Copyright Office’s consultation on the effectiveness of the DMCA is allowing stakeholders to have their say but in the meantime YouTube is bullying negotiations by utilizing the shield of safe harbor.

“When you compare what we get when we get to freely negotiate, with a company like Spotify, vs. what we get when we are under the burden of an expansively interpreted ‘safe harbor,’ when you’re negotiating with somebody like YouTube, you can see that you’re not getting the value across the platforms that you should,” Sherman says.

According to the RIAA chief the solution is for the current notice-and-takedown system to become notice-and-staydown, so that when one unlicensed copy of a song is removed from YouTube all other uploads of the same content are permanently barred from the system.

“If we had a system where once a song was taken down, you had a filtering system that prevented it from going back up, we wouldn’t have to be sending hundreds of millions of notices on the same content over and over again,” Sherman notes.

So the RIAA says its stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they want their properly licensed music on YouTube but in return they want all unlicensed copies of the same removed from YouTube on a permanent basis. Sherman says without that kind of agreement the one-sided negotiation process with the company goes something like this.

Look. This is all we [YouTube] can afford to pay you. We hope that you’ll find that reasonable. But that’s the best we can do. And if you don’t want to give us a license, okay. You know that your music is still going to be up on the service anyway. So send us notices, and we’ll take ’em down as fast we can, and we know they’ll keep coming back up.

“That’s not a real negotiation. That’s like saying, ‘That’s a real nice song you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it’,” Sherman says.

In effect, Sherman accuses Google-owned YouTube of running a DMCA-protected protection racket, with music possibly being offered freely to the masses in the same manner that bars might get inexplicably fire-bombed in Chicago during the night. While Google hasn’t responded to Sherman’s comments directly, a submission it has made to the Copyright Office pours cold water on the flames.

“Some in the recording industry have suggested that the safe harbors somehow diminish the value of sound recordings, pointing to YouTube and blaming the DMCA for creating a so-called ‘value grab.’ This claim is not supported by the facts,” the company writes.

Noting that YouTube has had licensing agreements in place with the record labels for many years, Google says it is simply incorrect that it relies on the DMCA instead of licensing content. Furthermore, Google says that those who claim that royalty rates are too low because of the DMCA notice-and-takedown process are forgetting the tools already provided by YouTube.

“This claim…ignores Content ID, which has been in existence since 2008 and which record labels (and many other copyright owners) use every day to monetize their works on YouTube. Thanks to Content ID, record labels do not have to rely
solely on the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown process on YouTube — they can remove any or all user uploads of their works from the platform on an automated and ongoing basis,” Google writes.

“Indeed, since January 2014, over 98% of all YouTube copyright removal claims have come through Content ID. Although business partners can be expected to disagree from time to time about the price of a license, any claim that the DMCA safe harbors are responsible for a ‘value gap’ for music on YouTube is simply false.”

With this war of words set to rage on, RIAA chief Cary Sherman says that he hopes for a future in which the DMCA has been fixed and the balance of power shifts back to the labels.

“I think the record companies would like to be partners with YouTube. But it’s a little hard to call it a partnership when it’s so one-sided in terms of the negotiating leverage,” he says.

Notice-and-staydown certainly has the potential to push the point of leverage back into the labels’ favor, but there’s a long way to go yet. Content ID aside, it doesn’t look like Google wants to play ball either.

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