Why is it always the state Attorneys General? Time and time again we see examples of state AGs who seem to think they’re above the law and can abuse their position to attack those they dislike. The latest? Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette. Apparently, he was none too happy that Huffington Post reporter Dana Liebelson was investigating juvenile prison conditions in the state, and had a representative from his office follow her for two hours across the state to slap her with two separate, but equally questionable, subpoenas, demanding all of her notes.
As Liebelson notes on her Twitter feed, she had had permission to visit the prisons, and agreed not to bring in a recording device. She noted that she followed all the rules that she was given for reporting from the prison — and yet, she immediately gets slapped with a subpoena demanding her notes.
And she wasn’t the only one. Another report notes that Schuette also sent a subpoena to Michigan Radio, demanding its recording of a prisoner/attorney interview.
Category: Censorship
UK ISPs Quietly Block Sites That List Pirate Bay Proxies
Following a series of High Court orders, six UK ISPs are required to block access to many of the world’s largest torrent sites and streaming portals.
The blocks are somewhat effective, at least in preventing subscribers from accessing the domains directly. However, there are also plenty of workarounds.
For many sites that are blocked one or more proxy sites emerge. These proxies allow people to access the blocked sites and effectively bypass the restrictions put in place by the court.
The copyright holders are not happy with these loopholes and have asked ISPs to add the proxies to their filters, which they have done on several occasions.
However, restricting access to proxies did not provide a silver bullet either as new ones continue to appear. This week the blocking efforts were stepped up a notch and are now targeting sites that merely provide an overview of various Pirate Bay proxies.
In other words, UK ISPs now restrict access to sites for linking to Pirate Bay proxies.
Among the blocked sites are piratebayproxy.co.uk, piratebayproxylist.com and ukbay.org. Both sites are currently inaccessible on Virgin Media and TalkTalk, and other providers are expected to follow suit.
Sky Will Hand Over Customer Data in Movie Piracy Case
Any regular reader of these pages will be familiar with the term “copyright troll”. These companies have made a business model out of monitoring file-sharing networks for alleged copyright infringements, tracking down alleged offenders and then demanding hard cash to make supposed lawsuits go away.
The practice is widespread in the United States but also takes place in several countries around Europe. Wherever the location, the methods employed are largely the same. ‘Trolls’ approach courts with ‘evidence’ of infringement and demand that ISPs hand over the details of their subscribers so that the copyright holder can demand money from them.
During September 2014, TorrentFreak became aware of a UK court case that had just appeared before the Chancery Division. The title – TCYK LLP v British Sky Broadcasting Ltd – raised eyebrows. From experience we know that TCYK stands for The Company You Keep and is the title of the film of the same name directed and starring Robert Redford, appearing alongside Susan Sarandon and Shia LeBeouf.
While the movie itself is reportedly unremarkable, the response to it being unlawfully made available on file-sharing networks has been significant. In the United States TCYK LLC has filed dozens of copyright infringement lawsuits against Internet subscribers in many states including Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Florida and Minnesota, to name a few. Those interested in their U.S-based activities can read about them extensively on ‘troll’ watching sites DTD and Fight Copyright Trolls.
The big news today, however, is that TCYK LLC is about to start demanding cash from customers of the UK’s second largest ISP, Sky Broadband. TorrentFreak approached Sky back in September for information on the case but after several emails back and forth the trail went cold. We can now reveal what has transpired.
USTR Goes Off The Deep End: Names Domain Registrar Tucows As A ‘Notorious Market’ For Piracy
As part of the annual joke from the USTR known as the Special 301 Report (which is so ridiculous that even top people at the US Copyright Office mock the USTR about it), the USTR publishes what it calls its “notorious markets list.” The Special 301 Report, if you don’t know, is the report where big companies whine to the USTR about countries those companies feel don’t respect US intellectual property rights enough. The USTR collects all of those whinings, and rewrites it as a report to send out to US diplomats to try to shame countries into “cracking down” on the behaviors that these companies don’t like — no matter whether or not it complies with US or local intellectual property laws. Starting a few years ago, the USTR broke out a separate list of online websites, which it refers to as “notorious markets.” It started doing this in 2011, in a process that was intended to support SOPA (because SOPA supporters wanted the list of “rogue” sites that would be banned under SOPA).
The USTR itself admits that there’s basically no objective or legal rationale behind its process:
The List does not purport to reflect findings of legal violations, nor does it reflect the U.S. Government’s analysis of the general IPR protection and enforcement climate in the country concerned.
The latest Notorious Markets list is out (technically, it’s the “2014 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets”) and it’s full of the usual misleading crap. It’s quite amazing to watch US government officials celebrating the censorship of online forums and websites, calling it “progress.” Free expression is not particularly important to the USTR when the MPAA complains about it, apparently.
But the really astounding move in this latest report is by the USTR to start including domain registrars as “notorious markets,” including one of the most popular and widely used registrar in the world, Tucows:
This year, USTR is highlighting the issue of certain domain name registrars. Registrars are the commercial entities or organizations that manage the registration of Internet domain names, and some of them reportedly are playing a role in supporting counterfeiting and piracy online.
And here is the entry against Tucows:
Tucows.com: Based in Canada, Tucows is reportedly an example of a registrar that fails to take action when notified of its clients’ infringing activity. Consistent with the discussion above, USTR encourages the operators of Tucows to work with relevant stakeholders to address complaints.
Aussie Anti-Piracy Plans Boost Demand for Anonymous VPNs
Australia has been called out as the world’s piracy capital for several years, a claim that eventually captured the attention of the local Government.
After negotiations between ISPs and entertainment companies bore no fruit, authorities demanded voluntary anti-piracy measures from Internet providers. If that failed, the Government threatened to tighten the law.
Faced with an ultimatum the telecoms body Communications Alliance published a draft proposal on behalf of the ISPs, outlining a three-strikes notification system.
Titled ‘Copyright Notice Scheme Industry Code‘, the proposal suggests that ISPs start to forward infringement notices to their subscribers. After the initial notice subscribers are warned that copyright holders may go to court to obtain their identities.
Several groups have voiced their concerns in response. Australia’s leading consumer group Choice, for example, warns over the potential for lawsuits and potentially limitless fines.
These threats haven’t gone unnoticed by the general public either. While the proposals have not yet been implemented, many Australians are already taking countermeasures.
Over the past two weeks many file-sharers have been seeking tools to hide their IP-addresses and bypass the proposed monitoring system. By using VPN services or BitTorrent proxies their sharing activities can no longer be linked to their ISP account, rendering the three-strikes system useless.
Data from Google trends reveals that interest in anonymizing services has surged, with searches for “VPN” nearly doubling in recent days. This effect, shown in the graph below, is limited to Australia and appears to be a direct result of the ISPs proposals.
Spanish Court Limits Scope Of EU’s Right To Be Forgotten
EU’s ‘right to be forgotten’ is still relatively new — the original ruling was made less than a year ago. Since then, the EU courts and companies have been trying to work out what it means in practice, which has led to some broadening of its reach. But an interesting court ruling in Spain seems to limit its scope. It concerns the following case, reported here by Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society:
The claimant was a Spanish citizen who found that when typing his name on Google Search, the results included a link to a blog with information about a crime he had committed many years ago. While the official criminal records had already been cancelled, the information was thus still findable on the internet.
The Spanish Data Protection Authority (DPA) made two rulings. One was that Google should remove the information from its search engine, and the other was that Google should remove personally identifiable information from a blog hosted on its Blogger platform. When these decisions were reviewed by Spain’s National High Court, it confirmed the first ruling, and clarified that Google needed to remove the link to the criminal records information from its search results. However, it did not confirm the second ruling:
The National High Court reversed that and held that the responsible for the processing is not Google but the blog owner. It further held that the DPA cannot order Google to remove the content within a procedure for the protection of the data subject’s right to erasure and to object.
This is significant, because it says the “controller of the processing” — a key concept in EU data protection law — is the blog owner, not Google, and so the latter cannot be forced to take down a blog post. The Center for Internet and Society post notes:
Arguably, under the rationale that the platform is not the controller of the processing, other user generated content sites such as YouTube or social networking sites might also fall outside the scope of the right to be forgotten.
Well, not entirely outside the scope: presumably, search engines could still be required to remove links to user-generated content, but it would be the creator of that content that would be asked to remove it entirely, not the hosting company. Clearly, further cases will be needed to clarify how exactly this will work in Spain, and whether it applies anywhere else.
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood Demands $2,100 To Reveal The Emails He’s Had With The MPAA
As you may know, we’ve been covering the story of Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and his campaign against Google. A few years ago, we noted how bizarre it was that Hood and other state Attorneys General seemed to be blaming Google for all kinds of bad things online. It seemed to show a fundamental lack of understanding about how the internet (and the law!) worked. Of course, things became somewhat more “understandable” when emails leaked in the Sony Hack revealed that the MPAA had an entire “Project Goliath” designed around attacking Google, and the centerpiece of it was funding Jim Hood’s investigation into Google, including handling most of the lawyering, writing up Hood’s letters to Google and even the “civil investigative demand” (CID — basically a subpoena) that he could send.
Hood lashed out angrily about all of this, even as the NY Times revealed that the metadata on the letter he sent Google showed that it was really written by top MPAA lawyers. Hood continued to angrily lash out, demonstrating how little he seemed to understand about the internet. He made claims that were simply untrue — including pretending that Google would take users to Silk Road, the dark market hidden site that could never be found via a Google search. Hood also dared reporters to find any evidence of funding from Hollywood, and it didn’t take us long to find direct campaign contributions to his PAC from the MPAA and others.
Given all of this, we filed a Mississippi Public Records request with his office, seeking his email communications with the MPAA, its top lawyers and with the Digital Citizens Alliance, an MPAA front-group that has released highly questionable studies on “piracy” and just so happened to have hired Hood’s close friend Mike Moore to lobby Hood in Mississippi. Moore was the Mississippi Attorney General before Hood and helped Hood get into politics.
We’ve had to go back and forth with Hood’s office a few times. First, his office noted that Google had actually filed a similar request, and wanted to know if we were working for Google in making the request. We had no idea Google made such a request and certainly were not working on behalf of Google in making our request — but Hood’s office helpfully forwarded us Google’s request, which was actually a hell of a lot more detailed and comprehensive than our own. This actually is helpful in pointing to some other areas of interest to explore.
However, after some more back and forth, Hood’s office first said that it would refuse to share the emails between Hood and the MPAA’s lawyers as they “constitute attorney-client communications” or “attorney work product” and that finding the rest of the emails would… require an upfront payment of $2,103.10
WordPress Wins $25,000 From DMCA Takedown Abuser
Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress blogging platform, has faced a dramatic increase in DMCA takedown notices in recent years.
Most requests are legitimate and indeed targeted at pirated content. However, there are also cases where the takedown process is clearly being abused.
To curb these fraudulent notices WordPress decided to take a stand in court, together with student journalist Oliver Hotham who had one of his articles on WordPress censored by a false takedown notice.
Hotham wrote an article about “Straight Pride UK” which included a comment he received from the organization’s press officer Nick Steiner. The latter didn’t like the article Hotham wrote, and after publication Steiner sent WordPress a takedown notice claiming that it infringed his copyrights.
WordPress and Hotham took the case to a California federal court where they asked to be compensated for the damage this abuse caused them.
The case is one of the rare instances where a service provider has taken action against DMCA abuse. The defendant, however, failed to respond in court which prompted WordPress to file a motion for default judgment.
The company argued that as an online service provider it faces overwhelming and crippling copyright liability if it fails to take down content. People such as Steiner abuse this weakness to censor critics or competitors.
“Steiner’s fraudulent takedown notice forced WordPress to take down Hotham’s post under threat of losing the protection of the DMCA safe harbor,” WordPress argued.
“Steiner did not do this to protect any legitimate intellectual property interest, but in an attempt to censor Hotham’s lawful expression critical of Straight Pride UK. He forced WordPress to delete perfectly lawful content from its website. As a result, WordPress has suffered damage to its reputation,” the company added.
After reviewing the case United States Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero wrote a report and recommendation in favor of WordPress and Hotham, and District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton issued a default judgment this week.
“The court finds the report correct, well-reasoned and thorough, and adopts it in every respect,” Judge Hamilton writes.
“It is Ordered and Adjudged that defendant Nick Steiner pay damages in the amount of $960.00 for Hotham’s work and time, $1,860.00 for time spent by Automattic’s employees, and $22,264.00 for Automattic’s attorney’s fees, for a total award of $25,084.00.”
The case is mostly a symbolic win, but an important one. It should serve as a clear signal to other copyright holders that false DMCA takedown requests are not always left unpunished.
New Anti-Corruption Social Network In Russia Requires Numerous Personal Details To Join: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
As the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov last week reminds us, the political situation in Russia is not just difficult, but extremely dangerous. Presumably hoping that technology might offer a relative safe way to cope with this situation, a Russian NGO has announced that it will be launching a nationwide social network dedicated to fighting bribery and corruption. You might expect that anonymity would be a crucial aspect, given the risks faced by those who choose to join. And yet, as this RT article explains, that’s not the case (via @prfnv):
the new project will have one major difference from existing social networks — a complete lack of anonymity. Membership will only be granted by invitation from existing members, and even when this condition is met, the institute that launches the project promises to open accounts only after verifying the identity of potential members in real life.
The users will have to provide a lot of details about themselves — from name and date of birth, to place of work, e-mail and phone numbers. The people launching the project say that this is a necessary measure to prevent attempted slander, which they see as the main danger threatening their network.
.SO Registry Bans More “KickassTorrents” Domains
With millions of unique visitors per day KickassTorrents has become a prime target for copyright holders, many of whom would like to see the site taken offline.
Among other tactics, copyright holders ask domain name registries to suspend pirate site domain names. For a long time the Somalian .so TLD appeared to be a relatively safe haven, but this changed last month when the Kickass.so domain was “banned.”
Initially the action appeared to be an isolated incident, but the .SO registry wasn’t done with the Kickass brand yet.
A few days ago the .SO registry targeted a new round of “Kickass” related domains. Kikass.so, Kickas.so, Kickasstorrent.so, Kickasstorrents.so, Kickasstorrent.so, Kickassmovies.so and Kickassmovie.so were all added to the ban list.
Interestingly, none of the domains were affiliated with the notorious torrent site. Kickassmovies.so, for example, was a relatively low traffic streaming site that simply used the Kickass brand to gain traffic.