A game studio that admitted to uploading a rigged copy of its own game to torrent sites informs TF that the positive feedback has been ‘overwhelming’. NoodleCake’s special version of Shooting Stars! features an unbeatable boss as a marketing stunt, a move that’s a million miles better than the anti-piracy schemes of yesteryear.
Source: Piracy Stunt Studio ‘Overwhelmed” By Positive Feedback – TorrentFreak
In short, Fox News issued a copyright takedown to YouTube over Sky News’ streaming the debate. While that might sound perfectly reasonable, it seems worth pointing out that both Fox News and Sky News are owned by the same company: News Corp.. Yes, News Corp. effectively DMCA’d itself. Because that’s how copyright works.
Source: News Corp. Makes Copyright Claim Over News Corp’s Live Video Stream Of The GOP Debate | Techdirt
Almost everything gets pretty contentious in a divorce. That’s pretty much a universal truth. And now we can thank copyright for making things even more of a mess. Five years ago we wrote about a case involving a divorcing couple who fought over the thousands of photos that were amassed during two decades of marriage. As we noted at the time, it seemed a bit odd that no one brought up the copyright question during that fight. Well, now it’s come to that. Comedian/TV host Rosie O’Donnell is apparently going through a (yup) contentious divorce with her wife, Michelle Rounds, and it’s reached the point were Rounds is claiming copyright over a photo that O’Donnell posted to Instagram last week. Rounds, of course, says that she took the photo and thus holds the copyright. She even went so far as to file a takedown notice with Instagram — though as of writing this, the photo is still up on the site.
This, of course, is not what copyright law is supposed to be used for — but since so many people now see it as a sort of universal “censor this now” button, that’s how it’s being used. It would be insane for this to actually result in a lawsuit, but if it did, I would imagine that O’Donnell would have a decent set of defenses, from an implied license to fair use and more. But, really, that’s besides the point. It’s becoming fairly ridiculous how frequently people seek to use copyright law to just block things because they don’t like it, not because of anything having to do with “promoting the progress.” This is just the latest example — which (once again) highlights the sheer insanity of automatically applying copyright to every work upon creation.
While relatively underreported, many U.S. district courts are still swamped with lawsuits against alleged film pirates.
One of the newcomers this year are the makers of the action movie Manny. Over the past few months “Manny Film” has filed 215 lawsuits across several districts.
Like all copyright holders, the makers of the film rely on IP-addresses as evidence. They then ask the courts to grant a subpoena, forcing Internet providers to hand over the personal details of the associated account holders.
In most cases the courts sign off on these requests, but in Florida this isn’t as straightforward.
When District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro was assigned a Manny Film case she asked the company to explain how an IP-address can pinpoint the actual person who downloaded a pirated film. In addition, she asked them to show that geolocation tools are good enough to prove that the alleged pirate resides in the Court’s district.
In a detailed reply the filmmakers argued that IP-addresses can identify the defendant and that a refusal to grant a subpoena would set a “dangerous precedent.” Manny Film further stated that “all other courts” disagreed with the notion that an IP-address is not a person.
This last remark didn’t go down well with Judge Ungaro. In an order handed down this week she cites various cases where courts ruled that IP-addresses don’t always identify the alleged offenders.
“Due to the risk of ‘false positives,’ an allegation that an IP address is registered to an individual is not sufficient in and of itself to support a claim that the individual is guilty of infringement,” wrote the Judge citing a 2012 case, one of many examples.
The referenced cases clearly refute Manny Film’s claim that all other courts disagreed with the Judge Ungaro’s concerns, and the Judge is not convinced by any of the other arguments either.
“As in those cases, Plaintiff here fails to show how geolocation software can establish the identity of the Defendant. Specifically, there is nothing linking the IP address location to the identity of the person actually downloading and viewing the copy righted material and nothing establishing that the person actually lives in this district,” Judge Ungaro writes.
“Even if this IP address is located within a residence, geolocation software cannot identify who have access to that residence’s computer and who would actually be using it to infringe Plaintiff’s copyright,” she adds.
As a result, the Court refused to issue a subpoena and dismissed the case against IP-address 66.229.140.101 for improper venue.
While not all judges may come to the same conclusion, the order makes it harder for rightholders to play their “copyright troll” scheme in the Southern District of Florida. At the same time, it provides future defendants with a good overview to fight similar claims elsewhere.
Is the process of copyright trolling protected by the First Amendment? That appears to be the claim that both Rightscorp and Warner Bros. are making in response to a class action lawsuit filed against them.
Back in November, we wrote about a class action lawsuit filed against Rightscorp, by lawyer Morgan Pietz. Rightscorp, of course, is a company trying (and mostly failing) to make copyright trolling slightly more respectable by shaking down accused infringers (based on a questionable methodology) for somewhat lower amounts than traditional copyright trolls. Morgan Pietz, if you don’t know, is one of the key lawyers who helped take down infamous copyright troll Prenda Law — so his involvement was noteworthy.
Since November, when the lawsuit was initially filed, there’s been some back and forth in the lawsuit (and even the main named plaintiff has changed). In the first amended complaint that was filed last month with new lead plaintiff, John Blaha, the claims about violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act have been removed, to focus mainly on violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and abuse of process. The TCPA bans autodialing telemarketers, and Pietz is trying to argue that Rightscorp’s autodialers fall under this law. The abuse of process claims focus on how Rightscorp got access to various people to shakedown, using DMCA 512(h) subpoenas. This is the process — which courts have clearly rejected — by which copyright trolls think they can issue subpoenas to ISPs about potential infringers, without first filing a lawsuit. Every few years, copyright trolls think they’ve newly discovered this loophole even though the courts have rejected it. The lawsuit has also added key Rightscorp clients, Warner Bros. and BMG, as defendants as well.
Last week, Rightscorp responded [pdf] by arguing that the case should be dismissed under California’s anti-SLAPP law. Now, we’ve been huge supporters of California’s anti-SLAPP law and believe that we need a similar federal anti-SLAPP law. Anti-SLAPP laws allow defendants to quickly get lawsuits dismissed when it’s clear those lawsuits are nothing more than attempts to silence their public speech (SLAPP standing for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.”) However, I’m hard pressed to see how robocalling someone demanding they pay up or get sued is “public participation” in any way.
After long maintaining a reputation for being one of the softest countries in Europe on piracy, in recent years Spain has really toughened up its approach to online infringement.
Last month the strength of new legislation became evident when a Madrid court gave local Internet service providers just 72 hours to block notorious torrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB).
The legal action against TPB was launched by the Association of Intellectual Rights Management (AGEDI) last year, but that wasn’t the only domain in the anti-piracy group’s sights. AGEDI and music group Promusicae had also been targeting Goear, an unlicensed music streaming service providing access to an estimated four million tracks.
Early efforts to bring down the site didn’t go to plan when a Madrid court refused to issue an order to block the site’s IP address back in March 2014. Undeterred, AGEDI responded with an appeal and complaint to the country’s Intellectual Property Commission.
Complaining that Goear provides access to copyrighted music without any permission from artists or rightsholders, AGEDI built a case highlighting commercial aspects of the site, particularly its advertising efforts which offered to put products in front of three million registered users via “millions of quality impressions.”
Goear had previously actioned some copyright takedowns, AGEDI said, but it was never enough to keep up with the rate that infringing content reappeared on the site.
After reviewing the case the National Court has now sided with AGEDI. Handing down an order similar to that issued last month in respect of The Pirate Bay, local ISPs have been given just 72 hours to block the site at the subscriber level. Currently the Goear website is hosted in the Netherlands.
“This new resolution adds to the one recently handed down in Spain against The Pirate Bay and confirms web blockades as the only effective measure to eliminate the websites that violate intellectual property rights,” said Promusicae and AGEDI president, Antonio Guisasola.
“The block against Goear means that the site will no longer be able to profit from the works of others. I always insist on the absolute need to act decisively to stop these kinds of sites that represent true unfair competition to other [authorized sites] that offer all the guarantees for consumers and producers of music.”
Whether local users will rush to unblock the site will remain to be seen. There are many dozens of similar portals offering access to the same level of content, none of which appear to be shutting down anytime soon.
At the heart of the European Union lies the Single Market—the possibility for people to buy and sell goods and services anywhere in the EU. So it is ironic that the European sector least constrained by geography—the digital market—is also the least unified. To remedy that situation, the European Commission has announced its Digital Single Market Strategy, which addresses three main areas.
The first is “Better access for consumers and businesses to digital goods and services” and includes two of the thorniest issues: geo-blocking and copyright. As the EU’s strategy notes, “too many Europeans cannot use online services that are available in other EU countries, often without any justification; or they are re-routed to a local store with different prices. Such discrimination cannot exist in a Single Market.”
There is strong resistance to removing geo-blocking, particularly from copyright companies that have traditionally sold rights on a national basis and which therefore want geo-blocking to enforce that fragmentation. The Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Julia Reda, quoted a fellow MEP justifying geo-blocking as follows: “I can’t buy Finnish bread in any German supermarket or bakery. Far too few people here would buy it, so the market doesn’t offer it to me. And you don’t see me demanding that the European Commission bloody-well make that product available to me.”
We noted that this was likely about a month ago, but IP-Watch is confirming that the USTR has bullied Japan, Canada, New Zealand and three other countries into agreeing that copyright terms must be life plus 70 years in the latest draft of the TPP agreement. This makes absolutely no sense, in part because even the head of the US copyright office has argued for the US to look at returning to the “life plus 50” baseline standard currently required by the Berne Agreement, and which those countries already abide by. Yet, here the USTR is rejecting that idea and saying that “life plus 70” will be required. That means that those countries will now have to jack up their copyright terms for absolutely no reason, even though it almost certainly harms the public for no benefit.
It’s not like these countries don’t know this is a bad idea. It’s been explained to them multiple times that even though the countries that have life plus 70 already are regretting it — and yet the USTR pushed for it anyway, and these countries backed down.
As we’ve noted for years, this is the really nefarious part of the agreements that the USTR negotiates. While this particular change won’t go against current US law, it makes copyright reform virtually impossible. That’s the real point of all this: by tying us up in “international obligations,” negotiated in backroom deals with no public input or review, the USTR is able to block Congress from having any meaningful chance at fixing the US’s broken copyright laws. Anyone who tries to put in place more sensible regimes will be told that they’re “violating international obligations” which will tie up the US government in things like those corporate sovereignty ISDS tribunals, in which merely fixing American copyright law will be seen as an unfair “appropriation” by the US government.
Representing major software companies, the BSA encourages people to report businesses that use unlicensed software.
If one of these reports results in a successful court case, the pirate snitch can look forward to a cash reward, which could amount to a million dollars per case.
According to a BSA executive the campaign has been very successful. It has resulted in many referrals and a decrease in software piracy rates.
Sounds great, but the way BSA recruits their snitches on Facebook is dubious and somewhat surrealistic. Instead of appealing to people’s ethics, the software group chooses to frames the campaign as a get-rich-quick scheme.
BSA continues to surprise us with new ads mainly targeting people who are short on money. For example, a few days ago this ad appeared in the timeline of thousands of Facebook users.
“Looking to pay off your credit card debt? If you know a company using unlicensed business software, file a report today to be eligible for a cash reward,” BSA’s latest Facebook ad reads.
It appears that every time we think BSA has found a new low, they come with a new ad that’s even more questionable. During the holidays, for example, they also appealed to the fact that many people are short on cash.
“Money can get tight during the holidays. If you know a company using unlicensed business software, file a report today to be eligible for a cash reward,’ the holiday ad reads, and there are more examples here.
While the BSA promises a quick cash solution, those who decide to report a pirating company are in it for the long haul. In the fine print it’s explained that people will only get a reward if a successful legal proceeding results in a settlement.
Shaheed said a “widely shared concern stems from the tendency for copyright protection to be strengthened with little consideration to human rights issues.” This is illustrated by trade negotiations conducted in secrecy, and with the participation of corporate entities, she said.
She stressed the fact that one of the key points of her report is that intellectual property rights are not human rights. “This equation is false and misleading,” she said.