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.
Tag: Google
Google Keeps Rejecting Hollywood’s Broad Takedown Requests
The MPAA and Google are not on speaking terms, to say the least.
In recent years the Hollywood group has pushed Google and other search engines to increase their anti-piracy efforts.
This prompted the search giant to filter certain keywords and update its algorithms to downrank pirate sites, but the MPAA is still not happy. Ideally, they want Google to de-list pirate sites entirely.
In a related effort, the group has been sending very targeted takedown requests. Instead of linking to individual download or streaming pages, they ask for the removal of the homepages of various pirate sites.
While these homepages often list links to infringing movies, as shown here, they also include a lot of other content that’s not specified in the takedowns. As a result, Google refuses to take action.
The MPAA’s most recent request lists 43 allegedly infringing URLs and Google refused to take 36 out of its search results, a total of 86 percent.
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
Copyright Monopoly Fraudsters Need To Go To Jail With Heavy Damages
Last week there was a story on TorrentFreak about a copyright monopolist who had gone absolutely insane and sent so-called “takedown notices” to everybody and their brother, from EFF to TOR – basically anybody with a download page.
It’s a complete mystery why this isn’t a criminal behavior. The fact that it isn’t is why it continues and harms innovation, creativity, free speech, and the Internet.
The Swedish Pirate Party had a very clear policy on crimes like this: if you lied about holding an exclusive right to something, the same penalty that would have applied to an infringer of that exclusive right would instead apply to you. This is only fair, after all: you are infringing on the distribution of a creative work by dishonest means.
For repeat offenders, or organizations that committed this crime on a commercial basis or commercial gain, like that idiot record label in the TorrentFreak story – they would be declared criminal organizations and have all their assets seized. The individuals doing so for commercial gain would go to jail for a couple of years.
The thing is, this should not even be contentious. This is how we deal with this kind of criminal act in every – every – other aspect of society. If you lie as part of commercial operations and hurt somebody else’s rights or business, you are a criminal. If you do so repeatedly or for commercial gain, direct or indirect, you’re having your ill-gotten gains seized. This isn’t rocket science. This is standard bloody operating procedure.
The copyright industry goes ballistic at this proposal, of course, and try to portray themselves as rightsless victims – when the reality is that they have been victimizing everybody else after making the entire planet rightsless before their intellectual deforestation.
Paypal Cuts Off Mega Because It Actually Keeps Your Files Secret
The world could really need a credible alternative to PayPal
There are way too many stories of Paypal unfairly and ridiculously cutting off services that rely on it as a payment mechanism, but here’s yet another one. Mega, the cloud storage provider that is perhaps well-known for being Kim Dotcom’s “comeback” act after the US government shut down Megaupload, has had its Paypal account cut off. The company claims that Paypal was pressured by Visa and Mastercard to cut it off:
Visa and MasterCard then pressured PayPal to cease providing payment services to MEGA.
MEGA provided extensive statistics and other evidence showing that MEGA’s business is legitimate and legally compliant. After discussions that appeared to satisfy PayPal’s queries, MEGA authorised PayPal to share that material with Visa and MasterCard. Eventually PayPal made a non-negotiable decision to immediately terminate services to MEGA. PayPal has apologised for this situation and confirmed that MEGA management are upstanding and acting in good faith. PayPal acknowledged that the business is legitimate, but advised that a key concern was that MEGA has a unique model with its end-to-end encryption which leads to “unknowability of what is on the platform”.
MEGA has demonstrated that it is as compliant with its legal obligations as USA cloud storage services operated by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, Box, Spideroak etc, but PayPal has advised that MEGA’s “unique encryption model” presents an insurmountable difficulty.
Is Retweeting ISIS ‘Material Support Of Terrorism’?
Last week there was a bizarre and ill-informed post by music industry lawyer Chris Castle — who has a weird infatuation with the idea that Google must be pure evil — in which he tried to argue that because YouTube wasn’t able to take down propaganda videos showing ISIS atrocities fast enough, that Google was providing “material support” for terrorism. As Castle notes:
Google’s distribution of jihadi videos on Google’s monopoly video search platform certainly looks like material support of terrorists which is itself a violation of the federal law Google claims to hold so dear. (See 18 U.S. Code §2339A and §2339B aka the U.S. Patriot Act.)
Of course, there are all sorts of problems with the Patriot Act, including its definitions of “material support of terrorism,” but to stretch the law to argue that providing an open platform and simply not removing videos fast enough (the videos in question all got removed pretty rapidly anyway, but not fast enough for Castle) is somehow “material support for terrorism” is flat out crazy. It stems from the same sort of confused logic that Castle has used in the past, arguing that Google and others must magically “just know” what is infringing and what is not — suggesting a true lack of understanding about the scale of offerings like YouTube and the resources needed to sort through all the content.
We were inclined to simply dismiss Castle’s nuttiness to the category of “WTF” where it belongs… until at a conference earlier this week, a DOJ official, John Carlin, who holds the role of assistant attorney general for national security, appeared to suggest that anyone helping ISIS’s social media campaign could be guilty of “material support” for terrorism:
John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security, told a cybersecurity conference in Washington on Monday that officials could try to blunt ISIS’s violent PR operation by essentially trying propagandists as terrorists. He suggested the Justice Department could bring prosecutions under the law against providing material support to a terrorist organization. His remarks were believed to be the first time a U.S. official has ever said that people who assist ISIS with online media could face criminal prosecution.
Carlin was asked at the conference whether he would “consider criminal charges” against people who are “proliferating ISIS social media.”
His answer: “Yes. You need to look at the particular facts and evidence.” But Carlin noted that the United States could use the material support law to prosecute “technical expertise” to a designated terrorist organization. And spreading the word for ISIS online could count as such expertise.
The World’s Most Idiotic Copyright Complaint
At least once a month TorrentFreak reports on the often crazy world of DMCA takedown notices. Google is kind enough to publish thousands of them in its Transparency Report and we’re only too happy to spend hours trawling through them.
Every now and again a real gem comes to light, often featuring mistakes that show why making these notices public is not only a great idea but also in the public interest. The ones we found this week not only underline that assertion in bold, but are actually the worst examples of incompetence we’ve ever seen.
German-based Total Wipes Music Group have made these pages before after trying to censor entirely legal content published by Walmart, Ikea, Fair Trade USA and Dunkin Donuts. This week, however, their earlier efforts were eclipsed on a massive scale.
wipedFirst, in an effort to ‘protect’ their album “Truth or Dare” on Maze Records, the company tried to censor a TorrentFreak article from 2012 on how to download anonymously. The notice, found here, targets dozens of privacy-focused articles simply because they have the word “hide” in them.
But it gets worse – much worse. ‘Protecting’ an album called “Cigarettes” on Mona Records, Total Wipes sent Google a notice containing not a single infringing link. Unbelievably one of the URLs targeted an article on how to use PGP on the Mac. It was published by none other than the EFF.
Internet Industry Now Considers The Intelligence Community An Adversary, Not A Partner
In an interview last month, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said the N.S.A. “would have to cart us out in a box” before the company would provide the government a back door to its products. Apple recently began encrypting phones and tablets using a scheme that would force the government to go directly to the user for their information. And intelligence agencies are bracing for another wave of encryption.
In fact, it seems noteworthy that this whole issue of increasing encryption by the tech companies to keep everyone out has been left off the official summit schedule. As the NY Times notes, Silicon Valley seems to be pretty much completely fed up with the intelligence community after multiple Snowden revelations revealed just how far the NSA had gone in trying to “collect it all” — including hacking into the foreign data centers of Google and Yahoo. And, on top of that, the NSA’s efforts to buy up zero day vulnerabilities before companies can find out and patch them:
“What has struck me is the enormous degree of hostility between Silicon Valley and the government,” said Herb Lin, who spent 20 years working on cyberissues at the National Academy of Sciences before moving to Stanford several months ago. “The relationship has been poisoned, and it’s not going to recover anytime soon.”