Soccer fever has been spreading across the globe this week, with dozens of millions tuning in to watch the World Cup via regular TV and an abundance of online services.

While England basked in its somewhat traditional World Cup disappointment Thursday, viewing records were being broken, but amazingly while Brazil sizzles, some want to pour cold water on the excitement.

Allow us to introduce MarkScan, a self-described “consulting boutique dedicated to your IP requirements”. The anti-piracy company is based in India and boasts a wide range of clients including the BBC, HBO, Nokia, and other prestigious brands.

Just recently MarkScan has been doing some work for Multi Screen Media Pvt. Ltd, a Sony Entertainment Television subsidiary in India. In June, Multi Screen Media launched LIV Sports, a digital sports entertainment site that was chosen by FIFA to be the official mobile and Internet broadcaster for the 2014 World Cup.

This week, MarkScan set off on an inevitable DMCA takedown spree to protect its clients’ and FIFA’s rights. What a disaster it’s been.

Much like FIFA, MarkScan began by sending its first batch of copyright complaints to Google several days before a ball had even been kicked. The notice, which covered 46 domains allegedly streaming the World Cup, was 100% rejected by Google.

One of the complaints targeted a great article by GigaOM which helpfully offered “Where to watch the 2014 FIFA World Cup live online, and how to stream it without cable.” The article listed all legal sources, including ESPN, across several countries.

Several subsequent takedown notices targeting more than 700 other URLs saw between 90% and 100% of URLs rejected by Google. One of them was nothing short of a disaster.

The notice, sent on behalf of Sony’s Liv Sports via Multi Screen Media, targeted 610 URLs, all of which were rejected by Google. All were claimed to be infringing on Liv Sports’ and FIFA’s rights, yet what the notice actually did was target some of the web’s most respectable news sites and resources.

In the article titled “World Cup 2014: How to watch across BBC TV, radio and online”, the BBC attempted to inform its millions of readers how to legitimately access the World Cup. However, as can be seen from the image below, MarkScan had other ideas.

Sadly, this attempted takedown of a purely informational and entirely legal article wasn’t the only casualty of this notice.

An article published by Variety informing its readership that ESPN would be streaming all 64 matches was deemed to be copyright-infringing too, as was a similar attempt by Canada’s CBC.ca.

Other catastrophes would be amusing if they weren’t so awful, such as the attempt to censor this article on Bleacher Report which advised how to watch Uruguay versus Germany – a match from FIFA World Cup 2010 four years ago.

Also targeted was this 2013 article from Hollywood Reporter which detailed plans by Sony (ironically) and FIFA to broadcast the World Cup 2014 in Ultra HD. FoxSports’ interactive World Cup Schedule was also marked as infringing. Both are shown below.

Even legitimate traditional broadcasters couldn’t get the word out unhindered. Communications company Cox wanted to let its residential customers know they could “Watch the World’s Biggest Soccer Games. Any Way You Want” but MarkScan told Google the page was illegal.

The whole notice, which can be read here, has many more examples than those listed above, including the attempted censorship of EA Sports’ Twitter account and FIFA’s very own site – for FIFA Futsal World Cup Thailand 2012. Brilliant.

But, in its own unique way, one takedown is more disappointing than most.

In a post dated June 9, before the World Cup had even begun, Symantec tried to inform its readers on how to avoid various World Cup related scams. We don’t need to tell you what happened to it.

TorrentFreak contacted MarkScan whose Internet Enforcement Team told us they take care to avoid mistakes.

“We want to assure you that we deploy technology, in addition to best efforts of our teams, to ensure that we do not impact legal content on yours, or any other website,” they explained.

We suspect someone could be seeing at least a yellow card, possibly worse, in the days to come.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Last summer Kim Dotcom resigned as Mega director to focus on other projects, including his Internet Party and upcoming music service Baboom.

The latter had its ‘soft launch’ in January featuring only one album, that of Kim Dotcom himself. A few months have passed since and Baboom is now gearing up for a full release.

Dotcom has been clear about his goal for the music service ever since it was first teased in 2011. By providing free music and compensating artists through advertising revenue, Dotcom believes he can decrease music piracy while giving artists proper compensation for their work.

But is that really doable? This week two of Baboom’s top executives spoke out on Baboom’s mission and some of the unrivaled features through which it hopes to disrupt the music industry.

Chief Technology Officer Marco Oliveira stresses that closing the gap between artists and fans is one of the main goals. One way to do this is by providing the best quality music possible, through lossless streaming of FLAC music files.

“Baboom is the first music streaming platform to support FLAC streaming, which delivers lossless audio. What this means, is that fans get to listen to music exactly how the artist intended. No degraded audio experience, you get an exact replica of what the artist recorded,” Oliveira says.

Streaming FLAC files will require a decent Internet connection, as a full music album can easily take up more than half a gigabyte. In addition to lossless streams, users will also be able to download tracks in FLAC format to listen to offline.

But the music quality is only part of the offer. For artists, Baboom wants to make it as simple as possible to share their work with the public and make a decent living while doing so. No strings attached.

“Artists should be in charge of their careers, instead of being locked in unfair agreements. Neither artists or fans care for this. All they care about is the music, and that’s what should matter,” Oliveira.

This vision is shared by Mikee Tucker, Baboom’s Head of Content and Platform, who has worked with independent artists for over a decade.

Tucker believes that Baboom can give artists full control over their music, and earn more than they would do through any of the major labels.

“For me there are two driving factors behind Baboom’s vision. Firstly, the spirit of true independence and artist freedom which inspires our vision to empower the artist and give control back to the creator. Secondly, the need for a solution to tackle declining revenues and outdated business models which inspires our vision innovate and disrupt,” Tucker says.

It may sound too good to be true, but Baboom believes it can generate enough revenue through its advertisement tool. This application works like an ad blocker, but instead of blocking ads it replaces a small percentage with Baboom’s own ads. Those who prefer not to install the app have the option to buy the music instead.

Most of the revenue will then flow directly to the artists with Baboom keeping a small share, 10 percent. This fraction pales in comparison to the amounts held back by the major labels.

While this may work in theory, in the end Baboom’s success will greatly depend on the content. Dotcom previously said that there are several “top artists” lined up for the launch, but who they are remains a mystery for now.

It’s no secret that Dotcom has several prominent connections in the music industry and it will be interesting to see which artists join him. In any case, there will definitely be plenty of attention for Baboom’s launch later this year.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

While much of the last decade-and-a-half’s fight against piracy has taken place on the national level, the attempted introduction of ACTA and similar legislation showed that broader approaches are increasingly under consideration.

In an announcement timetabled for July 1, the EU Commission will reveal the adoption of two sets of measures designed to promote “greater respect” for intellectual property rights in the European Union and beyond.

Firstly, the EU will announce the adoption of an action plan to fight infringement of intellectual property rights across Europe. The second will see the adoption of a strategy for the protection and enforcement of the same in third countries.

The EU action plan will comprise ten specific mechanisms which will provide new “policy enforcement tools” to counter intellectual property infringement being carried out on a commercial scale. This suggests a targeting of sites and services, rather than their users.

According to the Commission, commercial activities represent a major challenge for the EU due to the harm they cause, including the undermining of both investment in innovation and the creation of jobs.

Rather than going down the complex and expensive legal route to tighter enforcement, the EU says its new tools will be “non-legislative” in nature and will seek to “follow the money” in order to deprive commercial offenders of income.

The announcement in respect of third countries will outline plans to strengthen cooperation between the authorities, including customs authorities in the EU and those elsewhere. Common objectives will include preventing the spread of infringing content and the stimulation of investment, growth and employment through debate and awareness.

The “follow the money” approach is definitely the anti-piracy strategy that has been met with the least opposition over the last couple of years. The work with brands and their advertisers plus payment processors such as Visa and Mastercard to stop doing business with pirate sites has been well received by industry and appears to be gaining traction. Progress is being reported in the United States and more recently the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit detailed its own successes.

The full details of the new action plans will be made available by the EU in a little over a week’s time.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Despite the growing availability of legal music services in many countries, record labels are facing a constant stream of pirated music.

In an attempt to prevent stop these infringements, the RIAA and other music industry groups send millions of takedown notices to Internet services every month. Most of these requests are directed at Google.

This week the RIAA reached a new milestone after notifying Google of the 50 millionth allegedly infringing URL, up from 25 million less than a year ago. The latest figures show that the 50 million links were spread out over 14,907 separate DMCA takedown notices.

Most of the requests, nearly 2 million, were for URLs belonging to the cyberlocker search engine filestube.com, which now operates under a new domain name. The MP3 download portals pisamba.com, downloads.nl, mp3skull.com and beemp3.com complete the top five with between 1.3 and 1.6 allegedly infringing links each.

RIAA’s takedown stats

While Google swiftly removes infringing links from its search index, the RIAA remains unhappy with how the takedown process in general is working. One of the main issues is that several foreign websites simply ignore takedown notices, or put the links back under a slightly modified URL.

“All those links to infringing music files that were automatically repopulated by each pirate site after today’s takedown will be re-indexed and appear in search results tomorrow,” RIAA CEO Cary Sherman said previously.

“Every day we have to send new notices to take down the very same links to illegal content we took down the day before. It’s like ‘Groundhog Day’ for takedowns.”

For the RIAA and other copyright holders there are few options to deal with these ‘rogue’ sites. However, the music industry group believes that Google and other search engines can do more to prevent people from accessing pirate sites through their services.

The RIAA believes that search engines should strike a deal with copyright holders to make sure that pirated files stay down through advanced filtering techniques.

In addition the RIAA wants Google to lift all takedown limits, push down pirate sites in search results, promote legal sites and services, remove pirate terms from Autocomplete and completely remove “repeat infringers” from their search index.

Google sees things differently and believes that it’s already doing enough. The company’s Senior Copyright Policy Counsel Katherine Oyama previously noted that copyright holders should consider better SEO, and focus on offering consumers what they want; decent legal alternatives.

“The best way to battle piracy is with better, more convenient, legitimate alternatives to piracy, as services ranging from Netflix to Spotify to iTunes have demonstrated. The right combination of price, convenience, and inventory will do far more to reduce piracy than enforcement can,” she said.

Over the past few months numerous copyright holders and lawmakers have increased their pressure on Google, but the search engine shows no intention of changing its policies. The longer the current standoff continues, the more likely it is that this issue will eventually be fought out in court.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The results of a new survey commissioned by YouGov SixthSense on the file-sharing and content consumption habits of citizens in the UK have just been published.

Among broader issues, the study, which draws on a sample of 1,907 adults over 16 years old and 614 children aged between 8 and 15, looked at reasons why people use file-sharing sites, plus attitudes towards piracy and paying for content.

Online content should be free

The headline finding presented YouGov suggests that half of the up-and-coming generation believes that the Internet should be a content free-for-all. A total of 49% of the 8 to 15-year-olds questioned said that they believe that people should be able to download the content they want from the Internet for nothing.

Drilling down specifically into attitudes towards file-sharing sites, 6% of children said that using them is easy, with 7% agreeing that it had become the normal thing to do.

Interestingly, YouGov found that when questioning the 16-year-old and above group, the attitudes towards free content were the same, with an identical 49% stating that online content should be free to download.

Motivations to share files

The survey found that the major driver for use of file-sharing sites is cost. While adults tend to have the most disposable income, 51% said that they use file-sharing sites to save money.

Among the children, whose resources are often more limited, 44% said their motivation was financial, with a quarter of 16-24 year olds reporting that file-sharing is the only way they can afford to access content online.

Unsurprisingly, the issue of accessibility came in at a close second place for both groups. The speed and convenience of file-sharing was cited as a key motivator for use by 41% of adults and 38% of the children.

Attitudes towards piracy and sanctions

The mainstream entertainment companies invariably insist that downloading movies and music without permission is tantamount to stealing. However, when it comes to the UK’s children the survey suggests that Big Entertainment has a mountain to climb to have that notion widely adopted. While 16% of children accept that it’s wrong to obtain content for free without the creator’s permission, just 7% believe that file-sharing is a form of stealing.

When it comes to punishing someone, somewhere, for the piracy problem, it comes as little surprise that most of the adults feel that the blame should be placed elsewhere. Rather than being punished for illegal downloading themselves, 60% of the 16-24 year-olds said that the companies and websites providing the content should be punished instead.

The future

Despite the favorable cost and convenience of using unauthorized sources, YouGov notes that opportunities exist for content providers to address those issues. Legal alternatives, such as the free ad-supported model offered by Spotify, are being utilized more, and there are signs that people are happy to pay for exclusive content. Among the children, for example, 13% said they would spend their money if that meant supporting an up-and-coming artist.

“Children in this generation have grown up with digital material and are used to having access to what they want, when they want it and for some of the time not paying for it,” says YouGov Research Director James McCoy.

“Whilst they appreciate the issues surrounding piracy and illegal downloads, if they can get away with it, then they will. Why change the habit of a lifetime?”

McCoy says that the challenge for industry moving forward is to find ways to engage and educate this group “in a relevant and non-condescending way.” That can probably be done, it just might take a little while yet.

The Future of Digital Consumption 2014 can be purchased from YouGov.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.