While its popularity has waned in recent years, the issue of camcorder piracy is often spoken about in crisis terms by the major movie studios.

Part of the reason camming occurs, however, is down to the exclusivity enjoyed by the world’s theater chains, meaning that while a mainstream movie is being shown in a cinema, it is not available anywhere else. It will not be available on Netflix nor will it be available for purchase on Blu-ray or DVD. This creates a convenient opening for the black market.

Of course, pretty much the whole time a movie is showing in theaters it will be available both online and on DVD, because someone, somewhere, will have recorded it illegally. True exclusivity only exists in the minds of the theaters and distributors.

Just lately it’s been extremely popular for Australians to be criticized for their piracy habits, an activity sometimes justified by films not being made available quickly enough Down Under. This morning it’s been revealed that the group representing the Australian film and TV home entertainment industry intend to do something about that.

Speaking with Fairfax Media, Australian Home Entertainment Distributors Association chief executive officer Simon Bush said that the current theatrical window will be narrowed in an effort to reduce piracy.

“This 120 days is not the hard and fast rule anymore and there will be some studios this year that will be coming in around the 90 days,” Bush said. “[The studios] don’t like the fact that they are losing out a lot of money to piracy.”

It’s hoped that the shortening of the delay will go someway towards reducing illegal movie downloads in Australia by providing content in alternative formats in a more timely fashion. That being said, AHEDA still wish to preserve the big screen’s exclusivity in the market and its position as the premier location for early viewing.

“It continues to ensure that the theatrical window retains its rightful prominence in the market as the premium movie experience, but also allows the consumer to increasingly access the film earlier digitally and on DVD and Blu-ray and thus reduce what some refer to as the ‘piracy window’,” Bush said of the narrowing window.

While improved availability is key to reducing piracy, theaters will undoubtedly balk at the further erosion of their exclusive window of opportunity. However, according to comments made by DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, release windows could collapse almost entirely in the next ten years.

“I think the model will change and you won’t pay for the window of availability. A movie will come out and you will have 17 days, that’s exactly three weekends, which is 95% of the revenue for 98% of movies,” Katzenberg told the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills earlier this year.

“On the 18th day, these movies will be available everywhere ubiquitously and you will pay for the size. A movie screen will be $15. A 75” TV will be $4.00. A smartphone will be $1.99. That enterprise that will exist throughout the world, when that happens, and it will happen, it will reinvent the enterprise of movies,” he said.

In the meantime, the Australian government will try to legislate its way out of the piracy problem, by imposing “three strikes” style schemes on its citizens and pressuring ISPs to take responsibility for the actions of their subscribers.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

300: Rise Of An Empire is the most downloaded movie for the second week in a row.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(1)	300: Rise Of An Empire	6.6 / trailer
2	(3)	X-Men: Days of Future Past (HDCAM)	8.5 / trailer
3	(4)	The Grand Budapest Hotel	8.3 / trailer
4	(2)	Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist	8.5 / trailer
5	(…)	Edge of Tomorrow (TS/Cam)	8.2 / trailer
6	(10)	Rio 2	6.7 / trailer
7	(…)	A Million Ways to Die in the West (Webrip)	6.4 / trailer
8	(6)	The Lego Movie	8.2 / trailer
9	(5)	Non-Stop	7.2 / trailer
10	(…)	Sleeping Beauty	3.1 / trailer

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

Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress blogging platform, has seen a rapid increase in DMCA takedown notices in recent years.

Most requests are legitimate, aimed at disabling access to copyright-infringing material. However, there are also many overbroad and abusive takedown notices which take up a lot of the company’s time and resources.

Last November, WordPress decided to take a stand against these fraudulent practices. The company teamed up with student journalist Oliver Hotham who had one of his articles 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 it was infringing on his copyrights.

Through a lawsuit filed in a California federal court, WordPress and Hotham now hope to be compensated for the damage this abuse caused them.

“The information in the press release that Hotham published on his blog did not infringe any copyright because Hotham had permission to publish it. It was a press release, which by its very nature conveys the intent to ‘release’ information to the ‘press’,” WordPress’ attorney explains to the court.

The company says 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, and they have to be stopped.

“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 argues.

“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 adds.

Since Steiner failed to respond in court WordPress and Hotham have requested a default judgment. In a recent filing they demand a total of $10,000 in damages as well as $14,520 in attorneys’ fees.

If the court agrees with the request it will be mostly a symbolic win, and hopefully a signal to other copyright holders that false DMCA takedown requests are not without consequence.

During a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on the DMCA takedown system earlier this year, Automattic General Counsel Paul Sieminski also stressed the importance of this issue to lawmakers,

“The system works so long as copyright owners use this power in good faith. But too often they don’t, and there should be clear legal consequences for those who choose to abuse the system,” Sieminski said.

In a few weeks we’ll know if the court agrees.

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

This week’s IP Enforcement Summit in London brought together experts and stakeholders from all over the world to discuss intellectual property issues. In attendance were representatives from Hollywood, the music industry, and a whole swathe of companies reliant on the exploitation of IP rights.

One of the speakers at the event was Commissioner Adrian Leppard of City of London Police, who spoke about police are contributing to the ongoing fight against piracy. Losses to counterfeiting and pirated goods will amount to a trillion next year, Leppard began. “It’s high yield, low risk,” he noted.

“We need to focus on [the problem] in the UK. We know that UK ISP addresses are visiting websites that are downloading illegal content, up to 7 million of those hits on a monthly basis,” Leppard said.

Technology problems

“The Internet pushes through every border control legislation we have and it is carrying a huge amount of harm to our society, as well as offering creative opportunity for business. At some point there has to be a debate and a challenge about the harm the Internet brings,” the Commissioner told the audience.

While Leppard undoubtedly has a very good grasp of his core topics and has well-deserved reputation as a professional crime fighter, elements of the next section of his speech raise a concern or two. Speaking of the need to consider how pirated content is shifted around online when making new laws, the police chief only sowed confusion.

New legislation required

“The new legislation that’s necessary is not just about prosecuting people and protecting people, we’ve got to think about some of the enabling functions that allow this to happen that we just take for granted,” he began.

“Whether it’s Bitnet, The Tor – which is 90% of the Internet – peer-to-peer sharing, or the streaming capability worldwide. At what point does civil society say that as well as the benefits that brings, this enables huge risk and threat to our society that we need to take action against?”

Perhaps technology isn’t Leppard’s strong point.

Enforcement won’t work against a piracy tsunami

Noting how difficult it is for law enforcement to work across borders, Leppard went on to admit something with which most people agree.

“I don’t think enforcement is ever going to find a way out of this problem. When you’re in a tsunami you can’t push back the water and you have to start thinking very differently about how we protect society,” he said.

“The only way is to work with industry to prevent and to think about the enabling functions of this crime. Enforcement will only ever be a limited capability in this space.”

Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit

Speaking of the unit set up last year to deal with the piracy issue, Leppard said that the inspiration had arrived from across the Atlantic. PIPCU tries to mirror the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE unit, by working as a single point of communication between all interested parties.

Operation Creative

Operation Creative, PIPCU’s ongoing anti-piracy initiative, is designed to find a way around the ineffectiveness of enforcement, Leppard said.

“We’ll never enforce our way out of this problem so we have to think differently about how we tackle it and target it. Organized crime is motivated purely by money and the way to start dealing with this is to target the money flows and how people make money out of this crime,” he said.

Working with the entertainment industries, advertisers and credit card companies, PIPCU is provided with “a court-ready and very bespoke evidentiary package” against pirate sites.

“Once we’ve got that court package we know we can defend ourselves in a civil court or a criminal court and we take action,” he said.

What happens next is a phenomenon we’ve been documenting on TorrentFreak for nearly a year now – the official police letters to piracy sites that effectively ask them to close down. However, as Leppard reveals, the technique is not particularly effective.

“The first thing we do is make an overt approach to the owners of the websites and between 4% and 10% of those websites will close down just by having overt engagement. These are global websites, of course they may move to another ISP address, we know that, and we’ll target them there as well.”

Unresponsive sites then see their advertising hit, closely followed by the hindering of their payment processing options. When all else fails PIPCU will move onto the final step….

Disruption and enforcement

“We’re new into this although we’ve been piloting it for the best part of two years and we know it works. We’re in the first phases of that and it will be interesting to see as we move through the next year or so how successful that approach is and how much we get challenged. I expect us to get challenged as well but we have a lot of legal advice behind us,” Leppard said.

“But my point is whether this is successful or not it is this area that we all need to start thinking about if we’re going to combat this problem, not simply ‘how do we enforce, how do we prosecute, how do we target these organized crime groups’, but actually how do we start to disable the very factor that the crime exists – how people make money.”

The future

Looking forward, Leppard admitted that on their own the police can’t don’t much to solve the problem so collaborating with the private sector is the only way. The music and movie industries presumably won’t have much of a problem with that, but whether the approach will prove effective overall is another matter.

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

Following in the footsteps of the makers of uTorrent, the Vuze team is now taking a stand against piracy.

The California-based company says it will focus more on highlighting legal content through social media and other outlets. Vuze emphasizes that its technology is completely legal, but wants its users to understand that sharing files without permission of copyright holders isn’t.

“Although torrents themselves are a legitimate way to share files, understanding the rights of copyright holders and what content they have or have not authorized for free distribution is the core to understanding the difference between it being legal or illegal to share or distribute content using Vuze,” the company notes.

“Remember, if you use Vuze torrent client software for P2P file sharing then use it responsibly. Be aware of illegal torrents and avoid downloading them. Don’t infringe copyright,” Vuze adds.

This position is sensible for a technology company to take. Also, Vuze does highlight that copyright is a complex issue, and that there are ongoing discussions with varying positions. The bottom-line according to Vuze, however, is that downloading something without the permission of the owners is stealing.

“Now we can get into all sorts of political, social and even religious discussions on this topic, but right now as the laws exist in most places downloading and sharing content without the authorization of the rights-holder is stealing, and even if one copy was purchased, passing digital copies around via P2P is still illegal, sometimes criminally so.”

“Sharing and downloading infringing MP3s and MPEGs is virtually the same as swiping from a brick-and-mortar,” Vuze adds.

The “stealing” mention is a touchy subject. Many people, including scholars and a U.S. federal court, believe that this term should be avoided when talking about piracy.

Even the MPAA’s Chris Dodd agreed on this. “We’re on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery,” Dodd said two years ago, although the MPAA still uses the term today.

Vuze, however, doesn’t avoid this type of strong language. The company wants to make it clear that piracy is not allowed. In fact, the company encourages its users to follow suit, and “consider reporting illegal content infractions.”

Aside from the promise to highlight legal content on its blog, they also provide some tips for users to spot infringing content. Vuze hopes that with these guidelines, users will be able to steer away from any illegal behavior.

“We want to again stress that we respect the rights of copyright holders, and hope and expect that you do too,” Vuze concludes.

Whether that’s going to happen remains to be seen. Several studies have shown that more than 90% of all public transfers via BitTorrent are copyright infringing, and it will be hard to flip these numbers around.

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