Seeking to crack down on the rise and rise of online file-sharing, governments in countries all around the world continually come under US pressure to do something about infringement.

Just a few days ago Vice President Joe Biden questioned how a country could consider itself “a law abiding nation”, “when they are stealing the most valuable intellectual ideas of our country.”

Few civilized country’s escape the wrath of Biden and his friends in Hollywood and yesterday news broke that after continuous pressure from the studios, the Australian government will soon consider the introduction of two new anti-piracy mechanisms.

The first, the graduated response, has been documented many times before and is already present in several countries. Site blocking is more controversial though, since despite being demanded by Hollywood abroad, the same is not practiced at home.

Today the Australian Pirate Party says that it will do all it can to ensure that neither mechanism lands on Aussie soil. With the launch of a petition resting on the notion that neither technique has been shown to be effective against piracy, the Pirates hope to stop the juggernaut in its tracks.

“There has been no evidence advanced that graduated response regimes are effective. In fact, academic literature on the matter has been skeptical that they have any measurable impact on reducing file-sharing,” Brendan Molloy, Councillor of Pirate Party Australia, told TorrentFreak in a statement.

“Our petition is intended to remind the Senate of its obligations as the House of Review. It lays out detailed reasons for opposition to the proposals — including that neither will work — and calls on the Senate to reject any legislation instituting either a graduated response scheme or website blocking.”

Research is available to back up the Party’s stance. A paper published in January 2014 by U.S. and French researchers found that three-strikes-style regimes did little to reduce piracy. Also in January, the Court of The Hague ruled that the web blockade previously ordered against The Pirate Bay was not only disproportionate, but also ineffective.

Like many before him, Molloy says that something needs to be done about Australians being treated as second-class citizens when it comes availability and reasonable pricing of content. Dealing with these key areas will go somewhere towards solving the piracy conundrum.

“Geographical market segmentation is causing Australians to pay more for digital content. Is it any wonder Australians are called ‘the world’s worst pirates’ when we are paying significantly more than everyone else? Surely these issues are more deserving of attention than attempting to introduce schemes that have been proven to be ineffective?”

The Pirate Party petition can be found on Change.org.

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

In the hope of steering prospective customers away from pirate sites, copyright holders are overloading Google with DMCA takedown notices.

These requests have increased dramatically over the years. In 2008, the search engine received only a few dozen takedown notices during the entire year, but today it can process in excess of a million in a single day.

Adding up the numbers reported in Google’s Transparency Report, we found that since January 2014 Google has been asked to remove over 100,000,000 links to infringing webpages.

Most of the reported webpages have indeed been removed and no longer appear in Google’s search results.

The massive surge in removal requests is controversial. It’s been reported that some pages contain no copyrighted material, due to mistakes or abuse, but are deleted nonetheless. Google has a pretty good track record of catching these errors, but since manual review of all links is undoable, some URLs are removed in error.

On the other end of the spectrum, copyright holders are also far from satisfied. While Google does its best to comply with its obligations under current law, some industry groups claim that the search giant can and should do more.

For the RIAA the staggering amount of takedown requests only confirms the notion that the process isn’t very effective. Brad Buckles, RIAA executive vice president of anti-piracy, previously suggested that Google should start banning entire domains from its search results.

“Every day produces more results and there is no end in sight. We are using a bucket to deal with an ocean of illegal downloading,” Buckles said.

“Isn’t it simply logical and fair at some point to conclude that such links are infringing without requiring content owners to keep expending time and resources to have the link taken down?”

Google is doing its best to address the concerns of copyright holders. A few months ago the company released a report detailing the various anti-piracy measures it uses. However, the company also stressed that copyright holders can do more to prevent piracy themselves.

Without legal options it’s hard to beat unauthorized copying, Google argues.

“Piracy often arises when consumer demand goes unmet by legitimate supply. As services ranging from Netflix to Spotify to iTunes have demonstrated, the best way to combat piracy is with better and more convenient legitimate services,” the company explained.

“The right combination of price, convenience, and inventory will do far more to reduce piracy than enforcement can.”

The apparent standoff has also piqued the interest of U.S. lawmakers. Earlier this year the House Judiciary Subcommittee had a hearing on the DMCA takedown issue, and both copyright holders, Internet service providers, and other parties are examining what they can do to optimize the process.

In the meantime, the avalanche of removal requests is expected to continue, at an increasing rate.

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

For years Australia has wrestled with the thorny issue of online piracy. Citizens have long complained of being treated as second class consumers, in many cases having to wait months or years for new content from the United States to appear Down Under. This has only fueled the uptake of illegal file-sharing.

While there are signs that plans for improved availability of content might be developing, impatient entertainment companies want action now, and talks with ISPs have failed to show significant progress.

The threat that the government could get involved if voluntary agreements can not be reached has always loomed in the background, and now it seems that the government is getting ready to act. According to Fairfax (subscription), as early as this week the federal cabinet will consider two proposals to crack down on illegal file-sharing.

The first proposal, of sending letters to those found infringing copyright online, will already be familiar to Internet users in the United States, France, New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea. The idea is that persistent infringers receive subsequent and increasingly threatening letters in order to deter future offending but there is still debate whether such mechanisms are effective.

It will perhaps come as no surprise that the second discussion will center on the blocking or censoring of so-called ‘pirate’ sites by local ISPs, with the effect that their subscribers can no longer access them.

Andrew Maiden, CEO of ASTRA, the industry body for subscription TV, told Mumbrella that the legislative changes required to effect the above could be brought in as early as mid or late June this year.

“They have already made commitments to take action against piracy so I would think they would want to act sooner rather than later,” Maiden said.

While there are few details on the proposed letter-writing scheme, entertainment companies will be hoping that there will be consequences for those who fail to heed advice to stop downloading and sharing copyrighted material. At this stage, however, no punitive measures are being reported for the Aussie scheme.

But even before letter writing begins, there are complex issues for the government to overcome. In the past talks between movie and music companies and Aussie ISPs have deadlocked over, among other things, who should pay for such a program. There are no signs that the parties have reached consensus on this or any other matter.

On site blocking, it is expected that entertainment companies will be allowed to go to court to obtain injunctions against sites such as The Pirate Bay, which will compel local ISPs to block the sites. This same strategy is being used in several countries in Europe, notably the UK, although not in the United States where many of the entertainment companies are based.

However, the big difference with Australia is that as a result of content being made available elsewhere first, Aussie citizens have already become adept at using VPN and proxy services to access legal services such as Netflix. The exact same techniques can be used to access a blocked Pirate Bay, for example.

With the Australian government having previously promised to make “significant” changes to Australia’s copyright laws, the movie and music industries will be hoping that 2014 turns out to be a productive year. In the meantime, companies such as Google will continue to remind the Australian government that piracy is a pricing and availability problem.

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

This week we have five newcomers in our chart.

RoboCop is the most downloaded movie this week.

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	(…)	RoboCop	6.5 / trailer
2	(1)	Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Cam/TS)	8.3 / trailer
3	(…)	Pompeii	6.0 / trailer
4	(…)	The Monuments Men	6.2 / trailer
5	(3)	Vampire Academy	6.3 / trailer
6	(2)	That Awkward Moment	6.2 / trailer
7	(…)	I Frankenstein	5.2 / trailer
8	(7)	Rio 2 (HDTS)	6.8 / trailer
9	(…)	About Last Night	6.2 / trailer
10	(6)	Her	8.2 / trailer

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

In my last column, I explained how the copyright monopoly is fundamentally incompatible with private communications as a concept, and how we must weigh a silly distribution monopoly for one of many entertainment industries against such vital functions of society as whistleblower protection, freedom of the press, and the ability to hold a private conversation in the first place. While this argument is strong, it does require a bit of intelligence and the ability to see how two ideas conflict, so it can be hard to get across to copyright monopoly pundits.

The threat against private communications isn’t the only thing wrong with the copyright monopoly, of course. I have previously argued here on TorrentFreak that there’s really nothing defensible about the monopoly at all. But in order to break the spell of “publishers have always told me that the copyright monopoly is good and I have never had any reason to question their self-interest in the matter”, there are other tricks of honest, effective argumentation.

While it’s possible to attack the copyright monopoly construct from many angles – all of them, in fact – some fruit is more low-hanging than others. One easy angle is to point at the usual (horrible) motivation of the copyright monopoly; that it “enables creators to make money” (which is factually false, misleading, and dishonest). If you’re talking to a monopoly pundit, or just somebody who hasn’t had reason to question the monopoly, this point will come up sooner or later.

Once this point comes up, it’s an open goal. To make sure you understood the point correctly, reiterate back; “So your point is that they should be rewarded with a monopoly to make money, in order to give them an incentive to create more art?” Any monopoly pundit will nod enthusiastically.

Then, score the goal. “So why does the monopoly last 70 years after the author’s death? I don’t know of a single author who keeps writing books after they’re dead and buried. The copyright monopoly term is at least 70 years – a whole lifetime – too long. And if it is that obviously 70 years too long, then it’s absurd in the first place.”

Occasionally, you’ll see some fightback that their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren should inherit the privileges of the author, which you can easily refute by pointing out that the purpose was already agreed to be an incentive for the artist to create more art, not for their children to get privileged at the expense of others.

Once you have established that the copyright monopoly term is indefensively long – at least a lifetime too long – then the facade of pretend perfection is broken. If something as fundamental as that can be questioned, and it can, then everything else is also up in the air.

Have fun making the pennies drop and the facades crack.

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