A hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet has heard opinions from leading content providers and technology advocates on how best to progress online digital distribution.

The Rise of Innovative Business Models: Content Delivery Methods in the Digital Age heard testimony from Amazon, the MPAA, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and PreEmptive Solutions, an anti-piracy and reverse engineering mitigation company.

John McCoskey, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at the Motion Picture Association of America, began with an overview of how video content is currently being consumed. No longer are people simply sat in a theater or in front of a TV.

“Nearly 42 million homes in the United States now have any number of Internet-connected media devices, including game consoles, smart TVs, and online set-top boxes. More than 90 legitimate online services are already enabling those homes to download or stream movies and TV shows, offering a service for every type of content consumer out there,” McCoskey said.

He went on to speak of MPAA member companies embracing portability and flexibility so that viewers can “watch what they want, when they want, where they want.”

This innovation, McCoskey said, is a testament to a robust copyright regime that encourages the creation and delivery of content, adding that working together to crack down on infringement will be of benefit to all.

“We all share a responsibility to curb abusive practices online that stunt investment in content, hurt the rapidly evolving digital marketplace, and harm the interests of consumers who benefit from these innovations. That means finding ways of working together in good faith on voluntary solutions where everyone shares in the responsibility of creating a healthy digital marketplace for the exchange of ideas, goods, and services; one that promotes creativity, investment, innovation, and job creation,” McCoskey explained.

Also speaking at the hearing was Paul Misener, Amazon.com’s Vice President for Global Public Policy. He began with a brief history of his company and how it has developed from an Internet-based distributor of physical goods into one increasingly supplying digital products online.

“The content is the same, of course: digital bits that, once delivered, various electronic devices can convert into text, sounds, and images. And so our digital delivery business today is a natural continuation of our origins as a place where customers can find and discover content they want to buy online,” Misener said.

In common with the MPAA, Misener said that Amazon also recognizes the importance of supplying content for consumption on a wide range of platforms, but unlike their movie industry counterparts the company had a warning concerning unnecessarily tough copyright law and punishing damages for infringement.

“The risk of exorbitant statutory damage awards that the current system allows could chill the development of new products and services designed to help consumers enjoy copyrighted works,” Misener said.

“It may make sense to limit the availability of statutory damages in certain situations, such as where the defendant acted with a good faith belief that its use of copyrighted works was non-infringing or fair, or where the outcome turns on a novel question of law.”

After noting that digital music distributors have to negotiate a tough path to offering official content due to the lack of centralized information on music creators/publishers and no system for blanket licensing, Misener moved onto perhaps the most important issue of all – the preservation of the Internet itself.

“Continued growth and innovation in digital content delivery assumes that the Internet will remain a non-discriminatory, open platform, where bits are bits and arbitrary limits do not
inhibit consumer access to content. Consumer choice, without impairment, must be preserved,” Misener concluded.

The importance of giving customers what they want was later underlined by David Sohn, General Counsel and Director at the Center for Democracy & Technology. The success of iTunes proves that it is indeed possible to “compete with free” as long as services offer great choice and are easy to use. Failure to do so, Sohn said, can result in consumers making other choices.

“If lawful services fail to give consumers what they want, when they want it, unlawful sources will be out there, waiting to fill the gaps and satisfy the unmet demand.

“In a world in which information technology has made incredibly powerful tools for copying and disseminating data cheap and ubiquitous, no amount of wishing and no enforcement strategy will be able to fully eliminate unlawful sources of copyrighted material,” Sohn warned.

When considering reform of copyright law, Sohn said that Congress should keep in mind that the best defense against widespread infringement is via a “robust and evolving content marketplace” that satisfies consumer demand via convenient and attractive alternatives to piracy.

The key to that, he said, is by recognizing the importance of existing innovation-boosting elements in current law – the safe-harbor provisions of the DMCA, the “Sony doctrine” concerning products with substantial non-infringing uses, and fair use.

“Continued innovation and development in the online content marketplace would suffer greatly if Congress were to narrow or otherwise undermine any of these three legal principles,” Sohn said.

With technology companies and advocates recommending a softening of statutory damages while maintaining safe harbor and the expansion of fair use, the MPAA and other entertainment companies are again finding themselves at odds with their potential distribution partners. Bridging that gap will be an important challenge in the months and years to come.

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

In 2011 Belgium was one of the first countries to implement a court-ordered Pirate Bay blockade.

The action was the result of a lawsuit between the Belgian Anti-Piracy Foundation (BAF) and ISPs Belgacom and Telenet. Through the lawsuit BAF hoped to force the Internet providers to block subscriber access to the famous torrent site.

Initially the Antwerp Commercial Court ruled in favor of the ISPs, describing the notion of wholesale site blocking as “disproportionate”. However, this decision was later overturned by the Court of Appeal and access to The Pirate Bay has been blocked ever since.

As in other countries, however, Pirate Bay users soon found other ways to access their favorite torrent site. With hundreds of proxies to choose from they simply changed their bookmarks and continued to download and share as usual.

To address this issue a new verdict was issued last year, requiring all Belgian Internet Providers to block “current and future domains” that provide access to The Pirate Bay.

Several ISPs decided to challenge this broad order, but without result. This week the Supreme Court upheld the ruling of the lower court.

This effectively means that all providers have to actively police the Internet for domains that provide access to The Pirate Bay, report these sites to the authorities, and add these domains to their blocklist.

The verdict, which has yet to be published, is permanent and there are no further options to appeal in Belgium. At this point it is unclear whether the order is limited to The Pirate Bay, or if other sites such as ExtraTorrent and Kickass.to are also covered.

The Internet providers are not happy with their new duties as Internet police, with Belgacom spokesman Jan Margot describing the verdict as “disproportionate”.

“Internet providers are obliged to continue to block The Pirate Bay, even if the site moves to another domain. That is a very broad definition which obliges providers to police the entire Internet. This is something we can not accept,” Margot says.

The Pirate Bay is not the only torrent site that’s currently blocked in Belgium. A few months ago several ISPs quietly expanded their blocklists with Kat.ph, BitSnoop, ExtraTorrent other domains.

With the new Supreme Court ruling, this lists is expected to grow indefinitely.

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

In 2004 during some of the early days of the Swedish BitTorrent scene, a new private tracker appeared online. Swebits maintained a membership of up to 40,000 and was very popular with locals.

Seven years later in February 2011 the site announced it would close. News from the site suggested it had been targeted by a DDoS attack and alongside had suffered a catastrophic hardware disaster. Perhaps coincidentally, just a week before the site’s closure a Swebits user was arrested at his home following an investigation carried out by anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyran (now Rights Alliance).

It transpired that the then 25-year-old was a moderator on Swebits and between April 2008 and November 2011 had allegedly shared huge quantities of content with the site’s users. The prosecution in the case insisted that he had uploaded many thousands of movies and TV shows after obtaining them from so-called ‘topsites’ affiliated with the warez scene.

The final case, which involved the uploading of 518 titles, concluded yesterday afternoon in the Västmanlands District Court after being reduced to ‘just’ 517 titles on a technicality.

“A film was dropped [from the case] because the statute of limitations expired,” explained prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson.

However, out of the significant remainder the defendant confessed to just 13 of the charges, the number of titles Antipiratbyran / Rights Alliance said they downloaded directly from the man and later tested. As more than 500 titles remained untested, the former Swebits moderator believes he is innocent of those charges.

Despite the reduction and counterclaim, Rasmusson said that never before had a court dealt with someone who had uploaded so many movies and TV shows online. In what is generally seen as an aggravating factor, the court heard that many of the uploads took place before the products were officially available on DVD.

Although more than 500 titles were involved in the trial, it appears only one producer is seeking damages from the now 28-year-old. Nevertheless, they are substantial.

Represented by infamous pirate-hunter Henrik Pontén of Rights Alliance, Nordisk Film AS are trying to recover more than a million dollars in damages after their title “Buried Alive” was released onto the Internet two days before its official DVD release.

According to the prosecutor, a request for a custodial sentence will be the likely outcome.

“I will probably insist on imprisonment,” he concludes.

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

After a legal battle of nearly eight years isoHunt founder Gary Fung announced the site’s closure last month.

Fung signed a $110 million settlement with the MPAA and shut down isoHunt.com as stipulated in the agreement with the movie studios. Initially the domain was completely dead, but visitors to what was once one of the largest torrent sites are now greeted by the following message.

“A United States federal court has permanently shut down isoHunt.com because it was in violation of copyright law. If you are looking for your favorite movies or TV shows online, there are more ways than ever today to get high quality access to them on legal platforms.”

TorrentFreak reached out to Fung, who said he couldn’t go into detail about why the notice was put up, or who drafted the language. However, he did point out that his ideas on “sharing” haven’t changed a bit.

On the contrary, his work on isoHunt taught him that the freedom to share information is one of the core values of the Internet, and despite the setbacks he suffered Fung is still motivated to defend these ideas.

“I shut isoHunt down on October 23 to end the seven year battle with Hollywood, but for 11 years while I worked on isoHunt I’ve witnessed one thing: the Internet is about sharing, and file-sharing is a movement that is about more than mere files or copyright. It’s about the Freedom to share, the Freedom to create. And relatedly nowadays, the Freedom to not be spied on.”

“It is these freedoms, at the intersection of isoHunt closing and the erosion of privacy and other information freedoms, that gave me the idea for a clothing line. One that carries social statements with ironic twists, statements and designs in the form of t-shirts, sweaters and hoodies.”

This idea quickly turned into a new venture in which Fung teamed up with an old friend, Clifford Joe, who had already been working on starting his own clothing company. Today, the duo announced their plan to the world through a pre-Kickstarter project that has just gone public.

The clothing will carry the brand “Viva 10.23,” a reference to the day isoHunt was officially shut down. People can not fund anything yet, but are able to leave their email address so they are notified when the Kickstarter project goes live in a month or so.

The project page currently lists a handful of designs, including a Obama-style poster of Gary with the text “Share,” and shirts with the slogans “Stop Watching Us” and “Freedom to Share.” Fung told us that this is just an initial sample, and that Viva 10.23 invites designers from all over the world to submit their ideas and expand the product line.

The project page describes the concept as “political fashion” and Fung hopes to cover a wide range of Internet activism with the clothing line.

“What I’ve learned in my time working on isoHunt, is that the social, legal and political underpinnings of my work are just as important if not more so than the tech, and I see an opportunity now to bring both designers and ‘users’ together to casually campaign for what we believe in: information freedom, the freedom to share,” Fung says.

As for the revenue model, Fung notes that he will get a dollar as a consulting fee. The majority of profits Viva 10.23 makes will be donated to organizations that support Internet freedom issues, such as EFF, Openmedia.ca, as well as various charities and funds for emerging musicians and filmmakers.

“This is clothing we wear to advertise causes we believe in, and clothing that funds those causes,” Fung concludes.

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

While entertainment companies are able to chase down suspected owners of file-sharing sites in order to issue them with copyright complaints, the process can be both complex and expensive.

Even when an action gets underway it can be months or years before the matter is brought to a conclusion and despite having a pretty decent success rate, it is relatively rare for rightsholders to tackle their rivals in this manner.

More popular at the moment is to impact a site’s traffic in a particular region by appealing directly to a court. If a judge can be convinced that a site is causing immediate damage to a copyright holder that is likely to continue unless action is taken, having that site blocked at the ISP level is now a very real option in several countries across Europe.

Understandably people are concerned that the path could lead to serious overblocking and today we have the first signs that shadowy sites such as The Pirate Bay won’t be the only ones to face being censored.

VKontakte is Russia’s version of Facebook. It is a massive operation with upwards of 45 million daily users. The site allows its users to upload video and audio content which of course means that some will store copyrighted material. According to a company called Medusa Film, the site has been hosting a copy of its film Sole a Catinelle (Sun in Buckets).

Medusa Film is owned by Mediaset, a communications and media giant founded by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and owned by his family. According to their complaint, something dramatic needed to be done against not only VK.com but a range of other file-hosting sites actively making their content available.

The Public Prosecutor of Rome agreed and has now issued an order for all local Internet service providers to begin a blockade of vKontakte and several other hosting sites including Rapidgator.net, one of the largest file-hosters around.

The remaining sites to be blocked include movshare.net, nowdownload.ch, nowvideo.ch, topvideo.tv, upshared.com, usefile.com and videopremium.tv.

Marco d’Itri who runs Osservatorio Censura, a site dedicated to reporting on Italian web censorship, informs TorrentFreak that action is being taken before a hearing on the full merits of the case.

“As usual this is an ‘urgent’ confiscation request which happens well before a trial,” d’Itri explains.

It is not known whether Medusa reached out to vKontakte, Rapidgator or any of the other sites involved before they decided to go to court with a request for a web blockade. In any event, it seems unlikely that the two big ones will sit back and do nothing.

Earlier this year Rapidgator successfully fought back against another web blocking action initiated by the distributor of a cartoon movie. Fulvio Sarzana, a lawyer with the Sarzana and Partners law firm who specializes in Internet and copyright disputes, represented the site and convinced the court that Rapidgator was not responsible for user uploads.

The case with vKontakte is considerably more broad. The site is equivalent to Facebook and as such Russian citizens in Italy will now find themselves not only disconnected from files, but completely cut off from their social networking contacts.

However, as the number one visited site in Russia, VKontakte has incredible resources. Putting up a defense in a case like this should be well within its capabilities and there is a very real possibility that the decision will be overturned in due course. For the others (Rapidgator aside) the outlook seems much less positive.

Update: Fulvio Sarzana informs TorrentFreak that although not formally instructed in the case by Rapidgator at the present moment, he feels the site should appeal.

“Once again they have seized dozens of portals for a single film, which among other things, has already made 50 million Euros at the box office,” Sarzana says.

“Millions of files are being seized for a single film, a measure that appears disproportionate and contrary to European standards in terms of proportionality, adequacy and effectiveness of the measure.”

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