When copyright holders go to court in the United States they have the option to demand statutory damages in addition to the actual losses they have suffered.

Depending on the severity of the offense, these damages can reach $150,000 per infringement.

In 2009 Jammie Thomas-Rasset learned about these massive fines the hard way when she was fined $1,920,000 for sharing 24 songs online, an amount that was eventually reduced to $220,000 after several appeals. In a similar case, Boston student Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to pay $675,000 for sharing 30 songs.

Fines of this magnitude are often viewed by the public as disproportionate, but copyright holders argue that they are needed to deter the public from engaging in unauthorized file-sharing.

In court, the Obama administration sided with copyright holders earlier this year. However, in its recent Green Paper the Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force suggests that the current limits may need an update.

“Much public attention has focused on the size of the awards in the two infringement cases against individual file sharers that have gone to trial,” the Task Force wrote.

“These cases have led to calls for further calibration of levels of statutory damages. The Task Force reiterates the importance of statutory damages in online copyright enforcement, but believes that there are certain areas where recalibration of their scope may be appropriate.”

The Internet Policy Task Force asked the public to share their thoughts on this, and several other copyright related issues that were addressed in the paper. The comments, which have now been made public, include several from copyright industry groups such as the MPAA and RIAA in which they advise the Government not to lower the maximum fines.

The MPAA argues that the current Internet landscape doesn’t warrant a policy change.

“While we understand the concerns giving rise to the discussion around statutory damages in the Green Paper, the MPAA does not believe the experience in practice supports altering the existing regime, which has fostered investment and innovation not just in the production of content but also with respect to applications, devices and other digital technologies.”

The movie group says that P2P file-sharing, cyberlockers and streaming sites remain a massive threat to the industry and since it’s not always possible to accurately calculate the losses that are generated by piracy, statutory damages are helpful to come to a sizable punishment.

“Statutory damages play an essential role in redressing the financial harm caused by such infringement and punishing the wrongdoers. But, perhaps most importantly, statutory damages deter others from engaging in similar misconduct, advancing the societal goal of promoting innovation and creativity,” MPAA writes.

The studios don’t fear disproportionate fines and are confident that juries will eventually decide on an amount that is fitting in each case.

“The MPAA is confident that juries will continue to award statutory damages only in appropriate cases, in appropriate amounts, taking into consideration all salient factors, to serve the public interest.”

The RIAA also submitted their comments in response to the Internet Policy Task Force paper. In line with the MPAA the music group sees no reason to change the current policy, and says that “proper consequences” are needed in response to copyright infringement.

“We do not believe that recalibration of statutory damages is appropriate,” RIAA writes.

“Statutory damages must be meaningful, serving as a deterrent beyond mere restitution. And the law recognizes the need for flexibility within this statutory damages construct, and provides juries with wide discretion to determine the appropriate award,” RIAA adds.

The RIAA adds that in the Thomas and Tenenbaum cases the Appeal courts held that the “damage awards were entirely appropriate, based on the facts of each case.”

The music group does say that it’s open to discussing alternatives to statutory damages, as long as the deterrent function of the punishments for copyright infringement remain a core issue.

Besides copyright holders, there were also many comments from civil rights groups, copyright experts and the public that argued against high penalties. Copyright lawyer Andrew Bridges, for example, highlights that a potential $150,000 fine per shared file is ammunition for “predatory” copyright trolls such as Prenda and Righthaven.

“The current structure of statutory damages gives Predatory Enforcers (PEs) the weapons they need to extract significant settlements from accused infringers without regard to the truth of their allegations or the harm of the alleged infringing, just as Righthaven and Prenda did,” Bridges writes.

“One need only allege that there was copying in order to seek a subpoena unmasking anonymous online defendants, at which point PEs can send letters threatening maximum damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work and extract settlements without proving infringement, much less any harm.”

According to Bridges the Government may want to follow the example of Canada, where statutory damages for non-commercial file-sharing were reduced to an amount of between $100 and $5,000 per offense.

All comments in response to the Green Paper have been published on the Internet Policy Task Force website. The issue of statutory damages, as well as many related subjects, will be discussed during a public meeting on December 12 and will be followed by another round of comments.

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

There can be no doubt that copyright holders have a huge task ahead of them if they are to make even the slightest dent in the availability of unauthorized online content. Google has received more than 200 million notices this year alone and it’s still a breeze to obtain almost anything within a few minutes.

In an operation of this scale mistakes will be made and we’ve seen on dozens of occasions how content has been taken down wrongfully. But while Google is increasingly sharp when it comes to rejecting false claims against its search listings, the same cannot be said about its approach to YouTube where the playing field is much more tricky.

While it can be easy to see that a link to a blockbuster movie or music album might be unlawful, judging whether each and every video uploaded to YouTube is legal would amount to a full-time job for hundreds of lawyers, something that is simply not realistic. Due to these limitations illegal content is uploaded every day, while at the same time companies exploit the situation to silence their critics.

Dean Salter is a regular guy. He loves football, lives in Essex (UK) and has a passion for video games. Together with a few friends he spends his spare time creating videos for their Game Over Man podcast on YouTube, a non-monetized video gaming channel put up there purely for fun and the enjoyment of others.

“We don’t have a dedicated audience of any sort, we just enjoy the idea of meeting up, discussing our opinions and excitements within the gaming world, record these discussions and then upload them to iTunes and release them on to the internet to who ever happens to stumble across them, free of charge of course,” he says.

Just recently Dean made a video about Infestation: Survivor Stories, a zombie survival game previously titled The War Z that was renamed after receiving negative reviews. Dean’s video review, which is pretty damn funny if a little unconventional, went up on YouTube. Here it is, well worth a couple of minutes viewing to appreciate the context of what follows.

Anything illegal there? Absolutely not. But of course, the fact that it’s hosted in Vimeo Dailymotion pretty much predicts what has happened here. Following a copyright complaint from Hammerpoint Interactive, the company behind the game, the video has been taken down.

As readers will recall, last month famous game reviewer TotalBiscuit suffered a similar fate when Wild Games Studio censored his critical video of their game Day One: Garry’s Incident.

Commenting on his own woes, TotalBiscuit encapsulated the dilemma of users with less visibility than himself.

“I’ve gotta be honest, I am fortunate, my channel is large as is my following. I am backed by a great network with a lot of resources,” he said. “I can get my voice heard but what about the smaller channels that can’t?

TotalBiscuit’s problems were indeed widely covered in the press (after all, he has more than 1.3 million YouTube subscribers). Dean and his friends have only 66 subscribers, which is probably why they’re currently struggling to get the interest of the gaming press.

Also, the channel’s relative obscurity makes the perfect environment for the censors since after silencing it no one will care.

Wrong.

The entire point of sites like YouTube, the whole user-generated content movement, and even the Internet itself, is that anyone can have their voice heard. TotalBiscuit once had 66 subscribers, YouTube once had 66 subscribers and so did Google. Everyone has to start somewhere and abusing a law to bully someone offline and take their voice away is something that no company should be allowed to get away with.

Dean is currently awaiting a response from YouTube and Hammerpoint Interactive, whose awful website provides no contact details whatsoever. Let’s see what excuses they can come up with this time.

Update: The Vimeo video was taken down as well and it’s now hosted on Dailymotion.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected 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.

Week ending November 17, 2013

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(2)	Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters	6.4 / trailer
2	(9)	Elysium	7.0 / trailer
3	(…)	Prisoners	8.1 / trailer
4	(1)	The Wolverine	6.9 / trailer
5	(4)	Red 2	6.9 / trailer
6	(3)	2 Guns	7.4 / trailer
7	(5)	The Smurfs 2	5.0 / trailer
8	(6)	We’re The Millers	7.1 / trailer
9	(…)	The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones	6.0 / trailer
10	(…)	Machete Kills	6.1 / trailer

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

One recurring problem with the copyright industry is that it gets away scot-free with every glaring and egregious abuse of copyright monopoly law to silence other people, despite breaking the social contract.

We have seen examples of the copyright monopoly law being abused into outright censorship again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and… well, you get the picture. The glaring, egregious cases happen on a daily basis. The ones we never hear about probably happen in the tens or hundreds per second.

The premise is simple: since the copyright industry and other bullies risk absolutely nothing by sending out a copyright monopoly claim, they will keep doing so to silence protected speech, crush competition, and stifle legitimate criticism. This isn’t just fraud, it is a real problem for society and it is an audacious breaking of the social contract. In a word, it is – or should be – criminal.

Further, another serious consequence of this non-stop hammering against competition, criticism, satire, and fair use is that it moves the gray area for what is acceptable and what isn’t. If the copyright industry can relentlessly launch unfounded lawsuits against people who can’t defend themselves, despite the copyright industry knowingly being in the wrong, then the result over a number of years is a shift of the expected norm. This is a deliberate strategy from the copyright industry to skew the social norms away from a free market and idea of free speech, and toward a total control of people’s communications, leading to yet more harshening of the harmful copyright monopoly.

If we are to have this kind of distribution monopoly, the very least we can demand is that punishments for abuses of the monopoly come symmetrically: that the punishments are equal for violating the monopoly as a non-monopoly-holder or as a monopoly-holder.

In cleartext, this means that the same punishments and damages would be handed out for falsely using the copyright monopoly to silence criticism, free speech, or competition, as are handed out today for violating the distribution and duplication monopoly. And making the punishments symmetrical like that is absolutely, 100% reasonable.

Remember how the RIAA and MPAA expect everybody else to know when they are violating the copyright monopoly, but at the same time, violate that monopoly themselves regularly on what can’t be described as any more than an “oops” basis? Remember how copyright monopoly cases are so complex they can end up in the Supreme Court, yet the copyright industry demands that each and every Average Joe should know instinctively what is legal and what is not?

It’s all bullshit, of course. What the copyright industry is trying to push is a general blanket ban for anybody but themselves to copy freely. As for themselves, the copyright industry has ripped off artists since the 1950s.

It’s more than time that the harsh punishments for violating this monopoly go fully symmetrical. If you send out a copyright takedown notice or otherwise assert monopoly rights, automated or not, you must be held responsible for it – and possibly go to jail for a few years and pay up to $150,000 in statutory damages, per infraction, if the takedown notice is false or erroneous. That’s what the copyright industry holds as “reasonable” in one direction, and therefore, it must be reasonable in the other direction, too.

Obviously, the copyright industry would go ballistic over this – that there would be an idea of power symmetry in the copyright monopoly. That’s because the copyright industry has never been held to one shred of accountability. Such a day is several decades overdue.

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

For various reasons 2012 was not a good year for Usenet indexing services. First, pressure on payment processors such as PayPal, Mastercard and Visa became evident when the infamous Newzbin2 site shut itself down due to financial difficulties. Shortly after another giant bit the dust.

NZBMatrix was a very popular site in the newsgroup community and for many was the go-to place for NZB files linking to the latest content. In December 2012 the site was forced to close due to increased pressure from Hollywood studios who were sending more takedown notices than the site could handle.

Over the past year several sites have popped up to try to bridge the gap but while of decent quality, most are inherently prone to the same sort of attacks. If a site’s servers can be located then there is always a risk of litigation (or the threat of it at least) later down the line.

However, this week TorrentFreak has been speaking with Tyrion, the administrator of a fairly new Newznab-based site, who hopes to avoid some of the external pitfalls of running a Usenet indexer.

As its name suggests NNPbeta is in beta and at the time of writing is close to backfilling 340 groups to a total of 6,077,496 releases. But unlike other indexers the site is being built on an unusually secure footing right from the start.

“When I look back on the last few years of file sharing, I see the various organizations such as RIAA, MPAA, FACT, and Prenda getting ever-more aggressive in their hunting down of file sharers and search indexers,” Tyrion explains.

“For the file sharers and users of the services, the environment is getting to be one of Guerilla Warfare. They have taken away our ability to use centralized services and instead made us use small-force tactics in order to get our content.”

NNPbeta has no conventional web presence and cannot be found using Google. The site itself can be accessed via http://nnpbetabzsneptym.onion, but this link only works for users of Tor. The site is situated in what has become known as the Deep Web.

Tyrion naturally won’t say where his servers are other than they could be anywhere in the world. All users need to know is that by jumping onto Tor they are able to find the site as easily as they could a regular webpage but with much better security.

“Tor, I believe, is part of our evolution. By using Tor as the base of operations, we have reduced the risk of our users being discovered as well as the risk of the site being discovered, therefore providing a more reliable, long-term solution for indexing,” Tyrion says.

“We don’t know who our users are (unless they chose to provide a valid email) and they don’t know who we are. We hold the user’s privacy above all else and feel that this is the only way to accomplish our goal of providing a service that is stable, reliable, and resistant to external pressure.”

In describing what Tor does for the site (which he acknowledges isn’t entirely bulletproof), Tyrion uses a nightclub security analogy.

“We like to think of Tor as that bouncer at the front of the club that only lets people into our club that we want to let in. Yes, he can be overpowered if someone sets their mind to getting into the club regardless of the design of the system but we have a really good bouncer and the bad guys need significant manpower in order to beat him down,” said.

Tyrion believes there is a balance to be considered. Given the right manpower and resources it would be possible to bring down the site, but at some point the mounting costs versus the potential gains stop making financial sense.

Another thing for NNPbeta to consider is DMCA notices, not served on the site itself, but on external Usenet providers. One of the things pointed out by NZBMatrix in its goodbye message is that anti-piracy groups are becoming so fast at taking down infringing content from Usenet itself, Usenet indexers are being rendered much less useful. Tyrion believes that can be mitigated by acting quickly.

“From the time something is released on Usenet, [NNPbeta] users will have (at absolute maximum) about 30 minutes until we are able to identify that release until we are done with backfill. Once we are done, users can depend on knowing about a release in two minutes which provides that much more opportunity to grab files before something happens to them,” Tyrion concludes.

NNPbeta also plans on not succumbing to the payment processing issues suffered by other sites such as Newzbin2. Tyrion insists there will be no ads or affiliate links on the site, ever. As expected, the site will accept donations into a Bitcoin account.

Whether NNPbeta will grow to become a site as successful as NZBMatrix remains to be seen but they have significant hurdles to overcome. Not being indexed by search engines and sitting quietly in the Deep Web may be good for security, but it’s also likely to prove a hindrance to people who are just passing by.

Nevertheless, the emergence of sites hidden by Tor and other cloaking systems such as those employed by The Pirate Bay are an interesting development in the file-sharing space and a trend only like to increase in the months and years to come.

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