The copyright monopoly debate started with an assertion from the monopolists that “no artist can make money without having a complete monopoly on every form of distribution”.

This is obviously false, most easily observed by looking at the millions of works under Creative Commons licenses, where artists have renounced their already-awarded copyright monopoly rights.

When this is pointed out to copyright monopoly fundamentalists, who begrudgingly have to admit the existence of Creative Commons, they frequently shift stances and say it should be up to every individual creator what distribution they would allow of their book, painting, or guitar piece. They argue that the “distribution control of the author” is some kind of right that has no side effects at all.

Few things could be more deranged and out of touch with reality.

Today, noncommercial distribution of works under the copyright monopoly take place in our private communications, intermixed with our most private data that leave and arrive at our devices. You can’t tell one type of data from the other without looking at all of it, so the only way to discover copyright monopoly violations is by mass wiretapping and mass surveillance.

This means that enforcement of the copyright monopoly has become mutually exclusive with private communications as a concept, which is why the copyright monopoly must take a rather large step back into brain-undamaged territory.

This means that allowing every author to control distribution of their book – including me and my swarm leadership book Swarmwise – would give each and every one of those authors the right to wiretap and censor every individual on the planet. That’s the very real, and very insane, consequence.

Let’s take that again, because it is key to the whole copyright monopoly debate today: it was never about the money, it was about the fact that you can’t enforce the copyright monopoly without mass wiretapping, censorship, and intrusive mass surveillance. This is also why you see the copyright industry relentlessly pushing for just that – for example, when they sued Eircom for the right to install the copyright industry’s wiretapping and censorship equipment in the deepest of the Irish internet hubs. The audacity, it burns!

You cannot say that freedom of speech and the secrecy of private correspondence applies to some types of data (mail, surfing, communications) but not to other types (transmissions of works under copyright monopoly), because the only way to tell which is which is to break the secret of correspondence in the first place. You can’t tell if the contents of a letter is legal or illegal without opening it, reading it, and sorting it based on your findings. This monopoly enforcement breaks centuries of civil liberties.

This is also why the common and dismissive counter-argument from copyright monopolists along the lines of “you’re just spoiled brats who don’t want to pay” is such an enraging insult. In Sweden, there’s a saying that “the mouth speaks of what fills the mind”. Monopolists may only care about money, but I don’t care about that and I never did – the copyright monopoly conflict was always a deep civil liberties issue, where the monopoly has become incompatible with fundamental civil liberties for the entire online generation.

Therefore, the copyright monopoly needs to give way.

The copyright monopoly needs to be permanently and irrevocably scaled back in legislation. Until it is, it is everybody’s duty to undermine it in favor of the communications secret and freedom of speech that have always covered private communications.

In the words of the Freenet philosophy: “You cannot have both copyright monopoly enforcement and freedom of speech. Therefore, any technology designed to promote and protect freedom of speech must by necessity prevent copyright monopoly enforcement.”

Source: The Copyright Monopoly Can Only Be Enforced With Mass Wiretapping, And Must Therefore Be Torpedoed

In an effort to make piracy less visible, copyright holders are sending dozens of millions of takedown notices to Google every month.

Unfortunately not all of these requests are accurate. Because of the high number of often automated notices and the fact that copyright holders don’t check the validity of all requests, this results in questionable takedowns.

This week we stumbled upon a prime example in which Magnolia Pictures asked Google to remove a variety of URLs that are certainly not infringing.

The DMCA takedown request lists both a trailer and the IMDb listing of “Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie,” as well as news articles in The Week and Salon. The same notice also lists the Rotten Tomatoes pages of the movies “I Give It a Year” and “Mr. Nobody,” as well as a trailer of the movie “Prince Avalanche.”

Magnolia Takedown

Unfortunately this notice is not an isolated incident. In another DMCA notice Magnolia Pictures asked Google to remove a Hollywood Reporter article and several other clearly non-infringing pages.

The good news is that Google appears to have white-listed a few domains, as most of the sites mentioned in the DMCA notice above were not censored. However, less prominent sites may not be so lucky.

As we have mentioned before, the DMCA avalanche is becoming a bigger problem day after day, with Google now removing more than eight links per second. Since Google and other websites can’t possibly verify every DMCA claim, the problem will only increase as more takedown notices are sent each week.

Right now rightsholders and the anti-piracy outfits they employ have absolutely no incentive to improve the accuracy of their automated takedown systems, so perhaps it’s time for them to be held accountable?

Two weeks ago Microsoft set a great example by ditching its DMCA partner LeakID after it sent yet another embarrassing takedown request. Perhaps more will follow in the future.

Source: Movie Outfit Asks Google to Censor Its Own Trailer, IMDb and Reviews

This week BitTorrent Inc. surprised friend and foe with a brilliant marketing campaign.

The company, known for the popular file-sharing applications uTorrent and BitTorrent, put up shocking billboards in three major metropolitan areas.

One of the slogans displayed the spooky message “Your Data Should Belong To The NSA.” After a few days this billboard was updated, striking The NSA while adding You.

In a blog post BitTorrent’s marketing president Matt Mason later explained that the company wanted to wake the public up, alerting them to the fact that they have the power to do something about the gross rights violations that were all over the news lately.

“We’ve chosen to accept surveillance culture: the right of security agencies to violate the Fourth Amendment; to see and store data as they see fit. But these things are just that. They’re choices. And these choices belong to us,” Mason wrote.

According to Mason privacy is one of the core values of BitTorrent and a means to get away from nasty government surveillance.

“We’re a company founded on a few simple core values. Uphold user privacy, and user control,” he writes, adding that “BitTorrent is a secure, distributed response to the challenge of data surveillance.”

While these words are music to the ears of many Internet users, they certainly don’t apply to all BitTorrent products.

In fact, regular BitTorrent transfers through uTorrent or other clients lack any form of privacy. People who share files in public, including BitTorrent’s artist bundles, display their IP-addresses to the rest of the world and are tracked by dozens of monitoring outfits.

This was also picked up by David Lowery, a well-known musician and respected anti-piracy advocate in the music industry. Lowery was quick to highlight the privacy aspect in an article on the Trichordist where he slammed BitTorrent for not understanding their own technology.

“It seems to me that BitTorrent is suggesting that by using their product you are somehow safe from snooping by the NSA. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Nope you aren’t even safe from a so-called luddite musician,” Lowery writes.

Backing up his argument, Lowery goes on to list the IP-addresses of a few dozens downloaders who were sharing his work via BitTorrent, many using the software provided by the San Francisco company.

“Apparently BitTorrent doesn’t even understand how it’s own product works. Luddites,” Lowery notes.

BitTorrent does know its own technology of course, but we have to agree that the company’s messaging is confusing to say the least. Yes, BitTorrent released a great Sync application earlier this year, which allows people to run a private and secure backup service. But the general public associates BitTorrent with something entirely different – public downloads.

The billboard campaign and media commentary the company put out this week made no mention of this distinction. This is unfortunate, and perhaps a bit misleading. Not least because more than a quarter million torrent users have been sued in the U.S. alone because it’s so easy to monitor downloaders.

It becomes even more painful when we bring in the fact that BitTorrent refused to accept advertisements from a company that wanted to offer BitTorrent users a bit more privacy.

Earlier this year the company refused to run ads for TorGuard, because the VPN-service was considered to be “high risk”. The VPN service would only be welcome when it changed its name, logo, and removed all references to “BitTorrent,” “torrent” and uTorrent from its website.

For a business that claims to have privacy as one of its core values, this is a rather odd stance. But perhaps the privacy principle is only applied selectively, whenever it fits the company’s business interests.

Source: BitTorrent Inc. Doesn’t Care About Your Privacy, Not Always

Generally speaking movie theaters are the oil of the movie industry, generating billions of dollars in revenue each year.

However, it appears that not all theaters are playing along with Hollywood’s rules.

The Rogue Theatre in Oregon is not a classic movie theater but describes itself as a regional non-profit performing arts center. As such it hosts cultural events, including theater, concerts and film screenings.

One of its events is the yearly screening of the cult movie ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show‘ around Halloween. Although the film is nearly 40 years old it still has a dedicated fan-base, many of whom dress up in costume to participate live.

The Halloween screenings have been quite successful, but according to 20th Century Fox there is one problem. Apparently, The Rogue Theatre never bothered to license its screenings and is therefore infringing on the copyrights of the movie studio.

This week Fox filed a complaint at a federal court in Oregon demanding compensation for Rogue’s defiant acts. According to the complaint, the movie studio first warned the theater three years ago. Despite multiple warnings, the screenings haven’t stopped.

“Fox first learned of Rogue’s infringing conduct in or around October 2010, and promptly notified Rogue in writing that its exhibition of the Film infringed Fox’s copyright in the Film. Rogue did not respond, and, on information and belief, proceeded with its scheduled exhibition.”

“Since 2010, Fox has repeatedly warned Rogue that any further exhibitions could subject Rogue to copyright liability. Despite these warnings, Rogue has refused to cease its infringing conduct”

The Rogue Theatre is currently promoting yet another screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show on October 25 and 26. When Fox found out last month it sent letters to the theater’s president, directors, and secretary, ordering them to cease and desist from their planned unauthorized screening. There was no response.

The movie studio subsequently felt it had no other option than to ask the court to stop the screenings and award $150,000 in statutory damages plus all loss in profits.

“[Fox demands] damages in an amount sufficient to fairly compensate it for the injury it has sustained, plus all the profits attributable to Rogue’s infringement of the copyright in the Film, and further that the amount of the monetary award granted herein be increased by $150,000 in view of the willful and deliberate nature of Rogue’s unlawful conduct.”

For Fox the Rocky Horror Picture Show is certainly an asset worth protecting. With a budget of $1.4 million the movie generated $175 million in box office revenue, even without the sums generated from Rogue’s unauthorized screenings.

Source: 20th Century Fox Sues “Rogue” Movie Theater in Oregon

Just over two months ago Russia made some of its strongest steps yet against online piracy by introducing a formal system for rightsholders to have unauthorized content, or links to content, taken offline.

The system, dubbed Russia’s SOPA, forces sites to comply with copyright complaints in a swift manner or face their domains being added to a national blacklist. Being added to that register is a serious business, since all local ISPs are expected to blacklist corresponding IP addresses so that local Internet users cannot gain access.

Proposals put forward last month upped the ante again, with any service provider or search engine not blocking sites on the blacklist potentially facing fines of around $30,000.

But according to comments coming out of the Government yesterday, Russia appears to be taking its anti-piracy initiative to the next level and beyond, fully living up to its ‘SOPA’ billing.

Ministry of Communications deputy head Alexei Volin said that Russia now intends to compartmentalize sites that are dedicated to piracy. They will be treated completely differently from other sites, such as YouTube etc, who may have an infringement problem but respond to copyright holders positively.

“There are a conscientious and diligent owners of websites, to which some people upload illegal or dangerous content. When it comes to this sort of thing, we order blocks of URLs and individual pages,” Volin said.

“However, there are some specialized and entirely pornographic sites that are entirely blocked by IP address. The same principle will be observed in respect of torrents and sites engaged in outright piracy,” the minister added.

“We will not block them for some particular things, we’ll close them entirely by IP address,” Volin said.

According to the minister there are around 160 local sites, ten of them very popular, that are causing serious concerns for the entertainment industries. Dealing with these, he says, can be a positive for the economy.

“There are [around 8 million] people who pay money for the legal content that they get on the Internet. These are the users who are one of the growth drivers of the Internet economy,” Volin said, adding that even pirates will spend when the circumstances are right.

“People on the Internet are willing to pay, especially when the content is useful, available and at a fair price,” he concludes.

Right at this moment it is unclear how the system will be implemented and on what basis. Presumably some kind of ‘pirate’ list already exists but whether sites will be blocked without further discussion or will have to fall foul of future complaints is not known.

Whatever the outcome, sites like RuTracker.org will probably be a priority target, despite claims from the site’s operators that they comply with takedown requests.

The site has around 13.4 million registered users, 3.5 million of them active in the past year. It hosts close to 1.5 million torrent files and is currently the 14th most-popular site in Russia. It’s proven resilient so far and last month celebrated its 9th birthday, but only time will tell what the future holds.

Source: Minister: Government Will Censor All 160 Russian ‘Pirate’ Sites