With millions of visitors per month, Uploaded is one of the largest file-hosting services on the Internet.

Like many of its ‘cloud-hosting’ competitors, the service is also used to share copyright-infringing material, which is a thorn in the side of various copyright holder groups.

This led to all sorts of trouble for Uploaded’s parent company Cyando AG. It was sued in Germany, called out by the US Government, and subjected to a criminal investigation in Switzerland, where it’s believed to operate from.

The company’s whereabouts are not really a secret. Uploaded clearly displays the Swiss ‘base’ on its website. Switzerland is widely known for its strict data protection regulations, something Uploaded’s parent company also highlighted in a sponsored post on Gizmodo.

“The big cheese – sorry – in Swiss cloud computing is Cyando AG. Cyando AG is the name behind Uploaded.net, the file hosting service with millions of worldwide users. It’s growing quickly, and so is its reputation: individual and corporate users alike know that they can trust Uploaded.net with their most precious data.”

The apparent Swiss link prompted the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) to include it in its latest report to the US Trade Representative. By offering a home to these types of sites, Switzerland poses a threat to the interests of American copyright holders, it argued.

However, Switzerland doesn’t agree. A few days ago, the country submitted a rebuttal to the USTR. The Swiss point out that proposed updates to copyright law will alleviate many current concerns, and they also suggest that Uploaded.net is not their problem.

Local law enforcement authorities completed a criminal investigation into the site, but concluded that there are “no real ties” to Switzerland, unlike the IIPA suggests.

“IIPA seems to be unaware that a criminal proceeding has been conducted against Cyando AG/Uploaded.net. The investigation showed that there are no real ties to Switzerland and that the operation is very likely conducted from a neighboring EU member state,” Switzerland’s rebuttal reads.

“While the investigation proved unsuccessful for lack of ties to Switzerland, it nevertheless proves the ability and willingness of the Swiss authorities to act against Internet piracy,” it adds.

IIPA also mentioned Oboom, another file-hosting service which has a “Swiss made” logo on its homepage. However, according to the response from Switzerland’s Government, this site is no longer a problem either.

“Concerning Oboom, consulting the Commercial Register shows that the company is being liquidated and is therefore no longer a threat to copyright owners,” the Swiss write.

While the company may be liquidated soon, it’s unclear whether the site will also disappear. At the time of writing it is still fully functional, with no hint that anything is about to change soon.

The Swiss Government believes that their enforcement efforts and the proposed changes to the copyright law should put an end to criticism directed against Switzerland as a host country for infringing sites.

As such, they hope that the US Government won’t list the country in its upcoming Special 301 Report, which provides an overview of countries with lacking copyright regulations.

“Despite the erroneous picture the industry submissions convey, enforcement of copyright protection in the online context is possible in Switzerland,” the Swiss write in their letter.

“Given the steady progress made in the ongoing legislative process, Switzerland considers a further inclusion on the Watch List to be unjustified and inappropriate,” they add.

—

A copy of Switzerland’s submission to the United States Trade Representative is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Little more than three years ago, Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, took Sci-Hub to court.

It was a mismatched battle from the start. With a net income of more than $2.4 billion per year, the publisher could fund a proper case, while its nemesis relied on donations.

Elsevier won the case, including millions of dollars in damages. However, the site remained online and grew bigger. Ironically, the academic publisher itself appears to be one of the main drivers of this growth.

In recent years there has been a major push in academic circles to move to Open Access publishing. Instead of locking academic publications behind paywalls, they should be freely available to researchers around the world as well as the public at large, the argument goes.

There has been some progress on this front, but it’s been slow. Meanwhile, Elsevier and other publishers continue to sell expensive subscriptions to universities. So expensive, that many institutions can’t afford them.

This means that their researchers run into paywalls, so they can’t do their work properly. It’s an absurd situation for the academic world, which is built on the premise that researchers build upon the work of others.

In an attempt to force a breakthrough, the University of California (UC), which includes ten campuses, requested that all its research be made available to the public from Elsevier without cost. This was possible, but only if UC’s authors paid extra publishing fees.

This was not an option for UC, which already had to pay a multi-million dollar subscription, so it cut its ties with Elsevier. The university notes that it doesn’t want to pay the rapidly escalating costs when its own work isn’t freely available.

This isn’t a problem that’s limited to UC, many other institutions can’t or are not willing to pay millions in subscription fees. This has reached a point where it’s pretty much impossible, even for wealthy universities, to access all academic knowledge.

“Make no mistake: The prices of scientific journals now are so high that not a single university in the U.S. — not the University of California, not Harvard, no institution — can afford to subscribe to them all,” says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and economics professor at UC Berkeley.

“Publishing our scholarship behind a paywall deprives people of the access to and benefits of publicly funded research. That is terrible for society,” MacKie-Mason adds.

This issue is not new and Elsevier is not the only publisher to demand high subscription fees. As the largest academic publisher, however, the effects of canceled subscriptions are felt most at Elsevier.

Several universities from Germany, Hungary, and Sweden previously let their Elsevier subscriptions expire, which means that tens of thousands of researchers don’t have access to research that is critical to their work.

This is where Sci-Hub comes into play.

The “Pirate Bay of Science” might just quietly play a major role in this conflict. Would the universities cancel their subscriptions so easily if their researchers couldn’t use Sci-Hub to get free copies?

Without access to critical research, their employees can’t function properly, so this ‘pirate’ backup comes in handy for sure.

Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has always been forthcoming about her goals. Sci-Hub wants to remove all barriers in the way of science. She also made that crystal clear when we interviewed her back in 2015.

“Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal. Also, the idea that knowledge can be a private property of some commercial company sounds absolutely weird to me,” she said at the time.

While Sci-Hub may not be a permanent solution, its existence definitely pays a major role as a bargaining chip in a changing academic publishing world. While it’s early days, Sci-Hub certainly helped to make the paywalls crumble.

A quick look at some traffic stats shows that the site’s visitors continue to grow at a rapid rate, and with UC’s most recent decision to cancel its Elsevier subscription, this trend is likely to continue.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

We continue the episode starting with the idea of Silicon Valley as a new empire, restructuring the world’s institutions through software, we consider the ideology of this empire, and how it differs from that of the previous order of transnational capitalism.

Have what Evan calls Silicon Valley’s ‘social libertarian’ values survived the terrific enlargement of the second-wave web services like Uber, Facebook and Airbnb into global superpowers?

Finally, we discuss @Rabble’s work developing Scuttlebutt as a future platform for decentralised community, content distribution and monetisation. Are we moving away from the cycles of centralisation we’ve seen with platforms like Google and Facebook and towards a cycle of decentralisation?

—

Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing crypto, privacy, copyright and file-sharing developments. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Rabble

^{If you enjoy this episode, consider becoming a patron and getting involved with the show. Check out Steal This Show’s Patreon campaign: support us and get all kinds of fantastic benefits!}

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Lucas Marston
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Eric Barch

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

After lengthy discussion, campaigning, and sometimes hostile debate, earlier this month the European Parliament and Council finally agreed on the final text of the EU’s copyright reform proposals.

Based on a compromise deal struck between France and Germany, the final version of Article 13 requires for-profit Internet platforms to license content from copyright holders. In the event that’s not possible, platforms will be required to take infringing content down and ensure that it’s not re-uploaded to their services.

Proponents of the legislation argue that this does not automatically mean the use of so-called “upload filters” but those in opposition simply cannot see any way the objectives can be achieved without them. Needless to say, privacy advocates aren’t happy with the prospect of their data being analyzed every time they carry out an upload to qualifying platforms.

While most of the furor has centered around known false positive weaknesses in existing content recognition systems such as YouTube’s Content ID, there is increasing concern that only the richest of platforms will be able to build their own competing systems.

Those that don’t will be required to use third-party vendors and the fear is that the big players will scoop up the market, effectively channeling the traffic of millions of EU citizens through a small number of companies.

This, it appears, has raised alarm bells in the office of Ulrich Kelber, Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information.

In a statement published this week in German (translated by
Florian Mueller of fosspatents.com and officially approved by the government agency), Kelber states that the proposals currently on the table in Brussels pose significant risks to data privacy rights.

“Even though upload filters are not explicitly mandated by the bill, they will be employed as a practical effect. Especially smaller platform operators and service providers will not be in a position to conclude license agreements with all [copy]right holders. Nor will they be able to make the software develoment effort to create upload filters of their own,” Kelber writes.

“Instead, they will utilize offerings by large IT companies just the way it is already happening, for one example, in the field of analytics tools, where the relevant components created by Facebook, Amazon and Google are used by many apps, websites, and services.”

This, Kelber says, would have the undesirable effect of a small number of companies being able to scoop up even more data on Internet users, as they examine all uploads for allegedly infringing content.

“At the end of the day, this would result in an oligopoly consisting of a few vendors of filtering technologies, which would then be instrumental to more or less the entire Internet data traffic of relevant platforms and services,” Kelber notes.

“The wealth of information those vendors would receive about all users in the process is evidenced by, among other examples, current media coverage of data transfers by eHealth apps to Facebook.”

Kelber, a computer scientist himself, describes this looming side-effect of Article 13 as a “clear and present danger” and is calling on the EU to explain how the regime detailed in the proposals can be achieved without upload filters, as many supporters are claiming.

“If the EU believes platform operators can meet their new obligations [under the proposed copyright directive] without upload filters, it must make a clear showing. That is why I am awaiting with great interest the [European] Commission’s forthcoming recommendations.

“In the other event, data privacy considerations require a thorough overhaul of the bill. Notwithstanding the need to update the protection of author’s rights in our times, such a measure must not harm or compromise the protection of Internet users’ data,” he concludes.

Also this week, the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee voted through the final draft of the Copyright Directive, with sixteen votes in favor and nine against. Then, following the ‘mob’ PR disaster (1,2) last month, the EU managed to make a mess of things again with the following Tweet/video.

Your memes are safe ?
Freedom of expression is not affected ?
It's all about fair payment to content creators ?

Watch to learn more about the #copyrightdirective ? pic.twitter.com/ztYzrl4sdH

— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) February 27, 2019

<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

If you didn’t spot the need for clarification or correction of errors already, here’s Julia Reda MEP with the details.

“The video claims that the reform is directed at ‘large platforms’: In fact, the size of the platform does not matter for the application of #article13, merely whether it hosts ‘large amounts’ of protected content. This can also be the case for a platform run by a single person,” Reda wrote on Twitter, adding:

“The video says a lighter regime applies to platforms that have a turnover below 10 Million *or* less than 5 million unique visitors. This is just wrong. Actually, the lighter regime only applies if both criteria are met, and platforms are also younger than 3 years old.”

While the errors are of course a problem, the fact that the EU is weighing in yet again in a manner that appears to be biased is not being well received by opponents of Article 13. Indeed, it only appears to have further fueled the fire.

At the time of writing more than 4.9 million people have signed a Change.org petition to stop Article 13 , with 67 MEPs publicly pledging to vote against the law.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

The entertainment industries generally view website blocking as one of the best tools available to prevent people from pirating. 

The practice has been around for over a decade and has slowly expanded to more than 30 countries around the world. 

While these blockades may help to deter some casual pirates, there are plenty of people who find their ways to pirate content through workarounds. VPN services are often used as well as dedicated proxy sites, including those provided by “Unblocked.”

Unblocked started in 2013, mainly in response to the UK blocking efforts. It began with links to a few dozen blocked pirate sites, and today that number has grown to more than a hundred.

The site quickly gained popularity. While that’s usually good news, in this case it presented a problem as well, since the Unblocked site itself has now become a blocking target. It didn’t take long before it was added to various blocklists, which means that it has to regularly ‘relocate’.

In recent years this has resulted in domain change after domain change. Initially, this only happened sporadically, but the Unblocked team informs TorrentFreak that it’s done roughly once a month now, usually after users report new blockades.

Just a few weeks ago the site moved from unblocked.llc to unblocked.cx to evade another block, for example. However, the latter domain was swiftly suspended by the domain name registry CoCCA. 

Domain suspensions are not common, but they happen. In this case, the registry took action after a complaint from a copyright holder, the Unblocked team informs TorrentFreak.

“We contacted the registry and they said the use of unblocked.cx was against their TOS and showed us an automated DMCA complaint they received regarding some movie links. We then changed the domain to unblocked.pet.

“Unblocked.pet is the 38th domain for the site,” the Unblocked team adds.

To stay true to its name, the site has to find new domain names time and again. The total count of 38 domain names thus far says enough. While this is a nuisance for the operator, it doesn’t appear to hurt the userbase too much. 

“We haven’t noticed any major shifts in traffic caused by the blocks. As long as we have a new domain up and running, people are able to find it immediately through different means,” the Unblocked team notes. 

“After domain updates, traffic levels return to normal after about one or two days. It takes a little more time for traffic to recover after a domain suspension, such as what we just saw with unblocked.cx.”

After losing the .cx domain it took four to five days for the traffic levels to recover. That was also the case a few years earlier when the CoCCA registry suspended Unblocked’s .pe domain name. 

It appears that Unblocked users have become accustomed to regular changes. They can usually find the new domain through the official Twitter account, or by going to the GitHub mirror, which has been operational since 2015.

In any case, Unblocked is determined to keep going, and the site will probably burn through a few more domains before the end of the year.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.