As one of the leading blog platforms, WordPress.com receives thousands of DMCA takedown requests every year, but nearly half of these are rejected.

Parent company Automattic is known to inspect all notices carefully, and has a track record of defending its users against DMCA abuse. In addition, it occasionally highlights the worst offenders in its own “Hall of Shame.”

This week the company added a new entry for the first time in several months. The dubious honor goes to the City of Abbotsford, Canada, which tried to clean up its ‘image’ with a recent DMCA notice.

The “infringement” Abbotsford reported concerns an article written by a homeless blogger, who highlighted that city officials deliberately spread chicken manure on a camp for homeless people.

To illustrate this unfortunate event with a fitting image, the blogger posted a parody logo of the city, replacing the pine tree with a turd.

Abbotsford’s parody logo

Pretty innocent, one would think, but apparently the city of Abbotsford thought otherwise. Through a marketing company, Abbotsford city council sent a DMCA notice to Automattic, asking it to remove the offending image.

However, since there is a clear fair use case here, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform was not impressed.

“Pardon the pun. It was glaringly obvious that the addition of the hilariously large feces was for the purposes of parody, and tied directly to the criticisms laid out in the post,” Automattic writes.

“As a result, it seems hard to believe that the city council took fair use considerations into account before firing off their ill-advised notice, and trying to wipe up this mess,” the company adds.

Instead of taking the image offline, Automattic referred the takedown notice to the blogger in question. He decided to keep it online as well, adding a massive “parody” watermark just to avoid any further confusion.

PARODY

So, instead of wiping the “crappy” logo from the Internet, the marketing firm actually managed to magnify the issue, entering WordPress’ DMCA Hall of Shame. Since the original article is nearly four years old, they would have been better off ignoring it, but some people have to learn that the hard way.

In its closing comments, Automattic stresses that their use of the ‘shitty’ logo also falls under fair use protection, urging the City counsel to refrain from sending them any additional takedown requests.

“Our use of the Abbotsford city logo in this post is also for the purposes of commentary or criticism, and therefore falls under fair use protections. If anybody on the council happens to be reading, please don’t send us another DMCA takedown.”

At TorrentFreak we would like to repeat Automattic’s argument, also adding a fair use exception for the purpose of news reporting.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Serving more than a million users every day, FS.to was one of Ukraine’s largest pirate sites. Last year it was of the country’s top 20 most popular sites overall, but its focus on video content was to attract negative attention.

With FS.to in its sights for some time, the MPAA eventually filed formal complaints with local authorities. What followed was one of the biggest anti-piracy raids ever seen in Ukraine.

Last November, the cyber crime division of Ukraine’s national police shut down FS.to in what was a large and coordinated multi-location operation.

Authorities said that at least 19 people suspected of running the site via a network of local and offshore companies were arrested. The raids covered both residential and office locations, with swoops on datacenters where dozens of servers were seized.

One of those arrested was alleged FS.to owner Andrew Komlychenko. He was openly connected with the platform for a number of years, granting interviews with local media and discussing the site’s operations. In 2013 the site was reportedly sold to outside investors, but there are indications that the businessman remained involved.

Indeed, it appears that Komlychenko is now in considerable trouble. Alexander Strigunov, the prosecutor in charge of the case against FS.to, is calling for the toughest possible sentence. As a result, Komlychenko will be detained under house arrest for the next two months on a bail of almost $180,000.

Alexander Strigunov (credit)

“[The law] allows for up to six years in prison, but it is too early to begin talking about the sentence,” Strigunov said.

Also of interest is how Ukranian authorities have flip-flopped over what crimes the site and its owners have supposed to have committed. Initially it was made clear that FS.to had been shut down for being a piracy haven, but later it was suggested that non-payment of taxes and possibly money laundering was the main concern.

Of course, as the Megaupload case shows, these offenses aren’t mutually exclusive, but comments this week suggest that the protection of intellectual property with a distinctly political international angle is at the heart of this landmark case.

“I think it is necessary to compensate the losses incurred to foreign companies so that each company knows that its rights are protected not only by their national legislation, but the legislation of the countries where their rights are violated or affected. It is our image at stake,” Strigunov said.

But despite these notable efforts by the Ukrainian authorities, the country can’t seem to catch a break with the US Government. In the USTR’s latest annual Special 301 Report, Ukraine keeps its status as a priority threat.

Following the USTR’s announcement, First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Stepan Kubiv said that his country will continue its efforts to improve its copyright standing with the United States.

“Our task is to ensure proper protection of intellectual property for all creative works,” Kubiv said.

“This will improve the assessment of the Office of the US Trade Representative and the position of Ukraine in the Special 301 Report. That will improve the economic development of Ukraine, encouraging inventions and innovations while attracting significant investment to Ukraine.”

In the meantime, efforts have been underway to resurrect FS.to. At the end of March a new site appeared under the FS.life domain, but for the past several days the site has reportedly been under a DDoS attack and is currently non-functional.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Hundreds of millions of people upload and share files every day, and not always with permission from their rightful owners.

Aside from the traditional pirate sites, social networks and cloud hosting services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft’s OneDrive are also frequently used to share copyright-infringing content.

When copyright holders find out, they can report these files and ask the companies to take them offline and prevent similar files from being shared in the future, which regularly happens. However, with cloud storage services, simply deleting a file is not always an option.

If you buy a music album, you’re allowed to store this on your personal cloud-hosting account, for example, while sharing is prohibited. In this case, disabling that sharing option for this file while leaving it on the server seems to be the preferred option.

Still, it might be worth keeping an eye on frequent abusers, so they can be punished if needed, and Microsoft recently obtained a patent to do just that.

Titled: “Disabling prohibited content and identifying repeat offenders in service provider storage systems,” the patent describes a system where copyright infringers, and those who publish other objectionable content, are flagged so that frequent offenders can be singled out.

With an overview of the infringements, the hosting provider can choose to limit the sharing permissions of users, or terminate their accounts if warranted.

“Incidents that result in objects being so marked can be stored in an incident history associated with a user responsible for those objects. The incident history can be processed to identify repeat offenders and modify access privileges of those users,” the patent reads.

The “repeat infringer” is a hot topic at the moment, after ISP Cox Communications was ordered to pay $25 million for its failure to disconnect repeat offenders.

According to the DMCA, online service providers must implement a reasonable policy against frequent offenders, and the system described in the patent would allow Microsoft to do that.

The patent describes a variety of situations, ranging from disabling a single file from being shared, to taking measures against repeat infringers. However, it doesn’t state which policy Microsoft employs.

As far a we know, this is the first patent that specifically deals with the repeat infringer situation in these hosting situations, but it’s not uncommon for cloud hosting services to prevent users from sharing infringing content. We previously uncovered that Google Drive uses hash matching to prevent people from sharing “flagged” files in public, and Dropbox does the same.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Last Friday, Netflix became the key victim in one of the biggest piracy leaks in history.

A hacking group or person calling itself TheDarkOverlord (TDO) released the premiere episode of the fifth season of Netflix’s Orange is The New Black, followed by nine more episodes a few hours later.

Netflix hasn’t said much about the issue in public, aside from the generic response. “We are aware of the situation. A production vendor used by several major TV studios had its security compromised and the appropriate law enforcement authorities are involved.”

However, it appears that behind the scenes something has changed.

While browsing through Google’s public repository of piracy takedown requests, hosted by Lumen, we noticed that the anti-piracy vendor “IP Arrow” suddenly started to submit requests on Netflix’s behalf.

The first request from IP Arrow came in on Saturday, the day after the leak, and there have been at least a dozen more since.

What’s unusual about these notices is that they only target the leaked “Orange is The New Black” episodes, no other content. This is also clearly reflected in a statement by the anti-piracy firm, which comes with the request.

“This is submitted for my client Netflix These links are facilitating piracy of my client’s work. The work can be seen by visiting their site www.netflix.com. The item this is relating to is Orange Is The New Black Season 5,” it reads.

Although Netflix might not believe that the leak is a disaster for its business, which is also reflected in several opinion pieces published in recent days, the IP-Arrow notices suggest the company is focusing part of its takedown efforts specifically on containing the fallout.

Netflix isn’t new to anti-piracy work. With help from Vobile Inc the company started sending takedown requests to Google roughly a year ago. Unlike IP-Arrow’s requests, Vobile targets a wide variety of content.

A few weeks ago we also reported that Netflix has its own “Global Copyright Protection Group” which is tasked with fighting online piracy. Given the recent leaks, we assume that the group has plenty of work to do now.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Every day, millions of people use BitTorrent to obtain free movies, TV shows, and music but many aren’t aware that their activities can be monitored. Most monitoring is relatively benign but there are companies out there who make a living from threatening to sue file-sharers.

These so-called ‘copyright trolls’ share files along with regular users, capture their IP addresses and trace them back to their ISPs. From there, ISPs are asked to hand over the alleged pirates’ names and addresses so trolls can extract a cash settlement from them, but most ISPs demand a court process before doing so.

Over in Norway, a company called Scanbox Entertainment hired German anti-piracy outfit Excipio to track people sharing the movie ‘The Captive’. Between November 27 and December 1, 2015, the company reportedly found eight customers of telecoms giant Telenor doing so. While the numbers are small, initial cases are often presented this way to attract less attention in advance of bigger moves.

During December 2015, Scanbox sent a request to the Oslo District Court to force Telenor to hand over its subscribers’ information. It also asked the Court to prevent the ISP from deleting or anonymizing logs that could identify the alleged infringers.

In May 2016 Scanbox won its case, and Telenor was ordered to hand over the names and postal addresses of its subscribers. However, determined to protect its customers’ privacy (now and for similar cases in the future), the ISP filed an appeal.

At the Court of Appeal in September 2016, the tables were turned when it was decided that Telenor wouldn’t have to hand over the personal information of its customers after all. The evidence of the alleged infringements failed to show that any sharing was substantial.

But after coming this far and with lots of potential settlement payments at stake, Scanbox refused to give in, taking its case all the way to the Supreme Court where a panel of judges was asked to issue a definitive ruling. The decision just handed down by the Court is bad news for Scanbox.

In essence, the Court weighed Scanbox’s right to protect copyright versus Norwegian citizens’ right to privacy. If the former is to trump the latter, then any copyright infringements must be of a serious nature. The panel of judges at the Supreme Court felt that the evidence presented against Telenor’s customers was not good enough to prove infringement beyond the threshold. The panel, therefore, upheld the earlier decision of the Court of Appeal.

Torgeir Waterhouse of Internet interest group ICT Norway says that online privacy should always be respected and not disregarded as the rightsholders and their law firm, Denmark-based Njord Law, would like.

“This is not about enforcing copyright, this is about what methods are acceptable to use within the law,” Waterhouse says.

“This is an important decision that sends an important message to the licensees and Njord Law that the rule of law can not be set aside in their eagerness to deal with illegal file-sharing. We are very pleased that Njord’s frivolous activity has been stopped. We expect licensees to act responsibly and respect both privacy and the rule of law.”

ScanBox is now required to pay Telenor almost $70,000 in costs, a not insignificant amount that should give reason to pause before future trolling efforts get underway in Norway.

Full decision (Norwegian, pdf)

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.