Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress.com blogging platform, receives thousands of takedown requests from rightsholders.

A few days ago the company published its latest transparency report, showing that they processed 5,006 requests during the second half of last year.

While this is a significant amount, it pales in comparison to many other user-generated services. Google, for example, receives the same number in less than four minutes.

What’s also different is the high rejection rate WordPress has. More than 40% of all DMCA takedown notices are rejected due to inaccuracies or abuse, more than many other service providers.

Overall, however, both the number of takedown requests and the removal rate are relatively stable. As can be seen below, Automattic generally removes content for just over half of the notices it receives; the rest are rejected.

When we took a closer look at the takedown numbers, comparing them to Google’s data, something else stood out. It appears that Google receives more takedown requests for WordPress.com than Automattic, the company that operates the blogging platform.

Over the past 12 months, copyright holders asked Google to remove over 13,100 WordPress.com URLs, while Automattic received less than 10,000 last year. In other words, copyright holders are more keen to remove the search engine results than the actual content, which is not very logical.

TorrentFreak contacted Steve from Automattic, who says that the numbers suggest that rightsholders prefer to go through Google because this is the easier path.

“Those numbers aren’t entirely surprising for a few reasons. When looking to limit access to material online, complainants will naturally look for the path of least resistance,” Steve says.

“Since we manually scrutinize every single DMCA takedown notice that we receive for formal validity and fair use considerations, removal is not guaranteed, and we reject about 40% of all notices for being deficient in some way,” he adds.

The Google takedown process is highly automated which makes it relatively easy for copyright holders to target a high volume of URLs, including those of Wordpess.com.

“Removing sites from top search engines is often much easier due to the automatic nature of the review process… something that is made even easier still by the various trusted partnership programs, and use of bulk electronic takedown notices,” Steve notes.

Still, it’s a strange situation. If a copyright holder is really concerned about infringing content on WordPress.com, it should be at least worth a shot to ask the company to remove it.

But no, of the top ten reporting organizations that asked Google to remove WordPress URLs, none appears in Automattic’s most recent top ten.

Finally, it appears that the thousands of notices that are sent to the search engine are pretty much useless anyway. It may be easier than reaching out to Automattic, but not very effective since Google appears to have whitelisted the blogging platform.

Of the 13,100 takedown requests Google processed over the past 12 months, only 0.3% were ultimately removed.

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

Copyright education has come a long way in recent years, with a much greater proportion of Internet users now aware when their activities might fall foul of the law.

There is no doubt that many still have a problem with the level of freedoms available when it comes to sharing content online without copyright holders’ permission, but an understanding of how that is viewed by the authorities is certainly helpful.

In most areas certainty is available. In many jurisdictions, downloading and then sharing content online using BitTorrent, for example, is considered unlawful distribution, an act punishable by law. But what about those who only consume unauthorized content via online streaming and are not involved in dissemination?

What looks like a straightforward question does not have a straightforward answer. That’s somewhat unfortunate since streaming video is now an extremely popular activity engaged in by millions of Internet users.

Legal experts have gone back and forth on the issue of streaming for years. The idea that people who stream do not make any more than a transient copy of content on their own machine has led some to conclude the activity is either legal or sits in a gray area. That opinion is not shared by rightsholders.

One such example can be found in the case between Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN and Filmspeler.nl, a store which sold “piracy configured” Kodi-type devices. The case was referred to the EU Court of Justice, where several questions were discussed during a hearing late September. One question tackled streaming directly.

“Is it lawful under EU law to temporarily reproduce content through streaming if the content originates from a third-party website where it’s made available without permission?” it asked.

Interestingly, in this case, the European Commission equated streaming to watching, which in its opinion is legal from a viewer perspective. Based on this conclusion the Advocate General is to offer a recommendation, to be followed by a final verdict from the EU Court of Justice sometime in 2017.

With that moment still to arrive and anti-piracy groups still insisting that streaming illegal content is, well, illegal, earlier this month Derbyshire Council Trading Standards in the UK offered its opinion, which essentially supports the position of the EC.

“Accessing premium paid-for content without a subscription is considered by the industry as unlawful access, although streaming something online, rather than downloading a file, is likely to be exempt from copyright laws,” a spokesperson said.

But before streaming pirates begin celebrating too much, a rather influential individual has just thrown his hat, or indeed wig, into the arena.

Mr Justice Arnold has presided over a number of important copyright cases in the UK, including those involving The Pirate Bay and Newzbin2. He hasn’t been asked to rule directly whether users who stream content break the law, but he gave an opinion on the topic as part of the recent injunction application by The Premier League.

Before handing down an order to block pirate streams of Premier League matches, Justice Arnold had to consider whether “the operators and users” of pirate servers infringed the League’s copyrights.

In respect of operators, the decision was straightforward. They have a copy of Premier League content which they distribute unlawfully to the public. It’s an open and shut case dealt with under existing case law, something that cannot be said about user streaming specifically.

Nevertheless, Justice Arnold appears to have reached his decision with ease. The Judge decided that although they do not distribute, users do make unlawful copies of Premier League content, even if they only stream it to a device.

“In the course of streaming the Works, users who access a stream cause their computer, mobile device or set-top box to create copies of the Works in the memory of those devices. In some cases, a substantial part of a Work may be copied in a single frame (for example, a Logo),” the Judge said.

In an earlier case, it was determined that no copyright exists in a live match but The Premier League (FAPL) has now closed that loophole. It now records a copy of a match momentarily before transmission to the public, so it holds a copyright in the same way as a movie or TV show company would over their products.

“[T]he Clean Live Feed for each match is now recorded prior to onward transmission and so the FAPL now claims copyright in those films. In addition, FAPL now claims copyright in new logos and graphics,” the injunction reads.

It’s worth noting that to breach the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, a person needs to copy a “substantial” part of a work, whether that’s a movie, TV show, or indeed a football match. However, despite the transient nature of streaming video to the memory of a viewer’s device, the Judge said that a substantial part of the work would be copied if users stream content in any meaningful way.

“In the case of films of matches, copying of a substantial part is very likely to occur if users stream footage of any appreciable segment of the match,” he wrote.

So what we have here is a conflict of opinion. On the one hand, the European Commission doesn’t have a problem with users streaming under EU law, and on the other, a prominent High Court Judge believes that streaming amounts to illegally copying a substantial part of a copyrighted work into a computer’s memory.

What happens from here isn’t clear, but an opinion from the European Court of Justice is awaited, which should provide greater clarity. In the meantime, consumers of unauthorized streaming content will have to wait, unsure whether they’re breaking the law or not, which is far from ideal.

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

Starting in 2005, the SXSW music festival has published thousands of free tracks from participating artists.

The festival was, in fact, one of the first mainstream outlets to embrace torrents.

During the early years the festival organizers created the torrents for the artist showcases themselves, but since 2008 this task has been taken over by the public.

While torrents are no longer the standard, SXSW’s showcase MP3s are still freely available on the festival’s site for sampling purposes.

For the past several years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all of the MP3s on BitTorrent. Last week he published the latest 2017 torrent, which consists of 1,201 tracks totaling 7.86 gigabytes of free music.

All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available and most of these torrents remain well-seeded. The 2005 – 2017 archives now total more than 77 gigabytes.

Stolt previously told TorrentFreak that he spends several hours preparing the releases each year, in part for his personal pleasure.

“My motivation is in part selfish, because, like many others, my friends and I all use the contents of the torrent to prepare for our week at SXSW Music. But without fail the emails start coming in January and February asking if there will be a torrent,” Stolt said.

“Many people come back every year, so I can’t leave them hanging,” he adds.

The effort pays off, though. Many people love the SXSW torrents, which attract tens of thousands of downloaders each year. The SXSW torrents site also gets quite a bit of traffic, over a million visits thus far.

For some, the showcase torrent is a good consolation for not being able to attend the festival in person. Others see it as a yearly tradition that allows them to fill up their hard drive and check out recent music from new and established artists for free.

This year’s SXSW music festival is currently underway in Austin, Texas and ends on Sunday. The torrent, however, is expected to live on for many years, as long as people are sharing.

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

AEPI, the Greek Society for the Protection of Intellectual Property, has often called for pirate sites to be shut down for abusing the rights of artists. Now, somewhat ironically, there are calls for AEPI to be shut down for exactly the same thing.

Following an audit conducted on behalf of Greece’s Ministry of Culture by auditors Ernst & Young, serious financial irregularities have been discovered at AEPI. The audit was commissioned in 2015 but up until last September, AEPI refused to provide the necessary documentation. Only after the organization was fined did it comply.

Auditing restarted in September 2016 and was concluded on February 6th. The final report, obtained by Greek publication TVXS, reveals a capital deficit of around 20 million euros, which according to the publication means AEPI cannot meet its obligations.

Precisely how the group got into this mess still isn’t clear, but AEPI’s operating expenses certainly outstretched its income, creating an 11.3 million euro deficit for the period 2011 to 2014. During the same period, the company’s shareholders (CEO, General Manager, PR and Secretariat Manager) pocketed almost five million euros between them.

AEPI’s CEO alone received an annual salary of 625,565 euros in 2011, more than 52,000 euros per month. This figure has prompted outrage in local media.

But while they enriched themselves, the same could not be said about the artists AEPI claims to represent. According to the audit, AEPI’s IT system tasked with handling royalty payments was incapable of producing a report to compare royalties collected with royalties being paid out. But artists were certainly being short-changed on a grand scale.

“By Dec. 31st 2014, the undistributed royalties to members and rightsholders amounted to 42.5 million euros, and have still not been awarded to members,” the Greek newspaper EfSyn notes.

“The nature of a significant portion of this collected revenue of approximately 36.8 million euros has not been possible to assess, because collection invoices weren’t correlated to specific revenues in AEPI’s IT system.”

The scandal prompted the president of the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry (EBEA) to call on the Culture Minister to pull the plug on AEPI.

“The AEPI abscess needs to be burst,” Constantine Michalos said.

Earlier this month police raided AEPI’s offices after the public prosecutor launched an investigation. AEPI, which is now said to be around 19m euros in debt, faces a mountain of allegations, not least that it provided illegal loans to board members.

Last week, AEPI faced more problems when corporate and personal bank accounts operated by its board members were frozen by the authorities. But its miseries won’t be ending there.

This week the Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling in a separate case dating back to 1997 which compels AEPI to pay up to 35 million euros to a Greek composers’ association.

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

Former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde paid the ultimate price for his involvement with the notorious pirate site, sacrificing his freedom.

Since his release from prison over two years ago he has been busy with several old and new projects, ranging from Flattr to his art projects, and even a TV-show in Finland.

However, even though he hasn’t been involved with TPB for nearly a decade, his past association still haunts him. Just last year a District Court in Finland ordered him to pay €350,000 ($375,000) for music shared illegally by the site’s users.

Speaking on TorrentFreak’s Steal This Show podcast this week, Peter says that he wasn’t even aware that the case was ongoing until he heard the verdict.

Peter explains that the court wants him to prove that he’s no longer operating The Pirate Bay. An impossible task, according to the former TPB spokesman, who used the court’s own logic in a snarky reply.

“I sent the message to the court saying: you have to prove that you’re not trying to poison me. I didn’t get a reply, so I guess they are trying to poison me. I’m using their own logic now,” he says.

Where most people would be devastated when told to pay hundreds of thousands of euros, Peter is no longer impressed. The Finnish case is still under appeal, but even if the damages amount stands, it’s not that big of a deal.

As the result of various court cases, the former TPB spokesman already owes millions to Hollywood. In Sweden alone, the damages are already well in the range of €15 million and increase every year with a fourteen percent interest rate, he says.

With these numbers the damages will be more than half a billion before he retires. In fact, it already is pretty much impossible for Peter to pay even the interest alone. It’s likely he’ll be in debt for the rest of his life. But even if he could pay, he wouldn’t.

“Out of principle I would never pay them anything,” Peter says, as he doesn’t feel that he took anything from the Hollywood studios or record labels to begin with.

“People ask me so many times: how are you going to pay the money back, and I’m like, what do you mean back? You have to have the money first in order to give it back. There was never any money handed over to me. I didn’t take any money.”

During the Pirate Bay trial, Peter and his co-defendants presented evidence showing that piracy doesn’t cause rightsholders any significant harm, if any at all. However, The Pirate Bay defendants had to pay nonetheless, as the rightsholders argued that a proper license would have cost them too.

While debts can be a real burden, Peter is relaxed. Many of his friends are struggling to pay their mortgages or student loans, but he has stopped worrying.

“When you get to ten million euros, it is not like those two hundred and fifty euros per month are actually going to get you into that debt-free zone when you’re sixty. So you don’t care about it, you stop caring about it,” he says.

The massive debt, in a way, provided him a sense of freedom. No matter what financial trouble he runs into, it will still be impossible to pay. And since Peter opted not to pay at all, there’s less of a burden.

“So the only thing that actually happens is that you pay less. You just change the way of life. You’re actually protected. I can owe quite a lot of money. It means that I will never have to pay anything because I won’t be in a position where that’s gonna happen.

“Maybe I should start a torrent site in Sweden,” Peter jokes.

—

More details on the full episode with Peter Sunde is available at the Steal This Show website.

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