Last September, the European Commission published its long-awaited proposal to modernize EU copyright law. Among other things, it will require online services to do more to fight piracy.

Specifically, Article 13 of the proposed Copyright Directive requires online services to monitor and filter pirated content, in collaboration with rightsholders.

This means that online services, which deal with large volumes of user-uploaded content, must use fingerprinting or other detection mechanisms to block copyright infringing files.

“The Commission proposal obliges such service providers to take appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure the protection of user-uploaded works, for example by putting in place content recognition technologies,” the Commission explained.

The Commission stressed that the changes are needed to reinforce the negotiating position of copyright holders, so they can sign licensing agreements with services that provide access to user-uploaded content.

However, the proposal is drawing wide criticism from the public, digital rights activists, and legal scholars. Just recently, a group of legal experts bundled several of their main concerns in a paper.

TorrentFreak spoke with Dr. Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, Associate Professor in IT and IP law at the University of Southampton, who is one of the authors of the paper.

Stalla-Bourdillon and her colleagues warn that, in its current form, the proposal goes against existing EU law.

For one, the general obligation to monitor the content that users are transmitting, directly opposes Article 15 of the E-Commerce Directive. This article prohibits general monitoring obligations for service providers.

“Such an obligation [to monitor contents] goes against Article 15 of the E-commerce Directive, which prevents Member States from imposing upon intermediary providers general monitoring obligations,” she notes.

More importantly, the legal scholars also note that the filtering requirement also contradict Articles 8 and 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. These articles protect people’s freedom of expression and access to information, as well as their personal data.

Both articles were also cited in the Netlog filtering case that went before the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) a few years ago. At the time, the Court held that requiring an online platform to install broad piracy filters is incompatible with EU law.

In the proposed Copyright Directive the filters will be put in place in collaboration with rightsholders. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the human rights dimension is largely ignored.

“Requiring that filtering systems be put in place in collaboration with rightholders is not enough to eliminate these human rights challenges,” Stalla-Bourdillon says.

“The CJEU did not imply in Netlog that if the database of protected works was produced in collaboration with rightholders themselves, the general obligation to monitor imposed upon the service provider would thus be transformed into a permissible, special obligation to monitor.”

With their paper, the researchers are making a case for a complete re-assessment of the filtering requirement. They ask the EU Commission to carefully look at the new requirements, and make sure that they are in line with existing case law and legislation.

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

During the fall of 2007, tens of thousands of passionate music fans mourned the loss of the private music tracker OiNK.

One of the many avid users of the site was ‘WhatMan,’ who instead of crying in a corner decided to team up with others and build a new music tracker for all OiNK refugees.

“I felt sick to my stomach all morning,” WhatMan said at the time.

“We plan to grow into a large tracker – probably not as large as OiNK, and not as open, but eventually I would like to support at least a hundred thousand users,” he added.

This vision came to pass. Nine years later What.cd had more than 144,000 users, who together amassed 2,675,120 torrents, featuring 885,556 artists. Several users equated it to the Library of Alexandria for digital music.

Two weeks ago this library was burnt to the ground. French military police raided the site’s hosting company and took twelve servers, after which the What.cd team decided to pull the plug for good.

Over the years, What.cd’s music collection had outgrown that of its predecessor many times over but in a matter of a few hours, everything was gone. Or was it?

Soon after the shutdown, discussions began on other private trackers and elsewhere. Most people agreed that a new tracker should follow the path What.cd took nine years ago, and after the weekend was over, several alternatives were already up and running.

One of the new trackers is PassTheHeadphones (PTH), a name that’s obviously inspired by the PassThePopcorn site. As is often the case with private trackers, getting on board isn’t easy. At the time of writing the membership is capped at 10,000 users, but it’s expected that many more will follow.

According to one of the recruitment threads on a private tracker, the site is run by familiar faces in the community.

“Pass The Headphones is a new music tracker that aims to fill the void left in the wake of what.cd shutting down. Run by some familiar faces in the private tracker community, security is at the top of the list of priorities,” the message reads.

The rate at which PTH has been building its music library is impressive. The site is quickly closing in on its 200,000th torrent, which is the same number the original OiNK tracker had at its height.

PTH

Another popular new tracker is Apollo, which was first launched with the name Xanax. This tracker has more users than PTH, but fewer torrents, at least when we last saw the stats.

Both PTH and Apollo run on the Gazelle tracker software, which was originally developed by the What.cd team. The same goes for other, smaller trackers that appeared recently, including the properly named NotWhat.cd tracker that surfaced a few days ago.

The NotWhat team says they’ve postponed their launch in order to beef up security. According to the site’s staff, security of the userbase and infrastructure is their top priority.

“The time has been spent securing the Gazelle codebase, securing the server infrastructure and minimizing personally identifiable information. NotWhat.cd DOES NOT store IRC IP logs, user access logs are wiped on a regular basis and our staff members are vetted, trusted members of the community,” they announced.

These precautions are not unwarranted and something NoStream.co, another aspiring What.cd replacement, learned the hard way.

This new tracker was compromised last week. All users were promoted to sysop and soon after emails of users started leaking online. As a result, Nostream was forced to throw in the towel after a few days.

While it’s too early to call winners or losers, it’s clear that history is repeating itself. You can shut down the largest digital music library in the world but as a result, several new ones have been created, which may grow to become even bigger than the original.

A few years ago WhatMan told TorrentFreak that he was happy to see other trackers using Gazelle. It seems fitting to repeat this as the final words today, to complete the circle.

“It gives me great pleasure to see other trackers running on our code. By releasing the Gazelle frontend and the Ocelot tracker, our goal was to make it easier for admins to run large sites and for users to download content,” WhatMan said at the time.

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

^{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!}

In this episode we hear from Joe Matheny, one of the founders of the underground private torrent tracker The Grey Lodge.

Before it shut down, the site was used by millions of people per month in their quest to uncover the esoteric, strange and the downright weird.

Today we discuss the challenges of running a private underground tracker from the earliest days of BitTorrent, how even weirdos eventually get pursued by the MPAA, and how the demise of indie trackers from Grey Lodge to What.CD mean a net loss for our culture.

—

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

The guests for our news discussions will vary, and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the great innovators and minds.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Joe Matheny

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Riley Byrne
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Siraje Amarniss

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

Early November, police in Italy targeted more than 150 sites involved in the unauthorized streaming of movies and sports.

The Special Units of the Guardia di Finanza obtained a mass injunction from a judge in Rome, heralding the largest ever blocking operation in the country.

At the time, Fulvia Sarzana, a lawyer specializing in Internet and copyright disputes, described the move as “sensational.” Since then he’s been defending one of the sites targeted by the sweeping action and now reports success thanks to an EU ruling.

Kisstube.tv is a site that acts an index for movies hosted elsewhere. A cursory skim through its archives reveals plenty of content in both Italian and English, mainly stored on YouTube.

According to Sarzana, until the action last month Kisstube had never received any infringement complaints. Nevertheless, it found itself blocked along with dozens of other sites without any pre-action discussion.

After being hired by Kisstube, Sarzana took the site’s case to the Rome Court of Appeal, arguing that it should have never been ordered to be blocked. At first view and perhaps surprisingly, the Court agreed and overturned the injunction against the site. So what was its reasoning?

Like many other similar sites, Kisstube hosts none of its own content. The site embeds videos that are stored elsewhere, on hosting platforms such as YouTube.

“The Kisstube portal links to YouTube, where there is the Content ID system and a notice and takedown system, just as there is a notice and takedown system on the Kisstube site,” Sarzana informs TorrentFreak.

“I do not know whether they are copyrighted films and allowed on YouTube, but in this case it should have been YouTube that removed any pirated movies. The site that embeds the content can not be held responsible.”

In handing down its decision the Court of Appeals considered two rulings from the European Court of Justice.

The first involved water filtering company BestWater International, who accused two men of copyright infringement after they embedded a Bestwater promotional video in their website in a YouTube frame. Even though the video had been uploaded to YouTube without Bestwater’s permission, the Court found that embedding the content in a third-party site did not amount to infringement.

The second more recent case involved Dutch blog GeenStijl.nl, which published an article linking to leaked Playboy photos which were stored on file-hosting site FileFactory.

“I do not like mass-blocking and am convinced that before a judge you can always explain your case,” Sarzana told TF following his win for KissTube.

However, the lawyer says that the future may be more complex. New rules under discussion have the potential to limit the freedoms of sites that rely on user-uploaded content.

“My fear is that the new EU rules on copyright under discussion are trying to put rules in place which would prohibit any type of linking and embedding to overcome the protection that the EU Court of Justice has guaranteed UGC portals like Youtube,” Sarzana concludes.

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

Over the past decade, TV and movie companies have taken part in a massive experiment in which they’ve had to reinvent their business models, adopting to rapidly changing demands from consumers.

The first wave of change was triggered by BitTorrent, which allowed downloading huge video files with ease, something that wasn’t possible before.

The movie industry responded by offering their own online video download options, and with bandwidth getting cheaper and more readily available, streaming services soon followed.

However, having legal options available is just a tiny part of the puzzle. The next challenge is to set them up in a way so that people will actually use them, while optimizing revenue long-term. For example, should you allow people to stream your content for free online?

A new study by Carnegie Mellon University researchers aims to provide some empirical evidence on this issue. Using streaming and sales data for the popular show Downton Abbey, provided by PBS, they estimate the impact of free streaming on direct download (EST) sales.

The results, published in a paper for the upcoming International Conference on Information Systems, show that legal streaming options can hurt download sales significantly.

The researchers were able to estimate the impact in a natural experiment, since PBS was required to pull the free streams for all episodes at the same time. This means that some were streamable for more than a month, while others only for a week, or two.

PBS’ free treaming window for Downton Abbey season 5

In addition, they had sales data for several seasons, allowing them to make an alternative comparison between years, where the streaming windows varied. In both cases, they show that free streaming cannibalizes download sales.

“Our analysis in our primary specification indicates that availability in the free streaming window reduces EST sales by 8.4%. Using an alternative specification we find that free availability reduces EST sales by 9.9%,” they write.

The negative effect is not unexpected. However, it doesn’t mean that it is wrong to offer free streaming in the long run, as there are several positive side-effects. That’s where the puzzle starts to get complicated.

“For example, free streaming platforms owned by the broadcast network can draw new users to the platform, providing the network with valuable data about its viewers, and a stronger platform as consumers switch from consumption through broadcast television to online stream,” the researchers note.

“Networks also benefit from advertising sponsorship on their streaming channels. Streaming platforms may also enable customer discovery of other shows, or increase overall consumer goodwill,” they add.

And then there’s still piracy.

While unathorized downloads and streams weren’t factored into this study, the researchers point out that previous research has shown that making content legally available decreases demand for piracy.

For example, a 2015 study revealed that ABC’s decision to add their content to Hulu reduced piracy for this content. This shows that legal streaming may also have a positive long-term effect by decreasing people’s piracy habits.

Although the current results are important from a managerial perspective, it might just leave more questions than it answered. In any case, the puzzle of how to offer video content while maximizing revenues in the long run, is far from solved.

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