As residents know already and visitors soon learn, the tackling of piracy and counterfeiting isn’t a high priority in Spain. From the fake luxury goods on the streets to openly sold pirate TV services, the sixth most populated country in Europe often has other things on its mind.

This week, however, the government said it would re-focus attention on piracy and a number of related issues, including reform of compensation for private copying and tax breaks for live entertainment.

In an announcement before the Congressional Culture Committee, Iñigo Méndez de Vigo, Minister of Education, Culture and Sports, presented the government’s ‘Culture 20/20 Plan’, the successor to its Strategic Plan for Culture.

Among a basket of cultural-focused measures sits the creation of a special prosecutor’s office, dedicated to fighting piracy and other intellectual property-related offenses.

The Minister said that strengthening the fight against piracy, both online and offline, is an existing project receiving new life as one of the 20/20 Plan’s key objectives.

“It’s an old project with the Ministry of Justice and a clear signal that we’re serious,” he said, adding that the government will boost its human resources and technological means to tackle the problem at hand.

Turning to Internet piracy in particular, the Minister said that between 2012 and 2016 there had been 491 requests to remove illegal content from websites, almost all of which had been resolved. He reported that just over 50 sites had ceased their activities and 200 more had removed illegal content to move into compliance.

While there was no mention of any warning notice campaigns, such as the one underway in the United States and another preparing for launch in the UK, Spain plans to run anti-piracy awareness campaigns, both in the media and in classrooms.

“[We will] raise awareness among schoolchildren to respect property, protect creators and expand cultural heritage,” the Minister said.

“We have to achieve a great sensibility, mainly in the schools, so that the children understand that when they are illegally downloading a song they are stealing. It is an issue of education and awareness in which we will take advantage of the fact that Education and Culture are under the same jurisdiction.”

Also on the agenda is “urgent” reform of unpopular private copying rules and a promise to “respond in a balanced manner to the needs of consumers and the different sectors involved.”

If economic conditions allow, the government also wants to reduce VAT on live entertainment from the current 21% to just 10%.

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

Every hour of every day, millions of DMCA-style takedown notices flood into service providers all over the globe. Google alone has received a billion in the past 12 months.

While the majority of these notices comply with the law, a percentage are duplicates, erroneous, or flat-out malicious. Until recently, however, no one had ever been held to account for sending bad notices, but a case in Canada has changed that.

Whyte Potter-Mäl c Topdawg Entertainment Inc. is a curious case that has its roots back in 2011 when rapper Jonathan Emile asked fellow rapper and songwriter Kendrick Lamar to contribute to the track ‘Heaven Help Dem’. Lamar agreed and provided a verse in 2012.

“We sent [Lamar] an email outlining what we wanted to do and they got us on the phone and said they were feeling it and that they would go ahead and do the song,” Emile told Billboard.

“We paid Kendrick Lamar for a feature, and once we paid them, they basically stopped communicating with us altogether. It was understood that we’d take care of the paperwork with the lawyers, so we paid them and they basically disappeared… we couldn’t get in contact, so I just continued producing my album and with the verbal agreement we had, and we put out the song in 2015.”

Heaven Help Dem was supposed to be the lead track on Emile’s debut album, but instead it was quickly pulled from YouTube, iTunes, Soundcloud and other sites following bogus copyright claims from Lamar’s label Top Dawg Entertainment Inc., Interscope Records and Universal Music Group.

Emile says that after going back and forth with the labels, they realized that they had no right to take the track down. By then, however, the damage had been done and all momentum to promote the song had been lost. Also faced with the prospect of fans believing that he had stolen the verse from Lamar, Emile decided to take the labels to court in Canada.

In a case before the small claims division of the Court of Quebec, Emile asked for a token amount in damages – just CAD$15,000 – after the labels removed his work from the Internet for two months after bogus copyright claims. None appeared in court to defend themselves and Emile won by default.

“It’s only after the intervention of this lawyer that the song was reinstated on the social media,” the Court’s judgment reads.

“While the song was down, and even after it was reinstated, it is clear from the evidence provided that the incomes of the Plaintiff and his reputation was negatively affected from the false report of the Defendants.”

In most cases there would be earlier rulings to look back on, but the Montreal Court said that it was unable to find anything similar on file. Instead, it used Copyright Act to determine an appropriate damages award.

“In these circumstances, and after reviewing sections 28.1, 28.2, 34 of the Copyright Act, sections 6 and 49 of the Charter of human rights and freedoms and the Cinar judgment [1] from the Supreme Court, the Court will allow the discretionary amount of $5,000 as moral and material damages to be solidarily paid by the Defendants and an additional amount of $1,000 per Defendant as punitive damages,” the Court ruled.

Speaking with Legal Feeds, IP expert Noel Courage said he’d never seen a case where someone had been sued over a takedown notice.

“The Court seemed to say that the takedown affected the moral rights of the musician’s work or performance,” he said.

“Moral rights are the musician’s rights to the integrity of a work. These rights can be infringed if the work is modified without consent, and prejudices the musician’s reputation or honour. This is the first I have heard of the use of moral rights in response to a web music takedown.”

While the Court’s decision will be welcomed by those who believe the DMCA is too often used as a weapon, Courage said that the case doesn’t set a strong precedent due to it being heard before a low-level court.

However, “it may give companies pause before giving takedown notices.”

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

In an effort to curb online piracy, the movie and music industries reached an agreement with the UK’s leading ISPs to send warnings to alleged copyright infringers.

Mimicking its American counterpart, the copyright alert program will monitor the illegal file-sharing habits of UK citizens with a strong focus on repeat infringers.

The piracy alerts program is part of the larger Creative Content UK (CCUK) initiative which already introduced several anti-piracy PR campaigns, targeted at the general public as well as the classroom.

The plan to send out email alerts was first announced several years ago when we discussed it in detail, but it took some time to get everything ready. This week, a spokesperson from CCUK’s “Get it Right From a Genuine Site” campaign informed us that it will go live in first few months of 2017.

It’s likely that ISPs and copyright holders needed to fine-tune their systems to get going, but the general purpose of the campaign remains the same. This means that the focus lies on education.

While it may be quite scary for people to see that their piracy habits are being tracked and reported, the campaign stresses that they prefer the carrot over the stick.

“Educational emails will help account owners and others who use their accounts to do the right thing and get their content from legitimate sources,” the spokesperson informed us.

The alert emails will be similar to what we’ve seen in the United States, except that there are no direct punishments tied to them. They will, however, list details about the pirated files that were shared and how this can be prevented in the future.

“As well as providing links to help the customer find legal sources of content in future, the email will direct the user to further resources to answer any questions they may have about how the information was obtained and how to make sure their account is not used to infringe content again,” we were told.

“We realize that some people might not realize their account has been used to share files, for example if their children have been illicitly downloading content and then sharing it without their parent’s knowledge.”

Pointing people towards one of the many legal alternatives is a central goal, through which CCUK hopes to decrease piracy rates over time.

The “Get it Right From a Genuine Site” team is confident that they can drive some significant change. Several benchmark measurements were taken prior to the campaign, so its effectiveness can be properly measured once it’s underway.

Talks about this type of alert system have been on the agenda for almost a decade. Ironically, however, now that it’s getting close to finally being implemented, P2P file-sharing is on the decline.

Over the past years, most pirates in the UK have shifted towards direct download and streaming services. Since the copyright alerts only target P2P sharing, it will have less of an impact today than it would have a few years ago.

To what degree the new anti-piracy campaign will convert pirates into paying customers has yet to be seen. In any case, it won’t pass by unnoticed.

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

For years, the small Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda had a flourishing gambling industry, with an estimated 5% of all countrymen working in gambling-related companies.

However, measures taken by central, regional and local authorities in the US seriously affected the cross-border supply of gambling services, with Antigua’s High Commissioner to London stating that they had subsequently shrunk “to virtually nothing.”

In desperation, Antigua filed a dispute at the World Trade Organization (WTO), which it won. A 2005 ruling by the WTO found that denying Antiguan gambling companies access to the US market violated free-trade.

In 2007 the WTO ramped up the pressure, granting Antigua the right to suspend U.S. IP rights up to $21 million annually. With little progress made in the dispute, in 2013 Antigua threatened to launch its own ‘pirate’ site, which prompted a sharp response from the US.

“If Antigua actually proceeds with a plan for its government to authorize the theft of intellectual property, it would only serve to hurt Antigua’s own interests,” the U.S warned.

After three years without such a site appearing, a release from the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Board (DSB) indicates that Antigua and Barbuda has finally run out of patience and is ready to suspend protection of US intellectual property rights. A letter from a government representative to the WTO explains the situation.

“It has been 12 long years since an Arbitration panel, established under the rules and procedures of this body, issued a decision that found the United States of America in violation of international obligations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services.

“Over that entire 12-year period, my small country with a Gross Domestic Product of just $1 billion has been deprived of trade revenues which now exceed $250 million. For my country’s tiny economy, $250 million is a meaningful sum of money,” the statement reads.

Pointing out that $250m represents only 0.0003% of just one year of GDP for the US, the letter adds that over the past 12 years, the US has enjoyed a trade surplus with Antigua and Barbuda of more than $1 billion.

“Over all this time my government has patiently engaged in good faith consultations with the Government of the United States in the genuine hope that the harm done to our economy by US action would be repaired through a settlement that recognizes justice and fairness.

“Alas, the US has not been able to propose terms for a settlement that would even remotely compensate for the harm that has been done to our economy and continues to impact it negatively.”

The statement from Antigua and Barbuda adds that while the US continues to defy WTO rulings, it remains the most active user of the institution’s Dispute Settlement System, something which threatens to undermine the integrity of the WTO.

“[T]he protracted failure by the US to settle this matter, despite the fact that it is not compliant with WTO rules, has the potential to collapse confidence in the efficacy and credibility of the rules-based trading system.

“Antigua and Barbuda, one of the smallest economies in the world is yet to reap any benefit from having prevailed against the United States through the rulings and recommendations of the DSB,” it adds.

In a final warning that the gloves are about to come off, the statement concludes that time is running out and in a matter of weeks, unless something is done, United States intellectual property will receive no protection

“My government has almost exhausted its patient efforts to reach a settlement with the US. This is regrettable since, on our side, we have always conducted our relations with the US at a high level of regard and cooperation.

“We advise this body that we are now engaged in a final effort with representatives of the US Trade Representative’s Office to reach an agreed settlement. We hope that a sense of right will prevail. But, we cannot go beyond the end of this year.

“In light of the above, Antigua and Barbuda now informs the DSB that, if an appropriate and beneficial settlement is not reached with the US by year-end, the government will be compelled to take action to enforce the suspension of copyright on the sale of US intellectual property, consistent with the award of the DSB.”

The United States says it remains committed to resolving the matter but is “disappointed that Antigua and Barbuda had characterized the US as having acted in bad faith when the US had taken a constructive approach to resolving the matter.”

The US said it had put forward a package of concessions but Antigua and Barbuda are the only WTO member blocking the proposals.

Attorney Mark Mendel, a lawyer in Ireland who previously led the fight for Antigua at the WTO, informs TorrentFreak that a number of options remain open for the Carribean country.

“A couple of years back, when Antigua last came very close to implementing the remedies given them by the WTO, we had identified a significant number of areas where the suspension of United States intellectual property rights would, we had assessed, have had the desired effect,” Mendel explains.

“By ‘desired effect’, I mean the purpose of the remedies as given in the WTO rules – to put substantial domestic pressure on a recalcitrant government from a completely ‘innocent’ sector of the economy so as to encourage the government to comply with WTO rulings or at least agree a reasonable settlement. Since that time, all of those very well considered options exist, as do a few more that might even be more promising.”

Mendel says that since the remedies have been approved by the WTO, technically there will be no ‘pirating’, and whatever the Antigua and Barbuda government decides to do will be in compliance with the law.

“The only party in violation of International obligations in this dispute is the United States and I have all confidence that Antigua will continue to conduct itself in accordance with the agreed rule of law,” Mendel concludes.

The next meeting of the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Board is scheduled for mid-December. Whether any progress will be made to end the 12-year dispute remains to be seen but if not, 2017 could be an eventful one for pirates of the Carribean.

—

The full letter Antigua & Barbuda sent to the WTO is available here (pdf).

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

After seizing several servers of the popular private music tracker What.cd two weeks ago, the French military police have now caught an even bigger fish, Zone-Telechargement.com.

With millions of regular visitors, Zone-Telechargement was ranked the 11th most-visited website in the entirety of France.

Telechargement is French for “download,” and the site offered direct downloads of a wide variety of pirated content, including films, series, games, and music. However, yesterday afternoon the site suddenly became inaccessible.

After some confusion, the French Gendarmerie took credit on Twitter, stating that an investigation had concluded that the download portal caused rightsholders 75 million euros in losses.

Gendarmerie Nationale Tweet

Founded in 2011, Zone-Telechargement’s popularity soared after the shutdown of Megaupload, which was also hugely popular in France until its shutdown early 2012.

Interestingly, it appears that the site wasn’t the only target yesterday. DL-Protect, another large direct-download site and the 19th most popular website in France according to Alexa, also went down.

While the police only mentioned one site, Zataz reports that this direct download site was targeted by the police as well. In common with the action against What.cd, French music industry group SACEM also played a role in yesterday’s actions.

The police have yet to issue a full press statement on their investigation, but thus far no arrests have been announced. SACEM informs TorrentFreak that they will issue a comment later today.

With two prominent shutdowns in one month, it’s quite clear that the Gendarmerie’s cybercrime division and SACAM have online piracy high on their agenda.

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