Earlier this month, several copyright holder groups sent their annual “notorious markets” submissions to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR).

The U.S. Government uses this input for the Special 301 report, an overview of threats to various copyright industries. The recommendations usually include well-known piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay, but increasingly third-party technology providers are also added to the mix.

For example, this year the MPAA and RIAA identified domain name registrars as possible piracy facilitators. In addition, several “rogue” hosting providers were mentioned, as well as CDN provider Cloudflare.

The inclusion of these technology companies is a dangerous development according to the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (I2Coalition), which counts Google, Amazon, Verisign and Dreamhost among its members.

The I2Coalition submitted a rebuttal to the USTR this week in which they outline their concerns. They warn that if the MPAA and RIAA have their way, the entire Internet could be put at risk.

“Certain submissions favor an approach to intellectual property and infringement protections that would be harmful to the Internet infrastructure marketplace, and therefore to the Internet itself, as well as the global U.S. and global economies,” they write.

The main problem is that the entertainment industry groups “vilify” specific technologies instead of the marketplaces themselves, as the Special 301 process is supposed to do.

For example, MPAA’s characterization of Cloudflare as a service that creates “obstacles to enforcement” as it helps pirate sites to “hide,” is inappropriate according to the coalition.

“Technologies themselves cannot be bad actors. Further, a number of submissions characterize technologies and those using the technologies using unnecessarily inflammatory language.”

In addition to misguided statements about technology, I2Coalition also argues that the submissions show a misinterpretation of the obligations domain name registrars have under the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA).

Ideally, the MPAA and RIAA would like domain registrars to suspend domain names that are accused of copyright infringement, but most refuse to do so without a court order. Rightfully so, according to I2Coalition.

“Both the vilification of technology, and misconstruing of the RAA have one goal in common: forcing Internet infrastructure companies to act as intermediaries in intellectual property disputes,” the group writes.

“This is not the answer to intellectual property infringement, is not the purpose of the Special 301 process, and proposals to expand the use of these companies as intermediaries are misguided.”

Using a page from the entertainment industry playbook, the technology companies stress that billions of dollars are at stake if the Government steers policies in the wrong direction.

“The Internet infrastructure industry generates more than $100 billion in annual revenue and is growing at a rate of nearly 20% per year.

“Creating regulatory and legal hurdles to the industry’s progress will not only negatively impact the architecture and viability of the global Internet, it will also impact the overall economy, which is dependent on the continued growth of the Internet infrastructure industry.”

The rebuttal and other submissions will form the basis of the U.S. Government’s Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets, which is expected to come out later this year.

—

I2Coalition’s full submission is available here (pdf).

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

Content owners regularly accuse companies such as Google and Bing of including infringing content in their search results, often on the initial pages following a search where exposure to the public is greatest.

In addition to having these ‘pirate’ results demoted or removed entirely, content providers believe that results featuring genuine content should receive priority, to ensure that the legitimate market thrives.

At least in part, Google has complied with industry requests. Sites which receive the most takedown notices are demoted in results, while some legitimate content has been appearing higher. But of course, entertainment industry companies want more – and they might just get it.

Currently under discussion in Parliament is the Digital Economy Bill. It’s been covered here on several occasions (1,2,3) due to a key aim of harmonizing the punishments for on-and-offline infringement.

However, the Bill appears to be broadening in scope and the role of search engines is now on the agenda, something which the BPI hinted at last week in comments to TorrentFreak.

A new clause titled “Power to provide for a code of practice related to copyright infringement” envisions a situation whereby search engines come to a voluntary agreement with rightsholders on how best to tackle piracy, or have one forced upon them.

“The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision for a search engine to be required to adopt a code of practice concerning copyright infringement that complies with criteria specified in the regulations,” the proposed clause reads.

“The regulations may provide that if a search engine fails to adopt such a code of practice, any code of practice that is approved for the purposes of that search engine by the Secretary of State, or by a person designated by the Secretary of State, has effect as a code of practice adopted by the search engine.”

If the clause was adopted, the Secretary of State would also be granted powers to investigate disputes surrounding a search engine’s compliance with any code, appoint a regulator, and/or impose “financial penalties or other sanctions” if companies like Google fall short.

The Conservative government previously made a manifesto commitment to reduce copyright infringement and several MPs believe that this clause would help it to achieve that aim.

Speaking in Parliament this week, Labour MP Kevin Brennan said that Baroness Neville-Rolfe, the Minister for Intellectual Property, had chaired a series of roundtable discussions and meetings between rights holders and search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The rights holders proposed a voluntary code of practice, with some interesting parameters for the search engines to live up to.

“The guiding principles for the voluntary code of conduct would have been that in the top three results, fewer than 1% link to illegal sites; in the top 10, fewer than 5%; and in the top 20, fewer than 10%,” Brennan explained.

“Achieving these objectives would improve the quality of search results and resolve disadvantages that limit the visibility of legitimate sites on which consumers can buy or stream copyrighted works.”

However, it appears that the search engines in question aren’t particularly enthusiastic about the role they’re being asked to play.

“In essence, rights holders want search engines to do what ISPs already do — work co-operatively to take action against sites that have been identified by the High Court as pirate sites — but despite numerous efforts, search engines will not co-operate or agree to the code of practice,” Brennan said.

“They continue to take little responsibility for the fact that listings can overwhelmingly consist of illegal content—the equivalent of the ‘Yellow Pages’ refusing to take responsibility for publishing the details of crooked traders and fraudsters.”

Introducing the new clause (which grants the Secretary of State power to fine search engines) could help the search engines to become more compliant, Brennan said.

“Given the difficulties in negotiations, the new clause would provide a legal backstop to prevent search engines from refusing point-blank to co-operate in discussions. While the code of practice remains a voluntary dream, search engines can refuse to collaborate, as they have for many years.”

Concluding, Brennan indicated that given the Digital Economy Bill is in front of MPs, there is no better time to introduce such a clause. However, Minister for Digital and Culture Matt Hancock urged patience.

“I care about the substance of getting this Bill through right. There are, of course, important parts of parliamentary process both here and in the [House of Lords],” Hancock said.

“Given that the round table discussions are ongoing, including a meeting next week, now is not the right time for the broad reserve power.”

The debates continue.

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

Pirate video streaming sites are booming. Their relative ease of use and on demand viewing makes them a viable alternative to P2P file-sharing, which has traditionally dominated the piracy arena.

Over the past months, several newcomers appeared on the scene, some of which have quickly grown to become serious traffic magnets.

Fmovies.to is one of these relative newcomers. In tandem with the similar looking 123movies.to, the streaming service has built a user base of millions of people since the start of the year.

The downside to this success is that copyright holders are bound to come knocking, and this is exactly what has happened. A few days ago Fmovies.to and its operators were sued in a Florida federal court by the Philippine media conglomerate ABS-CBN.

In a complaint filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, the media company brands Fmovies as a classic pirate site.

“Defendant’s website is a classic example of a pirate operation, having no regard whatsoever for the rights of ABS-CBN and willfully infringing ABS-CBN’s intellectual property,” the company’s lawyers write (pdf).

“As a result, ABS-CBN requires this Court’s intervention if any meaningful stop is to be put to Defendant’s piracy,” the complaint adds, explaining that several of its movies are freely available on the site.

An ABS-CBN movie playing on Fmovies

ABS-CBN accuses Fmovies.to of unfair competition and several counts of both trademark and copyright infringement, direct or through the site’s users. In doing so, they argue that the streaming service has cause them substantial harm.

“Defendant’s Internet-based website business is an illegal operation, infringing on the intellectual property rights of ABS-CBN through its distribution and performance of ABS CBN’s Copyrighted Works and using the ABS-CBN Marks to promote, advertise, and distribute such content.”

At this point it’s unclear who is operating the site. The media company notes that the domain names are registered anonymously so it’s very possible that the operators are not from the United States.

However, ABS-CBN argues the court has jurisdiction over the defendant since the site is operating in the state of Florida.

Through the court case the media conglomerate is seeking damages, which may run to millions of dollars. In addition, they request a permanent injunction to bar the operators from running Fmovies.

This includes a request to seize the site’s current and future domain names that are tied to copyright infringements.

This is not the first time ABS-CBN has gone after pirate sites and recent history shows that the consequences can be quite severe. In a default judgment last year, a U.S. federal court in Oregon ordered the operator of several tiny streaming sites to pay $10 million in damages to the company.

However, with a user base of millions of people, Fmovies.to is by far the largest movie streaming site to be targeted in a U.S. Court, although probably not the last.

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

A case that recording labels EMI and Capitol filed against the long-since defunct music service MP3Tunes has been rolling on for nearly a decade.

MP3Tunes was originally a site selling MP3s from non-major label artists. It later added a locker service which allowed users to store their MP3s online and play them remotely on Internet-enabled devices.

MP3Tunes also ran Sideload.com, a service which enabled users to search for MP3s on the web and add them to the MP3Tunes service. Many of these MP3s infringed copyright, MP3Tunes and owner Michael Robertson both got sued, and together got mauled in court.

MP3Tunes went bankrupt in 2012 and following a 2014 trial, the jury awarded the plaintiffs $41m in damages. Punitive damages of $7.5m were later reduced to $750,000.

The case went to appeal and yesterday the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals handed down an opinion that should attract the attention of service providers and Internet users alike. The most interesting points from a wider perspective cover the parameters which define so-called ‘repeat infringers’.

Following an important case involving music outfit BMG, piracy monetization firm Rightscorp, and ISP Cox Communications, it was broadly accepted that a repeat infringer was a subscriber who repeatedly infringed BMG’s copyrights. In that case, those were subscribers who were repeatedly caught using BitTorrent to share (upload) copyrighted music online.

The fine received by Cox in that case provided the clearest indication yet that in order to retain their ‘safe harbor’ under the DMCA, service providers must take action against such ‘repeat infringers’. However, in the opinion handed down yesterday, the Court widens the net beyond those who get caught uploading.

Noting that the District Court in the MP3Tunes case had also defined a ‘repeat infringer’ as a user who posts or uploads infringing content “to the Internet for the world to experience or copy”, the Court of Appeals adds that the same court determined that a mere downloader of infringing content could not be defined as a repeat infringer “that internet services providers are obligated to ban from their websites.”

According to the Court of Appeal, that definition was too narrow.

“We reject this definition of a ‘repeat infringer,’ which finds no support in the text, structure, or legislative history of the DMCA. Starting with the text, we note that the DMCA does not itself define ‘repeat infringers’,” the opinion reads (pdf).

Noting that ‘repeat’ means to do something “again or repeatedly” while an ‘infringer’ is “[s]omeone who interferes with one of the exclusive rights of a copyright,” the Court of Appeals goes on to broaden the scope significantly.

“Copyright infringement is a strict liability offense in the sense that a plaintiff is not required to prove unlawful intent or culpability, and a user does not have to share copyrighted works in order to infringe a copyright,” its opinion reads.

“In the context of this case, all it takes to be a ‘repeat infringer’ is to repeatedly upload or download copyrighted material for personal use,” adding “that a ‘repeat infringer’ does not need to know of the infringing nature of its online activities, or to upload rather than download content.”

The notion that the term ‘repeat infringer’ can now be applied to anyone who knowingly (or unknowingly) downloads infringing content on multiple occasions is likely to set pulses racing. How it will play out in practical real-world scenarios will remain to be seen, but it’s certainly food for thought.

For those looking for more detail, Hollywood Reporter has a report covering the specifics in the MP3Tunes case, which will now head back to the District Court for damages to be determined and/or another trial.

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

Back in April, members of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and Australasian collecting society APRA AMCOS teamed up to file the music industry’s first ‘pirate’ site blocking application Down Under.

Filed at the Federal Court under section 115A of the Copyright Act 1968, member labels Universal Music, Warner Music, Sony Music and J Albert & Son demanded that then leading torrent site KickassTorrents (KAT) should be blocked by the country’s ISPs.

Arguing that KickassTorrents showed a “complete disrespect for music creators and the value of music”, the industry groups asked leading ISPs Telstra, Optus, TPG, and Foxtel to stop their subscribers from accessing the site. However, during the summer that job was effectively carried out for them by the US Department of Justice, which shut down KickassTorrents and had its owner arrested.

But despite the disappearance of the site, the Aussie case has continued. The music industry is now focusing on the many clones, copies, and wannabees that are using the KickassTorrents name to get traffic, despite having nothing to do with the original site.

This week the parties were back in the Federal Court. The ISPs aren’t fighting the blocking demand per se, but as usual there’s a dispute over who will foot the bill for legal proceedings and will shoulder costs of implementing the blockades.

None of the ISPs are objecting to paying for the blocking systems to be put in place. However, they want rightsholders to pay for the initial implementation and ongoing maintenance of a block, which according to ComputerWorld will be put in place for three years.

ISP Optus estimated a cost of AUS$12,500 (US$9,533) to put blocks in place. TPG informed the court that following initial setup, each domain name would cost $50 to block.

Simplifying the rolling injunctions demands made by the movie and TV industry in the blocking case against The Pirate Bay and others, the music industry is seeking straight-forward DNS-based blocking backed up by a system which would block subsequently appearing clones, mirrors, and proxy sites.

The record labels and their allies foresee an application to the court containing details of any site they wish the ISPs to block, with the ISPs given 10 days to object to the blocking demand. The court would then decide whether the parties would need to appear before another hearing in advance of the domain being added to the blocklist.

Of course, KickassTorrents no longer exists so the continuing of a case to have it blocked is somewhat unusual, to say the least.

Illustrating just how far removed the case has shifted from its original aims is an image posted by CNET, which shows the original domains the industry wanted blocked, and how that has completely changed following the demise of KAT.

– Kat.al is an incomplete snapshot of KAT before it went offline.
– Kattor.zyx has nothing to do with KAT, redirects to another site.
– Kickass.cd is a clone of The Pirate Bay.
– Kickasstorrents.immunicity.date is another ‘snapshot’ site.
– Kickass.pe is completely inactive
– Kickass.Ukbypass.download (see Kickass.cd)
– Kickass.Unblocked.tv (see Kickass.cd)

The case (which now has only tenuous links to KickassTorrents) continues alongside the movie industry’s blocking case against The Pirate Bay. That too is experiencing argument over who will pay for what and has also been affected by takedowns.

The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Torrentz, TorrentHound and Solarmovie are featured in that action, but only the first two domains are intact after last three permanently closed (1,2) in recent months.

Only time will tell whether the expense and inevitable game of whac-a-mole will be worth it, but all the signs point to this being a complex battle with no definite end.

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