With an impressive collection of more than 160 million items, the Library of Congress is the second largest library in the world.

The Library also serves as a legal repository for the copyright office. By law, everyone who publishes a copyrighted work in the U.S. is required to deposit two copies at the library.

This also applies to music and videos but up until now, content produced in an online-only format has been exempted from this mandatory deposit requirement.

However, now that digital is becoming the standard for more copyrighted works, the Copyright Office is considering a change. As a result, music publishers will be required to submit all digital works to the Library of Congress.

These files will then become freely accessible to the public through a secured system.

“Under any rule requiring mandatory deposit of online-only sound recordings, the Library would provide public access to such recordings,” the Copyright Office writes in its proposal.

“The Library currently has a system by which authorized users can access and listen to digitized copies of physical sound recordings collected through other means at the Madison Building of the Library of Congress.”

This proposal has been met with scrutiny by the music industry group RIAA, which states that it has “serious concerns.”

According to the RIAA, there is a risk that content hosted by the Library may be exploited by pirates, who could copy the music and share it on various pirate sites. This could then crush the major record labels’ revenues.

“It is well-established that the recorded music industry has been inundated with digital piracy,” the RIAA writes.

“If sound recordings available through the Library – whether on-premises or online – were managed in a way that patrons could use those recordings for uploading to pirate web sites and unlicensed streaming services or if the Library’s collection of sound recordings were made electronically available to the public at large, that could have a devastating impact on our member companies’ revenues.”

The RIAA further states that the current proposal lacks information on what security measures would apply to the storage of and access to sound recordings.

In addition to a general concern that the public could copy sound recordings in the library, the RIAA notes that there’s also a risk that the entire Library of Congress database could be hacked if people are allowed to access it over the Internet.

Should this happen, millions of digital sound recordings may leak to the public.

“In an age where servers are hacked on a regular basis, no electronic server is secure. Government servers are no different,” the RIAA writes.

“Given the inherent vulnerability of servers believed to be secure, we question the need for anyone to have remote access to a server that stores commercially valuable digital sound recordings.”

Since people have so many options to enjoy digital music nowadays, the RIAA sees no reason for the Library of Congress to allow electronic copying or distribution of the sound recordings of its members.

If the Copyright Office goes ahead, the RIAA urges it to consult the record labels to make sure that state of the art technological protection measures are deployed to secure their work.

—

RIAA’s full comments are available here (pdf).

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

Stanford University graduate Feross Aboukhadijeh is passionate about P2P technology. The founder of
P2P-assisted content delivery network PeerCDN (sold to Yahoo in 2013), Feross is also the inventor of WebTorrent.

In its classic form, WebTorrent is a BitTorrent client for the web. No external clients are needed for people to share files since everything is done in the user’s web browser with Javascript. No browser plugins or extensions need to be installed, nothing needs to be configured.

In the beginning, some doubted that it could ever work, but Feross never gave up on his dream.

“People thought WebTorrent was crazy. One of the Firefox developers literally said it wouldn’t be possible. I was like, ‘challenge accepted’,” Feross told TF this week.

WebTorrent

A few months after WebTorrent’s debut, Feross announced the arrival of WebTorrent Desktop (WD), a standalone torrent client with a few tricks up its sleeve.

After posting a torrent or magnet link into its somewhat unusual client interface, content can be played almost immediately via an inbuilt player. And with AirPlay, Chromecast and DLNA support, WD is at home at the heart of any multi-display household.

But WebTorrent Desktop’s most interesting feature is its ability to find peers not only via trackers, DHT and PEX, but also using the WebTorrent protocol. This means that WD can share content with people using the web-based version of WebTorrent too.

Since our April report, WebTorrent has been under constant development. It is now more responsive and uses fewer resources, casting has been improved, and subtitles are auto-detected, to name just a few improvements. As a result, the client has been growing its userbase too.

“The WebTorrent project is going full steam ahead and there has been lots of progress in the past few months,” Feross informs TF.

“We just passed a quarter million total downloads of the app – 254,431 downloads as of right now.”

For a young and totally non-commercial project, that’s an impressive number, but the accolades don’t stop there. The project currently has more than 2,083 stars on Github and it recently added its 26th new contributor.

In all, WebTorrent has nine people working on the core team, but since the client is open source and totally non-commercial, no one is earning anything from the project. According to Feross, this only makes WebTorrent stronger.

“People usually think that having revenue, investors, and employees gives you an advantage over your competition. That’s definitely true for certain things: you can hire designers, programmers, marketing experts, product managers, etc. to build out the product, add lots of features,” the developer says.

“But you have to pay your employees and investors, and these pressures usually cause companies to resort to adding advertising (or worse) to their products. When you have no desire to make a profit, you can act purely in the interests of the people using your product. In short, you can build a better product.”

So if not money, what drives people like Feross and his team to give up their time to create something and give it away?

“The real reason I care so much about WebTorrent is that I want decentralized apps to win. Right now, it’s so much easier to build a centralized app: it’s faster to build, uses tried-and-true technology, and it’s easier to monetize because the app creator has all the control. They can use that control to show you ads, sell your data, or make unilateral product changes for their own benefit,” he says.

“On the other hand, decentralized apps are censorship resistant, put users in control of their data, and are safe against user-hostile changes.

“That last point is really important. It’s because of the foresight of Bram Cohen that WebTorrent is even possible today: the BitTorrent protocol is an open standard. If you don’t like your current torrent app, you can easily switch! No one person or company has total control.”

WebTorrent Desktop developer DC Posch says that several things motivate him to work on the project, particularly when there’s no one to order him around.

“There’s satisfaction in craftsmanship, shipping something that feels really solid. Second, it’s awesome having 250,000 users and no boss,” he says.

“Third, it’s something that I want to exist. There are places like the Internet Archive that have lots of great material and no money for bandwidth. BitTorrent is a technologically elegant way to do zero cost distribution. Finally, I want to prove that non-commercial can be a competitive advantage. Freed from the need to monetize or produce a return, you can produce a superior product.”

To close, last year TF reported that WebTorrent had caught the eye of Netflix. Feross says that was a great moment for the project.

“It was pretty cool to show off WebTorrent at Netflix HQ. They were really interested in the possibility of WebTorrent to help during peak hours when everyone is watching Netflix and the uplink to ISPs like Comcast gets completely saturated. WebTorrent could help by letting Comcast subscribers share data amongst themselves without needing to traverse the congested Comcast-Netflix internet exchange,” he explains.

For now, WebTorrent is still a relative minnow when compared to giants such as uTorrent but there are an awful lot of people out there who share the ethos of Feross and his team. Only time will tell whether this non-commercial project will fulfill its dreams, but those involved will certainly have fun trying.

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

In this first episode of our new season, we interview Tamas Kocsis, the founder and developer Zeronet.

Zeronet is a relatively new project that gives us the ability to develop completely distributed websites, invulnerable to censorship of any kind.

With Tor anonymity baked in, at least on the Windows version, that creates a very powerful environment for free expression.

Today Zeronet founder Tamas talks us through the history of the platform and some of the features he’s working on at the moment.

In addition he discusses plans to add a BitTorrent plugin that may be able to provide distributed, anonymous video streaming – which sounds like a new headache for Hollywood just around the corner.

But, Zeronet isn’t just a about torrents: we also hear from Tamas how it can be used right now to set up anonymous messaging, forums, marketplaces, and more.

—

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: Tamas Kocsis

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.

The sudden shutdown last month of KickassTorrents left a sizeable hole in the torrent landscape. KAT was the largest torrent index on the planet and much-loved by those who frequented it.

On day one of the shutdown, the United States government revealed that they had one prime suspect in their sights. Ukrainian Artem Vaulin was said to be the mastermind of KickassTorrents, coordinating an international operation through Cryptoneat, a front company in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Yesterday the United States officially indicted Vaulin (aka ‘tirm’) along with two of his alleged KickassTorrents co-conspirators – Oleksandr Radostin (aka ‘pioneer’) and Ievgen Kutsenko (aka ‘chill’). All are said to have worked at Cryptoneat but little else is known about them. Today we can put some meat on the bones.

Artem Vaulin

Artem Vaulin is a 30-year-old man from Ukraine. Born in 1985, he is married with a young son. According to an investigation carried out by Vesti, his business life had simple roots.

After graduating from school, Vaulin went on to set up a vending machine business focusing on chewing gum and soft toys.

“My parents gave me $3000. They said: ‘Cool, you do not have to count on us. Now you have your own money’,” Vaulin told reporters in 2004.

Since then, Vaulin’s business empire seems to have taken off but despite reportedly having interests in several local companies (three with registered capital of more than $8.5m total), Vaulin appears to have been able to keep a reasonably low profile.

However, it is Vaulin’s love of squash that leads us to the only images available of him online. Ukrainian squash portal Squashtime.com.ua has a full profile, indicating his date and place of birth, and even his racquet preference.

Vesti approached the club where Vaulin trained but due to data protection issues it would not share any information on the businessman. However, local news resource Segodnya tracked down Vaulin’s squash coach, Evgeny Ponomarenko.

“I know it only from the positive side. Artem is a good man and a family man with a growing son,” Ponomarenko said.

Vaulin is also said to have signed petitions on the Ukranian president’s website, one requesting that the country join NATO and another seeking to allow Ukranians to receive money from abroad via PayPal.

Oleksandr (Alexander) Radostin

Alexander Radostin appears to have been a software architect and/or lead engineer at Cryptoneat but other than that, very little is known about him.

There are several references to him online in Ukraine in relation to the shutdown of KickassTorrents, but most merely speculate that as an employee of Cryptoneat, Radostin might be best placed to confirm Vaulin’s current arrest status.

Many former Cryptoneat employees have purged their social networking presence but some of Radostin’s details are still available via Ukranian-based searches, including the Linkedin image below.

While almost nothing is known about the third indicted KickassTorrents operator, Ievgen Kutsenko, images of the offices from where he and his colleagues allegedly ran the site can be hunted down.

The image below shows a screenshot from a Ukranian job seeking site where Cryptoneat had a page. It lists both Vaulin and Radostin to the right of some tiny thumbnails of photographs apparently taken inside the Kickass/Cryptoneat offices.

TF managed to track down a full-size version of the third image from the left and the environment looks very nice indeed.

While Vaulin is currently being held in a Polish jail, the whereabouts of his alleged co-conspirators is unknown. However, if they are still in Ukraine it might not be straightforward to have them extradited to the United States.

“Ukraine and the United States do not have an extradition treaty,” the U.S. Embassy confirms on its Ukraine website.

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

Megaupload was shutdown nearly half a decade ago, but all this time there has been little progress on the legal front.

Last December a New Zealand District Court judge ruled that Kim Dotcom and his colleagues can be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges, a decision that will be appealed shortly.

With the criminal case pending, the U.S. Government also retains control over several of the company’s assets.

This includes cash, cars, but also over a dozen of Megaupload’s former domain names, including Megastuff.co, Megaclicks.org, Megaworld.mobi, Megaupload.com, Megaupload.org, and Megavideo.com.

Initially, the domains served a banner indicating they had been seized as part of a criminal investigation. However, those who visit some of the sites today are in for a surprise.

This week we discovered that Megaupload.org is now hosting a site dedicated to soft porn advertisements. Other seized domains are also filled with ads, including Megastuff.co, Megaclicks.org, and Megaworld.mobi.

Megaupload?

Interestingly, this all happened under the watch of the FBI, which is still listed as the administrative and technical contact for the domain names in question.

So how can this be?

Regular readers may recall that something similar happened to the main Megaupload.com domain last year. At the time we traced this back to an expired domain the FBI used for their nameservers, Cirfu.net.

After Cirfu.net expired, someone else took over the domain name and linked Megaupload.com to scammy ads. The U.S. authorities eventually fixed this by removing the nameservers altogether, but it turns out that they didn’t do this for all seized domains.

A few weeks ago the Cirfu.net domain expired once more and again it was picked up by an outsider. This unknown person or organization parked it at Rook Media, to generate some cash from the FBI-controlled domains.

As can be seen from the domain WHOIS data, Megaupload.org still uses the old Cirfu.net nameservers, which means that an outsider is now able to control several of the seized Megaupload domain names.

The ‘hijacked’ domains don’t get much traffic but it’s still quite embarrassing to have them linked to ads and soft porn. Commenting on our findings, Kim Dotcom notes that the sloppiness is exemplary of the entire criminal case.

“Their handling of the Megaupload domain is a reflection of the entire case: Unprofessional,” Dotcom tells us.

What’s clear is that the U.S. authorities haven’t learned from their past mistakes. It literally only takes a few clicks to update the nameserver info and reinstate the original seizure banner. One would assume that the FBI has the technical capabilities to pull that off.

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