While Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload has been the focus of thousands of headlines over the past half decade, the tech entrepreneur also had many other successful ventures in his portfolio.

Among them was Megavideo, a file-hosting service that allowed users to upload video in much the same way as YouTube does today. The ad-supported platform was free to use for any video up to 72 minutes in length, with content of longer duration requiring a subscription to watch in full without waits.

Megavideo disappeared in 2012 following the raids on Megaupload but that didn’t stop Italian TV outfit RTI (Reti Televisive Italiane) suing for copyright infringement. As reported yesterday, a Rome court has just ordered Megavideo to pay $13.4m in damages after the company reportedly failed to respond to takedown notices.

However, the decision is an extremely unusual one. In Megavideo’s absence the court found that the copyright holder’s takedown notices (which listed only TV show titles and contained no URLs) were sufficient for Megavideo to take action. The court also found that video categorization and ad placement undermined Megavideo’s safe harbor.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Megaupload/Megavideo lawyer Ira Rothken says that the ruling represents a real cause for concern for other companies operating in the same sector.

“The Rome court apparently ruled on this Megavideo case in a default context, unknown to us, and the result is unworkable caselaw on ISP secondary copyright liability,” Rothken explains.

“The court used user-generated categorization and garden variety ads like those found on YouTube and other mainstream cloud sites as adverse factors. Without categories and ads there likely could be no user-generated content sites.”

But unsurprisingly it’s the issue of the URL-free takedown notices that attracts the most attention. In the United States and across Europe, it’s an accepted norm that takedown notices must be specific about the content to be removed. That the Italian court decided otherwise presents a real danger for service providers.

“It was not explained in the Rome ruling why the copyright owners couldn’t provide URLs in the takedown notices and no burden analysis based on competent evidence was done by the Court,” Rothken says.

“The Rome Court’s ruling not requiring specific URLs in cloud takedown notices contradicts US caselaw in the United States in cases which permit ISPs to ignore takedown requests that do not contain a specific link.”

Rothken points out that in US courts the burden is on copyright holders to police their works online and that service providers are not responsible for deciding what is and is not infringing.

“The ISP has no duty to investigate and providing only a title without a URL would require investigation and the making of ad hoc copyright assessments,” he adds.

But that’s exactly what Megavideo would have had to do in the scenario outlined by the court. Without specific URLs being provided in takedown requests, Megavideo would have been left to trawl its databases for titles of videos that contained the same or similar words cited by copyright holders, a notoriously inaccurate method of detecting infringing content.

“Under the Rome Court’s ‘no URL’ requirement, some enterprising plaintiff can do a takedown notice for some video clips called “the Greek wedding” with no URL provided and no one will know what Greek wedding clips they are referring to,” Rothken says.

“Worse, to disambiguate the takedown request the ISP would need a legal copy of the alleged video for comparison purposes obtainable through no court-described method.”

However, even in the event that the original video was successfully obtained from the copyright holder, matters would not be straightforward.

“The ISP would need a warehouse full of folks that would need to watch the target video and thousands of cloud-stored videos and make ad hoc assessments on infringements versus third-party works versus fair use versus licensed uses to avoid overbroad deletions or copyright lawsuits,” Rothken warns.

Aside from the obviously curious details of the ruling, it’s a little surprising that other companies invested in the sector, YouTube for instance, haven’t become involved in a case that appears to have implications for them. Nevertheless, the court has spoken and Rothken says that its ruling poses a real cause for concern.

“This type of secondary infringement rule if allowed to stand arguably violates EU freedom of expression and copyright-related treaties, amongst other things,” he concludes.

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

In recent years the U.S. Government has taken an aggressive stance towards copyright infringement, both at home and abroad.

However, that doesn’t mean that the Government always sticks to the rules, quite the contrary. In a recent lawsuit it stands accused of willful copyright infringement on a massive scale.

The case centers around “BS Contact Geo,” a 3D virtual reality application developed by the German company Bitmanagement. The Navy was enthusiastic about the geographical modeling capabilities of the software and in 2011 and 2012 it agreed to license its use for 38 computers.

“Those individual PC-based licenses authorized the Navy to install BS Contact Geo on a total of just 38 computers for the purposes of testing, trial runs, and integration into Navy systems,” the software vendor states in the federal claims court complaint (pdf).

After testing the application for a while, both parties started negotiating the licensing of additional computers. However, before any deals were made, the software maker learned that the Navy had already installed it on over 100,000 computers.

According to emails Bitmanagement executives received in 2013, the software had been rolled onto at least 558,466 computers on the Navy’s network, without their permission.

“Even as it negotiated with Bitmanagement over the proposed large-scale licensing of its product, the Navy was simultaneously copying and installing that software, without Bitmanagement’s advance knowledge or authorization, on a massive scale,” the complaint reads.

In addition, the Navy allegedly disabled the software that is supposed to track on how many computers the software is being used. This violation of the terms of service prevents the software vendor from stopping the unauthorized copying.

“To make matters worse, starting in 2014, the ‘Flexwrap’ software intended to track the Navy’s use and duplication of BS Contact Geo on Navy computers was disabled,” the complaint explains.

This change made it impossible for Bitmanagement to know the scope of the deployment and use of BS Contact Geo on unlicensed machines or to limit that use,” the company adds.

The software vendor says that the willful copyright infringement has caused injury to its business and rights. As a result, they’re now demanding compensation for the damage that was caused, to a total of nearly $600 million.

Installing BS Contact Geo onto a single PC cost roughly $1067 at the time, so Bitmanagement claims that it is entitled to at least $596,308,103 in unpaid licensing fees.

For comparison, that is more than the damages Kim Dotcom and Megaupload have caused copyright holders, according to the United States. And that case was billed by the FBI as one of the “largest criminal copyright cases” in history.

Interestingly this is not the first time that the U.S. military has been “caught” pirating software. A few years ago it was accused of operating unlicensed logistics software, a case the Obama administration eventually settled for $50 million.

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

For years, entertainment industry groups have been demanding that search engines do something about “pirate sites” showing up in their search results.

In France, this prompted music industry group SNEP to take the matter to court. Representing three local artists, they demanded automated search engine filters from both Google and Microsoft.

Before the High Court of Paris the music group argued that, when paired with the artist names, “torrent” related searches predominantly link to pirated content.

To counter this, they demanded a filter that would block results for these searches for the keyword “torrent,” as well as websites that include the same word in their domain name.

SNEP based its request on Article L336-2 of France’s intellectual property code, which states that “all appropriate measures” are permitted to prevent copyright infringement. The same article has been used before to force Google and Bing to make various other pirate sites disappear.

However, in the present cases the High Court of Paris decided against the music industry group, Nextinpact reports.

In their defense Microsoft had warned that the broad filtering system requested by the music group would be imprecise, disproportionate and inefficient, something the court agreed with.

While French law permits far-reaching anti-piracy measures, it also states that it’s necessary to preserve the rights of individual Internet users, such as freedom of expression and communication. An overbroad filtering scheme would go against this principle.

“SNEP’s requests are general, and pertain not to a specific site but to all websites accessible through the stated methods, without consideration for identifying or even determining the site’s content, on the premise that the term ‘Torrent’ is necessarily associated with infringing content,” the Court writes in its order.

More specifically, the court notes that the word “torrent” has many legitimate uses, as does the BitTorrent protocol, which is a neutral communication technology. This means that blocking everything “torrent” related is likely to censor legal content as well.

“Yet [torrent] is primarily a common noun, with a meaning in French and in English; it also refers to a neutral communication protocol developed by the company Bittorrent that enables access to lawfully downloaded files.

“The requested measures are thus tantamount to general monitoring and may block access to lawful websites,” the High Court order adds.

Part of the Bing order

The case against Google, which was similar in nature, also ended in favor of the search engine. The High Court dismissed this case on the grounds that it would only protect the interests of three artists, Kendji Girac, Shy’m and Christophe Willem.

For Article L336-2 to be invoked, the preventive anti-piracy measures have to protect a wider range of artists and rightsholders.

This means that both “torrent” filtering requests have not been rejected. Instead, the music group has been ordered to pay Microsoft and Bing 10,000 to cover legal fees and costs.

Interestingly, French media highlights that TorrentFreak would have been automatically censored if Google and Microsoft would have lost their case. After all, our URL includes the word torrent.

This means that a mere mention of the artists’ names would have been enough to make an article disappear from the search results.

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

Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload empire was shuttered in 2012 with dramatic raids in New Zealand and legal action on several continents. Nevertheless, the drama continues.

The entrepreneur and his former colleagues are fighting on several fronts, including extradition cases in New Zealand plus pending copyright, racketeering and money laundering charges in the United States. Interestingly, another case has just emerged out of the shadows in Europe.

Megavideo, Megaupload’s sister site, was focused on storing videos uploaded by its users. Predictably, however, thousands of these videos were movies and TV shows, for which Megaupload users held no copyrights.

Some of that content belonged to TV company RTI (Reti Televisive Italiane), a subsidiary of Mediaset, the media giant founded by former Italian president Silvio Berlusconi. In an effort to have that content removed, in 2010 RTI says it contacted Megavideo with takedown requests, takedowns which the company failed to act upon.

This prompted RTI to take Megavideo to court, claiming that the video hosting platform had infringed its broadcasting rights and engaged in unfair competition. RTI asked the court to order Megavideo to take down the unauthorized content and award damages of more than $110m.

The unfair competition claim gained no traction but the Tribunale di Roma has just handed down its decision and its bad news for Megavideo.

The Court found that the Hong Kong-based video hosting platform illegally distributed more than 16,000 minutes of RTI programming and ordered it to pay the equivalent of $13.4m in damages, plus more than $60,000 in legal costs.

In Megavideo’s absence (the company did not defend itself), the Court considered whether the platform could enjoy safe harbor as a hosting provider.

Megavideo failed on a number of points, notably by organizing content into various categories, placing advertising based on the geo-locations of its users, and lifting viewing limitations on users after they paid a subscription.

But perhaps the most curious element of the case surrounds the takedown notices RTI sent to Megavideo back in 2010.

While most DMCA-style efforts must include an offending URL so that platforms are easily able to identify the content in question, RTI offered Megavideo no such luxury. The TV company simply advised the hosting platform that its TV shows were on the site and ordered it to take them down.

Strangely the Court found that this was enough information for Megavideo to act on the allegations of infringement. In a partial translation of the ruling, IPKitten has the Court noting that “the information included in those takedown requests was sufficient to allow the defendant to take action to prevent the continuation of the infringement of [RTI’s] rights.”

Even in the absence of the takedowns, the Court added that “the defendant could easily and independently acquire knowledge of such infringements, both because of the notoriety of the TV programmes in question and the relevant broadcasting channels and, in particular, the presence RTI’s distinctive signs on all TV programmes’ extracts.”

In the overall scheme of things the ruling probably represents a minor setback for Kim Dotcom, but the notion that copyright holders can send extremely general takedown requests to hosting platforms and expect them to take action is a worrying one that might not be supported under EU law.

Kim Dotcom did not immediately respond to our requests for comment.

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

Movie studio Voltage Pictures is no stranger to suing BitTorrent users.

The company has filed lawsuits against alleged pirates in the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia, and is estimated to have made a lot of money doing so.

Most of these cases target downloaders of the Oscar-winning movie Dallas Buyers Club. Voltage Pictures is one of the production companies behind the film, but as is common in Hollywood, it’s not the sole rightsholder.

In fact, another company named “Dallas Buyers Club LLC” (DBC) has also filed dozens of cases against pirates. While one might think that both rightsholders are working in tandem, they are in fact fighting over the anti-piracy loot behind the scenes.

In a case DBC and Truth Entertainment filed against Voltage Pictures last year (pdf), the latter is accused of various deceptive practices, including breach of contract and fraud.

The two plaintiffs suggest that Voltage has been holding back money from foreign proceeds. They further state that the production company hasn’t been open about its practices.

Aside from claims that money has gone missing, its anti-piracy methods are also under the spotlight. According to DBC, Voltage hasn’t provided any details on enforcement actions, nor has it shared any of the proceeds from its anti-piracy efforts.

“DBC entered into an Agreement with Voltage to act as its agent to enforce Anti-piracy actions against people who have illegally downloaded or otherwise obtained the ability to watch the movie without paying for the right to watch it,” the filing reads.

“The only updates DBC receives are thorough, mostly negative, media reports about the actions of Voltage around the World. DBC has not received any funds, reports, updates or any information from Voltage on the status numerous lawsuits filed around the World in the name of DBC.”

Where’s the anti-piracy bounty?

While the paperwork doesn’t explicitly state that both parties agreed to share the anti-piracy bounty, the claims above suggest that this is the case. Most interesting, perhaps, is that it’s unclear whether all enforcement actions are ultimately driven by Voltage.

This confusing situation is casting doubt over the legitimacy of these piracy lawsuits, as FCT highlights. This prompted Nicholas Ranallo, attorney for an accused “pirate”, to ask a California federal court for an extra safeguard.

Ranallo mentions that there is doubt over who owns the movie and he cites the legal battle between Dallas Buyers Club LLC, in whose name his defendant was sued, and Voltage.

“It is unclear what rights (if any) are actually held by Voltage Pictures or the suing entities, though it is abundantly clear that Voltage Pictures controls the litigation and keeps the proceeds collected on behalf of the purported plaintiffs,” Ranallo writes.

The amended complaint against the accused pirate identifies Dallas Buyers Club LLC as the owner, but the original complaint listed Truth LLC as such. Then again, the DVD cover and other material list Voltage as the copyright holder.

“Various advertising and promotional materials cast further doubt about the claims that Dallas Buyers Club LLC owns the relevant copyright(s), and reveal a myriad of entities that have, at one time or another, claimed copyright in the film.”

As a safeguard, Ranallo asks the court to require Dallas Buyers Club to post a $50,000 bond (pdf), to secure costs and attorney fees if the suspicions do indeed hold ground.

While it’s not uncommon for several companies to have a stake in a single movie, it will be interesting to see if this case leads to more clarity over the rights they have to pursue a copyright claim in court.

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