“Information wants to be free” is a commonly used phrase in copyright debates. While it may not apply universally, in the academic world it’s certainly relevant.

Information and knowledge are the cornerstones of science. Yet, most top research is locked up behind expensive paywalls.

As with most digital content, however, there are specialized sites that offer free and unauthorized access. In the academic world the Library Genesis and Sci-Hub.org projects are two of the main ‘pirate’ outlets, and their presence hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Earlier this year publishing company Elsevier filed a complaint at a New York District Court, hoping to shut down the two portals. According to the publisher the sites willingly offer millions of pirated scientific articles.

The court has yet to decide on Elsevier’s request for an injunction and allowed the operators time to respond. This week, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan submitted her first response.

While Elbakyan’s letter doesn’t address the legality of her website she does place the case in a wider context, explaining how the site came to be.

“When I was a student in Kazakhstan university, I did not have access to any research papers. Papers I needed for my research project,” Elbakyan writes (pdf), explaining that it was impossible as a student to pay for access.

“Payment of 32 dollars is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,” she adds.

As explained in an earlier interview with TF, Elbakyan then decided to help other researchers to obtain research articles, which eventually grew to become a library of millions of works.

Elbakyan continues her letter by informing the court that unlike in other industries, the authors of these papers don’t get paid. Elsevier requires researchers to sign the copyright over to the company and collects money from their work through licensing and direct sales.

“All papers on their website are written by researchers, and researchers do not receive money from what Elsevier collects. That is very different from the music or movie industry, where creators receive money from each copy sold,” she notes.

Researchers often have no other option than to agree because a career in academia often depends on publications in top journals, many of which are owned by Elsevier.

“They feel pressured to do this, because Elsevier is an owner of so-called ‘high-impact’ journals. If a researcher wants to be recognized, make a career – he or she needs to have publications in such journals,” Elbakyan writes.

Sci-Hub’s operator notes that she’s not alone in her opinion, pointing to several top researchers who have also criticized the model. Most prominently, in 2012 more than 15,000 researchers demanded that Elsevier change its business practices.

Adding another illustration, Elbakyan notes that she never received any complaints from the academic community, except from Elsevier.

While many researchers will agree with Sci-Hub’s operator, the case seems almost impossible to win. Elbakyan pretty much admits to breaking the law and the court has little room to ignore that.

Elsevier hopes the court will soon issue the preliminary injunction so the domain names can be seized. The publisher disagrees with Elbakyan’s comments and notes that it participates in several initiatives to provide free and cheap access to researchers in low-income countries.

If the court sides with Elsevier, Library Genesis and Sci-Hub will likely lose access to their U.S. controlled domain names. However, taking the sites offline will prove to be more difficult as their servers and operator are not in the United States.

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

Malibu Media, the Los Angeles based company behind the ‘X-Art’ adult movies, is one of the most active copyright trolls.

This year alone they have filed more than 1,400 individual cases against alleged BitTorrent pirates in the United States.

The main goal of the company is to demand settlements of a few thousand dollars without going to trial. Many accused downloaders do indeed take the easy way out, but some are putting up a fight.

A case currently before the Southern District of New York provides one such example. The Doe defendant is maintaining his innocence but Malibu isn’t letting the case go and recently went as far as requesting a deposition of the defendant’s spouse and neighbors.

The defendant’s lawyer protested the demand noting that a request to interrogate third-parties about the client’s alleged downloading of pornographic content is a form of harassment, or a fishing expedition at best.

In an order signed yesterday federal judge Katherine Forrest agrees with the accused file-sharer. Using rather strong language, she denies Malibu’s request to depose the spouse and/or neighbors.

“Plaintiff may not subpoena neighbors or Defendant’s significant other based on the current record. As to the neighbors, Plaintiff would be engaged in a fishing expedition and/or harassment of defendant (by way of causing embarrassment/humiliation).”

According to the Judge any testimony from these third parties is irrelevant to the present case. Instead of solving the matter at hand it may only serve to embarrass and humiliate the defendant.

The order adds that there were no copyrighted files found on the defendant’s computer, so absent any new evidence that implicates the girlfriend, there’s no need to interrogate her at this juncture.

“At this point, this deposition appears to be harassment and at least outweighed by such considerations,” Judge Forrest writes. Despite the hints of harassment, the case is far from over.

FightCopyrightTrolls notes that the adult studio is keeping the pressure up with a new motion suggesting that the defendant used “military grade” software to “wipe” the computer shortly before it was brought in for investigation.

In addition, the Judge granted Malibu a subpoena to depose Verizon and request additional information on the defendant’s Internet use.

Among other things, Malibu plans to ask for DMCA notices and copyright alerts that were addressed to the subscriber. It’s unclear whether Verizon plans to protest these requests.

Fishing expeditions and harassment claims aside, this case once again shows that outfits such as Malibu Media will go to extremes to corner accused file-sharers.

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

Last weekend the Labour party elected a new leader, an appointment that has really stirred up politics in the UK.

Now Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn is considered to be a hard left, anti-establishment, anti-austerity, anti-war politician, and one that’s keen to scrap Britain’s nuclear arsenal and NATO. He won in a landslide victory taking almost 60% of the vote.

The ruling Conservative party were quick to take advantage of the decision by Labour to place Corbyn in charge, with Prime Minister David Cameron warning that the country would be in severe danger if somehow the opposition leader got into power. In fact, the Conservatives were so concerned they launched a new advert video which warned the public about the potential doom that lay ahead.

In monochrome and set to ominous music, “Labour: a threat to our national security” featured various videos of Corbyn in between clips of ISIS fighters.

“It starts with a clip of President Barack Obama announcing the death of Osama bin Laden, then cuts to Corbyn describing the killing of the man who masterminded 9/11 as a ‘tragedy’. (It’s edited to exclude the fuller context of his remark),” the Guardian explained yesterday.

But after stirring up all sorts of controversy (although not nearly as much as the appointment of Corbyn himself), the video is now gone from YouTube. According to the Google-owned company the video was the subject of a copyright complaint so has been removed.

While copyright complaints are nothing new, this particular takedown is something special.

As can be seen from the screenshot above, the person making the copyright complaint is listed as Adrian Cousins. So who is this mysterious character taming the political right? Only the founder and editor of socialist movement website Counterfire.org.

“Just had the Tory Jeremy Corbyn attack video removed from Youtube for copyright infringement,” Cousins confirmed on Facebook this afternoon.

Given the Conservatives’ strong support for the rights of copyright holders in recent years, the fact they would use ‘stolen’ video footage for a campaign is surprising enough. But to go one further and use footage filmed by an opposition supporter really is something else.

Adrian Cousins did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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

The General Publishers Group (GAU) is a trade organization that represents the interests of dozens of book publishers in the Netherlands.

Earlier this year GAU discovered that eBooks belong to some of its clients were being made available illegally on Google Play. According to the trade group the titles, which were being touted under the fictitious publisher name of Flamanca Hollanda / Dragonletebooks, were being sold at a price level considerably lower than the official versions.

GAU subsequently referred the matter to Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN for investigation. In turn, BREIN reported the illegal seller to Google who immediately removed the rogue account thereby preventing further unauthorized sales.

Early June, GAU reported that Google appeared to be taking steps to prevent rogue sellers from offering illegal content via its Play store. The group also noted that BREIN was attempting to obtain the personal details of the ‘pirate’ seller from Google.

Unsurprisingly that wasn’t a straightforward exercise, with Google refusing to hand over the personal details of its user on a voluntary basis. If BREIN really wanted the seller’s identity it would have to obtain it via a court order. Yesterday the anti-piracy group began the process to do just that.

Appearing before the Court of The Hague, BREIN presented its case, arguing that the rogue seller was not merely a user of Google, but actually a commercial partner of Google Play, a partnership that earned revenue for both parties.

“The case is clear,” BREIN said in a statement.

“There was infringement carried out by an anonymous seller that was actually a commercial ‘partner’ of Google via Google Play. This is how Google refers to sellers in its own terms of use.”

BREIN says that ultimately Google is responsible for the unauthorized distribution and sales carried out via its service.

“There is no right to anonymously sell illegal stuff, not even on Google Play while Google earns money,” the anti-piracy group concludes.

GAU’s partnership with BREIN dates back to April 2010. With its members complaining about the growing availability of ‘cracked’ and ‘scanned’ titles, GAU said that strong anti-piracy measures were required to protect creativity.

“With BREIN, GAU has found a partner that has a lot of know how in the fight against piracy,” the group said.

BREIN did not immediately respond to TF’s request for comment.

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

Four years ago New Zealand introduced new copyright legislation under which illegal file-sharers would be monitored, warned, and eventually punished.

The country was one of the first to have a Government mandated “strikes” policy, but of the initial enthusiasm among copyright holders very little is left.

While monitoring online pirates is relatively cheap, copyright holders are required to pay Internet providers a $25 fee to forward the warnings to their customers.

This means that three strikes costs copyright holders $75, and if they decide to lodge an official complaint after that an additional $200 is added. To put it bluntly, the warnings themselves may be more expensive than the harm online pirates cost the industry.

Talking to Stuff, Recorded Music NZ general counsel Kristin Bowman says that piracy remains a problem, because fighting it is too expensive.

“We haven’t got rid of it as the regime, unfortunately, is too costly. It’s really disappointing,” she notes.

Because of the high costs the music industry has lowered the number of notices it’s sending. There are hundreds of thousands of people in New Zealand who pirate content every week, but only a tiny fraction can be reached.

“Every time we send a notice it costs us $25. We would love to do 1000 of those a week, but we just can’t afford it,” Bowman says.

In addition, the music group has completely scrapped filing cases to the tribunal, so they won’t pursue any punishments for online pirates. Despite the downscaling efforts the music group isn’t giving up just yet.

“We definitely won’t give up though, because we constantly want to get the message out there that piracy is illegal,” Bowman notes.

Most copyright holders appear to have done the same. Thus far in 2015 only one complaint has been filed at the copyright tribunal, compared to four last year and 18 the year before. If this trend continues New Zealand’s much debated “three-strikes” regime may soon exist only on paper.

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