UK artist Dan Bull, famous for earlier musical swipes at Lily Allen and the Digital Economy Bill, has teamed up with UK ISP TalkTalk to release a new song and video.
“We all know that the government’s disconnection proposals to deter illegal filesharing are daft and dangerous. And many would agree that the way many people in the music industry have reacted is a little misguided. After all, haven’t we seen this type of scaremongering before?” writes TalkTalk’s Andrew Heaney on the ISP’s blog.
“If, like me, you remember the 80s, you may also recall recording the Top 40 on Sunday nights. Up and down the country, people were hovering over their cassette players with their fingers over the pause button, trying to get the perfect recording before Tony Blackburn [UK DJ] spoke and ruined it. Back then the music industry told us that home taping would signal the end of the music industry and that it must be stamped out. There are clear parallels with today’s debate about filesharing and the Digital Economy Bill,” he adds.
To get this message across, TalkTalk have teamed up with UK artist Dan Bull to create their own 80’s styled music video based on the ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ campaign.
In case you’re wondering….George Michael, Madonna and the probably-not-famous-in-America Adam Ant
The Open Rights Group are asking citizens to complain about a proposed amendment to law which would allow courts to block sites which allegedly infringe copyright.
A pair of Lords in the UK have proposed an amendment to the Digital Economy Bill which would force Internet service providers to deny their subscribers’ access to sites accused of infringing copyright.
The amendment would give courts the power to “prevent access to specified online locations for the prevention of online copyright infringement” in cases where a “substantial proportion of the content accessible at or via each specified online location infringes copyright” and where site operators had failed to take “reasonable steps” to stop infringements.
“This would open the door to a massive imbalance of power in favour of large copyright holding companies. Individuals and small businesses would be open to massive ‘copyright attacks’ that could shut them down, just by the threat of action,” writes Jim Killock for the Open Rights Group.
Those wishing to oppose the amendment can find the details here.
In yesterday’s House of Lords debate on the Digital Economy Bill, Lord Lucas provided a rather accurate summing up of the ‘pay up or else’ scheme being targeted at alleged file-sharers in the UK by ACS:Law and Tilly Bailey & Irvine.
Summary of the ACS:Law and now Tilly, Bailey & Irvine schemes to chase alleged file-sharers, as published yesterday by Lord Lucas.
(Video at end of post, should you prefer)
The game works roughly like this. You find an owner of an obscure bit of copyright that is available on the internet, preferably something pornographic and extremely nasty.
You then employ a piece of software whose innards have never been exposed to the public, or tested in a court, to produce allegations that a particular set of IP addresses have made that copyright material available for upload over the internet.
You then take tens of thousand of these cases to court and, using a Norwich Pharmacal order, obtain the details of the relevant subscribers from their internet service providers. You then write them a letter, which has basically three elements to it.
First, it says: “You have committed this transgression of copyright”.
Secondly, it says: “If you force us to take you to court, we will pursue you for a very large sum of money”.
Thirdly, it says: “But we offer you this opportunity to settle for a mere £500 or £800″ – or whatever the figure is – “and we will forget all about the perils of court and the vast sums for which you might otherwise be liable, because basically we are very good people, and all that we are seeking to do is to protect our copyright”.
This scam works because of the impossibility of producing proof against this allegation. How can you prove that you did not do this thing?
You have an internet connection, and they say that it was done over that internet connection. It is no good producing your computer, because you committed the offence using a different computer. It is no good saying that you are a 97 year-old widow and that you hardly know how to use the telephone, let alone the internet, because, nevertheless, you have an internet connection and they say that it was abused.
It is extremely difficult to produce evidence to gainsay this. All you can do is deny it, and one of the things that they say in the letter is, “Don’t bother to deny this without producing evidence that you didn’t do it”.
The result is that a very large people of number pay up, as a result either of the first letter or of the letters that follow. As far as I can discover, despite the tens of thousands of orders that have been granted, the solicitors involved have never taken a seriously contested case to court, because getting money out of people on the basis of the compromise offer is actually what is lucrative.
There may or may not be truth at the root of this, but this is a route for obtaining redress for copyright abuse which has been neglected, and with good reason, by the reputable end of the copyright industry. It produces a great deal of distress and indignation among many thousands of our citizens, and it ought not to be allowed to continue now that we are producing a better and proper route for redress for copyright owners, particularly where we are looking at volume cases-where we are looking at large volumes of infringement. That is exactly what the Bill aims to deal with.
My Amendments 15 and 31 look at a couple of possible ways of dealing with this. We could act on the internet service providers and give them a defence against revealing the details of their subscribers – we could say that either they or a court must be satisfied that a fair and accurate process was being used – or we could give the court the power to say, “No, here is this Act which provides a proper remedy for copyright owners who are suffering from the sort of abuse which is alleged in these letters. Let them use that route because that is fairer for consumers and a fairer basis on which to operate, which is what Parliament has decided, and lay off the techniques which are being used to extract money at present”.
Mostly, to date, one firm has been involved, but now a second firm is getting involved. The news of how lucrative this is has spread. If we do not do something about it, we will have more firms creeping into this business. There is plenty of copyright in unpleasant material. There are plenty of opportunities for these firms to make money.
It is high time that we do something effective to put a stop to it.
I do not mind which of the amendments the Government choose. I suspect that if I was forced to choose between them, I would choose the one put forward by the Liberal Democrats. It might not be perfectly drafted, but if we get it into the Bill now, the Government will have an opportunity to redraft it for Third Reading. But this must not be allowed to continue. I beg to move.
Untold thousands of people either leave their WiFi networks open or have no idea how to secure them. Inevitably this means they can be used to share illicit files. But what happens when the owner of the network gets blamed for infringing copyright?
Over on TorrentFreak we often get emails from people who have received letters from lawyers who claim that they have been caught infringing copyright by sharing illicit files on the Internet.
The majority of the time these are emails from account holders who did not infringe copyright but are the victim of mistaken identity. Sometimes the anti-piracy tracking company gets it completely wrong and sometimes they trace the correct IP address but blame the wrong guy.
This weekend we received an email which throws up an interesting moral dilemma.
A BitTorrent user from the US visiting his girlfriend who lives in Europe used a neighbor’s open WiFi network in order to download some media. Unfortunately the neighbor received a letter demanding a payment of several hundred euros for copyright infringement.
Clearly the neighbor is 100% innocent and could argue his/her case quite honestly. Unfortunately, as pointed out by the UK Lords recently in a discussion about the proposed Digital Economy Bill, it is impossible to prove your innocence in these cases.
In this case the infringer told us that he’s going to admit to the infringement and hand over his details so that the law firm pursues him instead, which is pretty admirable. But many people wouldn’t be so forthcoming.
If anyone has any intelligent advice for this guy, feel free to post in the comments, but in addition we’re interested to hear what you would do in his situation.
Is it OK for bill payers to take responsibility for everything that happens on their connection? Should WiFi network operators be responsible for securing their networks from intrusions?
Should people really be using other peoples’ networks to infringe copyright or with the introduction of more and more draconian copyright laws, will this be the way of the future?
Brazil’s Catholic Church is suing Columbia Pictures for including images of the huge statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro in their movie 2012. Copyright common sense strikes again…..
The massive Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio is one of the New Seven Wonders of the World and a landmark famous all around the globe. It took 9 years to build and was finally finished in 1931 at a cost of $250,000.
It’s now the center of a rather unholy row between Brazil’s Catholic Church and Columbia Pictures in the US. The Hollywood company included images of the statue being destroyed by a giant wave in its movie 2012 and the Church is far from happy.
“The archdiocese refused the use of the religious symbol during pre-production of the movie, but Columbia Pictures did not respect the prohibition,” said Church lawyer Claudine Dutra.
“Many faithful have said they are shocked and offended by the images of the destruction of this sanctuary that the archdiocese wanted to preserve. We want Columbia Pictures to publicly declare that it did not intend to cause offense,” she added.
The statue was created by Paul Landowski who died in 1961, but the archdiocese holds the copyright until 2032, when the sculpture enters the public domain.
I guess it would be customary to have a go at Columbia for being copyright hypocrites, but i’m struggling not to suggest that both parties should have their heads banged together on this.
In 2004, a series of short TV-style shows started to hit the web dramatizing the ‘Warez Scene’. ‘Welcome to the Scene’ was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
A blast from the past just popped up in my feeds today, so I thought i’d share.
Six years ago (wow, has it really been that long?) in a time before YouTube, a company called Jun Group created a new style of online TV series, which for pirates and geeks in general proved pretty entertaining, in an easily-pleased kind of way….
Welcome To The Scene ran for months and attempted to dramatize The Scene, the ‘place’ (for want of a better phrase) at the top of the so-called ‘piracy pyramid’ from where most illicit material cascades down to P2P networks.
The show ignited a fair bit of controversy within P2P circles and even attracted its own parody show called Welcome To Teh Scene (see bottom of this post).
The official website can be found here, all episodes here and episodes up to 15 are available on Veoh too – we’ve embedded episode one below to see if you like it – just in case you’re twiddling your thumbs today with nothing better to do 😉
As promised the UFC has started to set its lawyers on those it say are undermining their business. Although piracy of its events hasn’t stopped, and despite fighting talk from boss Dana White, their strategy is becoming more clear.
In December 2009, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Lorenzo Fertitta testified at a hearing of the US House Judiciary Committee, claiming that the UFC is losing millions of dollars to online piracy.
Then in January this year, UFC President Dana White said the company was readying a legal assault on those who pirate their content online, even going as far as to suggest the UFC would subpoena sites in order to gain the IP addresses of people who illegally download and share UFC events.
However, the first two lawsuits filed by the UFC show they are going after much more sensible and measurably easier targets.
The first lawsuit was filed in the District Court in Boston early January, with the UFC going after a bar owner for showing their events without an appropriate license.
A second lawsuit has just been filed against Moazzam Gandu, the operator of Rage-Streams.net, a site which has been selling access to live UFC PPV events.
Until it was shut down last week, Rage-Streams.net had been offering UFC events for $6.99, massively undercutting online UFC prices of $44.95.
The lawsuit asks for up to $150,000 per copyright infringement plus legal costs, reclamation of the revenue earned from the Web site and a halt to its operation. The latter has already been fulfilled.
“We take down more streams now than we ever have,” Lawrence Epstein, the UFC’s general counsel, told MMAJunkie.
“At every event, it’s more and more and more. The good news is that the tools that we have in our ability to discover these online streams has gotten better, too.
“I’m hopeful that at some point in the near future, we’re going to see a decided downturn in this activity. But I can tell you that we haven’t seen a decided downturn (at this point); that’s for sure.”
Although the UFC are still threatening that going after end users is still a possibility, they are demonstrating with these first two lawsuits that they intend to pursue those who are benefiting commercially from UFC material, i.e easy targets.
Despite all the fighting talk from Dana White, it is extremely unlikely the UFC will go after individual fight fans. If they do, however, they will reap the same rewards as the RIAA – a huge amount of bad publicity and even more piracy.
The court hearing between Hollywood movie studios and Newzbin will now resume in early March. In the meantime the Usenet indexer has been reassuring its users that it will neither close down nor hand over their details to their opponents.
Earlier this month the High Court case between the MPA and Newzbin was adjourned so that the Usenet indexer could hire more lawyers.
The case will resume in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime Newzbin has been trying to reassure a minority of its users who have been showing concern at developments.
“Some people have speculated that if we lose we may be closed down, but even the MPA isn’t arguing for that: what’s being debated is the manner in which we operate not whether we operate,” said the company in an update.
“The message we want you to take away is that, win or lose, you can be confident that the site is here to stay in the long term.”
Some Newzbin users said they were concerned about their privacy and asked the company what information was being held about them in the site’s logs.
Newzbin responded that although logs are kept for a short period, details of the NZB files downloaded by users are not stored, adding;
“No request has been made for our logs during the discovery phase of litigation and due to the nature of the legal process that request would have to have been made a long time ago: it wasn’t. They [the MPA] cannot now, legally, have it; and moreover they dont actually seem that interested either. The fact is this: they are gunning for Newzbin not you.”
Activist Mark Thomas talks to Billy Bragg, Feargal Sharkey, Cory Doctorow and TalkTalk about the challenges faced when disconnecting Internet users on allegations of file-sharing.
Comedian, presenter, activist and reporter Mark Thomas from London talks to Billy Bragg from the Featured Artists Coalition, head of UK Music Feargal Sharkey, Cory Doctorow and Andrew Heaney from UK ISP TalkTalk about the future under the UK government’s proposed Digital Economy Bill.
Off-topic, yes, but click here to check out Mark Thomas having a go at the arms trade.
After an unusual week of events in London’s High Court, the movie studios vs. Newzbin case has been adjourned for 2 weeks while the Usenet indexer hires more lawyers.
In 2008, Newzbin received complaints from the MPA who later in the year filed for an injunction against the site. (case background here)
The case began in London’s High Court last week and since then a chaotic view of the proceedings has been painted by Newzbin in a couple of daily updates.
Since then Newzbin claims that the MPA has tried to use these updates against them in court, but will continue to provide them anyway in order to keep their users updated.
There’s unlikely to be many more for a while though, since the case has been adjourned for 2 weeks. Newzbin asked for more time to go hire more lawyers, an application the MPA contested. In the end Newzbin prevailed.
The Usenet indexing company now says it expects closing submissions in early March 2010.
The famous chain renting out DVD, Blu-ray, and video games discs worldwide has announced it has gone bust in Portugal. Of course, it blames piracy.
Founded in 1985, Blockbuster is a well-recognized brand all over the planet with around 9,000 stores in around 25 countries worldwide.
A success for many years, the company started falling on harder times around 7 years ago with decreasing revenues, a trend that continues today.
The company licensed to operate the Blockbuster brand in Portugal has just announced it has initiated insolvency proceedings
“Our energies are now focused on trying to minimize the impact on our employees,” the company said in a statement.
Blockbuster is blaming its Portuguese demise on piracy and entertainment becoming available in new forms on the Internet.
Portugal’s Association of Audiovisual Commerce (ACAPOR) doesn’t spread the blame so thinly.
Spokesman Nuno Pereira said piracy was the main cause of reduced performance in the sector and accused the government of inaction in the face of “brazen and shameless theft.”
Neither company cite a failure to innovate as a reason for Blockbuster’s demise and will presumably continue trying to rent out plastic discs in other regions.
Successful streaming services like Spotify are set to be dumped by Warner Music since they are “clearly not positive for the industry”.
The hugely popular Spotify and other services being used to tempt file-sharers away from “the dark side” have been dealt a blow.
Warner Music, one of the Big Four labels, says that it will stop licensing its music for use on all streaming services.
“Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed,” said chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr.
“The get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price strategy, is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future,” he added.
Yet again a big label shoots itself in the foot. The question is, when will the rest follow?
Want to know which artists you won’t be able to hear streaming legally anymore? Click here.
There’s very little information coming out of the High Court case between Usenet indexing site Newzbin and their opponents from the MPA. A couple of updates on the Newzbin site point to a somewhat confused situation.
In 2008, Newzbin received complaints from the MPA who later in the year filed for an injunction against the site. (case background here)
The showdown in London’s High Court before Mr Justice Kitchin began last week but after the first day, reporting by Newzbin went a little quiet.
Since then there have been two updates by the company. Day 3 first;
There have been bizarre side issues which have emerged. To be fair to the MPA (god, we never thought we’d ever say that!) it was out of their control and down to internal Newzbin issues. Combined with Caesium falling ill during cross-examination by the opposing barrister, this has caused a delay and things are a bit of a shambles at the moment.
Quite what happens next week when the trial restarts is unclear and there may be more delays. Times are getting interesting: in a Chinese sense.
Caesium’s health aside, the update for Day 4 paints a pretty gloomy picture.
A refreshed Caesium finished cross examination today.
There have been/are huge procedural complications caused by Newzbin’s internal issues and this may cause delays in the case being concluded this week.
It would be fair to say that the picture painted in court of Newzbin has not been an entirely positive one. Whilst it is hard to double guess Mr Justice Kitchin, Newzbin may have some difficulties in the near future.
Caesium was accused of lying massively and repeatedly under oath and ‘concocting’ a phoney defence: ‘Bollocks’ we said, a technical latin legal expression, but nonetheless a problematic accusation.
We may be being paranoid, but at the moment our hunch is that things are looking less positive for us than last week. We hope we are wrong.
Other than these updates, Newzbin isn’t commenting on the case directly and the MPA told us they could not comment on an ongoing case, so providing more detailed coverage is proving problematic.
Following iiNet’s huge win over anti-piracy group AFACT, Aussie ISP Exetel has taken steps to soften its copyright infringement notice procedures and will no longer suspend accounts on mere accusations.
On February 4th, Australian Internet service provider iiNet won its court battle against several Hollywood studios.
Justice Dennis Cowdroy announced that iiNet was not responsible for the infringements of its subscribers when they shared copyright material using BitTorrent.
In the wake of this decision, ISP Exetel says it will modify long-standing procedures it has in place to forward infringement notices to its customers on behalf of copyright holders.
Previously customer access to the Internet was temporarily blocked while they either denied the infringement allegations or apologized to rights holders. Shortly this will change. In an email to customers the company said;
“We will continue to send any infringement notices we receive in the future, but before the end of February we will not require the user to acknowledge receipt of it nor will we temporarily block the customer’s internet access.”
“Subject to final legal advice, and re-coding time and testing, we will in future simply send the infringement notice to the registered ‘owner’ of the service,” the company added.
It seems the iiNet decision has clarified the position and responsibilities of ISPs, but not necessarily in the direction that copyright holders would’ve liked.
A trade group representing adult content companies is set to launch a new program to protect their products from infringement. However, a poll among their readers reveals that many believe the problem is too big to do anything about.
The interestingly named Free Speech Coalition (FSC) has just announced it will launch a new service to help porn content creators protect their product from copyright infringement.
The adult trade group says that the Anti-Piracy Action Program (APAP) employs spidering and fingerprinting techniques to track pirate material, can send DMCA takedown notices to infringers and offers legal consultation and litigation services.
So-called adult ‘tube’ sites will be negotiated with to replace pirate content with trailers that promote legitimate content. But will it all be worth it? A poll currently running on the FSC site asks this question:
What do you think should be done about content piracy and copyright infringement?
11.2% believe that “educating consumers that it’s wrong to steal content” is the way to go, while just 13% seem to back this and other schemes by voting to develop technologies that combat content theft.
21.9% want to take legal action against online pirates and 23.8% want to work with a combination of all the previous options. 30.1% believe that the problem is so big there’s nothing that can be done about it.
We’ll see if this new program can prove the last group of voters wrong. Somehow it seems unlikely.
Just a short update with two little snippets about the semi-private BitTorrent tracker, Demonoid. Don’t have an account? You can get one today.
For the last couple of weeks, Demonoid hasn’t been accessible from Germany. Over on TorrentFreak we’ve had lots and lots of emails asking us what’s been happening – was Germany being blocked on purpose?
Sadly, due to the fact that the Demonoid operators aren’t exactly talkative, it’s always difficult to confirm these things. However, we did pass a message yesterday morning to a Ukranian blogger who has a contact at Demonoid’s host.
Either by coincidence or design, a few hours later German Demonoid users could access the site again…….
And finally, anyone who still hasn’t got a Demonoid account is in for a treat today. Head over to the site by clicking here and in the top right hand corner you’ll see that signups are open. They probably won’t stay that way for long.
A 53 year-old grandmother was temporarily kicked off the Internet by her ISP after wrongful piracy allegations. Only when the press got involved was she cleared.
Cathi Paradiso, a customer of Qwest Communications has just been through a battle to clear her name.
The 53 year-old grandmother had her Internet account suspended after Hollywood studios accused her of multiple copyright infringements, including downloading ZombieLand, Harry Potter and even South Park.
Paradiso was told by Qwest that if she had one more accusation they would move from suspending her account to all-out termination, and even told her getting a new ISP would prove difficult with her record.
Desperate to prove her innocence, Paradiso wrote to the studios and begged them to find the person who really did download the movies.
Last week CNET got involved and this pushed Qwest to have a technician investigate the case. It turned out that Paradiso’s network had been compromised and someone else was to blame.
It seems that this accusation is the tip of a very large iceberg that will grow and grow in the months to come.
For the thousandth time, an IP address alone does not identify an infringer…
Just days after a judge reduced the $1.92m damages bill handed down to Jammie Thomas to a slightly more sensible $54,000, her legal team have turned down an offer to settle for $25,000.
Last year Jammie Thomas lost her retrial against the RIAA and was ordered to pay $1.92 million in damages for sharing 24 songs using Kazaa.
Outrage at the huge damages eventually resulted in Judge Davis lowering the damages last week to $54,000.
To try and bring the whole sorry episode to an end, yesterday the RIAA made an offer to Thomas to settle the case for $25,000, if she agreed to ask the judge to “vacate” last week’s decision, which means removing it from the record.
Her lawyers immediately rejected the offer, indicating they would only accept a settlement which means Thomas has to pay nothing.
The RIAA said that this rejection means that they will now challenge the judge’s decision last week to lower the $1.92m damages.
Will this ever come to an end? What a complete waste of money.
Next week the Federal Court will likely deliver its ruling on the epic copyright case which concluded in November 2009 between AFACT, representing the movie industry, and Australian ISP iiNet.
Last year several movie studios including Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises, Inc. and the Seven Network (all under the umbrella of AFACT) took legal action against Aussie ISP, iiNet.
They claimed that iiNet did nothing to stop its customers from sharing their copyright media via BitTorrent. The ISP refuted the claim with a multi-layered defense, and the case was adjourned in November 2009.
It’s believed that Justice Dennis Cowdroy will deliver his judgment next week. Check out TorrentFreak for a full report.
In the meantime, those wishing to brush up on the history of the case can find our detailed coverage here, here, here, here and here.
MusicDNA, the new music format being touted to take over from the humble MP3, is being promoted by the creators as a possible solution to piracy. But it doesn’t seem likely that music pirates will fall over themselves to adopt this new filetype.
This new digital music format unveiled at the MIDEM festival is being called “the successor to the MP3″ by its creators and others in the music industry. Rather than just providing music, MusicDNA is said to provide additional content such as videos, lyrics, artwork, artist tour dates and all manner of other data associated with the track.
The creators are suggesting that MusicDNA could deter piracy, but this seems hard to believe. Although MusicDNA files can be played in a standard MP3 player, when the MusicDNA player is connected to the Internet the additional content is sent by the labels. Only legitimately bought MusicDNA files can be updated in this way – pirated versions can not.
A regular MP3 from lets say, a ‘Scene’ source, is as safe as a file can be, but MusicDNA files possess a big extra ability – they can phone home.
“We can get very indepth profiles of the music users,” said Bach Technology CEO Stefan Kohlmeyer when describing the technology this week, without clarifying if this only applies to legitimately purchased music or all copies, regardless of status. If big labels get involved, you can guess which way they’ll be pushing.
That said, the argument is that MusicDNA will add value to the standard MP3, delivering a richer fan experience. It will probably achieve this admirably and those already buying will be very happy for the extras.
But will people not currently paying for music hand over money for content they already have access to on the Internet for free, from places such as YouTube and the artist’s website, without the intrusion of being profiled by the labels?
MusicDNA is set to launch in the spring, so we’ll find out then.
“We all know that the government’s disconnection proposals to deter illegal filesharing are daft and dangerous. And many would agree that the way many people in the music industry have reacted is a little misguided. After all, haven’t we seen this type of scaremongering before?” writes TalkTalk’s Andrew Heaney on the ISP’s blog.
Over on TorrentFreak we often get emails from people who have received letters from lawyers who claim that they have been caught infringing copyright by sharing illicit files on the Internet.
In December 2009, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Lorenzo Fertitta testified at a hearing of the US House Judiciary Committee, claiming that the UFC is losing millions of dollars to online piracy.
Earlier this month the High Court case between the MPA and Newzbin was 
The hugely popular Spotify and other services being used to tempt file-sharers away from “the dark side” have been dealt a blow.
For the last couple of weeks, Demonoid hasn’t been accessible from Germany. Over on TorrentFreak we’ve had lots and lots of emails asking us what’s been happening – was Germany being blocked on purpose?
Last year Jammie Thomas lost her retrial against the RIAA and was ordered to pay $1.92 million in damages for sharing 24 songs using Kazaa.
