WebProNews

Tag: copyrights

  • Australian ISP Tells Entertainment Industry To Start Offering Better Service

    After numerous delays, the six largest ISPs in America will be joining forces with rights holders to implement a six-strikes policy. The program will seek to educate Internet users on legal methods for obtaining content online. There’s already a discussion for a similar program in Australia, but one of the nation’s leading ISPs has just walked out of those talks.

    TorrentFreak reports that iiNET has refused to cooperate with rights holders with identifying those who illegally download content. The reasons for not cooperating are twofold – iiNET wants rights holders to start offering their content in a timely and inexpensive manner, and the ISP refuses to store identifying information on its customers.

    On the first point, it’s no secret that consumers in Australia get screwed over more often than any other country. Not only do they have to wait almost a year after the films come out overseas, but the prices for said content, even digitally, is exorbitantly high. Speaking to TorrentFreak, iiNET’s Chief Regulatory Office, Steve Dalby, had this to say:

    “The rights holders are still insisting ISPs should perform work on their behalf instead of addressing what we have always said is the root cause of the infringements – the limited accessibility to desirable content and the discriminatory and high cost of content in Australia. Infringements are a symptom – access is the problem.”

    As for the proposal that iiNET track its customers data, Dalby said that its not their responsibility to do so:

    “iiNet won’t support any scheme that forces ISPs to retain data in order to allow for the tracking of customer behaviour and the status of any alleged infringements against them. Collecting and retaining additional customer data at this level is inappropriate, expensive and most importantly, not our responsibility.

    It’s not iiNet’s job to play online police. The High Court spoke loud and clear in their verdict when they ruled categorically that ISPs have no obligation to protect the rights of third parties, and we’re not prepared to harass our customers when the industry has no clear obligation to do so.”

    The arguments for a six-strike system in the U.S. makes a little more sense than in Australia. U.S. consumers do have more choice when it comes to accessing inexpensive digital content for film and music. iiNET would probably be more willing to engage in talks with rights holders if Australian consumers were given access to new content at the same time, and same price, as other countries. There’s plenty of business to be had if ISPs and rights holders worked together to provide easy and cheap access to content, but rights holders aren’t exactly in the business of making it easy for consumers.

  • Alleged Copyright Infringers Could Be Outted By ISPs, EU Court Rules

    Earlier this month, a District Court in California ruled against a copyright holder who had wished to obtain the identity of a number of BitTorrent users by subpoenaing the ISP identified with the piracy. The copyright holder, Hard Drive Productions, wanted the IP addresses of the users who participated in the illegal file-sharing but didn’t wish to pursue the matter in court. Wisely, the District Court judge sense that Hard Drive essentially wanted the court to do the dirty work for them but not actually employ the court system to prosecute the accused copyright violators and therefore ruled that the ISPs didn’t have to reveal the identity of the alleged copyright violators.

    Across the Atlantic, a similar case in which copyright holders have demanded the identity of an alleged pirate be forfeited by a Swedish ISP wherein the European Court of Justice has decided that, yes, the ISP could be required to hand over the IP “which was allegedly used in an infringement.” This doesn’t mean that the ISP must now hand it over, per se, but rather that the case will return to Sweden’s Supreme Court in order to determine if the IP address will indeed have to be shared with the copyright holders.

    While this case is a suit to obtain the identity of one person who stored 2,000 audio books on his server whereas the California case was about ninety BitTorrent users, the same concerns cited by Judge Howard R. Lloyd in the BitTorrent case still persist, namely that the process of identifying the user via IP address is no guarantee of identifying the culpable person.

    Since the EU case is focused on only one user, it creates a dilemma between how courts should arbitrate when an ISP handing over IP addresses associated with illegal file-sharing. If it’s one, the thinking seems to be that the risk of misidentifying the copyright infringer is low; but if multiple identities are being requested, however, the risk of misidentifying copyright infringers goes up.

    Granted, these courts from country to country aren’t expected to rule in accordance.

  • White House Still Opposes SOPA, PIPA

    White House Still Opposes SOPA, PIPA

    The White House appears to mean what it said in March when it told supporters that it’s not ignoring the We the People petitions. As if to affirm that pledge, the Obama Administration restated in the 2011 Annual Report on Intellectual Property Enforcement released today that they still believe that the Protect IP Act and Stop Online Privacy Act introduced in 2011 aren’t such good ideas.

    In a response to a We the People petition in January that targeted the PIPA and SOPA, the White House released a statement then saying that while they it was committed to fighting online privacy, it would not do so in such a way that compromised an “open and innovative internet.” A few days after the White House’s statement, online opposition to the bills culminated with a widespread internet protest on January 18th in which several popular sites, including Wikipedia, reddit, Mozilla, craigslist, et al., commenced with a 24-hour blackout of their sites. Subsequently, the effort was enough to turn the political tide against PIPA/SOPA and the bills were eventually shelved although continue to linger in the shadows of Congress.

    In today’s report, the White House cautiously reiterated its support for bills that target online piracy yet it “will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk (including authority to tamper with the DNS system), or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet.” The statement continues to say that the Administration is open to the idea of working alongside Congress in order to make sure that these issues are “addressed in a manner that takes in account the challenges and opportunities of the Internet and that is consistent with the Administration’s goals and public policy principles.”

    At this point, however, any further debate and talk about the inequity of PIPA and SOPA would appear to be moot since a day after the internet’s constituency drove back the bills, the federal government decided it didn’t need such legal implements in order to shut down websites. So really, the White House can say they oppose SOPA all they want – it doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

    At any rate. Here’s the full Intellectual Property Enforcement report.

    White House Annual Intellectual Property Report

    [Via Mashable.]

  • Google Chimes In On MPAA’s Suit Against Hotfile

    Emboldened by the takedown of Megaupload, the Motion Picture Association of America continues its crusade against file-sharing sites with its latest target, Hotfile, a file-sharing site. The MPAA, however, might have unexpectedly found itself in a bigger opponent than it bargained for as Google unexpectedly entered the legal fray by lending its clout and legal experience to Hotfile’s defense.

    In the MPAA’s suit against Hotfile, Google submitted an amicus brief and cited that part of its success has relied on the “safe-harbor” protections allowed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Google previously used the “safe-harbor” provision in its successful defense against a lawsuit filed by Viacom. In that case, which was thrown out in 2010, a federal judge ruled that Google was protected by the DMCA and could not be found liable for providing an online service on which individual users uploaded copyrighted content.

    Going against Viacom’s claim that Google permitted copyrighted material to exist on YouTube while simultaneously profiting from it, Judge Louis L. Stanton of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote, “The present case shows that the DMCA notification regime works efficiently: when Viacom over a period of months accumulated some 100,000 videos and then sent a mass take-down notice on February 2, 2007, by the next business day YouTube had removed virtually all of them.”

    In the amicus brief, Google explains that the “safe-harbor” provision should be extended to protect Hotfile because, as evidenced in the Google’s Viacom case, the responsibility of policing the internet for copyright infringements should rest with the copyright owners and not with internet service providers.

    The Hotfile case is slightly peculiar because Hotfile maintains that it doesn’t even support a search feature for its site, which distinguishes it from other file-sharing sites that have been successfully sued by copyright holders in the past.

    That the courts retain a uniform interpretation of the DMCA’s “safe-harbor” provision is of utmost interest to Google’s case with Viacom, which is currently in appeal. Should a judge decide that the provision doesn’t provide legal protection to Hotwire, the ruling could open a nasty can of worms in Google’s defense against Viacom.

    Google’s full amicus brief can be found below.

    Google Amicus Brief PDF

  • SOPA Author Lamar Smith: Copyright Violator?

    Our chief SOPA correspondent is out of the office today but this story from VICE magazine was really too good to leave uncovered here at WPN, so I’m tagging in to share the story.

    So if you’ve been following the saga of SOPA, you are likely familiar with the author of the bill, Rep. Lamar Smith. He’s been a regular cast member in this epic struggle for Internet freedoms. If you’re short on time, though, here’s the abridged version: Lamar Smith believes the Internet is a wretched hive of scum and villainy when it comes to copyrighted material because he thinks people regard copyrights the same way they regard the newspaper you put in the bottom of a bird’s cage.

    Turns out, however, that the copyright-violating apple doesn’t fall far from the tree for Mr. Smith.

    VICE magazine writer Jamie Lee Curtis Taete took it upon herself today to check out Smith’s campaign website and make sure that all of the material on there was copyright-verified. Fair enough, I believe, to expect that the SOPA author should at least bear the standard (however terrible) that he’s trying to establish. Taete found a pre-SOPA’ed version of Smith’s site and discovered this image being used as the background:

    (image)

    Taete tracked the image back to the photographer who took the photo, DJ Schulte, and…. well, c’mon, you see where this is going…

    And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him.

    I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organization, requesting permission to use it: “I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes.

    “I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith’s organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com.”

    VICE said it contacted the office of Lamar Smith but, curiously, has not received a response.

    And so, it is the end of the day and I have no ending for this astounding news so I will simply take a bow. See you tomorrow.

  • Grooveshark sued by EMI Music

    Well, this will probably going to be detrimental to my future work productivity.

    Due to what it claims is a failure to receive any royalty kickbacks, EMI Music Publishing has filed a lawsuit against Grooveshark’s parent company, Escape Media Group. The New York Times explains:

    In the suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, EMI seeks unspecified damages. But in a series of recent e-mails and legal correspondence included with the filing as evidence, EMI asks Grooveshark for at least $150,000 in royalties.

    Grooveshark says its service is legal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal law that protects Internet companies that host third-party material if they comply with take-down notices from copyright holders.

    EMI is the fourth corner of the major music label square – the other three being Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group – that is suing Grooveshark over licensing and copyrighting issues.

    According to a statement provided to The Times, Grooveshark believes that “this is a contract dispute that we expect to resolve.” While that’s an optimistic outlook, this latest legal action against Grooveshark leaves little to look forward to in the future as they’re now involved in litigation battles on four separate fronts. Personally, I don’t like this news and hope Grooveshark can resolve these issues because if they disappear I’m gonna be left without a dealer to get my Philip Glass fix. Having said that, it doesn’t look good for home team.