As a hosting provider and search engine Google inadvertently plays a role in distributing the compromising shots, much to the displeasure of the women involved.

More than a dozen of them sent Hollywood lawyer Marty Singer after the company. Earlier this month Singer penned an angry letter to Google threatening legal action if it doesn’t remove the images from YouTube, Blogspot and its search results.

“It is truly reprehensible that Google allows its various sites, systems and search results to be used for this type of unlawful activity. If your wives, daughters or relatives were victims of such blatant violations of basic human rights, surely you would take appropriate action,” the letter reads.

While no legal action has yet been taken, some celebrities have also sent individual DMCA takedown requests to Google. On September 24 Jennifer Lawrence’s lawyers asked the search engine to remove two links to thefappening.eu as these infringe on the star’s copyrights.

This means that both the thefappening.eu main domain and the tag archive of Jennifer Lawrence posts no longer appear in Google’s search results.

Whether this move has helped Lawrence much is doubtful though. The site in question had already redirected its site to a new domain at thefappening.so. These links remain indexed since they were not mentioned in the takedown request.

The good news is that many of Lawrence’s pictures are no longer hosted on the site itself. In fact, the URLs listed in the takedown request to Google no longer show any of the infringing photos in question, so technically Google had no obligation to remove the URLs.

A prominent disclaimer on the site points out that the operator will gladly take down the compromising photos if he’s asked to do so. Needless to say, this is much more effective than going after Google.

Photo via

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

A few days ago Google received a request to remove links to Kate Upton’s stolen photos The request was not sent by Upton but by her boyfriend Jason Verlander, who also appears in a few of the leaked images.

The notice includes hundreds of URLs of sites such as thefappening.eu where the photos are hosted without permission.

It’s quite unusual for Google’s takedown team to be confronted with a long link of naked celebrity pictures. This may explain why it took a while before a decision was reached on the copyright-infringing status of the URLs, a process that may involve a cumbersome manual review.

Yesterday the first batch was processed and interestingly enough Google decided to leave nearly half of all URLs untouched. The overview below shows that with 16 of the 444 links processed, only 45% were removed.

The big question is, of course, why?

Verlander’s takedown request

Google doesn’t explain its decision keep the links in question in its search results. In some cases the original content had already been removed at the source site, so these URLs didn’t have to be removed.

Other rejections are more mysterious though. For example, the thefappening.eu URLs that remain online all pointed to stolen images when we checked. Most of these were not nudes, but they certainly weren’t posted with permission.

One possible explanation for Google’s inaction is that Verlander most likely claimed to own the copyright on the images, something he can only do with pictures he took himself. With Upton’s selfies this is hard to do, unless she signed away her rights.

While browsing through the reported URLs we also noticed another trend. Some sites have replaced Upton’s leaked photos with photos of other random naked women. Google’s takedown team apparently has a sharp eye because these were not removed by Google either.

Chilling Effects, who host Google’s takedown requests, just posted a redacted version of the original notice with Upton’s name removed. Unfortunately this doesn’t offer more clues to resolve this takedown mystery, so for now we can only guess why many of the links remain indexed.

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

But in early 2012, following a huge backlash from the public and technology sector, the dream turned into a nightmare. SOPA was not only dead and buried, but Hollywood had made new enemies and re-ignited old rivalries too.

In the period since the studios have been working hard to paint the technology sector not as foes, but as vital partners with shared interests common goals. The aggressive rhetoric employed during the SOPA lobbying effort all but disappeared and a refocused, more gentle MPAA inexplicably took its place.

Yesterday, in ongoing efforts to humanize the behind-the-scenes movie making industry as regular people out to make a living, “Beyond the Red Carpet: TV & Movie Magic Day” landed on Capitol Hill.

Among other things, the event aimed to show lawmakers that those involved in the movie making process are not only vital to the economy, but are the real victims when it comes to piracy. The message is laid out in this infographic from the Creative Rights Caucus.

As co-chair of the caucus, U.S. Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif. will be hoping to maintain momentum on issues such as tax incentives to keep film production in California, but yesterday the words of MPAA CEO Chris Dodd provided the most food for thought.

In comments to The Wrap, Dodd said that the MPAA is no longer seeking anti-piracy legislation from Congress.

“The world is changing at warp speed. We are not going to legislate or litigate our way out of it,” Dodd said.

For an organization that has spent more than a decade and a half tightening up ‘Internet’ copyright law in its favor, the admission is certainly a notable one, especially when the favored alternatives now include winning hearts and minds through education.

“We are going to innovate our way out by educating people about the hard work of people,” the MPAA CEO said.

“In this space everyone has to contribute to ensure that peoples’ content can be respected. Instead of finger pointing at everybody and arresting 14-year olds, the answer is making our product accessible in as many formats and distributive services as possible at price points they can afford. We are discovering that works.”

This tacit admission, that the industry itself has contributed to the piracy problems it faces today, is an interesting move. Over in Australia content providers and distributors have also been verbalizing the same shortcomings and they too have offered promises to remedy the situation.

But the development of new services doesn’t exist in a vacuum and time and again, across the United States to Europe and beyond, the insistence by Hollywood is that for legal services to flourish, use of pirate sources must be tackled, if not through legislation, by other means.

And here’s the key. Successfully humanizing the industry with lawmakers will provide Hollywood with much-needed momentum to push along its agenda of cooperation with its technology-focused partners.

ISPs will be encouraged to engage fully with the six-strikes “educational” program currently underway across America and advertising companies and big brands will be reminded to further hone their systems to keep revenue away from pirate sites.

But perhaps the more pressing efforts will entail bringing companies like Google on board. Voluntary agreements with the search sector can certainly be influenced by those on Capitol Hill, but with Google’s insistence that Hollywood moves first, by providing content in a convenient manner at a fair price, the ball is back in the movie industry’s court.

Dodd, however, is now promising just that, so things should start to get interesting. And in the meantime the MPAA can continue to fund groups such as the Copyright Alliance, a non-profit which regularly testifies before Congress on copyright and anti-piracy matters and of which the MPAA is a founding member.

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

Most of the time problems arise with companies making the odd embarrassing mistake. At other times things get more serious. Today we bring news of another mess that would’ve ordinarily flown under the radar.

On its Twitter account, Total Wipes Music Group claims to work with 800 music labels and cooperates with major digital music stores such as iTunes, Beatport and Juno. Early July the company began sending DMCA notices to Google and out of more than 15,000 URLs sent so far the majority have been rejected.

In an early notice the company asked Google to remove website pages of several of its partners including BeatPortCharts, Napster (UK and Germany), Rhapsody and TraxSource. Other notices targeted both iTunes and Apple.

In this notice, which claims to protect this content, Total Wipes launched a full frontal assault on anyone daring to use any words used in the title of their clients’ track “ROCK THE BASE & BAD FORMAT”. The results are awful.

In April this year DJ E-Z Rock, best known for the track ‘It Takes Two’ with partner Rob Base, sadly passed away. MTV, Rolling Stone and a number of news outlets all wrote about the event but in their notice Total Wipes demand that Google de-list all of their reports. They also attack a wide range of other random sites, some which dared to mention “rock” climbing and others which mentioned a rock festival on a military “base”.

For no apparent reason, another notice targeted The School of Performance and Cultural Industries at Leeds University in the UK, stopping off to admonish music mag Pitchfork Media and the evil PC gaming bloggers over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Perhaps the weirdest notice, currently being processed by Google, sees the music outfit target a wide range of sites with the word ‘coffee’ in their URLs. Cariboucoffee, cartelcoffeelab, clivecoffee, coavacoffee, coffee.org, coffeeandtealtd, coffeebean and coffeegeek are just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Quite what Ikea, Walmart, Fair Trade and Dunkin Donuts did to warrant inclusion is a mystery, but our money is on their connections to coffee. Github’s crime will be revealed in due course.

The end result is that Google has rejected what appears to be the lions’ share of more than 15,000 URLs sent by Total Wipes, even those that appear to target well-known ‘pirate’ sites.

There are far too many URLs for us to check individually but some poor soul at Google is probably going to have to do just that. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

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

As the world’s leading search engine, Google receives millions of DMCA-style notices every week. Its internal systems, both automated and human-reviewed, then attempt to assess the validity of the notices before removing URLs from its indexes.

What these notices all have in common is that they refer to infringements that have already taken place, since that’s the nature of a takedown. However, a notice that recently appeared in Google’s Transparency Report reveals that for at least one organization, looking into the future is now also on the agenda.

The notice was sent by an anti-piracy company working on behalf of World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE as it’s more commonly known. The notice aimed to tackle piracy of a WWE Event titled Money In The Bank 2014, which took place on June 29, 2014. However, the notice was sent to Google two days before, on June 27.

“The following links infringe on WWE’s copyrighted Pay Per View event Money In The Bank 2014, set to air this Sunday, June 29, by one or more of the following means,” the notice begins.

WWE then sets out three potential infringements.

“Providing a link to a free (pirated) stream of this event” is misleading since it’s impossible to link to an event that hasn’t aired yet. Conceivably an advance static link could have been setup to air the event come June 29, but on June 27 the event had definitely not aired, hence no piracy.

“Providing a promise of DIRECT free streaming of this event on the identified site” seems no different from the allegation made above. It’s certainly possible that some of the sites promised to illegally stream the event, but at the date of the notice that would have been impossible.

The fact that WWE resorted to telling Google that the event’s predictions show was the source material being infringed upon shows that no actual live event infringements had yet taken place.

The final claim – “Using copyrighted images, logos and celebrity photos to promote the site” – is one that carries far more weight than the two key instances of infringement alleged above. Some of the sites listed did use WWE artwork to promote their upcoming streams, but there were some notable omissions, not least the homepage of Justin.tv. Google refused to comply in this and three other instances.

The notice from WWE, which can be viewed here, illustrates the problems faced by companies airing live events. While outfits such as WWE often know where streams and links to streams will appear once an event goes live, taking them down quickly once it actually begins may not always go as smoothly as they would like.

While attempts at a pro-active DMCA-style notice like this might work on a small scale, it’s not difficult to imagine the chaos that would ensue if all rightsholders tried to have unauthorized content removed before it even appeared online.

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

In 2001, that began to change with the advent of Chilling Effects, an archive created by activists who had become concerned that increasing volumes of cease-and-desist letters were having a “chilling effect” on speech.

In the decade-and-a-third that followed the archive grew to unprecedented levels, with giants such as Google and Twitter routinely sending received notices to the site for public retrieval.

However, while Chilling Effects strives to maintain free speech, several times a month rightsholders from around the world (probably unintentionally) try to silence the archive in specific ways by asking Google to de-index pages from the site.

As can be seen from the tables below, Home Box Office has tried to de-index Chilling Effects pages 240 times, with Microsoft and NBC Universal making 99 and 65 attempts respectively.

The ‘problem’ for these copyright holders is two-fold. Firstly, Chilling Effects does indeed list millions of URLs that potentially link to infringing content. That does not sit well with copyright holders.

“Because the site does not redact information about the infringing URLs identified in the notices, it has effectively become the largest repository of URLs hosting infringing content on the internet,” the Copyright Alliance’s Sandra Aistars complained earlier this year.

However, what Aistars omits to mention is that Chilling Effects has a huge team of lawyers under the hood who know only too well that their archive receives protection under the law. Chilling Effects isn’t a pirate index, it’s an educational, informational, research resource.

Thanks to Google, which routinely throws out all attempts at removing Chilling Effects URLs from its indexes, we are able to see copyright holder attempts at de-indexing.

Earlier this month, for example, Wild Side Video and their anti-piracy partners LeakID sent this notice to Google aiming to protect their title “Young Detective Dee.” As shown below, the notice contained several Chilling Effects URLs.

Each URL links to other DMCA notices on Chilling Effects, each sent by rival anti-piracy outfit Remove Your Media on behalf of Well Go USA Entertainment. They also target “Young Detective Dee”. This is an interesting situation that offers the potential for an endless loop, with the anti-piracy companies reporting each others’ “infringing” links on Chilling Effects in fresh notices, each time failing to get them removed.

The seeds of the “endless loop” phenomenon were also experienced by HBO for a while, with the anti-piracy company sending notices (such as this one) targeting dozens of Chilling Effects pages listing notices previously sent by the company.

While publishing notices is entirely legal, the potential for these loops really angers some notice senders.

On April 10 this year a Peter Walley sent a notice to Google complaining that his book was being made available on a “pirate site” without permission. Google removed the link in its indexes but, as is standard practice, linked to the notice on Chilling Effects. This enraged Walley.

None of these rantings had any effect, except to place yet another notice on Chilling Effects highlighting where the infringing material could be found.

It’s a lesson others should learn from too.

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

The world’s largest recipient of these notices is Google and in the interests of transparency the company publishes a report detailing the requests it receives. But while the majority of the requests are processed without further issue, increasing numbers serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

Last year alone, Google discarded 21 million takedown requests, either because the claims were invalid or were duplicates of previously sent notices.

In 2014 the duplication problem appears to be getting worse, with even the BPI (who in all fairness are more accurate than most with their takedowns) sending large volumes of notices that contain high percentages of links that have already been taken down.

Across the Atlantic, Fox – which is the fifth all-time greatest sender of notices (28 million) – is also having difficulty remembering which URLs it has already asked to be erased. How Google can remember what takedowns Fox has already sent and why the studio cannot isn’t clear, but the high percentages in the refusal column suggests the numbers are significant.

That being said, these numbers should be put into perspective. The BPI has asked Google to take down more than 86 million URLs and Fox 28 million, so even many tens of thousands of duplicates are a relatively low percentage of the total. However, there is a far more depressing trend that suggests that some anti-piracy companies don’t check to see if the links they’re complaining about are actually infringing copyright at all.

The image below shows a selection of notices sent to Google this month by NBC, with a percentage of each rejected by Google. The reason for that is that they’re directed at isoHunt.com, a site that was shut down by NBC’s Hollywood allies last year. The links and the site itself simply do not exist.

Another instance, shown below, lists several TV and movie companies plus software companies Adobe and Lynda looking to take down URLs from another allegedly infringing site. Except this one, Hotfile.com, is not only dead, but was actually taken down by the studios themselves. For reference, these notices were sent four days ago and Hotfile closed down last December.

To see how prevalent this problem is we dug through the TorrentFreak archives to find sites that have been closed by copyright holders or the police in the last couple of years, to see if anti-piracy companies have updated their records.

Despite huge publicity, even now plenty of companies are wasting Google’s time with notices for content hosted on Megaupload, even though it has been closed for two and a half years. Just last month on the Usenet front, publisher Lynda targeted dead-since-last-year NZBsRus.

Also living in the past are the people at Viacom, who this month sent a flurry of notices asking for content to be removed from BTjunkie, a site that shut down 30 months ago in the wake of the Megaupload fiasco. Viacom are definitely not on their own though, as this link shows.

Finishing up, Warner Bros., whose UK-based anti-piracy group FACT shut down streaming site SurftheChannel in 2012 and helped to get its owner jailed, sent a notice to Google in March asking for it to remove links to The Big Bang Theory.

And Fox (shown earlier to be sending lots of duplicates), plus HBO, Evil Angel, NBC and Viacom are apparently still unaware that the UK Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit shut down Filecrop back in May.

Why this activity continues is anyone’s guess, but these takedowns either aren’t subjected to scrutiny or are deliberately passed with the knowledge that they’re invalid. Both options are causing unnecessary workloads for those employed to process them and putting money in the pockets of anti-piracy companies in return for zero effectiveness.

Some might argue that’s nothing new.

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

Stopping pirated live streams is one of the main priorities, but there is another concern. In all the excitement many social media users have added World Cup related logos and other pictures as their avatars, something that’s strictly forbidden by FIFA.

The football organization fears that use of their logos and emblems by others may cause serious damage. FIFA believes that this endangers the entire worldwide football community.

“Any unauthorized use of the Official Marks not only undermines the integrity of the FIFA World Cup™ and its marketing programme, but also puts the interests of the worldwide football community at stake,” FIFA says in an official statement.

Social media is particularly worrisome because the official logos may lead followers to believe that the user is somehow related to FIFA.

“FIFA’s official logos, symbols and other graphic trade marks may not be used on any social media platform. FIFA’s Protected Terms may not be used to create the impression that a page is officially related to the 2014 FIFA World Cup,” FIFA notes.

Considering the above FIFA sees no other option than to crackdown on Twitter users with official FIFA logos and images as avatars. In recent weeks Twitter has been asked to take action against several of its users, by removing their infringing profile pictures.

The requests were made for a wide variety of images including the World Cup emblem, logo and even the trophy. Twitter appears to have honored the requests and has replaced the infringing avatars with the default egg.

Most of the targeted accounts seem to be specifically related to football. However FIFA has also asked Twitter to remove the profile picture of @afobajee, a relatively random user.

Most of the affected users have changed their profile pictures to something non-infringing. However, others appear to have simply switched back to using official FIFA material.

We expect that FIFA still has their eye on the ball, so these infringing profile pictures probably won’t stay online for very long.

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

Not all copyright holders take the same approach. Where the RIAA targets millions of infringing URLs per month, the MPAA only sends out a handful of notices.

Instead of using dragnet scripts to take down everything that links to infringing copies, the movie industry group specifically targets homepages of ‘rogue’ sites and other high impact targets. In the latest DMCA notice, sent last week, Reddit ended up on the list.

Like many other user-generated content sites, Reddit has plenty of links to copyright infringing material. In fact, there are several sub-communities that are dedicated to finding and publishing lists to pirated material.

The subreddit r/fulllengthfilms is a good example. Here, users are encouraged to post links to their favorite movies, preferably from legal sources. However, pretty much all links point to streams of pirated films including “Gravity” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

The MPAA is not happy with this growing list of movies. In their most recent takedown notice they ask Google to remove the entire subreddit from its search engine, because it contains a link to a camcorded copy of “Edge of Tomorrow.”

Interestingly, Google has declined to action the MPAA’s takedown request. It’s not clear why the search giant refused to take it down, but one of the reasons may be that the MPAA did not limit their request to the “Edge of Tomorrow” posting. Instead, the movie industry group targeted the entire subreddit.

These broad takedown requests are not uncommon as most of the MPAA’s takedown notices contain homepages of download portals or streaming sites. In some cases the infringing work listed in the takedown request no longer appears on these homepages, and the MPAA often fails to list the internal page it’s supposed to link to.

With this strategy the MPAA has managed to remove the homepages of several popular sites from Google’s search results, including KickassTorrents. But Google doesn’t always comply. For the most recent DMCA notice it refused to take down most links, including the Reddit one.

It’s still unclear whether the MPAA also sent a takedown notice to Reddit. TorrentFreak asked Reddit for a comment on the news but we have yet to receive a response.

At the time of writing the FullLengthFilms subreddit and the “Edge of Tomorrow” posting remain online.

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

While England basked in its somewhat traditional World Cup disappointment Thursday, viewing records were being broken, but amazingly while Brazil sizzles, some want to pour cold water on the excitement.

Allow us to introduce MarkScan, a self-described “consulting boutique dedicated to your IP requirements”. The anti-piracy company is based in India and boasts a wide range of clients including the BBC, HBO, Nokia, and other prestigious brands.

Just recently MarkScan has been doing some work for Multi Screen Media Pvt. Ltd, a Sony Entertainment Television subsidiary in India. In June, Multi Screen Media launched LIV Sports, a digital sports entertainment site that was chosen by FIFA to be the official mobile and Internet broadcaster for the 2014 World Cup.

This week, MarkScan set off on an inevitable DMCA takedown spree to protect its clients’ and FIFA’s rights. What a disaster it’s been.

Much like FIFA, MarkScan began by sending its first batch of copyright complaints to Google several days before a ball had even been kicked. The notice, which covered 46 domains allegedly streaming the World Cup, was 100% rejected by Google.

One of the complaints targeted a great article by GigaOM which helpfully offered “Where to watch the 2014 FIFA World Cup live online, and how to stream it without cable.” The article listed all legal sources, including ESPN, across several countries.

Several subsequent takedown notices targeting more than 700 other URLs saw between 90% and 100% of URLs rejected by Google. One of them was nothing short of a disaster.

The notice, sent on behalf of Sony’s Liv Sports via Multi Screen Media, targeted 610 URLs, all of which were rejected by Google. All were claimed to be infringing on Liv Sports’ and FIFA’s rights, yet what the notice actually did was target some of the web’s most respectable news sites and resources.

In the article titled “World Cup 2014: How to watch across BBC TV, radio and online”, the BBC attempted to inform its millions of readers how to legitimately access the World Cup. However, as can be seen from the image below, MarkScan had other ideas.

Sadly, this attempted takedown of a purely informational and entirely legal article wasn’t the only casualty of this notice.

An article published by Variety informing its readership that ESPN would be streaming all 64 matches was deemed to be copyright-infringing too, as was a similar attempt by Canada’s CBC.ca.

Other catastrophes would be amusing if they weren’t so awful, such as the attempt to censor this article on Bleacher Report which advised how to watch Uruguay versus Germany – a match from FIFA World Cup 2010 four years ago.

Also targeted was this 2013 article from Hollywood Reporter which detailed plans by Sony (ironically) and FIFA to broadcast the World Cup 2014 in Ultra HD. FoxSports’ interactive World Cup Schedule was also marked as infringing. Both are shown below.

Even legitimate traditional broadcasters couldn’t get the word out unhindered. Communications company Cox wanted to let its residential customers know they could “Watch the World’s Biggest Soccer Games. Any Way You Want” but MarkScan told Google the page was illegal.

The whole notice, which can be read here, has many more examples than those listed above, including the attempted censorship of EA Sports’ Twitter account and FIFA’s very own site – for FIFA Futsal World Cup Thailand 2012. Brilliant.

But, in its own unique way, one takedown is more disappointing than most.

In a post dated June 9, before the World Cup had even begun, Symantec tried to inform its readers on how to avoid various World Cup related scams. We don’t need to tell you what happened to it.

TorrentFreak contacted MarkScan whose Internet Enforcement Team told us they take care to avoid mistakes.

“We want to assure you that we deploy technology, in addition to best efforts of our teams, to ensure that we do not impact legal content on yours, or any other website,” they explained.

We suspect someone could be seeing at least a yellow card, possibly worse, in the days to come.

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