Last year the former president of Brazil posed with Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde and vowed not to cave in to the interests of the copyright lobby. But with the change of leadership the MPAA sees new chances, and so Frazier went to Brazil to convince local politicians that tougher anti-piracy laws are needed.

In common with most Latin American countries, piracy is widespread in Brazil. According to a recent study more than half of all people living in urban areas regularly pirate movies, something the MPAA believes has to be stopped.

In an interview with local newspaper Folha, Frazier commented on the threat piracy poses to the major studios, responding with the classic textbook answers we’ve heard hundreds of times before.

“If you do not believe in the value of creativity, the importance of protecting it and the need to reward those who produce, then maybe you can justify piracy. But in that case you’ll be doing great harm to culture,” Frazier said. Please note the words ‘creativity’ and ‘culture’ in his answer, as we’ll come back to that later.

The reporter then went on to ask how important copyright really is when 44% of households in Brazil are not connected to the sewer system. Not really a fair question, but Frazier made it very clear that even when people are starving it would be immoral to ‘steal’ entertainment from U.S. corporations.

“Obviously, governments and societies have to work to make sure that the population has access to the basics in order to survive, but that does not mean you should ignore other things. Companies must live together because they respect each other and respect that people do not steal from one another. Even if you battle to put food on your plate, it is immoral to steal,” he said.

Things got more interesting when Frazier responded in a surprisingly open manner when asked about Creative Commons licenses, which allow for a more flexible approach to copyright. Creative Commons licenses are very popular in Brazil and the reporter wanted to know what the MPAA’s view on this approach is.

“They [Creative Commons supporters] don’t always agree with what we advocate,” Frazier responded. “And you are talking about democratizing culture, this is not in our interests. It really isn’t my interest.”

Although this answer may not really come as a surprise, combined with his previous answers it shows how subjective the MPAA’s view on creativity and culture is. According to the MPAA piracy is ruining culture, but at the same time they are not allowing others to use even tiny snippets of their works.

The MPAA is apparently only interested in creativity and culture when it applies to the works their studios produce. Needless to say, this isn’t necessarily what’s most beneficial to society. The MPAA is merely protecting their corporate interests.

For the general public, culture and creativity are probably better off with less restrictive copyright laws. This doesn’t mean that it should be okay to pirate every Hollywood blockbuster, but the laws that are put in place to please the movie studios are the same ones that cripple the creativity of tens of thousands of other artists and the public at large.

To the MPAA and many others in the entertainment industry, copyright has little to do with the word right, nor with creativity and culture. Instead, it’s a restrictive tool that allows works to be traded, leased and licensed in return for money.

Indeed, democratizing culture is not in the MPAA’s interest, but maximizing profits and control is.

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

The lawsuit was issued against Cadare Information Technology Ltd, a company which controls the iPlay.com.br site.

iPlay distributed a piece of popular P2P file-sharing software known as K-Lite Nitro, which allows users to download from several P2P networks including Gnutella, OpenFT and Ares.

In February this year a judge decided that rather than force iPlay to remove K-Lite Nitro from its site, the software should have a copyright filter implemented instead, to block sharing of unauthorized music. The anti-piracy groups promptly provided a list of 4 million tracks to be filtered.

However, the ruling fell flat since iPlay are not the developers of the software and have no control over it, so the case headed back to court.

Following a trial on August 25th, on Monday this week the 6th Civil Chamber of the Court of Paraná in southern Brazil handed down an unprecedented ruling.

The judge came to the conclusion that since the proposed K-Lite Nitro filtering mechanism was ineffective, he had no alternative than to issue a complete ban on the software instead, saying that the website offering it would be assisting the copyright infringements of its users.

He went on to suggest that any website offering the software alongside advertising (i.e, trying to profit from offering it) would be committing a crime, punishable by between two and four years in jail.

“By this logic, virtually any site in Brazil that offers P2P clients would be subject to accountability, to have their business threatened by the alleged illegality of the act of hosting certain types of software,” said Omar Kaminski, author of attorney Internet Legal, a blog specializing in IT law.

Announcing that Cadare Information Technology will appeal the decision, Nelson Cadare Luciano, owner of iPlay said: “We will defend ourselves because we always had the feeling that it [K-Lite Nitro] is not illegal since you can use it to share legal content as well.”

APCM said that the ruling is “important for the future of the digital music market in Brazil.”

Currently K-Lite Nitro has been removed from the iPlay site, but can be obtained from a number of other sources.

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

The International Free Software Forum (FISL) is an annual event sponsored by the Free Software Association taking place in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The event sees the coming together of researchers, social movements, entrepreneurs, hackers and free information advocates, this year including Peter Sunde, spokesman for The Pirate Bay.

At the event yesterday was a rather high-profile individual, Brazil’s President Lula. The President took the opportunity to publicly criticize the legislation supported by Senator Eduardo Azeredo.

“In our government it is prohibited to prohibit,” said the president during his speech at the event. “I consider this bill a form of censorship,” he added.

After meeting with others including Richard Stallman, President Lula noted that “..the Internet must continue free,” adding ”..the freedom is the source of the creativity”.

Also invited to the event was someone with perhaps an even higher profile in Internet-related issues than the president himself, The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde. Not wanting to miss out on a great photo opportunity to boost his popularity, President Lula Peter Sunde posed with Peter Sunde President Lula.

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

The current wording of the proposals have strong opposition in Brazil and an online petition against the legislation has more than 148,000 signatures. There has even been opposition from other politicians, with the secretary of legislative affairs Peter Abramovay commenting, “This surveillance could turn everyone on the Internet into a criminal. The Internet is a space of freedom par excellence, and should not be a place of fear,” he said.

However, the senator pushing for the legislation should look closer to home, since an investigation by Congressoemfoco has turned up something of significant interest on the Brazilian senate’s intranet, which runs counter to their mission statement shown below;

To provide and manage solutions for information technology and communications for the Senate, and improve work processes, contributing to the excellence and ethics fulfillment of its institutional role for the benefit of Brazilian society

To Congressoemfoco’s surprise, what they discovered on the government servers was a small mountain of copyrighted movies, music and games in several folders. These folders are available to the Senate’s staff and the senators themselves, including Eduardo Azeredo, the senator pushing for tough legislation against pirates.

Accessing the material proved easy enough. Anyone on the network could make a few clicks to get access to the folders. One of them around 6.4Gb in size contained music from Nelly Furtado through to albums by Megadeth, along with Brazilian acts and more well known groups such as Pink Floyd. Other folders included many top-rated PC games. Movies didn’t escape either, with Hollywood movies such as Iron Man, a DVD screener copy of Gran Torino and Happy Feet, all available for download by those running the country.

Once the government found out about this situation, they took steps to remedy it, promising an ‘internal investigation’ although sources suggest that this will likely amount to little more than a quick band-aid application.

“A network with more than ten thousand users is not easy [to monitor],” they said.

Thanks Luiz

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

On February 1st, after action by Brazil’s IFPI and MPA-affiliated Antipirataria Association Cinema and Música (APCM), the Legendas.TV site was taken down. APCM, which represents the interests of Universal, Warner, SonyBMG, Disney, Paramount, Fox and others, managed to force the site offline after threatening SoftLayer, the datacenter where the website was hosted.

According to Legendas.TV admins, although APCM issued a DMCA complaint, it was incorrectly formatted. APCM did not demand the removal of specific items (as is usual under the DMCA) but instead demanded that access to the entire server was terminated.

“In order to prevent misuse of our Terms of Service,” said SoftLayer in an email to Legendas.TV, “we have blocked access to the IP associated with the abuse report and request that this site be removed from our network.” The datacenter then blocked external access to the site.

“The APCM confirms that it requested withdrawal of the site Legendas TV network of computers worldwide,” said the group in a statement. “It is important to emphasize that the action was taken because its users were violating copyright. When a user makes the unauthorized copy of an audiovisual work available, it hurts everyone who worked in the production chain: producers, authors, actors, actresses, camera operators, scriptwriters, directors, marketing staff, production studio workers and translators etc.”

The reaction from angry fans was immediate. On Monday, hackers took over the APCM site and defaced it. Popups on the site said “Live For Downloads” – when clicked, visitors were redirected to downloads on Mininova.

APCM announced it was “taking all measures” to get its site back online, including “all other measures deemed appropriate,” but the site is still non-operational, four days after the attack.

The administrators of Legendas have created a temporary site where they explain why the site went down along with plans of a return online. After raising the necessary funds, the site will migrate to a new datacenter, maybe in The Netherlands or Sweden – and possibly with help from The Pirate Bay.

In contrast to the anti-piracy site which remains inoperable, already a new ‘lite’ version of Legendas.TV is back online, but it won’t stop there.

“We are returning with the full site this week, stronger than ever,” said a Legendas.TV administrator in a statement.

Earlier in 2009, APCM launched a campaign that claimed that subtitles from Legendas.TV were being used in commercially pirated DVDs, which were later sold on the streets. Legendas.TV vigorously denied this.

InSUBs, another Brazilian subtitling site, has also been taken offline.

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

These sort of problem – when users in one geographical location can access a site when others can’t – is usually down to DNS issues which generally resolve themselves in a short time. However, in the case of Demonoid, this doesn’t appear to offer the answer.

According to reports we’ve received, when users from the Netherlands try to access Demonoid all they get is a blank white page. However, should they try to access the site using a proxy or VPN making the visitor appear they are not from the Netherlands, the user can now gain access. The block happens on all the major ISPs, and are persistent.

Canadians, having been previously blocked, remain unblocked, presumably after Demonoid fell out of range of the CRIA. However, more recently reports indicate that not only are Dutch users blocked from Demonoid, but in an unlikely scenario, Brazilians appear to be blocked too. So what could be at the bottom of this?

There could be some purely technical issues with the web, but as time goes on, this seems less and less likely. It is of course possible that Demonoid itself has some technical problems, having reported that the site had a few bugs to be ironed out around 9 days ago or so. If this is the case, there will be lots of relieved people around.

It’s also possible that there is a legal angle to these blocks, after all this type of action by Demonoid isn’t new in its quest to stay within the law. Around 12 months ago Demonoid blocked Dutch users for a while, as the pressure from BREIN increased quietly behind the scenes, and then later on very publicly blocked millions of Canadians following pressure from the CRIA, only to unblock them again after moving to ‘safer’ Ukraine-based hosting.

But, if Ukraine is ‘safe’ as a host country, why block the Netherlands, and why block Brazil of all places? As it turns out there is a Demonoid/Brazil link, in that the Demonoid.com domain has a protected WHOIS provided by the Brazilian-based Neurocube.com, which in turn is hosted in the Netherlands at Demonoid’s old host, LeaseWeb. And of course, Netherlands-based anti-piracy group BREIN aren’t the biggest supporters of Demonoid either – and have lots of resources – but whether or not they still hold anything over the site in order to force a block of an entire country is a matter of speculation.

In the absence of any announcement from the new admin of Demonoid (which seems incredibly unlikely), it’s some users of Demonoid who asked us to find out why they can’t access the site. Unfortunately, we don’t have the answer for them right now, maybe they will become more clear in the future.

In the meantime, please keep us updated in the comments with access reports from your country and we’ll try to keep people updated on the position for Dutch and Brazilian Demonoid fans. If you can or cannot access Demonoid, we’d like to hear from you.

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

The professors are from the Centre for Technology and Society, a part of the prestigious Brazilian think-tank Fundação Getulio Vargas.

The reason for barring those professors entry could be that the organisation they are a part of, the Centre for Technology and Society, has prepared a manifesto that proposes to “amend” Brazilian copyright law. The IFPI probably didn’t want them around while they announced their new round of lawsuits where they try to catch another 8,000 alleged file sharers. Makes sense doesn’t it?

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry or the IFPI (official website) represents almost 1500 record companies in 75 countries and has announced similar anti-piracy campaigns in the past.

The official explanation for barring the profs was that the seating room could only hold 40 people. The funny thing is however that there were already 50 people in the room! So, they asked if they could stand and at least listen to the debate. Apparently, there wasn’t even room for standing. What really adds the cherry to this tropical sundae of suspicious behaviour is the fact that the professors were officially invited and given permission to participate.

Later on it was discovered from various news agencies including Reuters and the AP that it was in fact a lie and that there was ample seating available in the room.

A petition has been started to support the manifesto prepared by the Professors’ organisation. If you’re interested, you might want to have a look it at here (scroll down for the English version).

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