TorrentFreak

Yesterday Google kindly published a database of takedown requests sent to the search giant on copyright grounds. The DMCA notices are supposed to help protect legitimate sales but entertainment companies sending them are clearly having problems. Witness some of the world’s biggest music and movie companies taking down everything from news articles promoting their latest releases, to their very own marketing content.

Following in the footsteps of other courts around Europe, a Greek court has ordered the country’s ISPs to start censoring sites that allegedly infringe copyright. The blockades, which were requested by music rights organizations against two specific sites, will be implemented by DNS record tampering and IP address filtering.

Every single ISP in India has been ordered to block 104 sites offering unauthorized music. A total of 387 ISPs must block the sites immediately via DNS and IP address blocking, backed up with Deep Packet Inspection. While the IFPI praised the action, their Indian counterparts are singing are more interesting tune – they don’t want to destroy their opponents, but bring them into the business.

The DMCA was once drafted to protect the interests of copyright holders, allowing them to take infringing content offline. Today, however, the system is systematically abused by rightsholders as an overbroad censorship tool. One third of the notices sent to Google are false, companies like Microsoft censor perfectly legal sites, and others use the DMCA to get back at competitors.

A “human error” carried out by the police resulted in thousands of websites being completely blocked at the DNS level yesterday. Danish visitors to around 8,000 sites including Google and Facebook were informed that the sites were being blocked by the country’s High Tech Crime Unit due to them offering child pornography, a situation which persisted for several hours.

Responding to a question asking what film directors think when people torrent their work, filmmaker Heather Ferreira responded with an unusual tirade against the MPAA. According to her, the movie industry group is a censorship outfit that restricts the creative freedom of filmmakers. As such, the MPAA is hurting the film business more than file-sharers do.

In the wake of the online protests against the pending PIPA and SOPA anti-piracy bills, Rasmussen asked US voters what their opinion is on the issue. Should the public worry more about piracy or Internet censorship? Through a telephone survey voters were asked the following question. “Which is a bigger problem, that some people download [...]