Quite simply, rightsholders are having problems getting it right. Check out these ridiculous takedowns from some of the world’s leading entertainment companies against sites that have done nothing wrong.

Warner Brothers: Wrath of the Titans

When a movie’s either just about to come out or already doing the rounds, people want to find out about it. Amazingly, Warner and their anti-piracy partners managed to undermine their own marketing campaign for Wrath of the Titans with DMCAs sent to Google.

Through this DMCA takedown Warner requested the removal of the IMDb listing for their own movie.

But it didn’t stop there. Warner also asked Google to delist the official trailer on Apple along with the ones on Hulu, The Guardian and FilmoFilia. In addition, the studio asked for an article on BBC America to be removed along with a listing on a site that helps people find theaters to watch the movie.

IMDb

As can be seen here, Warner issued a takedown for the IMDb listing for its own movie Happy Feet Two. They were in good company since Paramount Pictures, NBC Universal and other rights holders did the same for IMDb information pages covering their content.

Hulu, Crackle

Hulu has also become an unlikely target. In addition to the Warner takedown mentioned above, UFC owner Zuffa also asked Google to delist its own content on the authorized video site.

Sony-owned Crackle was picked on too, when Warner Bros. asked Google to delist an information page about its movie Hall Pass.

Other news and information sites

Bizarrely, news sites are being hit with takedowns too. In addition to the Warner instance mentioned above, the RIAA asked Google to delist a review of the album Own The Night published on The Guardian. The artist behind the album is Lady Antebellum, signed to RIAA-member Capitol Records.

Even more worrying, the RIAA asked Google to delist Last.fm’s entire Electro Pop section because they thought it carried a pirate copy of All About Tonight by Pixie Lott.

Warner also reappeared later on, asking Google to delist a page on news site NME which lists information on the latest movies, which at the time included information on the movie Hall Pass. The same page on NME was targeted on several other occasions, including by anti-piracy company DtecNet on behalf of Lionsgate, who had info on The Hunger Games delisted.

Hollywood Reporter didn’t fare much better either. Sony Pictures asked Google to swing the banhammer against the popular news site after it published an article called “Trent Reznor Releases Six Free Tracks From ‘Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ Soundtrack” and Sony mistook it for a DVDRIP.

But as soon as Sony’s piracy fears on the first ‘Dragon Tattoo’ movie had subsided they were back as strong as ever with the sequel. This time the sinner was Wikipedia who dared to put up an information page on the movie The Girl Who Played With Fire. Luckily Sony were on hand to ask Google to delist the page.

Although just a tiny percentage of the thousands of correct takedowns issued, the above shows that overbroad filters and poorly considered notices can impact businesses who shouldn’t be affected by them, studios and people who merely report on their content alike.

Fortunately, Google says it does not comply with all takedown requests, rejecting a few percent and reinstating others at later dates, including some of the above.

Source: Copyright Holders Punish Themselves With Crazy DMCA Takedowns

Today we can report that Greece is the latest country to walk down the controversial path of web censorship for the protection of intellectual property. The Athens First Instance Court has just handed down a ruling which orders the country’s ISPs to begin censoring a pair of sites the music industry says are infringing their copyrights on a grand scale.

The ruling is based on Article 64A of law 2121/1993 which states that “Rightsholders may apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe copyright or related rights.”

A similar provision in Section 97A of the UK’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act led to The Pirate Bay being blocked there earlier this month.

Interestingly, neither of the sites to be blocked in Greece is The Pirate Bay, and the unusual features don’t stop there. The first site to be censored is Ellinadiko.com, a music sharing forum that was once very popular with locals. We’re referring to the site in the past tense since it appears to have shut down.

The second site to be blocked is Music-Bazaar.com, a Russian operated and hosted ‘AllofMP3′-style webstore selling MP3s at bargain basement prices. These sites are a thorn in the side of the recording industry but operate with both impunity and arguable legality in Russia.

The blocks will be initiated in two ways. ISPs will have to tamper with their DNS records so that subscribers trying to access the sites will be redirected elsewhere, probably to an ISP holding page.

Second, and to thwart people trying to visit the sites without the use of a domain name at all, the IP addresses for the sites will be filtered out. However, according to discussion on Greek file-sharing forums, the IP addresses listed in the court order are no longer in use by either site having been changed a while ago.

Following similar actions taken by the Dutch and UK Pirate parties, the Greek Pirate Party are indicating that they are “ready to implement any lawful technological measure to ensure freedom of communication, speech and exchange ideas online and in society.”

Source: Greek Court Orders ISP Blockades of ‘Pirate’ Music Sites

“We encourage the Indian film industry to reject as we have, the false argument that you cannot be pro-technology and pro-copyright at the same time,” he continued.

In framing “content theft” as a problem affecting the county’s middle-classes and alongside a clear dig at the likes of Google and Wikipedia, Dodd’s words could have been pulled verbatim from any pro-SOPA speech. But unlike the United States, India doesn’t need new legislation to allow site blocking – they already have it – and Dodd must be as jealous as hell.

Indian film companies have previously obtained court orders to have sites blocked at the ISP level but in recent weeks the IMI, the RIAA-like Indian Music Industry trade group, has shown the movie industry how it’s really done.

In a series of court actions at the Calcutta High Court, 142 music companies of the IMI have succeeded in obtaining orders to force every ISP in India – 387 in total – to block 104 sites (list here) the industry accuses of online piracy.

And when it comes to implementing the blocks, there are no half-measures. ISPs have been ordered to implement DNS and IP address blockades and for those thinking of using a DNS outside India, Deep Packet Inspection will step in to ensure the domains remain blocked.

“This decision is a victory for the rule of law online and a blow to those illegal businesses that want to build revenues by violating the rights of others,” said IFPI CEO Frances Moore in a statement.

But in a clear signal that for the music and movie industries even the toughest of anti-piracy measures are never enough, Moore says that current developments are a good start.

“The court ruled that blocking is a proportionate and effective way to tackle website piracy,” Moore noted, adding that the Indian government should now “build on this progress” by advancing further legislation to tackle digital piracy.

As tough as the Indian court orders are, already their weaknesses are being probed. One of the key sites on the lists – Songs.pk – has already circumvented the blockade by resurfacing with the new URL of Songspk.pk since the blockade was incapable of physically taking the Czech-hosted site offline.

But although the Indian labels have taken the nuclear option in blocking huge numbers of sites, Apurv Nagpal, CEO of Saregama, one of India’s largest music labels says that they don’t want to destroy their opponents. Interestingly, Saregama acknowledges the pirate sites’ “passion for music” and says the industry wants to befriend them.

“We don’t want these sites to be shut down, we want them to pay a license fee and flourish as a business,” Saregama said. “There are legitimate businesses in operation too. The scope is there, and we want these sites to be legal.”

It would be a cold day in hell before Westerners heard the likes of Chris Dodd or Frances Moore make a statement as radical as that. But if the stick is to work long-term it has to be backed up with a sizable carrot, and if the pirate sites really do only want money, surely that’s their Achilles’ heel right there.

Source: Court Orders SOPA-style Blackout of 100+ Music Sites

The article in question was mysteriously flagged as being infringing by an automated DMCA takedown tool. An honest mistake according to the people who sent the notice, but one that doesn’t stand in isolation.

Google previously noted that that 37% of all DMCA notices they receive are not valid copyright claims.

One of the problems is that many rightsholders use completely automated systems to inform Google and other service providers of infringements. They swear under penalty of perjury that the notices are correct, but this is often an outright lie.

Microsoft, for example, has sent Google dozens of notices about the massive infringements that occur on the site Youhavedownloaded.com, a site that is completely non-infringing. As a result, many pages of the website have been de-listed from Google’s search results, directly damaging the site’s owners.

Other rightsholders make even stranger mistakes by massively taking down content that they don’t own. The adult content outfit AFS Media for example asked Google to remove links to the movies Braveheart, Monsters Inc, Green Lantern and many more titles that have nothing to do with the content they produce.

Similar mistakes are made at NBC Universal who got Google to censor the independent and free-to-share movie A Lonely Place for Dying.

Or again by Microsoft, who successfully requested Google to remove a link to a copy of the open source operating system Kubuntu.

And then there’s YouTube’s content-ID system. We previously outlined many mistakes that were made by the DMCA-style anti-piracy filter, resulting in tens of thousands of ridiculously inaccurate claims.

This week yet another example came up when YouTube labeled birds tweeting in the background of a video as copyrighted music. Again a mistake, but one that probably would have never been corrected if Reddit and Hacker News hadn’t picked it up.

Aside from the mistakes outlined above, there’s also a darker side to DMCA abuse. Google previously revealed that 57% of all the DMCA notices they receive come from companies targeting competitors.

The “competition” angle also ties into the row between Megaupload and Universal Music Group. The latter removed a promo video from the cyberlocker from YouTube on copyright grounds, without owning the rights to any of the material.

It’s safe to say that the DMCA is broadly abused. Thousands of automated notices with hundreds of links each are sent out on a daily basis, turning it into a broad censorship tool. Only the tip of the iceberg is visible to the public thanks to companies like Google who publish some of the notices online.

We can only wonder what’s happening behind the scenes at other sites, but it’s not going to be any better.

Just a few months ago the cyberlocker service Hotfile sued Warner Bros. for DMCA abuse. In the suit Hotfile accuses the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don’t hold the copyrights to, including open source software.

Not good.

While we’re the first to admit that copyright holders need tools to protect their work from being infringed, mistakes and abuse as outlined above shouldn’t go unpunished. The DMCA was never intended to be an overbroad and automated piracy filter in the first place.

The above also illustrates why it’s dangerous to allow rightsholders to take entire websites offline, as the SOPA and PIPA bills would allow. The MPAA and RIAA have said many times that legitimate sites would never be affected, but didn’t they say exactly the same about the DMCA?

Source: DMCA: Horrors of a Broad and Automated Censorship Tool

Some people believe that all information should be free and as adults it should be our right to be able to make our own choices in deciding what to view. In other countries that is not an option since oppressive regimes take control in order to maintain their power base.

In the West, online censorship takes different forms. In addition to censorship aimed at tackling serious criminality, increasingly entertainment companies are pushing to have sites blocked to protect their corporate interests. Opponents argue that a free and open Internet overrides the need to protect a rightsholder every time, and that mechanisms such as DNS blockades could break the Internet.

In Denmark yesterday the Internet didn’t exactly collapse, but for thousands of businesses it was hardly service as usual.

For several hours, customers of ISP Siminn (although it could have easily been the whole country) were denied access to thousands of websites including Google and Facebook. When attempting to view any of the blocked pages visitors were given a worrying message relating to the most emotive blocking reason of all – the protection of children.

“The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police [NITEC], who assist in investigations into crime on the internet, has informed Siminn Denmark A/S, that the internet page which your browser has tried to get in contact with may contain material which could be regarded as child pornography,” the message began.

“Upon the request of The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police, Siminn Denmark A/S has blocked the access to the internet page.”

NITEC is responsible for maintaining a list of sites which they want to be made unavailable to Danish citizens. Each day the country’s Internet service providers retrieve the list and then apply DNS blockades across their infrastructure. Yesterday, however, someone made a huge mistake.

According to NITEC chief Johnny Lundberg, it began when an employee at the police center decided to move from his own computer to that of a colleague.

“He sat down and was about to make an investigation, and in doing so he placed a list of legitimate sites in the wrong folder,” Lundberg explained. “Before becoming aware of the error, two ISPs retrieved the list of sites.”

That list contained 8,000 sites.

After becoming aware of the problem NITEC corrected the error but it took at least 3 hours for customers of the ISPs to regain access to the sites in question. Fortunately no more ISPs adopted the erroneous lists in the meantime, but that was by sheer luck.

Lundberg said that his organization was sorry for the mistake and has now adopted a new system whereby blocked sites have to now be approved by two employees instead of one, although why that was not the case already for such a serious process is up for debate.

The other question is how at the flick of a switch do 8,000 sites suddenly get added to a blacklist – for whatever reason – without any kind of oversight. Denmark’s IT-Political Association is critical and has called for ISPs to cease cooperation with the voluntary scheme which operates without any kind of judicial review.

“Today’s story shows that the police are not able to secure against manual errors that could escalate into something that actually works as a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet,” the group said in a statement.

Source: Police Censor Google, Facebook and 8,000 Other Sites by Accident

On the contrary, the MPAA is often disliked for their aggressive censorship regime. Not SOPA-style Internet censorship but film censorship, allegedly used to protect the interests of the major studios.

Aside from leading the war on piracy, the MPAA is also the moral judge who decides what films the public is allowed to see. Through its ratings system they can make or break films. Just ask South Park creator Matt Stone or watch “This Film is Not Yet Rated” to get an idea of what’s going on behind the scenes. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Another filmmaker who came out against the MPAA recently is small-time film director Heather Ferreira who wrote a flaming rant directed at the MPAA on Quora. According to her, pirates are not the threat – it’s the MPAA that’s killing creative filmmaking through its censorship regime.

“What I see when I examine the MPAA is not a friendly guardian of feature film directors’ rights, even at the studio level. Instead, I see a very large lobby that began as a Christian right-wing organization instituted to keep minorities off motion picture screens, promote racism and homophobia, and restrict creative freedom in America,” she writes.

Ferreira feels left out in the cold by the movie group, and gives several examples of trivial censorship rules filmmakers have to abide by today.

“The Motion Picture Association of America has never written me a paycheck for anything. They’re not backing my picture. These are not nice guys. They are not in this business to help filmmakers at all.”

“They’re censors waiting to pounce my film and yours with an NC-17 rating for violence or for showing two consenting adults laughing while enjoying sex (rape however is okay), while curiously no one censors the news media for showing [..] eight-year-olds Paris Hilton’s latest upskirt with very little pixellated out,” she writes.

“Isn’t that pauseworthy? If there’s no censors for the news, why for dramatic movies and television?”

Eventually, Ferreira gets to answering the original question and then it becomes evident that she dislikes the MPAA much more than those who download her work. “Thanks. I hope you enjoyed it,” would be her response to pirates who download her work.

“What the MAFIAA fails to realize is p2p is not a black and white issue of ‘piracy is wrong; all of it; and if you didn’t pay us, you’re a criminal’,” she writes.

Ferreira then goes on to note that the MPAA could better address piracy by stopping killing the creativity of filmmakers, and offer reasonably priced and top quality films. After all, pirates are potential customers.

“They’re a potential paying future audience member. The technology has changed. The playing field is different now. We need to adapt to it, not it to us,” she ends.

Although the above is just a single example of a filmmaker’s disappointment with the MPAA, a rather extreme one too, Ferreira is not alone. The lobby group represents the major studios who themselves are also guilty of crushing the creative dreams of independent filmmakers.

Just last week a former film student detailed how his career was ruined by a major movie studio. In 2001, the student found inspiration for his thesis in a short story from Isaac Asimov’s that was part of the book “I Robot.” But even though he had consent from the Asimov estate, a major studio threatened to take him down if he dared to bring it out. Turns out that studio was working on a film titled “I Robot.”

This week another major studio sued the Corleone estate because they want to publish a “Godfather” sequel. The studio claims that it’s to “protect the integrity and reputation of The Godfather trilogy.”

It would be kind of weak to say that the questionable censorship practices described above are an excuse to go and pirate movies. However, they are examples of how common protectionism and censorship is among the biggest players in Hollywood, and that this may be more detrimental to creativity than piracy will ever be.

Source: Filmmaker: MPAA Is a Censorship Group, Go Torrent!

Alongside the millions who protest against these increasing censorship initiatives, there’s also a group of people who come up with ways to route around it. One of these projects is the RePress plugin for WordPress.

The plugin is developed by the hosting company Greenhost and allows everyone with a WordPress blog to start a proxy for sites that are censored elsewhere in the world. As an example, Greenhost have setup a Pirate Bay and Wikileaks proxy.

“By adding this plug-in to your WordPress website it will start functioning as a proxy and uncensor any blocked website you’d like,” Greenhost explains. “The only thing you’ll need is a WordPress website and the ability to install new plug-ins. After that you can maintain a list of websites you’d like to keep open freely available on the web.”

One of the main motivations for the plugin’s developers was to provide people in the Netherlands full access to The Pirate Bay when the recent court order is enforced. However, if SOPA or PIPA pass there might also be a need for people in the US to have a tool like this.

“We hope people outside Holland use the plug-in to uncensor piratebay.org, as it is in danger of being blocked in our country after a court-ruling. In the Netherlands we could then uncensor websites for people in oppressive regimes like Iran, Syria or the US after SOPA is passed.”

“[SOPA and PIPA] are said to defend the interests of the Entertainment industry, but will mainly cause grave and undeniable damage to the Open and Free web and all of its users: from the end-consumer to the cutting edge developers and inventors. Our aim is to make this impossible,” the Greenhost team notes.

Although the plugin can’t prevent domain names from being seized, it is indeed a good solution to bypass all of the common blocking measures that are used today.

The RePress initiative is applauded by several politicians, including European Parliament member Marietje Schaake. “This is a fantastic opportunity for human rights activists and a solution for people who face technological censorship and repression,” she told Webwereld.

To those eager to start their own proxy of blocked websites, RePress can be downloaded in the WordPress repository.

Source: WordPress Plugin Unblocks Censored Sites, Including The Pirate Bay

The “Daddy, I want a pony” tactic goes roughly like this:

Little girl: Daddy, I want a pony! Want pony! Want want want pony!
Dad: Uhm, no, uhm, uhm, no, how about a dog?
Little girl: No no no NO! Want pony! PONY! …Dog? Well, ok then.

At this point the dad thinks, “Phew, that was a close call!”. The little girl on the other hand thinks “Wow, that’s the easiest dog I ever got.” That’s the “Daddy, I want a pony” tactic.

You saw it with the DMCA in the United States, which severely restricted our rights to our own property, and the corresponding InfoSoc directive in the European Union. You see it right now with ACTA, which again shows this “the most offensive, repugnant may be gone” attitude, despite still being a giant leap backwards for human rights. You’ve seen it with the Data Retention Directive.

And each time, we defend and defeat the worst parts, burning our activist reserves way into the red, and then there’s another assault three years later. Plus the fact that while we’re fighting one of these evils, another 11 pass in the background.

The point is, as long as we’re just defending, we will always be on the retreat, and we will always lose. The copyright industry has the initiative and the best we can do is to delay or reduce the damages done. That’s not good enough.

It gets worse. The copyright industry has also gotten the rights to collect levies from trade with unrelated items, notably blank media but as unrelated as game consoles, because they can theoretically be used to copy in legal ways. Did you get that? It does not break the copyright monopoly to copy in these ways, and just therefore the copyright industry is compensated.

Let’s take that again.

The copyright monopoly, as wet a blanket as it may seem, does not cover every conceivable act of copying. There are many acts of copying that are fully legal and not covered. But in the industry’s sense of entitlement, they have demanded — and received — compensation for the areas where their monopoly does not extend. Compensation from taxpayer money to a private industry. For not having a monopoly. Really, can you believe this?

In this compensation scheme, they collect ridiculous amounts of money every year for doing absolutely nothing. A lot of the money goes straight towards the war on our civil rights and to collect yet more taxpayer money in new “Daddy, I want a pony” schemes. For us, it’s a vicious circle. Anybody familiar with incentives knows that it’s an absolutely terrible way of optimizing production to give money to an industry regardless of whether they’re doing the right thing, the wrong thing, or no thing at all.

So, to summarize, the copyright industry has put itself in a position where they get insane amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing, and use that money to buy laws that give them even more money and restrict our freedoms of speech. That is not just unacceptable. That is repulsive.

It comes as no surprise that I think the copyright monopoly is harmful (or at best useless) as a whole, and that creativity, business, and civil liberties would be much better off without it. Having studied the topic for six years straight, I discover more and more arrows that point in this direction.

But I’m also pragmatic enough to realize that if you shoot for the moon and insist on not doing any steps in between, you’re not only never going to the moon, but you’re also never taking a single step forward. Besides, getting a small way to the moon may be enough to give you that great view you really wanted. In the same vein, 99% of the problems with today’s copyright monopoly can be solved with a much smaller reform that is both reasonable, achievable and doable.

When it comes to large matters, after all, you can’t change all of the rules of the game overnight. So let’s shoot for a balanced, reasonable proposal that restores our civil liberties while retaining some of today’s investment incentives in culture.

I’m borrowing this blueprint from the Green group in the European Parliament (where, in turn, it came from the Pirate delegation). Let’s try this for a legislation package in Europe, the United States, Australia, and everywhere else we can:

• It must be made absolutely clear that the copyright monopoly does not extend to what an ordinary person can do with ordinary equipment in their home and spare time; it regulates commercial, intent-to-profit activity only. Specifically, file sharing is always legal.
• Free sampling. There must be exceptions that make it legal to create mashups and remixes. Quotation rights, like those that exist for text, must be extended to sound and video.
• Digital Restrictions Management should preferably be outlawed, as it is a type of fraud nullifying consumer and citizen rights, but at least, it must always be legal to circumvent.
• The baseline commercial copyright monopoly is shortened to a reasonable five years from publication, extendable to twenty years through registration of the work in a copyright monopoly database.
• The public domain must be strengthened.
• Net neutrality must be guaranteed.
• Levies on blank media are outlawed.
• Overall, it must always be clear where the line goes; “the courts will sort it out” areas are not acceptable and tantamount to outlawing.

This reasonable, balanced, achievable, and doable proposal would solve 99% of today’s problems, while still maintaining all four aspects of the copyright monopoly. It solves the witch-hunt on teenagers sharing TV series. It solves the problem with orphan works and restores our access to the cultural heritage of the 20th century. It solves the problem with the copyright industry getting taxpayer money for nothing. On the other hand it still maintains a 20-year commercial monopoly (at the most) for investments in cultural productions, defeating every argument from the copyright industry lobby that the monopoly is needed for more culture to be created.

While I don’t agree with patent monopolies, it’s a good talking point here that if pharma companies can do with a 20-year commercial monopoly (patents), then that term should certainly suffice for Disney and Elvis, too.

This, or something along these lines, is what we need to do. We need to go on the offensive for our freedom of speech.

Source: It’s Time To Go On The Offensive For Freedom Of Speech

Those pointing to China as an example of how bad things can get should now focus a little closer to the west, on the outskirts of Europe to be precise.

From January 6th, Belarus, which became independent in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, will begin severely restricting what its citizens can do on the Internet. New legislation requires that anyone doing business in the country may only utilize fully local Internet domains when carrying out their activities online.

As highlighted by the Law Library of Congress, this means that it will become illegal for locals to use a site such as Amazon.com, which has no official Belarusian presence. Indeed, browsing any website outside the country will be punishable with fines of up to $125.

The initial decree, issued in February 2010 by President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, requires the compulsory registration of all web sites which must then be hosted in the country.

The potential damage to the Belarus economy and their growth from online trade will be significant. According to Alexa, some of the world’s biggest sites are listed in the country’s Top 20 most-visited list including Google, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia, all of which have .com domains and US hosting. Indeed, only two sites in the Belarusian Top 10 currently appear to be ‘legal’ for local access.

Additionally, the legislation will also hold Internet providers, such as cafés providing wifi, responsible for the actions of their customers if they are found to be using foreign sites. The same responsibilities lie with home Internet subscribers who share their connections with others.

The suggestion is that such providers, commercial or domestic, will have to monitor for foreign website use and report the findings to authorities. The legislation also ensures there is plenty of data to hand over. As a minimum, ISPs and webhosts will be required to record the names and passport details of customers, along with their domain names, a description of their site’s activities and IP addresses allocated.

So for now, even Google’s Belarusian variant Google.by seems to fall outside the legal reach of citizens of Belarus, hosted as it is in the United States. Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia have further problems, since the .BY variants of their domains have been registered by other entities.

Interestingly, while Belarus National State Television has previously aired pirated movies such as The Hurt Locker, they won’t now be able to grab them from foreign torrent sites as they did in the past. RUTracker, one of Russia’s largest torrent sites, is Belarus’ 20th most-popular site. However, it too has a non .BY domain and is hosted abroad, rendering it off limits to locals.

Torrents.by will be doing lots of business soon though – hosted and registered in Belarus.

Source: Belarus Bans Browsing of All Foreign Websites

The release went viral and by now more than 200,000 people have installed the add-on. ICE wasn’t happy with this and asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. However, Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.

Today MAFIAAFire delivers a new release that aims to thwart the increasing censorship efforts in countries worldwide. Named “The Pirate Bay Dancing,” the Firefox add-on undoes local DNS and IP blocks by routing users through a series of randomly picked proxies.

The MAFIAAFire team told TorrentFreak that the development of the plugin was partly motivated by SOPA and PIPA, the pending anti-piracy bills in the US.

“DNS and IP blocking is probably the most dangerous part of SOPA/PIPA in terms of ‘breaking the Internet,’ so we tackled that first. We will be going after the other parts of SOPA in later releases but probably not in ‘our usual plugin form’ – the other parts require different solutions that we have already started work on,” we were told.

Although the add-on carries The Pirate Bay in its name it also works with other sites such as Newsbin2 and BTJunkie which are blocked in the UK and Italy respectively. In a broader sense it can also be used to bypass national “firewalls” such as in China, and soon perhaps the US.

Putting the add-on to work only requires two clicks and is completely free.

After the add-on is installed users can specify the websites for which they want it to work, and these sites then trigger a response from the plugin. If someone from Italy for example chooses to unblock The Pirate Bay, the add-on will save this preference and load the site through a proxy on the next visit.

MAFIAAFire is using thousands of proxies which will be rotated constantly, hence the (dirty) dancing. The current version is fully working but TorrentFreak was told that the functionality will be expanded in future releases.

The MAFIAAFire team told TorrentFreak that they were eager to help The Pirate Bay out, as the site’s operators have been an inspiration to them. The Pirate Bay team on their turn will soon feature the add-on on their homepage.

“Saving TPB was a big deal to us, we love the site and how it has stood the test of time while dozens of others fell, bent over or were run over. The MAFIAA have been trying to take down TPB’s sails for years, country by country, this extends its life a little more to give it smooth sailing,” TorrentFreak was told.

“In the bigger picture, other than the US’ SOPA we also have each country experimenting with its own mini-firewall. This makes all those blocks in all those countries, and all the millions the MAFIAA have spent to get to there, useless,” the MAFIAAFire team added.

While the latest MAFIAAFire add-on shows how easy it is to bypass these censorship attempts, supporters of the measures would argue that it will nonetheless stop the vast majority of casual pirates.

The creators of “The Pirate Bay Dancing” are not ignorant of this, but aside from delivering a working product, one of their main goals is to send a signal that censorship is never the right path to take. Judging from the recognition they’ve received so far, they sure have succeeded on that front.

Source: ‘The Pirate Bay Dancing’ Add-On Killls DNS and IP Blockades

Google users searching for terms like “torrent”, “BitTorrent” and “RapidShare” will notice that no suggestions and search results appear before they type the full word. As a consequence, there’s sharp decrease in Google searches for these terms.

Initially only a handful of “piracy-related” terms were censored, but a recent update to the blacklist includes nearly all the top file-sharing websites.

Searches referring to torrent sites such as “thepiratebay,” “the pirate bay,” “isohunt,” “torrentreactor,” “btjunkie,” “kickasstorrents,” “sumotorrent,” “btmon,” “extratorrent” and many others are now excluded from ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘. Interestingly, the full url “thepiratebay.org” is still offered as a suggestion.

The new list further includes several cyberlocker websites that were perviously left unfiltered, such as “4shared,” “filesonic” and “fileserve.” Although Google doesn’t censor the content of the websites in question, the Google searches for the affected terms drop significantly as can be seen below.

By voluntarily censoring parts of their search services, Google is trying to keep on friendly terms with copyright holders. The downside to this is that they put perfectly legitimate companies such as BitTorrent Inc and RapidShare at a disadvantage.

There is currently no clear definition of what Google considers to be piracy-inducing, but Google claims that the blacklist helps to reduce online piracy.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online,” Google spokesman Mistique Cano previously told TorrentFreak.

“This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference,” Cano added.

How positive this difference really is, of course depends on who you ask. IsoHunt owner Gary Fung told TorrentFreak that Google is going down a dangerous path.

“It’s a lot more subtle than the censorship attempts made possible by the pending PROTECT IP and SOPA bills, but it’s still censorship and it starts small. Google is increasingly becoming a self-righteous Big Brother of the Web. So much for ‘Do no evil’,” Fung told us.

A Pirate Bay insider also told TorrentFreak that Google doesn’t live up up to its famous motto.

“”It’s just another step towards censoring their search engine altogether – without a legal basis. We’re also wondering why this happens at almost the same time as they’ve released Google Music – a service where they sell music which in some cases might be found on The Pirate Bay,” he added.

Despite criticism from the public and the businesses affected by their blacklist, Google has said that it will continue to expand its piracy filter. The big question is, where will they draw the line?

Source: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

For the past several days, however, many Fileserve users from the UK have noticed they are unable to download files to their computers using the service.

Initially, users got a standard error message that the download could not be completed, but yesterday users got an updated message telling them that their downloads are being blocked by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF).

Internet Watch Foundation is a self-regulatory body that maintains a list of URLs that point to sexual child abuse and criminally obscene adult content. This list is used by all major UK Internet providers to prevent their subscribers from accessing these files. Unfortunately, however, the blacklist sometimes takes out legitimate services as well.

Fileserve users who try to download a file now see the following message which suggests that upgrading to a premium account will solve the problem, but TorrentFreak has learned that this is not the case. Premium users are also blocked.

Commenting on the issue, Fileserve confirms that a recent addition to the IWF blacklist is indeed causing problems for UK users. Although Fileserve expects that it will be eventually resolved, the file-hoster doesn’t think this will happen on short notice.

“Once again IWF has put Fileserve into watch list until further investigation from their side is done. It is not expected to be lifted within the next few days. IWF for UK is being very thorough in filtering Fileserve users,” the file-hoster informed one of their users.

“Please be reminded that it is not our will to have our UK users suffer from this, our Tech team are now looking into possible solution in getting around this IWF issue,” they added.

At this point little is known about the origin of the problem. It is clear that IWF has started to block one or more Fileserve URLs, but why all downloads are affected remains unknown. This is not the first time that the IWF blacklist has rendered legitimate content unavailable though.

In 2008 the blacklist censored the Wikipedia entry for the album “The Virgin Killer” from the German band Scorpions. This page was reported to IWF by a member of the public, and only after Wikipedia appealed twice did the IWF board decide to take it off the list.

Early January 2009 Archive.org’s Wayback Machine was entirely blocked by a UK ISP because one of the pages was listed on the IWF blacklist. This time the problem was due to conflicting incoming headers at Archive.org, beyond the control of IWF or the ISP.

The above suggests that Fileserve’s problems don’t necessarily have to result from a reconfigured blacklist.

In a week where Internet Censorship is a hot topic, the above is yet another reason why baking censorship tools into law has to be done wisely. In the case of Fileserve the IWF blacklist has rendered their site completely unusable to hundreds of thousands of UK users, something that may cost them if the problem persists.

TorrentFreak contacted the Internet Watch Foundation for a comment, and we will update this article when a response comes in.

Update: IWF confirmed to TorrentFreak that they added a single URL of Fileserve to their list, not the entire domain.

“We received a report of child sexual abuse content hosted on a Fileserve URL which was assessed as criminal under UK law. It is not uncommon to see child sexual abuse content hosted on legitimate cloud storage sites, in our most recent Annual Report we identified this trend as increasing. Our members Virgin Media have been investigating an issue regarding a Fileserve splash page message, the IWF have no control over any of the messages provided by Fileserve,” we were told.

Source: UK Internet Blacklist Censors Fileserve File-Hosting Service

But censorship is a thorny issue, especially when it is entrusted to faceless organizations who simply refuse to be held accountable.

As part of the ParentPort initiative, four leading UK ISPs – BT, Talk Talk, Virgin and Sky – have agreed to ask all new customers on sign-up whether they want explicit material viewable on their connections. Those who decline will face an “inappropriate image” blackout. This censorship, opted for by account holders and facilitated by the ISPs, will be carried out by systems already in place at the service providers.

Systems such as TalkTalk HomeSafe and Virgin Media Security Parental Control already offer subscribers the chance to block a range of sites, but the mandatory requirement to go through the process on sign-up is new. Since March 2011, BT has been offering its Family Protection filtering solution as part of its initial install process and has promised to remind its subscribers on a yearly basis that the service exists and can be activated.

But these systems don’t just censor adult content, they block a wide range of other sites including gambling and file-sharing sites, and its inevitable that some click happy parents will happily trust their ISP’s system to do a good job of blocking stuff they select.

Unfortunately, though, that faith will be completely blind. The blocklists used by the ISPs and other network operators (but not maintained by them) are unavailable for public scrutiny. We’ve asked for them on a number of occasions from numerous places and no one will hand them over. We don’t know for sure what the people behind them are so scared of, but we suspect it’s criticism.

So, considering the proprietary nature of these lists, how are we to know when mission creep sets in? How are we to know when someone, somewhere, decides that because a file-sharing search engine lists adult material, it should therefore be added not only to the file-sharing censorship list, but to the pornography list too?

Think that can’t happen? Think again.

As illustrated by our earlier article on the issue, if a customer decides to select the file-sharing category using TalkTalk’s system, they will no longer be able to access TorrentFreak, despite us being strictly a news source. The article you are reading now, which features the completely well-intended work of the ParentPort website, would be blocked, not because it carries pornography, but for a completely separate reason.

And consider this. According to the Daily Mail the ParentPort website and ISP filtering is just part of the overall initiative. Shops selling “overly-sexual clothes” such as “padded bikinis for seven-year-olds” and “billboards plastered with images of scantily-clad models” will also face restrictions

“There is growing concern about the impact on Britain’s children of adult images on the internet,” says the Mail.

Well let’s hope that future complainers to ParentPort concerned about their 8-year-olds on the Internet don’t take exception to selection of stories shown below taken from today’s Mail Online frontpage, or the faceless censors might get all click happy. Trust us, getting on these lists is easy, getting off is almost impossible.

Let’s protect our children and give them all the support in the world, but let’s do it in a transparent way that is open for discussion and improvement, devoid of the arbitrary decisions of the unaccountable. If parents are going to be encouraged to control what their kids do online, let them do it from an educated position.

When they choose to block a category of sites, show them the consequences of their decision. At least they won’t be surprised when the Daily Mail won’t load.

Or when their kids show them how to access it again.

Source: Will ISP ‘Child Protection’ Website Filtering Hit File-Sharing Sites?

The local anti-piracy movement applauded the verdict, which they see as a landmark case that will open the doors for further censorship attempts. However, it is questionable that it will have much of an effect.

Earlier today we already reported how the usenet indexing site Newzbin2 updated its anti-censorship client to allow Belgians to keep their access to The Pirate Bay. And a few hours later The Pirate Bay team delivered an even easier solution.

“The Judge obviously has no idea what he’s dealing with, because the verdict of this expensive court battle can be easily undone,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak.

“Just a few minutes ago we registered a new domain that’s not listed in the order. We have already started pointing users from Belgium to the new address, so they know where to go when their ISPs implement the DNS blockade.”

The new domain name is “depiraatbaai.be,” the literal translation of The Pirate Bay in Dutch. The new domain is already pointing to The Pirate Bay’s servers and people accessing the standard domain from a Belgian IP-address will be redirected to the new home.

“We have to admit that Belgian domain names are not cheap, but we have to make a stand here,” The Pirate Bay team told us.

The above is a clear example that the people judging on these issues don’t have the slightest idea what they’re dealing with. This is supported by the fact that the actual court order only lists the www domains of The Pirate Bay and not the bare addresses (www.thepiratebay.org vs. thepiratebay.org).

The ‘error’ above was pointed out by Maarten Schenk and soon picked up by the mainstream media in Belgium. They point out that if the verdict is taken literally, the ISPs don’t have to block the domains without the www. A massive failure.

“Let’s hope the ISPs are brave enough to put this theory to the test,” The Pirate Bay team notes.

The take home message is, as always, that there are plenty of options for users and site admins to bypass these and other censorship attempts. Or as John Gilmore once said: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

For the time being the number of Belgian visitors to The Pirate Bay is only going up.

Source: The Pirate Bay Adds Domain to Bypass Court Order

Releasing the browser add-on had a bigger impact than the MAFIAA Fire team could have ever hoped for. The U.S. Government was not amused by this “uncensor tool” and asked Mozilla to pull the it from their site. However, Mozilla refused to do so and the add-on gained Internet fame as a result.

This success motivated the MAFIAAFire team to come up with more anti-censorship tools. Two months ago they released the “Gee! No evil!” plugin which thwarts Google’s search engine censorship, and today they introduce a fresh add-on for Firefox and Chrome, which allows people to find alternative URLs for blocked content.

Named “Slash Unblocker” – a reference to a recent South Park episode – the add-on provides a quick way for people to submit and obtain links for videos or other content that has been taken down or removed.

“The idea is born out of the general frustration you have when you go to a page and see it has been taken down for some stupid reason. Or because the page is “not authorized for viewing in your country”,” the MAFIAAFire team explained to TorrentFreak.

The plugin is pretty straightforward. Whenever you run into a page that contains content which is blocked in your country, or has been taken down entirely, you’ll click on the “Slash Unblocker” button to see if there are alternative sources. The system relies on participation from users, who are encouraged to submit alternative sources when there are none available.

The video below explains in detail how the process works.

With more than 100,000 downloads the previous MAFIAAFire plugins have been a great success. This motivated the team to continue working on new projects that they believe are needed to stop the ever-increasing censorship attempts on the Internet. Not just because the tools are useful, but also to make a statement.

“The message is you CAN fight back, the time to fight back is NOW, we outnumber them in numbers, intelligence, and will,” the MAFIAAFire team told us. “The fact that the U.S. Government tried to interfere with what we are doing is testament to it working.”

Although not everyone will agree with the tactics used, MAFIAAFire is once again proving John Gilmore right:

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Source: MAFIAAFire’s ‘Slash Unblocker’ Revives Blocked and Deleted Videos

According to Google, the blacklist is an effective tool to curb online piracy, even if the terms themselves are not exclusively linked to copyright infringement.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online,” Google spokesman Mistique Cano previously told TorrentFreak.

“This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference,” Cano added.

The question is however, does this filter indeed make a difference?

In the past we’ve pointed out that many people discover piracy-related services based on Google’s suggestions. So, if Google’s censorship attempt would indeed decrease the number of actual searches for the filtered keywords, one could argue that it ‘works.’

To find out what effect the anti-piracy filter has had we decided to take a look at Google’s own search trends, and the results are quite astonishing.

Below are the search trend graphs for several forbidden keywords and all show a massive drop in search volume after the anti-piracy filter was implemented in January.

The graph above reveals that searches for BitTorrent quickly dropped by half, and as of today it remains that way. The graph below shows that a similar pattern can be observed for MegaUpload searches, which had been rising month after month until Google put it on its blacklist.

These search trends are the same for pretty much all the censored keywords. Even searches for the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent dropped to the lowest volume since 2006 after the filter was installed.

Below is the graph for Mediafire searches, one of the latest keywords that was added to the blocklist at the end of April.

Of course the drop in search volume doesn’t mean that there’s a significant drop in actual piracy rates, but the patterns above are surprising to say the least.

Although we had predicted a slight drop in search traffic because of the anti-piracy filter, we never expected it to have this much of an impact. All the more reason for the copyright lobby to suggest banning even more keywords.

While the copyright lobby will count this outcome as a win, the arbitrary filters are not necessarily in the best interests of the Internet as a whole. Google’s lack of transparency about the list of censored keywords and the fact that dictionary words such as ‘torrent’ and company names such as ‘RapidShare’ are included is a worrying development, to say the least.

Source: Google’s Anti-Piracy Filter Is Quite Effective

A perfect illustration of John Gilmore’s famous quote: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Releasing the browser add-on was a statement more than a technical breakthrough, but it had a bigger impact than the MAFIAA Fire team could have ever hoped for. ICE asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site but Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.

This victory for the MAFIAA Fire team encouraged them to come up with more anti-censorship tools. Today the team lived up to that aim by releasing a new Firefox add-on named “Gee! No evil!” which targets Google’s recent censorship initiative.

Starting a few months ago Google began filtering “piracy-related” terms from its ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘ services. The unpublished blacklist includes “torrent”, “BitTorrent”, “uTorrent” and “RapidShare” and was updated with the term “Mediafire” last week.

According to Google, the blacklist is an effective tool to curb online piracy, even if the terms themselves are not exclusively linked to copyright infringement.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online,” Google spokesman Mistique Cano told TorrentFreak.

“This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference,” Cano added.

But not everyone agrees that censorship is the preferred solution here. The MAFIAA Fire team, for example, believe that Google has simply caved into pressure from the entertainment industry.

“Although typing a few extra letters is not a big deal for most, the fact that a non-innovative industry like the music industry has so much clout to pressure one of the icons in one the most innovative industry in the world was too much for us to ignore,” a MAFIAA Fire representative told TorrentFreak.

“We had to do something about it, just out of principle,” he added, and so today they released the “Gee! No evil!” add-on for Firefox. As with the redirector add-on, a Chrome version may be released later when enough donations come in.

The plugin reverses Google’s filter and adds the banned keywords to Autocomplete as soon as the user types in the first letter. It also kicks in if the second keyword is on the blacklist, so if a user types “Linux t” it will suggest “Linux torrent.”

In addition to restoring censored keywords, MAFIAA Fire are also considering promoting other P2P services and cyberlockers with the add-on in the future, the opposite of what Google is attempting to accomplish. Site owners who want to support the initiative are welcome to apply.

With “Gee! No evil!” the MAFIAA Fire team have once again made a censorship effort defunct. But Google is not their main target, the pro-copyright lobby (MAFIAA) is what they are after. And their message is clear.

“Our message to the MAFIAA is this; the law of unintended consequences is very much alive. You took down Napster and what’s taken its place is far bigger. You are trying to censor little bits and pieces, but you inspired us to release more tools that will make you cringe for a very long time.”

“Censoring common words like “torrent” to help an outdated business model is not the right approach… and where does it stop? Who decides what goes on this slippery slope?” the MAFIAA Fire representative told TorrentFreak.

The above comment rightfully accentuates how subjective and risky censorship often is. While the U.S. Government is supporting tools to provide anonymous Internet to citizens of repressive governments, they also support drastic censorship measures at home. Although some may argue that it’s not fair to compare apples and oranges, censorship is censorship no matter how you frame it.

Source: Google Censorship Initiative Thwarted by ‘Gee! No Evil!’ Add-On

In the United Kingdom, you can get five years in prison for not revealing a password to an encrypted data set. Even if you have forgotten it. Even if it isn’t an encrypted dataset to begin with, but recorded astronomy noise, which looks just the same. If you can’t produce the documents that law enforcement says are in there, somewhere in the noise, then off to jail you go.

In Sweden, the government has enacted laws that enable wiretapping of all your communications at any time without warrant or notice (the FRA act). In France, the government is trying to send people into social exile for sharing music. Where’s the police here, protecting our rights? We find them in the shape of activists. Governments are slowly discovering that the door to freedom swings both ways.

If net activists are applauded as they help people in corrupt and repressed regimes expose secrets of the government, then those same technologies can and will be used in every country, even the ones who consider themselves good.

Don’t all governments consider themselves good? It’s just the citizens who tend to disagree to a varying level.

This pattern, where activists are seen as lawbreakers for doing what’s right, follows the patterns of history. It happens about every 40 years. 80 years ago, activists were protecting fundamental rights against law enforcement who opened fire on people who protested in the streets instead of being at work.

The activists founded a new political movement — the labor movement, social democratic parties — that rewrote the laws and reshaped law enforcement to police our rights. 40 years ago, activists were protecting our environment against law enforcement who were protecting corporations that polluted way above what was allowed.

The activists were the ones upholding the law and our rights; law enforcement and governments tried to prevent it from happening. In the end, the activism spawned green parties in many countries that reshaped law enforcement to stand on the side of the citizens, and not on the side of polluting corporations.

And here we are today, with a global, unfettered right to communicate, share, observe, and inform. Law enforcement is cracking down on it. Activists are defying law enforcement and giving us tools that guarantee our rights. People have a duty to defy unjust laws.

And until everybody finds the courage to do so, I am grateful and indebted to the activists who police and guarantee our fundamental rights.

— — —

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: Who’s The Police And Who’s The Crook, Anyway?

In keeping with a company of its stature, GroupM is very diligent when it comes to the placement of their clients’ ads. To ensure ‘legit’ advertising placements, this week GroupM introduced a blacklist designed to prevent its clients’ ads from appearing on websites that distribute illegally obtained content.

“We’re serious about combating piracy and protecting our clients’ intellectual property as forcefully as we possibly can,” said GroupM North America CEO Rob Norman in the press release.

“Pirate sites are known to ‘domain hop,’ so we need to keep on top of the latest list of identified offenders as best as we possibly can in order to enforce this new policy to its fullest effect,” Norman added.

Indeed, companies that maintain a blacklist have to be on top of it, and compile the list with the utmost care. The last thing they want is to miss a potential pirate site, or indeed the opposite – include websites that don’t offer or link to unauthorized downloads at all.

GroupM was kind enough to share the full list of 2279 domains with TorrentFreak, so we could see for ourselves how accurate their list is. As we suspected, there’s still a lot of work to do for the advertising giant.

Among the ‘pirate’ websites that are currently listed we find the non-profit digital library Archive.org, which isn’t particularly known for offloading warez. Also listed is the website of BitTorrent Inc., the San Francisco based company which only offers its own software for download.

Neither of the above sites carry advertising at the moment, which limits the effects of the blacklist, but they are undoubtedly unhappy being branded as pirates.

“BitTorrent is simply a technology company that enables people to efficiently move large files over the Internet. We don’t distribute unauthorized content, though we do work with many independent artists to help distribute their works,” BitTorrent Inc’s Senior Director of Marketing Allison Wagda told TorrentFreak.

Aside from Archive.org and BitTorrent.com there are various other websites in the list which don’t offer or even link to copyrighted material. The file-sharing clients Frostwire, Emule, BitTornado, SoulSeek and Acquisition for example, the IRC client mIRC and the ‘legal’ torrent search engines Mininova, Publicdomaintorrents and YouTorrent.com.

Other websites that are not directly linked to piracy are the Russian Facebook Vkontakte, the video portal Suprnova.org and the Linux distro site Tuxdistro.com.

And then there are many file-hosting services such as RapidShare, YouSendit and the late Drop.io that are in the grey area to say the least. All are banned from serving ads. Those who take a good look at the list will see many websites that are not necessarily linked to copyright infringement, but are included nonetheless.

GroupM’s failed effort to compile a completely accurate anti-piracy blacklist once again shows the problem with these types of censorship; the collateral damage. Although one can certainly make a case for blocking many of the listed sites, it also puts several obviously non-infringing sites in the same corner.

Although there are problems, rather than hide behind a veil of secrecy, GroupM has been bold enough to allow their list into the open, a level of transparency rarely seen in these instances. GroupM was asked to comment on our findings, and we will add their response to the article when it comes in.

Source: BitTorrent.com and Archive.org Blacklisted as Pirate Sites by Major Advertiser

Google users who now search for terms like “torrent”, “BitTorrent” and “RapidShare” will notice that no suggestions and search results will come up before they type the full word. This week this list was expanded with (at least) one new term – Mediafire.

By censoring parts of their search services, Google is sending out a strong signal that they are committed to combating online copyright infringement. Thus far, however, the list of forbidden words still appears to be arbitrary.

Why add the name of the file-hosting service Mediafire but not direct competitors such as Hotfile and Fileserve? Why delist the BitTorrent client uTorrent but not its main competitor Vuze?

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Google spokesman Mistique Cano reiterated what the company announced in a blog post late last year. “We are removing terms from Autocomplete where we find that those terms are closely associated with infringing results.”

Google could not provide us with a full list of banned terms or elaborate on the selection process.

“It’s not easy [to share the keywords] and the list will undoubtedly change over time,” we were told.

“When evaluating terms for inclusion, we examine several factors, including correlation between the term and results that have been subject to valid DMCA takedown notices,” Google’s spokesman added.

Although Google is not able to inform the public what terms they deem to be closely connected to infringing behaviors, the company does believe that their measures could help to decrease online piracy.

“While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online.”

“This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference,” Google’s spokesman said.

The above is interesting, since Google decided to fight a request from a French music rights organization last year, who demanded that Google would implement a similar filtering measure. Apparently they changed their minds.

Aside from censoring piracy-related terms, Google is also preventing various other terms from appearing through their Autocomplete and Instant services. Typing in “tits”, for example, is subject to the same treatment as the piracy-related words.

“We also take a similar approach to a narrow class of terms related to pornography, violence and hate speech. These steps do not remove any results from search results or prevent users from typing any term they choose into their queries,” Google’s spokesman explained.

Admittedly, the impact of the censoring of the Autocomplete and Instant features are not that dramatic. However, Google’s willingness to interfere with parts of their search service to combat piracy will motivate rights holders to request even broader filters.

Also, Google’s definition of “narrow changes” is worrying when a dictionary word such as “torrent” and trademarks of legitimate businesses such as “BitTorrent” and “RapidShare” are blacklisted. The big question is, where will they draw the line?

Source: Google Expands Piracy-Related Keyword Filter

Two weeks ago a group of U.S. senators proposed legislation to make it easier to crack down on so-called rogue websites, and today the Senate’s Judicial Committee unanimously approved the bill.

When the PROTECT IP Act becomes law the authorities can legitimately seize any domain name they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. All that’s required to do so is a preliminary order from the court. But that’s just the start, the bill in fact provides a broad range of censorship tools.

In case a domain is not registered or controlled by a U.S. company, the authorities can also order search engines to remove the website from its search results, order ISPs to block the website, and order ad-networks and payment processors to stop providing services to the website in question.

Backers of the bill argue that the PROTECT IP Act is needed as an extension of the already controversial domain seizures. As reported previously, it is now relatively easy for a seized website to continue operating under a new non-US based domain name.

Not everyone agrees with this stance. Yesterday several Internet giants including Google, Yahoo, eBay and American Express asked the Senate Committee not to adopt the bill, warning it would “undoubtedly inhibit innovation and economic growth.”

However, the concerns raised by the companies did not affect the vote today.

“Today the Judiciary Committee took an important step in protecting online intellectual property rights. The Internet is not a lawless free-for-all where anything goes,” commented Senator Orrin Hatch. “The Constitution protects both property and speech, both online and off.”

“The PROTECT IP Act targets the most egregious actors, and is an important first step to putting a stop to online piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods,” Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said commenting on the importance of the bill.

“Both law enforcement and rights holders are currently limited in the remedies available to combat websites dedicated to offering infringing content and products. These rogue websites are often foreign-owned and operated, or reside at domain names that are not registered through a U.S.-based registry or registrar,” Leahy added.

Similar comments were made by the other Committee members and the various entertainment industry lobby groups.

For Hollywood and the major record labels the PROTECT IP Act is the legislation they have dreamed of for a long time. It allows for copyright holders to obtain a court orders to seize a domain, or prevent payment providers and ad-networks from doing business with sites that allegedly facilitate copyright infringement. All without due process.

The PROTECT IP Act will now move on to the Senate where it’s expected to be opposed by Senator Ron Wyden, who also stopped the bill’s predecessor COICA, fearing it would stifle free speech. Whether it will be enough to prevent the legislation from becoming law has yet to be seen.

Update: Senator Wyden placed a hold on the PROTECT IP Act and released the following statement.

“Consistent with Senate Standing Orders and my policy of publishing in the Congressional Record a statement whenever I place a hold on legislation, I am announcing my intention to object to any unanimous consent request to proceed to S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act.

“In December of last year I placed a hold on similar legislation, commonly called COICA, because I felt the costs of the legislation far outweighed the benefits. After careful analysis of the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, I am compelled to draw the same conclusion. I understand and agree with the goal of the legislation, to protect intellectual property and combat commerce in counterfeit goods, but I am not willing to muzzle speech and stifle innovation and economic growth to achieve this objective. At the expense of legitimate commerce, PIPA’s prescription takes an overreaching approach to policing the Internet when a more balanced and targeted approach would be more effective. The collateral damage of this approach is speech, innovation and the very integrity of the Internet.

“The Internet represents the shipping lane of the 21st century. It is increasingly in America’s economic interest to ensure that the Internet is a viable means for American innovation, commerce, and the advancement of our ideals that empower people all around the world. By ceding control of the Internet to corporations through a private right of action, and to government agencies that do not sufficiently understand and value the Internet, PIPA represents a threat to our economic future and to our international objectives. Until the many issues that I and others have raised with this legislation are addressed, I will object to a unanimous consent request to proceed to the legislation.”

Source: Draconian Anti-Piracy Censorship Bill Passes Senate Committee

During the past 12 months the U.S. Government seized more than 100 domain names it claimed were promoting copyright infringement. But this was just the beginning. The domain seizures pale in comparison to a bill that’s about to be introduced by U.S. lawmakers.

Dubbed the PROTECT IP Act, the bill will introduce a wide-scale of censorship tools authorities and copyright holders can use to quash websites they claim are facilitating copyright infringement. It is basically a revamped and worsened version of the controversial COICA proposal which had to be resubmitted after its enaction failed last year.

The summary of the bill begins with a recital of the now-standard industry claims about the financial harm caused by copyright infringement. Claims that interestingly enough were put in doubt by the U.S. Government last year, but are still used to push anti-piracy legislation through globally.

“Copyright infringement and the sale of counterfeit goods are reported to cost American creators and producers billions of dollars and to result in hundreds of thousands in lost jobs annually. This pervasive problem has assumed an especially threatening form on the Internet,” the bill document reads.

It is further explained that the PROTECT IP Act is needed as an extension of the already controversial domain seizures. As reported previously, it is now relatively easy for a seized website to continue operating under a new non-US based domain name. With the new bill, however, the authorities and copyright holders have a broader scale of tools they can use.

“The Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (“PROTECT IP Act”) authorizes the Justice Department to file a civil action against the registrant or owner of a domain name that accesses a foreign Internet site, or the foreign-registered domain name itself, and to seek a preliminary order from the court that the site is dedicated to infringing activities,” the document continues.

In case a domain is not registered or controlled by a U.S. company, the authorities can also order search engines to remove the website from its search results, order ISPs to block the website, and order ad-networks and payment processors to stop providing services to the website in question.

“If the court issues an order against the registrant, owner, or domain name, resulting from the DOJ-initiated suit, the Attorney General is authorized to serve that order on specified U.S. based third-parties, including Internet service providers, payment processors, online advertising network providers, and search engines. These third parties would then be required to take appropriate action to either prevent access to the Internet site, or cease doing business with the Internet site.”

Although the above is already quite far-reaching, the bill also allows for private copyright holders to use some of the same tools as the Government. Without due process, copyright holders can obtain a court order to prevent payment providers and ad-networks from doing business with sites that allegedly facilitate copyright infringement. Unlike the DOJ, copyright holders can not obtain orders to block sites through ISPs or search engines.

The summary of the bill does not go into the constitutional issues that arise with several of the measures. However, it ensures that the legislation is in the best interest of the public by protecting people from any website that “endangers the public health.” The only protection for accused websites is that they can “petition the court to suspend or vacate the order,” but lessons from the previous domain seizures show that this process can take up several months.

The PROTECT IP Act is expected to be officially introduced in the coming weeks, and more details will be released at the time. Sources close to the U.S Government say the bill has already gathered a lot of support among legislators, which is a worrying message for the relatively free-Internet as its known today.

Source: U.S. To Introduce Draconian Anti-Piracy Censorship Bill

To deal with illicit sites on the Internet, the group suggested the adoption of a China-like firewall to block websites deemed ‘inappropriate’. The controversial proposal immediately met resistance from various sides, including ISPs who would be tasked with maintaining the blocklist.

The copyright lobby on the other hand welcomes the initiative which they’ve been suggesting for years.

One of the sites that has a fair share of experience with being blocked is The Pirate Bay. The popular BitTorrent site is currently censored in Ireland, Italy and Denmark, and almost lost its domain name to the U.S. Government last year.

Needless to say, they are not happy with the EU’s latest censorship proposal. In fact, today they declare war on the proponents of Internet censorship, most prominently the entertainment industry (MAFIAA) lobbyists.

In a slightly edited version of Winston Churchill’s “this was their finest hour” speech, in which they replace Nazi-Germany with MAFIAA, The Pirate Bay team declares war on Internet censorship advocates. Action has to be taken before it’s too late, is the message they convey.

“I expect that the Battle of Internets is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of an Uncensored civilization! Upon it depends our own free life, and the long continuity of our sites and our trackers. The whole fury and might of the enemy will very soon be turned on us,” The Pirate Bay writes.

“MAFIAA knows that they will have to break us in Brussels or lose the war. If we can stand up to them, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the free Internets and its multitude of sites last for a thousand years, citizens will still say, This was their finest hour,” they add.

The speech, signed by “Winston Bay,” clearly shows The Pirate Bay’s concern with censorship proposals as opted by the European Union recently. The big question remains, is there really something that can be done to stop it, or has that ship sailed already?

Source: The Pirate Bay: “The Battle of Internets is About to Begin”

As part of their anti-filesharing actions, in April 2010 SNEP initiated legal action against Google in an attempt to force the search giant to filter certain terms from their auto-suggest feature. It will come as little surprise that the words targeted were ‘torrent’, ‘RapidShare’ and ‘MegaUpload’.

SNEP’s case relied on Article L336-2 of France’s intellectual property code. The article states:

“In the presence of an infringement of copyright or related right caused by the contents of a communication service to the public online, the high court, acting as appropriate in summary proceedings,” is authorized to take “all appropriate measures to prevent or halt such infringement…”

As noted by news outlet Numerama, this provision was introduced into law in anticipation that some day ISPs would be asked to block access to file-sharing sites. SNEP clearly thought they could extend the target of the legislation in their favor.

In September 2010, the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris rejected the complaint and ordered SNEP to pay Google 5,000 euros in costs. Dissatisfied with the court’s decision, SNEP took the case to appeal, asking for damages of 1,000 euros for every day the results appeared in Google’s listings. Furthermore, they added a list of artists, albums and songs to be filtered in connection with the above terms.

This week the Court of Appeal in Paris handed down its ruling. In common with the earlier decision, the Court found that the mere presentation of terms in a set of search results did not necessarily mean that an infringement of copyright would follow.

Furthermore, in an apparent reference to RapidShare and MegaUpload, the Court noted that just because users of these sites can use them to transfer unauthorized copies of music, it does not automatically follow that the sites are rendered illegal as a result. The Court also made clear that SNEP could not hold Google responsible for the subsequent activities of Internet users who use their search engine.

However, as first reported by TorrentFreak earlier this year, Google already took the decision to filter its auto-suggest feature, a move duly noted by the Court of Appeal. But does it then follow that this act of self-censorship must be an admission of guilt?

“The fact that Google has filtered its results does not mean that they have complied with [SNEP's] request and admitted responsibility,” said the Judge, adding that despite Google’s actions, any infringing content still remains on the web.

Once again the case was decided in Google’s favor and SNEP was ordered to pay 5,000 euros costs.

Source: Google Wins Anti-Piracy Filtering Lawsuit, Filters Anyway

As part of their ongoing effort to tackle online piracy, the House of Representatives organized a hearing last month titled “Promoting Investment and Protecting Commerce Online: Legitimate Sites v. Parasites, Part II.” The main topic on the agenda was Google and why the company doesn’t do more to ensure that infringing materials aren’t indexed.

Earlier this year we discovered that following pressure from the entertainment industry, Google had already taken steps towards censoring their search results for this very reason. The result was that legitimate products of legitimate U.S. based companies (e.g. uTorrent from BitTorrent Inc.) are now actively censored from some of Google’s services. Let’s call it economic censorship.

Google’s move was applauded by many politicians who subsequently cheered the search giant on to take it up a notch. During the House hearing last month the big question appeared to be why Google hasn’t ended piracy yet. Some clever search keyword filters could help there, some argued. Indeed, just look at the torrent site isoHunt which was ordered by a U.S. court to censor its search engine based on a list of keywords provided by the MPAA.

Yes, isoHunt’s filter also makes some legitimate content inaccessible, but that’s just considered collateral damage. The overall agreement was that censorship is needed to solve online piracy.

This idea is also nested in some of the more recent legislative proposals in the U.S. The COICA bill for example, that would grant US authorities the power to seize (thus censor) domains that are deemed by the authorities to facilitate copyright infringement. COICA was introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and supported by 18 other Senators including Sen. Dick Durbin.

Again, with COICA it seems that censorship is not really seen as a major roadblock for prominent politicians. To some, economic censorship appears to be a must in order to protect corporate interests. The human rights and constitutional issues that may be violated in the process are reduced to collateral damage.

Considering the above it’s very interesting to see that Senator Durbin, who supported the COICA anti-piracy bill, has this week voiced his concerns about Internet censorship taking place in China. Yesterday Durbin published a letter he wrote to the Chinese search giant Baidu. In his letter the Senator voices his concerns over Baidu’s censorship efforts and asked the company to take “immediate steps” to stop them.

“I recently returned from a Congressional delegation to China. I decided to personally verify the reports about Baidu’s censorship. During my trip, I accessed Baidu’s homepage and attempted to search for a number of terms. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see that Baidu heavily censors its search results,” Durbin writes.

“As a member of the U.S. Congress, I am especially concerned about Baidu’s internet censorship because of your company’s extensive business dealings in the United States. Baidu has been listed on NASDAQ since 2005. I understand that two of Baidu’s five directors are American and that American institutions are significant investors in Baidu,” the senator adds.

So there we have it, censorship is a problem, but only if it suits the interests of the people advocating against it. This is often the case in politics of course. Many U.S. politicians don’t see any problems with Google censoring (possible) copyright infringement related terms, but if they or another search engine do the same with political terms then they change their tune.

Censorship is censorship, but many western politicians seem to make a clear distinction between political and economic Internet censorship. Hypocrisy?

Source: Piracy Politics Fuel Internet Censorship

Those who wish to do so can choose from plenty of great VPN services that are perfectly suited for this, and there are even specialized BitTorrent proxies such as BTguard.

The benefit of the above services is that they allow users to browse and download ‘anonymously,’ but at full speeds. The downside is that users have to cough up a few bucks a month for these premium services.

Perhaps in an attempt to avoid a paid subscription, there is also a certain group of BitTorrent users who use the Tor network to anonymize their traffic. This is a big problem. Although one BitTorrent user taking this option is unlikely to prove problematic, a few thousand can cause some serious damage, in more ways than one.

Aside from crippling the network by transferring massive amounts of data over a system that is set up for web browsing, Tor servers are also being monitored and subsequently notified by copyright holders for facilitating “infringing” transfers. The DMCA notices that copyright holders send out are strictly speaking not a problem, but some ISPs freak out over them, which may lead to servers being disconnected.

One Tor service that has received its fair share of DMCA notices over the last month is Torservers.net. A few days ago the operator posted a collection of 190 recent DMCA notices, and that only represented those received in a 20 day period. Most of the automated notices received were sent by MediaSentry (now Peer Media), on behalf of several major movie studios and other copyright holders.

As the Torservers.net operator Moritz Bartl explains, Tor servers are protected by the DMCA just like major ISPs are, but that doesn’t mean the avalanche of DMCA notices can’t do any harm. The companies where Torservers.net rents its servers may become worried about the large amounts of complaints being received and decide to kick their client nonetheless.

This is exactly what happened to Torservers.net in the past.

“The most frighting example was Softlayer. We had a deal with 100tb.com, a team of friendly and understanding people that use Softlayer as data center. Nonetheless, Softlayer cut us off after one single DMCA complaint that referenced a port we didn’t even allow to exit at that time,” Bartl told TorrentFreak.

“They did not care and didn’t want to hear any explanations, they just forced us off their network. This is an absurd situation similar to the recent Facebook incidents, because anyone could send DMCA complaints, and it is very hard to find ISPs that first ask for proof before taking action,” he added.

Talking to TorrentFreak, Moritz Bartl further said that he encourages the public to take a look at the emails to see if there’s a clear pattern to identify. This will help him and others to control the DMCA spam. Eventually, he might end up blocking the IP-addresses of all major BitTorrent trackers as a last resort.

Hosting companies who are Tor friendly and can take DMCA notices in their stride are being welcomed to get in touch too. The Torservers.net operator tried to contact the senders of the notices to come to a more workable solution, but thus far they seem to be unreachable.

The ultimate setup for Torservers.net is one where the hosting provider reassigns the IP-range to them, so they can handle the abuse emails directly. For ARIN IPs this doesn’t work, but then the provider could simply forward the DMCA notices, automatically or not, so Torservers.net can take care of it.

“We auto-reply to Mediasentry DMCA spam, telling them that we are not allowed to keep customer logs based on the German telecommunications law, and that we are not liable for content transmission. That’s what every ISP in the world should do – unless local laws require them to keep customer logs that is. Only a few countries really force you to keep customer logs though,” Bartl said.

The most important lesson, however, is that those who value anti-censorship tools should not abuse Tor by running their BitTorrent traffic over it. Although the massive amount of DMCA notices shows that it works, it may eventually mean that Tor is no longer available to the people who it was built for.

Source: Tor Servers Bombarded With BitTorrent DMCA Notices

Although this might sound like a good idea to some, Yahoo! appears to disagree. Those who try to paste a FilesTube link to their contacts in the Messenger app will notice that it never reaches its destination. The link goes directly into Yahoo’s dark hole and neither end of the conversation is alerted to this “feature”.

For those not familiar with the site, FilesTube is arguably the largest meta-search engine for content hosted on cyberlockers. Founded in 2007, the Polish-operated search engine serves millions of users every day, and this number is on the up.

The big question of course is why Yahoo! Messenger users are prohibited from sending their contacts links to the site. FilesTube is merely a meta-search engine and does not host any content on its servers. It even abides by the U.S. DMCA by honoring takedown requests from copyright holders.

TorrentFreak contacted Yahoo! to try and shed some light on the issue, but since we haven’t heard back yet all we can do at this point is speculate. Theoretically there could be a non-copyright related reason for the blocking, but we have failed to come up with one. On the other hand, in tests where we sent our contacts links to similar sites did not produce the same results, which is odd.

Although not very logical, such a selective censorship attempt would not be entirely new. Just a few months ago Google decided to arbitrarily block a few piracy related keywords from their “instant” and “suggest” features while leaving direct and just as popular alternatives unharmed.

Whatever the reason is for Yahoo! monitoring private conversations and then swallowing FilesTube links, censorship is an up and coming tool that will be used increasingly to protect the interests of the entertainment industries. It complements other indirect but effective anti-piracy strategies, and despite the constitutional issues that may arise, the anti-piracy lobby will not rest before their goals are completed.

Update: Arkadiusz Senko, CEO of Red – Sky, the owner FilesTube got back to us with the following message:

“I was surprised to have adopted information about blocking FilesTube.com by Yahoo Messenger. FilesTube.com is a legal search engine, meets all the legal requirements of both European and American. We are shocked by Yahoo Messenger to censor the Internet, and thus the actions of our users who use FilesTube.com for legal media. We would like to point out that we also have a video section, where the aggregated videos from YouTube or Dailymotion are placed. It seems to us that Yahoo has taken action to block links to competing sites. In such a situation it lefts us nothing but to recommend users to use other instant messengers, respectful of freedom of the Internet. You can find the alternatives for Yahoo Messenger on our new search engine alternative.to.”

Source: Yahoo! Messenger Censors FilesTube Links

In reality the MPAA’s steps against Usenet indexing site Newzbin had begun much earlier, first with prolonged action through the civil legal system and then a reassessment once it had become apparent that the site, now called Newzbin2, had been resurrected against all odds.

Earlier this month it was revealed that Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt had asked communications watchdog Ofcom to look at whether website blocking in general, as allowed in theory by last year’s passing of the Digital Economy Act, could actually work.

Ofcom is expected to report back during the spring, but in the meantime The Guardian is reporting today that the entertainment industries are revving up their blocking preparations in advance of a favorable outcome.

Rightsholders from the music and movie industries are said to have identified 100 websites which they would like blocked, including The Pirate Bay and file-hosting or so-called ‘cyberlocker’ sites. Perhaps predictably Newzbin2 is also on the list along with the lesser-known Movieberry and Free Movies Online 4 You.

Acceptance of a voluntary code under discussion would mean that ISPs would receive evidence of unauthorized file-sharing from rightsholders and then take action to block the sites in question.

A source at government meetings told The Guardian that site-blocking is preferable to sending out infringement notices to subscribers since that process is likely to be laborious and expensive.

“We’re more interested in site blocking. We don’t want to target end users, [the mass notification system] is long winded – we want something now,” said the source.

So which of these 100 proposed sites will we be familiar with? While there will be some surprises, it seems likely that those that have appeared on the recent “most notorious pirate markets” will be at the forefront.

Undoubtedly some of the Russian AllofMP3 replacement pay-to-download portals will be high on the list as these have long been a thorn in the music industry’s side. On the BitTorrent indexing front we already know about The Pirate Bay and it’s likely they will be joined isoHunt, BTjunkie, Kickasstorrents and Torrentz.

Sites with trackers such as Demonoid, RUTracker and Zamunda will also make an appearance. However, getting authorization to block pure trackers such as OpenBitTorrent and PublicBT may prove a step too far, since these sites have no search engines, no readable filenames and no torrents.

Nevertheless, even Ofcom says that site blocking is feasible, it’s unlikely any steps taken by ISPs will stop the really determined from accessing illicit music and movies. But crucially it may stop the casual downloader in his tracks – which is admittedly a sizeable proportion of file-sharers – so this may prove enough for the entertainment industries. For now at least.

Source: 100 Domains On Movie and Music Industry Website Blocking Wishlist

Without a public notice Google has compiled a seemingly arbitrary list of keywords for which auto-complete is no longer available. Although the impact of this decision does not currently affect full search results, it does send out a strong signal that Google is willing to censor its services proactively, and to an extent that is far greater than many expected.

Among the list of forbidden keywords are “uTorrent”, a hugely popular piece of entirely legal software and “BitTorrent”, a file transfer protocol and the name of San Fransisco based company BitTorrent Inc. As of today, these keywords will no longer be suggested by Google when you type in the first letter, nor will they show up in Google Instant.

All combinations of the word “torrent” are also completely banned. This means that “Ubuntu torrent” will not be suggested as a user types in Ubuntu, and the same happens to every other combination ending in the word torrent. This of course includes the titles of popular films and music albums, which is the purpose of Google’s banlist.

TorrentFreak contacted BitTorrent Inc. for a reaction, and Simon Morris told TorrentFreak that he believes the scope of this filter is too broad.

“We respect Google’s right to determine algorithms to deliver appropriate search results to user requests. That being said, our company’s trademarked name is fairly unique, and we’re pretty confident that anyone typing the first six or seven letters deserves the same easy access to results as with any other company search,” Morris said.

“A quick search for ‘BitTorrent’ currently returns a variety of legitimate and useful links, including company information, our software, our open-source protocol, and more. What Google may not realize is that our technology is used for many purposes that provide significant value to the technology industry, companies, artists and consumers at large,” he added.

What is most surprising about the new filter is that the keywords appear to be picked arbitrarily. It includes BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent and Xunlei, but not BitComet and Vuze. While cyberlockers such as RapidShare and Megaupload are banned, prominent sites such as 4shared, HotFile and MediaFire are not.

In addition, all the names of popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay are not included in Google’s banlist either. BitTorrent’s Simon Morris agrees that this is odd, to say the least.

“There’s no reason for Google to throttle search results for our trademarks, including BitTorrent, µTorrent and torrent. Indeed, they do still enable autocomplete for many third-party clients that use the BitTorrent protocol, including BitComet, BitLord, and even sites like The Pirate Bay and Isohunt.”

Morris further points out that the inclusion of Xunlei is a little hypocritical since Google is one of the investors in the Chinese BitTorrent client.

“We’d also like to point out that while Google doesn’t enable autocomplete for Xunlei (China’s largest software client that uses the BitTorrent protocol) Google did invest $5 million in the company in 2006, according to reports,” Morris says, adding, “We sincerely hope Google will recognize the value of BitTorrent and reevaluate this decision expeditiously.”

RapidShare is not pleased with Google’s new filter either, at least not with its current scope in today’s roll-out.

“We knew about Google’s plans for quite a few weeks now. We embrace that certain search suggestions will not put a wrong complexion on RapidShare anymore, but we are concerned that at the same time the legitimate interests of our users will also be affected. We believe it was the wrong decision to remove the term ‘RapidShare’ from the search suggestions,” RapidShare told TorrentFreak.

“RapidShare is one of the most popular websites worldwide. Every day hundreds of thousands of users rely on our services to pursue their perfectly legitimate interests. That is why Google has obviously gone too far with censoring the results of its suggest algorithm. A search engine’s results should reflect the users’ interests and not Google’s or anybody else’s,” the company added.

Indeed, RapidShare has certainly touched a nerve here. It is clear that this filter is the result of pressure from the entertainment industries, which is not at all in the interests of users. Now that Google has begun proactively censoring their services for commercial reasons, more companies will demand the same. At the same time, the entertainment industries will continue to pressure Google to go even further, and censor the actual search results.

Apparently Google has decided that its users should not be searching for the keyword BitTorrent, so why list any results then? It’s the beginning of the end.

Jamie King, the founder of Vodo – a platform where artists can share their work with million of people at no cost – agrees with this assessment. Searching for one of their perfectly legal releases on Google used to suggest the word “torrent” with a link to the download page, but not anymore.

“Google already showed it will censor for the highest bidder — China Inc. springs to mind. Now it’s doing it for MPAA & Co.,” King told TorrentFreak.

“I guess it’s simple: our favorite search monopoly cares less about helping the thousands of independent creators who use BitTorrent to distribute legal, free-to-share content than they do about protecting the interests of Big Media in its death throes.”

Indeed, Google is going down the wrong path by willingly and broadly censoring its services to please a few big companies. This is not the way to get rid of piracy, it’s the way to a corporate controlled Internet. Google may have been proud to leave China because of its political censorship, but it should be ashamed of promoting commercial censorship worldwide.

Source: Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

Calls from the public to allow freedom of speech for Tunisian citizens, however, have resulted in quite the opposite reaction from the authorities. Both online and offline protesters are quickly and sometimes violently silenced. A well documented article by Al-Jazeera earlier this week reports of hacked Facebook and Gmail accounts, presumably by the Tunisian Government.

Last weekend the secure https protocol became unavailable in the country and in the days that followed many bloggers and net activists were locked out of their personal accounts. Sofiene Chourabi, blogger and journalist for Al-Tariq al-Jadid magazine was one of the first to notice the ‘hack’ attempts last week.

“My personal account on the Facebook, including around 4200 friends, was exposed to failed hacking attempt last Friday, but I quickly recovered it after an unidentified person had taken control of it,” he told Al Jazeera. This first attempt failed, but a second last Monday was successful as Chourabi lost access to both his Gmail and Facebook accounts.

Another activist and critic of the Government who suffered the same fate is Azyz Amami, a member of the local Pirate Party. Amami had used a secondary email address to register at Gmail and Facebook which allowed him to regain access, but not before the authorities found the login information to his four blogs and deleted all content.

Amami said he thinks that the Government’s hacking and phishing attempts are more widespread, and that those reported thus far represent just the tip of the iceberg since many people fear repercussions from the Government. Only hours after stating his concerns in public on Thursday he was arrested, and he wasn’t the only one.

Slim Amamou and Slah Eddine Kchouk, both graduate students and members of the Pirate Party of Tunisia like Amami, were also arrested by the authorities. In addition several other activists and bloggers were arrested and taken in for questioning, without any specifics being released on the reasons of their arrests.

The arrests are a sign that the call for more freedom of speech on the Internet is backfiring. The more vocal people get the harder the Government is reacting. But the public is not giving up without a fight. Last weekend ‘Anonymous’ activists successfully took down several Government websites, but thus far this has only resulted in more censorship and less openness.

The Tunisian Pirate Party is outraged by the arrests of its members and has posted an appeal for more attention to the growing repression. According to the Party the three members were “kidnapped” by the political police without a warrant, and all three also had their computers confiscated.

“Tunisia is a country where torture while in detention or in prison is very common as reported and documented by Red Cross, Amnesty, HRW and other NGO’s. Pirate Party Tunisia severely condemns the dictatorship of Ben Ali and will engage every possible action to free its members and to seek international legal course in case of torture and inhumane treatment on its members,” the Party announced.

A few hours ago the international umbrella organization for Pirate Parties – Pirate Parties International – also released a public statement condemning the unjust arrests of Pirate Party members and free speech activists.

“Pirate Parties around the World condemn these acts against freedom of expression, human rights and democracy, and call upon governments take firm action against Tunisia for these recent events. Party members are advised to refrain from visiting Tunisia until the human rights situation has improved,” the statement says.

Despite the harsh actions from the police and the ever increasing censorship, many Tunisians are continuing their protests online and offline. Increasingly Twitter is being used to propagate the message they feel the world should know, as it is less prone to censorship than Facebook.

Posting a video, blog post or Facebook status update has become a challenge and a threat at the same time for many young Tunisians. The current situation brings freedom of speech issues closer to ‘home’ than ever before for many Internet users.

Source: Pirate Party Members Arrested in Tunisian Censorship Revolt

The injunction is the result of isoHunt’s protracted court battle with the MPAA that started back in 2006. The court ordered the owner of isoHunt to start censoring the site’s search engine based on a list of thousands of keywords provided by the MPAA, or cease its operations entirely in the U.S.

The filter has now been implemented for a few months and prevents a list of film related phrases from showing up in the search results. In addition, isoHunt changed the appearance of its search engine for U.S. users, such as removing the list of most searched for phrases on the site. Although the site’s owner actively protested this form of commercial censorship, the court left isoHunt with no choice.

However, isoHunt does not intend to be defeated so easily and has decided to take the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. There, it hopes to get the law on its side and quash the previous District Court ruling.

The BitTorrent search engine has now filed (pdf) its opening appellate brief to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, requesting for better protection from such mass copyright lawsuits for both isoHunt and other search engines alike. The counsel of isoHunt argues that if the permanent injunction holds up, other search engines such as Google may face similar censorship threats as well.

“This case is about the freedom to search on the internet and whether web search engines have to preemptively censor user generated links and torrent data files or be subject to keyword filtering,” said isoHunt counsel Ira Rothken.

The appellate brief addresses the various misunderstandings and misjudgments that the defendant believes were made by the District Court. One of the questions is whether the keyword filter violates the First Amendment Free Speech rights.

In addition, it is questioned “whether the District Court exceeded its territorial jurisdiction in ordering Defendants, Canadians operating in Canada, to ‘filter’ communications taking place entirely within Canada.” In other words, is a US court permitted to order censorship measures for a Canadian company?

Among other things, isoHunt further questions whether it was rightfully excluded from the “safe harbor” provided by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and whether the common law that resulted from the Grokster verdict applied to a BitTorrent search engine.

Instead of being equated to P2P applications that actually touch, distribute, or copy copyrighted material isoHunt should be seen a regular search engine. After all, most torrent files can be downloaded through Google as well, the defense argues.

“Defendants showed that 95% of the torrents available on their system were also available on Google or Yahoo!,” the brief reads.

The opposition against the permanent injunction does not mean that isoHunt is not willing to make concessions. Instead of a keyword filter, isoHunt’s owner would rather implement a system that bans torrent files based on “infringing” hashes. A similar system is already in use for a partnership the site has with the US Attorney General to ban child porn.

The Ninth Circuit Appeal Court has now to decide whether the permanent injunction will stay in place or not. This decision will be a crucial one to the future of isoHunt and possibly other search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Source: isoHunt Continues Legal Fight To Thwart MPAA Censorship

A few dozen sites have registered alternative domains, including the semi-private tracker Demonoid who already moved away from their .com domain earlier today.

Other torrent site operators have also bought additional backup domains, TorrentFreak has learned. To emphasize the irony of the situation, Chinese domains seem to be favored, but mosts sites have more than a few. One of the torrent site owners who already had a .hk backup domain is isoHunt’s Gary Fung.

Fung, who’s based in Canada where he runs his company, has been fighting the movie industry in US courts for nearly 5 years. Currently, he is appealing a ruling which forced isoHunt to implement a filter of film related keywords for US visitors.

Although this keyword filter was ordered through the normal legal channels, the US authorities have recently stretched the boundaries of commercial censorship. The owner of Torrent-Finder lost control over his .com domain a few days ago, without being informed and without any opportunity to defend himself.

With the COICA bill, this type of censorship is expected to only increase, and isoHunt’s Gary Fung points out to TorrentFreak that this is a worrying situation.

“Countries like China censor for political reason, US with COICA will censor for copyright and commercial reason. It’ll be a chilling parallel put into serious question how the US should still be in charge of the much of the internet infrastructure like the root DNS, or how US can continue to claim as the model example for free-speaking democracy.”

Where China’s censorship is mostly fed by the Government’s concerns, in the US it’s the copyright holders who fuel the fire. Interestingly, the authorities are quite open about the fact that last weekend’s seizures were a direct response to complaints from private companies.

“In general, what we can say is, there are specific complaints from rights holders that these sites were infringing on copyrights,” Erik Barnett of Homeland Security’s ICE said in response to the seizures.

And then there’s Google of course. The search engine that pulled out of China over censorship concerns, announced just a few hours ago that it will censor auto completion on ‘piracy’ related searches worldwide. Apparently censorship is not that bad in some cases.

“We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose,” Google writes.

This probably means that “thep” will no longer suggest “thepiratebay” and that the word “torrent” won’t be added to movie or music related searches anymore. Yes, that’s yet another successful lobby effort from the entertainment industry, and just a small step from banning ‘rogue’ sites from the search results altogether.

Earlier, the RIAA and MPAA handed in their wish lists for the COICA censorship bill, if it should pass. Judging from the comments from Homeland Security, this means that sites such as The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, RapidShare and MegaUpload may be next, as they were labeled as rogue websites by the movie and music industry representatives.

isoHunt’s Gary Fung was not impressed to see his site included on both lists though.

“For RIAA, MPAA’s slandering of us as rogue websites, it’s political PR and lobbying that has no basis in reality and ignorable. Perhaps they should be educated in the many non-infringing uses of BitTorrent and P2P, or they risk listing every social media and sharing website as rogue,” Fung told us.

The question is whether this lobbying will indeed be ineffective. Recent history offers little reassurance. It only takes a single seizure warning to take a site down, infringing or not. But then again, there’s always China where torrent sites like isoHunt can flee to if needed.

Source: Avoiding US Censorship, Torrent Sites May Flee To China

In 2009 The Yes Men hijacked a United States Chamber of Commerce press conference, declaring a U-turn on their climate change policy. In a response to this “identity correction” the Chamber filed a lawsuit against the duo, claiming that they misled the public. Due to this legal battle no TV-station wants to take the risk to run some of the most controversial material, so The Yes Men took matters into their own hands by releasing an updated P2P-edition of their latest film today.

In addition to avoiding censorship, The Yes Men are looking for donations to fund their upcoming projects. This is where the BitTorrent-powered distribution platform VODO comes in. With free promotion from uTorrent, Limewire and a variety of prominent torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and EZTV, this release will instantly have an audience of millions of downloaders.

To find out more about their motivation to get the film out on BitTorrent and to find out whether they were also this excited about BitTorrent when their first film was pirated by more than a million people, we caught up with Mike Bonanno, one half of The Yes Men.

“There are a few reasons why we chose BitTorrent. First off, it’s a way to avoid censorship,” Mike Bonanno told TorrentFreak. “This version includes video of an action against the US Chamber of Commerce that we are being sued for. No commercial outlets will touch it. We had a TV show scheduled on Planet Green and their lawyers nearly wet themselves when they heard we wanted to use footage of us making political mince-meant out of the largest lobbying organization in the world.”

“It’s unlikely that anyone would distribute this material before we get out of court,” Bonanno continued. “But we don’t want them to win a de-facto censorship case, so P2P is a great workaround. Another reason we are doing this is because this is the way people see movies these days, and we made this movie for people to see it. We would love it if people bought our DVD, but we also want people who don’t do that to see it. And last of all: we do hope to generate some donations: we are broke and there are not so many funders for our new project, especially given that they are all spooked by lawsuits, no matter how stupid!”

Although the benefits of BitTorrent are clear in this case, The Yes Men’s previous film was also pirated by more than a million people. When we asked Mike Bonanno how he felt about this we found out that he’s more upset about the stranglehold that the ‘copyright mafia’ puts on indie productions than the people who grab a copy of their movie on BitTorrent.

“It’s great that people are watching our films! We are very happy that they are getting seen. But that having been said, we do wish that a few more people were paying for it. We borrowed a shit-load of money from friends to make our latest movie and we still can’t pay them back. Also, the way the industry is set up, if you want your stuff on TV or delivered through any official channels you have to spend a massive amount of money clearing rights and paying for legal stuff and that is just silly.”

“For us to get our ‘errors and omissions insurance’ required for any distributor to take it, we had to clear the rights on all sorts of stuff we should not really have had to… including music written in the 17th century, which apparently because of some kind of law in Austria was not public domain according to the interpretation of insurance industry lawyers! Anyway, that’s just one example… so what happens as a film maker – especially a documentary maker – is that in today’s market we are fucked.”

“Because to get it on TV we still need to act like we have deep pockets and can pay for rights for all sorts of shit, but then with the collapse of the indy film market distributors won’t pay for it. And of course most people file-share it rather than pay for it. So yeah, we are happy that people are watching it but not so happy that we are financially screwed! But we also see that it’s the system that is screwing us: we are not blaming the pirates, we are blaming casino capitalism!”

This comment from Bonanno led us to ask the question whether The Yes Men would ever consider exposing the ‘copyright mafia’ and anti-piracy groups. These outfits have turned copyright into a cash cow while pretending to protect the rights of artists, something we address here on TorrentFreak every week. As it turns out, The Yes Men are siding with us in this regard.

“I think in some ways most of our work is about targeting ideas about the rule of private property… so this is related,” Bonanno said. “Our first four years as The Yes Men was dedicated to attacking the World Trade Organization, which has historically supported the idea of proprietary media. Overall, I think that in some ways everything today, every major issue facing us can be seen through the lens of what role it plays in the commons… or lack thereof, as many a government and corporation would have it.”

“If copyright was actually working the way it was supposed to, and protecting the authors that would be great. But that’s not how it works anymore – it just protects money; whoever has the most of it. And usually that means that the authors are fucked anyway!”

The Peer-to-Peer edition of The Yes Men Fix The World is now available for free on VODO. To spread their knowledge The Yes Men have started The Yes Lab, which is also worth checking out. Lastly, don’t forget to donate a few bucks if you like what you see.

Source: ‘Yes Men’ Use BitTorrent To Avoid Censorship

While some producers, directors and actors actually believe that BitTorrent and other filesharing tools help to boost the fanbase of films and TV-shows, this group disagrees. Signed by a staggering 116 names including the likes of directors Sir Alan Parker, Mike Leigh and supported by several entertainment industry groups, the letter claims:

At a time when so many jobs are being lost in the wider economy, it is especially important that this issue be taken seriously by the Government and that it devotes the resources necessary to enforce the law.

Ignoring for a moment that notably they make no mention of job losses in their sector, one of the problems with their demands is that the law they seek to enforce is civil law, not criminal.

Beyond employing judges there is nothing more that the government can do to enforce it. That is the problem with copyright law, it’s hard to know what’s legitimate and what’s not, what can be copied and what can’t, without checking with the rights holders first. This was exemplified perfectly earlier this year, when the IFPI sent out takedown notices for Travis tracks, despite the actual copyright holders, Travis, having already given permission to distribute.

The bigger problem comes from their data, the 98 million illegal downloads and streams. While we know TV shows are popular, our own data shows that British TV rarely features in the top 10. Movie downloads are more fleeting, with a certain bias towards the newest films, with a few exceptions. Their figures are also questionable; while we count downloads, we can’t quantify them with a figure for the UK.

Yet, if their stats on downloads are of questionable accuracy, it’s nothing compared to the power they ascribe to the ‘almighty ISP’. They believe that ISPs have the power to stamp out file sharing, stopping people from downloading TV shows and movies; they just need a prod. In this belief they are sadly mistaken.

Again, recent news has shown how hard it is to control access to even one image in the UK, on a cut-and-dried subject like child pornography. Being able to determine if something is infringing copyright or not would require huge lists of content, and real-time examination of all Internet traffic. Not just deep packet inspection, but an all-invasive Big Brother monitoring system, beyond the dreams of even the most totalitarian dictator.

Of course, those that bother to check facts know that not only is such a thing illegal (criminally illegal, not just civil) but that the tools they’ll want to use just don’t work. The problem is highlighted by Michael Malone, CEO of ISP iiNet, currently under attack from various movie studios, “I think they genuinely believe that ISPs have a secret magic wand that we are hiding and if we bring it out we can make piracy disappear just by waving it.”

And, when just this year it was reported that UK commercial TV broadcasters “enjoyed a bumper April with the highest viewing figures in five years”, that total TV viewing was up 10% year-on-year, and “the valuable yet hard-to-reach 16 to 24-year-old demographic [i.e the typical file-sharer] watched 4.9% more commercial TV in April year-on-year and saw 12% more ads,” you have to wonder exactly what the problem is.

Source: UK TV/Film Stars Urge ISPs to Stop Piracy

Consequently the court ruled that access to The Pirate Bay had to be blocked. Tele2 appealed this decision, but lost again two weeks ago.

The court case was initiated by the IFPI – the infamous anti-piracy organization that represents the recording industry. The IFPI later tried to use the “landmark decision” to force Swedish ISPs to do the same, but failed. In fact, it seems that filtering traffic to The Pirate Bay is actually illegal according to European law.

The fight is not over yet though. Since this case could have huge implications for other ISPs and websites, Tele2 has announced that it will take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Fortunately for them, they won’t be alone either. They are backed by the telecommunications industry association. Jens Ottosen, president of the association told Computerworld that, if this decision is upheld, Danish ISPs might be forced to block other sites as well.

In a response, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: “We’re confident that Tele2 will win in the Supreme Court, when they [the court] really dig into the technology and try to understand the whole concept. It’s important for net neutrality and it’s also important for file sharers in Denmark to have this tried (and won).”

When the appeal is successful, The Pirate Bay will claim damages from IFPI. “I hope that they [Tele2] win so we can demand retribution from IFPI.” Peter said. “As I’ve stated earlier we would like them to have to pay damages to us. In that case we would help set up a fund for Danish aspiring musicians that in turn would release music using a Creative Commons license.”

The Supreme Court still has to accept the appeal before the case can go on. Despite the outcome, blocking The Pirate Bay didn’t have the effect that the IFPI was hoping for. On the contrary, traffic from Denmark went up, instead of down. However, this case is about more than just The Pirate Bay, it is about censoring the Internet.

Source: Pirate Bay Censorship Case Not Over Yet

The Court of Bergamo has now lifted the block, and ISPs are again allowed to grant their users access to the most frequently used BitTorrent tracker on the Internet. More details on the decision, and the reason why the block was reversed, will be made public later.

In a previous interview, Pirate Bay’s lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi described the order as “‘original’ or ‘creative’ at best,” and said it should not have been ordered in the first place because of the lack of jurisdiction. In addition, they argued that The Pirate Bay is not breaking any laws since it’s not distributing copyright infringing material.

The court’s decision might set an important precedent for BitTorrent sites in Italy, especially for Colombo-BT, the largest Italian torrent site, which was shut down by the same prosecutor responsible for the Pirate Bay block. The action against Colombo-BT was orchestrated by the anti-piracy outlet IFPI, which also hijacked all Italian Pirate Bay visitors following the block.

Visitors who were blocked from The Pirate Bay were redirected to an IFPI server, instead of a server operated by the Italian government. This is again an example of how lobby groups such as the IFPI, MPAA and RIAA are treated as government institutions. Since many Pirate Bay visitors claimed their privacy was violated, the Italian Pirate Party and Altroconsumo filed a complaint with the ombudsman earlier this week.

Source: Pirate Bay Wins Court Case, Italian Block Lifted

So far, the IFPI has had little success with their lobby, that’s probably why they decided to put legal pressure on the ISPs. “We believe that ISPs have a special part to play in this and must help us. The discussions we’ve tried to have with the ISPs haven’t led anywhere,” IFPI’s Managing Director in Sweden, Lars Gustafsson, said in response to their recent announcement.

The IFPI claims to have studied several ISPs practices, but according to Lars Gustaffson they intend to focus on one particular company which they claim facilitates filesharing on the Internet. One of the services they hope to stop is their nemesis, The Pirate Bay.

Gustafsson was advised by his legal team not to disclose the name of the ISP yet, but many people think the ISP Bahnhof will be the most likely target, since they are recommended by the pirate community because of their high stance on integrity.

“The ISPs don’t believe they have any responsibility to help when it comes to hindering filesharing,” says Lars Gustafsson. IFPI already sent out letters to several service providers, urging them to start monitoring their customers and filtering websites.

Most ISPs refuse to cooperate with the IFPI though. Last month, Telia Sonera, a large Swedish ISP responded to the IFPI’s request by stating that such actions are illegal under EU law. Norwegian ISPs later responded with similar arguments.

On the other hand, the IFPI claims that restricting access to filesharing sites might actually benefit ISPs. “Illegal P2P file-sharing may have helped drive broadband subscriptions in the past, yet today these activities, particularly in respect of movies, are hogging bandwidth,” they state.

Thus far, the IFPI has won in Denmark. In February, a Danish court ordered the ISP ‘Tele2′ to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The decision is currently under appeal, and the Pirate Bay recently announced that they will demand compensation for the block.

To be continued…

Source: IFPI to Sue Swedish ISP for Facilitating Copyright Infringement

A crucial factor in the ruling is thus that the ISP commits copyright infringement in their routers when they allow access to The Pirate Bay. An absurd claim of course, and even more serious, it opposes the Infosoc Directive, that formed the basis of the Danish copyright law.

In in Article 5 of the Infosoc Directive it is clearly stated that “copying in routers” is allowed, as an exception to and a limitation of the rights holders’ exclusive rights. Even more so, this is non-negotiable, and every member state of the EU must accept it. Oscar Swartz, an Internet pioneer and writer in Sweden who has been researching the case extensively rightly argues that the Danish court misinterpreted the Directive in this case.

The misuse of the article in question has been confirmed by Cecilia Renfors, a Swedish judge and special governmental investigator who had the assignment to propose new legislation to combat unauthorized file-sharing. “She refers to the former opinion by the Swedish government and reconfirms that a Danish model would NOT be compatible with Article 5.1 in the Infosoc Directive. She also repeats the opinion that the Danish way actually nullifies the whole purpose of that Article,” Oscar writes.

The Danish ISP Business association has decided that they will challenge the decision in court. Ib Tolstrup, the director of the association said in a podcast interview with Computerworld that Tele2 is going to challenge the ruling, as they realize they are the only nation in Europe that talks about “copying in the routers”. Tolstrup further said that, if Denmark wishes to be a top IT nation, the topic must be put on the political agenda because a Google block is not far away if they do not challenge the courts decision.

In a comment to TorrentFreak Swartz said: “I am surprised that the Danish ISPs have simply accepted the rulings in Denmark when they are so obviously illogical and dangerous. The courts say that any network provider performs “copying” in their routers. If that is correct the consequences are enormous and The Pirate Bay and the two other cases in Denmark would just be the beginning.”

Swartz continues: “I think the case shows that we have to fight all the time. Stand up. Not back down. Work hard. Make research. Try to get the message out to media. What I miss in Sweden, and Denmark of course, is professors and lawyers who are also participating in the fight for communications freedom. Like in the EFF in the U.S. where top professors and lawyers donate time and knowledge to support cases in court. Where are they here?”

In a response to the courts decision, The Pirate Bay launched jesperbay.org. The site is named after Jesper Bay, the head of the Danish IFPI, and gives detailed instructions for affected customers on how to regain access to The Pirate Bay.

Interestingly, it turns out that the block by Tele2 didn’t have the effect that the IFPI was hoping for. On the contrary, Pirate Bay traffic from Denmark went up, instead of down. However, this case is about more than The Pirate Bay, it is about censoring the Internet.

Source: Danish Pirate Bay Block Breaks EU Law

The Pirate Bay team is also asking fellow BitTorrent admins to help out, by redirecting all customers from Tele2, to The Jesper Bay. They have written a piece of code that will redirect all the users from Tele2 to The Jesper Bay, so they can change their DNS.

The ruling of IFPI vs. Tele2 was officially released a few hours ago (translation included at the end of this post). It concludes that the ISP -Tele2- assist in copyright infringement because they give their customers access to The Pirate Bay, therefore they have to prevent access to the site.

A dangerous ruling, which is expected to result in Pirate Bay being blocked by other Danish ISPs, similar to what happened in the AllofMP3 case last year. However, it does not end there, other divisions of the IFPI throughout Europe have already announced that they will start similar cases.

Today, the IFPI in Norway and Finland announced that they too are considering taking action against Internet providers.

The executive director of IFPI Finland, Arto Alaspää, announced that they are considering taking action against ISPs in Finland: “Similar block petitions are likely to be used in Finland,” he said.

Alaspää was soon followed by his Norwegian colleague, Marte Thorsby, who told Dagbladet.no: “The verdict is very positive for us. We have to see if we can get this to Norway as well.”

Sebastian Gjerding, spokesperson for the Danish pro-piracy lobby Piratgruppen, told TorrentFreak yesterday: “It’s very frightening that the IFPI can get through the courts with something like this. In Turkey and China its the state that decides what information the people can access and what should be censored. In Denmark its apparently the record industry.”

For now, Jesperbay makes it pretty easy to lift the block. Let’s hope Tele2 will appeal against the IFPI, so it only has to be a temporary solution.

Translation of the court ruling, by Piratgruppen

It is found undisputed, that the website www.thepiratebay.org functions as an index and search engine which allow the users of the website to download files from each other.

Following the presentation of evidence it has been substantiated, that the major part of the material being exchanged between the users, is protected by the copyrights administered by the claimants, and that the claimants have not given their consent to such publication. Furthermore, it has been substantiated that the use of the website, which according to the information site www.alexa.com holds a 23. place among the most popular sites in Denmark, is somewhat diffused in Denmark.

The exchange of copyrighted material taking place among the users of the site , without the claimants consent , thus constitutes a violation of the copyrights for the audio and motion picture recordings and literary works administered by the claimants, to which the claimants hold the exclusive rights, cf. the Danish Copyright Act § 2, subsection 1.

The court finds the website www.thepiratebay.org to be functioning as a necessary and specifically created search engine for the unauthorised distribution of copyright protected works. Furthermore, the court finds the website’s function to be considered that of making copyright protected works available to the public in a manner to be compared with that of public performance, cf. the Danish Copyright Act §2, even if the www.thepiratebay.org is not itself responsible for the publication of copyrighted works online. The court in this connection emphasises the fact that the website, by means of its search function, is programmed with directs links to copyrighted materials hosted by its users, cf. UfR 2001.1572 V.

It is undisputed that costumers of the DMT2 Ltd. Telephone company have access to the website of www.thepiratebay.org and related sub pages and sub domains.

According to §2, subsection 2 of the Danish Copyright Act, any direct or indirect, temporary or permanent and full or partial reproduction is to be considered a reproduction, in any given way and in any given form. Any kind of copying is hereafter covered by §2.

The telephone company’s dissemination of access to the www.thepiratebay.org entails the transmission of copyright protected material through the company’s web. Hereafter, the court takes the view that the transmission of the works by DMT2 Ltd. entails temporary reproduction of the nature treated in §11 of the Danish Copyright Act. The fact that it is a temporary reproduction is to be given no significance, as the reproduction does not take place on a legal basis, cf. UfR 2006.1474 H, Københavns Fogedrets kendelse af 25. Oktober 2006 i sag FS 15124/2006 og Frederiksberg Fogedrets kendelse af 15. August 2007 i sag FS 7509/2007.

On this basis, the court finds that DMT2 Ltd., by giving its customers access to the www.thepiratebay.org, assists in the violation of the copyrights administered by the claimants, cf. the Danish Copyright Act §2, subsection 2, cf. subsection 1. The circumstance that the www.thepiratebay.org in a certain , even though limited , extend gives access to legal filesharing among the users of the website, is not found to legitimate the wrongful violations.

The County Court hereafter takes the view, that DMT2 Ltd. engages in actions that conflict with the rights of the claimants, cf. the Danish Administration of justice Act §642, subsection 1, nr. 1. The remaining grounds for injunction in accordance with the Danish Administration of justice Act §642 are found to be fulfilled as well, an the material presented to the County Court does not give any grounds for stating that an injunction against DMT2 Ltd. will cause damage or inconvenience in any evident disproportion with the claimants interest in such injunction, cf. the Danish Administration of justice Act §643, subsection 2.

It is ordered that:

It is prohibited to the DMT2 Ltd. to assist in the publication and reproduction of audio and motion picture recordings and literary works to which the claimants hold the exclusive copyrights, via the www.thepiratebay.org.

DMT2 Ltd. is ordered to undertake the adequate measures, suitable in the prevention of access for DMT2 Ltd. customers to the website of www.thepiratebay.org and related sub pages and sub domanis.

Case Closed

Court adjourned

Frederiksberg Fogedret d. 29/1 2008

Oversættelse: Nikolaj Heltoft

Source: The Pirate Bay Fights Danish ISP Block

This proposal has come under fire however, by Pirate Parties all around the world. The Chairman of the Austrian Pirate Party, Florian Hufsky, stated “it’s a tyrannical attempt to curtail useful knowledge from the general public on par with policies of China, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Thus, whilst ineffective as a measure, it is a strong deviation from the principles of the open society.”

With the various Pirate Parties aiming for the European Parliament in 2009, there is not a voice that can easily be discounted, and with the incumbents making these gargantuan faux-pas, it may seem that they are in with a shot of success

Source: Pirates say ‘Narrgh’ to EU Terrorism Censorship

If it’s any consolation, The Pirate Bay is not alone in being blocked. In March, YouTube was banned for hosting videos that insulted the founder of modern Turkey. To the relief of many Turks, the ban only lasted two days, as Google promptly pulled down the videos. And last month, WordPress.com was blocked because some of its users were charged with defamation of a Turkish author.

The first we heard of the Pirate Bay block was two days ago, when Cenk, a long-time reader of TorrentFreak from Turkey, e-mailed in to let us know that The Pirate Bay was no longer accessible in his country. Cenk states that since last Monday, government has shut down all access to thepiratebay.org. However, the press has said nothing on the matter. “I did not hear about thepiratebay.org getting sued or anything and even there was no news on the newspaper or anywhere,” he wrote.

We asked the TPB guys if they knew anything about this. According to them, it has been blocked “for over a year.” They’re “not sure if it’s the whole country or just the major ISPs,” but “there was some court ruling over it.” That court ruling, we’ve discovered, has ordered Türk Telekom, Turkey’s largest ISP, to block The Pirate Bay, though why exactly is still unknown to both the site’s admins and users of the site in Turkey.

There is a comical irony to this all, given that Turkey is the home of some of the most famous real life pirates history has seen, those of the Barbary coast. One can only guess that they have yet to set sail in the intertubes.

Source: The Pirate Bay blocked in Turkey