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

Gorman reports that in January of that year he’d been out riding his bike when he spotted letters of the alphabet that had been painted on metal shop shutters. He photographed ones he could find, posted them to Flickr, and then people started posting that they knew where the rest were located.

Over the next two days he’d photographed them all and posted them as a single image to his Flickr page. They turned out to be by an artist called Eine and the post by Gorman was a huge hit, netting him a couple of hundred thousand hits to his blog and publicity for the artist.

On February 17th, however, Flickr deleted the entire page. The company had been responding to a DMCA complaint from an anti-piracy company called Degban who do takedowns on behalf of porn studios. Only when Gorman filed a counter-complaint challenging the takedown did he discover that Degban had screwed up.

Flickr allowed him to repost the image but the damage was done – hundreds of fan comments and 6 year’s worth of inbound links to the page had been rendered useless.

Degban CEO Taban Panahi apologized in an email to Dave but said it wasn’t their fault.

“I do apologize for the inconvenience, we have been victim of a phishing/hacking attack, which was aimed at reducing our credibility among clients and the public as you can see how, I truly am sorry that you were effected as such, but allow to humbly suggest that you channel a part of your anger at those holier than thou hackers who effect users like yourself by such irresponsible actions we are working hard to fix the matter, but alas we cannot do much as the size of the attack was larger than we could have expected.

I am hoping you can manage to get back your traffic and are never affected by such issue ever again.”

In comments to AVN yesterday, Degban said that on February 29th their SMTP server had been accessed via a phishing scam and the intruder went on “to report legitimate content as piracy, using our own Take-Down notice templates. ”

Dave Gorman’s opinion is that the explanation “is either bullshit – which is worrying…or true… which is even more worrying.”

TorrentFreak has no way of knowing if Degban was really hacked or not (although Dave’s image was taken down before the company says it was hacked), but ignoring other claims made against the company recently, we thought we’d have a look at Degban’s track record with DMCA takedown requests to see if they take their work seriously.

Degban have been working on behalf of a company called Switchback Media taking down content owned by porn actress Destiny Dixon [NSFW] and quite frankly their efforts are a mess.

“I made a few ring-tones and uploaded them so I could distribute them on the fly but [Degban] took them offline out of Google. How can they do this? Is this not illegal? I hope others find this post and do something about them,” writes a disgruntled guy, coincidentally also called Dave.

The content Dave posted can be found here on TorrentTV, but a Google search advises that Degban took the content down via DMCA request in September last year on behalf of Destiny Dixon.

The problem, it seems, is down to Degban using an extremely primitive scanning system. They also fail to check their own results before they make a sworn declaration they are correct.

In a DMCA notice sent to Google against a listing for the torrent site H33t, they took down a link to an album titled Floorfillers 2010 which is owned by Universal Music. A scan of the track listing shows a track by A R Rahman Ft The Pussycat Dolls – Jai Ho! (You Are My Destiny) and another called Breathe Slow by singer Alesha Dixon.

In a DMCA notice to Google against a listing for the torrent site Bitreactor.to, they took down a torrent containing MTV music videos containing content from Destiny‘s Child and Alesha Dixon again. There are several more erroneous takedowns featuring these pair of famous artists, mostly on music compilation albums.

Here are more takedown examples, in brief. (We’ve only linked to the first couple to highlight the errors and for news and research purposes only)

- Reggae Hits Vol.01 to 37 (Contains artists Trevor Dixon / Pure Silk And One Destiny)
- Comic – DC Comics Chronology (References: Chuck Dixon, JLA: Destiny)
- Limitless (movie) – (Reference: “Eddie must stay wired long enough to elude capture and fulfill his destiny.”
- Haven (TV show) – Takedown reason unknown.
- Breaking Bad (TV show) – Takedown reason unknown.
- Leaves’ Eye – My Destiny (music)
- Howard TV (Howard Stern collection) – Takedown reason unknown.

In fact, of 82 DMCA takedown requests issued on behalf of Destiny Dixon in September 2011, at least 25 of them are completely incorrect and relate to other people’s content. Of course, the TV studios and music labels won’t mind the takedowns related to their work, but people like Dave Gorman absolutely do.

TorrentFreak asked Degban for comment, but at the time of publication we were yet to receive a response. It seems fitting that Dave Gorman should be left with the last word…..

Source: Anti-Piracy Co. Blames Hack For Bogus DMCAs, But They’re Just Sloppy

The file-hoster alleged that after giving Warner access to its systems, the studio wrongfully took down files including games demos and Open Source software without holding the copyrights to them. The false takedowns continued even after the movie studio was repeatedly notified about the false claims.

In a response, Warner Bros. admitted the accusations. However, the movie studio argued that they are not to blame because the mistakes were made by a computer, not a person. As a result, the false takedown request were not “deliberate lies.”

The pending case has major implications for the responsibilities of copyright holders when it comes to automated takedown requests. If the court decides that Warner Bros is not guilty of copyright abuse there’s a serious risk that DMCA notices will turn into a broad and uncontrollable censorship filter.

To prevent this from happening the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed an amicus curiae brief siding with Hotfile.

The EFF points out that because of the false takedown requests many of Hotfile’s users were denied access to legitimate content, effectively hurting speech on the Internet. Blaming the computer for these mistakes is not a valid defense according to the group.

“Hotfile’s customers unfairly lost access to content because of Warner’s bogus takedowns. But under Warner’s theory, any company could sidestep accountability for abusing the DMCA by simply outsourcing the process to a computer,” said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry.

“In fact, the companies would have a perverse incentive to dumb down the process, removing human review. What Warner is doing here is a ploy to undermine the DMCA provisions that protect Internet users from overbroad and indiscriminate takedowns like the ones it issued,” she adds.

As an example of how these automated processes hurt free speech the EFF names a recent case where articles from TorrentFreak and Techdirt were censored by mistake.

The brief further argues that if copyright holders aren’t responsible for computerized takedowns, they might be inclined to abuse the system for competitive purposes.

“Imagine the potential for mischief: Let’s say that Warner does not like competition from Universal. It could set a computer to search through Universal’s online presence, with the loosest possible settings, and issue takedown after takedown to Universal’s ISP for spurious claims,” EFF writes.

The competitive angle raised by the EFF is not just hypothetical, as Google previously noted that 57% of all the DMCA notices they receive come from companies targeting competitors.

As we pointed out two days ago, Warner Bros. is not the only company to make massive mistakes through their automated takedown systems. Microsoft, for example, asked Google to take down a link to the open source operating system Kubuntu, and NBC Universal censored a free-to-share movie.

It will be interesting to see what the judge decides in this landmark case.

Source: Warner Bros’ False Takedowns Stifle Free Speech, EFF Tells Court

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

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

In a show of openness, big companies such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Digg began sending DMCA takedown notices they received to Chilling Effects. In 2010 the clearing house received more than 12,000 such cease-and-desist notices which in turn contained thousands of links to content to be removed. At times this archive makes fascinating reading, as highlighted today by occasional TorrentFreak contributor SearchFreak.

The URL http://chillingeffects.org/dmca512c/notice.cgi?NoticeID=31773 shows a DMCA notice sent by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation to Google which contains a list of URLs which allegedly link to the movie Avatar. Fox demanded that Google should take them all down from its index, which it appears to have done.

However, if one enters this URL into a Google search, the only results listed are where other pages refer to this URL. The actual page with this URL is nowhere to be found. Indeed, as can be seen from the screenshot below, Google has removed the result due to a DMCA takedown complaint.

Fortunately we can see what this complaint was about and who sent it by, ironically, going to ChillingEffects. The DMCA complaint in question was sent by Fox to Google and contains dozens of links its anti-piracy division has culled from the web, allegedly linking to their movie Avatar.

However, deep into the complaint Fox has demanded that Google take down links to two pages on Chilling Effects (1) (2). Their crime? Containing links to the Avatar movie.

So, let’s have a little recap since this is becoming like an episode from Soap.

Chilling Effects is setup to stop the ‘chilling effects’ of Internet censorship. Google sees this as a good thing and sends takedown requests it receives to be added to the database.

Fox sends takedown requests to Google for pages which the company says contain links to material it holds the copyright to. Those pages include those on Chilling Effects which show which links Fox wants taken down.

Google delists the Chilling Effects pages from its search engine, thus completing the circle and defeating the very reason Chilling Effects was set up for in the first place.

Fox has repeated this somewhat ridiculous ‘error’ several times (1) (2) (3) (4) but they are not on their own. It seems that the UFC have also been trying to have ChillingEffects notices removed (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) but currently they remain listed by Google.

While the Fox takedowns happened a while ago, those sent by UFC are just a few weeks old. Let’s hope that when receiving these requests in future Google simply throws them in the trash, where they belong.

Source: Fox DMCA Takedowns Order Google to Remove Fox DMCA Takedowns

In recent years BitComet has been adding many features that have taken it way beyond being a regular BitTorrent client. It now has a full featured HTTP/FTP download manager, a VIP downloading feature, and its own proprietary file sharing protocol which the developers call long-term seeding.

Despite the wide range of features that have been implemented, BitComet has remained largely undiscussed in the English speaking part of the Internet. One of the main reasons for this is that none of the 20-people strong development team speaks English. So today, after working with a team of translators, we aim to bridge this gap and unravel a few mysteries by presenting our discussions with BitComet founder RnySmile.

“In the beginning I was using another BitTorrent client developed in Python,” RnySmile says, commenting on his motivation to start developing BitComet.

“After running a torrent all night long I noticed my harddrive was running like crazy, grinding away as the torrent progressed and I wondered why the developers didn’t use a disc cache to prevent the constant need for repeated read/writes. This client also didn’t have the ability to download more than one torrent at a time.”

“So, being a C++ programmer, I began development on a new client initially called “SimpleBT”, which was originally designed to simply run torrents and introduced a disc cache as well as the ability to download multiple torrents. This project eventually grew to be much more than a simple BitTorrent client so we eventually changed the name to BitComet,” he added.

Today, BitComet has grown far beyond being a one man operation. The current BitComet development team consists of approximately 20 people, who are all from China. These developers are obviously skilled in what they do, but the inherent language barrier also has some downsides.

During the early years there were quite a few controversies surrounding BitComet, which resulted in a bad reputation among many English speaking BitTorrent users. Although RnySmile acknowledges that some errors were made in the past, he believes that many of the reported issues were the result of a lack of communication.

“The criticism and rumors about BitComet that circulated through the English-speaking torrent community were largely unknown to us, at least not to the extent they were known in the English communities,” he says. “Being that BitComet is a free software product we haven’t had the resources to operate a public relations department to service our international users, issue press releases and communicate with the media.”

Although BitComet now has English volunteers who help out users in their native language, this type of support was mostly missing in the early years. In China, on the other hand, it was easier for the BitComet team to address and respond to concerns. “We have always operated a forum in China where we post updates and users can communicate with members of the development team,” RnySmile says.

For many in the English speaking BitTorrent community, the lack of communication resulted in a bad reputation. It all started in 2005 when BitComet was banned from several private BitTorrent trackers for ignoring the “private flag” – a feature that keeps private torrents, private. Even though this issue was resolved relatively quickly, the image of BitComet was permanently damaged.

In the years to come, more and more horror stories popped up, from spreading junk data, to disobeying BitTorrent rules. In 2007, BitTornado developer Shad0w even went as far as banning all BitComet users, because the client allegedly exploited super-seeds.

Around the same time, however, Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years experience, researched most of the claims against BitComet. He concluded that the client was not best suited for initial seeding tasks but at the same time refuted all other claims.

“BitComet is a worthy download client, providing some advantageous features not found in any other current BitTorrent client. Some of these features are confusing and are poorly implemented, but they are not detrimental to a BitTorrent swarm, nor do they take unfair advantage,” Topolski wrote.

“None of the typical accusations against BitComet, those that are provided as reasons for trackers or users to ‘Ban BitComet’ have held true. It is my professional opinion that the bans of BitComet are based on misunderstandings and falsehoods, and not on good data,” he added.

BitComet founder RnySmile agrees with this assessment, and in his full response (linked below) he addresses several of the rumors and misunderstandings in detail. Although the bad press was unpleasant, the BitComet team wanted to look ahead and create an universal download application that goes beyond BitTorrent.

“One thing we wanted to do was make BitComet into more than just a BitTorrent client. We wanted our users to be able to use one program to do all their downloading, no matter what the source of the files was, or the protocol used to get them,’ RnySmile said.

Among other things BitComet has introduced a feature called VIP-downloading which enabled user to download torrent that are accelerated by BitComet’s servers. It’s basically a private connection to a hight speed seedbox which speeds up the downloading process.

Another unique feature to BitComet is the proprietary file sharing protocol which the developers call long-term seeding (LT-seeding). With LT-seeding BitComet users can choose to keep on sharing files with other LT-seeders when their regular download is stopped. However, normal BitTorrent swarms will always have priority over LT-seeding.

Finally, BitComet is also planning to introduce an anonymity feature in the near future, but this is still a work in progress. The above, and integrating many other features that have been implemented over the years, is BitComet’s greatest accomplishment according to RnySmile. “It was a long, hard, and ongoing task to get these new features to all work together and develop a stable product.”

One thing’s for certain, BitComet is here to stay. Although it’s steering in a slightly different direction than most other clients, with some pretty unusual features, we feel that the BitComet team deserves more credit than it generally gets.

—

The full response from the BitComet team was too long to publish in its entirety but can be read here (pdf). We want to thank everyone who helped in getting this interview ready for publication, including RnySmile, The UnUsual Suspect, the BitComet development team, Lucy26, Kluelos, Cassie, GreyWizard and Vasy.

Source: BitComet – A Bittorrent Client Stuck Behind a Language Barrier

While the majority of these outfits do their job with a relative low profile, there are a few oddballs that continue to make the news due to their unconventional tactics. In the past we’ve covered the mysterious ways of the Web-Sheriff, and more recently the Indian based company AiPlex Software has been making a name for itself.

Last September Girish Kumar, managing director of AiPlex Software, admitted that his company DDoSed torrent sites that were not complying with their DMCA takedown requests. “We flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity,” he said at the time.

This revelation was not appreciated by everyone, and led to the start of Anonymous’ Operation Payback which took down the AiPlex website for days on end. A costly attack for the Indian multi-purpose firm that also specializes in medical transcription and search engine optimization.

Despite this setback AiPlex is not backing down, on the contrary. Although the DDoS attacks seem to have stopped the outfit has continued to harass torrent site owners, often incorrectly. Now Bitsnoop has alerted us to an interesting email conversation he had with AiPlex’s managing director.

A few days ago Bitsnoop’s owner received a takedown request for the following torrent, which linked to a copy of the Indian blockbuster Tees Maar Khan. The torrent site owner quickly took the linked page offline and thought the case was settled, but he was wrong. Yesterday, AiPlex’s general manager Girish Kumar sent a reminder for the file that was already removed.

For Bitsnoop’s owner these type of incorrect reminders are an annoyance, and he replied to AiPlex that similar unverified requests will be ignored in the future. Girish Kumar obviously failed to see the mistake he made, but quickly replied with an oddly worded, brand new and unprecedented threat.

HI,

In that case we may have pull the cat out of the bag & ban u completely…Anyways, if u don’t confirm to adhere to our Infringement notification requests, we will be forced send ur website details to the Indian Govt. to further ban ur site across pan India. In fact we have done this to several sites & u are given the last chance to comply the request…

Awaiting for ur earnest reply,
Best,

Girish Kumar N
Managing Director
Aiplex Software Pvt. Ltd.

Really?

It is hard to take any of the above response seriously and indeed Bitsnoop’s owner wisely ignored it. Needless to say, through these unusual threats AiPlex is not making themselves popular among site owners. TorrentFreak contacted Girish Kumar to hear more about their close ties and influence within the Indian authorities, but we have yet to receive a reply.

Of course this is just one side of the daily DMCA troubles torrent site owners face, there are also many agents that are more pleasant to work with, and these usually get more done. When the takedown notices are complete and properly formatted most torrent site owners will cooperate and take the infringing links offline quickly.

AiPlex has obviously chosen to go down another route, which makes it harder for them to succeed. But, this doesn’t matter much for them of course, they’ll simply ask the Indian Government to ban Bitsnoop and The Pirate Bay, making piracy a thing of the past.

And putting themselves out of the anti-piracy business in the process.

Source: Anti-Piracy Outfit Threatens Pan-Indian Torrent Site Ban

Earlier this year, the homepage of BitTorrent meta search engine BTJunkie suddenly disappeared from Google searches, but since the search giant submits the DMCA takedown requests it receives to ChillingEffects, we were able to discover at least some background to the complaint.

But this was just one URL in a single complaint out of the many thousands sent to ChillingEffects by the likes of Google, Yahoo, Digg and Twitter in the last 12 months.

In total, the clearing house received copies of more than 12,000 cease and desist notices, some containing a single URL and some (such as those relating to The Pirate Bay) containing hundreds. So who made the biggest noise with DMCA takedown notices in 2010?

It will come as no surprise that according to ChillingEffects stats, the international music industry, represented by IFPI, issued the most DMCA takedown notices to submitters during the last 12 months, 1272 in total. This may not sound like a huge number, but many of them contain lists of URLs which take a considerable time to simply scroll through.

In second place one might expect to find other representatives from the entertainment industry, but this position is taken with 303 complaints by Clube do Hardware, the largest site in South America to publish tutorials, articles and news on computer hardware.

Twentieth Century Fox secures the third spot with 299 cease and desists. Magnolia Pictures, a holding of the Mark Cuban owned 2929 Entertainment, takes fourth spot with 257 complaints. Porn aside, no further movie companies make the top 20.

Brazil’s Associação Anti Pirataria de Cinema e Musica, the anti-piracy group which caused so much trouble for popular fansubbing sites such as Legendas.TV, also makes a significant appearance in the ChillingEffects chart. APCM, which represents the interests of companies such as Universal, Warner, SonyBMG, Disney, Paramount, and Fox, was hacked in 2009 but made its comeback to take 5th position.

Operating in the adult entertainment market, RemoveYourContent came in 6th with 221 DMCA takedowns. With claims of a 99.3% success rate for removal of infringing content, the company has made enemies even within its own community, as demonstrated by various ‘hate‘ sites and critics. In 2009, RemoveYourContent was even blamed for having The Pirate Bay’s homepage delisted by Google.

The RIAA has to settle for a lowly 7th place with 203 DMCA takedowns. Sony/Epic/Estate of Michael Jackson slide in at 11th spot, followed by Stones Throw Records at 12th and Chappell & Co at 13th. There are no more music companies listed in the top 20.

Folkert Knieper, a producer of recipe photographs, is one of the more unusual entries at 9th position with 158 takedowns followed at 17th by Deckers Outdoor Corporation, the rightsholder for pictures of UGG boots.

Adult video company Vivid Entertainment Group sits at 18th position with 82 DMCA takedown requests.

Interestingly, some of the biggest copyright litigators of 2010, such as the United States Copyright Group and ACS:Law, appear nowhere in the top 20 list which perhaps suggests that having content removed is not their biggest concern, but generating profit from its existence is.

So which industry makes the most noise overall when it comes to DMCA complaints?

“While the mix changes over time, the most frequent senders of DMCA takedown notices remain the music industry, whose institutional members have sent a combined total averaging roughly 5 takedowns a day,” says ChillingEffects’ Wendy Seltzer.

The full list, which also lists famous copyright ‘agents’ such as the Web Sheriff, can be found here.

Source: The Top 20 DMCA Cease and Desist Senders of 2010

Choice aside, Mulve is particularly fast too. Searches yield results quickly and tracks download at excellent speeds, yet this software is not a traditional P2P app – in fact, there is no uploading required at all. Pulling its data off fast servers in Russia connected to the country’s biggest social networking site, downloading from Mulve is about as ‘safe’ as it gets.

Last week, after generating dozens of headlines and excitement around the Internet’s tech sites, Mulve’s homepage went offline, unable to cope with the demand.

TorrentFreak has learned that the site was getting more than 30,000 visitors a day and they were carrying out around 15000 searches every hour.

The site soon returned but those wanting to use the software today, however, will have problems. It is completely down, not due to excessive demand, but due to the lawyers at the RIAA.

“Just letting you know that Mulve has received a DMCA take down request from the RIAA, so it needed to be taken offline,” a Mulve spokesman told TorrentFreak.

While Mulve hosted no illegal files, it appears that the RIAA discovered that a small element of the site was hosted with US-based Hostgator. Once that element was taken down it was enough to effectively disable the site.

It is understood that Mulve has a new update in the pipeline which will improve the application, but there is currently no news on when the site and application will return. TorrentFreak is assured, however, the downtime is just temporary.

In the meantime, as we wait for news, we can ponder on the meaning behind the word ‘Mulve’.

“It is an abbreviation for Music Love,” the developers told us.

Update: The site’s back up (for now).

Source: RIAA Takes Down Music Downloading App Mulve

In that consultation the public made it clear that stricter copyright laws are not welcome. However, it seems that this has had very little effect as Canada’s Prime Minister is about to announce a ‘new’, even more draconian law. Michael Geist, prof. E-commerce Law in Ottawa, described the bill as “the most anti-consumer copyright bill in Canadian history.”

The owner of isoHunt, one of the largest BitTorrent sites that will be directly affected by the law, is rallying opposition against the new bill. IsoHunt’s Gary Fung is warning of the effects the bill will have on Canadians.

“The effects of a draconian copyright bill in Canada can be far reaching. Things Canadians take for granted, like copying your music from your computer to your music player and vice versa, can be deemed illegal with this new bill,” Gary told TorrentFreak.

“ISPs can be forced to handover private information of users on a whim without due process. They may be further encouraged to throttle P2P traffic, even for entirely legitimate uses like game files distribution. The new bill also is unlikely to provide fair exceptions for breaking DRM for purposes that doesn’t violate copyright, which unfairly prohibits one’s tinkering with electronics he owns,” Gary added.

Gary’s warnings are justified. Although it is not completely clear what the details of the new bill will be, it is expected that it will be the Canadian equivalent of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This means that copyright takedown request become a censorship tool while consumers lose several ‘fair use’ rights.

IsoHunt is currently hosted in Canada and involved in a lawsuit against the Canadian Recording Industry Assicoation (CRIA). If this new bill is passed, this would mean that isoHunt’s chances of winning that long standing legal battle will decrease significantly.

Gary further told TorrentFreak that he is worried that the new bill will lead to increased censorship by copyright holders. “We need laws that support our neutrality and our ability to operate a search engine free of censorship and unreasonable constraints,” Gary told us, adding that the new bill would provide the opposite.

“We’ve seen record labels sending us takedown notices mixed with links to porn, and the new Canadian bill should provide recourse against rights holders providing false identification information. Unless music companies are really switching to distributing porn,” he added.

Once again, we have to encourage all Canadian readers to speak out against the bill before it’s too late. Although the Government ignored the people’s opinion during the consultation, doing nothing will mean that the war is lost for sure. Michael Geist encourages all Canadians to write a paper letter to their Member of Parliament and provides some further pointers.

Update: Here’s a letter wizard.

Source: Canada Fast-Tracks Draconian Anti-Piracy Law

These exchanges often started off politely but later turned into an email fight when it became clear that The Pirate Bay didn’t intend on removing any torrents from their site. However, some rights holders are furious from the start and don’t even have to be triggered by such takedown refusals.

One such copyright holder, Paul Harris from ReverbXL, couldn’t hide his frustration when he harassed several torrent site admins. In his email, Harris holds the admins responsible for the illegal downloading that occurs though their site, and warns them about the consequences of their actions.

“You won’t win this fight. And not because the big mean corporate world will beat you, because you’ll end up as an insignificant foot note in history,” Harris writes.

Harris’ full rant is pasted below, for your consideration.

Paul Harris wrote:

Hi there webmaster. We are a music publisher and your web spiders are linking to songs by TURIN BRAKES, who we publish. We have not given permission to be distributed.

Please remove all links. I would appreciate it if you could monitor your service and ensure that NO copyrighted material is linked in it. If you do not have the technology to ensure this, then I advise you to invest in it before you are closed down or forced to remove all links. May I draw your attention to this recent ruling.

Mininova. Was the biggest, and the most uncooperative, now the humblest, and the most co-operative. You will be the same. Maybe it would be best to remove the links yourself?

From a moral standpoint, you are not only hurting the music industry but also the writers and the artists involved. Think about it, please. There are plenty of legal alternatives now where people who do not want to buy music can listen. But the contributors deserve to be paid.

Think about it. It’s like a company using their fleet of white vans to move other people’s stolen goods around – no you haven’t done the actual stealing, but you are facilitating the crime!

I work my balls off trying to make a living in music – I’m not some jerk off in a suit. Nor are my artists. But you cast us as such whilst knowing nothing of the reality.

If you are so brave, so keen to take a swipe at the corporate world, why don’t you go and picket Shell, Nike, HSBC, any number of industries who actually ARE immoral. But you won’t, because your moral stand point is totally warped. I can’t wait to see you go down. You won’t win this fight. And not because the big mean corporate world will beat you, because you’ll end up as an insignificant foot note in history.

Thanks very much.

P

Although we can sympathize with Harris somewhat, this is definitely not the best way to get links to content removed from a torrent site. In the case of Turin Brakes, a little patience might have gone a very long way since there are only a handful of torrents on public trackers so the job would’ve been pretty easy.

Despite the aggressive approach, most torrent site operators are still willing to cooperate and remove the associated torrent files. After a quick search though, Google turns up as many links as most public search engines. Whether they would respond favorably to an email like this is up for debate.

Source: Furious Copyright Holder Harasses Torrent Site Admins

Luckily, there are still some politicians who know what’s right and what’s not. Charles Angus, a Canadian MP, is not a fan of the ’3 strikes and you’re out’ proposals, which have also been discussed in Canada. Indeed, it seems that nobody, except the lobby groups pushing it, are for it. Cory Doctrow, in a piece for the Guardian the other day, proposed a similar 3-strikes measure for the anti-piracy officials. Send 3 false accusations and you’re off the net. Angus is similarly opposed in a recent interview:

Well, i think the outset the three strike law as admissible is idiotic. It’s idiotic because as we see with the DMCA those that get accused of infringements lack the legal power that the corporations that are threatening them have. So it’s always going to be a completely one-sided argument and if ISP’s are legally bound to cut you off after three claims of infringement, I think there are certainly problems.

Charles Angus, MP, is not your typical politician. Unlike most, he’s not a lawyer, and having worked first hand with those who have been forgotten by those in government , the homeless , has a good appreciation for cause and effect. Also, through clashes with his church over gay marriage in the past, he has also proven himself a man of morals, not easily swayed by peer pressure or lobbying.

It is welcome then, to hear that he is also in strong opposition to Canada’s bill C61, dubbed “the Canadian DMCA”. Back in early May, in a statement from his office he warned of lobby actions:

The DMCA lobby will be working closely with the government to create a false impression that there’s an international crisis of confidence in Canada’s copyright regime. They will attempt to portray copyright as a black and white battle against pirates, thieves and criminals. In doing so, they will tar the efforts of educators, consumer groups and artist’s organization who recognize that the DMCA is the wrong model for Canada.

DMCA advocates have attempted to portray Canada as a pirate haven for failing to ratify the WIPO agreement. Angus points out that many of Canada’s competitors are in exactly the same position, and that Canada could easily ratify WIPO without agreeing to the onerous restrictions included in the DMCA legislation. He says politicians need to wake up to the problems with the DMCA.

The DMCA is a failed model. It doesn’t work in the United States and it won’t address the needs of a 21st century innovation agenda in Canada. However, U.S. trade lobbyists are intent on bringing Canada to heel. They will try to choreograph a sense of fear that Canada is somehow failing internationally if we don’t go the DMCA route.

Many didn’t heed that warning, however, and bill C-61 was the result, introduced last month. Like a lot of consumers (including some 85,000 – up from 40,000 last month – on Michael Geist’s facebook group) Angus isn’t happy about the bill, as he states:

Bill 61 is a piece of legislation that is taking us down the wrong road. We really need to update our copyright legislation for the 21st century. It’s Something that has been dragging on much too long. But bill c-61 is premised on a number of very faulty assumptions. It’s also predicated on, well it’s been based on a complete lack of consultation with the key people who need to be at the table to make good copyright legislation.

When it comes to copyright, he is the one that had the advantage over politicians. A former musician, he also earns money from book sales as well as music. His views seem to be quite different from another artist, Indiana Gregg, the difference is, he has studied the facts, she hasn’t.

It is the punishments that come up for greatest scorn however, and he is firmly on the side of ‘proving your case’ something the industry hates to do, for studies, and now lawsuits.

If you look at how the lawsuits happen in the U.S, you will get a bill for 15-20,000 and be told to pay it. If you try to challenge it, they will bring a massive legal team against you, and we saw the woman in the U.S who basically lost her house and savings for the fact she uploaded 12-24 songs. Thats completely irrational. If there are damages, if someone has massivly infringed copyright, there has to be a limit. There has to be clear limits, and it has to be proven what those damages are.

For the full low-down on his thoughts, check out the full interview. For more information about the European “three strikes” legislation, visit the Open Rights Group.

Source: Canadian MP: Three Strikes Law is Idiotic

The bill is controversial in many ways. Whilst supporters of the bill will point to the allowances for time shifting, format shifting, and the ability to ‘private copy’ (moving a song from CD to an mp3 player for instance). It will, however, prevent that activity, though criminalization, if there is any sort of technological restriction on it. Anti-copy flags on TV shows, DRM on music, or rootkits on CDs would mean that any attempt to make a fair use, would be subject to prosecution and heavy fines.

Perhaps even more important, uploaders, and to an extent, downloaders too (certainly those on torrents), will now be liable. While in the past, the RMCP has stated it won’t pursue uploaders, with new laws come changes in policy for those that enforce the laws. Bill C-61 contains a statutory damage amount of $500.

Limitation
(1.If a copyright owner has made an election under subsection (1), a defendant who is an individual is liable for statutory damages of $500 in respect of all the defendant’s infringements that were done for the defendant’s private purposes and that are involved in the proceedings.

This is a change from the previous wording, which gave the court latitude to drop that $500 to as low as $200.

Scene members, and torrent sites will also find themselves under increasing pressure. Despite claims that most torrent sites are not commercial, it’s not stopped industry associations from claiming they are, in order to get law enforcement action against them. From the act,

Circumvention of technological measure
(3.1) Every person, except a person who is acting on behalf of a library, archive or museum or an educational institution, is guilty of an offence who knowingly and for commercial purposes contravenes section 41.1 and is liable

(a) on conviction on indictment, to a fine not exceeding $1,000,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or to both; or

(b) on summary conviction, to a fine not exceeding $25,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to both.

Although DRM has seen a decline in recent times, laws like this can only give content distributors incentive to bring them back, at least in Canada.

Source: Canada Proposes Draconian Anti-Piracy Law

The paper shows that the tracking methods used by anti-piracy enforcement companies are not watertight, to say the least. Indeed, last year we already reported that it is possible to trap people into being reported to the MPAA or RIAA, by simply letting them click on the announce url of a BitTorrent tracker. The research from the University of Washington confirm these vulnerabilities, as they managed to receive hundreds of infringement notices addressed to a networked printer.

In August of 2007, data was being collected for a study of BitTorrent activity. During the experiment, the research team received over 200 DMCA complaints, despite never having violated any copyright. This alone should, and does, strike at the basic credibility of the organizations issuing such notices, and will be a big question if the content industries attempt to push for another ’3 strikes’ approach.

Then, in May 2008, the team decided to repeat the tests, first to see if things had changed, and to discover if they could later implicate other IP’s, ‘spoofing’ their presence. This time, there were almost 40% more DMCA notices, despite still not actually infringing copyright as claimed in the notices.

However, not only did the number of notices rise between the two monitored periods, the actual number of swarms monitored by the research team decreased. In August 2007 they had one notice for every 270 swarms. In April, that was up to less than one per hundred. However, without better knowledge of the torrents they were on each time, it’s hard to say if the difference was down to the choice of targets, or if anti-piracy efforts had been stepped up. For example, it could be that the increase was down to picking ‘hotter’ torrents, rather than an increase in enforcement.

Michael Piatek, one of the researchers involved in the project told TorrentFreak that they have contacted BayTSP and other enforcement agencies about the vulnerabilities in their tracking methods, but nothing has changed so far. A spokesman of BayTSP said he could not give a comment yet, but he assured us that their technical team will look into the research.

In addition, the researchers also checked to see if they could detect anti-p2p efforts, such as loggers. Whilst the paper gives one potential way to identify things, and later a method for using that to automatically create blocklists, the end result is that even with these major assumptions in favor of the blocklists (by eliminating residential IP addresses from consideration, for instance) at best, out of the 17 suspicious IPs found, only 10 were in such blocklists, 8 of them at colo facilities, tagged as ‘Mediasentry ‘or ‘Mediadefender’ (note that MediaDefender does not do enforcement)

In summary, the paper says that “potentially any Internet user is at risk for receiving DMCA takedown notices today. Whether a false positive sent to a user that has never even used BitTorrent or a truly infringing user that relies on incomplete IP blacklists, there is currently no way for anyone to wholly avoid the risk of complaints.” More dishearteningly for groups like Bluetack, however, is that it’s yet another kick at their claims of protection.

The last paragraph sums things up better than I can, however: “We have further demonstrated that IP blacklists, a standard method for avoiding systematic monitoring, are wholly ineffective given current identification techniques and provide only limited coverage of likely monitoring agents.”

We will give a more detailed breakdown of the study and its implications, soon.

Source: Study Reveals Reckless Anti-Piracy Antics

TorrentFreak – What brought this law to your attention

Florian B̦sch РBoingBoing, through slashdot

TorrentFreak – The law wasn’t publicized at all?

Florian Bösch – It was, but it’s… a convoluted topic, and I don’t care about politics. There’s a trail of press releases and actions that accompany the passing of this law. It just didn’t gain any mainstream attention. Don’t know if it did now, I certainly hope so. You see I didn’t really know I cared that much about all of this, but somehow the news hit me and I knew it did.

TorrentFreak – Have you contacted your representatives in either council?

Florian Bösch – I didn’t contact the representatives in the councils no. Two reasons mainly, I don’t think it’ll help anything (with exception of two all voted for this law, no abstains), and I was pretty busy of late. (I have a day job too, one with deadlines) It’s a bit controversial, I work as a programmer for a company that sells DRM technology and services.

TorrentFreak – I would think that would put you in support of this law

Florian Bösch – I’m not. I think it’s a bad law, for the industry as well. See I think the DRM industry does just fine, it doesn’t require laws to protect it. They’ll make a shoddy product that will not be able to compete with actually free content once that becomes commonplace. And the cynicism of the industry is somewhat ungraspable for me.

TorrentFreak – This 50,000 signature rejection, is it common knowledge, or is it something brought up on rare occasions?

Florian Bösch – It is a very commonly known that it’s possible.

TorrentFreak – is it utilised often?

Florian Bösch – Yeah it’s usage is commonplace. Usually parties hold it up as a Damocles sword for discussions, at any time there’s 1-3 referendums running. It’s a bit rare that it’s started by people with no backing and clue how to do it.

TorrentFreak – How has this drive been met by the general citizenry?

Florian Bösch – I don’t know actually. I started last Friday (November 31st), spent the weekend doing the website, buried myself in mailing around and talking to people to do something, organized stuff.

TorrentFreak – What’s the response been like so far?

Florian Bösch – By the people who come to the mailing list and to the IRC channel, I’d say thankful and concerned. By people who worked on that law openly hostile (such as here). They basically think this law is the best we can manage, and the next one will be worse, so if we now abolish it, we will have to fight again, and it’s not sure it’s going to be better. (or the worst happens and the people vote for this law)

TorrentFreak – According to that thread, you believe DRM will soon be impossible to circumvent?

Florian Bösch – So hard it won’t matter, yes, I think that. See the DRM as you know it is already the past. That’s kiddie stuff, the future is polymorphic DRM that changes algorithm and inner working with every content item, because on it will be some bytecode that executes on a secure VM. Whilst it certainly won’t be uncircumventable, it will just be hard to keep open.

TorrentFreak – Yet, there’s the possibility that it will become undesirable

Florian Bösch – Yes, actually I think it’s inevitable this becomes undesirable, but I rather see it happen sooner then later.

TorrentFreak – More and more are going away from DRM and copy protection, and some of the best arguments came from a company called StarDock when they released the game GalCiv2 – that the only person it hurts and inconveniences are the legitimate consumers.

Florian Bösch – I don’t think that’s true. It hurts the whole content industry.

TorrentFreak – How so?

Florian Bösch – See we set-up music services for say mobile network operators. to do that you need players on mobile phones. To get content from the labels you need to prove that you do effective DRM. Then you have to explain to your client what he can and cannot do with DRM. It’s always funny when you get to the point where they absolutely want ripping to CD of your music, but insist that everything must be quite protected. Plain content on iPods (you got to support iPods) so the company I work for has this really good DRM, and your non-techie customers rip it apart with their real world business cases. Not that I mind, it’s just ironic. Then there’s the nature of obscurity. It permeates the whole system, you have to keep track of device IDs and userIDs and public keys and do the right dance against some piece of patented software to be privileged just to hand out a download url. I mean, something essentially simple, handing out a file, has become a huge and complex task.

TorrentFreak – So its log jamming itself, and that’s part of what is the problem with these laws, it not only hurts the consumers, but also the industries its intended to protect?

Florian B̦sch РExactly. it encourages the industry to more of that when it should do less. DRM in your business case is not quite yet the kiss of death, but it feels quite familiar.

TorrentFreak – How many signatures have you collected so far?

Florian Bösch – Embarrassingly few. we keep track here. It’s a lot more probably, but who knows.

TorrentFreak – and the signatures all have to be verified by the canton government?

Florian Bösch – By the municipality of the signatory; there’s about 1000 municipalities in Switzerland. The trouble is we should collect on the order of 2000 signatures a day. Those all have to go to the municipalities first and then be collected centrally; it’s a huge task. I think the important thing that happens isn’t so much the signatures as that people are talking more about this now then before. I’m happy I could help with that at least, and It’s a very interesting experience to go trough the signature collecting thing, I’ll write a tutorial/howto about it so more people can do it.

TorrentFreak – How do you plan on ‘expanding’ the campaign over the next few weeks?

Florian Bösch – I have no idea honestly. I try to make a breeding ground for like-minded and get them to talk to each other, and I hope we can form a network of action to have more local effect. I do just one thing, I express that I’m not happy with this law, and I thought I was not alone, and others might join in.

TorrentFreak – A laudable aim. Thank you for your time.

More information on the campaign can be found at http://no-dmca.ch

Source: Behind The Scenes of the Swiss DMCA Fight

The findings are quite shocking, but at the same time good news for filesharers who receive DMCA notices from their ISP. Ben found what some of us already expected. BayTSP only records who connects to the tracker, and has no proof that the alleged pirates actually tried to download infringing content. BayTSP merely collects IP addresses and forwards them to anti-piracy organizations. The anti-piracy then send a letter to your ISP, accusing you of sharing copyrighted material.

The really scary thing about this is that it is extremely easy for other people to make you receive a DMCA notice from your ISP, and possibly get disconnected if that happens more than once. As Ben points out, one way to make someone connect to a fake tracker (don’t try this at home) is by letting them click on a link like this:

http://tracker.com:12345/announce?info_hash=579CC43E4D6.

Their IP will then be recorded by the fake tracker, and they will probably receive an infringement notice soon after that. Even if they’ve never heard of BitTorrent at all! Another way to set someone up is by using “peer exchange“. All you have to do is enter someone else’s address, and the fake tracker will record it.

All this is actually good news for people who receive these DMCA notices. As Ben points out in his post: “If your ISP forwards a DMCA notice from these guys, point them here. This research suggests that they have no evidence of wrong-doing. If ISPs learn that the folks sending them DMCA notices are not being completely honest, they may be willing to reconsider their position about how they respond to the notices.”

Source: IP Harvesting: Filesharers Guilty Until Proven Innocent

With that in mind, tomorrow Giest launches 30 Days of DRM page and an associated wiki which will, “seek to provide a starting point for the kinds of protections politicians and policy makers should be contemplating,” at the same time forming a compilation of DRM policy issues.

While there was much to criticize about Bill C-60, the last attempt at copyright reform in Canada, “given continuing pressure from the copyright lobby and American government, the Conservatives’ bill may be, “far more extreme in its approach,” says Geist, stressing that anti-circumvention provisions which grant legal protection to technological protection measures (TPMs) are likely to be the most contentious issues.

“In plainer English, traditional copyright law grants creators a basket of exclusive rights in their work.”

“TPMs or digital locks (such as anti-copying technologies on CDs) effectively provide a second layer of protection by making it difficult for most people to copy works in digital format. Anti-circumvention legislation creates a third layer of protection by making it an infringement to simply pick or break the digital lock (in fact, it even goes further by making it an infringement to make available tools or devices that can be used to pick the digital lock).”

Under the DMCA, it’s an infringement to circumvent a TPM, “even if the intended use of the underlying work would not constitute traditional copyright infringement,” Geist emphasises.

The House of Commons reconvenes in a month and to highlight exceptions and limitations that should be included if a Canadian DMCA is introduced, starting tomorrow, each day for the next 30 days Geist will post a new provision focusing broadly on marketplace concerns, public protection, and fair circumvention,” .

“We should be working on a positive copyright agenda that includes an expanded fair dealing provision, reform to the statutory damages provision, the elimination of crown copyright, and protection from DRM,” he states.

“Instead, given the strength of the copyright lobby, we may need protection from the next copyright bill.”

The 30 Days of DRM page and the associated wiki will, “seek to provide a starting point for the kinds of protections politicians and policy makers should be contemplating,” Geist states.

Stay tuned.

p2pnet

Source: 30 Days of DRM