Both parties have good reason to progress. Copyright holders say the are tired of taking down content only to have it reappear quickly after. On the other hand, service providers and similar web companies burn through significant resources ensuring they respond to takedown demands in a way that maintains their protection from liability.

This fear of the law encourages service providers to err on the side of caution by taking content down quickly, and worrying about legitimacy later. Earlier this week TF spoke with a site operator with first hand experience of a major Internet company’s approach to what they believed to be a genuine copyright complaint.

As previously reported, BeBe is the operator of Wrestling-Network, a site that links to unauthorized WWE streams. While the legality of his main domain is up for lively debate, he maintains his Facebook page was squeaky clean when a WWE lawyer moved to have it taken down. What we didn’t report at the time is that this wasn’t the first time Wrestling-Network had lost a Facebook page.

“We’ve removed or disabled access to the following content that you posted on Facebook because we received a report from a third-party that the content infringes their copyright(s),” Facebook told BeBe in an email.

BeBe wrote back to try and resolve matters, offering to put things right should there have been a copyright-related oversight. But Facebook weren’t interested in being the middle-man in this dispute, instead directing BeBe to contact the person who filed the complaint against him.

“If you believe that we have made a mistake in removing this content, then please contact the complaining party directly.[..],” Facebook responded.

Once furnished with the complainant’s details BeBe recognized them as belonging to a person he’d been in an unrelated dispute with. Despite using a Yahoo email address (rather than @wwe.com), the fake copyright complainer had convinced Facebook to shut down a page in the name of a third-party.

Worse still, BeBe would now have to negotiate with his adversary in order to get his page back.

“If both parties agree to restore the reported content, please ask the complaining party to contact us via email with a copy of the agreement so that we can refer to the original issue,” Facebook explained. “We will not be able to restore this content to Facebook unless we receive explicit notice of consent from the complaining party.”

Fake copyright reports like this aren’t new. In 2011 there was a spate of false notices which saw well-known Facebook pages belonging to Ars Technica, Neowin and Redwood Pie all being taken down by fraudulent complaints.

Three years ago it was exceptionally easy to take down a page, but here we are several years later and the process is still open to abuse. So how easy is it to nuke a Facebook page? On condition of anonymity, a person who targeted another’s Facebook page out of revenge explained.

“Taking down the Facebook page was simple. It requires a well written and thought out mail, directly sent to Facebook, but it was a very straight forward process,” TF was told.

“I did not pretend to be [a rightsholder] however. I claimed to be a company that handles such legal aspects for big corporations without them being directly involved, in order to avoid public backlash but at the same time protect their interests. I provided enough copyrighted posts to prove that the page was a constant abuser and the page was taken down.”

According to PCWorld, during the Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force’s first public forum yesterday, Ben Sheffner, vice president of legal affairs for the MPAA, said that erroneous or abusive notices were a tiny part of the DMCA picture and should be afforded appropriate levels of attention.

Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, saw things quite differently.

Takedown abuse “regularly causes quite an uproar,” McSherry said. “Any multistakeholder dialog that was talking about the notice-and-takedown system and trying to improve it that didn’t include a discussion of takedown abuse would really have no legitimacy in the eyes of many, many Internet users.”

The problem might be small to the MPAA, but of course it’s not their Facebook page getting targeted. To smaller players the problem can be significantly more severe.

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

When it comes to targeting infringement Facebook has a better track record than its Russian counterpart VKontakte, which may be due to its progressive anti-piracy measures.

TorrentFreak has learned that one of the anti-piracy strategies developed by the company uses the social profile information of Facebook users and their connections to others as a factor in determining whether a shared file is copyright-infringing or not. Facebook was granted a patent for its invention today, but it’s not known whether the technology is already being used on a wide-scale.

The patent in question is named “Using social signals to identify unauthorized content on a social networking system” and in the introduction Facebook describes the wealth of personal and social information the company can tap into.

“”[...] users have been voluntarily divulging more of their personal information, such as their friends, geographic location, preferred television shows and movies, hobbies, and activities to social networks,” Facebook notes, adding that they can also see who people communicate with and who they are connected to.

Taken together this is a treasure trove of information, but one that’s currently underutilized. With its new anti-piracy tool, however, Facebook hopes to use this intelligence to predict whether shared content is legitimate or not.

“While all of this information is recorded and stored, it has not been used to predict the nature of any content items that users interact with. In particular, the social activity surrounding a piece of content on a social network has not been used to predict whether the content is unauthorized,” Facebook writes.

The patented technology can be used to detect a wide variety of unauthorized content, but piracy in particular is a problem for social networks, Facebook explains.

“Some users abuse the content posting feature by posting content items that infringe on copyright laws or otherwise violate the social network’s terms of use. For example, users might use the content sharing feature to post chapters from popular novels, episodes of television shows, or links to web pages on external domains that might contain similar copyrighted content.”

By using social signals to detect copyright infringing links and files, Facebook believes that operators of social networking sites can “minimize legal liabilities.”

To come to an accurate estimate of the infringing nature of a file, the patented system can use all social indicators available to it, including what people “like” and where the live.

“The social networking system may collect social signals about the content such as the diversity of the viewers of the content, the relationship between the viewers and another user or other entity that is featured or tagged in the content, and the relationship between the viewers and the user who posted the content,” Facebook writes.

“The social signals are then used to calculate a series of aggregated metrics to generate a prediction for whether the content is an unauthorized use of the social networking system.”

The final step is to delete the allegedly pirated files or links, or hand them over for a more detailed review.

Facebook doesn’t reveal whether the patented system is already in use or which personal details of Facebook users are considered. However, according to its privacy policy the company can use all available user information to protect “rights or property” of Facebook and others.

Nonetheless, not all Facebook users will be happy to see that everything they do is being carefully screened for hints of piracy.

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

But while blocking the most offensive of websites receives little opposition from the public, Russia’s fledgling and largely unpopular anti-piracy law also introduced provisions for sites carrying infringing content to be blocked at the ISP level.

Introduced to a wave of controversy on August 1, the legislation allows for sites that merely link to infringing content to blocked if they do not take action within 72 hours of a complaint. Blocked sites are all placed on the national blocklist where they stay until action is taken, whether that’s removing copyrighted files or complying with some other law.

Yesterday the list enjoyed its most high-profile addition yet after complaints were made about content located on one of Facebook’s countless pages. Telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor confirmed that the site had already been added to the blacklist and would be given three days to remove the yet to be detailed content.

Following speculation that the problem lay with an advert for ‘smoking blends’ on the site, Roskomnadzor said that it had also received complaints about other material and Facebook’s webhosts had been informed of the pending block. Facebook said it was not informed of any problems but the site is expected to do whatever is necessary to rectify the issue.

Artem Kozlyuk, head of RosKomSvoboda, an organization that monitors Russia’s blacklist, told TorrentFreak that in addition to sites being officially added to the blacklist, many thousands of websites are being blocked illegally due to broad IP address-based filters.

“99% of sites currently blocked in Russia are illegally being subjected to blocking,” Kozlyuk explained.

“At the moment, in quantitative terms, it’s more than 30,000 sites, but decisions under the law have only been issued against 450 of them. The remaining sites are being blocked just because they are on the same IP address as those carrying the illegal material.”

Kozlyuk says that the collateral damage extends far and wide, including operating system sites, libraries, publishing houses, plus forums and personal blogs of all kinds. With Russia set to broaden its new anti-piracy law, complaints are only likely to rise meaning that more blockades will be introduced and more sites will become blocked unfairly.

Meanwhile, a petition which gathered 100K signatures against the anti-piracy law looks set to fall on somewhat deaf ears. During a press conference yesterday it was made clear that the State Duma would not be withdrawing the legislation.

Minister of Culture Vladimir Medina said that canceling the law is out of the question.

“If we understand that there is private property, then intellectual property is the same. It is embedded with the blood, sweat and tears of the author. If we deny there is intellectual property, we are depriving the author of the opportunity to live,” Medina said.

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

It has become so important that some of the world’s leading Internet companies such as Google and Facebook, rights groups such as the EFF and Public Knowledge, and the biggest entertainment companies through the MPAA, have all become involved in the case.

First a little background. Marques Gunter owns a site called myVidster, a site designed for users to upload links and embed videos hosted on 3rd party sites. In 2010, adult studio Flava Works filed a copyright complaint against myVidster and 26 Doe users of its service.

Flava Works alleged that Gunter had failed to correctly police his site for infringement. Although Flava did not deny that Gunter had responded to specific takedown requests, the company said that despite being made aware of them, Gunter had done nothing to stop a sample of 26 repeat infringers who continually reposted links to infringing material on the myVidster site.

In July 2011, a contributory infringement claim was upheld and a preliminary injunction awarded against myVidster. The company was denied a DMCA safe harbor defense after it was said to have not done enough to deal with repeat infringement.

“[Gunter] removes videos from myVidster that are listed in DMCA notices, but goes no further. Beyond his mechanical response to the notices, Gunter refuses to concern himself with copyright protection,” Judge John F. Grady wrote.

“It is true that service providers are not required to police their sites for infringement, but they are required to investigate and respond to notices of infringement—with respect to content and repeat infringers,” Grady added.

Noting the importance of the case, late November 2011 the EFF and Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief. The pair said that Grady had gone too far with his interpretation of the DMCA and noted that the law “….does not say when and how service providers must terminate the accounts of ‘repeat infringers,’ nor does it define ‘repeat infringer’.’”

Also in November, Internet giants Google and Facebook signaled their interest in the case and their desire to have the original decision overruled. Their submission is complex, but boils down to a common theme.

“Lack of certainty not only harms established businesses like Google and Facebook, but may prevent investment in and development of the next Google or the next Facebook. A [recent study] found that imposing greater liability on Internet intermediaries for the actions of their users would have a devastating effect on investment in early-stage Internet companies,” the pair wrote in a joint amicus brief.

With such important issues at stake, and with their interests leaning more towards holding service providers liable wherever they can, on April 4th the MPAA added their amicus brief to the mix. The MPAA wants Judge Grady’s 2011 ruling upheld.

“Contrary to the assertions of myVidster and amici Google and Facebook, search engines and social networking sites are not the only businesses that desire certainty in a challenging online marketplace,” MPAA wrote. “MPAA member companies and other producers of creative works also need a predictable legal landscape in which to operate.”

“By advertising infringing material, refusing to terminate any of its users’ accounts, and failing to identify and stop infringers who repeatedly embedded links to unauthorized video streams and displays, myVidster did not qualify for safe-harbor protection,” the MPAA continued.

Again, the brief submitted by the MPAA is highly complex, but it too can be boiled down to a simple interest.

“Given the massive and often anonymous infringement on the internet, the ability of copyright holders to hold gateways like myVidster liable for secondary infringement is crucial in preventing piracy,” the MPAA states.

In keeping with that theme and according to a statement from Flava Works CEO Phillip Bleicher seen by AVN, Flava Works are also suing the web hosts of myVidster.

US-based Voxel.net and Netherlands-based LeaseWeb.com are said to be on the hook “…for failing to remove MyVidster.com from its servers despite dozens of DMCA notices alerting Voxel.net and LeaseWeb.com that Gunter was a repeat infringer. Under DMCA, safe harbor no longer applies to sites that fail to remove repeat infringers.”

Flava Works, Inc v. Gunter, currently up before the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, is one of the most important copyright-related cases around and definitely one to keep an eye on.

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

In a response to copyright infringement claims Facebook accidentally deleted the pages of several well-known websites, including Ars Technica.

A major screwup as it turns out, since the DMCA notices were bogus.

The pages in question were gone for a few hours but eventually returned. Some pages lost a few followers in the process, but other than that everything appears to be normal again.

The above suggests that Facebook is doing very little fact checking on the DMCA notices they receive, which is worrying to say the least.

The social network eventually came clean and released the following message.

—
We have investigated a number of recent intellectual property cases and have restored four pages as a result. We apologize for any inconvenience. Abuse of DMCA and other intellectual property notice procedures is a challenge for every major Internet service and we take it seriously. We have invested significant resources into creating a dedicated team that uses specialized tools, systems and technology to review and properly handle intellectual property notices.

This system evaluates a number of factors when deciding how to respond and, in many cases, we require the reporter to provide additional information before we can take action. As a result of these efforts, the vast majority of intellectual property notices that we receive are handled without incident. Of course, no system is perfect and we are always striving to improve our practices. As such, we will be considering the results of our investigation into this matter as we continue to refine our systems and procedures.
—

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

According to Tom Cook of Facebook’s systems engineering group, the daily code updates for Facebook used to cause a lot of trouble until they discovered BitTorrent. Cook gave a talk at the Velocity Conference this week titled ‘A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations’ where he explained how effective BitTorrent is for server deployment.

“BitTorrent is fantastic for this, it’s really great,” Cook said. “It’s ‘superduper’ fast and it allows us to alleviate a lot of scaling concerns we’ve had in the past, where it took forever to get code to the webservers before you could even boot it up and run it.”

With their BitTorrent-powered distribution system Facebook is now able to send a few hundred MB to tens of thousands of machines in just one minute. The internal Facebook swarm turns every server into a peer that helps in distributing the new code, which gets it updated as quickly as possible. Without BitTorrent this process could take several hours to complete.

Facebook is not the only large web-service that uses BitTorrent to keep its servers updated. Earlier this year we reported that Twitter is doing the same. Twitter’s implementation, codenamed ‘Murder’, is based on the BitTornado BitTorrent client. The code is open to the public and licensed under the free software Apache License.

Besides these social networking sites, several universities have been successfully using BitTorrent-powered systems to update their computers for quite some time already. A Dutch university reported that it retired 20 of the 22 servers it used to send out updates to workstations, saving not only time but also money.

It’s beginning to look like BitTorrent may become the standard for large scale networks that want to update their machines quickly and efficiently. With huge brands such as Facebook and Twitter adopting it, we can only expect that others will follow their lead.

Right now digital films are still shipped out on physical harddisk, which is an awfully slow and expensive process. Perhaps movie theaters should look into BitTorrent as well. That way the movie industry could actually benefit from BitTorrent, instead of complaining about it.

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

Both users and site admins have been pleased with Facebook so far, and some sites are ‘liked’ by over a hundred thousand people. Unfortunately, it seems that Facebook itself is not very happy with all torrent site fan pages.

KickassTorrents, one of the hot newcomers in the BitTorrent scene, decided to join Facebook just three weeks ago. In just a few days the page collected more than 25,000 fans, but the fun didn’t last long as it was quickly removed (Google cache).

The founder of KickassTorrents told TorrentFreak that he received an email from Facebook stating that his fan page violated the Terms of Use and as such was removed. No explanation was given on what the violation actually was or what action should be taken to prevent this from happening in the future.

It is hard to tell what Facebook’s motivation for removing the page was. The page was used solely to update and inform fans and there were no links to torrent files posted. However, it would not be a big surprise if the association with a torrent site is enough reason for Facebook to remove a page.

In the past, Facebook has taken an aggressive stance towards file-sharing related services. The social networking site has previously blocked The Pirate Bay’s “Share on Facebook” feature, and it later threatened the LimeWire developers that it will do the same to them if they didn’t disable the share feature in their client.

After banning The Pirate Bay a Facebook spokesperson told TorrentFreak: “Facebook respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ‘Share on Facebook’ links on sites that contain any content that is infringing.”

With KickassTorrent’s fan page things are different though, as it didn’t link to infringing content at all. The founder of KickassTorrents has been left in the dark about why his page was removed and assumes that it’s related to the ‘torrent site’ brand.

If this is indeed the case, Facebook is not very consistent as many other torrent sites are still using the service without running into trouble. But then again, they are known for their inconsistency as dozens of sites still carry the ‘Share on Facebook’ buttons too.

Facebook was asked for a comment but they have yet to respond.

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

Despite the good reviews from LimeWire users on the latest release, the management at Facebook was not amused. After having blocked The Pirate Bay’s “Share on Facebook” feature, the Internet’s largest social network has now threatened LimeWire that it will share the same fate.

Jason Herskowit, Vice President Product Management at LimeWire told TorrentFreak that Facebook has requested a number of changes to LimeWire’s Facebook integration after they introduced the new feature. LimeWire quickly complied with these requests, but that was not good enough.

“Unfortunately, this week we were contacted again. This time not with a change request, but with a notice that they were going to disable the feature,” Jason explained. “Rather than leave the users with a broken LimeWire, we decided to disable the feature before they did so. As an avid user of both Facebook and LimeWire myself, I am as disappointed by this as anyone.”

“It is unfortunate for us all, particularly considering that LimeWire and Facebook share the common vision of being ‘a place to connect and share’. We hope to find a way to work with Facebook to re-enable the features that you guys continue to ask for and we sincerely apologize for having to remove this feature in the near-term,” Jason added.

Facebook has yet to issue a statement on the LimeWire ban but it is likely that the company doesn’t want to be associated with file-sharing applications or sites, even though they are perfectly legal.

After The Pirate Bay was blocked a Facebook spokesperson told TorrentFreak: “Facebook respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ‘Share on Facebook’ links on sites that contain any content that is infringing,” and it seems that they will do the same to applications that can possibly be used to download copyrighted content.

Facebook was asked for a comment but they have yet to respond. The good news for BitTorrent users is that the share feature on The Pirate Bay is working again, as the site’s operators have implemented a workaround that lifted the block.

Feel free to share this article on Facebook while you still can.

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

The entertainment industries were not happy with the new feature, but since The Pirate Bay is not exclusively used to spread copyrighted material, there wasn’t much they could do about it. Facebook users responded positively and many began posting torrent links in their profile. This integration of the world’s largest tracker and the world’s largest social networking site generated hundreds of news articles and excitement. But it wasn’t to last.

This morning Facebook decided to put an end to the sharing and blocked not only the feature, but all links to Pirate Bay’s torrents. The ‘Share on Facebook’ button on the TPB torrent download pages doesn’t work anymore, and neither does the Facebook bookmarklet. Manually adding a link to your Facebook messages isn’t allowed either, regardless of the “legality” of the content it’s linking to. Facebook has basically launched a site-wide ban of Pirate Bay torrent URLs.

Any message containing a torrent URL, like this one, is blocked. According to the message you’ll see on Facebook it is because it “has been reported as abusive by Facebook users” but this is inaccurate. Facebook is actively blocking the links, also for new torrents and ‘legal’ torrents that are uploaded by artist who want to share their work.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told TorrentFreak, “Facebook respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ‘Share on Facebook’ links on sites that contain “any content that is infringing. Given the controversy surrounding The Pirate Bay and the pending lawsuit against them, we’ve reached out to The Pirate Bay and asked them to remove the ‘Share on Facebook’ links from their site. The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook.”

Interestingly, links from thepiratebay.se are still accepted. The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that this is plain censorship and said he will try to come up with a workaround so people can continue to share. “I’ll fix it later today so it will have a link to a redirect site or something,” he said.

Since Facebook’s Terms of Service forbid any acts of copyright infringement, the company wouldn’t generally be responsible for infringements committed by their users. However, just as a torrent site is expected to respond to DMCA takedown notices, so is Facebook. If, after being notified of an infringement Facebook fails to take action, it could itself become liable. Add this to the prospect of a growing administrative headache linked to a rising tide of DMCA takedown notices generated by TPB torrents, and Facebook probably decided it had enough grounds to justify a ban.

Facebook’s censorship policies are not very consistent though. Mininova and isoHunt, two other large BitTorrent sites remain unaffected, even though isoHunt offers the exact same ‘Share on Facebook’ feature as The Pirate Bay previously did.

Thanks to liquidmonkey

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

That’s not all though, the team has recently rolled out a new feature which is almost guaranteed to spark controversy. Visitors to a torrent details page on the site – such as this random Ubuntu torrent – will notice the addition of a brand new button labeled ‘Share on Facebook’.

Users clicking this button will be taken to the Facebook where the torrent will be added to the user’s profile. Anyone browsing the user’s profile page can simply click on the torrent and provided a torrent client is installed, download begins straightaway with no need to visit the Pirate Bay site.

The entertainment industries are obviously not amused by this new feature. A representative from the IFPI told the Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten that offering links to torrents that point to copyright works is illegal in Switzerland, while referring to the ShareReactor case .

Increasingly, social networking sites such as Facebook are used to share files with users linking to BitTorrent sites or file-hosters such as Rapidshare and Megaupload. Anti-piracy outfits see this as a new threat and request the site’s operators to remove the links.

Two weeks ago the Brazilian recording industry took action and managed to pressure the moderators of one of the largest groups on Google’s social network Orkut to shut down their group. But, when the 921,000 member group was closed, new ones soon took its place and the sharing continued.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde says that they haven’t seen any complaints regarding the new feature. “As far as I know, no rights-holders have complained to us yet,” while noting that any complaints they do receive get deleted immediately.

When asked if The Pirate Bay had permission from FaceBook to implement the new feature, Sunde said they didn’t feel the need to ask. “They monitoring their protal every day – they should have noticed it long ago,” he added. Facebook declined to comment on the issue.

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