Sent from an alleged former employee of Giganews who identified himself as Nick Caputo, the email contained serious allegations about his former employer. Caputo told us that he’d begun working at the company in 2009 and as a “huge pirate” he loved to help people download “all the rich multimedia content they could.” But that was just the beginning.

The email outlined Caputo’s rise through the company through two quick promotions in two-and-a-half years. However, it quickly descended into allegations that far from being a straight-down-the-line newsgroup provider, Giganews is in fact an FBI-run operation. Caputo says he discovered this after getting into a dispute with the company about removing child abuse material and elevating his complaint to the FBI.

TorrentFreak decided not to run with the story, despite clear indications that Caputo is who he claimed he was. The story, which had plenty of detail, just didn’t hold up on its own. There was plenty of ‘evidence’ provided but the problem was that none of it added up to a level of proof that we’d be prepared to stand behind.

But four days later and after being contacted by Caputo, Cryptome published the email and documents originally sent to TorrentFreak and possibly others.

The story quickly spread around dozens of sites including Reddit and HackerNews forcing Giganews to respond, acknowledging that Caputo was indeed a former employee but denying the allegations.

“This is a hoax. These allegations are 100% false,” the company wrote.

“Unfortunately, since his termination, the poster has periodically posted versions of this information online. Sometimes, he tries to misrepresent himself as our CEO and sometimes he posts as himself.”

With Giganews criticizing Cryptome for publishing the allegations, Caputo it seemed was not giving up. The archive of evidence originally offered to TF found itself uploaded to Internet Archive from where Caputo hoped it would be spread far and wide.

However, according to a new email published by Cryptome, that has now been brought to halt by the issuing of a DMCA notice.

Subject: archive.org item subject to copyright claim
From:”Internet Archive”
Date:Sep 18, 2014 9:41:11 PM

Hello,

Access to the item at https://archive.org/details/giganews-fbi has been disabled following receipt by Internet Archive of a copyright claim submitted on behalf of Data Foundry, Inc (datafoundry.com). The claim was submitted with information and statements requested by Internet Archive’s Copyright Policy (posted at https://archive.org/about/terms.php near the bottom of the page). If you have questions regarding the claim, please let us know.

Sincerely,

The Internet Archive Team

While Giganews clearly thinks the contents of the archive are defamatory, one has to dig into the details to see where the company has a copyright claim over the file.

That can be found in a dump of employee contact details which documents show were obtained from Data Foundry’s intranet. Each employee card has a photograph attached and those are likely to have been taken by a company employee in company time.

Also included in the dump is a Giganews appraisal of Caputo’s performance during 2010. It was authored by a manager and the rights to the form will most likely sit with the company. While Giganews would probably write something different today, four years ago the company felt that Caputo was “the go-to guy” for getting stuff done on nights, ranking his overall performance as “exceeding” the standard required.

“Giganews is in the impossible position of proving a negative,” the company said in a statement.

“If we say our list of employees does not include any FBI employees, then they must be ‘using false identities.’ If we say the named FBI operatives don’t look like any of our employee photos, ‘the pictures must have been altered.’ Even the denial itself is used as further evidence of the truth of the accusation. In a court of law, such an accusation would never stand up to scrutiny, but on the Open Internet, opinions can be formed by only a few words on a popular website.”

Whether the allegations will now calm down and go away is anyone’s guess, but a DMCA notice to one of the many sources of the file is unlikely to make it disappear forever.

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

The reasons the site gives are many, from Dropbox relying on Amazon’s servers instead of its own, using data deduplication which “sacrifices user privacy”, a lack of encryption, to other concerns including a claimed vulnerability to US privacy laws.

We wanted to know who was behind DumpDropBox so we started asking questions. Our inquiries kept turning up the same name over and over again.

Golden Frog are the operators of VyprVPN and the Dump Truck file-storage product which is given away free to every subscriber of Usenet giant Giganews. Although separate business entities, Golden Frog and Giganews have a few things in common, not least their sharing of the same co-founder, Internet entrepreneur Ron Yokubaitis.

Yokubaitis is a resident of Austin, Texas, so it didn’t come as a surprise that TorrentFreak managed to catch up with him during the SXSW festivities on Monday. So, is Golden Frog behind the anti-Dropbox campaign?

“Yes, Golden Frog is behind the dumpdropbox.com website,” Yokubaitis told us.

“Austin is our hometown so we wanted do something fun at SXSW. We decided the dumpdropbox.com campaign was a fun way to inform users about the privacy and security issues that affect online storage. We hope these conversations continue beyond SXSW.”

One key claim from the campaign site is that Dropbox doesn’t use its own servers for file-storage but relies on Amazon’s instead. Many sites rely on ‘the cloud’ – not least The Pirate Bay – so why does this pose a problem?

“Our goal is to educate users that there is ‘another way’ – Your data. Our servers. No 3rd parties,” Yokubaitis explained. “At our core, Golden Frog is focused on providing secure online tools for netizens and I think that resonates with both Golden Frog and Giganews userbases.”

Amazon’s servers are in the United States, a point highlighted as a supposed negative on the DumpDropBox site. However, raising this issue of jurisdiction is tricky for Dump Truck. Its servers are also entirely based in the U.S. but Yokubaitis told us that will soon change. In response to concerns European customers have over U.S. privacy laws, in the coming months users will be given a choice of where to store their files.

“Dump Truck will launch a European server cluster this year with the ability for users to designate that their files be stored in ‘Europe only’,” Yokubaitis told us. “We do a lot of business in Europe and our European users have heavily requested the feature. We are very focused on meeting the needs of our European userbase.”

So what exactly are the problems with the US?

“There are doubts about storage companies in the US and we share the same concerns. Last week, there was much discussion about Microsoft and Verizon scanning user’s files,” Yokubaitis said, pointing us to this article on Ars.

“Of course, Dropbox also uses data deduplication to scan users’ files to save on storage costs. We don’t scan users’ files and don’t rely on third parties to store our users’ data,” he added.

When considering possible weaknesses of US-based file-hosting services another issue comes to mind – the fate of Megaupload. Of course, Kim Dotcom is off to a fresh start with Mega.co.nz in New Zealand, backed by a company that is going out of its way to comply with every legal requirement. The service has received a good reception overall so we asked Yokubaitis if he sees Dotcom’s baby as a serious competitor. He wasn’t complimentary.

“Mega’s history makes them hard to trust with any important data. They’ve shown that they have little respect for governments and other corporations, and that leads to battles where the victim is the customer’s data. They might ‘beat the rap’, but their customers are getting ‘taken for a ride’,” he said.

That’s pretty harsh criticism. Time and again Kim Dotcom and his team have reported that they sought the best legal advice in the United States and were informed that their service complied with the law. And of course, Megaupload was a storage facility at its heart, one not entirely different from those provided by Dump Truck or indeed Giganews.

All of these services accept content uploaded by their users (some of it infringing, but that’s not the companies’ faults) and all have to comply with the DMCA as a result. Megaupload did and there’s no doubt that Giganews and Golden Frog do too – it’s almost a fact of life on the web these days. Nevertheless, Yokubaitis sees differences between the products.

“Ultimately, Mega looks to be the same service as Megaupload, just with more ass-covering for Mega. The fact that they don’t have tools to enable you to sync between your life and Mega shows that it’s a file-sharing product only. We don’t want Dump Truck users to sacrifice ease of use for security and privacy. We want our users to have both,” he concludes.

Perhaps it’s because i’m from Europe but I find the DumpDropbox campaign fairly uncomfortable reading. That being said, i’m informed this style of ‘negative’ advertising is common and widely accepted in the United States. Personally i’d prefer to see the virtues of a particular product promoted on their own merit, but others may well see things differently. Maybe the only important point is whether running Dropbox down will achieve the required result of more sales for Dump Truck, but for the answer to that we shall have to wait and see.

At the time of publication Dropbox had not responded to a request for comment.

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

Notable among them are Google, Microsoft and Amazon (for providing search engine results) and Mastercard, Visa and CCBill for providing payment services for allegedly infringing sites. Private settlement with Amazon aside, most of this legal action was a complete failure.

Undeterred, in 2009 Perfect 10 went after cyberlocker giant RapidShare, claiming that the company was infringing its copyrights by having Perfect 10′s images on its servers. That case failed too and RapidShare countersued.

With one failed file-hosting lawsuit behind them, this year Perfect 10 went after another – MegaUpload – and with the ink barely dry on that lawsuit, the company is getting even more adventurous.

As spotted by Slyck, Perfect 10 have now sued Giganews, one the world’s leading Usenet providers. Also in their sights are a number of Giganews resellers under the umbrella of LiveWire Services Inc. Perfect 10 is throwing a number of allegations at the companies including copyright and trademark infringement and unfair competition.

Perfect 10 describes Giganews as a company operating “virtual warehouses containing billions of dollars worth of copyrighted works” including “pirated movies, songs, images [and] computer programs.”

Furthermore, Giganews is accused of inducing and assisting others to infringe copyright and of selling illegal content to LiveWire and associates including rhinonewsgroups.com, powerusenet.com, infinityusenet.com, eurousenet.com, galacticgroups.com, cheapnewsgroups.com, fastusenet.com, usenetgiant.com, and usenet.net.

“Defendants are also aware that the USENET no longer has any significant legitimate application and virtually all of the activity on the USENET involves the authorized copying and distribution of infringing materials,” Perfect 10 allege.

“Defendants have in total, copied, distributed, displayed, and sold, more than 165,000 Perfect 10 copyrighted images – roughly 15,000 Perfect 10 copyrighted images per website.”

It would not be a surprise if Perfect 10′s images were to be found on the worldwide Usenet system, but providing Giganews complies with correctly formatted DMCA takedown requests, the company has protection under the law. “Correctly formatted” appear to be the key words here.

Perfect 10 says that on March 25th 2009, it sent Giganews “800 Perfect 10 copyrighted images, a number of which displayed Perfect 10 copyright notices”. Apparently, Giganews wrote back explaining that they could not find the images in question based on the information in the notice, a claim that Perfect 10 refutes.

“Giganews could have found each and every one of those images by using its own search function to search for the image identifiers provided with Perfect 10’s notice,” say Perfect 10 in their lawsuit.

“Once it found an infringing Perfect 10 image in a particular group of such images (called an “article”), it could have blocked other Perfect 10 images displaying Perfect 10 copyright notices in that same group, but failed to do so,” the complaint adds. This appears to be a reference to some kind of proactive deletion work Perfect 10 required of Giganews.

TorrentFreak has it on good authority that Giganews does in fact comply with many rightsholders and takes down content quickly once it has received a correctly formatted DMCA complaint. One of the things they ask for is a so-called ‘Message-ID’, which in basic terms is equivalent to a URL on the worldwide web. Giganews even provide a template for takedown requests, which can be found here.

In their complaint Perfect 10 seem to suggest that by providing a DMCA complaint in the form of an actual image, it’s then the responsibility of Giganews to search for the items on Usenet in order to remove them. Interestingly, in their 2010 legal action against RapdShare it transpired that Perfect 10 had failed to provide precise locations for allegedly infringing content in their takedown notices, a factor which helped them lose the case.

After multiple attempts and failures in similar lawsuits, Perfect 10 will be hoping that Einstein was wrong all along and that progress against Giganews will net them a jury trial and the cool $25 million they’re claiming.

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

In July 2009 the recording industry chalked up a significant legal win against Usenet.com. A judge ruled that the company had engaged in direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and induced others to infringe. Their actions were deemed significant enough to disallow the Usenet provider its rights to ‘safe harbor’ under the DMCA, a very dangerous situation indeed.

Just yesterday the newsgroup world received a further reminder of the legal spotlight tracking their movements as Usenet indexer Newzbin went into liquidation after a ruinous battle with several Hollywood movie studios.

It is therefore entirely appropriate for Usenet-related businesses to stay on both the right side of the law and the incredibly powerful entities who are ready to pounce should they stray off the straight and narrow. Make no mistake, the consequences for missteps can be severe, but one provider seems to have taken its caution just a little too far.

The folks over at Unzbin.com have been beavering away in recent months to make an NZB client that they hope will become the uTorrent of the newsgroups. The Unzbin client is very compact and since receiving a great review at the start of April has been refined further still. But unfortunately they’ve had a little problem in recent days.

At the end of March, Unzbin opened an affiliate account with Giganews, one of the world’s leading Usenet providers. Everything ran fine until a couple of days ago when Unzbin received an email warning – not from the MPAA, but from Giganews.

This letter shall serve as written notice that you are in material breach of the Giganews Terms and Conditions Agreement (“Agreement” or “Terms”) you entered into on March 31, 2010. In Section 3. 2. of the Agreement you represented and warranted that your website(s) would “not contain, display or in any other way communicate any inappropriate or illegal information as determined by Giganews in its sole and unfettered discretion”.

The web pages located at: http://www.unzbin.com/screenshots & http://www.unzbin.com contains instructions on how to illegally download copyrighted material, which is inappropriate or illegal information.

This inappropriate or illegal content found on your website(s) must be removed within a week of the date of this letter. Failure to remove all such content by this date may result in immediate termination of the Agreement in accordance with Section 5.2 of the Terms. We take the intellectual property rights of others very seriously and we encourage all of our Affiliates and Referral Sites to do the same. If you have any questions about this notice or the Agreement in general, please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely,
Office of General Counsel
Giganews, Inc.

Naughty Unzbin, then? Sadly, not even close. Here is the “copyright infringing” screenshot in question.

Free and legal to download movie. Check. Free and legal to download software. Check. Clearly there has been some sort of mistake then? Apparently not.

Unzbin later received a more personal email from a Giganews Affiliate Manager who explained the problem in more detail but only succeeding in creating more confusion.

Regarding the notice that was just sent to you, there is only one concern on your site, which is the prominence of the example “Steal This Film” in various screenshots of the program being used on the site.

As you know, we can’t control and monitor everything that is uploaded to Usenet, but we also don’t advertise the potential attainability of copyrighted materials and ask the same of all our affiliates. We do know that “Steal This Film” is a free documentary about file sharing and intellectual property, but to most people (and to legal entities), it will appear as instructional usage of your software.

The “Ubuntu” example is perfect, and I think that this is more than adequate in getting across the point of Unzbin’s functionality.

To say the least, Unzbin are very unimpressed with Giganews and expressed this clearly in their response.

As you may know “steal this film” is a documentary which is freely available. We’re not going to remove anything from our website and frankly I don’t understand why Giganews is meddling into our internal affairs. We run our project the way we want and that’s how it’s going to be. I think it’s a very bold and hypocritical move on your part!

And so we’re going to discontinue working with you guys, simply because we do believe in the freedom of speech and freedom of expression. We have no tolerance for nazi gestapo practices and threats (which don’t impress or scare me one bit).

Kind regards and a big FUCK YOU,

Unzbin!

“This is the second time I can recall that someone has been stupid enough to miss the joke of STEAL THIS FILM: that you *can’t* “steal” something that’s been offered to you willingly,” Jamie King, creator of Steal This Film told TorrentFreak.

“It kind of strains credulity that anyone could be so dumb, but there it is. Obviously we’re delighted Unzbin offer STEAL THIS FILM as a download example and doing so clearly doesn’t violate Giganews’ policies — asking for them to cease and desist amounts to nothing less than a freedom of speech violation,” he concludes.

TorrentFreak wrote to Giganews twice asking for a comment but we have received no response, which is a real shame but not really a surprise. Putting a foot wrong in today’s copyright climate could cost Giganews an absolute fortune and perhaps even their entire business so it is to be expected that they choose to err on the side of caution.

But come on guys….

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

This rapid increase in retention has left many NZB“>.NZB indexing sites behind, unable to handle holding data for such a long time.

However, Newzbin, one of the original Usenet indexing sites and creators of the .NZB format, is currently addressing this situation.

According to Caesium, the administrator at Newzbin, their setup was designed years ago to handle 50 to 60 days retention but with various tweaks and modifications, they are able to squeeze just about 100 days from the equipment. Following the Giganews announcement, Caesium explained that Newzbin are working to upgrade their systems to handle the increased retention. “We are already making substantial monetary investment into new hardware to store the increased amount of data required to mirror this on Newzbin” he said in a post on the site.

New hardware is being bought and is “halfway in place” to not only match the 200 days offered by Giganews, but to better it by 150-200 days to an impressive 350 to 400 days retention.

Caesium continued, “Unfortunately buying, building, testing, and deploying this sort of hardware does not come quickly or cheaply, and we have no estimate as to when it will be complete.”

Newzbin is a premium site so those preferring to obtain their .nzb’s for free might consider sites such as Binsearch, who have an .nzb creator and offer around 158 days retention. Other free services include those from NZBIndex and NewzLeech.

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