The PROTECT IP Act gives authorities and copyright holders a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. Aside from domain seizures, they can demand that search engines remove ‘rogue sites’ from their results, order ISPs to block their domains, and cut off their payments.

But what exactly is a rogue site? Judges will often base their verdicts merely on descriptions of entertainment industry groups such as the RIAA and the MPAA. According to RapidShare, one of the oldest file-hosting services, this is a problem.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, RapidShare general counsel Daniel Raimer confirmed that this vagueness is one of the main reasons why they hired lobbying firms to represent their interests in Washington. RapidShare has been frequently labeled a piracy haven and a rogue site by the entertainment industry, but Raimer said this is not justified.

“RapidShare’s goal in Washington is the same goal it has in the marketplace: to reassure potential customers that it is doing everything in its power to eradicate abuse. The officials that RapidShare has met with appreciate the company’s openness and willingness to assert industry leadership,” Raimer told TorrentFreak.

According to RapidShare, U.S. policymakers and opinion leaders have welcomed the opportunity to learn more about the company’s side of the story.

As a company, RapidShare sees itself operating in the “cloud hosting” business, offering a service comparable to the likes of Dropbox. And since people are moving data from local drives to the cloud at an increasing rate, these companies will undoubtedly host some copyrighted material too.

The question is then, what defines whether these cloud hosting services are labeled as ‘rogue’ operations, and when does it become warranted to seize their domain names?

“It is imperative that our governments need to have serious and well-thought discussions about cloud computing services,” Raimer told TorrentFreak.

“These discussions should be about consumer interests, about privacy concerns, about the content industry’s wish for the implementation of content recognition and filter technologies and the way providers are expected to deal with illegal content.”

Over recent years, RapidShare has taken a very strict stance against copyright infringement; disconnecting repeated offenders and even going after sites that index content hosted on their servers. Despite these efforts, they are still seen as a piracy haven by many.

By sharing their concerns RapidShare is trying to convince lawmakers that the picture is not as black and white as the RIAA and MPAA often paint it. A good discussion is needed to carefully determine what the rights and obligations of cloud hosting services are.

“RapidShare would like to be a constructive participant in these discussions as a ‘best practices’ leader. We have more knowledge on how to crack down against copyright abuse than any other company in the industry,” Raimer said.

“We have a 24/7 anti-abuse department, as well as a repeat infringer policy; DMCA take-down notices are instituted within one hour during regular business hours; we do not have reward program –to identify only a few of our efforts,” RapidShare’s general counsel added.

There are of course limits to what RapidShare is willing to do to protect the interests of copyright holders. Not to hinder the entertainment industries, but to secure the privacy of its customers.

“We have always highly respected our users’ privacy. We don’t analyze and filter files. By our terms of service we are strictly forbidden to access and open our users’ files – and we strictly abide by that,” Raimer said.

RapidShare believes that their decision to directly talk to the lawmakers in Washington has been the right one. The officials they have talked to are very eager to hear the other side of the story, and RapidShare’s efforts bring some much needed balance to the table.

Whether it will pay off, and to what extent, is something we’ll have to wait and see in the coming months.

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

In the hope of correcting this and other misconceptions surrounding their operations, RapidShare then took the unprecedented step of hiring the lobbying firm Dutko Worldwide, who also work for Google.

Initially, little was known about the priorities of RapidShare in Washington, but the most recent lobbying report filed by Dutko reveals that the PROTECT IP Act is high up the list. For good reason, because if the bill becomes law RapidShare could be one of the first to be put out of business, in the United States at least.

Under the PROTECT IP Act, authorities (and copyright holders) will have a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement, starting with domain seizures.

In case a domain is not registered or controlled by a U.S. company, authorities can order search engines to remove the website from their search results and order ISPs to block the website.

Although the above measures are already quite far-reaching, the bill also allows for private copyright holders to use some of the same tools as the Government. Without due process, copyright holders can obtain a court order to prevent payment providers and ad-networks from doing business with sites that allegedly facilitate copyright infringement.

One of the many problems of such a law is who gets to decide what the definition of a “rogue website” is. In common with other file-sharing platforms, RapidShare is often labeled as seriously problematic, despite the fact that they’ve been found to operate legally by a U.S. federal court. This could lead to a situation where hundreds of legitimate businesses are virtually shut down because the entertainment industry sees them as a threat.

To make lawmakers aware of these threats and to improve their image in Washington, RapidShare has already spent $260,000 in lobbying efforts during the first half of 2011.

The PROTECT IP Act, currently placed on hold by Senator Ron Wyden, is crucial in this regard as the RIAA and MPAA have already labeled RapidShare as a rogue website. This means that when the bill is signed into law the file-hoster could be one of the first companies to be targeted.

Whether RapidShare’s lobbying efforts in Washington will pay off is yet to be seen. It is no secret that entertainment industry groups are lobbying extensively in favor of the PROTECT IP Act, with much bigger budgets. That said, it’s certainly better than standing idly by.

In the coming months RapidShare is expected to continue their lobbying efforts at the White House Office, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Not only against the PROTECT IP Act, but to improve the image of their company and protect their rights and those of other file-hosting services.

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

As is tradition, the RIAA is the biggest spender of the two entertainment industry lobbying groups. In the first two quarters of this year the music industry representatives spent over $3.8 million in Washington.

The topics covered by the RIAA are as expected. They lobbied at the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives in favor of ACTA, the PROTECT IP Act, and to support new legislation that will make streaming of copyrighted material a felony.

And then there’s the MPAA.

Thus far, the MPAA’s lobbying efforts have cost over $1.2 million dollars this year. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but some of the topics they are lobbying for in Washington are quite interesting to say the least. Aside from focusing on the traditional copyright-related matters, the movie industry group is also concerned with reforming Wall Street.

By hiring Michael Torrey Associates, the MPAA has spent tens of thousands of dollars to advance the implementation of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Unusual, since the topic doesn’t relate to the interests of the thousands of movie industry workers whose jobs are at stake.

No, these lobbying efforts are only meant for MPAA’s Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd.

The Wall Street Reform Act the MPAA is heavily invested in is also known as the Dodd-Frank Act, as the current MPAA Chairman proposed the act late 2009 when he was still a senator.

Looking at the history of MPAA’s lobbying efforts we see that Wall Street Reform was already a topic the movie studios where interested in while Dodd was still acting as senator. Dodd was officially announced as MPAA Chairman March 2011, but the MPAA’s lobbying efforts already started in the last quarter of 2010.

The timeline above suggests that the MPAA was putting money into supporting Dodd’s legislation in the hope of convincing him to join them as Chairman. And it worked, as he signed on for the job by the end of February.

And it looks like the MPAA and Dodd made a long tern deal to support his old work. Even today the MPAA continues to put money in supporting Dodd’s Wall Street Reform plans ($180,000 and counting), all at the expense of those poor lighting technicians and makeup artists who work in the movie business.

Update: It appears that we jumped to conclusions.

The MPAA informed TorrentFreak that the lobbying efforts with regard to The Wall Street Reform Act are limited to combating a proposal to let financial traders speculate on motion picture box office revenues.

“Contrary to TorrentFreak’s accusation that this matter “doesn’t relate to the interests of the thousands of movie industry workers whose jobs are at stake,” derivatives based on box office futures are “no more than over-under bets on a movie’s performance and would have a detrimental impact on movies industry workers and businesses,” as we said at the time, working together with a broad coalition that included entertainment industry unions, independent filmmakers and distributors and theater owners.”

“Both the House and Senate, through their respective Agriculture Committees, wisely decided to examine this issue closely. Recognizing the serious problems that could be caused by these proposals, Congress approved a ban on trading box-office derivatives, sponsored by Senator Blanche Lincoln, as part of the much larger financial reform bill.”

“Because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is still in the process of implementing these provisions of the financial reform bill, the MPAA is continuing to monitor the situation. We are NOT, nor have we ever been, engaged in lobbying any other issues concerning the financial reform bill.”

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

While the debate over whether corporations should be allowed to lobby crime-fighting organizations such as the police and FBI will rage on, at least there is an enforced level of transparency which allows the public to see where lobbyists are spending their money.

The MPAA have just made their mandatory disclosure for the first quarter of 2011 and it makes interesting reading.

In total the member companies of the MPAA – Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Universal – spent $400,000 in the first three months of the year lobbying influential government departments. These included the office of Vice-President Joe Biden, a valuable MPAA ally in 2010 with his mantra of “Piracy Is Theft, Clean and Simple.”

In the filing, which covers the period from January 1st to March 31st, several government departments are listed repeatedly including the U.S Senate, House of Representatives, Homeland Security, Dept. of Justice, FBI, ICE, U.S. Copyright Office and U.S. Trade Representative.

On the back of moves to turn the activity into a felony, it’s no surprise that streaming illegal content featured heavily in the MPAA’s 1st quarter lobbying. Considering the huge effort already underway with domain seizures, many of them streaming-related, Operation in Our Sites remained firmly on the agenda.

Also listed is the issue of “Pay processors role in IP enforcement”, a reference to the developing strategy of strangling the revenue to sites that the MPAA believe are generating income from infringement.

In November 2010, file-hosting service RapidShare was among the first Internet services to be labelled by both the MPAA and RIAA as a so-called “Rogue Site”, a move which forced the cyberlocker service to initiate lobbying of its own.

In 2011 it is evident that Hollywood is continuing to pressure on the Swiss-based company. RapidShare is mentioned several times in the MPAA disclosure report under several headings, not least ‘Rogue Site Legislation’ and ‘Law Enforcement/Crime and Criminal Justice’.

Interestingly, ‘Graduated Response’ is also listed as a lobbying subject, although the U.S. appeared to rule out so-called “3 strikes” regimes earlier this month in response to a United Nations report.

On the educational front, the MPAA is keen to drive home the anti-P2P message to the country’s schools and universities. Equally it is pushing for anti-camcording activities in the Asia-Pacific region plus awareness of counterfeit movie usage at US military bases, a subject we’ve touched on previously.

The MPAA also discussed the anti-piracy company MiMTiD. A DMCA-related controversy connected to that company was covered by TechDirt in February.

The $400,000 spent by the MPAA in the first 3 months of 2011 represents a $30,000 uplift on the same period last year and a $60,000 increase on its spend during the final quarter of 2010.

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