In the 1980s, those with access to Bulletin Board Systems would download programs and share them with their friends, all with the full encouragement of the software’s creators. Shareware, as it was known, often encouraged users to send off a snail-mailed registration fee in return for a code to unlock premium features. Although basic, freemium had been born.

Today the concept has gone way beyond those humble roots. The App Store and Google Play are awash with free-to-play games with premium addons, and services such as Spotify and Dropbox offer decent free levels of service to get users onboard and primed to start parting with real cash.

If Joe Public was pressed into a snap judgment, Microsoft would probably be more associated with premium than free, with the company historically charging sizable amounts for its Windows and Office products, for example. However, speaking with CNBC, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that the company has always had an eye on the freemium experience.

The idea, the CEO notes, is to get people on board with a product they find useful. Then, when it becomes clear how users are utilizing the service, options to monetize become available alongside their demands for improved service. He uses the company’s cloud-storage service as an example.

“We want everybody to use OneDrive. And then when you are starting to use it for business, that’s when we want to monetize. So we do not want to have you only start using us when you have a business license or subscription. We want to have you use us when you just want to save any file or any document, any artifact of yours. And then have a natural way for us to monetize as you use more of it in the commercial context,” Nadella explains.

By now millions of people online are familiar with ‘freemium’ in one shape or another but comments from Nadella suggest that while this business model has been leveraged by Microsoft for quite some time, the company had it forced upon them.

“Well, we’ve always had freemium. Sometimes our freemium was called piracy,” Nadella reveals.

“[The] thing that I don’t want us as a company to shy away from is usage first. Because I think if anything, the new competition has taught is that, you know, what matters is do not try to equate revenue and usage day one.”

The ‘piracy is promotion’ angle is something rarely spoken about by company execs, probably in fear of endorsing an illegal activity and validating it in the eyes of piracy proponents. However, by speaking of it alongside ‘freemium’, Microsoft’s CEO appears to have confirmed what many have been saying all along, that getting people on board for free – via piracy if necessary – is one the first steps on the monetization trail.

Indeed, this belief his held so strongly in some quarters that there are some who insist that it’s preferable for people to pirate the software of company ‘A’ than switch to the opposition, whether paid or not.

That said, what Microsoft does not want is people selling pirated copies of its premium products – that kind of ‘promotion’ is never welcome. If people use a free sample of Microsoft products at home, the company isn’t likely to kick down the door. Do the same in a business environment, however, and things aren’t anywhere near as open-minded.

There are no signs that Microsoft is going soft on piracy but as business models change, as they have with Adobe’s Creative Cloud, free tiers attractive to would-be pirates will become more commonplace. And that can only mean one thing for piracy rates.

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

The government-funded City of London Intellectual Property Crime Unit is definitely showing no signs of losing interest, carrying out yet another arrest yesterday morning on behalf of video rightsholders. In the afternoon during the BPI’s Annual General Meeting in London, the unit was being praised by both government officials and a music sector also keen to bring piracy under control.

“We’ve given £2.5 million to support the City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, PIPCU,” Culture Secretary Sajid Javid told those in attendance.

“The first unit of its kind in the world, PIPCU is working with industry groups – including the BPI – on the Infringing Websites List. The list identifies sites that deliberately and consistently breach copyright, so brand owners can avoid advertising on them.”

Referencing rampant online piracy, Javid said that no industry or government could stand by and let “massive, industrial scale” levels of infringement continue.

“I know some people say the IP genie is out of the bottle and that no amount of wishing will force it back in. But I don’t agree with them,” he said.

“We don’t look at any other crimes and say ‘It’s such a big problem that it’s not worth bothering with.’ We wouldn’t stand idly by if paintings worth hundreds of millions of pounds were being stolen from the National Gallery.Copyright infringement is theft, pure and simple. And it’s vital we try to reduce it.”

Going on to detail the Creative Content initiative which the government is supporting to the tune of £3.5m, Javid said the system would deliver a “robust, fair and effective enforcement regime”.

But that, however, is only one part of the puzzle. Infringing sites need to be dealt with, directly and by other means, he added.

“Copyright crooks don’t love music. They love money, and they’ve been attracted to the industry solely by its potential to make them rich. Take away their profits and you take away their reason for being. Of course, it’s not just up to the government and music industry to deal with this issue,” he noted.

Putting search engines on notice, the MP said that they have an important role to play.

“They must step up and show willing. That’s why [Business Secretary] Vince Cable and I have written to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, asking them to work with [the music industry] to stop search results sending people to illegal sites,” Javid said.

“And let me be perfectly clear: if we don’t see real progress, we will be looking at a legislative approach. In the words of [Beggars Group chairman] Martin Mills, ‘technology companies should be the partners of rights companies, not their masters’.”

The Culture Secretary said that when it comes to tackling piracy, the government, music industry and tech companies are “three sides of the same triangle.” But despite that expectation of togetherness, only time will tell if the search engines agree to the point of taking voluntary action to support it.

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

If the entertainment companies had their way, however, things would be handled differently. The general line coming out of the MPAA, RIAA and their UK-based counterparts BPI, is that by now Google knows which domains are infringing copyright. On this basis action should be taken to render their indexes harder to find. Or better still, have them de-listed from search engines altogether, the rightsholders say.

While Google has shown zero interest in the latter proposal, over in Europe a case underway since 2011 has now concluded, with a thought-provoking outcome for the entertainment industries.

The case dates back to December 2011 when L’Association des Producteurs de Cinéma (APC), a group which in itself represents more than 120 companies including Paramount and Sony, teamed up with La Fédération Nationale des Distributeurs de Films (FNDF) and Syndicat de l’Edition Vidéo Numérique (SEVN). Adding to the already formidable lineup, the groups were later joined by the Union of Film Producers (UPF) and the Union of Independent Producers (SPI).

The film and TV companies’ complaint, rooted in Article 336-2 of the Intellectual Property code, targeted 16 domains connected to the popular Allostreaming, Fifostream and DPstream video portals. The aim was to force the world’s largest search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo – to completely delist the sites from their search results and to have local ISPs block them.

After previously obtaining emergency interim measures, yesterday the studios received good news from the High Court of Paris.

The court ruled that the film industry had clearly demonstrated that the sites in question are “dedicated or virtually dedicated to the distribution of audiovisual works without the consent of their creators,” thus violating their copyrights.

As a result the search services of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and local company Orange are now under orders to “take all necessary measures to prevent the occurrence on their services of any results referring to any of the pages” on these sites.

Several ISPs – Orange, Free, Bouygues Télécom, SFR, Numéricable and Darty Télécom were also ordered to “implement all appropriate means including blocking” to prevent access to the infringing sites.

Rightsholders have been celebrating the decision in the case which was concluded after almost two years of legal wrangling.

“The ruling today by the High Court in this case recognized the merits of the approach forcing ISPs and search engines to cooperate with right holders in the protection of the law of literary and artistic property on the Internet,” they said in a statement.

But despite the big win, the cards didn’t all fall in favor of the movie companies. PCInpact reports that they had demanded that the search engines and ISPs foot the bill of the blocking and censorship, but the court decided otherwise.

“The cost of the measures ordered can not be charged to the defendants who are required to implement them,” the decision reads.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and the ISPs now have two weeks to implement the measures, which come on the heels of the EU Advocate General’s advice earlier this week on the blocking of infringing sites.

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

Microsoft has been one of the most active notice senders and over the past year alone has asked Google to remove more than 10 million infringing URLs from its indexes.

The software giant has also developed a reputation for sending a lot of false notices, most of which have been sent through the French company LeakID.

This morning we again reported on some rather embarrassing takedown notices, which asked for the removal of Microsoft’s own website, its Wikipedia entry and an Open Source project. If that wasn’t bad enough, Microsoft also claimed ownership of a porn video.

It turns out this was the final straw for the company. Microsoft has just announced that it has decided to stop working with LeakID effective immediately.

“Microsoft is committed to ensuring that enforcement measures are appropriate and completely accurate. We are investigating the circumstances of this takedown and have instructed the vendor that it is no longer authorized to send notices on our behalf,” a Microsoft spokesman just informed TorrentFreak.

This makes Microsoft the first company to publicly cut its ties with an anti-piracy company for making too many embarrassing mistakes.

Microsoft’s troubles with LeakID started last year when a DMCA notice ordered Google to remove legitimate webpages from AMC Theatres, BBC, Buzzfeed, CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch, RealClearPolitics, Rotten Tomatoes, ScienceDirect, Washington Post, Wikipedia and even the U.S. Government.

In another notice Microsoft asked Google to remove a Spotify.com URL and on several occasions they even asked Google to censor their own search engine Bing.

Hats off to Microsoft for taking a stand on this matter in public. For us it probably means that we’ll have fewer mistakes to point out in the future, but it also shows that all our previous digging expeditions have not been in vain.

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

Day in and day out copyright holders send hundreds of thousands of DMCA takedown notices to Google, hoping to make pirated movies and music harder to find.

During the past month alone copyright holders asked Google to remove 20,497,209 URLs from its search results. Unfortunately, not all of these requests are legitimate.

Microsoft in particular has a horrible reputation in this regard. While most of the URLs submitted on their behalf do indeed link to infringing content, not all requests are correct. In fact, some takedown notices are rather embarrassing.

Last week, for example, one of Microsoft’s notices asked Google to take down the Wikipedia entry for Office 2007. As can be seen below, in the same notice the software giant also wants a perfectly legitimate tutorial on Microsoft.com taken down.

These are not the only mistakes though. The full notice includes no less than 4 URLs from Microsoft’s own website, a tutorial on Brighthub, a discussion thread on Lockergnome and several non-infringing Pastebin pastes.

In addition, the notice also includes links that appear to protect the work of others, as exemplified by the “Gay Amateur Spunk Volume 2,” “Batman” and “Taken” references in the screenshot above.

These are not isolated incidents. We reported on similar mistakes in the past, and more and more are rolling in every week.

In another notice sent a day earlier, Microsoft again requested the removal of several of its own webpages, but also the Open Source SharePoint Template Project, which is hosted at Sourceforge.

Luckily for Microsoft, Google spotted some of the errors, meaning that the Wikipedia, Sourceforge and Microsoft pages have not been scrapped from the search results. Several of the more dubious requests have been removed.

Unfortunately this is not the first time that notices sent on Microsoft’s behalf have included such glaring errors. This is troubling, especially because they are seemingly easy to avoid. For starters, the company could maintain a whitelist of trusted URLs that need a manual review before they are sent off to Google.

When TorrentFreak raised these issues with Microsoft the company said that it is committed to improving its accuracy and preventing these errors in the future.

“Microsoft is committed to ensuring copyright is respected online and enforcement measures are appropriate and accurate. We apologize when a notice is mistakenly directed to non-infringing content and take immediate action. We are committed to fixing the process that led to this result,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us last month.

For now, however, it appears that very little has changed and the embarrassing mistakes continue to stack up.

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

Microsoft has been one of the most active senders and over the past month alone has asked Google to remove more than a million infringing URLs from its indexes. In addition the software giant also strips infringing links from its own search engine Bing.

While most of the submitted URLs do indeed link to infringing content, not all requests sent by Microsoft and other copyright holders are correct. Their often automated anti-piracy systems regularly trigger notices that include links to perfectly legitimate content, sometimes from direct competitors.

The latter happened with several recent DMCA takedown requests sent to Google on behalf of Microsoft. The notices, which contain references to unauthorized copies of Microsoft Office, also list many links with Apache’s open source office suite OpenOffice in the title.

The example illustrated above is not an isolated incident either. A quick search reveals that more than a dozen notices sent in June alone (e.g. ^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}) include links to OpenOffice downloads, mostly on BitTorrent sites.

OpenOffice itself lists several official torrents on its download page and many of these are re-distributed across torrent sites. However, thanks to the overbroad filtering techniques of Microsoft’s DMCA takedown vendors many of these have now been stripped from Google and other search engines, Bing included.

Admittedly, OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are related terms, so mistakes can happen. However, based on the URLs we see that few attempts have been made to prevent this particular error from happening. It wouldn’t be hard, for example, to exclude the keywords “Open Office” to minimize instances of collateral damage.

Over the past several months Microsoft and many other copyright holders have built up a dubious track record when it comes to DMCA takedown notices. In addition to many “bogus” claims the company also tried to have its own website removed from Google.

The above mistakes may be relatively harmless to Apache’s OpenOffice, but they show once again how much can go wrong with these automated DMCA notices. This is particularly troublesome since Google down-ranks sites based on the number of DMCA notices it receives for them.

TorrentFreak asked Microsoft to comment on the mistakes but we have yet to hear back. Previously a company spokesman told us that the company is trying hard to eliminate false positives.

“Microsoft is committed to ensuring that copyright is respected online and that enforcement measures are appropriate and accurate. We and our vendors use several measures to verify the accuracy of information contained in our DMCA notices, including algorithmic and human review of notices,” Microsoft informed us.

Despite these efforts erroneous takedowns continue to stack up.

Update: TorrentFreak verified that legitimate Open Office links are censored. However, several of the links point to 1MB installers without seeders and are impossible to verify. In any case, they don’t point to Microsoft products.

Update: Microsoft came back with a response.

“Microsoft is committed to ensuring copyright is respected online and enforcement measures are appropriate and accurate. We apologize when a notice is mistakenly directed to non-infringing content and take immediate action. We are committed to fixing the process that led to this result,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us.

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

In closed meetings Bing, Google and Yahoo have been discussing these issues with copyright holders. Thus far, however, the search engines have been reluctant to do more than simply responding to DMCA takedown notices, as required by law.

Keeping the pressure on, copyright holders have responded by sending more and more takedown notices. Most of these are directed at Google, who have received over 100 million so far in 2013, but the others aren’t being ignored.

Traditionally, Microsoft doesn’t publicize any takedown statistics but the company informed us that they process hundreds of thousands of DMCA requests for Bing every month.

“Each month, Bing receives DMCA notices from a variety of copyright owners that seek removal of hundreds of thousands of URLs,” a Microsoft spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

Ironically, Microsoft itself is one of the most active senders. The company says that through their anti-piracy partners they target a variety of search engines, Bing included.

“We submit DMCA notices to Bing as well as Google and others,” Microsoft says.

Over the past month alone the software company has asked Google to remove about 800,000 search results. Interestingly, a quick check reveals that some of the URLs Microsoft wants Google to remove are still accessible on Bing, suggesting that not all search engines receive the same notices.

Microsoft’s takedown policies appeared in the news two weeks ago after they asked Google to take down links to their own Microsoft.com site. The company admits to TorrentFreak that this was an honest mistake and says it’s committed to preventing similar errors in the future.

“Microsoft is committed to ensuring that copyright is respected online and that enforcement measures are appropriate and accurate. We and our vendors use several measures to verify the accuracy of information contained in our DMCA notices, including algorithmic and human review of notices,” the company says.

Despite this dedication, errors will be hard to stamp out completely. While we assume that the company will not longer censor the BBC, Wikipedia, the U.S. Government or their own websites, mistakes are bound to happen.

Earlier this week Microsoft’s awkward dual role as both copyright holder and search engine became apparent in a report released by the tech industry group CCIA. The industry association, which lists Microsoft as a member, concluded that demoting “infringing” search results is not the best way to reduce piracy.

While Bing may agree with this assertion, at this point there’s no evidence that Microsoft does.

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

Guatemalan insurance company Seguros Universales had a similar visit and has now sued Microsoft accusing the company of extortion-like practices.

“Microsoft appeared with armed Guatemalan law enforcement officers and halted plaintiffs’ business operations. Microsoft then proceeded to extort Plaintiffs by demanding an on-the-spot agreement to pay $70,000 or Microsoft would remove all servers containing ALL data and operational software,” the company claims.

The company says the raid was unwarranted as it has payment receipts for 98% of the software licensing fees. It further accuses Microsoft of operating a racketeering scam in the country, wrongfully targeting many companies for allegedly using pirated software.

Microsoft denies all accusations, but it appears that the practices described in the complaint are not limited to Latin America.

In Belgium a long running lawsuit over a similar matter came to an end last week. In this case local printing company Deckers-Snoeck sued the BSA over an illegitimate raid where Microsoft was also listed as one of the complainants.

In common with the action against the insurance company, the raid came unannounced and the software group was assisted by local law enforcers and several policemen. The company was told that all its computers would be taken away for the alleged use of pirated software, unless it paid 30,000 euros ($40,000) in settlement fees.

“It was a robbery more than a check-up,” Deckers-Snoeck CEO Joris Deckers told De Tijd.

Not paying would mean that Deckers had to shut down the company, so he paid up. However, after the settlement fee was paid he found that not all software was illegitimate as the BSA had claimed. In fact, Microsoft knew that the company had valid licenses but failed to mention this to BSA’s attorney.

The raid on the printing company took place in 2003 and after a legal battle spanning over ten years the Brussels Appeal Court decided last week that BSA’s practices were “deceptive.” The printing company won the case and the Court ruled that it was not obliged to pay any damages to the software group.

According to Tom Heremans, the lawyer of the printing company, the judgment opens the door for other companies that have been pressured into entering similar settlements when not all software was unlicensed.

The BSA says it has since changed its policy and that companies get a warning first before they show up with the police, but apparently this does not yet apply to Latin America.

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

One of the problems is that many rightsholders use completely automated systems to inform Google and other sites of infringements.

That these automated tools aren’t always spot on is nicely illustrated by a recent DMCA notice sent to Google on behalf of Microsoft.

Claiming to prevent the unauthorized distribution of Windows 8 Beta the software company listed 65 “infringing” web pages. However, nearly half of the URLs that Google was asked to remove from its search results have nothing to do with Windows 8.

This apparent screw up in the automated filter mistakenly attempts to censor AMC Theatres, BBC, Buzzfeed, CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch, RealClearPolitics, Rotten Tomatoes, ScienceDirect, Washington Post, Wikipedia and even the U.S. Government.

Judging from the page titles and content the websites in question were targeted because they reference the number “45″.

Unfortunately this notice is not an isolated incident. In another DMCA notice Microsoft asked Google to remove a Spotify.com URL and on several occasions they even asked Google to censor their own search engine Bing.

The good news is that Google appears to have white-listed a few domains, as the BBC and Wikipedia articles mentioned in the DMCA notice above were not censored. However, less prominent sites are not so lucky and the AMC Theatres and RealClearPolitics pages are still unavailable through Google search today.

As we have mentioned before, the DMCA avalanche is becoming a bigger problem day after day.

Microsoft and other rightsholders are censoring large parts of the Internet, often completely unfounded, and there is absolutely no one to hold them responsible. Websites can’t possibly verify every DMCA claim and the problem will only increase as more takedown notices are sent week after week.

Right now rightsholders and the anti-piracy outfits they employ have absolutely no incentive to improve the accuracy of their automated takedown systems, so perhaps it’s time for them to be punished?

Just a thought.

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

The site, launched late last year, exposes what people behind an IP-address have downloaded using BitTorrent. This data was gathered from public BitTorrent trackers, and the founders released it to show how much information can be found on BitTorrent users who don’t hide their IP-address.

The site’s founders inform TorrentFreak that since this mission has now been accomplished, they have stopped adding new info to the site. However, existing data is still online and that allows us to “out” a group of corporate BitTorrent pirates once more.

In recent weeks Microsoft has taken a strong position against copyright infringers. They censored Pirate Bay links in Windows Live Messenger, funded a startup that aims to kill BitTorrent traffic, and a few days ago it was revealed that they are the most active sender of DMCA takedown notices to Google.

Clearly, Microsoft is anti piracy. But would they also prevent their employees from using Microsoft office connections to download pirated films through BitTorrent? Let’s find out.

The methodology is easy. Look up a range of IP-addresses assigned to Microsoft and enter those into the search form on YouHaveDownloaded one by one. While we expected that it might take a while to find one, we already had a handful of offenders after two dozen tries.

Below are a few of our findings, all downloads that are linked to Microsoft’s office in Sammamish, Washington (or Seattle). Interestingly, most of the hits we ran into are movies such as “The Debt”, “Bordertown” and lesser known “Blind”.

No listing of pirated files would be complete without an adult film. We had plenty to choose from, but Rocco’s Psycho Love was one of the better ones.

In Microsoft’s office in Arlington, Virginia, (or Charlotte) there are also quite a few hits, including some educational and inspirational books.

The above shows that despite Microsoft’s anti-piracy efforts, there are plenty of employees downloading files though BitTorrent, and not just legal files either.

Of course this is hardly a surprise. In companies with thousands of employees there will always be people who use BitTorrent for illicit purposes. And in tech companies it’s probably even more common.

Microsoft is in good company also.

Previously we were able to show that unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places, from the palace of the French President, via the Church of God, to the RIAA and the US House of Representatives.

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