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.

There are many ways that sites can generate revenue in order to keep going, but far and away the most obvious is by the placement of advertising. Most public facing sites carry adverts of some kind and it is the goal of entities such as the MPAA and RIAA to have these removed, either by placing direct pressure on advertisers themselves or through the agencies that handle them.

It will come as no surprise that due to them operating some of the Internet’s largest ad networks, search engines are high on the list for berating.

The latest pressure comes via new study carried out by the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Released today, the report aims to identify the online ad networks offering the most support to the “major pirate movie and music sites around the world.”

The top 10 list produced by USC notably features Google in the number two position and Yahoo at number six. Topping the chart is OpenX, a Pasadena company described by CrunchBase as “one of the world’s leading providers of digital and mobile advertising technology.” Web analytics and advertising company Quancast appears at position seven.

In order to compile the list of piracy-related sites, USC mined Google’s own Transparency Report for the sites that received the most DMCA takedown notices during the previous month.

In third position on Google’s report for most takedown requests is SumoTorrent. This torrent index also features at position four in USC’s report, with the university claiming that the site operates its own advertising network.

USC’s full list appears as follows:

1. Openx
2. Google (including Double Click)
3. Exoclick
4. Sumotorrent
5. Propellerads
6. Yahoo (including Right Media)
7. Quantcast
8. Media Shakers
9. Yesads
10. Infolinks

The university says that it used a bot to scrape Ad Network HTML identifiers from each ad in order to identify the advertising network responsible for its placement. Speaking with CNET, Google suggested the methodology might be flawed.

“The complexity of online advertising has led some to conclude incorrectly that the mere presence of any Google code on a site means financial support from Google,” the company said.

The report, which notes that it will continue to list the “top advertising offenders” on a monthly basis, states that major brands are not aware that their money is being spent financing the “piracy industry”.

USC says the aim of the report is to help these innocent companies “steer their ad dollars away from sites that exploit film, TV and music artists for what appears to be criminal gain.”

“Whenever we talk to a brand about the fact that their ads are all over the pirate sites, they’re like, ‘Oh, how did that happen?’” said Jonathan Taplin, Director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab. “We thought it would be easier if they knew what ad networks were putting ads on pirate sites — so they could avoid them.”

“We do not believe that government regulation alone is the answer to the Piracy problem, but rather that the self-regulation of major sectors like the online advertising industry could make it harder for the Kim Dotcom`s of the world to unfairly exploit artists,” Taplin continued. “We look forward to working with advertising agencies and networks in the coming months to address this issue.”

The report can be downloaded here (pdf).

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

In response to the news, Pirate Bay co-founder Brokep told TorrentFreak: “It’s dangerous to trust a company like Yahoo! when they filter the searches. It’s a new China, but this time Yahoo is the dictator. Yahoo should let the governments decide, not themselves. It’s dangerous when companies take the law into their own hands.”

It seems like The Pirate Bay is the only BitTorrent site that is filtered at the moment. Searches for Mininova and Isohunt are still working fine, Yahoo! even suggests you should try “mininova torrents”, “mininova downloads” and “mininova today downloads”, and more related searches.

It is not clear why Yahoo decided to filter The Pirate Bay, but seems unlikely that they did it because the site is often associated with copyright infringement. Perhaps Yahoo’s index is just screwed up? If we dig a little deeper, it turns out that not all Pirate Bay’s pages are gone.

Interestingly, Yahoo! was found guilty of infringing copyright themselves two months ago. During December last year, Yahoo China’s music search was confirmed illegal in a Beijing court ruling which stated that under new copyright laws it facilitates mass copyright infringement.

Update: February 21, Yahoo links to The Pirate Bay again…

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

After being hounded by the IFPI since April 2006, Yahoo! China – partly owned by one the world’s most prominent internet businesses, Yahoo! – today had its music search (via deep linking) deemed illegal by a Beijing Court, who said the service violates Chinese law by facilitating mass copyright infringement.

Yahoo! China had appealed against the guilty verdict reached in the case in April, but this was today dismissed by the Court.

In an earlier case it was decided that another company, Baidu, also facilitated copyright infringement when it used similar methods to Yahoo!, but under Chinese laws in operation at the time they had committed no offense. However, new copyright laws came into force in 2006 and it was under these that Yahoo! China was found guilty, as explained by John Kennedy, Chairman and CEO of the IFPI:

“We are disappointed that the court did not find Baidu liable, but that judgment was about Baidu’s actions in the past under an old law that is no longer in force.”

The IFPI say that when sites like Yahoo! and Baidu – or even Google – deep-link “to hundreds of thousands of pirate tracks” they are “a huge drain on efforts to develop a legitimate music market in China.”

According to IFPI statistics, music sales in China were just $76 million in 2006, with 99% of all music downloading done in a way that infringes copyright.

They also claim that Yahoo! China and Baidu “account for the bulk of the problem” so presumably now that both site’s searches are going to disappear, Chinese internet piracy will virtually end over night. That’s China sorted, then. Next stop, Russia.

John Kennedy said: “The ruling against Yahoo! China is extremely significant in clarifying copyright rules for internet music services in China. By confirming that Yahoo! China’s service violates copyright under new Chinese laws, the Beijing Court has effectively set the standard for internet companies throughout the country.”

“Our member companies seek partnership, not conflict, with China’s internet companies” he said, presumably as he decides who to take action against next.

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