In 2001, that began to change with the advent of Chilling Effects, an archive created by activists who had become concerned that increasing volumes of cease-and-desist letters were having a “chilling effect” on speech.

In the decade-and-a-third that followed the archive grew to unprecedented levels, with giants such as Google and Twitter routinely sending received notices to the site for public retrieval.

However, while Chilling Effects strives to maintain free speech, several times a month rightsholders from around the world (probably unintentionally) try to silence the archive in specific ways by asking Google to de-index pages from the site.

As can be seen from the tables below, Home Box Office has tried to de-index Chilling Effects pages 240 times, with Microsoft and NBC Universal making 99 and 65 attempts respectively.

The ‘problem’ for these copyright holders is two-fold. Firstly, Chilling Effects does indeed list millions of URLs that potentially link to infringing content. That does not sit well with copyright holders.

“Because the site does not redact information about the infringing URLs identified in the notices, it has effectively become the largest repository of URLs hosting infringing content on the internet,” the Copyright Alliance’s Sandra Aistars complained earlier this year.

However, what Aistars omits to mention is that Chilling Effects has a huge team of lawyers under the hood who know only too well that their archive receives protection under the law. Chilling Effects isn’t a pirate index, it’s an educational, informational, research resource.

Thanks to Google, which routinely throws out all attempts at removing Chilling Effects URLs from its indexes, we are able to see copyright holder attempts at de-indexing.

Earlier this month, for example, Wild Side Video and their anti-piracy partners LeakID sent this notice to Google aiming to protect their title “Young Detective Dee.” As shown below, the notice contained several Chilling Effects URLs.

Each URL links to other DMCA notices on Chilling Effects, each sent by rival anti-piracy outfit Remove Your Media on behalf of Well Go USA Entertainment. They also target “Young Detective Dee”. This is an interesting situation that offers the potential for an endless loop, with the anti-piracy companies reporting each others’ “infringing” links on Chilling Effects in fresh notices, each time failing to get them removed.

The seeds of the “endless loop” phenomenon were also experienced by HBO for a while, with the anti-piracy company sending notices (such as this one) targeting dozens of Chilling Effects pages listing notices previously sent by the company.

While publishing notices is entirely legal, the potential for these loops really angers some notice senders.

On April 10 this year a Peter Walley sent a notice to Google complaining that his book was being made available on a “pirate site” without permission. Google removed the link in its indexes but, as is standard practice, linked to the notice on Chilling Effects. This enraged Walley.

None of these rantings had any effect, except to place yet another notice on Chilling Effects highlighting where the infringing material could be found.

It’s a lesson others should learn from too.

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

Fortunately we don’t simply have to take Google’s statistics at face value. The notices received by the company are processed and later sent to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. There they are input into a searchable database so that the public can cross reference Google’s reports (along with others from companies such as Twitter) with the actual takedown notices, thus bringing accountability to the process.

It is through both of these database that TorrentFreak has been able to unearth dozens of serious errors and abuses carried out by the automated takedown systems operated by the world’s largest copyright holders. While there can be little doubt that Chilling Effects is an invaluable resource for those reporting on piracy issues or tracking DMCA abuses, not everyone is happy with the service being offered by the site.

As detailed in our previous reports (1,2), this week various rightsholders and service providers have been giving statements on the effectiveness of the DMCA. Among them was the Copyright Alliance, an organization that counts the MPAA, NBC, Viacom and TimeWarner among its members. The theme running through CEO Sandra Aistars’ statement is that the takedown provisions of the DMCA don’t work, whether you’re a creator or a website drowning in notices. Surprisingly, Aistars also took aim at Chilling Effects

The project is operated by a selection of law school clinics and the EFF with the aim of supporting lawful online activity against the chill of unwarranted legal threats, but the Copyright Alliance CEO says the site helps bully artists who stand up for their rights.

“The activities of chillingeffects.org are repugnant to the purposes of Section 512 [of the DMCA],” Aistars reported to the House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing.

“Data collected by high-volume recipients of DMCA notices such as Google, and senders of DMCA notices such as trade associations representing the film and music industries demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of DMCA notices sent are legitimate, yet the site unfairly maligns artists and creators using the legal process created by Section 512 as proponents of censorship.”

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Chilling Effects Project Leader Wendy Seltzer said that the repository exists for informational and research purposes.

“Many of the Chilling Effects participants filed an amicus brief (pdf) in the 9th Circuit a few years ago, in which we describe Chilling Effects’ public purpose at length, and cite 25+ research works that, even in 2010, had been written using Chilling Effects data,” Seltzer explained.

However, continuing her criticism, Aistars told the hearing that by publishing DMCA notices intact, thereby revealing their senders, Chilling Effects had helped subject creators to “harassment and personal attacks for seeking to exercise their legal rights.”

Seltzer, a Fellow with Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy who sits on the boards of both the Tor Project and of World Wide Web Foundation, dismisses the allegations.

“[Chilling Effects] has always had policies of redacting unnecessary personally identifying information, while preserving the information needed for researchers, including members of the Internet-using public, to determine who filed takedown notices and what content they requested removal.”

Finally, in a not unexpected development, the Copyright Alliance CEO said that due to Chilling Effects publishing DMCA notices in their entirety, its database had grown into a huge list of pirate content links.

“Finally, because the site does not redact information about the infringing URLs identified in the notices, it has effectively become the largest repository of URLs hosting infringing content on the internet,” Aistars concludes.

While copyright holders may not like what Chilling Effects does, the site brings much-needed accountability to those using and abusing the DMCA takedown process. Without it the entire process would exist in the dark, and content wrongfully disappeared from search engines and other sites would remain unaccounted for. The site is one of, if not the most important DMCA-related resource online today, and long may that continue.

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

In recent years BitComet has been adding many features that have taken it way beyond being a regular BitTorrent client. It now has a full featured HTTP/FTP download manager, a VIP downloading feature, and its own proprietary file sharing protocol which the developers call long-term seeding.

Despite the wide range of features that have been implemented, BitComet has remained largely undiscussed in the English speaking part of the Internet. One of the main reasons for this is that none of the 20-people strong development team speaks English. So today, after working with a team of translators, we aim to bridge this gap and unravel a few mysteries by presenting our discussions with BitComet founder RnySmile.

“In the beginning I was using another BitTorrent client developed in Python,” RnySmile says, commenting on his motivation to start developing BitComet.

“After running a torrent all night long I noticed my harddrive was running like crazy, grinding away as the torrent progressed and I wondered why the developers didn’t use a disc cache to prevent the constant need for repeated read/writes. This client also didn’t have the ability to download more than one torrent at a time.”

“So, being a C++ programmer, I began development on a new client initially called “SimpleBT”, which was originally designed to simply run torrents and introduced a disc cache as well as the ability to download multiple torrents. This project eventually grew to be much more than a simple BitTorrent client so we eventually changed the name to BitComet,” he added.

Today, BitComet has grown far beyond being a one man operation. The current BitComet development team consists of approximately 20 people, who are all from China. These developers are obviously skilled in what they do, but the inherent language barrier also has some downsides.

During the early years there were quite a few controversies surrounding BitComet, which resulted in a bad reputation among many English speaking BitTorrent users. Although RnySmile acknowledges that some errors were made in the past, he believes that many of the reported issues were the result of a lack of communication.

“The criticism and rumors about BitComet that circulated through the English-speaking torrent community were largely unknown to us, at least not to the extent they were known in the English communities,” he says. “Being that BitComet is a free software product we haven’t had the resources to operate a public relations department to service our international users, issue press releases and communicate with the media.”

Although BitComet now has English volunteers who help out users in their native language, this type of support was mostly missing in the early years. In China, on the other hand, it was easier for the BitComet team to address and respond to concerns. “We have always operated a forum in China where we post updates and users can communicate with members of the development team,” RnySmile says.

For many in the English speaking BitTorrent community, the lack of communication resulted in a bad reputation. It all started in 2005 when BitComet was banned from several private BitTorrent trackers for ignoring the “private flag” – a feature that keeps private torrents, private. Even though this issue was resolved relatively quickly, the image of BitComet was permanently damaged.

In the years to come, more and more horror stories popped up, from spreading junk data, to disobeying BitTorrent rules. In 2007, BitTornado developer Shad0w even went as far as banning all BitComet users, because the client allegedly exploited super-seeds.

Around the same time, however, Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years experience, researched most of the claims against BitComet. He concluded that the client was not best suited for initial seeding tasks but at the same time refuted all other claims.

“BitComet is a worthy download client, providing some advantageous features not found in any other current BitTorrent client. Some of these features are confusing and are poorly implemented, but they are not detrimental to a BitTorrent swarm, nor do they take unfair advantage,” Topolski wrote.

“None of the typical accusations against BitComet, those that are provided as reasons for trackers or users to ‘Ban BitComet’ have held true. It is my professional opinion that the bans of BitComet are based on misunderstandings and falsehoods, and not on good data,” he added.

BitComet founder RnySmile agrees with this assessment, and in his full response (linked below) he addresses several of the rumors and misunderstandings in detail. Although the bad press was unpleasant, the BitComet team wanted to look ahead and create an universal download application that goes beyond BitTorrent.

“One thing we wanted to do was make BitComet into more than just a BitTorrent client. We wanted our users to be able to use one program to do all their downloading, no matter what the source of the files was, or the protocol used to get them,’ RnySmile said.

Among other things BitComet has introduced a feature called VIP-downloading which enabled user to download torrent that are accelerated by BitComet’s servers. It’s basically a private connection to a hight speed seedbox which speeds up the downloading process.

Another unique feature to BitComet is the proprietary file sharing protocol which the developers call long-term seeding (LT-seeding). With LT-seeding BitComet users can choose to keep on sharing files with other LT-seeders when their regular download is stopped. However, normal BitTorrent swarms will always have priority over LT-seeding.

Finally, BitComet is also planning to introduce an anonymity feature in the near future, but this is still a work in progress. The above, and integrating many other features that have been implemented over the years, is BitComet’s greatest accomplishment according to RnySmile. “It was a long, hard, and ongoing task to get these new features to all work together and develop a stable product.”

One thing’s for certain, BitComet is here to stay. Although it’s steering in a slightly different direction than most other clients, with some pretty unusual features, we feel that the BitComet team deserves more credit than it generally gets.

—

The full response from the BitComet team was too long to publish in its entirety but can be read here (pdf). We want to thank everyone who helped in getting this interview ready for publication, including RnySmile, The UnUsual Suspect, the BitComet development team, Lucy26, Kluelos, Cassie, GreyWizard and Vasy.

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

Earlier this year, the homepage of BitTorrent meta search engine BTJunkie suddenly disappeared from Google searches, but since the search giant submits the DMCA takedown requests it receives to ChillingEffects, we were able to discover at least some background to the complaint.

But this was just one URL in a single complaint out of the many thousands sent to ChillingEffects by the likes of Google, Yahoo, Digg and Twitter in the last 12 months.

In total, the clearing house received copies of more than 12,000 cease and desist notices, some containing a single URL and some (such as those relating to The Pirate Bay) containing hundreds. So who made the biggest noise with DMCA takedown notices in 2010?

It will come as no surprise that according to ChillingEffects stats, the international music industry, represented by IFPI, issued the most DMCA takedown notices to submitters during the last 12 months, 1272 in total. This may not sound like a huge number, but many of them contain lists of URLs which take a considerable time to simply scroll through.

In second place one might expect to find other representatives from the entertainment industry, but this position is taken with 303 complaints by Clube do Hardware, the largest site in South America to publish tutorials, articles and news on computer hardware.

Twentieth Century Fox secures the third spot with 299 cease and desists. Magnolia Pictures, a holding of the Mark Cuban owned 2929 Entertainment, takes fourth spot with 257 complaints. Porn aside, no further movie companies make the top 20.

Brazil’s Associação Anti Pirataria de Cinema e Musica, the anti-piracy group which caused so much trouble for popular fansubbing sites such as Legendas.TV, also makes a significant appearance in the ChillingEffects chart. APCM, which represents the interests of companies such as Universal, Warner, SonyBMG, Disney, Paramount, and Fox, was hacked in 2009 but made its comeback to take 5th position.

Operating in the adult entertainment market, RemoveYourContent came in 6th with 221 DMCA takedowns. With claims of a 99.3% success rate for removal of infringing content, the company has made enemies even within its own community, as demonstrated by various ‘hate‘ sites and critics. In 2009, RemoveYourContent was even blamed for having The Pirate Bay’s homepage delisted by Google.

The RIAA has to settle for a lowly 7th place with 203 DMCA takedowns. Sony/Epic/Estate of Michael Jackson slide in at 11th spot, followed by Stones Throw Records at 12th and Chappell & Co at 13th. There are no more music companies listed in the top 20.

Folkert Knieper, a producer of recipe photographs, is one of the more unusual entries at 9th position with 158 takedowns followed at 17th by Deckers Outdoor Corporation, the rightsholder for pictures of UGG boots.

Adult video company Vivid Entertainment Group sits at 18th position with 82 DMCA takedown requests.

Interestingly, some of the biggest copyright litigators of 2010, such as the United States Copyright Group and ACS:Law, appear nowhere in the top 20 list which perhaps suggests that having content removed is not their biggest concern, but generating profit from its existence is.

So which industry makes the most noise overall when it comes to DMCA complaints?

“While the mix changes over time, the most frequent senders of DMCA takedown notices remain the music industry, whose institutional members have sent a combined total averaging roughly 5 takedowns a day,” says ChillingEffects’ Wendy Seltzer.

The full list, which also lists famous copyright ‘agents’ such as the Web Sheriff, can be found here.

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