Prince loves to file copyright infringement lawsuits and at the start of 2014 another has landed, ready to stir up a storm as the details become known and the case develops.

Filed in the United States District Court in the Northern District of California, the lawsuit targets 22 individuals, only two of which are referenced by their real names. The others remain ‘Does’ although eight are indicated by their online nicknames.

Sadly, with names such as PurpleHouse2, PurpleKissTwo and NPRUNIVERSE it’s difficult to see these people as anything other than Prince fans. But it is Doe 8 – THEULTIMATEBOOTLEGEXPERIENCE – that gives the clearest indication of what this lawsuit is all about.

“The Defendants in this case engage in massive infringement and bootlegging of Prince’s material,” the lawsuit reads.

“For example, in just one of the many takedown notices sent to Google with respect to Doe 2 (aka DaBang319), Prince identified 363 separate infringing links to file sharing services, with each link often containing copies of bootlegged performances of multiple separate musical compositions.”

While it’s clear by now that Prince doesn’t share the same opinions as the Grateful Dead or Nine Inch Nails on bootlegs, for once a file-sharing site isn’t in the cross hairs. The lawsuit says that the defendants used Facebook and Google’s Blogger “to accomplish their unlawful activity”, either by running fanpages or blogs and linking to live concert recordings without permission.

The complaint lists several pieces of audio offered by the defendants, concluding Prince performances from 2011 in North Carolina, 2002 in Oakland and 1983 in Chicago. Apparently even the circulation of a 31-year-old live set damages Prince’s earning capability, with the singer leveling charges of direct copyright infringement, ‘unauthorized fixation and trafficking in sound recordings’, contributory copyright infringement and bootlegging.

“Prince has suffered and is continuing to suffer damages in an amount according to proof, but no less than $1 million per Defendant,” the lawsuit reads.

Prince has a long tradition of suing anyone who dares to use his material without permission, but doesn’t always carry through on his threats. A 2007 effort to sue The Pirate Bay went nowhere. This new lawsuit is likely to go much further.

Update Jan 28: Without giving any reason, Prince has now dropped the lawsuit. The dismissal was without prejudice so could be raised again in the future.

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

In an interview with the UK’s Daily Mirror tabloid – which will be giving the album away for free in a covermount promotion this week – Prince explains why the likes of iTunes and other digital music stores won’t be getting the track either.

“The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it,” he explained.

“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you,” he added.

While the album is also set to be given away with other newspapers, such as Het Nieuwsblad and De Gentenaar in Belgium and Rolling Stone magazine in Germany, contrary to claims by Prince, 20Ten will also be available for free via thousands of Internet outlets.

Sometime soon, probably before the planned release date of July 10th, 20Ten will be all over BitTorrent, Gnutella, dozens of one-click hosters, Usenet and file-sharing blogs worldwide and not one of them will have paid Prince the kind of advance he expects but didn’t receive from iTunes and other digital stores. With nowhere else but from a newspaper in limited numbers to get the album, Prince fans will turn to the web in their millions.

At this point in the final paragraphs one would normally sum up the news. “Prince is crazy for slamming the Internet and digital devices” or maybe “Prince is a hero for giving his music away” but in this case it’s quite difficult.

“I really believe in finding new ways to distribute my music,” he told The Mirror and strangely, by completely shunning the Internet with the release of 20Ten, what Prince has done is given this “outdated” network a golden opportunity to distribute his music on a scale worthy of an artist of his stature.

So where can people download this album right now? Well, it seems, absolutely nowhere. Despite the fact that almost 100% of albums leak weeks before their planned release date, 20Ten remains stubbornly offline with just 4 days to go.

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

As stated previously, for your money you get a box that you plug into your network as close as possible to the Internet connection. Here it monitors all the traffic it can see, looking for data that matches the fingerprints stored in it. If it detects a transfer matching a fingerprint, it terminates the connection, in the same way Sandvine does , by sending RST packets to both ends of the connection, spoofed to look like the other sent it.

Although it seems like a fairer system than the Sandvine box Comcast used, it still has some significant flaws. Perhaps of greatest interest, is that it can be configured to act just like Sandvine, but more so. Literature for the system claims it “automatically filters copyright infringements, operating in a manner similar to a virus filter, without disrupting legitimate file trades.” But does it live up to the hype?

Audible Magic’s support site contains the answers to the basic questions most of us have about CopySense.

Q: What P2P protocols/programs are recognized?
A: The CopySense Appliance recognizes signatures from over 150 popular P2P applications and their derivatives. As new P2P applications are introduced, additional recognition capabilities are provided as software updates under your maintenance agreement
Q: How does it block traffic?
A: The appliance can be instructed to block all P2P traffic or to block only copyrighted content from P2P applications. The CopySense Appliance uses a patented packet-resetting process, and it sends a packet reset to both the requesting and sending IP addresses each time they attempt a P2P transfer that is to be blocked. The P2P application is thus forced to time out with an unsuccessful transfer.
Q: How does it recognize copyrighted content?
A: The CopySense technology examines the perceptual characteristics of a media file and compares that signature with those contained in a database of protected works. Publishers of media content register their works in Audible Magic’s database. The database is regularly updated in the CopySense Appliance as part of a content update subscription.

As the name of the site is TorrentFreak, and the main protocol in use is BitTorrent, let’s start there. Torrents are non-sequential downloads (illustration), that take ‘random’ (generally rarest first of what’s available) pieces from peers on the torrent, in 16KiB chunks. Also, although chunks might be sequential, pieces rarely are. A data stream may consist of 5 chunks from the start, then 2 from the back, and 1 from the middle. From just that 128KiB of data, Audible Magic claim they can identify a copyrighted work, and then terminate the connection.

If it sounds implausible, that’s because it is. It may work with systems like DC++, or possibly eD2k (as well as SoulSeek and KaZaA), but there is no way it can be accurate or effective with BitTorrent. Such methods would work better with HTTP (like Rapidshare) or FTP transfers, but aside from CopySense saying they don’t interfere with anything non-P2P, there is another problem.

As highlighted in the recent case involving the baby dancing to a Prince soundtrack, fair use is a perfectly adequate defence. This system makes no allocation for fair use at all. In the case, the judge ruled that before copyright enforcement can take place, the copyright owner is required to consider if the usage is fair use. An automated system is incapable of that. There have also been doubts surrounding the effectiveness of the streaming content version, which is based on the same technology.

So, in essence, CopySense does not (and can not) work to inhibit the most popular p2p protocol out there. If it could, then we would simply see a resurgence in passworded RAR files being torrented, with the passwords posted either on the torrent site, or even in the comment field of the torrent. CopySense also fails to check if a copyrighted file that it might identify (if you’re using a protocol that it can actually detect) is being used in a way consistent with fair use, or is licensed for use (although extremely improbable, the possibility exists, especially if copyrighted recording is right at the start).

In part two, we will look at claims that have been made from those who have used CopySense, and how that affects copyright infringement cases already in progress, and just how you get your content protected.

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

The Sheriff is convinced that he has a strong case and told CNET News: “There is no way that they will have any defense because it’s blatant piracy. They’ll either have to come out and fight or just try and ignore it. In that case, we’re going to win a default judgment against them. This could be a ticking time bomb for them. They can’t outrun this. We are very confident.”

Pirate Bay admin Brokep was not impressed by Web Sheriff’s expressed confidence, and told us earlier: “He’s welcome to try and sue us in Sweden, there’s no basis. And it’s so funny that he’s teaming up with the joke of the anti piracy world – Web Sheriff.”

In addition to suing The Pirate Bay, Web Sheriff also told CNET News that he will go after the companies that advertise on the popular BitTorrent tracker and that he will be involved an investigation into The Pirate Bay’s money streams.

This is not the first time the Web Sheriff, also known as John Giacobbi, clashes with The Pirate Bay. Some hilarious email correspondence is still available on The Pirate Bay’s legal threat page.

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

Most people who have been exposed to his music would agree, Prince is a truly great artist having written and produced literally hundreds of mostly good tracks.

Back in May, Prince announced the “Earth Tour” consisting of many concerts at the very reasonable price of £31.21 – priced deliberately low so that everyone could afford to go. All attending also received a free copy of Prince’s latest album, ‘Planet Earth’. In June, the UK’s ‘Mail on Sunday’ newspaper announced that it had struck a deal with Prince to give his new album away for free with its July 15th edition, in a never-seen-before groundbreaking deal.

After being forward-looking with this giveaway, Prince has now reverted back to the usual anti-piracy stance and according to MediaGuardian he is going to take action to protect copyrights “not just for himself, but for all artists in the digital age” and is aiming to “reclaim his art on the internet”.

So, exactly how does Prince aim to do this? Apart from an attack on commercial physical pirates operating out of eBay, his main focus will be YouTube and of course, The Pirate Bay.

Prince’s spokesman explained further: “Prince believes strongly that as an artist the music rights must remain with the artist and thus copyrights should be protected across the board. Very few artists have ever taken this kind of action over their rights. Yet, Prince has showed time and time again he is ready to challenge the system in new ways to put artists and music first”

In a move which shows that Prince (or at least his advisers) have a sense of humor, they have hired the infamous Web Sheriff (a division of Entertainment Law Associates), headed up by John Giacobbi to deal with the enforcement. They send out letters like this one – the site in question is of course, still up and running.

Apparently, following Web Sheriff threats, more than 2000 Prince clips have been removed from YouTube and 300 eBay auctions taken down but understandably, after Web Sheriff’s last contact with Pirate Bay ended in complete humiliation, they have decided to deal with them last. After they unsuccessfully demanded that PirateBay take down some ‘White Stripes’ torrents and unwittingly laid themselves open to mountains of ridicule on the infamous legal page, one can assume they plan to tread carefully next time.

TorrentFreak spoke to Brokep from The Pirate Bay to see how they feel about Prince’s plans, backed up by the fearsome Web Sheriff: “Well, ‘way to go on losing all your fans’” he said. “I truly respect the son of a king’s work as a musician but he seems like he has some kind of problem in getting to deal with his fans.” Commenting on the free CD album giveaway brokep continued, “And he’s desperate for media attention..

Earlier in the year, Web Sheriff ordered some torrent sites to publicly apologize for their activities by taking out half-page advertisements in Billboard Magazine, Music Week Magazine and Music & Media Magazine so maybe this will happen to The PirateBay?

Characteristically unfazed by the threat of Web Sheriff intimidation, brokep says: “He’s welcome to try and sue us in Sweden, there’s no basis. And it’s so funny that he’s teaming up with the joke of the anti piracy world – Web Sheriff. They are also in a big time need of some media attention, so I guessed they teamed up for that reason.”

Bloggers are also getting familiar with the Sheriff’s informal style of takedown request, which have no basis in law whatsoever. Some bloggers even feel like ‘they have arrived‘ when the Sheriff first comes-a-calling.

With his fans around the world, John Giacobbi isn’t short on publicity. His photos are all over the web but my favorite is this one of him relaxing on the hood of a classic car, not on a horse as everyone expected.

There again, maybe he’s not a real sheriff….

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