Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Pirate Bay Warned Facebook and Twitter Could Be Threatened Too

Defense claims that the public has seen similar examples regarding copyright issues over the years, recalling how the entertainment industry targeted any new technology – from radios and satellite dishes to VCRs and DVRs.

The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay has faced the last day of its appeal trial of the conviction for the facilitation of copyright violation with nothing new.

The attorney for one of the co-founders of the service, Frederik Neij, first highlighted that almost each case of unauthorized downloading where the tracker has been accused of facilitating, took place in a country with laws allowing legal file-sharing (Spain, for example).

Besides, he reiterated his contention that according to the Section 16 of the E-Commerce Act, the tracker is in fact protected as transmission service. If the court allows a guilty verdict to stand, this could endanger the whole worldwide web as we know it. The attorney says that a guilty verdict for his client would automatically imply a threat to the similar online search services, such as Twitter and Facebook, especially taking into consideration that the tracker never hosted any copyrighted content, and didn’t violate the laws itself, only its users did.

Another attorney, for the second co-founder Peter Sunde, later made an attempt to get to the core of technology, which is what all the trial has been about. He emphasized how the public has seen other examples over the years, with rights owners having targeted everything from radios to DVRs.

Whatever new technology appears, large companies always claim that it is really life-threatening. In the case of The Pirate Bay, the prosecutors are also after the technology. Then, the attorney argued that since the tracker never hosted copyrighted content, it can’t be held liable for infringement, but its users can, as they are the real people who committed the violation.

Finally, the attorneys pointed out that the only figures the judges have seen when estimating financial damages have been those the entertainment industry provided to the court, but not the ones of the independent outside experts.

The court is expected to hand out its verdict in the late November, but either way it’s just a boring waste of time. It actually doesn’t matter, what the outcome of the case will be – it will still make its way to the High Court.


Monday, October 18, 2010

Major BitTorrent Trackers Have Been Offline

It has been almost 2 weeks since two of the most popular online BitTorrent trackers, PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent, started going down. Considering the recent news of DDoS attacks at many BitTorrent tracker websites, the public feared that both this trackers became victims of such an assault. However, the cause is friendly fire now, though the largest trackers are really overloaded.

Both PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent are BitTorrent tracker sites of a non-commercial origin using Opentracker software. None of this services hosts or links to the .torrent files. Besides, the trackers are free to use by any BitTorrent user. The services are actually listed on the top of the most popular services, coordinating in common the downloads of twenty million users at any given time.

One of the services, OpenBitTorrent, though had a seemingly neutral setup, managed to get lots of legal troubles last year. The tracker faces legal issues from both movie and music industry that were fighting against what they understand an illicit service. Hollywood was the first to win the court case against the Internet service provider of the tracker. Then, after the tracker found a new one, IFPI traced it in Spain, thus forcing the service to move again.

With all this intensive history in mind, it wasn’t a surprise that many file-sharers were afraid of the worst when the tracker appeared to become unresponsive a few days ago. Nevertheless, this time the outages were not caused by legal issues. It turned out that the downtime is actually caused by a constantly increasing number of file-sharers. OpenBitTorrent’s servers are just overloaded and aren’t able to process all the requests. However, the operators ensured the users that the troubles will be dealt with in a few days.

At the same time when OpenBitTorrent faced the issue, another major BitTorrent tracker, PublicBitTorrent, also had to solve the problem of too many users in the network, with similar results. Over the last few days PublicBitTorrent has also been unresponsive for 50% of the time, because its servers were also overloaded. This proves only how vulnerable the BitTorrent tracker ecosystem can be. The tracker also ensured the users it’ll be all right in a few days.

Still, the good news is that most users can continue downloading, because torrents work fine relying on DHT and PEX.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

10 10 10

Today is 10/10/10 of 10:10am:10 seconds. It will be a once in a lifetime experience, ahmm not really but twice in a lifetime because we still have the other 10-10-10 10-10-10 tonight.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Canadian Recording Industry Insulted the Independent Musicians

The representative of the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) recently visited Washington to discuss the country’s copyright legislation over there. However, his discussion ended up with independent artist being furious about his comments.

The comment that insulted the musicians who chose to distribute their works online for free related to the assumption that Canadian citizens are willing to support the country’s record industry and Ottawa was called to act. The CRIA’s representative thinks that this “modern digital century creates beggars of creators, sending them back to the 1800s.”

At the same time Canadian artists know that Canadian Recording Industry Association doesn’t even come close to protecting the interests of the country’s material creators. That’s why the major country’s record labels left the Association after the Liberals Bill C-60 came around. The CRIA described people ready to give away their works for free as beggars from the 1800s – that’s what seems to creep close to the defamatory line. On the contrary, the artists themselves think they are rather fueling their independent business model by making the content they created available in the Internet. In fact, no-one can argue that it’s up to performers to choose whether they use the common (outdated) business model or their own. The brightest example of such artists is Toby Emerson, who has been giving away his music for free by uploading it to MySpace and other free services, and he finally became one of the most famous Canadian musicians online. Only then he began selling his works – when he already had a huge fan base. Now he’s enjoying both his fans and profits from his works, which he doesn’t have to share with record labels.

That is just a guy who chose a different way of marketing and succeeded. Why should he be called a beggar? Because he differs from the others? But he’s not alone – thousands of musicians are doing the same. Because he does have control over his works, as distinct from the performers who sign contracts with record companies? Hardly.

Targeted artists, insulted with this announcement of CRIA, remind the Association that the industry’s failed business model is not their problem. The public isn’t going to tolerate any efforts to censor creators, so if they decide to share their own creations on BitTorrent, they have every right to do so without being offended by such words.

Friday, October 1, 2010

New US Bill WIll Force ISPs Close Down Piracy Sites

The new proposed Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) may provide the Department of Justice with an accelerated process for blocking websites hosting unauthorized copyrighted content. It would include the ability to block the import into the country of products offered by online websites devoted to infringing activities.

Recently Senators announced they want to introduce a bill able to solve the growing problem of online piracy and counterfeiting. A group of Senators believe the proposed Bill would give the Department of Justice the instrument it needs for finding and closing down online sites dedicated to providing access to illegal downloads or sale of counterfeit goods and copyrighted material. The latter part is a cause for concern for many, as it refers to the very heart of non-commercial copyright violation in the Internet. In fact, unauthorized peer-to-peer and streaming online services are not like the websites that traffic in physical counterfeit goods, and therefore are not making any profit. The controversial issue of the commercial and non-commercial infringement is again discussed in connection with a new Bill, which ignores this distinction.

The tool the new Bill would give the Department of Justice in order to address the abovementioned trouble is quite heavy handed. Although the Department has always been able to block any domestic infringing sites, it would now be able to prosecute foreign sites as well, in its attempt to prevent the import into the country of goods sold by infringing websites in case it harms US copyright owners.

The new Act, if enforced, would provide courts with the power to force ISPs to block access to any sites hosting unauthorized material by American citizens. For rights owners like the RIAA and MPAA it would be pennies from heaven, and the RIAA has already expressed its happiness with the suggestion.

But the problem is that the sponsors of the proposal still believe that commercial and non-commercial violation is the same, while they definitely aren’t: one can see a big difference between sharing material to enjoy it for free and unfairly profiting from the stolen copyrighted works. Individual file-sharers never profit from file-sharing, so they two can’t be linked together. If the Bill is enforced, the chances are that the US will get a filtering system resembling one of China, which is not even funny.