Yahoo! Messenger Censors FilesTube Links

Censoring the Internet on behalf of the entertainment industries appears to be a growing trend. Talks about Internet blocklists, domain seizures of alleged pirate sites, and Google’s proactive filter of “infringing” searches are just a few examples. Today it appears that Yahoo! has hopped on the bandwagon with its censoring of links to FilesTube, one of the largest media search engines.

Imagine that you found this great new TV-show “Pioneer One,” which the makers decided to give away for free. You’re actually so excited about it that you want to share it with a friend by pasting them a FilesTube link in Yahoo! Messenger.

Although this might sound like a good idea to some, Yahoo! appears to disagree. Those who try to paste a FilesTube link to their contacts in the Messenger app will notice that it never reaches its destination. The link goes directly into Yahoo’s dark hole and neither end of the conversation is alerted to this “feature”.

For those not familiar with the site, FilesTube is arguably the largest meta-search engine for content hosted on cyberlockers. Founded in 2007, the Polish-operated search engine serves millions of users every day, and this number is on the up.

The big question of course is why Yahoo! Messenger users are prohibited from sending their contacts links to the site. FilesTube is merely a meta-search engine and does not host any content on its servers. It even abides by the U.S. DMCA by honoring takedown requests from copyright holders.

TorrentFreak contacted Yahoo! to try and shed some light on the issue, but since we haven’t heard back yet all we can do at this point is speculate. Theoretically there could be a non-copyright related reason for the blocking, but we have failed to come up with one. On the other hand, in tests where we sent our contacts links to similar sites did not produce the same results, which is odd.

Although not very logical, such a selective censorship attempt would not be entirely new. Just a few months ago Google decided to arbitrarily block a few piracy related keywords from their “instant” and “suggest” features while leaving direct and just as popular alternatives unharmed.

Whatever the reason is for Yahoo! monitoring private conversations and then swallowing FilesTube links, censorship is an up and coming tool that will be used increasingly to protect the interests of the entertainment industries. It complements other indirect but effective anti-piracy strategies, and despite the constitutional issues that may arise, the anti-piracy lobby will not rest before their goals are completed.

Aussie ISP Proposes To Treat Piracy As “Traffic Offenses”

In 2008 the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft filed its first lawsuit against Aussie ISP iiNet, stating that iiNet did not manage to undertake any measures to stop their network customers’ unlawful file-sharing. The Internet Service Provider succeeded in the first court trial and the trial’s verdict was upheld on the AFACT appeal.

Recently, iiNet has offered a number of rational ways out of this controversial situation, which were published in its report “Encouraging Legitimate Use of Online Content”. The company underlines the importance of diversifying legal options applied to the pirated content. According to the report, limiting the content accessibility is unreasonable, especially if it is much sought after by the network users. Meanwhile, the number of unsatisfied users keeps growing. They allege that they do not have any other choice but to turn to piracy simply because of the copyright holders’ inability to provide them with reasonable legal options. It is ridiculous that Australian residents cannot enjoy their beloved movies or TV shows until they show up in the US. As a result, the growing public demand is not satisfied.

As far as the above mentioned problem needs serious consideration, iiNet offers the following legal solutions. First, it is required to organize an independent body, the implementation of which into the process will enable to consider all the raised infringement claims as well as complaints of the network customers, access providers and content holders. Second, iiNet suggests making up a special copyright infringement penalty scheme, similar to that applied for traffic offenses.

For example, if traffic offense happens only once, the person will be fined or get demerit points. In case the offender keeps overlooking traffic regulations, demerit points will be accumulated, which may eventually result in the offender’s driving license suspension. In accordance with the iiNet’s report, the same penalty scheme should be applied to copyright infringements as well.

It is emphasized that just as even the most serious traffic offenses caused by speeding never result in complete prohibition to use different means of transport, copyright infringement should never end up with Internet termination. Here everything should depend on the gravity of copyright infringement. The more serious the infringer’s fault is, the more severe penalty should be imposed. Thus, copyright infringements may be subdivided into minor, major and serious, depending on the seriousness of the infringer’s fault, starting with fines and demerit points that will range according to the ISP’s financial loss related to the copyright infringement and up to the involvement of the infringer’s treatment fees set by the court.

Portugal Created Honeypot To Fight Piracy

Although copyright owners are known for taking extreme measures to fight piracy, the case of authorities creating a “pirate” honeypot is really exceptional. However, Portugal became the first country where a co-operation between the Ministry of Culture and the country’s entertainment industry led to a protocol calling for creating such a honeypot for scaring illegal downloaders. 

If you don’t know, the term “honeypot” is widely used among file-sharers in order to describe websites and networks specifically created in order to lure Internet users into downloading copyrighted content. Although this label is usually applied to all suspicious looking websites, the existence of true honeypots has never been proved. Many people have alleged that pay-up-or-else lawsuits against them resulted from .torrent files uploaded or seeded on purpose by the rights owners themselves. However, this hasn’t been proven either.

Meanwhile, no-one can say that it means honeypots are a myth. Actually, Portugal has confirmed their existence recently, when approving of agreement between the country’s Phonographic Association and the General Inspection of Cultural Activities.

The agreement in question was announced a couple weeks ago as a part of the effort to fight piracy under which pro-copyright outfit would provide some “anti-piracy” training to the inspection officers from the Ministry of Culture. However, the actual text of the protocol was never released, which makes the Portuguese Pirate Party believe that there’s something more. And they made no mistake, as the agreement turned out to promote a mentioned honeypot scheme. In fact, the music industry agreed to grant the authorities the right to upload copyrighted files to file-sharing networks in order to create traps designed to gather the IP-addresses of illegal file-sharers. Those who get caught by this honeypot scheme should expect a warning from their ISP, which may cause a disconnection because of a breach of the terms of service. Meanwhile, the sad thing about all this is that the evidence collected by the government isn’t very solid – it is supposed to only rely on screenshots indicating what kind of illegal material is being sharing.

As the Portuguese government claimed, the main purpose of the co-operation is to influence public opinion through the media.

Another UK BitTorrent Lawsuit Dropped

Two operators of FileSoup, the longest standing BitTorrent site, had their case dismissed by the Crown Prosecution Service. Actually, the prosecution only relied on the evidence by the anti-piracy outfit Federation Against Copyright Theft, also known as FACT, and due to this one-side view failed to build a case. The case became the second one, after the trial of OiNK, where British BitTorrent website admins have walked free.

FileSoup was launched 8 years ago, so it can be considered one of the original BitTorrent services. In fact, it outlived a huge number of trackers that sprung up around the time. Meanwhile, the service developed a reputation and a welcoming community in 8 years of existence. Everything has been going smooth, until 2 years ago, without any noticeable trouble, police and the Hollywood-backed outfit FACT suddenly decided to conduct a raid in the house of the site’s founder nicknamed “TheGeeker”. The first raid was followed by the second one on the property of fellow admin “Snookered”. Both of the site operators were arrested and taken in for questioning. Then, in a year, they were charged with conspiracy to violate copyright for their involvement with the online file-sharing service. Like many British cases, this one could only boast the evidence by the Hollywood-funded outfit FACT, and no other independent investigation.

This appeared to be the reason for the court to drop the case. The solicitors of the site operators, who previously managed to defend the owner of OiNK tracker, pushed the prosecutor to formulate the charges, which they failed to do. In fact, the prosecution couldn’t even understand technical side of the matter, wasn’t sure whether to prosecute BitTorrent tracker as a business or not, and didn’t know whether the rights owner had caused prejudice. As far as there wasn’t any additional investigation into the issue, no-one could answer these questions, which made the Crown Prosecution Service to dismiss the case entirely. The court ruling read that the offenses were rather a civil matter than criminal one, so no more public money should have been spent on the prosecution.

The site operators are relieved at the end of the trial, while FACT is quite frustrated by having spent thousands of dollars on this very case. Best for the British tax payers, the justice was served by dismissing the case.