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Spanish government agrees another law against file sharing websites
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| 22nd September 2013
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| See article from
torrentfreak.com
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From previously being exceptionally lenient on those publishing links to copyrighted files without permission, Spain is now well on its way to cracking down on the problem. Amendments to the country's penal code have been approved means that admins of
sites offering links to copyrighted works without the owners' permission could face jail sentences of up to six years. Spain has long been a thorn in the side of United States-based entertainment companies. In January 2012 it was revealed that the
United States had threatened to put Spain on a trade blacklist but just months later the country responded by introduced the so-called Sinde Law which was designed to offer greater protections for copyright holders. However, even though the legislation
included provisions to close infringing sites, there was clearly no appetite to do so. Now, a year-and-a-half on, Spain is having another go at appeasing the United States. The Government-approved amendments to the penal code target owners and
administrators of file-sharing sites that link to content hosted elsewhere. Previously these types of sites remained within the law provided they didn't profit directly from a file-sharing transaction. Under the new amendments, those making even indirect
profit from an infringement (such as via advertising) now face jail sentences of up to six years. But while the government has signaled a crack down in one area, it insists that flexibility will remain in others, particularly against basic search
engines and regular users. In no case will we act against regular users, neutral search engines, or against P2P programs that allow the sharing of content, Minister Alberto Ruiz Gallardon said. Now that the Cabinet has approved the
amendments they will head over to parliament for debate. Only time will tell if the government will really follow through with its threats. |
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| 19th
September 2013
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The music and film industries are speaking to US politicians about further copyright measures See article from
torrentfreak.com |
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City of London Police set up unit dedicated to copy crime
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| 14th September 2013
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| Thanks to Nick See article from
bbc.co.uk |
The City of London Police have launched a unit dedicated to pursuing serious intellectual property crime. Police will liaise with international agencies to tackle digital copyright infringement in the physical production and sale of counterfeit goods.
The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (Pipcu) will receive £2.56m funding over two years from the UK government body the Intellectual Property Office. Our focus will be the professional criminals using intellectual property
crime to generate illicit gains, Detective Chief Supt Oliver Shaw told the BBC. Policemen trained in online investigations will act on tip-offs from industry groups to identify UK suspects, and will proactively seek out websites offering
illegal goods and downloads. The 19-strong unit will have the power to seize goods and assets, and will push internet service providers to take down websites selling spurious products. UK efforts to counter serious copyright crime include the
appointment of an intellectual property adviser by Prime Minister David Cameron. Conservative MP Mike Weatherley, who will advise the prime minister on enforcement, has been appointed to the job. |
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Russian parliament introduces another censorship bill, 34 days after the previous one took affect
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| 5th September 2013
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| See article from
torrentfreak.com
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Russia is now proposing even tougher measures against those who facilitate piracy. A new bill has been approved which allows for fines of up to $29,853 for service providers, search engines and users who fail to comply with a blacklist of sites already
subjected to copyright complaints. Just over a month has passed since Russia introduced new legislation aimed at cracking down on online piracy. The law, which has become known as Russia's SOPA, takes a tough line with those offering or linking to
illicit content online. Copyright complaints against a site or service can lead to that domain being added to a national blocklist, if their operators fail to render the illicit content inaccessible within a few days. Just 34 days after the
initial law was implemented, the government is pushing through further punitive measures for pirates and those deemed to be assisting them. According to Vesti.ru a parliamentary committee has approved a new bill which will allow a range of
Internet entities to be fined if they fail to block content and sites as dictated by the country's blacklist. The bill, which was approved in the first of three planned readings in the State Duma, introduces fines of up to one million rubles ($29,853) to
be levied against search engines, web hosts, ISPs, and even regular web users. The heaviest of fines will be reserved for companies failing to comply with the requirements of the blacklist, while punishments for regular users are expected to sit around
5,000 rubles ($149). |
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German book publishers try to get newspaper articles banned just for mentioning the name of a pirate website
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| 31st August 2013
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| See article from
torrentfreak.com
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Just how far should liability for copyright infringement be stretched? In years gone by it was fairly widely accepted that if you host infringing material without permission then that is illegal. Now we are used to the idea that linking to that
material is also illegal, and even indexing a link that links to a page that links to a mere torrent file can be painted as infringement. Book publishers in Germany, however, think they can take this never ending game to a whole new level. Last Sunday Der Tagesspiegel published an interesting interview with a representative of a site offering ebooks without the permission of the authors. The site, which was founded in late 2012 and claims to be the largest pirate ebook site in Germany, says it serves up 1.5 million books every month.
By now many readers will be wondering which site this is. Der Tagesspiegel obviously thought the same so quite reasonably named it as Boox.to. The reaction from the publishers to that revelation was quite astonishing. According to
Buchreport the publishers filed a criminal complaint, not against Boox.to, but against both Der Tagesspiegel and Zeit.de who had republished the article. Their claim: by naming the site the publications had assisted copyright infringement. The publishers
write in their complaint: The publication of the Website and its Internet address immediately enabled a broad mass of readers to become aware of the site. The reader is also indirectly encouraged to take advantage of
the offer, taking advantage of the illegal site that has been highlighted by the play of the interview. ``
But it is hard to get something banned without mentioning what is being banned. Speaking with
TorrentFreak, the admin of Boox.to said: Soon people found out that the online magazine of the German Book Publishers Association had itself published the complete URL of the site. Well, then there was just laughter
and tears. So the criminal complaint was publicly dumped during the first few hours. The criminal complaint itself was made as a matter of principle without any prospect of success in a German court room.
It's
notable that the criminal complaint also named the site in question so that the authorities could properly investigate the matter. |
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Angered that ISPs refused their incorrect website blocking instructions which also took down websites unrelated to the copyright case
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| 16th August 2013
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| Thanks to Nick See article from
boingboing.net
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In the UK, rightsholders have the power to demand arbitrary censorship of websites they dislike, and ISPs are required to block those sites. The Premier League carelessly added the IP address of a major web-host to its censorship list, and as a result
blocked The Radio Times, Galaxy Zoo, and many other legitimate sites. People who tried to visit those sites instead saw a warning saying that the sites were devoted to copyright infringement and that anyone visiting them was also infringing
copyright. ISPs were flooded with complaints, and began to unblock the sites themselves. But the Premier League is outraged at this. They say that even if the Premier League censored the wrong sites, it isn't up to the ISPs to uncensor
them, the ISPs are supposed to comply with the lists they get from rightsholders, no questions asked.
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| 14th August 2013
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Anti-gay campaign groups uses US copyright takedown notice to censor interview that it did not like from a WordPress blog See article from ministryoftruth.me.uk
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TV station jokes about the Asiana crash and then tries to bully YouTube posters passing on the joke
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| 24th July 2013
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| Thanks to Nick See article from
boingboing.net
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KTVU, the San Francisco TV station that displayed a bunch of jokey pilot names on a newscast about the Asiana crash, is now misusing copyright law to take down clips that record its mistake for posterity. The station syas that everyone has
seen the clips and that it was an accidental mistake , and that this somehow justifies multiple acts of copyfraud against services around the Internet and their users.
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| 21st July 2013
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Continuing anti-democratic secret negotiations for extreme copyright controls that will be totally unacceptable once revealed See
article from huffingtonpost.ca |
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UK's blocking of file sharing websites descends into a dark secretive world
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| 20th July 2013
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| See article from
torrentfreak.com See also article from
openrightsgroup.org
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The UK High Court has been handing out website blocking injunctions regularly in recent months but despite the supposed transparency of the legal system, obtaining copies of the injunctions has proved impossible. Now the Open Rights Group is
putting pressure on the Court in the hope of being able to publish the content of injunctions for open analysis. Although controversial, the reasons why sites such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and Movie2K are being blocked are now clear.
Once ISPs have actual knowledge that their services are being used by their subscribers to infringe copyright, they are put on notice by the High Court to block the sites in question. However, it has become somewhat tiresome to learn that
when injunctions are handed down by the High Court to ISPs, they appear to fall into some kind of informational black hole -- fitting perhaps for a document authorizing censorship. To try and find out what these injunctions contain TorrentFreak
previously spoke with one of the leading ISPs who assured us that the documents aren't actually secret. However, when we requested a copy we were told that they couldn't send us one and we would have to go to the Court instead. No luck there -- and the
BPI weren't exactly forthcoming either. Now the Open Rights Group is reporting that it too has been trying to get to the bottom of the website injunction blackout. ORG's Jim Killock says everyone could benefit from their publication. Accountability, fewer errors and less confusion about what is happening should be the result,
he says. Killock reveals that ORG has also asked ISPs to cooperate but they too have been met with reluctance. Possibly [the ISPs] feel that copyright owners asking for the orders may find publication by an ISP provocative. This means we
are obliged to ask the courts for the documents, in order that we can publish and analyse their contents, he explains. But ORG found that the courts didn't want to help either, turning down the group's requests to view the injunctions. They
have done this because, they say, 'judgement has not been entered' or 'service has not been acknowledged'. At present the rules governing access to court documents only permit access to these orders as of right once the litigation has finished, Killock explains.
The courts seem to be treating blocking injunctions as if they were like temporary injunctions made while proceedings are still going on. In fact the injunctions are the end of the section 97A process. Nothing more is intended to happen. With this in mind, ORG have applied to have a procedural judge review the group's requests in order to gain access, at least in the first instance, to the injunctions issued to the ISPs against Fenopy, H33t and KickassTorrents.
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16th July 2013
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| iPhone hackers have already bypassed anti-jailbreak measures in Deus Ex: The Fall. Game maker Eidos has attempted to thwart pirates by disabling weapons on jailbroken iPhones and iPads See
article from macworld.co.uk |
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France replaces the file sharing deterrent of internet connection with a 1500 Euro fine
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| 10th July 2013
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| See article from
torrentfreak.com
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After years of debate and controversy the French Government has finally backtracked on the law which allowed errant subscribers to be disconnected from the Internet. This morning a decree was published which removed the possibility for file-sharers to
have their connections cut for copyright infringement. Instead, those caught by rightsholders will now be subjected to a system of automated fines. The so-called graduated response to the file-sharing issue has for years been championed by
the mainstream music and movie industries. One of the first countries to see value in the idea was France, and under the supportive eye of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, Hadopi was born. The taxpayer-funded agency would oversee monitoring of Internet
subscribers along with a mechanism for sending them successive warnings, each designed to be more worrying than the last. Controversially, the final warning would result in Internet disconnection. However, the idea that these threats would entice
subscribers into music and movie stores and away from unauthorized sites in a meaningful way never came to be. In June, a nine-member panel lead by former Canal Plus chairman Pierre Lescure produced a 700 page report on policies for advancing
entertainment industries in the digital age. Among other things, the panel concluded that the three strikes mechanism had failed to benefit authorized services as promised. It also recommended that the ultimate sanction of Internet disconnections for
infringers should be dumped. That recommendation has now been carried out by the French Government. Earlier this morning the Ministry of Culture published official decree No. 0157 of July 9, 2013 which removed the additional misdemeanor
punishable by suspension of access to a communication service. The decree goes on to explain that file-sharing offenses may still be punishable by a fine, up to 1500 euros in the case of gross negligence.
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Visa and Mastercard deny payment facilities to VPN and anonymising services
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4th July 2013
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| See article from
torrentfreak.com
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Following the introduction of restrictions against file-sharing services, Mastercard and Visa have now started to take action against VPN providers. This week, Swedish payment provider Payson cut access to anonymizing services after being ordered
to do so by the credit card companies. VPN provider iPredator is one of the affected customers and founder Peter Sunde says that they are considering legal action to get the service unblocked. Payment providers are increasingly taking
action against sites and services that are linked to copyright infringement. There's an unwritten rule that Mastercard and Visa don't accept file-hosting sites that have an affiliate program and PayPal has thrown out nearly all cyberlockers in recent
months. It now turns out that these policies have carried over to VPN providers and other anonymizing services. Before the weekend customers of the popular Swedish payment service provider Payson received an email stating that VPN services are no
longer allowed to accept Visa and Mastercard payments due to a recent policy change: Payson has restrictions against anonymization (including VPN services). As a result Payson can unfortunately no longer give your
customers the option to finance payments via their cards (VISA or MasterCard).
The new policy went into effect on Monday, leaving customers with a two-day window to find a solution.
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| 4th July 2013
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Sony outlines a list of nasties to be incorporated in 4K Ultra High Definition movie players See article from
torrentfreak.com |
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