TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom: “We’re Going To Win”
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
- Thoughts on IP Reforms and Best Practices for Creators
- Cyberlocker To Shut Down After PayPal Ban
| Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom: “We’re Going To Win” Posted: 27 Feb 2012 05:03 AM PST
Many of us can’t handle being offline for more than a few minutes. An ISP outage or cellphone breakdown often signals furious nail biting and a unique technological form of isolation anxiety. For Kim Dotcom, the founder of the now-defunct Megaupload file-hosting service and a man whose fame and fortune was largely made online, communicating via purely AFK methods is now a fact of daily life. After being denied bail on several occasions, at the North Shore District Court on February 22nd Judge Nevin Dawson finally agreed to Kim’s release. Although he is allowed to have a computer, the strict terms of Kim’s bail dictate a total ban on Internet access. A few hours ago, armed with a good old-fashioned telephone, TorrentFreak spoke with Kim at his New Zealand home. So how is he bearing up after the ordeals of the past few weeks? “I’m fine thanks,” he reassured us in a cheerful tone. “I’m only just catching up.” During the days since his release Kim says he’s enjoyed spending time with his wife Mona and their children – a quiet family time in stark contrast to the events of January 19th. “You should have been here, it was amazing, it was like a war zone. Armed police everywhere….two helicopters,” Kim recalled. “The New Zealand authorities certainly put on a show for the FBI.” But if the dramatic events of that morning – elite anti-terrorist police running around with assault rifles and shouting about bombs – are bothering Kim inside, he certainly isn’t letting it show. Mirroring the tone of the discussions TorrentFreak had with the larger-than-life entrepreneur last year, the Mega founder was as calm and considered as ever. For a man who has not only lost everything (not least all of his companies and tens of millions of dollars) but also faces extradition to the United States, he’s amazingly positive that the battles ahead are winnable. Those battles, however, will initially have to be fought in New Zealand courtrooms and if the extradition is successful, back in the United States too. Kim is naturally cautious about us revealing too much about Megaupload’s strategy and how the company’s owners intends to counter the claims being made against them, but it’s safe to say that it’s underpinned by a firm belief that on the best legal advice, the business operated legally. This confidence, Kim says, is shared by his co-defendants – Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato. “We’re going for this and we’re confident we’re going to win. It [the heavy handedness] went way too far, it was out of all proportion,” Kim told TorrentFreak. “We feel that the action taken against us was political.” Source: Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom: “We’re Going To Win”
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| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent Posted: 27 Feb 2012 01:26 AM PST
The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
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| Thoughts on IP Reforms and Best Practices for Creators Posted: 26 Feb 2012 12:51 PM PST
First and foremost is that I was trying to provide my viewers with history and context. I wanted to inform their positions and decisions, rather than hand them a ready-made set. Secondly, it just seemed like a really uncinematic way to close the series, almost like a premature credit roll. I find the topic ill-suited to an audio-visual treatment. A much better way to discuss it is right here in good old-fashioned text. So consider this an addendum to Everything is a Remix, a brief overview of what we can do and what we should push for. Some of these are attainable, some probably aren't, and they're all offered with a dose of humility. This is pure opinion, a discussion piece, not a manifesto. It's food for thought from someone who spent a year-and-a-half living in this topic, both as my subject and as my creative technique. This was written fairly swiftly, so if there are any factual errors or poor arguments, I would appreciate your help in correcting or improving them. Copyright Classic The hard truth is that most creations are worthless immediately. Most books, films, albums, computer applications, or whatever else are met with not just indifference but disuse. They basically aren't read, aren't viewed, aren't used. Of the lucky ones that find a modest audience, almost all of those fall into obscurity within a few decades. Only a slim minority of works have commercial value after that and current copyright legislation is clearly written for this tiny group. Copyleft activists sometimes refer to this segment as the "lottery winners." Prior to 1976 the American copyright term was 28 years with the option to renew for another 28. Two big changes happened after that. Firstly, the term was dramatically extended to lifetime plus 70 years. Secondly, the option to renew was removed, automatically granting all rights holders the maximum term. Neither of these changes had any benefit to anyone but the lottery winners. Lifetime plus 70 years is a wildly excessive copyright duration for almost all creations. According to Laurence Lessig, 85 percent of copyright owners failed to renew their copyright after 28 years. That means for 85 percent of them, their creation had little or no commercial value by then – 28 years of protection was plenty. If I could wave a magic wand, I would wind copyright back to its pre-1976 state: 28 years of protection, with the option for a 28-year renewal. This would put the majority of works into the public domain in 28 years. Those who renew would get 56 years of copyright protection, probably enough to last a lifetime. If this system was in effect now, a vast amount of 20th century material would be ours to use and share freely. Just imagine what Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, YouTube or Google Books would be in this world. They'd be resources unlike anything we've ever seen. The sad reality is that a reduction in the length of copyright's duration seems enormously unlikely. A more winnable battle will be defeating another extension come 2023, at which point there will undoubtedly be another lobbying effort by the ever-dwindling segment of lottery winners. If You're American, Use Your Fair Use Fair use is a limitation on US copyright protection that allows works to be re-used for purposes like commentary, criticism, and education. Copyleft activists tend to denigrate fair use because it doesn't prevent anyone from clobbering you with a massive lawsuit. This is unfortunately true. Even with a solid fair use defense, you can get dragged into court and even if you win the case, your legal defense might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the emotional toll will be massive. So the boundaries of fair use need clarification, but the fact remains that fair use is employed reliably and without incident countless times every day. Watch a newscast, a documentary or The Daily Show and you'll see fair use at work throughout. The high-profile lawsuits we hear about are the exceptions and they over-shadow just how effective and powerful fair use is. (And let's not forget that should you employ fair use and find yourself in a lawsuit, there are now a variety of public interest organizations that can provide pro bono legal defense.) The various codes of best practices that have emerged in recent years are a demonstration of how powerful fair use can be when adopted by a community. A superb and under-appreciated resource here is Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi's Reclaiming Fair Use, which also happens to be an excellent short history of the copyleft movement. For those of you outside US and thus without fair use, well, you have the benefit of living in a much less litigious culture. De Minimis Definitions Needed This is an example of how fair use needs stronger boundaries. In copyright law "de minimis" refers to uses that are too small to be considered infringing – they would be considered fair use. However, the bizarre Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films suit made it unclear if de minimis even exists anymore. In this losing case a two-second snippet of Funkadelic was unrecognizably used in "100 Miles and Runnin'" by NWA. (And the defendant wasn't even NWA or their record company, but a film distributor that happened to use the song in a film.) If any case is a signpost for the era of IP dystopia, this is it. Every re-use of even the tiniest fragment of published work now seems vulnerable. We need some distinct thresholds below which copyright protection doesn't apply. Maybe it's two seconds of recorded music. Maybe its five seconds of video footage. These are arbitrary, but whatever these standards are, they'll make more sense than copyright protection covering subliminal-scale slices of media. Abolish Software and Business Method Patents I'm not going to go deep into patents because it's a complicated realm that incorporates vastly different industries. Real patent reform would need to address this disparity. A patent for a drug that cost a billions dollars to bring to market should be treated differently from a patent for a novelty invention created in a couple weeks by one guy. What can be stated simply is that patents for software and business methods (which are mostly software) have done nothing to incentivize innovation and plenty to de-incentivize it. We've seen a massive arms race of patent holdings in the smart computing realm, an untold number of small companies being exploited by trolls, and the unabashed weaponization of these instruments. It's so abundantly clear that software patents do not "promote the progress of useful arts," that the most sensible route isn't reform but abolition.  About The Author Kirby Ferguson is a freelance filmmaker, writer and speaker in New York City and the creator of Everything is a Remix. He is currently running a KickStarter campaign for a free and open political series called This is Not a Conspiracy Theory. The other three episodes of Everything Is a Remix can be found here. Source: Thoughts on IP Reforms and Best Practices for Creators
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| Cyberlocker To Shut Down After PayPal Ban Posted: 26 Feb 2012 06:50 AM PST
While many file-hosters panicked, former Megaupload users hopped from site to site trying to find a suitable alternative. RapidGator was such an alternative, and in recent weeks the site saw its traffic increase from a few hundred to over a hundred thousand visitors a day. However, this newly gained popularity may only be short-lived as the cyberlocker has just lost its most popular payment option, PayPal. “PayPal just informed us that our PayPal account is closed due to the high risks of processing file sharing payments,” RapidGator announced. According to the site’s operators this may very well be the end of the file-sharing industry. PayPal has frozen the cyberlocker’s funds for 6 months and new users can no longer make payments through PayPal. The ban probably means that “affiliates” can’t be paid through PayPal either. It’s not exactly clear what “high risk” PayPal refers to, but one of the most likely options concerns the many chargebacks people carried out at other cyberlocker services recently. Many users asked for their money back from PayPal when other cyberlockers such as Fileserve temporarily disabled public sharing. RapidGator believes that PayPal’s policy will affect other file-hosters as well. “Seems that all new file sharing hosts will experience same fate like us and all other big hosts,” they write, adding that the site will close if nothing changes in the coming month. “We did our best to make it work, but unfortunately this circumstance doesn’t depend on us. We will run the host for a month, and if nothing will change, we will close it after,” the RapidGator team concludes. While more cyberlockers may fall victim to the same fate in the future, for now many of the largest sites including 4Shared are still accepting PayPal payments. Source: Cyberlocker To Shut Down After PayPal Ban
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This week there are three newcomers in our chart. Tower Heist is the most downloaded movie for the third week in a row.
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