TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Spanish ‘SOPA’: 79 Site Takedown Requests in First Month
- Pirate Party Refuses to Shutdown Pirate Bay Proxy, Faces Lawsuit
- We’re No Rogue Site: PutLocker Responds To Hollywood
| Spanish ‘SOPA’: 79 Site Takedown Requests in First Month Posted: 04 Apr 2012 12:37 AM PDT After being threatened with a place on a United States trade blacklist, the Spanish government passed the so-called Sinde Law, legislation that allows for the blocking of allegedly infringing sites based on reports from copyright holders. On March 1st the Sinde law went into effect and now, a month on, the Spanish Ministry of Culture has revealed that in total almost 300 official complaints have been received. The Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual (Copyright Commission) has received 213 copyright complaints plus 79 closure requests from rightsholders against specific websites accused of online piracy. The Commission will investigate all allegations and has the power to dismiss claims or set the ball rolling for further action, including the removal of links said to infringe copyright through to the court-ordered closure or ISP blockade of entire websites. Although the process between complaint and site shutdown can in theory be completed in about a month, the Ministry of Culture reports that no punitive action has yet been taken in respect of the 300 complaints. It is not clear how many of the complaints being processed, if any, are the result of a hacktivist sabotage campaign launched on the day the Sinde law came into effect. The group Hackivistas encouraged sites to link to a copyrighted track from artist Eme Navarro, a member of the music rights group SGAE but also an outspoken critic of the Sinde law. Hundreds of websites reportedly linking to Navarro’s song without permission, with Navarro subsequently reporting them to the Ministry of Culture. While the initial aim of the campaign was to overload the Commission, it was also designed to discover more about the uncertain takedown process. Current thinking suggests that Spanish hosting companies will be asked to shut down non-compliant websites and ISPs will be asked to block those hosted outside Spain. In theory it’s possible to shut down sites within a month, which could mean that the first closures from the first batch reported by the Ministry of Culture will be seen in April. Source: Spanish ‘SOPA’: 79 Site Takedown Requests in First Month
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| Pirate Party Refuses to Shutdown Pirate Bay Proxy, Faces Lawsuit Posted: 03 Apr 2012 01:53 PM PDT
Both ISPs appealed the verdict, but in the meantime affected subscribers have plenty of ways to route around the blockades. In the space of a few days hundreds of individuals setup proxy websites that allow customers of the ISPs to continue using The Pirate Bay. Countering this move, local anti-piracy outfit BREIN obtained an injunction from the Court of The Hague which instructed the proxy site tpb.dehomies.nl to shut down or face a 1000 euros a day fine. The group is now using this injunction to press other site owners to do the same. Last week the local Pirate Party also received a letter from BREIN, demanding the shutdown of their Pirate Bay proxy site hosted at tpb.piratenpartij.nl. However, unlike the site owners that were previously contacted by the group, the Pirate Party is not caving in. They would rather fight the case in court. Today the Party informed BREIN that the proxy site will stay online. To show that The Pirate Bay can be a useful communication tool the Pirate Party sent the letter through a torrent file, hosted on the BitTorrent site at the center of the dispute. “The demands are ridiculous,” Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot told TorrentFreak. “A private lobbying organization should not be allowed to be the censor of the Dutch internet. We were also amazed to find an ex-parte decision attached, threatening Dutch minors with €1000 per day fines for operating their proxy. If we would have yielded, their trick would immediately be played out against numerous other private citizens.” According to the Pirate Party chairman BREIN’s efforts are not just going too far, they are useless too. “There are a plethora of proxy sites on the internet. On almost any them TPB can by reached, even with a single URL. That’s not even mentioning the ways you can get to TPB if you’re willing to put in more effort than saving a single URL. If this keeps going there will be no Internet left by the time BREIN has achieved its goal of making TPB inaccessible.” “In their self-righteous zealousness they have brought substantial damage to the free and open Internet,” Poot said. While the legality of The Pirate Bay and reverse proxy sites is for the courts to decide, it is clear that blocking the website hurts legitimate artists as well. In BREIN’s demand letter the anti-piracy group pasted a screenshot of the proxy site showing the Pirate Bay homepage. But ironically enough, instead of the iconic logo it showed one of the many promotional campaigns the torrent site is running for independent artists. The Pirate Party believes that the broad censorship BREIN is pushing for goes too far. And although they are not delighted to face thousands of euros in fines, they see it as their duty to fight back in court. “Unless someone calls them on their tactics, they will be allowed to continue those tactics indefinitely. Yielding does not make the problem go away. We would preferred to tackle this issue in parliament, where it belongs. However, if we have a chance to stop this ex-parte from being reused again and again, we ought to grab it. We’ll need serious donations, though…,” Poot told us. More news about the upcoming lawsuit is expected to be announced in the coming weeks. BREIN was asked to comment on the issue as well, but the group kindly declined. Source: Pirate Party Refuses to Shutdown Pirate Bay Proxy, Faces Lawsuit
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| We’re No Rogue Site: PutLocker Responds To Hollywood Posted: 03 Apr 2012 05:00 AM PDT
"We continue to make criminal referrals," said Paramount Pictures' Alfred Perry during a conference last week. Perry, Paramount’s vice president for worldwide content protection, went on to list five other hosting services in the MPAA’s spotlight – FileServe, MediaFire, Wupload, PutLocker and Depositfiles. At the weekend MediaFire insisted that they aren’t run by some criminal gang and today we’ve spoken with Putlocker to get their take on Paramount’s statement. “In any other industry, a person making this type of statement could be sued for libel. Funny how that works,” PutLocker Operations Officer Adrian Petroff told TorrentFreak. “PutLocker takes a strong stand against copyright infringement and in the past year and a half we have taken down hundreds of thousands of infringing files and blocked the accounts of hundreds of repeat offenders,” adds Petroff. “PutLocker always cooperates with copyright holders and law enforcement agencies at home and abroad to uphold the rights of content producers and distributors alike.” In common with competitor RapidShare, PutLocker says it’s going the extra mile to tackle infringement. Like its Swiss counterpart, PutLocker also has a program to monitor external sites for abuse of their service and aggressively takes down files that contravene the company’s terms of use. PutLocker, a service with offices in the UK, has only been existence for a little over 18 months but during that time it has grown quickly. From a standing start the service had reached around 800,000 visitors a day by early January 2012, and like many other comparable services benefited greatly in traffic terms after Megaupload was shut down. It now brings in around 1.6 million visitors every day. Petroff told us that the company exists to enable legitimate users to quickly and easily upload large files and access them anywhere in the world, filling a gap in the market that not even GMail with its 20mb attachment limit can match. “Less than 2% of the files uploaded to our servers are flagged as infringing which is a strong indication of the amount of legitimate usage we provide to the online community,” he told us. Another of the issues that has become a hot topic since January is the rewarding of cyberlocker users when others download their content. Despite Megaupload discontinuing its program many months ago, the fact that it once had such a program is referenced heavily in the US government indictment. On February 1st 2012 (and in common with many other similar services) PutLocker also shut down its affiliate program. Other sites in the crosshairs of the MPAA are Wupload and FileServe. Today we can report that following the Paramount statement on Friday, both file-hosting services have taken the most drastic of actions. “All sharing has been disabled,” Wupload said in an announcement. “Wupload is not a file sharing site. If you uploaded a file, only you can download it and it can’t be shared with anyone else.”  Having temporarily blocked 3rd party sharing in January, FileServe appeared to re-enable the feature, only to switch it off again in the last few hours. As of now, it appears that FileServe too are no longer in the file-sharing business. (read more here on Wupload and FileServe)  Petroff told TorrentFreak that these are worrying developments. “Who needs SOPA when a studio exec can make a wish/hit list and sites ‘voluntarily’ shut down?” he questioned. From our discussions with PutLocker it seems clear that while maintaining existing popular features such as not throttling free users or putting limits on the number of files people can download, the service intends to move onwards and upwards with upgrades and additions. “We are currently in a middle of a major site overhaul which will introduce a wide array of unique features that will help PutLocker secure itself as a leader in cloud storage and collaborative sharing platform for regular users, and businesses alike.” “At the same time, we are always looking forward to working with content producers, distributors and their agents to diversify their distribution strategies and uphold intellectual property rights,” Petroff concludes Source: We’re No Rogue Site: PutLocker Responds To Hollywood
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In January, a Dutch court ruled that Ziggo, the largest ISP in the country, and competitor XS4ALL, must 
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