TorrentFreak Email Update |
| MediaFire Shocked By Hollywood Smear Campaign Posted: 04 Apr 2012 02:09 PM PDT
The exec identified Fileserve, MediaFire, Wupload, Putlocker and Depositfiles as targets that might be referred to the US Government next, describing these businesses as “rogue sites.” The announcement clearly came as quite a shock to these major players. After Putlocker refuted the claims earlier, today MediaFire responds to the allegations. “It was both shocking and disappointing that Mr. Perry referenced us as a ‘rogue’ website,” MediaFire co-founder Tom Langridge told TorrentFreak. “It's my opinion that the inclusion of MediaFire was most likely the result of misinformation. We have already received very positive responses from people supporting us, both in and outside of the copyright industry, and we hope that the public and press will continue to challenge Mr. Perry's assertions.” Langridge goes on to explain that MediaFire is a storage and backup service that doesn’t promote or encourage copyright infringements in any way. The site has never paid users to upload content, and it doesn’t have download limitations to encourage people to convert to paid subscriptions either. But mistake or not, being featured on a Hollywood hit-list these days is bad PR, and thus far the movie studio stands by its assessment. It even went as far as to include MediaFire on a poster of rogue cyberlockers. Hollywood’s shutdown list
In their response, MediaFire stays classy. The company doesn’t see any point in throwing mud back at Hollywood and instead explains that they operate a perfectly transparent US company. A business that has proven to be useful to many legitimate customers. “MediaFire is a US based company with a highly transparent business model and management team. MediaFire was founded by a group of reputable entrepreneurs with diverse backgrounds who have a history of building innovative and valuable websites and technologies,” Langridge told us. “Over the past several years, we have been focused on releasing numerous updates to MediaFire's professional and business services. Just in the last month, we launched our document viewing system (in beta) and rebuilt our image system – not the kind of features that incentivize illegal activity.” Of course MediaFire, like any other file-hosting service, can’t prevent copyrighted material from ending up on its website occasionally. However, the company has all the legally required tools in place for copyright holders to address these violations. “MediaFire continues to cooperate fully with the MPAA, RIAA, and various other organizations who work to identify and prohibit the distribution of copyrighted content. We have a variety of advanced automated systems designed to detect violations of our Terms of Service and automatically warn and terminate users.” “In fact, these systems have received rave reviews from organizations monitoring copyrighted content,” Langridge. Unfortunately, this is no guarantee for escaping legal action. Both Hotfile and Megaupload were praised for their takedown policies on several occasions as well, but both later ended up in court. MediaFire’s Langridge nonetheless believes that Hollywood’s allegations are “most likely an inadvertent result of misinformation.” While this sounds plausible after reading the above, we doubt that Paramount Pictures will retract their statements, let alone offer an apology. Source: MediaFire Shocked By Hollywood Smear Campaign
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| The Fight Against Copyright Enforcement & The Fight For Civil Liberties Are The Same Posted: 04 Apr 2012 09:49 AM PDT Before the net, if you wanted to send a copy of something that was protected under the copyright monopoly, it was an absolute given that you could do so. You would send that copy in the mail without a single thought of repercussions. You could send copies of drawings, you could send mixtapes of music, you could send copied movies. The reason for this was simple: the right to communicate in private is a fundamental human right, and the copyright monopoly is a commercial distribution monopoly that carries significantly less weight. The problem recently is that civil servants, not politicians, have been tasked with upholding the copyright monopoly. These people are not only unaccountable, but also easily accessible to copyright industry lobbyists, and these civil servants provide background material to the actual decision-making politicians. And if you control the background material, you also control the decision’s outcome. Long story short, these civil servants don’t care about the costs to society of enforcing the copyright monopoly in a changed communications environment: it’s literally not their job. If the issue had been properly politicized, then politicians would be forced to look at more than just the necessary methods for enforcing today’s monopoly laws – they would also have to look at the overall cost of society to using those methods, and simply question if those laws are really worth the sacrifices required to uphold them. This is the discussion that needs to happen on the political level, and which the Pirate parties are trying to make happen. For when I send a piece of music in an e-mail to somebody, I typically violate the copyright monopoly. When I drop a video clip in a private chat channel, same thing. If I use some other protocol, maybe BitTorrent, same thing again. If you are to enforce the copyright monopoly in the connected environment, then you cannot do that without abolishing the right to private communications as a concept. And that’s exactly what the copyright industry is trying to do. Let me explain. If there is a list of bitpatterns that are illegal to transmit – and such a list could indeed be constructed with today’s laws – then the only way to find those bitpatterns is to eavesdrop on all the ones and zeros that leave my computer, assemble them by protocol to analyze my communications in the clear, and then sort my transmissions into “legal” and “illegal”. But you can’t do this without breaking and abolishing the postal secret. There is no way to tell one from the other without looking at them in the first place. So, out goes the postal secret, the right to communicate in private. At this point in the discussion, the copyright industry will complain that they only take action for the illegal bitpatterns found, and that there is no infraction on the right to legal communications. And in doing so, they put themselves in the exact same spot as the old East German Stasi, which also steamed open all letters sent in the mail – but only took action on those with illegal content, just like the copyright industry describes as their preferred scenario. Stasi, too, sorted legal from illegal, and left the legal alone. With the loss of the right to communicate in private, we also lose several other important rights. We lose reporters’ right to protect their sources (since such communication happens in the same digitized private space). We lose a large portion of the ability for attorneys to communicate in private with their clients. These are considered cornerstones in the construction of checks and balances in the powers of our society, and yet an industry of entertainment middlemen expect to strike them out with a pen in order to uphold a crumbling distribution monopoly? It goes even further. With a loss of private communications, you lose the ability to safely confide in people – the mere suspicion of somebody else eavesdropping on your communications will lead you to stay silent, in case the communication would later be used against you. (This effect has already been observed on a large scale: over half of the population are now thinking twice whether to communicate in ways that could later be used against them by a third party, regarding everything from contacting suicide helplines to divorce counseling.) So, without the ability to confide in people, you even lose your very ability to form an identity. How are you going to come out of the closet, for example, if you can’t talk to a trusted friend first? The bottom line is that the fight for basic civil liberties and the fight against the copyright monopoly are one and the same. They are not two identical fights; they are one and the same fight. When our parents sent a letter in the mail, they alone determined whether they wanted to be identified as sender, and nobody had the right to open the letter in transit just to check that the contents were legal. When our parents sent a letter in the mail or placed a phone call, they had an expectation of privacy – considered a fundamental human right. It is entirely reasonable that our children get the same rights – completely regardless of whether that means that an obsolete distribution industry will go out of business or not. Perhaps the policy of FreeNet, the darknet project, worded most clearly how a copyright monopoly on today’s level simply cannot coexist with freedom of speech (my highlights): "You cannot guarantee free speech and enforce the copyright monopoly. Therefore, any technology designed to guarantee freedom of speech must also prevent enforcement of the copyright monopoly."  About The Author Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy. Book Falkvinge as speaker? Source: The Fight Against Copyright Enforcement & The Fight For Civil Liberties Are The Same
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Talking at a copyright conference in New York last Friday, Paramount Pictures' Alfred Perry 
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