TorrentFreak Email Update |
- New Details of UK Piracy Monitoring Plan Made Public
- FrostWire Seizes Domain Name From P2P Scammer
- Court Denies Pirate Party Naming Right, Cites “Real Pirate” Confusion
| New Details of UK Piracy Monitoring Plan Made Public Posted: 26 Jun 2012 04:41 AM PDT The anti-piracy elements of the UK’s controversial and much-delayed Digital Economy Act are continuing their slow march to implementation with the publication of OFCOM’s updated Initial Obligations Code today. As the DEA dictates, ISP accounts linked to peer-to-peer infringements will be subject to receiving a series of notifications warning the bill payer that their activities (or those of people in their household) are unacceptable and in need of change. The amendments to the Code, which provides a set of standards and procedures by which the anti-P2P (mainly BitTorrent related) elements of the Act will be governed, are very much a mixed bag. First, and on the plus side for subscribers, is that evidence collection systems of copyright holders will have to fall into line with OFCOM standards before they can send any CIRs (copyright infringement reports) to ISPs. Additionally, the Code states that copyright owners may only send a CIR if they have “gathered evidence in accordance with the approved procedures” which lead to the “reasonable” belief that the subscriber has infringed a rightsholder’s copyright or that he has allowed someone else to use his account in order to do so. In the original version of OFCOM’s Code rightsholders were given 10 days in which to send CIRs to ISPs, but in the updated code they are allowed a month following the time of detection – roughly three times longer than before. For their part, ISPs were previously allowed 10 days from receipt of a CIR to notify a customer that they had been tracked. That period has now been extended to one month. This means that there could be a 60 day gap between an alleged infringement and a subscriber being notified, up from just 20 days. On the downside for consumer protection is the complete removal of a clause which allowed ISPs to reject rightholder CIRs if they felt in their “reasonable opinion” they were invalid. Originally it was envisaged that so-called ‘first and ‘second’ strike warnings would go out via email with only the ‘third’ going out by recorded regular mail. That has now been scrapped. All warnings will now go out by regular first class mail, meaning that there will be absolutely no proof that a subscriber has received his third warning. In addition to conveying the warning itself, CIRs will now have to show the time and date when any infringement took place (as opposed to simply when the evidence was gathered) and also display the number of previous CIRs sent to the subscriber. OFCOM reports that it has also introduced a requirement that there be a 20 day gap introduced between the date a previous CIR was sent out to a subscriber and evidence being valid for the creation of a subsequent CIR. Under the previous iteration of the Code, copyright owners would only be able to request a copyright infringement report from ISPs once every three months, and the service provider would be given 5 days to produce it. That three month period has been reduced to a single month and ISPs will have double the time – 10 days – to produce it. Under the Code subscribers will be able to lodge an appeal against wrongful accusations of infringement. The time to do so has now been clarified as 20 days from the date of receiving a CIR. Finally, the amended Code ends with notes that the UK Government ordered the removal of two elements, both of which would have given a level of protection to subscribers. “On the instruction of Government we have removed the ability for subscribers to appeal on any other ground on which they choose to rely,” the report notes, adding: “On the instruction of Government we have removed the requirement for ISPs and copyright owners to provide a statement showing how their processes and systems are compliant with the Data Protection Act.” This draft Code is now open for a one month consultation period before being presented to parliament later this year. Letters will start going out in 2014…..maybe. The full report is available here. Source: New Details of UK Piracy Monitoring Plan Made Public
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| FrostWire Seizes Domain Name From P2P Scammer Posted: 25 Jun 2012 01:43 PM PDT
The sites in question appear to offer downloads for software such as uTorrent, Vuze, LimeWire and FrostWire, but these free clients come with a twist. In some cases people have to pay for the download 'service' while others simply install a malware-infested program on users' computers. Growing tired of these scammers, the company behind the FrostWire BitTorrent client decided to take action. To protect their brand and prospective users, earlier this year the company filed several domain name disputes with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). “The initial motivation goes back many years ago when the fraudsters started hurting lots of FrostWire users and our reputation,” FrostWire’s Angel Leon tells TorrentFreak. “It wasn’t until this year that we learned about the WIPO mechanism from some friends and we decided to do it once we saw the fraudsters started appearing on the first page of search results on Google.” And this effort has not been without success. FrostWire has now gained control over the domain name frostwirereview.com after a WIPO panel concluded that it was registered in bad faith. The site in question profited from offering counterfeit FrostWire installers and passing off third-party software as FrostWire. “It is clear that the website at the disputed domain name blatantly seeks to confuse Internet users into thinking that the website is the Complainant's or at the least is authorized by the Complainant and that the Complainant's FROSTWIRE software may be uploaded from this site,” the panel writes in its decision. “The Panel finds that the Respondent is seeking to confuse consumers and is using the disputed domain name to attract consumers for commercial gain to its website by creating a likelihood of confusion with the Complainant's FROSTWIRE name and mark,” they add. Talking to TorrentFreak, FrostWire’s Angel Leon explained that they still have cases pending against several other domains, including frostwire10.com, downloadfrostwire.org and frostwirefree.net. Although the problem might not go away by seizing a domain name, the FrostWire team told us that it’s better than taking no action at all. “We know they won’t go away 100% but it’s a great step in the right direction against this type of internet fraud,” Leon says. Source: FrostWire Seizes Domain Name From P2P Scammer
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| Court Denies Pirate Party Naming Right, Cites “Real Pirate” Confusion Posted: 25 Jun 2012 06:06 AM PDT
From their Scandinavian roots in the Antipiratbyran movement from which the Pirate Bay was born, today Pirate policies are being spread using dozens of languages. Currently there are parties in at least 29 different countries and although subject to local variations there is one constant – the use of the word ‘Pirate’ in the party name. But for the Taiwan Pirate Party the term is proving problematic. Its woes began earlier this year when local founder Tai Cheh logged an application to form the Party with the now standard ‘Pirate’ prefix. The application was rejected by the Ministry of the Interior as “improper” on the grounds that the word ‘pirate’ has "bad connotations". Tai, an associate psychology professor, immediately complained. "It is a matter of free speech,” he said. “When parents name a child, should the government interfere and say: 'Don't name the child this way because it sounds bad'?" A subsequent appeal by Tai to the Executive Yuan's Administrative Appeals Commission was rejected in February, leading the professor to announce the filing of a lawsuit with the Tapai Administrative Court. The Court’s decision is now in and it’s bad news for the Party. In its ruling, the High Administrative Court agreed with the Ministry of the Interior’s stance that the use of the word ‘Pirate’ did not accurately describe the true aims of the Party. The MOI said that the term “pirate” could mislead members of the public into voting for people they believed to be real, sea-based pirates. The country’s Criminal Code outlaws acts of piracy, the MOI added. Tai says that the English usage of the word “pirate” is associated with those who object to restrictive copyright and correspondingly his aim is to bring reform to Taiwan’s copyright and patent systems, not to form a criminal gang. Of course, the word was originally used to describe people who engaged in crime at sea, but was later applied to those who snubbed their noses at restrictive licensing, such as in the case of ‘pirate’ radio operators. In the history of the very first Pirate Party in Sweden, founder Rick Falkvinge says that using the term ‘pirate’ was a natural choice. In 2001, the copyright enforcement group Antipiratbyrån — (the Anti-Piracy Bureau) was formed, only to be countered two years later by Piratbyrån (the Piracy Bureau). “Choosing that name, they wanted to signal that they were the progressives, and the antis were the regressives. These activists were the first to talk back to the copyright lobby, and immediately catapulted into media everywhere,” says Falkvinge. “Inspired by the talkback culture of Piratbyrån, a small subgroup of their activists set up a BitTorrent tracker as an experiment in the fall of 2003. They named it The Pirate Bay.” In 2005, when copyright law was toughened again in Sweden, Falkvinge says it was time to take the war to the politicians, and threaten to take their jobs. “It's important to understand that at this point in Sweden, pirate policies were already established by the Piratbyrån. When the time came to politicize the issues, it was not a matter of founding a new party and start contemplating its name. It was a matter of founding The Pirate Party.” Source: Court Denies Pirate Party Naming Right, Cites “Real Pirate” Confusion
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