The battle between the MPAA and related industry bodies and piracy has been a long one not likely to end any time soon. In a report the Motion Picture Association of America made public today, Google and other search engines were accused of helping facilitate piracy by providing links to copyrighted content for non-piracy related […]
3D printers are gradually working their way into the mainstream, and as they do so concerns regarding intellectual property and the theft of blueprints have increasingly become the substance of conversation. One startup company in California, Authentise, is offering a solution to this issue however, creating software that streams blueprint information directly to the printer. […]
Anti-Gay group Straight Pride UK is abusing the DMCA takedown process to censor work by a journalist. No surprise there—the DMCA is twisted for all kinds of dumb purposes. The inexplicable part? The hate group filed a takedown on… its own press release. How dare you say that we said the words that we wrote in a press release.
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Google said last month it would require German publishers to opt-in if they wanted to continue to be featured on Google News. The AP is now reporting that several have decided to remain on the service, including Spiegel Online, Zeit Online and Springer AG. Publishers have long been pushing for the government to change the law so news aggregators would have to pay for the content they scrape. A new copyright law does come into effect today limiting how much info aggregators are allowed to borrow for their feeds, and to avoid any legal scuffles, Google decided an opt-in policy was safest. This may not be the end of the company’s troubles with publishers in the country, however, as Springer AG has said “it still expects to receive money from Google eventually.”
Source: AP
Twitter just released its latest transparency report detailing government requests for information requests, content removal requests and copyright takedowns. Not just one or two but all three categories are up in the first half of this year.
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Because every company with even just a three-legged rat in the copyright race basically just shotgun sprays Google for takedown requests these days, Microsoft accidentally but very hilariously asked Google to censor… Microsoft.com. That’s got to be even worse than HBO giving Google a takedown request for VLC
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It’s not uncommon for media companies to send in DMCA takedown requests to Google in order to have it removed from search listings and indexing, but sometimes it can get a bit ridiculous. Case in point: HBO is demanding that Google remove a link to a torrent listing of a version of VLC, the popular open-source media player.
Okay, so it’s not rare when media companies request takedowns of torrent listings, because most of them contain copyrighted material. However, VLC is a completely free and open-source piece of software that has no copyrights, and since torrent sites themselves aren’t illegal, we’re not sure what HBO is getting at with this request in particular.
Copyright holders ask Google to remove millions of links every month. Just last month alone, media companies sent in almost 15 million URLs that they demanded be taken out of Google’s search results, proving that copyright holders are a persistent bunch, even to the point where they’re citing copyright infringement for things that don’t even have copyrights in the first place.
However, this could be a simple mistake on HBO’s part. We’re guessing these companies have computer bots that scour the internet for copyrighted material and then sends it into Google, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if these bots made a mistake every now and then, but this one is certainly a laughable mistake.
Unfortunately, we doubt that media companies will crack down on the number of false positives they come up with, seeing as how they seem to work off the notion that the more URLs they send Google’s way, the more chances they have at getting their copyrighted material taken off in search results, no matter how many mistakes they make.
VIA: TorrentFreak
HBO demands Google take down VLC torrent listing is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Despite its “Defend Your Net” campaign last year, Google was unable to fully put the brakes on changes to German copyright law that may mean it has to pay up for news excerpts it indexes. As a result, the company announced that unlike the other 60 countries where Google News operates by relying on sources to opt out of inclusion by request, robots.txt file or meta tags, it’s requiring German publishers to opt-in. According to Google, it’s pushing six billion visits per month to publishers worldwide as a free service, not something it should have to pay for. As TechCrunch points out, the issue comes as a result of the new German law that allows search engines to continue to publish snippets of news without paying, but isn’t clear about just how much information that can include.
Via: TechCrunch (1), (2)
Source: Google Germany Product Blog
The Internet-using public is no stranger to off-the-wall plans and ideas to stop the so-called blight of copyrighted content sharing, but a new proposal recently submitted to the government is perhaps unlike any before it in terms of craziness. In a report, the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property proposed many ways piracy can be combated, including infecting alleged violators’ computers with malware that can wreck havoc, including and up to destroying the user’s computer.
In the proposal, which spans 84-pages, the Commission stated that software can be pre-installed on computers for the purpose of monitoring and identifying copyright-violating activity, which is comprised of storing, using, or copying such content. If the software detects copyright-violating activities of any of those sorts, it would cause the computer or its files to being locked.
Once the files and/or computer was locked, it would show up with a dialog that requires a password in order to unlock the system, as well as instructions telling the computer user to contact a law enforcement agency, which will have the password necessary to unlock the computer. The obvious part of this being, one will theoretically end up confessing to piracy.
The proposal states that such a method of combating piracy wouldn’t violate any laws, but would “stabilize” an infringement situation and get police involved. While that method is allegedly legal, the next one – which is arguably crazier than the first – is not: deliberately infecting computers with malware designed to do several things, including snapping a picture of the computer user with their webcam without their permission.
The malware would allow companies to gather data off a computer, change data located on the network, and destroy it if it feels such an action is necessary – all without permission, obviously. There’s also suggestions that it could be used to do other things as well, including up to destroying the user’s computer and/or network. We’ll have to wait for the official response on this, but we’re guessing it’ll be something akin to throwing the report against the wall.
SOURCE: The Next Web
Proposal seeks to lock copyright infringing computers, force owners to contact police is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
The folks over at Torrent Freak have made a habit of monitoring certain known digital pirate havens using ScanEye, a BitTorrent tracking platform. While we assume that is mostly an uneventful task, yesterday they came across something very interesting: a dozen or so instances of adult content videos being seeded by an IP address originating from the RIAA, which is known for rabidly pursuing those who share content via torrent networks.
The first round spotted showed 16 adult content videos, all of them copyrighted, being distributed by torrents via the IP address “76.74.24.200,” which ScanEye showed as belonging to the Recording Industry Association of American, better known as the RIAA. Most of the videos were shown as being made available in April, with a couple being posted just a couple weeks ago.
A closer look was a bit more interesting, revealing that the IP address was specifically pointing at the RIAA website. As Torrent Freak points out, this could indicate the IP address is originating from a webseed added to the torrent files so that even if the files aren’t hosted on the website, they still point to it, making it appear the RIAA is sharing copyrighted videos.
Such an action can be accomplished by anyone, and the most logical explanation is that it would be done in an effort to get the RIAA in trouble or to make some kind of point. This theory makes more sense when it is noted that, according to the EyeScan platform, none of the 16 video files were ever downloaded, indicating they weren’t hosted where they were alleged to be.
Whatever the reason the videos have surfaced, this underscores a solid point – that via the so-called webseed method, any individual can spoof an IP address of someone else, making it appear to watchful eyes that an individual is sharing copyrighted content who isn’t actually doing so. Unless someone performed due diligence and checked out the matter thoroughly, an innocent individual could possibly be pegged for copyright infringement.
SOURCE: Torrent Freak
RIAA website caught sharing copyrighted content is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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