Torrenting, despite its many legitimate uses, has always had its reputation plagued by the rampant piracy it allows. Get ready for that all to get drudged up again because uTorrent, a very popular client, just announced it’s getting ad-support. More »
Google is implementing a new policy that will smack down search results from sites that get a lot of DMCA requests. That must affect Google’s own YouTube, which must get slammed with them all the time, right? Not exactly. More »
Do you know how the FBI justified the insane raid of Kim Dotcom’s mansion? By saying that it suspected that Kim Dotcom had a ‘doomsday’ device that could “wipe out evidence of internet piracy around the world.” No, seriously. More »
Next week Google will begin censoring sites for which it receives a large number of copyright removal requests by reducing their Google site rank across their entire domains. More »
It’s time for Google to stand up to illegitimate sources of content, or so they say, with a new rankings system based on the number of valid copyright removable notices they receive. It’s not long now that pirates of all types will be having a much harder time finding that torrent of the newest blockbuster film they’ve been wanting to see since it came out a day ago. Today’s announcement from Google is just one more update to their copyright removal initiative re-booted just over two years ago.
This new system will take into account every one of the Copyright Removal Requests they receive that turn out to be valid. You can see the TOTAL number of requests at Google’s Transparency Report website in the Copyright Removal Requests Overview. At the moment they’re at 4,308,618 over the past month alone. Sites with a higher number of removal requests levied against them will be appearing lower in search results via Google.
Google is currently receiving and processing more copyright removal notices each and every day than they did through the entirety of the year 2009. Google had the following to say on their process in today’s announcement:
“Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law. So while this new signal will influence the ranking of some search results, we won’t be removing any pages from search results unless we receive a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner. And we’ll continue to provide “counter-notice” tools so that those who believe their content has been wrongly removed can get it reinstated. We’ll also continue to be transparent about copyright removals.” – Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering, Google
Stay tuned as Google continues to make their search results more perfectly tuned according to the whims of the society we all live in. Sound alright to you?
[via Google]
Google proclaims war on piracy is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Some movies need to be seen in movie theaters, on the biggest screen you can find. Some movies need to be at least seen in home theaters, on the most comfortable couch you own. No movie should be seen using a black market copy with subtitles that butcher the English language like this Avengers movie. More »
Chalk another one up for the governments waging this anti-piracy war we keep hearing so much about, as Ukrainian authorities have taken down Demonoid. The raid on Demonoid’s servers comes after the torrent tracking giant suffered a large-scale DDoS attack a few days before, and it seems that the US may have been involved in some way. Reports say that Anti-Cyber Research Affairs of Kiev conducted the raid on Demonoid host ColoCall, copying all of the information on Demonoid’s servers before shutting them down.
“Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid and sealed them,” an anonymous ColoCall source tells Ukrainian newspaper Kommersant “Some equipment was not seized, but now it does not work, and we were forced to terminate the agreement with the site.” The source said that Demonoid’s owners – who remain unnamed and are thought to be operating out of Mexico – had backups stored with ColoCall, but the fact that they haven’t used any of them yet suggests that Demonoid has been closed for good.
This raid on Demonoid’s servers coincides with a US visit by Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky. In his first visit to the United States, Khoroshkovsky apparently discussed copyright infringement (among other topics), though USTR spokesperson Carol Guthrie tells Ars Technica that Demonoid wasn’t specifically mentioned during the meeting. Regardless of whether or not it was, the Ukrainian government seems happy to stand by the US as it attempts to bring file sharing sites down.
Demonoid did what it could to avoid prosecution in the Ukraine by denying access to anyone with a Ukrainian IP address, but that doesn’t seem like it was enough. It’s unclear if Demonoid will return eventually, but we have a feeling it will end up much like MegaUpload. To put it simply, don’t expect Demonoid to be up and running again anytime soon, if ever. Stay tuned, because this definitely isn’t the last we’ll hear of governments taking down file sharing sites.
Demonoid taken down by Ukrainian authorities is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Just before an official state visit with the US, Ukraine’s Interior ministry seized all of Demonoid’s servers, rendering the torrent site non-functional. Serving the most popular torrent destination following the neutering of The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak believes the site was a target because Ukraine wanted to prove to the US that they take copyright infringement seriously. Motivation! More »
A few months back, porn studio Flava Works and the MPAA launched a legal campaign against site myVidster to outlaw the embedding of videos that weren’t uploaded with the permission of the copyright holders. Specifically Hypothetically, you could be punished for posting an old N*Sync video to you blog that wasn’t uploaded by Vevo (or whoever). Thankfully the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals struck that case down. More »
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