Tag: big content

Big Content forces Chilling Effects to self-censor

Posted on January 12, 2015 by - News

 seal_3Big Content has pressured the Chilling Effects DMCA archive to censor itself, just as the world is starting to see those who stand up to censorship as heros.

The organisation decided to wipe its presence from all popular search engines to prevent it being sued by copyright holders.

Chilling Effects was an archive of all sites which had been shut down with a DMCA court order.  For years it was quietly showing how free speech was being threatened by take-down orders.

Google now processes more than a million takedown requests from copyright holders, and that’s for its search engine alone.

Google partners with Chilling Effects to post redacted copies of all notices online seeing it as one of the few tools that helps to keep copyright holders accountable. It shows inaccurate takedown notices and other dirty deeds by the content industry.

Founded by Harvard’s Berkman Center, it offers an invaluable database for researchers and the public in general.

Chilling Effects removed its entire domain from all search engines, including its homepage and other informational and educational resources and it looked like Big Content is behind it.

Its pages contain hundreds of millions of non-linked URLs to infringing material. Copyright holders are not happy with these pages. Copyright Alliance CEO Sandra Aistars described the activities of the Chilling Effects projects as “repugnant”.

Berkman Center project coordinator Adam Holland told TorrentFreak,  Chilling Effects has now decided to hide its content from search engines, making it harder to find.

The self censorship may sound strange coming from an organisation that was founded to offer more transparency, but the Chilling Effects team believes that it strikes the right balance, for now.

“It may or may not prove to be permanent, but for now it’s the step that makes the most sense as we continue to think things through,” he added.

The notices themselves remain online, but with just the site’s own search it’s harder to find cases of abuse. The copyright holders on the other hand will be happy.

Studios try internet take over

Posted on December 1, 2014 by - News

hollywoodThe movie and nusic studios have taken their first steps towards controlling ISPs who do not do what they are told, and, indirectly the internet,  with court actions.

BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music have sued Cox Communications for copyright infringement, arguing that the internet service provider does not do enough to punish those who download music illegally.

BMG and Round Hill are clients of Rightscorp, a copyright enforcement agent whose business is based on threatening ISPs with a high-stakes lawsuit if they don’t forward settlement notices to users that Rightscorp believes are “repeat infringers” of copyright.

Saying this is a high-stakes, game is an understatement. The studios are trying to hold an ISP responsible for users engaged in piracy. If it comes off, then ISPs could find themselves responsible for all the content that users post online.

BMG and Round Hill claim that they have notified Cox about 200,000 repeat infringers on its network, which means trillions of dollars.

The music publishers describe the Cox network as an out-of-control den of piracy. “Today, BitTorrent systems are like the old P2P systems on steroids,” BMG lawyers write. “Despite its published policy to the contrary, Cox’s actual policy is to refuse to suspend, terminate, or otherwise penalize subscriber accounts that repeatedly commit copyright infringement through its network in any meaningful numbers.”

Cox has ignored “overwhelming evidence,” and the complaint lists a few examples. A “Cox subscriber account having had IP address 70.168.128.98 at the time of the infringement, believed to be located in Fairfax, Virginia, was used to infringe twenty-four particular copyrighted works 1,586 times since December 9, 2013,” they note. “Cox subscriber having IP address 24.252.149.211 engaged in 39,432 acts of copyright infringement over 189 days.”

Rightscorp is furious that  Cox started treating its e-mails like spam.

Part of the issue here is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, which requires ISPs to have a policy to terminate “repeat infringers,” but there’s not a lot of clarity as to exactly what that means.

If a “repeat infringer” has to be defined by a judge rules then the music publishers and Rightscorp have many more hoops to jump through before they have any hope of beating Cox in court. However if Rightscorp’s notifications are enough to find a user is a repeat infringer, then the Interent could be in trouble.

Rightscorp believes, of course that all it has to do is accuse someone of being a witch, er movie pirate, and Cox should dump them as a client.

Big Content has not wanted to pick this particular fight. If they win, they could get more enforcement tools, but if they lose then they would end up with less power over ISPs than they have now.

ISPs are compromising on the issue and slowly moving forward with a “six strikes” system. That would go out the window if ISPs have a legal precedent to tell the studios to get a court order.

There is also the additional problem that if the ISPs, lose it will make it possible for anyone to censor the internet for the price of a stamp. All you need to do is sue the ISP and they will either take down the content or have to go to court to defend it.