CyberLaw Blog

Archive for December 13th, 2008

Post from: TorrentFreak

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OiNK Admin and Uploaders Appear in Court: “

Yesterday, well over a year since the initial raids, Alan Ellis the ex-admin of OiNK, appeared in crown court along with five users accused of uploading music via the now-defunct BitTorrent tracker. Ellis appeared charged with conspiracy to defraud, while the others faced copyright charges.

In October 2007, Operation Ark Royal achieved its aims. OiNK, one of the biggest and probably the most prestigious tracker in the world, was shut down in a joint effort by British and Dutch law enforcement.

Site administrator Alan Ellis, 25, was arrested immediately and eventually charged with conspiracy to defraud.

Five others, who were arrested months later, were accused of uploading music to others via the site. They were charged with copyright infringement offenses.

Yesterday, all six appeared at Teesside Crown Court in the UK. Ellis faced a charge of conspiracy to defraud, while the others – Steven Diprose, 21, from Staines, London, James Garner, 19, from Winsford, Cheshire, Michael Myers, 34, of Brough in North Humberside, Mark Tugwell, 19, from Caister near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk and Matthew Wyatt, 19, a student in London but originally from Stamford, Lincolnshire – all faced charges of copyright infringement.

Ellis did not enter a plea, and his case has been adjourned until 23 March 2009. The five uploaders entered pleas, and their hearing will continue at a later stage. All five uploaders were accused of making music albums available on OiNK, and according to insider information, at least four of them pleaded guilty.

No violation of Article 10 with regards to a cartoon which was published on 13 September, 2001. The European Court of Human Rights held that the publication of a drawing (cartoon) representing the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, with a caption which parodied the advertising slogan of a famous brand: “We have all dreamt of it… Hamas did it” provoked a certain public reaction, capable of stirring up violence and demonstrating a plausible impact on public order in a politically sensitive region, namely the Basque Country. The drawing was published in the Basque weekly newspaper Ekaitza on 13 September, 2001, two days after the attacks of September 11.

The European Court of Human Rights on 02.10.2008 notified in writing its Chamber judgment in the case of Leroy v. France (application no. 36109/03).

The Court held unanimously that there had been

· no violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights in respect of the applicant’s conviction for complicity in condoning terrorism;

· a violation of Article 6 § 1 (right to a fair hearing within a reasonable time) of the Convention on account of the failure to communicate to the applicant the reporting judge’s report to the Court of Cassation.

Under Article 41 (just satisfaction), the Court concluded unanimously that the finding of a violation constituted in itself sufficient just satisfaction for the non-pecuniary damage sustained by Mr Leroy and awarded him 1,000 euros (EUR) for costs and expenses. (The judgment is available only in French.)
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Mumbai terrorists thwarted security agencies by using internet telephones: “The terrorists who attacked Mumbai were able to thwart security agency
attempts to monitor their communications by using an internet telephony
service similar to Skype, the free tool used by millions of ordinary web
surfers, Indian officials have said.”

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)

Post from: TorrentFreak

Pirate Bay Censorship Case Not Over Yet

Earlier this year a Danish court ordered the ISP ‘Tele2′ to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The appeal of this initial ruling was lost two weeks ago, but the case is far from over. Tele2 has decided to appeal the decision before the Supreme Court, supported by Denmark’s telecommunications industry association.

The case in question is a unique one that has already generated a heated debate on the liabilities of Internet service providers. According to the court’s decision, Tele2 was infringing copyright on a grand scale, because users were transferring pirated material, copied (like all traffic) via the ISP’s routers.

Consequently the court ruled that access to The Pirate Bay had to be blocked. Tele2 appealed this decision, but lost again two weeks ago.

The court case was initiated by the IFPI – the infamous anti-piracy organization that represents the recording industry. The IFPI later tried to use the ‘landmark decision’ to force Swedish ISPs to do the same, but failed. In fact, it seems that filtering traffic to The Pirate Bay is actually illegal according to European law.

The fight is not over yet though. Since this case could have huge implications for other ISPs and websites, Tele2 has announced that it will take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Fortunately for them, they won’t be alone either. They are backed by the telecommunications industry association. Jens Ottosen, president of the association told Computerworld that, if this decision is upheld, Danish ISPs might be forced to block other sites as well.

In a response, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: ‘We’re confident that Tele2 will win in the Supreme Court, when they [the court] really dig into the technology and try to understand the whole concept. It’s important for net neutrality and it’s also important for file sharers in Denmark to have this tried (and won).’

When the appeal is successful, The Pirate Bay will claim damages from IFPI. ‘I hope that they [Tele2] win so we can demand retribution from IFPI.’ Peter said. ‘As I’ve stated earlier we would like them to have to pay damages to us. In that case we would help set up a fund for Danish aspiring musicians that in turn would release music using a Creative Commons license.’

The Supreme Court still has to accept the appeal before the case can go on. Despite the outcome, blocking The Pirate Bay didn’t have the effect that the IFPI was hoping for. On the contrary, traffic from Denmark went up, instead of down. However, this case is about more than just The Pirate Bay, it is about censoring the Internet.

(Via TorrentFreak.)

MPAA Urges Obama to Embrace Internet Filtering: “The Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s lobbying arm, is urging the incoming Obama administration to embrace internet filtering to crack down on online piracy. The announcement comes weeks ahead of an Obama inauguration. Obama is set to become the nation’s first chief executive with a cabinet-level copyright czar.

(Via Wired News.)

(Via Techdirt.)

Should Internet Censors Be Responsible For Breaking Stuff?: “In the wake of the UK Internet Watch Foundation’s block of a particular Wikipedia page for what it claimed was illegal child pornography, and the group’s subsequent reversal of that decision, the EFF is now asking will IWF be held responsible for the unintended consequences of its unregulated ability to ban websites? In this case, the action lead to a chain of events that blocked a significant number of UK Wikipedia users from being able to edit any page on the site. The EFF points out that the IWF’s reversal on the ban was for all the wrong reasons: rather than it being because the image was old or widespread — the group never should have put up the ban in the first place, recognizing that Wikipedia’s open group review process is a lot more effective than IWF’s arbitrary and secretive process.

Internet Censors Must Be Accountable For The Things They Break | Electronic Frontier Foundation

“December 9th, 2008
Internet Censors Must Be Accountable For The Things They Break
Deeplink by Peter Eckersley

Yesterday’s scandal over the UK Internet Watch Foundation’s attempt to censor a purportedly pedophiliac Wikipedia entry raises some important questions about unintended technical consequences of Internet censorship systems. The Wikipedia article was about a 1970s hard rock album called Virgin Killer [NSFW] by the German band Scorpions.

Censorship technologies are purveyed as a way to protect us from the evils of child abuse. But they’re costly systems that are unlikely to actually protect anyone or prevent any child abuse — they’re more likely to interfere with the way the Internet works and hamper innovation by online communities.

The Wikipedia entry for Virgin Killer contains an image of the album’s cover, which depicts a nude teenage girl, with only minimal obscurement by a ’shattered glass’ effect. The article contains an encyclopedic discussion of how executives at RCA Records had decided on the cover concept, the controversy it had caused at the time, and how the woman depicted had no objections to the image’s use, even in retrospect. Wikipedia had come under pressure from conservative Christian groups in the United States to remove the image, but through extensive debate Wikipedia editors agreed to keep the image with the article.

Last weekend, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a coalition of UK ISPs, Internet companies and censorware vendors, listed the image as a ‘potentially illegal indecent image of a child hosted outside the UK’. This caused a number of UK ISPs to begin routing all Wikipedia traffic through filtering proxy servers, which disallowed access not only to the cover image but the entire Virgin Killer article.

This is where the unintended consequences began. Some of the ISPs’ proxy servers were unable to handle the volume of traffic Wikipedia attracts, making Wikipedia unavailable entirely. But there were also stranger side effects.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia which allows anyone to edit an article by clicking an ‘edit’ button, changing the text, and clicking ’save’. Because of the site’s enormous visibility, there are thousands of people around the planet who are continuously trying to deface pages by editing them. Wikipedia responds to the most persistent attempts at vandalism by blacklisting IP addresses that are repeatedly the source of vandalistic edits. In some cases, users can get around the blocks if they have accounts at Wikipedia, but in severe cases, users must petition to have their account allowed through the block. Without these blocks, the encyclopedia would have long ago been reduced to gibberish.

What does this have to do with censorship by the IWF? It turns out that IWF had decided upon a method for censorship which was incompatible with Wikipedia’s anti-vandalism architecture. The proxy servers that IWF member ISPs used to block the Virgin Killer article meant that Internet users at Britain’s largest ISPs were suddenly sharing a handful of proxy servers. Many of those proxy servers were configured to make the users affected by them indistinguishable to Wikipedia. Enough of those indistinguishable users were vandalizing Wikipedia that site admins were forced to block all of them from editing.

That meant that huge numbers of ordinary British Internet users could no longer edit Wikipedia, because technical decisions by Internet censors suddenly caused them to be sharing IP addresses with a horde of vandals.

Today, the IWF reversed its previous ban on the Virgin Killer article, concluding that the intervention had been counterproductive because it was causing more people to see the allegedly pornographic image. We agree with their decision, but they have the wrong reasoning: they had no business censoring that article in the first place — the community of Wikipedia editors is if anything the more legitimate, reliable and grown-up adjudicator of which images are appropriate subject matter for an encyclopedia. And the block on the editing of Wikipedia by a large portion of the UK population just highlights the dangers of deleterious unintended consequences once we travel down the low road of Internet censorship.

The IWF’s censorship failed doubly to be transparent. It is not transparent technologically, which leads inevitably to a conflict the end-to-end expectations of the rest of the Net. And its process of attempting to block and filter is far from transparent to those who are caught up in it: from puzzled and frustrated Wikipedia users to the millions of Britons who never realized they were paying their ISPs for a compulsorily and arbitrarily sanitized Internet.

Update, 10th of December: Mark Pellegrini, Wikimedia Foundation Communications Committee member, writes to point out that the IWF blacklist only blocked the Virgin Killer article and the image’s description page; they did not block the actual URL of the controversial image itself.

Technical aspects of the censoring of Wikipedia: “

Part of the encyclopaedia website Wikipedia was censored in the UK between Friday 5th December 2008 and Tuesday 9th December 2008. Errors in the way that this was done has shown up a number of inconsistencies in the blocking mechanisms employed.

The story is relatively simple. A member of the public made a ‘hotline’ report to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) about a scanned image of the album cover art for a 1976 LP from the German heavy-metal band The Scorpions. The IWF concluded that the image was ‘potentially illegal’ because they believed it to be an ‘indecent’ image of a child under the age of 18 (the definition in UK law, see statute as currently amended). They then added two URLs to their ‘Child Sexual Abuse Content URL List’. The IWF list is distributed twice a day to most UK ISPs, who then use various technologies to block access to the URLs.

The ISPs operate systems that don’t block entire websites. Instead they pass the traffic to suspect websites through a web proxy. This proxy checks the web requests and blocks only the specific URLs that are on the IWF list. However, the use of proxies meant that all of the Wikipedia users from major UK ISPs now all appeared to have one of a handful of IP address (of the ISP proxy machines). This broke Wikipedia’s security model in that they use IP addresses to distinguish between helpful editors who improve the content of the site and vandals who attempt to trash it. Therefore, rather rapidly (for vandalism is commonplace), all UK based editors (who were editing anonymously rather than from registered accounts) were barred. However, they couldn’t register for new accounts because the IP address from which they came was barred… and so this unfortunate situation rapidly came to the notice of Wikipedia’s administrators.

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Good for them!

(Via Techdirt.)

Australian ISPs Refuse To Censor The Internet: “It looks like the Australian government’s latest plan to censor the internet is running into a few snags. Earlier, one big ISP had agreed to take part, but only to show how stupid the plan was. However, a few readers have sent in the news that both Telstra and Internode have refused to take part in the trials that are starting up. Plus, the government is now claiming that the trials won’t involve any actual customers. And, from the sound of things, there is growing opposition to the entire plan, with opposition politicians pushing to scrap the whole thing. Maybe the current government officials pushing this plan should have thought through how this would go before unilaterally announcing the plan, and spending plenty of money on it.

(Via Techdirt.)

Davenport Lyons Reported To Authorities; DigiProtect Insists Its Actions Are Aboveboard: “It seems things kept getting worse for Davenport Lyons and DigiProtect, who have teamed up to threaten an awful lot of people that they need to pay up to avoid getting sued for file sharing, usually on extremely flimsy evidence. That means, way too often, the letters are received by innocent people who wonder why they should pay £500 to avoid being sued for something they never did. It certainly feels like a good old fashioned protection racket, and a UK consumer group has now complained to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) in the UK, noting that a number of innocent folks have been apparently bullied by Davenport Lyons into paying up just to avoid being sued for something they never did. The group points out:

Davenport Lyons’ letters to alleged file sharers: make incorrect assertions about the nature of copyright infringement; ignore the evidence presented in defense; and increase the level of compensation claimed over the period of correspondence. In addition, the letters threaten, incorrectly, that failing to properly secure an internet connection is grounds for legal action.

Meanwhile, last month we talked about a clause in DigiProtect’s contract that appeared to say that the firm promised to upload the content to various file sharing networks, which certainly looked like they were going to spread the content more widely in order to be able to send out more of these ‘pre-settlement’ letters. Considering DigiProtect promotes its service as helping companies profit from piracy, it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that in order to increase profit, it has every incentive to first increase the ‘piracy.’ However, the company (who has been rather quiet during all of this) has granted an interview to xbiz where it refutes the arguments that it’s uploading content, saying that the terms of the contract were simply necessary to transfer the legal rights to DigiProtect. Of course, if that were true, why not say they transferred the actual copyrights, rather than say they had obtained the rights to make content available, along with listing out the specific file sharing networks. Oddly, DigiProtect then goes on to claim that any online distribution of porn is illegal online due to laws against distributing porn to minors. That seems like a total nonsequitor.

The company doesn’t explain the claims from its only named client, Evil Angel, about the fact they were told the pre-settlement letters would be for more like $50. It also refuses to name any other customers, though points out that it works with companies besides porn movie makers, specifically noting that it works with software companies too, but it refused to name any. Perhaps that’s because software firms like Atari have backed away from these tactics after all of the negative publicity.

In the end, the whole thing seems pretty questionable. Trying to force people to pay up with threatening, misleading letters with extremely flimsy evidence (which has been barred in some countries) is hardly a reasonable business model. Hopefully, companies think twice before signing up for such a program — and perhaps the SRA will sanction Davenport Lyons for its participation in this scheme.