CyberLaw Blog

Archive for September 14th, 2009

China: Blue Dam activated: “

Beijing government has recently required all Internet service providers (ISPs) and data centers to install a software called Blue Dam in all their servers. According to todays Taiwan Apple Daily News, the Blue Dam has to be activated by today (September 13) or the companies have to subject to punishment.

The Blue Dam software can be downloaded from here. The Blue Dam is developed by Shanghai Andatong Information Safety Technology Company and ccording to a report back in July 2009, the Blue Dam is 20 times more effective than the Green Dam as it is a combination of software and hardware.

The Blue Dam system is consisted of the following features: a graphic-filtering system, administrative-management system, internet-behavior manager, VPN client. The developer said that the business version of the Blue Dam can help company to stop their workers from visiting websites or hanging around in the Internet on non work related activities.

Back in June, the Beijing government required international PC makers to equip their PC shipped to China with a filter software called ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’ by July 1. The plan was finally dropped as the internet public opinion has strong reaction against the filter.

Now that the Blue Dam is installed at the ISP level without much open discussion. Netizens will be subject to censorship and online behavior control with little self-awareness.

“

(Via Global Voices Advocacy.)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Porn Studios Set To Target 65,000 Movie Uploaders Two months ago, a collection of fifty US and Japan-based adult movie studios filed a mass copyright complaint against around 10,000 South Koreans accused of being heavy uploaders of porn.

The studios also filed suit against 80 websites accused of aiding and abetting the distribution of the illegally uploaded movies.

A National Police Agency spokesman said that the lawsuit was filed at 10 police stations in the South Korean capital, Seoul, and in the Gyeonggi province. The studios asked the police to investigate the infringements, which carry a potential jail sentence.

However, from the 10,000 complaints issued, prosecutors charged just 10 people with copyright infringement. In response, the disappointed studios say they will fight back. Next week they promise to re-file their lawsuit, but this time will increase the number of individuals accused to 65,000.

Kim Han-Seo, a lawyer representing the movie producers, said that the prosecutors were not tough enough so they had decided to up the ante.

‘Now, we’ve drawn up a new list of some 65,000 users who fit this guideline,’ he said. ‘We’ll see whether the prosecutors will press charges against them all.’

As we reported earlier on our sister site FreakBits, at the end of August distributors of a hit Korean disaster movie called in the police after it was leaked to the Internet and was downloaded 100,000 times. Kim Han-Seo said that the Korean authorities had responded quickly to that local problem, but accused them of different standards when it comes to protecting foreign content, such as the material produced by his porn movie employers.

‘We believe that [the prosecution] should not be discriminatory in applying copyright laws. Illegal copying and distribution run rampant in Korea because it is one of the world’s most wired countries. We decided to take legal action to minimize our past business losses and to protect anticipated future profits,’ he said.

The threat now is that if the local Korean authorities fails to act in a way that pleases the porn producers, they will take their case directly to the US government instead.

The initial lawsuit indicated that the studios had also harvested the IP addresses of around 100,000 individuals who downloaded the adult movies but to date, there is no indication that they will become a target.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Israeli MPAA Goes After Premier Subtitling Site

Translated subtitles are a wonderful tool for those who either can’t read the official language of a movie or TV show or are suffering from deafness.

Big Media attacks on those who provide these subtitles have been documented regularly here on TorrentFreak. From WikiSubtitles in Spain, to a broad assault on many outlets in Greece, threats of legal action are commonplace.

Of course, those who rely on translated and home-made subtitles can be very passionate about the enjoyment they can bring, so when anti-piracy groups moved against Legendas subbing group earlier this year, hackers were motivated enough to take their revenge.

While Legendas argued that fansubbers aren’t thieves but avid customers, anti-piracy outfits clearly don’t agree.

One such group is ALIS, Israel’s arm of the MPAA. In late 2007 it assisted in raids on the admins of three sites known as ‘xvoom’, ‘MYakuza’ and ‘Donkey‘ which carried Hebrew subtitles for US movies. In the end ALIS reached private compensation and closure agreements with the owners of two of the sites and took legal action against a third.

Now in 2009 ALIS is again active against creators of subtitles. Targeting Qsubs, one of Israel’s best translation groups, ALIS is threatening legal action against three of its members after sending them cease and desist letters last week.

ALIS is demanding that Qsubs, which has dozens of translators, stops their activities and is ordering the three translators to pay damages of around $264,000 each. They also want the individuals to issue a public apology for creating subtitles. ALIS believes that the three individuals it has identified are administrators of Qsubs.

In addition to copyright claims over subtitles, ALIS lawyer Eran Presenti says that there are further infringements on Qsubs such as movie and TV artwork along with various screenshots.

While the legal ramifications are digested by the Qsubs team, its subtitling activities have been suspended.

According to intellectual property lawyer Ran Camille, movie and TV show scripts are considered ‘dramatic creations’ and therefore subject to copyright law. Article 16 of the Copyrights Act states that only the primary copyright holder has the right to distribute any part of a finished product, subtitles included. However, it is unclear how this legal position is affected by subtitles translated from another language.

‘We have been doing this for years and never got a dime for our services, everything was done for free,’ Qsubs spokesman Amit told TorrentFreak. ‘We have a lawyer already which is costing us a lot of money that comes out of our own accounts,’ he added.

Although Qsubs can finance their lawyer right now, they need further funds in order to mount their defense or sadly they could be forced to close down and pay huge damages. Anyone wishing to contribute can do so by pressing the PayPal donation button on the Qsubs site.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It’s Time To Sink The Pirate Bay, and Replace It

Whether or not The Pirate Bay will end up being sold, the ship has served its purpose and is destined for Davy Jones’s Locker. Luckily for most BitTorrent fans there are plenty of alternatives.

However, in the current climate where media moguls send their lawyers after everything that could be used to infringe copyrights, a paradigm shift might be needed. This is exactly what Piracy Bureau co-founder and Pirate Bay insider Rasmus Fleischer is hinting at.

‘The symbolic value of The Pirate Bay has enabled us to make a difference in many ways. But there are also problems with it which are becoming ever more clear. After all, P2P was never meant to have one single ship as its almighty symbol,’ he writes in a recent blog post.

‘It’s time to sink the ship and move on,’ Rasmus adds, as he links to a presentation (see below) where he explains how it may live on in a more decentralized setup. In short he argues that The Pirate Bay will dissolve, but in its place many ‘new TPBs’ will return, just without the familiar domain name and pirate ship logo.

This is very similar to a concept Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde had in mind for the new Pirate Bay. A decentralized setup through which the ‘torrent site’ controls only a tiny part of the ’sharing’ process.

At the basis of this new scheme are two services that have launched in recent months, all run by people close to the original Pirate Bay crew. On the one hand there is the new OpenBitTorrent tracker that does not have a searchable index of torrents, but is simply used as a standalone tracker handling communication between peers.

To decentralize even further, friends of The Pirate Bay have launched the new torrent hosting service Torrage. This new service is open to other torrent sites and can be accessed through an API. When Torrage and OpenBitTorrent are combined everyone can run a BitTorrent site of their own with minimal resources.

There is little doubt that The Pirate Bay as we know it will cease to exist, but with OpenBitTorrent and Torrage it is easy enough to build new ones – and there are already a few promising projects in the making. You’ll be surprised.

Musicians hit out at plans to cut off internet for file sharers Musicians from some of the world’s biggest bands are calling on the Government to abandon proposals to cut off the internet connections of people who illegally download music.

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)

Ministers need to act quickly on child internet safety, warns adviser Millions of children are still at risk online because moves to enhance internet safety have stalled, according to Gordon Brown’s adviser on the issue.

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)

UK – Boxer threatens Facebook with legal action(Guardian)
The WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan and his promoter, Frank Warren, are squaring up to the social networking site Facebook in a legal battle that could have far-reaching consequences. The pair have engaged lawyers to threaten the US internet company with action over the use of images and names alongside material they consider to be defamatory and racist. Stephen Taylor Heath, head of sports and media at Lupton Fawcett, said that a cursory search of Facebook quickly led to ‘bogus’ pages that used the images and names of the pair to link to material that would be ‘highly defamatory’ if published in a newspaper or magazine. Warren, who has fought several high-profile legal battles, is understood to be determined to force Facebook to change its policy and take responsibility for the more unsavoury opinions of its registered users. There is a legal grey area about the extent to which the operator of a website, or the provider of community tools, can be held liable for comments posted.

(Via QuickLinks Update.)