CyberLaw Blog

Archive for the ‘Notice and Takedown’ Category

Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List: A detailed menu of Yahoo’s spying services for law enforcement agencies leaks onto the web. The company issues a DMCA takedown notice to a site that posted it.

(Via Wired News.)

Terrorism chiefs don’t know what they’ve censored online: “

You jolly well wanted records? Oh

Police are shutting websites without keeping any records, hampering government efforts to address online extremism, it’s been revealed.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

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

Court Orders The Pirate Bay To Delete Torrents:

In an attempt to ensure that Dutch citizens can’t access The Pirate Bay, BREIN took three of the tracker’s founders to court. The anti-piracy outfit won the case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were ordered to block Dutch users, a decision they decided to appeal.

Today the Amsterdam Court announced that the earlier default judgment has been nullified. That is, the three operators don’t have to block access to all Dutch users.

It was concluded that The Pirate Bay itself is not necessarily guilty of copyright infringement. However, according to the Court the site does assist in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.

The defense had argued that not Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were not the owners of the site, but a Seychelles based company named Reservella. The Court rejected this defense as the defendants could not name the current owners or provide any documents proving that the site was sold. It concluded that the three defendants are responsible for the site.

The Court ruled that The Pirate Bay has to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works. The list is to be provided by BREIN, and is similar to the earlier ruling against Mininova. The defendants are given three months to comply, if not, they will face penalties of 5,000 euros ($7,500) per person, per day.

In addition to removing the torrents the defendants have to block Dutch users from accessing certain parts of the site (across all their domains) where users can download copyrighted files. Finally, the three have to cover the costs BREIN made for the court case.

Ernst-Jan Louwers, the lawyer for the three Pirate Bay defendants told TorrentFreak that his clients are currently considering whether or not to appeal this judgment.

More info will be added as it comes in… (Court ruling in Dutch)

Mininova Ordered to Remove All ‘Infringing’ Torrents: “

Mininova were sued this spring by BREIN, an outfit which protects the rights of several large entertainment industry corporations.

Today, the judge ruled that the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer has been ordered to clean up its site and remove all torrents that link to infringing content.

BREIN’s intention was not to shut down the site. Instead, the organization called for a filter based on infringing keywords and possibly digital fingerprints to guarantee that the rights holders have sufficient means to protect their content.

The court agreed with BREIN’s assessment that Mininova is not doing enough to protect the rights of copyright holders, and ordered the site to remove all torrent files that link to infringing content within three months, or pay a penalty of 1000 Euro per infringing torrent with a maximum of 5 million euros ($7 million).

Mininova’s notice and takedown policy that allows copyright holders to remove infringing torrents is not sufficient, the court said. Interestingly, the recently announced copyright filter that Mininova launched together with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) wasn’t mentioned in the verdict.

The court did not agree with Mininova’s defense that it is impossible to moderate all torrents that are uploaded to the site. It further said that Mininova is encouraging its users to download copyrighted material, helped by the several moderators that the site has in place.

The moderators keep the site clean and ‘family friendly’ be removing torrents that link to adult content, viruses and fake files. They do this proactively and in response to user feedback, the court concluded, pointing out that they should also be able to moderate torrents that link to copyrighted material.

It was further concluded that Mininova profits from copyright infringement though the ads that appear on the site.

Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer said in a response: ‘We are obviously not happy with the verdict.’ Mininova is considering to appeal the decision, which they have to do within three months

Developing story.

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

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(Via TorrentFreak.)

Germany poised to impose police-run block list: “

Quality of German debate shames cosy UK arrangements

Germany’s main political parties have agreed the text of legislation designed to enshrine the blocking of selected internet sites in law.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

IWF: Child abuse domains down, reports up: “

Bigs up a year of achievement, glosses over iffiness

The Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) Annual Report reveals an apparent fall of nearly 10 per cent in the number of international websites hosting child sexual abuse content.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

UK – IWF chief: why Wikipedia block went wrong: “(ZDNet.co.uk)
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), an organisation set up by internet service providers to monitor child sexual abuse websites, caused a furore in December when it attempted to block a page on online collaborative encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Through a combination of technical factors, people wishing to edit Wikipedia were blocked from doing so, causing an outcry. The image the IWF tried to block was the LP cover for Virgin Killer, a 1976 album by German rock band Scorpions. Peter Robbins, chief executive of the IWF, talked to ZDNet UK about the fallout from the decision to block the page, and whether self-regulation of internet content is effective.”

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

The updated EFF report entitled Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which assesses the problematic application of the notice & takedown provisions of the US legislation is definitely worth reading. [Yaman Akdeniz]

EFF Marks 10th Anniversary of DMCA with Report on Law’s Unintended Consequences | Electronic Frontier Foundation

October 27th, 2008
EFF Marks 10th Anniversary of DMCA with Report on Law’s Unintended Consequences
Ten-Year Legacy of Harm to Fair Use, Free Speech

San Francisco – Ten years ago Tuesday, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law. In a report released to mark the anniversary, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) documents the ways in which this controversial law has harmed fair use, free speech, scientific research, and legitimate competition.

‘Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the DMCA’ focuses on the most notorious aspect of the law: its ban on ‘circumventing’ digital rights management (DRM) and ‘other technical protection measures.’ Instead of protecting against copyright infringement, this ban has routinely been used to stymie consumers, scientists, and small businesses. ‘Unintended Consequences’ collects reports of the law’s most egregious abuses over the last decade. In 2003, for example, Lexmark used the DMCA to block distribution of chips that allow the refilling of laser toner cartridges. In 2006, computer security researchers at Princeton delayed disclosure of a dangerous hidden program in some Sony CDs based on fears of DMCA liability. Meanwhile, the DMCA has not prevented digital piracy. DRM systems are consistently and routinely broken almost immediately upon their introduction.

‘Over the last ten years, the DMCA has done far more harm to fair use, free speech, scientific research, and competition than it has to digital piracy. Measured from the perspective of the public, it’s been a decade of costs, with no benefits,’ said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. ‘The music industry has given up on DRM, and Hollywood now relies on DRM principally to stop innovation that it doesn’t like. It’s time for Congress to consider giving up on this failed experiment to back up DRM systems with misguided laws.’

For ‘Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the DMCA’:
http://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-ten-years-under-dmca

For more on the DMCA:
http://www.eff.org/issues/dmca

(Via Techdirt.)

The Web Thrived In Spite Of The DMCA, Not Because Of It: “While I was pointing out all of the reasons why the DMCA needs to be re-examined from scratch, Wired has put up an article detailing the one single positive aspect of the DMCA: the safe harbor provisions that protect service providers from liability for copyright infringement done by users. However, I think Wired, and the various people quoted in the article, give way too much credit to the DMCA for a variety of reasons. In fact, Wired goes way too far in claiming that the DMCA ’saved’ the web and allowed it to become what it is today, suggesting (incorrectly) that things like blogs and YouTube wouldn’t be successes without the DMCA.

First, the claim by an MPAA representative that without the DMCA movie studios wouldn’t have moved to DVDs is, at best, stretching the truth. While some studios would have been nervous, it wouldn’t have taken long for some studios to more aggressively experiment with DVDs, and early success would have made studios unwilling to hold back. Besides, it’s not as if the DMCA has actually done anything to protect DVDs. DVD ripping software is widely available.

As for the safe harbor provisions, there’s plenty of reason to believe that we would have reached the same legal situation even without the DMCA’s safe harbors. Two years prior to the DMCA, the CDA was passed, and while pretty much all of that law was thrown out as unconstitutional, the bit that remained was the famous section 230, which provides a very similar safe harbor for non-copyright issues. It’s not difficult to believe that in the absence of a DMCA, section 230 would have been expanded to cover copyright. And, even if section 230 wasn’t extended explicitly, one would hope that the courts would have established the exact same precedent by noting how ridiculous it is to blame a service provider for the actions of its users. The fact that we even need safe harbor provisions is ridiculous. It should be common sense that liability should be placed on the actual party to do the action, rather than any service provider that was used in the process.

Finally, Wired talks up the whole notice-and-takedown process, which has been a tremendous burden for many sites. While Wired does highlight how the notice-and-takedown process has been regularly abused, it still gives too much credit to the whole system. If Congress really had to have a formal takedown process, it makes perfect sense to have a notice-and-notice system, where the accused infringer would have a chance to respond to the charges before the content is taken down (innocent until proven guilty, blah blah blah).

So, yes, the safe harbors provided by the DMCA are a good thing — but to extrapolate from that and a few other questionable points that the DMCA is responsible for the rise of things like blogging and YouTube is hard to square with reality. It’s quite likely that things wouldn’t be all that different in the absence of the DMCA — except we’d have a lot fewer abuses of it.

Legal Crackdown Jams Michael Moore’s ‘Slacker Uprising’: “Takedown letters go out after the documentary, distributed online as a free gift to the filmmaker’s fans, shows up on torrent sites.

(Via Wired News.)