CyberLaw Blog

Archive for the ‘P2P file sharing’ Category

Belgian ISP does not have to filter out copyright-infringing traffic, says ECJ advisor: “Belgian ISP Scarlet should not have to filter copyright-infringing traffic from its service because to do so would invade users’ privacy, an advisor to the EU’s top court has said.“

(Via OUT-LAW News.)

Dutch Govt to Make Downloading a Crime, Block P2P Sites: “

Fred Teeven, the Secretary for Security and Justice wants to make downloading for personal use a crime, and to allow copyright holders to obtain a court order to force an ISP to block a ’specific website or service’ accused of infringement.

To the dismay of many, the Netherlands, an erstwhile bastion of freedom and inhibition, is now moving to usher in a new era of repressive Internet filtering and copyright crimes.Fred Teeven, the Secretary for Security and Justice, wants to ‘modernize’ the country’s copyright laws to build ‘confidence in the copyright organizations,’ and to ‘enhance the position of authors and performers.’Dutch law currently only outlaws uploading copyrighted material; it’s considered illegal ‘distribution.’ Downloading copyrighted material for personal use is legal, at least for content other than games and software, but the govt wants to add movies and music to the list.In exchange for adding music and movies the govt would eliminate the private copying levy currently added to the price of blank media like CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. It would also make new levies on new technologies, in his words, ‘undesirable.’‘Technology has overtaken the private copying regime,’ he says. ‘ There is therefore no room for the private copying levies. New levies on devices such as MP-3 players, laptops, DVD recorders and USB sticks will Teeven undesirable. The same applies to a tax on Internet subscriptions.‘The govt also wants to address copyright infringement abroad. It says that ‘owners will soon be able to ask a court for an order to block a specific website or service once it is confirmed that they acted unlawfully, and then Dutch access providers will have to block access for their customers to those sites.’He adds that it would only be a measure of ‘last resort,’ and that site administrators and hosting providers would have a chance to dispute the allegations.In a nod that copyright holders are also part of the problem, he says that copyright license reform is also necessary if the govt is to encourage legal alternatives to online infringement.‘New online services now have 27 EU member states to obtain a license,’ he says. ‘Its is a marked contrast to the boundless nature of the Internet and is an obstacle to the provision of legal digital creative services.‘He also calls for an incorporation of a ‘fair-use’ exemption in any legislation to ‘encourage creative reuse of works.‘Dutch anti-P2P group BREIN, which has successfully targeted illegal downloaders and shuttered a number of piracy sites over the years, said it is a ’supporter of the ban’ because it removes one of the last defenses offered by P2P sites and services which had argued they only ‘facilitate the downloading of illegal content [for personal use]‘ which is legal in the Netherlands.Stay tuned.jared@zeropaid.com “

(Via ZeroPaid.com.)

French Constitutional Council Validates Internet Censorship | La Quadrature du Net

Submitted on 11 March 2011

Paris, March 10th, 2011 — The French Constitutional Council has released its decision1 regarding the LOPPSI bill. Judges held that article 4 of the bill, which allows the executive branch to censor the Net under the pretext of fighting child pornography, is not contrary to the Constitution. In doing so, the constitutional court has failed to protect fundamental freedoms on the Internet, and in particular freedom of expression. Hopes lie now in European institutions, which are the only ones with the power to prohibit or at least supervise administrative website blocking and its inherent risks of abuse.

The LOPSSI law compiled many repressive measures on vastly unrelated subjects. The Constitutional Council found itself caught by this strategy. While it did strike down some of the most shocking provisions, it left untouched those that seemed less harmful or were proposed in the name of noble goals, in spite of having a highly detrimental impact on civil liberties, such as the ones related to the Internet.

LOPPSI’s article 4 gives the executive branch the power to suppress the flow of information on the Internet. In a highly hypocritical move, the government claims to be fighting child pornography, a goal for which filtering is both ineffective and vastly overkill, especially given the risk of collateral censorship of perfectly legal websites2. There is a high risk of seeing such a scheme used for other goals.

‘This decision about article 4 is a great disappointment. It is obvious that Internet censorship will not help solve the child pornography problem in any way, as experiments in other countries have shown 3. After HADOPI’s Internet access suspension measures, calls to ban WikiLeaks hosting and recent talks against Net Neutrality, France is siding ever more with the group of countries hostile to a free Internet by adopting administrative filtering of the Internet.’, says Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder and spokesperson for La Quadrature du Net.

‘It is unfortunate that the Constitutional Council did not build on its own HADOPI jurisprudence by giving the judiciary branch exclusive authority to control restrictions to online free speech. The solution may lie in European institutions: the EU Parliament is currently trying to supervise blocking measures adopted at the national level, which could impede their implementation in France4. Moreover, administrative Net filtering seems contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights5, and one can expect an appeal before European judges.’, concludes Félix Tréguer, policy and legal analyst for the advocacy group.

ISPs urged to block filesharing sites | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Music and film groups in talks with broadband providers over code that would bar access to sites such as The Pirate Bay

* Josh Halliday
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 March 2011 11.35 GMT

Rights holders from across the music and film industries have identified about 100 websites – including The Pirate Bay and ‘cyberlocker’ sites – that they want internet service providers such as BT to block under new measures to tackle illegal filesharing.

Under a voluntary code that is under discussion, content owners would pass evidence of illegal filesharing sites to ISPs, which would then take action against those sites.

However, the proposals are fraught with complications. ISPs are understood to be open to the idea of cutting off access to some infringing sites, but argue that an impartial judge should decide which get blocked. It is also unclear whether content owners or ISPs would be liable to pay compensation to a site that argues that it has been unfairly censored.

The communications minister, Ed Vaizey, is leading a series of talks with rights holders and ISPs, including BT and TalkTalk, aimed at developing voluntary code on internet policy, including site blocking.

The proposal is part of a contentious range of plans to curb illegal filesharing in the UK. Rights holders and ISPs have been at loggerheads over legislation due to be introduced under the Digital Economy Act, which faces a high court challenge by BT and TalkTalk on Wednesday.

BT and TalkTalk – which together have 8.4 million UK subscribers – have already spent close to £1m in legal fees on challenging the act, the Guardian understands. The government, meanwhile, is keen to push through voluntary agreements on controversial issues such as site blocking, as the act faces a delay of at least 12 months.

Issues such as how to give accused sites a fair hearing, indemnity and costs, as well as the governance structure of the code are yet to be ironed out.

‘Cheaper than notice sending would be site blocking,’ said one rights holder present at the government meetings. ‘We’re more interested in site blocking [than mass notification letters]. We don’t want to target end users, [the mass notification system] is long winded – we want something now.’

Another source at the meeting told the Guardian: ‘Site blocking is an interesting concept which we’re open to, but there are issues on how to make it work, how to give sites a fair hearing, its governance structure and indemnity. But get a judge to tell us to do it and we’ll do it.’

The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has convened a government-led working group, that comprised ISPs and search engines, to find a ‘plan B’ to avoid potential litigation arising from the blocking of websites accused of illegal filesharing.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA), the trade body representing Hollywood studios including Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Disney, argues ISPs should block access to filesharing portals such as Newzbin2, The Pirate Bay, Movieberry and Free Movies Online 4 You.

In December, the MPA filed an injunction forcing BT, the UK’s largest broadband provider, to throttle users’ access to Newzbin2 using the UK Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act. Although the a voluntary set of principles is preferred to the legal route, the high court is expected rule in June on whether BT should block access to the site.

12,895 New Porn BitTorrent Lawsuits Filed Since December 23: “On December 16, 2010, things didn’t appear to be heading in a favorable direction for the likes of the USCG (US Copyright Group) or the bevy of other lawyers involved with P2P litigation. That’s because on that day, a judge in West Virginia ruled that instead of lumping thousands of defendants together in one lawsuit, the cases must be filed separately. This follows closely with other developments in these types of cases, which started when Judge Rosemary Collyer, who presides in the Far Cry case, ruled that only those defendants in her court’s jurisdiction could be sued.”

(Via Slyck.com File-Sharing News And Information.)

Spain rejects 'US influenced' copyright bill: “
After a narrow vote, a Spanish parliamentary commission has rejected a controversial bill aimed at protecting content owners from internet downloaders. All of the main Spanish parties, except for Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s Socialists rejected the so-called Sinde Bill, named after Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde. The draft legislation would have set up a government commission which would have then provided courts with details of websites offering access to copyright-protected material such as music, movies, video games or software. A judge could then have ordered the closure of offending websites.

The bill sparked furious opposition from internet users who accused the government of violating the freedom of expression but Gonzalez-Sinde said the law only intended to put an end to Spain’s position as a ‘paradise of piracy.’ Techdirt put a different slant on things, firstly praising Spain’s ‘somewhat more reasonable copyright laws than other parts of the world’ highlighting provisions that say that ‘personal, non-commercial copying is not against the law and also says that third parties should not be liable for copyright infringement done by their users’ adding that obviously Hollywood ‘hates’ this and that Spain’s recently introduced reform package seemed like a ‘checklist of the entertainment industry’s wishes’ and that one of the recent Wikileaks diplomatic cable leaks showed that ‘US diplomats played a role in pressuring the Spanish government to make these changes, at the behest of movie industry lobbyists’.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101221/15434012367/spanish-legislature-rejects-hollywood-backed-copyright-law-changes.shtml

“

(Via The 1709 Blog.)

U.S. Judge Blocks Porn BitTorrent Suits Filed in W. Va. – XBIZ.com

By Rhett Pardon
Friday, Dec 17, 2010 Text size:

MARTINSBURG, Va. — A federal judge has quashed thousands of subpoenas that were requested in seven porn BitTorrent suits, ruling that the cases improperly join mass defendants together.

U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey, in each of the orders, threw out all of the defendants with the exception of one John Doe for each claim. As a result, 5,462 unnamed defendants have been pared from suits filed by Combat Zone, Elegant Angel, Third World Media and West Coast Productions.

Bailey, in his ruling, said that the cases reeked of misjoinder, finding that it is an ‘ undeniable fact that each defendant will also likely have a different defense.’

In each of the cases, Bailey said that he would sever all Doe defendants except the first Doe of each suit. He also said that because so many ISPs were identified with each suit, ‘[allegations making] the propriety of joinder even more tenuous.’

Bailey also said that if plaintiffs’ counsel want to proceed they can do so by filing fees for each of the amended complaints, which would be assigned separate civil action numbers, but only if the defendants are located in West Virginia, where the cases were filed.

In the seven cases, Time Warner Cable moved to quash subpoenas seeking the identities of accused filed sharers.

Kenneth Ford of the Adult Copyright Co., which filed the suits, did not immediately respond to XBIZ for comment.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed amicus briefs in the cases, lauded the judge’s ruling, calling it a ‘big victory in the fight against copyright trolls.’

The EFF said that the studios in the seven suits were ‘abusing the law in an attempt to pressure settlements.’

‘In these cases — as in many others across the country — the owners of the adult movies filed mass lawsuits based on single counts of copyright infringement stemming from the downloading of a pornographic film, and improperly lumped hundreds of defendants together regardless of where the IP addresses indicate the defendants live,’ the EFF said in a statement.

‘The motivation behind these cases appears to be to leverage the risk of embarrassment associated with pornography to coerce settlement payments despite serious problems with the underlying claims.’

The West Virginia order comes on the heels of a ruling by a judge in the District of Columbia earlier this month that dismissed hundreds of individuals from across the country named in the U.S. Copyright Group’s campaign due to lack of personal jurisdiction in Washington, D.C.

The below article is from the 1709 Blog which is highly recommended.

Oh the luck – Irish get three strikes back – and a new music service too!: “
Eircom, the Irish internet service provider, has resumed its policy of cutting off the internet connection of customers who illegally share music online. The company had suspended its policy earlier this year but before this the company sent out about 1,000 warning notifications each week to people who were allegedly infringing copyright by illegally downloading music. Its ‘three strikes’ policy allows customers three official warnings before their internet connection is suspended.

The move is especially interesting given that the Mr Justice Charleton, in Irish High Court, had (somewhat reluctantly) agreed with rival broadband supplier UPC in a battle against several record companies, ruling that internet service providers were not liable for a customer’s illegal downloading nor did Irish law provide any basis for a ‘three strikes’ approach. In an very impressive presentation on recent case law in this area at the Music and IP conference in London yesterday (8th December) 5RB barrister Christina Michalos explained that Mr Justice Charleton said that there was no injunctive relief available in Ireland in the matter and that Irish copyright legislation made ’no proper provision for the blocking, diverting or interrupting of internet communications intent on breaching copyright’ – and that the powers of Irish courts did not extend to obligating an ISP to block access to file sharing sites. Despite this, Eircom has decided to resume the strategy it implemented a year earlier following an out-of-court settlement with the same companies. Stephen Brennan, Eircom’s managing director for consumers and small businesses said that as the country’s largest broadband provider, Eircom felt its method of warning internet users about their activities was the best compromise between music companies and internet providers. Before the suspension Eircom had not actually yet disconnected any customers’ broadband but it did have some on three strikes at the time of the High Court case.

Simultaneously Eircom has launched a new online legal service, MusicHub, which offers free and unlimited streaming to Eircom broadband customers along with deals for legally downloading music to personal computers offering a range of bundled download packages where the unit price for each track downloaded could be as low as 32 cents. Launching the new service yesterday, Eircom’s Stephen Beynon said ‘MusicHub is a major development for Eircom in the online content space. We are the first and only internet provider in Ireland to offer online streaming as part of a music service. Customers will not find a greater selection of music across all genres anywhere else in Ireland from their broadband provider’. Mr Brennan described it as the ‘carrot’ part of the company’s carrot-and-stick approach to counteracting copyright infringement, with the three strike process agreed with record labels being the ‘stick’. An Eircom’s statement stressed net suspensions was a ‘measure of last resort’.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/1209/1224285100549.html

EMI Records & Others v UPC Communications Ireland Ltd (2010) IEHC 377.