[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Monday, September 22nd, 2014
| Time | Event | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 6:51a | Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 09/22/14
Transformers: Age of Extinction is the most downloaded movie. The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 9:11a | BPI Hits Record Breaking 100 Million Google Takedowns
In an attempt to prevent these infringements, the BPI and other music industry groups send millions of takedown notices to Internet services every month. Most of these requests are directed at Google. This week the UK music industry group BPI reached a new milestone after notifying Google of the 100 millionth allegedly infringing URL, up from 50 million just 10 months ago. http://pastebin.com/search?cx=0133056354 As can be seen below, the latest update shows that the 100 million links were spread out over 274,810 separate DMCA takedown notices.  With 100 million requests the BPI has broken a new milestone. Never before has a copyright holder representative reported so many allegedly infringing links to Google. Degban is currently second in this list with 99 million URLs, followed by the RIAA with 57 million. For the BPI this record isn’t something to be proud of though. The music industry group tells us that it shows just how hard it is for copyright holders to have infringing content taken offline. “This milestone makes two things very clear. First, that however much creators do, the system of ‘notice and takedown’ will never be enough on its own to protect them or consumers from the online black market, or to spur growth in the digital economy,” a BPI spokesperson says. “Second, that despite its clear knowledge as to which sites are engines of piracy, Google continues to help build their illegal businesses, by giving them a prominent ranking in search results.” The BPI stresses that Google should do more to lower the visibility of unauthorized content in its search results. Despite promises to do so, the music group still sees very little improvement on this front. “To illustrate: Google’s records show it has been told more than 10 million times that content on 4shared.com is illegal – yet it’s still the very first result today when we search for ‘Calvin Harris mp3′ – ahead of Amazon and every other legal service,” BPI notes. Addressing this issue is pretty straightforward, the BPI argues. Google should work with the entertainment industries to adjust its search algorithm, as the UK Government also highlighted recently. “Google can simply fix this problem by amending its algorithm. We hope they will respond positively to the invitation from Government to negotiate voluntary measures to do so,” BPI says, closing with an iconic lyric. “It’s time the media giant changed its tune – we need a little less conversation and a little more action please.” Google has thus far been hesitant to fiddle with its search results. The company has made several changes to address the complaints of copyright holders. However, it also stressed that the entertainment industries themselves should take responsibility, arguing that piracy is primarily an availability and pricing problem. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 6:20p | Giganews Resorts to DMCA to Quieten FBI Allegations
Sent from an alleged former employee of Giganews who identified himself as Nick Caputo, the email contained serious allegations about his former employer. Caputo told us that he’d begun working at the company in 2009 and as a “huge pirate” he loved to help people download “all the rich multimedia content they could.” But that was just the beginning. The email outlined Caputo’s rise through the company through two quick promotions in two-and-a-half years. However, it quickly descended into allegations that far from being a straight-down-the-line newsgroup provider, Giganews is in fact an FBI-run operation. Caputo says he discovered this after getting into a dispute with the company about removing child abuse material and elevating his complaint to the FBI. TorrentFreak decided not to run with the story, despite clear indications that Caputo is who he claimed he was. The story, which had plenty of detail, just didn’t hold up on its own. There was plenty of ‘evidence’ provided but the problem was that none of it added up to a level of proof that we’d be prepared to stand behind. But four days later and after being contacted by Caputo, Cryptome published the email and documents originally sent to TorrentFreak and possibly others. The story quickly spread around dozens of sites including Reddit and HackerNews forcing Giganews to respond, acknowledging that Caputo was indeed a former employee but denying the allegations. “This is a hoax. These allegations are 100% false,” the company wrote. “Unfortunately, since his termination, the poster has periodically posted versions of this information online. Sometimes, he tries to misrepresent himself as our CEO and sometimes he posts as himself.” With Giganews criticizing Cryptome for publishing the allegations, Caputo it seemed was not giving up. The archive of evidence originally offered to TF found itself uploaded to Internet Archive from where Caputo hoped it would be spread far and wide. However, according to a new email published by Cryptome, that has now been brought to halt by the issuing of a DMCA notice.
While Giganews clearly thinks the contents of the archive are defamatory, one has to dig into the details to see where the company has a copyright claim over the file. That can be found in a dump of employee contact details which documents show were obtained from Data Foundry’s intranet. Each employee card has a photograph attached and those are likely to have been taken by a company employee in company time. Also included in the dump is a Giganews appraisal of Caputo’s performance during 2010. It was authored by a manager and the rights to the form will most likely sit with the company. While Giganews would probably write something different today, four years ago the company felt that Caputo was “the go-to guy” for getting stuff done on nights, ranking his overall performance as “exceeding” the standard required. “Giganews is in the impossible position of proving a negative,” the company said in a statement. “If we say our list of employees does not include any FBI employees, then they must be ‘using false identities.’ If we say the named FBI operatives don’t look like any of our employee photos, ‘the pictures must have been altered.’ Even the denial itself is used as further evidence of the truth of the accusation. In a court of law, such an accusation would never stand up to scrutiny, but on the Open Internet, opinions can be formed by only a few words on a popular website.” Whether the allegations will now calm down and go away is anyone’s guess, but a DMCA notice to one of the many sources of the file is unlikely to make it disappear forever. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| << Previous Day |
2014/09/22 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |