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Saturday, March 16th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 11:09a | Steal This Show S04E13: Faircoin
Faircoin is a fascinating experiment in cryptocurrency: a LETS-style community currency which also functions as an exchange-traded token. With it, Duran’s Fair Co-op wants to power an international co-operative movement based on ideas and principles emerging from the Catalan Integral Co-operative: peer-to-peer organization, and horizontal governance by consensus. We discuss how the Fair Co-Op project co-opted (!) the original Fair Coin for its own use; trust and reciprocity in small communities and how crypto can extend this into the wider world; and just how to think about the ‘ecological cost’ of Bitcoin as a means to create a truly trustless global exchange network. — Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing crypto, privacy, copyright and file-sharing developments. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis. Host: Jamie King Guest: Enric Duran If you enjoy this episode, consider becoming a patron and getting involved with the show. Check out Steal This Show’s Patreon campaign: support us and get all kinds of fantastic benefits! Produced by Jamie King Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons. |
| 12:01p | Rightholders Have Asked Google to ‘Remove’ 4 Billion Pirate Links
For most people, search engines such as Google are an essential tool to enjoy the web in all its glory. With clever algorithms, the company offers a gateway to billions of sites, many of which would otherwise remain undiscovered. This also includes many ‘pirate’ sites. While there are plenty of people who don’t mind seeing these show up in search results, their presence is a thorn in the side of copyright holders. At the beginning of this decade, this problem was hardly recognized. When Google published its first transparency report, it received just a few thousand requests per day. Today, that number has grown to well over two million. For years this number kept going up and up. While that trend was broken recently, the total now adds up to an impressive figure. Google’s transparency report shows that copyright holders have asked the company to remove four billion links to alleged copyright-infringing content. The majority or these requests, more than 90%, were indeed removed or put on a preemptive blacklist. The four billion links were reported by 168,180 copyright holders who identified 2,283,811 separate domains. These domains also include false positives, including websites of The White House, the FBI, Disney, Netflix, the New York Times, and even TorrentFreak.  Most reported links do indeed point to copyrighted material, however. Google typically takes these out of their search engine softly after a request comes in. This means that the takedown process works as intended. However, it remains controversial. Several major copyright groups see the huge number of reported links as evidence that their efforts are futile. No matter how many links they submit, there are always new ones to find the next day. “Every day we have to send new notices to take down the very same links to illegal content we took down the day before. It’s like ‘Groundhog Day’ for takedowns,” RIAA CEO Cary Sherman described the situation previously. Ideally, the major copyright groups would like Google to remove all results from known pirate sites. However, the search engine believes that this goes a step too far, warning that it could lead to overbroad censorship. “When it comes to entire websites, Google may demote a site in our search results if we receive enough copyright removal notices for it, but we do “Although this would reduce our operational burden, whole-site removal is ineffective and can easily result in the censorship of lawful material,” Google wrote in its latest overview of anti-piracy measures, published late last year. Google itself is not completely apathetic to the piracy issue. It does ‘demote’ sites for which it has received a substantial number of takedown notices. These will then appear lower in search results. The demotion ‘signal’ can weigh even stronger for specific keywords, such as recently released films. This demotion strategy gives copyright holders a “powerful tool against rogue sites,” Google notes. When new pirates sites appear, copyright holders can target these with takedown notices, after which Google will demote them. As such, the four billion reported links will likely be five billion by the end of next year. Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons. |
| 6:01p | Travis McRae: Sue Me Over EBook Site, I Want the BS Over & Done With  Most entities behind user-generated upload platforms know that lawsuits are always a possibility and accept them as a risk of doing business. YouTube, for example, knows that it can be sued but since the company follows applicable law to the letter, it’s not a straightforward prospect for opponents. It also has the deepest of deep pockets. Then there’s Travis After launching a movie torrent site in 2011, the keen pilot is now in the eBook market. His site is simple and free to use but authors and publishers are furious that he appears to hold no licenses for the content on his platform. Not unlike YouTube, however, Earlier this week, McRea told the show that his website isn’t based around the idea of copyright infringement but was actually designed “by authors, for authors” and is a group effort to share books. He also insisted that he isn’t hiding behind the DMCA, stating that it’s not a “cover my butt answer” and authors he knows are actually uploading content to his platform. Joanne Harris, whose books also appeared on EBook.bike without permission, countered by saying she has never encountered any author who uploads content to “It is copyright theft, it’s not sharing. Sharing is when an author decides to put their own book online for purposes of their own,” she said. “I’ve been involved in a three-day Twitter conversation with many, many hundreds of people who are very annoyed that their books are there. I haven’t yet met one defending the site.” The conversation then moved to McCrea’s claim that content is taken down quickly. Harris said her publisher doesn’t believe the system is good enough and it had been trying to take down content “over several weeks”, while insisting that McRea hasn’t been “consistent in taking things down.” McCrea disagreed and reiterated that the website isn’t dedicated to copyright infringement, it’s there to help authors. He also said that personal attacks on Twitter against his family mean that authors are unlikely to step forward to support him. “My mother, my girlfriend – notably not my father – all had their public information shared on Twitter, Having listened to the show, TorrentFreak spoke with McRea who told us that he wasn’t happy with the final broadcast. “I didn’t hear the final interview, I didn’t like the way the interview went. There were technical issues and all my questions were worded with a bias,” he said. “I get that I’m going to have an uphill battle but at least from the sound booth the interview sounded like a hit piece.” That being said, an uphill battle appears to be exactly what McRea is gunning for. “My statement remains what it always was. I want someone to sue me. I want to win that case and then have legal precedent which should let me start finding ad partners, not having to deal with as much BS,” he told TF. Wanting to be sued is usually at the bottom of most people’s bucket list, but McCrea is clearly no ordinary player. He told us that living Canada means that he’s not compelled to follow the terms of the DMCA but does so out of choice. For those still unhappy, he’s throwing down the gauntlet. “While we stay committed to following all US copyright laws and ensuring we maintain our DMCA compliance, I would like to reiterate that I am a Canadian and my focus is on upholding the laws of my country. It just has always been that the DMCA provides the best framework for how to handle copyright complaints,” he said. “I use the DMCA because it offers the best framework, not because I feel I’m obligated to. If they feel I’m liable, come sue me.” While McRea is certainly taking a tough stance, in a follow up he told us that he’s also developing policies and tools to help both authors and users to better understand their rights while using his website. “I’m also working on a copyright tool that can be built into ebooks like a robots.txt file which allow authors to specify what platforms their book can be uploaded to. Ebook Bike will search for that file and honor it if it exists,” he concludes. Whether publishers will now take McCrea up on his offer to battle this out in court will remain to be seen. Public standoffs like this are very rare indeed, particularly when legal precedents are there for the taking. It’s unclear whether the former Pirate Party leader has the resources to take on a giant like Harper Collins, for example, but his confidence suggests he may have a plan. We’ll have to wait to find out the details. The full BBC show, You and Yours, can be heard here, (skip to 30m40s) Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons. |
This is part one of a two-part series with 
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