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Sunday, September 29th, 2019

    Time Event
    10:38a
    DISH to Subpoena Google, Facebook, PayPal & Twitter to Identify ‘Pirate’ IPTV Operators

    DISH Networks’ efforts to disrupt, take down, or obtain settlements from unlicensed IPTV operators are continuing with force through the US legal system.

    The broadcaster is currently tied up in a number of lawsuits, each targeting companies and individuals that allegedly provide the company’s content to the public, without having first obtained appropriate licensing.

    A complaint filed in August targets Easybox IPTV, an allegedly-infringing IPTV outfit that supplies both subscriptions and ready-configured (aka ‘fully-loaded’) devices to the United States market.

    Easybox IPTV’s offering

    The DISH lawsuit, which demands around $10 million in damages, was filed in a Texas federal court. It lists up to five ‘John Does’, claiming that individually and collectively they do business under the Easybox IPTV banner.

    DISH earlier explained that it doesn’t actually know who these people are but its investigations indicated that they might be from China. Now, however, it has now been given the opportunity to discover their identities after gaining permission from the Court.

    A discovery order signed September 19 by District Judge Lynn N. Hughes grants DISH permission to subpoena and obtain information from some of the world’s largest Internet companies that have done or are still doing business with Easybox.

    The list is comprehensive and a potential eye-opener for other IPTV providers operating without cast-iron licensing agreements.

    Top of the list is payment processor PayPal. The Easybox website is currently down for supposed maintenance but according to archive copies of the site, PayPal isn’t clearly listed as a payment option for direct customers. Nevertheless, the company is probably head of the list for good reason.

    Second up is Google. Like many companies, Easybox is likely to have used Google in several ways but a cursory review of the site’s source reveals an analytics account and links to the now-defunct Google+.

    On the domain front, DISH has permission to subpoena Washington-based domain name registrar Enom and domain registry Namecheap. The Easybox.tv domain has clear links to both and could provide useful information.

    When it comes to hosting, Miami-based Netrouting Inc. makes an appearance. In common with the domain companies, these may also have valuable information for DISH.

    Easybox’s Facebook and Twitter pages are no longer active. The former is listed as unavailable but the latter appears to have been suspended after violating the platform’s rules. But whatever the reasons for their demise, both companies are likely to have plenty of additional information to offer up.

    Finally, DISH will be able to enter the physical world to request information from entities that appear to have distributed or sold Easybox IPTV devices. Michigan-based fulfillment company Xpert Fulfillment Inc., Finest Bargain Inc. (which appears to sell via Amazon), and Ace Discount Store are all listed and should expect calls for information soon.

    “By November 4, 2019, DISH must replead this case identifying the defendant as Easybox IPTV. When the other defendants are identified, they may be named,” Judge Hughes concludes.

    The discovery order can be obtained here (pdf)

    Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

    6:53p
    Facebook Takes Down TorrentFreak Post Over ‘Infringing’ Meme

    When the EU Copyright Directive protests were in full swing earlier this year, many people warned that upload filters would “kill memes.”

    We weren’t particularly fond of this oversimplification, but the problems with upload filters are obvious, with or without the new EU directive.

    In fact, even without automated filters copyright enforcement efforts can be quite problematic. Today we present a rather unusual example, where one of the “memes” we published in the past, was effectively taken down by Facebook.

    To put things in a proper context, we take you back to 2014. At the time we reported that photographer Christoffer Boffoli had filed a lawsuit against the popular image sharing site Imgur, which allegedly ignored his takedown requests.

    Boffoli hoped to protect his copyrights, but this effort soon backfired. A few weeks after he filed the complaint someone uploaded an archive of 20,754 of his photos to The Pirate Bay, specifically mentioning the lawsuit against Imgur. The torrent in question remains online today.

    In recent years we haven’t heard much from the photographer, until this week, when someone alerted us to a rather unusual issue. The person in question, who prefers not to be named, had one of his Facebook posts removed over alleged copyright infringement.

    The post in question was a link to our news article covering the Pirate Bay ‘issue.’ At the time, this was by default shared with a portrait of Boffoli that someone turned into a meme, as can be seen below (meme text cropped).

    The Facebook notice mentions that the content in question was “disabled” due to a third-party copyright complaint. While it didn’t specify what the infringing content was, our article was listed as the “source,” and the link and the associated image were indeed removed.

    Since Boffoli doesn’t own any copyrights to our work, and since we didn’t link to the Pirate Bay archive, we assume that the takedown notice is targeted at the meme image, which includes the photographer’s portrait. Whether it’s justified is another question though.

    Memes are generally seen as fair use. As such, people can share them without repercussions. A photographer may contend this, and fight it out in court, but in this case that could prove difficult.

    When looking into the matter, we noticed that the original portrait has been hosted by Wikipedia for more than 15 years. This shows that the photo is credited to Boffoli himself, and shared with a public domain ‘license’, allowing anyone to use it freely.

    This means that creating a meme out of it is certainly not a problem. But perhaps there was another reason for the takedown?

    Since Facebook doesn’t share any further details, and our own original Facebook posting is still up, we can’t be 100% sure what the alleged infringement is. However, looking through Facebook’s archive we see that another user had the meme image removed as well (TF link remains online here), suggesting that this is indeed the problem.

    So there we have it. Facebook effectively ‘killed’ removed a meme. In at least once instance, it removed a link to a perfectly legitimate news article, based on a takedown request that doesn’t seem to hold water. The meme isn’t quite dead yet though, it’s on the Internet after all.

    Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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