Does the U.S. government’s shuttering of the file-sharing website Megaupload.com show that new laws are not needed to battle intellectual property piracy? Brookings’s Allan Friedman believes it does.
“Given that the U.S. authorities have just used existing law, I think the answer is a resounding yes,” Friedman says in an interview with Information Security Media Group. He’s a fellow in governance studies and research director of the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings, a Washington think tank.
Federal authorities on Thursday charged the operators of Megaupload with violations of numerous conspiracy laws for pirating copyrighted music. The charges came as Congress suspended consideration of the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act because of public objections of provisions of the bills. Opponents contend the legislation would violate Internet freedom. To protest the legislative proposals, a number of websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, staged temporary blackouts this week.
“The interesting thing is that these lockers (such as Megaupload.com), as they’re called, have been cited as reasons why we need these new laws,” Friedman says. But he points out that existing laws, such as those used by federal authorities this week, seem to be adequate.
The charges against Megaupload’s leaders provoked the hacker collective Anonymous to launch on Thursday denial-of-service attacks at Justice Department and FBI websites as well as those of the motion picture and recording industries’ trade associations (see Hackers Target DoJ, FBI Websites).
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In what the U.S. authorities have called one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have seized the Web site Megaupload and charged seven people connected with it with running an international enterprise based on Internet piracy.
Megaupload, one of the most popular so-called locker services on the Internet, allowed users to transfer large files like movies and music anonymously. Media companies have long accused it of abetting copyright infringement on a vast scale. In a grand jury indictment, Megaupload is accused of causing $500 million in damages to copyright owners and of making $175 million by selling ads and premium subscriptions.
Four of the seven people, including the site’s founder, Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz), were arrested Friday in New Zealand; the three others remain at large. Each of the seven people — who the indictment said were members of a criminal group it called Mega Conspiracy — is charged with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. The charges could result in more than 20 years in prison.
As part of the crackdown, about 20 search warrants were executed in the United States and in eight other countries, including New Zealand. About $50 million in assets were also seized, as well as a number of servers and 18 domain names that formed Megaupload’s network of file-sharing sites.
The police arrived at Dotcom Mansion in Auckland on Friday morning in two helicopters. Mr. Dotcom, a 37-year-old with dual Finnish and German citizenship, retreated into a safe room, and the police had to cut their way in. He was eventually arrested with a firearm close by that the police said appeared to be a shortened shotgun.
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Legal experts are warning that the proposed PROTECT IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation, currently working their way through Congress, will damage the world’s DNS system, cripple attempts to get better online security and violate free speech rights in the US constitution.
In an essay published in the Stanford Law Review professors Mark Lemley, David Levine and David Post warned that the overarching reach of the legislation would cause people to seek alternatives to the existing DNS system, manufacture massive technical problems in the implementation of DNSSEC and trample over rights of free expression by allowing the total suppression of published opinion based on allegations without proof, or even a hearing.
“These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the internet,” the trio warn.
Under the terms of the proposed PROTECT IP legislation a US federal prosecutor who finds a foreign website that is “dedicated to infringing activities” can force all US internet service providers, domain name registries, domain name registrars and operators of domain name servers to block either the offending page or the whole web domain from the DNS system* – effectively wiping the site off the internet map.
The professors warn that the SOPA legislation is even worse in this regard. “Under SOPA, IP rights holders can proceed vigilante-style against allegedly offending sites, without any court hearing or any judicial intervention or oversight whatsoever… and all of this occurs based upon a notice delivered by the rights holder, which no neutral third party has even looked at, let alone adjudicated on the merits,” they write.
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Earlier this week, it was found that employees of major copyright holders Sony, Universal, and Fox were all found to have illegally downloaded content through the BitTorrent network.
Today, two prominent figures in the online piracy fight were also found to be seemingly undoing all of their employers’ hard work in the fight against online piracy.
Perhaps it just goes to prove that everybody pirates?
The Recording Industry of America (RIAA) is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Hollywood, working on behalf of the record industry. It’s also one of the main proponents behind SOPA, the controversial anti-piracy act currently working its way through Congress.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does what it says on the tin. Part of its remit is to seize domain names controlled or managed by the U.S. government or U.S.-based firms to crack down on online piracy.
It would therefore be highly ironic should one find that employees of both the RIAA and the Dept. of Homeland Security should be found to be illegally downloading copyrighted material through peer-to-peer networks.
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Piracy of films, music and innovative technology is stunting creativity in the UAE, experts say.
The Ministry of Economy plans to restructure the intellectual property system and bring in new copyright laws, following a study by the Abu Dhabi Technology Development Committee expected to be released this month.
The plans include streamlined licensing with reduced bureaucracy, and tougher policing, with special intellectual piracy courts.
Industry specialists say drastic changes are needed to protect intellectual property rights, particularly in music, film, technology, book publishing and television.
David Butorac, chief executive of OSN Network, the cable and satellite operator, said pay-TV piracy in the Mena region cost operators more than US$500 million (Dh1.8bn) a year in lost revenue.
Governments must recognise the true cost of piracy, which “is too often seen as a victimless crime”, he said. TV piracy affected the broadcaster’s ability to invest in expanding the local production industry, which in turn made it harder to compete with the rest of the world.
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Bloggers rejoice! No longer will the recording, movie and software industries retain exclusive rights to the FBI’s familiar anti-piracy logo.
The “FBI Anti-Piracy Warning Seal,” which has been draped on Big Content’s wares since 2004, is going to be made available for use on all copyright content. Even personal websites can proudly display the logo without violating federal law, which carries a maximum six-month sentence and other penalties for using the insignia without FBI approval.
The FBI has only allowed its use by members of the Recording Industry Association of America, Business Software Alliance, Entertainment Software Association, Software & Information Industry Association, and of course the Motion Picture Association of America, which likes to make sure you can’t fast-forward through the DVD while the warning is displayed, thus driving you to download an MPEG from the Pirate Bay.
The Justice Department is taking public comment on the proposed new rule through November 7, and the changeover will likely be approved by the attorney general soon thereafter.
The FBI, in announcing the proposal in the Federal Registrar on Wednesday, said the insignia was an important warning to “users of copyrighted media about the potential consequences of intellectual property crime, and the FBI’s role in investigating such crime. It serves as a vivid and widely recognizable reminder of the FBI’s authority and mission with respect to the protection of intellectual property rights.”
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Two television producers say Fox ripped off their idea for a hidden-camera series in which a team of undercover investigators and decoys tempt potentially cheating lovers, branding it as the short-lived “Sex Decoy: Love Stings.”
Jennifer Barlow and Chantal Coffey Boccaccio say they conceived the idea for “Love Decoys” in early 2005. The television producers “outlined a premise, a format, trade secrets, marketing strategies, production theories, and a three-act scene structure for a hidden-camera show,” according to the copyright infringement action in Los Angeles District Court.
After registering “Love Decoys” with the Writer’s Guild of America, the producers made a “sizzle real” – a video teaser used for promotion. They pitched the video to Sandra Hope, a private investigator who had founded the Mate Check PI service that dispatches “decoys” to investigate suspected cheaters.
With the help of producer Tom Klein, Barlow and Boccaccio say they had meetings with Sandra Hope, but were unable to reach an agreement.
In May 2006, they took their idea to Mark Wolper, another producer, who agreed “to help sell and produce the potential series.”
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TWO hours before the NRL season kicked off, a young hacker was politely told to shut down his illegal website which had been streaming live matches – or face going to jail.
The NRLfixit.com.au website was started last season by a Rozelle youngster just out of high school.
In two days, “Liam” – as he wants to be known – had 6000 members and by the end of last season the number had grown to 12,000. He believed he would have tripled that this year.
Flushed with the success of his site, the young entrepreneur moved from amateur hacker to budding businessman and began looking for sponsors.
But NRL officials were not impressed.
“Organisations pay large sums of money for the rights to televise these matches,” NRL spokesman John Brady said. “And, like any brand, we have to protect ourselves and our clients against piracy.”
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Despite an international effort to ensure safe passage through the world’s most treacherous waters, pirates escalated their attacks in 2010 for the fourth straight year, striking more ships and taking more hostages last year than in any year on record, according to an annual report on piracy.
The report, by the Piracy Reporting Center of the International Maritime Bureau, found that pirates had taken 1,181 people hostage and killed 8 in attacks on 445 ships over the course of 2010. At least 53 ships were hijacked last year, the bureau said.
Attacks on ships were up 10 percent over 2009, as were the number of hostages. Pirates captured 1,050 people in 2009, with 4 killed.
“At the moment, it looks like it’s getting out of control,” said Capt. Pottengal Mukundan, director of the maritime bureau, which has tracked incidences of piracy at sea since 1991.
While the report catalogs violent attacks on ships around the world including those off the coast of Nigeria, Indonesia and Bangladesh, the most dangerous waters remain those off the coast of Somalia. Ninety percent of ship seizures occurred there last year, and at year’s end at least 28 vessels bearing 638 hostages were still being held for ransom.
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Ofcom has decided that only fixed line ISPs with more than 400,000 subscribers will be forced to comply with the Digital Economy Act’s controversial anti-filesharing provisions.
The communications regulator has informed the Internet Service Providers’ Association of the benchmark, and said it intends to publish rules within the next two weeks. The decision marks the swift conclusion of talks we reported on towards the end of April.
It means mobile broadband operators will be exempt from the system. The fixed line ISPs that will be required to send warning letters to customers and potentially throttle their bandwidth or temporarily suspend their access are: BT, TalkTalk, Virgin Media, Sky, Orange and O2.
KC, part of the KCOM Group, has less than 400,000 subscribers but does have a monopoly on fixed line internet access in the Hull area, so is also likely come under the regime.
Ofcom’s move will be welcomed at dozens of smaller ISPs who target niche and business markets. They argued that the administrative overheads of matching IP addresses to customers and sending out letters would have been disproportionate to the level of copyright infringement on their networks.
For their part, rights holder organisations such as the BPI want to address mainstream consumers who may be persuaded to revert to accessing copyright works lawfully. Between them, the seven ISPs that Ofcom’s code of practice will target control more than 95 per cent of the home broadband market.
However, a mass migration of copyright infringers to smaller ISPs is likely to prompt Ofcom to cast its net more widely.
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20th Century Fox may be thrilled to see how well Avatar is selling on Blu-ray, but the studio can’t be happy about the film’s through-the-roof piracy rates.
TorrentFreak reports that the Blu-ray version of Avatar was downloaded more than 200,000 times within four days of release. At this rate, it should have no trouble becoming the most popular pirated Blu-ray download of all time.
Avatar’s Blu-ray version measures roughly 10 GB, and the number of downloads is small compared to the film’s DVD version, but no other Blu-ray film comes close on the BitTorrent charts. This makes sense given that the movie crushed day one Blu-ray sales records through legitimate outlets.
TorrentFreak notes an interesting trend, however: A “relatively high percentage of downloads” (the site didn’t give specific numbers) come from the United Kingdom and Australia. That may be because 20th Century Fox released the film in the United States on April 22, and in the United Kingdom on April 26. The time difference may have played a role in peoples’ decisions to download, especially given that a weekend passed between the U.S. and U.K. release dates.
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CAMCORDER THEFT
Approximately ninety percent of newly released movies that are pirated can be traced to thieves who use a digital recording device in a movie theater to literally steal the image and/or sound off the screen. Camcorder theft is one of the biggest problems facing the film industry. All it takes is one camcorder copy to trigger the mass reproduction and distribution of millions of illegal Internet downloads and bootlegs in global street markets just hours after a film’s release and well before it becomes available for legal rental or purchase from legitimate suppliers. Studios and theater owners have significantly increased security and surveillance in theaters all over the world to thwart would-be camcorders. Since 2003, the major motion picture studios have employed technology such as watermarking films, which enables film companies to discern the source of a stolen film through forensic analysis and trace it back to the very theater in which it was recorded.
PEER-TO-PEER (P2P) THEFT
A peer-to-peer (P2P) network is a system that enables Internet users through the exchange of digital files among individual computers or “peers” to (1) make files (including movies and music) stored on their computer available for copying by other users; (2) search for files stored on other users’ computers; and (3) transfer exact copies of files from one computer to another. P2P technology itself is not illegal and may be useful for many legal purposes, but people often use the technology to illegally exchange copyrighted material on the Internet. While people may believe their files are being exchanged among only a few “friends,” these files can be accessed by millions of people around the world who are part of the same P2P network.
If you download movies using illegal peer-to-peer sites, you are often also distributing illegal content, as the default setting of most P2P networks ensures that individuals downloading files from the network are simultaneously uploading files and thus distributing illegal copies of works to other peers in the group, who in turn distribute the files to yet others.
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