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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Graphic designer and creative coder Frederic Brodbeck has analyzed movies to create a visual “fingerprint” for them, analyzing information such as editing structure, color, speech or motion and transforming them into graphic representations that can be compared side by side.
The project, called Cinemetrics, was for Brodbeck’s thesis in generative design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Brodbeck recognized that there were already lots of infographics using metadata related to movies, such as budget, box office data and awards. However, he was keen to use the movie itself as a source of data and create visualizations that captured the movies in their entirety.
Brodbeck disassembled video files into their components — video, audio, subtitles — and then processed them frame by frame, detecting when a shot ended, how much movement there is in the scene, and the colors used within the scene. These were fed into visualizations that are much more interactive and detailed than the likes of the Moviebarcode project, which Wired.co.uk reported on a few months ago.
The resulting “fingerprints” look a little like pie charts. The size of the pie corresponds to the length of the film. The segments of the fingerprint correspond to the length of the shots within the film. You can view the overall colors used in the entire movie, and broken down by each chapter. The amount that the segments move reflects the amount of movement in that scene. You can even click on the chart to see the particular frames that have been analyzed.
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Global software piracy reached a record figure of $59 billion last year, a new study from the Business Software Alliance has found.
That figure represents a 14 percent increase compared with 2009 and a doubling since 2003, the trade group said today. Forty-two percent of PC software was pirated worldwide last year, the group added, down one point from the previous year.
“The software industry is being robbed blind,” BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said in a statement. “Nearly $59 billion worth of products were stolen last year–and the rates of theft are completely out of control in the world’s fastest-growing markets.”
The Business Software Alliance operates on behalf of the software industry. Its members include Adobe Systems, Apple, Microsoft, and Symantec.
Emerging markets are the most troublesome for software makers, with the majority of all software piracy–$32 billion worth–occurring in those markets. In 2010, the BSA said, 50 percent of all PCs shipped around the world went to emerging markets. However, less than 20 percent of all paid software license revenue came from those areas.
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More than 23,000 people will soon be notified by their internet service providers that their subscriber information is being turned over to lawyers suing over the 2010 Sylvester Stallone flick The Expendables.
As we first reported Monday, the case is the largest BitTorrent file sharing lawsuit in U.S. history.
We just updated our IP Detective tool with the 23,322 IP addresses targeted between February 5 and April 22 in the mass lawsuit filed by the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Copyright Group on behalf of Nu Image Inc.
All told, more than 140,000 BitTorrent downloaders are being targeted in dozens of lawsuits across the country, many of them for downloading B-rated movies and porn. Film companies pay snoops to troll BitTorrent sites, dip into active torrents and capture the IP addresses of the peers who are downloading and uploading pieces of the files.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great resource on what to do if you’re a target.
As before, our widget also will attempt to check if you’re one of the nearly 6,000 targets in the controversial Nude Nuns with Big Guns case, or the Openmind Solutions lawsuit that’s going after nearly 3,000 alleged porn downloaders.
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A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. may spell the end of the “pay-up-or-else-schemes” that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person.
In the last year various copyright holders have sued well over 100,000 alleged file-sharers in the United States alone. The purpose of these lawsuits is to obtain the personal details of the alleged infringers, and use this information to negotiate a settlement offer ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
Lawyers, the public and consumer advocacy groups have compared these practices to extortion, but nonetheless new cases are still being filed every month. This week, however, an interesting ruling was handed down by District Court Judge Harold Baker that, if adopted by other judges, may become a major roadblock for similar mass-lawsuits.
In the case VPR Internationale v. Does 1-1017, the judge denied the Canadian adult film company access to subpoena ISPs for the personal information connected to the IP-addresses of their subscribers. The reason? IP-addresses do not equal persons, and especially in ‘adult entertainment’ cases this could obstruct a ‘fair’ legal process.
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More than 26 million pieces of pirated and illegal publications were destroyed across China on Friday to mark the World Intellectual Property Day on April 26, a sign of the country’s determination to protect intellectual property rights (IPR).
Pirated discs and books as well as unauthorized newspapers and periodicals were destroyed on Friday after being confiscated by authorities in all 31 province-level regions on the Chinese mainland.
Authorities will further crack down on piracy and focus on illegal printing houses and disc production lines, said Yan Xiaohong, deputy director of the State Press and Publication Administration and of the National Copyright Administration.
In Yunnan Province, anti-piracy authorities targeted their campaigns to areas nearby schools. Pornographic discs, books and pirated software were confiscated, said Yang Wenhu, head of the provincial Press and Publication Bureau.
Online piracy is a recent development, so Hainan Province targeted its campaign not only toward illegal publications but also to pirated content available online, said Wang Yangjun, deputy secretary general of Hainan provincial government.
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The White House’s top intellectual property official wants stiffer prison sentences for those found guilty of crimes such as selling counterfeit goods for military or law enforcement use, and she also wants illegal streaming of online content to be made a felony level crime when appropriate.
The recommendations were among a set of 20 suggestions Victoria Espinel made to Congress on Tuesday.
Espinel called on lawmakers to pass legislation requiring tougher sentences for organized crime groups and gangs that deal in counterfeit goods or commit other IP crimes, as well as for repeat offenders.
“Because of the high profit margin and shorter prison sentence for intellectual property crimes compared to other offenses, piracy and counterfeiting are a strong lure to organized criminal enterprises, which can use infringement as a revenue source to fund their other unlawful activities,” Espinel wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
She also wants lawmakers to enact longer sentences for people who transfer trade secrets outside of the U.S. or peddle counterfeit drugs.
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Falling DVD sales and piracy of movies is leading to renewed calls by Hollywood for new technologies to prevent unauthorised distribution of their intellectual properties.
A recent study by Adams Media Research found that DVD sales declined by 27 per cent since the heady days in 2004 when sales reached $12 billion worldwide.
To boost falling revenues and protect content, studios are “exploring on-demand delivery of theatre movies direct to consumers’ homes, confident that the service will not impact traditional theatre movies and DVD releases — that is, unless the business model is disrupted by piracy,” says global security software security firm Irdeto.
To prevent illegal viewing of pirated satellite signals around the globe, Irdeto has patented new “watermarking technology for set-top boxes.”
The company said that “studios are requiring additional security measures to mitigate potential threats of piracy and new software must be deployed to every set-top box offering early release entertainment.”
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Piracy worries and BitTorrent lawsuits have made their way into the generally very liberal anime industry. Last week, the producers of the new anime series Fractale told distributor Funimation to stop the online broadcast of the their show in the United States over piracy concerns, and a few days later Funimation announced a lawsuit against 1337 alleged BitTorrent downloaders.
Piracy is an issue that is troubling many content publishers worldwide, but the responses to copyright infringement differ from company to company. A great example of how not to stop piracy was made by the the producers of the new Anime series Fractale last week.
In an attempt to stop the illicit distribution of the series, the American anime distributor Funimation was ordered by Fractale’s production company to stop the online broadcast of the series on Hulu. The producers wanted Funimation to get rid of all pirated copies online before the broadcast could continue.
An interesting take on how piracy should be dealt with, and arguably one of the worst things a company can do to stop illicit copies from appearing online. Since the broadcast ban was limited to the US but not Europe, it only created an increased demand for pirated copies, while it did little to stop illegal copies from showing up online.
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If there was ever any doubt that the war on piracy was going to escalate this year, just look at how a new study out last week from research firm MonitorMark was received.
Sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the study found that 21 billion of the 53 billion visits per year that come to sites identified as sources of copyright-infringing content were concentrated among just three companies: Rapidshare(), Megavideo and MegaUpload(). Not long after the Motion Picture Association of America issued a press release hailing the study, Rapidshare threatened to sue MonitorMark for defamation, while MegaUpload dismissed it as “overblown allegations.”
The dueling rhetoric underscores the sensitivity over a very distinct shift away from the Bittorrent sites where the rate of piracy has leveled off, to a new breed of file-hosting websites that are seeing explosive growth. That shift has necessitated a redrawing of content owners’ battle plans. Here’s a look at the likeliest new fronts in the war on piracy in 2011.
File hosting sites come in a few different flavors. There are cyberlockers, which provide cloud-based storage to consumers who pay monthly fees to store what the studios claim is an ungodly trove of copyrighted content. Companies like Rapidshare would beg to differ, depicting themselves as legitimate companies that are working on ridding their sites of what little pirated content they host.
There are also linking sites, which provide users with links to either stream or download content but don’t actually host that content. And then there are storefronts, which essentially provide both hosting and linking, sometimes with interfaces so slick they can fool unsuspecting customers into thinking they are legit.
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