Continuing our series of articles on the most pivotal BitTorrent sites of the last decade, our focus turns to the most dramatic site shutdowns. Without doubt, 2005 proved a momentous year, marked by the introduction to the war of a new anti-piracy force to be reckoned with - the FBI.
Nemet Chevrolet sued the website Consumeraffairs.com over some posts on that website which Nemet thought were defamatory and interfered with Nemet’s business expectancy. The website moved to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that the Communications Decency Act at 47 U.S.C. 230 immunized the website from the lawsuit.
The court dismissed the action on Section [...]
As the year moves toward its conclusion, we have been listing the most pirated entertainment titles of 2009. Following our Top 10 games and movies charts, we now turn to the most downloaded TV-shows. Despite declining viewership offline, Heroes is the most downloaded show, with over 6 million downloads for a single episode.
We are about to end the decade that brought us BitTorrent, and all the good and bad that came with it. In a series of articles during the coming days, we will review some of the most pivotal torrent sites that emerged over the years, each of which left their mark and brought us to where we are today.
Sunday’s New York Times featured a provocative op-ed arguing in addition to regulating “net neutrality” the FCC should also effectuate “search neutrality” - requiring search providers rank results without consideration of business entities. The author heaps particular scorn upon Google for promoting its own context-relevant services (i.e. maps and weather) at the fore of search results. Others have already reviewed the proposal, leveled implementation critiques, and criticized the author’s gripes with his own site. My aim here is to rebut the piece’s core argument: the analogy of search neutrality to net neutrality. Clearly both are debates about the promotion of innovation and competition through a level playing field. But beyond this commonality the parallel breaks down.
Net neutrality advocates call for regulation because ISP discrimination could render innovative services either impossible to implement owing to traffic restrictions or too expensive to deploy owing to traffic pricing. Consumers cannot “vote with their dollars” for a nondiscriminatory ISP since most locales have few providers and the market is hard to break into. Violations of net neutrality, the argument goes, threaten to nip entire industries in the bud and rob the economy of growth.
Violations of search neutrality, on the other hand, at most increase marketing costs for an innovative or competitive offering. Consumers are more than clever enough to seek and use an alternative to a weaker Google offering (Yelp vs. Google restaurant reviews, anyone?). The author of the op-ed cites Google Maps’ dethroning of MapQuest as evidence of the power of search non-neutrality; on the contrary, I would contend users flocked to Google’s service because it was, well, better. If Google Maps featured MapQuest’s clunky interface and vice versa, would you use it? A glance at historical map site statistics empirically rebuts the author’s claim. The mid-May 2007 introduction of Google’s context-relevant (“universal”) search does not appear correlated with any irregular shift in map site traffic.
Moreover, unlike with net neutrality search consumers stand ready to “vote with their [ad] dollars.” Should Google consistently favor its own services to the detriment of search result quality, consumers can effortlessly shift to any of its numerous competitors. It is no coincidence Google sinks enormous manpower into improving result quality.
There may also be a benefit to the increase in marketing costs from existing violations of search neutrality, like Google’s map and weather offerings. If a service would have to be extensively marketed to compete with Google’s promoted offering - say, a current weather site vs. searching for “Stanford weather” - the market is sending a signal that consumers don’t care about the marginal quality of the product, and the non-Google provider should quit the market.
There is merit to the observation that violations of search neutrality are, on the margin, slightly anti-competitive. But this issue is dwarfed by the potential economy-scale implications of net neutrality. The FCC should not deviate in its rulemaking.
Conduit, the leading provider of community toolbars for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and the Safari web browsers, has decided to ban the use of P2P-related words on their services. Toolbars using the words ‘torrent’ or ‘p2p’ are banned as they apparently violate the the terms and conditions of Conduit’s publisher agreement.
Reports this morning indicate that the government plans to prorogue Parliament, effectively shutting it down until March. One of the effects of prorogation is that all bills that have not received royal assent die and must be restarted from the beginning when a new Parliament begins. While the government can try to move bills with broad support quickly back through the process (reinstatement requires approval in the House), the delays are significant. Only 27 of the 64 Government bills introduced during the current session have received royal assent, leaving 37 bills in need of a restart. Of those, at least four involve technology law: C-27 (anti-spam, electronic commerce), C-46 (lawful access), C-47 (lawful access), and C-58 (ISP child pornography reporting). The anti-spam bill was the most advanced, having cleared the House of Commons and slated for review by a Senate Committee early in the new year.
The Canadian government has convinced a German ISP to shut down two environmental parody sites that were developed by the "Yes Men" and garnered considerable attention during the Copenhagen climate conference. The ISP complied with the request without seeking a court order first and in the process blocked an additional 4,500 sites hosted on the same IP block.
Groovle, a Toronto-based firm, has defeated Google in a domain name dispute case. Google claimed that the domain was confusingly similar to its own, but an NAF panel disagreed.
The NY Times reports on the fee-for-carriage fight brewing in the U.S. (where carriage is optional and fees are negotiating). Denis McGrath highlights some of the key differences between the U.S. and Canada on this issue.