The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that ISPs can be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. According to the decision by the Supreme Court, sites offering torrent files that link to copyrighted material are engaging in criminal activity.
Lawyers who told thousands of individuals that they held proof of their illicit file-sharing, have made a surprise announcement. ACS:Law, who help companies generate revenue from porn movie copyrights, say they are dropping many cases because litigation is neither viable nor beneficial to their clients.
uTorrent – the preferred Bittorrent client for many BitTorrent users – has been doing really well in 2009. Contrary to reports claiming that BitTorrent and P2P usage has been declining, in the last year uTorrent nearly doubled its userbase to 52 million unique users a month.
Our fellow Internet freedom advocates at Electronic Frontiers Australia are gearing up for an important fight in the new year as the Australian government proposes mandatory national Internet filters with a secret blacklist. EFA is looking for volunteers and colleagues — particularly Australians, but they can use help from outside Australia as well — to help take on this critical issue. As Lelia Green wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald, the censorship proposal risks “legitimating a range of repressive policies pursued by some of the globe’s least accountable governments.”
In 2006, the New York Times reported that the People’s Republic of China was defending its Internet censorship and surveillance practices by claiming that they were not particularly different from those of other countries. The Times reported that a Chinese official argued (in the newspaper’s paraphrase) that “the controls [China] places on Web sites and Internet service providers in mainland China do not differ much from those employed by the United States and European countries”.
“If you study the main international practices in this regard you will find that China is basically in compliance with the international norm,” [Liu Zhengrong] said. “The main purposes and methods of implementing our laws are basically the same.”
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“It is clear that any country’s legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information,” he said. “We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front.”
This argument sounded like a weak rationalization in 2006, and the Times noted various qualitative differences between Internet restrictions in the PRC and those in liberal democracies. But researchers have told us that governments around the world, including Australia’s, seem eager to chip away at those differences. The forthcoming book Access Controlled from the OpenNet Initiative, according to its authors, reports on an alarming trend where “Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance are increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states.” The OpenNet Initiative researchers have also noted that governments are increasingly looking to other countries’ practices as precedents. Soon illiberal regimes’ claims that Internet censorship and national firewalls are a widespread international norm could ring less hollow. Some year soon, it may be sober fact rather than rationalization.
EFA’s fight against Internet censorship in Australia is crucial. We hope Internet users around the world will join it.
Following a 2006 complaint by several Hollywood studios, a US federal court in California has ruled that isoHunt is guilty of inducing copyright infringement. Due to the similarities between this case and earlier ones involving Napster and Grokster, the judge decided there is no need to proceed to a full trial. Summary judgment was granted.
The Pirate Bay is one of the longest-standing BitTorrent sites. The former BitTorrent tracker recently celebrated its 6th birthday, and this Christmas they bring back the good old days by reverting to their old layout. The frontpage now has a classic look and is Swedish only.
In 2005, Mongo56 was a household name in the BitTorrent community. Much to the disappointment of hundreds and thousands of users, the site collapsed under its own success and the DDoS attacks that accompanied it. But now, nearly 4 years later, the brand name has resurfaced.
A U.S. federal court in California has issued a summary judgment against Canadian-based isoHunt (and its owner Gary Fung), ruling that the site violates U.S. copyright law by inducing copyright infringement. The judge ruled that the isoHunt case is little different from other U.S. cases such as Napster and Grokster, therefore concluding that there is no need to proceed to a full trial and granting Columbia Pictures request for summary judgment.
The court is dismissive of claims that differences in BitTorrent technology raises different legal issues from those addressed in the other peer-to-peer cases. Moreover, the decision includes an extensive discussion of Fung's comments regarding P2P file sharing, which proved damaging to his case. The court also notably concludes that inducement liability and the safe harbours found under the DMCA are incompatible – if you are found to have induced infringement, you cannot qualify for the safe harbour. IsoHunt will presumably appeal the U.S. decision, but it marks a resounding victory for the movie studios that launched the case.
English singer-songwriter Jamie Cullum has admitted that, like many of his fellow Brits, he is an avid music pirate. While noting that as many copies of his album have been downloaded illicitly as bought officially, Cullum says that punishing file-sharers is out of the question. Only cutting-edge legal services have the solution.