TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Google and Leading Web Firms Get Their Way in Online Piracy Dispute
- BitTorrent Inventor Demos New P2P Live Streaming Protocol
- US Official Speaks Untruths About Torrent-Finder Domain Seizure
| Google and Leading Web Firms Get Their Way in Online Piracy Dispute Posted: 20 Jan 2011 03:18 AM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! .
The focus of this attention has fallen on some of the country’s biggest web companies – Google, mail service Mail.ru, social networking site Vkontakte (which was named by the RIAA as one of the world’s most notorious ‘pirate markets’ for illicit music), and search engines Yandex and Rambler. Via an open letter to both the entertainment industries and lawmakers last year, the five companies insisted that it is impossible for them to monitor millions of users to ensure their every act is legal. Furthermore, it is the actual infringers who should be held liable for their own copyright breaches, the companies said. Now, according to a statement by Russian Communications and Press Minister Igor Shchyogolev reported by Vedomosti, it appears these web giants will have their way. In future, Internet users – not service providers, will be held accountable for making available copyright infringing media. While Google welcomed the announcement, it and other web companies won’t be completely absolved of responsibility when it comes to infringing material held on their servers. While placing the main burden on the shoulders of the main infringers, Shchyogolev reminded web firms that they too have responsibility and must remove content from their servers once they are advised by copyright holders it is unauthorized. This manoeuvring on liability by both the entertainment industries and service providers is an attempt to influence a bill currently being drafted by Russia’s communications ministry. The bill will regulate intellectual property rights disputes on the Internet which are often perceived as operating in something of a legislative vacuum. But not everyone welcomes the change. "It is not up to the communications ministry to regulate intellectual property rights," said Irina Tulubyeva, IP lawyer and head of the Russian Organization for Intellectual Property Rights. Tulubyeva says that while protecting service providers, the law will damage the interests of rightsholders and hold the average Internet user to blame, all while the big web companies continue to make advertising money. "With this new law, piracy will reign," Tulubyeva said. |
| BitTorrent Inventor Demos New P2P Live Streaming Protocol Posted: 19 Jan 2011 01:40 PM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! .
However, a key characteristic of the young Internet is that it constantly evolves, and in 2005 video streaming was brought to the mainstream thanks to YouTube. This online video streaming revolution has hugely increased the use of bandwidth by individual consumers. At the same time it's also resulting in huge bandwidth bills for streaming sites. So as we near the 10th anniversary of BitTorrent its inventor Bram Cohen is finalizing a new protocol, this time aimed at P2P-live streaming. Although P2P-live streaming is not something new per se, Cohen thinks that his implementation will set itself apart from competitors with both its efficiency and extremely low latency. "Doing live properly is a hard problem, and while I could have a working thing relatively quickly, I'm doing everything the 'right' way," Bram Cohen told TorrentFreak last year when he announced his plans. He further explained that the BitTorrent protocol had to be redone to make it compatible with live streams, "including ditching TCP and using congestion control algorithms different from the ones we've made for UTP" In the months that followed Cohen figured out most of this complex puzzle and the technology is now mature enough to show to the public. Although there’s still a lot of secrecy around the technical details, the BitTorrent team agreed to show TorrentFreak a demo in anticipation of the official release later this year. Although it’s fascinating to see BitTorrent’s inventor waving at a computer, it is impossible to see how this compares to competing technologies without the option of testing a working version and having more technical details. Over the years we’ve already seen a few working implementations and adaptations of the BitTorrent protocol that allow for P2P live streaming. Most notable is the SwarmPlayer, which has proven to work well with low latencies in real live tests, but usually supported by high bandwidth ‘fall-back peers’. “The main areas of innovation relate to techniques he is using to manage latency at an unprecedented low while controlling network congestion,” BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris told TorrentFreak in our quest for more information. “As outlined in the academic literature on live P2P content delivery, the management of live p2p streaming on the open internet requires split second reconfigurations to reroute content delivery in the fewest possible round trips between peers in the event of network hiccups.” “Bram's methods to manage network reconfiguration wrap rerouting together with a novel approach to congestion control. Obviously we'll be happy to share more technical details in due course, but only once the technology reaches a level of maturity that it makes sense to share.” This means that the wait continues, and we were told that the official release will take at least a few more months. For some reason we think that it might take until July, which makes sense PR-wise because the BitTorrent protocol then officially celebrates its tenth anniversary. |
| US Official Speaks Untruths About Torrent-Finder Domain Seizure Posted: 19 Jan 2011 06:15 AM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! .
The legitimacy of the Torrent-Finder domain seizure was questioned from the start, and the owner of the site is now fighting to get his domain back through an expensive legal procedure. In the past several weeks the authorities involved in the seizures have not responded to the critique, but at the Congressional Internet Caucus’ State of the ‘Net conference ICE director John Morton broke the silence. “They were all knowingly engaged in the sale of counterfeit goods,” Morton said yesterday, defending the “Cyber Monday Crackdown" domain seizures. “We’re going to enforce the law. It’s that simple,” he added. Now this is just flat out wrong, on more than one count. For one, torrent sites are in no way connected to counterfeit goods. A counterfeit product is by definition an imitation of a product that is often sold to consumers as the real deal. The term applies to fake watches, clothing and other consumer goods, but certainly not to any of the digital files that can be found via search engines such as Torrent-Finder. In addition, the ICE director claims that such counterfeit goods were sold at Torrent-Finder. Again, this is nowhere near the truth as virtually all torrent sites, Torrent-Finder included, offer their services to the public at no cost. There is nothing to be sold, and certainly not any counterfeit goods. It has to be said that many of the seized domains were indeed involved in selling counterfeit products, but Torrent-Finder and several music linking sites weren’t. That said, Morton’s statement specifically includes all their seized sites, even though the controversial position of Torrent-Finder and the music linking sites were brought up at the conference. The ICE director made quite a misstep with the statement we quoted above, and the worrying part is that it might even be unintentional. It wouldn’t surprise us if Morton has no idea what a torrent site actually is. The frequent mix-up between counterfeiting and digital piracy, however, is a worrying trend for sure. Although we quoted less than two dozen words from Morton there is another part that we believe isn’t as “simple” as the ICE director claims. “We’re going to enforce the law,” he said, but that’s a stretched statement to say the least. What law is it, that mandates the seizure of a website that links to other websites that may link to files that could link to copyrighted material? If there’s arguably any suspicion of a copyright infringement related offense committed by Torrent-Finder, wouldn’t it be a civil dispute under current law? The documentation and the official response from ICE regarding the seizure of Torrent-Finder have “fail” written all over them. Not only is the response from Morton factually incorrect and inappropriate, but the original seizure warrant was also full of inaccuracies and misunderstandings as well. The big question is whether it will matter in the end. The Government seems to be committed to a crackdown on piracy, and domain seizures are an effective tool to get sites down temporarily. It’s a grim outlook, but with the increased Government involvement in the Internet we fear that many sites may lose their domains in the coming year. |
For the past several months the international entertainment industries, desperate to stop the illicit sharing of their movies and music, have increasingly insisted that Russian web companies should keep their systems free from copyright works, if necessary by employing teams of people to do so.
BitTorrent was the first widely adopted technology that made it possible to download large videos online in a timely fashion. It’s needless to say that BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen unleashed a small revolution here, even though he never 
Late November last year, the news that 82 domains had been | You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment