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First Ever Scottish ‘Anti-Camcorder’ Piracy Conviction
Stream Torrents in Your Web Browser With Magic Player
Newzbin Speaks Out On MPA High Court Blocking Action

First Ever Scottish ‘Anti-Camcorder’ Piracy Conviction

Posted: 01 Jul 2011 01:10 AM PDT

When it comes to “first ever” convictions, prosecutors in Scotland are certainly racking up the points this year.

In May we reported that Anne Muir, a 58-year-old woman from Ayr, had pleaded guilty to criminal file-sharing offences. She received three years probation.

While Muir’s case was brought following investigations by the BPI and IFPI, this latest case is the work of FACT, the Hollywood-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft.

From their monitoring of the Internet, FACT were able to trace ‘cam’ copies of movies including Big Bang, Four Lions, Iron Man 2, Kick Ass and Nanny McPhee back to Scotland. Hidden watermarks in the recordings led them directly to the Cineworld cinema in Renfrew Street, Glasgow.

In order to build their case, FACT were given access to a database of Cineworld customers who pay a set fee to watch unlimited movies each month. They found that now 25-year-old Christopher Clarke from Glasgow had watched them all.

In May last year a pre-Cannes Film Festival screening of Robin Hood was arranged for Cineworld, a golden opportunity for someone looking to get an early copy of the movie. Clarke took the bait and FACT were waiting for him.

Alerted by FACT, the police stopped Clarke as he left the cinema. They found a mobile phone hidden in a cloth enclosure, fashioned to hide the device and keep it still during recording. It contained a copy of Robin Hood. A subsequent search of Clarke’s flat revealed recordings of other films on his computer.

As we’ve learned from other cases in Britain, making a recording of a movie in a cinema isn’t necessarily illegal. However, Clarke admitted to using his girlfriend’s Internet connection to upload the movies to an unnamed “pay website”, an action which rendered his camming a criminal act.

Clarke pleaded guilty to a charge under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and was sentenced at Glasgow Sheriff Court to 160 hours of community service.

“Following the intelligence development by FACT, there was excellent co-operation from Cineworld, Strathclyde Police and the procurator fiscal to ensure that Christopher Clarke was brought to justice,” said FACT Director General Kieron Sharp.

“This individual was responsible for the recording of five films and their subsequent uploading to the internet for downloading or streaming by millions of people worldwide.”

This first-of-its-kind conviction in Scotland follows a similar English case last year. In September 2010, then 22-year-old Emmanuel Nimley was sentenced to 6 months in jail for recording movies including Alice in Wonderland and Green Zone and subsequently uploading them to the Internet.

Source: First Ever Scottish ‘Anti-Camcorder’ Piracy Conviction

Stream Torrents in Your Web Browser With Magic Player

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 02:44 PM PDT

While millions of people still use BitTorrent every day to download videos, increasingly streaming sites have become more dominant for online entertainment. Nearly every video file available via BitTorrent can also be streamed online somewhere, for a payment or totally free.

While BitTorrent was one of the first technologies to enable the easy downloading of very large video files, it now has some catching up to do. The masses want their video and music on demand, and if BitTorrent wants to remain the big player it is today it has to deliver just that.

To this end, during recent years many BitTorrent clients have introduced streaming functionality, and there are also a few web-based services that offer similar capabilities. The Torrent Stream Magic Player is a new streaming service that sets itself apart by offering a true video-on-demand look and feel through a browser add-on.

Developed by a team of Russian coders the free add-on, bundled with a windows streaming application, adds a “view torrent online” option to the browser’s context menu. Once the add-on and app are installed and configured all the user has to do is right click on a .torrent link and a fancy player slides into the browser.

Torrent Stream Magic Player

torrent stream

Providing the user has enough bandwidth and the torrent file is well seeded, the video or music track starts to play in just a few seconds. Additional controls also give the user the option to manage a playlist and pause the torrent file whenever needed.

The add-on is in an early stage of development and the developers told TorrentFreak that many new features will be added in the near future. Aside from obvious bugfixes users will get the option to style the player into a more personal look. The team is also working on decreasing buffering times to allow for even more instant gratification.

And then there’s another upcoming feature that will be a bit more controversial. The developers are working on an upgrade that will allows users to get relevant streams from various movie and music portals that don’t offer content themselves. This ‘magic button’ will appear when users browse a compatible site such as IMdB, and it will bring up suggested content to stream directly.

We tried the add-on and can confirm that it works as promised. Although the add-on can be improved on some small points it doesn’t have the clunky feel of some other browser-based torrent streaming solutions. It works well with both videos and music and is definitely worth a try.

Interested readers should be aware that aside from streaming, data is also saved on the local computer and has to be removed manually. More information, tips and tricks are available on the Torrent Stream Magic Player website.

Source: Stream Torrents in Your Web Browser With Magic Player

Newzbin Speaks Out On MPA High Court Blocking Action

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 05:24 AM PDT

newzbin There have been dozens of news reports on the High Court proceedings this week. While the MPA and BT have made token comments to the press, the thoughts and opinions of Team R Dogs, the group behind Newzbin2, have not featured anywhere.

Despite an earlier statement which indicated that Newzbin2′s owners would hire lawyers to fight attempts to have them blocked by ISPs in the UK, the site was not represented at this week’s hearing nor did they have any type of input.

Today, through site spokesman Mr White, Team R Dogs denounce what the team feel are the pointless efforts of the “Copyright Dinosaurs” at the MPA and bemoan the site’s lack of input at the High Court proceedings.

"A Newzbin2 themed costume party, with horsehair wigs, and no-one invited us. The MPA didn't invite us, BT didn't invite us, the court didn't invite us. Team R Dogs would have loved to have had some say,” Mr White explains.

Nevertheless, although the input of the team would have been useful, their absence from the proceedings shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, despite their enthusiasm.

Not only would their involvement represent a huge financial cost to the site, any official contribution would almost certainly require that the site’s ownership break their carefully crafted cover. As observers of file-sharing litigation will recognize, that kind of exposure can open up unwanted and painful fronts when fighting an entity such as the MPA.

The importance of the action, however, is clear to Newzbin2.

“If the MPA get this injunction they will certainly, in the mould of the Internet Watch Foundation, start to add to the list other sites that offend them, e.g. the Pirate Bay. All of this will probably also be secret and, like us, not subject to an appeal or any due process,” Mr White explains.

“What happens when some bunch of quackpot frauds like homeopaths decide that instead of suing Simon Singh and losing, it would be easier to force BT to block access to any website referring to his debunkings?”

But of course, getting a site blocked either by injunction or via some other private company-run firewall service is one thing, getting a site white-listed again is another matter.

Mr White says that even if Newzbin2 began operating in an MPA-approved manner in the future, it is doubtful that event would signal the lifting of any granted injunction or ISP blockade, something that would prove unpopular with site subscribers.

“The injunction will be hated by our users – none of whom have asked for the site to be blocked: those trying to access our content, much of it legal, will simply be denied access to a site they have paid a membership to. Web blocks only ever work where people bump into a site accidentally; our users will simply use Google to find us by some other method: probably a method provided by us.”

As noted in our earlier article, BT was selected by the MPA not only because it’s the largest UK ISP, but because it already has blocking technology in place. Known as Cleanfeed, the system is used by the ISP to block images of child abuse.

Whatever readers may think of Newzbin2′s actions, those of the MPA, BT, or any decision coming from the High Court, blocking images of exploitation has to be a good thing. The problem here, however, is that along with blocking technologies come unblocking technologies, and they will only become more prevalent as more people need them.

Currently only a small subset Internet users need to know how to evade blocks to get to child porn; giving millions of others trying to access sites such as Newzbin2 the ability will eventually tear a hole through the originally well-intentioned Cleanfeed, and that can never be good. The copyright war continues to cause collateral damage, the “unintended consequences” so often spoken about.

“Newzbin2 is currently evaluating methods to defeat Cleanfeed without the need to adopt radical technological changes (although we are looking at those too for the future).

“Blocking us is futile and the MPA have made Cleanfeed technology a target to be defeated by those determined to counter censorship technologies. How unfortunate if that allows perverts to prosper. Perhaps the MPA should have thought of the kids?”

The Newzbin2 team also criticize the words of MPA Euro head Chris Marcich when he said this week that Hollywood had “explored every route to get Newzbin to take down the infringing material” and was ultimately “left with no option but to challenge this in the courts.”

“Two things have obviously never passed the lips of Mr Marcich: the truth, or the tongue of a loving woman,” says Mr White.

“Newzbin2 has never heard a peep out of the MPA; not so much as a Christmas card let alone a DMCA takedown notice.”

Going on to differentiate Newzbin2 from the original Newzbin (the site battered by the MPA in a 2010 legal victory), Mr White says that the latest incarnation of the site “respects copyright and acts on DMCA notices: [the MPA] just haven't sent us any.”

Of course, DMCA notices are from the US legal system and don’t mean very much in a UK court. Furthermore, Team R Dogs say they are not UK-based and therefore are not bound by UK copyright law. The site itself appears to be hosted in Sweden. Such is the nature of the Internet; are we here, there, or somewhere else when using it?

Nevertheless, ISPs in the UK are required to take action against direct infringement when they become aware of it which brings us full circle to the very point of the MPA’s demands for an injunction against Newzbin2. But does the MPA’s request go too far?

We will have to wait for that decision. Yesterday Mr Justice Arnold said the court will make a formal judgment soon after July 12th, pending the outcome of another case involving the sale of counterfeit products on eBay.

The ruling in that case, i.e whether eBay is responsible for illegal products being sold by 3rd parties via its site, will have a bearing on the Newzbin2 case.

Source: Newzbin Speaks Out On MPA High Court Blocking Action

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