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As ISPs Mull Pact To Fight AFACT, Pirate Party Condemns ‘Extortion’ Posted: 13 Jul 2011 03:25 AM PDT To many in the business world, using strong-arm tactics against companies whose help you need to achieve your aims is something to be avoided. It creates bad feeling and can be somewhat counter-productive. Issuing threats to potential business partners is hardly an indication that those relationships are going the right way. Nevertheless, this is the position Australia’s ISPs find themselves in today. They have a written ultimatum from the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, the anti-piracy group financed by the big Hollywood studios. Received last week, the memo gives the ISPs until close of business today to give their commitment to entering into talks to hinder online file-sharing – or suffer the consequences. This aggressive approach has already “rubbed up” Exetel boss John Linton “the wrong way”, as Aussies might put it. He has declared that he won’t be responding to AFACT’s threats. Now, according to a new report and contrary to the result hoped for by AFACT, another ISP is trying to form a coalition with its rivals to fend off Hollywood’s demands. A Telstra spokeswoman quoted by The Australian has confirmed that the ISP is liaising with the Communications Alliance to develop an industry-wide response to AFACT. “Telstra remains open to discussing how we might assist copyright holders to enforce their private property rights. Given this is an industrywide issue Telstra has encouraged discussions to be facilitated by the Communications Alliance,” she said. The Communications Alliance was set up to provide a unified voice for the Australian telecommunications industry, offer contributions to policy development and ensure the protection of consumer interests. A spokesperson confirmed that the organization is working with the ISPs to find “an industry-led solution” to online copyright issues. Rather than adopt ISP suggestions that are unlikely to go far enough for Hollywood, AFACT appears to prefer a fairly aggressive approach to infringement touted by Judge Arthur Emmett during the iiNet trial. Throwing their 3-cornered hats into the mix, Pirate Party Australia have rejected not only Emmett’s suggestions, but also the manner in which AFACT have approached the ISPs. “Pirate Party Australia is opposed to the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft’s (AFACT) latest offensive against Australian internet users,” the party said in a statement. “AFACT’s alleged extreme demands would require ISPs to notify their customers of infringements as alleged by AFACT and disconnect them if they do not respond within 7 days. “These veiled threats are nothing more than intimidation tactics that once again clearly display the extent that Big Media will go to in their failing attempts to protect their flawed business models. Extortion is a new low even for AFACT,” says Acting Secretary, Brendan Molloy. “It is completely inappropriate to have closed-room discussions even before the iiNet court case has concluded, and even more inappropriate to make veiled threats to begin yet another court case for not attending these ‘voluntary talks’.” The party concludes by urging ISPs to unite against AFACT and refuse to become their copyright enforcement officers. Involving the Communications Alliance in AFACT discussions would seem to be a sensible move by the ISPs. In the light of this development it remains to be seen whether AFACT still feels inclined to go ahead with whatever action lies behind today’s deadline. Source: As ISPs Mull Pact To Fight AFACT, Pirate Party Condemns ‘Extortion’

Google’s Anti-Piracy Filter Is Quite Effective Posted: 12 Jul 2011 02:27 PM PDT Starting a few months ago Google began filtering "piracy-related" terms from its 'Autocomplete' and 'Instant' services. The unpublished blacklist includes "torrent", "BitTorrent", "uTorrent" and "MegaUpload" and was updated with the term "Mediafire" last month. According to Google, the blacklist is an effective tool to curb online piracy, even if the terms themselves are not exclusively linked to copyright infringement. "While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online," Google spokesman Mistique Cano previously told TorrentFreak. "This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference," Cano added. The question is however, does this filter indeed make a difference? In the past we’ve pointed out that many people discover piracy-related services based on Google’s suggestions. So, if Google’s censorship attempt would indeed decrease the number of actual searches for the filtered keywords, one could argue that it ‘works.’ To find out what effect the anti-piracy filter has had we decided to take a look at Google’s own search trends, and the results are quite astonishing. Below are the search trend graphs for several forbidden keywords and all show a massive drop in search volume after the anti-piracy filter was implemented in January. BitTorrent Searches on Google The graph above reveals that searches for BitTorrent quickly dropped by half, and as of today it remains that way. The graph below shows that a similar pattern can be observed for MegaUpload searches, which had been rising month after month until Google put it on its blacklist. Megaupload Searches on Google These search trends are the same for pretty much all the censored keywords. Even searches for the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent dropped to the lowest volume since 2006 after the filter was installed. Below is the graph for Mediafire searches, one of the latest keywords that was added to the blocklist at the end of April. Mediafire Searches on Google Of course the drop in search volume doesn’t mean that there’s a significant drop in actual piracy rates, but the patterns above are surprising to say the least. Although we had predicted a slight drop in search traffic because of the anti-piracy filter, we never expected it to have this much of an impact. All the more reason for the copyright lobby to suggest banning even more keywords. While the copyright lobby will count this outcome as a win, the arbitrary filters are not necessarily in the best interests of the Internet as a whole. Google’s lack of transparency about the list of censored keywords and the fact that dictionary words such as ‘torrent’ and company names such as ‘RapidShare’ are included is a worrying development, to say the least. Source: Google’s Anti-Piracy Filter Is Quite Effective

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