TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Digital Economy Act: A Foregone Conclusion?
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
- Torrent Sites Get “Restraining Order” From Indian High Court
| Digital Economy Act: A Foregone Conclusion? Posted: 01 Aug 2011 01:42 AM PDT Was the Digital Economy Act always going to be implemented? The latest revelations in the Act’s complex two year history shows that it was always going to happen, and that public consultation on the matter was just a sham.
The Act was pushed through by Lord Mandelson, then Secretary of State (SoS) for Business, reportedly after visiting Dreamworks founder David Geffen at a villa in Corfu on 7 August 2009. It turns out that Lord Mandelson’s protestations, that the meeting had nothing to do with his support for the initial Bill, were true. Just released documents show that Mandelson had made his mind up before that, following meetings several weeks earlier with head of Universal Music, Lucian Grainge. If that doesn’t sound so bad, keep in mind that at this point Mandelson’s department was conducting a public consultation on this very topic, with 2 months still to go. Documents released from Lord Mandelson’s office this week under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that this was a waste of time, and that almost nothing any participant could have said would have made a difference. Notes from the July 2nd 2009 meeting show Grainge stating that notices will not work, which users have been happy to verify, and that "industries are being decimated by illegal file sharing", an odd position to take since the British Phonographic industry has noted singles sales growing by at least 30% annually for the 4 years prior to this, and album sales only slightly down on their pre-Napster figures. They might be forgiven for this mistake, unless someone had actually pointed out the sales figures in a consultation response, which someone did, although not until the end of the consultation period, in late September, two months after the decisions had been made. In fact, the timetable released shows that the day after meeting with Grainge, Mandelson looked to force regulator OFCOM to go straight to ‘technical measures’ (slowdowns and disconnections), followed a week later by advice that judging the effectiveness of notices wasn’t needed, based purely on the (false) claims of a music industry CEO.
Such flagrant disregard for public opinion is not all that uncommon, but to do so in the middle of a public consultation is a very questionable practice One consultation respondent told TorrentFreak: "As someone who went to considerable effort to submit a rational and evidence-based response to the consultation on these issues, I am disappointed, although not surprised, to see that the outcome was predetermined." The UK Pirate Party is a little more scathing. “These documents show how outrageously complicit everyone from the entertainment industry, politicians and unions were in framing the Digital Economy Act," PPUK Chair Loz Kaye told TorrentFreak. "Its most controversial aspect – suspending people from the Internet – was already sorted out in July 2009. It appears that the consultation was just for show, and the lobbyists got all they asked for. There are now serious questions to be asked of successive governments’ relations to groups like Universal Music and the BPI.” As for the Geffen issue, while it is unlikely that claims that the topic never came up are true, there can be no doubt that Mandelson was not ‘recruited’ then, but a month earlier. A fact he teased with in his denial, which emphasised that "… work on this was already well in hand before the SoS’s [Mandelson's] holiday.” — Many thanks to Philippe Bradley and the Open Rights Group for persevering and getting these documents made public. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent Posted: 01 Aug 2011 12:10 AM PDT The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Your Highness’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’. ‘Source Code’ completes the top three.
The DVDrip of Your Highness is the most downloaded movie this week, bumping Source Code off its throne. The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
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| Torrent Sites Get “Restraining Order” From Indian High Court Posted: 31 Jul 2011 12:46 PM PDT In an attempt to prevent pirates from downloading their latest movie Singham, Reliance Entertainment came up with a rather unconventional anti-piracy strategy. The company managed to obtain a so-called John Doe order from the Indian High Court, which they are now sending to various torrent sites that could potentially link to a pirated version of the movie.
It turned out that the ISPs in question were responding to a court order under which they had to block access to the Reliance Entertainment movie Singham. Responding to this request, some ISPs overreacted and blocked entire sites, rather than just the single movie. Aside from asking ISPs to serve as the copyright police, the makers of Singham also approached many torrent sites directly over the last days. Armed with a “John Doe” order from the Indian High Court, they are going after all sites that could potentially link to pirated versions of their film. Since the order is not targeted at any site in particular (but at anonymous offenders), Reliance Entertainment can simply send the order to whoever they wish. One of the torrent sites that was approached by the lawyers of Reliance Entertainment is BitSnoop. In an email they sent the owner of the torrent site a copy of the court order, preventing him from making the movie Singham available. “Defendants and other unnamed and undisclosed persons, are restrained from communicating or making available or distributing, or duplicating, or displaying, or releasing, or showing, or uploading, or downloading, or exhibiting, or playing, and/or defraying the movie ‘Singham’ in any manner without proper license from the plaintiff or in any other manner which would violate/infringe,” the order of the Indian High Court reads. The lawyers further request the site’s owner to remove all material related to their movie from the site, should it be uploaded in the future. “Our clients request you to kindly block access to any copyrighted material of our clients including the movie ‘Singham’, its snip ads [sic], its pictures or songs or any audio or video format from your website immediately and notify your consumers/customers not to download/upload the movie ‘Singham’ by putting it on your websites homepage,” the lawyers add. In a response to TorrentFreak, BitSnoop’s owner said that he doesn’t intend to adhere to the order and will continue business as usual. He argues that he’s not governed by Indian law and adds that he already provides sufficient options for copyright holders to remove infringing content. In common with nearly all the other torrent sites that were served the order, BitSnoop does not proactively police its site for torrents that could link to copyright-infringing content. Instead, they allow copyright holders to send proper takedown notices if they want to take a torrent offline. TorrentFreak has asked Reliance Entertainment’s lawyers what their next step will be when torrent sites ignore the court order, but we have yet to hear back from them. The Court order / emailSource: Torrent Sites Get “Restraining Order” From Indian High Court | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This week there are four newcomers in our chart. 
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