In a world where I as an every day citizen am still never too dumb founded to believe half the news articles I read about or see on TV. In a world where every day when picking up a news paper or reading articles online or on tv, I still cannot believe some of the rediculous stories I hear about, and have a hard time taking them as “real”. A more recent one however about Polish policy and anti piracy group, FOTA have just arrested a 16, 17 and 21 year old for multiple counts of copyright infringement for running and operating a torrent forum that posts no actual material on their sites, but users use it to post links to torrents that end up on torrent sites like RapidShare.com amongst others. On the site it clearly states a disclaimer,
“Forum administrators are not responsible for content written by users. The files placed here by users are only for promotional purposes. After 24 hours you must delete all files downloaded from this forum,”
This was on the front page of the site before it was taken off the web on February 12, 2010 by Polish officials. This disclaimer obviously didn’t deter or help calm the worries of Polish anti piracy groups when raiding the homes of the three individuals and arresting them. Amongst the seized material were 6 computers, and 150 CD which apparently were thought to have copyrighten material. The official sentence for copyrighted material in Poland is up to 5 years in jail, where the 16 year old was detained for the longest amount of time, and will have his case conducted in a family court system.
It comes to no surprise that the most ridiculous and radical actions always tend to come from the piracy world. With more and more people being arrested and sued for substantial amounts of money for downloading or sharing “copywriter” material is in of itself a drastic over statement of how we as a social beings see such “crimes” as piracy, and how the actions taken upon by law enforcement compare to more serious crimes like acts of violence and drugs.
Torrent sites and users being sued is anything but new. Every day new legal actions are taken on by large corporations, mainly in the music and movie industry against torrent sites, as well as their users. In recent news, Microsoft sued Lithuanian BitTorrent Site, LinkoManija for $43 Million dollars for supposed illegally torrented versions of Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007. Kestas Ermanas, owner and operator of the BitTorrent site, which is the 3rd most visited site in the country said,
“that Microsoft’s move surprised him, as the company has never sent a torrent takedown request to the popular BitTorrent tracker. We informed them that we wanted to cooperate with them, they just had to give us the links to the infringing torrent files, Kestas said, adding they never wrote back to us.” According to torrent site, TorrentFreak.com
These actions taken on by Microsoft are but one of many of the endless amounts of allegations against torrent sites and users for “illegally” downloading and distributing “copy written material” Its amazing how often and how much a company can sue not only the torrent providers, but the innocent users of the torrent sites for ridiculous amounts of money that have no basis on any kind of facts or statistics on how much the files were even downloaded. Courts need to realize that taking on cases for an inevitable piracy laws are starting to hurt the industries more than they think they are “helping”. And in the end, just making users of the music, movies, software, ect not want to give the multi billion dollar companies more money than they already have to control their industry further.
With technology improving constantly, anti piracy groups are coming up with new ways to try and limit the amount of people torrenting illegally. Tracking isp addresses, contacting service providers to cut off internet to people using torrents, sending out collections for copyright material, are but just a few of the actions groups like the RIAA are using to try to discourage piracy when it comes to copyright material. Pirates on the other hand are taking the initiative to stay anonymous says Torrent Freak. VPN’s are a new service provided to pirates looking to stay anonymous from the outside world, letting pirates connect to the internet while hiding their IP address to make finding those users almost impossible. VPN’s are sprouting up constantly, some requiring subscription fees, other supplies free accounts such as Itshidden.com, a free VPN site that allows users to make an account for free and then upgrade depending on how much you download. Fees for these sites vary, however $10 a month seems to be the average monthly amount to make your internet downloading completely anonymous. According to Torrent Freak, over 100,000 users have already signed up for an account on multiple VPN sites showing anti piracy groups that pirates are actually willing to spend up to $120 dollars a year per user for unlimited access to downloadable material. 12 million dollars isn’t a small amount of money taking into consideration that there are a lot more than 100,000 users downloading illegal copyright material, just goes to show you pirates are not as cheap as they look, they just seem to like the idea of infinite downloads to anything on the web at any time.
According to the torrent news site Torrent Freak, Amsterdam court ruled today, Oct 22 that the torrent site, The Pirate Bay has to remove certain torrents from its site that infringes on copyrights, as well as blocking the entire Danish community from certain parts of the site exposing “illegal copyright material”. Danish copyright protection group BRINE brought the suit to the court in its continued effort to eliminate piracy. The Pirate Bay has three months to take off the copyright material posed forth by BRINE or fees of up to $7500 dollars per day per person who downloads the material will be forced upon the torrent sites owners. The actions taken by BRINE and the RIAA to try and “protect” copyrights are ridiculous, using scape goats like The Pirate Bay and Mini nova as well as the much acclaimed torrent site Napster as the evils of piracy. While this is occurring numerous innocent people are being arrested and fined absurd amounts of money for “damages” from illegally downloaded content from the web. Its unfair to treat individuals harshly because your trying to make an example out of them. Its not hard to find the lawsuits brought to everyday people by the RIAA, simply type in RIAA Lawsuits in google and page after page of lawsuits and sites pertaining to lawsuits with the RIAA are evident. The accusations against students however is becoming harsh. A recent Cornell paper, the Cornell Sun posted an article about 16 Cornell students being fined by the RIAA for “copyright infringement damages”. Is it right for these accusations to keep arising until the term “intellectual content” is figured out? Or are we going to help the industry move on and realize that with changing technology, businesses have to adapt in order to stay competitive, that choice is up to you as the reader.
The film RiP: A Remix Manifesto is up on Hulu and I highly recommend watching it. Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers. The film follows Girl Talk extensively, as well as renowned copyright reformist lawyer Lawrence Lessig in its exploration on the history and current issues in copyright and media. The film is also available for a pay-what-you-want scheme under a Creative Commons license, just like Feed The Animals.
I found an interesting article from the Copyright Alliance, about a letter that has been generated with signatures from artists (which the site lists about 30 different artists from musicians to sculptors). This letter is being sent to President Obama and Vice President Biden to take a look at and, hopefully, improve the rights of Artists with new policies and who knows, maybe even some new laws. Which would be the end-game regarding the letter.
There are some key facts in the article that may help sway Obama towards approving and acting on the letter. One is the fact that after “internal circulation” the letter got 7,000 signatures in a couple of days. But mainly the fact alone, found below, helps tremendously (despite being slight out-dated):
In 2007, copyright industries in the U.S. contributed $1.52 trillion to the nation’s GDP. They employed over 11 million workers and represented over 43 percent of the U.S. economy’s total real growth between 2006 and 2007. [Source: Copyright Industries in the U.S. Economy, the 2003-2007 Report; Stephen E. Siwek, Economists Inc. for the International Intellectual Property Alliance].
In the economy we have now, this might help Obama realize how important creative arts really are and decide to act more for the benefit of artists, to help artists and maybe nudge our economy out of recession.
In a world where I as an every day citizen am still never too dumb founded to believe half the news articles I read about or see on TV. In a world where every day when picking up a news paper or reading articles online or on tv, I still cannot believe some of the rediculous stories I hear about, and have a hard time taking them as “real”. A more recent one however about Polish policy and anti piracy group, FOTA have just arrested a 16, 17 and 21 year old for multiple counts of copyright infringement for running and operating a torrent forum that posts no actual material on their sites, but users use it to post links to torrents that end up on torrent sites like RapidShare.com amongst others. On the site it clearly states a disclaimer,
