Good morning/afternoon/evening/night (delete as appropriate – we’re a global community). The world has turned once more, the sun has crawled into the sky, and we’re back in the room.
Nate began the day with an update on the Foundation’s financial status: income, expenditure, bank balance, sponsorships and revenue sources. The good news is that we’re financially stable, but the bad is that we’re never going to be rich. Damn this volunteering thing, it’s almost like everyone does this for free. Oh, wait…
Next up, garbear took to the stage to talk about the upcoming (and long-anticipated!) RetroPlayer. This is already available in the 18.x “Leia” builds, so you can try it now if you like. As well as a demo to the team, the presentation covered how we’re addressing controller topology (including hubbing and mapping), user interface options, configuration, potential for user profiles, binary add-on repository structure, and some potential future features.
Martijn next took us through our current user statistics. Because we do no user tracking, it’s always been difficult to get any real numbers, so we’re reliant on partial data: Play Store active user counts, Microsoft app store figures, what we see hitting our repos for e.g. scraper or other add-on downloads. We probably have c. 80 million downloads and c. 30 million recently-active users across all platforms and versions – including some active installations on every release since 13.x “Gotham”. This presentation also led into a conversation about release management, specifically, the intended schedule for the upcoming 18.x “Leia” release plus very early timing plans for 19.x “M*”.
The next presentation was by kib, giving us an update on all things related to the Kodi infrastructure – build servers, download servers, web hosting, caching. He took us through upgrades to the Windows build system, wiki software upgrade, https implementation, the Kodi paste site, LXD containerisation, OS reinstallation and upgrades, changes to mirror up/down detection, CloudFlare, and more.
Finally, a1rwulf rounded out the day by talking about the Kodi databases: the basic architecture, current limitations, and potential changes that we need to consider as new features are introduced.
A shortened day today, with a couple of topics kicked into Sunday for a variety of reasons. Watch this space for an update on those, as we’ll add them in due course, either as an update to this post or as a separate one, depending on content.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Devcon-2018-Sofia-Part-II.jpg14882000Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2018-10-01 03:45:592018-10-01 03:45:59Devcon 2018 – Sofia – Part II
With millions of visitors per week, Torrent9 is a force to be reckoned with.
The site is most popular in French-speaking countries, which hasn’t gone unnoticed to local copyright holders.
Last year, the Paris Court of First Instance ordered French ISPs to block the site. However, Torrent9 was quick to take countermeasures and moved to a new domain name.
Quite recently, it was operating from Torrent9.blue. This went fine until the site’s owner started to notice that Google traffic had tanked. The torrent site used to get roughly 20% of its visitors through the search engine, but that suddenly dropped to less than 5%.
As it turned out, the French anti-piracy outfit SACEM had sent takedown requests for hundreds of thousands of URLs in the span of a few days. Google then removed these from the search engine, adding a downranking punishment on top.
SACEM’s ‘carpet-bomb’ of takedown requests was clearly targeted and massive in scope. In one week in August, the group asked Google to remove over 350,000 torrent9.blue URLs. For comparison, The Pirate Bay usually gets a tenth of that, from all copyright holders combined.
Torrent9.blue takedowns
While we were taking a closer look at the notices in question, we spotted another peculiarity.
It almost looks like the French anti-piracy group submitted each and every URL they could find, regardless of whether it actually points to works from their music industry members.
Some URLs do indeed point to music, but there are also plenty of others, targeting movies, TV-shows, games, and software. In some cases, the torrents are not even infringing, such as the open source copy of Ubuntu listed below.
Pirated Ubuntu?
Google appears to have removed nearly all URLs including the ones that don’t point directly to copyright infringing content of SACEM members.
The removals were probably automated, but they certainly warrant a closer look. There is no question that Torrent9 offers links to pirated content, but should such broad takedown requests be permitted?
This endeavor left Torrent9 no other choice than to move to another new domain. At the time of writing the torrent site is operating from Torrent9.ph, but this could easily change again in the near future, as SACEM has already started to target the new domain with another carpet-bombing of ‘dubious’ DMCA takedown notices.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/computerkeyboardfeat.png2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2018-09-30 12:44:532018-09-30 12:44:53Anti-Piracy Group Wipes ‘Torrent9’ From Google With ‘Dubious’ Requests
What, a year already? Yup, twelve months have passed, we’re all a year older, the world is still mad, and we’re once again sitting in an overly-warm, windowless, anonymous conference room, discussing everyone’s favourite media software while wondering where the coffee is. Welcome to DevCon 2018, coming to you this year from Sofia/Со́фия, the capital city of the beautiful Balkan nation of Bulgaria.
So: Team Kodi Assemble!
We hit the ground running this morning. Mixed in with initial logistics, introductions, and the annual battle with AV and hotel wifi, keith led a conversation about github, and how we could perhaps better use it to track code and project issues. We currently use trac for bugs, which presents more than a few challenges to both casual users and the team; we could also potentially use github for bug reporting/allocation instead, and also use the associated project tracking to also keep better notes of e.g. press conversations, Foundation issues, and similar.
We continued into a conversation about conferences – which are most appropriate, how do we best cover them, what and where, how do we get most benefit. More later on this year’s conference experiences.
Martijn then talked about the move from Python 2 to Python 3: approach, milestones, timeline. Python 2 is EOL in 2020, so this is becoming a more urgent task. The intention is to combine this into the normal Kodi rolling release schedule, so expect a significant focus on Python 3 readiness and enforcement as we move past 18 (Leia) and on to 19 (M). If you’re an addon developer, specifically, then it’s time to pay attention to this as “later” is rapidly becoming “now” – everyone has had ten years to think about this, after all!
The big challenge is how we encourage developers to migrate while not inconveniencing or irritating users. This is a significant change, and some things are likely to break. Blog post here.
We next moved to conduct and standards – not because we believe there are specific problems, but more because it’s generally good practice to have some expectations regarding behaviour of team members and contributors: if you follow the news, you won’t have missed some of the headlines around what can happen when people go beyond constructive disagreement and move into personal attacks, particularly when social media or public discourse is involved. As such, we’re putting in place some clearer ground rules and management policies around our own behaviour, just as we have done around the standards we expect from our forum contributors.
The conversation then moved on to engagement and communication – how we keep people informed, updated, involved. Kodi is a big project, with very many moving parts, and nearly as many ways to interact. That’s not just about the code, but it’s Foundation stuff, user support, strategy, wiki, external conversations, release management: keeping on top of all of these is undoubtedly a challenge. This is very much an internal Team conversation, but one that we’ll continue to progress, as even orientation to the project can potentially be a barrier to new contributors.
Moving on, Martijn led a conversation around issue tracking – trac vs github. While we currently use an internal trac system, and it has some genuine benefits, it’s neither the most usable nor maintanable of systems. By contrast, hosting and managing the issues on (public) github means they’re more closely linked with code and commits, so we’d get some significant advantages there that should more than offset what we’d be missing. If we do make this change, which is likely, it won’t happen overnight, as we’ve much to decide: what to do with old (and maybe no-longer-valid) bug reports, what labelling/tagging structure we’d need, what systems we’d need to have in place to ensure that we receive “complete” reports going forward, and so on. More to come.
Related to this – because github is, in general, a more public platform than trac – we had a conversation about embracing this as a benefit and how we become more open. Again, Kodi is a hugely-complex project and is very daunting to a potential contributor: where to start? Who to talk to? How to get help? Who are all these people, anyway?? So, many thoughts: github conversations, GSoC experiences, public discussion channels, updated build/”getting started” documentation, code documentation/architecture. If you’re a potential developer and feel like you don’t know where to begin, please, contact a member of the team to help us address any concerns you have. We can always use some more help, particularly on the features and multiple platform support that everyone values so much.
Returning to a topic introduced earlier in the day, garbear, Razze and yol took the floor to report back on their attendance at VDD (Video Dev Days) earlier this month (also attended by Martijn and RomanVM). This was also touched on in a previous blog post. Sessions included AV1 CODEC development, including the dav1d decoder and rav1e encoder; the x265 HEVC encoder; VLC 4.0 plans and features; a series of short “lightning talks” on various AV-related topics; and, of course, many networking opportunities across a common community of interest (website hosting and load balancing, request handling/download management, breakouts on FFMpeg, programming languages…). Useful bridges built with like-minded people, which is ultimately good for the whole open source multimedia landscape.
As the day started to draw to a close, mohit-0212, one of our 2018 GSoC students, gave a presentation on his project around episode intro/outro detection. The goal of this project is to improve the user experience by editing out the endless theme tunes and credits you get, particularly when binge-watching a box set. This involves searching for common scene transition points across multiple episodes of a series, and using hashing algorithms on the video stream to work out when the likely sections begin and end. In the first implementation, then, the detection is run and then the user is presented with a “skip” button as a the section begins. Fully-automated skipping would perhaps be a later addition, but more work is needed yet on the code, detection of “edge cases”, and UI, and similar.
Finally, natethomas and the other Foundation board members spent some time talking about the board responsibilities: who, what, how, why. The XBMC Foundation has a legal status, and thus there are ongoing administrative, legal and financial activities around our overall direction as a project, non-profit status, trademarks, incorporation status, revenues from sponsorship and donations, approval of expenditure, taxes, PR/press, GSoC admin, Foundation membership and bylaws, internal policies, and any formal legal communications as required.
And that’s it for day one. Time to head out into the fading evening light before reconvening in the morning.
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It’s been only a few weeks since BitTorrent was officially aquired by Tron, a relatively new cryptocurrency.
Both companies were built around decentralization, which makes for a good match. However, it doesn’t stop there.
BitTorrent and Tron plan to integrate blockchain technology into future releases of their torrent clients. In short, they want to make it possible for users to ‘earn’ tokens by seeding. At the same time, others can ‘bid’ tokens to speed up their downloads.
The new plan is dubbed “Project Atlas” and BitTorrent currently has seven people working on it full-time. In theory, the incentives will increase total seeding capacity, improving the health of the torrent ecosystem.
“By adding tokens we’ll make it so that you can effectively earn per seeding and create incentives for users not only to seed longer but to dedicate more of their bandwidth and storage overall,” Project Atlas lead Justin Knoll says.
The idea to merge the blockchain with file-sharing technology isn’t new. Joystream, previously implemented a similar idea and Upfiring is also working on incentivized sharing. BitTorrent itself also considered it before Tron came into the picture.
“Even before the Tron acquisition, our R&D team was looking at ways to add blockchain based incentives to the protocol. Now with the addition of Tron’s expertise, we can accelerate that effort,” Knoll says.
It remains unclear when the project will be ready for the public, but this week the team announced some further details. In particular, BitTorrent and Tron stress that there won’t be any need for BitTorrent users to change their current habits.
The BitTorrent protocol will always remain open and Project Atlas will be implemented as a series of optional protocol extensions. These will be available for anyone to use, much like uTorrent’s previous uTP extension.
This means that users of third-party BitTorrent clients can still download from and seed to blockchain enhanced clients, and vice versa.
“If you want to keep using your current client, it will still work with project Atlas clients. If you don’t want to bid or earn tokens per seeding, you don’t need to,” Knoll clarifies.
While backward compatibility is a major upside, it seems likely that new clients will prioritize each other, at least in some instances. After all, that’s a requirement to speed up torrents.
BitTorrent says it will start implementing the technology in its desktop clients, such as uTorrent. The next step is mobile. In addition, the company encourages developers of other BitTorrent clients to follow suit.
“We’ll release the details of our implementation and encourage third-party clients and the whole ecosystem to implement this,” Knoll says.
The developer of the third-party torrent client Frostwire previously showed his interest in the idea late August. He asked BitTorrent and Tron whether the technology would be public but never received an answer.
Speaking with TorrentFreak, developer Angel Leon confirmed his interest.
“It’s something we were interested in and that we think is necessary to fulfill a vision of a decentralized Apple Store/Google Play/Amazon Music|Video competitor with BitTorrent as the transport mechanism,” Leon told us.
However, the developments come too late for Frostwire, as the torrent client just shut down. Whether other client developers are also interested, remains a question for now.
In any case, BitTorrent and Tron stress that any changes will be backwards compatible. The protocol and its extensions remain open, the clients will remain free of charge, and there is absolutely no mining involved.
More information about Project Atlas’ plans is expected to be unveiled in a few hours, during a live presentation.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/worldfea.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2018-09-29 06:42:592018-09-29 06:42:59BitTorrent and Tron Hope Other Clients Will Embrace ‘Paid’ Seeding
Back in 2004, when LimeWire was the file-sharing client of choice for millions of users, a new kid appeared on the block.
FrostWire was originally an open source fork of LimeWire distributed under the GNU General Public License.
In 2006, FrostWire added BitTorrent support and in 2011, as LimeWire drew its final breath under pressure from the RIAA, its Gnutella base was dropped completely in favor of BitTorrent.
Over the years, FrostWire became available on multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. However, a huge problem with their Android variant has now caused the FrostWire team to make a rather sad announcement.
The issues began back on September 18 when the FrostWire Android app was taken down from Google Play following a DMCA takedown request.
“In the notice, the company claimed their content was uploaded to the FrostWire app and provided screenshots of their content being played in the FrostWire Music Player,” the FrostWire team explains.
“Asking for reinstatement, we made it clear that it is technically impossible to upload any content to FrostWire. We explained that FrostWire is a tool, a BitTorrent client, a downloader for a distributed peer-to-peer network and that as such, it does not host, index, nor has the ability to control the content it is technically capable of downloading from third party sources.”
But despite a DMCA counter-notice to Google, the Internet giant stood its ground. Google refused to reinstate the Android app, a surprise decision given FrostWire’s reputation for staying within the law.
After almost eight successful years on the Google Play store, the FrostWire team says they have been left “dumbfounded” by what they say is an “unsubstantiated claim” from a single company.
Sadly, this unfortunate situation appears to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Heavily reliant on their Android variant, the team indicate they will now move away from FrostWire.
“With over 80% of our user-base running on the Android platform, in a world where the majority of android installs occurs through a centralized app store monopoly, we don’t see a viable path forward. After 14 years the team is ready to move on to other passions and challenges,” they reveal.
Thanking users past and present for their support, the FrostWire team say that users should now take the opportunity to update their clients using FrostWire’s Github repository or its SourceForge page.
While this sounds like the beginning of the end for FrostWire, it isn’t the first time that the project has had a run-in with Google over its popular client.
In April 2015, FrostWire was temporarily removed from Google Play in a dispute over YouTube integration. Earlier that year, Amazon removed FrostWire citing copyright concerns.
This reliance on centralized and near monopoly app databases is clearly a big negative for applications like FrostWire. The team hopes that, moving into the future, Internet freedom will come to the forefront.
“We hope that in the end, a free, uncensored and decentralized internet will prevail,” the team concludes.
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Last month, Cox ended its piracy liability lawsuit with music company BMG, agreeing to a “substantial settlement.”
That doesn’t mean that the ISP is now in the clear. Cox is also caught up in another lawsuit filed by a group of major music labels, all members of the RIAA.
The labels argue that Cox categorically failed to terminate repeat copyright infringers and that it substantially profited from this ongoing ‘piracy’ activity. All at the expense of the record labels and other rightsholders.
This week Cox submitted a reply to the complaint, denying all these allegations. It requests a declaratory judgment from the court stating that it’s not liable for any copyright infringements carried out by its customers.
“Cox does not control the Internet,” the company writes, adding that it has “no ability to remove or take down infringing content from its customers’ computers” and “cannot restrict, or even detect, the specific content that its customers access or share.”
“Cox does not spy on its customers or monitor their Internet traffic. Even if it could do so — and it cannot — it wouldn’t. Engaging in surveillance in such a fashion would violate Cox’s policies, ethics, and corporate culture.”
The record labels are unlikely to refute any of the above. The real dispute, however, is about whether Cox should have terminated customers for whom it received many notices. The labels previously argued that 20,000 Cox subscribers can be categorized as blatant repeat infringers, some of whom have been ‘warned’ more than 100 times.
Writing to the court, the ISP counters that these notices could not be trusted or easily verified.
“The systems Plaintiffs used to detect infringement and send copyright infringement notices were unreliable, and were known to be unreliable,” Cox writes, adding that it “lacked the ability to verify Plaintiffs’ allegations of infringement.”
“Indeed, studies and published reports show that such notices can be wildly inaccurate,” Cox writes, pointing to an academic report as well as a TorrentFreak article which shows how HBO targeted its own website.
DMCA notice inaccuracies
This critique on the accuracy of DMCA notices is not new. It has repeatedly been highlighted in similar cases.
Perhaps more novel is Cox’s mention of the “six strikes” Copyright Alert System. This was a partnership between US ISPs and copyright holders, including many of the labels, to forward infringing notices to pirating customers.
This groundbreaking deal set a limit on the number of copyright notices ISPs had to process. Perhaps more crucially, it didn’t require the companies to terminate repeat infringers, even after 100+ warnings.
This is an interesting ‘double standard’ angle, as the labels now accuse Cox of failing to terminate repeat infringers, something that was never a requirement under the Copyright Alert System.
This deal (which Cox wasn’t part of) was still active during the time period that’s covered by the lawsuit, and apparently, the RIAA was pretty happy with it at the time.
“In May 2014, RIAA Chairman and CEO Cary Sherman described the Center for Copyright Information as ‘a model for success,’ Cox writes, adding that he lauded program and all its accomplishments.
Fast forward a few years and now ISPs are being sued for adhering to the same standard as set out in the groundbreaking Copyright Alert System.
Based on these and other arguments, Cox requests a declaratory judgment stating that it’s not liable for contributory infringement, and another declaratory judgment clarifying that it’s not vicariously liable for pirating subscribers.
—
A copy of Cox recent filing is available here (pdf).
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Many Internet traffic reports have been published over the years, documenting how traffic patterns change over time.
One of the trends that emerged in recent years, is that BitTorrent’s share of total Internet traffic decreased.
With the growth of services such as YouTube and Netflix, streaming started to generate massive amounts of bandwidth. As a result, BitTorrent lost a significant chunk of its ‘market share.’
This trend gradually increased, until recently. In some parts of the world file-sharing traffic, BitTorrent in particular, is growing.
That’s what’s suggested by Canadian broadband management company Sandvine, which has kept a close eye on these developments for over a decade. The company will release its latest Global Internet Phenomena report next month but gave us an exclusive sneak peek.
Globally, across both mobile and fixed access networks file-sharing accounts for 3% of downstream and 22% of upstream traffic. More than 97% of this upstream is BitTorrent, which makes it the dominant P2P force.
In the EMEA region, which covers Europe, the Middle East, and Africa there’s a clear upward trend. BitTorrent traffic now accounts for 32% of all upstream traffic. This means that roughly a third of all uploads are torrent-related.
Keep in mind that overall bandwidth usage per household also increased during this period, which means that the volume of BitTorrent traffic grew even more aggressively.
BitTorrent traffic also remains the top upstream source in the Asia Pacific region with 19% of total traffic. Percentage-wise this is down compared to two years ago, but in volume, it’s relatively stable according to Sandvine.
Other popular file-sharing upload sources in the Asia Pacific region are the Korean P2P app “K grid” (7%) and “Afreeca TV” (2%).
In the Americas, BitTorrent is the second largest source of upstream traffic. It has a market share of little over 9% and is most popular in Latin America. BitTorrent is only a fraction behind MPEG-TS, which is used for backhauling data from video cameras and security systems.
BitTorrent dead?
TorrentFreak spoke to Sandvine’s Vice President of Solutions Marketing Cam Cullen, who notes that more details will be released in the upcoming report. However, it’s clear that BitTorrent is not dead yet.
The next question is why BitTorrent traffic is on the rise again? According to Cullen, increased fragmentation in the streaming service market may play an important role.
“More sources than ever are producing ‘exclusive’ content available on a single streaming or broadcast service – think Game of Thrones for HBO, House of Cards for Netflix, The Handmaid’s Tale for Hulu, or Jack Ryan for Amazon. To get access to all of these services, it gets very expensive for a consumer, so they subscribe to one or two and pirate the rest.
“Since these numbers were taken in June for this edition, there were no Game of Thrones episodes coming out, so consider these numbers depressed from peak!” Cullen notes.
And we haven’t even mentioned non-filesharing traffic sources such as cyberlockers and streaming sites, which are even more popular than BitTorrent…
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Since the opensource commity is open as the name implies we as Team Kodi at times also attend other conferences. One of those is VDD which is hosted by the Videolan team which you might know from the VLC player. During the conference many developers related to their software projects are invited to attend and join in on presentation and techincal discussions. The Kodi project is in that regards related we are also in the multimedia “business” and share a similar vision. Next to that we use the same undelying opensource projects like FFMpeg and code libraries made by Vidolan which you use for DVD and Bluray.
For us it started on Thursday 20 September 2018 when we arrrived in Paris where their 10th conference took place. During the day we walked a bit throuw Paris and in the evening we enjoyed some beers and prepared for the next day which was the community bonding day.
So during Friday we gathered in the morning to be given the assignement to from small groups and start a sort of scavenger hunt throughout Paris. The goal was to find the answer which would form an URL and in the mean time you would encouraged to make awesome pictures using the VLC hats and in the end the best team received some nice price. Although it was quite an exhausting day it was for sure great fun and a good way to see Paris. Saturday there were several very interesting talks on a variety of topics.
and after that we went to have a boat tour on the Seine to have some more drinks and food and the winners of the scavenger hunt were announced. Sadly our groups didn’t win :(
`
Sunday was day of short lightning talks in the morning and in the afternoon you were free to meet up and have small discussion on whatever topic.Although this is just a very short summary of the past days it had quite a lot of content and was great to meet up with other developers. We would to thank the Videolan organisation for making this possible.
Next up is our own Kodi Devcon in the city Sofia (Bulgaria).
Earlier this year Hollywood’s Motion Picture Distributors’ Association stated that site-blocking was the only option left to beat online piracy.
While it’s impossible to completely eradicate the phenomenon, rightsholders generally see ISP blockades as one of the most effective tools at their disposal.
This is also true for Sky TV New Zealand. Last year the company took its first steps in this direction, and it is now pushing on. Newsroom reports that Sky hopes to file a lawsuit targeting The Pirate Bay and an unnamed sports streaming site before the end of the year.
The company just released the results of an extensive piracy survey which shows that 29% of all New Zealanders have pirated sport and entertainment during the last month. The majority of pirates prefer streaming, but downloading and pirate boxes are popular too.
“We’ve known that piracy is a problem for a while, but the scale is even bigger than we thought,” SKY spokesperson Sophie Moloney says.
“If piracy remains unchecked, it risks really hurting the sports and entertainment industry in New Zealand, and our ability to create great content,” she adds.
The lacking availability of legal viewing options is the main reason why people pirate, the research reveals. Legal content is either not available or it’s significantly delayed. Interestingly, non-pirates believe that people mainly turn to unauthorized offerings to avoid paying.
Sky TV, however, believes that there are plenty of legal option and will push its blocking plans through.
“Other countries are taking steps to stop piracy and encourage people not to steal content, and we want to do the same here in New Zealand, including by way of blocking pirate websites,” Sky TV’s Moloney says.
Surprisingly, there is even support for this effort among self-proclaimed pirates.
Just over half of all pirates agreed that they “would be happy for my ISP to block access to a piracy website if it was required by a court to do so.” This is also preferred over other options, such as tighter regulation or lawsuits against individual pirates.
“Site-blocking is used in 42 countries around the world, including Australia and the UK. It’s good to see that many New Zealanders would prefer that these dodgy sites are blocked from view using this approach,” Moloney notes.
Whether Internet providers feel the same way has yet to be seen. When Sky TV first announced its blocking intentions last year, local ISPs responded critically.
“SKY’s call that sites be blacklisted on their say so is dinosaur behavior, something you would expect in North Korea, not in New Zealand. It isn’t our job to police the Internet and it sure as hell isn’t SKY’s either, all sites should be equal and open,” said Taryn Hamilton of local IPS Vocus at the time.
ISPs instead pointed out that rightsholders should focus on improving the legal options. And with Sky TV’s research revealing ‘limited legal options’ as the main motivation to pirate, they are likely to stick with this.
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Every day, countless thousands of pieces of infringing content are uploaded to the Internet including most movies, TV shows, games, and commercial software.
Rightsholders everywhere are struggling to the contain the influx, often having to resort to filing millions of takedown notices with Internet companies, the bulk of which target the world’s major search engines.
While this doesn’t take down the actual content itself, there is a theory that citizens often turn to search engines to find their fix. These sites, in turn, direct users to sites hosting infringing content. To combat this facilitation, copyright holders want search companies to remove these results from their indexes.
Takedowns like this are common in the West, with Google removing billions of links upon request. In Russia, however, search engine Yandex found itself in hot water recently after refusing to remove links on the basis that the law does not require it to do so. This prompted the authorities to suggest that a compromise agreement needs to be made, backed up by possible changes in the law.
It now appears that this event, which could’ve led to Yandex being blocked by ISPs, has prompted both Internet companies and copyright holders to consider a voluntary agreement. Discussions currently underway suggest a unique and potentially ground-breaking plan.
The initial meeting between telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor, Internet companies Yandex, Google, and Mail.ru, plus representatives of the Association of Producers of Cinema and Television (APKiT), the National Media Group, and Gazprom Media Holdings, took place September 19.
According to news outlet RBC, the topic of discussion was the creation of a special database holding the details of known infringing copies of content including movies, games, software and other pirated content.
The proposals envision that once details of content are placed in the database, search engines and video hosting sites that sign up to a memorandum of understanding with rightsholders will automatically query the database every five minutes for updates.
Once the details are fed back, search companies will remove links to pirate resources from their search results within six hours, without any need for a court process. This will run alongside the current database currently maintained by Roscomnadzor and utilized by ISPs, which contains links to sites that are blocked due to having multiple complaints filed against them at the Moscow City Court.
If adopted, this new extrajudicial process will go some way to clearing up the problems caused by the current legal gray area, which led to Yandex removing links to content from its video portal to avoid a potential ISP blockade, even though the company believes that the law does not require it to do so.
It’s suggested that the infringing resource database, should it go ahead, could be maintained by the Internet Video Association (IVA), which represents intellectual property rights holders. Alternatively, RBC notes, an alternative coalition of entertainment companies including legal streaming platforms could be put in charge of the project.
Talks appear to be fairly advanced, with agreements on the framework for the database potentially being reached by the middle of this week. If that’s the case, a lawsuit recently filed by Gazprom Media against Yandex could be settled amicably. It’s understood that Yandex wants all major Internet players to become involved, including social networks.
With the carrot comes the possibility of the stick, of course. Gazprom Media indicates that if a voluntary agreement cannot be reached, it will seek amendments to copyright law that will achieve the same end results.
With millions of visitors per week, 
It’s been only a few weeks since BitTorrent was officially 
Last month, Cox ended its piracy liability lawsuit with music company BMG, agreeing to a “
Many Internet traffic reports have been published over the years, documenting how traffic patterns change over time.
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Earlier this year Hollywood’s Motion Picture Distributors’ Association stated that site-blocking was 
