Figuring out what to do about the online piracy problem is an ongoing puzzle for rightsholders everywhere. What they’re all agreed upon, however, is the need to educate the public.

Various approaches have been deployed, from ISP-based ‘education’ notices through to the current practice of painting pirate sites as havens for viruses and malware. The other approach, of course, has been to threaten to sue pirates in an effort to make them change their ways.

These threats have traditionally been deployed by so-called copyright trolls – companies and groups who have the sole intention of extracting cash payments from pirates in order to generate an additional revenue stream. At the same time, many insist that their programs are also designed to reduce piracy via word of mouth.

While that might be true in some cases, there’s little proof that the approach works. However, a new study carried out on behalf of the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC) in Finland suggests that they may have had some effect.

The survey was carried out between 11 September 2017 and 10 October 2017 among people aged 15 to 79-years-old. In total, 1001 people were interviewed, 77% of whom said they’d never used pirate services.

Of all people interviewed, 43% said they’d heard about copyright holders sending settlement letters to Internet users, although awareness rates were higher (between 51% and 55%) among people aged between 25 and 49-years-old. Predictably, awareness jumped to 70% among users of pirate services and it’s these individuals that produced some of the study’s most interesting findings.

Of the pirates who said they were aware of settlement letters being sent out, 13% reported that they’d terminated their use of pirate services as a result. A slightly higher figure, 14%, said they’d reduced their use of unauthorized content.

Perhaps surprisingly (given that they aren’t likely to receive a letter), the study also found that 17% of people who listen to or play content on illegal online services (implication: streaming) stopped doing so, with 13% cutting down on the practice.

“According to the Economic Research Survey, these two groups of respondents are partly overlapping, but it can still be said that the settlement letters have had a decisive impact on the use of pirated services,” CIAPC reports.

The study also found support for copyright holders looking to unmask alleged Internet pirates by compelling their ISPs to do so in court.

“The survey found that 65 percent of the population is fully or partly in favor of rightsholders being allowed to find out who has infringed their rights anonymously on the Internet,” the group adds.

Overall, just 17% of respondents said that rightsholders shouldn’t be able to find out people’s identities. Unsurprisingly, young pirates objected more than the others, with 35% of 25 to 49-year-old pirates coming out against disclosure. That being said, this figure suggests that 65% of pirates in this group are in favor of pirates being unmasked. That appears counter-intuitive, to say the least.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Pirate Party vice council member of Espoo City Janne Paalijärvi says that study seems to have omitted to consider the effects of legal alternatives on pirate consumption.

“The analysis seemingly forgets to fully take into account the prevalence of legal streaming services such as Netflix,” Paalijärvi says.

“Legitimate, reasonably-priced and easy-to-use delivery platforms are the number one weapon against piracy. Not bullying your audience with copyright extortion letters. The latter approach creates unwanted hostility between artists and customers. It also increases the demand for political parties wanting to balance copyright legislation.”

Overall, however, Finland doesn’t appear to have a serious problem with piracy, at least as far as public perceptions go. According to the study, only 5% of citizens believe that unauthorized file-sharing is acceptable. The figure for 2016 was 7%.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Google regularly removes infringing websites from its search results, but the company is also wary of abuse.

When the Canadian company Equustek Solutions requested the company to remove websites that offered unlawful and competing products, it refused to do so globally.

This resulted in a legal battle that came to a climax in June, when the Supreme Court of Canada ordered Google to remove a company’s websites from its search results. Not just in Canada, but all over the world.

With options to appeal exhausted in Canada, Google took the case to a federal court in the US. The search engine requested an injunction to disarm the Canadian order, arguing that a worldwide blocking order violates the First Amendment.

Surprisingly, Equustek decided not to defend itself and without opposition, a California District Court sided with Google yesterday.

During a hearing, Google attorney Margaret Caruso stressed that it should not be possible for foreign countries to implement measures that run contrary to core values of the United States.

The search engine argued that the Canadian order violated Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes Internet services from liability for content created by third parties. With this law, Congress specifically chose not to deter harmful online speech by imposing liability on Internet services.

In an order, signed shortly after the hearing, District Judge Edward Davila concludes that Google qualifies for Section 230 immunity in this case. As such, he rules that the Canadian Supreme Court’s global blocking order goes too far.

“Google is harmed because the Canadian order restricts activity that Section 230 protects. In addition, the balance of equities favors Google because the injunction would deprive it of the benefits of U.S. federal law,” Davila writes.

Rendering the order unenforceable is not just in the interest of Google, the District Court writes. It’s also best for the general public as free speech is clearly at stake here.

“Congress recognized that free speech on the internet would be severely restricted if websites were to face tort liability for hosting user-generated content. It responded by enacting Section 230, which grants broad immunity to online intermediaries,” Judge Davila writes.

“The Canadian order would eliminate Section 230 immunity for service providers that link to third-party websites. By forcing intermediaries to remove links to third-party material, the Canadian order undermines the policy goals of Section 230 and threatens free speech on the global internet.”

The preliminary injunction

The Court signed a preliminary injunction which prevents Equustek enforcing the Canadian order in the United States, which is exactly what Google was after. Since the Canadian company chose not to represent itself in the US case, this will likely stand.

The ruling is important in the broader scheme. If foreign courts are allowed to grant worldwide blockades, free speech could be severely hampered. Today it’s a relatively unknown Canadian company, but what if the Chinese Government asked Google to block the websites of VPN providers?

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A copy of the full order is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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When Megaupload was shut down in January 2012, US authorities did everything within their power to financially ruin Kim Dotcom and his associates.

Aside from taking much of his personal property, tens of millions of dollars of assets were seized around the world.

Under instruction from the U.S. government, US$42.57m in assets were seized in Hong Kong and since then Dotcom has been trying to claw it back, bit by bit.

Back in July, Dotcom revealed that the Hong Kong High Court had released more of his funds, plus four containers of seized property. Noting that he missed the country, he gave thanks for the lifeline.

“Thanks to a Hong Kong Judge my family can move to Queenstown and my kids will be surrounded by beautiful mountains & lakes instead of spies,” Dotcom said.

That move eventually went ahead, with Dotcom regularly tweeting beautiful waterside views from his new home over the past few months. But of course, nice things tend to cost quite a bit of money, so Dotcom’s legal team have been working hard in Hong Kong to have more funds released.

According to a report from NZHerald, his latest request is fairly sizeable, reaching NZ$1.2m (US$829,400), everything considered.

First up, Dotcom is seeking around NZ$1m (US$691,200) for costs relating to his relocation from Auckland to Queenstown. That’s comprised of two years worth of rent at NZ$40,000 (US$27,648) per month (no typo), plus NZ$150,000 (US$103,680) to cover the actual cost of the move.

On top, Dotcom is looking for NZ$73,000 (US$50,457) per month for living expenses, an amount that’s roughly US$2,000 per month up on the amount he currently receives.

According to the report, Dotcom’s team are also proposing a further amount of NZ$200,000 (US$138,240) to cover emergency items including “medical expenses of the family, car maintenance, household repairs and two holidays of the family”.

It seems unlikely that this will be the final request from Dotcom. According to Gerard McCoy, Dotcom’s lawyer in Hong Kong, the extradition process in New Zealand is nowhere near complete. In fact, McCoy told the court that proceedings won’t be completed during the next two years.

That takes us to 2020, at least, meaning that Dotcom will still be in New Zealand a full eight years after the raid. Given the massive number of court battles and subsequent appeals into every detail of several resulting cases, that’s probably not a surprise, however.

The progress in the extradition process itself is also somewhat glacial, with the next hearing set for the first quarter of 2018 in the Court of Appeal. If past experience is anything to go by, neither side will be happy with the outcome. This means that an appeal to the Supreme Court is almost inevitable.

Over in the United States, progress has also been slow. Recently, a petition from Dotcom and his former Megaupload colleagues over millions of dollars in seized assets was denied by the US Supreme Court.

While this decision means that the battle over a further US$67 million in assets has been exhausted, the question of whether Dotcom and former colleagues Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato will ever stand trial in the US remains unanswered.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Day Two dawns… most people are bright-eyed and ready for another day, although, if I’m honest, some people may be here more in body than in spirit…
 

First on today, chewitt from LibreELEC gave us an update: the installed base continues to grow, with the Raspberry Pi in different forms easily remains the dominant platform, although this is slowly declining in favour of SoC (Android stock) devices. Given the appliance nature of LE – operating system and applications – a large part of the presentation was given over to security, including automated updates and the overall integrity of the process.

Next up, a series of sessions led by our newest team members – our Google Summer of Code students (or maybe “graduates” now, given their contributions!).

Vel0city presented his work on multi-pass shaders – programs that run on the GPU to manipulate an image frame at a pixel level between decoding and display – so, blur, enhance, scale, and so on. These are particularly useful for improving image quality when perhaps the display technology has advanced significantly beyond what the source material was created for (resolution, colour depth, frame rate, etc.).

Next, yol took us through his work on touch and Wayland (vs X11) integration. While we’d had some Wayland implementation previously, this work brought it right up-to-date with native support within Kodi on Linux.

And finally, arpitn30 talked about his project to port over to Python 3 (Python 2.x goes end of life in 2020). As would be expected, this involved changed library calls, removal of deprecated syntax, and updated dependencies and versions. There are significant differences between Python 2 and 3 – they’re almost different languages – which give rise to real challenges in a cross-platform, multi-version environment. Of course, the shift to Python 3 will require rework in all Python addons, so this is a long-term migration across many different packages. If you’re an addon author, keep an eye out for further information on this topic in the coming weeks and months, as it’s not negotiable.

To close off GSoC 2017, then, razze led a conversation about GSoC 2018 – a call for more mentors, for more developers to get involved. We can bring in students, we can offer project ideas, but we need the experience of the existing developers to be successful: to help orientate people to the code and guide them through the best way to get code accepted into Kodi for release.

 

After a brief but passionate conversation about trademarks, licensing and similar, the sessions moved on to usability, and the “out-of-the-box” appeal of piracy addons versus “raw” Kodi. While we don’t provide any content, we could maybe make it easier for people to catalogue their media, perhaps with more pre-defined skin nodes or similar. We also covered interaction between addons and skins, and what the implications are of some modules either demanding or objecting to the presence of other modules, and what this means for the user experience.

Following this – in a deja vu moment for many people – the discussion moved to what we can realistically do to support DRM-protected content. People have an understandable desire to watch their legitimate, paid-for content, so we continue to explore what can be done in this area. This is likely to be a conversation that will run for some time, however.

Next up, Martijn talked about our next major release. We’ve just launched the latest point release of Krypton 17.x, so it’s time to be looking towards Leia 18.x; the code is broadly ready and stable, so it’s now a process of locking down features, freezing code, building alphas, and so on. As always, this is a major piece of logistics, so it needs to be planned and timed properly.

 

      

As the day started to lurch towards the finishing line, the sessions moved on to platform specifics.

Fresh from the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, lrusak covered Kodi on embedded Linux – specifically, where we are with Kodi now, and where we want to be as the SoC/embedded market continues to develop. The plethora of boards has caused immense fragmentation, and this is becoming impossible to maintain because of different approaches to windowing, rendering, and so on. There are technologies to address this, however: Linux kernel support for Atomic DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) starts to simplify the problem; V4L2 augments this further. These are not implemented on all platforms, though, so it’s sadly not that simple. The level of support, and dependency on specific kernel versions or proprietary blobs, varies between Broadcom, Amlogic, Allwinner, Rockchip, Qualcomm, and Freescale. There’s thus more work from the vendors while software packages develop in parallel: improved V4L2 in FFmpeg, Kodi changes, kernel work.

Most Windows-specific activity revolves around Kodi under UWP, which we’ve covered before. There were no major updates to report on Apple or Android platforms.

Final thoughts before we tail away… further conversations about the migration to Python 3 and how that might be phased/implemented, and anything else needed in the 17.x branch for a further point release.

 

And that’s it for Day Two – a few attendees are going to leave early today (or maybe we’ll just leave them in a bar somewhere), but there’ll still be more Devcon tomorrow.

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