Last week the European Parliament and European Council agreed on the final text of the EU Copyright Directive.

Supporters of Article 13 say this will lead to a better deal for the entertainment industries at the expense of Google’s YouTube, since it will have to obtain proper licenses for content uploaded to platform, while taking responsibility for infringing uploads.

Opponents, on the other hand, believe that the Article 13 proposals will be bad news for the Internet as a whole, since they have the potential to stifle free speech and expression, at the very least.

It’s important to note that Article 13 opponents come in all shapes and sizes, some more militant than others. However, last Friday the EU Commission took the ‘one size fits all approach’ by labeling every dissenting voice as being part of a “mob”, one groomed, misinformed and misled by Google.

Given that the Commission’s own Code of Conduct mandates that “both Commissioners and Commission staff are bound to act objectively and impartially”, the publication of the piece was a real surprise. That it also appeared to demean and devalue the public protests of millions of its own citizens bordered on the outrageous.

Proponents and opponents of any pending legislation should be free to undermine the position of their opponents by any legal, non-violent means, but this intervention by the EU seemed flat-out wrong. Taking sides in this way – even if the piece had been against Article 13 – is inappropriate at this stage of the game.

Before we published our report on Friday, a short discussion here at TF concluded that a record of the piece should be taken. None of us here believed it would stay up for long and it transpires that gut instinct was right. Visitors to the Medium page where the piece was published now see the following text;

The piece appears to have been removed (archive copy here) following a torrent of complaints on social media, with supporters of Article 13 incensed that they were essentially being told they hadn’t made up their own minds about the proposed legislation, but had become mindless zombies hypnotized by an insidious Google campaign.

Whether there is any truth to claims that Google is behind some kind of ‘bot’ campaign will be for future dissection but organizations like the EU Commission shouldn’t go around implying that voters are stupid. They’re allowed to think it (don’t we all to a degree?), but saying it is incredible.

Quite why this line was crossed is anyone’s guess but someone reasonably important sanctioned this piece and it would be nice to know who – and why.

What is even more bewildering is that the Commission is not sorry for what was written. The article was removed not because it was incorrect, but because the public apparently doesn’t have the capacity to understand it. Evidently, a simple update and clarification wouldn’t have been understood either, hence the deletion of the entire piece.

Mentioning SOPA in the same breath as Article 13 always raises hackles among entertainment industry groups because there are plenty of legitimate reasons why they want it to be forgotten. Now, seven years on, they might finally get their wish because what is happening now is arguably much more ugly. This could be the new benchmark, the new low.

Let’s be absolutely clear and honest here. In common with every political campaign in history, there has been misinformation on both sides of the Article 13 debate. In the middle, however, are genuine people who either want to protect their creative revenues or keep their Internet free and open.

The bias presented in the piece by the EU Commission undermined the credibility of all of them. It doesn’t need to be explained, it speaks for itself.

If the music industries and the EU want to take on the dominance of Google, then they should do so. If Google is found to have done wrong in this campaign, then it should face whatever is coming. That said, why do hundreds of millions of citizens have to be caught in the crossfire?

George Carlin said we should never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. Or was that the EU Commission, I forget now.

What i’m absolutely certain of is that it was David Brent, the world’s greatest living philosopher, who said that when we treat people greatly, they will show themselves to be great. I guess it’s a bit late for that now.

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Several weeks ago, former BitTorrent Inc. executive Simon Morris published a series of articles on Medium, discussing his time at the company and thoughts for the future.

By any standard, his articles are absolutely first class and a must-read for anyone interested in the resilience of the BitTorrent protocol, decentralization, and how ‘breaking rules’ can create both winners and losers.

The third piece in the series raises an extremely important issue – that of initial intent when creating disruptive platforms or technologies.

Perhaps most notably and despite his technology facilitating the sharing and downloading of billions of dollars worth of content, BitTorrent protocol inventor Bram Cohen was never sued for his work. Cohen set out to solve the problem of transferring big files in an efficient way, there was never any talk of piracy.

The same can be said of BitTorrent Inc., which despite controlling uTorrent, the world’s most recognizable file-sharing client, has never been taken to court for its activities. Considering the scale of infringement that’s now accidentally associated with the work of Cohen and his now-former company, it’s notable – but not that surprising – that the lawyers have stayed away.

That didn’t happen by chance. Neither Cohen or his former company have ever advocated the use of their technologies for infringing purposes.

This valuable lesson, of not promoting a tool or service for illegal uses, should never be underestimated. Intent, as mentioned earlier, is almost everything. No matter if a product passes the test of having “substantial non-infringing uses”, incriminating statements made by its creator (even before a project even gets off the ground) can come back to haunt – indefinitely.

Regularly, on various online discussion platforms, technically gifted individuals report that they are about to launch a new torrent site, streaming service, app, or similarly functional platform. Invariably they explain their project’s progress thus far (sometimes with links to Github) and then seek opinions on what users might find useful in a finished product.

However, more often than not, they also shoot themselves in the foot by talking about piracy-related matters. While it’s undoubtedly useful to consider how the law might view such a platform in the future, very often the conversations step over the line, with the effect of forever associating the finished product with copyright infringement.

Admittedly, the odds of site/service/app operators getting sued are relatively small, given the large number of sites out there that continue to operate both blatantly and with impunity versus the number of lawsuits filed.

However, given the importance of intent, especially that which is made public in discussions when a project is getting off the ground, the chances of any subsequent prosecution being successful increases exponentially.

Given that people launching such sites and services must be pretty familiar with the hostile legal environment surrounding these platforms, it seems entirely counter-intuitive to state from the outset that the intent is to infringe, or at least assist others in their infringing activity. But herein lies the problem.

As Morris suggests, those who set out to break rules (disrupting big business or even governments with cryptocurrency, to take his example) essentially have two choices.

They can either do so without displaying ‘evil’ intent while throwing plenty of positive reinforcement into the mix (promotion of legal activity). Or they can do so anonymously, so a potentially incriminating past doesn’t catch up with them later.

While anonymity is an option for those intending to create piracy-focused platforms, it isn’t a simple position to maintain long-term, especially for those whose aim is to generate and ultimately enjoy revenue.

Also, not promoting a ‘pirate’ service for piracy purposes means that the intended audience won’t easily flock aboard to make the site or service a success, since there are so many competitors obviously doing so already.

So, while the headline of this piece states that ‘intent’ is almost everything, in today’s environment it could be argued that for prospective ‘pirate’ site operators, anonymity is even more important.

A third option, which is generally underrated, is obscurity – but that’s way too boring for those seeking notoriety on the high seas.

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Streaming set-top boxes and IPTV services have been selling like hot cakes over the past several years.

While some of these offer access legally, that’s certainly not always the case. The unauthorized services are a thorn in the side of mainstream entertainment industry companies, which are trying hard to address the problem. 

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has been particularly active on this front. The anti-piracy partnership between Hollywood studios, Netflix, Amazon, and more than two dozen other companies, has filed lawsuits against several services already, and this week they add a big one to the list. 

In a complaint filed at a Federal Court in California, ACE accuses the US-based company ‘Omniverse One World Television’ and its owner Jason DeMeo of copyright infringement.

Omniverse doesn’t offer any streaming boxes but sells live-streaming services to third-party distributors, such as Dragon Box, HDHomerun, Flixon TV, and SkyStream TV, which in turn offer live TV streaming packages to customers. 

“Defendants operate at a higher level in the supply chain of infringing content—recruiting numerous downstream services like Dragon Box into the illicit market and providing them with access to unauthorized streams of copyrighted content.

“Defendants function as a ‘hub’ of sorts, with the enlisted downstream
services as the ‘spokes.’ Omniverse’s offering is illegal, it is growing, and it
undermines the legitimate market for licensed services,” the complaint adds.

According to the official website, Omniverse includes more than 70 top US TV channels and 8 premium channels. However, ACE and its members allege that some of the channels are offered without proper licenses. As such, they are illegal.

“Omniverse’s illegal services, and the downstream ‘Powered by Omniverse’ entities, undermine the legitimate market for legal and licensed services, a harm that has grown as Omniverse has expanded,” ACE spokesperson   Richard VanOrnum informs TorrentFreak.

Omniverse’s owner Jason DeMeo previously insisted that his company had acquired the rights to stream some channels in the US. However, in an interview with Cord Cutters News, he was not willing to share any details on the underlying contract.

The complaint clearly disputes this, stressing that Omniverse and all “Powered by Omniverse” services are operating illegally.

“Plaintiffs have not granted licenses that permit Defendant DeMeo or
Omniverse to stream the Copyrighted Works or sublicense streams to whatever counterparty they wish,” ACE writes.

According to ACE, the public has plenty of options to watch movies and TV-shows through official channels, with 140 legal online services for film and TV content is the US alone. 

The movie, TV show, and distribution alliance is now asking the California court for an injunction to shut down the infringing service and impound all hardware. In addition, they’re requesting statutory damages which can go up to several million dollars.

MPAA CEO Charles Rivkin comments that lawsuits like this one are needed to protect the livelihoods of millions of people who depend upon a healthy film and television industry.

“I’ve seen firsthand how creators are economically harmed by piracy enterprises, which is why today’s ACE litigation – and the MPAA’s work helping make it happen – is another strong step forward protecting the rights of artists,” Rivkin says.

We also reached out to Omniverse for a comment on the allegations but at the time of writing, we have yet to hear back. The Omniverse website, meanwhile, remains online.

—

A copy of the ACE complaint against Omniverse is available here (pdf).

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When it comes to pirate site blocking, South Korea is one of the most active countries in the Asia-Pacific region. 

According to recent data from the Motion Picture Association, the country has blocked 456 sites to prevent the public from accessing pirated material.

These blocking orders are sanctioned by the Korean Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), which also oversees other blocking efforts, including those targeted at porn or illegal gambling sites. 

While the ISP blockades work well for regular HTTP sites, they are fairly easy to bypass on HTTPS connections, something most sites offer today. For this reason, the Korean authorities are now stepping up their blocking game. 

This week the Government announced that it will start eavesdropping on SNI fields, which identify the hostname of the target server. This allows ISPs to see which HTTPS sites users are trying to access, so these can be blocked if they’re on the Korean blocklist. 

The new measures will apply to 895 foreign websites that are linked to porn, gambling or copyright infringement.

“The SNI blocking is a method of checking and blocking the target server in the SNI field. It is not related to communication interception and data packet interception,” the Government writes.

“In particular, the new method plans to block illegal sites related to child pornography, video piracy, and illegal gambling,” the translated press release adds. 

The new blocking measures were already announced early last year as a new tool to deal with pirate sites, and are expected to take effect on February 22. From then on, users who access a blocked HTTPS site will be redirected to the following warning page. 

The new blocking policy is meeting quite a bit of resistance locally. A petition that was launched earlier this week has been signed by over 180,000 people already and this number is growing rapidly. 

The petition warns that this type of censorship is limiting freedom of expression. At the same time, however, it notes that people will find ways to bypass the blockades. 

“We will continue to bypass and evade Internet censorship. The new https blocking can also be bypassed through VPN programs or by activating ESNI. Do you really think limiting this way is effective?” it reads. 

Indeed, SNI eavesdropping and blocking is useless when people use a VPN. In addition, more modern browsers and companies such as Cloudflare increasingly support encrypted SNI (ESNI). This prevents ISPs from snooping on SNI handshakes.

The nightly build of Firefox added support for ESNI last October, for example. As Bleepingcomputer notes, this is a more pressing issue now for South Koreans, which is exemplified by a recent message on Firefox’s bug tracker.

While it is no surprise that many South Koreans are not happy with the changes, at least their Government and ISPs are transparent about the matter. In Europe and elsewhere, HTTPS blocking is also fairly common, but it’s not always clear what measures are used. 

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Authorities in Russia maintain a huge database of banned sites, from platforms that promote terrorism to those that engage in unlicensed gambling and copyright infringement.

ISPs are required to prevent their users from accessing these sites by interfacing their systems with the so-called FGIS (Unified Register of Prohibited Information) database. More recently, however, legislation was tweaked so that search engines must also prevent banned sites from appearing in their search results.

Late 2018, this caused problems for Google. While local providers including Yandex and Mail.ru connected to the blacklist as required, Google did not. This prompted local telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor into action.

In the first instance, the telecoms watchdog contacted Google with a demand that it should immediately connect to the FGIS blacklist. But, despite a meeting with the authorities, Google still refused to comply, something which placed the company in breach of federal law.

As a result, Google was hit with a fine of 500,000 rubles (US$7,595), the lowest amount that can be handed down under existing laws.

Ever since, Roscomnadzor has been encouraging Google to connect to the FGIS but the US-based company has declined. However, it now appears that Google is effectively carrying out the search result delistings the Russians have requested, even though the mechanics appear slightly different.

According to an Interfax source, Google has received a list containing 120,000 ‘banned’ URLs and has been removing them from its search results. Thus far, Google is reported to have deleted around 73% of the illegal content present in the FGIS database from its results using this method.

While checking all of the links is certainly beyond the scope of this article, TorrentFreak checked the results for RuTracker, Russia’s most popular torrent site and one that is permanently blocked in the country.

Last year, RuTracker.org and .net featured prominently in Google.ru’s results but when searched for using a Russian IP address, they are no longer present.

Interestingly, when searching for RuTracker.org using Google.ru but via a foreign (non-Russian IP address), the results are what one might expect, with RuTracker.org and RuTracker.net as the top results. Nevertheless, Roscomnadzor seem happy with Google’s efforts.

“Constructive dialogue and cooperation have been established between Roscomnadzor and Google. At the moment, we are satisfied with the results of this cooperation,” Roscomnadzor spokesperson Vadim Ampelonsky told Interfax.

The cooperation appears to have calmed relations between Google and Roscomnadzor on the issue of filtering. Less than a month ago, the telecoms watchdog threatened to fine Google again for non-compliance, warning that Google itself could find itself blocked in Russia.

That threat seems to have been headed off, at least for now.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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