Sony is following in the footsteps of established anti-piracy lobbyists. The IFPI, for example, has been lobbying politicians to force ISPs to identify, filter, block and remove copyright infringing content from the Internet. For their part, the RIAA has suggested similar measures for the upcoming Anti-Piracy Trade Agreement Wishlist (ACTA).

Thus far, these attempts haven’t been particularly successful. ISPs worldwide are refusing to cooperate, mainly because they feel such actions violate the privacy of their customers. In addition, last week the Belgian ISP Scarlet - previously ordered to stop illegal file-sharing on its network - told the court that it is simply impossible for it to do so.

Nevertheless, Sony’s John McMahon said in his keynote speech at the Broadband World Forum, that he would like ISPs and copyright owners to cooperate in order to reduce piracy. According to McMahon, the entertainment industry is losing more than two billion dollars a year because of piracy, but he believes this number can be reduced significantly with the help of ISPs.

Interestingly, McMahon also said that customer frustration with DRM is one of the main reasons why people turn to file-sharing networks, instead of legal alternatives. Sony recognizes, but at the same time ignores these signals from their customers, as they are not planning to get rid of DRM. Instead, they are investing in a new and improved DRM, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE).

Post from: TorrentFreak

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Sony Urges ISPs to Cooperate Against Piracy torrent downloads.

Last year the court decided that Leaseweb had to take down everlasting.nu and hand over the name and address of the owner because the site structurally facilitated copyright infringement, as pointed out by BREIN.

At the time Leaseweb was hosting dozens of torrent sites, including Demonoid, mybittorrent.com, btmon.com, btjunkie.org, seedpeer.com, what.cd and waffles.fm. Although Leaseweb decided to appeal the decision, the torrent sites were no longer welcome, and were asked to find a new ISP.

Yesterday the appeal was denied, as the Amsterdam court again ruled that everlasting.nu was facilitating copyright infringement by allowing their users to download copyrighted content via torrents hosted on their site.

Leaseweb’s defense argued that Everlasting was not facilitating copyright infringement, because the torrent files itself are not copyrighted. However, the judge ruled that this was irrelevant, since the files are an essential part of the download process.

Leaseweb’s lawyers further argued that the tracker is not necessary for the download process, that the torrents could be mislabeled, and that there are also BitTorrent clients that do not upload (downloading music and movies is legal in the Netherlands), but their arguments did not impress the judge either.

At the moment it is still unclear what this means for future cases, such as the upcoming court case between Mininova and BREIN. In the ruling the court places a lot of emphasis on the tracker, as an essential component of the infringement process. Mininova does not operate a BitTorrent tracker.

It is however very unlikely that Leaseweb will ever host a BitTorrent tracker again. The ISP that once was a safe haven for most torrent sites is most likely done fighting.

Source TorrentFreak

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BitTorrent Tracker Hosting Illegal Says Dutch Court torrent downloads.

So far, the IFPI has had little success with their lobby, that’s probably why they decided to put legal pressure on the ISPs. “We believe that ISPs have a special part to play in this and must help us. The discussions we’ve tried to have with the ISPs haven’t led anywhere,” IFPI’s Managing Director in Sweden, Lars Gustafsson, said in response to their recent announcement.

The IFPI claims to have studied several ISPs practices, but according to Lars Gustaffson they intend to focus on one particular company which they claim facilitates filesharing on the Internet. One of the services they hope to stop is their nemesis, The Pirate Bay.

Gustafsson was advised by his legal team not to disclose the name of the ISP yet, but many people think the ISP Bahnhof will be the most likely target, since they are recommended by the pirate community because of their high stance on integrity.

“The ISPs don’t believe they have any responsibility to help when it comes to hindering filesharing,” says Lars Gustafsson. IFPI already sent out letters to several service providers, urging them to start monitoring their customers and filtering websites.

Most ISPs refuse to cooperate with the IFPI though. Last month, Telia Sonera, a large Swedish ISP responded to the IFPI’s request by stating that such actions are illegal under EU law. Norwegian ISPs later responded with similar arguments.

On the other hand, the IFPI claims that restricting access to filesharing sites might actually benefit ISPs. “Illegal P2P file-sharing may have helped drive broadband subscriptions in the past, yet today these activities, particularly in respect of movies, are hogging bandwidth,” they state.

Thus far, the IFPI has won in Denmark. In February, a Danish court ordered the ISP ‘Tele2′ to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The decision is currently under appeal, and the Pirate Bay recently announced that they will demand compensation for the block.

To be continued…

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

IFPI to Sue Swedish ISP for Facilitating Copyright Infringement

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IFPI to Sue Swedish ISP for Facilitating Copyright Infringement torrent downloads.

It’s becoming a trend for outfits such as the IFPI, MPAA, BPI and their equivalents to demand that ISPs disconnect their file-sharing customers from the internet. Unfortunately for them, ISPs don’t want to play ball with these demands and are starting to make their opinions known while refusing to be bullied. Even the European Parliament thinks that disconnecting file-sharers from the Internet is disproportionate.

When Simonsen Advokatfirma sent a letter to Norwegian ISPs via the MPAA’s lawyer Espen Tøndel, it was probably expected that the ISPs would agree to their outrageous demands. Not so. Instead, IKT Norway - an interest group for ISPs - stood up for the ISPs stating:

“In a constitutional state, the police and the prosecuting authority have the job of investigating and indicting, not lawyers and communication engineers. Most of the big ISPs in Norway are members of IKT Norway and we will support the various ISPs as best we can against what we see as a preposterous demand from Simonsen”

Now, in a detailed letter, IKT Norway has responded in the strongest possible way:

Regarding demands to prevent alleged unauthorized publication.

We refer to the letter from Simonsen Advokatfirma DA on behalf of Norsk Videogramforening dated 4. March 2008, also other letters from Simonsen dated 19 march 2008 and sent to several internet service providers (ISPs)

1. Demands issued to the ISPs

In your letter you claim that the ISPs have an obligation to prevent alleged illegal activity. It’s further suggested that this should be carried out by the ISP by matching IP addresses with customer names and thereafter forward provided letters to the subscribers which (apparently) used the listed, dynamic IP addresses.

Principally we do not consider it an ISPs role to report on suspicions regarding breach of intellectual property rights without a court ruling, to contribute to legal decisions regarding our customers.

The ISPs will of course follow current laws and, if they receive a final ruling which demands action, they will follow it.

However the ISPs do not believe it to be their task to monitor or through their own evaluation and/or the subjective assessments of others, to censor or sanction [content] on the net. It’s important that the rule of law is upheld and that the protection of rights is correct in accordance with the constitution, i.e. the police investigate and the court of law makes the judgment.

2. Roles of the ISP and responsibility

We stress that the ISPs on their own do not breach the law. We believe that you are familiar with the national implementation of the European Info-Soc Directive and that it deviates from Denmark. Your reference to a Danish ruling is not relevant in this case.

(Comment from Norwegian translator: Norway parted from Denmark in 1814, that’s why we celebrate 17th May and they should know better!)

In your letter you refer to the law regarding e-trade and cease and desists. Such an instruction must be issued to the one who’s allegedly breaching your clients rights. A superficial trial to ascertain an copyright breach without the accused being a part of the case, and without letting the accused defend himself according to the normal principle of contradiction, is inexpedient.

The consequence of this will be of such a large magnitude for the individual Internet user that we believe a more though investigation and court involvement is needed. Further investigation [by the police] will show if it’s possible to identify the user which the copyright holder claim has beached their rights, and after this a justified ruling can be made by the court of law.

When it comes to your comment on responsibility and helping out to commit the crime if the ISP does not prevent the alleged illegal activity, we do not agree. An ISP has no responsibility for what the customer does on the net as you suggest in your letter.

Based on this we reject your accusation that the ISPs have a responsibility for the users use of network and devices. The ISPs will not follow your demand to block access/prevent alleged illegal activity.

3. Conclusion

IKT-Norway stresses that it’s important to protect intellectual property. Without a strong governance of intellectual property rights, the incentive to invent and create may suffer. We do not protect nor sympathize with breaches of intellectual property rights, or other actions which breach the law.

However, the work to protect intellectual property must be carried out in such way that it does not breach fundamental constitutional principles. Your private investigation carried out on the net has be further investigated by the police and/or the court of law.

Best regards,
IKT- Norway

Hallstein Bjercke,
Director of “governmental contact”

Thanks to Harald for the translation of the original letter and Happy Birthday!

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

MPAA Gets a Slap From Norwegian ISPs

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MPAA Gets a Slap From Norwegian ISPs torrent downloads.

Rogers‘ new pricing scheme (see image below) gets rid of the all-you-can-eat plans most ISPs offer, and charges customers for every additional gigabyte once they have reached their monthly quota. For example, customers with an “extreme plus” plan pay $99.95 a month for the first 95GB, and $1.25 for every additional gigabyte they consume.

Here’s what Rogers wrote in a letter to their customers: “With households doing more online every day - from downloading music and streaming videos to joining online communities - it’s important to have an Internet provider that evolves to meet your online needs. At Rogers, we remain committed to always providing you with the best Internet experience possible.”

Don’t get me wrong, a contentious pricing scheme makes sense. The more people consume, the more they pay, fair enough. What bothers most Rogers users is that, even with this new pricing scheme, their BitTorrent traffic is still being throttled.

Rogers was one of the early adopters of BitTorrent traffic shaping. The first reports date back to 2005, and last year Rogers even decided to block all encrypted traffic, just to make sure that BitTorrent protocol encryption didn’t work.

Nevertheless, Rogers plays nice to its customers, and says it is “committed to providing the best Internet experience as possible”, but how can this be true if their customers can hardly use BitTorrent?

In the letter they sent to their customers they mention that, with a monthly bandwidth limit of 95GB, users can download a whopping 24,320 songs a month. However, if Rogers continues to throttle BitTorrent traffic, it can take up to 67.6 months before their customers actually reach their quota.

In a response to the new pricing scheme, a Rogers subscriber told TorrentFreak: “Pretty funny actually, as with the throttling they are doing, I could downgrade my service considerably.”

Not to worry though, there are several tip and tricks to get around the traffic shaping devices rogers uses. For some, BitTorrent encryption is sufficient to circumvent Rogers’ throttling, others need to adjust a few extra settings to enjoy their torrents in full-speed.

Happy torrenting…

Rogers’ new pricing scheme

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Rogers Continues to Throttle BitTorrent Traffic, Despite Contentious Pricing Scheme

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Rogers Continues to Throttle BitTorrent Traffic, Despite Contentious Pricing Scheme torrent downloads.