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EU Commission Set to Unveil New Anti-Piracy Action Plans

Posted: 21 Jun 2014 02:24 AM PDT

While much of the last decade-and-a-half’s fight against piracy has taken place on the national level, the attempted introduction of ACTA and similar legislation showed that broader approaches are increasingly under consideration.

In an announcement timetabled for July 1, the EU Commission will reveal the adoption of two sets of measures designed to promote “greater respect” for intellectual property rights in the European Union and beyond.

Firstly, the EU will announce the adoption of an action plan to fight infringement of intellectual property rights across Europe. The second will see the adoption of a strategy for the protection and enforcement of the same in third countries.

The EU action plan will comprise ten specific mechanisms which will provide new “policy enforcement tools” to counter intellectual property infringement being carried out on a commercial scale. This suggests a targeting of sites and services, rather than their users.

According to the Commission, commercial activities represent a major challenge for the EU due to the harm they cause, including the undermining of both investment in innovation and the creation of jobs.

Rather than going down the complex and expensive legal route to tighter enforcement, the EU says its new tools will be “non-legislative” in nature and will seek to “follow the money” in order to deprive commercial offenders of income.

The announcement in respect of third countries will outline plans to strengthen cooperation between the authorities, including customs authorities in the EU and those elsewhere. Common objectives will include preventing the spread of infringing content and the stimulation of investment, growth and employment through debate and awareness.

The “follow the money” approach is definitely the anti-piracy strategy that has been met with the least opposition over the last couple of years. The work with brands and their advertisers plus payment processors such as Visa and Mastercard to stop doing business with pirate sites has been well received by industry and appears to be gaining traction. Progress is being reported in the United States and more recently the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit detailed its own successes.

The full details of the new action plans will be made available by the EU in a little over a week’s time.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

RIAA Reported 50 Million Pirate Links to Google

Posted: 20 Jun 2014 11:06 AM PDT

Despite the growing availability of legal music services in many countries, record labels are facing a constant stream of pirated music.

In an attempt to prevent stop these infringements, the RIAA and other music industry groups send millions of takedown notices to Internet services every month. Most of these requests are directed at Google.

This week the RIAA reached a new milestone after notifying Google of the 50 millionth allegedly infringing URL, up from 25 million less than a year ago. The latest figures show that the 50 million links were spread out over 14,907 separate DMCA takedown notices.

Most of the requests, nearly 2 million, were for URLs belonging to the cyberlocker search engine filestube.com, which now operates under a new domain name. The MP3 download portals pisamba.com, downloads.nl, mp3skull.com and beemp3.com complete the top five with between 1.3 and 1.6 allegedly infringing links each.

RIAA’s takedown stats

While Google swiftly removes infringing links from its search index, the RIAA remains unhappy with how the takedown process in general is working. One of the main issues is that several foreign websites simply ignore takedown notices, or put the links back under a slightly modified URL.

"All those links to infringing music files that were automatically repopulated by each pirate site after today's takedown will be re-indexed and appear in search results tomorrow,” RIAA CEO Cary Sherman said previously.

“Every day we have to send new notices to take down the very same links to illegal content we took down the day before. It's like 'Groundhog Day' for takedowns.”

For the RIAA and other copyright holders there are few options to deal with these ‘rogue’ sites. However, the music industry group believes that Google and other search engines can do more to prevent people from accessing pirate sites through their services.

The RIAA believes that search engines should strike a deal with copyright holders to make sure that pirated files stay down through advanced filtering techniques.

In addition the RIAA wants Google to lift all takedown limits, push down pirate sites in search results, promote legal sites and services, remove pirate terms from Autocomplete and completely remove "repeat infringers" from their search index.

Google sees things differently and believes that it’s already doing enough. The company's Senior Copyright Policy Counsel Katherine Oyama previously noted that copyright holders should consider better SEO, and focus on offering consumers what they want; decent legal alternatives.

"The best way to battle piracy is with better, more convenient, legitimate alternatives to piracy, as services ranging from Netflix to Spotify to iTunes have demonstrated. The right combination of price, convenience, and inventory will do far more to reduce piracy than enforcement can," she said.

Over the past few months numerous copyright holders and lawmakers have increased their pressure on Google, but the search engine shows no intention of changing its policies. The longer the current standoff continues, the more likely it is that this issue will eventually be fought out in court.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.