TorrentFreak Email Update

RIAA Copyright Pressure Silences Historical Radio Archive

Posted: 16 Jul 2014 04:28 AM PDT

When sites like The Pirate Bay come under copyright holder pressure, there is often a big backlash from users who see such action as unfair. That being said, it’s generally accepted by both sides that The Pirate Bay courts trouble by, rightly or wrongly, laughing in the face of copyright law.

The situation now faced by ReelRadio, a site dedicated to the streaming of archived historical radio, sits at the other end of the spectrum, but nevertheless the site is still facing potential dismantling by the RIAA.

In existence since 1996, ReelRadio still looks and feels like a site made in, well, 1996. Its classic feel is further outdated by the content it hosts, decades-old ‘aircheck’ demo recordings which were often used to showcase radio announcers before being placed in the archives.

Aircheck recordings appear to be popular among nostalgia hunters who can pick a memorable year from their life or another historical moment and become transported back in time. It’s a million miles away from what most people see as damaging piracy yet the RIAA is now applying the copyright thumbscrews to tax-exempt ReelRadio.

The problem is this. Airchecks are broadly split into two categories. ‘Unscoped’ airchecks contain not only the DJ or announcer’s voice, but also the music played in between. Airchecks recorded for troops fighting in Vietnam, for example, contain music being played during that era. ‘Scoped’ airchecks have the announcer’s voice intact but the music removed, leaving edited recordings that fail to flow.

ReelRadio streams both kind of recordings, or rather it did until the RIAA came knocking just over a week ago. Let’s be clear, ReelRadio does in fact have a license to play the music contained in its ‘unscoped’ airchecks. However, after years of operating trouble-free, the RIAA now wants the site to operate strictly within the parameters of its statutory license.

“The RIAA has determined that our service fails to meet the requirements for ‘archived programs’, which must be at least five hours in duration and may not be made available for more than two weeks. The service must also display the Title, Artist and Album of each featured song, but only while the recording is being performed,” ReelRadio President Richard Irwin explains.

The problems faced by the site are immediate. Irwin says he carries no airchecks with a duration of five hours and obviously the site makes them available for more than two weeks. Also, their streaming method does not cater to the display of meta-data. Worse still, it appears the RIAA also wants ReelRadio to do the impossible.

“The RIAA insists that we obtain permission from the copyright owners of these old radio broadcasts. Many broadcasters understand the difficulty of this requirement, since nearly all radio stations have changed ownership, format, and call letters, many times over,” Irwin explains.

“Nevertheless, we are expected to provide the RIAA with an explanation of how we have permission from radio stations that no longer exist and copyright owners who have no interest in historic recordings of their property.”

As a result of the RIAA complaint, ReelRadio has been forced to remove more than 1,100 ‘unscoped’ airchecks. Its ‘scoped’ airchecks, which are not part of its license, remain available under ‘fair use’ provisions.

The RIAA has given ReelRadio until August 8 to provide its response and holds the ability to close the site entirely by suspending its license. Whether it will choose to do so remains to be seen, but it’s clear that if it does there will be no gain whatsoever to the RIAA, but a really big loss to history.

Legally the RIAA appears to be on solid ground, but the court of public opinion on preserving nostalgia is likely to see things quite differently.

Those wanting to check out some unscoped airchecks can do so on YouTube. They won’t be going anywhere soon, there’s little doubt about that, so check out the gem below featuring the world’s easiest phone-in competition followed by a piece of unbelievable advertising for Winston cigarettes (1m 30s).

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

Google Processes Millions of Useless DMCA Notices

Posted: 15 Jul 2014 11:20 AM PDT

A major Internet anti-piracy strategy is to trawl the Internet for infringing content in order to send sites a DMCA-style notice. This, if all goes to plan, results in the content, or at the least a link to it, being removed from availability.

The world’s largest recipient of these notices is Google and in the interests of transparency the company publishes a report detailing the requests it receives. But while the majority of the requests are processed without further issue, increasing numbers serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

Last year alone, Google discarded 21 million takedown requests, either because the claims were invalid or were duplicates of previously sent notices.

In 2014 the duplication problem appears to be getting worse, with even the BPI (who in all fairness are more accurate than most with their takedowns) sending large volumes of notices that contain high percentages of links that have already been taken down.

Across the Atlantic, Fox – which is the fifth all-time greatest sender of notices (28 million) – is also having difficulty remembering which URLs it has already asked to be erased. How Google can remember what takedowns Fox has already sent and why the studio cannot isn’t clear, but the high percentages in the refusal column suggests the numbers are significant.

That being said, these numbers should be put into perspective. The BPI has asked Google to take down more than 86 million URLs and Fox 28 million, so even many tens of thousands of duplicates are a relatively low percentage of the total. However, there is a far more depressing trend that suggests that some anti-piracy companies don’t check to see if the links they’re complaining about are actually infringing copyright at all.

The image below shows a selection of notices sent to Google this month by NBC, with a percentage of each rejected by Google. The reason for that is that they’re directed at isoHunt.com, a site that was shut down by NBC’s Hollywood allies last year. The links and the site itself simply do not exist.

Another instance, shown below, lists several TV and movie companies plus software companies Adobe and Lynda looking to take down URLs from another allegedly infringing site. Except this one, Hotfile.com, is not only dead, but was actually taken down by the studios themselves. For reference, these notices were sent four days ago and Hotfile closed down last December.

To see how prevalent this problem is we dug through the TorrentFreak archives to find sites that have been closed by copyright holders or the police in the last couple of years, to see if anti-piracy companies have updated their records.

Despite huge publicity, even now plenty of companies are wasting Google’s time with notices for content hosted on Megaupload, even though it has been closed for two and a half years. Just last month on the Usenet front, publisher Lynda targeted dead-since-last-year NZBsRus.

Also living in the past are the people at Viacom, who this month sent a flurry of notices asking for content to be removed from BTjunkie, a site that shut down 30 months ago in the wake of the Megaupload fiasco. Viacom are definitely not on their own though, as this link shows.

Finishing up, Warner Bros., whose UK-based anti-piracy group FACT shut down streaming site SurftheChannel in 2012 and helped to get its owner jailed, sent a notice to Google in March asking for it to remove links to The Big Bang Theory.

And Fox (shown earlier to be sending lots of duplicates), plus HBO, Evil Angel, NBC and Viacom are apparently still unaware that the UK Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit shut down Filecrop back in May.

Why this activity continues is anyone’s guess, but these takedowns either aren’t subjected to scrutiny or are deliberately passed with the knowledge that they’re invalid. Both options are causing unnecessary workloads for those employed to process them and putting money in the pockets of anti-piracy companies in return for zero effectiveness.

Some might argue that’s nothing new.

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