Category: Piracy

U.S. companies help piracy websites evade the law

U.S. based companies assist pirate websites by providing cover for their illegal piracy business while pocketing their own dirty money in the process.

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Kim Dotcom may be going to jail, but MEGA piracy still going strong

U.S. based companies assist these efforts by literally providing cover for their illegal piracy business while pocketing their own dirty money in the process.

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YouTube’s Content ID Easily Fooled

When people talk about effective ways to mitigate the impact of online piracy, YouTube’s Content ID is often used as an example of what works. Unfortunately, despite its role as poster boy for anti-piracy tech, in reality it falls flat as a gatekeeper against online piracy.

Aside from a labyrinth-like user interface that seems likely to have been designed–not to help– but to discourage rights holders from using Content ID, the actual fingerprinting technology behind it can be easily fooled.

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Why is YouTube such a garbage dump?

Time for YouTube to get serious about cleaning up all the junk, spam and malware files on its site

YouTube is great for finding videos about pretty much everything.  Need to learn how to fix a furnace or use the latest camera equipment? There’s bound to be a video shows you how.  Unfortunately, amid the useful stuff, YouTube is also chock full of garbage.  The question is, with its massive technical resources, why doesn’t the site do a better job keeping house?

I’ve written before about the epidemic of fake “full-movie” uploads that fill YouTube.  That was in 2012.  Now, six years later, the problem still exists.  Apparently, YouTube isn’t concerned that its pages are full of spam files, many of them fake pirate movie uploads that lead users to sites rife with malware and money-making scams.

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Improving YouTube’s Content ID could help creators of all stripes

Why not make Content ID more accessible and transparent?

Much has been written about YouTube’s Content ID program, a fingerprinting technology that allows rights holders to find and claim their music or movies when uploaded to YouTube.  The technology was introduced in 2008 in the wake of Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube and since then has helped (some) creators mitigate the problem of piracy on the popular UGC (user-generated content) site.

Those who have access to the Content ID system can uploaded reference files and use a dashboard to choose how matches should be handled.  They can be limited based on audio, video, and length.  Matching content then can be blocked, removed, or monetized based on territorial rights.

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BOGUS fair use claims hurt creators already victimized by piracy

YouTube users claim Fair Use as a defense for uploading full copies of pirated movies

There was a lot of talk about fair use and takedown abuse at last week’s the U.S. Copyright Office’s Section 512 roundtables in San Francisco.  Many of those who spoke, bemoaned how poor, innocent uploaders were victimized, time after time, by malicious DMCA takedowns.

It’s a tried and true talking point, convenient, but disingenuous all the same.  Some of us, myself included, tried to make the point that creators, whose work is routinely (and massively stolen),  are often (doubly) victimized by malicious fair use claims.  

I thought I’d share an example of this that occurred just this week on YouTube.  On Tuesday a full-copy of the Swedish indie film “Kyss Mig” (all 147 minutes of it) was uploaded to YouTube by a user aptly named “Free Movies.”  As an added flourish, the user-name included the notation, “free movies bitches.”

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MUSO piracy report spots some new global trends

A report in today’s Torrent Freak noted that content protection firm (anti-piracy) firm Muso recently released its annual Global Piracy Insights Report for 2016 so I was prompted to take a look to see what what’s new on the piracy landscape.  According to the report there’s been a, “massive shift towards direct downloads for music content – growing by 31% in 2015”  In addition the report found that “28% of all visits to piracy sites in 2015 were through mobile devises, up 8% during the year.”

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