US government takedown requests more than triple in 12 months, says Google Report

By Jeff Blagdon on June 18, 2012

In its new Transparency Report, Google presents a look at the number and nature of the takedown requests it received from governments and copyright holders during the second half of 2011. In an accompanying blog post, the company states that current trends are "troubling," before stating that it complies with 65 percent of court orders and 47 percent of "more informal requests" to remove material from its search results (e.g., requests from police and executive branches of government). 

The report indicates that the number of US court and government requests to remove material more than doubled over the previous 6-month period — from 92 to 187. The number for the same period (July to December) in 2010 was 54.

Since May, the report now includes takedown requests from copyright holders and reporting organizations like Marketly. Also present are notes on specific removal requests by governments, including a gem from Passport Canada concerning video footage of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet (Google didn’t comply).

The UK makes the highest number of information requests per capita
 
Statistics on the user data requests that Google receives from courts and government agencies are also available in the report, broken down by country. The top spot once again goes to the US, with 6,321 requests and a 93 percent rate of full or partial compliance on Google’s part. The country with the highest number of information requests per capita might surprise you, however — the United Kingdom makes 23 for every million citizens (the US is slightly lower, at just over 20), and gets compliance 64 percent of the time. In comparison, Canada posted a more restrained 1.18 per million.

Break In Case Of Censorship

What Are Our Free Speech Fail-safes If SOPA Passes?

by Joshua_Kopstein - motherboard.vice.com

As I’m writing this, Congress is getting ready to vote on the single most destructive piece of legislation that the internet has ever faced. SOPA, penned by a team of corporate shills who now have swell lobbyist jobs to show for it, is a bill aimed at combating online piracy in the worst conceivable way possible: By giving copyright holders and the government overreaching, due process-circumventing powers to shut down entire websites based on the mere suspicion that they might contain infringing material.

Worst of all, it’s already happening. Even before the bill has come to vote, censorship shenanigans have already been demonstrated by Universal, who fraudulently removed a music video by Will.i.am that voiced opposition to SOPA. Now, imagine what will happen when SOPA is in full-swing and all of YouTube is held liable for bogus copyright claims … or Etsy, or Flickr.

Of course that says nothing of the countless technologists who have warned SOPA’s China-style DNS blocking will seriously fuck up the internet in general, so it’s really not hyperbolic to say that this is the worst nightmare of a democratic and stable internet.

So the question on everyone’s mind right now is what kind of free speech fail-safes exist if and when SOPA (and its twin in the Senate, PROTECT-IP) passes? Although we can’t guarantee that they will be 100 percent legal, here are a couple of them:


THE IP ADDRESS TRICK (THE DIRTY WAY)

The first is an extremely simple and dirty hack: Because SOPA’s provisions call for the re-routing of DNS (the web’s addressing system that links browsers with the computer hosting a site), the websites will still be there — you just won’t be able to get to them via the usual “www dot com” method. If a site gets blocked, typing the IP address of the host directly (eg: 192.168.1.1) would connect you to that site. The downside: This creates a lot of security risks for the site in question. The fact that DNS exists in part to mask these addresses from the average user should tell you something.

THE WORLD TOR

Tor is what some would call a “darknet,” a network that runs under the radar of the normal internet and can only be accessed using special client software. By connecting to the Tor network, you are anonymizing and encrypting your browsing activity by making your IP address appear as that of a random node somewhere else on the network. And since that random node will typically be outside of the United States, you won’t be getting routed away from sites the copyright elite have deemed “infringing.”

It’s scary to think that Tor might become an option for some Americans, seeing as how it’s been previously used to subvert censorship in places like China and Syria. But even with web traffic fully anonymized and virtually untraceable, it’s not merely a “censorship off” button and there are risks involved if you don’t know what you’re doing. Additionally, securing the means of connecting to (and obtaining information about) the Tor network could become a lot more difficult for newcomers if Tor’s website gets blocked. And moreover, doing so would likely be illegal under SOPA on grounds that it is exists to subvert the filtering system being put in place.

The Bitcoin “Dimnet”

Dot.Bit is another hidden network similar to Tor but operating off a system of encrypted “tokens,” acquired in a way very much like Bitcoins, the decentralized digital currency system . Potentially a boon for sites that want to run outside the reach of the censor, Dot.Bit allows these tokens to be used in order to anonymously register domains under its network, which are accessed under the Top-level Domain (TLD) .bit

This seems like a great idea, but even .bit domains run the risk of being targeted under SOPA. If the law requires ISPs to block access, it would be a simple matter of cutting off the ports that those domains run on. And if those domains are involved in shady black market dealings like the rest of the Bitcoin network, they’ll have ample reason to do so.

All in all, the options are either incredibly obtuse, risky or likely to become illegal anyway. But one thing is for certain: SOPA and PROTECT-IP’s ‘killing spiders with a sledgehammer’ strategy isn’t going to smash piracy — it’s just going to make the internet a lot messier.

The Author of SOPA Is a Copyright Violator

By Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, Digg.com

 

US Congressman and poor-toupee-color-chooser Lamar Smith is the guy who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as I'm sure you know, is the shady bill that will introduce way harsher penalties for companies and individuals caught violating copyright laws online (including making the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime which you could actually go to jail for). If the bill passes, it will destroy the internet (for more info, go here).

I decided to check that everything on Lamar's official campaign website was copyright-cleared and on the level. Lamar is using several stock images on his site, two of which I tracked back to the same photographic agency. I contacted the agency to make sure he was paying to use them, but was told that it's very difficult for them to actually check to see if someone has permission to use their images. (Great news, copyright violators!) However, seeing as they're both from the same agency and are unwatermarked, it seems fairly likely that he is the only person on the entire internet who is actually paying to use a stock image (and he'd be an idiot not to).

So I took a look back at an archived, pre-SOPA version of his site.

This is a screenshot of his site as it appeared on the 24th of July, 2011.

And this is the background image Lamar was using. I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photographer who took it.

And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him.

I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organization, requesting permission to use it: "I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes.

"I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com."

The RIAA? Amateurs. Here's how you sue 14,000+ P2P users

Ars Technica
By Nate Anderson

The big music labels and movie studios have stepped back from the lawsuit business. The MPAA's abortive campaign against individual file-swappers ended years ago, while the RIAA's more widely publicized (and criticized) years-long campaign against P2P swappers ended over a year ago.

So why have P2P lawsuits against individuals spiked dramatically in 2010? It's all thanks to the US Copyright Group, a set of lawyers who have turned P2P prosecution into revenue generation in order to "SAVE CINEMA." The model couldn't be simpler: find an indie filmmaker; convince the production company to let you sue individual "John Does" for no charge; send out subpoenas to reveal each Doe's identity; demand that each person pay $1,500 to $2,500 to make the lawsuit go away; set up a website to accept checks and credit cards; split the revenue with the filmmaker.

The lawsuits are brought in Washington, DC's federal courthouse, and they all come from the same law firm: Leesburg, Virginia-based Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver. In half a year, the group has proved surprisingly active and has managed the rare feat of making the RIAA campaign look slow-moving and small-scale.

No one seems quite sure how large this new pool of lawsuits has become, so we scoured the DC federal docket to find out just how many of these cases were brought already in 2010, and have collected them below for convenience. With a major new case filed only a week ago, it's clear that this campaign is just ramping up.

As it does so, the cries of those who say they have been wrongly targeted will grow—but most people will probably just pay up.

January 2010

The Gray Man, 749 Does. Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver went after its first set of targets in January, bringing suit on behalf of Worldwide Film Entertainment against 749 anonymous individuals. The Gray Man tells the story of an aging grandfather with a secret: "in actuality, he is a child murderer who tortures and cannibalizes his victims." The film's tagline reads, "A real-life Hannibal Lecter."

Uncross the Stars, 195 Does. In the other case filed in January, G2 Productions brought suit against 83 Does over the film Uncross the Stars, a family-friendly flick starring Ron Pearlman (who also plays Hellboy) and Barbara Hershey. The plot involves a retirement community in Arizona, which may be why the National Senior Living Providers Network called the film "a rare treat...that makes the audience laugh and cry."

The Uncross the Stars suit is notable for bring the first time that Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver rolled out a strategy it would employ repeatedly over the following months: suing a few people first and then amending the complaint later to up the number significantly. Thus, while the case is headed "G2 PRODUCTIONS, LLC v. DOES 1-83," 195 Does are now targeted after an Amended Complaint was filed.

March 2010

Far Cry, 4,577 Does. (In)famous German director Uwe Boll, best known for a series of mediocre video game films, got in on the lawsuit action two months later. In the middle of March, Boll's production company Achte/Neunte Boll Kino Beteiligungs GmbH filed suit against 2,049 Does over illicit distribution of the movie Far Cry based on the FPS of the same name. A few weeks later, the complaint was amended and it upped the number of targeted Does to 4,577.

Call of the Wild, 1,062 Does. The 2009 3D adaptation of Jack London's "Call of the Wild" was independently funded by Call of the Wild LLC. The producers hitched themselves to the litigation dogsled, filing suit a day after the Far Cry case. While only 358 Does were targeted initially, that number jumped to 1,062 a few weeks later as more Does were added in the Amended Complaint.

As for the movie itself, Christopher Lloyd starred in it, and a Variety reviewgave the picture decent marks apart from its use of the 3D gimmick. "Too bad the animal's protruding nose is the only feature that demands the third dimension," the review concluded.

The Steam Experiment, 2,000 Does. A few days later, yet another suit hit the DC District Court. Production company West Bay One sued an even 2,000 Does over its film The Steam Experiment, also known as The Chaos Experiment. The film stars Val Kilmer. According to the Internet Movie Database plot summary, "A deranged scientist locks 6 people in a steam room and threatens to turn up the heat if the local paper doesn't publish his story about global warming."

April 2010

Smile Pretty (aka Nasty) and others, 1,000 Does. Maverick Entertainment Group makes a host of low-budget films that will never make it to your local cineplex, including Army of the Dead, Border Town 2009, Buds for Life, Demons at the Door, Holy Hustler, and Smile Pretty (aka Nasty). In mid-April, the company went after 1,000 Does for sharing one or more of these films over the Internet.

May 2010

The Hurt Locker, 5,000 Does. The most influential case was filed only recently. Thanks to its Oscar buzz, Voltage Pictures' The Hurt Locker is the best known of all films involved in these lawsuits. It's also the largest case to date, with 5,000 Does, and has attracted some significant publicity.

Adding it up
14,583 Does have now been sued in federal court, with lawyers from Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver handling each case. The number is extraordinary; even after years of lawsuits, the RIAA campaign against file-swapperstargeted 18,000 people

Between January and May of this year, indie filmmakers have been persuaded to go after almost the same number of people, with most of that volume coming in only three months.

Data source: Administrative Office of the Courts, Wired

The sheer volume suggests that these cases aren't designed for prosecution—and they don't need to be. As the RIAA lawsuits showed us, most people will settle. Data from the recording industry lawsuits, revealed in a court case, showed that 11,000 of the 18,000 Does settled immediately or had their cases dropped by the labels. Seven thousand either refused to settle or never responded to the settlement letter, but after the RIAA subpoenaed their identities and filed "named" lawsuits against them, nearly every one settled.

After years of litigation, the number of people who have pursued a trial all the way to a verdict can be counted on one hand.

The legal campaign has the potential to earn real money. Copies of the settlement letters and settlement contracts seen by Ars Technica show that Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver generally asks for $1,500 to $2,500, threatening to sue for $150,000 if no settlement payment is forthcoming. Assuming that 90 percent of the current targets settle for $1,500, this means that the lawyers, studios, and P2P detection company would split $19.7 million.

Once the infrastructure has been set up, this sort of system is simple to replicate, since it's built largely on sending out letters and collecting cash. If the lawyers can continue signing up indie film clients at the current rate, they could be on their way to filing nearly 30,000 lawsuits by year's end, which would double the potential cash on the table.