“Making available and managing an online platform for sharing copyright-protected works, such as ‘The Pirate Bay’, may constitute an infringement of copyright”

That summary, from the CJEU’s press release, doesn’t capture a key aspect of the case, which is that The Pirate Bay is not storing any copyright-protected works on its site, merely hosting links to torrents. The latest judgment builds on an earlier ruling by the CJEU, which held that sharing hyperlinks to unauthorized copies was legal but only if it was done unwittingly, and not for commercial benefit. In the case of The Pirate Bay, the court has now ruled that neither applied. The Pirate Bay was run to make a profit, the judges said, as the advertising on the site indicated, and it knew it was linking to unauthorized copies:

“the operators of ‘The Pirate Bay’ have been informed that their platform provides access to copyright-protected works published without the authorisation of the rightholders. In addition, the same operators expressly display, on blogs and forums accessible on that platform, their intention of making protected works available to users, and encourage the latter to make copies of those works.”

A highly problematic aspect of the latest judgment is that the links in question were uploaded by users, not by The Pirate Bay itself, so arguably BREIN should pursue the former. However, the CJEU did not agree that this fact exonerated The Pirate Bay:

“Whilst it accepts that the works in question are placed online by the users, the Court highlights the fact that the operators of the platform play an essential role in making those works available. In that context, the Court notes that the operators of the platform index the torrent files so that the works to which those files refer can be easily located and downloaded by users. ‘The Pirate Bay’ also offers — in addition to a search engine — categories based on the type of the works, their genre or their popularity. Furthermore, the operators delete obsolete or faulty torrent files and actively filter some content.”

The CJEU seems to be saying that if a site carries out common activities like providing an index or categorizing content uploaded by its users, it can no longer be considered a “mere conduit“, and can become an active participant in the linking to copyright material. As such, the court implies, it loses the intermediary liability protection that is enshrined in the EU’s e-commerce directive.

Undermining intermediary liability protection in this way is very bad news for companies offering online services in the EU that allow users to post links – the vast majority. It suggests that they must either stop providing any kind of search facility or content moderation/organization, or they must actively check every user posting for possible copyright infringement – clearly an impossible task, since there are so many legal factors involved. This is a hot issue at the moment, as the revised EU copyright directive includes measures that would require larger sites to filter all user uploads for possible copyright infringements.

Ironically, one outfit that will not be much affected by the judgment is The Pirate Bay. For Internet users outside the EU, the ruling will have negligible impact. They will continue to access The Pirate Bay as before. Even within the European Union, the effect will be limited, and only make itself felt after a while. The CJEU’s ruling merely clarifies the underlying law, and now it will be up to the Dutch court that referred the case to make its own decision in accordance with the CJEU’s guidelines. Even then, the most that the local court can do is to order Dutch ISPs to block direct access to The Pirate Bay. Circumventing such blocks using VPNs or one of the many proxies available will be straightforward. If anything, imposing blocks in the EU will encourage even more people there to discover and start using these kind of tools – no bad thing at a time when online privacy is under threat from many quarters.

Featured image by Alex Borland.

The post EU’s top court says The Pirate Bay <i>can</i> be blocked, because it knowingly links to unauthorized copyright material appeared first on Privacy News Online by Private Internet Access VPN.

Ten years ago, activists argued that file sharing was unstoppable and would adapt to any threat using mobile transmissions. However, this innovation hasn’t taken place, maybe out of a lack of urgency. Let’s examine how such a technology could work.

A little history

When music sharing became file sharing with the advent of the first home computers, files were physically carried on cassette tapes and floppy disks to the recipient. This was the early 1980s, and this form of sharing has been nicknamed the AdidasLAN in retrospect, joking about the fact that files were carried by Adidas sneakers.

The first major development came with BBSes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when an error-correcting and signal-quality-sensitive file transfer protocol appeared intended to transfer files over phone lines. It was known as ZModem, and you could call it an early poor man’s version of TCP (as in the TCP/IP suite of Internet protocols; this was not yet the Internet). This protocol was used to transfer a lot of correspondence and discussions (and other files) on an amateur network known as FidoNet that predated the mainstream Internet rollout.

Fast forwarding to 1999, and Napster appeared, with one centralized server and centralized client databases (where everybody could see everybody’s full collection). It was shut down by the copyright industry in a move that was the first in a long string of mistakes.

A few months later, a competitor named DirectConnect appeared, which quickly got many protocol-compatible clones. Thus, the servers had decentralized to many different servers – but the clients still served their full database, which presented a legal weakness, and a file was transferred between one source and one destination at a time, which presented an efficiency weakness.

In response to this in turn, BitTorrent was developed and released in the summer of 2001. It decentralized the client databases and the transmission, so nobody could see the full shared catalog of another peer. And… well, the innovation basically ends at that point.

Let’s take that again: when BitTorrent was developed, not only did Facebook and Twitter not exist, but the world didn’t have modern mobile phones or the very concept of apps on mobile phones.

If you want an idea of just how old BitTorrent is, consider the fact that it was released in the same summer as Windows XP (July 2 and August 26, respectively).

There has been basically no innovation at all in the file sharing field after BitTorrent, and that’s a problem on many fronts. The development that has happened has mostly been in the convenience field – like the ability to subscribe to certain TV shows using RSS.

The one major security add-on is VPNs, and although they are tremendously useful in anonymizing and the best we’ve got today, they are but one security layer on top of an old technology.

Convenience or security?

There’s always a case to be made for user convenience if you want adoption of software. Popcorn Time, for example, can be argued to be the most recent big innovation in file sharing – but it adds convenience only, and not one piece of security. If we’re updating the security to account for the latest fifteen years, convenience may be nice, but it’s not our main focus.

The founders, operators, and spokespeople for The Pirate Bay have long argued that it’s a weakness of the ecosystem that they’re a centralized chokepoint. It’s easy to see they’re right in this. In the latest installment, Peter Sunde argues that IPFS or ZeroNet would provide significant innovation – but much of this just builds another interceptable layer on top of legacy BitTorrent instead of doing what BitTorrent did: reinventing ground-up to meet a clear and present threat.

It’s important to understand that developing a technology to protect dissidents in repressive regimes, and a technology to enable the nonprofit sharing of culture and knowledge, are one and the same thing — even up to where repressive regimes and the copyright industry use the same surveillance/repression vendors.

Therefore, in this thought experiment, we’re focusing on developing a technology to enable the free and safe information sharing for dissidents in repressive regimes; a tool to safeguard human rights. As a bonus, we’re also getting a general information-wants-to-be-free technology. (This is a common factor of the copyright industry, that they fight against basic human rights in order to enforce their monopoly. For example, the copyright industry recently complained that TOR and bitcoin – two tools used to help dissidents in repressive regimes safeguard human rights – indeed “get in the way” of copyright monopoly enforcement.)

Once you’re focusing on making information anonymous and untraceable, you’re doing the bulk of your transmission off the traceable Internet. You’re using the fact that there are many clusters forming daily (if not hourly) of random sets of mobile devices (Androids and iPhones) that happen to come into physical proximity of each other – at subway stations, in buses, in parks. You use the fact that these can hold massive data amounts today, and that they can contact each other and transfer tons of data anonymously and untraceably in such spontaneous clusters, using low-energy long-range Bluetooth 4 as the most obvious transmission candidate. Thus, we have huge set of constantly shifting mesh networks (a supermesh) where nodes come and go, and carry data from one mesh to the next.

When using a network like this, you would choose to publish a document or subscribe to a certain flow (maybe a series of documents from a dissident), and a peer somewhere – at a safe distance from you, many hops away – could choose to act as a gateway to the Internet, thereby making the endpoints truly anonymous and untraceable, not to mention uncensorable.

As a funny observation, such a transmission technology would build more on the original AdidasLAN than it builds on BitTorrent, as the successful transmission of data depends on nodes being in physical motion through the day.

Of course, as mentioned, such a technology could also be used to tell the mesh network to subscribe to episodes of a certain TV show, where those episodes would practically appear everywhere at once in a city with just a few gateway feeds into the supermesh in that particular city. That’s a byproduct of developing human rights software, as observed earlier.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

The post BitTorrent is fifteen years old. What would a file sharing technology developed today look like? appeared first on Privacy News Online by Private Internet Access VPN.

Your ISP is going to spy on you starting July 12, 2012

One year ago, the RIAA and the MPAA organized a project with the largest internet service providers in the US to begin monitoring their customer’s internet activity.  This monitoring was introduced as a joint coalition to combat piracy.  A list of providers that are on board includes, but is not limited to, Time Warner, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon and AT&T.

According to CNet’s Greg Sandoval, Cary Sherman of the RIAA has announced this week that deployments of the spying tools are nearly prepared and a tentative launch of July 12, 2012 has been set.

Reports indicate that there will be consequences for users who are caught pirating digital media.  First offenses may include forced educational rehabilitation as well as throttled connection speeds.  There have also been discussions stating that the top 200 websites will become inaccessible for users who are caught pirating.

However, the fact that ISPs are able to detect this activity indicates that they will be spying on their users.

Tips to protect your privacy

Using the internet, as well as using the internet to fileshare, is completely legal.  Here are ways to protect your privacy when engaging in legal activities:

1. Use an anonymous VPN service.  For us, not only is it obligatory to recommend a VPN, but in general, this is also the most widely accepted solution to privatize internet traffic.  VPN services provide tunnels which are completely encrypted.  Your ISP will not be able to monitor your connection.  Additionally, every application will communicate through the VPN without any manual configuration.  Bonus points for paying with anonymous crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, but for no log VPN services it is not necessary. UPDATE: Be sure to disable Google Web History and use Chrome in Incognito mode to gain even more privacy!

Difficult: Easy
Cost: Paid
Pros: All applications are encrypted.  Your ISP will not be able to spy on you.
Cons: Paid service.
Recommended: ✮✮✮✮✮

2. Use an ssh based SOCKS5 proxy.  You can run a local SOCKS5 proxy with the distributed ssh client in *nix and Mac OS X as well as PuTTY for Windows.  In Windows, simply set the options for PuTTy.   In Mac OS X and *nix, simply connect via SSH like:

ssh -D <port> (<user>@)<server>

UPDATE:

3. Tor is an amazing tool for obtaining privacy and anonymity.  For all your regular browsing needs, Tor is ideal, and best of all, it’s absolutely free.  However, Tor is not recommended when using heavy peer to peer file sharing protocols.

Difficult: Easy
Cost: Free
Pros: Very anonymous and completely free.
Cons: Slow and unable to do heavy p2p.
Recommended: ✮✮✮

The post Your ISP is Going to Spy on You Starting July 12, 2012 appeared first on Privacy News Online by Private Internet Access VPN.

• • •

Please give the world a brief introduction about yourself, such as past projects, interests, beliefs?
I’m a mathematician. I’m not great with people but I’m good with abstract ideas. All of my projects have the same influence and characteristics. For example, XMLShop.com is an automated drop-shipping system. Then, there’s SEMrush.com, a competitive intelligence tool. They have teams, of course. But if the team were to disappear one day, customers wouldn’t notice for weeks. When it comes to beliefs, I have none. I’m a facts and numbers guy. Having beliefs indicates a lack of knowledge and/or the ability to draw conclusions based on known facts. I have no problem admitting when I have no knowledge of something, so I simply don’t need to believe.

Why did you create YouHaveDownloaded?
It started as a joke. We were talking with two other guys, having a beer and a few laughs. Some guys talk about football, other guys talk about girls – we talk about P2P protocols, social aspects of file sharing and privacy concerns. Some conversations end up in a bar fight, some end up in hangovers (most of them, actually) – our conversation ended up in a little coding. By the way, just to prevent nerd jokes, all of us are pretty successful with girls and money . We just find complicated ideas a bit more interesting then discussions about whether John Doe hit a ball or not.

What roadblocks or difficulties did you face when launching and operating YHD?
You must be kidding. What obstacles could such a simple site have? Actually, the only challenge was Facebook. They turned off the Facebook login when they saw too many registrations. It was a minor inconvenience though. The website had up to 4 million visitors per day. But my system administrator is one of the best. Ilya (the coder) is a very smart guy as well. The system only utilized less than 10% of its capacity and it is just one server.

What are your predictions for the future of file sharing?
I think new, anonymous protocols will surface pretty soon. They’ll make file sharing “safer” in legal terms. On the other hand, initial copies will get digital watermark fingerprints. It will still be possible to share but the copies will be traceable to the first uploader. For the rest, it’s a never ending power struggle or as I like to say, “A fight between the bullet and the armor.”

Do you think your site has helped people become more aware of the privacy risks when file sharing?
Definitely! However, the majority is too dumb to learn anything. For example, we get the same question about dynamic IP at least ten times a day. The answer is right on the first page. It’s on every page, actually. Ignorance is bliss but most people abuse it. They never really learn, they just get used to something.

How did you handle the load on your site when you were being linked to from everywhere?
As I mentioned before, it was quite easy. When visitors search for something on the website, there’s a small pop-up that jumps out and offers you to “like us while you’re waiting”. That’s an artificial delay. We can return results in milliseconds. The pop-up and delay was my idea just to collect more likes.

Have you ever thought of selling your data to the RIAA/MPAA?
Nah. First of all, they have their own data. Second of all, they’re arrogant jerks. I don’t like to deal with people like that. I think of them as the inquisition. They took a promising idea and turned it into a giant sledgehammer to crush others for profit.

What are your moral views on piracy?
Just like I told a French journalist and to the lady at the Washington Post, pirates are thieves and they do steal. Yeah yeah, “when I steal your DVD, you have no DVD, but when I copy a file, you still have a file” – I get that BS. We all know that it’s BS too. However, SOPAs and PIPAs create tyranny. If given the choice between thieves and tyranny, I’d rather stay with the thieves. That reminds me of a piece of history…at the beginning of Nazi Germany, a lot of Germans didn’t pay the public transportation fare. But young Nazis decided to put an end to that. They stopped busses and shot several gatecrashers dead. That’s when things changed. You can say the gatecrashers brought it on themselves. The truth is it’s cruel, but effective. The problem is that it didn’t stop there and we all know what happened next. See, I was born in the Soviet Union and I’ve seen things that, for you, would be an abstract social theory. The US is going in a very wrong direction here.

What are your thoughts on bitcoins?
There are two aspects. Scientifically, it’s a very neat algorithm. Kudos to the inventor – the guy (or team) is brilliant. Socially – it’s another great thing. It’s a new, perfect gold. If some big social network (hmm, who might that be?) or a big social network game manufacturer (hmm, and who might that be?) started using bitcoins as in-game currency…Wow. It would create initial demand. It’s hard to predict the outcome. But it will be outrageous for sure. It’s a distributed and corruption-free Federal Reserve. Governments will need new underwear. A lot of new underwear. It seems like the inventors realize where it fits pretty well. The creator has been hiding for a reason. If I were in his shoes, I’d be hiding too 

Do you have any projects in the pipeline you would like to announce?
SEMrush.com is the interesting one. It’s not necessarily in the pipeline in terms of being new. But we are constantly adding many new features. Some idiots were concerned about the privacy invasion of YHD. Ha! SEMrush.com – that’s a real invasion of privacy. It reveals the commercial secrets of large corporations. YHD is just a toy. SEMrush is the real thing.

Do you have any other words you would like to share with the world?
I’m not so good with words. I’d rather share some real stuff with the world 

The post Exclusive Interview with Suren Ter from YouHaveDownloaded.com appeared first on Privacy News Online by Private Internet Access VPN.