Piracy Archives

Canada’s embarrassing place in the BitTorrent rankings, Torrentz.com and IsoHunt world leaders

TorrentFreak just published its Top 25 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2009. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank.

Out of the top 25, 7 of them are located or have connections to Canada. Of the top 10, 4 are located or have connections to Canada. This means that Canada, alone, is home to more than 25% of the world’s public English language unauthorized BitTorrent sites and 40% of the leading ones are in Canada. …

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Non-commercial P2P file sharing is not fair use says court in Sony BMG v Tenenbaum case

A U.S. district court has now issued a wide area injunction in the Sony BMG Music Entertainment v Tenenbaumcase, 2009 WL 4723397 (D.Mass.Dec 7. 2009). The order is as follow:

“…defendant shall be, and hereby is, enjoined from directly or indirectly infringing plaintiffs’ rights under federal or state law in any sound recording, whether now in existence or later created, that is owned or controlled by plaintiffs (or any parent, subsidiary, or affiliate record label of plaintiffs) (“Plaintiffs’ Recordings”), including without limitation by using the Internet or any online media distribution system to reproduce or distribute any of Plaintiffs’ Recordings, except pursuant to a lawful license or with the express authority of plaintiffs.…

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Mininova gone, who’s left and where are they located?

In August of this year a Dutch court ordered Mininova to remove all infringing torrents within three months. Yesterday, Mininova complied with the court’s order and disabled all torrents, except those in the licensed “content distribution” part of the service.

Mininova was the world’s second most popular unauthorized BitTorrent site. It facilitated infringement on a massive scale, with more than 10 billion downloads. Its demise follows Pirate Bay which was also ordered shut down following a decision by a Swedish court this past April which found Pirate Bay’s operators criminally responsible for copyright infringement.…

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OECD counterfeiting report misinterpreted to support myth of Canada as a low piracy country

On November 20th, the OECD published a report titled Magnitude of counterfeiting and piracy of tangible products – November 2009 update. The report is an update to a previous major study on counterfeiting undertaken by the OECD in 2008. The report confirms what has been known for a long time: that counterfeiting and piracy of tangible goods is a major impediment to global trade that is getting worse. The report estimates that global trade in counterfeit and pirated tangible goods more than doubled in this decade to approximately 250 billion US dollars in 2007, up from just over USD 100 billion in 2001.…

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Support for ACTA Urged by Over 20 Leading Organizations

On November 19, leading American entities representing the creative industries including representatives of authors, publishers, directors, artists, photographers, and distributors wrote to Chairman Patrick Leahy, U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee as well as to ranking members of various Senate and House Committees to express their strong support for ACTA.

The letter summarizes some of the reasons why ACTA is important. Here are some extracts from the letter, which are equally applicable to Canada:

“The United States is currently engaged in discussions with many of its major trading partners to negotiate a new agreement: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) — to enhance and strengthen the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting. …

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MAGNITUDE OF COUNTERFEITING AND PIRACY OF TANGIBLE PRODUCTS

The OECD just published an update on the magniture of counterfeiting and piracy of tangible products. The report, Magnitude of Counterfeiting and Piracy of Tangible Products-An Update, is a useful reminder of the problem and reinforces the need for a global agreement like ACTA to address the problem.

An 2008 OECD study concluded that international trade in counterfeit and pirated goods could have accounted for up to USD 200 billion in 2005. The updated estimates, based on the growth and changing composition of trade between 2005 and 2007, suggests that counterfeit and pirated goods in international trade grew steadily over the period 2000 – 2007 and could amount to up to USD 250 billion in 2007.…

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Fear Mongering and Misinformation Used to Slag ACTA

Last week saw a lot of digital ink spilled over speculation about what the Internet Chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is going to contain. Some opponents of ACTA including Prof. Geist helped to leak the contents of a two page confidential memorandum that contained a written account of an oral report on what was still being negotiated.[i]

Based on this two page preliminary document, ACTA opponents began a frenzied propaganda campaign against ACTA. Prof. Geist led the feverish attack writing articles, blogs, tweets, giving a speech in Washington, and press and radio interviews.…

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