Yesterday the UK government announced that following a report from regulator OFCOM, plans to block alleged copyright-infringing websites would be dropped. However, there was a second report where OFCOM detailed ways of keeping the costs of Digital Economy Act infringement appeals down. The document carried the usual redactions but TorrentFreak has put on its X-ray vision for your viewing pleasure.

Yesterday, detailing the government’s response to the Hargreaves report, business secretary Vince Cable confirmed that the website blocking provisions put in place under the controversial Digital Economy Act will be discontinued. The decision coincided with an OFCOM report which noted that website blocking would not be effective.

OFCOM also released a second report titled Digital Economy Act, Online Copyright Infringement Appeals Process: Options for reducing costs.

On the front page of the report there is a note that redactions have taken place to censor sections relating to “on-going policy development” of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

The DCMS did a better job of hiding the blacked-out text than earlier in the week but not so good as to keep out TorrentFreak and our X-ray specs.

The first redaction on Page 3 says simply “Revisit the grounds for appeal set out in Ofcom’s draft Initial Obligations Code” but two pages later things start to get much more interesting. It seems the government (or more likely their friends in the copyright lobby) doesn’t want talk of an error-prone system becoming public.

Page 5 – OFCOM wants rights holders’ accusations to be ‘quality assured’

Ofcom has also sought to ensure efficiency by introducing into the Code a requirement that Copyright Owners take part in a quality assurance process with the aim of minimising errors. This should help to reduce the number of wrongly identified infringements and subscribers. (ISPs can also have some impact here by ensuring that the letters they send to subscribers make clear the implications of receiving a notification).

A “quality assurance process” sounds like a great idea, but who could be trusted to implement such a regime and ensure independent scrutiny? Anti-piracy tracking companies are notoriously secretive and unlikely to be open about the short-comings of their “proprietary systems”.

Page 11 – Government rejects OFCOM suggestion of subscriber appeal “on any reasonable grounds”

The grounds set out in the Act are non-exhaustive and we reflected this in our drafted Code by including an option to appeal on “any other reasonable ground”. This was intended to provide an efficient mechanism through which to avoid a lengthy revision of the Code should subscribers find additional, but reasonable, grounds for appeal as technologies and consumer behaviours evolve.

We understand that Government believes we should not include this mechanism in the final Code

It is far from clear why the government wishes to remove the right for a citizen to appeal a wrongful accusation on “any reasonable ground”. What is clear, however, is why the government might wish to redact this statement from the report – it looks very bad indeed.

Page 11 – ISP IP address matching to be “quality assured”

We have also introduced into the Code a requirement that Copyright Owners take part in a quality assurance process with the aim of minimising errors. We are proposing to sponsor a similar standard for the IP address matching processes of the ISPs, although participation will be voluntary. This should help to reduce the number of wrongly identified infringements and subscribers (appeal grounds (a) and (b)). We anticipate that the majority of appeals will rely on ground (c) in the absence of systematic failures by a Copyright Owner or ISP under the Code.

When it comes to copyright infringement cases ISPs make errors so it is good they will be required to adopt similar “quality assurance” processes as rights holders. However, how many will choose to do so when participation is voluntary remains to be seen.

Redactions on page 17 merely repeat details covered in earlier redactions. Redactions on page 19 likewise, save a comment that a rightsholder “quality assurance” process

….does not create a rebuttable presumption in favour of the rights holder but should help bring down the proportion of incorrect CIRs [Copyright Infringement Reports] and therefore appeals costs since there are likely to be fewer meritorious appeals in this respect. This quality assurance is also intended to make sure that the number of CIRs rejected by ISPs for process reasons is minimised

The full but redacted document can be downloaded here.

Source: UK Govt. Censors Concerns of Erroneous Piracy Allegations

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Plans to block websites alleged to facilitate copyright infringement are to be dropped by the UK government. The announcement was made by Business secretary Vince Cable following a review by communications regulator OFCOM which found that blocking provisions in the Digital Economy Act would not be effective. Nevertheless, website blocking will be attempted, just by other means.

Outlining the government’s response to the Hargreaves report, business secretary Vince Cable today confirmed that the website blocking provisions put in place under the country’s controversial Digital Economy Act will be abandoned.

As widely predicted, a review by communications regulator OFCOM found that the plans were unworkable.

“Ofcom was also asked to consider whether the site-blocking provisions in the Digital Economy Act would work in practice,” began today’s statement from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

“The Act contains reserve powers to allow courts to order that websites dedicated to copyright infringement are blocked. The regulator concluded the provisions as they stand would not be effective and so the Government will not bring forward the Act’s site-blocking provisions at this time.”

While some will see the decision as a victory for common sense, it does not necessarily follow that there will be no site blocking in the UK.

As the recent MPA v BT case showed all too clearly, existing legislation (the Copyrights, Design and Patents Act) is now deemed powerful enough to carry out the same function. The ruling in that case ordered ISP BT to block all subscriber access to Usenet indexing site Newzbin2.

However, without the assistance of the now-nuked provisions of the Digital Economy Act, copyright holders may be forced to go “the long way round” to get sites blocked, i.e through the legal system and existing legislation.

But as complicated as it was, the Newzbin2 case had a number of special features (such as a previous UK court ruling against Newzbin1) which helped the case along and through to ultimate success for the MPA. Relatively speaking, future legal attempts will not be as easy.

“The MPA focus until now has been on this Newzbin case and not beyond it,” the MPA told TorrentFreak when asked about future site-blocking plans. “Although there will be other targets, no decisions have yet been made.”

“However, other rights-holders have been watching the case with interest and may well have their own target rogue sites,” the MPA concludes.

But of course, there are still ongoing discussions between the government, rights-holders and ISPs concerning the voluntary blocking of websites, something which the MPA and international music industry will be keen to pursue.

Other elements of Cable’s announcement, such as the creation of a Digital Copyright Exchange, the relaxation of laws which currently forbid UK citizens from format-shifting their own legally purchased media, and the permitting of parody works without copyright-holder permission, can be read here.

Source: UK Government Abandons File-Sharing Website Blocking Plans

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Initiatives to punish alleged copyright infringers after repeated warnings are popping up all over the world, most recently in the United States. In the UK a similar scheme is embedded in the Digital Economy Act despite strong opposition from ISPs, the public and various human rights groups.

The entertainment industries claim that the threat of losing one’s Internet connection will deter a large group of copyright infringers. Thus far, however, no research has backed up this prediction. On the contrary, the results of a recent survey conducted by the British Internet provider BE Broadband reveals that the impact might be far less than expected.

BE Broadband surveyed a few hundred customers and asked them whether they are aware of the Digital Economy Act, and how they think their file-sharing habits would change under the new law. The results are intriguing.

Of all the respondents who use file-sharing networks (85% of the total sample) more than 94 percent say they will not share less when the Digital Economy Act gets into full swing. Instead, the majority of the file-sharers say they will simply take measures to hide their IP-address, by using VPN and proxy services for example.

Roughly 1 percent of the people who share files now say they will stop doing so and about 5 percent claim they will reduce their use of file-sharing software. Needless to say, the survey results suggest that three-strikes measures can hardly be called effective.

BE Broadband Survey Results

Taking into account that the survey may not be representative of the general population in the UK (judging from the high percentage of file-sharers), it does appear that many of the people who now use file-sharing networks won’t be deterred from doing so under the new law. Instead, many of them will simply take measures to ensure that they’re not caught.

This raises some serious concerns.

Although the entertainment industries may argue that even a few percent less copyright infringers is a victory, the question of costs remain. Implementing the three strikes procedures will cost ISPs millions of pounds a year, money that will be eventually clawed back from consumers.

In addition, the three strikes scheme puts tens of thousands of innocent Internet users at risk of being wrongfully accused and disconnected by mistake. This has been demonstrated several times in the ACS:Law debacle, and was even reported on in the British mainstream media.

Last but not least, even if the right person is targeted then there’s still the human rights issue. A UN report published last month labeled the three strikes provision in the Digital Economy Act a breach of human rights. Disconnecting users from the Internet is a disproportionate penalty, the report concluded.

Perhaps it’s time for the copyright lobby and legislators to look at the alternatives. Preferably measures that improve the legal offerings and take away the incentive for people to pirate, rather than radically enforcing copyright infringement without knowing that it will have any effect at all.

Source: ISP Survey: Three Strikes Won’t Deter Pirates

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We did it again. Despite being chronically understaffed we managed to get at least one article published on TorrentFreak every day in 2010. Although we aim to regularly publish articles worthy of being listed in a year‘s end overview, rather than choose those for inclusion ourselves we felt our loyal readers should do the talking. So what were the hottest debated topics in the file-sharing world this year? Let’s find out.

At the TorrentFreak office we toyed with several ideas to form the basis of this list. The largest failures, victories, losses, innovations and so forth, but it seemed impossible to make a good selection without leaving some of the best stories out.

So instead we decided to go for the articles that our readers found interesting enough to discuss in volume; the most commented articles of 2010.

Below are the 25 most discussed articles of the year. It’s been an exciting ride, with many ups and downs, and we’d like to thank everyone who read and contributed for your support. Do you have a favorite that didn’t make the list? Feel free, as always, to comment below.

Happy New Year… We’ll report for duty in the morning.

1. U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More (November)

2. U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs (July)

3. OiNK Admin Found Not Guilty, Walks Free (January)

4. ACS:Law Anti-Piracy Law Firm Torn Apart By Leaked Emails (September)

5. The Pirate Bay Goes Down Following Legal Pressure (May)

6. Digital Economy Bill Passes, File-Sharing Ends Soon (June)

7. Leaked Emails Reveal Profits of Anti-Piracy Cash Scheme (September)

8. BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures (November)

9. Senate Committee Passes Bill To Quash Pirate Websites (November)

10. ‘Piracy Is Theft, Clean and Simple’ US Vice President Says (June)

11. The Pirate Bay Appeal Verdict: Guilty Again (November)

12. 4chan DDoS Takes Down MPAA and Anti-Piracy Websites (September)

13. The Mysterious And Scary BitTorrent Monitoring Site (April)

14. LimeWire Shuts Down After Losing Court Battle With The RIAA (October)

15. 4chan to DDoS RIAA Next – Is This the Protest of the Future? (September)

16. LimeWire Resurrected By Secret Dev Team (November)

17. The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay’s New Host (May)

18. World’s First Pirate ISP Launches In Sweden (July)

19. Police in File-Sharing Raids Across Europe, WikiLeaks Host Targeted (September)

20. IP-Addresses of First Hurt Locker Victims Revealed (June)

21. Mulve – The Nightmare-Scenario Music Downloading Tool (September)

22. Demonoid Faces Major Downtime Once Again (April))

23. Rapidshare Terminates Accounts of Copyright Infringers (March)

24. US Lawmakers Want to Quash Pirate Websites (September)

25. RIAA Wins Big Against File-Sharer, $1.5M for 24 Songs (November)

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Popularity: 1% [?]

In early April the UK Government forced through the controversial Digital Economy Bill after its third reading and just two hours debate. Complaints that the legislation was far too important to be passed through during the last minute ‘wash-up’ period were ignored, and the Digital Economy Act was born.

“It’s our belief that this haste meant the Digital Economy Bill, as it then was, became law without being properly scrutinised and without its impact being properly assessed,” writes TalkTalk boss Charles Dunstone today.

TalkTalk, which has been speaking out against both the Bill and Act from the beginning, intends to carry on its opposition by hopefully taking its argument to the High Court with the support of a rival ISP.

“Today, in conjunction with BT, we’ve filed papers with the High Court asking for a judicial review of the Digital Economy Act,” says Dunstone. “We’ve asked the High Court to look at whether the Act was passed into law without going through the correct parliamentary procedures.”

TalkTalk also believes that there could be incompatibilities between provisions in the Act and the E-Commerce Directive which restricts the obligations of ISPs. Other areas concerning subscriber privacy could also be problematic, with Dunstone noting that the measures in the Act designed to prevent file-sharing could undermine “the basic rights and freedoms of citizens.”

“As a result, we’re seeking clarity from the Court before we and other industry players are asked to implement the Act,” says Dunstone. “We want to avoid a situation where we invest tens of millions of pounds in new systems and processes only to find that the Act is unenforceable and the money wasted.”

In recent times, TalkTalk has sought to protect its subscribers from outside interference and is the only mainstream ISP in the UK to stand up to ACS:Law and its campaign against alleged file-sharers. In advance of ACS:Law going to court to obtain the real identities of individuals behind IP addresses it has harvested, the law firm approaches ISPs and asks them if they will contest the court action.

TalkTalk always refuses to comply and is therefore never included in court documents. This means that TalkTalk subscribers are protected from all the wrongful accusations documented dozens of times in recent months. The same, however, can not be said about BT. When approached by ACS:Law, BT indicates in advance that it will cooperate, which means its customers become heavily targeted.

Support TalkTalk on this too, BT, and then your subscribers will really take you seriously.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Pirate Bay Criticizes UK's Digital Economy Act Zeropaid As expected, Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay is lashing out at the UK's recently enacted Digital Economy Act (DEA) for including …

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TorrentFreak (blog)

Pirate Bay Rallies Against UK Anti-Piracy Act TorrentFreak (blog) The Pirate Bay is encouraging its users to oppose the Digital Economy Act that was recently forced through by the UK Government. … and more »

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Earlier this month the Digital Economy Act was forced through by the UK Government. Under the new law copyright holders have the power to spy on those who infringe their rights, which may ultimately lead to file-sharers being disconnected from the Internet. In addition, copyright holders can urge the Government to close websites without the hassle of going through the courts.

One of the sites expected to be a main candidate for disconnection under the new legislation is The Pirate Bay. The largest torrent indexer on the Internet is synonymous with BitTorrent sharing for many people. This reputation has already led to the site being blocked in several European countries.

To prevent this from happening in the UK, The Pirate Bay has published a special information bulletin to inform users what actions they can take to get the Act revoked. The publication comes with a new doodle and temporarily replaces the well known pirate ship on the site’s homepage.

The Pirate Bay gives a brief overview of the history of the new legislation and why it’s important to take action against it. As a recommendation, they encourage users to email their candidates and ask them whether they oppose the Act or not. Another recommendation is to inform friends about the implications the legislation may have for the future of the Internet.

From the looks of it, The Pirate Bay has set the page up in collaboration with the Open Rights Group, which has been fighting the Act for months already. Despite heavy opposition from the public and several successful campaigns against the Act, those who had to vote on its passing continued to support it.

But all is not lost yet.

With the General Election coming up in early June, the act has become a hot item for the candidates. The Liberal Democrats have already said they will repeal the Act if they make it into the Government, and we’re sure that the Pirate Party will do the same.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Following the passing of the UK’s Digital Economy Act in early April, BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor has been speaking with Billboard about how he sees the next steps for tacking file-sharing in the UK.

Although so-called “educational letters” will be sent out to those suspected of illicit file-sharing towards the end of this year and “technical measures” (throttling/account suspension) imposed if illicit sharing isn’t reduced by around 70% in the next 18 to 24 months, Taylor says that the music industry will probably have to start suing people again in the meantime.

Due to the fact that ISPs will have to keep lists of those subscribers who have received the greatest number of educational letters, ultimately the music industry will be able to identify, they say, those who being most stubborn to change.

Armed with this information they will be able to proceed to court to obtain their real-life names and addresses. Taylor says that there is a possibility that even at the early stages of the letter sending campaign, the music industry will use this information to start suing the “most egregious infringers”.

Taylor insists that the BPI will take this action reluctantly, and would have preferred that the problem be solved through the early introduction of technical measures, but that wasn’t to be.

“Government disagreed with us, regrettably, and decided not to bring the technical measures into effect immediately and has said to us that it expects us to bring legal cases and that it will take that into account when it looks at whether or not to introduce technical measures,” he explained.

To this end, Taylor said that the BPI may well have to sue people “at some level”, a course of action that he claims the Government expects of them in advance of its decision to implement technical measures.

Of course, suing file-sharers is something that the BPI did before back in 2004. Taylor admitted that they were unable to carry out that campaign on a level which would become a deterrent to the masses but said at least this time round they will be able to target those who have offended the most and failed to change their ways.

This approach raises another interesting situation. Rather than just about anyone being a target for litigation – potentially for downloading a single album for example – the BPI is now saying that only the worst offenders will be targeted for action. Since their legal resources are limited, this could only conceivable aimed at the top 1 or 2% of aggressive file-sharers.

So, since many file-sharers download a hell of a lot more music than they’d ever really need, it could be argued that by only downloading the stuff that they really want, their chances of ending up at the top of the heap are very slim indeed.

This would of course result in a sizable reduction in file-sharing transfers, but would it drive people into music stores? It seems unlikely.

Article from: TorrentFreak, in the morning.

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Today, anti-piracy company DigiProtect are being featured in an article by the BBC where they defend their UK file-sharing witch-hunt. As usual, the firm says its just protecting rights holders when it demands cash payments from individuals, without solid proof that the accused have actually done something wrong.

Notably, the German-based outfit refused to tell the BBC the names of its clients, but this is to be expected. Part of the DigiProtect service is to shield the brand image of its clients by taking all the adverse publicity these campaigns generate by taking it on their own chin. However, despite putting themselves front and center for criticism, it doesn’t actually play out like that.

It is ACS:Law, the tiny one-lawyer UK law firm who do the ‘dirty work’ for DigiProtect, which gets all the attention. Unlike lawyers Davenport Lyons and more recently Tilly Bailey & Irvine who withdrew from this business due to the damage it was causing to their reputations, ACS:Law don’t care about the negative publicity. Considering the huge amounts of money they’re bringing in, some might consider their defiance understandable.

But perhaps ACS:Law should stop for a moment and think about the damage being done to the reputation of their profession and to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA), the body charged with the task of ensuring the law business in the UK isn’t brought into disrepute. As we will now reveal, the toll is considerable.

During the debates about the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Lords, repeated mentions were made that the appropriate route of complaint for recipients of demands relating to filesharing accusations is via complaints to the appropriate legal authorities. Comments along these lines were made by Lord Young, despite his department having received a number of complaints from individuals stating they had exhausted all their options.

It was therefore surprising that the following comment was made on record during these debates: (Lord Young – 20 Jan 10)

“The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said that these actions are appalling and unacceptable, but nobody has referred them to any of the regulatory bodies. I find that strange. We are saying that we have had thousands of these cases yet nobody has said that this law firm is acting in a totally unacceptable way. I should have thought that the legal regulatory bodies would by now have been involved and I am puzzled why they have not been.”

As a result of this claim, which he knew to be untrue, John Fletcher (working with Beingthreatened.com) discovered that the total number of complaints to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) could be found using a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which the SRA voluntarily honor.

An FOIA request was made and the results are astonishing.

By the end of December 2009, a full month before Lord Young claimed “nobody had referred [ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons] to the regulatory bodies”, more than 247 individual complaints had in fact been made to the SRA.

At the answering of the FOIA request, nearly 300 complaints had been made against a total of three law firms. Of these, 14 complaints are recorded as having been resolved in one case file, which would have pertained to Davenport Lyons and 3 complaints at the time of the request were against Tilly Bailey and Irvine. So what about the rest?

As of 22 March 2010, a staggering 283 of these complaints related to the activities of ACS:Law.

Together, the individual complaints made against mainly ACS:Law (and to a much lesser extent Tilly Bailey & Irvine and Davenport Lyons) over the past two years dwarfs the levels of SRA complaints relating to any other area of intellectual property law in the UK.

Furthermore, in September 2009, complaints against ACS:Law topped out at over 16% of the 500 complaints made in total to the SRA for the whole month.

But there is a serious problem. The SRA is there to serve the public by ensuring that disreputable lawyers are quickly kept in check, and to this end they have to adhere to timeliness targets.

The information published by the Office of the Legal Services Complaint Commissioner (OLSCC) in their annual report has set the following timeliness targets for the SRA and the Legal Complaints Service (LCS):

Timeliness Target T1 – 6 Month Closures: The Legal Complaints Service to investigate and conclude at least 87% of cases within 6 months of receipt.

Timeliness Target T2 – 12 Month Closures: The Legal Complaints Service to investigate and conclude 100% of cases within 12 months, apart from in exceptional circumstances.

The Freedom of Information request referred to above discovered that of the 14 complaints made regarding the activity of Davenport Lyons:

· Only 7% of cases were closed within 6 months of receipt (against the target of 87%).

· 29% of cases were closed within 12 months of receipt.

This means that a huge 64% of all complaints failed to meet targets T1 and T2, yet no explanation has been given by the SRA as to the exceptional circumstances preventing these complaints being resolved quicker.

We can also see from the FOIA request that the complaints against ACS:Law appear to be following exactly the same pattern.

In this case the complaints have not yet been concluded, but at the time of writing 51% of complaints have already passed beyond the 6 month target (according to target less than 13% should have done so). We are also less than two months from the first complaints against ACS:Law also exceeding the 12 month target.

To our knowledge no complainant has been kept up to date on the timeliness of their complaints nor given any indication of their progress. This appears to be completely unacceptable, especially given the continued failing to meet targets.

Sadly, the office that set the targets is due to have closed on the 31st March, and therefore is no longer in a position to uphold them, but those who have made complaints should persist as they deserve and have a right to be heard.

Those affected should take their cases to the Office of the Legal Services Ombudsman and the Ministry of Justice to ask why these timeliness targets have not been adhered to and why there has been no communication as to the progress of their complaint.

One could perhaps conclude that the reasons for the delays are obvious. Due to the activities of ACS:Law, DigiProtect and their faceless, entirely non-UK clients, the systems of the SRA have been entirely overwhelmed. This means that not only do recipients of these letters get a poor service from the SRA, but quite possibly complainants in other areas of law.

But despite these huge and growing problems, Andrew Crossley from ACS:Law is absolutely defiant that he will continue to operate this scheme in the UK. His claim that his number one priority is protecting copyright is increasingly falling on deaf ears, particularly when he revealed recently that in the last 11 months alone he had collected £1 million from letter recipients.

The cost to the legal profession overall, however, can’t be measured in terms of money. Some things have greater value.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Popularity: 4% [?]