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Google Won’t Take Down Links to Censored Celebrity Sex Story

censoredLast month it was revealed that an individual in the “entertainment business” had prevented a UK tabloid newspaper from printing details of his extramarital affairs.

Referred to in court papers by the initials PJS (not his real initials), the reportedly “well known” individual is said to had some kind of “three-way sexual encounter” with another couple more than four years ago. This, while being married to his partner, YMA, also in the entertainment business.

The third-party couple (referred to as AB and CD) approached the UK’s Sun on Sunday newspaper in January this year and revealed details of their encounter with PJS. The paper then contacted PJS’s lawyer, at which point a legal battle ensued.

On January 18, lawyers for PJS and YMA applied for an order against Sun on Sunday preventing it from printing the story. The High Court rejected the demand but did hand down an interim order blocking publication while the pair filed an appeal (pdf)

The Court of Appeal subsequently ruled that the Sun on Sunday cannot publish the story because the entertainer had an expectation that his sexual encounters should remain a private matter. Inevitably, however, there are plenty of people who believe it should not.

The Sun on Sunday is determined to publish the story whenever it can but in the meantime the celebrity couple have been named countless times on social media and in dozens of press articles, including in Scotland, Europe, the United States and Canada.

So what, if anything, can be done about that? According to a BBC report citing Desmond Browne QC, the lawyer for PJS, “remarkable efforts” are taking place to remove the story from Twitter and Google. That can now be confirmed, at least in respect of the latter.

Usually dealing with the business of having copyright-infringing content taken down from the Internet, UK-based copyright takedown outfit Web Sheriff is well known in file-sharing circles. However, the company has also branched out to offer a number of additional services, including “Privacy Protection – reputation management.”

These activities rarely come into the public eye but it appears that Web Sheriff has recently been negotiating with Google to have sensitive content removed from its indexes. The matter in question can be found in the search giant’s Transparency Report where it’s listed under a fairly obvious heading.

web-sheriff-take

As can be seen from the image above, Web Sheriff targeted 174 URLs in two batches, one on April 4 and the other on April 11. In total the anti-piracy outfit sent seven notices to Google but interestingly the search giant has taken no action on the overwhelming majority.

web-sheriff-take2

Why Google has taken no action is unclear but it’s possible that as an overseas company Google may not feel bound to remove the links. It’s also possible that the complaint was filed with Google as a copyright request and therefore does not meet the criteria for removal.

In any event, most links are now reaching “content not found” pages on various news resources, so there’s probably very little for Google to remove. This raises another topical point.

While Google is often portrayed as being able to do a lot to stop infringing (or in this case sensitive) content being made available via its search engine, it’s a lot more effective to have content taken down at the source. It seems likely that Web Sheriff has being doing just that and on the whole appears to have done a pretty good job.

But of course the big question is whether it was all worth it.

While news outlets are now waiting for a judgment set to be handed down Monday which could allow them to name the couple, their names are already all over the Internet. What started off as a story that would probably have been forgotten in a few days, has now transformed into a battle of international interest that has already failed in its key aim.

In the meantime, those who have ignored the injunction have been feeling the heat. A blogger who named the pair online says he’s been threatened by the entertainer’s legal team but doesn’t really care.

“It’s a massive Streisand effect. Now I am fielding calls from European tabloids,” he said.

“I told [PJS’s legal team] to take it where the sun doesn’t shine. There’s no bricks and mortar in the UK, there’s no printing press in the UK, there’s no server in the UK.”

The all-important hearing will be heard in open court on Monday after Lord Justice Jackson ruled that the case addresses matters of public interest.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

Judge Allows Popcorn Time “Pirate” to Keep on Torrenting

popcorntLawsuits against alleged file-sharers are a common occurrence in United States federal courts.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been accused in recent years, most after using standard BitTorrent clients.

More recently there’s been a specific focus on Popcorn Time users. They were targeted in a series of lawsuits this summer.

One of the cases was filed by the makers of The Cobbler, who listed the IP-addresses of several Popcorn Time users in their complaint. The goal of the filmmakers is to identify the account holders and settle the dispute out of court, which many have done already.

Recently, another Popcorn Time user settled with the movie studio. While the scale of the agreement was not disclosed they usually range between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars.

The defendant in question was allowed to remain anonymous but admitted that her IP-address was indeed used to download and distribute the movie in question. To end the lawsuit, both parties agreed to a ‘consent judgment’ which was signed off by a District Court judge.

While this is a common procedure, Magistrate Judge Stacie Beckerman decided to make several crucial changes to the proposed permanent injunction, even though both parties already agreed on it.

Among the stricken parts is a line that would order the defendant to remove all BitTorrent clients from her computer and observe a ban on P2P software in the future (order: pdf).

“DOE-73.180.17.189 is hereby directed to immediately delete all unlicensed content in which Voltage has any rights or interest including plaintiffs motion picture, together with any and all BitTorrent clients on any computer(s) she owns or controls together with all other software used to obtain media through the Internet by peer-to-peer exchange,” it read.

In recent cases many other judges left this language intact, but for Judge Beckerman it appears to have gone too far.

In addition, the Judge also removed the line preventing the defendant from engaging in any infringing BitTorrent transfers in the future, limiting the scope of the permanent injunction only to titles to which Voltage Pictures holds the copyrights.

While the defendant still has to pay, the changes are important as it allows her to keep using BitTorrent and P2P software in general, which of course have many legitimate purposes as well.

It’s also good to see that judges are not blindly signing off on any order they see before them.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

vKontakte Appears to Be Cracking Down on eBook Piracy

e-booksWhile movies, music and TV show downloading grabs most of the headlines, a growing subset of Internet pirates like to obtain eBooks online for free.

With the growth of dedicated readers such as Kindle and eBook-capable hardware such as iPads, tablets and smartphones, eBooks are easily downloaded from torrent and file-hosting sites in a few seconds and consumed on the go.

One site where eBooks are particularly easy to find is Russian social networking platform vKontakte. The site often appears in searches for popular book titles and downloads are mostly direct and speedy. For this reason vKontakte has found itself embroiled in various copyright-related disputes.

Now, however, there are signs that the platform is taking steps to do something about the phenomenon.

According to a report coming out of Russia, vKontakte has introduced a system that not only takes content down following rightsholder complaints, but also stops that same content becoming available for download in the future. Users are reportedly able to upload previously-flagged content but it is not made available for download.

At the moment vKontakte is refusing to comment on the reports but according to Izvestia the existence of the system has been confirmed by both rightsholders and operators of social network-based eBook communities.

Any user of vKontakte is allowed to upload eBooks in a range of formats and embed these in their pages. These can then be downloaded directly from vKontakte’s servers. However, according to the report there are increasing problems with content disappearing, with VK reporting that files have been deleted following requests from copyright holders.

Interestingly the development is having an impact externally too, with a prominent anti-piracy outfit reporting a shift in availability.

“We have noticed that our monitoring service is sending fewer claims [to VK] and we are now analyzing the cause to discover the reason,” says Maxim Ryabyko, Director General of the Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPO).

Back in February, AZAPO reported vKontakte to the Moscow City Court after the platform allegedly failed to take solid measures to protect copyright. AZAPO’s aim was to force the social network into negotiations.

“Our goal is to urge vKontakte to adequately interact with the book industry,” Ryabyko said at the time.

What has prompted the disappearance of books from the platform remains unclear but Ryabyko says that he doesn’t rule out a link between recent developments and AZAPO’s legal action against vKontakte. Another possibility is that some kind of deal has been reached with book owners.

Last year publishers offered several opportunities for VK to monetize content on its platform, including via an all-you-can-eat subscription model. Other offers included an ad-supported mechanism and a partner program, which would see samples of books diverting to publisher platforms.

It is not clear whether these offers were attractive to VK but if pirate content is disappearing from the site, publishers will be happy.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak