Month: July 2015

One Direction Remix Comp Entry is Copyright Infringing, Sony Says

1d-fourIn advance of the release of their latest album ‘Four’, One Direction invited remixers and producers from the UK to remix their track Steal My Girl.

“This is a huge opportunity to work with the music and vocals of Harry, Niall, Louis, Liam and Zayn,” said artist network TalentHouse in its introduction.

“After getting involved in remixing himself, Liam Payne wanted to give other people the opportunity. He, and their guest judges including senior A&R and Radio executives from Sony Music, will select one artist to receive a prize of £1,500. The selected remix will be posted to millions of music fans across the band’s official channels and potentially played on radio as an exclusive premiere,” TalentHouse continued.

The competition attracted the attention of UK-based producer and songwriter Lee Adams who took on the remix challenge after using the track stems uploaded to Soundcloud by TalentHouse themselves. Things didn’t go to plan, however.

Even though the stems were put on Soundcloud and entrants were told to upload their remixes there [“Artists must submit their remix via Talenthouse by pasting in their SoundCloud link”], the automated anti-piracy engines of the music site apparently weren’t informed.

“I made my remix, put it on Soundcloud about a week before the contest closing date. About two days later, it was taken down as it had been detected by SoundCloud’s own copyright system as infringement,” Lee informs TorrentFreak.

According to several other complaints left on the competition’s official page, Lee wasn’t the only one affected either. It’s not clear what happened in the other cases but Lee was left to negotiate with SoundCloud over the strike on his account. That didn’t go well either.

“I messaged SoundCloud back saying it was part of a remix contest. Then they told me that doesn’t mean I own the copyright,” Lee says.

“I then explained that if the stems had been put out by the record company officially, then they had given permission. They still argued that I didn’t own the copyright.”

Undeterred, Lee contacted the company running the competition on Sony’s behalf.

“As it was only a couple of days before the contest closed, I emailed TalentHouse themselves to see if they could do anything,” Lee explains.

“They were very good and after a couple of emails SoundCloud reinstated my track. Interestingly, TalentHouse made the comment that ‘this kind of thing happens all the time with SoundCloud’.”

But following months of silence and the ‘infringement’ episode now a fading memory, SoundCloud copyright complaints are again back on the agenda.

“We’ve received a report that your track ‘One Direction – Steal My Girl (Lee Adams Remix)’ contains copyrighted content. As a result, your track has been removed from your profile for the time being,” SoundCloud informed Lee this week.

Having a second complaint filed against his remix upset Lee, who took to Twitter to vent his frustration.

one-direction

“I only remix a song if I am asked to or a public contest is put out officially by a label. If I had just remixed this song unofficially because I wanted to, I think that would be a good claim that I had infringed the copyright,” Lee explains.

It must be noted that the competition rules make it clear that “all rights in materials that are created by entrants using the stems are assigned to Sony Music” but filing copyright infringement complaints against remix competition entrants seems like a particularly poor way to deal with fans.

“To me this is just a poor decision by Sony, maybe they shouldn’t do remix competitions of their artists if they don’t want problems like this. To me it’s a good marketing decision to do a remix competition in the first place but everything that has gone on after has been poor,” Lee concludes.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the original One Direction stems uploaded for the competition are still being offered on SoundCloud for people to remix. However, those tempted to do so should be warned, since re-uploading finished tracks back to SoundCloud risks a potential infringement strike against their account.

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


Source: TorrentFreak

UK Wants 10 Year Prison Sentence For Online Pirates

uk-flagIn an effort to deter online piracy the UK Government is proposing to increase the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement to ten years.

The current maximum of two years is not enough to deter infringers, lawmakers argue.

The new proposal follows a suggestion put forward in a study commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) earlier this year.

The study concluded that the criminal sanctions for copyright infringement available under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA 1988) could be amended to bring them into line with related offenses, such as counterfeiting.

According to the Government it’s important that online piracy is seen as “no less serious” than offline infringements, and the increased sentence will put both offenses on par.

“By toughening penalties for commercial-scale online offending we are offering greater protections to businesses and sending a clear message to deter criminals,” says Intellectual Property Minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe.

The proposal is being welcomed by copyright holders who have lobbied extensively to increase penalties for online piracy.

“This consultation is very welcome as we feel there is a clear anomaly in the way that online copyright infringement by criminal enterprises is treated by the justice system,” Eddy Leviten, Director General of the Alliance for Intellectual Property, says.

Although targeted at online piracy, casual file-sharers have little to worry about. The new legislation will be targeted at those involved in organized and commercial copyright infringement. This would include operators of large piracy sites, but not their users.

Before going forward with the proposal the Government is seeking input from the public. A consultation launched today invites supporters and opponents of the plan to chime in, which is likely to trigger a heated debate.

The consultation will run until the end of August and the Government will release the individual responses and publish a summary report afterwards.

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


Source: TorrentFreak

KickassTorrents Disappears From Google After Penalty

kickassWith millions of visitors per day KickassTorrents (KAT) is arguably the most visited torrent site on the Internet, outranking even the notorious Pirate Bay.

After several domain hops KAT has been operating from the KAT.cr domain name for a few months now. However, in recent weeks many infrequent visitors have experienced trouble locating the site, leading to all sorts of problems.

Traditionally, the site has been easy to find through Google by entering the search terms “KickassTorrents” or “Kickass Torrents,” but this is no longer the case.

In fact, the official KAT.cr address is nowhere to be found in the top results. Instead, people see the unknown and unaffiliated Kickasstorrents.eu domain on top in many locations, as the screenshot below shows.

Google’s KickassTorrents search results

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The KAT team informs us that Google began to penalize its pages a while ago, for reasons unknown. Perhaps there are ways to solve the problems, but the site is currently not doing any search engine optimization (SEO).

“It’s already about five or six months since we started to experience some kind of penalty from Google. The issue is that we were not performing any SEO activities at all,” KAT says.

What makes matters worse is that .eu site which tops Google search results is a scam. It doesn’t offer any torrents but instead prompts visitors to download File_Downloader.exe, which appears to be malware.

The KAT team finds it unfortunate that Google is sending tens of thousands of visitors to a shady site and encourages people to check the official Facebook and Twitter accounts for the latest official domain name.

Interestingly, not all search engines treat KAT the same. In Bing the site’s official domain name is not on top either, but it’s listed on the first page. DuckDuckGo does the best job, identifying the correct domain and even tagging it as an “official site,” which is quite useful to estranged KAT users.

DuckDuckGo’s KickassTorrents search results

duckkick

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


Source: TorrentFreak