Anti-piracy organizations send out thousands of infringement notices a year to alleged pirates. Strangely enough, these infringement notices are hardly ever backed up by solid evidence. The Norwegian Consumer Council is now proposing to create an independent committee to deal with copyright infringement disputes between alleged pirates and rights holders.

Similar to other consumer rights organizations, the Norway Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet) is dedicated to representing the interests of consumers, operating independently of the commercial interests of others. It aims to influence business, at the same time as educating and providing help to consumers, and has been vocal in its opposition of iTunes DRM.

Back in March this year, the Council (NCC) entered the file-sharing debate, when it advised members of the public not to comply with the demands of a Norwegian law firm. The law firm, Simonsen, had sent out letters to ISPs demanding that alleged pirates sign legal agreements accepting that they had shared files, and promising never to do it again. The NCC legal officer, Hans Marius Graasvold, said that the signing of such a letter (which is very similar indeed to the letters sent out by UK lawyers Davenport Lyons) makes the consumer liable for all past and future acts of file-sharing in his household, and should be avoided at all costs. This intervention by NCC led to the Norwegian ISP association advising their members not to pass on the lawyers letters.

NCC is also opposed to any “3 strikes” type legislation, calling it a “grossly disproportionate” response, with Hans Marius Graasvold stating that consumers facing such allegations are deprived of due process and their right to privacy. Internet access should be provided by an ISP on “neutral terms” with “legal protection against arbitrary termination of the contract.”

Presumably trying to find some middle-ground in this file-sharing debate, which includes the sticky issues of citizen’s rights, due process and privacy, the NCC has started discussions with representatives of the copyright industry and ISPs, with a view to the creation of an independent committee empowered to act in cases of alleged copyright infringement. Major Norwegian ISPs have apparently welcomed the initiative.

The proposals suggest that such a committee should be run by a public authority, and act as a mechanism for alternative dispute resolution and in other cases, a complaint board. When an alleged pirate is approached with allegations by a copyright holder, the consumer would then have the opportunity to send the complaint to the committee for its consideration, with any decision subject to appeal.

The NCC hopes to put its proposals to the Norwegian government by mid 2009.

Ofcom, the UK’s independent regulator for the communications industry has also indicated that it could get involved in the file-sharing debate, in trying to find an alternative to the doomed “3 strikes” proposals, although it hasn’t suggested that it would offer any arbitration services.

Post from: TorrentFreak

If the MPAA and RIAA are to be believed, rather than buying media, file-sharers around the world are saving billions of dollars by downloading copyrighted material instead. For these people, we now have the ultimate solution to salve their ‘guilt’. Donate a week in piracy ’savings’ to reduce poverty among those who need it.

Together with thousands of other blogs, TorrentFreak is participating in the Blog Action Day 2008. This year’s goal is to raise awareness and generate discussion on poverty, so that’s exactly what we’ll do.

Our plan? Encourage people to donate their pirate ’savings’ to projects that help to reduce poverty. Why? Because we believe in sharing.

The Rules:

The idea is to calculate how much you have ’saved’ in the past week by downloading copyrighted content. If you haven’t downloaded anything, just pretend you have, we’re trying to raise money here.

In the interests of grossly inflating the figures and therefore raising as much money for charity as possible, just like the MPAA and RIAA we’re going to assume that one pirated copy equals one lost sale. We decided not to include software, because things can get a little out of hand for those who downloaded Photoshop.

1 music track = $1
1 music album = $10
1 movie = $10
1 TV-show = $5
1 book = $10

Now, calculate your savings based on the example above (you are allowed to show off in the comments) and donate this amount to a project that aims to reduce poverty. You can pick your own charity of course, but we also have a pretty good suggestion.

Where to Donate?

We assume that most of our readers are familiar with the concept of P2P, so we would like you to consider the following. Let’s say you fire up your BitTorrent client because you want to download the latest album from your favorite artist. You use BitTorrent, which means that the more you share with others, the more you will receive back.

The only problem is that you will start with nothing, so initially, you don’t have anything to share at all. Luckily, the BitTorrent protocol has solved this problem, and when the swarm recognizes you as a new entrant, random peers will send you a few bits which you can then start to re-share with others. People might wonder what this has to do with poverty, so we’ll try to explain.

In ‘real life’, people sometimes also need to receive something before they can start building up their business, and generate a steady income. They are just like file-sharers – without the first bits, they can never fully participate in the downloading process. Kiva tries to solve this problem. With Kiva you can lend a few dollars to entrepreneurs in developing countries, who will use it to make a living for themselves.

These people will use your $10 to start their own businesses, so they can provide for themselves and their families – P2P in the real world. The good thing is, once they have a steady income they will repay their loans, give to get, just like BitTorrent.

Final Note

The MPAA, RIAA and other anti-piracy lobbyists want you to believe that thousands of people lose their jobs because of piracy, and that it’s a disaster for the global economy. We know better of course, and would argue the opposite. An illegally downloaded song is not a lost sale, in fact, it tends boost sales. We could even argue that, without piracy, hundreds of thousands of people would lose their jobs. For example, iPod sales would plunge and bandwidth usage would drop by 50%.

Piracy is embedded in our world economy and eliminating it would be devastating. It’s better to work on legal alternatives instead. So dust off your calculator and let’s donate!

Post from: TorrentFreak

The Performing Rights Society, the UK outfit collecting royalties for the music industry, seems it will stop at nothing as it demands money from small businesses, charities, playschools, and now, kids’ community centers, all so that they can listen to music without fear of prosecution.

The UK’s Performing Rights Society (PRS) is a non-profit organization, setup to ensure that the music industry continues to make plenty more profits on an on-going regular basis. For years now, they have collected license fees from companies that use music as part of their businesses, such as pubs, clubs and restaurants. Some might argue that these type of companies benefit commercially from playing music to the public, so a license fee, although not particular popular, can be absorbed as a legitimate business expense.

However, recently the PRS has been getting more and more aggressive in its quest to funnel cash to its paymasters. It now sees every UK organization – commercial or otherwise – as a legitimate target to intimidate with threats of legal action, should they dare to play a radio, TV or DVD within earshot of the public without a license. Small businesses playing the radio for personal entertainment to pass the working day, charities, tea rooms, corner shops and even community centers are being targeted by this outfit. Bizarrely, they are currently going after the British police, who have been refusing to pay. It’s clear, they care about just one thing – money.

To get this money the PRS go after people like the 61 year-old mechanic Paul Wilson, who has worked alone at his garage for 23 years since he was 15. He can’t afford the PRS license, so now he has to work in silence. “When I was first contacted by the PRS I thought somebody was having a laugh with me,” he said. But really, this is no laughing matter. After the demands for money, Mr Wilson told the PRS to take his radio to prove he wasn’t listening to it, but the PRS warned that the police could come round to do spot checks. Meanwhile, the garage next door to Mr Wilson also received a PRS letter, so they are maintaining radio silence too. Just regular people trying to earn a living, being chased down for money to listen to a radio at work. It’s astonishing.

When the small guy gets hit by these type of issues it really annoys people in the copyright debating community. However, if you really want to widen the debate and spread some really bad PR, it’s going to take tactics which show how low you are prepared to go. For instance, you could go after a charity trying to raise funds via a tea-room, discover their staff radio can be overheard, and demand money from them.

But it is possible to further outrage people. And this is what these type of collection outfits are doing, by widening their campaigns to start going after the softest most impressionable target in the country – kids. Last week we reported how the MPLC, a Hollywood royalty collection outfit, (illegally) demanded money from kindergartens in Ireland, so that the kids could watch DVDs there.

But going after children isn’t exclusively an MPLC tactic, the PRS are doing it too. Part of the claim against the tea-rooms mentioned above was that the kids there needed to be licensed to sing carols in front of the public and now, to add insult to injury, the PRS ‘non-profit’ copyright cop is going after a kid’s non-profit community center in Glasgow, Scotland. The Yoker Resource Center is faced with a £3,000 bill, it if wants to carry on using its TV, radio or CD player, that is.

Elizabeth Busby, the after-school supervisor at the center said: “We can’t afford to pay this money. Although we have a TV license for the center, under these rules we cannot let all the kids watch it.”

Wondering (like the rest of us in the sane world) why people have to pay twice or more for using the same product, Ms Busby added: “If the children are watching a DVD then I have gone out and paid for it, so whether it is one person or twenty-five I still paid for it. It’s not as if I’m buying pirate copies or downloading them illegally. Soon it will be the Halloween party and what do we do for music?”

Asked to comment, the PRS declined. I’d like to think that the silence is down to shame, but I doubt it. I’ll leave you with some comments from Steve Pendlebury, writing in The Bolton News:

“Radio stations pay large amounts of money to licensing organizations PRS and PPL for the music they play, and music has been on the radio for many years. During the war, there were programmes like Workers Playtime and Music While You Work. Now, many radio stations have features about workplaces. If the PRS force people to switch their radios off then how are these stations going to survive?

Music has to be heard before people go out and buy it.”

Post from: TorrentFreak

In an attempt to make BitTorrent more secure, and to reduce some of the load on their own tracker, The Pirate Bay has started to remove all duplicate, dead and anti-pirate trackers from the torrents they host. These changes will improve the trackers’ performance, and increase ’security’ for its users.

Running the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet requires a lot of expensive hardware. To keep this hardware running smoothly, The Pirate Bay is constantly optimizing their setup.

One of the latest changes is that they have started to automatically remove duplicate trackers from torrent files, to keep unnecessary connections between BitTorrent clients and their tracker to a minimum.

Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO explained to TorrentFreak: “It’s totally unnecessary to have more than one of our tracker URLs when they all have the same peers, they just ask the tracker for the same data lots of times.”

“Also, now we can strip out all bad trackers from anti-p2p companies, as well as old ones that stopped working years ago,” he added. So, while they were at it, they have also decided to remove dead trackers, and BitTorrent trackers that are run by anti-piracy organizations. This makes it less likely that the MPAA and RIAA , often though companies like Mediasentry, can keep tabs on the download habits of Pirate Bay users.

Another advantage, of course, is that the number of fake files and spam from companies such as MediaDefender are kept to a minimum. Fake torrents are often used to trick people into downloading useless data instead of Hollywood’s latest blockbuster. The Pirate Bay already had quite a good track record when it comes to removing fakes, and this will only improve with these latest changes.

The Pirate Bay currently has 13 servers dedicated to the tracker, and another 14 servers for the website itself. Yesterday, the tracker broke a new record, with close to 18 million active users on “TV-torrent Tuesday“, and at the current rate, they will be tracking 20 million peers a few weeks from now.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Keeping large networks up to date can be a costly practice. Large corporations or government institutions often need dozens, if not hundreds of servers to distribute updates and patches, for which they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. With DistriBrute, the first P2P based desktop deployment product, this is no longer needed – thanks to the BitTorrent protocol.

DistriBrute is a brand new desktop deployment solution developed by 4M88. Instead of several decentralized distribution servers, it uses the BitTorrent protocol to update workstations in a local network.

With DistriBrute, distribution servers are no longer needed. The data doesn’t have to be distributed from one location, since all the workstations connected to the network actively help in the spreading the data. Every desktop in the system becomes a peer, and helps to send the data to other desktops. The result: faster distribution of updates and patches, and a significant cost reduction.

There are more selling points other than the cost reductions and speed improvement. Since servers tend to use a lot of energy, between 6000 and 7000 KWh a year, it can also be seen as a ‘green’ solution. This ‘green’ aspect has not gone unnoticed. Today, DistriBrute won the audience price of the Digikring Innovation Awards, an initiative that rewards environment friendly ICT solutions.

After winning the award, DistriBrute officially launched. Thus far, it had two successful test runs at large educational institutions in The Netherlands, and the initial results are promising. At INHOLLAND, a concept version of DistriBrute is now used to send software to 6500 desktop computers across 16 different locations. It thereby eliminates 20 servers that were used before to distribute 25.6 TBs of data across the network. Even more so, the P2P based solution speeded up this process significantly, from 4 days to only 4 hours.

The cost savings for those who use DistriBrute are immense. Leo Blom, co-founder of 4M88 told TorrentFreak that they were able to cut 50 servers at ROCMN, another Dutch educational institution. The costs to manage a server can get as high as $10,000 a year, but these will evaporate thanks to DistriBrute.

DistriBrute is one of the first commercial products for business use to reveal the true power of the BitTorrent protocol. For now, availability is limited to organizations in The Netherlands, in the first quarter of 2009 it will be released internationally.

Post from: TorrentFreak

This week many sites offering homemade Greek subtitles received legal threats from an organization representing the TV and movie industries. Very quickly, fansub sites closed down or removed access to subtitles, leaving thousands of Greek file-sharers quite literally in a position of not understanding what is going on.

EPOE, Company for the Protection of Audio-Visual Works (known as Eteria Prostasias Optikoakoustikon Ergon), is a non-profit organization working to protect the copyrights of its for-profit members. Operating at the behest of its members, EPOE is given authority by Greek law enforcement and works under license of the Greek Copyright Organization, which itself is linked to the Ministry of Culture. Its members include many Greek companies but its international members are most easily recognized as they include MPA, Columbia, Fox, Universal, Buena Vista, MGM, Warner and Paramount.

On Tuesday, virtually every site offering user-generated Greek subtitles (fansubs) for English language movies and TV shows received legal threats from EPOE. Within a very short time, all sites including greektvsubs.gr, subtitles.gr, greeksubs, subs4u.gr and apsubs.com had either closed down or removed all subtitles. A sample of the translated complaint issued to greektvsubs is shown below:

According to our information and evidence, in your capacity as owner and manager of the website under the name www.greektvsubs.gr, without right and in violation of the provisions of Law 2121/93, without the required prior written permission of the legitimate beneficiaries of copyright and related rights of our member-companies, are engaged in a totally illegal activity, which consists of right without translation in the English language texts / dialogues and subtitles creation of films or television series, the royalties of which belong to our member companies, which you have then illegally and without right, distributed via the Internet.

So why are the Greeks file-sharers so upset? Yiannis, a user close to the subtitling sites explained to TorrentFreak: “Greek TV networks are most of the times very slow in airing the popular shows (one or two years is common), not showing them at all or the worst, or show a season or two and then forget about them, leaving the fans looking desperately for solutions. DVD distribution companies are no better. Some popular shows do not even exist in a translated form.”

“A couple of years ago dedicated fans started working to translate and create subtitles of their favorite shows and they teamed up to create a few web sites to share them with the rest of the fans,” Yiannis said “One of the biggest was greektvsubs.gr. These people managed to do with hard work, love and dedication what the TV industry failed: translate TV show episodes hours after they were aired and offer the subtitles for Greek speaking people to be able to watch their favorite show.”

There is currently a fierce debate surrounding the legality of such fan-subtitling sites. The Greek subtitles (in common with user-generated subtitles in other locales) are the result of hours of really hard work, listening to the TV show or movie in its native English and then translating by hand into Greek. The ’subbers’ don’t have access to the original scripts, everything is created from scratch since the movie or TV show isn’t even available in Greek, so on this basis some believe the sites operate legally. However, some are suggesting that under Greek copyright law, a translation could be considered as a ‘derivative work’ and as such requires permission from the original copyright holder.

Whatever the truth – and this is echoed in the emails we’ve received here at TorrentFreak from the fans – there is obviously a really healthy demand for these products in Greek language (not to mention from deaf people who absolutely rely on subtitles), yet the media companies spend their money on litigation, instead of addressing the core issue of giving the fans what they want.

In the meantime, while EPOE throws its considerable weight around, the show goes on for Greek subtitling fans as they head to their new home at gr.tvsubtitles.net.

Thanks to Yiannis and fakeb0us

Post from: TorrentFreak

Dan Morrill, Program Director at City University of Seattle, who has appeared in previous TorrentFreak articles, has written a book entitled “Selling Books On Amazon, Tips and Secrets”. In true BitTorrent style, he’s not selling his work, but asking people to please pirate it, courtesy of Mininova’s CDN.

Sweet…Pirate My Book Please
Guest post: Dan Morrill, Program Director at City University of Seattle

BitTorrent needs to do things to survive the lawsuit roiled atmosphere that is happening world wide. There is no argument; there is a lot of stuff on BitTorrent that literally belongs to someone else. BitTorrent however is part of the landscape; it is something that we all have to deal with, both in terms of a legitimate and non legitimate content distribution channel.

With the permission of my publisher, and in talking to some of the best people in the world when it comes to helping people generate buzz, I uploaded my book into BitTorrent to see what would happen. For me this is a marketing decision, and not something that I am overly worried about, because I am giving the eBook away for free anyways, this allows me to control the release and gather good stats on the process. Mininova offers that opportunity, so my marketing person and my publisher both agreed that this would be a grand experiment to see how well BitTorrent equates to additional sales if any.

I am not worried about the sales, what I am interested in is how the data is distributed using BitTorrent as a CDN (Content Distribution Network). For bands, for new publishers, for eBooks, using BitTorrent as a CDN makes sense, especially if you have marketing goals in mind. Does it matter if it generates additional sales? No not really. Does it matter if you want to build buzz around your book, definitely.

If you own the copyright, Mininova’s foray into using Bittorrent as a CDN can power a lot of good things. The biggest one is helping generate buzz, most small bands, most small publishers who are doing eBooks or music do not have a global network to distribute their goods. Access to the global network is going to be spotty; you have the choice of ITunes that has cross border licensing issues or Google searches, which are not always going to be effective. Here is how the data breaks out though:

The above picture is the global distribution channel for the book in the first 24 hours, with some 691 downloads. What makes me particularly happy is the picture below.

The reason this makes me happy is that Africa is one of those places where knowing how to run an ecommerce shop, or even in alliance with a larger ecommerce site can help a person raise themselves out of poverty. You can track all the stats on the book right here if you want to.

While the book is written in English, and aimed right at American business and business law, the basic principles apply universally. Have something that someone wants, and price in a range that people can afford to buy at. This works regardless of local or international borders, and seeing the book being downloaded in chronically economically depressed regions is very good to see.

The pie chart below also shows how the country distribution breaks out overall, while I am not surprised by the American stats, what is interesting to me is to see outside of the country. The book is not distributed globally; no one has global rights to the book outside of me. Seeing the UK, Canada, and Australia downloads coming in at 18.2% is also good. The book can help them out as well. India is the surprise at 5.2%.

Overall, with the number of downloads, this has been amazingly successful as a way to generate marketing buzz, and the potential to reach an international audience. The book is too pricy for people living on less than a dollar a day, but if sales should pick up internationally, or even locally that will be an interesting thing to see. Sales in the last 24 hours have remained the same as they have been since the book came out. It is at least a steady seller.

Overall I would have to rate my experience with Mininova over the last 24 hours as highly satisfying, and something that people who do not mind using BitTorrent to distribute their free eBook, or other digital good should check out. While it has yet to equate to sales, what is has done is build buzz, as a marketing process, this cannot be beat. As a survival mechanism for Mininova, this can be their saving reasoning, because they are offering a valuable service, not everyone has access to a CDN.

Download ‘Selling Books On Amazon, Tips and Secrets’ from Mininova, and please take the time to leave a comment for Dan.

Dan’s blog can be found here.

Post from: TorrentFreak

New Zealand is known for sheep, rugby, and dramatic filming locations. However, it will also be known for being the first place in the world with a 3-strikes law for copyright infringement. The Copyright Amendment Act 2008 gained royal assent earlier this year, and goes into effect at the end of February 2009. Opposition to this bill, despite being signed into law, is still growing though.

Previously we’ve discussed how certain countries have been pushing for laws requiring ISPs to disconnect filesharers, if they receive multiple notices alleging copyright infringement. This proposal has been struck down by the EU, and no-one but lobby groups seems to want it.

However, over in New Zealand a law requiring ISPs to disconnect repeat copyright infringers has been proposed, passed and signed into law. The law, Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act 2008 adds a new section to deal with Internet Service Providers and copyright infringement. Yet, opposition from ISPs, and Internet user groups may see it being struck down or modified before it goes into force.

The section in question, 92A reads

Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers
(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.
(2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.

Opposition to this section of law has been steady, with six industry bodies that have opposed the law meeting with government ministers. Indications from Communications Minister David Cunliffe and Associate Commerce Minister Judith Tizard, are that if the opposing groups and rights holders can come to an agreement by developing a workable code of practice, the law can be reworded. Tizard also reiterated strongly that the law was going ahead, and it would do so because of ‘Internet piracy’, according to one of the meeting’s participants

The issue at the heart of the debate is that of proof. InternetNZ head Keith Davidson told New Zealand’s Stuff, that he wanted to see an element of proof being required before people are cut off. A position understandable with the recent bad press given to copyright infringement allegations in the US, both in studies, and the courtroom. Countering him was the CEO of the NZ Recording Industry Association, telling Stuff that proving the guilt of infringers in a court of law, before any penalty is dealt out would be “impractical and ridiculous”, a sentiment also shared by his American counterparts.

A provision to penalize false or inaccurate accusations was in the bill at one point, after dealings by the group of six with a select committee. However, Tizard stated that it was inappropriate, as the Cabinet had already decided the law was to go ahead as was, and that people shouldn’t be surprised.

New Zealand is also in the middle of an election (voting day is November 8th) so there may be a change of ministers soon. These may be more amenable to changing the wording of the law, to be based on proof, not simple accusations. As always though, nothing is certain for the 3.3 million kiwi’s (around 80% of the population) on the net, except they are considered less important than the greed of lobby groups.

Post from: TorrentFreak

While some universities restrict the use of BitTorrent clients, others embrace the popular flilesharing protocol and use it to spread knowledge. Stanford University is one of the few to realize that BitTorrent does not equal piracy. They use BitTorrent to give away some of their engineering courses, with some success.

Always wanted to learn more about Robotics, Linear Dynamical Systems or Programming Paradigms? Now you can, for free, thanks to Stanford Engineering’s online courses.

The University not only gives away videos of lectures, but also syllabi, handouts, homework and exams. In addition to offering torrents, the courses are also available on YouTube, via iTunes and Vyew. With the project Stanford aims to spread knowledge on technology worldwide.

Thus far, the online courses have been a great success. Over 200,000 people from all over the world have visited the site already. Most foreign visitors come from Canada, according to a recent news release, followed by Brazil, China, Italy and the UK.

For now, only the 10 most popular computer science and electrical engineering courses are published online, but additional courses will be added later. All course materials are published under a Creative Commons license, which allows others to adapt, remix and share them as long as it is for noncommercial use, and if they link back to the university.

As P2P-blog points out, there is one downside to the torrents Stanford is offering. They do not use regular trackers, but only Vuze’s DHT tracker. This means that people who use BitTorrent clients that do not support DHT, such as Transmission, BitLord and BitTornado, are not able to download the files. Of course, uTorrent and Azureus users will have no problems.

While Stanford recognizes the benefits of BitTorrent, it is also cracking down on students who use it to download copyrighted material. Students who get caught for the first time have to pay a $100 fine, the second offense costs $500, and those who get caught three times will have to pay $1000 to regain access to the university network.

Post from: TorrentFreak

The website of a record label which offers completely free music downloads has been taken down by its host for copyright infringement, even though it only offers its own music. Quote Unquote Records calls itself “The First Ever Donation Based Record Label”, but is currently homeless after its host pulled the plug.

Quote Unquote Records is an Internet based record label, run by Bomb the Music Industry! and ‘The Arrogant Sons of Bitches’ frontman Jeff Rosenstock. A forward looking outfit, all artists on the label give their music away for free on the label’s website. Well, they would, if the webhost hadn’t have taken down the site for alleged copyright infringement.

In a MySpace blog entry, Jeff Rosenstock explained that the Quote Unquote Records site is non-operational, and other sites connected to the label, including the Bomb the Music Industry! and Arrogant Sons of Bitches sites, have all been taken down too. So what happened?

Around a week ago, the label was notified by its webhost that it had some copyright music files on its server, which was no surprise to them since they were tracks by Arrogant Sons of Bitches, one of the label’s bands. The tracks the webhost referred to were actually written by Jeff himself. Jeff spoke with someone at the host on the telephone, explained that they were his own tracks and was informed this wasn’t a problem.

Three days later the labels site went down completely, due to Jeff hosting his own copyright files on his own site – a claimed violation of the hosting company’s Terms of Service. In order to solve the problem, Jeff would have to send his copyright registration forms to the host by mail, to prove he held the copyright, a problem in itself, explains Jeff:

“I called the company to explain that a lot of this material was NOT in fact registered with the US copyright office, instead we did the ol’ poor man’s copyright. The music that was copyrighted was done so under a Creative Commons License, which is a digital copyright that cannot be viewed if the website where the files are posted is down.”

It seems amazing that a host should be proactive like this, especially since it has clearly made a huge mistake. However, a week later and Jeff’s site is still down and he’s quite rightly upset: “I guess the scary thing for me is that it seems that my hosting server employs a guilty before proven innocent policy, which is terrifying for anyone who does not physically mail forms for every small idea they’ve ever had in their bedroom to the US copyright office. What a great new digital age, stuck in the trappings of wasteful forms and red tape.”

If losing your site to a bogus copyright claim isn’t enough, there is a more immediate problem. Jeff is being denied access to his data by the host and he says that since he had a crash on his local hard drive, he no longer has copies of any of the content that was on the Quote Unquote Records server. “So, long story short, I’m looking for any artwork or mp3s that were put on Quote Unquote Records,” he said.

If you can find any of the material Jeff is looking for on P2P networks, please post comments on his blog.

Post from: TorrentFreak