Acta opposition grows as Pirate Party UK joins day of action

According to The Guardian, The Pirate Party UK will join an international day of action against controversial copyright agreement ACTA on Saturday with protests planned for London, Glasgow and Nottingham.

Pirate Party UK leader Loz Kaye said: "We saw what the combination of protest and political pressure achieved with the dropping of SOPA [the Stop Online Piracy Act].

"But the threats to digital rights and civil liberties aren't over. It's vital that we send a clear message that the people of Europe don't want ACTA."

Read full article.

ACTA. A New Question of Internet Freedom

European activists who participated in American Internet protests last month learned that there was political power to be harnessed on the Web. Now they are putting that knowledge to use in an effort to defeat new global rules for intellectual property. The New York Times reports.

In the U.S. protests , Web sites including Wikipedia went dark Jan. 18, and more than seven million people signed Google’s online petition opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Ultimately, even the bills’ sponsors in the U.S. Congress backed down under the onslaught of public criticism.

The European activists are hoping to use similar pressure to stop the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement , or ACTA, which is meant to clamp down on illegal commerce in copyrighted and trademarked goods. Opponents say that it will erode Internet freedom and stifle innovation. About 1.5 million people have signed a Web petition calling for the European Parliament to reject ACTA, which some say is merely SOPA and PIPA on an international level. Thousands of people have turned out for demonstrations across Europe, with more scheduled for next Saturday.

Read full article.

Ads get social at Super Bowl

Super Bowl ad campaigns are going beyond the field- tapping into social media to leverage the millions of dollars spent on the 30-second or 60-second ads aired during the big game. Bobbi Rebell reports for Reuters video (2:17).

11 February: A day of protest in Europe against ACTA

Access, an organisation that says it is a “new global movement for digital freedom”, has organised an international day against ACTA on February 11, hoping the world comes out in “an unprecedented showing of solidarity” against the treaty. TheNextWeb reports.

Access already seen 331,976 people sign its Anti-ACTA petition and has gone one step further to assist in notifying its website visitors of protest events in their local area. The organization has begun listing Facebook events for each protest around the world, motioning for individuals to create their own and request for them to be added to the list.

Read full article.

Pirate Bay Founders Lose Supreme Court Appeal, Going to Jail

Sweden’s Supreme Court just announced it won’t agree to hear an appeal by The Pirate Bay’s founders, meaning the jail sentences and fines imposed by the Swedish Court of Appeals will stand.

In other words, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström, who started file-sharing site The Pirate Bay in September 2003, face jail time and have to collectively pony up a fine of 46 million Swedish kronor (US$6.7 million). TIME Techland reports.

In April 2009, The Pirate Bay’s founders were found guilty of abetting copyright infringement and sentenced to a year in prison, plus a fine of 30 million SEK (about US$4.2 million at the time). All four appealed, but the Swedish Appeals Court upheld the verdict in November 2010, decreasing the sentence’s jail times, but increasing the fine to 46 million SEK.

The group then attempted to bring the case before Sweden’s Supreme Court, but found themselves rudderless this morning after the Supreme Court effectively waved the case off.

Read full article.

Wall Street Journal Launches Video Channel for YouTube

The Wall Street Journal joins Reuters in launching dedicated YouTube channels.

... In conjunction with the launch, the channel will showcase "Off Duty," a daily lifestyle show debuting today based on the eponymous section of WSJ Weekend, the Journal's Saturday paper.

Hosted by Wall Street Journal reporter Wendy Bounds, "Off Duty" will bring to life many of its namesake's features, as well as other culture coverage from the Journal – from food to fashion, music and movies, travel to tech.

Full WSJ press release. via Mediabistro

Obama faces protests over British student extradited to U.S. over pirated films

Barack Obama was last night facing a groundswell of protest within the U.S. over attempts to extradite British student Richard O’Dwyer. The Daily Mail reports.

Incredibly, the plight of the 23-year-old – who is accused of breaking copyright laws – came top of a list of subjects the American public want to put to their president.

The student’s legal team argue the site did not store any copyright material and merely pointed users to other sites in the same way as Yahoo and Google.

... Any American with a YouTube account was invited to post a question or vote on a question. Some 227,966 submitted 133,255 questions and cast 1,630,870 votes. The top question read: ‘Why are you personally supporting the extradition of UK citizen Richard O’Dwyer for solely linking to copyright-infringing works using an Extradition Treaty designed to combat terrorism and to bring terrorists to judgement in the USA?’

Read full article.

As Anonymous protests, Internet drowns in inaccurate anti-ACTA arguments

Many of the claims about ACTA that are circulating among the treaty's opponents are highly misleading or outright inaccurate. arstechnica has been covering ACTA for over four years, and sheds some light on a tricky subject.

Mainly, thanks in part to an intense public backlash, most of the controversial proposals were stripped out, or at least watered down, in the final version of ACTA.

That final version has been publicly available for months, but many ACTA opponents continue to focus on these deleted provisions in their arguments against the treaty. arstechnica will examine four of the most trenchant claims about ACTA that have been circulating on the Internet in the last week, then compare them to what ACTA actually says.

Read more.

ACTA. Which Countries Signed When and Countries That Haven't Signed Yet

David Meyer for ZDNet in article titled "ACTA: Facts, misconceptions and questions" takes stock of the final treaty, outlining key points about the contents and process and about the next steps.

Very useful because it's an area where most media reports are confusing, Meyer lists which countries signed when - and the countries that haven't signed yet - though they were present at the negociations.

MegaUpload data could be erased Thursday

Data from MegaUpload could be erased as early as this Thursday, a report says--a disturbing prospect for those who might have used the recently shut down cyberlocker for legitimate purposes such as backing up business files. [via CNet]

... MegaUpload attorney Ira Rothken told the AP that at least 50 million Megaupload users have data that could be deleted, and that the company is working with prosecutors to try to prevent the data from being vaporized.

Read full article.

Stop ACTA Timeline banner

With Facebook planning the global roll out of Timeline, consider using the above banner as your profile picture. Drag it off the page to your desktop then upload it on Facebook. Help Stop ACTA.

Search engines are asked to de-list popular filesharing sites and give higher ranking to authorized sites

At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.

[via TorrentFreak]

The EU and 22 member states sign the controversial ACTA ‘Internet surveillance’ treaty

22 European Union states, and the EU itself, have today signed the controversial ACTA treaty, which critics say could lead to severe restrictions on freedom and civil liberties online. TheNextWeb reports.

As Wired UK reports, at a ceremony in Tokyo, the UK, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden all agreed to adopt ACTA.

ACTA - the Anti-Counterfeiting Trademark Agreement – is a voluntary agreement between nations that covers a wide range of counterfeit goods, both physical and digital. However, it has stirred up controversy for both the secretive ‘behind-closed doors’ way in which it was drafted, and the effect it could have on our online lives. As the Stop Acta campaign site explains, the agreement would make ISPs liable for copyright infringements carried out on their networks, leading to them to introduce surveillance technology to keep tabs on their customers’ online activity. A ‘Three strikes’ policy would also be forced upon Internet users, blacklisting them from ISPs after a series of warnings if they were found to have shared files illegally.

Critics also accuse ACTA of introducing important news laws ‘through the back door’, via a trade agreement which will become binding when ratified, instead of via individual countries introducing their own laws which would have to be debated openly in public. The remaining EU member states are expected to sign soon. Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the US are already signed up to the agreement.

However, ACTA isn’t a done deal yet – it still needs to be ratified by the countries that have joined, something that’s not expected in the EU for several months. An opposition movement is gathering pace.

Given the international nature of this agreement, the noise made against the United States’ SOPA and PIPA bills last week could be nothing to what we see against ACTA.

Read full article. Image from Athena Live on ACTA demonstrators in Warsaw.

Help Stop ACTA

What is Acta and why should you be worried about it?

SOPA and PIPA might be on hold for the time-being, but there is a greater threat looming. It's called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and it's an international agreement that aims to establish multinational standards on intellectual property rights enforcement.

Read full article in Wired]

Google Hangouts to watch local news

Google+ recently added video conferencing capabilities to its platform. Like Skype, you may have used Google+ hangouts to talk to your friends face-to-face for free using your computer. But have you used it to watch your local news? Social Times reports.

Google has started rolling out Google+ hangouts On Air to public figures, celebrities and users with large number of followers. Whereas the original Hangouts were limited to groups of ten, with one host and nine participants, the new version allows everyone beyond the participating group to watch the hangout as a YouTube live stream. The host can broadcast the session to specific Google+ Circles or to the public on Google+.

Television stations love it because it’s basically a broadcast tower in the middle of a social network.

Read more.

ACTA vs. SOPA: Five Reasons ACTA is Scarier Threat to Internet Freedom

ACTA may be scarier than SOPA, Internet freedom advocates say, and outrage over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement treaty is growing as it gains international prominence in the wake of the U.S. Congress shelving the Stop Online Piracy Act last week. International Business Times reports.

ACTA opponents, from the EFF to the Anonymous hacktivist collective are coalescing in opposition to the treaty.

Despite these key similarities, the ACTA vs. SOPA debate usually ends up with opponents warning that ACTA is an even graver global threat to the Internet as we know it.

Five reasons why:

1. Scope: The key reason why ACTA is scarier to many online freedom advocates is the fact that it is an international treaty.

2. Transparency: The SOPA debate took place mostly outside of the public eye at first, but because it was taking place in the halls of the U.S. Congress, Internet freedom advocates were able to monitor the proceedings and respond.

But the ACTA treaty is being negotiated almost entirely behind closed doors.

3. Ease of Approval: The SOPA bill was derailed because it required both houses of the U.S. Congress to pass it, and for President Barack Obama to sign it. Once approved, it would have been subject to legal challenge and could have been repealed or amended by future Congresses.

ACTA, on the other hand, was already signed by the United States on Oct. 11, 2011, and Obama was not required to get the approval of any outside authority to do so: not the Congress, not the Supreme Court, and not the American public.

4. Level of Support: Even before the efforts of opponents brought down the controversial legislation, SOPA had only 31 co-sponsors in Congress, meaning it was never a wildly popular bill to begin with. Despite the loud cries that SOPA was threatening the Internet as we know it and that Congress was about to pass it, it was never really that close to being made into law.

ACTA, on the other had, is an international treaty, meaning that it requires unilateral signatures, not votes based at least in part on public opinion. And the Obama administration has already signed it for America.

5. Visibility: The campaign to stop SOPA began relatively early on in its development. By the time it was even able to go to markup in the House Judiciary Committee, opponents were already loudly making their opinions known to a large slice of the Internet-using public.

ACTA, on the other hand, is largely off most people's radars, though it has been under negotiation for about five years.

Read full article.

Rapper Swizz Beatz braces for FBI interview as CEO of Megapuload

Swizz Beatz, the rapper and producer who is married to singer Alicia Keys, is allegedly "bracing himself" for an FBI interview following the arrest of executives at filesharing website Megaupload, where he was listed as CEO.

[via The Guardian]

Polish sites hit in ACTA hack attack

Dear Polish government, we will continue to disrupt and interfere with your government official websites until the 26th. Do not pass ACTA.

— Anonymous ✔ (@AnonymousWiki) January 22, 2012

According to the BBC, online activists have attacked Polish government websites in protest against plans to sign an international copyright treaty.

The websites of the prime minister, parliament and other government offices were all rendered unreachable or sluggish on Sunday.

Critics say the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) could lead to censorship.

The government said it would sign the treaty as planned on Thursday.

Read more.

Storage sites unnerved by Megaupload action

The arrest of Megaupload's founders has led to other file storage sites taking action in an apparent attempt to protect themselves from legal action. And raises legitimate concern over consumers relying on 'cloud' storage for their data. The BBC reports.

Filesonic has disabled its sharing functions, allowing users to access only their own files.

Uploaded.to, which offers a service in which uploaders can receive money depending on how many people download their files, remains fully operational - but US visitors can no longer access its servers.

Other so-called "digital locker" services, such as Switzerland-based Rapidshare, have defended themselves by pointing out their anti-piracy measures.

Megaupload's closure suggested that copyright enforcers were moving away from targeting individual file-sharers as they had done in the past.

"This is all a trend of going towards the facilitators, the organisers of this," Michael Moore, a partner at law firm Marks & Clerk, told the BBC.

Read BBCfull article.

White House petition to end support for ACTA

ACTA is a secretly negotiated copyright treaty that obliges its signatories to take on many of the worst features of SOPA and PIPA. The EU is nearing ratification of it. ACTA was instigated by US trade reps under the Bush Administration, who devised and enforced its unique secrecy regime, but the Obama administration enthusiastically pursued it. This White House petition asks the administration to withdraw its support for the treaty.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is a 'plurilateral' trade agreement, currently being negotiated between the US, Canada, Japan, the European Union, South Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand. It is somewhat similar to SOPA/PIPA, however ACTA is an executive agreement between countries besides the United States, and it can be passed without the approval from Congress and the Supreme Court. It is potentially hazardous to the Internet we know and how it works.

We need to stop ACTA before it is finally approved by all countries involved. If you value your privacy and you don't want "Big Brother" watching over you, sign this petition and spread the word. Research ACTA and see just how dangerous it is to the Internet, our privacy, and our liberties.

[via boingboing]

Inside the Lavish Life Of Megaupload's Mr. Dotcom

Kim Schmitz legally changed his surname to Dotcom at some point over the last decade, a homage to the technology that made him a millionaire and that has now landed him in a New Zealand jail. The WSJ reports.

The 38-year-old Internet entrepreneur was arrested Thursday at his birthday celebration inside a 25,000-square-foot mansion in Auckland. When police entered the property, Mr. Dotcom fled to a safe room, where he was found with a loaded shotgun, officials said.

... Despite the legal controversy brewing around his website—and a previous conviction for insider trading—Mr. Dotcom didn't lay low or hide anonymously behind his computer.

Rather, Mr. Dotcom openly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. He owned at least 18 luxury cars—including a 1959 pink Cadillac and three cars with vanity license plates that read "HACKER," "MAFIA," and "STONED," according to U.S. officials—flew helicopters, and personally funded the city of Auckland's 2010 New Year's fireworks celebration.

Read full article. Above image from Gizmodo's piece The Best Worst Photos of Megaupload's Kim Dotcom.

Privacy Lawyers Process Megaupload Copyright Case

The Justice Department's massive copyright case against the file-sharing website Megaupload.com had the Internet world hopping this week. But it also got lawyers talking, about the scope of a criminal investigation that spanned eight countries and the hard-nosed tactics that the government deployed. npr reports.

Prosecutors and FBI agents who built the case against Megaupload call it an international crime ring — a racketeering enterprise, like the mob or a drug gang, that made $175 million from pirated movies and music since 2005 and cost copyright holders nearly half a billion dollars more.

... Megaupload has hired megalawyer Bob Bennett, who once represented President Bill Clinton, to make its case in American courts. Bennett told NPR that he intends to "vigorously dispute the charges," which carry huge financial penalties and a 20-year prison term if the executives are convicted.

Orin Kerr, an expert in computer law at George Washington University, says the legal fight is only just beginning.

"There are very complicated jurisdictional questions," Kerr says. "Did the individuals know they were violating United States law? Did that matter? Does it matter that you know you're violating the law in the U.S. even though you're outside the U.S.?

Read full article.

Why Did the Feds Target Megaupload?

There are plenty of players in the no-questions-asked online storage game: HulkShare, MediaFire, YouSendIt. They're all staples of web sharing—and they're all still up and running today. Partly because they're smaller than Megaupload, partly because they're smarter, but mostly because they're don't operate like sloppy drug kingpins. Gizmodo reports.

The Mega Conspiracy crew—which spanned continents, and was lead by flamboyant fatboy millionaire conman Kim Dotcom—was openly, wittingly rich off of copyrighted music. They were flagrant about their intentions to squeeze cash out of Simpsons episodes and 50 Cent albums, rewarding their most piracy-pushing users, laundering money through the site, and spending the cash in the most conspicuous ways imaginable.

Read more.

Senate vote on PIPA is postponed

In the most decisive sign yet that support for controversial antipiracy legislation has collapsed, Sen. Harry Reid issues a statement announcing he has postponed the vote on the Protect IP Act. [via CNet]

In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday's vote," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), in a statement.

Read full article.

How the Internet blackout affected congressional support for PIPA/SOPA

Pro Publica posted a simple/powerful image of the members of Congress' position on SOPA/PIPA today vs. yesterday."

Colbert explains how to deal with Internet censorship protests

EFF: Thank You, Internet! And the Fight Continues

EFF's anti-blacklist crew gathers around laptops showing websites participating in the protest.

The numbers are pretty amazing. More than 1 million messages (and counting!) were sent to Congress Wednesday via the EFF action center. More than 4.5 million people signed Google's petition registering their opposition to the bills. And that's just the beginning.

[EFF via boingboing]

Anonymous goes nuclear; everybody loses?

In the aftermath of Wednesday's SOPA/PIPA blackout protests, the Internet community amassed quite a bit of goodwill, flexed its muscles in a friendly, humorous, civil-disobedience kind of way, and, remarkably, even managed to change quite a few minds. CNet reports.

Just 24 short hours later, Anonymous legions nuked that goodwill and took cyber security into thermonuclear territory. The real question now is: were they played?

... Affected sites include the White House, the FBI, the Department of Justice, multiple record label sites, the MPAA, and RIAA, and the U.S. Copyright Office.

The attacks were spawned by a large-scale indictment and the arrest of four people associated with a hosting and storage site called Megaupload, all accused of online piracy.

In a collective rage, Anonymous lashed out with the force of a cyber-nuke. The display of power is awesome--there will be a lot of high-fiving hackers tonight, that's for sure. And given the massive power of the legions, this story will get more attention in just a few hours than the SOPA/PIPA blackouts ever did.

But then the other shoe will drop.

Read full article.

Feds Shut Down Megaupload.com File-Sharing Website

According to the AP, Federal prosecutors in Virginia have shut down one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, and charged its founder and others with violating piracy laws.

The indictment accuses the company of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content.

The indictment says at one point, Megaupload was the 13th most popular website in the world.

Read full article.

Culture Film YouTube launches online short film festival

YouTube and the producers of its user-generated film Life in a Day will send 10 winners to the Venice film festival to compete for a $500,000 film-making grant.

[via The Guardian]

PIPA support collapses, with 13 new Senators opposed

Members of the Senate are rushing for the exits in the wake of the Internet's unprecedented protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

At least 13 members of the upper chamber announced their opposition on Wednesday. In a particularly severe blow for Hollywood, at least five of the newly-opposed Senators were previously co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act. (Update: since we ran this story, the tally is up to 18 Senators, of which seven are former co-sponsors.)

[via arstechnica]

4.5 million sign Google's anti-SOPA petition

Over the course of Wednesday, millions of people signed onto Google's petition by clicking on a thick black censorship stamp across its colorful logo. [via CNet]

"The last number we released was at 4:30pm ET," said Google spokesperson Christine Chen. "At that point we were at 4.5 million signatories and counting."

Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.," the petition reads. "Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.

Read more.

How much would Facebook, Google or Twitter lose if they shut down for one day?

TheNextWeb has put together a list of some of the Web’s major sites and figured out approximately how much they stood to lose, based on their annual revenue, if they had gone black to protest SOPA.

Google: About $100 million per day if Google had done more than cover its logo.

Facebook: If they closed shop for one day they would lose almost $11.7 million, and angered tons of Facebook users.

eBay: eBay alone would put one day’s loss at almost $28 million, without taking into account each individual seller’s losses.

Amazon: Amazon would have been looking at around $82 million lost in one day.

Yahoo: The company would have missed out on about $11.8 million, but it has far more to worry about these days.

Groupon: Could have lost around $7 million.

Read full article.

What does SOPA mean for us foreigners?

The Stop Online Piracy Act is an American piece of legislation, and as a general rule, American legislation has only limited influence outside US borders. arstechnica reports.

SOPA is a little different from most legislation, however, in that it has an explicit focus on websites that are, in some sense, "foreign." SOPA regulates the dealings between American service providers—most notably search engines, advertising networks, and payment processors (such as PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard)—and foreign sites. Search engines will have to remove listings of offending foreign sites; advertising networks will have to stop selling ads to offending sites; payment processors will have to stop processing payments from Americans for offending sites.

Early versions of the bill also had provisions requiring disruption of DNS services, something that would have had an impact that was felt globally. Fortunately, these provisions have been dropped.

The delineation between foreign and domestic that SOPA makes is arbitrary and inaccurate. Canadians, whose IP address allocations are governed by the US-based ARIN, probably qualify as "domestic," and so may evade SOPA's regulations. So too might the Hong Kong-based MegaUpload, thanks to its dot-com domain name, and similarly the Switzerland-based RapidShare. The Pirate Bay might also escape SOPA's reach, thanks to a dot-org domain name. There's plenty of scope for interference with these sites' operations, through measures such as ICE takedowns. Just not necessarily using SOPA as the justification.

ut most foreign sites—those using domain names registered in non-US registrars, and/or IP addresses allocated by non-US regional Internet registries—are covered by SOPA. If they deal, in whole or in part, with Americans, and if this dealing involves counterfeit medicines or pirated intellectual property, they can find themselves victims of a range of unilateral actions. Search engines could purge them from their listings, and payment processors and advertisers could cut off their revenue streams.

Read more.

Google.com USA blacks out logo in protest of SOPA/PIPA

Today, if you reside in the U.S and you access Google.com, the search giant has blacked out its logo in protest against the SOPA and PIPA, stating that it believes politicians should “end piracy, not liberty” as the bills would “cenesor the Internet and slow economic growth.”

[via TheNextWeb]

Screen Captures of Sites Gone Dark in protest of SOPA/PIPA

Screen Captures of Sites Gone Dark: From top to bottom: Wikipedia.org (engl), boingboing the Australian Pirate Party and Wired.Google.com accessed from the US, shows blacked out logo. Full of Websites Gone Dark to Protest SOPA Wednesday via Mashable.

Web pages have gone black on the Internet before, in protest of the Decency Act in 1996. Read article here.

Reuters Teams With YouTube to Launch Reuters TV Channel

Reuters today announced the launch of Reuters TV, a new YouTube channel featuring 10 news, commentary and analysis programs covering hard news, finance, politics, technology and special Reuters investigations.

The programming, which will appear on Reuters.com and on Reuters redesigned YouTube channel, marks Reuters entry into the rapidly growing business of online video programming, in partnership with one of the biggest players in next-generation TV, YouTube. Reuters is employing a creative editing style that is suited for Internet programming and does not mimic traditional TV.

[via MarketWire]