3 Count: Iceland Blockade

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1: Copyright Groups Demand Pirate Bay Blockade in Iceland

First off today, Ernesto at Torrentfreak writes that a collection of rightsholder groups, representing both the major movie and record studios, have filed a complaint in Iceland asking that ISPs there block both The Pirate Bay and Deildu, a local BitTorrent site.

The complaint was filed with the head of police and requests and injunction that will force ISPs to block access to the sites, following on the heels of similar blockades in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and other countries.

The groups said that they saw no other options and that the proposed blocking does not go against Icelandic rule son freedom of expression. However, others, including a Pirate Party member of the Icelandic Parliament, disagree with the effort, saying it will not likely be effective.

2: Hollywood: How Do We Secure High-def 4K Content? Easy. Just Brand the Pirates.

Next up today, Faultline at The Register writes that Movielabs, the R&D firm for Hollywood, has released new specifications for securing and watermarking 4K ultra-high-definition streaming video. The new standards, though listed as “recommendations” will likely be adopted by studios for content that’s being streamed over the Internet.

The goal of the technology is not to prevent the copying of such high definition video, but rather, to mark it with unique identifiers so that include information about the device decoding the stream. That way, should it appear online elsewhere illegally, the leaker can be tracked down and punished. Such watermarks, typically, are seen as harder to remove than DRM schemes, requiring the comparing of multiple copies and the lack of certainty that the watermark was removed completely.

However, the new specifications could slow down the adoption of 4k video, especially on computers and stock devices that lack the needed encryption tools.

3: Google Takes Down More Than Eight ‘Pirate’ Links Every Second

Finally today, Samuel Gibbs at The Guardian reports that Google has broken it’s previous record of most copyright removals in one week, hitting 5.3 million allegedly infringing links removed in the last week of September.

That represents nearly 9 removals every second and a three fold jump from the 1.8 million removals from that time last year.

The information comes from Google’s transparency report and comes on the heels of a study from the London School of Economics that found piracy to have an overall neutral impact on the bottom line of copyright holders.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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