3 Count: International Edition

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1: Italian Court Orders ISPs to Block Several Major Torrent Sites

First off today, Andy at Torrentfreak writes that the music industry group FIMI have successfully, by turning over the case to a criminal prosecutor, secured a court order that will require ISPs in Italy to block a series of BitTorrent-related sites, including ExtraTorrent, 1337x, H33t and Torrenthound.

The move is only the most recent round of site blocking in Italy. The Pirate Bay was the first subject of blocking in the country in 2008 and also comes up in the most recent round as FIMI adds more IP addresses associated with the site to the list.

However, it’s The Pirate Bay IP block that has raised the most concern as several addresses are involved, including ones affiliated with the site’s mail service. Nonetheless, FIMI has said that they are happy with the outcome.

2: UPC Polska Hit by Copyright Fine

Next up today, Chris Dziadul at Broadband TV News reports that the Polish Filmmakers’ Association (SFP) has won a legal victory against the country’s leading cable provider, UPC Polska, over the issue of UPC’s rebroadcasting of films outside of their contracts.

The ruling comes from the Warsaw Court of Appeal and orders UPC ot pay SFP compensation for the retransmissions. Though the court did not set an amount, it is expected to be in the millions and be 2.2% of the revenue earned from the retransmission.

UPC is expected to appeal the decision, but the ruling is seen as further confirmation that the 2.2% rate is a fair amount in Poland.

3: Kim Dotcom’s Mega ‘Not Being Used for Wide-Scale Copyright Infringement’

Finally today Stuart Dredge at The Guardian reports that, according to Mega’s CEO, Vikram Kumar, the site is not being used for widespread copyright infringement and actually attracts a very small number of copyright takedown notices.

The service was launched by Kim Dotcom one year after he and others were arrested for criminal copyright infringement charges and their site, Megaupload, was shuttered. Mega focuses on security and end-to-end encryption as a benefit. However, according to Kumar, the site’s structure makes it unappealing to copyright infringers and they only receive about 100 takedown notices per day, despite millions of uploads.

He also said that Mega is planning on working to block external search engines that claim to index files hosted on the site, saying Mega does not want to be connected with such services.

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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