3 Count: French Disappearance

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: French Court Orders Search Firms to Block Pirate Sites

First off today, the BBC is reporting that a court in Paris, France has ordered Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to remove some 16 streaming sites from their search index.

The plaintiffs in the case, which were companies representing the film industry, argued that the sites violated copyright laws in France by streaming films without copyright holder permission. The court agreed and not only ordered that local ISPs block the sites, but also that search engines remove them.

A separate case will be before the same court today. This case, brought by Irish subsidiaries of U.S. content companies, targets the site Kickass Torrents.

2: Open Letter to Spike Lee Pleads for Copyright Dispute Intervention

Next up today, Ben Child at The Guardian reports that designer Juan Luis Garcia alleges that director Spike Lee used posters he designed without permission or payment and, in turn, he is asking for help in getting in touch with the director.

At issue is a series of posters Garcia says he designed for the recently-released Lee film “Oldboy”, which is a remake of a South Korean revenge film. According to Garcia, he was approached by Lee’s agency to make the posters but the two sides could not reach an agreement on price, resulting in Garcia walking away. However, after that happened, Garcia says that Lee began to use posters based on his designs to promote the film, without even paying him the small fee he was owed for the proposals.

Lee has not commented publicly on the controversy but Garcia said that, after he approached Lee’s agency about the use of his work, he was threatened with legal action. The film itself, however, did not do well at the box office its opening weekend and is widely expected to gross less than $3 million.

3: FilesTube Search Engine First to Smash 10 Million DMCA Notice Barrier

Finally today, Andy at Torrentfreak writes that the file search engine site FilesTube has become the first site to pass 10 million DMCA notices sent to Google, nearly doubling its nearest competitor, Zippyshare.

Over 4 million of those notices were filed by the BPI, which represents the British record industry, and a mother 1.7 million were filed by their American counterpart, the RIAA.

Though the site has long purported to be just a search engine, it’s begun to host its own content and get involved with content more directly. The site also moved to a new domain, one with a .to extension, to avoid an ISP block in the UK.

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.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.