3 Count: Sunk Pirates

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1: Pirate Bay Goes Offline After Stockholm Police Raid

First off today, Dave Lee at the BBC reports that The Pirate Bay is down following a raid at a Swedish datacenter and has remained offline for over a day.

Authorities in Sweden say that police, at the request of the Rights Alliance, raided a hosting provider in Stockholm and removed several servers. A similar raid in 2008 preluded the arrest and conviction of four founders of the site, but the site itself remained open. The site was reported to have come back up underneath a different domain but that appears to be a mirror, one without search functionality.

The latest raid took place at a host named Nacka, an ISP known for its datacenter in an old bunker located in the side of a mountain. The raid has also resulted in a number of other, smaller BitTorrent websites going down, which are also believed to have been hosted in the same datacenter.

The Pirate Bay has not returned as of this writing but has repeatedly promised that they are able to recover quickly from such raids.

2: Judge Dismisses a Suit Over Jay Z’s ‘Run This Town’

Next up today, Joe Coscarelli at The New York Times reports that Jay Z has emerged victorious in a lawsuit filed by the record label TufAmerica, which accused the rapper of illegally using a single-syllable sample from Eddie Bo’s song “Hook and Sling – Part 1” in his song “Run This Town”.

TufAmerica has earned a reputation for suing over older sampling cases. According to them, new technology just enabled them to detect unauthorized samples of the music they represent. However, the judge tossed this case saying that the sound, which was an exclamation of “Oh!”, “has essentially no quantitative significance” and does not qualify for copyright protection.

A lawyer for TufAmerica said that a separate lawsuit over the same sample, this one against Kanye West, was settled. That case was over West’s song “The Blueprint 3”, which was from 2010.

3: Actors Guild Gets Behind Copyrights for Some Performers

Finally today, Eriq Gardner at The Hollywood Reporter Esquire reports that Cindy Lee Garcia has gotten at least some support in her fight against Google, as the Screen Actors Guild has filed a brief with the appeals court supporting her claims that some actors deserve copyright interest in their work.

Cindy Lee Garcia was an actor featured in the controversial short Innocence of Muslims, which is connected with riots and caused Garcia to receive death threats. However, Garcia says that she was duped into the role, told that she was starring in an action movie and had her voice overdubbed without permission. She filed takedown notices with Google seeking to have the video removed from YouTube but Google refused saying that an actor, even if she didn’t sign away her rights, doesn’t hold copyright interest.

While the lower court agreed with Google, a three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit sided with Garcia and ordered the video removed. Now that issue is being reheard en banc, meaning in front of all nine judges, and countless companies have filed petitions siding with Google. The Actors Guild, however, is the first to file one in support of Garcia and says that actors provide creative contribution to a work and, furthermore, since Garcia’s voice was dubbed over, her performance can be considered a pantomime, which is protectable.

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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