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1: RIAA Asks BitTorrent to Help Clamp Down on Piracy
First off today, Colin Stutz at Billboard reports that the executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sent a letter to the CEO of BitTorrent Inc. asking the company to help filter out infringing material shared through its software.
The letter specifically asks the company to use hashes that the RIAA has agreed to provide in order to block users from downloading copyright-infringing material. BitTorrent Inc. not only developed the protocol, which has become very popular for sharing files illegally, but also develops the popular uTorrent client, which is the most popular application for using BitTorrent.
The RIAA sent a similar letter to the head of CBS, which owns the site CNet, which is a common destination for downloading and obtaining software commonly used in piracy. In both cases the RIAA offered to work with the companies to help reduce distribution of copyright infringing works.
2: Russia Mulls Anti ‘Cut-and-Paste’ Piracy Law
Next up today, Andy at Torrentfreak writes that recent comments made by government officials to Russia’s TASS news agency indicate that the country may be looking to further expand its anti-piracy laws to include written works.
The country has passed a series of tough new anti-piracy laws aimed at requiring websites to remove infringing materials quickly after notification or risk sanctions, including having their site blocked by local ISPs. The laws originally only covered films but were quickly expanded to include music, now the laws may be expanded again to include text works.
Currently images and photographs are not covered under the law and there’s no indication whether the government is looking to expand it in that direction. According to the comments, the current push is coming from the local journalism community, which is hoping to stop copy and paste infringement of their articles.
3: Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video
Finally today, Hank Green wrote on his blog at Medium an update on his complaints about Facebook and its relatively new video sharing product. According to Green, while Facebook may claim that it is now a larger streamer of videos than YouTube, it’s only because Facebook cheats, lies and, most importantly, steals from creators.
According to Green, Facebook shows preference to videos hosted on its platform and uses a non-standard way to count views in order to inflate totals. This, in turn encourages others to rip videos off of other providers, including YouTube, and reupload them to Facebook, a process known as “freebooting”.
A representative from Facebook responded to Green’s post saying that it currently uses Audible Magic to prevent the upload of infringing materials and is exploring alternatives to further help creators protect their work. He said that they expect to have more on this subject to share later this summer.
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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