3 Count: Batman v Superman v Piracy

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1: ‘Batman v Superman’ Release Delayed in Parts of Russia Amid Piracy Concerns

First off today, Vladimir Kozlov at The Hollywood Reporter writes that Warner Brothers has postponed several planned screenings of its new film Batman v Superman in Russia due to concerns over piracy.

At least six major Russian cities were impacted by the decision, which cancelled planned Thursday screenings and pushed them back to Friday at noon local time. However, the decision didn’t stop showing at all Russian cities, with showings in Moscow and elsewhere going as scheduled.

The move seems to indicate that Warner Brothers was concerned about piracy of the film in certain towns but not the country on the whole.

2: British Recording Group Calls for ‘Urgent Reform’ of Search Takedowns, Google Responds

Next up today, Andrew Flanagan at Billboard reports that the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), a trade group that represents UK record labels, has called for urgent reform in both the U.S. and the EU to force Google to do more to stop pirate links from appearing in search results.

The BPI is currently the largest filer of takedown notices with Google having sent over 200 million notices to the search engine. As part of the a copyright review taking place both in the U.S. and EU, the BPI is asking policymakers to do more to force hosts and search engines to ensure that infringing content, once removed stays offline.

Google has responded to the BPI statement saying that it removed some 80 million links last month alone and that search engines only drive a small amount of traffic to most pirate sites.

3: ​Police Raid Usenet Service, Arrest Operator, Seize Data

Finally today, Andy at Torrentfreak writes that, in France, police has raided the nation’s largest independent Usenet provider, Newsoo, arresting the service’s operator and seizing all of the servers that operated it.

Newsoo was fairly small, having about 5,000 users, but the site was large enough to draw the attention of SACEM, a French anti-piracy group. They filed a complaint with the police that resulted in the raid. Arrested in the raid was Newsoo’s owner, Cedric, and the service was shut down. According to one report, the raid seized some 650 TB of data including at leas 26 million MP3 files.

Cedric claims that he earned no money from the service and that all funds earned through it were funneled back into maintenance and improvements. However, he also says that the service’s closure is a relief as it had become an all-encompasing project he was solely responsible for.

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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