3 Count: Unsafe Waters

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1: Google Blocks The Pirate Bay in Chrome and Firefox as a ‘Deceptive Site’

First off today, Emil Protalinski at VentureBeat reports that visitors to The Pirate Bay, when using either Chrome or Firefox, are receiving warnings that the site is “Deceptive” and that it should be avoided.

The move comes from Google’s Safe Browsing initiative, which powers the malware and bad site detection for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. However, the issue doesn’t appear to be the copyright infringing material on the site, but rather, bad advertising networks that attempt to install malware on user machines.

Google regularly updates its Safe Browsing database and as it has done previously, if the site cleans up the bad code, it will be restored. However, it may take days or weeks for the service to update, depending on how long is required for The Pirate Bay to locate and remove the bad advertising network.

2: Court Lays Out Guidelines on ‘Fair Dealing’ in Moneyweb/Fin24 Case

Next up today, Ernest Mabuza at Times Live reports that, in South Africa, the judge in the Moneyweb/Fin24 case has laid down what he considers to be the key factors in determining whether a use of a copyrighted work is “fair dealing”, setting up a standard akin to the four fair use factors in the United States.

The case centers around the local financial news site Moneyweb, which accused its competitor, Fin24, of copyright infringement. Moneyweb claimed that Fin24 took its articles and rewrote them without attribution. However, of the eight articles that Moneyweb sued for, the judge only ruled that there was infringement in one.

As part of the ruling, acting judge Daniel Berger laid down a number of factors including whether the original work has been published, the time that lapsed between the original and new work, the amount (quality and quality) used and the extent of attribution given to the original work. The judge says that the list is not exhaustive, but should be considered when doing any fair dealing test in the country.

3: Someone is Leaking the Plot of Every New ‘Game of Thrones’ Episode on YouTube — and HBO is Trying its Best to Stop It

Finally today, Kim Renfro at Business Insider reports that a YouTuber known as the “Spanish Spoiler” has been posting videos where he details the entire plot of the upcoming episode of Game of Thrones days before the episode airs. 

The person, who goes by the handle Frikidoctor, has repeatedly had his videos pulled from YouTube on copyright grounds. However, he has continued posting them, saying that the takedown notices are false because his videos, despite containing spoilers, do not use any images or audio from the episodes themselves.

HBO, the producers of Game of Thrones, have long battled leaks in their distribution system. Last season, several of the episodes leaked online before they aired, creating a piracy rush before the series began. Since then, HBO has been extremely aggressive at dealing with pre-release piracy of its work, an effort that seems to expand to Frikidoctor’s posts. Frikidoctor, for his part, did not say where he was getting the information, only that his contact was only a few weeks old.

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.

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