Ars Technica reports that Sabam, the Belgian equivalent of the RIAA, have taken Belgium’s ISPs to court demanding they pay 3.4 percent of what they get from customers to content owners. In other words, Sabam is suggesting that ISPs pay an Internet tax to make up for what it perceives as lost revenue due to piracy.

Apparently, Sabam has been trying to get reach an agreement with ISPs over such a “tax” since 2011. It only brought the matter to the courts when the deal fell through. ISPs are saying an Internet tax to be paid to content owners “lacks any legal basis,” but content owners obviously don’t think that way.

Now, this situation brings up a really intriguing concept. Would you be willing to pay a few extra dollars per month on your Internet bill to continue pirating content? Even if you didn’t pirate content yourself, you would still be paying for those who did. Would that be fair to all the people who buy their content from legitimate sources? Such a tax would remove the need for efforts like the Copyright Alert System and other three/six strikes systems that punish Internet users for downloading pirated content.

Of course, the flip side to such a “tax” is that it would embolden content owners and other industries to demand similar fees from ISPs. ISPs would then pass off the extra cost to the consumer resulting in even more expensive monthly subscription fees.

Still, it’s an interesting proposal – is there a way to only charge those who pirate to satisfy content owners without threatening the sanctity of the Internet? Some have suggested that torrent trackers go private, start charging a monthly fee to downloaders, and pay those fees directly to content owners. It sounds good on paper, but content owners probably wouldn’t go for it. They’re already neurotic about people promoting content on BitTorrent so I highly doubt they would be fine with supporting “paid piracy.”

After being tossed out of every port it came across, TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay has finally found a home in Iceland. Its new .is domain reflects the move, and any attempt to visit old domains will redirect you to the new one.

So, why Iceland? It seems that the company that operates the .is domain – ISNIC – won’t take any action against The Pirate Bay, or at least not yet. The company told TorrentFreak that it’s not responsible for what Web sites do on its domain. The only possible way for The Pirate Bay to be booted from its new .is domain is if the Icelandic courts issued a court order.

For now, it looks like The Pirate Bay is safe in its new home. ISNIC has a good track record of hosting controversial sites without any issues. The country’s anti-piracy group will also probably stay away for a while as it’s still reeling from a piracy-related PR disaster from earlier this year.

On Monday, the Copyright Alert System, or “Six Strikes”, went into affect across the five biggest ISPs in the U.S. The system hopes to catch those pirating content over P2P networks, and send them a notice detailing their infringement. The hope is that those who are caught will start using legal alternatives.

Do you think the Copyright Alert System will work? Will people truly stop pirating content after receiving an alert? Let us know in the comments.

To better understand the CAS, we have to look at what the Center for Copyright Information is doing with it. First, there are three tiers to the CAS that consumers should be aware of with each tier having two levels within it. The three tiers are as follows – educational alerts, acknowledgement alerts and mitigation measures.

The first two warnings – “educational alerts” – tell consumers they’ve been caught. The email will then direct them to legitimate sources of content with the hopes that the early warnings are enough to scare people into buying content.

The next two warnings step it up a notch with what’s called “acknowledgement alerts.” The first two alerts were simply emails, but these next two will actually hijack your browser. You will be hit with a message telling you that you’ve been caught yet again, and must acknowledge that you’ve been caught before you can start browsing.

The next two tiers, and presumably every alert afterwards, will be “mitigation measures.” In essence, the ISPs will begin throttling your bandwidth or blocking Web sites you frequently visit. The ISPs will not be able to cut off your Internet connection under the plan.

For a visual explanation, here’s the CCI’s soothing jazz version:

The actual specifics of these tiers will be different across the five ISPs participating in the CAS. We don’t know what every alert will look like, but Ars Technica did manage to get a hold of what Comcast’s alerts would look like.

As you would expect, the CAS hasn’t exactly garnered many fans. New Jersey Gubernatorial candidate Carl Bergmanson recently spoke out against it by saying ISPs have no right to monitor what you download:

“The internet has become an essential part of living in the 21st century, it uses public infrastructure and it is time we treat it as a public utility. The electric company has no say over what you power with their service, the ISPs have no right to decide what you can and can not download”.

The EFF has also come out swinging against CAS. The group says the system presents a number of troubling statements that don’t just hurt Internet users but the Internet for itself. For instance, the group points out that the CCI Web site tells people to lock down their Wi-Fi connections so others don’t pirate on your connection. The EFF sees this as an attack on the open Wi-Fi movement and it would be especially troublesome for those who do share their Internet connections with others, like small businesses.

Small businesses are where we run into the biggest problems. The CCI says that rights holders won’t target open Wi-Fi networks run by businesses. Your local Starbucks or Panera Bread are safe as they run off of a business network. The problem comes in the form of small businesses like a local coffee shop or bakery that runs free Wi-Fi off of a residential network. These businesses will be held liable for the actions of its consumers.

The CCI argues that it won’t hurt small businesses running residential networks because the CAS will never terminate an Internet connection. That’s entirely true, and it’s good that copyright owners didn’t go as far to request that ISPs terminate connections. The problem, however, lies in the fact that the fifth warning and afterwards will either block popular Web sites or throttle connections. For a small business that has multiple customers all on the same network, that’s just as good as shutting off the connection. People who want to use the Internet at these places will find it too much of a pain and take their business elsewhere.

Do you think the CAS will hurt small businesses? Or do you think the EFF and other groups are just exaggerating? Let us know in the comments.

This all brings us to the question of whether or not the CAS will even stop piracy. That’s obviously the goal, but it doesn’t look like an attainable one at the moment. In fact, the CAS is its own biggest enemy in the war on piracy.

The alerts obtained from Comcast all have one troubling thing in common. They don’t list any of the alternative, legal sources for content. The main point of the program is to educate consumers on legal alternatives, and it can’t even do that. Consumers receiving the alert with no prior knowledge of the system will most likely see it as a scam email and won’t act upon it. Later tiers require consumers to watch an educational video on copyright, but it doesn’t say whether these videos will present legal alternatives.

Fortunately, legal alternatives are doing a good enough job stopping piracy themselves. A recent report from the NPD found that legal alternatives like Spotify were driving music piracy down. It proves once again that easy access at a fair price can beat out piracy any day. Heck, the proliferation of streaming services even gave the music industry its first raise in revenue since 1999.

So why do copyright owners think the CAS will work? Do they really expect piracy rates to magically drop once the alerts start flying out? Past examples would suggest that no such thing would happen. In fact, previous efforts on the part of copyright owners to curtail piracy have had the opposite effect. Just look at the shutdown of Megaupload or the blocking of The Pirate Bay in the UK. Both cases actually saw an increase in piracy.

At this point, it’s still too early to tell how much the CAS will actually accomplish. At best, copyright owners will be able to proclaim that piracy rates are down as more people either use VPNs or move off of P2P and onto Usenet or Mega. At worst, consumers revolt and ISPs drop it after seeing that it’s costing them customers. Either way, piracy isn’t going anywhere.

Do you think piracy will ever stop being a problem? Or is it just a fact of life in the Internet age? Let us know in the comments.

TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay has decided to move its operations to Norway and Spain after its previous host, the Pirate Party of Sweden, was targeted by anti-piracy group Rights Alliance. Why does The Pirate Bay have to move though? It’s hosted in the cloud, so it’s technically not tied to the Pirate Party or any other group, right?

The Pirate Bay addressed these concerns in its latest Facebook post:

The Pirate Bay16 hours ago

As some of you may know, where 99% cloud based today. We have though, enjoyed the great company of the swedish Pirate party. As they have gotten a severe legal threat (that will cost a lot to defend against) we’ve taken the decision to move on to Norway and Spain.

This is not permanent though. Next week (hopefully), we’ll announce some MAJOR changes to the site. Now don’t worry, everything will look the same to you. The changes are all under the hood.

Let’s just say that it will change a lot of things for a lot of people. When the bomb goes off, remember that we did it with love in our hearts and with hope of humanity. We believe we can change the world by doing this.
We’re kinda aiming for the nex Nobel peace prize…

//Winona, Winston & Winnie.

The Pirate Bay Departs Sweden And Sets Sail For Norway and Spain | TorrentFreak
Following threats of legal action in its traditional home of Sweden, a few hours ago The Pirate Bay set sail for pastures new. Sweden’s Pirate Party had been providing bandwidth to the site for the last three years but came under intense pressure last week when a local anti-piracy group threatened t…

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The Pirate Bay is now hosted by the Pirate Parties of both Norway and Spain. Of course, these aren’t the only parties hosting The Pirate Bay, but these are the official hosts for the time being. The reason being that Norwegian courts have so far refused to block The Pirate Bay, and Spain, despite having some strict anti-piracy laws on the books, does nothing to block file-sharing sites.

To reflect its resilience, The Pirate Bay has momentarily changed its name to The Hydra Bay. I wouldn’t say that losing its host in Sweden is equivalent to having a head cut off, but it’s still appropriate to say that The Pirate Bay has withstood more legal threats and take downs than any other file sharing site on the Internet.

The Pirate Bay has also taken to its blog to say the current campaign against the site in Sweden, and Europe at large, is equivalent to a big game of Whac-A-Mole. The kicker is that anti-piracy groups are bad at this game:

A typical Whac-A-Mole machine consists of a large, waist-level cabinet with five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole and the machinery necessary to move it up and down. Once the game starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, thereby adding to the player’s score. The quicker this is done the higher the final score will be.

Current score: 0

As for the Swedish Pirate Party, its leader, Anna Troberg, told TorrentFreak that it’s happy the site is in the hands of its “two sister parties.” She continues the hyrdra rhetoric by saying that “every cut connection to The Pirate Bay will generate two new connections.” The Swedish Pirate Party also revealed that it may issue a police complaint against the Rights Alliance to “determine precisely how forgiving the system is to those who try to abuse the judicial system to silence others.”

Carl Bergmanson, the Gubernatorial Candidate in New Jersey, recently said that the six strikes policy was no good for the Internet or consumers:

“The internet has become an essential part of living in the 21st century, it uses public infrastructure and it is time we treat it as a public utility. The electric company has no say over what you power with their service, the ISPs have no right to decide what you can and can not download”.

Bergmanson says that he doesn’t condone piracy, and added that he finds it unethical. That being said, he says that piracy is a result of bad laws.

“…it is not surprising that as the law evolves to disrespect the public domain, that the public would grow to disrespect copyrights.”

I think we can add fair use to the number of things that laws continue to “disrespect” that lead people to piracy. The Internet has changed the consumer/provider dynamic, yet the content provider refuses to update their business model to reflect this new reality.

Aside from the argument against more restrictive copyright laws, it’s far more interesting to see Bergmanson address the idea of the Internet being a public utility. Some of the Internet’s most outspoken proponents have suggested such a reclassification in order to ensure that more people get access to affordable Internet. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, however, as major telecommunications companies have powerful lobbying arms.

All that being said, Bergmanson and his ideas will probably not see the light of day in New Jersey. Current governor Chris Christie is a local favorite, and he has the support of some powerful people in the Internet business if his recent fundraiser hosted by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is any indication.

[h/t: TechDirt]

The Daily Dot reports that the CCI plans to launch the six strikes Copyright Alert System across all the major participating ISPS – AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon – this week. Each ISP will reportedly launch on a different day this week which Comcast reportedly launching its system today.

A small recap for those unaware, the Copyright Alert System is a joint operation between ISPs and major content holders around the country. In essence, these content holders will be scanning Internet connections looking for people downloading pirated content via BitTorrent. If you’re caught, the content holders will send your a notice through your ISP. There are three tiers of warning with two warnings per tier, hence the six strikes.

The first two warnings are “educational alerts” that tell consumers they’ve been caught. The email will then direct them to legitimate sources of content with the hopes that the early warnings are enough to scare people into buying content.

The next two warnings step it up a notch with what’s called “acknowledgement alerts.” The first two alerts were simply emails, but these next two will actually hijack your browser. You will be hit with a message telling you that you’ve been caught yet again, and must acknowledge that you’ve been caught before you can start browsing again.

The next two tiers, and presumably every alert afterwards, will be “mitigation measures.” In essence, the ISPs will begin throttling your bandwidth or blocking Web sites you frequently visit. The ISPs will not be able to cut off your Internet connection under the plan.

Of course, the real fun of all of this is that the copyright holders have all the power in this relationship. They can simply accuse you of piracy with little proof, and the ISPs must hit you with whatever tier of alert you’re on. Sure, you can appeal the accusation, but it costs you $35 up front and goes before the American Arbitration Association. In short, it’s not worth fighting, and the content holders know it.

Despite being anti-consumer and potentially damaging to small businesses, the CCI wants you to know that it’s your friend. The group put together a small video that says it only wants to be your friend as long as you purchase all your content legally.

I’m sure that the CCI will announce that P2P sharing is down in a few months from now, but we’ll know what’s really up. The number of VPN subscriptions in the U.S. is already on the rise, and more people will presumably start using Mega, Usenet and other non-P2P networks.

Nonetheless, It will be interesting to see the response from Internet users not aware of these programs once the first alerts start rolling in. The response may be so vitriolic that ISPs and the CCI call it off until it can formulate another plan. The consumer is king in the U.S. and corporations have been known more than once to back down when programs like this only serve to piss off their most loyal consumers.

[h/t: TechDirt]

TorrentFreak reports that Finnish anti-piracy outfit CIAPC has recently opened a new Web site. Here’s the front page design:

What does this look like? Oh right, it’s the exact same layout as used by The Pirate Bay:

Besides the graphic and text, the sites are essentially the same. That’s not a coincidence as a spokesperson for The Pirate Bay says CIAPC stole their CSS code to build their parody Web site. That’s not exactly sitting well with the The Pirate Bay.

You might be wondering why The Pirate Bay cares so much about this. The group doesn’t exactly care that people use their Web site to share pirated content with others. So why do they suddenly care about copyright? The Pirate Bay has a strict usage policy in place that restricts other from using its site design.

The group also feels that their lawsuit is a matter of principal. In a statement to TorrentFreak, a Pirate Bay spokesperson said:

“We feel that we must make a statement and therefore we will sue them for copyright infringement. If not even IFPI and their friends can respect copyright, perhaps it’s time to move on?”

It’s not known how serious The Pirate Bay is about this potential litigation, but I kind of hope that they go forward with it. It would be absolutely hilarious to see The Pirate Bay sue CIAPC for copyright infringement – the very thing such anti-piracy groups stand against.

We think that the Timberlake jokes are a little dismissive of the revamped social network, which successfully combines free music streaming and discovery with the social layer. It definitely has its kinks and problems, but the new Myspace is an undeniable improvement over the service that has been wasting away for the past couple of years.

Impressive or not, the new Myspace is already running into some problems with its free streaming music. Apparently, one large agency is accusing the company of making tracks available that they no longer have the rights to.

According to the NY Times, Merlin Network claims that Myspace is currently streaming songs from over 100 independent labels under its wing, although their permission to do so expired over a year ago.

Merlin, a global right agency representing various independent labels like Sub Pop, Merge, and Domino, says that its deals negotiated with Myspace on the labels’ behalf ended in 2011. But much of that music is still streaming to users worldwide.

“While it’s nice that Mr. Timberlake is launching his service on this platform, and acting as an advocate for the platform,” said Merlin’s Charles Caldas. “On the other hand his peers as artists are being exploited without permission and not getting remuneration for it.”

Myspace has responded, saying that any remaining Merlin-represented artsits remain due to users uploading their music, and that they would cooperate in removing the “unlicensed” tracks per Merlin’s request.

For a social network looking to rebrand itself and battle in a crowded market, the last thing they need is a rights battle.

For a look at the redesigned Myspace, check out our hands-on.

The case involves a photographer named Daniel Morel, who accused both the Agence France-Presse and The Washington Post of improperly selling his photos of the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, which he published on Twitter.

Morel tweeted out the photos, which were disseminated by the AFP (they distributed “several” images to Getty Images). The Washington Post later published four of the images on its website, as they are a Getty Images client.

Although the AFP argued that the photos became fair game once they were publicly posted to Twitter, the Judge in the case disagreed. He claimed that Twitter’s Terms of Service did not give them the right to license or publish Morel’s photos without his permission.

Twitter’s Terms of Service, like most social networks’, explicitly express that users own their content – bottom line. “What’s yours is yours – you own your Content (and your photos are part of that Content),” says Twitter.

But Twitter, like most other social networks, also contains this clause giving themselves rights to distribute and publish said content:

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

Twitter also gives its “ecosystem partners” rights to the content as well:

You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.

But that pertains to developers who use Twitter’s API, not news outlets looking to run photos in a for-profit setting or companies looking to license said photos. The Judge was clear on that. He acknowledged that Twitter allows for retweeting (obviously), but not for commercial use of user content without their permission.

Twitter was never named a party in the case, as their terms clearly protect them from liability in cases like this.

The Judge didn’t completely agree with Morel, however. Although Morel requested damages based on each Getty subscriber who used his photos, the Judge ruled that only AFP and Getty can be tapped for damages for each improperly distributed image.

[via Reuters]

Ars Technica reports that Verizon and Time Warner Cable were present at a CCI panel discussion at this year’s INET New York conference. The two companies described the systems they will put in place to deter piracy. Subscribers under these ISPs will encounter slower speeds and blocked sites after going through the first few rounds of warnings.

To recap, a user caught pirating content will be sent a warning for the first two offenses. The message will contain an alert saying they were involved in copyright infringement, and offer up educational resources on where to find legal alternatives.

The second and third alert will contain much of the same information, but require the user to actually acknowledge receipt of the alert before they can continue on their day. The CCI says this will be accomplished by the use of a “conspicuous mechanism.” By that, they mean that you’ll be spammed by pop-ups until you click through.

The fifth and sixth alert are where the ISPs take action. Some leaked documents said that AT&T would throttle speeds, and hand over the user’s identity to copyright holders for potential litigation. Verizon and Time Warner’s methods aren’t that different. According to Ars Technica, Verizon will throttle speeds of those found pirating content more than five times. Time Warner will take it a step further by blocking popular Web sites that user frequently visits.

What’s interesting is that neither company mentioned handing over a user’s identity to copyright holders. It was in the leaked memo from AT&T, but the other ISPs seem to be steering away from that potential outcome. The content holders are also saying that lawsuits are not the intention of this new system. Ron Wheeler, senior VP at Fox Broadcasting said “This system is not designed to produce lawsuits – it’s designed to produce education.”

Only time will tell if that’s really the case. The RIAA and MPAA have been pushing for this system for some time now, and who knows how both groups will react to this newfound power. We might just be looking at the beginning of another file-sharer witch hunt.