Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 24th June 2009
3 COMMENTS 
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
It seems like in the age of Social Media you don’t need a fancy lawyer’s letter to summon someone to court. A DM on a social network is just as effective. Dutch copyright agency BREIN has tonight issued a press release claiming it has summoned The Pirate Bay’s founders to court using Twitter and Facebook.
BREIN Director Tim Kuik says in the release “You can find the defendants on Facebook and Twitter. Internet works for enforcers as well as infringers. Now they know about the court case in The Netherlands. The hearing is on the 21st of July.” Following the recent successful conviction of The Pirate Bay’s founders in Sweden earlier this year, currently pending appeal, BREIN is now looking for a similar settlement in the Netherlands.
With rightsholders keen to recoup money from pirates it wouldn’t be surprising if copyright associations in other countries filed their own suits against The Pirate Bay in time. It looks as if The Pirate Bay’s fans aren’t too keen on BREIN’s actions though. One tweet reacting to the news states “I’ve got a botnet just for you, BREIN”. At the time of writing BREIN’s anti-piracy.nl site is currently inaccessible – it could well be that a Denial of Service attack is underway right now.
It seems like in the age of Social Media you don’t need a fancy lawyer’s letter to summon someone to court. A DM on a social network is just as effective. Dutch copyright agency BREIN has tonight issued a press release claiming it has summoned The Pirate Bay’s founders to court using Twitter and Facebook.
BREIN Director Tim Kuik says in the release “You can find the defendants on Facebook and Twitter. Internet works for enforcers as well as infringers. Now they know about the court case in The Netherlands. The hearing is on the 21st of July.”
Following the recent successful conviction of The Pirate Bay’s founders in Sweden earlier this year, currently pending appeal, BREIN is now looking for a similar settlement in the Netherlands.
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Written on 23rd June 2009
3 COMMENTS
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
French filesharers might have thought they were home dry when the country’s Constitutional Council scrapped tough anti-piracy proposals earlier this month. Now France’s President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has said he will continue to push for with the new law regardless.
The controversial HADOPI law aims to give those accused of illegal filesharing a “three strikes and you’re out” ultimatum. Unlike similar schemes elsewhere which tend to work on an ISP-by-ISP basis, the French approach would put those suspected of offending on a blacklist available to all ISPs, completely banning them from having any home internet connection.
Speaking yesterday Sarkozy made clear that France is not a place that will tolerate “lawlessness” online.
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Written on 9th December 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A year ago, exciting news about publishing 2.0 reached the blogosphere. Thriller writer Paulo Coelho had started to tell people how he was using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books.
Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more (Watch the video here).
That was back in January, let’s see what Coelho has to say about tolerated piracy and publishing almost a year later.
What about publishers?
Coelho gives the same Russian example. Apparently, interviewer Kathy Brooks hadn’t heard of this sales boost before and she reacted very surprised. “What about your publisher?”, she asked in amazement. “They come to me and shout: this is not legal”, Coelho said. He then replies he’s just linking and that it’s not his fault. His American publisher wasn’t too pleased though. After a rather imitating call from CEO Jane Friedman, Coelho chose a middle way and made the book viewable – but not downloadable. The torrent links are still up there though. Why? Coelho: “You’ll have to share in order to get some revenue”.
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t hurt your sales. People download the book but don’t read it They wait for the hard copy anyway”, Coelho continued. “Don’t be fooled by the publishers who say that piracy costs authors money.”
How the information overload influences writing
Co-host Loic Le Meur asked how the well-known information overload influences Coelho’s writing. The writer replied that he always had a dream of going to a lodge in the mountains and write the book of his life. So Coelho went to the Pyrenees and wrote his book. The result? The most boring piece of writing he had ever produced.
Coelho: “From now on I live a normal life when I write a book, since I’ve to stay connected to reality”. The Brazilian author builds up creative tension throughout a busy day. After having breakfast, reading newspapers, checking email, lunch and meeting with friends – Coelho finally frees 30 minutes to write: “Then I always wind up writing for five hours. My texts need to be touched by life.”
Written on 8th August 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The French are quite of fond of torrents, shows a study of the leading French anti-piracy association. Every day, 450,000 illegal downloads of recent films find their way to computers in France. This puts illegal pirate copies close to the level of legitimate box-office sales.
The study of the Association Against Audiovisual Piracy (ALPA) focuses on the 100 most sought-after foreign and French film downloads from November 2007 to June 2008. This made up for 90 percent of the total traffic. ALPA scrutinized Internet traffic originating from France to foreign networks permitting illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading.
The director of ALPA Frederic Delacroix admitted he was surprised by the results: “We did not expect such numbers. We are facing a major phenomenon that can endanger the film industry and (other) audiovisual industries.”
To makes things worse, even the study was pirated. It wasn’t supposed to be published officially till September. How ironic is that?
Written on 30th July 2008
1 COMMENT
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent
Colombo-bt.org, has been closed down by police today. The site offered about 400,000 music files, a stunning 500,000 movie files and received about 800,000 unique visitors per month, making it the biggest Italian BitTorrent website. The site currently displays the text: “Access denied in execution of an Italian Court Authority injunction”.
The shutdown was coordinated with the Italian police and the FPM, an Italian anti-piracy group affiliated with the IFPI. The police froze two bank accounts and seized several computers. The three men that ran Colombo-bt were charged with copyright infringement and received heavy financial penalties. They could be sent to prison for up to three years.
Enzo Mazza, president of FPM, said:
“Colombo-BT.org was Italy’s version of The Pirate Bay. Its operators deliberately facilitated availability of copyright infringing content to line their own pockets. The gang of three now face potential prison sentences and hefty fines as a result of their activities. This police action sends a strong message that Italy will not tolerate serious online music piracy so criminals looking for get rich quick schemes should consider other options.”
Speaking of ThePirateBay, Torrent freak reports that the popular torrent site is facing troubles and downtime. The rumors state that that the site has been raided again, but it turns out that the site simply has trouble keeping up with ever-increasing traffic. Moral of the story? IFPI successfully puts the smaller torrent sites down, but Pirate Bay seems to thrive in these times.
Written on 15th July 2008
0 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent
Viacom, owner of media channels as MTV, accused Google to facilitate copyright infringement on Youtube. The lawsuit that followed summoned Google to comprehend and give user-data to Viacom, data included the user playlists, IP addresses and time-codes. That was two weeks ago, today we find that Viacom stepped down from their original demand.
Google will not be obligated to provide the user-data to Viacom. “We have reached agreement with Viacom and the class action group,” Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes said. Youtube will anonymize the data before it is published to Viacom, leaving out critical information such as usernames and IP addresses.
I am not in favor of copyright infringement, and I support the idea of a monetary stream back to the respective artist, but the original settlement was one step closer to Viacom suing everyone that watched the latest videoclip of Madonna on youtube, or worse, who has been Rickrolled for that matter! This settlement is a step in the right direction for privacy protection, congratulations.
Written on 6th May 2008
3 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
A Swedish court has convicted a 31 year old file-sharer for uploading 4,500 music tracks and 30 movies with the filesharing application Direct Connect. He was fined to 10000 kronor ($1650) and will have to pay the cost of the trial which will be another 44670 kronor ($7360).
Interestingly enough the court blames the industry for a part of the mess they created. That is also why the 31-year-old was not sent to prison but instead given a suspended sentence and a fine.
According to Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Agency (APB) this is an important case because it will set an example and general a matter of principle for other file-sharers. “It’s clear that the court takes seriously the extensive infringement of which the man is guilty. The huge amount of illegal file sharing which takes place in Sweden causes creators tremendous harm,” said APB’s lawyer Sara Lindbäck.
But I can’t imagine that the open accusation from this court that they have themselves to blame is the result they were hoping for. My guess is that most File-sharers will use this verdict more as an excuse to share and download content more than before. After all, even a judge agrees that the current situation is a mess.
More background information in this post at TorrentFreak.com.
Written on 16th February 2008
10 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last week I posted a story here titled “Record Label quits, uploads music to The Pirate Bay“. I had received a tip that Dependent Records had decided to quit their business and uploaded all their music to The Pirate Bay. The whole story turned out to be a hoax. Something I could have found out myself if I had taken the time to contact Dependent Records to ask for confirmation. But I didn’t. Instead I checked if the music was actually there, read a few comments and figured the story was good enough to run. The next day Dependent Records came out with an official statement that the whole thing was a hoax. By then the story was posted to many popular blogs and we all had to retract, edit and/or amend our stories and apologize to Dependent Records and our readers.
Since the news broke that this was a hoax and not a true story I have been having a heated debate with Stefan Herwig, the victim of this hoax, about the ethics of bloggers and their attitude in this whole situation both here in the comments and at the Dependent Records Forum. Stefan Herwig obviously is not very happy with all these blogs writing stuff about him that isn’t true. I understand that but also think that it will be hard to avoid and blame the person who started this hoax more than the bloggers who fell for it. Not a subject we will reach an agreement on soon.
Enough reason to give Stefan Herwig the chance to tell us what actually happened and who is to blame. The following is the result of an email interview between The Next Web Blog and Stefan Herwig from Dependent Records.
Stefan Herwig
We heard a lot of different stories of what happened. Can you give us YOUR side of the story?
“Well, someone over the weekend took the “liberty” to take parts of our record catalogue and put it online as torrent files through The Pirate Bay. This person added a little text in German and english, but it was only a few lines. Somebody at Torrentfreak stumbled over it, thought that it was true, and brought it as a story, without checking back with us. From there other magazines including yours linked the story or brought it themselves with minor modifications.” (more…)
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