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Piracy

RightsCorp To Bring Its Controversial Copyright Protection Tactics To Europe 196

judgecorp (778838) writes "RightsCorp, the controversial copyright enforcer, is planning to begin operations in Europe. In the U.S., the company scans torrents for IP addresses on behalf of media companies, shares them with ISPs, forcing them to send lawyers' letters (using the DMCA) demanding money from the supposed copyright infringers. RightsCorp says Europe needs its help in fighting piracy." They recently expanded operations into Canada as well.
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RightsCorp To Bring Its Controversial Copyright Protection Tactics To Europe

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  • RightsCorp (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    More like YuoHaveNoRightsCorp!!

    Thank you, i'll be here all week.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @07:54AM (#46938547)

    And I shall sell you lists of IP addresses for $10 each.

    They correspond to people torrenting files without the copyright owner's permission.

    I swear.

    • Wait, so under DMCA anyone can extort $10 per IP address out of ISPs by claiming they are involved in piracy? Glad I live in Europe where this could never happen.
    • by Bigbutt ( 65939 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:35AM (#46938941) Homepage Journal

      Did you RTFA? Apparently RightsCorp gives the ISP the list of IPs for free. They make their money off of the folks who do the downloading ("for $20 per track or movie we'll remove your name from this list we're sending to your ISP"). Anyone still on the list goes to the ISP who is legally required to send letters to the subscriber. This increases their chances of losing the customer. Without the list of IPs provided by RightsCorp, the ISP legally doesn't have to do anything.

      So "I'll sell you this list of IP addresses for $10 each" would be met with "sorry, no idea who you are or what you're talking about, kthxby"

      Sounds more like Blackmail.

      [John]

    • by Lumpy ( 12016 )

      I'll give them a freebie.

      Anyone that has the address 127.0.0.1 on their computer is a thief and you can bill them right now.

  • "... we are optimistic that there will be a way to do this in Europe"

    We are optimistic that with the DCMA or Canadian equivalent this is not as simple as you think

  • by clarkkent09 ( 1104833 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:03AM (#46938635)

    I have a friend who makes great money in similar way but with porn. He searches file sharing sites on behalf of a bunch of porn producers and looks for their content and then tries to figure out who shared it (some sites sneakily attach the member id to each downloaded clip and there are other ways too). Then he has his lawyer send them a letter threatening a lawsuit but offering to settle for $500 or something. He makes sure that the letter contains in big bold font the clip title as well as a detailed description of the contents. Decent enough percentage of them just mail the check.

    • Re:Porn (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:06AM (#46938661)

      So your friend is a blackmailer. The more you know ~~~*

    • by Minwee ( 522556 )
      Really? How long have John Steele and you been friends, anyway?
  • Indie (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pr0fessor ( 1940368 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:05AM (#46938651)

    My brother is in an indie band and they payed to go to a small but professional studio and record an EP. The content is all original and they have copyright but he saw a blog about indie bands publishing through tunecore on multiple services {iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, etc...} getting take down notices from companies claiming to represent the copyright holder.

    He's a little freaked out because although they payed all that money for copyright and self publishing they really couldn't afford a lawyer if something like that happened to the band.

    • by Threni ( 635302 )

      He doesn't need a lawyer; just tell Google "that's BS - it's my copyright" and they'll put the content back up again.

      • Re:Indie (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Sockatume ( 732728 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:34AM (#46938927)

        ...unless the spurious claimant continues to assert that it's the real owner, in which case Google washes its hands and says you've got to find a lawyer, take them to court, and prove that your own work actually does belong to you.

        • This was an issue of Indmusic having a deal with Tunecore to monetize music published through its service. If you didnt publish your music
          through tunecore then its not an issue. Your brother needs to read the TOS and decide if Tunecores uses of your brothers rights is what he wants.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

          Isn't the onus on the party asking for the take-down? When I countered a DMCA request the response from Google was that the content would remain up unless the other party got a court order.

          Since then I moved my data out of the US anyway, so am immune to DMCA notices. When I get them I usually pretend to be clueless just to string them along a bit, and waste some expensive lawyer time.

    • Re: Indie (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:18AM (#46938763)

      i get those infringement notices by youtube all the time - except that i have all the right to use the material in question (i make music videos) - it's a hassle, that's usually sorted out by an e-mail - still, it's fucking annoying to constantly "clear" the rights of material, you already have the rights to - often multiple times - because some stupid program identifies the material as belonging to someone you've licensed it to.

      it also cost's money (time).
      i think, copyright holders should pay a small fine for every wrong infingement notice that could have been avoided.

      • Re: Indie (Score:4, Interesting)

        by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:49AM (#46939099) Journal

        i think, copyright holders should pay a small fine for every wrong infingement notice that could have been avoided.

        Why small? May be it should start small and escalate based on each false claim they have filed, may be exponentially. Also small should be in relation to the size and strength of the spurious claimer. What is small for RIAA is not huge for the lone indie trying to get his/her work back from the false claimers.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        i think, copyright holders should pay a small fine for every wrong infingement notice that could have been avoided.

        You mean, copyright pretenders. I disagree. They should pay a large fine. We are talking about tortious business interference here.

        And preferably with a three-strikes scheme. Three wrongful accusations, and you get put on a national copyright offender registry and are barred from making DMCA claims. Instead you have to go to court, and when you don't prevail, pay the court fees of the defendant as a rule.

        The cost of handing those industries a free pass for abuse is just too high and interferes with civ

    • The content is all original

      But how can your brother's band prove that its music is original? There are only 105 million distinct musical hooks under one plausible metric,* and with all the millions of songs already published, your song's hook might have collided with that of an existing song. See for example Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, where a copyright owner successfully sued over an accidental infringement.

      * Music is about intervals. Each note has a duration and a difference in pitch to the next note. There are seven

      • Well his copyright application went through so it should at least protect him from vague DMCA take down notices.

        * Music is about intervals. Each note has a duration and a difference in pitch to the next note. There are seven distinct pitches in the scale, and durations can (roughly) be short or long. This gives 7*2 = 14 possibilities for each interval. A hook with eight notes has seven intervals, and 14^7 = 105,413,504

        If you start applying more music theory using chords, cadences, and standard chord progressions the number of possibilities gets even smaller, because it limits which chords can be played in succession.

  • by spiritplumber ( 1944222 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:06AM (#46938667) Homepage
    send a letter like that to the wrong person, you will see exactly what happens if you set up a protection racket where the marketplace is already full.
  • So let me see if I have this right
    connect to a torrent and collect $10 from each person torrenting the file by notifying the ISP of the infringement, aint that great I can leach off this copyrighted stuff and make a bundle.

    Using the DMCA, I thought A was for America anyway.

    So which is the biggest paracite? The torrenters or RightsCorp?

    • Using the DMCA, I thought A was for America anyway.

      Nope. WIPO is the World Intellectual Property Organization. Both the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive) are implementations of the same WIPO Copyright Treaty.

  • by Jahta ( 1141213 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:29AM (#46938867)

    From TFA:

    I can’t give any specific dates, but we are getting a great reception from everyone we have spoken to [in the UK],” RightsCorp co-founder and CEO Robert Steele told TechWeekEurope.

    It's significant, I think, that he singles out the UK which is becoming increasingly like the 51st state in legal/civil rights terms.

    In the rest of Europe I'd suggest they won't find the legal and regulatory environment anything like as forgiving of their methods as the U.S.

    • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      The won't find it that forgiving in the United Kingdom either. There has already been a copyright troll like this who tried to operate in the U.K. They are barred from practice at the moment and bankrupt. I suggest you search for "acs:law" to see how well it panned out for the last person who tried this.

      • by Jahta ( 1141213 )

        The won't find it that forgiving in the United Kingdom either. There has already been a copyright troll like this who tried to operate in the U.K. They are barred from practice at the moment and bankrupt. I suggest you search for "acs:law" to see how well it panned out for the last person who tried this.

        Fair point. I'd forgotten about ACS:Law. That said, there are still fans of draconian measures against file-sharers in the current UK government. For example Government "must consider" jail time for illegal file-sharers [pcpro.co.uk].

  • Said it best ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hebertrich ( 472331 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:46AM (#46939075)

    There's an old cut from Fila Brazillia and they said it well ..

    " Suck a tailpipe , fucking hang yourself , borrow a gun from a yank friend .. i dont care how you do it ,just rid the world of your fu****** evil machinations "
    " kill yourself "

    Dosen't it just sum up what everyone thinks about the copyrights lobby ?

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @09:15AM (#46939369)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The copyright term for parts of Europe is often less than in the US. I've a nice site I made that contains a lot of music which is public domain here in the UK, but still under copyright in the US. Unless they are very careful about dates, they are likely to end up threatening people for sharing music that is public domain because their bots are configured for the wrong jurisdiction.

    • The point is, they don't care. They sue/extort first and hope that they don't pick on someone with deep pockets who will sue the bejeezus out of them.
      Just don't have any of that public domain music on any device you might take to the USA.

      • https://birds-are-nice.me/musi... [birds-are-nice.me]

        If they try to sue me for that, I'll... back down without a fight, because I can't afford to spend my life's savings to stand up for my principles. But I will then tell everyone I can about the incident, including every internet rights organisation, and hope the backlash does some damage. Maybe one will even agree to pay the costs and handle the hassle for me.

        • For one thing, even though copyright in recordings may expire after 50 years, the recording is also subject to the copyright in the underlying musical work. That lasts until 70 years after the end of the year in which the last surviving songwriter died. Besides, they could still sue you in a United States court for having violated United States copyright law by making the works available without appropriate IP address geolocation methods. I was able to reach that page through Comcast in Indiana.
          • In which case I can at least get some publicity and further reveal to the world what a one-sided sham copyright law is, when even the public domain is so convoluted as to be unuseable and national law is meaningless.

            I've been trying to figure out how the underlying musical work copyright actually works in this situation. I honestly can't tell if it's an issue or not, I keep finding contradictory information on the subject. I'm not actually doing anything with the musical work, it just happens to be incident

            • In which case I can at least get some publicity

              Are you willing to pay the maximum statutory damages [ehow.co.uk] for this publicity if you're successfully sued?

              • I have done everything I can to ensure legality. That includes not just making sure all the music was published before 1963, but also that it is all original release version - not later digital remastering. That's why it's largely mono. I'd like to run this by a real copyright attorney,is i one who is actually qualified, but I can't afford that. This is, to the best of my knowledge, all legal. I admit there is a possibility of my being mistaken, which is why I also state on the page that I will remove any i

  • by X10 ( 186866 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @10:42AM (#46940371) Homepage

    They would have a point if the money would go to the artists. But it doesn't.

He who has but four and spends five has no need for a wallet.

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