Copyright online keeps getting benefits, following the collapse of the file-sharing giant Megaupload.
In this case, an old date competitor of Megaupload is affected, although in a lighter way, by a court order: the company Rapidshare, based in Germany, among the first to provide its users with online storage at competitive prices.
The High Regional Court of Hamburg, with an order issued recently, declared Rapidshare’s activities as “legitimate” (in terms of a business model based on “public offering of online file storage”), but at the same time ordered the German company to enact an accurate monitoring of third-party web sites, and consequently block the access to all files that are shared among users on plain pirate websites.
We know that Rapidshare will surely appeal the latter part of the order, strong of the recognition of its behavior as quite different from the one of Megaupload, however, we can only applaud the change of perspective proposed by the German High Court: as the provider of online storage services is often unable to control in real time what is uploaded on its servers and therefore limits its responses to a mechanical removal of contents or individual accounts reported by visitors, imposing it an obligation to act preventively with a removal of content uploaded to its servers and shared on plain pirate websites seems a good start, to restore a balance with copyright owners.

The Motion Picture Association of America presented its request to the U.S. federal judge, asking to order the company Carpathia, main host in Virgina of the former filesharing giant Megaupload, to keep storing on its servers about 25 petabytes of data, including user account information.
In an interview with “Wired”, Howard Gantman, vice-president of the MPAA, has reassured ex-Megaupload users, specifying that the association would not be starting prosecutions against single users: the retained data would instead only be used to check the involvement of some intermediaries in the illegal activities of Megaupload. The association’s request is motivated by the recent events in the case: the federal authorities, in fact, have already copied – a long time ago- part of the said amount of data to government servers, so to be able to analyze its contents and search for related responsibilities. Carpathia, on the other hand, advocates the removal for reasons of cost (the company claims to spend about $ 9,000 a day to keep the data on their servers). Considering, however, that the government estimates the effects of the case – in terms of damage to copyright holders – of approximately 500 million dollars, the request of the MPAA does not seem excessive at all: after all, Gantman said, the only scope of such data preservation is to focus search for those users with peak utilization of their data capacity for illegal activities, so to reveal their economic gain, or at least their substantial interest in the continuation of Megaupload’s activities, and selectively bring them to face their responsibilities.

With a short note (published on its website at the address: http://www.anica.it/online/index.php/news.html), ANICA (the Italian National Association of Cinematographic Audiovisual and Multimedia) has bluntly disapproved the step back took by AGCOM over the possibility of exercising its powers regarding protection of Copyright, as expressed by AGCOM’s President, Corrado Calabro, in his recent hearing to the Senate.
The President of ANICA, Riccardo Tozzi, defines “farcical” the conduct shown by the Authority on the matter, criticizing the first announcement of intention to exercise such powers, the long consultations taken with the players of the market and the final abrupt denial of its prior intensions. The President closes his intervention expressing his sincerest hope that the Italian Government, casting aside the immobility shown in recent years, will finally intervene, and adopt the urgent measures needed in the audiovisual sector, to to combat piracy and to renew a culture of legality and quality of contents.

After removing the use of torrent files (deemed to be “too traceable”) and promoting the use of magnet-links only, after changing domain name and location to their servers almost a hundred times, the web-admins of the famous search portal and bittorrent tracker “ThePirateBay” have announced the start of a series of experiments to adopt a new “dynamic” hosting system for their mainframes: making use of  the latest micro-technologies, the web site
could soon be sent in low-altitude orbit, inside flying mini-drones, controlled by GPS, scattered on international waters, and placed in strategic latitudes, all around the globe.

This way, the administrators say, all attacks seeking to interrupt operations on ThePirateBay would have to be physical, and involve shooting down the drones in question, thus realizing something to be qualified as an “act of war” .

Looking beyond the obvious provocative statements by the spokesmen of the infamous search portal (which, only months ago, declared they were ready to drop the website itself, switching its distribution to multimedia keys containing a
miniaturized version of the portal, so to allow search for illegal files without loading ThePirateBay’s main interface), we can easily spot signs of a critical situation going on: after the collapse of the giant Megaupload and the closure of multiple portals and file sharing dedicated forums, it now appears that the flow of illegal downloading is mostly shifting back to the BitTorrent network. Nothing strange then, for those managing the main web portal dedicated to illegal downloads through BitTorrent, to seek to stimulate and “reassure” their users.

The truth is that, at least for now, no file sharing method can really be defined as “safe” or bear no consequences at all.

We will see if ThePirateBay will follow or not the route explained above.

In an interview with the popular magazine Wired (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/),
Nicole Navas, spokesman of ICE (Immigration and Customs Department for the USA),  admits that the Obama administration has already seized, in recent years, a total of at least 750 Internet domain names, thus preventing access to the
relevant webpages.

The methodology, developed with expertise from the US State Department, is
actually very simple: through a complex bureaucratic maneuver, in 1999 the company Network Solutions acquired the management of “key” domain names  (basically, the most part of domain names ending in. com or. net). In 2000, Network Solutions was acquired by VeriSign, one among the most famous
validation and certification company of the web, based in the States, who was already active in the domain registrar busines: this operation granted VeriSign a quasi-monopoly situation on .com and .net domains; the company also manages and sublets these domains to other registrar companies around the globe.

This architecture ensures that, to obtain seizure (but also cloaking) of a website
using the domain name “.com,” the US State Department, in 90% of cases, be the website infringing or not, just has to file a motivated request to VeriSign, regardless if the domain itself has been registered through the main company or via one of its international partners/licensees, thus bypassing all traditional (and international) barriers to the operation.
The operation would be so simple and so immediate effect to be achieved with record numbers, during the Obama administration; this clearly explains why many popular websites performing “unorthodox” activities, including the well-known ThePirateBay, have gradually abandoned the suffix “.com”, opting for domain registrars which are different and unrelated to VeriSign.

In the wake of many other cases, involving, during the last decades, both the famous Detective Comics (better known as DC) and Marvel Enterprises publishers, and bringing to court the historical origins of cartoon characters (among the many, see the famous “Siegel and Shuster / v DC” case, regarding copyrights on Superman, whose outcomes are still uncertain, due to conflicting decisions between the various courts – and whose latest installment has been filed, recently, by the heirs of the cited artists), in January, the District Court for the Southern District of New York City has rejected the appeal by cartoonist Gary Friedrich against Marvel Enterprises, establishing the full rights of the latter on the comic book character “Ghost Rider”, also protagonist of a recent movie and of an upcoming sequel.

Friedrich, well-known author in the comics world, began working at Marvel in
the ’70s, and, like many of his colleagues, had the “misfortune” to sign a receipt of payment, proposed by the publisher around 1978 as a condition to the payment itself, thus relinquishing to Marvel any and all rights regarding characters and the stories produced during the period of employment.

Perhaps oblivious to that fact, in the wake of the popularity gained by his character in 2004, the author sued Marvel, claiming to have created the character with the intention to hand over all its rights of exploitation to Skywald Publications, publisher of some his books in those years, but had not been able to accomplish such assignment, since the publishing house shut down in 1975. At the same time, Friedrich said he had signed the 1978 agreement without even realizing it, due to its well-known problems of alcoholism.

The goal of his 2004 law case was, of course, to get back some of the profits
arising from the first movie about the character, staged by Nicholas Cage, and
released in theaters in 2007. Having failed the first attempt in front of the East St. Louis – Illinois Court, Friedrich sued once again Marvel in the Southern District of New York, to achieve some of the revenues deriving from the sale of comic books, toys, cartoons, movies and any other kind of Marvel-branded merchandise, related to the flaming biker character.
The District Court of New York, however, has thoroughly reviewed all circumstances against his claims, exposed in the counter-lawsuit filed by Marvel Enterprises (now a division of The Walt Disney Company, following the notorious acquisition occurred in 2009), and dismissed Friedrich’s claims, indeed condemning him to pay $ 17,000 to Marvel, for the unauthorized Ghost Rider merchandising he has illegally and independently produced and sold, during the last years.

All industry analysts have commented the case, pointing out the irony of the
situation: if Friedrich really had sold “Ghost Rider” to Skywald instead of Marvel, not only the character would not have achieved the fame it lives today, but neither would such an acquisition have avoided the bankruptcy of the independent horror publisher.”

With its decision of February 10th, the Council of State (Italian Supreme Administrative Court) suspended ,as a precautionary measure, the enforceability of the judgment by which the TAR Lazio (first instance administrative court) declared illegal the LCN system (Logical Channel Number), imposed by the Italian Communications Regulatory Authority in its TV frequencies National Plan.
The TAR judgment, now appealed by RTI, RAI and numerous other television companies together, stated that the system imposed by AGCOM and implemented to manage TV frequencies would be illegal, since it would grant traditional TV operators “more visiblity”, by placing their channels on positions easy to remember, on the TV remote.

The first-degree appeal was brought on by SKY Italia, who has always lamented being discriminated, since the launch of its free thematic channel on digital terrestrial frequencies: as a result, the TAR declared void the automated
system imposed by AGCOM.

While we wait for the decision of the State Council on the merits of the appeal
brought by the rivals of SKY Italia, we can merely note that, in hindsight, the
disruption of the positions of the digital terrestrial channels on the remote
control will only further discourage the average viewer, whose patience has
been sorely tested by the continuous need to retune his TV each month, during
these three years of slow switch-off to digital terrestrial television.

Hoping the Council of State to throughly evaluate the interests at stake and
the issues underlying the case, we will keep a watchful eye – it is appropriate
to say – over it.

The “Megaupload Effect” keeps going on, as we mentioned some time ago.

On the 1rst of March, the Italian portal DDLFantasy.net, which became very
famous for the huge amount of movies, videogames, video, music and ebooks
illegally distributed (thousands of registered users and thousands of content
published in both national and international copyright infringement), has decided to spontaneously cease its activities.

Last Thursday, following the closure of Megaupload and the “virtuous” behavior of other file-sharing services still online, as well as the capture of the hacker firm “SIDCrew” (as seen on Quintarelli’s blog: http://blog.quintarelli.it/
blog/2012/02/beccato-sid-crew.html), who specialized in illegal distribution of
movies for a fee, the Web Admins of one of the most popular portals for piracy
in Italy, whose servers were located in France to avoid seizures, decided to
close DDLFantasy, declaring they had to do so, to avoid becoming victims of a
“witch hunt” under way for copyright protection.

Leaving aside such a provocative statement, it might be interesting to ask these gentlemen how much have they actually earned from the activity of illegal distribution and files exchange, from both spontaneous donations from members
of the portal and advertising spaces’ revenues, during these years of activity of the portal.

In a ruling filed on February 2, the Council of State (the Amministrative court of Appeal in Italy) put an end to a court case, filed in 2009 by the company “Edizioni Master” SpA, against the mandatory SIAE labelling of all recorded medias attached to magazines (SIAE is the Italian collecting society for copyrighted works).

The story started in 2001: the Presidency of the Council of Ministers adopted
Decree n.331/2001 to regulate the request for SIAE label on these media (first
introduced as mandatory by Law n. 248/2000), but forgot the prescribed prior
notification of said act to the European Commission. For this reason, in its
judgment of 8 November 2007, the European Union Court of Justice declared the Decree unenforceable, pursuant to the Parliament and Council Directive no. 98/34/EC.

Following this judgment, “Edizioni Master” requested the SIAE and the Presidency of the Council the refund of all contributions paid for the labels from 2004 to 2008, and began to sell new medias without the SIAE labels on.

In 2008, the Presidency of the Council of Ministers drew up a new regulation
draft on the matter and, after several steps of evaluation in front of the European Commission, finally adopted the new regulation with decree 31/2009,
establishing, among other things, the illegal circulation of all media lacking
the label since 2000.

The Decree 31/2009 was immediately brought to court by “Edizioni Master”, that filed a case at the Italian Administrative Court (TAR), but didn’t succeed in obtaining the annulment of such regulation.

With its judgment, the Council of State, while declaring void the provision
contained in such regulation to retroactively claim payments before the year
2000, has confirmed the validity of all other prescriptions contained in Decree
31/2009, and thus reasserted the obligation to affix the SIAE label on all type
of medias attached to magazines.”