ITV

Tag: URL

  • Google asked to remove 100 million ‘piracy’ links in 2013

    Google asked to remove 100 million ‘piracy’ links in 2013

    MUMBAI: That is double the number it received for the whole of 2012 and a sign that publishers are stepping up their battle against internet piracy.

     

    Copyright holders send millions of “takedown” requests to Google every week in an attempt to make pirated material harder to access online.

     

    Many of the takedown requests made under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other national copyright laws are generated by third parties, or reporting organisations, on behalf of copyright holders.

     

    Google began publishing all such requests in its Transparency Report in 2012 and since then the number has risen sharply, as rights holders have made greater use of the reporting system.

     

    In the past month alone Google received requests to take down nearly 14 million links from its search results, relating to 3,200 copyright owners.

     

    One digital content protection specialist, Degban, makes requests for about 300,000 link removals per week on behalf of clients and has asked for nearly 31 million web pages, or URLs, to be removed from Google’s results so far, reports the search firm.

     

    The website domains concerned are almost entirely person-to-person file-sharing services, such as Fenopy.eu, extratorrent.com, torrenthound.com, filestube.com and bittorrent.com.

     

    More than half of Degban’s URL requests were made on behalf of Froytal Services, a pornography producer, giving an indication of the kind of content people are sharing online.

     

    But other major copyright owners making the most takedown requests included the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) and its member companies, the Recording Industry Association of America, and various film studios, such as Warner Brothers.

     

    There are concerns that some of these takedown requests may not be accurate.

     

    For example, Microsoft recently asked by mistake for links to its own sites to be deleted.

     

    The embarrassing request was made on Microsoft’s behalf by LeakID, an anti-piracy specialist, according to Torrentfreak.com.

     

    A growing number of sites accused of aiding piracy are now blocked to UK web users, including the Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, H33T, Fenopy, Movie2K and Download4All.

  • Pak govt not interested in giving access to YouTube: Lahore HC

    Pak govt not interested in giving access to YouTube: Lahore HC

    NEW DELHI: The Lahore High Court has observed that it appears that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is least interested in drafting a mechanism that could open (unblock) YouTube in Pakistan.

     

    The observation was made earlier this month in ‘Pakistan Internet Freedom’ (Bytes for All Vs Federation of Pakistan).

     

    However, the Deputy Attorney General informed court that Google did not respond to the request and seemingly has no interest in this case and so did not appear in court. Earlier, it was learnt that a legal representative of Google was going to appear before the court.

     

    Bytes for All, the petitioner of the case, informed that PTA was misleading the court and that it had the mechanism to filter the unwanted blasphemous and anti-social content on internet.

     

    “While PTA has the technical capacity to block individual URLs to keep the rest of the platform accessible, they had been denying their ability to do so”, the petitioner argued.

     

    A filtering solution is already in practice at Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) who hired the technology from a Canadian firm Netsweeper.

     

    According to the petitioner, Netsweeper technology is being implemented in Pakistan on PTCL for purposes of political and social filtering, including websites of secessionist movements, sensitive religious topics, and independent media.

     

    Several times, the Pakistan government and its regulatory bodies have announced that they lack a technical capability to block specific URLs in Pakistan and for that they require filtering software. Other than this, government representatives have been demanding Google to open its office in Pakistan so that legal affairs could be controlled in a better way.

     

    An official of the ISP while commenting on the situation said, “It is very easy to provide complete access to YouTube archive and filter the unwanted content at the same time. If government is seriously willing to resolve the issue, ISPs can install the filtering software on their end. This will ensure filtered access to entire YouTube”.

     

    Meanwhile even as PTA had claimed last year that that it had blocked the access to the videos on YouTube that are anti-Islamic, many leading Pakistani ISPs are still making it possible for people to access those videos (without even using any proxy) which are actually the trailers of the movie titled Innocence of Muslims.