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John Lemke

Bad Police Info Led Spies To Monitor Dotcom, Govt. Suppressed Information | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/-suppressed-information-120926

2012 police information Kim Dotcom Dotcom MegaUpload FileSharing p2p newmediaorder govt

shared by John Lemke on 26 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • On Monday, Prime Minister John Key announced that he had requested an inquiry by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security after it was revealed that the Government Communications Security Bureau (GSCB) illegally intercepted the communications of individuals in the Megaupload case.
  • GCSB is an intelligence agency of the New Zealand government responsible for spying on external entities. It is forbidden by law from conducting surveillance on its own citizens or permanent residents in the country. Now it has been revealed that incorrect information supplied by the police’s Organized and Financial Crime Agency (OFCANZ) led the GCSB to spy on Kim Dotcom and Bram van der Kolk.
  • During an earlier hearing, Detective Inspector Grant Wormald of OFCANZ said that apart from surveillance carried out by the police, no other surveillance had been carried out against Dotcom. But with the revelation that GCSB had indeed been monitoring the Megaupload founder at the behest of OFCANZ, questions are now being raised about this apparent inconsistency, not least since Wormald previously acknowledged that a secret government unit had been involved in a pre-raid planning meeting in January.
John Lemke

Mega Goes Legal, Issues Ultimatum Over Cyberlocker Report | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/over-cyberlocker-report-140925

2014.09.29-TNN indienationnews news report mega law legal P2P filesharing

shared by John Lemke on 25 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Mega was founded by Kim Dotcom but the site bears little resemblance to his now defunct Megaupload. Perhaps most importantly, Mega was the most-scrutinized file-hosting startup ever, so every single detail simply had to be squeaky clean. As a result the site took extensive legal advice to ensure that it complies with every single facet of the law. Nevertheless, NetNames took the decision to put Mega in its report anyway, bundling the site in with what are described as some of the market’s most dubious players. This was not received well by Mega CEO Graham Gaylard. In a TorrentFreak article he demanded a full apology from NetNames and Digital Citizens Alliance and for his company to be withdrawn from the report. Failure to do so would result in “further action”, he said.
  • “Mega’s legal counsel has written to NetNames, Digital Citizens Alliance and The Internet Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) stating that the report is clearly defamatory,” Mega CEO Graham Gaylard told TorrentFreak this morning.
  • Firstly, Mega’s legal team are now demanding the removal of the report, and all references to it, from all channels under the respondents’ control. They also demand that further circulation of the report must be discontinued and no additional references to it should be made in public.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • also demanding a list of everyone who has had a copy of the report made available to them along with details of all locations where the report has been published.
  • Finally, Mega is demanding a full public apology “to its satisfaction” to be published on the homepages of the respondents’ websites.
  • Mega has given the companies seven days to comply with the above requests.
John Lemke

Revisiting The Purpose Of The Copyright Monopoly: Science And The Useful Arts | Torrent... - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/nce-and-the-useful-arts-121202

2012 indienationnews legal law government politics IN TNN intelectualProperty IP copyright constitution USA

shared by John Lemke on 04 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • If there’s one thing that needs constant reminding, it’s the explicit purpose of the copyright monopoly. Its purpose is to promote the progress of human knowledge. Nothing less. Nothing more.
  • [Congress has the power] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
  • has the power, and not the obligation
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • two kinds of monopolies: copyright monopolies and patent monopolies, respectively. Science and the useful arts. The “science” part refers to the copyright monopoly, and the “useful arts” has nothing to do with creative works – it is “arts” in the same sense as “artisan”, that is, craftsmanship.
  • the purpose of the copyright monopoly isn’t to enable somebody to make money, and never was. Its sole purpose was and is to advance humanity as a whole. The monopoly begins and ends with the public interest; it does not exist for the benefit of the author and inventor.
  • The second thing we note is the “science” part. The US Constitution only gives Congress the right to protect works of knowledge – educational works, if you like – with a copyright monopoly. “Creative works” such as movies and music are nowhere to be found whatsoever in this empowerment of Congress to create temporary government-sanctioned monopolies.
  • Which brings us to the third notable item: “the exclusive right”. This is what we would refer to colloquially as a “monopoly”. The copyright industry has been tenacious in trying to portray the copyright monopoly as “property”, when in reality, the exclusive rights created are limitations of property rights (it prohibits me from storing the bitpatterns of my choosing on my own hardware). Further, it should be noted that this monopoly is not a guarantee to make money. It is a legal right to prevent others from attempting to do so. There’s a world of difference. You can have all the monopolies you like and still not make a cent.
  • The fourth notable item is the “for limited times”. This can be twisted and turned in many ways, obviously; it has been argued that “forever less a day” is still “limited” in the technical sense. But from my personal perspective – and I’ll have to argue, from the perspective of everybody reading this text – anything that extends past our time of death is not limited in time.
John Lemke

Bad Police Info Led Spies To Monitor Dotcom, Govt. Suppressed Information | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/-suppressed-information-120926

2012 police Kim Dotcom Dotcom MegaUpload FileSharing p2p yourrights dueprocess

shared by John Lemke on 26 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Court documents have revealed how information supplied by New Zealand’s Organised and Financial Crime Agency led to Kim Dotcom and his associates being illegally monitored by GCSB, the Kiwi spy agency comparable to the United States’ CIA. Today a High Court judge expressed concern at the situation, with Dotcom’ legal team calling for an independent inquiry into the fiasco. Meanwhile, pressure continues to mount on Prime Minister John Key as it’s revealed the government issued an information suppression order.
  • According to court documents, GCSB checked with OFCANZ that both Dotcom and der Kolk were indeed foreign nationals. OFCANZ said they were, but in fact neither should have been spied on by GCSB. The monitoring went ahead anyway. In the High Court today, Justice Helen Winkelmann asked lawyers how it could be possible that GCSB hadn’t known about Dotcom’s New Zealand residency.
  • During an earlier hearing, Detective Inspector Grant Wormald of OFCANZ said that apart from surveillance carried out by the police, no other surveillance had been carried out against Dotcom. But with the revelation that GCSB had indeed been monitoring the Megaupload founder at the behest of OFCANZ, questions are now being raised about this apparent inconsistency, not least since Wormald previously acknowledged that a secret government unit had been involved in a pre-raid planning meeting in January.
John Lemke

RapidGator Wiped From Google by False DMCA Notices | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/e-by-false-dmca-notices-131223

2013 dmca google indienationnews legal law intellectualproperty take-down yourrights

shared by John Lemke on 24 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • File-hosting service RapidGator has had nearly all of its search results wiped from Google, including many clearly non-infringing pages. The URLs in question were removed by the search engine after a DMCA notice from several copyright holders. RapidGator is outraged and says the overbroad censorship is hurting its business, warning that the same could happen to others. “If it happens to us, it can happen to MediaFire or Dropbox tomorrow,” they state.
  • Thus far this has resulted in more than 200 million URLs being removed from Google’s search engine. While many of these takedown claims are legit, some are clearly false, censoring perfectly legitimate webpages from search results. File-hosting service RapidGator.net is one site that has fallen victim to such overbroad takedown requests. The file-hosting service has had nearly all its URLs de-listed, including its homepage, making the site hard to find through Google. Several other clearly non-infringing pages, including the FAQ, the news section, and even the copyright infringement policy, have also been wiped from Google by various takedown requests.
  • “Our robots.txt forbids search engines bots to index any file/* folder/ URLs. We only allow them to crawl our main page and the pages we have in a footer of the website. So most of the URLs for which Google gets DMCA notices are not listed in index by default,” RapidGator’s Dennis explains.
  • John Lemke on 24 Dec 13
     
    Quoting the article: "File-hosting service RapidGator has had nearly all of its search results wiped from Google, including many clearly non-infringing pages. The URLs in question were removed by the search engine after a DMCA notice from several copyright holders. RapidGator is outraged and says the overbroad censorship is hurting its business, warning that the same could happen to others. "If it happens to us, it can happen to MediaFire or Dropbox tomorrow," they state." This is, sooner or later, going to have to be addressed... It totally works against the concept of the cloud. I can not believe that more people are using the cloud for illegal uses than legit.
John Lemke

Pirate Bay Docks in Peru: New System Will Make Domains "Irrelevant" | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/make-domains-irrelevant-131212

2013 pirate bay peru news p2p

shared by John Lemke on 12 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Currently under development is a BitTorrent-powered browser that will enable users to store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other sites without need for central hosting. This means sites will be able to exist in a new and decentralized form with no reliance on a public-facing website. In a message to “BREIN and friends,” The Pirate Bay cautions that while closing down domains may be an irritant today, that loophole won’t be open forever.
  • “They should wait for our new PirateBrowser, then domains will be irrelevant,” an insider told TorrentFreak.
John Lemke

CRIA Watches Massive Music Piracy Crisis Devastate Unknown Band | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/-devastate-unknown-band-110404

2011 wroteatindienation woteabout music cria torrent torrentfreak p2p false PR publicity

shared by John Lemke on 12 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • John Lemke on 12 Apr 11
     
    A band, almost entirely unknown, is reportedly devastated by piracy.  Thing is, seems there are no torrents out there.
John Lemke

CRIA Watches Massive Music Piracy Crisis Devastate Unknown Band | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/-devastate-unknown-band-110404

2011 p2p music businessmodel filesharing writeabout wroteatindienation

shared by John Lemke on 05 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • John Lemke on 05 Apr 11
     
    "The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) states that, to achieve Platinum status, an album must achieve sales of 100,000 copies/downloads of an album. Sales…that's the key. A random polling of several torrent site's downloads-ILLEGAL downloads-has shown that 1ST, the debut cd by ONE SOUL THRUST has been downloaded over 100,000 times," he wrote. Now, 100,000 downloads is a lot, especially for a band like One Soul Thrust who have just 176 Twitter followers and a single short, non-musical video on their YouTube channel which at the time of writing has 79 views. Incidentally, the video is quite nice, since they have actually taken the time out to thank a radio station for playing one of their songs. However, the band are less pleased that people are apparently sampling their music using newer methods, i.e BitTorrent. "We paid to create that album totally out of our own pockets. People think of illegal downloading not hurting anyone, but we're real people too- with real mortgages, real family to feed and real bills to pay," said lead-vocalist Salem Jones. "By downloading our album from pirate sites, people have stolen from us, our families, everyone involved in the production of our album, and their families."
John Lemke

Fraud and Embezzlement Drives Anti-Piracy Group into Bankruptcy | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/y-group-into-bankruptcy-140821

2014 indienationnews law legal

shared by John Lemke on 21 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • The organization’s board filed for bankruptcy after it discovered a wide range of serious problems. The group’s financial statements were falsified, the books were not in order, and taxes haven’t been paid since 2007.
  • CEO Snæbjörn Steingrímsson has admitted to embezzlement
  • The last time SMAIS made international headlines was last year, when the group pulled its Facebook page offline after four days. According to Steingrímsson, SMAIS didn’t have enough resources to handle the constant flaming comments from the public.
John Lemke

Dotcom Faces Jail Following Application to Revoke Bail | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/lication-to-revoke-bail-141117

2014 indienationnews jail DotCom Ki9mDotCom Mega bail law legal technology

shared by John Lemke on 17 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • a bail revocation application is underway which could put back behind bars as early as next week.
  • Last week it was revealed that his New Zealand legal team had backed out of their arrangement to defend the Megaupload founder.
  • A full report on developments isn’t possible due to a news blackout, but Crown Prosecutor Christine Gordon told the Court that an application had been made to have Dotcom’s bail revoked after an apparent breach of conditions.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In the meantime, apparently considering him a flight risk, Judge Nevin Dawson has taken the decision to clamp down on Dotcom’s movements ahead of next week’s hearing.
  • banning him from using his helicopter, Dotcom is forbidden from using boats and undertaking any travel whatsoever by sea. He must stay within 80km (50 miles) of his home and report to police every single day, rather than his previous weekly check-ins.
  • One interested firm said it would need 120 days just to look over the case to see they can help, a serious problem when the extradition hearing is scheduled for February and has taken 18 months to prepare. Today the Crown said it was prepared to give Dotcom an extra month by postponing the hearing until March, but that was overruled by the Judge who said that it would now take place in early June.
John Lemke

Kim Dotcom Teases Megabox, Reveals Exclusive Artists? | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/veals-exclusive-artists-120926

2012 Kim Dotcom Dotcom MegaUpload Megabox p2p fileshring newmedialorder newbusinessmodel business music_Business

shared by John Lemke on 26 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Kim Dotcom is determined to put the major music labels out of business with Megabox. At the same time he promises to give artists full control over their own work and a healthy revenue stream. Today Dotcom released a video on the making of Megabox which unveils some of the service’s features. The video also shows “The Black Keys,” “Rusko,” “Two Fingers” and “Will.i.am” as exclusive artists.
  • So why would artists join Megabox in the first place? The goal of Megabox is to give the public access to free music and compensate artists through advertising revenue. Megaupload’s founder believes that this “free music” business model has the potential to decrease music piracy while giving artists proper compensation for their work. This revenue comes from the Megakey application that users have to install. Megakey works like an ad blocker, but instead of blocking ads it replaces a small percentage with Mega’s own ads. Those who prefer not to install the app have the option to buy the music instead.
  • “These new solutions will allow content creators to keep 90% of all earnings and generate significant income from the untapped market of free downloads,” Dotcom said.
John Lemke

Why The Copyright Industry Is Doomed, In One Single Sentence | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/-in-one-single-sentence-140126

2014 indienationnews copyright industry privacy yourrights law legal tech

shared by John Lemke on 27 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In order to prevent copyright monopoly violations from happening in such channels, the only means possible is to wiretap all private digital communications to discover when copyrighted works are being communicated. As a side effect, you would eliminate private communications as a concept. There is no way to sort communications into legal and illegal without breaching the postal secret – the activity of sorting requires observation.
  • Therefore, as a society, we are at a crossroads where we can make a choice between privacy and the ability to communicate in private, with all the other things that depend on that ability (like whistleblower protections and freedom of the press), or a distribution monopoly for a particular entertainment industry. These two have become mutually exclusive and cannot coexist, which is also why you see the copyright industry lobbying so hard for more surveillance, wiretapping, tracking, and data retention (they understand this perfectly).
  • Any digital, private communications channel can be used for private protected correspondence, or to transfer works that are under copyright monopoly. In order to prevent copyright monopoly violations from happening in such channels, the only means possible is to wiretap all private digital communications to discover when copyrighted works are being communicated. As a side effect, you would eliminate private communications as a concept. There is no way to sort communications into legal and illegal without breaching the postal secret – the activity of sorting requires observation.
John Lemke

File-Sharing Boosts Creation of New Hit Music, Research Finds | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/it-music-research-finds-140102

2014 legal law technology tech p2p music sales IN-Pub hit

shared by John Lemke on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • It is clear that file-sharing encourages the distribution of existing music, and in a paper titled “A Case Study of File Sharing and Music Output” the professor examines what the connection is between music piracy and the creation of new music.
  • The paper provides empirical evidence that file sharing did not reduce the creation of new hit songs. Instead, more new music entered the hit charts, an effect that’s driven by existing artists.
  • The data shows that the output from existing artists increased, while new artists appeared less frequently in the hit charts. However, since the new material from existing artists was greater than the loss from new artists, the “creation” of new music increased overall.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “Specifically, the [result] suggests that the 58.92 percent decline in record sales would be associated with a net increase of 20.6 new songs in the study’s sample annually, all else constant,” Professor Lunney writes.
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