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Postby account deleted by request » Mon Oct 22, 2007 10:24 pm

· Football fans may face expensive libel claims
· Defamation lawyers see growth area in cyberspace

* Clare Dyer, legal editor
* The Guardian
* Monday October 22 2007

Disgruntled fans of Sheffield Wednesday who vented their dissatisfaction with the football club's bigwigs in anonymous internet postings may face expensive libel claims after the chairman, chief executive and five directors won a high-court ruling last week forcing the owner of a website to reveal their identity.

The case, featuring the website owlstalk.co.uk, is the second within days to highlight the danger of assuming that the apparent cloak of anonymity gives users of internet forums and chatrooms carte blanche to say whatever they like.

In another high court case last week, John Finn, owner of the Sunderland property firm Pallion Housing, admitted just before he was due to be cross-examined that he was responsible for a website hosting a scurrilous internet campaign about a rival housing organisation, Gentoo Group, its employees and owner, Peter Walls.

Exposing the identity of those who post damaging lies in cyberspace is a growth area for libel lawyers.

Dan Tench, of Olswang, the law firm representing Gentoo, said: "This case illustrates an increasingly important legal issue: proving who is responsible for the publication of anonymous material on the internet. This is likely to be a significant issue in defamation cases in the future."

The website Dadsplace, set up to campaign against perceived injustices in the family courts, had a forum where anonymous postings made various accusations against Gentoo, Mr Walls and his staff.

Those posting the comments went to considerable lengths to hide their identity, and Gentoo's lawyers ran up a bill estimated to be about £300,000 - which Mr Finn will now have to pick up, along with any damages awarded - taking the case to court and amassing circumstantial evidence that he was behind the website.

Revealing the Sheffield Wednesday fans was comparatively easy since there was no secret about the website owner. The next move was to apply for a court order requiring him to reveal the identities of "Halfpint" and the other fans behind what the club's lawyers described as a "sustained campaign of vilification". Fans made serious allegations against the club's chairman, Dave Allen, and directors and shareholders.

The club's lawyers asked the judge, Richard Parkes QC, to order disclosure about the identity of 11 fans.

But the judge decided some fans, whose postings were merely "abusive" or likely to be understood as jokes, should keep their anonymity.

The judge ordered that three fans whose postings might "reasonably be understood to allege greed, selfishness, untrustworthiness and dishonest behaviour", should be unmasked. Their right to maintain their anonymity and express themselves freely was outweighed by the directors' entitlement to take action to protect their reputation, he said.

Court orders obliging websites to disclose the identity of users posting anonymous defamatory remarks began in 2001.

Dominic Bray, of K&L Gates, Sheffield Wednesday's solicitors, said: "There seem to be quite a lot of websites that are using their anonymity to make comments about people and think that there shouldn't be any liability for it. But the internet is no different to any other place of publication, and if somebody is making defamatory comments about people then they should be held responsible for it. What these cases do is just confirm that's the law - the law applies to the internet as much as it does to anything else."


Not really about downloading but one or two people had better watch out :D
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Postby Sabre » Mon Oct 22, 2007 10:41 pm

Dominic Bray, of K&L Gates, Sheffield Wednesday's solicitors, said: "There seem to be quite a lot of websites that are using their anonymity to make comments about people and think that there shouldn't be any liability for it. But the internet is no different to any other place of publication, and if somebody is making defamatory comments about people then they should be held responsible for it. What these cases do is just confirm that's the law - the law applies to the internet as much as it does to anything else."


Yes, provided that the lies are hosted in an english server. If I open a server in Spain for you to chat, it will be opened under Spanish laws, so if you start lying the English lawyers can be fuming, but they'll can't do much. They could try to sue me through the Spanish law, but they'd have a hard time in closing the site. And we're talking about Spanish laws, if you open something in Russia, they couldn't do much but moan.

No doubt that the government will have to legislate a lot to sort things out, but a controlled internet is far from a near future IMHO.
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Postby GOAT » Tue Oct 23, 2007 12:14 am

typical that was a useful site, all this copyright stuff is pis.sin me off, let me watch me damn programmes!!  :D

TV Links shut down for linking
And if linking is illegal, how many of us are guilty?
October 20, 2007 1:42 PM

The TV Links disclaimer

According to a report in The Guardian: "A 26-year-old man from Cheltenham was arrested on Thursday in connection with offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet, Fact said."



The arrest and the closure of the site - www.tv-links.co.uk - came during an operation by officers from Gloucestershire County Council trading standards in conjunction with investigators from Fact and Gloucestershire Police.

Fact claims that tv-links.co.uk was providing links to illegal film content that had been camcorder recorded from cinemas and then uploaded to the internet. The site also provided links to TV shows that were being illegally distributed.



It's a pity the Gloucestershire Police started with such small fry. There are a couple of multibillionaires called Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- the founders of Google -- who provide vast numbers of links to content that is being illegally distributed. Indeed, as everyone knows, they actually host plenty of illegal content on their own video site, YouTube, which has a UK operation.

Is the message that it's less criminal to host illegal content on YouTube than it is to to link to it from a site such as TV Links? Or is it just that FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft) and the police won't tackle anybody with enough high-powered lawyers to fight back? Is The New Freedom blog correct in saying: "They just have so much money that they have become above the law."

Of course, there is a difference between building a site around links to content that could be presumed to lack copyright clearance and linking unintentionally from a site set up for a different purpose. However, I'm not a lawyer so I don't know how significant this is. (Is shoplifting OK if you have a proper job but criminal if you're unemployed and starving?)

It will be interesting to see who FACT picks on next. There are plenty of newspaper journalists who nowadays, as part of their proper jobs, link to YouTube videos and other internet content. It would be amazing if every single bit of material -- some of it "repurposed" -- had full and correct copyright clearance.

In future, do I risk being thrown in the slammer for linking directly to a YouTube video? What if I just say "go to Google and search for [YouTube xxx yyy]" or whatever? Oh dear, I forgot, Google's illegal so that will have to be closed down.

Perhaps I am already breaking the law by linking to Google, YouTube, TV Links, Pirate Bay and other sites that link to illegal content because this must also count as contributing to "the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet" -- and, by the way, I expect you are breaking the law if you link to or even read this story.

Indeed, if linking is illegal, we might as well shut down the Internet, because there is no practical way anybody can guarantee the legality of what's on the end of any link. Even if you could guarantee it at the time of linking, there's no guarantee it would still be legal less than a second later, or for the rest of time.
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Postby Dundalk » Tue Oct 23, 2007 7:43 pm

Fuck sake they have hit another one now.....


British and Dutch police have shut down a "widely-used" source of illegally-downloaded music.

A flat on Teesside and several properties in Amsterdam were raided as part of an Interpol investigation into the members-only website OiNK.

The UK-run site has leaked 60 major pre-release albums this year alone, said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

A 24-year-old man from Middlesbrough was arrested on Tuesday morning.

'Extremely lucrative'

The IT worker was led from his home in the town's Grange Road and is being questioned on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law.

At the same time his employer - a large multi-national company - and his father's home were also raided.


Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found
IFPI spokesman

A Cleveland Police spokesman said: "This extremely lucrative and creative scheme consisted of a private file-sharing website being set up. Membership was by invitation only.

"The site allowed the uploading and downloading of pre-release music and media to thousands of members."

An IFPI spokesman said: "Once an album had been posted on the OiNK website, the users that download that music then passed the content to other websites, forums and blogs, where multiple copies were made.

"Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found further down the illegal online supply chain."

The site's servers, based in Amsterdam, were seized in a series of raids last week.

It followed a two-year investigation by music industry bodies the IFPI and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).
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Postby Dundalk » Mon Nov 19, 2007 8:41 pm

:D  :D  :D

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Postby Emerald Red » Mon Nov 19, 2007 9:06 pm

Demonoid closed down also. I was well p*ssed with that, as it was a great site with brilliant and reliable feedback from users so you knew what you were getting before you started downloading torrents.

TV Links may be gone, but a big f*ck you to the man in reply was issued in the form of a new site I found called Video Lemon. I think it's even better. :D
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Postby Dundalk » Sat Nov 24, 2007 12:53 pm

French web users caught pirating movies or music could soon be thrown offline.
Those illegally sharing files will face the loss of their net access thanks to a newly-created anti-piracy body granted the wide-ranging powers.

The anti-piracy body comes out of a deal agreed by France's music and movie makers and its net firms.

The group who brokered the deal said the measures were intended to curb casual piracy rather than tackle large scale pirate groups.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the deal was a "decisive moment for the future of a civilised internet".

Net firms will monitor what their customers are doing and pass on information about persistent pirates to the new independent body. Those identified will get a warning and then be threatened with either being cut off or suspended if they do not stop illegal file-sharing.

The agreement between net firms, record companies, film-makers and government was drawn up by a special committee created to look at the problem of the net and cultural protection.

Denis Olivennes, head of the French chain store FNAC, who chaired the committee said current penalties for piracy - large fines and years in jail - were "totally disproportionate" for those young people who do file-share illegally.

In return for agreeing to monitor net use, film-makers agreed to speed up the transfer of movies to DVD and music firms pledged to support DRM-free tracks on music stores.

The deal was hailed by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which represents the global interests of the music business.

"This is the single most important initiative to help win the war on online piracy that we have seen so far," it said in a statement.

French consumer group UFC Que Choisir was more cautious.

It said the agreement was "very tough, potentially destructive of freedom, anti-economic and against digital history".
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