HomeWeekly News Roundup (October 9, 2016)
Vote for your favourite catdidate in the Meowware Presidential Elections
The News Gods did not bless us with vast amounts of interesting news this week, which is just as well since it gave me more time to work on my latest insane creation: The Meowware 2016 Presidential Elections. Yes, you now now vote for the feline version of your favourite US Presidential candidates, or catdidates. Why? No, the question should be “why not”!
So when you’re finished deciding between cat Trump, cat Hillary, cat Jill and cat Gary, come back and we’ll go through the news stories this week, which as I’ve mentioned earlier, isn’t the most exciting collection I’ve ever seen.
Finally, a judge has started asking questions about just how valid IP addresses are in BitTorrent court cases. Many judges are now wise to the fact that IP addresses are often dynamically assigned to users, and so extra care is needed when linking an IP address to an actual person. But in the legal arena, it’s important to establish jurisdiction, and with IP addresses, some kind of geolocation search is usually needed in order to establish this. Most lawsuits, however, use geolocation data from a timeframe that could be months after the IP address was recorded as being involved in a swarm.
This is the issue that came up in this particular news story, and the judge eventually rejected the plaintiff’s request for a subpoena. The problem now for those engaged in copyright lawsuits is to be able to quickly tie an IP address to location using geolocation data, but it’s often not possible because geolocation databases usually aren’t updated as regularly as the courts may like.
So it seems courts are finally wising up to these kind of lawsuits, and are no longer willing to rubber stamp lawsuits unless they’re backed up by good evidence.
More DMCA takedowns does not equal less pirated downloads
Not backed up by any evidence that it’s doing a damn thing are Google’s DMCA takedowns, which is breaking records every week it seems. I normally don’t even bother writing stories about this anymore, because I would end up writing one every week, but this past week being as slow as it is, I just had to. So basically, Google are doing 24 million link removals every week now, which means they may break the “billion links per year” at some point over the next year. Google are now processing more DMCA notices every 3 days as they did in the first year of their DMCA regime.
And yet, rights-holders are not happy because apparently none of this actually helps to reduce piracy. Of course, this is what Google and those in the know has been saying all along, that one, pirate sites don’t rely on Google and other search engines for traffic, and even if they did, it would be too easy to create new links for ones that have been removed. So rights-holders then ask for “take down, stay down”, but I’m sure there are easy ways for sites go get around this even if it’s implemented.
Rights-holders are only blaming Google because it’s a nice and big target for them, but the reality is that Google and other search engines are not fueling the piracy craze. People will find a way to locate pirated content even without search engines, and so if you want to stop piracy, you have to stop the people who pirate, and the only sane way to do this would be to take away the reasons why people choose to pirate. Everything else is just a waste of time.
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So that’s it for the news this week, and I had to really stretch the definition of “news” to just come up with these. Will now pray even harder to the News Gods!