Yahoo Sued Over Copyright Claim

A major news paper in Singapore has filed copyright claims against popular internet site Yahoo. The newspaper Singapore Press Holdings claims that Yahoo has reproduced many parts of articles from various newspapers owned by the southeast Asia press company. When running one of the mentioned websites stomp.com.sg through Copy Scape (copyscape.com) we did not find any duplicate content on the internet at first. Later clicking on an option on Copy Scape to search through the sites Ask Libby section many results from all over the web returned many results but still no content from a Yahoo website. Copyright violations are becoming a more and more serious threat in many major governments around the world as they ramp up censorship through legislation and policies like Sopa and The Ip Protect Act.

Singaporeseen.stomp.com.sg did offer an RSS feed for aggregation on there site by the way but the articles in the RSS feed are not the entire stories. Aggregation is one of the common ways news websites like Yahoo and Google News get there news articles and contents from internet blogs. But scraping and reproducing the entire story on Yahoo's website while not having the license to reproduce the entire stories is usually a clear cut case as long as evidence of content reproduction is given in court. If this happens to you and your website ends up getting ripped make sure to take several screen shots of the content on your website and the copyright infringers website. Screen shots are key and essential in a court case like this as a web service like Yahoo may try and take the evidence down to cover there tracks.

Unblocking The Pirate Bay

Many countries including many European countries have recently over the past couple years past laws and created policy's to block such torrent sites like The Pirate Bay. Many of the blocking techniques included dns level blocking and even some entire ip address blocks. In efforts to unblock these torrent websites internet user communities are creating browser add-ons and techniques to fight back. The group MAFIAAFire recently created a tool that redirects you to a different domain name when the domain name is blocked for the torrent website. ThePirateBay Dancing! is an add-on from MAFIAAFire one of there latest and most sophisticated internet browsers add-ons for Mozilla Firefox that uses advanced random proxy technology.

UK Blocks Newzbin

Several internet service providers in the United Kingdom have received letters asking them to block access to Newzbin. If you are not familiar with Newzbin it is a British Usenet service used to index Usenet content. The controversy started after efforts by Hollywood companies like Fox, Universal, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, and Columbia began to push for legal action in spring of 2010 in British Courts. The website itself hosts torrent files much like the Pirate Bay which aren't the actually illegal files themselves but contain information on how to find the network seeding the illegal file. As blocks go into place users begin moving onto other methods like bit torrent proxies, vpn servers, and encryption standards. Many rights group argue although over 90 percent of the content on these index servers is clearly illegal and copyrighted the courts orders just force users underground into newer more decentralized methods. And rights groups claim that there is almost no affect on the users downloading illegal content that it just takes away rights from normal internet users and pushes more control into government on shutting down internet services. No alternative has yet to be proposed from rights groups except to ignore the courts request. We should note that the website newzbin.com and thepiratebay.com are both hosted physically in the country of Sweden where a British court has no jurisdiction in pulling the plug. Also the information available did not say if the movie companies attempted to contact websites directly as that would be one of the best solutions.

Sri Lanka Mirror Site Partially Unblocked

The country of Sri Lanka a large island just off the southern tip of India has agreed to allow the website Sri Lanka Mirror to be the first website of five to be unblocked by the country’s internet service providers. The website came back into compliance with government rules late Thursday after removing links to already blocked websites in the country. The ruling to allow the website back online came through an agreement reached in Sri Lanka Supreme Court.

Beyond just linking to websites back in November the Sri Lanka Mirror (srilankamirror.com) four other websites including www.lankaenews.com, srilankaguardian.com, paparacigossip9.com, and www.lankawaynews.com were blocked by the government media minister. The websites were charged with character assassination and violating individual privacy.

Sri Lanka itself has had a long history of internet and other media in general censorship. Not to mention the amount of government control involved regulating content providers. It should be noted that the country requires registration of your website with the government if you want to run one in the country. Reporters without borders organization also has the country listed on a listed on its list of countries that monitor there citizens online in some form. Sri Lanka dropped off the lists in 2010 but was re-added just this year to this lists.

Social Media Unblock BlackBerry

New development for the BlackBerry has lead to the ability for a special content filtering solution for the phone. The app will allow access to many popular features and functions of websites and apps like twitter and facebook. While being able to use the content filter to block pages and other parts of social media services like facebook. Research in Motion the main developers of the BlackBerry worked with a Canadian company named Ufone. Now the test is to see whether or not countries and localities like Pakistan will accept the new content filtering technology for social media sites on smart phones and other devices. A courts ruling in Pakistan was the main driver behind the need for specific content filtering on smart phones. Without many of these social media websites unblocked partially demand for services would have dropped significantly leaving many companies with a loss in revenue.