Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits within the next few days in three countries--including the United States--against The Pirate Bay, CNET News.com has learned.
John Giacobbi
(Credit: Web Sheriff)One of the world's best-known BitTorrent indexing sites, The Pirate Bay has defiantly linked to pirated copies of films, TV shows, music videos, and other content while often boasting that it ignores Hollywood's requests to remove them. The Pirate Bay does not host any unauthorized content, but the service is internationally famous for being a highly effective file-sharing tool.
Prince will file similar suits against The Pirate Bay in the U.S., France, a country with laws favorable to copyright owners, and Sweden, where The Pirate Bay is based. In addition, Prince is preparing to take civil action against companies that advertise on The Pirate Bay, many of which are headquartered in Israel, according to John Giacobbi, Web Sheriff's president.
Prince has hired Giacobbi and Web Sheriff, a service that protects copyright materials from Internet piracy, to coordinate the legal challenges against The Pirate Bay and others who the singer believes has violated his copyright.
Giacobbi said Web Sheriff is also helping to launch an investigation into The Pirate Bay's off-shore connections to determine whether the company is compliant with Swedish and international income and corporation tax laws.
The Pirate Bay has already weathered several attempts by the governments of Sweden and the United States to shut down the site. Yet, this is likely the largest civil challenge the Web site has ever faced.
At the core of Prince's lawsuits are his claims that the three founders of The Pirate Bay are profiting from the work of artists without compensating them. The Pirate Bay earns $70,000 a month in advertising revenue, Giacobbi alleged. The site's founders have previously denied that the operation makes money.
None of the three founders of The Pirate Bay could be reached for comment.
The Pirate Bay Founders, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm
(Credit: Pontus Alexander/Fabian Landgren)
Prince, who Giacobbi said has the backing of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, the group that represents the recording industry worldwide, is only adding to The Pirate Bay's legal troubles. The site founders also face criminal charges, according to a story published Thursday on the blog TorrentFreak.
A prosecutor in Sweden announced that he plans to press charges against five people involved with The Pirate Bay before January 31, 2008, the blog reported. The five are being accused of infringing on intellectual property.
The copyright battle that Prince has waged the past two months has not been without its costs. He was widely criticized this week when three unauthorized fan sites accused him of trying to violate their free speech rights when his handlers demanded that they remove several photos of him.
It was widely reported this week that Prince had begun suing fans. His representatives denied this.
"Prince is not suing his fans, is not looking to penalize fans and nor is he looking to inhibiting freedom of speech in any way," said AEG, Prince's promoter.
Prince began making headlines in September after lashing out against sites he believed were violating his intellectual-property rights.
In September, the singer said he planned to take legal action against The Pirate Bay, YouTube, and eBay. As of Friday, Prince's lawsuits appeared to be solely targeted at The Pirate Bay.
By suing The Pirate Bay in three different countries, Prince is hoping to put financial pressure on the service, Giacobbi said. Copyright laws in the United States and France would also make it nearly impossible for a site like The Pirate Bay to triumph, he claimed.
"There is no way that they will have any defense because it's blatant piracy," Giacobbi said. "They'll either have to come out and fight or just try and ignore it. In that case, we're going to win a default judgment against them. This could be a ticking time bomb for them. They can't outrun this. We are very confident."
YouTube can't guarantee that its new filtering system will catch every case of piracy. But one company says it can help plug the hole.
Web Sheriff, the British company hired by performers such as Prince and the Village People to protect their music from Web piracy, is now branching into a new service on the heels of Monday's announcement by YouTube.
John Giacobbi
(Credit: Web Sheriff)The juggernaut video-sharing site owned by Google rolled out a long-awaited filtering technology that's designed to automatically detect whether a piece of digital video uploaded to the site is pirated or not.
Here's the rub: Copyright owners must first send YouTube copies of the material they want the system to recognize.
In addition, the more degraded the quality of the pirated copy, the greater the chance it will be missed and not flagged as an illicit copy.
John Giacobbi, Web Sheriff's president, said that what hasn't been established is whether YouTube's new system can recognize music playing within a video. This is of special interest to one of Web Sheriff's clients, the Village People. (Giacobbi's site even features a clip of them.)
YouTube was already using technology from a company called Audible Magic, which offers copyright holders a way to police music, video, and computer software that is being reproduced without permission. MySpace has also licensed Audible Magic's product.
The Village People band has threatened YouTube with legal action over a clip that features its music combined with archival footage of Adolf Hitler. The clip, which has been removed from YouTube hundreds of times and keeps getting reposted, shows images of German youth and the Nazi leader.
"There's still a lot of unanswered questions about the system," Giacobbi said. "YouTube has acknowledged that if you change the file's characteristics enough, video may not be filtered. The site will still need to be monitored, and that's what we do."
Web Sheriff says it will, on behalf of its clients, also handle the transferring of video clips as well as turning the clips into digital fingerprints and dealing with YouTube on a day-to-day basis.
(Editor's note: We couldn't immediately reach YouTube for comment on Thursday. This story will be updated if YouTube replies.)
John Giacobbi
(Credit: Web Sheriff)The names of some of the top antipiracy companies--MediaDefender, Web Sheriff and MediaSentry--evoke the images of muscle-bound, caped crusaders who swoop in to rescue copyright content from masked Internet bandits.
It appears now that the kryptonite for some of these companies is hackers. Just more than a week ago, someone swiped 6,000 of MediaDefender's e-mails and published them on the Web.
In what has turned out to be an embarrassing revelation for the company, the correspondence shows that the firm employs controversial methods to fight piracy, such as honeypots, decoys and denial-of-service attacks.
But John Giacobbi, president of Web Sheriff, a British company that has worked to protect the music of such artists as Moby, The White Stripes and The Shins, said not everyone in the sector takes such a hard-line approach to file sharing.
"We're trying to be more civil," Giacobbi said. "We have good relationships with most of the file-sharing and blogging sites, and when we ask them to take down material, the vast majority of them respond straight away. In some cases, the sites give us access to their databases, and we remove content ourselves."
Movie studios and record labels hire Web Sheriff and other antipiracy companies to act as sort of bodyguards for digital content. Typically, they are asked to protect the entertainment industry's most valuable digital material: unreleased songs or films.
Giacobbi said a song from a popular artist leaks to the Web, on average, between two and four months before its release date. Journalists who receive early copies of a song to review are suspected of being the source of many leaks, according to Giacobbi.
Antipiracy firms patrol the Web looking for unauthorized copies of the music or movies they are hired to protect and must act fast when they do. Giacobbi's staff rushes to send a takedown notice to tracking sites like TorrentSpy and IsoHunt. These search engines don't host any copyright material but are often used by file sharers to track down pirated movies or songs they want.
Giacobbi's secret sauce is relying more on phone calls than automated systems to spit out takedown notices. The former music industry attorney said his company relies on relationship building more than technology.
"Most file sharing is done by highly enthusiastic fans," Giacobbi said. "We just (try) to educate them about the harm they might be committing. I don't want to appear as if I'm criticizing MediaDefender, but we try to use a much more tempered approach."
Gary Fung, IsoHunt's founder, calls Web Sheriff the white hat of antipiracy companies.
"Web Sheriff, in my book, are the good guys," Fung said. "What they do is send takedown notices for copyright owners, which is perfectly legitimate. This is far different from MediaDefender, which (is) using tactics that are probably illegal and for sure aren't really polite."
This doesn't mean that Web Sheriff is totally toothless when it comes to piracy. The company announced earlier this month that it is helping to launch lawsuits against YouTube, eBay and The Pirate Bay on behalf of rock star Prince. Giacobbi accuses each of the sites of promoting copyright violations.
Giacobbi acknowledges that all of his approaches have so far failed to convince the operators of The Pirate Bay to work with his company. He said he reserves a special dislike for that site.
"We have civilized relationships with everyone except The Pirate Bay," Giacobbi said. "It's estimated that they make about $75,000 a month from advertising. How come they are allowed to make money from copyright content, but the record labels can't? Well, they are going to face the music soon. They'll be taken down eventually."
Operators of The Pirate Bay could not be reached for comment.
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