The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has announced the shut down of nine movie piracy sites, the first sites in a major crackdown from federal officials.
The anti-piracy initiative is dubbed “Operation in Our Sites,” and is aimed at taking down sites that stream or offer downloads of films that are currently in theaters.
Movies-links.TV, nowmovies.com, thepiratecity.org, filespump.com, planetmoviez.com, zml.org, tvshack.net, ninjavideo.net and thisninja.net were all taken down.
Each site generated revenue from ads and some accept donations. All assets from the sites were seized, including PayPal and advertising accounts.
ICE president John Morton says the amount of illegal movie sites is rising rapidly, with organized crime behind a number of the bigger sites.
Morton added that the sites taken down combined for “millions and millions of hits on a monthly basis.”
Result for: files
MySpace has taken steps this week to combat Facebook, the behemoth social networking site plagued by criticism over its privacy settings.
The once-extremely-popular site will simplify its own privacy settings over the coming weeks, giving users the “option to select one privacy setting for all information in their profiles, which often include a user’s name, birthday, interests and photos.”
Profiles can be made public to everyone, MySpace friends only, or MySpace users over 18 only.
Previously, the settings for different sections of their profile were scattered, including the separate controls for privacy on their photos, comments and friend’s lists.
Taking a jab at Facebook’s recent plights, MySpace Co-President Mike Jones says: “Given all the noise in the industry, we want to get out and state a clear position so that our users understand that we take privacy very seriously.”
Result for: files
RapidShare has announced this week that an appeals court in Germany has ruled in favor of the file sharing site, saying it could not be found liable for distribution of unauthorized files, and that forcing the company to filter all uploads would “produce too many false positives.”
The court ruled in their favor because the company does not make uploaded files publicly available, and the uploaders themselves have control of who sees the links.
In 2008, a different court ruled against the sharing site, saying they were currently not doing enough to combat copyright infringement and that the filter system employed was ineffective.
If that decision had stood, RapidShare would have had to log IP addresses, and “proactively check content before publishing it.”
Adds Christian Schmid, founder of RapidShare: “We are very happy about the judgment. The court has confirmed that RapidShare is not responsible for the contents of files uploaded by its users. The judgment shows that attempts to denounce our business model as illegal will not be successful in the long run. With its 1-click-filehosting model, RapidShare responds to legitimate interests of its users and will continue to do so in the future.”
