Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Request
In a comical display of meta-censorship several copyright holders including 20th Century Fox and NBC Universal Movie Studios have sent Google takedown requests asking the search engine to take down links to takedown request they themselves sent.
Photo: Kimihiro Hoshino / Getty Images
Torrent Freak
April 5, 2013
Google refused to comply with the movie studios requests and the “infringing” DMCA notices remain online. Meanwhile, the number of takedown notices received by Google is nearing 20 million per month.
There’s a dark side to Google’s transparency efforts, especially when it comes to publishing DMCA requests it receives from copyright holders.
With more than 100 million links to pirated files Google is steadily building the largest database of copyrighted material. This is rather ironic as it would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available.
Indeed, the DMCA notices are meant to make content harder to find on the Internet, but in the process they create a semi-organized index of links to infringing material.
This problem is illustrated by several takedown requests that were sent on behalf of movie studio 20th Century Fox recently. Usually these notices ask Google to remove links to pirate sites, but Fox also wants Google to remove the DMCA notices they sent earlier.
Below is an example, with Fox stating that this DMCA takedown request is “infringing” itself.
Meta-censorship
The movie studio is not the only copyright holder going after their own takedown notices. Other Hollywood studios including NBC Universal and Lionsgate have done the same, and Microsoft too.
We expect that the notices are just another byproduct of the automated tools that are used to find infringing URLs. However, it’s a “mistake” that signals one of the key problems of automated censorship, and one that can lead to an endless loop of DMCA notices.
Thus far the infringing takedown notices remain accessible through Google search. Apparently Google has white-listed the Chillingeffects domain because it doesn’t see these indirect links as infringing.
While this may seem logical, Google is no stranger to removing non-direct links to links. If we take a look at the text pasting service Pastebin we see that Google removed 82,937 URLs from its index. These indirect links are all non-clickable and no different from the DMCA notices.
The standards are shifting in other ways too. No longer is Google merely asked to remove direct links to copyrighted material as the DMCA prescribes, but also links to links to links to copyrighted material.
The above shows the growing mess the current DMCA procedures are creating and for now there is no end in sight. Both Google and the copyright holders agree that something has to change, but understandably the solution they envision is quite different.
In the meantime, copyright holders continue to push the search engine to its takedown limits at a rate of 20 million URLs a month.
To be continued.
Intellihub.com
Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Request
Thursday, March 28, 2013
When Will Deposit Haircuts Take Place In Other European Countries?
When all is said and done, what happened in Cyprus over the past two weeks, is nothing but the culmination of re-marking the “assets” in the country’s financial system (which as noted previously, were a preponderance of worthless Greek bonds and countless other non-performing loans), long priced at assorted “myth” levels, to a long overdue reality.
As a result of delaying resolving the mismatch between non-performing assets and liabilities for years, the resolution was one which saw some €16 billion of the total asset base impaired, which in turn necessitated the impairment of billions of deposits: the primary liability funding the Cypriot financial system.
Furthermore, as a result of the “Freudian Slip” by the Eurogroup’s new head earlier this week, we know that Cyprus will be the template for all future bank resolutions, which seek to avoid a democratic popular vote of depositor self-impairment (a vote which is now known will never actually pass) and proceed to restructuring the banking sector a la carte, by liquidating bad banks and impairing liabilities to the point where the balance sheet is once again viable (however briefly).
The bottom line is that at its core, it is all simply a bad-debt problem, and the more the bad debt, the greater the ultimate liability impairments become, including deposits. Which means that the real question in Europe is: how much impairment capacity is there in the various European nations before deposits have to be haircut? Thanks to Credit Suisse we now know the answer.
The chart below shows the liability breakdown for various Eurozone nations, of which the key line item is the Total Deposits, and which in Europe comprises the bulk of bank funding. It becomes obvious why Cyprus had no choice but to crush depositors: they make up a whopping 84% of all liabilities (the highest in Europe and matched only by Greece), so assuming all other liabilities are liquidated, there still would be impairments if the total bad assets (assuming all bank assets are loans which in Europe, unlike the US, is more or less the case) pushed above 16% which in Cyprus they did.
So applying some simple balance sheet equality math, one can quickly calculate how much of a “Bad-Debt Impairment” assorted European financial systems can withstand before they too have no choice but to follow in Cyprus’ footsteps and begin crushing depositors, who in bankruptcy court are known by a different, less friendly term: General Unsecured Claims.
The resulting chart is below:
Not surprisingly, in first place is Cyprus which underwent precisely the deposit haircut exercise that would have befallen Greece as well (at the same bad debt capacity), if only Greece had an easily expendable, for political reasons, deposit class – Russian Oligarchs. However, as more and more bad-debt accumulates within the system, the ability to provide a liquidity buffer, instead of resolving what is fundamentally a solvency issue, evaporates, and soon Greece, then Belgium, the Slovenia, then Spain, then Portugal, and so on, will have to address which, as Cyprus clearly demonstrated, is a solvency problem, not liquidity!
When will such days of reckoning happen? Ask the Cypriots: they had no idea they would wake up one day with virtually all of their deposits over €100,000 wiped out. Point being – nobody knows, or more specifically, fundamentally this is a political decision, usually one which is taken ahead of elections (i.e., those in Germany this September), and which has nothing to do with actual finances.
The reality however is that all of Europe’s banks have a soaring bad-asset overhang, and sooner or later it will have to be resolved.
It is now common knowledge that such resolution will not take place via additional liquidity injections, but through impairment of the various liability classes as per the reverse waterfall of seniority: first equity, then capital and reserves then junior debt, and finally, senior debt and deposits (with secured senior debt last).
The lesson here is: do your homework, and know your bank. If one’s deposits are in a bank that has, or is rumored to have, many bad loans, then pull your money and either put it in a safe bank, put it offshore, or just keep it under the mattress.
Because what happened in Cyprus is now, despite all promises to the contrary, the template for what will happen to all the countries to the right of Cyprus on the chart above.
It’s only a matter of “when.”
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When Will Deposit Haircuts Take Place In Other European Countries?