The dollar is trading modestly firmer, finding its feet after declining yesterday. EUR-USD is off by 0.25%, having ebbed from 1.0637, which was a six-day peak seen in NY trade yesterday after the European exit. Better than expected unemployment data had yesterday imparted a bid in the euro, though follow-through has been limited ahead of prelim November Eurozone HICP today (a rise to 0.3% y/y is expected after October's 0.2%), tomorrow's ECB meeting (where a 20 bp cut in the deposit rate is anticipated, plus a widening in asset eligibility in the QE program), and Friday's U.S.
In 2012, as Megaupload’s servers were being closed down in the U.S. and Dotcom’s New Zealand mansion was being raided by armed police, the entrepreneur’s offices in Hong Kong were being turned over by a reported 100 customs officers.
Under instruction from the U.S. government, HK$330 million (US$42.57m) in assets were seized and have remained restrained in Hong Kong ever since.
In April 2014, Megaupload launched legal action against the Hong Kong government, applying for the restraining order to be set aside while accusing the secretary for justice of procedural failings when the application for seizure was made.
In December 2014 came a breakthrough when a judge in the High Court set aside the restraining order. However, while an almost immediately lock was reapplied to Dotcom’s assets, a revised order granted Dotcom’s legal team the right to contest the asset freeze.
As part of that ongoing process, Dotcom’s lawyers were back in court this week asking for the release of large amounts of funds, the equivalent of US$2.3m to cover legal costs plus US$52,000 per month for his living expenses.
In keeping with argument presented at his recent extradition hearing in New Zealand, Dotcom’s legal team told the Hong Kong court that by restraining his funds and expecting him to mount a defense their client’s hands “were tied behind his back.”
SCMP reports that while Dotcom had a “world-class” legal team in the New Zealand hearing, he had no money left to pay them so had to use “junior lawyers.” Money had now run out in New Zealand, so the funds in Hong Kong were the next best option.
But just like last year when Hong Kong authorities were accused by Dotcom’s team of not making a “full disclosure” of the facts, this week the authorities sought to turn the tables.
Representing the government, prosecutor Wayne Walsh SC claimed Dotcom did the same after starting two new businesses and running transactions “worth hundreds of millions of dollars” through Hong Kong bank accounts. Dotcom was also criticized for not disclosing details of his living costs
Once a staunch supporter of Hong Kong, Dotcom now finds himself at the mercy of the country’s judges who to date have been much less flexible than their counterparts in New Zealand when it comes to releasing funds.
Back in May a New Zealand court released millions in funds to pay for Dotcom’s legal bills, plus $128K per month in living expenses.
A sizable $60K of that money was earmarked to pay the rent on Dotcom’s mansion, which has been reported to cost around $750,000 per annum under a lease signed in February 2013.
However, the terms of the agreement meant that Dotcom would ultimately have to buy the property or move out. It was reported in November that the entrepreneur would be moving to a waterfront penthouse apartment on “fashionable” Princes Wharf instead.
“It’s significantly more humble than what I am used to but that’s okay,” Dotcom said last month. “I am also not living with a partner any more, we have reduced our staff numbers significantly and this place feels a little bit big now.”
The dollar lost some ground following the big November ISM miss, though reaction was partially mitigated by a better construction spending outcome. EUR-USD opened near 1.0600, and made its way to session highs of 1.0636. USD-JPY started the session at highs near 123.20, though slipped to 122.80 after the data. Yields fell on raised concerns over a December Fed tightening, as Wall Street posted decent gains, likely for the same reason. The November ADP employment survey will be the key event on Wednesday, and will firm up forecasts for Friday's official BLS employment report.
Considering the amount of publicity a wrongful DMCA notice can generate these days, it’s no surprise that when a gift of a story presents itself, people are happy to jump on board.
Unfortunately, however, some stories are more complex than they first appear and when that complexity is borne out of a deliberate desire to mislead, chaos is bound to ensue.
On November 25 a tantalizing piece appeared in Electronic Beats detailing how in an apparent desire to protect copyright, Soundcloud had finally gone too far. A follow-up piece from YourEDM put meat on the bones.
“Just when you thought Soundcloud couldn’t get any worse, they strike again harder than ever. Now reaching an all time low, Soundcloud has removed a track that is nothing but 4 minutes of pure silence due to ‘Copyright Infringement’ claims,” it declared.
The piece was uploaded to an account operated by D.J. Detweiler and consisted of a remix (if one could ever be possible) of the John Cage ‘track’ 4’33”, a famous performance consisting of nothing but silence.
“That’s right, a song that has literally no sound was flagged for removal. How? Because Soundcloud is lazy and takes shortcuts to flag and remove content,” the YourEDM piece continued.
“Instead of crawling the uploaded content for copyright material, which takes a decent amount of CPU power, Soundcloud has resorted into cutting that process out entirely and beginning to flag content based on JUST the track title.”
As recipes for outrage go, this was an absolute doozy and no wonder it was picked up by several publications in the days that followed. However, as is now becoming painfully obvious, the whole thing was a giant stunt. A statement from Soundcloud obtained by Engadget revealed the cringe-worthy truth.
“The upload referenced in the screenshot was not a track of silence and was taken down because it included Justin Bieber’s What Do You Mean without the rightsholder’s permission,” the company said.
“The respective user uploaded the track under the title “4’33”,” which is also the name of John Cage’s famous piece of silence but it was not, in fact, silence.”
So what were D.J. Detweiler’s aims? Well, trolling the press appears to be one. In a biting follow-up amid several retweets of regurgitated articles on the same topic, D.J. Detweiler posted the following image.
Another aim appears to be recreating the work of Cage to prove a point. Although Cage’s track 4’33” was supposed to be silent, ‘performers’ are expected to be present but not play. Unless done so in a vacuum, the resulting ‘performance’ therefore includes ambient noise. Equally, it appears that D.J. Detweiler’s ‘silence’ is now intentionally causing noise around the Internet too.
“We are making a remix of the original performance of John Cage. The only different thing is that we are making it on the internet in 2015, instead of doing it in a space like a theater, like John Cage did. The whole environment around what we’re doing is the performance because everybody’s reacting.”
But trolling and frivolity aside, it does appear that DJ Detweiler have a copyright message to deliver.
“When John Cage wrote that piece, one of the main reasons was because he was trying to ask, who owns the silence? Who has the copyright for the silence?” they ask. “The laws surrounding copyright at this point seem highly outdated and need some sort of reformation, and we just want to push that.”
While the group have certainly achieved their aims, it’s perhaps a bit of a shame that’s been achieved at the expense of publications who mainly appeared to have sympathy with often overreaching copyright law.
That being said, when one looks at DJ Detweiler’s Facebook and homepages (epilepsy warning!), the value of doing more research really starts to pay off.
DJ Detweiler are taking part in a panel discussion about “branding, hype and trends” this Thursday at the 3hd Festival in Berlin. He’s described as an individual there but at this point, who knows?
The dollar corrected some of the gains it saw yesterday. EUR-USD lifted to a 1.0618 high in the wake of German unemployment data, which revealed a new record low of 6.3%. The Eurozone jobless rate also fell to a four-year low of 10.7%.. USD-JPY has settled lower, back to below and around the 123.00 level, below yesterday's high at 123.34. In Japan today, capex data was much better than expected, rising 11.2% in Q3 from 5.6% in Q2, though this won't likely dent mainstream expectations for the BoJ to deliver a policy expansion in January.
In an effort to curb online piracy, early last year the movie and music industries reached agreement with the UK’s leading ISPs to send ‘warnings’ to alleged pirates.
The warning program is part of the larger Creative Content UK (CCUK) initiative which also includes an educational component. Though various PR campaigns the coalition hopes to change people’s attitudes towards piracy.
CCUK was launched after years of negotiating and the plans were widely discussed in the media. However, when the first campaign launched a few weeks ago there was a remarkable silence.
The first education campaign is called “Get It Right from a Genuine Site.” It encourages people to stay clear from pirate sites and use licensed services instead, so that copyright holders and industry employees are properly compensated.
The campaign was promoted alongside an ad which aired during the UK version of The X-Factor and elsewhere late October. In the high-profile advertising spot, which isn’t cheap, viewers were encouraged to duck dodgy sites and go legit.
“Get the stuff you love from genuine sites and support creativity. Download or stream from dodgy sites and contribute nothing. It’s your choice,” it says.
Get It Right from a Genuine Site
CCUK is encouraging the public to use the hashtag #genuine to promote the initiative. However, thus far the response has been rather underwhelming with only a handful of tweets, mostly from industry insiders.
Today, the hashtag is mostly used in totally unrelated tweets and on other social media the project isn’t really taking off either. The official Facebook page of the campaign has only 114 likes.
The only Facebook comment responding to the campaign ad is not very encouraging either. “It’s not 2003. No one’s getting pirated music from IRC or whatever,” it reads.
In addition to the ad, CCUK is also backing a large street art project. It’s not entirely clear how this offline project relates to online piracy, but perhaps it’s an effort to appeal to the target audience.
TorrentFreak asked CCUK for a comment on the first campaign, but at the time of writing we haven’t heard back.
A CCUK spokesperson previously informed us that their ultimate goal is to bring down local piracy rates. During the months following the rollout the file-sharing habits of UK Internet users will be frequently polled to measure the impact of the campaign.
“The aim of Creative Content UK is to encourage greater use of legal content services and to reduce online copyright infringement. There will be regular measurements of legal and illegal consumption of content throughout the duration of the initiative, which will be compared with levels before the launch of the program,” CCUK told TF.
Considering the response and exposure thus far, there’s still a long way to go.
The dollar is trading at moderately softer levels after rallying to fresh trend highs yesterday. The Aussie outperformed, logging a six-week versus the greenback, three-month highs against the yen and five month highs versus the euro. AUD-USD's high was 0.7284. Australian data were encouraging: the current account balance narrowed to A$18.2 bln from A$20.5 bln, while building approvals unexpectedly rose by 3.9% in October, up from September's 2.3%. The RBA, meanwhile, left the cash rate unchanged at 2% for the seventh consecutive time, as widely expected.
In 2012, as Megaupload’s servers were being closed down in the U.S. and Dotcom’s New Zealand mansion was being raided by armed police, the entrepreneur’s offices in Hong Kong were being turned over by a reported 100 customs officers.
Considering the amount of publicity a wrongful DMCA notice can generate these days, it’s no surprise that when a gift of a story presents itself, people are happy to jump on board.
In an effort to curb online piracy, early last year the movie and music industries 
