It appears that entertainment industry trade groups like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have found a new ally in their fight against piracy, as internet giant Yahoo! has begun censoring communications in their Messenger chat program.
TorrentFreak has discovered that links to media search engine FilesTube sent in Yahoo! Messenger chat sessions are suddenly being inexplicably blocked.
“Those who try to paste a FilesTube link to their contacts in the Messenger app will notice that it never reaches its destination,” says TorrentFreak writer Ernesto in an article this week. “The link goes directly into Yahoo’s dark hole and neither end of the conversation is alerted to this ‘feature’.”
There are several problems with Yahoo’s decision to censor such links, if that is what is indeed what is happening.
FilesTube, while offering a way to find links to BitTorrent content, does not host any content on its own servers. It is merely a search engine, much like Yahoo!. Yes, some of the links that can be found via FilesTube are infringing upon copyrights, however the company has swiftly responded to DMCA takedown notices that have been issued.
Also, the chats in which the links are being censored are private conversations between two people. Not that it would be any less forgivable if the information was actually out in the open, but where does Yahoo! get off trying to censor personal conversations?
Furthermore, there is plenty of legal material, like the original BitTorrent-exclusive series Pioneer One which are now blocked from Yahoo! Messenger conversations because of this ridiculous move.
This is even worse than Google’s move to censor search results containing anything to do with torrents, an action that sparked great media controversy when it went into effect in January.
Frankly, I’m outraged that Yahoo! would try to tell me what I can and cannot talk about in private online chats. If I was actually using their services for anything at this point, they’d be losing a customer.
