Month: October 2017

Last November, the cybercrime unit of the French military police shut down the country’s largest pirate site, Zone-Telechargement (Download Zone). This was a huge problem for the millions of people who visited the site on a daily basis.

Founded in 2011, Zone-Telechargement’s popularity soared after the closure of Megaupload, which was also hugely popular in France until its shutdown early 2012. It’s been dead ever since though, despite suggestions it might somehow return to life.

Interestingly, however, a site claiming to be a reincarnation of the original is now trying to scoop up traffic, with promises that the excitement can be found at a new URL.

“Welcome to the new Zone-Telechargement! This is the new address of the indexing site to find movies and series,” a notice on the site reads.

“We make every effort to ensure that you can watch your movies and series in the best conditions and in complete safety. Therefore, we invite you as a Zone-Telechargement user to help us in our big mission! Share our site, talk about it!”

This cloned pirate site is not what it seems

During the past couple of days, people have certainly been talking about it, but not for the usual reasons. As reported by NextInpact, the site already has 100,000 links on Google after being launched sometime in August.

But this is no ordinary pirate site. In fact, it’s not a pirate site at all. While it looks exactly like its pirate namesake, the site links only to legal content on platforms such as Amazon, iTunes, and other official sources.

NextInpact reports that the site is hosted in France and uses film posters and metadata hosted by the National Film Center, which grants official vendors access to a database of supporting content to help them sell their products online.

So, could this be an innovative and unconventional service set up by elements of the film industry to suck in pirates, perhaps?

TF decided to look into the possibility by pulling information from WHOIS, DNS and MX records, hoping to find a trace of who’s behind the operation. None of the searches yielded much information of direct value but they did turn up something else.

Zone-Telechargement.al, it seems, is not on its own. Hosted on the same server at OVH in France is Voirfilms.al which clones VoirFilms.org, a pirate site that was ordered to be blocked by the Paris District Court earlier this year.

Two peas in a pod on the same server

Just like Zone-Telechargement.al, Voirfilms.al only links to legal content. However, when one searches for movies, at least the first two sets of links to content contain affiliate codes for Amazon and a local service, meaning the site’s operators get a kickback from any sale.

Given they use the same host server, mail server, and referral codes (tag=blue0d7-21 for Amazon), we considered it likely that the same people are behind both domains, passing them off as pirate sites in an effort to generate revenue.

Then, on Friday afternoon, NextInpact editor Marc Rees contacted us with a really interesting update. After further research, Rees had concluded that anti-piracy outfit Blue Efficience was probably behind the scheme. Sure enough, after contacting founder and CEO Thierry Chevillard, the company confirmed the project.

“We always had the idea to promote the legal offer. Anti-piracy protection is good, but it is insufficient without this component,” Chevillard told Rees.

Chevillard said that since video-on-demand platforms have difficulties in getting themselves noticed over pirate sites, his company took the decision to mimic the pirate strategy.

“[T]he pirate sites are extremely talented at putting themselves ahead in search engines where they beat the legal offers,” he said, adding that using similar weapons was the solution.

Chevillard told NextInpact that his company initially published links to content without the affiliate kickback but later took the for-profit route in order to “partially offset the costs, even if we are far from covering the costs of developing and operating the site.”

Of course, there’s a certain irony in an anti-piracy outfit actively pirating a pair of pirate sites, particularly since it clearly pirated the pirate sites’ logos and graphics, in order to pass the clones off as the real thing. However, Chevillard sees them as fair game and says his company will take action in the unlikely event the pirates take legal action.

The big question, of course, is whether the clone sites are having the desired effect of encouraging legal purchases. According to early data from Zone-Telechargement.al, around five purchases are made out of every 1000 clicks on content listed by the site.

While Blue Efficience’s cover has been well and truly blown, the company is undeterred and says it will expand its pirate site cloning business. If the strategy reaches any scale, that could be a whole new level of spam for would-be pirates to wade through. Nevertheless, there is a comedy ending to this story.

It appears that since the fake sites are so convincing, rival anti-piracy outfits have been asking Google to take down pages (1,2) from its indexes. Most ‘impressive’ are the efforts from takedown outfit Rivendel, which has filed dozens of complaints against these ‘pirate’ sites. Ouch.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Mario und ein Assassine springen wieder herum. In Windows 10 kommt auch Bewegung. Und die Telekom gräbt um. Sieben Tage und viele Meldungen im Überblick. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Assassin's Creed)

Portugal have introduced changes in copyright law that aims to make them fairer for consumers, potentially paving the way for other EU nations to adopt similar changes.

Most of the changes center around the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, and to enhance the user's rights when dealing with content protected by DRM.

The first major change will see existing copyright exemptions and fair use being applied to DRM, to allow DRM to be circumvented legally in these situations. For researchers, archivists and educators, this means they can remove DRM without worrying about the legal consequences. Exemptions are also in place for home users, who can now remove DRM for reproduction/copying, as long as it's for private use only.

The changes also deal with the situation where the licensee of content decides to place DRM on the content without the explicit permission of the copyright work's owner. In cases such as this, users are free to circumvent the DRM for any reason.

But perhaps the most important change is the complete banning of the use of DRM in certain cases where their use is considered counter-intuitive. Works that are in the public domain, or works produced or paid for by the government, will now no longer be allowed to include DRM. Not only will users be free to remove the DRM in these cases, the person or organisation that added the DRM to this content would be breaking the law and be subject to legal repercussions.

Despite these numerous exemptions to removing DRM, the act of producing or distributing anti-DRM tools is still considered illegal. This means that while ripping DRM is legal in some cases, users may have to resort to "illegal" means to obtain the tools and methods do carry out their legal right.

[via EFF]

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December 2015, a Virginia federal jury ruled that Internet provider Cox Communications was responsible for the copyright infringements of its subscribers.

The ISP was found guilty of willful contributory copyright infringement and ordered to pay music publisher BMG Rights Management $25 million in damages.

Cox swiftly filed its appeal arguing that the district court made several errors that may ultimately restrict the public’s access to Internet services.

This week the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard oral argument from both sides, which turned out to be an interesting exercise. The panel of judges Motz, Shedd, and Wynn grilled of both attorneys in an effort to distill the crucial arguments.

Cox attorney Michael Elkin was first up. Among other things, he stressed that Cox didn’t have actual and sufficient knowledge of the claimed infringements.

While BMG uncovered internal Cox emails discussing how frequent offenders were kept on board, these were not specifically discussing BMG infringed works, he argues. However, Judge Wynn stressed that the emails in question did discuss Cox’s policy of not disconnecting infringers.

“But they’re talking about the general abuse department in terms of, where we get these things, this is what we’re going to do with them because we don’t want to lose customers. I mean, it’s the same thing,” he said.

It’s also clear that BMG sent over a million takedown notices to Cox. However, since these were not the ones referenced in the company’s internal emails, these are irrelevant when it comes to the company’s liability for alleged contributory infringement, Cox’s attorney noted.

The back and forth over various issues became rather lively up to a point where Elkin was asked to stop interrupting. “When a judge speaks, you have to be quiet,” Judge Shedd said.

BMG attorney Michael Allan was next in line to present his arguments, which were also carefully dissected by the judges. The attorney stressed that in addition to the takedown notices, BMG provided Cox with a wealth of information on the alleged infringers.

He explained that they sent 1.8 million takedown notices to Cox. When asked what the Internet provider should do with all these notices, Allan mentioned the dashboard they made available, which would help the ISP to check all claims.

“We also provided them with a dashboard. It’s a searchable website that they can search by most egregious repeat infringer, they can pull up every single piece of information we’ve ever provided to them, and they can play the actual songs that were downloaded,” BMG’s attorney said.

Judge Wynn, however, questioned whether the ISP’s abuse department would listen to thousands of infringing songs.

“An internet service provider is going to receive 20,000 of these things per day, 1.8 million a year, or whatever, I don’t care. And they’re going to start playing songs and things like that to see if it’s going on?

“You think that’s where this case is going to go?” Wynn added.

The judges then moved on to the repeat infringer question. An important question asked, was what a ‘repeat infringer’ actually is. BMG’s attorney described this as “someone who repeatedly infringes copyright,” but that wasn’t enough.

“How does somebody know a third party is an infringer? ‘Cause you say so?” Judge Shedd asked.

Cox, for example, sees a repeat infringer as someone who has been previously adjudicated, not someone who has received several takedown notices. Eventually, all had to admit that a repeat infringer is not clearly defined in the DMCA.

Judge Wynn then moved on to highlight another peculiarity. While this case deals with Cox’s failure to implement a repeat infringer policy, this legal requirement by itself is rather meaningless. Even when subscribers are disconnected, they can still join another ISP or come back to Cox after a few months, which makes it pointless.

“As Judge Motz indicated it’s not a perfect solution,” BMG’s lawyer commented.

“It’s not even a good one,” Judge Wynn added.

Another controversial topic that came up is the fact that Cox refused to pass on BMG’s demands because the ISP saw the included settlement demands as extortion. While BMG’s attorney tried to downplay the money issue, Judge Shedd made it very clear what this case is actually about.

“[The DMCA notice] says: you are infringing, you can go to this website and click and pay us $20 or $30. If not, you’re looking at a $150,000 fine. It was about collecting money. We don’t dance around that do we?” Shedd said.

Both Cox and BMG ultimately wanted money from the allegedly infringing subscribers, who might now face an even bigger threat.

“You have two corporations fighting over money, which may be justified. But the net effect of this battle is going to be up against another policy, which is, I think it is the policy, that people should have access to the Internet,” Judge Shedd said.

While the case can still go either way, the oral hearing suggests that the panel of judges is not putting too much weight on the notices sent by BMG. The internal emails from Cox appear to be the key part. Still, we’ll have to wait for the full opinion to see if that’s really true.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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