Month: December 2018

Every year we write roughly 900 articles here at TorrentFreak, and some are more popular than others.

On the brink of the new year, we look back at 2018 by going over the 18 most read news items of the year.

All in all, it was quite a controversial year once again. Troubles at various torrent sites were frequently mentioned, as well as the inevitable legal issues.

But what will 2019 bring?

1. LimeTorrents Fights Blocking Efforts With New Domain and Homepage

In July, LimeTorrents changed domain names and updated its homepage in response to various blocking efforts. The site hoped to bypass ISP blockades, at least temporarily, but also to counter a Google ban. While the changes helped temporarily, the new limetorrents.info remains hard to find in the search engine.

2. Pirate Bay Suffers Downtime, Tor Domain is Up

The Pirate Bay has suffered weeks of downtime over the past year. There were several related articles that qualified for this list, but we limited it to this one entry from August. The mysterious issues continued for weeks and some still have trouble accessing the site through its regular .org domain.

3. Terrarium TV: One of the Best-Loved Pirate Apps Shuts Down

In September, Terrarium TV – one of the most-loved ‘pirate’ applications for Android – ceased operating for good. Developer NitroXenon announced that the software, known for its slick interface and huge content selection, would stop working at the end of the month.

4. Demonoid Goes Down While Owner Remains ‘Missing’

Demonoid has a reputation for disappearing, sometimes for months. This became painfully apparent again this year. During the summer the site started to suffer downtime and later on it vanished completely. The site’s owner also went missing around the same time. While he reached out to staff weeks later, the site remains offline today. The issues at Demonoid were discussed in several popular news posts but we limited them to one entry in this list.

5. SevenTorrents Shuts Down, Transfers Database to New Torrent Site

In August, torrent site SevenTorrents closed its doors. The site’s operator announced that the user database was transferred to the brand new torrent site Watchsomuch, so the community can live on. This site remains online today.

6. OfflineBay ‘Saves The Day’ When Pirate Bay Goes Down

With all the Pirate Bay downtime an ‘offline’ copy of the site’s torrent database sounded like a good idea to software developer TechTac. Based on the number of people who read the article, many people agreed.

7. Torrent Links Return to Torrentz2 After Mystery Disappearance

All links to torrents disappeared from Torrentz2 December 2017. The site remained without links for roughly three weeks, after which the site, just as surprisingly, returned to its former glory. Two weeks later a similar issue appeared, but that only affected ad-block users.

8. ExtraTorrent Replacement Displays Warning On Predecessor’s Shutdown Anniversary

ExtraTorrent.ag, the unofficial successor of ExtraTorrent, started to point to a security warning a year after the original site shut down. The warning was only short-lived as everything went back to normal after a few days.

9. IP Address is Not Enough to Identify Pirate, US Court of Appeals Rules

This summer the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reached a verdict in Cobbler Nevada v. Gonzales. The Court ruled that identifying the registered subscriber of an IP-address by itself is not enough to argue that this person is also the infringer. The order also affected several other cases.

10. Thor Ragnarok Furiously Pirated After iTunes Pre-Order Blunder

Following a massive blunder, Thor Ragnarok was made available on iTunes weeks before its official release. Soon after, copies started to spread all over the Internet, which were pirated at a furious rate.

11. Flixtor Offline Following Mysterious Domain Updates

Late November, pirate streaming site Flixtor became unreachable. After a week it returned without content. According to a message posted on the site, Flixtor must be rebuilt from scratch. It’s unknown how long this will take.

12. Top 10 Torrent Site iDope Goes Down With Domain Issues

In August, iDope – one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet – went offline. The site’s operator informed us normal service would be resumed in a few days, through new domain names. However, at the end of the year the original iDope site is nowhere to be found.

13. Nintendo Sues Console ROM Sites For ‘Mass’ Copyright Infringement

In July, Nintendo filed a complaint at a federal court in Arizona, accusing LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co of massive copyright and trademark infringement. The operators, a married couple, eventually agreed to a $12 million settlement in favor of the game developer.

14. Tamilrockers Arrests: Police Parade Alleged Movie Pirates on TV

Three men said to be behind notorious India-focused pirate site Tamilrockers were reportedly arrested in March. Two other men, allegedly linked to partner site DVD Rockers, were also detained.

15. SkyTorrents Dumps Massive Torrent Database and Shuts Down

The ad-free and privacy-focused torrent site “SkyTorrents” became a victim of its own success. With millions of pageviews per day, the site was too expensive to manage, leaving the operator with no other option than to shut it down.

16. Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC With Five Million Downloads

An ad-supported VLC clone on Google Play amassed a staggering five to ten million downloads while breaching VLC’s GPL license. Google initially didn’t take it down, but that changed soon after the article was published.

17. Terrarium TV Dev Says He Could Hand User Info to Authorities

After shutting down the ‘pirate’ app Terrarium TV, the developer released some worrying news for former users. He informed TorrentFreak that if required, he’ll give up user data to the authorities.

18. PUBG Files Copyright Lawsuit to Shut Down Competition

In April, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the developer of the mobile games “Rules of Survival” and “Knives Out.” The company argued that the games copied specific elements as well as the overall look and feel from PUBG. This case remains ongoing.

—

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

In wenigen Wochen wird Nvidia die vergleichsweise günstige Geforce RTX 2060 für Desktop-Systeme veröffentlichen. Raytracing beschleunigt die Turing-Karte, der Videospeicher könnte aber zum Problem werden. (Nvidia Turing, Grafikhardware)

Fünf Buchstaben haben unser Jahr 2018 charakterisiert: DSGVO. Außerdem: Rekorde, Jubiläen, neue Mitarbeiter, Leserumfragen - und ein spannendes, aber weniger erfolgreiches Projekt. (Golem.de, Internet)

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Anyone even remotely interested in movies and the Internet will have likely stumbled across the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb for short.

The site is an absolute goldmine of information on every imaginable movie, listing everything from cast and crew to user reviews, trailers and trivia, with dozens of additional data points to allow the consumer to research and invest in content.

IMDb is an entirely legal venture but for reasons best known to dozens of content and anti-piracy companies, it is regularly subjected to takedown notices who claim that the service is a pirate site.

For example, early December an anti-piracy outfit working to protect the movie ‘The Wedding Ringer’ for Sony Pictures Entertainment targeted a range of URLs in a notice to Google. Unfortunately, the notice also listed an IMDb URL that offers the legal trailer for the movie.

Even more bizarrely, a company working on behalf of TV company RCN TV filed a strongly-worded notice aiming to protect the TV show “The Law of the Heart“.

“[The URLs contains] an illegal pirated copy of RCN’s copyrighted episodic series La ley del corazon episode/s 01-130. RCN TV has not in any capacity, authorized https://www.imdb.com to distribute its content,” the notice reads.

“RCN hereby requests that based on the DMCA and Google’s own copyright infringement rules, that said portal be removed from its system in order to prevent further abuse and financial losses to our brand as copyright owners.”

The notice lists 132 IMDb URLs, all of which promote and inform the public on the show with none offering any episode for free. Google did the right thing and removed none of them.

But it’s not just foreign companies targeting IMDb with wrongful takedowns. On December 8, an anti-piracy company working for Home Box Office tried to ‘protect‘ the TV show Rellik by removing its IMDb page.

A few days earlier, the same company (this time working for MGM Studios) tried to remove the IMDb page for Get Shorty, while throwing in its Wikipedia page for good measure.

A takedown notice sent on behalf of Columbia Pictures to protect The Amazing Spider-Man 2 didn’t achieve much either.

No, that’s not right…

While most if not all notices that target IMDb are sent in error, there appears to be a common mistake made by some anti-piracy companies.

When sending notices to Google, instead of listing IMDb URLs as the source of the content (it isn’t, but many companies list it as such), they accidentally put IMDb as the infringing URL. This notice sent on behalf of National Geographic lists several such examples.

Google’s Transparency Report lists more than 170 largely bogus DMCA complaints against IMDb, which is something easily prevented with a simple whitelisting of the site’s URL.

What makes things even more ridiculous is that IMDb is owned by Amazon and on every page where legal consumption is possible, the company provides a link where visitors can watch legally using Prime Video. Given that, at the time of writing, the complaints covered more than 4,600 URLs, that’s potentially a lot of lost business via Google search.

Thankfully, as the image below shows, Google’s diligence when reviewing DMCA complaints prevents most notice senders from shooting themselves in the foot. However, it doesn’t take a genius to work out what delisting from IMDb could do for a movie’s sales. Is it really too much effort to whitelist the site?

Google saves the day for hundreds of movies

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Anyone even remotely interested in movies and the Internet will have likely stumbled across the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb for short.

The site is an absolute goldmine of information on every imaginable movie, listing everything from cast and crew to user reviews, trailers and trivia, with dozens of additional data points to allow the consumer to research and invest in content.

IMDb is an entirely legal venture but for reasons best known to dozens of content and anti-piracy companies, it is regularly subjected to takedown notices who claim that the service is a pirate site.

For example, early December an anti-piracy outfit working to protect the movie ‘The Wedding Ringer’ for Sony Pictures Entertainment targeted a range of URLs in a notice to Google. Unfortunately, the notice also listed an IMDb URL that offers the legal trailer for the movie.

Even more bizarrely, a company working on behalf of TV company RCN TV filed a strongly-worded notice aiming to protect the TV show “The Law of the Heart“.

“[The URLs contains] an illegal pirated copy of RCN’s copyrighted episodic series La ley del corazon episode/s 01-130. RCN TV has not in any capacity, authorized https://www.imdb.com to distribute its content,” the notice reads.

“RCN hereby requests that based on the DMCA and Google’s own copyright infringement rules, that said portal be removed from its system in order to prevent further abuse and financial losses to our brand as copyright owners.”

The notice lists 132 IMDb URLs, all of which promote and inform the public on the show with none offering any episode for free. Google did the right thing and removed none of them.

But it’s not just foreign companies targeting IMDb with wrongful takedowns. On December 8, an anti-piracy company working for Home Box Office tried to ‘protect‘ the TV show Rellik by removing its IMDb page.

A few days earlier, the same company (this time working for MGM Studios) tried to remove the IMDb page for Get Shorty, while throwing in its Wikipedia page for good measure.

A takedown notice sent on behalf of Columbia Pictures to protect The Amazing Spider-Man 2 didn’t achieve much either.

No, that’s not right…

While most if not all notices that target IMDb are sent in error, there appears to be a common mistake made by some anti-piracy companies.

When sending notices to Google, instead of listing IMDb URLs as the source of the content (it isn’t, but many companies list it as such), they accidentally put IMDb as the infringing URL. This notice sent on behalf of National Geographic lists several such examples.

Google’s Transparency Report lists more than 170 largely bogus DMCA complaints against IMDb, which is something easily prevented with a simple whitelisting of the site’s URL.

What makes things even more ridiculous is that IMDb is owned by Amazon and on every page where legal consumption is possible, the company provides a link where visitors can watch legally using Prime Video. Given that, at the time of writing, the complaints covered more than 4,600 URLs, that’s potentially a lot of lost business via Google search.

Thankfully, as the image below shows, Google’s diligence when reviewing DMCA complaints prevents most notice senders from shooting themselves in the foot. However, it doesn’t take a genius to work out what delisting from IMDb could do for a movie’s sales. Is it really too much effort to whitelist the site?

Google saves the day for hundreds of movies

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Aufatmen bei Publishern: In China gibt es wieder Zulassungen für Computerspiele. Auf einen Schlag wurden jetzt 80 neue Games auf allen Plattformen freigegeben. Weitere sollen folgen - auch von Tencent und Netease, deren Aktienkurs unter der monatelangen Sperre gelitten hatten. (Games, Playstation 4)

Droht eine Republica-nisierung des Chaos Communication Congress? Der CCC nutzte das Tagungsmotto "Refreshing Memories", um auf dem 35C3 über den Umgang mit rechten Parteien und die Bedeutung der Hackerethik zu erinnern. Eine Analyse von Friedhelm Greis (35C3, CCC)

Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments