Month: June 2020

YTS ‘Copycat’ Agrees to Settle Trademark Dispute for $200,000

The operator of YTS.ws has agreed to pay $200,000 in damages for using the YTS trademark without permission. While YTS is widely associated with torrent sites, the trademark was recently scooped up by a Hawaiian company that uses it to protect its rights. In addition to paying damages, YTS.ws will soon become unavailable as well.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

YTS.ws logoBrands are important for most businesses. They identify a service or product and are often associated with certain qualities.

This is no different in the piracy ecosystem. Brands are essential there as well but are not always what they seem.

Given the nature of pirate sites, brand copying is widespread. For example, EZTV is not operated by the original EZTV group, and the same goes for Torrentz, ExtraTorrent, NYAA, Popcorn Time, and many others. With the original operators gone or pushed aside, others have stepped in and taken over.

It is easy for copycats to jump in as there are no trademarks that offer protection and pirate sites are unlikely to sue each other. However, over the past weeks, trademark disputes have become a thing in piracy circles, leading to unprecedented outcomes.

In a consent judgment filed at a federal court in Hawaii this week, the operator of YTS.ws agreed to sign a consent judgment over his unauthorized use of the YTS trademark. YTS is the most popular torrent site online, which itself ‘copied’ the name from the defunct YTS group. However, this trademark claim isn’t being made by a torrent site.

Instead, the lawsuit was filed by Kerry Culpepper, a well-known anti-piracy lawyer. He works for the company 42 Ventures which registered several piracy-related trademarks a few months ago, including Popcorn Time, Showbox, and YTS. These trademarks are used to pressure piracy-related sites and services to pay settlements.

It’s a new scheme that raises all kinds of legal questions. However, pirate sites and services are not usually fond of litigating cases in court and in this case it’s no different. The owner of YTS.ws, a Russian man named Patrick Petrov, agreed to a settlement-type deal instead.

The consent order signed off by US District Court Judge Derrick Watson this week requires Petrov to pay $200,000 in damages.

YTS.ws consent judgment

In addition to paying a large sum of money, the YTS.ws operator agreed to a permanent injunction which requires him to stop using the YTS trademark within 30 days and to redirect the domain to a non-infringing site.

At the time of writing YTS.ws still operates as one of the many YTS copycats but, based on the agreement, this will change soon.

This is the first-ever case where the owner of a copycat pirate site has agreed to pay damages for trademark infringement. It may not be the last, however, as 42 Ventures has sued several other YTS sites as well.

Whether the Russian operator of the site will indeed pay $200,000 in damages is unknown. It’s not uncommon to list high damages amounts on paper while a lower amount is agreed upon behind the scenes.

A few weeks ago we reported that 42 Ventures had gone after a popular Popcorn Time fork, taking down their Twitter account. This revealed that both parties discussed a settlement to resolve the matter, which would cost the app’s developers ‘just’ $4,900.

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A copy of the consent judgment agreed and signed by both parties and approved by the federal court is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Plate tectonics vs. erosion—what sets the height of a mountain range?

Wish your mountain was a little bit taller? Blame plate tectonics.

The Andes along the border of Bolivia and Chile, as seen from the International Space Station.

Enlarge / The Andes along the border of Bolivia and Chile, as seen from the International Space Station. (credit: NASA EO)

If you think about mountain ranges like the Andes or the Himalayas, you can come up with multiple factors that must affect their size and shape. There’s the collision of tectonic plates that squeezes them up into the air, of course. At a subduction zone where oceanic crust sinks downward beneath the continent, you can also sprout volcanos that grow skyward. On the other side of the ledger, various weathering and erosional processes sculpt the peaks. Streams cut sharp V-shaped valleys, while glaciers scrape out broad U-shaped ones instead. Either way, the end result is that the high places are gradually worn down, their rock scattered into the lowlands.

So what, exactly, is the primary control on the range’s height? Is it just a function of the plate tectonic forces? Or does climate dictate things by setting the rate at which the peaks are consumed?

This is an actual topic of considerable debate in geology, with arguments going both ways. A team led by Armin Dielforder at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences wanted to test these hypotheses in a new way. The researchers set out to calculate the theoretical height of mountain ranges based purely on the tectonic forces. If erosion is dominant, you would see big mismatches between theoretical and actual heights—hopefully varying along with factors that influence erosion, like the climate.

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Bikes, baking, baseball cards: Three months (and counting) of pandemic hobbies

At least we’re holding onto hobbies that require no human interaction or travel.

Let's not mince words: 2020 has been an extremely tough hang. It sucks, frankly. We're three months into a viral pandemic that continues to kill thousands of individuals both in the US and abroad, and now numerous instances of police violence against Black Americans have urged protesters to take to the streets despite the underlying health risk (and the potential for more violent interactions with law enforcement). To make matters worse, no one still has any idea what a post-pandemic society will look like.

Our lives have inevitably changed forever, and we haven't even hit July. So, occasionally, we all need whatever bit of temporary respite we can find. COVID-19 has, naturally, also halted some of the most basic kinds of past hobbies—playing sports, eating out or having guests over, traveling, etc. But it hasn't drained every ounce of relaxation from the world yet, judging at least by some of the weekend hobbies still being clutched tightly around the Orbital HQ.

  • At top, St. Louis ribs, dry rubbed. At bottom, a tri-tip that got a quick sear and then about 40 minutes of smoking with oak, à la Cold Spring Tavern outside of Santa Barbara, Calif. [credit: Eric Bangeman ]

Hickory, oak, or mesquite tonight?

I'm a serial hobbyist, taking up new pastimes and then giving them up when I get tired of them. Hence my coin collection that has been untouched for most of the past decade and the empty fishtanks in my garage. But one hobby I've held on to, and have invested more time into, since the pandemic reared its ugly head in the United States: smoking meat.

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Schlechte Nachrichten für Trump: Hydroxychloroquin taugt nicht viel

Eine klinische Studie von Oriol Mitjà, der auf das Präparat gehofft hatte, weist auf keine positiven Wirkungen von Hydroxychloroquin hin und bestätigt eine Studie der University of Minnesota

Eine klinische Studie von Oriol Mitjà, der auf das Präparat gehofft hatte, weist auf keine positiven Wirkungen von Hydroxychloroquin hin und bestätigt eine Studie der University of Minnesota

Rebellion as Reddit Teenagers Stir Up Their Own Pirate Movie Bonanza

Reddit’s massively popular /r/teenagers sub went bootleg crazy this week when thousands of subscribers used the platform to watch pirated movies. For reasons that aren’t exactly clear, young adults suddenly began uploading titles including Sonic the Hedgehog, Cars, Shrek, Toy Story and…erm…Silence of the Lambs.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Reddit pirateWith close to two million subscribers, Reddit’s /r/teenagers sub-Reddit is a massive community by any standards.

“Run by teenagers for teenagers”, this section of Reddit is “primarily for discussions and memes that an average teenager would enjoy to discuss about.”

This week, however, it also became a hive of copyright-infringing activity.

For reasons that aren’t exactly clear, young people suddenly decided that their favorite discussion forum should be spiced up a bit. Not with the freshest of fresh memes but a flood of pirated movies considered popular with the younger generation.

One of the first to be uploaded was the 2020 movie Sonic the Hedgehog, complete with embedded subtitles for any Korean visitors. As the image below shows, the post received a selection of awards, thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments, some expressing praise and others a level of surprise.

Sonic the Hedgehog

With a minority wondering if these uploads were a particularly good idea, the fuse nevertheless appeared to have been well and truly lit. Over the next several hours the feeding frenzy continued, with uploads of movies including Cars, Bee Movie, The Incredibles and Toy Story, to name just a few.

Despite little immediate fear that something bad might happen to the uploaders (a couple of ‘FBI’ and “Wait…this is illegal” comments aside), at least one user uploaded a copy of Shrek, with a note pleading with Dreamworks not to sue them.

Shrek

While Dreamworks probably has bigger fish to fry, Shrek movies continued to be uploaded, with copies of Shrek 2 and Shrek Forever After adding to the bootleg viewing experience spreading across the sub-Reddit.

What it must be like trying to control a sub-Reddit full of teenagers is open to guesswork but the moderators were certainly kept busy for a while trying to delete the movies being uploaded. However, despite best efforts to delete the posts, in many instances the movies themselves remained stubbornly embedded, only adding to the viewer count and the “new trend” of pirating Hollywood movies on /r/teenagers, as one user put it.

It’s worth remembering that the teenage bracket spans a wide range of years, at least as far as life experiences go. The sub-Reddit attempts to cater to 13 to 19-year-olds, which may go some way to explaining why some were crazy for Shrek while others preferred something a little more…sophisticated….

Silence of the Lambs

While Reddit users have found themselves banned for repeatedly posting copyrighted content, this ‘trend’ – like many teenage crazes in history – went off with a bang and then fizzled out when people got bored of being outrageous.

Soon after, it was back to memes and other things teenagers love to discuss these days. No intention of going into detail here but suffice to say, posting movies appears to be relatively tame these days.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.