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Auch der Westen ist verantwortlich für die Verklärung Massouds zum Helden des Widerstands gegen die Sowjets im Kalten Krieg
Auch im wenig beachteten Galicien hat Spanien “Terroristen” aufgespürt, die nun vor dem Nationalen Gerichtshof abgeurteilt werden sollen
Warum in der Stadttechnik unsere Zukunft liegt
In a new complaint filed at a Hawaii federal court, 19 ‘John Does’ are accused of sharing pirated copies of the film Ava. The defendants, who are only known by their IP-addresses, are described as users of the site YTS. While there is no hard evidence to back up all claims, the accused may still be in trouble.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
In recent months we have reported in detail how users of the popular torrent site YTS were sued in US courts.
In several of these cases, information shared by the site’s operator was brought in as evidence. The user info was obtained by anti-piracy lawyer Kerry Culpepper, as part of an undisclosed settlement agreement.
This week the same attorney is back in court representing ‘Eve Nevada LLC,’ the company behind the film Ava, which is shared widely on various pirate sites. Again, YTS is prominently mentioned, but this time things are different.
The complaint, filed at a Hawaii federal court, lists 19 ‘John Doe’ defendants who are only known by their IP-addresses. These addresses were caught sharing the film via public torrent trackers. Specifically, the complaint mentions a file titled “Ava (2020) [1080p] [WEBRip] [5.1] [YTS.MX].”
This title leads the filmmakers to the conclusion that the defendant must have been users of the YTS site. Or as the complaint puts it:
“Upon information and belief, each of the Defendants registered for an account on the YTS website using an email address or installed a BitTorrent Client application on their device that retrieved torrent files from the YTS website.”
This same conclusion, in addition to the fact that defendants downloaded the same file, is also used as an argument to join the 19 defendants in one case. However, based on the information presented, it’s far from clear that at all of these people were indeed YTS users.
Unlike in the other cases, the copyright holder didn’t present any information from the YTS user base, likely because it doesn’t have any. The data-sharing was a one-time arrangement several months ago, long before YTS released the movie Ava.
While it’s possible that the defendants indeed used YTS, they could have easily downloaded the .torrent file from other sites where the same file was made available. Although several torrent sites banned YTS torrents, many haven’t, including the illustrious Pirate Bay.
Whether the defendants are actually YTS users or not may not make much of a difference. At least not for the copyright infringement allegations.
In addition to direct and contributory copyright infringement, the complaint also accuses the defendant of violating the DMCA by altering copyright management information (CMI). In this case, that means distributing the movie Ava with an edited title, which references YTS.
“Particularly, the Defendants distributed the file names that included CMI that had been altered to include the wording ‘YTS’. Defendants knew that the wording “YTS” originated from the notorious movie piracy website for which each had registered accounts and/or actively used,” the complaint reads.
It’s doubtful that any of these cases will be fought on the merits. When the defendant’s personal information is exposed it’s likely that they will receive a settlement request, which is usually around $1,000. Those who refuse to settle can argue their case in court, but that’s going to cost as well. They can eventually win the case, but not without investing in a legal defense first.
As far as we know this is the first time people have been sued for downloading the film Ava. The company Eve Nevada is a new name as well, but one with familiar connections. It’s connected to the broader Voltage Pictures family, which has sued tens of thousands of people over the years.
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A copy of the complaint filed at the US District Court of Hawaii is available here (pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Just give Antony Starr an Emmy already for his incredible portrayal of Homelander
Superheroes abuse their powers rather than using them for good in The Boys, which just concluded its second season.
In my review of The Boys S1 last year, I called the Amazon Prime series "a wickedly funny, darkly irreverent adaptation" and "ideal late-summer therapy for anyone who has grown a bit weary of the constant onslaught of superhero movies." I wasn't alone in my love for the show: The Boys was a massive hit, and that success has continued with S2, which was the most-watched global launch of any Amazon series to date, pretty much doubling the show's worldwide audience. S2 is even better than its predecessor, deftly tackling timely themes and hot-button issues, while never sacrificing all the biting satire and good, gory fun that we loved about S1. And can we just give Antony Starr an Emmy already for his stunning performance as Homelander?
(Spoilers for S1 below; some spoilers for S2, but no major reveals.)
The Boys is set in a fictional universe where superheroes are real but corrupted by corporate interests and a toxic celebrity-obsessed culture. The most elite superhero group is called the Seven, headed up by Homelander (Starr), a truly violent and unstable psychopath disguised as the All-American hero, who mostly bullies his supe team into compliance. The other members include A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), who boasts super-speed but has also become addicted to the experimental performance-enhancing substance called Compound-V. The Deep (Chace Crawford) can breathe underwater, thanks to having gills—voiced in S2 by Patton Oswalt during a hallucination sequence—and converse with marine creatures.
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Seit Monaten wurden die großen Messen aufgrund von Corona entweder ins Virtuelle verlegt, verschoben oder gleich ganz abgesagt. In Düsseldorf wurde ein Neuanfang gemacht
Frankreich: Ein brutaler Terrormordanschlag, Fanatismus, Mohammad-Karikaturen und die Rolle sozialer Medien
Nice looking website you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if someone DDoSed it.
Ransomware attacks that tear through corporate networks can bring massive organizations to their knees. But even as these hacks reach new popularity highs—and new ethical lows—among attackers, it's not the only technique criminals are using to shake down corporate victims. A new wave of attacks relies instead on digital extortion—with a side of impersonation.
On Wednesday, the Web security firm Radware published extortion notes that had been sent to a variety of companies around the world. In each of them, the senders purport to be from the North Korean government hackers Lazarus Group, or APT38, and Russian state-backed hackers Fancy Bear, or APT28. The communications threaten that if the target doesn’t send a set number of bitcoin—typically equivalent to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars—the group will launch powerful distributed denial of service attacks against the victim, walloping the organization with a fire hose of junk traffic strategically directed to knock it offline.
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Die Elektroautos von Tesla erfahren eine Reichweitenerhöhung – beim Model 3 gibt es auch optische und technische Neuerungen. (Tesla, Technologie)
Die Elektroautos von Tesla erfahren eine Reichweitenerhöhung - beim Model 3 gibt es auch optische und technische Neuerungen. (Tesla, Technologie) Anti-piracy group BREIN says it is targeting people who run the open source software known as Spotweb, asking them to close down their platforms and pay settlement fees. So what is Spotweb and why is BREIN so concerned about it? The answers to those questions lie in the shutdown of a pirate indexing site more than nine years ago.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
While most pirates in 2020 use torrent, streaming and download portals for their general piracy needs, many are still obtaining the latest content from Usenet, one of the oldest file-sharing systems around.
With masses of storage space and blisteringly quick download speeds available (not to mention archives dating back years), Usenet is still a significant source of pirated movies, music, games and just about every other type of content available. But finding that content isn’t always so easy.
Since Usenet isn’t web-based, methods have been created over the years to enable people to download more easily from the newsgroups. The NZB file, for example, can be described as a kind of .torrent file for Usenet, one that is quickly downloaded and contains ‘directions’ so that clients can access content.
Sites for downloading NZB files still exist but aren’t as prevalent as they once were, so finding the whereabouts of content on Usenet is still something pirates have to achieve. In 2001, almost two decades ago, Netherlands-based Usenet community FTD launched with a goal of helping people do just that.
After around eight years in operation, the FTD community had grown to 500,000 members and with the assistance of its own software, was enabling users to find (‘spot’) the location of material they found on Usenet and share that information with others. This community effort enabled huge numbers of people to find and download all the content they wanted but with much of it infringing, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN became involved.
Ultimately, a court found that FTD acted outside the law and in 2011 it was ordered to remove all ‘spots’ of copyrighted files within a month. At the time BREIN said that people weren’t allowed to structurally make use of illegal files, and that applied to Usenet as well as the wider Internet.
“BREIN will also hold liable any other websites and services that do the same regardless of the technical protocol they use for their illegal business model,” BREIN chief Tim Kuik said at the time.
As it turns out, nine years after the takedown of FTD, BREIN says it is still doing just that.
Following the demise of FTD, a protocol known as Spotnet gained an unexpected boost. Operating on top of Usenet, Spotnet provides an alternative to Usenet indexing sites, making ‘spots’ less vulnerable to the anti-piracy actions of groups like BREIN. In order to see content ‘spots’ a Spotnet client is required. However, people can also make use of Spotweb, a piece of software that as its name suggests, brings ‘spots’ directly to the web.
“Spotweb is open source software that allows you to locate illegal copies of entertainment content in newsgroups on usenet. You can set up Spotweb so that it is visible to everyone. It then acts as a website,” Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN said in an announcement this week.
While BREIN is interested in all types of piracy related to Usenet, Spotweb’s ability to make content extremely easy to find via the web is clearly an issue, as the screenshot of a Spotweb instance below shows.
Spotweb is available on Github and can be installed on Unix-based systems and even NAS devices from companies such as Synology and QNAP. As such the barrier to running a public repository of infringing content links is quite low, something that BREIN is keen to discourage.
“People who do this offer illegal spots (nzb links or references) to unauthorized content. BREIN writes to such providers and urges them to stop doing so, to sign a declaration of abstention with a penalty of 500 euros and to pay 150 euros in costs,” BREIN said this week.
Speaking with TorrentFreak, BREIN chief Tim Kuik said that Spotnet/Spotweb has become one of the main means to search for and download pirated content from Usenet and those running it for infringing purposes face a situation as precarious as that faced by FTD all those years ago.
“The legal position is the same as for FTD and other link sites. Linking to illegal content is illegal and has been standing case law [in the Netherlands] for well over a decade. It started out being a tort and in the meantime, under EU case law, it is now a communication to the public,” he explained.
As is common with ongoing actions for shutdown and settlement, Kuik didn’t provide specifics on who had been approached to shut down, who had shut down, or how many people had agreed to pay settlements. However, he confirmed that during the past few weeks, “a handful” of people operating Spotweb sites had been approached by the anti-piracy group with orders to close.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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