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Google has applied some kind of penalty to Torrent website KickassTorrents (KAT) to make it completely disappear from its index, a situation that now means scam sites pretending to be the torrent indexer now tops popular search terms.

Google algorithm, which determines how high sites will rank in search results, has long been demoting piracy related results (based on the number of DMCA requests each site receives). However, the demotion penalty is only meant to lower the position of the site's pages in search result, it was never meant to complete remove results.

The KAT team told TorrentFreak that they've been aware of the penalty for some time, but things apparently have escalated recently.

"It's already about five or six months since we started to experience some kind of penalty from Google. The issue is that we were not performing any SEOactivities at all," KAT says.

The removal of all official KAT results from Google now means that unofficial and unaffiliated results now occupy to the top positions for all KAT related keywords. Depending on your location, the top spot for the keyword "kickasstorrents" is now occupied by either kickasstorrents.pw or kickasstorrents.eu. The former serves adult advertising over what appears to be a copy of the KAT site, while the later promotes an unrelated download that may be malware.

The KAT team is still investigation the possible cause of the penalty, and urges users to visit the official Facebook and Twitter to find information on the latest official domain name for the site.

One of the most popular digital image formats, JPEG, may soon have DRM added to it. 

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), responsible for managing still image coding standards, has signaled it is investigating the possibility of adding a DRM standard to JPEG files.

The DRM standard would allow authors to limit access to JPEG files by user, number of views or downloads, location and other criteria.

While the addition of DRM to a previously DRM-free format could lead to a backlash from Internet users, especially if the DRM is used for commercial purposes such as preventing copying or to enforce a payment system for viewing images, the JPEG committee however says the addition would be for privacy and security reasons mainly.

The group states that:

"The JPEG committee investigates solutions to assure privacy and security when sharing photos on social networks, (stock) photography databases, etc. JPEG Privacy & Security will provide new functionality to JPEG encoded images such as ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual rights, while maintaining backwards and forward compatibility to existing JPEG legacy solutions."

One potential non commercial application for access control could be to prevent unauthorized viewing of private images, such as images shared on social media. It can also be used to prevent surveillance by government agencies.

Top DVD and Blu-ray producers have attacked movie studios for poorly managing the Blu-ray format, and warns that if lessons are not learnt, the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disc format may be doomed as well.

Speaking at the San Diego Comic-Con, a panelist of people responsible for creating Blu-ray movies, including Star Trek: TNG's Robert Meyer Burnett, Blade Runner: The Final Cut's Charles de Lauzirika and The Hunger Games's Cliff Stephenson, say that studios seem ready and willing to abandon the Blu-ray format in favor of the new kids on the block, digital distribution and the yet unreleased 4K Ultra HD disc format.

They say the main problem stems from the fact that the success of DVD altered the industry's perception about home video, turning what was a collector's product into a mainstream one. The studios then took that expectation forward to Blu-ray, which has failed to achieve the same level of success.

"DVD got really successful, far more successful than anybody knew it would be," said Stephenson, who also produced the Hannibal box sets. "It turned people from collectors to consumers. They bought stuff just to buy stuff and that boosted all the sales numbers. Then you go to Blu-ray which became much more collector driven, so the people who didn’t want to buy every single title weren’t buying every single title, so the studios looked at that as not as successful, when the reality is it’s as successful as Laserdisc was 20 years ago, even more so."

The reason why Blu-ray could not meet studio expectations, Burnett explains, is because the "general population" did not really care about what the main advantages offered by Blu-ray, essentially superior picture and audio quality.

"You have to have a decent home theater system to really appreciate the Blu-ray format," Burnett said. "And most people really don’t get it. You have to really be a discerning viewer to get something out of Blu-ray. My mother couldn’t care less, and my mother is the general population. She just wants to put something on and be able to see it. If we talk about the nuances of the transfer my mother doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. So to go to Ultra 4K? Who’s going to care about that?"

And this is why studios should readjust their expectations of 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, and should not expect it to be the "new DVD", in terms of revenue.

"Blu-ray should never have been marketed as a mass product,” Stephenson explained. "It should have been more of a collector format that could support the numbers that it would ultimately do because as all of us can attest, we would pay."

Apart from not understanding what consumers wanted, the moderator of the panel, Bill Hunt of TheDigitalBits.com, also criticized studios for being too greedy when it comes to "double dipping", or making consumers purchase the same content over and over again.

"If you were loyal and bought each season, you paid a premium but you didn’t get the bonus disc that came in the boxed set. So a lot of people learned, ‘well, I'll just wait.’ And by the way we'll wait and we’ll get it cheaper and we'll wait until Black Friday and we'll get it even cheaper. And it’s a vicious cycle because the sales aren’t there," said Hunt.

Stephenson also chimed in, saying the inconsistency and lack of commitment by studios have also dented consumer enthusiasm in Blu-ray.

"Then they’ll release something random, like Sony will put out Troop Beverly Hills," Stephenson said. "I don't get what the logic is."

"The other problem with these boxed sets that everyone's been talking about, is that they’ll start something and then they'll end it," Stephenson said, perhaps referencing the recent decision by Fox Home Entertainment to stop releasing The Simpsons box sets half way through the available seasons. "So everybody feels burned because you bought into this thing, and I think they haven't done a very good job of supporting the format that they created."

As for the future of packaged media, most of the panel agreed that it is not the end for discs, and that it will be always around as a niche product.

"I find it impossible to believe that the people who were buying movies 20 years ago suddenly stopped buying movies," Stephenson said. "I think they’re there. I think it’s the studio expectations that have shifted and that once those sort of get realigned and the resources are funneled in the right direction, I think the ship will right itself. The problem is they can’t make the mistakes with 4K that they made with Blu-ray. Hopefully they’ll make all new mistakes, but it’s like there’s things that they can learn and there’s ways to make it successful."

CloudFlare has won a victory against the RIAA for what the content delivery network claims is a over-broad attempt at censorship.

Last year, the RIAA sued music streaming site Grooveshark and the two parties settled, with Grooveshark agreeing to shut down. Soon after, sites using the now defunct Grooveshark's branding appeared, trying to take advantage of the disappearance of one of the biggest music sites.

It was due to this that the RIAA sued CloudFlare, and other service providers, to try and shut down Grooveshark related websites.

To make it easier for themselves in future, and to avoid having to play an endless game of "whack-a-mole", the RIAA deliberately made their injunction against CloudFlare and others broad - by asking for any accounts and domain names featuring the term "grooveshark" to be blocked.

While the RIAA's injunction was granted by the courts, service providers fought back, arguing that censorship based on a single keyword, without even examining whether the site in question was breaking the law or not, was overly broad. CloudFlare argues that this kind of broad censorship ban will impact legitimate websites, and could limit free speech rights.

And CloudFlare's fear was justified, as the content delivery network was legally forced to follow the RIAA's initial injunction, and shut down many sites before the court could hear their arguments, including sites that were totally legitimate. One site that was shut down was groovesharkcensorship.cf, a single page site that was set up to protest the RIAA's censorship attempts - in one fell swoop, the RIAA not only managed to shut down piracy sites, but also sites that were exercising their free speech rights to criticise the music industry's copyright lobby.

The RIAA defended their actions, and instead said the responsibility to determine whether a site was infringing was the responsibility of CloudFlare, despite the RIAA being the only one capable of determining whether their own content has been infringed or not.

Fortunately for CloudFlare, District Court Judge Alison Nathan agreed that the RIAA's initial injunction was too broad, and instead, has ordered the RIAA to first identify specific sites that are infringing before asking CloudFlare to remove them (something that CloudFlare has said they are more than willing to accommodate). 

Judge Nathan did also order CloudFlare to close down any sites that it knew, without a doubt, that was infringing, but put the onus firmly on the RIAA to identify and inform CloudFlare about any potentially infringing sites.

From high quality video to low quality legislation, read this and other news stories from the week ending 28 June 2015

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The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 13th June 2015 is in. Kingsman: The Secret Service was the week's top selling title, and top selling new release.

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here

A group backed by the MPAA and RIAA has called for more action to be taken by domain name registrars when it comes to stopping piracy sites.

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s Internet subcommittee, the Coalition for Online Accountability (COA) says that domain name registrars are not following the own rules, and that the privacy of registrants should not be respected if there are copyright violation allegation against the site.

The membership of the COA is a virtual who's who of anti-piracy lobbying, including the previously mentioned RIAA and MPAA for the music and movie industries, as well as the Entertainment Software Association and the Software and Information Industry Association, copyright lobbyists for the gaming and software industries respectively. The group's main aim is to promote the "effective enforcement against online infringement of copyrights and trademarks."

And it appears the first target for the COA will be domain name registrars, which the group says is not doing enough to combat online piracy.

COA counsel Steve Metalitz's testimony calls on registrars to be more responsive to rights-holders, and to suspend domain names when requested. Metalitz says that registrars are signatories to the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), and the 2013 revision of the agreement asks registrars to take on more responsibility in tackling the piracy problem - something that registrars have not been abiding by, according to Metalitz. 

Metalitz provided an example relating to a Romanian music piracy website and how the RIAA's complaint was largely ignored.

"By August of last year, RIAA had notified the site of over 220,000 infringements of its members’ works (and had sent similar notices regarding 26,000 infringements to the site’s hosting providers). At that time, RIAA complained to the domain name registrar (a signatory of the 2013 RAA), which took no action, ostensibly because it does not host the site," Metalitz testified.

The COA also believes that domain privacy services, which protect the identify of registrants, should be forced to hand over user details when requested. Metalitz asked for "ground rules for when the contact points of a proxy registrant will be revealed to a complainant in order to help address a copyright or trademark infringement."

Arguing against these proposals, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that the organisation responisble for managing domain names worlwide, ICANN, and individual registrars should not be made responsible for anti-piracy policing. The EFF says that should these proposals be adopted, it would in effect by bringing back some of the worst elements of the controversial SOPA bill, which was overwhelmingly rejected by the public when it was to be voted on in 2011.

"As advocates for free speech, privacy, and liberty on the global Internet, we ask the Committee to resist calls to impose new copyright and trademark enforcement responsibilities on ICANN. In particular, the Committee should reject proposals to have ICANN require the suspension of Internet domain names based on accusations of copyright or trademark infringement by a website," the EFF writes in a letter to the committee. 

"This is effectively the same proposal that formed the centerpiece of the Stop Online Piracy Act of 2011 (SOPA), which this Committee set aside after millions of Americans voiced their opposition. Using the global Domain Name System to enforce copyright law remains as problematic in 2015 as it was in 2011," says the EFF.

From Australian thought-police to the MPAA blocking the one good thing they've ever done, read this and other news stories from the week ending 3 May 2015

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The pre-release leak of the first four Game of Thrones episodes may have split downloaders' attentions, and prevented the season premier from "winning" any day-one piracy records, it hasn't taken long for the hit HBO show to break new piracy records.

Media intelligence firm Tru Optik collated publicly available torrent swarm data and found that the season premier, plus the pre-release leaked episodes (as well as the "A Day in the Life" documentary on the show) managed to account for 32 million downloads during the first week of release, breaking new ground in terms of piracy.

While the leaked episodes grabbed the most attention when it came to downloaders, those that had waited to download after the show aired predominantly went for the 720p or 1080p versions of the episode. This is easily explained by the fact that those willing to wait would have mostly done so in order to download higher quality versions of the episode, as opposed to the leaked episodes, which were sourced from standard definition DVD screeners.

43.5 percent of post-broadcast downloads were for the 720p version, with 31.4% opting for the even higher resolution 1080p version, compared to 35.1% for the SD 480p version.

On a per capita basis, Australia was once again top of the piracy chart. Of all the viewers that watched the season premier, on legal and illegal channels, 32 percent were pirates. This compares to only 8% in the United States.

With that said, most of the downloaders did come from the US, despite the availability of HBO's unbundled streaming service HBO Now. While that appears to be disappointing from HBO's point of view, the fact that the season premier's ratings were the highest on record for the show, indicates that paying customers are also increasing in numbers too.

And Tru Optik also believes that US pirates are the core demographic that HBO Now will try to win over, and will do so given time, giving HBO a glimmer of hope in their battle against piracy.