Copyright Troll Partner Threatens to Report Blogger to the Police

A company assisting US-based copyright troll outfit TCYK LLC has just threatened to report a blogger to the police. Joe Hickster, an anti-troll activist who has helped dozens of wrongfully accused individuals avoid paying settlement fees, was threatened after describing troll services company Hatton and Berkeley as being involved in a smoke-and-mirrors operation.

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

trollsignOne might think that if a copyright holder would like to chase down alleged pirates in the UK it would be a relatively simple affair. Track their IP addresses and obtain their identities from ISPs, hire a lawfirm, send out the letters, and wait for the cash.

However, that’s been tried before and it has universally ended in tears for the lawfirms involved. As a result, copyright trolls are now deploying the new tactic of sending the letters via a limited company.

This is a pretty good idea. Not only do these companies avoid the scrutiny of the Solicitors Regulatory Authority but if it all goes wrong in a messy court battle, for example, the limited company can simply cease trading. It’s happened before.

The tactic is being employed by at least two sets of trolls and their partners in the UK. Golden Eye International, for example, is the front company acting for a number of porn copyright holders. By troll standards their operation seems relatively straightforward, but the same cannot be said of TCYK.

TCYK stands for The Company You Keep, a Robert Redford film that’s being used as a money generator by TCYK LLC, a US-based outfit attempting to turn piracy into profit. They’ve just accused an 82-year-old woman of being a movie pirate, which prompted intervention from her “disgusted” local MP.

However, instead of setting up in the UK themselves to chase alleged pirates themselves, TCYK employ the services of a company called Hatton and Berkeley. This is where things get messy.

According to the UK government’s Companies House database, the sole director of Hatton and Berkeley is a man called Paul Carter yet according to his various claims in the media and on his website, Robert Croucher says he is both managing director and owner.

In fact, according to public records Robert Croucher has never been listed as any kind of director of the company nor listed as having had any kind of shareholding. Croucher also claims to be personally based at 43, Berkeley Square in London while dozens of companies share the same address. It appears to be a virtual office.

Only complicating matters is that when alleged pirates receive ‘pay-up-or-else’ letters from Hatton and Berkeley on behalf of TCYK LLC, they aren’t told to pay either.

Instead they are told to send money to a third company called Ranger Bay Ltd, a company operated by a Marcus Auton. A former Bank of America employee and experienced accountant, Auton makes no mention of his copyright troll links on his Linkedin profile but TF has confirmed that his company is receiving money from suspected pirates.

Underlying the TCYK/Hatton and Berkeley/Ranger Bay operation are links with notorious copyright troll Patrick Achache, who is up to his neck in copyright litigation in the United States and elsewhere. Robert Croucher has made no secret of his affiliations with Achache, even posing with him for pictures while announcing a copyright troll invasion of the UK last October.

There can be no doubt that these kinds operations are set up in a complex manner, with some believing the tiered structure is deployed as a defensive mechanism in case everything goes wrong via a failed court action, for example. Of course, that is denied by those involved but not everyone is so keen to accept that at face value.

One of the most persistent troll-watchers in the UK is known as Joe Hickster. He runs the ACS Bore blog (Twitter) which was set up to undermine the activities of the now-defunct ACS:Law but has since expanded to cover any and all copyright troll-affiliated companies operating in the UK.

There’s no denying that Hickster is both persistent and at times abrasive, but he’s a man on a mission who feels it is his duty to help people wrongly accused by trolls. Indeed, Hickster is responsible for at least dozens (he doesn’t keep count) of people not paying companies like ACS:Law, GoldenEye and now Hatton and Berkeley/TCYK/Ranger Bay many tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of pounds.

Now, however, things are getting messy. It began last year when Robert Croucher weighed in on a four year old discussion on phone number database site WhoCallsMe about a company called Westone Business Services Ltd.

Westone (which has Hatton and Berkeley’s current director Paul Carter also listed as a former director) were being called out by reviewers as “scammers” who apparently took their money for business services and ran. Croucher stepped in with his opening lines.

“To whom it may concern, I am Robert Croucher. I have no affiliation to Mr Paul Carter,” he said.

As previous highlighted, Companies House begs to differ. In fact, the government database indicates the pair having been involved in several companies together – here, here, here and here.

All of this information came to the attention of Joe Hickster who stepped into the discussion on March 22 to add his opinion.

“Seems that CMI Business Group (t/a Hatton & Berkeley) are really a Speculative Invoicing outfit, in association with the notorious Patrick Achache, who assisted ACS:LAW and Tilly Baily Irvine, in their actions in sending thousands of letters to people in the UK demanding money for Pornography or other films and threatening to go to Court if they were not paid,” he said.

From there things went quickly downhill. People can read the full exchange here but in summary Hickster accused Croucher of being involved in a “smoke and mirrors” operation, Croucher took offense, and the gloves came off.

“Your previous accusations that Paul Carter is the owner and director of Hatton & Berkeley is flawed, I would advise scrutiny over any of your research from hereon,” Croucher said.

Again, Companies House lists Paul Carter as Hatton and Berkeley’s sole director. Nevertheless, Croucher continued.

“Due to the nature of your defamatory and unsubstantiated remarks above, I shall be seeking legal action against you should this continue,” he said.

The exchanges continued and then Croucher dropped the bombshell.

“You and others have been sending false and defamatory Tweets to myself and worryingly the more junior female members of my staff, this is being reported to the MET Police as it is continued harassment (see Malicious Communications Act 1988),” he told Hickster.

“I will be seeking that charges be brought against you should you not cease and desist from contacting myself, members of my staff or other officers of any of my operating companies. This is being taken very seriously and I believe you are underestimating the impact of your actions.

“To summarise; Please stop contacting me, any of my staff and certainly any of my clients, should you continue I will ensure that you are put to maximum task with respect to issuing legal proceedings against you for ongoing harassment and defamation,” he warned.

TorrentFreak caught up with Joe Hickster who denied harassment.

“I would not DREAM of harassing, ANY innocent person, whether they are young woman or men or pensioners. I would obviously leave that in [Croucher’s] more than capable hands, he has more experience at doing that than I,” he said.

While it’s not unusual for anti-troll activists to hold their battles in public, it’s quite extraordinary for their targets to duke it out on the Internet. Where this will go from here is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for certain. Robert Croucher’s business affairs (and those of the companies he’s involved with) seem far from straightforward and one way or another, with or without Joe Hickster, anti-troll activists in the UK remain intent on exposing them.

Robert Croucher did not immediately respond to TorrentFreak’s request for comment

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

Geheimdienste: Regierung und Verfassungsschutz gegen EU-Terrorabwehrzentrum

Datenaustausch: ja – gemeinsames Terrorabwehrzentrum: nein. Die europäischen Geheimdienste trauen sich offenbar nicht genug gegenseitig, um zusammen effektiv den Terrorismus zu bekämpfen. Das belegen neue Enthüllungen zum BND. (Datenschutz, Internet)

Datenaustausch: ja - gemeinsames Terrorabwehrzentrum: nein. Die europäischen Geheimdienste trauen sich offenbar nicht genug gegenseitig, um zusammen effektiv den Terrorismus zu bekämpfen. Das belegen neue Enthüllungen zum BND. (Datenschutz, Internet)

Oculus SDK v1.3: Erste Steam-Spiele unterstützen das Rift CV1

Wer möchte, kann mittlerweile Steam-Spiele wie Project Cars oder Time Machine VR mit dem Oculus Rift CV1 nutzen. Auch Applikationen wie Player laufen. Allerdings startet die Oculus-Software immer mit. (Oculus Rift, Steam)

Wer möchte, kann mittlerweile Steam-Spiele wie Project Cars oder Time Machine VR mit dem Oculus Rift CV1 nutzen. Auch Applikationen wie Player laufen. Allerdings startet die Oculus-Software immer mit. (Oculus Rift, Steam)

Senator: let’s fix “third-party doctrine” that enabled NSA mass snooping

Q&A: Ars sits down with Oregon’s outspoken advocate of strong crypto, Sen. Ron Wyden.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) gave the keynote address on Wednesday at RightsCon in San Francisco. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

SAN FRANCISCO—This past week hundreds of lawyers, technologists, journalists, activists, and others from around the globe descended upon a university conference center to try to figure out the state of digital rights in 2016. The conference, appropriately dubbed "RightsCon," featured many notable speakers, including Edward Snowden via video-conference, but relatively few from those inside government.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), however, was an exception. On the first day of the conference, he gave an in-person speech, in which he argued for a "New Compact for Security and Liberty."

The Oregon senator is likely familiar to Ars readers: he’s been one of the most consistently critical voices of the expansion of government surveillance in recent years. We last spoke with him in October 2014 when he made the case that expanded active spying hurts the American economy. In December 2014, Wyden introduced the "Secure Data Act" in the United States Senate, which aims to shut down government-ordered backdoors into digital systems. However, that bill hasn’t even made it to committee yet, over a year later.

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New Study: Nearly One Third of Takedown Requests ‘Questionable’

A new study shows that 28% of piracy takedown requests submitted to Google may be questionable at best.The study by researches at Columbia University’s American Assembly and Berkeley’s School of Law looked at more than 108 million takedown re…



A new study shows that 28% of piracy takedown requests submitted to Google may be questionable at best.

The study by researches at Columbia University's American Assembly and Berkeley's School of Law looked at more than 108 million takedown requests submitted to the search engine, and found that a large percentage of these may be invalid.

4.2% of these requests targeted content that wasn't even present on the listed URLs, while another 24% raised issues about the request's validity, including in relation to fair use.

Some also targeted websites that no longer existed, such as the now shuttered Megaupload.com.

Rights-holders themselves usually aren't involved in the actual process of locating infringing links. Instead, they outsource the job to companies that specialize in anti-piracy activities. These companies will normally use automated scripts to scour the web for potentially infringing links, but these automated "bots" are prone to false positives.

Worse yet, when these links are submitted to Google, Google's uses their own bots to determine the validity of the request, meaning the entire process could be devoid of human intervention and verification. The researchers also say Google, like many other service providers, takes a cautions approach when it comes to removal requests and often over removes content just to protect themselves legally.

This, the researchers say, is why calls for a "take down, stay down" regime are potentially very dangerous, with many legitimate sites likely to be wrongly targeted.

Why Blue Origin’s latest launch is a huge deal for cheap space access

Blue already proved it could land. Now it’s showing it can rinse and repeat.

Engineers work on a New Shepard capsule in March inside Blue Origin's rocket factory near Seattle. (credit: Blue Origin)

Today marks the third time in just over four months that Blue Origin has successfully launched and landed its New Shepard spacecraft and propulsion module. The launch and landing took place in a remote area of West Texas and is a significant step for a company that wants to dramatically cut the cost of access to space.

Before last November, when New Shepard made its historic first flight, it was unclear how difficult it would be to land a rocket vertically on the ground after sending it into space. But then Blue Origin did it. A month later SpaceX performed the same feat with its Falcon 9, a much larger and more powerful booster that had just delivered a payload into orbit.

That led to the next hurdle: could rockets be refurbished quickly and relatively inexpensively for subsequent flights? This was a stumbling block for the space shuttle, which required hundreds of millions of dollars in engine tests and retrofitting after every flight. Blue Origin has begun jumping this hurdle too. First, it flew the New Shepard module again in January, a turn-around time of about two months.

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FBI offers crypto assistance to local cops: “We are in this together”

After iPhone unlock in San Bernardino, FBI re-assures police it will try to help.

(credit: Cliff1066™)

In a new two-paragraph letter to state and local law enforcement partners, the FBI reiterated its commitment to helping those agencies unlock seized encrypted devices.

The letter was first reported Friday evening and published by BuzzFeedbefore being sent to Ars and presumably other media outlets.

Earlier this week, government prosecutors formally asked a federal judge in California to cancel her prior order that would have compelled Apple to assist efforts to unlock a seized iPhone linked to the San Bernardino attacks in late 2015. US Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym did so on March 29.

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This Millennium’s Best Picture Oscar Winners Are Not On Netflix

A recent study commissioned by Hollywood shows that with 120 legal online services, movies and TV-shows are more accessible than ever before. Unfortunately, however, content remains scattered and the dominant streaming service Netflix doesn’t have any of the best picture Oscar winners of this century in its U.S. catalog.

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

netfAn often heard excuse from pirates is that they can’t find the content they’re looking for in their home country, at least not for a decent price.

In recent months Hollywood has started to attack what they see as a myth, pointing out that movies and TV-shows are more widely available than ever before.

“The number of online platforms for legally viewing movies and TV shows continues to grow steadily, making more creative content from all over the world available to more audiences than ever before,” the MPAA’s Julia Jenks wrote last week.

“There are now more than 480 unique legitimate online services available in countries around the world and 120 such services available in the United States.”

This is correct and backed up by a recent MPAA-commissioned study. But there’s also an important element missing from the analysis. Unlike the music industry, where subscription services such as Spotify offer the most popular content, the video market is much more scattered.

Perhaps the public doesn’t want to use dozens of different services to watch movies and TV-shows?

And what about the news that the content library of the dominant video platform Netflix is shrinking rather than growing? Earlier this week Allflix showed that the U.S. Netflix catalog has shrunk by more than 2,500 titles since 2014.

This prompted us to conduct a small survey, looking at some of the top movies made over the past two decades – the winners of the Academy Award’s Best Picture category. Quite surprisingly, none of the films that won the prestigious award this millennium are available on the U.S. version of Netflix.

We have to go all the way back to 1999 to spot the first Best Picture Oscar winner on Netflix, American Beauty.

Interestingly, many of the more recent Oscar winners are available in other regions, such as Afghanistan, Antarctica, Aruba, Canada, Guyana, Haiti and Venezuela, to name a few.

As can be seen in the table below, the only Best Picture-winning film that’s not on a non-U.S. version of Netflix is Spotlight, which makes sense as it hasn’t been released for the home-entertainment market yet.

Best Picture Oscar Winners on Netflix? (April 2016)

Year Movie Available US? Available elsewhere?
torrentfreak.com
2015 Spotlight No No
2014 Birdman No Yes, Canada
2013 12 Years a Slave No Yes, Japan and South Korea
2012 Argo No Yes, Afghanistan and 115 others
2011 The Artist No Yes, Aruba and 10 others
2010 The King’s Speech No Yes, Venezuela and 51 others
2009 The Hurt Locker No Yes, Cuba and 58 others
2008 Slumdog Millionaire No Yes, Samoa and 23 others
2007 No Country for Old Men No Yes, Guyana and 58 others
2006 The Departed No Yes, Antarctica and 34 others
2005 Crash No Yes, Suriname and 45 others
2004 Million Dollar Baby No Yes, Holy See and 3 others
2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King No Yes, Azerbaijan and 131 others
2002 Chicago No Yes, Haiti and 45 others
2001 A Beautiful Mind No Yes, Norfolk Island and 21 others
2000 Gladiator No Yes, Montserrat and 45 others
1999 American Beauty Yes Yes, Bhutan and 210 others
1998 Shakespeare in Love Yes Yes, Puerto Rico and 6 others
1997 Titanic No Yes, Canada
1996 The English Patient Yes Yes, Martinique and 52 others

The Oscar-winner limitations don’t seem to be tied to the Best Picture category either. Of the twelve films that won an Oscar in 2013, only two are listed in the U.S. Netflix library.

The two films are “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life,” which won an Oscar for the best short documentary, and “The Great Gatsby” which won the Oscars for best costume and best production design.

We can’t and won’t point any fingers as to the source of this availability “problem.” It might be that the studios are reluctant to put their most acclaimed titles on Netflix, or perhaps Netflix isn’t willing to pay enough.

However, the above does illustrate that in its current form, Netflix alone is certainly not going solve Hollywood’s piracy problems. This is an important note, as Netflix is by far the most popular consumption platform for films and TV-shows.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether there are 12 or 12,000 legal video platforms in a country. More services may actually mean that it becomes less convenient for consumers, as long as the content is scattered.

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

Brussels terror attacks: Why ramping up online surveillance isn’t the answer

Op-ed: Brief moratorium needed on calls for new spying laws after atrocities.

I am in Brussels. And I am scared. Very scared… of the probable security backlash following last month’s terrorist attacks.

I don’t want to live in a city where everyone is viewed with suspicion by the authorities, because it won’t stop there. Because suspicion is infectious. When misappropriated and misdirected, that sort of suspicion can very easily become racism and prejudice—two of the key ingredients that led the awful attacks on the morning of Tuesday, March 22.

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