Author: Andy

Wherever there’s a controversy over unauthorized file-sharing it’s almost guaranteed that the copyright trolls at Guardaley won’t be far behind. For many years the company has been central to cases against alleged file-sharers around the world, from the United States through to the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Guardaley is at the heart of what many describe as a “settlement factory”, an industrialized system to track infringements on file-sharing networks, identify Internet subscribers, and leverage cash payments from them, whether they’re guilty or not.

The list of films ‘protected’ by Guardaley is extensive but includes well-known troll fodder such as The Hurt Locker, The Expendables and The Company You Keep.

Chief Operating Officer Patrick Achache largely operates in the background but in recent times has been nurturing his public image. From public declarations of his charitable work to parading in the UK to warn of impending file-sharing doom, Achache paints himself as man on a mission of goodness. His targets, however, feel little but misery.

In a new interview conducted at the Cannes Film Festival and published on FilmFestivals.com (article since disappeared), Achache describes his life and frustrations as one of the world’s most visible copyright trolls.

“The technology to identify IP addresses is very easy – it’s participating in file-sharing networks, the difficult part is the data management and analysis, as well as the traffic. We record 200 million IP addresses per day and that is a lot to process, analyze and store,” he explains.

But while tracking might be the easy part, Achache sees pushing the boundaries of the legal system as a valuable tool to elicit payments from alleged infringers.

“Our lawyers are constantly looking into setting up new precedence cases (e.g. third party liability). In the US we have always worked with the statutory damages, which can be up to $150,000 USD for willful copyright infringement. Let us be serious – there is nothing like clicking on the wrong link and [getting] caught up in our software,” Achache says.

While it’s not difficult to take much of what Achache says with a healthy side portion of salt, he’s certainly not wrong there. Over the years tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of alleged file-sharers have fallen into Guardaley’s global clutches and most regret having done so.

“Our clients have sued infringers in Singapore. There are criminal proceedings in Poland, where people get arrested and their computers get taken away. We have provided data for at least 1,000 lawsuits in Germany. In the US our clients are thriving to take someone to court,” he reveals.

But while Achache and his clients regularly speak of their desire to go to court, their real aim is cash settlements. Achache won’t give the details but he says his lawyers have reached financial agreements with some amazing people – the German equivalent of the FBI, for example.

“We caught their IP address several times. They admitted, but I can’t provide further details as per confidentiality of the settlement. Our lawyers have all type of businesses – gas stations, embassies, army bases, banks, law firms – the list is really long. Some have thousands of illegal files on their hard drives.”

It can’t be denied that plenty fall into the Guardaley trap but it isn’t always plain sailing. According to Achache, ISPs opposing efforts to unmask file-sharers can be quite a challenge.

“In various jurisdictions they fight back hard, as they earn money from the pirating consumers which are signing on high volume bandwidth contracts,” he says.

But there are bigger challenges, ones that involve convincing industry groups and the authorities that the best way to deal with file-sharers is to threaten them with court action until they cough up hard cash.

“What is [an even bigger challenge] is to convince industry bodies and local government that the way we police piracy is the only effective way,” Achache says.

“Let us take the UK as an example: We have sent letters to all the industry bodies, tried to work with the House of Lords, sent a letter to David Cameron. No one ever responded. That’s why we call out the UK government as cowards like Avi Lerner did.”

For those familiar with the work of copyright trolls, the idea that Achache is surprised that no one responded to his overtures is somewhat surprising in itself, not to mention amusing.

While most industry bodies have a huge interest in protecting their copyrights, there is absolutely zero chance that a group like the BPI, for example, would team up with Guardaley to demand money from grandmothers, as the company recently did in the UK.

Furthermore, expecting a response from the Prime Minister is so optimistic as to be laughable and wanting to work with the House of Lords shows a disregard for history.

In 2010 the UK’s Lord Lucas described copyright trolling as “a scam” and “legal blackmail“, Lord Young likened trolls to “rogue wheel-clampers”, and several other members of the House joined them in criticism. This is not a business that lawmakers want to get involved in.

But for Achache and his numerous rightsholder partners, such setbacks are just another day at the office. Guardaley are planning on expansion, including a new case in Australia where the Dallas Buyers Club case just crashed and burned, plus other English speaking territories.

In the meantime, downloaders of the movies ‘London Has Fallen’ and ‘Criminal’ need to take care since Achache has revealed that those titles are being monitored by his company. Expect the threats and cash demands to follow in the not too distant future.

Essential further reading on Guardaley here for those hungry for the details.

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

Taking recording equipment into a cinema with the intention of grabbing a copy of the latest movie is a very risky occupation in the United States. Thanks to the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act 2005, doing so is a criminal offense.

“Any person who, without the authorization of the copyright owner, knowingly uses or attempts to use an audiovisual recording device to transmit or make a copy of a motion picture…from a performance of such work in a motion picture exhibition facility, shall..be imprisoned for not more than 3 years, fined under this title, or both,” the Act reads.

Over the years this legislation has been applied to everyone from the world’s most prolific pirates to absolute innocents. Nevertheless, the existence of this law has undoubtedly contributed to a significant drop in camcording offenses in the United States. Some people, however, don’t see the danger

Yesterday the unlikely-named romantic comedy “A Aa” enjoyed its worldwide premiere. One of the theaters showing the movie was the Muvico Rosemont in Chicago.

According to the movie distribution company behind “A Aa” there was some unexpected action Thursday at the 18 screen complex. Bluesky Cinemas reports that a student from Valparaiso University, Indiana, took a mobile phone into the premiere and began recording the movie and live streaming it on Facebook.

While it’s relatively common at this point for people to get caught by theater staff, the infringement was reportedly monitored by an anti-piracy team 8,200 miles away in Hyderabad, the capital city of the southern Indian state of Telangana.

After taking action to remove the links on Facebook, Bluesky Cinemas’ anti-piracy team say they contacted management at the Muvico Rosemont in Illinois. In turn, staff there called the police.

“[The] student was caught red-handed with [the] content,” Bluesky said in a statement.

But while these kinds of cases often get seriously out of hand (and an arrest is of course somewhat serious), Bluesky reports that the content recorded on the students’ device – all few minutes of it – was subsequently deleted. That hints at a no-further-action scenario.

Nevertheless, the police clearly thought this offense was worth dealing with based on instructions issued from half way around the world, even if the recording was probably not professional in nature.

“Recording and sharing unauthorized video in social media is also a part of cybercrime,” Bluesky warns.

“We request especially students in USA not to [get involved in] these kind of issues and get into trouble yourself. [Our] anti-piracy team is actively working on tracing any kind of illegal activities.”

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

VKontakte (or Russia’s Facebook as it’s often known) is the largest European social network with 300 million registered users, around a third of which are active. Due to the way it hosts user content largely without question, VK carries huge amounts of infringing movies, music, TV shows.

Like similar sites, vKontakte has groups dedicated to endless regular topics. It also has groups dedicated to movie and TV show piracy inhabited by those looking to obtain content for free. Of course, copyright holders have the ability to take this content down via regular takedown notices, but like their counterparts in the West they’re tired of playing whac-a-mole.

To this end, copyright holders are now teaming up to put vKontakte under pressure to remove entire groups from where infringing content is being made available. Under the immediate spotlight are the ten largest groups specializing in movies and TV shows. They are huge.

Alexei Byrdin of the Internet Video Association informs Russia’s Izvestia that each group has a minimum of one million members while the largest has more than seven million. As a result the rightsholders’ anti-piracy group wants vKontakte to completely take them down.

“We have repeatedly appealed to the groups themselves to remove the content, but the complaints were not satisfied and content continued to be active,” says WebKontrol CEO Olga Valigurskaya, adding that if vKontakte wants to do the right thing it should either delete all the content or remove the groups altogether.

However, vKontakte’s owners over at Mail.ru (who own all three top social networking platforms in the country) see the situation somewhat differently, as do vKontakte themselves.

“In most cases we refuse to block communities specializing in video content as we consider this measure excessive,” a vKontakte spokesperson explained.

“Instead, we remove specific videos that violate the rights of a particular copyright holder, provided that the rightsholder has provided all the necessary documents. And managers of these communities are sent a notification about the inadmissibility of posting illegal content.”

Rightsholders wanting broad anti-piracy action and tech platforms demanding a precision approach is a common and growing theme online today. A similar war of words is playing out in both the United States and Europe, where whole sites are being censored and entertainment companies are demanding a “takedown, staydown” approach to copyright enforcement.

Whether they will get their way remains to be seen, but in the meantime the battle lines are being drawn in Russia – and unsurprisingly it’s copyright versus tech all over again.

“The platform should stop IP violations. If they cannot stop the violation in any other way, except to remove a whole group, then it is necessary to remove the group,” National Federation of the Music Industry (Sony, Universal, Warner, EMI) chief Leonid Agronov told Izvestia.

Agronov’s stance was predictably rejected by Sergey Grebennikov, director of the Regional Public Center of Internet Technologies (ROCIT), a non-profit with a mission to popularize the Internet.

“Deleting whole groups is unlawful,” he said. “Removals should concern only the videos, for which rightsholders have rights.”

There can be little doubt that the issue of infringing online content is largely descending into a worldwide battle not between copyright holders and actual pirates, but between entertainment companies and Internet platforms such as vKontakte, YouTube and Google. It won’t be settled any time soon.

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

It’s not clear how many DMCA takedown notices The Pirate Bay receives each day but the site is extremely clear – no torrents are ever removed following a request from copyright holders.

The Pirate Bay, however, is somewhat of an exception. For many torrent sites, dealing with a flood of DMCA takedown requests (or their EU equivalent) is a part of everyday life. For those who want to stay online, complying with them is often seen as essential.

As a result it is extremely common to visit big sites to view a torrent only to find that it has been removed by rightsholders. One site that complies with DMCA takedown notices is market leader KickassTorrents (KAT).

While no overall stats are provided by the site, disappearing torrents are common phenomena, much to the disappointment of many users. However, one particular user has more than the average reason to feel deflated this morning.

‘Zorro’ is one of the few users on KAT to have achieved the rank of Elite Uploader. He describes himself as a male from Uganda although there are signs he could hail from somewhere in Asia. Overall, Zorro has uploaded well in excess of 2,400 torrents to KAT but today they have all been removed following copyright holder action.

In a broken English response to VIruz, another KAT uploader who thought the torrents had been taken down over the period of a day, Zorro revealed the truth.

“Not in one day..it’s within 12 minutes,” Zorro explained.

To underline the scale of the takedown, the image below provided by Zorro himself shows the mass of popups he received from KickassTorrents when the torrents were deleted. It’s quite a sight to behold.

Of course, for many copyright holders to coordinate on a single day would be quite a thing, but dealing with Zorro was a little more straightforward.

All of Zorro’s torrents contained content belonging to game engine and asset company Unity, with most appearing to have been sourced from its Asset Store.

Zorro says he has suspicions that a user he previously complained about may have had something to do with his torrents being removed. While that’s certainly possible, a much more convenient explanation is at hand.

Yesterday at Unite Europe (video), Unity made an important announcement. Noting that Unity isn’t as accessible as it could be, the company announced a new strategy.

“So, we wanted to simplify. We wanted to give more value. With our three new products we’re confident we have increased the ability for you to reach the largest audience, provided increased no worry access to the latest tech and made Unity more affordable,” Unity said.

The details are available here, but essentially Unity now has a completely free tier (not even a credit card required) through to Plus, Pro, and enterprise solutions.

Meanwhile, Zorro and his fans are now staring at where his uploads used to be. In addition to the 2,400 taken down by Unity, Zorro says he personally deleted the rest. However, he appears to be relatively upbeat.

“Never mind somehow I survived. And still I am here at KAT with more stronger courage. Sooner or later I will reupload everything. I will reupload all 2506 torrents in a new way. From now on I will work like a hacker bandit,” Zorro says.

While there will be plenty of users who are disappointed at this turn of events, it’s perhaps a sign of the times that other uploaders on the site consider these events to be an occupational hazard to be taken in one’s stride.

“Well the company [Unity] that wants it down wants it down for a reason…it’s their hard work being pirated off of. Have to look at the whole thing that way,” said an uploader called Jagwar.

“Kat just complies with their request. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We all know if we upload a torrent there’s a chance it will be removed due to copyright owner request. Seems like that guy just got unlucky.”

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

Last week Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz chose a panel of individuals to draft the party’s platform.

As previously reported, 15 were selected, with six chosen by Clinton, five chosen by Bernie Sanders and four chosen by Wasserman Schultz. While other publications will certainly pick over the bones of the rest of the committee, one in particular stands out as interesting to TF readers.

Howard L Berman is an attorney and former U.S. Representative. He’s employed at Covington & Burling as a lobbyist and represents the MPAA on matters including “Intellectual property issues in trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties, copyright, and related legislation.”

It will come as no surprise then that the major studios have been donors throughout Berman’s political career. As shown in the image below, the top five contributors are all major movie companies.

Born in 1941, Berman’s work with the film industry earned him the nickname “the congressman from Hollywood” and over the years he’s been at the root of some of the most heated debates over the protection of intellectual property.

In 2007 and as later confirmed by Wikileaks, Berman was one of the main proponents of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Just five short years later Berman was at the heart of perhaps the biggest copyright controversy the world has ever seen when he became a co-sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

“The theft of American Intellectual Property not only robs those in the creative chain of adequate compensation, but it also stunts potential for economic growth, cheats our communities out of good paying jobs, and threatens future American innovation,” Berman said in the run-up to SOPA.

While these kinds of soundbites are somewhat common, it’s interesting to note that Berman showed particular aggression towards Google during hearings focusing on SOPA. On November 16, 2011, Berman challenged the search giant over its indexing of The Pirate Bay.

Insisting that there “is no contradiction between intellectual property rights protection and enforcement ensuring freedom of expression on the Internet,” Berman said that Google’s refusal to delist the entire site was unacceptable.

“All right. Well, explain to me this one,” Berman demanded of Google policy counsel Katherine Oyama.

“The Pirate Bay is a notorious pirate site, a fact that its founders proudly proclaim in the name of the site itself. In fact, the site’s operators have been criminally convicted in Europe. And yet…..U.S.-Google continues to send U.S. consumers to the site by linking to the site in your search results. Why does Google refuse to de-index the site in your search results?” he said.

Oyama tried to answer, noting that Google invests tens of millions of dollars into the problem. “We have hundreds of people around the world that work on it,” she said. “When it comes to copyright….”

Berman didn’t allow her to finish, repeating his question about delisting the whole site, again and again. Before Berman’s time ran out, Oyama was interrupted several more times while trying to explain that the DMCA requires takedowns of specific links, not entire domains. Instead, Berman suggested that Oyama should “infuse herself” with the notion that Google wanted to stop “digital theft.”

“[T]he DMCA is not doing the job. That is so obvious,” he said. “[Y]ou cannot look at what is going on since the passage of the DMCA and say Congress got it just right. Maintain the status quo.”

These arguments continue today in the “takedown, staydown” debate surrounding the ongoing review of the DMCA, with Hollywood lining up on one side and Google being held responsible for the actions of others on the other. But simply complaining about the DMCA is a little moderate for Berman.

Almost one and a half decades ago in the wake of Napster and before the rise of BitTorrent, Berman had a dream of dealing with peer-to-peer file-sharing by force. In 2002 he proposed the Peer To Peer Piracy Prevention Act, which would have allowed copyright holders to take extraordinary technical measures against file-sharers in order to stop the unauthorized distribution of their content.

H.R.5211 sought to amend Federal copyright law to protect a copyright owner from liability in any criminal or civil action “for impairing, with appropriate technology, the unauthorized distribution, display, performance, or reproduction of his or her copyrighted work on a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file trading network.”

The bill didn’t deal in specifics, but “impairing” was widely believed to be a euphemism for DDoS and poisoning attacks on individual file-sharers in order to make sharing impossible from their computers.

At the time “shared-folder” type sharing apps were still popular so bombarding networks with fake and badly named files would also have been fair game, although distributing viruses and malware were not on the table. Eventually, however, the bill died.

Berman, on the other hand, appears to be very much alive and will be soon helping to draft the Democratic Party platform. On past experience his input might not be too difficult to spot.

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

While torrents remain popular with millions of file-sharers, cheaper bandwidth and faster Internet connections have contributed to an explosion of content being streamed online.

Today there are thousands of sites offering huge libraries of unauthorized content, all of it available via a YouTube-like interface accessible via any Internet browser. With a non-existent learning curve, it’s piracy anyone can get involved in.

As a result these kinds of sites can quickly gain a massive following and efforts to hinder their operations continue every day. With millions of links being removed from search engines and site-blocking a regular occurrence, other more aggressive options are also regularly explored.

Currently that is the stance of prosecutors in Rome, Italy, who say they have carried out a large operation to shut down a network of sites offering live sports events, movies, TV shows and concerts without permission from copyright holders.

Titled Operation Match Off 2.0, the action was carried out by the Comando Unità Speciali (Special Command Unit) of the Guardia di Finanza (GdF), a department under Italy’s Minister of Economy and Finance tasked with dealing with financial crime.

According to GdF the operation targeted 50 sites running on 41 servers located on three continents. Three servers were seized locally in Italy. After raids were carried out in a number of regions across the country, five suspects were detained. Further details on the sites and the suspects are yet to be released.

The sites are said to have offered live streaming of sports, on-demand content such as movies and TV shows, plus scheduling features in return for a ten euro payment per month. Italian authorities say the equivalent official offering would cost nearer 100 euros.

GdF report that the five suspects had built of a “vast network” of users and were generating huge profits from them.

“To understand the scope of the operation we detected the presence of more than 340,000 registered users within a community,” GdF said in a statement.

“Assuming that everyone had an illegal ‘subscription’, you can, with a simple calculation, estimate that the turnover is nearly €3,500,000 monthly ($3.89m), or more than €40,000,000 ($44.46) per year.”

Should they be found guilty, the five suspects would face fines and up to four years in prison.

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

As 2016 nears its midway point the rhetoric over DMCA takedowns is more fiery than ever. Aware that a favorable change in the law might be possible sometime in the future, copyright holders are pushing the Copyright Office in the United States to consider a ‘takedown, staydown’ system.

This proposal, should it ever become enshrined in law, would enable copyright holders to issue a DMCA notice to a site for a particular piece of content with the expectation that it will never appear again on that same platform. Opposition to such a regime is notable but it’s not difficult to see why copyright holders are so keen to have it implemented.

In the meantime they are stuck with the existing system and their efforts are clearly illustrated in Google’s Transparency Report. During the past month alone 7,015 copyright holders and 3,176 reporting organizations sent requests for 87 million URLs to be removed from Google’s indexes. It’s a huge amount by any standard.

What is interesting is how a relatively small number of domains account for a disproportionate number of takedowns. For instance last month two sites – file-hosting site 4shared and MP3 site GoEar – accounted for close to 11 million takedowns. That means that it took complaints against another 77,855 domains to make up the remaining 76 million URLs.

When looking at the figures for the last year a similar picture emerges, with a small number of domains attracting disproportionate levels of complaints. Interestingly, those thinking that The Pirate Bay or KickassTorrents would get the top slots will be disappointed. Those sites pale into insignificance when compared to the front runners.

Also of interest is the kind of site being targeted.

In first position is 4shared, a file-hosting site traffic ranked 434th in the world by Alexa. While that represents huge amounts of traffic, it’s the site’s popularity in Brazil that is causing it to receive a disproportionate number of notices. 4shared is ranked the 53rd most popular domain there, something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by local anti-piracy outfit APDIF who since 2013 have filed 17 million complaints in response.

MP3 indexing site FlowXD takes second place with an ‘impressive’ 8.2 million takedowns. Again APDIF has been sending the lion’s share of the notices, presumably due to the site’s popularity in Brazil and elsewhere in South America.

In a close third with almost 7.7 million takedowns in the past twelve months is Chomikuj, a Cyrus-incorporated file-hosting site that is the 34th most-visited site in Poland. Overall, the UK’s BPI has shown the most interest in the site, having sent more than 4.5 million notices since 2011. More recently, however, a much wider spread of copyright holders have targeted the site.

Perhaps unsurprisingly a website unblocking service is also up there with the front runners. Unblocksit.es has had almost 7 million complaints filed with Google, mostly by anti-piracy outfit Rivendell who boast being the “world Leader on Google’s transparency report for removal illegal links.”

In fifth and sixth place respectively sit file-hosting giants Rapidgator and Uploaded with around 6.5 million complaints each. A wide range of copyright holders focus on both sites with an emphasis on the music sector. Rapidgator and Uploaded have experienced a decline in traffic since the start of the year but neither are showing signs of going away any time soon.

From there, all remaining sites in the top 10 are dedicated to offering free music. None seem particularly popular with English-speaking users. GoEar gets quite a lot of Spanish eyes and for some reason Gooveo is rocking it in Guatemala. Viciomp3 and Esamusica both appear to be defunct although copyright holders are continuing to send complaints to Google.

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

While Internet piracy has thrived on desktop machines for decades, it is now quite common to find the activity taking place in the living room. Expensive equipment is no longer needed and bulky machines have been replaced by much smaller HDMI-capable devices.

There are several types around but the most common have Android under the hood. Typically in small set-top or dongle format, these products can be loaded with media software from Google’s Play Store or invariably “side-loaded” with more unofficial products such as customized versions of Kodi, Showbox and Popcorn Time.

These cheap IPTV systems can provide users with access to a bewildering array of free content, from movies and TV shows to live sports and other PPV events. As a result, copyright holders around the world are mounting aggressive crackdowns on those who sell such devices for infringing uses.

Some of the most prominent actions have involved the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), who together with police have conducted a number of raids in the UK in recent months. Most have taken place in England but news is now emerging of a large scale anti-IPTV operation underway in Scotland.

According to local police, two premises were raided in Glasgow this week as part of what they describe as the “world’s largest” investigation into pirate IPTV boxes which has been underway for the last 16 months.

While movie companies have shown an interest in these devices it appears the focus in Scotland is on the streaming of live sports broadcasts. These are officially offered by FACT partners the English Premier League (soccer) alongside distributors Sky and BT but individuals and pubs are obtaining them illegally.

Speaking with STV, police say that initial estimates of the scale of infringement are now being dwarfed.

“As of today we estimated about 500 pubs might be involved, but today’s investigation has suggested it could be thousands,” a spokesman said.

“This is undoubtedly the biggest operation of its kind in the world in terms of recovery. It’s a process that’s been done elsewhere but not on this scale, this is the biggest.”

In a comment FACT director general Kieron Sharp said that his organization is committed to working with law enforcement to crack down IPTV-related piracy, wherever it may be.

“Pub landlords, as well as the general public, need to be aware that IPTV and set-top boxes with apps and add-ons allowing the streaming of pirated TV, sports and films are very much illegal,” Sharp said.

“FACT will continue to work with police forces across the UK to crack down on the illegal sale of these boxes.”

In other action, police in Scotland say that in conjunction with FACT they have taken down three “major” torrent sites operated from the Edinburgh, Kilmarnock and Falkirk areas.

“We’ve been successful in removing these sites and work is ongoing to remove several more that we have identified, in what is undoubtedly a growing problem,” said Police Constable Andy Law.

“Hosts often believe they leave no footprint, but in reality we can trace sites back to an address and from there it leaves little scope for the culprit to hide their actions.”

Police have not revealed the names of the sites and there has been no indication in torrent circles of any large indexes or trackers going down. It therefore seems more likely that these are lower level sites rather than the “major” ones suggested by the police.

“Websites offering illegal access to films, music, games and books are threatening our creative industries and the 1.8 million people in the UK working in them,” said FACT’s Kieron Sharp.

“FACT is committed to tackling online piracy and together with our partners at the police and within industry, we will continue the fight to clampdown on anyone operating these sites within our own territories.”

These latest announcements come alongside news that FACT has lost the support of its movie studios partners alongside an estimated 50% of its budget. The MPA says it will carry out its own investigations from regional hubs in future.

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

Back in 2010, the major movie studios of the Motion Picture Association were pursuing a dream. Rather than deal with each individual file-sharer the companies decided that website blocking could be a solution to mass online piracy.

Their first target was Usenet-indexing site Newzbin, a somewhat soft target considering the site had already been declared as operating illegally in the UK.

Almost five years ago the High Court ruled in the studios’ favor, ordering ISP BT to block the site. This action set a precedent in the UK and in the years that followed a similar process was used to block hundreds of ‘pirate’ sites, with the recording, publishing and sports industries all getting involved.

Currently, sites are blocked on a regular basis as copyright holders are allowed to add new domains to existing court orders if the domains are considered to be closely associated with a previously blocked site. This covers new Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents proxy sites, for example.

However, during the past few days several sites became unavailable via UK ISPs that were not closely associated with sites already blocked, CouchTuner for instance. This was a fairly clear indication that a new High Court order had been obtained.

That confirmation has now arrived, with notification from ISP Virgin Media that it has blocked several streaming sites in compliance with an injunction obtained by the Motion Picture Association on May 5. The sites are Couchtuner.ag, Merdb, Putlocker.is, Putlocker.plus, Rainiertamayo.com (Rainierland), Vidics.ch, Watchfree.to and Xmovies8.tv.

From a traffic perspective, Putlocker is without doubt the largest target. According to Alexa the streaming portal is the 219th most popular site on the Internet, 166th in the United States and an impressive 35th in the UK.

Next up is Watchfree.to, a site that rocketed from relative obscurity this time last year to become the 1,369th most popular site on the Internet. In third place comes CouchTuner, a fan favorite that’s currently ranked 1,609th worldwide. The remainder are relative minnows, with Vidics barely able to break the 28,000 barrier.

As always the current injunction was obtained under Section 97a of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act but one has to go back more than a year to find a similar fresh order obtained by the MPA. That came in April 2015 when several PopcornTime, isoHunt, EZTV and sundry streaming sites were targeted.

But while the MPA’s applications are spread out, it’s likely their reach will continue to grow. Any sites that have a similar name and/or functionality to those in an existing order will be added to the injunction without having to obtain a new one. In an effort to thwart workarounds, that includes proxies, mirrors and even copycats too.

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

In an effort to turn piracy into profit, more than a decade ago enterprising groups centered around lawfirms decided that file-sharers were ripe for a shakedown. Tracking IP addresses back to their users, companies demanded settlements of hundreds to many thousands of dollars each, to make supposed lawsuits go away.

During the last 10 years many companies have gained infamy with this business model, but few stirred up as much hatred as Prenda Law. Prenda and its principals John Steele, Paul Hansmeier and Paul Duffy grabbed dozens of headlines, mostly surrounding negative court rulings which found the outfit to have engaged in everything from vexatious litigation through to identity theft, misrepresentation and even deception.

Underlying this deviant behavior was the disturbing fact that rather than simply monitoring pirates online, Prenda actually uploaded content itself in order to create pirate honeypots on The Pirate Bay and elsewhere, a practice that pushed the company well over the moral line.

Although now defunct, Prenda is still fresh in the minds of its many victims so news last year that the outfit was under investigation by the FBI was well-received. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Pirate Bay co-founders Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij confirmed that they had both been interviewed in prison by police acting on behalf of the FBI.

“They wanted to know if I could verify the accuracy of the IP-address logs, how they were stored, and how they could be retrieved,” Neij explained.

But since then another year has passed and memories of Prenda have continued to fade. Will the world’s most hated trolls ever be brought to criminal justice? Well, fresh news from Ken White at Popehat suggests that the FBI still have a keen interest in the case and could be close to their goal.

Operating out of its Minneapolis office, the FBI has continued to seek additional information about Prenda and has reportedly sent out a letter “on a large scale” to attorneys who have represented alleged file-sharers targeted by the law company.

Ken White says he has seen the document and it reveals that the FBI is investigating several entities connected to Prenda including Steele Hansmeier PLLC, LW Systems, Livewire Holdings, AF Holdings, Ingenuity13, and Guava LLC.

“The FBI has devoted substantial resources to soliciting victim impact in a systematic way, and based on its questions about availability to testify is contemplating prosecution,” White explains.

Noting that the letter has gone out in a fairly public fashion, While says he believes that the investigation is probably in its latter stages, with the FBI already in possession of the evidence it needs to prosecute a case of wire and/or mail fraud.

By contacting Prenda’s victims, White believes the FBI is attempting to establish the amount of damages to claim, which could be substantial.

“Bear in mind that under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the more money wrongdoers made, the more time they’re facing. Team Prenda needs federal criminal defense attorneys, and needs them right now,” he concludes.

News that the investigation into Prenda’s activities could be in its final stages will be well received by thousands of victims and the possibility of peering behind the curtain of one of the most hated troll outfits is certainly welcome. The cherry on the top would be a successful prosecution but that could be some time away yet.

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