Author: Andy

Founded in 2011, Swefilmer was Sweden’s most popular streaming movie and TV show site. Research published last year by Media Vision claimed that 25% of all web TV viewing in the country was carried out on Swefilmer and another similar site, Dreamfilm.

All that began to change in July 2015 when one of the site’s operators, local man Ola Johansson, revealed that he’d been raided by the police who seized various items of computer equipment and placed him under arrest.

“It’s been a tough month to say the least. On 8 July, I received a search by the police at home. I lost a computer, mobile phone and other things,” Johansson said.

The gravity of the situation became clear when the Swede revealed in a video posted to YouTube that he’d been detained for almost four days.

Now, fresh news coming out of from Sweden is shining new light on the scale of the investigation which is already the largest involving a streaming site in the country.

While Johansson remains suspected of copyright infringement offenses, he is not thought to be the main person behind the site. A second man, believed to be the main operator of Swefilmer and the person who handled its revenue, has now been arrested in Germany.

According to Expressen he was first arrested in his absence last summer and was physically arrested in January 2016 after Sweden obtained a European arrest warrant. The existence of the warrant had previously been kept secret and news of the arrest only came to light last evening.

The man is reportedly a 25-year-old Turkish citizen resident in Germany. He is accused of being the site’s main operator and the person who setup the site’s deals with advertisers and accepted donations from users.

Court documents obtained by Expressen show that the European arrest warrant was obtained in Sweden on August 18, 2015. Signed by veteran file-sharing prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad, the 25-year-old suspect is accused of offenses including copyright infringement and aggravated money laundering.

The case involves a sample 1,400 movies that were allegedly made available without copyright holders’ permission between January 2013 and July 2015. In respect of the financial crimes the man is accused of receiving the equivalent of $1.7m in advertising revenue and donations into a Turkish bank account.

An order already exists to seize around $1.5m, which will be confiscated in preparation for any financial settlements when the case goes to trial. In January other seizures were made including a $77,000 car and properties worth $233,000.

The man remains in custody in Germany and it’s understood that his lawyer is campaigning for his release. Last month he filed an appeal which stated that no evidence had been produced to suggest the man was involved in Swefilmer. The appeal was rejected.

In the meantime Claes Kennedy, the lawyer representing Ola Johansson, expressed surprise that he had not been informed of the recent developments.

“It is strange that I was not informed about this,” Kennedy said. “Ola admits that he has been involved to some extent in the site Swefilmer, but his involvement was limited.”

While the prosecution is not expected to reach Pirate Bay-style heights, it does mark the most significant case against a streaming portal in Sweden to date. There is some way to go but it’s expected that the prosecution will demand the most severe sentences available.

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

Following pressure from AACS LA, the decryption licensing outfit founded by companies including Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft and Intel, last week copy-protection circumvention company SlySoft shutdown.

Unusually, the precise reasons for the closure remain uncertain. The only comment made by the company suggests that “regulatory requirements” had caused it to close down. There has been no triumphant announcement from the MPAA either.

That is unusual. One of SlySoft’s flagship products was AnyDVD, a Blu-ray ripping tool that was recently described by the studios as “a source for widespread, large-scale and commercial copyright infringement.” With that product now not on sale, one might think there would be at least some cause for celebration. However, something seems amiss.

For example, while SlySoft as a company says it has shut down, its forums are still operating from a subdomain of SlySoft.com. Interestingly they have just been renamed to RedFox, a nod to the creature depicted in SlySoft’s logo, and the discussion there is certainly providing food for thought and cause for optimism.

Firstly, according to people closely associated with SlySoft, even some key personnel weren’t informed of any potential problems with the company. Only adding to the intrigue is the claim that although SlySoft was shutdown in Antigua, none of the team were based there.

“We all were shocked when [the] message came on Monday to shut down [the] SlySoft website. Staff [still have] no complete information about what really happened and what’s going on in Antigua, as nobody of the SlySoft team is physically based in Antigua. We don’t even know each other,” says an admin identifying himself as ‘Ivan’.

Being scattered in different jurisdictions certainly has its plus points though and Ivan suggests that following lengthy discussion, big things could be on the horizon.

“We (developers and admins) had a few chat conferences this week and we came to the conclusion that if we have the backup of the community, we might consider to continue the development on our own,” he says.

While that is good news for AnyDVD fans, also of interest is that former employees of SlySoft still have access to key Slysoft infrastructure.

James, a now ex-SlySoft developer who says he is “probably the only person on this planet who can actually create an AnyDVD HD release build” says that ex-employees have “control over the assets (sources, servers)”.

But while that’s well and good, he seems less clear over whether those people are free to use them. Furthermore, there are questions over who legally owns AnyDVD if SlySoft itself is out of business.

“If AnyDVD was property of SlySoft, Inc and SlySoft no longer exists, who owns AnyDVD?” he asks.

So at this point questions are being asked based on two theories, or more, depending on how many one is prepared to entertain in this informational vacuum.

Firstly, if SlySoft shut down of its own accord, the company could potentially take legal action against any person resurrecting their products. However, it appears that SlySoft hasn’t parted company with its employees as smoothly as they might have liked, so loyalties don’t appear to be high on the agenda.

“SlySoft, Inc. owes us quite a lot of money, so morally I don’t have too much of a problem,” James says.

While SlySoft may or may not sue, if the shutdown was part of a settlement negotiated with AACS LA and/or the MPAA, it’s feasible those entities might have control of the rights to products including AnyDVD, or at least an agreement that controls their distribution and development.

However, according to key AnyDVD developer James, the latter scenario has not played out.

“I am quite sure, there is no settlement with AACS. The situation would be completely different,” he says.

So what for the future? At this point it’s clearly early days but it does appear that key people with the ability to resurrect products such as AnyDVD are seriously considering their options.

“I mostly worked on AnyDVD, this is my ‘baby’. I can push this forward,” James says.

“I certainly can’t do this on my own. e.g., I can’t maintain the server side, my skills are elsewhere. The other guys (network gurus, other devs, support people, forum mods) need to agree. I have some homework to do now. I’m certain that most of the ex-SlySoft people will agree to move forward.”

This turn of events is not entirely unexpected but there is a long road ahead littered with dozens of obstacles for anyone considering a “RedFox” revival. Nevertheless, with the possibility of release delays on the horizon, thousands will be cheering them on and that will be a hell of a boost.

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

If one had to create a list of the most influential torrent sites of the last decade, YTS/YIFY would certainly be among the top 10.

After arriving on the scene in 2010 the group shared more than 6,000 releases, on the way making YIFY one of the most recognizable piracy brands in the history of file-sharing.

Responsible both directly and indirectly for the sharing of countless millions of movies by millions of devoted fans, YTS/YIFY was bound to attract negative attention from the powerful businessmen of Hollywood. And, sure enough, in October 2015 the site disappeared, leaving only speculation in its wake.

Soon, however, the fog began to clear. Early November the MPAA confirmed it had shut down the operation, with its alleged New Zealand-based mastermind facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

Somewhat surprisingly the dispute with the site’s owner was quickly handled after he reached a private settlement deal with the studios. The terms have never been made public but several months on there are some interesting loose ends to tie up 11,600 miles away in the UK.

This may come as a surprise, but YTS/YIFY wasn’t just a website domain carrying torrents for DVD rips. It was in fact a fully registered company in the United Kingdom. On February 5, 2015, YTS (RE) Limited was incorporated under the company number 09424588.

The company’s address in the UK is 20-22, Wenlock Road, London, but searching there for a torrent site would prove somewhat pointless. That location is a so-called ‘virtual office‘ that offers customers a London presence for a small fee, along with mail forwarding, telephone answering and fax forwarding services if required.

Born in 1994, the sole director of YTS (RE) Ltd is listed as a New Zealand national holding the somewhat predictable status of “programmer”. Presumably ‘torrent site operator’ would be a little too obvious, even if the company name gives things away somewhat.

Last Tuesday the Registrar of Companies filed its response to the official shut down request, confirming the closure of YTS (RE) Ltd in two months’ time barring any complications.

If the company has any assets at all one might assume they will have already been handed to the MPAA as part of the YTS settlement, as the site’s YTS.to domain already has. However, if anything is left over the ownership of those items will transfer to the state.

In line with tradition the application for strike off has already been published in The London Gazette (pdf), which to our knowledge marks the first time that a torrent site has appeared in the journal since it was first published in 1665.

Interestingly, YTS isn’t the only torrent site with roots in a UK company. EZCloud Ltd is listed in the site’s WHOIS details as the owner of torrent site EZTV.ag.

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

For much of the last decade, PayPal was used on hundreds of file-sharing sites and services in order to accept donations from users. It was convenient for everyone concerned but copyright holders were less than impressed.

Slowly but surely PayPal, along with payment processors including Visa and Mastercard, were put under pressure to either server their links with piracy-focused sites or raise the bar so that sites operating in potential gray areas would find it difficult to meet strict criteria. PayPal later required that file-sharing services obtain pre-approval before using their facilities.

After 14 years of doing business with PayPal, in 2015 veteran P2P file-sharing software Soulseek found itself a victim of the payment processor’s tightening grip. The non-commercial music-swapping service had used its PayPal account to receive donations from users but all that came to an end when PayPal abruptly closed its account.

After being stonewalled by PayPal who had permanently limited the service’s account, Roz Arbel (who runs Soulseek with husband Nir) reached out to the EFF, who intervened on the service’s behalf. The decision worked wonders.

“Thanks entirely to Rainey Reitman, the EFF’s Activism Director, we are very happy to announce that our PayPal account has been restored!!!” Soulseek announced.

“As the EFF has helped us many times in the past, it seemed natural to reach out to Rainey, who has written a number of EFF blog posts specifically about PayPal and credit card companies. We want to send a shout-out to Rainey Reitman and the EFF for all that they do.”

In a piece penned by Rainey Reitman herself, the EFF says that the actions against Soulseek represent a rising threat to free speech.

“Threats to free expression online can come in many forms, but shutting down or limiting a law-abiding website is censorship,” Reitman writes.

“While the situation with Soulseek turned out well in the end, we’re concerned about the many websites we haven’t heard from that may be facing similar problems. It’s time for the payment providers to start erring on the side of supporting legal speech and let courts — not arbitrary corporate policies — decide what content should be censored.”

It’s been known for some time that PayPal now requires file-sharing and related services to obtain pre-approval to a set of strict standards, but Soulseek was actually given a questionnaire to complete in order to validate its service with PayPal.

Reproduced in full below, it’s the clearest indication yet that copyright holders are breathing heavily down PayPal’s neck and if they didn’t actually write the questionnaire themselves, they certainly played a massive role in its production.

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1. Business Overview. Please provide a general overview of your business, identifying all related website URLs or apps, describing the services you offer and how revenue is earned, and indicating how you use or would like to use PayPal’s services. (The terms “you” and “your” refer to your business in the remainder of this questionnaire.)

2. Typical Usage. Please describe the kinds of files that are most often stored or transferred using your services (indicating, for example, typical file types, sizes, content and/or other relevant attributes) and, to the extent of your knowledge, the typical purposes that your customers have for using your services.

3. Incentives for Uploaders. Do you offer rewards, cash payments or other incentives to some or all users who upload files? If so, please describe your related practices, including the criteria used to determine the nature and amount of incentives that users are entitled to receive.

4. Membership Tiers and Benefits. Please describe any membership tiers, subscription plans or service levels that you offer (e.g., “free,” “premium,” etc.), indicating for each any payments required and the main benefits users receive. Are paying users entitled to enhanced benefits related to downloading or otherwise accessing files uploaded by other users, such as faster access speeds, higher allowances for total amount of data accessed, or the reduction/elimination of wait times, captchas or advertising? If so, please describe the related terms.

5. Forum Codes. Do you offer “forum codes,” “URL codes,” “HTML codes” or other features that facilitate the incorporation of links to uploaded files on third-party websites? If so, please describe such features.

6. Link Checker. Do you offer users a link checker or other functionality that helps users determine whether links to uploaded files have been disabled. If so, please describe such functionality.

7. File Deletion. Please describe any practices you employ related to the expiration, purging or other automated deletion of uploaded files. Is the timing of a file’s deletion influenced by the frequency with which it is downloaded or otherwise accessed? If so, please explain.

8. Information Collection. Do you collect information about the uploaders of files? If so, please describe your related practices, including whether you collect any of the following: name, postal address, email address and IP address.

9. Repeat Infringement. Please describe any practices you employ to prevent users of your system from uploading copyright infringing files on multiple occasions. Please include information about any technological methods you use to identify repeat infringers, such as methods involving the IP addresses of computers used to upload files. If a policy or other information related to repeat infringement is available on your website, please provide a link.

10. Copyright Infringement Reports. Please describe your practices related to soliciting, receiving and responding to reports from third parties about copyright-infringing files accessible through your service. If a policy, reporting instructions or other information related to such practices (e.g., a DMCA policy) is available on your website, please provide a link.

11. Illegal File Reports. Please describe your practices related to soliciting, receiving and responding to reports from third parties about illegal files accessible through your service (other than reports of copyright infringement covered by Item 10 above). If a policy, reporting instructions or other information related to such practices is available on your website, please provide a link.

12. Monitoring. Do you employ any practices involving the monitoring of uploaded files to identify and remove copyright infringing files or other illegal files? If so, please describe those practices, including any manual review or automated scanning of files performed by your staff or by any third-party firms. Please indicate the names and website URLs of any such third-party firms.

13. Law Enforcement Cooperation. Please describe your practices with respect to responding to requests or orders from law enforcement, courts or other government bodies, such as information requests, discovery orders, search warrants and subpoenas.

14. Child Exploitation. Please describe any actions you take if you become aware that a file uploaded to your system involves child exploitation or any sexually-oriented depiction of a minor.

15. Other Controls. If you employ any processes or controls not otherwise covered in your responses to this questionnaire that are aimed at preventing or otherwise addressing any actual or potential use of your system for the storage or transfer of illegal files or for other illegal activities, please describe them.

16. Point of Contact. Please identify and provide contact information (including phone number and email address) for a person who will serve as PayPal’s point of contact with respect to our review of your business and any future inquiries or concerns we may have.

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

SlySoft was a company that gained a reputation for producing software designed to circumvent copyright protection mechanisms. Among them was AnyDVD, a device driver for Windows which allowed users to decrypt DVDs and Blu-ray discs on the fly.

Under pressure from AACS LA, a decryption licensing outfit founded by a group of powerful Hollywood movie studios and various technology partners, SlySoft first went dark and then announced its closure this week.

And now, in the space of just a couple of days, another DVD/Blu-ray copying software company also appears to be feeling the heat.

Like SlySoft, China-based Fengtao Software has also been involved in a dispute with AACS LA and in 2014 was the subject of a preliminary injunction after a court found that DVDFab violates the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause. In 2015 a federal court in New York extended the injunction, further pressuring the company.

Then yesterday, just a day after the closure of SlySoft, Fengtao dropped a bombshell of its own. In a press release sent to Myce the company announced that DVDFab will not be updated to crack the Advanced Access Content System encryption that will be present in the next generation of 4K UHD Blu-ray discs.

“The next version of AACS Copy Protection accompanying those newly released Ultra HD Blu-ray titles is the version 2.0 of Advanced Access Content System. According to a document called AACS 2.0 Draft, the new copy protection requires the Ultra HD Blu-ray players to support two AACS 2.0 functionalities, one named ‘basic’ and the other referred as ‘enhanced’,” the company said in a statement.

“Fengtao Software Inc. makes it clear that the company will not decrypt or circumvent AACS 2.0 in the days to come. This is in accordance with AACS-LA, (which has not made public the specifications for AACS 2.0), the BDA and the movie studios.”

Noting that the debate over copying commercial movie discs for home use has “raged on for decades”, Fengtao says that the practice of decrypting copy protection technology has done so too and is not likely to stop in the foreseeable future. Even the fact that AACS 2.0 requires an Internet connection for Ultra HD Blu-ray discs to be played back for the first time is unlikely to stop the problem.

“Now here comes the question: will there be a solution to crack AACS 2.0? Likely, there will be, publicly or secretly,” the company says. Nevertheless, Fengtao insists that it won’t be behind the effort.

The company won’t be shutting down though. Fengtao says that it will concentrate its development efforts on DVDFab and its support for editing 4K/UHD content.

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

Last October the most popular Popcorn Time fork and the one most-closely linked to the original project shut down its website PopcornTime.io.

With rumors flying the worst case scenario eventually reared its head, with confirmation that the MPAA had filed a lawsuit against the project’s developers in Canada. The legal threats triggered a domino effect and several other contributors ceased working on the platform.

However, earlier this month people with outdated versions of the PopcornTime.io software began receiving updates declaring “Hail Hydra”, and with that the application started working once again.

Surprised at this sudden reanimation, TF asked around to find out who was behind it but no one wanted to claim responsibility. That’s understandable – no sane person wants the MPAA’s lawyers monitoring their every move. However, just over a week later and we now have the first official statement from the people behind the reincarnation.

Noting that an explanation is long overdue, the team (located at popcorntime.sh) are now attempting to clarify their mission and point out where they stand in what has recently become an extremely confused and messy ‘marketplace’.

“After the ‘MPAA incident’, we’re a little diminished, and we’ve chosen a new direction: we’re shifting from an active development of Popcorn Time to a more or less resilience-driven development,” the team announced.

Although at this point the team aren’t being more specific, in this case ‘resilience’ appears to be avoiding the fate of the people who became known to the MPAA last year. Some of those people were quite open about their work on Popcorn Time and few measures were taken to hide identities, which in hindsight was probably their undoing.

This time around things seem to be taking a different shape. Instead of working on what is probably an illegal application, it appears that the software’s former developers are now working on ‘Butter‘, a relatively new streaming project with neutral technology and no illegal content.

However, the work and development that goes into Butter will then be leveraged by a separate team to power the variant of Popcorn Time using the .SH ccTLD.

“Most of our old teammates have left the ship to focus on a new technology, they called it Butter, and we use their platform as a base to make Popcorn Time,” the team says.

“The bonus is that we, as well as other existing and future projects, will indirectly profit from all the changes brought in Butter.”

So what we appear to have here is a line being drawn in the sand. On one side is Butter, a project that developers can work on (possibly) without fear of being tarnished with the stigma of Popcorn Time. On the other, people working on a Butter-based Popcorn Time who hope that they don’t suffer the same fate as their predecessors did last year.

The team behind the new variant has also addressed the question of monetization of the Popcorn Time platform. The founding ethos, which was only adhered to 100% by the original, original project, was to make no money. Generating money is seen as an Achilles’ heel by some and the PopcornTime.sh team say they will return to a zero revenue setup.

“We’d like to add that we do not accept any donation and have no interest in monetizing Popcorn Time by any way: our philosophy hasn’t changed,” they note.

But far beyond the dangers of monetization and the wounds inflicted on Popcorn Time by the MPAA, the ‘brand’ has been tarnished in recent months by a crowded marketplace filled with Popcorn Time clones, copies and wannabees. The new team also addresses these problems.

“The last four months have been chaotic. We’ve seem some forks keeping up the good work and others who just wanted to attract users into a trap of adwares & malwares. We would like to take a moment to thank the Reddit Community for taking things over while we were in standby.”

So what is the current state of play? Well the problem from potential users’ perspectives is that no one is really able to say absolutely definitively which forks are totally trustworthy and which ones aren’t, since everyone is keen to hide their identities and remain unaccountable.

As a result it’s no longer possible to publicly point to a set of trustworthy developers and use their credentials to give credibility to a project. Not to say that some haven’t tried, however.

A diagram that has been circulating on Reddit attempts to put the current mess into an easy to understand format but claims that the Time4Popcorn fork (which incidentally has offered the most consistent service throughout) is somehow untrustworthy have never been backed up by solid proof.

Also, since no one is prepared to confirm who is behind the .SH version, users simply have to take their word for it that they are somehow linked with and/or trusted by the .IO team that was taken down last year. That assumption does generally exist but since there is no consistency and no public face it’s almost impossible for anyone to give it an official stamp of approval.

Perhaps the most important point is no matter who one speaks to about any variant of Popcorn Time, there is nearly always an element of bias. Some point to open source being the yardstick, others suggest that making no money is they key. Most users simply don’t care as long as free movies appear. In future the proof of the pudding will probably have to be in the eating.

In any event, at least for now there appears to be three main editions of Popcorn Time (loosely PopcornTime.sh, Popcorn-Time.se and PopcornTime.ml), each with their own lines of development but only the former based on Butter. Whether it’s wise for them all to carry the same name is a matter for them but in any event confusion is likely to persist, as is the ever-looming threat from Hollywood.

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

Around the world there are periodic arrests of people who are alleged to have been involved in the running of ‘pirate’ sites but the general file-sharing public is usually subjected to much lighter treatment.

Often part of so-called ‘graduated response’ schemes, emailed warnings are the most common weapon of choice for copyright holders to get a “we’re watching you” message to relatively small time pirates. Japan, however, likes to do things a little differently.

According to an announcement by the National Police Agency (NPA), in recent days officers across Japan carried out raids against individuals believed to have downloaded and shared a variety of content without obtaining permission from copyright holders.

In a three-day long crackdown between February 16 and 18, police in 29 prefectures searched 93 locations, eventually arresting a total of 44 people. All are suspected of engaging in online piracy of either movies, music, anime, manga or computer software. All were detained under the Copyright Act.

A wide variety of heavyweight industry groups were behind the action including the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPAJ), the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), the Japan Video Software Association (JVA) and the Software Alliance (BSA).

According to the Association of Copyright for Computer Software (ACCS) the large-scale crackdown on Internet pirates is the seventh of its type since 2009.

Those detained include a 55-year-old office worker who along with the others faces fines between $1,785 and $89,200 (200,000 to 10 million yen) and jail sentences of up to ten years, depending on their offense.

Until 2012 only uploading was considered a criminal offense in Japan but in that same year local authorities upgraded mere downloading to a crime carrying jail sentences of up to two years.

It’s an important point then that police report the suspects as mostly using “shared folder” style P2P applications, a method of sharing that has remained popular in Asia despite the worldwide rise of software such as BitTorrent. Users of this software tend to both share and distribute content for extended periods of time, thus opening them up to the harshest sentences.

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

There are many different ways that people are able to share files online and they broadly fall into two categories – public and private.

Public sharing is generally carried out using peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent. Anyone participating in a torrent swarm should be aware that unless they take precautions by using a VPN or proxy, their IP address is visible to all of the other people engaged in the same act.

Private sharing can also take many forms, from exchanging content via email to uploading and downloading content from invite-only servers, for example. While it has to be noted there are always weak leaks, this kind of sharing usually receives less interest from anti-piracy companies as it tends to be scattered and somewhat cost ineffective to police.

That being said, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has just managed to scare an unnamed number of pirates after they participated in a presumed-private sharing circle that utilized Dropbox for exchanging copyrighted content.

The story traces back to December 2015 when BREIN obtained an ex parte court order against a man they accused of being the administrator of a Dropbox account that was being used to distribute copyrighted eBooks.

It was alleged that the man was active on a number of Internet forums and on request granted fellow members with access to said account in order to download titles without paying. After a complaint from BREIN the court found this behavior unacceptable and ordered the man, in his absence, to cease his activities or face fines of 2,000 euros per day up to a maximum of 50,000 euros.

However, as previously reported, BREIN is now regularly striking private settlement deals with people it also targets in court. It’s not known if there was a financial arrangement in this particular case but quite clearly BREIN has been able to leverage its position to scare the individuals that had been downloading from the Dropbox account.

Since those downloading from the eBook-filled Dropbox folder were required to give up their email addresses to the person administering the account, they became vulnerable when BREIN discovered his identity. So, as part of the settlement deal, BREIN was then able to contact those individuals with a custom threat, direct to an email address they had previously considered private.

“BREIN has recently found that you are a user (or: Member) of the Dropbox account called ‘—‘, offered by ‘—‘. Your email address is visible to third parties and by BREIN for the purpose of sending you this email,” the email to the assumed pirates begins.

“Without permission of the copyright holders this account was used for sharing copies of eBooks, which is not lawful. The administrator was (as the owner and administrator) responsible for this and the judge has ruled that this person has infringed on the rights of the copyright holders BREIN represents.”

The Dropbox users are then informed that they too have almost certainly infringed copyright due to them downloading copyrighted content from an illegal source and they should therefore consider purchasing their content from legal sources in the future.

“BREIN received several positive responses to [these emails] and it also seems that the exchange of ebooks via the forums that BREIN found in its research has almost completely ceased,” the group said in a statement.

While there’s no suggestion that BREIN intends to take matters further, it seems clear that those sharing or obtaining copyrighted content even from a Dropbox account should be aware that if the person they’re downloading from caves in, their email address (at the very least) could be vulnerable to threats. If that email then correlates with other information available on the web, things certainly have the potential to escalate.

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

Despite sending notices requesting the removal of hundreds millions of links from Google’s search results, the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) consistently manages to do so without causing serious collateral damage.

While that accuracy is to be commended, the BPI is also famous for being involved in the wholesale blocking of hundreds of ‘pirate’ websites in the UK, regardless of the non-infringing content many of them index. It also has a reputation for being ruthless in prosecutions of people sharing files.

All that being said, the BPI’s anti-piracy team is one of the most effective out there so an announcement last December that there would be upheaval in the team came as something of a surprise. The heads of both its Copyright Protection Unit and Head of Internet Investigations would both be moving on following a restructuring exercise, the BPI said.

Now the industry group has revealed a key new addition to the team. On April 20, Tim Cooper will become the BPI’s brand new Head of Content Protection.

Cooper is currently Head of Operations at NetResult, a Thomson Reuters company doing business in the anti-piracy space. Established in 2000 and headquartered in London, NetResult describes itself as being active in the online monitoring and enforcement sector for intellectual property rights.

Cooper has spent a decade at NetResult and according to the BPI developed the world’s first anti-piracy service to combat live streaming and devised strategies to tackle live P2P networks and streaming platforms. Chinese operator PPLive was one of the main targets but since then web-based operations have swamped the market.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to look far to find instances of Cooper’s anti-piracy footprints on the web, in this instance threatening the operators of a site indexing clips of soccer games who sarcastically refer to Cooper as their “friend”.

But after 10 years with NetResult Cooper says he’s looking forward to working in the music sector.

“I am thrilled to be joining The BP‎I to head up its content protection work. I have worked in rights protection for over a decade and music has been a passion all of my life,” he said in a statement.

“I look forward to leading The BPI’s Content Protection team and working closely with its General Counsel to continue to develop and deliver The BPI’s world-renowned content protection services for record labels and performers.”

Interestingly, the BPI has also taken the opportunity to thrown down some general anti-piracy statistics concerning the UK, claiming it now has one of the lowest piracy rates in the world.

“The number of UK consumers visiting illegal sites has fallen to about half the global average, and is lower than any other technologically advanced country except the USA and Japan,” the BPI says.

However, as our article earlier today shows, pirate site blockades in the UK are faltering, at least temporarily, with key sites regained lost ground due to what appears to be technical issues at ISPs.

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

When mentioned by US-based entertainment companies, Russian social networking giant vKontakte is often portrayed as a poor copyright partner that does little to deal with the huge amounts of infringement on its platform.

Indeed, vKontakte faces regular criticism from both the RIAA and MPAA, with various affiliated companies having taken the platform – which has an estimated 80 million users per day – to court on a number of occasions. However, vKontakte is now under threat locally, a threat it needs to take very seriously indeed.

For the first time ever vKontakte has been reported to the Moscow City Court for its apparent failure to protect copyrights. This Court has the power to order a site to be blocked by local ISPs based on complaints from copyright holders. Should those complaints persist, the Court has the power to order a site – even vKontakte – to be blocked on a permanent basis.

In this instance vKontakte is under fire from AZAPO, the Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet. The anti-piracy outfit represents several book publishers but the current complaint involves just a single title, Zahara Prilepina’s “Resident”.

“There are Public and ‘My Documents’ sections, which we have cleaned and vKontakte has deleted files based on our claim. But in one of the cases we have found that the content has remained in place. It turns out that vKontakte is not taking proper protection measures,” says AZAPO Director General Maxim Ryabyko.

Previous claims against vKontakte have been processed through the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg however AZAPO has tried that before and feels the process offered by the Court is too slow.

“We have accumulated a lot of history with vKontakte, including negative experiences. We decided to appeal to the Moscow City Court as claims filed with the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg are long and expensive, and the procedure is not quite clear to us,” Ryabyko notes.

Given that the Moscow City Court has the power to render vKontakte inaccessible in Russia to its hundreds of millions of signed-up users, perhaps the big question is why no one has reported the site to the Court before. Interestingly, Russia’s Izvestia cites anonymous rightsholders who claim that telecoms watchdog Roskomadzor asked them not to. The government agency apparently said that vKontakte should be given space since it had been cooperating with entertainment companies on piracy.

Clearly AZAPO didn’t get the memo but it appears that the anti-piracy group is more interested in getting a fair deal for its members than having vKontakte blocked.

“I know that negotiations are actively underway with the audio and film industries, but the authors of books do not perceive themselves as participants in the negotiation process,” says Ryabyko.

“Our goal is to urge vKontakte to adequately interact with the book industry.”

It’s understood that AZAPO would like vKontakte to move in a number of ways, each of which allows content (in whole or in part) to be made commercially available on the platform. The first option would see a full subscription platform put in place while a second envisages an ad-supported model. The third would see vKontakte users getting access to a sample of a book which later diverts to the author’s own website.

For its part, vKontakte appears less than impressed at being reported to the Moscow City Court.

“Instead of a constructive conversation we see legal claims imposed. The true aim of the plaintiff, in our opinion, is not to protect their rights but to put pressure on vKontakte,” says spokesperson Evgeny Krasnikov.

“Obviously, only an open dialogue about the models and methods to monetize content for rights holders will help the development of legal content market in Russia. Such communication we have had with the largest local book distributors.”

Whether AZAPO’s negotiating technique will bear fruit will be revealed in the months ahead.

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