Author: Ernesto

With 400,000 subscribers nationwide, RCN is one of the larger Internet providers in the United States.

Like many other ISPs the company has been overloaded with piracy notices in recent years. One of the most prolific senders is Rightscorp, who submit DMCA notices on behalf of clients including BMG.

These notices are controversial, because they use an aggressive tone paired with settlement demands.

In addition, Rightscorp and its clients claim that ISPs could be held liable for the infringing actions of their customers if they fail to take proper action. This includes disconnecting repeat copyright infringers.

RCN is not pleased with these allegations and this week took legal action. The Internet provider filed a lawsuit against music rights group BMG at a New York federal court, seeking a legal opinion on the matter.

“The central question for this Court’s determination is whether an Internet service provider should be held liable for copyright infringement simply because it provides Internet connectivity to its customers,” RCN writes.

The Internet provider explains that BMG and its anti-piracy partner are demanding payment for the alleged wrongdoings of its customers. In the process, they are bombarding RCN’s mailservers with notices.

“Both BMG and Rightscorp are wrongly demanding payment from RCN for that alleged infringement, and have clearly expressed their intention to enforce these purported rights,” the ISP writes.

“To substantiate its allegations, BMG asserts that RCN is on notice of the alleged wrongdoing by pointing to Rightscorp’s history of inundating RCN’s email server with millions of notifications purportedly reflecting instances of subscriber infringement.”

According to the Internet provider the notices are so numerous and so lacking in specificity, that it’s not feasible to investigate the claims. In addition, RCN points out that Rightscorp’s monitoring technology is flawed for various reasons.

Among other things, the ISP notes that Rightscorp only checks if a small portion of an alleged copyrighted work is shared, not the entire file.

RCN further says that it is not liable for the infringement of its subscribers because it is merely passing on traffic, which allows the company protection under the DMCA’s safe harbor provision.

The company is asking the court to review the matter and issue a declaratory judgment to provide more certainty.

“BMG’s repeated assertions that RCN is liable for copyright infringement lack merit. RCN therefore seeks a judgment from this Court declaring that it is not liable to BMG for copyright infringement,” RCN writes.

This is not the first lawsuit to deal with the question of liability.

In a similar case last year, Internet provider Cox Communications was held responsible for the copyright infringements of its subscribers. In that case a Virginia federal court ordered Cox to pay BMG $25 million in damages.

Given the stakes at hand, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see various other ISPs and copyright holders taking an interest in RCN’s case, as it’s likely to have a wide impact.

The full complaint filed by RCN is available here (pdf).

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

Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has targeted the operators of pirate sites for more than a decade, but more recently it began going after uploaders as well.

Over the past several months the group has tracked down several prolific uploaders and has now announced intentions to take these efforts a step further.

While many efforts have focused on BitTorrent uploaders, BREIN is also keeping a close eye on other sharing platforms. This includes Usenet, which despite staying out of the piracy headlines, remains relatively popular.

Representing several large book publishers, the anti-piracy group is going after two anonymous Usenet users, who allegedly uploaded more than 2,000 books to newsgroups.

BREIN has already contacted their Usenet providers, Eweka and Usenetter, who in response cancelled the accounts in question.

However, they refused to hand over any personal details. According to the providers, they are no longer allowed to share personal data under the e-Privacy regulation if an account is disconnected.

BREIN contests this and is now taking the matter to court. According to the group this case isn’t about regular data retention policies, instead, it’s a unique situation where the enforcement rights of the publishers should outweigh privacy concerns.

A local court will now review both positions. The court has already stated that it will review the circumstances under which BREIN requested the data, when the users’ accounts were still active.

If BREIN succeeds then the group has an extra tool in their arsenal, making it easier to expose prolific uploaders. This could also spell trouble for BitTorrent uploaders, as BREIN could try to request personal information from their ISPs.

TorrentFreak asked BREIN for a comment on their plans for the information, but at the time of publishing we haven’t heard back.

This isn’t the first time BREIN has gone after serial e-book infringers. Last year, a Dutch court ordered Google to hand over the personal details of a user that sold pirated books in the Play Store. In that case the court concluded that the rights of copyright holders outweigh the user’s rights.

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

Like many other countries around the world, downloading music and movies is hugely popular in the Netherlands.

In part, the popularity was facilitated by the fact that downloading pirated music has long been legal under local law.

This tolerant stance towards online piracy changed in 2014 when the European Court of Justice ruled it to be unlawful. As a result the Dutch Government quickly outlawed unauthorized downloading.

Despite this change piracy remains widespread in the country and film producer Klaas de Jong is now trying to hold four large Internet providers to account.

Last week De Jong filed a complaint with the police, holding KPN Telfort, Vodafone and Ziggo directly responsible. The producer wants the providers to be criminally prosecuted for passing on traffic to various pirate sites.

“If someone sells you an illegal bike, this fencer is also punishable,” De Jong tells Het Parool, adding that “time is running out.”

The producer, who has worked on many Dutch film projects, states that the local movie industry is losing tens of millions of euros due to piracy.

Whether the case will be prosecuted has yet to be seen.

In a civil proceeding against various ISPs a local court previously overturned the Pirate Bay blockade, concluding that it was ineffective and that it restricted the ISPs’ entrepreneurial freedoms.

This case is under appeal at the Supreme Court, which in turn has sought clarification from the EU Court of Justice on several issues.

De Jong’s complaint is not an isolated incident though and the local film industry is clearly losing its patience.

Earlier this year the Association of Professional Film Entrepreneurs (VPSO) decided to take action as well. In a letter sent to the Secretary of State for Justice they held the Government responsible for over a billion euros in piracy losses.

The Dutch Government denied these allegations and said that the film industry has plenty of options to recoup their losses. Through civil procedures against downloaders, for example.

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

In this special episode Rick Falkvinge, founder of The Pirate Party

Rick talks about the origins of the party, its relationship to The Pirate Bay and Pirate Bureau, his experience of taking it to the European Parliament, and the party’s relation to questions of privacy and surveillance looming ever larger in today’s society.

Should the Pirate Party really be called the Private Party? No, says Rick, it’s evolving into the natural home of citizens’ rights for digital freedom – and that’s just fine for pirates.

—

Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary and analysis.

The guests for our news discussions will vary and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the great innovators and minds.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Rick Falkvinge.

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Eric Bouthiller
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Siraje Amarniss

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

This year HBO decided to stop releasing promotional Game of Thrones screeners to the press.

The drastic move was taken to prevent early leaks, as had happened last year. However, thus far this strategy hasn’t been very effective.

While no screener releases have come out, as planned, the company itself has been the source of several breaches already.

Sunday afternoon, several hours before the official premiere, episode 8 of Game of Thrones’ latest season was already being shared online by tens of thousands of people.

A high quality copy with the scene release group tag “EXCLUSiVE” quickly spread to various torrent sites, giving pirates the exclusive indeed.

While it’s unclear how the group got their hands on the early copy, it appears that HBO may be to blame. The episode carries the regular HBO watermark and the “WEB” release tag shows that the video was ripped from an online service, likely HBO Go.

In addition to the Game of Thrones, HBO’s Veep and Silicon Valley were also released several hours early by the same scene group.

HBO leaks

This isn’t the first episode of Game of Thrones to came out early this year. The same happened with the fifth episode due to a mistake at HBO Nordic. In addition, the season premiere also leaked a few hours early according to some reports.

For several years in a row Game of Thrones has been the most pirated TV-show, and this year the interest is once again overwhelming. What appears to be changing is HBO’s attitude towards those who share the show without permission.

Not too long ago HBO CEO Jeff Bewkes said that GoT’s piracy records were “better than an Emmy,” but the company gradually increased its efforts to combat unauthorized sharing.

Over the past several weeks thousands of pirates have received warnings in their mailboxes, the company is also fervently taking down links to pirated copies of the show, and “porn” clips and spoilers have been targeted.

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

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

X-Men: Apocalypse is the most downloaded movie for the third week in a row.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(1)	X-Men: Apocalypse (HDCam/TC)	7.7 / trailer
2	(…)	Warcraft	7.7 / trailer
3	(…)	Eye In The Sky	7.6 / trailer
4	(4)	Zootopia	8.3 / trailer
5	(…)	Midnight Special	6.9 / trailer
6	(2)	13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi	7.4 / trailer
7	(3)	London Has Fallen	5.9 / trailer
8	(…)	Cell	4.7 / trailer
9	(6)	Captain America: Civil War (TC)	8.4 / trailer
10	(9)	Alice Through the Looking Glass	6.4 / trailer

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

Nearly a decade ago, research from the University of Washington revealed that some piracy tracking outfits were painfully sloppy.

The researchers found that not all anti-piracy companies actually check if someone’s sharing a file, before sending out their DMCA notices. As a result, a local printer at a university was branded a serial pirate.

This mistake is the result of passive monitoring, where tracking outfits don’t verify if an IP-address in a BitTorrent swarm is actually trading pieces of a copyrighted file. This results in many false accusations, not least because many trackers insert random IP-addresses.

While this practice has become more rare in recent years, tracking methods at some companies are still not perfect.

TorrentFreak was recently approached by a torrent site operator who regularly scrapes trackers and BitTorrent’s DHT to discover new metadata. While his system is setup specifically to gather information (not to share any content), he is still accused of doing so by copyright holders.

“In less than 24 hours of indexing we’ve received more than a dozen DMCA notices from IP-Echelon, claiming that we are ‘distributing copyrighted video files’,” the site owner explains.

The odd part is that these notices we’re not meant for the website, but targeted the server that gathered the torrent information. These are similar to the warnings regular downloaders receive through their ISP, and list the IP-address and port that was allegedly used to “distribute” the files.

TorrentFreak has seen copies of the notices in question, which are sent on behalf of major movie studios including Paramount Pictures. They were not sent to the torrent site directly, but to its hosting provider instead.

“IP-Echelon has become aware that the below IP addresses have been using your service for distributing video files, which contain infringing video content that is exclusively owned by Paramount,” the tracking company writes.

“We are requesting your immediate assistance in removing and disabling access to the infringing material from your network. We also ask that you ensure the user and/or IP address owner refrains from future use and sharing of Paramount materials and property,” the notice adds.

The torrent site owner doesn’t deny that he is fetching information from the same BitTorrent swarms IP-Echelon is monitoring, but says that his systems are specifically configured not to share any infringing content.

In fact, he also received notices for a server that only fetches torrent metadata from the DHT.

“This server just fetches infodata, never starts any piece transfers. It was setup specifically as a ‘clean’ box and never participated in any torrent transfers,” he says.

According to the site owner this shows that IP-Echelon doesn’t really bother to check if the people they accuse are actually sharing any substantial copyrighted data, unless they see metadata as “infringing” too.

“To qualify for ‘sharing’ you have to actually share content. That is, have a piece of data, advertise that as available, and then send at least a valid piece of data when asked to. That would be proper actionable evidence.

“IP Echelon just seems to spam anyone who turns up in peer lists,” he adds.

When asking for additional details the site owner explained that his DHT fetching method uses libtorrent’s ‘disabled_storage’ storage setting. This means that no data is stored on the server, so there would be no infringing pieces to upload either.

TorrentFreak contacted IP-Echelon to hear their side of the story, but the company preferred not to respond in detail. Instead, they left the following comment.

“We do not comment in the press regarding IP-Echelon’s technology and operations. However, we can assure you that all statements made by IP-Echelon in dispatched notices are accurate,” the company replied.

“Any recipient of a notice who has concerns about its legitimacy is welcome to get in touch with us direct,” the company added.

Without a comprehensive audit on both ends it’s hard to conclusively say which side is right. However, this is certainly not the first time that torrent tracking methods have been called into doubt.

Earlier this year researcher Aymeric Vitte TorrentFreak revealed extensive research showing that very few DHT tracking outfits actually check whether a BitTorrent user is actively uploading content.

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

Megaupload was shutdown nearly half a decade ago, but data from hundreds of the site’s servers are still in storage.

This is also true for the files that were placed at Cogent.

While the original machines are no longer intact, the hosting company has backed up all data which it will keep in storage pending the various lawsuits against the company and its operators.

However, as time has gone by the condition of the harddrives has deteriorated. A few weeks ago Cogent warned that sixteen of them have actually become unreadable, which is a serious concern since they contain important evidence.

To resolve the issue the RIAA and MPAA, representing various major copyright holders, asked if they could preserve a copy of the data themselves. Alternatively, they were also open to bringing in an independent computer forensics vendor, to copy and preserve the data.

Megaupload disagreed, arguing that rightsholders or other outsiders shouldn’t get their hands on possibly privacy sensitive user data, and opted to simply repair the failing disks.

This week District Court Judge Liam O’Grady ruled on the matter at hand. He rejected the copying proposal by the rightsholders, and went with Megaupload’s suggestion instead.

Judge O’Grady’s order

“The Court finds Defendants’ proposal is the more appropriate remedy for the issue at hand,” Judge O’Grady writes in his order.

The Judge instructs all stakeholders in the civil and criminal cases, including the U.S. Government and Cogent, to come together and agree on a repair process.

“[All parties] shall meet and confer with United States Magistrate Judge John F. Anderson to discuss and devise an appropriate solution to repair the Cogent drives and preserve the evidence on the Cogent servers, as well as to secure and preserve other digital evidence.”

While none of the parties are likely to disagree to a repair, they do have to determine who should pick up the tab.

Megaupload previously said that it doesn’t have the financial resources to do so, and suggested that either the copyright holders or the Government must take care of this. The Government is unlikely to pay though, and previously said that it no longer has an interest in the data.

The fact that the recent filings in the Megaupload proceedings are about data loss is exemplary of the slow progress in the cases, which are still a long way from trial.

Last December a New Zealand District Court judge ruled that Kim Dotcom and his colleagues can be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges. This decision was appealed and will be heard later this summer, so until then not much is expected to happen.

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

In a few hours the 2016 UEFA Euro Cup kicks off in France, an event that will be seen by more than hundred million soccer fans from all over the world.

While most people watch the matches through licensed broadcasters, there is also a large group of people who resort to shady sources.

Most popular are the so-called “pirate” streaming sites where fans can watch the game live. These typically generate millions of views during popular sporting events.

In addition, those looking for an archive copy of a match or higher quality video, can find pirated copies on numerous torrent sites, where HD copies are uploaded minutes after the final whistle.

These unauthorized transmissions are a thorn in the side of various rightsholders and some are taking action to prevent it. Before the event kicks off, Sony Pictures Network (SPN) has already issued the first warnings.

From a known source who prefers to remain anonymous, TorrentFreak obtained a copy of the letter SPN sent to torrent sites and possibly streaming sites as well.

“Please be advised that our Client has exclusive Television Rights, Mobile Transmission Rights and Broadband Internet Transmission Rights for the upcoming 2016 UEFA Euro Cup,” the letter begins.

The Indian branch of Sony Pictures goes on to explain that they have the exclusive rights to broadcast the event in various countries, through ESPN and other platforms.

Logically, this means that torrent sites and pirate streaming portals are not allowed to offer the same content.

“Any manner of communicating and/or making available for viewing the UEFA EURO CUP 2016 matches on any platform shall therefore amount to violation of our Client’s exclusive rights in which our client has invested significant amount of money,” SPN writes.

Pre-piracy warning

The “pre-piracy” warning alerts the site operators to possible legal consequences, including criminal prosecutions.

The company explicitly states that it’s “compelled to initiate legal proceedings (civil and/or criminal) should you engage in violation of our Client’s rights despite the present notice.”

Despite the startk language, the site owner who informed us about the notice says he has no plans to take action in response. Quite the contrary, the letter actually serves as a reminder to make sure that users have access to the latest UEFA Euro Cup matches.

“I forgot that we need to upload UEFA. It’s good that they reminded us,” the torrent site operator told TorrentFreak.

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

Many Hollywood insiders see online piracy as a major threat, but only very few are willing to target file-sharers with lawsuits or settlement demands.

Millennium Films and LHF Productions, two companies behind the blockbuster “London Has Fallen” have no problem crossing this line.

A few days ago a high quality Blu-Ray rip of the movie appeared online, more than a week before the official release. Since then hundreds of thousands of people have pirated the film, much to the outrage of the studios.

To compensate the potential revenue loss of these and earlier leaks, LHF Productions has filed lawsuits against more than 1,000 people in recent weeks.

The cases are filed against “does” who are only known by their IP-address, with the studio then trying to uncover their real identities by subpoenaing their ISPs. After their personal info is released, the accused Internet subscribers will get a settlement offer, which can go up to several thousands dollars.

A relatively straightforward way to recoup damages, but there is an even easier option. In addition to the lawsuits the film’s production company Millennium Films has started sending automated settlement demands to U.S. Internet subscribers.

These settlement offers bypass the courts and are sent as part of a DMCA notice. Several Internet providers voluntarily forward these notices to the account holders associated with the infringing IP-addresses.

Excerpt from the notice

The language in the notices will be quite intimidating to some. After listing the evidence, Millennium Films’ anti-piracy partner CEG TEK warns that the subscribers could face a potential lawsuit.

“CEG informs you that you may be held liable for monetary damages, including court costs and/or attorney fees if a lawsuit is commenced against you for unauthorized copying and/or distribution of the Work listed above,” it reads.

However, the letter also offers a way out. By settling the case right away and paying $300, all problems will go away. To increase the pressure, CEG TEK adds a hard deadline that expires after a few days.

“If you fail to respond or settle within the prescribed time period, the above matter may be referred to attorneys representing the Work’s owner for legal action. At that point the original settlement offer will no longer be an option, and the settlement amount will increase significantly,” the company adds.

Those who follow the link are directed to the settlement page where the suspected pirates can pay their dues directly through a credit or debit card.

CEG TEK’s settlement page

CEG TEK is not a new player on the scene, but it’s rare to see notices for such a high-profile movie. The company mostly works with players in the adult industry, who typically demand a few hundred dollars per infringement as well.

Despite all the anti-piracy activity, thousands of people are still sharing “London Has Fallen.” This means that there’s enough potential for more lawsuits and automated fines.

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