Author: Ernesto

After becoming one of the top grossing movies of all time in theaters, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is now gearing up for its home entertainment releases.

Many people are expected to buy the Blu-Ray and DVDs, which are scheduled to come out on April 5th, so they can relive the latest chapter in the convenience of their own home.

However, it appears that pirates are off to an early start. As is often the case with popular movies, the Blu-Ray versions of Star Wars: The Force Awakens has leaked online in advance of its retail debut.

There are currently dozens of copies posted on torrent, hosting and streaming sites, including The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents where it leads the lists of most shared files.

The first copy appeared online yesterday and within 12 hours an estimated 250,000 people had already grabbed a copy. This number is likely to increase to several millions during the weeks to come.

The Blu-Ray disc, posted below, originates from the REPLiCA release group and appears to be a regular retail copy.

Under the most recent rules, Scene release groups are required to supply a photo of the physical disc with their group tag as proof.

Leaked Star Wars Blu-Ray

The leaked Blu-Ray is by no means the first footage that has ended up on pirate sites. Several camcorded copies of the movie have been floating online for three months, but due to their low quality the interest in these releases has been limited.

Needless to say, this isn’t an issue with the Blu-Ray version.

Screenshot from the pirated Blu-Ray

In recent weeks Disney and Lucasfilm have tried to limit the exposure of pirated copies. The companies sent out tens of thousands of takedown requests to Google. However, on most pirate sites the film remains widely available.

In any case, it’s safe to say that the movie studios will be disappointed with the early pirate release, which is likely to eat away at some of the home entertainment revenues.

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

During the summer of 2014, City of London Police arrested the then 20-year-old Callum Haywood of Bakersfield for his involvement with several proxy sites and services.

Haywood was interrogated at a police station and later released on bail. He agreed to voluntarily hand over several domain names, but the police meanwhile continued working on the case.

One of the main services linked to the investigation was Immunicity, a censorship circumvention tool that allowed users to route their traffic through a proxy network.

In addition, Haywood was also connected to the Pirate Bay proxy list Piratereverse.info and KickassTorrents proxies Kickassunblock.info and Katunblock.com, movie2kproxy.com, h33tunblock.info and several other proxy sites.

These proxies all served as a copy of the original sites, which are blocked by several UK ISPs, allowing users to bypass restrictions imposed by the High Court. While Haywood wasn’t operating any of the original sites, police have decided to move the case ahead.

Today, after nearly two years, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) formally announced the charges, which amount to one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property and six counts of possession of an article for use in fraud.

The charges relate to the operation of a Pirate Bay proxy and two KickassTorrent proxies.

Piratereverse.info

Based on the charges the now 22-year old student potentially risks a long prison sentence.

Possession of articles for use in fraud is punishable by up to five years in prison under UK law, while supplying articles for use in a fraud carries a sentence of up to 10 years. Converting and/or transferring criminal property is money laundering, for which the maximum sentence is 14 years.

Speaking with TorrentFreak today, Haywood denies any wrongdoing.

The prosecution is the first of its kind, in that it targets a person who allegedly assisted Internet users to bypass High Court orders to block The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites.

Even though the blocking orders don’t apply to all UK ISPs, who continue to provide access to the very same sites, PIPCU alleges that Haywood’s sites were setup to circumvent the court orders.

Haywood is scheduled to appear on bail at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court on April 21 for a preliminary hearing.

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

Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has been very active recently, targeting various release groups that frequent popular torrent sites.

Yesterday the Hollywood-backed group announced another victory after obtaining ex-parte injunctions against three members of the torrent release group 2Lions-Team.

The three members were ordered to pay €2,000 in damages each. In addition, BREIN reached out of court settlements with an undisclosed number of 2Lions-Team members, bringing the total damages amount to €67,500.

2Lions-Team has uploaded thousands of files to popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and ExtraTorrent. The group published a wide variety of titles including movies and TV-shows such as The Revenant, Making a Murderer, The Walking Dead, as well as several local titles.

According to BREIN the group is responsible for uploading thousands of torrents, some of which were downloaded over 470,000 times. As part of the settlements, most torrents have now been pulled offline.

Indeed, several “2lionsteam” related accounts and their torrents have now been deleted from The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent and other sites.

2Lions-Team on TPB before it was removed)

The release group’s own website is no longer functioning either, but points to a messages from BREIN instead.

“Making copyrighted works available through torrents is an unauthorized reproduction and publication which infringes on the copyrights and related rights of BREIN affiliated rightsholders,” the message reads.

Judging from recent BREIN pursuits, the anti-piracy group is not interested in bankrupting any of the uploaders. For the level of the settlements in this case, BREIN says it took the financial capabilities of the 2Lions-Team into account as well.

Over the past several months BREIN has been pursuing uploaders more aggressively and this trend is expected to continue.

Last week the anti-piracy group was granted permission to monitor IP-addresses of torrent users on a broad scale, suggesting that it will also target individual BitTorrent users who share pirated content on a regular basis.

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

While relatively underreported, many U.S. district courts are still swamped with lawsuits against alleged film pirates.

Malibu Media, the Los Angeles based company behind the ‘X-Art’ adult movies, is behind most of these cases. The company has filed thousands of lawsuits in recent years, targeting Internet subscribers whose accounts were allegedly used to share Malibu’s films via BitTorrent.

Like all copyright holders Malibu collects file-sharers’ IP-addresses as evidence. They then ask the courts to grant a subpoena, forcing Internet providers to hand over the personal details of the associated account holders.

In most cases the courts sign off on these requests, but two recent orders from the Southern District of California show that matters aren’t always as straightforward.

In a recent case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Mitchell Dembin was not convinced that geolocation tools are good enough to prove that the alleged pirate resides in the Court’s district. As a result, he denied Malibu’s request for a subpoena.

“The allegation that the IP address at issue likely resolves to a physical address in this District is not supported in any of the declarations filed in connection with the instant motion,” Judge Dembin writes.

“In its Memorandum of Point and Authorities filed in support of this Motion, Plaintiff again asserts that it employed geolocation technology to trace the physical address of the offending IP address within this jurisdiction, and adds the name of the software employed, but again provides no evidentiary support for its assertions,” he adds (pdf).

Malibu had provided the court with a lengthy memorandum (pdf) explaining how it traced the IP-address to California. Among other things, the company pointed out that it uses a geolocation database from Maxmind, which it believes to be accurate 99% of the time.

Judge Dembin, however, concluded that Malibu fails to provide sufficient evidence, and he is not alone. Late last week Magistrate Judge Ruben Brooks issued a similar order against the adult media company.

“Plaintiff fails to offer any evidence to support its allegation that the infringing IP address was actually traced to a location within this judicial district,” Brooks writes (pdf).

“Nothing in the declarations Plaintiff submitted with its Ex Parte Motion explains what steps Plaintiff took to trace the IP address to a physical point of origin within this Court’s jurisdiction.”

In addition, Judge Brooks also raised questions about the accuracy of a geolocation tool to identify the ISP, concluding that the request for a subpoena should be denied based on a lack of evidence.

Geolocation tools are widely used in copyright lawsuits, so the reservations held by the judges could impact future litigation. Interestingly, when we compared the results of various geolocation tools for one of the IP-addresses involved, the results were different across several databases.

While the orders are good news for the defendants in these particular cases, copyright troll watcher SJD points out that several other local judges have granted similar requests.

That said, the recent decisions do offer hope to those who are targeted by Malibu cases in Southern California, as they now have some additional ammunition to fight back.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Deadpool 3 is the most downloaded movie for the second 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)	Deadpool (HDTS)	8.6 / trailer
2	(2)	Kung Fu Panda 3 (HDrip)	8.0 / trailer
3	(…)	The 5th Wave (Webrip)	5.4 / trailer
4	(3)	IP-Man 3	7.6 / trailer
5	(4)	The Hateful Eight	8.0 / trailer
6	(5)	The Revenant (DVDscr)	8.2 / trailer
7	(…)	Zootopia (HDcam)	8.4 / trailer
8	(8)	The Big Short	8.1 / trailer
9	(9)	Spectre	6.9 / trailer
10	(…)	The Gigolo 2	4.4 / trailer

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

Every day dozens of millions of people share files using BitTorrent, willingly exposing their IP-addresses to the rest of the world.

For those who value their privacy this is a problem, so many sign up with a VPN provider or torrent proxy service. This is fine, but some people then forget to check whether their setup is actually working, which is not always the case.

Some torrent clients may be vulnerable to leaks, or people simply forget to configure their client properly, which may involve ticking a few extra checkboxes and disabling features such as DHT and PEX.

So how do you check if your VPN and proxy are working properly? While it’s easy enough to test your web IP-address through one of the many IP-checking services, checking the IP-address that’s broadcasted via your torrent client is more complex.

There are a few services that offer a “torrent IP check” tool but these are generally limited to responses from HTTP trackers. Luckily, a new project allows people to dive a bit deeper.

Doileak is free a service that runs IP-address checks to test for general leaks, but also more specific torrent checks.

After loading a test torrent it will report back the IP-address your torrent client is using to connect to other peers. In addition to an HTTP tracker, it also has an UDP version, which is crucial as UDP trackers are more likely to leak information.

Furthermore, Doileak also reports the various DNS requests your torrent client is using, which may also be a weak link for some.

Doileak torrent results

Everything is functioning properly as long as your residential IP-address or your Internet provider’s DNS server doesn’t show up in the torrent sections. For VPN users the web and torrent IP-address should be the same, but for proxy users the two IPs are different.

Talking to TorrentFreak, Doileak founder Tobias warns that not all VPN services are as effective as they should be, so encourages people to check their setup.

“BitTorrent support initially wasn’t on my todo list, but after some research it became clear that a lot of torrent users believe they are anonymous, while they are broadcasting their real IP-address,” he says.

In a separate article Tobias identifies several weak spots for torrent users, including UDP leaks and the DHT vulnerability.

Users who are interested in their setup can run the test over at Doileak.

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

Since 2005 the SXSW music festival has published thousands of free tracks from participating artists.

For some of the first releases the festival organizers created the torrents for the artist showcases themselves, but since 2008 this task has been taken over by the public.

Luckily all of the SXSW showcase MP3s are still freely available on the festival’s site for sampling purposes, so it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running.

For the past several years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all the MP3s on BitTorrent, and the latest 2016 release consists of two torrents containing 1,593 tracks.

That’s a record-breaking 10.39 gigabytes of free music in total, almost four times the file size of the first torrent in 2005.

All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their harddrives without having to invest thousands of dollars. The 2005 – 2016 archives now total more than 69 gigabytes.

Every year SXSW torrents are a great success, with many thousands of music aficionados downloading gigabytes of free music across virtually every genre from both established acts and upcoming bands.

TorrentFreak spoke to Ben Stolt who spends several hours preparing the releases each year, in part for his personal pleasure.

“My motivation is in part selfish, because, like many others, my friends and I all use the contents of the torrent to prepare for our week at SXSW Music. But without fail the emails start coming in January and February asking if there will be a torrent,” Stolt says.

“Many people come back every year, so I can’t leave them hanging,” he adds.

The job comes witch challenges though. SXSW doesn’t always make it easy to publish the tracks. For example, a few years ago Stolt had to start re-writing the ID3 tags based on the artist pages, as SXSW stopped doing so.

“Without that, the tracks would be a giant mess and mostly unidentifiable since the file names on the SXSW site are purely numeric. Also in 2014 they abruptly switched to using SoundCloud for the samples, but that was thankfully short-lived and things were back to normal the next year,” Stolt notes.

The efforts pay off though. Many people love the SXSW torrents which attract tens of thousands of downloaders each year. For some, it almost makes up for not being able to attend the festival in person.

“Appreciate the amount of work involved to make it happen. Can’t get to SXSW, so having these torrents available are the next best thing,” one downloader responds.

This year’s SXSW music festival is currently underway in Austin, Texas and ends on Sunday. The torrents, however, are expected to live on for as long as there are people sharing.

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

In 2010 a fresh movie piracy brand began to conquer the Internet. Bypassing the so-called ‘Scene’, YIFY joined a new breed of release groups who publish their work directly to torrent sites.

In fact, YIFY, which later rebranded to YTS, started its own torrent website featuring high quality releases of the latest movies.

As the years went by the group amassed a huge following, and a year ago its website generated millions of pageviews per day. A true success story, but one that ended abruptly last October.

Hollywood sources tracked down the founder of YIFY and filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit in New Zealand. This meant the end of YIFY and YTS, but surprisingly the case was never heard in court.

Instead, both parties agreed to a private settlement outside of court, keeping the identity of one of YIFY’s key players out of the public eye. However, this didn’t last long.

Last week a New Zealand court confirmed the identity of the YIFY founder to the local Sunday Star Times. The news outlet reported that the movie studios filed their lawsuit against Yiftach Swery, a 23-year-old app and website developer.

Several years ago YIFY told TorrentFreak that the name was “just a random alias” but this explanation is hard to maintain now.

While we have always doubted the randomness of the popular tag, Yiftach Swery leaves little room for speculation.

Indeed, we confirmed with someone in the know that the YIF part is derived directly from the founder’s name. In theory, the same could be said for YTS but this stands for “YIFY Torrents Solutions,” our source says.

It’s worth noting that Yiftach was not the only person behind YIFY. In fact, towards the end he was no longer actively involved in encoding and uploading movies.

How many other people were involved in the group remains unknown. TorrentFreak did hear that other people connected to YIFY have been “approached” by the movie industry over the years, but Yiftach is the only one who signed a settlement deal.

One thing is very clear though, the original YIFY team is not coming back. Instead, Yiftach and his former colleagues will probably focus on picking up their regular lives again.

That said, the YIFY name lives on in the memories of million of pirates. While most of its shine has been lost, YIFY will certainly go down in history.

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

Netflix has upped its anti-piracy efforts recently, by taking a more aggressive stance against subscribers who use VPN services.

These changes were implemented to appease the major movie studios, but Netflix is also taking measures to limit access to pirated copies of its own original programming.

During the past several weeks the company has started to report thousands of ‘pirate’ links to Google, asking it to remove these from search results.

With help from their anti-piracy partner Vobile, Netflix has targeted 71,861 links to allegedly copyright infringing material from torrent and streaming sites, most of which have indeed been removed.

The links in question all point to content owned by Netflix, including popular series including House of Cards, Narcos, Sense8 and films such as The Ridiculous 6 and A Very Murray Christmas.

Unlike other copyright holders Netflix is a relative newcomer when it comes to sending DMCA takedown notices to Google. The first request was recorded last December, targeting over 3,000 links at once.

Netflix takedown request

Netflix is targeting a wide variety of torrent, streaming and hosting sites, with uploaded.net and vodlocker.com being the prime targets.

In addition to reporting these links to Google, Netflix also appears to be reaching out to ‘pirate’ sites directly as recent listings for House of Cards and other Netflix originals are frequently removed.

While the takedown efforts are unlikely to make the piracy problem go away, Netflix likely hopes to frustrate pirates enough to convert them into paying customers. That is, if Netflix’s original programming is available in their country, which isn’t as logical as it may sound.

In any case, the takedown efforts are a notable change compared to the casual piracy attitude the company had a few years ago.

Previously, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that the company was not really bothered too much by people who pirate content via torrent sites. In fact, Netflix admitted to using piracy data to determine what shows they should license in different regions.

“Certainly there’s some torrenting that goes on, and that’s true around the world, but some of that just creates the demand,” Hastings said at the time.

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

Earlier this year, Warner Bros. and Intel daughter company Digital Content Protection (DCP) filed a lawsuit against LegendSky, accusing it of violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions.

LegendSky is the maker of HDFury devices which allow users to “strip” the latest HDCP encryption, according to the complaint.

This makes it much easier for pirates to circumvent the stronger HDCP content protection and release pirated copies of 4K films and series. Late last year several 4K leaks started to appear online, right after the HDFury devices went on sale.

However, the Chinese company fiercely rejects these piracy claims and has launched a counterattack in a New York federal court this week. LegendSky explains that their devices are not “stripping” any HDCP copy protection.

Instead, the HDFury devices merely convert newer versions of HDCP to older versions, such HDCP 1.4. These conversions are permitted by the DMCA as a fair use exception when they are used connect two separate computer programs.

In addition, DCP’s own license agreement specifically permits licensees to convert HDCP copy protection, the company informs the court.

In their counterclaim (pdf) LegendSky notes that several HDCP licensees including Netflix, Disney, NBC and CBS have bought their devices for legitimate purposes. “And yet Plaintiff alleges that HDFury Devices are nothing more than “strippers,” the company adds.

NBC and others use HDFury

LegendSky states that DCP’s lawsuit is an illegitimate attempt to keep its licensing monopoly intact, and the company is now countersuing the Warner and Intel daughter company for monopolization.

“Plaintiffs’ Complaint is a sham. They know, or should know, that Plaintiff DCP’s licensees, including Netflix, use HDFury Devices to convert newer to older versions of HDCP so as to enable interoperability between devices.”

“In reality, then, the Complaint is a bludgeon to use against Defendant so as to unlawfully expand the scope of Plaintiffs’ copyright monopolies, and protect Plaintiff DCP’s HDCP monopoly licensing rents in the relevant market..,” LegendSky adds.

In addition, DCP is also being sued for defamation after painting LegendSky and its customers as criminals.

“Plaintiffs have, either directly or indirectly, made knowing false statements of fact to third parties wherein they have painted Defendant as a criminal enterprise releasing the HDFury Devices with no other intent than to steal and pirate copyrighted materials,” they write.

“These imputations of intentional criminality have injured Defendant’s reputation and standing in this District,” the counterclaim adds.

The Chinese hardware manufacturer is asking the court to dismiss the original complaint and award damages and penalties against DCP, where appropriate.

Given LegendSky’s strong reply, this case could get very interesting. While there is no doubt that pirates can use HDFury devices to downgrade HDCP copy protection to a more easily crackable version, the devices also have plenty of legitimate uses.

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