Author: Ernesto

Adult magazine publisher Perfect 10 has made a business out of suing online services for allegedly facilitating copyright infringement.

Over the past several years the company has targeted a dozen high-profile companies including Google, Amazon, Yandex, MasterCard, Visa, Leaseweb, RapidShare, Depositfiles and Giganews.

Private settlements aside the legal campaigns haven’t been particularly successful for the publisher. Last year Perfect 10 lost another battle against Giganews, with the court ordering the company to pay $5.6 million in legal fees.

This case is now on appeal where it has attracted the attention of several major players, including the RIAA. The music industry group has joined Perfect 10 and argues that Giganews should be held responsible for its infringing activities.

In a brief submitted to the court the RIAA notes that, unlike several decades ago, Usenet is no longer a neutral means to share files. Instead, it’s populated by many “shady” companies who intentionally sell access to pirated content.

“Shady companies now use the Usenet network to copy copyrighted movies, music, software, and images from servers known to host pirated content; store those works on their own servers for extended periods of time to maximize the availability of the infringing content; and then distribute those pirated copies to their users,” the RIAA writes.

“These companies profit handsomely by charging their users monthly fees for private access to this unauthorized content – fees that increase based on the amount of content users download,” the add.

The RIAA goes on to cite a study which suggests that an overwhelming majority of the audio files shared through Giganews are likely to be copyright infringing.

The appeal has also introduced a dispute over the “volitional conduct rule,” which prescribes that Internet services can only be held directly liable if they also control the decision to copy pirated works.

Among other things the RIAA argues that this rule shouldn’t apply in the current case because it’s widely criticized and questioned by other courts, most recently by the Supreme Court in the Aereo case.

However, this stance is fiercely opposed by several digital rights groups including The Internet Association, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), the EFF and Public Knowledge.

In two separate amicus curiae briefs submitted to the court this week, they urge the Court of Appeals not to reverse the District Court decision, as that may be disastrous for a free and open Internet.

When Internet services face direct liability, they may be inclined to block legitimate content or prevent content being posted, just to avoid legal issues, they argue.

“If an intermediary faces the possibility of potentially unlimited legal liability for content hosted, transmitted, or disseminated through its services by a small minority of users, it will feel compelled to scrutinize and limit all user activities,” the brief filed by EFF and Public Knowledge (pdf) reads.

“This is likely to lead to over-blocking, sacrificing lawful content in an effort to limit potential litigation. The strong incentive to over-block can cause particular harm to free speech where, as here, intermediaries often are not able to easily determine if the content is unlawful on its face,” the groups add.

The Internet Association and the CCIA, which includes prominent members such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, agree (pdf) that scrapping the volitional conduct rule “would chill legitimate speech.”

According to the RIAA, however, it’s clear that Giganews profits from piracy and a ruling supporting this wouldn’t threaten the future of the Internet.

“This case simply involves defendants who utilize the Usenet to profit from piracy by selling access to infringing content from private servers that they control,” RIAA writes.

“Unlike legitimate service providers involved in the early Usenet cases, the defendants here are committing blatant copyright infringement. Recognizing this fact does not undermine in any way the operation of the open Internet,” they add.

It is now up to the court to weigh up the arguments from both sides.

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

Founded in 2013, the streaming site Full-Stream has steadily worked itself to the top of the French piracy community.

With nearly 100,000 streams per day and over a million monthly visitors, it was one of the 150 most visited websites in the country.

This changed last week, when an alleged operator of the site was arrested by local police. According to the prosecution office at d’Aix-en-Provence the 22-year-old man was subsequently jailed.

The man reportedly admitted that he founded the site three years ago and it’s claimed that he profited substantially through advertisements. This revenue was kept offshore in a Hong Kong bank account.

The investigation into Full-Stream began in 2014 after the authorities received a complaint from the local entertainment industry group SACEM and the Association Against Audiovisual Piracy (ALPA).

According to the prosecution office the investigation found that the site offered pirated copies of 2,426 TV-series and 10,152 films. How much revenue the alleged operator made is still being researched.

Meanwhile, the prosecutor applauds the cooperation with the private industry groups which led to the arrest.

“This is the first time in France that, in this legal framework, cooperation between investigators and agents SACEM and ALPA has lead to the arrest of suspects.”

A second man was also detained in Grenoble last week, but he was released after an interrogation. However, the authorities note that other persons may be indicted at a later stage.

On the official Facebook page many people are mourning the loss of Full-Stream. Initially the Full-Stream.org and Full-Stream.me domains remained accessible, but at the time of writing these are offline as well.

The operator of the site will remain in prison for at least four months “because of his behavior and statements made ​​in court,” and he ultimately faces a prison sentence of up to five years.

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

A few days ago Kanye West released The Life of Pablo. The album subsequently ended up on various pirate sites where it was quickly downloaded by hundreds of thousands of fans.

A lot of media attention has focused on The Pirate Bay, where it is still listed as the most popular music download after two weeks, with thousands of people actively sharing the tracks.

Meanwhile, the news also reached Kanye West himself, who considered taking legal action against the notorious torrent site. While he would not be the first to try, a tweet posted a few hours ago made the whole situation a lot more ironic.

Kanye’s tweet

At first sight little appears wrong with the tweet, which comes with an image showing a YouTube video of Sufjan Stevens’ track “Death with Dignity.” However, taking a closer look at the other open tabs is quite revealing.

For example, the tab second to the left reads “”Pirate Bay Torrent Xfe..,” where the last part is likely a reference to Xfer Records.

Pirate What?

The tab itself is not from The Pirate Bay website, which uses a different title structure, but comes from a site that uses the TPB brand. This release blog, which lists a pirated copy of Xfer Records synthesizer software Serum, seems to be a likely candidate.

This suspicion is supported by another open tab pointing towards a Music Radar article listing the best VST/AU plugins, where Serum comes out as one of the winners.

Finally, the “MediaDownloader” tab completes the pirate circle, as that would allow West to rip music from YouTube so it can be used together with the pirated software to create his next hit.

Kanye’s tweet is a painful mistake, and one that didn’t go unnoticed.

DJ Deadmau5, who co-founded Xfer Records, saw the tweet and called out Kanye as a dick. Not much later he showed a bit more sympathy for Kanye’s circumstances, calling for a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a legal copy of the software.

Kanye Dick

The Pirate Bay team, meanwhile, is quite amused by the whole episode and says it welcomes pirates from all different walks of life.

“If he runs into difficulty he should try the forum for technical help and support,” TPB staff member Spud17 informs TorrentFreak, noticing the shift from the earlier agressive stance.

“Makes me wonder just how skint he claims to be, perhaps he’s ‘slumming it’ to try and regain some credibility,” Spud17 adds.

Of course, there’s a slim chance that Kanye is pulling off an elaborate prank, which would be a good one. If so, he managed to plug The Pirate Bay in the process, so it’s unlikely that he will take credit for it anytime soon.

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

In recent years the music industry‘s battle against piracy mostly focused on torrent sites, cyberlockers and unauthorized MP3 indexes.

However, those are certainly not the only ‘threats’ it faces. Online radio stations, often operated by hobbyists, also remain a concern.

This has prompted a coalition of record labels to file a lawsuit against Radionomy, a platform that allows users to start their own online radio stations.

In their complaint filed at a California federal court Arista Records, LaFace Records, Sony Music Entertainment and Zomba Recording accuse the service of several forms of copyright infringement.

Radionomy, which also owns Winamp and Shoutcast, offers between 30,000 and 50,000 radio stations which are controlled by its users. These stations are freely broadcasted online through a variety of sites and apps.

“Defendants operate an online music service through which users can listen to music stations, or create stations, that Defendants stream to listeners worldwide,” the complaint reads (pdf).

“To program music stations on Defendants’ service, users can upload music from their own collection or use music from Defendants’ library of popular music and podcasts.”

In addition to picking tracks from the Radionomy library, users can also upload their own tracks and stream these online. Listeners from all over the world can then tune in by searching for stations by theme, genre or even artists.

While many users and listeners enjoy the service, the record labels point out that Radionomy fails to pay the proper licenses. As such, they argue that it’s promoting and facilitating widespread copyright infringement.

Searching Radionomy for pirate

The labels list hundreds of tracks that were used without permission on Radionomy including work from Adele, Bob, Dylan, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Elvis Presley, John Mayer, Michael Jackson, One Direction, Pink Floyd and Shakira.

“On January 12, 2016 a station on Defendants’ service, named ‘One Direction The Radio,’ played the recordings ‘Nobody Compares’ and ‘Something Great’ by One Direction, both of which are Plaintiffs’ owned or exclusively licensed copyrighted works,” one of the examples reads.

As an example, the labels further mention that Radionomy encourages its users to start popular stations offering rewards for the number of listeners they attract, while canceling the least popular stations.

“Defendants encourage users to include popular copyrighted recordings in programmed stations by offering to ‘reward’ users with cash payments if they create a station that reaches a large audience and threatening to deactivate users that fail to reach ‘minimum audience’ requirements,” the complaint reads.

Late last year the labels reached out to Radionomy, which is owned by the entertainment industry mogul Vivendi, who reportedly admitted that they had not paid royalties to SoundExchange since 2014. Despite these talks, no agreement was reached on the issue.

The music companies now hope to get help from the court and are requesting a permanent injunction against the radio service, as well as damages which can easily add up to dozens of millions of dollars.

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

Traditionally, Microsoft isn’t known for going after people who use pirated copies of Windows, but every now and then the company draws a line in the sand.

Late last week Microsoft filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a person, or persons, who activated pirated copies of Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server and Office 10 from a Comcast Internet connection.

The software company has a specialized cyberforensics department which analyzes activation logs to detect activation patterns and characteristics which make it likely that certain IP-addresses are engaged in unauthorized copying.

“Cyberforensics allows Microsoft to analyze billions of activations of Microsoft software and identify activation patterns and characteristics that make it more likely than not that the IP address associated with the activations is an address through which pirated software is being activated,” the company writes in its complaint.

Generally speaking, one person who activates a pirated copy of Windows has little to worry about. Microsoft will log those IP-addresses but has shown little interest in going after casual pirates.

However, in this case the company noticed that a lot of suspicious activity was coming from a single Comcast connection.

“Microsoft’s cyberforensics have identified several thousand product key activations originating from IP address 173.11.224.197, which is presently assigned to Comcast Cable Communications,” Microsoft writes.

“On information and belief, each of these activations and attempted activations constitutes the unauthorized copying of Microsoft software, in violation of Microsoft’s software licenses and its intellectual property rights.”

According to the complaint the suspicious keys were likely stolen from Microsoft’s supply chain and used more often than permitted by the company.

In order to pinpoint the culprit, Microsoft has asked the court for a subpoena to identify the Comcast subscriber in question. It then hopes to recoup some of its claimed losses by requesting both actual and statutory damages.

From the descriptions used in the complaint it seems likely that the target is a company, rather than an individual user. Microsoft previously filed similar cases where the defendants turned out to be computer-related businesses.

The full compliant is available here.

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

“Information wants to be free” is a commonly used phrase in copyright debates. While it may not apply universally, in the academic world it’s certainly relevant.

Information and knowledge are the cornerstones of science. Yet, a lot of top research is locked up behind expensive paywalls.

As with most digital content, however, there are specialized sites that offer free and unauthorized access. In the academic world Sci-Hub has become an icon for this pirate version of “Open Access.”

Early last year one of the largest academic publishers, Elsevier, filed a complaint at a New York District Court accusing the sites’ operators of systematic copyright infringement.

However, instead of stopping the site the case raised its profile, putting it at the center of a debate about paywalled research. As a classic demonstration of the Streisand effect the site’s userbase grew while many academics publicly showed their support.

According to Sci-Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan tens of thousands of people now use the site to download papers. On an average day last week 69,532 users downloaded 217,276 different papers, all without paying a penny.

India, China, Iran, the United States and Russia are the top download locations according to data shared with TorrentFreak. In most of these countries academics have limited access to research papers due to high costs or other restrictions, with the U.S. being an unusual exception.

Sci-Hub

Perhaps even more important than the massive number of users is the lively debate around Sci-Hub and copyright’s role in academic publishing.

Sci-Hub’s efforts are backed by many prominent scholars, who argue that tax-funded research should be accessible to everyone. Others counter that the site doesn’t necessarily help the Open Access movement forward.

Elbakyan defends her position and believes that what she does is helping millions of less privileged researchers to do their work properly by providing free access to research results.

Meanwhile, with the debate heating up Elsevier may regret having filed their lawsuit in the first place. It’s clear that whatever verdict the U.S. court announces in the future Sci-Hub is not going to shut down anytime soon.

A preliminary injunction already prohibits Elbakyan from operating the site (without any effect), and the site has shown that it can easily switch to new domain names when needed.

And with the mainstream media now showing interest in the case, Sci-Hub is expected to grow its presence during the months to come.

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

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Deadpool 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	(7)	Kung Fu Panda 3 (Webrip)	8.0 / trailer
3	(3)	Victor Frankenstein	6.1 / trailer
4	(6)	The Big Short (Web-DL)	8.1 / trailer
5	(2)	Creed	8.0 / trailer
6	(5)	Spectre	7.9 / trailer
7	(4)	Ride Along 2	5.8 / trailer
8	(…)	Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny	6.5 / trailer
9	(9)	The Revenant (DVDscr)	8.2 / trailer
10	(…)	In The Heart of The Sea	7.0 / trailer

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

Late last December millions of pirates cheered behind their computers as the “screener season” finally got underway.

High quality copies of some of the hottest Hollywood productions appeared online, with some titles even beating their official theatrical release.

The high-profile leaks were put on the radar of the FBI and this week the Justice Department announced that they caught one of the sources, a 31-year old entertainment industry worker.

Kyle Moriarty from Lancaster admitted to copying screeners of The Revenant and The Peanuts Movie, while working on a movie studio lot. Both copies were uploaded to the private BitTorrent tracker Pass The Popcorn (PTP) and found their way to many public sites in the following days.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that Moriarty has signed a plea agreement which was submitted to a District Court last Friday.

“…defendant obtained copies of the copyright-protected films The Revenant and The Peanuts Movie. Each of the films was a “screener,” a disc containing an advance screening copy of a film, which defendant took without authorization while at work,” the agreement reads.

Moriarty copied the films onto a USB drive and took them home. After encoding the releases he uploaded The Revenant screener and The Peanuts Movie to the PTP tracker, with the username “clutchit.”

The Justice Department reports that both movies were downloaded millions of times following their early release, causing significant damage to the copyright holders.

“Over one million people have downloaded from peer-to-peer networks the version of The Revenant that defendant uploaded to the Internet. Fox has suffered losses of at least $1.12 million,” the press release states.

Leaked Revenant screener

The plea agreement doesn’t identify Moriarty’s employer but according to The Smoking Gun he worked as a production coordinator for the “Dr. Phil” show, which shoots close to the Paramount studio.

It remains unclear how the FBI identified Moriarty us the uploader, but according to the plea agreement he uploaded the movies from his home address.

The Lancaster man doesn’t appear to be connected to the release group Hive-CM8, which uploaded the bulk of the leaked screeners last December. Hive-CM8 leaked over a dozen screeners but The Revenant and The Peanuts Movie were not among their releases.

In a statement released to the public, U.S. Attorney Eileen Decker applauds the enforcement efforts, stating that the leaks endangered the local entertainment industries.

“As the Academy Awards ceremony this weekend highlights, the entertainment industry is the economic cornerstone of the Central District of California. Therefore, my office is committed to protecting its intellectual property,” Decker notes.

“The defendant’s conduct harmed the very industry that was providing his livelihood as well as the livelihood of others in Southern California,” she adds.

Moriarty is scheduled to be arraigned next month and faces a maximum prison sentence of three years.

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

After having fought pressure from Hollywood for over a decade, SlySoft threw in the towel earlier this week.

The company shut down its main website at Slysoft.com and ceased to provide new updates to its popular Blu-Ray ripping tool AnyDVD. An announcement posted in the forums suggests that the decision is part of a deal.

“We were not allowed to respond to any request nor to post any statement, but now it is official: SlySoft has been shut down after almost 13 years,” SlySoft’s Tom announced.

“I am really sorry for that, but this is final. SlySoft is gone..,” he adds

To most laypeople the news may be easily discarded as ‘just’ another company falling victim to Hollywood’s copyright enforcement. However, insiders warn that it may have a massive impact on millions of movie pirates.

For many years AnyDVD (HD) has been the go-to tool to crack Blu-Ray encryption, pretty much without competition.

In recent days TorrentFreak has spoken to several prominent release group insiders who fear that future Blu-Ray releases will take much longer to appear because their copy protection will be harder to circumvent.

“This will delay things for new releases that have updated AACS protection or completely kill AACS decryption from SlySoft,” the operator of a popular P2P group informed TF.

“Alternatives usually delay updates two to three months. If they don’t pick up the slack Hollywood have just won a huge victory, because future releases that have updated AACS protection will be delayed,” he adds.

Another insider confirms the concerns, noting that SlySoft has often gone to great lengths to ensure that new copy protections are cracked as soon as possible.

“Over the past decade SlySoft has been the main ripping tool for Scene groups, P2P groups and just about everyone,” our second source says.

While it’s currently unclear what will happen during the weeks and months to come, a feeling of uncertainty appears to dominate among many pirate movie release and distribution groups.

“The loss of SlySoft is being rapidly discussed among all movie pirate groups and there is no consensus yet for what is to come next, just concern,” our source says.

As for the future, there are a few things that may happen.

It’s possible for competitors such as DVDFab to pick up the slack and release their copy protection cracks in a timely fashion. However, the latter has already announced that it won’t break the copy protection of Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs, so there’s not much faith in this option.

It’s also possible that AnyDVD will make a comeback in some shape or form. Or perhaps defiant members of the old team will re-brand it and continue their work from another jurisdiction. Alternatively, they could continue to offer their services in the background, without a public facing website.

The third option is a more grim scenario for pirates, one in which copy protection becomes more effective, possibly delaying pirate Blu-Ray releases by weeks or months.

This is the scenario AACS and Hollywood are hoping for.

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

Last month Netflix announced that it would increase its efforts to block customers who circumvent geo-blockades.

As a result it has become harder to use VPN services and proxies to access Netflix content from other countries, something various movie studios have repeatedly called for.

With the application of commercial blacklist data, Netflix already blocks IP-addresses that are linked to such services, something which also affects well-intentioned customers who merely use a VPN to protect their privacy.

Instead of providing access to the latest video entertainment, Netflix then serves the following error message to these blocked users.

In recent weeks TorrentFreak has kept a close eye on the expanding blockade and its aftermath. We’ve learned that servers belonging to many popular commercial VPN services have been added to the blocklist, including ExpressVPN, Mullvad, Private Internet Access and StrongVPN.

While the blocks are being rolled out in phases, it’s already clear that some VPN users can’t access Netflix, even if the VPN server is located in the same country as they are. This means that Americans can no longer use a U.S. VPN server to protect their privacy.

Ironically, Netflix is even restricting access to its own original series, despite being the primary rightsholder.

This approach is meeting fierce resistance from many sides. To coordinate the protest Digital rights organization OpenMedia has started an OpenMedia petition urging Netflix to rethink its approach, which has already been signed by more than 33,000 people.

“Privacy is a huge priority for us as a digital rights organization, and that VPNs are probably the simplest, most user-friendly way for everyday Internet users to safeguard their online activities,” OpenMedia spokesperson David Christopher informs TorrentFreak.

“Given that a huge percentage of the population uses Netflix, if they were all forced to stop using VPNs, that would represent a major setback for privacy,” he adds.

OpenMedia itself has been affected by the new measures as well, as some of their staff members can no longer watch Netflix without having to turn off their VPN.

The group is concerned that Internet users are being forced to give up their privacy when they are not even trying to circumvent any geo-blockades. A better way would be to restrict content based on people’s credit card addresses, which doesn’t require any VPN blocking.

“We’re cooking up plans to take this message directly to Netflix and hope that if enough people speak up, Netflix will listen to their customers and find a better way,” Christopher says.

Meanwhile, the complaints keep pouring in on social media. There are even reports from users who are blocked without even using a VPN. In addition, several people claim to have ended their Netflix subscriptions due to the restrictive policies, and some hint at going back to their old pirate ways.

Despite the public outrage, Netflix said that it’s not worried about a subscriber exodus. “I don’t think we will see any impact,” CEO Reed Hastings said in a shareholders’ interview last month.

In the long-term the company hopes to make the entire geo-blocking discussion obsolete by offering movies and TV-shows worldwide. But given Hollywood’s reluctance to adapt, it may take a few years before this will be realized.

Tweets about netflix vpn block OR blocked OR blocking OR detecting OR work OR working

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