Author: Ernesto

The Oscars is the most watched award show of the year, closely followed by hundreds of millions of movie fans around the world.

A few days ago the 2016 nominees were announced and as usual this triggered a spike in interest from box office visitors as well as online pirates.

The latter group has been spoiled with a steady supply of pirated titles over the past several weeks. Ironically, many of these titles leaked from DVD screener copies which were sent out to reviewers, including Academy members who vote for the Oscars.

Inspired by the work of Andy Baio early 2015, we decided to take a look at this year’s contenders, excluding short and foreign films, to see how many films are already available on pirate sites.

To our surprise, all of the 37 nominated movies are widely available through unauthorized sites. Most are released in Blu-Ray or DVD quality, including several DVD screeners.

The list of leaked movies includes Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which is the only movie that’s not available in a decent quality. The only copies of the blockbuster are so-called “Cams,” recorded in the theater.

Due to the low quality the number of Star Wars downloads pales in comparison to other nominees such as The Big Short and The Martian, which have both been downloaded millions of times.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens ‘Cam’

Of all movies that leaked 17 were sourced from DVD screeners. This number of leaked nominee screeners is a record high for this decade.

In recent years the number of leaked screener copies was significantly deceased due to increased security measures. However, this trends was broken this year thanks to Hive-CM8, who released 14 screeners last month.

It’s unclear whether these screeners were intended for the Oscars or another award show.

Below this article we’ve included an overview of all the nominees, whether the films were leaked as a DVD screener, as well as the highest quality leak format in which they are currently available.

All 2016 Oscars Nominees (ex. foreign and shorts)

Movie	Screener leaked?	Best quality
torrentfreak.com
45 Years	No	BluRay
Amy	No	BluRay
Anomalisa	Yes	DVDscr
Boy and the World	No	WEBRip
Bridge of Spies	Yes	BluRay
Brooklyn	Yes	DVDScr
Carol	Yes	DVDScr
Cartel Land	No	BluRay
Cinderella	No	BluRay
Creed	Yes	DVDScr
Ex Machina	No	BluRay
Fifty Shades of Grey	No	BluRay
Inside Out	No	BluRay
Joy	Yes	DVDScr
Mad Max: Fury Road	No	BluRay
Racing Extinction	No	HDTV
Room	Yes	DVDscr
Shaun the Sheep Movie	No	BluRay
Sicario	Yes	BluRay
Spectre	Yes	BluRay
Spotlight	Yes	DVDScr
Star Wars: The Force Awakens	No	HDCam
Steve Jobs	Yes	DVDscr
Straight Outta Compton	Yes	BluRay
The Big Short	Yes	DVDScr
The Danish Girl	Yes	DVDscr
The Hateful Eight	Yes	DVDScr
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared	No	BluRay
The Hunting Ground	No	DVDRip
The Look of Silence	No	BluRay
The Martian	No	BluRay
The Revenant	Yes	DVDScr
Trumbo	Yes	DVDScr
What Happened, Miss Simone?	No	DVDRip
When Marnie Was There	No	BluRay
Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom	No	WEB-DL
Youth	No	BluRay

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

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

This means that it will 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 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.

A Netflix error several VPN users already see (U.S. server)

TorrentFreak spoke with several VPN providers to hear their thoughts on Netflix’s plans. Several are already dealing with the issue and promise to do their best to ensure that workarounds will remain available.

“This announcement comes as no surprise to us and we have been expecting a Netflix VPN crackdown for some time now,” TorGuard’s Ben van der Pelt says.

“Unfortunately, many legitimate paid subscribers will be left in the dark as an unavoidable outcome of overreaching IP blocks.

“TorGuard is monitoring the situation closely and we have recently implemented new measures that can bypass any proposed IP blockade on our network. VPN users who encounter Netflix access problems are encouraged to contact us for a working solution,” he adds.

SlickVPN takes a similar stance and says that the static IP-addresses they offer are less likely to be blocked.

“We work tirelessly to ensure our customers have access to the entire internet. If we find that our IP addresses start to become blocked we’ll migrate to new IPs as needed. We also offer the option of static IPs which eliminates the problem entirely,” SlickVPN’s Greg Lyda says.

Mullvad is one of the VPN services that’s already blocked by Netflix. The company doesn’t understand why companies such as Netflix have to make it impossible for people to pay for their services.

“Why do some companies insist on making it difficult or impossible to buy their products? Why does a company resort to blocking people from literally paying them?” Mullvad’s Fredrik tells TF.

“Seriously, this world would be a much better place if services like ours didn’t have to exist – Not for censorship, not for mass surveillance, and not for geographic restrictions. I love what I’m doing, but I’m even more looking forward to the day when Mullvad goes bankrupt from obsoletion,” he adds.

Andrew Lee, Digital Rights Activist at Private Internet Access, notes that their users are not experiencing any problems yet. However, he adds Netflix’s planned crackdown is clearly violating Net Neutrality.

“By blocking PIA and other VPN customers, it would be a very loud and clear message heard across the world: Netflix does not believe in net neutrality and will even go to lengths to block access to their service from privacy minded customers who live in the U.S,” Lee notes.

“Netflix is a for-pay credit card service that requires a billing address. There is no reason to ban a VPN unless the billing data is fraudulent,” Lee adds.

The last issue is also referenced by GoldenFrog President Sunday Yokubaitis, who operates VyprVPN. If Netflix knows where people live they can simply always show the same content library everywhere, which new European regulation also requires.

“As a Netflix customer, I know that they collect my billing information, including my mailing address and country. Why doesn’t Netflix use the customer billing information to display the correct content to users?” Yokubaitis asks.

This option would also eliminate the need to do any VPN blocking whatsoever. The only change would be that Netflix has to put more effort into verifying people’s addresses.

While most providers are planning to counter Netflix’s blocking efforts, not all are. IVPN informed TorrentFreak that their focus lies on privacy and that enabling customers to watch Netflix has never been a priority.

The company does point out that VPNs in part contributed to Netflix’s success, which makes the recent crackdown changes even more bitter.

“Netflix has clearly benefited from VPN service providers for many years. This has helped facilitate the rapid expansion of Netflix’s worldwide customer base whilst at the same time complying with the ‘letter’ if not the ‘spirit’ of their content providers’ restrictions,” IVPN’s Nick says.

“In reality Netflix has become a victim of its own success. Netflix’s content providers now wish to curtail the provision of material to markets that are not licensed by Netflix and their content providers,” he adds.

At this point it’s unclear how Netflix plans to block VPNs and proxies and what precautions Netflix will take to ensure that legitimate users are not hindered.

However, someone from the U.S. who wants to use a Canadian server to connect to the Internet is likely to be blocked, so with millions of VPN users around the world there will be plenty of collateral damage.

—

Disclaimer: PIA, SlickVPN and TorGuard are TF sponsors

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.

Spectre and Bridge of Spies were both released as a DVDrip a few days ago.

The Big Short 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)	The Big Short (DVDscr)	8.1 / trailer
2	(7)	Spectre	7.9 / trailer
3	(2)	The Revenant (DVDscr)	?.? / trailer
4	(8)	Bridge of Spies	7.9 / trailer
5	(4)	The Intern	7.4 / trailer
6	(3)	The Martian	8.2 / trailer
7	(…)	Black Mass (Web-DL)	7.1 / trailer
8	(5)	Solace	6.4 / trailer
9	(…)	The Last Witch Hunter (WEB-DL)	6.0 / trailer
10	(9)	Sisters (Webrip)	6.5 / trailer

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

The movie industry has gone head to head with Google in recent months, demanding tougher anti-piracy measures from the search engine.

According to the MPAA and others Google makes it too easy for its users to find pirated content. Instead, they would prefer Google to remove sites such as The Pirate Bay from its search results completely.

In addition, Google should boost the rankings of legal services and sites that allow the public to find legal content. To lead the way, the movie industry group launched its own WhereToWatch search engine where visitors can find out where to watch the latest blockbusters.

Ironically, the MPAA’s very own site is now being censored by Google upon request of a movie industry outfit in Europe.

In recent weeks film distributor “Forum Film Poland” sent several DMCA takedown requests to Google listing five URLs of the MPAA’s WheretoWatch.com service. The search engine kindly complied with the request and as a result the pages are no longer listed in Google’s search results.

People who try to find the WhereToWatch page for “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2″ get the following result, linking to this DMCA notice.

Where to?

The DMCA notices were sent by the reporting agency “Anti-Piracy Protection” who also sent one on behalf of another Polish media outlet, ITI Neovision, which removed the entry for “The Fault in Our Stars.”

This means that six WhereToWatch pages are no longer present in Google’s search results.

The errors illustrate how easily mistakes are made by often automated takedown processes. It appears that WhereToWatch is not whitelisted by the reporting organization and mistakenly flagged as infringing content.

Similar errors have been made in the past with other movie industry supported search engines such as FindanyFilm and JustWatch.

Yes, these type of mistakes are easily corrected with a counter-notice but then they have to be spotted first, which is usually not the case.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the MPAA files a counter-notice to have their pages restored again. At Google, the inadvertent censorship will probably be welcomed with a smile.

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

With the launch of legal streaming services such as Netflix, movie and TV fans have less reason to turn to pirate sites. At the same time, however, these legal options present new copyright-related problems and threats.

Traditionally the movie industry has relied on geographical licensing deals through which movie and TV-show rights are sold to separate parties in various countries.

Ten years ago this model wasn’t causing any issues. But now that the Internet has made entertainment more instant and global, the public is beginning to complain.

Why do Netflix users in Andorra, Bolivia and the Cook Islands have access to Better Call Saul, while Americans don’t? Similarly, why can Danish people watch American Sniper while it’s pretty much unavailable in the rest of the world?

Most Netflix users don’t understand.

This frustration is driving people to circumvent geographical restrictions by using VPNs and proxy services. With help from handy tools such as the “unofficial Netflix online Global Search” every Netflix subscriber can easily access these hidden treasures.

There are even specialized applications that do the same, giving people a browsable library of all Netflix titles with built-in proxies.

unofficial Netflix online Global Search

Netflix’s announcement to ramp up its crackdown on VPN and proxy pirates comes a week after Netflix expanded its reach by more than 130 countries. This obviously isn’t a coincidence, as the two are directly linked.

While Netflix has always been contractually obliged to take measures against unblocking efforts, its near worldwide expansion makes it a higher priority.

Targeting VPN and proxy “pirates” has been high on the Hollywood agenda for several years already. For example, in 2014 Sony Pictures conducted research to identify the IP-ranges of various VPNs and proxies.

It turned out that most were not, and these results were shared with Netflix and other streaming services so they could take action and expand their blocklists where needed.

The question is, however, whether this repressive approach will be effective.

In fact, the announced measures may cause some people to give up their subscriptions and return to their old piracy habits, which should worry both Netflix and the movie studios. The true solution lies somewhere else.

While it’s easier said than done the film industry should move away from its complicated licensing schemes and windowed releases, much like the music industry has. This is a change Netflix backs according to recent statements.

According to Netflix the ‘VPN pirates’ are willing to pay, they just can’t get what they want through their local Netflix.

Speaking out on the controversial VPN use, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that the problem can be fixed if the industry starts to offer the same content globally, without artificial barriers.

“The basic solution is for Netflix to get global and have its content be the same all around the world so there’s no incentive to [use a VPN]. Then we can work on the more important part which is piracy,” Hastings said.

For now Netflix can do little else than comply with the pressure from Hollywood, but as soon as they roll out broad VPN blockades it’s going to cause problems.

Many people use VPN services to protect their privacy, not to fool Netflix, and when they are locked out of their accounts there’s bound to be some uproar. At the same time it will trigger a new cat-and-mouse game where “unblocking” services will try to bypass Netflix’s blocks against them, and so on.

It’s hard to see any winners in this game, except perhaps from the Hollywood insiders who lack a long-term vision.

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

People all around the world are unable to access the most visited torrent site since a few hours.

The site is suffering from a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and has been hard to reach.

As a result, all official KAT proxies are suffering downtime as well.

The KAT team confirmed to TorrentFreak that attack is targeted at the site’s DNS servers and they are doing their best to solve the issue.

The DDoS attack is not new and also caused a brief outage yesterday and earlier in the week. The site has managed to come back a few times, but it appears that the problems still persist.

KAT down

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

Birthdays are the highlight of the year for most children and what better way to celebrate than with a cake featuring their favorite cartoon character.

Although the parents and local pastry shops may be well-intentioned, there are lurking copyright issues that can easily spoil the party.

This issue is currently on debate in Croatia where nearly all pastry shops have received legal threats for their use of popular cartoon and movie characters. Facing fines in the range of $300 to $1,000 they are urged to stop baking infringing cakes.

The demands come from a law firm hired by the competing pastry chain Fun Cake Factory and target birthday cakes with popular Star Wars, Frozen, Sponge Bob, Peppa Pig and Ninja Turtles characters.

The company is a partner of Finsbury Food Group and has the exclusive rights to sell cakes with Disney characters. In addition the chain also secured the rights to use Nickelodeon, Astley Baker Davies and Universal Studios characters, which covers most popular cartoons.

With the legal claims the pastry chain hopes to prevent the competition from selling “infringing” cakes, so more people will choose to buy their products instead.

Ana Marcelić, owners of Zagreb’s pastry shop Fancy Cake was one of the recipients who received a threatening letter.

“We are appalled by this decision which we consider unfounded and unfair. It is a huge loss for us, because the penalties are terrible, and it is a difficult situation to explain to the customer,” Marcelić told Jutarnji.

“We can inform parents about the situation, but how do you explain the legal situation to children who are screaming because they simply want Elza on their birthday cake?”

Just to clarify what is allowed and what isn’t, a representative of the Association of Pastry Caterers contacted the law firm to get clarification, but thus far it only received an ambiguous response.

There haven’t been any reports of damage claims against disobedient pastry makers yet, however, if the pirated cakes continue to be sold offenders could eventually face a copyright infringement lawsuit.

—

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

The Pirate Bay has had its fair share of domain name issues in recent months.

The site previously burnt through a ‘hydra’ of six domain names after it sailed away from its .se mainstay. Ironically, the Swedish TLD turned out to be more resilient than any of the alternatives.

In an apparent attempt to diversify TPB switched on a new domain name last week. However, the Montserrat-based ThePirateBay.ms didn’t last long either and has already been suspended.

The .MS domain now has the infamous “serverhold” status which suggests that the responsible registry interfered. The status has been used before when domain names were flagged for copyright issues, and strips the domain name of its DNS entries.

“This status code is set by your domain’s Registry Operator. Your domain is not activated in the DNS,” ICANN writes.

As a result of the issue ThePirateBay.ms is no longer accessible. TorrentFreak reached out to the responsible registry for a comment but at the time of writing we haven’t heard back.

The suspension means that TPB is back to square one again, leaving ThePirateBay.org and ThePirateBay.se as the only stable domain names. Whether the Pirate Bay team has any plans to add any new domains is unknown at this point.

The site’s operators previously informed TF that they have plenty of domain names prepared, so it’s likely that one or more will become active in the future.

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

Last year the UK Government announced a plan to increase the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement to ten years.

The current maximum of two years is not enough to deter infringers, lawmakers argued.

The plan followed a recommendation put forward in a study commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) a few months earlier.

This study concluded that the criminal sanctions for copyright infringement available under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA 1988) could be amended to bring them into line with related offenses, such as counterfeiting.

Before implementing the changes the Government launched a public consultation, asking for comments and advice from the public. This generated a lot of responses and this week the results were published by the IPO.

In total there were 1,032 responses to the consultation, and an overwhelming majority of 98 percent oppose the increased prison term.

There were only 21 responses supporting the plan, which all except one came from organizations. A total of 1,011 individuals came out in opposition, most of which used a submission form made available by the Open Rights Group (ORG).

Consultation response

The Government has released a summary of the findings (pdf) presenting the primary arguments from both sides. The opponents argue that prison term extension is not acceptable because the punishment would be too harsh.

“10 years is too high; copyright infringement is not a serious crime,” IPO summarizes.

In addition, due to the vague language employed, opponents are worried that the changes could lead to prison sentences for naive file-sharers who have no real criminal intent.

“The term ‘affect prejudicially’ is too vague and could mean someone facing a criminal charge where only a minimal amount of content has been infringed. This requires some threshold to ensure only commercial scale infringers are punished.”

The supporters of the prison term extension, including industry groups BPI, FACT and the MPA, argue that harsher sentences would help to serve as a deterrent, preventing people from pirating copyrighted works.

“Change would act as a powerful deterrent to those engaging in IP crime,” IPO summarizes.

According to the opponents there is no reason why online piracy should be treated differently than physical counterfeiting.

“It is important that creativity is respected and rewarded, and those who deliberately infringe or facilitate infringement should face criminal sanctions. Copyright infringement online is no less serious than that of physical, and therefore shouldn’t be treated any differently.”

The UK Government has not made any decisions yet on how to move forward but IPO notes that it will conduct an in-depth analysis of all the points raised. Any future legislation should take into account the public responses.

“This proposal has clearly struck a chord with many stakeholders, which is reflected in the high number of responses. As a result, the Government is now carefully considering the best way forward,” IPO notes.

“However, the Government remains committed to tackling those engaged in online criminality,” it adds.

The comments appear to suggest that a 10-year prison term may have been averted for now, but some sort of change to the current law is expected to come sooner or later.

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

In common with many other user-generated sites, Twitter is used by some of its members to host or link to copyright infringing material.

If rightsholders submit a takedown request, Twitter swiftly takes the infringing content down. Over the past several months the company processed thousands of requests and complied with most of them.

However, a new lawsuit filed in a California federal court suggests that Twitter’s takedown efforts are not always sufficient.

This week Wisconsin-based photographer Jennifer Rondinelli Reilly filed a complaint (pdf) against Twitter in which she accuses Twitter of hosting or linking to one of her works without permission.

After discovering the unauthorized use of her work the photographer sent Twitter dozens of DMCA takedown requests. However, according to the complaint Twitter failed to act on most of them.

“On November 18, 2015, Reilly sent 28 notices to Twitter regarding the Infringing Uses,” the complaint reads. “Twitter has not removed or disabled access to 50 of the 56 Infringing Uses.”

The complaint

At the time of writing several of the tweets still remain online, with many linking to a poster for the University of North Texas’ annual “Poetic Justice” showcase. This poster allegedly uses the copyrighted image without permission of the photographer.

One of the DMCA notices

While the DMCA safe harbor shields Internet services such a Twitter from being liable for the acts of their users, this may not be the case when the company structurally fails to respond to takedown requests.

According to the photographer the social network was aware of the infringements but chose not to take appropriate action.

“Twitter had actual knowledge of the Infringing Uses. Reilly provided notice to Twitter in compliance with the DMCA, and Twitter failed to expeditiously disable access to or remove the Infringing Uses,” Reilly writes.

Reilly demands an injunction against Twitter preventing the company from infringing her work and also demands both actual and statutory damages to compensate the losses she’s suffered.

This is not the first time that Twitter has been sued for copyright infringement. Just a few months ago award-winning photographer Kristin Pierson launched a similar case. It was dismissed soon after, suggesting that both parties solved the dispute behind the scenes.

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