Author: Ernesto

Last November several pirated copies of 4K videos started to leak from both Netflix and Amazon. These leaks were unusual as online 4k streams were always well protected against pirates.

While it’s still not clear how these videos were copied, a new lawsuit from Warner Bros. and Intel’s daughter company Digital Content Protection (DCP) suggests that HDFury devices may be involved.

The companies have filed a lawsuit at a federal court in New York against the maker of the devices, technology company LegendSky.

Starting a few weeks ago the Chinese company launched a range of new devices which allow users to strip the latest HDCP encryption. This hardware sits between a HDCP-compliant source device and another device, allowing it to pass on a “stripped” 4K signal.

The Hollywood studio and DCP argue that these devices violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions and should no longer be sold to prevent further damage.

One of the HDFury devices

TF obtained a copy of the complaint in which Warner Bros. allege that the hardware threatens copyright holders because it enables users to render 4K video “in the clear,” making it easy for pirates to share it online.

“The HDFury Devices harm copyright owners like Warner Bros. because they enable Digital Content to be displayed without the protections of HDCP, thereby enabling users to access copyrighted works, make and/or distribute copies of copyrighted works […] all without the permission of the copyright owner,’ they write.

DCP, on the other hand, is harmed because it owns and controls the HDCP standard. When this copy protection is easily circumvented it loses much of its value and potential licensing revenue.

“The HDFury Devices harm DCP because, among other things, they undermine the effectiveness of HDCP, lower the value of HDCP, and thereby jeopardize DCP’s ability to license HDCP to Digital Device manufacturers and Digital Content owners,” the complaint reads.

Both Warner Bros. and DCP accuse LegendSky of violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. In addition, they claim that the company violated the Lanham Act by falsely stating that the HDFury devices comply with HDCP’s license requirements.

The plaintiffs ask the court to prohibit these devices from being sold and advertised. In addition, they want to be compensated for the damages they’ve suffered.

In discussions with TorrentFreak, someone who recently purchased an HDFury 4K ‘stripper’ confirmed that the product does indeed work. The first devices were shipped from China early November, a few days before the first 4K rips appeared online.

For Warner Bros. it is essential that 4K copy protection remains strong. The company just announced that it will release several dozen 4K Blu-ray movies this year and would like to keep these out of the hands of pirates.

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

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

The Martian 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 Martian	8.2 / trailer
2	(…)	The Big Short (DVDscr)	8.1 / trailer
3	(2)	The Revenant (DVDscr)	?.? / trailer
4	(7)	Spectre (DVDscr)	7.1 / trailer
5	(3)	The Hateful Eight (DVDscr)	9.1 / trailer
6	(5)	Bridge of Spies (DVDscr)	7.9 / trailer
7	(4)	Creed (DVDscr)	8.2 / trailer
8	(…)	Burnt	6.7 / trailer
9	(8)	The Intern (Web-DL)	7.4 / trailer
9	(2)	The Peanuts Movie (DVDscr)	7.7 / trailer
10	(10)	In The Heart of The Sea (DVDscr)	7.1 / trailer

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

There are dozens of sync and backup services available on the Internet, but most have a major drawback. They rely on external cloud-based hosting.

This may work well for smaller files, but when large videos have to be distributed among several devices people may run into trouble. This is one of the reasons why BitTorrent Sync has become quite popular.

Dropbox, one of the leading cloud syncing services, also appears to realize that there’s an opportunity here. Behind the scenes the company has been working on a technology that allows users to share files across different devices through secure P2P transfers.

This month the company scored a patent for a secure peer-to-peer synchronization system through which users can quickly share and collaborate on files without uploading them to Dropbox’s servers.

“Peer-to-peer distributed sharing of the content items in such an online content management system can eliminate bottlenecks, thereby increasing the speed at which the content items can be shared among the individuals,” Dropbox explains

“In particular, in peer-to-peer distributed sharing, the individuals can directly transfer the content items from one computer or electronic device to another, instead of uploading and downloading the content items to and from remote storage in the online content management system,” they add.

Dropbox’ P2P synchronization

This type of peer-to-peer sharing is useful for groups of people who require access to the same files, especially if they are large. In addition, the technology could also help to quickly share the files of one person between different devices.

However, P2P syncing can also lead to all kinds of conflicts and errors, in particular when more people are working on the same file at the same time. After all, the system must know what files are the most recent and how to properly distribute them.

To address this Dropbox’s system will allow users to provide a cryptographic key to a server. This signals what version of the file they have and how it should be synchronized across the other devices.

“…the recipients can use the cryptographic key during peer-to-peer distributed sharing of the version of the content item among the user and the recipients in a shared network (intranet or Internet) without synchronization conflicts …,” the patent reads.

The patent is an interesting development. If Dropbox goes ahead and implements a form of peer-to-peer syncing then this would greatly increase the appeal to users who share large data files, such as editors and graphic designers.

In a way it’s framed as a competitor for BitTorrent Sync, which specifically targets this niche. Launched in 2013, BitTorrent Sync allows users to become their own cloud and share massive files without storing them on external central servers.

BitTorrent Sync previously announced that it was seven times faster than Dropbox, which may have prompted the cloud syncing service to follow BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer lead.

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

Most file-sharers are creatures of habit, but when their favorite site disappears they gladly hop over to the next one.

This is also reflected in our annual top 10 which sees the usual names on top but also features some dubious newcomers.

One of the major changes came with the hostile takeover of the popular TV-torrent site EZTV. This prompted the popular TV-torrent distribution group to shut down last May. Another group took over the popular brand and continued with their own ‘unofficial’ EZTV releases. We therefore marked the site as a newcomer.

Something similar happened to YIFY’s YTS website, when the Australian admin ran into legal trouble. The official YTS website shut down but it was quickly replaced by the “unofficial” YTS.ag, which gathered a large user-base over the past two months.

Apparently, most torrent users are happy as long as they can get their fix, no matter what the source is.

KickassTorrents (KAT) remains the most visited torrent site and continues to grow. The Pirate Bay is listed in second place and made a strong comeback after nearly two months of downtime spanning the turn of the year. Since the site has been operating from several domain names until a few days ago, we chose not to list an Alexa rank.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Rutracker would have made it into the top five based on the number of visitors. However, we choose to only include English language content sites.

Below is the full list of the top 10 most-visited torrent sites at the start of the new year. The list is based on various traffic reports and we display the Alexa rank for each. In addition, we include last year’s ranking for each of the 10 sites.

1. KickassTorrents

KickassTorrents was founded in 2009 and surpassed The Pirate Bay in traffic last year. Battling various censorship efforts the site has burned through a few different domain names over the years. Most recently it switched to a Costa Rican .cr domain after it lost its Somalian .so address.

2. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is one of the main piracy icons. The torrent site wasn’t online at the beginning of 2015 and had to deal with a staff revolt. However, it quickly regained millions of users after a successful comeback operating from a hydra of domain names until last week.

3. ExtraTorrent

ExtraTorrent continues to gain more traffic and has become one of the most active torrent communities. The site is also the home of the popular ETTV and ETRG release groups.

4. Torrentz

Torrentz has been the leading BitTorrent meta-search engine for many years. Unlike the other sites featured in the list Torrentz does not host any torrent files or magnet links, but redirects visitors to other places on the web. The site uses several domain names with .eu being the most popular.

5. RARBG

RARBG, which started out as a Bulgarian tracker, was last year’s newcomer and continues to rake in more visitors. The site was blocked by UK ISPs last year, which put it on par with most other sites in the top 10.

6. 1337x

1337x has traditionally been a community driven torrent site but several weeks ago most of the admins and moderators abandoned ship over security concerns. The coming year it will become clear whether 1337x can keep its popular status.

7. EZTV.ag

TV-torrent distribution group EZTV shut down earlier this year after a hostile takeover. The site continued to operate under new ownership and releases its own torrents now. In solidarity with the original owners several large torrent sites have banned these ‘new’ releases from their sites.

8. TorrentHound

TorrentHound has been around since the last decade but is a newcomer in the top 10. It has also been on the radar of copyright holders this year. The torrent site is blocked in several countries and was reported as a piracy haven to the U.S. government, alongside many other sites in this list.

5. YTS.ag

YTS.ag has nothing to do with the original YTS or YIFY group, but aims to take its place. As with the new EZTV, several large torrent sites are not allowing the group to use the YIFY or YTS brands on their sites.

10. TorrentDownloads

TorrentDownloads has been around for several years. The torrent site regained a spot in the top 10 this year after it was featured for the last time in 2011. It’s a no-nonsense index that provides torrents to millions of users each month.

Disclaimer: Yes, we know that Alexa isn’t perfect and that Compete has plenty of flaws, but when combined both do a pretty good job at comparing sites that operate in a similar niche.

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

At the start of the new year the TF news desk often wonders how things can become even more extreme than the year before.

Today we decided to share some of these thoughts with you.

Granted, predicting the future isn’t an easy task, but the predictions below give plenty of food for thought and discussion.

Copyright Holders Will Sue Chrome and Firefox

This is an easy one really. After pursuing legal action against hundreds of thousands of people, many website operators, software developers, and even a large U.S. Internet provider, it’s only a small step to take.

Initially the RIAA and friends considered going after BitTorrent Inc., but web browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla’s FireFox pose an even greater threat. In their complaint the righsholders will blame the browsers for granting unrestricted access to millions of copyrighted works, through torrent, streaming, file-hosting and linking sites.

Popcorn Time for Recipes

Popcorn Time sells. We’ve seen Popcorn Time applications for TV and movies, for music and even for porn. Copyright holders and tracking companies also jumped on the bandwagon and used the Popcorn Time brand to sell their schemes.

The Popcorn mania reached unprecedented levels in 2015 and it won’t end in the new year. During the months to come we’ll witness the launch of various new spin-offs including a Popcorn Time for recipes, allowing users to browse an advertising-free library of some of the hottest cooking instructions.

ISPs will disconnect millions of “pirating” subscribers

This is another shoe-in. A few weeks ago Cox Communications lost its lawsuit against music rights group BMG. The Internet provider was held liable for the copyright infringements of its users because it failed to disconnect persistent pirates.

The result is that Cox now has to pay $25 million in damages. However, the lawsuit also raised alarm bells at other major Internet providers, as most large ISPs don’t disconnect repeated infringers either. In 2016 copyright holders will raise the pressure by sending out dozens of millions of infringement notices.

In response, large ISPs will have to disconnect millions of pirating customers.

Initially copyright holders will praise the actions as a clear victory, but they will have second thoughts when they realize that the disconnected subscribers are canceling their Netflix, Spotify, and other legal subscriptions in droves.

The Pirate Bay becomes Invincible

The world’s most notorious torrent site has had quite a few ups and downs over the years, but in 2016 there will be some truly remarkable developments. Initially we thought TPB could be working on a new website design after all these years, but that’s probably too far-fetched.

Instead we predict that the Pirate Bay’s low orbit server drones will finally take off, making the site even more resilient. In addition the TPB team will launch its planned application to decentralize the entire site and database among its users so it can withstand pretty much any raid.

Google Bans everything piratey

In recent years the MPAA, RIAA and others have cyber-bullied Google to extremes. The rightsholders accuse Google of facilitating piracy and believe the company hasn’t done enough to address the situation. The MPAA even went as far as enlisting Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood to take Google out.

In 2016 the search giant will throw in the towel. Instead of fighting the mounting pressure it will give the MPAA and friends everything they want, without any form of oversight.

As a result, The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and various other pirate domains will completely disappear from the search index. The same is true for other websites rightsholders frequently send takedown notices for, such as Netflix, IMDb, The Hollywood Reporter, Rotten Tomatoes, Spotify and Pandora.

And remember, take down means stay down.

—

Happy 2016!

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

During December, all self-respecting search engines produce an overview of the most popular search terms of the past year.

These lists give insight into recent trends, and in 2015 Lamar Odom, Paris and American Sniper were among the top trending searches on Google.

But what about torrent search engines? With billions of searches every year it’s worth taking a look at the most-entered keywords on the dominant file-sharing network.

A few years ago we started the ‘Pirate zeitgeist’ tradition with help from one of the largest torrent sites around. Based on a sample of hundreds of millions of searches, this list should give a decent overview of what people are looking for.

2015’s number one query is the same as last year’s, YIFY the name of the popular movie release group which was forced to shut down in October after a legal threat. This means that its popularity is expected to fade in the new year.

In second place we find NeZu, another popular movie release group that made it into the top 50 for the second year. Interestingly, NeZu’s releases are not wildly popular, which might suggest that this high ranking may have been boosted somehow.

The term 2015, often used to find recent movies, comes in third place, followed by Hindi. Other movie related terms such as 1080p, YIFY 720p and YIFY 1080p show that users are increasingly looking for high quality video.

The first content related search query is Game of Thrones in seventh place. Other popular TV searches are The Walking Dead and The Big Bang Theory taking 10th and 16th place respectively.

Movies also remain popular with Star Wars in 27th, Fifty Shades of Grey in 29th and Interstellar in 32nd place. Perhaps surprisingly, there are no searches related to music titles in the top 50. The only music related terms are Discography in 11th place and Flac in 26th.

Finally, various regional searches also remain popular, as they are often used to find localized releases. The terms Hindi, French, Tamil, Telugu, Ita and NL all have a spot in the top 20.

Below is the full list of the 50 most-entered search queries on one of the most popular torrent sites on the Internet.

—

1. yify
2. nezu
3. 2015
4. hindi
5. 1080p
6. yify 720p
7. game of thrones
8. yify 1080p
9. ripsalot
10. the walking dead
11. 3d
12. french
13. discography
14. tamil
15. 2014
16. the big bang theory
17. telugu
18. ita
19. hindi 2015
20. nl
21. malayalam
22. android
23. the flash
24. movies
25. arrow
26. flac
27. star wars
28. the blacklist
29. fifty shades of grey
30. gotham
31. walking dead
32. interstellar
33. batman
34. mac
35. insurgent
36. wwe
37. telugu 2015
38. mad max
39. fast and furious 7
40. jurassic world
41. avengers
42. sword coast legend
43. american sniper
44. gta v
45. dual audio hindi
46. vikings
47. lynda
48. apk
49. avengers age of ultron
50. ettv

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

Paramount Pictures is generally not that protective when in comes to fan-made projects that involve the Star Trek franchise.

However, the well-received short film Star Trek: Prelude to Axanar and the planned follow-up feature film Anaxar has crossed a line. This week both Paramount and CBS Studios sued the makers of the Star Trek inspired fan film, accusing them of copyright infringement.

Prelude to Axanar is an idea from Alec Peters who started working on it half a decade ago. After a few years he and his team decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to get it funded, with an initial goal of $10,000.

The project turned in to a massive hit and quickly raised more than $100,000 for the short film, and a similar campaign for a follow-up feature that will soon start filming raised another $638,000 on Kickstarter alone.

That’s a healthy budget for a fan-art project and the success prompted the attention of both Paramount Pictures and CBS Studios.

In a complaint filed (pdf) at a federal court in California the movie studios accuse the people behind the Anaxar project of various counts of copyright infringement.

“This is an action for copyright infringement arising out of Defendants’ unauthorized exploitation of Star Trek, one of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time. Since its inception, Star Trek has become a cultural phenomenon that is eagerly followed by millions of fans throughout the world,” the complaint reads.

“The Axanar Works infringe Plaintiffs’ works by using innumerable copyrighted elements of Star Trek, including its settings, characters, species, and themes,” it adds.

Through Kickstarter and Indiegogo crowdfunding campaigns the projects raised over a million dollars. In their complaint Paramount Pictures and CBS Studios believe that they are entitled to any profits the films make as well as $150,000 in statutory damages.

In a response to the lawsuit, Anaxar’s Alec Peters states that they are not trying to exploit the Star Trek franchise since their work is a harmless fan film project.

“Axanar is a fan film. Fan films – whether related to Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Power Rangers, Batman or any other franchise – are labors of love that keep fans engaged, entertained, and keep favorite characters alive in the hearts of fans.”

“Like other current fan films, Axanar entered production based on a very long history and relationship between fandom and studios. We’re not doing anything new here,” he writes on Facebook.

Peters remains open to discussion and hopes that the parties involved can come to a mutually beneficial solution, so it’s likely that the lawsuit will eventually steer toward some form of settlement deal.

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

In recent years copyright holders have overloaded Google with DMCA takedown notices, targeting links to pirated content.

The majority of these requests are sent by the music and movie industries, targeting thousands of different websites. In recent years the volume of takedown notices has increased spectacularly and this trend continued in 2015.

Google doesn’t report yearly figures, but at TF we processed all the weekly reports and found that the number of URLs submitted by copyright holders last year surpassed the 558 million mark – 558,860,089 at the time of writing.

For the first time ever the number of reported URLs has surpassed half a billion in a 12-month period. This is an increase of 60 percent compared to last year, when the search engine processed 345 million pirate links.

The majority of the links are being removed from the search results. However, Google sometimes takes “no action” if they are deemed not to be infringing or if they have been taken down previously.

This year most takedown requests were sent for the domains chomikuj.pl, rapidgator.net and uploaded.net, with more than seven million targeted URLs each. The UK Music industry group BPI is the top copyright holder of 2015, good for more than 65 million reported links.

Looking at the totals for this year we further see that 329,469 different domain names were targeted by 27,035 copyright holders. Interestingly, these staggering numbers are interpreted differently by Google and various copyright holders.

A few weeks ago Google told the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator that it has taken various measures to help copyright holders, including swift removals.

“We process more takedown notices, and faster, than any other search engine,” the search giant commented.

“We receive notices for a tiny fraction of everything we host and index, which nonetheless amounts to millions of copyright removal requests per week that are processed, on average, in under six hours.”

The company rejects broader actions, such as the removal of entire domain names, as this would prove counterproductive and lead to overbroad censorship.

Many copyright holders, however, don’t share these concerns. Over the years groups such as the MPAA and RIAA have repeatedly argued that clearly infringing sites should be barred from Google’s index. In addition, they want Google to make sure that pirated content stays down.

While Google believes that the billion reported URLs are a sign that the DMCA takedown process is working properly, rightsholders see it as a signal of an unbeatable game of whack-a-mole.

As this stalemate continues we can expect the number of reported pages to continue to rise in the future, adding millions of new URLs on a daily basis. Perhaps there will be a billion reported pirate links in 2016?

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

Over the past several days more than a dozen high quality screeners of Hollywood films have appeared online, including The Hateful Eight, The Revenant and Steve Jobs.

Devastated Hollywood studios are now working with the FBI to catch the perpetrators, with some success.

Last week they traced The Hateful Eight leak back to a Hollywood executive and the feds are currently looking into additional leads.

The main targets in this case are individuals connected to the release group Hive-CM8. They’ve released the majority of the DVD screeners that are out at the moment and earlier promised to leak a total of 40.

However, it now appears that their releasing spree has come to an end.

Comments made by an insider on a private torrent site claim that a recent “expose” of a torrent uploader has something to do with it. This information was posted on various sites including KAT and in the TF comment section.

The person responsible for the expose, who uses the screen name Sup3rman, contacted TorrentFreak to provide his side of the story.

After reading an article about how easy it can sometimes be for law enforcement to catch movie pirates, he decided to test this theory on someone who uploaded many Hive-CM8 releases. To do this, he looked at the source of the movie screenshots and found that they were linked to an image sharing account with thousands of images.

All this info was (and is) rather public as the screenshots were posted with the torrent uploads. Also, everyone could see where they were hosted and figure out that the account name in question matched that of the torrent uploader.

However, not everyone close to the release group appreciated the “exposure” and as a result the public Hive-CM8 releases were halted. Hive-CM8 has not commented on the break but on a separate site he wrote that he won’t be available for some time.

On first sight the ‘leaked’ information doesn’t appear to be anything new or particularly private. However, it certainly appears that something spooked the group or uploader into halting the releases.

The reported break is confirmed by the lack of new releases over the past day or two, which is the longest gap since the first DVD screener was posted. Interestingly, however, The Big Short and Anomalisa have been published in private, or ‘internally’ as it’s known.

At the end of the day many questions remain. Could it really be that the exposed image account is the sole reason for stopping the public releases? Or is something else going on behind the scenes?

There’s no point in speculating any further at this point or drawing connections that may be totally irrelevant, but one has to wonder.

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

Last May the Stockholm District Court ordered the Pirate Bay’s .SE domains to be handed over to the Swedish state, a decision which is currently being appealed.

In a response The Pirate Bay decided to quickly redirect its visitors to a ‘Hydra’ of six new domain names in case the .SE domains were lost for good.

The notorious torrent site decided to use more than one domain name, anticipating that not all would survive pressure from copyright holders.

This was no unnecessary precaution as the first domain name was quickly suspended following an intervention from the associated registry, which soon chopped off the first head.

Today, the Hydra lost its remaining heads after TPB’s domain registrar took over all remaining domain names.

This morning ThePirateBay.la, ThePirateBay.gd, ThePirateBay.mn and ThePirateBay.vg were all listed as “clienthold” by the registry and the same is true for several other official TPB domains including those using the .FM, .SH, .MU and .TW extensions. This means they are no longer accessible, once all DNS entries are updates.

All affected domain names are linked to the same service and registered to Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij. According to ICANN the clienthold status is uncommon and “usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment, or when your domain is subject to deletion.”

Pirate Bay’s .LA Whois

As a result of the domain troubles The Pirate Bay is currently not reachable (cached DNS entries aside, but these will expire soon) through the usual ThePirateBay.se domain, which redirects to the domains listed above. However, the .org domain remains operational and the same is true for the .onion address.

At this point there is no official statement on the reason for the seizures/suspensions. The responsible registrar appears to be Idotz.net, which is a U.S. based 1api/Hexonet reseller. TorrentFreak has asked the company for a comment but at the time of publication we hadn’t yet heard back.

Not all domain registrars and registries are equally responsive to copyright complaints. Some suspend a domain name after a single complaint, while others require a local court order before taking action.

The Mongolian registry, which is behind TPB’s .MN domain name, previously informed TF that they will process potential complaints through ICANN’s Dispute Resolution Policy, suggesting that they will not take any voluntary action.

Still, that didn’t prevent the registrar from putting the .MN domain name on hold today.

Considering Pirate Bay’s defiant stance it’s likely that a copyright holder complaint triggered the current actions, but that hasn’t been confirmed. The TPB team has yet to make an official statement on the problems.

We will update this article should more information become available.

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