As copyright holders try to slow the spread of copyrighted content, torrent and streaming sites are being blocked by ISPs across Europe and Russia at an alarming rate.
On the one hand this is an annoyance to site operators, who are having to adapt their operations in order to mitigate the effects of blockades. On the other, music and movie companies feel justified in taking any measures they can to protect their rights.
Somewhere in the middle lies the ordinary users who, in an effort to circumvent blockades, are ending up on copycat, clone and just plain scammy sites that are cynically cashing in on all the confusion. One site attempting to do something about this problem is Russian torrent giant RuTracker.org.
Blocked by local ISPs following escalating disputes with copyright holders, the site says that its users are falling foul to clone sites carrying out phishing and extortion-like attacks. RuTracker believes that if it obtained a recognizable URL ending in .RU, local users would be more reassured that they’re visiting the correct site.
To that end RuTracker.org has been trying to obtain RuTracker.ru, a domain currently owned by a rival torrent site.
“Blocks are not much for us to care about. Much more important for us is that users can accidentally fall on phishing sites that steal passwords,” an RuTracker representative told Izvestia.
Unlike its much larger namesake, RuTracker.ru is not currently blocked by court order and since RuTracker.org really wants an .RU domain, RuTracker.ru is the natural choice. However, the site also has aspirations of keeping the price realistic and that appears to be a stumbling block.
Izvestia managed to track down RuTracker.ru owner Oleg Volkov who told the publication he isn’t happy with the price being offered.
“From 100,000 rubles, you can start a conversation. But I’m not eager to sell it,” he said.
Indeed, less than $1,400 seems like a giveaway price, especially for a site with as many visitors as RuTracker.org. However, another issue has the potential to further complicate matters.
RuTracker.org is owned by a company called DreamTorrent Corp. and in 2012 the outfit applied for two trademarks – RuTracker and RuTrackerorg. A year later the site acquired the rights to the names.
So, in theory at least, DreamTorrent could use its grip on its trademarks to attempt to gain control of RuTracker.ru by force. However, the site has said that it does not wish to go down that route and would prefer to negotiate a fair price instead.
But while the details are being thrashed out it seems that RuTracker.org has been experiencing yet more blocking problems, this time from an unexpected direction.
According to a post by an administrator on the site’s forum, RuTracker recently began receiving reports that the site was no longer accessible to users from outside Russia from countries including Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Israel.
It transpired that RuTracker had engaged the services of an anti-DDoS company based in Russia, who had begun passing foreign traffic destined for the site through the Russian Federation. Since RuTracker is blocked by Russian ISPs, this foreign traffic also became blocked.
The problem was eventually solved but it does show how blockades can overreach and cause unintended consequences, in this case a locally-focused block extending internationally.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
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