When launching an investigation into a pirate site there are many publicly available sources that can be trawled for information.

 

No matter how detailed the findings, however, nothing beats knowing the name and address of a pirate site operator. With this information to hand a number of options become available, from straightforward legal threats to full-blown lawsuits. As a result, most site operators closely guard their identities but others can make crucial mistakes or leave useful crumbs behind.

 

These trails can sometimes be found at third-party service providers. Domain registries can be useful since domain owners are required to give up their real names, at least in theory anyway. Platforms such as Cloudflare may also carry useful intelligence and a recent case involving pirate index Mangabank shows that the company does indeed hold a lot of information about its customers.

MPA/ACE Seeks Info From TONIC

The Motion Picture Association and anti-piracy partner Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment are no strangers to gathering information in this manner. After many similar requests in recent years, this week they were back in a California court seeking to compel domain registry TONIC to give up the identities of many of its customers.

 

One of the most visible targets in the first request is long-standing torrent giant rarbg.to, one of the most resilient (and reliable) pirate sites online today. According to SimilarWeb stats the site enjoys more than 60 million visits per month and as a result the MPA wants the TONIC registry to hand over the details of its owner.

 

Another big target is moviesjoy.to, a streaming site with around 20 million visits per month. Next in popularity (in traffic terms) is freefilm.to, an 8.5 million visitor film streaming platform that is very popular in the Czech Republic. The same can be said for TV streaming platform freeserial.to, where Czech visitors make up the majority of its 3 million visits every month.

 

Showing the global reach of the MPA/ACE, they are also seeking the identity of the owner of kisstvshow.to, a 6.3 million visit per month TV show site that is popular in Indonesia and the Philippines. The list is completed with requests to unmask those behind several other streaming sites including yesmovies.to, nox.to and kinomax.to (both popular in Germany) and ymovies.to, which is popular in the US, UK and Canada.

 

The second DMCA subpoena targeting TONIC references a single domain – watchhd.to. This IPTV supplier has been in operation for a number of years with many using its dedicated Kodi addon to access the service. It carries a wide variety of content with a focus on sport but also has a VOD service that reportedly carries more than 4,000 movies and TV shows.

 

The final subpoena again lists just one domain – oha.to – which isn’t a pirate site, at least in the traditional sense.

 

To appreciate the importance of this domain one has to look towards the popular ‘Watched’ streaming app that at one point entered the top 30 most popular entertainment apps on Apple’s App Store. Watched is also available on various other operating systems but needs a ‘bundle’ to be installed to make it a functional pirate tool, which is where Oha! (available at oha.to) comes in.

 

Earlier this year, MPA/ACE went to court in the United States to have Cloudflare hand over information about the owner of oha.to. Whether that was useful or not is unknown but they are now pressing TONIC for information about the domain owner. Hollywood clearly wants this operation shut down.

 

Whether this trio of subpoenas will bear any fruit will remain to be seen but TONIC is already under scrutiny in the US after being called out by the MPA as a “notorious market” in a submission to the USTR. It’s a characterization the registry fiercely rejects but the diplomatic pressure may yet prove to be a factor.

MPA/ACE Seeks Info From Cloudflare

The final pair of DMCA subpoenas target Cloudflare and more than two dozen of its customers. Several of these (freefilm.to, freeserial.to, nox.to, kisstvshow.to) appear in the subpoenas to TONIC but there are many others too.

 

They include major streaming site primewire.ag (20 million visits), Chinese streaming site ifsp.tv (15.7m), and Italy-focused supervideo.tv (3.6m).

 

Also included is egy.best. In 2019 the site announced its shutdown but it is now back up and pulling in more than 15 million visits per month, mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Morocco. The site was also called out recently by the MPA in its ‘notorious markets’ submission to the USTR.

 

The rest of the domains in the third MPA/ACE subpoena against Cloudflare are as follows: obniv.com, hd-world.cc, pelis-online.net, 7movierulz.vc, extramovies.camp, sendfox.org, ogladaj.to, 94itv.app, imybinoo.net, extrabb.com, wavob.com, vagdi.com, bovmi.com, kissasian.sh, phimmoizz.net, unblockit.app and vod.phimmoicdn.net

 

The final application against Cloudflare targets a pair of pirate IPTV sellers/suppliers. They are named as iptvsubscription.tv and webestreams.com. The documentation lists ‘backend’ URLs which suggests the MPA/ACE is interested in their VOD offerings.

 

Copies of all five DMCA subpoena applications can be found here (1,2,3,4,5 pdf)

 

Most pirate sites and apps won’t survive without ad revenue. This is why the advertising industry is seen as an ally in the fight against piracy.

 

Over the years, several ad-focused anti-piracy initiatives have emerged. In the UK, hundreds of advertising agencies began banning pirate sites, and the European Union chimed in as well.

WIPO’s Pirate Site Blocklist

These initiatives are relatively local while many pirate sites cater to a global audience. This lack of coordination motivated the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to develop a system that’s coordinated worldwide, with input from around the globe.

 

WIPO, which is part of the United Nations, was founded more than 50 years ago with the aim of protecting intellectual property. This includes combating online piracy, something it hopes to facilitate with its blacklist.

 

The idea for such a global database was first introduced by WIPO in 2017 and, behind the scenes, it was developed into a fully operational resource. It was initially rolled out as the ‘BRIP’ Database, short for “Building Respect for Intellectual Property,” but was later renamed to “WIPO Alert”.

Cutting Off Ad Revenue

The goal of the project is simple: allow stakeholders from member states to report problematic sites and share the resulting list with advertisers, so they can block bad apples. This should result in less money going to pirate sites, making it harder for them to generate profit.

 

At the moment, little is known about the effectiveness of the WIPO Alert system since the organization and its partners haven’t released much detail. What we do know is that earlier this year, there were 5,800 domain names reported as “copyright infringing” sites.

 

Needless to say, this is a massive blocking campaign, arguably one of the largest in the world. What’s concerning, however, is that there’s little information available on what sites are included.

WIPO Can’t Guarantee Accuracy

As we highlighted in the past, WIPO says that it can’t guarantee that the websites listed in its system are indeed copyright infringing. This responsibility lies completely with the reporting organizations.

 

“WIPO is simply providing a service to its Member States and to the international advertising industry in facilitating global access to data compiled at national level. The national agencies which create the lists of sites remain solely responsible for their contents,” the organization writes in its FAQ.

 

Initially, it was unknown who these national reporting agencies are but WIPO has made some progress on this front. There’s now a public page that shows which organizations are maintaining the blocklists.

 

The list of reported organizations includes Roskomnadzor from Russia, Italy’s AGCOM agency, CODA from Japan, Korea’s Copyright Protection Agency, Lithuania’s RTCL, and a Spanish Government department. Some blocking agencies publicize details on the blocked sites, but others intentionally keep these from public view.

 

A few weeks ago we reached out to WIPO requesting more details about the system and the blocked URLs. Despite confirmation that our inquiry had been received, there was no response. When we tried again this week WIPO continued its silence.

 

While we have no reason to believe that most of the sites in the “WIPO Alert” database are indeed infringing, the current system makes it hard to verify this and spot potential errors. This can cause some serious issues.

National Rules Differ

Russia’s Roskomnadzor, for example, previously instructed local ISPs to block 13.5 million Amazon IP-addresses to prevent subscribers from accessing the Zello app. And the same organization is cracking down on “unauthorized” VPNs too, and has threatened to block Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

 

The examples above are not strictly related to copyright but it shows that blocking standards can be quite different from country to country. On its website, WIPO acknowledges this by stressing that reported sites are deemed to be copyright infringing based on “national rules.”

 

The varying standards are also apparent when we look at the sites and services that copyright holders report to the US Trade Representative as notorious piracy markets. Just a few weeks ago, the MPA flagged Telegram as a piracy haven, and Russia’s social networking site VK.com was called out as well.

 

Interestingly, the MPA also reported the advertising company PopAds as a notorious piracy market. This, despite the fact that PopAds actively uses the WIPO Alert system to block pirate sites.

 

There’s no evidence that any of the services mentioned above are on WIPO’s blocklist. But that’s exactly the problem. At the moment, there is no way to check and scrutinize one of the largest blocking operations on the Internet.

 

WIPO stresses that its Alert system helps brands to avoid the negative reputational effect they can face when their ads appear on pirate sites. Nothing is said, however, about the potential reputational damage for the WIPO Alert system that may occur if a legitimate site inadvertently ends up on its list.

 

Over the past year in particular, anti-piracy group Rights Alliance has been applying maximum pressure to various players in the piracy ecosystem.

 

Through detailed investigations that are ultimately referred to local law enforcement, one of the group’s main aims is to disrupt and ultimately disassemble the private torrent site scene in Denmark. With the shutdown of several major private trackers in recent months, Rights Alliance clearly has the momentum but that isn’t to say that clearing-up operations aren’t needed.

 

Last week news broke that six people had been arrested following criminal referrals by Rights Alliance relating to private torrent sites ShareUniversity, DanishBytes, and potentially others. An aspect of the operation last week will be of interest to private tracker users all over Europe and potentially even the United States.

Seedboxes Providers and Sellers Under Pressure

The revelation came from the Public Prosecutor for Special Economic and International Crime (SØIK) which indicated that one of the arrested men reportedly sold access to seedboxes, a BitTorrent-related term for specially-configured servers that allow people to share content remotely.

 

These servers were reportedly rented by BitTorrent users for use on one or more of the private trackers to share around 3,800 copyrighted works.

 

It’s important to note that seedboxes aren’t illegal per se but if they are used to share infringing content then there are implications for users and seedboxes providers alike, when certain conditions are met. The circumstances surrounding last week’s arrests will become clearer in the coming weeks and months but in the meantime, some providers are already taking action.

Announcement from Seedbox.io and Walkerservers

In an announcement posted to its portal on November 6, 2021, seedbox provider Seedbox.io said that due to the recent raids in Denmark, it would no longer allow its customers to seed (share) content on three named private trackers.

 

“Due to recent events in Denmark on November 3rd we have decided to take our precautions and as a result we have blocked access to the below domains from our servers. The trackers in question are: https://superbits.org, https://danishbytes.org (And all subdomains/alternative domains) [and] https://cynicalgen.org. The sites have been blocked on the network level,” the provider explained.

Walkerservers, which is operated by the same company as Seedbox.io, later confirmed that the same announcement is true for its business too.

Criminal Complaint Was Filed By Rights Alliance

Given that Rights Alliance is behind most if not all pressure in Denmark that can lead to this type of response, TorrentFreak asked the anti-piracy company what it knows about these announcements. As it turns out, it knows quite a lot.

 

“The Rights Alliance filed a criminal complaint against HNielsen Networks, the Danish company behind Seedbox.io and Walkerservers, in March this year for facilitating copyright infringements by providing seedbox servers pre-installed with software for torrenting and providing customer support for using their services on illegal torrent sites,” explained Ditte Rie Agerskov, Head of Communications at Rights Alliance.

 

“Seedboxes greatly increase the efficiency of illegal torrent activity. This facilitation is similar in nature to the Filmspeler service that the European Court of Justice has looked at in its case law.”

 

The Filmspeler case involved Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN and Netherlands-based Filmspeler.nl (Movie Player). The online store sold piracy-configured media players that came with pre-installed add-ons containing hyperlinks to websites from where copyrighted works such as movies, TV shows and live broadcasts were made available without copyright holders’ permission.

 

Filmspeler lost that fight after the battle went all the way to the European Court of Justice. As a result, the case has been cited in many separate copyright infringement discussions since, sometimes with references to how those devices were marketed and the sellers’ stated aim of allowing customers to access content for free.

 

Rights Alliance also highlights the existence of criminal precedents in Denmark stating contributory infringement related to “illegal infrastructure.” These include the convictions of men who provided detailed instructions on how to use the piracy app ‘Popcorn Time’.

HNielsen Networks Responds

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Kasper Nielsen of HNielsen Networks acknowledges that an investigation is underway but to comply with legal standards in Denmark, wouldn’t comment on its status. However, he does confirm that he never received any approach from Rights Alliance over alleged wrongdoing. No abuse reports were sent to his hosting providers and, until recently, he had no idea what was going on.

 

He also insists that Rights Alliance’s claim, that his company provided customers with support to use “illegal torrent sites”, is wrong. Support is only given on how to use the platform his company provides.

 

“We do not provide that kind of support, in fact we have denied it to clients that have come seeking for it. We provide support for our platform – application-specific issues like programs not responding etc.”

 

Nielsen also believes that comparing his business with that previously operated by Filmspeler (the case cited by Rights Alliance) is somewhat of a stretch.

 

“There’s a pretty large difference between the two cases. Filmspeler provided a box that was preconfigured for piracy with addons leading to copyright-protected content but this is not the case on our end. We provide a clean (blank) installation with a set of applications that are in their default settings, there are no links to copyrighted content nor is there any content on the server when you purchase the service,” he says.

 

“In essence here, I am being investigated as a hosting provider for what my users are using my services for. There’s no encouragement to doing things illegally from our side, that would be up to the end-user and how they want to handle it.”

 

In respect of responding to reports of abuse, copyright complaints included, HNielsen Networks says that all are responded to and, when required, content is removed from servers. In this case, however, none were sent by the opposing parties.

 

“Had the Rights Alliance sent in abuse notices for all the cases here then they would have been handled accordingly. There’s a really firm, strict policy inhouse on how these are handled,” Nielsen concludes.

Blocking Decision by Ultra.cc Was “A Smart Move”

Around the same time that WalkerServers and Seedbox.io announced they would block three torrent sites, another provider called Ultra.cc said it would take similar action. In this case, the provider said it would block four unnamed sites to protect its users.

 

“We would like to inform that we have taken the decision to block 4 websites from our servers. This decision came after the evaluation to protect our clients and their privacy. Our clients is our priority and sometimes we have to take the bold decisions in order to protect them and our business [sic],” the announcement reads.

 

“Please note that we received no court order or warning this is just a precautionary measure. We at Ultra.cc take privacy, security, and concerns surrounding them very seriously.”

 

The blocking actions of all three seedbox providers have already been observed by Rights Alliance who say that, while they can’t comment on the ongoing police investigation, they can confirm that users are reporting issues with connecting their seedboxes to several sites. In respect of Ultra.cc, they say that blocking was the correct course of action.

 

“As our actions during the past year have shown we are targeting all parts of the illegal market from operators to users and illegal infrastructure. So we look at Ultraseedbox’s actions related to the blocking of illegal torrent sites as a smart move that others should follow,” the anti-piracy group concludes.

 

The inception and early years of The Pirate Bay are an intriguing chapter of the Internet’s history.

 

While most pirate sites hid in the shadows, Pirate Bay’s founders were public figures, who openly taunted the entertainment industries.

 

This chapter didn’t end as planned for Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Gotffrid Svartholm, who were eventually sentenced to prison. By then, however, they had already sparked a digital and political revolution of which the impact is still felt today.

 

Some have argued that without the meteoric rise of the notorious torrent site, the entertainment industries would not have embraced services such as Netflix and Spotify so easily.

Pirate Bay TV Series

Over the years, a lot has been said and written about TPB and the closely affiliated pro-culture organization Piratbyrån. Some of these stories will soon be transformed into a TV drama written by Piotr Marciniak and directed by Jens Sjögren, who also made the “I am Zlatan” documentary.

 

Sjögren is humbled to take on this project and show how TPB changed the world. The director, who describes himself as an old punk, plans to tell the story without making ethical judgments. Reading between the lines, however, it’s easy to conclude that there’s admiration for what TPB has achieved.

 

“As an adult, you can think that you are so fucking involved in the match, but just like with the climate movement, it was the youth who got to teach the old dogs to sit,” Sjögren tells SVT, commenting in the news.

 

“This was the key that unlocked all information for an entire generation. At the same time, we had officials at Government Offices who could barely send emails to each other. It is a story about a Sweden that faced a new reality,” the director adds.

Peter Sunde is Flattered

Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde informs TorrentFreak that he’s not directly involved in the TV drama. He’s flattered, however, and hopes that the story will capture the true TPB spirit.

 

“It’s flattering, and a bit nerve-racking, that there’s interest in making a series about TPB. I think it’s an important story and if they get into production I hope they’ll do it justice – and not make me look like too much of a fool,” he says.

 

Peter discussed the TV project idea with the show’s writer Piotr Marciniak a few years ago but decided to go his own way. TPB’s co-founder believes that the TV series has a great team but he plans to focus on his own video project.

Another TPB Project

Instead of focusing on the known story, Peter plans to highlight what happened behind the scenes. This includes many non-filesharing-related things that made TPB what it was and still is today.

 

“To make the story justice I feel there needs to be a more personal touch into making it: TPB for me is techno, love, drugs, and Foucault. I get that we were great at strategically making the media fall for our pranks and that’s still fun, but the story was so much more,” Sunde tells us.

 

Marciniak and Sjögren’s TV series about The Pirate Bay is developed by SVT Drama and B-Reel Films and will air on the public broadcaster SVT. The six-part series will start recording in the autumn of 2022.

 

Further details of Sunde’s plans have yet to be released but TPB’s co-founder is looking forward to seeing both projects come to fruition.

 

“I am really hoping that both projects turn out great, and hopefully they’ll spark some debate again about the important issue: who owns and controls our internet and our cultural heritage,” Sunde concludes.

 

The entertainment industry’s battle against pirate sites is frequently described as a cat-and-mouse game.

 

The site operators are often anonymous or located in exotic countries, completely ignoring any and all legal threats.

 

Take The Pirate Bay, for example. While the site’s founders were convicted over a decade ago, the site continues to thrive. It’s still accessible from its original .org domain name but the current operator is unknown.

 

The Pirate Bay is just the tip of the iceberg. There are literally thousands of pirate sites in all kinds of flavors. Some offer a wide variety of content while others specialize in a niche, such as “pinoy” movies and series.

 

Pinoy is the term Filipinos use to refer to Philippine culture and content, including entertainment. This content is the core business of the Philippine media conglomerate ABS-CBN, which has been rather active in US courts in recent years.

ABS-CBN Sues Pirate Sites

While US-media giants rarely file lawsuits against pirate sites on their home turf, ABS-CBN has sued well over a hundred. Earlier this year, for example, it filed a copyright and trademark infringement complaint against 21 “John Doe” site operators at a federal court in Florida.

 

The defendants are mostly running smaller “pinoy” streaming sites. The legal paperwork lists 40 ‘pirate’ domains including pinoymovies.org, pinoyhd.net, pinoysflix.su, 123fullpinoymovieshub.com, and craigwhittakermp.co.uk.

 

At first sight, craigwhittakermp.co.uk is an odd name on that list. The domain was previously connected to the conservative British MP Craig Whittaker, but it was later taken over by pirates, who turned it into a streaming portal.

 

As is often the case with these lawsuits, none of the defendants made an appearance in court. This prompted ABS-CBN to request a default judgment, including a permanent injunction and damages for both copyright and trademark infringement. Last week, this motion was granted by District Court Judge James Cohn.

‘Millions in Damages’

Without a word from any of the defendants, the court approved the request for $1 million in trademark infringement damages against each of the site operators. In addition, six of the defendants also have to pay between $30,000 and $90,000 for copyright infringement offenses.

 

Finally, the operator of thefilipinochannel.su has to pay an extra $10,000 for cybersquatting, as the domain name is confusingly similar to one of ABS-CBN’s registered trademarks.

 

The order is a massive windfall for the media giant, at least on paper. However, without knowing who the operators are and where they’re located, it will be quite a challenge to get paid. And that’s assuming that the defendants have the financial means to pay.

 

ABS-CBN is aware of this problem and anticipated it to some degree. In addition, there’s a bigger goal, and that’s to make sure that the sites are no longer available. On that front, the media giant succeeded.

Seized Ad Revenue and Domains

The default judgment includes a permanent injunction that requires advertising networks and payment providers to hand over the revenues these pirate sites generated. These funds, at services such as Popads and Google Adsense, were previously restrained.

 

“All funds currently restrained by the financial institutions, advertising services, advertising networks, or advertising platforms, payment processors, banks […] are to be immediately (within 5 business days), transferred […] to Plaintiffs and/or Plaintiffs’ counsel in partial satisfaction of the monetary judgment entered herein against each Defendant,” the order reads.

 

 

In addition to securing these funds, the domain registrars connected to these pirate sites must hand over the domain names to ABS-CBN.

 

“In order to give practical effect to the Permanent Injunction, the domain names […] are hereby ordered to be immediately transferred by Defendants, their assignees and/or successors in interest or title, and the Registrars to Plaintiff’s control.”

 

If the current registrars don’t comply, ABS-CBN can take the matter to the controlling registry. The registries, such as .ORG’s Public Interest Registry, are then instructed to put the domains on hold and remove them from the TLD zone files.

Effective Strategy?

The lawsuit already succeeded in taking several pirate sites offline. At the time of writing, 18 domain names point to a serving notice page where visitors are informed about the legal action. This includes all .org, .com, .to, and .net domains.

 

Ten .su domain names are still operational, while eight redirect to a new domain. The remaining four domains have yet to be seized but are down for a different reason, as shown in the overview at the bottom of this article.

 

It is hard to tell how effective this legal strategy is. After all, the site operators whose domains have been seized could simply continue with another domain name. In that case, ABS-CBN will have to start over again.

 

That said, the lawsuit shows that something can be done against foreign pirate sites through the US court system. In theory, that could also affect The Pirate Bay, which uses a .org domain, but the infamous torrent site has shown before that it’s willing to switch to new domains if needed.

 

—

 

A copy of the default judgment in favor of ABS-CBN is available here (pdf). Below is an overview of the 40 affected domains and their status at the time of writing.

 

– 123fullpinoymovieshub.com (serving notice)
– craigwhittakermp.co.uk (serving notice)
– filpinereplay.com (serving notice)
– futuregallery.co.uk (serving notice)
– garmoshka.su (redirect to new domain)
– griefworld.su (still operational)
– lambingantv.su (suspended by hosting company)
– pinoy-channels.su (no DNS record)
– pinoytambayanteleseryetv.su (no DNS record)
– pinoyteleserye.su (still operational)
– pinoytvlambingans.su (redirect to new domain)
– pinoytvteleseryes.net (serving notice)
– creatomic.co (serving notice)
– fullpinoymovieshub.com (serving notice)
– hdfullmovies.net (serving notice)
– kapamilyaforever.su (redirect to new domain)
– tambyanteleseyre.com (serving notice)
– kshows.club (serving notice)
– moviesnipipay.co (serving notice)
– pinoyflixteleserye.su (still operational)
– pinoyhdnishai.com (serving notice)
– pinoyteleseryelambingan.net (serving notice)
– pinoy-hd.asia (redirect to new domain)
– pinoyhd.net (serving notice)
– pinoyhdflix.su (still operational)
– pinoys1tv.su (still operational)
– pinoystvtambayan.su (still operational)
– pinoytambayanonline.su (still operational)
– replaypinoytvs.su (redirect to new domain)
– thefilipinochannel.su (cloudflare time-out)
– wikisaji.su (still operational)
– pinoyhdteleserye.com (serving notice)
– pinoymovies.ch (redirect to new domain)
– pinoymovies.org (serving notice)
– pinoymovieshub.to (serving notice)
– pinoysflix.su (still operational)
– pinoysmovieshub.su (still operational)
– pinoysreplays.su (redirect to new domain)
– pinoyteleseryehdreplay.net (serving notice)
– teleseryeonline.su (redirect to new domain)

 

Last week we reported that a San Francisco law firm acting for Japanese publisher Shueisha had filed an ex parte application at a California district court.

 

The application, which sought discovery of information for use in a foreign proceeding (28 U.S. Code § 1782), targeted a number of websites believed to act as file-hosting repositories for pirated manga works.

 

According to the publisher, the content contained in the sites – ssl.axax.cloud, ssl.advx.cloud, ssl.akkx.net, ssl.sdox.cc, ssl.standardcdn.net, ssl.lsh.buzz, ssl.appx.buzz, ssl.asiax.cloud, ssl.appsx.cloud – were indexed by Mangabank.org, an extremely popular manga downloading resource that until recently enjoyed in excess of 81 million visits per month.

Mangabank Disappears

The application, which seeks the help of both Google and Hurricane Electric to identify the people behind the domains, is yet to be granted. That being said, a major goal of Shueisha already appears to have been fulfilled. At the time of writing, Mangabank and the associated domains listed in the discovery application are all down and presumably out.

 

It seems logical to link the legal action with the disappearance of the connected services but, according to someone who communicated with TorrentFreak from an email address registered with one of the affected domains, something else could have played an important part.

Earlier DMCA Subpoena Forced Cloudflare to Hand Over Information

In March this year and well in advance of the recent discovery request, Shueisha sent Cloudflare a copyright infringement complaint containing a laundry list of infringing content, all of which was reportedly stored on the domains listed above. The publisher asked Cloudflare to “immediately disable access” to that content but whether that actually happened is unknown.

 

Within days, Shueisha followed up with a DMCA subpoena application filed at a California court. The company provided a copy of the copyright infringement notice sent to Cloudflare and demanded that the company hand over “information sufficient” to identify the persons infringing its works so that Shueisha could protect its rights under the Copyright Act. The DMCA subpoena was issued by the court on April 5, 2021.

Mangabank’s Cloudflare Protection Compromised

Last week in the wake of the most recent discovery request, Mangabank went down. It initially cited maintenance issues but in an email to TorrentFreak sent from one of the domains obtained via Hurricane Electric, someone connected to the site claimed that its ability to protect itself from attacks had been compromised.

 

According to the source, the earlier DMCA subpoena resulted in Cloudflare handing over its backend server IP address, an address that had previously only been known to people within the team. That is a simplification, of course, since the address was also known to Cloudflare but with the handover of information, the address potentially became available to an unknown number of additional entities too.

 

What followed in recent weeks was a sustained DDoS attack on its backend server, the source added. The attack was allegedly traced to AS9370 SAKURA Internet Inc. and had a peak value of ~50Gbps/s.

 

Certain additional claims relating to the source of the attack were also sent to TorrentFreak but after we sought additional evidence, none of which was provided by the person connected with the operation, we feel it’s inappropriate to repeat them here.

 

What we can say is that the source believes that if Cloudflare had not shared the IP address, the attack would not have happened. While that remains a question for now, a plausible explanation of how the IP address may have entered the public domain could lie in documents presented to the court as part of the most recent proceeding.

 

A declaration filed with the court by Shueisha (pdf) contains a copy of Cloudflare’s response to the DMCA subpoena filed earlier this year. Among other things, it contains IP addresses, email addresses, and login times related to the domains and user Shueisha is trying to track down. If one of those IP addresses was subjected to a DDoS attack, the necessary information was made available through the court.

Mangabank Appears to Have Operated From China

With Cloudflare’s protection now gone, searches on Mangabank’s main domain now lead to an IP address located in China. That is not a surprise. Shueisha’s most recent request for discovery revealed that when Cloudflare handed over information in response to the March DMCA subpoena, one of the IP addresses was indeed linked to China.

 

Obtaining discovery from China wasn’t an option though since, under the country’s e-commerce laws, telecommunication companies and access providers can’t be compelled to disclose the identifying information of internet service users. That’s why Shueisha took its discovery requests to the United States, which at least to some extent, appear to have proven fruitful.

 

Whether the apparent demise of Mangabank and associated entities will have any effect on Shueisha’s legal strategy moving forward remains to be seen but the company recently said it would file a lawsuit in Japan or potentially in China against whoever is behind the operation.

 

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

 

These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

 

This week we have five new entries in the list. “Finch” is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on November 8 are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrent sites
1	(…)	Finch	7.0 / trailer
2	(1)	Dune	8.3 / trailer
3	(3)	Free Guy	7.4 / trailer
3	(2)	Army of Thieves	6.4 / trailer
4	(…)	The Harder They Fall	6.5 / trailer
5	(4)	Halloween Kills	6.1 / trailer
6	(…)	Apex	?.? / trailer
7	(5)	The Suicide Squad	7.6 / trailer
8	(…)	Venom: Let There Be Carnage	6.3 / trailer
9	(10)	Black Widow	6.8 / trailer
10	(…)	Eternals	6.9 / trailer

 

 

Note: We also publish an updating archive of all the list of weekly most torrented movies lists.

 

Many people see optional anonymity as a key feature of the Internet but increasingly there are calls for stricter identity checks.

 

Such requirements are not new. In daily life, many people have encountered situations where they have had to prove their identity. When opening a bank account, for example. But online it is rare.

 

This should change, according to some voices. In recent years copyright holders and industry groups have called for stricter “know your business customer” rules. This effort is starting to pay off in Europe and over in the United States, similar calls are heard.

 

Earlier this year, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order that partially addresses this issue. The executive order aims to stop foreign cybercriminals from using US-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products. Specifically, this can be achieved by requiring such services to properly verify and retain the identities of non-US customers.

 

The U.S. Department of Commerce is considering how this proposal can be best implemented. To do so, it launched a public consultation requesting various experts and stakeholders for input.

ICLE Chimes In

Last week, the response from The International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE) was published online. This independent bi-partisan research center relies on input from academics and regularly shares its thoughts on important policy debates. That includes the executive cybersecurity order.

 

According to ICLE, real anonymity is hard to find on the Internet. Using the term “pseudonymous” would be more appropriate. However, certain tools and services definitely make it harder for law enforcement to track down criminals.

 

VPNs, Tor, and proxy services can be used for good. However, they can also be abused by malicious actors, the research center notes.

 

“(i)t remains the case that when anonymity is combined with easily accessible tools like virtual private networks, proxy servers, and The Onion Network (Tor), it can tend to confound law enforcement,” they write.

Carefully Calibrated Policy

The overall message of the research center is clear. ICLE believes that, through carefully calibrated policy, IaaS providers can be required to collect and share information that’s sufficient to identify criminals.

 

This information doesn’t have to be extensive or foolproof. The goal should be to minimize the burden for IaaS providers and their customers while collecting enough information to pinpoint bad actors

 

“[T]he Department is pursuing a sound policy by instituting KYBC requirements on IaaS providers. Ultimately, the question is not whether to adopt such a policy, but how best to do so,” ICLE writes.

 

“Understanding that no system will be perfect, and that the vast amount of IaaS providers’ customer relationships should continue relatively unburdened, the Department’s final rules should capture most bad actors by relying on obligations to supply minimal, but sufficient, user information.”

Tor, VPNs, and 8chan

The research center believes that less extreme policy interventions may achieve a great effect. At the same time, however, it also suggests that IaaS products are not the only problem.

 

ICLE notes that other ‘anonymous’ online services, including 8chan and file-sharing platforms, have been used by terrorists including those involved in the San Diego and Christchurch attacks.

 

“In the case of an April 2019 attack on a synagogue in San Diego, for example, the perpetrator allegedly both drew inspiration for the attack from 8chan forums and used the site to advertise his actions and garner more attention from likeminded users.

 

“The perpetrator of the San Diego attack also used other services that allow anonymous interaction, such as Pastebin and Mediafire. Similar sites offering free, anonymous filesharing are widely available online,” ICLE adds.

Piracy Problems

Anonymity is also abused by copyright infringers. While the research center notes that this isn’t as dramatic as terrorist attacks, services such as VPNs can pose enforcement challenges.

 

“For instance, LiquidVPN was sued earlier this year for designing and marketing its services as a ‘no-log’ VPN. LiquidVPN promoted its service as enabling use of peer-to-peer networks and pirate-streaming websites with impunity, because the company would be unable to comply with any ISP or rightsholder demands to unmask users.”

 

These examples could offer policy lessons that can help the Government to shape its anonymity approach in the context of IaaS providers, the researchers write, adding that existing privacy regulations such as Europe’s GDPR should be kept in mind.

MPA Contribution

ICLE is not the only organization to support new regulations. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) also backs the executive order and argued to expand it to other services such as DNS servers, reverse proxies, and cryptocurrency exchanges.

 

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the MPA is also a financial contributor to the ICLE. In the latest MPA tax filing we could find online (2018), the movie industry group listed a $200,000 contribution to the research center.

 

—

 

A copy of the International Center for Law’s comments and suggestions in response to the U.S. Department of Commerce consultation is available here (pdf)

 

One of the great ironies of anti-piracy technologies is that they not only offer zero benefits to paying customers but when things go wrong, pirates are often better off.

 

What appears to be a classic example of this topsy-turvy relationship emerged last night in a long complaints thread on Steam. Players who had legitimately bought Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy found that it was impossible to play the game since it simply wouldn’t load.

 

The problem seemed to appear after players updated the game, leading some to believe that code may have broken the game. However, as more and more complaints came in, another potential problem was identified. It was so simple as to be almost unthinkable but so devastating that it rendered games completely useless.

Questions to Support Reveal Server-Side Problem

After complaining to Guardians of the Galaxy support, one Steam user obtained acknowledgment from the company that the problem was indeed server-side, which was quite the annoyance for a single-player game.

 

“Unfortunately I don’t have an estimated time for the resolution. But our team is working on it,” the response reads.

 

“I’m expecting a fast resolution. The issue seems to be on our side, we will probably publish more info on our official media.”

 

At the same time, some users resorted to uninstalling the game and redownloading to see if that made a difference – it didn’t. PC restarts also failed to solve the problem. Then it became clear that other games were affected too (Planet Zoo, Shadow of War, Football Manager, Dead Rising, Tomb Raider plus others) and all appeared to have at least one thing in common – Denuvo DRM.

 

Could it be that something had gone wrong with this anti-piracy technology?

Someone Forgot to Renew a Domain

With the problems now affecting a large number of users, the complaints inevitably spread to Twitter where one eagled-eyed user explained what he believed had happened. According to Alex Buckland, the DRM provider for all of the affected games had let a key domain expire, rendering the system inoperable.

 

“@PlanetZooGame @shadowofwargame your DRM provider has let their domain name lapse, and it’s killed your game startup… along with multiple other games I imagine,” he wrote.

 

Buckland identified the domain ‘codefusion.technology’ as the culprit and offered a screenshot of its WHOIS records, which clearly shows that the domain expired on September 24, 2021, and had not been renewed.

 

 

Following the failure to renew, the domain then went into a grace period but when that expired too, it appears to have been removed from DNS records. This meant that the domain would not resolve to an IP address, effectively breaking the system.

 

To solve the problem, some users on Steam posted up tutorials for players to modify their Windows HOSTS file to point to the last known IP address for the domain. This appeared to do the trick but obviously, such drastic measures shouldn’t be needed to play a game that has been legally purchased – especially those that are single-player only.

What Does Denuvo Have to Say About The Issues?

Given that all of the above is just one side of the story, TorrentFreak contacted Denuvo-owner Irdeto to discover how they viewed the problem and whether they were really to blame, or someone else. Sadly, that proved completely fruitless.

 

After sending a set of questions to two of our usual contacts at the company, we received a pair of automated emails stating that our correspondence was “undeliverable”, that the messages had been “bounced by administrator” and as a result had permanently failed.

 

It seems unlikely that this is part of the same problem but it appears that Denuvo does have some communication problems right now. We’ll update this article should we eventually get a response.

 

In the meantime, someone has now renewed the codefusion.technology domain, which appears to have solved players’ problems. It’s now set to expire on September 24, 2022, meaning just a single year was added to the bank. Hopefully next year doesn’t bring similar problems.

 

The Entertainment Law Institute and the Sports and Entertainment Law Society (SELI) at the University of New Hampshire recently hosted a panel discussion titled “Online Piracy of UFC Fights and Live Sports: The Role of Copyright Law.”

 

It featured Lawrence Epstein (Chief Operating Officer of the UFC), Debbie Spander (Founder and CEO of Insight Sports) and Ryan Vacca (Professor of Law at UNH Law). Since the UFC is very active in trying to shape legal policy in the streaming space, Epstein’s comments are of particular interest.

 

Epstein described the current piracy situation as intellectually “super interesting” but in practical terms, “incredibly frustrating”. He noted that the UFC has been negatively affected by piracy since its inception and until recently, the vast majority of its revenues came from PPV events, which are heavily pirated.

 

“A lot of people feel that piracy is a victimless crime, that there really isn’t that much damage that’s being caused. But as a creator of content, in particular of sports content here at the UFC, it’s a huge damage to us and it’s a huge damage to our athletes who are our partners with us in these events,” he said.

 

“It is a situation where unfortunately technology for pirates continues to get better and better and better, and this cat and mouse game we’re constantly playing gets more and more complicated every day. The problem is pervasive, it is consistent, it has never gone away, it likely will never go away.”

 

The problem according to Epstein is that the UFC is constrained by outdated laws, specifically the DMCA which hasn’t been updated for almost a quarter of a century. In particular, UFC’s COO feels that the takedown provisions of the DMCA are outdated and especially so when it comes to protecting live events.

DMCA is Ill-Suited to Dealing With Live Sports Events

“The reality is that to the content owner and creator, the DMCA is really a reactive tool. You as the copyright owner have to go onto YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and say, ‘hey – without authorization you’re displaying our copyrighted material.’ And through a variety of technology – whether it’s a takedown tool or notifications – you ask them to take it down.”

 

Epstein believes that this type of content removal is less than ideal because the value of UFC’s content is at its peak when it’s broadcast live and since most of the piracy takes place during that window, piracy has the greatest financial impact on the company. Under the current regime, takedowns simply do not happen quickly enough to make a difference when it matters.

 

“When you use one of these [takedown] tools or you provide notice, typically it takes a period of time, it’s not instantaneous. So if a UFC live [pirated] PPV stream is taken down 15 or 20 minutes after it was launched, the entire fight could’ve taken place. We just had a huge event with Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier and that event took five minutes, so if a takedown takes ten minutes, guess what? People were able to view that without any disruption at all,” he explained.

 

“We certainly feel that this tool [the DMCA] doesn’t work anymore based upon the way people are stealing content and the way technology has evolved. The other reality is that the vast majority of piracy for our content and most content holders is the network providers, the OSPs – the Facebooks, the YouTube’s, the Twitters. They are in my view hiding behind the safe harbor and the DMCA and it’s happening to the detriment of content creators like us.”

 

Discussion moderator, SELI Director Michael McCann, asked Epstein how long a typical takedown takes to process. He responded that the system differs depending on the target, i.e the ‘networks’ (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) and the ‘advanced’ platforms, UFC terminology for dedicated pirate sites. UFC’s COO refused to name the players in the latter group but was very happy to talk about the former.

 

According to Epstein, the UFC has access to takedown tools which in the case of Facebook means they are able to tackle streaming piracy fairly quickly. However, in a typical situation it takes between 8 and 10 minutes to take a stream down, which is unacceptable to them. Even if the UFC was able to take down pirate streams in five minutes, that wouldn’t be quick enough to suit their business model.

 

“This in our view needs to be the obligation and the burden of the OSPs or ‘networks’ as we refer to them,” Epstein said, adding that suing the big platforms into compliance isn’t an option under current law.

 

“As far as suing Facebook or YouTube, we’ve looked at it and the current legal landscape is not favorable to us. So we’ve taken a look at it and we just don’t think there are any claims that we could credibly assert.”

UFC: We Need Takedown-and-Staydown

McCann raised the issue of the key changes that the UFC and similar organizations are looking for, i.e a takedown-and-staydown system, in which platforms such as YouTube and Facebook would be notified of infringing content once, be compelled to remove it, and then keep the same content off the platform while monitoring for repeat infringers.

 

But how likely is it that something like that could be put in place?

 

“We think that this burden-shifting is something that has to occur on these big platforms. The vast majority of piracy is taking place on household names, on Facebook and YouTube. So these big platforms that are making tons and tons of money have to take responsibility for what happens within their ecosystem,” he said.

 

“The staydown system does exactly that but right now, the prospects of something getting done are tough. We know that in general it’s tough to get anything done in Washington but technology-related issues, intellectual property-related issues, even though there seems to be some cooperation, it never seems to get done.”

 

As an exception, Epstein referenced the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act passed late last year, which closed the so-called streaming loophole by making the streaming of infringing content a felony. Changing the DMCA is a different matter, however, with UFC’s COO describing it as ‘heavy lifting’ despite having worked on it for more than a decade.

Make The Platforms Liable, They Have The Tools Already

The UFC believes that the solution to the problem is actually very simple. If they can hold the major online platforms liable for what their users are doing and take action in response, the problem can be mitigated to a point that would prove acceptable to the combat sports organization. And it’s not as if YouTube and Facebook don’t have the tools available to make it happen.

 

“They do it already right now. We’re hearing it in the media how they are filtering out certain contents, terrible things such as [CSAM] and other things like that are somehow being filtered off these sites and not allowed to be posted up,” he explained.

 

“We know they have the technology and now we have to give them the will, and the only way frankly is to require them to do it via federal law. [The DMCA] is currently allowing the foxes to design the hen house here and they’ve done a really, really good job of creating a landscape that is just as favorable as it possibly could be for them and as unfavorable as it could possibly be for content owners.”

 

Epstein believes that by simply seeking a level playing field, with major platforms policing their own users, the UFC’s demands are not a big ask. However, Ryan Vacca (Professor of Law at UNH Law) raised the issue of whether requiring big companies to implement takedown-and-staydown systems would have a chilling effect on smaller players trying to enter the marketplace.

Chilling Effects?

The problem is that startups, which could be the next big thing, necessarily have to start small and could find it difficult to make significant financial investments to be compliant in a marketplace where takedown-and-staydown is required by law. Vacca also raised the issue of whether a takedown-and-staydown system would be able to recognize when a piece of content is allowed under fair use.

 

Epstein felt that neither would be an issue. Asking for content not to be pirated on a platform simply isn’t unreasonable and all legislative fixes have pluses and minuses, he said. People need to look at the proposals “in totality” and how to the best of their ability they try to level the playing field.

 

“The status quo is not cutting it for content creators and so in my view, I think whatever negative connotations you could throw on this thing about chilling certain types of thought, or whether it’s cost associated that may stop smaller tech companies, I think it’s far, far outweighed by the reality of the damages that are currently occurring and the unfair situation that allows this to continue.”

Tech-Savvy Jake and Logan Paul Fans “Love to Steal”

One of the questions put to the panel involved a scenario where YouTube and Facebook are brought under control but then UFC’s 18 to 40 demographic finds smaller piracy sites where they can still illegally stream events. That is not just a concern, Epstein said, but already a reality, which he chose to frame around fans of two of the most popular social media/sports crossover stars.

 

“It’s beyond worry, it’s real and it’s getting worse,” Epstein said. “I’m sure people have seen some of these crazy sort of spectacle events that have been taking place with Jake Paul and Logan Paul fighting ex-UFC athletes or boxers etc. That has brought in a very young and very piracy-savvy demographic to the world of combat sports,” he said.

 

The end result of these events (which detractors label ‘freak shows’) is that the UFC is seeing an uptick in piracy due to the type of fans they attract. They want content but they don’t want to pay for it and fans of the Pauls are among the worst.

 

“Young people are tech-savvy and unfortunately this Jack Paul, Logan Paul crew. These guys are a bunch of…, they bring in a demo that loves to steal. It’s getting worse.”

Could The UFC Do More to Accomodate Fans?

Finally, a contributor to the discussion asked whether the UFC could do more to adjust its business model to ensure that pricing on its PPV events is more affordable for those tempted to pirate. Has the company even considered that?

 

“The answer is we have. We look at it in respect to the mix of events that we put on and we’ve seen a fair amount of data that shows that people steal on a percentage basis more of the smaller events than they do the bigger events,” Epstein revealed.

 

“They don’t want to miss the Conor McGregor fight because the [pirate] stream has been taken down, so they’re willing to pay for that typically. As a portion it’s the smaller events that they’re stealing so we have looked at that,” he added.

 

Epstein said that UFC’s own piracy focus group considered whether people getting smaller events for half the price, for example, would make a difference. For some people, it might make a difference between piracy and going legal but the UFC hasn’t done anything about this since it hasn’t figured out how to “crack the pricing”.

 

Either way, they’re not convinced that such a change would make a particularly big difference and as such, the emphasis appears to be on legislative change. How long that will take is anyone’s guess but takedown-and-staydown systems are popular among almost all major rightsholders globally, so this topic is likely to remain on the US agenda.

 

The full panel discussion can be watched here

 

There is little doubt that, for many people, streaming services have become the standard for watching TV-shows.

 

This is no surprise, since subscription-based streaming services are among the best and most convenient alternatives to piracy at this point.

 

However, the appeal of the streaming model becomes diluted when there are too many ‘Netflixes.’ Most people gladly sign up for one or two streaming services, but more than a handful is a bridge too far for many.

 

This ‘subscription fatigue’ risk keeps piracy relevant. But does this mean that the traffic to pirate sites is growing as well? According to new data, released by the UK piracy tracking firm MUSO, it is.

TV Piracy is On the Rise

MUSO continuously monitors the number of visits to pirate sites across various categories. According to their data, visits from TV pirates increased significantly during the first three quarters of 2021.

 

“MUSO has measured over 64.9 billion visits to TV specific piracy websites between January and September 2021 which equates to a 30% increase year on year compared to the same period in 2020,” the company notes.

 

TV pirate site visits January – September 2021 (Image: MUSO)  

 

This increase is all the more impressive because piracy already reached new highs last year when the coronavirus pandemic started. This initial boost was only temporary but the new data show that TV piracy continued to grow this year.

 

MUSO’s numbers don’t explain why TV piracy rose. One reason could be the aforementioned subscription fatigue, as people can’t or don’t want to pay for access to a wide variety of streaming services.

America First

When we look at the countries where most TV pirates are coming from, the United States comes out on top, with more than double the number of visits compared to runner-up Russia. This is in part due to the relatively large population, but it also tops China and India, which both have more Internet users.

 

TV pirate site visits per country (Image: MUSO)  

 

Needless to say, availability isn’t an issue in the United States, where most TV shows are readily available, albeit at a cost. The same can’t be said for China, which sits in third place in absolute piracy numbers.

Squid Game’s Impact

Squid Game, arguable the hottest TV title of the year, is not available legally in China. While a knockoff appears to have been in the works, many Chinese opted to pirate the Korean Netflix show instead. The same is true for other people who couldn’t or didn’t want to pay for a Netflix subscription.

 

MUSO specifically mentions Squid Game as one of the reasons for the TV-piracy surge, but other shows such as Loki and Wandavison had an impact as well. These are all titles that require access to either Netflix or Disney+.

 

Apple’s exclusives tend to do well on pirate sites too. In a detailed measurement of BitTorrent traffic conducted during the last week of October, Ted Lasso, See, and The Morning Show were in the top ten. Netflix’s Squid Game was still in the lead, with Loki as the runner-up.

 

TV torrent activity 20th-27th October 2021 (Image: MUSO)  

 

In 2021, the vast majority of TV-show piracy takes place through streaming sites. This percentage has shot up to nearly 95% in recent years, and that’s excluding IPTV and streaming box viewers, which are popular streaming options too.

Threats and Opportunities

These numbers will be used by copyright holders to increase enforcement efforts but there are opportunities too. According to MUSO, piracy traffic can spot potential hit series before they’re breaking through.

 

“MUSO’s data has previously identified South Korean titles like Hotel Del Luna S1 2019, Mr Queen S1 2020 and True Beauty S1 2020 as hits with piracy audiences long before they became mainstream,” the company writes.

 

In the recent sample, the first season of The Veil is listed as the third most pirated TV show. This might foreshadow global success for that title, MUSO notes.

 

Over the years copyright holders have tried a multitude of measures to curb copyright infringement, with varying levels of success.

 

Site blocking has emerged as one of the preferred solutions. While blocking measures are not foolproof, the general idea is that they pose a large enough hurdle for casual pirates to choose legal options instead.

 

Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN was one of the first organizations to request an ISP blockade. In 2010, it went to court demanding that local ISP Ziggo should block The Pirate Bay. This marked the start of a legal campaign that lasted a full decade.

 

BREIN eventually succeeded and today The Pirate Bay is blocked, not just by Ziggo, but also by other ISPs who were challenged in a separate lawsuit. The final ruling opened the door to follow-up blockades. We expected these to follow sooner but, in public, BREIN remained quiet on the blocking front.

Landmark Site-Blocking Deal

Today it becomes clear that this delay was for a good reason. Behind the scenes, BREIN worked on an agreement with all large Dutch Internet providers to streamline the blocking process going forward.

 

The result is a “Website Blocking Covenant” where Ziggo, KPN, DFN, T-Mobile, Canal+, and members of the industry organization NLConnect, promise to block pirate sites when rightsholders obtain a blocking order against one of the other ISPs.

 

BREIN and the ISPs agreed on a rotation scheme that will target the legal efforts at different ISPs each time. In addition, all parties will cover their own legal fees.

 

Other costs will be divided as well. For example, the Internet providers will pay for the technical implementation of the blockades. BREIN, for its part, will bear the responsibility and cost for keeping the blocklists accurate and up-to-date.

No Net Neutrality Issues

The landmark agreement was reached with help from the Dutch Government, which took part in the negotiation process. This also involved advice from the Authority for Consumers & Markets (ACM) to ensure that the plan would not violate the local net neutrality regulation.

 

“This is an important step in tackling online piracy,” says Sander Dekker, the Dutch Minister for Legal Protection, adding that copyrighted content should be “fairly rewarded and not illegally distributed.”

ISPs Prefer No Blocks

NLconnect, which represents a variety of Internet providers, describes the agreement in a more practical manner. Managing Director Mathieu Andriessen notes that ISPs still believe that there are better ways to tackle piracy.

 

“Illegality must be fought at source, so we maintain fundamental objections to blocking websites,” Andriessen says.

 

“Nevertheless, we are pleased with the clear agreements in the covenant; when an independent judge orders in a carefully conducted process that an Internet provider must block a certain website, it is efficient for us as providers to follow up on this together.”

 

BREIN director Tim Kuik is happy with the deal. He says that it will help to limit traffic to sites that continuously evade law enforcement efforts.

 

“This is an important step in the fight against large-scale piracy. We see sites that persist in their illegal offering and are anonymously hosted with companies that do not comply with summons or otherwise offer the sites ample opportunity to seamlessly continue elsewhere.”

Six New Targets Identified

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Kuik says that BREIN already has an action in the mail to target six additional pirate sites, including their proxies and mirrors. BREIN hopes to have this legal procedure completed before the end of the year.

 

It is worth noting that the agreement doesn’t prohibit ISPs from fighting blocking requests on their merit. And if an ISP chooses not to put up a defense, others are allowed to take their place.

 

That said, with all the legal precedents in favor of site blocking, both at the Dutch Supreme Court and the EU Court of Justice, challenging a blocking request isn’t going to be easy.

 

Publishers around the world regularly engage in various actions aimed at preventing the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of academic publications and eBooks.

 

From repeated visits to court to implement site blocking in the UK to lawsuits targeting entities such as Sci-Hub, the approach is sustained, multipronged, and has no fear of tackling smaller players either.

Rights Alliance Investigation

For the past several years, Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance has been tracking down individuals said to have profited from the sale of pirated textbooks. These can be controversially expensive items that the majority of students have no choice but to purchase legally. However, there are those who have made cottage industries out of the sale of illegal copies at significantly lower prices.

 

One such individual, a 28-year-old man from Denmark, was spotted by Rights Alliance selling copies of textbooks via DBA, Denmark’s most popular online marketplace.

 

According to the anti-piracy group, it first took action to have the listings taken down and then made contact with the man with a request for him to stop his infringing behavior. This had little effect. New profiles were created and the sale of the digital textbooks continued on the same online platform.

Case Referred State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime

After collecting evidence of the illegal sales, Rights Alliance made a referral to SØIK, the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime. SØIK is often involved in higher-level prosecutions of pirate site operators but appears to consider smaller players important enough to pursue with criminal cases.

 

In this matter, the man was said to have offered for sale 51 digital textbooks from different fields of study over a period of more than eight months, without permission from rightsholders. They were sold below the market rate and in some cases at half the original price.

Man Handed Suspended Prison Sentence

According to an announcement from Rights Alliance, the Court in Aalborg has now sentenced the 28-year-old for his crimes.

 

Based on the sale of 146 pirated digital textbooks, the Court issued a 30 day suspended sentence and ordered the confiscation of a computer and DKK26,544 (US$4,120) in criminal proceeds. In addition, the man is also required to compensate the textbook rightsholders to the tune of DKK35,000 (US$5,450).

 

Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund welcomes both the sentence and the involvement of SØIK in these types of cases.

 

“It has major consequences for rights holders when their digital books are copied and sold illegally,” Fredenslund says.

 

“On behalf of both authors and publishers, I am therefore pleased that SØIK is focusing on this type of infringement and that the decision sends a clear signal that the illegal sale of digital textbooks cannot pay off. On the other hand, there is a risk of severe punishment, through confiscation, compensation and a prison sentence.”

 

One of the books offered for sale was published by Hans Jørgen Biede, associate professor at the Aarhus Business Academy. He says this type of theft is an annoyance and threatens the publication of books in Danish.

 

“Unfortunately, this is not the first time that I have experienced my books being copied and shared illegally. Even before, the digital editions have been copied and this kind of theft annoys me, because in the worst case it undermines the financial basis for textbooks to be written in Danish in the future,” the professor says.

Latest in a Series of Successful Prosecutions

Rights Alliance has pursued several cases against textbook pirates over recent years. In 2017, three men aged between 26 and 71-years-old received conditional jail sentences of four months for selling online access to around 198 textbooks without permission via the LendStudy website, the domain of which was confiscated.

 

In 2019, a 26-year-old man was handed a 20-day suspended prison sentence and fined around US$4,000 for similar offenses and in 2020, a woman who sold access to pirated copies of academic textbooks stored on Dropbox received a similar punishment.

 

More recently, a former student who sold pirated digital copies of textbooks was handed 20 days probation and a confiscation order after pleading guilty to selling copies of 38 different textbooks between January 2018 and April 2020.

 

In just a few years, New York lawyer Richard Liebowitz filed over a thousand copyright infringement lawsuits.

 

The vast majority of these cases were filed on behalf of photographers who accuse companies, including mainstream media outlets, of using their photos without permission.

 

When we first spotted this emerging trend in 2016, Liebowitz told us that he was helping independent photographers to protect their rights. All too often, companies would exploit their work without paying, he said.

Liebowitz’ Repeated Misconduct

While that argument still holds true in many cases, the attorney himself has trouble sticking to the rules too. In his relatively short career, courts have reprimanded and sanctioned him for various types of misconduct.

 

Last year, these missteps led to a severe sanction. After reviewing the lawyer’s track record, the Grievance Committee of the Southern District of New York decided to suspend Liebowitz until further order.

 

That order was just the start though. While Liebowitz continued to be active as a lawyer elsewhere at a lower frequency, his options have become limited as other courts took over the suspension order.

Suspensions Spread

The Eastern District of New York was once of the first to issue a suspension order based on the Southern District’s findings, and federal courts in Tennessee, Colorado, and Illinois followed suit.

 

This week, the appellate division of the New York Supreme Court expanded the suspension even further. Reuters reports that, after reviewing the available evidence, the Court banned Liebowitz from practicing in the State of New York.

 

“Under the circumstances of this case, we conclude that an immediate suspension is warranted. The respondent’s misconduct in litigation has at times endangered his clients’ prospects of recovery, and put his adversaries to needless expense,” the ruling reads.

 

The order specifically references the disrespect Liebowitz has shown in the Berger case, where the lawyer repeatedly misled the court while questioning the authority of District Court Judge Cathy Seibel. The lawyer also misrepresented his grandfather’s date of death in that case.

‘Recurrence is Likely’

The disbarred lawyer indicated that he has learned from his mistakes. However, the appellate court is not convinced and points out that he minimized his wrongdoing by framing it as “sloppiness” and “administrative failures.” As such, future missteps can’t be ruled out.

 

“The existing record from the Southern District supports its conclusion that, given respondent’s history of repeated disregard for court orders, recurrence of his misconduct is likely.

 

“We find that the respondent has engaged in conduct immediately threatening the public interest and his immediate suspension from the practice of law is warranted,” the appellate court adds.

 

 

The Court’s order, which is signed by five judges, suspends Liebowitz from practicing law in the State of New York, effective immediately.

 

Responding to the decision, Liebowitz’s attorney Michael Ross told Reuters that his client is “disappointed” that the Court took this measure before the case is fully heard by the Southern District of New York, where the suspension is being opposed.

 

—

 

A copy of the order issued by New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, Second Department, is available here (pdf). Photo credit: Liebowitz image by”King of Hearts” (CC BY-SA 4.0)

 

At the beginning of 2021, anti-piracy group Rights Alliance declared victory over piracy services in Denmark after a major push to wipe out the big players.

 

In October 2020, private torrent tracker DanishBits went offline after the 33-year-old owner was arrested in Morocco. He was later sentenced to a year in prison.

 

NordicBits was also taken down after its 69-year-old owner was arrested in Spain. He sadly passed away after an illness but other sites were also in the spotlight. Asgaard quickly opened its doors to new members but then shut down to avoid legal trouble.

 

ShareUniversity also seized the opportunity to expand but last December announced that it would shut down too. However, it appears that Rights Alliance referrals to law enforcement may now have resulted in the arrest of one or more of its members.

Law Enforcement Announce Raids

In an announcement Wednesday, the Public Prosecutor for Special Economic and International Crime (SØIK) revealed that several people have been arrested following criminal referrals by Rights Alliance relating to torrent sites including ShareUniversity and DanishBytes.

 

DanishBytes is a new site that appeared in early January 2021. Even in the early days it had a reported database of 3,600 well-seeded torrents covering movies and TV shows, with an emphasis on locally subtitled content.

 

According to SØIK, searches were carried out at the homes of six men – a 41-year-old from Hedensted, a 27-year-old from Tjele, a 24-year-old from Vojens, a 22-year-old from Silkeborg, plus a 33-year-old and a 34-year-old, both from Aalborg. All were arrested under suspicion of serious copyright infringement offenses and will be released following interrogation.

 

The searches were carried out by SØIK assisted by IT specialists from the National Police’s National Cyber Crime Center (NC3). In addition to seizing computers, phones and other IT equipment, officers also seized DKK300,000 (US$46,700).

Seedboxes

According to the authorities, the money seized thus far is believed to represent the profits from the sale of seedboxes, a BitTorrent-related term for specially-configured servers that allow people to share content remotely.

 

One of the arrested men is said to have sold access to the servers which were used by a currently unknown number of users to share around 3,800 copyright works on the torrent sites, a number that is very close to the number of torrents on the DanishBytes tracker.

Alleged ‘Ringleaders’, Central Staff and Users

According to Michael Lichtenstein, acting police inspector at SØIK, the arrested men are believed to be key players at the sites referred by Rights Alliance.

 

“It is very satisfying that, on the basis of a thorough investigation, we can hold the six detainees, who we believe are the responsible ringleaders or centrally located staff members, to account for their illegal operation of the file-sharing services,” Lichtenstein says.

 

Also of interest is the mention of site users and the possibility that they too could be swept up in the investigation and, at least potentially, face some form of action.

 

“On the basis of this effective effort, we must review the seized material – and in this respect it can not be ruled out that users can also be held accountable for using the illegal file-sharing services,” Lichtenstein adds.

 

While using a torrent site can leave information behind such as IP and email addresses, users who purchased a seedbox for use on the site may be more exposed. It’s unclear how those users paid for their seedbox subscriptions but if straightforward credit card or PayPal payments were used, it may be fairly trivial for the police to map these back to real-life identities.

 

At the time of writing the DanishBytes site appears to be operational. Whether the same can be said for the tracker and seedboxes is currently unknown.

 

Last year, Texas-based model Deniece Waidhofer sued Thothub for copyright infringement after the site’s users posted many of her ‘exclusive’ photos.

 

Soon after the complaint was filed at the federal court Thothub went offline. This prompted Waidhofer to change priorities.

 

In an amended complaint Waidhofer shifted the focus to third-party services such as Cloudflare. At the same time, fellow OnlyFans creators Ryuu Lavitz and Margaret McGhee, better known as OMGcosplay, joined the lawsuit looking for retribution.

Cloudflare as Piracy Facilitator?

The trio accused Cloudflare of both direct and contributory copyright infringement. They argued that the company made copies of their copyrighted works on its servers and deliberately marketed its service to pirate sites such as Thothub.

 

Cloudflare clearly disagreed with these allegations and asked the court to dismiss these claims. A few weeks ago, US District Court Judge Fernando M. Olguin ruled on the matter with a mixed order.

 

Judge Olguin concluded that the direct copyright infringement claim was ungrounded. Even if Cloudflare temporarily stored the infringing material, there was no evidence that the company committed voluntary acts that caused the infringing activity.

 

The OnlyFans creators were allowed to amend their complaint with further evidence. The contributory copyright infringement claims also survived the motion to dismiss, which means that the matter could go to trial. However, a new filing shows that this isn’t going to happen.

Lawsuit Dismissed

A few days ago the models informed the court that all remaining claims against Cloudflare have been dropped, which means that the case is closed.

 

“Plaintiffs Deniece Waidhofer, Margaret McGehee, and Ryuu Lavitz, LLC and their counsel of record give notice that the remaining claims in this action are hereby dismissed without prejudice,” the filing reads.

 

 

In addition to dropping the claims against Cloudflare, the OnlyFans creators also dismissed their claims against the other defendants. This includes the advertising company MultiMedia, also known as Chaturbate, which was actively used by Thothub in the past.

 

There is no further information that explains why the case has been dropped. TorrentFreak’s request for comment remains unanswered by the plaintiffs’ attorney. Cloudflare’s press department hasn’t responded to our inquiry either.

Settlement?

Without further details, we can only speculate on what happened. One option is that the parties managed to settle the matter out of court. When that happens, the details of the agreement are usually kept out of public view.

 

A recent court ruling in a similar piracy liability lawsuit may have played a role too. A week before the models dismissed their lawsuit, a California federal court ruled that Cloudflare is not contributorily liable for copyright infringement.

 

In that case, Judge Vince Chhabria concluded that neither Cloudflare’s CDN service nor its IP-address obfuscation system materially contributed to the alleged copyright infringements of its customers.

 

Back in June, the hugely popular Filelinked service, which enabled Amazon Fire TV users to easily install piracy-related apps, disappeared in mysterious circumstances.

 

It was later revealed that the shutdown followed legal pressure from the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, which objected to the tool’s ability to act as an unofficial marketplace for piracy-focused apps. As always, however, replacements were soon at hand.

 

The so-called hydra analogy dictates that when one head is cut off, several more appear to replace it and in this case, Applinked, FileSynced and Unlinked were happy to oblige. All three are functionally similar tools (marketing and community approaches aside) but Applinked is perhaps the most interesting for a couple of reasons.

Applinked Developer Operated Openly

Operating in what Filelinked demonstrated was a controversial niche, it was a surprise to see Applinked offered in the open by a developer who is easily found on the web. In fact, Applinked was initially served from the developer’s own website and is still advertised and linked from there, despite what happened to its predecessor.

 

Of course, there could be a level of confidence that the same fate does not apply in this instance, perhaps for a number of legal reasons and considerations. Nevertheless, in early October an announcement clearly indicated that change was on the horizon.

 

 

Given the long history of sites and services changing owners for any number of reasons, this didn’t come as a particular surprise. However, new owners aren’t interested in existing projects for no reason so what followed next could be of some interest to users of the software.

 

This particularly applies to people who are happy to install updates to any software that isn’t open source or is delivered without informative changelogs or indeed any at all.

New Version of Applinked Just Grew 10x in Size

Those who have monitored the filesizes of Applinked, Filesynced and Uplinked over time will be aware that, give or take, all floated around the 3MB mark. However, the last update of Applinked has now jumped from 3MB to a relatively huge 33MB, without offering any significant additional functionality or features.

 

It’s important to stress that this in its own right does not show that anything nefarious is at play here but given that a change in ownership reportedly took place just before this update was rolled out, these two developments could be linked, at least potentially.

 

The developer and new owners (whoever they are) are currently silent on the purpose of that additional 30MB but running the APK through VirusTotal’s scanner shows that Applinked’s previous clean bill of health is now covered in red ink, with at least 16 security vendors advising caution over the software.

 

 

False positives are not unusual in this space but alerts from 16 vendors is a concern and worthy of explanation. That does not appear to be a priority, however.

Developer ‘Takes a Break’ From Social Media

In an announcement on October 20, the developer of Applinked – who is now not the owner according to previous statements – said that he would be taking a break from social media.

 

“This does not mean I won’t continue to develop… you will see updates being pushed for all my apps you just may not see the announcements here. the reason for [the] break [and] silence is the idiotic people who think they can command [and] I will obey,” he wrote on Twitter.

 

Withdrawing from social media due to insulting behavior certainly isn’t a crime and is probably the best response in many circumstances. However, given the change of ownership and the massively increased filesize, the withdrawal may have been a little mistimed. Add in the warnings now attached to the APK and a public statement seems to be needed more than ever.

 

Whether that explanation will come is yet to be seen but for the masses who have installed the app, assurances that the sudden unexplained bloat and alerts from VirusTotal are not a cause for concern (and why) could put fears to rest.

 

In the meantime, it’s worth repeating that people who install software purely based on trust are always susceptible to unexpected outcomes. Such outcomes are invariably traded off risk versus reward, but people shouldn’t be surprised when things go wrong.

 

It’s happened countless times before in the P2P, file-sharing and streaming spaces over the years (even with previously-trusted software) and it will happen again. Maybe this time, maybe not, but people certainly shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions.

 

YouTube’s copyright takedown policy poses one of the biggest threats to the platform’s content creators.

 

YouTubers who receive three copyright infringement strikes can easily lose their channels, which for some equates to their livelihood.

 

Over the years we have seen numerous examples of YouTubers whose accounts were terminated after repeated copyright claims, legitimate or not. Examples of claimants being punished are rare though.

Targeting Takedown Abuse

The only example that comes to mind is the lawsuit YouTube filed against a scammer who extorted people through the takedown process. The man, who requested payments in exchange for retracting bogus copyright claims, eventually settled the matter and offered a formal apology.

 

In recent years there have been increasing calls to hold senders liable for such false claims. This even reached the political agenda where it’s now being considered as part of the DMCA review.

 

YouTube doesn’t need a new law to police its own platforms though. This week we stumbled upon a rare example that shows how the video streaming service is actively punishing alleged fraudsters.

“Musical Creator” Loses Account

Yesterday, the owner of the “Musical Creator” channel complained that their channel had been terminated after submitting a copyright takedown request. The operator of the channel doesn’t appear to be a native English speaker as the comment below shows, but it’s clear that they disagree with this decision.

 

“My youtube channel MUSICAL CREATOR has been terminated due to inlegal information copyright infringement. But I not violating any policy of youtube, I don’t know how my channel is terminated I filled out all the information legal. I want to get back my channel again,” the operator writes.

 

The YouTuber explains that they reported someone else for copying their video and that their own channel was terminated as a result. According to a follow-up message from YouTube, the initial takedown notice is seen as potentially fraudulent.

 

“We are concerned that some of the information within this legal request may be fraudulent,” YouTube’s response reads. “Please understand that YouTube receives a large number of fraudulent copyright takedown requests, and we take abuse of that process very seriously.”

 

The YouTube support team references the aforementioned lawsuit filed against the extortion scammer. At the same time, however, it also provides the affected user with the opportunity to prove that their copyright claim is accurate.

Unique Copyright Abuse Termination?

“Musical Creator” says that they sent their passport to YouTube but, at the time of writing, the channel remains offline. Visitors are informed that the account was terminated for a violation of YouTube’s Terms of Service.

 

This is the first time we have seen an example of this rigorous punishment in the wild. This could be in part because “rightsholders” are less likely to complain in public.

 

Unfortunately, the support thread doesn’t include any further details and we were not able to contact the affected user directly. This means that there’s little we can say about the validity of YouTube’s action.

 

That said, these types of fraud accusations and account terminations are unlikely to happen without a manual review of some sort.

 

One of the key anti-piracy tools at the disposal of rightsholders in Russia is the memorandum signed by leading tech and entertainment companies in 2018.

 

The agreement saw the creation of a centralized database of allegedly infringing content that is queried every few minutes by internet companies. When referenced content is spotted by search engines, for example, corresponding links in search results are removed automatically, with the aim of making pirated content harder to find.

 

Over the past several years this system has assisted in the removal of millions of links and there is momentum for even more parties to get involved. However, the blacklisting system is not without problems, as became evident following a blunder last week.

Yahoo.com Added to Anti-Piracy Register

As part of its regular takedown efforts, Star Media Distribution LLC recently filed a complaint alleging that its rights in the TV series “Secret Love” were being infringed online. The problematic URL was subsequently added to Russia’s infringing content registry on October 26, according to a Kommersant report.

 

This meant that companies signed up to the memorandum were required to delist it from their platforms but that didn’t happen without issues. For reasons that are still not clear, an unspecified rightsholder error meant that the domain Yahoo.com was placed on the blacklist. Yahoo.com is one of the world’s most-visited domains with more than three billion visits per month.

Search Engine Mail.ru Blocks Yahoo.com

As required under the memorandum, local search giant Mail.ru (operated by VK) appears to have queried the blacklist database and concluded that Yahoo.com had been designated as infringing by the registry’s operators. It then blocked the entire domain in its search results, meaning that for Mail.ru’s search users, competitor Yahoo! no longer existed.

 

This situation appears to have persisted for around four days until the alarm was raised. VK/Mail.ru says that it informed the operators of the registry that adding an entire domain to the blacklist was wrong and after review, the domain was indeed removed. However, the error has now attracted the attention of other search companies and the government.

Yandex Raises Concerns With Blacklist Administrator

On October 29, search giant Yandex sent a letter to the Media Communications Union, the entity that manages Russia’s piracy blacklist. As seen by Kommersant, the letter requested that the body should immediately check the legality of adding Yahoo.com to the database.

 

Unlike Mail.ru, neither Yandex nor Rambler removed Yahoo’s domain but as Yandex points out, the terms of the memorandum dictate that all incoming complaints should be first checked by the registry to ensure they are valid. In this case, Yandex believes that something went wrong.

 

“[When the system is followed] abuse and erroneous blocking of domains of legal resources can be avoided. This should be an extreme step, since in the event of an error, both the site owners and their partners and users may suffer,” the letter reads.

Government Responds to Controversy

Responding to the fallout from the erroneous blacklisting of Yahoo, the Russian government stressed that before sites are added to the country’s blacklist, the owners of those sites should be warned of what is about to happen. In addition, evidence should be provided that postings are indeed illegal and this evidence should be verified, to ensure mistakes such as this are avoided.

 

Star Media, the company that filed the complaint, declined to discuss the error in detail other than to say the issue was being “dealt with”.

 

 

Yahoo.com Placed on Piracy Blacklist Following Copyright Claim Error

 

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

 

These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

 

This week we have three new entries in the list. “Dune” is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on November 1 are:

 

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrent sites
1	(1)	Dune	8.3 / trailer
2	(3)	Free Guy	7.4 / trailer
3	(…)	Army of Thieves	6.4 / trailer
4	(2)	Halloween Kills	6.1 / trailer
5	(8)	The Suicide Squad	7.6 / trailer
6	(…)	Lamb	6.4 / trailer
7	(4)	Copshop	6.4 / trailer
8	(…)	Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin	5.2 / trailer
9	(6)	Old	5.9 / trailer
10	(9)	Black Widow	6.8 / trailer

 

Note: We also publish an updating archive of all the list of weekly most torrented movies lists.

 

Hacking group Team-Xecuter was a thorn in the side of major gaming companies for a long time.

 

The group offered hardware and software solutions that allowed people to install and play unofficial games and pirated copies on various consoles, including the popular Nintendo Switch.

 

Team-Xecuter defended its work by pointing out that their products are not necessarily pirate tools. They supported the ‘right to repair’ movement and backed people who wanted to play homebrew games on their devices for personal use.

Team-Xecuter Prosecution

The affected game companies disagreed, with Nintendo front and center. The Japanese gaming company had chased down Team-Xecuter for years and last October they were joined by the U.S. Government which launched a criminal prosecution of three group members.

 

One of the defendants is Canadian Gary Bowser. He was arrested in the Dominican Republic in September 2020 and was deported to the U.S. soon after. Bowser is perhaps best known through his nickname GaryOPA, the operator and a frequent writer on the website “MaxConsole,” which regularly reviewed Team-Xecuter hardware and other hacking tools.

 

According to the indictment, Bowser was more than just a writer. The Government saw him as part of the Team-Xecuter conspiracy. Among other things, he allegedly advertised and trafficked circumvention devices, while maintaining regular contact with resellers throughout the world.

Bowser Pleads Guilty

Bowser initially denied any wrongdoing but last week he changed his position and pleaded guilty. The plea agreement with the U.S. Government sheds more light on how Team-Xecuter operated. It contains a statement of facts to which all parties agreed, which includes various admissions.

 

“Defendant, GARY BOWSER, aka ‘GaryOPA,’ knowingly and willfully participated in a cybercriminal enterprise that hacked leading gaming consoles and that developed, manufactured, marketed, and sold a variety of circumvention devices that allowed the enterprise’s customers to play pirated versions of copyrighted video games, commonly referred to as ‘ROMs’,” it reads.

 

Bowser’s involvement started in June 2013 and continued until his arrest last year. With the new agreement, the Canadian pleads guilty to conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and trafficking in circumvention devices. He also admits to violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. Both counts carry a maximum prison penalty of five years.

The Homebrew Cover

The conspiracy, which also includes co-defendants Max Louarn and Yuanning Chen, used various brands including “Team Xecuter,” “Axiogame.com,” “Maxconsole.com,” and “China Distribution.” Team-Xecuter regularly stressed its intention to support homebrew enthusiasts. However, the U.S. prosecution sees this as a cover.

 

The primary goal was to sell circumvention devices that would allow customers to play pirated ROMs. To achieve this, co-defendant Max Louarn put Bowser in charge of operating maxconsole.com, through which he helped to market and sell Team-Xecuter devices.

 

“Mr. Bowser’s role was to market the enterprise’s products, post news releases about new products and updates to products, and work with retailers who distributed the enterprise’s products. Mr. Bowser would also post replies to inquiries from customers of these illegal circumvention devices on Maxconsole.com,” the plea agreement reads.

Tens of Million in Revenue

SX OS was one of Team-Xecuter’s most lucrative product lines. It allowed gamers to use Nintendo Switch with custom firmware which allowed them to play pirated games. Through all sales, Team-Xecuter reportedly generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

 

“The enterprise generated at least tens of millions of dollars of proceeds from the sale of its circumvention devices,” the agreement reads, adding that this directly harmed Nintendo and other parties.

 

Bowser himself only saw a fraction of these revenues coming his way. He earned between $500-1000 a month as the operator of the team-xecuter.com and maxconsole.com websites. In addition, he was allowed to keep the advertising income, which brought his total revenue to roughly $320,000.

$4.5 Million Restitution

In addition to the guilty plea on two counts, Bowser also voluntarily agreed to pay $4.5 million in restitution to Nintendo. He also agreed to help locate any remaining Team-Xecuter assets.

 

The cooperative stance increases the likelihood of a reduced sentence but the Government stresses that there are no guarantees. The prosecution did agree to waive the nine remaining charges in the indictment, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

 

Based on the agreement, U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Tsuchida recommends that Bowser will indeed be found guilty. The final sentence will be issued in due course after both the defense and prosecution have shared their recommendations.

 

In addition to the criminal proceeding, Bowser was also sued directly by Nintendo last April. This case remains ongoing and Bowser has yet to file an official response to the complaint.

 

—-

 

A copy of the plea agreement between Gary Bowser and the US Government is available here (pdf)

 

After a long wait, the 2021 installment of the sci-fi classic Dune finally premiered in the United States last week.

 

The film had already come out in other parts of the world a month earlier, which caused quite a bit of frustration among eager fans.

 

Their patience was further tested when a relatively high-quality copy of the film leaked on pirate sites days before the premiere on HBO Max and in theaters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, millions of people decided to download or stream these illegal copies.

Dune Piracy

These pre-release leaks are seen as one of the worst threats in Hollywood and one would expect a massive piracy spike from the get-go. However, when we analyzed a large sample(*) of the download numbers through BitTorrent, we noticed an interesting pattern.

 

The chart below starts on Monday 17th October, the first full day the film was available. On that day, there were hundreds of thousands of downloads, which easily made Dune the most downloaded film that day.

 

Dune Downloads (torrents)  

 

Dune retained this ‘most pirated’ title on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, despite a sharp drop in absolute downloads. When we look at the ‘market share’ of Dune downloads we notice a similar decrease. On Monday, Dune was good for 5.16% of all BitTorrent downloads and this percentage dropped to 2.10% on Thursday.

Double Spike

What is most interesting, perhaps, is that interest started picking up again after Dune was released on HBO Max. Soon after the official streaming release, HBO Max rips appeared online in reportedly better quality than the early pirated copies.

 

Whether the broader public is aware of this quality difference is up for debate. All releases were tagged as ‘Web Rips’ so the video quality is not obvious based on the title and tags. Nonetheless, the downloads spiked.

 

The second peak in Dune downloads started on Friday and the Saturday and Sunday numbers were also higher than Monday’s when the first release appeared. This isn’t a typical pattern for new film releases but there are a few factors at play that could explain it.

Quality, PR, and Timing

As mentioned before, the HBO Max release was higher quality, which may have been worth the wait for some pirates. That said, the quality difference wasn’t obvious, and we expect that those who are particularly concerned about quality would probably want to see it in the theater anyway.

 

The PR angle is another option. Not every pirate is a news junkie so it’s definitely possible that many people didn’t bother to search when the film wasn’t yet out. Also, movie premieres tend to come with a lot of advertising, which may have increased demand as well.

 

There is another timing factor that can play a role. BitTorrent traffic tends to go up during the weekend, which coincides with the HBO Max release of Dune. This will have likely boosted the downloads somewhat, but even in relative terms Friday (5.30%) and Saturday (5.32%) topped the Monday percentage.

 

Also, when we look at the release of The Suicide Squad on HBO Max in early August we see a steady decline during the first 9 days, where downloads during the second weekend were lower than on Thursday.

 

The Suicide Squad Downloads (torrents)  

What’s the Point?

The above is just a simple case study that’s certainly not representative of every future movie release. We’re not trying to make a huge point here, but it’s fascinating to see these types of patterns in the wild.

 

The safe conclusion is that quality, timing, and PR all contributed to the second peak in Dune downloads. If we have to bet, however, our money would be on PR as the main contributor. While some pirates may view themselves as vigilantes, they’re certainly not immune to outside infuence.

 

—

 

* The data used in the graphs above is taken from a large but non-exhaustive sample of estimated worldwide downloads. The information is gathered from the public DHT network, as reported by the data provider Iknow. BitTorrent piracy is only a fraction of the total piracy landscape.

 

Every year, major copyright industry groups compile their lists of the most notorious pirate sites, which are publicly reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR).

 

These overviews provide input for the USTR’s annual notorious markets overview, where sites such as The Pirate Bay, Fmovies and Uploaded have appeared as repeat offenders.

Pressure Tool

The goal of this process is to identify pressing piracy problems and to encourage foreign administrations, from where these portals often operate, to take action. It’s very much a diplomatic pressure tool with the ultimate goal of helping US rightsholders tackle online piracy.

 

Over the past years, there has been a lot of debate about which sites and services should be included. Not everyone agrees that YouTube downloaders and domain registrars are piracy havens, and adding advertising companies is seen as a controversial step as well.

 

Copyright holders clearly believe that these services deserve to be called out. This is apparent from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) submission, which lists a wide range of third-party services. They include advertising company PopAds, which is described as follows:

 

PopAds and PopCash are ad networks owned by Tomksoft in Poland but incorporated in Costa Rica. PopAds generates advertising revenue for copyright infringing sites including gomovies123.org, megafilmeshdplus.org, video.az, and mega1080.com, while PopCash is currently used by watchmoviestream.me. PopAds had previously been generating advertising revenue for Openload and Streamango, two of the most popular video file hosting services with over 136 million and 32 million visits per month, respectively, according to SimilarWeb (Openload and Streamango were shut down in October 2019).

PopAds Responds

PopAds is not happy with this callout. The company’s attorney Kamil Nagrabski sent a rebuttal to the USTR and points out that MPA’s submission includes false and misleading information. For one, PopAds has no relationship with PopCash.

 

“My Principal has nothing to do with PopCash and has never had. My Principal has no idea why is he connected with PopCash at all. This information is completely false and misleading for the general public and your institution,” the rebuttal starts.

 

The main complaint from copyright holders is that PopAds provides its services to alleged pirate sites. The suggestion is that the Costa Rican company does nothing to stop or limit piracy. PopAds wholly disagrees with this assertion.

 

The advertising company points to its DMCA reporting tool. While the DMCA doesn’t mention advertising networks, PopAds has chosen to implement this functionality to help reduce piracy. PopAds doesn’t only remove ads from reported pirate sites, it also terminates accounts of repeat offenders.

 

“Of course, repeated offenders, anyone who tries to cheat the system is immediately and permanently banned. My Principal also operates a Multi-Account Control System that will automatically detect and ban new accounts opened by a person who had an account banned in the past,” PopAds notes.

Piracy Blocklists

The advertising outfit doesn’t stop there either. It recently launched a new Adscore Compliance Intelligence system. This automatically detects copyright-infringing websites, which are subsequently blocked from displaying ads.

 

At the moment, PopAds uses several official piracy blacklists. This includes Operation Creative’s IWL blacklist from the City of London Police, as well as the WIPO ALERT blacklist, which is maintained by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Sites on these blacklists are blocked in real time.

 

These blocking efforts prevent ads from appearing on sites that are blacklisted. In addition, PopAds also makes sure that content loaded by these sites through frames is blocked as well.

‘MPA Can Easily Block Ads’

The above suggests that rightsholders have a variety of options to report and block content on pirate sites. This also applies to the MPA, which works with the IWL blacklist.

 

“MPA can just list any website that they believe is illegally hosting copyrighted content on the Operation Creative IWL blacklist. Once that happens, PopAds system will automatically stop displaying any advertisements on the reported website within 24h without any human involvement,” PopAds notes.

 

Based on PopAds’ rebuttal, it seems that copyright holders still have room for improvement on their end. For example, MPA told the USTR that PopAds generated revenue for gomovies123.org, megafilmeshdplus.org, video.az, and mega1080.com. However, it did little to report this activity to PopAds directly.

 

“My Principal has never received any DMCA complaints on any of these websites, neither they are listed on any of the piracy website blacklists my Principal participates in,” PopAds’ attorney informs the USTR.

 

—

 

A copy of PopAds’ full rebuttal, submitted as part of the USTR’s 2021 Review of Notorious Markets, is available here (pdf)

 

For more than a decade the Hadopi (High Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet) anti-piracy agency was France’s official response to the threat of peer-to-peer file-sharing.

 

The anti-piracy body pioneered the so-called “graduated response” system back in 2010, with Hadopi tracking down copyright infringers using mainly BitTorrent networks and then warning, fining, or even disconnecting them. Over time, however, more convenient methods of illicit consumption (such as streaming) gained traction, putting Hadopi a little behind the times.

New Bill to Tackle Infringement

Back in April, France’s Council of Ministers was presented with a new bill that aimed to more tightly regulate and protect access to cultural works in the digital age. At the forefront is the protection of creators’ rights by tackling sites and services that Hadopi’s graduated response failed to reach.

 

The plan was to merge Hadopi with the Higher Audiovisual Council (CSA) to create a new regulator, one with greater powers and jurisdiction over the entire field of audiovisual content. The bill was adopted by parliament last month by 49 votes to 4, effectively giving the green light for the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (Arcom).

 

The new law “on the regulation and protection of access to cultural works in the digital age” was officially published this week.

Arcom Will Launch in January 2022

In an accompanying announcement, Hadopi and CSA welcome the publication which effectively “consecrates the birth” of Arcom.

 

“The creation of Arcom will make it possible to constitute an integrated regulator with extended powers, particularly in the creation chain, from the setting of obligations to the protection of copyright and the fight against piracy. This new authority will also be more in touch with digital issues, the fight against fake news and hate content, and the regulation of subscription video platforms with the obligations incumbent on them,” Hadopi says.

 

“Far from being a simple juxtaposition of skills, Arcom will thus be the support and the engine of a new public policy by modernizing the exercise of regulation,” Hadopi continues.

 

“It will thus embody the new model of audiovisual and digital regulation that we are putting in place: regulation that is more attentive to audiences and their concerns, but also resolutely committed to the defense of freedoms of expression, information, and communication of creation.”

Arcom Anti-Piracy Powers

On January 1, 2022, Hadopi will be dissolved and the CSA will take the Arcom name. This new regulator will operate with expanded investigation powers and will be responsible not only for tackling piracy but also for the protection of minors and the fight against disinformation and hatred online.

 

On the anti-piracy front, Hadopi’s ‘graduated response’ will be adopted by Arcom and the regulator will also focus on illicit streaming, direct download, and linking platforms that profit from the online publication of works in violation of creators’ rights.

 

Arcom’s key responsibilities will include the management of a “blacklist” of infringing sites. A site can find itself on this database after being labeled a “repeat infringer” in a yet-to-be detailed process. A site appearing on the list will act as a signal for search engines to carry out delistings, advertisers to curtail business deals, or be presented as support for rights holders engaged in legal action.

 

The new regulator will also establish a system to combat “mirrors”, sites that help to facilitate access to platforms previously blocked following earlier enforcement actions. Measures can include more blocking or search engine delisting.

 

In addition, Arcom will create a mechanism to deal with piracy of live sporting events, one that is able to cope with ad hoc emergency referrals aimed at quickly preventing access to pirate sports streams. That falls in line with the recent passing of the Digital Services Act proposals by the European Parliament which also envisions rapid 30-minute takedowns.

 

The new law can be read here