Last month, Japan-based anti-piracy group Authorized Books of Japan (ABJ) ran a newspaper advertising campaign in the United States, Italy, Spain, and France.

Its launch on July 17 was declared “Manga Day” and its purpose was to raise awareness of manga piracy by thanking those who pay for comics, rather than attacking those who do not pay. The ad below ran in the New York Times, with variants making an appearance in La Repubblica, El Pais, and Le Monde.

Most anti-piracy campaigns focus on negatives in the hope that fear overwhelms pirates to the extent they feel happier buying. ABJ’s campaign tries a different approach, one that has enjoyed success in Japan.

By showing appreciation towards people who pay (“Thank you for reading official versions”) it’s hoped that positivity will be better received and ultimately have a more lasting effect among manga’s continuously expanding fan base.

A Mountain to Climb

The world-famous news publications mentioned above have faced considerable challenges with the transition to digital, including unauthorized digital copies of their products being made available online by pirate sites. Yet, based on the sheer scale of piracy, none have experienced anything close to that taking place in the manga market.

When the campaign launched in the United States and Europe last month, ABJ reported that a total of 1,332 pirate sites, most dedicated to manga, were offering comics for free viewing online or otherwise making them available for download. The lion’s share is made available on a relatively small number of sites, mostly offering manga translated into English, and together pulling in billions of annual visits.

“The amount of free reading per month on the top 10 English translation piracy sites alone amounts to 800 million US dollars, a figure that is increasing every year and requires immediate action,” ABJ reported, citing figures from May 2024.

Recent Data on Manga Piracy

The reports supporting these claims aren’t usually made directly available in full. However, they do make appearances in support of presentations, seminars (videos of which sometimes appear on YouTube), and government meetings back in Japan. That often means that background documentation is available from public sources.

The first slide below relates to the Top 10 sites mentioned earlier; redactions are the work of ABJ, any English text represents our translations from Japanese to English.

One of the most striking aspects of this slide is the apparent massive growth of several sites in the top 10 over the space of just a month. ABJ reports that the site in the #1 position in May ranked #4 a month earlier in April after what appears to be a doubling of its traffic.

How the site managed to do that isn’t explained, but given the nature of the niche, where sites frequently disappear and rebrand, only to reappear, rinse and repeat, visitor numbers can fluctuate drastically before settling down again.

In a slide dated early July, ABJ states that “accesses have decreased due to the shutdown of large sites” but also cites concerns “over the emergence and growth of mass-produced sites by certain groups.” The anti-piracy organization doesn’t name the group, but it may be a reference to activity in Vietnam. Sites can give the impression of being mass-produced due to how quickly they disappear and reappear, while still managing to retain traffic despite new branding.

Another familiar scenario is outlined as follows: “Sites with the same content are provided via multiple domain names and CDNs. Images are stored in the same location or the same images are used.” Without specifics, it’s difficult to identify the sites in question, but this may be a reference to content sources remaining mostly static, with various front ends and domain names jumping around to give the impression of multiple moving targets.

It’s disorientating by design and can lead to the appearance of 100 new target sites in as little as a month.

Sites Cater to Various Audiences

As an indication of how site numbers can ebb and flow, ABJ reports that a total of 1,332 pirate sites were offering pirated manga in May 2024. Figures from February reveal a total of 1,207 sites, catering to various audiences. As broken down by ABJ, 294 sites were listed as catering to Japan, while 466 sites were offering English translations.

The remaining 477 sites were offering manga in languages other than Japanese or English, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Italian. By volume, English translation sites take the top slot overall, followed by Japanese language platforms and those offering content in Vietnamese.

Piracy Rates in Recent Years to Present Date

Research by ABJ estimates that free viewing of manga titles on pirate sites cost the industry the following amounts:

• 2020 – ~210 billion yen (estimated as of February 2021)

• 2021 – ~1.19 trillion yen (estimated as of February 2022)

• 2022 – ~506.9 billion yen (estimated as of February 2023)

• 2023 – ~381.8 billion yen (as of the end of January 2024)

The exact reason for the significant reduction in 2023 over the figures reported in 2022 is unknown, but ABJ identifies two possibilities. The first, “expedited measures” to remove links to pirated content from Google search results, which began during the fall of 2022. The second, “the unprecedented proliferation of the ongoing “STOP! Piracy Campaign.”

“We have built up various measures and realized a decrease of about 25% from 2022 to 2023,” ABJ explains.

The above is just the tip of a very large, coordinated effort, which also includes work by anti-piracy group CODA, to tackle piracy of all kinds of Japanese content, wherever it takes place. When the tide will conclusively turn is unknown, but the nature and scale of the effort suggests that it’s no longer the impossible mission it once appeared.

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To the average internet user, DNS translates a domain into an IP address to make browsing as simple and unintrusive as possible. Under the hood, DNS does just that and for the majority of people online, that’s good enough.

For those who work with DNS and understand how incredibly important (and beautiful) it is, the idea that DNS is something to be tampered with, so that the system effectively tells lies, steps over the line. Yet, thanks to the global site-blocking drive, DNS servers all around the world, in dozens of countries, constantly lie to those who use them.

Site-blocking programs dictate that, when ISP-operated DNS servers are asked to return the IP addresses for tens of thousands of ‘pirate’ domains, the IP addresses returned by those DNS servers (if any IP addresses are returned at all) will not be the correct ones. This means that the user cannot access the domain; not by this route at least.

Public DNS – Mostly Tamper-Free

Since most blocking measures are implemented by consumer ISPs that operate their own DNS servers, users who switch to public DNS servers operated by Cloudflare, Google, Quad9, and many others, can usually avoid ISP blocking altogether. There are some exceptions depending on country, and since all three of the above have been ordered to block a small number of domains, switching to their DNS servers won’t unblock every domain, just the overwhelming majority.

Pressure from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) to introduce pirate site blocking in Malaysia, led to its implementation under Section 263 of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998. Requests to block sites are processed by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), which instructs local ISPs to prevent their systems “from being used in, or in relation to, the commission of any offense,” including copyright infringement.

MPA reports on Malaysia’s site-blocking program have painted a regular picture of success but, in common with other schemes reliant on DNS tampering at ISPs, users eventually discovered that switching to public DNS restores connectivity.

Reports emerging from Malaysia this week, affecting both Cloudflare and Google DNS, are much more concerning than ISP blocking or even blocking measures imposed on public DNS providers.

Public DNS Under Threat and Reportedly Hijacked in Malaysia

The Internet Monitoring Action Project (iMAP) monitors internet interference and restrictions impacting freedom of expression online in Cambodia, Hong Kong (China), India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Timor-Leste and Vietnam. The group uses the detection and reporting systems of the Open Observatory Network Interference (OONI) and this week reported a significant shift in Malaysia’s site-blocking program.

“It was detected through automated and manual testing on 5th August, that transparent DNS proxy redirecting of DNS queries to Google and Cloudflare public DNS servers has been implemented by two Malaysian ISPs Maxis and Time,” iMAP reports.

“Users that have configured their Internet settings to use alternative DNS servers, would have found that they are now unable to access websites officially blocked by MCMC and [are now] getting a connection timeout error.”

A brief technical summary from iMAP reveals what happens when users attempt to access sites using Cloudflare and Google DNS.

• On Maxis, DNS queries to Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8) servers are being automatically redirected to Maxis ISP DNS Servers;

 

• On Time, DNS queries to both Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8) and Cloudflare Public DNS (1.1.1.1) are being automatically redirected to Time ISP DNS servers.

“Instead of the intended Google and Cloudflare servers, users are being served results from ISP DNS servers. In addition to MCMC blocked websites, other addresses returned from ISP DNS servers can also differ from those returned by Google and Cloudflare,” iMAP warns.

Technical Problems, Technical Solutions

It’s worth highlighting the seriousness of these claims. Requests destined for Google and Cloudflare DNS are being rerouted to local ISPs, in a manner that indicates those companies are responsible for users ending up at the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission’s IP address (175.139.142.25), rather than the website they requested.

In a nutshell, internet users cannot rely on their ISPs’ DNS servers to respond accurately, and can longer rely on third-party DNS to respond accurately either.

But if there’s one good thing about such aggressive blocking it’s this: like almost all efforts that rely on a technical solution to impose blocking, there is a technical solution to neutralize it.

Details are available from iMAP and apply to anyone wishing to improve their online privacy and security in general, not just those wishing to avoid their DNS requests being hijacked.

“Users that are affected, can configure their browser settings to enable DNS over HTTPS to secure their DNS lookups by using direct encrypted connection to private or public trusted DNS servers. This will also bypass transparent DNS proxy interference and provide warning of interference,” iMAP concludes.

Tacit Acceptance of ■■■■■■■■■■

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that Malaysia is no stranger to censorship and controlling access to information. Under the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984, unlicensed use or possession of a printing press is still a crime. Site-blocking measures that go way beyond blocking pirate sites currently target thousands of websites.

The big question is whether asking countries that routinely block access to information, to add even more domains to already large lists, sends the right kind of message.

Worse still, is active participation taken as an endorsement of what some claim is a denial of fundamental human rights? Not to mention being an affront to DNS, the very thing that underpins the right to communication and the free exchange of information and ideas.

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The Artificial Intelligence boom promises unparalleled progress but, in reality, it’s still early days.

As startups and established tech giants explore their options, semiconductors are selling like hot cakes, while seemingly mundane data archives are suddenly portrayed as digital gold.

Chips and data are the oil of the AI-revolution and a quick glance at Nvidia’s stock chart shows that business is going well. At the same time, some rightsholders such as Reddit and Getty Images are making deals to license their ‘data’, although that’s still relatively rare in the AI space.

Many AI companies have simply been training their models on data scraped or downloaded from online resources, often without explicit permission. This has triggered many lawsuits and complaints, with new ones appearing in court dockets on pretty much a weekly basis.

Music Companies vs. Anthropic

In one of these lawsuits, music publishers including Concord and Universal sued AI startup Anthropic. In a complaint filed last fall, they accused the company of “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.”

Specifically, they argued that Anthropic used their lyrics as training data without obtaining permission. They also showed several examples of lyrics that were reproduced by the Claude chatbot when prompted. With hundreds of works in suit, potential damages run into the millions of dollars.

In response to the claims, Anthropic didn’t deny that it used lyrics to train its model but argued that this falls under fair use. Its chatbot is not intended to reproduce lyrics in full but if it did, that was merely a “bug” rather than a “feature”.

“Anthropic has always had guardrails in place to try to prevent that result. If those measures failed in some instances in the past, that would have been a ‘bug,’ not a ‘feature’, of the product,” the company wrote earlier this year.

A Guardrail Injunction

The guardrail comment was made in response to a request for injunctive relief by the music publishers. They want the court to issue an order that prevents the use and reproduction of its copyrighted works going forward.

The injunction request was recently updated and renewed, and the matter has yet to be decided by the court. In this filing the music companies reiterate that Anthropic built its “multibillion-dollar AI business on brazen, widespread copyright infringement.”

That the Claude chatbot can reproduce lyrics is “a feature, not a bug,” they say, asking the court to issue an injunction that requires Anthropic to do two things:

1. Maintain guardrails to prevent its AI models from generating output that contains the publishers’ lyrics.

2. Refrain from using unauthorized copies of such lyrics to train future AI models.

From the proposed injunction

RIAA et al. Back Music Publishers

At this point, all AI-related lawsuits can potentially set precedents. For this reason, other companies and industry groups are keeping a close eye on developments, so they can have their say if necessary.

This week, a group of music industry related organizations got involved. The RIAA, together with the Artist Rights Alliance, the Music Artists Coalition, and others, asked the court for permission to file an amicus curiae brief in support of the publishers.

The trade groups say they have a vested interest in the matter and submitted a copy of their proposed filing, which clearly condemns the actions of Anthropic. The brief stresses that while other AI companies agreed to licensing deals, Anthropic refused to do so.

“[M]any companies in the AI field have obtained licenses to use copyrighted content for AI model training and other purposes. These companies are willing and able to comply with the law as they develop generative AI software. But not Anthropic,” the RIAA and others write.

“In order to obtain an advantage over its competitors, Anthropic has refused to license or compensate the authors and owners of the highly creative, copyrighted works that it copies and uses to generate competing works. Anthropic has argued this is a ‘fair use.’ It is not.”

Like Napster?

The full brief discusses Anthropic’s alleged wrongdoings and shortcomings in great detail. According to the trade organizations, Anthropic’s fair use defense falls short. Interestingly, they liken the company’s defense to that of ‘pirate’ tools of the past, including Napster and Grokster.

According to Anthropic, the requested injunction would hamper innovation of AI technology. As a result, it could slow down the development of new legitimate AI uses, stifling technological progress.

The RIAA and others highlight that this presumed choice between innovation and copyright protection was used by ‘pirate’ services in the past, but courts rendered these services unlawful anyway.

“The false choice that Anthropic and COP have presented between compliance with copyright law and technological progress is a well-worn, losing policy argument previously made by other mass infringers such as Napster and Grokster in their heyday. Anthropic and COP even employ the same rhetoric as those pirate sites,” the amicus brief notes.

As shown above, the trade groups go on to mention several examples of similar language used by Napster and Grokster, concluding that the courts rejected these arguments at the time.

Napster’s Demise Was Great For Apple

The amici point out that shutting down Napster didn’t hurt progress. Instead, it paved the way for legal music services, including Apple’s iTunes Store that properly compensated rightsholders.

“Far from stifling growth, prohibiting bad actors from engaging in illegal practices while file downloading technology developed helped the responsible, licensed business models employing that technology to flourish – such as Apple’s iTunes store, which paid for the content it offered,” the brief reads.

The last comment is accurate, of course. If the court had allowed Napster to continue, people would’ve had little incentive to purchase music tracks they could easily download for free.

That said, Napster certainly spurred innovation before that happened. It showed the music industry that there was a massive interest in digital music, and Steve Jobs was able to launch Apple’s service in part because the Napster threat existed.

Similarly, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek has said that Napster served as inspiration for the streaming subscription model his company pioneered. This model is now responsible for the bulk of music industry revenues.

What this means for the Anthropic case is up to the court to decide. Many people agree that AI technology needs some boundaries, but where these should be is yet to be defined.

AI Already Learned to be Cautious?

While writing this article, we tested Claude to see whether it would quote lyrics when asked. That sounds easier than it is, as the chatbot appears to be very copyright-conscious.

Even when we fed Claude the first line of a popular Elvis Presley song, it refused to finish these over copyright concerns.

These copyright-conscious responses suggest that there are already some guardrails in place. These are undoubtedly a feature, not a bug. That said, the music publishers would still like the court to issue an injunction, just in case.

—

A copy of the proposed amicus curiae brief submitted by the RIAA, NMPA, AAP, News/Media Alliance, SONA, Black Music Action Coalition, Artist Rights Alliance, the Music Artists Coalition, and A2IM is available here (pdf)

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According to the latest Freedom House report, citizens of the United States benefit from robust freedoms of expression and a wide array of other civil liberties. For that, the country receives a score of 83/100.

With just 3.4 million citizens, the relatively tiny country of Uruguay receives 96/100 and, while it’s certainly not perfect, it does a lot of things right. Given that the United States is currently mulling the introduction of a pirate site-blocking program, lawmakers may like to take a look at Uruguay’s program. Not necessarily the implementation, but the government’s dedication to transparency.

Fox Networks Blocked RojaDirecta

The first pirate site blockade in Uruguay was back in 2018. Fox Networks Group Latin America filed a criminal case against popular sports streaming portal RojaDirecta and a court ultimately instructed local ISPs to block the site. Fox described the ruling as “the beginning of judicial awareness on online piracy issues.”

With the passing of Article 712 of Law No. 19,924 in 2020, the Communications Services Regulatory Unit (URSEC) was set to take responsibility for processing blocking requests.

On October 25, 2022, the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining (MIEM) issued a decree noting that the State has an obligation to protect intellectual property; through a site-blocking program, it would seek to “eliminate the broadcasting of television signals broadcast through the Internet or similar networks, for unauthorized commercial purposes.”

The system required pay TV rightsholders to file “a well-founded complaint with the URSEC, as an affidavit,” and after an evaluation of the complaint, URSEC would advise local service providers to block the domains listed in the application for an initial 30-day period, in advance of a judicial review.

Rightsholders Begin Filing Applications

This semi-administrative approach to site-blocking appears to work well in Uruguay. In some countries where similar programs exist, limited or even no judicial oversight has translated into a veil of secrecy, where applications and decisions are made in private and transparency doesn’t exist. Uruguay’s approach is the polar opposite.

Taking the most recent successful application as an example, every application and decision has a reference number, every rightsholder applicant is named, and the channels to receive protection (and the domains to be blocked) are made available to the public with flawless transparency.

An extract from a recent URSEC blocking decision

The decision above is notable for targeting RojaDirecta domains, some six years after Fox Networks first tried to block the platform in Uruguay. Overall, however, every decision handed down in Uruguay is notable due to URSEC’s transparency and the inclusion of each decision in a publicly available dataset.

Uruguay Reaches 300 Domains Blocked

The data reveals that the first blocking application was filed by Consorcio Cable Visión San José and requested the blocking of two domains; librefutboltv.com and sfntv.xyz.

URSEC granted the application under decision 78/0223 dated May 10, 2023. By the end of June 2023, Consorcio Cable Visión had filed successful applications that went on to block another 13 domains, including futbollibre.lol, futbol-libre.org, pirlo.tv, megatelevisionhd.live, and megadeportes.xyz.

The most prolific site-blocking applicant since launch, with over 220 domains blocked by URSEC, is broadcasting market leader Directv del Uruguay Ltda, with Trinidad Video Cable S.A a distant third place.

For those interested in the fine detail, URSEC provides a convenient spreadsheet of all successful applications from May 2023 to date. Continuously updated, it provides the name of the applicant, the domains to be blocked, and a reference number linking to each full decision.

URSEC Blocking Data

To our knowledge, no other country in the world makes this much data available, and certainly not in such a convenient format. Italy’s approach is good but not quite as convenient; while some other countries in Europe offer limited data but force interested parties to hunt for it.

Spain’s reports are not bad if three months out of date is acceptable, but even that’s preferable to the approach of Portugal and France, which prefer to keep the public almost completely in the dark. That doesn’t inspire confidence in subsequent transparency reporting, at least in the event any exists.

Does Uruguay’s Blocking Scheme Work?

In common with all blocking schemes, no matter where they are in the world, assessments on their effectiveness mostly rely on reporting from those who request the blocks. These reports aren’t particularly useful. It’s hardly surprising that, when all ISPs blocked the domain piratedmovies999.xyz, nobody could access it, so blocking was up to 100% effective for that domain.

A better accounting could include sales data or subscriber numbers, but those tend not to be suitable for public consumption. The opposite is true for pay TV subscriber numbers, which are made public for each region, along with the revenue those subscriptions generate overall.

Unfortunately, TV subscriber numbers are trending strongly in the wrong direction and have been for some time. Figures reported for December 2022, just a couple of months after the government confirmed blocking was on the way, reveal that there were 573,746 pay TV subscribers, a far cry from a peak of 733,002 in June 2018.

Pay TV subscriptions, going downhill fast

As the chart above shows, the number of (legitimate) subscribers didn’t improve in 2023, even when challenged by site blocking. When compared to the figures reported for December 2022, the number of subscribers in December 2023 was down 77,619, a reduction of 13.5% in 12 months.

The reasons behind such a dramatic fall in subscriber numbers are for the experts to address. However, no particular skills are needed to look at other transparency data provided by the government, which reveals how much revenue was generated from pay TV subscribers in Uruguay.

It appears that when pay TV revenues hit their peak in late December 2021, there were 606,909 pay TV subscribers. In late 2023, when the number of subscribers had fallen 18% to 496,127, revenue to broadcasters during the same period fell just 4.3%.

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Last month, several major record labels sued Internet provider Verizon over its subscribers’ alleged copyright infringements.

The companies alleged that the Internet provider “buried its head in the sand” while knowingly providing its Internet services to a massive community of online pirates.

This is not the first case of this kind. In recent years, several Internet providers were accused of the same. These claims are grounded in the DMCA, which requires ISPs to take reasonable steps to stop persistent pirates on their networks. Failing to implement such a ‘repeat infringer’ policy can have costly consequences.

Cox as ‘Billion Dollar’ Poster Child

Internet provider Cox Communications is familiar with the potential damage by now. In 2019, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for pirating subscribers because it failed to terminate subscriber accounts after repeated accusations, ordering the company to pay $1 billion in damages.

Cox pursued various avenues to appeal the verdict and earlier this year booked a partial victory. The Court of Appeals confirmed that the ISP was liable for contributory infringement in respect of its subscribers’ piracy, but reversed the vicarious copyright infringement finding. A new trial will determine appropriate damages under these new circumstances.

With a billion dollars at stake, Cox is leaving no stone unturned. The company is currently drafting a Supreme Court petition and has also appealed the denial of Rule 60 motions at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the music companies concealed evidence and failed to disclose information.

Rehashed Infringements & Reappearing Source Code

Without going too deep into the intricate details of the allegations, Cox argues that the record labels’ piracy tracking company MarkMonitor recreated evidence. Specifically, the music files that were used as the basis of copyright infringement notices between 2012 and 2014 were initially deleted.

In 2016, the music files were redownloaded based on the original hashes. This issue was also raised in the record labels’ lawsuit against Charter, where it was first uncovered. This could have turned the case upside down, but the lawsuit was settled before trial.

According to Cox, this settlement might suggest that more is going on, but when it pointed this out to the court in 2022, requesting ‘relief from judgment’, the court denied its Rule 60 motion.

Cox later learned that the labels had also failed to disclose key portions of MarkMonitor’s source code in a related lawsuit against another ISP, Bright House. This also impacted the Cox case, and the ISP again requested relief from judgment.

According to the ISP, the source code issue could be another smoking gun, as the Bright House lawsuit was also settled at the eleventh hour. The court disagreed, however, and denied the second Rule 60 motion.

Labels: There’s Nothing New

In May, the ISP appealed these Rule 60 denials, asking the court to issue a new trial so the ‘concealed’ evidence could be tested and scrutinized properly. Reopening the case at this stage makes sense, it argued, as the appeal that concluded in February also reopened several key questions.

This week, the record labels responded to Cox’s request, arguing that Cox had a fair trial and that the contested issues not the ‘smoking guns’ they’re made out to be.

“Cox lost this case, in a fairly litigated trial where it had every opportunity to defend itself,” the labels write.

“Cox (and its appellate counsel) clearly regret some of its trial team’s decisions. But Rule 60(b) does not provide a pathway to re-try a case with the benefit of hindsight. The District Court correctly recognized this. This Court should affirm.”

The music companies don’t contest that the music files were redownloaded after the fact. They also confirm that some source code was initially not shared as evidence. But this doesn’t turn the case, they say, as the District Court previously recognized.

Hashes & Source Code

The labels state that they never denied that the hashes were redownloaded and point out that this should have been clear from the testimony. The fact that some files were not available anymore, and could not be redownloaded, is no game changer either.

According to the plaintiffs, it is irrelevant whether the music tracks are originals or copies, since hashes are “more unique than DNA”. This means that the redownloaded files are the same as the deleted originals.

“Because these 2016 files match the infringing files by ‘hash value,’ they are not just copies of those earlier files; they are those files. It makes no difference when they were downloaded,” the labels write.

Cox’s suggestion, that the labels don’t have any evidence that MarkMonitor’s hash value database is sound, is a red herring, not a smoking gun.

“That is a red herring. The ‘soundness of MarkMonitor’s hash value database’ does not turn on when the Hard Drive files were downloaded because, again, as fully explained at trial, files with matching hash values are identical regardless of when downloaded,” the labels write.

In a similar vein, the undisclosed source code is no game changer either. While the labels settled their lawsuit with Bright House after this revelation, Cox has no real evidence to revisit the matter, only speculation.

“Cox offers no real argument that the portion of source code is material or would have likely changed the outcome of this lengthy jury trial,” the labels write.

“Cox merely speculates that the missing portion of code might have the potential to ‘reveal a fault in MarkMonitor’s process of constructing a database of allegedly infringing hash values’. Cox is grasping at straws.”

It is now up to the court to decide whether Cox will get a new trial or not. Whatever the outcome, this case is far from closed. In a few days, the ISP is expected to file its Supreme Court petition, which will undoubtedly receive support and opposition from several other companies and organizations.

Evidence issues aside, the ISP strongly believes that the current verdict is dangerous, as it puts innocent people at risk of losing their Internet access, based on unadjudicated claims from rightsholders.

—

A copy of the music companies’ reply brief, filed at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, is available here (pdf)

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Every day, millions of people break the law; by posting copyrighted images, music, and videos on social media, for example.

For most of these people, copyright is merely an afterthought, not a real concern. Especially when snippets of copyrighted content are posted to a small audience, the chances of being noticed are small.

The legal consequences of mass online piracy are more problematic. That said, there are still examples of apparent ‘inadvertent’ mass-piracy projects. For example, when a Utah town approved a pirate IPTV scheme for use by its citizens.

Mayor Proudly Pirates ‘Inside Out 2’ on Town Square

In Brazil, there was a similarly unbelievable display of public piracy last week that went on to make national headlines. The mayor of the municipality Acopiara, in the north-east of the country, invited citizens of the small town Trussu to join a screening of the blockbuster “Inside Out 2” at the local town square.

With little more than a thousand inhabitants, many of whom have limited means, this appeared to be a kind gesture. The mayor, Anthony Almeida Neto, could use some positive marks too; he was removed from office three times on suspicion of being involved in corruption schemes, and was most recently reinstated in March.

The mayor officially announced the public screening of ‘Inside Out 2’ via Instagram and Facebook, inviting people to join him. That worked well as a sizable crowd showed up, allowing the controversial major to proudly boast the event’s popularity in public through his social media channels.

The announcement
 

Needless to say, public figures such as mayors have a vested interest in being liked by the public. Whether this screening was politically motivated or not isn’t clear but from a legal perspective, the plan backfired.

Pirate Screening

Taking place in an outside theater created just for this occasion, the screening was a unique opportunity for the small town’s residents. There are no official movie theaters nearby, so locals would normally have to travel for several hours to see a film that’s still in cinemas.

Thanks to the mayor, people could see ‘Inside Out 2’ in their hometown instead.

The mayor was pleased with the turnout too and proudly broadcasted it through a livestream on Instagram. Amidst all this joy, however, people started to notice a watermark on the film that was clearly associated with piracy. In addition, it was apparent that the copy had been sourced from pirate streaming site, Obaflix.

Town square screening
 

All signs indicate that the public event wasn’t authorized or licensed. Instead, it appeared to be an improvised screening of a low-quality TS release of the film, which is widely available through pirate sites.

When this ‘revelation’ was picked up in the Brazilian press, mayor Anthony Almeida was quick to respond with assurances that he only had honest intentions.

Mayor Responds

According to the mayor, the City Counsel regularly hosts these types of events to entertain elderly people and children in the rural region. There was absolutely no political motivation, he stressed.

“There were only children, everyone was happy, there was no political speech, there were no politicians, the only one was me, but I didn’t even speak, it had nothing to do with politics, the film is not about politics either,” Almeida told PontoPoder.

While the public pirate screening was widely reported in the press, a key fact was omitted; one that should also grab the attention of political figureheads, including the mayor.

According to recent data, only 7% of municipalities in Brazil have a movie theater. That means a visit to an official theater requires a full-day commitment, assuming that some people can afford it.

This availability problem isn’t only limited to rural areas. In Brazil, there are cities with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants that don’t have an official movie theater. This would be unthinkable in the United States and many other countries.

No copyright infringement intended

As far as we know, there are no legal consequences for the mayor. It’s also unknown whether he’s aware of the legal complications that could arise. While that may seem obvious, not everyone is well versed in copyright nuances.

The mayor is not alone in this. Many schools and sport clubs also entertain people by showing copyrighted content. Even when that’s from a paid Netflix or Disney+ subscription, semi-public broadcasting is still not allowed.

Even those who seem to be aware of copyright infringement may actually have no idea what’s allowed and what’s not. In recent years, we have seen thousands of social media posts with the tagline “no copyright infringement intended“, stating that “all rights are reserved to the owner.”

While this is rather honest, the posters are basically admitting that they knowingly post copyright-infringing material online, without obtaining any permission. That’s actually much worse than not adding the tagline at all.

But, apparently, some people simply don’t know any better.

—

Note: With thanks to the Brazilian reader who helped with the research.

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

Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This week we have three newcomers on the list. “A Quiet Place: Day One” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on August 05 are:

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

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If rightsholders didn’t get everything they asked for when Italy passed tough new anti-piracy legislation in 2023, they still received more than the majority of their counterparts have elsewhere in the EU.

Harsher penalties for both providers of pirated content and those who consume, including fines for simply watching a pirate stream. That was in addition to new site-blocking powers, considerably more aggressive than those seen almost anywhere else, on paper at least.

With the launch of the fledgling Piracy Shield blocking system, the technical cherry on top of a robust legal base, two initial issues were preparing to disappoint.

Targeting Opponents’ Strengths

The first relates to the chosen arena. Pirates are well known for their ability to obtain and copy content, but before the streaming boom, distribution was mostly the work of consumers, via P2P networks like BitTorrent. With content easier to obtain than ever before, more often than not pirates in the IPTV space today are distribution specialists, so any reliance on technical measures actually plays to their strengths.

Second, laws to deter piracy may have become more elaborate and increasingly tough with each passing decade, but piracy itself has become easier and more prolific. Getting caught can lead to more serious consequences for those involved, but if the law is any deterrent, the availability of content suggests that where it matters, the law makes almost no difference.

Obviously, laws to prevent or deter piracy are rarely static for long and exist to be tightened whenever the opportunity arises. Unfortunately, Italy’s blocking data suggests that the big stream suppliers are minimally affected by laws overseas and are extremely unlikely to face any type of punishment in Italy.

‘Piracy is an Internet Problem’

Every few years, frustration sets in and rightsholders’ attention refocuses more on internet infrastructure companies; typically Google, but also companies like Cloudflare, DNS providers, domain name companies, or anyone perceived to have a kill switch or magic filter. In Italy, where an ‘everything is possible’ mindset appears to have run head first into reality, attention is back on Cloudflare and Google.

Piracy Shield had been operational for just two weeks when Google found itself suddenly under pressure to fight piracy of its own volition. Yet the specific issue at hand – an alleged pirate app on Google Play – simply required a rightsholder to send a takedown notice, which apparently hadn’t been done. Instead, public comments implied that a lack of ethics and self-regulation were the problem.

Cloudflare Provides Infrastructure, Cloudflare Becomes a Target

On the back of a court battle that ultimately required Cloudflare to stop providing DNS services to music download platforms in Italy, Cloudflare is now facing a legal complaint filed by top-tier football league, Serie A.

This relates directly to IPTV providers using Cloudflare’s services in a way that means they can’t be blocked by Piracy Shield. Or, rather, they can’t be blocked without blocking innocent platforms too.

As a result, telecoms regulator AGCOM is taking a path already familiar to dozens of major rightsholders; find companies not engaged in piracy themselves but with plenty to lose, present piracy as their problem to solve, and then pile on the pressure and hope something gives.

Cloudflare and Google Summoned to Italy

A La Repubblica report published on Sunday (perhaps fittingly behind a hard paywall and not indexed by Google), AGCOM has summoned Cloudflare and Google to attend an official meeting in Italy during September.

According to the report, AGCOM chief Massimiliano Capitanio wants to hear directly from Google and Cloudflare about their strategies for defeating piracy in Italy, in particular those that target the sale and supply of pirate IPTV. Additional action to further limit the appearance of services in Google’s search results is apparently on the agenda, but even total elimination might not yield the desired results.

For comparison, search results in the UK no longer contain results for the major streaming sites; only imposters remain, but piracy levels aren’t reducing as a result. The fact that the major platforms are also blocked by all major ISPs, with more robust systems than those deployed under Piracy Shield (simply changing DNS is insufficient to unblock), suggests a complex landscape ahead. As for pirate IPTV devices and services discovered via search, anecdotal evidence indicates a shift towards offline or private sales, often facilitated via social media platforms, not search engines.

AGCOM Will Almost Certainly Aim High

In respect of Cloudflare, the company has made its legal position clear over the past several years. If rightsholders have a complaint, it will immediately forward that to the entity with the ability to remove the allegedly infringing content. The slides below show key company policy but AGCOM, which has made much of the ‘streams blocked in 30 mins’ standard for Piracy Shield, will want more and will demand much more.

Cloudflare’s Approach to Copyright Protection

Should AGCOM achieve any concessions or receive special treatment, two things are guaranteed; other rightsholders will demand the same or even more, then when that fails to achieve the desired result, all will keep returning for more.

How Cloudflare responds, if at all, could have implications for its global policy on copyright protection.

Meeting Under Dark Clouds

In line with its recent experiences of AGCOM, Google’s starting position seems more complex. In May, the Italian Council of State confirmed AGCOM sanctioning measures against Google Ireland, YouTube, and Twitter/X for violating the ban on advertising gambling with cash winnings.

The ruling that concerns Google Search found that the platform is an active hosting provider and therefore liable for infringement. The Court of Justice of the European Union previously determined that since the Google Ads service was automated and passive, Google incurred no liability.

Friction between AGCOM and Google on this and several other matters may prove insignificant in light of an announcement in mid-July by Italy’s antitrust agency, Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (Competition and Market Authority / AGCM).

AGCM said it had launched an investigation into Google and parent company Alphabet over alleged unfair practices involving users’ personal data. The agency said that consent notices Google sends to its users to connect to various services, such as Gmail and YouTube, “could constitute misleading and aggressive commercial practice.”

Google’s response was measured and non-aggressive, simply noting that it would cooperate with the authority on the matter.

Overall, Google does seem to present itself different, compared to several years ago. For example, it’s no longer completely opposed to many of the things it refused to do in the past, such as deranking pirate sites and completely deindexing others.

Deploying strong-arm tactics against Google on copyright matters, when things have been going generally in the right direction for some time, may not be the best approach. Cloudflare, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer to the piracy wars so is already on a different timeline and trajectory, offering products that in some areas may be considered even more of a threat.

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Faced with the growing popularity of ‘pirate’ libraries such as Z-Library and Anna’s Archive, book publishers have ramped up their anti-piracy efforts.

This year alone, Google has processed hundreds of millions of takedown requests on behalf of publishers, at a frequency we have never seen before. The same publishers also target the pirate sites and their hosting providers directly, hoping to achieve results.

Thus far, little is known about the effectiveness of these measures. In theory, takedowns are supposed to lead to limited availability of pirate sources and a subsequent increase in legitimate sales. But does it really work that way?

To find out more, researchers from the University of Warsaw, Poland, set up a field experiment. They reached out to several major publishers and partnered with an anti-piracy outfit, to test whether takedown efforts have a measurable effect on legitimate book sales.

The study only takes printed books into account, since the Polish e-book market is rather small, and statistically reliable sales data is difficult to obtain.

One-Year Takedown Experiment

The research methodology for this study is quite straightforward. In total, 12 prominent publishers took part, of which three dropped out. The publishers shared between 5 and 53 book titles, which were assigned to a takedown group or a control, for which no takedown notices were sent.

The group assignment wasn’t completely random. Instead, books were matched in pairs based on characteristics such as price, format, and previous sales figures, to remove as much noise as possible.

After the books were assigned, those listed in the takedown group were shared with the Polish anti-piracy outfit Plagiat.pl, which started protecting these works. For the remaining books, no action was taken. In total, Plagiat.pl found pirated copies on 53 sites and continually issued takedown notices for a full year.

Takedowns Were Effective, Sales Trend Up

After the research was completed, three assistants were asked to conduct online searches to confirm whether it was harder to find pirated copies ‘protected’ books online. That was clearly the case, as fewer copies were spotted, and it also took longer to find them

The effect of these successful takedowns didn’t clearly translate to sales of print books, however. While the researchers found a small positive effect in the takedown category, it wasn’t pronounced enough to be statistically significant.

Non-significant differences between experimental treatment (ET) & control (CT)
 

Only after the researchers tried a Bayesian analysis, adding data from previous research, did they find an uptick in book sales.

“We were able to substantially curb the unauthorized distribution, which resulted in a small, positive effect on sales,” the researchers write.

“While using classical analysis we found it not to be significantly different from zero, a Bayesian approach using previous ‘piracy’ studies to generate a prior led to the conclusion that protecting from piracy resulted in a significant sales boost of about 9 per cent.”

Open Ending

The paper attributes the lack of a stronger initial result to the relatively low sample size. With more books, it would have been easier to get a more definite answer. However, the positive direction doesn’t contradict earlier research.

For example, a previous study found that takedown notices can lead to an increase in sales of e-books, which are digital, and therefore a more direct substitute for pirated copies.

Strong results or not, the researchers believe that their work is an important contribution to the existing literature. Piracy research typically relies on before-after comparisons, while this study allowed results to be compared during the same time period, with a full control group.

In the end, however, many questions remain unanswered, so follow-up research is warranted. It would be interesting to see the same approach in countries where e-books are more prevalent too.

Since the major publishers are now heavily involved in takedown efforts, they might be interested to see if they get a decent return on their investment? After all, sending takedown notices typically isn’t free.

—

A copy of the paper, published in a recent edition of the Journal of the Economic Science Association is available online here.

Hardy, W., Krawczyk, M. & Tyrowicz, J. Internet “piracy” and book sales: a field experiment. J Econ Sci Assoc (2024)

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Major rightsholders are constantly seeking tougher legislation, more effective anti-piracy tools, and enhanced cooperation with governments and other stakeholders.

Even in countries where authorities view protection of intellectual property rights as a priority, achieving any of the above usually involves significant periods of negotiation. In Asia, where attitudes to IP crime vary considerably from one country to the next, tackling piracy may not be out of the question but may be considered less of a priority than other crime.

Thailand’s Perfect Storm

In Thailand, where anti-piracy operations are already more common than in most of its neighbors, legal Premier League streams are readily available at affordable prices.

Nevertheless, the piracy problem persists year after year, in part due to Thailand’s prohibition of most forms of gambling. In the absence of legitimate businesses to separate gamblers from their money, organized crime offers the forbidden fruit via illegal websites, with pirated Premier League live streams laid out like a red carpet.

The use of pirated content, to promote and support crimes typically considered to be more serious, provides rightsholders with a golden opportunity to place copyright infringement in the same conversation as illegal gambling and money laundering. An operation carried out by the government’s Department of Special Investigation (DSI) this week shows how effective that can be.

DSI Raids 21 Locations Across Thailand

According to the DSI, an investigation uncovered a network of sites broadcasting live Premier League matches for free. These streams were used to attract potential gamblers who were greeted with banner ads and links to sites, including those operated from other countries, ready to take their bets.

The DSI says that Thai nationals and foreigners, mostly poor with no fixed jobs, operated more than 100 ‘mule’ accounts through which revenue from illegal gambling was processed.

To tackle all of the above, a joint operation on July 31 under the Ministry of Home Affairs, saw the DSI and the Minburi Metropolitan Police carry out raids at 21 locations in several regions of Thailand.

Image credits: DSI

The suspects reportedly operated around 10 websites from an office in the Minburi district of Bangkok.

A document obtained by TorrentFreak reveals several domain names including TVsod.com, Bee789.com, Ballza.com, 7mscorethai.com, 7mscorethai.net, Dooballdottink.com, Suckballhd.com, Amloin789.com and 7upth.com. At the time of writing, none are operational.

“Two suspects were arrested: Mr. Athiwat (surname withheld) and Mr. Yutthaphong (surname withheld),” a DSI statement reads.

“They were arrested in front of the Songkhla Provincial Court, Bo Yang Subdistrict, Mueang Songkhla District, Songkhla Province, for the offense of jointly violating the copyright of others for commercial purposes by publishing creative works such as movies and artworks without permission.”

The authorities say that the arrested men are programmers, responsible for running the servers used to provide the pirated match streams and operating ‘mule’ accounts for transferring money. The second suspect is also accused of receiving money from gambling websites.

No Longer Working at the Car Wash

A video released by the authorities on social media shows a press conference and various clips from one of the raided locations.

That appears to be a car wash and according to information made available separately, may have been involved in the supply/distribution of pirated Premier League streams.

The scale of the law enforcement response suggests that washing cars probably wasn’t the extent of the business, butt that appears to be true of other images from the raids made available by DSI. That includes the image below which doesn’t appear to have an official explanation beyond being taken as part of the raids.

The number of graphics cards tends to point in one direction, so additional offenses may be announced at a later date. In any event, whether from the car wash or elsewhere, the DSI is advising those intending to make a clean getaway to reconsider.

“In this search and arrest operation, the Department of Special Investigation would like to inform those involved or suspects with arrest warrants who intend to flee, to surrender or provide information to enter the justice process, because the Department of Special Investigation will not exempt offenders from prosecution.”

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Similar to other user-generated content platforms, X allows people to freely share content online.

This includes text, images, music, video, and live streams. In some cases, content is shared by users of X without first obtaining permission from rightsholders.

Over the years, various parties have called out Twitter/X over alleged copyright infringement. Research published by the EU Intellectual Property Office found that X is rife with piracy-related discussions. U.S. lawmakers, meanwhile, suggested that piracy is part of the company’s business model.

Last year, these complaints resulted in a lawsuit, filed by the major music labels. The companies accused Elon Musk’s X Corp of “breeding” mass copyright infringement and demanded damages, which could reach $250 million. The lawsuit continues as copyright pressure continues to build.

Sports Leagues and Broadcasters Demand Action

This week, AP reported that a group of sports leagues and broadcasters had contacted X CEO Linda Yaccarino, urging the platform to take live-streaming piracy more seriously. The letter, signed by the Premier League, LaLiga, Bundesliga, Serie A, UEFA, CONMEBOL, DAZN, Sky, beIN, DirecTV and Movistar Plus+, claims that the platform is falling short on its enforcement actions.

X is legally obliged to process DMCA takedown notices. While the company stopped releasing transparency reports after Elon Musk took over, the company hasn’t halted this practice. However, the letter, which appears to address Musk too, suggests that technical support for rightsholders decreased after he acquired Twitter.

“X’s approach to taking down unlawful live content notified to them is woefully insufficient and inadequate,” the letter notes. “Critically, since you acquired the platform, we have witnessed a demoralizing reduction in technical support making it ever more difficult to engage with the platform in any kind of meaningful discussion on this topic.”

‘X: The Home of Social Media Piracy’

While all social media platforms have to deal with piracy, the letter complains that X’s response to the problem falls short. This, purportedly, gives pirates the idea that they can abuse the platform without serious repercussions.

According to the rightsholders, the problem is getting worse, evidenced by an increased number of pirated live-streams on the platform. At the same time, moderation efforts have reportedly decreased.

“X is increasingly the home of unlawful social media piracy,” the letter reads.

The rightsholders are calling for a meeting with X to discuss these matters. Ideally, they want X to turn the tide by taking piracy more seriously, while meeting its obligations under the Digital Services Act. No concrete measures are mentioned, but the DSA calls for increased takedown transparency and prioritizing takedowns by ‘trusted flaggers’.

META and YouTube Do Better

The AP hasn’t released the letter in full, so it’s unknown whether it includes more concrete demands. What’s clear, however, is that X stands out in comparison to other platforms, with rightsholders stating that it “lacks many of the features which other responsible social media operators deploy to combat piracy.”

This notion is supported by Cameron Andrews, Legal Director at BeIN, who addressed X’s shortcomings in a BroadcastPro article yesterday.

“While some of the big players like META and YouTube have worked with rights owners to reduce the availability of pirated live content on their platforms, others like X, are doing very little,” Andrews writes.

During the Euro 2024 football championship this summer, BeIN identified 1,198 illegal streams, with hundreds of thousands of unauthorized viewers tuning in. Ideally, these streams should be shut down near instantly.

“In the absence of any effective cooperation from X, there is very little that rights owners can do to prevent the massive abuse of broadcast rights in this way,” BeIN’s anti-piracy director notes.

Just how receptive X is to this critique has yet to be seen. The company hasn’t officially commented on the matter, and Elon Musk hasn’t weighed in yet either. However, he previously made it clear that he’s not a fan of broad takedown measures.

Musk’s 2022 Tweet

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On June 24, 2024, the RIAA announced two separate copyright infringement lawsuits targeting what many believe are the most impressive services in the generative AI music market.

Unchartered Labs, the owner of Udio, was sued in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. At the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the target was Suno, Inc. the company behind the AI platform of the same name.

Plaintiffs including UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Sony Music Entertainment, Atlantic Records and Warner Records, dominate both lawsuits, which contain broadly similar claims against both AI companies. The labels claim that Udio and Suno “copied decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings” and then ingested those copies into AI models to generate outputs that “imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings” for the purpose of generating profit.

The labels claim that both businesses “exploit copyrighted sound recordings without permission” in support of services that threaten to “displace the genuine human artistry that is at the heart of copyright protection.” Any attempt to mount defenses based on fair use, the labels warned, would end in failure.

AI Companies Confidently Answer Respective Complaints

Given the similarities in the labels’ complaints, Udio and Suno have taken the logical step of consolidating their respective defenses at Latham & Watkins LLP, an international law firm with a specialist artificial intelligence team. Filed earlier today, Udio and Suno’s individual answers have much in common, as one would expect given the nature of the complaints.

Details specific to each case see the answers diverge on occasion but where it really matters, Udio and Suno are not only in lockstep but seemingly brimming with confidence.

In opening preliminary statements, the companies explain that their respective platforms are tools for making new music, original music, and that’s how they’re being used; to create “new songs that didn’t and often couldn’t previously exist.”

“Like a human musician, [Suno/Udio] did not develop its capabilities in a vacuum. It is the product of extensive analysis and study of the building blocks of music: what various genres and styles sound like; how songs in those genres and styles are harmonized and structured; the characteristic timbres of the instruments and vocalizations in those genres and styles; and so on,” the answers begin.

“Those genres and styles—the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music—are not something that anyone owns. Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself.”

Labels Control Using Copyright, No Libraries of Music Exist

The AI companies are not the first to describe the plaintiff RIAA labels as dominating forces in the music industry. Claims that these copyright lawsuits, like many that preceded them, are ultimately about control rather than infringement, are in no way unique either. Yet, in these lawsuits, unlike any others before them, potential loss of control meets non-typical copyright infringement claims, as both answers explain.

“[The labels] frame their concern as one about ‘copies’ of their recordings made in the process of developing the technology — that is, copies never heard or seen by anyone, made solely to analyze the sonic and stylistic patterns of the universe of pre-existing musical expression. But what the major record labels really don’t want is competition.”

The labels’ position is that any competition must be legal, and the AI companies state quite clearly that the law permits the use of copyrighted works in these circumstances. Suno and Udio also make it clear that snippets of copyrighted music aren’t stored as a library of pre-existing content in the neural networks of their AI models, “outputting a collage of ‘samples’ stitched together from existing recordings” when prompted by users.

No Storage of Music, Only Information About Musical Styles

“[The neural networks were] constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings,” Suno explains.

“From analyzing their constitutive elements, the model derived a staggeringly complex collection of statistical insights about the auditory characteristics of those recordings — what types of sounds tend to appear in which kinds of music; what the shape of a pop song tends to look like; how the drum beat typically varies from country to rock to hip-hop; what the guitar tone tends to sound like in those different genres; and so on.”

These models are vast stores, not of copyrighted music, the defendants say, but information about what musical styles consist of, and it’s from that information new music is made.

Input to AI Was Fair Use, AI Output is Non-Infringing

Most copyright lawsuits in the music industry are about reproduction and public distribution of identified copyright works, but that’s certainly not the case here.

“The Complaint explicitly disavows any contention that any output ever generated by Udio has infringed their rights. While it includes a variety of examples of outputs that allegedly resemble certain pre-existing songs, the Complaint goes out of its way to say that it is not alleging that those outputs constitute actionable copyright infringement.”

With Udio declaring that, as a matter of law, “that key point makes all the difference,” Suno’s conclusion is served raw.

“That concession will ultimately prove fatal to Plaintiffs’ claims. It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product.”

Noting that Congress enacted the first copyright law in 1791, Suno says that in the 233 years since, not a single case has ever reached a contrary conclusion.

In Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., copying all the books in numerous university libraries, to create a commercial, full-text searchable index, was found to be fair use. The same conclusion was reached in Kelly v. Arriba SoftCorp, where copying vast amounts of online images to create thumbnails was deemed transformative fair use. Likewise, A.V. ex rel. Vanderhye v. iParadigms, where copying students’ papers into a plagiarism tool was also deemed fair use.

Labels Own Copyrighted Music, Nobody Owns Musical Styles

In addition to addressing allegations unique to their individual cases, the AI companies accuse the labels of various types of anti-competitive behavior. Imposing conditions to prevent streaming services obtaining licensed music from smaller labels at lower rates, seeking to impose a “no AI” policy on licensees, to claims that they “may have responded to outreach from potential commercial counterparties by engaging in one or more concerted refusals to deal.”

The defendants say this type of behavior is fueled by the labels’ dominant control of copyrighted works and by extension, the overall market. Here, however, ownership of copyrighted music is trumped by the existence and knowledge of musical styles, over which nobody can claim ownership or seek to control.

“No one owns musical styles. Developing a tool to empower many more people to create music, by scrupulously analyzing what the building blocks of different styles consist of, is a quintessential fair use under longstanding and unbroken copyright doctrine.

“Plaintiffs’ contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values.”

Suno and Udio’s answers to the RIAA’s lawsuits are available here (1,2, pdf)

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Three years after the raids that dismantled his Megaupload empire, it was clear that Kim Dotcom was digging in for the long haul.

Whether even he anticipated just how long that haul would be is unclear. Having taken every imaginable step to make his prosecution and likely extradition as difficult as possible, it certainly can’t be ruled out.

For Dotcom, information has proven to be a valuable and flexible commodity; in 2015 he made dozens of requests to numerous government departments to gain what he described as ‘urgent’ access to information to assist in his looming extradition defense.

Vexatious Requests Denied

With Dotcom’s case already a political hot potato, decisions were made to transfer these requests, mostly under s39 of the Privacy Act, to then-Solicitor General Chris Finlayson. Due to their broad scope, allegedly including demands for trivial information, Finlayson labeled the requests frivolous and ultimately vexatious.

The Solicitor General noted that the July 2015 information requests were labeled urgent because Dotcom’s extradition eligibility hearing was due to take place in September at the District Court. However, the nature of the requests led him to conclude that their true purpose was to disrupt that hearing and since they weren’t made in good faith, he rejected them all.

Dotcom Takes Legal Action

Dotcom denied he had an ulterior motive and followed up with legal action, claiming that the government was holding back information to which he was legally entitled.

In Dotcom v Crown Law Office [2018] NZHRRT 7 (pdf), the Human Rights Review Tribunal found that the Crown had indeed interfered with Kim Dotcom’s privacy by rejecting what was described as “multiple, near identical, Privacy Act requests made to all Ministers and nearly every government department for all personal information held about him.”

For “loss of dignity or injury to feelings” Dotcom won NZ$60,000 in damages plus another NZ$30,000 to compensate for the lack of disclosure. The Crown appealed that decision and in September 2018 the matter was heard at the High Court in Wellington.

High Court Sides With Solicitor-General

The High Court agreed with the Solicitor-General, noting that the requests were transferred for lawful reasons. The Court described the earlier damages award in favor of Dotcom as “wholly erroneous.” There was no evidence to show that the information being sought was even relevant to the extradition proceedings, the High Court ruled.

Months earlier, the government had actually started to respond to Dotcom’s requests and by mid-June 2018, “tranches of information” had been handed over to Dotcom, with a few exceptions for legal reasons.

Nevertheless, the High Court’s decision in October 2018 was labeled “a bad day for human rights” by Dotcom, who took his many grievances to the Court of Appeal.

Court of Appeal Sides With Dotcom

The Court of Appeal eventually sided with Dotcom and, by broad extension, the decision in his favor at the Human Rights Review Tribunal earlier. The transfer of the information requests between government departments breached Dotcom’s privacy, the Court of Appeal confirmed. All that remained was to determine the scale of Dotcom’s damages award.

Having previously ruled in favor of Dotcom with an award of NZ$90,000, in February 2022 the Tribunal decided that this time around, Dotcom wouldn’t receive a penny. In response, Dotcom appealed once more to the High Court, but it also declined to award him damages. When Dotcom applied for leave to appeal the High Court’s decision at the Court of Appeal, the High Court rejected that too.

Application for Special Leave to Appeal

Never one to give up, Dotcom filed an application at the Court of Appeal. He requested special leave to appeal the decision of the High Court, which had dismissed his appeal against the decision of the Human Rights Review Tribunal, which had awarded him zero damages.

Late last month, Dotcom’s application for special leave to appeal was declined by the Court of Appeal. The reasoning behind that decision is laid out in considerable detail in the court’s decision, which is linked below.

What is clear, however, is that Dotcom’s focus on receiving an award for damages for “loss of benefit” under New Zealand’s Privacy Act, concerned his inability to use the information requested during the extradition proceedings. That failed to move the needle at the Court of Appeal.

“It is clear from the various judgments given in the extradition proceedings that there would have been no benefit to Mr Dotcom if he had received the information requested at the time the extradition proceedings were underway. The Courts consistently held that the peripheral matters raised by Mr Dotcom were irrelevant to the extradition process, given the Court’s limited role in determining a person’s eligibility for surrender,” the Court of Appeal’s decision reads.

“Following the Tribunal complaint decision, Mr Dotcom sought to raise before this Court the fact that the Tribunal had found that there had been an interference with his privacy and had awarded him [NZ]$90,000 in damages for breach of the 1993 Act. Mr Dotcom argued that the Tribunal complaint decision was relevant to the extradition hearing, because it confirmed an abuse of process that would undermine public confidence in the judicial system.

“This Court disagreed. It noted that the conduct at issue did not come close to establishing the high threshold required to stay extradition proceedings and that the attempt to rely on it for this purpose was misconceived.”

Tactics Noted But Ultimately Unsuccessful

Other matters were also considered by the Court, none of which went in Dotcom’s favor. In closing, the Court of Appeal made a general assessment of events relating to this application. From a few steps back, attributing it to most side issues raised by the defense, before numerous courts in more recent years, might not be an especially big stretch.

“This Court’s primary function is to clarify the law. It is not every alleged error of law that is of such importance, either generally or to the parties, as to justify the further pursuit of issues which have already been considered on multiple occasions. That is very much the case with the present application,” the decision reads.

In the absence of “any other reason” that would make it appropriate to grant Dotcom special leave to appeal, the application was denied.

The decision is available here (pdf)

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is known to be very protective of its intellectual property rights.

Using an image of the Olympic rings or even just the word ‘Olympic’ can lead to legal trouble, especially when use takes place in a commercial context.

Most valuable, however, are IOC’s broadcasting rights. With literally billions of dollars at stake, the IOC and its licensing partners are doing everything in their power to prevent people from enjoying their events without permission.

From Torrents to Streaming

The IOC doesn’t shy away from using its power and influence to aid this cause. Sixteen years ago, for example, it reached out to the Swedish Government, asking for assistance to remove pirated Olympic broadcasts from The Pirate Bay.

Sweden couldn’t directly help with this problem, as it lacked any control over the notorious torrent site. The Pirate Bay itself didn’t feel threatened by the diplomatic pressure either. On the contrary, it temporarily renamed itself The Beijing Bay.

Today, Olympic piracy remains a problem, but the nature of the threat has evolved. Instead of worrying about torrents, the IOC sees live-streaming portals as the menace du jour. Unlike torrents, which can take a while to download, live streams directly compete with regular broadcasts.

Thousands of Olympic Takedowns

Last week, we already reported that the IOC, alongside others, obtained a site blocking order at the Paris Judicial Court. This order requires the large French ISPs to block access to several pirate streaming sites and IPTV providers.

While the blocking order is currently in effect, it is limited to 25 domain names and only applies to France. The Olympic Committee didn’t stop there though, it also enlisted anti-piracy partner Friend MTS to issue more traditional DMCA takedown requests.

Most of these DMCA efforts take place outside the public eye. With help from Google’s transparency report and the Lumen Database, we can nonetheless get a glimpse of the takedown action.

These public data reveal that IOC has sent numerous takedown notices this month, together targeting thousands of URLs. The notices request Google to remove these links from its search engine, to make it harder for the public to find pirated Olympics streams.

“Please note that the IOC is the owner of all rights in and to the Olympic Games and the Olympic Properties and, in particular, regarding the audio-visual content produced for the Olympic Summer Games Paris 2024,” IOC writes

“Such Olympic content may not be transmitted or communicated via the internet or any other interactive media or electronic medium without the express prior written approval of the IOC, which in accordance with our records, has not been granted to you.”

The Pirate Bay’s No Longer a Serious Threat

Thus far, the IOC has asked Google to remove 5,907 URLs from its search engine. The list is dominated by pirate streaming sites such as Antenasports.ru, Buff-streams.net, Francemag.com, and Watchsportnow.com. Interestingly, we didn’t spot a single torrent site.

Due to the delayed nature of torrents and direct downloads, in combination with widely available pirated live streams, it makes sense that sites such as The Pirate Bay are no longer considered a significant threat.

In fact, aside from the opening ceremony, we haven’t spotted any regularly scheduled ‘torrents’ of Olympic competitions. That’s a far cry from a decade ago when the original EZTV team openly revolted against IOC’s anti-piracy tactics by sharing numerous Olympic torrents.

“[T]he IOC is purely interested in making as much money from broadcasting as possible. We think differently, we believe everyone should be able to see these events freely and inspire future sport heroes!” EZTV told us at the time.

Fast-forward a decade, and the new EZTV team has no Olympic coverage and there is no “Paris Bay” either. IOC is still very much concerned with piracy, of course, but has shifted to a new set of targets.

Times change, but some things will always be the same.

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After receiving an anonymous tip in 2019, anti-piracy group Nordic Content Protection (NCP), and members including pay-TV company C More (previously Canal+), Warner Bros. Discovery and streaming service Viaplay, launched a pirate IPTV investigation.

NCP received a similar tip in 2020, this time from police in the city of Gävle. They were passing on the details of another anonymous tip detailing the activities of a suspected pirate IPTV network. After a period of surveillance, which included wiretapping an unknown number of suspects, police executed warrants at two addresses, one in Gävle and the other in Sandviken.

Two suspected operators were detained along with evidence that included 47 gold bars, an expensive whiskey collection, around $25,000 in cash, and roughly $41,000 in bitcoin.

At the Stockholm District Court’s Patent and Market Court in October 2023, the men were found guilty of criminal copyright infringement and sentenced to prison. They were also held jointly and severally liable for damages totaling SEK 196,247,000 ($18 million), payable to C More, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Viaplay.

The Inevitable Appeal

In the belief that the sentences were too lenient, the prosecutor asked the Patent and Market Appeal Court to increase the sentences of the defendants, who in court records are identified by the initials S.Ö. and JL.

S.Ö and JL asked the Patent and Market Appeal Court to acquit them, dismiss the copyright holders’ claims for damages and the requirement to pay their legal costs, plus a full dismissal of a confiscation order against seized IPTV boxes.

In common with the trial at the lower court, the men denied claims that they retransmitted the plaintiffs’ TV broadcasts. JL appears to have conceded limited involvement in IPTV sales, handling just a few clients via a guest login to a service he’d previously handed over to someone else, plus sales of unmodified IPTV boxes.

Evidence showed that during the raids on the men’s homes, no ‘outward flow’ was identified from the suspects’ computers. However, one of JL’s computers contained software “that enabled reception and streaming of IPTV.” Evidence showed that S.Ö. paid for server space while JL had purchased server licenses and software subscriptions for receiving and distributing IPTV.

The content of chat messages and their handling of payments confirmed to the satisfaction of the court that the men were indeed involved in IPTV. All that remained was to determine the scale of the offending.

Thousands of Customers, But How Many Thousands?

The prosecutor’s case against the men called on significant evidence that reportedly left little doubt that they were closely involved with all aspects of the alleged IPTV business. To demonstrate that the operation distributed content illegally to many users, the prosecution partly relied on photographs taken during the raids, including those that claimed to show how many users S.Ö and JL serviced on the platform.

“According to the prosecutor, the photographs show that S.Ö. at the time of the crackdown had 4,619 users in the network and that JL had 8,303 users in the network, i.e. their network had a total of 12,992 users,” the court’s decision reads.

Evidence Fell Short

But there was a problem. S.Ö. and JL informed the court that the photographs, which showed IPTV panel software Ministra (formerly known as Stalker portal), did not show the number of users but rather the number of ‘events’ generated by users. That cast doubt on the claim that the service had close to 13,000 users.

Instead, several pieces of evidence backed up the defendants’ assertion that their platform had around 5,000 users, a claim that was first made in the anonymous tip received by NCP back in 2019.

Without making any changes to the substance of the underlying judgment, the Court of Appeal recalculated the damages payable to the rightsholders. From just over SEK 196,000,000 (US$18,210,000) the new damages amount of just under SEK 114,000,000 (US$10,591,000) trimmed the original amount by roughly US$7 million.

The decision may be appealed before August 2, 2024 (pdf)

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Internet infrastructure service Cloudflare serves millions of customers around the globe, providing various connectivity and security features.

When it comes to DMCA takedown requests, the company has always drawn a clear line; when it doesn’t store any content for a customer, it will simply forward DMCA takedown requests to the customer’s hosting company.

Ideally, rightsholders would like Cloudflare to take a more active stance. Since popular pirate sites, including The Pirate Bay, use the CDN service, they argue it would be helpful if Cloudflare disabled access to infringing content though its platform.

Cloudflare, however, sees itself as a ‘mere conduit’ service that merely passes on bits. This means that it is not required to take action against third-party infringements directly, unless content is permanently stored on its servers, which is rare.

DMCA Subpoena

Rightsholders are well aware of Cloudflare’s stance. While there have been plenty of complaints in the past, the status quo remains. Groups such as the Alliance of Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) still send DMCA takedown notices, but that’s mostly as a prelude to sending §512(h) DMCA subpoenas.

Grounded in the same law, DMCA subpoenas allow rightsholders to request the personal details of Cloudflare customers who are allegedly engaged in pirating activities. These subpoenas don’t require judicial oversight and Cloudflare generally complies with them, handing over customer data.

Earlier this month, a seemingly obscure DMCA subpoena request was submitted at a California federal court. The request came from J18 Publishing, the owner of Doujin.io. With the subpoena, J18 hopes to uncover the identity of the alleged operator of pirate site Nhentai.net.

Nhentai is by no means a small site. With more than 70 million monthly visits, the free hentai manga and doujinshi reader has a sizable audience. Understandably, rightsholders would like to know who’s running the site.

As is often the case, a court clerk swiftly signed off on the subpoena paperwork, requiring Cloudflare to comply. In this case, however, that’s not going to be straightforward.

Improper

A few days after the DMCA subpoena was issued, lawyers representing Nhentai slammed on the brakes. They don’t want any personal data to be disclosed and argue that the subpoena should have never been granted.

Nhentai asks the court to quash the subpoena for several reasons. For one, it argues that these DMCA subpoenas are not intended for use against companies that operate as mere conduit providers.

In its defense, Nhentai cites several precedents where courts have concluded that DMCA subpoenas don’t apply to mere conduit services. This includes the RIAA vs. Verizon case.

“In analyzing the issue in a very detailed fashion, Courts have quashed §512(h) subpoenas where they were served on a party that was not ‘engaged in storing on its servers material that is infringing or is the subject of infringing activity’,” Nhentai writes, adding another example.

“The D.C. Circuit further held that ‘§512(h) does not authorize the issuance of a subpoena to an ISP acting as a mere conduit for the transmission of information sent by others’.”

Mere Conduit

As highlighted earlier, Cloudflare has clearly positioned itself as a ‘mere conduit’ provider under the DMCA. Nhentai argues the same, and stresses that DMCA subpoenas are not applicable for that reason.

“Cloudflare is a §512(a) ISP that acts only as a conduit with respect to Nhentai.net, and accordingly, it is not properly subject to subpoena under §512(h). Specifically, images from Nhentai.net never pass through or are stored on Cloudflare servers in any form.”

Nhentai further notes that the subpoena is too broad, arguing that the owners of the domain name are not the infringers. In addition, the subpoena would violate the owners’ right to anonymous speech.

Thus far, Cloudflare itself hasn’t objected to DMCA subpoenas, and this case is no exception. Courts have recently quashed DMCA subpoenas directed at mere conduit ISPs, reiterating that they don’t apply to companies that store no content, so it will be interesting to see how Nhentai’s challenge pans out.

Fringe Case, Landmark Decision?

For now, the California federal court has stayed the matter, meaning that Cloudflare doesn’t have to comply with the subpoena. Meanwhile, J18 Publishing has two weeks to argue why it should be granted after all.

While Nhentai operates in a fringe corner of the broader piracy landscape, this case could have far-reaching consequences. If the court quashes the subpoena, similar efforts from other mainstream rightsholder groups, including ACE/MPA, may have to be reevaluated too.

In recent years, DMCA subpoenas have become one of the primary tools in the anti-piracy toolbox, so the outcome of this case may eventually turn out to be a landmark decision.

Given what’s at stake, it’s possible that other rightsholders may want to intervene in the matter, and Cloudflare may want to share its thoughts on the matter too.

—

A copy of Nhentai’s motion to quash the DMCA subpoena is available here (pdf)

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Depending on personalities and intake of alcohol, a karaoke night can see people demanding to be next on the mic or scurrying away before they’re forced to do something they’ll later regret.

According to reports, karaoke in the West may be set for a resurgence but in Asia, karaoke (’empty orchestra’) never went away. In Japan, it still receives an 80%+ approval rating among high school students with around half of 20 to 24-year-olds regularly taking part.

With a global market reported to be worth around $5 billion, karaoke may make people smile but for investors it’s a serious business.

Hong Kong Customs: Operation Magpie

Cases reported by Hong Kong Customs over the past month include raids on drugs labs, convictions for laundering huge sums of money, two investigations into large-scale tobacco smuggling, and an operation to combat the provision of infringing karaoke songs. While some may feel the latter is in strange company, the karaoke operation appears to have been allocated plenty of resources.

Described as a “territory-wide enforcement operation” it ran for almost a month (July 2 to July 25) and targeted restaurants and so-called party rooms, which are often booked on a private basis by groups of friends. According to the official report, Customs didn’t hold back.

“During the operation, Customs officers raided 31 party rooms and one restaurant in various districts, including Kwun Tong, Causeway Bay, Tsuen Wan and Mong Kok. A total of 39 sets of karaoke devices used for playing suspected infringing songs, four sets of game consoles with suspected pirated electronic games, and a batch of audio and video equipment and network devices were seized.

“The total estimated market value is approximately $1.1 million (US$140,820),” Customs reports.

A raided room (Credit: Hong Kong Customs/screen enhanced by TF)

While music rightsholders were almost certainly involved in the operation, none are mentioned by name. In the major markets most music falls under the control of less than a handful of headline recording labels, so a rough guess might not be too wide of the mark.

18 People Arrested

Hong Kong Customs reports that eleven men and seven women, aged between 23 and 49, were arrested on suspicion of violating copyright law and/or trading law. Seven of those arrested were in charge of running venues, six were company directors, and five are described as “shop proprietors.”

Two of those arrested were charged with copyright offenses, while the remainder were released on bail pending further investigation. Customs reports that the investigation remains ongoing, so further arrests aren’t being ruled out.

Interesting equipment seized

A basic pirate karaoke setup used to consist of a hardware player or PC, fueled by rows of cumbersome VCDs carried around in a big bag or kept in some kind of storage box. After switching to DVDs, there was much less weight to carry or space to find; with the advent of USB drives, much less still.

The nature of every raided venue isn’t provided in the report. However, customs say they uncovered something more advanced than usual.

“[C]ustoms detected the first-ever case of providing infringing karaoke songs by using streaming technology. Through in-depth investigation and with the assistance of copyright owners, Customs officers raided one data center and four party rooms involved in the case, seizing five karaoke devices preloaded with suspected infringing karaoke songs and a batch of network equipment.”

On closer inspection, it’s possible that one or two of the photos supplied by customs show examples of the streaming system in operation.

Streaming Karaoke Piracy?

According to our rough translation, the text in the top left of the image says “Intelligent Song Request System” while the text on the right suggests a connection to WeChat.

The second image comes with no specific explanation either but the text at the top of the screen is not dissimilar to that highlighted above. When translated it says, “Welcome to the HD intelligent song request system” while other parts of the screen appear to have been covered for security reasons.

More Karaoke Streaming Piracy?

Potential punishments for operating a pirate karaoke system of any kind are fairly severe in Hong Kong.

Under local copyright law, “[A]ny person who, without the license of the copyright owner of a copyright work, possesses infringing copies of a copyright work for the purpose of, or in the course of, any trade or business with the view to it being used by any person commits an offense. The maximum penalty upon conviction is a fine of $50,000 (US$6,400) per infringing copy and imprisonment for four years,” Hong Kong Customs notes.

Those who engage in unfair trade practices, “including making false trade descriptions in relation to service, commits an offence. The maximum penalty upon conviction is a fine of $500,000 (US$64,000) and imprisonment for five years.”

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As the home of Bollywood, India has a thriving movie industry that’s known all around the world.

At the same time, the country also has one of the highest piracy rates, which is seen as a major threat by industry insiders.

Following pressure from U.S. movie companies, India’s government recently agreed to update its Cinematograph Act to outlaw ‘cam’ piracy. Anyone recording or transmitting movies in a movie theater without permission now faces a three-year prison sentence.

The new anti-camming bill was implemented last year, which understandably makes the activity a higher priority for law enforcement. Criminal prosecutions are rare, however, and earlier this year international copyright groups complained that the law had yet to results in “meaningful steps” to deter piracy.

Movie Camming Arrest

Preventing movie piracy in a country with 1.4 billion people is a challenge indeed, but rightsholders must be pleased with an investigation that resulted in the arrest of a 33-year-old movie camming suspect late last week.

According to local news reports, an investigation by the Ernakulam city cyber police, headquartered in the office pictured below, led to the arrest of 33-year-old Jebe Stephan Raj.

The Madurai resident stands accused of various copyright-related violations. While the arrest itself is notable, the investigation leading up to it deserves to be highlighted as well.

CSI: India

The start of the case dates back to May of this year, when Supriya Menon, producer of the movie Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil, reported that the film had leaked on torrent sites and Telegram shortly after its premiere. This kick-started an investigation in which the police, assisted by other cyber experts, tried to identify the source.

With help from forensic watermarks, the investigation revealed that the pirated copy was recorded at the Ariesplex cinema in Thiruvananthapuram on May 16. While this information was useful, finding the cammer wasn’t straightforward, as there was no CCTV footage available.

“The CCTV footage was not available in the theater. Due to this, our investigation got stuck,” Mr. Vinod, the Cyber Police Station’s Sub-Inspector, told TNM.

The investigation didn’t end there, however. After analyzing the pirated film, investigators zoomed in for an enhanced view. With the movie theater now marked as a ‘crime scene’, the investigators used the camera angle to triangulate the seats from where the recording likely took place.

The potential seats were cross-referenced with ticketing data, which led to a phone number from outside the region. This number was more frequently used to book premiere tickets.

The owner of the phone number was tracked down, but since they didn’t travel to Thiruvananthapuram when the movie premiered, they couldn’t have recorded the pirated copy.

Instead of blowing their cover, the investigators decided to wait for the next time the same phone number booked a ticket. That came last week, for the ‘Raayan’ premiere at the Ariesplex cinema.

Arrest and Aftermath

The Ernakulam city cyber police alerted the local police about the situation and the 33-year-old man was arrested soon after he started recording the film. According to the police, the man used an iPhone 15, mounted on the cupholder with a tripod, to record the film.

The man reportedly confessed, also to his involvement with other recordings that previously surfaced online. According to some news reports, the suspect is described as an “admin” of the notorious pirate site TamilRockers, but we’ve seen no evidence for that.

Instead, it seems more plausible that the suspect was merely hired by outsiders to cam new films in exchange for money. That’s also what the local police report, according to TMN.

“He said he received instruction to record only using the latest iPhone and from a theater which has a good screen as well as sound quality. They used to pay him Rs 5,000 for recording each film,” police stated.

Needless to say, getting paid by someone to record a movie for roughly USD $60 is something different from being an administrator of one of the largest and most notorious Indian pirate sites. A follow-up investigation will likely reveal what role the defendant played exactly.

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

Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This week we have three newcomers on the list. “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on July 29 are:

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

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The promise that pretty much everything is available for free on the internet was one of the key driving forces behind surging uptake at the end of the century. The reality was more nuanced, of course.

The marketing and framing of this utopian vision relied on the relative naivety of most internet users. None were strangers to adverts appearing on TV, radio or in print, so the concept needed no explaining.

That advertising online wasn’t so passive, and over the next two decades would in some cases become an abusive, privacy-destroying nightmare, certainly wasn’t mentioned up front as part of the deal.

The revelation that adverts could be blocked edged into the mainstream around 15 years ago and developed into an industry in its own right. Easy to install, the AdBlock browser extension grew in popularity along with its rivals, leading to publishers of all kinds questioning their business models and whether ‘free’ even had a future.

Axel Springer Takes on Eyeo GmbH

German publisher Axel Springer, owner of brands including Bild and Die Welt, eventually decided that the ad blocking problem could be solved by its legal department. The company took legal action against Eyeo GmbH, the owner of what had become the multi-platform Adblock Plus, arguing that the software interfered with its business model.

After trips through regional courts and eventually Germany’s Supreme Court, in April 2018 Adblock Plus and Eyeo came out on top, having been found not in breach of competition law. After concluding that the solution to ad blocking must be available somewhere else in the law, Axel Springer filed a new lawsuit on new grounds.

The publisher claimed that AdBlock Plus “changed the programming code of websites thus directly accessing the legally protected offer of publishers.” In layman’s terms, by meddling with the appearance of the publisher’s website in users’ browsers, AdBlock Plus breached Axel Springer’s rights under copyright law. Eyeo dismissed the claim as “almost absurd” and Springer carried on regardless.

In January 2022, the Hamburg Regional Court decided that the publisher wasn’t entitled to an injunction; there was no unauthorized duplication and/or reworking of copyrighted computer programs as defined in copyright law, so neither Eyeo nor its users could be considered infringers.

“No company has the right to prohibit users from setting their own browser settings,” Eyeo declared after yet another win.

Axel Springer’s appeal meant that it would continue arguing to the contrary and at the Hamburg Higher Regional Court in 2023, the publisher lost and then appealed once again.

Federal Court of Justice (BGH) Must Decide

The case is now in the hands of the Federal Court of Justice (BGH). In advance of a hearing, the BGH summarized the matter as follows:

The plaintiff claims – as far as still relevant for the proceedings – that the programming of its websites constitutes computer programs within the meaning of Section 69a Paragraph 1 of the Copyright Act, to which it has exclusive rights of use.

 

When the web pages are called up by the web browser, the HTML file is transferred to the RAM on the user’s device. To display the HTML file, the web browser interprets its content, creating additional data structures. The plaintiff sees the influence on these data structures by the ad blocker as an unauthorized modification of a computer program within the meaning of Section 69c No. 2 of the Copyright Act. It is suing the defendant for an injunction and damages.

At a hearing last week, the BGH indicated that before making a decision, it would wait for the outcome in another case, one that began before the original Adblock first started to gain traction 15 years ago.

Waiting for Sony

After competition law had failed to produce results, Axel Springer referenced the Sony vs. Datel/Action Replay case after switching to copyright claims several years ago. With a decision in that case a decade and a half in the making, and seemingly headed in the wrong direction for Sony, this may be the last roll of the dice.

As detailed in our report early July, key questions in the Sony matter were previously referred by the BGH to the Court of Justice of the European Union for a preliminary ruling.

The similarities in the cases are striking; while both Adblock Plus and Datel’s Playstation Portable cheat device interfere with the eventual output of Springer’s website and Sony’s games respectively, neither do so by circumvention of technical measures, or by copying any copyrighted material.

What Would a Win Look Like?

Each case offers its own complications but in the case of Adblock Plus, Springer’s arguments seem uncomfortably close to the legality of running a firewall. At the very least, the question of who gets to decide what data is allowed to pass through a network Springer doesn’t own, to a computer it doesn’t own either, seems like an important one.

Yet, if Springer somehow wins and Adblock Plus is compelled to remove its ad servers from Adblock updates, it still won’t be able to prevent users from carrying out an easy DIY fix. And since its enforcement powers inside people’s homes borders on nil, in practical terms that’s just another loss to add to the list.

Worse still, a win would likely serve as motivation to ensure that alternative ad blocking lists, for all kinds of systems, are not just kept up to date, but that Springer websites always receive extra special attention.

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When it comes to the protection of its intellectual property rights, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is notoriously uncompromising. Hardly a surprise given the role the brand and other rights play in this global sporting event.

Non-Profits Always Worry About Piracy

With piracy always a concern to those at the top of the multi-billion dollar non-profit Olympic pyramid, those fears naturally filter down to other non-profit entities involved every four years.

Joining the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and International Paralympic Committee (IPC) is the Paris Organizing Committee for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games (COJOP2024). In keeping with tradition, these bodies have been closely monitoring the piracy situation, with French news outlet L’Informe suggesting that a list of problematic pirate sites and services was already being prepared in April.

Action in Paris

In mid-July, the IOC, IPC and COJOP2024, commenced legal action against the leading French ISPs. This is a required step in the site-blocking process but offers no threat to the ISPs themselves. In common with a growing number of ISPs internationally, French ISPs don’t oppose site-blocking actions, not least since in many cases they stand to benefit due to broadcasting deals.

At the Paris Judicial Court last Wednesday, the trio obtained an ISP blocking order. In their application the rightsholders informed the Court that around 30 domains that had previously shown infringing behavior were accessible in France.

On that basis they argued that the Court should order the ISPs to implement blocking measures, to prevent their customers from watching unlicensed streams of Olympic events.

One of the problem streaming sites

With those likely to request blocking now very familiar with the process, the Paris court had no problem issuing a dynamic injunction. These are flexible orders that authorize blocking measures against services detailed initially, but can be modified as required in response to countermeasures, most commonly the deployment of new domains.

The Olympic organizations will simply have to inform telecoms regulator Arcom of any new domains, and those will be added to the blocklist, probably quite quickly.

The domains are listed at the end of this report but it appears that several are already redirecting or have moved to new homes.

As shown below, at least one of the targets has no DNS records and according to traffic data, may have been abandoned in June.

The measures as awarded will time out on September 8, to coincide with the end of the 2024 event.

The list of domains, as reported by L’Informe, reads as follows:

Crichd.tv
Crichdplayer.com
Kkzb8.net
Hplayer.ggapk.net
Worldcupfree.com
Redditsoccerstream.online
Bobres.net
Ip.sltv.be
App.kiwi-ip.tv
Dfwu.link
Ip1.mypsx.net
Supremtv.fr
Iceflashott.com
66768-task.cdn-o2.me
Ott.drmouad.uk
Fr.4k-ott.xyz
Necroiptv.vom
Neczmabfa.to
Lightnings.live
Necstraz.to
Neczbm.to
Wishiptv.com
Xcvip.wishiptv.com
Tv.expressiptv.xyz
Greenlinetv.xyz

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The American copyright industry is one of the country’s primary exports, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Whether it’s movies, music, software or other goods, U.S. companies are among the global market leaders.

To protect the interests of these businesses around the world, copyright holder groups can count on help from the U.S. Government. The annual list of ‘notorious markets,’ for example, is a well-known diplomatic mechanism to encourage other countries to up their enforcement actions and improve laws.

The same is true for trade deals and other policies, which often require trade partners to take action in favor of copyright holder interests.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which represents the ESA, MPA, and RIAA, among others, has been the voice of major entertainment industries on this front. The Alliance regularly encourages the U.S. to further the international interests of its members, including in Africa.

The African Growth and Opportunity Act

A few weeks ago, the IIPA published its views on the latest eligibility review of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). This process, led by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), determines which sub-Saharan African countries can enjoy certain trade benefits or, on the other end of the spectrum, be sanctioned.

This isn’t the first review of its kind; we have reported on similar efforts in the past and the most recent review features much of the same critique.

IIPA is concerned that South Africa isn’t doing enough to deter copyright infringement. There are also grave concerns that proposed “fair use” exceptions, which are partly modeled after U.S. law but go further on some issues, could lead to problems in the African country.

The critique from rightsholders hasn’t gone unnoticed by South Africa. President Ramaphosa previously sent the Copyright Amendment Bill (CAB) back to Parliament for a thorough review. That was four years ago and the South African Government is now making it clear that it doesn’t intend to let external forces dictate its law.

South Africa Defends Broad Fair Use Exceptions

This week, the Government sent a response to the USTR addressing IIPA’s critique. It points out that the copyright law hasn’t been implemented yet, so it wouldn’t make sense for the U.S. to use it as a basis for sanctions.

Technicalities aside, South Africa openly rejects IIPA’s critique. The copyright group’s arguments are not new; they were discussed during open review processes and considered by parliament, which simply disagrees with the notion that broad fair use exceptions are a problem.

Specifically, IIPA complained that the new law would create an “overbroad amalgamation of copyright exceptions that includes an expansive ‘fair use’ rubric” that’s “appended to a large number of extremely open-ended new exceptions and limitations to copyright protection, resulting in an unclear thicket of exceptions and limitations.”

In short, this means that the existing ‘fair dealing’ language will be extended with many ‘fair use’ exceptions, allowing the public to use copyrighted material without being punished for it. This can be for educational purposes, for example, but also for personal use as long as it passes the four fair use factors, which also are used in the US.

Regardless of the details, the South African Government says that it doesn’t plan to go back to the drawing board again.

“The issues IIPA has raised are not new and have been addressed previously and the public participation processes in Parliament recently have considered them again,” South Africa writes.

Unlike the IIPA, the Government of South Africa believes that its fair use proposal will benefit society as a whole. Better yet, it may even have a positive effect on the economy.

“Fair dealing in our current Copyright Act is outdated, limited and static, and does not address the digital world. Fair use, on the other hand, is progressive, dynamic and future proof and ‘digital-friendly’.

“Globally, research has found that fair use has not impacted negatively on the economy. On the contrary, there is evidence that shows that countries with open exceptions and fair use have high levels of innovation, economic growth and development,” South Africa adds.

US-Inspired and Innovation-Friendly

In its letter, the South African Government notes that more regimes are moving away from a closed list of fair dealing exceptions, to a more open system that can deal with future technologies and innovation.

The United States has set the example in this regard, with its fair use language that has been pretty much unchanged for nearly half a century.

“It is a fact that fair use was coded in the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 and has not had to be amended, as it applies to new technologies as they arise,” South Africa writes.

“Other countries have also adopted fair use in their copyright laws and more countries are considering it, because it is ‘future-proof’ and benefits users and producers of information and knowledge. Its four factors give clarity to what can be used and reused.”

The letter makes it clear that the concerns of IIPA and other rightsholder groups have been noted, but no more than that. South Africa clearly wants to move forward and this direct pushback against the lingering demands of the copyright lobby shows that the time for negotiations and backroom meetings has passed.

The Copyright Amendment Bill was formally adopted by South Africa’s Parliament in February, and was sent to President Ramaphosa for approval.

—

A copy of IIPA’s original critique, submitted in early June, can be found here (pdf). This includes many other points and issues that we didn’t discuss. South Africa’s repsonse is available here (pdf).

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App stores are littered with apps that promise free access to music, but only few live up to expectations. Musi is one of them.

The music app made headlines in 2016 when its founders, who were teenagers at the time, presented their brainchild in an episode of the Canadian edition of Dragons’ Den.

In essence, the software itself is relatively simple. Musi can stream music, which it sources from YouTube, and allows users to create and share playlists. It essentially uses YouTube as a music library, without showing the video.

This functionality directly rivals other streaming apps such as Spotify. However, since content is sourced from YouTube, costs associated with payments to labels are absent from the Musi equation, and that means it’s much cheaper to run.

This business model is a win-win for Musi’s operators and the platform’s users. Music industry insiders, on the other hand, are less pleased. They describe the app as “parasitic”, a reference to the app’s reliance on YouTube content, which it allegedly obtains by circumventing the platform’s technical protection measures.

For Dragon’s Den judge Joe Mimran, potential challenges to the business proved too much. While he was initially interested in investing $125,000 in exchange for a 15 percent stake in the company, the entrepreneur eventually walked away from the deal due to legal concerns.

“I was advised that when companies such as Musi get to a critical size, they could be sued for past use by the publishers,” Mimran informed the Financial Post in 2016.

Musi’s Millions

Musi didn’t throw in the towel after this setback. The app, which was already operational, continued to grow its user base in Apple’s iOS store. In the years that followed, it was downloaded dozens of millions of times.

Currently, Musi is ranked 5th in the App Store’s music category with over 3.5 million mostly positive ratings. That’s truly remarkable for a bootstrapped company that relied on YouTube, without any direct licensing deals in place with the major labels.

Earlier this year, a Wired piece highlighted Musi’s success, while also shedding some light on the legal concerns. The piece doesn’t offer any conclusions, but it suggests that the app is making many millions of dollars by operating in a ‘gray area’.

At the headquarters of global music industry body IFPI, legal matters are black or white, however. The group has had the Musi app in its crosshairs for a while. Information reviewed by TorrentFreak shows that legal pressure is building.

IFPI Reports Musi to Apple

TorrentFreak learned that IFPI reported the Musi app to the App Store last summer. Apple had already removed Musi years ago but later reinstated it. With this new request, the music group hoped for a better outcome.

Four days after IFPI submitted its complaint, U.S. legal counsel for Musi Inc. reached out to IFPI, refuting its claims. Musi’s lawyer argued that the app was merely providing access to publicly available music, stressing that it doesn’t store any content on its servers.

It’s not clear whether Apple took any position in this dispute. We do know that the company, which typically has rigorous copyright standards, didn’t remove Musi from the app store.

Apple’s inaction shows that the legalities surrounding the software are certainly not straightforward. IFPI continued to press on, however, and they eventually booked a small success, which was noticeable for Musi users too.

Secret Sauce

After the initial back and forth in July last year proved unsuccessful, IFPI reached out to Musi’s law firm again in September. Among other things, the music group specifically called out Musi’s “secret sauce” feature which, purportedly, provided access to pre-release music.

The exact contents of the letter are unknown but, in October 2023, Musi permanently removed the “secret sauce” feature.

Meanwhile, IFPI continued to hammer on the precarious legal situation it believes Musi to be in. The group has two main arguments, starting with the claim that the app circumvents YouTube’s technical protection measures.

In addition, it argues that Musi infringes its members’ rights by communicating their works through ‘new means’ to a ‘new audience’.

Musi Inc, however, continues to refute these claims though its legal team and maintains that it operates within the boundaries of copyright law.

Escalation to Apply Maximum Pressure

The communication between IFPI, Musi, and Apple continued into 2024 and the status quo remains. Apple has decided to leave the matter open for now and Musi continues to add over a million new downloads per month, frustrating IFPI.

Around February, the music group proposed to escalate the matter, encouraging its members to help out by putting pressure on Apple, while also involving YouTube in the matter. The plans are as follows, paraphrased:

– Music companies might want to complain to Apple about Musi, using their existing contacts at the company.

– In addition, they should motivate YouTube to take an active stance against the app’s developers, and complain to Apple as well.

– IFPI, for its part, should inquire among legal contacts to see whether there’s a basis for a lawsuit against Musi.

These plans would use existing business relationships to tackle the Musi problem. Whether any of these suggestions were followed up, and if so, to what extent, is unknown. The proposal is a few months old by now and from the outside there doesn’t appear to be much movement. That could easily change, of course.

After more than a year, users of the Musi app haven’t noticed anything new since much of the pressure is applied behind closed doors. In itself that’s an interesting observation, as it makes one wonder what else is going on.

It’s clear, however, that IFPI can garner the full power of its high-profile record label members. These are also the names that are likely to be listed on a lawsuit, if it ever comes to that.

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To a greater or lesser extent and depending on region, rightsholders across all major industries are now regular participants in site-blocking actions.

Most blocking takes place to prevent access to movies and TV shows on static platforms such as torrent sites and streaming indexes, plus streaming platforms typically operated by IPTV providers offering live sports. These video-based sectors now account for the majority of blocking but the major recording labels, publishers, and video game companies are all still involved.

New Action By The Music Industry

In France, where rightsholders are taking small, incremental steps to make blocking easier and potentially more effective, the major recording labels have recently obtained permission from a Paris court to add even more domains to their ever-expanding blocklists.

First reported by French news outlet L’Informe, the blocking application was made under the umbrella of collection organization SCPP (Civil Society of Phonogram Producers), which represents major labels including Sony, Universal and Warner, plus hundreds of others.

The 40 targets are domains operated by familiar pirate sites or those that facilitate access to them. They include torrent9, cpasbien, yggtorrent, tirexo, zone-annuaire, and wawacity.

Also on the list, three proxy domains that until recently helped users to access the previously-blocked BitTorrent DHT index, Magnet DL. Since that site disappeared offline a few weeks ago, blocking these three proxies (magnetdl.unblocked.id, magnetdl.uproxy.to, magnetdl.proxyninja.net) will achieve nothing, but it’s possible that French ISPs will implement blocking regardless.

SCPP Evidence Supports Site-Blocking

Citing the decision of the Paris court, L’Informe reports that “SCPP established in a sufficiently convincing manner that the disputed sites, which are aimed at a French-speaking public, allow Internet users, via the aforementioned access paths, to download or continuously access protected works via hyperlinks without obtaining authorization from rights holders.”

Since in this context hyperlinking amounts to copyright infringement, the court agreed that ISP blocking is warranted. In the event that the sites switch to new or alternative domains to evade blocking, SCPP will be able to return to court to have those blocked too.

SCPP did just that in April and then again in May, to counter two recent rounds of circumvention by torrent9, cpasbien, and yggtorrent. This latest order comes in response to what appears to be a third, but certainly won’t be the last.

Deindexing Domains From Search Results

Search engine deindexing usually accompanies ISP blocking measures since the latter is believed to make the former more effective. For example, in a scenario where an ISP implements blocking measures against PersistentPirateSite.com, former users of that now-blocked domain may turn to Google hoping to discover the site’s new and unblocked domains. If all goes to plan, access to the site is restored.

In a combined blocking/deindexing scenario, domains blocked by ISPs are also removed from search results. It doesn’t necessarily follow that users searching for new domains will leave empty-handed, but deindexing does make the task harder for the less experienced. Using the latest order as an example, ISPs are required to block torrent9.sb, torrent9.rs, torrent9.ink, and nine others connected to a site of the same name.

With all of these domains now absent from search results, less experienced users who search for ‘torrent9’ will find dozens and dozens of almost identical domains, but no idea which – if any – lead to the real site. They may not even be aware that some may exist purely to spread malware and empty their wallets. The image below is just a small sample of the choices available.

I’m Spartacus! No… I’m Spartacus!

At this point it would be quite reasonable to conclude that the root of this problem isn’t deindexing at all, it’s a problem faced by those who prefer to get content for free rather than paying for it. On that basis, there will be no sympathy when instead of downloading an album, users silently install malware instead. Unfortunately, that becomes everyone’s problem.

Mitigating Piracy Should Not Increase Online Risks

The phrase “what’s illegal offline should be illegal online” is used to highlight disparity between laws in the physical world and those on the internet. Yet accepted standards in the ‘real world’ often tend to be higher than those applied online.

In this case, more savvy internet pirates will circumvent these recent blocks within seconds, negating any need to visit search engines, thereby avoiding the dangers associated with bogus sites. With every blocking measure, pirates are becoming even more savvy.

For those who are less savvy, the reverse is true. Forced to visit search engines, soon they will only see bogus platforms or at the very least, those sites will feature prominently in search results, appear more legitimate, and attract even more clicks. Increased traffic will likely lead to more revenue, increased visibility, and even more unwitting visitors than before.

When mitigating offenses in the ‘real’ world, solutions that expose people to even more risk are avoided. When dealing with the same online, the importance of not allowing site operators to generate revenue “that funds wider crime” is immediately forgotten, even when the measures themselves contribute to that.

Additional verification is needed but if a report concerning a Z-Library scam turns out to be accurate, the consequences of giving scam websites the oxygen to operate freely couldn’t be any more clear. When that happens without any progress being made in the reduction of piracy rates, there has to be a better way.

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In terms of general internet security, there are few things worse than reports of yet another potentially massive leak of personal information.

Whether due to incompetence or deception, the bottom line is often the same; exploitation of data at the expense of those to whom it relates, and a further undermining of online safety to the detriment of all.

A report published by Cybernews.com claims that a Z-Library related scam lured 10 million people to a look-a-like site, where their personal information was held for nefarious purposes.

Key Claims

TorrentFreak has not seen the allegedly exposed database, so it necessarily follows that we’re in no position to confirm or reject any claim of authenticity. However, the general circumstances are familiar to us so with that as background, we’re able to provide some additional context.

Cybernews says its researchers discovered the database exposed on Z-Library lookalike site, z-lib.is, on June 27, 2024. It describes z-lib.is as a “malicious clone of Z-Library” and claims that the exposed database contains “almost 10 million users’ data.” The specifics are reproduced below verbatim.

Threat actors accidentally leaked usernames, email addresses, passwords, and Bitcoin and Monero wallet addresses of 9,761,948 users.

 

For many users, other data contains country codes, book requests, timestamps, comments, invoices, etc.

 

Researchers verified the validity of the data and confirmed that registered users were spammed with malicious links.

 

Researchers conclude with a high level of certainty that the data is authentic and filled out by users themselves

Z-Lib.is Previously Described as Malicious

Based on information publicly available for more than a year, Z-Lib.is is almost certainly malicious. In March 2023, the domain was reported alongside several others as fraudulent and a security risk by the official Z-Library team. They were very specific about the nature of the threat.

“These websites may steal your personal information and compromise your security,” Z-Library wrote.

The new report indicates that the data of almost 10 million users appears in the database. That is a very large number but on a base level, not impossible when considering traffic to the clone domains. Data shows that in February 2023 alone, Z-Lib.is had around 7.8 million visits. In the same month, the connected Zlibrary.to had around 9.1 million visits.

‘Data of 9.76 Million Users Leaked’

The claim that 9,761,948 people had their “usernames, email addresses, passwords, and Bitcoin and Monero wallet addresses” leaked in the database is less easily explained.

While it would be unremarkable for all users to have a username, an email address, and a password, it seems unlikely that details of Bitcoin and Monero wallets were handed over at anything like a similar rate. It’s of course feasible that the report didn’t intend to give that impression.

Yet if we assume that not every user handed over their crypto details (or even had any to hand over at all), that meets a challenge later in the report. It describes the leak as “extremely disturbing as it deanonymizes millions of crypto wallets and links related transactions to individuals who tried to access pirated content.”

Copyright Consequences, Punishment for Piracy?

After linking crypto with attempts to access pirated content, two further references to copyright infringement feature later in the report.

“The database backup was generated on June 20th, 2024. It contains user data and other information used in the operation, such as received Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests and payments to access the website’s resources,” the report notes.

“Z-Lib users should expect that the exposed data will likely be used by authorities, cybersecurity researchers, cybercriminals, and potentially anyone who can benefit from it. The data is not widespread yet, but it is vital to take action to protect other accounts.

“Law enforcement and copyright holders may use the leaked data to take legal action against the website’s users,” the researchers add.

As stated at the beginning, we have no access to the database and no knowledge of what else it may contain. On that basis, predicting whether it might be useful for civil litigation or even criminal prosecution, would be premature. The report makes no mention of any implications for the operators of the website itself, but notes that there may be attempts to blackmail users.

The Cybernews report also warns that people could face targeted phishing campaigns for the purpose of stealing their cryptocurrency, and follows up with various tips for those who may be affected.

Whether any, all, or none of these dangers will surface any time soon is unknown. That being said, it does seem fairly ironic that Z-Library is seen as a platform for study and research, but the success of the scam relies on potential targets being oblivious to the threat, having done little or no research over the past year.

Of course, there’s as much misinformation as there is information right now, so research may prove difficult. The basics, on the other hand, are very predictable. No pirate site ever needs a user’s personal details and handing them over will never lead to anything good.

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