UEFA is the international body that governs football throughout Europe.

As part of FIFA, the organization holds the rights to several major competitions and tournaments, including the Champions League and the European Championships.

These events are good for billions of euros in broadcasting rights and with these types of figures at stake, UEFA is understandably keeping a close eye on piracy. The job has become increasingly complex, now that unauthorized live-streaming is booming.

EURO 2024 Pirates

With the EURO 2024 tournament starting in Germany tomorrow, the organization and its anti-piracy partners are on high alert. Systems are in place to detect and shut down pirate streams within minutes, and social media will be heavily monitored as well.

UEFA is not the only organization preparing for the major tournament; pirates are planning ahead as well. In recent weeks, several sites have put up placeholders for the upcoming EURO 2024 matches.

These placeholders are picked up and indexed by search engines. As a result, the pirate sites are easily findable when match day comes. That is, if these pages are still in search engines by then.

According to a notice, published in the Lumen database, UEFA anti-piracy partner ‘Friend MTS’ asked the search engine to remove thousands of ‘pirate’ live-streaming links over the past week. This includes links to EURO 2024 games that are not even ‘live’ yet.

Preemptive Takedowns

The Chinese site below, for example, prepared a dedicated page for upcoming Euro 2024 live streams. After Friend MTS listed the URL in a takedown notice, Google promptly removed it. The same is true for other “EURO 2024” pirate streaming placeholders.

Google has removed most of these links from its search index. Although there is technically no copyright infringement yet, Google presumably finds it reasonable to assume that links to pirated streams will appear there eventually, as advertised.

In some cases, UEFA’s requests are rather broad. For example, one of the EURO 2024 takedowns lists a page from Leisu.com that doesn’t mention live streams. Instead, it looks more like a live score page.

According to its own website, Leisu Sports is the official ‘copyright data supplier‘ of the Chinese Football Association.

We don’t know whether Google looked into the matter in detail, but the company removed the leisu.com URL from its search results. That said, Google doesn’t simply take down every link that’s submitted.

Homepage Removals

After looking into more UEFA takedown requests from this month, including friendly matches that were played over the past days, we see many ‘homepages’ of pirate streaming sites listed. Google appears to be more reserved when it comes to such broad requests.

For example, 123koora.com, amzfutbol.com, rojadirectenvivo.me, and others are still indexed by Google, despite being listed in takedown requests.

It’s clear that UEFA will be pulling out all the stops to ensure that licensed broadcasts are properly protected. In the past, it also sent advance warnings to pirate site owners directly, but we haven’t heard similar reports this time around.

EUIPO Support

While Europe is gearing up for the Championship of the continent’s most popular sport, UEFA received some indirect support from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office.

Yesterday, EUIPO put a spotlight on the alarming sports streaming piracy rates in the EU. The press release mostly regurgitates previously published reports, but that didn’t prevent mainstream media from picking it up.

“According to EUIPO data, millions of EU citizens access or stream sports content from illegal online sources while fake sports equipment cost manufacturers €850 million per year,” EUIPO wrote.

One can wonder whether a reminder of the immense popularly of pirate live streams actually works as an advertisement to the general public, instead of a deterrent. After all, research has shown that these popularity ‘warnings’ can backfire.

EUIPO’s intentions are clear; however. It wants fans to ‘play fair’ and use legitimate viewing options, as pirate ‘cheers’ don’t pay off.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Almost half a decade ago, eight Las Vegas men were indicted by a grand jury for conspiring to violate criminal copyright law via two IPTV services, Jetflicks and iStreamitAll.

The indictment accused the defendants of reproducing tens of thousands of copyrighted TV shows without authorization, and distributing that content to tens of thousands of paid subscribers across the United States.

At one point, Jetflicks was said to have made available more than 183,200 different TV show episodes. iStreamitAll allegedly made available more than 118,479 TV shows and 10,980 movies; at the time more content than Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime offered.

The Road to Trial

After pleading guilty to copyright infringement and money laundering, in 2021 a key defendant was sentenced to 57 months in prison and a $1m forfeiture order. In the same year, another pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and was sentenced to one year and a day in prison.

Other defendants dug in to fight a case that had become unusually complex, for a range of reasons, many of which are still not for public consumption.

After reportedly generating 19TB of data and 175,000 pages of print discovery, the defense previously estimated that it would take “at least a couple of months” just to take a copy of the data needed for trial; by then a bewildering 63TB in total.

Trial Begins in Las Vegas, Nevada

Since instructions issued by District Judge Richard F. Boulware, II, state that transcripts must not be made available online for several weeks, reporting daily events in detail presents challenges. Nevertheless, there’s no shortage of general information available that shows the scale of the matter in hand and the mood of the parties involved.

On May 28, day one of the trial, the government had four attorneys listed for appearance, alongside an FBI Special Agent and an IT expert. Listed for lead defendant Kristopher Lee Dallmann, three counsel, a paralegal, an investigator, and two interns. For Felipe Garcia, two counsel and a paralegal; for Douglas Courson, Jared Edward Jaurequi, and Peter H Huber, two counsel each.

At 09:28, prospective jurors were called to the courtroom and at 09:43, a total of 85 were in attendance. By 11:00, they numbered ‘just’ 50.

Day Two to Day Four

After two jurors raised concerns at the start of day two, each spent some time with the Judge. The nature of those concerns and the outcome are absent from the docket.

The government’s opening statement arrived just before noon, with defendants’ counsel delivering their statements early afternoon, before jury members were excused for lunch at 14:30. A direct examination of a Supervisory Special Agent at the FBI by counsel for the government brought the second day to a close.

The fourth day of the trial began with counsel for Peter Huber informing the Court about an issue with her client. While that has no explanation either, counsel for Kristopher Dallmann advised the Court of a forthcoming motion on behalf of his client; details of that matter are substantial.

Dallmann Files Motion For Mistrial

On Saturday, May 25, the government provided a PowerPoint presentation to the defense that it intended to use in opening statements to the Court. Counsel for Dallmann notified the government on Monday, May 27, that they intended to object to the proposed use of the presentation, details of which were also provided to the Court.

“Counsel for Mr. Dallmann specifically noted that they would seek a mistrial if the exhibits were permitted to be shown during opening statements,” Dallmann’s motion for mistrial notes.

The government ultimately went ahead anyway, prompting counsel for Dallmann to respond as promised.

“Here, a mistrial is warranted because the government was permitted to show inadmissible and highly credible legal conclusions to the jury during opening statements with no qualification or limiting instructions,” the motion continues.

“Inadmissible and Impossible to Disregard”

One of the exhibits shown to the jury was a letter dated July 22, 2011, sent by HBO to Jetflicks c/o Dallmann.

“While the letter is framed as a notice, it is based on a finding that copyright infringement occurred (otherwise, the letter would not have issued). That finding constitutes a legal conclusion,” the motion continues.

“Steven Rosenthall was not just any lawyer—he was the Director of Anti-Piracy in HBO’s legal department. There can be no question that someone who has ascended to that position is scrupulous, detail-oriented, and credible. Furthermore, the legal department at HBO is not some ragtag team of vagabonds. It’s the legal department within a massive, flagship American media organization. Consequently, a legal conclusion by HBO’s legal department carries significant weight.”

In summary, counsel for Dallmann argues that the jury was exposed to an inadmissible legal conclusion that will be impossible to disregard, in a letter sent by someone who is not noticed as a government witness, so cannot be cross-examined. The only solution, therefore, is a mistrial.

MPAA Infringement Notice, PayPal Correspondence

Similar concerns are leveled at an infringement notice sent by the then-MPAA to Dallmann dated November 16, 2012. While not mentioned by the defense, it refers to infringement on jetflick.mobi, a domain for which no records appear to exist, since it may have never been registered. Jetflicks.mobi may have been the intended target, however.

An email dated October 24, 2016, sent by PayPal to Dallmann to advise his account had been temporarily limited due to violation of the company’s Acceptable Use Policy, also came in for criticism.

“The email is hearsay, and no PayPal witness has been noticed who can testify about the email. The email is prejudicial because the government used it to establish that Mr. Dallmann had engaged in copyright infringement,” the motion continues.

Other, apparently contentious, items include records provided by Google in response to a warrant, listing details of several searches allegedly carried out by Dallmann. An extract of a conversation that allegedly took place between Dallmann and Coulson, with the source listed as ‘IPhone 7 Plus/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db’, appears to contain details of business planning.

In any event, the defense insists that the slides are inadmissible on several grounds, including a lack of authentication and failure to adhere to rules governing coconspirator statements.

Government Opposition to Motion

In its 10-page opposition, the government notes that before these items were shown to the jury, they were previewed by the Court and defense counsel. In all instances, “..the Court determined that the slides could properly be displayed during opening statement.”

In broad terms, the defense argues that the exhibits were presented as proof of copyright infringement, contrary to the government’s claim that they would be offered “for the effect on the listener and not for the truth of the matter.”

What that means in practice is explained in a statement by the Court in response to the defense’s objection to the MPAA letter of infringement being shown to the jury.

“The defense objected again during court proceedings, and the Court similarly responded, ‘If it’s being offered for the same reason, which is for your client’s state of mind, not for the fact that it’s true, but for the fact that he received it, then it wouldn’t be hearsay’,” the government explains.

“The Court repeated its view that use of the exhibit in the opening as a demonstrative was acceptable ‘so long as I find that there’s a likelihood that the evidence would be admitted’.”

In a nutshell, the documents were shown to the jury (the PayPal documents were apparently withheld) to demonstrate that Dallmann had received notice, that victims and/or their representatives believed his conduct was infringing, and they had ordered him to stop. The ‘effect on the listener’ amounts to Dallmann’s conduct after he took possession of those notices.

Every Detail Subject to Challenge

When viewing progression in this case from indictment to day one of the trial, with every detail a potential avenue for prolonged argument, the potential for some kind of derailment seems higher than normal for this type of case.

That being said, the government is backed by heavyweight artillery, as this sample of witnesses heard thus far reveals.

• Alexis Brown, Special Agent, FBI
• Joseph Varani, Digital Investigative Analyst, DoJ, Cyber Crime Lab
• Thomas Song, Deputy Director Cybercrime Lab, DoJ
• Michael Housley, Senior VP, Counsel of Content Protection, Paramount Global
• Matthew Andrews, Director of Global Content Protection, Netflix
• John Kern, IT Specialist, Digital Forensic Examiner, FBI
• Laura Peterson, Digital Forensic Analyst, Department of Homeland Security
• Lucia Rangel, VP Content Protection, Warner Brothers Discovery
• Jan van Voorn, Chief Executive Officer, IP House (previously MPA/head of ACE)
• Daniel Cooper, Senior VP of Intellectual Property, NBC Universal
• Daniel Ogden, VP Cyber Operations, OUR Rescue
• Michael Poston, Supervisory Special Agent, FBI

Dallmann’s motion for mistrial / government’s opposition available here and here (pdf)

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Plex is a multifunctional media software and service that allows users to easily access all of their entertainment in one place.

Whether movies, music, TV shows, or photos, Plex can organize and index, making the content ready to stream on a wide variety of supported devices.

Plex can be used for curating home videos or enriching purchased media with metadata, for example, which can be stored on the media server. In addition, the company offers Plex Pass, a premium subscription that provides access to DVR recording, downloads, intro skipping, and many other features.

Plex Pirates

Lately, Plex has been working closely with some of the major content publishers to give provide access to licensed entertainment. At the same time, however, it is also battling a group of ‘pirates’ who abuse their system by publicly sharing libraries with infringing content.

Last summer, Plex surprised users by actively blocking media servers hosted at large German company Hetzner. These were, purportedly, often used to share pirated material and an outright ban aimed to end this unauthorized activity.

Plex also targeted a GitHub repository that allowed people to reshare Plex libraries that were not originally theirs. This workaround was used to share content with broader audiences than originally intended, without the owners’ permission.

New Problem: Media Server Hack

The ‘reshare’ repository was removed by GitHub, and it was removed from Docker soon after. While there are still copies of the code floating around today, Plex already has a new problem on its hands.

A few days ago, anti-piracy outfit MarkScan sent a DMCA notice to GitHub on behalf of Plex. According to the takedown request, there are several repositories that contain code used to ‘hack’ Plex’s media server.

“We have found that users on your platform are providing codes to hack Plex servers. Therefore, we request that you remove the below URLs from your website,” the takedown notices reads.

Free Pass and Godmode

The notice isn’t particularly specific, but archived copies of the repositories, which have since been removed, explain more clearly what the code could do. For example, plexmediaserver_crack enabled “Godmode”, allowing people to use all features without a subscription.

“Enables Godmode, unlocking all features on (hardware transcoding, intro/credit detection, HEVC transcoding, etc..) on Plex Media Server. Including Plex Pass features without a required subscription, and including early-access/development/Plex Ninja features.”

A companion repository titled ‘plexpass_hook‘ fools Plex into believing that a user has a paid Plex Pass subscription, making it possible to skip intros as well.

While the code itself doesn’t appear to be copyright infringing, it might circumvent Plex’s technological protection measures, which violates the DMCA. In any case, GitHub didn’t hesitate, and the repositories were swiftly removed.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Three years ago, German Internet providers agreed to voluntarily block the most egregious pirate sites.

The ISPs teamed up with copyright holders and launched the “Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet” (CUII), which is now responsible for handing down blocking ‘orders’.

While CUII doesn’t rely on court judgments, there is some form of oversight. When copyright holders report a pirate site, a review committee first checks whether the domain is indeed linked to a website that structurally infringes copyrights.

If a website overwhelmingly hosts or links to pirated material, the site can be nominated for a blocklist entry. This can apply to torrent sites, streaming portals, search engines and direct download hubs, as long as piracy is front and center.

Romslab Blocked

The voluntary system has not yet resulted in a massive blocking wave. Thus far, only nineteen sites have been blocked, with game download portal Romslab as the latest addition.

In a decision that was published a few days ago, CUII concludes that Romslab is a structurally infringing website. The site, which offers links to pirated games and popular Nintendo emulators including Yuzu and Ryujinx, should be blocked.

“The request for a recommendation to block the ROMSLAB website is justified. The website is a structural copyright infringing website (SUW). There is a clear infringement of copyright. The blocking is reasonable and proportionate,” CUII concludes.

This isn’t the first video game-related site that has made it onto the German blocklist; Nsw2u and NswGame were added previously.

Romslab isn’t specifically targeted at a German audience. The site is most popular in Iraq and the United States. According to CUII, the site had 161,330 German ‘visitors’ between March and August last year, less than 1,000 per day.

Mystery Applicant?

CUII doesn’t mention the claiming party or the infringed game title by name. Instead, it writes that the game is “created by the game developers ***** and ***** and the composers of the music *****, *****, *****, *****, *****, *****, ***** and *****”.

It doesn’t take much imagination to take an informed guess, however. The paperwork references article 15 of a foreign copyright law, quoting a ‘work for hire’ section that matches article 15 of Japan’s copyright law. That happens to be the home country of Nintendo.

Added to the fact that the two previously blocked game sites specifically targeted Nintendo content, combined with Nintendo’s site-blocking efforts in other countries, the 135-year-old company would be our pick.

Not the First Romslab Block

There are more leads pointing to the Japanese gaming giant if we dig a bit deeper. Romslab was previously blocked in Italy, and a publication from the local telecoms watchdog AGCOM specifically mentions Nintendo as the rightsholder there.

Romslab.com is also blocked in Spain since last year. It’s not clear who requested that blockade, but Nintendo is a likely candidate. In Spain, Romslab’s sister site Repacklab.com was also blocked in February of this year.

In addition to the site blocking efforts, Romslab also had its Twitter account, Facebook page, and Subreddit suspended or removed. The site’s Patreon is still online.

With Romslab, the German site blocking list has now grown to nineteen entries, and we presume that more candidates are already in the pipeline.

—

The websites listed for blocking in Germany since 2021 include: s.to, canna.to, nsw2u.com, newalbumreleases.net, bs.to, streamkiste.tv, kinox.to, cine.to, serienjunkies.org, taodung.com, israbox, jokerlivestream, serienfans.org, filmfans.org, buffstreams, sci-hub, NSWGame, Megakino and Romslab.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

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. “Hit Man” is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on June 10 are:

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

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

More than a decade ago, decryption licensing outfit AACS began to crack down on DVD and Blu-Ray ripping software.

Founded by Disney, Warner Bros, Intel, and Microsoft, among others, the licensing outfit put legal pressure on the makers of AnyDVD and DVDFab, which were the key players at the time.

AACS eventually booked a legal victory against DVDFab in a US court, but that did little to stop the operation. Pressure on AnyDVD’s parent company Slysoft, meanwhile, did yield results as the software was taken down. That was only temporary, however, as some of AnyDVD developers restarted the business under a new name, RedFox.

For the next eight years, the DVDFab and AnyDVD products managed to survive. With online streaming taking over, both outfits also launched new software to rip streaming content, in addition to old-fashioned discs.

RedFox, for example, offered the AnyStream tool, which proved to be quite popular. Streaming platforms, including Netflix, worked hard to make these tools unusable, resulting in a seemingly endless cat-and-mouse decryption game.

RedFox Disappears

Without prior warning, the RedFox website suddenly ‘disappeared’ late last week. There is no sign that the software outfit ran into legal trouble, but some of its products have been rendered useless. This isn’t the first time that RedFox has suffered downtime, but after more than five days, many users fear the worst.

Over the past few days, we have tried to find out what’s going on, but unfortunately, the RedFox team remains quiet. An email sent to our contact there never arrived, as the mail server is unreachable as well.

There is no shortage of speculation online to explain the downtime. While we prefer not to entertain these theories, there are a few things worth highlighting.

First, there is no evidence that the RedFox site was pulled offline by an external force. The site isn’t working because the domain name’s A records were removed on June 6, and the same is true for the MX records.

As a result, browsers and email clients don’t know where to send requests.

It’s not clear who removed these records, but external interventions by domain registries and registrars are generally marked with ICANN codes, and we don’t see any here. Since this is a domain name configuration issue, there is no sign that there’s a hosting problem either.

Without any signs of external interventions, there is not much to report on. For now, everyone except the RedFox team is in the dark, and time will tell whether the site will resurface or not.

StreamFab Gains Users (and pressure)

The RedFox trouble hasn’t gone unnoticed at the DVDFab/StreamFab team. Looking for an alternative stream ripping tool, AnyStream users are checking out the competition now, similar to what happened when Slyfoft shut down AnyDVD many years ago.

This puts a new spotlight on DVDFab, which it probably doesn’t mind. The company has been around for more than 20 years now and seems unfazed by any legal pressure.

After ignoring the initial court order in favor of AACS issued a decade ago, DVDFab continued to exist. The same can be said for the legal troubles.

While StreamFab doesn’t appear to circumvent AACS’s Blu-Ray decryption, DVDFab and related tools do. In recent years, the legal battle continued at a federal court in New York, resulting in a massive damages verdict and a broad injunction a few months ago.

Last summer, U.S. District Court Judge Vernon Broderick ruled in favor of AACS, ordering DVDFab and its presumed operator Lanny Chen to pay nearly $15 million in damages.

In addition, the court ordered the operation to shut down. This injunction also required banks, domain registrars, and other intermediaries to cease working with the software company.

StreamFab wasn’t specifically covered by the injunction but, since it’s linked to the same operators, it’s not immune to the broad injunction, which expands to hosting providers and payment services too.

As a result of the injunction, DVDFab lost some of its domain names, including dvdfab.com which was put on ‘serverHold’ by the domain registry. However, other domains survived and the software company continues to operate to this day. That includes StreamFab.

This lawsuit and the resulting injunction have nothing to do with RedFox’s recent troubles. There is no AACS lawsuit against RedFox that we know of. If anything, however, it indicates that it’s not easy to shut down a software company that’s determined to stay online.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

After years of criticism from rightsholders, punctuated by incremental but significant adjustments to limit the appearance of pirated content in search results, Google is no longer continuously painted as siding with the enemy.

Of course, Google has always argued it never did. The company’s search engine acts as an indexer of content, content placed on the internet by others, Google reminded frustrated rightsholders. In response to properly formatted DMCA notices, links to infringing content were systematically taken down but, in another reminder playing on repeat, Google advised that removing links does nothing to take infringing content offline.

With tens of millions of search results now systematically wiped out before they even appear, anti-piracy groups such as BREIN seem happy with the direction the relationship with Google is heading. Yet, a lawsuit filed in New York last week by Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, Macmillan Holdings, LLC; Elsevier Inc., Elsevier B.V., and McGraw Hill LLC, paints an entirely different picture for the publishing industry.

Pirate Site Promoter, Piracy Profiteer

The opening salvo in the publishers’ lawsuit, which majors on violations of the Copyright Act, the Lanham Act, and New York’s General Business Law, details Google’s ‘systemic and pervasive advertising’ of infringing copies of their textbooks and other educational works.

“For years, Google has knowingly facilitated and reaped profits from the sale of infringing works through pirate websites that Google promotes. The Publishers have reported infringement after infringement to Google, only to have those reports ignored,” the complaint begins.

For background, the publishers claim that Google’s position as the dominant provider of digital advertising services earned the company $300 billion in revenue last year. They claim that the company’s advertising power is used to undermine publishers for the purpose of generating profit.

Search and Shopping

Turning to Google Search, the publishers note that in addition to providing organic search results, results also contain advertisements. These include ads that are part of Google’s Shopping platform containing both text and images, with the latter providing users with a “strong sense” of advertisers’ products, as per Google marketing.

After clicking the ‘Shopping’ tab on the main search page, users are presented with more Shopping Ads, including sponsored ads where merchants pay Google based on the volume of clicks.

“Of course, Google’s Shopping Ads for Infringing Works (‘Infringing Shopping Ads’) do not use photos of the pirates’ products; rather, they use unauthorized photos of the Publishers’ own textbooks, many of which display the Marks. Thus, with Infringing Shopping Ads, this ‘strong sense of the product’ that Google is giving is a bait-and-switch,” the complaint alleges.

“The Pirate Sellers rely on Google Shopping Ads to advertise their Infringing Works and gain sales, and Google systematically and repeatedly creates Infringing Shopping Ads to ‘send’ consumers to Pirate Sellers’ websites (‘Pirate Sites’) to buy their infringing products.”

No Indiscriminate Advertising

At this point the publishers’ strategy begins to take shape. Drawing a reverse analogy to the Yellow Pages, where ads were allegedly printed as supplied and then disseminated “indiscriminately” to the public, Google’s role here is described as active. The company creates the ads and targets merchants’ products to the very users looking for those products, at a time it determines, the publishers claim.

The significant allegation from the publishers in this respect is that Google ranks ‘Paid Ads’ by “advertiser bid and ad quality” which puts the publishers and their distributors up against the ‘Pirate Sellers.’ Also in the mix is Google’s assessment of “ad quality” which considers the relevance of the ad to the user’s search and Google’s evaluation of the website the ad points to, i.e a pirate site.

“Google often ranks both Paid Ads and Free Ads for Infringing Works in close proximity to, or even ahead of, ads for the Publishers’ authentic textbooks,” the complaint alleges, adding the following:

Google’s Infringing Shopping Ads are extremely effective at diverting would-be purchasers of the Publishers’ textbooks to buy Infringing Works instead of legitimate copies. When students seeking to purchase textbooks initiate searches for the Publishers’ textbooks on google.com, they see not just organic search results and ads for the Publishers’ legitimate textbooks, but also ads for pirated textbooks.

 

Indeed, Infringing Shopping Ads make up a substantial portion of the Shopping Ads these users see, often outnumbering ads for authentic textbooks and often with preferable placement. Worse, Google’s advertisements reflect the Infringing Works’ artificially low prices. And the ads, which reproduce the Publishers’ own images of the textbooks without authorization, are often indistinguishable from legitimate ads.

The publishers say that in most or all cases, Google’s ‘Infringing Shopping Ads’ include textbook cover images, which neither Google nor the Pirate Sellers have permission to use in connection with the promotion or sale of infringing books.

Publishers Claim Google Should Know Products Are Illegal

With names including “Cheapbok,” “Athena Line Store,” “Biz Ninjas,” “Nardab,” “Livyluxe,” and “Shop Hoth,” the publishers say that Google should’ve known who they were dealing with; even more so since the publishers included those names in their takedown notices.

The publishers note that other red flags include extremely low pricing. This is due to the Pirate Sellers offering books in PDF format when “legitimate distributors rarely, if ever, sell their textbooks in PDF form.” That Google allegedly helps users to refine their searches by adding ‘pdf’ via a dedicated button, only makes matters worse, they add.

The complaint then turns to Google’s claim that it verifies sellers’ identities. Google also verifies sellers’ authorized ownership of their sales websites and verifies their suitability to use Google ad services. The publishers’ turn these claims to their own advantage.

They claim that verification means Google has the ability to communicate with sellers via email or verified phone numbers

In cases where Google was advised that a seller was offering pirated content and Google users were still able to place orders after clicking an ad, “Google had the ability to stop the direct infringement entirely.”

In the majority of cases where pirate sellers predominantly or exclusively use Google Ads to reach their customer base, terminating their accounts would’ve had a significant impact on future sales.

“Google’s removal of Infringing Shopping Ads and termination of repeat infringers’ advertising privileges also would have a significant impact by eliminating or greatly curtailing the reproduction of Infringing Works by Google’s users when they make purchases on Pirate Sites promoted by Google,” the complaint adds.

Lacking Response to Infringement Notices, Lawsuit Ensues

The publishers claim that they began sending infringement notices to Google in June 2021, identifying pirate sellers, pirate sites, and Shopping ads advertising pirated works, but to no avail.

“Indeed, despite receiving notice after notice, Google has continued to advertise specific Infringing Works sold by specific Pirate Sellers identified in the Publishers’ notices. Google has also continued to advertise Infringing Works for Pirate Sellers who have been the subject of repeated notices. Google did not terminate these repeat infringers’ Merchant Center accounts within a reasonable time, if at all.”

The complaint also cites an aggravating factor; when the publishers sent follow-up notices for matters previously reported but not handled to their satisfaction, “Google threatened on multiple occasions to stop reviewing all the Publishers’ notices for up to six months,” the complaint alleges.

Google’s response was due to duplicate requests; the company warned that if that happened three or more times on the same request, it would “consider that particular request to be manifestly unfounded” which could lead the company to “temporarily stop reviewing your requests for a period of up to 180 days.”

The publishers claim that Google is contributorily liable for at least two forms of direct infringement, vicarious infringement, and trademark infringement for allowing the plaintiffs marks to be used in commerce in connection with infringing works. They also allege violations of New York General Business Law section 349(a) for engaging in materially deceptive and misleading practices.

The publishers’ complaint can be found here (pdf)

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Most people know all too well that downloading and sharing pirated content is against the law. Nonetheless, millions do so daily.

There’s no denying that piracy affects legal sales to some degree. That said, piracy is a complicated phenomenon and the reported effects are not always straightforward.

Instead of trying to quantify the prospected losses in yet another study, researchers from Georgia Tech, Chapman University, and Carnegie Mellon University, posed a different question.

Do price reductions for legal content have an effect on piracy?

Price and Piracy

Various surveys have indicated that many people cite high costs as a prime reason to pirate, so it’s any area worth researching. Doing so elegantly is not easy, however, as researchers can’t simply ask sellers to change their pricing. Luckily, a natural experiment with help from updated EU tax regulations provided an opportunity.

In 2018, the European Union passed a directive that allowed member states to reduce the VAT on e-books, bringing it in line with the lower tax rate for physical books. This change was implemented by several countries in 2019, including Ireland, where e-book prices dropped 14%.

The researchers used this natural variation to examine the effect on piracy. Specifically, they looked at visits to publishing related pirate sites in Ireland after this change was implemented, comparing it to the EU countries where prices remained unchanged in the same period.

If cheaper prices matter, traffic to pirate sites should drop in Ireland. The 14% price decrease is relatively minimal, but the effect was indeed noticeable.

Direct Pirate Site Visits Unchanged

The researchers relied on pirate site ‘visits’ data from tracking company MUSO and, at first glance, there weren’t any major changes. The lower prices didn’t result in fewer direct visits to book pirate sites.

“We find that direct eBook piracy is not affected by the decrease in the price of eBooks that resulted from lowered tax rates,” the researchers write.

The term direct traffic applies to visitors who go to these pirate sites directly. For example, by typing the address into the browser directly or through a bookmark. These people are already familiar with the pirate sites, and price reductions don’t impact their habits.

Fewer Indirect Pirate Site Visits

In addition to direct visits, MUSO also records indirect traffic. This refers to visits coming from search engines such as Google, or from sites that link people to these pirate sites in other ways. These indirect visitors are impacted by price reductions, the research found.

The data show that, compared to other countries, indirect visits to book pirate sites in Ireland decreased significantly as e-book prices were dropped.

“[W]e find evidence that these price decreases reduced indirect eBook piracy visits by at least 27%, an effect that starts smaller and grows larger over time as indirect pirates become aware of the lower prices.”

As mentioned, this effect became stronger as time passed. According to the researchers, it’s likely that it took some time for people to learn about the price drops, which would explain this gradually increasing reduction.

Hardcore vs. Casual Pirates

The researchers found that cheaper prices decrease indirect traffic to pirates sites, while direct visits are not affected. The researchers mention a few possible reasons for this distinction.

Broadly speaking, direct pirates can be considered more hardcore. Piracy is ingrained in their system, they have their favorite sites, and small price reductions generally don’t impact their behavior.

“Because pirates who navigate directly to piracy sites have already paid the fixed search and learning costs for piracy, the legal price is of little interest to them, nor are they likely to notice changes in this price since they do not search.

“Indeed, for these pirates, there seems to be some truth to the adage ‘you cannot compete with free’,” the researchers add.

Casual pirates who use search engines to find free books are easier to sway. Since they search, they are more likely to notice the price differences in the first place. The results of the study suggest that these ‘indirect’ pirates weigh both legal and illegal options, and are willing to pay if the price is right.

Implications

This is just a single study that has to be replicated by future research, also in other countries and across other content categories. That said, there are some provisional lessons to draw.

The researchers suggest that casual pirates, who use search engines to visit pirate sites, may be the best group to target and convert. For example, by offering discount coupons to draw them to legal platforms.

More hardcore pirates, who directly visit pirate sites, are not likely to be lured by cheaper offers. They will pirate if they get the chance.

“Our results demonstrate the potential of using price to mitigate piracy, but they also highlight the challenges firms face in competing with piracy for experienced pirates,” the researchers conclude.

—

The article will be published in a forthcoming edition of the peer-reviewed journal MIS Quarterly. An early copy is available on SSRN.

Rajavi, Koushyar and Danaher, Brett and Newby, Jesse, Price, Piracy, and Search: Which Pirates Respond to Changes in the Legal Price? (February 01, 2024). MIS Quarterly (forthcoming).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

In March 2024, the major Hollywood studios, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, teamed up in a lawsuit against popular cyberlocker platform DoodStream, previously labeled the leading global piracy threat.

The U.S. entertainment companies had been filing takedown notices to prevent their copyright works being illegally shared among DoodStream’s tens of millions of users, and beyond that, many millions more. They claim the takedown notices were ineffective due to a system at DoodStream that generated replacement links to ensure content remained available.

Since DoodStream is run from India, the site’s owners were sued in the Delhi High Court. In March, an injunction compelled the site to purge itself of all links to the plaintiffs’ content inside 24 hours. As detailed in part one of this article published yesterday, DoodStream didn’t remove the content in the allocated period and certainly didn’t shut down.

Instead, it complained that the links to be removed were supplied in an inconvenient file format, and refused to disable various download links because that would ruin the site. In general, the injunction’s terms appeared to act as a starting point for negotiation, with DoodStream making it clear that it simply wouldn’t comply with certain requests.

The Court’s assessment of DoodStream’s compliance thus far, and its decision based on those findings, could have a profound effect on DoodStream’s ability to conduct business.

Infringing Content on DoodStream “Vast and Numerous”

Compared with documents concerning earlier hearings, the order handed down by Justice Anish Dayal leaves the DoodStream defendants almost nowhere to go.

“[T]he quantity of infringing content that Doodstream allows its users to upload, is vast and numerous. Further, not only does the site, in its current architecture, allow the user/uploader to either simply upload content, create a link and disseminate a link to that content, but also allows users to access infringing content on remote hosts and secure access to the same through the Doodstream website,” Justice Dayal begins.

“Effectively, the site in its current architecture, is an aggregator or a library of unfiltered content, therefore, allowing users/uploaders to inevitably use the platform for disseminating infringing content.”

Not Just Infringing Content, Illegal Content Too

Also “funneled through” DoodStream, the Judge added, is adult pornographic content. The movie companies have no claim in their case related to that type of material, but nevertheless brought it to the attention of the Court. In India, the distribution of pornography is an imprisonable offense.

“Not only is the site allowing the funneling and dissemination of content but also incentivizing the uploaders to place content which can be watched and seen by other users, and get money on a pay-per-view basis,” Justice Dayal continues.

“For this, naturally, the response to the queries of concerned uploaders […] when their link was disabled, was that Doodstream had features on the website that allowed the generation of another link, or avoiding the DMCA radar.”

DMCA Does Not Apply in India

In his now-infamous 2004 letter to DreamWorks, The Pirate Bay’s Anakata politely pointed out that United States law applies in the United States, not in Europe or elsewhere. While arguably still true, it’s hard to run a site from any country without having some kind of contact with the U.S.

However, since U.S. rightsholders are most likely to sue, compliance with the DMCA, for example, is viewed by some as a way to enjoy protection from liability as a passive intermediary might in the U.S. In DoodStream’s case, the gap between perception and reality was huge and as the Judge points out, the DMCA isn’t likely to help here.

“The DMCA compliance, as adverted to by the defendants, may not come to their assistance for the reason that the DMCA is a regulation which is applicable in the United States of America. In India, we are governed by the Information Technology Act, 2000 [‘IT Act’] and the Rules made thereunder. Section 79 of the IT Act gives exemption from liability to intermediary in certain circumstances,” Justice Dayal writes.

Exemption from Liability is Conditional

In common with the U.S. equivalent, exemption from liability in India is not a given. If an intermediary observes the rules and operates with due diligence, that does go a long way to avoiding liability. If, on the other hand, an intermediary has “conspired, abetted, aided, or induced the commission” of an unlawful act or, as the Judge puts it, fails to expeditiously remove or disable access to infringing material, for the intermediary “that is vitiating.”

The Judge notes that intermediaries must observe the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which expressly forbid the storage and distribution of content for which no rights have been obtained, or is pornographic in nature.

For an intermediary to successfully limit liability via a defense of due diligence, under the rules it must have previously appointed an officer to oversee a ‘grievance redressal mechanism’. Since it appears that DoodStream has no mechanism and no officer, Section 79(2)(c) of the IT Act will not come to its rescue, the Judge suggests.

“Moreover, the insulation, if any, is prone to be punctured due to their acts of inducement or abetment for users/uploaders to use Doodstream for uploading and disseminating infringing content.”

Too Much Infringing Content to Remove Quickly Is Not a Defense

As mentioned in yesterday’s article, DoodStream submitted that it wasn’t given enough time to remove infringing links, since the volume was just too great. Justice Dayal found the excuse uncompelling.

“The defendants cannot have an excuse that a large amount of infringing content links made it practically impossible for them to fully comply with the orders of this Court,” the Judge notes.

Recalling a similar case against Mixdrop, a broadly similar file-hosting service from which around 600,000 to 800,000 links were removed, the Judge quickly drew parallels to the case in hand. Here, 500,000 to 1,000,000 links represent infringement of the plaintiffs’ rights on a similarly large scale.

With the Mixdrop matter for guidance, the Judge formulated his decision here along similar lines.

DoodStream’s Operators Banned

Having determined similarities between the DoodStream and MixDrop cases, Justice Dayal’s decision targets DoodStream owners Raja Durai and Sarvesh Chandran by restraining their ability to do business.

In view of the above facts and circumstances, and considering that this Court is conscious and alert to the issue of piracy through rogue websites of infringing content, till the next date of hearing, directions are being passed in the following terms:

 

a) Defendants nos. 5 and 6, and all those acting for/on their behalf, are restrained from directly or indirectly operating the website Doodstream.com, and domains which are listed as defendants nos. 1, 2, and 3 in the memo of parties..[..]

 

Defendant no.5 and 6 and all those acting for/on their behalf are also restrained from using any other similar platform to make accessible content which is infringing of the plaintiffs’ proprietary rights and uploading, posting, screening, distributing, or making available to the public through/in any manner whatsoever, the cinematographic work/ content/ programme/ shows in relation to which the plaintiffs have copyright.

 

In the event the content, rights, or access to the same from the Doodstream portfolio of websites is transferred to any third party and/or subsequently operated through a mirror/ redirected/alphanumerically varying website(s), the plaintiffs shall have a right to approach this Court for suitable directions along with documents to substantiate its claim.

The next hearing is listed for September 18, 2024, but if DoodStream can show compliance in the interim, they can apply to modify Justice Dayal’s order. That’s unlikely to prove straightforward.

Catch 22

To show full compliance, the DoodStream platform will need to be modified to prevent reappearances of the plaintiffs’ content. Unfortunately, as per the text above, the site’s operators “and all those acting for/on their behalf, are restrained from directly or indirectly operating the website.”

At the time of writing, DoodStream remains online either intentionally, or possibly because the injunction prevents the operators or anyone else shutting it down.

That raises the question of what happens when movies and TV shows are illegally uploaded but nobody has permission to take them down. The reign of the autonomous website may have arrived early.

All public filings in the case thus far are available here (pdf)

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

The USTR’s ‘notorious markets’ report is one of the more powerful tools available to rightsholders aiming to tackle infringement orchestrated from overseas.

When Hollywood first submitted cyberlocker platform DoodStream for consideration in 2022, its framing was not dissimilar to that used to shape perceptions of Megaupload. Front and center, a cash incentive scheme that rewards DoodStream’s users based on the popularity of ‘their’ videos.

Based on broadly the same copyright infringement-related allegations, a Paris court ordered French ISPs to block DoodStream in 2023. Late last year, the MPA’s Global General Counsel, Karyn Temple, personally informed a House Judiciary Subcommittee of the threat posed by DoodStream. That wasn’t intended to be taken lightly.

Major Hollywood Studios, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, Sue DoodStream

In March this year, Hollywood’s movie and TV show giants filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against India-based DoodStream at the Delhi High Court

A total of six defendants included the domains doodstream.com, doodstream.co, dood.stream and their underlying websites (defendants 1-3), plus a server (defendant 4) used by defendants 1 to 3, to allegedly facilitate storing and dissemination of infringing content. Defendants 5 and 6, neither of whom were identified in initial public court records, were described as the site’s operators.

Our March report offers more detail but, in short, takedown notices filed at DoodStream were ineffective. When content was taken down, a system was in place to automatically generate a new working link. On that basis, and many more, the plaintiffs demanded total blocking of DoodStream or the imposition of new management to take over the site.

DoodStream Somehow Makes a Counter-Offer

After DoodStream promised to “exhaustively and completely” remove the plaintiffs’ content, and disable the system that renders takedowns pointless, the Delhi High Court’s March 18 order compelled DoodStream to remove all content owned by the plaintiffs within 24 hours. The site’s operators were further ordered to hire an accountant to disclose all revenue generated by the site, although that would be allowed more time.

In the U.S. and Europe, the short window available to comply with the takedown requirements of the injunction would mean taking the site offline until the content had been removed. Alternatively, face being held in contempt of court.

In documents filed at the High Court dated April 5, the plaintiffs reported non-compliance with the injunction. Not only was the infringing content still available on DoodStream, the link generating system was still in place too, violating the court’s orders.

In documents filed at the High Court dated April 7, counsel for the defendants stated that, contrary to the plaintiffs’ claims, DoodStream had complied with the terms of the injunction and had “placed on record certain technical aspects relating to the allegations of the plaintiffs.”

Settling Differences of Opinion

Faced with apparently conflicting statements, the Court decided that the “technical aspects” referenced by the defendants needed to be understood. Handing the task to the Joint Registrar, to be assisted by the Director and Joint Director of the Delhi High Court’s IT department, they would understand the technicalities together.

“This may require the plaintiffs and the defendants to show the [infringing] content on [DoodStream] to the Joint Registrar (and the IT Team),” the Court explained.

While the idea of ordering the parties to conduct searches for pirated content in court seemed a little unconventional, the Court noted that the plaintiffs’ technical advisor would be in attendance to assist.

For the defense, the technical representatives would be the actual operators of DoodStream, defendants No.5 and No.6 in the complaint. Or, as the court referred to them, the site’s ‘proprietors’, who were named in public court documents for the first time. To some in the Indian tech startup space, the names may look familiar.

In an order dated April 22, the Court provided a progress update on events thus far.

IT Department, Counsel for Plaintiffs and Defendants, Report Back

In their report to the Court, “counsel for the plaintiff presented an elaborate list of around 1512 links which are still operative thus illegally leaking the copyrighted content of the plaintiff, despite the directions dated 18.03.2024.”

The Court notes that the list was emailed to the director of the IT department, where a selection of “random links” were tested to see if they were live on DoodStream. The Court randomly tested six links and found that all, except one, were still live.

Counsel for the defendants explained these links “were left out since more than 5 lakhs links [500,000] were shared initially [by the plaintiffs for deletion] and they [DoodStream] are trying their level best to comply with the list.”

With the Court noting that the defendants must block all links supplied in future lists, the next update would be issued on April 25 – just 72 hours later.

Progress At Last?

The Court’s order dated April 25 contained positive news. Both parties agreed that all links that needed to be blocked, had indeed been blocked. Further positive news was reported in respect of the link generator tool.

It was disabled early April, although there was disagreement on the date. The defendants said it couldn’t have been disabled any sooner “due to logistic and technical aspects” including “the cache memory and Cloudflare CDN.”

Less positive news concerned the revenue accounting exercise ordered by the Court, which still hadn’t been carried out. Meanwhile, the studios suggested some additional changes to curb infringement.

Publish Users’ Names Next to Their Uploads

Counsel for the studios said that DoodStream should modify its code so that the names of users are published next to their uploads. DoodStream said that the proposal would be discussed with the technical team, as if coding was somehow the biggest barrier to implementing such a feature. Still, the studios had plenty of ideas where that came from.

Since download links, embedded links, and embed codes facilitate sharing of content with others, disabling these features “would put a plug on the sharing of infringing content.” Or perhaps a suggestion from the Court’s IT department might be better received; DoodStream should start imitating YouTube.

“They have stated that the ‘YouTube’ usually reviews the entire uploaded content in the background with the help of both the manual as well as the technical intervention whereby once the copyrighted content is identified, the uploader is informed to either take down the content immediately or its account would be blocked forever,” the Court added.

In the Court’s opinion, this would be the “perfect model to be replicated in the present circumstances.” Whether those circumstances included a feasibility study wasn’t made clear, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Much as the 24-hour deadline was brushed aside, other conditions appeared open for negotiation too.

Lawsuit or Business Meeting? And Who’s in Charge?

In its order dated May 1, the Court provides an update on DoodStream’s responses to the requests made earlier by the most powerful movie and TV show studios in the world.

Unfortunately, having considered the proposal to remove the ‘Download Link, embed link, embed code’ options, DoodStream concluded that removal wasn’t necessary.

“Counsel for the [defendants] states that they would not be removing these features since, as per their understanding, none of those encourages re-uploading. The counsel for the plaintiff counters this submission by stating that these features do result in the dissemination of their copyrighted content.

“Be that as it may,” the Court added, “the [defendants] have expressed their inability to remove these features.”

The proposal to put the names of DoodStream users next to their uploads, “whereby the infringer(s) can be identified and prosecuted” by the studios, wasn’t popular either.

“The counsel for the [defendants] states that such details cannot be provided, due to the lack of infrastructure and technical feasibility,” the Court’s assessment reads.

And Just Like That, No Consensus on Anything

In its order dated May 13, the Court considers DoodStream’s general compliance with the injunction issued March 18, weighing input from the studios and the defendants.

The plaintiffs describe a climate of “serious non-compliance” alongside DoodStream’s refusal to remove all shareable links. Counsel said that “about 10 lakh” [~1 million] links had been communicated to the site for removal but “the architecture of the site consciously supports the preservation of the infringing content on Doodstream despite takedowns.”

The site also pays infringers when videos they upload are viewed by others.

Counsel for the defendants argues that DoodStream has always been compliant, even before the lawsuit, taking down or deleting content in response to complaints. Part of the problem since the lawsuit began is that plaintiffs kept sending takedowns in PDF format, and that meant they couldn’t be complied with.

While it was confirmed that steps had been taken to implement an upload filter to protect “various” copyright holders, there was a more fundamental problem. The venue for suing DoodStream should not have been India, counsel explained.

“While the defendants are based in Coimbatore, the hosting platform is in United States of America and therefore, the plaintiff have no reason to approach this Court in the first place.”

As for the proposed culling of download links, that wasn’t going to happen.

“Removing the tabs of ‘download link’, ’embed link’, and ’embed code’ by the defendants would end up in the website being completely bare and inept,” DoodStream added.

The High Court’s brutal assessment on compliance, and what that could mean for DoodStream’s future, will appear here tomorrow

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Supported by Hollywood and other content industries, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has a long and well-established track record.

The group’s actions regularly make it into our headlines, but there is also a lot of work carried out behind the scenes.

BREIN has just published its latest annual report, providing insights into the priorities of the organization and the progress being made. This was BREIN’s final year under the leadership of Tim Kuik, who recently handed his life’s work to the organization’s new director, Bastiaan van Ramshorst.

610 ‘Shutdowns’

Looking at the latest numbers, we see that the anti-piracy group has closed the books on a very productive year. In total, BREIN completed 615 investigations, which resulted in the shutdown of 610 illegal sites and services.

These targets include 501 proxies and mirrors, 14 pirate streaming sites, 14 IPTV/VOD sellers, as well as 23 uploaders, scripters, and operators who were connected to various pirate sites.

The remaining offenders include a wide variety of pirate sites and services such as Usenet indexers, pirate apps, cyberlockers, Facebook groups, stream-rippers, as well as old school open directories. These are typically quite small ‘operations’ but the takedowns still add up.

BREIN also kept a close eye on advertisements for pirate services and other illegal offerings. A total of 3,739 advertisements were flagged and reported, a figure that has been relatively stable over the years.

Google Takedowns & Site Blocking

The same can’t be said for search engine removals. In 2023, BREIN helped to remove 132,455 links to pirate sites from third-party search engines such as Google. That’s down significantly from last year, further still when compared to years earlier.

From an enforcement perspective, the decline is considered a positive. As reported previously, Google now delists entire domains from search results in countries where ISPs are required to block those platforms.

This means that The Pirate Bay and many of its proxies and mirrors no longer show up in Google. The same applies to other blocked sites; following requests from BREIN, in 2023 Google completely delisted 256 domain names already blocked by ISPs in the Netherlands,

“The ‘delisting’ […] is equivalent to millions of search results that can no longer be seen in the search engine and therefore no longer have to be reported by BREIN. On balance, the number of permanently deleted Google search results has increased to many tens of millions,” BREIN writes.

The new delistings were in part the result of the Lookmovie and Flixtor blocking order that was obtained last year. With the previously blocked Pirate Bay, 1337x, LimeTorrents, YTS, RARBG, Kickasstorrents and EZTV, the total has now reached nine sites and hundreds of proxies.

Next year, this will increase further, as a recent order added shadow libraries ‘Anna’s Archive’ and ‘LibGen’ to the Dutch blocklist.

Knock Knock…

The full annual report includes many more details and nuances. For example, BREIN also completed 41 settlement agreements, mostly with site operators or uploaders. Twelve of these were the result of ‘knock & talks’, where the alleged pirates received a home visit.

BREIN tends to be fairly pragmatic with its settlement approach. The ultimate goal is to stop the infringements. Offenders typically have to agree to stop their activities, or face a hefty penalty if they continue.

Ideally, the anti-piracy group would like offenders to cooperate, but that doesn’t always work as planned.

Last year, BREIN used previously obtained information about a pirate script seller to identify several new uploaders and site owners. One of those individuals chose to settle for a higher fee, rather than expose the person who sold the script. Ultimately, however, the ‘protected’ scripter was caught.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning a large criminal prosecution of an IPTV operation, where the originating complaint was filed by BREIN. This case, which is still pending, took down an entire datacenter and resulted in several arrests.

These types of copyright-related criminal prosecutions are rare in the Netherlands, and this was the largest of its kind in the country.

“Illegal IPTV is the most serious threat to legal offerings of movies, series, television and sports broadcasts. This case involves a criminal organization behind the large-scale sale of more than 1 million IPTV subscriptions in the Netherlands, among other countries,” BREIN writes.

Finally, BREIN also had one of its largest ever setbacks last year. In a Usenet-related lawsuit, a provider that had already shut down years before ended up with a moral victory.

After a legal battle of 14 years, the Dutch Supreme Court concluded that Usenet provider NSE was not liable for copyright infringement. The fact that NSE had a takedown procedure and no apparent knowledge of infringement, weighed in its favor, and BREIN was ordered to pay €65,000 in legal fees.

—

A copy of BREIN’s latest annual report in available here, in Dutch

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

YouTube is the most watched streaming platform in the world. The endless library of videos, uploaded by both amateurs and professionals, is simply unrivaled.

The site’s popularity translates into hard dollars, with YouTube and its creators generating billions in yearly revenue. However, there are downsides too, as some content is shared without permission.

To protect copyright holders, YouTube uses an advanced content recognition system called Content ID that flags potentially infringing videos. Videos can then be taken down, or monetized, depending on the preference of the claiming party.

Fewer Content ID Partners

The Content ID system works reasonably well, but access is limited to a select group of major copyright holders. According to YouTube’s latest transparency report, the group is shrinking.

In the last six months of 2023, 7,791 partners had access to Content ID, down from over 8,900 partners in the first half of the year. No reason for the reduction is mentioned but of all partners that had access, 4,511 actively used Content ID.

Companies and individuals that don’t have access to the automated system can use the webform to file DMCA notices manually. Alternatively, there are almost 3 million YouTube users who have access to the Copyright Match tool, a 25% increase compared to the previous reporting period.

Access and usage of copyright tools
 

The table above shows that users of the Copyright ID tool are in the minority, representing less than 2% of all complaining rightsholders. However, this relatively small group is responsible for more than 99% of all copyright claims on YouTube.

A Billion Copyright ID Claims

For the first time, YouTube has processed more than a billion Copyright ID claims in a six-month period. Between July 2023 and December 2023, a total of 1,016,137,305 potential infringements were flagged.

The vast majority of the flagged videos weren’t removed, but monetized instead. This is big business, which has generated more than $9 billion in revenue for rightsholders over the years.

The number of claims per six months has also steadily increased in recent years. When YouTube published its first transparency report in 2022, it reported 722 million Content ID claims, a figure that has increased by 40% since then.

Not all copyright claims come from Content ID, as shown below. However, the webform and Copyright Match claims pale in comparison, coming in at just a few million in total, which is less than 1% of all ‘actions’.

Copyright actions by tool

More Counter-Notices and Challenges

More claims logically result in more challenges. Percentage-wise, the Content ID challenges have also increased from 0.40% to 0.42%. That seemingly small percentage translated to more than 4 million disputes in the last half of 2023. In 2.7 million cases, the content was successfully disputed at the first attempt.

The other takedown tools have a higher dispute percentage. For classic webform DMCA takedowns, 7.5% was challenged through a counter-notice, up from 5.9% a year earlier.

The relatively high ‘abuse’ rate is one of the main reasons why YouTube hasn’t opened up its Content ID system to a broader group of rightsholders. After all, a Content ID mistake has the potential to impact many thousands of user uploads at once.

“While a single copyright removal requested from the webform impacts only one (or a handful) of videos, a single invalid reference file in Content ID can impact thousands of videos and users, stripping them of monetization or blocking them altogether,” YouTube clarifies.

This doesn’t mean that Content ID is perfect, of course. There have been plenty of mistakes in the past and even outright criminal abuse. With the current setup, YouTube hopes to have found a balance that most rightsholders and content creators can live with. Whether that’s indeed the case, depends on who you ask.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Rightsholders and their anti-piracy partners have faced an uphill struggle trying to convince the UK public that streaming copyrighted content from illicit sources is illegal.

News of legal ‘gray areas’ and other perceived loopholes in the law travel fast, but in the case of unlicensed streaming, the idea that no laws were being broken had solid support. In 2017, Trading Standards went on record stating that streaming consumers had nothing to fear under copyright law, a position supported – albeit briefly – by the European Commission.

Early 2017, Justice Arnold at the High Court said that in his opinion, viewing pirated streams was obviously illegal under copyright law and in April 2017, Europe’s highest court agreed. There had never been a gray area after all, but it’s up for debate whether anyone cared one way or the other.

Like never before, streaming piracy was skyrocketing.

Early 2017: Not Illegal. 2024: Supporting Organized Crime

Drowned out by a massive surge in streaming piracy, of live sports in particular, confirmation of illegality had close to zero effect on consumer attitudes or habits. In practical terms, rightsholders couldn’t do much with it either, despite the transformation from nothing particularly serious in 2017, to more recent assertions that consuming streams is illegal and fuels other criminality.

On Wednesday, the UK’s North East Regional Organized Crime Unit (NEROCU) reported a ‘strike day’ during which officers targeted “fraud and illegal streaming” of premium Sky content, with a broader aim to “defund and dismantle” wider organized crime.

“Today, (Wednesday), officers executed a warrant on Coxwold Road in Stockton-on-Tees that is believed to be involved in an illegal streaming operation involving fraud and money laundering,” NEROCU reported.

“The specialist police operation resulted in a 52-year-old man being arrested under suspicion of supplying articles for use in fraud and money laundering. He has since been released under investigation while enquiries continue.”

High on Detail But Not Always Where it Matters

Supplying articles for use in fraud as defined by the Fraud Act 2006, leaves plenty of room for speculation in the context of illegal streaming. Additional detail on the alleged crime would’ve been more useful than the name of the street where the suspect lives, but perhaps details were supplied in this format for a reason.

In summary, an ‘article’ under the Fraud Act can be a physical item such as a pirate set-top box, or a non-physical item such as a piracy app or subscription login for a pirate IPTV service. Anyone who makes, adapts, or supplies (or simply offers to supply) any article for use or in connection with fraud, while knowing what the article is designed to do, likely commits an offense under Section 7 of the Fraud Act 2006.

The 2017 revelation, that consuming unlicensed streams is illegal, could in theory apply to those who used whatever ‘articles’ the arrested man was allegedly supplying to watch streams. In reality, however, Section 6 of the Fraud Act (Possession of articles for use in fraud) is much more straightforward; possession or control of an article intended for use in the course of (or in connection with) any fraud, is an offense under Section 6.

And yet interestingly, NEROCU’s press release doesn’t mention that, not even in passing.

Police Frame Customers as Potential Victims

As previously reported, there has been an awful lot of misinformation – disinformation at times – published in British online publications in recent months.

Some readers may have seen the recent articles concerning the Tyson Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk fight and an earlier wave claiming that people risk £50,000 fines and ten years in prison for viewing illegal streams. There have been many others of course, and it will probably come as no surprise that we now know that at least one campaign was orchestrated.

The important detail is that when the misinformation starts to fly, official police sources are not cited in those articles. Sometimes older comments, completely unrelated to the article in hand, are woven in for effect; generally, however, those who enforce the law aren’t the ones driving the hyperbolic threats. For contrast, NEROCU’s statement from Wednesday.

While most people think paying for illegal streaming devices and services is a victimless crime – this couldn’t be further from the truth.

 

Illegal streaming services that supply entertainment and sports content via modified boxes, firesticks, and subscriptions, help fund wider organized crime such as human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, drug supply and other sinister crimes.

 

We’re also warning users of the many other risks associated with illegal streaming, including fraud, scams, exposure to inappropriate content, viruses, and malware.

So it appears that a cautionary word will suffice for subscribers. No raids on people’s homes, no life-changing fines, or a decade in prison. No carefully crafted sentences designed to mislead. Why? Because this is a police press release and the police are accountable.

People shouldn’t make the mistake of believing offenses are simply being overlooked, temporarily or permanently, however. Circumstances can turn policy in a heartbeat, and when that happens, the public will be informed. Just don’t expect to get an early heads-up, that’s not how policing works.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

In an ideal world, there should be no reason for people to pirate. However, that world doesn’t exist.

On the contrary, in recent years, movie and TV-show piracy appears to have become more relevant.

The fragmented libraries of video streaming services, paired with their costly monthly subscriptions, play a part in this resurgence. Many people have become accustomed to ‘pirating’ content on the side when the services they pay for don’t offer everything they want.

Diverse viewing options haven’t made it easier to find movies and series, either, especially so when content is removed from platforms unexpectedly. That was the case for ‘Adam Ruins Everything‘, which disappeared from HBO Max a few months ago.

When That Fails: BitTorrent…

When a fan of the series asked lead star Adam Conover where they could watch the series today, the comedian/writer came back with some interesting options, as spotted by Dextero.

“Adam Ruins Everything was removed from Max last year, despite the fact that many, many people still watch the show. The best way to watch the show currently is to buy a season pass on Amazon or iTunes. When that fails: BitTorrent,” he wrote.

The BitTorrent mention is an indirect reminder that fans have the option to pirate the show. While that might be interpreted as a comedic touch, there appears to be more going on here.

Conover obviously doesn’t want fans to pirate everything. He serves on the board of the Writers Guild of America, the labor union that represents film and TV writers. These people all depend on paying consumers to make a living.

That said, Conover is seemingly more frustrated with the capitalistic moves of the Hollywood majors than he is with pirates.

‘Monopoly Capitalism’

The comedian is hardly a neutral party, as ‘Adam Ruins Everything’ wasn’t renewed in 2019, presumably as part of cost cutting activities. The series became a casualty of WarnerMedia’s consolidation of TruTV, HBO, TNT and TBS. The viewing numbers were great, but the series didn’t survive.

Although mergers and consolidations may be a great way to save costs, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the industry benefits as a whole.

“The problem is when two big companies merge into one, there’s less competition and less competition means less jobs for us to go around and less options for us in the media. So if you want to know what killed Adam Ruins Everything, monopoly capitalism did. That’s the murderer,” Connoly said in 2022.

At the time, ‘Adam Ruins Everything’ was still streaming on HBO MAX, but it seems that Connoly saw the writing on the wall a few months later.

More Money, More Pirates?

In August 2022, HBO removed dozens of shows from its streaming platform, again to save costs. The decision was related to the Warner Bros. merger with Discovery and left many writers and actors frustrated, including Conover, who shared his frustration online.

“Remember when the promise of streaming was an endless library where even niche shows would be watchable forever? Now b/c of the merger, HBO Max is DELETING dozens of shows, just to save $ on taxes and residuals. A needless, shameful waste,” Conover wrote.

Fast-forward a year or so, and ‘Adam Ruins Everything’ was gone from HBO MAX too, which brings us back to today.

While piracy certainly isn’t the solution to any of the problems highlighted here, piracy does get a boost when movies and series seem to disappear from streaming platforms at random.

Don’t believe me? Just ask Adam Conover.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

When attempting to tackle large-scale infringers of any kind, there’s no single approach that can stop the most determined.

Introducing new technical measures may have some effect, while a strategic lawsuit alongside measured, public messaging are usually more effective when combined rather than delivered in isolation.

Yet there are other considerations too; warnings that are heard too often lose their impact, threats that in time become parodies of themselves are ultimately received as such.

When Bungie filed yet another lawsuit against alleged developers, marketers, support staff, and sellers of Destiny 2 cheating software last August, the complaint’s introduction contained a two-line statement. Even at the time it sounded more like a promise than a threat; 10 months later Bungie’s actions are speaking just as loud as its words.

Ramping Up The Pressure

Filed August 1, 2023, at a Washington court, Bungie’s complaint targets alleged members of the cheat developer/distributor operation, Ring-1. Bungie had targeted the group previously, obtaining settlements from at least three members, but with many loose ends to tie up, the video game developer was back to finish the job.

The complaint alleged the usual violations of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. On top, Civil RICO (racketeering: wire fraud, criminal copyright infringement, money laundering), violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Breach of Contract, Interference with Contractual Relations, and Civil Conspiracy.

With the progressive addition of new claims, an element of uncertainty is introduced.

Relentless Pursuit of ‘Anonymous’ Ring-1 Defendants

For facilitating cheating in a video game, the list of claims in Bungie’s complaint would likely prove baffling to the layman. The harsh reality is that all would amount to nothing if Bungie failed to deanonymize the defendants and for some, Bungie didn’t even have an online pseudonym to work with.

In the original complaint, Bungie said it knew the real names and general whereabouts of Joshua Fisher (UK), Jacob W. Mahuron aka ‘Pragmatic Tax’ (Delaware), Matthew Abbott aka ‘Nova’ (West Virginia), and Travers Rutten (Australia). David Hastings aka ‘J3ster’ and Jesse Watson aka ‘essewatson3944’ were matched to their pseudonyms, but physical locations were unknown.

Other pseudonyms identified included Calc, Cypher, Khaleesi, god, c52you, lelabowers74, Framework, Sequel, 1nvitus, and Sinister. As for defendants 11-50, they were little more than ‘John Does’.

After 10 months of investigations, Bungie now wants to file its first amended complaint, which reveals the progress to date.

Bungie’s Deanonymization Efforts Pay Off

In November 2023 and April 2024, Bungie received authorization to conduct third-party discovery with the aim of unmasking more defendants. That appears to be paying off.

David Hastings aka ‘J3ster’ has been identified as Jose DeJesus. Andrew Thorpe, for whom Bungie did not list an online handle, now has one: Cypher. Others have real names too: Khaleesi (Ryan Power), Sequel (Kichang Kang), and Sinister (David Brinlee).

Named and pseudonymous defendants are also being methodically associated with their alleged roles at Ring-1.

They include Joshua Fisher (middleman reseller and payment processing service), Mahuron/Pragmatic Tax (support staff), Abbott/Nova (support staff), Rutten (reseller), Watson (reseller), Calc (administrator/developer), c52you (developer), lelabowers74 (developer), Framework (administrator), and 1nvitus (reseller/operator of 1nvituscheats.com)

Even the John Does are being slowly unmasked. Former Does include TheGuy, Beatred, CommunityMods, CM, Palace, VincentPrice, Esswan, Admiral, TomDickHarry, Rob, Staylocked, Five-star, Horror, Elitecheatz.co, Mihal Lucian, Nathan Bernard, BlackMamba, BillNye, Banek192, Shoppy.gg, and Finn Grimpe/Finndev. The remaining yet-to-be-unmasked Does now number 31-50.

Bungie has linked several defendants to specific addresses, including Mahuron (Pragmatic Tax) and Abbott (Nova) who have been positively identified and served.

Bungie Intends to Continue Indefinitely

“Ring-1 is an extensive and sophisticated enterprise which goes to extraordinary lengths to conceal its scope, its reach, and the extent of its wrongful conduct,” Bungie’s proposed amended complaint informs the court.

“The members of the enterprise are careful to conceal their identities as much as possible in an effort to escape accountability for the harm their activities cause to the players, developers, and producers of games like Destiny 2. These efforts have included changing pseudonyms, falsely claiming that people have left the enterprise, and even falsely claiming that people involved in the enterprise have died.

“Bungie has not been deterred and has found them anyway.”

Bungie’s proposed amended complaint is available here (pdf)

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

In recent years, legal video and sports streaming services have flourished around the world.

At the same time, millions of people are streaming from unauthorized sources, often through perfectly legal streaming devices including Amazon’s Firesticks.

Most people know that the subscription services that typically arrive pre-installed on the devices are unauthorized. However, with such significant discounts available, millions can’t resist these offers.

The demand has created an entire new industry with a few big players at the top, making millions. Further down the food chain, there is a wide variety of subscription resellers who take a cut as well, running their own ‘shops’.

Court Sentences IPTV Firestick Seller

The latter description applies to Mr. O’Donnell, a 41-year-old man from the North West of England who was sentenced at Liverpool Crown Court today. The defendant, who pleaded guilty, received a two-year suspended prison sentence and was ordered to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work.

As often seen in UK cases, the sentence is for “supplying” content under the Fraud Act. In addition, the defendant violated the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988 by “providing, promoting and marketing in the course of a business, a service designed to circumvent technological measures.

O’Donnell promoted and sold the ‘fully loaded’ Firesticks though direct contact, Facebook and WhatsApp, delivering some of the purchases in person. After an investigation by local anti-piracy group FACT, he was eventually arrested by Merseyside Police on July 4th last year.

According to FACT, these unauthorized IPTV subscriptions included broadcasts of Sky, TNT Sports, and possibly others.

£130,000

The Liverpool man doesn’t seem to be a key player in the broader pirate IPTV ecosystem, but still generated £130,000 in revenue. How much work that involved isn’t clear, but FACT mentions that the Firesticks were sold ‘over a number of years’.

Not all of the revenue came from selling modified Firesticks. The defendant also sold standalone IPTV subscriptions, priced between £40 and £85 for an annual plan.

How much profit the operation made is unclear. According to information available to us at the time of writing, O’Donnell is not required to pay any costs to the victims due to his personal circumstances.

Sticky Message

All in all, both FACT andMerseyside Police are pleased with the outcome of this case. They hope that it sends a clear message to others operating in the same line of business.

“The message is very clear: if you sell a device that provides access to content that is not licensed to you or owned by you, you could face criminal investigation, prosecution and a conviction,” FACT CEO Kieron Sharp comments.

Detective Inspector Steve Frame at Merseyside Police adds more cautionary words for pirate IPTV peddlers.

“We will use all available powers and continue to work with FACT to identify anyone else who is involved in this form of criminality and put them before the courts,” Frame says, commenting on the news.

This certainly isn’t the first IPTV-related sentencing in the UK; time will tell if the message eventually sticks.

Finally, the FACT press release prominently refers to the activities as an “illegal Firestick operation“. However, it is worth clarifying that Firesticks themselves are perfectly legal and are still on sale at Amazon.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Driven by views, likes, and in some cases, a reasonable level of fame, around 2016 emboldened YouTubers threw caution to the wind with their ‘content acquisition’ tutorials.

Where there had once been a nod-and-a-wink, many ventured into the full-blown piracy tutorial arena. For good measure, they also marketed them as such.

While some claimed protection based on freedom of speech, many underestimated the implications of exercising that right on YouTube, a platform they did not own. The majority failed to appreciate the importance of framing and intent and, as predicted in 2018, YouTube’s 2021 response was inevitable.

Piracy Tutorials in 2024

On May 31, a popular GitHub repo containing Switch emulation tutorials found itself targeted by Nintendo.

According to a just-published DMCA notice, Nintendo’s main target was the Switch-Emulators-Guide repo and, by extension, over 120 forks.

A note from GitHub confirms that since most or all of the forks were infringing to the same extent as the parent repo, it processed the notice against 127 repos in total.

The Switch Emulators Guide was presented in the context of piracy, something made clear by a note on the main page of the original repo which stated that the tutorial was made, in part, for use on the /r/NewYuzuPiracy subreddit.

Since the actions of Yuzu and its eventual demise are part of the unwritten framework for similar takedowns, that sets the tone (although not the legal basis) in favor of takedown.

Violations of DMCA’s Anti-Circumvention Provision

When asked to provide a description and URL pointing to the copyrighted content allegedly infringed by the repos, Nintendo states that the works are the ‘Nintendo Switch firmware” and various games protected by technological protection measures (TPM) which prevent users from unlawfully copying and playing pirated games. The notice states the repos ‘provide access’ to keys that enable circumvention of its technical measures.

“The reported repositories offer and provide access to unauthorized copies of cryptographic keys that are used to circumvent Nintendo’s Technological Measures and infringe Nintendo’s intellectual property rights. Specifically, the reported repositories provide to users unauthorized copies of cryptographic keys (prod.keys) extracted from the Nintendo Switch firmware,” Nintendo writes.

“The prod.keys allow users to bypass Nintendo’s Technological Measures for digital games; specifically, prod.keys allow users to decrypt and play Nintendo Switch games in unauthorized ways. Distribution of keys without the copyright owner’s authorization is a violation of Section 1201 of the DMCA.”

Nintendo further notes that unauthorized distribution of prod.keys “facilitates copyright infringement by permitting users to play pirated versions of Nintendo’s copyright-protected game software on systems without the Nintendo Technological Measures or systems on which Nintendo’s Technological Measures have been disabled.”

Since the prod.keys are extracted from the Nintendo Switch firmware, which is also protected by copyright, distribution amounts to “infringement of Nintendo Switch firmware itself.”

Repo ‘Encrypts’ Links to Circumvention Tools

Given that the repo’s stated purpose was to provide information on how to circumvent Nintendo’s technical protection measures, it’s fairly ironic that it appears to have used technical measures itself to hinder detection.

“The reported repositories attempt to evade detection of their illegal activities by providing access to prod.keys and unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s firmware and video games via encoded links that direct users to third-party websites to download the infringing content,” Nintendo explains in its notice.

“The repositories provide strings of letters and numbers and then instruct users to ‘use [private] to decode the lines of strings given here to get an actual link.’ The decoded links take users to sites where they can access the prod.keys and unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s copyright-protected material.”

The image below shows the encoded links (partially redacted) that allegedly link to the content in question on third-party sites. To hide their nature, regular URLs are encoded using Base64, a binary-to-text encoding scheme that transforms them into a sequence of characters. Those characters can be decoded to reveal the original URL using online tools.

This type of encoding has increased in popularity in recent years since it’s believed that automated DMCA notice systems are more likely to pass by when no obvious URL exists in a web page. While in some cases that may still be true, it’s beyond clear that Nintendo’s notice here is the work of humans, even if a machine was responsible for finding the repo with the words ‘switch’ and ’emulators” in the title.

Repo Modifications, Original Stays Up

In line with GitHub policy, the repo was allowed to put right its transgressions to stay up. A number of modifications were made, including the removal of all encoded URLs and the references to piracy made on various pages. Most if not all forks were unable to take action in a timely fashion, so these were disabled by GitHub.

Finally, it’s worth noting that this was not a regular DMCA takedown notice; Nintendo sent a DMCA anti-circumvention notice for which there is no official counternotice process available. While on many other platforms a notice like that can be instantly and permanently terminal, GitHub said that it did not find sufficient information to determine a valid anti-circumvention claim.

It did find other valid claims, however, and that led to the outcome detailed above.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

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. “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on June 03 are:

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

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

Over 5,800 posted in 2023. Nearly 2,400 this year up to May.

With more than a quarter billion site visits between February and April, pirate streaming site Fmovies is seen as a major threat by Hollywood.

The pirate site rivals legal streaming platforms such as Disney+ in web traffic and has become the poster child for rejuvenated site blocking proposals in the U.S. Congress.

Fmovies is no newcomer to the pirate streaming market. The site has been around for quite some time and ACE and the MPA have pinpointed its alleged operators in Vietnam. Efforts to shut the site down have failed thus far, however, while its main user base in the United States continues to grow.

The Indian Threat

There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon for Hollywood. In India, the home of Bollywood, courts have recently signed several site blocking orders, amplified with broad injunctions intended to have a global effect.

In addition to requiring Indian ISPs to block access to pirate sites, High Court orders also require domain registrars to suspend their domain names. Some American domain name registrars are receptive to these orders, as they otherwise risk being banned from doing business in India.

Earlier this year, this resulted in suspensions of popular pirate site domains including Zorox, Upmovies, Animeflix, and Vegamovies. Many of these suspensions were the result of action by foreign companies, including US-based domain name registrars Namecheap and Porkbun.

Top Pirate Sites Switch Domains

Domain suspensions can prove punishing, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that pirate sites go down for good. Losmovies.id, which lost its domain last month, continues its operations from Losmoviesz.to. And it’s not the only popular pirate site to relocate.

This weekend, several pirate streaming sites switched to new domain names. Fmovies, for example, traded in its fmoviesz.to domain name for fmovies24.to, without any explanation.

Other popular pirate site domains that appear to be part of the same group, took similar decisions. For example, Bflix.to moved to Bflixhd.to, Soap2dayx.to, became Soap2dayx2.to, and Sflixhd.to switched to Sflixhd.to.

The suggestion that these sites are operated by one group is strengthened by their redirection notices. All appeared at the same time and are identical, as shown above.

Why Move?

None of the sites provided an explanation for their sudden moves. We can only guess what motivated them, but considering the domain crackdowns over the past several months, one explanation stands out.

TorrentFreak learned that the originating domain names of these pirate sites were all registered though Namecheap. This makes them vulnerable to Indian court orders. The new domains have moved away from Namecheap, possibly as a preemptive move to avoid suspensions.

Technically, the original domain names could have been transferred out without moving to a new domain. It’s not clear why that hasn’t happened, but there must be a good reason for it.

All new domain names are still .to, which are overseen by the Tonic registry. The new domains might also be registered there directly but, in any case, the new domains are not linked to Namecheap.

It’s possible that the Tonic registry will be subjected to the same Indian court order, but the company’s compliance standards might be different. Thus far, only .to domains registered though Namecheap have been suspended. Other domains listed in the same court orders, such as huramovies.to and eztvz.to, remain active.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

While rightsholders in Belgium have been slightly less vocal in support of site-blocking measures than others around Europe, they now appear to be making up for lost time.

With rightsholders eager to block large swathes of pirate sites and local ISPs on record saying they want exactly the same thing, an application for a blocking injunction filed by DAZN’s Eleven Sports Network in March showed partners working together.

Eleven Sports Network / 12th Player BV

Filed at the Dutch-speaking Business Court in Brussels, the application saw DAZN’s Eleven Sports Network (ESN) and 12th Player BV, a joint venture between ESN and the Spanish company Mediapro Internacional, team up hoping to compel local ISPs to block around 90 pirate domains.

According to the claimants, the platforms are dedicated to streaming live football matches in violation of their rights. Visitors to these pirate services reside in Belgium and access matches illegally using local internet service providers.

In this matter, the main internet service providers in Belgium are the named defendants, but only for the purposes of establishing their role as intermediaries. The ISPs are supporters of site-blocking measures because they also stand to benefit: Telenet via its Play Sports service, Proximus via Proximus Pickx, and Voo via Voo Sports.

Rightsholders ‘Recommend’ ISPs Should Block the Sites

With claimants and defendants all aiming for the same thing, the language used in the decision handed down by the Brussels court is non-adversarial, to put it mildly.

The claimants asserted that the domains submitted for blocking “provide access to websites on which audiovisual content broadcast on the channels of Eleven Sports Network BV is communicated to the public” and that customers of Telenet NV, Proximus NV, Voo NV, and Orange Belgium NV, facilitate access to those domains.

To tackle this problem, the claimants “recommended” that in their roles as intermediaries, the ISPs should implement DNS measures to prevent access to the ‘pirate’ domains.

The claimants further suggested putting the DNS tampering to good use; customers attempting to access the domains should be redirected to a DAZN anti-piracy site (screenshot below) set up to advise visitors on the reasons for redirection.

All parties also agreed to bear their own costs.

Not Much for the Court to Do

With no evidence before the Court that the claims were inadmissible and no grounds being identified that they might be, the claims of the applicants were declared admissible. The ISPs disputed the applicants’ claims for the record but offered no argument in support. Instead, as part of the predetermined direction of the case, left judgment in the hands of the Court.

The Court determined that as providers of internet connectivity, the ISPs are intermediaries and, as such, are in a position to prevent their subscribers from accessing the pirate streaming sites. The ISPs were ordered to do just that.

The request by Eleven Sports for the ISPs to redirect subscribers to a block page provided by DAZN was rejected. However, the decision notes that the ISPs “are free to provide the public with such information about the blocked access that these parties deem appropriate.”

Given that the claimants and defendants worked together to present the blocking action to the Court, it’s possible that the ISPs will find it appropriate to redirect visitors to DAZN’s anti-piracy page after all. Describing it as a ‘block page’ seems insufficient, however.

The site, located at dazn-antipiracy.be where the image above is displayed, seems to have a lot going on behind the scenes considering its straightforward task. One might even conclude that the aim isn’t just to inform, but to track visitors longer term.

The domains to be blocked by the ISPs are listed below. Three domains (aliezstream.pro, cdnssd.ru, ustream.pro) appear to be duplicates.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

A press release issued by Spain’s Ministry of the Interior on Friday initially sounds straightforward.

Based on a complaint filed by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, in November 2022 an investigation was launched to identify those responsible for two websites that marketed a service that allegedly violated the rights of ACE members.

“The complex computer and banking investigation carried out, together with several police investigation techniques, allowed the specialists of the Central Cybercrime Unit to prove that the websites investigated were registered, controlled and operated from several companies directed by the main suspect, a citizen of Dutch origin,” the statement reads.

“This man allegedly led a business and criminal network, made up of citizens living mainly in Gran Canaria, which appeared to be a legitimate business structure with which he managed to earn more than 5,300,000 euros.”

International TV Channels, Movies, TV Series

The press release describes an “international criminal organization” operating a pirate IPTV network using “the latest technology and the most advanced technical devices” to capture satellite signals from various countries.

“They subsequently amplified them and decrypted the multimedia content they transported, content that they then distributed publicly and illegally. In total, more than 130 international television channels and thousands of movies and series that they made available to citizens around the world,” the Ministry continues.

The service, which isn’t named by the Ministry, reportedly had more than 14,000 subscribers who paid between 10 and 19 euros per month, resulting in “damage to the rights of the authors, producers and distributors of these artistic works.”

Service Dismantled, Eight People Arrested

The Ministry of the Interior says that eight people, described as the main members of the network “who held or had held positions of responsibility” have now been arrested.

They were targeted in raids on addresses in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Madrid, Oviedo, and Málaga. Two home searches, executed simultaneously, led to the seizure of a vehicle and two computers. Bank accounts containing 80,000 euros were frozen.

“Likewise, the servers of the online platforms investigated were seized and blocked. Sixteen web pages controlled by this criminal organization were also blocked, so that when their users currently try to access them, their access is prevented. It redirects them to a National Police website where a message is displayed informing them that this page has been intercepted,” the government ministry concludes.

Service Targeted Was TVMucho, Recently Rebranded as Teeveeing

Supplied by the Ministry of the Interior, the video above is much like many others depicting raids against pirate IPTV services. In this case we can confirm the target was the service formerly known as TVMucho and more recently known as Teeveeing.

Launched around 2015 and originally incorporated in London as TVMucho Ltd early 2016, the company ran for 18 months before shutting down. Company data in Spain reveals that TVMucho Sociedad Limitada began trading just under nine years ago and was registered to an address in Las Palmas.

Unless there was a lot more going on than its public image suggested, TVMucho didn’t seem to exist for the purpose of usurping traditional pay TV providers or the likes of Netflix.

The premise was simple; expats away from home with zero access to the free-to-air channels they had come to rely on, could subscribe to TVMucho and the service would pipe those channels to them over the internet for viewing in Spain.

At least as far as we’re aware, the channels on offer from TVMucho were the channels expats would receive simply by switching on a TV at home. While a TV license would be required to view them in the UK, for example, none required a subscription or payment over and above that.

Beyond a handful of free minutes as a promotion, TVMucho did cost money to view but with no official alternative, the service proved popular.

Citing ‘Insurmountable Challenges’ TVMucho Shuts Down

In a message that appeared on its homepage in October 2023, TVMucho spoke of “unsurmountable challenges” presented by a company in the U.S. and advised its customers the company had ceased trading with immediate effect.

Since the authorities have refrained from revealing the identity of the main suspect, we won’t be naming him here either. However, the paragraph that references the “often misunderstood” business model is something the Dutch owner of TVMucho has spoken about for years.

We will revisit his position on legality at a later time once the charges against him have been made clear; what we can confirm is that while he believed that the law protected his business, major rightsholders have repeatedly argued quite the opposite.

TVMucho is Dead, long Live TeeVeeing?

The sudden demise of TVMucho was matched by the equally sudden appearance of an almost identical platform called TeeVeeing.

All former subscribers of TVMucho needed to do was agree to new terms and conditions and according to reports, normal service was resumed.

The marketing material pretty much confirmed that everything would remain the same, including access to the same free-to-air content from back home (but unavailable in Spain), all laid out nicely in a glossy EPG.

For reasons that still aren’t clear, the TeeVeeing app is still available on Apple’s App Store and still free to download from Google Play. That doesn’t seem to dovetail particularly well with the emphasis being placed on “dismantled” services and blocked websites in Spain.

Yet, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment confirms that this action is indeed about TVMucho and TeeVeeing and the “125 channels, including major networks like BBC, ITV, Sky, and RTL” offered by the service(s).

The report avoids mentioning that the channels are all free-to-air but notes that due to the work of the Spanish National Police, “the access to infringed content and 15 related domains were blocked.”

Dismantled, or Just Dismantled a Bit?

When putting together this report on Friday, we had zero problems accessing the TVMucho website. We had zero problems accessing the website of TeeVeeing too, which in view of the statements about its dismantling is a bit of an issue. Through our Spanish contacts we asked if the websites were accessible in Spain and whether by pure luck or otherwise, neither were blocked.

While that’s not a particularly big deal for TVMucho’s website, the same can’t be said about that of TeeVeeing; quite obviously it’s still online and as the screenshot sent to us independently confirms, a live event that was taking place in the UK on Friday afternoon was being shown live, in browser, no complications.

Which 16 websites the Spanish government is referring to as blocked is unclear. The same seems to hold true for the dismantled services that, as least as far as we can tell, doesn’t include the main one. Other questions can be addressed in due course, including the claim that the suspects captured satellite broadcasts.

It’s possible they did just that, but there’s also information to suggest that content was more easily obtained from at least one other IPTV service.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Sincere thank you for your Feedback and Likes.

The invention of the MP3 format in 1993 didn’t make any mainstream news headlines. In hindsight, however, it was a pivotal moment that would revolutionize music consumption, and more.

Invented by the German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg and colleagues at the Fraunhofer Society, the coding format made it possible to reduce the size of music files without any significant loss of audible sound quality.

Due to the size reductions, these digital files could be stored on flash-memory devices. This led to the invention of dedicated MP3 players capable of playing music ripped from CDs. Many considered this a more compact and shock-resistant alternative to the Discman.

At the time, music industry insiders were already fantasizing about the ‘celestial jukebox’; a tool or service that would make it possible to play any track on demand. The MP3 helped to bring this concept a step closer too, as Napster would soon prove.

Napster: June 1, 1999

At the end of the nineties, technology and the Internet were a playground for young engineers and ‘hackers’. Some of them regularly gathered in the w00w00 IRC chatroom on the EFnet network. This tech-think-tank had many notable members, including WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and Shawn Fanning, who logged on with the nickname Napster.

In 1998, 17-year-old Fanning shared an idea with the group. ‘Napster’ wanted to create a network of computers that could share files with each other. More specifically, a central music database that everyone in the world could access.

This idea never left the mind of the young developer. Fanning stopped going to school and flanked by his friend Sean Parker, devoted the following months to making his vision a reality. That moment came on June 1, 1999, when the first public release of Napster was released online. Soon after, the software went viral.

Napster was quickly embraced by millions of users, who saw the software as something magical. It was a gateway for musical exploration, one that dwarfed even the largest record stores in town. And all for free. It sounds mundane today, but some equated it to pure technological sorcery.

For many top players in the music industry, Napster’s sorcery was pure witchcraft. At the time, manufacturing CDs with high profit margins felt like printing money and Napster’s appearance threatened to ruin the party.

Music Industry Shocked

According to the RIAA’s former CEO, Hilary Rosen, a few months after Napster’s release, the music industry shifted into full panic mode. In February 2000, all major label executives discussed the threat during an RIAA board meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.

“I will never forget this day. All of the heads of the labels, literally the titans of the music business, were in that room. I had somebody wheel in a PC and put some speakers up and I started doing a name that tune,” Rosen later recalled.

The major music bosses started to name tracks, including some that weren’t even released yet, and time and again Napster would come up with results. Needless to say, the board was terrified.

Within a year, the RIAA sued Napster Inc. and soon after artists including Metallica and Dr. Dre followed. These high profile cases only raised the popularity of Napster and MP3 players began to sell like hotcakes.

Peak Napster

At the start of 2001, Napster’s user base reached a peak of more than 26.4 million worldwide. Yet, despite huge growth and backing from investors, the small file-sharing empire couldn’t overcome the legal challenges.

The RIAA lawsuit resulted in an injunction from the Ninth Circuit Court, which ordered the network to shut down. This happened during July 2001, little more than two years after Napster launched. By September that year, the case had been settled for millions of dollars.

While the Napster craze was over, file-sharing had mesmerized the masses and the genie was out of the bottle. Grokster, KaZaa, Morpheus, LimeWire, and many others popped up and provided sharing alternatives, for as long as they lasted. Meanwhile, BitTorrent was also knocking on the door.

Ripple Effect

Today, 25 years later, music piracy certainly hasn’t disappeared, but it has changed. When Napster came out, there simply weren’t any legal options to buy digital music online; let alone one that offered ‘unlimited access’.

Napster paved the way for Apple’s iTunes store, to serve the demand that was clearly there. The boom in digital download sales never came close to mimicking the ‘all you can play’ experience and was soon marginalized.

The current music industry generates the bulk of its revenues from online streaming subscriptions, while CDs have been downgraded to rare artifacts. This music streaming landscape was largely pioneered by a Napster ‘fan’ from Sweden, Daniel Ek.

Like many others, Ek was fascinated by the ‘all you can play’ experience offered by file-sharing software, and that planted the seeds for the music streaming startup Spotify, where he still serves as CEO today. In fact, Spotify itself used file-sharing technology under the hood to ensure swift playback.

Spotify is just one of the many examples of the Napster ripple effect, which reaches far beyond technology. The entire music industry has changed, for better and worse, depending on one’s perspective. And the ripples that started 25 years ago will still be felt in the decades to come.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Feedback welcome and Likes very much appreciated.

Little over a decade ago, Google expanded its transparency report with a new section dedicated to DMCA takedown requests.

For the first time, this allowed outsiders to see which URLs were being targeted by copyright holders and in what quantity.

In the years that followed, we meticulously covered a steady increase in takedown notices. From just a few thousand reported links per week, soon it was hundreds of thousands, eventually crossing the 7 million mark around 2015.

The graph below shows the takedown boom during these years. At the time, we covered these record-breaking numbers, which peaked at roughly 20 million links reported weekly.

All Google Takedowns (2012-2016)
 

The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017 the takedown volume began to decline. The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results.

Takedown Resurgence

While Google’s demotion measures are still in place, pirates haven’t disappeared. On the contrary, they actively try to bypass the search engine’s countermeasures. As a result, after a few years of declining volumes, DMCA notices shot up once again.

The resurgence produced record-breaking numbers. As reported earlier this year, it only took little over six months for Google to add a billion takedowns. That’s 36 million pirate URLs flagged per week, on average, but more was yet to come.

While browsing though Google’s transparency report this week, we noticed one reporting outfit quickly climbing the ranks. Dutch piracy reporter Link-Busters works with major book publishers and is now the top sender of Google takedown notices this year. The company is flagging URLs at a rate we’ve never seen before.

To set the stage; last year, MG Premium broke new records by being the first reporters to submit over 14 million links per week. That’s peanuts compared to Link-Busters’ latest efforts.

Last year, Link-Busters reported hundreds of thousands of links per week, increasing to around 14 million during the first months of the year. More recently, however, reporting rates have skyrocketed.

56 Million Per Week

In April, the anti-piracy group flagged a record-breaking 56 million links in a single week. That’s an average of more than 5,000 URLs per second. If it could maintain this rate, this single company would report 2.5 billion URLs in a year.

Link-Busters Weekly Takedowns (to Google)
 

The chart above shows Link-Busters’ weekly takedown volume, which already seems to have dropped a bit. Still, the company may be on track to be the first to report a billion pirate URLs to Google.

And there’s another interesting statistic. Since February, Google processed around 750 million reported links, nearly half of which were reported by Link-Busters.

For the Books

As mentioned earlier, Link-Busters mainly works with major book publishers. Most of its takedowns are sent on behalf of Penguin Random House, HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette, John Wiley & Sons, and Princeton University Press.

This ‘book’ crackdown is also relatively new. Previously, music, movie, and adult rightsholders occupied the top takedown spots.

Not surprisingly, Link-Busters mainly targets the domain names of popular shadow libraries. Their top 10 includes several domains connected to Anna’s Archive and Z-Library, as show below.

Link-Busters Most Targeted Domains
 

Whether Link-Busters can keep up this takedown rate has yet to be seen. We’ve asked the company to comment on the recent volume surge and how it expects things to evolve going forward, but we haven’t heard back.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Feedback welcome and Likes very much appreciated.

Amendments to Spain’s Copyright Act (Law No. 2/2011) in 2011 led to the formation of an administrative body known as the Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission (S2CPI).

S2CPI launched in 2012 under the Spanish government’s Ministry of Culture and Sports and has the authority to instruct the country’s internet service providers to block subscriber access to confirmed pirate sites and services.

Data just published, covering the first quarter of 2024, begins with an overview of the number of blocking applications filed by rightsholders since records began in 2012. Even though three-quarters of the year remains, it seems unlikely that 2024 will see as many applications as 2023 or 2022.

Blocking applications to S2CPI (2021-2024(Q1)

The blocking process is triggered when rightsholders file an application with S2CPI to block a domain operated by a pirate site or service. From 2012 to Q1 2024, 909 applications were submitted, although just 11 of those during the first three months of 2024.

Over a Third of Applications Fail

While the specifics aren’t for public consumption, since its launch, S2CPI has rejected 24 blocking applications. Four of those were rejected in Q1 2024 for complaining about the registration of a website, not an established website where infringement is taking place.

In fact, the Spanish system seems quite prone to applications failing for one reason or another. Of the 909 applications ever received, 335 were closed for various rightsholder-related reasons, including withdrawing their own applications, failing to correct defective applications, and filing applications on insufficient grounds.

Other applications failed due to the disappearance of the pirate site in question, or the removal of the infringing content during S2CPI’s preliminary investigations.

“In the first quarter of 2024, no applications have been closed after the phase of investigations prior to the initiation agreement due to the applicant’s withdrawal,” S2CPI’s report notes.

564 Successful Applications From 2012 to Q1 2024

An application is considered successful if it complies with the law and “has given rise to the initiation of a procedure.” From 2012 to Q1 2024, 564 applications met the standard and of those, 447 were “fully processed” after a final resolution of withdrawal or blocking- or a resolution to archive.

“In the first quarter of 2024 there were 17 final resolutions corresponding to two special procedures (shorter because the responsible party was not duly identified in accordance with article 10 of Law 34/2002, of July 11, 2002, on information society services) and one ordinary procedure,” S2CPI notes.

Domain Names Subject to Final Resolution

There are no specific requirements for EU member states to make the domain names they block on copyright grounds available to the public. For those that do, transparency is often cited as important; for those that don’t, it’s not unusual for the justification for non-transparency to be just as opaque.

Despite recent controversies with its Piracy Shield blocking system and a marked reduction in transparency, no country comes close to the detailed reporting of Italy in respect of its regular site blocking system. Spain could do much more, but it still goes further than most.

By making lists of targeted domains public it hopes to “encourage and promote the adoption of voluntary measures of collaboration by intermediary services, electronic payment services and advertising services with respect to these infringing services.”

The domains listed below are those for which the S2CPI has issued a firm “Final Resolution” for the removal of pirate content or ISP blocking.

Administrative Blocking in Spain

When the site blocking movement was first gaining momentum, concerns at internet service providers were not uncommon. As providers of internet connectivity, blocking elements of the internet ran counter to their core mission. Others quite rightly expressed concerns that if they agreed to block a few bad actors, it most likely wouldn’t stop there.

But even more importantly, where were the legal protections should everything go wrong? In the UK, Scandinavia and other European countries testing these waters, applications for injunctions at competent courts allowed increasingly flexible ISPs to offload their concerns onto the shoulders of a judge.

Judicial oversight on blocking matters still plays a role in some countries but in Denmark, Germany, Portugal, and more recently Spain, codes of conduct agreed between rightsholders, ISPs, and other interested parties, tackle site-blocking on an administrative basis.

Operated within the confines of the law but without its persistent oversight, those who request blocking and those with the ability to carry it out, do so directly.

Countering Blocking Countermeasures

For blocking proponents, eliminating friction in the system is increasingly important; blocked sites tend not to stay blocked for very long, so any blocking countermeasures need to be countered quickly. In Spain, sites that have already been blocked after being declared infringing, are handled under the administrative system when infringement persists.

That can mean rightsholders reporting replacement domains, proxy and mirror sites, or the growing deployment of subdomains by pirate sites whose main domains are usually already blocked.

According to the latest S2CPI report, late December 2023 the technical committee representing rightsholder signatories to Spain’s code of conduct, was submitting around 132 reports on a weekly basis, relating to more than 848 domains which together had deployed at least 3,972 subdomains.

Since in many cases these subdomains are configured to undermine blocking, swift and direct action is preferred to the relatively laborious process offered by the courts.

In this case all were quickly blocked but the use of subdomains to mitigate blocking isn’t anything new. Spain mentioned the practice in its 2021 report but with smaller numbers; 172 domains deploying 697 subdomains. In reality, this has been going on for a long time, but it’s the scale that makes it more notable today.

If we compare Spain’s figures to a small sample of the subdomains deployed by pirate IPTV providers to evade blocking by Sky in the UK, we get some idea of just how quickly matters can get out of hand when it’s possible to generate and deploy thousands of subdomains at will, within just a few minutes.

The 848 domains and by extension their 3,972 subdomains mentioned in the report are likely to be outdated figures after five additional months of blocking. However, when compared to other countries, Italy for example, Spain’s blocking of main domains is fairly low. At the time of writing, Italy’s main blocklist (not Piracy Shield) contains exactly 4,000 domains. Perhaps the closest by volume is Denmark’s list, which currently contains 783 domains.

The final list of domains made public by S2CPI in its latest report is somewhat similar to the UK’s Infringing Website List. It’s designed to prevent advertisers from doing business with the sites but also rolls in ISP blocking for good measure.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Feedback welcome and Likes very much appreciated.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post, feedback and Likes welcome