Copyright law crafted decades ago to prevent infringement in an analog world has in many cases held up remarkably well in the digital age. Copying or reproduction remains relevant, as does the concept of distribution.

In the United States, the existence of a loophole in copyright law had been an open secret for some time. One way or another, file-hosting and BitTorrent sites could be linked to the unlicensed reproduction and distribution of copyright works, both of which carry felony charges.

However, a newer breed of streaming sites were seen as engaging in unlicensed public performances of copyrighted works; a misdemeanor offense under a law that failed to anticipate streaming, let alone its meteoric rise to piracy dominance.

The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act (PLSA) closed the loophole late December 2020 with the creation of a new felony offense (18 U.S.C. § 2319C) for those who, willfully and for commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital service that illegally streams copyrighted material.

A Brand New Start or Just Hype

After taking so long to arrive, expectations were high. The return of “billions of dollars in stolen revenue” may have been optimistic, but after all the talk and calls for urgency, it was suddenly up for debate whether the PLSA would be used at all.

Keen to get on with the fight against piracy, Senators Patrick Leahy and Thom Tillis urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to make prosecutions under the PLSA a priority. But then, several months later in 2021, something caught our attention.

The instantly recognizable term “illicit digital transmission” had appeared in a criminal complaint for the first time. The case ultimately went in a different direction and the charge was shelved, but it was a sign of intent, if nothing else.

First Conviction Under PLSA – How it Started

Seemingly out of nowhere, the PLSA claimed its first conviction this week. Landmark events like this are usually seen as an opportunity to celebrate the hard work of everyone involved, while sending a deterrent message to would-be pirates. But in this case, apparently not.

According to a grand jury indictment, from December 11, 2017, until September 7, 2021, Franklyn Valverde owned and operated an IPTV and VOD service marketed as ‘Fenix’.

In South Carolina and elsewhere, it’s claimed that Valverde knowingly and intentionally conspired to commit offenses against the United States, “to wit: the illicit digital transmission of services, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 2319C.”

DISH Network Mentioned Early

A prosecution under the PLSA shouldn’t be much different from any other but in this matter, an oddity raises its head right at the start. The indictment claims that Valverde’s streaming service operated by way of a “copyright infringing connection to DISH Network.”

DISH is extremely well-known for filing its own lawsuits because, at least on paper, most years they generate damages awards that can reach hundreds of millions of dollars. Why DISH suddenly found itself in the middle of a criminal case isn’t revealed in the indictment; what does seem clear is that others also had ‘copyright-infringing connections’ to DISH.

“M.D., a person known to the Grand Jury, owned, and operated ‘Cord Cutters’ and ‘Olympus TV,’ IPTV and VOD services that sold access to copyrighted movies and television programs by way of an unauthorized and copyright infringing connection to
Dish Network,” the indictment reads.

Valverde’s Operation

Subscribers to the Fenix service were able to access infringing content through various web-based applications for use on various platforms, including smart TVs, computers, set-top boxes, cellphones, and tablet devices.

According to the indictment, Valverde marketed Fenix and attracted subscribers through a network of resellers, each of whom sold monthly subscriptions via so-called reseller credits. One credit equals one month of access; profit is generated by buying credits at a discount and selling them on at a higher price to customers.

“Typically, [Valverde] sold access to Fenix streams of content to resellers using a unique access code. The reseller would then provide the code to the customers at an upcharge; Customers would then have access to the copyrighted materials for a specified period, typically one month.”

While the ‘publicly performed’ aspect clearly relates to the PLSA, all other aspects from reproduction to secondary infringement could’ve been handled under existing law. Nevertheless, the indictment covers other matters too.

Overt Acts

In furtherance of the conspiracy, it’s alleged that Valverde committed the following acts:

1. Between 2017 and July 2021, Valverde sold reseller credits to ‘J.R.D’, a person known to the Grand Jury, for between $9 and $15 per credit. J.R.D resold the credits to customers for $25, enabling them to view the “publicly performed” works.

2. Between 2018 and May 2020, Valverde sold reseller credits to ‘M.D’, a person known to the Gran Jury, for between $7 and $15 per credit. M.D resold the credits to customers for $25, enabling them to view the “publicly performed” works.

“All in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371,” the indictment adds. (18 U.S.C. § 371, Conspiracy to Defraud the United States)

Count Two

In essence, count two in the indictment repeats the allegation that Valverde operated a digital transmission service, contrary to the PLSA.

Here, however, it’s alleged that on an unknown date, his Fenix service transmitted “one or more works being prepared for commercial public performance,” and where the defendant “knew or should have known that the work was being prepared for commercial public performance.”

Under the PLSA these violations can dramatically increase the maximum penalties available to the court.

The indictment doesn’t reveal which rightsholders’ content was infringed via the service, i.e which TV shows or movies were publicly performed. The other question involves the content allegedly obtained from DISH. If the content was obtained from DISH at the time it was broadcast to the public by DISH, as is usually the case, it raises the question of how it was still being prepared for broadcast. Court filings offer no explanation.

Valverde Enters Plea

On June 9, 2023, at a district court in South Carolina, Valverde entered a plea of not guilty. He was subsequently given additional time to “review discovery, discuss the case, and negotiate further with the Government in an effort to resolve the case short of trial.”

With a full trial looming, a plea agreement dated November 23 reveals that Valverde had agreed to plead guilty to Count 2 of the indictment. This count covers the provision of the illicit digital service and the works being prepared for commercial public performance; as such the potential penalties are significantly increased.

In a judgment published Tuesday, District Judge Mary Geiger Lewis sentenced Valverde to twelve months and one day in federal prison followed by three years of supervised release.

The financial components of Valverde’s sentence include a $250,000 fine plus $22,639.27 in restitution. That amount is payable to NagraStar, the anti-piracy company partially owned by DISH that seems to have carried out the investigation against Valverde, in part at least.

The fates of ‘J.R.D’ and ‘M.D’ are unknown.

Source

Starting last year, various rightsholders have filed lawsuits against companies that develop AI models.

The list of complainants includes record labels, book authors, visual artists, a chip maker, and news publications. These rightsholders all object to the presumed use of their work without proper compensation.

Keeping pace with the constant stream of legal paperwork is a challenge, but a complaint filed at a New York federal court yesterday deserves to be highlighted. In this case, eight major news publications are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.

U.S. Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft

The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Sun-Sentinel, Mercury News, Denver Post, Pioneer Press, and Orange County Register, claim that the AI companies used their publications to train and develop ChatGPT models without obtaining permission.

In addition, ChatGPT can recall large parts of their copyright-protected articles, which effectively bypasses their paywalls. This has a direct effect on the newspapers’ revenues, they argue.

“Defendants are taking the Publishers’ work with impunity and are using the Publishers’ journalism to create GenAI products that undermine the Publishers’ core businesses by retransmitting ‘their content’—in some cases verbatim from the Publishers’ paywalled websites—to their readers.”

Training On and Reproducing Copyrighted Articles

The complaint alleges that the newspapers’ articles are prominent parts of the training material for OpenAI’s models. GPT-3, for example, has 175 billion parameters and includes the ‘WebText2’ and ‘Common Crawl’ databases that both contain material owned by the plaintiffs.

This alleged unauthorized use remains ongoing, the newspapers claim, and it will likely continue in the future.

“On information and belief, Microsoft and OpenAI are currently or will imminently commence making additional copies of the Publishers’ Works to train and/or fine-tune the next generation GPT-5 LLM,” the complaint adds.

The plaintiffs show that ChatGPT can reproduce content from copyrighted news articles when prompted. In addition, third-party services in the OpenAI store are specifically marketed to bypass their paywalls, they say.

These tools include a custom GPT called “Remove Paywall” and a tool such as “News Summarizer”, which promises to “save on subscription costs” and “skip paywalls just using the link text or URL.”

OpenAI and Microsoft have previously argued that the use of copyrighted works to train its models falls under fair use. In addition, they called out the lack of specific copyright infringements by third parties.

This lawsuit is likely to trigger similar defenses, but copyright infringement allegations are just part of the newspapers’ complaint.

‘Fake News Hallucinations’

The newspapers are not only concerned by the unauthorized use of their works; they also allege that the AI tools cause commercial and competitive injury by spreading false claims.

The plaintiffs cite various examples where ChatGPT allegedly links dubious news reporting to their newspapers.

“As if plagiarizing the Publishers’ work were not enough, Defendants’ products are often subject to ‘hallucinations’ where those products malign the Publishers’ credibility by falsely attributing inaccurate reporting to the Publishers’ newspapers.

“Beyond just profiting from the theft of the Publishers’ content, Defendants are actively tarnishing the newspapers’ reputations and spreading dangerous disinformation.”

One example is the spurious claim that disinfectants can cure Covid. While many newspapers reported on these claims, they didn’t endorse them.

These hallucinations dilute and injure the reputation of the newspapers, the complaint alleges. This claim comes on top of the various copyright infringement accusations for which they request compensation.

Ultimately, the newspapers are not against Artificial Intelligence, but they do want OpenAI and Microsoft to pay for the content they use and, ideally, ensure that their reputations are not harmed in the process.

“This lawsuit is about how Microsoft and OpenAI are not entitled to use copyrighted newspaper content to build their new trillion-dollar enterprises, without paying for that content.

“As this lawsuit will demonstrate, Defendants must both obtain the Publishers’ consent to use their content and pay fair value for such use,” the newspapers conclude.

—

A copy of the complaint, filed by the newspapers at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is available here (pdf)

Source

As part of anti-piracy scheme featuring warning letters, fines, and ISP disconnections, France has monitored and stored data on millions of internet users since 2010.

Digital rights groups insist that as a general surveillance and data retention scheme, the ‘Hadopi’ program violates fundamental rights.

Any program that monitors citizens’ internet activities, retains huge amounts of data, and then links identities to IP addresses, must comply with EU rules. Activists said that under EU law, only “serious crime” qualifies and since petty file-sharing fails to make the grade, the whole program represents a mass violation of EU citizens’ fundamental rights.

Surveillance and Serious Crime

Seeking confirmation at the highest level, La Quadrature du Net, Federation of Associative Internet Service Providers, French Data Network, and Franciliens.net, began their challenge in France. The Council of State referred the matter to the Constitutional Council, which in turn referred questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for interpretation under EU law.

EU member states may not pass national laws that allow for the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data. Retention of traffic and location data is permitted on a targeted basis as a “preventative measure” but only when the purpose of retention is to fight “serious crime.”

In his non-binding opinion, CJEU Advocate General Szpunar described Hadopi’s access to personal data corresponding to an IP address as a “serious interference with fundamental rights,” the clearest sign yet that the right to privacy had already taken a blow.

CJEU judgments have balanced citizens’ rights and rightsholders’ right to copy many times over the years but here, case law was deemed potentially problematic. In fact so much so, AG Szpunar proposed “readjustment of the case-law of the Court” to ensure that rightsholders would not be left in a position where it was impossible to enforce their rights on BitTorrent and similar networks.

EU Law Shouldn’t Rule Surveillance Out

By last September, it was clear that a legal basis needed to be found to allow Hadopi and similar programs to continue. For example, the fluid nature of dynamic IP addresses was mentioned as an obstacle to comprehensive tracking.

Well-constructed arguments stated that balance could be found in securing the harvested data and, to protect fundamental rights, limitations on how much data could be used in the event an alleged file-sharer was prosecuted.

Ultimately, however, when infringement occurs exclusively online, an IP address may be the only means to track down an alleged infringer, leading to the conclusion that retention and access to civil identifying data is both “necessary” and “wholly proportionate.”

Copyrights Trump Privacy Rights

In its decision handed down Tuesday, initially only in French, the CJEU leaves no stone unturned in delivering a win for rightsholders. Despite the problematic case law, the judgment builds a framework for how monitoring and data retention can be conducted within the requirements of EU law.

The judgment deals with three key questions, summarized as follows:

1. Is civil identity data corresponding to an IP address included among the traffic and location data which, in principle, requires prior review by a court or administrative entity?

2. If yes, is EU law to be interpreted as precluding national legislation that provides for the collection of such data, corresponding to users’ IP addresses, without prior review by a court or administrative entity?

3. If yes, does EU law preclude the review from being performed in an adapted fashion, for example as an automated review?

In other words, are member states precluded from having a national law that authorizes a copyright authority to access stored IP addresses and civil identity data relating to users, collected by rightsholders monitoring their activities on the internet, for the purpose of taking further action, without a review by a court or administrative body?

Data collected includes date and time of alleged infringement, IP address, peer-to-peer protocol, user pseudonym, details of copyright works, filename, ISP name.

Ensuring Privacy and Data Security

The judgment notes that IP addresses can constitute both traffic data and personal data. However, IP addresses that are public and visible, as they are in file-sharing swarms, are not being used in connection with the provision of an ‘electronic communication service’.

The judgment also states that, if Member States seek to impose “an obligation to retain IP addresses in a general and indiscriminate manner, in order to attain an objective linked to combating criminal offenses in general”, they should lay down clear and precise rules in legislation relating to retention of data, meeting strict requirements.

IP and civil identity data must be separated from each other and all other data, in a secure and reliable computer system. When IP addresses and civil data need to be linked, a process that does not undermine the “watertight separation” should be used, and regularly inspected for effectiveness. When these rules are followed, even citizens’ data gathered indiscriminately cannot result in “serious interference” to fundamental rights.

The judgment notes that EU law does not “preclude the Member State concerned from imposing an obligation to retain IP addresses, in a general and indiscriminate manner, for the purposes of combating criminal offenses in general.”

Balancing Competing Rights

The CJEU says that while EU citizens using internet services “must have a guarantee that their privacy and freedom of expression” will be respected, those fundamental rights are not absolute. The prevention of crime or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others may see those rights deemed less important.

Then, with some fluidity, the CJEU pulls the rug on excuses and upgrades petty file-sharing to something, well, a bit more serious.

To prevent crime, it may be strictly necessary and proportional for IP addresses to be captured and retained for “combating criminal offenses such as offenses infringing copyright or related rights committed online.”

Indeed, not allowing the above “would carry a real risk of systemic impunity not only for criminal offenses infringing copyright or related rights, but also for other types of criminal offenses committed online or the commission or preparation of which is facilitated by the specific characteristics of the internet.”

Pirate Privacy? Not Here

The judgment adds that despite the strict security guarding private information, there’s always a chance that a person might find themselves profiled. And that, the court suggests, may be of their own making.

(s)uch a risk to privacy may arise, inter alia, where a person engages in activities infringing copyright or related rights on peer-to-peer networks repeatedly, or on a large scale, in connection with protected works of particular types that can be grouped together on the basis of the words in their title, revealing potentially sensitive information about aspects of that person’s private life.

 

Thus, in the present case, in the context of the graduated response administrative procedure, a holder of an IP address may be particularly exposed to such a risk to his or her privacy where that procedure reaches the stage at which Hadopi must decide whether or not to refer the matter to the public prosecution service with a view to the prosecution of that person for conduct liable to constitute the minor offense of gross negligence or the offense of counterfeiting.

Throughout the course of the next few paragraphs, the judgment mentions processing data for the “prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offenses,” and a quote from the French government stating that “the measures adopted by Hadopi in the context of the graduated response procedure ‘are of a pre-criminal nature directly linked to the judicial proceedings’.”

That leads to the predictable conclusion that EU law does not preclude national legislation that allows for the surveillance of internet users and the retention of their data, for the purpose of identifying users and taking legal action against them.

Member states just need to follow the rules to ensure that those who didn’t have their privacy breached when their data was collected, don’t have it breached or leaked as they wait for whatever punishment arrives in the mail.

La Quadrature du Net says it’s disappointed with the judgment.

“[T]his decision from the CJEU has, above all, validated the end of online anonymity. While in 2020 it stated that there was a right to online anonymity enshrined in the ePrivacy Directive, it is now abandoning it.

Unfortunately, by giving the police broad access to the civil identity associated with an IP address and to the content of a communication, it puts a de facto end to online anonymity.”

The judgment is available here

Source

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

While a full-blown ‘Internet passport’ is not yet required anywhere just yet, ‘know your customer’ requirements are increasingly common as a means to deter fraud and abuse.

“Know Your Customer” Rules

In recent years, copyright holders and industry groups have argued to expand these identity verification rules to tackle the online piracy problem. These efforts have begun to pay off in Europe and, over in the United States, similar calls are heard.

In 2021, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to stop foreign cybercriminals from using US-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services. This kicked off a proposed rulemaking process to require advanced services to implement “Know Your Customer” regimes.

Last year, this proposal was followed up by an executive order from President Biden, with an added focus on potential abuses of online services to train Artificial Intelligence models. If adopted, the rules would put an end to anonymity for users of online cloud services.

Before taking the matter forward, the Department of Commerce asked the public for input on its plans which resulted in some noteworthy responses.

Rightsholder Coalition Chimes In

The Coalition for Online Accountability filed a response yesterday. While not generally known to the wider public, the coalition’s members are seven well-known copyright industry players; the RIAA, MPA, ESA, Broadcast Music, Disney, Warner Bros, and NBCUniversal.

Given the makeup of the coalition, it doesn’t come as a surprise that its submission has a strong focus on piracy.

“There is no doubt that the motion picture, music, and video game industries have long suffered from widespread online piracy and other abuses,” the coalition writes.

The proposed rule could help to tackle the piracy problem. After all, pirate sites use cloud hosting and other IaaS services. Making it easier to identify the owners would greatly help to hold them accountable. However, the coalition sees a major shortcoming too, as the proposal doesn’t include domain name services.

The proposal is very clear about this exclusion. Since domain name registrars and registries don’t host any content, they fall outside its scope.

“It does not, however, capture domain name registration services for which a consumer registers a specific domain name with a third party, as that third party does not provide any processing, storage, network, or other fundamental computing resource to the consumer.”

‘U.S. Domain Name Services Should be Included’

The Coalition urges the Department of Commerce to reconsider its position. According to the rightsholders, domain name registrars must be included in the IaaS category, as they are broadly abused by pirate sites and services, with little recourse.

“Currently, many domain name registrars turn a blind eye on the rampant domain name abuse practices. They provide the means and instrumentalities for impersonation making no effort to collect true and correct data about their clients,” the coalition writes.

To address this, the Coalition for Online Accountability proposes two main changes to the proposed rules.

The first one states that U.S. domain name service providers, including Verisign and GoDaddy, should be classified as IaaS providers. In addition, domain registries must ensure that the identifying information they collect is accurate.

“(i)t is important that all U.S. domain name registries be required by the forthcoming regulations to maintain complete and accurate databases of the identity and contact information of all registrants for the domain names that such registries administer,” the coalition writes.

Currently, U.S. domain registries such as Verisign and PIR already require customers to supply accurate information but pirate sites typically don’t do so. In addition, it’s not always easy for rightsholders to access shielded Whois information.

The coalition proposes to make domain name registration directories openly accessible, free of charge. Many domain name services shielded this data for privacy reasons when the EU adopted the GDPR, but the rightsholders would like to go back to the old system, where all information is public.

If registrars use proxy or anonymizer services, these too should be required to disclose a domain name’s owner in response to good faith claims of abuse.

Suspend Pirate Domain Names

As the cherry on top, the coalition goes beyond the “Know Your Customer” framework by proposing that domain name services should also take enforcement actions if “Trusted Notifiers” flag a domain for abuse.

This means that U.S. domain registrars and registries should suspend or disable a domain that is reported by a ‘trusted’ rightsholder representative.

“The domain name registrar, registry, privacy service, proxy service, or other domain name registration authority must disable, disrupt, or suspend any domain names used for domain name abuse within 48 hours of receipt of a notice submitted in good faith from a Trusted Notifier.”

This type of scheme is not unprecedented. Currently, the MPA and RIAA already have trusted notifier status at several online intermediaries. This includes the domain registries Identity Digital and Radix, which regularly take action against piracy-related domains.

Whether the Department of Commerce is open to broadening the scope of its proposal remains to be seen. Rightsholders previously argued for similar expansions during the earlier inquiry, which didn’t lead to the inclusion of domain name services.

—

A copy of the comments submitted by the Coalition for Online Accountability is available here (pdf)

Source

Last November, IPTV subscription resellers operating from channels4cheap.com (C4C) and purchase-iptv.com found themselves being sued by broadcaster DISH Network.

After what appears to have been a handful of trouble-free years of trading, the lawsuit named Texas residents John Gwaka Magembe and Joyce Berry as the alleged operators of the C4C website.

The decision to sell packages branded as Beast TV, a service that was taken down three years earlier by several Hollywood studios, Netflix, and Canada’s Bell Media, may have been a ploy to exploit existing brand awareness among pirates. The obvious downside was awareness among rightsholders.

DISH Was More Aware Than Expected

“Defendants are trafficking in the Beast TV internet streaming television service a/k/a Channels4Cheap through their websites located at www.channels4cheap.com and its sister website www.purchase-iptv.com,” the company wrote in its complaint.

“Defendants sell Device Codes [subscriptions] to the Service on the C4C Website for $2 for a forty eight hour trial; $15 for one month; $40 for three months; $70 for six months; and $120 for twelve months, depending on the option selected by the user.”

And then came the body blow. DISH produced a screenshot to show that a person, also called John Magembe, was among the top 10 resellers of Beast TV subscriptions when the platform was in full swing.

In common with many other lawsuits of this type, this seemed destined for a predictable outcome. The final judgment would be months in the making so, in the interim, DISH took on another reseller.

IPTV and Astrology Align

In a complaint filed at a California court in February, DISH and Sling described Mr.Sharma of Sharma IPTV, and his company Astro Vastu Solutions (AVS), as traffickers of an illegal streaming service. Flyers distributed in the Bay Area advertising the service had led to DISH investigators handing over $135 for a subscription test purchase.

Payment for the alleged 10,000 channel service was made to Astro Vastu Solutions LLC. DISH and Sling alleged that this was to separate the name Sharma IPTV from transactions, with users asked to disguise their payments as something unrelated, such as an astrology consultation. Evidence presented in court reveals that the DISH test purchase was recorded as a “3 month warranty” (pdf).

Other documents filed in the lawsuit reveal that a cease-and-desist notice sent to Sharma IPTV last September contained an offer to settle the case. DISH and NagraStar cited similar cases where failing to settle ended up costing a lot more, the $100m+ judgment against Nitro TV, for example.

With the $1m settlement offer attracting no interest, the companies ultimately sued for willful violations of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2) and 17 U.S.C. § 1201(b)(1) when the defendants manufactured, offered to the public, provided, or otherwise trafficked in their infringing IPTV service. DISH and Sling also demanded an injunction under 17 U.S.C. § 1203(b)(1) plus actual or statutory damages of up to $2,500 for each infringement under § 1201.

On February 20, 2024, DISH and Sling filed their motion for preliminary injunction but were unable to personally serve the defendants until early March, leading to a request to continue the hearing on May 30, 2024, around a month from now.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, a note appeared on the docket last week. It revealed that since the owner of Sharma IPTV was representing himself, he would appreciate some help from the clerk of the court “to process and serve documents to other parties.”

Exactly what that note means in the context of the lawsuit, which started with a rejected $1m settlement offer and escalated from there, isn’t made clear from the docket.

What is clear, however, is that the very next day DISH and Sling dismissed all of their claims in the lawsuit.

An accompanying note states that the notice of dismissal was served on the defendants at their last known addresses. Beyond that, there’s no additional information to explain why such a serious matter suddenly ended with no mention of a settlement.

Contrasting Fortunes

For channels4cheap.com (C4C) and purchase-iptv.com operators John Gwaka Magembe and Joyce Berry, their fates diverged considerably, even from each other. It transpired that Berry is Magembe’s mother and the reason she appeared as a defendant in the lawsuit was her son’s unauthorized use of her bank account to receive payments for IPTV subscriptions. Berry was dismissed from the case, Magembe was left to face the music alone.

In a judgment handed down April 26, 2024, District Judge Mark T. Pittman noted that the plaintiffs had filed a well-pleaded complaint but the defendants’ failure to defend the claims against them had “brought the adversarial process to a halt, causing substantial prejudice to Plaintiffs.”

Based on this and other factors, a default judgment was warranted (1,2). On top of a broad injunction to restrain any similar conduct, Judge Pittman said that Magembe must pay damages totaling over $30 million in connection with the sale of at least 12,000 ‘device codes’ (subscriptions).

The conclusions of these cases couldn’t have been more different, despite being about broadly the same thing: reselling IPTV subscriptions to services operated by people other than the defendants in these cases.

Predictions sometimes miss the mark but for those who like a wager, it’s more than likely that new information will play a role when DISH moves on to its next targets. And the targets after those.

Source

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. “Dune: Part Two” is the most downloaded title.

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

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

Source

Tracking BitTorrent pirates isn’t all that hard since IP addresses are openly broadcasted. With help from Internet providers, these addresses can then be linked to account holders.

ISPs don’t hand over this data voluntarily; they typically require a subpoena or court order before taking action.

In the United States, subpoenas are typically obtained by filing a copyright complaint in federal court against a “John Doe” who’s known only by an IP address. Most of these cases are filed against a single person, which makes it a relatively expensive process.

DMCA Shortcut

In recent years, some rightsholders have used a shortcut to bypass this costly process. Taking a page from the RIAA’s early efforts to identify music pirates in the early 2000s, they used the DMCA subpoena process to obtain the personal details of suspected copyright infringers.

Unlike regular subpoenas, the DMCA equivalents are not reviewed by a judge and only require a signature from the court clerk. While several courts effectively banned the practice two decades ago, the new attempts cited fresh interpretations and conflicting case law, to back up their requests.

This tactic worked as many courts went along with these new requests, requiring Internet providers to identify hundreds, if not thousands of alleged pirates.

It’s not always clear what the rightsholders do with this personal information, as the eventual follow-ups fall outside the court’s purview. Typically, however, rightsholders reach out to alleged pirates privately to negotiate some type of settlement; either monetary, in exchange for information, or both.

Cox Intervenes with Success

Most of these recent DMCA subpoenas progressed quietly, with little fanfare or pushback, but that changed last year when a Cox subscriber filed an objection in court.

The objection triggered Cox Communications to intervene. The Internet provider decided to challenge the use of the DMCA subpoena tool, as detailed in DMCA §512(h). Similar to the earlier opposition against RIAA’s attempts, the ISP argued that DMCA subpoenas don’t apply to mere conduit providers.

The challenge was fiercely contested by the rightsholders, including film companies Voltage Holdings, Millennium Funding, and Capstone Studios, who argued that ISPs can be required to respond to DMCA subpoenas.

Mere Conduit?

The main contention in this case is whether DMCA subpoenas apply to regular Internet providers. Cox argued that they don’t, as it’s a mere conduit provider. This falls under the DMCA §512(a) safe harbor, which does not require ISPs to take anything down, as nothing is stored by the ISP.

DMCA subpoenas don’t apply to DMCA §512(a) services, but do apply to other providers that store or link to infringing content directly. As such, the movie companies’ request should be denied.

A magistrate judge followed Cox in this reasoning and recommended quashing the subpoena. The Hawaiian District Court agreed, and earlier this year it effectively slammed the breaks on the DMCA shortcut.

The full ruling is much more detailed than the simplified version presented above, but the ultimate conclusion is that movie companies can’t use the DMCA subpoena to unmask alleged BitTorrent pirates. In addition, the court held that any information they had already obtained this way, could no longer be used.

Court Keeps Shortcut Closed

Hoping to change the court’s opinion, the filmmakers swiftly submitted a motion for reconsideration. In addition, they asked to stay the order to destroy any information that was previously obtained, pending a potential appeal.

In the motion for reconsideration, the movie companies argued that Cox and other ISPs are not just mere conduit providers under DMCA §512(a); they would also fall under DMCA §512(d), as they can remove or disable ‘references or links’ to infringing content.

If this argument succeeds, a DMCA subpoena would be valid, as these do apply to services that fall under DMCA §512(d).

The movie companies used various arguments to make their case. For example, they argued that IP addresses are in themselves “references or links to infringing material” which can be disabled through null-routing. In addition, Cox can respond to takedown notices by implementing filters or blocking ports.

The court reviewed these reconsideration arguments but didn’t change its conclusion. While null-routing would work, the measure goes far beyond disabling “access to infringing material” and is therefore not authorized by the DMCA.

“Null routing a subscriber’s IP address is not equivalent to ‘remov[ing], or disabl[ing] access to’ links to infringing material or activity, because null routing a user’s IP address has the outsize effect of terminating that address’s connection to the network,” the court writes.

The same applies to filtering techniques and port blocking, which go further than directly addressing alleged copyright infringements.

“[T]his argument would fail for the same reasons as Petitioners’ ‘null routing’ argument—whether ISPs can in fact ‘remove, or disable access to’ infringing material or not, it would not change the court’s interpretation of §512(d).”

The full motion for reconsideration includes several other attempts to classify Cox as more than a mere conduit provider, but these all fail. Ultimately, the court denied the motion for reconsideration, keeping the DMCA shortcut closed.

Piracy Settlements and User Data

The order is a setback for the rightsholders and also presents a new problem. The movie companies previously used the subpoena to identify Cox subscribers, and already settled with some of them.

Since the court ordered all information from the subpoena to be destroyed and returned, the movie companies fear that Cox will delete all subscriber data, while they still have the option to appeal.

In addition, the movie companies used settlements to obtain testimony from subscribers on their piracy habits, which they would like to use as evidence against pirate sites. If the settlement data is deleted, that evidence can no longer be used.

“If Petitioners destroy this information, their legal proof for asserting legal relief against the piracy website and the subscriber data will be lost,” the movie companies argued, asking the court to stay this ‘destruction’ order.

The movie companies don’t mention any pending lawsuits against pirate sites but they previously identified “watchmovierulz” and “piratebay” as sites that were mentioned as part of a settlement.

The court reviewed the arguments but didn’t change its order. The court notes that Cox already agreed to retain the contested subscriber data pending further appeals, so that will not be lost.

The court further clarified that all pending settlement discussions have to end immediately. In addition, the movie companies can’t use the evidence obtained from earlier settlements in potential lawsuits against pirate sites.

“Petitioners may maintain records of, for example, correspondence and binding settlement agreements with subscribers, but may not continue to seek settlement with any subscriber who has not yet concluded an agreement, and may not use information received from subscribers as evidence in litigation, e.g., against piracy websites.”

All in all, the court’s latest order is another setback for the movie companies but it’s not the end. The filmmakers have already indicated that they plan to appeal the case.

Needless to say, this could prove to be a crucial legal battle for copyright holders, Internet providers, and anyone accused of pirating content via BitTorrent going forward. At the same time, it may also cast doubt on how DMCA subpoenas are used against other services, such as Cloudflare and domain registrars.

—

A copy of the Hawaiian District Court’s order denying the motion for reconsideration, as well as the motion to stay, is available here (pdf)

Source

In February 2023, Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security revealed an extension to Operation 404, an ongoing anti-piracy operation to disrupt websites and apps involved in online piracy.

The purpose of 404-offshoot Operation Anime was to “suppress crimes committed against intellectual property” with a specific focus on piracy of Japanese cartoons, better known as anime. Several sites were shut down including goyabu.com and animeyabu.com.

Close to a year later, the Ministry of Justice has confirmed a new phase of Operation Anime with a new partner appearing for the first time in 2024.

Operation Anime Phase 2: Japan Joined By Korea

The announcement confirms that the goal of Operation Anime Phase 2 remains unchanged for 2024 and Japan-based anti-piracy group Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) still features prominently.

A change comes in the form of a new partner, South Korea-based Copyright Overseas Promotion Association (COA), which aims to suppress piracy of animated content, known locally as webtoons, on behalf of companies such as Kakao, Webtoon, and many others.

In the latest operation, authorities in Brazil report that police in five regions – Alagoas, Ceará, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo – executed 11 home search and seizure warrants this week. The objective was to seize computer equipment containing evidence to show involvement in intellectual property crimes.

The Ministry of Justice reports that two websites were “blocked and/or suspended” but didn’t officially name either. Based on information obtained from other sources, at this point, we feel confident enough to name one as definitely shut down

Animetvonline.cx

The search and seizure warrants covering Ceará were coordinated by the Cybercrime Repression Police Station (DRCC), with support from the Operational Center of the Specialized Judiciary Police Department (DPJE) and the Crateús Regional Police Station.

The target was a 26-year-old man, alleged to be the operator of a pirate site receiving around 1.2 million visitors per month. At the man’s home in Planalto Crateús, police seized cell phones, computers, hard drives, and other IT equipment.

As data from SimilarWeb shows, Animetvonline.cx had around 1.2m visits per month. In Google search, the site is now listed as “closed due to copyright infringement” and if one clicks through, a seizure banner hosted on CODA’s website confirms it ran into terminal trouble.

With animetvonline.cx as a starting point, other domains start to show up that also appear to have been seized. They include animetvonline.xyz (zero traffic), animesbr.cc (3.4m), animesone.cc (60K), and animesonline.one (zero). These have links to animetvonline.cx but exactly when they were seized isn’t clear.

Other information points to the shutdown of anime.vision and potentially a handful of others, but there’s not enough solid evidence to show anything beyond coincidental downtime.

The action was coordinated by the Directorate of Integrated Operations and Intelligence (Diopi), through the Cyber Operations Laboratory (Ciberlab), of the Ministry of Justice and Public Security (MJSP).

CODA and COA signed a memorandum of understanding in December 2017 and have been working together ever since to protect content overseas, including in Brazil.

Source

In the summer of 2009, hackers from all over the world gathered at an outdoor conference near Vierhouten in the Netherlands.

The event was mostly a meetup of like-minded geeks, but one person stood out a mile; Tim Kuik, director of anti-piracy group BREIN.

Kuik joined a panel discussion where he calmly explained why his organization helped rightsholders to shut down pirate sites. The group was winning its lawsuit against Mininova at the time and had just booked a victory against the founders of The Pirate Bay just a few weeks earlier.

As the panel was opening up for questions, a stereotypical neck-beard sporting hacker stepped forward, questioning Kuik on comments he made about The Pirate Bay’s revenues. It was none other than Pirate Bay founder Anakata, easily identifiable thanks to his Pirate Bay t-shirt.

The two opposites engaged in a brief tete-a-tete of which the contents are irrelevant at this point. However, Kuik’s presence there, on that day, is exemplary of his tendency not to shy away from conversation, no matter the audience. The friendly photo both men took afterward is a testament to that.

Anti-Piracy Veteran Retires

Earlier this month, Tim Kuik informed TorrentFreak that he’s retiring, passing on the baton to BREIN’s new director Bastiaan van Ramshorst. While people retire every day, Kuik’s departure deserves a special mention; he’s an anti-piracy icon that formed a common thread throughout our reporting over the past 19 years.

Unlike others operating in a similar position, Kuik never dodged questions. Not everyone shares BREIN’s goals but the organization is transparent whenever that’s possible. The group also differs from many of its counterparts in its pragmatic approach. Instead of going for ‘headline’ convictions, BREIN focuses on the main goal; stopping pirates.

Kuik started his professional career at CIC Video International, shortly after he graduated from law school 42 years ago. In 1992 he became anti-piracy director at the Motion Picture Association’s European branch, moving on to a role as MPA’s global anti-piracy boss soon after.

When a new anti-piracy group was formed in the Netherlands, just before the turn of the millennium, Kuik changed positions again, albeit for the last time.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Needless to say, a lot has changed since Kuik started working in the anti-piracy field. In the early 80s, bootleg VHS tapes were just getting popular, while the World Wide Web had yet to be invented.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Kuik recalls that the home video market was just opening up. Initially, movie studios saw videotapes as a threat, but they soon realized that they could market official movies to consumers as well, which proved to be a new source of revenue.

The downside was that pirates would create bootleg copies. This wasn’t unexpected, but it posed a major problem. When E.T. came out in the early 80s, director Steven Spielberg was particularly upset and Kuik, working for CIC Video, was called in to solve the problem.

“When ‘E.T. The Extraterrestrial’ was released theatrically by Universal, Spielberg was very upset about the video piracy because he envisaged the movie as theatrical only and didn’t want it on TV screens,” Kuik says.

“So, I was tasked to collect evidence against video rental shops that carried illegal copies of it. The shops were full of illegal titles and we realized we had to band together instead of chasing individual titles.”

This realization that ‘cooperation’ between studios was wise, paved the way for future anti-piracy initiatives. CIC Video was a joint venture of Paramount and Universal, both members of the Motion Picture Association, which became a key anti-piracy force in the following decades.

Kuik helped to bundle the powers of the major Hollywood studios, first at CIC Video, and later at the MPA. In that role, he helped to establish more than thirty local anti-piracy programs. Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles to become head of MPA’s global anti-piracy program.

At the end of the nineties, he moved back to his home country, the Netherlands, to manage BREIN. This was the start of a 25-year adventure that left a mark on the industry in many ways.

Threats

Kuik served as BREIN’s first director, which was initially a temporary role that he planned to fill for a few years. However, years turned into decades. While the role was rewarding, it also came at a cost. As the public face of an anti-piracy group, Kuik was often scolded by supporters of his opponents.

Most of this critique came from keyboard warriors, but there were escalations. At some point in the early 2000s, the threats got so out of hand that BREIN’s office needed strict physical security. There was a constant barrage of hate aimed at the group, with Kuik often the prime target.

In a recent interview with a Dutch film magazine, Kuik mentioned that BREIN received hydrochloric acid in the mail at some point, adding that police complaints were filed on various occasions.

These threats have faded in recent years. In part, perhaps, because BREIN often found the law on its side in courts. The group can be credited for shutting down thousands of sites and services, including Mininova, the largest torrent site at the time.

Accomplishments

BREIN also went after The Pirate Bay. While it never managed to take the site offline, it did book many victories in court that greatly helped international anti-piracy efforts. This includes a ruling from Europe’s highest court, which allowed The Pirate Bay to be blocked.

The court ruling laid the groundwork for other European pirate site blockades and, in the Netherlands, led to the first site blocking order after a legal battle of more than ten years.

“The best [achievement] is the CJEU ruling that The Pirate Bay is a copyright-infringing service. Although that did not close down the site, it set EU case law and, for us in the Netherlands, it made blocking possible, leading to a covenant with access providers about blocking illegal services,” Kuik notes.

Site blocking is an essential tool, Kuik says, as it’s often the only way to act against anonymous site operators who do all they can not to get caught.

Various other court rulings, where online intermediaries such as hosting platforms and payment providers were held accountable, also proved to be important. This helped takedown efforts and investigative work; to track down site operators, whenever possible.

While BREIN won most of the lawsuits it initiated, not all succeeded. The greatest defeat came in a Usenet-related lawsuit, where the court ultimately ruled that the provider was not violating copyright law.

The provider, NSE, had already shut down years before that final ruling came in but ended up with a moral victory.

After a legal battle of 14 years, the Dutch Supreme Court concluded that NSE itself 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.

Kuik sees the NSE verdict as the worst legal outcome in his career and still believes that the court reached the wrong conclusion. Despite the loss, he stresses that BREIN can and does hold usenet services accountable today, as they are required to take down infringing content while taking additional measures.

Piracy Remains a Problem

Despite all the hard work over the past 42 years, the piracy problem hasn’t been solved. While the industry has more tools to tackle copyright infringement today, new forms of piracy continue to show up. This includes emerging technologies including artificial intelligence.

“Currently, illegal IPTV is the main threat to TV, film, series, and live sports. In addition, there are illegal sites that serve as large repositories for generative AI, which forms a threat to man-made creative content of any kind,” Kuik notes.

If Kuik could dictate the law, he would make it mandatory for online services to verify who their customers are. Such “know your customer” policies could help to identify operators of pirate sites and services more easily, so they could be held accountable.

“In general, intermediaries should verify who their customers are and should be willing to share this with parties that are injured by such customers,” Kuik says.

“Currently, such an obligation is based on case law and the principle of it is often denied by intermediaries, even though it exists for example for VAT purposes and for online marketplaces.”

Rightsholders are already lobbying for these types of policies, which are high on anti-piracy wishlists around the globe.

Piracy Positives?

For Kuik, the active anti-piracy work ends here. When asked whether there is anything positive about piracy at all, he’s willing to entertain the idea that unauthorized use, in some cases, has shown the way for legal business models.

For example, one can argue that Napster led to the first legal digital music store, and that services such as Netflix and Spotify were positioned as piracy alternatives when they first hit the market. Kuik recognizes this, at least in part.

“You could indeed argue that there are instances where illegal (unauthorized) exploitation showed the way forward before licensed models were established,” Kuik tells us

While piracy may lead the way, Kuik stresses that it’s certainly not sustainable. Without proper enforcement, it’s hard for legal services to compete and their revenues are vital for creating the new content consumers demand.

“Enforcement is one of the conditions to get rightsholders to enter a market and make legitimate businesses thrive. And that, in turn. secures structural employment in content creation and distribution. Which is what the customer wants. Piracy does not provide that,” Kuik concludes.

Back in 2009, when Kuik and Pirate Bay founder Anakata went head-to-head, the situation was no different, and both men agreed to disagree. However, battling The Pirate Bay indirectly brought BREIN its key site blocking victory several years later.

While Kuik moves on, his legacy remains. The same is true for a ‘copy’ of the iconic Pirate Bay t-shirt Anakata was wearing at the hacker conference, which is one of the many relics still on display in BREIN’s office.

—

The Kuik / Anakata photo was taken by and is credited to Reinoud Van Leeuwen

Source

Each year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes a new update of its Special 301 Report, highlighting countries that fail to live up to U.S copyright protection standards.

The annual overview is meant to urge foreign governments to improve policy and legislation in favor of U.S. copyright holders.

The process has shown itself to be an effective diplomatic tool and has helped to kick-start copyright reforms around the globe. Not all governments are equally susceptible to critique and Canada once described the process as flawed. Still, no country wants to be included in the list.

2024 Special 301 Report

USTR’s latest Special 301 Report, published yesterday, features considerable overlap with previous editions. The ‘Priority Watch List’ countries remain unchanged; they are Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Venezuela.

The reported issues range from high levels of online piracy to problems with trademark protection. Inadequate legal protections, enforcement shortcomings, and other trade barriers are frequently mentioned too.

These priority threats are followed by regular Watch List countries, twenty in total. They include United States’ neighbors, Canada and Mexico, as well as Brazil, Bulgaria, Egypt, and Vietnam.

The inclusion of Vietnam doesn’t come as a surprise since it’s been on the Watch List for a few years now. According to reports from rightsholders, the piracy problem has only worsened since then.

‘Online Piracy Haven’

The USTR’s report is partly based on these rightsholder complaints. They include a detailed submission from IIPA earlier this year, which characterized the Asian country as the leading global exporter of piracy services.

“Vietnam has become a leading global exporter of piracy services and Vietnamese operators have been associated with some of the world’s most pervasive piracy websites, causing significant damage to both the local and international marketplaces,” IIPA wrote.

The country is considered ‘home’ to problematic sites and services such as Fmovies, AniWave, 123movies, 2embed, BestBuyIPTV, and Y2mate, which have many millions of monthly users globally. Rightsholders repeatedly report these problems to local authorities but apparently with little effect.

Earlier this week there appeared to be somewhat of a breakthrough when the operator of “BestBuyIPTV” received a suspended prison sentence from a local court. However, the popular IPTV service remains online and despite rightsholder celebrations, it’s uncertain whether the relatively mild sentence will have any deterrent effect.

‘Leading Source of Online Piracy’

What’s clear, however, is that Vietnam is a high-priority country for anti-piracy efforts. While that didn’t translate into a “Priority Watch List” label, USTR’s Special 301 listing for Vietnam is becoming more concrete.

The Trade Representative starts by acknowledging that Vietnam has taken steps to improve its copyright law. Other positive signs include an increase in raids and seizures of counterfeit goods and increased enforcement. However, piracy remains a problem.

“Vietnam has increasingly become a leading source of online piracy, including through online piracy services that capitalize on the widespread use of illicit streaming devices and applications,” USTR writes.

“Vietnam currently hosts some of the most popular piracy sites and services in the world that target a global audience,” the Special 301 Report adds.

The language in USTR’s report is more robust than last year when there was no mention of Vietnam’s leading role in online piracy. And that’s not the only change either; complaints about the lack of enforcement are sharpened too.

Vietnam’s Failure to Deter Online Piracy

In recent years the major Hollywood studios have made a series of criminal referrals backed up by their own investigations, but responses from the authorities leave a lot to be desired.

“Despite having criminal laws imposing substantial fines and years of incarceration for copyright and trademark infringement, Vietnam has almost no criminal investigations or prosecutions,” USTR writes.

“Stakeholders note there has yet to be a single criminal conviction for a copyright offense in Vietnam, as a criminal investigation against the operators of Phimmoi.net has stalled and Vietnamese authorities have not addressed other criminal complaints submitted by stakeholders.”

USTR’s enforcement comments are somewhat dated as they were written before the recent conviction of a ‘BestBuyIPTV’ operator. That said, one suspended prison sentence after a four-year legal process seems unlikely to change much.

Vietnam mostly relies on administrative enforcement actions, but they have failed to stop the large pirate sites and services from operating. The MPA and ACE had limited success by privately taking action against 2Embed and Zoro.to, but ‘successors‘ of both platforms remain active today.

According to the USTR, these private actions are no substitute for full-fledged criminal prosecutions.

“[A] few successful efforts by stakeholders to negotiate directly with operators of piracy sites to shut down the sites are no substitute for enforcement actions and criminal prosecutions by government authorities,” USTR writes.

Reading between the lines, it’s clear that the U.S. would like Vietnam to step up its anti-piracy efforts significantly. While things have been slowly moving in that direction recently, the critique will likely remain, at least until some big fish are caught.

—

A copy of the USTR’s full 2024 Special 301 Report is available here (pdf)

Source

In a world where there’s always someone telling people what to do, Garry’s Mod is a breath of fresh air. Launched in 2006, the sandbox game has no goals; just hand over $9.99 to Steam, jump in, and do whatever you like.

With the benefit of hindsight, some fans may have taken that a little too literally. At the time of writing, Garry’s Mod workshop content uploaded by users over many years, is being systematically taken down in response to takedown notices filed by Nintendo.

“This is an ongoing process, as we have 20 years of uploads to go through. If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot,” the Facepunch Studios announcement reads.

The team don’t seem especially upset and are taking everything in their stride. Nintendo has a reputation for taking action against content featuring its characters and artwork so removing it now is the right thing to do.

“Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo’s content and what they allow and don’t allow is up to them. They don’t want you playing with that stuff in Garry’s Mod – that’s their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can,” the announcement adds.

DMCA Notices Aren’t Real, or Even Sent By Nintendo, Some Claim

Normal service will be restored shortly, but some fans may still need convincing regarding recent events. They believe that some type of scammer, probably not even connected to Nintendo, has been using bogus notices to take content down for quite some time.

Mindful that Garry and the team needed to be aware of that, so that nothing gets taken offline unnecessarily, attracting their attention became a priority this week.

As the image from X shows, a few hours after being alerted, investigations ended with the conclusion that the takedowns were legitimate. Yet for some, that still wasn’t good enough. Over the past few months there have been reports of bogus DMCA notices claiming to have been sent by Nintendo, containing allegedly similar fictitious claims. Many were resurrected this week after more than three years, contributing to the chaos.

In some cases, users simply expressed sadness or sympathy for Garry and the team. In many, many others, passions and frustrations proved too much. Instead of the usual blanket bitterness towards Nintendo, Garry’s X account filled up with demands for evidence, rock-solid proof that Nintendo really was to blame. Some even fired off accusations that no work had been done to get to the bottom of the crisis.

In a post to X, Garry addressed the “it’s fake” guys by posing five questions, all of them related to a domain name referenced in one or more of the takedown notices. The skeptics believe that the domain mm-nintendo.com is fake; Nintendo ‘always’ use a different domain, and domain details here are different to those used elsewhere, etc.

We’ve seen more than our fair share of bogus notices in the past but since these notices don’t appear to have been shared in public, determining whether they’re real or fake simply isn’t possible.

Since Garry is on record saying that they’re real, there’s no obvious reason to question that. It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that developers can become quite attached to their projects and the communities that support them; removing content for no reason isn’t something they do lightly. So whether real or fake, voluntarily or under duress, a decision has clearly been made to say goodbye to content that, in real terms, amounts to a liability.

That being said, let’s squeeze the domain mm-nintendo.com and see what comes out.

Genuine or a Big Fat Phoney?

Finding takedown notices featuring the domain mm-nintendo.com wasn’t difficult. The pair shown below seem fairly typical; they both use notice@ in their email addresses and were sent to ISPs asking for content to be taken down.

Similar notices dated 2016, 2017, and 2018, fail to raise any obvious red flags and since the first and last were processed by GitHub, people can be confident they received considerable scrutiny.

A similar notice sent to GitHub in 2020 took content down using the DMCA. In other parts of the notice, takedowns were requested under trademark law.

At this point, it’s worth highlighting something that all of these notices have in common: not a single one targets pirated copies of Nintendo games. Instead, they all target audiovisual works, images, and fictional character depictions, to which Nintendo owns the rights. It’s a trend that runs through all similar notices.

A 2019 takedown notice sent to itch.io, also featuring the email address notice@mm-nintendo.com, displays the same features as another sent to Sankakucomplex in 2019. No games piracy in sight, only alleged infringement in characters, artwork, and audiovisual works.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to raise a theory at this point; is it possible that Nintendo uses the mm-nintendo.com domain when takedown notices target characters, artwork, and audiovisual works, in cases where specific expertise is necessary?

MarkMonitor (MM for short?)

There’s no direct evidence to show that the MM in mm-nintendo.com stands for MarkMonitor. However, there’s plenty of evidence to show MarkMonitor has connections to Nintendo. The domain was registered through MarkMonitor in September 2016 and then updated somewhat coincidentally this Wednesday when the Garry’s Mod controversy began.

The most obvious change is the prominence of the email address brandprotection@mm-nintendo.com before the update. MarkMonitor doesn’t manage all 6,431 domain names currently listed under Nintendo of America, but it has provided brand protection services for some of the biggest names in business.

When Apple worked with MarkMonitor back in 2013, records show the company operated the domain mm-apple.com. While that domain has long since expired, mm-microsoft.com is very much alive and just like mm-nintendo.com, redirects to its owner’s main domain.

Other domains registered through MarkMonitor and used for brand protection over the years, probably behaved in much the same way; mm-velcro.com, mm-walmart.com, mm-loreal.com, and mm-nissan.com, for example.

So Real or Fake?

There seems no doubt that the domain mm-nintendo.com a) actually exists b) is used for brand protection purposes and c) isn’t used often or even at all for regular DMCA takedown work. That leads to the final item, d) the domain is different because it has a specific purpose.

It’s possible that brand protection matters are handled by a dedicated Nintendo department and/or MarkMonitor itself, which also has an office in the UK. Perhaps the image below, uploaded on Thursday, offers a few more clues. Just don’t venture too close to the edge.

Whether the DMCA or similar takedown notices sent to Garry and the team are legitimate is best judged by those who have seen them. Based on the above, however, his claim – that the notices are official – should really be the last word on the matter.

As for the other ‘fake’ notices previously sent that also mention the mm-nintendo.com domain, only a close review of each could determine whether they’re genuine and/or accurate. When everything is said and done, however, perhaps the most important question is whether they target obviously Nintendo-like characters or imagery.

From what we’ve seen, most seem to do just that.

Source

It’s long been the case that access to certain services, whether on or offline, will only be granted when customers prove their identity.

Often linked to financial products but in many cases basic money/goods transactions carried out online, handing over a name, address, date of birth and similar details, can increase confidence that a deal will more likely than not go according to plan. In some cases, especially when buying restricted products, proving identity can be a condition of sale.

Yet, for many years, companies operating in the online space have been happy to do business with customers without knowing very much about them at all.

In some cases, where companies understand that a lack of friction is valuable to the customer, an email address has long been considered sufficient. If the credit or pre-payment card eventually used to pay for a product has enough credit and isn’t stolen, there seems very little to be concerned about. For many governments, however, any level of anonymity has the capacity to cause concern, and if that means unmasking everyone to identify a few bad actors, so be it.

Improving Detection and Prevention of Foreign Malicious Cyber Activity

Perceived and actual threats from shadowy overseas actors are something few countries can avoid. Whether in the West or the East, reports of relatively low-key meddling through to seriously malicious hacks, even attacks on key infrastructure, are becoming a fact of modern life.

After being under discussion for years, late January the U.S. Department of Commerce published a notice of proposed rulemaking hoping to reduce threats to the United States. If adopted, the proposal will establish a new set of requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS), often known as cloud infrastructure providers, to deny access to foreign adversaries.

The premise is relatively simple. By having a more rigorous sign-up procedure for platforms such as Amazon’s AWS, for example, the risk of malicious actors using U.S. cloud services to attack U.S. critical infrastructure, or undermine national security in other ways, can be reduced. The Bureau of Industry and Security noted the following in its announcement late January.

The proposed rule introduces potential regulations that require U.S. cloud infrastructure providers and their foreign resellers to implement and maintain Customer Identification Programs (CIPs), which would include the collection of “Know Your Customer” (KYC) information. Similar KYC requirements already exist in other industries and seek to assist service providers in identifying and addressing potential risks posed by providing services to certain customers. Such risks include fraud, theft, facilitation of terrorism, and other activities contrary to U.S. national security interests.

While supposedly aimed at external threats, only positive identification of all customers can eliminate the possibility that an ‘innocent’ domestic user isn’t actually a foreign threat actor. Or, according to the proposal, anyone (or all people) from a specified jurisdiction at the government’s discretion. Upon notification by IaaS providers, that could include foreign persons training large artificial intelligence models “with potential capabilities that could be used in malicious cyber-enabled activity.”

Scope of IaaS and Customer Identification Programs

Under the proposed rule, Customer Identification Programs (CIPs) operated by IaaS providers must collect information from both existing and prospective customers, i.e. those at the application stage of opening an account. The bare minimum includes the following data: a customer’s name, address, the means and source of payment for each customer’s account, email addresses and telephone numbers, and IP addresses used for access or administration of the account.

What qualifies as an IaaS is surprisingly broad:

Any product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or “trial” offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications.

 

The consumer typically does not manage or control most of the underlying hardware but has control over the operating systems, storage, and any deployed applications. The term is inclusive of “managed” products or services, in which the provider is responsible for some aspects of system configuration or maintenance, and “unmanaged” products or services, in which the provider is only responsible for ensuring that the product is available to the consumer.

And it doesn’t stop there. The term IaaS includes all ‘virtualized’ products and services where the computing resources of a physical machine are shared, such as Virtual Private Servers (VPS). It even covers ‘baremetal’ servers allocated to a single person. The definition also extends to any service where the consumer does not manage or control the underlying hardware but contracts with a third party for access.

“This definition would capture services such as content delivery networks, proxy services, and domain name resolution services,” the proposal reads.

The proposed rule, National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities, will stop accepting comments from interested parties on April 30, 2024.

Given the implications for regular citizens, many of whom are already hanging on to what remains of their privacy, the prospect of handing over highly sensitive information just to obtain a product trial is a real concern. The potential for leaks grows with each disclosure, as does the possibility of personal information ending up for sale on the dark web.

Which is where the threat actors will obtain other people’s credentials to masquerade as regular users when subjected to a Know Your Customer process. For IaaS services themselves, the largest will have few problems implementing customer identification programs and may even consider them useful. On one hand, they can help to stop threat actors and on the other, take the opportunity to build a database containing the personal details of every single customer.

Source

Twenty-five years ago, peer-to-peer file-sharing took the Internet by storm.

The ability to search for and share content with complete strangers was nothing short of a revolution.

In the years that followed, media consumption swiftly moved online. This usually involved content shared without permission, but pirate pioneers ultimately paved the way for new business models.

The original ‘pirate’ ethos has long since gone. There are still plenty of unauthorized sites and services, but few today concern themselves with decentralization and similar technical advances; centralized streaming is the new king with money as the main motivator.

AI Meets BitTorrent

There are areas where innovation and technological progress still lead today, mostly centered around artificial intelligence. Every month, numerous new tools and services appear online, as developers embrace what many see as unlimited potential.

How these developments will shape the future is unknown, but they have many rightsholders spooked. Interestingly, an ‘old’ research group, that was already active during BitTorrent’s heyday, is now using AI to amplify its technology.

Researchers from the Tribler research group at Delft University of Technology have been working on their Tribler torrent client for nearly two decades. They decentralized search, removing the need for torrent sites, and implemented ‘anonymity‘ by adding an onion routing layer to file transfers.

Many millions of euros have been spent on the Tribler research project over the years. Its main goal is to advance decentralized technology, not to benefit corporations, but to empower the public at large.

“Our entire research portfolio is driven by idealism. We aim to remove power from companies, governments, and AI in order to shift all this power to self-sovereign citizens,” the Tribler team explains.

Decentralized AI-powered Search

While not every technological advancement has been broadly embraced, yet, Tribler has just released a new paper and a proof of concept which they see as a turning point for decentralized AI implementations; one that has a direct BitTorrent link.

The scientific paper proposes a new framework titled “De-DSI”, which stands for Decentralised Differentiable Search Index. Without going into technical details, this essentially combines decentralized large language models (LLMs), which can be stored by peers, with decentralized search.

This means that people can use decentralized AI-powered search to find content in a pool of information that’s stored across peers. For example, one can ask “find a magnet link for the Pirate Bay documentary,” which should return a magnet link for TPB-AFK, without mentioning it by name.

This entire process relies on information shared by users. There are no central servers involved at all, making it impossible for outsiders to control.

Endless Possibilities, Limited Use

While this sounds exciting, the current demo version is not yet built into the Tribler client. Associate Professor Dr. Johan Pouwelse, leader of the university’s Tribler Lab, explains that it’s just a proof of concept with a very limited dataset and AI capabilities.

“For this demo, we trained an end-to-end generative Transformer on a small dataset that comprises YouTube URLs, magnet links, and Bitcoin wallet addresses. Those identifiers are each annotated with a title and represent links to movie trailers, CC-licensed music, and BTC addresses of independent artists,” Pouwelse says.

We tried some basic searches with mixed results. That makes sense since there’s only limited content, but it can find magnet links and videos without directly naming the title. That said, it’s certainly not yet as powerful as other AI tools.

In essence, De-DSI operates by sharing the workload of training large language models on lists of document identifiers. Every peer in the network specializes in a subset of data, which other peers in the network can retrieve to come up with the best search result.

A Global Human Brain to Fight Torrent Spam and Censors

The proof of concept shows that the technology is sound. However, it will take some time before it’s integrated into the Tribler torrent client. The current goal is to have an experimental decentralized-AI version of Tribler ready at the end of the year.

While the researchers see this as a technological breakthrough, it doesn’t mean that things will improve for users right away. AI-powered search will be slower to start with and, if people know what they’re searching for, it offers little benefit.

Through trial and error, the researchers ultimately hope to improve things though, with a “global brain” for humanity as the ultimate goal.

Most torrent users are not looking for that, at the moment, but Pouwelse says that they could also use decentralized machine learning to fight spam, offer personal recommendations, and to optimize torrent metadata. These are concrete and usable use cases.

The main drive of the researchers is to make technology work for the public at large, without the need for large corporations or a central government to control it.

“The battle royale for Internet control is heating up,” Pouwelse says, in a Pirate Bay-esque fashion.

“Driven by our idealism we will iteratively take away their power and give it back to citizens. We started 18 years ago and will take decades more. We should not give up on fixing The Internet, just because it is hard.”

The very limited De-DSI proof of concept and all related code is available on Huggingface. All technological details are available in the associated paper. The latest Tribler version, which is fully decentralized without AI, can be found on the official project page.

Source

The joint press release issued Monday by the Premier League and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) was unusual right from the start.

Published early on Monday, even the timing was a break from the norm, but the content was even more surprising. Following criminal referrals by the Premier League and ACE, an operator of BestBuyIPTV – a platform that has appeared on the USTR’s Notorious Markets report for the past five years – had been convicted at the People’s Court of Hanoi.

For a country where criminal referrals have traditionally disappeared into the ether, that could be a very big deal.

Sentencing Details Are Somewhat Puzzling

The press release clearly identifies Le Hai Nam as “the operator” of BestBuyIPTV. He entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay the equivalent of $4,000. Whether that was a straightforward fine or something else isn’t clear, but more than $24,000 in illegal profits were identified, confiscated, and then seized by the state, while $12,000 in restitution was paid according to the indictment.

Having learned more about the case and its challenges since Monday, the conviction seems to represent a minor miracle in itself. In isolation, however, there’s an irreconcilable gap between the scale of the infringing and the punishment handed down.

For reasons that aren’t addressed, the court suspended the entire sentence, i.e no prison time at all. Assuming the restitution was split 50/50, that’s $6,000 each for the Premier League and ACE, while $24,000 – the bulk of funds – simply evaporated into the public purse. It’s a baffling situation, but clearly the conviction is the main prize here; it could be priceless.

Legal Process Took Four Years

Information made available to TorrentFreak suggests that the Premier League filed a complaint with authorities in June or July 2020, requesting an investigation and criminal prosecution of not one, but two Vietnamese nationals, one of which was Le Hai Nam.

The other, whose name we’ll refrain from revealing here, was considered the operator of BestBuyIPTV while Nam appears to have controlled the restreaming side of the business. Communications with customers show involvement in both reselling and direct sales, however.

Estimates of how much BestBuyIPTV was making overall were not made available to us, but a third party estimate provides some basis to throw some figures into the air to compare with the $14,000 paid in restitution.

In common with similar services who use subscriber numbers as part of their marketing, BestBuyIPTV’s homepage boasted 900,000 subscribers, between 10,000 and 12,000 resellers, and around 2,000 restreaming affiliates. If we assume these figures are highly inflated and then broadly avoid counting revenues twice, a conservative estimate would run to a seven-figure sum, and quite possibly eight.

The other remarkable aspect to this case can be viewed from two different directions. Either there was a complete lack of awareness on the security front, or maybe none of those involved actually cared. Given the technical skills on display concerning the service itself, the former seems to be out of the question. That leaves the latter, and probably one of the easier identifications for the Premier League in recent years.

Of course, that’s just a small part of the puzzle; gathering evidence to support convictions is painstaking work and more may be needed to bring this particular battle to an end.

Official Admits Manga Piracy Problem

As regularly reported over the past few years, Vietnam is home to some of the world’s largest pirate sites. In the United States, with site-blocking legislation back on the political agenda, the spotlight is on FMovies, one of the world’s leading movie and TV show streaming sites.

For some time, however, copyright holders in Japan have been reporting several other Vietnam-based or Vietnam-operated platforms responsible for staggering levels of piracy. They specialize in Japanese comics, known as manga, and local cartoons, better known as anime.

After recently renewing an anti-piracy partnership with Hollywood, publishers and anti-piracy group CODA are independently working flat out to solve what at times has looked like an unsolvable problem. However, unusual comments published in local media may suggest some light on the horizon.

Hundreds of Millions of Dollars

Pham Hoang Hai is the director of the Radio, Television and Electronic Information Testing Center, which operates within the Department of Broadcasting and Electronic Information under the Ministry of Information and Communications.

In comments published recently in local media, Hai said that around 100 websites are known to offer football matches illegally in Vietnam, together responsible for around 1.5 billion views in the 2022/2023 season. He also commented on sites dealing in other content, around 200 generating around 120 million views. And then something else, which as far as we know is the first public comment that acknowledges the scale of manga piracy traceable to Vietnam.

“Recently, we discovered a number of websites with servers located abroad that violate comic book copyrights,” Hai said.

“There have been a number of Japanese organizations working with the Ministry of Information and Communications, reporting comic book violations. Wars in cyberspace have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to copyright owners.”

In isolation, that may not sound like a particularly important comment and with no context, a suspended sentence and measly restitution could easily be dismissed on the same grounds. Only time will tell whether these seeds will grow into something more substantial but in Vietnam, where signs of progress are extremely rare, any achievement in the right direction holds significant value.

Source

For online media consumers, things have improved significantly over the years. More content is being made available on-demand than ever before.

Netflix set the tone a decade ago by offering movies and TV series online as a convenient alternative to piracy. This worked well, so well that more than a dozen other streaming services were launched, all with their own exclusive releases.

While this may sound positive, in some ways it made things worse for consumers. As it turns out, it’s quite costly to have more than a handful of subscriptions and fees may rise to the point where people feel justified to pirate some content to keep costs under control.

This revelation isn’t new. It’s been brought up several times over the years, dating back to at least 2017. And indeed, while most people gladly pay for streaming subscriptions, many use pirate sites and services ‘on the side’ to incidentally watch content from services they’re not already subscribed to.

Academic studies are yet to examine this effect in great detail, but there is survey data to back the theory up. Previously, most UK consumers felt that they were paying too much for legal subscriptions, with half indicating that piracy is a viable alternative.

1 in 3 Americans Pirated Movies or TV recently

New data from U.S. respondents released this week suggests that expensive streaming subscriptions are an issue there too. The online survey, conducted by Cordcutting among a sample of 988 American adults, finds that a third of all respondents pirated TV series or movies in the past year.

Younger people are more likely to have pirated at some point in their lives. For example, 76% of Generation Z says they have pirated content, a figure that falls to 28% for baby boomers.

Piracy habits are relatively stable. Most people who admitted pirating something over the past twelve months indicate that they ‘consume’ about the same as they did earlier. The positive news for rightsholders is that 35% pirate less than before, while just 11% have increased their piracy volume.

Streaming Costs Trigger Piracy

For many people, fragmentation and cost of paid streaming services appear to be key reasons for turning to pirate alternatives. More than a third of the self-proclaimed pirates mentioned the price of legal subscriptions among their reasons.

Of all pirating respondents, 36% said they used unauthorized alternatives because they were only interested in a specific show or movie, which alone was not worth a full subscription. This is close to the 35% who indicated that subscription services are too expensive.

The results of these types of surveys should always be interpreted with caution. The formulation of questions can be leading at times, for example, and paid online polls may have a selection bias.

The results make it clear that the price of legal subscriptions is an issue for a number of people. At the same time, however, the majority of respondents didn’t mention cost as a problem. Other popular reasons to pirate include content being unavailable through legal channels, or to avoid advertising.

How to Solve It?

The current streaming landscape is complicated for a reason. Many players are trying to gain market share hoping to become a dominant force. However, at some point more consolidation would make sense to keep costs under control for distributors and consumers.

When asked about possible solutions, many respondents mentioned that cheaper legal services would help, as would stronger penalties for online pirates.

At the moment, rightsholders are mostly focused on enforcement efforts to tackle the problem. In addition to going after pirate sites and services, they hope to introduce site blocking legislation to the United States. That has the potential to deter some casual pirates.

According to the survey, an emphasis on the potential negative effects of piracy could help. Among the U.S. respondents who indicated that they had never pirated anything, malware threats and potential negative effects on the industry were frequently mentioned as reasons.

Source

The non-profit Internet Archive (IA) aims to preserve digital history for generations to come.

The organization literally archives key parts of the Internet, copying older versions of websites to preserve them for future generations. This information becomes more and more valuable as time passes by.

IA has plenty of other archive projects too. For example, it operates a library that offers a broad collection of digital media, including books, which patrons can borrow upon request.

Thousands of libraries have digital lending services but IA’s approach is different. The organization doesn’t license authorized digital copies from publishers; instead, its books are scanned and digitized in-house. Each copy can only be loaned to one person at a time, to mimic the lending attributes of physical books.

Lawsuit and Appeal

Internet Archive believes that its approach falls under fair use but publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley, and Penguin Random House disagree. They filed a lawsuit in 2020 equating IA’s controlled digital lending operation to copyright infringement.

Earlier this year a New York federal court concluded that the library is indeed liable for copyright infringement. The court’s decision effectively put an end to IA’s self-scanning library, at least for books from the publishers in suit.

IA is not letting go without a fight and in December the non-profit filed its opening brief at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, hoping to reverse the judgment. Among other things, IA argued that its lending activity causes no financial harm is substantially different from the ebook licensing market.

Fearing a ‘Napster moment’ for books, the publishers rejected the notion that outsiders can run their own digitization programs and operate distribution platforms, without rightsholders being involved. Rightsholders should remain in control of all digital copies to be monetized on their terms.

Both sides were supported by amicus briefs from interested parties, a clear indication of what’s at stake in this dispute. Before the court case moves forward, however, IA replied to the publishers’ Napster comments and other critiques.

IA Points Out ‘Critical Misconceptions’

The Archive maintains that its lending service is fair use. The organization points out that the publishers have several misconceptions about its service.

IA points out that it doesn’t lend out digital copies without limits. For each physical book, it will only lend a single digitized copy at the time. This fixed “owned-to-loaned ratio” sets it apart from many of the copyright-infringing services mentioned by the publishers..

“Controlled digital lending is not equivalent to posting an ebook online for anyone to read or copy or to peer-to-peer file-sharing by companies like Napster. Neither practice is based on use of a library’s lawfully acquired physical copy, and neither ensures that only the one person entitled to borrow the book (or recording) can access it at a time.”

IA further notes that it has no profit motive, which differs from companies that resell digital copies without permission. In addition, the enormous work that goes into digitizing the books makes it hard for others to do the same, so fears of a flood of similar services are overblown.

“[B]ecause of the huge investment required to operate a legally compliant controlled lending system and the controls defining the practice, finding fair use here would not trigger any of the doomsday consequences for rightsholders that Publishers and their amici claim to fear,” IA writes.

Libraries Have Broad Missions

The brief goes on to counter the publishers’ “cramped” view of what libraries are for. Libraries are not just outfits that lend physical books to people nearby; their missions are much broader.

IA says that libraries make books available to a broad public, no matter their social status or location. They also preserve books for future generations and ensure that readers can enjoy books without giving up their privacy.

“Libraries provide readers more egalitarian access to a wider range of books, overcoming socioeconomic and geographic barriers by sharing resources with other libraries through interlibrary loans.”

“They also build permanent collections to preserve books, including older editions, for future generations. And they protect reader privacy, preventing disclosure of patron records that could chill access to information,” IA adds.

IA’s lending service advances this mission and was launched, in part, because the current ebook licensing schemes are seen as too restrictive.

A “Copyright” Balancing Act

The parties broadly agree on what the lending program entails and how it operates from a technical perspective. However, it’s the purpose and consequences that mostly determine whether a service is ‘fair use’, and here they have diametrically opposing views.

The publishers have argued that IA offers digital copies of their books without permission, which directly competes with its legal licensing business.

IA, in turn, doesn’t deny that copyrights play a role but stresses that its controlled lending is fair use. The reply highlights several arguments to make this point and concludes that the scale clearly tips in its favor.

The reply brief notes that the lower court didn’t properly balance the interests required by copyright law, largely overlooking the benefits the service has to the public at large, while strongly focusing on the financial aspect of copyright instead.

“[The District Court] decision barely mentions copyright’s ultimate purpose of ‘promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts’. Publishers do not deny that IA’s use serves this purpose; instead, they ask the Court to ignore that service and focus instead on copyright’s financial incentives for creativity.”

IA cites the Warhol Supreme Court case which made clear that fair use is a balancing act between the interests of the public and rightsholders. In this case, it believes that the balance favors its lending service.

“Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts. The district court’s failure to consider the latter contravenes decades of precedent recognizing that rewards are a secondary consideration, while promoting availability is primary,” IA informs the court.

“Here, the record shows that the balancing act between these purposes is better served by allowing the use than by preventing it,” IA concludes.

—

A copy of the Internet Archive’s reply brief, submitted at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, is available here (pdf)

Source

Since its launch early February, Italy’s Piracy Shield system and its operators have been at the center of a series of controversies.

From blocking innocent platforms and bizarre public denials claiming that never actually happened, to the leaking of Piracy Shield source code online and claims that didn’t happen either, a more difficult debut would be hard to imagine.

Yet with legitimate complaints from negatively-affected members of the public being given short shrift, and access to information requests pushed aside, the groundwork is in place for additional controversy further down the line.

AGCOM Issues its First Piracy-Shield Related Fine

Without assistance from Italian ISPs, blocking pirate services would be impossible in Italy. Against the wishes of many, however, their role in the system is enshrined in law.

When the Piracy Shield system churns out domains and IP addresses to be blocked, ISPs must ensure that none of their customers can access them within 30 minutes. Associated costs are the ISPs’ burden too, as are the fines they face for non-compliance. Rightsholders, meanwhile, face no sanctions whatsoever for their own blunders.

ISP association ASSOProvider has protested this imbalance from the beginning; it represents smaller companies likely to be disproportionately affected by the imposition of additional costs. Last year, ASSOProvider mounted a legal challenge and predictably ran into the combined might of telecoms regulator AGCOM and Piracy Shield’s corporate backers, including top-tier football league Serie A.

The challenge failed to stop the launch of Piracy Shield but when predictions of over-blocking became reality, ASSOProvider filed an official information request to obtain data relating to the program thus far. AGCOM’s response was to fine ASSOProvider for obstructing its Piracy Shield supervisory activities; specifically, for not providing a list of the ISPs it represents, despite AGCOM already being well aware of their names.

That the first fine linked to the new anti-piracy regime targeted non-pirates hasn’t gone unnoticed. ASSOProvider seems to have drawn energy and motivation from it, contrary to the intended effect.

New Legal Challenge Filed at the Council of State

Working with the Sarzana Law Firm of Rome, ASSOProvider will now challenge the legality of the regulatory provisions underpinning the AGCOM-supervised Piracy Shield.

“The dozens of reports from users, businesses and associations, whose rights have been unjustly violated, have convinced the Association to continue its battle for legality and the protection of citizens’ rights on the internet,” an announcement from Sarzana & Associati reads.

“In recent months the Association had already requested the list of access inhibition measures implemented through the platform, especially since the inhibitions seem to have also involved subjects completely unrelated to piracy activities,” it continues, referencing the access to information request filed last month.

The Consiglio di Stato (‘Council of State’) is the body that ensures public administration in Italy complies with relevant law. The specifics of ASSOProvider’s challenge will appear in due course but since the Council has jurisdiction over all administrative authorities in Italy, the association will seek a robust review and a positive outcome.

Giovanbattista Frontera, President of the Board of Directors of ASSOProvider, says its aims are clear; greater transparency in order to identify the critical issues that can compromise the battle against internet piracy.

“The association I represent intends first of all to thank the free press and the countless ‘straight-backed’ journalists who covered the Piracy Shield affair with professionalism and independence, in an objectively difficult context. What happened to completely innocent individuals who had nothing to do with piracy is there for all to see,” Frontera says.

“ASSOProvider will continue to invoke the principles of legality and protection of rights before the Judiciary, as it has always done and will not be afraid to report the errors of the system before all possible jurisdictions and institutions, in compliance with the law.”

Predictable Action By Legal Streaming Services

Piracy Shield typically aims to prevent consumer access to pirate IPTV services, especially those that provide access to live sports broadcasts. Subscribers to these services typically mention the expense of legal services as a driving factor; paying a fraction of the cost for a pirate product is clearly more attractive than paying perhaps ten times more.

Depending on opinion, legal services are over-priced because football in general lives beyond its means, they simply like to profiteer, or because of thieving pirates. If these people paid their fair share, companies could reduce their prices to all, some have claimed.

As we’ve heard from AGCOM and Serie A since Piracy Shield launched in February, the system works; pirates are getting blocked left and right, and pirate services are having big problems servicing customers in Italy. If that is indeed true, it would be interesting to know the background to Sky’s decision to increase the price of its sport and football packages in Italy.

DDaY reports that annual subscribers will see the sport component increase from 16 euros to 22 euros, a total of 90 euros per month. The football package will increase from 5 euros to 8 euros per month. Those who subscribe to the Open offer will see the sports pack increased from 20 euros to 26.90 euros per month, with football increasing from 5 to 8 euros per month.

If it’s true that Piracy Shield is definitely working, those who predicted falling prices appear to be wrong. In theory, at least.

Source

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 four newcomers on the list. “Dune: Part Two” is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on April 22 are:

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

Source

In recent years, copyright holders have paid close attention to a growing number of large piracy services with connections to Vietnam.

Popular brands including Fmovies, AniWave, 123movies, BestBuyIPTV, 2embed, and Y2mate are all linked to the Asian country, which was recently branded a ‘piracy haven’.

BestBuyIPTV Conviction

To curb this trend, western rightsholders have been working with local authorities to bring local investigations and enforcement efforts up to par. While this process takes time, there was a breakthrough last week.

The People’s Court of Hanoi handed BestBuyIPTV operator Le Hai Nam a 30-month suspended prison sentence. In addition, the man must pay the equivalent of $4,000 in local currency, after having paid $12,000 in restitution previously.

BestBuyIPTV is known as one of the most popular IPTV services. The subscription platform has been repeatedly called out as a notorious piracy market by the US Trade Representative, as recently as this year.

The defendant reportedly pleaded guilty to his role in the BestBuyIPTV operation. While a copy of the verdict is not immediately available, a release shared by rightsholders attributed the following quote to the Hanoi court Judge.

“The defendant has violated the provisions of the law which protect the copyright and related rights of the Motion Picture Association’s members and the English Premier League,” Judge Le Hai Yen said.

According to the Judge, these types of crimes are a danger to society and should be strictly enforced and prosecuted, to send a deterrent to other operators of pirate sites and services.

First Ever Online Piracy Conviction

The prosecution follows referrals from the Premier League and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), who note that this is the first-ever online piracy conviction in Vietnam.

The rightsholders see last week’s conviction as an important milestone that will set a precedent in Vietnam. It’s a clear signal that online pirate sites and services won’t be tolerated, they say.

“This result should serve as a stark warning to anyone involved in the illegal supply of Premier League streams in Vietnam. It is the result of a strong partnership between the Vietnamese authorities and local law enforcement, ACE and the Premier League,” says Kevin Plumb, Premier League’s General Counsel.

Karyn Temple, MPA’s Senior Executive Vice President, shares this view and hopes that the Vietnamese authorities will move onto other high profile targets next, which could include the popular streaming site Fmovies.

“We eagerly await similar action from Vietnamese law enforcement on other longstanding priority targets engaged in digital piracy on a global scale,” Temple notes, without explicitly naming any.

BestBuyIPTV is Online?

Interestingly, the BestBuyIPTV threat may not be completely dealt with yet. MPA previously called out the ‘Bestbuyiptv.biz’ domain in relation to the popular service, which remains online today.

“BestBuyIPTV is extremely popular in the United States & Europe,” MPA wrote at the time, adding that “the operators are located in Vietnam.”

It’s possible that other operators of the service managed the service online, which would put the conviction’s deterrent effect in doubt. Or was the sentenced operator perhaps linked to another BestBuyIPTV service?

We have asked the MPA for clarification, as its press release makes no mention of this, and will update the article when an official response comes in.

Source

Spain found itself at the center of a worldwide controversy last month when it was revealed that various rightsholders had somehow managed to convince a local judge to block Telegram in its entirety.

Under intense pressure, the judge quickly rolled back the decision after an advisor concluded that the planned measure was massively disproportionate. Just weeks later, a row over an app that’s no longer available from any official app store, seems to be heading towards another controversy and yet more debate on what constitutes a proportionate response to online piracy.

This time top-tier football league LaLiga stands front and center.

Newplay: Popular .M3U Player Unpopular With LaLiga

For an explanation of the capabilities of the Newplay app, here’s what LaLiga itself told the European Commission in a 2022 submission to its Counterfeiting and Piracy Watch List (pdf, translated)

The ‘Newplay IPTV’ player application, developed by ITECH SLU, is one of the main player apps focused on Spain. In 2021, more than 900,000 users downloaded the app through Google Play, in Spain alone. This application has its own website (www.newplay.site) and has various profiles on social networks and communication channels: Telegram (+17k members); Twitch (+2,000 followers); Instagram (+29.2k followers); YouTube (23k subscribers). Through these, the use of the app is promoted. As can be seen in the attached evidence, through this application users can access various audiovisual content such as sports, TV channels, series, movies, etc.

That the description above offered plenty of facts and figures for everything except the alleged infringement, which only gets a line of attention right at the end, isn’t exactly typical of these kinds of submissions. The evidence amounted to a screenshot of a video of the app on YouTube, showing icons for various TV channels, two of which appeared to relate to LaLiga.

Crucially, there were no claims that the app arrives in the hands of users already configured to supply LaLiga match streams, nor was there any mention that the app requires users to supply their own M3U playlists. However, there was a screenshot of a comment made by a user querying an in-app message (“It asks me to enter a URL, what do I have to do?”) and two responses.

One response appeared to be from someone affiliated with Newplay, who wrote: “You have to add or create a channel list.” The other response linked to a URL where a playlist could be obtained. If that playlist had been posted by someone working for Newplay, that could’ve caused problems. There are no signs that was the case though; in isolation it only adds weight to the claim that no channels were provided in the app.

LaLiga Takes Complaint to Court

In the same month as the submission, April 2022, LaLiga walked away from a Spanish court (Juzgado de. Instrucción Nº 1 de Cieza) with an order that targeted Newplay.

The order is referenced multiple times on the LaLiga website but no copy has been posted for public consumption and, thus far, we’ve had no luck locating a copy. The big question is whether the order was handed down after an adversarial procedure or one that relied purely on evidence supplied by LaLiga.

What does seem clear, however, is that the order required various intermediaries to take action to undermine Newplay’s ability to remain functional. Whether the companies took action before or after the order was handed down isn’t clear but Google, Apple, and Huawei acted similarly by removing Newplay from their app stores.

But for LaLiga’s top man, that wasn’t enough. Last September, Javier Tebas revealed that LaLiga had “eliminated” 58 pirate apps, by unspecified means, together worth a million downloads in Spain. He said that having “eliminated” the apps, LaLiga wanted Google to ‘locate’ apps already downloaded onto users phones, so they too could be “eliminated”. If the same can be done for child abuse images, then the same should apply to piracy tools, Tebas said.

There was no official response from Google, but it’s not difficult to see why the prospect of digging into users’ phones, to remotely delete content, could be problematic. The privacy implications alone could cause huge headaches, as LaLiga is well aware; a 250,000 euro fine for turning fans phones into piracy spying devices should’ve been an instant reminder, logically at least.

Instead, LaLiga is doubling down

According to an eLDiario.es report, LaLiga has now asked the investigating judge in the Newplay case to charge the local directors of Google, Apple, and Huawei, with “a crime of serious disobedience.” This relates to their alleged failures to prevent users of their app ecosystems from continuing to use downloaded copies of Newplay that still exist on their devices.

It’s a crime that carries a sentence of up to a year in prison.

In these preliminary proceedings, Google, Apple, and Huawei as corporate entities also stand accused of the same “crime of serious disobedience.” They also stand accused of cooperating with Newplay’s developer while profiting from his allegedly infringing, ad-supported activities.

“The person under investigation used his ‘simple’ video player as a necessary instrument for his clients to access the Television services he offered in exchange for a subscription or advertising, violating the rights of the content owners,” LaLiga informed the court, as recalled by elDiario.es.

In addition to removing the app from their stores, the order required Google, Apple, and Huawei to “prevent users” who had downloaded app from “accessing the application.” It further ordered them to “immediately cease payment of commissions” derived from Newplay’s paid version (without ads) and make available to the court “the amounts that may be pending delivery” to the Newplay developer.

According to LaLiga, the companies haven’t complied in either respect. All three refused to comment for legal reasons.

As reported this weekend, the app Smart IPTV was blocked by ISPs in Spain recently. In common with Newplay, Smart IPTV is also an .M3U player and comes with no infringing content or links.

Source

England is widely regarded as the ‘home of football’ and the Premier League is its top competition, drawing hundreds of millions of viewers from all over the world.

Aside from the sportive stakes, the Premier League also has a vested interest in selling broadcast rights. These rights generate billions of pounds in revenue per year; a staggering amount unmatched by any other football league.

Broadcasters who secure these rights typically recoup their investment through the public, often in the form of subscriptions. However, not all football fans are willing to play this game and some seek out free or cheaper alternatives in the form of pirate streaming platforms.

In recent years, the Premier League has tried several legal avenues to tackle the piracy problem. In addition to obtaining blocking orders in multiple countries, the organization has been a driving force behind several lawsuits, some of which resulted in prison sentences.

Shutting down a pirate operation is always the preferred outcome for rightsholders, but it’s more easily said than done. Operators of streaming sites and services are typically aware of the risks and do their best to remain anonymous.

Premier League Takes Aim at GoDaddy Customers

In an attempt to lift this veil, the football organization went to a California federal court this week, hoping to discover the identities of operators connected to more than two dozen domain names.

The legal request isn’t targeted at the streaming sites directly. Instead, the Premier League requests a DMCA subpoena to compel domain registrar GoDaddy to hand over all information it holds on the operators. This doesn’t have to but might result in useful intel.

Domain names mentioned in the request (full list below) include live-kooora.com, 30.tv, live4.kooora-gooal.com, fctvlive.com, and soccertv4k.com. Some of these have a few hundred domain names, while others have several millions of monthly visits.

Some of the Targeted Domains
 

In addition, the Premier League requests information on several backend domains connected to the popular pirate streaming services EVPad and SVI Cloud. These two platforms are particularly popular in South East Asia and were previously called out as “notorious markets.”

EVPad, for example, was described as an “extremely sophisticated” pirate streaming service.

“A product purchased on behalf of the Premier League was found to provide access to over 1,700 channels, including 75 offering live sports broadcasts. The operators have been very careful to hide their location and identities, Premier League links them to Hong Kong and China.”

EVPad and SVI Cloud domains

Identifying Pirates and More?

Through the requested DMCA subpoena, the Premier League hopes to gather more information on the people behind the sites and services.

Among other things, the football league asks GoDaddy for information that can identify people connected to the domains. This includes names, addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses, payment information, and other account details.

Aside from the subpoena request, the Premier League sent a letter directly to GoDaddy, asking the domain registrar to remove or disable access to the infringing content. If not, it is expected that these sites will continue to broadcast similar pirate streams throughout the rest of the season.

From the Letter to GoDaddy
 

At the time of writing, many of the domains and services listed in the application remain online. GoDaddy typically doesn’t take domains offline without a court order, so that doesn’t come as a surprise.

That said, if the DMCA subpoena is granted, GoDaddy will hand over the requested account holder information. These types of subpoenas only require a signature from a court clerk, so this will likely move forward.

Whether any of the information is usable to the Premier League is another question. Many pirate site owners use ‘inaccurate’ domain registration data and, since GoDaddy accepts cryptocurrency payments, the financial trail might run dead as well.

Update: The subpoena was signed by a court clerk.

—

The subpoena request and the associated paperwork, filed at a California federal court, is available here (1, 2, 3, 4).

A full list of all the domains mentioned can be found below. The request below includes several subdomains.

Websites

– live-kooora.com
– 5koora.live-kooora.com
– mpm24hd.com
– fctvlive.com
– koora-live.io
– yalla-shoot-as.com (redirects to yyallashoot.live)
– tarjetarojatvenvivo.net
– yalla–live.net
– kooora4lives.io (redirects to koora4live.ai)
– futbollibretv.me (redirects to futbollibretvhd.me)
– doomovie-hd.com (redirects to doomovie-hd.pro)
– streamlive7.com (redirects to match.fctvhd.com)
– live4.kooora-gooal.com
– 30.tv
– koooralive-tv.com (redirects to kooralive-tv.io)
– dooball2you.com
– dooballx.com
– soccertv4k.com
– futebolgratis.net
– baadooball.com
– dooballfree24hr.com
– herodooball.com
– kora-live-new.com
– kora-livee.com
– koora–live.com
– bein–match.com (redirects to tv.bein-match.pro)

SVI Cloud

– broker.6868a.cc
– 6868b.cc
– vpic.6868c.cc
– playback.f666666.xyz

EVPad

– appindex.google10sv.com
– v10js.google144.com
– sx.dl1717.com
– dlt.6868nbtc.com
– findpic.00005555.cc
– tm1.hdtvvip.com
– cdn_pic.0168861.com

Source

In a world where users can have their own ChatGPT-like AI instances up and running on their own PCs, in just a handful of minutes, for zero spend and completely legally, the app experience on smart TVs rarely fails to disappoint.

Yet when smart TV users somehow manage to clunk their way through, say, LG’s menus, and then avoid the avalanche of distractions that exist purely to break their will, only disappointment lies ahead for the IPTV-curious.

If, against all odds, they find an app that resembles the thing they actually searched for, the high probability of being presented with the app “Smart IPTV” is something thousands before them will attest to.

More Disappointment

It’s not that Smart IPTV is a poor product, it’s not. The fact that most of the time people have to pay to use it isn’t to blame either. The problem is the expectations of those who bought the software in the belief it contains illegal streams. It doesn’t, and that can be very disappointing.

Most likely due to the number of complaints from misinformed buyers, listings for the app on the LG, Samsung, and Google Play stores are now very clear: Smart IPTV does not provide access to playlists or streams, so don’t even ask.

LG TV App Store

The reason for the confusion among prospective buyers isn’t immediately clear. Smart IPTV seems like it’s been around forever and at no point has anything stuck out as being especially misleading or offering any suggestion that more might be on offer.

Yet now, even those who purchased Smart IPTV in full knowledge it offered no content, are being disappointed too.

Smart IPTV Website Blocked in Spain

During the past few days, reports have surfaced indicating that the official website of Smart IPTV has been blocked by Spanish ISPs. Visitors to siptv.app are instead redirected to an alternative page displaying the following text:

“Contenido bloqueado por requerimiento de la Autoridad Competente, comunicado a esta Operadora”

When translated to English, the message reads: “Content blocked at the request of the Competent Authority, communicated to this Operator.

In common with many countries around the world, particularly in Europe, Spain has a site-blocking system that restricts access to sites and services deemed to infringe copyright. Some prominent cases receive publicity as they travel through the legal system, most notably when top tier football league LaLiga and its broadcasting partners obtain injunctions to block pirate IPTV services.

While Spain does put together a report every few months to show the extent of blocking in the country, its usefulness is limited to a review of blocking already in place. As a tool to explain what is happening now, much less why a site or service was deemed infringing, the report is effectively useless.

As a result, which company declared the Smart IPTV app as copyright-infringing is unknown. What we can do, if only as a thought exercise, is use existing information to establish the most likely candidate based on motivation and past statements.

LaLiga – Who Else?

When it comes to blocking measures, especially those related to pirate IPTV, no rightsholders anywhere in the world are more aggressive than those behind the most popular football leagues.

The Premier League (England), Serie A (Italy) and LaLiga (Spain) are widely considered to be the leading proponents of blocking measures. Through a basic process of elimination, LaLiga is the only entity from the three likely to have targeted Smart IPTV in Spain, but there are more compelling reasons than simply being an aggressive blocking proponent in a specific geographic area.

In a 2022 submission to a then-upcoming edition of the European Commission’s Counterfeiting and Piracy Watchlist, LaLiga submitted a list of apps that, from a technical perspective, could play illegal streams of LaLiga football matches.

More accurately, the majority simply allowed the users of the apps to play content referenced in .M3U playlists that were not supplied with the apps themselves.

Terrifying Text Files From The 90s

Being able to play an .M3U playlist is a basic functionality offered by media players including VLC. For those sporting gray hair today, the same ‘technology’ was available in Winamp. Those who remember .M3U playlists starting to gain popularity in 1996 will be able to explain this incredible technology in a few words; it’s a text file containing locations where information can be found, on a hard drive (c:\playlists) or a network, mostly using a domain or IP address.

Instead of accusing the apps of infringement directly, LaLiga used broad strokes to paint a picture of infringing capability.

“It is important to note that all of these player applications allow the consumption of an innumerable amount of audiovisual contents such as sports, movies, series TV channels, etc. In other words, this problem affects the entire audiovisual and entertainment industry in general,” LaLiga added, carefully choosing its words.

As we highlighted at the time, LaLiga’s careful words were supported by carefully presented evidence, which in one case took an IPTV developer’s documentation and used it against them, after cropping the screenshot to disappear a line that began: “This app doesn’t contain any built-in channels…”

Again, we must reiterate that Spain’s blocking mechanism fails to offer enough transparency to identify who is behind the blocking of Smart IPTV. This means that we cannot say with any certainty that LaLiga is actually behind the blockade, but we can offer a generalized conclusion.

Any system that allows participants to mark their own homework in relative secrecy, can never be fit for purpose when other people’s basic rights begin to suffer. The fundamental right to conduct a legal business throughout the Union, for example.

Blocking Began Around April 12

To find out more about recent events, TorrentFreak spoke with the owner of Smart IPTV.

“The website domains siptv.app and siptv.eu have been blocked at some of Spain’s ISPs since approx. 04/12. Some ISPs still allow access to the website,” he explains.

“I have not received any correspondence from the officials or ISPs, I only started receiving messages from angry users from Spain that they couldn’t access the website. I conversed with a couple of them and it turned out the blocking is on the domain level, where ISPs are redirecting using 451 HTTP error, which also threw SSL certificate errors for those using HTTPS.”

With the blocking clearly causing access and security issues, Smart IPTV’s owner says that blocking can be avoided using a VPN but for him, it’s “not a very good solution.”

Instead, he’s having to make modifications to his apps to mitigate the problems.

“Since the App is operating on the same domains [as the website], the only way to work around this is to release updates of the appropriate Apps on devices, which I have already submitted and waiting for approval from Apps Stores (this can take a while),” he explains.

“A manual Android install is already operating normally, confirmed by Spanish users. The problem is that older devices that won’t get the app update (I am talking 10-year-old devices) will not be able to benefit from the app any longer.”

Of course, it’s likely that angry users who don’t understand the situation will blame the developer, then expect a new version of the app for free. But, as the MPA highlighted recently as it prepares its own proposals for blocking in the United States, blocking never, ever goes wrong.

As everyone else knows, that’s absolutely true, except for when it does.

Source

Under U.S. copyright law, Internet providers must terminate the accounts of repeat infringers “in appropriate circumstances.”

Many ISPs have been reluctant to take such drastic measures, which triggered a wave of copyright infringement lawsuits in recent years with WideOpenWest (WOW!) as one of the targets.

The Colorado-based Internet provider was sued by a group of movie companies including Millennium Media and Voltage Pictures. The filmmakers accuse the ISP of failing to disconnect the accounts of subscribers who were repeatedly flagged for sharing copyrighted material via BitTorrent.

The movie companies hold WOW! liable for these pirating activities, which could lead to millions of dollars in damages. The ISP rejects the claims and responded with a motion to dismiss, which was denied last year, and the case remains ongoing today.

Multi-Million Dollar Lawsuit Expansion

After the case was stalled for over a year, the movie companies requested permission to submit an amended complaint, which would add seven new plaintiffs and more than 300 new works.

The proposals raised the stakes significantly. Instead of 57 works, good for maximum statutory damages of roughly $8 million, an expansion to roughly 375 works would increase the statutory maximum to $56 million.

In addition to the monetary stakes, the proposed update also introduced evidence from two new third-party piracy tracking companies, Irdeto and Facterra. The initial complaint only included piracy tracking information from anti-piracy partner Maverickeye.

WOW protested these additions, but the court allowed the movie companies to go ahead. This week, they filed their second amended complaint at the Colorado federal court, making the changes official.

Same Claims, Higher Stakes

The nature of the claims against WOW! haven’t changed. The movie companies accuse the Internet provider of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, as well as DMCA violations.

The complaint lists several examples of WOW! subscribers who, according to the referenced piracy tracking data, repeatedly shared copyright-infringing content including plaintiffs’ films.

From the amended complaint
 

WOW! purportedly received tens of thousands of infringement notices and was allegedly aware of these piracy activities. However, the ISP decided not to take any action as that could hurt its revenues, the movie companies allege.

“Defendant knew that if it terminated or otherwise prevented repeat infringer subscribers from using its service to infringe, or made it less attractive for such use, Defendant would enroll fewer new subscribers, lose existing subscribers, and ultimately lose revenue,” the amended complaint reads.

Redditors and Site Blocking

In addition to IP-address logs and other evidence, the movie companies also cite screenshots from Reddit users who discussed WOW!’s handling of piracy notices, or its lack thereof. They suggest that this acted as a draw to potential subscribers.

“The ability of subscribers ‘who want it all’ to use Defendant’s high speed service to ‘intensively upload and download’ Plaintiffs’ Works without having their services terminated despite multiple notices being sent to Defendant acts as a powerful draw for subscribers of Defendant’s service,” they write.

Cited Reddit Comments
 

Besides terminating accounts of subscribers whose connections are repeatedly used to pirate, the ISP could have taken other ‘simple’ actions as well. For example, by blocking notorious ‘pirate’ sites such as torrent sites YTS and (the now defunct) RARB.

“Upon information and belief, Defendant refuses to block or limit its subscribers from accessing notorious piracy websites out of fear of losing subscriber revenue,” the complaint reads.

Increased Damages and More

To compensate for this wrongdoing, the plaintiffs request statutory damages up to the maximum of $150,000 per work. With roughly 375 titles in suit, damages could reach $56,250,000 for the copyright infringements alone. The DMCA violations could add millions more to this tally, the movie companies note.

On top of the damages increase, the movie companies still seek far-reaching injunctive relief. They specifically request an order requiring WOW! to terminate the accounts of subscribers targeted by three unique infringement notices in three days.

In addition to this mandatory three-strikes policy, WOW! should also block all alleged pirate sites listed in the USTR’s annual overview of notorious markets. This includes the likes of The Pirate Bay, FMovies, and YTS.

Finally, the movie companies request an order that requires the Internet provider to disclose the identities of account holders whose accounts are flagged for copyright infringement. Needless to say, such an order would allow the companies to target the alleged pirates directly.

—

A copy of the movie companies’ second amended complaint, filed against WOW! at the US District Court for Colorado, is available here (pdf)

Source

At the start of the 2010s, Movie2K was one of the most visited sites on the web.

The site was an early adopter of pirate streaming and at its peak, secured a spot among the twenty most-visited websites in Germany, beating Twitter and Amazon.

Movie2K’s success generated a healthy revenue stream which its operators converted to a new and exciting ‘currency’ called Bitcoin. It’s assumed that the goal was to keep the haul hidden from prying eyes, but more on that later.

The site’s reign ended with a surprise shut down in the spring of 2013. Many believed that legal troubles had plagued the site, a suspicion that was eventually confirmed years later when Dresden police announced several arrests.

Early Arrests and Prison Sentences

These initial arrests targeted one of the main operators, who received a one-year prison sentence for copyright infringement in 2023, as well as an eight-month sentence for money laundering, fraud, and tax evasion.

In the same criminal prosecution, the site’s financial agent received a ten-month suspended prison sentence. All sentences were suspended and both men issued a full confession. In addition, at least one of the defendants helped the investigation into other suspects.

Movie2K.to
 

The authorities had also seized 2,700 bitcoins. These are currently valued at €160 million but were previously exchanged by the authorities in an “emergency sale” for 38.6 million euros. The money remains in custody pending a final decision on the fate of these criminal proceeds.

While 2,700 bitcoins was already the largest seizure in a piracy-related prosecution, this figure was topped by the nearly 50,000 bitcoins the German authorities voluntarily seized earlier this year.

Fresh Charges

This second Bitcoin heist is connected to an ongoing prosecution where the Dresden General Prosecutor’s Office announced its charges this week, more than a decade after the site shut down.

The main suspect is one of Movie2K’s main admins, who remained on the run for a long time. The 40-year-old German man has been listed as wanted internationally since 2019. He was eventually arrested in Spain last year and extradited to Germany to face prosecution.

The defendant now faces charges including unauthorized commercial exploitation of copyrighted works and commercial money laundering. The second defendant, a 37-year-old Polish man, is charged with commercial money laundering and tax evasion.

The Polish defendant was a friend of the main suspect and reportedly received a salary in Bitcoin for his work at the pirate streaming portal.

As mentioned by Tarnkappe, the crackdown and investigation into Movie2K also led to a real estate agent from Berlin who allegedly received millions of euros from the site’s operators through a Dutch mailbox company.

The Prosecutor’s Office notes that the Leipzig district court has yet to admit further charges against the real estate agent, who reportedly invested the money in physical properties.

Billions in Bitcoin

While the charges announced this week are significant, the earlier seizure of 50,000 bitcoins stands out most. These are valued at roughly 3 billion euros today and, as far as we know, they’re yet to be sold.

“The investigation into the handling of the seized Bitcoins is ongoing,” the Dresden Prosecutor’s Office notes.

It’s remarkable to see the recent developments in this case, considering that the site itself has been offline for eleven years. That said, with billions in Bitcoin at stake, perseverance seems to have paid off.

Source

From a standing start in 2016, manga piracy site Mangamura (Manga Village) took just two years to become the largest site of its type and the single largest online piracy threat Japanese publishers had ever encountered.

Publishers including Shogakukan, Kadokawa, and Shueisha, and their anti-piracy partner CODA, estimated that in its relatively brief time online, Mangamura had caused a staggering $2.91 billion in losses. In April 2018, in the wake of a government announcement that detailed emergency website blocking against sites including Mangamura, the site suddenly disappeared and was never seen again. Then came the reckoning.

A criminal investigation eventually led to the arrest of the site’s operator, Romi Hoshino, in Manilla. After being deported to Japan and arrested, Hoshino faced a criminal trial and in June 2021, was handed a three-year prison sentence and financial penalties totaling around $650K.

Publishers Sue For Damages

Hoping to recoup some of their losses, in the summer of 2022 manga publishers Kodakawa, Shogakukan, and Shueisha filed a civil action against the former operator of Mangamura. Their lawsuit sought damages of 1.9 billion yen ($12.3 million at today’s rates) from Hoshino, supported by evidence obtained from Google and Cloudflare, among others.

Following his release in 2022, Hoshino hit the headlines last September when promoting the imminent release of his new book, The Truth About Mangamura, which appears to have generated mostly positive reviews on Amazon.

Publishers Handed Big Win in Tokyo

Whether Hoshino’s book was a commercial success isn’t clear. However, a decision handed down today at the Tokyo District Court in the civil action, brought against him by the publishers, carries a damages award big enough to upset even the most successful authors.

According to the publishers’ complaint, around 8,200 pirated copies of manga and magazines (73,000 volumes) were offered on Mangamura. With monthly visits of up to 100 million, totaling 538 million between April 2017 and April 2018, the publishers estimated overall damages in excess of 320 billion yen, around $2 billion at today’s rates.

The publishers’ 1.9 billion yen claim, based on a calculation that multiplied the average number of views by the sales price of each of the 17 infringed works in suit, was the largest ever claim against a pirate site in Japan. Even then, it represented just a small part of the overall damages attributable to the site, the publishers argued.

Judge Masaki Sugiura agreed that Mangamura caused damage to the publishers but awarded less than the 1.9 billion yen requested. The award of 1.7 billion yen, around $11 million, is still believed to be a record amount for a piracy case in Japan.

Hoshino and Publishers Respond to Decision

Outside the Tokyo District Court, Romi Hoshino appeared happy to answer questions about the decision. The full video is embedded below for any native speakers or those who have any confidence in the accuracy of the transcript. While the translation doesn’t feel authentic enough for us to report on directly, there’s no doubt when it comes to Hoshino’s overall opinion of the decision.

He rejects the decision, the amount, and even the result of the first trial that landed him behind bars. In the short term, Hoshino says he may appeal today’s decision. Ultimately, however, he lacks any motivation to balance the books.

“I have no intention of paying anything,” he said, effortlessly closing the loop.

A statement published on Kadokawa’s website notes that the award for damages is appropriate; it also concedes that it will be “impossible to recover all of it.”

“We believe that it is of great significance that the illegality and liability for compensation regarding ‘Mangamura’ have been recognized in the judicial arena. Copyright infringement cases are not limited to pirated sites targeting manga, but also include movies, anime, etc., and the scope of damage is wide-ranging. Our company intends to take a resolute stance in dealing with cases of rights infringement,” Kadokawa concludes.

Source