The Motion Picture Association’s interest in file-hosting platform DoodStream first came to light in a submission to the USTR in October 2022.

 

The MPA described DoodStream as a video hosting service offering free storage and premium services including priority encoding and an ad-free experience. Videos uploaded to the platform were embedded on many other streaming sites, the MPA reported, and as a result, traffic was booming.

 

The MPA estimated the site received 82.7 million visits in August 2022, while using the services of DDoS-Guard in Russia and OVH in France.

 

“DoodStream operates a partner program that offers financial remuneration, either per download or stream depending on the country of origin,” the MPA informed the USTR in its ‘notorious markets’ submission.

 

DoodStream rates

 

A year later in a new submission to the USTR, the MPA described DoodStream as a ‘top priority’ for its anti-piracy efforts.

DoodStream in the Spotlight

In its October 2023 submission to the USTR’s notorious markets report, the MPA’s cyberlocker and video streaming category listed DoodStream front and center as the priority problem. The MPA still believed the site was operating from OVH in France but also listed other companies as hosts, including Online S.A.S., Hetzner Online GmbH, and Interkvm Host10 SRL.

 

The MPA noted that the Delhi High Court had ordered ISPs to block DoodStream in 2023, a measure also handed down by a French court during the same year. The Paris court noted that the site “encouraged the infringement of copyright and related rights by setting up tools specifically designed for the mass and illicit sharing of protected content.”

 

“The operators are located in India,” the MPA informed the USTR.

Entertainment Giants Team Up Against DoodStream

Two months later, Karyn Temple, Senior Executive Vice President and MPA Global General Counsel referenced DoodStream before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet (pdf). DoodStream continued, business as usual, until now.

 

In a lawsuit being heard at the High Court of Delhi, eight plaintiffs are listed as follows: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Amazon Content Services LLC, Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Disney Enterprises, Inc., Netflix US, LLC, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Universal City Studios Productions LLP and Apple Video Programming.

 

A total of six defendants include the domains doodstream.com, doodstream.co, dood.stream and their underlying websites (defendants 1-3), plus a server (defendant 4) used by defendants 1 to 3 which allegedly facilitates storing and dissemination of illegal content. Defendants 5 and 6, neither of whom have been named, are reportedly site operators.

 

According to counsel for the plaintiffs, “rogue cyberlocker websites provide an infrastructure specifically designed to incentivize hosting, uploading, storing, sharing, streaming, and authorize the downloading of copyrighted material without obtaining authorization from the plaintiffs.

Claims Against The DoodStream Defendants

The plaintiffs allege that a massive amount of infringing content to which they have exclusive rights, is uploaded by users on the defendants’ websites.

 

“Counsel for plaintiffs say the studios approached defendants upon noticing this infringing content, first in June, 2023, after they discovered the identity as to who was operating these websites, who happen to be individuals based in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, arrayed as defendants nos. 5 and 6,” an order from the court reads.

 

“This, according to plaintiffs’ counsel, was achieved after some effort since the WHOIS details of defendant nos. 1 to 3 were masked.”

 

The court notes that the plaintiffs continuously pursued the defendants to take the infringing content down. However, despite promises to comply, a mechanism built in to the site simply generated new links whenever content was supposedly removed.

 

“Further, uploaded content would also generate a link which could be disseminated by the uploader and therefore, potentially could be disseminated through parallel websites. Thus, as per counsel for plaintiffs, the takedown itself was elusive and of no effect, since the system immediately permitted generation of a new link.”

 

The court notes that through this mechanism, DoodStream becomes a “hydra-headed monster” that is difficult to police through takedowns alone.

Plaintiffs Want DoodStream Shut Down

The plaintiffs submit that DoodStream should either be comprehensively blocked or a Local Commissioner should be appointed to take over the administration of the sites. However, counsel for the defendants told the court that their clients are prepared to “exhaustively and completely” remove the plaintiffs’ content from the platform.

 

Due to the link generation mechanism in operation on the site, the plaintiffs expressed concern that content taken down would nnot stay down. The defendants offered assurances that they would “change the features on their websites’ architecture” to ensure that once the process of takedown is complete, regeneration would not be allowed.

 

In view of this undertaking, the court ordered (pdf) all content belonging to the plaintiffs to be taken down within 24 hours, and ordered the defendants to hire a chartered accountant to disclose all revenue generated by the sites since their launch.

 

The case is listed for hearing on April 8, 2014.

In a little over a week’s time, Italy’s Piracy Shield system will have been fully operational for two whole months.

 

Claims that IPTV piracy would be eliminated almost overnight helped to convince lawmakers that without Piracy Shield and the legislation that underpins it, Italian football could die.

 

In reality, the system was never capable of eliminating piracy and football in Italy was never on life support; the big question now is whether it’s performing close to predictions, or even having any effect at all.

Two Months of Dynamic Blocking

During a hearing Wednesday to review Piracy Shield’s performance after almost eight weeks in the trenches, AGCOM President Giacomo Lasorella provided data to show participation in the Piracy Shield platform, specifically the number of entities that filed applications and received accreditation.

 

Lasorella revealed that 314 requests have been received to date, including five relating to the main users of the platform; broadcasters DAZN, Sky (Comcast) and RTI (Mediaset Group), Serie A, and Serie B. The remaining 309 applications were received from the ISPs required by law to implement blocking instructions issued by Piracy Shield.

 

In its first full month of operations, the platform handled blocking instructions related to 11 precautionary measures, all of them issued to protect live sports: football from Serie A and Serie B, UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, and UEFA Europa Conference League, plus Formula 1, MotoGP, Eurocup Basketball, ATP and WTA tennis.

 

“In total from February 2 to March 3, 3,127 fully qualified domain names and 2,176 IP addresses were blocked,” Lasorella said, noting that figures are available to show IPs blocked each day.

 

“Obviously these blocks mainly appear when there are sporting events; they are definitely encouraging results which we say testify to the incisiveness of AGCOM’s action.”

The Measure of Success

Whether the nature of AGCOM’s reporting will change as blocking matures is unknown, but in common with other countries, success in Italy is expressed through the use of blocking data; essentially the number of IP addresses and domains blocked. That’s not entirely unexpected but as a measure of success, it’s almost completely meaningless.

 

The true measure of success isn’t the number of IP addresses blocked or domains rendered inaccessible, but the rate at which new customers sign up and/or remain loyal to legal broadcasting services.

 

The broadcasters, DAZN and Sky, for example, will already have the data for February, most likely accurate to a single subscriber. Without sight of that all-important data, AGCOM could block the entire internet and those figures would still mean nothing. The unlikely prospect of actually blocking the entire internet took a step closer in February, however.

AGCOM Addresses Over-Blocking Allegations

Following a blunder mid-February that saw an IP address belonging to Zenlayer CDN blocked in error, someone with accreditation to input IP addresses on behalf of rightsholders added one belonging to Cloudflare, with predictably disastrous results.

 

Those who expected an explanation or perhaps an apology, received something else entirely. During a TV appearance helpfully facilitated by TG24, a channel operated by key Piracy Shield user Sky, AGCOM’s commissioner stated categorically that there had been no blunders. Reports published by journalists at Wired and DDaY were described as “absolutely false” and the whole debacle found itself dismissed as “fake news”.

 

During the hearing Wednesday, AGCOM’s president conceded that there had indeed been some “critical operational issues” and even went on to explain what had happened.

 

“The problems we encountered essentially concern the need to discriminate the legal contents from the illicit ones that exist on the same platform. That is, there are platforms where there are legitimate sites and illicit sites together, and the law prescribes that the sites must be uniquely dedicated to, let’s say, the illicit contents.”

Pirates Using Devious Methods? Impossible, surely

The issue of shared IP addresses and the likelihood of overblocking was repeatedly raised by tech experts in the run-up to the new legislation being passed last year. Assurances that blocking ‘dual use’ IP addresses would be explicitly forbidden in the text, which would be strictly adhered to, eventually led to a prediction that was only 50% accurate.

 

According to Lasorella, however, this is a trap being laid by pirates.

 

“Subjects addicted to piracy are increasingly using so-called Content Delivery Networks, CDNs. Content Delivery Networks by their nature may not be uniquely intended for activities therefore licit and illicit appear together,” Lasorella said.

 

“On the same IP address used for the violation of copyright can exist a perhaps fictitious domain that spreads legitimate content and this evidently prevents this address from being obscured.”

 

Or in Cloudflare’s case last month, evidently not.

 

Lasorella confirmed that one of the accredited reporters uploaded a ticket to the Piracy Shield platform which contained a Cloudflare IP address. Since legitimate and illegitimate sites shared the same IP, all found themselves blocked. AGCOM’s president said everything was sorted out “in a couple of hours” but from online reports, a minimum of four hours seems closer to events on the ground.

Potential Showdown With Cloudflare, Google

While describing events of that Saturday a few weeks ago, Lasorella mentioned that a Cloudflare IP address had been blocked and then took the opportunity to state that Cloudflare is “always more involved in these proceedings” due to its provision of DNS and VPN services “that actually facilitate online copyright violations.”

 

Google also received a mention; the company seems prepared to work with AGCOM to deindex pirate sites that appear in reports uploaded to Piracy Shield, but at the moment has not “considered being accredited” to the platform.

 

“Google has confirmed its intention not to intervene on its DNS through a local block,” Lasorella said.

 

It’s a little early to predict how this situation will play out but after blocking Cloudflare last month, following repeated warnings, even from Cloudflare itself, AGCOM has a side order of “we told you so” to contend with. That’s in advance of a starter being prepared right now.

 

In an email sent out to all customers affected by the erroneous blocking last month, Cloudflare is now encouraging users to file an official complaint with AGCOM. The stated aim is to “expand government awareness” of the collateral damage caused by IP blocking in the hope that will prevent overblocking in the future.

 

AGCOM already seems fully aware of the risks but, as a completely impartial regulator, must also weigh the interests of football against the interests of everyone else. Its response to these letters may prove informative.

 

Blocking of [website redacted] via the Piracy Shield Platform

 

On Saturday, February 24, 2024, a Cloudflare IP address was blocked in Italy through the Italian government’s Piracy Shield system. As a result of this action, Internet users in Italy were unable to access tens of thousands of websites. Although the block was removed within hours because of the number of innocent sites affected, we have identified your website as one that appears to have been temporarily blocked.

 

The Italian Media Regulator (Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni, AGCOM) provides interested parties, including the managers of websites and pages, the right to lodge a complaint about blocks implemented through the Piracy Shield Program. Cloudflare believes it is important to document the collateral damage caused by IP blocking in order to expand government awareness of the risks of the practice and hopefully prevent future overblocking. If you would like to submit a complaint, you can submit your own complaint to tavoloantipirateria@agcom.it and agcom@cert.agcom.it, as laid out on the AGCOM website.

 

To assist you, we have prepared the below template email, in both English and Italian, that may be used to submit your complaint to AGCOM:

 

Template email to AGCOM:

 

Re: Blocking of [website] via the Piracy Shield platform

 

We write to file a complaint regarding the blocking action ordered by the Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (AGCOM) of IP address 188.114.97.7 on Saturday, February 24, which rendered our website [redacted] inaccessible to Internet users in Italy. While we understand that the blocking order under AGCOM’s Piracy Shield was intended to prevent copyright infringement, our website does not infringe copyright and has never been accused of copyright infringement.

 

We formally complain about this action and request that AGCOM take immediate steps to prevent any future blocking of our website and other innocent websites.

 

Re: Provvedimenti di blocco Piracy Shield / blocco del sito [website redacted]

 

Scriviamo per presentare un reclamo in merito al blocco ordinato dall’Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni, sabato 24 febbraio 2024, dell’indirizzo IP 188.114.97.7 24, che ha reso il nostro sito web [redacted] inaccessibile agli utenti Internet in Italia. Pur comprendendo che l’ordine di blocco previsto da “Piracy Shield” di AGCOM era finalizzato a prevenire la violazione del diritto d’autore, segnaliamo che il nostro sito web non viola il diritto d’autore e non è mai stato accusato di simili illeciti.

 

Ci doliamo formalmente di questa iniziativa e chiediamo che AGCOM voglia prendere provvedimenti immediati per prevenire qualsiasi futuro blocco del nostro sito e di altri siti web conformi alla legge.

Most anti-piracy tools and mechanisms, whether dedicated online platforms or legislation crafted to achieve a particular goal, have issues that affect their performance.

 

No matter how tough, legislation could be of date when finally implemented, or reveal itself to be unwieldy in practice, too costly, or simply ineffective. Technical solutions may face compliance and regulatory issues, while pirate adversaries remain light on their feet by ignoring them all.

 

One key to success for rightsholders is to exploit pirates where they’re most vulnerable, i.e anywhere where they’re reliant on services operated by businesses that already comply with the law and are more likely to take action.

 

The European Commission’s Recommendation (Toolbox) published on Tuesday, focuses on just that by providing guidance on enforcement, suggesting priority actions, and encouraging use of existing anti-counterfeit/anti-piracy tools.

Cooperation, Coordination and Information Sharing

The Commission says a key aim of the Toolbox is to promote and facilitate effective cooperation between rightsholders, providers of intermediary services, and competent authorities, by promoting good practice and use of appropriate tools and new technologies.

 

The headline focus is anti-counterfeiting but within the text the EC notes that “most guiding principles, good practices and tools” developed under the recommendation can also be relevant when tackling pirated content online. In particular, voluntary actions taken by online intermediaries, “enhanced cooperation among competent national authorities,” and the sharing of information and data.

 

Cooperation and increased information sharing are essential and should be further promoted, at all levels, in accordance with Union law, the protection of personal data and the freedom to conduct business under Article 16 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (‘the Charter’). Good practices should be identified, and recommended to all actors, including e-commerce marketplaces, transport and logistic service providers, payment services providers, social media providers, providers of domain name services, etc. Secondly, further cooperation and information sharing should be encouraged. This relates to all competent authorities, including market surveillance authorities that currently may not have competences for IP-infringing activities, and promoting further the use of dedicated tools such as the IP Enforcement Portal (‘IPEP’)…

Payment Services, Social Media Platforms

The EC highlights payment services as an area where more can be done. On one hand, these companies are central to rightsholders’ activities. On the other, they can also be used to support IP-infringing activities. The EC says that to prevent misuse of their services for IP-infringing activities, payment services should be encouraged to implement the following good practices:

 

(a) to clearly state in their terms and conditions, as a ground for suspension or termination of their contract with sellers, any finding, including by the competent authority, of the use of their payment services for IP-infringing activities;
(b) to set up notification mechanisms allowing rightsholders using their payment services to notify any IP-infringing activity;
(c) where technically and economically feasible, to have an information system in place to enable the identification of operators engaging in IP-infringing activities, across different payment services, when one payment service provider has terminated its services with such operators on the grounds of IP-infringing activities;
(d) to exchange information with other payment service providers on trends regarding IP-infringing activities and to put in place specific measures against repeated misuse of their services, particularly where there has been a finding by a competent authority that their services have been used for IP-infringing activities.

Social media providers should similarly prevent misuse of their services, including by having systems in place to identify and take action against those misusing their services for IP-infringing activities.

Domain Name Registries/Registrars

The Commission’s Recommendation naturally assumes that where the law compels intermediaries or service providers to take action, that should be the standard minimum response. However, when entities are asked to go above and beyond, which appears to underpin almost every proposal in the Toolbox, service providers find themselves “encouraged to implement” various measures.

 

In respect of domain names, Directive (EU) 2022/2555 obliges “TLD name registries and entities providing domain name registration services” to “collect and guarantee the integrity and availability of domain name registration data.” EU Member States should further require these entities to “respond without undue delay” to requests for the disclosure of registration data following requests from “legitimate access seekers.”

 

Legitimate access seekers include those considered competent under EU or national law for the prevention, investigation, detection, or prosecution of criminal offenses. However, the definition can also encompass anyone with a legitimate reason to access the information, which includes rightsholders and their agents.

 

When access to domain name registration data that is personal data is sought, TLD-name registries and entities providing domain name registration services established in the EU and/or offering services in the EU are encouraged to recognize as legitimate access seekers any natural or legal persons who make a request for a right to information pursuant to Directive 2004/48/EC.

Member States are further encouraged to share intelligence and data on emerging piracy trends, including lists of websites that have been held by competent authorities to have carried out IP-infringing activities, the tactics and behaviors of alleged infringers, and to explore news ways to share information on those who “repeatedly engage in IP-infringing activities.”

Dynamic Injunctions, Unmasking Petty Infringers

Several EU Member States already have mechanisms in place that allow rightsholders to obtain injunctions against infringers and intermediaries, but the Commission would like to see more.

 

Specifically, Member States are encouraged to provide for the possibility of dynamic injunctions that can be applied to IP-infringing activities that are similar to those already identified, but are yet to be identified, such as the use of mirror sites.

 

The Commission also encourages Member States to ensure that petty infringers can’t escape simply because their activities are not commercial in scale or even commercial at all.

 

“Member States are encouraged to provide for the possibility for the competent judicial authorities to order disclosure of the relevant information to effectively fight IP infringements which are not on a commercial scale, in response to a justified and proportionate request of the claimant in proceedings,” the Commission writes.

 

“For these purposes, the relevant information could consist of the same information which may be requested in accordance with Article 8(2) of Directive 2004/48/EC, including the email address, telephone number and IP addresses relating to alleged infringers or participants to alleged infringing activities.”

 

The European Commission’s Recommendation (Toolbox) can be found here (pdf)

 

Over the past year, new artificial intelligence tools and services have been surfacing everywhere.

 

The same can be said for AI-related lawsuits and complaints, which have been piling up by the dozen.

 

In the UK, music industry group BPI has enetered the mix, targeting AI-generated voice models and cover tracks. This technology, which partly relies on copyrighted recordings, has been controversial for a while.

Voicify Faces Legal Pressure

AI vocal-cloning service Voicify was previously called out by the RIAA. In a recommendation to the U.S. Trade Representative, the recording label group asked the USTR to put the site on its list of notorious piracy sites. The USTR did not include the site in its report, however, and Voicify continued its operations as usual.

 

After the RIAA put a spotlight on Voicify, the BPI maintained the pressure in a letter to the site’s operators, urging them to stop all copyright-infringing activity. If not, the BPI would consider follow-up steps, implying a full-blown lawsuit.

 

The letter was sent privately on February 26th but aside from the legal threat, its contents remain unknown. While Voicify failed to respond appropriately according to the BPI, the service did announce a major change soon after by rebranding its website to “Jammable“.

 

Rebrand Can’t Escape Lawsuit Threat

According to the website, the brand change was motivated by the service’s move away from just being an ‘AI Voice Platform’. However, a source familiar with the situation informs TorrentFreak that a ‘legal matter’ played a yet role in the decision. That could very well be related to BPI’s letter.

 

Perhaps not coincidentally, the news about BPI’s legal threat against Voicify/Jammable broke in The Times, just days after the rebrand. As ‘a matter of policy’, BPI can’t say whether it reached out to The Times first, or vice versa, but the added pressure helps its case.

 

An accompanying message released by BPI’s General Counsel Kiaron Whitehead is also crystal clear.

 

“The music industry has long embraced new technology to innovate and grow, but Voicify (now known as Jammable), and a growing number of others like them, are misusing AI technology by taking other people’s creativity without permission and making fake content. In so doing, they are endangering the future success of British musicians and their music.”

Massive music ‘Deepfake’ Service

With a library featuring thousands of voice models, the BPI considers Jammable one of the world’s largest and most egregious deepfake AI music sites. In its letter the BPI gave the voice cloning site the option to respond and avoid legal action but thus far the BPI remains dissatisfied.

 

While AI-related copyright issues are still rather novel and mostly unexplored from a legal perspective, the music group is convinced it has the law on its side. The BPI’s complaint centers around Jammable’s purported use of copyrighted music recordings to create voice models and AI covers.

 

In theory, these types of services could enable people to create a cover of a Frank Sinatra song using the voice of Homer Simpson, if they’d like to hear that.

 

This use of copyrighted music, combined with the commercial nature of Jammable, is not allowed according to BPI.

 

Thus far, music-related AI lawsuits haven’t appeared in UK courts so if the BPI decides to follow up on its threat, this would be the first. For now, however, there is no sign of legal action.

 

Several other music industry entities including the Musicians’ Union and UK MUSIC support the efforts to protect rightsholders against AI troubles.

 

“Jammable is just one worrying example of AI developers encroaching on the personal rights of music creators for their own financial gain,” Musicians’ Union General Secretary Naomi Pohl says.

 

“It can’t be right that a commercial enterprise can just steal someone’s voice in order to generate unlimited soundalike tracks with no labelling to clarify to the public the output tracks are not genuine recordings by the original artist, no permission from the original artist and no share of the money paid to them either.” 

 

Speaking with TorrentFreak, a BPI spokesperson says that it has only sent a letter to Voicify/Jammable, not to any similar services. We also asked Jammable for a comment on the legal threat but, at the time of publication, we have yet to hear back.

 

Late 2019, Internet provider Cox Communications lost its legal battle against a group of major record labels, including Sony and Universal.

 

Following a two-week trial, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for its pirating subscribers. The ISP failed to disconnect repeat infringers and was ordered to pay $1 billion in damages.

 

That wasn’t the end of it. Following the initial verdict Cox launched several challenges, including an appeal that delivered a mixed result earlier this year. The Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit kept the contributory copyright infringement ruling intact but reversed a finding of vicarious copyright infringement.

 

The latter was good news for the ISP, especially since the appeals court concluded that the scale of the damages award should be redetermined in the district court.

Both Parties Request a Rehearing

Neither Cox nor the labels were satisfied by this outcome so both requested a rehearing. The music companies want the $1 billion damages award to remain and noted that Cox already waived its right to appeal. Cox, in turn, would like the contributory copyright infringement ruling to be reversed.

 

The ISP argued that the landmark liability ruling results in more terminations of Internet connections, based on piracy accusations from third parties. This shapes a “draconian regime” that threatens the Internet connectivity of millions of people.

 

Cox’s request received support from several amici, including the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. The latter detailed the stakes in a blog post recently, stressing that courts shouldn’t turn ISPs into the Internet police.

 

“The root of the problem is that the court failed to recognize that ISPs are infrastructure providers, not content police. Like other common carriers such as phone companies, broadband providers should not be liable for how their subscribers use their services,” Public Knowledge wrote.

 

“In today’s world, where broadband is essential infrastructure more akin to electricity or water than a luxury, an ISP’s role is to provide reliable internet access – not to work on behalf of the music industry. We urge the Fourth Circuit to rehear this case en banc and correct its erroneous decision on contributory liability.”

Request Denied

Despite fierce opposition from both sides, the court of appeals won’t reconsider its earlier decision. A few hours ago, it ruled on the rehearing requests, denying both without providing further detail.

 

“The court denies the petition for rehearing en banc and the petition for rehearing and rehearing en banc. No judge requested a poll […] on the petition for rehearing en banc,” the order reads.

 

 

This means that Cox will remain contributorily liable for the pirating activities of its users. Given what’s at stake, it wouldn’t be a surprise if this matter eventually ends up at the Supreme Court.

 

The $1 billion damages award remains vacated and a new trial will have to determine the scale of the damages, taking into account that Cox is no longer liable for vicarious copyright infringement.

 

In 2007, Netflix shifted from distributing optical media via the mail to streaming content online. Apple released the first iPhone in the same year, but neither were quite ready to start squeezing the modern equivalent of the silver screen onto a 320×480 LCD panel.

 

From a standing start alongside these innovative products in 2007, within a year SeriesYonkis would establish itself as one of Spain’s most-visited sites. Soon after, as the discontinued iPhone collapsed in the rear-view mirror in the summer of 2018, SeriesYonkis powered on to become one of the most popular ‘pirate’ sites in mainland Europe. That didn’t go unnoticed.

Hyperlinks vs. Hosting

Providing links to TV shows hosted on sites such as Megaupload may have been exciting for fans, but SeriesYonkis and movie-focused sister site PeliculasYonkis would soon feel the heat. When a black and white movie produced in Argentina was spotted by the rightsholder, a criminal complaint escalated into Spanish law enforcement action in 2009, and a search at the home of one of the site’s operators.

 

The search turned up nothing useful, at least when viewed through the eyes of Spanish law and how it was perceived at the time. SeriesYonkis was fueled by links to content hosted elsewhere, posted by users. There was no evidence to show that the site’s operators uploaded any content, or even checked the links to see if they actually worked.

 

The big struggle for rightsholders was a lack of clarity in Spanish law; specifically whether the mere provision of links amounted to a ‘communication to the public’, a regular feature of many copyright cases that have ended up at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

 

Between 2007 and 2014, Spain’s Criminal Code had no definition for ‘communication to the public’ and when efforts were made to utilize provisions in the country’s Intellectual Property law, courts looked at other cases involving hyperlinks. All determined that linking did not amount to a communication to the public.

Court of Justice of the European Union on Hyperlinks

In February 2014, when dealing with the landmark case Svensson v Retriever Sverige AB, the CJEU set out the criteria for a communication to the public. Communication was defined as making works available in a way the public can access them. The term ‘public’ was clarified to mean a large number of people, who were not the original audience rightsholders had envisioned when they made the content available.

 

Importantly, the CJEU clarified that the provision of hyperlinks to protected content amounts to making content available.

 

Since making content available constitutes an act of communication, the people behind SeriesYonkis understood that this case, which didn’t directly involve them, certainly did now. Rightsholders did not envision their content reaching the users of SeriesYonkis via file-hosting sites for free, so that qualified as a ‘new public’ as defined by Europe’s highest court.

 

SeriesYonkis’ fate was sealed; Spain updated its laws with explicit reference to hyperlinks and before that came into force, SeriesYonkis shut itself down. Yet four years later, the men behind the site were on trial, facing years in prison and a claim for over half a billion euros in damages.

Not Guilty and Still Not Guilty

Following relentless legal pressure by several major Hollywood studios and their local proxies EGEDA and the Spanish Anti-Piracy Federation, four men went on trial in April 2019 for their work on SeriesYonkis, PeliculasYonkis and VideosYonkis (Series, Film, and Video Junkies).

 

Founder and original owner Alberto García and subsequent owners Alexis Hoepfner, Jordi Tamargo and David Martínez, faced a damages claim of 550 million euros and calls from Hollywood for prison sentences of up to four years each. The local prosecutor felt that two years would be sufficient.

 

For reasons directly linked to the CJEU ruling in Svensson, and the fact that the site’s operators shut everything down before Spain updated its law, Judge Isabel María Carrillo Sáez of Murcia’s Criminal Court said the men would not be going to prison, because they had committed no crimes.

 

The inevitable appeal, filed by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and EGEDA, was subsequently rejected by the Murcia Provincial Court. Three magistrates ratified the decision handed down by the Murcia Criminal Court in 2019; still not guilty, all four remain acquitted.

Yet Another Appeal….

According to a new report by elDiario.es, anti-piracy group EGEDA has filed an ‘amparo claim’ at the Constitutional Court against the acquittal of the men in 2021.

 

Amparo is one of the main powers conferred by the Constitution to the Constitutional Court. The object of this process is the protection against breaches of the rights and freedoms enshrined in Articles 14 to 29 and 30.2 of the Constitution originated by provisions, legal acts, omissions or simple actions of the government of the State, the Autonomous Communities and other public bodies of territorial, corporate or institutional nature, as well as their staff.

 

The only claim that can be enforced through the amparo is the restoration or preservation of the rights or freedoms for which the appeal is lodged.

EGEDA’s claim, access to which was obtained by elDiario.es, states that by finding the operators of SeriesYonkis innocent on the basis detailed above, the Provincial Court of Murcia’s decision violated “their right to enjoy effective judicial protection.”

 

As a result they want the case examined again; the Constitutional Court has accepted.

 

Carlos Sánchez Almeida, a lawyer for one of the men behind SeriesYonkis, expressed the opinion that if anyone needs protection, his client is a prime candidate.

 

“Whoever needs effective judicial protection and all the rights of Article 24 of the Constitution is our client,” Almeida says.,

 

“He designed [SeriesYonkis] when he was a student, and for which he has suffered, is suffering and will suffer a 16-year bench sentence,” his response to the Constitutional Court reads.

 

“Basically, practically the entirety of his work and family life has been spent dealing with a lawsuit constantly threatening present and future plans, with media, mental, family and economic expenses that would wear down any person. And in the face of such suffering, an accusation puts an imaginary 550 million euros on the scales of justice, invoking the right to effective judicial protection of legal entities that produce cinematographic works.”

 

It could be several years before the Constitutional Court issues its verdict.

 

“The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

The quote above comes from the late Jack Valenti, who was the Motion Picture Association’s boss in 1982, when he warned the House of Representatives of the looming video recorder threat.

 

With the benefit of hindsight, the VCR wasn’t all that scary for Hollywood. The movie industry continued to flourish in the decades that followed, while technology continued along the path of progress too. New inventions have come along and for many rightsholders, generative AI (GenAI) is today’s growing concern.

 

The VCR threat cemented itself in legal history through the Betamax decision which still plays a role today, for various reasons. As reported yesterday, the decision was cited in the ongoing legal battle between book publishers and the Internet Archive. Simultaneously, the VCR is also starring in a legal dispute between the New York Times and Microsoft.

NYT vs. OpenAI/Microsoft

Late last year The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that its generative AI models were trained on copyrighted news articles. The news publication also suggested that, when prompted the right way, ChatGPT could recite content from these articles.

 

OpenAI previously asked the court to dismiss these claims, alleging that the New York Times ‘hacked’ its service to produce the ‘highly anomalous’ outputs. The Times’ DMCA violation claim, misappropriation claim, and contributory infringement claim either fail or fall short, OpenAI added.

 

Microsoft filed a separate motion to dismiss. Instead of focusing on alleged hacking practices, the company led with Jack Valenti’s ‘Boston Strangler’ analogy, part of an all-out effort by television and movie producers to stop a groundbreaking new technology.

 

Hollywood was ultimately unable to stop the VCR. The ‘scaremongering’ didn’t convince the Supreme Court in ‘Sony (Betamax) v. Universal City Studios’ and the VCR was declared legal. The rest is history.

Microsoft Cites VCR Scaremongering

According to Microsoft, the legal crusade against AI models should be seen similarly. Instead of alleging concrete copyright infringement by end users, the technology itself is framed as copyright-infringing. That’s incorrect, the tech giant countered in its motion to dismiss earlier this month.

 

“At most, The Times’s allegations establish Microsoft’s awareness that someone could use a GPT-based product to infringe. Of course, the same was true of the VCR — as it is of word processors, hard drives, social media feeds, internet connections, and so forth.

 

“Fortunately, the Supreme Court long ago rejected liability merely based on offering a multi-use product,” Microsoft added.

 

Microsoft asked the court to dismiss several key claims, including contributory copyright infringement. The claim fails because there’s no evidence that the tech company knew of any third-party copyright infringements or contributed to them, Microsoft argued.

NYT: AI is Nothing Like the VCR

Yesterday, The Times responded to the motion to dismiss, starting with a VCR analogy. According to the news outlet, the VCR is nothing like the GenAI threat they’re facing today.

 

“Defendants’ generative AI models are nothing like VCRs. Sony didn’t copy movies and television shows to build VCRs; Defendants built their AI models by copying millions of Times articles and other copyrighted works without permission or payment.”

 

Unlike the VCR, GPT services are trained on copyrighted content without permission and can reproduce these in part, The Times argues.

 

“Defendants are using their AI models to copy and summarize even breaking news articles that users would otherwise seek on a publisher’s website. If VCRs had been built with movies to make movies that compete with movies, or if Sony oversaw the VCR’s infringing users, Sony would have gone the other way.”

 

Microsoft’s defense is largely predicated on its conclusion that the use of copyrighted content for AI training is fair use. The Times sees this as an “absurd argument” but doesn’t respond to it in detail. Instead, it mostly sticks to its original claims.

‘Using AI to Bypass Paywalls’

One of the key claims in the complaint is contributory copyright infringement. According to legal precedents, a party can be found liable for copyright infringement if it induces, causes, or materially contributes to it. This is particularly true when a service has few non-infringing uses.

 

This claim was also used against Sony’s VCR but that ultimately failed. The Times hasn’t listed any concrete infringements in its complaint but notes that its pleadings against Microsoft are sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss at this stage.

 

“Although Microsoft argues that copyright infringement by users of its GenAI products is just a ‘theoretical possibility’, the question at this stage is whether The Times has plausibly alleged that such infringement has taken place. The answer is yes,” Microsoft notes.

 

To illustrate, The Times references a Gizmodo article that suggested ChatGPT’s ‘Browse with Bing’ was paused after people used it to bypass paywalls. Microsoft wasn’t blind to these copyright infringement issues, The Times notes, stressing that it previously alerted the company to its concerns.

 

All in all, the Times wants the case to move forward in its entirety while Microsoft would like it to end here. It’s now up to the court to decide if the case can go forward, and on what claims. Alternatively, the parties can choose to settle their disagreements outside of court but, thus far, there’s no evidence to show either side prefers that option.

 

—-

 

A copy of Microsoft’s motion to dismiss, submitted at a New York federal court, can be found here (pdf) and The Times’ response is available here (pdf)

 

Unless they already have links to existing platforms or can somehow benefit from traffic previously destined for a popular preexisting domain, most new pirate sites aren’t overnight success stories.

 

In a saturated market where most innovation takes place behind the scenes, if it happens at all, the next big thing may struggle to make any kind of serious impression. When dozens, even hundreds of similar platforms are already offering the same content, presented in a broadly similar way, potentially via the same interface, evidence of success may take months or even years to appear.

Popular in Months, Blocked Many, Many Months Later

In 2024, the most obvious outward indication of success for many sites is being placed on various rightsholder-maintained blocklists; they reward a site’s success or recognize its potential by stymieing further progress through the use of mostly regional ISP blockades. Australia has been methodically dealing with locally-significant sites in this manner since 2015, and via a more robust system since 2018.

 

Legislation has been developed to permit DNS and/or IP address blocking within a flexible ‘dynamic injunction’ framework, but when reading through an injunction signed off by Justice Nicholas at the Federal Court this week, it’s evident just how quickly things can change.

 

The original application was filed on November 9, 2023, headed up by local companies Roadshow Films and Village Roadshow Films, plus Disney, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Universal City Studios, Warner Bros., plus affiliates Netflix Studios and Netflix Worldwide Entertainment. The respondents in the matter, dozens of local ISPs operating under Telstra, Optus, TPG Telecom, Aussie Broadband, iiNet, Vodafone, and other branding, were asked to block over 30 pirate sites operating under dozens of different domains.

 

The sites include: bayofpirates, proxygalaxy, tvbayoplus, haitu, watch-free, bbmovies, wcoanimedubbedonline, 6movies, animeflv, hdwatch, 9movies, seriesonlinehd, soap2dayhd, 123moviesfree, watchmovies, movieshd, gogoanime, animepahe, losmovies, 4anime, extratorrents, limetorrents, nivod4, aniwatch, kissanime, and watchcartoononline

 

 

After years of tuning the process is now well understood, and there’s little to no opposition from anyone since the criteria for blocking speaks for itself. However, after four months of ensuring the paperwork is correct, the list itself is predictably in need of an update.

 

Since dynamic injunctions are flexible, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed, but even after being identified in some cases by their main domains and several alternatives, targets continue to move. Aniwatch stands out as a site known by millions, yet just a few weeks before the application was made it was called Zoro.to. Today, after yet another change, it operates from HiAnime.to.

 

Gogoanime, on the other hand, laughs in the face of such consistency. Currently operating from anitaku.to and gogoanime3.co, the last round of switches featured gogoanimehd.io and gogoanime3.net. And since it doesn’t matter how many times a site changes its domain, or if other similar domains are even operated by the same people, gogoanimex.to, gogoanime.video, gogoanime.sk, .tel, news, .bid, .ar, and all the others, can now be blocked in Australia regardless.

 

The studios have to compensate the ISPs for initial blocking at the rate of AUS$50 per domain (US$33), and then another AUS$50 per domain after that. Pirate sites could try to bleed the studios dry by maintaining a more vigorous domain-switching pace but as strategies go, there have been better ones; blocking carried out as part of this order will continue for three years, minimum.

The Second Blocking Bus Has Apple on Board

The second application worthy of mention today was filed on March 13, 2024, and is unfortunately so new that precise details of the application are yet to be made available.

 

Until the real documents appear, we’ve put together the details of the request in a document available below. It features all the usual ISPs, the usual local rightsholders, plus members of the MPA including Netflix.

 

But perhaps the most interesting rightsholder is new arrival Apple Video Programming LLC, which owns the rights to Apple+ shows including Silo and Criminal Record, among many others, mostly exclusives.

 

 

The blocking order related to the November 2023 application is available here (pdf)

 

The application filed on March 13, 2024, featuring Apple hasn’t been made available yet so, in the meantime, the basic details can be found here (pdf)

 

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 one newcomer on the list. “Madame Web” is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on March 18 are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrent sites
1	(…)	Mademe Web	3.8 / trailer
2	(7)	Oppenheimer	8.5 / trailer
3	(2)	Poor Things	8.2 / trailer
4	(4)	Damsel	6.3 / trailer
5	(1)	Argylle	5.8 / trailer
6	(6)	The Beekeeper	6.5 / trailer
7	(3)	Dune: Part Two	9.0 / trailer
8	(10)	Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom	6.7 / trailer
9	(9)	Wonka	7.3 / trailer
10	(5)	Ricky Stanicky	6.2 / trailer

 

 

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

 

In 2020, publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley and Penguin Random House sued the Internet Archive (IA) for copyright infringement, equating its ‘Open Library’ to a pirate site.

 

IA’s library operates as a non-profit organization that scans physical books, which can then be loaned out in an ebook format. Patrons can also borrow books that are scanned and digitized in-house, with technical restrictions that prevent copying.

 

Staying true to the centuries-old library concept, only one patron at a time can rent a digital copy of a physical book. These restrictions were temporarily loosened at the height of the COVID-19 epidemic when IA launched the National Emergency Library.

Publishers vs. Internet Archive

The self-scanning approach differs from the licensing deals other libraries enter into. Not all publishers are happy with IA’s service which triggered a massive legal battle four years ago.

 

Publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley, and Penguin Random House filed a lawsuit, equating IA’s controlled digital lending (CDL) program to a piracy operation. Last 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, but IA isn’t prepared to let go without a fight. Last December, the non-profit filed its opening brief at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, hoping to reverse the judgment.

Publishers Respond to IA’s Appeal

IA argued that its scanning-and-lending activities amount to fair use. They cited expert witnesses who concluded that there’s no financial harm and further argued that the service is substantially different from the ebook licensing market.

 

Late last week, the publishers filed a redacted copy of their reply brief at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. According to the companies, IA engaged in “massscale infringement” by making digital copies of physical books without permission from the works’ rightful owners.

 

The IA-digitized books are then lent to patrons instead of officially-licensed ebooks, which the publishers see as a direct threat to their rights and business.

 

“Controlled digital lending is a frontal assault on the foundational copyright principle that rightsholders exclusively control the terms of sale for every different format of their work – a principle that has spawned the broad diversity in formats of books, movies, television and music that consumers enjoy today,” the publishers write.

 

The publishers state that more than 93% of the public libraries in the US license ebooks through official channels. IA refuses to do so, arguing that making their own digital copies of legitimately purchased books amounts to fair use.

Not a VCR

IA views these digital copies as “transformative” and argues that its scan-and-digitize practice is fair use. In the appeal brief, the library equated it to the digital copies of video broadcasts, which people can legally make following the Betamax decision.

 

The publishers, however, maintain that IA’s lending operation is an effort to bypass official licensing channels, arguing that it has little to do with how people could use a VCR for private use.

 

“IA reaches far afield and twists Sony beyond recognition in an effort to manufacture some support. But Sony only held that it was fair use for users of Betamax machines to ‘time-shift’ free television programs ‘for private home use’.

 

“This bears no resemblance to IA’s massive book digitization project systematically distributing bootleg ebooks to the worldwide general public,” the publishers add.

 

 

The book publishers believe that IA is headed into uncharted waters, where no other library has ever gone. While IA sees its lending program as a logical and widely accepted step, the rightsholders frame it as a novel digital threat.

 

“Public libraries […] have never engaged in mass-digitization of millions of commercially available print books and distributed the resulting ebooks to anyone with an internet connection; they have never systematically evaded publishers’ terms of sale for specific formats like ebooks; they have never partnered with a used bookstore to funnel books to offshore scanning facilities..,” the publishers write.

All About Control

IA and several supporters, including the Authors Alliance and various copyright scholars, previously argued that publishers currently have too much power and control.

 

Allowing libraries to scan and digitize their books would certainly limit this control, but the publishers believe that’s clearly against the law.

 

“In short, IA’s practice of CDL is radical and unlawful. A decision deeming CDL fair use would have a dire impact on book publishing and all creative industries. Libraries around the country could skirt the current library ebook markets, fundamentally interfering with the Publishers’ digital strategies and destabilizing book markets,” they write.

A Napster Moment?

The publishers fear a ‘Napster moment’ for books if outsiders can run their own digitization programs and operate distribution platforms, without the involvement of rightsholders. Napster has shown that this is a viable threat and recent legal discussions surrounding the use of copyrighted works for AI training make this a very relevant issue today.

 

“Indeed, as technology companies ‘train’ generative AI products on vast numbers of books and other media, maintaining legal protection for derivative uses has never been more important,” the publishers note.

 

“The long-range disruptions in the music industry caused by Napster and other file sharers are a cautionary tale on the dangers of illicit copying that deprives rightsholders of the ability to control their markets.”

 

Interestingly, Napster’s existence arguably provoked the foundation of a new music industry model. It proved to be a large inspiration for innovators including Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who pioneered the music streaming business that generates most of the industry’s revenue today.

 

The publishers don’t elaborate on the broader implications of Napster, but they likely refer to the drastic decline in music sales that took place shortly after the service gained popularity.

 

The publishers ask the court to affirm the lower court’s decision, which currently prevents IA from lending out digitized copies of its books. The request is backed by a series of detailed legal arguments and citations in the full brief, which can be accessed here (pdf).

 

Orders handed down by courts presiding over novel intellectual property cases routinely convey clear instructions, regardless of underlying complexity. With no room for misinterpretation, everyone knows where they stand and what the court expects of them.

 

Such clarity can also be a plus outside court too, at least when orders are made available to the public. When originating applications or complaints are also made available for scrutiny, that allows most interested parties to take in the facts and draw reasonable conclusions.

 

When it first emerged last week that a court in Barcelona had issued an order to help Spain’s LaLiga fight TV piracy, the order itself hadn’t been seen in public. The originating application still hasn’t. An unsourced statement in the article that broke the news appeared to send people in the wrong direction, and a general reluctance by those familiar with the facts to actually share some, sealed the deal.

A Mostly Accurate Report, One Pivotal Claim

 

As far as we can determine, El País broke the story after gaining access to the court order handed down by a Barcelona court in February.

 

In almost all respects, the article accurately reports the information contained in the order. The problems appear when information that doesn’t appear in the order is presented as fact leading in. Specifically, that the court had granted LaLiga permission to target “private users who consume protected audiovisual content through IPTV.”

 

The source of that statement wasn’t mentioned in the article but assumptions that the claim was true ignited widespread misinterpretations concerning the nature of the case.

 

El País used the claim in the headline of the article and from there, stories stating that LaLiga would be targeting regular IPTV viewers with fines, spread like wildfire.

 

A single statement with the potential to affect thousands

 

That prompted an official statement from the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJ-Cataluna) which attempted to set the record straight.

 

The statement confirmed that the case isn’t about pirate IPTV services. It relates to a specific type of piracy known as card-sharing and the ISPs in this matter are only required to hand over the details of individuals who profit from illicit content, the statement added.

 

People who simply view content without paying for it are not affected, TSJ-Cataluna stressed.

LaLiga Responds via an ‘Information Notice’ and Social Media

The ‘Information Notice’ published by LaLiga doesn’t directly challenge the TSJ-Cataluna statement but describes it as an “interpretation” of the order handed down by Commercial Court no.8 of Barcelona.

 

President of LaLiga, Javier Tebas Medrano, posted something similar on X, without any useful context that might help anyone understand why the facts, whatever they might be, seem to be in public dispute. Through the sharing of just a few lines of text, however, LaLiga mentioned details of the authorization it had obtained from the court, but left the backstory wide open to speculation.

 

According to LaLiga, it will provide Spain’s ISPs with the IP addresses of servers that “transmit illegal content.” Again, the lack of clarity doesn’t help people to understand what “illegal content” means, but those who reasonably concluded that meant “pirated LaLiga football streams,” were incorrect.

Card-Sharing Piracy is Not IPTV, But it is Illegal

The servers mentioned by LaLiga grant access to a card-sharing piracy system. Our earlier report has a more detailed explanation of what that entails but here, even the Superior Court of Justice statement struggles to offer a suitable definition that doesn’t imply the distribution of audiovisual content.

 

“Cardsharing is a practice by which legitimate users re-broadcast the signal to certain ‘pirate’ networks in which all participants, including those who only defraud the quota, use decoders,” it reads.

 

To be clear, these servers supply codes, not audiovisual content. No video, no audio, no streams; those are transmitted via satellite. The codes that are shared via these servers allow people to decrypt the channels transmitted by the satellite, and technicalities aside, that’s pretty much it (detailed description at the end of this article).

 

While some have suggested these services operate in a gray area, distributing the codes and using the codes to obtain subscription TV without paying for it is illegal in the EU.

 

Yet when LaLiga’s president was asked during a Movistar Plus+ interview to clarify the nature of the IP addresses and servers the league is targeting, he responded: “Those IP addresses, which LaLiga is going to provide [to the ISPs], are obviously IP addresses where football and other content is being broadcast, but above all LaLiga football, absolutely free. Well, free. Sometimes, there’s a charge.”

 

Again, implying that LaLiga audiovisual content is being broadcast from these servers only adds to the IPTV-related confusion. Of course, the end result is still people watching premium content illegally. However, this is not about pirate IPTV services, and even in this interview, that wasn’t made clear, and it still isn’t being made clear now.

 

At this point clarity becomes even more important. As currently written, the mechanism outlined in the court order is likely to have privacy implications for every internet user in Spain. When compared to the problem they purport to solve, the provisions in the order seem significantly disproportionate.

Surveillance By Proxy

In basic terms, LaLiga has identified servers offering services that allow people to decode satellite signals of LaLiga matches. For argument’s sake, let’s equate a server with a pirate site, a famous pirate site called The Pirate Bay. What LaLiga has apparently been given permission to do is contact ISPs with a list of server IP addresses previously collected, and say: “Please go through your files and identify every subscriber who visited a site called The Pirate Bay, server 123xyz etc.”

 

Once the ISPs have made a list of customers who accessed those servers, it seems they’ll package up almost everything they have on file for those customers and send that personal data, which is protected under both local and EU data protection laws, over to LaLiga for further action. According to LaLiga’s president, the users identified won’t be ‘fined’ but they could receive claims for damages.

 

It’s worth repeating: LaLiga supplies evidence to the ISPs that outlines suspected infringement by server operators, not the ISPs’ subscribers. By proxy, however, LaLiga appears to gain access to the ISPs’ logs to identify suspected historical infringement, by trawling the logged activities of all ISP customers, across every major ISP, to determine who – if anyone – accessed those servers.

Legal Basis For Gaining Access to ISP Subscriber Data

The order of the Barcelona court cites 256.1.11 LEC (Civil Procedure Law) as the mechanism through which ISPs can be compelled to cooperate (translation below).

 

Through the request, formulated by the owner of an intellectual property right who intends to exercise an action for infringement thereof, that an information society service provider provide the necessary data to carry out the identification of a user of their services, with whom they maintain or have maintained in the last twelve months relations for the provision of a service, with which there are reasonable indications that they are making available or disseminating, directly or indirectly, content, works or benefits subject to such right without the requirements established by intellectual property legislation are met, and through acts that cannot be considered carried out by mere end consumers in good faith and without the intention of obtaining economic or commercial benefits, having taken into account the appreciable volume of unauthorized protected works and loans made available or disseminated.

 

At this point a conflict emerges. LaLiga seems to want the whole country to understand that through this action, it will target users of pirate servers, but prefers not to state the nature of the piracy system with any clarity.

 

The TSJ-Cataluna statement says no, end users will not be targeted: “[T]he basis for agreeing to the requested preliminary diligence, can only be carried out against the ‘cardsharers’ who re-spread the signal and profit from it, and not against mere end users.”

 

This controversy is being fueled by confusion and here it appears there’s also a dispute over what constitutes a ‘user’ of a card-sharing service.

 

On one hand, the term ‘user’ is useful for LaLiga’s deterrent messaging because ‘user’ is widely understood to mean ordinary people, albeit those consuming pirated content. These are the people causing the overwhelming majority of LaLiga’s problems and when they believe the sky is falling, that’s a plus for LaLiga.

 

The problem is that the TSJ-Cataluna statement insists that regular users are not the targets here. Yet as far as we can see from the information available, LaLiga’s position is the one that receives direct support in the text of the court order. (order in Spanish, translation below)

A public dispute over what does and does not constitute a user who can be pursued isn’t the best start, and seems unlikely to improve later. Even if ISPs successfully match the server IP addresses with some of their subscribers, how will it be possible to differentiate between those who profited and those who did not? Indeed, will that decision fall at the feet of the ISPs or will LaLiga make that determination?

 

Perhaps even more digging around in ISP logs for circumstantial contacts with other servers belonging to PayPal might help, or those held by Mastercard or Visa? Perhaps the Santander bank will need to scan all of its customers’ bank accounts for payments, just in case someone happened to make a payment to a server on a particular day? With IP addresses in hand, those can be compared with ISP subscriber logs perhaps?

 

Of course, banks aren’t going to roll over so easily, but the bigger question is why Spain’s ISPs aren’t concerned by where this could eventually lead if taken to its logical conclusion.

ISP Defendants Have a Vested Interest

This matter is still ongoing, so the ISPs still have time to show their hands. However, the financial elephant in the room has gravity all of its own.

 

This January, Telefonica retained the rights to air LaLiga matches until end of the 2026/27 season in a €1.29bn deal. The games will air on Movistar Plus+, a subscription TV platform owned by Telefónica whose illegally decoded satellite signals lie at the heart of this legal action.

 

Last July, Orange Spain reached agreement with Movistar and DAZN to share LaLiga TV rights. Vodafone has a deal to show LaLiga matches, likewise MásMóvil and Digi.

 

There’s no question that the legal rules and regulations will be followed to the letter. However, the existence of these deals may at least dampen enthusiasm for any meaningful opposition to a request for subscriber data that goes well beyond what has gone before.

An Information Vacuum Fills Itself

Finally, legal technicalities aside and when viewed as a whole, if this matter had been portrayed from the beginning as strictly targeting, for example, commercial resellers of card-sharing subscriptions, the opposition and animosity of the last week could’ve been mostly avoided. Some people would’ve still argued against granting LaLiga authority to chase down commercial pirates, but overall interest would’ve been significantly lower.

 

Instead, whether by design, mistake, or merely by coincidence, the apparently erroneous focus on IPTV and the man in the street delivered nothing of value and may even have set relations back.

 

Given the choice, people prefer buying from friends, only when forced will they reluctantly buy from perceived enemies. As a basis for a business relationship, only A is sustainable, while repeatedly burned bridges – no matter who burns them – become less and less attractive to cross.

 

The original order in Spanish is available here (pdf). An OCR’d, translated and mostly tidied version is available here (pdf) purely for reference purposes, since it may contain errors.

 

Further detail on card-sharing: Legal TV signals are encrypted using keys known as Control Words (CW). If a TV set-top box doesn’t receive a regular supply of CW through the system, the box won’t be able to decrypt the signal and viewers will be unable to watch TV. The CWs themselves are sent to set-top boxes in encrypted packages (ECM) which are decrypted by the viewing card using other keys that determine whether the subscriber has standing to view the channel.

 

In an illegal system, ECM packages containing the Control Words (CW) are sent via satellite to the pirate’s set-top box, which forwards the ECM over the internet to an Internet Key Sharing server (IKS). The IKS forwards the ECM to a card reader containing a real viewing card which does its work and returns the decoded CW to the IKS, which in turn sends the decoded CWs to the pirate set-top box, where they are used to decrypt the satellite signal.

 

In recent months, we have reported on the rollout of Italy’s blocking regime and the Piracy Shield system which operates under the auspices of telecoms regulator AGCOM.

 

AGCOM issues the relevant site IP address blocking orders and, from the get-go, it countered critics by stating that the system was “working perfectly”.

 

High marks aside, Internet providers and network specialists painted a different picture. They noticed several overblocking examples and not just small ones either. In response to one order, ISPs were required to block an IP address belonging to Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, which reportedly rendered thousands of websites unreachable across Italy.

 

AGCOM prefers not to give credence to the widespread critique and remains laser-focused on defeating online piracy. This week, tensions rose to alarming levels when AGCOM chief Massimiliano Capitanio issued a new warning, suggesting that people watching pirate streams or downloading piracy apps, risk fines of up to 5,000 euros.

 

While Capitanio’s comments are certainly not intended as “psychological terrorism,” some framed it as nuanceless scaremongering. At this point, however, it’s clear that very little is going to stop AGCOM from going full steam ahead with its anti-piracy efforts. And, as long as the group operates within the legal boundaries, they have every right to do so.

 

Taking the hard-line does come with risks, however. Small mistakes can turn into big ones and oversights risk being framed as incompetence; or worse; counter-ammunition. For example, the Piracy Shield’s overblocking errors may fuel site-blocking opposition in other countries, including in the United States where lawmakers are wary of overblocking.

AGCOM Domain ‘Troubles’

In a similar vein, the public may start to notice other purported errors. That happened earlier this week when we were alerted to the fact that AGCOM’s domain name, agcom.it, is configured rather peculiarly. The domain only works through the www version, but not without it.

 

While the www. subdomain is a largely outdated concept nowadays, most sites still support it by properly configuring the domain’s A records. For example, if you try to access https://www.torrentfreak.com in a browser we will redirect you to the non-www version you’re on now.

 

Pretty much all websites operate this way, including the domain names of anti-piracy outfits such as ACE, the RIAA, and BREIN. The sites can be accessed with and without www, with one redirecting visitors to the other. Setting this up this way takes less than a minute.

 

For some reason, however, AGCOM has decided not to add any official records for its root domain. We can’t think of a practical reason why this is the case, so we assume that this is an oversight that makes the site harder to reach.

 

Root Domain Unreachable

Luckily, most popular browsers correct these types of errors when you enter the domain name in the address bar, but following a direct link will lead nowhere. DNS resolvers simply don’t know to what IP-address the traffic should go.

 

 

This isn’t some type of standard we’re making up, it’s one of the basic principles of the web as DNSimple explains.

 

“Each domain needs to have a record for the root domain. Otherwise your domain won’t resolve, and accessing the URL in the browser will return a resolution error.”

 

To make matters more confusing, AGCOM also has some other subdomains, including geo.agcom.it and conciliaweb.agcom.it. These both work fine, without an extra www subdomain.

 

Again, we have no idea why AGCOM hasn’t configured its root domain properly. For many other organizations, this would be a petty issue, but since AGCOM is a key player in one of the largest blocking operations on the Internet, dubious technical decisions may find themselves under the spotlight.

 

TorrentFreak asked AGCOM for a comment on our findings but the telco watchdog didn’t immediately respond. The MX records for agcom.it are properly configured, however, so our question should have arrived, assuming that our domain isn’t on any blocklist.

 

In the past two decades, Internet traffic has exploded with more bytes being transferred in each successive year.

 

While this stable trend continues, the types of traffic that pass through the pipes have changed radically.

 

Back in 2004, in the pre-Web 2.0 era, research indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic. At the time, file-sharing via peer-to-peer networks was the main traffic driver as no other services consumed large amounts of bandwidth.

Video Streaming Killed the Torrent Star

Fast-forward two decades and these statistics are ancient history. With the growth of video streaming, including services such as YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok, file-sharing traffic is nothing more than a drop in today’s data pool.

 

Even among pirates, file-sharing is no longer as relevant as it once was. Most pirate sites today are streaming-based and BitTorrent lost pretty much all of its ‘market share’ there too.

 

As these changes took place, BitTorrent-watchers, including the undersigned, started to focus on upload traffic. This continued to be dominated by BitTorrent for a long time. Two years ago, the file-sharing protocol still accounted for the largest share of global upstream Internet traffic.

 

The main question was how long this would last. In 2013, BitTorrent still accounted for roughly a third of all upload traffic. It remained the dominant upload source in the years that followed, but trended downwards, reaching a new low of 10% two years ago.

BitTorrent Dethroned

This week, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine released its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report which makes it clear that BitTorrent no longer leads any charts.

 

The latest data show that video and social media are the leading drivers of downstream traffic, accounting for more than half of all fixed access and mobile data worldwide. Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of ‘top apps’.

 

Looking at upstream traffic, BitTorrent still has some relevance on fixed access networks where it accounts for 4% of the bandwidth. However, it’s been surpassed by cloud storage apps, FaceTime, Google, and YouTube. On mobile connections, BitTorrent no longer makes it into the top ten.

 

Top Upstream Apps (fixed/mobile)
 

The average of 46 MB upstream traffic per subscriber shouldn’t impress any file-sharer. However, since only a small percentage of all subscribers use BitTorrent, the upstream traffic per user is of course much higher.

End of an Era

The report mentions BitTorrent as a “significant factor” as the traffic is generated by a small number of users. These include pirates, but also academics who use torrents to share large datasets. However, Sandvine also sees the writing on the wall.

 

“[U]sage of BitTorrent might go down as people use the cloud and tap the content that is increasingly available through streaming services,” the report reads.

 

Finally, it’s worth noting that not all torrent traffic can be accurately measured. When people use VPNs, for example. While this may impact the statistics, the VPN category doesn’t appear in the top upload lists so its usage won’t change the overall conclusion that BitTorrent no longer dominates.

 

This marks the end of an era; two decades of BitTorrent’s status as a traffic leader in some way, shape, or form, disappearing in the rearview mirror. As such, this will likely be the last report of this kind on TorrentFreak. Unless there’s an unforeseen revival somewhere in the future, of course.

 

—

 

One of the most frustrating aspects of DMCA notices outside the usual complaints aired by rightsholders, is their ability to trigger policies that assume notices are accurate and in some cases, should be blindly obeyed.

 

Certainly, if the sender of a bogus notice puts in enough effort, the end result can be the removal of whatever material appears in the notice, even when sent to the largest platforms most familiar with fraudulent claims.

 

In March 2022, someone began sending DMCA notices to YouTube, claiming that the content listed in the notices infringed the rights of videogame developer Bungie. YouTube removed the videos, some of which belonged to high-profile Destiny content creators. Other notices targeted Bungie’s own channels, yet fingers of blame soon pointed toward the company itself, compelling Bungie to defend its reputation and clean up the mess.

Impressive Investigation, Culprit Found

During the early days of its investigation, Bungie revealed that the notices sent to YouTube came from a fraudulent Google account; the username was crafted to give the appearance it was sent by a Bungie anti-piracy partner. Bungie also filed a full-blown lawsuit in the United States which is currently in its third year.

 

The lawsuit alleged that the bogus copyright complaints not only disrupted Bungie’s gaming community, it caused “nearly incalculable damage” to Bungie itself. The language deployed in the complaint was unusually aggressive, noting that one of its key aims was to “demonstrate to anyone else stupid enough to volunteer as a Defendant by targeting Bungie’s community for similar attack that they will be met by legal process.”

 

In June 2022, Bungie filed an amended complaint which demanded $7.65m in damages against a YouTuber called Lord Nazo, aka Nicholas Minor.

 

Not only had Bungie’s investigation tracked down the culprit, the details were laid out in unusual detail in the amended complaint. Bungie methodically followed the online trails, capitalized on the YouTuber’s mistakes, and then identified, located and named Minor as their defendant.

 

Among other things, the investigation showed how persistent email addresses, used across multiple sites, one of which was the victim of a data breach, critically undermined any assumption of anonymity. Bungie was ultimately able to match a confirmed email address with a historic content purchase, made through an account that carried Minor’s full name and physical address.

Trigger For the Takedown Campaign

In his deposition, Minor confirmed that the seeds of the campaign were planted when Bungie sent him a takedown notice via YouTube. The video had been hosted on his channel for eight years without issue, so convinced the notice was fraudulent, he sought help from YouTube hoping to get it restored.

 

When that failed to produce any results, a “confused” and “angry” Minor decided to “raise awareness” of transparency issues in the DMCA takedown process by filing bogus DMCA notices against legitimate videos uploaded by members of Bungie’s online community.

 

Minor reportedly accepts that he “gravely messed up and fully accept(s) that this is [his] fault” but claims he was “oblivious to the reprehensible damages [he] was causing to the community.”

Summary Judgment

In December 2023, Bungie filed a motion for summary judgment on the DMCA component of its overall claim. Minor did not oppose the motion but did appear in the case as required, including for his deposition and to provide discovery responses.

 

“The undisputed record before the Court shows that Minor violated the DMCA by knowingly, intentionally, and materially misrepresenting to YouTube that the takedown notifications were authorized by Bungie and that the material itself was infringing,” Senior District Judge Marsha J. Pechman notes in her judgment issued last week.

 

“Bungie has provided evidence that the materials at issue did not violate its IP Policy, and that the DMCA notices were not properly issued. And, crucially, Minor admits that he had no authority to issue the notices, that he intentionally and knowingly issued the notices, and that he ‘gravely messed up.'”

 

Referencing Section 512 of the DMCA, Judge Pechman notes that the evidence shows that Minor’s violations were intentional, and that he lacked a subjective, good faith belief that the targeted material was infringing.

 

“Bungie has also provided evidence that the fraudulent notices harmed its reputation and caused it to devote significant resources to attempt to remediate the harm. The Court therefore GRANTS summary judgment in Bungie’s favor on this claim and GRANTS the Motion,” the judgment adds.

Not Over Yet, Possibly Not For a Long Time

The Court notes that the judgment is partial since it does not resolve the question of damages, costs, and attorneys’ fees Bungie will likely claim in due course. The amount could be significant and at least in public, Bungie has shown few signs of mercy recently.

 

Then there are the rest of Bungie’s claims in this matter. They include false designation under 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a), copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501, business defamation, violations of the Washington Consumer Protection Act, and breach of contract.

 

The order granting partial summary judgment is available here (pdf)

 

Internet provider Cox Communications has been on the sharp end of several piracy lawsuits in recent years.

 

The biggest hit came four years ago when the Internet provider lost its legal battle against a group of major record labels, including Sony and Universal.

 

A Virginia jury held Cox liable for pirating subscribers because it failed to terminate accounts after repeated accusations, and ordered the company to pay $1 billion in damages to the labels. This landmark ruling was appealed, leading to a mixed outcome last month.

Appeals Court Issues Mixed Order

After taking a fresh look at the case, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled partly in favor of Cox. The Court concluded that Cox is not vicariously liable for piracy carried out by subscribers, as it didn’t directly profit from their activity.

 

The Court did not reverse the lower court’s contributory copyright infringement finding, however. According to the Court of Appeals, there was sufficient evidence to show that Cox ‘knew’ piracy would likely occur if it continued to provide its Internet services to particular subscribers.

 

While the ruling is a mixed bag, it also meant that the $1 billion damages award could not stand. Instead, the Court ruled that a new trial should determine the scale of the damages.

Rehearing en Banc

Neither party was pleased with the ruling and both Cox and the labels requested a rehearing en banc, essentially calling for a do-over.

 

The labels, for example, would like the $1 billion in damages to remain unchanged, arguing that Cox waived a potential challenge of it earlier. In addition, the music companies argue that the Court’s decision conflicts with appeal court precedents.

 

Cox also calls for a rehearing. The Internet provider argues that this case isn’t merely about nuances of copyright law and associated liability, it’s much bigger than that. According to the ISP, the Internet connectivity of countless people is at stake.

‘Disconnecting Schools and Nanny Cams’

In its petition, the provider argues that the current precedent results in a highly restrictive regime where Internet providers may find themselves forced to disconnect ‘innocent’ people because someone allegedly used their connection to pirate content.

 

“If an ISP receives more than one accusation that some anonymous person used a specified internet connection to download infringing songs, it can avoid liability only by swiftly throwing every person in that home or business off the internet, disconnecting the guilty and innocent alike from their schools, their livelihoods, their nanny cams, their news, and everything else they do online,” Cox warns.

 

“If instead the ISP continues to provide the connection, a jury can find it engaged in ‘culpable conduct’ akin to aiding-and-abetting a crime.”

 

 

The ISP argues that the liability finding is at odds with a recent Supreme Court decision which concluded that a service is not necessarily liable for ‘merely’ providing a service that’s used for illegal activity. The Court of Appeal didn’t consider this in its latest ruling, but should do so, Cox notes.

 

A rehearing is also warranted because a party shouldn’t necessarily be held liable for willful secondary infringement, as is the case here. This conflicts with earlier precedent, the ISP argues.

 

“[W]illfulness requires the defendant’s awareness that its own conduct violates the law, as the Eighth Circuit has squarely held in a secondary infringement case like this one,” Cox writes in its petition.

‘Draconian Regime’

These two earlier conclusions of the court created “the most draconian approach in the country,” Cox argues, stressing that a rehearing should be granted to address them.

 

The matter ultimately boils down to an interpretation of the law, which can get quite technical. However, Cox also highlights the potential consequences, stressing that these issues are “extraordinarily important.” Not just for Cox, but for millions of Internet subscribers at risk of disconnection.

 

“The issues presented here are deeply important, not only to copyright defendants like Cox, but to millions of people who depend on internet access every day,” Cox writes.

 

“[T]he legal regime the panel decision and BMG enact requires an ISP to cut the cord on subscribers after receiving just a handful of notices alleging that some anonymous person has used the subscribers’ connection to infringe.”

 

The current precedent requires ISPs to disconnect subscribers based on repeated third-party claims. If they don’t, they subject themselves to liability, as the previous $1 billion verdict showed.

‘Hobson’s Choice’

Cox suggests that this looming punishment is disproportionate. Not only in terms of the financial consequences for Internet providers but also because the public’s Internet connectivity will be put at risk based on unadjudicated piracy claims from rightsholders.

 

“Without meaningful limits on secondary liability, ISPs face powerful incentives to swiftly terminate the internet connections of innumerable businesses and households, their monthly subscription fees a pittance compared to the threat of $150,000 in damages for every downloaded song.

 

“The full Court should grant rehearing and reject a Hobson’s choice that threatens to throw countless ordinary people offline in service of the music industry’s bottom line,” Cox concludes.

 

The ISP’s position is supported by several amici including the American Library Association, Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and fellow Internet provider Frontier Communications, which has filed supporting briefs.

 

—

 

A copy of Cox’s petition for a rehearing en banc is available here (pdf) and the record labels’ petition can be found here (pdf). Frontier’s proposed amicus curiae brief can be found here (pdf) and the brief of the other supporters is available here

The Oscars is the most prestigious movie awards show of the year, one that’s closely followed by hundreds of millions of movie fans around the world.

 

This year’s awards ceremony was no exception. In the U.S. alone, close to 20 million people tuned in to the ABC show on Sunday evening; a four-year record.

 

In today’s connected world, news spreads quickly across other entertainment channels. As always, most interest goes out to the big winners. This weekend, Oppenheimer emerged as the clear victor with five Oscars, including the most prestigious “Best Picture”.

 

Poor Things and The Zone of Interest followed at a respectable distance with two wins each, followed by the rest of the field of single winners, including Barbie, The Zone of Interest, and Killers of the Flower Moon.

The Oscar-Effect

In the past we have seen that Oscar wins are not just about prestige, they can also increase sales. This was particularly impactful for titles that are sold separately, as opposed to being part of a streaming bundle.

 

On the flip side, the Oscars can also impact piracy rates. This is something we can measure directly, as we did when the Oscar nominations were announced in January. We saw interest in many contenders rise but with Oppenheimer, there was little impact.

 

At the time, we theorized that Oppenheimer was already widely promoted and seen by many millions of people. As a result, the extra attention from the Oscar nomination didn’t move the needle, as it did with ‘smaller’ titles.

 

When we gathered the new piracy data this Monday and Tuesday, we didn’t expect to see a massive boost in piracy activity for Oppenheimer. The fact that high quality pirated copies of the film have been available since November last year only reinforced that assumption. The data show that assumption was incorrect.

Oppenheimer Piracy Spikes Post-Oscars

Looking through the data we see that Oppenheimer saw a massive 135% increase in downloads on Monday and Tuesday, compared to the same days a week earlier. This made it the second most pirated movie on these days, just behind Damsel which came out on pirate sites a few days ago.

 

This level of interest in a movie that’s been out for months is a rarity. The Oscar win convinced many people who hadn’t seen it yet to finally give it a go. This effect isn’t just limited to pirate sites as Oppenheimer also moved up Apple’s movie rental charts, and probably elsewhere too.

 

While Oppenheimer saw the largest piracy increase, other Oscar winners recorded download spikes as well. Poor Things, for example, saw a healthy 39% increase. Killers of the Flower Moon (30%) saw a healthy double-figure increases too and The Zone of Interest downloads surged 116%, as shown below.

 

Oscar Winners See Piracy Boost

Barbie?

When Barbie and Oppenheimer premiered in theaters last summer, the term “Barbenheimer” became somewhat of an Internet phenomenon. Today, however, the differences between these box office hits couldn’t be bigger.

 

Although Barbie managed to secure an Oscar in the ‘Best Song’ category, the number of pirate downloads is lower than all other films mentioned here. The piracy volume did spike somewhat compared to last week, but at 28% this boost is rather modest compared to Oppenheimer.

 

All in all, it’s safe to say that after 95 years, the Academy Awards ceremony is as relevant today as it ever was. While people now have the freedom to watch what they want, whenever they want, their free choice continues to be directed by external forces.

 

As with all trends today, the piracy boosts don’t last long. They already started to drop off after a day and will likely be back to normal by the end of the week.

 

—

 

^{Note: The data used in this article comes from Iknow, which tracks torrent downloads through DHT and PEX. While it may not be able to track all downloads, it’s a substantial sample, which acts as a good proxy for the overall interest on all pirate sites and services.}

 

^{It is worth stressing that this sample only looks at torrent downloads. Views on streaming platforms, direct downloads, and other piracy sources can’t be measured directly. That said, we assume that the trend will be similar there.}

 

The head of Italian telecoms regulator AGCOM has confirmed that long-promised fines targeting end users of illegal streaming services will be arriving “soon.”

 

Massimiliano Capitanio has long insisted that citizens with an illegal streaming habit are legitimate targets for enforcement, but for those still unaware of that message, another reminder was published today.

Communications, Regulated

“Perhaps it is not yet clear that penalties of 150 to 5,000 euros will be coming soon, and this, as with all fines, is a step that one would like to avoid but has become necessary, not least because those who do business illegally are making unsuspecting users believe that nothing will happen (user forewarned…),” Capitanio wrote on LinkedIn.

 

Directing this important message toward a mostly business audience, rather than social media platforms more closely associated with the target audience, may not be optimal. However, at a time when public feedback to AGCOM’s anti-piracy plans has become rather energetic, AGCOM’s accounts on platforms including X are gathering dust.

 

While seemingly disinterested in conversation, AGCOM wants its message to be heard loud and clear across Italy, especially when proving the naysayers wrong.

 

One point of particular interest concerns the state’s ability to handle investigations into tens of thousands of illegal stream consumers. Preceded by a football icon (in case anyone had forgotten why all of this began), a new agreement to streamline investigations was revealed.

 

“⚽️ Note for those who ‘know it all, fines will never do it’: an agreement was revealed yesterday between [Guardia di Finanza] and the Prosecutor’s Office in Rome to facilitate the identification of users,” Capitanio wrote.

Removal of Multiple Authorization Requirements

A DDay report provides much needed context. Before conducting an investigation to establish an offense, Guardia di Finanza (a police force under the Ministry of Economy and Finance) would ordinarily seek authorization from the judiciary on a per-person basis.

 

That could prove unwieldy here due to the volume of illegal streamers, so an ‘intervention protocol’ has been put in place. That allows Guardia di Finanza to cross-reference all data in its possession without having to obtain authorization for each person surfaced in its inquiries. DDay reports that income received from fines will go to the Ministry of Justice to assist in the overall fight against piracy and the Ministry of Economy to fund awareness campaigns.

Business People Use LinkedIn…

While members of the public are fed deterrent messages concerning the consumption of illicit streams, AGCOM has also been putting companies like Google under pressure to do more in the fight against piracy. Public complaints recently led to Google removing an infringing streaming app from Google Play. A positive move, perhaps, but always likely to fuel demands for even more.

 

“The best way to fight #piracy is to fight criminal but also legal (!) associations that make business out of stealing intellectual property and rights of others,” Capitanio noted this morning.

 

These ‘legal associations’ include Google, Apple, and Amazon, whose customers are just regular internet users looking for software to install, in many cases to avoid frequenting pirate sites, as requested.

 

In a comment that could easily backfire, Capitanio effectively suggests that choosing a legal platform is no obstacle to users being fined up to 5,000 euros.

Nowhere to Hide

“Unfortunately, a necessary, though probably unpopular, step will be to fine #piracy users, users of apps easily downloaded from #Android and #Apple stores but also from #Amazon portals, users of the many sites easily reached by search engines (which still do not cooperate as they should),” the statement reads.

 

“Meanwhile, Spain is also moving in the same direction. A common front in Europe can only do good,” Capitanio added, referencing action by LaLiga in Spain that also makes little sense, and may yet backfire.

 

“Pointing out that Law 93/2023 provides for fines of up to 5,000 euros is not psychological terrorism but sharing useful information,” Capitanio added.

 

“Are subscription prices too high? I clear up misunderstandings. I think so, but it is not my expertise. The solution is certainly not stealing. And maybe the prices are so high also because of the parasites who live off the backs of those who pay regular contracts.”

 

 

Javier Tebas Medrano is the president of LaLiga, Spain’s most prestiguous football league.

 

Medrano’s position makes him the most powerful man in Spanish football and by extension, also one of the most powerful in European football, a market worth an estimated €30 billion.

 

In common with key rivals at the Premier League (England) and Serie A (Italy), Medrano has an IPTV piracy problem to solve. In addition to blocking injunctions already in place, rumors of a crackdown on users of pirate IPTV services persist. A post to X on Monday reignited those rumors.

Medrana Posts Partial Court Order to X

When Medrano posted part of a court document to X yesterday, some assumed that the much-promised IPTV piracy crackdown had arrived; the post attracted over 1.2m views and prompted a significant amount of misunderstanding. Here we begin with the post (translated from Spanish) and the relevant text as it appears in the order.

Medrano refers to a statement from the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (the document embedded in his post and partially shown below) concerning the outcome of legal action by LaLiga following a piracy investigation.

 

According to Medrano, the order will see IP addresses collected by LaLiga “that transmit illegal content” sent to Spanish ISPs [Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, MásMóvil and Digi].

 

Under the orders of the court, the ISPs will match those IP addresses to the relevant subscriber accounts. The personal details of those subscribers will then be handed over to LaLiga.

Order posted by Medrano (highlights are LaLiga’s)

 

The highlighted potato-quality Spanish text relates to the information the ISPs must hand over. When translated to English it reads as follows:

 

1) IP address assigned to the user when they accessed the Server that enabled the audiovisual content to be shared unlawfully
2) Name and surname of the holder of the Internet access service contract
3) Postal address of the [internet] line installation and billing details
4) Identification document [NIF, NIE, other] regarding the information of the IP Address of the server to which you have connected, port of the server to which you have connected, and time of the request (GMT+0)

What This Case is *Not* About

Before tackling the court order itself and comparing that to how LaLiga presents it, some important background.

 

This legal action does not relate to people who watch or subscribe to pirate IPTV services, nor does it have anything to do with people who access illicit streams of LaLiga matches, made available by unlicensed websites.

 

As illustrated in the image to the right, some mainstream Spanish newspapers have opted for the sensational reporting angle that anyone who watches pirated football will receive a fine. There is no evidence to support that claim, but it’s possible from the information made available thus far, that something even more sensational may be underway.

Order Issued By Barcelona Court

Court: Commercial Court Number 8 of Barcelona
Judge: Javier Ramos De La Peña
Applicant: La Liga Nacional De Fútbol Profesional (LaLiga)

 

In order for LaLiga to obtain customer information from ISPs, ISPs are sometimes considered ‘no fault’ defendants in these types of applications. Five headline ISP ‘brands’ are involved here, but many more ISPs are listed in the order, including some providing mobile internet access:

 

Orange Espagne Sau, Vodafone Ono Sau, Masmovil Ibercom Sa, Digi Spain Telecom Slu, Telefonica De España Sau, Telefonica Moviles España Sau, Orange España Virtual Slu, Vodafone – Espana Sau

 

In the words of the Judge as presented in his order, the case concerns piracy of content detailed as follows:

 

Specifically, it concerns audiovisual content offered live and with exclusive access to residential customers and public establishments on pay television, with customers of the Movistar Plus+ satellite service being the only ones with access for their exclusive consumption, through a satellite dish, decoder terminal, and customer card.

Card-Sharing Piracy

It’s alleged that Movistar Plus+ content is being accessed illegally using ‘card-sharing’. In basic terms, legal subscribers to Movistar Plus+ hand over money and in return receive a viewing card. Once placed in an authorized set-top box, these cards enable scrambled satellite signals to be viewed as intended on a TV.

 

Such ‘conditional access’ systems provide access to TV content on the condition that the viewer has subscribed and is using a legitimate viewing card. In card-sharing systems, however, the codes that unlock the encrypted TV signals in connection with a legal viewing card are retransmitted via unauthorized equipment over the internet.

 

Internet users in possession of a suitable non-official set-top box can pay a small subscription fee to an illegal supplier to receive the codes from the legal card. These are streamed continuously over the internet and that decrypts the regular satellite signal usually received.

 

In summary, card-sharing piracy can involve the purchase of a single legal card and the benefit from that card can be shared among any number of additional viewers via the internet. Only codes are sent and received, all audiovisual content is obtained from regular satellite signals.

LaLiga’s Claim, Judge’s Conclusion

The Judge’s order addresses the two main types of people involved in card-sharing as detailed above: [1] those who purchase a legal viewing card and share the codes to others over the internet in exchange for a fee, and [2] those who pay a fee to access the codes but do not pay anything to Movistar Plus+. ([1]+[2] added for reference)

 

One of the forms of unlawful access is the so-called “Cardsharing,” which uses the protocols “CCCam and IKS,” presupposing the participation in the piracy network, on one hand, of [1] users who paid for conditional access to a satellite connection, offering them on the internet for illicit profit, and, on the other hand, of [2] users who acquire satellite connection equipment enabled to access original card codes without authorization.

At this point one of the Judge’s comments gives reason to pause. It references IP addresses and how they can be “detected” to show the IP addresses of servers supplying codes and the IP addresses of users receiving codes.

 

The basic element for identifying connections on the Internet, the IP address, can be detected both to show the identification of servers and the connections of users participating in the piracy platform.

If we use a simple downloading analogy, a computer offering a movie for download and a computer offering codes are essentially the same. Anti-piracy companies can easily identify both by simply requesting the movie or subscribing to the card-sharing server and logging what they receive.

 

The same cannot be said of those downloading a movie or receiving codes from a server. If there was a way to positively identify downloaders of pirated content engaged in a client/server arrangement that stood up in court, it would’ve been used by now.

 

Time to break out a hastily-put-together diagram to show why obtaining IP addresses of card-sharing servers is easy, and why obtaining those of customers is not.

 

 

The satellite top right transmits an encrypted TV signal (everything in red is encrypted) to a legitimate viewing card top left. From there the extracted codes pass through a regular router/modem (with a public-facing IP address that can be “detected”) and onwards to the subscriber’s internet service provider, depicted here as three blue servers. From there they are further distributed via the internet.

 

Directly underneath the ISP’s servers are the internet connections of the card-sharing service’s customers who receive the codes. After passing their routers/modems, those codes are received by their unofficial set-top boxes. In exactly the same way the satellite transmitted encrypted TV signals to the legitimate card, these set-top boxes also receive encrypted signals, also shown in red.

 

However, since these set-top boxes are receiving the codes from a card-sharing server, their output to a TV or similar viewing device (depicted here in purple) is a clear, unencrypted picture.

Anti-Piracy Investigators

Inside the orange box at the top are anti-piracy investigators. Just like any other customer, they have subscribed to the card-sharing service, which means they have direct access to the server’s IP address, shown here using the orange lines/pointers. Bottom right in a second orange box is a second set of anti-piracy investigators and their job is to identify the IP addresses of those receiving the codes.

 

According to the Judge, the IP addresses of both the server “and the connections of users participating in the piracy platform” can be detected. And herein lies the problem.

 

From the information made available, LaLiga appears to have no idea who these users are. It appears that while LaLiga has the IP addresses of the card-sharing servers, it has no idea of the IP addresses used by those who accessed those servers.

 

That seems to lead to a remarkable conclusion; IP addresses are usually the starting point for most online infringement allegations. Rightsholders match known infringements to IP addresses themselves and then move to ISPs, hoping to match those IP addresses to real-life identities. In this case, LaLiga has the IP addresses of the servers, but has no IP addresses for the users.

 

That necessarily means that no violations have been matched to any user IP addresses. The big question is whether LaLiga has any evidence whatsoever to show that any customer at any ISP has done anything wrong. It doesn’t have their IP addresses, that much is certain.

Let’s Go Fishing

According to the court documents, the information LaLiga wants the ISPs to hand over can be deduced from information LaLiga has in hand. The information was obtained from card-sharing servers, including IP addresses and ports. Here’s how that’s explained in the order (legal conditions unrelated to technical matters have been removed)

 

La Liga provides in its request the IP addresses and port of the servers, as well as the time of the request, data that has been obtained legitimately. With this starting data, it is possible, after issuing the requirement contained in art. 256.1.11* LEC to the internet service providers listed in the request, to complete the identification of the users of their services participating in the scheme….

That seems to lead to just one conclusion. LaLiga has the IP addresses, port details, and potentially other information related to the card-sharing servers, but may be working on the mere assumption that users of the five ISPs accessed those servers at specific times, but has no evidence to prove it – yet.

 

If that’s actually the case, and there isn’t some extra dimension to this that hasn’t been revealed or is being hidden, LaLiga may be doing something that to our knowledge has never been done before.

 

The court order seems to require the five ISPs to go through their IP address logs – not to identify the names and addresses of subscribers behind known/suspected infringing IP addresses – but to identify infringement itself.

 

When the ISPs match card-sharing server IP addresses with IP addresses that appear in subscribers’ activity logs, that may be the first time that any evidence of potential infringement has been surfaced against any user in this case thus far.

 

There may be other explanations but with veteran file-sharing defense lawyer David Bravo posting memes to X, he may be already counting the money.

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) is the world’s most active anti-piracy coalition, initiating and assisting enforcement efforts around the world.

 

Most anti-piracy actions are focused on streaming sites and services, many of which are located in or operated from Vietnam.

 

ACE previously visited Vietnam and met with government officials to explore potential solutions to address the problem. However, aside from some incidental successes, the problem persists.

 

Earlier this year, rightsholders flagged the Asian country as a ‘haven’ for pirate sites. In a letter to the US Trade Representative, IIPA pointed out several problematic sites and services, including Fmovies, AniWave, 123movies, BestBuyIPTV, 2embed, and Y2mate.

Vumoo.to Takedown

The above-mentioned sites remain online at the time of writing, but ACE did book a new success this week by taking the popular pirate streaming site Vumoo.to offline.

 

On Sunday, the nameservers of Vumoo.to were updated to ns3.films.org and ns4.films.org, which typically signals ACE taking control. And indeed, the group confirmed to TorrentFreak that Vumoo.to is currently offline following ACE action in Vietnam.

 

 

Jan van Voorn, MPA’s Chief of Global Content Protection and head of ACE, says the takedown was not assisted by third parties such as domain registries or registrars. ACE worked directly with the operator of the site, who presumably took it offline voluntarily.

 

Vumoo.to first came online in 2016 and built a large audience in the years that followed. With well over 12 million monthly visits, the streaming portal was a sizable target and a key one for ACE.

Perpetual Crackdown?

How the anti-piracy group tracked down Vumoo’s operator isn’t mentioned, but ACE has been gathering information for years. Through U.S. courts, the group previously obtained DMCA subpoenas requiring the Tonic domain registry and Cloudflare to share all useful info they have on the site.

 

Pirate sites often use false information to register domains, so this information may have led to nothing. However, local connections and OSINT may ultimately have helped to pinpoint the site’s operator.

 

With the ‘takedown’ of Vumoo.to, ACE can chalk up yet another success but whether it will last remains to be seen. Previous Vietnamese actions against sites such as Zoro.to and 2embed had mixed results, as these sites soon came back ‘under new management‘ or in ‘cloned’ versions.

 

Early 2023, Brazil’s National Film Agency (Ancine) and local telecoms regulator Anatel (National Telecommunications Agency) announced a new anti-piracy partnership.

 

In isolation that was nothing out of the ordinary but just a couple of months earlier, ANCINE had announced a “reformulation” of its anti-piracy work. Specifically, it would “move away” from combating the distribution of pirate set-top boxes and similar work aimed at protecting the movie and TV sector.

 

“The understanding is that there would be an overlap in responsibilities with the National Telecommunications Agency (ANATEL),” ANCINE explained, adding that it would be combating copyright violations of Brazilian works on digital platforms instead.

 

Despite overlapping responsibilities, ANCINE still took part in the March 2023 wave of Operation 404. The agency’s logo did not appear alongside those of the MPA and ACE on the banners celebrating the next wave a few months later, however.

Concerns Over Comments in Brazil

In its submission to the USTR’s 2024 Special 301 Review, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which counts the MPA among its members, raised concerns over the situation in Brazil. Following the public hearing last month, the USTR asked IIPA to provide additional detail on why “recent positions vocalized by the Ministry of Culture and ANCINE officials concerning the protection of copyright” were seen as an issue.

ANCINE’s focus on the protection of domestic content is a problem, IIPA informed the USTR.

 

“This statement is troubling because it implies that ANCINE prioritizes the protection of domestic works and will not take actions to ensure the adequate and effective protection of works owned by U.S. rights holders, raising questions regarding Brazil’s international obligations,” the response notes, briefly, with almost no context.

 

To summarize IIPA’s submission, Brazil received praise for taking down 868 websites and applications, for taking action in eight states against live sports piracy, for deploying site-blocking injunctions, and for carrying out search and seizure raids and arresting pirates.

 

Ultimately, however, “several long-standing normative and legislative concerns warrant keeping Brazil on the Watch List,” the IIPA wrote.

 

So did Brazil suddenly become uncooperative overnight for no reason? Not exactly; in fact, deeper cooperation with the MPA played a significant role in the decision to prioritize local content protection.

ANCINE’s Special Agreement With the MPA

In April 2021, ANCINE announced it had signed “technical cooperation agreements to intensify the fight against piracy of audiovisual content.” This involved gaining access to automated systems to help it fight piracy more effectively.

 

One of those agreements (pdf) would apparently cement a partnership between ANCINE and the Motion Picture Association Latin America (MPA-AL), which represents Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. in the region.

 

At the time, ANCINE was clear that the deal meant it would gain access to automated systems that would allow it to “monitor irregularities” related to online advertising in connection with piracy-related products. There was never any real mystery about what it hoped to achieve.

Civil Servants Demand Access to Agreement

When reading a grand press release, people may reasonably conclude that grand moves are underway. They may even start to suspect that even bigger things are going on.

 

Beginning around September 2022, more than a year after the ANCINE announcement, ASPAC (Associação dos Servidores Públicos da ANCINE) an association of civil servants connected to ANCINE, sent questions to the cinema regulator seeking information concerning its agreement with the MPA. ASPAC also filed an access to information request through which it hoped to obtain “copies of all documents involving the MPA and the use of the Ether platform.”

 

Among other details, ASPAC expressed deep concern that the deal with the MPA prioritized the protection of foreign movies over those created in Brazil.

EtherCity Anti-Piracy Services

EtherCity is an entity that “provides services, advanced automation solutions, and business intelligence for brand protection and anti-piracy operations.” Founded in 2018, EtherCity claims to be based in São Paulo, Brazil, and currently lists the MPA, ACE (Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment) and ANCINE as clients. Ether appears to be one of its anti-piracy platforms.

 

EtherCity’s website reveals a client list that goes way beyond the world’s most powerful movie studio association and the world’s most powerful anti-piracy coalition. Both ANCINE and Brazil telecoms regulator ANATEL are listed as clients alongside the likes of Prime Video, Discovery Plus, Netflix, Sky, Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Hulu, Roku, Warner, ESPN, Fox, and the list goes on.

 

EtherCity data has been cited in ACE reports (pdf) and EtherCity reports on ACE anti-piracy action have concluded how effective that’s been against LATAM-focused pirate sites.

 

The São Paulo operation is also mentioned in annual reports published by the local CNPC anti-piracy program in Brazil. EtherCity has been involved in efforts (pdf) to delist pirate TV box ads from Google and Meta platforms, and mentioned in respect of proposed subsidies for reverse engineering pirate set-top boxes in 2021.

ASPAC Opposes ANCINE/MPA Deal

ASPAC made several allegations concerning the ANCINE/MPA deal, including that the software in use at EtherCity was developed by the MPA. Furthermore, ASPAC claimed that since the software was designed to protect the interests of MPA members, ANCINE’s use of the software meant that Brazil’s cinema regulator was working in defense of Hollywood and against its rivals’ products.

 

Crucially, that included Brazilian films that receive no MPA protection, ASPAC claimed.

 

ASPAC further alleged that the deal should’ve been published in the Diário Oficial da União, the official journal of the federal government of Brazil. Instead, it had to resort to a freedom of information request to find out what had been agreed.

 

The letter was signed by ASPAC’s president; it called for a public consultation and an investigation into who was responsible for a deal that “does not comply with the minimum legal requirements and ends up distorting the very purpose of public policy.”

MPA: We Don’t Interfere, Anti-Piracy Work is Normal

In a statement to local publication Metropoles, Andressa Pappas, Director of Government Relations at the Motion Picture Association, said that support for copyright everywhere is effectively what the MPA is best known for.

 

“Supporting content protection and anti-piracy measures has always been one of MPA’s global key actions. As trusted advisors to authorities around the world, the MPA provides several tools, such as technical expertise and research, as it aims to defend a better scenario for audiovisual and copyright, including in Brazil,” Pappas said.

 

The MPA further added that it “does not interfere and has no impact on decisions taken within the scope of public administration” since it “respects the autonomy of public bodies and entities in Brazil.”

No Serious Issues Found, Damage Already Done

It was later revealed that ANCINE’s access to the Ether system would allow it to identify problematic ads related to set-top boxes and instances of copyright infringement on websites. The agreement allowed ANCINE to use that data for enforcement purposes, including against infringers directly and in support of site-blocking measures. ANCINE could use the system or not, there were no strict requirements. Some issues did remain, however.

 

The agreement was considered confidential and that ran counter to a requirement for transparency. Criticism from ASPAC held that by using a platform provided by the MPA and designed to protect its own content, ANCINE had effectively delegated its supervisory powers to the MPA.

 

That subsequently led to ANCINE announcing the previously-mentioned “reformulation” of its anti-piracy work and its move away from targeting pirate set-top boxes. ANCINE’s Anti-Piracy Coordinator, Eduardo Luiz Perfeito Carneiro, was dismissed, and his replacement was given a new title to reflect the new image and direction of ANCINE.

 

Carlos Chelfo, Copyright Protection Coordinator at ANCINE, was instructed to review work with the MPA to ensure that, moving forward, the protection of Brazilian content would always take priority. The deal itself was terminated.

 

And that’s why Brazil is causing such concern for the IIPA in the United States, and what prompted its comment to the USTR:

 

“This statement is troubling because it implies that ANCINE prioritizes the protection of domestic works and will not take actions to ensure the adequate and effective protection of works owned by U.S. rights holders, raising questions regarding Brazil’s international obligations.” IIPA to USTR – 2024 Special 301 Review

 

In isolation, it might sound that Brazil suddenly became uncooperative for no reason. With context, it simply shows both countries putting their own interests first. How the that will be viewed at the USTR and reflected in the Special 301 Report will be revealed in just a few weeks.

 

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. “Argylle” is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on March 11 are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrent sites
1	(…)	Argylle	5.8 / trailer
2	(1)	Poor Things	8.2 / trailer
3	(7)	Dune: Part Two	9.0 / trailer
4	(…)	Damsel	6.3 / trailer
5	(…)	Ricky Stanicky	6.2 / trailer
6	(4)	The Beekeeper	6.5 / trailer
7	(6)	Oppenheimer	8.5 / trailer
8	(2)	Code 8: Part II	5.8 / trailer
9	(5)	Wonka	7.3 / trailer
10	(9)	Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom	6.7 / trailer

 

 

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

 

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, even the New York Times. These rightsholders all object to the presumed use of their work without proper compensation.

“Books3”

Many of the lawsuits filed by book authors come with a clear piracy angle. The cases allege that tech companies, including Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, used the controversial ‘Books3’ dataset to train their models.

 

Books3 was created by AI researcher Shawn Presser in 2020, who scraped the library of ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik. The dataset was broadly shared online and added to other databases including ‘The Pile‘, an AI training dataset compiled by EleutherAI.

 

After pushback from rightsholders and anti-piracy outfits, Books3 was taken offline over copyright concerns. However, for many of the companies that allegedly trained their AI models on it, there are still some legal repercussions to sort out.

Authors Sue NVIDIA for Copyright Infringement

On Friday, American authors Abdi Nazemian, Brian Keene, and Stewart O’Nan joined the barrage of legal action with a copyright infringement lawsuit against NVIDIA. The company, whose market cap exceeds $2 trillion, is mostly known for its GPUs and related software and services, but also has its own AI models.

 

In a concise class action complaint, filed at a California federal court, the authors allege that NVIDIA used the Books3 dataset to train its NeMo Megatron language models. The models are hosted on Hugging Face where it states that they are trained on EleutherAI’s ‘The Pile’ dataset, which includes the pirated books.

 

 

Putting two and two together, the plaintiffs conclude that NVIDIA’s models were trained on pirated books, including theirs, without their permission.

 

“NVIDIA has admitted training its NeMo Megatron models on a copy of The Pile dataset. Therefore, NVIDIA necessarily also trained its NeMo Megatron models on a copy of Books3, because Books3 is part of The Pile,” the complaint reads.

 

“Certain books written by Plaintiffs are part of Books3 — including the Infringed Works — and thus NVIDIA necessarily trained its NeMo Megatron models on one or more copies of the Infringed Works, thereby directly infringing the copyrights of the Plaintiffs.”

Direct Infringement Damages

Relying on the same logic, the authors accuse the company of direct copyright infringement, noting that NVIDIA copied their books to use them for AI training purposes. Through the lawsuit, the rightsholders demand compensation in the form of actual or statutory damages.

 

The class action lawsuit includes three authors thus far, but more may be added to the case as it progresses. NVIDIA has yet to respond to the allegations but in light of similar cases, it will likely oppose the claims and/or argue a fair-use defense.

 

Last month, OpenAI managed to ‘defeat’ several copyright infringement claims from book authors in a somewhat related “Books3” lawsuit. However, the California federal court didn’t review the direct copyright infringement claims in this case, which have yet to be argued in detail at a later stage.

 

—

 

A copy of the class action complaint against NVIDIA, filed by the authors in a California federal court, is available here (pdf)

 

When pirated copies of “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” came out nearly two decades ago, The Pirate Bay changed its front page logo.

 

The Pirate Bay became the “Grand Theft Bay,” illustrating the deviant stance upon which the site built its reputation since the year of its launch.

 

The GTA-inspired logo was the first of many ‘doodles’ that separated the ‘most resilient torrent site’ from its competition. Instead of hiding from law enforcement or big media’s anti-piracy groups, The Pirate Bay often went on the offensive, facing all challenges head-on.

 

Many believed it was revolutionary, while others thought it was naive. What’s clear, however, is that The Pirate Bay fulfilled an unmet source of demand.

Pirating Pioneers

At the time, it was nearly impossible for people to consume media online. Music streaming services simply didn’t exist yet, games were sold wrapped in plastic, and Netflix had yet to start its streaming business. Meanwhile, everything was available on The Pirate Bay, for free.

 

Times have changed but even the most staunch pro-copyright advocates can’t deny that piracy helped to lead the entertainment industries to new business models. Without the Napsters, Limewires and Pirate Bays of the time, media consumption wouldn’t have evolved so swiftly.

 

There is no award for this accomplishment, however. On the contrary, the public faces of The Pirate Bay’s founding crew all served prison sentences. Hollywood never managed to bring the site completely to its knees, but did make its founding fathers pay with life’s most precious asset: TIME.

 

Intriguingly, The Pirate Bay story itself now serves as inspiration for a TV production. B-Reel Films started working on a Pirate Bay TV series for Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT a few years ago

 

Peter Sunde (Simon Gregor Carlsson), Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (Arwid Swedrup) and
Fredrik Neij (Wiljam Lempling). photo: Stina Stjernkvist/SVT
 

None of the Pirate Bay founders are closely involved in the TV project, and they’re certainly not being compensated either. Instead, the producers used interviews with other people involved, plus the vast amount of public information available on the Internet.

Filming Finished

The new Pirate Bay series is scheduled to be released on Swedish television later this year. It has just finished filming and the first images, as well as the leading characters, were recently revealed to the public.

 

The production took place in Stockholm, Sweden, but also ventured to other countries including Chile and Thailand, where Fredrik Neij was arrested and paraded in front of the press in 2014.

 

Time will tell how the producers and director have decided to tell this story; there are many rabbit holes to pursue after all. Director Jens Sjögren describes it as a thriller, albeit one with humor.

 

“The Pirate Bay is a character-driven thriller told with great heart, warmth, nerve, will, and humor that takes us from a basement in the suburbs to fancy offices in Hollywood. A story about how a spark in a student corridor takes off and risks setting fire to the entire establishment far away in Hollywood,” Sjögren says.

Global Release Uncertain

With millions of former and current users of the torrent site, there will likely be some interest in the series from an international audience too. Thus far, no deals have been announced and, at this point, it’s uncertain if the series will be available outside of Sweden this fall.

 

Dynamic Television has acquired the global distribution rights to the series. Speaking with TorrentFreak, publicist Marylou Johnston says that the series is now going post-production so it is “way too early” to report any international sales.

 

“International sales will start when we can show the series to potential buyers. I doubt we will have a global release but it could happen,” Johnston notes.

 

Needless to say, selling a TV series to Hollywood, one that documents the history of its arch-enemy, is an intriguing proposition. While film insiders are smart enough to recognize potential when they see it, there’s a certain barrier to overcome.

You Can’t Stop Pirates?

Ironically, if The Pirate Bay series isn’t made available globally, people might be incentivized to download a copy from The Pirate Bay instead. That would show that, despite being declared illegal a long time ago, the site still fills demand today.

 

If anything, The Pirate Bay’s history has shown that it’s impossible to stop people from pirating. The people involved are not oblivious to this fact either. However, it’s no different from all other productions they’re working on and Johnston doesn’t expect that piracy will hurt sales.

 

“We can never guarantee that some ‘pirate’ version is not going to circulate but that applies to every show! Thankfully it doesn’t affect sales,” she explains

 

There are ways to minimize piracy, of course. A worldwide premiere on a streaming service, for example. If people can watch the series legally on a service they already subscribe to, there’s less incentive to go to The Pirate Bay; sentiment aside.

 

While this sounds simple; making it happen isn’t easy.

 

Global releases are still a rarity today for content owned by a third party, which typically sells it to the highest bidder. These negotiations take time and, in some cases, the offers simply aren’t good enough.

 

In theory, a globally operating streaming service could pick the show up, either this year or after its Swedish premiere.

 

It would be truly revolutionary if all streaming services licensed the show at the same time, making it available everywhere and to everyone; Pirate Bay style. That utopian vision is probably a bit naive though.

 

ALPA, the Association Against Audiovisual Piracy (Association de Lutte contre la Piraterie Audiovisuelle) has been active in France since the mid-eighties.

 

With heavyweight backing from the Hollywood studios of the MPA, and the music industry through a number of large groups and organizations, wherever there’s a piracy fight in France, ALPA is unlikely to be too far away. The anti-piracy group also publishes various studies, including one that estimates audiences for pirate sites that have a key focus on France.

New Report Delivers Positive News for the Industry

Published in French, the latest edition of ‘Audience For Illicit Sites Dedicated to Video Consumption in France‘ covers the period December 2021 to December 2023. The ALPA, Mediametria, and NetRatings study has been running for the last eight years and while 2016/17/18 showed few signs of pirate audiences in decline, recent years suggest a continuous downward trend.

Illicit Video Site Audiences, Dec 2021/2023 (ALPA)

 

Following a peak in 2018, in part due to the addition of mobile devices as a viewing source, the only year to show an uplift in pirate audiences was 2021. Linked directly to the COVID pandemic, during which piracy increased almost everywhere, 2021 can probably be ironed out as an anomaly.

 

According to the report, average monthly audiences for Frace-focused pirate sites dropped from 11.8m in 2019 to 6.3 million in December 2023, roughly half the size they were five years earlier.

Effect of Enforcement Actions, Deterrent Measures

While the chart below shows audiences in clear overall decline since early 2022, the suggested effect of enforcement measures and deterrent messaging on audience size, is a bit of a mixed bag.

Decisions handed down by local courts (labeled Décisions judiciaires) since late December 2021 at times precede reductions in pirate audience size. However, the opposite is also true in some cases, most notably at the end of July 2022.

Piracy Audiences By Piracy Method

French pirates have traditionally gravitated towards so-called DDL services. In terms of overall audience share, those platforms are currently neck-and-neck with streaming platforms, which tend to enjoy overall dominance elsewhere.

Between December 2021 and early 2023, audiences for streaming sites and DDL platforms display a loose mirror effect; when streaming sites peaked, DDL sites troughed. Beyond February 2023, audiences for streaming and DDL platforms appear to sync, with DDL platforms commanding a greater audience share, albeit briefly, in April 2023 and again in August 2023.

 

The study’s overall conclusions indicate a strong reduction in piracy audiences when compared to those seen in 2016, including a 15% overall reduction in 2023 versus 2022.

 

During the same period, audiences for legal content experienced a small decrease of 2%. That’s not an especially concerning figure in itself but if declining pirate audiences fail to translate into at least some increases for legal audiences, that would seem to be a much bigger worry.

 

ALPA’s report is available here (pdf)