At the turn of the century, online piracy hubs began to surface at universities around the world.

 

Seemingly unlimited broadband connections and the presence of many tech-savvy students provided an ideal breeding ground for the rapid expanision of the file-sharing craze.

 

Napster and Limewire played a major role in this growth, as well as DC++ and i2hub, which typically relied on closed networks. Students exchanged hub/server addresses with each other in order to share files at very high speeds within local networks or between universities.

Universities Ordered to Tackle Piracy

This virtual free-for-all lasted for years and in some places continues today. In the United States, however, higher education institutions were forced to put the brakes on piracy due to the passing of the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) in 2008.

 

Students today may not be aware of it, but the HEOA requires American universities and colleges to adopt and implement effective anti-piracy policies. These should include technological anti-piracy measures as well as educational material to deter piracy.

 

It’s not hard to find these policies outlined on various university websites, paired with obligatory warnings. Here’s what the University of Texas writes.

 

“If you copy and distribute copyrighted material without legal permission, you may be found liable for civil or criminal copyright infringement. Civil penalties for Federal Copyright infringement range from $750 per song to $150,000 in damages for each willful act.”

Piracy Scammers Abuse Universities

While universities and colleges do their best to abide by the rules, outsiders have started to exploit these same institutions to promote piracy-related scams.

 

When we conducted some Google searches targeting the official website for The University of Texas at Austin, several scammy results came up, advertising pirated movies including The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

 

Some of these links have since disappeared but at the time of writing, we are still able to access several of the links. These include a PDF file that advertises a free copy of “Avatar: The Way of Water”, as shown below.

 

Like many others, the advert shown above arrives as a file containing a link to a third-party website. In this case, the link goes to a dodgy movie platform that immediately triggers anti-virus alerts warning of potential harm to devices or risks to personal data.

Scams Target Many Universities

These PDFs are not clever guerilla marketing tactics by Robin Hood-inspired pirates. Instead, they tend to trick people into believing that there are free films available but in reality link to scams or attempt to obtain victims’ credit card details.

 

It’s worth pointing out that Texan University is by no means the only site with this type of spam problem, we have seen similar piracy ‘ads’ at the University of Oregon, UMass Amherst, The George Washington University, The University of Rhode Island, and many others.

 

The scammers have struck gold by exploiting the university websites. These sites are seen as authoritative by search engines such as Google. As a result, the scammy PDFs are now among the top results for several piracy-related queries, beating ‘real’ pirate sites.

 

We have to say though, that most universities and colleges are quick to remove most of these PDFs, which are typically added through public upload tools. In many cases, the files are gone within a few days.

 

How many people ultimately fall for these dubious advertisements is unknown. Most people will probably recognize the scams right away but it requires only a few victims to make it worthwhile for the scammers.

 

Being held responsible for the actions of others can seem fundamentally unfair but when the internet is involved, liability is rarely more than a step away.

 

In 2008, consuming pirated movies and TV shows using BitTorrent was practically the norm in Australia and rightsholders had seen enough. Movie and TV show companies, including Village Roadshow, Universal, Warner, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, and Disney, sent copyright infringement notices to internet service provider iiNet, demanding action against its pirating subscribers.

Authorization, Liability, Safe Harbor

Citing various grounds, iiNet refused. The studios responded with a lawsuit that made global headlines while raising key questions on big issues.

 

On the basis that iiNet’s customers were primary/direct infringers, did iiNet ‘authorize’ those infringing activities in its role as a service provider? Could iiNet be held liable when its customers downloaded and shared movies using BitTorrent? Could iiNet rely on protection from liability under the safe harbor provisions in the Copyright Act?

 

The recently concluded consultation stage of Australia’s Copyright Enforcement Review recognizes the importance of these issues well over a decade later. Due to the nature of the case, the stakes remain high for rightsholders and intermediaries alike, regardless of who ‘won’.

 

Following an eight-week Federal Court trial in 2009, a 2010 decision found that iiNet was not liable for its customers’ piracy activities. The studios filed an appeal and two out of three judges sided with iiNet in 2011. An appeal to the High Court ended with a unanimous technical victory for iiNet but also drew lines in the sand that may have left ISPs in a more vulnerable position.

 

The legal process clarified that under the right conditions, ISPs could indeed be held liable for authorizing customer infringements. The appeal court judges further found that since iiNet had no disconnection policy for dealing with repeat infringers, it would not have received ‘safe harbor’ protection under the Copyright Act.

Safe Harbor and Liability in Need of Adjustment?

Initially applying only to carriage service providers, Australia’s safe harbor scheme was extended in 2018 to online service providers in the public sector, including libraries and educational institutions, among others. Importantly, it still does not extend to other online service providers, digital platforms, for example.

 

As the image shows, addressing infringements today extends to industry-driven initiatives that are linked to safe harbor protection, in part courtesy of the iiNet decision. These are sometimes referred to as voluntary arrangements. As reported earlier this week, rightsholders believe that intermediaries and service providers ‘volunteer’ more readily when the legal environment leaves them no choice.

Authorization Law Works, “Strictest in the World”

The Communications Alliance represents the interests of service providers and digital platforms. Its members include major telecoms companies, Google, Facebook, Cloudflare, Twitter, Apple, and many, many more. The last thing they need is additional liability.

 

Referencing the iiNet and more recent Redbubble decisions, the Communications Alliance says authorization laws need no amendments.

 

“Authorization liability laws are robust and no change is needed. We do not support any change to section 101 that would reverse the High Court’s decision in the iiNet case. Following the Redbubble Australia decision, Australia has one of the strictest authorization laws in the common law world,” the submission notes.

 

“There have been numerous claims made by rights holders in the past that authorization law is ‘broken’ and not capable of addressing online piracy or capable of applying to digital platforms. We do not agree with these assertions.”

Foxtel Sees Value in Holding Platforms Liable

Foxtels’ submission calls for changes to the Copyright Act to clarify authorization liability in relation to digital platforms. The company says this would help to ensure that anti-piracy mechanisms like YouTube’s Content ID and Facebook’s Rights Manager are fit for purpose.

 

“Copyright infringements occurring via the digital platforms continues to be a major problem. Our experience has been that the solutions that are widely promoted by the digital platforms, such as Content ID and Rights Manager, are too slow, too easily bypassed and leave the monitoring/ingestion burden on rightsholders,” Foxtel reports.

 

“As such, we submit that the authorization liability provisions of the Copyright Act should be amended to specifically provide that the digital platforms can be liable for authorizing the copyright infringements that occur on their platforms, where the digital platform fails to take reasonable steps to act to prevent the infringement.”

Safe Harbor: Good for Service Providers, Good For Rightsholders

On the issue of safe harbor, the Communications Alliance believes that changes are warranted. Calling for a significant expansion, the group says both service providers and rightsholders will reap the benefits.

 

“Copyright safe harbors are critical – they incentivize service providers to work with rights owners to remove infringing content, whilst providing safeguards for users,” the submission notes.

 

“The protections offered by the safe harbor scheme should be extended to include all online service providers,” it continues, echoing earlier recommendations from Australia’s Productivity Commission.

 

By expanding the definition of a service provider to encompass carriage service providers and all digital platforms, and then granting universal access to safe harbor protections, the Communications Alliance believes that any shortcomings in digital platforms’ notice-and-takedown regimes can be addressed.

 

“These platforms are already heavily incentivised to combat infringement and develop close partnerships with rights holders, and there is no proven need to put in place any separate, mandatory, enforcement regime,” the group adds.

 

In a separate submission, Google agrees. It warns that since digital platforms cannot currently rely on safe harbor protections, they are not able to “collaborate with copyright owners and consumers in a balanced way, to enforce copyright.”

Foxtel Is Not Convinced

In a clear sign that compromise will be difficult to reach, Foxtel says that any expansion of safe harbor protections will have the opposite effect.

 

“It is imperative that all providers of online services (including the digital platforms) are incentivised to cooperate with rights holders in relation to online piracy,” the TV giant notes.

 

“Foxtel Group is concerned that any expansion to the safe harbor regime without a corresponding clarification to authorization law will reduce the incentive for the digital platforms to work with rights holders in relation to this issue.”

 

The major movie and TV studios agree that there should be no expansion of the safe harbor statute, and they aren’t calling for changes to authorization laws either. In respect of the latter, they believe that the same effects could be achieved by requiring new intermediaries to comply with blocking orders.

 

The Communications Alliance, Foxtel, and Google submissions can be found here (1,2,3)

 

Over the past several years, a wave of copyright infringement lawsuits has targeted alleged cheaters and cheat makers.

 

Several game companies including Take-Two Interactive and Epic Games have taken cheaters to court in the United States. More recently, American video game developer Bungie has been rather active as well.

 

Bungie is known for the Halo and Destiny series, which have millions of fans around the world. The popularity of these games also attracts cheaters and cheat sellers so in an attempt to stop them, Bungie has filed several lawsuits in US federal courts.

 

This strategy yielded some success last year when Elite Boss Tech accepted a loss by signing a consent judgment, agreeing to pay $13.5 million in copyright damages. The lawsuit against AimJunkies is another story, as that cheat seller is doing everything in its power to fight back.

Bungie vs. Veterancheats

Bungie’s case against cheat seller Veterancheats went in yet another direction. After the lawsuit was filed in 2021, very little happened. The site’s alleged operator, Romanian resident Mihai Claudiu-Florentin, didn’t answer the complaint so Bungie was left to proceed on its own.

 

Earlier this year, the lack of action prompted Bungie to request a default judgment for copyright infringement and the circumvention of Bungie’s technological protection measures under the DMCA. To compensate for this wrongdoing, the game company requested more than $12 million in damages and fees.

 

According to Bungie, Veterancheats sold several Destiny 2 cheats, including “Razor”, “HLBOT”, and “Render.” These pieces of software allowed “unskilled” and “unethical” players to gain an unfair advantage, effectively ruining the fun for everyone else.

 

“Cheat software negatively impacts the gaming experience of Bungie’s community of honest players who enjoy playing and winning fairly using skill and developed through practice,” Bungie wrote.

Court Awards Millions in Damages

This week, United States District Judge Tana Lin ruled on the motion, largely siding with Bungie. After concluding that the court has jurisdiction over the Romanian defendant, Judge Lin also agreed that a default judgment is warranted based on the evidence.

 

The court notes that Veterancheats’ violations of the DMCA were willful and that an award of up to $2,500 per
download of the VeteranCheats Hack is justified. Since Bungie actually asked for less than that, the damages request was granted.

 

“Bungie has asked for only $2,000 for each of the 5,848 downloads of the VeteranCheats Hack and the Court finds that this amount is appropriate. The Court will therefore enter default judgment in the amount of $11,696,000 for Claudiu-Florentin’s violations of the DMCA,” Judge Lin writes.

 

For circumvention violations under the DMCA, each cheat software download goes towards the final damages amount, which can be susbstantial. The same isn’t true for statutory copyright infringement damages, which are counted per copyright work, but in this case that was irrelevant.

 

Instead, Bungie requested actual copyright infringement damages based on the cheat sellers’ subscription revenue. The game company relied on data obtained from payment processor Stripe to calculate the final amount.

 

“Bungie has provided sufficient evidence to support this request, including accounting information from Stripe, as well as Barker’s declaration which explains the basis for the calculation. The Court therefore awards $146,662.28 in actual damages for the Copyright Act claim,” the Judge adds.

 

Finally, Judge Lin also granted more than $200k in attorneys’ fees and costs, which puts the total default judgment amount at a sizable $12,059,912.98.

Injunction Targets Domains, Reddit, Discord, and More

In addition to the substantial damages award, Judge Lin also issued a permanent injunction that prohibits Veterancheats and Claudiu-Florentin from selling cheats for Bungie’s games or engaging in any related copyright-infringing activities.

 

Veterancheats is also prohibited from using other services to promote or sell the cheats. Those include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Discord, GBATemp, Reddit, Telegram, Skype, WeChat, WhatsApp, Signal, and similar apps and services.

 

“Claudiu-Florentin is prohibited from using any social network, video sharing, or digital messaging accounts under their control to provide any content relating to the distribution, marketing, offering for sale, or promotion of the Wallhax cheat software..,” the order reads.

 

Even more valuable, perhaps, is that third parties, including but not limited to domain name registrars
or registries, are also prohibited from supporting these infringing and DMCA-violating activities. That means that the .com domain name of Veterancheats, which remains online at the time of writing, is at risk of being suspended if Bungie cheats are sold.

Worldwide

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the injunction isn’t just limited to the United States. It can be enforced in every country of the world where the defendant or the cheating operation has connections.

 

“This permanent injunction is binding against Claudiu-Florentin worldwide, without regard to the territorial scope of the specific intellectual property rights asserted in the Amended Complaint and may be enforced in any court of competent jurisdiction wherever Claudiu-Florentin or his assets may be found,” the order reads.

 

All in all, this is a significant win for Bungie on all fronts. The Veterancheats website remains online but that’s not necessarily a problem in this case, as the cheat seller previously removed the Destiny 2 cheats from sale.

 

—

 

A copy of the default judgement and associated permanent injunction, issued by United States District Judge Tana Lin, is available here (pdf)

 

When the United States wanted Sweden to take action against The Pirate Bay, communication through diplomatic channels oiled the wheels, led to a raid, and was followed by handshakes all round.

 

The Pirate Bay famously reappeared online but in that moment, collaboration between U.S. and Swedish authorities was set on a more harmonious course. At the time it was rumored that cooperation had prevented Sweden being placed on the USTR’s Special 301 Report ‘Watch List’ but whatever the truth, that never happened.

 

The same cannot be said of Vietnam. Five years ago the USTR warned that unless Vietnam took stronger enforcement action, not only would it remain on the Watch List, but online piracy was likely to get worse as broadband penetration increased. The prediction was solid.

Vietnam Stays on the Watch List

In 2018 there had been some promising signs. After the the US Ambassador to Vietnam called on the local government to criminally prosecute the people behind movie streaming sites 123movies, Putlocker and Kisscartoon, 123movies – also known as 123movieshub and GoMovies – suddenly shut down.

 

A criminal investigation had toppled a site once described by the MPA as “the most popular illegal site in the world.” Once again, enforcement in Vietnam suddenly seemed viable.

 

When the USTR published its list of ‘notorious markets’ in 2019, Vietnam had other problems on its hands. Local piracy platform Phimmoi.net was pulling in 75 million monthly visits according to the USTR, and a site called FMovies was also making waves, although it wouldn’t be officially associated with Vietnam for some time.

 

In August 2019, right holders filed a criminal complaint against the operators of Phimmoi.net but a year later local authorities suspended their investigation for “unknown reasons.” The site reportedly moved domain and went on to become one of the most popular sites in Vietnam.

True Scale of the Problem Emerges

The language barrier and lower levels of transparency hinder proactive reporting on events in Vietnam, but rightsholders in the United States have provided a steady flow of information and the USTR has reported accordingly.

 

Fmovies, also known as Bmovies and Bflix, are three of the most recognizable pirate streaming brands for good reason. SimilarWeb data indicates that a single domain, fmovies.to, currently receives 92 million visits per month to its archive of mainstream movies and TV shows. One Bflix domain currently manages around 10 million, still significant numbers.

 

Also believed to be operated out of Vietnam is BestBuyIPTV, a pirate IPTV service boasting 900,000 users and 12,000 resellers. Whether these figures are accurate is up for debate but for a premium service costing 15 euros per month, half the number of users sounds like $81 million in annual revenue. Cut that figure in half for good measure and it’s still hugely significant.

Vietnam May Be The World’s Biggest Piracy Problem

By 2022, the MPA was openly linking Fmovies and its sister sites to Vietnam.

 

This January, the International Intellectual Property Alliance also linked Fembed to Vietnam, describing the platform as ‘Piracy-as-a-Service.’ Y2Mate, the world’s most popular stream-ripping site, good for at least 120 million visits per month, was also linked to Vietnam. Then even more meat was put on the bones.

 

“The operator of the notorious streaming piracy network of sites Fmovies has over 60 associated domains, many of which are known pirate brands such as Bmovies, 9anime, Putlocker, and Solarmovies, provides unauthorized access to popular movies and TV series, and is domiciled in Vietnam,” the anti-piracy group wrote.

 

As soon as 9anime enters the mix, the few hundred million visits per month mentioned thus far risk being overshadowed. We cannot confirm who is behind these domains but the numbers are staggering: 9animetv.to pulls in 197.3 million visits per month, 9anime.to receives over 97 million. In January, 9anime.gs received 95 million visits but in March, ‘just’ 35 million.

 

There may be some doubling up or crossover traffic when multiple domains are in play but, for reference, 9anime.pl receives more than 37 million visits per month and with ‘just’ 18 million, 9anime.id seems hardly worth mentioning.

 

And then there’s zoro.to, which some suggest also has links to Vietnam. We’re in no position to confirm that but the traffic it receives is certainly worth recording for posterity; in January 2023 alone the site received over 206 million visits.

USTR Publishes Special 301 Report 2023

The publication of the USTR’s 2023 Special 301 Report this week highlighted recent changes in Vietnamese law.

 

“[A]mendments to the IP Code entered into force in January 2023, which include categorizing the illegal uploading and streaming of a cinematographic work as a violation of communication rights and clarifying that copying of part of a work will be considered as a reproduction,” the report reads.

 

Describing IP enforcement as a “serious challenge” the report references the stalled investigation into Phimmoi.net. It further notes that there are “no criminal investigations or prosecutions” in Vietnam, even though criminal law allows for “substantial fines and years of incarceration” for copyright infringement.

 

“[O]nline piracy, including the use of illicit streaming devices and associated piracy applications to access unauthorized audiovisual content, remains a significant concern,” the report adds.

 

Yet despite all of the above, Vietnam was not upgraded to the Priority Watch List, despite rightsholder recommendations. The reasons for that could be political or maybe a grain of optimism remains. Perhaps a little bit of both.

 

Whatever the truth, Vietnam seems to be riding its luck. No country in the history of online piracy has ever had so much power, refused to use it, and then reaped the benefits longer-term. A turnaround may still be possible but unlike the pirated movies, TV shows, anime and manga currently flooding the internet, patience isn’t always in unlimited supply.

 

The 2023 Special 301 Report can be found here (pdf)

 

Two years ago, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) reported the Portuguese streaming site MrPiracy to the U.S. Trade Representative.

 

The Hollywood anti-piracy group described the site as a notorious pirate operation that should be dealt with accordingly.

 

Whether this diplomatic lobbying effort had a direct effect is not clear, but MrPiracy.top shut down a few weeks later. Interestingly, however, it didn’t take long for another site to step up and take its place.

Pobre.tv Rises

The successor was Pobre.tv, where Pobre is Portuguese for ‘poor’. The site offered many thousands of movies and TV shows free of charge and quickly became the go-to entertainment portal for millions of people.

 

This meteoric rise was in part facilitated by the old MrPiracy domains, which were redirected to Pobre without an official explanation. Perhaps the old behemoth willingly ‘handed over’ the reigns to this ‘newcomer’, or there might have been some kind of deal behind the scenes.

 

In part due to these redirects, the popularity of Pobre.tv and Pobre.wtf in Portugal was massive from the get-go. Up until last month, it was ranked among the top 25 most visited sites in the country, beating the web traffic numbers of legitimate platforms such as Netflix, HBO, and Disney.

Enforcement Efforts Begin

PobreTV’s status didn’t go unnoticed by rightsholders. Over the last year, the MPA-led Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) tried its best to identify the operators through a series of DMCA subpoenas, targeted at Cloudflare.

 

The first DMCA subpoena, through which Cloudflare was asked to share identifying information of the domain name’s owner, was filed early last year, with another one following in November.

 

Whether these legal requests resulted in usable intelligence is unknown but PobreTV did eventually move away from Cloudflare. Most recently, it was hosted at AlexHost but, over the past few days, it became completely unreachable.

Pobre TV Vanishes

When a site of this size disappears, people start looking for explanations. Thus far, however, the operators have yet to comment in public and they seem to have disappeared from the official Discord channel too.

 

Pobre hasn’t been mentioned officially in any recent enforcement waves either. In theory, it could have been (indirectly) caught up in a recent anime crackdown that also hit several other Portuguese language sites, but here’s no concrete evidence for that.

 

From what we can see, the domain names haven’t been seized so it’s possible that the operators decided to shut down voluntarily, perhaps after being pressured by enforcement actions. That could include the ongoing ACE actions, for example.

ACE Kept the Pressure On

ACE boss Jan van Voorn informs TorrentFreak that, as the largest illegal streaming site in Portugal, Pobre TV has been on the ACE radar for a while. This dates back to the DMCA subpoenas we mentioned earlier but there were more recent activities as well.

 

“Over the recent weeks, ACE obtained several disclosure orders requesting intermediaries connected to the operation of Pobre TV to hand over their customer details,” Van Voorn tells us.

 

“Due to the confidential nature of these legal actions, we cannot disclose further details at this stage,” he adds.

 

The anti-piracy alliance doesn’t mention which intermediaries were targeted. There are a few options, including the hosting company, domain registrar Namecheap, Discord, or any payment companies that were used to pay for these services.

 

ACE comments suggest that it is not directly involved in Pobre’s disappearance in the sense that it negotiated a settlement. However, it is possible that ACE managed to identify the operators, who then chose to abandon ship.

Not Taken Lightly

Across the web, there is plenty of speculation about what may have happened. Also, the news site Noticias e Tecnologia quotes a ‘reliable’ but anonymous source which states that the site is closed for good. No explanation is provided, however.

 

What we do know is that decisions like this aren’t taken lightly. Pobre was a highly successful streaming operation that, in addition to running ads, also monetized its service through premium subscriptions paid in Bitcoin.

 

These subscriptions provided access to exclusive features such as Chromecast support and an Android app, and were selling for €24 per year. This must have been quite a lucrative revenue source that most pirate site operators would not give up easily.

 

Whatever the reason for the shutdown, it can’t be ruled out that the database and site assets will reappear one way or another. If that’s the case, ACE will probably continue its enforcement efforts too.

 

The Australian government’s review of copyright enforcement measures aims to ensure that responses to infringement are “appropriate, effective and proportionate.”

 

The Attorney-General’s Department released an issues paper for public consultation late 2022, presenting a golden opportunity for rightsholders to explain why measures they fought so hard for are no longer fit for purpose. Or at least that’s how things usually play out.

Leading With The Positives

A wide range of stakeholders filed submissions during the public consultation but since movie and TV show companies feature most prominently in online enforcement actions, their framing of the current piracy situation is of particular interest.

 

The ‘Australian Film/TV Bodies’ submission is the work of mostly American companies including Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner, plus local studio Village Roadshow, cinema groups and distributors. No other rightsholders have more experience of blocking injunctions.

 

The overarching positive tone in the studio-led submission comes as no surprise. It carefully highlights how good industry advice and wise decisions by the Australian government led to positive reforms, not least the “highly effective” no-fault site blocking regime introduced in 2015. Coupled with the market “making content readily available online for reasonable prices” the Australian copyright system supported the market and a “potential free-for-all” was avoided.

 

The clear message in the submission is that the studios requested the right measures and since the government’s judgement was solid, everything went according to plan. Changes requested as part of the current consultation aren’t to fix any past shortcomings, the submission suggests, they’re about meeting future challenges using a tried-and-tested approach.

Good News / Good Cop

The companies behind the ‘Australian Film/TV Bodies’ submission say their use of Australia’s site-blocking provisions has resulted in the blocking of over 2,000 infringing domains since 2015. Citing government research demonstrating the efficacy of these interventions, successes are clear.

 

“In 2015 lawful online consumption of TV was the lowest of all entertainment categories tracked at 51%, growing to 74% in 2022. Online TV consumption increased from 67% to 78% over the same period. Unlawful consumption of Film, meanwhile, went down from 49% in 2015 to 26% today, and TV went down from 33% to 22%,” the companies note.

 

With direct thanks to the Australian government for its “progressive” copyright policy, the submission recalls that in 2018, traffic to blocked sites declined by 53%. Efficacy today is reportedly at 75%, although blocking can be circumvented by pirate site operators and users alike, the submission adds.

Bad News / Bad Cop

The circumvention claim is presented in more detail in a submission from Creative Content Australia. In common with the Australian Film/TV Bodies, CCA’s members include Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner, local studio Village Roadshow, plus cinema groups and distributors.

 

The ‘Australian Film/TV Bodies’ report cites CCA research to back up its own claims, despite the groups sharing the same core membership of the same major studios. However, while the former moderates negativity in its submission, the studios are much less constrained when wearing their CCA hats.

 

“[P]irate operators – mostly based overseas in countries like Russia and Vietnam – make no investment in original content, leeching off the efforts of others, and pay no taxes, leaving Australia worse off overall,” the CCA submission reads.

 

“Their operations might look increasingly sophisticated, mimicking the interfaces of streaming services, but these sites are overwhelmingly run by organised crime,” the submission adds, noting that money is generated from malicious ads, ransomware, hacking and identity theft.

 

The sites aren’t named and the claims aren’t new. Proof is in short supply too but persistent anecdotal evidence suggest the claims most likely hold water. Whether that means imminent disaster for Australia is unclear but it’s an opportunity to important to miss.

 

“The safety of Australians is increasingly at risk, and urgent changes are needed to stop this problem in its tracks,” the submission warns.

Site Blocking Works, But Also Doesn’t

The CCA submission states that current site blocking measures can lead to “positive behavioral change.” Citing its own research, the group says that half of all ‘Active Pirates’ (49%) have seen site blocking in action and that was enough for 26% to give up searching and 11% to seek out a legal source.

 

“Unfortunately, the majority of infringers who experienced a blocked site simply continued their piracy journey with 29% continuing to search for the same illegal content and 22% going directly to a pirate site that they already know of,” CCA reports.

 

“Of the total Active Pirates surveyed by CCA, 51% are not impacted by site blocking at all, thanks to circumvention techniques to navigate around site blocks, thus removing any friction caused by site blocking completely to seamlessly access pirated content.”

 

So how bad is the situation in Australia? Citing a report from the MPA, which comprises CCA’s own core members, which in turn are also behind the Australian Film/TV Bodies submission, the situation is very bad indeed.

 

“The staggering volume of Australian’s pirating is all the more unbelievable when considering recent analysis of SimilarWeb data carried out by the Motion Picture Association which found there were 1.8 billion visits to pirate sites from IP addresses based in Australia in 2022, representing a 10% increase on 2021,” the CCA adds.

Targeting DNS Providers

According to both the Australian Film/TV Bodies and CCA submissions, Australian pirates are circumventing site-blocking measures on a grand scale. By switching away from their ISPs’ DNS services and using DNS provided by Google, OpenDNS and others, site-blocking injunctions are neutralized in a minute. Both submissions agree on what should be done and how it can be achieved.

 

In 2019 both Google and Bing agreed to remove pirate site URLs from Australian search results when those sites were listed in blocking orders. Google’s own consultation submission describes this as a voluntary action as part of its overall commitment to combating piracy. The Australian Film/TV Bodies submission states that voluntary actions only exist because of a credible threat of being held liable for infringement.

 

In 2018, the Australian government rejected calls from the movie and TV industry to expand site-blocking legislation beyond consumer ISPs to other online intemediaries; DNS providers, for example. While Google agreed to the deindexing of sites from search results, it refused to censor its DNS service. The studios suggest that companies like Google will only consider ‘voluntary’ measures against DNS if the law leaves them no other choice.

Recommendations

There are additional proposals in the combined submissions but the key recommendations are as follows:

 

– Require intermediaries to implement blocking, DNS providers included
– Speed up blocking orders to mitigate pirate countermeasures
– Establish a dedicated IP Task Force, prioritize intellectual property crime
– New law to combat use of technology (e.g IPTV boxes) to circumvent access controls
– Require intermediaries to verify identities of customers and account holders
– Allow rightsholders to obtain customer data for enforcement purposes

 

The submissions referenced above can be found here (Film/TV, CCA, Google)

 

Piracy is by no means exclusive to any particular generation but among the general public, it’s often associated with younger people.

 

This notion may very well change over time as the Internet-native generation gets older. That said, younger people tend to be more open to change, also when it comes to piracy habits.

 

Over the past two decades, new online piracy sites, apps and other consumption methods have emerged. This can pose quite a challenge for anti-piracy outfits, whose main goal is to spot new piracy trends and nip them in the bud.

Social Media Piracy Panel

To help with this ongoing process, Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance plans to involve youth directly. This week, a job listing appeared online offering teens an hourly wage of 150 Danish kroner (~US$22) to join a piracy discussion panel.

 

“We want to know more about young people’s ways of being and behaving on social media – and online in general. With your help, we will become much wiser about young people’s behavior and will be able to reach new heights in our work.”

 

Rights Alliance is specifically looking for young people between the ages of 15 and 17. These teens will join a panel of eight peers who, together with an employee from the anti-piracy group, will discuss piracy-related Internet and social media developments.

Friends and Family are Safe

There’s no need for prospective candidates to be deeply involved in illegal activities or to expose pirating friends. The main goal is to learn how young people are exposed to pirated media during their online activities, which can help to spot emerging threats.

 

“It is important for us to emphasize that you should not disclose yourself, your friends or others in your social circle. The sole purpose is to help us learn more about current trends,” Rights Alliance clarifies.

 

According to the job listing, each panel meeting will last for roughly two hours with three tentatively scheduled for the coming year. The meetings will take place in Copenhagen and travel expenses will be covered.

 

While it’s unusual for anti-piracy organizations to recruit teenagers, it makes a lot of sense. Piracy preferences change rapidly and obtaining direct input from younger people is a relatively effective way to keep an eye on new developments.

Preventing Bad Habits

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund says that the panel should help to provide more insight into the habits and behavior of today’s youth on social media.

 

“We are especially looking into how we can educate and perhaps prevent young people from forming bad habits with regard to consuming illegal content like live football, films, etcetera, on social media platforms,” Fredenslund notes.

 

Online piracy remains a major challenge in Denmark. Last year, an annual survey carried out by Mediavision revealed that movie and TV piracy had reached the highest level in nine years. According to the same research, YouTube and Facebook were cited as the most used piracy sources, but it’s likely they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

 

When countries are placed on the USTR’s ‘Watch List’ for failing to combat piracy, most can expect years of pressure punctuated by annual Special 301 Reports declaring more needs to be done.

 

Bulgaria was on the Watch List in 2015 when the USTR reported “incremental progress” in the country’s ability to tackle intellectual property infringement, albeit nowhere near enough to counter unsatisfactory prosecution rates. In 2013, Bulgaria’s Ministry of Culture had carried out 743 checks related to online copyright infringement but a year later, it conducted just 13 (pdf).

 

Still, the United States reported that Bulgaria was continuing its efforts to draft a new Criminal Code with the goal of significantly reducing piracy. That would eventually arrive, but not for quite some time.

Bulgaria Promises to Deliver

In 2018 the United States softened its position toward Bulgaria, removing it from the Watch List on the basis that the government would probably deliver. In the wake of that reprieve in 2020, local prosecutors filed just one copyright indictment. In the following year, not a single person was charged with a copyright infringement offense.

 

That led to a warning in the 2022 Special 301 Report that the USTR would conduct an Out-of-Cycle Review to assess if “any material progress” had been made.

 

In September 2022, Bulgaria was further criticized in a trade barriers report for “poor IP protection” and as recently as this month, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator reported (pdf) that these issues are just part of Bulgaria’s “larger rule of law problems.”

 

To this background, Bulgaria might ordinarily have found itself edging toward the Watch List once again, but last week it took a significant step that will be welcomed in the United States.

Draft Criminal Code Amendments

Just eight short years after the United States reported Bulgaria’s work on legal amendments, things appear to be coming together. Last week the Council of Ministers approved draft amendments to the Criminal Code that aim to protect authors, rightsholders, and state revenue.

 

“Crimes against intellectual property should be perceived as acts with a high degree of public danger, not only considering the rights and interests of the individual author, which they affect, but also considering the financial losses for the holders of these rights, which also affects the revenues in the state budget,” the explanatory notes read.

 

The stated aim of the bill is to solve identified weaknesses by upgrading substantive law to counter computer-related crimes against intellectual property. The text references those who “build or maintain” an information system or provide a service to the information society for the purpose of committing crimes. The notes offer further clarification.

 

“The bill aims to prosecute those who create conditions for online piracy – for example, by building and maintaining torrent tracker sites, web platforms, chat groups in online communication applications for the online exchange of pirated content, and any other activities that may fall within the definition of ‘information society service’ within the meaning of the Electronic Commerce Act (pdf) and which are carried out with the specified criminal purpose.”

Bulgaria’s Response to U.S. Criticism

The Bulgarian government notes that the amendments are part of its response to criticism in the USTR’s Special 301 Report. The fact that Bulgaria has been absent from the ‘Watch List’ for the last five years is down to “specific commitments” made by the authorities, with progress being monitored closely by the United States in respect of Bulgaria’s future status.

 

The draft approved by the Council of Ministers last week envisions sentences of up to six years imprisonment and a fine of up to BGN 10,000 (US$5,600). According to the draft, there is no intent to prosecute individual users who simply consume pirated content.

 

1337x.to is the go-to destination for many seasoned BitTorrent users. The site has been around for fifteen years and is home to many reputable uploaders.

 

Over the years 1337x has steadily climbed through the ranks, building a stable and loyal userbase.

 

With over 60 million monthly visits to its main domain name, 1337x is currently the second most used torrent site, trailing only behind YTS.mx, while beating The Pirate Bay. This also means that if something breaks, people take notice.

1337x Troubles

1337x has had its fair share of issues over the years. The forum, for example, has been offline for years despite still being promoted throughout the site. The same is true for the site’s chat function, which is offline as well.

 

Most users can live with these shortcomings, as they are mostly interested in finding the latest torrents. However, that has started to become a problem as well recently, as 1337x’s search function is not functioning as it should.

 

Over the past few days, many users have complained that they are unable to find recent uploads. A quick inspection of the site shows that new content is still being added, exemplified by recent torrents in the lists.

No Torrents After April 10

While they do exist, finding these recent torrents using direct searches seems to be a problem. It appears that the search function only shows torrents uploaded on or before April 10, more than two weeks ago.

 

TorrentFreak reached out to 1337x’s operator to get a comment on this problem, but we haven’t heard back. Previous requests for comment remained unanswered as well, which isn’t really a surprise as the domain’s MX records, which specify the mail server, are gone.

 

Based on available information, the search problems appear purely technical in nature, likely related to a simple database issue. If and when the issue will be fixed is unknown.

 

On Reddit, some people have pointed out that some 1337x mirrors can still find recent torrents. While that may be the case, none of these sites are official. They likely scrape the official site or use other data sources.

 

This certainly isn’t the first time that 1337x has run into trouble. Last year, the official 1337x.to domain name stopped working entirely after it expired. That issue was resolved fairly quickly, however.

 

Minecraft is unquestionably one of the most iconic and recognizable videogames of recent times.

 

The game was originally created by Markus “Notch” Persson, the founder of Mojang Studios, which continues to develop the software today.

 

In the years following its initial release in 2011, Minecraft captured a truly massive audience. With hundreds of millions of copies sold, it’s also the best-selling video game in history, a reign that looks set to continue.

 

Success has transformed Mojang into a multi-billion dollar company that, through Xbox Game Studios, is now ultimately owned by Microsoft. Interestingly, another Microsoft-owned company has been at the center of several copyright disputes recently.

Eaglercraft Crackdown

A few weeks ago we reported that Mojang had asked Github to remove several Eaglercraft repositories. The software in question is a Minecraft clone that allows people to play the game in the browser, without paying for it.

 

In the weeks that followed, Mojang kept up the pressure. The company targeted a Discord server and a Gitlab account operated by one of the main developers. Both were shut down.

 

Eaglercraft developer “lax1dude” voluntarily removed the code from his own website after Mojang came knocking. Initially, he continued to offer the “EaglercraftX 1.8” repository, providing tools and instructions on how to decompile Minecraft 1.8. He eventually took that offline as well.

 

Lax1dude has put up a message for Mojang on his GitHub account, explaining that he’s not looking for trouble. The developer’s goal is simply to preserve the project after all the countless hours that were put into it.

 

“We are not interested in fighting your DMCA complaints, neither are we affiliated with any sites still providing the infringing files,” Lax1dude explains.

 

“The goal of eaglercraft was never to pirate the game, it was just to port it to the browser, and the years of time and effort put into the port should not be killed off so violently. We ask that you contact us at the email above to talk things out and figure out a future for eagler.”

New DMCA Wave

Whether Mojang ever reached out to the developer directly is unknown, but we do know that the game company isn’t slowing down enforcement actions. A few days ago, Mojang sent another series of takedown requests to GitHub, targeting hundreds of Eaglercraft-related repos.

 

The notices in question target Eaglercraft server code, the Eaglercraft web client, and various other Eaglercraft releases. According to Mojang, these are all copyright infringing, even though they may not all use copyrighted content directly.

 

“EaglerCraft allows the connection to servers and does not align to the authentication schema of the authentic Minecraft game. Exact source code or pixel perfect images do not need to be in the repo to constitute copyright infringement,” Mojang writes.

 

“The development and distribution of this product infringes Mojang’s intellectual property rights and violates the Minecraft EULA. EaglerCraft also infringes Mojang’s Minecraft copyrights by using Minecraft character designs and artwork to advertise these services.”

Stubborn Eaglercraft Servers

The takedown notices were successful; GitHub responded by removing all the targeted repositories. However, that doesn’t completely stop the problem. Several Eaglercraft instances remain up and running, and these aren’t folding quite so easily.

 

The Russian operator of Eaglercraft.ru, for example, has kept his service online despite being repeatedly targeted.

 

In recent weeks, Mojang asked Cloudflare to take the site down, without result, and the company also sent several DMCA notices to Google. In response to the latter, the Eaglercraft.ru homepage was removed from the search engine, but the site remains online.

 

“My main motivation for hosting the site is for kids to have fun because not everybody can afford it where I’m from,” the Eaglercraft.ru operator tells us. “So long as I don’t get any knock on the door from FSB, I will try my best to keep the site online.”

 

The Eaglercraft.ru website doesn’t charge people for access, but it does run ads. These generate between $1000 and $2000 per month and cover server costs and other expenses.

 

This unauthorized Minecraft economy is a thorn in the side of Mojang, which will continue to use all tools at its disposal to shut down the remaining Eaglercraft projects. While it enjoyed some success with its takedown strategy, completely eliminating it is easier said than done.

 

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

 

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

 

This week we have one newcomer on the list. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”, which came out as a high-quality pirate release, is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on April 24 are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrent sites
1	(7)	Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania	6.4 / trailer
2	(…)	Ghosted	5.8 / trailer
3	(1)	Avatar: The Way of Water	7.8 / trailer
4	(2)	Shazam! Fury of the Gods	6.3 / trailer
5	(3	65	5.5 / trailer
6	(6)	John Wick: Chapter 4	8.5 / trailer
7	(9)	The Super Mario Bros. Movie	7.4 / trailer
8	(4)	The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die	7.3 / trailer
9	(8)	Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre	6.5 / trailer
10	(10)	Puss in Boots: The Last Wish	7.9 / trailer

 

 

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

 

In mid-January, the European Commission (EC) issued a call for evidence to support a proposed “toolbox” of measures to combat live sports piracy.

 

Rightsholders usually welcome support at the EU level with open arms, but in this case it only increased frustrations. Last October a huge coalition of rightsholders called on the EC to introduce new law that would compel intermediaries to take pirate streams offline within minutes of a complaint.

 

The EC refused and offered existing law as the solution. For rightsholders claiming to have exhausted its limits, that clearly wasn’t ideal.

More Evidence Needed

Over a period of several years, rightsholders have reported in fine detail the numerous challenges they face when it comes to tackling piracy of live sports. Dozens of reports spanning thousands of pages have left almost no stone unturned. The issue is comprehensively mapped, to say the least.

 

This January, the EC issued a call for evidence so that rightsholders and other stakeholders could detail their problems all over again. The aim was to find solutions to these well-documented problems under existing law, which rightsholders insist is inadequate.

 

Whether anyone learned anything substantially new from that process is unknown but having gone through the motions, the EC’s recommendation will be officially released early May. Perhaps fittingly given the topic, the EC’s report has already leaked online and according to reports, rightsholders are underwhelmed by the document, to put it mildly.

Leaked Report Delivers Disappointment

While it must be frustrating for the EC to see its report publicly rejected in advance of its release, one gets the impression that nobody really expected the EC to come up with anything groundbreaking, at least not on the scale demanded by rightsholders.

 

Euractiv says the recommendation focuses on the “effective handling of take-down requests, dynamic injunctions, and voluntary cooperation” but for rightsholders already engaged in all of these things and more, that advice seems unlikely to inspire.

 

An anonymous representative of the Live Content Coalition, which counts the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA) and several other major video groups as members, kept things simple with claims of hollow promises and a failure to act.

 

“We have consistently been assured by the European Commission that ‘what is illegal offline is illegal online’, yet there appears to be no urgency to enforce the rule of law in the case of piracy, despite the blatant theft of highly valuable, proprietary content which is undeniably taking place,” the unnamed representative told Euractiv.

Commission Suggests and Encourages (But Doesn’t Insist)

On the understanding that all recommendations must exist in the current legal framework, one of the points in Euractiv’s summary is that hosting services will be “asked to collaborate with rightsholders, notably by engaging with trusted flaggers,” to take down pirate streams as quickly as possible. That raises interesting questions.

 

Firstly, new legislation denied by the EC would more likely than not attempt to hold these same hosting services more liable for their customers’ activities, a major negative for companies in that sector. Yet now, they’re expected to warm to the idea of collaborating with rightsholders voluntarily, including by putting technical solutions in place to speed up the notification process.

 

In an entirely commercial environment, that leads to the question of incentives. The law doesn’t require collaboration behind its limits and currently protects intermediaries from liability. Not only are these the same protections rightsholders wish to forcibly limit, there appears to be no obvious commercial benefit for service providers.

 

The biggest conundrum is that the really big players in the pirate streaming market know that rightsholders want to limit their business, but are struggling to do so. The entities providing pirate IPTV infrastructure are selected because they’re good at it and, for one reason or another, are difficult to disrupt and are unlikely to collaborate.

 

And then there’s this:

 

“Intermediary services, like web hosting services, that can identify and locate the pirated transmission of live events are encouraged to cooperate with hosting services and rightsholders to identify the source of unauthorized retransmissions and prevent it from popping up again in so-called mirror websites once it is shut down.”

 

It will be interesting to read the official text to which this relates, and also what type of hosting services the EC has in mind. There are lots of services online that have the ability to identify and locate pirate streams but getting that information from them usually requires a legal process. The idea that this information can be shared between companies voluntarily is bound to raise eyebrows, if indeed that’s what the text suggests.

Action at National Level

Blocking injunctions are common around Europe but for rightsholders, not common enough. The EC suggests that dynamic blocking orders, such as those already in place in the UK and Ireland, should be assessed for suitability in EU countries that don’t currently have them. Again, questions are raised.

 

If EU countries don’t already have blocking injunctions in place, that suggests that either rightsholders haven’t gone to court to obtain them, or perhaps some kind of obstacle exists locally that renders them overly problematic or costly, for example. How requests for cooperation from the EC can solve these issues quickly is unknown.

Voluntary Cooperation

The remainder of the suggested measures are really just that – suggestions. Intermediaries that aren’t targeted with an injunction could choose to take “voluntary measures ” to prevent illegal streaming of live events. Advertisers and payment services could ensure that don’t help to finance or facilitate piracy.

 

Such voluntary actions aren’t unheard of. Perhaps the most notable is Google’s commitment to deindex domains from search results when they appear in court orders, despite those court orders having nothing to do with Google. Fresh requests were filed by Brazil recently and more will surely follow.

 

The reasons for Google’s cooperation are unknown but it’s highly unlikely it felt a bit sorry for rightsholders and just wanted to help out. Directly or indirectly, whether today or in the future, cooperating will have made commercial sense. If other intermediaries feel it’s in their interests, anything is possible.

 

Other EC proposals include turning blocked sites into advertising platforms for legal services, encouraging governments to allocate more resources to law enforcement, training judges, and encouraging rightsholders to “increase the availability, affordability, and attractiveness of their commercial offers to end users across the Union.”

 

There are some who argue that if rightsholders want unprecedented assistance to protect their profits, improving affordability for the public should be mandatory. It isn’t though, and it never will be, no matter how much ‘encouragement takes place.

EUIPO Will Monitor and Report Back

Perhaps the most bitter pill for rightsholders is that they’re unlikely to see changes to the law for at least three years. EUIPO looks set to monitor progress and within 36 months of the recommendation’s adoption, the Commission will assess its effectiveness.

 

The Live Content Coalition told Euractiv that’s just not good enough.

 

“The suggestion that the effects of the recommendation be assessed three years after its adoption is completely at odds with the urgency of the situation,” the anonymous representative said.

 

In the meantime, Italy is reportedly ready to launch the most aggressive live stream IPTV blocking program the world has ever seen – actioned under existing EU law, no amendments needed.

 

Given the popularity of YouTube and the huge number of websites and apps that allow people to rip music from the platform, the conflict surrounding ‘stream-ripping’ shouldn’t be underestimated.

 

Downloading a track takes about the same time as a shrug of the shoulders followed by an internal “who cares?” Multiply that by hundreds of millions of people shrugging several times a week, and the answer is “the recording industry, big time.”

Stream-Ripping and Public Perception

Many people in the UK, especially younger people, believe that listening to music on YouTube and ripping songs from YouTube are broadly the same thing. Both options are free; what’s the problem? Strangely, the value of ‘likes’ and ‘views’ is comprehensively understood when the topic of conversation isn’t centered on ripping music from YouTube.

 

The reasons for that disconnect aside, lots of people do ask questions. “Is it legal to download music from YouTube?” is always popular, along with its self-focused twin sister, “Can I get caught downloading music from YouTube?”

 

Thankfully, Google Lawyer (Google Doctor’s twin brother) is always around to help.

 

Anyone who read past the first line of this top result, collect 10 points. Those who read the second, take another 20 because that claim seems fairly important and we may have to come back to it.

 

If you spotted that the advice is published on a site promoting YouTube-ripping tools, nice work. Unfortunately, the article is of no fundamental use, no matter what it says, since it speaks about U.S. copyright law.

 

With no copyright experts immediately available on TikTok or Facebook, we turned to the UK’s third pillar of wisdom to get answers the big questions.

Free Legal Advice, Nationwide

Since lawyers are expensive, it’s not unusual to see some national newspapers put out a bit of legal advice here and there to make life that little bit easier. Thanks to the following text appearing in their URLs (youtube-to-mp3-converter-free-online and youtube-to-mp4) a pair of articles published in The Sun were easy to find.

 

Both were published this March; one asks “Is converting YouTube to MP3 legal and safe?” and the other goes with “Are YouTube to MP4 converters legal and safe?” They’re broadly the same article, but the latter gets right down to the legal nitty-gritty.

 

“No, it is not illegal,” the legal advice reads. Admittedly a citation would’ve been helpful but since there are apparently “no laws that prohibit downloading videos from YouTube” it would be unreasonable to demand links to things that don’t exist.

 

This will probably come as a huge shock. More than two years ago the High Court in London had a look through some of its law books and found that yes, there are some laws that prohibit downloading content from YouTube. And, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it is not legal at all.

What Happened, in Brief

Because the music industry wants to put an end to stream-ripping sites and tools, labels in the UK spent two years preparing a case that would compel the country’s major ISPs to block YouTube-ripping sites/tools.

 

Following an online hearing on February 3, 2021, Mr Justice Miles rendered his decision at the High Court in London. To keep things as simple as possible, his key findings were as follows:

 

1) The streaming-ripping sites were “designed to provide a service which enables users to make infringing copies.”
2) Sites’ whole purpose was to “circumvent the copyright-protecting safeguards” built into services like YouTube.
3) The operators of the sites “induced, incited or procured” users of their sites to commit infringements of copyright and as such, both the site operators and the sites’ users acted “pursuant to a common design to infringe.”
4) The operators of the sites were “jointly liable for the infringements committed by users.”

The Importance of Circumvention

The High Court ruling is long and complex. For some it is controversial too. Stream-ripping services and tools can be used to download content for journalistic purposes, to download content that isn’t owned by major recording labels, or to make permitted copies under the exceptions granted by copyright law.

 

One of the key issues here is that the High Court recognized YouTube’s rolling cypher as a technological protection measure, describing it as a “copyright-protecting safeguard” built into YouTube.

 

The High Court said it was satisfied that the entire purpose of the sites/services was to help users circumvent YouTube’s technological protection measures. In the UK, circumventing technological measures is a type of copyright infringement and in the overwhelming majority of cases, completely illegal.

 

Even if the recording labels’ music was taken out of the equation, when dedicated YouTubers create their own videos or the general public upload theirs, all creators can immediately rely on protection because they already own the copyright to their own work.

 

These people may decide that suing people who download their content using a ripping service is silly, but that doesn’t immediately grant a downloader a license or provide permission to circumvent technological measures, although permission may be requested in the UK.

Future Circumvention

Stating that something is entirely legal when the truth is much closer to the opposite is reckless but it goes way beyond that. It denies the reality that this and similar legal rulings are taking the internet and its users into more restricted and complicated territory because a minority of people pirate music.

 

History shows that when the major labels feel threatened, the internet starts to feel threatened. It probably should given the latest developments.

 

Sony Music currently wants DNS provider Quad9 held liable for infringement it has nothing to do with and in Italy, the labels took legal action against Cloudflare for broadly the same reasons. In Germany, a host is in a legal battle because it provided a link to a piece of YouTube-ripping software hosted elsewhere.

 

These won’t be the last blocking actions of their type, yet while they build and build, millions will shrug while finding new ways to circumvent endless blocking, claiming it doesn’t affect them. And it probably won’t, at least not until blocking is recognized as a technological protection measure in its own right. Then what?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The filing fee for these cases is over $400 and there are no guarantees the money will be recouped. Some rightsholders believe that this cost of admission is money well spent, but others are prepared to test alternative routes.

Capstone Studios Targets 150 IP-addresses

Movie production company Capstone Studios is one of those rightsholders. The company decided to take action when it noticed that its survival thriller film “Fall“, which it co-produced with BuzzFeed, was widely pirated through various torrent sites.

 

To stop these infringements, Capstone sent takedown notices to Internet providers whose customers’ IP-addresses showed up in the public swarms. These warning notices, sent through the Cyprus-based company PML Process Management, were meant to be forwarded to the linked subscriber accounts.

 

“We respectfully ask that you stop infringing and redistributing Capstone Studios Corp. copyright protected content, and take the proper steps to secure your Internet so that others do not infringe and redistribute our content as well,” they read.

 

The enforcement effort didn’t end there. A few days ago, Capstone requested a so-called DMCA subpoena at a federal court in colourado. The request targets 150 IP-addresses that are linked to allegedly ‘infringing’ Centurylink accounts.

Clerk Signs Off

These types of subpoenas don’t require a court hearing and are typically signed off by a clerk. That’s also the case here. Within a matter of days, Capstone’s request was granted, which means that Internet provider Centurylink, also known as Lumen, must provide the subscribers’ details.

 

The list of IP addresses reveals that the targeted subscribers are not limited to colourado. They are spread all over the U.S., including Chicago, Denver, Miami, Las Vegas and Phoenix.

 

The above shows that, with a relatively simple request, the movie production company can identify 150 alleged pirates. It wouldn’t be a major surprise if these people are approached with a settlement offer in the near future.

 

The legal paperwork doesn’t mention any concrete plans and merely states that the personal details “will be used only for the purpose of protecting the rights granted to the copyright owner.”

Undisputed Shortcut?

To a layperson unfamiliar with the history of DMCA subpoenas, this may sound like a logical process, and much cheaper than filing a federal case. While the latter is true, the practice of identifying large groups of alleged BitTorrent pirates this way isn’t undisputed.

 

Two decades ago the RIAA used a similar tactic to go after large groups of file-sharers. The music group opted to file DMCA subpoenas to save costs but met resistance from ISPs.

 

At the time, Internet providers argued that DMCA subpoenas are only valid when an Internet service stores or links to the infringing content, not when they merely pass on traffic. Various courts have agreed with this line of reasoning and the practice was essentially banned in the early 2000s.

 

If copyright holders wanted to identify alleged pirates, they would have to file a complaint at the federal court and request a regular subpoena there instead, as many have done since.

 

Capstone Studios’ legal representative Kerry Culpepper is aware of the judicial history but argues in the application that the Tenth Circuit Appeals Court, which colourado falls under, has never ruled on the ‘mere conduit’ issue in a case like this. Hence, it’s an open question.

 

Additionally, the attorney argues that more recent decisions suggest that DMCA subpoenas may apply in these instances. For example, in repeat infringer cases against ISPs such as Cox and Grande, courts have concluded that DMCA notices are valid and apply to conduit providers.

More Common?

Whether this line of reasoning applies to DMCA subpoenas is something that has to be tested in court, but Centurylink doesn’t appear to be protesting thus far.

 

While the use of DMCA subpoenas against pirating subscribers is relatively rare, Culpepper has managed to obtain several over the past years. The ones we’ve seen are all directed at Centurylink and target an increasing number of IP addresses.

 

The first request last year targeted 13 alleged pirates, increasing to 40 subscribers a few weeks later. Late last year another DMCA subpoena listed 63 subscribers, while the latest request relates to 150 IP addresses.

 

What the rightsholders did with the information obtained through these earlier subpoenas is unknown. After the court signs off on them, all follow-up activity takes place behind closed doors.

 

—

 

A copy of the DMCA subpoena request is available here (pdf) and the signed subpoena can be found here (pdf).

 

Over the years, we have reported on the demise of hundreds of torrent sites. Many of them folded due to legal pressure.

 

This week yet another site bites the dust; one that has been around since 2005, when the likes of TorrentSpy and Mininova ruled the scene.

 

While those two giants would eventually succumb to legal pressure, Legit Torrents kept on going. Unlike most others, this site specifically focused on content that would not cause any trouble with rightsholders.

RIP Legit Torrents (2005 – 2023)

Legit Torrents managed to flourish in its small niche for roughly 17 years but has now decided to shut down. According to its founder and operator, Dustin Montgomery, recent technical issues proved to be too much of a challenge.

 

The trouble started when the server’s IP address was null-routed for sending spam or hosting malware. The action was the result of a larger IP address being blocked, which made it impossible for the site’s hosting provider to restore the server remotely.

 

Technically, it would have been possible to rebuild the server and site, but after spending most of his life maintaining Legit Torrents, Dustin decided that the time had come to shut it down.

 

“I started Legit Torrents in the fall of 2005. I was still in high school and back then there was no 100% legal torrent tracker that anyone could easily submit to,” he recalls in a farewell message posted on the site.

Millions of Views

Like many others at the time, Legit Torrents began as a hobby project with minimal resources. Dustin recalls that it initially started out with a free dyndns.org subdomain. When traffic eventually started to come in, he made the site’s first investment by picking up the legittorrents.info name for $0.99.

 

In the years that followed the site signed up roughly 50,000 users and hosted 5,500 torrents. With a few thousand pageviews a day, it certainly wasn’t the most popular torrent site around, but unlike many others, Legit Torrents survived, eventually reaching 22 million pageviews.

 

The site ran Adsense ads for a while to cover the bills. This worked well until it got banned, not because of copyright issues, but because Legit Torrents signed up for an offer that later turned out to generate fraudulent clicks.

 

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Dustin notes that at its height in 2010, the site generated over $1,000 for a few months. Admittedly, however, that was in part due to the release of the Pontiac Torrent car and some decent SEO skills.

Legal ‘Troubles’

Running a legal torrent site doesn’t mean an absence of legal challenges. Over the years, several rightsholders mistakenly accused the site of sharing copyright-infringing material without permission.

 

In 2007, for example, the infamous Web Sheriff accused the site of sharing a pirated copy of the movie The Warlords, confusing it with the free MMORPG kung fu game Warlords in the torrent site’s archive.

 

Dustin challenged several of these takedowns and he also spent quite a few hours keeping spammers off the site, which wasn’t always straightforward.

 

“I had spammers uploading torrents en masse for a good while. With auto approval of torrents, I spent a lot of time logging in to fight them,” Dustin says.

 

Auto-approval could also be a problem when users inadvertently uploaded pirated content. In the end, Legit Torrents chose to manually approve users for posting, to avoid potential trouble.

Life Defining

Looking back, Dustin is quite proud of what he achieved. Offering a site that helped people get a copy of Linux, indie film releases, game updates, or other software was quite rewarding.

 

“My best memories of the site are just having it be of use,” Dustin tells us, adding that he would get excited when he saw random strangers adding links to the index.

 

While working on the site, Dustin also helped himself move forward in life. Today, he works as an SEO consultant and Legit Torrents was an informal education that turned out to be quite valuable. Interestingly, even The Pirate Bay played a small part in this process.

 

“I cannot state enough how much I learned from running this site and others. Way better than a degree in my opinion. It was one of my first exposures to implementing SEO, which funny enough was mostly copied tags from The Pirate Bay and modified to be about legal torrents instead.”

Goodbye

With the shutdown of Legit Torrents, Dustin closes the book on an important chapter of his life. While these goodbyes are never easy, it’s quite refreshing to see a positive ending.

 

Legit Torrent’s founder is blessed with a happy, healthy, growing family, which is also one of the reasons why he can do without a time-consuming project. That said, letting go is easier than it sounds.

 

“It’s not an easy thing to say goodbye to this silly site. It has been a part of my entire adult life. For ~17 years it was always there for me to check on, moderate, and take care of,” Dustin notes.

 

“If you ever used Legit Torrents, I sincerely hope it helped you. My mission in life is love Jesus and love others, and I think Legit Torrents did that in some weird techy way.”

 

An announcement by the Brazilian government in February revealed that “the two biggest digital anime pirate sites” in Brazil had been “taken down” in Operation 404 offshoot, ‘Operation Anime’.

 

The Ministry of Justice and Public Security said the objective was to “repress crimes committed against intellectual property” on the internet; more specifically, piracy of Japanese cartoons, better known as anime.

 

The Ministry of Justice reported that the operation received support from the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), an anti-piracy group that protects anime content in Japan and overseas.

 

While no sites were named at the time, our initial report named Animes-Vision and AnimesOnline among the most likely candidates. We also suspected that the crackdown may have been broader than the authorities in Brazil had stated at the time, with Animeyabu and Animesbr among a growing list of sites apparently heading for the hills.

CODA Confirms True Scale of Operation Anime

For operational reasons, anti-piracy group CODA was unable to comment on the February crackdown as it was taking place, but it is able to do so now. Information made available to TorrentFreak shows that while two of the largest sites were indeed targeted, the scale of the operation went far beyond that.

 

“From February to March 2023, several malicious piracy sites of Japanese anime in Brazil, including ‘goyabu.com’ and ‘animeyabu.com,’ were shut down due to accusations by CODA members,” CODA reports.

 

“These pirate sites were publishing Japanese anime with subtitles in Portuguese, the local language, on the Internet without the proper authorization from the rights holders.”

 

As part of Brazil’s Operation 404 anti-piracy initiative, Operation Animes was the first crackdown in Brazil against sites specializing in Japanese cartoons, targeted at a local audience. It’s also the first time that CODA’s members have filed a criminal referral against pirate sites focusing on an overseas market.

Criminal Referral, Raids, Shutdowns

“In November 2022, TOEI ANIMATION CO., LTD., TOHO CO., LTD., and Bandai Namco Filmworks Inc. filed criminal referral through CODA against four pirate sites in Brazil that infringe on Japanese animation,” CODA reveals.

 

“The investigation revealed that two of the sites were opened by the same operator. In response to this, since February 8, 2023, raids and other investigations have been conducted in each of the three cases, and a total of 13 sites have been closed down, including these four sites as well as nine related sites operated by the suspects.”

 

CODA reports that its investigations opened up opportunities for direct confrontations with site operators, also known as “knock-and-talks”. The operators of nine sites found themselves involved in these direct negotiations which led to their sites and affiliated sites – 18 in total – being shut down as well.

 

In total, 31 sites were shut down as a direct result of CODA’s involvement, but since news travels fast, the actual number of closures surpasses that.

Knock-On Effects

During a press conference today at the House of Councillors, the upper house of the National Diet of Japan, CODA director Masaharu Ina provided even more detail on the events of February and March. In response to the 31 sites directly shut down, another five sites decided to close voluntarily, making 36 shutdowns in total.

 

CODA reports that the average monthly traffic for these sites, in the three-month period spanning December 2022 to February 2023, was approximately 83 million visits. The closure of the 36 sites means that 12 of the top 20 most popular anime piracy sites in Brazil, detailed in Mr. Ina’s presentation, were removed from the market.

 

At the time of writing, CODA reports that 22 of 36 domains have been signed over to the anti-piracy group. Many currently direct to the CODA shutdown notice below.

 

With the details of the operation now being made public, it’s clear that Operation Anime was indeed bigger than the authorities suggested back in February and it remains ongoing.

Most Domains Being Handed Over, But Not All…

Documents seen by TorrentFreak indicate that there are still some loose ends to tie up, with the operators of five sites (animesonehd.cc, animesonehd.xyz, anizero.site, animesup.biz, animesup.cx) still in negotiations to transfer their domains.

 

After agreeing to help CODA in future investigations, the operators of two targeted sites will be allowed to keep their domains, but obviously not for piracy purposes. Inevitably, however, a stubborn minority seem happy to risk another throw of the dice.

 

These photographs were taken when police visited a suspect’s home on February 8. His site is believed to have received around 1.3 million visits per month but on this occasion the alleged operator’s whereabouts couldn’t be established. Despite his site being DNS blocked in Brazil, the slide suggests that may not deter him from his work.

 

Finally, it’s worth noting that despite the strongest of suggestions that the two key sites mentioned in February had been “taken down” by the authorities in Brazil, it now appears that what their press release really meant to say was that the sites’ operators somehow learned about CODA’s work and decided to shut themselves down.

 

Since sites as large as those rarely surrender, the stronger, clearer message may have been missed.

 

The DMCA takedown process allows copyright holders to report infringing content and have it removed or taken down.

 

It is a powerful tool that takes millions of URLs and links offline every day. In most cases, this happens for a good reason, but some takedown efforts are questionable.

DMCA Takedown Abuse

In recent years there have been numerous examples of clear abuse and impersonations, as revealed through Google’s transparency report. Abuse of the DMCA is prohibited by law and can result in legal action; Bungie’s $7.7 million lawsuit against an alleged fraudster is one example.

 

Dubious or erroneous takedown notices are not harmless. Many millions of URLs have already been ‘mistakenly’ flagged and in some cases the reported links were actually removed from Google’s search results.

 

YTMP3.nu is of the sites that sees itself as a victim of bogus takedown notices. The YouTube ripper is frequently targeted by music industry groups such as the BPI and RIAA, who accuse it of violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. However, it also appears to be targeted by one or more competitors.

 

The site has spotted several questionable notices that urge Google to remove its URLs, without a proper basis. According to YTMP3.nu, this is the work of rivals who want to remove YTMP3 from search results, in order to improve their own ranking.

Cease and Desist

This activity has been a growing source of frustration for YTMP3.nu’s operator. To put an end to the abuse, the YouTube ripper asked its lawyer to send a cease and desist and preservation demand to Google.

 

According to the letter, YTMP3.nu is willing to take legal action against the alleged fraudsters. In addition, it reserves the right to take further steps against Google if its demands are not met within the stated deadline.

 

“We write to you on behalf of Our Client because it appears that Google has become an unwitting tool used by third-parties to engage in fraudulent and unfair business practices that are causing Our Client significant damages,” the letter starts.

 

“Our Client is prepared to take immediate legal action against these third parties and, unless Google complies with Our Client’s demands herein, Our Client will consider Google to be acting in concert with these third parties in their fraudulent activities and reserves all rights as against Google.”

 

The letter puts Google on notice, claiming that its DMCA takedown process is being used for false and fraudulent takedown notices. According to YTMP3.nu, these are sent by competitors instead of legitimate rightsholders.

Two Examples

One of the highlighted takedown requests was sent under the name “Hale Hoola Hamakua”. This person, who apparently resides in Jamaica, lists a track by Damian & Stephen Marley as the copyrighted work, but there’s no evidence that the sender is indeed the rightsholder.

 

In addition, YTMP3 points out that the reported links don’t identify a specific copyrighted work on the site. Instead, the notice asks Google to delist the site’s homepage.

 

The second notice highlighted in the letter doesn’t even explain what content is supposedly being infringed. Instead, a company called “DMCA Defense” simply asks Google to remove YTMP3.nu’s front page without a reason.

No Legal Basis

The YouTube ripper continues by noting that there is no legal basis for these takedown notices, even if they are being sent by legitimate rightsholders.

 

YTMP3 states that it merely offers a general-purpose downloading tool, that automates a process that can be carried out with any regular web browser. A similar argument was used by Yout.com in its legal dispute with the RIAA, which is currently under appeal.

 

Google apparently does nothing to verify whether the senders are actually rightsholders, the letter adds, which makes it potentially liable for the abusive activity.

 

“By knowingly allowing, accepting, and processing fraudulent takedown notices, especially after specific notice, Google is aiding and abetting the fraud of the submitters of the notices and subjecting itself to potential liability,” the letter notes.

YTMP3 Requests DMCA Sender Verification

To put a halt to the fraudulent activity, YTMP3.nu wants Google to start verifying the identities of DMCA notice senders before it takes action. This includes the sender’s name, email address, and IP address.

 

On top of that, the YouTube ripper requests an immediate litigation hold for all information related to takedown notices that target YTMP3.nu URLs. That information may be used in follow-up legal proceedings. The letter gives Google 10 days to implement both requested steps.

 

YTMP3.nu is represented by Boston Law Group attorney Val Gurvits, who is also part of Yout.com’s defense team, which challenges the legitimacy of the RIAA’s claim that YouTube rippers violate the DMCA. The attorney also represented the operator of YouTube rippers FLVto and 2Conv.

 

A copy of the full cease and desist letter, directed at Google’s Copyright Manager, is available here (pdf).

 

When a company like Nintendo puts out a press release, the entire world pays attention. This week was no different.

 

Nintendo has been locked in a legal battle with French file-hosting service 1fichier for the past five years. The basic facts don’t appear to be in dispute; Nintendo informed 1fichier that it had found pirated copies of its games on the service, but 1fichier refused to take them down.

 

Nintendo responded with legal action in France and in 2021, won its case. By not taking the pirated content down, 1fichier became liable for damages, the court ruled.

 

Unhappy with the decision, 1fichier filed an appeal, but on April 12, 2023, the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed that 1fichier’s owner, DStorage SAS, “engaged its civil liability for failing to withdraw or block access to illicit copies of Nintendo games hosted on its platform, despite the notifications Nintendo had sent to it for such purposes.”

Why Would 1fichier Deliberately Expose Itself?

Nintendo’s dispute with 1fichier sounds like a straightforward copyright case; hosting companies generally avoid liability for user-uploaded content but can pay the price if they refuse to take content down. The fundamental question not addressed by Nintendo’s release is why 1fichier would intentionally expose itself to so much risk and then keep digging.

 

For the sake of all parties involved and our own sanity, legal opinions in this matter are best left to the experts. However, we’re informed that this lawsuit is the product of a fundamental disagreement, not on the removal of content per se, but on the conditions laid out in French law for a notice to be considered valid.

DStorage’s Relationship With Customers and Content

As the operator of 1fichier, DStorage states that it provides file-hosting services for its customers and, as such, the company has a duty to ensure that their data is held securely.

 

The file-hoster says that the files on its servers are uploaded by users, and it is their choice whether to keep those files entirely private, or share them more widely with others. In any event, DStorage insists it has no way of knowing what files its users upload, or what decisions they make in terms of keeping files private or communicating them to the public. It does note, however, that independent court experts found that 80% of the data on its servers is never made public.

 

Complicating matters further are 1fichier’s claims that it receives many abusive takedown notices. As a supplier of services to its customers, one gets the impression that 1fichier prefers to give the benefit of the doubt to its users, until such time that the sender of a takedown notice can show that their complaint is shown to be justified.

Nintendo Demands Takedowns

Court documents state that Nintendo “regularly submitted notifications” to DStorage relating to “illicit copies of videogames” that the company had identified as being hosted on 1fichier’s servers. In January 2018, Nintendo used a registered letter to advise DStorage of “the existence of links allowing the downloading” of pirated copies of Super Mario and Pokémon games.

 

The response from DStorage gave Nintendo two options. The company could initiate legal proceedings for the purpose of obtaining an order to establish the “manifestly unlawful nature of the content.” Alternatively, Nintendo could enter into a contractual relationship with DStorage that would grant access to takedown tools while indemnifying 1fichier against abusive takedowns.

 

Nintendo responded within days, demanding the takedown of the allegedly infringing content mentioned in the first letter while advising the existence of additional links to other unauthorized copies of the company’s games. In common with its first response, DStorage informed Nintendo that under the LCEN law, content that is alleged to infringe copyright is not “manifestly illegal.”

LCEN and the Fundamental Dispute

According to the text of France’s LCEN law, “online public communication services” cannot incur liability for content posted by users “if they were not effectively aware of their manifestly illicit nature” or if they “acted promptly to remove this data” when they were made aware of it.

 

DStorage/1fichier says it did not remove the content reported by Nintendo because it wasn’t manifestly illegal and, in any case, Nintendo had failed to meet reporting standards required under French law.

 

According to 1fichier’s commentary on its Facebook page, the unlawful nature of the content complained of must be obvious to a non-lawyer.

 

“That is to say that there should be no room for doubt, and the diligent host therefore does not have to devote resources to verifying the veracity of the allegations. It is also not up to the host to contest the reality of the rights of third parties. In addition, Intellectual Property is never presumed and must necessarily result from an originality that the rightful claimant must demonstrate.”

Other Contested Issues on Reporting Standards

According to 1fichier, the LCEN requirements for a takedown notice must include a description of the disputed content and its precise location, plus the reasons why the content must be removed, including relevant law and justification based on facts.

 

The company says that in the first instance, rightsholders are required to contact the person who actually published the allegedly infringing content online, and then supply a copy of the correspondence with that person in support of their takedown notice.

 

1fichier further claims that Nintendo was unable to prove that any of the files from the hundreds reported were actually made available to the public. We cannot independently verify that Nintendo failed to meet these alleged standards, but we are informed that this is the basis of the dispute.

 

In a nutshell, 1fichier will side with its customers and their files until claims meet certain standards. Alternatively, rightsholders can sign a contract (pdf) that grants access to takedown tools while indemnifying 1fichier of all damages and losses in the event that users’ rights are infringed.

 

There is no charge for rightsholders to use the program, and we’re informed around 50 are happy to use it; Nintendo is not one of them but the company could join almost immediately.

Paris Court of Appeal

In its decision the Paris Court of Appeal ruled that the Nintendo takedown notices “met the formal conditions” prescribed by the LCEN law. It further noted that Nintendo could not contact the person/s who made the allegedly infringing content available to the public, since 1fichier does not make its users’ contact details available on its website.

 

In broad terms, the court also found that since Nintendo is such a well-known company, with millions of games sold around the world, it could “rely on presumptions both for the ownership of their rights and for the originality of the video games.”

 

1fichier notes that files reported by Nintendo carried names such as ‘GC0013.part4.rar or PKMMEURRCGI.part1.rar or PUM.cia’ which reveal little about their contents, even when considering the profile of Nintendo. It also pointed to the availability of the takedown contract that Nintendo declined.

 

The Paris Court of Appeal ultimately sided with Nintendo, but 1fichier strongly believes that it complied with the letter of the law and says it will file an appeal against the decision. The company says that law requires certain proof to accompany a takedown notice but according to the decision of the court, none is required.

 

“The court said that in the process of the notice, we can not ask for any kind of proofs….proofs of rights, proofs of originality (no IP without), proofs of the counterfeit … it removes everything from the laws,” 1fichier says.

 

How the appeal will play out and when is unknown but this is certainly one of the more unusual cases seen in recent years.

 

If nothing else, the dispute highlights the balance of power surrounding infringement allegations. 1fichier’s claim that it receives abusive takedown demands every day show that notifications cannot always be taken on face value. Nintendo clearly wishes to protect its rights and wants 1fichier to take its claims on face value or face legal action.

 

1fichier seems to think that its users should receive the benefit of the doubt, or alternatively, Nintendo can sign on the dotted line and accept liability in case things go wrong. One can’t help but think that somewhere in all of that there was a compromise to be found but this is no ordinary case.

 

For those used to dealing with the DMCA, it may feel completely alien.

 

Over the past few years, Brazil has worked hard to combat online piracy from various angles.

 

The “Operation 404” campaigns, in particular, have led to numerous takedowns and arrests with the most recent wave taking place last month.

 

Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security (MJSP) praised the international mobilization which resulted in 11 arrests. In addition, 63 music apps were taken down in the enforcement push, while 128 pirate site domains were blocked by ISPs.

 

“The objective is the removal of audio and video content, such as games and music, blocking and suspension of illegal streaming websites and applications, de-indexing of content in search engines and removal of profiles and pages on social networks,” the Ministry commented at the time.

Google Court Order

These anti-piracy actions have been widely covered in the press, also internationally. Noticeably absent from the many dozens of reports were the details of the sites and apps actually targeted. A few weeks on, we may be able to partially fill this gap.

 

The Ministry of Justice specifically mentioned that search engines would be required to deindex domain names. We hadn’t seen any evidence of that but yesterday Google made note of a court order submitted by Brazilian authorities, which requested the removal of 167 domain names from its index.

 

These types of government-backed blocking requests are relatively rare. While we can’t confirm that these are the exact same domains that were targeted in the latest Operation 404 wave, it certainly would make sense considering the information we have available.

Vizer.tv and Other Targets

Unlike a similar notice, sent by the Ministry of Justice two years ago, the recent complaint doesn’t include a copy of the court order. After that time, Google was asked to remove over 200 domains from its search results in Brazil, including The Pirate Bay, 1337x, YTS and Fmovies.

 

The latest notice targets many lesser-known sites, but also several that are quite popular in Brazil. Vizer.tv appears to be one of the largest streaming portals on the list with more than 11 million monthly visits of which 88% come from Brazil.

 

If we take a closer look at the recent traffic pattern for Vizer.tv, we see that there was a significant drop in visitors that started last month. This coincides with the Operation 404 wave and the associated blocking actions.

 

Other domain names that are listed in the court order also lost traffic last month, such as myfamilycinema.com. Others, including cuevana.ch, tvfree.xyz and ultraflix.tv have started to redirect to new domain names, presumably in an attempt to circumvent the enforcement actions.

No Action Yet?

Google typically complies with these types of court orders. In response to a similar request from Brazilian authorities two years ago, it swiftly deindexed the targeted domains from local search results.

 

At the time of writing, however, Vizer.tv and all other domains we checked from the recent court order have yet to be deindexed.

 

It seems likely that Google needs more time to respond to the order. We have seen this before with other blocking requests, where Google was asked to deindex pirate sites that ISPs have to block, with which it eventually complied.

 

—

 

A copy of the “court order complaint” Google received from Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security was posted on Lumen yesterday. The full list of domain names is available below.

 

– 123moviess.se
– 123series.bz
– 4kfilmeshd.net
– aboboraflix.online
– amazflix.live
– armagedomfilmes.top
– azseries.org
– bbflix.pro
– betaseries.com
– bkserieshd.org
– bkseriestv.live
– bludv.co
– bludvfilmes.tv
– bludvfilmes4k.net
– blueplay.me
– blueplay.vip
– bluetvdigital.com.br
– bluetvrecargas.com.br
– bluf.online
– boxfilmes2.live
– braziltv.ru
– canais.live
– canaislive.com
– canaisplay.com
– centralflix.online
– chilliflix.com
– compreredplay.com
– cuevana.ch
– cuevana3.info
– desenhosanimados.site
– detran-br.com
– deusdotorrent.com
– digaonline.pro
– downloadlivre.net
– downloadlivre.top
– dozitos.com
– dublaseries.net
– elitecinesonline.info
– express.pro
– familiaredplay.com
– filmelgbt.com
– filmesongratis.com
– filmezando.cc
– filmezando.net
– flixhd.cc
– flixhd.io
– fonlinebr.com
– fonlinee.net
– full-movie.org
– fullmaxtv.net
– futebol.flog.br
– futebolbrasil.online
– g1novelas.fun
– gdrivemovies.xyz
– gfilmesflix.org
– good-torrent.com
– gordolafilmes.com
– gordotorrent.com
– hdfilme.pics
– hdfilme.top
– hdflix.club
– hdonline.eu
– hdtoday.mx
– himovies.to
– hostfilmes.com
– kibado.com
– limontorrents.com
– lookmovie2.to
– lovemovie.org
– maxcine.net
– megapeliculas.xyz
– megapeliculasrip.net
– meucinema.org
– minhateca.su
– minhateca.to
– movies.hdflix.club
– moviesnation.de
– moviesnation.mobi
– moviesnation.pw
– movietorrent.co
– moviexfilm.com
– mp4hdd.com
– myfamilycinema.com
– myfamilycinemaapp.com
– nossotorrent.com
– novaflix.io
– novaflix.vin
– novelasflix.com
– novelasflix.net
– obaflix.net
– onlinetvhd.net
– otampadabola.net
– otampadabola.org
– otampadabola.tv
– overflix.cc
– overflix.com
– overflix.live
– overflix.online
– overflix.org
– pelisplushd.nz
– pelisplushd.to
– play.bkserieshd.live
– playrecargas.com.br
– redplayoficial.com.br
– redplayplanos.com
– rjseries.live
– rjseries.online
– seriale-online.net
– serialeonline.io
– seriesempire.com
– soap2day-to.org
– soap2day.tube
– soap2days.la
– starflix.live
– suatela.com
– suatela.net
– superfilmes.cx
– superfilmesonline.pro
– superseries2.live
– tabonitobrasil.biz
– tabonitobrasil.co
– tabonitobrasil.us
– theflix.com.br
– thepiratefilmes.fun
– thepiratefilmeshd.org
– topdezfilmes.info
– torrent-movies.fun
– tugastream.club
– tv0800.xyz
– tvcanais.online
– tvexpresspro.digital
– tvfree.xyz
– tvhd-online.org
– tvonline.fm
– tvpro.live
– tvprodigital.com.br
– tvprodigital.net
– tyflex.co
– tyflex.tv
– uauflix.site
– ultracinebr.com
– ultraflix.live
– ultraflix.org
– ultraflix.tv
– ultraflixtv.live
– universorangers.xyz
– varioscanais.com
– vembaixarfilmes.xyz
– ver-filmes-online.com
– verfutebol.live
– verfutebol.tv
– vgtvon.com
– vizer.in
– vizer.info
– vizer.tv
– vizer.vc
– vizer.vip
– w10.hdonline.eu
– ww2.bbflix.pro
– www.brasiltvweb.com
– www.tvexpress.io
– www5.himovies.to
– www9.pelisplushd.to
– xxiku.com
– yesmovie.bz
– yts.rs
– zeroflix.org

 

While some anti-piracy groups focus on taking content down, others prefer to take entire sites down.

 

The benefits of the latter approach are obvious; when a site no longer exists, the need to send future takedown notices is eliminated. It’s also much more easily said than done but certainly not impossible.

 

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has taken down hundreds of sites, and it’s often possible to predict which sites are about to feel the heat. DMCA subpoenas obtained at courts in the United States compel intermediaries to hand over details of pirate site operators, and since the applications are public, the names of sites are public too.

 

A series of recent applications revealed ACE attempting to gain information on The Pirate Bay’s operators but other sites were mentioned too. Despite having millions of monthly visitors, two of them have just disappeared into thin air.

Bulgarian Exodus

Over the past several days, at least four pirate sites with a focus on Bulgaria disappeared without warning. According to SimilarWeb data, Filmisub.com was the largest with around 7.8 million visits per month.

 

Filmisub specialized in streaming movies and TV shows. From its apparently large selection, ACE/MPA complained about just one (Shaft) but that was enough to get Cloudflare to hand over the operators’ details. Of the four sites confirmed to have gone offline, Filmisub is the only one to have left any kind of message.

 

“The site is permanently closed. It will never work again in any form whatsoever,” it announced before disappearing offline.

 

“All sites, pages and groups on social networks that impersonate us offering applications and promises of return and continued activity have nothing to do with us and are created to mislead and abuse you in some way by using our name.”

Filmi7 Down, Most Likely Permanently Out

Before it went offline, Filmi7.com was another popular site with a focus on Bulgaria. SimilarWeb data indicates the site received around 2.7 million visits per month, with video content the main attraction.

 

Filmi7 left no goodbye message, at least as far as we can determine. However, there are signs that it will likely follow the same terminal path as Filmisub.

 

As the image below shows, in court documents Filmi7 was also accused of making available the movie Shaft without permission. The URL pattern is identical to that deployed by Filmisub, so when combined with other telltale signs relating to site infrastructure, it’s highly likely that the two platforms were connected.

 

The remaining pair of sites were not mentioned in the ACE/MPA subpoenas and neither left a shutdown message. Various rumors on Bulgarian forums are promoting theories on their demise but there may be a simple explanation based on available information.

Muvibg.com and Kinofen.net

When compared to Filmisub and Filmi7, Kinofen.net and Muvibg.com were much smaller sites, 880K and 230K visits per month respectively.

 

In common with Filmi7, Kinofen makes an appearance on the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit’s Infringing Website List, a fate avoided by Filmisub despite it having considerably more traffic. Kinofen was first flagged by police in September 2021 and Filmi7 was added to the list in December 2020.

 

It’s possible that Muvibg’s lower traffic levels rendered it less interesting to the authorities, but the circumstances of its disappearance along with the other three sites suggests that it won’t appear on the list in future; all four sites were apparently connected so they may all share the same fate.

 

Ever since its launch in 2009, rightsholders have complained that file-hosting platform 1fichier.com fails to take intellectual property rights seriously.

 

1fichier operates a “freemium” business model which allows users to access the platform for free and then pay a fee to have various restrictions removed. 1fichier allows user content to be accessed via links posted elsewhere, meaning that when users upload infringing content, links render that content available to the public.

 

Rightsholders have publicly criticized the platform for more than a decade, claiming that 1fichier’s response to takedown notices is minimal – in some cases amounting to a compliance rate of just 0.12%.

Nintendo Files Lawsuit

With the goal of forcing 1fichier to comply with its takedown notices and pay compensation for damages incurred due to its poor response, Nintendo sued 1fichier’s owner, Dstorage SAS.

 

The Judicial Court of Paris sided with Nintendo in a decision handed down on May 25, 2021. The Court found that Dstorage could be held liable for failing to remove illegal copies of Nintendo games hosted on 1fichier, based on notifications sent by rightsholders.

 

The court also addressed 1fichier’s assertion that content does not have to be removed without authorization from a court. The platform was informed that direct takedown notices from rightsholders do not require a court order to be valid. 1fichier was also instructed to publish the following notice:

 

By decision dated May 25, 2021, the Paris court ruled that the company DSTORAGE, which operates the website 1fichier.com, has engaged its liability as as a content host by not removing illegal content despite the notifications made by Nintendo Co., Ltd., The Pokémon Company, Creatures Inc. and DE Inc. and ordered it to pay NINTENDO Co Ltd, the sums of 885,500 euros and 50,000 euros in compensation for its damages.

Court of Appeal Sides With Nintendo

A press release published by Nintendo on April 17 reveals that on April 12, 2023, the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed that Dstorage SAS “engaged its civil liability for failing to withdraw or block access to illicit copies of Nintendo games hosted on its platform, despite the notifications Nintendo had sent to it for such purposes.”

 

Nintendo says the Court of Appeal ruling confirms that rightsholders are not required to obtain a court order before filing requests with file-hosting services to remove or block access to infringing content. In respect of copyright infringement notices or trademark-based takedowns, rightsholders are not required to provide information that goes beyond the requirements of the law.

 

“Nintendo welcomes this judgment of the Court of Appeal whose message is clear: by refusing to remove or block access to unauthorized copies of video games notwithstanding prior notification, a provider of share hosting services such as that Dstorage (1fichier) is liable under French law, exposing it in particular to damages,” Nintendo says.

 

“Dstorage’s commitment to liability is important for Nintendo, but also for the entire video game industry, since shared content hosts such as 1Fichier cannot claim that a prior court decision is necessary for the removal of illegal content.”

Damages Award Appears to Have Been Reduced

Nintendo reports that the Court of Appeal ordered Dstorage to pay 442,750 euros in damages and 25,000 euros in legal costs incurred by Nintendo. The videogame company did not share the Court of Appeal’s decision and thus far we’ve been unable to obtain a copy. That leaves a key question unanswered.

 

According to the May 2021 decision, 1fichier was required to publish the fact that it had been ordered to pay 885,500 euros, an amount that’s exactly half of the damages award made public this week. The reasons for that are currently unknown but the decision can still be appealed.

 

The official stable release of the first person shooter game Dark and Darker is eagerly awaited by hundreds of thousands of fans.

 

Whether the full game will actually be released is uncertain, however, as the game is at the center of a legal dispute.

 

Last month, police in South Korea raided the offices of Dark and Darker’s developers, local game studio Ironmace. The legal action was triggered by a complaint from game publisher Nexon, which accused its rival of copyright infringement and stealing trade secrets.

 

Ironmace was founded by former Nexon developers who allegedly took thousands of files with them. The game publisher believes that these files were used to develop Dark and Darker, which is similar to the “P3” game project Nexon is working on.

 

Following the raid, the disgruntled publisher also complained to Steam, which banned Dark and Darker from its platform. And when Ironmace released its latest alpha test via BitTorrent last weekend, its adversary pulled out all the stops to slow down distribution.

Nexon Sues Ironmace in U.S. Court

The recent actions show that Nexon is serious about protecting its rights. This isn’t limited to sending takedown notices and legal threats either; the company also filed a lawsuit at a federal court in Seattle, Washington, last Friday.

 

The 55-page complaint accuses Ironmace of copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. In addition to the Korean game studio, two former Nexon employees – Ju-Hyun Choi and Terence Seungha Park – are personally listed as defendants too.

 

Choi is currently employed as Ironmace’s Managing Director but he used to work as the director of Nexon’s P3 game project. Park, who is a US citizen, is the CEO and co-founder of Ironmace and was previously employed as the head of a design team for Nexon’s P3 project.

 

“In flagrant breach of their obligations to Nexon, the individual defendants stole P3 source code, audiovisual, and other materials that Nexon developed through a substantial expenditure of time and money,” Nexon writes in its complaint.

 

The complaint alleges that Choi started requiring people from the P3 team, while working at Nexon, to recreate the game project outside of the company. He eventually took roughly half of the team with him to start Ironmace and develop the Dark and Darker game.

 

“Choi succeeded in recruiting nearly half of the P3 team, including, Defendant Park, the former director of game development at Nexon. Choi and Park formed Defendant Ironmace as the corporate vehicle to exploit the assets Choi stole,” Nexon alleges.

Similar Look and Feel

The stolen content includes more than 10,900 visual data source files, Nexon claims, while protectable source code was confiscated as well. These assets were allegedly used to create Dark and Darker, which shows several similarities to Nexus’ unpublished P3 project.

 

According to the complaint, visual elements weren’t directly copied. Instead, the “look and feel” of both games are similar. The same also applies to characters, movements, settings, and other elements.

 

The complaint provides a visual comparison of several of these similarities. For example, Nexon mentions that both games contain identical monsters, including the “Mimic” chest, “Wraith,” and a cave troll, shown below.

Assets Purchased from Unreal

Ironmace previously contested the copyright infringement claims by pointing out that it did nothing wrong. Among other things, the developer said that most Dark and Darker assets were purchased from the Unreal Engine marketplace.

 

“Our code was built from scratch. Most of our assets are purchased from the Unreal marketplace. All other assets and all game designs docs were created inhouse. […]. As far as we know you cannot copyright a game genre,” Ironmace said in a public statement.

 

Nexon disagrees with this conclusion. While the assets may have been bought from Unreal, the “look and feel” and the similarity in the “arrangement” of the assets could still be considered copyright infringement.

 

“No matter how creative a developer’s selection of assets, the selection could be copied at will by any other developer. Works of enormous creativity would be left unprotected by copyright simply because the building blocks of the work came from the Unreal Engine Marketplace,” Nexon writes in its complaint.

 

Based on these and a variety of other arguments, Nexon asks the court to put a stop to the alleged copyright infringements. In addition, it seeks damages for the unauthorized activities, including the allegedly stolen trade secrets and other ill-gotten gains.

 

—

 

A copy of the complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, is available here (pdf). Hat tip to Eurogamer

 

It’s not unusual for piracy groups to have dozens of domains in storage for when things go wrong, but none has a bigger collection than Hollywood itself.

 

The MPA still owns isoHunt’s domain following its legal defeat a decade ago, alongside other spoils of war following battles with Popcorn Time, YTS/YIFY (the real ones), Hotfile and Openload. These examples represent just a handful of domains from a collection that has exploded since the 2017 launch of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.

 

Over the past few days, another dozen or so domains boosted the existing haul of several hundred domains that no longer play a part in the piracy landscape.

IPTV Targets Shutdown, Domains Stripped

As reported last November, DMCA subpoena applications filed in the United States revealed that ACE had developed an interest in pirate IPTV service MagisTV.

 

Early December 2022, ACE/MPA quickly took control of two domains – Magisglobal.net and Magistvapk.com – presumably as part of its ongoing investigation. During the last week or so, several additional domains were taken over, including magistvcostarica.com, magistvglobal.com, magistvparaguay.com, magistvbolivia.com, magistvbrasil.com,, magistvchile.com, magistvcolombia.com and magistv.global.

 

Late last week, signs pointed to yet another IPTV takedown. A service that had been variously known as Opt TV, Optimum IPTV, Opt Hosting and Opt Hosting IPTV, was suddenly identifiable as another ACE casualty. Offering a reported 1,300 channels, including PPV events, international and 24/7 channels, Opt IPTV had been available across multiple devices for as little as $8 per month.

 

With key domains opt.tv and opthosting.com now redirecting to the ACE anti-piracy portal, that rodeo is probably over. Whether the same is true for another domain redirecting to ACE is less clear, but this one is markedly different from those usually associated with ACE work.

Seizures and Redirects

One of the clearest signs that ACE has shut down a pirate site or service is the appearance of a seizure banner on the platform’s homepage. The text is unmistakable and largely self-explanatory.

 

In the majority of cases, a WHOIS lookup reveals that domains are now operated by the Motion Picture Association. This removes all doubt over a domain’s status but in some cases, domains are never transferred. In January 2021, ACE announced the closure of Megadede; the site’s domains were never transferred yet still redirect to ACE.

 

There are also cases where piracy domains redirect to ACE for no apparent reason, the MPA previously informed us. That raises the question of what alliance4creativity.xyz is all about and why it currently redirects to the official portal at alliance4creativity.com after being registered last month.

Domain Shows No Sign of MPA/ACE Ownership

Domains under full MPA/ACE control usually have a particular signature. With MarkMonitor listed as the registrar, the Motion Picture Association, Inc. is openly displayed as the registrant along with one of two specific email addresses. The domains also use the MPA’s name servers at ns3 and ns4.films.org and ultimately are directed to Amazon-owned IP addresses.

 

Alliance4creativity.xyz has different characteristics. It was registered with Namesilo on March 27 with PrivacyGuardian.org hiding the registrant’s details. The domain uses Cloudflare for hosting and DNS, and uses ProtonMail as its email provider. It transitions seamlessly to the real ACE portal like the official domains do, despite having none of their technical characteristics.

 

The MPA informs TF that they’re investigating the domain, so we hope to get a comment in due course. However, if this turns out to be an imposter domain, the potential for abuse can’t be understated. ACE has a pretty fearsome reputation woven into its branding so if people believe that they’re being contacted by the real ACE, that could lead them to do extraordinary things.

How Bad Could it Get?

Only MPA/ACE can clear up the true status of this unusual domain, but given the current climate of phishing, extortion, blackmail and similar online exploitation, considering the potential implications is useful since the same tactics are widely deployed elsewhere.

 

If a victim can be convinced they’re speaking to a specific person or entity, the potential for abuse is almost limitless. Considering that pirates represent obvious targets, a smart opening move in a hypothetical scenario would be to ensure no one else gets involved by insisting on confidentiality. From there, a malicious actor could attempt to ‘seize’ domains, extract a settlement, or resort to basic blackmail.

 

None of that would help ACE and could even make enforcement efforts more difficult in the future. There may also be a more benign explanation but only ACE/MPA and the domain owner are in a position to confirm that. We’ll update this article as soon as we know more.

 

Update: TF received an email from the domain owner who claims to buy ‘important domains’ to resell. We asked what use the domain could be put to and we’re waiting for a response.

 

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

 

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

 

This week we have three newcomers on the list. “Avatar: The Way of Water”, which came out as a high-quality pirate release, is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on April 17 are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrent sites
1	(3)	Avatar: The Way of Water	7.8 / trailer
2	(1)	Shazam! Fury of the Gods	6.3 / trailer
3	(2)	65	5.5 / trailer
4	(…)	The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die	7.3 / trailer
5	(4)	Creed III	7.8 / trailer
6	(5)	John Wick: Chapter 4	8.5 / trailer
7	(10)	Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania	6.4 / trailer
8	(7)	Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre	6.5 / trailer
9	(…)	The Super Mario Bros. Movie	7.4 / trailer
10	(…)	Puss in Boots: The Last Wish	7.9 / trailer

 

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