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 two new entries on the list. “The Batman” is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on May 02 are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrent sites
1	(2)	Uncharted	6.6 / trailer
2	(1)	The Batman	8.4 / trailer
3	(5)	Ambulance	6.3 / trailer
4	(3)	Spider-Man: No Way Home	8.6 / trailer
5	(…)	365 Days: This Day	2.6 / trailer
6	(6)	Moonfall	5.2 / trailer
7	(8)	Death on the Nile	6.5 / trailer
8	(10)	Dune	8.1 / trailer
9	(…)	Silverton Siege	5.9 / trailer
10	(back)	Turning Red	7.0 / trailer

 

 

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

 

Earlier this year, producer and cinema investor Moshe Edery fired warning shots across the bows of Mastercard, Visa and American Express for continuing to provide payment processing to pirate streaming sites.

 

Edery, the co-founder of Screen iL, an international TV streaming platform aimed at Israelis living abroad, said the companies must be aware that pirate sites are involved in criminal copyright infringement and money laundering. The suggestion was that by continuing to do business with them, the payment companies should also expect legal action against them.

 

While that would be a first in anti-piracy enforcement, several Edery-related companies have just won three separate copyright lawsuits in the United States. The judgments and injunctions not only break new ground in the United States but might also represent one of the most significant anti-piracy wins of the century.

Edery-Affiliated Companies Sued Pirate Sites in 2021

Last year, companies including United King Film Distribution, DBS Satellite Services, and Hot Communication filed three copyright infringement lawsuits in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Each complaint targeted a specific pirate streaming site – Israel-tv.com, Israel.tv and Sdarot.tv – the latter being Israel’s most popular pirate streaming site with millions of visitors each month.

 

At least in broad terms, the lawsuits were relatively unremarkable. They followed traditional lines by demanding $150,000 in statutory damages for every copyrighted work infringed and an injunction to prevent infringement moving forward. From the beginning it seemed highly unlikely that the operators of these sites would turn up in court to defend themselves, meaning that a win for the plaintiffs in these cases was never really in doubt.

 

Late last week, the plaintiffs won all three lawsuits via default judgments. The court ordered the operators of Israel-tv.com, Israel.tv and Sdarot.tv to each pay $7,650,000 in statutory copyright infringement damages related to 51 registered works owned by the plaintiffs.

 

While almost $23 million in damages isn’t an inconsiderable amount, the injunctions handed down in all three cases are something never seen before in a TV/movie piracy case.

Permanent Injunctions Break New Ground in the US

In all three judgments, the defendants are enjoined and restrained from infringing the plaintiffs’ rights, including by streaming, distributing, or otherwise making any of their copyrighted works available to the public. They are also banned from operating their websites from existing domains or any other they might use in the future.

 

All pretty standard stuff so far – and then the big one.

 

All ISPs…and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today…or to be used in the future by the Defendants…by any technological means available on the ISPs’ systems.

 

Attached to each judgment is a list of US-based Internet service providers that are required to not only block the domains currently used by the pirate sites but any they might use in the future too. The first page of the list of ISPs is shown below but there are nine pages in total covering almost 100 residential ISPs.

 

The injunctions also clarify that the list is non-exhaustive, meaning that the orders also apply to all other ISPs providing services in the United States.

 

“The domain addresses and any Newly Detected Websites shall be channeled in such a way that users will be unable to connect and/or use the Website, and will be diverted by the ISPs’ DNS servers to a landing page operated and controlled by Plaintiffs,” the injunctions continue.

 

It’s not clear how long it will take all ISPs in the United States to comply with the order but the specified landing page is already live at http://zira-usa-11025.org.

 

So what we appear to have here are three substantially identical judgments and permanent injunctions that compel all ISPs in the United States to implement whole-site blocking for copyright infringement. Not only that, these are examples of so-called ‘dynamic’ injunctions that are designed to adapt to any anti-blocking countermeasures the sites might deploy in the future.

 

These injunctions exist in several other countries already but at least as far as we know, this is the first time that copyright holders have been granted such sweeping powers in the United States. SOPA promised whole-site blocking for piracy but a decade later it transpires that existing copyright law was good enough already.

Additional Features of the Injunctions

All three injunctions prevent any third-party company (including ISPs, webhosts, CDN providers, DNS providers, domain name companies, advertising services, financial institutions, payment processors, etc) from doing any business with the sites at their current domains or any new ones.

 

All domains must be channeled to the landing page operated by the plaintiffs and all companies where the defendants hold accounts must be located and frozen. To satisfy the damages listed in each judgment, any funds in those accounts must be transferred to the plaintiffs within 30 days.

 

The plaintiffs can also conduct additional discovery against pretty much any entity they believe to be connected to the infringing sites (or their operators) to locate more assets.

 

If the defendants don’t like the Court’s ruling, they are invited to appeal but having avoided court thus far, that seems unlikely. Whether every (or any) ISP in the United States will contest the injunction is currently unknown, but we can be fairly confident that if they choose not to, these three site-blocking injunctions won’t be the last in the United States.

 

All three judgments and injunctions can be found here (1,2,3, pdf)

 

Piracy is a complicated phenomenon and the reported effects on legal consumption are not always straightforward.

 

The issue has been researched extensively with both positive and negative effects being reported, often varying based on the type of content studied.

 

A new academic study published in the “Information & Management” journal adds another piece to the puzzle. Together with two colleagues, Korean researcher Dongyeon Kim studied how online piracy affects legitimate viewership and how “Internet buzz” mediates this impact.

 

Specifically, the researchers tracked BitTorrent downloads and analyzed how they impacted legitimate viewership of several top TV shows in the United States. The sample, taken in 2018, consists of 20 TV shows in total, including the popular titles Arrow, Lucifer, Supernatural, The Blacklist, and The Flash.

Piracy, Buzz, and Views

The researchers then looked at Google, Twitter, and YouTube activity to see how piracy affected the online “buzz” for these shows and how that impacted the legitimate viewership.

 

On a basic level, the results are in line with what most piracy skeptics would assume. More piracy leads to fewer legitimate viewers, suggesting that piracy has a detrimental effect on revenues. However, that’s not the full picture.

 

The researchers also found that piracy increases “Internet buzz” which in turn increases the viewership of the TV shows. Following a mediation analysis, they conclude that the negative effect of piracy is significantly decreased by the extra attention.

 

“We show that although the direct effect of media consumption through BitTorrent to TV viewership is negative, the indirect effect that mediates Internet buzz is positive, which dilutes the negative effect of digital piracy,” the researchers write.

 

Further analysis reveals that this mediating effect is the strongest for less popular shows, which benefit more from the online buzz. In addition, the effect is stronger during the second half of a season.

Boosting Legal Viewership

The latter point is worth zooming in on. The findings show that the online buzz generated by piracy doesn’t really have much of an effect on earlier episodes. However, it was clearly visible later on.

 

In fact, when the mediation effect of online buzz is taken into account, piracy has a positive effect on legitimate viewership in some cases.

 

“The mediating effect was negligible for episodes in the first half, such that the negative effect of digital piracy prevailed during the first half. The mediating effect of Internet buzz was significant in the second half, thereby diluting the negative effect of digital piracy, and even creating an overall positive piracy effect for TV ratings,” the researchers write.

 

All in all, the research shows that TV piracy can generate significant online “buzz” which, in some cases, may lead to more viewers.

 

This is a controversial take in Hollywood but it’s not completely alien. Almost ten years ago, Game of Thrones director David Petrarca suggested that piracy helped to create “cultural buzz” around the series, which could eventually boost the number of HBO subscriptions.

 

A copy of the Information & Management paper titled “The effect of TV drama piracy: An analysis of digital piracy users, internet buzz, and TV drama viewership” is available on Sciencedirect, behind a paywall.

 

Bing has a relatively small market share but that doesn’t mean that it’s being ignored by copyright holders.

 

Microsoft’s search engine processes millions of takedown requests per week on average and these numbers add up quickly.

142,855,667 URLs

Bing’s latest transparency report was published last week, allowing us to take a closer look at the latest trends. The data show that, in 2021, Bing was asked to remove more than 144 million URLs.

 

More than 99% of these requests were valid and accepted, which ultimately resulted in the removal of 142,855,667 URLs. This is a small increase compared to the 125 million URLs that were taken down a year earlier.

 

Looking more closely at the data, we see that there was a sharp drop in removal requests in the second half of the year. The number of reported URLs dropped from 103 million in the first six months to 41 million in the months after.

Top Senders and Targets

The drop in takedown volume can largely be explained by a single takedown sender. More specifically, it’s caused by the absence of requests from “Remove Your Media” toward the end of the year.

 

Remove Your Media works with various ‘Manga’ copyright holders and sent Bing over 50 million takedown requests in the first half of 2021. In the second half, this dropped to a measly 46k.

 

With over a third of all reported URLs, the company was still the top sender in 2021, followed by the UK music group BPI and Marketly with 31 million and 11 million reported URLs respectively.

 

When we look at the most reported domains, manga-related sites are on top as well. Mangapark.net was targeted more than 2.5 million times, followed by related domains such as Mangafox and Ninemanga.

Spillover

As we learned recently, these removals also appear to affect other search engines that rely on Bing’s data. These include DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Qwant, and Ecosia.

 

To give an example, one of our news articles about a Game of Thrones leak was removed from Bing’s search results due to erroneous takedown requests. As a result, that article was nowhere to be found in the other search engines either.

 

After we covered this mistake, the article reappeared in Bing. Unsurprisingly, it reappeared in Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and other search engines as well. However, other removed news articles that we didn’t mention, including this article about several movie screener leaks, are still unfindable at the time of writing.

 

This takedown spillover effect saves copyright holders a lot of time and effort. However, for those who are targeted by takedown mistakes, it just adds insult to injury.

 

In 2018, broadcaster DISH Network sued the people behind pirate IPTV service SetTV.

 

The defendants were eventually ordered to pay DISH $90 million in damages and comply with the terms of a permanent injunction that prevented them from operating a similar service in the future. This February, DISH alleged that the terms of the injunction had been breached.

 

A month later, DISH and NagraStar followed up with a new lawsuit claiming that former SetTV operators Jason LaBossiere, Sean Beaman, and Stefan Gollner had launched three new pirate IPTV services/brands.

 

According to the complaint, ExpediteTV, Mundo TV, and Must TV offered DISH copyrighted content. As a result, the men are liable for breaches of the DMCA and Federal Communications Act, and are in contempt of court.

LaBossiere Slams DISH in Answer to Complaint

LaBossiere has now responded to DISH’s comprehensive allegations which are partly based on evidence obtained from telephone conversations recorded at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. LaBossiere comes out swinging, reminding the court that after eight years of Department of Justice litigation, a massive judgment against DISH put the company into financial turmoil.

 

“Pursuant to a six-week trial in 2016, Dish Network L.L.C. (‘Dish’) was fined $280,000,000, of which it agreed to pay $210,000,000 in 2020 after Dish was found in violation of federal and state law. Since 2017, Dish has been struggling to keep its stock price up from its 2015 and 2017 peaks,” LaBossiere’s answer begins.

 

“In order to find new profit centers, this $15.49 billion dollar company will stop at nothing to bully people into settlements to help its bottom line.”

LaBossiere Admits Involvement With ExpediteTV

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the level of detail in DISH’s new complaint, LaBossiere does not deny being involved in ExpediteTV. However, he claims that DISH’s allegations lack nuance. Any involvement, he says, was aimed at turning his “prior distribution channel” into a legitimate business offering lawful licensed content, for which DISH is now seeking to “punish” him.

 

“Dish gained the information in this case from subpoenas issued in a closed federal case issued with no notice to any party or court. The federal court enter [sic] an order exclaiming that it did not have jurisdiction. Clearly, Dish will do anything to add to its bottom line,” his counsel informs the court.

ExpediteTV Was Supposed to Be Licensed and Legal

LaBossiere then recalls another blast-from-past – Ominverse One World Television – an IPTV company that agreed to pay the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment $50 million in damages after content licensing deals it believed it had in place were found to be invalid.

 

“While LaBossiere was initially working with ExpediteTV and Beaman to create a new platform with licensed content through Omniverse One World Television, Inc (‘Omniverse’), LaBossiere’s limited involvement was to find a middleware company for the licensed content and reviewed and made recommendations for the initial marketing blast in 2018,” his answer reads.

 

Noting that Omniverse eventually shut down, LaBossiere suggests that his co-defendants in the current lawsuit may have taken a different approach and if that involved rebroadcasting DISH content, he wasn’t a participant.

 

“Apparently, and according to the Plaintiff’s Complaint, others that may have been involved with ExpediteTV changed the course of ExpediteTV’s business model from content licensed from Omniverse, likely as the result of Omniverse no longer offering its service,” his rebuttal adds.

Involved in Expedite TV, Never Heard of Mundo TV and Must TV

LaBossiere admits that ExpediteTV was advertised as a subscription-based streaming service “providing over 800+ channels” but says that his involvement stopped short of infringing DISH’s rights. Any ‘device codes’ (IPTV subscriptions) processed through ExpediteTV related only to licensed content and if they went beyond that, he has no knowledge.

 

Additionally, LaBossiere admits that one or more people utilized an address related to him to register companies connected to ExpediteTV but he denies benefiting from them to the extent that involved any DISH content.

 

Regarding the other IPTV brands mentioned in the lawsuit (Mundo TV and Must TV), LaBossiere says that before reading the DISH lawsuit, he’d never heard of them and he had nothing to do with the processing of their credit card payments.

 

“LaBossiere prays this Court will deny the relief requested by Plaintiffs, issue sanctions against Plaintiff for wrongfully issuing subpoenas in a closed case and for a wrongful purpose, and award attorney’s fees and costs against Plaintiffs,” he concludes.

 

Separately, defendant Stefan Gollner has filed a motion with the court asking to be dismissed from the action for lack of personal jurisdiction. He wants the court to resolve this jurisdictional challenge prior to disposing of DISH’s motion for a preliminary injunction.

 

The related court documents can be found here (1,2,3, pdf)

 

The Office of the United States Trade Representative has just released its 2022 Special 301 Report detailing the state of intellectual property protection and enforcement by trading partners around the world.

 

The annual report aims to spotlight laws, policies, and practices of foreign countries that fail to meet standards set by the United States. This public document seeks to inform the public and trading partners and hopes to be a “positive catalyst” for change.

 

The Special 301 Report places the most problematic countries on its ‘Priority Watch List’. This year Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Venezuela meet the criteria.

 

Almost two dozen others are featured in the standard ‘Watch List’ – Algeria, Barbados. Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Mexico, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

 

Ukraine was destined to appear on either the Priority or standard Watch List, but its Special 301 review has been suspended due to the ongoing Russian invasion.

 

The 88-page report covers a broad range of intellectual property rights issues. In our summary, we’ll focus on matters related to online piracy and enforcement (or lack thereof).

USTR: Broadband Penetration is Good for Trade But Helps Pirates

There can be little doubt that increased availability of fast broadband connections is a boon for global trade. Legal content distribution platforms rely on excellent connectivity to grow their businesses, spreading everything from movies, television, and music, to electronic books and beyond. However, the US government warns that greater connectivity for legal content benefits pirates too.

 

“Online piracy is the most challenging copyright enforcement issue in many foreign markets. For example, during the review period, countries such as Argentina, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, India, Mexico, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, Switzerland, Thailand, Ukraine, and Vietnam had high levels of online piracy and lacked effective enforcement,” the report reads.

Pirate IPTV Services Are a Global Problem

First mentioned in the USTR’s 2017 ‘Notorious Markets’ report, piracy-configured set-top boxes (‘Illicit Streaming Devices’) are still considered a major threat to many US businesses including movie/TV show producers, sports leagues, and legitimate streaming, on-demand, and over-the-top media service providers. ISDs are often supplied with free infringing apps that aggregate content but can also be used alongside subscriptions to pirate IPTV services.

 

The USTR says that these for-profit entities are supported by complex technical infrastructures and along with ISDs, cause high levels of piracy globally. In particular, the report calls out “notable” levels of infringement in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Guatemala, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

 

The USTR says that the use of illicit streaming devices is excessively high in Brazil, and the number of criminal prosecutions has been insufficient to deal with the problem. Countries such as Algeria, Colombia and Guatemala are signaled as pirate IPTV problem areas but others receive more detailed criticism.

 

China is described as a “leading source and exporter of systems that facilitate copyright piracy”. The USTR calls for “sustained action” against ISDs, websites and online platforms containing or facilitating access to unlicensed content, and piracy apps that facilitate access to such websites.

 

The US welcomes new amendments to Chinese law, including protections against the circumvention of technological protection measures, but notes that criminal liability for the manufacture, distribution, and exportation of circumvention devices needs clarification.

Movie ‘Camming’

The disruption of COVID-19 saw some movies premiering in theaters and on streaming services simultaneously. Within hours, pirate copies were available too, mostly in very high quality, having been ‘ripped’ from these platforms. This week, John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theatre Owners, declared the simultaneous release strategy “dead as a serious business model” and said piracy was to blame.

 

This means that the unauthorized recording of movies in cinemas is set to bounce back. The USTR is aware of the threat and names several countries that need to step up their anti-camming games.

 

“Stakeholders continue to report serious concerns regarding unauthorized camcords. For example, in Russia, the number of sourced camcords prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was reportedly 48 in 2018 and 45 in 2019. While COVID-19-related cinema closures suppressed this activity during the pandemic, camcords have reportedly reappeared as theaters have started to re-open,” the Special 301 Report reads.

 

In 2019, India proposed draft legislation to criminalize unauthorized camcording but has not passed into law. China is also cited as a source of cammed movies but several criminal convictions for unauthorized camcording in 2020, the country still lacks a specific criminal law to address the issue.

 

Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, India, Peru, and Russia “do not effectively criminalize unauthorized camcording,” so should follow the examples set by Canada, Japan, the Philippines, and Ukraine, the USTR suggests.

 

“Countries also need to update legal frameworks to effectively deter unauthorized camcording and keep up with changing practices,” the report adds. “For example, the requirement in some countries that a law enforcement officer must observe a person camcording and then prove that the person is circulating the unlawfully recorded movie before intervening often precludes effective enforcement.”

Other Types of Piracy

The USTR says that virtually every country in its Special 301 Report has additional problems with online piracy and related infringement. The rebroadcasting of live sports and the unauthorized cloning of cloud-based entertainment software allow users to access pirated content online, while game copiers and mod chips allow users to play pirated games on physical consoles.

 

The report also highlights the problem of “stream-ripping software” which can be used to create infringing copies of copyrighted works by accessing licensed streaming sites.

 

“Stream-ripping is now a dominant method of music piracy, causing substantial economic harm to music creators and undermining legitimate online services. During the review period, stream-ripping was reportedly popular in countries such as Canada, India, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland, and Ukraine.”

 

In reality, stream-ripping is popular everywhere and at least in volume terms, the United States could easily qualify for inclusion in its own list, despite having access to some of the tightest laws and enforcement tools anywhere on the planet.

 

The 2022 Special 301 Report can be found here (pdf)

 

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. More recently, American video game developer Bungie joined in on the action.

 

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, including those who used the ‘Destiny 2 Hacks’ suite that was offered for sale at AimJunkies.com.

Bungie Sued AimJunkies

In a complaint filed at a Seattle federal court last June, Bungie accused AimJunkies.com of copyright and trademark infringement, among other things. The same accusations were also made against Phoenix Digital Group, the alleged creators of the software.

 

Initially, the parties entered settlement discussions. AimJunkies has already removed the Destiny 2 cheats from its site and was willing to negotiate. However, when Bungie moved for a default judgment, reportedly without prior warning, tensions rose.

 

Earlier this year, AimJunkies hit back with a motion to dismiss. According to the cheat seller, no law prohibits cheating. In addition, the company denied Bungie’s copyright infringement allegations.

 

Among other things, AimJunkies countered that Bungie’s allegations are vague and not specific enough to allege a plausible claim. The cheat software itself certainly isn’t a copy of Bungie’s work, they argued.

 

Bungie also accused AimJunkies of a variety of other wrongdoings, including breach of contract, tortious interference, and unjust enrichment.

 

These claims don’t belong in federal court either, according to the cheat maker, since Bungie’s own License Agreement (LSLA) prescribes that, aside from copyright and trademark issues, all disputes should be resolved by mandatory arbitration.

Court Dismisses Copyright Claims

After reviewing the positions from both sides, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly has now ruled on the matter. Judge Zilly dismisses the copyright claims as Bungie failed to show that AimJunkies copied its work.

 

“Notably, Bungie has not pleaded any facts explaining how the cheat software constitutes an unauthorized copy of any of the copyrighted works identified in the complaint. Bungie’s complaint must contain more than a ‘formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action’,” Judge Zilly writes.

 

The court does leave room for Bungie to fix this issue in an amended complaint, but for now, it’s dismissed.

 

Judge Zilly also agrees to refer the non-copyright and trademark-related claims to arbitration, as AimJunkies requested. This is in line with Bungie’s own license agreement and both parties are encouraged to resolve these issues outside of court.

Not Over Yet

Not all of Bungie’s claims were dismissed or referred. Judge Zilly concludes that Bungie’s trademark infringement accusations are sufficiently pled, which means that the case can go ahead based on that allegation. The same is true for the “false origin” claim which is closely related to trademark infringement.

 

AimJunkies booked an initial victory with the dismissal of the copyright infringement claims but they’re not celebrating yet. Bungie can still refile these claims with additional evidence and the trademark accusations remain.

 

Responding to the order, the cheat seller informed us that it’s not commenting on the matter just yet. However, it did stress that they are in the final stages of selling the AimJunkies websites to a Ukrainian group of investors.

 

—

 

A copy of U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly’s order on the motion to dismiss/refer is available here (pdf)

 

During the summer of 2017, several of the world’s largest entertainment industry companies teamed up to create a new anti-piracy coalition.

 

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) brought together well-known Hollywood companies including Disney, Warner Bros, NBCUniversal, media giants such as Sky and BBC, as well as streaming-based newcomers Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu.

 

Heading towards its fifth anniversary, the coalition is stronger than ever. ACE continues to expand and now has 35 members, with beIN becoming the latest addition just this week. The addition of the sports rightsholder also represents an expansion into the live streaming arena.

 

The coalition’s growth is not limited to its member count, the number of people involved in ACE’s anti-piracy operations also continues to grow. The team currently consists of more than 100 full-time professionals speaking 30 languages across 24 countries.

 

Expansion appears to be paying off. While many pirate site operators manage to avoid ACE’s grasp, those who fail to take extreme precautions have become easy prey.

 

ACE’s global content protection chief Jan van Voorn informs us that more investigators and attorneys continue to be added to the alliance in various parts of the world. These “boots on the ground” allow access to local governments and law enforcement, to target local piracy players.

ACE Books Progress

Over the years ACE has built a dedicated library of open-source intelligence. This has resulted in a wealth of information that is now paying off at a rapid pace.

 

“Over the past three years, we have built up a significant pipeline of investigations. These are coming to fruition week by week and month by month. If someone is running a pirate business of any significance, they can be 100% sure that their case is somewhere in our pipeline,” van Voorn says.

 

These strong words are expected, as ACE wants site operators to feel vulnerable, but they’re not hollow threats. Over the past few months alone the coalition has shut down several prominent piracy players, including Pelisplushd.net, Afdah.video, and Altered Carbon.

 

And those names are just the tip of the iceberg. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of illegal websites and streaming subscription services operated from North America reportedly dropped from 1,400 to just 200. ACE believes this is in large part the result of its anti-piracy efforts.

Cease and Desist

There are a variety of enforcement actions available to ACE. The coalition takes a holistic approach, searching for vulnerabilities wherever it can. While court cases are also part of the repertoire, a cease-and-desist letter is usually the first step taken.

 

“Whenever the case at hand allows for it, ACE’s preferred course of action is to serve cease and desist notices on pirate operators and then open discussions to shut down their illegal enterprise voluntarily. The increasing number of pirate services’ domains taken over by ACE is a testament to the effectiveness of such direct action,” van Voorn tells us.

 

While this sounds easy, finding out who’s behind a pirate site isn’t always straightforward. The operators of these sites and services often go to extremes to hide their identities, using proxies, VPNs, and fake names and addresses.

 

ACE regularly tries to uncover information through DMCA subpoenas in the U.S. or Right of Information (ROI) claims in the EU. These target intermediaries such as hosting providers and Cloudflare, who are compelled to hand over customer information.

 

“Disclosure requests have been a very effective way for ACE to expand its investigations. Through these processes we target all relevant intermediaries that have customer information that can help us identify the operator of a pirate site or service, including hosting providers, payment processors, advertising networks, etcetera.”

 

“Having targeted more than 200 online intermediaries this way, it also allows us to identify patterns of piracy friendly intermediaries across the globe,” van Voorn notes.

 

Even when intermediaries cooperate, information obtained isn’t always useful. Many operators of pirate sites and services use fabricated or inaccurate details to sign up.

 

“The information we receive from intermediaries is mixed. While the information obtained does not always instantly identify the individual running a pirate operation, there are almost always leads we can follow that either give us investigative insights or that help confirm prior suspicions.”

KYBC Frustrations

In recent years many ACE members have lobbied for stricter “Know Your Business Customer” (KYBC) requirements for online intermediaries. The lack of identity verification is one of the greatest frustrations for ACE at the moment. Making these checks mandatory would be a game-changer.

 

Van Voorn says that it’s not hard for people to stay anonymous and run a commercial pirate enterprise. Online service providers hardly ever check who their customers really are. And while ACE doesn’t want to limit the privacy of regular Internet users, it believes that pirates are in a different league.

 

“Private individuals are entitled to their personal privacy, of course. But when you start running a business that is taking people’s money and selling services, you incur certain obligations to tell the world who you are and to obey the law,” van Voorn says.

 

“What’s illegal offline should be illegal online. Online service providers should be able to respond to legitimate civil judicial and law enforcement requests to identify their customers. If they can’t do that, they are enabling illegal activity, and there should be consequences.”

 

Identifying people behind pirate sites and services is a priority but when intermediaries can’t or won’t hand over any useful information, ACE will look for other ways to go after the culprits.

 

“There are many more ways to make the lives of pirate operators unpleasant, make their websites less user-friendly, and significantly impact their bottom line. We can, and we always will, disrupt and ultimately identify pirate operators by pouring more resources into our investigations.”

Civil and Criminal Lawsuits

As ACE is expanding, the cease-and-desist approach has become a more international endeavor. And with employees around the globe, it becomes more difficult for pirate sites and services to stay under the radar.

 

Cease-and-desist letters can be effective but they are no silver bullet. In some cases, operators of pirate sites and services will continue undeterred. When that happens, ACE will consider taking action in court, or referring the operators to local prosecutors.

 

“We think of litigation or criminal referrals as the logical next step when discussions with pirate operators are unsuccessful, or when operators try to go back into business despite agreeing not to do so. There are certainly more civil and criminal cases to come in the near future,” van Voorn notes.

 

At the end of 2020, the United States adopted the ‘Protecting Lawful Streaming Act’ which was seen as a game-changer since it made running an illegal streaming service a felony. Thus far, this hasn’t resulted in a wave of prosecutions.

 

This isn’t due to a lack of referrals, according to ACE’s global anti-piracy chief.

 

“Illegal streaming is now a felony in the US, and we are doing our best to help ensure that those criminal offenders will face justice. We know that DOJ is aware of some significant pirate operators in the US, and we trust that they will take appropriate action.”

 

In recent months ACE has published a steady stream of enforcement successes on its website. While not all achievements can be shared publicly, the alliance sees the shutdown of PrimeWire, Altered Carbon, 123movies.la, Afdah.video, and Pelisplushd.net as some of the biggest successes of the past year.

Future Plans

Looking ahead, van Voorn mentions a few areas where ACE plans to spend more time and effort. This includes enforcement targeted at live streaming, which in part motivated beIN to join the coalition.

 

ACE already has some experience in going after IPTV services and they have learned that a lot of IPTV sellers rely on a relatively small group of wholesalers. Targeting these big players is a priority.

 

In addition, the alliance also takes a special interest in release groups at the top of the ‘piracy pyramid’. Last year, ACE shut down the movie and TV show release group NTG and it plans to use the same strategy to go after other key players.

 

“Another important issue we are dedicating even more time to are release groups, in particular those that focus on ripping content from ACE Members’ streaming services,” van Voorn says.

 

“Following our success in shutting down the NTG release group last year, we are currently focusing on major release groups following the same strategy and we are working closely with law enforcement on these cases,” he adds.

 

All in all, ACE is confident that it can severely disrupt the piracy ecosystem. While it’s undeniable that the alliance has booked several major successes, history has shown that the most stubborn pirates are hard to catch. In any case, it will be an interesting battle to watch.

 

Over the years we’ve published thousands of articles on copyright law, from how it works in theory to its application in full-blown lawsuits.

 

In most cases involving pirate sites, for example, the unlicensed distribution of movies, TV shows, music and games is easily determined. But other copyright disputes, where infringement isn’t so obvious, can trigger new complexity and polarized legal opinions. We might have one of those today.

Background – Nintendo’s Unreleased ‘Mario Movie’

In 2018, Nintendo announced a collaboration with film and animation studio Illumination (Minions, Despicable Me) to produce a new ‘Mario’ movie. Production got underway in 2020 and a theatrical release was expected in late 2022.

 

An announcement this week by Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that the movie will now launch next spring, not in 2022 as expected. The few extra months will give fans even more time to speculate on how the film will play out. And herein lies the problem.

 

Rumors relating to the as-yet-unnamed ‘Mario Movie’ are rife on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms, but how does one even begin to separate fact from fiction in these numerous reports? The obvious fakes are pretty easy to spot but there is no simple way to steer towards more truthful information – until someone draws unusual attention to it, that is.

Just Another Mario Rumor Post or Something More?

A couple of weeks ago a Reddit user posted a thread titled [Spoilers?] Potential plot for the Mario movie. The post began with advice for people to read “with a grain of salt”. The information provided was unconfirmed and apparently based on comments from people who may have attended a test screening or had heard reports of the same from others.

 

The poster noted that while it appeared the information had multiple sources, several people might have copied existing information. Either way, the post on Reddit claimed to be a compilation of these third-party rumors, including a fairly lengthy plot outline.

 

The piece was a fairly typical forum-style post and at the time didn’t seem like a particularly big deal at the time. Then, out of the blue, Bowser Streisand turned up.

Post Removed By Reddit For Copyright Infringement

The user’s post was subsequently removed by Reddit’s Legal Operations team following a “copyright claim by a third party.”

 

The important thing here is to find out who sent the notice and on what grounds. We contacted Reddit PR and the site’s legal team but neither wanted to make any further comment, despite appearing to be aware of the notice. Copies of the copyright notices sent to Reddit users don’t help much either, since these do not relay who made the copyright complaint or on what grounds.

 

An educated guess suggests that the most logical complainants might include Nintendo, Illumination, or Universal Pictures. A malicious third party with too much time on their hands might also be a possibility but we would’ve expected more engagement from Reddit if that was the case.

 

So, if we rule out the ‘bad actor’ theory for a moment, we’re left with the prospect of a genuine copyright complaint from a rightsholder – but on what grounds?

Fair Use? A Review? Reporting Facts?

Given that the Reddit post contained no screenshots or video clips from the movie, logic suggests that the problem must lie in the post’s text. After ruling out the existence of copyrighted script elements, for example, we’re left with the possibility that the post was removed for carrying spoilers. But would that be illegal under US copyright law?

 

Under the doctrine of fair use, the law allows people to use portions of a copyrighted work without first obtaining permission from the owner. However, since fair use is a defense, conflicts need to be settled in court. Every case has its own nuances and in the ‘Mario’ post there are unusual issues, not least a complete absence of third-party copyrighted material.

 

The post (which can still be found on Twitter if people really, really want to see it), uses ‘Mario Movie’ rumors to form a basic (and ultimately positive) review. So, if the speculation is accurate, it could be argued that the post is a simple statement of facts. However, if the post does contain a large number of genuine plot spoilers, some law firms are prepared to put up a fight on copyright infringement and other grounds.

Spoilers: Are They Copyright Infringement?

‘The Spoiling Dead’ was a thriving online community dedicated to The Walking Dead. Their passion for the hit zombie show was extreme and if inside information became available, they were prepared to publish big spoilers. The promise to reveal who killed the character ‘Negan’ after a show cliffhanger pushed AMC’s patience to the limit and through lawfirm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP, the company took action.

 

In a 2016 cease-and-desist notice, the operators of the ‘The Spoiling Dead’ were accused of receiving “copyright protected, trade secret information about the most critical plot information” with a plan to “distribute this purported highly confidential information” despite knowing that such distribution would damage AMC.

 

According to AMC, significant spoilers can be considered copyright infringement.

 

“The release of plot summaries and particularly the types of crucial plot elements that you have stated you intend to release, have been found to constitute copyright infringement,” the company’s legal team told The Spoiling Dead.

 

“Specifically, in Twin Peaks Productions vs. Publications International, the Court ruled that publishing a work that ‘recount(s) for its readers precisely the plot details’ of a fictional work constitutes copyright infringement.”

 

In the same year, HBO filed DMCA takedown notices against a YouTuber who persistently posted accurate predictions of forthcoming events in hit show Game of Thrones, again claiming breach of copyright.

 

YouTube eventually reinstated the videos but this event showed that unless users are prepared to fight back, content can and will be taken down at the press of a button.

 

It’s a little too early to say if a DMCA takedown notice was the most appropriate tool to take down the ‘Mario Movie’ speculation post, but the copyright system is a quick fix and people tend not to ask too many questions.

 

Not usually, anyway.

 

In the early days of file-sharing the demise of a large pirate site or service would mean just that. The shutters would come down and users would migrate to new homes – story over.

 

In more recent times, the situation has become more fluid. The closure of a pirate site often means that identically named or at least similarly presented platforms appear as reincarnations, replacements, or simply the next big thing.

 

That’s why we’re reporting today on the closure of Zone-Telechargement (ZT), one of the most popular French-language pirate sites, almost six years after it was first ‘permanently’ shut down.

French Military Police Shut Down Site in 2016

After being founded in 2011, ZT grew to become one of France’s most-visited sites overall with millions of visitors every month. Offering a wide variety of pirated content, including movies, TV shows, games and music, the site’s domain was once the 11th most popular in France. But in 2016, ZT ran into serious trouble.

 

Following complaints from copyright holders, the French Gendarmerie and Andorran police arrested seven people as part of an operation to shut ZT down. Within hours the site flickered back to life (at least in a limited fashion) and over the years, several platforms with the same name attempted to emulate the original.

 

Bizarrely, at least one of these was run by an anti-piracy company but others preferred a more traditional ‘pirate’ business model, attracting blocking measures by rightsholders.

Zone-Telechargement Shuts Down Again

On Monday, visitors to some of the most successful ‘replacement’ domains (zone-telechargement.cam and zt-za.net, for example) found themselves redirected to an announcement revealing that ZT had pulled down the curtain once again.

 

“Hello everyone. It is on these few lines that we announce the closure of the ZT site. Yes that’s the end no joke, not everything is eternal,” the message reads.

 

“Thank you all without exception, they were very good times spent sharing on ZT. We would like to thank everyone who took part in this adventure for their loyalty, their support, and those who made ZT, the download directory. We hope everyone appreciates.”

 

Specific domains aren’t listed on the platform but the announcement states that all old and new domains connected with the platform will be closed. For good measure, the site’s operators say they will “completely destroy” the database and there will be no recovery or reincarnation, meaning that around 11 million monthly users will be affected.

Tirexo Says It Will Also Shut Down

In an announcement Sunday, the operators of popular streaming site Tirexo revealed that they too will shut down. The closure is expected to take place in the next few days but the announcement carries a similar message to ZT – thanks to everyone, but the show is over.

 

“The Tirexo adventure ends here. Thank you for everything. You can rage, yell, insult us (yes, yes, you’re entitled to that, I had to remove comments, it hurt my heart) but it won’t take anything away from what we’ve done for us and you until now. Bye,” the message reads.

 

In the meantime, the big questions remain unanswered: Why have the sites shut down now and were they under pressure?

Fingers Point Towards Anti-Piracy Groups

When pirate sites suddenly shut down in France, anti-piracy groups ALPA and SACEM are often among the main suspects. French journalist Tristan Brossat says that in response to his inquiries, ALPA responded: “No comments at this stage” but what we know already is that ZT and Tirexo were at the top of ALPA’s priority list.

 

In a report published last year titled ‘Illegal consumption of videos in France’ (pdf), ALPA listed ZT and Tirexo-branded domains in first and third positions in its ‘illegal site’ list.

 

If any group takes responsibility for the closures, we’ll publish an update here.

 

Determining which domains will fall out of use for both sites will hopefully become easier in the coming days. Google is awash with results for similarly named platforms meaning that these pirate ‘brands’ will continue in the months and years to come, even if the ‘real’ sites have long since been retired.

 

In 2019 the European Parliament adopted the new Copyright Directive that aims to modernize how copyright is protected in the online environment.

 

After the directive passed, individual EU member states began working to implement the text into local law.

‘Upload Filters’

This includes the controversial Article 17, which requires online services to license content from copyright holders. If that is not possible, these companies should ensure that infringing content is taken down and not re-uploaded to their services.

 

Many opponents fear that this language will effectively lead to broad ‘upload filters’ that will take down more content than needed. These concerns been reiterated by several experts over the years.

 

After massive protests failed to stop the legislation, Poland became the last beacon of hope for the opposition. The country petitioned the EU Court of Justice to annul Article 17, claiming it would violate the freedom of expression of European citizens.

 

Last summer, EU Advocate General Saugmandsgaard Øe advised the Court not to grant Poland’s request. The AG argued that ‘upload filters’ would not significantly harm freedom of expression.

CJEU Dismissed Polish Opposition

Today, the EU’s top court issued its final decision, siding with the Advocate General’s advice. This means that Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive will remain in place, effectively putting an end to several years of opposition.

 

According to the Court, Article 17 contains sufficient safeguards to limit the potential negative effect on people’s freedom of expression. For example, any automated filtering tools should be able to clearly distinguish lawful from illegal content.

 

“The EU legislature […] laid down a clear and precise limit on the measures that may be taken or required in implementing the obligations laid down in that provision, by excluding, in particular, measures which filter and block lawful content when uploading,” CJEU writes in a press release.

 

The Court also stresses that Article 17 can’t lead to a general monitoring obligation. This means that online services should only filter content that’s flagged as infringing by copyright holders. In addition, the Court notes that copyrighted works can still be used for parody and pastiche under the EU’s copyright exceptions.

Striking a Balance

According to the CJEU, there are sufficient procedural safeguards in place to protect freedom of expression. While mistakes can never be ruled out, it believes that Article 17 strikes “a fair balance” between the rights of copyright holders and those of the public.

 

Member States should keep this “balance” in mind when implementing the legislation into national law.

 

“Member States must, when transposing Article 17 of the Directive into their national law, take care to act on the basis of an interpretation of that provision which allows a fair balance to be struck between the various fundamental rights protected by the charter of fundamental rights,” CJEU writes.

 

Several EU countries have postponed their implementation of Article 17 pending the outcome of this case. With today’s judgment, there’s no ground for any further delays.

 

While the CJEU ruling puts an end to legislative opposition, it will not be the last time we hear of Article 17. The next step is to wait for actual lawsuits where the language is put to the test. These may eventually find their way to the EU’s top court as well, for further interpretation and fine-tuning.

 

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 new entries on the list. “The Batman” is the most downloaded title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on April 25 are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrent sites
1	(1)	The Batman	8.4 / trailer
2	(…)	Uncharted	6.6 / trailer
3	(3)	Spider-Man: No Way Home	8.6 / trailer
4	(2)	X	6.9 / trailer
5	(…)	Ambulance	6.3 / trailer
6	(4)	Moonfall	5.2 / trailer
7	(5)	The Outfit	7.2 / trailer
8	(9)	Death on the Nile	6.5 / trailer
9	(…)	9 Bullets	3.8 / trailer
10	(back)	Dune	8.1 / trailer

 

 

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

 

Following a disastrous few years at the turn of the century where the major labels failed to accept the direction their own industry was heading, streaming services such as Spotify are now giving the majority of music consumers what they have demanded all along.

 

Massive libraries of accessible music at prices suitable for all pocket depths are helping the industry back to its glory days, with last year proving the most successful on record. But despite music being readily available for free, somehow piracy is still an issue for the world’s largest labels, with stream-ripping platforms the current boogeyman.

 

In recent years, the majors have targeted some of these services in successful civil lawsuits but a new partnership suggests that criminal enforcement may lie ahead for selected targets.

RIAA and Homeland Security’s IPR Center Team Up

A joint announcement from the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reveals a long-term agreement that formalizes and expands cooperation between the public and private sectors in the fight against all forms of digital piracy.

 

Through the signed Memorandum of Understanding, the IPR Center and RIAA will implement “an aggressive multi-layered strategy to strengthen the digital ecosystem” including training events and the promise to “dismantle large-scale online criminal enterprises” via referral packages on the “most egregious violators.”

Prospects for Criminal Enforcement

Potential targets for dismantling are not discussed in the announcement. Thus far, stream-ripping platforms have been handled in civil lawsuits and services mentioned in the RIAA’s submission to the USTR ‘Notorious Markets’ list (MP3Juices.cc and Newalbumreleases.net) are presumably based overseas, given the nature of the process.

 

Clues may be available in the European Commission’s equivalent list, but US-based criminal enforcement for music piracy has been rare, with the last notable case concluding four years ago with a five-year prison sentence for the former operator of ShareBeast and AlbumJams.

 

Given trends over the years, it seems likely that platforms engaged in pre-release piracy could be at the front of the queue for enforcement, while a criminal conviction relating to a stream-ripping service could prove strategically useful in the US. That being said, the partnership appears to be gearing up for greater international enforcement.

IPR Center Acknowledges Overseas Links

“Investigations into illicit streaming services are extremely complex; these services are typically operated from abroad through multi-faceted schemes that touch numerous countries,” says acting director of the IPR Center, Ricardo Mayoral.

 

“Because of this complexity, our partnership with RIAA brings us one step closer toward dismantling criminal enterprises that think they are above the law, attempting to use the internet to hide illicit activity.”

 

According to Brad Buckles, the RIAA’s Chief Content Protection Officer, digital piracy is “too big a problem for any one artist, industry, or agency to handle on their own” so the public/private partnership will address that with enhanced cooperation and coordination.

 

“As global piracy operations evolve their tactics and innovate new ways to steal and profit from creative works, this MOU will empower creators and the federal government to work together on the cutting edge of this fast-moving fight,” Buckles says.

 

Reading between the lines, rather than the RIAA having to wade through the complexities and restrictions usually associated with civil lawsuits, it will now have have direct access to powerful toolkits only usually available to government agencies – with the public, at least in part – picking up the bill for enforcement.

IPR Center Now Partners With All Major Rightsholders

RIAA’s announcement that it will partner with IPR Center follows similar moves by major players in the movie, TV show and broadcasting sectors.

 

In September 2020, the MPA and anti-piracy coalition Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment signed an similar agreement with IPR Center and earlier this year, the groups revealed they would embed their own personnel in the government department.

 

In recent years the European Commission has proposed and adopted various legislative changes to help combat online piracy.

 

This includes the Copyright Directive which passed in 2019 as well as the Digital Services Act (DSA), which was officially unveiled at the end of 2020.

 

The new legislation was met with fierce criticism. Some believe that it will lead to more ‘dumb’ upload filters. At the same time, copyright holders believed that it didn’t go far enough, as there’s no ‘staydown’ requirement.

DSA Agreement

After the official adoption by the EU Parliament earlier this year, representatives of the Parliament, the Council and the Commission engaged in trialogue negotiations to flesh out the final details. On Saturday morning, after 16 hours of discussions, the parties reached an agreement.

 

At the time of writing the final text is yet to be published. It is clear, however, that the main goal is to keep large online platforms and services accountable to stop the spread of harmful, misleading, and illegal content.

 

“The DSA will upgrade the ground-rules for all online services in the EU. It will ensure that the online environment remains a safe space, safeguarding freedom of expression and opportunities for digital businesses,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says.

 

The DSA is the official successor to the E-Commerce Directive. The new package aims to bring EU legislation into line with the current state of the digital age, which has changed dramatically over the past several years.

Takedown Transparency

The legislation includes new rules for big tech and also touches on some copyright issues. These set out how online services should handle takedown notices, without being held liable for user uploads.

 

In addition, it will allow “trusted flaggers” to get preferential treatment in the takedown process.

 

The DSA proposal also strengthens the rights of users with a strong focus on transparency. For example, if platforms or services work with trusted flaggers, the public has the right to know who these are.

 

Also, if a hosting provider removes content following a takedown notice, users should be informed on what grounds this action was taken, and how they can appeal. On top of that, platforms have to take measures to prevent abusive takedown notices.

 

According to the DSA drafters, this added transparency is required to safeguard the fundamental right to freedom of expression.

Big Tech

The new rules and requirements don’t apply equally to all online platforms and services. The DSA makes a distinction between intermediary services, hosting services, online platforms, and very large platforms. The strictest rules apply to the latter category, which includes “big tech” outfits with more than 45 million EU users.

 

For example, the DSA requires online platforms and big tech to properly verify the identities of third-party suppliers to tackle the sale and distribution of illegal content. This KYBC requirement does not apply to intermediaries and hosting platforms.

 

The big tech companies also have to allow for external audits and offer broad transparency into how their recommendation algorithms work. If a company doesn’t comply with any of these rules, the EU can issue multi-million euro fines.

 

It is hard to properly evaluate the final agreement without the final text. However, over the past months, we have seen that both rightsholders and digital rights activists are not completely happy with the DSA, which is an indication that it’s somewhat of a compromise.

 

The new DSA rules will go into effect for big tech platforms later this year. For the other platforms and services, it can take up to 2024 before the changes go into effect.

 

For more than a decade, various copyright industry groups have called on Google and other search engines to help contain the piracy problem.

 

Google was initially hesitant to take action, but the company has gradually tweaked its algorithms over the years to accommodate the complaints.

 

The first step was to demote results for domain names for which it receives many DMCA takedown notices. On top of that, it has also removed several piracy-related terms from its autocomplete feature.

Whole-Site Removals

Behind the scenes, rightsholders and Google also worked on other undisclosed measures. While the company hasn’t said much in public, one major change is hard to miss. Starting last year, Google began removing entire domains from its search results.

 

In the past, Google said that it wasn’t in favor of these “whole-site” removals, but this stance has changed. When rightsholders inform the search engine of an order that requires local ISPs to block specific pirate sites, Google voluntarily does the same.

 

These search results removals are limited to the region where the blocking order applies, usually a single country.

 

There have been a few of these instances already, including in France, Denmark, and the UK. Most of the requests cite dated court orders; in some cases close to a decade old. However, new information shows that Google responds quickly to new orders as well.

New Dutch Blockades

Last month, a Dutch court ordered local ISP Delta to block access to dozens of domains linked to popular torrent sites such as YTS, RARBG, and 1337x. This second site blocking order in the Netherlands is a big win for local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, which has spent more than a decade on blocking-related cases.

 

BREIN’s efforts also resulted in a covenant, signed last year, where the major Internet providers agreed to voluntarily comply with orders issued against rival ISPs. And they are not the only ones.

 

A few days after the latest blocking order was issued BREIN notified Google, requesting the search engine to remove these domain names for Dutch visitors. And indeed, after a few days, the domains are completely gone.

 

“In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 6 result(s) from this page,” Google writes at the bottom of the search results for RARBG, for example.

 

These removals are entirely separate from the DMCA process. It’s a big step for Google to do this voluntarily but, given the detailed jurisprudence that’s in place, there’s a good chance that the search engine would have been ordered to do the same if the matter went to court.

Unused Powers?

While BREIN is certainly on the ball, not all rightsholders are as eager or sharp. For example, in the UK rightsholders have asked Google to remove dozens of domain names. However, some prominent sites still remain in search results.

 

These ‘missed’ domains include The Pirate Bay, Nitroflare, NSW2U, and various YouTube-rippers such as Flvto.biz and 2Conv.com. These sites are all blocked by UK ISPs but are still available in search results.

 

Perhaps some rightsholders are not aware of these new powers. We can’t think of any other reason why they wouldn’t ask Google to remove the domains. Especially since they send hundreds of regular takedown notices to Google every day.

Google is Silent

Several copyright holder groups, including the MPA and BREIN, have confirmed Google’s cooperative stance. They believe the removals are an effective tool to help fight online piracy since they boost the effect of site blocking measures.

 

Google itself remains quiet. TorrentFreak has sent repeated requests for comment on this matter over the past weeks and months. All requests remain unanswered.

 

Whether movies and TV shows, music or other types of piracy, most major anti-piracy enforcement groups have a dedicated niche to protect. Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN covers them all.

 

In a report last summer, BREIN revealed that in addition to taking down more than 460 pirate sites and services, it had 180 Pirate Bay proxies blocked at ISPs, played a part in 338 more shutting down, tackled 23 pirate IPTV sellers, 33 illegal streaming sites and reached settlement agreements with 42 “identified perpetrators”.

 

This year BREIN is staying busy and in the last few days alone, has reported three more settled cases covering IPTV, Usenet, and comic book pirates.

Pirate IPTV

According to BREIN, “All-in-One-Premium-TV” sold media boxes to the public complete with a subscription to an illegal IPTV service. After identifying the previously anonymous individual behind the sales, BREIN approached the man. He agreed to stop his activities and report his sales to the anti-piracy group.

 

In common with other cases involving pirate IPTV providers and sellers, BREIN is prepared to take people to court. However, in this instance, the man was prepared to reach a settlement with BREIN. These payments can be quite hefty but due to the man’s “personal circumstances”, BREIN says it “moderated” the settlement amount to a more modest 2,500 euros.

 

To prevent a return to the same type of business, the man also signed a declaration of abstention with a penalty clause of 500 euros per day for any breaches. Another case being handled by BREIN with a similar clause saw an IPTV seller breach his agreement and by February 2022, had run up penalties of 420,000 euros.

Usenet Piracy ‘Spotter’

When content is uploaded to Usenet (otherwise known as newsgroups), it is not automatically finable by users of regular search engines. This led to the rise of so-called ‘spotters’, users who find material including movies, TV shows, music and eBooks, and post links to various forums and communities.

 

Spotters can be uploaders of content too and according to BREIN, it has put one such player out of action.

 

“A man from [Netherlands province] Overijssel was active for years under various aliases as a large-scale uploader on Usenet. The 49-year-old man was a member of several ‘release teams’ that were the first to upload and ‘spot’ unauthorized material, i.e refer to it on indexing sites,” BREIN’s statement reads.

 

The anti-piracy group says that it took legal action after obtaining the man’s name and address. In the event the man chose to settle rather than fight, paying BREIN 10,000 euros and providing information on other parties involved in the groups. Again, the deal with BREIN includes an abstention agreement with a penalty clause of 2,500 euros per day, to a maximum of 50,000 euros.

 

As recently reported, BREIN has been applying continuous pressure to Usenet pirates. In 2021, the anti-piracy group took down five Usenet indexing platforms and approached 38 uploaders of content for settlement. Overall, BREIN collected cash payments of $290K from pirates, with settlements presented as an alternative to protracted and expensive legal battles.

BREIN Settled With Comic Book Pirate, Then Went After Successor

At the start of 2021, BREIN launched an investigation in response to various uploads of comics to Usenet that referred to a list on a collector’s website calling for users to fill gaps in the archive. At the time around 128,000 titles were on the list, of which around 77,000 had been digitized.

 

In the summer of the same year, BREIN reported that it had reached a settlement with an individual “who played a facilitating role” in the unauthorized digitization of comic magazines and books. Following an approach, the man signed a declaration of abstention with a penalty clause.

 

However, the updating of the archive was apparently taken over by others, with Usenet uploads continuing to reference the collector’s website. As a result, BREIN continued its investigation and managed to identify a second person involved after researching administrators and uploaders in Usenet communities.

 

BREIN says the individual has now agreed to pay a 5,000 euro settlement with an abstention penalty component of 500 euros per day to a total of 50,000 euros. The anti-piracy group says its investigation will now continue due to it obtaining further information.

 

YouTube’s Content ID is an advanced piracy recognition system that aims to flag videos or music on users’ channels uploaded without permission.

 

Once detected, such content can be removed or monetized at the discretion of the relevant rightsholders.

 

While Content ID is generally considered effective and financially useful for rightsholders, the system relies on the honesty of those allowed to use it. Rumors of abuse have circulated for years, with many reports of user videos being monetized by people that shouldn’t have the right to do so. A grand jury indictment unsealed late 2021 uncovered one such scheme.

Grand Jury Indictment

The case – United States of America vs. Webster Batista Fernandez and Jose Teran – detailed a massive Content ID scam that generated more than $20 million for the defendants. Between 2017 and April 30, 2021, Fernandez and Teran began monetizing music on YouTube for a vast library of more than 50,000 songs, none of which they owned the rights to.

 

Using forged documents and other means, the men (via their companies) represented to YouTube and an intermediary company that they were the owners of the music and therefore entitled to collect “royalty payments” from the platform. Over the course of almost four years via fraudulent transactions, the defendants generated millions of dollars, with some of the proceeds spent on property, sports cars, and jewelry. The artists who created the tracks got absolutely nothing.

 

Batista and Teran were charged with thirty counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering, and aggravated identity theft. The indictment also sought forfeiture of any and all property traceable to the pair’s offending.

Webster Batista Fernandez Confesses

On Thursday, the Department of Justice revealed that Fernandez has entered a plea agreement to dispose of the matter subject to specific terms and conditions. It carries the following confession:

 

I, Webster Batista Fernandez (BATISTA), Jose Teran (TERAN), and other co conspirators, worked together to monetize music on [YouTube] we had no lawful rights to monetize or otherwise control. Sometime in 2016, I discovered there were recorded songs of musicians and bands on the internet that were not being monetized. I began searching for these songs and uploading them to [YouTube], as mp3 files. I falsely claimed legal ownership over them and began receiving royalty payments.

 

In early 2017, Teran and I created an entity called MediaMuv L.L.C., for the purpose of falsely claiming large swaths of music recordings we had no legal rights to whatsoever. Teran and I were partners, and we co-owned and managed this illegal operation. Using MediaMuv, we entered a contract with Y.T. to utilize their content management system (CMS) to monetize music we purportedly owned and controlled. We also entered contract with a third-party company, A.R., to assist us in administering the music we fraudulently claimed.

 

According to the confession, Batista and Teran hired over five people to use a tool called ‘Heartbeat’ to scour YouTube for Latin music. When they found content that had not yet been monetized, they downloaded the songs in mp3 format and then reuploaded them to YouTube’s CMS to claim ownership and collect the royalties.

 

The fraudulent scheme netted more than $23.4 million.

Batista Will Plead Guilty

Fernandez will plead guilty to Count 1 and 2 of the indictment and the remainder of the charges (Counts 3 to 30) will be dismissed.

 

Count 1 charges Fernandez with Conspiracy (a Class D felony), in violation of Title 18, United States 23 Code (U.S.C.) § 371, punishable by a maximum fine of $250,000, up to five years in prison (or both), a maximum of three years supervised released and up to five years probation.

 

Charge 2 charges Fernandez with Wire Fraud (a Class C felony) in violation of Title 18, U.S.C. § 1343, punishable by a maximum fine of $250,000, up to 20 years in prison (or both), a maximum of three years supervised released and up to five years probation.

 

Fernandez will also be required to pay restitution (not to exceed $25 million) to all victims “directly or proximately harmed” by his “relevant conduct.” He is also required to make a “full accounting” of all assets in which he has an interest and must not sell, hide, waste, spend or transfer any asset before sentencing.

 

Real estate and land in Arizona, more than a million dollars in several bank accounts, a 2017 Tesla, and a 2014 i8 BMW, will be forfeited and not treated as satisfaction for fines, restitution, or any other penalties.

 

The plea agreement can be found here (pdf)

 

Online anonymity is a great good for many poeple but increasingly there are calls for stricter identity checks.

 

Such requirements are fairly common offline but on the Internet, they are relatively rare; for now at least.

Verified Identities

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) would like this to change. The organization is particularly concerned with website operators who use fake or unconfirmed identities to sign up with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services.

 

The definition of IaaS services is open to interpretation but the MPA includes domain registrars, hosting companies, CDNs, and proxy services in this category. If these companies properly verified their customers, it would be easier to go after pirate site operators.

 

There is currently no legal obligation to carry out such thorough identity checks. However, the MPA believes that a new trade agreement between the US and the Indo-Pacific region, as proposed by President Biden last year, offers an opportunity for change.

IPEF Trade Agreement

In a letter sent to the US Trade Representative, which co-chairs the U.S. during the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) negotiations, the movie industry group mentions verification as a key negotiation item.

 

“Commercial entities that intentionally distribute illegal and harmful services or content online tend to hide their true identity when they sign up for online services, such as web hosting. This anonymity complicates law enforcement efforts to the detriment of consumers..,” the MPA writes.

 

“By verifying and retaining the identity of business customers, IaaS providers can help deepen consumer trust in the safety and security of the online marketplace,” MPA’s letter adds.

 

The MPA mentions malware, data theft, and unsafe products and services as examples of concrete threats. However, we assume that online piracy is one of the main concerns for the movie industry group.

Online and Offline Enforcement

Piracy is also mentioned more directly in another suggestion for the IPEF agreement. According to the MPA, a trade deal should include a specific obligation that offline enforcement tools and procedures are also available in the digital environment.

 

“Piracy services steal and disseminate content, depriving creators of millions of dollars in fair remuneration that they would otherwise use to fund U.S. production and employ thousands of Americans.

 

“Including a provision in IPEF to help ensure the full availability of online enforcement tools would respond to the harm of digital piracy on the U.S. economy and U.S. workers,” MPA notes.

 

The IPEF is far from a done deal. A broad variety of stakeholders and members of the public have submitted their suggestions. It is now up to the negotiators to come up with a draft that will offer the best benefits.

 

—

 

A copy of MPA’s letter, written by Senior Vice President Global Policy and Federal Affairs Anissa Brennan, is available here (pdf)

 

For the past three years, authorities in Brazil have displayed new momentum in the battle against all types of pirate sites.

 

Following a complaint from local anti-piracy group APDIF (Association for the Protection of the Intellectual Property Rights of the Phonographic Industry), in January 2019 Brazil’s Federal Police shut down a private torrent site but that was just a taste of things to come.

 

Just months later, Brazilian law enforcement agencies launched a large anti-piracy campaign codenamed ‘Operation 404,’ a nod to the well-known HTTP error code. The aim was to take down pirate sites via suspensions, raids and arrests.

New Phase of Operation 404

This week, a new phase of Operation 404 was launched by the Civil Police of Rio de Janeiro in partnership with the government’s National Film Agency (ANCINE).

 

More than a dozen search and seizure warrants were executed in Rio de Janeiro, Duque de Caxias, Magé, Cabo Frio, and Casimiro de Abreu against three pay-TV piracy sites, two illegal streaming portals, and one IPTV service.

 

In common with previous actions, authorities are yet to name the affected platforms, but according to a statement from ANCINE anti-piracy coordinator Eduardo Carneiro, they are all suspected of breaching intellectual property rights and together attracted around 46 million visitors.

 

“Content is stolen and distributed illegally. Depending on the type of operation, with a monthly fee, or free of charge on websites, with funding made through advertising,” Carneiro says.

 

“Evidence of the occurrence of the crime, such as computers, cell phones, which may produce evidence within the investigation and perhaps even the illicit acquisition center of audiovisual content,” were items of interest, he added.

Three People Detained, One Caught ‘Red-Handed’

As part of the operation the Civil Police detained three people and took them to the Cidade da Polícia for questioning.

 

Two were released after giving statements but according to Brazil’s G1, one of the suspects – accountant Bruno da Silva Guimarães – was caught “red-handed” in his office where a computer was “broadcasting pirated content.” He was later released on bail with his lawyer declining a request for comment.

 

“According to the investigations, the targets created distribution centers where they clandestinely sold the packages and violated copyrights,” says Pedro Brasil from the Department for Repression of Crimes Against Intellectual Property (DRCPIM).

 

Operation 404 is coordinated by the Integrated Operations Secretariat (SEOPI), a federal public higher-level body linked to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security (MJSP), and has support from United States and United Kingdom authorities.

 

In the first wave, 136 sites and 100 apps were targeted and in the second, another 300 were added to the list. The third wave in 2021 saw law enforcement officials block or seize the domains of 334 websites, 94 piracy apps, and 20 IP addresses.

 

There has never been any shortage of Spanish-focused piracy sites.

 

Roughly a decade ago these sites could operate relatively freely, but law enforcement has become more active recently, in part backed by new legislation.

 

By now it’s clear that running a pirate site is not without risk. And running five pirate sites at once is even more problematic, as Miguel TG found out the hard way.

Running Five Sites

Miguel and his mother were seen as the masterminds behind the sports streaming copycat site rinconrojadirecta.com, as well as portalXD.com, epubgratis.tv, rinconpeliculas.com, and torrentsdvdrip.com, which offered a wide variety of content.

 

To facilitate their venture the two founded the company Jupiter Networks. In addition, the mother established a second company, La Clave Ganadora, which was also used to facilitate their online business.

 

The two eventually appeared on the radar of Spanish law enforcement. According to the prosecution, the five sites offered access to copyright-infringing material and generated over a million euros in revenue between 2013 and 2018.

 

Most of the revenue came in from rinconrojadirecta.com, likely through aggressive advertising, but with hundreds of thousands of members, portalXD.com was probably the most popular site.

 

The case went to trial at a Madrid court this week where the prosecution sought five-year prison sentences against the mother and son. In addition, copyright holders requested compensation for the damages they suffered.

Suspended Prison Sentence

The court had scheduled a three-day trial for the case but local newspaper El Pais reports that both parties reached a consent agreement in just three hours.

 

As part of the agreement, Miguel was sentenced to two years in prison. In addition, he must pay €500,000 in damages to various rightsholders; €125k to LaLiga, €125k to Mediapro, €241k to the Association of National Videographic Distributors and Importers, and €9k to AEVI.

 

Interestingly, the total damages amount is lower than the revenue the sites reportedly made.

 

The prison sentence is conditional, meaning that it won’t have to be served if Miguel remains free from criminal accusations in the next five years. He is also required to pay off the full damages amount within seven years. Meanwhile, he is not allowed to operate or host any websites for a two-year period.

 

As part of this agreement, the prosecution dropped the charges against the mother, who wasn’t sentenced for her role in the operation.

Rojadirecta Confusion

Over the past few hours, several confusing reports appeared in Spanish-language publications. Some mainstream media reports claim that the operator of popular streaming site Rojadirecta.com was convicted, which is not the case.

 

While Miguel operated rinconrojadirecta.com, which used content from rojadirecta.com, he is not associated with the latter. In fact, the real Rojadirecta previously won a WIPO domain dispute against Miguel’s company because he impersonated the original site, violating the Creative Commons license.

 

TorrentFreak spoke to the operator of the original Rojadirecta site, who is considering taking steps in response to the “fake news” reports.

 

The real Rojadirecta is not without legal trouble, as it’s also the subject of a criminal prosecution. In that case, for which the trial has yet to start, the prosecution seeks a four-year prison sentence for the operator and up to two years for five accomplices.

 

Last December, Paramount, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Disney and Netflix sued PrimeWire, one of the most recognizable pirate streaming sites of the last decade.

 

To stop PrimeWire from offering links to a massive library of movies and TV shows, the plaintiffs obtained a preliminary injunction that required PrimeWire to stop infringing their copyrights.

 

In the short term, PrimeWire appeared interested in continuing business as usual, but when its domains became the subject of enforcement action, its operators appeared to change course. After announcing a new domain (primewire.tf), the site’s operators removed all links to pirated content and later doubled down with a promise to introduce upload filters.

PrimeWire’s Traffic Plummets

PrimeWire has operated several domains over the years and has switched between them to avoid ISP blocking in various countries. Last December, for example, primewire.ag was receiving an estimated 20 million visits per month according to SimilarWeb estimates.

 

After its .ag domain was suspended, PrimeWire began operating from .li and .vc variants, and once in full ‘go legal’ mode, these domains redirected to the new .tf domain. That took place a little over a month ago, and as this image based on SimilarWeb data shows, traffic took a battering.

 

A combination of the .ag domain suspension, a switch to the newer .li domain, then a removal of pirated content, means that since December 2021, PrimeWire lost at least 13 million monthly visits.

 

PrimeWire’s key audiences in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany and New Zealand were pretty much synchronized in leaving the platform after the content was removed, SimilarWeb estimates show.

 

While this decline in traffic would’ve been welcomed by the Hollywood studios and Netflix, PrimeWire’s efforts to ‘go legal’ made no difference to the lawsuit. PrimeWire failed to formally respond to the complaint, resulting in an early win for the studios.

Copyright Liability

In an order handed down yesterday at a California court, District Judge Mark C. Scarsi deals with the plaintiffs’ request for a default judgment against the operators of PrimeWire, focusing on the issues of liability and a permanent injunction. With PrimeWire choosing not to appear, it was a pretty one-sided affair.

 

The Judge found that PrimeWire has a very large US audience. A contract with Cloudflare and other references to US law (DMCA) indicates that the site’s operators “purposefully directed” their activities at the United States.

 

Turning to the studios’ claims for induced and contributory infringement, the Judge cited the case against isoHunt founder Gary Fung and found that the plaintiffs had properly alleged the distribution of a product, acts of infringment, the promotion of infringement, and causation.

 

Judge Scarsi found that third parties directly infringed the studios’ rights by hosting and streaming copyrighted works. Through their operation of the PrimeWire website, the defendants encouraged users to supply infringing links, curated them, and provided them to the public.

 

PrimeWire demonstrated knowledge of these infringements by hiding their identities, encouraging users to deploy VPNs to hide theirs, and providing a means to connect users to illegal streaming performances.

But PrimeWire ‘Went Legal’? – Not Enough, Judge Says

In an effort to prevent its .tf domain being suspended, in the past few weeks PrimeWire communicated directly with the studios’ legal team, arguing that the domain hadn’t been used to facilitate movie or TV show piracy. It didn’t go well.

 

“As I have said before […] we need to know who you are and, if you are represented by counsel, who your lawyer is in connection with this case. We cannot have substantive discussions about the case with people who will not identify themselves,” the studios’ counsel told PrimeWire.

 

“[P]rimeWire’s intentions are not sufficient to rebut the case for injunctive relief. PrimeWire has caused substantial and irreparable harm to Plaintiffs, and Plaintiffs have been forced to expend substantial resources in seeking to stop PrimeWire’s mass infringement of their works in the U.S. and around the world,” the response added.

Plaintiffs Win Default Judgment on Liability

In a subsequent filing to the court, the studios stated that PrimeWire’s “out-of-court assertions, made in anonymous emails, merit little weight” and their “failure to appear in this litigation is also presumably a calculated attempt to avoid submitting themselves to the discovery process” are factors that weigh in favor of a default judgment. Judge Scarsi agreed.

 

A court does not have jurisdiction to grant an injunction if defendants voluntarily cease their infringing activities but it has to be absolutely clear that the alleged wrongful behavior won’t reasonably be expected to recur. That threshold was not met.

 

“It is the burden of the party voluntarily ceasing its conduct to appear and make the strong showing it cannot reasonably be expected to restart its behavior. Defendants have not defended this lawsuit despite receiving notice and despite changing the PrimeWire website in response to the Court’s orders,” the Judge’s order reads.

 

The PrimeWire defendants are “free to enter an appearance and move to set aside the default judgment” but that seems unlikely to happen.

Permanent Injunction

The terms of the permanent injunction require PrimeWire to shut down and “transfer the operation of the PrimeWire websites” to the studios.

 

PrimeWire’s operators are restrained and enjoined from “linking to, distributing, reproducing, copying, hosting, uploading, making available for download, indexing, displaying, exhibiting, publicly performing or otherwise exploiting” any copyrighted works owned by the plaintiffs and “taking any action” that directly or indirectly enables any user or third party to do the same.

 

The site’s domains (primewire.li, primewire.ag, primewire.vc, primewire.tf) cannot be transferred to any other registrant or registrar other than as identified by the plaintiffs.

 

“[T]he PrimeWire Websites are hereby ordered to be immediately transferred by the Defendants, their assignees and/or successors-in-interest or title, and/or the domain name registrars (currently Sarek Oy and Gandi SAS, collectively ‘Registrars’) to Plaintiffs’ control,” the order reads, noting that if the registrars do not facilitate transfer within five days, the relevant top-level domain registries must take action.

 

With the matters of liability and a permanent injunction settled, Judge Scarsi says the plaintiffs are now free to conduct discovery to determine the level of damages caused by the PrimeWire site. He allocated 90 days but extensions may be granted.

 

Clearly, the studios aren’t going to settle for the closure of PrimeWire, they want their pound of flesh too.

 

The default judgment can be found here, other documents here (1,2,3, pdf)

 

As the first major legal streaming service on the Internet, Netflix paved the way for a streaming revolution.

 

The company started competing with piracy from the get-go, branding itself a superior alternative.

 

At some point, the company even used illegal download statistics as market research, to determine what shows and movies should be added to its library.

‘Piracy is No Match’

In the early days, Netflix viewed piracy as an opportunity rather than a threat. According to CEO Reed Hastings, piracy could even help to create demand for the superior streaming service, which was a good thing.

 

“Certainly there’s some torrenting that goes on, and that’s true around the world, but some of that just creates the demand,” Hastings said at the time.

 

Hastings appeared to be right as Netflix went through a period of unprecedented growth, with hundreds of millions of subscribers signing up. In the span of just a few years, Netflix became one of the largest media empires with its own content production arm.

 

This success story didn’t go unnoticed by the Hollywood incumbents; and that’s when things started to change.

 

Inspired by Netflix’s success, major Hollywood players such as Disney and HBO started their own exclusive streaming services, while Amazon and Apple also joined in. These and other companies are now fighting for the same share of household budgets that are unfortunately not unlimited.

Netflix Subscribers Decline

For the first time in its history, Netflix reported a drop in subscriber numbers yesterday. This came as a disappointment to analysts and it was a shock for the streaming service as well, which predicted modest growth during this period.

 

Following the announcement and a new forecast, which expects subscriber numbers to drop by two million during the second quarter, the company’s stock tanked.

 

There’s a variety of factors that resulted in this surprise drop. The waning pandemic likely didn’t help, nor did Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing or the decision to leave Russia. And of course, competition plays a major role as well.

 

Over the years, several studies, experts, opinionators, and Elon Musk suggested that the increasingly fragmented streaming landscape would only keep piracy relevant. While many households are happy to sign up for two or three subscriptions, a dozen monthly payments is often a bridge too far.

 

It wouldn’t surprise us if some former Netflix subscribers canceled their subscriptions and went on to pirate instead. Netflix titles are regularly listed among the most downloaded movies and TV shows on pirate sites. This is a global trend that also affects the US.

Piracy Concerns

There is no reason to believe that piracy caused the drop in subscriber numbers. However, people may start to pirate Netflix shows more often after they primarily canceled the service for an unrelated reason. This is a tricky development, as new habits are easily formed.

 

Once people know how to get their favorite shows without paying, there are fewer incentives to resubscribe. With subscriber numbers dropping, piracy is posing a serious concern.

 

This isn’t news to Netflix. While Reed Hastings wasn’t worried about piracy a decade ago, the company now spends millions of dollars tackling the problem. The streaming giant joined the MPA a few years ago and is also a member of the anti-piracy coalition ACE.

 

In addition, Netflix also has its own in-house anti-piracy department which has been expanding steadily over the years.

 

The question of whether enforcement is the best answer remains. Even if piracy magically disappeared, many people still can’t afford a dozen streaming subscriptions. Perhaps the fragmented streaming landscape and subscription fatigue are the real problems?

 

Despite the absence of any similar coordinated scheme in the United States, Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. regularly criticize countries for not implementing measures to block pirate sites.

 

When they do, however, praise isn’t far behind/

 

In April 2021, the Philippines joined the growing list of countries to implement site-blocking measures, in this case one that needs no oversight from the courts. The voluntary agreement saw the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL), the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) and the country’s internet service providers team up to block pirate sites in a swift and streamlined manner.

 

In the same month, IPOPHL announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the Asia Video Industry Association, which aims to increase information sharing alongside the development of piracy monitoring, site-blocking processes, and their implementation.

 

The MPA welcomed these voluntary moves, highlighting “bureaucratic process” as an enemy in the fight against piracy, a nod towards actually having courts decide whether sites should be blocked or not. This week the MPA and IPOPHL signed a new site-blocking agreement of their own.

Memorandum of Understanding

In an announcement Tuesday, IPOPHL revealed that it has partnered with the MPA, which commits to support IPOPHL “in developing an effective piracy monitoring system and a rolling site-blocking regime that will disrupt accessibility to piracy sites.”

 

“This newest partnership with MPA elevates IPOPHL’s whole-of-society efforts in fostering a digital environment that respects intellectual property (IP) rights,” IPOPHL Director General Rowel S. Barba said at the signing ceremony.

 

“Unfortunately, some people would watch illicit content because it is free rather than pay for legitimate ones, failing to see how this can destroy our economy and creativity as a nation in the long run.”

 

According to a recent survey, carried out on behalf of the Coalition Against Piracy, piracy increased in the Philippines during the pandemic. YouGov found that 61% of consumers in the Philippines admit to accessing pirate services versus the 49% of Filipinos that admitted to accessing piracy sites in September 2020. It is hoped that blocking pirate sites will help bring the numbers down.

 

“A site blocking framework, which incorporates transparency and due process, can be incredibly effective at reducing levels of online piracy in key markets like the Philippines,” says Jan van Voorn, the MPA’s Executive Vice President of Global Content Protection.

Transparency – Something Lacking in Site Blocking Processes

The statement from the MPA’s van Voorn that this framework will be transparent will be tested in time. The memorandum doesn’t appear to have been published so its precise contents remain a mystery for now. The announcement states that there will be a “lawful sharing of information” and the MPA has committed to conduct training on piracy takedown measures.

 

Other than that, transparency appears to be minimal, something that is becoming more evident in blocking practices elsewhere.

 

In the early days of site blocking in the UK, Europe and beyond, the legal processes that led to sites being blocked were indeed very transparent. Over time, however, there has been a shift towards keeping the details as secret as possible. Outside the content companies and cooperating Internet service providers, an accurate picture of how many domains are blocked is a complete unknown.

 

Ostensibly this aimed at keeping pirates in the dark to prevent circumvention but even processes that aim to remove hundreds of sites from search engines (something that cannot be circumvented) are conducted in private and in some cases voluntarily, between interested corporations.

 

As such, there appears to be no legal requirement to open these practices up to scrutiny.

MPA Praises The Philippines, US Govt. Not So Sure

In November 2021 at the MPA’s ‘Global Site Blocking Legal Conference’, the major Hollywood studios and Netflix gave the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines a fancy glass award titled “Site blocking in Asia Pacific – Government Leadership Award.”

 

This suggests that the MPA probably likes what it sees in the Philippines vis-à-vis site-blocking and could press other countries to follow suit in the future. Behind the scenes, however, the MPA criticizes the country for not doing enough.

 

“Market access barriers for the region’s theatrical, television, and streaming industries take several forms, including content quotas, foreign investment limitations, and dubbing and advertising restrictions,” the MPA wrote in its submission to the US Government’s 2022 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers.

 

Local screen and content quotas applied to theatrical and/or payTV businesses “limit consumer choice and often contribute to piracy by restricting the licensed supply of content,” the MPA wrote, calling on the Philippines to “remove any consideration of a screen quota” in proposed legislative amendments.

 

The Philippines, along with countries including New Zealand, were also called upon to extend copyright terms from 50 years to 70 years, with the former also being called out for being “a safe haven for some top piracy websites.” On top, the Philippines was also criticized for having long been “a primary source of camcord piracy of major motion pictures.”

 

In its final report (pdf), the US Government recognized some improvements in the Philippines but noted that courts are influenced by bribery while “corruption is a pervasive and longstanding problem” in both national and government agencies.

 

Some of the activities of the National Telecommunications Commission (a key signatory to the earlier site-blocking memorandum) are “inherently non-transparent”, the US added, noting that the country overall is declining according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

 

It’s not a secret that Google and Bing are tweaking their search results to accommodate copyright holders.

 

However, it was a surprise to see that pirate and related sites also started to disappear from DuckDuckGo, as we reported last week.

 

An initial review revealed that the official domains for sites such as The Pirate Bay, Fmovies, and YouTube-DL were no longer showing up. This led us to conclude that they had been removed for some reason or another.

Not Removed?

DuckDuckGo didn’t immediately respond to our findings but after two days DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg reacted on Twitter.

 

According to Weinberg, the search engine never removed anything. Instead, the problems were attributed to the “site:” search operator we used as an example in our article. Apparently, that is broken.

 

“We are not ‘purging’ YouTube-dl or The Pirate Bay and they both have actually been continuously available in our results if you search for them by name (which most people do). Our site: operator (which hardly anyone uses) is having issues which we are looking into,” Weinberg wrote.

 

These comments suggest that our coverage was wrong. However, that’s not the full picture, far from it.

 

When we wrote our article, we didn’t only use the “site:” operator. We also searched for keywords directly, without the domain names showing up. This means that the sites were unfindable for another reason.

DuckDuckGo Restoral

Coinciding with the tweets from DuckDuckGo’s CEO, several of the domains we listed in our article started to reappear in the search engine. The Pirate Bay homepage reappeared, and the same applies to YouTube-DL and Fmovies, even when we use the ‘broken’ “site:” operator.

 

These restorals supported the suggestion that this was merely a temporary technical issue. However, it wasn’t hard to find other examples of domains that were still unfindable.

 

On Sunday, we updated our article to add that YTMP3.cc and Prostylex were not appearing in search results; a few hours later these reappeared as well.

 

While we were amazed by this magical superpower that allows us to revive websites by simply mentioning them, someone else was pulling the strings. Behind the scenes, DuckDuckGo was working hard to restore sites that were mentioned in the media.

It’s Bing

At this point, it became clear that the search engine wasn’t at all happy with what was happening. They never actively removed any of these sites. Instead, a third-party data provider ‘removed’ the results for them.

 

Like many other smaller search engines, DuckDuckGo uses hundreds of data sources, including Bing. After some back and forths, DuckDuckGo’s spokesperson informed us that Microsoft’s search engine was the culprit.

 

“Yes, this is related to using data from Bing,” DuckDuckGo’s Senior Communications Manager Allison Goodman said.

 

Goodman also asked us to share a list of additional sites that were affected, so they could look into these. And indeed, a few hours after we sent over more affected domains such as 1fichier.com, 2embed.ru, and torrentgalaxy.com, these were restored as well.

Broader Issue

It’s understandable that DuckDuckGo wasn’t happy with the coverage. However, the problem was real. And since it’s emanating from Bing, other smaller search engines that rely on that data may be affected as well.

 

“Since these occurrences originated on Bing, they were passed down to our results, as well as other Bing syndication partners,” Goodman clarifies.

 

For DuckDuckGo, it may be tricky to resolve the issue permanently as long as it relies on Bing. Aside from the potential legal implications of actively restoring pirate sites, there are dozens, if not hundreds of other domains that are still unfindable.

 

We don’t intend to keep hammering on this but, at the time of writing, the immensely popular YouTube ripper is not listed in search results, and the to the streaming service gimy.app.

Inaccurate DMCA Removals?

While looking into these issues, we noticed that Bing also affects DuckDuckGo in other ways. From what we can see, the DMCA removals also spill over, including the inaccurate ones.

 

For example, some news articles from TorrentFreak are not available in Bing, presumably due to takedown requests. That includes this news report about a leaked Game of Thrones episode.

 

A few weeks ago Warner Bros. asked Google to remove this article. Google refused to do so, but it looks like Bing complied as the article is unfindable there. When we search for the title or even the URL, it’s not there.

 

The same applies to DuckDuckGo, where the article is not listed. Instead, is a . In Google’s search results our news article is the first result, as expected.

 

All in all, we want to emphasize that these issues are not caused by DuckDuckGo, which has been trying hard to mitigate the problem. However, the issues do exist and it is clearly more than a broken search functionality.