Fake Pirate Movies Annoy Pirates & Anti-Pirates Alike

[Batu69]

Anti-piracy advocates are continuing to pile the pressure onto YouTube, this time from a quite unexpected angle. Bizarrely, the site is now under attack for allowing people to upload videos that send would-be pirates to scammy sites. But doesn't that help the cause?

 

In case readers missed it, copyright holders are very unhappy with YouTube. In recent months the site has developed into a battleground over the DMCA and the entertainment industries’ war with Google, with the record labels making most of the noise.

 

This week it was the MPAA’s turn to put more pressure on the site, this time by linking to an article published by filmmaker and anti-piracy advocate Ellen Seidler. As can be seen below, it implores YouTube to clean up its act.

Quote

"Time for YouTube to get serious about cleaning up all the junk, spam and malware files on its site" https://t.co/DsTwh3GYv7 @voxindie

— MPAA (@MPAA) July 7, 2016

 

The piece by Seidler is an interesting one, in that it criticizes YouTube for allowing people to upload fake movies that lead people to scammy sites.

In the unlikely event readers haven’t seen them, these fake movies are easily found by typing the name of almost any mainstream film into YouTube’s search box and adding the words “full movie”.

 

Once accessed, the videos nearly always instruct users to ‘click the link’ below the video to access the full movie. These links rarely, if ever, lead to anything good, and especially not the movie people expect.

 

 

While Seidler’s post expresses concern over the dubious sites that YouTube users are sent to, it seems likely that her post is more broadly aimed at chipping away at YouTube’s credibility and reputation. Little doubt that the MPAA’s retweet had that in mind too.

 

However, taking a step back reveals a much more complex picture.

Seidler correctly notes that these fakes pollute YouTube’s results but she also reports a secondary problem – it makes her anti-piracy work much harder.

“When I search for copies of my film using my Content ID account, I have to wade through dozens of these fake uploads,” Seidler complains.

 

“Removing them is an incredibly time-consuming task as it seems YouTube has purposely chosen to make the Content ID dashboard as inconvenient as possible for users.”

 

 

Of course, this situation is bad for people like Seidler who are trying to protect their content but consider for a moment the tremendous negative effect on pirates.

For many years people were able to type a movie title into YouTube, filter out all clips less than 20 minutes long, and more often than not come up with a decent copy of the movie in question.

 

Well, no more.

Today, YouTube’s search results are a horrible place to attempt ‘full movie’ piracy and that’s mostly down to the ‘full movie’ scammers.

If anything, one might think that Hollywood would be at least marginally grateful for third-parties infecting would-be pirates with malware or getting them stuck in horrible subscription traps. That’s quality piracy deterrence right there.

 

Instead, Seidler suggests ways that YouTube could clean up its site, perhaps by detecting and removing these fakes with ContentID. Pirates would certainly appreciate that, but YouTube isn’t likely to oblige.

 

Proactively removing content in that manner would only invite calls for YouTube do the same for copyrighted content. Before long, the same calls would go out to Google in general, with big implications for its search business.

 

So for now, both Seidler and would-be pirates are going to have to put up with these fake movie operations. Anti-piracy people will have to figure it out for themselves, but the best advice for regular users is to never click on the links in ‘fake movie’ YouTube descriptions.

 

Finally, Seidler raises the question of who is behind these scams. One of the outfits she names is TzarMedia.com, a site that has hundreds of negative online reviews.

The rabbit hole seems very, very deep on this one but there seems to be a recurring theme for those with an urge to investigate further. It looks messy, really messy.

 

Article source

[visualbuffs]

atleast there are people resposible for removing fake torrents haha

[luisam]

Record industry had been using systematically FAKE P2P links to annoy and deter users. I remember having serious problems to download from Kazaa end other P2P networks, mainly because I was still using the slow phone connexion @ 3 - 4 kbps and to download a simple mp3 file could take me up to 30 minutes - to get pure garbage.

I don't quite understand how these Youtube links to fake downloads work. Actually, Youtube doesn't look the most appropiate site to get movies, unless you feel happy with some 40 years old B rated movie at 128p

[steven36]

4 hours ago, luisam said:

Record industry had been using systematically FAKE P2P links to annoy and deter users. I remember having serious problems to download from Kazaa end other P2P networks, mainly because I was still using the slow phone connexion @ 3 - 4 kbps and to download a simple mp3 file could take me up to 30 minutes - to get pure garbage.

I don't quite understand how these Youtube links to fake downloads work. Actually, Youtube doesn't look the most appropiate site to get movies, unless you feel happy with some 40 years old B rated movie at 128p

The good old days  i remember this well  56 k dial up  it took like 12 hours to download one album ..This is why Kazaa and Imesh  was much more popular than bit torrent back then fasttrack had lots of singles  and  bit torrent  were massive .  If people use private  bit torrent  ,just download verified public torrents uploaded by trusted downloaders  or use trusted filelocker sites .. You will hardly ever get a fake .

Like you said fakes are nothing new, they always been around and if they are a problem for you shows  you don't use no  conman sense when  downloading .people who download fake files . You will end up with something much worse than a dud ..Virus ,Malware  or ransomware if you are this careless.... 

[luisam]

5 hours ago, steven36 said:

Like you said fakes are nothing new, they always been around and if they are a problem for you shows  you don't use no  conman sense when  downloading .people who download fake files

 

Please remember that Kazaa and other P2P fake "audio" files were not malware so they were not detected by antivirus. They were just garbage audio or even some "empty" files, implanted by Record industry. I remember that there was some discussion on record industry level if they should post P2P with some kind of malware but they decided that it would be explicitly illegal and actually a felony worse then downloading some illegal music.

With some experience you could detect these fake files following the pattern of computer generated filenames and so avoid downloading them