Many rightsholders around the world are looking for ways to cut down on Internet piracy and US-based Rightscorp thinks it has an attractive solution.

The company monitors BitTorrent networks for infringement, links IP addresses to ISPs, and then asks those service providers to forward DMCA-style notices to errant subscribers. Those notices have a sting in the tail in the shape of a $20 settlement demand to make supposed lawsuits go away. The company says 75,000 cases have been settled so far with copyright holders picking up $10 from each.

Earlier this year the company reported that its operation cost $2,134,843 to run in 2013, yet it brought in just $324,016, a shortfall of more than $1.8 million. With the second quarter of 2014 now in the bag, Rightscorp has been reporting again to investors. TorrentFreak has seen a transcript of an August 13 conference call which contains some interesting facts.

In pure revenue terms the company appears to be doing better, $440,414 during the first six months of 2014. However, operating costs were $1.8m compared to $771,766 in the same period last year. Bottom line – the company lost $1.4m in the first six months of 2014.

Still, Rightscorp is pushing on. It now represents the entire BMG catalog, plus artists belonging to the Royalty Network such as Beyonce, Calvin Harris and Kanye West. And, as previously reported, it’s now working with 140 ISPs, some of which are apparently disconnecting repeat infringers.

Interestingly, and despite the ISP removing settlement demands from infringement notices, Comcast subscribers are apparently handing cash over to Rightscorp too. How this is being achieved wasn’t made clear.

What is clear is that Rightscorp is determined to go after “Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Cable Vision and one more” in order to “get all of them compliant” (i.e forwarding settlement demands). The company predicts that more details on the strategy will develop in the fall, but comments from COO & CTO Robert Steele hint on how that might be achieved.

“So we start in the beginning of the ISP relationship by demanding the forwarding of notices and the terminations,” Steele told investors.

“But where we want to end up with our scalable copyright system is where it’s not about termination, it’s about compelling the user to make the payment so that they can get back to browsing the web.”

Steele says the trick lies in the ability of ISPs to bring a complete halt to their subscribers’ Internet browsing activities.

“So every ISP has this ability to put up a redirect page. So that’s the goal,” he explained.

“[What] we really want to do is move away from termination and move to what’s called a hard redirect, like, when you go into a hotel and you have to put your room number in order to get past the browser and get on to browsing the web.”

The idea that mere allegations from an anti-piracy company could bring a complete halt to an entire household or business Internet connection until a fine is paid is less like a “piracy speeding ticket” and more like a “piracy wheel clamp”, one that costs $20 to have removed.

Except that very rarely are Rightscorp looking for just $20.

According to comments Steele made to investors, “very few” people targeted by his company pay a fine of just $20, even though that’s what most of them believe to be the case after Googling the company.

“[For] most people, piracy is a lifestyle, and so most people are getting multiple notices,” Steele explained. “So we’re closing cases everyday for $300, $400, $500 because people got multiple notices.”

One of the ways Rightscorp achieves these inflated settlements is by having a headline settlement fee of $20, but not applying that to a full album. By charging $20 for each and every album track, costs begin to climb.

So, while someone receiving an initial infringement notice might think the matter can be solved by paying $20, after contacting the company they realize the matter is much more serious than first believed. At this point the company knows the name and address of the target, something they didn’t initially know. Now the pressure is really on to settle.

Finally, we come to the question of success rates. We know that 75,000 cases have been settled overall, but how many people have simply ignored Rightscorp notices and moved on. One investor indirectly asked that question, but without luck.

“At the moment we consider that trade secret,” Steele said.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

— by Julia Reda

It wasn’t easy to meet Peter in prison. Initially, his request for the approval of my visit was rejected, as have been requests on behalf of other friends. It was only when he read up on the regulations and filed a complaint – pointing out my status as an elected representative of the European Parliament – that my visit was approved.

He tells me that this is par for the course in prison. “If you don’t constantly insist upon your rights, you will be denied them”. Repeatedly, he had to remind the guards that they’re not allowed to open confidential mail he receives from journalists. His alleged right to an education or occupation during his jail time in practice amounted to being given a beginners’ Spanish book.

“Prison is a bit like copyright,” Peter remarks. In both areas, there is a lack of transparency and the people in power profit from the fact that the average person doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the issue. That opens the door to misuse and corruption.

Few people feel directly affected by these systems (even though a lot of Internet users commit copyright infringements, many don’t even realize that they are breaking laws and suffer no repercussions). Hence it is difficult to get traditional politics to change even the most blatant injustices that these systems produce. I ask him whether his imprisonment has changed his political views.

“It has confirmed them,” he replies. “I knew the system was broken before, but now I know to what extent.”

“The worst thing is the boredom”, Peter informs me when I ask him about life in prison. He gives an account of his daily routine: “I have soy yoghurt and muesli for breakfast, which I was recently allowed to buy from my own money, as the prison doesn’t offer any vegan food.”

That is followed by one hour of exercise – walking around the yard in circles – and sometimes the chance to play ping-pong or visit the prison library in the afternoon, before Peter is locked in his cell for the night. The only other distraction comes from the dozens of letters Peter receives every day.

Not all the books that his friends and supporters send make their way to him – they are screened for “inappropriate content” first. Other items that arrive in the mail, such as vegan candy, won’t be handed out to him until after his release, “but at least the prison has to catalog every single thing you send me, which pisses them off,” Peter says with a wink.

While his notoriety mostly comes from his role in founding the Pirate Bay, Peter has been critical of the platform’s development for a long time and has been focusing his energy on other projects.

“There should be 10,000 Pirate Bays by now!” he exclaims. “The Internet was built as a decentralized network, but ironically it is increasingly encouraging centralization. Because The Pirate Bay has been around for 11 years now, almost all other torrent sites started relying on it as a backbone. We created a single point of failure and the development of file sharing technology got stuck.”

In Peter’s eyes, the Pirate Bay has run its course and turned into a commercial enterprise that has little to do with the values it was founded on. Nowadays, the most important battles for an open Internet take place elsewhere, he says, noting that the trend towards centralization is not limited to file sharing.

Facebook alone has turned into its own little walled-garden version of the Internet that a lot of users would be content using without access to the wider Net. At the same time, services from Google to Wikipedia are working on distribution deals that make their services available to people without real Internet access.

One step to counter this trend towards centralization could be data portability, the right to take all one’s personal data from a service such as Facebook and bring it along to a competitor. The right to data portability is part of the proposed European data protection regulation that is currently stuck in negotiations among the EU member states.

“Having data portability would be a great step forward, but it’s not enough. Portability is meaningless without competition.” Peter says.

“As activists and entrepreneurs, we need to challenge monopolies. We need to build a Pirate social network that is interoperable with Facebook. Or build competition to small monopolies before they get bought up by the big players in the field. Political activism in parliaments, as the Pirate Party pursues it, is important, but needs to be combined with economic disruptions.

“The Internet won’t change fundamentally in the next two years, but in the long-term, the effects of the decisions we take today can be dramatic.”

According to Peter, establishing net neutrality, especially on mobile networks, will be one of the crucial fights. The Internet may have started out as a non-commercial space, but is entirely ruled by business arguments nowadays, and without net neutrality, large corporations will be able to strengthen their monopolies and stifle innovation. A pushback will be needed from small enterprises as well as civil society – but those groups struggle to be heard in political debates as they often lack the financial resources for large-scale lobbying efforts.

Although Peter is visibly affected by his imprisonment and talks about struggling with depression, he has not stopped making plans for the future. “Things will get easier once I get out. I’ve been a fugitive for two years and could hardly go to conferences or would have to show up unannounced.”

Once his eight month sentence has come to an end, Peter wants to get back to activism. When I ask about his upcoming projects, he starts grinning and tells me to be patient.

“All I can say now is that I’m brimming with ideas and that one of my main goals will be to develop ethical ways of funding activism. You often need money to change things. But most ways of acquiring it require you to compromise on your ideals. We can do better than that.”

Peter is now hoping for his prison sentence to eventually be transformed into house arrest, which would allow him to see his critically ill father and spend less time in isolation. Whether that happens will largely depend on whether the Swedish state will continue to view a file-sharing activist as a serious threat to the public. In a society where the majority of young people routinely break copyright law simply by sharing culture, that view seems entirely unsustainable.

About The Author

Julia Reda is a German politician for the Pirate Party Germany and a member of the European Parliament since 2014, where she serves as a Vice-President of the Greens/EFA group. She is also the chairperson of the Young Pirates of Europe.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Today sees the official premiere of The Expendables 3, but what was supposed to be a celebration for the makers has turned into a fiasco.

Three weeks ago a high quality leak of the film appeared online. This resulted in millions of downloads long before it reached the big screen.

Fearing a massive loss in revenue, Lionsgate issued thousands of takedown requests to limit the leak’s availability and sued six file-sharing sites that allegedly failed to respond to these notices.

It now appears that Lionsgate has more tricks up its sleeve. The owner of cloud hosting service filecloud.io informs TorrentFreak that he never heard from Lionsgate, yet the movie studio is now going after his DDoS protection provider Cloudflare and domain registrar Easyname.

TorrentFreak obtained a copy of the notice, which is also believed to have been sent to the service providers of several other file-sharing sites. In the notice Lionsgate’s law firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton requests that these companies render the sites in question unavailable.

The law firm lists several allegedly infringing URLs and points out that the hosting providers and domain name registrars have to take responsibility.

part of Lionsgate’s notice

The following text comes from a notice Cloudflare and others received, accusing the company of potentially assisting a criminal operation and ignoring a previous notice.

“In accordance with the DMCA, we have already notified you of the infringement, but you have continued to cause, enable, induce, facilitate and materially contribute to the infringement by continuing to provide your users with the means to unlawfully distribute, reproduce and otherwise exploit The Expendables 3,” the email reads.

The same takedown notice was also sent to the domain name registrar Easyname, who were encouraged to “take action” against the allegedly infringing site under ICANN rules. In their notice Lionsgate appears to hint at a domain name suspension.

“If you are the domain name registrar for the domain name referenced above, under ICANN rule 3.18.1, you are required to take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately to any reports of abuse,” the notice reads.

“You are hereby put on notice that despite Rule 3.18, and the website owner’s representation to you that it is not using the domain name ‘in violation of any applicable laws’, the owner is either directly infringing the rights of Lionsgate or contributing to such infringement through the distribution of the stolen work referenced above,” it adds.

Lionsgate’s methods are unusual as the operator of filecloud.io was never contacted by the movie studio’s law firm. There were abuse mails sent by other outfits though, and the URLs listed in the takedown notice were already taken offline. This means that the infringing pages listed by Lionsgate were directed to a 404 page.

The owner of filecloud.io informs TF that he’s not happy with the pressure Lionsgate has put on the companies he works with, especially since they failed to first contact the site itself.

“It might be nice if these complaining entities actually checked that their emails have a valid claim before firing them off to everyone under the moon,” filecloud.io’s owner notes.

“The majority of notices I get daily are dud but at least none of them go out of their way forwarding their gripe to everyone who has anything remotely to do with the site,” he adds.

In this case the notices haven’t yet caused any trouble for filecloud.io, but it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which smaller companies are easily threatened to pull the plug on an accused site.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Piracy is a hot topic, so when there are statistics to report the media is usually all over it. This week a series of intriguing maps has been doing the rounds.

The data was first published by the piracy experts over at Movoto Real Estate. Based on a large sample of three million unique IP addresses collected over a period of 40 days they presented a map of the most torrented movies, TV-shows and games per state.

This was quickly picked up by The Washington Post, Venturebeat and several other publications, who all shared the findings with their readers. TorrentFreak was ready to jump on the bandwagon too, but we couldn’t help noticing a few odd results.

What stands out immediately is that some of the most-downloaded movies in certain states are barely downloaded at all through torrent sites. “La Grande Bellezza” in New Jersey, for example, or “Cuban Fury” in Florida. The same is true for “Witching and Bitching” which, according to the map, is very popular in Indiana and Tennessee.

Are these movies really more often downloaded than blockbuster successes such as Divergent and X-Men as the map below suggests?

Most pirated movies per state?

The same odd results appear in the games and TV-show maps. Game of Thrones is by far the most downloaded TV-show in America, but for some reason “Awkward” is more popular in Texas and Louisiana. The same Louisianans also download the game “Scribblenauts Unlimited” more frequently than popular releases such as Minecraft and Watch Dogs.

Something is clearly amiss, so we took the unprecedented step of downloading the source data which is readily available.

To our surprise, the maps in question don’t represent the most-downloaded titles. Instead, they appear to reveal for which shows the download numbers differ the most when compared to the national average. This is completely unrelated to which movie, TV-show or game was downloaded the most.

Whoops, not downloads

Now back to our earlier question. Is “La Grande Bellezza” really that popular in New Jersey? No, the actual data shows only 2 downloads in this state…

Similarly, is “Awkward” the most pirated TV-show in Texas? Again, no, it has 232 downloads in the dataset compared to 2,554 for a single Game of Thrones episode. And we can go on and on.

In fact, if we made a real map based on the actual download counts in the dataset, Game of Thrones would be the most downloaded show in each and every state, as expected.

Confusingly, however, a map of the most pirated movies per state would list “Blood Widow” on top in pretty much every state.

This suggests that there’s an issue with the data itself too, as this movie is nowhere to be found in the list of most shared files on The Pirate Bay and elsewhere. The most likely explanation is that the researchers ran into a fake torrent file with bogus IP-addresses.

Whatever the case, it’s safe to say that the maps in question should be taken with a grain of salt, or a barrel of rum perhaps.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

When Steve Wilhite of Compuserve created the GIF format in the late 80s, he probably didn’t imagine it would be in use more than a quarter of a century later.

Against the odds, in 2012 the GIF celebrated its 25th birthday, a fitting tribute to a format that has not only endured but also enjoyed a resurgence alongside today’s meme culture. However, the tiny video clips available in today’s GIFs aren’t appreciated by everyone.

On the eve of the new season, the UK’s Premier League has been putting fans on notice that it will no longer tolerate the unauthorized distribution of its copyright works. In addition to going after those who live stream full matches, the football giant says it now intends to tackle individuals who post short clips online.

According to the League, the problem is being caused by fans who record goals and upload them as GIFs and Vines within a few minutes of the event. These spread virally around blogs and sites such as Twitter and are enthusiastically consumed, especially on mobile devices.

“You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law,” Dan Johnson, director of communications at the Premier League, told the BBC.

These over-enthusiastic fans sharing a few seconds of footage – often at particularly low quality – are apparently causing financial hardship for the most-watched football league in the world. So, to bring that to an end, the Premier League are looking towards a technological solution.

“It’s a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it, we’re developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity,” Johnson said.

“I know it sounds as if we’re killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property.”

Going after those who place short video clips online is not new. There have been several reports in the past few months of UFC owner Zuffa taking action against individuals who upload GIFs, with a recent purge in July against content hosted on popular hoster GfyCat.

While fans insist that GIFs of goals and knockouts are simply free promotion, the rights to show such things don’t come cheap. UK tabloid The Sun has an app which shows Premier League goals within two minutes of the moment, but fans have to pay £7 per month ($11.68) to access it.

As the UFC have no doubt realized by now (and the Premier League soon will), taking down GIFs will be a huge resource drain and will do little to stop availability of content. The files are too tiny, far too easily shared and come from potentially thousands of directions. Add to this the problem of having to nuke content in near real-time, and this becomes an unsolvable problem, at least by enforcement means.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.