Two years ago district court Judge Beryl Howell, a former RIAA lobbyist, granted adult movie company AF Holdings the right to obtain the personal details of more than 1,000 Internet users suspected of downloading their works using BitTorrent.

The verdict was a big win for the porn studio and its controversial law firm Prenda, since many other judges had previously rejected joining so many defendants in one lawsuit. The ruling would allow copyright holders to sue large groups of alleged pirates who may have never interacted, or even lived near the district they were being sued in.

The ISPs were not happy with Howell’s ruling and Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Cox filed an appeal. The providers hoped to reverse the earlier ruling and stop copyright trolls from targeting hundreds of defendants in a single lawsuit.

The ISPs were joined in their efforts by several citizen rights groups including EFF, American Civil Liberties Union and Public Knowledge, who all argued that the mass-lawsuits should be struck down.

Yesterday, nearly two years after the original ruling, Court of Appeals Judge David Tatel finally came to a decision. The verdict is a clear win for the providers and concludes that AF Holdings and Prenda’s mass-lawsuits are an abuse of the judicial process.

“Sometimes individuals seek to manipulate judicial procedures to serve their own improper ends. This case calls upon us to evaluate—and put a stop to—one litigant’s attempt to do just that,” the Judge begins.

One of the issues at stake was that of personal jurisdiction. According to Judge Tatel the evidence made it clear that the porn company had no real intention of pursuing cases again all these defendants, not least because many do not live in the District of Columbia.

“We think it quite obvious that AF Holdings could not possibly have had a good faith belief that it could successfully sue the overwhelming majority of the 1,058 John Doe defendants in this district,” Judge Tatel writes.

“In seeking such information, AF Holdings clearly abused the discovery process,” he adds.

The same reasoning also applies to the issue of venue, with the Judge noting that it’s improper to lump together hundreds of IP-addresses from people scattered all over the country.

Finally, Judge Tatel looked at the joinder issue. While he doesn’t define any clear rules, the verdict makes it clear that adding hundreds of BitTorrent users in one suit because they downloaded the same file is not sufficient. Especially when there’s no indication that they ever exchanged files with each other.

“AF Holdings has provided no reason to think that the Doe defendants it named in this lawsuit were ever participating in the same swarm at the same time. Instead, it has simply set forth snapshots of a precise moment in which each of these 1,058 Does allegedly shared the copyrighted work—snapshots that span a period of nearly five months.”

To illustrate the issue, Judge Tatel uses a blackjack analogy that was brought up by one of the citizens’ rights group counsels.

“To paraphrase an analogy offered by amicus counsel at oral argument, two BitTorrent users who download the same file months apart are like two individuals who play at the same blackjack table at different times. They may have won the same amount of money, employed the same strategy, and perhaps even played with the same dealer, but they have still engaged in entirely separate transactions.”

All in all the ruling makes it clear that the copyright troll tactic of suing hundreds of individuals without showing that they are connected and living in the district they are being sued in, is a no go. While it doesn’t sent any strict rules on when a case is appropriate, and when not, it can be seen as a “crushing blow” for copyright trolls.

Most importantly is that the Internet providers, and the various groups that joined the case, have prevented worse. If the previous ruling would have held up copyright trolling would have been made much easier and more lucrative than it is today.

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

While many content creators believe that taking down pirate links will make their material harder to find, the value of this endless task is often questioned. As content spreads like a virus, links often reappear elsewhere as fast as they are taken down.

The response has been to send more and more takedown requests and the end result of that has been mixed to say the least. While the music industry does a pretty accurate job despite sending tens of millions of notices, smaller players tend to embarrass themselves regularly with ridiculous claims against clearly non-infringing domains.

Today its the turn of DMCA Copyright Enforcement, an anti-piracy company working on behalf of adult media company Cybertania Inc, the claimed operators of the myfreecams.com website. DMCA Copyright Enforcement started sending DMCA notices to Google on Cybertania’s behalf on May 13. It didn’t go well; the first 999 URL notice was rejected in its entirety by Google.

The notice that caught our eye, however, shows just how bad things can get when an anti-piracy company sets its dumb bots loose but fails to properly check on their work. First up to be accused of hosting pirated cam content, The Library of Congress.

So what pirated and filthy content is to be found behind this innocent looking URL? The Charleston Daily News apparently – from October 7, 1871.

Pressing on with their anti-piracy crusade, DMCA Copyright Enforcement’s bots thought they’d found evidence of yet more cam-focused infringement, this time on that well-known rogue site, NASA.gov. The bots homed-in on two allegedly infringing links – here and here – both NASA datasets and definitely not porn.

With a fuse clearly blown, the bots’ next stop was the profile page of The Reverend Alicia R. Forde at the Unitarian Universalism religious movement. Judging by the number of camgirls by the name of “Alicia” (and close variants) in the DMCA notice, it seems pretty clear what the poor Reverend’s crime was.

Now out of control, the bots headed off to Google’s product forums and a page on Ripoff Report for no apparent reason, stopping by at Newspapers.com to try and censor copies of The Kane Republican from May 14, 1958, the El Paso Herald-Post from May 1962 and the Miami Daily News from November 1941. And a copy of Farmer’s Wife from 1921, just for good measure.

Things then got really weird when the bots attacked some technical sites including Website Informer, Domain Tools’ DNS reporting service DailyChanges.com and Github.

After hitting search results on eBay (because they contained the name “Sonia”) this hugely embarrassing URL on The Daily Mail was up next, a clear attempt by the anti-piracy outfit to turn the site’s own search engine against itself.

The worst part of this sorry episode is that the items detailed above do not amount to a fully comprehensive report on all the disasters present in this single notice, there are many, many more.

In fact, since the middle of May around 15 notices containing approximately 1,000 URLs each have been rejected completely by Google with only eight making it through relatively unscathed. According to Google, four notices were so bad as to be marked as a potential abuse of the DMCA process.

Needless to say, DMCA Copyright Enforcement and Cybertania have got some serious problems to sort out before their bots cause any more damage.

Update: Since the publication of this article, Cybertania have been in touch to explain that the notices being sent out in their name are fraudulent. The company adds that they have not hired “DMCA Copyright Enforcement” (whoever they are) and suspects this outfit is deliberately trying to hurt the SEO of other sites. Google has been informed.

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

With millions of visitors per day Torrentz is one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet.

Yesterday many of its regular users were in for a surprise though, after their favorite search engine suddenly became unreachable.

It turned out that the site’s domain name registrar, the Poland-based company Nazwa, had suspended the Torrentz.eu domain. This drastic step was taken after they received a letter from the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

In recent months City of London Police have targeted dozens of domains through their registrars. Some complied, but others refused to take action without a court order, which is appropriate in these cases.

At first Nazwa placed themselves in the first group, as they were quick to suspend the torrentz.eu domain. However, it appears that the company was willing to listen to reason since their initial decision has now been reversed.

This morning Torrentz.eu’s old DNS entries were put back in place, replacing the ns1.blocked.netart.pl and ns2.blocked.netart.pl ones.

The Torrentz team informs TorrentFreak that their lawyer contacted the registrar yesterday afternoon. In a long letter the lawyer explained that the domain can’t simply be held hostage based on a third-party request.

Among other things, this argument is based on an earlier decision by ICANN’s Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy panel which concluded that a court order is required to take such drastic action (although it has to be noted .EU doesn’t fall under ICANN’s TDRP).

While the registrar has not yet replied to the letter, the fact that the old DNS entries have been restored suggests that they admit that the suspension was in error.

The Torrentz team is happy with the outcome thus far and will continue operating from the .eu domain. The site should be accessible again worldwide, at least to those who have the latest DNS information.

The UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit informs TorrentFreak that the recent efforts to ask registrars to suspend domain names is part of “Operation Creative.” The websites targeted by the police are identified by copyright holders, and then verified by police officers.

Update: Responding to the inquiry we sent yesterday, the police sent the following statement explaining how websites are identified and what actions are taken in response. As with the previous initiatives, such as the pirate site advertising blocklist, these fall under “Operation Creative.”

“As part of Operation Creative, rights holders in the creative industries identify and report copyright infringing websites to PIPCU, providing a detailed package of evidence indicating how the site is involved in illegal copyright infringement. Officers from PIPCU then evaluate the websites and verify whether they are infringing copyright. At the first instance of a website being confirmed as providing copyright infringing content, the site owner is contacted by officers at PIPCU and offered the opportunity to engage with the police, to correct their behaviour and to begin to operate legitimately.”

“If a website fails to comply and engage with the police, then a variety of other tactical options may be used including; contacting the domain registrar informing them of the criminality and seeking suspension of the site and disrupting advertising revenue through the use of an Infringing Website List (IWL) available to those involved in the sale and trading of digital advertising.”

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

Just how far we’ve come on the bandwidth front in the past few decades is astonishing.

In the early 80s the 8-bit demo scene manage to thrive with pedestrian transfers of 75 characters per second. By 2002 in the heyday of Kazaa, users still on dial-up were pondering whether an awful 28mb cam rip of 28 Days Later would be worth the herculean effort.

These days, some users are still happily gobbling up 700mb YIFY movie rips but for others bandwidth has become so plentiful that only multi-gig Blu-ray releases will suffice. However, there is a point at which even the swarthiest of pirates begin to complain.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is the long-awaited re-imagining of the cult classic game of the same name and as expected upon its release last week it quickly turned up on torrent sites. However, its huge size had some potential downloaders wondering whether to bother or not.

“43GB? holy fuck,” exclaimed Pirate Bay user sealtmx2.

“I have to uninstall like 10 games to play this shit!!” added ucci4life.

Reports suggest that the massive file size is due to uncompressed graphics textures but it comes as no surprise that some believe that annoying downloaders was in the developers’ minds. Bethesda had deliberately padded out the game with junk as a clever anti-piracy deterrent, some concluded.

While extremely unlikely, for some the big download was simply too much.

“43GB, the hell? No thanks, guess I will buy this when the price drops to £29.99,” said user u2konline.

The impatience in torrent sites comments sections was interesting to behold, with several downloaders reporting the abandoning of the download in favor of paying for the game instead. For them, waiting two or three days (according to times estimated by their torrent client at the time) was simply too much.

“I was gonna get this torrent but I saw the size and how long it would take me to download it, I said fuck it I’m getting it from Steam,” said user Caxtilteca. “Took me 2 hours to download 40GB including the day one update.”

Part of the problem, especially when the torrents were fresh, is that due to the time to completion there were a tiny amount of seeders (users with the whole game) compared to leechers (those still downloading). The effect of that was highlighted by speed157.

“38 hours later I finally finish my download and have uploaded 122.15 GB,” he wrote.

But while the huge download clearly deterred some, it appears to have had no serious effect on the number of downloaders overall. Although its size clearly had something to do with it, Wolfenstein: The New Order had the largest torrent swarms of any game last week and by the weekend more than 100,000 pirates had endured the wait to grab themselves a copy.

Reports on exactly how long people had to wait varied, from a few hours to a few days. However, it’s still interesting to see how that desire for content right here and right now led some to the doors of Steam or retailers when they became more convenient than the pirate option. For once and for a few, the boot seemed to have switched to the other foot.

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

Over the past few months City of London Police have been working together with copyright holders to topple sites that provide or link to pirated content.

The police started by sending warning letters to site owners, asking them to go legit or shut down. Late last year this was followed by a campaign targeted at domain registrars, asking them to suspend the domain names of several “illegal” sites.

A few days ago police sent out another round of requests to various domain name registrars, asking them to suspend the domains of several allegedly infringing sites. Before the weekend we reported that the cyberlocker search engine FileCrop was targeted, and today the same happened to Torrentz.eu.

Starting a few hours ago the popular search engine became unreachable after its DNS entries were pointed at ns1.blocked.netart.pl and ns2.blocked.netart.pl.

The operator of Torrentz informs TorrentFreak that the site’s main domain name was suspended by its registrar following a request from police in the UK. The site is still registered to the Torrentz team, who hope that they will be able to lift the suspension or move the domain name elsewhere.

Several other Torrentz domains remain unaffected, and the site can still be accessed via the Torrentz.ch and Torrentz.me domains.

Torrentz is the most prominent site thus far to lose control of its domain following action by UK police. With millions of visitors a day it’s one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet. The site is also an unusual target since it is a pure meta-search engine, showing nothing more than a search box on the homepage.

The actions of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit are not without controversy. While some registrars are willing to cooperate, Canada-based easyDNS previously refused to comply and successfully defended its customers.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to ‘some guy on the internet’ sending emails. While that’s plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn’t fly here,” easyDNS’ CEO Mark Jeftovic said at the time.

In Torrentz’s case, however, it appears that an email from the UK Police was good enough to have their domain suspended. However, the site’s owner should still be able to regain full control over the domain name.

Previously, ICANN’s Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy panel ruled that registrars can’t hold domain names hostage simply because a law enforcement agency believes it may be infringing.

“Although there are compelling reasons why the request from a recognized law enforcement agency such as the City of London Police should be honored, the Transfer Policy is unambiguous in requiring a court order before a Registrar of Record may deny a request to transfer a domain name,” the panel wrote in its decision.

“To permit a registrar of record to withhold the transfer of a domain based on the suspicion of a law enforcement agency, without the intervention of a judicial body, opens the possibility for abuse by agencies far less reputable than the City of London Police,” it added.

The above means that there’s a good chance that Torrentz will be able to get its domain unsuspended, or transferred to a new registrar at least (although it has to be noted .EU doesn’t fall under ICANN’s TDRP). Time will tell if this is indeed the case.

TorrentFreak has asked the UK Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit for a comment on the renewed suspension requests, but we haven’t heard back from them thus far – today is a national holiday in the UK.

Update: Torrentz.eu is unsuspended and back in action.

Update: The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit shared the following response with TorrentFreak.

“Operation Creative is a ground-breaking initiative is designed to disrupt and prevent websites from providing unauthorised access to copyrighted content, in partnership with the creative and advertising industries.

“As part of Operation Creative, rights holders in the creative industries identify and report copyright infringing websites to PIPCU, providing a detailed package of evidence indicating how the site is involved in illegal copyright infringement. Officers from PIPCU then evaluate the websites and verify whether they are infringing copyright. At the first instance of a website being confirmed as providing copyright infringing content, the site owner is contacted by officers at PIPCU and offered the opportunity to engage with the police, to correct their behaviour and to begin to operate legitimately.

“If a website fails to comply and engage with the police, then a variety of other tactical options may be used including; contacting the domain registrar informing them of the criminality and seeking suspension of the site and disrupting advertising revenue through the use of an Infringing Website List (IWL) available to those involved in the sale and trading of digital advertising.

“The IWL, the first of its kind to be developed, is an online portal providing the digital advertising sector with an up-to-date list of copyright infringing sites, identified and evidenced by the creative industries and verified by the City of London Police unit. The aim of the IWL is that advertisers, agencies and other intermediaries will use it as a brand safety tool and cease advert placement on these illegal websites.”

Photo: Michael Theis

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