Cinavia’s anti-piracy technology relies on a unique type of watermarking that allows it to remain present in pirated movies despite re-recording, transcoding, compression, or other type of transfer.

This means that camcordings of Cinavia-protected first-run movies, Blu-ray and DVDrips can be easily detected.

Support for the technology has been mandatory for all hardware and software Blu-ray players since 2012, which causes headaches for many pirates every day. Pirated movies protected by Cinavia work at first, but after a few minutes playback is halted and a warning notice appears on the screen instead.

“Audio outputs temporarily muted. Do not adjust the playback volume. The content being played is protected by Cinavia™ and is not authorized for playback on this device,” one of the notices reads.

Cinavia has been hailed as an unbeatable anti-piracy technology and up until today it was impossible to crack through a simple software solution. However, after several years DVD-Ranger has now solved the puzzle.

The company informs TorrentFreak that their Cinavia removing solution is now able to remove the play restrictions from pirated downloads in various video formats, something that was previously impossible.

“We have improved DVD-Ranger for use with torrent files. Now DVD-Ranger CinEx HD can remove Cinavia from downloaded torrent video files such as avi, mkv, mp4, mov and others,” DVD-Ranger’s Ingo Förster explains.

“The new module first scans the audio and then removes the Cinavia protection on the first pass. The contained video and subtitles will be handled pass-through, meaning that only the selected audio track will be re-encoded,” he adds.

On their website the software specifically targets BitTorrent pirates, many of whom have run into Cinavia protection in recent years. With DVD-Ranger’s “CinEx HD Advanced” software this is no longer a problem, although freedom doesn’t come cheap at $69.99 per license.

Förster and his colleague at DVD-Ranger have been working in the DVD-copying business for over a decade. For them, it was mostly the challenge that made them decide to break the Cinavia technology.

“Me and my partner are working both in science jobs and we were in contact with digital watermarks many years before Cinavia was born, so we know many things about digital watermarking. After we saw how many problems the major players such as DVDFab and Slysoft had with Cinavia, we started our own development,” Förster says.

Technically, Cinavia is not copy protection so the German based developer doesn’t believe they are breaking any laws. The files can be copied with and without a watermark, and their software only removes these “play” restrictions.

“In our country it is only forbidden to develop and sell software that circumvents copy protection. The law doesn’t mention digital watermarks. So is it legal? Definitely,” Förster notes.

In any case, DVD-Ranger’s breakthrough is likely to cause concern at Verance, the company where Cinavia is developed. Perhaps it’s the start of a new watermarking arms race?

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

Following its launch in the last quarter of 2013, City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has been working hard to disrupt the activities of sites in the file-sharing arena.

The Unit works on the recommendations of international music, movie and TV companies but is financed by the UK taxpayer, funding set to continue if Prime Minister David Cameron’s IP advisor has his way.

PIPCU’s activities began with the sending of warning emails to many domains around the world, warning them that non-compliance with police requests would result in further action. That action has taken several forms, including the attempted seizure of domains, reported disruption of advertising revenue, through to physical raids such as the one carried out on Boxing Guru earlier this year.

Today there are clear signs of further action by PIPCU. During the past few hours, file-sharing site FileCrop disappeared from the Internet, to be replaced by the PIPCU notice shown below.

While it’s not particularly unusual for PIPCU to target file-sharing related sites, what is special in this case is the nature of the FileCrop operation. FileCrop wasn’t a non-responsive Pirate Bay style torrent site, nor was it a file-hosting site operating on the boundaries of the law.

As illustrated by the image below, FileCrop was a search engine that allowed its users to seek content hosted on various file-lockers around the world including RapidShare, Mediafire and Mega, sites that all have strict notice-and-takedown procedures.

While the police making a search engine a priority target seems somewhat unusual (FileCrop also responded to takedowns), the targeting of FileCrop doesn’t come as a complete surprise. In mid 2013 the BPI began preparations to have another batch of domains blocked by local ISPs.

FileCrop.com was included in that list and before the year it was mostly inaccessible in the UK. The Alexa chart below suggests that the blockade had quite an effect on FileCrop’s popularity.

While there has been no announcement from City of London Police, previous actions resulting in the displaying of the “under investigation” banner shown above have always followed boots-on-the-ground efforts by the authorities. This suggests a UK presence for FileCrop’s owners or operators, although examination of the site’s WHOIS entries suggests that the domain owner is located in Ukraine.

Another unusual aspect to the case is why police would prioritize a site that apparently causes relatively few problems for rightsholders. While Google received more than 659,000 complaints last month against Fileshut.biz, a functionally similar site, the search engine has been receiving an average of just 37 complaints a week against FileCrop.

TorrentFreak’s requests for information from the police have gone unanswered this morning, suggesting that it will be next week before more is known about this case.

Update: The sports streaming site Cricfree.tv was shutdown as well.

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

OpenBitTorrent, PublicBitTorrent and Istole.it are the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, coordinating the downloads of tens of millions of file-sharers every day. The non-commercial services don’t host or link to torrent files themselves.

The trackers provide a useful function for the public, but are also used by copyright holders to track down pirates. This includes the companies that are used for the various “strikes” initiatives around the world, and various copyright trolls.

To make these increasing snooping efforts more difficult, the tracker operators have decided to take a drastic measure. The three top trackers have all implemented a ban list which includes the IP-address ranges of many of the larger hosting providers, which are frequently used by anti-piracy firms.

The operator of one of the trackers informed TorrentFreak that the measure will help to keep anti-piracy monitoring firms at bay. At least, those who use services of large hosting firms such as Leaseweb.

However, there is also a downside to the measures. Since many VPN services, proxies and seedboxes also use these hosting providers, they are banned as well. The tracker operators are aware of these consequences, but note that there are ways to circumvent the ban.

Also, affected services and users can still connect to DHT and PEX, which essentially makes the trackers obsolete. By using DHT, BitTorrent users are creating their own peer-to-peer trackers. The tracker operator we spoke to recommends enabling DHT whenever possible.

“Trackers are really not needed anymore for torrents to work. All BitTorrent users should switch to DHT primarily,” he says.

One of the collateral damage victims of the ban is torrent download service Put.io. They have quickly enabled DHT and PEX to ensure that torrents can still be downloaded, and will take measures to ensure that the trackers can be used through a separate server in the future.

“Right now turning on DHT and PEX brought some relief, but this limits our speed in finding peers and in general, our options. We will try our best to first get off those lists and then find a way to route the announce traffic over another server so this doesn’t happen again,” Put.io’s Hasan Yalcinkaya informed us.

Of course, anti-piracy outfits could take similar steps to bypass the ban. However, several are believed to rely solely on trackers for the time being. How effective the IP-address blacklist will be in the long run has yet to be seen.

The measure is not the silver bullet that will stop all anti-piracy outfits, but it’s certainly not making it any easier monitor file-sharers. So for once, they will be the ones who have to circumvent a blockade.

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

In 2012 following the raid on his New Zealand mansion, Kim Dotcom fought to gain access to the information being held against him by the FBI.

A ruling by District Court Judge David Harvey in May of that year, which stood despite an August appeal, ordered disclosure of all documents relating to the alleged crimes of the so-called Megaupload Conspiracy.

While it was agreed that this information should be made available, an order forbidding publication was handed down in respect to the so-called Record of Case, a 200-page document summarizing an estimated 22 million emails and Skype discussions obtained by the FBI during their investigation.

Last November a sealed court order by US Judge Liam O’Grady already allowed the U.S. Government to share the summary of evidence from the Megaupload case with copyright holders, something which was actioned before the end of the year.

Over in New Zealand, however, Kim Dotcom has been fighting an application by the Crown to make the Record of Case public. That battle came to an end today when Auckland District Court Judge Nevin Dawson rejected an application by Dotcom’s legal team to extend the suppression order placed on the document.

According to RadioNZ, the document contains sensitive information including email and chat conversations which suggest that the Megaupload team knew their users were uploading copyrighted material.

In another setback, further applications by Dotcom to force Immigration New Zealand, the Security Intelligence Service, and several other government departments to hand over information they hold on him, were also rejected by Judge Dawson.

Dotcom’s lawyer Paul Davidson, QC, told Stuff that the battle will continue.

“We will press on with our resolve,” he said.

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

As the largest user-generated content site, YouTube employs ContentID, a system that scans uploads and compares them to a list of works in its databases. If a match is found YouTube can take a variety of actions, from disabling the upload entirely to allowing third-party rightsholders to monetize the content.

Sadly, the system is not foolproof, especially when it is fed false data. Only recently a user was hit with bogus claims from a digital distributor after they wrongly claimed monetization rights over a public domain JFK speech.

Yesterday the scattergun approach to claiming rights on content people simply don’t own hit an inappropriate target, to say the least.

Michael Tiemann is Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, the 6,000 employee giant behind many open source enterprise products including Red Hat Linux. Apparently, even a man with Tiemann’s credentials and copyright awareness can’t escape bogus YouTube claims.

After creating a video recently, Tiemann decided to set it to music. Quite appropriately he headed off to ccMixter, a site which originated as a Creative Commons site a decade ago and one which provides samples, remixes and a cappella tracks under Creative Commons licenses.

Tiemann selected Sunray, a track available under a CC-BY-NC 3.0 Creative Commons license, married it to his video and uploaded it to YouTube. Things didn’t go well.

Straight after the upload a user called “RouteNote” claimed copyright ownership over Tiemann’s video. He filed an immediate dispute and RouteNote promptly dropped the claim. But then things started to get silly.

“I posted new versions of the video that were shorter, but using the same music, and lo, I received several more claims from routenote (and others!),” Tiemann explains.

“I disputed those, which routenote initially released. But here’s where things are broken: less than a day after they released the claim, they filed a new claim, against the same song, in the same video.”

So who are RouteNote? The YouTube user account is linked to a network of 53 channels totaling 21,717,873 views. It links to RouteNote.com, a company offering digital distribution services.

“RouteNote is the leading digital music distributor in the UK” the company claims.

TorrentFreak contacted RouteNote to find out why they’re plaguing Tiemann, but at the time of publication we’ve received no response. But for the Red Hat Open Source chief, however, the nightmare continues.

“In the mean time, others have filed claims against that song, which I have disputed, and some of those others have released their claims. They have subsequently filed claims against the new versions of the video that contain the same songs,” Tiemann explains.

Making matters worse, AdRev, a company that claims to be “the leading ContentID and Network partner on YouTube”, has also claimed copyright over Tiemann’s upload. But while RouteNote initially dropped their claims, AdRev have not.

“Another entity, AdRev, has rejected my dispute, despite me providing the URL to my source material,” Tiemann explains.

For AdRev, complaints about their copyright claims are nothing new. Their Twitter account is littered with questions about why they are monetizing other people’s content or having strikes placed on their YouTube accounts. In this instance a problem took more than a month to sort out.

Since AdRev rejected his dispute Tiemann now needs to appeal, but as this exchange shows, the company is not initially responsive.

Add the risk of getting a YouTube account strike if it all goes bad, Tiemann wonders what effect this is having on creators.

“So now I need to file an appeal, which puts my account at risk of a copyright strike. How many others have abandoned the fight at this point? How many Creative Commons artists are seeing their works abandoned because of this bad behavior on the YouTube frontier?”

While alleged infringers are quick to be punished by the YouTube system, there is no come back on those making the erroneous complaints. This is something that YouTube definitely needs to address.

“Banks got into a lot of trouble for robo-signing mortgages. I think that all this robo-enforcement of copyright is going to end badly for everybody, too,” Tiemann concludes.

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