Pirate streaming boxes remain widely appealing to a broad audience. At a fraction of the normal costs, they open the door to all sorts of broadcasts, including football matches.

On the sports side, BeoutQ has shown to be is a thorn in the side of many rightsholders. It launched in 2017 and ever since various parties have tried to stop it’s infringing activity.

While BeoutQ remains widely available today, the Premier League can chalk up a new victory with the conviction of a London seller of streaming boxes. The devices in question offered access to BeoutQ as well as several other illegal channels, such as beIN and Sky.

The conviction, handed down by the City of London Magistrates’ Court this week, follows a joint investigation from the English Football League and FACT. The Premier League subsequently prosecuted the 39-year-old seller, Ammar Al-Silawi, with success.

Following a trial earlier this month, Mr. Al-Silawi received a sentence of 300 hours of unpaid community service. In addition, the vendor is required to pay the Premier League’s legal costs.

The sentencing is unique, according to the Premier League. In the UK, it’s the first time that selling pirate set-top boxes was deemed to be an act of communicating infringing copies of copyright works to the public. This is in line with the Filmspeler judgment from the European Court of Justice.

“The law is very clear that the sale of ISDs is illegal and it is an issue taken very seriously by both the police and the courts,” says Kevin Plumb, Premier League Director of Legal Services.

“We will continue to investigate and pursue all suppliers of illegal streaming services, regardless of the size or scale of their operation, to protect the intellectual property that enables the Premier League to be so competitive and compelling.”

FACT is equally pleased with the outcome and Chief Executive Kieron Sharp notes that it serves as a stark warning to other vendors.

“The message is now unequivocal; if you sell a device that provides access to content that is not licensed or owned by you, you will face a criminal conviction. Illicit retailers should be aware of the Court’s view that ignoring a cease and desist notice was a clear aggravating factor in this case,” Sharp says.

While the rightsholders certainly have something to be pleased about, the community order sentence pales in comparison with earlier pirate streaming vendor convictions, which resulted in multi-year prison sentences.

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Along with the RIAA and several other industry groups, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) submitted its overview of “notorious markets” to the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) this week.

These submissions serve as input for the USTR’s yearly overview of piracy ‘markets’ which helps to shape the Government’s global copyright enforcement agenda.

The ESA, which represents video game companies including EA, Nintendo, Sony, Take-Two Interactive and Ubisoft, hopes that the interests of its members will be taken into account. In its report, the group lists various pirate sites that allow the public to download games for free.

Torrent sites are among the most significant threats according to the ESA, with The Pirate Bay being a key player. According to the game companies, TPB is a “major source” of copyright infringement that operates “with the assistance” of an unnamed U.S.-based CDN provider.

The less popular Skytorrents is the only other torrent site that’s included, while the list of ‘rogue’ sites also includes the linking sites oceanofganies.com and darkumbra.net, plus the cyberlockers rapidu.net, ltichier.com.

Pirate sites are not the only rogue actors. A special mention goes out to the so-called bulletproof hosting service FlokiNET. ESA reports that this company ignores its takedown requests, which allows the sites team-xecuter.com and sx.xecuter.co to operate freely.

“FlokiNET is a hosting provider that does not respond to notices of infringement or warning letters concerning their hosting and support of infringing websites. Despite attempts to send notices to FlokiNET’s abuse contacts pursuant to FlokiNET’s Acceptable Use Policy, the notices go ignored,” ESA writes.

These two FlokiNET hosted sites enable piracy of Nintendo Switch games and similar sites were previously blocked in the UK.

Finally, the ESA also highlights so-called “pirate servers” or “Grey Shards” that offer free access to subscription-based game services. Cloud-based games are less vulnerable to traditional forms of piracy but these “rogue” services circumvent the technological protection measures.

“When users are diverted to play on such servers, video game publishers are not able to monetize their online content on as described above and thus face reduced opportunities to recoup their investment in new distribution platforms,” the ESA notes.

As an example, the ESA lists Firestorm-servers.com and Warmane.com. The latter allows over 20,000 people per day to play World of Warcraft without paying the monthly subscription fee Blizzard requires.

While the purpose of the submission is to identify “notorious markets” that operate outside of the US, ESA frequently mentions that pirate sites are assisted by a US-based CDN provider. The provider in question is not named, but the game companies are clearly referring to Cloudflare.

In a footnote, ESA mentions that CDN’s have legitimate purposes, but that they also allow pirate sites to hide their true hosting location, while speeding up file transfers. Roughly half of the highlighted sites work with the unnamed CDN, they note, stressing that this has to stop.

“[I]t is important that all U.S.-based CDNs join ISPs, search engines, payment processors, and advertising services that have successfully collaborated with rights holders in recent years to develop reasonable, voluntary measures to prevent sites focused on copyright infringement from using their services,” ESA writes.

In a few months, the US Trade Representative will use the submissions of the ESA and other parties to compile its final list of piracy havens. The U.S. Government can then alert the countries where ‘rogue’ sites operate, in the hope that local authorities take action.

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A copy of ESA’s submission for the 2019 Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets is available here (pdf).

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In 2010, France became a pioneer of the so-called “graduated response” system for dealing with online piracy.

The plan was to deter users of peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent to refrain from sharing copyrighted content by sending them escalating warnings, with the ultimate threat of Internet disconnection or other punitive measures.

The system is overseen by government agency Hadopi, the High Authority for the Distribution and Protection of Intellectual Property on the Internet. Periodically the agency publishes its progress in the field, with the latest report made public this week.

Covering the period between January 2019 to August 2019, the report shows that Hadopi has been kept busy. The headline figure is that 479,177 Internet users received an email indicating they’d received a ‘first strike’ after allegedly sharing copyrighted material online without permission.

The next step up the ladder, the so-called ‘second strike’ notices, are sent to individuals who reportedly carried out a repeat infringement within six months of the first. Hadopi says it sent 165,683 of these to France-based Internet users by both email and physical letter, making a grand total of 644,860 notices sent overall.

The so-called ‘graduated response’ means that after each warning there is an escalation of seriousness with the authorities. So, after a ‘third strike’ in a 12 month period, Hadopi can refer cases to the public prosecutor.

Between January and August this year, 1,149 such cases were sent to the judicial authority. This is a considerable increase over the last set of published figures which showed that 1,045 similar cases were referred during the whole of 2018.

Of the 1,149 cases referred, Hadopi reports there are 387 known outcomes thus far. A total of 301 cases were settled without criminal prosecutions, with 199 people being cautioned. 64 cases were settled with fines of between 100 euros and 500 euros alongside a citizenship course, with the remainder dealt with in other ways.

A total of 86 cases ended in a criminal conviction. These included 31 sentences for “gross negligence” resulting in fines averaging 350 euros plus 300 euros in damages. These appear to have been cases where Internet connections were repeatedly used to infringe, without the connection owner taking preventative measures.

Of the 86 convictions, 47 concluded with repeat infringers receiving fines ranging from 150 euros to 1,000 euros.

Hadopi’s report for the first eight months of 2019 can be found here (pdf)

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President of the United States Donald Trump is well-known for his love of Twitter.

He currently has well in excess of 65 million followers and regularly uses the platform to promote himself and attack his critics.

Earlier today, Twitter erupted when a tweet by the President, which contained a video attacking the integrity of political rival Joe Biden, received some serious editing thanks to Twitter.

While the words “LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRAPH!” remained, the actual video had been removed following a copyright infringement complaint.

Trump’s tweet contained a video that has been doing the rounds featuring a photograph central to the recent Biden/Ukraine controversy. However, the photograph itself wasn’t the reason the video was taken down by Twitter.

The viral video contains a clip from Nickelback’s 2005 video ‘Photograph’, prompting speculation that the band itself was behind the takedown sent to Twitter. While they may have had a hand in it, the actual DMCA served on Twitter and obtained by TorrentFreak reveals that the notice was sent by Warner Music.

The cited source material for the takedown indeed points to the ‘Photograph’ video on YouTube, confirming the Nickelback link to the takedown.

Unfortunately, if Trump wanted to legally use the track in a political context, this would usually mean requesting permission from not only the publisher but also Nickelback, who may or may not wish to be associated with the effort. The copyright takedown suggests that the required pieces probably weren’t in place.

Perhaps the most interesting thing when one ignores the political angle of Trump’s tweet is that the President has been in this and similar positions several times before.

The Lumen Database, a repository to which Twitter sends its takedown notices, currently lists at least seven DMCA complaints filed against Trump this year alone, all of which have resulted in the removal of content.

On the other hand, people receiving DMCA notices from the IFPI, which acts as a copyright enforcer for Warner on Twitter and elsewhere, get their accounts terminated for fewer strikes. Perhaps there’s a presidential exemption from the DMCA repeat infringer policy at Twitter.

Notices filed against Trump on Twitter in 2019 can be found here 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 (pdf)

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This is part one of a two-part interview with Finn Brunton, author of ‘Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency’.

In this part we dig into the secret pre-history of Bitcoin, including the World War 2 origins of public/private key cryptography, how Proof Of Work was initially proposed as a means to fight spam,  and how the ‘Extropian’ movement – which, Finn explains, stood for ‘more life, more energy, more time, more space, more money… more everything! – collected an uncanny number of the early engineers contributing to what would eventually become Bitcoin.

If there’s one key takeaway from this episode, it’s that there’s no one Satoshi Nakamoto — Bitcoin’s a bricolage of math, technology and ingenuity stretching back at least seventy years.

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Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing crypto, privacy, copyright and file-sharing developments. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Finn Brunton

^{If you enjoy this episode, consider becoming a patron and getting involved with the show. Check out Steal This Show’s Patreon campaign: support us and get all kinds of fantastic benefits!}

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Lucas Marston
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Eric Barch

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