After launching its own streaming network and speculation surrounding a takeover, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is now worth a reported $2.3 billion.

Like many large entertainment industry companies, WWE is an aggressive protector of its copyrights and for several years has been pursuing companies and site owners who dare to step over the line. Part of that strategy is to force fan sites to hand over their domains, should they include ‘WWE’ in their URL. For owners of sites which threaten their PPV and streaming sales, things aren’t much better.

During March 2013, Facebook said that WWE Intellectual Property Director Matthew Winterroth was behind the closure of a page operated by Wrestling-Network, a site offering links to WWE streams and shows. Wrestling-Network operator ‘BeBe’ was told by the social network that he would need to contact the lawyer directly to solve the dispute. BeBe decided to quit Facebook and moved to Twitter instead, but by the summer WWE had raised its head again, this time after PayPal disabled an account used for the site’s finances.

BeBe says that in October WWE sent a takedown notice to Cloudflare, who handed over the details of the site’s actual host. For a few months things went calm, but last week all that changed. PayPal closed the site’s new account which had been opened by a third-party, and Facebook shutdown Wrestling-Network’s new page and BeBe’s personal page while they were at it. At this point things took a turn for the unusual.

After being given Winterroth’s contact details by Facebook, BeBe contacted the lawyer to see what could be done.

“My Facebook page was removed, care to share why?” BeBe wrote in an email to WWE last Saturday.

Without being given any further details (aside from BeBe’s email address which is enough to connect him with Wrestling-Network via a simple Google search), Winterroth wrote straight back suggesting there might have been some kind of mistake.

“What is your name, address and Facebook page that was potentially inadvertently removed and I’ll look into it,” the lawyer wrote.

“http://facebook.com/WrestlingNetworkHD,” BeBe responded.

Since Winterroth was the person named by Facebook as being responsible for the takedowns, it would be reasonable to presume that he already knew the circumstances behind the page’s disappearance, so suggesting at this point that there might have been some kind of error seems somewhat unusual. Nevertheless, Winterroth further underlined that notion in a rather unusual follow-up email.

Needless to say, BeBe wasn’t tempted to take up the offer.

“I just woke up and while I was checking my phone, I read the email and started laughing hysterically,” BeBe informs TF.

“I mean, I heard a long time ago about a case where in order to arrest them on US territory, some guys were attracted to the USA by undercover FBI agents who promised them money and girls, but a gift bag from WWE? Really? He could at least given me some WrestleMania tickets.”

BeBe says he politely declined the offer.

“Oh, that’s so generous of you, but no thanks,” he told Winterroth. “I just want my page back since I didn’t post any links to copyrighted materials like you claim.”

Exactly 20 minutes later, the WWE lawyer’s tone had changed.

“Thank you for your correspondence. We have shut down your Facebook page and also worked with PayPal to permanently suspend your payment processor account with them. We now have your address and whereabouts in Romania,” he explained.

“Should you not shut down the website and agree not to infringe WWE intellectual property in the future in an immediate fashion, WWE will continue to work with our counsel in Romania, as well as the relevant legal authorities, including the Ministry of Internal Affairs/Bucharest City Police and Romanian National Audiovisual Council on our ongoing criminal complaint against you.”

What followed were demands for BeBe to hand over his domain but with tempers beginning to fray, that seemed unlikely.

“[..] If you don’t know, Romania is not a state in the United States of America. Romania is a country in eastern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here and no Romanian law is being violated,” BeBe told the WWE in an Anakata-inspired response.

“Yes, this is why we are working closely with Romanian legal authorities on this matter, who have more knowledge of the current state of Romanian law that [sic] either you or I,” BeBe was informed. “Your website exists to infringe WWE intellectual property in a wholesale fashion, and such illegal use will not be tolerated.”

At this point, relations truly broke down.

“Ok, ok, I’m gonna go outside and wait for the SWAT team, or are you gonna send Seal Team 6? Well, whatever, in the meantime, you can go fuck yourself ‘Captain Skinny-Dick’,” BeBe told Winterroth.

“Oh, since you wanted my name and address, here it is: Mr. Fukhusen, 110 eatshitlane, 6800 Romania. Also, please stop with these legal threats Judge Judy, go back in your room and watch Suits and Law and Order.”

Signing off with a request for Winterroth to say “Hi” to WWE supremo Vince McMahon, BeBe severed his “negotiations” with WWE and has heard no more since.

Whether WWE will be tag-teaming with the Romanian police anytime soon will remain to be seen.

Photo credit

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

To deal with the ongoing threat of online piracy, major Hollywood studios have entire divisions dedicated to tracking down copyright infringers. Exactly what goes on behind the scenes is a mystery, but if the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has its way, part of this veil will soon be lifted.

Last month the digital rights group asked a Florida federal court to unseal the filings Warner submitted in its now-settled DMCA abuse case against Hotfile.

EFF argued that the public has the right to know what mistakes Warner made. Knowing how Warner Bros’ anti-piracy system works will be instrumental in discussing the effectiveness of the DMCA takedown procedure and similar measures.

This week Warner opposed the EFF’s request. The movie studio fears that by exposing the sealed documents pirates will obtain an unfair advantage. According to David Kaplan, Warner’s Senior Vice President of Anti-Piracy operations, the information “would give pirates multiple routes for evading detection and copyright enforcement.”

“Persons familiar with Warner’s methods and strategies for identifying unauthorized Warner content online could infringe without fear of detection if they knew how the detection worked,” Kaplan informed the court.

The above is intriguing, as it suggests that there are ways to bypass Warner’s anti-piracy systems. While this may be as simple as using anonymizer tools, the studio clearly doesn’t want the public to know. The opposition filings themselves are heavily redacted, but Warner warns the court that exposing their secrets could allow more “criminals” to avoid justice.

From Warner Bros’ redacted filing

The movie studio asks the court to keep the documents under seal, and accuses EFF of having a secret agenda. Warner believes that the digital rights group is not so much interested in serving the public good, and suggests that the EFF mostly wants to use the information to their own advantage.

“Although EFF claims that this unsealing would serve the ‘public interest,’ EFF’s motion is a thinly-veiled effort to gain access to Warner’s confidential information for EFF’s own tactical advantage in private litigation that EFF regularly brings against copyright owners to challenge their use of takedown systems,” Warner writes.

In EFF’s case, the public interest may of course be aligned with the interests of the group itself. However, the Hollywood studios believe that EFF is mainly interested in scandalizing.

“Plaintiffs’ concern that EFF’s true intentions are to exploit the sealed information in order to ‘promote scandal’ regarding Warner and other copyright owners is fully justified, and tips the balance even further toward continued sealing of the designated information,” Warner informs the court.

According to Warner, the EFF’s reasoning doesn’t trump their right to protect their anti-piracy secrets. This is not to avoid “embarrassment” as EFF suggests, but to prevent pirates from outsmarting them. If the sealed documents were exposed, this could severely damage Warner’s operation, they claim.

“As Plaintiffs have explained, this detailed information could be used by infringers to evade Warner’s copyright enforcement efforts. That such disclosure would cause significant harm to Warner’s copyright enforcement efforts is beyond serious dispute,” Warner stresses.

It’s now up to the court to decide whose interests weigh stronger. If Judge Kathleen Williams decides to unseal the documents, it will be interesting to see what Warner is so afraid of.

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

Earlier today news broke that Viacom and Google/YouTube have settled their billion dollar copyright infringement dispute, in which the former had accused the latter of hosting its video content without permission.

The precise terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, but the fact that YouTube has been trying hard to combat piracy in recent years can hardly have gone unnoticed. It invests large sums into Content ID, but this anti-piracy / monetization system can’t ever hope to solve the problem completely.

So, while the world is worrying about The Pirate Bay and other so-called ‘rogue sites’, through no fault of its own YouTube continues to be a pretty decent place to watch unauthorized content, not least hundreds if not thousands of Hollywood movies.

Finding that content is fairly easy too, via a title search (sometimes followed by “full movie”) and the activation of the “Duration Long” feature which only returns videos in excess of 20 minutes. However, spammers have been doing their best to pollute these results for some time, with fake video uploads of around two hours which claim to be the movie but are actually ploys to generate traffic to other sites.

If only there was a pre-moderated YouTube-movie-indexing site with a great Popcorn Time-style interface complete with reviewer ratings. Maybe looking something like this?

Actually there are already quite a few of these kinds of sites but MovieFork attracted our attention after it appeared in a complaint to Google penned by Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner and Disney – together the MPAA.

The complaint features three sites – MovieFork, FullMovies.cc and Otakhang.com, each dedicated to indexing Hollywood movies already available on YouTube. While many of the titles indexed by these sites are older classics, there’s no shortage of newer titles from the past year. Quality is half decent too, hardly the peer-through-a-letterbox experience of years gone by.

In its complaint the MPAA asks Google to take down specific URLs, including the MovieFork homepage. In another it asks for the FullMovies.cc domain to be delisted along with that of fellow YouTube movie indexing site Uflix.net.

But despite the nature of the sites, Google refused to comply with the MPAA’s requests. Google’s own Transparency Report shows it took “no action” in respect of the takedown notices and searching for the precise URLs with Google search reveals they are still indexed, with none of the sites’ homepages being delisted either.

Quite why Google is refusing to respond is unclear, but there are some interesting pointers. For example, similar requests to take down URLs that point to movies hosted on sites other than YouTube have been successful, such as the one for Man of Steel listed in this complaint.

It’s certainly possible that Google expects rightsholders to send their takedowns directly to YouTube, rather than shooting endless links and leaving the original content intact. Indeed, there are plenty of signs they are doing just that as some links are no longer available.

The scale of the free-full-movies problem is evident when one looks at Zero Dollar Movies, a site that claims to index 15,000 movies, all available for free from YouTube. It appears to use the YouTube Search API and even has its own ‘Instant’ feature for suggesting content that searchers may be interested in.

Other indexes, such as /FullMoviesonYoutube, a section of Reddit dedicated to just that, are pretty basic but show that not much infrastructure is needed in order to create a decent selection.

The movies-on-YouTube problem isn’t new in the same way that the torrents issue isn’t, but like Popcorn Time showed, it’s certainly got an awful lot prettier.

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

The Finnish constitution allows citizens to draft and submit legislative proposals for Parliament to vote on. All proposals that get 50,000 supporters within six months will be referred.

This also happened to a crowdsourced draft for a “fairer” copyright law which reached the required threshold last summer.

Termed “The Common Sense in Copyright Act,” the proposal aims to reduce penalties for copyright infringement, increase fair use, ban unfair clauses in recording contracts, and ease the ability for people to make copies of items they already own for backup and time-shifting purposes.

Last month the proposal was first presented in the Finnish Parliament. This piqued the interest of copyright lobby groups, who handed over a memo to Members of Parliament before the hearing, to inform them on their stance. Needless to say, the entertainment and media companies were rather critical of the public proposal.

What was more surprising though, is that many MPs repeated the rhetoric that was put forward in the pamphlet. Member of Parliament Kauko Tuuppainen went as far as parroting from the memo word-for-word, which was noticed by fellow MP Oras Tynkkynen, and later picked up by the Finnish press.

Below is a translation of Tuuppainen’s address in Parliament:

“The proposal could make Finland into a safe harbor for international piracy. Why? Because it encourages copyright infringement in many ways. One would be free to copy illegal content from the internet according to the proposal.” – MP Kauko Tuupainen in the initial hearing in Parliament.

Now compare this to the language used by the copyright groups in their memo:

“The proposal would make Finland into a safe harbor for international piracy. The proposal encourages copyright infringement in many ways. One would be free to copy illegal content from the internet according to the proposal.” – Joint announcement by the content and media industry organizations.

The two descriptions of the law are nearly identical, with several phrases being read word-for-word directly from the memo.

Open Ministry, the organization that coordinates the public law proposals, is not happy with the display of lobbyists’ influence. The whole idea of the public proposals is to hear the voice of the public and experts, but some MPs would rather parrot lobbyists’ opinions.

“Since copyright issues can be complex, we asked MPs to first hear what the experts have to say on the suggested changes, before shooting them down based on industry lobbyists objections and exaggerated propaganda. They did not,” Open Ministry Chairman Joonas Pekkanen says.

“The suggested changes are not that radical, since there is national room to maneuver within the boundaries set by the EU Copyright legislation,” he adds.

The above shows that the copyright lobby has a strong influence on lawmaking, and that in some cases the voice of the public can be easily countered by a handful of lobbyists. While it doesn’t leak out in public very often, it’s not a big secret that industry groups have a strong say in the laws that are enacted worldwide.

Just a few months ago it was revealed that 150 amendments to the EU data protection bill, submitted by Belgian Member of European Parliament Louis Michel, were copy-pasted from lobbyist paperwork.

For the Finnish “fairer” copyright law there is still hope though, but full transparency will be required. The next hearings are scheduled to be behind closed doors, but Open Ministry hopes that will change considering the recent events.

“There is hope that the committee chair, MP Raija Vahasalo, has the character to heed the request from professors and experts for full transparency and open this up for public hearings, workshops and debate – like the other citizen initiatives currently in Parliament,” Open Ministry’s Pekkanen says.

The proposal has now been referred to the Culture Committee, who will advise on whether to accept it later this year.

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

Malibu Media, the Los Angeles based company behind the ‘X-Art’ adult movies, is one of the most active copyright trolls in the United States. This year alone they have filed 288 separate cases involving one or in some cases dozens of defendants.

Day in and day out the company scours the Internet for people sharing their movies via BitTorrent. They then collect the associated IP-addresses, and ask courts all over the country to help them find the perpetrators.

Nearly all of these cases end up being settled for a few thousand dollars each. However, every now and then a defendant fails to respond, giving Malibu Media the opportunity to obtain a default judgment.

This happened to L. Sagala from Muskegon, Michigan, who was found guilty of willful copyright infringement by a federal court last week.

Malibu Media found that the IP-address registered to Sagala was used to share several X-Art movies and asked the court to award $40,500.00 in statutory damages. A bargain, according to Malibu Media, who claim that the real damages are even higher.

“Despite the fact of Defendant’s willful infringement, Plaintiff only seeks an award of $40,500.00 in statutory damages. This amount is reasonable when considering that Plaintiff’s actual damages far exceed this sum,” Malibu Media’s lawyers write.

“To explain, Defendant materially aided each of the other participants in the BitTorrent swarm of infringers. This swarm contained thousands of peers and continues to grow. Plaintiff’s actual damages are the lost sales of its content to those thousands of infringers. In the aggregate, these lost sales far exceed $40,500.00,” they add.

In an order filed before the weekend, District Court Judge Robert Jonkert grants Malibu Media’s damages request, as well as $1,649.40 for attorneys’ fees and costs. As Sagala failed to defend himself the verdict doesn’t come as a surprise. However, the relatively high damages award is not something we see every day.

The Order

Over the past few months Malibu Media has scored several similar default “victories” and there is no sign that they will be stopping anytime soon. Together with numerous settlements, which are worth up to thousands of dollars each, the company and its lawyers are estimated to have made millions of dollars.

Malibu Media’s legal action against alleged BitTorrent pirates initially started in 2012, when it followed in the footsteps of several other adult entertainment outfits. Since then, the company has filed a total of 1,894 lawsuits. It’s pretty safe to say that in addition to its x-rated activities, Malibu Media has also perfected the ‘art’ of copyright trolling.

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