AACS, the decryption licensing outfit founded by a group of movie studios and technology partners including Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft and Intel, has launched a crackdown on DRM-circumvention software.

In an effort to limit the availability of so-called DVD ripping software, AACS has sued the company behind the popular DVD ripping software DVDFab.

Under U.S. law it’s forbidden to distribute software with the primary intention of circumventing copyright protection. In its complaint, AACS accuses the “DVDFab Group” of violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause by selling tools that can bypass their DVD encryption.

“The DVDFab Group openly touts these illegal circumvention attributes of the DVDFab Software on the DVDFab Websites, advertising that, among other things, its software products ‘remove all Blu-ray copy protections,’ and ‘can remove … all known AACS copy protections’,” AACS writes in its complaint.

To stop the Chinese-based DVDFab from distributing its software in public, AACS moved for a preliminary injunction. After DVDFab failed to respond in court the request was granted by New York Federal Judge Vernon Broderick. TF has obtained a copy of the order.

The broad injunction is unique in its scope, ordering several domain registrars to disable all domains associated with the DVDFab group. This includes DVDFab.com, DVDFab.net, DVDidle.com, 3d-videoconverters.com, 3dBluRay-ripper.com, Blu-Ray-ripper.us, Blu-Ray-Software.us, BluRayripper.jp, BluRaysbs3d.com, BluRaysoft.jp, CopyBiuRay.us, DVDFab.jp, DVDFab9.com and DVDvideosoft.jp.

At the time of writing none of the above domains can be reached.

Besides the domain names, DVDFab’s hosting providers are also ordered to stop servicing the company, as are other online services including Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Whether AACS has asked for the closure of DVDFab’s social media accounts is unclear, as they remain active for now.

Adding to DVDFab’s troubles, Judge Broderick also ordered several banks and payment providers to freeze or stop processing the company’s funds. This includes PayPal, Amazon Payments, Visa and MasterCard.

The injunction

In summary, the order grants AACS the power to completely wipe all traces of DVDFab from the Internet, and make it hard for the company to resurface elsewhere. At least, that was the plan.

The Chinese software vendor is not giving up easily, and is already making a comeback.

“Existing bookmarks for either site may not work from some locations, so temporary sites for both are being prepared and will be online shortly,” a company spokesman says, pointing users to dvdfab.jp.

Quite how long this domain and associated payment services can remain functional remains to be seen.

In any case, AACS and the movie industry will be encouraged by this broad injunction, and it wouldn’t be a big surprise if we see this strategy being repeated against other piracy-related targets in the near future.

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

Over the past few years the copyright troll industry has grown from a few scattered companies trying to earn a few extra bucks into a huge machine with some very big players.

The business is now widespread in the United States, is spreading into Canada and has been present in Europe for many years, Germany feeling the most pain. It seems fitting, then, that the government there should feel what it’s like to become a victim of an aggressive copyright holder.

Sebastian Heiser is an editor at popular news resource Taz.de. Back in 2005 he attended a panel where he took a photograph of Manfred Stolpe, a politician with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), part of the current coalition government.

So that anyone could enjoy his work, Heiser uploaded his photo to Wikipedia with just two Creative Commons CC-BY-SA conditions – the creator must be mentioned along with the fact the image is available under a free license.

The SPD, however, didn’t feel bound by these minor restrictions, republishing Heiser’s work on netzwerkberlin.de and manfred-stolpe.de without the correct attribution.

“Usually it does not bother me when other people distribute my text or images. If it still bothers me sometimes, I write a friendly e-mail or pick up the phone,” Heiser explains.

But this case was different. Heiser saw an opportunity to turn the tables on the SPD, a party he believes is at least partly responsible for the “broken” copyright situation in Germany today. Why shouldn’t they suffer like everyone else?

Mirroring the behavior of the trolls that have flourished under German copyright law, Heiser hired himself a lawyer who formulated a suitable threatening letter with the aim of getting compensation from SPD. Heiser asked them to declare for how long they had been infringing his rights, requested payment equivalent to that of an appropriate license to use the content, and doubled them up for failing to attribute him correctly. Of course, there would be legal fees on top.

Perhaps surprisingly, without any fight Heiser received a letter back stating that copyright is important to SPD and as such they were willing to obey the law – and pay the ‘fine’.

“After some back and forth, because there were two images on the two websites, 1,800 euros was remitted to me,” Heiser says. However, according to Heiser, things have not reached a happy conclusion.

Underlining the state of today’s “great copyright”, of the 1,800 euros paid ($2,497) Heiser only pocketed 696 euros ($965) since the remaining 1,104 euros ($1,531) went into his lawyer’s bank acccount. Of course, SPD would’ve had to pay legal fees too, estimated at another 1,100 euros.

Total outlay 2,900 euros ($4,023). Amount paid to copyright holder – less than a quarter of that.

Heiser signs off with a call for SPD to fix the copyright situation, with a minimum requirement that the party understands it in future, and with artists getting paid more than lawyers.

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

As in many other countries, online piracy is causing headaches for the Australian Government. A variety of anti-piracy strategies to deal with the problem have been suggested in recent years, but thus far without result.

Late last year Australia’s Minister for Communication invited several companies to share their thoughts on the reduction of regulation in the communication sector. The minister asked for input on a variety of issues including future legislation regarding copyright.

One of the companies that responded is Google, and TorrentFreak has obtained a previously unpublished copy of the company’s response.

In its letter Google warns the Government not to implement draconian ant-piracy legislation. The search giant notes that they believe piracy is mostly an availability and pricing problem, which is best tackled with innovation instead of legislation.

“We believe there is significant, credible evidence emerging that online piracy is primarily an availability and pricing problem. We would encourage the Government to promote new business models and a free marketplace for legal purchasing of content,” Google writes.

“We would be disappointed if the Government decided to go down the route of overly harsh regulation to combat piracy without considering the evidence from around the world that this would likely be costly for businesses to implement and with little effect,” they add.

Besides the warning above, Google stresses that some of the current legislation is also problematic. For example, Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act is used to censor websites, which threatens the free availability of information.

“It appears that this law has been interpreted broadly by various Australian government agencies to include the take down of websites that are deemed illegal,” Google writes.

“Google believes that section 313 does not contain sufficient safeguards, and could potentially impact significantly on the availability of information and content on the internet through the over­broad blocking of websites.”

Google recommends that the Government should create more oversight by implementing measures to make these website takedowns more transparent.

In addition, Google is also worried about the lack of a safe harbor for Internet services, which can now be held liable for pirating users.

According to the company it is of “critical importance” that this gap is addressed, as the current uncertainty has a chilling effect on innovation among Internet services.

Google’s suggestions appear to stand in sharp contrast to the plans Australia’s Attorney-General George Brandis unveiled a few weeks ago. In a speech to the Australian Digital Alliance forum, Brandis opted for a ”three strikes” graduated response  system for persistent pirates as well as wide scale blockades of infringing websites.

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

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

Oscar winner 12 Years A Slave is the most downloaded movie this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(3)	12 Years A Slave	8.4 / trailer
2	(1)	Frozen	8.1 / trailer
3	(…)	Delivery Man	6.4 / trailer
4	(6)	Gravity	8.2 / trailer
5	(4)	I Frankenstein	5.5 / trailer
6	(2)	American Hustle	7.6 / trailer
7	(5)	Thor: The Dark World	7.6 / trailer
8	(…)	Bad Country	?.? / trailer
9	(…)	Dallas Buyer’s Club	8.0 / trailer
10	(…)	The Bag Man	5.5 / trailer

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

BitTorrent is a great technology to share large files with a massive audience, but it’s also one of the least private tools for communicating on the Internet.

It therefore makes sense for frequent BitTorrent users to use anonymity services such as VPNs and proxies. But those who sign up with a VPN should take a good look at the fine print, as not all VPN providers allow BitTorrent traffic across their entire network.

TF is currently compiling our latest overview of logging policies at various VPN providers, and by popular demand we also asked whether these services allow BitTorrent and other file-sharing traffic. The responses received thus far confirm that BitTorrent traffic is not welcome everywhere.

While all VPN providers we surveyed have BitTorrent-friendly servers, many have chosen to block file-sharing traffic on U.S. and U.K. servers. The main reason for these policies is piracy related.

VPNs Blocking File-sharing traffic

It appears that companies who offer VPN services in the US are often flooded with DMCA notices. This causes issues with the ISPs, as Unspyable explains.

“The issue is simply that the U.S. ISPs forward all the DMCA complaints to us. This forces us to deal with them which wastes time and effort, as we do have to send them a response,” Unspyable says.

“Since we don’t track anything we have nothing to give them in the response to the DMCA. However, many times that is not sufficient and we have had ISPs shut down our servers several times. This results in having to find new ISPs and the expense of setting up new servers,” the company adds.

NexTGenVPN notes that they block file-sharing traffic in the U.S. and U.K. because of bandwidth restrictions. The company also mentions that banning this type of traffic helps them to prevent being flooded with DMCA requests.

“The reason is quite simple actually. UK and U.S. are the only two locations where our bandwidth allocation is not really extendable at the moment, and we cannot accommodate massive transfers speeds there. Also, this prevents us from being flooded with DMCA complaints. Not that we really care, but it gets annoying in the end,” NexTGenVPN explains.

HideIPVPN also prohibits file-sharing traffic on some servers. The company notes that downloading copyrighted content is prohibited by law in the US, UK and Canada, so has decided to block both legal and unauthorized BitTorrent traffic on these servers.

“As you know uploads and downloads of copyrighted content via P2P and torrent networks is considered illegal in the U.S. With that in mind and also the fact that we do not wish to monitor traffic and data exchanged by our users, the simplest solution was to ban such traffic on some servers,” HideIPVPN tells TF.

While unauthorized file-sharing is against the law in most countries, rightsholders mostly send their takedown notices to U.S. ISPs. This is one of the main reasons why several VPN providers block BitTorrent traffic there.

NordVPN provides a similar explanation. The company currently blocks all file-sharing in several places.

“We only allow P2P traffic on servers that are located in the countries where there are no restrictions on the content downloaded via BitTorrent or other file-sharing applications,” NordVPN informed us.

File-sharing traffic is a no-go on EarthVPN‘s U.S. servers as well. The company mentions the DMCA as the main reason for this decision.

“Torrent and other file-sharing traffic is only allowed on Canada, Panama, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg and Romania locations as of now due to the DMCA,” the company explains.

PureVPN takes it a step further. In addition to blocking file-sharing traffic on their servers in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, they also block various torrent sites on these connections.

“We have blocked torrents on some of our servers. If users want to use BitTorrent, they can connect to our servers in Turkey, Sweden, Romania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany (Frankfurt only) or Russia and enjoy P2P/file-sharing there.

Non-blocking ISPs

Not all VPN providers are blocking file-sharing traffic in the U.S. and elsewhere though. Private Internet Access, for example, prides itself on providing unrestricted access to the Internet on all servers.

“We do not discriminate against any kind of traffic/protocol on any of our servers, period. We believe in a free, open, and uncensored internet,” PIA notes.

Ipredator, the VPN that was launched by a founder of The Pirate Bay, doesn’t have any file-sharing restrictions either.

“Besides filtering SMTP on port 25 we do not impose any restrictions on protocols our users can use on the VPN, quite on the contrary. We believe our role is to provide a net-neutral access,” the company told us.

The same is true for BlackVPN, Mullvad, Proxy.sh, VikingVPN and many others.

TF’s full report on the BitTorrent and logging policies of several dozen VPN providers will be published next week.

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