While Netflix is without doubt a hit service credited for doing something positive in the battle against piracy, it needs to spread its wings even more widely. There is one region in particular that would love to see it arrive on its shores, but probably won’t for some time.

Australia is often criticized for its appetite for unauthorized downloading but it’s a country with a better ‘excuse’ than most for engaging in it. Not only is legal content much more expensive than in the US, the region is continually under-served, meaning that locals resort to file-sharing networks for shows such as Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, turning Australia into a per-head piracy front-runner.

Netflix is blocked in Australia, partly because the big US studios have an exclusive deal with media giant News Corp to show content. On the Internet, however, news travels fast. Googling “netflix australia” turns up dozens of articles explaining how to circumvent the Netflix geo-blocking mechanism to (shock, horror) actually PAY to watch Netflix in Australia using VPN services and proxies.

Naturally there are no official figures on how many people watch Netflix this way but estimates range from 20,000 up to 200,000 subscribers. Highlighting how the TV networks view these people, an article this morning in News Corp-owned The Australian went as far as labeling subscribers as “pirates”, even though they are paying for the service.

“There is concern at local networks about the growing impact of the US company flouting international regulations by accepting payments from Australian credit cards, despite maintaining a geo-block that is easily bypassed by VPN manipulation or spoof IP addresses,” the paper said.

But do subscribers deserve to be called pirates when they are showing the clearest possible buying signals? In 2011, then Attorney-General Robert McClelland gave his opinion.

“In relation to the use of VPNs by Australians to access services such as Hulu and Netflix, on the limited information provided there does not appear to be an infringement of copyright law in Australia,” McClelland told The Australian, the same News Corp-owned publication now calling Aussie Netflix subscribers “pirates”.

But with Netflix not having to go to the expense of setting up in Australia in order to service the region, rivals in the same market area are also feeling uneasy.

“The studios have licensed Netflix to distribute content on particular terms in the US and other larger markets, they haven’t licensed Netflix for Australia,” said Quickflix chief executive Stephen Langsford this morning.

“I have no doubt that the studios are in discussions with Netflix about VPNs because it is blatantly in breach of terms and Netflix is essentially getting a free ride into Australia.”

Quickflix currently has around 100,000 full subscribers so if the highest estimates are to be believed, the company has potentially half the 200,000 “unauthorized” subscribers Netflix already has in Australia.

The only real solution to the situation with Netflix, VPNs, piracy and the Australian content problem is to properly service the region with legal video in a timely fashion and at a reasonable price. By now it’s a stuck record, but anything else simply won’t work.

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

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

Frozen, which came available as Blu-ray rip a few days ago, 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)	Frozen	8.1 / trailer
2	(…)	American Hustle	7.6 / trailer
3	(1)	12 Years A Slave	8.4 / trailer
4	(…)	I Frankenstein	5.5 / trailer
5	(2)	Thor: The Dark World	7.6 / trailer
6	(4)	Gravity	8.2 / trailer
7	(…)	Saving Mr. Banks	7.7 / trailer
8	(…)	The Book Thief	7.7 / trailer
9	(7)	Ride Along	6.5 / trailer
10	(9)	The Wolf Of Wall Street (DVDscr)	8.5 / trailer

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

In a few hours from now we will know which film has won the 2014 Oscar for Best Motion Picture.

One of the contenders is Dallas Buyers Club, which grossed over $30 million at the box office on a relatively small budget. Despite this success, the studio behind the movie fears that piracy may cannibalize future profits.

Last month we reported that its makers, Voltage Pictures, launched a series of lawsuits in the U.S. against dozens of people who downloaded an unauthorized copy of the film via BitTorrent. This is not the first time for the studio – it previously launched a similar campaign against downloaders of The Hurt Locker.

Voltage’s anti-piracy actions are not limited to the courts though. The company is also sending out DMCA takedown requests, one of which was directed at Google. While this isn’t something newsworthy per se, the takedown request does include some curious URLs which appear to be counterproductive.

The DMCA notice lists 388 URLs in total. As can be seen below, these links are not all pointing to copyright-infringing content. On the contrary, Voltage Pictures asks Google to censor a perfectly legal Dallas Buyers Club page on Comcast’s XFINITY on-demand service.

The notice also includes several other URLs which don’t link to pirated material, including an article on CNN and a page from Google’s own webmaster FAQ.

Dallas Buyers Club Takedown Notice

It appears that Google isn’t happy with the sloppy DMCA notice, as the search engine has decided to remove none of the links in the request. This means that the Pirate Bay links listed in the notice remain accessible through Google.

Also of note, is that this is the first and only DMCA request Voltage Pictures has ever sent to Google. This suggests that the company might not be too worried about appearing in search results. Instead, the takedown notice may have been a preemptive action related to the BitTorrent lawsuits we mentioned earlier.

With this DMCA notice Voltage can show the court that it took other anti-piracy efforts as well. Whether that is wise has yet to be seen though, since right now it mostly shows how weak the studio’s evidence gathering tools are.

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

During May 2013, police assisted by the Federation Against Copyright Theft carried out a surprisingly heavy-handed raid in the UK against a suspected movie cammer. Five unmarked police vehicles containing detectives and FACT employees were deployed to arrest a 24-year-old said to have recorded the movie Fast and Furious 6.

The man, who had lots of property seized, was arrested, detained and later questioned by police and FACT. Later released on police bail until September 2013 as the investigation continued, the man told TorrentFreak he had been banned from entering any cinema in England and Wales.

With the guy’s bail date just a few weeks away, the story took another twist. Police and FACT again turned up at the man’s home in the West Midlands armed with a new search warrant. This time they said that along with his sister and her ex-boyfriend, the man was suspected of camming the movie “Epic”. All of their homes were raided. With a lot more equipment seized and yet more detainment and questioning, all involved were bailed until this month.

“I went to answer bail at a local police station around a week ago,” the alleged cammer now informs TF.

“When I arrived I was told that the officer in charge of the case wasn’t on duty. However, when he was called at his home he said he had completely forgotten about the bail date and said that F.A.C.T had not sent over any paperwork relating to the case, so he did not know what to do.”

At this point a decision was taken to re-bail the three people involved in the case until March 13, and a few days later the man’s sister received a call from FACT saying that they would soon return the property they seized from her. Wednesday this week the trio went to the local police station to collect it.

“We were greeted by Simon from F.A.C.T, the person who came and searched my property and interviewed me last year,” the man explains.

“When my sister returned to the car she had several evidence bags, three of which were for me which contained my phone, six laptops, a desktop computer, two tablets and around eleven hard drives plus an external hard drive. Her bags included hard drives, two Xbox 360 consoles, a mobile phone and other items. Another bag contained my brother’s property (a mobile phone, laptop and several USB memory sticks) and a further bag contained my friend’s property including a laptop, an old mobile phone and other things.”

However, it appears that that despite spending significant time and resources on the case, police have no further interest in the investigation or anyone’s prosecution.

“Speaking with the officer in charge of the case this week he informed me that when I do go to answer bail all criminal charges will be dropped, or NFA [no further action] as they call it,” the man informs TF.

But with the police backing off, does that mean an end to the matter? Possibly not.

The officer in charge of the case has told the man that FACT don’t appear to be giving up and are attempting to bring a private prosecution. That seems to be backed up by FACT not returning all property – a mobile phone, three servers, plus a router and modem are all still in the anti-piracy group’s possession.

“The fact that there is no evidence for a criminal prosecution begs the question as to whether or not there is sufficient evidence for a private law suit. Surely if there was any evidence at all [the police] would not be dropping the criminal charges,” the man says.

“Also what can they possibly sue me for? I have no job, no savings and no means of paying any compensation regardless of the outcome. Is it simply going to be a waste of everyone’s time?” he concludes.

These questions can only be answered by FACT, although at the time of publication no answers to our questions had been received.

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

It’s no secret that many people catch up with their favorite TV-shows via BitTorrent. Popular shows such as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead are downloaded millions of times by people from all over the world.

While downloading and/or sharing copyrighted material is against the law in many countries, there are plenty of tools around to help people’s TV-torrenting habits. The new Chrome extension ‘SeriesGuide’ falls into this category.

SeriesGuide keeps track of people’s favorite TV-shows, which are then displayed in a calendar format, so users know when to tune in. In addition, it offers Pirate Bay download links for each episode, ranked by the number of seeders and leechers.

SeriesGuide Overview

TF caught up with SeriesGuide’s developer who goes by the nickname SchizoDuckie. The developer says he coded the extension to fix a recurring problem he faced.

“I’m developing this mostly because it’s a solution to a problem I have myself. I’m following loads of series that air at separate intervals and you keep having to take the same steps manually: Figure out when something has aired, wait for a download to appear, go to The Pirate Bay, search for a torrent, sort it by most seeds, weed out the crap, and download.”

While he has a Netflix account, SchizoDuckie says most TV-shows take weeks or months to become available in Europe where he’s located.

“We don’t even have the final half of Breaking Bad yet. So then you resort back to piracy,” he says, adding that many other people are probably facing a similar problem.

Right now SeriesGuide is in beta stage, but SchizoDuckie says that many more features will be added in the near future. This will include automatic notifications when new episodes are released, automatic downloads, plus support for seedboxes and remote downloading.

SeriesGuide Downloads

SeriesGuide is free of charge and available in the Chrome Store. It currently comes in two flavors; one that opens the extension in the same tab, and one that launches it in a separate tab.

There’s very little doubt that the TV-companies wont be amused by SeriesGuide. However, SchizoDuckie believes that the extension is perfectly legal and there’s no lawsuit on the horizon.

“I’m not really worried. First off, I’m in Europe, I don’t have to worry about gazillions of dollars of lawyer fees if I cough in the wrong direction. Secondly, I’m not distributing anything illegal, I’m merely connecting pieces of data that are freely available on the web and presenting them in another interface,” he says.

“This is exactly what Google and The Pirate Bay does too, and this is exactly what a human does if he operates this same procedure manually. If there’s a law against that somehow, then I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”

That said, Google is known to boot torrent related extensions from the Chrome Store over “piracy concerns“, so there is a chance that SeriesGuide will not be available there forever. According to SchizoDuckie, this isn’t really a major problem.

“If somehow the whole thing does get taken down, then the source code is still out there, since it’s an open source project. The genie is out of the bottle,” he concludes.

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