If one took a broad overview of the entire history of video gaming, few would dare to argue Nintendo’s legend status over the past several decades.

The Japanese company’s games, both old and new, are renowned for their brilliance and enduring characters. Arguably the most iconic is Mario, who first made his appearance as the hero in the timeless 1981 release Donkey Kong.

Even today, dangerously close to 40 years on, countless players still enjoy this and other classics on emulators and similar tools but Nintendo’s tolerance is becoming increasingly fragile. Over the past couple of years, as players toil in the shadows to defeat Kong, Nintendo has become a litigation machine throwing takedown notices and even lawsuits (1,2,3) at sites and alleged infringers.

The company’s latest effort came on Friday when it sent a copyright complaint to development platform Github. The target was a remake of Donkey Kong built with React Native, the open-source mobile application framework created by Facebook.

Created by developer ‘bberak’, this React Native version of Donkey Kong isn’t an emulation, it was created from the ground up for iOS and Android and documented in a detailed post on Hackernoon in April 2018.

Perhaps a little unusually, given the risks associated with stepping on Nintendo’s toes lately, the original repo – which was now been taken down – basically acknowledges that parts of the project may infringe copyright. The game’s code may have been created independently but the visual and audio assets are undoubtedly Nintendo’s. And the repo happily pointed to the company behind the project too.

“Copyright Notice: All content, artwork, sounds, characters and graphics are the property of Nintendo of America Inc, its affiliates and/or subsidiaries,” the repo read.

“Get in Touch: We are Neap – a development and design team in Sydney. We love building stuff and meeting new people, so get in touch with us at https://neap.co.”

The Neap website reveals that ‘bberak’ is Boris Berak, co-founder and Technical Director of the Australia-based company. TF contacted them for comment but at the time of publication, we hadn’t received a response.

In hindsight, it was probably a mistake to use Donkey Kong as a technical demo since Nintendo has already shown an aversion to such projects in the past. Back in June 2017, the company targeted a Donkey Kong remake for Roku, also hosted on Github. Interestingly, the complaint filed Friday appears to have an artifact from that two-year-old notice.

Stating the content being targeted most recently, Nintendo states: “Nintendo’s Donkey Kong video game, covered by U.S. Copyright Reg. No. PA0000115040 (supplemented by PA0000547470). The reported repository contains a recreation of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong video game for Roku, which was created and published without Nintendo’s authorization.”

The text is an exact match with that in the earlier complaint, even going as far as referencing Roku, which appears to be an error. Nevertheless, those details are irrelevant to the claim and won’t be good grounds for a counter-notice.

As Nintendo’s notice points out, at least another 30 developers forked this Donkey Kong variant on Github, so all those repositories have been taken down too. They could probably be restored if Berak removed all the original Donkey Kong references, graphics, and sound, but that seems unlikely.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Ten years ago Facebook reached out to The Pirate Bay, asking the torrent site to remove the ‘share’ button from its site.

At the time, the torrent site was at the center of a high profile copyright infringement lawsuit, something the social media network didn’t want to be associated with.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Pirate Bay wasn’t very cooperative. The request remained unanswered which left Facebook with no other option than to block Pirate Bay URLs at its end.

“The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook,” the company told us at the time.

Today, more than a decade later, the “share” button on The Pirate Bay is long gone. Somewhere during this period, Facebook’s ban was also lifted. When the social media site started blocking several other torrent sites a few weeks ago, we noticed that TPB was not among them.

However, this changed recently. When we reviewed Facebook’s blocking efforts a few days ago we noticed that The Pirate Bay is now blocked as well. Similar to the other pirate sites, it apparently violates the platform’s “community standards.”

People who want to use Facebook to post a link to The Pirate Bay will see the following error message instead; “You can’t share this link. Your post couldn’t be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards.”

Similarly, all Pirate Bay links are blocked in Facebook’s Messenger chats as well, returning a similar notification.

Facebook’s Community Standards and its Terms of Service allow the platform to take action against potential intellectual property infringements, which is likely what triggered this action.

While The Pirate Bay is now blocked again by Facebook, the current ban is substantially different from the previous one. Ten years ago the site only prevented people from linking to actual torrent pages, while all URLs, including the homepage, are banned today.

It is apparent that Facebook is gradually expanding its ‘piracy’ blocking efforts. In addition to adding The Pirate Bay, 1337x.to was recently added as well, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if more URLs will follow.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is the most downloaded movie.

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 Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(2)	Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw	6.7 / trailer
2	(3)	Toy Story 4	8.1 / trailer
3	(1)	Spider-Man: Far from Home	7.8 / trailer
4	(…)	Crawl	6.4 / trailer
5	(4)	Dark Phoenix	6.0 / trailer
6	(5)	John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum	7.8 / trailer
7	(…)	In The Shadow of The Moon	6.2 / trailer
8	(6)	Avengers: Endgame	8.7 / trailer
9	(7)	Aladdin	7.3 / trailer
10	(…)	Midsommar	7.4 / trailer

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

When the EU Copyright Directive protests were in full swing earlier this year, many people warned that upload filters would “kill memes.”

We weren’t particularly fond of this oversimplification, but the problems with upload filters are obvious, with or without the new EU directive.

In fact, even without automated filters copyright enforcement efforts can be quite problematic. Today we present a rather unusual example, where one of the “memes” we published in the past, was effectively taken down by Facebook.

To put things in a proper context, we take you back to 2014. At the time we reported that photographer Christoffer Boffoli had filed a lawsuit against the popular image sharing site Imgur, which allegedly ignored his takedown requests.

Boffoli hoped to protect his copyrights, but this effort soon backfired. A few weeks after he filed the complaint someone uploaded an archive of 20,754 of his photos to The Pirate Bay, specifically mentioning the lawsuit against Imgur. The torrent in question remains online today.

In recent years we haven’t heard much from the photographer, until this week, when someone alerted us to a rather unusual issue. The person in question, who prefers not to be named, had one of his Facebook posts removed over alleged copyright infringement.

The post in question was a link to our news article covering the Pirate Bay ‘issue.’ At the time, this was by default shared with a portrait of Boffoli that someone turned into a meme, as can be seen below (meme text cropped).

The Facebook notice mentions that the content in question was “disabled” due to a third-party copyright complaint. While it didn’t specify what the infringing content was, our article was listed as the “source,” and the link and the associated image were indeed removed.

Since Boffoli doesn’t own any copyrights to our work, and since we didn’t link to the Pirate Bay archive, we assume that the takedown notice is targeted at the meme image, which includes the photographer’s portrait. Whether it’s justified is another question though.

Memes are generally seen as fair use. As such, people can share them without repercussions. A photographer may contend this, and fight it out in court, but in this case that could prove difficult.

When looking into the matter, we noticed that the original portrait has been hosted by Wikipedia for more than 15 years. This shows that the photo is credited to Boffoli himself, and shared with a public domain ‘license’, allowing anyone to use it freely.

This means that creating a meme out of it is certainly not a problem. But perhaps there was another reason for the takedown?

Since Facebook doesn’t share any further details, and our own original Facebook posting is still up, we can’t be 100% sure what the alleged infringement is. However, looking through Facebook’s archive we see that another user had the meme image removed as well (TF link remains online here), suggesting that this is indeed the problem.

So there we have it. Facebook effectively ‘killed’ removed a meme. In at least once instance, it removed a link to a perfectly legitimate news article, based on a takedown request that doesn’t seem to hold water. The meme isn’t quite dead yet though, it’s on the Internet after all.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

DISH Networks’ efforts to disrupt, take down, or obtain settlements from unlicensed IPTV operators are continuing with force through the US legal system.

The broadcaster is currently tied up in a number of lawsuits, each targeting companies and individuals that allegedly provide the company’s content to the public, without having first obtained appropriate licensing.

A complaint filed in August targets Easybox IPTV, an allegedly-infringing IPTV outfit that supplies both subscriptions and ready-configured (aka ‘fully-loaded’) devices to the United States market.

The DISH lawsuit, which demands around $10 million in damages, was filed in a Texas federal court. It lists up to five ‘John Does’, claiming that individually and collectively they do business under the Easybox IPTV banner.

DISH earlier explained that it doesn’t actually know who these people are but its investigations indicated that they might be from China. Now, however, it has now been given the opportunity to discover their identities after gaining permission from the Court.

A discovery order signed September 19 by District Judge Lynn N. Hughes grants DISH permission to subpoena and obtain information from some of the world’s largest Internet companies that have done or are still doing business with Easybox.

The list is comprehensive and a potential eye-opener for other IPTV providers operating without cast-iron licensing agreements.

Top of the list is payment processor PayPal. The Easybox website is currently down for supposed maintenance but according to archive copies of the site, PayPal isn’t clearly listed as a payment option for direct customers. Nevertheless, the company is probably head of the list for good reason.

Second up is Google. Like many companies, Easybox is likely to have used Google in several ways but a cursory review of the site’s source reveals an analytics account and links to the now-defunct Google+.

On the domain front, DISH has permission to subpoena Washington-based domain name registrar Enom and domain registry Namecheap. The Easybox.tv domain has clear links to both and could provide useful information.

When it comes to hosting, Miami-based Netrouting Inc. makes an appearance. In common with the domain companies, these may also have valuable information for DISH.

Easybox’s Facebook and Twitter pages are no longer active. The former is listed as unavailable but the latter appears to have been suspended after violating the platform’s rules. But whatever the reasons for their demise, both companies are likely to have plenty of additional information to offer up.

Finally, DISH will be able to enter the physical world to request information from entities that appear to have distributed or sold Easybox IPTV devices. Michigan-based fulfillment company Xpert Fulfillment Inc., Finest Bargain Inc. (which appears to sell via Amazon), and Ace Discount Store are all listed and should expect calls for information soon.

“By November 4, 2019, DISH must replead this case identifying the defendant as Easybox IPTV. When the other defendants are identified, they may be named,” Judge Hughes concludes.

The discovery order can be obtained here (pdf)

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.