Over the past few years the entertainment industries have repeatedly asked Google to step up its game when it comes to anti-piracy efforts.

These remarks haven’t fallen on deaf ears and Google has slowly implemented various new anti-piracy measures in response. For example, the company began filtering “piracy-related” terms from its AutoComplete and Instant services.

One of the main demands from copyright holders is that Google should downrank copyright-infringing websites, so these don’t show up as the top results in Google. The search engine promised it would do so, but reports published by the MPAA and RIAA a few months back provided little evidence to back that up.

To see how accessible The Pirate Bay is in Google we decided to run a few tests of our own. The results undoubtedly show that Google is now downranking the most-used torrent site, although it is far from completely gone.

For example, those who type “The Pirate Bay” in Google’s search box will still see the notorious torrent site as the first result. The same is true for the three-letter abbreviation TPB and several related searches.

The results are quite different, though, when people search for specific titles such as “12 years a slave dvdrip“. For these keywords The Pirate Bay doesn’t appear on the first pages of the search results. Several other popular torrent sites do show up of course.

In itself the above doesn’t really prove that any downranking is going on, although it’s strange that the world’s biggest torrent site is absent from results. So, the next step is to take content that’s unique to The Pirate Bay, and let Google search for that.

We picked a phrase from TPB’s help page, which doesn’t show or link to any pirated files. The phrase in question is as follows: “There are many different clients for bittorrent, this guide explains how to use Bitlord”. As can be seen below, The Pirate Bay is not showing in the top results when we search for it on Google.com, even though it’s the source of the content.

Instead, the first result is a Pirate Bay proxy.

We used the same method with a few other targeted searches, including a track Dan Bull uploaded to the site, and got a similar result. The top result doesn’t list The Pirate Bay site, which is the original place where the “Sharing Is Caring” song was uploaded.

The above suggests that individual Pirate Bay pages are being downranked. This is confirmed by the fact that the results for the search phrases above do show TPB as the first result on other Google domains, such as Google.ca and Google.co.uk. Apparently, the downranking for this phrase only happens on the .com domain.

It has to be noted though, that the result above shows the Pirate Bay’s old domain, thepiratebay.org, where one would expect thepiratebay.se. The .se site does appear on other Google domains for the Dan Bull song and several other keyword variations we tested.

The more phrases and keywords we tried, the more varying results we encountered. For example, searching for a sentence on The Pirate Bay’s “doodle” page doesn’t list TPB’s official site in the top results of any of the Google domains we tried. Clearly, something is going on here.

Our findings show that Google is certainly downranking The Pirate Bay in its search results. Whether this is part of the earlier announced anti-piracy initiatives is unknown at this point.

In any case, The Pirate Bay is not really bothered by Google’s decision to downrank websites that are accused of linking to pirated material. According to The Pirate Bay team, it will only result in more direct traffic.

“That Google is putting our links lower is in a way a good thing for us. We’ll get more direct traffic when people don’t get the expected search result when using Google, since they will go directly to TPB,” the site previously told TF.

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

There was a time when raiding a torrent site meant that it stayed down for good, but with 2014 just a couple of months old it’s clear that things have changed.

The latest signs relate to Tankafetast, Sweden’s #2 torrent site and the 95th most popular site in the country according to Alexa. The site, second only to The Pirate Bay, specializes in movies and TV shows and has been an anti-piracy target for some time. With a motto of “We shall never surrender!” one gets a flavor of how that’s gone so far.

On October 1, 2012, PRQ, a webhost previously owned by Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, disappeared offline after Swedish police raided the facility. Many file-sharing sites went offline and it was later confirmed that Tankafetast was the prime target.

Just three weeks later it was back online, taunting the authorities and nemesis Henrik Pontén at copyright protection outfit Antipiratbyrån (Rights Alliance).

In April 2013 yet more action was taken against the site, with the arrest of one of the site’s admins. Yet again the site remained intact and online.

And now, according to the site’s operators, Rights Alliance and local authorities have had another go at shutting Tankafetast down.

“Once again, we fell victim to a Rights Alliance (Anti-Piracy Office) ploy to shut down TankaFetast! Our data centers have been raided,” the site’s operators report.

It appears that a continuing investigation led authorities to a location from where they believed Tankafetast was operating. While the raid last week may have unearthed something, the site was fully prepared for the event.

“Instead of sitting and waiting to see what the authorities want us to do we can move just anywhere to our other servers located abroad. Once again we will rise up again!” the site’s operators said.

And, a few initial problems aside, Tankafetast returned online this weekend. [Update: site has some stability issues]

“We’re going nowhere Rights Alliance, believe it!” the site declared.

Interestingly there was no announcement of action against Tankafetast last week from Rights Alliance or the police. Both are usually fairly quick to inform the press of their achievements but there are no reports from either. TorrentFreak contacted lawyer Henrik Pontén for comment but we have received no response.

It is certainly possible that the raid on the Tankafetast datacenter was expected to fail. Last Thursday a site operator revealed that the 2012 raid on PRQ didn’t net the site, just a gateway.

“We had some old empty dusty boxes with PRQ a few years ago but that was merely a proxy. When police got them there was nothing left in them anyway, since the memory was cleared for the least outside risk,” he revealed.

While in the ‘old days’ torrent site admins simply crossed their fingers and perhaps wore garlic to fend off attacks, it’s becoming clear that these days site setups are being hardened in preparation for what many believe to be an increasingly likely event. But these systems cost money and that has to be made somehow. Intrusive advertising is one way, according to Tankafetast.

“It is precisely because of pop-under advertising that we have been able to have servers around the world. Here you get a really good example. When one goes down we just move to another. The advertising that many find annoying saves us in situations like this,” they conclude.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

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	(…)	12 Years A Slave	8.4 / trailer
2	(1)	Thor: The Dark World	7.6 / trailer
3	(4)	Frozen	8.1 / trailer
4	(2)	Gravity	8.2 / trailer
5	(…)	After The Dark	5.7 / trailer
6	(…)	RoboCop (CAM)	6.7 / trailer
7	(5)	Ride Along	6.5 / trailer
8	(3)	Homefront	6.8 / trailer
9	(7)	The Wolf Of Wall Street (DVDscr)	8.5 / trailer
10	(10)	The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (DVDscr)	7.7 / trailer

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

I sometimes try to hold the copyright monopoly to the same legislative quality standards as other laws.

It fails laughably at the “necessary, effective, and proportionate” test, where a law must be necessary (meet an identified legislative need), effective (solve that problem effectively), and proportionate (not cause worse damage in the process).

Most of the time, the copyright monopoly fails all three tests, and when legislators have this pointed out to them, they shift uncomfortably in their chairs and change the subject.

I don’t know any profession except legislation that gets away with such abysmal quality assurance.

Most of the time, the discussion focuses on the “effective” and “proportional” parts of copyright legislation, illustrating how it is absolutely toothless in the absence of draconian privacy invasions, which is exactly what the copyright industry is tenaciously pushing for – which brings us to the “proportional” part right in the next sentence.

For once, though, “necessary” is up for debate. Is the copyright monopoly even necessary to solve a real problem? If so, what specific problem is it trying to solve? This passage is notably absent from most copyright monopoly legislations: “The purpose of this law is X”. If you were arguing for the introduction of such a monopoly today, how would you justify it? Could you conceivably do so?

To that effect, a new book, Without Copyright, was published recently. It reminds us of a sobering fact – even though the copyright monopoly was created in 1554 in England by “Bloody” Mary I in order to persecute political dissenters, it didn’t have much of an international effect until the 1900s. The copyright monopolies only protected authors of books in their own countries; outside the author’s own country, it was generally a free-for-all, and nowhere moreso than in the United States.

The international convention that turns copyright monopolies international is known as the Berne Convention, and it is overseen by the UN organization WIPO (the only UN organization to be funded by outside private interests). The United States ratified the Berne Convention only when it became geopolitically important to aggressively push its monopolies onto other countries, as described in The History of Copyright. More specifically, the United States ratified international copyright monopolies on March 1, 1989.

That’s very recent. To put it in perspective, that’s a newer event than Mario Bros, Die Hard, The Princess Bride, and The Legend of Zelda. It’s over fifteen years after the introduction of TCP/IP, the communications protocol of the modern Internet.

The U.S. had recognized some international monopolies to a very limited degree before that point. But before 1891, only citizens and residents of the United States could qualify for copyright monopolies at all. In today’s words of the United States: America was a rogue piracy state, plain and simple. That begs the obvious question – if there was no copyright monopoly, how did the writers make money, and since we have been told this always depends on the copyright monopoly, why were any books written at all in this time period?

But books were written before 1891. Tons of them. And there’s nothing to indicate more books were written after the United States accepted international monopolies, neither in the 1891 change nor in the 1989 change.

The answer, it turns out, was very simple. There wasn’t really any need for the copyright monopoly. There was a whole slew of tools available for publishers and authors to enforce business terms and make their agreed money, where – notably – not a single one of them involved lawyers. And this was considered modern times.

So that lets us return to the question:

How necessary is the copyright monopoly, anyway?

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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

The ongoing legal battle between Hotfile and the MPAA is nearing its climax.

In August the movie studios won summary judgment on the issues of DMCA defense and vicarious liability, while the file-hosting site was cleared of direct copyright infringement. The remaining issues, including the damages amount, will be decided during a trial early next month.

In preparation for the trial both parties have submitted motions to the court in recent weeks. Hotfile, for example, asked the court to prevent the MPAA from using “pejorative” terms including piracy, theft and stealing as these could misguide the jury.

District Court Judge Kathleen Williams has now ruled on these motions, with the file-hosting service scoring several important victories.

The Judge granted Hotfile’s “pejorative” terms motion, which means that the movie studios and its witnesses are not allowed to use words including “piracy,” “theft” and “stealing” during the trial.

“Defendants’ Motion in Limine to Preclude Use of Pejorative Terms is GRANTED IN PART. The parties may not use pejorative terms but may use terms of art,” the order reads.

The file-hosting service previously argued that since piracy and theft-related terms are derogatory, their use could mislead the jury and possibly influence their judgment. According to Hotfile there is no ground to substantiate the use of such terms.

“In the present case, there is no evidence that the Defendants (or Hotfile’s founders) are ‘pirates’ or ‘thieves,’ nor is there evidence that they were ‘stealing’ or engaged in ‘piracy’ or ‘theft.’ Even if the Defendants had been found to have directly infringed on the Plaintiffs’ copyrights, such derogatory terms would add nothing to the Plaintiffs’ case, but would serve to improperly inflame the jury.”

The MPAA countered that there is absolutely no reason to exclude words that are commonly used in cases related to copyright infringement. Banning the terms would make it hard for MPAA’s lawyers and the witnesses to describe the events that took place, according to the movie studios.

“Terms like ‘piracy’ and ‘theft’ are commonplace terms often used in court decisions, statutes, and everyday speech to describe the conduct in which Hotfile and its users engaged, and for which the Court has already found Defendants liable,” MPAA’s legal team wrote.

With her ruling Judge Williams clearly sides with Hotfile’s argument that the jury could be misled by piracy and theft-related descriptions. This is a clear win for the file-hosting service, but it also leads to the awkward situation that several witnesses can’t name their job titles, such as Warner’s head of Global Corporate Anti-Piracy.

Additionally, the MPAA can no longer quote Vice President Joe Biden’s famous comment: “Piracy is theft, clean and simple.”

The full list of motions Judge Williams ruled on includes more good news for Hotfile. For example, with regard to Hotfile’s countersuit over alleged DMCA abuse by the movie studio, Warner’s motions to exclude the term “perjury” and the studio’s audit of its anti-piracy system from trial were both denied.

On the downside, Hotfile’s request to prevent the MPAA from bringing up the criminal indictment against “Megaupload” was denied. This means that in describing the Megaupload case the movie studios can’t quote passages that reference piracy or theft.

It will be interesting to see how the MPAA tackles Hotfile now that they are restricted in the language they can use. It probably means that the term “copyright infringement” will be used more often than they had hoped.

To be continued.

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