Responding to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), on Friday the MPAA submitted a new list of so-called “notorious markets.”

The MPAA’s report listed many of the usual suspects such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent and Torrentz, plus a selection of file-hosting sites such as Netload, ExtaBit and PutLocker.

A little while ago TorrentFreak obtained a copy of the RIAA’s submission and aside from doubling up on some of the same sites listed by the MPAA, it also delivers a surprise.

Torrent site blocking imminent

The RIAA says that in just 48 hours time a new wave of site blocking will take place in the UK covering not only the usual BitTorrent indexes, but also dedicated search engines in the torrent and file-hosting space.

On October 30, ExtraTorrent will be blocked by the UK’s leading ISPs, presumably following action by the major labels of the BPI. ExtraTorrent has suffered at least two anti-piracy setbacks in the last week, first when City of London Police convinced its registrar to take its domain and second when Google removed the site’s homepage from its search results.

The second indexing site to be blocked on Wednesday will be BitSnoop, which earlier this year was the eighth most-popular torrent site in the world. The RIAA says that since the site provided no way for rightsholders to make contact the decision was made to have ISPs block the site instead.

The third site to be rendered inaccessible this week will be Torrentz.eu. What is unusual about this development is that Torrentz is a so-called meta-search engine, in that it carries no torrents of its own but searches other torrent sites instead. Nevertheless, the site still complies with DMCA takedown notices, a fact acknowledged by the RIAA.

“[Torrentz] is currently hosted by Canadian providers. The site complies with take down notices by removing the torrents identified in those notices which provide access to infringing files. The site can take up to several days to remove infringing files following a request by right holders,” the RIAA explain.

In the rest of the USTR submission on torrent sites the RIAA lists many of the usual suspects, including The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, Torrenthound.com, Fenopy.se, Monova.org, Torrentreactor.net and Sumotorrent.sx. Many of these sites are blocked around Europe already.

As usual, two resilient trackers from Bulgaria – Arenabg and Zamunda – also get a mention.

Cyberlockers and related search engines

While there are plenty of file-hosting sites to choose from that could certainly be considered rogue (refusing to take down content etc) it’s again somewhat of a surprise that this week a copyright-compliant site will become blocked at the ISP level.

FilesTube is the most popular search engine for file-hosting sites and as such has been absolutely hammered by rightsholders looking for links to be taken down. It is by far the most targeted domain in Google’s Transparency Report with 9,242,032 URLs removed, double its closest ‘competitor’.

Interestingly the RIAA admits in its report that Filestube does respond to takedown notices. However, the industry can’t keep up so the implication is that this is FileTube’s fault.

“Industry reports links to infringing materials to the site operator, but any action by the operator is ineffective as the speed of the takedowns cannot match the speed at which new links are added,” the RIAA writes.

Along with the sites listed above, FilesTube will be blocked by the UK’s top six ISPs on Wednesday.

Other hosting sites singled out for detailed criticism by the RIAA include Uploaded.net, 4Shared.com, ZippyShare.com, Rapidgator.net, TurboBit.net and a selection of lesser known sites located in the Czech Republic. Three other sites are mentioned in passing – FreakShare.com, BitShare.com and Extabit.com.

“We greatly welcome this initiative designed to expose businesses who operate notorious markets for infringing materials, and who generally either directly profit from the sale or other distribution of infringing materials, or who profit from facilitating such theft—in many cases through the sale of advertising space,” the RIAA writes.

“Quite simply, there is no place for open and notorious theft in a civilized world, regardless of how that theft is accomplished. Addressing the conduct of these notorious markets for piracy will go a long way towards promoting the rule of law, fuelling creativity and innovation, and maintaining US economic competitiveness,” the industry group concludes.

Meanwhile, every single site listed in the notorious market reports of both the RIAA and MPAA remain 100% accessible from all of the ISPs in the United States.

Source: RIAA Rogue Site Report Reveals Major Site Blocking in 48 Hours

For years the entertainment industries have been complaining that online piracy is hurting their revenues.

The problem has motivated people to start anti-piracy companies such as Rightscorp, a company which uses standard DMCA takedown requests to send settlement offers to alleged copyright infringers.

Rightscorp today announced that it has completed an alternative public offering (APO) and has begun trading on the OTCQB under the ticker RIHT. In addition, the company finalized a $2 million equity financing, money that will be used to expand its patent-pending technology so it can handle more clients.

The company says it’s pursuing an estimated “$2.3 billion opportunity” of revenue that’s now lost through online piracy.

As an anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp operates in between the Copyright Alert System and the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that are now common in the United States. The company tracks down copyright infringers and sends settlement requests to Internet providers, who forward them to their customers.

The typical settlement request is $20 per copyright infringement, but this sum increases if pirates continue to share the file after they received the first notice. For music albums every song counts as a single offense, which means that an album of 10 tracks can cost $200.

Rightscorp has a wide variety of clients, including Warner Bros. and BMG. Talking to TorrentFreak, the movie studio previously said that it uses the settlement approach to complement their anti-piracy efforts for customers whose ISPs don’t participate in the Copyright Alert System.

Warner Bros. settlement offer

Rightscorp CEO Christopher Sabec tells us that their approach is not only more effective than the Copyright Alert System, but generates revenue at the same time.

“The Copyright Alert System is simply not scalable. On October 26, 2013 there were 47m active peers on the Pirate Bay trackers,” Sabec says.

“Recent stats show that there are hundreds of millions of monthly BitTorrent users. Without a model that recoups revenue from the infringers, a CAS-style system would have extraordinary costs to handle even 10% of the BitTorrent traffic.”

On the other hand, Rightscorp believes that their approach is fairer than mass-lawsuits, which cost alleged pirates thousands of dollars in settlement fees.

According to the company the copyright holders they represent will only take legal action against subscribers who ignore all warnings and continue to share pirated files for three months.

“The mass lawsuit approach is problematic because there is no appearance of due process to the public. With Rightscorp, if a copyright holder chooses to sue someone who received 90 of our notices over 90 days and continued file sharing, they had ample warning to stop file sharing,” Sabec tells TorrentFreak.

“We believe that our notice approach appears much more fair than someone getting sued with no warning. With the current mass lawsuit paradigm, people are sued for millions of dollars after having never received a warning. The public seems to feels that is extreme and unfair. We believe we fix that problem.”

It’s worth noting that Rightscorp announced its public offering on the fifteenth birthday of the DMCA law. As far as we know that’s a complete coincidence.

Source: Piracy Monitoring and Settlement Firm Goes Public

Ever since Hollywood and their Australia-based anti-piracy group AFACT lost their copyright infringement liability case against local ISP iiNet, authorities have been keen to find a way to restart negotiations on the issue of online piracy.

Pushed along by the Attorney General’s Department, discussions between rightsholders and ISPs took place during late 2011 and 2012 in the hope that a mutual agreement could be reached. That proved impossible. Frustrated at what one ISP said was a failure to get to the root of the problem – a reluctance to provide Australians with desirable content in a timely manner and at a fair price – iiNet walked out.

Now close to a year later it seems that the whole debate is set for a reboot, with the new Coalition Federal Government putting its weight behind both entertainment companies and Internet service providers in the hope of finding an urgent solution.

According to The Australian, the Attorney-General’s Department has sent out letters to Australia’s leading ISPs and content creators requesting their participation in a series of roundtable meetings. New Attorney-General George Brandis is reported to be treating copyright infringement as a priority issue.

So what will be on the agenda? Details are scarce, but traditionally there are at least a couple of areas where ISPs can help rightsholders.

The first is by the implementation of a three or six-strike style scheme, where subscribers are monitored by anti-piracy companies and issued with warnings that are passed on by their ISP. While these can be purely educational, rightsholders do like a punishment element for the most persistent of pirates. However, iiNet will not go along with that.

“iiNet won’t support any scheme that forces ISPs to retain data in order to allow for the tracking of customer behavior and the status of any alleged infringements against them,” said iiNet Chief Regulatory Officer Steve Dalby. “Collecting and retaining additional customer data at this level is inappropriate, expensive and most importantly, not our responsibility.”

Since any agreement would have to implemented equally across the country’s main ISPs, a strike scheme with punishments seems to be dead in the water, without fresh legislation at least. So, the suggestion is that ISPs could be asked to do what many others are currently doing around the world – implement blocking of file-sharing sites. The notion has drawn the ire of the local Pirate Party who say they condemn any kind of censorship regime.

“Yet again we are faced with a government that is an enemy of the Internet,” said Simon Frew, President of Pirate Party Australia. “Previous Attorney-Generals organized secret meetings between ISPs and the copyright lobby, deliberately excluding consumers, and now history repeats. We demand that any consultation about the future of the Internet be conducted transparently and include competent and trusted representatives of the community, not just vested interests.”

It’s no surprise that online piracy has again become a political issue in Australia. This past year the country has been in the news several times due to infringement issues, including a public admonishment by the U.S. Ambassador to Australia which referred to Aussie TV fans as “some of the worst offenders” in the world when it comes to downloading TV shows such as Game of Thrones.

Source: Site Blocking on the Agenda for Fresh Aussie Anti-Piracy Action

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Turbo is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected 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.

Week ending October 27, 2013

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Turbo	6.3 / trailer
2	(3)	Despicable Me 2	7.7 / trailer
3	(1)	Man Of Steel	7.5 / trailer
4	(2)	Pacific Rim	7.4 / trailer
5	(6)	Kick-Ass 2	7.0 / trailer
6	(7)	Elysium	7.0 / trailer
7	(…)	Grown Ups 2	5.2 / trailer
8	(4)	White house Down	6.4 / trailer
9	(9)	The Internship	6.3 / trailer
10	(8)	2 Guns (TS/Webrip)	7.0 / trailer

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week

It has been said, that nobody is as hard to convince of a fact as those whose paycheck depend on not understanding it.

This applies strongly to those copyright industry lobbyists who make a living dismantling our freedoms of speech, assembly, and opinion.

One of the more obscene arguments from the copyright industry lobby is that people who facilitate unlicensed manufacturing of culture and knowledge – breaking the copyright monopoly in the process – make money from facilitating this process, through ads and the like. At the same time, the people of the copyright industry lobby – the Dutch Tim Kuik, the Swedish Henrik Pontén, the Danish “child-porn-is-great” Johan Schlüter (yes, he said that), you all know your local antagonists – are raking in money themselves on introducing censorship, tracking and wiretapping, while somehow claiming it is immoral to do so for those who spread knowledge and culture to humanity. It is sickening, really.

We know that we are winning, only that it takes an enormous amount of time to shift the overall direction of society. We come from the Internet, we’re used to changing the world in a weekend of coding. The nightmare with today’s copyright and patent monopoly laws is that they have their origin in Industrial Protectionism (IP) in the United States directed against Japanese cars in the mid-1970s.

Yes, the anti-liberty, anti-market, and anti-humanity forces have been working for 40 years to take us where we are today. We’ve been making great strides in the past decade, but it’s going to take much more work – not to mention endurance – to save the world from a surveillance society nightmare where the copyright industry determines what we get to know, see, and learn.

The copyright industry has long been working in collusion with the wiretapping industry – the FRA, NSA, GCHQ, etc. – to get laws that enable more tracking, more wiretapping, and more surveillance. This, after all, is the only way the copyright monopoly can be preserved: by eliminating private communications as a concept. But we can turn the tide. Just look at the tipping point in public opinion brought about by Edward Snowden’s leaks, not to mention the outrage from affected politicians.

When activists fought software patent monopolies in Europe just under a decade ago, many of them burned out in the process and suffered from what can only be described as a post-traumatic stress disorder, even though the good side won the legislative process. (Which was immediately ignored by software patent monopoly lawyers, for which they should be sent to prison, but that’s a separate topic.)

That victory night, the activists met with the fell-funded corporate lobbyists where the activists had won, and the lobbyists smiled professionally, raised their glasses, and said “see you in another two years”. The corporate anti-liberty lobbyists, particularly from the copyright industry, will simply never stop. That’s why we need to strike at the root of the problem and work long-term, rather than thinking that a reduction or two in the scope of these monopolies will fix everything.

Christian Engström, one of the activists in that battle who is now an elected Member of the European Parliament, has a particularly good quote: “If you’re getting bitter and burnt out and feel you need to take a break from activism, that is always the right thing to do. There will always be something to do when you come back; you never need to worry about the world running out of evil while you’re away.”

Fortunately, there are small things that each of us can do every day that doesn’t require the exhausting effort of writing long articles or reading complex reports. When hundreds of thousands of people do these small things, it has a tremendous effect:

- Share articles with your social network on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Two kinds of articles are particularly valuable – those that expose the copyright industry’s bottomless cynicism, and those that propose a better alternative.

- Use correct language, and if you have the energy, call people out who don’t. Every time you say “copyright monopoly” instead of just “copyright”, it makes a difference. Every time you say “manufacturing their own copies” and reject “stealing movies”, it makes a difference. Every time you point out that people are manufacturing their own copies using their own property entirely, it makes a difference. Every time you point out that we never determined our freedoms of speech and expression based on who gets to make a profit or not, it makes a difference. See my previous TorrentFreak column on Language Matters.

These two simple actions, when done by tens of thousands, have an immense impact – and can be done even if you’re tired and bitter of fighting what seems like an uphill battle.

I write more about this kind of swarm intelligence in my book Swarmwise, which you can download for free, by the way. If you want more arguments against the copyright monopoly, I recommend the book “The Case for Copyright Reform”, also available for free.

Source: Reflections On The Long Fight Against The Copyright Monopoly – And What You Can Do