Late last year the first provisions of Canada’s long awaited Copyright Modernization Act were implemented.

While the new law introduces great improvements in terms of fair use and non-commercial file-sharing, the “notice-and-notice” provisions are more problematic, especially for VPN providers and their customers.

Under the new law Internet providers and VPN services are required to forward copyright notices they receive from rightsholders to their customers. To be able to do so, the companies have to retain access logs for a minimum of six months so the pirating customers can be identified. Providers who do not comply face damages up to $10,000.

Specifically, the law requires providers to “[...] retain records that will allow the identity of the person to whom the electronic location belongs to be determined, and do so for six months [...].” Failing to forward a notice may result in “[...] statutory damages in an amount that the court considers just, but not less than $5,000 and not more than $10,000 [...].”

The new logging requirements in combination with a notice policy and fines are a disaster for VPN providers, and that’s not an overstatement.

The mandatory data retention is expected to lead to a customer exodus as it makes it impossible for providers to guarantee people’s anonymity, a key feature of any VPN service.

In addition, it will require VPN providers to implement an extensive logging and notice policy to deal with takedown notices. This will prove to be quite costly or simply impossible, especially for smaller companies that are sometimes run by individuals.

For example, many VPN providers assign shared IP-addresses to their customers, so even if they wanted to there is no option to accurately identify a copyright infringer. For these companies the only option will be to shut down, or move the company outside of Canada.

TorrentFreak contacted University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, who signals two main issues for VPN providers. On the one hand there are the resources that come with the implementation of the new provisions, and on the other there is the privacy issue for VPN users.

“First, are the resources needed to comply with a notice-and-notice system. These can be significant and it is disappointing that the government has decided not to consult on potential fees for notices. The law gives them the right to establish a fee, but it seems as if they will not do so, at the last for the time being,” Geist tells TorrentFreak.

“Second, on the privacy issue, notice-and-notice does not require disclosure of the identity of the subscriber. The additional logging of user information does create a new privacy issue, however. This is particularly sensitive given the recent Snowden disclosures and the growing interest among Internet users to safeguard their privacy.”

In a blog post Geist further highlights that the Government’s tone on the notice-and-takedown provisions recently shifted. Initially it was meant to be balanced and functional for both copyright owners and internet intermediaries, but the scale has slowly tipped towards the interest of copyright holders.

“It is our goal that a system be in place that is both balanced and functional; but, most importantly, it must endeavour to deter infringement,” the latest version reads.

The Canadian Government currently invites stakeholders to voice their opinions through the public consultation, and it might be wise for VPN providers and users to voice their concerns. There is currently no date set for the implementation of the notice-and-notice provisions.

Source: Canada Wants VPNs to Log and Warn Pirating Customers

Earlier this week it became apparent that City of London Police had approached certain domain registrars with demands that they should suspend the domains of various torrent and other file-sharing sites. Among them were ExtraTorrent and SumoTorrent, some of the largest indexes on the web today.

There appeared to be no legal basis for the requests, something which outraged Canada-based EasyDNS who refused to comply with a suspension request for meta-search engine TorrentPond.com

To get the lowdown on the latest developments and in order to be absolutely sure that there is no formal legal process underway, TorrentFreak spoke with City of London Police. They told us that in the summer they began a campaign to target websites “that attract visitors by providing unauthorised access to copyrighted content for criminal gain” and that the project is now in new hands.

“In September the project was taken on by the City of London Police’s new Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit [PIPCU], which has been set up to target serious and organized intellectual property crime affecting physical and digital goods, with a specific focus on offences committed online,” a spokesman confirmed.

“The latest stage of Operation Creative, as it is now known, involves contacting registrars whose website domains have been identified as involved in facilitating criminal copyright infringement under UK law and as result are potentially breaching the terms and conditions of the registrars. PIPCU are then requesting the registrars adhere to their terms and conditions and take consideration to suspending the supplied domain.”

So, while the police are stating that the domain registrars are involved in facilitating a crime, there is no formal legal process which establishes either that or whether the torrent and other file-sharing sites involved are actually illegal under UK law.

Given the status of The Pirate Bay and sites like KickassTorrents in the UK it’s certainly possible they are, but none of the sites are based in the UK.

Legal certainty would of course be of some comfort to registrars trying to decide the best course of action in these cases. However, for PDR Ltd, the company we yesterday revealed as suspending the domains of ExtraTorrent and three other MP3 sites, no such reassurance was needed.

So far PDR Ltd have failed to respond to our requests for comment, but according to Mark Jeftovic of EasyDNS, they may now need to think again.

“Any of those registrars that actually complied with the UK requests to bring down the torrent domains *must* allow those domains to simply transfer out, or they themselves will be in violation of the ICANN transfers policy,” Jeftovic told TorrentFreak this morning.

The problem is that the suspended domains are effectively seized and out of the control of their owners. This, Jeftovic notes, leaves the registrar exposed to the wrath of ICANN.

“Since there were no charges against any of the domains and no court orders, it may be at the registrars’ discretion to play ball with these ridiculous demands. However – what they clearly cannot do now, is prevent any of those domain holders from simply transferring out their names to more clueful, less wimpy registrars,” Jeftovic explains.

“If any of those registrars denied the ability to do that, then they would be in clear violation of the ICANN Inter-Registrars Transfer Policy.”

According to that policy, registrars can only take a domain when it was paid for fraudulently or is the subject of a “court order by a court of competent jurisdiction.” As already established, one of those doesn’t exist.

This means that domain owners who refuse a transferral of a domain to a new registrar will open themselves up to further action under ICANN’s Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy, a battle Jeftovic predicts they will lose.

“This is why it is never a good idea to just react to pressure in the face of obnoxious bluster – in the very act of trying to diffuse any perceived culpability you end up opening yourself to real liability,” the EasyDNS CEO concludes.

Source: Seized Torrent Domains Must Be Released Says Domain Registrar

For more than seven years isoHunt and the MPAA have been battling it out in court.

After the District Court ruling against the torrent site was affirmed in March, the case is now moving towards a trial next month from which the movie industry hopes to win hundreds of millions in statutory damages.

To secure this amount the MPAA has to prove direct infringement and show that United States users either uploaded or downloaded copyrighted works. In addition, they have to show that they are the rightful owners of the files in question. The movie studios want to settle these issues before trial and recently submitted a motion for summary judgment as well as supporting evidence.

However, isoHunt’s legal team is now pointing out that the evidence is not only far from conclusive but in some accounts completely inaccurate.

The MPAA initially listed 3,947 files, all movies and TV-shows, which means that the total damages isoHunt faces is as high as $592,050,000. To prove that isoHunt was offering these copyrighted files the MPAA hired Bruce Ward, owner of the consulting firm IP Intelligence. Ward identified the “infringing” torrents by searching through a copy of the isoHunt database from 2007. He then loaded the torrents into a BitTorrent client and transferred the downloaded files onto a hard drive.

The hard drive was subsequently sent to the movie studios to confirm that the downloaded files were indeed the infringing files listed as evidence. While this sounds like a solid process, something went seriously wrong somewhere down the line.

After all the files were identified the MPAA sent the hard drive with the infringing content to isoHunt’s legal team. On the drive were the torrent files and related videos categorized in folders, each with a unique id number (BT_ID) associated with the movie IDs on the list of titles isoHunt is accused of infringing.

However, when isoHunt’s legal team inspected the contents of the drive it turned out to be quite a mess, as the torrent files were not all linked to the right files.

“Plaintiffs’ BT_ID List identifies dot-torrent file 2224 as corresponding to Plaintiffs’ work ‘Legends of the Fall.’ Plaintiffs produced a copy of a dot-torrent file named ’2224.torrent’ on September 19, 2013. But opening the dot-torrent file ’2224.torrent’ in a BitTorrent client causes it to begin attempting to download a copy of a work entitled ‘Buddha Bar – Vol 4′,” isoHunt’s legal team explains to the court.

The mismatch between the titles provided by the MPAA and what the torrent files link to is not an isolated incident. isoHunt’s legal team has found several other examples, even though they only looked at a small selection of the files that were provided. They were unable to download all of the files in question, so they couldn’t check the actual videos.

In one case isoHunt’s team was able to download a torrent, but instead of the movie “Lords of Dogtown” it was linked to an MP3 album.

“On September 28, 2013, I launched the dot-torrent file ’16170.torrent’ using the BitTorrent client uTorrent, which downloaded eighteen files from the Internet. I reviewed each of the files and determined that none of them is the movie ‘Lords of Dogtown’,” isoHunt’s attorney writes.

“Indeed, none of the files is a video file. Rather, the downloaded files comprise sixteen mp3 audio files, an m3u file, a .sfv file, and a .nfo file that contains textual information about the audio files. Launching the 16170.torrent file using a BitTorrent client results in a download of audio files identical to the content files Plaintiffs actually produced on their hard drive on September 19, 2013.”

The attorney doesn’t mention the name of the album in question, but it seems plausible that the MPAA confused the “Lords of Dogtown” film with the soundtrack. In any case, isoHunt’s team argues that it is far from clear that the provided evidence is sufficient to prove that all torrents link to the movies and TV-shows the MPAA lists as evidence.

isoHunt’s legal team further notes that MPAA’s method to determine the location of isoHunt downloaders contains a pretty significant flaw. In his report, the MPAA’s expert notes that he used a geolocation tool to lookup the redacted IP-addresses of downloaders from isoHunt’s 2007 log.

The report concludes that at least one U.S. IP-address is linked to each of the downloads, but apparently the investigator used a recent IP-location database to determine that. This would be a problem, since an IP-address that was previously in use by a U.S. Internet provider might be used by an ISP in a different country today.

“Plaintiffs’ analysis of direct infringements also relies on geo-location data that does not cover the time periods at issue, such that their conclusions about the locations of purported downloaders are unreliable,” isoHunt’s legal team points out.

Based on the above and several other arguments isoHunt is now asking the court to reject the MPAA’s motion for summary judgment and reserve these issues for the upcoming trial. It’s now up to the judge to decide whether the MPAA’s evidence is good enough, or whether it requires a review during the trial.

Source: MPAA Screws Up Torrent Evidence in isoHunt Trial

Yesterday it became apparent that the newly-founded Intellectual Property Crime Unit of the City of London Police had deepened its campaign against some of the world’s largest torrent sites.

The unit has been in operation for some time, but until this week the only immediate signs of its existence were the threatening letters sent out to sites a few months ago. Now the unit is sending letters to domain registrars asking them to suspend the domains of sites that the police – and their Hollywood and music industry partners – say are copyright-infringing criminal organizations.

“Say” is the key word here. There appears to be no court orders and no due process, something that was condemned yesterday by EasyDNS, a registrar approached by the police to suspend the domain of meta-search engine TorrentPond. The Canada-based company refused to do so and published the letter from the police instead.

For half a dozen sites it was already too late. ExtraTorrent, SumoTorrent, MisterTorrent and MP3 sites emp3world.com, full-albums.net and maxalbums.com, all had action taken against their domains this week. However, at least one will be fighting back.

At the start of 2013 ExtraTorrent was the 5th largest torrent site in the world so the fact that the police decided to target the site is significant. Its owners are annoyed to say the least, particularly with PDR Ltd (Public Domain Registry), the registrar that suspended ExtraTorrent’s .com domain and also those belonging to the previously mentioned MP3 sites.

“After contacting PDR [after the suspension] they kept giving us funny replies but finally gave us a copy of the PDF file sent by the London Police,” ExtraTorrent told TorrentFreak.

“This was even more funny than the rest of the communications we had with PDR Ltd because it turned out that the suspension was solely and willfully under the discretion of the registrar and with no legal basis.”

ExtraTorrent says that they view the police correspondence, which suggested ways in which a website could be in breach of the registrar’s own ToS, as “guidance” to PDR Ltd on how to suspend a website domain in the absence of any due process.

“PDR Ltd didn’t even think of spending more time on understanding the content of the email sent by London Police. Basically they just got scared and did what was asked of them even with no legal implications indicated by the sender. The police were dictating to registrars what to do and how to do it their way,” ExtraTorrent explains.

ExtraTorrent remains operational at ExtraTorrent.cc but the site believes that it should fight back in order to regain control over its .com domain.

“We are going to fight this action legally if needed,” the site concludes.

After the news of the suspensions spread yesterday much of the criticism transcended the issues of copyright infringement or whether or not any of the sites had committed any offenses as claimed by the police. The general consensus among critics is that if sites are indeed guilty of a crime then it should be a court’s responsibility to order action to be taken.

TorrentFreak spoke with City of London Police yesterday and asked if it was normal to take this kind of action without court orders. We were informed that more information would be made available in the coming weeks.

It goes without saying that domain names and domain name servers are a crucial part of what makes the Internet tick. Little surprise then that there are concerns when copyright holders with police backing decide to meddle with them without the expected formalities.

As pointed out by EasyDNS, first they came for the file-sharing websites….

Source: ExtraTorrent Threatens Legal Action Over Police-Ordered Domain Seizure

Following the raids on Megaupload in January 2012, some pretty big figures were thrown around in respect of the alleged damages the site had caused copyright holders.

The general consensus of those rallying against the site was that Megaupload, a site that accounted for around 4% of all Internet traffic and dominated the online storage space, cost Hollywood around $500 million during its many years of operation.

This was the big one, the U.S. Government said, the world’s most notorious file-hosting site. But unknown to them in the depths of Europe a formidable new online piracy force was waiting to be unleashed.

According to the Guardia di Finanza (GdF), a department under Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance tasked with dealing with financial crime, the damage caused to the movie industry since the portal’s launch in 2012 has been enormous.

By offering Hollywood blockbusters and first-run movies illegally, in just over 12 months the operation netted more than 240 million visits resulting in 80 million unauthorized movie viewings. According to Italy’s leading copyright protection group SIAE, the losses were incredible.

“The damage, attributable to the non-collection for the film sector, according to estimates by the SIAE, amounted to about 330 million euros [$445m], with negative consequences on employment, huge losses for the treasury and inevitable repercussions on the country’s health,” the Guardia di Finanza said.

Yesterday, the GdF ran out of patience and raided the “operational headquarters” of the organization behind this piracy behemoth, taking their cameras along for the ride. Upon viewing the footage it doesn’t take long for the gloss to come off both the headlines and the wild claims of losses.

While the video (complete with flashing lights while the supposed pirate kingpin appears to be spirited back to GdF headquarters) is particularly poor, the claims of seizures of substantial quantities of “new generation computer equipment” aren’t backed up by the content either.

But always of most concern is when sites apparently as large as these are raided but not named by the authorities. We did some digging around and armed with the information that the site’s domains were ordered to be seized, we spoke with Marco d’Itri who runs Osservatorio Censura, a site dedicated to reporting on Italian web censorship, to try and find out some names.

“It has to be Casacinemas.com,” d’Itri told TorrentFreak.

Casacinemas is indeed a movie streaming portal and the pieces all fitted together. The operation against the site (which was indeed founded in 2012) took place in Verona and the only domain seizure order coming out of Verona is for Casacinemas. GdF revealed that the site’s admin was from Moldova, and that’s where Casacinemas was hosted.

So now to the wild claims of losses – do they hold water? Frankly – no.

Casacinemas was fairly popular in Italy, currently ranked 574th most popular site in the region by Alexa, but no way was it pulling in the claimed number of visits. Making the figures even more ridiculous is that around 86% of the site’s visitors were from Italy. This means that if the police figures are to be believed, every man, woman and child in Italy separately watched at least one movie on the site in the last 12 months.

Finally, another reason for not naming the site. Despite apparently getting their man and seizing Casacinemas.com, the site remains up at Casacinemas.in, ready to cost another half a billion dollars by this time next year.

“Investigations are continuing and, at the moment, we can not rule out further developments,” GdF conclude.

Enjoy the video.

Source: Police Dramatize ‘$445 Million’ Pirate Movie Site Raid