Earlier this year UK police began working with rightsholders on a campaign to shut down file-sharing sites. Many site operators received warnings that their activities were breaching copyright law as well as the UK’s Serious Crime Act.

The actions yielded some success as a few smaller sites closed their doors. However, the major targets were unfazed by the police demands and continued business as usual.

This week the newly founded Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) of the City of London Police stepped up its efforts and instead of targeting the site owners, they contacted their domain registrars. In a carefully worded letter the police warn that the sites in question may be copyright-infringing.

“The owners of the aforementioned domains are suspected to be involved in the criminal distribution of copyrighted material either directly or indirectly and are liable to prosecution under UK law for the following offences: Conspiracy to Defraud, Offences under the Fraud Act 2006, Copyright, Design & Patents Act 1988,” the letter states.

“Should a conviction be brought for the above offences, UK courts may impose sentences of imprisonment and/or fines. PIPCU has criminal and civil powers in UK law to seize money, belongings and any property in connection with these offences.”

There is no reference to an active court order that requires the registrar to take action, but the police unit instead points at the obligations the registrars have. Among other things, the letter lists a possible breach of ICANN policy and a violation of the registrars’ own Terms of Services as a validation for the suspension.

The letters were sent to the registrars of dozens of domain names and the fallout is already visible. TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of SumoTorrent.com who confirmed that his domain was suspended yesterday. The site quickly moved to SumoTorrent.sx, but lost a lot of traffic in the process.

MisterTorrent.me was also suspended after the registrar received the police letter, and ExtraTorrent’s .com domain presumably suffered that same fate.

With millions of visitors a day ExtraTorrent is the biggest casualty so far. TorrentFreak talked to the operator who couldn’t yet confirm that City of London Police are behind the suspension, but this seems very likely. For now the site has moved to ExtraTorrent.cc which is still operational.

Not all domain name registrars are blindly complying with the demands of the Intellectual Property Crime Unit. Canada-based easyDNS is refusing to suspend TorrentPond’s domain, describing the police request as overbroad and unfounded as there is no hint of due process.

“Who decides what is illegal? What makes somebody a criminal? Given that the subtext of the request contains a threat to refer the matter to ICANN if we don’t play along, this is a non-trivial question,” easyDNS’ CEO Mark Jeftovic responds.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to ‘some guy on the internet’ sending emails. While that’s plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn’t fly here,” he adds.

It’s unclear how many sites were targeted by the police letter but it’s not unlikely that more registrars will take action during the hours to come. The police letter recommends the registrars to act within 48 hours and asks the companies to “consider their liability.”

“Suspension of the domain(s) is intended to prevent further crime. Where possible we request that domain suspension(s) are made within 48 hours of receipt of this Alert. In respect of the information provided by us, we respectfully ask you to consider your liability and the wider public interest should those services be allowed to continue,” the letter states.

In addition, the registrars are being asked to effectively send the traffic of the torrent sites to a landing page with the City of London Police logo, as well as the logos of their entertainment industry partners. Again, all without citing a court order or specific legal mandate.

“We request that the aforementioned domain(s) are redirected to the PIPCU Warning Page located at IP address: 83.138.166.114,” the letter notes.

TorrentFreak asked the City of London Police for the comment on their latest actions but we have not heard back from them. It’s clear, however, that the cooperation between the entertainment industry and UK law enforcement is serious.

Whether the impact will be lasting has yet to be seen.

Update: The emails were sent to registrars of other “pirate” sites as well, including emp3world.com, full-albums.net and maxalbums.com. We will update this article when more information comes in.

Update: ExtraTorrent confirms that their domain troubles are related to the same issue.

“Our registrar and with no court order or due process got scared of the London Police email and did suspend the domain. We are communicating with the registrar to find a logical solution to this chaos,” TorrentFreak was told.

Source: UK Police Orders Registrars to Suspend Domains of Major Torrent Sites

BitTorrent Inc, the company behind the successful uTorrent and BitTorrent file-sharing clients, has been making huge efforts in recent times to shed the false image that it is synonymous with mass online piracy.

The company’s tools can of course be put to illegal uses, but so can those of a thousand other companies in thousands of cities worldwide. The company has been relentless in its quest to get this message to the masses, but it’s also taking another approach to boosting its image with its tech-savvy customer base.

Anyone who monitors the company’s Twitter feed will see that it regularly retweets items that relate to privacy and freedom, such as the recent NSA whistle-blower scandal for example.

Like many technology companies BitTorrent Inc. has an interest in keeping the Internet both free and open so the news today that the San Francisco-based company is behind a controversial advertising campaign doesn’t come as too much of a shock.

Last week billboards appeared in three major cities – New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles – each with a statement designed to be offensive to anyone who values freedom, privacy and a right to choose.

Your Data Should Belong To The NSA

Artists Need To Play By The Rules

The Internet Should Be Regulated (via)

“These statements represent an assault on freedom. They also, for the most part, represent attitudes Internet culture has accepted. Chips we’ve traded for convenience. Part of the allegiance we’ve sworn to the web’s big platforms and server farms. That’s what you get for going online,” BitTorrent Inc. says of the campaign’s messages.

The company goes on to bemoan general society’s apparent eagerness to accept data centralization and along with it the distribution of personal information to powerful companies and governments who choose to exploit it.

“We’ve chosen to accept surveillance culture: the right of security agencies to violate the Fourth Amendment; to see and store data as they see fit,” the company says.

Interestingly, BitTorrent Inc. also takes a shot at entertainment companies who put content behind paywalls and suggests that all-you-can-eat outlets like Spotify, for example, fail to adequately compensate the artists.

“We’ve chosen to accept walled gardens of creativity: a lifetime of work (our life’s work) locked into digital stores that take 30% of the revenue and streaming services that pay pennies in royalties,” BitTorrent says.

Of course, the campaign isn’t simply a me-too retaliation at the revelations of the past few months and years. BitTorrent Inc. has a business model and several products that really do put the power back in the hands of the individual, from its BitTorrent Bundles through to its DIY decentralized Dropbox alternative, BitTorrent Sync and its “NSA-proof” messenger app.

With these tools and last week’s billboard campaign the San Francisco-based company hopes to capture the imaginations of Internet users who have become weary of entrusting their data to big companies and artists who want to leave the industry machine behind and take their futures into their own hands, as the updated billboards suggest.

“This is the generation that will decide whether the Internet is a tool for control, or a platform for innovation and freedom. We have an incredible opportunity. We can shape the next one and one hundred years of human connection. A free, open Internet is a force for change, creativity; the backbone of a society where citizens are stakeholders, not data sets.

“BitTorrent is built to preserve that Internet,” the company concludes.

Source: BitTorrent Mastermind Controversial NSA Billboard Campaign

In recent months the MPAA has made a habit of attacking every paper which suggests that piracy may not actually be that big of a problem after all.

While the movie industry group often raises valid points, the critique is also one-sided. Much like the critique often voiced by pro-sharing opponents, it’s merely reinforcing their existing beliefs.

Yesterday the MPAA “debunked” the findings of a policy brief the London School of Economics and Political Science published last week.

In their report the scholars noted that there is ample evidence that file-sharing is helping, rather than hurting the creative industries. The scholars therefore called on the Government to look at more objective data when deciding on future copyright enforcement policies.

The MPAA, however, is quick to point out that the researchers are wrong. For example, they refute the argument that piracy may do little harm because revenues are still booming. Describing the analysis as “unsophisticated and misleading,” the Hollywood group notes that they could have made even more money if piracy was properly dealt with.

The MPAA points out that there is plenty of academic research that affirms how piracy leads to a loss in revenue. To strengthen their argument they highlight a literature review study published last summer, which ironically displays the following footnote on the first page.

“We thank the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for providing generous funding to support this study.”

The MPAA’s debunking effort also refers to music industry analyst Matt Mulligan, whose critique of the LSE brief has also been retweeted by the RIAA and IFPI. Again, while some of Mulligan’s arguments make sense, many are rather one-sided.

For example, LSE noted that the music industry is holding ground as revenues from live performances compensate for the decline in revenues from the sale of CDs or records. Mulligan’s reply to this is that revenues from live gigs are over-reported because they include reseller revenue, which doesn’t go anywhere near the artists.

However, this appears to be a skewed logic, because the same can be said for recorded music where traditionally only a tiny fraction of the retail value goes to the musician, probably much less than for live performances. And the same can be said for streaming services and digital download platforms where a lot of money sticks in the distribution chain.

It’s not our intention to debunk all comments from the MPAA and Mulligan, but their responses are an illustration of the problem LSE tried to highlight. TorrentFreak spoke with Dr. Bart Cammaert, one of the authors of LSE’s policy brief, who believes that the industry critique completely misses the point.

“The main problem here is that the copyright and file sharing debate is waged in a highly ideological fashion. In other words, the industry is itself guilty of the allegations it fields at us. A closer reading of what we actually say in the reports shows furthermore that the industry has misread what we actually say.”

“In addition to this, we would argue that in this debate we only really hear the self-interested arguments and skewed figures of the lobby organizations calling for repression. We almost never hear the many counter-arguments to their positions,” Cammaert tells TorrentFreak.

LSE’s intention was not to write a definitive piece arguing that piracy doesn’t have any negative effects. Instead, they wanted to highlight certain points where the industry is misrepresenting what’s actually happening.

“Hence, one of the main aims of our policy briefs is to rebalance this and list, document, outline the counter-arguments to this repressive logic and to the same old tune that the internet is killing the video stars. From this perspective, the entertainment industry refuting and taking issue with our findings and conclusions is hardly surprising and as far as we’re concerned totally logical,” Cammaert adds.

The industry response to LSE’s brief is perhaps the best reinforcement of the main point the scholars tried to make. That is, review existing copyright law based on objective and independent analysis that strikes a healthy balance among the interests of a range of stakeholders, including copyright holders, Internet Providers and internet users.

The above clearly illustrates that this advice is perhaps more relevant than ever before.

Source: Hollywood Attacks Scholars Who Deny The Evils of Piracy

As Internet speeds and available bandwidth have increased along with a thirst for high quality video on super-large screens, thirst for ‘cammed’ copies of movies has died down somewhat. Nevertheless, there are still those who are prepared to take risks to capture the latest blockbuster.

Opening weekends, where demand for big titles is greatest, has always been a popular time for pirates to try and grab a copy. But for the men recording the Sandra Bullock and George Clooney movie ‘Gravity’ in a Michigan theater last Sunday, things went pretty badly.

Unknown to the men, both from Detroit and aged 48 and 49, they were sharing the theater with private investigators hired by the MPAA. The P.I.s watched the men set up their camera and start recording after using a baseball cap and a towel to cover the device.

As can be seen from the image below, the camera was fitted with a clamp so that it could be attached to an arm rest or possibly the back of a seat.

Camcorder with clamp used by pirates (image: ABC)

So was it pure chance that the investigators were on site? According to John Coghlan, an MPAA investigator from New York in charge of the investigation, the pair were already under surveillance. Thanks to their previous activity and watermarks present in the copies, the MPAA were able to trace them to the exact theater.

“They did several movies before,” Coghlan said.

The men are currently out on bail and may well be coming to the conclusion that going back to the same theater time and again wasn’t the best strategy, especially on opening weekends.

During the last decade recording movies in theaters became a pretty big deal. Hundreds of big movies were recorded and uploaded to the Internet, creating an online feast for movie pirates.

However, after the introduction of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act in 2005, ‘camming’ became an extremely risky act in the United States, with first time offenders facing up to three years in jail and six years for those who don’t get the message first time round.

Of course, United States legislation has little bearing on pirates determined to record movies in other countries and in respect of Gravity this is appears to have happened this past weekend.

Copies are now surfacing online which have Russian and Spanish audio, so all that remains is for someone to record the English audio (much easier than capturing the video) and splice it to the foreign video. That will happen very soon indeed.

Screenshot of Russian pirate Gravity – honest

That said, why anyone would do so is open to question. A stunning 2013 movie like Gravity really deserves to be seen as the makers intended, not on some terrible cam copy that takes us back 50 years.

Source: MPAA Private Investigators Bust ‘Gravity’ Pirates

In a world where all kinds of entertainment media is available for free download with a couple of clicks, we have been led to believe that competing with such a reality is not just hard, but virtually impossible.

So who could have imagined then that after its birth five years ago today (during the glory years of The Pirate Bay no less) Spotify would develop into a hugely successful consumer product that has not only proven popular with music lovers around the world, but with pirates past and present.

Against the odds, Spotify has gone beyond turning many dedicated file-sharers into revenue-generating customers, it has made them happy ones too.

Earlier this year Spotify revealed it had signed up 24 million users worldwide, 18 million to the ad-supported service and 6 million to a paid subscription. But as revealed by company founder Daniel Ek, even greater goals are being eyed.

“My goal is to not just convert the 24 million into buying a subscription,” Ek said. “My goal is to get 1 billion using streaming services rather than a piracy service.”

But during the early days in Spotify’s Swedish homeland, a problem persisted. By failing to respond to customer needs a content availability vacuum had formed, and it came as no surprise to Spotify’s Scandinavia CEO Jonathan Forster that sites like The Pirate Bay were thriving.

“It is a society that loves music and when the internet exploded it was no surprise that it took place in Sweden. In the absence of a legal service, people used whatever was available,” Forster told Metro today.

But despite a huge customer base in waiting and a dream of luring people away from unauthorized sources en masse, Spotify faced problems with the labels.

“When I started at Spotify and realized that we really had not even talked to any of the majors, I felt that this would be difficult,” Forster explains.

So Spotify embarked on a mission to convince the record companies that making their catalogs available on an ad-supported basis would be the way to go. However – and perhaps unsurprisingly given the track records of some of their countrymen before them – they were instead treated as if they were creating a piracy service of their own.

“[The labels] were very polite, but utterly amazed at what we wanted to do,” Forster recalls. “In their eyes we were just a bunch of Swedes who wanted to take their music and give it away for free. We were no different than the people behind the Pirate Bay for them.”

But Spotify refused to give in and two years later the company netted its first license agreements and is now promoted heavily by the labels. According to Rasmus Fleischer, former Piratbyran member and author of award-wining thesis “The music’s political economy,” some of Spotify’s success in Sweden can be attributed to the entertainment companies’ legal victories against The Pirate Bay and the streaming service’s reputation for stirring things up.

“On a symbolic level, it was incredibly significant,” Fleischer says. “The history of Spotify has been built in the Swedish press and media as a rebel company that has rebelled against an outdated recording industry.”

The art of rebellion against the entertainment industries was perfected by The Pirate Bay during the last decade and as a result the site made itself some dangerous rivals. But interestingly while the most powerful forces in the world have failed to take it down, it’s companies like Spotify that could end up becoming its most serious adversary yet.

That, however, will rely on the company maintaining its rebellious streak, positive image and excellent product at a fair price. It will be interesting to see if it can keep that up.

Source: Spotify: Labels Thought We Were No Better Than The Pirate Bay