Last week, chaos was widespread in the ‘pirate’ IPTV market after authorities in Italy took unprecedented action against the operators of Xtream Codes.

Undoubtedly prompted into action by entertainment and media industry groups, the same authorities are now tackling another perceived threat to revenues – piracy of daily newspapers.

In common with the IPTV crackdown, the latest effort is somewhat unusual in that it tackles fairly unconventional methods and techniques for distribution. Rather than above-ground and obvious websites, Italian authorities are chasing down suppliers to and users of various chat groups.

Authorities reportedly have three key individuals on their radar who are suspected of providing digital copies of daily newspapers to WhatsApp and Telegram groups with many thousands of subscribers.

Italy’s Postal and Communications Police recently provided the prosecutor of Cagliari a report with the details of the three men. According to La Repubblica, they include a man from Sardinia born in 1974 and another from Milan born in 1964.

The newspaper titles they reportedly distributed to the groups were available officially via monthly subscriptions costing a few euros. However, one of the suspects, an unemployed computer technician from Turin, somehow managed to crack or ‘steal’ the passwords used to access the newspapers.

After the discovery of this unlawful access and distribution, the publishers of newspaper L’Unione Sarda filed a complaint. Then, in collaboration with the Postal Police, the company placed ‘markers’ in downloaded copies of their paper which allowed them to see where the copies were being distributed.

After identifying two channels distributing their content, the investigators found a third, more important channel. However, when Telegram was approached for assistance, the company failed to respond, so the investigators carried out their own work, “cross-checking financial transactions” of paying channel users to uncover the identity of the channel operator/uploader.

Once identified, the alleged operator received a visit at his home in Turin and was reportedly caught in the act of uploading pirated copies of newspapers, accessed with ‘stolen’ passwords, to the channels being investigated.

But despite this apparent success, the problem of ‘pirate’ newspapers continues.

According to the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEG), Telegram is refusing to respond to its complaints about “repeat and massive infringement, meaning that there are at least eight additional groups still in existence, servicing an alleged 500,000 ‘pirate’ users.

In a follow-up and subscription-only interview with La Repubblica, Giuseppe Zafarana, general commander of Italy’s Guardia di Finanza (the force behind last week’s IPTV raids), wondered how many pirates would be reading his words without paying for them.

Estimating “several dozen thousand” illegal readers, Zafarana said that they will now be getting the message that they “will know no rest” and these types of anti-piracy actions are only the beginning of a drive to protect cinema, TV, sports and journalistic content.

“We will identify and we will seize the servers, wherever they are, that are used for piracy and we will hit and confiscate the assets of those who enrich themselves by violating copyright,” he said.

Finally, in addition to tackling those who supply pirate content, authorities are also threatening to go after those who consume it too. It was mentioned last week that customers of IPTV providers could be tracked down and given fines and it seems they feel the same way about consumers of ‘pirated’ newspapers too.

Whether that’s bluster will remain to be seen but prosecuting millions of consumers through an already under-pressure legal system is unlikely to be a simple prospect. Perhaps a handful of ‘show trials’ will be the more likely outcome.

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Two weeks ago, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against the game download portal RomUniverse.

The website, which also allows users to download movies and books, stands accused of massive copyright infringement, including that relating to many Nintendo titles.

“The Website is among the most visited and notorious online hubs for pirated Nintendo video games. Through the Website, Defendants reproduce, distribute, monetize, and offer for download thousands of unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s video games,” the Japanese gaming giant wrote.

In the complaint filed at a federal court in California, Nintendo further stated that the site, which reportedly has 375,000 members, offers downloads for nearly every video game system it has ever produced.

According to the game company, “hundreds of thousands of copies” have been illegally downloaded through RomUniverse. The site, meanwhile, profits from this by offering premium memberships that allow users to download as many games as they want.

The alleged operator of RomUniverse is California resident Matthew Storman. He was served shortly after the action was filed but has yet to file a response to the allegations. Going up against a major company such as Nintendo is no easy feat and to foot the legal bills, Storman is now asking the public for help.

The operator has added a donation option to the RomUniverse homepage and also launched a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe, setting a goal of $100,000 to assist with the defense.

“RomUniverse.com was founded in 2009 under the notion that users like you should have easy access to the content that you purchased and the ability to relive those childhood moments.  It is because of this, that I am asking for your help,” Storman writes.

A representative of RomUniverse previously informed TorrentFreak that the site responds to takedown notices, but that it didn’t receive any from Nintendo recently. While it’s not hard to see that pirated games are indeed shared on the site, Storman is determined to put up a fight.

“Now I know what you’re thinking, this one person is going to take on one of the largest console/gaming manufacturers in the world?  And the short answer is YES,” he notes.

“I believe that I have a solid defense, and considering that other romsites have folded and settled, this has never been done before,” Storman adds.

The RomUniverse operator likely refers to the now-defunct ROM sites LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co. These were sued by Nintendo last year and the owners, a married couple, agreed to resolve the matter in exchange for a $12 million consent judgment.

The ‘admin’ of the official discord channel shared the link to the GoFundMe campaign with us, so the crowdfunding campaign is indeed linked to the ROM site. We subsequently requested more information on the forthcoming defense but, at the time of publication, we have yet to hear back.

On the GoFundMe page, Storman notes that he’s not “greedy” or a scammer. He merely wants to defend his rights and those of others in this “unknown” landscape. In the meantime, the site remains online.

While some people may have donated to the site directly, thus far, the crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe hasn’t gained any traction. After two days, the donation counter is still at $0.

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This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Spider-Man: Far from Home 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)	Spider-Man: Far from Home	7.8 / trailer
2	(…)	Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw	6.7 / trailer
3	(9)	Toy Story 4	8.1 / trailer
4	(1)	Dark Phoenix	6.0 / trailer
5	(3)	John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum	7.8 / trailer
6	(5)	Avengers: Endgame	8.7 / trailer
7	(4)	Aladdin	7.3 / trailer
8	(…)	Running with the Devil	5.4 / trailer
9	(8)	Godzilla: King of the Monsters	6.5 / trailer
10	(…)	Annabelle Comes Home	8.0 / trailer

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The Pirate Bay has been both an early adopter and a pioneer when it comes to cryptocurrencies.

The popular torrent site first embraced Bitcoin in 2013 and soon after many other pirate sites followed suit.

The advantage of bitcoin donations is that they are relatively anonymous. This is an upside for the operators, but also a major concern for rightsholders who feared that it may become a stable revenue stream that can’t be touched.

The RIAA, for example, previously told the U.S. Trade Representative that Bitcoin could make it harder to crack down on pirate sites.

“There are no central authority or banks involved which makes it very difficult to seize or trace Bitcoin funds,” the music industry group wrote in a letter.

While it’s no secret that Bitcoin is indeed fueling some criminal operations, The Pirate Bay’s donations certainly can’t keep the notorious torrent site afloat. Today, more than six years after the site first accepted cryptocurrency donations, it adds up to little more than a small daily tip.

If we take a look at The Pirate Bay’s most recent Bitcoin legacy address, which it started advertising late 2017, we see that a total of 0.49 Bitcoin was received. Translated to US dollars (current value for simplicity purposes), this is $4,838, or $7.63 per day.

The Bitcoin Segwit address looks more promising. Here we see a total of 1.48 BTC coming in. However, on closer inspection, most of that comes from one transaction which was sent by TPB’s old Bitcoin wallet, so we scrapped that.

This leaves us with 0.33, or $3,255, which adds another $5.13 per day. It’s worth noting that more than half of this came from one donation. It came from a rather generous person apparently, as he or she also sent roughly the same amount to ProtonMail.

Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency The Pirate Bay accepts of course. The torrent site also lists a Litecoin and Monero address. Monero can’t be tracked, but the Litecoin address received 3.40 LTC, or $252, which is $0.40 per day.

When we add up all these figures we come to a total of $13.16 per day, which clearly can’t keep The Pirate Bay afloat.

That said, the Bitcoin donation income is relatively stable. When we did the same calculations a few years ago, we arrived at a donation average of $9.34 per day. At the time, one Bitcoin was about $425, so if the site didn’t sell any, the value will have gone up remarkably.

That brings us to the unavoidable “what if.” Looking back further, we see other Pirate Bay Bitcoin wallets dating back as far as 2013, which received dozens of BTC. At the time that wasn’t worth that much (1BTC ~ $120, May 2013), but the position is different today. If the team kept those, of course.

Perhaps that’s TPB’s long-term exit strategy. If one Bitcoin eventually reaches a value of over a million dollars, The Pirate Bay crew may start thinking of their retirement and buying an island. Sealand anyone?

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For as long as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as BitTorrent have existed, anti-piracy companies have been monitoring the activities of those who use them.

This is to be expected. Not only do the companies have a vested interest in keeping an eye on what’s going on, by their very nature P2P networks are open and easily trackable.

The rise of streaming piracy – computer servers streaming video directly to end-users – has presented a new problem, however. Unlike P2P systems, there’s no easy way for an anti-piracy company to get in between the user and the server to see what’s going on. Only ISPs can see that data, which is why a recent interview caught our eye.

Friend MTS (FMTS) is an anti-piracy company based in Birmingham, UK. They’re perhaps best known for their live IPTV blocking work carried out on behalf of the Premier League, for which they have to partner to a greater or lesser extent with ISPs in the UK. FMTS tells them which servers to block, and the ISPs carry out it, broadly speaking.

However, in a recent interview, Simon Hanna of FMTS spoke about a different type of collaboration with ISPs, one that has the potential to raise eyebrows among privacy advocates, especially those who hoped all of their Internet traffic would remain completely their business.

Quite soon into the interview, Hanna correctly points out that broad availability of pirated content online tends to give an indication of how popular particular content is but isn’t always a great indicator of how much is actually being consumed.

“Consumption is a much more valuable indicator than pure availability of content and consumption has always been very difficult to monitor. People often throw numbers out but they are guesswork at best and we don’t really put a lot of faith in the numbers that have been made available in the past,” Hanna said.

With this in mind, FMTS say they have developed a system that allows them to work with content owners and ISPs to form a greater understanding of the consumption of media from online ‘pirate’ sources. The company does this by first tracking the servers down from where the content is being streamed and handing this information to the ISPs.

“We can see through our monitoring activities the range of servers that are available globally delivering this pirate content and we can provide that information to an ISP who are monitoring the flows of data requests in and out of the networks all day long,” Hanna explained.

“They can use these lists of IP addresses to really focus on consumption of content from those servers by the broadband subscribers within the ISP network and that will then give information around the scale of the problem.”

That’s probably a bit of a “wow” moment for many Internet subscribers who believed that once their traffic entered their ISP’s network it wouldn’t be closely monitored until it left to access a BitTorrent swarm, for example.

If FMTS’ statement is what it seems, some ISPs might be following their customers’ broadband usage habits a little bit more intimately than previously thought.

On the plus side, at least as far as individual subscribers are concerned, FMTS say they don’t look at or care about “the individuals themselves”. They’re not looking for any personally identifiable information and are just trying to get a handle on the volume of content being consumed.

Whether dual broadband/TV supplying companies are more interested in this data remains open to question, however.

“Because inevitably, if a large proportion of the ISP’s broadband subscribers are actually consuming content, they are not paying for the associated operator’s TV services,” Hanna added.

In many cases, of course, the broadband provider/ISP is also a supplier of TV content to the same customers – Sky, Virgin Media, and BT in the UK, for example. There’s no claim that these ISPs are indeed teaming up with FMTS in this project but any and all might be interested in the information it reportedly makes available.

“We work with content owners to basically go out and find pirate sources of the content. We can then real-time update these lists, feed this information into the ISPs and the ISPs can then use this information to generate the reporting real-time but with the flow monitoring, more in-depth reports of three-months plus worth of data, to actually get a real picture of consumption habits, both of TV channels but also specific events and pieces of content,” Hanna revealed.

FMTS says that monitoring consumption is important because it allows action previously taken to reduce availability to be measured at the end where it really matters.

“If you can then reduce the availability, then inevitably you should be able to reduce the consumption but you keep monitoring to observe that you do actually have this effect. If you can reduce the availability and reduce the consumption, chances are you would expect you would then preserve and reinforce your pay-TV revenues,” Hanna concluded.

The full interview, which covers many aspects of anti-piracy activity, from general enforcement to fingerprinting and watermarking, can be viewed here.

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