Of the hundreds of file-sharing sites operating during the past decade, only a few have admitted that their main aim is to be disruptive. The Pirate Bay is notable for having this kind of approach but not even the world’s most infamous torrent site had a particular exit strategy in mind.

Last week we reported on Torboox, an ebook site providing millions of unauthorized ebooks to the public. The site made the news after German reporters were subjected to a criminal complaint by publishers who didn’t want the site named. While that complaint has now been withdrawn, Torboox say that not only will they continue, but they have a serious plan to shake up the ebook market by targeting Amazon. Here’s how.

In Germany books are subjected to fixed pricing by law, which means that books can only be offered for sale to the public at a price determined by the publisher. This effectively means that there is no competition between rival sellers on the issue of price, value placed on books is not linked to the cost of making them, and supply and demand variables are a thing of the past.

“German publishers can set the prices that Amazon sells ebooks for,” Spiegelbest, the admin of Toorboox, told TorrentFreak. “That’s why Amazon is trying to become a publisher itself by offering authors much better conditions than the publishers can.”

Spiegelbest says that there are currently two players of significance in the German ebook market – Amazon and Torboox – and they have things in common.

Torboox and Amazon are just the same, only the price is different.

“If you look at it, they are very similar. Amazon is nothing but a hoster for the authors. No wonder they can offer 70% provision,” he says.

“Amazon does nothing to ‘produce’ books. Thus they are very similar to Torboox. Both of us – legal and illegal – are book hosters, not traditional book publishers. The ebook market is shared between two book hosters.”

According to Spiegelbest, publishers entering the German ebook market face many risks and a fierce competitor in Amazon, a company that has already prepared for a market without paper books.

“From the start Amazon saw themselves as a mere publisher of ebooks. Why let the publishers come into a market Amazon created and dominates already? So they do business with the authors willing to publish digitally,” he explains.

With the way that the market is arranged at the moment and as the paper market slows down, Spiegelbest says that German publishers are trapped. Amazon dominates the ebook market and is defending its market share. On the other hand is Torboox, a site offering ebooks much, much cheaper than anyone else in the market, Amazon included.

“We ourselves are not the born enemy of the publishers,” Spiegelbest explains. “We slash the prices okay, we steal their content if you want, but we see publishers as co-producers of books like the authors.

“For us it is not just hosting a book. That’s not enough. There is a lot more to it. It sounds strange but we love books. We are in it for the books not for the business. Amazon is our enemy – not life or death – but for the sake of the quality of future books.”

We asked how Torboox hopes to battle such a huge company, change the market and come out on top. The response is pretty controversial. According to Spiegelbest, piracy currently controls around 50% of the market, with Amazon on 40% and others holding the rest.

Send Amazon business – and then take them down.

“If you look at it you get a funny picture. At the moment we are doing a good job for Amazon. We are offering the best-sellers of the publishers for nothing. Thus the publishers make less money, can pay their authors less and will eventually lose them to Amazon. Very nice construction this is. As Amazon itself is already cutting prices with their titles you have a double effect of strangling the publishers,” Spiegelbest explains.

“At the moment you have high quality content of the publishers trying to enter the ebook market. But the prices are high and the conditions for the customers (DRM etc) are unacceptable. The publishers have no concept. You cannot sell ebooks like paper books.”

The solution, the Torboox admin believes, is offering a flat-rate, all you can eat service. He says he already has plenty of users willing to become customers.

“Our users could easily become customers of publishers with a sound concept. But publishers have to listen – not to us but to their would-be customers. They have superior content but have no answer to Amazons’s challenge,” he says.

The business model

“In the end the publishers have to talk to us. They have to find a way to make us legal. It is their job not ours. A flatrate will be 10 euros a month – no limit. Licensing will again be the job of the publishers. If a publisher isn’t wise enough to participate – no problem,” Spiegelbest says.

“The author gets the same as Amazon pays. If Amazon pays 80% we pay 80%. They get paid according to what the users read. Every read page is paid.”

Figures shared with TorrentFreak suggest that Torboox users are indeed consuming a lot of books which could conceivably translate into revenue if the userbase warms to the flatrate idea. Currently the site’s users are downloading around 2 million books per month, increasing to a predicted five million in the run up to Christmas.

At the moment the site operates on a donation model but as things grow the users will be expected to pay their way. It’s the publishers’ choice whether they get a look at that money, Spiegelbest says, while noting that the site continues to grow.

“If our server is grounded by traffic we will have our own cloud. We have plenty of time. Again if the publishers don’t want to talk to us it is okay. But one day without talking to us there will be a Christmas business without German book publishers that’s for sure. In a way it’s the Grooveshark thing. You want money for your files, you get it. You don’t want money for your files, we have them downloaded anyway. Be a wise man.”

In the end Spiegelbest believes that the publishers will have little choice but to come to him.

“We have the concept. The publishers have the content. Together we can indeed battle Amazon. And Amazon is not monopolizing films, games or music – why ebooks? For me the biggest problem is this: Will the publishers understand before they vanish? That’s 50-50, no more,” he concludes.

Source: Pirates Plan to Beat Up Amazon & Disrupt the Ebook Market

Internet filters are now on the political agenda in many countries around the world.

While China and Iran are frontrunners for political censorship, the UK is leading the way when it comes to porn and other types of adult content.

All mobile Internet providers are currently complying with a voluntary code of practice to make adult content inaccessible on their networks by default. Subscribers then have the option to lift the block if they can verify that they are at least 18 years old.

However, mobile filtering alone is not enough to protect the children. Last month Prime Minister David Cameron announced a default filter for all Internet connections. This means that in the near future UK Internet subscribers will be required to opt-in if they want to view adult content online.

After the news broke the Open Rights Group warned that this new filter could also block other content too, including anonymizing services such as VPNs. And indeed, it now appears that this worry isn’t as far-fetched as some thought.

TorrentFreak has learned that VPN provider iPredator is already blocked under the “adult filter” of some, if not all, mobile providers. TorrentFreak has seen communication between the mobile provider GiffGaff and iPredator which makes it clear that the VPN’s website is blocked because it allows kids to bypass the age restrictions.

“[...] websites or services that offer, inter alia, a method for younger members to access over 18 content, without age verification; such as VPN services, are blocked [...],” the provider explained.

GiffGaff claims that they can’t change anything in the filter’s settings since they use O2′s network and referred to the Independent Mobile Classification Body (IMCB) for further details. TorrentFreak contacted IMCB for a comment on the issue last week, but they are yet to respond.

Based on the above it is safe to say that censorship is a slippery slope, especially without any oversight. VPNs are used for numerous purposes and bypassing age restrictions is certainly not the most popular one. If this holds up then proxy services and even Google’s cache may soon be banned under the same guise.

Earlier today news broke that Australia may soon be confronted with an equally restricted Internet. The opposition, which is likely to form the new Government, has put forward a proposal to start filtering adult content on both mobile networks and fixed access Internet lines.

Inspired by the UK, the goal of these filters is to protect children from harmful content.

“As has recently been achieved in the UK, we expect these standards will involve the major internet service providers providing home network filters for all new home broadband services, which will be switched on as the default unless the customer specifies otherwise,” the proposal reads.

Interestingly, the coalition quickly distanced itself from the plan once it hit the news. The proposal was deleted and statements Liberal MP Paul Fletcher made to ZDNet were swiftly characterized as non policy.

So it appears that Australia may escape mandatory Internet filters, for now at least.

The UK example, however, begs the question how effective these blocklists are to begin with, and how broad they have to be to reach their goal. If a kid is smart enough to go to a VPN provider in order to unblock content, he or she clearly doesn’t want to be protected.

As we have seen time and time again with piracy-related website blockades, those who want to circumvent blocked content on the Internet will find a way. Unless you take down the entire Internet of course. That might just work.

Source: UK Internet Filter Blocks VPNs, Australia to Follow Soon?

In May 2013, Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm stood trial for alleged hacking offenses carried out against Logica, a Swedish IT company working with local tax authorities, and local bank Nordea.

Following a two-week trial, the Nacka District Court handed down its verdict in June. Gottfrid was found guilty of hacking, aggravated fraud and attempted aggravated fraud, and was given a two-year jail sentence.

In July it was revealed that appeals had been filed by both the defense and prosecution – one hoping to have the sentence quashed and the other hoping for even more jail time.

During the hearing this week at the Court of Appeal, Tor developer and former Wikileaks spokesman Jacob Appelbaum gave evidence on a key part of the defense’s case, that Gottfrid’s computer was controlled by a third-party who also carried out the hack attacks.

According to IDG, Appelbaum heavily criticized the conclusions drawn by the police following the investigation carried out on Gottfrid’s computers.

Police and prosecutors had come to the conclusion that were no traces left behind on Gottfrid’s computers at the times and dates when the hacks against Logica and Nordea were carried out. But Appelbaum said that the police should have looked at a wider range of applications that could have been compromised.

The hacker, a well-respected security expert, said that not only could control of the computer have been carried out using Python and Neko, but it would have been trivial to hide any traces of that.

“It’s so simple that there are blog posts showing how to do it,” he said.

However, the issue for the Court of Appeal is not really if it is possible to hack a computer, hack an IT company and a bank, and then leave no traces. The Court has to consider how likely it is that those sequence of events actually occurred.

For his part, Gottfrid says that the attack did take place but it was carried out by one or more of his friends.

Whether the Court believes this version of events will become known in two weeks when its decision is handed down.

Source: Hacker Criticizes Police Investigation During Pirate Bay Founder Appeal

Following a series of High Court orders, six UK ISPs are required to block subscriber access to several of the world’s largest torrent sites.

The blocks are effective, at least in preventing subscribers from accessing the domains directly, but that doesn’t mean that the sites are completely inaccessible.

With every site that is added to the blocklist, several reverse proxies are launched. These proxy sites give people access to the blocked sites and effectively bypass the restrictions that were put in case by the court.

TV-torrent site EZTV is the latest target of the UK blocking spree. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) and FACT applied for a court order to render the site inaccessible and at the end of July UK providers complied.

At the same time, however, several EZTV proxies popped up. In addition, EZTV redirected UK visitors to a special landing page with instructions on how to circumvent the blockades, although this was soon blocked as well.

Needless to say, the movie studios are not pleased with the proxies and TorrentFreak learned this week that they have asked the Internet providers to block these too.

A few days ago eztvproxy.net and eztv.dashitz.com became inaccessible on several ISPs and anti-piracy group FACT confirmed that they are behind these recent changes.

“We have notified some proxies,” FACT informed TorrentFreak after we inquired about the blocked sites.

The new proxy blockades are currently live on BSkyB, BT and O2 and the other providers are expected to follow suit. Previously, the music industry applied for a similar expansion blocking several proxies pointing to The Pirate Bay, H33t and KickassTorrents.

The full range of sites added during the latest update remains a mystery for now – neither the movie studios nor the ISPs make these public.

The question remains, however, how effective these new blockades will be. There are still many alternative proxies up and running and with every one that’s blocked, new sites will appear.

It’s possible that the movie industry hopes people will eventually grow tired of finding alternatives and give up. In line with this strategy, FACT told TorrentFreak that they will ask the court for additional orders in the future to block more infringing sites.

“We have made it clear that we will seek action against sites that continue to provide unremitting mass access to infringing content following due legal process,” FACT said.

And so the Whack-a-Mole continues.

Update: Movie streaming site movie4k.to also appears to be added to the blocklist.

Source: Movie Studios Get UK ISPs to Block Torrent Site Proxies

Just over a month has passed since Russia introduced new legislation aimed at cracking down on online piracy. The law, which has become known as Russia’s SOPA, takes a tough line with those offering or linking to illicit content online.

Copyright complaints against a site or service can lead to that domain being added to a national blocklist, if their operators fail to render the illicit content inaccessible within a few days.

Although rightsholders have struggled at times to provide the necessary information required for a correctly formatted complaint, orders have already been issued to add sites to the Russian national blocklist. But now, just 34 days after the initial law was implemented, the government is pushing through further punitive measures for pirates and those deemed to be assisting them.

According to Vesti.ru a parliamentary committee approved a new bill yesterday which will allow a range of Internet entities to be fined if they fail to block content and sites as dictated by the country’s blacklist.

The bill, which was approved in the first of three planned readings in the State Duma, introduces fines of up to one million rubles ($29,853) to be levied against search engines, web hosts, ISPs, and even regular web users.

The heaviest of fines will be reserved for companies failing to comply with the requirements of the blacklist, while punishments for regular users are expected to sit around 5,000 rubles ($149).

Last week, Russian authorities ordered the blocking of Rutor, one of the largest Russian torrent sites. At the moment the site is not on the national blacklist and remains available via ISPs but unless the site complies with a previous order it’s IP address will soon be blocked.

Later in the year, possibly in the fall, Russia will seek to expand the current law. At the moment only TV shows and movies are protected by the legislation but music, books and other works are expected to be added.

Source: Russia to Punish ISPs, Search Engines & Users Over Content Blocking