It’s been an interesting first month for Russia’s new anti-piracy plan.

After a tentative start with only a handful of rightsholders filing complaints, it quickly became clear that in order for the system to work effectively, movie and TV companies would have to be a little better organized.

Thursday last week it was revealed that out of a total of 19 submitted complaints just 11 had been accepted after administrative faults were found with the others.

In the coming months, in which the law will almost certainly be amended to protect other copyright works including music and lyrics, it is expected that copyright holders will become more adept at supplying the required paperwork.

But despite the early hiccups, the law is already showing its teeth.

According to the Roskomnadzor communications agency, a large file-sharing site will soon be censored by locals ISPs after failing to respond appropriately to copyright complaints.

Rutor.org, a public torrent site running its own tracker, operates out of Sweden but is targeted at Russia. According to Alexa the site is the 32nd most-visited site in Russia. Around 9% of the site’s traffic comes from Ukraine where it is the country’s 60th most-popular site.

Rutor stands accused of making available movie and TV show content without obtaining permission from rightsholders. Its domain will shortly be added to Russia’s national blocklist meaning that it will be rendered inaccessible to users of the Runet not running a proxy or VPN service.

Another site has seen its luck change. OpenSharing.org indexes primarily Russian content but actually operates out of neighboring Ukraine. It is less popular with Russians than Rutor and is the country’s 894th most-popular domain. After being marked for blocking last week, it has now complied and will be removed from the blocklist.

Other sites that face being blocked include torrent sites turbofilm.tv and fast-torrent.ru, plus streaming portals online.stepashka.com, seasonvar.ru, smotruonline.ru, intv.ru and kinozal.tv. Roskomnadzor reports today that four of the sites have complied and will be removed from the blacklist.

Under the new law blocks are carried out against a site’s IP address so there’s a possibility that unconnected domains could also be censored if they share the same IP. Rutor’s IP is not currently in use by any other site.

In a cruel twist, Rutor.org was one of the driving forces behind the successful 100K+ signature petition to have Russia’s anti-piracy law withdrawn. That petition will now be reviewed by the government.

Source: Large Torrent Site to be Blocked by Russia’s SOPA

There’s no shortage of ways to obtain music online for free, but surprisingly there are plenty of people who will pay hard cash to obtain MP3s, even though they aren’t buying them from official sources.

For well over a decade there have been big sites, mainly hosted in Russia or Ukraine, that allow their users to download music for a fraction of the prices quoted by outlets such as iTunes. Historically the sites claimed protection under licensing from the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (ROMS) but that has always been a controversial assertion. Few if any pay money to western labels.

One of the most famous, AllofMP3.com, generated dozens of news headlines around 2005 and even became a political issue when the United States suggested that Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization would be threatened by the site’s existence.

On August 22 2012 and after 19 years of waiting, Russia became the 156th member of the WTO but despite complaints from the U.S., dozens of similar sites continue to operate in Russia and across the border in Ukraine.

Although many have come under pressure from payment providers, most still seem able to take money, even from giants Visa and Mastercard. Previously sites have chosen to charge a few cents per track (around $1.00 per album) but more recently the trend is to offer unlimited music for a set price. Others allow users to charge their accounts with payments of around $25.00 each in order to spend those balances over time.

One of the sites offering this model was LegalSounds. Online since 2005 and launched with a campaign that announced “The end of peer-to-peer networks is near!”, the site offered MP3s for around $0.09 each. But while this may have worked well for a while, the party is now over.

“We are terribly sorry, but due to recent changes in Russian Federation legislation (Anti-Piracy Law, which came into force August 1), we can’t continue offering you our service,” LegalSounds announced in a brief statement.

“Thanks for all of you, who supported legalsounds.com through these years. We hope to come back with something new.”

It’s far from clear why LegalSounds felt an urgent need to close down. Thus far no application has been made to the Russian authorities to have content removed from other MP3 sites under the new legislation (it only covers movies and TV shows) and there is currently no indication that other sites intend to follow.

In the meantime and for the customers hit by the closure, the outlook isn’t good. LegalSounds’ Facebook page appears to have been abandoned, leaving behind only furious ex-customers who seem to have lost all the money they had in their accounts. While there are threats ranging from class action to murder, few users of the site appear to have read LegalSounds’ terms and conditions.

“Only payments made from credit cards are refundable. The entire amount of transaction is subject to be refunded. Partial refunding is not allowed. Refund can’t be provided when customer used part of the balance,” the ToS on the now-dead site used to read.

Whether this closure will have a chilling effect on the cheap MP3 market remains to be seen. That will largely depend on whether other sites follow suit.

Source: Cheap MP3 Site Shuts Down, Keeps Users’ Cash, Blames Russian SOPA

All around the world there are initiatives that require Internet providers to block access to child pornography.

The UK has the Internet Watch Foundation and in New Zealand there is the Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System, for example. These initiatives are not widely discussed, but occasionally they make the headlines when a legal site ends up in the filter.

In Finland the National Bureau of Investigation is in charge of maintaining a local blocklist, targeting foreign sites that distribute child pornography.

While nearly everyone agrees that child abuse is something that should be rooted out, not everyone believes that these secret blocking initiatives are the best solution. Internet activist Matti Nikki belongs to the latter group, and to express his opinions he started lapsiporno.info, which translates to “child porn dot info.”

“I started the site back in december 2005 with only one article online, outlining what I knew about Internet censorship and [that] it would and wouldn’t apply to child porn distribution,” Matti explains.

“It has been my belief that censorship isn’t any kind of solution to child porn, and I actually believe it’ll only worsen the situation as it’ll give a reason for the people involved to tighten their security and anonymity.”

In addition to writing opinion articles and pointing out that many websites are being censored by mistake, Matti also posted a list of hundreds of URLs that are blocked under the filter. And this is where things took a turn for the worse.

The National Bureau of Investigation decided to add lapsiporno.info to the filter because it exposed the blocked links, a decision Matti challenged in court. In 2011 a Helsinki court sided with Matti, ruling that his site should not be blocked, but this has now been overturned by the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court decided today that, even though the site itself isn’t linking to or hosting illegal material, the need to protect children from harm outweighs freedom of speech in this case.

The Court noted that if lapsiporno.info is allowed to stay accessible then other sites could circumvent the blockade as well by adding legal content to their websites. The Court waved away the argument that the site is not covered by the blocking legislation, which applies to foreign sites only, since it lists domains of foreign sites.

The ruling means that the website in question remains blocked by most ISPs in Finland. The ironic situation is, however, that lapsiporno.info still accessible to the rest of the world, hosted on a Finnish server.

The Finnish case opens up the debate where the censorship line should be drawn. While this case resolves around child pornography, copyright holders could be inclined to make the same claim for sites that link to The Pirate Bay.

And what about news sites who cover this issue and mention lapsiporno.info?

Source: Finnish Court Censors Website That Criticizes Censorship

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

Now You See Me 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 August 25, 2013

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Now You See Me	7.4 / trailer
2	(…)	Star Trek Into Darkness (Webrip)	8.1 / trailer
3	(…)	We’re The Millers (Webrip)	7.2 / trailer
4	(1)	Iron Man 3	7.5 / trailer
5	(2)	The Conjuring	7.9 / trailer
6	(9)	R.I.P.D (TS/Webrip)	5.5 / trailer
7	(4)	Pain and Gain	6.7 / trailer
8	(3)	The Great Gatsby	7.4 / trailer
9	(…)	The Frozen Ground (Webrip)	6.4 / trailer
10	(5)	Oblivion	7.1 / trailer

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week

Payment services are increasingly taking action against VPN providers, and as of today paysafecard can be added to the list.

Paysafecard is a popular prepaid coupon sold at 450,000 sales points in dozens of countries. It is accepted by Internet companies worldwide, including many gambling sites and file-hosting services such as RapidShare and Netload.

The payment method recently gained the interest of iPredator, a VPN provider launched by Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde. After losing Visa and Mastercard as a payment option, as well as recent troubles with PayPal, the Swedish VPN provider needed another payment option.

However, when iPredator decided to sign up with paysafecard the alarm bells began to ring in the company’s internal control department. “We don’t work with VPN services,” was the reply paysafecard sent, denying the application.

Hoping to get some more details on this strong anti-VPN stance TorrentFreak contacted the company. paysafecard’s PR Specialist Michaela Unger informed us that they don’t accept VPN services because these allow users to spoof IP addresses.

“In terms of security it is seen as a very high risk for paysafecard, because you cannot trace where the information is coming from,” Unger says.

“In many cases VPN services are used for businesses which have something to hide – this can be any illegal business because if the IP address is spoofed, you cannot trace where all the information is coming from. People can hide a lot of illegal content and you will never be able to detect the original source,” she adds.

Paysafecard is the first payment method to confirm a VPN ban. Earlier this year the Swedish payment service provider Payson outlawed anonymizing services as well, but only for Visa and Mastercard payments.

Interestingly, paysafecard still lists a VPN provider as one of their merchants, but this will probably change in the near future.

It is unclear what evidence of abuse the company has seen. There are obviously plenty of legal uses for VPNs. The news, however, does follow a trend in which online payment systems take action against VPNs.

For example, one large European payment processor informed iPredator that they have been put on a blacklist of services that are not allowed to accept credit card payments. TorrentFreak previously asked both MasterCard and Visa about the claims of an operational blacklist, but both companies denied one exists.

Mastercard’s Senior Vice President of External Communications, Andrew Bowins, told us that they have no policy to ban VPN services, but that they occasionally disconnect merchants who violate their terms.

“We don’t currently have a policy that unilaterally prohibits VPNs or anonymizers. That said, in order to protect the integrity of the payment system and its participants, we do review merchants to determine whether their models are in compliance with our rules,” Bowins told TorrentFreak.

Neither MasterCard nor Visa could confirm that iPredator was allowed to process credit card payments.

The big question is, why are VPNs slowly starting to lose access to online payment systems? Is it all a coincidence or are we witnessing a coordinated push against anonymizer services? Are there any agreements being made behind the scenes to target these services?

If that’s indeed what’s going on, how long before VPNs become illegal?

Source: Paysafecard Begins Banning VPN Providers