As the poster child for copyright trolls, Prenda Law has been running into all sorts of trouble lately.

In June, Prenda and its boss John Steele were accused of running a “honeypot” based on an expert report authored by Delvan Neville, whose company specializes in monitoring BitTorrent users.

The report hinted that the law firm was seeding the very files they claimed to protect, and found that many of the torrents detailed in Prenda lawsuits originate from a user on The Pirate Bay called ‘Sharkmp4′.

In an effort to expose the alleged honeypot, The Pirate Bay then jumped in and revealed the IP-addresses that ‘Sharkmp4′used to upload the torrent files. Since the site wipes all IP-addresses after 48 hours, The Pirate Bay team had to decrypt older backups to eventually offer the list below.

Sharkmp4 IP-addresses

While the public is already convinced that the honeypot is real, the Pirate Bay evidence has now become part of the AF Holdings v Patel case which could land the law firm in even more trouble.

After a judge approved discovery to both parties in the case, defense lawyer Blair Chintella sent out a series of subpoenas hoping to expose the copyright troll’s nefarious tactics.

One of the subpoenas covered the Comcast IP-address 75.72.88.156 used by “Sharkmp4,” as can be seen at the bottom of the list of Pirate Bay IPs shown above.

After a few weeks Comcast returned the subscriber details that matched the IP-address at the time the files were uploaded. As can be seen from their response detailed below, this IP is indeed the Comcast account of Steele Hansmeier PLLC, which is directly connected to Prenda Law.

Comcast confirms

The revelations above are the first solid proof of copyright trolls operating a honeypot scheme on The Pirate Bay, or any other BitTorrent site for that matter.

The honeypot strategy is just one piece of the puzzle, albeit an important one. The defense team has filed more subpoenas which are expected to be returned later, in the hope of uncovering more dirt on Prenda and its associates.

The discovery process in the case is still ongoing and ends in September. After the dust has settled it will be up to the court to decide how to rule on this and other damning revelations.

The irony of the above is that Prenda is now being haunted by the IP-address subpoenas they first used to pressure accused file-sharers into paying thousands of dollars in settlement fees.

Perhaps that can be called justice?

Source: Copyright Troll Ran Pirate Bay Honeypot, Comcast Confirms

While BitTorrent sites have gone from strength to strength in recent years, so-called streaming portals have really gained traction.

These sites, which in appearance are not dissimilar to YouTube, provide links to all the latest movies and TV shows. This content, usually held on 3rd party file-hosting services, is then displayed in a window, accessible at the touch of the button. No need to download the whole thing before viewing and no wait times.

But for reasons that are not entirely clear, some of the leading sites in this field – which at times have been among the most popular sites on the Internet – have been involved in activity that has undermined confidence in their services and damaged their rankings.

The problem appears to be that they have rivals, enemies who are prepared to hack their domain names, hijack their sites and pass themselves off as the real thing.

The biggest disaster by far involves the famous 1Channel.ch. This site, which grew out of the LetMeWatchThis this domain, was apparently hacked back in May. 1Channel then pointed to a fake site which looked almost identical, which left the original site owner to revert back to the original LetMeWatchThis domain.

Then in June, LetMeWatchThis went down without explanation, only to reappear a few days later with a new domain – PrimeWire.ag. If you’re keeping up by this point you’re doing well – hold tight.

Now, just two months later, PrimeWire.ag is redirecting to a brand new domain – Vodly.to. There’s a notice on the front page as follows:

But there’s a problem. If 1Channel.ch was hijacked earlier this year and became a fake site, why would the owners of Vodly.to associate themselves with it? Why would they say that 1Channel.ch, PrimeWire.ag and now Vodly.to are one and the same? Why is there no mention of LetMeWatchThis.ch, a hugely popular domain that preceded 1Channel in its first incarnation, PrimeWire.ag in its second and it still online at this very moment?

Perhaps the most important question is this: are these all the same sites? The short answer to that is ‘No’.

Earlier this year the admin of LetMeWatchThis showed TorrentFreak a detail present on his site which enabled us to confirm he was the admin after 1Channel.ch was hijacked. That feature was also present on PrimeWire.ag which led us to feel moderately comfortable (entire server/backup takeover excepted) that PrimeWire was in fact the new name for LetMeWatchThis.

But now, if one goes to PrimeWire.ag (which diverts to the new name of Vodly.to) that feature is not present, which suggests that Vodly.to is probably a whole new site and nothing to do with the sites it claims to succeed. In the meantime the Twitter account for PrimeWire is advising people to use LetMeWatchThis.ch again.

So in summary…..no, let’s not even go there. This entire episode is a disaster from start to finish which has caused more uncertainty and doubt than any anti-piracy campaign could hope to achieve. There are countless users online wondering whether these sites are some sort of trap or have been set up for malicious purposes. Very few people know the answer to that question and those that do are not responding to their mails…..

Source: Vodly.to, PrimeWire.ag, LetMeWatchThis, 1Channel is a Streaming Fiasco

Every week copyright holders send millions of DMCA takedown notices to Google in the hope of making pirated content harder to find.

Microsoft has been one of the most active senders and over the past month alone has asked Google to remove more than a million infringing URLs from its indexes. In addition the software giant also strips infringing links from its own search engine Bing.

While most of the submitted URLs do indeed link to infringing content, not all requests sent by Microsoft and other copyright holders are correct. Their often automated anti-piracy systems regularly trigger notices that include links to perfectly legitimate content, sometimes from direct competitors.

The latter happened with several recent DMCA takedown requests sent to Google on behalf of Microsoft. The notices, which contain references to unauthorized copies of Microsoft Office, also list many links with Apache’s open source office suite OpenOffice in the title.

Microsoft targets OpenOffice

The example illustrated above is not an isolated incident either. A quick search reveals that more than a dozen notices sent in June alone (e.g. ^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}) include links to OpenOffice downloads, mostly on BitTorrent sites.

OpenOffice itself lists several official torrents on its download page and many of these are re-distributed across torrent sites. However, thanks to the overbroad filtering techniques of Microsoft’s DMCA takedown vendors many of these have now been stripped from Google and other search engines, Bing included.

Admittedly, OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are related terms, so mistakes can happen. However, based on the URLs we see that few attempts have been made to prevent this particular error from happening. It wouldn’t be hard, for example, to exclude the keywords “Open Office” to minimize instances of collateral damage.

Over the past several months Microsoft and many other copyright holders have built up a dubious track record when it comes to DMCA takedown notices. In addition to many “bogus” claims the company also tried to have its own website removed from Google.

The above mistakes may be relatively harmless to Apache’s OpenOffice, but they show once again how much can go wrong with these automated DMCA notices. This is particularly troublesome since Google down-ranks sites based on the number of DMCA notices it receives for them.

TorrentFreak asked Microsoft to comment on the mistakes but we have yet to hear back. Previously a company spokesman told us that the company is trying hard to eliminate false positives.

“Microsoft is committed to ensuring that copyright is respected online and that enforcement measures are appropriate and accurate. We and our vendors use several measures to verify the accuracy of information contained in our DMCA notices, including algorithmic and human review of notices,” Microsoft informed us.

Despite these efforts erroneous takedowns continue to stack up.

Update: TorrentFreak verified that legitimate Open Office links are censored. However, several of the links point to 1MB installers without seeders and are impossible to verify. In any case, they don’t point to Microsoft products.

Update: Microsoft came back with a response.

“Microsoft is committed to ensuring copyright is respected online and enforcement measures are appropriate and accurate. We apologize when a notice is mistakenly directed to non-infringing content and take immediate action. We are committed to fixing the process that led to this result,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us.

Source: Microsoft Censors OpenOffice Download Links

In 2010, a California District Court ordered isoHunt to implement a filter to exclude movie and TV show-related terms from its search engine.

Despite running the filter for some time the Canada-based torrent search engine hoped to have the decision overruled on appeal, but in March this year that aim suffered a setback.

The Ninth Circuit upheld the decision of the lower court. In addition, the court requested that the permanent injunction should be updated to clarify some parts that could be interpreted in multiple ways.

Last month the MPAA and isoHunt legal teams got together to propose a modified injunction, which the court has signed off on last week.

Overall the changes are fairly minimal, and isoHunt is still required to filter its site based on a list of infringing keywords provided by the MPAA. In addition, the BitTorrent site is prohibited from indexing torrents or linking to various other file-sharing sites.

Initially, the injunction held that isoHunt could not index or provide access to “Dot-torrent or similar files harvested or collected from well-known infringing source sites, such as The Pirate Bay.”

Since the term “well-known infringing source sites” is open to interpretation, this part was updated by naming specific sites.

Under the new injunction isoHunt is prohibited from “indexing or providing access to Dot-torrent or similar files harvested or collected from the following sites or services: The Pirate Bay, Torrentspy, BT Junkie, Torrentreactor.net, kat.ph or torrents.net”

No index

While it’s understandable that this language is updated, the inclusion of “TorrentSpy and BTJunkie” is peculiar since these sites closed down a long time ago.

TorrentSpy closed down half a decade ago when the MPAA won a $110 million judgment against the site. BTJunkie has been around for longer, but threw in the towel early last year after the Megaupload raid.

Needless to say, there’s not much that can be harvested from these sites so isoHunt should have no issues complying with this part of the injunction.

The injunction does, however, allow the MPAA to request that new sites are added to this list when they have sufficient proof that they’re infringing. This effectively means that it can severely limit isoHunt’s sources.

Another update to the injunction is that isoHunt is prohibited from advertising its services by referring to the following sites: The Pirate Bay, TorrentSpy, Aimster, Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus, Newzbin, BT Junkie, Torrentreactor.net, kat.ph, torrents.net, SurftheChannel.com, Kino.to, Movie2k.to, and/or Dl4all.com.

Again we see TorrentSpy and BTJunkie listed, as well as many other defunct services including Kazaa, Grokster and SurftheChannel.com.

Overall the modified injunction doesn’t change much for isoHunt. However, the MPAA is still pursuing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages as well as a motion for contempt, as the movie studios claim that isoHunt’s filtering software is not working.

And so the case continues.

Source: Court Forbids IsoHunt From Indexing Dead Torrent Sites

To celebrate its 10th birthday, last Saturday The Pirate Bay released a new anti-censorship tool.

Called PirateBrowser, the tool allows Internet users to unblock websites that have been rendered inaccessible by governments, rightsholders and Internet service providers.

As of yesterday the software had been downloaded a highly impressive 100,000 times, a clear indication that people not only disapprove of website censorship but will also take measures to circumvent it.

While The Pirate Bay is highly censored in many countries, other sites are also affected, including the TV show-focused EZTV. That site was blanked out by the UK’s leading ISPs following a court order obtained by the MPA, and last week that particular blockade caused its first instance of collateral damage.

After EZTV experimented with its DNS settings pointing them at TorrentFreak.com, Sky Broadband’s systems automatically blocked the site, rendering it inaccessible to the ISP’s four million customers. The company eventually reversed the block, but despite the warnings it appears that yet another site has been wrongfully censored.

On Monday it was reported that RadioTimes.com, a TV scheduling site, had become unavailable to users of both Sky-owned Be Broadband and Virgin Media in the UK. Today there is confirmation that the problems were down to ISP anti-piracy filters failing again.

According to PC Pro, the problems were not caused by an EZTV-style DNS issue, but a long-feared problem – that sites with shared resources would be all fall victim to overbroad blocking.

An industry source confirmed that rightsholders did not check whether the IP address they called to be blocked was being shared by other sites. As a result, RadioTimes.com went down as collateral damage.

Neither Sky nor Virgin Media officially confirmed what had caused the problems, but did say that the blocks had now been lifted.

According to the Open Rights Group, Sky operate a blocking system codenamed “HawkEye”. Let’s hope the system can live up to name in future – with a little help from improved rightsholder caution.

Update: According to the BBC the problem lies at the feet of the Premier League. When trying to have an IP address of streaming sports site FirstRow Sports blocked by ISPs, the UK football outfit failed to notice that many other sites shared the same IP address.

Now the blame-game is on, with the Premier League blaming the ISPs for not indicating they had a problem with the block, and the ISPs insisting it’s the Premier League’s responsibility to ensure that the provided IP addresses only relate to blocked sites.

Protip: Both act responsibly and stop blocking sites without checking these things, it’s literally a two minute job.

Source: RadioTimes.com Blocked By UK ISPs Due to “Rightsholder Error”