This May, the popular Vader Streams ‘pirate’ IPTV service was suddenly shut down.

From the very beginning of the disruption, it was fairly clear that the service was in special difficulties, probably related to legal action.

For months there has been speculation but last week it was finally confirmed that the global anti-piracy coalition Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment was behind the shutdown. According to the MPAA, a leading force in the group, Vader Streams is now liable to pay $10 million in damages.

According to ACE, as part of the surrender package, Vader must also “cede administrative control” over its entire “piracy infrastructure”. The full list of assets that Vader can hand over to ACE members isn’t clear but for months now TF has been monitoring two domains that we know were directly connected to Vader.

At the time of the shutdown, Minihosts.org – a site where users could directly signup to the Vader service – was pointing to a server in the Netherlands. It has been stubbornly pointing to the same Netherlands-based IP address ever since. The same can also be said about the more obviously-named Vaders.tv, pictured below.

In advance to the announcement last week, any changes to these domains could’ve given an early indication of confirmed legal action, including who was behind it. This time around, however, the Alliance for Creativity waited for their official announcement before making any changes.

Now, however, both domains are now displaying the familiar ACE anti-piracy message shown below, before diverting to the Alliance’s official web portal, which details some, but not all, of its actions against other ‘pirate’ video services.

When compared to previous domain ‘seizures’, however, this one looks slightly different. In other cases, several of which we’ve detailed before, the MPAA itself has taken over the domains, a fact that has been made clear via WHOIS lookups that show that the Hollywood group is the new owner.

This time, however, both domains currently have their ownership details hidden by privacy-protection service Privacy Protect LLC. The reason for this is currently unclear but given that domains now redirect to ACE and are also using the MPAA’s nameservers, it seems fairly obvious the handover of former Vader assets is well underway.

The service previously promised that it would protect user data with the statement, “We’re going to make sure, no Email, IP, account + reseller name goes to the wrong hands. Everything will be wiped clean and that’s all.”

While that may very well have happened as promised, we also know that ACE used a secret court process and effectively ambushed one or more Vader operators/staff armed with an Anton Piller order, a civil search warrant that granted them no-notice permission to enter premises to secure and copy evidence before it could be destroyed or tampered with.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

For as long as piracy and counterfeiting have existed, there have been claims that groups engaged in the practices have links to other, more serious crimes.

Over the past couple of decades the claims have persisted but even the most serious legal cases (ones for which people have been jailed for many years) have failed to turn up evidence that people running pirate sites, services, and similar platforms are connected to even more serious crimes.

This week, however, following news from FACT that it had targeted numerous IPTV sellers and providers in the UK, Lesley Donovan – the National Coordinator for the multi-agency Government Agency Intelligence Network (GAIN) – repeated similar claims.

Referencing even the smaller players – those who re-sell access to larger IPTV providers – Donovan said that they are contributing to what many people consider to be some of the most serious crimes.

“This type of activity is also often a cog in a larger criminal machine, often ultimately funding drugs, weapons and people trafficking,” Donovan said.

Clearly, most members of the general public wouldn’t want to feel that they’re funding drug supply, helping to encourage the flow of weapons, or contributing to the suffering of those trafficked illegally across or even within borders.

However, these claims are rarely (if ever) backed up with references to cases where people can see evidence of that happening for themselves in Internet cases. And with the word “often” being used twice in the GAIN statement, one might be forgiven for thinking it’s commonplace.

Several weeks ago, while in discussion with the operator of an IPTV service based in Europe, this very topic raised its head. Our contact, while acknowledging that what goes on the IPTV space isn’t exactly legal, bemoaned claims that links to wider crime are rampant.

“The truth is that most IPTV services that I know of only do IPTV. The other half have normal jobs that they do day in, day out,” he explained.

Indeed, TF is informed from several sources that IT professionals, both former and current (and particularly those in the networking space), have close interests in supplying IPTV services to the public. “A natural progression and salary supplement,” is how one described it recently.

Interestingly, one provider spoke of how supplying IPTV to the public has actually become an alternative option for those who may have become involved in other types of crime. Nevertheless, gun-running and people trafficking aren’t part of the equation.

“I’m not saying they are whiter than white but they certainly aren’t some mobster gangsters involved in human trafficking,” he said.

Another thing that seems to have irritated IPTV suppliers is the claim by anti-piracy groups that members of the public open themselves up to being stolen from when they deal with ‘pirate’ IPTV providers.

It’s often claimed that handing over personal information along with payment details can result in people being deprived of their cash through ancillary fraudulent transactions. But again, this is something rarely reported in public by any alleged victims, or backed up by evidence from law enforcement.

“Nobody is forced to give real details when signing up [to an IPTV service]. In fact we don’t care what name or address you put as we aren’t going verify the information,” one source told TF.

“We use third-party gateways for payment such as PayPal or Stripe and so on, so none of us ever see card details [enabling us to] commit fraud.”

Of course, it could also be argued that in common with the thus-far unsubstantiated claims that IPTV providers are involved in more serious crime, the claims of these providers are also without supporting evidence.

Nevertheless, they seem keen to distance themselves from the claims and in the main, approached us first to dispel the narrative they’re involved in anything other than the supply of illegal streams.

In the interim, it will be for the public to decide who to believe and a court case showing otherwise to run its course and reveal if such connections are both real and substantiated. Until then, the business will remain in the shadows, with both claims and counterclaims up for debate.

Finally, we spoke to one lower-tier reseller and asked him about the recent involvement of organized crime units and whether “organized crime” was an accurate description of his reseller sideline.

“I’ve got about 250 customers,” he told TF. “It’s too many for me really and if it is crime it’s VERY disorganized. So no.”

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

This week the US Customs and Border Protection Bureau hosted a meeting discussing various copyright enforcement efforts.

During the meeting, various stakeholders were invited to submit input for the Presidential Memorandum on Combating Trafficking in Counterfeit and Pirated Goods, set to be released later this year.

A similar request was previously made by the US Department of Commerce. While we already covered some of these responses, the views of the Copyright Alliance, which were sent in response to the latest meeting, haven’t been mentioned yet.

In a detailed submission the Copyright Alliance, which says it represents 1.8 million creators and 13,000 pro-copyright organizations in the United States, mainly focuses on online piracy. Specifically, the non-profit group urges the Trump administration to prioritize enforcement against online piracy.

“Online digital piracy has been and continues to be a plague on the creative community that harms both large and small copyright owners. Established channels of digital piracy, such as peer-to-peer file sharing and cyberlockers, remain popular, while emerging threats such as stream ripping services gain ground,” the group writes.

Another ’emerging’ piracy problem, one that involved physical products, is the growing threat of piracy devices and apps, which the Copyright Alliance abbreviated to PDAs. Kodi-based devices are most prevalent among this category, the group notes, but it adds that the Kodi software itself is legal.

Problems arise when people configure Kodi-devices with add-ons that give people easy and direct access to pirated movies, TV-shows, and other video content.

“Distributors of PDAs make it easy to stream and download pirated content at the push of a button. Their devices essentially allow purchasers to watch for free what legitimate streaming services charge you to access, and they advertise it as such,” the Copyright Alliance writes.

The group points at various examples including advertisements for the now-defunct Dragon Box, which encouraged potential customers to “Get rid of your Premium Channels” and to “Stop paying for Netflix and Hulu”.

These devices and services threaten the revenue of copyright holders, the group states. Not just those who produce the content, but also various legitimate distribution platforms.

“The widespread use of PDAs not only infringes upon the copyrights of creators of films and TV shows, but also harms competition by harming legitimate streaming services, such as Netflix and Hulu, that are licensed to provide content and increasingly produce their own works,” the Alliance writes.

The Copyright Alliance encourages the US Government to address these problems where possible. In addition, it also would like to see the criminal penalties for streaming piracy to be increased from a misdemeanor to a felony. This would bring it on par with the criminal penalties for downloading.

This argument has been made by several parties in recent months, and the Copyright Alliance backs it as well.

“We agree that copyright criminal penalties should reflect the realities of how infringing conduct is occurring and believe the presence of meaningful criminal penalties plays a significant role in deterring willful and egregious infringement.

“We urge the Administration to continue working on harmonizing criminal penalties for the most common types of infringement,” the Alliance adds.

A full overview of the recommendations sent to the Customs and Border Protection Bureau, which also supports the pending CASE ACT and calls for measures against textbook counterfeiting, is available here.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

In recent years website blocking has become one of the most widely-used anti-piracy enforcement mechanisms in the world.

ISPs in several dozen countries are now required to prevent subscribers from accessing a variety of ‘pirate’ sites. While new blocks are added every month, research on their effectiveness has been rather scarce.

Most ‘studies’ promoted by copyright holders conclude that blocking a site does indeed reduce traffic to the affected domains. While this is hardly surprising, less is known about where ‘blocked’ subscribers go instead.

Do they simply give up and stop pirating? Are they finding ways to circumvent blockades? Do they decide to sign up for a paid streaming service such as Netflix? As it turns out, all of the above can be answered positively, according to one of the most details studies on site blocking.

In a paper titled The Effect of Piracy Website Blocking on Consumer Behavior, researchers connected to the Carnegie Mellon University’s IDEA program thoroughly researched the effect of various blocking orders in the UK.

The latest version of the peer-reviewed paper, which will soon be published in the Management Information Systems Quarterly, builds on earlier findings that we’ve reported on in the past.

For example, the researchers found that when ISPs only blocked The Pirate Bay in the UK in 2012, not much happened. Pirates were still pirating but simply switched to alternative sites or Pirate Bay mirrors. Others circumvented the blockades by using VPNs.

Follow-up research, looking at the effect of 19 additional sites that were blocked by UK ISPs in 2013, revealed a different trend. Blocking more sites decreased the numbers of visits to pirate sites, but only cyberlockers.

This was later confirmed with data from an even larger blocking wave from 2014, which also found that visits to other unblocked pirate sites decreased. These data also revealed another interesting trend. The broader blocking effort also increased the number of visits to paid streaming services such as Amazon and Netflix.

The latest article expands on the last finding by estimating whether the blockades actually increased the number of subscriptions. This, opposed to the possibility that pirates were already subscribed and simply used the legal services more after the blocks.

To do this, the researchers looked at ‘pirates’ who repeatedly visited legal services after the blockades, but didn’t before, and compared this to people who were not pirating. This shows that the blocks increased the number of paid subscriptions to streaming services.

“We show that blocking 53 sites in 2014 caused treated users to decrease piracy and to increase their usage of legal subscription sites by 7-12%. It also caused an increase in new paid subscriptions,” the researchers write in their paper.

“Together, these results imply that supply-side antipiracy enforcement can be effective in turning users of illegal piracy channels toward paid legal
consumption,” the paper adds.

It has to be noted that the estimated increase in subscriptions is relatively small. It’s just 1.1 percentage points higher than in the control group of people who were not affected by the blocks. That said, this translates to around 50,000 new subscribers in the UK, which is pretty significant.

Overall the research finds that there are varying responses to pirate site blockades. Some may circumvent them by using alternative pirate sites or signing up for a VPN, while others increasingly turn to legal alternatives.

In addition to this, one of the main messages is that blocking multiple sites at once is more effective than blocking just a single site. Broader blocks are likely to make it harder for people to find pirated content and, as a result, some people appear to give up.

The researchers illustrate this by pointing at the ‘Hydra’ comparison, which has been used by The Pirate Bay as well in the past. In Greek mythology, the Hydra is a beast that’s particularly hard to kill, as it has multiple heads that can grow back.

“Blocking a single site is akin to decapitating only one of the Hydra’s heads. The result will only be a more diffuse network of piracy sites, with no curb on pirating activity,” the researchers write.

Stabbing the Hydra in the hard is the only way to kill it effectively. While that may be impossible in the pirate ecosystem, cutting off as many heads as possible comes close. Especially if these heads are important sources for other sites.

“Blocking multiple sites at once is akin to decapitating several of the Hydra’s heads. With the network of sites significantly disrupted, this could possibly be a mortal wounding. We have shown that users’ behavior is sufficiently disrupted and that some increase the use of legal channels, and reduce illegal ones,” the paper concludes.

The website blocking research was carried out as part of Carnegie Mellon University’s Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics (IDEA), which received a generous donation from the MPAA. However, the researchers stress that their work is carried out independently.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

During March, US-based author John Van Stry filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Travis McCrea, the operator of controversial eBook download platform eBook.bike.

McCrea initially opted not to become involved in the US lawsuit and in June, Van Stry’s lawyers filed for a default judgment in a Texas court.

In common with most copyright cases, this one isn’t straightforward and seems to have been complicated by McCrea’s early non-participation. However, the former Pirate Party of Canada leader eventually had a change of heart. He recently asked the Court to consider accepting late motions to vacate the default, dismiss the case, and/or change the venue.

Following a recent telephone conference, Judge William Bryson issued an order in response to those requests.

In respect of Van Stry’s motion for default (which had the potential to put McCrea on the hook for around $150,000 in statutory damages), that has now been vacated, meaning that McCrea will be able to fight his corner.

On the question of venue and personal jurisdiction (McCrea resides in Canada), the eBook.bike operator wasn’t so lucky. In his order, the Judge concluded that in a copyright infringement case like this, Van Stry’s location is the deciding factor, since that’s where the alleged injury was caused.

“Based on the evidence before the Court, the location of the copyright holder is his current residence within the Eastern District of Texas. Therefore, with respect to personal jurisdiction and venue, the Court has personal jurisdiction over the defendant, and venue is proper in the Eastern District of Texas,” the order reads.

As reported previously, McCrea asked the Court to dismiss the entire case, based on his assertion that the DMCA takedown notices filed with eBook.bike by Van Stry were deficient. Among other things, McCrea argued, precise URLs for the allegedly-infringing content were not provided.

In another setback, the Judge denied McCrea’s motion to dismiss, “holding that the complaint, which alleges proper notification of claimed infringement under 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3) and other facts challenging the applicability of the DMCA safe harbor, is sufficient to state a claim for copyright infringement at the pleading stage.”

A control order is now on the docket, indicating – among other things – that jury selection for the trial will take place during June 2020. Whether the parties will agree to settle in the meantime is open to question but as costs continue to mount (both McCrea and Van Stry have complained about cash shortages recently), that might be the sensible outcome.

Not least since eBook.bike has been down for weeks and is showing no signs of returning.

The related court orders can be found here and here (pdf)

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.