Many governments around the world regularly complain that their countries are negatively affected by piracy. The only thing that differs is how seriously the problem is treated on the ground and how far they’re prepared to go in order to deal with unlicensed consumption.

There are many strategies available but the government in Malaysia is currently considering something unheard of anywhere on the planet. While it hasn’t shied away from ordering ISPs to block pirate sites, it now wants to hit consumers of content too, specifically those using Android-style set-top boxes.

Malaysia already has legislation in place which typically requires such devices to comply with national standards, with the Standard and Industrial Research Institute of Malaysia (SIRIM) responsible for product quality assurance and subsequent certification.

Without certification from SIRIM, devices are considered illegal and those found in breach of the rules could be fined or handed up to six months in prison. This is a big deal because many imported devices, which are often used for piracy purposes, do not have the necessary certification. But Malaysia is now planning to step things up another notch.

The mission of the National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (FINAS) is sometimes compared to that of the MPAA in the US. Unlike the MPAA, however, FINAS is a government department within the Ministry of Communications and Multimedia. Its chairman, Datuk Hans Isaac, says that it’s time to hold the public accountable for piracy.

“I’m putting a paper together to propose that the owner of the house is responsible for the use of illegal Android TV boxes,” he said at the Fast Track 2019 Creative Digital Economy Forum in Cyberjaya.

In the United States, Europe and elsewhere it’s not uncommon for copyright trolls to blame Internet subscribers (often the homeowner) for Internet piracy. However, it seems that FINAS wants to take things a whole lot further by placing the responsibility for piracy on those who may be innocent and/or completely absent.

“It doesn’t matter if the person is renting the house to another person who bought the device,” the FINAS chairman clarified.

According to The Star, FINAS is planning to set up a “war room” at its offices to deal with online piracy. It’s unclear how the department will obtain the ability to determine whether citizens are using pirate boxes in their homes (or indeed someone else’s home) but the department is certainly talking tough.

“[The war room is] where we will discuss what to do when we receive reports about digital piracy so we can take action immediately,” Hans said. “A day of the content being illegally streamed online is a loss of income for the investors or stakeholders.”

Media and entertainment company KRU Studios is a supporter of government proposals to target consumers who support online piracy.

“What the industry expects of the government now is to address the real problem, not just the pirates online. It is high time that the users are also punished. What is illegal offline, should be illegal online too,” says executive president Datuk Norman Abdul Halim.

Norman believes that when tackling the problem, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) should consider restricting Internet access to those who utilize pirate services.

Again, it remains unclear how the government could determine who these people are. The main problem cited isn’t easily-trackable BitTorrent users but those who frequent streaming sites, portals, and other services.

The MCMC, which earlier this year claimed to have blocked 246 sites supplying pirate boxes, also supports a change in the law, noting that it has already expended a lot of its resources dealing with piracy.

However, according to recent reports, the MCMC has also been spending its money where it shouldn’t, including “donating” around US$24,000 to buy 50,000 copies of former prime minister Najib Razak’s books.

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YTS is the most-visited torrent site on the Internet. It specializes in uploading movies, which are widely shared online.

The site ‘unofficially’ took over the YTS brand after the original group quit four years ago. Since then, it has amassed a rather impressive user base of millions of daily visitors.

The site is a major source of frustration for the movie industry but, thus far, copyright holders haven’t been able to do much about it. Recently, however, pressure has been mounting.

A few weeks ago trouble started when a group of movie companies sued the site’s operator, who they accused of inducing massive copyright infringement. Following this lawsuit, the site moved to a new domain name, YTS.lt, but that didn’t end the problems.

In a new lawsuit filed at a Hawaiian Federal Court, the site is now being targeted by HB Productions. The company, which is an affiliate of Millennium Media, owns the copyright to the popular movie “Hellboy“. Among other things, it accuses the site and several of its users of copyright infringement.

“Plaintiff brings this action to stop the massive piracy of its motion picture Hellboy brought on by websites under the collective names YTS and their users,” the complaint reads.

“Defendant JOHN DOE promotes its website for overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, infringing purposes, and that is how the users use the websites,” it adds.

According to the movie company, YTS.lt has sufficient ties to the US and Hawaii to warrant jurisdiction. Among other things, it uses or used services of US-based companies, including Cloudflare, Level 3 Communications, Inc., and QuadraNet, the complaint clarifies.

To conceal its identity, the site operator allegedly used the American VPN provider London Trust Media, which owns Private Internet Access. For the same purpose, it also used the tunneling service from Hurricane Electric and the TOR service.

Despite the attempts to conceal, the Hellboy rightsholders managed to find some breadcrumbs. For example, the WHOIS details list “TechModo Limited” as the registrant of the YTS.lt domain. Whether this will lead anywhere is unknown, as that UK-company was dissolved late April.

Another lead comes from Hurricane Electric. After Cloudflare revealed that the YTS operator used Hurricane’s tunneling service to login, the movie company sent a subpoena to Hurricane, which revealed that the person in question used a Hotmail account and an IP-address from the Canadian ISP Cogeco.

“Hurricane has indicated that an individual who identified himself by a verified Hotmail email address from a location in Ontario, Canada subscribed for the so-called tunneling service with Hurricane to tunnel its true IPv4 address to the IPv6 address of Hurricane,” HB Productions notes.

The movie company plans to use this information to find the YTS operator. At this point, it’s unclear if it actually belongs to the person who runs the site, but the rightsholder believes that it points to at least one of the operators.

The complaint further alleges that the defendant created the “Hellboy (2019) [WEBRip] [1080p] [YTS.LT]” torrent, which was made available through YTS.lt and other torrent sites. The other defendants, who are all Hawaiian subscribers of ISP Spectrum, then downloaded and shared this file.

While the mastermind behind the site might not be easy to track down, the 19 “John Doe” users being sued might be easier to find. They are all known by Spectrum IP-addresses. While the account holders are not necessarily the people who shared “Hellboy,” it’s certainly a more concrete lead.

That said, these individual downloaders are small fish compared to the YTS operator.

The movie company hopes that, through this lawsuit, it will be able to recoup some of its alleged losses. It accuses the YTS operator and its users of contributory and direct copyright infringement, while tagging on a claim of intentional inducement against the former.

HB Productions also requests an injunction to stop the defendants’ infringing activities and to prevent third-party intermediaries such as hosting companies, domain registrars, and search engines, form facilitating access to the YTS domains.

Whether the court will grant these requests remains to be seen. In the other lawsuit against YTS we mentioned earlier, the Hawaiian Federal Court wasn’t convinced that it has personal jurisdiction over the alleged operator of the site.

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A copy of the complaint filed by HB Productions is available here (pdf).

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While many pirate site users already know the direct URLs of their favorite free movie resources, entertainment industry groups feel that search engines still play a key role in unlicensed content discovery.

As a result, anti-piracy companies are continuously tasked with having allegedly-infringing results removed from search results offered by companies such as Google, in an effort to minimize traffic to pirate sites.

In Russia, which is rapidly emerging as world-leader in anti-piracy strategies, the government now wants to take things a step further by modifying search results to include a ‘tag’ or marker that clearly identifies legal video platforms.

According to local news outlet Vedomosti, the proposal forms part of an amendment to copyright law penned by Russia’s Ministry of Culture.

“We expect that in this way users will make a more informed choice not in favor of pirates, but in favor of legal platforms,” says Olga Lyubimova, director of the cinematography department of the Ministry of Culture.

While having a gold star or similar marker next to a site’s listing may help users to better identify legal offerings, the government isn’t planning to hand out endorsements on a whim. Movie and TV companies want to get a better idea of what content is being viewed and in what volumes. As a result, sites to be considered for preferential marking will have to give something back.

Russian cinemas are already required to report data on all tickets sold but there is no equivalent for online viewing resources, leaving production companies to complain that they need more information. The current proposals would require legal online providers to provide such data to content companies and the government.

If they do not, it’s suggested they could be declared illegal with various repercussions, not least the inability to be highlighted in search results as a legitimate provider.

The proposal to highlight legal platforms in search results is in addition to a ground-breaking agreement reached in Moscow last year. Signed by major rightsholders, Internet companies, and search providers, the pact sees Internet platforms query a centralized database of infringing content to ensure that none of it is presented on their platforms.

It’s expected to be written into law but in common with the search tagging proposal, the precise details are still being hammered out.

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In theory at least, running a content upload site should be relatively straightforward. Put the necessary infrastructure in place, wait for users to upload files, then make those files available for download or streaming.

This works extremely well for sites like YouTube, for example, because they have teams of lawyers in place that ensure that the company operates to the letter of the law while standing by to swat away any irritating lawsuits over allegedly-infringing content.

Smaller sites tend not to have these luxuries, so there’s always the chance that groups like the RIAA will come knocking, threatening legal action for copyright infringement failings. This appears to be part of the puzzle facing popular upload site Picosong.

Picosong has been around for more than ten years. Its Twitter account dates back to May 2009, a lifetime for many similar sites operating in the same niche. For much of that time, the platform has provided a simple solution for users to host music files. Soon, however, that will come to an end.

A notice currently displayed on the site’s homepage says that Picosong has reached the end of the road. There are better alternatives for hosting musicians’ content, the announcement reads, so as a result, Picosong will close in October.

While the stated aim was to assist musicians to host (presumably) their own content, it’s clear that many uploaders to the site have been sharing content that doesn’t belong to them. A cursory skim around the web reveals plenty of links to content that is almost certainly copyrighted, a situation that affects Picosong and YouTube alike.

Whether Picosong’s impending shutdown was prompted by anything other than a lack of desire to compete with Soundcloud and Bandcamp is unclear. However, a filing at a federal court in Columbia reveals that the site is firmly on the radar of the RIAA after a leaked Kanye West track was uploaded to the site.

In common with similar efforts in 2019, the RIAA applied for and obtained a DMCA subpoena compelling domain registrar Namecheap to hand over the personal details of the site’s operator. Dated July 23, the application lists three infringing tracks;

• Ed Sheeran & Travis Scott – Antisocial
• Tyler, the Creator – 435
• Kanye West feat. XXXTentacion, Ty Dolla Sign – The Storm

While the first two songs are already widely available, the latter appears to be an unreleased Kanye West track that hit the web earlier this month as part of a batch of similarly-leaked titles.

Pre-release content appearing online is a particularly sensitive matter for the labels. According to a contributor on Genius.com, the leak may even put the track’s album release at risk.

“‘The Storm’ is a leaked collaboration between Kanye West, Ty Dolla $ign and the late XXXTENTACION. On the track, Ty and Kanye encourage a female listener to take control of their life. X’s rowdy verse, which was picked from his unreleased ‘Yes Indeed Remix,’ features him boasting about fighting, his sex life, and his expensive taste,” the review reads.

“‘The Storm’ is believed to be a cut from West’s upcoming album, Yandhi. However, since the track leaked online on July 12, 2019, its standing on the album is unsure.”

The Storm was previously uploaded to many hosting sites, including YouTube (where it remains at the time of writing) and Soundcloud, which appears to have responded to a takedown notice.

TorrentFreak requested comment from the operator of Picosong but at the time of publication, we were yet to receive a response.

The RIAA’s demand for a DMCA subpoena can be found here (pdf)

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In the spring of 2013, more than six years ago, a new niche hosting service called Instaudio saw the light.

The site, operated by an anonymous musician, offered anyone a quick and easy way to upload music files. Before the launch, it was used as a private service, but the operator eventually made it available to the public at large.

Despite attracting a healthy user-base, the site always remained a side-project. The operator, who works at a music-related company, didn’t promote it either. People simply found their way to the site through word-of-mouth promotion.

This went well, but as time went by, more and more problems arose. As with any hosting service, some people started to use the site to share pirated files. On popular forums and leak-sharing sites, links to Instaudio were no exception either.

This meant that the operator had to worry about removing content from his platform. While the site accepts and honors takedown requests, it was never meant to be a platform for leaks, something that was communicated loud and clear on Twitter and elsewhere.

Despite this call, the abuse didn’t stop. This led to the frustrating situation that a site, which aimed to help musicians share files, was increasingly seen as a threat by music industry outfits. As a result, the operator has now decided to put an end to it himself.

A few days ago, Instaudio stopped accepting new uploads and signups. Previously uploaded files will remain available for now, but they will be made unavailable to the public at the end of August. Four weeks later, all files and user accounts will be purged.

In a public announcement, the Instaudio operator cites the “abuse” as one of the reasons for his decision.

“The abuse situation has gotten to the point where I’m being threatened with ‘legal consequences’ and other such things because, in those organizations’ judgment, I am ineffective at preventing infringing content from being distributed through Instaudio.”

To stop widespread uploading of pirated material Instaudio could implement an upload filter, but the operator is not a fan of these types of measures, as they can lead to false positives.

In addition to sharing pirated content, people were also abusing the site by hotlinking to files and bulk-downloading content. This significantly increased costs.

“Other forms of abuse also occurred, such as automated bulk-downloading, or hot-linking to Instaudio-hosted files on webpages with high traffic. Both of these result in high bandwidth, and therefore high cost for me,” the operator notes.

The growing costs are cited as another reason for the shutdown. As Instaudio was a personal project, all costs were paid out of the pockets of the operator. While he did have a sponsor, it has now reached the point where the costs are no longer justified.

All in all, the negatives outweigh the positives, and shutting Instaudio down is the logical conclusion.

“As time went on I had to put more and more effort into the ugly side of keeping Instaudio running, which left no energy to work on cool new features. Coupled with the cost and the stress, it became an overall negative for me,” Instaudion’s operator writes.

“I have other, more fulfilling hobbies that I’d much rather spend the time and money on,” he adds.

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