Blocking websites associated with piracy is one of the most common tools deployed against unauthorized content distribution involving movies, TV shows, and music.
However, the rising consumption of pirate sources of live TV, particularly sports, has presented broadcasters with a new challenge.
The Premier League has been attempting to solve this problem in the UK with so-called ‘dynamic’ blocking injunctions, one which allows servers to be blocked in real-time by ISPs, as matches are underway.
Earlier this month it was reported that the League had filed an application to expand this effort to Ireland. Targeting major ISPs Eircom, Sky, Virgin Media, and Vodafone, the League sought permission to have these companies quickly respond to blocking demands.
On Monday in the Commercial Court, after ISPs either supported or failed to oppose the application, the proposal was converted into Ireland’s first dynamic blocking injunction. It will aim to prevent consumers from accessing ‘pirate’ streams via IPTV services, websites, apps, and third-party Kodi addons.
Counsel for the Premier League told the Court that the bulk of those the company is seeking to block access the company’s matches via set-top boxes.
According to a report from Irish Times, the IP addresses of streaming hosts will be updated at least twice while matches are underway so that ISPs are able to prevent their subscribers from accessing the locations. Once the matches have ended, the blocking measures are supposed to stop.
There is also a nod to due process, with hosting companies being told of the existence of the order enabling them to notify their customers (the alleged infringers) that their streams will be blocked.
Targeted suppliers, almost certainly IPTV providers, are also given permission to apply to the court to have their servers unblocked, if any of their legitimate content is rendered inaccessible as a result of the injunction.
In common with the applications in the UK, the order granted in Ireland was in part based on “confidential information” that only the court and the parties involved have access to in order to prevent technical circumvention of the order.
The precise nature of that information isn’t clear but we’re informed that the blocking process is already well understood by outside parties, with providers able to take countermeasures and, if all else fails, end-users able to deploy VPNs.
Back in March, Travis McCrea, the former leader of the Pirate Party of Canada, faced mounting opposition against his eBook platform, Ebook.bike.
Following in the footsteps of his similar creation TUEBL (The Ultimate eBook Library), Ebook.bike allows users to upload and download eBooks, some of which have turned out to be copyright-infringing.
Despite McCrea taking content down following copyright notices, large numbers of authors weren’t impressed, with some urging legal action. McCrea responded by inviting someone to sue.
Author John Van Stry took on the challenge by suing McCrea and alleged business partner Francisco Humberto Dias (doing business as ‘Frantech Solutions’) in a Texas court for direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement.
“Mr. McCrea has a long and proud history of pervasive, blatant, and egregious violations of other persons’ intellectual property rights,” the complaint read.
After the complaint was filed on March 27, 2019, the docket reports that McCrea was served on May 20. Eight days later, Van Stry requested the clerk to file an entry for default, which was actioned a day later. In June, Van Stry’s lawyers filed for a default judgment.
Claiming direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement in respect of 12 books written by Van Stry and allegedly distributed on eBook.bike, the author asked for $15,000 in statutory damages for each of the infringed works. He further demanded that McCrea should pay attorneys’ fees and costs.
From the proposed judgment
On Friday, Judge William C. Bryson handed down an order but it wasn’t a straightforward rubber-stamping of the proposed judgment and doesn’t lay the matter to rest. Since McCrea has chosen not to participate in proceedings thus far, the Judge writes that the Court must consider whether a default judgment can be handed down and if so, what form it would take.
To begin, the Court needed to determine whether McCrea has entered an appearance in the case. That standard was apparently met after McCrea reportedly sent a signed email indicating that he was prepared to accept email service in the case. A later email from McCrea reportedly had him threatening a countersuit for libel and proposing an offer to settle.
Email allegedly from McCrea presented to the Court
The Court also needed to determine whether it has subject matter jurisdiction. While that was quickly established, the question of personal jurisdiction over McCrea appears less straightforward, which is a problem because, without that, any judgment would be void.
In his order, the Judge explains that there are two bases for personal jurisdiction – general and specific.
“General personal jurisdiction is available when the defendant’s contacts with the forum State are ‘continuous and systematic’,” the Judge notes, adding that specific personal jurisdiction “must be based on activities that arise out of or relate to the cause of action, and can exist even if the defendant’s contacts are not continuous and systematic.”
In this case, the Court found that it “plainly” does not have general jurisdiction over McCrea as the complaint offered no evidence of that. “The question, therefore, is whether this Court has specific jurisdiction over Mr. McCrea based on particular acts relating to the cause of action having a sufficient relationship with the forum to support a finding of jurisdiction.”
In summary, based on the claims and allegations in the complaint, Judge Bryson says he doesn’t have enough evidence before him to conclude that the Court has personal jurisdiction over McCrea and as such it will not be handing down a default judgment at this time.
Instead, the parties have been told to file simultaneous briefs within 14 days, each detailing whether the Court has personal jurisdiction over McCrea, considering whether the injury to the copyright holder occurred in Texas, whether that injury is sufficient enough to imply a “substantial connection” with the forum/state, and whether McCrea knew that “his acts would be felt” by Van Stry in Texas. The Judge specifically asks both parties to consider McCrea’s residence outside the United States.
All of that said and taking McCrea’s general non-participation in the process into consideration, the Court says that Van Stry’s factual claims are enough for it to find McCrea liable for copyright infringement in the 12 books. If personal jurisdiction can be established to the Court’s satisfaction, that leaves the matter of damages.
While the excerpt from the proposed judgment above shows that Van Stry is demanding $180,000 in damages, the Judge cites $150,000 in his order. However, he also writes that no documentary evidence has been submitted to the Court which would explain why the amount is appropriate.
Furthermore, Van Stry’s demands for a comprehensive injunction cause an additional complication, the Judge notes, since a copyright injunction cannot be served outside the United States and does not apply directly to conduct occurring outside the United States.
“Such an injunction, if issued, would have to be framed so that it is directed only to conduct occurring within this country, which would be narrower than the full scope of the injunctive relief sought in the complaint,” the Judge writes. And that might be tricky since the relief being sought is extensive.
Van Stry’s motion demands that McCrea should refrain from directly, contributorily or indirectly infringing his rights in the future, not only for the 12 books in the complaint but any others written by him.
On top, there’s a request for caching and proxy services, web hosts, email providers, social media platforms and payment processors currently doing business with McCrea in connection with eBook.bike or similar platforms, to stop doing so, if those sites infringe Van Stry’s rights.
A further request would require search engines to “prevent links to the Defendant’s accounts or websites, which distribute or encourage the copying and distribution of Works or other titles by the same author, from displaying in search results, and removing such links from any search index.”
All that considered and if personal jurisdiction can be established, the Court is prepared to award damages, but not immediately to the level demanded by Van Stry.
“[T]he Court would be prepared to hold that the plaintiff is entitled to a statutory award of $750 for each of the 12 works as to which he has alleged copyright infringement, for a total award of $9000, if the plaintiff were to elect to accept the statutory minimum damages award in lieu of a damages award calculated after a hearing,” the order reads.
In the absence of such an agreement, the Judge says that the Court would not be prepared to go any higher without a further hearing to determine the appropriate amount of damages. In an effort to keep costs down for both sides, the Court is prepared to hold that hearing over the phone.
The proposed motion for default judgment is available here, Judge Bryson’s order is available here (both pdf)
Website blocking is without a doubt one of the favorite anti-piracy tools of the entertainment industries.
The UK has been a leader on this front. Since 2011, the High Court has ordered ISPs to block access to many popular pirate sites.
Over time the number of blocked URLs in the UK has grown steadily to well over 1,000. This includes many popular torrent, streaming, and direct download sites, which remain barred today.
We have covered these efforts extensively here at TorrentFreak. However, since late 2016 something appears to have changed. The movie industry’s MPA(A) and the music industry’s BPI suddenly stopped submitting new requests.
The latest regular blocking order dates back nearly three years. While the Premier League did request some “dynamic” blockades of streaming related IP-addresses more recently, there have been no new efforts targeting traditional pirate sites.
This lack of new blocking requests is striking, especially since the UK model is often used as a prime example of anti-piracy enforcement around the world. Just a few months ago, MPAA and RIAA argued that it should become part of a possible US-UK trade deal.
“Website blocking has been successful in the United Kingdom with 63 music sites being ordered to be blocked following music right holders’ initiatives. On average this produces a reduction in the use of those sites by UK users by approximately 75 percent,” the RIAA said at the time.
Despite this effectiveness, UK piracy site-blocking efforts have been rather stagnant. While older court order are sill updated with new domain names, no new sites have been targeted by the MPA(A) and BPI in years. As such, new pirate sites can flourish.
TorrentFreak reached out to the MPA and BPI for a comment on this apparent slowdown. Neither organization gave a concrete reason for the absence of recent applications.
MPA informed TorrentFreak that it will continue to use a range of different methods for its enforcement efforts around the world. That includes working with local enforcement agencies to refer criminal cases, offering consumers new and innovative ways to access content, as well as seeking court orders to block access to pirate sites.
“The MPA will continue to use this range of methods as appropriate in the UK as we do around the world. Ensuring that filmmakers everywhere are compensated for their work and that revenues can be reinvested in new productions continues to be the number one priority for the MPA,” the group said.
BPI also stressed that site-blocking remains part of its anti-piracy toolbox.
“There are a very wide range of effective and complementary tools we use to reduce music piracy – site blocking is just a part of these,” a BPI spokesperson told us.
BPI’s other tools include delisting infringing URLs from search engines, site demotion under the search engine Voluntary Code of Practice, direct litigation against sites, criminal investigations, disrupting money flows to pirate sites, anti-piracy partnerships with online platforms, and consumer education.
The music group didn’t provide any details that explain why no new blocking orders were requested in recent years. However, it suggests that other tools are more appropriate at the current time.
“The mix of techniques we use varies over time and reflects the most appropriate strategy for dealing with a given problem at a given time,” the BPI spokesperson says.
“Having obtained High Court orders to block many of the major pirate brands, over the last few years other approaches have been effective to continue the reduction in music piracy. However, website blocking remains part of the mix and we will continue to use it in appropriate cases.”
The question remains why site blocking is seen as less appropriate. Perhaps the rightsholders feel that requesting additional blockades is not worth the resources, compared to other anti-piracy initiatives.
Part of the reason may be that the blocking orders can be quite expensive. Previously, it was estimated that an unopposed application for a section 97A blocking order is roughly £14,000 per website, while maintaining it costs an additional £3,600 per year.
With well over a hundred sites blocked, the costs are quite significant, to say the least.
While there haven’t been any new requests, the previously ordered blockades are still in place, of course. That being said, we have to note that these are not effective everywhere. When we tried to access The Pirate Bay on a Virgin connection this week, it was freely accessible.
While the notorious pirate site may still be blocked on other ISPs, workarounds are not hard to find. At the time of writing PirateProxy.ch, a TPB proxy, is among the 150 most-visited websites in the UK.
That said, rightsholders were never under the illusion that they can prevent the most determined pirates from accessing these sites. They simply want to dissuade casual pirates, and they feel that the current site blocking efforts are doing their job.
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.
RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.
By now most people will be familiar with the news that BitTorrent Inc. recently released a new version of its dominant uTorrent client.
The claims are that this will revolutionize torrenting, with people able to earn BTT in exchange for seeding. The plan is that this will make swarms more healthy because there is more bandwidth available. This, in turn, should speed up downloads – for BTT-spending uTorrent users, at least.
The idea of a torrent client allocating bandwidth to peers via financial discrimination is contrary to the broad aims of the original BitTorrent protocol. As such it is a divisive and sensitive topic. Nevertheless, we wanted to find out more because if it does work, loyalty to tradition might be a thing of the past.
As reported during launch week, all downloaders of the new uTorrent were gifted 10 BTT to bootstrap the system. One way or another, we were determined to make this value change. However, despite extensive seeding of in-demand and low-seeded torrents alike, it stubbornly remained the same, despite the client insisting that there were plenty of BTT-enabled peers in the swarms.
Meanwhile, crypto-focused people appearing in BitTorrent CEO Justin Sun’s Twitter feed were apparently having huge success, raking in more than a dollar’s worth of BTT after seeding dozens of torrents during the first day.
This success raised a few eyebrows because one of our sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told us July 10 that after running two instances of the software, one with 6.5TB seeded and another with 1.1TB downloaded, he hadn’t made or lost a penny, with his BTT stubbornly sitting at 10 BTT. Some people just can’t catch a break, it seems.
Of course, these uploads and downloads have to be made to and from BTT-enabled peers to count, so it’s possible (although a little improbable) that not a single uTorrent user with the feature enabled entered any of the swarms being serviced by the expert torrent user mentioned above.
However, the crypto-minded Twitter user in Sun’s feed was kind enough to hand out some advice, including getting torrents from BitTorrent’s own ‘Now‘ index. That felt like a good idea since users of that resource might be more likely to be running uTorrent with BTT enabled than random torrent users elsewhere. Particularly those who prefer open-source software rather than the proprietary offering from BitTorrent.
To allow us to do some tests over a number of minutes, we needed a reasonably-sized torrent from the Now resource. We picked a 416MB file called “Live From Brixton and Beyond” since most of the other files were too small to measure beyond a few seconds.
Our aim was to find plenty of BTT-powered uTorrent users ready to boost our download speeds, spend some of our own BTT, potentially earn some BTT back, and test out exactly how much faster these downloads can go with this new system promising to change the world.
To do this we downloaded the file detailed above six times in total – three times with BitTorrent Speed enabled and three times without. Each Speed-enabled download was followed by a non-Speed transfer directly after, to ensure that the swarm conditions stayed roughly the same throughout.
Each ‘Speed’ download initiated would enable us to see the number of BTT-enabled peers in the swarm prepared to connect to us (the client provides this number), see the promised speed boost (it also provides that), then compare the promised boosts with the results of an equal number of downloads with everything turned off.
The rough images below show the following: Our download reference number at the top, BTT balance, promised Speed boost in MB/s, number of peers (we allowed this to reach a minimum of 15 before taking a screenshot) followed by the percentage Speed boost.
Underneath that are two further screenshots showing stats from the uTorrent client. The first reveals the download time elapsed with Speed turned on, the second with Speed turned off. All screenshots of transfers were taken as close to one second remaining as possible to show that no transfers were extended beyond the downloading phase, which would distort download times.
Downloads 1 and 2
As the image above shows, 24 BTT-enabled peers wanted to do business with the promise of increasing download speeds massively. However, the “download speed increase” bar is next to useless as a measurement tool (particularly when a torrent is just starting) and as the final elapsed times show, the Speed boost – if there is any at all as a result of spending BTT – is pretty small.
So, on to Downloads 3 and 4, the first with Speed, the second without. Again, it’s exactly the same file and as close to the same swarm as possible by executing both transfers immediately after the first batch.
Downloads 3 and 4
The results show that the Speed-enabled transfer took 28 seconds less than the one without, but given the promises of massive speed boosts when the torrent first started, we can conclude that the figures in the client are misleading at best. So, onto downloads 5 and 6 as quickly as possible, to ensure a consistent swarm.
Downloads 5 and 6
As the transfer stats for Download 5 show, the elapsed time (6m 16s) is remarkably consistent when compared to Download 1 (6m 14s) and Download 4 (6m 12s), a testament to the stability of the swarm. It’s worth noting that Download 4 (the fastest of the three) was a test with Speed turned off.
Importantly, we can also see that during this final test the results were reversed over the previous one, with the non-Speed Download 6 trumping the BTT-powered Download 5 by 43 seconds.
Finally, we decided to put two torrent clients into exactly the same swarm. One of the clients was uTorrent with Speed turned on, the other was a basic Deluge client. We loaded the same torrent into both and gave uTorrent a small head start, basically the time it took to move the mouse over to Deluge and trigger the start. This is what uTorrent promised as a boost;
More than 320% speed increase offered…
As the video below shows, uTorrent managed to connect to many more seeders than Deluge and the performance of each client differed quite a bit in other areas too. Crucially, however, the downloads in both clients finished within a second of each other.
It’s important to note that there are many moving parts in any torrent swarm but the bottom line here is that when a BTT-enabled uTorrent client was placed in a swarm with many other clients with the same ability, it performed no better than one without, despite lofty claims to the contrary.
Of course, we should also remind people that with Deluge (in this case) people won’t earn any BTT for seeding but we’ve already established that the figure of 10 BTT that we began with has never changed since the client was installed.
Magic beans? People should taste them themselves before making their own minds up. Maybe they’ll taste better in future….we’ll see.
Website blocking is without a doubt one of the favorite anti-piracy tools of the entertainment industries.
This week we have three newcomers in our chart.
