In recent years, file-sharers around the world have been pressured to pay significant settlement fees or face legal repercussions.

These so-called “copyright trolling” efforts have been a common occurrence in the United States for roughly a decade, and they still are.

Malibu Media, the Los Angeles-based company behind the ‘X-Art’ adult movies, is behind many of these cases. The company has filed thousands of lawsuits in recent years, targeting Internet subscribers whose accounts were allegedly used to share Malibu’s films via BitTorrent.

These cases generally don’t make it to trial and there are several examples where the rightsholder opted to voluntarily dismiss a case when a defendant pushed back. This is also what happened in a lawsuit that was filed against Tim McManus. 

The adult entertainment company named McManus in a complaint last year and later added his company Greenwood Digital as well. However, these defendants were not intent on settling and fought back. They filed a counterclaim for “abuse of process” against Malibu Media and requested discovery. 

The defendants were ready to fight the case on its merits as that would help them to clear their names. However, Malibu Media then decided that it would no longer pursue the case. 

While we have seen such voluntary dismissals in the past, in this case, the adult entertainment company gave a rather unique explanation. It informed the court that it chose not to continue because the defendants are “IT professionals” who know how to hide infringing activity.

“Plaintiff has elected not to pursue its claim against Defendants as present evidence does not support the time and expense that would be incurred in an attempt to bear out Defendants’ infringer status as a direct or contributory infringer as it appears the Defendants are sophisticated IT professionals with the knowledge to hide infringing activity.

“For this reason, and to conserve judicial resources and prevent unnecessary expense for the parties, Plaintiff respectfully requests that this Court dismiss with prejudice Plaintiff’s claim against Defendants,” Malibu Media added.

In essence, Malibu argues that it’s not financially feasible to pursue the matter because the IT company can, presumably, hide any infringing activity despite the evidence it has collected. 

McManus and his IT company deny these accusations and believe that the rightsholder didn’t have any proper evidence to begin with.

They are not happy with this request for a dismissal, as it will make it harder for them to clear their name and get compensated for the costs they have incurred thus far in their defense. They made this clear in a filing submitted to the District Court of New Jersey yesterday. 

According to the defendants, the allegations made by Malibu Media have led to both financial and reputational damage. They request the court to deny the motion to dismiss, allowing the case to be fought on its merits.

“Defendants have been severely prejudiced by being forced to expend substantial sums of money and time to defend against plaintiff’s claims and pursue their Counterclaims.  In addition, by the mere existence of plaintiff’s lawsuit against defendant Tim McManus, Mr. McManus’s reputation and ability to secure business have been negatively affected,” the defendants argue. 

In an additional certification, defendant Tim McManus writes that the case has harmed his reputation. Among other things, he says that the false accusations were brought up by one of his students at Fordham University. 

“It is a challenge explaining to the students that I did not download the titles outlined in the plaintiff’s Complaint. These accusations have harmed my reputation since I cannot say (yet) that I won a favorable judgment in the case,” McManus writes.

McManus stresses that his company is also harmed by the case and wants to fight the allegations in court so he can properly refute the claims. If the case was simply dismissed, as Malibu wants, that wouldn’t be an option. 

It is now up to the court to decide whether this case will be dismissed or whether McManus and his company will have the chance to clear their names and request compensation. 

—

A copy of the defendant’s opposition is available here (pdf). The matter is currently scheduled to be discussed in a court hearing later this week.

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

When it was released in 1982, the Commodore 64 (or C64) was a revelation.

Resplendent in all its 8-bit glory, the machine packed 20 kilobytes of ROM, 64 kilobytes of RAM, the ability to display multicolor sprites and a sound chip (the now legendary SID) to die for.

How many machines were eventually sold is up for debate, but with lower estimates of more than 12 million units and some as high as 30 million, it was clearly a massive success story that still has developers excited today.

In parallel with the companies who wrote code for Commodore’s machine, a thriving hobbyist scene thrived in the 80s. So-called ‘demos’, distributed via BBSs, pushed the computer to its limits, delighting users with super-smooth scrolling and sampled speech – in fact anything it wasn’t originally expected to do.

The fascination with the C64 has persisted for decades. It wasn’t officially discontinued until 1994 but since then has lived on, both in hardware and emulated forms. Those pushing the limits of what the machine can do have also remained hard at work.

One of those individuals is a programmer known online as ZeroPaige, who for the past seven years has been attempting to cram a port of Nintendo’s 1985 NES game Super Mario Bros. into Commodore’s now ancient hardware.

On April 18, 2019, ZeroPaige revealed that his goal had been reached, with the release of Super Mario Bros 64.

“This is a Commodore 64 port of the 1985 game SUPER MARIO BROS. for the Famicom and Nintendo Entertainment System,” ZeroPaige wrote.

“It contains the original version that was released in Japan and United States, as well as the European version. It also detects and supports a handful of turbo functionalities, and has 2 SID support.”

The developer released the somewhat incredible port as a C64 disk image file, playable on hardware or emulators. The reception it received was amazing, with many fans heaping praise on ZeroPaige for completing a task many believed couldn’t be done.

But of course, the mighty Nintendo was watching too.

Links to the image squirreled away on hosting platforms started to go down, with the suspicion that the Japanese gaming giant was behind the deletions. Seven years of hard work taken down with a few lines of text.

Early this morning, the Commodore Computer Club revealed that it too had been hit with a copyright notice, effectively confirming that Nintendo was behind the action against Super Mario Bros. 64.

Good times. Due to a DMCA takedown notice we had to remove the Super Mario Bros 64 download from our website blog post from 4 days ago. Hopefully everyone enjoys the #Commodore 64 #C64 game who was able to snag it.

— PDX Commodore Club (@c64club) April 22, 2019

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It doesn’t really come as a surprise that Nintendo has targeted the project. The company has been extremely busy in recent months taking down sites that offer ROMs that infringe on its copyrights.

Furthermore, Super Mario Bros. is also available on its Game Boy, Wii U, and Switch platforms, so the ….erm….Commodore 64…is also a market threat.

But while this takedown will have C64 fans shaking their heads, it will prove impossible to delete Super Mario Bros. 64 from history. As things stand, the disk image is available for download in a number of places and for those who want to play it, a few minutes searching will yield results.

The other factor is that the people most interested in this project will already have plenty of connections in the emulator scene, so much of the sharing will go on behind closed doors. This is perhaps a fitting tribute to the distribution that took place in the 1980s, when hobbyists began pushing the C64 to perform tricks its creators never envisioned.

While Nintendo’s lawyers clearly see Super Mario Bros. 64 as just another threat to be countered, the company’s programmers are probably sitting quietly at their desks, smiling quietly at the impressive work of ZeroPaige.

After all, they’re all striving for the impossible. <style>.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

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

During the summer of 2017, several of the largest entertainment industry companies in the world teamed up to create a new anti-piracy coalition.

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) brought together well-known Hollywood outfits including Disney, Warner Bros, NBCUniversal, media giants such as Sky and BBC, as well as the streaming-based newcomers Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu.

This is without a doubt one of the most prominent copyright enforcement groups in history and one with a clear mission. ACE wants to bring a halt to all forms of piracy but with a specific focus on online streaming, which it sees as a major threat to its industry.

The organization has filed several lawsuits in the US, for example, targeting vendors of pirate streaming boxes. This has been quite effective so far, with Dragon Box settling for $14.5 million TickBox TV agreeing to pay $25 million in damages.

However, behind the scenes, there have been many less visible enforcement efforts as well. ACE regularly reaches out to developers who create ‘add-ons’ and ‘builds’ that are specifically designed to access pirated content through streaming boxes, including those running Kodi.

These efforts are not made public by ACE, but the targeted developers sometimes speak about them in public. Last week, for example, when the Hydra9 repository was targeted, among others. 

“Some in the community got served ACE letters yesterday, including myself. My letter specifically mentions most of my builds, and the Hydra9 repo,” developer ‘Terror’ informed people on Telegram, sharing a cease and desist letter. 

“I have made so many friends in this community and the Hydra9 team has been the highlight of my time making builds. I will likely continue as a skinner/teacher only, after I’m done dealing with ACE,” he added.

The letter in question is similar to those that have gone out to many other developers since 2017. As can be seen below, it comes with a rather impressive list of logos from entertainment industry companies, to which Discovery Inc., Channel 5, and Telefe have yet to be added.

It appears that these efforts have been quite successful but thus far ACE hasn’t said much about them in public. To find out more, we asked the organization whether it could share any data on how many of these requests it has sent out over the past two years. 

While we didn’t get any exact figures from ACE, which clearly doesn’t want to give away too much, the group said that a “significant” number of developers and site operators cooperated after being notified. 

“ACE has sought and obtained voluntary cooperation from a significant number of owners, operators, and developers of sites, add-ons, and services that facilitate piracy,” ACE spokesperson Richard VanOrnum told us. 

ACE targets people throughout the world and says it prioritizes voluntary measures over lawsuits. Through these efforts, it hopes to boost the legal market. Thus far, the media companies behind the group are happy with the results.

“Our members are pleased that the overwhelming majority of owners, operators, and developers of sites, add-ons, and services that facilitate copyright theft voluntarily comply with copyright law upon contact with ACE representatives,” VanOrnum tells us.

“We will execute more planned global actions along these lines and look to continue our success protecting creators around the world,” he adds.

If a cease and desist order is ignored, legal action remains an option. While ACE hasn’t shied away from that in the past, it aims to address issues out of court where possible.

Cease and desist letters are only part of its strategy though. ACE also seeks cooperation from many other players in the ecosystem, including advertising networks, payment processors, cyberlockers, domain name registrars and registries, search engines, online marketplaces, and social media services, to name a few.

ACE hopes to promote legally available content while addressing illegal add-ons and streaming boxes. However, it also has its eyes set on other streaming services, including apps and websites. 

“We are continuously reviewing our strategy and will consider new outreach and enforcement efforts where appropriate,” VanOrnum tells us, again, without giving away any concrete targets.

The group does explain that it has a comprehensive “piracy reduction plan” which tries to incorporate all the major streaming threats.

While the early signs suggest that this plan is paying off, work is far from done yet. New investigations are being launched on a regular basis, which means that the cease and desist letter Hydra9 received, was certainly not the last.

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 we have two newcomers in our chart.

Glass is the most downloaded movie.

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.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(1)	Glass	6.9 / trailer
2	(2)	Escape Room	6.4 / trailer
3	(…)	High Life	6.3 / trailer
4	(3)	How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World	7.8 / trailer
5	(5)	Aquaman	7.7 / trailer
6	(…)	The Professor and the Madman	7.5 / trailer
7	(6)	Bumblebee	7.0 / trailer
8	(9)	The Mule	7.1 / trailer
9	(4)	The Upside	6.5 / trailer
10	(7)	Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse	8.6 / trailer

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

For more than a decade, copyright holders around the world have pushed Internet service providers to block ‘pirate’ sites.

While users in the United States are yet to experience any blocking on copyright grounds, elsewhere – particularly in Europe – the site blocking phenomenon is in full swing.

Indeed, according to a recent overview by the Motion Picture Association, almost 4,000 websites are blocked by ISPs across 31 countries. The number of domains blocked is more than double that amount, in excess of 8,000 worldwide.

While the action is seen as effective at preventing direct access to sites, plenty of workarounds exist. Alternative ‘pirate’ domains regularly appear, along with mirrors, clones and the rising use of Tor and, of course, VPNs.

Interestingly, however, we received correspondence from the operator of a major ‘pirate’ site this week that indicated that VPN-based traffic is undesirable because it is considered almost worthless by advertising networks.

“Pirate sites need money to operate,” he explained. “Having more VPN users accessing the site doesn’t equal more money.”

According to the operator, ad agencies frown upon such traffic. Instead, they prefer traffic that is easily categorized into geographic regions, with some countries’ traffic being considered more valuable than others.

Users visiting sites from places such as the US, UK, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia, are considered more valuable than those visiting from India and China, for example.

The site operator says that advertisers pay for his traffic on a geographic basis. An example list of geocodes published by Maxmind shows a sample, with the United States listed as ‘US’, United Kingdom as ‘GB’, and Canada as ‘CA’. However, at the top of the list is A1, which stands for Anonymous Proxy.

“Advertisers pay per [geocode] and do campaigns per [geocode]. VPNs are marked with GEO A1 which is outside the scope of those tiers thus no one gets paid for those,” he explained.

Another site operator working in a similar niche told us that in his experience, payment for VPN traffic is patchy. However, he agreed with the overall sentiment.

“It all depends on the network to be honest. I have worked with a few networks before that don’t even show a popup if you’re using a VPN,” he explained.

Of course, the A1 code isn’t just limited to VPNs. TOR also comes under that category and that traffic is frowned up too.

“No ad agency pays for TOR traffic,” we were told. “There are special flags for TOR , anonymous proxies, VPN, dedicated servers, VPS servers. It’s really easy to monitor those networks and changes to them. Everything is public anyway.”

IP2Location sells access to a database for $799 which claims to be able to detect VPNs, proxies, and bots. It also offers a demo, which allows the user to enter an IP address and discover whether it falls into the above categories. We tested it with a diverse range of VPN servers and the tool identified the VPN every single time.

So while visitors may be able to unblock ‘pirate’ sites with VPNs, TOR, and similar tools, it’s clear that many advertisers aren’t partial to this kind of traffic. There are other more creative ways to monetize these visitors through various schemes but for the large site in question, they’re more of a burden.

“More visits, more server load for 0$,” he concluded.

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