For a long time, pirate site blocking was regarded as a no-go topic in US politics.

This was a remnant of the SOPA defeat, which drove copyright holders to focus on blocking efforts in other countries instead, with success.

Now that nearly a decade has passed, momentum is changing. After Canada became the first North American country to impose a pirate site blockade, the issue is now openly debated on the Hill. Just a few weeks ago, it was the main topic during a Senate subcommittee hearing.

This hearing was informative but also raised further questions from Senators Tillis, Coons, and Blumenthal, who asked participants to follow up in writing. Stan McCoy, President and Managing Director of the Motion Picture Association’s EMEA region, for example, was asked to go into the site-blocking issue in more detail.

His answers, which have now been published, are carefully worded but clearly suggest that “takedown notices” alone are not effective in stopping piracy. According to the MPA, the standard takedown procedure must be paired with site blocking.

“The lesson of our experience at the Motion Picture Association is that notice-and-takedown must be complimented [sic] by voluntary proactive measures and other legal tools, such as no-fault injunctive relief,” McCoy writes.

This experience comes from the various blocking efforts in other countries. These have shown that the process works without significantly affecting the availability of legal content.

[T]he experiences of numerous jurisdictions that have implemented site blocking to date demonstrate clearly that the remedy is highly effective and has posed no obstacle to innovation, nor has it adversely affected the internet and online services in those countries.

“Quite the contrary in fact: By curbing piracy, this remedy enhances the opportunity for legitimate services to flourish,” McCoy adds.

During the Senate hearing, it was stressed that site blocking is already an option in the US. Under DMCA section 512(j), copyright holders can request such an injunction, without making any changes to the current law.

At the time, MPA’s Stan McCoy said this was a “hypothetical remedy” that may not work, so Senator Tillis asked him to explain what the problem is.

In his response, McCoy writes that the MPA indeed believes that the relevant DMCA section allows courts to order pirate site blockades. However, the text of the law is not entirely clear on whether ISPs have to be held liable or not.

“[T]his provision suffers from some drafting ambiguity – including its location within the overall safe harbor regime – and has likely not been used due to concern by rightsholders that the provision might be interpreted as requiring a finding of liability on the part of the ISP,” McCoy responds.

According to some, this could be fixed by changing the provision to allow for so-called “no-fault” injunctions. However, the MPA understands that legislative change is not easy, so they are also looking for alternative legal options, while also trying to get ISPs and other intermediaries to cooperate voluntarily.

Throughout his answers, the MPA executive repeats that site blocking is an effective tool. In response to a question from Senator Coons, McCoy confirms that the US can implement a similar framework while providing adequate due process protections and without violating free speech rights.

“[M]any jurisdictions around the world that share a strong commitment to human rights, including freedom of speech, have implemented site blocking with due process safeguards appropriate to their legal systems,” McCoy writes.

The responses clearly show that the MPA is continuing to push US lawmakers to consider options for ‘no fault’ site-blocking injunctions in the US.

The hearing and subsequent questions also included different opinions, however. As highlighted earlier, former Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda stressed that the availability of affordable legal options should be the priority.

More recently, Daphne Keller of Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center cautioned senators that site blockades have led to negative consequences in other countries, and that foreign standards may prove to be problematic in the US.

“Whatever attempted safeguards may pass muster under European or international standards for protection of free expression, however, there will likely remain serious questions under the U.S.’s stringent constitutional standards,” Keller cautioned.

As said before, these recent developments are a clear change compared to previous years, when the site-blocking topic was largely avoided. The question is whether this will result in any concrete legislative proposals.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

From a standing start just few short years ago, pirate IPTV services are now just a few clicks away for anyone determined to obtain a subscription.

Packages start at pocket-money prices of just a few dollars, euros, or pounds each month and in return, subscribers are treated to packages that can include up to thousands of otherwise premium channels, plus PPV events.

One of the big draws is live sporting events, which goes a long way to explaining why companies like the Premier League are determined to disrupt IPTV providers. However, during the more or less global coronavirus lockdown, sports are a major casualty, meaning that everyone from the Premier League to the NBA, NFL and UFC aren’t putting out any new content at all.

While this is a serious problem for the sports organizations and traditional broadcasters, this week EU law enforcement agency Europol inadvertently pointed out something that looks like a bit of an own goal. Due to the current restrictions, pirate IPTV services are apparently stepping up their game to ensure that subscribing to them remains attractive to the public at large.

In an advisory covering streaming but majoring on ‘pirate’ IPTV, Europol warned that due to millions of people being locked down, many will turn to online entertainment outlets to cope with social isolation. If that choice involves an illegal service, consumers have at least a couple of things to look forward to.

“Criminals are quickly adapting their activities, offering high-quality stream[s] while legitimate providers have agreed to reduce stream quality due to EU broadband overload,” Europol writes.

This is an obvious reference to Netflix which agreed last month to reduce the bitrate of streams for 30 days in an effort to reduce the load on the Internet in Europe. Europol’s aim, it seems, is to portray pirate services as behaving irresponsibly towards the yet-to-emerge Internet capacity crisis. Counter-intuitively, however, it seems to suggest that if people want high-quality video, pirate sources are a good option.

While pirate suppliers could probably care less about available bandwidth, the vast majority of suppliers don’t provide content in anywhere near the highest quality available via Netflix. Certainly, true 4K streams are so rare as to seem non-existent, so the claim they’re using up too much bandwidth seems a little picky in the scheme of things.

Additionally, Europol goes on to inadvertently highlight another benefit of using pirate services – content choice. While mainstream subscription TV companies are struggling to fill in the gaps, especially those created by a lack of live sporting content, the EU law enforcement agency claims that pirate suppliers are actually upping their game by offering “more content variety to compensate [for] the lack of sport events.”

While both of these claims sound like reasons for people to take interest in pirate suppliers rather than stay away, Europol also balances things out with a number of warnings. These take the form of the standard caveats regularly cited by the entertainment industries, including malicious software infecting devices, ‘criminals’ stealing payment credentials, and bank accounts getting compromised.

As is common with these types of warnings, the standard advice from Europol doesn’t highlight how these things happen or how they can be prevented. The agency simply states that people should stay away from pirate services which would work, as would staying off the Internet completely. However, with most (but not all) users enjoying the benefits trouble-free, the warnings may not have much of an effect. That’s not to say that Europol doesn’t have some genuinely good advice in other areas though.

While there is no single piece of guidance that covers all streaming apps, the agency warns that people are probably better off not accessing “free IPTV platforms”. They don’t give a specific reason why but it is true that users could do worse than to consider how free IPTV services, usually supplied via apps, are funding their operations.

Much like free VPNs, there will be a cost somewhere, whether that’s intrusive or lots of advertising or, as Europol points out, potentially crypto-miners or other software that most people would prefer not to have on their machines. But sound advice from the law enforcement agency doesn’t stop there.

“Don’t share your phone number, email address or contact details with unofficial streaming platforms,” Europol warns.

While casual users might think that handing over such information is required, it shouldn’t be shared under any circumstances. Whether it’s a ‘reputable’ pirate IPTV supplier or one seeking to monetize free streams, no supplier needs to know a user’s personal details.

Fake names, phone numbers, temporary email addresses and imaginary physical addresses are never a problem for ‘reputable’ pirate suppliers because they have no interest in any of this information. Many use standard platforms that request it as part of the sign-up process but the information (email address aside) is never used to make contact or deliver goods.

Equally, providing fake details to a malicious third-party effectively gives them nothing, which is exactly what many savvy users already do with Internet-based services they are unsure of, whether that’s an IPTV provider or anything else for that matter.

Finally, Europol mentions something that cannot be disputed. While giving money to Netflix means that you will get precisely what you pay for, subscribing to pirate IPTV services directly or through a reseller is always a gamble. Either can disappear at any time taking subscribers’ money with them and many do.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

Traditionally, when copyright holders go after pirate sites their main mission is to shut them down permanently.

This strategy has resulted in the demise of thousands of websites over the past decade or so.

In some cases these shutdowns are easy, only requiring a cease and desist order to be delivered to the owner’s home address. However, there are also prolonged legal battles, such as the one against isoHunt.

In Hawaii, a group of movie companies, tied to films such as ‘Hitman’s Bodyguard,’ ‘Hunter Killer’ and ‘Mechanic Resurrection,’ has taken a different path. They sued the operator of the popular torrent site YTS.mx last year but are allowing the site to stay online, under certain conditions.

The tactic previously became public when attorney Kerry Culpepper struck a deal between YTS and other movie companies. This allowed YTS to stay online as long as it paid damages and made sure that their films were not listed at the torrent site.

Now, a group of seven related movie companies has agreed to a similar deal. In a consent judgment, signed at the Hawaii federal court a few days ago, the torrent site operators agreed to pay $150,000 to each company, which amounts to a total of $1,050,000 in damages.

The consent judgment lists a person named Senthil Vijay Segaran and the company Techmodo as the YTS operators. In addition to paying over $1 million in piracy damages, they also agreed to remove the torrents of the movie companies, and prevent these from being reuploaded.

While a monetary settlement is not unprecedented, it is worth mentioning that YTS is being allowed to continue to operate as usual. Aside from removing torrents that point to the seven movies, nothing appears to have changed. YTS still lists hundreds of other pirated movies.

This pragmatic stance may perhaps be the easy option for all involved. However, it does seem odd, especially considering the recent anti-piracy push from Millenium Media co-president Jonathan Yunger, who urged US Congress towards more stringent anti-piracy legislation.

“Piracy is an existential threat to our business and the livelihoods of all the individual creatives who work so hard to bring entertainment to audiences,” Yunger told Congress last month.

This is worth mentioning since Yunger’s company produced many of the movies that are at the base of this lawsuit. In fact, most of the companies that signed a deal with YTS are affiliates of Millenium Media.

YTS.mx today

The precise motivations are open to speculation, at least for now. However, we do know that these consent judgments are not the end of the story. At least not for YTS users.

After the first deal was announced a few months ago, the movie companies started filing lawsuits against YTS users. This included some who were using a VPN. The associated complaints further included information that appeared to have come directly from the torrent site’s database.

So, it’s possible that the rightsholders received more from YTS than money alone. Details from the user database perhaps? That would be in line with earlier enforcement efforts, where the film companies obtained user information from the operator of the piracy app CotoMovies.

TorrentFreak spoke to the attorney of the movie companies this week who confirmed that YTS users are indeed at risk. However, in recent weeks, no new lawsuits have been filed as far as we can see.

We will keep a close eye on these and other cases to see if more details emerge.

In addition to the proposed consent judgment against YTS, the seven movie companies also agreed to a similar deal with the operator of YIFYmovies.is. This torrent site was considerably smaller and shut down months ago, however, the operator also agreed to pay $1,050,000 in damages, on paper.

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Here is a copy of the consent judgment, signed by the YTS operator as well as Venice PI LLC, MON LLC, Millennium Funding Inc., Bodyguard Productions Inc., TBV Productions LLC, UN4 Productions Inc., and Hunter Killer Productions Inc.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

With many countries now into their second month of lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, people all around the world now consider entertainment platforms as essential services.

This week, for example, Netflix announced that it had signed up 15.77 million new subscribers during the last three months, more than double the 7 million it previously expected. Disney’s streaming platform Disney+ has also hit the jackpot, doubling its subscriber base to 50 million since February.

As one might expect, piracy levels have gone up too. Interest in pirate sites increased in March and a global surge was evident in early April, increasing broadly in line with countries’ lockdown measures.

One of the many tools contributing to this surge is Popcorn Time. After storming the scene in 2014 and impressing with its ground-breaking Netflix-style interface, it drew an audience of millions. Since then improvements to its multiple variants have been incremental rather than ground-breaking but one Popcorn Time fork has now released Popcorn Time Kids, an app that only presents family-friendly content to the user.

According to the team behind the app, they recently noticed a surge in demand, something they attribute to people being in quarantine.

“The amount of love and thankfulness we’ve received from our millions of users in recent weeks was overwhelming! And taking the risk of sounding corny – they really touched us. We understood suddenly how much this project meant not only to us, but to millions of people from all over the world,” a developer told TF.

“Out of all the enthusiastic responses, we received thousands(!) of emails from parents asking for something so obvious, a family-friendly version of Popcorn Time!”

The resulting Popcorn Time Kids software is essentially a version of the regular app but with filters that aim to remove all content unsuitable for the younger viewer.

“Popcorn Time Kids provides a more contained environment for kids and is designed to help parents and guardians keep their kids entertained as they spend most of their time at home. PT Kids library is filled with a variety of the best family-friendly movies and shows from the broader universe of content on Popcorn Time,” the team add.

While there have been Kodi-addons that have catered directly to a younger audience in the past, it is relatively unusual to see an app targeted directly at children. In a way, of course, the app seems designed to appeal to adults who might enjoy not having to keep worrying about the type of content their kids might be viewing.

Popcorn Time Kids will no doubt prove attractive to a certain subset of users but being BitTorrent-based, it comes with the usual caveats. While streaming copyrighted content can be illegal depending on jurisdiction, users will be uploading at the same time, an act that is illegal almost everywhere on the planet. The threat can be mitigated with a VPN but ensuring that stays on in the hands of a seven-year-old sounds like Russian roulette.

There can be little doubt that plenty of broke and perhaps now unemployed parents will find this kind of app attractive but there is no doubt that copyright holders will not. In many respects then, it’s business as usual, even in these remarkable times.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

With pirate IPTV services still managing to capture the imaginations of people looking for a premium TV package at a fraction of the usual cost, authorities across Europe and the United States continue to crack down.

Spain has carried out a number of enforcement actions over the past several years and this week the country’s National Police added another scalp to its collection.

The investigation reportedly began in May 2019 following a criminal complaint filed by EGEDA, a non-profit association and collection society that manages the rights of audiovisual producers. The group sought police action against local supplier Comprarccam, a pirate IPTV supplier that also appears to have offered card-sharing subscriptions.

According to a police report, initial inquiries determined that the group, which advertised and sold its services via a website and social networks, serviced at least 15,000 customers in Spain. Its two leaders were identified and then traced to the cities of Salamanca and Zamora.

The dismantling of the service was reportedly actioned in two phases, one during February which netted documentation and accounts and then a second during March. The operation ended with searches carried out on six locations, during which seven individuals were arrested in various areas of the country – two in Zamora and Salamanca, one in Córdoba, three in Valencia and another in Málaga.

The individuals were detained under suspicion of a range of offenses including intellectual property crimes and telecommunications fraud. During the raids, police seized numerous items of computer equipment and mobile phones, around 11,000 euros in cash, plus seven gold bars.

At the time of the searches, police also disconnected a total of 5,673 users from the pirate service, closed down the group’s website, and froze online payment and related bank accounts.

“This is the most important operation of this type in Castilla y León [community in the north-west of the country] and one of the most important carried out to date in Spain,” the National Police said in a statement.

“It has dealt a blow to the illegal distribution of audiovisual and television content throughout Spain through closed groups on social networks, which greatly hinder this type of investigation due to the anonymity that their use confer.

“Anonymity was increased due to the fact that the main instigators used the identities of third parties without their knowledge, to appear as the owners of the phones and accounts in the financial institutions they used.”

Police estimate that during the last year alone, the pirate IPTV operation cost rightsholders around 11.8 million euros in revenue, with the country’s treasury losing out on more than 3.14 million euros in taxes.

However, this appears to presume that all 15,000 subscribers would have paid around 800 euros a year to official suppliers for the same kind of service, had they not had access to a vastly cheaper offering that almost certainly gave them a broader range of content too.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.