Regular Internet providers are being put under increasing pressure for not doing enough to curb copyright infringement.

Music rights company BMG got the ball rolling a few years ago when it won its piracy liability lawsuit against Cox.

Following on the heels of this case, several major record labels including Capitol Records, Warner Bros, and Sony Music, filed a lawsuit in a Texas District Court. Helped by the RIAA, they sued ISP Grande Communications for allegedly turning a blind eye to its pirating subscribers.

The labels argued that the Internet provider knew that some of its subscribers were frequently distributing copyrighted material, but failed to take any meaningful action in response. For example, it didn’t have a proper policy in place to deal with persistent pirates. 

In order to enjoy safe harbor protection, the DMCA requires ISPs to adopt and reasonably implement a policy for terminating the accounts of repeat copyright infringers. According to the labels, it is clear that Grande failed to do so. 

Last year, the record labels moved for summary judgment on this safe harbor protection defense, ahead of the trial. This is a crucial issue, as the ISP can be held directly liable without a safe harbor defense. 

A few days ago,  Senior US District Court Judge David Ezra ruled on the request, siding with the record labels. The decision follows the report and recommendations from US Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin, but Judge Ezra conducted a fresh review of several contested issues. 

According to Judge Ezra, it is clear that Grande Communications is not entitled to a safe harbor defense. The evidence, including comments from the ISP’s own employees, clearly shows that it hasn’t adopted and reasonably implemented a repeat infringer policy.

“In this case, the evidence is clear that from at least 2011 until 2016 Grande had no internal policy or procedures whatsoever to enforce their forward-facing statement that they would terminate customers for repeat infringements,” the order reads.

Grande terminated subscribers before October 2010 but stopped doing so for the six-and-a-half year period that followed.  The ISP argued that it had a public-facing policy under which it could take action, but this wasn’t actively enforced, evidence shows.

“In internal emails, one Grande employee even stated that ‘we have users who are racking up DMCA take down requests and no process for remedy in place’,” the order reads.

“Moreover, to be eligible for the DMCA safe harbor, an ISP must ‘reasonably implement’ a termination policy, not just adopt one,” Judge Ezra adds.

Grande didn’t terminate any subscribers between October 2010 and May 2017. This, despite receiving over a million copyright infringement notices, and tracking over 9,000 customers in its DMCA “Excessive Violations Report.”

The court states that this “utter failure to terminate any customers at all over a six-and-a-half-year period,” shows that the ISP made every effort to “avoid reasonably implementing” a repeat infringer policy.

Terminations eventually started again in 2017, two months after this lawsuit was filed. 

The record labels made several comparisons between Grande and the ISP Cox Communications, which also lost its safe harbor defense in a similar case. Grande contested that this argument doesn’t hold, as Cox actually failed to enforce its specific policy. 

However, Judge Ezra counters that Cox at least had internal procedures that in theory could lead to the termination of a customer. Grande failed to implement a proper policy to begin with.

“Grande thus did even less than Cox to ‘reasonably implement’ the kind of policy required for the protections of DMCA’s safe harbor,” Judge Ezra writes.

“If lax enforcement and frequent circumvention of existent procedures disqualifies a defendant from the safe harbor’s protections, the complete nonexistence of such procedures surely must do likewise,” the order adds.

In its defense, the ISP also raised serious concerns about the reliability of Rightscorp’s piracy notices. Grande said that there are critical flaws in the Rightscorp system based. As such, terminating the Internet access of any subscriber based on this info may not have been right.

Judge Ezra waved away this argument as well, highlighting that there were hundreds of thousands of notices from other companies, which the company didn’t act on either. 

“Even if the Court were to accept Grande’s arguments related to the Rightscorp notices, the summary judgment evidence shows that Grande failed to terminate a single customer despite the receipt of several hundred thousand other copyright infringement notices,” Judge Ezra writes.

The result is that the court has adopted the recommendations from the Magistrate Judge, granting summary judgment in favor of the record labels. As a result, Grande will go to trial without a safe harbor defense. This means that it can be held directly liable for the pirating activity of its users. 

This is a major setback, and there is more bad news for the ISP.

Grande requested summary judgment in its favor on a variety of liability issues, including direct infringement, willfulness, damages, and ownership of copyright. These were all denied, as recommended, except for two limited issues regarding the alleged violation of reproduction or public performance rights.

The RIAA labels also submitted a cross-motion on these liability issues, requesting a ruling in their favor, but that was denied as well. This means that those matters will be decided at trial.

—

A copy of Judge Ezra’s order adopting the report and recommendations is available 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.

On March 17, 2019, TorrentFreak published an article about Reddit’s /r/piracy discussion forum.

It was actually prepared six days earlier, a point of importance that will become clear later on.

We noted how some in the thriving community of around 350,000 subscribers were concerned that it could be shut down for talking about piracy. In general, we highlighted what should be apparent – discussing piracy is a whole different animal than actually engaging in it.

Perhaps even more importantly, we reported on statements issued earlier this month by a key moderator of /r/piracy. The person in question, ‘dysgraphical’, reported that the section effectively has a zero-tolerance stance against infringement.

Not only do posters of any offending links to allegedly infringing content face an immediate suspension, but also anyone who even asks for them. This, quite clearly, goes way beyond the requirements of the DMCA.

Furthermore, /r/piracy – just like any other service provider – lists rules (effectively Terms of Service) that expressly forbid any kind of copyright infringement. Any posts breaking these rules are deleted, either with automated tools or manual intervention.

It’s a classic situation of technology and humans policing a platform as the law requires, but exceeding its requirements. Indeed, anyone looking for actual links to pirated content will find /r/piracy one of the least useful resources on the Internet, thanks to the work of the mods and the 99.9% of users who respect the rules.

Yesterday, however, not long after our piece was published, the moderators of /r/piracy made it known that they had just received a formal notice from Reddit Legal, dated March 14, regarding copyright infringement. While that pre-dated our article’s publication date, the complaint was sent after it was drafted.

“This is an official warning from Reddit that we are receiving too many copyright infringement notices about material posted to your community. We will be required to ban this community if you can’t adequately address the problem,” the notice reads.

“Over the past months we’ve had to remove material from the community in response to copyright notices 74 times. That’s an unusually high number taking into account the community’s size.”

This communication from Reddit Legal came as a complete surprise. The moderators of /r/piracy have never had any contact with the admins on this topic previously, as dysgraphical explains.

“Reddit Legal states that they have acted 74 times on these copyright notices through removals, but it is the first time we have been officially contacted regarding any infringement where it be through modmail or PMs.”

This claim deserves some analysis. Firstly, “past months” is pretty vague (Reddit Legal hasn’t responded to a request for more information) so given that the claim is 74, let’s make the assumption that it’s three months, or 90 days.

That’s less than one infringement notice per day. If it’s six months, it’s just three every week. The Pirate Bay this certainly isn’t.

The sub-Reddit has 350,000 subscribers but anyone on Reddit (getting close to a quarter of a billion unique monthly users) can post on /r/piracy. Less than one infringement notice per day doesn’t seem like a lot (Google just processed its four-billionth) but even that needs to be viewed while considering something of even more importance.

FACT: These are not notices of actual infringement being received by Reddit, but claimed notices of infringement.

We know from our own experience that Google has received many copyright infringement complaints against TorrentFreak.com (see here) but every single one is false. Indeed, one of the companies who filed these notices actually apologized to us recently for their errors. But then, of course, it’s too late, and the damage has been done.

“Considering our stringent rules against distributing pirated content through this platform, it is unclear what constitutes copyright infringement to Reddit or whether the simple mention of a release name falls under their broad interpretation,” dysgraphical notes.

This is an extremely good point.

Earlier this year we reported on several sites that report on the mere availability of pirate releases yet are systematically reported to Google for infringement, despite committing no infringement. Reddit’s /r/piracy sub allows release names (as is its right) to be published for discussion, so are these being flagged by over-enthusiastic copyright bots?

We truth is, we don’t know and neither do /r/piracy’s moderators, because Reddit doesn’t make the notices available to them. All the legal team would reveal is that the latest claim came from Warner Bros, which is hardly the basis for a meaningful investigation.

“We replied immediately requesting a list of offending material that was removed and have not received a reply yet,” dysgraphical explains.

While Reddit does publish a token “transparency report“, unlike other ‘rivals for eyeballs’ such as Google, Twitter, etc, it does not publish received notices. As such, there is no real transparency as to what is going on here.

That only adds fuel to a particular theory – that Reddit is actively trying to get rid of sub-Reddits that are unpalatable to its sponsors or those that are out of line with its corporate aims.

“It has become abundantly clear in the past months and years that Reddit has never been the bastion of freedom that many people see it as,” dysgraphical writes.

“Reddit’s passivity in enforcing its own rules is continuously tested whenever one of its subreddits are thrusted into the limelight by the media. As we wait for more information from Reddit Legal, there is one certainty that comes from all of this, r/Piracy will be banned.”

While there’s hope that this doomsday scenario can be avoided, it’s almost impossible to play by the rules when the state of play isn’t transparent. Reddit itself executed 26,234 content removals in 2018 due to copyright but no one is suggesting that Reddit’s host should ban Reddit.

Why? Because when it’s informed of the existence of allegedly infringing content Reddit removes it, as the law dictates. Reddit’s /r/piracy goes beyond those requirements.

It removes any infringing content not only pro-actively in advance of receiving any complaints but also removes it faster than Reddit itself. We’re not talking a couple of hours here, we’re talking minutes or even seconds.

The mods on /r/piracy will clearly be having some discussions about how to save their community in the face of this out-of-the-blue warning but in the short-term, it’s clear they’ll be held to a higher standard than almost any other sub-Reddit around – even the dozens of image-based sub-Reddits that breach photographers’ copyrights every minute of every day.

That will probably have to mean immediate bans (not just suspensions) of rule breakers while making this fact known in the sidebar, and doing what they’ve always done really effectively – take out the trash. Unfortunately, there’s clearly a feeling that no matter what gets done, it won’t make any difference.

Meanwhile, Reddit should consider giving the moderators the information they have requested. That will go some way to restoring trust that this isn’t a witchhunt but is a genuine complaint in need of attention and/or rectification.

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 four newcomers in our chart.

Aquaman 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)	Aquaman	7.7 / trailer
2	(10)	The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part	7.0 / trailer
3	(3)	Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse	8.6 / trailer
4	(2)	Mary Poppins Returns	7.1 / trailer
5	(…)	Triple Frontier	6.6 / trailer
6	(4)	Captain Marvel (HDCam)	7.0 / trailer
7	(…)	Holmes and Watson	3.5 / trailer
8	(…)	Vice	7.2 / trailer
9	(8)	Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald	6.8 / trailer
10	(…)	Stan and Ollie	7.5 / trailer

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

Australian entertainment company Village Roadshow has been on the anti-piracy frontlines for several years.

Where most Hollywood studios hide behind the MPAA, Village Roadshow, and its CEO Graham Burke in particular, have lashed out against pirates and their facilitators on numerous occasions.

The company has repeatedly lobbied for tougher copyright legislation down under, for example. And it’s one of the driving forces behind the recent wave of blocking orders against Australian ISPs.

As CEO,  Burke is known for his frontal attacks on Google, accusing the search engine of  “facilitating crime” and using “stolen movies” to lure visitors. Pirate site operators are no better off, as they were compared to heroin dealers by the outspoken movie boss. 

“We are sending our kids to very dangerous online neighborhoods — the pirates are not good guys,” Burke said previously. “These aren’t roguish, basement-dwelling computer geeks — these are the same type of people that sell heroin.”

This ‘passion’ is understandable for a man who’s been linked to the company for more than 60 years. It’s his life’s work, to a certain degree, and the sight of people sharing ‘his’ movies without paying is clearly something that frustrates and angers Burke. 

Even some of the most hardcore pirates may be able to sympathize with this stance but while Burke condemns pirates, site owners, search engines, ISPs, and various other players, the role of his own company shouldn’t be ignored. 

Research has shown time and again that, when people can’t see a movie or TV-show legally, they turn to illegal sources. Just last month a New Zealand study found that people don’t want to break the law, pointing out that “availability” of legal content is a crucial factor.

Even Burke himself realized this years ago. In 2014 his company released The LEGO Movie weeks after it premiered in other countries because it wanted to premiere the film close to the holiday season. That decision backfired badly. 

“It was a disaster,” Burke later said at a Government initiated panel discussion about copyright issues. The CEO admitted that the company’s decision facilitated piracy, and he promised to not significantly delay future releases. 

“It caused it to be pirated very widely. As a consequence – no more – our policy going forward is that all our movies will be released within the time and date of the United States,” Burke added.

The humbling comments suggested that Village Roadshow had learned from its mistake.

However, two years later, when the LEGO: Batman movie came out, Burke’s wise words rang hollow. Again, Australians had to wait more than six weeks longer than people in the US and other countries. Needless to say, Australians were not happy. 

Perhaps Burke forgot about his earlier statements. Surely, when The LEGO Movie 2 was released, things would go better, not least due to the film, like the first one, being created partly in Australia. 

That was idle hope. 

The LEGO Movie 2 premiered in the US and various other countries early February, but in Australia, it has yet to appear in theaters. The official release date is set for March 21, again more than six weeks after the US release. 

Burke previously admitted that such a delay was “a disaster” which causes movies to be “pirated very widely,” so it’s a mystery why this scenario keeps repeating itself. 

This week the situation got even worse for the company as a high-quality release of The LEGO Movie 2 appeared on pirate sites. This pirated copy doesn’t come with any artificial delays or restriction for Australians. 

Let it be clear that a release delay doesn’t entitle anyone to pirate a film. Village Roadshow is the rightsholder and it’s entirely up to them when they want a film to premiere.

That said, delays certainly don’t help to keep people away from pirate sites. Burke himself previously admitted that holding back a movie release can lead to more piracy.

Availability is an important determinant for piracy, after all.

However, Village Roadshow apparently believes that their release schedule will increase revenue. The March 21 date is closer to the Australian holidays, which is likely the main reason.

But, if Village Roadshow demands far-reaching anti-piracy measures from lawmakers, while asking Google to do everything in its power to stop pirates, shouldn’t we expect the same from Village Roadshow? Right now, they’re keeping piracy ‘alive.’

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

As one of the most-visited sites on the entire Internet, Reddit needs little introduction.

The site has millions of daily visitors who read and contribute to countless discussions on every conceivable (and often inconceivable) topic.

In the piracy space, Reddit’s /r/piracy sub-Reddit is an invaluable source of information. It has close to 350,000 subscribers, making it one of the largest piracy-focused discussion platforms on the Internet. As such, many users feel the section is precariously placed.

As detailed previously, this often controversial forum is regularly subject to conjecture about its future, with many worrying that it may be shut down for breaching Reddit’s global rules, mainly after receiving too many copyright complaints.

The truth, however, is that /r/piracy is run by pragmatic individuals who work extremely hard to ensure that their baby is run not only in compliance with the law, but actually in excess of its requirements.

It’s important to know that /r/piracy is NOT the Wild West. It has a strict set of rules in place, including that people do not request or link to pirated or copyrighted content. Having this in place is important, since that’s what keeps the section in line with the law and out of trouble.

However, what’s most important is how the sub-Reddit deals with repeat offenders. Most ISPs and service providers now have such policies in place to keep the law from the door but most people won’t appreciate just how tough /r/piracy itself is now being policed.

In a recent discussion, moderator ‘dysgraphical’ revealed that he now effectively operates a zero-tolerance policy, not only for people posting links to infringing content but also people who request the same.

“I’m very proactive in temporarily banning first time offenders of rule 3 [posting or requesting infringing content), and permanently banning any spam or intent to sell/distribute personal information. As long as the community keeps reporting rule breaking posts, we’re fine,” he wrote.

That’s worth highlighting again. Most online platforms will tolerate three, four, or more actual infringements of copyright before taking firm action, while ISPs tend to err on the side of caution by only taking action against subscribers who’ve had multiple infringement allegations made against them.

While this may sound harsh to those who feel all content should be free (and they should have the freedom to both request and obtain it), they aren’t running Reddit, they aren’t in charge of any sub-Reddits, or the ones that will suffer if a section is shut down for repeat infringements.

In addition, /r/piracy has automated tools in place that aim to catch people breaking the rules (which go beyond the requirements of the law) and the law itself. These so-called ‘automoderators‘ aim to catch infringing posts immediately while making the mods’ life that little bit easier.

“Automod catches a ton of request posts and automatically deletes them everyday. All together with manual mod and automod removals, about ~25 posts are removed daily for breaking the rules,” dysgraphical explains.

“The issue is that there will always be people attempting to circumvent the rules by oddly rewording their titles. For what it’s worth, they get the banhammer whenever I catch them.”

Again, this is worth repeating. Those who simply have no respect for the rules of /r/piracy not only face suspension for a first offense, but also face a permanent ban if they attempt to outwit the system that protect the sub-Reddit’s future.

TF has a system in place that’s able to monitor requests and other rule-breaking posts and capture copies of them before they are automatically deleted. It isn’t perfect, but we can confirm that /r/piracy and its mods (both human and machine) are very diligent.

To some, it may seem counter-intuitive for /r/piracy to be so tough on piracy itself, but the entire future of the discussion platform is reliant on strictly policing the platform. If those in charge loosened their grip, there’s little doubt that a minority of people who simply refuse to read the rules would be responsible for the forum being banned by Reddit.

However, it’s clear that since the opposite is true, the reality of the situation is much less precarious than some might assume.

“Contrary to the fearmongering that Redditors love contriving, we have never been contacted by the Admins for any copyright infringement or sitewide rule violation,” dysgraphical adds.

“They have deleted a few posts here and there at their own discretion and have notified the OPs but we (mod team) have never received any complaints or notices for that matter.”

For a community of almost 350,000 subscribers that is some record (especially given the topic), and one the moderators of /r/piracy should be proud of. There are thousands of dedicated platforms to choose from if people want to engage in actual piracy but sacrificing /r/piracy to the gods would only serve to stifle entirely legal discussion.

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