Founded in 2006,  Zippyshare has gathered an impressive userbase over the years.

While early competitors such as Rapidshare, Hotfile, and Megaupload, are now long gone, the free file-hosting service continued to thrive. 

The site currently has millions of visitors per day from all over the world. There are also significant numbers hailing from the UK, where it is one of the most-used download portals not currently blocked by a High Court order. 

However, starting a few days ago, UK visitors are no longer able to access the site. Instead of the usual download page, they are welcomed by a “403 forbidden” error message in their browsers. This remains the case today. 

The site serves as a popular hosting location for both third-party ‘linking’ sites and individual users. Some people have used it for over a decade, but that recently came to an abrupt end. For now at least.

This mysterious blockade led to numerous complaints and unanswered questions all over the Internet. 

Even several anti-piracy outfits were puzzled by the issue. VideoLock and Digital Copyright both mentioned the issue on Twitter. The latter initially suspected an ISP block, it seems, which would be a surprise as Zippyshare has always been extremely cooperative.

Since court-ordered site blockades are fairly common, several people reached the conclusion that Zippyshare had become the latest target. This suspicion even made it into the Wikipedia entry, although it was deleted soon after, probably for good reason. 

It is true that some UK ISPs may block Zippyshare under their parental control filters, but court-ordered blockades don’t result in “403” errors. And since users of UK based VPN IP-addresses see the same error message, there’s clearly something else going on. But what?

The error message in question suggests that Zippyshare is blocking UK visitors. This could be intentional or due to some misconfiguration. To find out more, TorrentFreak reached out to Zippyshare at the beginning of this week but, thus far, we haven’t heard back. 

This leaves us with little other option than to speculate. One possibility is that Zippyshare took this step after some kind of legal pressure. It wouldn’t be the first time that a website does this. Two years ago, several stream-rippers also blocked UK traffic, presumably over legal concerns.

Without jumping to too many conclusions, it is evident that Zippyshare has been under quite a bit pressure. A few months ago the RIAA reported it as a notorious pirate site to the US Trade Representative, which already called out the site in the past.

Without an official explanation from Zippyshare, we can only guess what the real reason for the UK visitor blockade is. In any case, no matter who’s initiating the blockade, there’s always a way around it. UK visitors can still access the site from a non-UK VPN server.

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

In 2012, file-hosting site Megaupload was shut down by the United States government and founder Kim Dotcom and several associates were arrested in New Zealand.

For the past seven years, the US government has been engaged in a battle to extradite Dotcom, so that he can face trial in the US on several counts including copyright infringement, racketeering, and money laundering.

Dotcom has fought back every step of the way and in 2016, filed an eight-point statement of claim for judicial review, aimed at “attacking the underpinnings of the extradition process” by filing an eight-point statement of claim for judicial review.

In a 22-page High Court ruling (pdf) handed down in December 2017, Justice Timothy Brewer sided with the US and rejected seven out of the eight causes of action, stating they were either not reasonably arguable or were abuses of process.

The eighth point, which wasn’t challenged by the US, concerns the decision by the Deputy Solicitor-General in June 2017 to direct that clones be made of the electronic devices seized from Mr Dotcom’s homes so they could be sent to the US.

Dotcom appealed but the Court of Appeal dismissed the action. Dotcom then sought permission to appeal that decision at the Supreme Court. In a judgment handed down this morning by Justices William Young, O’Regan and Ellen France JJ, the Supreme Court denied leave to appeal.

“The applicant [Dotcom] argues that the criteria for the grant of leave to appeal in s 74 of the Senior Courts Act 2016 are met in relation to the present application either because the application raises matters of general and public importance or because a substantial miscarriage of justice may occur if leave is not granted,” the judgment reads.

“We are not persuaded that the proposed appeal raises matters of general and public importance.”

Dotcom argued that a miscarriage of justice would take place if he was denied permission to appeal. However, the Supreme Court said that was not correct.

“The applicant is seeking to challenge concurrent findings in the Courts below on almost every point that would be in issue if leave were granted. We do not see the arguments foreshadowed by the applicant in his application for leave and the submissions in support of that application as having sufficient prospects of success to justify the grant of leave,” the judgment adds.

After dismissing Dotcom’s application for a hearing at the Supreme Court on the matter, the Court then ordered him to pay $2,500 to the US Government to cover its costs.

Thus far, Dotcom hasn’t commented publicly on the judgment but did find a report published here on TF yesterday darkly amusing. Safe harbor for YouTube, but not him, apparently.

The judgment can be obtained 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.

YouTube downloaders, often called stream rippers, are seen as the largest piracy threat to the music industry. As such, record labels are doing their best to shut them down.

In 2017, YouTube-MP3, the world’s largest ripping site at the time, went offline after being sued, and several others folded in response to increased legal uncertainty.

Last summer, a group of major record labels, helped by the RIAA, targeted two of the larger stream-rippers that remained online. FLVTO.biz, 2conv.com, and their owner Tofig Kurbanov were sued for copyright infringement at a Virginia District Court.

While the record labels hoped for an easy win, their lawsuit didn’t go as planned. Kurbanov, who resides in Russia, fought back with a motion to dismiss. He argued that the Virginia federal court lacked jurisdiction over a site that’s managed from abroad.

The Court agreed with this assessment. In a verdict released this January, US District Court Judge Claude M. Hilton dismissed the case. The Court carefully reviewed how the sites operate and found no evidence that they purposefully targeted either Virginia or the United States.

“As the Websites are semi-interactive, the interactions with the users are non-commercial, and there were no other acts by the Defendant that would demonstrate purposeful targeting, the Court finds that Defendant did not purposefully avail himself of the benefits and protections of either Virginia or the United States,” the verdict read.

The record labels and the RIAA were disappointed with the outcome and swiftly announced they would appeal. This week they submitted their opening brief which argues that the District Court came to the wrong conclusion.

The record labels state that the site owner’s contacts with Virginia or with the United States are well established. The stream ripping sites transmit hundreds of millions of infringing files to U.S. devices and are monetized by ads which are partly targeted at U.S visitors.

If the current verdict stands, the companies fear that Internet pirates will have “carte blanche” to facilitate copyright infringement, as they will remain out of the reach of U.S. courts.

“The result of the district court’s ruling is that the only court in which U.S. record companies can bring suit to challenge millions of instances of U.S.-based online piracy is in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, where Kurbanov purportedly resides,” the labels write. 

“The district court’s decision thus gives carte blanche to Internet pirates to set up shop outside of the United States, safe in the knowledge that they are  effectively immune from the reach of U.S. courts seeking to vindicate the rights of U.S. plaintiffs for violations of U.S. copyright law, even as they cater to U.S. users.”

In their opening brief the labels reiterate that FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com have millions of US-based users, including hundreds of thousands in Virginia. The interactions with these users are repeated and interactive, they say.

The District Court previously ruled that the number of U.S. users is irrelevant, as the sites’ contacts with these people are “unilateral” and “non-commercial. The site does generate income from US users through ads, but that was not enough to be seen as a commercial contract.

The labels clearly disagree with this conclusion, calling it absurd.

“To isolate the content from the revenue generating advertisements as the district court did here would be to say that Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and countless other Internet companies’ relationships with their users is non-commercial. That position is absurd,” they counter.

The labels further point out that the sites used a U.S.-based advertising firm, U.S.-based domain registrars and, until recently, U.S.-based servers. In addition, the site owner registered a DMCA agent with the U.S. Copyright Office, which isn’t typical for a site that doesn’t target the U.S.

“Appellee has, for example, registered a DMCA agent with the U.S. Copyright Office—the only purpose of which is to seek to qualify for the DMCA’s safe harbor defense to claims of copyright infringement in U.S. courts,” the brief reads.

Based on these arguments the labels ask the appeals court to overturn the District Court’s verdict. Or, as an alternative, vacate it to allow for jurisdictional discovery.

Tofig Kurbanov and his legal team have yet to respond to the accusations. They don’t believe that U.S. courts have jurisdiction over the sites and its owner, and will likely make that clear during the weeks to come.

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A copy of  the record labels’ opening brief 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 an average day, roughly half a million hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. As with any user-generated content site, this also includes copyright-infringing content.

YouTube processes takedown notices and uses its Content-ID system to automatically remove allegedly infringing content to address this.

However, major copyright holders are not all happy with the platform’s efforts. Record labels want to see more compensation, for example, and others want YouTube to do more to prevent pirated videos from appearing on the site.

In Austria, this led to a lawsuit between the local television channel Puls 4 and YouTube. In an initial order last summer, the court ruled that the video platform can be held directly liable for users’ copyright infringements. YouTube was not seen as a neutral intermediary and should do more to prevent infringing uploads.

The court noted that YouTube takes several motivated actions to actively organize and optimize how videos are displayed. By doing so, it becomes more than a neutral hosting provider. Therefore, it can’t rely on a safe harbor defense.

“Through the connections, sorting, filtering and linking, in particular by creating tables of contents according to predefined categories, determining the surfing behavior of users and creating a tailor-made surfing proposal, offering help etc, YouTube leaves on the role of a neutral intermediary and therefore cannot claim the host provider privilege,” the court wrote.

YouTube disagreed with the ruling and appealed the matter at the Higher Regional Court of Vienna. The video service maintained that, as a neutral hosting provider, it’s protected under the safe harbor provisions of the Austrian E-Commerce Act.

After a careful review of the case, the Higher Regional Court of Vienna agreed with YouTube, overturning the previous order. According to the appeal court, YouTube doesn’t have an “active role” and is therefore shielded from liability through its safe harbor defense.

The Court doesn’t dispute that YouTube provides search, categorization, and advertising services. However, these are seen as part of the normal business model of hosting platforms, which do not make the company liable.

“If it had to forgo structuring and search options in order to avoid a damaging ‘appropriation’ of video content, its video platform would lose all user-friendliness,” the Court writes in its decision.

“The less users are able to find videos of interest to them amid the vast multitude of uploaded videos (several hundred million in this case), the less it would make sense even to visit such a video platform,” it adds.

Puls 4 cited the GS Media/Sanoma case, where the European Court of Justice ruled that posting infringing hyperlinks, during the course of business, can lead to liability. However, that doesn’t apply in this case, the Court notes, as YouTube wasn’t aware of the infringing nature of the videos.

In summary, the Higher Regional Court of Vienna concludes that, as a hosting platform, YouTube benefits from the safe harbor privilege. This means that it’s not liable for uploads of users and Puls 4’s complaint is dismissed as a result.

The outcome is good news for YouTube, as the order from the lower court severely threatened the operation of the video platform. However, it is not the end of the road yet.

Higher Regional Court of Vienna allows the case to be appealed at the Supreme Court and Puls 4 informs TorrentFreak that it will use this opportunity.

Puls 4 stresses that the current decision does not take into account relevant decisions of the CJEU, including the case regarding the infringing nature of The Pirate Bay. Nor does it reference the recent developments regarding liability under the proposed Article 13 of the EU copyright directive.

“Puls4 will therefore definitely file an appeal to the Supreme Court,” a company spokesperson informs TorrentFreak.

A German court referred various copyright infringement related questions to the European Court of Justice a few months ago. Since this involves YouTube directly, the Austrian Supreme Court will likely consider the pending outcome in this case too.

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A copy of the Higher Regional Court of Vienna’s verdict is available here (pdf)

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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.

Distribution and uploading of copyrighted content without an appropriate license is illegal in most countries of the world.

It is seen as the most damaging form of infringement, largely on the basis that this fuels illicit downloading.

Straightforward downloading of movies, TV shows and other unlicensed content is rarely, if ever, policed, even when such activity is proscribed under law, as is the case in the EU following rulings from the European Court of Justice.

In Japan, however, new legislation under consideration by the government would’ve taken things to a whole new level. Criminalizing the unlicensed downloading of all content – including the pasting of lyrics or taking of screenshots – struck fear into Internet users and experts alike.

With serious punishments under consideration (up to two years in prison and fines of two million yen – US$18,000), serious alarm bells were sounded, with academics coming out strongly in opposition. Now, however, the government has become sufficiently unsettled and has shelved the proposals altogether.

The planned copyright amendments were set to be submitted to the Diet on March 8, 2019 but Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP or Jimintō) put the brakes on the proposals the day before they were due to be submitted.

Early this morning the Japanese government took the decision not to submit the bill to the Diet at all, after executives failed to approve it.

“We have yet to eliminate the worries of both copyright holders and [internet] users,” said House of Councillors lawmaker Masaaki Akaike, as cited by Mainichi. “We should work on it anew.”

The proposals also contained measures to deal with ‘pirate’ indexing sites (known locally as “leech sites”) which don’t host any infringing content themselves but provide hyperlinks to content hosted elsewhere. Estimates suggest that around 200 such sites exist in Japan.

The aim was to criminalize the act of knowingly linking to copyrighted content, or linking to the same when site operators should “reasonably be expected” to know that the content is infringing. Unlike the anti-downloading provisions, plans to criminalize site operators with sentences of up to five years in prison were met with little opposition.

If approved, the revisions to Japan’s copyright law were set to take effect on January 1, 2020, but it’s now unclear whether that target will be met.

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