For well over a decade, content industry groups – mainly representing movie and music companies – have petitioned courts around the world to limit access to so-called pirate sites.

The theory is that by blocking sites that host or link to infringing content, piracy rates will go down, thus leading to increased sales. However, not much evidence is available to say that blocking is effective in achieving the latter two objectives, even if direct visits to pirate sites are reduced.

Nevertheless, entertainment groups continue to press ahead with blockades in many countries against a huge number of sites. Their latest target, streaming site Cuevana, is not only very popular in South America but also a bit of a veteran in the piracy scene.

Offering a wide range of movie and TV show content for instant viewing, Cuevana has been a Hollywood and TV company irritant for almost a decade. In 2012, an administrator of one variant of the site was arrested in Chile following a complaint by HBO, but not even that managed to kill the platform.

Available now via a number of domains, a partial solution to the Cuevana problem appears to be blocking. To that end, Disney, Fox, Paramount, Columbia, and others filed a complaint against the popular platform in Argentina, hoping that the courts would render the site inaccessible in the region. According to SimilarWeb data, Cuevana2.com is the country’s 109th most-popular site.

Following an initial application by rightsholders, the National Chamber in Criminal and Correctional Matters has now reversed an earlier ruling and ordered a provisional blockade of Cuevana.

Due to the site providing unlicensed access to works owned by the plaintiffs, the Court found that the site is in breach of Law 11.723, which covers intellectual property matters. Article 79 reportedly allows measures to prevent further infringement.

Like many popular under-siege pirate sites, Cuevana also relies on multiple domains and addresses to keep itself online and accessible. With this in mind, the Hollywood companies have filed requests to have all Cuevana-related domains blocked in Argentina, to prevent circumvention of their injunction.

Much like The Pirate Bay, Cuevana appears to have many namesakes which may, or may not, be linked to the official platform.

According to local media reports, the court found that blocking ‘pirate’ websites is an “appropriate and proportional measure” to prevent infringement, particularly in the case of Cuevana which has been infringing copyrights for many years.

While Cuevana variants have always been popular in South America and other Spanish-speaking regions, the platform attracted international attention in 2014 when the MPAA reported it to the United States Trade Representative.

Following the success of its web-based portal, the pirate site began offering Cuevana Storm, a Popcorn Time-like streaming solution, utilizing torrents under the hood. It now appears to have reverted largely to web-based streaming, relying on file-hosting sites for content.

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At the start of this year, pirate streaming site 123movies, also known as 123movieshub and GoMovies, was one of the largest pirate streaming sites on the web.

The site received millions of visitors per day which prompted none other than the MPAA to label it “the most popular illegal site in the world.”

The site offered access to pretty much all popular movies and TV shows, most in reasonable quality. However, it also advertised another site, WatchAsap.com, which offered the best video quality for a monthly subscription.

Many people believed that both sites were closely connected. While that may have been the case, WatchAsap remained online when 123movies decided to shut down earlier this year.

The shutdown happened just days after the MPAA visited Vietnamese officials. Not entirely coincidentally, perhaps, as we later learned that the site folded in response to a criminal investigation by the authorities of Vietnam, where the site’s owners were allegedly based.

“An important development in 2018 was the shuttering of a ring of piracy services that had operated under the names 123movies, 123movieshub, gostream, and gomovies following the launch of a criminal investigation in Vietnam and significant industry engagement,” the MPAA explained.

While WatchAsap remained online for several months, the site’s homepage changed drastically this month. Instead of paid access to HD streams, users are now welcomed by an ominous seizure banner.

“This domain name associated with the website WatchAsap.com has been seized pursuant to an order issued by the U.S. District Court,” it reads, adding that a federal grand jury indicted several individuals for related crimes.

Seized?

This type of banner has been used in the past for criminal investigations. In fact, the banner previously displayed at Megaupload.com was identical, apart from the name of the website.

As far as we can see the image hasn’t been doctored and WatchAsap.com shouldn’t have any reason to implicate itself in a crime, but thus far we haven’t seen any public announcement of a related indictment.

Further complicating the matter is the fact that the domain WHOIS hasn’t been updated to indicate a seizure. Also, the site still uses Cloudflare’s nameservers, which is unusual as well, compared to previous domain takeovers.

In theory, a Federal Court may have instructed Cloudflare to point the site to a server that’s controlled by the feds, of course, but there’s no confirmation of that either.

To resolve this mystery, TorrentFreak reached out to the Department of Justice and the IPR Center, whose seals are prominently featured on the shutdown banner. After a week had passed a reminder was sent, but we have yet to hear back.

It might be that we received no response because the court records are still sealed, or that it’s all an elaborate hoax. Either way, it’s highly unusual.

What we do know is that whoever is responsible for placing that banner didn’t do a very good job.

As it turns out, they forgot to redirect the site’s www traffic. At the time of writing, people who type in www.watchasap.com are sent to another pirate site called YesMovies instead. That site is not too dissimilar from the original 123movies…

The mystery continues.

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A few weeks ago, the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), asked the public for input on ways to improve consumer privacy.

The NTIA wants to increase the privacy of users through more transparency, user control, minimization of data collection, and security, among other things. This is particularly important when it comes to online platforms.

“Often, especially in the digital environment, these products and services depend on the collection, retention, and use of personal data about their users,” NTIA wrote.

“Users must therefore trust that organizations will respect their interests, understand what is happening with their personal data, and decide whether they are comfortable with this exchange.”

The request came a few months after the EU’s new privacy regulation, the GDPR, was implemented. The GDPR requires many online services and tools to tighten their privacy policies, which also affects domain registrars.

As of June 2018, ICANN implemented a temporary measure to restrict access to personal data that would previously have been available through WHOIS, unless explicit permission is given. A welcome privacy change to many domain registrants, but anti-piracy groups are not happy.

While the limited WHOIS data is supposed to improve user privacy, the MPAA tells the NTIA that the opposite is true. They believe that opening it up again “will advance privacy while protecting prosperity and innovation,” in line with NTIA’s aims.

The MPAA is taking a different approach when compared to most of the other comments we’ve seen. For example, more transparency is generally seen as services being more open about what personal information they collect and share.

Or, as the NTIA puts it: “Users should be able to easily understand how an organization collects, stores, uses, and shares their personal information.”

The MPAA says that when it comes to WHOIS data, sharing more personal data in public – as it was in the past – benefits the public at large. Sharing personal data of all website owners allows visitors to check who they are dealing with.

“Users are not ‘reasonably informed’ or ’empowered to meaningfully express privacy preferences’ if they cannot determine the entity behind a website,” the MPAA explains.

“Continued access to WHOIS data will help consumers identify domain name registrants and web site operators when necessary, advancing the NTIA’s user-centric outcome of transparency.”

In other words, the MPAA believes that it is important for WHOIS data to be ‘transparent’ so the public can decide whether they can trust a website with their personal details. That’s a bit of a shift when compared to how other commenters approached this question.

Of course, there’s also a downside to public WHOIS data. In the past, other organizations have warned that WHOIS details may make it easier for criminals to harass website owners, as their digital and real-life addresses are listed publicly.

The Hollywood group realizes that there are possible concerns. It notes, however, that a risk analysis weighs in favor of restoring full WHOIS access, adding that registrants only have to provide “mundane” information.

“The risk to registrants is also comparatively small, as they, too, have long operated with these types of obligations and the information they must provide is relatively mundane data used to contact them,” MPAA writes.

The group, therefore, calls on the NTIA to ensure that the original WHOIS requirements are restored. Not just to help Hollywood to fight piracy, but also to address other crimes, including sex trafficking and illegal drug sales.

“This overbroad application of the GDPR is already hindering the ability of law enforcement agencies and others to investigate illicit behavior — including sex trafficking, unlawful sale of opioids, cyber-attacks, identity theft, and theft of intellectual property,” the MPAA warns.

Concerns about limited WHOIS data are not new. Previously, a group of 50 organizations warned that it makes pirates harder to catch, which is of course the MPAA’s main stake in the matter.

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A copy of MPAA’s full submission is available here (pdf).

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For many years, Ukraine has been openly criticized for not doing enough to tackle both online and offline piracy.

The country is known for its high piracy rates but enforcement against local pirate and gray-area hosting platforms has been sporadic and largely ineffective.

According to an announcement from Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, however, fresh action has taken down at least one and possibly many piracy-linked Internet resources.

The Ministry says that officers from the Kiev Department of Cyberpolicies, together with investigators from the Vasylkivsky police department, have executed a warrant in the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia. Their target was a 24-year-old man suspected of running the pirate streaming portal OneMov.net and several other pirate sites.

OneMov.net – shutdown notice (Image credit: Ukraine Government)

The authorities say that the individual “reproduced and distributed audiovisual works” belonging to Universal City Studios LLLP, which is represented locally by the Ukrainian Anti-Piracy Association.

The government department says that OneMov attracted attention due to its international appeal. Although it was administered from Ukraine, the platform carried movies that were mostly in English, with titles later appearing in Ukrainian and Russian.

After carrying out what is being described as an “authorized search”, police say they discovered items linking the man to the platform.

“In his apartment, the system unit of a personal computer containing an electronic control panel of the site was removed. In addition, a router was found that was used to administer the specified web resource and bank cards, which included funds from advertising on the specified site,” the Ministry of Internal Affairs said.

An officer searching the suspect’s PC (Image credit: Ukraine Government)

The authorities claim that the arrested man could also be the brains behind another 10 pirate sites but at the time of writing, the names of those sites haven’t been released. However, a screenshot of what appears to be the suspect’s computer reveals links not only to OneMov, but also MovDB.net and OneStream.cc, both of which are currently inaccessible.

The arrested man is being investigated for offenses under Part 3, Article 176 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (Infringement of Copyright and Related Rights) and could receive a prison sentence of up to six years.

Earlier this year the United States Trade Representative (USTR) kept Ukraine on its Priority Watch List (pdf), accusing government agencies of using pirated software and a “failure to implement an effective means to combat the widespread online infringement of copyright in Ukraine.”

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Over the years we have closely followed various reports on Internet traffic changes, specifically in relation to BitTorrent.

Many of these came from the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine, which often focused on the popularity of different types of traffic in specific regions.

That was also the case a few weeks ago when its latest report revealed which sources generate most upload and download traffic in various regions of the world. This revealed that BitTorrent is far from dead.

What it didn’t reveal, however, is which traffic sources consume the most traffic worldwide when both upstream and downstream traffic are combined. This broad overview was missing from earlier reports as well, but in a new update Sandvine now fills this gap.

When all traffic from sources worldwide is combined, Netflix comes out as the clear winner with 13.75% of the total traffic share. The streaming giant is followed by HTTPS Media data (12.25%) and YouTube (10.51%) respectively.

BitTorrent comes in fifth place with 4.10% of all Internet traffic globally, which is mostly driven by the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and APAC (Asia-Pacific) regions.

The full picture, courtesy of Sandvine

“As expected, the top four applications are all video, and also not surprisingly, BitTorrent is fifth overall – strongly boosted by the utter dominance on the upstream in EMEA and APAC,” Sandvine’s Cam Cullen notes.

“This is a pretty significant number since downstream traffic is an order of magnitude larger than the upstream traffic totals worldwide.”

Looking at the upstream and downstream totals in various regions, we see that Netflix accounts for nearly 17% of all traffic from the Americas. Interestingly, BitTorrent doesn’t make it into the top 10, sitting well below 2%.

BitTorrent traffic is most popular in the APAC region where it sits in second place with 7.87%, generating more traffic than both Netflix and YouTube.

It’s interesting to see the bigger picture, where both upload and download traffic is combined on both fixed and mobile connections.

This offers a unique snapshot of Internet traffic sources in 2018. Hopefully, Sandvine will continue to make these data available going forward, so we can track changes over time.

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