More than a decade ago, users visiting torrent and file-hosting platforms were often greeted with the same quality of ads present on many regular sites.

Leading companies and brands had few problems with their marketing appearing on major ‘pirate’ sites, with visitors to The Pirate Bay, for example, regularly viewing ads indirectly placed by huge corporations.

Over the years, as anti-piracy groups have sought to deprive ‘pirate’ platforms of their revenue streams, many sites have found themselves pushed towards lower grade ad networks that they previously wouldn’t have considered. This has not only led to a decrease in ad quality but often reduced revenues for the sites in question.

Perhaps inevitably, undesirable ads sometimes creep through the net, including popups, popunders, fake download buttons and forced downloads. These can often be prevented with a good ad-blocker but Google itself has taken steps with measures built directly into Chrome, targeting malicious ads on all platforms, not just pirate sites.

Google’s Safe Browsing initiative was launched more than ten years ago and in 2016, the company announced steps to hit fake ‘download’ and ‘play’ buttons. Last November, Google said that Chrome version 68 would try to prevent unexpected redirects to a new page in a new tab, a phenomenon many streaming site users will be familiar with.

“A play button that sends a user to an unwanted APK (left) and a close
button that triggers popups (right)”

While these efforts had some effect, a new announcement from Google suggests that the systems built into Chrome need to be improved.

“These protections blocked pop-ups and new window requests from sites with certain abusive experiences like redirecting pages. However, we’ve learned since then that this approach did not go far enough,” says Google Product Manager Vivek Sekhar.

“In fact, more than half of these abusive experiences are not blocked by our current set of protections, and nearly all involve harmful or misleading ads. These ads trick users into clicking on them by pretending to be system warnings or ‘close’ buttons that do not actually close the ad. Further, some of these abusive ad experiences are used by scammers and phishing schemes to steal personal information.”

As a result, Google has announced that starting in December, Chrome 71 will remove ALL ads on the “small number of sites” with persistent abusive experiences, something which will hopefully encourage a speedy response to potential issues.

Site owners will be able to check their own sites against the ‘Abusive Experiences Report‘ in their Google Search Console to check if they are affected. If changes aren’t made within 30 days, Chrome will remove all of their ads.

Google stresses that it always wants users to be in control of their own browsing experiences. So, if they choose, Chrome users will be able to disable ‘abusive site filtering’ by toggling it off in the browser’s settings.

TorrentFreak spoke with a small number of ‘pirate’ site owners about the update but none expressed particular concern. That being said, the sites that are most likely to fall into Google’s traps are often the least likely to respond to our questions, so time will tell how they fare following the update.

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

With a backdrop of Hollywood waging war on pirates and pirate sites, 2007 delivered a ray of light for BitTorrent users and filmmakers alike.

After being produced on a tiny budget, an almost unknown independent sci-fi film called “The Man From Earth” appeared on pirate sites after someone obtained a promotional screener and uploaded it to the Internet, weeks before its official release.

While this type of development is often labeled as disastrous by movie executives, The Man From Earth director Richard Schenkman was very upbeat indeed.

“A week or two before the DVD’s ‘street date’, we jumped 11,000% on the IMDb ‘Moviemeter’ and we were shocked,” Schenkman told TorrentFreak at the time.

Piracy had been labeled as a great promotional vehicle before but the team behind the movie really embraced it, with producer Eric Wilkinson writing to the operators of RLSlog, a once-popular piracy links site – to thank them for their support.

“Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download,” Wilkinson said.

“Most of the feedback from everyone who has downloaded ‘The Man From Earth’ has been overwhelmingly positive. People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the net!”

The Man From Earth went on to win multiple awards and did really well on Netflix, so it was a nice development when the movie’s sequel – The Man from Earth: Holocene – appeared on The Pirate Bay upon release earlier this year. This time, however, the team had decided to ‘leak’ the movie themselves, hoping to follow the success of the original more than ten years earlier.

“It was going to get uploaded regardless of what we did or didn’t do, and we figured that as long as this was inevitable, we would do the uploading ourselves and explain why we were doing it,” Schenkman told TF.

“And, we would once again reach out to the filesharing community and remind them that while movies may be free to watch, they are not free to make, and we need their support.”

The team hoped that pirates would flock to the movie’s ‘tip jar’ while using word-of-mouth advertising to ensure that the sequel did as well as the original. When speaking to TF in January 2018, Schenkman was really upbeat and enthusiastic but somewhere on the way, something went wrong – very wrong indeed.

In a new piece published by pro-industry, anti-piracy alliance Creative Future, Schenkman rips into pirates big and small. While noting that the sci-fi sequel has been downloaded almost a million times with uncounted streaming views on top, just 7,000 people supported it with donations.

“If each one of the illegal downloaders (to say nothing of the streamers) had donated just one dollar, we would have already broken even on Holocene and been well on the road toward making our next film. Alas, most people aren’t willing – or able – to pay even that much,” Schenkman says.

But while individual pirates didn’t dig as deeply as Schenkman would’ve liked, he says his venture also fell victim to commercially motivated pirates who took his movie, hired actors, and had it professionally dubbed in Russian – all without permission.

“[I] learned through this experiment that there are people who don’t merely pirate a film, but who are willing to take full advantage of producers like us – who, remember, are offering our movie for free – for their own profit,” he explains.

“I’m talking about Green Ray, a Russian ‘distribution company’ that created a dubbed version of Holocene and offered it on their website. Not only did they do so without any permission, but they removed my donation preface and replaced it with an advertisement so they could monetize it.”

Schenkman says he wrote to Green Ray’s operators, suggesting that in the absence of them leaving the donation elements intact, a revenue-sharing arrangement might be in order. To date, the site has not offered a response.

While it could be argued that Green Ray’s adaption of The Man from Earth: Holocene ensured the movie could be enjoyed by a new audience, the commercial exploitation of the movie in this manner is extremely blatant, to say the least, so it’s hardly a surprise that Schenkman is disappointed.

“Clearly, there is an audience in Russia who cares about seeing a high-quality version of our movie. Perhaps this same audience would have even been willing to pay the actual filmmakers behind the movie to watch it. Now, we will never know,” he says.

Despite his early love affair with pirates (which appeared to still exist early this year), the director now finds himself singing the same anti-piracy tune as the majority of film creators around him. Movies aren’t free to make, he points out, so people need to understand they can’t be free to watch either.

“The lion’s share of films that get released aren’t studio blockbusters, but super low-budget projects from independent filmmakers who struggled just to get their films produced in the first place – and who are very lucky if they break even on them,” he says.

Of course, it’s difficult for Schenkman to deny that the original movie benefited greatly from pirates and that his team believed that the sequel could follow in its footsteps. But now, barely 10 months on, he’s done a complete 180, noting that if there’s no financial support for the people who make them, movies like his won’t be made.

“We need to educate our audience to understand that we are the same as them: working people who love cinema. Piracy poses an existential threat to all of us,” he concludes.

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 five newcomers in our chart.

Incredibles 2 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	(…)	The Equalizer 2	6.9 / trailer
2	(…)	The Meg	5.9 / trailer
3	(1)	Incredibles 2	8.0 / trailer
4	(…)	The Nun (subbed HDRip)	5.7 / trailer
5	(…)	Mile 22	6.1 / trailer
6	(3)	Alpha	6.9 / trailer
7	(…)	Papillon	7.0 / trailer
8	(2)	The Spy Who Dumped Me	6.2 / trailer
9	(10)	BlacKkKlansman	7.7 / trailer
10	(4)	Christopher Robin	7.6 / trailer

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

Founded in 1999, the Southern African Federation Against Copyright Theft (SAFACT) has been fighting piracy for nearly two decades.

The group was long supported by a variety of media industry groups, but in recent years, things have gone downhill.

While the group still lobbied for tougher anti-piracy measures recently, SAFACT’s official website and social media accounts have been quiet for years.

In recent months matters took a turn for the worse. MyBroadband reports that the anti-piracy group is shutting down after several members decided to pull their funding.

Employees were informed about the decision to retrench in a letter they received mid-October. They were asked to vacate their offices and were promised one week in severance pay for every year served.

“The SAFACT board of directors do not believe that there is any compelling reasons that an organization such as SAFACT should still be in existence,” the letter, seen by MyBroadband, reads.

“It is not anticipated by the directors of SAFACT that any new members will want to fund SAFACT. SAFACT has effectively become dormant as it cannot operate without any funding.”

While no further details on the sudden course change were provided, recent scandals at the organization didn’t help.

Two of SAFACT’s female employees have accused a senior executive of sexual harassment. The executive refused to participate in the resulting disciplinary proceedings and resigned instead.

In addition, MyBroadband reports that a large sum of money disappeared and that there were various accusations of administrative and mismanagement. The company’s official records still list various directors who are no longer with the organization, for example.

Peter Dignan, Managing Director for United International Pictures in South Africa, is the current chair. When asked about the trouble he pointed to the lack of funding, without providing more detail.

Reportedly, all members – including the MPA, Disney Africa, and Multichoice – have either withdrawn their funding or indicated that they planned to do so. This left SAFACT with no other option than to close shop.

Over the past several years, the anti-piracy group has been in the news on several occasions, booking some successes locally. For example, it was the driving force behind South Africa’s first online piracy case, where a Pirate Bay user was sentenced to five years in prison.

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

Roughly a decade ago torrent sites ruled the piracy landscape.

In recent years, however, the public has started to shift to streaming, through authorized services like Netflix but also streaming pirate sites.

Globally, streaming piracy has outgrown torrent sites, many of which still offer pretty much the same deal as ten years ago. While torrents remain an important source for many pirate streams, there has been very little innovation.

Yes, some torrent clients have built-in streaming, and Popcorn-Time used to be all the rage, for a while at least. But aside from an occasional flirt with torrent-based streams, big players such as The Pirate Bay stick to torrents.

This is something TorrentGalaxy is hoping to change.

For those who haven’t heard, TorrentGalaxy is a new torrent site that’s only a few months old. The idea for the site came from ExtraTorrent members and staffers, who were left homeless after it shut down. They were later joined by a number of WWT staffers, with the goal to create a unique torrent site.

While there are already dozens of torrent sites out there, TorrentGalaxy hopes to set itself apart by maintaining an active community and experimenting with new features. This includes streaming, something most torrent sites stay clear of.

“Torrent sites and their communities feel torrenting is ‘better’ than streaming sites and their followers feel the opposite. To us, that whole premise is wrong. That’s why we came up with the idea to merge streaming into a torrent site,” TorrentGalaxy informs us.

“This way users don’t have to choose a camp, but can use the convenience of streaming while still retaining the quality and portability of torrenting all under the same roof.”

Since last week, the site has begun offering more than 1,100 active streams. These are not pulled from a shared database but are automatically uploaded to an external stream provider (e.g. Openload) by the site’s own bots, which also distribute the other [TGx] releases. This means that they are all ‘fresh’.

Technically, it’s also possible to offer torrent-based streams in the browser, but the site has chosen a centrally hosted alternative instead. This offers more stability and works even if the torrent has no seeds.

“All new SD TV uploads by TGx bots have an online stream available minutes after the torrent is uploaded. This process is fully automated. Later on, we intend to include TV HD and movies as well,” we were told.

For die-hard torrent users it may be odd to see a streaming video next to a torrent link. While “fake” streaming buttons are a common sight, these ones actually seem to work, without having to jump through hoops.

Torrents that have a stream are marked with a separate icon in the torrent listings, and on the detail page, there’s a “click to stream” button that leads visitors to the streaming page.

Streaming video, highlighed by TorrentGalaxy

With the demise of several torrent sites, including the criminal investigation of KickassTorrents, it’s clear that operating a torrent site is a severe liability. And users who use them to access infringing content are obviously doing so without permission.

Copyright holders, who have grown increasingly worried about streaming sites, are not going to like this development. However, this doesn’t appear to affect the TorrentGalaxy team. Their prime motivation is to move forward.

“Our goal is to focus on progress, set the bar higher. Rise the ranks fairly that way. Or at the very least, give a kick up and force the others to start working again. That is why this is not just a new site feature, but important progress in torrent site world.”

This hasn’t been without controversy either. Just a few weeks ago TGx was called out by ETTV who accused the group of ‘taking’ some of its releases. While the site doesn’t deny that they used scene releases that were distributed by ETTV early on, they say they’ve stopped doing so a long time ago, something our research tends to confirm.

Whether the hybrid model will be welcomed by others has yet to be seen. Traditionally there has been quite a bit of competition between torrent and streaming sites, but according to TorrentGalaxy, it’s time to bury the hatchet.

“There is somewhat of a wedge between torrent and streaming audiences and it is a mistake if we do not try to unify those. The tight release organizing and quality control of the torrent standards combined with the convenience of streaming is powerful progress.”

Whether users want to use torrents or streams is entirely up to them, TorrentGalaxy says. In some cases, an SD streaming video may be more suited to get a quick glance, while an HD download may be preferred for others.

“It should not have to be a one or the other choice. Now that’s the power of a hybrid torrent/streaming site. And I would very much like to see that becoming the standard for all large-scale general piracy sites,” TorrentGalaxy concludes.

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