Commercial streaming-capable devices are often designed to receive officially licensed programming but many can be reprogrammed to do illegal things.

Manufacturers say they are not responsible for this behavior but last year in Mexico, that position was successfully challenged.

Following a complaint filed by cable TV provider Cablevision, the Superior Court of Justice of the City of Mexico handed down an order preventing the importation of Roku devices and prohibiting stores such as Amazon, Liverpool, El Palacio de Hierro, and Sears from putting them on sale.

Cablevision complained that pirated content was being made available through Roku devices, with claims of more than 300 channels of unauthorized content being supplied to consumers.

Following a swift appeal by Roku, the sales ban was quickly overturned by a federal judge. However, on June 28, 2017, a Mexico City tribunal upheld the previous decision which banned importation and distribution of Roku devices. Several appeals followed, without success, leading to Roku declaring the ban unjust.

Now, however, and after an extended period off the shelves, Roku has booked a significant legal victory. A ruling handed down by the 11th Collegiate Court in Mexico City has found that the original ban was incorrect and the Roku device isn’t illegal, which means that the streaming hardware will soon be back on sale.

The Court reportedly acknowledged Roku’s efforts to keep pirated content away from its platform, an opinion also shared by Cablevision. However, should pirate channels appear on Roku in the future, Cablevision warned that it would take further legal action to have those sources blocked via the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property and other local authorities.

The decision of the Mexico City Court was welcomed by Roku General Counsel Stephen Kay.

“Today’s decision is an important victory for Roku and its Mexican distributor, Latamel Distribuidora, S. de R.L. de C.V. and Mexican retailers in the legal battle against an improper ban on sales of its popular streaming players in Mexico. We are pleased with the Collegiate Court’s decision and look forward to continuing to build Roku’s TV streaming business in Mexico,” Kay said.

Noting that streaming is the future of TV, offering greater choice for consumers alongside better value for money, Roku Chief Marketing Officer Matthew Anderson thanked the company’s customers in Mexico who continued to use the device over the past year, despite the troubles.

“We are grateful for our customers in Mexico who, despite the sales ban, continued to stream more and more hours; and for our retail partners and content providers who supported us throughout this past year. We look forward to launching the latest Roku devices in Mexico soon and giving customers an even richer streaming experience,” Anderson said.

Roku devices are expected to become available again during the next few weeks via distributors including Amazon, Best Buy, Office Depot, Radio Shack, Sears, and Walmart.

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Last year we highlighted a rather interesting service which makes it easy for anyone to embed a pirated movie.

Requiring only an IMDb number, Vodlocker.to allows anyone to embed videos, many of which are pirated.

This turned out to be a welcome feature for many smaller site operators, who use basic scripts to set up a streaming portal with minimal investment. In exchange, Vodlocker can serve some extra ads on these sites, which makes it a win-win for both parties.

More recently, however, it appears that ‘someone’ has added some extra code to the Vodlocker site that does more than streaming video or placing ads. As a result, the embedded videos are also being used to DDoS certain video streaming portals.

Looking at the source of the embed pages, we see a piece of JavaScript that attempts to load content from external sites. This is triggered by unwitting visitors; not once, but dozens of times per second. The smaller sites in question, understandably, collapse under this load.

The script

When we checked the site on Monday, Rainierland.com and Movie2k.st were being targeted, resulting in downtime. Today, the code has been updated and it’s now pointing movie4k.is, which is mostly unreachable as a result.

Movie4k.is attack in action

It’s not clear what the motivation for this attack is, or if Vodlocker is perhaps compromised, but it appears to be an intentional effort to take these streaming sites down.

Before the weekend the German news site Tarnkappe reported that another site, Filmpalast.to, was suffering from a similar DDoS attack.

Many of the sites that rely on these Vodlocker.to embed codes probably have no idea that they are participating in the attacks. The same is true for their visitors, who are unwittingly transformed into an army of stream-watching DDoS bots.

We contacted several of the affected sites for a comment but haven’t heard back. Vodlocker.to has no contact address listed, so we haven’t been able to reach out to the site itself.

The JavaScript-based attack itself isn’t new. Cloudflare previously highlighted the problem, describing it as a growing issue on the Internet.

“If an attacker sets up a site with this JavaScript embedded in the page, site visitors become DDoS participants. The higher-traffic the site, the bigger the DDoS,” Cloudflare explained in a blog post some years ago.

“Since purpose-built attack sites typically don’t have many visitors, the attack volume is typically low. Performing a truly massive DDoS attack with this technique requires some more creativity.”

In this case, there appears to be enough volume to take smaller sites offline. Not only are there a lot of sites who rely on the Vodlocker.to embeds, the visitors generally keep their tabs open for a more than an hour, while they’re watching, continuously hammering away.

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In an effort to reduce levels of copyright infringement, content companies and distributors have adopted site-blocking as one of their preferred anti-piracy tools.

The practice is now commonplace across Europe, with many of the main torrent and streaming portals blocked by local ISPs.

In Sweden, ‘pirate’ site blocking became a reality in February 2017 when ISP Bredbandsbolaget (Broadband Company) was ordered to block The Pirate Bay and streaming portal Swefilmer.

That process took a long time to come to fruition. The original lawsuit, filed in 2014 by Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Nordisk Film, and the Swedish Film Industry, initially went in the ISP’s favor.

A subsequent appeal, however, saw the rightsholders emerge victorious, with Bredbandsbolaget ordered to implement “technical measures” to prevent its customers from accessing the ‘pirate’ sites through a number of domain names and URLs.

For more than a year, other ISPs in Sweden have been able to provide subscribers with access to The Pirate Bay, since the earlier case was targeted at just one ISP. Now, however, local ISP Telia finds itself in a similar position following an order handed down Monday by the Patent and Market Court.

Following an application by a huge coalition of content companies and groups including the Swedish Film Industry, Nordisk Film, Disney, Paramount, Columbia, Disney, and Twentieth Century Fox, Telia must now block subscriber access to several ‘pirate’ sites.

As is often the case, torrent favorite The Pirate Bay heads the list, with streaming platforms Fmovies, Dreamfilm and NyaFilmer following closely behind.

Cited by IDG, Per Strömbäck of the Film and TV Industry Cooperation Committee said that a favorable decision was anticipated.

“The decision was expected and complies with the current legal situation. Now it’s high time that Telia takes the same responsibility in Sweden as it already does in Denmark and Norway,” Strömbäck said.

While the move to site blocking in Sweden hasn’t always plain sailing, last year’s decision in the Bredbandsbolaget case laid down some valuable pointers.

The Court found that under EU law it is possible for copyright holders to obtain an injunction against ISPs whose services are used to commit copyright infringement, noting that the Swedish Copyright Act should be interpreted “in the light of EU law.”

Before deciding on an injunction, the Court also sought to ensure that any blocking would be proportional. Since sites like The Pirate Bay and similar platforms primarily offer illegally-distributed copyright-protected content, a blocking order is now considered an appropriate response.

The decision handed down Monday is an interim measure valid from October 30. From that date, Telia must prevent its subscribers from accessing the sites listed in the complaint and keep those measures in place until the case is finalized. In the meantime, Telia says it is considering its position.

“We are surprised by the news and we are going to analyze the decision to decide if we will appeal,” says Telia spokesperson Iréne Krohn.

“We believe that legislators and courts should make the assessment. Service providers cannot and do not want to decide what’s available on the internet.”

In a reaction to the news, Jon Karlung, CEO of freedom-loving ISP Bahnhof, criticized the court and its decision.

“It is a specialized court without credibility that represents a special interest,” he said.

“[Blocking] does not work technically and, in principle, you can not build a filter for everything you dislike on the internet. You are destroying the core of the internet, to communicate freely.”

The injunction handed down against Bredbandsbolaget last year was the first of its kind in Sweden. It had a time limit of three years and a penalty of around US$56,000 for any breaches. The details on the Telia case will be revealed in due course.

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Over the past year there has been a wave of copyright infringement lawsuits against alleged cheaters or cheat makers.

More than a handful have been filed in the US, but there’s also been some action in Australia recently.

In one case, filed last month, GTA V developer Rockstar Games and its parent company Take-Two Interactive are going after several people believed to be linked to the popular “Infamous” cheat.

This lawsuit is notable because the Federal Court of Australia has signed off on several broad enforcement actions. Not only are the defendants restrained from any cheating related activity, they are also the subject of a search and assets freezing order.

The orders are issued against the person or persons known as Christopher Anderson, Cycus Lesser, Sfinktah, Koroush Anderson, and Koroush Jeddian. Per the court’s order, all are prohibited from cheating and can be imprisoned if they refuse to comply.

Restrained

The associated search order identifies two Melbourne premises. It allows a search party to enter the buildings and search, copy, or remove relevant evidence including any computer, electronic storage device, or documents related to “Infamous.” Any cars that are located at these locations can also be searched.

In addition to the search order, the Federal Court also issued a freezing order preventing the defendants from taking out more money than needed for regular expenses.

“You must not remove from Australia or in any way dispose of, deal with or diminish the value of any of your assets in Australia (Australian assets) up to the unencumbered value of AU$286,609.80 (the Relevant Amount),” the order states.

This freezing order also applies to any cryptocurrency and other digital currency, including the money stored in the PayPal account that’s assigned to “Christopher Anderson.”

It is likely that Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive will try to obtain copyright infringement related damages, and with the freezing order they can make sure that the money isn’t spent beforehand.

The orders in question were initially not disclosed, but that restriction has now been lifted. From the information we have available the searches were carried out late last month. In a follow-up order, the federal court ruled that the freezing and other orders should remain in place for now.

The defendant(s) have yet to file a defense, which is expected later this month. Whatever the outcome, these orders and actions reveal that GTA V’s developer and its parent company are taking cheating rather seriously.

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An overview of the various orders is available here (pdf).

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For the past several months, authorities in Japan have been grappling with the thorny issue of online piracy. The country has attempted to deal with the issue previously but there now appears to be greater momentum.

Back in September an advisory panel for the Agency for Cultural Affairs recommended that ‘pirate’ indexing sites (known locally as ‘leech’ sites) should be outlawed. These platforms host no infringing content themselves but provide hyperlinks to content hosted elsewhere.

Unlike in Europe where such sites are illegal when they deliberately provide access to content on a for-profit basis, in Japan there is no law that specifically renders them illegal. An estimated 200 ‘leech’ sites exist locally and plugging the legal loopholes could make a significant impact on piracy rates, the government believes.

The aim will be 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. Copyright holders will be able to have such links taken down and when site operators fail to respond, hefty sentences will apply.

According to Mainichi, the proposals currently contain a recommendation for prison sentences of up to five years for the worst offenders. The publication notes that in October last year, the people behind Japan’s largest ‘leech’ site were arrested on suspicion of copyright infringement but authorities were only able to take action due to parallel bootlegging offenses.

The agency will submit proposals for amendments to the Copyright Act to lawmakers in 2019. Meanwhile, efforts are underway to introduce a site-blocking regime in Japan to deal with overseas sites that infringe copyright.

Earlier this year, ISPs NTT Communications Corp., NTT Docomo Inc. and NTT Plala Inc. voluntarily blocked access three sites identified by the government – Mangamura, AniTube! and MioMio – adding that more sites could be blocked upon request.

The government, however, is keen to have blocking measures enshrined in law, along with pirate sites being removed from search results and site operators prevented from generating revenue from advertising.

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