Every year, trade groups representing movie, TV show, music, video game, and a broad range of other content companies make submissions to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR).

These documents outline sites, services, platforms and other locations that rightsholders believe should be branded “notorious markets” in the USTR’s annual overview of overseas infringing businesses.

The USTR’s final report carries significant weight and often guides the U.S. Government’s attitudes toward foreign governments when it comes to enforcement of intellectual property rights.

The latest submission by the MPAA highlights many of the usual suspects, including The Pirate Bay, RARBG, 1337x, Rutracker, and Torrentz2. However, it also includes a lesser-known Poland-based video site that on closer inspection seems a little out of place.

“Cda.pl is Poland’s most popular piracy website where users from around the world find and view copyright infringing content,” the MPAA wrote.

“It is so big that it is now more popular than several legitimate VOD services in the country. Cda.pl had 68.13 million worldwide visitors with nearly 13 million unique visitors in July 2018 according to SimilarWeb data and currently enjoys a global Alexa rank of 1,477 and a local rank of just 15 in Poland.”

Continuing to paint a picture of blatant piracy, the MPAA highlights that the owner of CDA.pl – CWMedia S.A. – attempts to hide where their site is hosted, using Cloudflare to mask server IP addresses and reverse proxies located at OVH in Poland to “curb rights holders’ ability to identify its precise host.”

While these kinds of claims are common in MPAA filings against ‘pirate’ sites, according to the company the MPAA is well off the mark with its ‘notorious market’ branding. As a result, it will now “intervene in the case” using official channels.

“CDA.pl is a very large and very popular service, often more popular than other VOD services in Poland. Yes it’s true. We’re big and we’re popular,” the site said in a statement.

“On CDA.pl, you can find videos that users have uploaded that breach copyright law. Yes, such cases happen, just like everyone else – we emphasize everyone, including social video websites where users add content. The same problem applies to CDA.pl, as well as YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and others.”

The site says that in common with similar upload platforms, it takes positive steps to deal with infringing content when it becomes aware of it. In accordance with Polish and EU law, CDA.pl says it utilizes a notice-and-takedown system which removes infringing content without delay.

Furthermore, in common with services like YouTube, CDA.pl also provides rightsholders and other interested parties with direct access to tools that allow content to be removed from the platform.

“The law does not require us to do this, but it is a solution that significantly increases the effectiveness of combating illegal content. It is also worth remembering that the content in question can only appear on a specific part of CDA.pl, which is created by users (i.e the so-called user-generated content),” it adds.

The site points out that other areas of its site are dedicated to hosting content provided by verified submitters, partners and copyright holders, including its CDA Premium service which offers paid access to films supplied under licensing agreements made with distributors.

“CDA Premium is one of the most popular services of this type in Poland, and due to licenses, the Company paid PLN 5.4m ($1.45m) to distributors in the first half of this year alone!” the company notes.

On the claim that the CDA.pl uses Cloudflare to hide its location, the company appears to be even more irritated by the MPAA’s report to the USTR, noting that they’re either ignorant of the uses for the technology or are simply acting maliciously.

To clarify, CDA.pl says it uses Cloudflare for two reasons – to protect against DDoS attacks and to speed up the website for end users – and the service is not used to “hide” from anyone. Complaints can easily be made to the company so knowing where a server is located isn’t helpful, it adds.

“The entities whose rights are violated does not need to know the server IP address, he must be able to contact the website administrator for this (all contact details are available on the website). We remind you that you can report problems by e-mail or using the ‘report violation’ button, which is found next to every video on CDA.pl,” the company concludes.

It is relatively rare for a company reported as a ‘notorious market’ to fight back publicly so it will be interesting to see how this develops. Whether the USTR will choose to omit CDA.pl from its final report remains to be seen. Thus far, however, the MPAA isn’t well known for making publication retractions.

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This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Ant-Man and the Wasp 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)	Ant-Man and the Wasp	7.3 / trailer
2	(…)	Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again	7.1 / trailer
3	(2)	Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation	6.3 / trailer
4	(3)	The First Purge	5.2 / trailer
5	(4)	Solo: A Star Wars Story	7.1 / trailer
6	(6)	Sicario: Day of the Soldado	7.3 / trailer
7	(5)	Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom	6.5 / trailer
8	(9)	The Meg (Subbed HDRip)	6.0 / trailer
9	(8)	Skyscraper	6.1 / trailer
10	(…)	Venom (TS/Cam)	7.1 / trailer

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The Web Sheriff, aka John Giacobbi, has been protecting the Internet from pirates for well over a decade.

In the early days, he became somewhat of a cult figure thanks to his polite style and trademarked letterhead. This set him apart from other anti-piracy crusaders who usually sent DMCA takedown requests with a more aggressive lawyer-like style.

The Sheriff once had a lively discussion with The Pirate Bay folks, who then sent him this invoice fax. Not much later relationships deteriorated even further after Giacobbi announced he would sue the site’s operators in the US, France, and Sweden, but not much came of that.

In recent years the Web Sheriff hasn’t been parading in public much, but together with his deputies, he remains on duty. In recent years he has sent thousands and thousands of takedown requests to Google, for example.

We like to stay updated on the Sheriff’s accomplishments and when we looked at some recent submissions one targeted domain name stood out. Over the past weeks, Film.nl was targeted twice on behalf of the American film distributor NEON. The first time it listed a “Borg vs McEnroe” URL and later an “I, Tonya” link.

Granted, if you look at the pages in question, they might look suspicious with terms such as “I, Tonya torrent” and “I, Tonya downloaded,” surrounded by incomprehensible Dutch words.

I, Tonya on Film.nl

Way above that, however, there are eleven legal platforms listed. These include iTunes, Google Play and various local movie platforms, something a human reviewer can hardly miss.

Film.nl is by no means a pirate site. It’s exactly the opposite. The site was launched by members of the Dutch film industry last year to provide people an all-in-one search engine for legal content.

The keywords such as “torrent” and downloaden” are used to draw in pirates who search for illegal content using these terms. If we translate the Dutch text below “I, Tonya torrent” we read the following.

“Do you think that in order to watch I, Tonya, you still have to find a torrent? Good news: that’s no longer the case. Nowadays there are several alternatives to illegal torrents. So you no longer have to search for torrents on websites that are bursting with viruses.”

A clever way to confuse some pirates, perhaps, but maybe it’s an idea to alert the Web Sheriff as well next time, before he starts shooting at innocent targets again.

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Over the past decades, the entertainment industries have tried out numerous anti-piracy campaigns.

From “don’t copy that floppy,” “copyright alerts,” to “get it right,” and everything in between, it has been tried.

The problem with these campaigns is that it’s hard to measure the direct effect. This prompted psychology researchers Joanne Ullman and Clayton Silver from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to conduct a controlled experiment.

The results, published in an article titled “Perceived Effectiveness of Potential Music Piracy Warnings” show that some warnings are more effective than others.

The researchers conducted a study where students would see a series of piracy warning labels. These came with one of four icons, depicted below, as well as one of the signal words; NOTICE, IMPORTANT, and STOP. For each of these, five different warning categories were created.

1. Icon + Signal word – No warning
2. Icon + Signal word – “This is illegal”
3. Icon + Signal word – “This is illegal. You may be fined.
4. Icon + Signal word – “This is illegal. You may be monitored.”
5. Icon + Signal word – “This is illegal. You may be monitored and you may be fined.”

4 icons were tested with varying signal words and warnings

The students then had to rate each of these 60 warning messages for perceived effectiveness. These ratings were then analyzed to see if some are believed to work better than others, which was indeed the case.

The computer icon with a download arrow and a slash through it received the highest rating. The one of the right, with the cross and without the computer, was seen as least effective.

“The highest perceived warning effectiveness icon was the computer with the download paired with a slash; whereas, the no computer with the download followed by the cross, had the lowest perceived warning effectiveness,” the researchers write.

As for the signal words, both IMPORTANT and STOP were seen as more effective than NOTICE. This is something senders of infringement ‘notices’ might want to keep in mind.

When it comes to warnings, the combination of “this is illegal” with “you may be monitored and fined” received the highest perceived effectiveness rating. The control group where no warning was shown was the least effective.

These findings suggest that the more explicit warnings work better. Indeed, that’s also the case when the researchers pinpointed the most effective combinations of all, with an example pictured on the right.

The most effective warning includes a computer for context, a download symbol, a slash symbol, the signal words STOP or IMPORTANT, and a message with all consequences (fined and monitored).

It is worth noting that these results are about ‘perceived’ effectiveness. While that’s a decent indicator, it doesn’t say anything about how these warnings would change the behavior of an actual audience of pirates.

This experiment is limited to a small set of warnings, but the researchers believe that developing an effective warning label can help to deter piracy and inform consumers.

The research suggests that explicit warnings are better than vague ones. In addition, we would caution that some campaigns can also go too far. Over the past decade, the “Piracy. It’s a crime” PSA has been mocked and ridiculed for being overly dramatic, without much substance.

Joanne Ullman, lead author of the article, tells us that the “Piracy. It’s a Crime” campaign isn’t particularly informative and therefore not very explicit. Providing explicit information about the risks appears to be most effective.

“This may be of value to some consumers given that we all have varying levels of risk aversion due to personality and/or situational factors,” Ullman says.

“For others, perhaps being reminded of these restrictions would embolden them to take legal and proactive measures to change current policies. The overall aim of this research is to maximize the capacity of people to make sound decisions for themselves.”

Piracy. It’s a Crime

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Released back in 2015, the Fuckr desktop application provides controversial enhanced access to the popular Grindr dating service.

Among other things, Fuckr gives Grindr users the ability to precisely locate hundreds of other users while revealing usually hidden information such as photos, HIV status, and even preferred sexual positions.

Early September, Grindr hit Fuckr with a DMCA notice, targeted at its official Github repository. Fuckr was taken down by Github but perhaps surprisingly, its developer ‘tomlandia’ chose to fight back.

Responding with a DMCA counter-notice, ‘tomlandia’ denied Grindr’s assertion that Fuckr “facilitate[s] unauthorized access to the Grindr app by circumventing Grindr’s access controls” and refuting that it circumvents “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work” protected under the Copyright Act.

Github policy determines that this counter-notice would trigger the reinstatement of Fuckr within 14 days but as highlighted in our earlier article, it also opened up a can of worms for both Grindr and ‘tomlandia’.

If Grindr wanted to keep the tool down it would have to sue ‘tomlandia’ in the United States, meaning that an expensive legal process would ensue. It would be a put-up-or-shut-up moment for both parties, but with Grindr clearly having the most resources, the experience would probably prove financially uncomfortable for ‘tomlandia’ at best and potentially ruinous if a court eventually ruled against him.

It now transpires that ‘tomlandia’ wants no part in this kind of war. Probably recognizing the impossible situation he finds himself in, the developer has now backed away. In a fresh communication with Github, ‘tomlandia’ suggests that having his software reinstated on Github isn’t a big enough prize to warrant a fight with Grindr’s lawyers.

“I wish to retract my DMCA counter notice concerning my repository tomlandia/fuckr,” he writes.

“While I don’t believe my code infringes Grindr LLC’s copyright in any way, I am no longer willing to face legal action in a foreign court simply to keep this project hosted on Github.”

Fuckr backs away from legal action

There are a couple of interesting pieces of information in the retraction, not least the suggestion that ‘tomlandia’ isn’t located in the United States. Being sued in a foreign court is rarely fun and never cheap, so financial considerations certainly played a part in this withdrawal.

Perhaps more importantly, however, is that ‘tomlandia’ still maintains that his software creation does not infringe on Grindr’s copyrights in any way. Of course, this is the kind of thing that would need to be determined by a court, which brings us back to the potential David versus Goliath battle that ‘tomlandia’ is trying to avoid.

The situation is certainly interesting, since it raises important questions about the nature of the DMCA.

While copyright holders often complain about the law’s ineffectiveness, DMCA takedown notices (when filed against sites like Github) wield considerable power. They have the ability to neutralize allegedly infringing content almost immediately but if targets dare to dispute the notice, they immediately sign up to an expensive legal battle.

This situation may be tolerable if both parties are healthy corporations but when a company like Grindr targets a Github developer, the former is almost certainly in a position to outgun the latter. Put simply, unless you’re prepared to lose everything, fighting one of these cases is completely out of the question for most people.

We’ll probably never know if Fuckr was indeed infringing Grindr’s copyrights but due to the way the DMCA works, victory, in this case, has been determined by those with the deepest pockets. And all they had to do was send a single email to Github and let fear do the rest.

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