A typical case featured here on TorrentFreak will usually feature companies, anti-piracy groups, site operators and/or members of the public fighting it out in the legal arena due to someone allegedly infringing someone else’s intellectual property rights.

Sky TV and anti-piracy group FACT have featured on a number of occasions, as they target IPTV providers, Kodi box sellers, or others involved in facilitating access to infringing content. However, the pair also target licensed premises – mostly pubs – which are regularly accused of showing Sky’s content without an appropriate license.

These cases are not our usual beat but one in particular is worth highlighting since it shows how far these companies are prepared to go and what infringers should expect to be confronted with when they pull out the stops.

Sky charges commercial premises large sums of money to air content (usually Premier League football matches) so it’s perhaps no surprise that pubs that can least afford it gravitate towards securing a drastically cheaper residential subscription.

To be clear, this is illegal and plenty of landlords have found themselves on the end of legal action and court appearances following Sky and FACT investigations. One of those is Middlesbrough pub landlady Catherine Beadnall, who should’ve been paying £820 per month to Sky but instead used a Virgin Media residential package at a fraction of that.

Back in June the 61-year-old, who runs the Park End pub in Middlesbrough, admitted in court that she’d screened Premier League matches without a commercial Sky license. One of those matches was Middlesbrough’s home game against Sunderland last November. There were nine customers in the pub at the time. Other match screenings had between six and nine people in attendance.

After ignoring warnings from FACT advising her to obtain a license, Beadnall was eventually fined £320 and ordered to pay costs of £210 after admitting four counts of dishonestly receiving matches with intent to avoid payment, Gazette Live reports.

Since Beadnall was given every chance to correct her behavior in advance, the fine and costs were to be expected. However, it transpired last week that FACT was not happy with the punishment handed down by the court and wanted even more aggressive action taken against Beadnall.

In view of the fact that the landlady had been given a conditional discharge for a similar offense in 2009, FACT wrote to local authorities demanding that they take further action. According to an application sent by the anti-piracy outfit, FACT demanded that the pub, which Beadnall had managed for almost 16 years, have its license revoked.

Of course, having no license would be a death sentence for the pub, one that would not only affect management and staff but would also prove damaging to the communities built around it. It was a dramatic request with the potential to negatively transform the lives of dozens of families.

Fortunately, according to a document published recently by Middlesbrough Council Licensing Sub Committee, it appears that almost three weeks later, FACT scaled down its demands, but not by much.

“On 21 August 2018 further correspondence was received from FACT which stated that having given the matter further consideration they would consider that the removal of Catherine Beadnall from the premises as being a satisfactory outcome for FACT,” the document reads.

“[To] facilitate this they would consider a suitable resolution to be the canceling of Catherine Beadnall’s lease by the Premises Licence holder and an undertaking that they would not issue a new lease to her or her family members.”

Given the detail above, it’s clear that Beadnall acted irresponsibly given her previous conviction. There’s also no doubt that she should’ve heeded the warnings of FACT and either bought an official subscription or stopped airing matches altogether. She foolishly did not, and for that error of judgment she went to court and had to pay a fine determined by local magistrates, as per the law.

The problem here, however, is the apparent determination of a disappointed FACT to either shut down an entire pub or, alternatively, deprive Beadnall of her livelihood and presumably her main source of income. At 61-years-old, Beadnall probably doesn’t have that many options open to her, particularly after managing the pub in question for almost 16 years.

“I’ve been to court for it [but because] I only got a £500 fine they [want] the pub shutting down they saying its criminal,” Beadnall wrote on her Facebook page recently, a post that drew support from her friends and customers.

“That’s disgusting. They are trying to victimize you by trying to get you out of the premises! That is totally unjust given the ‘offense’ you committed for God’s sake!” one wrote.

“So you played a few unlicensed football games, got caught and paid a fine! That’s no reason for them to try and now attempt to take away your livelihood. Bunch of Arseholes!”

Another commenter noted the social importance of the pub and its positive effects on the area.

“It’s the last pub standing in the area we grew up in,” a customer called Tracy added. “Good luck Cath it’s not just a boozer it actually does events for kids in the community at affordable prices for low income parents.”

“They wanna look at the good things you do for our community,” added another.

“There’s no way on this earth that any of us will stand by and let them take the pub, your livelihood away from you without a fight.”

With words like “victimization” and “bullying” regularly appearing in Facebook responses, other commenters criticized Sky for their sky-high prices, noting that people in the council estates nearby don’t have that kind of disposable income.

While that may be the case, the law is the law and Beadnall could’ve avoided this wretched attempt on her pub, livelihood, career, and customers if only she’d heeded the warnings. That being said, one would think that the people filing this application would’ve seen fit to put this matter into perspective.

Ruining lives is never going to be a great advertisement for your product or your way of doing business. To Joe Public it looks bad – really bad – and is a great way to further cultivate the them-versus-us culture that’s attached to the wickedly high prices charged by Sky which have to be charged to fund the billions demanded by the Premier League.

On the other hand, taking down an offender in such a dramatic way could prove a great deterrent to others considering a similar course of action. There’s no doubt that figured into the equation.

Last week, following a council hearing in Middlesbrough, FACT and Sky’s plan probably achieved both. Catherine Beadnall was stripped of her license and her career was brought to an end.

According to a report from Gazette Live, FACT dug up every possible piece of negative information they could in order to achieve their aims, including mentioning that Beadnall was fined in 2007 for not having fully-functioning CCTV at the pub and that in 2013 “someone” discharged a shotgun outside.

The anti-piracy outfit also mentioned that someone had been stabbed at the pub. However, during the meeting, it transpired that it was Beadnall’s own son who had been attacked when trying to remove a man from the premises.

The belief all along was that FACT only targeted Beadnall’s livelihood because the earlier court fine wasn’t as heavy as they’d hoped. Statements at the meeting seemed to support that.

When Andrew Cochrane of Stars Pubs and Bars, which owns the pub, asked FACT representative Stephen Gerrard if they’d called for a review due to being “aggrieved” by the relatively small fine handed down in earlier in the year, the response was positive.

“I was disappointed yes,” Gerrard said, adding: “I don’t consider it to be a deterrent.”

But despite two local councilors speaking in support of Beadnell, it wasn’t enough. The landlady and her entire family were banned from managing or being employed at the pub. The pub itself had its license suspended for three months.

While Beadnall really should’ve acted more responsibly, the six to nine people present during the match screenings at her pub doesn’t seem like a reasonable fit for the termination of her career and the suspension of the entire pub’s license. Nevertheless, it appears the authorities think otherwise.

Fortunately, however, Beadnall is trying to look on the bright side, noting that this Christmas, for the first time in 15 years, she’ll be able to cook her family a dinner at home. It seems unlikely that Sky TV will accompany the mince pies and coffee.

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

Released back in 2015, the Fuckr desktop application provides enhanced access to the popular Grindr dating service. However, the extra features offered by the software are controversial, to say the least.

Fuckr gives users the ability to precisely locate hundreds of Grindr users to an accuracy of just a few feet. In addition, Fuckr offers access to a trove of information about Grindr users not freely available, including photos, HIV status, and even their preferred sexual position.

Early September, following an exposé by Queer Europe, Grindr decided to end Fuckr’s party. The company filed a DMCA notice with Github, where the application’s code was hosted. This resulted in Fuckr being taken down.

As reported Tuesday, Grindr is still battling availability of the software. Dozens of ‘forks’ of Fuckr were still available for download from Github so, in response, Grindr filed a new notice with the coding platform. It targeted around 90 Fuckr clones, all of which were taken down by Github. Now, however, Grindr has another problem on its hands.

When content is taken down following the filing of a DMCA notice, the target of the notice (in this case a user called ‘tomlandia’) has the right to issue a DMCA counter-notice. This is a challenge to the statement of facts in the original notice and will usually point out deficiencies therein.

In its original complaint, Grindr claimed that Fuckr “facilitate[s] unauthorized access to the Grindr app by circumventing Grindr’s access controls,” adding that the software was primarily designed for the purpose of “circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work” protected under the Copyright Act.

In a DMCA counter-notice filed this week, ‘tomlandia’ argues that Grindr’s claims are false. After confirming that he is indeed the creator of Fuckr, the Github user offers a short rejection of the dating app’s copyright complaint..

“Fuckr does not bypass any technical access control mechanism and does not access any work copyrighted by Grindr LLC,” the notice reads.

“I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good-faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.”

Fuckr DMCA counter-notice

While DMCA takedown notices themselves can be filed at will with almost no consequences when they’re inaccurate, DMCA counter-notices open up a can of worms for those who file them, as Github explains.

“Submitting a DMCA counter notice can have real legal consequences. If the complaining party disagrees that their takedown notice was mistaken, they might decide to file a lawsuit against you to keep the content disabled,” the code platform says.

“You should conduct a thorough investigation into the allegations made in the takedown notice and probably talk to a lawyer before submitting a counter notice.”

Neither Grindr or TF has been able to contact ‘tomlandia’ to ask whether he sought legal advice but by submitting the counter-notice, he opens himself up to potential legal action. Github explains that copyright complaints can prove complicated, highlighting the very reason given by Grindr for taking Fuckr down.

“Sometimes a takedown notice might allege infringement in a way that seems odd or indirect. Copyright laws are complicated and can lead to some unexpected results,” Github notes.

“In some cases a takedown notice might allege that your source code infringes because of what it can do after it is compiled and run. For example: The notice may claim that your software is used to circumvent access controls to copyrighted works.”

While the argument over whether that really is the case with Fuckr probably lies with lawyers and ultimately the Court, the counter-notice from ‘tomlandia’ now sets in motion a process in which Grindr will either have to put up or shut up.

For the next 10 to 14 days, Github will keep the Fuckr repository down and if the company doesn’t hear anything from Grindr during that period, the repository will go back up. However, if Grindr believes its claim is valid, it will be forced to take swift legal action against ‘tomlandia’ to ensure Github doesn’t reactivate the repo.

If ‘tomlandia’ is in the United States, his counter-notice states that he consents for legal action to go ahead in the “jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which [his] address is located” or the Northern District of California where GitHub is located.

Only time will tell where the battle, if one is to take place, will be fought.

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

With millions of visitors per week, Torrent9 is a force to be reckoned with.

The site is most popular in French-speaking countries, which hasn’t gone unnoticed to local copyright holders.

Last year, the Paris Court of First Instance ordered French ISPs to block the site. However, Torrent9 was quick to take countermeasures and moved to a new domain name.

Quite recently, it was operating from Torrent9.blue. This went fine until the site’s owner started to notice that Google traffic had tanked. The torrent site used to get roughly 20% of its visitors through the search engine, but that suddenly dropped to less than 5%.

As it turned out, the French anti-piracy outfit SACEM had sent takedown requests for hundreds of thousands of URLs in the span of a few days. Google then removed these from the search engine, adding a downranking punishment on top.

SACEM’s ‘carpet-bomb’ of takedown requests was clearly targeted and massive in scope. In one week in August, the group asked Google to remove over 350,000 torrent9.blue URLs. For comparison, The Pirate Bay usually gets a tenth of that, from all copyright holders combined.

Torrent9.blue takedowns

While we were taking a closer look at the notices in question, we spotted another peculiarity.

It almost looks like the French anti-piracy group submitted each and every URL they could find, regardless of whether it actually points to works from their music industry members.

Some URLs do indeed point to music, but there are also plenty of others, targeting movies, TV-shows, games, and software. In some cases, the torrents are not even infringing, such as the open source copy of Ubuntu listed below.

Pirated Ubuntu?

Google appears to have removed nearly all URLs including the ones that don’t point directly to copyright infringing content of SACEM members.

The removals were probably automated, but they certainly warrant a closer look. There is no question that Torrent9 offers links to pirated content, but should such broad takedown requests be permitted?

This endeavor left Torrent9 no other choice than to move to another new domain. At the time of writing the torrent site is operating from Torrent9.ph, but this could easily change again in the near future, as SACEM has already started to target the new domain with another carpet-bombing of ‘dubious’ DMCA takedown notices.

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

In 2003 the ‘world wide web’ was an entirely different place than it is today.

This was especially true for streaming video. YouTube had yet to be invented, while Netflix only sent out films via the postal service.

It was at this time that a group of New Zealand friends was shooting a fan film of The Matrix, appropriately titled “The Fanimatrix.” With a limited budget of just $800, of which nearly half went into a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days.

There was a problem though. As video streaming services were still non-existent, distribution was a challenge. The makers managed to reduce the filesize down to 150MB, but even that was too expensive.

TorrentFreak spoke to the film’s ‘IT-guy’ Sebastian Kai Frost, who also had a bit part in front of the camera, in addition to being a wire-work counterweight, gopher, and light holder. According to Frost, regular centralized hosting was not an option.

“In New Zealand this would have resulted in a completely unaffordable amount of bandwidth to be used sharing the file via traditional HTTP or FTP methods. Especially given that the entire bandwidth in and out of the country at the time was less than a modern WiFi link,” Frost tells TorrentFreak.

With no budget left they had to find something cheap, or free. Frost, who was working as a network administrator at the time, went looking for a solution and stumbled upon a new technology that could help. Something called “BitTorrent.”

“It looked promising because it scaled such that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution,” Frost says, looking back.

After convincing the crew that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent on September 28, 2003. He also compiled a tracker on his own Linux box and made sure everything was running correctly.

That was fifteen years ago. Today, this torrent is still up and running with a handful of seeders. As far as we know, it’s the oldest active torrent on the Internet. A real piece of history.

Fanimatrix torrent created 15 years ago

In a way, Fanimatrix became one of the first showcases of what BitTorrent can do.

Sure, at the time people were already sharing movies and TV-shows on sites such as Suprnova.org, Donkax.com, Bytemonsoon.com, and Torrentse.cx, but that was mostly pirated stuff. For the Fanimatrix, BitTorrent was a necessity.

“It turns out that using BitTorrent was a really really good idea because the file was downloaded over tens of thousands of times in the first week and then REALLY took off based off feature news articles on both New Zealand and American TV news,” Frost recalls.

In a New Zealand Herald report from 2003, the film’s director Rajneel Singh noted that the torrent had been downloaded 70,000 times is just one week. An impressive statistic, even by today’s standards.

BitTorrent was not only able to handle all the downloads, but it was also a serious cost saver. The film crew did some back-of-the-napkin calculations at the time which showed that BitTorrent saved them roughly $550,000 in bandwidth bills during the first month alone.

Frost and the team were blown away by the experience. And while the film is dated by today’s special effect standards, it’s good to see that people are still interested. Whatever their reason may be.

“The fact that people still seed it after all these years is a good feeling. Though I suspect a lot of people are on board now because they want to be part of keeping the world’s oldest active torrent going. Which is in itself pretty cool,” Frost says.

Frost plans to keep a restored version of the original site and the torrent up and running during the decade to come. It’s a piece of Internet history, after all.

“At the time we had no idea how popular this ‘BitTorrent’ thing would become, but being there at the beginning, and having it still operating and seeding even now is a pretty awesome thing.

“I intend to keep it going as long as I have a seed left to give,” Frost concludes.

—

^{Note: If anybody knows of any torrents that beat this record, feel free to let us know.}

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

As entertainment giants and governments in the West struggle to deal with the ongoing flood of pirate content hitting the Internet, Russia has emerged from the shadows as a surprise front-runner in the anti-piracy wars.

The country has passed several pieces of legislation over the past few years, all designed to limit the availability of pirated content. Court processes are now swift and particularly voluminous, with large numbers of sites ordered to remove illegal content or face the proposition of temporary and indeed permanent blocking.

This week, Alexander Zharov, the head of the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Communications, Information Technologies and Mass Media (better known as Roscomnadzor), met with President Vladimir Putin to provide a one-on-one update on the situation in the country.

Two topics were on the agenda – the protection of personal data held by millions of Russian companies and the thorny issue of intellectual property protection.

Putin & Zharov discussing piracy (Credit:Kremlin)

“For three years already, the law on the protection of intellectual property rights is working. Most of the complaints from copyright holders are related to movies,” Zharov told Putin.

“More than six thousand claims over three years were filed mainly by [local] companies, and a very small percentage of Western companies, that for some reason are suing at the Moscow City Court.”

The Moscow City Court is tasked with receiving lawsuits from copyright holders demanding that sites with infringing content either remove it, or face blocking procedures implemented by local ISPs.

Zharov said that three entities are involved in copyright action in Russia; the copyright holders who file the complaints, the Moscow City Court which decides on what course of action to take, and telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor, which is tasked with executing the orders of the Court. In total, complaints have been filed against 17,000 pirate sites, Zharov told the President.

“A few years ago, the Russian Internet was absolutely a safe haven for pirates. Any premiere immediately appeared on hundreds and thousands of resources, and people watched them for free, even in poor quality, but nevertheless, that’s how it was,” he said.

“Now the situation has changed dramatically: six thousand resources have been blocked and 11,000 have deleted such content. And the numbers speak for themselves.

“For the first time in the history of Russian cinematography, our very good film, the premiere of 2018, ‘Move Up’, raised about three billion rubles (US$45.5m). This is comparable, perhaps, with only one American blockbuster, which raised the same amount.”

Zharov also updated Putin on the development of legal offerings in Russia, claiming that last year legal online streaming services earned 60% more than a year earlier, to the tune of eight billion rubles (US$121.4m). Traditional cinemas are also doing well, he added, noting that 55 million people attended premieres, 40% more than a year earlier.

“We intend to continue this work with rights holders. And, in general, all the largest pirate sites are now blocked. We will continue to clean up the Internet,” he concluded.

The positive messages from the meeting with Putin follow hot on the heels of a rather less optimistic report from Group-IB.

The cyber-security company reported that in 2016, there were ‘only’ 33 Russian cinema leaks via illegal camcording. By 2017, that had increased more than 500% to 211 but in the first eight months of 2018, 280 movies had leaked online – despite site blocking.

“Almost every film released in 2018 has been pirated and leaked to the web. In 2017, the country’s cinemas showed 477 movies, and 211 of them were pirated, which is 6 times more than a year earlier,” Group-IB reported.

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