After complaining that Russian Internet giant Yandex had failed to keep pirated versions of their content out of its search results, several major broadcasters filed a lawsuit with the Moscow City Court.

Gazprom-Media outlets including TNT, TV-3, 2×2, and Super went straight for the jugular, petitioning the Court to have ISPs block Yandex’s video indexing platform. The Court granted the request and gave Yandex until August 30 to remove all of the offending content.

Initially, Yandex flat-out refused. The company said the law was being misinterpreted, claiming that current legislation states that pirate content must be removed from sites hosting it and that search engine links are not covered.

However, after announcing that it would appeal the decision of the Moscow City Court, Yandex suddenly changed its mind on removing the content. Fearing its entire platform would be blocked by ISPs, Yandex erred on the side of caution, deleting all content that may (or indeed may not) have infringed the media companies’ rights.

Early September the TV channels again filed lawsuits with the Moscow City Court, again over the appearance of links to their content appearing in search results.

“Four lawsuits were filed by Yandex. In all the lawsuits, the TV channels ask the Court to oblige the defendant to stop creating technical conditions that ensure the placement of works on the Yandex.ru website,” press secretary of the court Ulyana Solopova told Interfax.

With a decision on the matter pending (and the underlying aim of Gazprom Media to reach a settlement agreement with Yandex), soon after the Moscow City Court responded to Yandex’s original appeal against a preliminary blocking injunction.

In a blow to Yandex, the Court upheld its original ruling, meaning that the decision to remove the content before an ISP ban was put in place was well-timed by the search company.

However, it now appears that the confusion over the requirements of the law will see the government step in to offer a solution. According to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Maxim Akimov, the country’s anti-piracy legislation needs to be “improved” following the Yandex/Gazprom Media dispute.

“Regarding the regulation of data in terms of copyright and intellectual property rights, of course, the improvement of legislation, including anti-piracy, is exactly necessary,” Akimov told Interfax.

“By the end of the year we will try to present the necessary amendments to the Duma, which will allow us to more clearly define the rights of the parties,” he said.

Akimov said that the amendments will be the product of negotiations between the Federal Antimonopoly Service, intellectual property bodies, and the Ministry of Economic Development and Business.

It is currently unclear which direction the talks will go and whether any changes will favor Yandex’s perception of the law or the Moscow City Court’s interpretation.

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

More than two weeks ago we reported that The Pirate Bay was suffering a long stretch of downtime.

The site came back eventually, went offline again, and later reappeared. While this is normal behavior by now, for a significant group of people the downtime is rather persistent.

Quite a few people are still unable to reach the site through the usual thepiratebay.org domain name. Instead, they get a Cloudflare notice mentioning that TPB is not responding.

While writing this article we tried to access from various locations, with mixed results. On some connections, it works just fine, while it’s unreachable in others. There’s not really a clear pattern.

No TPB in Dallas

The Pirate Bay’s moderators have no explanation for what’s going on, and the tech admins haven’t made any statement. As is often the case, it’s probably some kind of technical issue, one that’s not going away easily. The Tor domain and many proxies remain unaffected though.

Meanwhile, Demonoid users are also having a hard time getting the latest torrents.

Last month we reported that Demonoid’s torrents had gone missing. While these came back eventually, new problems were on the horizon. At the moment, torrent detail pages are not accessible to many people and others can’t get past the site’s Captcha.

No torrent…

Demonoid staffer Phaze1G informed TorrentFreak that there are indeed some issues. However, Deimos, the site’s administrator, is still unreachable. While he has logged in sporadically, staffers haven’t heard from him in weeks.

The staffer shared what he knows in the Demonoid forums, but can’t do anything personally.

“We don’t know why Deimos is not on Demonoid, but if I have to guess those are real-life issues and Demonoid at this moment is not a priority. I really hope that he will return in next 1-2 months and keep this place up and running like he did last year,” Phaze1G notes.

“Right now, we can only wait as Demonoid is hosted on 6 continents and if one of the locations have some minor issue, the whole site will face partial issues.”

While these issues are inconvenient for users, both Demonoid and The Pirate Bay have faced rougher waters over the years. As for the users? They must have learned to be patient by now.

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 2002, Swiss-based RapidShare was one of the first and most popular one-click file-hosting services on the Internet.

Like most sites of this nature, RapidShare was frequently used by people to share copyright-infringing material. It was a relationship that got the company into trouble on multiple occasions.

RapidShare fought many legal battles with entertainment companies seeking to hold the company liable for the actions of its users, and to top it off the site was called out by the U.S. Government as a “notorious market.”

In response, the company implemented a wide variety of anti-piracy measures. These seemed to work but as a result, RapidShare’s visitor numbers and revenues plunged, eventually costing most of RapidShare’s employees their jobs.

Early 2015 the company decided to quit its business. RapidShare shut down, giving users a few weeks notice to secure their files.

While the site is little more than a distant memory for many people, it remained in sight of Swiss law enforcement. Following up on several complaints from rightsholders, including several academic publishers, the site’s founder, his wife, and one of RapidShare’s former lawyers went on trial this week.

The public prosecutor of the court in Zug, Switzerland, accuses the three executives of “commercial misconduct by multiple offenses against copyright.” The proceedings started on Wednesday and are scheduled to take a total of four days.

RapidShare’s founder prefers to remain silent. “I really do not want to make any statements,” the 38-year-old said at the start of the trial, Bote reports. Most of the talking was done by the company’s former lawyer instead.

According to the prosecutor, RapidShare’s business prioritized profit over copyright, and the three defendants are accused of assisting copyright infringement.

The founder and the two other accomplices were in a position to prevent copyright infringements but failed to do so appropriately, according to the prosecution. As such, they are all liable and subject to high fines.

During the hearing, the judge asked how RapidShare’s filtering system worked. The company’s former lawyer explained that, following a takedown notice, files could no longer be reuploaded. When the judge asked whether this would still be the case when the filename changed, the lawyer said no.

At that point, RapidShare’s founder broke his silence. He jumped in to clarify that, in addition to the name, the file itself also had to be changed in order to bypass the filter.

Whether RapidShare’s executives are eventually held liable or not, the company was certainly profitable. Documents reveal that in 2009 alone, RapidShare’s gross dividend was 47 million Swiss francs, the equivalent of nearly $49 million.

With this in mind, the damages amount of 190,000 francs ($197,000) requested by the copyright holders is relatively mild. In addition to the damages, the prosecution also demands several hundreds of thousands of francs in fines.

While RapidShare is long gone, the present case could have an effect on other hosting services. As Tarnkappe points out, this includes Uploaded.net, which is also based in Switzerland.

This was also confirmed by renowned Swiss IT lawyer Martin Steiger.

“Depending on the ruling, service providers’ liability in Switzerland would be strengthened in favor of the providers or the rightsholders,” Steiger told local press.

After two days of trial, the case will continue next week. The last hearing day is set for the week after.

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

In dozens of countries around the world, website blocking has become one of the preferred ways for copyright holders to restrict access to pirate sites.

While very popular in Europe, the tactic has been spreading, with blockades now in place from Asia to South America. The latest involves infamous sports streaming portal Rojadirecta.

Targeted at mainly Spanish speaking visitors, Rojadirecta has experienced legal issues in several countries, the latest being Peru where the site is again accused of copyright infringement.

Concerned about its sports content being made available without the required licensing, Fox Sports Latin America – part of Fox Network Group Latin America – filed a complaint with the authorities, requesting a block of the popular portal.

The Copyright Commission (CDA) of the National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (INDECOPI) handled the complaint and has just handed down its decision.

The Commission says it considered a number of factors, including whether the site infringes copyright by knowingly providing links to various sporting events, even though the content was transmitted from elsewhere. Ultimately it decided this was a breach of the law so a blocking order was handed down.

“[W]ithin the framework of its powers, [the Commission] issued two precautionary measures which order the blocking of the website named ‘Roja Directa’, which facilitates allegedly illicit access to the transmission of various sporting events, in particular, football matches of the so-called ‘Copa Libertadores de América’ ​and ‘Copa Sudamericana’, among others,” the Commission states.

As a result, local ISPs Telefónica del Perú and América Móvil Perú are required to block Rojadirecta.me, the platform’s main domain.

“We are very pleased with the decision of INDECOPI, which has already notified the main Internet service providers to implement the blockade as soon as possible,” said Daniel Steinmetz, Chief Anti-Piracy Officer of Fox Networks Group Latin America (FNG).

“We see this decision as a clear message of opposition to illegality and support for the efforts of companies that do comply with and respect copyright and the rights of the owners of the works and productions they use.”

Back in April 2018, FNG obtained another blocking order against Rojadirecta in Uruguay, their first in the country.

Describing the ruling as “exemplary”, Steinmetz said it marked the “beginning of judicial awareness” on online piracy issues.

It’s understood that Fox intends to take action against Rojadirecta and similar sites in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala.

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

Last month it was reported that a Netherlands-based repository, which contained several popular Kodi addons, had been shut down by anti-piracy group BREIN.

The Dutch developer and administrator of XvBMC-NL was visited by bailiffs in July and soon after the repository shut down. BREIN offered to settle the matter for 2,500 euros as long as the admin known as ‘Z’ signed an abstention agreement.

Months earlier, however, the XvBMC-NL repo was an unwitting participant in a campaign to infect Kodi users with cryptocurrency-mining malware, security firm ESET reports.

“According to our research, the malware we found in the XvBMC repository was first added to the popular third-party add-on repositories Bubbles and Gaia (a fork of Bubbles), in December 2017 and January 2018, respectively,” ESET writes.

“From these two sources, and through update routines of unsuspecting owners of other third-party add-on repositories and ready-made Kodi builds, the malware spread further across the Kodi ecosystem.”

ESET reports that the malware has a multi-stage architecture and uses techniques to hide the fact that the cryptominer came from a malicious addon. The miner, which is Monero-based, runs on Windows and Linux only, a relief to Android and macOS users who appear to be unaffected.

The three potential infection routes appear to be fairly cunning, ESET notes.

1. [Users] add the URL of a malicious repository to their Kodi installation so as to download some add-ons. The malicious add-on is then installed whenever they update their Kodi add-ons.

2. [Users] install a ready-made Kodi build that includes the URL of a malicious repository. The malicious add-on is then installed whenever they update their Kodi add-ons.

3. [Users] install a ready-made Kodi build that contains a malicious add-on but no link to a repository for updates. They are initially compromised, though receive no further updates to the malicious add-on. However, if the cryptominer is installed, it will persist and receive updates.

Further analysis by ESET shows that the top five countries affected by the threat are the United States, Israel, Greece, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

With the Bubbles repo now down, that is no longer a source for the malware. Gaia, ESET reports, is no longer serving the malicious code either. However, Kodi users who were infected could still have the malware on their machines and there’s a risk that other repos and Kodi builds could be distributing the code, “most likely” without their knowledge.

Timeline of the attack, as per ESET

A very detailed technical analysis of the attack has been published by ESET along with instructions on how users can discover if they’re affected.

“To check if your device has been compromised, scan it with a reliable anti-malware solution. ESET products detect and block these threats as Win64/CoinMiner.II and Win64/CoinMiner.MK on Windows and Linux/CoinMiner.BC, Linux/CoinMiner.BJ, Linux/CoinMiner.BK, and Linux/CoinMiner.CU on Linux,” the company reports.

“On Windows you can use the ESET Free Online Scanner, and on Linux the free trial of ESET NOD32 Antivirus for Linux Desktop, to check your computer for the presence of these threats and remove anything that is detected. Existing ESET customers are protected automatically.”

While the attack is undoubtedly serious, at the time of writing its reach appears to be limited. By examing the malware authors’ Monero wallet, ESET estimates that a minimum of 4,774 users are infected. Between them they have unwittingly generated around 5,700 euros or $6,700 for the attackers.

As ESET notes, Kodi malware is very rare. Aside from the case detailed above and the DDoS attack carried out briefly by an addon and reported here on TF, no other evidence of malware being distributed via Kodi addons has been reported.

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