Over the past decade, online video streaming has become the preferred media consumption tool for many, and more and more people are getting on board.

While legal streaming tools such as Netflix and YouTube have a massive reach, unauthorized streaming sites and services have grown alongside.

To curb this trend several new anti-piracy initiatives have popped up. These include the Coalition Against Piracy (CAP). The group launched last year as CASBAA’s anti-piracy arm and is now backed by its successor, the Asia Video Industry Association (AVIA).

To get an overview of the latest developments TorrentFreak reached out to AVIA’s Neil Gane, who works as the Coalition Against Piracy‘s General Manager. While he prefers not to mention any specific piracy targets, Gane emphasizes that pirate streaming boxes remain a top enforcement priority.

“I can say that CAP’s immediate focus is on infringing applications and its associated ecosystem, including the preloaded illicit streaming devices (ISD) used to access infringing content,” Gane informs TF.

These illicit streaming devices are boxes pre-configured to stream pirated content. This allows users to watch free movies and TV-shows, or live broadcasts including sports games, which millions do.

The streaming box problem isn’t an easy one to solve. However, Gane hopes that a lot of progress can be made when various industry players and organizations work together.

“There is no one silver bullet to streaming piracy and the infringing APK ecosystem. And there will always be a small number of consumers who prefer to free-ride,” Gane says.

“What is required is a holistic solution with all stakeholders including content producers, distributors and industry associations working together to address this serious and growing problem.”

AVIA already works closely together with similar-minded groups. This includes the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, which is very active in the US, with which it shares intelligence and resources. This results in more efficient and effective investigations, Gane notes.

While the entertainment industry has a similar goal, AVIA would also like various governments to work together. By providing the rights enforcement tool and updating copyright law, where needed. Thus far, progress on this front has been slow.

“The impact that intellectual property crimes can have on a country’s economy is now widely accepted. But this recognition does not always result in legislative change and meaningful solutions,” Gane tells TF.

“Unfortunately, some policymakers in Asia have chosen to delay any action on ISDs and the APK infringing ecosystem, whilst the problem grows and enters the consumer mainstream.”

But even when the entertainment industries and governments are aligned, more collaboration is required. In particular from Internet services such as online shopping platforms and payment providers.

There is some progress on this front. For example, PayPal and Mastercard are helping to address the piracy problem in Asia, and so are local e-commerce platforms such as Lazada.

“Working alongside e-market platforms and social media sites where ISDs are commonly traded, as well as disrupting illicit commercial transactions at the point of sale are key components of any anti-piracy strategy,” Gane notes.

“Over the last 8 months CAP has been working closely with popular e-markets in SE Asia as well as local and international payment processors including PayPal and Mastercard.”

Overall, the key term is collaboration. According to Gane, things are going well between local and international industry associations.

AVIA and the Coalition Against Piracy itself are a good example of collaboration too. The latter protects the interests of many major players in the region, including Disney, Fox, HBO Asia, NBCUniversal, Premier League, Turner Asia-Pacific, BBC Worldwide, National Basketball Association, TV5MONDE, Viacom International, and others.

More progress can be made against streaming piracy if governments and Internet services work along as well. That, however, is more easily said than done.

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

To protect copyright holders, YouTube uses an advanced piracy recognition system that flags and disables videos which are used without permission.

This system, known as Content ID, works well most of the time, but it is far from perfect.

It’s not well equipped to determine whether certain uploads are in the public domain or protected under ‘fair use.’ While mistakes are bound to happen with automated processes, it becomes problematic when there’s a clear pattern. Especially when it clearly interferes with the public interest.

This issue was highlighted once again by German music professor Dr. Ulrich Kaiser. In an article written for Wikimedia, republished by Ars Technica, he explains how one of his educational videos was flagged as copyrighted content by YouTube.

“In this video, I explained my project, while examples of the music played in the background. Less than three minutes after uploading, I received a notification that there was a ContentID claim against my video,” Kaiser writes.

The music used in the video wasn’t infringing, however. The performance of a 17th century Biber composition was first published in 1962 and therefore in the public domain, according to German law. When the professor contested the claim the video was swiftly restored, but that wasn’t the end of the matter.

Curious about the accuracy of the Content ID process, Kaiser created a test account to find out whether this was a one-off or not.

“I decided to open a different YouTube account “Labeltest” to share additional excerpts of copyright-free music. I quickly received ContentID notifications for copyright-free music by Bartok, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner.

“Again and again, YouTube told me that I was violating the copyright of these long-dead composers, despite all of my uploads existing in the public domain.”

Kaiser contested all the claims stressing that the recordings of these old composers were not copyright-infringing. The creators have been dead for years, and the recordings were all pre-1963, so in the public domain under German law.

Undeterred, YouTube’s Content ID system went after Beethoven, although that recording could stay online without ads.

“I only received more notices, this time about a recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5, which was accompanied by the message: ‘Copyrighted content was found in your video. The claimant allows its content to be used in your YouTube video. However, advertisements may be displayed’.”

In the end, Kaiser managed to restore much of the public domain content. However, he notes that even when the claims were released, the videos were not converted to a free license, which he intended. This makes it harder for others to share the works, which was the goal all along.

All in all, the professor concludes that upload filters such as Content ID can seriously harm the distribution of cultural and educational content.

“Filters like ContentID can be useful for platforms that host large amounts of user-generated content, but as my story exposes, they have significant flaws which can lead to the diminishment of educational and cultural resources online,” Kaiser says.

The professor cautions lawmakers to keep this in mind before they mandate broad upload filters. And with the EU’s upload filter vote just a few days away, this message will be music to the ears of Article 13 opponents.

While it’s easy to blame YouTube, the real problem, in this case, is that some publishers have apparently claimed public domain works. Perhaps YouTube may want to come up with a strike system for false claims too?

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

Running alongside the incredibly popular torrent site The Pirate Bay, Dreamfilm was a Swedish portal that offered content in the increasingly popular streaming format.

With no fancy software needed, the site enjoyed considerable growth, particularly among locals seeking quick and easy access to the latest local and Hollywood movies.

In January 2015 and after capturing millions of visitors, Dreamfilm announced it would close down after one of its administrators was detained by the authorities.

A month later, apparently in response to the upheaval at Dreamfilm, several other sites fell including the country’s second largest torrent site Tankefetast, torrent site PirateHub, and streaming portal Tankefetast Play (TFPlay). Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance described the four linked sites as Europe’s leading players in file-sharing and streaming.

Four men, aged in their 20s and 30s, were eventually hauled to court, with each admitting involvement but confessing no crimes.

The Linköping District Court found them all guilty of copyright infringement offenses and sentenced them to between six to 10 months in jail. They were also ordered to pay a fine of SEK 1,000,0000 (US$109,500) to plaintiffs including the Swedish Film Industry, Nordisk Film, and Walt Disney.

With all parties dissatisfied with the outcome – sentences too harsh for the defendants and not aggressive enough for the plaintiffs – the case went to appeal. Citing recent clarifications of EU law, the defendants argued that the content offered on the sites was already online and could be accessed in other ways. This, they said, meant the content had not been “made available to a new audience”.

The Court of Appeal, however, sided with the District Court, agreeing that the links on the site targeted a new and unauthorized audience and therefore amounted to copyright infringement. The samples detailed in the case meant that the men committed between 45 and 188 infringements each and were motivated by profit, as determined by the advertising present on the platforms.

Where the Court of Appeal differed in its opinion was on the punishments that should be handed down. The financial penalty was more than quadrupled from SEK 1,000,000 to SEK 4,250,000 (US$465,500) but the immediate jail sentences pressed for and then obtained by the plaintiffs were removed.

Due to the fact that the men were all relatively young, had never been in trouble with the authorities, and were unlikely to offend again, the Court of Appeal wiped out their custodial sentences, replacing them with conditional ones instead.

While this was welcomed by the defendants, the hugely increased damages bill was hard to swallow, despite the movie companies in question originally demanding more than SEK 9,000,000 (US$985,800). The four million damages award, the Court of Appeal ruled, was the amount a hypothetical license to distribute would have cost.

DagensJuridik reports that two out of the four men have now taken their case to the highest court in the land, the Högsta Domstolen (Supreme Court).

Unlike the lower court, the Supreme Court will not determine the guilt or otherwise of the defendants. The hearing will only concern whether the damages award and compensation for the film industry was reasonable when it was set at SEK 4,250,000 (US$465,500).

The Supreme Court will also have no involvement in the conditional sentences previously handed down by the Göta Hovrätt (Court of Appeal). They will stand as previously ordered, with two of the defendants paying daily fines, penalties based on the offender’s daily personal income.

Also under consideration by the Supreme Court is the ruling handed down in the Swefilmer case. In March this year, two men had their sentences increased by the Court of Appeal in Sweden.

After originally being told to serve three years in prison, the main operator of the site had his sentence increased to four years with additional damages on top. The second man’s conditional sentence was augmented with a fine.

Swedish anti-piracy outfit Rights Alliance has long campaigned for harsher sentences for copyright infringement offenses in Sweden, particularly those handed down in connection with file-sharing platforms. It argues that when courts go soft on offenders, it only encourages others to set up similar operations in what is then perceived as a safe(r) haven.

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 two newcomers in our chart.

Ocean’s Eight 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	(2)	Ocean’s Eight	6.3 / trailer
2	(1)	Deadpool 2	8.0 / trailer
3	(5)	Hereditary	8.7 / trailer
4	(3)	Avengers: Infinity War	8.7 / trailer
5	(…)	Reprisal	4.4 / trailer
6	(4)	Upgrade	7.7 / trailer
7	(8)	Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (subbed HDRip)	6.5 / trailer
8	(…)	Superfly	4.9 / trailer
9	(10)	Rampage	6.3 / trailer
10	(9)	Skyscraper (subbed HDRip)	6.1 / trailer

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

Every single day, largely automated bots scour the web for references to pirated content.

These links are then reported to various online services, such as Google, requesting the operators to remove the allegedly infringing content.

This works fine, most of the time. But, in common with their human counterparts, these bots aren’t perfect. This was made painfully visible last month when Topple Track had to disable its reporting tool after it triggered a wave of faulty takedown notices.

That was not an isolated incident though. None of these takedown tools are perfect.

Over the past few weeks, we noticed another worrying trend. Suddenly, Google started to receive a lot of DMCA notices for the Internet Movie Database, with the majority of these requests coming from the UK-based reporting agency Entura International.

Since it’s unlikely that the movie site, which has been operating legally for 27 years, had suddenly gone rogue, something else must be up.

We decided to take a closer look at the reports in question, which were sent on behalf of well-known companies including Columbia Pictures, National Geographic, and Sony Pictures Television. Most of the links in these notices indeed reference classic pirate sites.

Good notice

The IMDB links are mostly used as a reference to the original content. However, it appears that due to a bug in the system the IMDb links move to the “infringing content” field when there are no pirate links to report, as shown below.

Bad notice

This is a rather obvious bug. However, after several weeks it has yet to be corrected. As a result, Google has been asked dozens of times to remove legitimate IMDb URLs from its search results.

TorrentFreak reached out to Entura to report this issue, and request a comment, but at the time of writing, we have yet to hear back.

Google, meanwhile, has widely put IMDb on its whitelist. This means that none of the inaccurately reported links have been removed. However, a smaller or relatively unknown site may not be that lucky, when it comes to these type of mistakes.

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