In this episode we meet Zenna, Andre and Zack from Scuttlebutt, a P2P-based social ‘network of networks’ based around a BitTorrent-like distribution technology.

After figuring out what Scuttlebutt is (and is not) we discuss: the roots of Scuttlebutt in New Zealand, the system’s politically anarchist/libertarian ethos, how Scuttlebutt survived (or shrugged off) a right-wing deluge; and how SSB’s technical architecture eliminates the need for moderators.

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Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing crypto, privacy, copyright and file-sharing developments. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Zenna, Andre and Zack

^{If you enjoy this episode, consider becoming a patron and getting involved with the show. Check out Steal This Show’s Patreon campaign: support us and get all kinds of fantastic benefits!}

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Lucas Marston
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Eric Barch

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Based in the Netherlands, anti-piracy group BREIN has been fighting copyright infringement of all kinds since it was founded around 20 years ago.

One of its key activities in more recent years has been tackling file-sharing sites. BREIN has taken on the very largest of platforms, such as The Pirate Bay, and has been a major player in testing EU legislation in key areas, particularly in relation to the ‘making available’ right.

But while BREIN has tackled some of the largest issues, it hasn’t shied away from dealing with sites of all size. Its latest victim, it seems, is the (now former) leading Dutch Usenet indexing community Place2Home.net.

With roots reaching back more than half a decade, Place2Home.net was a community of mainly Dutch file-sharers focused on content available on the worldwide Usenet (newsgroup) system. Its members shared links to content including movies, TV shows, music and books, which attracted the negative attention of BREIN, as visitors to the site now discover.

“This site has been closed by order of the BREIN foundation,” a notice there now reads.

“Over the past few years thousands of (recent) films, TV series, music, games and e-books have been made available on this website. The making available of copyright-protected works infringes the copyrights and neighboring rights of the copyright holders to those works.”

For many years, pure downloading of pirate content was allowed in the Netherlands. However, that all changed in 2014 when the European Court of Justice ruled that the “piracy levy” used to compensate rightsholders was unlawful. Almost immediately, the Dutch government outlawed downloading. Uploading has always been illegal.

“Downloading from unauthorized sources is also prohibited in the Netherlands, just like unauthorized uploading,” the notice on Place2Home correctly adds.

The details of when and how the operators of Place2Home were discovered have not yet been announced but we do know that they have reached some kind of settlement with BREIN. If past cases are anything to go by, a cash sum is likely to be due to BREIN, in an amount relevant to the activities of the site balanced with its operators’ ability to pay.

Back in May, Place2Home.org, which acted as the sister site to the .net variant, also disappeared after being targeted by BREIN. While .net was focusing on Usenet, .org focused on torrents, becoming the largest private site in the Netherlands. It too was forced into a settlement agreement with BREIN and hasn’t been seen since.

Back in September 2017, it became clear that both variants of Place2Home were on BREIN’s radar. The anti-piracy group revealed it had tracked down and settled with prolific uploaders connected to the Libra Release Team who had uploaded content to both sites.

At the time of publication, BREIN hadn’t yet responded to our request for comment.

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A dramatic situation is developing around billion dollar Internet company Yandex and several major Russian broadcasters.

Gazprom-Media and others claim that Yandex isn’t doing enough to keep ‘pirate’ content out of its search results. After reaching a brick wall with the search company, the broadcasters filed a copyright infringement complaint with the Moscow City Court, the entity responsible for handling ISP blocking requests.

Late last week, the Court handed down a decision compelling Yandex to remove links to pirated TV shows belonging to Gazprom-Media outlets including TNT, TV-3, 2×2, and Super. The Court gave Yandex until the end of today to remove the content or find itself blocked throughout Russia. It’s now clear that Yandex will not comply.

According to a statement from the company, Yandex believes that the law is being misinterpreted. While under current legislation pirate content must be removed from sites hosting it, the removal of links to such content on search engines falls outside its scope.

“In accordance with the Federal Law On Information, Information Technologies, and Information Protection, the mechanics are as follows: pirated content should be blocked by site owners and on the so-called mirrors of these sites,” Yandex says.

“We consider the claims against us to be unreasonable and not in accordance with the law and we will appeal the decision of the Moscow City Court.”

A Yandex spokesperson told Interfax that the company works in “full compliance” with the law and is open to finding a cooperative solution.

“We will work with market participants to find a solution within the existing legal framework,” Yandex said.

In the midst of this serious situation, Yandex insists that it stands for an “honest Internet” in which legal content is made available and rightsholders earn their rightful share from it. Now, however, the action by the TV companies and the Court has undermined that.

“In response to the TV channels’ complaint, the Moscow City Court has passed rulings that are fundamentally contrary to its own previous practice on this issue. Worse still, they do not solve the problem of unauthorized content, since resources with such content will be available in other search systems, social networks and so on,” Yandex says.

But despite Yandex filing an appeal against the Court’s decision, there appears to be no escape from it being wiped from the Russian Internet in a matter of hours. Telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor says that it is obliged to act on the instructions of the Court and will instruct ISPs around the country to disabled access to Yandex.

“Roskomnadzor is required to comply with the court’s decision, which introduced preliminary provisional [blocking] measures against Yandex’s resource, regardless of the company’s appeal against this decision,” a spokesperson said.

But while executing a potentially devastating block on the one hand, Roscomnadzor is also offering to help mediate a peaceful solution to this growing dispute.

“We are ready to assist in finding points of interaction between companies,” Deputy Head of Roskomnadzor Vadim Subbotin told Interfax.

“I hope that in the pre-trial procedure, Yandex will take steps to resolve this conflict before the blockade, I very much hope that this will be done in cooperation with the rights holders,” he said.

Absent some last-minute miracle, it seems Yandex is doomed to preliminary blocking measures sometime today. While these usually last for an initial 15 days, the big question is how they will be carried out.

It’s unclear if a precise element of the service can or will be targeted (i.e Yandex.ru/video/ and/or Yandex.video) or whether Roscomnadzor will go down the Telegram route and block everything.

Ominously, Rosomnadzor is already warning that it doesn’t know what effect the blocks will have on Yandex’s other services.

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Playing retro games is a popular pastime of some of the most avid game fanatics, who can’t always feed their urge through official channels.

Some titles are more than two decades old and no longer legally available. This gap has always been filled by emulators and ROMs sites. However, these have come under fire recently.

Last month Nintendo filed a complaint at a federal court in Arizona, accusing LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co of massive copyright and trademark infringement.

This case might soon be settled, but not without causing collateral damage. Following the legal campaign, several sites stopped offering ROMs, to avoid millions of dollars in potential damages.

While these decisions are understandable, not everyone is equally impressed by the show of legal force. The niche pirate site ‘Good Old Downloads,’ for example, sees the ROMs controversy as a good opportunity to expand its catalog. With retro games.

Coming soon…

The new section is “coming soon” according to the site’s homepage. While no further details are listed, it is now linked to a Tweet which makes it rather clear what motivated ‘Good Old Downloads’ to add retro-titles.

The tweet embeds a video showing recent press coverage of the Nintendo lawsuit and the related shutdowns. Towards the end, it shows a clip from “Age of Ultron” where Thanos’ face is replaced by the site’s logo.

“Fine, I’ll do it myself,” he says.

The head..

Should've gone for the head.

Video Credit: MnSXx pic.twitter.com/iteEfXpNkp

— Good Old Downloads (@goddownloads) August 23, 2018

<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

In recent weeks, thousands of gamers have been deprived of their favorite ROM sources. They will surely welcome Good Old Download’s most recent expansion plans.

That said, ROMs haven’t been particularly hard to find through traditional pirate sources. For example, shortly after Nintendo announced its lawsuit, one Demonoid user uploaded torrents featuring thousands of ROMs to the site, including tiles belonging to the Japanese game giant.

Nintendo is obviously not going to like this public deviance. But whether they will act on it is another matter.

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The VPN industry is highly competitive. Combined with a userbase which tends to be more suspicious than the average Internet user, this is a volatile mix.

In recent weeks there have been a series of allegations lodged against NordVPN. The company is being linked to Lithuanian tech company Tesonet, which offers a wide range of services and products. According to the allegations, Tesonet owns NordVPN, a claim the latter denies.

This turns out to be problematic for some, as Tesonet is involved in data mining practices, and the company also runs a residential proxy network. While there is no evidence that NordVPN is involved in any of that, it’s enough to feed conspiracies.

The situation didn’t improve when Tesonet was sued by Luminati, the company behind the “not so private” VPN service Hola. The complaint accuses Tesonet of infringing Luminati’s proxy patents and NordVPN is listed is the suit as well, with the claim that it had a business relationship with Hola.

TorrentFreak previously asked NordVPN about the allegations and the company said that they are operated by the Panamese company Tefincom, which also has the NordVPN trademark. Tesonet is closely related to the company, but it doesn’t legally own and never owned NordVPN.

NordVPN initially opted not to comment publicly but that changed when a new storm of mostly ‘fake’ Twitter accounts (many of which were created years ago but have only tweeted on this particular issue) made themselves heard over the past days.

“We realized that remaining silent is no longer an option and we must respond for the sake of our reputation,” NordVPN wrote in a recent blog post.

NordVPN responds to several claims including that they are operating the same way as Hola, by selling users’ bandwidth. This is something anyone can verify independently, they say, by monitoring their traffic via a network monitoring application.

“Anyone with Wireshark (or any other similar app) and some networking knowledge can perform a network scan, check all requests made by the NordVPN application, and verify their destinations. The results will prove that the web scraping accusations are false,” the company writes.

The patent infringement lawsuit, which these allegations can be traced back to, doesn’t mention NordVPN as one of the proxying apps. However, it does claim that HolaVPN and NordVPN had a business relationship. This is “misleading,” the VPN states in its response.

“HolaVPN was one of many minor affiliate partners and would refer users who canceled Hola to NordVPN. We would pay a small commission for the referral,” NordVPN writes.

While NordVPN admits that Tesonet is a partner, it stresses that they were never in any way been related to other projects developed by Tesonet.

The company describes the allegations as an organized smear campaign and points out that this was in large part driven by competitors. To back up its position and address any doubt, they are also taking concrete action.

“We understand that these facts alone may not be enough to clear our name,” NordVPN writes.

“Therefore, we are hiring one of the largest professional service firms in the world to run an independent audit and verify our ‘no logs’ claim. The audit is expected to be completed within 2 months and will independently verify that the accusations are false.”

NordVPN’s full response is available on the company’s blog. A copy of the aforementioned patent infringement complaint can be found here (pdf).

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TF note: We do not make a habit of reporting on these type of issues but felt that since NordVPN is one of our sponsors, we should address it. This article was written independently, as per standard TF policy. We trust that people can make up their own minds.

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