While there are encouraging signs for the recording industry that piracy is being brought under control, there is no shortage of unlicensed music online.

This content is obtained in a number of ways but some of the key sources are effectively right under record labels’ noses.

Sites including YouTube, Spotify and Deezer are all exploitable and with the right know-how, music can be downloaded from them and permanently stored on users’ devices.

This escalating ‘ripping’ phenomenon is now viewed as a more serious threat to the industry than traditional piracy, mostly since it eats away at streaming revenues. On that basis, it’s no surprise that fresh legal action is underway in the United States.

A lawsuit reportedly filed Friday (but not yet publicly available at the time of writing) has Universal, Warner Bros, Sony and other major record labels targeting FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com, Billboard reports.

That these two portals have effectively become targets for the RIAA isn’t much of a surprise. Last year the music group submitted its list of “notorious” piracy websites to the U.S. Government, noting that it’s tracking 70 ‘ripping’ sites while detailing several, FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com included.

“The overall popularity of these sites and the staggering volume of traffic it attracts evidences the enormous damage being inflicted on the U.S. record industry,” the RIAA wrote.

The RIAA’s claim that these sites generate huge volumes of traffic is beyond dispute. According to SimilarWeb data, FLVTO.biz is a monster attracting more than 94 million visits per month, making it the #322 most popular site in the world. With almost 12% of that traffic coming from the United States, it’s no wonder the RIAA is concerned.

While 2conv.com is a smaller site, it too is extremely successful. Every month the site pulls in around 23 million visitors, giving it a global ranking of #1,021. Unlike FLVTO, 2conv is more popular in Poland, Brazil, and Italy than it is in the United States.

It’s reported that both sites are operated out of Russia but according to a report filed by the IIPA earlier this year, they’re actually connected and serving MP3s to the public from servers in Germany.

“The recording industry also notes many stream-ripping services believed to be sourced from Russia including Flvto.biz, 2Conv and Fly2mp3.org (all three are essentially the same service operating from different domains). The sites provide downloads of converted YouTube videos to users as MP3 audio files (from servers in Germany),” the IIPA wrote.

The hosting position doesn’t appear to have changed much since the IIPA report was filed in February. FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com are hosted on consecutive IP addresses handled by German-based hosting company Hetzner Online GmbH.

Supporting the claim that they’re connected by infrastructure, both sites provide the same email address in the event copyright holders want to get in touch. It’s reported that both the RIAA and IFPI did that but without success.

“These sites have no place in today’s music market where fans have access to millions of songs from dozens of legitimate services that pay creators and value their work, all at the tap of a finger,” the RIAA said in a comment.

“This action should serve as an unmistakable warning to operators of similar sites that schemes to rob music creators and profit from the theft of their music will not be tolerated.”

How these platforms will respond to the filing of a lawsuit in the United States isn’t clear. In their respective ‘Copyright Claims’ sections (which are identical), both point out that their cooperation under the DMCA is purely voluntary.

“Although we are not subject to United States law, we voluntarily comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Pursuant to Title 17, Section 512(c)(2) of the United States Code, if you believe that any of your copyrighted material is being infringed on the Website, we have designated an agent to receive notifications of claimed copyright infringement,” the sites state.

Perhaps surprisingly, both also have repeat infringer policies which note (in block capitals and in bold) that “any user for whose material we receive three good-faith and effective complaints within any contiguous six-month period will have his grant of use of the website terminated.”

Despite the major labels filing a copyright infringement suit against YouTube-MP3 in 2016, a YouTube-ripper case has never gone to trial in the United States. That case was settled confidentially, with YouTube-MP3 handing over its domain to the RIAA.

This lack of legal clarity previously prompted the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to inform the USTR that not all stream ripping sites facilitate copyright infringement by definition.

“RIAA’s discussion of ‘stream-ripping’ websites misstates copyright law. Websites that simply allow users to extract the audio track from a user-selected online video are not ‘illegal sites’ and are not liable for copyright infringement, unless they engage in additional conduct that meets the definition of infringement,” the EFF wrote.

While the case never went to trial, it seems unlikely that YouTube-MP3 would have survived the claims of direct infringement leveled at it. It was reported that YouTube-MP3 stored converted MP3 files on its servers long term so while the ripping and conversion may have resided in a gray area, the storage of infringing files would have been tougher to defend.

At the time of writing, both FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com remain online.

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This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Avengers: Infinity War, released in a high quality format last week, 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	(6)	Avengers: Infinity War	8.7 / trailer
2	(1)	Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (subbed HDRip)	6.5 / trailer
3	(4)	Rampage	6.3 / trailer
4	(2)	Escape Plan 2: Hades	3.9 / trailer
5	(3)	Sanju	8.8 / trailer
6	(…)	Overboard	7.9 / trailer
7	(10)	Deadpool 2 (Subbed Rip)	8.0 / trailer
8	(8)	Ready Player One	7.7 / trailer
9	(9)	Raazi	7.9 / trailer
10	(…)	First Reformed	7.5 / trailer

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Over the past few years, we’ve featured our fair share of bizarre DMCA takedown articles.

Most of these boil down to mistakes by automated bots or plain incompetence. More recently, however, we’ve started to notice an influx of more coordinated DMCA abuse.

Scammers, posing as legitimate rightsholders and reporting agencies, are asking Google to remove hundreds of thousands if not millions of URLs. Many of these links do indeed point to pirate sites, but copyright enforcement is not the main reason why they’re sent.

Instead, these takedown requests appear to be generated with the sole purpose of downranking ‘competitors.’

While many of these notices are seemingly sent on behalf of well-known companies, there are some clear red flags. They use variations of names that have not been used before, such as ‘Walt Disney LTD,’ and generate confusing entries in Google’s transparency report.

For example, Walt Disney Company reportedly sent a takedown notice on behalf of the Russian company WebControl, instead of the other way around. This notice states that the reported links infringe the copyrights of the film Looking Glass, which as far as we know is not linked to Disney.

There are thousands of these scammy reports where “impostors” pretend to be copyright holders and reporting agencies. Quite a few are targeted at Russian domains and sites and are apparently sent from Russia, but the problem goes further than that.

There are also notices that list one allegedly pirated film and then ask Google to remove dozens or hundreds of URLs from a single site.

While it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between legitimate and scam requests, something clearly looks off.

Suspicious notice

These seemingly fake notices haven’t gone unnoticed. There is a thread in the Russian Google webmaster forum where site owners discuss this, calling out numerous alleged scammers.

Many of the victims are pirate sites, which makes it a sensitive issue. However, we’ve seen a complaint from a furniture store as well, accusing a competitor of taking down its links, and those of other colleagues.

While many of the affected sites are Russian, we also noticed various suspicious notices supposedly sent by UK anti-piracy group MUSO. We reached out to the company for clarification, and MUSO informed us that these are indeed fake.

“Google advises that as they identify these submissions as impersonations, no action is taken by them on any of the URLs submitted. Further information may be requested of them for specific claims via a formal legal process,” MUSO told us.

Another reporting agency that confirmed the fake notices is the French-based company Blue Efficience. In particular, they noticed an influx of fake reports in the name of “Anti-piracy net” but their own name is being abused as well now.

For example, this notice they supposedly sent on behalf of Netflix is fake, so is this Paramount Pictures notice, this one from 20th Century Fox, and many, many more.

“Recently some people started to send notifications using our company name, and we suspect that these impersonators are the same people who were using the name ‘Anti-piracy net’,” Blue Efficience’s managing Director Thierry Chevillard tells us.

While Google is aware of the problem and flags some of these notices as fake, not all are recognized as such. This means that potentially millions of URLs are removed by scammers who don’t own any of the copyrighted content but are just looking to downrank sites of competitors.

In recent weeks the issue also made its way to the international webmaster forums. The owner of iKinoHD.cc flagged several problematic submissions in his best English.

“Dear webmasters and the administration of googles I ask for help, in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan. Mosquitoes abuse the name of DMSA and remove all references from competitors from the [search results],” the webmaster writes, adding that “this has already been going on since February.”

The site owner says he even contacted the copyright holder, who reportedly confirmed that scammers were responsible.

The thread in question turned into a discussion as to whether alleged pirate sites should be able to complain about false takedown notices. However, there has been no official response from Google yet. One top contributor in the forums notes that “law in the US is what it is” and advises people who are affected to file a counter-notice.

We have also reached out to Google for a comment but after more than a week we have yet to hear back. Meanwhile, the issue persists. And while Google does flag some imposters, many others still get through.

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 confirmed that BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the uTorrent and Mainline clients, had been acquired by TRON.

This week TRON founder Justin Sun revealed that he’s considering building some kind of system, presumably into his uTorrent and Mainline clients, that will reward people if they’re sharing particularly well.

The theory is that if people are incentivized to seed for longer, they will share more and content will stay available for much longer. The big question is whether things will turn out that way once currency starts flying around.

Right now, the vast amount of sharing carried out on public BitTorrent networks is motivated by very little other than obtaining content. This is because large volumes of users jump onto torrents with the intention of getting whatever content they need and deleting the torrent soon after it reaches 100%.

Of course, they can’t do this alone, so other people just like them assist by default, with everyone’s BitTorrent clients busily uploading at the same time as they’re downloading. Others in the swarm, the rarer ‘hardcore’ seeders, stick around much longer than everyone else, making sure that the content is shared among all and then staying after everyone else has gone home.

So what happens one day, when these generous guys turn on their torrent clients and find a button saying: “Get your sharing benefits here”? Once they realize that there’s money (virtual or otherwise) to be made, it’s likely that many – if they can benefit anonymously – will take the opportunity. Why wouldn’t they? It’s absolutely free.

But there are issues. The happy volunteer – who up until now didn’t ask for a penny – is now signed up to a business relationship with this torrent client. He seeds a lot and he gets paid, but suddenly he has a robot boss counting the beans. It’s a significant shift in culture for what is currently a casual, altruistic, and effective system.

But let’s forget all that for a moment. Anyone can get paid for seeding you say? Right, let’s crunch numbers because this might be a decent business proposition. I’m awful with figures but shall we just get a couple of dozen fat-piped seedboxes on the case for the first month and see how this goes?

The point is that if there is money to be made, every man and his dog will want a piece of the action. Sadly, however, it’s likely that many will leave disappointed after being bullied out by the serious players with the heavy bandwidth artillery.

A similar phenomenon can be witnessed on some smaller private trackers when a few big guns step in with their fast seedboxes and no one with a regular connection is able to build a decent sharing ratio due to a shortage of leechers. Of course, public swarms are bigger but that just means more bandwidth for the professionals to supply.

This problem could be countered by not paying seeders too much but if the rewards aren’t useful, people might not bother to sign up in the first place. It will be a delicate balancing act for sure.

A more important question, perhaps, is how the introduction of financial incentives will affect the mindset of the regular user. Of course, some will try to jump aboard the paid seeding scheme too, but of those who don’t, what will their perception of the rewards system be?

Will they simply ignore it while grabbing content and seeding as usual, or will they suddenly perceive seeding as a business arrangement and therefore justification for ending all of their ‘unpaid’ torrents at 100%? After all, people are professionally seeding now while getting rewarded, so why bother to contribute?

Beyond the few details announced this week, we have no idea what plans TRON has for BitTorrent but considering its focus on currency, you can be sure that any plan involves generating wealth at some point. Until now, BitTorrent Inc. has done that too but they have never put the act of sharing at the heart of the action.

That the torrent sharing mechanism itself is being touted as part of TRON’s plans has the potential to stir up a hornets’ nest, particularly among ‘free’ file-sharing advocates. Not to mention that the protocol wasn’t designed with financial benefits complicating the formula in mind.

Then there’s the monitoring. If people are to get paid, their contribution to the TRON/BitTorrent ecosystem will need to be tracked and reported back to the TRON system. Only when all this data gathering has been carried out will anyone get paid, even if it is in an experimental currency. Is this the kind of intrusion most BitTorrent users expect?

The final big question relates to where this business model goes after paid sharing. If enough users can be incentivized to earn TRX tokens by seeding, isn’t it logical to presume they’ll want to start spending them too?

Sun has already hinted at the possibility of some kind of content marketplace where currency could presumably get spent. However, is anyone confident that these tokens won’t, at some point, be handed over in exchange for faster download speeds or other file-sharing features?

There seems to be a real risk that the introduction of financial reward into a previously free sharing equation will only encourage selfish behavior among others. That’s the last thing that the BitTorrent ecosystem needs so TRON will need to be careful where they take this and how quickly.

Of course, if things get too restrictive people will be free to jump ship onto other clients such as qBittorrent or Deluge, which will still work no matter what TRON decides to do. But could there be issues there too?

If one chooses to be alarmist and take a worst case scenario, there’s always the prospect of future changes that might see uTorrent favoring other uTorrent clients over those offered by outsiders. Hopefully, that will never happen, but few people believed that getting paid for seeding would ever be a thing either, so all options are open.

Finally, (and being rather more positive for a moment) there’s always the possibility that TRON is the shot in the arm BitTorrent needed. Perhaps it’ll be a roaring capitalist success with none of the downsides of other financially-motivated markets. We’ll have to wait to find out.

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

Sci-Hub has often been referred to as “The Pirate Bay of Science,” but that description really sells the site short.

While both sites are helping the public to access copyrighted content without permission, Sci-Hub has also become a crucial tool that arguably helps the progress of science.

The site allows researchers to bypass expensive paywalls so they can read articles written by their fellow colleagues. The information in these ‘pirated’ articles is then used to provide the foundation for future research.

What the site does is illegal, according to the law, but Sci-Hub is praised by thousands of researchers and academics around the world. In particular, those who don’t have direct access to the expensive journals but aspire to excel in their academic field.

While publishers such as Elsevier convinced the courts that Sci-Hub is a force of evil, many scientists see it as an extremely useful tool. They don’t want research locked up behind paywalls, they want it to be read, to inspire.

Pro tip

Under the current system these researchers are often put in a position where they have to give up their copyrights, so large publishers such as Elsevier can exploit them. The researchers don’t see a penny of this money. What they see is their hard work ending up behind a paywall, out of public view.

It’s this system that prompted Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan to start Sci-Hub. She believes that it’s wrong to use copyright as a tool to shield important research from the public and hopes to tear down the paywalls.

“When Sci-Hub became known, I thought that it will provide a good case against copyright law. When the law prevents science to develop, that law must be repealed,” Elbakyan wrote in a recent blog post.

However, this was easier said than done. With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, the publishers fought back.

“Instead, Sci-Hub was quickly banished as an ‘illegal’ solution and projects like Unpaywall emerged and started promoting themselves as a ‘legal’ alternatives to Sci-Hub.”

Unpaywall is a useful search tool that helps researchers to find articles that are already freely accessible. However, this is not a Sci-Hub alternative, according to Elbakyan, as it does nothing to free the locked up research

Real change can only come when copyright law changes, she argues.

On closer inspection that may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. According to the US Constitution, copyright is meant to aid the progress of arts and science. Some would argue that Sci-Hub does exactly that. However, the US courts disagree.

Elbakyan is not giving up though. She wants the law to change and encourages anyone to support this goal, by supporting their local Pirate party, for example.

“Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science,” she notes.

While Sci-Hub’s call might not sway lawmakers right away, the platform continues to make an impact. Every month, the site helps researchers to access millions of articles, which are used as the building blocks for new researchers.

These researchers publicly share the latest working Sci-Hub domain names among each other and gladly pass on Sci-Hub links to those in need.

In fact, Sci-Hub has become such a commonly used tool for some scientists that they include Sci-Hub URLs in the references sections of their published papers. Ironically, there are even links to Sci-Hub in papers published by Elsevier, showing how dangerously useful it is.

To circle back to the Pirate Bay comparison, that would be the same as Netflix linking to copyright infringing torrents of other films in their movie descriptions…

Sci-Hub references on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect…

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