For as long as computer software has existed in commerical form, pirates have been keen to reap the benefits without handing over cash.

This is particularly true for video games which have been enthusiastically copied for several decades no matter whether they’ve been made available on tape, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs or digital downloads.

Stopping pirates is no easy task although that doesn’t stop companies from trying. Denuvo is perhaps the most recognizable system and one of the most fiendish. However, there are other ways of stopping pirates in their tracks without completely alienating your customer base.

Earlier this week TF received a tip about a torrent on The Pirate Bay. It links to the city builder game ‘Depraved‘ which is ordinarily available on Steam. Interestingly, the top comment on the torrent indicates that the release may not work as intended.

“This copy contains the developers DRM whereby after building a warehouse, it will start to slowly fill up with pirate hats which are irremovable thereby making the warehouse slowly useless,” the comment reads.

Depraved is created by Germany-based development team Evil Bite, which was founded in 2015 and consists of just two individuals, Danilo and David Tondl.

Speaking with TF, Evil Bite confirms that the claimed ‘pirate hat’ DRM does indeed exist.

“The pirate hats protection is real. It is a really cheap protection, but what can I say, it works,” Danilo says.

“We wanted to give the player a kind of demo. So the game works a bit until the pirate hats appear with a nice tooltip ‘Please support our 2 man development team’.”

Despite describing the protection as “cheap”, Danilo doesn’t want to reveal too much about how it works. However, the idea wasn’t to completely stop pirates but to let them get to a point where they’ve at least had a chance to test the game, hopefully in advance of a genuine purchase. This also involved fooling those who remove the protection from games.

“The protection waits in the background and ‘blocks’ or informs the player later in the game. That way the cracker thinks: ‘oh, ok it is working’ and moves on to the next title. I guess no cracker has time to play the game a couple of hours to test if there is some other protection,” he reveals.

The practice of using copy protection to convert potential pirates is probably the only type of DRM that isn’t universally pilloried by legitimate and pirate players alike. Evil Bite is pragmatic about the situation and hopes that its light-hearted approach is able to win over those considering a purchase.

“We really believe that there are people in the world who don’t have the money for such a game but on the other side there are people have the money but never bought a game because it is so easy to ‘steal’ it and in the end of the day it is our money we are losing,” Danilo notes.

“For us this DRM is more a joke than a real DRM and ‘money saver’. And like I said earlier, it is more like a demo. A lot of pirates want to test a game first before they buy it even with the Steam refund system.

“Is it worth it? I don’t know. We had at least one player who thought it was funny and bought the game because of it,” he concludes.

Danilo is the first to admit that the concept of dropping some pranks into a copy-protection method isn’t new. Several other developers have done similar things in the past, with varying levels of success (1,2).

What’s absolutely certain, however, is that this kind of approach towards copy-protection is generally better tolerated than that taken by the infamous Denuvo.

With the system criticized for reportedly being resource-hungry, the company behind Denuvo recently resorted to filing a criminal complaint against Bulgaria-based cracker Voksi.

Until last week, Voksi had been dismantling Denuvo’s efforts with relative ease so if nothing else, the company’s actions suggest that there is actually no technological solution to the piracy problem. It also means that its piracy problems are likely to return, sooner rather than later.

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

During the summer of 2012, the FBI took down Appbucket, Applanet, and SnappzMarket, some of the largest pirate app stores at the time.

In the years that followed several people connected to the Android app sites were arrested and indicted, resulting in prison sentences for some.

Aside from the initial announcement, the cases have been handled relatively quietly by the US Government. We can report, however, that after six years all cases that we know of have now been closed.

The last remaining case was that of Gary Sharp, who was indicted in two separate cases.

The Massachusetts man, who’s now in his early thirties, worked as “super moderator” on Applanet’s servers and Facebook page, for which he received a video game as compensation. At SnappzMarket he had a more important role, dealing with finances and the administrative side of the operation.

Sharp never denied his involvement with any of these sites and pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit criminal copyright infringement in both cases. In addition, he provided the FBI with detailed background information and testified in the trial of another defendant.

Based on this cooperative stance, Sharp’s attorney requested a lower sentence, which was granted. A few weeks ago, he was sentenced to a six months prison term, which started on July 14th.

This means that, without any appeals, all pirate app store cases have now been closed.

While the enforcement efforts led to convictions in most instances, the Department of Justice isn’t publicly celebrating. Perhaps that’s due to the stories of the defendants being littered with personal problems and them being far from the hardcore criminals some might expect.

The convicts did, however, help to distribute hundreds of thousands of pirated apps. And while they haven’t made millions, the Government found that they caused substantial losses to the respective copyright holders.

For example, a defendant in Appbucket case, Mr. Blocker, earned $7,222 from his involvement with the site. However, he was held liable for over $750,000 in damages. The defendant faced years in prison, but he eventually received a sentence of two years probation earlier this year.

Two other operators of Appbucket were also sentenced to probation this year, while the founder received a prison sentence of a year and a day. Two Applanet defendants walked free, while two Snapzmarket operators previously received prison sentences of 16 and 46 months.

Most cases ended in successful convictions which will likely deter others from starting similar sites. However, as is often the case with pirate ventures, there will always be people still willing to take the risk.

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

For reasons best known to rightsholders internationally, site-blocking is now one of the most favored anti-piracy mechanisms.

Five years ago, Russia decided that it too would join the movement, hoping to put a dent in rampant online sharing of copyrighted content.

August 1, 2013, new legislation came into force which allowed rightsholders to block video content that had been posted online illegally. A year later, the same protections were extended to other kinds of intellectual property, excluding photographic works.

In the months that followed, it became clear that some sites were being reported for copyright infringement on multiple occasions. This led to calls for repeat offenders to receive special treatment from the courts. On May 1, 2015, new rules made it possible for sites to be permanently blocked. Thousands of platforms have been affected.

Last October yet more legislative amendments came into force. These allowed rightsholders to target so-called ‘mirrors’, platforms that are functionally similar to sites that have already been blocked but manage to evade that fate. According to figures supplied by telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor and published by Russia’s RBC, 2,421 mirror sites have been blocked under the legislation.

Just a month later during November 2017, Russia tightened the law up once again, this time targeting VPN and anonymizer services that provide access to blocked sites. These must now connect to a national register of blocked sites to ensure they don’t facilitate access to such platforms. If they fail to do so, they can also be blocked.

Search engines haven’t escaped the clutches of the authorities either. They too must interface with government systems listing blocked sites in order to prevent any from appearing in search engine results. After a period of uncertainty as to how this should be carried out, search engines should be fully compliant by the end of September.

During the five years between Aug 1, 2013 and Aug 1, 2018, Roscomnadzor reports that it received 3,702 blocking orders from the Moscow City Court following 8,454 complaints by rightsholders.

“In total, the Moscow City Court’s rulings and applications by rightholders concerned 116,298 sites or pages of websites,” the watchdog reports.

“After receiving a notification from Roskomnadzor to prevent violation of the law, the vast majority of Internet resources remove pirated copies of films, music, etc.”

Roscomnadzor says that access is currently limited to around 8% (5,058) of web pages that previously had measures taken against them. The owners of 60,834 other web pages independently took measures to restrict access to pirated content, without waiting to be blocked by the authorities.

According to RBC, the Gazprom-Media owned channel TNT was the most active rightsholders over the past five years. The broadcaster filed 447 applications at the Moscow City Court for interim measures and 489 full claims.

The majority of respondents in cases handled by the Court were foreign hosting companies. However, getting these companies to appear in Russia seems to have proven impossible in the majority of cases.

“Neither foreign hosting providers, nor the overwhelming majority of their domestic colleagues bothered to attend the sessions of the Moscow City Court. For example, from August 2013 to August 2014, only three cases were recorded, when the defendant appeared in court,” RBC reports.

The defendant listed on most occasions in connection with blocking efforts was US-based CDN company Cloudflare. The company was named in 554 lawsuits with a further 300 relating to Russia-based hoster, uCoz and British Virgin Islands-based Compubyte. Hosting provider Inferno Solutions appeared in third place.

But despite many thousands of actions, it appears that copyright holders remain unhappy with the system.

“There are results, but there is no effectiveness,” says Dmitry Sychugov, general director of Amedia TV, a company that filed 169 applications for interim measures plus 60 lawsuits.

“In technical terms, [tools for rightsholders] are far behind the advanced solutions of pirates. The majority of users still turn to pirated sites for viewing video content.”

With other rightsholders describing the current system as effective as a “sieve”, Roscomnadzor is trying to remain upbeat.

“For five years anti-piracy legislation was supplemented by new norms, the implementation of which increased the effectiveness of copyright protection on the Internet,” the watchdog concludes.

It’s interesting to note that despite Russia’s site and content blocking system being one of the toughest in the world, rightsholders still aren’t happy. Whether additional legislative measures will move into place during the next five years will remain to be seen but until then, content will continue to leak through the mesh, at pace.

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

As one of the most popular consumer items in the whole world, music is important to billions of citizens globally. It’s also surrounded by a giant industry that for years has complained bitterly about online piracy.

More recently, however, there have been signs that illegally grabbing music from the Internet is not as prevalent as it once was. A new report from market research and data analytics firm YouGov only adds weight to that apparent shift.

The headline stat from the company’s Music Report is that just one in ten Brits are currently downloading music illegally. That’s down from almost double (18%) that figure five short years ago.

While this is already a decent reduction, YouGov says that the 10% figure is set to further decrease in the years to come.

More than six out of ten (63%) illegal music downloaders predict they’ll still be pirating in five years’ time but a significant 22% believe they won’t. Just over a third (36%) acknowledge that using unofficial sources for music is becoming more difficult but the summary doesn’t offer reasons why.

YouGov reports that the decrease in piracy can in part be attributed to the rise of legal streaming services such as Spotify. Indeed, its survey reveals that more than six out of ten (63%) former Brit music pirates now rely on a legal streaming service for their fix.

“It is now easier to stream music than to pirate it. And the cost is not prohibitive,” one respondent said. “Spotify has everything from new releases to old songs, it filled the vacuum, there was no longer a need for using [an] unverified source,” added another.

While the shift to legal services is certainly encouraging for the labels, millions of music consumers still obtain their content illegally.

According to YouGov, just over half of this group (51%) say that “exclusives” restricted to a single platform are an irritating factor with 44% claiming that they only download illegally when they can’t find the content elsewhere.

“While illegal downloads still present a significant challenge to the music industry, there appears to be some light at the end of the tunnel,” says Justin Marshall, Associate Director, YouGov.

“Our research reveals a change in behavior, with those that previously attained music by unlawful means now being enticed by the low costs and ease of use associated with streaming.”

Marshall says that since consumers are increasingly satisfied with legal services, trawling the Internet for illegal copies is no longer high on their agenda.

“Whether or not streaming is what finally banishes illegal downloads remains to be seen, but there are encouraging signs,” he concludes.

In an effort to appreciate the nuances behind the figures, TorrentFreak asked YouGov for a copy of the report. Sadly we were told that it won’t appear publicly since it’s part of a wider study being made available to clients.

That leaves the question of how “stream-ripping” (downloading music from sites like YouTube onto a user’s machine) fits into this overall decrease in music piracy. While the record labels once considered file-sharing sites and services as the work of the devil, today they’re much more likely to be heard complaining about stream-ripping and how this affects revenues.

It’s not clear whether stream-ripping is considered an illegal download as far as the report goes. However, there are plenty of signs that downloading music in this manner is gaining traction among younger people for whom YouTube is often the default music source. The labels are extremely keen to bring this kind of activity to an end.

All that said and despite the persistent piracy problem, the popularity of legal services, especially among pirates, cannot be ignored.

A report released by MUSO found that 91% of all pirates already have a streaming subscription, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify or Apple Music. That’s a higher rate than their non-pirating counterparts, of which less than 80% subscribe to legal services.

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

For more than a decade, copyright holders have been sending takedown notices to ISPs to alert them that their subscribers are sharing copyrighted material.

Under US law, providers must terminate the accounts of repeat infringers “in appropriate circumstances” and increasingly they are being held to this standard.

Cox Communications has been one of the prime targets thus far. A federal court previously ordered the ISP to pay $25 million in damages to music publisher BMG. While this was overturned on appeal, where a retrial was issued, it’s not in safe waters yet.

This week Cox’s problems doubled after a group of high profile record labels filed a new piracy liability lawsuit against the Intenet provider. Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music, Warner Bros Records, and several others accuse the company of turning a blind eye to pirating subscribers.

The labels argue that Cox has knowingly contributed to the piracy activities of its subscribers and that it substantially profited from this activity. All at the expense of the record labels and other rightsholders.

“Indeed, for years, Cox deliberately refused to take reasonable measures to curb its customers from using its Internet services to infringe on others’ copyrights — even once Cox became aware of particular customers engaging in specific, repeated acts of infringement,” the complaint reads.

To stop the infringing activities, the music companies sent hundreds of thousands of notices to the Internet provider. This didn’t help much, they claim, noting that Cox actively limited the number of notices it processed.

“Rather than working with Plaintiffs to curb this massive infringement, Cox unilaterally imposed an arbitrary cap on the number of infringement notices it would accept from copyright holders, thereby willfully blinding itself to any of its subscribers’ infringements that exceeded its ‘cap’.”

Cox has previously stressed that it implemented a “thirteen-strike policy” to deal with the issue. According to the labels, however, the BMG lawsuit has already shown that this was a sham.

The labels stress that the ISP never permanently terminated any subscribers. Instead, it would apply a so-called “soft termination” where subscribers’ accounts were reinstated swiftly after they were disconnected.

“The reason for this is simple: rather than stop its subscribers’ unlawful activity, Cox prioritized its own profits over its legal obligations. Cox’s profits increased dramatically as a result of the massive infringement that it facilitated, yet Cox publicly told copyright holders that it needed to reduce the number of staff it had dedicated to anti-piracy for budget reasons,” the complaint notes.

Since the case revolves around repeat copyright infringers, the labels only sue over tracks and compositions that were infringed by subscribers who’ve been warned before. The complaint further notes that at least 20,000 Cox subscribers can be categorized as blatant repeat infringers, some of whom have been ‘warned’ more than 100 times.

Repeat warnings

According to the record labels, it is clear that Cox intentionally ignored these repeated copyright infringements. As such, they believe that the ISP is liable for both contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.

As compensation for the claimed losses, the companies demand statutory or actual damages, as well as coverage for their attorney fees and other costs.

This could get quite expensive. The complaint lists well over 10,000 musical works, which means that the potential claim is immense. With a statutory maximum of $150,000 per work, the case could, in theory, cost Cox more than $1.5 billion.

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A copy of the complaint filed at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is available here (pdf).

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