After years of criticism from both international and local rightsholders, in 2013 the Russian government decided to get tough on Internet piracy.

Sites engaged in Internet piracy can now find themselves blocked by ISPs, who render them inaccessible to local citizens.

Several years on, Russia is still grappling with a huge piracy problem that refuses to go away. It has been blocking thousands of sites that allegedly engage in copyright infringement. Some of the blocks are lifted when sites comply but for those that repeatedly flaunt the rules, tougher punishment lies in wait.

Sites that continuously offer unauthorized content or links to that content can now be subjected to what is known locally as the “permanent lock”. Infamous torrent site RuTracker, for example, has been permanently blocked in Russia for some time but ever since its addition the list has been growing exponentially. This week the scale of the effort was revealed.

According to local telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor, more than 3,400 online resources where “multimedia content was repeatedly and improperly placed in violation of copyright” have been placed on Russia’s national Internet blacklist.

The sites and services have been blocked on the orders of two authorities, the Moscow City Court and the Ministry of Communications.

The Court, which handed down 302 blocking decisions, deals with cases against torrent trackers, streaming sites and music services based on complaints from rightsholders. When sites are determined to be non-compliant and/or repeat infringers, they are ordered to be blocked.

The Ministry, which handed down 2,286 decisions, deals with mirror and clones of sites that have been previously blocked by the City Court. Whenever such a site appears, to facilitate access to RuTracker, for example, it can be dealt with relatively swiftly.

The 3,400 permanently blocked resources are also forbidden from appearing in search results, a point highlighted by Roscomnadzor.

“The search engines Yandex, Mail.ru, Rambler, Sputnik and Google that have been operating in Russia have stopped issuing information about pirated Internet resources blocked on an ongoing basis,” the telecoms watchdog announced.

Earlier this month, Roscomnadzor revealed that efforts to block pirate resources increased in 2018, with the watchdog acting upon hundreds of decisions from the Moscow City Court.

“During the first half of 2018, Roscomnadzor received 791 decisions of the Moscow City Court on the adoption of preliminary provisional measures [blocking] aimed at protecting copyright and related rights of rights holders on the Internet,” Roscomnadzor revealed.

This represents an increase of 36% over the same period in 2017, where 507 decisions were handed down. Thus far this year, 567 decisions have concerned movies with 89 relating to protecting the rights of TV companies.

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Anti-piracy firms often portray copyright infringers as thieves that must be stopped or eradicated.

However, the people at UK firm MUSO have a different take on the piracy problem. With funding from the local Government, they’re offering classic takedown tools, but the company prefers to frame piracy as an opportunity rather than a threat.

This became apparent once again when UK telecoms regulator OFCOM released new figures this week. According to the agency, online subscription services including Netflix and Amazon Prime have, for the first time, overtaken satellite and cable TV.

This shows once again that the Internet is transforming the way people consume media. Moving from linear viewing to an on-demand model is something many ‘torrenters’ already envisioned more than a decade ago.

It’s a landmark change that certainly shouldn’t be ignored. This is something Chris Anderson, MUSO’s Head of Film & TV, wholeheartedly agrees with, albeit with a major footnote.

“Technology has completely transformed the way people are able to watch TV and the days of being tied to a TV schedule are well and truly behind us, with streaming services now officially the preference for the majority of viewers,” he says.

“The word ‘officially’ is key – because what these figures from Ofcom don’t take into account is the many hundreds of thousands of people who are streaming TV in the UK through unlicensed services and sites.”

When piracy is taken into account, online streaming overtook traditional TV viewing a long time ago.

There’s a general idea that legitimate streaming services are driving people away from pirate sites. However, that’s a misperception. While more and more pirates have a Netflix subscription, piracy remains alive and well.

“The idea that services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have eradicated piracy is a fallacy. Our figures show that global piracy has increased year-on-year, in spite of the rise of streaming services. The UK had 4,776,616,717 total visits to film and TV piracy sites in 2017 alone,” Anderson says.

MUSO encourages UK broadcasters not to fixate on the competition from legitimate streaming services alone, but to consider the potential pirate audience as well.

“Piracy audiences are one of the great untapped pools of wealth – they have extremely high intent to access content but are often simply unable to. Finding ways to access this audience could be the secret bringing higher profits back to broadcasting,” the company adds.

Of course, MUSO doesn’t make these comments without having a stake in the matter. The company previously launched a piracy marketing platform, which helps content creators to connect with and convert pirates.

That said, it’s a refreshing message compared to the usual stream of legal threats, crime reports and malware warnings.

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So-called copyright trolling in the file-sharing space involves copyright holders claiming their rights have been infringed before heading to court to demand the identities of subscribers behind IP addresses.

Once these identities have been obtained, law firms affiliated with trolls write to the person whose name appears on the ISP bill in order to demand cash settlements to make supposed lawsuits go away. It’s a lucrative but extremely controversial practice.

This type of activity got underway in Finland during 2013, taking hold during 2014, with a notable escalation in 2015 and 2016.

Early 2017, local media sources reported that up to 60,000 people could be in line to receive cash demands from Helsinki-based law firm Hedman Partners, something which prompted the government to conduct an investigation (pdf) with help from the authorities.

Now, however, Hedman Partners have a related matter to deal with, one that’s seen a lawyer at the firm accused of misconduct due to the way some private Internet subscriber data was obtained from ISPs and subsequently handled.

According to the Finnish Bar Association, lawyer Joni Hatanmaa and Hedman Partners applied to the Market Court for access to data held by ISPs, to enable it to send settlement letters to Internet users. The Copyright Act allows rightsholders and their representatives to apply for this right on a case-by-case basis.

However, it appears that after applying to obtain personal information on behalf of one client, Hatanmaa and Hedman Partners then used that same information to identify subscribers who had allegedly infringed the rights of other clients also managed by the law firm.

This means that when an IP address appeared on lists of those sharing multiple clients’ copyright works, the law firm made only one application to obtain the alleged infringer’s personal details instead of starting a new disclosure process for each client.

When ISP subscriber data is handed over to a third-party, it is delivered on the basis that it will be used in a very narrow set of circumstances and certainly not for the benefit of many entertainment industry groups scouring the web for infringement.

This breach of copyright law, the Board found, was not in keeping with the standards expected by the Bar. But, according to Joni Hatanmaa himself, the problems actually arose due to different interpretations of the law.

“In this case, the Board of Supervisors considered that the application process should have been handled in a different way under copyright law,” he told Helsingin Sanomat.

“The decision has made it clear that the law has the potential for a wide range of interpretations.”

In any event, the lawyer says, the cases against infringers will continue. Plenty are still underway and the project continues to expand.

“If copyright infringement has been violated in peer-to-peer networks, those responsible are still liable. The remark was purely a matter of interpreting the law in the application process as to how the application should be made in order to give people full responsibility,” he said.

A second complaint against the law firm, in respect of wording in letters sent to alleged infringers, was also considered by the Board but was deemed to be low priority.

The decision of the Disciplinary Board is not yet final and can be taken to the Helsinki Court of Appeal. Meanwhile, it seems that the threat-letter model will continue. Ahto Apajalahti, a board member at digital rights group Electronic Frontier Finland, informs TF that a change in the law is required to bring ‘trolling’ to an end.

“The Ministry of Education and Culture doesn’t want to change the law. However, both the Ministry and the Market Court are uneasy about the vast scope of these activities. The peak year so far for these letters was 2016, when letters were sent to tens of thousands of people,” Apajalahti explains.

“This unease has been reflected in the decisions by the Market Court in 2017 and 2018 which established some limits. Basically it is now more difficult for Hedman Partners and others to get people’s contact information. They have to show more evidence than before and as a result they get far fewer contact details than they apply for.”

In a recent case, Hedman requested the identities behind 1,860 IP addresses but got only 30. Still, the company continues to send letters to those whose details were obtained in 2017 and 2016 so the company still has plenty to go at, regardless of the negative ruling from the Finnish Bar Association.

“This violation case where Hedman was reprimanded is mostly a technical matter and I don’t think it changes the situation at all. Hedman just have to change their working procedures a bit,” Apajalahti concludes.

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Emulators are handy tools for people who want to play games on platforms other than the usual console they’re intended for.

These are particularly useful for retro games and consoles, which are no longer sold, allowing users to enjoy the games they were hooked on decades ago.

However, many game publishers are less content with this practice. Nintendo, in particular, has repeatedly called out ROMS and emulator sites, both in and outside the United States.

This week, Nintendo took two of these sites to court. In a complaint filed at a federal court in Arizona, the game publisher sues LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co for copyright and trademark infringement.

Both sites are believed to be operated by Jacob Mathias and his Arizona company Mathias Designs LLC. They offer access to a wide variety of ROMs, including many Nintendo games.

“The LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites are among the most open and notorious online hubs for pirated video games,” Nintendo writes in the complaint.

“Through the LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites, Defendants reproduce, distribute, publicly perform and display a staggering number of unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s video games, all without Nintendo’s permission.”

In addition to the copyrighted games, the sites also distribute proprietary BIOS software, while using trademarked logos and characters, Nintendo notes.

While some ROMs sites may be hobby projects, Nintendo sees these two sites as professional operations that profit from its works.

“Defendants are not casual gamers but are instead sophisticated parties with extensive knowledge of Nintendo’s intellectual property and the video game industry more generally,” the company notes.

LoveROMS complaint

Through the lawsuit, which also lists a count of unfair competition, Nintendo hopes to shut both sites down. The company requests statutory damages of $150,000 per infringing Nintendo game and up to $2,000,000 for each trademark infringement.

This means that, with more than 140 copyrighted titles and 40 trademarks on the record, theoretical damages could go up to a staggering $100 million.

Nintendo further requests a permanent injunction ordering the sites to stop their infringing activities while handing over domain names to the game publisher. At the same time, Nintendo wants the operator of the sites to reveal the sources for the infringing ROMs.

The defendant has yet to respond publicly to the allegations and at the time of writing both LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co remain online.

—

A copy of Nintendo’s complaint, obtained by TorrentFreak, is available here (pdf).

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During the summer of 2016 the torrent community went into shock when KickassTorrents (KAT) disappeared offline.

Polish law enforcement officers apprehended Artem Vaulin, the site’s alleged founder, at a local airport and around the same time the site went dark

The arrest was part of a U.S. criminal case which also listed two other men as key players. At the time, KAT was the most-used torrent site around, so the authorities couldn’t have hit a more prominent target.

The criminal case meant the end of the torrent site, but also the start of a slowly progressing legal battle for the defendants. Vaulin was held in a Polish prison cell for months. While he was released on bail last year, the final decision in the extradition proceedings is still pending.

Previously, a Polish court ruled that the alleged owner of KickassTorrents can be extradited to the United States. However, this ruling was just the first of two in an ongoing extradition process.

In recent months there haven’t been any public updates from the defense team and our inquiries have remained unanswered. However, a recent status report filed by John R. Lausch Jr, US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, shows that there’s still no final decision.

“Defendant is still undergoing extradition proceedings in Poland, and the parties are not currently aware of a timetable for a resolution of those proceedings,” Lausch informed the US Federal Court earlier this month.

From the status report

The case’s status hearing, which was planned last week, has now been postponed until October, but it’s unclear whether there will be any progress by then.

While two years is a long time, it pales in comparison with Kim Dotcom’s extradition battle, which remains in progress after more than six years.

Through his legal team, Artem Vaulin previously indicated that he would be open to surrendering voluntarily under the right conditions. However, there are no signs that this was seriously considered.

The defense team also submitted a motion to dismiss the entire case. Among other things, it argued that torrent files themselves are not copyrighted content. The court decided, however, that the US Government’s case is strong enough to continue.

Vaulin previously denied any wrongdoing and said that he always asks for legal advice when starting a new venture.

“I’m a businessman. When I start a business I consult lawyers. I was never told that anything I was involved in was against the law,” Vaulin told The Verge last year.

“I’m not crazy. If someone came to me to tell me the United States was angry with something I do, whatever it was, I would stop,” he added.

KickassTorrents, meanwhile, is now a distant memory to most people. While several copycats and KAT -inspired sites are still around, including one operated by former staffers, the real torrent juggernaut is gone.

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