Harry Potter is without a doubt one of the biggest entertainment brands in the world.

As a result, the various copyright holders are very protective of their asset, sometimes to the extreme.

For example, publisher Pottermore previously tried to censor J.K. Rowling’s Wikipedia page, as well as several unrelated entries. While this may have been a mistake, other enforcement actions clearly arent.

When an underground restaurant tried to host a Halloween party with a Harry Potter theme a few years ago, Warner Bros. lawyers came knocking. Trying to avoid trouble, the owner quickly changed the name of the event to the ‘Generic Wizard night.’

That Warner Bros. is protective of its Harry Potter rights also became clear in Denmark this week after a local festival was forced to change its name.

For more than a decade a local library in Odense has organized a Harry Potter festival, with great success. The non-profit event transformed from a small gathering of wizard enthusiasts to a festival with thousands of visitors.

While the library is proud of this achievement, Warner Bros. was growing more and more concerned.

Initially, the movie studio condoned the use of Harry Potter’s name, but this year that stopped being the case. Warner Bros. lawyers informed the festival that it could no longer use names and images related to the Harry Potter movies.

“Over the years, we have been in continuous dialogue with Warner Bros. Studios, which administer all rights regarding the Harry Potter universe,” says Kent Skov Andreasen, Head of Odense’s Libraries and Citizens’ Service.

“The dialogue has been positive and we respect the fact that the company now estimates that the festival has reached a size and spread which means that they ask us to change the name moving forward.”

The name change has quite a few implications. For example, the festival’s original domain name harrypotterfestival.dk, can no longer be used, and even the event’s Facebook page has been pulled offline.

As for the new name? The Library has picked “Magical Days in Odense” as the provisionary working title, but that might change going forward. The organizers don’t want to worry about copyright disputes, they just want to give children and their families a great time.

“We can continue but must call it something else. Whether it will be magical days or ‘the festival whose name cannot be mentioned’. We do not want to stop,” Søren Dahl Mortensen, project manager and librarian tells BT.

“There are many children who are sitting and wearing suits at home and really preparing themselves,” Mortensen adds.

While many of the festival visitors might not appreciate the name change, it is no surprise that Warner Bros. is protecting its brand. One non-profit festival is probably not a problem, but others may follow, which may ultimately compete with the studio’s commercial ventures.

More information about the upcoming Harry Potter Magical Days festival is available at the new non-infringing Facebook page, or at the new Potter-less domain name.

No Potter

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In 2017, Sky TV launched legal action in New Zealand against two companies – Hamilton-based My Box and Christchurch company FibreTV NZ.

Both companies sold Kodi-based devices that were configured to receive copyrighted content, including that for which Sky TV holds the rights.

Last November, the Christchurch District Court handed down an interim injunction against FibreTV based on the terms sought by Sky TV. The broadcaster was also awarded costs.

“The distributors pay nothing to the creators of the movies, TV and sports content, and simply cream off their fee, often in the hundreds of dollars,” said Sky spokesperson Kirsty Way.

“The court will liaise with Sky and Fibre TV lawyers to allocate a fixture for the summary judgment application in 2018.”

There are two key points in the case against Fibre TV.

Firstly, whether the company’s marketing claims surrounding its devices’ capabilities and legal status were misleading and deceptive, and secondly, whether the provision of addons that provide access to infringing content amounts to “authorization” under the Copyright Act 1994.

In an announcement this morning, Sky TV claimed victory against Fibre TV. The company said that the Christchurch District Court had determined that the company’s marketing had indeed been misleading. (An example of how the company operated was reported on Reddit last year.)

Fibre TV advertised itself as having “all of the content with none of the fees,” something which Judge MacAskill found to be in breach of the Fair Trading Act. The Judge further ruled that the sale of these “pre-loaded” devices to the public amounted to copyright infringement.

“It is great to have this matter clarified, as we were concerned that New Zealanders were buying these boxes under the false impression that they were legitimate – it simply wasn’t true,” says Sky TV General Counsel Sophie Moloney.

“Piracy is an ongoing problem for everyone in the content and creative sectors. Recent research shows that almost a third of New Zealanders are pirating, some as regularly as weekly, with one in ten saying it’s the way they ‘normally’ access content.”

According to Sky, around 100,000 Kiwis regularly use Kodi software to access TV, movies and sport without paying for that content. Some, the company says, have been duped into believing that is legal by companies including Fibre TV.

“[W]e just want to highlight to New Zealanders that ‘Kodi boxes’ like the Fibre TV ones breach copyright and do not have a legitimate place in our market,” Sky concludes.

The Court will now decide what happens to Fibre TV and their devices but in the meantime, the company seems in no mood to play it calm.

A representative told Stuff that it was not aware of Judge MacAskill’s ruling and the company was still waiting on a court date. When that arrives, the spokesperson predicted that Sky would not prevail.

“We intend to wipe the floor with Sky TV,” the company said.

Back in April, My Box NZ, another company being sued by Sky for selling piracy-configured Kodi devices, announced that it had been sold to a Chinese investor.

The High Court is yet to rule in the MyBox matter, but it’s Sky’s position that since its action is against both My Box NZ and founder Krish Reddy, the case will continue.

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A decade ago online piracy was mostly a habit of downloaders. While online streaming did exist, watching pirate broadcasts live over the Internet was a rather cumbersome niche activity.

Nowadays, that’s no longer the case. Live streaming pirate broadcasts, especially of sports content, is more popular than ever. And with dedicated set-top boxes, it’s pretty easy too.

This has triggered a new wave of enforcement actions, one of which came to its conclusion in Sweden a few days ago. In a landmark ruling, the Stockholm Patent and Market court found three operators of the IPTV service Advanced TV Network (ATN) guilty of copyright infringement and misuse of decoding information.

ATN’s owner Hamid al-Hamid, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. The owner’s son and another accomplice both received one-year prison sentences. In addition, they were ordered to pay over 209 million Swedish kroner ($24m) in damages to rightsholders, Reuters reports.

The case was filed by the Qatari company beIN Sports and the Albanian TV group Digitalb, who accused ATN of rebroadcasting its channels without permission. With help from the local anti-piracy outfit Nordic Content Protection, it filed a complaint against the IPTV operator two years ago.

This lead to a police raid at ATN’s office in Malmo office in 2016, where roughly 20 police cars appeared at the premises. Three people were arrested and servers were seized, which caused the IPTV channels of tens of thousands of customers to go dark.

While the verdict makes it clear that ATN broke the law, the company wasn’t operating as a typical pirate site. In fact, up until the raid it had been a rather successful business.

Founded in 2008, ATN was a fast-growing business which had 25 employees and over 70,000 paying customers at its height.

The company’s ATN box listed more than a thousand channels which allowed customers to view foreign content without satellite dishes. It was targeted at Arabian customers in Sweden, but also attracted people from abroad.

ATN was properly incorporated, paid taxes, and filed annual reports. This revealed that the company generated nearly 60 million Swedish kroner ($7m) in 2013, with a healthy profit margin.

While business was booming, it quickly came to an end when the company was raided and dragged to court. ATN eventually had to close its doors for good and in September 2016 SVT reported that the IPTV service had gone bankrupt. Two years later the three were sentenced.

“We are delighted that the Swedish courts have taken a strong stance against the industrial piracy perpetrated by ATN,” Anders Braf, CEO of Nordic Content Protection says, commenting on the outcome.

“The prison sentences and record fines handed down in this case send a clear message to broadcast pirates – the industry is taking action and we will use the full extent of the law to see offenders brought to justice.”

This is shared by Cameron Andrews, Senior Legal Counsel at beIN, who described the verdict as a significant victory in the fight against illegal TV pirates.

“TV pirates like ATN package hundreds, and often thousands of pirated television channels from around the world, and then make big money by selling subscriptions,” Andrews says.

“These businesses are parasites, making huge profits off the back of stolen content. The damages and prison sentences ordered by the Swedish court reflect the serious harm that piracy on this scale causes.”

While this is a clear victory for the copyright holders, the case is not over yet. At least two of the defendants, including ATN owner Hamid al-Hamid, intend to file an appeal.

Defense lawyer Jonas Nilsson previously stated that his client denied the criminal charges. In addition, a family member of ATN’s owner said that most of the channels were legally broadcasted.

Meanwhile, the ATN brand is not gone. While the Swedish company is bankrupt, the foreign-operated ATN Networks is around, listing Hamid al-Hamid as its CEO. There’s also still an ATN shop in Malmo.

—

A copy of the court order is available here (Swedish pdf).

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While millions of users still obtain pirate music from peer-to-peer platforms such as BitTorrent, in recent years a new challenge has appeared on the horizon.

Sites like YouTube, which offer millions of copies of almost every song imaginable, are now an unwitting player in the piracy ecosystem. Every day, countless people use special tools to extract music from video tracks before storing them on their local machines.

This so-called ‘stream-ripping’ phenomenon is now cited as being one of the greatest piracy threats to the record labels but thus far, no single action has been able to stem the tide.

Over in Denmark, however, there has been a breakthrough of sorts following action by local anti-piracy outfit RightsAlliance taken on behalf of IFPI, collecting society KODA, the Danish Artist Union, and the Danish Musicians Association.

The action targeted Convert2MP3, a site that allows users to download audio and video from platforms including YouTube. The recording industry groups wanted the stream-ripping platform blocked by Internet service providers in Denmark but first, they needed it to be declared illegal in the country. That decision came last week from a court in Frederiksberg.

“The result of the case is historic, as it is the first time worldwide that a stream-ripping service has been ordered to be blocked,” Rights Alliance said in a statement.

“It also proves that the activities of Rights Alliance are compliant with developments on the Internet, where illegal services constantly find new ways to exploit rights illegally. The case thus illustrates the importance of the technology-neutral approach in the Alliance’s blocking work.”

Rights Alliance Director Maria Fredenslund says that the ruling creates clarity for users, who until now may have considered that sites like Convert2MP3, which are used alongside digital platforms such as YouTube or Spotify’s free tier, operate legally.

“It is clear that you can quickly be cheated to believe that free music means that you have the right to do what you want,” Fredenslund says.

“The problem is that stream ripping services do not license the music from the rightholders, which therefore lose their business base. Therefore, we are very pleased that we now have confirmation that stream ripping is therefore illegal.”

Convert2MP3, which claims on its website to be based in Germany, did not respond to TorrentFreak’s request for comment. However, the decision against it has the potential to have wider implications across the region.

Back in 2016, YouTube-MP3, the world’s largest YouTube-ripping site (also based in Germany), was sued in the United States by IFPI, RIAA, and BPI. However, that ended in a settlement agreement rather than a full trial, so the case was never decided on the merits.

The decision of the Danish court against Convert2MP3 is likely to be referenced in future blocking cases around Europe, where stream-ripping is seen as a major threat to the recording industries and more serious than traditional peer-to-peer piracy.

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ABS-CBN, the largest media and entertainment company in the Philippines, is continuing its legal campaign against pirate sites in the US.

The company has singled out dozens of streaming sites that offer access to ‘Pinoy’ content without permission, both in the US and abroad.

The company has already won several cases with damages ranging from a few hundred thousand to millions of dollars. However, the associated injunctions in these cases are perhaps even more significant.

We previously covered how ABS-CBN managed to get court orders to seize domain names, without the defendants getting actively involved. In another case, it expanded on this strategy by also going after advertising revenue.

This is also the case in a recent lawsuit, where a Florida federal court signed a temporary restraining order targeting more than two dozen sites. However, ABS-CBN takes it up another notch, going after the bank accounts of the sites involved.

Last week Chief United States District Judge Kevin Michael Moore signed a temporary restraining order directed at 33 pirate sites. The targets are predominantly niche streaming sites specializing in Pinoy content, such as pinoy.live and pinoybay.se.

While these sites serve a relatively small audience, the restraining order has broad implications.

It orders domain registrars and registries to make the sites unavailable, for example. In addition, advertising networks are compelled to stop doing business with the sites and freeze any outstanding funds.

Finally, and that’s new, the restraining order also targets payment processors. The court specifically mentions PayPal, but the order applies to other payment processors, banks, escrow services, and/or money transmitters as well.

The court orders these companies to “…immediately identify and restrain all funds, as opposed to ongoing account activity, in the advertising or PayPal accounts related to Defendants, and their associated payment accounts and e-mail addresses…”

From the TRO

The advertising companies, including Google’s Adsense, and the other companies such as PayPal also have to provide a detailed overview of the funds they hold for each of the respective sites.

Interestingly, the PayPal addresses were discovered through data provided by Cloudflare in response to a subpoena. The details of the relevant order are, unfortunately, being kept under seal.

It’s clear, however, that the media giant is using all the legal tools at its disposal to target these pirate sites.

The restraining order (pdf) will remain in effect until the court rules on ABS-CBN’s motion for a preliminary injunction. Based on previous cases it’s likely that the measures will remain in effect.

At the time of writing, most of the targeted sites are still available, either on their original domain names or through a backup location.

Some of the sites.

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