France has been fighting on the anti-piracy enforcement frontline for more than a decade now.

The country was the first to introduce a graduated response system, Hadopi, where Internet subscribers risked losing their Internet connections if they were caught sharing torrents repeatedly.

Today this approach is no longer as effective as it once was. The bulk of all online piracy has moved from P2P downloading to streaming, which isn’t traceable by anti-piracy watchdogs.

For this reason, the French Government is now considering to institute a national streaming site blacklist. Interestingly, however, it appears that even without such measures, online piracy is on the decline.

A new report published by consultancy firm EY reveals that the number of French pirates has dropped by 8%, from 11.6 million in 2016, to 10.6 million last year. The remaining pirates also downloaded and streamed less infringing content than the year before, with consumption dipping 4%.

Piracy predominantly affects the movie industry, with 94% admitting to downloading or streaming films. While that’s bad news for Hollywood, the report is not all doom and gloom.

In fact, it appears that pirates are increasingly “going legal.” This doesn’t mean that they have quit their copyright infringing habits completely, but they are more likely to pay for access too.

In the span of a year, the number of pirates without a video on demand subscription dropped by nearly 30%. The result is that more than half of all pirates also pay for a legal movie streaming service now.

EY further signals a significant drop in TV show piracy, which it links to the increasing popularity of paid streaming services.

“We see a significant drop in the pirating of series which is not without a link to the boom in SVoD platforms,” ScreenDaly quotes from the report.

Netflix is clearly leading the charge here. The streaming service saw a significant increase in pirate consumers last year.

“Netflix has managed to reel in pirate consumers who weren’t signed up with a legal service before. In 2017, there were 20% more pirate consumers paying for a Netflix subscription than the year before,” EY’s report states.

This suggests that the main goal of movie studios and other content providers is to make sure that their work is widely available on legal streaming platforms. Ideally, without any delays and at a reasonable price.

It’s not all roses, of course. The more than 10 million pirates that remain reportedly cause around 1.18 billion euros in losses, which translates to more than 100 euros per pirate.

That’s still quite a few extra Netflix subscriptions to go…

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American satellite and broadcast provider Dish Network is continuing its legal battles against alleged pirate streaming services.

The company previously filed a lawsuit against the people behind TVAddons and the ZemTV Kodi addon, but it’s fighting on more fronts too.

The largest success thus far was its case against “Shava TV,” which was filed back in 2015. Last year this resulted in a $25,650,000 judgment in favor of Dish, but that didn’t mean that the problems were over.

Shava TV reportedly continued its business and despite a contempt order against the operators, as well as several domain seizures, the boxes are still widely available. Not just on the Internet, but also in bricks-and-mortar stores.

This prompted Dish to file a new lawsuit at a federal court in New York this week. This time, the company is targeting several dealers located in New York, as well as a distributor.

The complaint lists the New York stores “ABC Wireless NYC,” and “ Family Phone” and accuses these of selling infringing Shava TV boxes. Goyal Group is accused of selling and distributing the boxes to various dealers.

“DISH sues for contributory copyright infringement because Defendants knew that Shava TV set-top boxes and service plans were providing access to television channels exclusively licensed to DISH and materially contributed to direct copyright infringement by Shava and persons purchasing Shava TV set-top boxes and services from Defendants,” the filing reads.

According to Dish, the defendants continued to sell and promote Shava TV despite multiple demands to cease the activity. This, despite the fact that a contempt order issued in the original Shava TV case specifically forbids them from doing so.

The contempt order, issued in February by US District Court Judge Thomas Ellis, enjoined several US dealers of Shava TV from engaging in infringing activities.

Dish notified the defendants

“Defendants actually know that the retransmission of the Protected Channels on the Shava TV service infringes DISH’s copyrights. Defendants disregarded DISH’s written demands […] and the Contempt Order, and are continuing to distribute, sell, and promote Shava TV set-top boxes and services,” the complaint reads.

“Defendants did not acknowledge or respond to any of these written demands or the court orders, nor did they take any action to comply.”

The broadcast provider argues that the stores and the distributor are liable for contributory copyright infringement. Dish asks the court to issue an injunction to stop the infringing activity and requests statutory damages to compensate its losses.

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A copy of Dish Network’s complaint against Goyal Group, Family Phone, ABC 1 NYC and ABC Wireless is available here (pdf).

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After protecting Assassins Creed Origin for the previous several months, earlier this year version 4.9 of the infamous Denuvo anti-tamper system was defeated by Italian cracking group CPY.

While all cracks of the tough and continuously developing Denuvo system are welcomed by pirate consumers, this one was particularly sweet, having also defeated Ubisoft’s decision to use VMProtect technology on top. Soon after, Bulgarian cracker Voksi, who previously defeated version 4, released a video showing how things were done.

Unlike CPY, Voksi is a rather more high-profile individual. While his true identity is known only to those closest to him, he has become somewhat of a folk hero on various cracking-focused forums, engaging in conversation with fans and discussing the latest developments.

This week, Voksi announced the passing of yet another milestone, one that’s bound to disappoint the people at Denuvo. After sinking endless hours into what he openly admits is a personal grudge against the company’s technology, Voksi revealed that its latest v4.9++ protection had fallen.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Voksi says that after tackling previous versions, a little while back he began dissecting the newer 4.7/4.8 builds (not official Denuvo versions but a numbering system used by the cracking scene).

“Man, it seemed impossible back then. The obfuscation was insane, I had no idea what to do. So, over the next two months, with little breaks from time to time, I was analyzing exactly how [Denuvo] does those hardware checks,” he notes.

“Then I tried my tricks for 4.7 on 4.8, but something wasn’t quite right. It was way more obfusticated and had some strange patterns and I couldn’t figure out why it was like that. Soon enough though in June things started to change.”

Voksi says that he tackled several games with test cracks, with variants working on older and newer CPU generations for most people. He then came up with a new theory but needed a game to test it on.

“So I downloaded Puyo Puyo Tetris. I thought ‘it’s small game, it’d be easier to analyze’, but oh no no,” he said.

“The game executable is 128MB big, of which just 5-6MB is the real game code. The rest of it is Denuvo. It’s the most bloated Denuvo I’ve ever seen.”

Nevertheless, Voksi got to work and built a crack and implemented patches (including his new code) based on the new theory. Twelve hours later there was something to celebrate, with a crack working for the vast majority (around 99%) of users. But that wouldn’t be the end of it, he promised.

True to his word, this week Voksi announced that he’d defeated the Denuvo protection on Injustice 2, something that was met with jubilation on Reddit’s /r/crackwatch sub. He informs TF that his new techniques delivered the goods once again.

“I cracked it the same way I cracked Puyo Puyo Tetris. I don’t want to get too technical, because I don’t want to give away my techniques, but I can say it’s not an easy task,” he says.

“I cracked Injustice 2 in 10 hours. The game has custom protection on top of Denuvo and some nice anti-debug features.”

What comes next for 21-year-old Voksi remains to be seen but given his determination, other games are probably being worked on right how. He says that several other titles use 4.9 or 4.9++ protection so it’s possible he’ll have more surprises in the days and weeks to come.

“In the end, it might take some more testing and test cracks, but I’m very happy to announce that I won’t stop until we are Denuvo Cancer Free from all games,” he concludes.

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

Many seasoned file-sharers, who’ve been around for a while, will recognize UseNeXT as a familiar brand.

The Usenet provider advertised its services on popular platforms in the past, including many torrent sites. These promotional efforts also drew the interest of rightsholders, but not in a good way.

In Germany, the local music rights group GEMA, which represents roughly 72,000 artists, took UseNeXT’s parent company Aviteo to court. The first request for an injunction dates back to December 2006, almost twelve years ago but, despite several judgments, the battle is not over yet.

GEMA does, however, get to celebrate another victory this week.

The Regional Court of Hamburg recently ruled that the service provider can be held liable if its business model promotes the upload and distribution of copyrighted content.

According to the court, Aviteo Ltd is liable for the copyright infringements committed by its users in this case, which means that it must pay damages to GEMA.

“The judgment is a groundbreaking success for all authors”, GEMA’s legal advisor Dr. Tobias Holzmüller comments on the news.

“Online services like UseNeXT are primarily responsible and cannot hide behind legal privileges. The judges of the Hamburg Court have set an important precedent for claims for Internet piracy related damages.”

Traditionally speaking Usenet is a content-neutral system. However, providers such as UseNeXT offer specialized software that can make it easier for users to find specific content. If the software promotes infringement, a service can get in trouble.

According to GEMA, it is clear that UseNeXT went too far in this case.

“All in all, the offer is clearly geared to the download of works protected by copyright. This makes the services so lucrative for their operators,” the music rights group notes.

“The judges of the Hamburg Court clearly stated in their verdict that services whose business model is based on the illegal downloads of protected works owe rightsholders.”

Tarnkappe reports that while the verdict is another setback for the Usenet provider, it can still be appealed and is not final. The scale of the damages amount has yet to be established as well.

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When the European Commission announced its plans to modernize EU copyright law two years ago, the public barely paid attention. This changed significantly in recent months.

Hundreds of thousands of people spoke out against Article 13, which imposes new restrictions on online service providers. At the same time, many people in creative industries stressed the importance of the plans.

After the Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliament (JURI) adopted the proposals last month the campaigns continued, targeting today’s plenary vote in the European Parliament.

Opponents pressed their representatives to open up the proposal for debate, so significant changes can be made. Supporters, for their part, urged Members of Parliament to keep things the way they are now.

This afternoon the plenary voted in opposition of the mandate, with 278 votes in favor and 318 against.

The result

This means that the proposals, which were agreed on in the JURI committee, will be debated and voted on in Parliament next September where changes can be made to the current text.

“Great success: Your protests have worked! The European Parliament has sent the copyright law back to the drawing board,” Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda commented on the outcome.

“Rather than proceeding directly to negotiations with the Council, the law will be re-opened for amendments and scheduled for a vote in the September plenary session,” she added.

It is worth noting that, while Article 13 is widely referred to as the “upload filter” plan, the word filter doesn’t appear anywhere in the full text of the proposal.

In short, the relevant text states that online services are liable for any uploaded content unless they take “effective and proportionate” action to prevent copyright infringements, identified by copyright holders. That also includes preventing these files from being reuploaded.

The latter implies some form of hash filtering and continuous monitoring of all user uploads. Several companies, including Google Drive, Dropbox, and YouTube already have these types of filters, but many others don’t.

Now that the plenary has voted against the mandate, the proposal and possible alternatives will be discussed in the European Parliament this coming September.

In addition to Article 13, there was also considerable pushback against Article 11, which is regularly referred to as the “link tax.” This article will be debated in Parliament.

Today’s vote follows aggressive lobbying efforts from both sides. While the door to changes has been opened, copyright reform plans to bridge the ‘value gap’ are still on the table, so we can expect more campaigning during the weeks to come.

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