While torrent sites were once the next big thing, streaming is now at the height of fashion.

A shocking number of platforms now offer instant access to massive movie and TV shows libraries, something the authorities seem powerless to do much about. Over in Ukraine, authorities say they have made a start.

For the past nine years Onlainfilm has been serving up movies to the masses but this week all that came to an end when local cyberpolice shut the operation down.

Government and police investigators report that after detecting “members of a criminal group” behind the site, police carried out five raids in the city of Khmelnytskyi located in the west of Ukraine.

One of the searched locations

“Online movie theater ‘Onlainfilm’ was among the five most-visited sites in several countries,” police said in a statement.

“Every day, the site was visited by half a million Internet users, and the number of video views exceeded two million. The total amount of videos posted on the site exceeded 50 TB.”

While police haven’t yet announced how many people were arrested, the image below reveals that hardware, money, and other items were seized during their searches.

Like many other sites of a similar nature, Onlainfilm took precautions to reduce the chances of detection. Police say that its operators used a reverse proxy server which enabled it to relay visitors’ requests to other servers hidden elsewhere.

In such cases, prosecutors and copyright holders tend to lead up front with claims of millions in lost revenues caused by sites such as Onlainfilm. However, authorities say those figures won’t be released until “the necessary investigative actions” have been carried out.

Ukraine’s reputation for low levels of intellectual property crime protection has placed the country firmly in the crosshairs of the United States Trade Representative.

The country is currently on the Priority Watch List with the USTR recently reporting that Ukraine had failed to “implement an effective means to combat the widespread online infringement of copyright” in the country.

Although Ukraine was featured quite heavily for other reasons, Onlainfilm was not listed in the USTR’s 2017 list of Notorious Markets.

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

The entertainment industries have repeatedly accused Google of not doing enough to limit piracy while demanding tougher action.

Ideally, groups including the MPAA and RIAA want search engines to remove clearly infringing websites from their search results entirely, especially if courts have previously found them to be acting illegally.

While Google doesn’t want to remove whole sites, the critique did prompt the company to make changes.

For example, in 2014 it updated its core algorithms aimed at lowering the visibility of “pirate” sites. Using the number of accurate DMCA requests as an indicator, these sites are demoted in search results for certain key phrases.

“Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results. This ranking change helps users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily,” Google explained.

While the effects were felt immediately, it’s been unclear how many sites were affected by the algorithmic change. This week, the search engine is filling in some of these blanks.

In a comment to Australian media, Google states that it has demoted 65,000 sites in search results, a list that’s still growing every week. In total, the company received DMCA takedown requests for over 1.8 million domain names, so a little under 4% of these are downranked.

The result of the measures is that people are less likely to see a pirate site when they type “watch movie X” or “download song Y.” This means that these sites see a drop in visitors from Google and a quite significant one too.

“Demotion results in sites losing around 90 percent of their visitors from Google Search,” a Google spokesperson told The Age.

Indeed, soon after the demotion signal was implemented, pirate sites were hit hard. However, pirates wouldn’t be pirates if they didn’t respond with their own countermeasures.

In recent years, many infringing sites have hopped from domain to domain, in part to circumvent the downranking efforts. In addition, Google’s measures also created an opportunity for smaller, less reputable, sites to catch search traffic that would otherwise go to the main players.

Overall, however, it’s probably safe to argue that Google’s demotion efforts lowered the search engine’s referrals to pirate sites.

That said, demands to do more won’t subside. In Australia, Village Roadshow co-chief Graham Burke has been especially vocal. He has accused Google of profiting from piracy-related traffic and wants the search engine to permanently remove infringing sites from search results.

Blaming piracy for declining revenues, Burke noted this week that there are “empty desks everywhere … we can’t compete with stolen goods being sold for free.” And he is not alone.

Google sees things differently of course. The company has repeatedly highlighted that it has taken several measures to address the piracy concerns, while noting that the entertainment industries have a responsibility of their own as well.

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

While BitTorrent indexing sites dominated the landscape until just a few years ago, streaming is now the most visible form of online video piracy.

Through networks of hosting platforms and indexing sites, pirate streaming is now available to any Internet user, as long as he or she can operate a web browser. It’s a far cry from the complex file-sharing world of yesterday.

This shift prompted researchers at Queen Mary University of London to examine this relatively new ‘pirate’ ecosystem. Titled ‘Movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Exploring Illegal Streaming Cyberlockers‘, their study finds a “remarkably centralized system with just a few networks, countries and cyberlockers underpinning most provisioning.”

Co-author Dr Gareth Tyson informs TF that after previously looking at technologies like BitTorrent, the team decided to take a closer look at the role cyberlockers are playing in the distribution of copyright media.

“At first, we weren’t really sure about how they were being used. So we decided to dig into things a little bit and found that there were hundreds of them, but lacking the types of search functionality of YouTube,” Dr Tyson explains.

“This piqued our interest and we decided to dig a bit deeper, which led us to the indexing sites. I suppose the short answer is that it seemed a pretty interesting ecosystem that nobody had looked at before, so we got curious.”

While simple on the surface, the cyberlocker ecosystem isn’t entirely straightforward. Most hosting sites don’t allow users to search directly, which means visitors are often redirected from indexing platforms that are more specific about the content that’s available.

“This has created an interesting ecosystem where cyberlockers depend on third party (crowd-sourced) indexing websites that create a searchable directory of direct links (URLs) to the videos. These two types of website operate hand-in-hand with a symbiotic relationship, collectively underpinning a global network of online piracy,” the researchers write.

Given the scale of the ecosystem, examining everything would prove impossible. Instead, the researchers homed in on three indexing sites – Putlocker.is, Watchseries.gs and Vodly.cr – which were found via Google and selected for their regular appearances in search results.

Also under the spotlight where 33 cyberlockers including Movshare, NowVideo, and Openload, whose content was accessed via the indexing sites.

“We started off by scraping the indexing sites because it seemed that they were the main ‘entry point’ to the cyberlockers,” Dr Tyson informs TF.

“This was because many of the cyberlockers had fake front pages (i.e. they didn’t show their real content – presumably to hide all the copyright stuff) and they lacked search features to find it. Hence, it was pretty much impossible to access the copyright infringing content by visiting the cyberlocker alone.”

Between January and September 2017, monthly crawls collected information from the indexers and scraped related data from the cyberlockers, including file availability and where the videos were hosted. This revealed some interesting data indicating a potential weakness for the cyberlockers when defending against enforcement attempts.

“A key finding is the apparent centralization of these portals, with a small
set of dependencies vulnerable to attack from copyright enforcers. For example, we observe that 58% of all videos are located within just two hosting providers [M247 and Cogent/LeaseWeb], despite being spread across 15 cyberlockers,” the researchers reveal.

“M247 is based in Romania, which (as a country) hosts the largest share of streaming servers, containing 42% of the total streaming links witnessed. Similarly Cogent/Leaseweb are based in the Netherlands which hosts 23% of streaming links.”

The team cites previous research which found that a lack of copyright enforcement coupled with high capacity Internet infrastructure may drive sites to use these territories. However, putting all eggs in one basket could be a risky strategy, if the tides begin to turn.

“A sudden increase in copyright regulation within these countries may see a shift in this behavior and, again, we argue that this dependency on individual countries poses a resilience challenge for the cyberlockers,” they note.

Also of interest are the researchers’ findings that the same sets of pirates could be behind multiple websites, with DaClips, GorillaVid and Movpod put forward as candidates.

“These three cyberlockers alone host 15% of observed content. Again, this suggests a distribution model that is far less resilient than its decentralized P2P counterparts,” they add.

Digging deeper, the researchers say at least one-fifth of the cyberlocker domains in the study are actually operated by just two organizations/individuals, something which confirms a “remarkable dependency on just a small number of stakeholders.”

Also under the researchers’ spotlight was the number of takedown notices issued against the domains in the study. Using LumenDatabase, 21.8m allegedly infringing URLs were identified across 49,829 individual complaints sent by 304 organisations.

To see how the cyberlockers react to copyright complaints, six were chosen for their mixture of behaviors. Openload.co, Estream.to and Streamin.to are said to have reacted “positively” to copyright complaints with 75% of videos being deleted within a month of reports being registered on Lumen. Vidzi.tv and TheVideo.me earned a poor report, with less than 30% of videos deleted within the same period.

Finally, the researchers reveal some interesting findings in respect of where infringing content is hosted and how that relates to takedowns.

“We observe that the videos that are not deleted from openload.co, estream.to,
vidzi.tv are all hosted in Romania on M247. That said, it would be unwise to draw conclusions here, as Romania hosts both the cyberlocker that ignores the most complaints and the cyberlocker that acts upon most complaints,” they write.

“Overall, the country hosting content that least frequently respects complaints is
the Netherlands, where only 6% of requests are acted upon. Hence, the diversity seen within individual countries suggests that the decision to act upon a complaint is largely driven by the individual cyberlockers.”

Aware that research of this type can often have links to rightsholders, TF asked the team at Queen Mary University of London if their research had in any way been funded or shared with content industry groups.

“No, the research was performed independently,” Tyson confirmed. “The research was not funded by any movie studios and the university received no external funding for this particular stream of research.”

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

Like many other countries throughout Europe, Ireland is no stranger when it comes to pirate site blocking efforts.

The Pirate Bay was first targeted in 2009, as part of a voluntary agreement between copyright holders and local ISP Eircom. A few years later the High Court ordered other major Internet providers to follow suit.

Next, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) set their eyes on other targets.

On behalf of several major Hollywood studios, the group obtained blocking orders against the most used torrent and streaming sites, including 1337x.io, EZTV.ag, Bmovies.is, 123movieshub.to, Putlocker.io, RARBG.to, and YTS.am.

This most recent order, issued earlier this year, triggered the usual response. Many users who have their favorite sites blocked, tried to find alternatives, such as the various proxy and mirror sites that are available.

This works well, but it’s usually not a permanent solution. A few weeks ago Irish ISPs expanded their blocklist covering several of the most used proxy sites for Rarbg, 1337x, and others. Again, users were confronted with a blocking notification, such as the one below from Virgin Media.

It is not uncommon for blocking injunctions to allow copyright holders to update the targeted domains. For example, when new domains or proxies appear. And indeed, this is what’s happening here, according to the MPA.

“In accordance with the orders issued by the Dublin High Court, the blocklist is regularly updated, including for alternative domains and proxies,” an MPA Europe spokesperson informed TorrentFreak.

The latest update was processed quietly earlier this month, which led to frustration among avid torrenters, many of whom had just settled with an alternative. It’s something they have to get used to though.

While the MPA can’t share the full list of blocked sites, it informed us that over 250 domains are on the most recent version of the blocklist. More domains will be added when needed.

This strategy may be effective, to a degree, but determined pirates who look hard enough can usually find a workaround, such as a new proxy, VPN, Tor, or other options.

The MPA knows all too well that site blocking is not a silver bullet. Still, the Hollywood-funded group believes that it’s effective enough to stop a significant number of people. Or perhaps frustrating pirates alone might already be worth it?

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

Every year, the entertainment industries celebrate their stars in various award ceremonies.

From the Oscars, through the Grammys, to the Emmys, there’s no shortage of spotlights for the finest performers.

This week the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA) launched an award of its own, to praise those who protect the entertainment industries.

The group, which counts prominent media players such as BT, Canal+, Fox Networks, La Liga, Premier League and Sky among its members, issued its first Anti-Piracy Award.

The award ceremony took place at Europol’s Intellectual Property Crime conference in Budapest, Hungary. The anti-piracy division of the Spanish police came out as the big winner.

Police Nacional’s ‘Grupo de Antipirateria’ is led by inspector Marlene Álvarez Vicente, who personally received the award from the hands of AAPA’s Vice President Mark Mulready.

Together with AAPA member Irdeto, the Spanish Police played a key role in several successful operations. This includes the shutdown of an ISP in Malaga which offered unlicensed IPTV subscriptions, as well as “Operation Casper,” through which a large IPTV piracy ring was dismantled.

“Irdeto has been working with Marlene and her team on cases such as Operation Casper and Y-Internet and I can testify personally to the commitment, dedication and skills demonstrated by her and the team,” Mulready says.

Mark Mulready and Inspector Marlene Álvarez Vicente (Photo AAPA pr)

The runners-up for the Anti-Piracy award were a team from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, a branch of the Irish Police, and Bogdan Ciinaru of Europol’s IPC3 unit.

The AAPA is mostly concerned with audiovisual piracy so the new award has its limitations. The winners all directly protected the interests of several of the group’s members, which made them prime contenders.

“The work done by our three award recipients in fighting audiovisual piracy is of enormous value to the industry. It sends a clear signal that piracy will not be tolerated and law enforcement has the resources, skills and expertise to investigate this crime and bring the perpetrators to justice,” Mulready says.

“We hope that these awards will help encourage others to take up the fight against audiovisual piracy and we are ready to support those efforts,” he adds.

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