It’s been more than six years since New Zealand and United States authorities collaborated to take down Megaupload. While the site itself is long gone, founder Kim Dotcom is putting up a determined fight.

At every twist and turn of his epic legal battle, Dotcom has challenged the efforts of authorities in multiple jurisdictions. The New Zealand courts, in particular, have seen sustained action.

From the beginning, Dotcom has aimed to extract as much information about his case as possible. From the seized data that was present on Megaupload’s servers to the information held by New Zealand authorities, Dotcom has chased down every bit, byte, letter, and document. At almost every turn, he’s met resistance.

In a series of tweets this morning, Dotcom has revealed a surprising turn of events in response to an order compelling authorities to provide him with data. New Zealand police have informed Dotcom’s lawyers that they haven’t complied with Human Rights Tribunal judgment because the information requested was generated before December 2013 and is no longer in the new IT system.

4.5 years later…..it’s all gone

“According to the new Attorney General David Parker (Labour Govt) he can’t comply with a judgment to provide me with information I’m entitled to because he doesn’t have access to the data of the previous Attorney General. What an utterly embarrassing mockery of New Zealand law,” Dotcom explains.

Information provided by Dotcom shows that the current Attorney-General David Parker has provided information held during his administration. However, the majority of the data requested by Dotcom’s team related to the term covered by his predecessor Chris Finlayson.

Citing several paragraphs of the New Zealand government’s Cabinet Manual relating to ‘Convention on access to Cabinet records of a previous administration’, Parker says he does not have access to information held under Finlayson’s watch. Dotcom’s lawyers immediately complained.

“This is an artificially narrow interpretation of the Tribunal’s order and the relevant rules and defeat the purpose of the order,” they wrote in a submission filed with the Human Rights Tribunal this morning, which also seeks an order for the government to comply with the Tribunal’s earlier judgment by July 31.

With that done, Dotcom turned his attention to a group of people he previously hoped would develop into allies but have yet to do so.

When the 2012 raid on Megaupload and Dotcom took place, it was under a National Party government. When they lost power to Labour in 2017, Dotcom appeared to adopt a more gentle tone, perhaps hoping that the new government would take the opportunity to declare his case a National Party mistake and one best forgotten.

Since it seems clear that isn’t going to happen, Dotcom’s tone is now changing for the worse.

“Let it be known. The new Labour government is continuing the unlawful persecution of my family while breaching every law and judgment in the land to prevent me from getting access to information that the New Zealand Supreme Court ruled I should have,” he warned this morning.

“The gloves are coming off!”

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With hundreds of millions of viewers from all over the world, the FIFA World Cup in Russia is one of the most anticipated sporting events of the year.

During these weeks, fans are most concerned with the performance of their favorite teams. For FIFA and all other stakeholders, however, the World Cup is also a battle against piracy.

While most people watch the matches through licensed broadcasters, there is a large group of people who resort to unauthorized sources. These so-called “pirate” streams are available via hundreds of sites or apps, generating millions of views during popular sporting events.

Other fans are using VPNs and proxies to bypass geo-blockades to tune into legal broadcasts. By changing their virtual location to one where the World Cup is freely accessible, they can watch without paying.

These types of ‘piracy’ are a thorn in the side of rightsholders, who are doing their best to take appropriate countermeasures. Sony Entertainment Network, for example, sent out preemptive takedown notices to streaming sites a few weeks ago.

More recently we spotted a takedown notice which NetResult sent to Google, on behalf of FIFA, targeting various allegedly infringing sites.

The list includes several known offenders, such as zorrostream.net and thefirstrow.eu, and asks Google to remove these sites from search results. In addition, it also targets several URLs which ‘advise’ users how they can access World Cup streams through a VPN, which some use to bypass geo-blockades.

For example, the takedown notice lists URLs from ExpressVPN and BestVPN, which explain how users can access FIFA World Cup matches from various locations.

“The listed URLs are all either linking directly to embedded live streams of unauthorized live football content (2018 FIFA World Cup), or advising users how to access unauthorized live streams not available in their territory,” the notice reads.

From the takedown notice

Interestingly, Google decided not to remove any of the reported URLs. The search engine has given no explanation, but it’s possible that the notice in question is seen as too general. In many cases, it points to the homepages of sites, without identifying a specific copyright infringement.

Whether it’s illegal to advise users how they can use a VPN to access World Cup streams is also up for debate.

Finally, it appears that not all of the URLs identified in FIFA’s takedown notice are actually infringing. The list also includes a page from the Canadian sports service Sportsnet.ca, which is owned by Rogers Media.

FIFA’s notice also targets the American sports streaming service FuboTV, which is partly funded by investors such as AMC Networks, 21st Century Fox, and Sky.

Considering the latter, it might be wise that Google didn’t blindly honor the request.

TorrentFreak reached out to NetResult’s parent company MarkMonitor for more information on FIFA’s takedown efforts, but the company informed us that it couldn’t comment on individual brands or companies.

FIFA and other rightsholders, meanwhile, continue to fight World Cup piracy globally and on several fronts. In addition to VPN tips and traditional streaming sites, they’re also up against alleged pirate TV services such as BeoutQ, and Fly TV from Ghana.

Game on.

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About a week ago we reported that The Pirate Bay’s upload functionality was broken.

While this problem was eventually solved after a few days, the regular domain became unusable soon after.

Today, more than five days later, the problem persists. For most people, the site currently displays a CloudFlare error message across the entire site, with the CDN provider mentioning that a “bad gateway” is causing the issue.

No further details are available to us and there is no known ETA for the site’s full return. However, judging from past experience, it’s likely some technical issue that needs fixing.

TPB 502 Cloudflare error

The Pirate Bay has had quite a few stints of downtime in recent months, and by now it’s becoming a regular occurrence. While more than five days is a new record, aside from the 2014 ‘raid,’ there’s no news to report.

The moderators in the official forums don’t appear to have any information on the ongoing issues either. They do point out, however, that the site is not down completely.

TPB is still available via its .onion address on the Tor network, accessible using the popular Tor Browser, for example. The site’s Tor traffic goes through a separate server and works just fine.

The Pirate Bay team has a status page in the forums where people can check to see if an outage is affecting everyone or not. This also shows that the Tor version of the site is working fine. At least, at the time of writing.

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2017 saw the birth of two major anti-piracy coalitions with some common members and similar goals.

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) was formed by 30 major players including Disney, HBO, and NBCUniversal. Several of the same media giants are also involved in the Coalition Against Piracy (CAP).

CAP coordinates anti-piracy efforts in Asia and is backed by CASBAA, Disney, Fox, HBO Asia, NBCUniversal, Premier League, Turner Asia-Pacific, A&E Networks, Astro, BBC Worldwide, National Basketball Association, TV5MONDE, Viacom International, and others.

From the outset, CAP has had the stated aim of tackling the pirate set-top box market. CAP General Manager Neil described their prevalence as “staggering” and a new report published this morning appears to back that up.

The newly released survey, commissioned by CAP and carried out by YouGov, reveals that one in four Hong Kong consumers own a set-top box that can be used to stream pirated TV and movies content.

“TV boxes BossTV (9%), Ubox (7%), EVPad (6%), Lingcod (5%), and Magic Box (4%), which come pre-loaded with applications allowing ‘plug-and-play’ access to pirated content, are among the most popular ISDs amongst Hong Kong consumers,” the study reveals.

It’s claimed that these devices, which often contain piracy-enabled Kodi setups, dedicated Android apps, and players configured to receive pirate IPTV services, are taking chunks out legitimate content distributors’ userbases. The survey offers some evidence to that end and the numbers are significant.

Of the quarter of all consumers who own a piracy-enabled set-top box, almost half (49%) told the survey that they had canceled all or some of their subscriptions to legal pay-TV services as a result.

Slightly more than one in four (26%) claimed to have canceled their subscription to a local premium provider as a direct consequence of owning a pirate box, with 21% saying the same for their international subscriptions. Almost a fifth (19%) claimed to have canceled a part of their traditional cable TV bundle after acquiring a device,

In common with other players in the anti-piracy space, the Coalition Against Piracy has a two-pronged strategy when it comes to presenting this information to the public. In addition to highlighting the damage these devices can do to the suppliers of entertainment, CAP warns customers of the negative issues they face as users.

“The damage that content theft does to the creative industries is without dispute. However, the damage done to consumers themselves, because of the nexus between content piracy and malware, is only beginning to be recognized,” CAP Managing Director Neil Gane says.

“The piracy ecosystem is a hotbed for malware, whether purchasing ISDs from Sham Shui Po’s Golden Arcade [a popular electronics ‘hotspot’ in Hong Kong] or downloading content from infamous torrent sites.

“Unfortunately the appetite for free or paying cheap subscription rates for stolen content, blinkers some consumers from the real risks of malicious malware infection such as spyware,” Gane adds.

While it is certainly possible to download content that contains malware from torrent sites, people who use set-top boxes to stream content rarely do so from torrent sites. Streaming platforms and file-locker sites are the number one source for video and malware almost never transfers to devices in this manner.

The effort to associate malware with set-top boxes running Kodi is nothing new but the claims are not without challenge. A report published by TorrentFreak earlier this month revealed that several major anti-virus vendors are entirely unaware of any such threat.

That’s not to say there aren’t issues with malicious software, of course. People buying ready-configured Android boxes, for example, could have almost anything inserted into their devices pre-sale, so it really is a matter of ‘buyer beware.’

Overall, however, there can be little doubt that these devices are having an impact on legitimate distribution models particularly considering their popularity with younger people. The study found that the boxes are particularly popular with high-income 25-34-year-olds, which is a desirable and valuable market for distributors.

“The illicit streaming device (ISD) ecosystem is impacting all businesses involved in the production and distribution of legitimate content,” says Louis Boswell, CEO of Casbaa.

“ISD piracy is also organized crime, pure and simple, with crime syndicates making substantial illicit revenues from the provision of illegally re-transmitted TV channels and the sale of such ISDs.”

In addition to public information campaigns, CASBAA welcomes enforcement action against those involved in the growing industry.

In May, Hong Kong customs arrested seven men and one woman while seizing more than 350 pirate devices. Last October, ACE and CAP teamed up to shut down an illicit IPTV provider in Australia.

While these operations are touted as successes, it will take a remarkable effort to stem the tide of this piracy juggernaut which has now spread to every major country on the planet.

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This week we have five newcomers in our chart.

Rampage is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(…)	Rampage	6.3 / trailer
2	(…)	Ready Player One	7.7 / trailer
3	(1)	Escape Plan 2: Hades	3.9 / trailer
4	(2)	Tomb Raider	6.6 / trailer
5	(3)	Pacific Rim: Uprising	5.8 / trailer
6	(…)	Blockers	6.6 / trailer
7	(4)	Avengers: Infinity War (HDCam)	9.1 / trailer
8	(…)	Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (HDTC/CAM)	6.7 / trailer
9	(…)	Truth or Dare	4.8 / trailer
10	(9)	Black Panther	7.9 / trailer

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