Anyone familiar with the annual leak of awards season movies onto the Internet will recognize the watermarks used to identify the purpose of a copy.

The “For Your Consideration” watermarks are perhaps the most widely recognized additions to DVD screeners, notifying the viewer that the copy was originally provided for the scrutiny of Oscars and similar voters.

Other watermarks, with “Property of Studio XYZ here” splashed across the screen, serve a similar purpose.

While these watermarks are designed to ensure that any leaks result in heavily defaced ‘pirate’ copies, other less visible watermarks can be used by studios to track a leak back to its original source, including back to a single person. These provide a deterrent but in the event a copy is diverted or stolen, they do nothing to stop a leak that has already happened.

In the case of pirate streams of live events, such as TV and sports programs made available online via websites and illicit IPTV services, watermarks have the ability to help anti-piracy efforts much closer to real-time.

Since pirate streams are often captured from consumer decoders, a watermark denoting which subscriber account is being used can be embedded into the video. Once the mark is identified and matched with a customer device, the stream can be cut off at its source by the broadcaster.

Watermark hashcodes during the Mayweather v McGregor fight

While it is possible to remove these codes, doing so isn’t always straightforward. Systems can place the watermark in any place at any time, meaning that some always slip through the net. However, others are more easily dealt with, as a report from security company Irdeto reveals.

“So-called ‘HashCode removal tools’ work in near real-time to strip away any kind of visual marks from a video feed. This ranges from unique fingerprints right down to the broadcaster’s on-screen logo that’s so familiar on many channels, both helping pirates to cover their tracks,” the company explains.

“These tools are so smart, they take a sample of the surrounding pixels and re-use them to replace the visual marks, so the viewer of the pirate stream barely notices any disturbance in the picture.”

Irdeto says that its work with TV companies has revealed an uptick in the use of such tools in recent months. That’s partially down to how readily available they are.

“Research by Irdeto’s anti-piracy team found HashCode removal tools openly on sale via popular selling platforms like eBay and Alibaba for less than US$2,000,” the company reveals.

Remove watermarks automatically

“These devices fall into a legal grey-area. They don’t actively ENABLE piracy, but they do help pirates to mask their identity. This means the sellers don’t even need to be shy about describing exactly what their products can achieve,” Irdeto notes.

Indeed, some companies are happy to publish demonstrations on YouTube showing their systems in action, complete with before-and-after videos supplemented by behind the scenes action.

Live watermark removal in action

While these devices have their uses, Irdeto says they cannot tackle the most sophisticated watermarking systems that use covert methods.

“A unique User ID is still inserted into the stream and persists through different screen-capture and transformation techniques, but because the pirates can’t see the watermarks, they have a hard time obscuring them,” Irdeto explains.

While both overt and covert watermarking has its uses, to date they haven’t managed to prevent the major IPTV ‘wholesalers’ from putting together packages consisting of thousands of pirated TV channels from most major broadcasters worldwide.

With these consistently available for just a few dollars, euros, or pounds per month, the cat and mouse game will continue.

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

Online censorship has always been a hot topic and with the EU’s proposed “upload filters” hitting the headlines, it’s at the top of the agenda once again.

The fear of losing the ability to share ‘memes’ plays well on social media. Similarly, many journalists happily use ‘censorship’ in their headlines as, apparently, the fate of the Internet is at stake.

A common theme is that, if the plans are implemented, powerful corporations may soon decide whether you can share something online – fair use or not. While to a degree this fear is warranted, it’s also nothing new.

The ‘censorship machines’ are already up and running as we speak.

YouTube, to give an example, regularly takes down videos for dubious reasons. Some are pulled manually after rightsholders file complaints, while many more are targeted by YouTube’s automated piracy filters.

It’s not clear how many ‘memes’ are killed in the process, but what many people describe as the ‘censorship’ that will ‘destroy the Internet,’ is already fully operational on the largest video sharing platform of all.

But the problem goes even further. Aside from copyright issues, YouTube also demonetizes certain accounts because their content isn’t advertiser-friendly. There is still free speech, to a certain degree, but not all speech can be monetized.

Mind you, this policy is not forced by the EU. It’s regular business practice on the same platform where people are currently sharing their EU censorship warnings. Let that sink in for a minute…

Meme killers

These issues are not limited to YouTube of course. Many other sites have automated filters or approve questionable takedowns.

This week, for example, Twitter removed a video of a cheering kid, because the World Cup was playing on a TV in the background. Also, accounts – including prominent ones – are frequently suspended for alleged copyright infringements which may be fair use.

Similarly, Facebook is known to police its network for possibly infringing content. Like YouTube and others, they use automated filters to spot possibly infringing content, which it takes down before asking questions.

Given the above, there is some irony to the fact that sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are the main venues used by people protesting the EU’s looming censorship machines.

Yes, the EU plans will force smaller companies to spend money on anti-piracy measures, above and beyond what they do now. They will potentially increase liability and uncertainty for startups too. That’s a legitimate concern. But censorship machines are nothing new.

If we use the same rhetoric seen in various “upload filter” protests, the Internet is already being ‘destroyed’ by the Twitters, Facebooks, and YouTubes of this world.

In the current climate, many large platforms will resort to filtering tools or other measures to stop copyright infringements. Their aim is to protect rightsholders, which is understandable, but unfortunately, that can also lead to collateral damage.

The good news is that YouTube, or Facebook, or Twitter, are not the Internet. The Internet will be totally fine. If history has shown us anything, it’s that clever people will come up with new ways to defeat censorship attempts.

While it may sound alien to many, there are alternatives for all these platforms – alternatives that people can host and control themselves. Not to pirate, but to ensure that people can share their legal work without having to worry about overzealous censorship machines.

The real question is, perhaps, if the broader public will ever be ready for these kinds of tools.

Twenty years ago the Internet was a place where a lot of people built stuff, but today it’s mostly a place to consume. There are still plenty of creators and contributors, but these mostly rely on large platforms over which they have no control themselves.

These platforms are convenient, have a broad audience, and even allow some people to make a living. However, they also have power and control over what people are allowed to do and share, memes included. And many (ab)use that power, whether the EU tells them to or not.

Instead of resorting to Twitter activism and YouTube outrage people can also take matters into their own hands, of course, but that would require some work…

Perhaps someone can start a campaign for that?

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

For several years, ETTV has been a household name in the torrent community.

The group, which distributes pirated TV-shows, originated at ExtraTorrent but when the site closed it built its own home.

Together with several like-minded uploaders, including ETHD, they launched ETTV.tv last fall. While the groups still distribute their work on other mainstream torrent indexes, the site’s traffic has been growing steadily.

That doesn’t mean that it’s been a smooth ride though. Like many other sites that offer pirated content, ETTV has been subject to various blocking efforts. Some ISPs in India are blocking the site, for example, and this week Australian providers were ordered to do the same.

To counter these efforts ETTV.tv has now launched its own proxy portal at ETTVproxies.com. The site currently lists one operational ‘alternative,’ but a site representative tells TF that other domains will follow.

“We’re going to launch more. This is just the beginning for us,” ETTV informs TorrentFreak.

“The goal here is to bypass these blocks they are trying to do. It’s not hard to evade their blocks at all, but for those that can’t be bothered ..we will have a bunch of domains which they can find us on.”

Generally speaking, ETTV is not overly concerned about the blocking efforts. While they are a nuisance, determined users have several options to circumvent them, even without a proxy site.

“We think the website blockades are useless. Some people are going to evade them using VPNs, some people using public DNS services such as Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google (8.8.8.8), and others are using Tor.”

ETTV is also planning to launch its own Tor version of the site, to make it more resilient. Also, it will keep its proxies out of popular search engines, hoping to stay under the radar as much as possible.

As we highlighted in the past, ETTV, ETHD, and similar groups don’t rip or encode any releases themselves. They’re pretty much automated scripts that take scene releases, and put these out in public.

There’s a broad audience for this content as their torrents are downloaded millions of times every week. This has also inspired some copycats to take away some of their traffic. But, ETTV is not too worried about those.

“They do not provide original content, and they will never gain popularity especially since people know who we are and where to find us, so they will eventually shut down,” ETTV tells us.

The biggest threat are the copyright holders, perhaps. Many torrent sites have come and gone over the past decade and a half, and several operators have paid a high price for stepping into this business.

Again, ETTV doesn’t seem to be too bothered about the ever-looming crackdown.

“Let’s see how much progress they will make by 2028. Last 15 years was a complete failure for them. The only people that got something out of this are the lawyers. Everybody else lost. Some more, some less,” ETTV concludes.

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

On Tuesday we reported that several YouTube channels had all their videos blocked worldwide. This included those belonging to MIT OpenCourseWare,’ the ‘Blender Foundation,’ and many others.

The error message that was displayed typically appears for copyright reasons. However, in this case, the problem was more complicated, related to a new license agreement, among other things.

While some prominent channels have now been restored, others still face similar issues. The people at Human Beatbox, for example, tell us that they are experiencing the same problem, which at the time of writing is still not fixed.

YouTube simply informed them that its a “technical issue” which the engineers are trying to resolve. Meanwhile, all videos of theirs and many other channels have been inaccessible for nearly a week…

Whatever the problem is, it’s clearly a ‘mistake’ of epic proportions.

While YouTube probably has no intention to ‘censor’ these channels, it shows what can go wrong if creators put their faith in the hands of a single service. A service they have no control over at all, which removes your content, erroneously or not.

Luckily there are some alternatives that put creators in control again. PeerTube is one of these options.

When the Blender Foundation had all its videos blocked by YouTube earlier this week, a decision was taken to give this alternative a try. In a matter of hours, Blender had a fully operational streaming site, one which they had complete control over.

This prompted TF to take a closer look at PeerTube and what it has to offer.

Blender testing PeerTube

Put simply, PeerTube allows anyone to set up their own video streaming site. This can run independently, but it can also be linked, or federated, with other PeerTube instances to create a broader reach. All with P2P steaming support.

The first version of PeerTube launched last year. It’s operated by the small French company Framasoft, and thus far it hasn’t really broken through in English-speaking countries. The Blender Foundation’s problems, while very unfortunate, may change that.

“Blender’s example illustrates our main goal: autonomy, independence from external platforms. When you centralize videos and attention, you gain power over the users. Our approach goes the other way,” Framasoft’s Pouhiou tells TF.

PeerTube comes with built-in WebTorrent support. This means that viewers also contribute their bandwidth, which can come in handy if a video goes viral.

To ‘federate’ with other PeerTube instances, the software uses the ActivityPub protocol, which is also used by the popular social networking software Mastodon. This helps to grow the video library if needed, but it’s entirely optional.

“Federation allows diversity in the governances: each PeerTube Instance Hoster can determine their own set of rules, their settings, their moderation policy, etcetera,” Pouhiou says.

Embedding a PeerTube video

The idea behind PeerTube is to let creators regain control over their content. This helps to avoid censorship in the broadest sense of the word, and also “problems” that block videos for days on end.

It’s this spirit that also drives the developers to make the software entirely free and open.

“To us, it is really about taking back the web into our own hands. We have a joke about the ‘Power to the people’ song of John Lennon: PeerTube is kind of ‘Software to the people’,” Pouhiou tells us.

“That’s why PeerTube has to be Free-Libre software: not even we should be able to ‘close’ the code, it would give us way too much power, which we don’t want.”

Of course, there are plenty of downsides to alternatives like PeerTube. For one, in terms of costs, they are not free to operate. Even though WebTorrent can limit the bandwidth bill to a degree, it requires hosting and some technical skills.

Monetizing PeerTube videos will also require more work. You can’t just click a button and magically start earning money. And then there’s the issue of reaching a wide audience, which may be harder for creators who are ‘locked’ into external services.

That said, for outfits such as Blender and MIT OpenSourceWare which are non-profit and have their own sites which people know how to find, it makes a lot of sense.

At the least, everyone who relies on external platforms might want to stop and think for a minute if they really want to put all their eggs in someone else’s basket.

More information on PeerTube can be found on the official site. The company recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to ensure continued development, which has raised over €20,000 at the time of writing.

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

For many years, Netflix relied on content supplied by other companies to satisfy its growing userbase. Now, however, that reliance is beginning to take a back seat to productions of its own.

Back in February, Netflix CFO David Wells said that his company was set to spend more than $8 billion on content in 2018, a figure that contributes to the 700 original TV shows and 80 movies it will offer globally this year. There can be little doubt, Netflix is now a powerful creator and commissioner of content in its own right.

This shift in strategy raises some interesting points, not least concerning the company’s attitude toward piracy. While the MPAA has spat venom over the issue for decades, Netflix has appeared somewhat more relaxed. Quietly, however, Netflix understands that scraping every possible dollar from consumers while restricting the availability of pirated content is something it must sink resources into.

Back in 2017, we revealed the existence of Netflix’s Global Copyright Protection Group when the company advertised for a Global Copyright Protection Counsel. Since then the company has recruited more individuals to the cause and this week advertised for another new recruit.

Netflix’s new Copyright and Content Protection Coordinator will work with the Global Copyright & Content Protection Group to protect Netflix Originals, the TV shows and movies for which Netflix owns the rights.

“The ideal candidate will have carried out a similar role at another company and can hit the ground running,” the listing for the position reads.

“He or she should have experience of anti-piracy initiatives and be very well versed in managing an effective notice and take down program and experience of working with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing, VK, Daily Motion and other well known platforms.”

Although Netflix’s business model is somewhat different to that of more traditional studios, the company faces the same problems with pirate links appearing online. To that end, the successful applicant will be expected to disrupt this availability as much as possible, particularly through the management of the company’s DMCA notice sending systems.

The company’s new coordinator will be expected to carry out daily scanning of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Periscope, Google Search, Bing, VK, DailyMotion and other platforms used for piracy. Fingerprinting technologies on YouTube (ContentID) and Facebook (Rights Manager) will also need to be monitored, with attention paid to content that’s uploaded in a way that circumvents those recognition systems.

Of course, these legitimate platforms are just the tip of a very large iceberg. It seems likely that Netflix content is more likely to be found illegally on torrent and streaming platforms so these will need to be tackled too, with Netflix advising that the candidate will gather data on “pirate streaming sites, cyberlockers and usenet platforms.”

While Netflix is now a true competitor to the mainstream Hollywood studios and companies like Amazon, they all have to deal with piracy in roughly the same way. These synergies were formalized last June with the debut of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a coalition of 30 companies dedicated to presenting a united front against piracy.

As a founding member of ACE, Netflix contributes $5m per year to the alliance. This expensive relationship needs to be nurtured so the new coordinator will have responsibilities there too, working with other ACE members to tackle the piracy threat.

The full listing can be found here.

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