The ongoing battle between copyright holders and pirates is often described as a cat and mouse game, especially when it comes to content protection.

Hollywood studios release their movies with copy protection. Pirates break it. New protection is released. Pirates break it again. And so forth.

With UHD Blu-rays, copyright holders have long had the upper hand in this game. The discs are protected with AACS 2.0 encryption which was long believed to unbreakable.

This changed late last year. While the encryption technically wasn’t ‘cracked,’ at least not publicly, various pirated UHD Blu-ray movies were released. After several years behind, the ‘pirates’ were in front again.

Not much later, another breakthrough came when a Russian company released a Windows tool called DeUHD that could rip UHD Blu-ray discs. While this was initially another win for pirates, bad news was on the horizon.

Last month, the UHD Bluray releases of the movies Fury and The Patriot came out with a new encryption version, labeled AACS 2.1. This addition made it impossible to rip the discs and some feared that bypassing the protection could take a long time.

Yesterday, however, Arusoft released a new version of its DeUHD ripping tool that is now able to rip AACS 2.1 discs.

DeUHD announcement

TorrentFreak reached out to Arusoft who informed us that the AACS 2.1 discs come with a crucial difference. The main file has a fmts extension, an encrypted m2ts format, which contains forensic information.

“[I]t’s extension is fmts instead of m2ts because it contains some extra info used by studios to track the player used for decryption, which is the major difference from aacs2.0 discs,” Arusoft notes.

“It is not too difficult to bypass this protection, just takes some time to do it,” they add.

While Arusoft doesn’t condone piracy, as MyCE notes, the new DeUHD release opens the door for pirates to share releases to a wider audience.

And indeed, a few hours ago several UHD Blu-ray rips of Fury have appeared online.

Interestingly, there is some concern among the broader public whether this would be ‘safe’ or not.

It’s obviously illegal, but the main worry is that AACS 2.1 presumably added forensic watermarks could help to identify the source of a leak. DeUHD’s developers, however, suggest that these data have been stripped.

“All redundant data has been cleared from the disc,” Arusoft tells TorrentFreak.

In a similarly worded statement, MyCE was informed that DeUHD “clears the garbage from the file” but other than that no definite claims were made.

TorrentFreak previously reached out to the licensing outfit AACS LA to find out more about the new encryption. The company said it would review our request but has yet to comment.

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In the early 2000s, international and Danish entertainment industry groups joined forces to tackle the rising threat of piracy affecting movies, TV shows, music, and similar products.

The result was the anti-piracy group Antipiratgruppen (now RettighedsAlliancen / Rights Alliance), an organization dedicated to tackling the problem of unlicensed sharing.

Like all such operations, Antipiratgruppen needed legal representation and local law firm Johan Schlüter was hired for the job, representing groups including the MPAA.

In subsequent years, Johan Schlüter (which was founded by a lawyer of the same name) was involved in numerous anti-piracy cases. However, something was seriously amiss in this company that had long claimed to protect the interests of its entertainment industry clients.

Following an investigation into the company’s accounts by auditing company Deloitte, financial irregularities amounting to millions of dollars were reported in the media during 2015.

The Johan Schlüter law firm should have been distributing huge sums to movie and TV industry associations and their underlying rightsholders but its three partners – Johan Schlüter himself, Lars Halgreen and Susanne Fryland – had been lining their own pockets instead. Massive sums were siphoned away from their clients.

Yesterday, after more than 20 hearings during which the defendants maintained their innocence (with Schlüter and Halgreen painting themselves as victims of Fryland’s actions), all three were found guilty of fraud and false accounting to the tune of 100 million Danish kroner (US$15.83m).

Johan Schlüter was sentenced to four years in prison, Susanne Fryland was ordered to serve five and a half years, and Lars Halgreen was sentenced to nine months. Because of his age, Schlüter’s sentence is conditional. Due to his relatively minor role, so is Halgreen’s.

“The court has ruled that gross economic crime has been committed. And the prison sentences take into account the crime committed,” special prosecutor Malene Stage Christensen told DR News.

The Johan Schlüter law firm went bankrupt in 2015 and, during the trial, events leading up to its demise were placed under the spotlight.

It transpired that in addition to being a partner in the law firm, Susanne Fryland was also a director of a subsidiary company which was responsible for managing registration, collection and administration rights for various film and TV associations.

The prosecutor presented an email sent by Fryland to the account manager at the subsidiary noting that Johan Schlüter in Copenhagen was “screaming for liquidity”. When asked who was screaming, Fryland pointed the finger at Schlüter and Halgreen.

“When they looked at liquidity in Copenhagen, did Susanne Fryland print an invoice to an association?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes,” Fryland confirmed.

The trial heard that this kind of fraud, including but not limited to issuing unwarranted invoices, had been ongoing for at least four years.

Schlüter, a former director general of IFPI, was banned from practicing law and running a company. His lawyer, Jakob Arrevad, says he will read the verdict before deciding whether to file an appeal, DR.dk reports.

Susanne Fryland, who wasn’t in court to hear the decision, was also banned from practicing law and running a company. She immediately filed an appeal, as did former associate Halgreen, who was banned from practicing law for two years.

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Last month we were the first to report that Justin Sun, the entrepreneur behind the popular cryptocurrency TRON, was in the process of acquiring BitTorrent Inc.

The San-Francisco based file-sharing company confirmed the interest from Sun but noted that the acquisition was not yet 100% finalized.

This position appears to have shifted in the weeks that followed. Last week Sun’s company Rainberry Aquisition filed paperwork related to a merger at California Secretary of State, Variety reports, and BitTorrent did the same.

BitTorrent changed its name to Rainberry last year, and new information suggests that the acquisition by Sun was recently finalized.

This is further backed up by Variety which learned that BitTorrent management informed employees about the deal last week. The staffers were told not to share any information with the press, but word got out eventually.

It’s unclear how much was paid for the acquisition. Sun’s plans for BitTorrent also remain a mystery.

In the short term, not much is expected to change. However, it could be that Sun will eventually use BitTorrent’s user base of over 100 million users to popularize TRON even further. With the acquisition, Sun will also own several BitTorrent patents, including one for P2P live streaming.

TRON is one of the hottest and most controversial cryptocurrencies. After a successful ICO, it now has a market cap of more than $3 billion, which is surpassed by few others.

The TRON mainnet, which went live two weeks ago, has the ultimate goal to “decentralize the web.” BitTorrent would fit well in this picture, especially since the TRON whitepaper mentions torrents as one of its pillars.

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Even though sports streaming services are widely available in most countries, people are not always willing to pay for them.

This applies to individuals, who turn to pirate sites or other unauthorized channels, but also to businesses such as bars and restaurants.

The latter group is seen as a thorn in the side by many rightsholders. This includes the Spanish soccer league “La Liga,” which broadcasts some of the most viewed matches in the world.

In an effort to curb this type of piracy, “La Liga” has recently started to use modern technology, and its users, to its advantage. In an unprecedented move, the soccer league has turned its official Android app into a piracy spying machine.

The app in question, which has been installed by millions of users, will use the microphone and GPS readings of the devices its installed on to report possible instances of streaming piracy.

With consent from the user, the app will analyze the audio in its surroundings to check if one of La Liga’s matches is being played. It then pairs that with GPS data to see if that location is an authorized broadcaster.

“Protect your team,” users read when they are prompted to enable this type of data collection.

Protect your team (photo: Jorge Morell Ramos)

The unusual functionality is detailed in the privacy policy which mentions tackling piracy as one of the main purposes.

“The purposes for which this functionality will be used are: (i) to develop statistical patterns on soccer consumption and (ii) to detect fraudulent operations of the retransmissions of LaLiga football matches (piracy).”

The microphone will only be activated when La Liga is broadcasting its football matches, the policy further clarifies.

The spying tool was spotted by Eldiario.es, which reached out to “La Liga” for additional information.

The Spanish soccer league informed the publication that “nobody accesses the audio fragments captured by the microphone” as the audio “automatically becomes a signal, a binary code.” This happens only in Spain and “without storing any recording or content.”

The organization states that it has to resort to these kinds of measures since piracy is resulting in losses of up to 150 million euros. It doesn’t mention how the data will be used, but establishments who broadcast their matches without consent, are warned.

Users who’ve enabled the functionality but no longer want to operate as piracy spies can go into the settings of their phone to disable audio and location sharing.

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Unauthorized IPTV services that provide competition to traditional broadcasters and VOD providers are a huge thorn in the side of mainstream entertainment industry companies.

As a result, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), an anti-piracy partnership forged between Hollywood studios, Netflix, Amazon, and more than two dozen other companies, is now fighting on the front line, attempting to bring these competitors down.

Two early targets were the Kodi-powered Tickbox and Dragonbox services, who are both been tackled in US courts.

Earlier this year, ACE members launched similar action against Florida-based Set Broadcast, LLC, the company behind the popular IPTV service SET TV. The complaint, filed at a California federal court in April, claimed that Set TV was nothing but a piracy tool which offered copyright-infringing streams to a large number of subscribers.

Despite the threats and a lawsuit, Set TV has continued to provide service to thousands of customers who access media via set-top boxes, laptops, tablets, phones and various other hardware devices. Just before the weekend, however, trouble appeared on the horizon.

A message published on Set TV’s homepage indicated that the platform might be facing difficulties.

Set TV down

Given that Set TV is under intense pressure from ACE, many observers and some media reports put two and two together, concluding that Set TV had probably buckled under the pressure and thrown in the towel.

While that might still transpire at a later date, no official messages appeared on Set TV’s social media accounts to confirm or deny. So, to learn more, TorrentFreak contacted Set TV who emailed back a short message Sunday.

“We apologize for this inconvenience. We are working on getting our system back online,” the company said in response.

A call to the company’s support line was met with a similar message.

This morning Set TV’s service still appears to be down and no updates are available detailing when (or indeed if) the platform will return. The statement that efforts are underway to bring the service back suggest that technical issues may be behind the downtime but what they might be is pure guesswork at this point.

As far as we can see, Set TV was still encouraging potential customers to sign up via Twitter last Thursday, with the downtime apparently coinciding with an unknown event on Friday.

More than 72 hours later the service is still down with no concrete news, so it’s hardly surprising that people are jumping to conclusions. The fact that the company erased all of the posts in its Facebook timeline isn’t helping either.

Only adding to the intrigue are reports from claimed Set TV customers that they were advised that a new IPTV service called https://www.simply-tv.com/ was just Set TV under another name.

That site is only partially operational but does have Android APK files on offer. However, trying to buy the service prompts the user with a newsletter option instead and users report that using their Set TV credentials with the service (which is certainly not advised at this point) doesn’t provide any kind of service.

On the other hand, several others report that everything works fine with the new service but a user with a single post giving precise details should be approached with a healthy amount of caution, at least for now.

In situations like these, it’s difficult to know who to trust but as one former user points out, sometimes it’s best to trust no-one if information isn’t being provided directly by the companies involved.

“I am highly disappointed with the lack of response from Set TV or Simply Tv or whoever they are,” he wrote on Reddit.

“I paid for 3 months and got only one. I’ve emailed them and nothing. I don’t think I’ll go with Simply TV either. I don’t trust them.”

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