Despite the fact that most modern music is readily available for free on ad-supported platforms such as YouTube and Spotify, a thriving market for pirated content remains.

While streaming is convenient and mostly cheap, part of the lure of pirate sites is that music can be downloaded to users’ machines, to be played back whenever they like, with or without an Internet connection and associated costs.

The threat from unlicensed sources is actively countered by groups such as the RIAA, which is regularly seen targeting so-called YouTube-downloader sites via legal action and DMCA anti-circumvention notices. However, there are also efforts to identify the people behind these sites and the weapon of choice in that respect appears to be the DMCA subpoena.

The latest, filed by the RIAA at a district court in Columbia, targets a handful of unlicensed music platforms, all of which use or have used the services of Cloudflare. The theory is that the CDN company holds information on the operators of these sites so if the RIAA can gain access to that too, something can be done to disrupt their activities.

“We have learned that your service is hosting the below-referenced websites on its network,” the RIAA’s latest subpoena to Cloudflare reads.

“These websites are offering recording s which are owned by one or more of our member companies and have not been authorized for this kind os use, including without limitation that referenced at the URLs below. We have a good faith belief that this activity is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”

The first unlicensed site targeted by the RIAA is iPlusFree.org, a music download site that appears to specialize in tracks culled from iTunes.

iPlusFree isn’t a particularly big platform when compared to some of the most popular YouTube-ripping sites and if anything its traffic has been reducing over the past several months. However, at least a quarter of the site’s traffic comes from the United States so the RIAA appears keen to unmask its operators for offering tracks by prominent artists without permission.

They include The Other Side (SZA & Justin Timberlake), Rare by Selena Gomez, and A Boogie wit da Hoodie by Artist 2.0.

The three other sites listed in the DMCA subpoena do not appear particularly popular in the United States. However, the RIAA will be concerned by their popularity in South America, Brazil in particular, where the trio are thriving.

From virtually no traffic at all six months ago, Asmelhores.net (Portuguese: ‘The Best’) is now enjoying more than 360,000 visits per month, with 97% of users hailing from Brazil.
Baixarcdscompletos.net (Portuguese: ‘Download Complete CDs’), the second most-trafficked site in the list with 340,000 visits per month, is also big in Brazil with a similar percentage of traffic.

With more than 218,000 visits per month according to SimilarWeb, Xandaodownload.net is also dominated by traffic from the same region. Unlike the others, however, the site also offers non-musical content including movies, TV shows, software and games.

This trio are accused of offering unlicensed copies of tracks from Red Hot Chili Peppers (Scar Tissue), Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana), Sexx Dreams (Lady Gaga), Daydream (Maria Carey), plus several others.

“As is stated in the attached subpoena, you are required to disclose to the RIAA information sufficient to identify the infringers,” the letter to Cloudflare reads. “This would include the individuals’ names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, payment information, account updates and account history.”

The subpoena was signed off by a court clerk in the District of Columbia three days after it was filed, with two of those days covered by a weekend. It requires Cloudflare to hand over the personal details requested by the music industry group by 17:00 on March 13, 2020.

Whether Cloudflare holds any useful information will remain to be seen. All four sites are operational at the time of writing.

The RIAA’s subpoena to Cloudflare can be obtained here (pdf)

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Australia’s latest online copyright infringement report, released by the Department of Communications in December, suggested that piracy is falling.

The data pointed out that there’s been a steady decrease in the number of people who consume music, movies, and TV shows illegally. This follows a trend that was revealed in earlier reports.

According to the Government, a mere 16% of the population can be classified as pirates. This is a drastic drop compared to last year when a similar study found that 32% obtained content illegally. In 2015, when the first survey was taken, the number was even higher at 43%.

Like many other news outlets, we reported the numbers as they were presented. However, something didn’t feel right. This prompted us to step back and take a closer look at the reported data to see how this unprecedented drop took place.

Specifically, we want to see where this drop comes from and how it can be so massive.

The bar chart below provides a good starting point. It shows what percentage of a particular category of digital content is consumed 100% legally, 100% illegally, or a mix of both. The chart also shows the same data for “any of the four” content categories.

As reported, the bar on the far right shows that, across all categories, only 16% of the respondents consumed content unlawfully in any of the four categories. That is exactly as reported, so that’s good news.

The problem is, however, that this percentage doesn’t make much sense when we look at the individual categories.

Based on the reported sample numbers, the 16% across all categories translates to 314 respondents. In other words, 314 people pirated something from any of the four categories which includes music, games, movies and TV.

However, when we look at the movies category on its own we see that 25% of the respondents consumed movies illegally. Based on the sample size for that category, that translates to 316 respondents.

How can it be that more people consume movies illegally than in the four categories combined, which also includes movies, and thus the same respondents?

Technically this can be chalked up as rounding variance. But even when that’s the case, it seems implausible that every person who pirated something also pirated movies.

That explanation is even more implausible when we look at the exact same data from the year before. That year 32% of the people consumed content from any of the four categories unlawfully (555 respondents). However, less than half of these were also movie pirates (240 respondents).

It seems very unlikely that when in 2018 less than 50% of the self-proclaimed pirates consumed illegal movies, this suddenly went up to 100% in 2019.

We shared our findings with the Australian Government’s Department of Communications and the Arts. Despite several back and forths, they were not able to explain these findings.

In previous years the report also included the raw numbers for all the categories, which could provide more insight. However, the most recent report no longer includes these and the Government informed us that it does not have permission to share the data.

And it doesn’t stop there. The further we delve into the numbers the weirder things get.

For example, there is a similar chart to the one shown earlier but in this instance detailing the consumption of “free” content (e.g. downloading from torrent sites).

As shown above, this indicates that 46% of all respondents who consumed free content in any of the four categories did so unlawfully.

This translates to roughly 678 respondents, which is much more than the number cited for all content consumers (paid and free), which presumably includes the same people.

There are many other examples to give but the above clearly illustrates that there’s something fishy with these numbers. According to the Government, the entire pirate population was slashed in half last year, but we doubt that this is really the case.

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For more than a decade, rightsholders and anti-piracy groups in Sweden have criticized the scale of the penalties available for courts to hand down in cases of serious copyright infringement.

Perhaps the most famous case, involving the people behind The Pirate Bay, ended with defendants Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström originally receiving eight, ten and four months in prison. As things stand the absolute maximum sentence is two years. The government now wants to challenge the status quo with changes to the law that will see the most egregious infringers jailed for much longer.

The amendments, which began with a 2017 investigation and cover many aspects of intellectual property including patents and trademarks, were first tabled more than two years ago. According to an announcement by the Swedish government, they have now been passed to the Law Council for consideration.

“There has been significant social development since the penalties for intellectual property infringement took their present form,” the government writes in its submission.

“The meaning of intellectual property rights has increased substantially at the same time as large-scale and industrially-operated infringement operations. This has serious consequences for society as a whole.

“It is therefore important that criminal law is designed so that this type of crime can be met with penalties commensurate with the seriousness of the offense. Therefore, in the Law Council’s remit, it is proposed that the penalties for the most serious cases of intellectual property infringement are sharpened and special penalties for intentional serious crimes are introduced in all intellectual property laws.”

To this end and in addition to regular fines, the proposals envision a two-tiered approach.

Less serious copyright infringement offenses will still be punishable by up to two years in prison (‘copyright infringement’) but should a crime be considered serious (‘gross copyright infringement’), the government wants to set a minimum of six months detention. This category of offenders, who will have shown an intent to commit large scale crime, face up to six years’ imprisonment.

To determine whether an intellectual property infringement is gross or serious, the government says that particular consideration must be given to whether the crime was preceded by special planning, part of a crime that was organized and/or extensive, or was of a “particularly dangerous nature.”

As previously reported, the government also looked at whether amendments would be required to more easily seize all kinds of property in response to infringement, including intangible assets such as domain names. This was most likely a nod towards the Pirate Bay case which dragged on for several years before the state was able to take over the thepiratebay.se domain.

In the event, the final proposals note that changes to confiscation standards can be omitted since developments in case law have rendered them unnecessary.

“There should be no new provisions introduced in intellectual property laws on the seizure of property which can reasonably be believed to be subject to confiscation. There is also no need for changes in the law regarding the handling of domain names that have been forfeited,” the proposals read.

“In case law, it has been found that the right to a domain name used as a means of committing copyright infringement constitutes such property that may be forfeited under the provisions of the Copyright Act. Also in relation to the general rules on the use of [infringement tools] in Chapter 36 of the Criminal Code it has been found in practice that any form of property can be forfeited.”

After consideration by the Law Council, the legislative amendments (pdf, Swedish) are proposed to enter into force on September 1, 2020.

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With more than 271 million users across 79 markets, Spotify is the most popular music streaming service in the world.

Its 50 million song library is accessed by 124 million paying subscribers, who gain additional features such as an ad-free experience and the ability to download tracks to their own devices for offline listening. These tracks are encrypted so can’t be used outside the Spotify software, at least by conventional means.

One tool that turns this business model on its head is Windows-based application XSpotify. The tool has gained popularity for a number of reasons, not least its ability to remove DRM from the tracks stored in Spotify’s extensive library and permanently download them for keeping on users’ machines.

XSpotify has been quietly growing its userbase, offering track downloads from both free Spotify accounts (in 160 kb/s, 32-bit, 44100 Hz .ogg) and premium accounts (in 320 kb/s, 32-bit, 44100 Hz .ogg) while pulling down metadata such as artist, title, and album covers. Considering the above and its ability to block ads, it’s no surprise that Spotify eventually took legal action to tackle the spread of the tool.

This week, Washington-based law firm Perkins Coie LLP sent a broad takedown notice to Github, where XSpotify was available for download, citing breaches of the DMCA by the app and its developer.

“Copyrighted files on Spotify’s services are protected by encryption. Spotify uses a key to decrypt the copyrighted files so legitimate users can listen to the copyrighted files through the Spotify services. Spotify’s encryption system prevents users from listening to copyrighted works without Spotify’s decryption key,” the notice reads.

“XSpotify states that it is a ‘DRM bypass’ that allows users to ‘Download all songs directly from Spotify servers.’ XSpotify’s technology circumvents Spotify’s encryption by stealing the Spotify key and using it in a way Spotify prohibits, namely, enabling users to access encrypted copyrighted content without authorization.

“By providing technology that circumvents Spotify’s access controls, XSpotify violates 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201(a)(2),” the law firm writes.

The section of US law cited by Spotify’s attorneys is clear. Among other things, it states that no person shall offer any technology to the public that is “primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”

In addition to removing the main XSpotify repository, Github was also ordered to delete almost 130 others that carried forks of the popular tool. At the time of writing, every repository reported by Spotify as infringing has been removed. Of course, XSpotify is still available for download from other locations but whether its developer will continue his work after this warning shot is yet to be seen.

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Online piracy is an issue that affects many industries, and game developers are certainly no exception.

While some big game companies are responding with lawsuits and takedown notices, not all game studios necessarily see piracy was something that has to be rooted out.

Yesterday, game studio RageSquid brought attention to the topic in a unique and creative way. The company, known for the downhill mountain biking game “Descenders,” is all too familiar with ‘unlicensed’ players. Their game was pirated by groups such as CODEX and SKIDROW, which are familiar names in the game now.

The game studio, however, is pretty open to pirates and has never treated them any differently. But, after some internal discussions, that changed yesterday when RageSquid decided to give all known pirates a unique flag on their bikes.

“We just realized we never thanked SKIDROW and CODEX for sharing our game. So as appreciation we gave them all a little flag they can never unequip,” RageQuid wrote on Twitter.

Although pirates can still play the game just fine, they are forced to wave the pirate flag. Some may see this as a badge of honor, others may take it as a punishment. RageSquid’s Studio Director Lex Decrauw explains to us that it is certainly not intended that way.

“Honestly, we were just having a laugh at the office, it was a spur of the moment thing. We were having a look at our piracy rates and someone dropped a ‘wouldn’t it be fun if all pirates were forced to sail the pirate flag?’ and that was all that was needed for our artist to whip up something neat,” he says.

“We’ve not done this as some form of punishment as some people have suggested. We acknowledge how many people play our game through pirated versions and we’re okay with that,” Decrauw adds.

The game studio confirms that roughly 60% of all Descenders players have pirated the game. While that is a very substantial figure, the effect pirates have on the company’s revenues is nothing close to that.

“It would be really easy to shout ‘Oh no, there’s X amount of people playing our game on pirated versions, we’re being robbed of X * [game price] dollars!’ but that’s simply not true,” Decrauw says.

Ultimately, RageSquid wants as many people as possible playing the game, and piracy certainly helps with that. It makes it available to those who don’t have the means to pay for it or wouldn’t have tried it otherwise, the company says.

On top of that, the pirate players may spread the word, which eventually could very well lead to more buyers. In other words, piracy can be seen as a form of promotion as well.

“More often than not the people who pirate the game wouldn’t have bought it otherwise,” Decrauw says. “On top of that, there are people who pirate it and tell their friends about the game, who then may buy it through official channels.

“All in all, we’re perfectly fine with pirates and I’d say it is absolutely not a problem at all for us. The flag is simply supposed to be a friendly joke to our pirate friends out there,” RageSquid’s Studio Director adds.

Many of these pirate “friends” will now happily wave their pirate flags going downhill. And those who don’t like it can always buy the game. Similarly, legitimate customers who fancy a pirate flag on their bike have options too, although this gimmick probably isn’t intended to draw people to pirate sites.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.