In 2011 Hollywood’s MPAA highlighted SeriesYonkis as one of the most prolific pirate sites on the Internet.

“With a worldwide Alexa rank of 855, Seriesyonkis.com is one the most visited websites in the world for locating and streaming unauthorized copies of motion picture and television content,” Hollywood’s industry group informed the US Government.

While the MPAA was calling for tough enforcement actions, film industry partners in Spain came up with a different plan. They signed an unprecedented deal with the pirate site in 2011, hoping to convert its users into paying customers.

The main figures in this unusual episode are Juan Carlos Tous, the founder of the legal streaming platform Filmin, and SeriesYonkis owner Alexis Hoepfner, who operated the pirate site under his company Burn Media.

With help from lawyer Andy Ramos they negotiated a unique deal that would ‘merge’ both businesses. According to local newspaper El Confidencial, which has seen a copy of the agreement, SeriesYonkis company would get a 23% stake in Filmin, on the condition that pirate links were replaced with legal ones within a set period.

The entire agreement was kept secret by a confidentiality clause, which worked well until a few days ago.

SeriesYonkis also made two loans of 250,000 euros available, which were convertible into shares. In addition to the above, Filmin also offered compensation for every pirate it converted, up to 10 euros per user that signed up for an annual subscription.

The agreement further stipulated that SeriesYonkis had to apologize for its pirate ways. Point five stressed that SeriesYonkis and other Burn Media sites had to “carry out communication and awareness actions so that the users of the websites understand the need to legally access audiovisual content.”

Interestingly, SeriesYonkis wasn’t planning to go down and let other pirate sites take its traffic. The agreement included a clause that obligated Filmin to spend 25,000 euros to shut down or reduce traffic to other pirate sites.

The episode took place when Spain was about to implement its Sinde law, which would make it hard for local pirate sites in a country that was considered a “safe haven” at the time. However, not everything went according to plan.

The Sinde law didn’t destroy all Spanish pirate sites and six months after signing the agreement, SeriesYonkis stopped deleting pirate links. Even worse, its owner launched several new pirate sites, such as SeriesCoco and SeriesKiwi.

Filmin’s founder was outraged and sent an email demanding answers.

“I would like to hear your opinion on the progress and explanation of your plan with SeriesCoco! I do not understand anything! I thought you were going to decrease, and I see that you are opening portals!! WTF!” Tous wrote.

The deal eventually fell apart. Filmin kept its shares and stopped paying for new referrals. SeriesYonkis’ company Burn Media filed a lawsuit to get back its money, but thus far that hasn’t happened.

According to an insider close to the deal, the idea was brilliant. SeriesYonkis reportedly earned millions of euros at the time, more than Filmin, and used this money to go legal and destroy the competition ahead of a tough new anti-piracy law.

“The pirate not only abandons its weapons, but is integrated into the industry, and uses capital earned from piracy to fight against it,” a source told El Confidencial.

“It was a winning deal for everyone,” another source added, regretting that it didn’t work out. “It was a very bold agreement, something unusual in this sector, that would have changed the scenario if it had worked.”

Today, roughly seven years after the agreement was set into motion, Filmin is one of the larger streaming platforms in Spain. SeriesYonkis is also still around, but was sold by Hoefner in 2016 and no longer links to pirated content.

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In the United States, citizens are generally prohibited from tampering with DRM and other technological protection measures.

This means that Blu-ray rippers are not allowed, nor are mod chips for gaming consoles, and some pirate streaming boxes could fall into this category as well.

Despite possible sanctions, there are plenty of manufacturers who ship these devices to the US, often to individual consumers. To arrive at their destination, however, they first have to pass the border control.

Not all make it to their final destination. A new report released by Homeland Security shows that the number of “intellectual property” related seizures increased by 8%, from 31,560 in 2016 to 34,143 a year later.

The vast majority of these seized items are traditional counterfeit goods. This includes fake brand clothing, shoes, replica watches, toys, as well as consumer electronics.

What caught our eye, however, is a sharp increase in “circumvention devices” that were found to violate the DMCA. Last year, the number of these seized items U.S. Customs and Border Protection increased by 324%.

“CBP seized 297 shipments of circumvention devices for violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 324 percent increase from 70 such seizures in FY 2016,” the report reads.

While the relative increase is quite dramatic, the absolute numbers are perhaps not as impressive, with less than one seized device per day. The report gives no explanation for the surge, nor is there an estimate of how many devices slip through.

What we did notice is that the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) recently framed streaming boxes as possible circumvention tools. The strong enforcement focus of rightsholders on these devices may have been communicated to border patrols as well.

When we previously reached out to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to find out more about what type of circumvention devices are seized under the DMCA, a spokesperson provided us with the following definition.

“[P]roducts, devices, components, or parts thereof that are primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner, and have only limited commercially significant purposes or uses other than to circumvent such protection measures.”

TorrentFreak reached out to CBP again this week to ask if streaming boxes are seen as circumvention devices, but at the time of writing, we have yet to receive a response.

In a press release commenting on the news, CBP Acting Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said that his organization is happy with last year’s results.

“The theft of intellectual property and trade in counterfeit and pirated goods causes harm to an innovation-based economy by threatening the competitiveness of businesses and the livelihoods of workers,” McAleenan said.

“Another record-breaking year of IPR seizures highlights the vigilance of CBP and ICE personnel in preventing counterfeit goods from entering our stream of commerce and their dedication to protecting the American people,” he added.

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With 80 million streaming links to more than 700 video services, Alluc sold itself as the premier streaming link site.

It offered a wide variety of content and over the past thirteen years it grew out to become one of the largest sites of its kind. This week, however, Alluc surprised friend and foe by shutting down.

“The alluc search engine has been discontinued. After 13 years of alluc, we decided to take a break and focus on other projects,” a message posted on the site’s homepage reads.

That the site was popular is not a secret. People used it to find streaming links to nearly everything, from old movies to the latest hit series. The operators mention that they served a billion unique visitors over the past decade, which is an incredible achievement.

Alluc says farewell

What’s less clear, however, is why the site decided to stop now. In the past, we’ve reported on similar sites that threw in the towel because revenue was dwindling, but Alluc told us that is not the case here.

“The decision was not driven by monetary reasons. We started alluc when we were still in high-school and it became into something bigger and better than we could have ever imagined when we started it,” Alluc’s Sebastian tells us.

“But now it’s time for us to move on. We hope to have contributed a lot to the video space and to have helped out a lot of people during these 13 years of running alluc full time.”

While Alluc could be used to find both authorized and unauthorized content, the movie industry saw it as a blatant pirate site. This resulted in a site blocking request in Australia, among other things.

Alluc, however, always rejected the ‘pirate’ label and saw itself as an “uncensored” search engine. While they are shutting down now, they still see a future for similar services.

“There will always be a future for uncensored search and I hope us shutting down alluc can help to create the vacuum needed to incentivize new sites of similar quality and scope or even a decentralized solution to be created by others,” Sebastian tells us.

Time will tell whether another site will indeed jump in to fill the gap.

Alluc’s API, which is used by third-party apps and services to find streaming links, will remain available until the end of the month when it will shut down. Meanwhile, Alluc’s search engine framework lives on at pron.tv, an adult-themed site.

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In 2018, music piracy is a very different beast than it was back in the early P2P days of Kazaa and LimeWire.

Where once it ran rampant, vastly improved official offerings have ensured that millions of former pirates are now enjoying music legally via convenient streaming services such as Spotify. However, there is no shortage of people who prefer to have personal archives of illicit MP3s stored safely on their own machines.

This content can be easily obtained from web-based pirate sites, torrent platforms, and the aging Usenet system. The latter is often (and incorrectly) considered to be a safer option for distribution but for one uploader, things haven’t played out that way.

According to news from Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, a “large-scale” Usenet uploader has recently agreed to pay the not inconsiderable sum of 10,000 euros ($12,374) to make a potential lawsuit disappear.

BREIN says the person was responsible for uploading unlicensed music releases to Usenet in breach of copyright, including recent albums by Ed Sheeran and Justin Timberlake. However, BREIN also criticizes the Usenet providers who facilitate this kind of sharing.

“Although such uploaders usually do this free of charge for the status they receive from illegal downloaders, it is the Usenet providers that make money by selling subscriptions for access to their servers,” says BREIN director Tim Kuik.

“Such providers like to close their eyes and claim that they do not know what is happening on their servers and only take action when they receive a notification.”

Alongside BREIN’s suggestion of willful blindness to infringement, there’s also the issue of compliance when Usenet operators are presented with an official complaint. Dutch case law requires that when a “reasonable” case of infringement is presented, they must give up the identity of the alleged infringer. In this case, that’s exactly what happened.

“BREIN has, in order to obtain the details the uploader, requested the Usenet provider of this uploader to provide the data. This request was answered,” the anti-piracy outfit reveals.

Unlike other jurisdictions where a specific court order is needed for disclosure, in the Netherlands no such process is required. BREIN has taken advantage of this position in many previous cases, insisting that providers who don’t disclose when there are reasonable grounds are acting unlawfully.

Following BREIN’s approach and the 10,000 euro settlement, the anti-piracy outfit says that the uploader took to Spotnet, a piece of software that allows downloading from newsgroups, to announce his demise.

“As you may have noticed, I have not been actively uploading for a while, because BREIN finally found my details and I have been asked to stop acting as an uploader of copyrighted music content to Usenet,” the uploader wrote.

“I have made a settlement with BREIN. A part of this settlement consists of the payment of a considerable sum of 10,000 euros, so I stop with uploading and advise other uploaders to think carefully about whether they want to continue. BREIN doesn’t stand idly by either. They are willing to take the necessary steps to get your details.”

BREIN says that the circumstances of the uploader were taken into consideration when reaching the 10,000 euro figure but whether the full amount will ever get paid will never be publicly known. That being said, the publicity attached to the settlement agreement will be worth more to BREIN than the cash alone.

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In recent years Internet provider Bahnhof has fought hard to protect the privacy of its subscribers.

The company has been a major opponent of extensive data retention requirements, has launched a free VPN to its users, and vowed to protect subscribers from a looming copyright troll invasion.

The privacy-oriented ISP is doing everything in its power to prevent its Swedish customers from being exposed. It has even refused to hand over customer details in piracy cases when these requests are made by the police.

This stance resulted in a lawsuit in which Bahnhof argued that piracy isn’t a serious enough offense to warrant invading the privacy of its customers. The ISP said that this is in line with European privacy regulations.

Last month, the Administrative Court in Stockholm disagreed with this argument, ordering the ISP to hand over the requested information.

The Court ruled that disclosure of subscriber data to law enforcement agencies does not contravene EU law. It, therefore, ordered the ISP to comply, as the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) had previously recommended.

While the order is a serious setback for Bahnhof, the ISP isn’t letting the case go just yet. It has filed an appeal where it maintains that disclosing details of alleged pirates goes against EU regulations.

Bahnhof says NO

To settle the matter once and for all, Bahnhof has asked the Swedish Appeals Court to refer the case to the EU Court of Justice, to have an EU ruling on the data disclosure issue.

“Bahnhof, therefore, requires the Court of Appeal to obtain a preliminary ruling from EU law so that the European Court of Justice itself can rule on the matter before the Court of First Instance reaches a final position,” Bahnhof writes.

Law enforcement requests for piracy-related data are quite common in Sweden. Bahnhof previously showed that more than a quarter of all police request for subscriber data were for cases related to online file-sharing, trumping crimes such as grooming minors, forgery and fraud.

The ISP is vowing to fight this case to the bitter end. While it has no problem with law enforcement efforts in general, the company doesn’t want to hand over customer data without proper judicial review of a suspected crime.

“This legal process has already been going on for two years and Bahnhof is ready to continue for as long as necessary to achieve justice. Bahnhof will never agree to hand over delicate sensitive customer data without judicial review,” the company concludes.

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