Last year, American satellite and broadcast provider Dish Network targeted two well-known players in the third-party Kodi add-on ecosystem.

In a complaint filed in a federal court in Texas, add-on ZemTV and the TVAddons library were accused of copyright infringement. As a result, both are facing up to $150,000 in damages for each offense.

While the case was filed in Texas, neither of the defendants live there, or even in the United States. The owner and operator of TVAddons is Adam Lackman, who resides in Montreal, Canada. ZemTV’s developer Shahjahan Durrani is even further away in London, UK.

According to the legal team of the two defendants, this limited connection to Texas is reason for the case to be dismissed. They filed a motion to dismiss in January, asking the court to drop the case.

“Lackman and Durrani have never been residents or citizens of Texas; they have never owned property in Texas; they have never voted in Texas; they have never personally visited Texas; they have never directed any business activity of any kind to anyone in Texas […] and they have never earned income in Texas,” the motion reads.

Dish, however, sees things differently. Yesterday the broadcast provider replied to the motion, submitting hundreds of pages of evidence documenting TVAddons and ZemTV’s ties to the United States.

According to Dish, both defendants utilized US companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Cloudflare to facilitate their infringing activities. In addition. US residents were directly addressed in various messages on the TVAddons site and social media.

“Defendants used TV Addons to target residents of the United States and it was designed to appeal to United States television consumers. The TV Addons Home page stated ‘Whether you’re in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, India or anywhere else, Kodi Addons will work great for you!’,” Dish writes.

Furthermore, TVAddons own data showed that most of its users came from the United States, more than one-third of the total user base.

“The United States was Defendants’ largest market with approximately 34% of all TV Addons traffic coming from users located in the United States, which was three times the traffic from the second largest market.”

Dish points out that the Court has personal jurisdiction under the “Calder effects test,” because defendants knew that the focal point of the harm from their action was in the US, and because their actions connect the defendants to the US in a meaningful way.

The focal point of the harm from TVAddons and ZemTV was in the United States, Dish states, adding that both defendants were well aware of their infringing activities.

“Defendants’ boasting on TV Addons that their services allow users ‘to cut down your cable or satellite television bill substantially, if not entirely’ shows that Defendants were well aware that TV Addons and ZemTV were harming DISH and other legitimate, subscription television service providers in the United States,” Dish writes.

Without getting too deep into the legal jargon, Dish relies on an alternative basis for jurisdiction as the defendants did in their motion to dismiss, which means that they don’t have to address specific connections to the state of Texas.

The broadcast provider hopes that the Court agrees, and wants the case to proceed.

—

A copy of Dish Network’s reply is available here (pdf).

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

The Pirate Bay has been hard to reach for roughly a day now.

For most people, the site currently displays a CloudFlare error message across the entire site, with the CDN provider mentioning that the “connection timed out.”

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 a small technical issue that needs fixing.

TPB 522 Cloudflare error

The Pirate Bay has had quite a few stints of downtime in recent months. The popular torrent site usually returns after several hours, but an outage of more than 24 hours has happened before as well.

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 suffering downtime, although it briefly reappeared a few times.

As always, the TPB team advises people to be patient.

“If our sites are down we’ll already know and be working on getting them back up. We don’t issue estimates so don’t ask how long it will take,” the status page notes.

In any case, there’s no need to panic. But we expect that seasoned TPB users will probably know the drill by now…

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

When Megaupload was forcefully shut down in 2012, it initially appeared like ‘just’ another wave of copyright enforcement action by US authorities.

When additional details began to filter through, the reality of what had happened was nothing short of extraordinary.

Not only were large numbers of Megaupload servers and millions of dollars seized, but Kim Dotcom’s home in New Zealand was subjected to a military-style raid comprised of helicopters and dozens of heavily armed special tactics police. The whole thing was monitored live by the FBI.

Few people who watched the events of that now-infamous January day unfold came to the conclusion this was a routine copyright-infringement case. According to Kim Dotcom, whose life had just been turned upside down, something of this scale must’ve filtered down from the very top of the US government. It was hard to disagree.

At the time, Dotcom told TorrentFreak that then-Vice President Joe Biden directed attorney Neil MacBride to target the cloud storage site and ever since the Megaupload founder has leveled increasingly serious allegations at officials of the former government of Barack Obama.

For example, Dotcom says that since the US would have difficulty gaining access to him in his former home of Hong Kong, the government of New Zealand was persuaded to welcome him in, knowing they would eventually turn him over to the United States. More recently he’s been turning up the pressure again, such as a tweet on February 20th which cast more light on that process.

“Joe Biden had a White House meeting with an ‘extradition expert’ who worked for Hong Kong police and a handful of Hollywood executives to discuss my case. A week prior to this meeting Neil MacBride hand-delivered his action plan to Biden’s chief of staff, also at the White House,” Dotcom wrote.

But this claim is just the tip of an extremely large iceberg that’s involved illegal spying on Dotcom in New Zealand and a dizzying array of legal battles that are set to go on for years to come. But perhaps of most interest now is that rather than wilting away under the pressure, Dotcom appears to be just warming up.

A few hours ago Dotcom commented on an article published in The Hill which revealed that Barack Obama will visit New Zealand in March, possibly to celebrate the opening of Air New Zealand’s new route to the U.S.

Rather than expressing disappointment, the Megaupload founder seemed pleased that the former president would be touching down next month.

“Great. I’ll have a Court subpoena waiting for him in New Zealand,” Dotcom wrote.

But that was just a mere hors d’oeuvre, with the main course was yet to come. But come it did.

“A wealthy Asian Megaupload shareholder hired a friend of the Obamas to enquire about our case. This person was recommended by a member of the Chinese politburo ‘if you want to get to Obama directly’. We did,” Dotcom revealed.

Dotcom says he’ll release a transcript detailing what Obama told his friend on March 21 when Obama arrives in town but in the meantime, he offered another little taster.

“Mistakes were made. It hasn’t gone well,” Obama reportedly told the person reporting back to Megaupload. “It’s a problem. I’ll see to it after the election.”

Of course, Obama’s position after the election was much different to what had gone before, but that didn’t stop Dotcom’s associates infiltrating the process aimed at keeping the Democrats in power.

“Our friendly Obama contact smuggled an @EFF lawyer into a re-election fundraiser hosted by former Vice President Joe Biden,” he revealed.

“When Biden was asked about the Megaupload case he bragged that it was his case and that he ‘took care of it’,” which is what Dotcom has been claiming all along.

On March 21, when Obama lands in New Zealand, Dotcom says he’ll be waiting.

“I’m looking forward to @BarackObama providing some insight into the political dimension of the Megaupload case when he arrives in the New Zealand jurisdiction,” he teased.

Better get the popcorn ready….

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

Largely since the advent of the third generation of games consoles in the early to mid 80s, adventurous users have been interested in making their machines do things they’re not supposed to.

In common with the 8bit games-capable computers that preceded them, much emphasis was placed on piracy, with people seeking to cut console games costs with copies of what would otherwise be expensive investments. Alongside, however, was a rapidly developing “homebrew” scene in which often amateur coders sought to utilize their purchased hardware for non-conventional means.

These days the process of digitally cracking open a device is much more complex and has given birth to the term ‘jailbreaking’. It can be applied to devices as diverse as iPhones and PlayStations but it all means the same thing – the removal of restrictions put in place by manufacturers in order to control what can be done with a device.

These restrictions mostly relate to the running of software, with the big manufacturers wanting people to not only use ‘app stores’ that they control but also to pay for the privilege. The jailbreaking scene often aims to undermine the former but despite many good intentions, it often gets dragged into piracy as a result.

Yesterday there was cause for both homebrew coders and pirates-in-waiting to celebrate with the announcement that developer ‘Qwertyoruiop’ had released the full code for his PS4 firmware 4.55 kernel exploit.

While the release caused much excitement, the kernel exploit still needs a usermode entry point. As reported by Wololo, that could come via the Webkit exploit previously released by Qwertyoruiop for PS4 firmware 4.07 a while back.

So, to put things into basic terms, while the new exploit works up to v4.55, the user exploit only works up to those with PS4s running v4.07, at least until another usermode exploit for later firmwares is released.

But with anticipation in the air, a few hours later yet more exciting news appeared on the horizon. Taking Qwertyoruiop’s v4.55 kernel exploit and running with it, developer SpecterDev announced on Twitter that he’d published a full implementation of the exploit on Github.

4.55 Full Stack https://t.co/mFQdmZlIt9 Enjoy :) Cheers @qwertyoruiopz @flat_z

— Specter (@SpecterDev) February 27, 2018

<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

In other words, SpecterDev has released a fully-functional jailbreak of PS4 firmware 4.55, which opens up a whole world of opportunities for the homebrew scene – and beyond. That being said, he’s careful to note on Github that others will have to step up to fill in the gaps from here.

“[The implementation] will allow you to run arbitrary code as kernel, to allow jailbreaking and kernel-level modifications to the system. This release however, does not contain any code related to defeating anti-piracy mechanisms or running homebrew,” he explained.

Nevertheless, SpecterDev’s code has an inbuilt ‘ear’ that can take instructions (a so-called ‘payload’) and do something useful with them.

“This exploit does include a loader that listens for payloads on port 9020 and will execute them upon receival,” he explains.

Rumors suggest that there’s already some kind of payload being shared privately. We haven’t been able to confirm what it does yet but people seem excited by it.

Update: Confirmation of what it does from Wololo: “When run in combination with the recently released exploit for PS4 4.55, Holy Grail lets users install and run unsigned packages. In practice, this will let 4.55 owners install and run homebrews as well as, yes, pirated PS4 games.”

A video showing the jailbreak in action has been uploaded to YouTube and can be seen below.

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

In a few weeks, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) will publish its yearly Special 301 Report, highlighting countries that fail to live up to U.S copyright protection standards.

In recent years Switzerland was among countries that were placed on the ‘Watch List.’ In 2017, the US reported that the Swiss had made some progress, but not enough. Its policies towards online piracy were not up to par, according to U.S. standards.

“Switzerland remains on the Watch List this year due to U.S. concerns regarding specific difficulties in Switzerland’s system of online copyright protection and enforcement,” USTR wrote in its Special 301 Report.

One of the key issues the United States identified is the lack of enforcement against hosting companies that do business with pirate sites. Branding these as a “safe haven” for pirates, the US called for suitable countermeasures.

A second problem that was highlighted is the so-called ‘Logistep Decision.‘ In 2010 the Swiss Federal Supreme Court barred anti-piracy outfit Logistep from harvesting the IP addresses of file-sharers. The Court ruled that IP addresses amount to private data, and outlawed the tracking of file-sharers in Switzerland.

According to the USTR, this ruling prevents copyright holders from enforcing their rights, and they called on the Swiss Government to address this concern as well.

Today nearly a year has passed and it looks like the recommendations were not ignored. In a letter to the USTR, the Swiss Government writes that the two main complaints are dealt with in their new copyright law, which was introduced late last year.

“The draft bill, adopted by the Federal Council at its meeting on November 22, 2017, addresses both of those concerns. It aims at further modernizing Swiss copyright law for the purposes of the digital environment and steps up the fight against Internet piracy,” the Swiss write.

The new copyright law addresses the hosting problem by introducing a “take-down-and-stay-down” policy. Internet services will be required to remove infringing content from their platforms and prevent that same content from reappearing. Failure to comply will result in prosecution.

“The ‘stay down’ will prevent rogue websites from being hosted in Switzerland and will make the fight against Internet piracy more effective and sustainable. That should put an end to criticism directed against Switzerland as a host country for infringing sites,” Switzerland informs the U.S.

Similarly, the Logistep ruling will no longer be an issue either if the country’s new copyright law is implemented.

“[T]he draft bill clarifies that the processing of data for the purposes of prosecuting copyright infringement is permissible. With that, it puts an end to the debate that followed the Logistep decision about the extent to which the recording of IP addresses for prosecution purposes is admissible.”

Many copyright holder groups have also asked for ISP blocking of pirate sites, but Switzerland notes that this idea is off the table for now. There is not enough support in Parliament for an Internet blocking provision which may jeopardize acceptance of the entire draft bill, their letter explains.

While not mentioned in the letter, downloading and streaming copyright infringing content for personal use also remains unpunished, video games and software excepted. Uploading and other types of distribution of infringing content are not permitted, however.

Still, the Swiss hope that the newly proposed changes to its copyright law will be enough to have it removed from the Special 301 Watch List.

“Switzerland is confident that the revision of the Swiss Copyright Act will more effectively address the challenges posed by the Internet,” the Swiss Government writes, adding that it “looks forward to continuing to work with the U.S. to further clarify any issue relating to online piracy.”

—

Switzerland’s letter to the United States Trade Representative is available here (pdf).

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