The “repeat infringer” issue remains a hot topic in US courts after rightsholders filed lawsuits against several ISPs.

These Internet providers are accused of not doing enough to stop copyright infringers on their networks, even after receiving multiple ‘copyright infringement’ notifications.

Last December, one case resulted in a guilty verdict against Cox. Following a jury trial, the company was ordered to pay a billion dollars in damages to a group of major record labels.

Following the verdict, many of the labels shifted their focus to the next target, ISP Grande Communications. This case was scheduled to go to trial last week but, at the last minute, it was postponed until September.

This decision came after the court advised both parties that it only had time for a six-day trial, as opposed to the ten days originally requested. Both the defendant and plaintiffs argued that considering the extensiveness of the case, this was not enough, so they filed a request for a delay.

“The Parties do not believe that six days is an adequate amount of time to try this case. Accordingly, the Parties request that the Court continue the trial setting and reset it at a time that allows for ten trial days,” Grande and the record companies informed the court.

Last week U.S. District Judge David Ezra granted the request. This means that the case will be postponed for several months, with the new trial taking place in September.

The extra time will also allow both parties to resolve some of their outstanding differences. Both sides submitted several motions to exclude information from the trial and they hope to narrow these requests in the coming months.

In addition, jury selection has also been postponed. This means that the record labels must wait a bit longer before they can ask potential trial jurors if they read TorrentFreak.

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

In days gone by, living rooms around the world could be found stacked with video cassette tapes full of films and TV shows. Some bought, others recorded at home, these copies would need to be waded through, to find whatever content the owner fancied watching that day.

With the rise of digital technology, however, such physical collections have largely disappeared, replaced by copies that occupy virtually zero space, with thousands of movies, TV shows, music tracks, and photographs effortlessly stored on relatively cheap hard drives.

Paper-based indexing systems, for those who cared to maintain them in the analog age, have now been replaced by software that not only does all the hard work but also makes collections a thing of beauty. While there are alternatives, Emby for example, the clear market leader is Plex. However, the company behind the software is now facing a backlash for failing to control how people interact with its creation.

According to CreativeFuture, a pro-copyright coalition of more than 560 companies and organizations, Plex – which is basically a pretty media player – is helping to fan the flames of piracy. While there are some exceptions which we’ll come to shortly, people generally need to be in physical possession of movies or TV shows to watch them using Plex, with torrents providing the necessary material.

“[T]he problem now finds itself on a dangerous precipice where it could easily slip right back into becoming a crisis again, as it was in the mid-2000s – before streaming was all the rage,” Creative Future writes.

“Thanks to a rapidly growing media application called Plex, torrent-based piracy is back in vogue, and better than ever (for criminals who have no problem with profiting from content that doesn’t belong to them, that is).”

To set the scene, that Plex is some kind of ‘rogue’ application, CreativeFuture (CF) aligns the media player with another piece of software, one that has also suffered reputational damage as a result of its users’ activities. The choice of adjective to describe both is particularly interesting.

“To understand what Plex is and how it functions, it is helpful to look at Kodi – another dangerous digital media player that we have written about repeatedly here at CreativeFuture,” CF notes.

The claim that Plex is dangerous is supported by an article published in The Verge, which reported on so-called ‘Plex shares’. Without going into the minutiae, ‘shares’ effectively allow Plex users to access content on other users’ Plex servers which, in some cases, could have been obtained illegally.

That some Plex users allow others to access huge libraries of pirated content is a fact, with some being targeted by anti-piracy groups such as BREIN. But, in common with so many piracy controversies in recent years, CF feels that if Plex users are doing something illegal, then the company behind the Plex software should be held responsible for their actions.

In this respect, CF claims that like “most” tech platforms, Plex is doing what it can to avoid accountability.

“In turning a blind eye to its piracy problem, Plex has joined the ranks of internet heavyweights who refuse to take responsibility for the criminal behavior on their platforms,” the copyright coalition notes.

“With heightened scrutiny on the biggest platforms, lawmakers across the country, and abroad, have increasingly demonstrated less tolerance for tech companies that sidestep law and order in their relentless quest for user growth.”

Quite what CF believes Plex should do isn’t covered. If we take current industry strategies as a benchmark, we might guess that the organization would encourage the use of some kind of pro-active filtering mechanism, which would prevent Plex users from adding potentially infringing material to their own computers.

Of course, that would mean massive implications for end-user privacy, almost impossible calculations to determine who is allowed to add content to a library within the law in multiple jurisdictions, plus an inevitable backlash and migration to other platforms that reject such intrusions. It would also require the company behind Plex to get deeply involved and therefore acquire ‘knowledge’ of infringing user behavior, something that raises all kinds of red flags.

The piece, which deserves to be read in its own right, also accuses or Reddit of being a “notorious piracy-enabling outlet”. What it fails to mention, and probably should’ve done, however, is that Plex is already making progress with various entertainment industry groups to tackle piracy in the best way possible – providing users with easy access to licensed content.

In 2019, Plex announced it would begin streaming thousands of free movies, TV shows and music documentaries from within the app, after striking deals with relevant rightsholders. The content is ad-supported and the hope is to expand the offering in the future.

“Over time, we’ll be adding more stuff from different studios and creators — from Oscar-winning Hollywood movies to the latest from India, Russia, China, Japan, Africa, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe to really cool independent movies fresh off the festival circuit,” the company said.

That Plex now finds itself in the firing line isn’t really a surprise – if Reddit is a “notorious” enabler of piracy, then any company with end users could find itself tarred with the same brush. TorrentFreak contacted the software developer for its opinion on the latest set of claims but at the time of publication, Plex chose to remain silent.

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

A group of movie companies, operating under the parent company Millennium Funding, has broadened its anti-piracy efforts over the past year or so.

Where the makers of films such as Hellboy, Hitman’s Bodyguard, and Mechanic: Resurrection previously focused on individual pirates, they have upped the ante by targeting site owners as well.

These efforts enjoyed some success including the shutdown of the popular app Cotomovies and settlements with torrent site YTS. While the latter remains online, this can’t be said for another well-known torrent site, MKVCage.

After the makers of the movie ‘Hellboy’ filed a lawsuit against MKVCage at a Hawaii District Court last summer, the site became unreachable. At the same time, the MKVCage uploader stopped pushing torrents to other sites as well. There was a brief comeback in October but soon after it went offline again.

By effectively shutting down the site, Hellboy’s makers (HB Productions) achieved part of their goal. However, in addition to stopping the infringing activity, they also want to see cash from the site’s alleged operator, a Pakistani man named Muhammad Faizan.

A few weeks go Hellboy’s attorney Kerry Culpepper submitted an amended complaint to the court. This was notable as it mentioned Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde as a “notorious copyright thief” whose domain registration service Njal.la worked with MKVCage.

While Sunde is not part of the lawsuit, the complaint was a precursor to a request for a default judgment, which was submitted to the court this week. As Faizan failed to respond to the complaint, Hellboy is asking for $270,902 in damages, as well as $4,410 in fees and costs.

Hellboy doesn’t ask for statutory damages, which are capped at $150,000 per infringed work. Instead, it calculated its losses based on the purchase price of the movie and the number of “instances of infringement” that were logged in torrent swarms.

“The certain sum of $270,902.58 […] was calculated by multiplying the number of instances of infringement in the United States logged by Plaintiff’s agent by the price for purchasing a copy of the motion picture in Hawaii,” attorney Culpepper explains.

The Hawaii court has yet to sign off on this request. While it’s likely that Hellboy will come out as the winner of this case, it may be a hard for the company to recover the damages from a foreign defendant.

—

A copy of HB Productions’ motion for a default judgment against Muhammad Faizan is available here (pdf).

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

In common with at least 30 countries all around the world, France is becoming ever more receptive of site-blocking as a means to mitigate copyright infringement.

France has been blocking ‘pirate’ sites for more than five years on behalf of the music and movie industries but last year academic publishers Elsevier and Springer Nature also got involved. As a result, a court in Paris ordered several of the largest French ISPs to block access to 57 domain names related to pirate scientific libraries LibGen and Sci-Hub.

Later that year, France broke fresh ground again. Following a complaint from anti-piracy group SCPP, a court handed down the very first European order compelling local ISPs to block file-hosting services.

Several weeks ago, Internet users in France reported fresh difficulties accessing many ‘pirate’ sites, mainly platforms that in some way offer access to streaming movies and TV shows. It now transpires that a new wave of blocking has hit the country following legal action initiated by movie industry groups.

According to NextInpact (paywall), the National Federation of Film Publishers (FNEF), the Syndicate of Digital Video Editing (SEVN), the Union of Film Producers (UPC) and the National Cinema Center (CNC) teamed up back in October 2019 to request the blocking of dozens of pirate sites.

Reports on the sites’ activities were compiled by local anti-piracy group ALPA, which noted that torrent site YTS reportedly made available 11,676 movies without permission from rightsholders, “the vast majority of which are legally available in theaters, digital or online.” TV torrent index EZTV was accused of offering 4,781 on the same basis.

Streaming platform Allostream reportedly offered more than 1,300 movies and close to 900 TV shows. Overall, it was estimated that almost three-quarters of the content on the site was pirated. When compared to the other sites this was relatively low, however, with most others clocking up 85% unlicensed copyrighted content. This evidence was enough to convince the court.

“[The rightsholders] have established with sufficient evidence that the disputed sites allow internet users, via the aforementioned paths, to download or continuously access works protected works via hypertext links, without having the authorization of the rights holders, which constitutes an infringement of copyright or neighboring rights,” the court ruling reads, per NextInpact.

In common with similar blocking applications around Europe, the French court considered not only the intellectual property rights of the movie companies but also the rights of the Internet service providers to do business and their customers’ rights to send and receive information on the Internet. In the end, the rights of the content companies outweighed the interests of the other parties.

As a result, the Paris court handed down an order on January 16, 2020, which compelled ISPs including Bouygues Télécom, Free, Orange, and SFR to prevent their users from accessing 36 platforms listed in the complaint. The vast majority appear to be streaming-related sites with the addition of torrent indexes YTS and EZTV.(full list below)

While there are 36 headline sites, the court recognized that these platforms can operate from many more domains. In respect of TV torrent platform EZTV, for example, the site’s .io, .it, .ch, .re and .ag domains are listed for blocking. For movie index YTS, three domains appear – yts.lt, .am and .ag. As a result, 79 domains are detailed overall in the order handed down by the Paris court, which is valid for 18 months.

Despite the comprehensive attempt at covering all domains, it’s likely the platforms will seek out new ones in response to the order. Should evasive action be taken by the sites, the complainants will have to obtain permission from a judge to update the list of domains.

The full list of sites blocked by ISPs following the latest order is as follows:

Allostream
Annuaire-telechargement-ec
Annuaire-telechargement-fr
ATFUT
DivxTOP
DPSTREAM
DPStreaming
ETOPOP
EZTV
Filme-Streaming
Filmcomplet
FilmStreamingg1
FilmStreaming1FV
Filmz
FRStream
Full-Serie
HDS-Streaming
HDSS
LibertyVF
N1Streaming
Papystreaming
Planet-Streaming1
Radego
Serie-Streaming
Seriecomplete
SKStream
Streamcomplet
Streamdirect
Streaming-VOSTFR
StreamingDIVX1
Time2watch
VKStreaming
Voir-Films-Series
VOSTFRSerie
Wikiserie
YTS

The related court order can be found here (pdf)

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

In life, there are few things as certain as death and taxes. For many creators, piracy falls into this category too.

There are multiple ways people can respond to this threat. In Hollywood and the music industry, takedown notices and other anti-piracy efforts are preferred. Others simply do nothing.

There’s also a third option. Over the years a small subset of creators has actively embraced piracy. Not because they don’t want any income. Instead, they see it in part as a promotional vehicle.

This is also the case with Oak, the developer of the game named ‘Death and Taxes.’ The recently released 2D narrative-based game, where people can play the role of Grim Reaper, currently sells for $12.99 on Stream.

At the same time, however, the game is also available for free on many torrent sites. There is an official ‘pirate’ release from the group PLAZA but, in addition to that, the developer also shared his own torrent.

“I’d just like the inevitable release to be on my own terms, meaning that it’s the best possible version, that people can enjoy hassle-free, not a potentially janky release with shitty workarounds or other problems,” Oak from Placeholder Gameworks tells TorrentFreak.

The developer torrents are available on a variety of torrent sites. They come with a special message from Placeholder Gameworks, stating that they are ok with piracy and that they understand that some people can’t afford games, or want to try them before buying.

While major corporations may not understand this move, it makes total sense for the smaller indie developer. A game produced on a small budget can’t afford expensive marketing campaigns. They do want eyeballs, however, and that’s where torrent sites come in.

“It’s super difficult to stand out nowadays, especially for a game that has literally ZERO budget. I can just hope that having a free version out will help the game and its ideas reach a wider community than we would have been otherwise able to connect to.”

In his quest to release the torrent, the developer went a step further than some others. Oak actually reached out directly to some torrent sites, which gladly helped him. This explains why his official release is on a site such as RARBG, which generally isn’t open to public uploads.

“I received assistance from 1337x and RARBG. Both sites’ staffers were super helpful and helped me get up the release within minutes. Mad props to them! I literally couldn’t have done that without them,” Oak tells us, adding that Reddit’s Crackwatch admin team lent a helping hand as well.

These types of developer-sanctioned releases are not new. Just recently, we highlighted a similar move from the developer of the indie shooter game ‘Danger Gazers,’ who actually noticed a significant boost in sales afterward.

While that can happen, embracing torrent sites is by no means a magical ‘profit boost’ wand. In ‘Danger Gazers’ case, the announcement went viral and it was later picked up in the press, which made it a self-fulfilling prophecy to a certain degree.

Death and Taxes didn’t get this massive external boost and shows a much more natural sales pattern.

On February 20th, when it was first released on Steam, Death and Taxes was sold 4,282 times, followed by 4,017 and 2,915 copies the days after. This dropped to 2,770 a day later, when the torrent came out and continued to fall in the following days to 1,398 on Wednesday the 26th.

These numbers are quite typical for the release of a new game. There certainly no magic boost thanks to piracy, but sales didn’t fall beyond what was expected either. In the broader scheme, however, the developer thinks that the torrent will have a positive effect.

“It’s quite simple: more people will be playing our game. More people will be talking about it, more people will have opinions about it. That’s the best we could ever ask for,” Oak says.

What also plays a role is that the developer used to be a pretty hardcore pirate himself. As a young game fan, he simply couldn’t afford to pay for every release. That said, now that he has the means to do so, Oak is making up for it.

“If I counted the games that I torrented (and edonkeyd/emuled), I would die of old age. I didn’t grow up rich, and could only afford maybe a single game a year,” Oak says.

“I’ve now tried to buy all the games that I had pirated as a kid. Better late than never, right? And having access to that, I got enamored with games and really I generally try to buy everything now, since as a developer I feel honor-bound to buy my colleagues’ works.”

The developer torrent also includes a link to the official Steam release, where people can buy it if they want. Most importantly, however, Oak hopes that people will enjoy the game. Based on the responses thus far, that seems to be the case.

“People like the game, they enjoy what it offers, they seem to really like the art, writing, music and voice acting, which I also think are our strongest aspects. Could have always had better gameplay design, but we had limited time and I think we did pretty well,” Oak says.

‘Death and Taxes’ is available on Steam as well as many torrent sites near you. In the future, the source code will be made public as well.

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