Figuring out what to do about the online piracy problem is an ongoing puzzle for rightsholders everywhere. What they’re all agreed upon, however, is the need to educate the public.

Various approaches have been deployed, from ISP-based ‘education’ notices through to the current practice of painting pirate sites as havens for viruses and malware. The other approach, of course, has been to threaten to sue pirates in an effort to make them change their ways.

These threats have traditionally been deployed by so-called copyright trolls – companies and groups who have the sole intention of extracting cash payments from pirates in order to generate an additional revenue stream. At the same time, many insist that their programs are also designed to reduce piracy via word of mouth.

While that might be true in some cases, there’s little proof that the approach works. However, a new study carried out on behalf of the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC) in Finland suggests that they may have had some effect.

The survey was carried out between 11 September 2017 and 10 October 2017 among people aged 15 to 79-years-old. In total, 1001 people were interviewed, 77% of whom said they’d never used pirate services.

Of all people interviewed, 43% said they’d heard about copyright holders sending settlement letters to Internet users, although awareness rates were higher (between 51% and 55%) among people aged between 25 and 49-years-old. Predictably, awareness jumped to 70% among users of pirate services and it’s these individuals that produced some of the study’s most interesting findings.

Of the pirates who said they were aware of settlement letters being sent out, 13% reported that they’d terminated their use of pirate services as a result. A slightly higher figure, 14%, said they’d reduced their use of unauthorized content.

Perhaps surprisingly (given that they aren’t likely to receive a letter), the study also found that 17% of people who listen to or play content on illegal online services (implication: streaming) stopped doing so, with 13% cutting down on the practice.

“According to the Economic Research Survey, these two groups of respondents are partly overlapping, but it can still be said that the settlement letters have had a decisive impact on the use of pirated services,” CIAPC reports.

The study also found support for copyright holders looking to unmask alleged Internet pirates by compelling their ISPs to do so in court.

“The survey found that 65 percent of the population is fully or partly in favor of rightsholders being allowed to find out who has infringed their rights anonymously on the Internet,” the group adds.

Overall, just 17% of respondents said that rightsholders shouldn’t be able to find out people’s identities. Unsurprisingly, young pirates objected more than the others, with 35% of 25 to 49-year-old pirates coming out against disclosure. That being said, this figure suggests that 65% of pirates in this group are in favor of pirates being unmasked. That appears counter-intuitive, to say the least.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Pirate Party vice council member of Espoo City Janne Paalijärvi says that study seems to have omitted to consider the effects of legal alternatives on pirate consumption.

“The analysis seemingly forgets to fully take into account the prevalence of legal streaming services such as Netflix,” Paalijärvi says.

“Legitimate, reasonably-priced and easy-to-use delivery platforms are the number one weapon against piracy. Not bullying your audience with copyright extortion letters. The latter approach creates unwanted hostility between artists and customers. It also increases the demand for political parties wanting to balance copyright legislation.”

Overall, however, Finland doesn’t appear to have a serious problem with piracy, at least as far as public perceptions go. According to the study, only 5% of citizens believe that unauthorized file-sharing is acceptable. The figure for 2016 was 7%.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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It seems everyone’s getting in on the “fake news” game today, from far-right parties in Germany to critics of Catalan separatism — but none more concertedly than the Russian state itself.

In this episode we meet Ben Nimmo, Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, to talk us through the latest patterns and trends in online disinformation and hybrid warfare. ‘People who really want to cause trouble can make up just about anything,’ explains Ben, ‘and the fakes are getting more and more complex. It’s really quite alarming.’

After cluing us in on the state of information warfare today, we discuss evidence that the Russians are deploying a fully-funded ‘Troll Factory’ across dominant social networks whose intent is to distort reality and sway the political conversation in favour of its masters.

We dig deep into the present history of the ‘Battle Of The Bots’, looking specifically at the activities of the fake Twitter account @TEN_GOP, whose misinformation has reached all the way to the highest tier of American government. Can we control or counter these rogue informational entities? What’s the best way to do so? Do we need ‘Asimov Laws’ for a new generation of purely online, but completely real, information entities?

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Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis.

The guests for our news discussions will vary, and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the great innovators and minds.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Ben Nimmo

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Riley Byrne
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Siraje Amarniss

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

As torrents and other forms of file-sharing resolutely simmer away in the background, it is the streaming phenomenon that’s taking the Internet by storm.

This Tuesday, in a report by Canadian broadband management company Sandvine, it was revealed that IPTV traffic has grown to massive proportions.

Sandvine found that 6.5% of households in North American are now communicating with known TV piracy services. This translates to seven million subscribers and many more potential viewers. There’s little doubt that IPTV and all its variants, Kodi streaming included, are definitely here to stay.

The topic was raised again Wednesday during a panel discussion hosted by the Copyright Alliance in conjunction with the Creative Rights Caucus. Titled “Copyright Pirates’ New Strategies”, the discussion’s promotional graphic indicates some of the industry heavyweights in attendance.

The Copyright Alliance tweeted points from the discussion throughout the day and soon the conversation turned to the streaming phenomenon that has transformed piracy in recent times.

Previously dubbed Piracy 3.0 by the MPAA, Senior Vice President, Government and Regulatory Affairs Neil Fried was present to describe streaming devices and apps as the latest development in TV and movie piracy.

Like many before him, Fried explained that the Kodi platform in its basic form is legal. However, he noted that many of the add-ons for the media player provide access to pirated content, a point proven in a big screen demo.

Kodi demo by the MPAA via Copyright Alliance

According to the Copyright Alliance, Fried then delivered some interesting stats. The MPAA believes that there are around 38 million users of Kodi in the world, which sounds like a reasonable figure given that the system has been around for 15 years in various guises, including during its XBMC branding.

However, he also claimed that of those 38 million, a substantial 26 million users have piracy addons installed. That suggests around 68.5% or seven out of ten of all Kodi users are pirates of movies, TV shows, and other media. Taking the MPAA statement to its conclusion, only 12 million Kodi users are operating the software legitimately.

TorrentFreak contacted XBMC Foundation President Nathan Betzen for his stance on the figures but he couldn’t shine much light on usage.

“Unfortunately I do not have an up to date number on users, and because we don’t watch what our users are doing, we have no way of knowing how many do what with regards to streaming. [The MPAA’s] numbers could be completely correct or totally made up. We have no real way to know,” Betzen said.

That being said, the team does have the capability to monitor overall Kodi usage, even if they don’t publish the stats. This was revealed back in June 2011 when Kodi was still called XBMC.

“The addon system gives us the opportunity to measure the popularity of addons, measure user base, estimate the frequency that people update their systems, and even, ultimately, help users find the more popular addons,” the team wrote.

“Most interestingly, for the purposes of this post, is that we can get a pretty good picture of how many active XBMC installs there are without having to track what each individual user does.”

Using this system, the team concluded there were roughly 435,000 active XBMC instances around the globe in April 2011, but that figure was to swell dramatically. Just three months later, 789,000 XBMC installations had been active in the previous six weeks.

What’s staggering is that in 2017, the MPAA claims that there are now 38 million users of Kodi, of which 26 million are pirates. In the absence of any figures from the Kodi team, TF asked Kodi addon repository TVAddons what they thought of the MPAA’s stats.

“We’ve always banned the use of analytics within Kodi addons, so it’s really impossible to make such an estimate. It seems like the MPAA is throwing around numbers without much statistical evidence while mislabelling Kodi users as ‘pirate’ in the same way that they have mislabelled legitimate services like CloudFlare,” a spokesperson said.

“As far as general addon use goes, before our repository server (which contained hundreds of legitimate addons) was unlawfully seized, it had about 39 million active users per month, but even we don’t know how many users downloaded which addons. We never allowed for addon statistics for users because they are invasive to privacy and breed unhealthy competition.”

So, it seems that while there is some dispute over the number of potential pirates, there does at least appear to be some consensus on the number of users overall. The big question, however, is how groups like the MPAA will deal with this kind of unauthorized infringement in future.

At the moment the big push is to paint pirate platforms as dangerous places to be. Indeed, during the discussion this week, Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid claimed that users of pirate services are “28 times more likely” to be infected with malware.

Whether that strategy will pay off remains unclear but it’s obvious that at least for now, Piracy 3.0 is a massive deal, one that few people saw coming half a decade ago but is destined to keep growing.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

When it comes to how piracy affects sales, there are thousands of different opinions. This applies to music, movies, software and many other digital products, including ebooks.

When we interviewed Paulo Coelho nearly ten years ago, he pointed out how piracy helped him to sell more books. While a lot has changed since then, he still sees the benefits of piracy today.

However, for many other authors, piracy is a menace. They cringe at the sight of their book being shared online and believe that hurts their bottom line. This includes Maggie Stiefvater, who’s known for The Raven Cycle books, among others.

This week she responded to a tweet from a self-confessed pirate, stating that piracy got the box set of the Raven Cycle canceled. As is usual on social media, it quickly turned into a mess.

Instead of debating the controversial issue indefinitely in 140 character tweets, Stiefvater did what authors do best. She put her thoughts on paper. In a Tumblr post, she countered the belief that piracy doesn’t hurt authors and that pirates wouldn’t pay for a book anyway.

The story shared by Stiefvater isn’t hypothetical, it’s real-world experience. She had noticed that the third book in the Raven Cycle wasn’t doing as well as earlier editions. While this is not uncommon for a series, the sales drop was not equal across all formats, but mostly driven by a lack of eBook sales.

While her publisher wasn’t certain that piracy was to blame, Stiefvater was convinced it played an important role. After all, the interest in her book tours was growing and there was plenty of talk about the books online as well. So when the publisher said that the print run of her new book the Raven King would be cut in half compared to a previous release, she came up with a plan.

Instead of trying to take all pirated copies down following the new release, she created her own, with help from her brother. But one with a twist.

“It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again,” Stiefvater writes.

“I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.”

And so it happened. When the book came out April last year, customized pirated copies were planted all over the Internet by the author’s brother. People were stumbling all over them, making it near impossible to find a real pirated copy.

“He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.”

This paid off. Many people could only find the “troll” copies and saw no other option than to buy the real deal.

“The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.”

As a result, the first print of the book sold out in two days. Stiefvater was on tour and at some stores she visited, the books were no longer available. The publisher had to print more and more until… the inevitable happened.

“Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences,” Stiefvater writes, summarizing the morale of her story.

While this is unlikely to change the minds of undeterred pirates, it might strike a chord with some people.

Of course Stiefvater’s anecdote is no better that Coelho’s, who argued the opposite in the past. Perhaps the real takeaway is that piracy doesn’t have any fixed effects and it certainly can’t be captured in oneliners either. It’s a complex puzzle of dozens of constantly changing factors, which will likely never be solved.

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Maggie Stiefvater’s full Tumblr post is a recommended read and can be found here, or below.

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Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Google regularly removes infringing websites from its search results, but the company is also wary of abuse.

When the Canadian company Equustek Solutions requested the company to remove websites that offered unlawful and competing products, it refused to do so globally.

This resulted in a legal battle that came to a climax in June, when the Supreme Court of Canada ordered Google to remove a company’s websites from its search results. Not just in Canada, but all over the world.

With options to appeal exhausted in Canada, Google took the case to a federal court in the US. The search engine requested an injunction to disarm the Canadian order, arguing that a worldwide blocking order violates the First Amendment.

Surprisingly, Equustek decided not to defend itself and without opposition, a California District Court sided with Google yesterday.

During a hearing, Google attorney Margaret Caruso stressed that it should not be possible for foreign countries to implement measures that run contrary to core values of the United States.

The search engine argued that the Canadian order violated Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes Internet services from liability for content created by third parties. With this law, Congress specifically chose not to deter harmful online speech by imposing liability on Internet services.

In an order, signed shortly after the hearing, District Judge Edward Davila concludes that Google qualifies for Section 230 immunity in this case. As such, he rules that the Canadian Supreme Court’s global blocking order goes too far.

“Google is harmed because the Canadian order restricts activity that Section 230 protects. In addition, the balance of equities favors Google because the injunction would deprive it of the benefits of U.S. federal law,” Davila writes.

Rendering the order unenforceable is not just in the interest of Google, the District Court writes. It’s also best for the general public as free speech is clearly at stake here.

“Congress recognized that free speech on the internet would be severely restricted if websites were to face tort liability for hosting user-generated content. It responded by enacting Section 230, which grants broad immunity to online intermediaries,” Judge Davila writes.

“The Canadian order would eliminate Section 230 immunity for service providers that link to third-party websites. By forcing intermediaries to remove links to third-party material, the Canadian order undermines the policy goals of Section 230 and threatens free speech on the global internet.”

The preliminary injunction

The Court signed a preliminary injunction which prevents Equustek enforcing the Canadian order in the United States, which is exactly what Google was after. Since the Canadian company chose not to represent itself in the US case, this will likely stand.

The ruling is important in the broader scheme. If foreign courts are allowed to grant worldwide blockades, free speech could be severely hampered. Today it’s a relatively unknown Canadian company, but what if the Chinese Government asked Google to block the websites of VPN providers?

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A copy of the full order is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.