As one of the members of Sweden’s infamous Piratbyrån (Piracy Bureau), Rasmus Fleischer was also one of early key figures at The Pirate Bay. Over the years he’s been a writer, researcher, debater, and musician, and in 2012 he finished his PhD thesis on “music’s political economy.”

As part of a five-person research team (Pelle Snickars, Patrick Vonderau, Anna Johansson, Rasmus Fleischer, Maria Eriksson) funded by the Swedish Research Council, Fleischer has co-written a book about the history of Spotify.

Titled ‘Spotify Teardown – Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music’, the publication is set to shine light on the history of the now famous music service while revealing quite a few past secrets.

With its release scheduled for 2018, Fleischer has already teased a few interesting nuggets, not least that Spotify’s early beta version used ‘pirate’ MP3 files, some of them sourced from The Pirate Bay.

Fleischer says that following an interview earlier this year with DI.se, in which he revealed that Spotify distributed unlicensed music between May 2007 to October 2008, Spotify looked at ways to try and stop his team’s research. However, the ‘pirate’ angle wasn’t the clear target, another facet of the team’s research was.

“Building on the tradition of ‘breaching experiments’ in ethnomethodology, the research group sought to break into the hidden infrastructures of digital music distribution in order to study its underlying norms and structures,” project leader Pelle Snickars previously revealed.

With this goal, the team conducted experiments to see if the system was open to abuse or could be manipulated, as Fleischer now explains.

“For example, some hundreds of robot users were created to study whether the same listening behavior results in different recommendations depending on whether the user was registered as male or female,” he says.

“We have also investigated on a small scale the possibilities of manipulating the system. However, we have not collected any data about real users. Our proposed methods appeared several years ago in our research funding application, which was approved by the Swedish Research Council, which was already noted in 2013.”

Fleischer says that Spotify had been aware of the project for several years but it wasn’t until this year, after he spoke of Spotify’s past as a ‘pirate’ service, that pressure began to mount.

“On May 19, our project manager received a letter from Benjamin Helldén-Hegelund, a lawyer at Spotify. The timing was hardly a coincidence. Spotify demanded that we ‘confirm in writing’ that we had ‘ceased activities contrary to their Terms of Use’,” Fleischer reveals.

A corresponding letter to the Swedish Research Council detailed Spotify’s problems with the project.

“Spotify is particularly concerned about the information that has emerged regarding the research group’s methods in the project. The data indicate that the research team has deliberately taken action that is explicitly in violation of Spotify’s Terms of Use and by means of technical methods they sought to conceal these breaches of conditions,” the letter read.

“The research group has worked, among other things, to artificially increase the number of plays and manipulate Spotify’s services using scripts or other automated processes.

“Spotify assumes that the systematic breach of its conditions has not been known to the Swedish Research Council and is convinced that the Swedish Research Council is convinced that the research undertaken with the support of the Swedish Research Council in all respects meets ethical guidelines and is carried out reasonably and in accordance with applicable law.”

Fleischer admits that part of the research was concerned with the possibility of artificially increasing the number of plays, but he says that was carried out on a small scale without any commercial gain.

“The purpose was simply to test if it is true that Spotify could be manipulated on a larger scale, as claimed by journalists who did similar experiments. It is also true that we ‘sought to hide these crimes’ by using a VPN connection,” he says.

Fleischer says that Spotify’s lawyer blended complaints together, such as correlating terms of service violations with violation of research ethics, while presenting the same as grounds for legal action.

“The argument was quite ridiculous. Nevertheless, the letter could not be interpreted as anything other than an attempt by Spotify to prevent us from pursuing the research project,” he notes.

This week, however, it appears the dispute has reached some kind of conclusion. In a posting on his Copyriot blog (Swedish), Fleischer reveals that the Swedish Research Council informed the researchers that the case has been closed, i.e. they do not agree with Spotify’s claims and won’t withdraw funding.

“It must be acknowledged that Spotify’s threats have taken both time and power from the project. This seems to be the purpose when big companies go after researchers who they perceive as uncomfortable. It may not be possible to stop the research but it can be delayed,” Fleischer says.

“Sure [Spotify] dislikes people being reminded of how the service started as a pirate service. But instead of inviting an open dialogue, lawyers are sent out for the purpose of slowing down researchers.”

Spotify Teardown. Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music is to be published by MIT Press in 2018.

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

In recent years various copyright holder groups have adopted a “follow-the-money” approach in the hope of cutting off funding to so-called pirate sites.

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) is one of the organizations that helps to facilitate these efforts. TAG coordinates an advertising-oriented Anti-Piracy Program for the advertising industry and has signed up dozens of large companies across various industries.

Today they released a new report, titled “Measuring Digital Advertising Revenue to Infringing Sites,” which shows the impact of these efforts.

The study, carried out by Ernst and Young, reveals that the top 672 piracy sites still generate plenty of revenue. A whopping $111 million per year, to be precise. But it may have been twice as much without the industry’s interventions.

“Digital ad revenue linked to infringing content was estimated at $111 million last year, the majority of which (83 percent) came from non-premium advertisers,” TAG writes.

“If the industry had not taken aggressive steps to reduce piracy, those pirate site operators would have potentially earned an additional $102-$177 million in advertising revenue, depending on the breakdown of premium and non-premium advertisers.”

Pirate revenue estimates

Taking more than $100 million away from pirate sites is pretty significant, to say the least.

It, therefore, comes as no surprise that the news is paired with positive comments from various industry insiders as well as US Congressman Adam Schiff, who co-chairs the International Creativity and Theft Prevention Caucus.

“The study recently completed by Ernst and Young on behalf of TAG shows that those efforts are bearing fruit, and that voluntary efforts by advertisers and agencies kept well over $100 million out of the pockets of pirate sites last year alone,” Schiff says.

While TAG and their partners pat themselves on the back, those who take a more critical look at the data will realize that their view is rather optimistic. There is absolutely no evidence that TAG’s efforts are responsible for the claimed millions that were kept from pirate sites.

In fact, most of these millions never ended up in the pockets of these websites to begin with.

The $102 million that pirate sites ‘didn’t get’ is simply the difference between premium and non-premium ads. In other words, the extra money these sites would have made if they had 100% premium ads, which is a purely hypothetical situation.

Long before TAG existed pirate sites were banned by a lot of premium advertising networks, including Google AdSense, and mostly serving lower tier ads.

The estimated CPM figures (earnings per 1,000 views) are rather optimistic too. TAG puts these at $2.50 for non-premium ads. We spoke to several site owners who said these were way off. Even pop-unders in premium countries make less than a dollar, we were told.

Site owners are not the only ones that have a much lower estimate. An earlier copyright industry-backed study, published by Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), put the average CPM of these pirate site ads at $0.30, which is miles away from the $2.50 figure.

In fact, the DCA study also put the premium ads at $0.30, because these often end up as leftover inventory at pirate sites, according to experts.

“Based on MediaLink expertise and research with advertising industry members, the assumption is that where premium ads appear they are delivered programmatically by exchanges to fulfill the dregs of campaigns. As such, rates are assumed to be the same for premium and non-premium ads,” the DCA report noted.

In the TAG report, the estimate for premium ads is a bit higher, $5 per 1000 views. Video ads may be higher, but these only represent a tiny fraction of the total.

While TAG’s efforts will no doubt make a difference, it’s good to keep the caveats above in mind. Their claim that that the ad industry’s anti-piracy efforts have “cut pirate ad revenue in half” is misleading, to say the least.

That doesn’t mean that all numbers released by the organization should be taken with a grain of salt. The TAG membership rates below are 100% accurate.

TAG membership fees

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

While many EU countries have millions of Internet pirates, few have given citizens the freedom to plunder like the Netherlands. For many years, Dutch Internet users actually went about their illegal downloading with government blessing.

Just over three years ago, downloading and copying movies and music for personal use was not punishable by law. Instead, the Dutch compensated rightsholders through a “piracy levy” on writable media, hard drives and electronic devices with storage capacity, including smartphones.

Following a ruling from the European Court of Justice in 2014, however, all that came to an end. Along with uploading (think BitTorrent sharing), downloading was also outlawed.

Around the same time, The Court of The Hague handed down a decision in a long-running case which had previously forced two Dutch ISPs, Ziggo and XS4ALL, to block The Pirate Bay.

Ruling against local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, it was decided that the ISPs wouldn’t have to block The Pirate Bay after all. After a long and tortuous battle, however, the ISPs learned last month that they would have to block the site, pending a decision from the Supreme Court.

On September 22, both ISPs were given 10 business days to prevent subscriber access to the notorious torrent site, or face fines of 2,000 euros per day, up to a maximum of one million euros.

With that time nearly up, yesterday Ziggo broke cover to become the first of the pair to block the site. On a dedicated diversion page, somewhat humorously titled ziggo.nl/yarrr, the ISP explained the situation to now-blocked users.

“You are trying to visit a page of The Pirate Bay. On September 22, the Hague Court obliged us to block access to this site. The pirate flag is thus handled by us. The case is currently at the Supreme Court which judges the basic questions in this case,” the notice reads.

Ziggo Pirate Bay message (translated)

Customers of XS4ALL currently have no problem visiting The Pirate Bay but according to a statement handed to Tweakers by a spokesperson, the blockade will be implemented today.

In addition to the site’s main domains, the injunction will force the ISPs to block 155 URLs and IP addresses in total, a list that has been drawn up by BREIN to include various mirrors, proxies, and alternate access points. XS4All says it will publish a list of all the blocked items on its notification page.

While the re-introduction of a Pirate Bay blockade in the Netherlands is an achievement for BREIN, it’s potentially bad timing for the copyright trolls waiting in the wings to snare Dutch file-sharers.

As recently reported, movie outfit Dutch Filmworks (DFW) is preparing a wave of cash-settlement copyright-trolling letters to mimic those sent by companies elsewhere.

There’s little doubt that users of The Pirate Bay would’ve been DFW’s targets but it seems likely that given the introduction of blockades, many Dutch users will start to educate themselves on the use of VPNs to protect their privacy, or at least become more aware of the risks.

Of course, there will be no real shortage of people who’ll continue to download without protection, but DFW are getting into this game just as it’s likely to get more difficult for them. As more and more sites get blocked (and that is definitely BREIN’s overall plan) the low hanging fruit will sit higher and higher up the tree – and the cash with it.

Like all methods of censorship, site-blocking eventually drives communication underground. While anti-piracy outfits all say blocking is necessary, obfuscation and encryption isn’t welcomed by any of them.

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

After years of accepting donations via Bitcoin, last month various ‘pirate’ sites began to generate digital currency revenues in a brand new way.

It all began with The Pirate Bay, which quietly added a Javascript cryptocurrency miner to its main site, something that first manifested itself as a large spike in CPU utilization on the machines of visitors.

The stealth addition to the platform, which its operators later described as a test, was extremely controversial. While many thought of the miner as a cool and innovative way to generate revenue in a secure fashion, a vocal majority expressed a preference for permission being requested first, in case they didn’t want to participate in the program.

Over the past couple of weeks, several other sites have added similar miners, some which ask permission to run and others that do not. While the former probably aren’t considered problematic, the latter are now being viewed as a serious problem by an unexpected player in the ecosystem.

TorrentFreak has learned that popular CDN service Cloudflare, which is often criticized for not being harsh enough on ‘pirate’ sites, is actively suspending the accounts of sites that deploy cryptocurrency miners on their platforms.

“Cloudflare kicked us from their service for using a Coinhive miner,” the operator of ProxyBunker.online informed TF this morning.

ProxyBunker is a site that that links to several other domains that offer unofficial proxy services for the likes of The Pirate Bay, RARBG, KickassTorrents, Torrentz2, and dozens of other sites. It first tested a miner for four days starting September 23. Official implementation began October 1 but was ended last evening, abruptly.

“Late last night, all our domains got deleted off Cloudflare without warning so I emailed Cloudflare to ask what was going on,” the operator explained.

Bye bye

As the email above shows, Cloudflare cited only a “possible” terms of service violation. Further clarification was needed to get to the root of the problem.

So, just a few minutes later, the site operator contacted Cloudflare, acknowledging the suspension but pointing out that the notification email was somewhat vague and didn’t give a reason for the violation. A follow-up email from Cloudflare certainly put some meat on the bones.

“Multiple domains in your account were injecting Coinhive mining code without
notifying users and without any option to disabling [sic] the mining,” wrote Justin Paine, Head of Trust & Safety at Cloudflare.

“We consider this to be malware, and as such the account was suspended, and all domains removed from Cloudflare.”

Cloudflare: Unannounced miners are malware

ProxyBunker’s operator wrote back to Cloudflare explaining that the Coinhive miner had been running on his domains but that his main domain had a way of disabling mining, as per new code made available from Coinhive.

“We were running the miner on our proxybunker.online domain using Coinhive’s new Javacode Simple Miner UI that lets the user stop the miner at anytime and set the CPU speed it mines at,” he told TF.

Nevertheless, some element of the configuration appears to have fallen short of Cloudflare’s standards. So, shortly after Cloudflare’s explanation, the site operator asked if he could be reinstated if he completely removed the miner from his site. The response was a ‘yes’ but with a stern caveat attached.

“We will remove the account suspension, however do note you’ll need to re-sign up the domains as they were removed as a result of the account suspension. Please note — if we discover similar activity again the domains and account will be permanently blocked,” Cloudflare’s Justin warned.

ProxyBunker’s operator says that while he sees the value in cryptocurrency miners, he can understand why people might be opposed to them too. That being said, he would appreciate it if services like Cloudflare published clear guidelines on what is and is not acceptable.

“We do understand that most users will not like the miner using up a bit of their CPU but we do see the full potential as a new revenue stream,” he explains.

“I think third-party services need to post clear information that they’re not allowed on their services, if that’s the case.”

At time of publication, Cloudflare had not responded to TorrentFreak’s requests for comment.

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

Responding to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), the MPAA has submitted an updated list of “notorious markets” that it says promote the illegal distribution of movies and TV-shows.

These annual submissions help to guide the U.S. Government’s position towards foreign countries when it comes to copyright enforcement.

What stands out in the MPAA’s latest overview is that it no longer includes offline markets, only sites and services that are available on the Internet. This suggests that online copyright infringement is seen as a priority.

The MPAA’s report includes more than two dozen alleged pirate sites in various categories. While this is not an exhaustive list, the movie industry specifically highlights some of the worst offenders in various categories.

“Content thieves take advantage of a wide constellation of easy-to-use online technologies, such as direct download and streaming, to create infringing sites and applications, often with the look and feel of legitimate content distributors, luring unsuspecting consumers into piracy,” the MPAA writes.

According to the MPAA, torrent sites remain popular, serving millions of torrents to tens of millions of users at any given time.

The Pirate Bay has traditionally been one of the main targets. Based on data from Alexa and SimilarWeb, the MPAA says that TPB has about 62 million unique visitors per month. The other torrent sites mentioned are 1337x.to, Rarbg.to, Rutracker.org, and Torrentz2.eu.

MPAA calls out torrent sites

The second highlighted category covers various linking and streaming sites. This includes the likes of Fmovies.is, Gostream.is, Primewire.ag, Kinogo.club, MeWatchSeries.to, Movie4k.tv and Repelis.tv.

Direct download sites and video hosting services also get a mention. Nowvideo.sx, Openload.co, Rapidgator.net, Uploaded.net and the Russian social network VK.com. Many of these services refuse to properly process takedown notices, the MPAA claims.

The last category is new and centers around piracy apps. These sites offer mobile applications that allow users to stream pirated content, such as IpPlayBox.tv, MoreTV, 3DBoBoVR, TVBrowser, and KuaiKa, which are particularly popular in Asia.

Aside from listing specific sites, the MPAA also draws the US Government’s attention to the streaming box problem. The report specifically mentions that Kodi-powered boxes are regularly abused for infringing purposes.

“An emerging global threat is streaming piracy which is enabled by piracy devices preloaded with software to illicitly stream movies and television programming and a burgeoning ecosystem of infringing add-ons,” the MPAA notes.

“The most popular software is an open source media player software, Kodi. Although Kodi is not itself unlawful, and does not host or link to unlicensed content, it can be easily configured to direct consumers toward unlicensed films and television shows.”

Pirate streaming boxes

There are more than 750 websites offering infringing devices, the Hollywood group notes, adding that the rapid growth of this problem is startling. Interestingly, the report mentions TVAddons.ag as a “piracy add-on repository,” noting that it’s currently offline. Whether the new TVAddons is also seen a problematic is unclear.

The MPAA also continues its trend of calling out third-party intermediaries, including hosting providers. These companies refuse to take pirate sites offline following complaints, even when the MPAA views them as blatantly violating the law.

“Hosting companies provide the essential infrastructure required to operate a website,” the MPAA writes. “Given the central role of hosting providers in the online ecosystem, it is very concerning that many refuse to take action upon being notified…”

The Hollywood group specifically mentions Private Layer and Netbrella as notorious markets. CDN provider CloudFlare is also named. As a US-based company, the latter can’t be included in the list. However, the MPAA explains that it is often used as an anonymization tool by sites and services that are mentioned in the report.

Another group of intermediaries that play a role in fueling piracy (mentioned for the first time) are advertising networks. The MPAA specifically calls out the Canadian company WWWPromoter, which works with sites such as Primewire.ag, Projectfreetv.at and 123movies.to

“The companies connecting advertisers to infringing websites and inadvertently contribute to the prevalence and prosperity of infringing sites by providing funding to the operators of these sites through advertising revenue,” the MPAA writes.

The MPAA’s full report is available here (pdf). The USTR will use this input above to make up its own list of notorious markets. This will help to identify current threats and call on foreign governments to take appropriate action.

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