The online porn industry is rather diverse but there is only one company leading the charge, that’s Mindgeek.

The company, formerly known as Manwin, owns the most visited adult website on the planet, Pornhub, and is also the driving force behind YouPorn, Redtube, Tube8, Xtube, and dozens of other sites.

With Pornhub, in particular, the company has made news headlines in mainstream media. The informative yearly interest insights, April fools jokes, and even its environmental campaign have been widely covered.

The company’s open and casual image is generally well appreciated. However, Mindgeek and its many daughter companies also have another side. They tend to be very protective of their copyrights.

Mindgeek subsidiary MG Premium, for example, has more than 10,000 works registered at the US copyright office. To prevent these from being shared without permission, the company has sent over a quarter billion takedown requests to Google alone.

More recently, Pornhub’s sister company expanded its copyright enforcement efforts in another area. In addition to sending takedown notices, it also started going after people who allegedly shared its videos through BitTorrent.

This campaign was recently highlighted by Swedish Internet provider Bahnhof, which keeps a close eye on copyright trolling efforts in the Scandinavian country.

A search through public Swedish court records reveals that MG Premium obtained eight applications to identify the account holders behind 16,594 IP-addresses. The company uses this information to approach these alleged pirates with a settlement offer.

A copy of a settlement request, shown below, shows that the account holder is offered a settlement of 7,000 Swedish Krona ($722) for “filesharing of an erotic movie”. Considering the number involved, this is a potential multi-million dollar enforcement campaign.

While some may have indeed shared the infringing content, the letters also target people who are not directly involved. After all, Internet connections are often shared with other members of a household or are open to the public at large.

Bahnhof, which is one of the few ISPs that doesn’t share the personal information of its customers, sees the practice as blackmail. It believes that the company chooses this tactic to generate some extra profits.

Mindgeek, for its part, says that the Swedish legal campaign is intended to help reduce piracy. The initiative just started and the company will evaluate the results in the near future to see what steps it will take next.

“MindGeek, through its exclusive content subsidiary MG Premium, seeks to protect thousands of its copyrighted audiovisual works from blatant infringement. MG Premium is constantly testing and evaluating methods of reducing the extent to which its works are pirated,” Mindgeek’s Michael Willis says.

“At different times, these methods can result in targeting website operators, vendors supporting such operators, and in certain cases, end users who are taking advantage of, or sharing pirated works,” he adds.

The initiative in Sweden is similarly intended to help reduce piracy. It is very recent, and thus not necessarily an integrated or long term strategy. The results will be evaluated in the coming months, which will help determine the next course of action.

It is worth noting that Mindgeek’s empire is broader than adult sites alone. The company has dozens of subsidiaries, including AppAtomic, which is the driving force behind the VPN service VPNHub.

VPNHub, like many other VPN services, doesn’t keep any logs of IP-address assignments. Ironically, this means that MG Premium has no means to identify pirates who use the service. Then again, Mindgeek wins either way, as the VPN business can be quite lucrative too.

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

Reddit is without doubt one of the most visited sites on the Internet.

The community-oriented platform has “subreddits” dedicated to pretty much every topic you can think of. These result in a constant stream of discussions and links, all generated by the site’s users.

While most links remain within the boundaries of the law, on occasion users share copyright-infringing material. This means that, as required by law, Reddit also has to process a steady stream of takedown requests from rightsholders.

To give the public insight into the process and volume, Reddit started publishing a transparency report in 2014. At the time, the company received roughly one takedown notice every other day of which more than half were rejected. However, times have changed.

In the most recent report, published a few hours ago, the company states that it received 34,989 copyright notices last year, which resulted in 124,247 pieces of content being removed. This is a five-fold increase compared to the year before and 20 times more than in 2017.

“The content Reddit removed for copyright infringement in 2019 amounted to around a 500% increase from the 26,234 pieces of content removed in 2018, and increased by over 2000% from the 4,352 pieces of content removed in 2017,” Reddit writes.

For the first time, Reddit also reports how many users and subreddits were removed from the platform on copyright grounds. This typically happens when they are classified as repeat copyright infringers.

“Sometimes a repeat infringement problem is limited to one user and we close just that user’s account. Other times, the problem pervades a whole subreddit community and we close the subreddit,” Reddit explains.

In 2019, Reddit removed 283 users following repeat copyright complaints and 137 subreddits were taken down under this policy. This includes the popular mmastreams subreddit, which we reported on previously.

While the number of takedown notices and removed content has increased dramatically, Reddit also rejected a significant number of complaints. Last year, the site decided not to remove 46,427 pieces of content, which is roughly 27 percent of the total volume.

The reasons to reject takedown requests vary. The vast majority were duplicate requests, but Reddit also refused takedowns because an entire subreddit was targeted, or simply because no infringement was found.

Reddit reports that one copyright holder retracted a takedown notice. In addition, the site received seven counternotices from users who disputed a claim, after which three items were restored.

All in all the transparency report shows that the number of takedown notices is skyrocketing. While this might be a sign that more copyright infringement is taking place, it’s also very likely that rightsholders are paying more attention to the site now.

It’s noteworthy that some of the language used in Reddit’s report has been updated as well. In the first transparency report the site wrote that “links do not generally infringe copyright” as they link to content on external websites. That mention is no longer present.

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

In an effort to provide a comprehensive overview of online consumption habits in the UK, for the past several years the Intellectual Property Office has published its Online Copyright Infringement Tracker.

The latest wave of research, dated March 2019, covers both legal and illegal online consumption in several key areas including music, film, TV, video games, software and a new category this year, live sports.

At 158-pages long, the report is certainly comprehensive but it does come with an important note. In common with similar consumer surveys, there are concerns that respondents may not tell the whole truth when asked about their illegal activities. With this in mind, instead of asking people whether their sources were illegal, respondents were given a list of options with the categorization being done behind the scenes.

Importantly, one of the options was “Download/access for free from the internet, without really being sure where it comes from”. This category was completely excluded from illegal/legal calculations and consumers who only utilized these sources were omitted from the results. This means that caution should be applied when comparing this wave’s results to the previous year’s.

The published infringement figures are based on the number of people who used at least one illegal source during the previous three months. The headline figure is that 25% of the online content consuming population did so, a figure that has remained static for the past three years. However, there have been some considerable shifts when individual categories of content are considered.

In the area of films, for example, there was an 8% increase in the proportion who used an illegal source, up to 27% of online consumers. Music, on the other hand, remained largely stable at 20% (19% in 2018). Both TV and video game piracy are on downward trends, with the former dropping from 23% to 17% and the latter from 16% to 6% over a single year.

However, the addition of a new category (live sports) and the broadening of the e-publishing category to include content beyond just eBooks, reveals large volumes of infringers. From not being counted in 2018, 34% of online consumers said they pirated live sports at least once in the previous three months, with the e-publishing numbers jumping from 13% to 35%, making it the most-infringed category overall.

While the headline infringement figure has remained static and some categories show significant shifts, the report notes there are encouraging signs in respect of consumers who can be considered hardcore pirates, i.e those who do not consume from legitimate sources at all.

“Across most categories, it is encouraging to note that between 2018 and 2019 there was a decrease in the proportion who only used illegal sources. Where overall infringement levels remained the same, this proportion seemed to migrate towards using at least some legal sources,” the report notes.

Films, for example, where the 8% increase in some infringement may be considered a setback by the movie industry, the number of hardcore pirates plummeted from 11% down to just 2%. The actual growth in infringement was to be found among people who use a mix of legal and illegal sources, up from 7% in 2018 to 17% in 2019. Similarly, hardcore music pirates fell from 11% to just 2%, TV pirates from 14% to 2%, and video game pirates from 10% to 1%.

When the entire UK population is considered, the report estimates the following numbers of infringers: 5.7m for film, 5.1m for music, 4.4m for TV, 4.1m for e-publishing, 2.4m for live sports, 2m for software and 600,000 for video games.

Men were more likely to pirate music, films, TV shows and video games, but women come out on top when it came to live sports, software and e-publishing.

Interestingly, the report also touches on VPN usage, noting that “across all categories, respondents who had used VPNs were more likely to have infringed compared to those who had not. This difference was most pronounced in film (+13%), TV (+11%), software (+11%) and music (+8%).”

Somewhat inevitably the report also drills down into what would happen if pirate sources dried up. Would people start to pay out money (or indeed more money for dual-use consumers) or would free legal options prove more attractive?

In respect of video games, already one of the lowest-pirated mediums, 68% of people who admitted to piracy in the previous three months said they would turn to paid sources. When it came to films and TV, 57% and 46% respectively indicated they would hand over cash to a service such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, while 32% and 44% would seek out free services such as YouTube or BBC iPlayer.

Just over a third of music pirates (34%) said they would migrate to a paid service if pirate sources ceased to exist, with Spotify and Apple Music coming out on top. However, 61% said they would prefer not to pay, instead searching out free music on sites such as YouTube.

When considering live sports, companies such as the Premier League and Sky will be interested to learn that almost half of infringers (49%) said they would shift to a premium service if pirate options were limited, with 31% still determined to track down free legal sources.

Finally, the report highlights three broad drivers that lead people to access all types of content illegally, even when they may already be paying for content.

“The abundance of free and widely accessible illegal content means that even those concerned about infringing may occasionally resort to using unofficial sources if they want the content badly enough. A few mentioned the near obsessive mindframe of not finding something on legal channels but knowing it is ‘out there somewhere’ and hunting it down,” the report notes.

“Another factor is the cost of accessing content and a desire to limit spending. Given the amount of content that is increasingly available, consumers are worried about overspending. As such, the opportunity to turn to free, illegal methods is valued. It enables them to access the content they want without exceeding their budget.”

Since finding and accessing illegal content is considered simple, quick and easy to carry out, consumers may actually save time and effort when compared to obtaining material from official sources, the research suggests. Not having to sign up or search through multiple legal platforms for desired content may actually be a time-saver, so improvements can probably be made here.

The latest Online Copyright Infringment Tracker can be downloaded here (pdf)

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Up until late last year RapidVideo was one of the largest video hosting sites on the Internet, used by millions of people.

Like many of its competitors, the platform was often frequented by pirates. As such, it was a thorn in the side of many major entertainment industry companies.

For RapidVideo this eventually culminated in a lawsuit filed by two members of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), Warner Bros. Entertainment and Netflix. The media companies hoped the court would to put an end to the site’s alleged infringing activity.

RapidVideo’s operator decided not to await the verdict and shut the site down without prior warning. This meant that from one day to the next, one of the largest sites on the Internet was gone.

While we already knew that the site wasn’t coming back, something changed a few days ago. Ownership of the Rapidvideo.com and Rapidvideo.is domains was handed over to the MPA, as the whois details below show.

Initially, it wasn’t clear whether RapidVideo’s operator handed over the domain names voluntarily. However, the MPA, which leads the global anti-piracy coalition ACE, informs TorrentFreak that the transfers are part of a settlement. This also marks the end of the German lawsuit.

“The case has now been closed, with the operator agreeing to transfer the domain names and to paying a substantial amount of damages to the ACE members,” says Jan Van Voon, MPA’s Chief of Global Content Protection.

After the MPA gained control over the domains, Rapidvideo.is started to redirect to the ACE website and the .com domain will likely follow suit. The same happened with similar sites that were previously taken over following legal pressure, including Openload and Streamango.

RapidVideo’s operator previously said that, before it shut down, ACE and the MPA demanded far-reaching anti-piracy measures. The rightsholders requested a thorough “take down, stay down” policy that would go further than hash or filename filtering.

Facing these demands as well as a legal battle, the site decided to throw in the towel instead.

This shutdown combined with the substantial settlement is yet another victory for ACE and its members. These include Netflix and Warner Bros. Entertainment, which got the ball rolling.

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

As the largest CDN and DDoS mitigation service on the planet, Cloudflare provides services to millions of websites.

A tiny proportion of these sites are on the radars of entertainment and publishing companies since they either directly offer or link to unlicensed copies of copyrighted works. As a result, Cloudflare is under almost continual pressure to cease doing business with these entities.

As first reported here on TF in September 2019, Japan-based publishers Shueisha, Kadowaka, Kodansha, and Shogakukan sued the ‘pirate’ site Hoshinoromi in a New York federal court. The platform, which positioned itself as a replacement for self-shuttered pirate site Mangamura, was accused of “willful and massive infringement” of the publishers’ copyrights.

That case is still ongoing and according to a filing late last week (pdf), the publishers are having considerable difficulty identifying and serving the defendants, so need an extension. Cloudflare was mentioned in that lawsuit too and it now transpires that the same publishers previously targeted the CDN company in a Japan court back in 2018.

In common with other lawsuits in Japan, details are hazy. However, according to a joint statement issued late last week, Shueisha, Kadowaka, Kodansha, and Shogakukan filed a motion at the Tokyo District Court in August 2018 with a demand that Cloudflare should stop providing services to several ‘pirate’ platforms, Hoshinoromi included. Due to caching, that amounted to Cloudflare delivering infringing content to the public, they argued.

For reasons that appear related to the ongoing case in the United States, they have waited until now to reveal a settlement of sorts with Cloudflare. It was reportedly reached in June 2019 and seems to hinge on whether a court determines that the ‘pirate’ sites in question are copyright-infringing and therefore illegal.

The publishers’ statement indicates that when the ‘pirate’ sites using Cloudflare are viewed by users in Japan, most of those users will be accessing them via Cloudflare’s Japan-located servers. So, if the Tokyo District Court rules that the sites are illegal, Cloudflare has reportedly agreed to “stop the replication of the sites to Cloudflare’s servers in Japan.”

At least in part, the announcement is designed to be a warning to other ‘pirate’ sites that may be considering using Cloudflare’s services to improve uptime and general accessibility. Whether it will make much of a difference on the ground remains to be seen, however.

While this particular matter appears to be settled, last December Cloudflare was sued by Takeshobo, another major publisher based in Japan that distributes dozens of manga publications, many under the Bamboo Comics label.

The publisher said it was forced to sue Cloudflare because takedown notices sent to the CDN company in respect of a nameless ‘pirate’ site were effectively ignored, allowing infringing material to stay online via Cloudflare’s services. Progress in that particular case is unknown but the settlement with Shueisha, Kadowaka, Kodansha, and Shogakukan may provide a possible solution for Takeshobo.

Cloudflare is obviously extremely cautious when faced with similar lawsuits, always insisting that as a service provider it is not responsible for the activities of its users. Last week, however, the effects of a ruling handed down in December by a German court saw Cloudflare disconnect pirate music platform DDL-Music under the threat of serious fines.

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