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In this episode, we meet Steve Phillips of The Pursuance Project. Pursuance is a new tool for organising activists and journalists online which springs directly from the work of journalist Barrett Brown and Barrett’s experience handling the Stratfor HBGary leaks around 2012-2013, which resulted in him going to prison.

We discuss the tech behind the Panama Papers and Snowden leaks, the details behind the HB Gary leaks, how Steve was inspired by the story of Anonymous’ first big online hit and how organizational tools are the new frontier online – whether for corporate teams or activist groups.
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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: Steve Phillips

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.

More and more people are starting to use “fully-loaded” set-top boxes to stream video content directly to their TVs.

Although the media players themselves can be used for perfectly legal means, third-party add-ons turn them into pirate machines, providing access to movies, TV-shows and IPTV channels.

Over the past several years, there has been little enforcement effort on this front. However, this changed earlier this year, when the European Court of Justice ruled that selling devices pre-configured to obtain copyright-infringing content is illegal.

The hardware can still be sold and media player software such as Kodi is legal too, but vendors who ship boxes with pirate add-ons could get a letter or visit from rightsholders. Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN is particularly active on this front and has convinced hundreds of sellers to clean up shop.

One of these vendors, located in The Hague, recently promised that it would stop offering these boxes. However, BREIN discovered that while the pirate media players disappeared from the online store, they were still sold in the bricks-and-mortar store.

The anti-piracy group obviously wasn’t happy with this and reported the shop owner to the local police, who went in and confiscated 245 “pirate” media players a few days ago.

“We summoned this merchant to stop but, despite his promise to do so, he continued. We have therefore reported it to the police. These players cause great damage because people no longer pay for the movies and series they watch,” BREIN director Tim Kuik says.

It is now up to the authorities to determine if any further action is needed. BREIN expects that the prosecutor’s office will try to settle the case with a fine, but if the vendor refuses to pay it may also lead to a prosecution. At the same time, BREIN also has the option to file a civil case.

Although BREIN’s actions usually don’t result in criminal prosecutions, the anti-piracy group continues to pressure people who are involved in selling and developing these platforms. Ultimately, they hope that this will deter others from getting involved.

Earlier this year the Motion Picture Association described pirate media players as a major threat, dubbing them “Piracy 3.0.” While this threat is far from over, it has definitely become riskier for people to get involved in developing and selling these boxes.

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

The seventh season of Game of Thrones has been the most-viewed thus far, with record-breaking TV ratings.

Traditionally, the season finale is among the most-viewed episodes of the season. This is true on official channels, but also on pirate sites.

Despite numerous legal options, Game of Thrones remains extremely popular among pirates. Minutes after the official broadcast ended last night people flocked to various torrent and streaming sites, to watch it for free.

Looking at the torrent download numbers we see that the latest episode is topping all previous ones of this season. At the time of writing, more than 400,000 people were actively sharing one of the many available torrents.

Some of the more popular GoT torrents

While the demand is significant, there is no all time “swarm record” as we saw two years ago.

In part, this may be due to improved legal options, but the recent rise of pirate streaming sites and services are also ‘stealing’ traffic. While there is no hard data available, millions of people now use streaming sites and services to watch pirated episodes of Game of Thrones.

Record or not, there is little doubt that Game of Thrones will end up being the most pirated show of the year once again. That will be the sixth year in a row, which is unprecedented.

In recent years, HBO has tried to contain piracy by sending DMCA takedown notices to pirate sites. In addition, the company also warned tens of thousands of BitTorrent downloaders directly. Nonetheless, many people still find their way to this unofficial market.

While HBO has grown used to mass-scale piracy in recent years, it encountered some other major setbacks this season. Hackers leaked preliminary outlines of various episodes before they aired. The same hackers also threatened to release the season finale, but that never happened.

There were two episode leaks this year, but these were unrelated to the aforementioned. The fourth episode leaked through the Indian media processing company Prime Focus Technologies, which resulted in several arrests. Two weeks later, HBO Spain accidentally made the sixth episode public days in advance, which spread online soon after.

On the upside. Piracy aside, the interest of the media and millions of ‘legal’ viewers appears to be on a high as well, so there’s certainly something left to celebrate.

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

The boxing matchup between Mayweather and McGregor was an unusual sporting event in many ways, not least financially.

With close to a billion dollars at stake, various rightsholders did their best to ensure that piracy was kept to a minimum.

However, despite an injunction against pirate streaming sites and mysterious tracking codes embedded in streams, they were easily defeated.

New data published by Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that there was a massive surge in live streaming piracy around the fight. The company monitored traffic at a fixed access tier-1 network in North America and found that many people tuned into pirate IPTV services.

Generally speaking, a single pirate live streaming channel never accounts for more than five percent of the total bandwidth generated by these unauthorized broadcasts. However, it was quite different last weekend.

“On Saturday that all changed, as the report below shows: at its peak, the pirated UFC and PPV channels for the Mayweather/McGregor fight accounted for 50% of all pirate TV streams,” Sandvine notes.

Streaming piracy boost

According to Sandvine, roughly 8% of the sampled subscribers have pirate live streaming devices at their homes and many of these were tuning into the fight between Mayweather and McGregor.

Towards the end of the event, 3.5 percent of total bandwidth consumed on the network came from these pirate streams. To give an illustration of the traffic that was generated, Sandvine notes that the unauthorized boxing streams totaled more traffic than Twitch, Facebook, and Instagram together.

Streaming piracy market share

While the figures are based on a sample of North American fixed access network traffic, Sandvine believes that it provides a good indication of the total traffic. In the near future, the company plans to release more details on this pirate streaming trend, to better understand what’s going on.

Sandvine informed TorrentFreak that the current numbers apply to pirate IPTV services, not the live streams that people watch in their regular browser.

This means that the complete piracy numbers are even higher. There is a wide variety of live streaming options available to pirates, and tracking outfit Irdeto estimates that close to 3 million people watched streams through YouTube, Facebook, Periscope and various pirate streaming sites.

It’s safe to say that in theory, the rightsholders could have made millions more. But then again, with hundreds of millions fresh in the bank, they’re not doing too badly at the moment.

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

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Hitman’s Bodyguard is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(…)	Hitman’s Bodyguard	7.2 / trailer
2	(2)	Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2	8.0 / trailer
3	(1)	Baywatch	5.7 / trailer
4	(3)	The Mummy 2017	5.8 / trailer
5	(5)	Wonder Woman (Subbed HDrip)	8.2 / trailer
6	(4)	King Arthur: Legend of the Sword	7.2 / trailer
7	(7)	Spider-Man: Homecoming (HDTS)	8.0 / trailer
8	(…)	Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie	6.5 / trailer
9	(8)	The Boss Baby	6.5 / trailer
10	(9)	Despicable Me 3 (HDTS)	6.4 / trailer

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