Game of Thrones has been the most pirated TV-show online for years, and this isn’t expected to change anytime soon.

While most of today’s piracy takes place through streaming services, BitTorrent traffic remains significant as well. The show’s episodes are generally downloaded millions of times each, by people from all over the world.

In recent years there have been several attempts to quantify this piracy bonanza. While MILLIONS of downloads make for a good headline, there are some other trends worth looking at as well.

TorrentFreak spoke to Abigail De Kosnik, an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Together with computer scientist and artist Benjamin De Kosnik, she runs the BitTorrent-oriented research project “alpha60.”

The goal of alpha60 is to quantify and map BitTorrent activity around various media titles, to make this “shadow economy” visible to media scholars and the general public. Over the past two weeks, they’ve taken a close look at Game of Thrones downloads.

Their tracking software collected swarm data from 72 torrents that were released shortly after the first episode premiered. Before being anonymized, the collected IP-addresses were first translated to geographical locations, to reveal various traffic patterns.

The results, summarized in a white paper, reveal that during the first five days, alpha60 registered an estimated 1.77 million downloads. Of particular interest is the five-day time-lapse of the worldwide swarm activity.

Five-day Game of Thrones piracy timelapse

The time-lapse shows that download patterns vary depending on the time of the day. There is a lot of activity in Asia, but cities such as Athens, Toronto, and Sao Paulo also pop up regularly.

When looking at the absolute numbers, Seoul comes out on top as the Game of Thrones download capital of the world, followed by Athens, São Paulo, Guangzhou, Mumbai, and Bangalore.

Perhaps more interesting is the view of the number of downloads relative to the population, or the “over-pirating” cities, as alpha60 calls them. Here, Dallas comes out on top, before Brisbane, Chicago, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Seattle, and Perth.

Of course, VPNs may skew the results somewhat, but overall the data should give a pretty accurate impression of the download traffic around the globe.

Below are the complete top tens of most active cities, both in absolute numbers and relative to the population. Further insights and additional information is available in the full whitepaper, which can be accessed here.

Note: The download totals reported by alpha60 are significantly lower than the MUSO figures that came out last week. Alpha60 stresses, however, that their methods and data are accurate. MUSO, for its part, has made some dubious claims in the past.

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Most downloads (absolute)

1 Seoul, Rep. of Korea
2 Athens, Greece
3 São Paulo, Brazil
4 Guangzhou, China
5 Mumbai, India
6 Bangalore, India
7 Shanghai, China
8 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
9 Delhi, India
10 Beijing, China

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Most downloads (relative)

1 Dallas, USA
2 Brisbane, Australia
3 Chicago, USA
4 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
5 Seattle, USA
6 Perth, Australia
7 Phoenix, USA
8 Toronto, Canada
9 Athens, Greece
10 Guangzhou, China

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

In the wake of the Dish Network lawsuit filed against TVAddons in Texas, the booming Kodi third-party addon scene received its first real taste of corporate power.

With lawyers breathing down their necks, several high-profile Kodi addons took the decision to shut down and even TVAddons itself went offline without explanation.

With very little news surfacing, last week we revealed how three key domains previously operated by TVAddons had ended up in new hands. TVAddons.ag, the site’s main domain, plus Offshoregit.com and XBMCHUB.com, were transferred to Canadian law firm, DrapeauLex.

With no explanations forthcoming from company owner Daniel Drapeau or staff at TVAddons, no solid conclusions could be reached. Was this part of a settlement with Dish Networks or was something unrelated underway?

With everyone involved remaining tight-lipped since, further investigations by TorrentFreak this week have revealed more developments on the domain shifting front, with one in particular catching the eye.

Back in May, one of the oldest and most popular Kodi addons was shut down by its operators. Navi-X, which was used by hundreds of thousands of people, was discontinued after spam, pollution of its indexes, and mislabeled adult content piled on top of general legal fears.

Navi-X was a particularly iconic piece of software. Launched in 2007 by Netherlands-based coder ‘Rodejo,’ it debuted on XBMC (Kodi’s previous name) on the original XBoX. Subsequent success aside, that longevity put the addon into the history books.

So why then is Navi-X’s former main domain now in the hands of the same law firm that’s taken control of TVAddons’ domains?

Now Navi-X’s domain is in the hands of lawyers

Navixtreme.com was first registered in November 2007 and was the key domain associated with Navi-X. For years it was prominently displayed on the addons’ Twitter feed, for example. Another domain – navi-x.org – was registered more recently in February 2017. Both are now under the control of lawyer Daniel Drapeau.

What is unusual about this situation is that Navi-X shut down long before the Dish lawsuit was filed against TVAddons. If TVAddons did indeed shut down because of that lawsuit, why then have the domains of Navi-X been transferred in the same manner as TVAddons’ domains? They certainly weren’t mentioned in the lawsuit so one has to conclude that something else is at play here.

Again, no one wants to talk, but the situation appears to be fluid. In addition to the TVAddons .ag domain that was transferred last week, the law firm has now acquired other TVAddons domains that were registered around the same time, including TVAddons.com, .org, and .TV.

Something unusual is undoubtedly going on in the addon scene but quite where this will all end up is currently anyone’s guess. All the signs point to legal action of some kind but the nature of that is still unclear. That being said, it’s unlikely to remain a secret forever.

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

Apple is known to have a rigorous app-review policy.

Over the past several years, dozens of apps have been rejected from the App Store because they mention the word BitTorrent, for example.

The mere association with piracy is good enough to warrant a ban. This policy is now expanding to the privacy-sphere as well, at least in China.

It is no secret that the Chinese Government is preventing users from accessing certain sites and services. The so-called ‘Great Firewall’ works reasonably well, but can be circumvented through VPN services and other encryption tools.

These tools are a thorn in the side of Chinese authorities, which are now receiving help from Apple to limit their availability.

Over the past few hours, Apple has removed many of the most-used VPN applications from the Chinese app store. In a short email, VPN providers are informed that VPN applications are considered illegal in China.

“We are writing to notify you that your application will be removed from the China App Store because it includes content that is illegal in China, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines,” Apple informed the affected VPNs.

Apple’s email to VPN providers

VPN providers and users are complaining bitterly about the rigorous action. However, it doesn’t come as a complete surprise. Over the past few months there have been various signals that the Chinese Government would crack down on non-authorized VPN providers.

In January, a notice published by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that the government had launched a 14-month campaign to crack down on local ‘unauthorized’ Internet platforms.

This essentially means that all VPN services have to be pre-approved by the Government if they want to operate there.

Earlier this month Bloomberg broke the news that China’s Government had ordered telecommunications carriers to block individuals’ access to VPNs. The Chinese Government denied that this was the case, but it’s clear that these services remain a high-profile target.

Thanks to Apple, China’s Government no longer has to worry about iOS users having easy access to the most popular VPN applications. Those users who search the local app store for “VPN” still see plenty of results, but, ironically, many of these applications are fake.

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

When it comes to the protection of intellectual property, China is often viewed as one of the world’s leading scofflaws. Everything is copied in the country, from designer watches to cars. Not even major landmarks can escape the replica treatment.

In more recent times, however, there have been signs that China might be at least warming to the idea that IP protection should be given more priority.

For example, every few months authorities announce a new crackdown on Internet piracy, such as the “Jian Wang 2016” program which shuttered 290 piracy websites in the final six months of last year.

Maintaining the same naming convention, this week China’s National Copyright Administration revealed the new “Jian Wang 2017” anti-piracy program. During a meeting in Beijing attended by other state bodies, copyright groups, rights organizations, and representatives from the news media, the administration detailed its latest plans.

The anti-piracy program will focus on protecting the copyrights of the film, television, and news industries in China. Infringing websites, e-commerce and cloud storage services, social networks, plus mobile Internet applications will all be put under the spotlight, with authorities investigating and prosecuting major cases.

The program, which will run for the next four months, has a mission to improve compliance in three key areas.

The first aims to assist the film and TV industries by cracking down on ‘pirate’ websites, the unlawful use of file-sharing software, plus “forum communities and other channels that supply infringing film and television works.”

Also on the cards is a blitz against users of the hugely popular social media and instant messaging app, WeChat.

Released in 2011, WeChat now has more than 930 million users, some of which use the platform to republish news articles without permission from creators. Chinese authorities want to reduce this activity, noting that too many articles are stripped from their sources and reproduced on personal blogs and similar platforms.

The second area for attention is the booming market for pirate apps. Chinese authorities say that cracked app stores and the software they provide are contributing to a huge rise in the unlawful spread of films, TV shows, music, news and other literature. Set-top boxes that utilize such apps will also be targeted in the crackdown.

Finally, there will be a “strengthening of copyright supervision” on large-scale e-commerce platforms that supply audio and video products, eBooks, and other publications. Cloud storage platforms will also be subjected to additional scrutiny, as these are often used to share copyright works without permission.

What kind of effect the program will have on overall copyrighted content availability will remain to be seen, but if previous patterns are maintained, the National Copyright Administration should reveal the results of its blitz in December.

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

There are plenty options for copyright holders to frustrate the operation of pirate sites, but one of the most effective is to attack their domain names.

The strategy has been deployed most famously against The Pirate Bay. Over the past couple of years, the site has lost more than a handful following copyright holder complaints.

While less public, hundreds of smaller sites have suffered the same fate. Sometimes these sites are clear infringers, but in other cases it’s less obvious. In these instances, a simple complaint can also be enough to have a domain name suspended.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge address this ‘copyright bullying’ problem in a newly published whitepaper. According to the digital rights groups, site owners should pick their domain names carefully, and go for a registry that shields website owners from this type of abuse.

“It turns out that not every top-level domain is created equal when it comes to protecting the domain holder’s rights. Depending on where you register your domain, a rival, troll, or officious regulator who doesn’t like what you’re doing with it could wrongly take it away,” the groups warn.

The whitepaper includes a detailed analysis of the policies of various domain name registries. For each, it lists the home country, under which conditions domain names are removed, and whether the WHOIS details of registrants are protected.

When it comes to “copyright bullies,” the digital rights groups highlight the MPAA’s voluntary agreements with the Radix and Donuts registries. The agreement allows the MPAA to report infringing sites directly to the registry. These can then be removed after a careful review but without a court order.

“Our whitepaper illustrates why remedies for copyright infringement on the Internet should not come from the domain name system, and in particular should not be wielded by commercial actors in an unaccountable process. Organizations such as the MPAA are not known for advancing a balanced approach to copyright enforcement,” the EFF explains.

While EFF and Public Knowledge don’t recommend any TLDs in particular, they do signal some that site owners may want to avoid. The Radix and Donuts domain names are obviously not the best choice, in this regard.

“To avoid having your website taken down by your domain registry in response to a copyright complaint, our whitepaper sets out a number of options, including registering in a domain whose registry requires a court order before it will take down a domain, or at the very least one that doesn’t have a special arrangement with the MPAA or another special interest for the streamlined takedown of domains,” the groups write.

Aside from the information gathered in the whitepaper, The Pirate Bay itself has also proven to be an excellent test case of which domain names are most resistant to copyright holder complaints.

In 2015, the notorious torrent site found out that exotic domain names are not always the best option after losing its .GS, .LA, .VG, .AM, .MN, and .GD TLDs in a matter of months. The good old .ORG is still up and running as of today, however, despite being operated by a United States-based registry.

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EFF and Public knowledge’s full whitepaper is available here (pdf).

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