A cat playing a game of whack-a-mole, a goat hitching a ride on the back of donkey, and a flying squirrel that’s eaten too much.

Besides being animals, they have something else in common. They’re all stars in viral videos.

With millions of views these lucky clips draw a lot of eyeballs. This is good news for the creators, who can monetize the views. And mainstream news sites and tabloids like them as well, since ithey can add some amusement to their online publications.

The problem, however, is that quite a few websites don’t pay for the viral content they put up. In some cases, they assume that videos can be shared freely, while others ignore the copyright issue on purpose.

According to a complaint submitted to a US District Court late last week,
popular British tabloid Daily Mail is guilty of the latter. The lawsuit was filed by Rumble, a company that manages the rights of hundreds of thousands of viral videos.

Rumble informs the court that it’s representing small creators who often don’t have the means to put up a fight against companies that ‘steal’ their content.

“By themselves, these individual content creators cannot effectively police and enforce their copyrights against those infringers who use their videos without approval, authorization or paying anything,” Rumble writes.

“These serial infringers can and do make very large sums of money using these copyright-protected videos without ever paying one penny to the content-creator,” the company adds.

Initially, Rumble and the Daily Mail had a license agreement to use the videos on their website. However, according to the complaint, the British tabloid continued to publish them after the license expired.

When the infringing usage continued, Rumble retained legal counsel to solve the matter, but that didn’t help either. This eventually culminated in legal action.

“Rumble asserts that the infringement here is of the most bold and bald-faced kind, exhibiting an utter disrespect for the copyrights of others,” the complaint reads.

“That [the infringment] is ‘willful’ in the factual and legal sense of the word is beyond dispute, such that the ultimate damages to be awarded will be reasonably and justifiably enhanced, including an award of Rumble’s attorneys fees as well.”

Rumble expects that Daily Mail will claim that they were not aware of the infringing activities so cautions the court not to fall for these type of excuses. The video platform stresses that turning a blind eye to the copyrights of others is part of the tabloid’s playbook, and plans to prove this at trial.

With dozens of videos listed in the legal paperwork, the potential piracy damages requested by the company are around $10,000,000. In addition, Rumble asks for an injunction to stop the infringing activity as soon as possible.

While Rumble prides itself for sticking up for the small guy, as the main rightsholder it has a direct financial interest in the case, of course. We asked the company whether the creators will also get a share of any potential damages, but at the time of publication, we have yet to hear back.

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A copy of the complaint is available here (pdf).

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

Back in the summer of 2003 when torrenting was still in its infancy, a new torrent client hit the web promising big things.

Taking the Latin name of the blue poison dart frog and deploying a logo depicting its image, the Azureus client aimed to carve out a niche in what would become a market of several hundred million users.

Written in Java and available on Windows, Linux, OSX, and Android, Azureus (latterly ‘Vuze’) always managed to divide the community. Heralded by many as a feature-rich powerhouse that left no stone unturned, others saw the client as bloated when compared to the more streamlined uTorrent.

All that being said, Vuze knew its place in the market and on the bells-and-whistles front, it always delivered. Its features included swarm-merging, built-in search, DVD-burning capabilities, and device integration. It felt like Vuze was always offering something new.

Indeed, for the past several years and like clockwork, every month new additions and fixes have been deployed to Vuze. Since at least 2012 and up to early 2017, not a single month passed without Vuze being tuned up or improved in some manner via beta or full versions. Now, however, all of that seems to have ground to a halt.

The last full release of Vuze (v5.7.5.0) containing plenty of tweaks and fixes was released on February 28 this year. It followed the previous full release by roughly three months, a pattern its developers have kept up for some time with earlier versions. As expected, the Vuze 5.7.5.1 beta versions followed but on April 10, everything stopped.

It’s now three whole months since Vuze the last beta release, which may not sound like a long time unless one considers the history. Vuze has been actively developed for 14 years and its developers have posted communications on their devblog archives every single month, at least as far back as July 2012. Since then – nothing.

Back in May, a user on Vuze forums noted that none of Vuze’s featured content (such as TED Talks) could be downloaded, while another reported that the client’s anti-virus definitions weren’t updating. Given past scheduling, a new version of the client should have been released about a month ago. Nothing appeared.

To illustrate, this is a screenshot of the Vuze source code repository, which shows the number of code changes committed since 2012. The drastic drop-off in April 2017 (12 commits) versus dozens to even hundreds in preceding months is punctuated by zero commits for the past three months.

Of course, even avid developers have offline lives, and it’s certainly possible that an unusual set of outside circumstances have conspired to give the impression that development has stopped. However, posting a note to the Vuze blog or Vuze forum shouldn’t be too difficult, so people are naturally worried about the future.

TorrentFreak has reached out to the respected developer identified by Vuze forum users as the most likely to respond to questions. At the time of publication, we had received no response.

As mentioned earlier, torrent users have a love/hate relationship with Vuze and Azureus but there is no mistaking this clients’ massive contribution to the torrent landscape. Millions will be hoping that the current radio silence is nothing sinister but until that confirmation is received, the concerns will continue.

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

Assisted by police in France and the Netherlands, the FBI took down the “pirate” Android stores Appbucket, Applanet and SnappzMarket during the summer of 2012.

The domain seizures were the first ever against “rogue” mobile app marketplaces and followed similar actions against BitTorrent and streaming sites.

During the years that followed several people connected to the Android app sites were arrested and indicted. This is also true for the now 27-year-old Joshua Taylor, a resident of Kentwood, Michigan.

Taylor, who arranged SnappzMarket’s servers, was previously convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and has now been sentenced (pdf) to 16 months in prison for his role in the operation.

According to the Department of Justice, SnappzMarket distributed more than one million pirated apps with a retail value exceeding $1.7 million.

In a sentencing memorandum, defense attorney John Lovell argued that his client never made any “profits” from his involvement, noting that the co-conspirators played a much more significant role.

“Josh Taylor is 27 years old with no other criminal history. His offense involved procuring storage space for the masterminds of the operation,” Lovell wrote. “SnappzMarket did not pay Josh. Whatever profits were generated by SnappzMarket were split between Sharp and Peterson.”

The court record further reveals that Taylor had a very tough childhood and was plagued by both mental and physical challenges.

According to the testimony from his psychologist Meredith Davis, he didn’t understand that he was committing a felonious act, and lacked the cognitive capacity do so intentionally.

The psychologist stressed that her client deeply regrets what happened and she doesn’t think it’s likely that would run into similar problems in the future.

“He has expressed a great deal of remorse for his involvement in the charged crime. Mr. Taylor possesses a high degree of vigilance to avoid any further contact with the law,” Davis wrote to the court.

Despite these arguments, U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten Sr. found a prison sentence appropriate.

While 16 months is significant, it’s not as much as 46 month prison sentence co-conspirator Scott Walton received earlier. Kody Peterson, another key SnappzMarket operator, only received a one year sentence but he agreed to do undercover work for the FBI.

Gary Edwin Sharp II, the only remaining defendant, previously pleaded guilty and is currently scheduled to be sentenced in November. Like the others, he also faces up to several years in prison.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Alien Covenant 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	(7)	Alien Covenant (Subbed HDrip)	6.7 / trailer
2	(…)	Ghost In a Shell	6.8 / trailer
3	(1)	Kong: Skull Island	6.9 / trailer
4	(…)	Despicable Me 3 (HDTS)	6.7 / trailer
5	(2)	Wonder Woman (Subbed HDrip)	8.2 / trailer
6	(3)	King Arthur: Legend of the Sword	7.2 / trailer
7	(4)	The Fate of the Furious	6.7 / trailer
8	(…)	Transformers: The Last Knight (TC/HDTS)	5.3 / trailer
9	(5)	The Mummy 2017 (HDTS)	5.8 / trailer
10	(6)	The Boss Baby	6.5 / trailer

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

With torrent sites dropping like flies recently, a lot of people are looking for alternatives.

For many, Google is the preferred choice to find them, and the search engine is actually quite helpful.

When you type in “best torrent sites” or just “torrent sites,” Google.com provides a fancy reel of several high traffic indexers.

The search engine displays the names of sites such as RARBG, The Pirate Bay and 1337x as well as their logo. When you click on this link, Google brings up all results for the associated term.

While it’s a thought provoking idea to think that Google employees are manually curating the list, the entire process is likely automated. Still, many casual torrent users might find it quite handy. Whether rightsholders will be equally excited is another question though.

The automated nature of this type of search result display also creates another problem. While many people know that most torrent sites offer pirated content, this is quite different with streaming portals.

This leads to a confusing situation where Google lists both legal and unauthorized streaming platforms when users search for “streaming sites.”

The screenshot below shows the pirate streaming site Putlocker next to Hulu and Crackle. The same lineup also rotates various other pirate sites such as Alluc and Movie4k.to.

The reels in question are most likely generated by algorithms, which don’t distinguish between authorized and unauthorized sources. Still, given the repeated criticism Hollywood has for Google for its supposed facilitation of piracy, it’s a bit unfortunate, to say the least.

This isn’t the first time that Google’s “rich” search results have featured pirate sites. The same happened in the past when the search engine displayed pirate site ratings of movies, next to ratings from regular review sites such as IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes.

We can expect the MPAA and others to take note, and bring these and other issues up at their convenience.

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Note: the search reel doesn’t appear on many localized Google domains. We tested and confirmed it only on Google.com.

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