All types of media content can be exploited online with movies, TV shows, and music among the most popular among pirates. However, in recent years books have proven desirable, especially those that otherwise have hefty price tags.

Textbooks are particularly well known for their stiff pricing, something which presents a thorn in the side for thousands of students every year. Making matters worse, books are often marginally tweaked per revision, ensuring that second owner books lose their value. This isn’t something that affects pirates though.

Over the years, many file-sharing sites have catered to people seeking textbooks for free, with many building up a dedicated following. Others, however, have seen the opportunity to make some money, offering broad but illegal access to textbooks for a nominal fee.

That was the case with Denmark-based website LendStudy. It provided students with access to hundreds of textbooks for a comparatively reasonable price of 300 kroner ($45.00) per semester. Unfortunately, that attracted the attention of anti-piracy outfit Rights Alliance, who pursued a case against its operators.

In court this week, three men aged 26, 31 and 71 stood accused of scanning and then making available at least 198 copyrighted textbooks to paying members. Between August 2013 and October 2014 it was alleged the textbooks were downloaded from the site 2,574 times, netting the men revenues of around $3,500.

According to local media, all three men initially pleaded not guilty but later admitted being operators of the site.

The court heard how RightsAlliance tried to create an account on LendStudy but its request for membership was discovered and rejected by the site’s operators. Other evidence presented by the prosecution included photographs of the men loading computers, scanners, and other IT equipment into a car.

“It is expensive for students to acquire new knowledge. Lendstudy wanted to spread knowledge in the form of books that give students more opportunities for new knowledge,” the 31-year-old defendant said in court.

Unfortunately for the site’s operators, the desire to enrich the minds of students failed to persuade the court that piracy could be ignored. All three were found guilty of criminal copyright infringement and handed four-month conditional jail sentences. The LundStudy.dk domain was confiscated.

The notice on the LendStudy site

“If textbooks are made freely available or sold illegally, publishers have less incentive to produce textbooks,” said Martin Lindø Westeraaard from University Press of Southern Denmark.

“It will be detrimental both for publishers and for the students, who will lose the opportunity to read Danish-language textbooks.”

A claim for damages against the men will now be pursued by Rights Alliance in a civil case.

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

In April, draft legislation was developed to crack down on systems and software that allow Russian Internet users to bypass website blockades approved by telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor.

Earlier this month the draft bill was submitted to the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. If passed, the law will make it illegal for services to circumvent web blockades by “routing traffic of Russian Internet users through foreign servers, anonymous proxy servers, virtual private networks and other means.”

As the plans currently stand, anonymization services that fail to restrict access to sites listed by telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor face being blocked themselves. Sites offering circumvention software for download also face potential blacklisting.

This week the State Duma discussed the proposals with experts from the local Internet industry. In addition to the head of Rozcomnadzor, representatives from service providers, search engines and even anonymization services were in attendance. Novaya Gazeta has published comments (Russian) from some of the key people at the meeting and it’s fair to say there’s not a lot of support.

VimpelCom, the sixth largest mobile network operator in the world with more than 240 million subscribers, sent along Director for Relations with Government, Sergey Malyanov. He wondered where all this blocking will end up.

“First we banned certain information. Then this information was blocked with the responsibility placed on both owners of resources and services. Now there are blocks on top of blocks – so we already have a triple effort,” he said.

“It is now possible that there will be a fourth iteration: the block on the block to block those that were not blocked. And with that, we have significantly complicated the law and the activities of all the people affected by it.”

Malyanov said that these kinds of actions have the potential to close down the entire Internet by ruining what was once an open network running standard protocols. But amid all of this, will it even be effective?

“The question is not even about the losses that will be incurred by network operators, the owners of the resources and the search engines. The question is whether this bill addresses the goal its creators have set for themselves. In my opinion, it will not.”

Group-IB, one of the world’s leading cyber-security and threat intelligence providers, was represented CEO Ilya Sachkov. He told parliament that “ordinary respectable people” who use the Internet should always use a VPN for security. Nevertheless, he also believes that such services should be forced to filter sites deemed illegal by the state.

But in a warning about blocks in general, he warned that people who want to circumvent them will always be one step ahead.

“We have to understand that by the time the law is adopted the perpetrators will already find it very easy to circumvent,” he said.

Mobile operator giant MTS, which turns over billions of dollars and employs 50,000+ people, had their Vice-President of Corporate and Legal Affairs in attendance. Ruslan Ibragimov said that in dealing with a problem, the government should be cautious of not causing more problems, including disruption of a growing VPN market.

“We have an understanding that evil must be fought, but it’s not necessary to create a new evil, even more so – for those who are involved in this struggle,” he said.

“Broad wording of this law may pose a threat to our network, which could be affected by the new restrictive measures, as well as the VPN market, which we are currently developing, and whose potential market is estimated at 50 billion rubles a year.”

In its goal to maintain control of the Internet, it’s clear that Russia is determined to press ahead with legislative change. Unfortunately, it’s far from clear that there’s a technical solution to the problem, but if one is pursued regardless, there could be serious fallout.

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

Last week, news broke that the Superior Court of Justice of the City of Mexico had issued a ban on Roku sales.

The order prohibited stores such as Amazon, Liverpool, El Palacio de Hierro, and Sears from importing and selling the devices. In addition, several banks were told stop processing payments from accounts that are linked to pirated services on Roku.

While Roku itself is not offering any pirated content, there is a market for third-party pirate channels outside the Roku Channel Store, which turn the boxes into pirate tools. Cablevision filed a complaint about this unauthorized use which eventually resulted in the ban.

The news generated headlines all over the world and was opposed immediately by several of the parties involved. Yesterday, a federal judge decided to suspend the import and sales ban, at least temporarily.

As a result, local vendors can resume their sales of the popular media player.

“Roku is pleased with today’s court decision, which paves the way for sales of Roku devices to resume in Mexico,” Roku’s General Counsel Steve Kay informed TorrentFreak after he heard the news.

Roku

TorrentFreak has not been able to get a copy of the suspension order, but it’s likely that the court wants to review the case in more detail before a final decision is made.

While streaming player piracy is seen as one of the greatest threats the entertainment industry faces today, the Roku ban went quite far. In a way, it would be similar to banning the Chrome browser because certain add-ons and sites allow users to stream pirated movies.

Roku, meanwhile, says it will continue to work with rightholders and other stakeholders to prevent piracy on its platform, to the best of their ability.

“Piracy is a problem the industry at large is facing,” Key tells TorrentFreak.

“We prohibit copyright infringement of any kind on the Roku platform. We actively work to prevent third-parties from using our platform to distribute copyright infringing content. Moreover, we have been actively working with other industry stakeholders on a wide range of anti-piracy initiatives.”

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

Two years ago, academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint against Sci-Hub and several related “pirate” sites.

It accused the websites of making academic papers widely available to the public, without permission.

While Sci-Hub is nothing like the average pirate site, it is just as illegal according to Elsevier’s legal team, who obtained a preliminary injunction from a New York District Court last fall.

The injunction ordered Sci-Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan to quit offering access to any Elsevier content. However, this didn’t happen.

Instead of taking Sci-Hub down, the lawsuit achieved the opposite. Sci-Hub grew bigger and bigger up to a point where its users were downloading hundreds of thousands of papers per day.

Although Elbakyan sent a letter to the court earlier, she opted not engage in the US lawsuit any further. The same is true for her fellow defendants, associated with Libgen. As a result, Elsevier asked the court for a default judgment and a permanent injunction which were issued this week.

Following a hearing on Wednesday, the Court awarded Elsevier $15,000,000 in damages, the maximum statutory amount for the 100 copyrighted works that were listed in the complaint. In addition, the injunction, through which Sci-Hub and LibGen lost several domain names, was made permanent.

Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan says that even if she wanted to pay the millions of dollars in revenue, she doesn’t have the money to do so.

“The money project received and spent in about six years of its operation do not add up to 15 million,” Elbakyan tells torrentFreak.

“More interesting, Elsevier says: the Sci-Hub activity ’causes irreparable injury to Elsevier, its customers and the public’ and US court agreed. That feels like a perfect crime. If you want to cause an irreparable injury to American public, what do you have to do? Now we know the answer: establish a website where they can read research articles for free,” she adds.

Previously, Elbakyan already confirmed to us that, lawsuit or not, the site is not going anywhere.

“The Sci-Hub will continue as usual. In case of problems with the domain names, users can rely on TOR scihub22266oqcxt.onion,” Elbakyan added.

Sci-Hub is regularly referred to as the “Pirate Bay for science,” and based on the site’s resilience and its response to legal threats, it can certainly live up to this claim.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is happy with the outcome of the case.

“As the final judgment shows, the Court has not mistaken illegal activity for a public good,” AAP President and CEO Maria A. Pallante says.

“On the contrary, it has recognized the defendants’ operation for the flagrant and sweeping infringement that it really is and affirmed the critical role of copyright law in furthering scientific research and the public interest.”

Matt McKay, a spokesperson for the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) in Oxford went even further, telling Nature that the site doesn’t offer any value to the scientific comunity.

“Sci-Hub does not add any value to the scholarly community. It neither fosters scientific advancement nor does it value researchers’ achievements. It is simply a place for someone to go to download stolen content and then leave.”

Hundreds of thousands of academics, who regularly use the site to download papers, might contest this though.

With no real prospect of recouping the damages and an ever-resilient Elbakyan, Elsevier’s legal battle could just be a win on paper. Sci-Hub and Libgen are not going anywhere, it seems, and the lawsuit has made them more popular than ever before.

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

When Megaupload and Kim Dotcom were raided five years ago, the authorities seized millions of dollars in cash and other property.

The US government claimed the assets were obtained through copyright crimes so went after the bank accounts, cars, and other seized possessions of the Megaupload defendants.

Kim Dotcom and his colleagues were branded as “fugitives” and the Government won its case. Dotcom’s legal team quickly appealed this verdict, but lost once more at the Fourth Circuit appeals court.

A few weeks ago Dotcom and his former colleagues petitioned the Supreme Court to take on the case.

They don’t see themselves as “fugitives” and want the assets returned. The US Government opposed the request, but according to a new reply filed by Megaupload’s legal team, the US Government ignores critical questions.

The Government has a “vested financial stake” in maintaining the current situation, they write, which allows the authorities to use their “fugitive” claims as an offensive weapon.

“Far from being directed towards persons who have fled or avoided our country while claiming assets in it, fugitive disentitlement is being used offensively to strip foreigners of their assets abroad,” the reply brief (pdf) reads.

According to Dotcom’s lawyers there are several conflicting opinions from lower courts, which should be clarified by the Supreme Court. That Dotcom and his colleagues have decided to fight their extradition in New Zealand, doesn’t warrant the seizure of their assets.

“Absent review, forfeiture of tens of millions of dollars will be a fait accompli without the merits being reached,” they write, adding that this is all the more concerning because the US Government’s criminal case may not be as strong as claimed.

“This is especially disconcerting because the Government’s criminal case is so dubious. When the Government characterizes Petitioners as ‘designing and profiting from a system that facilitated wide-scale copyright infringement,’ it continues to paint a portrait of secondary copyright infringement, which is not a crime.”

The defense team cites several issues that warrant review and urges the Supreme Court to hear the case. If not, the Government will effectively be able to use assets seizures as a pressure tool to urge foreign defendants to come to the US.

“If this stands, the Government can weaponize fugitive disentitlement in order to claim assets abroad,” the reply brief reads.

“It is time for the Court to speak to the Questions Presented. Over the past two decades it has never had a better vehicle to do so, nor is any such vehicle elsewhere in sight,” Dotcom’s lawyers add.

Whether the Supreme Court accepts or denies the case will likely be decided in the weeks to come.

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