While legal action against low-level individual file-sharers is extremely rare in the UK, the country continues to pose a risk for those engaged in larger-scale infringement.

That is largely due to the activities of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit and private anti-piracy outfits such as the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT). Investigations are often a joint effort which can take many years to complete, but the outcomes can often involve criminal sentences.

That was the profile of another Internet piracy case that concluded in London this week. It involved three men from the UK, Eric Brooks, 43, from Bolton, Mark Valentine, 44, from Manchester, and Craig Lloyd, 33, from Wolverhampton.

The case began when FACT became aware of potentially infringing activity back in February 2011. The anti-piracy group then investigated for more than a year before handing the case to police in March 2012.

On July 4, 2012, officers from City of London Police arrested Eric Brooks’ at his home in Bolton following a joint raid with FACT. Computer equipment was seized containing evidence that Brooks had been running a Netherlands-based server hosting more than £100,000 worth of pirated films, music, games, software and ebooks.

According to police, a spreadsheet on Brooks’ computer revealed he had hundreds of paying customers, all recruited from online forums. Using PayPal or utilizing bank transfers, each paid money to access the server. Police mentioned no group or site names in information released this week.

“Enquiries with PayPal later revealed that [Brooks] had made in excess of £500,000 in the last eight years from his criminal business and had in turn defrauded the film and TV industry alone of more than £2.5 million,” police said.

“As his criminal enterprise affected not only the film and TV but the wider entertainment industry including music, games, books and software it is thought that he cost the wider industry an amount much higher than £2.5 million.”

On the same day police arrested Brooks, Mark Valentine’s home in Manchester had a similar unwelcome visit. A day later, Craig Lloyd’s home in Wolverhampton become the third target for police.

Computer equipment was seized from both addresses which revealed that the pair had been paying for access to Brooks’ servers in order to service their own customers.

“They too had used PayPal as a means of taking payment and had earned thousands of pounds from their criminal actions; Valentine gaining £34,000 and Lloyd making over £70,000,” police revealed.

But after raiding the trio in 2012, it took more than four years to charge the men. In a feature common to many FACT cases, all three were charged with Conspiracy to Defraud rather than copyright infringement offenses. All three men pleaded guilty before trial.

On Monday, the men were sentenced at Inner London Crown Court. Brooks was sentenced to 24 months in prison, suspended for 12 months and ordered to complete 140 hours of unpaid work.

Valentine and Lloyd were each given 18 months in prison, suspended for 12 months. Each was ordered to complete 80 hours unpaid work.

Detective Constable Chris Glover, who led the investigation for the City of London Police, welcomed the sentencing.

“The success of this investigation is a result of co-ordinated joint working between the City of London Police and FACT. Brooks, Valentine and Lloyd all thought that they were operating under the radar and doing something which they thought was beyond the controls of law enforcement,” Glover said.

“Brooks, Valentine and Lloyd will now have time in prison to reflect on their actions and the result should act as deterrent for anyone else who is enticed by abusing the internet to the detriment of the entertainment industry.”

While even suspended sentences are a serious matter, none of the men will see the inside of a cell if they meet the conditions of their sentence for the next 12 months. For a case lasting four years involving such large sums of money, that is probably a disappointing result for FACT and the police.

Nevertheless, the men won’t be allowed to enjoy the financial proceeds of their piracy, if indeed any money is left. City of London Police say the trio will be subject to a future confiscation hearing to seize any proceeds of crime.

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

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada, and Mexico was negotiated more than 25 years ago. With a quarter of a decade of developments to contend with, the United States wants to modernize.

“While our economy and U.S. businesses have changed considerably over that period, NAFTA has not,” the government says.

With this in mind, the US requested comments from interested parties seeking direction for negotiation points. With those comments now in, groups like the MPAA and RIAA have been making their positions known. It’s no surprise that intellectual property enforcement is high on the agenda.

“Copyright is the lifeblood of the U.S. motion picture and television industry. As such, MPAA places high priority on securing strong protection and enforcement disciplines in the intellectual property chapters of trade agreements,” the MPAA writes in its submission.

“Strong IPR protection and enforcement are critical trade priorities for the music industry. With IPR, we can create good jobs, make significant contributions to U.S. economic growth and security, invest in artists and their creativity, and drive technological innovation,” the RIAA notes.

While both groups have numerous demands, it’s clear that each seeks an environment where not only infringers can be held liable, but also Internet platforms and services.

For the RIAA, there is a big focus on the so-called ‘Value Gap’, a phenomenon found on user-uploaded content sites like YouTube that are able to offer infringing content while avoiding liability due to Section 512 of the DMCA.

“Today, user-uploaded content services, which have developed sophisticated on-demand music platforms, use this as a shield to avoid licensing music on fair terms like other digital services, claiming they are not legally responsible for the music they distribute on their site,” the RIAA writes.

“Services such as Apple Music, TIDAL, Amazon, and Spotify are forced to compete with services that claim they are not liable for the music they distribute.”

But if sites like YouTube are exercising their rights while acting legally under current US law, how can partners Canada and Mexico do any better? For the RIAA, that can be achieved by holding them to standards envisioned by the group when the DMCA was passed, not how things have panned out since.

Demanding that negotiators “protect the original intent” of safe harbor, the RIAA asks that a “high-level and high-standard service provider liability provision” is pursued. This, the music group says, should only be available to “passive intermediaries without requisite knowledge of the infringement on their platforms, and inapplicable to services actively engaged in communicating to the public.”

In other words, make sure that YouTube and similar sites won’t enjoy the same level of safe harbor protection as they do today.

The RIAA also requires any negotiated safe harbor provisions in NAFTA to be flexible in the event that the DMCA is tightened up in response to the ongoing safe harbor rules study.

In any event, NAFTA should not “support interpretations that no longer reflect today’s digital economy and threaten the future of legitimate and sustainable digital trade,” the RIAA states.

For the MPAA, Section 512 is also perceived as a problem. While noting that the original intent was to foster a system of shared responsibility between copyright owners and service providers, the MPAA says courts have subsequently let copyright holders down. Like the RIAA, the MPAA also suggests that Canada and Mexico can be held to higher standards.

“We recommend a new approach to this important trade policy provision by moving to high-level language that establishes intermediary liability and appropriate limitations on liability. This would be fully consistent with U.S. law and avoid the same misinterpretations by policymakers and courts overseas,” the MPAA writes.

“In so doing, a modernized NAFTA would be consistent with Trade Promotion Authority’s negotiating objective of ‘ensuring that standards of protection and enforcement keep pace with technological developments’.”

The MPAA also has some specific problems with Mexico, including unauthorized camcording. The Hollywood group says that 85 illicit audio and video recordings of films were linked to Mexican theaters in 2016. However, recording is not currently a criminal offense in Mexico.

Another issue for the MPAA is that criminal sanctions for commercial scale infringement are only available if the infringement is for profit.

“This has hampered enforcement against the above-discussed camcording problem but also against online infringement, such as peer-to-peer piracy, that may be on a scale that is immensely harmful to U.S. rightsholders but nonetheless occur without profit by the infringer,” the MPAA writes.

“The modernized NAFTA like other U.S. bilateral free trade agreements must provide for criminal sanctions against commercial scale infringements without proof of profit motive.”

Also of interest are the MPAA’s complaints against Mexico’s telecoms laws. Unlike in the US and many countries in Europe, Mexico’s ISPs are forbidden to hand out their customers’ personal details to rights holders looking to sue. This, the MPAA says, needs to change.

The submissions from the RIAA and MPAA can be found here and here (pdf)

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

Earlier this month we broke the news that third-party Kodi add-on ZemTV and the TVAddons library were being sued in a federal court in Texas.

In a complaint filed by American satellite and broadcast provider Dish Network, both stand accused of copyright infringement, facing up to $150,000 for each offense.

While the allegations are serious, Dish doesn’t know the full identities of the defendants.

To find out more, the company requested a broad range of subpoenas from the court, targeting Amazon, Github, Google, Twitter, Facebook, PayPal, and several hosting providers.

From Dish’s request

This week the court granted the subpoenas, which means that they can be forwarded to the companies in question. Whether that will be enough to identify the people behind ‘TVAddons’ and ‘ZemTV’ remains to be seen, but Dish has cast its net wide.

For example, the subpoena directed at Google covers any type of information that can be used to identify the account holder of taacc14@gmail.com, which is believed to be tied to ZemTV.

The information requested from Google includes IP address logs with session date and timestamps, but also covers “all communications,” including GChat messages from 2014 onwards.

Similarly, Twitter is required to hand over information tied to the accounts of the users “TV Addons” and “shani_08_kodi” as well as other accounts linked to tvaddons.ag and streamingboxes.com. This also applies the various tweets that were sent through the account.

The subpoena specifically mentions “all communications, including ‘tweets’, Twitter sent to or received from each Twitter Account during the time period of February 1, 2014 to present.”

From the Twitter subpoena

Similar subpoenas were granted for the other services, tailored towards the information Dish hopes to find there. For example, the broadcast provider also requests details of each transaction from PayPal, as well as all debits and credits to the accounts.

In some parts, the subpoenas appear to be quite broad. PayPal is asked to reveal information on any account with the credit card statement “Shani,” for example. Similarly, Github is required to hand over information on accounts that are ‘associated’ with the tvaddons.ag domain, which is referenced by many people who are not directly connected to the site.

The service providers in question still have the option to challenge the subpoenas or ask the court for further clarification. A full overview of all the subpoena requests is available here (Exhibit 2 and onwards), including all the relevant details. This also includes several letters to foreign hosting providers.

While Dish still appears to be keen to find out who is behind ‘TVAddons’ and ‘ZemTV,’ not much has been heard from the defendants in question.

ZemTV developer “Shani” shut down his addon soon after the lawsuit was announced, without mentioning it specifically. TVAddons, meanwhile, has been offline for well over a week, without any notice in public about the reason for the prolonged downtime.

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The court’s order granting the subpoenas and letters of request is available here (pdf).

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

Domains have become an integral part of the piracy wars and no one knows this better than The Pirate Bay.

The site has burned through numerous domains over the years, with copyright holders and authorities successfully pressurizing registries to destabilize the site.

The latest news on this front comes from the Central American country of Costa Rica, where the local domain registry is having problems with the United States government.

The drama is detailed in a letter to ICANN penned by Dr. Pedro León Azofeifa, President of the Costa Rican Academy of Science, which operates NIC Costa Rica, the registry in charge of local .CR domain names.

Azofeifa’s letter is addressed to ICANN board member Thomas Schneider and pulls no punches. It claims that for the past two years the United States Embassy in Costa Rica has been pressuring NIC Costa Rica to take action against a particular domain.

“Since 2015, the United Estates Embassy in Costa Rica, who represents the interests of the United States Department of Commerce, has frequently contacted our organization regarding the domain name thepiratebay.cr,” the letter to ICANN reads.

“These interactions with the United States Embassy have escalated with time and include great pressure since 2016 that is exemplified by several phone calls, emails, and meetings urging our ccTLD to take down the domain, even though this would go against our domain name policies.”

The letter states that following pressure from the US, the Costa Rican Ministry of Commerce carried out an investigation which concluded that not taking down the domain was in line with best practices that only require suspensions following a local court order. That didn’t satisfy the United States though, far from it.

“The representative of the United States Embassy, Mr. Kevin Ludeke, Economic Specialist, who claims to represent the interests of the US Department of
Commerce, has mentioned threats to close our registry, with repeated harassment
regarding our practices and operation policies,” the letter to ICANN reads.

Ludeke is indeed listed on the US Embassy site for Costa Rica. He’s also referenced in a 2008 diplomatic cable leaked previously by Wikileaks. Contacted via email, Ludeke did not immediately respond to TorrentFreak’s request for comment.

Extract from the letter to ICANN

Surprisingly, Azofeifa says the US representative then got personal, making negative comments towards his Executive Director, “based on no clear evidence or statistical data to support his claims, as a way to pressure our organization to take down the domain name without following our current policies.”

Citing the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society of 2005, Azofeifa asserts that “policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of the States,” which in Costa Rica’s case means that there must be “a final judgment from the Courts of Justice of the Republic of Costa Rica” before the registry will suspend a domain.

But it seems legal action was not the preferred route of the US Embassy. Demanding that NIC Costa Rica take unilateral action, Mr. Ludeke continued with “pressure and harassment to take down the domain name without its proper process and local court order.”

Azofeifa’s letter to ICANN, which is cc’d to Stafford Fitzgerald Haney, United States Ambassador to Costa Rica and various people in the Costa Rican Ministry of Commerce, concludes with a request for suggestions on how to deal with the matter.

While the response should prove very interesting, none of the parties involved appear to have noticed that ThePirateBay.cr isn’t officially connected to The Pirate Bay

The domain and associated site appeared in the wake of the December 2014 shut down of The Pirate Bay, claiming to be the real deal and even going as far as making fake accounts in the names of famous ‘pirate’ groups including ettv and YIFY.

Today it acts as an unofficial and unaffiliated reverse proxy to The Pirate Bay while presenting the site’s content as its own. It’s also affiliated with a fake KickassTorrents site, Kickass.cd, which to this day claims that it’s a reincarnation of the defunct torrent giant.

But perhaps the most glaring issue in this worrying case is the apparent willingness of the United States to call out Costa Rica for not doing anything about a .CR domain run by third parties, when the real Pirate Bay’s .org domain is under United States’ jurisdiction.

Registered by the Public Interest Registry in Reston, Virginia, ThePirateBay.org is the famous site’s main domain. TorrentFreak asked PIR if anyone from the US government had ever requested action against the domain but at the time of publication, we had received no response.

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

For more than a decade copyright holders have been sending ISPs takedown notices to alert them that their subscribers are sharing copyrighted material.

Under US law, providers have to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers “in appropriate circumstances” and increasingly they are being held to this standard.

Earlier this year several major record labels, represented by the RIAA, filed a lawsuit in a Texas District Court, accusing ISP Grande Communications of failing to take action against its pirating subscribers.

“Despite their knowledge of repeat infringements, Defendants have permitted repeat infringers to use the Grande service to continue to infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights without consequence,” the RIAA’s complaint read.

Grande and its management consulting firm Patriot, which was also sued, both disagree and have filed a motion to dismiss at the court this week. Grande argues that it doesn’t encourage any of its customers to download copyrighted works, and that it has no control over the content subscribers access.

The Internet provider doesn’t deny that it has received millions of takedown notices through the piracy tracking company Rightscorp. However, it believes that these notices are flawed as Rightscorp is incapable of monitoring actual copyright infringements.

“These notices are so numerous and so lacking in specificity, that it is infeasible for Grande to devote the time and resources required to meaningfully investigate them. Moreover, the system that Rightscorp employs to generate its notices is incapable of detecting actual infringement and, therefore, is incapable of generating notices that reflect real infringement,” Grande writes.

Grande says that if they acted on these notices without additional proof, its subscribers could lose their Internet access even though they are using it for legal purposes.

“To merely treat these allegations as true without investigation would be a disservice to Grande’s subscribers, who would run the risk of having their Internet service permanently terminated despite using Grande’s services for completely legitimate purposes.”

Even if the notices were able to prove actual infringement, they would still fail to identify the infringer, according to the ISP. The notices identify IP-addresses which may have been used by complete strangers, who connected to the network without permission.

The Internet provider admits that online copyright infringement is a real problem. But, they see themselves as a victim of this problem, not a perpetrator, as the record labels suggest.

“Grande does not profit or receive any benefit from subscribers that may engage in such infringing activity using its network. To the contrary, Grande suffers demonstrable losses as a direct result of purported copyright infringement conducted on its network.

“To hold Grande liable for copyright infringement simply because ‘something must be done’ to address this growing problem is to hold the wrong party accountable,” Grande adds.

In common with the previous case against Cox Communications, Rightscorp’s copyright infringement notices are once again at the center of a prominent lawsuit. According to Grande, Rightscorp’s system can’t prove that infringing content was actually downloaded by third parties, only that it was made available.

The Internet provider sees the lacking infringement notices as a linchpin that, if pulled, will take the entire case down.

It’s expected that, if the case moves forward, both parties will do all they can to show that the evidence is sufficient, or not. In the Cox lawsuit, this was the case, but that verdict is currently being appealed.

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Grande Communication’s full motion to dismiss is avalaible here (pdf).

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