While there are dozens of torrent release groups in operation today, some providing extremely high quality work, every few years a notable ‘brand’ group appears.

Two of the most famous from recent memory were aXXo and YIFY. Neither were known for historic individual releases or world-beating quality, but both were particularly consistent. An aXXo or YIFY label on an official torrent assured the potential downloader they would be getting a ‘McDonalds-quality’ product; never haute cuisine but just enough taste and in enough volume to fill people up.

As a result, these groups gained millions of followers, something that put anti-piracy targets on their backs. No surprise then that neither are around today, with YIFY subjected to legal action in New Zealand and aXXo….well, no one seems to know.

With those groups gone, there was a gap in the market for a similar product. Popular releases delivered to the masses in small file sizes is clearly a recipe for success and an existing group called ShAaNiG decided to step in to take up some of the slack.

What followed was thousands of ShAaNiG movie and TV show releases, which were uploaded to The Pirate Bay and direct download sites. They also took pride of place on the group’s forum at Shaanig.org, where they were neatly organized into relevant categories.

ShAaNiG’s release forum

But like aXXO and YIFY before it, something went wrong at ShAaNiG. After publishing a couple of releases on Saturday, including a Blu-ray rip of the movie Jawbone and an episode of TV show Outcast, ShAaNiG unexpectedly threw in the towel. A notice on the group’s homepage gives no reason for the sudden shutdown but makes it clear that ShAaNiG won’t be coming back.

“ShAaNiG has shut down permanently,” it reads. “Every journey must come to an end, This is the end of our journey. Thank you for all your support.”

While there are only so many ways to say that a site has been shut down for good, the first sentence is identical to the one used by ExtraTorrent when it closed down last month.

Another potentially interesting similarity is that both ExtraTorrent and ShAaNiG had huge followings in India, with both sites indexing a lot of local content, especially movies.

More than 30% of ShAaNiG’s traffic came from India, with much of it driven from The Pirate Bay where more than a thousand releases live on today. When ExtraTorrent shut down, around 40% of the new traffic arriving at another popular platform came from India.

Whether the Indian connection is pure coincidence remains to be seen, but it seems possible if not likely that some kind of legal pressure played a part in the demise of both. However, if the situation plays out in the same manner, we’ll hear no more and like ExtraTorrent, ShAaNiG will simply fade away.

While that will come as a huge disappointment to ShAaNiG fans, other file-sharers are likely to have less sympathy. Like aXXo and YIFY before it, ShAaNiG was rarely (if ever) the source of the material it released, instead preferring to re-encode existing releases. For some pirates, that’s a red line that should never be crossed.

Whether a new group will rise phoenix-like from the ashes will remain to be seen but as these ‘brand’ groups have established time and again, there’s always a market for passable quality movie releases, if they come in a compact file-size.

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.

The Fate of the Furious, which came out as Web-DL this week, 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	(5)	The Fate of the Furious	6.7 / trailer
2	(…)	Wonder Woman (TC)	8.2 / trailer
3	(7)	Life	6.8 / trailer
4	(1)	John Wick: Chapter 2	8.0 / trailer
5	(2)	The Boss Baby	6.5 / trailer
6	(3)	Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (TS)	7.1 / trailer
7	(4)	Logan	8.6 / trailer
8	(…)	The Belko Experiment	6.2 / trailer
9	(8)	Ghost in The Shell (Subbed HDRip)	6.9 / trailer
10	(9)	Kong: Skull Island (Subbed HDRip)	7.0 / trailer

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

Over the past year several major torrent sites have shut down, causing quite an uproar among file-sharers.

Interestingly, however, several copyright holders still appear to think that these sites are alive and kicking. That is, judging from the takedown notices they send to Google.

Publisher Penguin Random House is particularly forgetful. Through its anti-piracy partner Digimarc, the company has reported hundreds of ‘infringing’ KickassTorrents URLs. Not only was KAT shut down last summer, the reported URLs are no longer listed in Google’s search results either.

Penguin is not alone though. Other rightsholders such as Sony Music, Dreamroom Productions, Taylor & Francis Group, The University of Chicago Press and many others have made the same mistakes recently.

Over the past month alone Google has received 1,340 takedown notices for Kat.cr URLs and an additional 775 for the Kat.ph domain name.

The problem is not limited to KAT either. Torrentz.eu, another major torrent site that went offline last summer, is still being targeted at well.

For example, earlier this week Sony Pictures asked Google to remove a Torrentz.eu URL that linked to the series Community, even though it is no longer indexed. In just one month copyright holders sent Google 4,960 takedown requests for “dead” Torrentz URLs.

Recent takedown requests for Torrentz.eu

Apparently, the reporting outfits have failed to adjust their piracy monitoring bots for the changing torrent landscape.

The mistakes are likely due to automated keyword filters that scour sites and forums for links to hosting services. These bots don’t bother to check whether Google actually indexes the content, nor do they remove dead sites from their system.

While targeting dead KAT and Torrentz links is bad enough, things can get worse.

The iconic torrent search isoHunt.com shut down following a MPAA lawsuit in 2013, well over three years ago. Nonetheless, rightsholders still sent Google takedown notices for the site, more than a dozen a month actually.

Or what about BTJunkie. This torrent indexer closed its doors voluntarily more than half a decade ago. Dead or not, some copyright holders still manage to find infringing links in some of the darkest corners of the Internet.

Apparently, torrent users are far quicker to adapt to the changing landscape than the monitoring outfits of some copyright holders…

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

Perfectly legal as standard, the Kodi media player can be easily modified to turn it into the ultimate streaming piracy machine.

Uptake by users has been nothing short of phenomenal. Millions of people are now consuming illicit media through third-party Kodi addons. With free movies, TV shows, sports, live TV and more on tap, it’s not difficult to see why the system is so popular.

As a result, barely a day goes by without Kodi making headlines and this week was no exception. On Monday, TorrentFreak broke the news that the ZEMTV addon and TV Addons, one of the most popular addon communities, were being sued by Dish Network for copyright infringement.

Within hours of the announcement and apparently as a direct result, several addons (including the massively popular Phoenix) decided to throw in the towel. Quite understandably, users of the platforms were disappointed, and that predictably resulted in people attempting to apportion blame.

The first comment to catch the eye was posted directly beneath our article. Interestingly, it placed the blame squarely on our shoulders.

“Thanks Torrentfreak, for ruining Kodi,” it read.

While shooting the messenger is an option, it’s historically problematic. Town criers were the original newsreaders, delivering important messages to the public. Killing a town crier was considered treason, but it was also pointless – it didn’t change the facts on the ground.

So if we can’t kill those who read about a lawsuit in the public PACER system and reported it, who’s left to blame? Unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of targets, but most of them fall short.

The underlying theme is that most people voicing a negative opinion about the profile of Kodi do not appreciate their previously niche piracy system being in the spotlight. Everything was just great when just a few people knew about the marvelous hidden world of ‘secret’ XBMC/Kodi addons, many insist, but seeing it in the mainstream press is a disaster. It’s difficult to disagree.

However, the point where this all falls down is when people are asked when the discussion about Kodi should’ve stopped. We haven’t questioned them all, of course, but it’s almost guaranteed that while most with a grievance didn’t want Kodi getting too big, they absolutely appreciate the fact that someone told them about it. Piracy and piracy techniques spread by word of mouth so unfortunately, people can’t have it both ways.

Interestingly, some people placed the blame on TV Addons, the site that hosts the addons themselves. They argued that the addon scene didn’t need such a high profile target and that the popularity of the site only brought unwanted attention. However, for every critic, there are apparently thousands who love what the site does to raise the profile of Kodi. Without that, it’s clear that there would be fewer users and indeed, fewer addons.

For TV Addons’ part, they’re extremely clear who’s responsible for bringing the heat. On numerous occasions in emails to TF, the operators of the repository have blamed those who have attempted to commercialize the Kodi scene. For them, the responsibility must be placed squarely on the shoulders of people selling ‘Kodi boxes’ on places like eBay and Amazon. Once big money got involved, that attracted the authorities, they argue.

With this statement in mind, TF spoke with a box seller who previously backed down from selling on eBay due to issues over Kodi’s trademark. He didn’t want to speak on the record but admitted to selling “a couple of thousand” boxes over the past two years, noting that all he did was respond to demand with supply.

And this brings us full circle and a bit closer to apportioning blame for the Kodi crackdown.

The bottom line is that when it comes to piracy, Kodi and its third-party ‘pirate’ addons are so good at what they do, it’s no surprise they’ve been a smash hit with Internet users. All of the content that anyone could want – and more – accessible in one package, on almost any platform? That’s what consumers have been demanding for more than a decade and a half.

That brings us to the unavoidable conclusion that modified Kodi simply got too good at delivering content outside controlled channels, and that success was impossible to moderate or calm. Quite simply, every user that added to the Kodi phenomenon by installing the software with ‘pirate’ addons has to shoulder some of the blame for the crackdown.

That might sound harsh but in the piracy world it’s never been any different. Without millions of users, The Pirate Bay raid would never have happened. Without users, KickassTorrents might still be rocking today. But of course, what would be the point?

Users might break sites and services, but they also make them. That’s the piracy paradox.

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

As one of the leading CDN and DDoS protection services, Cloudflare is used by millions of websites across the globe.

This includes thousands of “pirate” sites, including the likes of The Pirate Bay and ExtraTorrent, which rely on the U.S.-based company to keep server loads down.

Many rightsholders have complained about Cloudflare’s involvement with these sites and last year adult entertainment publisher ALS Scan took things up a notch by dragging the company to court.

ALS Scan accused the CDN service of various counts of copyright and trademark infringement and listed 15 customers that used the Cloudflare’s servers to distribute infringing material.

Through an early motion, Cloudflare managed to have several counts dismissed, but the accusation of contributory copyright infringement remained.

Hoping to further limit the scope of the lawsuit, Cloudflare asked the California federal court to grant a summary motion that would exclude 14 of the 15 listed ‘pirate’ sites from the lawsuit, as the original sites are not hosted on U.S. servers.

The image hosting sites in question include imgchili.com, slimpics.com, bestofsexpics.com, greenpics.com, imgspot.org and imgsen.se, among others.

Cloudflare argued that in order to be contributing to copyright infringement, the ‘pirate’ sites have to be direct infringers, which isn’t the case if are they are hosted abroad as that would fall outside the scope of U.S. courts.

However, according to the Court, which ordered on the motion for partial summary judgment a few days ago, this argument doesn’t hold.

“Here, it is undisputed that cache copies of Cloudflare clients’ files are stored on Cloudflare’s data servers; it is also undisputed that some of those data servers are located in the United States,” the order (pdf) reads.

These cached files are the result of the pirate sites’ decisions to sign up and pay for Cloudflare’s services. This ties direct infringements to U.S. servers.

“Thus, to the extent cache copies of Plaintiff’s images have been stored on Cloudflare’s U.S. servers, the creation of those copies would be an act of direct infringement by a given host website within the United States,” the court adds.

The Court further clarified that unlike Cloudflare claimed, under U.S. law the company can be held liable for caching content of copyright infringing websites.

In addition, Cloudflare’s argument that “infrastructure-level caching” is a type of fair use was denied as well.

Based on a detailed analysis of all the arguments provided, the Court concludes that the motion for summary judgment is denied for 13 of the 14 contended sites. This means than Cloudflare has to defend itself against the associated copyright infringement claims in an eventual trial.

The lawsuit is a crucial matter for Cloudflare, and not only because of the potential damages it faces in this case. If Cloudflare loses, other rightsholders are likely to make similar demands, forcing the company to actively police potential pirate sites.

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