American anime distributor FUNimation is no stranger to hunting down pirates.

Headquartered in Texas, the company targeted 1337 alleged BitTorrent downloaders of the anime series “One Piece” at a local court a few years ago.

While the company no longer targets individual users through the U.S. legal system, it now appears to have its eyes set on a higher profile target, the popular anime streaming site KissAnime.

With millions of pageviews per day, KissAnime is the go-to site for many anime fans. The site is listed among the 250 most visited websites in the United States, making it one of the largest unauthorized streaming platforms in the world.

This is a thorn in the side of FUNimation, which recently obtained a DMCA subpoena to unmask part of the site’s infrastructure. Like many other streaming portals, KissAnime uses Google’s servers to host videos. These videos are served through CDN links, presumably to make them harder to take down.

FUNimation traced a CDN IP-address, used by KissAnime to stream pirated “One Piece” content, back to U.S. cloud hosting platform DigitalOcean, and asked the company to disable the associated link.

“Through our investigations, we have a good faith belief that a web server for which Digital Ocean, Inc. provides service, located at 138.68.244.174, is being used for the unauthorized copying and distribution […] of digital files embodying the Property,” FUNimation lawyer Evan Stone recently wrote to the company.

“FUNimation hereby requests that Digital Ocean expeditiously causes all such infringing materials to be removed or blocked or freezes the account at issue until the account holder removes all infringing materials or disables access thereto.”

FUNimation DMCA notice sent to Digital Ocean

Although KissAnime isn’t specifically mentioned in the DMCA notice or the subpoena request, a source close to the issue informs TorrentFreak that the IP-address in question is linked to the anime streaming site.

Because the CDN links keep rotating, FUNimation now wants to know the name of the customer that’s connected to the IP-address in question. The company therefore requested a DMCA subpoena from a federal court in Texas, which was granted earlier this month.

The subpoena orders DigitalOcean to hand over any and all contact information they have on the customer linked to the offending IP-address.

The DMCA subpoena

To find out what FUNimation intends to do with the information, provided that DigitalOcean will hand it over, we contacted the company’s lawyer Evan Stone. He couldn’t confirm the target but noted that it’s not about an end-user.

“We are targeting someone associated with disseminating infringing content on a MASSIVE scale, for profit. This is not a prelude to an end-user lawsuit, nor does this involve your typical fan uploader,” Stone told TF.

It’s likely that Funimation will pursue further action against the DigitalOcean customer associated with the pirates KissAnime streams. Whether this will be a central player or someone only remotely connected to the site remains unknown for now.

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

After complaining about “rogue” sites and services for more than 15 years, the music business is now concentrating on the so-called “value gap”.

The theory is that platforms like YouTube are able to avoid paying expensive licensing fees for music by exploiting the safe harbor protections of the DMCA and similar legislation. Effectively, pirate music uploaded by site users becomes available to the public at no cost to the platform and due to safe harbor rules, there is no legal recourse for the labels.

To close this loophole, the EU is currently moving forward with reforms that could limit the protections currently enjoyed by platforms like YouTube. In short, sites that allow users to upload content will be forced to partner up with content providers to aggressively filter all user uploads for infringing content, thus limiting the number of infringing works eventually communicated to the public.

Even as they stand the proposals are being heavily protested (1,2,3) but according to Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda, a new threat has appeared on the horizon.

Ahead of a crucial June 8 vote on how to move forward, Reda says that some in the corridors of power are now “resorting to dirty tactics” to defend and extend the already “disastrous plans” by any means.

Specifically, Reda accuses MEP Pascal Arimont from the European People’s Party (EPP) of trying to sabotage the Parliamentary process, by going behind negotiators’ backs and pushing a new filtering proposal text that makes the “original bad proposal look tame in comparison.”

Reda says that in the face of other MEPs’ efforts to come up with a compromise text upon which all of them are agreed, Arimont has been encouraging some MEPs to rebel against their negotiators. He wants them to support his own super-aggressive “alternative compromise” text that shows disregard for the Charter of Fundamental Rights and principles of EU law.

Arimont’s text is certainly an interesting read and a document that could have been formulated by the record labels themselves. It tightens just about every aspect of the text proposed by the Commission while running all over the compromise text put together by Reda and other MEPs.

For example, where others are agreed on the phrase “Where information society
service providers store and provide access to the public to copyright protected works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users”, Arimont’s text removes the key word “store”.

This means that his filtering demands go beyond sites like YouTube that actually host content, to encompass those that merely carry links. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the potential for chaos there.

Also, where the Commission is happy with the proposed rules only affecting sites that store and provide access to “large amounts” of copyright protected works uploaded by users, Arimont wants the “store” part removed and “large” changed to “significant”.

“[Arimont] doesn’t want [filtering rules] to just apply to services hosting ‘large amounts’ of copyrighted content, as proposed by the Commission, but to any service facilitating the availability of such content, even if the service is not actually hosting anything at all,” Reda explains.

The text also ignores proposals by MEPs that anti-piracy measures to be taken by platforms should be proportionate to their profit and size. That being said, Arimont does accept that start-ups would probably face “insurmountable financial obstacles” if required to deploy filtering technologies, so he proposes they should be exempt.

While that sounds reasonable, any business that’s over five years old would need to comply and Reda warns that the threshold could be set particularly low.

“So if you’ve been self-employed for more than 5 years, rules the Commission wrote with the likes of YouTube and Facebook in mind would suddenly also apply to your personal website,” she warns.

But Arimont’s proposal goes further still and has the potential to have privacy advocates up in arms.

In order to check that all user uploaded content is non-infringing, platforms would necessarily be required to check every single piece of data uploaded by users. This raises considerable privacy concerns and potential conflicts with EU law, for instance with Article 15 of the E-Commerce Directive, which prohibits general monitoring obligations for service providers.

Indeed, during the Netlog filtering case that went before the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) in 2012, the Court held that requiring an online platform to install broad piracy filters is incompatible with EU law.

Nevertheless, Arimont sees bridging the “value gap” as somehow different.

“The use of technical measures is essential for the functioning of online licensing and rights management purposes. Such technical measures therefore do not require the identity of uploaders and hence do not pose any risk for privacy of individual end users,” his proposal reads.

“Furthermore, those technical measures involve a highly targeted technical cooperation of rightholders and information society service providers based on the data provided by rightholders, and therefore do not lead to general obligation to monitor and find facts about the content.”

But what should really raise alarm bells for user-uploaded content platforms is how Arimont proposes to strip them of their safe harbor protections, if they optimize the presentation of that content to users. That, as Reda points out, could be something as benign as listing content in alphabetical order.

Julia Reda’s article has some information at the end for those who want to protest Arimont’s proposals (pdf).

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

There are a handful of traditions we have at TorrentFreak, and remembering the first raid on The Pirate Bay is one of them.

Not only was it the first major story we covered, it also had a significant impact on how the piracy ecosystem evolved over the years, and the role TPB has taken on since then.

This is just as relevant today as it was a decade ago. Following a year in which KickassTorrents, Torrentz.eu and ExtraTorrent were all shut down, The Pirate Bay remains online.

While the site has had plenty of downtime issues in recent years, many people may not realize that without a few essential keystrokes in the site’s early years, The Pirate Bay may not have been here today.

This is what happened.

The Raid

May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The policemen had instructions to shut down the Pirate Bay’s servers, which were already seen as a major threat to the entertainment industry.

At the time The Pirate Bay wasn’t the giant it is today though. And ironically, the raid only made the site bigger, stronger, and more resilient.

As the police were about to enter the datacenter, Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid and Fredrik got wind that something was up.

In the months before the raid they were already being watched by private investigators day and night, but this time something was about to happen to their trackers.

At around 10 am in the morning Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office, and asked him to get down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence,’ although none of it, whatever it was, was related to The Pirate Bay.

As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized that the problems might be linked to their tracker. He therefore decided to make a full backup of the site, just in case.

When he later arrived at the co-location facility, the concerns turned out to be justified. There were dozens of policemen floating around taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.

Footage from The Pirate Bay raid

In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik’s decision to create a backup of the site was probably the most pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup, Fredrik and the rest of the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days.

Of course, the entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for.

Unimpressed, the site’s operators renamed the site “The Police Bay”, complete with a new logo shooting cannon balls at Hollywood. A few days later this logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes.

Logos after the raid

Instead of shutting it down, the raid propelled The Pirate Bay into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. All the publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike for TPB, exactly the opposite effect Hollywood had hoped for.

Despite a criminal investigation leading to convictions for the site’s founders, The Pirate Bay kept growing and growing in the years that followed.

The site’s assets, meanwhile, were reportedly transferred to the Seychelles-based company Reservella.

Under new ownership, several major technical changes occurred. In the fall of 2009 the infamous BitTorrent tracker was taken offline, turning The Pirate Bay into a torrent indexing site.

Early 2012 The Pirate Bay went even further when it decided to cease offering torrent files for well-seeded content. The site’s operators moved to magnet links instead, allowing them to save resources while making it easier for third-party sites to run proxies.

These proxies turned out to be much-needed, as The Pirate Bay is now the most broadly censored website on the Internet. In recent years, ISPs all around the world have been ordered by courts to block subscriber access to the torrent site.

While TPB swiftly recovered from the “original” raid, it did suffer nearly two months of downtime late 2014 when another raid took place.

Initially it was believed that some of the site’s crucial servers were taken by the police, but the TPB team later said that it was barely hit and that they took the site offline as a precaution.

While the first raid made The Pirate Bay stronger, the two-month stint of downtime was a big hit. The site initially lost a lot of traffic, but after other key torrent sites were shutdown, it is now the most dominant player once again.

Although domain problems, technical issues, and outages are a regular occurance nowadays, TPB is still here. But remember, if there hadn’t been a recent backup back in 2006, things might have turned out quite differently.

The question that remains now is how long The Pirate Bay can keep going. The site has weathered several storms, but now that most other large sites are gone the pressure is growing.

To some, TPB lost its shine in recent years and several “co-founders” would rather see it gone. For now, however, that doesn’t seem to bother the current TPB-team. They do all they can to keep the site online, just like the site’s operator did on May 31, 2006.

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

Last week, adult ‘tube’ site Pornhub celebrated its 10th anniversary, and what a decade it was.

Six months after its May 2007 launch, the site was getting a million visitors every day. Six months after that, traffic had exploded five-fold. Such was the site’s success, by November 2008 Pornhub entered the ranks of the top 100 most-visited sites on the Internet.

As a YouTube-like platform, Pornhub traditionally relied on users to upload content to the site. Uploaders have to declare that they have the rights to do so but it’s clear that amid large quantities of fully licensed material, content exists on Pornhub that is infringing copyright.

Like YouTube, however, the site says it takes its legal responsibilities seriously by removing content whenever a valid DMCA notice is received. Furthermore, it also has a Content Partner Program which allows content owners to monetize their material on the platform.

But despite these overtures, Pornhub has remained a divisive operation. While some partners happily generate revenue from the platform and use it to drive valuable traffic to their own sites, others view it as a parasite living off their hard work. Today those critics were joined by one of the biggest stars the adult industry has ever known.

After ten years as an adult performer, starring in more than 600 movies (including one that marked her as the first adult performer to appear on Blu-ray format), in 2012 Jenna Haze decided on a change of pace. No longer interested in performing, she headed to the other side of the camera as a producer and director.

“Directing is where my heart is now. It’s allowed me to explore a creative side that is different from what performing has offered me,” she said in a statement.

“I am very satisfied with what I was able to accomplish in 10 years of performing, and now I’m enjoying the challenges of being on the other side of the camera and running my studio.”

But while Haze enjoyed success with 15 movies, it wasn’t to last. The former performer eventually backed away from both directing and producing adult content. This morning she laid the blame for that on Pornhub and similar sites.

It all began with a tweet from Conan O’Brien, who belatedly wished Pornhub a happy 10th anniversary.

Happy 10th Anniversary to PornHub, a website I just now heard about. Seriously. Just now.

— Conan O'Brien (@ConanOBrien) May 30, 2017

<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

In response to O’Brien apparently coming to the party late, a Twitter user informed him how he’d been missing out on Jenna Haze. That drew a response from Haze herself, who accused Pornhub of pirating her content.

“Please don’t support sites like porn hub,” she wrote. “They are a tube site that pirates content that other adult companies produce. It’s like Napster!”

In a follow-up, Haze went on to accuse Pornhub of theft and blamed the site for her exit from the business.

“Well they steal my content from my company, as do many other tube sites. It’s why I don’t produce or direct anymore,” Haze wrote.

“Maybe not all of their content is stolen, but I have definitely seen my content up there, as well as other people’s content.”

Of course, just like record companies can do with YouTube, there’s always the option for Haze to file a DMCA notice with Pornhub to have offending content taken down. However, it’s a route she claims to have taken already, but without much success.

“They take the videos down and put [them] back up. I’m not saying they don’t do legitimate business as well,” she said.

While Pornhub has its critics, the site does indeed do masses of legitimate business. The platform is owned by Mindgeek, whose websites receive a combined 115 million visitors per day, fueled in part by content supplied by Brazzers and Digital Playground, which Mindgeek owns. That being said, Mindgeek’s position in the market has always been controversial.

Three years ago, it became evident that Mindgeek had become so powerful in the adult industry that performers (some of whom felt their content was being exploited by the company) indicated they were scared to criticize it.

Adult actress and outspoken piracy critic Tasha Reign, who also had her videos uploaded to Pornhub without her permission, revealed she was in a particularly tight spot.

“It’s like we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place in a way, because if I want to shoot content then I kinda have to shoot for [Mindgeek] because that’s the company that books me because they own…almost…everything,” Reign said.

In 2017, Mindgeek’s dominance is clearly less of a problem for Haze, who is now concentrating on other things. But for those who remain in the industry, Mindgeek is a force to be reckoned with, so criticism will probably remain somewhat muted.

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

The Kodi media player software, previously known as XBMC, has seen a massive surge in popularity in recent years.

More and more people have started to use Kodi as their primary source of entertainment, often with help from unofficial add-ons that allow them to access pirated movies and TV-shows.

While the Kodi software itself is perfectly legal, a lot of third-party software are not. In Israel, this prompted the local anti-piracy group ZIRA to take action against several popular Kodi add-ons and repositories.

Last week the group filed for an injunction to stop the site owners from offering their ‘pirate’ Kodi tools, but before the cases went to court, the industry group already announced a settlement with three of them.

A few days ago abeksis.com, kodiwizardil.net, and kodi-senyor.co.il ceased operating, without prior warning. The Abeksis repository was one main targets, as it offered an easy way to turn the Kodi media player into a piracy hub.

Abeksis

The targeted Kodi repos and add-ons were not monetizing their services and some also offered access to legal content. However, facing the threat of a lawsuit by the anti-piracy group, they chose to cease their services indefinitely.

ZIRA is happy with the outcome and notes that the shutdowns are “another victory in the struggle against the pirated content on the Internet and the preservation of Israeli creators and content.”

The operators of the sites reportedly paid a settlement of a few thousand shekels. In addition, they will have to pay 100,000 more ($28,000) if the repositories or add-ons reappear in the future.

As a warning to the public, the three sites in question replaced their regular content with a message from ZIRA. The message informs visitors about the shutdown, and the threat piracy poses to the local content industry.

“The site you’ve entered was taken down since it was violating intellectual property rights. The site’s operators were fined by the court and therefore the site ceased to operate!” the message reads.

“The cost of copyright infringement is paid by the Israeli population, Israeli culture and the income of the producers,” it adds.

ZIRA’s message

The enforcement actions have caused quite a bit of uncertainty among developers of Kodi add-ons and repositories. Several members of the community feel that the services in question did nothing wrong. Some other developers, however, also prefer to play it safe from now on.

The IsraeLive add-on, for example, which offered access to streams that are available through public websites, decided to remove all Israeli content and rename itself GlobeTV. This was presumably done to prevent legal issues with the respective rightsholders.

“Israeli broadcast streams are available on official websites and not using our add-on, and that’s due to legal reasoning and the Laws of the State of Israel,” the developer posted recently.

Whether ZIRA’s enforcement actions will have a lasting effect on the use of streaming piracy in Israel has yet to be seen. However, as the first broad enforcement action against developers of ‘pirate’ Kodi repos and add-ons, it’s a landmark case that could very well be copied elsewhere in the future.

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