In the UK, top tier football is handled by The Premier League and its broadcasting partners Sky and BT Sport. All are facing problems with Internet piracy.

In a nutshell, official subscriptions are far from cheap, so people are always on the lookout for more affordable alternatives. As a result, large numbers of fans are turning to piracy-enabled set-top boxes for their fix.

These devices, often running Kodi with third-party addons, not only provide free or cheap football streams but also enable fans to watch matches at 3pm on Saturdays, a time traditionally covered by the blackout.

To mitigate this threat, earlier this year the Premier League obtained a rather special High Court injunction.

While similar in its aims to earlier orders targeting torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, this injunction enables the Premier League to act quickly, forcing local ISPs such as Sky, BT, and Virgin to block football streams in real-time.

“This will enable us to target the suppliers of illegal streams to IPTV boxes, and the internet, in a proportionate and precise manner,” the Premier League said at the time.

Ever since the injunction was issued, TF has monitored for signs that it has been achieving its stated aim of stopping or at least reducing stream availability. Based on information obtained from several popular IPTV suppliers, after several weeks we have concluded that Premier League streams are still easy to find, with some conditions.

HD sources for games across all Sky channels are commonplace on paid services, with SD sources available for free. High-quality streams have been consistently available on Saturday afternoons for the sensitive 3pm kick-off, with little to no interference or signs of disruption.

Of course, the Internet is a very big place, so it is certainly possible that disruption has been experienced by users elsewhere. However, what we do know is that some IPTV providers have been working behind the scenes to keep their services going.

According to a low-level contact at one IPTV provider who demanded total anonymity, servers used by his ‘company’ (he uses the term loosely) have seen their loads drop unexpectedly during match times, an indication that ISPs might be targeting their customers with blocks.

A re-seller for another well-known provider told TF that some intermittent disruption had been felt but that it was “being handled” as and when it “becomes a problem.” Complaint levels from customers are not yet considered a concern, he added.

That the Premier League’s efforts are having at least some effect doesn’t appear to be in doubt, but it’s pretty difficult to find evidence in public. That being said, an IPTV provider whose identity we were asked to conceal has taken more easily spotted measures.

After Premier League matches got underway this past Tuesday night, the provider in question launched a new beta service in its Kodi addon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it allows users to cycle through proxy servers in order to bypass blocks put in place by ISPs on behalf of the Premier League.

Embedded proxy service in Kodi

As seen from the image above, the beta unblocking service is accessible via the service’s Kodi addon and requires no special skills to operate. Simply clicking on the “Find a Proxy to Use” menu item opens up the page below.

The servers used to bypass the blocks

Once a working proxy is found, access to the streams is facilitated indirectly, thereby evading the Premier League’s attempts at blocking IP addresses at the UK’s ISPs. Once that’s achieved, the list of streams is accessible again.

Sky Sports streams ready, in HD

The use of proxies for this kind of traffic is of interest, at least as far as the injunction goes.

What we know already is that the Premier League only has permission to block servers if it “reasonably believes” they have the “sole or predominant purpose of enabling or facilitating access to infringing streams of Premier League match footage.”

If any server “is being used for any other substantial purpose”, the football organization cannot block it, meaning that non-dedicated or multi-function proxies cannot be blocked by ISPs, legally at least.

On Thursday evening, however, a TF source monitoring a popular IPTV provider using proxies reported that the match between Southampton and Manchester United suddenly became blocked. Whether that was due to Premier League action is unclear but by using a VPN, usual service was restored.

The use of VPNs with IPTV services raises other issues, however. All Premier League blockades can be circumvented with the use of a VPN but many IPTV providers are known for being intolerant of them, since they can also be used by restreamers to ‘pirate’ their service.

The Premier League injunction came into force on March 18, 2017, and will run out this weekend when the football season ends.

It’s reasonable to presume that the period will have been used for testing and that the Premier League will be back in court again this year seeking a further injunction for the new season starting in August. Expect it to be more effective than it has been thus far.

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

This week the torrent community entered a state of shock when another major torrent site closed its doors.

Having served torrents to the masses for over a decade, ExtraTorrent decided to throw in the towel, without providing any detail or an apparent motive.

ExtraTorrent operator SaM simply informed us that “it’s time we say goodbye.”

Now that a few days have passed the dust is slowly beginning to settle. Frequent ExtraTorrent users have started to flock to alternatives such as The Pirate Bay, Torrentz2 and RARBG, which have all noticed a clear uptick in users.

What has also become clear is that ExtraTorrent won’t have quit without leaving its mark. The site was home to several prominent uploaders and groups, and some feared that these would go down with the site. However, it looks like that won’t be the case for them all.

On Thursday, shortly after the site was closed, ExtraTorrent operator SaM said that the movie torrent distribution group ETRG would disappear, but that there was hope for others.

“Ettv and Ethd could remain operational if they get enough donations to sustain the expenses and if the people handling it [are] ready to keep going,” SaM said.

Indeed, both TV groups are keeping the ET spirit alive as dozens of fresh torrents have appeared over the past few days. While they’re no longer on ExtraTorrent, the accounts on The Pirate Bay remain very active, as can be seen below.

ettv’s recent releases

Another well-known uploader, DDR, will continue to release torrents as well. TorrentFreak was informed that the uploader will use the ‘SaM’ accounts at The Pirate Bay and 1337x to continue his work.

And ExtraTorrent’s name lives on elsewhere too. The image hosting site Extraimage, which was regularly used by torrent uploaders to feature samples, is still up and running as well.

There is another major casualty of the ExtraTorrent closure though. TorrentFreak is informed that ET’s inhouse encoder FUM, known for regular high-quality TV releases, will stop.

Over the weeks we will see what the real impact of the surprise shutdown will be. A community was destroyed this week, and many uploaders lost their home, but as we’ve seen with KickassTorrents, Torrentz, and other sites before them, the torrent ecosystem isn’t easily disrupted.

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

This isn’t a particularly good week for avid torrent users. After the public ExtraTorrent index shut down, the private community must now say goodbye to Freshon.tv (TvT).

Sysops of the private tracker, which specialized in TV releases, have decided to move on and focus on their personal lives instead.

“We are shutting the website down due to the lack of interest,” TvT staff wrote in a message yesterday.

“This is no longer a fun activity and the old members simply have other things to focus on, like work and families. We like to thank each member that was present in the comunity we built and maintained for a decade.”

Soon after, the site went dark, removing the option to login and showing a brief shutdown message instead.

Poor hamsters

The decsion came as a surprise to the site’s users. Several staffers were also unaware of the decision the sysops had taken, according to a statement by a member on Reddit.

“We, the staff, didn’t know of this until they made the public announcement, so this all comes a bit rushed,” Liberateus writes, adding that fellow torrent tracker Morethan.tv is willing to take on refugees.

“Morethan.tv is a rather young but fast growing tracker focused on TV and movie content, with a nice community, dedicated staff and a huge selection of content,” he writes.

The Reddit thread also includes offers from other trackers that are willing to take people in, so it appears that most users will find a new home.

Freshon, or ‘TV Torrents RO,’ was one of the larger specialized TV trackers on the Internet. The site had close to 20,000 users who together shared tens of thousands of torrents.

The site was particularly popular popular in Romania, from where the site originated. The specialized TV tracker first saw the light of day more than a decade a ago, reportedly with help from several staffers of the defunct torrents.ro tracker.

Better times for TvT (image via Opentrackers)

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

Once the preserve of countries like China whose government likes to routinely censor and control information, website blocking is now a regularly occurence elsewhere.

With commercial interests at their core, most website blocking efforts now take place under copyright law, to protect the business models of the world’s leading entertainment companies. While that usually involves those in the movie and music industries, occasionally others get involved too.

That’s now the case in Russia, where the UK division of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is currently taking steps to prevent the illegal distribution of its videogame products via online platforms.

According to local news outlet Izvestia, SIE has filed seven lawsuits at the Moscow City Court targeting sites that offer Sony titles without obtaining permission.

While they have no yet been named, the lawsuits indicate that copyright action has been taken against the sites before. This means that under Russia’s strict anti-piracy laws, these repeat offenders can be subjected to the so-called “eternal lock.” Under that regime, once ISP blockades are put in place, they stay in place forever.

Sergey Klisho, General Manager of Playstation in Russia, says that the lawsuits and subsequent court orders will enable the company to deal with the worst offenders.

“Positive changes in legislation aimed at protecting rightsholders, plus greater attention by state bodies to intellectual property rights violations, allows us today to begin to fight against piracy on the Internet,” Klisho says.

According to Vadim Ampelonsky, a spokesman for telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor, protection of gaming titles is becoming more commonplace, with companies such as Sony and Ubisoft resorting to legal action against sites offering pirated titles.

For Sony, it appears this action might only be the beginning, with a company representative indicating that more lawsuits are likely to follow in the future. But just how effective are these blockades?

Russian torrent giant RuTracker, which is permanently blocked by all local ISPs, believes that the effect on its operations is limited. Just recently the site’s tracker ‘announce’ URLs were added to Russia’s blocklist, on top of the site’s main URLs which have been banned for some time.

That resulted in the site offering its own special app on Github this month, which allows users to automatically find proxy workarounds that render the current blocking efforts ineffective.

The tool is already proving a bit of a headache for Russian authorities. Internet Ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev says that Roskomnadzor won’t be able to ban the software since it can spread by many means.

“I do not believe that Roskomnadzor can block any application,” Marinichev says.

“You can prevent Google Play or Apple’s iTunes from distributing them. But there is still one hundred and one ways left for these applications to spread. Stopping the application itself from working on the device of a particular user is a daunting task.”

Interestingly, Marinichev also believes that targeting RuTracker is the wrong strategy, since the site itself isn’t distributing infringing content, its users are.

“Rightsholders can not punish RuTracker. They are not engaged in piracy. Piracy is carried out by the ones who distribute and duplicate. It is impossible for the law to solve technological problems,” he concludes.

It’s an opinion shared by many in the pirate community, who continue to find technical solutions to many legal roadblocks.

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, Libgen and several related “pirate” sites.

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

While Sci-Hub and Libgen are nothing like the average pirate site, they are just as illegal according to Elsevier’s legal team, which swiftly obtained a preliminary injunction from a New York District Court.

The injunction ordered Sci-Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who is the only named defendant, to quit offering access to any Elsevier content. This didn’t happen, however.

Sci-Hub and the other websites lost control over several domain names, but were quick to bounce back. They remain operational today and have no intention of shutting down, despite pressure from the Court.

This prompted Elsevier to request a default judgment and a permanent injunction against the Sci-Hub and Libgen defendants. In a motion filed this week, Elsevier’s legal team describes the sites as pirate havens.

“Defendants’ websites exist for the sole purpose of providing unauthorized and unlawful access to the copyrighted works of Elsevier and other scientific publishers. Collectively, Defendants are responsible for the piracy of millions of Elseviers’ copyrighted works as well as millions of works published by others.”

As compensation for the losses it has suffered, Elsevier is now demanding $15 million in damages. The publisher lists 100 works as evidence and argues that the maximum amount of $150,000 in statutory damages is warranted in this case.

“Here, Defendants’ willful conduct rises to the level of truly egregious conduct, justifying the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per infringed work,” Elsevier’s team writes (pdf).

“The Preliminary Injunction constituted such notice by a court, and Defendants have flagrantly disregarded the Preliminary Injunction by continuing to operate their piracy enterprises.”

Not only did the defendants ignore the preliminary injunction by continuing to operate their websites, Sci-Hub’s operator stated that she chose to willingly disregard the court order.

“Moreover, Elbakyan has publicly stated that she is aware that Sci-Hub’s actions are unlawful and that this Court has enjoined her infringing activities, but that she intends to continue to defy the Court’s Order.”

The amount is also justified based on the scale of infringement, Elsevier stresses. The sites in question offer dozens of millions of copyrighted works which are downloaded hundreds of thousands of times per day.

A good chunk of these papers are copyrighted, many by Elsevier. In fact, when the original complaint was filed, Elsevier had trouble locating ScienceDirect-hosted articles that were not available through Libgen.

“Here, the scale of Defendants’ infringement is so staggering that a reasonable estimate of appropriate damages, even if based on a lower, license- fee-based metric, would be difficult, if not impossible, to calculate,” Elsevier’s legal team writes.

Since the court’s clerk has already entered a default against the defendants, it’s likely that Elsevier will win the case. As a result, Sci-Hub and Libgen will likely have to relocate again. Whether Elsevier will see any damages from the defendants has yet to be seen.

Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan wasn’t really sure how to comment on the million dollar claims. She described Elsevier’s requests as “funny” and “ridiculous,” while confirming that 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 tells us.

In hindsight, Elsevier may regret its decision to take legal action.

Instead of taking Sci-Hub and Libgen down, the lawsuit and the associated media attention only helped them grow. Last year we reported that its users were downloading hundreds of thousands of papers per day from Sci-Hub, a number that has likely increased since.

Also, Elbakyan is now seen as a hero by several prominent academics, illustrated by the fact that the prestigious publication Nature listed her as one of the top ten people that mattered in science last year.

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