During a town hall meeting in New York on Monday, Disney CEO Bob Iger informed a group of ABC employees that hackers have stolen one of the company’s movies.

The hackers offered to keep it away from public eyes in exchange for ransom paid in Bitcoin but Disney says it has no intention to pay.

Although Iger did not mention the movie by name during the meeting, Deadline reports that it’s a copy of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.’

The fifth movie in the ‘Pirates‘ franchise starring Johnny Depp, is officially scheduled to appear in theaters next week. Needless to say, a high-quality leak at this point will be seen as a disaster for Disney.

The “ransom” demand from the hacker is reminiscent of another prominent entertainment industry leak, where the requested amount of Bitcoin was not paid.

Just a few weeks ago a group calling itself TheDarkOverlord (TDO) published the premiere episode of the fifth season of Netflix’s Orange is The New Black, followed by nine more episodes a few hours later.

Despite Netflix’s anti-piracy efforts, the ten leaked episodes of Orange is The New Black remain popular on many torrent indexes and pirate streaming sites.

There is no indication that the previous and threatened leaks are related in any way. TorrentFreak has seen a list of movies and TV-shows TDO said they have in their possession, but the upcoming ‘Pirates’ movie isn’t among them.

The Disney hackers have threatened to release the movie in increments, but the movie studio is hoping that they won’t go ahead with their claims.

Thus far there haven’t been any reports of leaked parts of the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean film. Disney, meanwhile, is working with the FBI to track down the people responsible for the hack.

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

With more ways to consume multimedia content than ever before, locking down music, movies and TV shows continues to be big business online.

The key way this is achieved is via Digital Rights Management, which is often referred to by the initials DRM. In a nutshell, DRM is achieved via various technologies which dictate where and when digital content can be accessed.

While DRM is popular with providers seeking to exercise control over their content while preventing piracy, DRM is viewed by some consumers as a restrictive practice that only inconveniences genuine customers.

This weekend, further fuel was poured on that fire when Android Police reported that subscribers to Netflix who access the service via ‘rooted’ Android devices can no longer download the official Android app from Google Play.

The app’s changelog reports that Netflix’s V5 software “only works with devices that are certified by Google and meet all Android requirements” but what underlies this claim is a desire by Netflix to ensure that subscribers are DRM compliant.

“With our latest 5.0 release, we now fully rely on the Widevine DRM provided by Google; therefore, many devices that are not Google-certified or have been altered will no longer work with our latest app and those users will no longer see the Netflix app in the Play Store,” Netflix confirmed.

Widevine is a company owned by Google and its DRM platform claims to be able to “license, securely distribute and protect playback of content on any consumer device.”

To meet those claims, Google requires that its partners running Widevine-protected systems live up to its standards by becoming a Certified Widevine Implementation Partner (CWIP). A part of that requires that software platforms are only allowed to run on approved hardware/software combinations.

It is no surprise that ‘rooted’ Android devices fail to meet those requirements. When a user ‘roots’ their device they effectively gain administrator rights, which allows them to get into the nuts and bolts of the machine and carry out modifications.

Many users do this to innocently customize how legally purchased hardware performs, including making the Netflix experience better, as illustrated by the Google Play review on the right.

However, it’s clear that this kind of low-level access also has the potential to make piracy easier, whether that’s through the defeating of licensing checks or indeed the wholesale extraction of video content.

For this reason, ‘rooted’ devices raise red flags, not only for content delivery companies like Netflix and partners Google, but also for certain banking companies whose apps won’t run on devices with extended administrator capabilities. These companies want a predictable and secure environment in which to offer their services and ‘rooted’ platforms do not offer that.

The problem, however, is that for every potentially malicious user, there are many thousands of others who want to have the freedom to run a ‘rooted’ device while also being a legal consumer of Netflix. For them, the frustration could even boil over into what DRM was designed to prevent in the first place.

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

With millions of daily visitors ExtraTorrent is the second largest torrent site, trailing only behind The Pirate Bay.

However, for almost a day now visitors have been unable to reach the site. Those who try to access it see a Cloudflare notification instead, suggesting that the site’s servers are down.

TorrentFreak reached out to the site’s operator a while ago, but thus far we haven’t heard back. The site’s official Facebook page doesn’t have any updates on the situation either.

ExtraTorrent is down

While users may fear the worst, for now the most likely explanation is that the site is down as the result of a technical problem. The site’s domain names are operating as they should, but there might be an issue with the server.

Although ExtraTorrent is offline, several release groups connected to the site are still operating. The popular TV distribution groups EtHD and ettv continue to release content through other sites, including The Pirate Bay.

ExtraTorrent’s image hosting site ExtraImage is also up and running, as usual.

If we hear more about the current downtime, we will update the article accordingly. For the time being, however, ExtraTorrent users will have to get their torrent fix elsewhere.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Logan, which came out as DVDRip last 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	(3)	Logan	8.6 / trailer
2	(1)	Ghost in The Shell (Subbed HDRip)	6.9 / trailer
3	(…)	First Fight	5.7 / trailer
4	(4)	Kong: Skull Island (Subbed HDRip)	7.0 / trailer
5	(…)	The Great Wall	6.9 / trailer
6	(2)	xXx: Return of Xander Cage	5.3 / trailer
7	(6)	Split	7.0 / trailer
8	(8)	The Fate of the Furious	6.7 / trailer
9	(…)	Get Out	7.9 / trailer
10	(5)	Gifted	7.0 / trailer

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

In recent years, file-sharers around the world have been pressured to pay significant settlement fees, or face legal repercussions.

These so-called “copyright trolling” efforts have been a common occurrence in the United States for more than half a decade, and still are.

While rightsholders should be able to take legitimate piracy claims to court, there are some who resort to dodgy and extortion-like tactics extract money from alleged pirates, including people who are innocent.

This practice has been a thorn in the side of Matthew Sag, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and the Associate Director for Intellectual Property at the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies.

“Over the past few years, I have seen one example after another of innocent defendants being victimized by these lawsuits,” Sag explains to TorrentFreak.

This motivated the professor to take action. One of the problems he signals is that not all defense lawyers are familiar with these cases. They sometimes need dozens of hours to research them, which costs the defendant more than the cash settlement deal offered by the copyright holder.

As a result, paying off the trolls may seem like the most logical and safe option to the accused, even when they are innocent.

“Put simply, by the time your average lawyer has figured out what’s wrong with these cases and how to respond she has sunk 50 to 100 hours into a case that probably could’ve been settled for $2000 or $3000,” Sag notes.

“That makes no sense, so people settle cases with no merit. That, in turn, encourages meritless cases. We wanted to level the playing field and reduce the plaintiffs’ informational advantage,” he adds.

To balance the scales of justice, the professor wrote an article together with Jake Haskell, a recent Loyola University Law School graduate. Titled “Defense Against the Dark Arts of Copyright Trolling,” the paper provides a detailed overview of the various tactics the defense can use.

Not all cases filed by copyright holders can be characterized as “trolling.” According to Sag, copyright trolls can be best defined as “systematic opportunist, want” and he hopes that defense lawyers can use his article to prevent clear abuses.

Of course, judges play an important role as well, and some could certainly benefit from reading the paper.

“The federal courts should not be used as vending machines to issue indiscriminate hunting licenses. Judges need to keep a close eye on discovery and tactics used by the plaintiff to prolong proceedings or run up attorney’s fees,” Sag tells us.

“Hopefully, we have given defense lawyers a significant head start on figuring out how to defend these claims. If innocent defendants refused to settle, the plaintiffs would be forced to clean up their act,” he adds.

The article is a recommended read for everyone with an interest in copyright trolling in general, and is well worth a read for anyone wants to learn more about how these companies operate.

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