Each year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes its Special 301 Report that highlights countries that are considered to be failing when it comes to the protection of intellectual property rights.

As part of the preparations for publication, the USTR asks for input from copyright holders, content distributors and other interested parties, which are then taken into consideration when deciding which countries appear in the final report. One of the hot topics in 2020 has its center in the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia.

In 2017, a new broadcaster called beoutQ began transmitting from the country, mainly utilizing satellite communications. However, instead of licensing or producing its own content, beoutQ rebranded and rebroadcast content owned by Qatar-based broadcaster beIN Sport. After much outcry and complaints from content owners globally, the USTR labeled beoutQ a “notorious market” in its 2019 Special 301 Report.

In August 2019, beoutQ suddenly stopped broadcasting via satellite but that was not the end of the matter. With millions of beoutQ devices installed in homes, the IPTV-enabled devices are now being primarily repurposed as streaming boxes, delivering the same content as they did before but utilizing the Internet. According to some of the world’s leading sports leagues and bodies, this presents a clear threat to the industries they represent.

In submissions to the USTR filed over the past few days, the International Olympic Committee, global soccer governing body FIFA, Englands’ Premier League and Spain’s La Liga, urge the USTR to keep Saudi Arabia on the Priority Watch List for 2020 on the basis that it denies “adequate and effective protection of intellectual property rights.”

The submissions begin with an outline of what each organization does and how beoutQ has affected their businesses. There is a level of déjà vu when reading the submissions by the Premier League and La Liga in that their collaboration is obvious, with entire sections cut and paste across the submissions. In that respect, they agree in exactly the same words that while the satellite broadcasting element isn’t an immediate threat, the IPTV capabilities are.

“Although beoutQ ceased broadcasting in mid-August 2019 (though rumors continue to circulate about its possible return), piracy continues to run rampant in Saudi Arabia. IPTV apps providing access to vast swaths of pirated content continue to be available on the up to three million beoutQ set-top boxes reportedly in circulation in Saudi Arabia and the region, among other IPTV boxes in the Saudi market,” both submissions read.

“For example, an independent report commissioned by the Premier League and several other sports rights holders and published in April 2019 revealed that one such IPTV app EVDTV, is itself based in Saudi Arabia. According to that report, contact details for the pirate service are publicly available on the app’s website, universeiptvs.com, which provides, inter alia, a phone number and location in Saudi Arabia.

“Despite repeated complaints by beIN and other rights holders, Saudi Arabia has never brought criminal action against beoutQ, or its Saudi facilitators and supporters,” the pair add in unison.

The FIFA submission is essentially an edited variant of the submissions presented by the Premier League and La Liga, with various paragraphs copied verbatim and others that are more specific to its role as a governing body. However, they all agree that after spending 15 months attempting to initiate a copyright infringement case in Saudi Arabia against beoutQ and its Saudi-based facilitators, it proved impossible to obtain legal counsel in the country.

With no legal remedy available, the USTR should punish Saudi Arabia, the soccer groups insist.

For its part, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) says its policy is to ensure that the Olympics reaches the widest possible audience, by allocating broadcasting rights to television, radio, mobile and Internet platforms. It says that the majority of the revenue generated by these rights is pumped back into sports and supporting athletes, including those in the United States.

The big issue in the Middle East and North Africa is that the IOC has licensed beIN, the official broadcasting partner that has been heavily targeted by beoutQ with its pirated broadcasts, which included the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games. With the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games coming up, the IOC is concerned that its broadcasting partnerships could be undermined once again.

“In view of this longstanding situation, the IOC respectfully requests that USTR maintain Saudi Arabia’s position on the Priority Watch List and engage with Saudi Arabia to encourage the Kingdom to protect and enforce the intellectual property rights of rights holders and to consider taking further appropriate steps in order to address the ongoing harm caused to rights-holders and broadcasters from this pirate activity,” the IOC concludes.

The submissions from IOC, FIFA, Premier League and La Liga can be found here (1,2,3,4 pdf)

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This week we have five newcomers in our chart.

Ford v Ferrari 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 articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(…)	21 Bridges	6.6 / trailer
2	(1)	Ford v Ferrari	8.2 / trailer
3	(…)	Knives Out	8.0 / trailer
4	(2)	Terminator: Dark Fate	6.4 / trailer
5	(…)	Jojo Rabbit	8.0 / trailer
6	(…)	Dolittle	5.6 / trailer
7	(3)	Doctor Sleep	7.5 / trailer
8	(4)	Joker	8.8 / trailer
9	(…)	Midway	6.8 / trailer
10	(5)	Uncut Gems	7.9 / trailer

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Last year there were fierce protests against the EU Copyright Directive which, according to opponents, would result in broad upload filters on the web.

Despite this pushback, the directive passed, and individual EU member states are now working on implementing the text into local law.

This includes Article 17 (formerly Article 13), which requires many online services to license content from copyright holders. If that is not possible, these companies should ensure that infringing content is taken down and not re-uploaded to their services.

These new requirements are welcomed by rightsholders but many tech companies see them as a threat. This week, several industry groups issued a warning about the negative consequences in their submissions for the US Trade Representative’s Special 301 Report.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which includes Amazon, Cloudflare, Facebook, and Google as members, is one of the concerned groups. According to the CCIA, Article 17 will have significant consequences for both online services and users.

“Online services must implement filtering technologies in order to comply with the requirements under Article 17. While Article 17 avoids the word ‘filter’, practically speaking content-based filtering will be required if a service is to have any hope of achieving compliance,” the group writes.

CCIA notes that Article 17 will result in a ‘notice-and-staydown’ obligation. This goes against the current global standards that provide online services with a safe harbor against copyright infringements committed by users.

As a result, tech companies fear that they will no longer be able to operate freely in the EU. In some cases, that could mean that they can’t operate there at all. Contrary to claims from EU officials, CCIA believes that lawful activities carried out by users will be severely restricted.

Technically speaking, fair use including memes and parodies will still be allowed. However, since these copyright exceptions can’t be determined by automatic filters, services may choose to remove more content than they have to.

“Because algorithms used to monitor content on platforms cannot contextualize to determine whether the content was lawfully uploaded under one of the exceptions listed, the law requires platforms to err on the side of removing content,” CCIA writes.

This is exacerbated by the concern that copyright exceptions apply to users, but not to the platforms, the tech companies argue. This means that online services can still be held liable for content users have posted lawfully.

While it’s too late to stop the legislation now, CCIA urges the US Government to make EU member states aware of these concerns. Ideally, EU member states should ensure that the fallout from the new requirements is limited. For example, by requiring rightsholders to notify online services before they have to take action.

This criticism is shared by the Internet Association (IA), which includes many of the same tech companies as members.

“The EU Directive effectively requires internet services of all sizes to implement comprehensive content filtering systems, without regard for the inevitable consequences of such filtering,” IA writes.

In addition to the critique on Article 17, both industry groups also flagged various European website blocking schemes and orders as problematic. In particular, those that take place without any oversight from courts.

This includes Greece’s “Committee for Online Copyright Infringement” which issued various pirate site blockades after a similar attempt previously failed in court.

The IA and CCIA both mention Italy’s site-blocking efforts as well. This is administered by the Italian Communications Authority (AGCOM) which can require ISPs to block sites without a judicial process.

Finally, Russian piracy blocking efforts are mentioned too. These affect some of the tech companies directly, as it requires search engines to remove all links to
allegedly infringing websites within 24 hours.

“In practice, this law has resulted in overbroad removal and delisting requests for general-purpose websites that would not be subject to removal under Section 512 of the Copyright Act or other parts of U.S. copyright law,” IA writes.

The tech companies hope that the US Government will take its concerns into account. Aside from the EU-focused issues, the full requests of both CCIA and IA highlight a variety of concerns in other regions as well.

—

The CCIA’s submission to the USTR is available here (pdf) and the Internet Association’s submission can be found here (pdf).

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Last weekend, we reported on a rather peculiar legal request from a group of major record labels.

The companies, which will go to trial against Internet provider Grande later this month, want to know whether potential jury members read TorrentFreak.

In theory, it could be an attempt to get well-informed jurors on the bench. However, it’s also possible that the labels see our reporting as biased. That second scenario seems more likely based on some new information we have received.

This week the same record labels, including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music, and Warner Bros Records, mentioned TorrentFreak again. This mention is part of a motion in another lawsuit, the one against ISP Bright House. This case also revolves around liability for pirating subscribers.

Before we highlight the TorrentFreak mention, some background information on the lawsuit is required.

In short, the labels argue that the ISP is liable for pirating subscribers because it failed to disconnect repeat infringers. Bright House disagrees. Among other things, it pointed out that under the Copyright Alert System, which the labels took part in, ISPs were not required to disconnect repeat infringers.

Last month. the ISP asked the court to take “judicial notice” of several documents related to the Copyright Alert System. This included the memorandum of understanding, as well as several news reports – including one of our articles – that reference statements from participating ISPs such as AT&T and Verizon.

These “judicial notices” basically ask the court to accept certain facts into the record that can’t be reasonably doubted. With regard to the news articles, Bright House doesn’t ask the court to accept that all information in them is factual, but simply that the ISPs did indeed make these statements.

This request wasn’t well-received by the record labels, for a variety of reasons.

In their response, the labels point out that three of the five documents are not “press releases” that were “issued by the Internet service providers.” Instead, they point to news articles or blog posts of which the “reliability” is “suspect.”

As an example of these suspect articles, the record labels highlight one of our articles but also reports from Ars Technica and Business Insider.

“Exhibit 5 is another article, this one written by ‘Ernesto’ (no last name provided), for a website called ‘TorrentFreak.’ Far from being a press release issued by AT&T, the article purports to describe leaked AT&T documents that TorrentFreak obtained,” the response reads.

We fully stand behind the accuracy of the reported information, which was never disputed and is certainly reliable. That said, the record labels do have a point. Our report is not a direct press release from an ISP and that applies to the other news reports too.

We simply reported on information that we received from an employee. The two other news articles are not press releases either, although they do include statements that were attributed to ISPs that participated in the Copyright Alert System.

That said, the labels don’t even want to accept the ISPs’ official press releases (e.g.), as these apparently aren’t “self authenticating.” Even the publicly published memorandum of understanding (MOU) doesn’t pass muster, the companies write.

“Taking judicial notice of this document is inappropriate, as there is no indication from the document itself that it in fact is the final MOU or that the MOU was not amended, terminated, or qualified at some later point in time,” the labels write.

What we have here is an ISP that is trying to show that other ISPs who participated in the music industry sanctioned Copyright Alert System did not terminate any subscribers. The record labels are trying to block this, as they do not agree with or indeed like this argument.

As said before, the labels do have a point about the news articles not being press releases. That said, Bright House may not have to jump through hoops if they simply want to argue that copyright alerts didn’t automatically lead to terminations.

If we pull up an archived version of the official Copyright Alert System website, which was backed by the music industry, we read the following:

“While the ISPs can modify the Mitigation Measures in a manner consistent with their own policies, ISPs will not use account termination as a Mitigation Measure.”

Even better, perhaps, the same site also archived all of the ‘final’ MOU, including all the amendments that were later made.

We’re not legal experts, but this appears to be fairly solid, coming directly from the source. That said, the record labels will likely disagree. In any case, it’s not up to us to present any arguments.

Finally, we want to briefly come back to the record label’s comment that our reliability is suspect. That’s an interesting argument, as our reporting has repeatedly been cited by copyright holders in the past.

For example, the RIAA used our coverage as evidence in comments it made to the U.S. Copyright Office. Similarly, the International Intellectual Property Alliance mentioned our reporting repeatedly in public submissions to the US Government.

In fact, even Sony Music Entertainment, which today questions our reliability, cited our reporting in an earlier submission to the US Trade Representative. Apparently, our coverage about Google’s takedown efforts was pretty solid according to the company.

While we realize that the stakes and circumstances are different in this case, we just want to set the record straight.

—

A copy of Bright House’s request for judicial notice is available here (pdf). The response from the record labels can be found here (pdf).

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As part of its ongoing campaign targeting unlicensed IPTV providers servicing the US market, broadcaster DISH Network filed a lawsuit in a Texas court last August.

It targeted Easybox, an IPTV service that reportedly offered subscribers more than 1,000 channels, including more than two dozen channels exclusively licensed by DISH.

The broadcaster’s lawsuits often target IPTV providers for alleged breaches of the Federal Communications Act but in this instance, the lawsuit was based in copyright law. In common with other similar actions currently winding their way through US courts, this one met little opposition along the way.

DISH says it tried to get Easybox to stop its illegal activities on many occasions before filing the lawsuit, including by sending around 300 copyright infringement notices to the provider and its CDN providers between 2016 and 2019. All were ignored so the broadcaster was left with little option but to bring the matter before a judge.

As reported in detail last week, DISH recently put forward a proposed final judgment and permanent injunction for the court’s consideration. That has now been largely accepted and signed off by the court, with some exceptions, but largely along the lines of DISH’s recommendations.

In an order signed February 5 by District Court Judge Lynn N. Hughes, the Judge notes that defendants Hung Tran and Thi Nga Nguyen were served on November 21, 2019, but neither filed an answer or otherwise appeared to defend the action. As a result, the order grants DISH $150,000 in statutory damages for 66 of DISH’s copyrighted works infringed via the IPTV service.

“Dish Network LLC will take $9,900,000 from Hung Tran, Thi Nga Nguyen, and Easybox IPTV, jointly and severally, plus interest,” the default judgment reads.

“This amount reflects statutory damages of $150,000 for their willful infringement of sixty-six of Dish’s copyrighted works.”

The terms of the permanent junction are less tightly-worded than those proposed by DISH but still restrain the defendants, Easybox IPTV, or any entity they create, from distributing DISH’s channels in the United States or selling Easybox set-top boxes or IPTV subscriptions that stream DISH’s channels.

The injunction also orders various service providers to stop doing business with Easybox and the named defendants, if that business entails transmitting copyrighted TV shows. Those third-party Internet companies are named as Global Layer B.V. and WorldStream B.V. (Netherlands), OVH Hosting Inc. (Canada), and Netrouting Inc. (United States).

In its proposed permanent injunction, DISH previously requested that the registries in control of domain names connected to Easybox should render them inaccessible before transferring them to DISH for the company’s use. The actual injunction handed down by Judge Hughes doesn’t go quite that far.

“Registries must disable the domain names used to transmit Dish’s protected channels within forty-eight hours of receiving this order. The domain names to be disabled include easybox.tv, e900x.com, and k2442.com, and any future domain name used by Easybox IPTV, Hung Tran, or Thi Nga Nguyen to transmit Dish’s channels.”

Whether the defendants will pay all or indeed any of the damages handed down by the Court remains an open question. The Easybox service and associated sites appear to have been down for some time.

The default judgment and injunction can be viewed here (pdf)

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