YouTube is not only one of the best sites on the Internet today but is arguably the best multimedia platform ever created. There can be barely a person alive who has heard of the Internet but not of YouTube. The site is that important.

But today, YouTube has problems. Despite generating hundreds of millions each year for the music industry, the major labels argue that the company fails to do enough about piracy while exploiting the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA.

YouTube sees things quite differently. The company says that its Content ID recognition system, which was developed at huge cost, allows creators to block or monetize otherwise pirated content uploaded to the platform by users.

Like every anti-piracy system ever created, Content ID is fallible. It can be circumvented using various techniques and tricks found on any number of sites and indeed, on YouTube itself. This week, that fact attracted the attention of the Music Tech Policy blog.

“What’s Wrong With Content ID? Start with Dozens of YouTube Videos on How to Defeat It,” wrote editor, industry veteran, and outspoken Google critic, Chris Castle.

Castle begins by talking a little about one of the techniques often used by people trying to evade the clutches of Content ID – changing the tempo of an uploaded music track. The idea is that by altering the speed, the fingerprint of the uploaded track is changed enough for YouTube not to recognize it as an infringing copy.

No doubt it’s a popular trick, but at this point the conspiracy theories begin.

YouTube has a feature which allows people to speed up or slow down videos, which can be handy for speed ‘reading’ an audio book, for example, or slowing down a tutorial so someone inexperienced in the task can keep up.

However, discounting fans of pitch-shifted vocals, Castle says it’s actually there for Google to make money from pirates. Slowed-down, Content ID-evading tracks can be sped back up to enjoy at normal speeds, he says.

“Why is it there? To cater to fans of Alvin and the Chipmunks? No. It’s there so YouTube can monetize illegal copies of music and movies,” he says.

“If Google were serious about piracy, they’d dump the speed control on YouTube. They’d also police the ‘how to’ defeat Content ID videos on YouTube.”

While Castle is perfectly entitled to his opinion (and it’s one that is popular in the industry) he seems oblivious to the fact that his own article not only reveals how Content ID can be gamed, but also goes on to demand that YouTube censors discussion on the same topic.

If that doesn’t already feel like a case of “don’t do as I do, do as I tell you”, then perhaps the next bit will.

Amping the irony up to 11, Castle then embeds one of the Content ID circumvention videos from YouTube into his own article.

How the video appears in the article

Of course, some people will quite rightly argue that in order to properly report on the problem, someone writing on this topic might need to show an example of an ‘offending’ video on YouTube. We wouldn’t disagree with that assertion at all, 100% in agreement.

There are, however, plenty of problems. For a start, discussing how Content ID can be bypassed isn’t illegal, so if any uploaded videos covering that topic are all the creators’ own work, the resulting videos are legal too.

With that in mind, it’s difficult to see what grounds YouTube would have for taking those videos down. If nothing else, it would be seen as stifling free speech, no matter how disappointing that speech is to the music and movie industries.

Admittedly, inciting people to commit a civil wrong might be a problem in some regions, but in most cases that’s not what we’re talking about here, as illustrated by Music Tech Policy’s willingness to embed the video on its site.

The take-home here is that some material on YouTube is always going to be offensive to some people, we just have to learn how to deal with it and in some cases, make the best of it.

For example, last year I was particularly irritated to find a video on YouTube which detailed how my car could be stolen in seconds using a special device. A link to buy that device was included below the video. Screw YouTube, right? Not really.

With the information presented in the video, I was able to find and buy an aftermarket alarm/immobilizer that defeated that device and others like it.

Admittedly the video (and ‘buy’ link) had the potential to recruit other would-be car thieves to the party, but if I hadn’t have seen it too, my car would still be vulnerable today. The thieves, meanwhile, would still have the ability to steal it. As it stands, it’s going nowhere, at least by that method.

Ultimately, knowledge is power and it is absolutely pointless to try and suppress it with censorship, people are always one step ahead. We just need to use all available knowledge to our advantage.

So, despite Chris Castle perhaps not appreciating the irony, he was absolutely within his rights to write that article and embed those videos in order to illustrate a point that is not only important to him, but others too. Whether people agree with him or not is moot.

He shouldn’t be censored, and YouTube shouldn’t be required to censor people either. The site already provides Content ID to millions of satisfied users and presumably, it’s in YouTube’s best interest to have that working as advertised.

That it fails sometimes is no surprise but talking about its weaknesses, on YouTube and sites like Music Tech Policy and indeed here on TF, draws attention to the topic. And only when people are allowed to discuss stuff openly does anything get done.

Censorship is never the answer and only makes matters like these worse.

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

Copyright holders often complain that they have virtually no means to target pirate sites, especially those run from overseas.

Interestingly, however, in recent months it has become apparent that the US Federal Court system can be used as a prime enforcement tool to shut down pirate domain names.

This is also the path Indian media outfit Times Content Limited (TCL) decided to go down. The company operates the cricket channel Willow TV and owns the US broadcasting rights to the Indian Premier League cricket tournament, which is currently ongoing.

Two weeks ago the company sued several sports streaming sites including smartcric.com and crickethdlive.com. These sites allow users to watch cricket games for free over the Internet, without permission.

To stop this from taking place, the Indian company requested a broad injunction, which the court granted last week.

The preliminary injunction (pdf) orders various third party providers to stop working with these sites effective immediately to prevent future copyright infringements. This also applies to any new domain names or websites the operators may launch.

“…all service providers whose services will enable or facilitate Defendants’ anticipated infringement are ordered to suspend all services with respect to smartcric.com, smartcric.eu, crickethdlive.com, and crickethdlive.pw, or any other website or domain that is redirected from the Websites and continues to distribute and publicly perform the 2017 IPL,” it reads.

Domain registries and registrars are not the only parties that are compelled to comply. It also lists a broad range of intermediaries including hosting companies, CDN services, advertising outfits, and streaming providers.

Where this order clearly differs from similar injunctions in the US is that it specifically targets “anticipated infringement.” Or put differently, it aims to prevent piracy before it takes place.

From the injunction

What stands out further is that the injunction is temporary in nature. It only applies while the Cricket tournament is active. This ends on May 22, after which the parties involved are free to lift or reverse the actions they took.

“For the avoidance of doubt, the Court’s intent is to ensure that Defendants’ Websites be rendered offline, inaccessible and incapable of receiving or displaying audio or video signals between the date of this order and 6:00 am. CDT on May 22, 2017,” the injunction reads.

Over the past few days several of the seized domain names have been placed in a Godaddy holding account belonging to the law firm that represents TCL. And per court order, they will stay there until said date.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the case is over after the tournament ends. In the complaint, TCL also requests damages and other punitive measures, which is something that has to be decided over at a later date.

TorrentFreak spoke to the operator of the streaming sites in question, who says that the lawsuit took him by surprise. After losing his initial domain names he registered several new ones, but these were swiftly taken down as well.

“I moved Smartcric.com to Smartcric.be and Crickethdlive.com to Crickethdlive.pw. However, both domains were suspended as well within a day. Later, I moved Crickethdlive content to Crickethdlive.to however that was suspended yesterday as well,” the operator says.

“It was shocking to see that non-US registries were following the order issued by a US court. It was unfair and unjust to comply with orders of a non-competent court by these registries.”

Interestingly, one of the domain names was registered through the domain name service Njalla, which Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde recently launched. Sunde stresses that the domain was seized beyond their control and that no personal information was shared.

“We’re looking into the case at the moment, but the court took the domain and sent it to a legal firm. We have no way of going above the court and ICANN on this. However, we have of course not sent any information about the customer to anyone,” Sunde says.

The streaming site operator still doubts that he will get his domain names back after the injunction expires. Instead, he’s decided to focus his effort on finding a domain name that falls outside of the scope of the US courts.

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

One of the main questions asked by new users of the Kodi media player is what addons should be installed to get the best experience right from the start.

Over the years, hit add-ons such as Exodus, Phoenix, SALTS and SportsDevil have all been top of the list but due to its wide range of content, one in particular has enjoyed broad appeal.

Navi-X began life ten years ago in 2007. Developed by Netherlands-based coder ‘Rodejo’, it debuted on XBMC (Kodi’s previous name) on the original XBoX.

“Navi-X originally only played back media items of video and audio content and was eventually expanded to included many other media types like text, RSS, live streams and podcasts,” the team at TV Addons explain.

Over the years, however, things changed dramatically. Due to the way Navi-X works, the addon can import playlists from any number of sources, and they have invariably been dominated by copyrighted content, from movies and TV shows through to live sports.

This earned the addon a massive following, estimated by TV Addons – the site that maintained the software – as numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Soon, however, Navi-X will be no more.

“Every good thing must come to an end. After ten years of successful operation, Navi-X is sadly being discontinued. Navi-X was first released in April 2007, and is the oldest Kodi addon of its kind,” TV Addons explain.

“There are a few reasons why we made the decision to close Navi-X, and hope that the hundreds of thousands of people who still used Navi-X daily will understand why it was best to discontinue Navi-X while it was still on top.”

The team says that the main reason for discontinuing the addon and its underlying service is the current legal climate. Hosting Navi-X playlists is something that TV Addons no longer feels comfortable with “due to the potential liability that comes with it.”

Also, the team says that Navi-X was slowly being overrun by people trying to make a profit from the service. Playlists were being filled with spam, often advertising premium illegal IPTV services, which TV Addons strongly opposes.

Mislabeling of adult content was also causing issues, and despite TV Addons’ best efforts to get rid of the offending content, they were fighting a losing battle.

“We tried to moderate the database, but there was just too much content, no one had the time to watch thousands of videos to remove ads and distasteful content,” the team explains.

Unlike other addons that have come under legal pressure, the shutdown of Navi-X is entirely voluntary. TV Addons extends thanks to developers rodejo16 and turner3d, plus Blazetamer and crzen from more recent times.

The repository also thanks those who took the time to create the playlists upon which Navi-X relied. It is this that shines a light at the end of the tunnel for those wondering how to fill the void left by the addon.

“We’d also like to recognize all the dedicated playlisters, who we invite to get in touch with us if they are interested in releasing their own addons sometime in the near future,” TV Addons concludes.

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

It was once a region where people could share files without fear of reprisal, but over the years Scandinavia has become a hotbed of ‘pirate’ prosecutions.

Sweden, in particular, has seen many sites shut down and their operators sentenced, notably those behind The Pirate Bay but also more recent cases such as those against DreamFilm and Swefilmer.

To this backdrop, members of the public have continued to share files, albeit in decreasing numbers. However, at the same time copyright trolls have hit countries like Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, hoping to scare alleged file-sharers into cash settlements.

This week regional ISP Telia revealed that the activity has already reached epidemic proportions.

Under the EU IPR Enforcement Directive (IPRED), Internet service providers are required to hand over the personal details of suspected pirates to copyright holders, if local courts deem that appropriate. Telia says it is now being bombarded with such demands.

“Telia must adhere to court decisions. At the same time we have a commitment to respect the privacy of our customers and therefore to be transparent,” the company says.

“While in previous years Telia has normally received less than ten such [disclosure] requests per market, per year, lately the number of requests has increased significantly.”

The scale is huge. The company reports that in Sweden during the past year alone, it has been ordered to hand over the identities of subscribers behind more than 45,000 IP addresses.

In Finland during the same period, court orders covered almost 37,000 IP addresses. Four court orders in Denmark currently require the surrendering of data on “hundreds” of customers.

Telia says that a Danish law firm known as Njord Law is behind many of the demands. The company is connected to international copyright trolls operating out of the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

“A Danish law firm (NJORD Law firm), representing the London-based copyright holder Copyright Management Services Ltd, was recently (2017-01-31) granted a court order forcing Telia Sweden to disclose to the law firm the subscriber identities behind 25,000 IP-addresses,” the company notes.

Copyright Management Services Ltd was incorporated in the UK during October 2014. Its sole director is Patrick Achache, who also operates German-based BitTorrent tracking company MaverickEye. Both are part of the notorious international trolling operation Guardaley.

Copyright Management Services, which is based at the same London address as fellow UK copyright-trolling partner Hatton and Berkeley, filed accounts in June 2016 claiming to be a dormant company. Other than that, it has never filed any financial information.

Copyright Management Services will be legally required to publish more detailed accounts next time around, since the company is now clearly trading, but its role in this operation is far from clear. For its part, Telia hopes the court has done the necessary checking when handing information over to partner firm, Njord Law.

“Telia assumes that the courts perform adequate assessments of the evidence provided by the above law firm, and also that the courts conduct a sufficient assessment of proportionality between copyright and privacy,” the company says.

“Telia does not know what the above law firm intends to do with the large amount of customer data which they are now collecting.”

While that statement from Telia is arguably correct, it doesn’t take a genius to work out where this is going. Every time that these companies can match an IP address to an account holder, they will receive a letter in the mail demanding a cash settlement. Anything that substantially deviates from this outcome would be a very surprising development indeed.

In the meantime, Jon Karlung, the outspoken boss of ISP Bahnhof, has pointed out that if Telia didn’t store customer IP addresses in the first place, it wouldn’t have anything to hand out to copyright trolls.

“Bahnhof does not store this data – and we can’t give out something we do not have. The same logic should apply to Telia,” he said.

Bahnhof says it stores customer data including IP addresses for 24 hours, just long enough to troubleshoot technical issues but nowhere near long enough to be useful to trolls.

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

While relatively underreported, many U.S. district courts are still swamped with lawsuits against alleged film pirates.

The copyright holders who initiate these cases generally rely on an IP address as evidence. This information is collected from BitTorrent swarms and linked to a geographical location using geolocation tools.

With this information in hand, they then ask the courts to grant a subpoena, directing Internet providers to hand over the personal details of the associated account holders.

Malibu Media, the Los Angeles-based company behind the ‘X-Art’ adult movies, is behind most of these cases. The company has filed thousands of lawsuits in recent years, targeting Internet subscribers whose accounts were allegedly used to share Malibu’s films via BitTorrent.

Increasingly, judges around the country have grown wary of these litigation efforts. This includes US Federal Judge William Alsup, who’s tasked with handling all such cases in the Northern District of California.

Responding to a recent request, Judge Alsup highlights the fact that Malibu filed a “monsoon” of hundreds of lawsuits over the past 18 months, but later dismissed many of them after without specifying a reason.

The judge is skeptical about the motivation for these dismissals. In particular, because courts have previously highlighted that Maxmind’s geolocation tools, which are cited in the complaints, may not be entirely accurate. This could mean that the cases have been filed in the wrong court.

“Malibu Media’s voluntary dismissal without prejudice of groups of its cases is not a new pattern. A sizable portion of the cases from previous waves were terminated in the same way,” Judge Alsup writes (pdf).

“The practice has just become more frequent, and it follows skepticism by the undersigned judge and others around the country about the accuracy of the Maxmind database,” he adds.

This is not the first time that geolocation tools have been called into doubt and to move the accuracy claims beyond Maxmind’s own “hearsay,” Judge Alsup now demands extra evidence.

In his order he denies the request to continue a case management conference in one of their cases. Instead, he will use that hearing to address the geolocation issues. In addition, all Malibu cases in the district may be barred if the accuracy of these tools isn’t “fully vetted.”

“That request is DENIED. Instead, Malibu Media is hereby ordered to SHOW CAUSE at that hearing, why the Court should not bar further Malibu Media cases in this district until the accuracy of the geolocation technology is fully vetted,” the order reads.

“To be clear, this order applies even if Malibu Media voluntarily dismisses this action,” Judge Alsup adds.

Denied

SJD, who follows the developments closely and first reported on the order, suspects that the IP-address ‘error rate’ may in fact be higher than most people believe. She therefore recommends defense lawyer to depose ISP employees to get to the bottom of the issue.

“If you are a defense attorney who litigates one of the BitTorrent infringement cases, I suggest deposing a Comcast employee tasked with subpoena processing. I suspect that the error rate is much higher than trolls want everyone to believe, and such testimony has a potential to become a heavy weapon in every troll victim’s arsenal,” SJD says.

In any case, it’s no secret that geolocation databases are far from perfect. Most are not updated instantly, which means that the information could be outdated, and other entries are plainly inaccurate.

This is something the residents of a Kansas farm know all too well, as their house is the default location of 600 million IP-addresses, which causes them quite a bit of trouble.

It will be interesting to see if Malibu will make any efforts to properly “vet” Maxmind’s database. It’s clear, however, that Judge Alsup will not let the company use his court before fully backing up their claims.

To be continued.

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