Like many other countries throughout Europe, Ireland is no stranger to pirate site blocking.

The Pirate Bay was blocked back in 2009, as part of a voluntary agreement between copyright holders and local ISP Eircom. A few years later the High Court ordered other major Internet providers to follow suit.

However, The Pirate Bay is not the only ‘infringing’ site out there, and this year the Motion Picture Association (MPA) went to the Commercial Court, hoping to expand the blockades.

On behalf of several major Hollywood studios, the group requested Irish Internet providers to block access to three popular streaming sites; movie4k.to, primewire.ag, and onwatchseries.to.

In their complaint, the movie studios, including Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Bros, described the sites as massive copyright infringement hubs, with each offering thousands of infringing movies.

Monday evening the court approved the request. This means that the three websites will soon be rendered unavailable by Eircom, Sky Ireland, Vodafone Ireland, Virgin Media Ireland, Three Ireland, Digiweb, Imagine Telecommunications, and Magnet Networks.

According to Justice Brian Cregan it was “clear” that copyright infringement “manifestly occurred” on the three streaming portals. In addition, he ruled that the ISP blockades will not interfere with lawful Internet use, nor can they be characterized as disproportionate.

Watchseries

Irish Times reports that none of the ISPs opposed the blocking request. However, Eir said that the costs involved could become an issue if the number of blocked websites increases drastically in the future.

The ISP asked the court to put a cap on the number of notifications, limiting it to 50 per month. However, the movie studios objected to a blocking cap, and the judge decided not to add any limitations for now.

How the Internet providers will restrict access to the sites in question is unclear for now, but it’s likely to be through DNS, IP-addresses, or a combination of both. If Ireland follows the UK, the number of blocked domains may soon rise to several thousand.

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

While most gamers do their best to win fair and square, there are always those who try to cheat themselves to victory.

With the growth of the gaming industry, the market for “cheats,” “hacks” and bots has also grown spectacularly. The German company Bossland is one of the frontrunners in this area.

Bossland created cheats and bots for several Blizzard games including World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, and Overwatch, handing its users an unfair advantage over the competition. Blizzard is not happy with these and the two companies have been battling in court for quite some time, both in the US and Germany.

Last week a prominent US case came to a conclusion in the California District Court. Because Bossland decided not to represent itself, it was a relatively easy for Blizzard, which was awarded several million in copyright damages.

The court agreed that hacks developed by Bossland effectively bypassed Blizzard’s cheat protection technology “Warden,” violating the DMCA. By reverse engineering the games and allowing users to play modified versions, Bossland infringed Blizzard’s copyrights and allowed its users to do the same.

“Bossland materially contributes to infringement by creating the Bossland Hacks, making the Bossland Hacks available to the public, instructing users how to install and operate the Bossland Hacks, and enabling users to use the software to create derivative works,” the court’s order reads (pdf).

The WoW Honorbuddy

The infringing actions are damaging to the game maker as they render its anti-cheat protection ineffective. The cheaters, subsequently, ruin the gaming experience for other players who may lose interest, causing additional damage.

“Blizzard has established a showing of resulting damage or harm because Blizzard expends a substantial amount of money combating the use of the Bossland Hacks to ensure fair game play,” the court writes.

“Additionally, players of the Blizzard Games lodge complaints against cheating players, which has caused users to grow dissatisfied with the Blizzard Games and cease playing. Accordingly, the in-game cheating also harms Blizzard’s goodwill and reputation.”

As a result, the court grants the statutory copyright damages Blizzard requested for 42,818 violations within the United States, totaling $8,563,600. In addition, the game developer is entitled to $174,872 in attorneys’ fees.

To prevent further damage, Bossland is also prohibited from marketing or sellings its cheats in the United States. This applies to hacks including “Honorbuddy,” “Demonbuddy,”
“Stormbuddy,” “Hearthbuddy,” and “Watchover Tyrant,” as well as any other software designed to exploit Blizzard games.

While its a hefty judgment, the order doesn’t really come as a surprise given that the German cheat maker failed to defend itself.

Bossland CEO Zwetan Letschew previously informed TorrentFreak that his company would continue the legal battle after the issue of a default judgment. Whatever the outcome, the cheats will remain widely available outside of the US for now.

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

Website blockades are becoming more common throughout Europe, with Italy taking a particularly active approach.

In recent months hundreds of domain names have been added to the nation’s pirate blocklist, based on complaints from a wide range of copyright holders.

It is not just the numbers that set Italy apart, the blocking mechanism itself is unique as well. To have a website blocked, rightsholders can ask the local telecoms watchdog AGCOM to issue an order, without need for a trial.

Instead of dealing with blockades in court, AGCOM has the power to grant injunctions without judicial overview, which it does on a regular basis.

The regulation hasn’t been without controversy. Soon after it was introduced several consumer rights groups and other organizations challenged it in court, arguing that it’s unconstitutional.

The case was initially rejected by the Constitutional Court in 2015, which referred it back to the administrative court of Lazio. Last week this court decided that the site blocking procedure is in line with both European and Italian law.

According to the court, the site-blocking regulation is compatible with the European Union’s E-Commerce Directive as well as the Italian Copyright Act. In addition, the procedure doesn’t violate the Italian constitution or fundamental rights in general, as opponents had argued.

Overall the case is seen as a significant victory for copyright holders. Not only can they continue with their site-blocking requests, but the court also clarified that all the blocking costs must be paid by Internet providers.

“This is a big win for rightsholders,” says Enzo Mazza, chief of the Italian music group FIMI, who says that they have plans to expand the current scope of the blocking efforts.

“Our future goal is now to increase the enforcement of AGCOM to also cover new forms of piracy such as live streaming, stream ripping and similar issues. In addition, we hope AGCOM will extend the blockades to the IP-address level as the Criminal Courts are using now,” Mazza tells TorrentFreak.

The consumer groups are disappointed, but lawyer Fulvio Sarzana tells TorrentFreak that this outcome was expected considering the previous stance of the judges. However, he also notes that the battle has only just begun and that the case will be appealed.

“It is important to know that there will be an appeal represented by the State Council and that, should it be confirmed in that case, there is always the possibility of acting in front of the greatest judicial order in Italy, the Court of Cassation,” Sarzana says.

For his part, FIMI’s boss is positive that the current verdict will be upheld in future cases. Meanwhile, Mazza and his organization will continue to push for more and broader blockades.

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A copy of the verdict, in Italian, is available here (pdf).

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

It’s incredible to think that more than five years after the raids on Megaupload, in some respects the case has made virtually no progress. This is particularly true of the defunct company’s servers in Canada.

Canada became quietly involved in the Megaupload investigation in December 2011, around a month before the raids in New Zealand, United States, and elsewhere. The U.S. Department of Justice asked the Minister of Justice to grant to obtain a search warrant authorizing the seizure of 32 leased computer servers located in Toronto.

On January 18, 2012, a Superior Court judge in Ontario issued the warrant which targeted the servers located in an Equinix datacenter. As the case continued to build against Megaupload, Kim Dotcom and his associates, the U.S. government asked Canadian authorities to hand the hardware over, claiming that an internal Megaupload email revealed them to be “database / number crunching machines.”

With the servers in the possession of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, during January 2013 the Minister of Justice applied for an order for the servers to be sent to the United States. Megaupload protested on the basis that the servers contain a lot of information irrelevant to the case, but agreed that an independent forensic examiner could examine them before any handover.

An Ontario court sided with Megaupload and refused to send the servers’ data to the United States. In 2015, both sides were ordered to find a way to filter out irrelevant content, perhaps with the aid of a “clean team” of FBI investigators who had no connection with the case.

While this path was approved by a judge, both Megaupload and Equinix objected to the proposal, complaining that the FBI shouldn’t be involved at all and any examination should be carried out independently. In common with almost every decision in various Megaupload cases, this one also went to appeal.

The Ontario Court of Appeal handed down its decision on Friday, this time in favor of Megaupload.

“The judge had to decide what material, if any, should be ordered sent to the United States. The appellant and the American investigators, the FBI, stood in a strongly adversarial position with respect to the order that should be made,” the Court of Appeal wrote in its decision.

“The judge, because of the nature of the seized material, needed help in determining what order should be made. The judge needed someone who could prepare a report outlining the nature of the material so that the judge could decide what part of the material, if any, should be sent to the United States.”

Noting that the report would “significantly influence” the nature and scope of any order made by the judge, the appeal court said that while the FBI may indeed carry out their task as asked, having them involved at all would be entirely inappropriate.

“In my view, it is offensive to the appearance of fairness, and specifically the appearance of judicial impartiality, to have an entity closely associated with one of the adversaries provide the judge with the necessary report,” the decision reads.

“In coming to that conclusion, I make no assumption that the FBI ‘clean team’ would not comply with whatever conditions the court imposed. My concern is with the appearance of fairness and impartiality.”

The appeal court said that when a judge is asked to appoint an investigator, the starting point should always be with people unconnected with the case. Consideration should also be given to the issue of costs (the FBI option in the Megaupload case was cheaper) but they would have to be prohibitively excessive to chose an affiliated entity over an independent party.

With the earlier decision now overruled, the servers will continue to gather dust in the hands of the RCMP, where they have been since their seizure in 2012. No doubt the legal wrangling will continue, as it has done in the United States concerning the servers there.

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.

Rogue One is the most downloaded movie for the third week in a row.

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	(1)	Rogue One	8.0 / trailer
2	(…)	Monster Trucks	5.5 / trailer
3	(8)	Logan (HDCam)	8.6 / trailer
4	(…)	Beauty and the Beast (HDTS)	7.8 / trailer
5	(2)	The Great Wall (Subbed HDRip)	6.2 / trailer
6	(7)	Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them	7.6 / trailer
7	(…)	Brimstone	7.1 / trailer
8	(4)	Assassin’s Creed	6.3 / trailer
9	(5)	Split (Subbed HDRip)	7.4 / trailer
10	(6)	xXx: Return of Xander Cage (Subbed HDRip)	5.5 / trailer

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