During the summer of 2014, City of London Police arrested then 20-year-old Callum Haywood of Bakersfield for his involvement with several proxy sites and services.

The investigation linked Haywood to Immunicity, a censorship circumvention tool that allowed users to route their traffic through a proxy network. In addition, he was also connected to the Pirate Bay proxy list Piratereverse.info plus several KickassTorrents and other proxy sites.

These proxies all served as a copy of the original sites, which are blocked by several UK ISPs, allowing users to bypass restrictions imposed by the High Court. While Haywood wasn’t operating any of the original sites, police decided to move ahead with the case anyway.

Following the arrest, progress was slow. It took nearly two years for the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) to formally announce charges, which amounted to one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property and six counts of possession of an article for use in fraud.

The charges related to the operation of a Pirate Bay proxy and two KickassTorrent proxies, and could’ve potentially landed the now 23-year-old a prison sentence of over ten years.

Haywood, however, denied any wrongdoing and after three dismissal hearings, his Honour Judge Dickinson QC of the Nottingham Crown Court agreed that the case should be dismissed. The initial dismissal was signed late last week, and after PIPCU chose not to appeal, the case is now over.

Piratereverse.info

No official paperwork has been released yet, but we were informed that the Court dismissed the case because of conflicting arguments that were presented during hearings last September and December.

The prosecution initially argued that the reverse proxy sites allowed users to make a fraudulent false representation to their ISP, by obscuring their IP-addresses. In a later hearing, however, they argued that Haywood was the one who made the false representation through his software.

The contradicting claims appear to demonstrate a lack of technical understanding on the prosecution’s side. In their September argument, they seemed to confuse a reverse proxy site with a forward proxy, which would indeed hide a user’s activity from an ISP.

In the December hearing, the prosecution made another error. In their attempt to explain what a reverse proxy server is, they relied on printouts from Wikipedia as official evidence. The judge wasn’t happy and stressed that it was unacceptable for the prosecution to submit clearly inadmissible evidence.

While Haywood is obviously pleased with the end result, the case took its toll. There was a looming uncertainty present for years, as well as the prospect of ending up in prison if the case went in the wrong direction.

“Two and a half years is a long time, I have gone from being an undergrad computer science student to graduating with a first class honours, and working as a software developer for a network appliance vendor,” Haywood informs TF.

“While I don’t think it has prevented me from achieving what I wanted, it has been a very difficult period of time for my family, and my friends. Having the case dismissed goes to show how the right decision was to plead not guilty – had I pleaded guilty, I would have been sentenced without contest.”

Haywood always maintained his innocence and in the end it paid off. He now hopes to leave the bad times behind and focus on the future. As for the authorities, he hopes that they will address real threats to society, instead of reverse proxy sites.

“I am pleased that it is over, as it was very frustrating. Everyone that I had discussed the case with who had a decent understanding of the technicalities was shocked that it had been allowed to get so far.

“It is also a disappointment how many resources were wasted in dealing with this case, when there are much more serious actual crimes on our streets,” Haywood concludes.

TorrentFreak contacted PIPCU for a comment, but we haven’t heard back at the time of publication.

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

Following roundtable discussions between the BPI, Motion Picture Association, Alliance for IP, plus representatives of Google and Bing, in February a voluntary anti-piracy agreement was announced.

Under this anti-piracy code, search engines agreed to further optimize their algorithms to demote pirated content in search results, with the aim of making infringing content less visible and legal alternatives easier to find.

As highlighted last month, details of the arrangement were planned to remain largely secret but thanks to a pair of Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests from both the EFF and TJ McIntyre from Digital Rights Ireland, we now have a somewhat clearer idea of what will be happening between the groups.

As expected, the main focus is the search deranking of sites “dedicated to infringement” based on the volume of valid DMCA-style notices rightsholders send to Google. In other words, sites that index a majority of infringing content and are subjected to a lot of rightsholder complaints will find their results buried.

Unfortunately, the report released under the FOIA request is redacted, which leaves some sections ambiguous at best and hard to follow at worst. This section, however, seems to indicate an additional effort to manipulate search results that are generated from “neutral” non-piracy related search terms.

“All parties support the objective of removing links to infringing content from [REDACTED] search results returned to consumers in the UK in response to ‘neutral’ formulations of search query (exact search terms to be agreed) with the goal of presenting the consumer with links to legitimate sites. This includes search results presented to the user in the form of natural search results, sponsored or advertisement results or media player ‘box’ results,” the document reads.

These search terms haven’t been defined publicly but based on previous copyright holder complaints, words such as ‘download’, ‘MP3’ and even artist or content names could be in the mix. In any event, an assessment will take place to see how they prejudice rightsholders, especially when it comes to fresh content.

“Selection of such search queries by the parties shall take into account data indicating the actual levels of usage of such search terms, as well as the harm that illegal access to content via specific queries can cause to creators, in particular for new releases,” the agreement notes.

Google’s AutoComplete feature, which has proven controversial in the past, will also be subject to tweaks that focus on not suggesting infringing content when neutral terms are entered.

Moving forward, an area that is likely to raise an eyebrow or two is a statement in the agreement which possibly suggests the sharing of search engine user behavior data with rightsholders.

“Search engines and rights holders will exchange detailed information on a confidential basis in order to better understand how users are searching for content,” it reads.

“This information exchange will not be expected to include commercially confidential information, and is without prejudice to the existing legal remedies available to either party.”

To give an indication of how complex these discussions must’ve been at times, one only has to look at the following paragraph, which appears to be an effort to lay some of the blame with rightsholders, should infringing links appear more prominently than legal ones in search results.

“Performance in achieving the above metric should be considered in tandem with an objective assessment of the existence of legitimate websites (of rights holders or their partners, distributors or other authorized locations) that offer consumers access to legitimate content or information for the measured queries, and the efforts made by rights holders to take advantage of reasonable techniques such as search engine optimisation,” it reads.

In other words, rightsholders shouldn’t be able to blame Google and Bing for the appearance of ‘pirate’ results if they don’t make legal alternatives available or fail to carry out effective SEO. That shouldn’t be too much of a problem though, since the agreement notes that the parties will work together to optimize SEO for legitimate sites to “improve the likelihood such sites will rank higher in results for well-meaning queries.”

Another interesting detail in the agreement is how the parties intend to tackle so-called “domain hopping” by pirate sites. Currently, when Google receives a lot of DMCA notices for a domain utilized by a pirate site, the site is downranked in results. That often leads to the site getting a new domain, at which point the ‘clean’ domain starts appearing higher in results again. The agreement seeks to deal with that.

“All parties will work with the [Intellectual Property Office] to evaluate how frequently copyright infringing websites, subjected to demotion, change their top-level domain (TLD), but otherwise retain substantially the same identity,” the agreement reads.

“If this activity is sufficiently widespread as to justify it, search engines and rights holders should develop a process whereby rights holders can notify search engines of the occurrence so that, when verified, such domains can be appropriately demoted.”

Overall, Google and Bing will work with rightsholders to demote domains quicker, with the latter encouraged to use APIs and better-formatted infringement notices. A whitelist of sorts will also be introduced, to ensure that legitimate sites don’t get caught up in Google and Bing’s downgrading filters.

But for those concerned about the potential for this voluntary agreement to spread beyond those currently involved, there’s something looming on the horizon. Google and Bing have also committed to sharing their work in this area with search engines and rightsholders that are not already signatories.

“All parties to this Code of Practice commit to ensure that progress or best practice in this area (to the extent that such information is non-confidential) is shared widely with smaller search engines and independent rights holders,” the agreement notes.

As previously reported, the Minister of State for Intellectual Property will oversee the implementation of the voluntary code, and provide quarterly cycles of research and a review after one year.

The full, albeit redacted document, can be viewed here (pdf)

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

In recent years, so-called copyright trolls have been accused of various dubious schemes and actions, with one group as the frontrunner.

Prenda Law grabbed dozens of headlines, mostly surrounding negative court rulings over identity theft, misrepresentation and even deception.

Most controversial was the shocking revelation that Prenda uploaded their own torrents to The Pirate Bay, creating a honeypot for the people they later sued over pirated downloads.

The allegations ultimately resulted in a criminal indictment last year, and now one of the main Prenda attorneys has pleaded guilty before the District Court of Minnesota. A few hours ago John Steele, 45, signed a plea agreement admitting that he is guilty of mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

According to Steele, he and his colleague Paul Hansmeier generated more than $6 million by threatening BitTorrent users who allegedly downloaded pirated porn videos, some of which the attorney created and uploaded himself.

“Steele admitted that he and Hansmeier created a series of sham entities to obtain copyrights to pornographic movies – some of which they filmed themselves – and then uploaded those movies to file-sharing websites like ‘The Pirate Bay’ in order to lure people to download the movies,” the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced.

The Pirate Bay played an important role in this case. Not only were the founders of the site heard as witnesses, but the site was also an unwitting part of Prenda’s honeypot scheme as our coverage exposed several years ago.

“…defendants caused P.H. to upload their clients’ pornographic movies to BitTorrent file-sharing websites, including a website named the Pirate Bay, without their clients’ consent in order to entice people to download the movies and make it easier to catch those who attempted to obtain the movies,” the plea agreement reads.

From the plea agreement

Prenda Law went to great lengths to hide its direct involvement in the uploading of the material as well as its personal stake in the lawsuits and settlements, according to the plea agreement.

After extracting IP-addresses of account holders who allegedly shared the files Prenda created and uploaded, they asked courts for subpoenas to obtain the personal info of their targets from ISPs. This contact information was then used to coerce victims to pay high settlement fees.

“Steele and Hansmeier used extortionate tactics such as letters and phone calls to threaten victims with enormous financial penalties and public embarrassment unless they agreed to pay a $3,000 settlement fee,” the DoJ writes.

No sentencing date has been set yet. In theory, the Prenda attorney now faces statutory maximum sentence of 40 years in prison as well as a criminal fine of hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, by signing a plea agreement Steele is likely eligible for a reduced sentence.

Steele’s co-defendant Paul Hansmeier remains innocent until proven otherwise. However, he appears to be worse off now that Steele’s words can be used against him. Steele’s full guilty plea is available here (pdf).

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

Website blockades are becoming more common throughout Europe, but with a flurry of recent orders Italy takes the crown.

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.

An overview of most of the key cases available on the website of local telecoms watchdog AGCOM lists 300 blocked urls alone.

Over the past week several new domain names were added once again, including ddlhqfilm.com, flashx.tv, games.torrentsnack.com, mega-wii.com, musicplayon.com and rarbg.to.

The applications came from a variety of rightsholder groups and companies, listing several examples of copyright infringements. For Mega-Wii, for example, Digital Content Protection listed several pirated games belonging to EA, Nintendo and Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Based on the information provided, AGCOM ordered local ISPs to block access to the site within two days, as required by law.

TorrentFreak spoke to a site operator whose domain name was blocked recently. He says that in absolute terms, the effect is fairly obvious. Italian traffic to the site tanked soon after Internet providers processed the order, as can be seen below.

Traffic drop following blockade

Still, whether this means that these visitors will stop pirating is less clear. The operator, who prefers not to have his site named, points out that people will simply find ways arount the restrictions.

“These blockades definitely have major effects on site users. Users learn to circumvent them, realizing how stupid their governments are,” the operator informs TorrentFreak.

The effectiveness of the blockades is also put in doubt by academic research. University of Padua professor Giorgio Clemente previously ran a comprehensive analysis, comparing traffic data before and after the Italian blocking measures were implemented.

This research used the same methodology as an earlier MPAA-commissioned study which examined UK blockades. However, instead of merely looking at the blocked domains, Professor Clemente also took domain name changes into account because site operators commonly switch domains to bypass censorship efforts.

With this more complete set of datapoints, he found that Government-sanctioned blockades actually increased traffic to the targeted sites.

“The most important conclusion is that blocking access to websites increases their popularity. In particular, AGCOM helps to advertise pirated works, creating the classic and well-known Streisand effect,” Professor Clemente told TF at the time.

Still, AGCOM and rightsholders are convinced that their actions help people to stay away from pirate sites. In addition to the domains mentioned above, there’s also an application pending against the popular streaming site 123movies, which is the next target to be blocked.

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

Decades ago when the Internet was a distant dream, copyright legislation existed to protect content found in the physical world. As a result, most countries have robust legislation in place to tackle someone counterfeiting a CD or DVD, for example.

With the rise of online digital content, some of that legislation has been struggling to catch up. In the UK, for example, offline infringement is punishable by up to 10 years in jail, while online infringement currently carries a maximum two-year sentence.

Back in March 2014, Mike Weatherley MP, then IP advisor to former Prime Minister David Cameron, said that the disparity “sends all the wrong messages” and something should be done to correct it. Fast forward to today, and the UK is extremely close to making ten-year sentences for online infringement a reality.

The amendment contained in the Digital Economy Bill certainly ticks all the boxes as far as rightsholders are concerned. However, there is a serious problem for the general public.

As the draft law currently stands, anyone who makes available any amount of copyrighted content without permission will open themselves up to criminal liability, if when doing so they expose a copyright owner to the “risk of loss”. That definition is extremely broad and depending on how rightsholders choose to frame any infringement, prosecutions could have a worryingly low bar to entry.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed to the Open Rights Group, who have been putting the government under pressure to include specific wording in the legislation to ensure that a clear criminal threshold is written into the law. It also expressed concerns that the amendments could encourage more copyright trolls in the UK.

The government has now formally responded to ORG but not in any positive way.

“The criminal offenses penalize communicating a copyright work to the public and infringing a performer’s ‘making available’ right. Both of these acts are considered criminal where a person knows, or has reason to believe, that they are infringing the right and either intends to make a monetary gain, or knows or has reason to believe that they will cause loss or expose the rights holder to a risk of loss in money,” the government writes.

“These offenses focus on those causing harm either for monetary gain or a monetary loss or risk of loss to the rights holder. A mental element has been introduced which requires an intention to make a gain or knowledge or reason to believe that the copyright owner will suffer loss or be exposed to a risk of loss.”

As ORG points out in its response, many small-time infringements can be intentional, from using a photograph of a pop star on a personal site through to low-volume sharing music on torrent networks.

“As we have said, publication without a license is often an intentional act, where people either know or ought to know that they are infringing copyright. The question is whether these usually minor offenses are worthy of criminal sanctions?” the group writes.

“The acts appear to be criminal under the proposed offense. We understand that they are unlikely to be sentenced, or even prosecuted, but the question remains as to why these minor acts should be criminalized, rather than being subject to civil charges.”

It’s a question that the government doesn’t appear to want to answer, despite the relatively easy job of introducing a threshold for criminal behavior into the relevant Digital Economy Bill section.

“Our proposal is to set a threshold of ‘commercial scale loss’, and revising ‘risk of loss’ to ‘serious risk of commercial scale loss’. These are flexible rather than ‘specific’, so the government’s objection does not make sense to us,” ORG notes.

But despite these calls, the government remains unmoved.

“It would not be practical for the government to set a specific level of loss or gain at which infringement becomes a criminal offense. This is because the circumstances of each infringement needs to be taken into account,” it says.

The government’s comments on copyright trolling also raise concerns. While correctly noting that rightsholders are perfectly entitled to seek compensation when their rights are infringed, the government notes that those targeted have a support mechanism at hand, should they feel they are being bullied.

“Copyright owners are entitled to enforce their rights. On occasion this may include contacting members of the public who are alleged to have infringed their rights. Such approaches are entirely legal,” the government notes.

“However if done in a threatening or harassing way, members of the public can report the solicitors in question to the Solicitor’s Regulatory Authority (SRA). The SRA has taken action in previous such cases.”

The SRA has indeed taken action against at least one rogue solicitor, but this Achilles heel was quickly spotted by copyright trolling companies. Now, to avoid this kind of scrutiny, none of the trolls currently active in the UK use solicitors to contact the public, it’s all done by private companies. That means the SRA has no jurisdiction and the public has no body of support to fall back on.

Open Rights Group Executive Director Jim Killock informs TorrentFreak that the government’s resistance on both counts leaves the public open to exploitation and even imprisonment.

“ORG supporters asked for small and sensible changes to the Digital Economy Bill, which would reduce the risk of ordinary people facing the threat of criminal charges,” Killock informs TF.

“The IPO haven’t adequately explained why they cannot or should not introduce a threshold for criminality. Without these changes, we could see people being exploited by copyright trolls and threatened with prison sentences for minor offenses.”

The Open Rights Group are calling for supporters to keep up the pressure by emailing Jo Johnson MP, before it’s too late.

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