With help from copyright holders, ISPs will send email notifications to subscribers whose connections are allegedly used to pirate content.

These “alerts” are meant to educate copyright infringers about legal alternatives in the hope of decreasing piracy rates over time.

In recent weeks the parties involved have put everything in place to get going. Following BT, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Sky have all now posted advisories on their respective websites.

A question that repeatedly returns is whether people are at risk of losing their broadband access. The answer for all parties is a clear NO. Sky, however, isn’t letting its customers continue on their merry way without any repercussions.

“Your broadband service won’t be affected as a result of receiving this email alert,” Sky assures its subscribers, but it doesn’t stop there.

“However, if you continue to share content illegally using your broadband connection, Sky will request that you take immediate steps to remove or disable any file sharing software that is being used to share copyrighted content illegally,” Sky writes.

In other words, repeat infringers can expect follow-up communication from the ISP, asking them to remove all BitTorrent clients that are used to share infringing material. That’s quite a strong message.

This promise also raises a new question. What will happen if the users in question refuse to remove the file-sharing software, or get caught again? Will that lead to more severe repercussions?

The FAQ section doesn’t go into detail on this hypothetical situation. That said, many ISPs reserve the rights to terminate accounts of users who are persistent copyright infringers.

TorrentFreak also reviewed the advisories of the other ISPs, but none of these refer to such follow-up requests.

TalkTalk does stress that they won’t report customers to the police though, and Virgin mentions that they won’t share any personal details with copyright holders, unless they receive a valid court order.

In a way, it’s not really surprising that Sky has a more aggressive approach. The company is a major copyright holder itself and has invested “billions of pounds” in entertainment.

Whether their emails will help cut these losses has yet to be seen…

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

Millions of people use Kodi as their main source of entertainment, often with help from add-ons that allow them to access pirated movies and TV-shows.

One of the most popular addons is Exodus. The software is maintained by “Lambda,” who’s one of the most prolific developers in the community.

Exodus is widely praised as one of the most useful addons to access streaming video, including pirated movies and TV-shows. This prominent position also brings along quite a few adversaries, which recently led to an unusual situation.

Due to the controversial nature of his work, Lambda has always preferred to remain anonymous. However, he was recently confronted with some people who copied his work and/or threatened to expose his real identity. But instead of backing down, he launched an attack.

Roughly a week ago several lines of code were added to the Exodus plugin, which contacted external sites. While this is nothing new for Kodi addons, in this case the lines in question were targeting resources of Lambda’s adversaries.

Soon after people started to notice, complaints started rolling in accusing Exodus of creating a DDoS “botnet.” The Ares Blog mentioned the issue and a lively discussion started in the TV Addons forum, where the developer himself joined in defending his actions.

The offending code

Lambda says that he added the code as a countermeasure against people who he believes are trying to do harm or get him in legal trouble. The users themselves are not harmed by the code since they are simply trying to access another web source, he adds.

“Like I said they try to find my identity and give me legal trouble. I have no choice but to protect myself. If this won’t help me to defend myself I will retire from all these and focus on my legal addons,” the developer notes.

While some people sympathized with the move, Lambda eventually decided to make the “protection” feature optional. Still, that didn’t satisfy everyone and soon after the developer decided to throw in the towel and retire.

“I just couldn’t deal with all this stress anymore, I made bad decisions that I shouldn’t take and I am sorry about that,” Lambda explains in a formal apology.

“I think this is the time for me to leave, this whole thing is changing me as a person, so it’s time for me to take care of myself and leave this scene once and for all,” he adds.

TorrentFreak reached out to TV Addons repository which offers the Exodus addon, and they told us that the malicious code is no longer present. They are very unhappy with the incident and say they did their best to resolve the matter as swiftly as possible.

“The actions taken were inexcusable,” TV Addons’ Eleazar informed us. When they found out about the code, the developer’s repository was locked and they stress that “this situation is not being taken lightly.”

TV Addons has previously published a malicious code policy and says it takes an active stance against this type of abuse. As such, the team has taken it upon themselves to continue the development of Exodus, with Lambda’s approval.

“Moving forward, his addons will be maintained by another member of our team. TV ADDONS stands for the end user first, integrity is of our utmost concern,” Eleazar notes.

As for Lambda himself, he plans to continue his work on other projects.

“I want to thank everybody who stood by me all these years. It’s time for me to move on and I hope the team to take over my beloved addon. Take care everybody,” he concludes.

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

Despite its proximity to European countries with strong intellectual property laws, Ukraine tends to fall behind when it comes to online piracy.

As a result, the site has played host to a wide range of prominent sites over the years, not least The Pirate Bay and ExtraTorrent.

As a result of its lax approach, Ukraine has been criticized on many occasions by the United States, particularly by the USTR who regularly brands the country as a piracy haven. This week it was the European Commission’s time to chime in.

In an interview with Ukrainian news outlet Unian, Nicholas Burge, head of the trade section of the European Commission’s delegation to Ukraine, expressed his opinions on where the country needs to improve.

“There should be a law that would provide a major responsibility for the contents of pirate sites. We will only believe in Ukraine’s serious intentions to fight pirate sites when there are penalties for those involved in supporting them,” he said.

Given moves underway in both the US and EU that could affect safe harbors for Internet service providers and hosting platforms, it’s no surprise that Burge wants Ukraine to take a firmer line with those present in Ukraine, especially those playing host to pirate sites.

“Internet service providers should also bear some legal responsibility for what they do. Otherwise, putting an end to online piracy will be impossible,” he said.

The EU representative said that this would have been possible under recent draft legislation designed to protect the film industry, but the amendments were vetoed by the President and never put into place.

“We urge Parliament to consider and adopt appropriate amendments to the law as soon as possible,” Burge said.

While Ukraine isn’t known for taking a hard line against pirate sites, it would be wrong to suggest it does nothing at all. Only recently, Ukrainian police acted on a complaint from the MPAA to close down FS.to, one of the country’s largest pirate sites. Sixty servers were seized and 19 people arrested. However, Burge believes more needs to be done.

“One site was closed and another appeared. This is a battle that is constantly going on,” he said.

According to comments made to Unian, Burge said that by neglecting intellectual property rights, Ukraine is not fulfilling its obligations under the Association Agreement with the EU and risks damaging relationships with the economic and political union.

“In case of default, the Agreement provides for appropriate mechanisms to deal with such situations within our relationships,” Burge said.

In addition to new criticism from the EU, Ukraine already faces annual complaints from the United States Trade Representative. In its latest Special 301 Report, the USTR kept Ukraine on its Priority List, meaning the country must make significant improvements if it is to meet US standards for IP protection.

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

This week KickassTorrents’ alleged owner Artem Vaulin asked the Illinois District Court to dismiss the criminal indictment and set him free.

The fundamental flaw of the case, according to defense lawyer Ira Rothken, is that torrent files themselves are not copyrighted content.

In addition, he argued that the secondary copyright infringement claims would fail as these are non-existent under criminal law.

District Court Judge John Lee previously questioned the evidence in the case and according to Rothken, it is certainly not enough to keep his client behind bars. This is also what he told the court during the hearing this week, stressing that torrents themselves are not copyrighted.

“We believe that the indictment against Artem Vaulin in the KAT torrent files case is defective and should be dismissed. Torrent files are not content files. The reproduction and distribution of torrent files are not a crime,” Rothken tells TF.

“If a third party uses torrent files to infringe it is after they leave the KAT site behind and such conduct is too random, inconsistent, and attenuated to impose criminal liability on Mr. Vaulin. The government cannot use the civil judge-made law in Grokster as a theory in a criminal case.”

Furthermore, Rothken argued that the US indictment is flawed because it fails to allege an actual criminal copyright infringement anywhere in the world, the United States included. The defense likened KickassTorrents to general search engines such as Google instead.

On the other side of the aisle stood US Department of Justice prosecutor Devlin Su. He urged the court to wait for the extradition hearing in Poland before ruling on the request, noting that Vaulin should come to the US voluntarily if he wanted to speed things up.

According to the prosecution, KickassTorrents operated as a piracy flea market, with an advertising revenue of about $12.5 million to $22.3 million. Comparing it with Google is nonsense, Su argued.

“Google is not dedicated to uploading and distributing copyrighted works,” Law360 quotes the prosecutor.

It is now up to the Illinois District Court to decide how to move forward. The defense is hoping for an outright dismissal, while the U.S. wants to move forward.

Meanwhile, over in Poland, Vaulin remains in custody after he was denied bail. Facing severe health issues, the Ukrainian was transferred from Polish prison to a local hospital a few weeks ago, where he remains under heavy guard.

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

In July 2011, the Czech division of the Pirate Party reacted angrily when a local anti-piracy outfit targeted a 16-year-old who they accused of posting links to infringing content.

Under the slogan “Linking is not a Crime” the party launched Tipnafilm.cz, its own pirate movie download site, quickly followed by another indexing 5,800 titles.

“We challenge the Anti-Piracy Union to stop bullying the under-aged and to aim its preposterous claims at the Pirate Party,” the pirates said at the time.

In a declaration of “open war,” the Czech Pirates went on to launch TV-focused site Sledujuserialy.cz (I Watch TV Series). That provoked a response from the Anti-Piracy Union, and in January 2016 the party became the subject of a criminal prosecution, which they welcomed with open arms.

Sledujuserialy.cz – I Watch TV Series

“Our goal is to change the copyright monopoly law so that people are not fined millions for sharing culture with their friends. However, until we achieve that, we will fight in courts over interpretation and enforcement of the law,” the party said.

But now, a year later, the action against the party has fizzled out. Despite offering 1,205 videos without permission from copyright holders and standing accused of causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses, the Prague District Court has stopped the prosecution in its tracks.

After consulting EU case law, particularly the landmark GS Media ruling in the Netherlands, it was found that since the Pirates ran their site without generating revenue, they weren’t in violation of the law.

“The sledujuserialy.cz website was non-commercial. Therefore the owner of the website does not have the obligation to check the ‘legality of hyperlinks’ on his website, i.e. we did not have to check whether the content was online legally,” party spokesman Mikulas Ferjencik informs TorrentFreak.

“Unfortunately, if our website was commercial we would have to check it. The good thing about the current decision is that it specifies ‘non-commercial’ pretty broadly, i.e. no financial profit for us.”

While the absence of revenue played its part, the problems for the Pirates’ adversaries did not stop there.

Although the Czech Anti-Piracy Union (CPU) complained to the Pirate Party about links to copyrighted content present on their site, it failed to provide evidence that it was authorized to act on behalf of copyright holders whose content was allegedly being infringed.

“The court stated that a random letter from anyone is not good enough to make us obliged to take down the links even if it is from the CPU, which is notorious for enforcing harsher copyright law,” Ferjencik says.

“However, they provided this evidence to the court in the criminal procedure. This means we cannot put the website back online so easily, as we would have to remove hyperlinks to illegal sources first, as we now officially know these are illegal sources.”

Under same GS Media EU ruling, knowingly linking to infringing content, even without commercial interests, is illegal.

Commenting on this week’s ruling, party vice-president Jakub Michálek says that the value of hyperlinks shouldn’t be understated and anti-piracy outfits shouldn’t overreach.

“If we want a working digital economy, where also the artists make money, we cannot turn sharing of a hyperlink on a video a crime. This ruling is important for legal certainty of all Internet users as it states that you do not infringe copyright by linking unless you know that the content was uploaded illegally,” Michálek said.

“The court also confirmed that the Czech Anti-Piracy Union cannot act as the Internet Police and they cannot ask other actors to take down content, without providing evidence that they act on behalf of the copyright owners.”

Party chairman Ivan Bartos says that the criminal prosecution is proof that rightsholders are clinging to their old business models, which appear to be doing rather well, despite piracy.

“We view the whole case as a fight between a modern and backward understanding of the world and digital reality. The criminal prosecution is proof that the old structures do not want to innovate. Instead, they rely on their old business models, which do not have much to do with reality,” Bartos says.

“Last year, 13 million people went to the Cinema in the Czech Republic, it is the highest number in the last five years. If this is the result of piracy – and I believe it is – the filmmakers should thank us instead of suing us.”

The decision of the Prague court (pdf) is not yet final and the public prosecutor could still file an appeal.

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