Earlier this year, the Australian Government’s Productivity Commission published a Draft Report on Intellectual Property Arrangements. It recommended various amendments to local copyright law.

As previously reported, the Commission suggested allowing the use of VPNs and similar technologies to enable consumers to bypass restrictive geo-blocking. It also tabled proposals to lower the length of time content remains protected by copyright and suggested the introduction of fair use exceptions.

Australia currently employs a “fair dealing” approach. Specific exemptions for research or study, criticism or review, parody or satire, news reporting and certain use within legal circles are available. Under a “fair use” arrangement, it’s envisioned that a use would not necessarily have to fall into the categories above to be fair.

“This is one of the key benefits of fair use. Unlike the fair dealing provisions, fair use is not limited to a set of prescribed purposes,” the Australian Law Reform Commission explains.

While the Commission insists that under “fair use” it will still be possible to outlaw instances where infringement undermines the ordinary exploitation of a work, copyright holders are not convinced. They see the introduction of fair use as an erosion of their rights.

For example, Foxtel says that fair use would introduce “significant and unnecessary uncertainty into Australian law” while undermining copyright protection that’s essential for “protecting investment in Australia‘s cultural industries.”

As 2016 enters its final weeks, momentum against fair use is building. A new campaign launched by the Copyright Agency alongside royalties and anti-piracy group APRA AMCOS hopes to convince lawmakers that culture itself is under threat.

The campaign comes in two slightly different flavors “This Song Changed My Life” and “This Book Changed My Life.” It has many Australian celebrities uploading short videos to the campaign site in which they explain how songs and books changed their lives.

“Your choices around how you access creative content can have a real impact. Books, songs, plays, movies, art and even poems are powered by copyright. Copyright helps take our Australian voices, our unique take on life, to the world,” the campaign notes read.

“You can show your respect for creators by pledging to pay for the creations you love, asking before you use other people’s creative work, crediting creators for their work and letting others know that it’s important to you. By showing your respect in this way, you can help an author, musician or artist to keep creating amazing and powerful works for us to enjoy.”

For royalties outfit the Copyright Agency, the introduction of fair use could mean a significant reduction in revenues. Currently the agency collects between AUS$17 and AUS$30 per student per year when teachers copy and share content with their students. Under fair use, arguably that same freedom could be obtained for free.

Author and TV personality Tara Moss told News.com.au that the introduction of fair use would mean that creators have to go to court to protect their rights.

“Court battles are not something most authors can afford, and history tells us that a lot of this style of fair use benefits big companies the most, including tech companies, while smaller businesses and individuals, including writers, lose their rights to fair compensation,” she said.

Following the publication of the government’s Productivity Commission draft in April, the final report detailing all of the proposed changes to copyright law is currently with the government. It’s expected to be tabled in parliament during the first quarter of 2017.

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

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

Ben Hur is the most downloaded movie for the second 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)	Ben Hur	5.7 / trailer
2	(…)	Inferno (subbed HDrip)	6.4 / trailer
3	(3)	Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (TS)	7.9 / trailer
4	(2)	Pete’s Dragon	7.1 / trailer
5	(…)	The Accountant (subbed HDrip)	7.6 / trailer
6	(…)	Sully	7.7 / trailer
7	(5)	Doctor Strange (Cam/TS)	8.0 / trailer
8	(4)	Snowden	7.4 / trailer
9	(6)	Suicide Squad	6.7 / trailer
10	(…)	Storks	7.0 / trailer

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

For well over a decade, there’s been a clear distinction between public indexes and private trackers in the torrent community.

The first are open to anyone, and prominently visible in general search engines. The latter prefer to keep a lower profile, and often require users to maintain a healthy share ratio.

In recent weeks, an odd newcomer appeared online that is neither public nor private, according to the established definitions.

AlphaReign.se is a new site that allows users to find torrents gathered from BitTorrent’s ‘trackerless’ Distributed Hash Table, or DHT for short. While we have seen DHT search engines before, this one requires an account to gain access.

Private, in this case, is relative, as the operator has publicly shared an invite link that allows anyone to join. However, there is a good reason why this roadblock was put in place.

“The main reason is that if we have a login, we can keep torrents from being indexed by search engines and thus DMCA’d much less frequently. We can also block abusive users,” AlphaReign’s Prefinem tells TorrentFreak.

“While it does create a barrier to entry, we feel the increased control will help us last longer than traditional torrent search engines,” he adds.

AR’s login

This is quite an interesting development. Most public torrent sites work very hard to be visible in regular torrent search engines in order to drive more traffic to the site. AlphaReign, however, appears to give priority to fending off takedown requests.

For the operator, the DHT search engine is a culmination of previous experiments. In the past, he coded more traditional torrent indexes that relied on trackers, but these often shut down.

“With the new AlphaReign, I wanted to build a search engine that didn’t rely on trackers since these can be taken offline,” Prefinem says.

Another advantage is that he no longer has to scrape torrents from external sites. Instead, he crawls the open DHT network for new content and adds this to his existing search index.

At the time of writing, AlphaReign lists 5.7 million public torrents. Aside from having to login, the site functions like a regular search engine, listing magnet links in the results instead of torrents.

AR’s search results

The site’s operator notes that the site is still a work in progress, but thus far feedback on sites such as Reddit has been positive.

In the future, he hopes to expand AlphaReign with new software that allows users to search the DHT network on their own devices, with help from peers. Such a system would remain online, even if the website itself goes down.

“This is a long-term goal, but one I believe is necessary for torrents to stay alive. Think of it as like a Tor node, that passes DHT queries in-between all the nodes and each node runs an independent search engine that can be queried by anyone,” Prefinem explains.

Regular readers may notice that AlphaReign shows a lot of similarities with the defunct DHT search engine Strike. However, Prefinem assures us that it was developed from scratch. In fact, he had never even heard of Strike until this week.

It will be interesting to see how a private DHT search engine will perform in the long run and whether the operator will achieve his goals.

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

This week, Members of Parliament debated the Report stage and Third Reading of the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Commons. The bill is broad in scope and has the ability to upset Internet users in a number of ways.

As reported by The Guardian this week, if the bill passes web users in the UK will be banned from websites which portray certain sex acts, all of which are entirely legal between consenting adults in the country. Websites which fail to stop UK residents from viewing such content will be blocked.

Here at TF we’ve been keeping an eye on the proposed changes to the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) which will affect people who share copyrighted content online.

As previously reported, the government’s main aim is to harmonize penalties for offline infringements with those carried out online, chiefly by upping the maximum penalty from two to ten years in prison. The latest bill published this week puts some additional meat on the bones.

As things stand under current law, section 107 (criminal liability for making or dealing with infringing articles) reads as follows:

(2A) A person who infringes copyright in a work by communicating the work to the public —

(a) in the course of a business, or

(b) otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright,

commits an offense if he knows or has reason to believe that, by doing so, he is infringing copyright in that work.

The latest draft amendment makes no mention of carrying out infringement during the course of business. Instead, for a person to be held criminally liable for distribution (such as uploading), they only need to have reason to believe something infringes copyright while making a personal gain, a gain for someone else, or exposing a copyright owner to the mere risk of loss.

(2A) A person (“P”) who infringes copyright in a work by communicating the work to the public commits an offense if P —

(a) knows or has reason to believe that P is infringing copyright in the work, and
(b) either —
(i) intends to make a gain for P or another person, or
(ii) knows or has reason to believe that communicating the work to the public will cause loss to the owner of the copyright, or will expose the owner of the copyright to a risk of loss.

In this context, the words ‘gain’ and ‘loss’ are very important. For the avoidance of doubt, the draft sets the bar as low as it can practically go.

(2B) For the purposes of subsection (2A) —
(a) “gain” and “loss” —
(i) extend only to gain or loss in money, and
(ii) include any such gain or loss whether temporary or
permanent, and
(b) “loss” includes a loss by not getting what one might get.

Similar amendments are proposed for section 198 of the CDPA, which deals with ‘Criminal liability for making, dealing with or using illicit recordings’.

“These are recordings made without the consent of the performer (i.e. piracy or bootlegging). Bootlegging is the recording, duplication and sale of a performance such as a live concert stage performance without the permission of the performer,” a description from the Crown Prosecution Service reads.

Like the amendments to section 107, gone are the references in current legislation to offenses carried out in the course of a business. Instead, the wording closely follows the section detailed above.

(1A) A person (“P”) who infringes a performer’s making available right in a recording commits an offense if P —

(a) knows or has reason to believe that P is infringing the right, and
(b)either—
(i) intends to make a gain for P or another person, or
(ii) knows or has reason to believe that infringing the right will cause loss to the owner of the right, or expose the owner of the right to a risk of loss.

In common with the amendments to section 107, to be found criminally liable an infringer will only need to expose a rightsholder to the risk of loss, not an actual loss.

While at several points MPs have insisted that these legislative amendments won’t target the man in the street or the casual file-sharer, there appears to be nothing in the above that excludes a person who shares a single movie, song, or indeed bootleg recording, from being branded a criminal by the state.

The full draft bill can be downloaded here (pdf, 180 pages)

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

Two weeks ago and seemingly out of the blue, popular private music tracker What.cd went offline. French military police targeted some of the site’s infrastructure at hosting provider OVH and the site responded by deleting itself.

The news came as a huge disappointment to the site’s users and the wider torrent community as a whole, but French police weren’t done yet.

In a follow-up action, French Gendarmerie targeted Zone-Telechargement (Download Zone), the country’s largest pirate site and 11th most-visited website in the region overall. That site went down too, closely followed by affiliated DDL site, DL-Protect.

Behind all of these actions is SACEM, the Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music. This industry group has a mandate to collect and distribute royalties while protecting the copyrights of its members. And according to its general secretary, they’re only just getting started.

In an interview with French news site Le Monde, David El Sayegh said that SACEM and the police hadn’t “just woken up” to pirate sites operating in France. The actions against both What.cd and Zone-Telechargement were the result of a “long process and meticulous work.”

The SACEM chief said the investigation into the two million direct download link Zone-Telechargement began two years ago in partnership with another local anti-piracy outfit. It turned up a lot of useful information.

“We filed a complaint in 2014, joined by ALPA (French Association for the Fight against Piracy). This process was to identify accounts, assets, servers and advertising agencies. It’s always quite a complex and sophisticated system, they are large investigations,” he said.

“There were many advertisements on the site, often pornographic. [Zone-Telechargement] generated at least 1.5 million euros in sales per year, with offshore accounts located in Malta, Cyprus and Belize.”

David El Sayegh said that rightsholders were looking at damages of more than
75 million euros but the operators of the site were no longer resident in France. That didn’t stop their arrests, however. Seven people were arrested on Monday in France and Andorra, with police there calling the action ‘Operation Gervais‘.

“The two administrators, arrested by international mandates, had left France to settle in Andorra. Large seizures of assets were carried out: luxury cars, real estate, and savings accounts,” he said.

The Gendarmerie confirmed the seizure of 450,000 euros and two cars and said that the men, both aged 24, were “repeat offenders.” Authorities in Andorra confirmed that 250,000 euros across several accounts had been frozen.

“We are looking at a case of counterfeiting for profit, on a large scale,” El Sayegh continued. “These people do not pay taxes, they do not pay the rightful rightsholders, they do not respect anything. They have developed a very organized and sophisticated mechanism to voluntarily operate outside the law.”

With the site targeted in France and its operators arrested in Andorra, the operation spread further afield. SACEM says that servers were also seized in Germany and as far away as Iceland, a country often associated with high levels of privacy.

Of course, the recent shutdowns were very unpopular with users, but El Sayegh said that the law is on SACEM’s side.

“These are counterfeit business activities, these are people who have grown rich on the backs of creators. They make millions without paying one euro to creators. They are thugs who should not have the compassion of one person, and who will answer for their acts before justice.”

But while harshly criticizing site operators, El Sayegh tone was a little more moderate when speaking of their users. He asked them to consider how creators are to earn a living in the face of piracy but suggested that they’re only chasing the bigger fish.

“The challenge is mainly to stop those who trade works. But the objective above all is to attack the evil at its source, and the administrators of the pirate sites,” he said.

Other unnamed targets are also in SACEM’s sights. However, it seems unlikely that many sites will continue their stay in France following the events of the past couple of weeks.

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