Slowly but steadily piracy has moved away from downloads to streaming. According to recent estimates, streaming services are already more popular than torrent sites, a trend that seems hard to stop.

One factor that plays a major role in this shift is ease of use. Aside from having movie and TV-shows instantly available, it’s also easier to stream content on a regular TV, through Kodi powered applications or set-top boxes for example. While Kodi itself is a neutral platform, there are lots of add-ons available that turn in into a pirate’s heaven.

TVAddons is of the largest repositories of these plugins. The site, which also distributes FreeTelly, a custom pre-loaded version of Kodi for the PC and Mac, is the go-to destination for those who want to upgrade their Kodi experience.

TorrentFreak spoke to TVAddons’ Eleazar, who informs us that the recent growth in popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed.

While the site doesn’t keep any in-depth statistics for privacy reasons, they do know how many active Kodi users access their add-ons because of the update requests they receive. These numbers show a sharp increase.

December last year, TVAddons received 2.8 million unique calls to their update server per day, and over 13 million for the entire month. Today, these numbers have doubled to a rough average of 5.6 million per day and 24.7 million a month.

This means that every 24 hours more than five million Kodi-boxes with their add-ons are online, checking for updates.

TVAddons update traffic

According to Eleazar, the convenience of Kodi is one of the main drivers for this growth. Compared to many torrent and streaming sites, the clean interface is a breath of fresh air.

“It makes the streaming process far simpler and more enjoyable than visiting sketchy ad-ridden sites, or using torrent-based services like Popcorn Time that end up resulting in hundreds of thousands of people receiving legal fines,” Eleazar says.

“Anyone who uses Kodi on a regular basis considers it a life changer, bringing more entertainment to their home than they ever thought possible,” he adds.

Of course, pirates are not the only ones who’ve been watching the rise of Kodi’s pirate add-ons. The entertainment industry and law enforcement are keeping a close eye on the situation as well.

Several sellers of pre-loaded Kodi boxes have been raided, with some risking serious prison time. And just last week the UK Intellectual Property Office described pirate boxes as a growing threat.

The makers of Kodi are not happy with these developments. They clearly want to distance themselves from anything piracy related, blaming the add-on makers and distributors. TVAddons, however, doesn’t believe that it’s breaking the law.

“Technically we’re not doing anything wrong, we don’t encourage users to distribute pirated content like torrent apps do, nor do we have anything to do with the content whatsoever.”

“We’re just providing code that ‘can’ be used to scrape websites, the content of those sites has nothing to do with us,” Eleazar adds.

Nevertheless, TVAddons has taken various preventive measures to ensure the continuation of its operation, such as regularly moving their servers. In addition, they have several policies in place to preserve the privacy of add-on developers and users.

TVAddons also make it clear that they are strongly against the sale of preloaded hardware devices and paid services. They feel it “dumbs” down the community and causes users to feel that they owe them something, since they paid for it.

Thus far TVAddons hasn’t seen any public complaints from the industry that target their service. So, instead of focusing on the negative, they’re putting their efforts into improving what they have to offer – more convenient streaming tools and better add-ons.

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

One of Russia’s most prominent anti-piracy fighters has found himself at the center of a criminal fraud investigation.

Maxim Ryabyko, Director General of Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPO), was reportedly arrested in Moscow earlier this week, together with a friend.

According to local news reports, the pair were carrying out a money handoff after offering to help drop a criminal investigation against a local Internet entrepreneur in return for 50 million rubles ($800,000).

Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs confirmed the arrests but didn’t mention any names. Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk said that two men were arrested in a cafe in the center of Moscow on Thursday, suspected of fraud. Both have since been released on bail.

A source in the Government, however, confirmed to the TASS news agency that AZAPO’s General Director was one of the arrested men.

While details are scarce, there are reports suggesting that the case is related to the prominent pirate book library Lib.rus.ec. Last week AZAPO announced that the site was being investigated in both Russia and Ecuador, while the operators are on the run.

AZAPO’s announcement specifically highlighted the possible involvement of the Russian service iMobilco, which reportedly charged for access to infringing books obtained through Lib.rus.ec, without compensating copyright holders.

In a separate article, AZAPO reprinted a news report from Gazeta which reported that Russian authorities carried out a search at the Moscow home of iMobilco’s founder, Nikolai Belousov.

Belousov is reportedly the person who was being offered a “deal” in exchange for 50 million rubles.

iMobilco’s founder told the news site Vedomosti that he is aware of Ryabyko’s arrest. He says that he was being extorted after AZAPO accused him of profiting from copyright infringements linked to Lib.rus.ec.

AZAPO’s General Director, meanwhile, denies all allegations including the arrest itself, which he says he first heard about in the media.

In recent months the anti-piracy group has been in the news several times, most notably for its efforts to block the prominent torrent site RuTracker, and limit copyright infringements on sites such as VKontakte.

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

The concept of whole-site blocking has been on the entertainment industries’ agenda for a decade now, after Russia’s AllofMP3 and then The Pirate Bay were blocked in Denmark. Since then, momentum has been building.

Blocking is now underway in multiple countries around the world, especially in Europe where the practice is widespread. The music and movie industries say blocking is effective but they also know that pushing blockades through the courts can be expensive and controversial.

In Portugal, however, things are much more streamlined. Thanks to an agreement forged between rightsholders, ISPs and the government in 2015, it is now a formality to have sites blocked in the country. If the parties agree that a site is operating illegally it can be blocked, all without stepping into a courtroom.

No surprise then that copyright holders have been taking full advantage of the system. After blocking The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent, Isohunt, RARBG, and dozens of others in October 2015, another 40 sites were added the month after. By April 2016 at least 330 sites had been blocked and every month the same process repeats.

The smoothness of the non-adversarial system appears to have impressed the MPAA. According to a SapoTek report, the Hollywood group has been presenting the Portuguese model to the Spanish Senate and is now planning to do the same before the French Senate.

FEVIP, the Portuguese Association of Audiovisual Works Defense, said in a statement that an MPAA-sponsored study between September 2015 and February 2016 found that out of 250 unauthorized sites, 22 had already been voluntarily blocked by the program.

Paulo Santos, executive director of FEVIP, said that Portugal’s program is now receiving international recognition for its streamlined processes. Noting a “special efficiency” in relation to results versus costs of litigation, Santos said that the program has resulted in a decrease in visits to pirate sites of “at least 60%”.

FEVIP say that the reductions are similar to those achieved by blocking in the UK, where the group claims pirate sites typically lose 75% of their local users within three months of a blockade being put in place.

To date, hundreds of sites and thousands of URLs have been blocked in both countries, yet piracy somehow persists. Clearly, a 60% or even 75% reduction in traffic to domains is not translating to a similar drop in piracy rates or indeed, increases in sales.

However, it seems likely that the MPAA and others will continue their blocking efforts regardless. Voluntary solutions are clearly in favor, since they receive less judicial scrutiny after implementation and cost far less to run on an ongoing basis. Spain and France next? Only time will tell.

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

Last summer saw the launch of the latest Nintendo craze, with the augmented reality Pokémon Go game taking the world by storm.

While most countries don’t have a problem with Nintendo’s popular offering, others have reacted negatively after players turned up in culturally sensitive areas.

Similar issues are now causing problems in India, despite the game not being available there. But of course, that hasn’t stopped determined pirates from getting copies.

Over the past several months, countless people in India have been downloading illicit copies of Pokémon Go from the Internet. In the West, this has already caused copyright issues, but India’s are somewhat unique.

Public-Interest Litigation (PIL) is quite literally litigation for the protection of the public interest. One such PIL was filed last month in the Gujarat High Court against the developers of Pokémon Go. The petitioner claimed that the game hurt the religious feelings of citizens after it placed eggs in places of worship.

“To find eggs in temples of Hindus and Jains is blasphemous, and therefore my client has sought a ban on the game from the country,” petitioner Alay Anil Dave’s lawyer told the Court.

A second PIL filed with the Court by Sanjay Chaudhari claims that the game endangers public safety.

San Francisco-based developer Niantic Inc. and central and state governments are respondents in the somewhat unusual cases and all were issued with notices by the Court last week. Of course, the PILs aren’t copyright-related but the same problems persist – how can Indians be stopped from pirating and then playing the game?

That’s the question now being asked by the Gujarat High Court, which has filed a request with the state government asking for ideas on what steps can be taken to stop the game from being downloaded from the Internet.

“The division bench of Chief Justice R Subhash Reddy and Justice V M Pancholi asked the government how the downloading of the game could be stopped, after it was told that legally the game was still not available in India, yet people were downloading its pirated copy,” the report notes.

Only time will tell what solutions the state government will come up with. However, India has developed quite a reputation for broad-brush actions to stop citizens downloading illicit content from the Internet.

So-called ‘John Doe’ orders have regularly restricted access to sites including The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent and hundreds of other domains, so a similar response could be under consideration.

That being said, trying to stop downloads of an app that typically weighs in at just 60MB will be an entirely different matter.

There are many thousands of sites that can and do host the game, including entirely legitimate affairs such as Dropbox. Stopping the distribution of Pokémon Go in India won’t be just difficult, it will be entirely unachievable by any anti-piracy technique, or any number of techniques working in tandem.

Perhaps the only way of making a dent in this problem will be getting the developer on board to restrict where Pokémon appear. That would certainly make more sense than going down the blocking route and all the collateral damage that would cause.

We’ll know more about the blocking plans next week, which could provide an indication of just how far India’s courts are prepared to go when it comes to blocking illicit content online.

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

Millions of Pirate Bay users are currently unable to access the torrent detail pages on the site without receiving a stark warning.

Over the past few hours Chrome and Firefox have started to block access to ThePirateBay.org due to reported security issues.

The homepage and various categories can be reached without problems, but when visitors navigate to a download page they are presented with an ominous red warning banner.

“Deceptive site ahead: Attackers on Thepiratebay.org may trick you into doing something dangerous like installing software or revealing your personal information,” it reads.

“Google Safe Browsing recently detected phishing on thepiratebay.org. Phishing sites pretend to be other websites to trick you,” the Chrome warning adds.

Chrome’s latest Pirate Bay warning

Firefox is showing a similar error message, as do all applications and services that use Google’s safe browsing database, which currently lists TPB as “partially dangerous.”

According to Google the notorious torrent site is linked to a phishing effort, where malicious actors try to steal the personal information of visitors.

It’s likely that the security error is caused by a malicious third-party advertisement. The TPB team informs TorrentFreak that they are aware of the issue, which they hope will be resolved soon.

This is not the first time that The Pirate Bay has been flagged by Google’s safe browsing filter. The same happened just a month ago, when the site was accused of spreading “harmful programs.” That warning eventually disappeared after a few days.

By now, most Chrome and Firefox users should be familiar with these intermittent warning notices. Those who are in a gutsy mood can simply “ignore the warning” or take steps (Chrome, FF) to bypass the blocks permanently.

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