Whenever anti-piracy groups decide to take action against large file-sharing platforms, they do so on the basis of achieving crushing punishments for their operators. Only severe punishments can stop hardcore pirates, they argue.

In France, a similar situation has been playing out. Back in June 2015 following a four-month investigation, people connected to the public torrent site OMGTorrent were arrested and taken into custody. Early claims suggested the site had offered for download more than 10,000 pirated movies.

Founded in 2008, the site had built up a solid userbase of around 3.5 million visitors per month. Police insisted it was a for-profit project.

“The people behind this platform do not do it for fun, through the platform they earn a lot of money,” a police spokesperson said at the time. “Even if they offer movies without requesting compensation, they earn money with various advertisements that appear alongside.”

Searches of two suspects’ homes yielded several computers plus more than 3.5 terabytes of the latest movies. A separate server found overseas contained several thousand more.

Police warned that the site’s operators could face 10 years in jail plus millions in damages, but they weren’t going to stop there. Their investigations had led them to four of the site’s top downloaders who they intended to prosecute for receiving stolen goods.

After more than a year, six people connected with the site have now been sentenced and it’s harsh punishments all round.

Following a hearing in March, yesterday the Criminal Court of Chalons-en-Champagne (Marne, France) sentenced the founder of OMGTorrent to one year in prison. The 28-year-old was also ordered to pay a fine of around five million euros for the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works.

Also sentenced was a 38-year-old woman who had worked as a moderator on the site. She was given a four-month suspended sentence and told to pay damages to the plaintiffs in the case.

In an unusual turn of events, prosecutors also tracked down four of the site’s most heavy downloaders. They too were given prison sentences of one month each and are required to settle with rightsholders.

Based on an investigation carried out by ALPA (Association Against Audiovisual Piracy), the prosecution estimated that damages exceed 20 million euros.

Following the decision, the site’s founder posted an update to the Wareziens forum.

“I’ve been fined a total of 5,000,000 euros for financial damage, 12 months imprisonment and 4 more [months] from a former sentence. My mod has to pay approximately 1,000,000 euros for financial damage,” he wrote.

“Others, those who have downloaded, I don’t know the amount for them, but it far exceeds 500,000 euros. Note: They seized the servers and used them to get the IP addresses of the big downloaders of content.”

Lashing out at those who hounded him, the admin said the judgment had really hurt. He said he understands why he needed to be punished but for those lower down the chain, the sentences were “beyond comprehension.”

“To all the [anti-piracy groups and authorities]: You are a lot of vile shit, destroying lives of people who are already struggling to pay their rent, their food, their bills,” he said.

“Why all this? Because they wanted to watch and because they didn’t necessarily have the capabilities to buy a DVD / BluRay or go to the theaters.”

Listing the country’s most popular torrent indexes, trackers and DDL sites, the admin declared that they would never fall.

“Warez is a hydra, you cut off one head, 10 will grow back. You’ll never kill this beautiful community. It’s like drug dealers, it will never stop,” he said.

Following the raid on OMGTorrent, an unknown third-party managed to secure the domain. The site is now working, as it did before, as a public torrent index.

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

Founded in 2007, TorrentHound.com has been around for nearly a decade.

With millions of visitors per month the site enjoyed a fairly large userbase, but it never reached the status of giants such as The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, and KAT.

That said, copyright holders had no trouble finding the site. Over the years TorrentHound became the target of various industry complaints and the site was blocked in several countries. Nevertheless, it always remained online, until today.

A few hours ago the site’s ‘founder’ sent us an email with an ultra-short message: “Finito.”

A quick look at the website shows that this isn’t a prank. TorrentHound is the latest large torrent site to keel over this year.

TorrentHound 2007 – 2016

At TorrentFreak we have been keeping a close eye on the torrent ecosystem for more than a decade, but never have we seen so many large sites going offline in such a short period.

TorrentHound follows the ‘example’ of KickassTorrents and Torrentz, which went offline in July and August respectively. This means that three sites from our top 10 most-visited torrent sites, are now gone.

Neither Torrentz nor TorrentHound have commented in detail on their surprise shutdowns. However, the fact that they followed shortly after KickassTorrents’ alleged operators were inducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, may not be a total coincidence.

It’s unlikely that TorrentHound was facing concrete legal pressure as it’s currently linking to various “not terrible” alternative torrent sites on its current homepage.

We asked our TorrentHound contact to shed some light on his decision and we will add an update if a response comes in.

TorrentHound, a few days ago

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

During his State of the Union address today, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced several plans to modernize copyright law in Europe.

The proposal (pdf) is part of the Digital Single Market reforms, which have been in the making for several years.

Despite earlier suggestions that geo-blocking would be banned for streaming portals such as Netflix, these ideas haven’t made it into the final text. Instead, it introduces a wide range of reforms that improve the position of rights holders.

One of the suggestions that has a lot of people worried is Article 13, which requires online services to police pirated content. This means that online services, which deal with large volumes of user-uploaded content, must use fingerprinting and filtering mechanisms to block copyright infringing files.

“The Commission proposal obliges such service providers to take appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure the protection of user-uploaded works, for example by putting in place content recognition technologies,” the commission explains.

This could, for example, be similar to the Content-ID system YouTube has in place, which hasn’t been without controversy itself.

While the Commission stresses that small content platforms won’t be subject to the requirement, the proposal doesn’t define what “small” means. It also fails to define what “appropriate” or “effective” content recognition systems are, creating a fair bit of uncertainty.

Article 13

Commenting on the proposal, Digital rights group EDRi says that it will put many European companies at risk while endangering users’ right to free speech.

“The text that was launched today includes a proposal to potentially filter all uploads to the Internet in Europe. The draft text would destroy users’ rights and legal certainty for European hosting companies,” EDRi notes.

The Commission, however, notes that the changes are needed to reinforce the negotiating position of copyright holders, so they can sign licensing agreements with services that provide access to user uploaded content.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this language is directly aligned with recent calls from various music industry organizations.

Just a few month ago the BPI asked for new legislation to prevent platforms like YouTube abusing safe harbor protections in order to create “royalty havens”. With the current proposal, this wish has been partly granted.

TorrentFreak spoke with Pirate Party Member of Parliament Julia Reda who is fiercely against mandatory piracy filters.

“There are countless problems with this approach. First of all, Google spent upwards of $60 million on the development of ContentID. Asking every startup or community project to make the same kind of investment is ludicrous,” Reda says.

Most services that deal with user-uploaded content can’t invest millions into content recognition technologies so they would have to license it from others such as YouTube, Reda adds. This will only increase the already dominant positions of the major players.

In addition, she points out that automated systems often lead to overt mistakes and are poorly equipped to deal with the finer nuances of copyright.

“Just because part of a copyright-protected work shows up in a video, that doesn’t mean that the new work constitutes a copyright infringement,” Reda says.

“There are numerous exceptions to copyright such as parody or quotation – different in every EU country – that could justify the re-use of part of a protected work. An algorithm can’t detect that. It will take down lots of legal remixes and mashups, thus stifling freedom of expression,” she adds.

A valid comment, as we witnessed ourselves just a few days ago when one of our perfectly legal videos was inaccurately flagged as a copyright infringement.

YouTube aside, Reda stresses that there are many other platforms to which automated recognition systems are not well suited. Wikipedia, for example, which uses mostly Creative Commons licensed content, or services such as DeviantArt which hosts user-uploaded artwork, or MuseScore that hosts sheet music.

“There is no technology available that would reliably detect copyright infringements in these formats. The Commission is asking Internet companies to do the impossible, thus endangering collaborative communities on the Internet as well as European startups,” Reda tells us.

The filtering requirement is not the only plan that’s getting a lot of pushback.

Another controversial proposal is the introduction of a new related right for press publications. This allows online newspapers to negotiate licences from third party services that use their texts, such as Google showing article clippings in its news section.

Opponents, including several young members of the European Parliament, have dubbed the proposal a “link-tax” and are fiercely against it.

#Savethelink

“This plan would break the internet as we know it. The way people share news online today – by posting a link that includes a short snippet or image from the article – would be made illegal unless a licence had been previously agreed,” MEP Marietje Schaake says.

Considering the stakes at hand, it’s expected that there will be several organized protests, similar to the “Save the Link” campaign, to stop the proposals from becoming law in their current form.

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

In an effort to control the prevalence of online piracy, numerous criminal actions against file-sharers and file-sharing site operators have already taken place in the UK. However, these prosecutions have not been straightforward.

Due to UK copyright law allowing for custodial sentences of ‘just’ two years for online offenses, anti-piracy groups such as the Federation Against Copyright Theft have chosen to pursue their own private prosecutions. These have largely taken place under legislation designed for those who have committed fraud, rather than the more appropriate offense of copyright infringement.

Physical pirates (CDs, DVDs) can be jailed for up to 10 years under current legislation. During the past few years, there have been lobbying efforts for this punishment to apply both on and offline. That resulted in a UK Government announcement last year indicating that it would move to increase the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement to ten years.

This proposal was detailed in a draft of the Digital Economy Bill published in July. If passed into law, it would amend the relevant section of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

That likelihood increased yesterday with the 2nd Reading of the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Commons. Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, was in attendance. The MP, who was appointed in July, spoke strongly in favor of strict copyright enforcement.

“We will help businesses from attacks on their intellectual property. Burglars can be sentenced to ten years in prison, but the criminal gangs that are making vast sums of money through exploiting the online creations of others only face a two-year sentence. We will increase this to ten,” Bradley said.

Interestingly, Bradley mentioned a convicted pirate by name. Paul Mahoney ran streaming portal FastPassTV and discussion and linking forum BedroomMedia. After being raided in 2011, the Northern Ireland-based man was sentenced to four years in jail under the Fraud Act, two more than the maximum he would’ve received under copyright legislation.

“Criminals like Paul Mahoney, who profited by almost £300,000 and cost industry millions by facilitating access to illegal films on the Internet, need to be sent a clear message,” Bradley said.

“We need to ensure that enforcement agencies and their partners have the right set of tools to tackle all types of piracy, which is why this clause is so important.”

When the increase to ten years was first reported, some news outlets suggested that regular file-sharers could be subjected to the decade-long sentence. That was addressed in Parliament yesterday by Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire, who welcomed the move but sought assurances that the casual downloader wouldn’t be targeted.

“I am pleased that clause 26 amends the current legislation on copyright to bring online criminal penalties for copyright infringement in line with off-line penalties, with a maximum of 10 years’ imprisonment. This will target anyone who infringes copyright in order to make a commercial gain,” he said.

“However, I wish to stress to hon. Members and to members of the public that this is not to catch out people who download music and unwittingly download or stream something illegal. I want to make that clear in adding my support to this measure. As far as I understand it, it targets the criminals who make money from distributing music to which they do not have the rights.”

Culture Secretary Karen Bradley confirmed that was indeed the case.

Speaking in support of the amendment, Conservative MP John Whittingdale said he was “delighted” that online and offline penalties will be equalized but said that more still needs to be done. Unsurprisingly, given the current environment, Google was again the target.

“The Conservative party manifesto stated that we would put pressure on search engines to try to prevent illegal sites from coming up at the top of a search. I know that round-table discussions have been taking place for a considerable time, but it is a matter of great concern that no significant progress has yet been made,” Whittingdale said.

“In the most recent attempt to find out whether or not there had been an improvement, a Google search was made for ‘Ed Sheeran Photograph download’, with ‘Photograph’ being one of Ed Sheeran’s most recent songs. Only one of the top 10 listings involved a legal site, and the legal site was YouTube, which, of course, is owned by Google.”

In response, Labour MP Dr Rupa Huq offered his thoughts on how that might be mitigated in future.

“[John Whittingdale] said that Ed Sheeran’s song was available on illegal platforms. Does he agree that technology companies, ​and platforms such as Google and YouTube, should be compelled to list only legal sites?” Huq said.

“At present the pirates are sometimes listed higher up than legal sites, and our British musicians who contribute, I believe, £4 billion annually to the economy are losing out as a consequence.”

Whittingdale wasn’t convinced of Huq’s solution, but agreed that much more needs to be done.

“I think it would be unrealistic to expect Google to establish whether every single site was legal or illegal. What it can do is react when illegal sites are brought to its attention,” the MP said.

“[Google] does de-list, but new sites then appear immediately. There have been a vast number of complaints from rights owners about particular sites, but they should tweak their algorithms so that those sites no longer appear at the top of the search listings. Measures of that kind have been under discussion for months and months, but the problem still exists.”

Whittingdale added that there may be a need to include a legal provision which would encourage service providers to establish some kind of voluntary code.

“[T]here may well be a case for legislation, because we cannot allow Google and other search providers to go on allowing people access to illegal sites,” he said.

The Bill will now move to Committee and Report stages, before moving to its Third Reading. It will then pass to readings in the House of Lords before undergoing amendments and the final stage of Royal Assent.

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

Returning guest Holmes ‘I’m on a boat‘ Wilson (Fight For The Future) checks in from… a boat in the harbour of Rio de Janeiro.

We discuss the ongoing attempt to extradite Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom to the United States, why Creative Future is publicly dissing his organisation, and what (if anything) should come after big torrent sites.

We then take another twenty minutes to discuss how decentralisation of media is contributing to the rise of the kek-worshipping alt-right. How does P2P affect political power in general? And what’s the importance of meme-creation in a distributed media environment?

—

Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary and analysis.

The guests for our news discussions will vary and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the great innovators and minds.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Holmes Wilson

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Riley Byrne
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Siraje Amarniss

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