Compared with countless other offenses, piracy ranks pretty low on the serious scale with most regular people. After all, given how easy it is to break the law, it’s likely that everyone has been an infringer at some time or other.

That being said, during the last decade there have been some signs that piracy might be becoming a little less socially acceptable than it once was, possibly due to increased awareness of getting caught and potential punishments thereafter. Still, it hasn’t always been that way, far from it.

Svet kompjutera (World of Computers) is Serbia’s most popular computer magazine. Launched in 1984, the publication has regularly taken an interest in piracy and in 2010 published an edition titled “Prohibited Ideas”, which featured the flag of the Pirate Party on the cover.

While covering the Pirates in 2010 wouldn’t have been particularly controversial, back in 1989 when the publication was just five years old, World of Computers had a mission to look after its readers’ interests, no matter what.

This resulted in the magazine running a “consumer protection” competition to determine the country’s finest pirate software suppliers.

The piece, embedded below, provides a unique insight into how attitudes towards piracy (and certainly encouraging piracy) have changed in the media over the past two and a half decades.

“And here it is, finally, the result of our competition to decide who is the Pirate of the Year,” the article begins.

“This list is a kind of buyers’ protection from bad and unprincipled pirates by indicating the most reliable and honest people able to satisfy the conditions of the market.”

What follows is a list of five of the country’s best pirate suppliers, as voted by World of Computers’ readers. The publication went to the other end of the scale too, publishing the names of five suppliers that fell well short in the eyes of the pirating public.

“We think that by now several curses have flown from the lips of these [latter] five in our direction. Instead, it would be better for them to think why they scored such a poor result,” the article reads.

“Readers who gave votes, voted mainly by judging according to their own experience and some impressions were actually not positive. Some of them sent us their own comments or explanations along with their votes. It was very interesting to read them, especially when they reported their conversations with the pirates and the pirates’ statements, giving us a faithful account of their curses (…“then he told me to f… off“).”

These days pirates might give a torrent or streaming site a negative review for a slow download of a badly cammed movie. They might also complain of too many popups. Surprisingly, back in 1989 things weren’t much different.

“For some, the main reason for granting negative points was the bad quality of cassettes, the quality of the recording, and the promptness of delivery,” the article notes.

“Very interesting are the objections related to some pirates’ adverts, their size, text, text structure, truthfulness, and the presence/absence of the program names etc.”

The competition was apparently well received among World of Computers readers so the publication immediately declared it would publish another list the following year, to ensure that pirates kept standards high.

“This will give bad pirates a chance to improve, while the good ones will be in stand-by mode and won’t get rusty. This means that our contest stays open and that you can continue to send us your votes. The letters received so far will not be taken into account in the new round and everything starts from the drawing board.”

These days it would almost unthinkable for a magazine to run this kind of competition. However, to get an idea of just how much things have changed, one only has to look at the rules World of Computers deployed for subsequent competitions.

“Should a pirate be operating within a company, the name of the company is compulsory, as well as the pirate’s real name, of course, provided that he/she included it into the advert,” the magazine said.

“If several pirates work for the same company, just state the name of the company and not those of the individual pirates. This will make our counting of the votes easier.”

Thanks, Nul Den

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

No, Trump personally can’t and won’t shut down The Pirate Bay. Period.

Excuse me for the clickbait title and the strange intro, but since it’s the topic of this opinion piece, I thought it was warranted.

Here’s what’s going on.

The torrent community is in turmoil after the shutdowns of KAT and Torrentz. We’ve written about this extensively, but there’s a rather frustrating side-effect that we haven’t discussed so far.

For some reason there’s a slew of news sites, prominently featured in search engines and on social media, that keep spreading fear and panic about a looming Pirate Bay shutdown.

These publications take every piece of file-sharing related news, often sourced from TorrentFreak, and rewrite it in a way that suggests the world’s number one torrent site may disappear, or is already gone.

Here are just a few headlines I’ve seen over the past few days. Click on the links at your own risk.

Pirate Bay, Extra Torrent Shutting Down; Fans In Search For Best Torrent Alternative (link)

The Pirate Bay (TPB) Shut Down Imminent After Service Partner Faces Piracy Lawsuit (link)

Goodbye The Pirate Bay? Cloudflare Under Fire For Helping TPB, Terror Groups (link)

The Pirate Bay to shut down soon? (link)

The Pirate Bay Shut Down Rumors: Once Site Goes Down, US Library Of Congress Might Be The Next Piracy Haven (link)

Pirate Bay to Shut Down…

The Pirate Bay To Shut Down Soon As Excipio Starts To Shoot And Kill Torrent Sites? (link)

TPB Now Leads The Pack Of Torrent Sites, But Might Shut Down Soon? List Of Top Torrent Sites Inside (link)

The Pirate Bay (TPB), KickassTorrents, Torrentz Shut Down: US Library of Congress As Next Alternative? (link)

These reports have absolutely nothing to do with an apparent Pirate Bay shutdown of course.

The last one, for example, bizarrely connects concerns the RIAA has about access to digital works at the Library of Congress, to the potential demise of TPB, which is pure nonsense.

Pirate Bay Declared Dead

Many other articles follow the same format, writing nonsensical trash such as the following:

“Other torrent sites such as TorrentFreak is not happy with the growing population of The Pirate Bay but they do appreciate the role that TPB is playing in the world of torrent sites.”

The quote above comes from The Parent Herald, which also suggests that copyright trolls plan to fine The Pirate Bay. Clearly, they have not read the TorrentFreak article on the topic, which they’re quoting, or they simply don’t understand it.

Might Shut Down Soon?

So why are these “news” sites reporting this type of doom and gloom? The short answer is ad views. The clickbait articles are shared on social media, appear in Google news and in search results.

The latter can bring in thousands of views. If people Google for “The Pirate Bay,” these headlines are featured as “news” and beg to be clicked on, generating revenue for the sites in question. For the very same reason you’ll see numerous articles about KAT and Torrentz alternatives.

Click, Click, Click

Why are we complaining about this? Well, these news reports are picked up by other sites and shared among thousands of people. At TorrentFreak we do our best to report news as accurately as possible, and these clickbait articles go directly against this, often using our name.

We have addressed the clickbait issue in the past but in recent months it has gotten much worse.

While there are many different sites guilty of this practice, we recently stumbled upon a ring of related publications that all belong to the same company. They carry names such as Parent Herald, iSports Times., University Herald, Mobile&Apps and share a similar layout and design.

The owner in question, according to the copyright statement, is the New York based company IQ Adnet, which is… surprise surprise, an ad network that specializes in premium digital and native advertising. That explains everything.

There’s not much we can do about this, unfortunately, besides telling people what’s really going on and venting our frustration every now and then.

In the meantime, we’ll be waiting for these sites to pick up the Trump angle, which shouldn’t take long.

—

For the record. At TorrentFreak we don’t use pay per view ads, partly to get rid of the pageview obsession. This means that the clickbait title we used for this article doesn’t bring in any extra money.

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

In an effort to make piracy less visible, copyright holders are sending dozens of millions of DMCA takedown requests to Google every month.

Since there are so many takedown notices it’s no surprise that errors are made. In recent years we have frequently pointed out various mistakes, some more serious than others.

This week we spotted a takedown request that targets one of the most shared files on BitTorrent, Ubuntu releases.

Unlike Hollywood blockbusters Ubuntu distros are released under free software licenses, which means that people are encouraged to share them. In fact, Ubuntu’s official download site offers BitTorrent as one of the options.

For some reason, however, Paramount Pictures is not happy with seeing the popular operating system on torrent sites. In a notice sent out by the movie studio’s anti-piracy partner a few days ago, Google is asked to remove an Ubuntu torrent download page on ExtraTorrent.

According to the notice, the Ubuntu release infringes the copyrights of the movie Transformers: Age of Extinction.

The “infringing” Ubuntu url

It’s a mystery why this URL is targeted as the entire page doesn’t contain any references to Transformers, at least when we checked.

There is a likely possibility that the list of “recent searches” at one point included a Transformers mention, but even then the takedown request would clearly be overbroad.

Despite the obvious non-infringing status of the Ubuntu release, Google moved ahead and removed the page from its search index. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering the volume of requests that the company has to process.

Google currently receives reports for around three million “pirate” URLs per day. While the search engine has some automated filters to catch mistakes, it’s virtually impossible to check all submissions by hand.

URL removed

Paramount’s mistake may be relatively harmless, but it shows once again how much can go wrong with these automated DMCA notices. Whether these errors can be rooted out is doubtful as there is very little incentive for copyright holders to improve their accuracy.

Google, however, previously told us that they are determined to prevent abuse and mistakes.

“We still do our best to catch errors or abuse so we don’t mistakenly disable access to non-infringing material. Google continues to put substantial resources into improving and streamlining this process, including into identifying erroneous and abusive takedowns, and deterring abuse,” a spokesperson said.

Luckily, a search for Ubuntu download still features plenty of options.

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

At the turn of the century when file-sharing was in its infancy, some of the earliest adopters of P2P technology were those in the student population.

Freely available Internet access for those in educational establishments meant unprecedented numbers of young people going online, and with that a large upswing in unauthorized downloading.

The RIAA was one of the first groups to take a stand, suing thousands of students across the United States in an effort to send a message that free music may very well come at a cost. Later, changes in legislation meant that schools and universities across the country could lose funding if they didn’t keep piracy under control.

Of course, students continue to download to this day and each time they do they risk receiving a warning letter or worse, as students in Canada are finding out.

According to the copyright office at the University of Manitoba, mainly US-based rightsholders are writing on a regular basis to students demanding cash settlements for alleged infringement.

Noting that the university forwards copyright infringement notices to students as they’re required to under the country’s ‘notice and notice‘ regime, the copyright office says some of the letters are “tantamount to extortion.”

In a piece published in official student newspaper The Manitoban, copyright office strategy manager Joel Guenette says that while many of the 8,000 notices received are legitimate (HBO is said to have sent many warnings in connection with Game of Thrones downloads), others sink to reprehensible lows.

In addition to cautioning over the potential for multi-million dollar lawsuits, some notice senders are stepping up their threats to suggest that students could lose their scholarships if fines aren’t paid. For visiting students, things become even more scary.

According to the university’s copyright office, some porn producers have told foreign students that they could face deportation if an immediate cash settlement of hundreds of dollars is not forthcoming.

“None of these are real consequences that could ever happen in the Canadian scheme of things, but we hear from students all the time – especially international students – who are really freaked out by this,” Guenette says.

While being scared is understandable in such situations, Guenette’s department is keen to educate students on what these notices really mean. Particularly, they’re keen to stress that notice senders have no idea who notices have been delivered to, so students shouldn’t believe that copyright holders already know who they are.

Day to day, there’s nothing in current law that compels the University to hand over their identities but students can still compromise themselves by negotiating directly with notice senders, so that isn’t advised.

“We can’t tell students ‘ignore these notices’ and we can’t tell students ‘never pay a claim’ but, personally, I want students to know what these are and I want them to know that most of these settlement claims are extortion,” Guenette says.

“When I’m talking to students directly, without giving them legal advice, I would say ‘if I were you, I would never pay this.’ In my opinion, I don’t think any student on campus should be paying this.”

The University of Manitoba certainly isn’t on its own as other educational establishments are reporting similar problems. According to a separate report, the University of Calgary also finds itself in a similar position.

The university says that it’s been receiving similar copyright notices since January 2015 and now wants to crackdown on unlawful file-sharing across campus. A meeting took place in August to discuss how the university intends to deal with unauthorized downloading but the problem isn’t straightforward.

“We can certainly track an IP address, but the difficulty is that the owner of that device is not necessarily the downloader of content. Someone can use someone else’s computer without that person’s knowledge,” says provost and vice-president Dru Marshall.

Complications aside, it’s likely that if the flood of notices to universities continue, they could be forced to take more robust action. How that will manifest itself is yet to be seen, but it’s unlikely that copyright trolls will benefit, despite being the main cause of the problem.

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

YouTube is a great platform for creators, allowing them to broadcast their work to hundreds of millions of people around the world, for free.

At TF we focus on writing news so we don’t use YouTube much for the site. A few years ago, however, we did host TorrentFreak TV and last week we decided to put the video archive on YouTube.

The shows were released seven to eight years ago so the news that’s discussed is all dated. However, having it all in one place on YouTube helps to keep it archived in an orderly fashion.

What we didn’t expect, however, is that hours after the first upload we were already presented with a copyright claim from a third-party.

Interestingly, the copyright claim was not coming from a major rightsholder or an obscure trolling operation. Neither was it some random bird humming that was flagged. The claim in question was made on a track by none other than Dan Bull. Yeah, Bull.

Copyright dispute

Dan Bull is an English rapper and songwriter who writes tracks about video games and various Internet related topics. We know him very well at TorrentFreak and he was featured and interviewed in several of our articles over the years.

For example, he protested against restrictive copyright legislation that would hunt down file-sharers and trample on free speech and fair use. In fact, the Dan Bull rap that was featured in the TorrentFreak TV video is a protest against the UK’s Digital Economy Bill.

Dear Mandy

We prominently featured this track in a TorrentFreak news article as well and used it with explicit permission from Dan himself.

So why are we receiving a copyright claim on YouTube now, seven years later? Perhaps Dan’s online accounts were hijacked? His Twitter account obviously wasn’t, as this was the first tweet I saw in his timeline.

How appropriate.

Dan’s tweet from last week

To find out what really happened we got in touch with Dan himself, who had a good explanation for the rather ironic situation.

“I am so embarrassed that TorrentFreak’s first copyright claim has been for a piece of content that I created. Ironically, TorrentFreak’s coverage of the music in question 7 years ago is what made it popular in the first place,” he says.

Dan explains that he’s part of a YouTube network which helps to monetize his videos and as part of this strategy they also claim his content on videos of other people who use his work. This includes our video.

So, the bots Dan was referring to in the earlier tweet also work ‘for’ him.

“The claim was made on my behalf by the YouTube network I’m a part of – Brave Bison. It was presumably done automatically by a bot which is unable to deal with the nuances of fair use. This is one of many serious issues with YouTube’s Content ID system,” Dan says.

The sad part is that this is not what Dan wants these bots to do. In fact, he actively encourages people to use his content in their own creations. However, the Brave Bison network doesn’t give him the option to do so without specifically whitelisting every video by hand.

“But even putting fair use aside, I have told the network before that I don’t mind people using clips of my music in their own videos. However, apparently the only way I can put that into practice is to personally submit them a whitelist of individual videos – this is of course not realistic, especially as new videos are being made all the time.

“For the record, I would like to say that if you want to use something I’ve made as part of your own project, please go ahead, I love seeing where people take things I’ve made,” Dan adds.

We applaud Dan for being so open about the situation and obviously don’t blame him for what happened.

However, we hope that Brave Bison and other YouTube networks seriously reconsider their restrictive policies. If a creator is more than happy to allow others to use his or her work, this should be allowed, instead of squeezing every cent from third-party videos.

Luckily, the TorrentFreak TV video that featured the Dan Bull track is still up. The only difference is that Brave Bison is now showing their ads on it, while it was free of advertising before.

We filed a counterclaim several days ago to get this lifted, clarifying that we have explicit permission from the owner to use the video. Fingers crossed that the entire situation will be resolved in a few weeks, more or less.

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