There are dozens of celebrity cats on the Internet, but Grumpy Cat probably tops them all.

The cat’s owners have made millions thanks to their pet’s unique facial expression, which turned her into an overnight Internet star.

Part of this revenue comes from successful merchandise lines, including the Grumpy Cat “Grumppuccino” iced coffee beverage, sold by the California company Grenade Beverage.

The company licensed the copyright and trademarks to sell the iced coffee, but is otherwise not affiliated with the cat and its owners. Initially this partnership went well, but after the coffee maker started to sell other “Grumpy Cat” products, things turned bad.

The cat’s owners, incorporated as Grumpy Cat LLC, took the matter to court last year with demands for the coffee maker to stop infringing associated copyrights and trademarks.

After Grenade Beverage failed to properly respond to the allegations, Grumpy Cat’s owners moved for a default, which a court clerk entered early June. A few days ago they went ahead and submitted a motion for default judgment.

A memorandum (pdf) supporting the new motion repeats many of the allegations that were listed in the original complaint. Among other things, it accuses the coffee maker of manufacturing and selling Grumpy Cat merchandise without permission.

“Not only was the Infringing Product never approved by Plaintiff under the License Agreement, but the packaging and marketing materials for the Infringing Product, as depicted in the example below, primarily and exclusively incorporate Plaintiff’s exclusive intellectual property, including the Grumpy Cat Copyrights and the Grumpy Cat Trademarks,” the memorandum reads.

Allegedly infringing Grumpy Cat coffee

At the time of writing, the coffee maker’s Grumpy Coffee website is offline. In addition, the associated social media accounts also went quiet late last year, when the lawsuit was first announced.

Nevertheless, Grumpy Cat and her owner still hold the company responsible for its previous infringements. In their motion they list four copyrights, claiming the maximum of $150,000 in statutory damages for each.

“Here, the magnitude of Grenade’s willful infringement of Plaintiff’s Grumpy Cat Copyrights, willful disregard of this Court’s authority, and refusal to stop its blatant infringement renders Plaintiff entitled to a $150,000 statutory damages award for each of the Grumpy Cat Copyrights, in a total amount of $600,000,” the motion reads.

This number is repeated in the proposed default judgment (pdf) as well, which the court still has to sign off on.

Proposed injunction, $600,000 copyright damages

In addition to the copyright infringements, Grumpy Cat also asks for actual and treble damages for trademark infringements, damages for contract breach, and injunctive relief to prevent the coffee maker from selling Grumpy Cat products in the future.

Since it’s a request for a default judgment, there is a good chance that the judge will approve the demands. While it’s unlikely that Grumpy Cat herself will care, her owners will definitely be happy if that’s the case.

Still, a default judgment doesn’t mean the end of the Grumpy Cat dispute. Defendants Paul and Nick Sandford, who are affiliated with Grenade Beverage, did respond to the original complaint and are not yet throwing in the towel.

Together with the non-party company Grumpy Beverage, they filed a counterclaim asking for declaratory judgments affirming that they are the rightful owner of various Grumpy Cat coffee-related trademarks and copyrights, as well as several disputed domain names.

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

In 2012, Megaupload was shut down in a massive international operation. At the time the file-storage site had been one of the most-visited on the planet with around 100 million users.

U.S. authorities subsequently claimed that Megaupload illegally generated more than US$175 million and cost copyright owners more than $0.5bn in lost business.

The former operators of Megaupload – Kim Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk – insist that their business was a completely legal cloud storage platform so any infringement carried out by their users was not their responsibility. They are all fighting their cases from New Zealand where they are residents.

Last December, after almost ten weeks of hearings, District Court Judge Nevin Dawson found there was an “overwhelming” case for Kim Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, to be extradited to the United States. There they face decades in jail on various charges including copyright infringement, money laundering, and racketeering.

Today, around a dozen lawyers were present in New Zealand’s High Court as Dotcom and his former colleagues mounted a formal appeal of last year’s extradition decision. The trio say that Judge Nevin Dawson didn’t give them a fair hearing.

The appeal is expected to last six to eight weeks but it began without Dotcom in attendance. He arrived after the hearing began and sat at the back with girlfriend Elizabeth Donelly. NZ’s Radio Live reported that the Megaupload founder appeared “relaxed”.

While Dotcom was not presenting argument today his lawyer Ron Mansfield told the court that due to the unprecedented issues involved and the international interest in the case, the hearing should be live streamed.

Mansfield said that a complex case of this nature is unlikely to receive balanced reporting so a live stream could ensure that all information is made available for public scrutiny. That could be done via YouTube, he said, with a 10-minute delay to ensure any sensitive material could be withheld.

A decision on that request wasn’t made right away, however. Judge Murray Gilbert said that the streaming request had been submitted late so he wanted to give representatives from the media time to consider the request and make their submissions. As previously reported, the United States government is objecting to the application.

Public interest in the case is undoubtedly high. Dotcom has become somewhat of a celebrity locally in New Zealand and he has a huge profile online as a serial entrepreneur, privacy activist, and video gamer. Unsurprisingly the public gallery in the High Court was full, with one man reportedly standing outside waving a banner claiming that Dotcom’s persecution is part of a CIA conspiracy.

With Dotcom not expected to speak until later next week, the hearing began with representation from Grant Illingworth QC, the lawyer representing Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk.

Illingworth said that the hearing had been unfair since the United States had denied the defendants the opportunity to hire specialist US-based technology experts who could help to support their defense.

He said that the case against the former Megaupload operators “had gone off the rails” and their extradition should be halted since the District Court had shown “extraordinary disinterest” in their arguments at the earlier hearing.

“It’s like ships passing in the night with no radar — the judge simply did not engage with the arguments in a meaningful way,” Illingworth said.

Pointing to alleged breaches of conduct by U.S. authorities, Illingworth
said that a situation of urgency had been manufactured in order to achieve procedural shortcuts.

There had been a “covering up” of unlawful activities preceding the arrests in 2012 and “downstream attempts to cover that up including a police officer giving incorrect information to this court, [and] unlawfully sending clones of hard drives overseas.”

Arguments for Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk are expected to take around eight days but the whole process is forecast to be a drawn-out affair. In the District Court the extradition hearing was supposed to take four weeks but actually took ten.

This time around the actions of the District Court will be picked over in fine detail, concentrating closely on numerous matters of law.

The United States Department of Justice isn’t expected to begin its arguments for another three weeks or so.

The hearing continues tomorrow but it’s unlikely that any final decision will arrive even this year. Dotcom and his rivals in the US both seem prepared to take this battle all the way to the Supreme Court in New Zealand if necessary. That could take years.

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

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Now You See Me 2 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.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(1)	Now You See Me 2	6.8 / trailer
2	(…)	Blood Father	7.1 / trailer
3	(2)	Independence Day: Resurgence (Subbed HDRip)	5.6 / trailer
4	(…)	The Conjuring 2	7.8 / trailer
5	(3)	The Legend of Tarzan (Subbed HDRip)	6.6 / trailer
6	(4)	Neighbors 2	6.0 / trailer
7	(9)	Jason Bourne (HDTC)	7.4 / trailer
8	(6)	The Jungle Book	7.8 / trailer
9	(8)	Warcraft	7.7 / trailer
10	(5)	Imperium	6.7 / trailer

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

While torrents will work without them, trackers are very handy for quickly finding other BitTorrent peers with the same content. They’re also essential for those who have DHT and PEX disabled in their clients.

Often run by people with an interest in the technology, public trackers are incapable of generating funds in their own right. This means that from a financial perspective there’s almost no incentive to run one.

The important thing to remember about trackers is that they carry no infringing content whatsoever, they merely direct torrent client traffic to a particular torrent hash. Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop tracker operators from getting copyright-related headaches.

In early 2016, a new stand-alone tracker was born. Operating from zer0day.ch, the tracker grew quite quickly in the first few days of life after ETRG (ExtraTorrent’s release group) added the tracker to its releases.

But with its first 10,000 torrents tracked, the problems began. The tracker was hosted in Germany and soon its host ran out of patience with mounting copyright infringement claims. After moving to Romania, history repeated itself when the tracker’s host suspended its server.

“They didn’t want to hear that running a tracker is not illegal,” zer0day’s admin informs TF.

Late April, the tracker moved again, this time to a Latvia/Sweden setup. From there the tracker’s popularity went through the roof after an important development. Unknown to the tracker’s admin, The Pirate Bay began adding zer0day as one of the default trackers in its magnet links.

Now coordinating millions of peers, zer0day became an important player but in August the site had yet more trouble. The tracker’s server went offline again, this time without any prior notice and despite the fact that in eight months of operation not a single DMCA notice had ever been directly filed with the tracker.

With a fourth server secured elsewhere, zer0day continued with its business but more aggravation was on the horizon. Early this month, Swiss domain registry Switch told the site’s operator that his .CH domain was in trouble.

According to Switch, someone had tried to send some documents to the domain owner by snail mail and the documents had not reached the address mentioned in the WHOIS. Zer0day’s admin was given 30 days to prove his identity (with residency papers, for example) or face his domain being deleted.

While keeping the .CH domain would have been preferable, Switch didn’t make anything easy. They blocked the domain from being transferred to a third party and refused to say which agency had tried to contact the tracker’s operator.

Frustrated, the tracker’s admin decided to jump ship after a friend donated a server and a new .to (Tonga) based domain. At the time of writing the tracker is doing well, reporting 1.21m torrents and 4.44m peers (3.04 M seeders + 1.40 M leechers) on its main page.

Speaking with TF, the tracker owner says that while the ride has been a bumpy one, things got much worse after Pirate Bay began adding his tracker URL by default, something he had no control over.

“Things went from bad to worse after TPB added the tracker to their magnet links. [That knowledge] might help ease someone’s efforts to run a torrent tracker in the future,” he concludes.

As mentioned earlier, trackers aren’t absolutely essential for the functioning of BitTorrent transfers. However, their existence certainly improves matters and sites like zer0day are happy to contribute, even if their work mainly flies under the radar.

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

From a networking perspective most Internet providers are generally not very happy with BitTorrent users.

These users place a heavy load on the network and can reduce the performance experienced by other subscribers. In addition, the huge amount of data transferred outside the ISPs’ own networks is also very costly.

Some ISPs are trying to alleviate the problem by throttling or otherwise meddling with BitTorrent traffic, but there is a more customer-friendly solution.

Instead of working against their torrenting subscribers, various Internet providers in India have found a win-win solution. They help users to download content faster by linking them to local peers in their own network.

ISPs such as Alliance Broadband, Excitel, Syscon Infoway and True Broadband, have been offering accelerated torrents for a while. Some have had their own custom ‘caching’ setups but increasingly they are teaming up with the torrent search engine Torbox.

While not well-known in the rest of the world, Torbox is a blessing for many Indians who are lucky enough to have an ISP that works with the site.

Through Torbox they can download torrents at speeds much higher than their regular Internet connection allows. This is possible because Torbox links them to peers in the local network, which means that the traffic is free for the ISP.

Most people who visit Torbox will see a notice that their ISP doesn’t have a peering agreement. However, for those who have a supporting ISP the torrent site returns search results ordering torrents based on the proximity of downloaders.

Torbox uses downloaders’ IP-addresses to determine who their ISP is and directs them to torrents with peers on the same network.

“It’s a highly sophisticated IP technology based on network proximity,” Torbox explains, adding that every ISP is welcome to sign a peering agreement.

“Then based on your IP address TorBox can estimate how well you are connected to peers who have the content in question. It’s quite a tough job but luckily it works,” they add.

The downloads themselves go through a regular torrent client and don’t use any special trackers. However, the torrent swarms often connect to dedicated “cache peers” as well, which serve bits and pieces to speed up the swarm.

Torbox itself doesn’t get involved in the traffic side, they only point people to the “peering” torrents. The actual peering is handled by other services, such as Extreme Peering, which is operated by Extreme Broadband Services (EBS).

TorrentFreak spoke with EBS director Victor Francess, who says that with this setup most torrent data is served from within the ISP’s own network.

“It all creates a very powerful user experience, so in fact just about 10-20% of all torrent traffic comes from the upstream and everything else is local,” Francess says.

As for the content, Torbox links to the torrents you would generally find on a torrent site. It even has a handy catalog page featuring some recent blockbusters and other popular videos. This page also advertises Strem.io as a service that can be used to stream video torrents directly.

TorrentFreak spoke to several Indian Torbox users at different ISPs, who are all pretty happy with the service. It allows them to download torrents at much faster rates than their regular Internet speed.

One user told us that his downloads sometimes reach a 10 MBps download speed, while his Internet connection is capped at 4 MBps.

The ISPs themselves are not too secretive about their peering agreements either. Excited previously advertised the Torbox peering on its main site and others such as Sifi Broadband still do.

Alliance Broadband still lists Torbox in its FAQ at the time of writing, describing it as a “local content search engine” through which subscribers receive files “at ultra-high speed from the other peering users.”

For most outsiders it’s intriguing to see ISPs publicly cooperating with a torrent site, but in India it’s reality.

The question is, however, how long this will last. In recent months piracy has become a hot topic in India, with Bollywood insiders linking it to massive losses and even terrorism.

Ironically, many ISPs have also been ordered by courts to block access to hundreds of piracy sites, including many torrent search engines. For now, however, Torbox remains freely accessible.

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