VKontakte (or Russia’s Facebook as it’s often known) is the largest European social network with 300 million registered users, around a third of which are active. Due to the way it hosts user content largely without question, VK carries huge amounts of infringing movies, music, TV shows.

Like similar sites, vKontakte has groups dedicated to endless regular topics. It also has groups dedicated to movie and TV show piracy inhabited by those looking to obtain content for free. Of course, copyright holders have the ability to take this content down via regular takedown notices, but like their counterparts in the West they’re tired of playing whac-a-mole.

To this end, copyright holders are now teaming up to put vKontakte under pressure to remove entire groups from where infringing content is being made available. Under the immediate spotlight are the ten largest groups specializing in movies and TV shows. They are huge.

Alexei Byrdin of the Internet Video Association informs Russia’s Izvestia that each group has a minimum of one million members while the largest has more than seven million. As a result the rightsholders’ anti-piracy group wants vKontakte to completely take them down.

“We have repeatedly appealed to the groups themselves to remove the content, but the complaints were not satisfied and content continued to be active,” says WebKontrol CEO Olga Valigurskaya, adding that if vKontakte wants to do the right thing it should either delete all the content or remove the groups altogether.

However, vKontakte’s owners over at Mail.ru (who own all three top social networking platforms in the country) see the situation somewhat differently, as do vKontakte themselves.

“In most cases we refuse to block communities specializing in video content as we consider this measure excessive,” a vKontakte spokesperson explained.

“Instead, we remove specific videos that violate the rights of a particular copyright holder, provided that the rightsholder has provided all the necessary documents. And managers of these communities are sent a notification about the inadmissibility of posting illegal content.”

Rightsholders wanting broad anti-piracy action and tech platforms demanding a precision approach is a common and growing theme online today. A similar war of words is playing out in both the United States and Europe, where whole sites are being censored and entertainment companies are demanding a “takedown, staydown” approach to copyright enforcement.

Whether they will get their way remains to be seen, but in the meantime the battle lines are being drawn in Russia – and unsurprisingly it’s copyright versus tech all over again.

“The platform should stop IP violations. If they cannot stop the violation in any other way, except to remove a whole group, then it is necessary to remove the group,” National Federation of the Music Industry (Sony, Universal, Warner, EMI) chief Leonid Agronov told Izvestia.

Agronov’s stance was predictably rejected by Sergey Grebennikov, director of the Regional Public Center of Internet Technologies (ROCIT), a non-profit with a mission to popularize the Internet.

“Deleting whole groups is unlawful,” he said. “Removals should concern only the videos, for which rightsholders have rights.”

There can be little doubt that the issue of infringing online content is largely descending into a worldwide battle not between copyright holders and actual pirates, but between entertainment companies and Internet platforms such as vKontakte, YouTube and Google. It won’t be settled any time soon.

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

As one of its ‘hottest’ properties, HBO has become very protective of Game of Thrones.

In recent weeks thousands of pirates have received warnings in their mailboxes, and the company is also fervently trying to take down links to pirated copies of the show, with some success.

Besides targeting full copies of episodes, HBO also appears to have an eye on unauthorized compilations that focus on scenes without costumes, which are quite a common occurrence.

Sites such as Pornhub list thousands of clips of Khaleesi, Margaery Tyrell, Melisandre and others, fully uncovered. While this isn’t a new trend HBO now says that it’s taking action in response.

“HBO is aware of the issue and is in the process of getting material taken down from Pornhub,” the company said in a statement.

A quick search revealed that a lot of compromising material is still readily available, but some videos have indeed been removed. This includes the Daenerys Targaryen compilation video below.

Daenerys Targaryen’s compilation video is gone

Since the videos are uploaded by Pornhub users the site itself enjoys safe harbor protection. This means that there’s little else HBO can do other than issue regular takedown requests to protect their assets.

That said, Pornhub is well-aware of the interest in Game of Thrones. In an ‘insights‘ article last month the site analized various trends. Among other things it reported a massive spike in GoT searches before this year’s season premiere.

Popular search terms include “sex scene,” “khaleesi,” “boobs,” “nude” and “parody” while further analysis revealed that Emilia Clarke (Khaleesi) was also by far the most popular Game of Thrones actress on the porn site.

Hot GoT actresses

Of course HBO has the right to remove the infringing footage, but the company has reportedly targeted various porn parodies as well. These can in theory be contested, but thus far we haven’t seen any signs of this.

Interestingly, HBO is not the only company that’s worried about having their brand on prominent display at the porn site. A few days ago several users reported that Blizzard began cracking down on Overwatch inspired porn on Pornhub as well.

Whether HBO’s actions will be good enough to keep GoT nude videos from spreading has yet to be seen. Once something’s on the Internet, it’s generally pretty hard to take down, and highlighting the problem may even have an adverse effect.

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

It’s not clear how many DMCA takedown notices The Pirate Bay receives each day but the site is extremely clear – no torrents are ever removed following a request from copyright holders.

The Pirate Bay, however, is somewhat of an exception. For many torrent sites, dealing with a flood of DMCA takedown requests (or their EU equivalent) is a part of everyday life. For those who want to stay online, complying with them is often seen as essential.

As a result it is extremely common to visit big sites to view a torrent only to find that it has been removed by rightsholders. One site that complies with DMCA takedown notices is market leader KickassTorrents (KAT).

While no overall stats are provided by the site, disappearing torrents are common phenomena, much to the disappointment of many users. However, one particular user has more than the average reason to feel deflated this morning.

‘Zorro’ is one of the few users on KAT to have achieved the rank of Elite Uploader. He describes himself as a male from Uganda although there are signs he could hail from somewhere in Asia. Overall, Zorro has uploaded well in excess of 2,400 torrents to KAT but today they have all been removed following copyright holder action.

In a broken English response to VIruz, another KAT uploader who thought the torrents had been taken down over the period of a day, Zorro revealed the truth.

“Not in one day..it’s within 12 minutes,” Zorro explained.

To underline the scale of the takedown, the image below provided by Zorro himself shows the mass of popups he received from KickassTorrents when the torrents were deleted. It’s quite a sight to behold.

Of course, for many copyright holders to coordinate on a single day would be quite a thing, but dealing with Zorro was a little more straightforward.

All of Zorro’s torrents contained content belonging to game engine and asset company Unity, with most appearing to have been sourced from its Asset Store.

Zorro says he has suspicions that a user he previously complained about may have had something to do with his torrents being removed. While that’s certainly possible, a much more convenient explanation is at hand.

Yesterday at Unite Europe (video), Unity made an important announcement. Noting that Unity isn’t as accessible as it could be, the company announced a new strategy.

“So, we wanted to simplify. We wanted to give more value. With our three new products we’re confident we have increased the ability for you to reach the largest audience, provided increased no worry access to the latest tech and made Unity more affordable,” Unity said.

The details are available here, but essentially Unity now has a completely free tier (not even a credit card required) through to Plus, Pro, and enterprise solutions.

Meanwhile, Zorro and his fans are now staring at where his uploads used to be. In addition to the 2,400 taken down by Unity, Zorro says he personally deleted the rest. However, he appears to be relatively upbeat.

“Never mind somehow I survived. And still I am here at KAT with more stronger courage. Sooner or later I will reupload everything. I will reupload all 2506 torrents in a new way. From now on I will work like a hacker bandit,” Zorro says.

While there will be plenty of users who are disappointed at this turn of events, it’s perhaps a sign of the times that other uploaders on the site consider these events to be an occupational hazard to be taken in one’s stride.

“Well the company [Unity] that wants it down wants it down for a reason…it’s their hard work being pirated off of. Have to look at the whole thing that way,” said an uploader called Jagwar.

“Kat just complies with their request. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We all know if we upload a torrent there’s a chance it will be removed due to copyright owner request. Seems like that guy just got unlucky.”

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

Last week Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz chose a panel of individuals to draft the party’s platform.

As previously reported, 15 were selected, with six chosen by Clinton, five chosen by Bernie Sanders and four chosen by Wasserman Schultz. While other publications will certainly pick over the bones of the rest of the committee, one in particular stands out as interesting to TF readers.

Howard L Berman is an attorney and former U.S. Representative. He’s employed at Covington & Burling as a lobbyist and represents the MPAA on matters including “Intellectual property issues in trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties, copyright, and related legislation.”

It will come as no surprise then that the major studios have been donors throughout Berman’s political career. As shown in the image below, the top five contributors are all major movie companies.

Born in 1941, Berman’s work with the film industry earned him the nickname “the congressman from Hollywood” and over the years he’s been at the root of some of the most heated debates over the protection of intellectual property.

In 2007 and as later confirmed by Wikileaks, Berman was one of the main proponents of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Just five short years later Berman was at the heart of perhaps the biggest copyright controversy the world has ever seen when he became a co-sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

“The theft of American Intellectual Property not only robs those in the creative chain of adequate compensation, but it also stunts potential for economic growth, cheats our communities out of good paying jobs, and threatens future American innovation,” Berman said in the run-up to SOPA.

While these kinds of soundbites are somewhat common, it’s interesting to note that Berman showed particular aggression towards Google during hearings focusing on SOPA. On November 16, 2011, Berman challenged the search giant over its indexing of The Pirate Bay.

Insisting that there “is no contradiction between intellectual property rights protection and enforcement ensuring freedom of expression on the Internet,” Berman said that Google’s refusal to delist the entire site was unacceptable.

“All right. Well, explain to me this one,” Berman demanded of Google policy counsel Katherine Oyama.

“The Pirate Bay is a notorious pirate site, a fact that its founders proudly proclaim in the name of the site itself. In fact, the site’s operators have been criminally convicted in Europe. And yet…..U.S.-Google continues to send U.S. consumers to the site by linking to the site in your search results. Why does Google refuse to de-index the site in your search results?” he said.

Oyama tried to answer, noting that Google invests tens of millions of dollars into the problem. “We have hundreds of people around the world that work on it,” she said. “When it comes to copyright….”

Berman didn’t allow her to finish, repeating his question about delisting the whole site, again and again. Before Berman’s time ran out, Oyama was interrupted several more times while trying to explain that the DMCA requires takedowns of specific links, not entire domains. Instead, Berman suggested that Oyama should “infuse herself” with the notion that Google wanted to stop “digital theft.”

“[T]he DMCA is not doing the job. That is so obvious,” he said. “[Y]ou cannot look at what is going on since the passage of the DMCA and say Congress got it just right. Maintain the status quo.”

These arguments continue today in the “takedown, staydown” debate surrounding the ongoing review of the DMCA, with Hollywood lining up on one side and Google being held responsible for the actions of others on the other. But simply complaining about the DMCA is a little moderate for Berman.

Almost one and a half decades ago in the wake of Napster and before the rise of BitTorrent, Berman had a dream of dealing with peer-to-peer file-sharing by force. In 2002 he proposed the Peer To Peer Piracy Prevention Act, which would have allowed copyright holders to take extraordinary technical measures against file-sharers in order to stop the unauthorized distribution of their content.

H.R.5211 sought to amend Federal copyright law to protect a copyright owner from liability in any criminal or civil action “for impairing, with appropriate technology, the unauthorized distribution, display, performance, or reproduction of his or her copyrighted work on a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file trading network.”

The bill didn’t deal in specifics, but “impairing” was widely believed to be a euphemism for DDoS and poisoning attacks on individual file-sharers in order to make sharing impossible from their computers.

At the time “shared-folder” type sharing apps were still popular so bombarding networks with fake and badly named files would also have been fair game, although distributing viruses and malware were not on the table. Eventually, however, the bill died.

Berman, on the other hand, appears to be very much alive and will be soon helping to draft the Democratic Party platform. On past experience his input might not be too difficult to spot.

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

In recent years Hollywood has taken a rather aggressive approach against Google. The movie studios believe that the search engine isn’t doing enough to limit piracy, and have demanded more stringent measures.

One of the suggestions often made is to boost the visibility of legal movie services in search results. For example, show a list of streaming and download portals when users search for a movie.

In recent months Google has experimented with exactly this. People who search for classic “pirate” terms may see ads for legal options. In addition, the search engine now shows a snippet with all sorts of movie details when people search for a title.

This movie information also includes reviews and ratings from around the web, with links to IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and other prominent sites. A useful feature for sure, but Hollywood will not like all of the sites that are featured.

Among various established sources, Google is also showing ratings from the “pirate” streaming site FMovies. As can be seen below, FMovies user ratings are tucked between IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, using the rather inviting title “Watch Free Movies Online.”

Watch Free Movies Online (context, different search)

While FMovies ratings only appear incidentally, we have seen it across different browsers and on both desktop and mobile searches.

The link in question points directly to the FMovies page where a high quality stream of the film is readily available. In addition, users can opt to download it directly to their computer or mobile device.

Love (2015)

The FMovies ratings appear in the movie snippet because FMovies is using Google’s review markup. This allows any site to be featured there, when it complies with all the quality guidelines.

When Google announced the ratings feature last year it said it offers “publishers with an opportunity to increase the discoverability and consumption of their reviews using markup,” but we doubt that pirate sites are meant to be included.

Ironically, one of the tools that is supposed to divert people from pirate searches is now used to link people to one directly. Mistake or not, the movie studios will use these and other examples to argue that Google still has a long way to go.

Meanwhile, FMovies is enjoying the free traffic, for as long as it lasts.

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