Website blocking applications are active in many countries around the world and they are often complex beasts, with negotiations drawn out over months and in some cases years.

Legislation passed last year in Australia aimed to formalize the process but that doesn’t appear to have detracted from the complexity of getting sites blocked under Section 115A of the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015.

Two cases are currently testing the legal machine at the Federal Court. Roadshow Films (the movie division of Village Roadshow) and TV giant Foxtel are both seeking to have several pirate sites blocked at the ISP level. The latter wants to render The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and TorrentHound inaccessible while the former is targeting streaming portal Solarmovie.

The Internet service providers involved – TPG (including subsidiary iiNet), Optus, Telstra and M2 – have today confirmed that while they don’t intend to accept the blocking applications made by Roadshow and Foxtel they don’t intend to oppose them either, a move which leaves the matter in the hands of the Court.

But even with opposition out of the way, things aren’t necessarily progressing smoothly. Just as the issue of costs made a mess of Australia’s three-strikes regime and eventually shelved it, the ISPs are now insisting that they shouldn’t be forced to pay for the entertainment industries’ blocking efforts either.

While talks have been underway between the parties since last year, the ISPs feel that as innocent parties they shouldn’t be the ones picking up the bills. Quite how much those costs will rise to is also a matter for debate.

In Court today TPB/iiNet said it could carry out DNS blocking relatively cheaply at just AUS$50 (US37) per domain. M2, on the other hand, said its costs would be AUS$400 (US$295) per domain in the best case scenario and could climb to AUS$800 (US$590) in the worst.

While other ISPs have yet to put in their estimates (they will do so in the coming weeks), the sheer amount of blocking that will eventually take place in Australia must be a point of concern. After several years there are now around a 1,000 domains on the UK’s unofficial blocklist and that number is increasing every month. Deciding who pays at this early stage is definitely an important exercise.

As a result all parties will return to Court for an additional hearing on the blocking application on June 23. In the meantime, however, further discussion on site-blocking will continue in a parallel case brought by the music industry.

Last month members of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and Australasian collecting society APRA AMCOS teamed up to file their first site-blocking application at the Federal Court. Record labels Universal, Warner, Sony, and Albert & Son targeted KickassTorrents.

After describing KickassTorrents as the “worst of the worst”, they too demanded
a close to nationwide ISP blockade of the famous torrent site and its associated proxy sites. A case management hearing in that case will take place on June 6.

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

Internet provider Verizon recently submitted a response to the U.S. Copyright Office, which is reviewing the effectiveness of the DMCA takedown process.

In line with other ISPs, the group stresses that the DMCA doesn’t require Internet providers to forward notices to their subscribers. This requirement only applies to services which actually host content, they point out.

Despite this crucial difference ISPs receive countless copyright infringement warnings which target subscribers who allegedly pirate movies and music. This is a growing problem, according to Verizon, who describe the notices as invalid.

“The biggest problem faced by Verizon is the deluge of invalid notices that it now receives in its role as a provider of conduit services – typically relating to peer-to-peer file sharing. These are notices that are not provided for or contemplated by the DMCA,” the ISP notes.

“Ten years ago, Verizon received as little as 6,000 invalid P2P notices each month. As a result of automated notice factories such as Rightscorp, that number has increased to millions each month,” Verizon adds.

The massive increase in volume also directly affects Verizon’s ability to process legitimate notices. In fact, two-and-a-half years ago a batch of over two million notices in one day crashed one of Verizon’s mail servers.

“In November 2013, Rightscorp, Inc., one of the principal abusers of the section 512 framework, inundated Verizon with over 2 million invalid notices in a single day, causing the server for inbound DMCA notices to crash.”

“The deluge of these improper notices jams the system and slows Verizon’s ability to respond to the valid notices that it receives,” Verizon explains.

The ISP is only required to respond to takedown notices for its hosting services and CDN, which are only a few dozen per month. So, finding these in a pile of millions of incorrect notices can indeed be quite a challenge.

Congress never intended ISPs who merely pass on traffic to receive these kind of notices, Verizon says. They condemn outfits such as Rightscorp who regularly issue demands for ISPs to terminate the accounts of pirating subscribers.

“That is an abuse of the DMCA notice process,” the ISP writes. “In Verizon’s view, it is important that sanctions be available for this kind of abusive conduct.”

In addition to sanctions for improper takedown notices, Verizon directly attacks Rightscorp’s settlement business model, equating it to a “shakedown.”

All in all, the ISP hopes Congress will help Internet providers to keep the current safe harbor protections for ISPs in place, while making sure that abusive anti-piracy outfits are properly sanctioned.

Verizon’s submission to the U.S. Copyright Office can be read in full here.

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

After many years of targeting the operators of pirate sites, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN is now turning up the pressure on some of the more prolific online file-sharers.

Naturally those individuals frequent some of the largest torrent sites and BREIN hopes that by tracking them down and holding them to account, others engaged in similar activities will reconsider their options, thus removing pirate content from the Internet.

As part of this project BREIN previously targeted 2Lions-Team, a release group that reportedly uploaded thousands of files to popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and ExtraTorrent.

The group was involved in the spread of a wide range of content including popular TV show The Walking Dead and recent hit movie The Revenant. According to BREIN, 2Lions-Team were responsible for almost half a million pirate downloads.

Back in March BREIN announced that it had obtained ex-parte injunctions against three members of the torrent release group. As a result they faced fines of €2,000 per day fine if they infringed BREIN members’ copyrights in the future.

BREIN also reached out-of-court settlements of around €15,000 with five members of 2Lions-Team members, to a total of €67,500. But BREIN still wasn’t done. According to a new announcement from the anti-piracy group it has just caught up with a uploader and moderator for the group.

“The uploader posted frequent torrents for illegal English subtitled movies and TV series on illegal websites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents,” BREIN announced.

“[After the other members were identified] the uploader in question stopped uploading and hoped in vain that he would be spared. He was still identified by BREIN.”

Just like his former colleagues in 2Lions-Team, the unnamed individual is now required to settle with the anti-piracy group. That amount has apparently been set at €7500 which is an uncomfortable amount for most people and could be devastating to others.

Furthermore, the individual will also have to remove all the torrents he uploaded to various sites, something other team members were also required to do. In some cases that will be possible but torrents tend to have a life of their own and can’t be stopped simply by the removal of a file.

BREIN says that in total it will now receive €75,000 in settlements from 2Lions-Team members, a not insignificant amount for people engaged in what was probably an oversized hobby project. And for those wondering about the future, these kinds of actions look set to increase.

Back in March the anti-piracy group was granted special permission from the national data protection authority to monitor torrent users on a large scale.

“I advise notorious uploaders to think twice, after all, forewarned is forearmed,” said BREIN chief Tim Kuik, who noted that VPN users might get even tougher treatment.

“VPN services can see what you do, you run a security risk and it is possible that you can still be identified, which will result in a higher ‘fine’,” Kuik said.

This week the anti-piracy group is reiterating its threats that important uploaders run the risk of significant punishments.

“BREIN again warns that the monitoring of initial and/or large-scale illegal uploaders is extensive and that settlement amounts could reach thousands of euros per case,” the outfit concludes

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

Hoping to stop the unauthorized distribution of millions of academic papers, academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint against Sci-Hub and several related sites last year.

While Sci-Hub is nothing like the average pirate site, it is just as illegal according to Elsevier’s legal team, which obtained a preliminary injunction from a New York District Court last fall.

The injunction ordered Sci-Hub’s operator to quit offering access to any Elsevier content, but this didn’t happen. Instead of taking Sci-Hub down, the lawsuit and the associated media attention only helped the site grow.

However, as part of the injunction Elsevier is able to request domain name registrars to suspend Sci-Hub’s domain names. This happened to the original .org domain earlier, and a few days ago the Chinese registrar Now.cn appears to have done the same for Sci-hub.io.

The domain name has stopped resolving and is now listed as “reserved” according to the latest WHOIS info. TorrentFreak reached out to Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who informed us that the registrar sent her a notice referring to a complaint from Elsevier.

Message from the registrar

Elbakyan was also quick to add that several ‘backup’ domain names are still in play, including Sci-Hub.bz and Sci-Hub.cc. This means that the site remains accessible to those who update their bookmarks.

In addition to the alternative domain names users can access the site directly through the IP-address 31.184.194.81, or its domain on the Tor-network, which is pretty much immune to any takedown efforts.

The Ukraine-born Elbakyan has no intention of throwing in the towel and believes that what she does is helping millions of less privileged researchers to do their work properly by providing free access to research results.

Authorized or not, there is definitely plenty of interest in Sci-Hub’s service. The site currently hosts more than 51 million academic papers and receives millions of visitors per month.

Many visits come from countries where access to academic journals is limited, such as Iran, Russia or China. But even in countries where access is more common, many researchers visit the site, an analysis from Science magazine revealed last week.

Elsevier says it is still deliberating what steps to take next. The publisher recently informed the New York District Court that it’s researching what “potential additional remedies” it can take against Sci-Hub and its operator.

Meanwhile, academic pirates continue to flood to Sci-Hub, domain seizure or not.

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

Back in January the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) drew attention to a consumer-unfriendly situation in the United States which forces millions of cable TV viewers to access content through devices offered by their providers.

According to the FCC, 99% of pay-TV subscribers are chained to set-top boxes that are supplied at inflated rates. On average, the average American household pays $231 in rental fees – a cool $20 billion a year for all U.S. consumers.

To reduce the effects of this problem the FCC approved a proposal that would allow consumers to swap expensive cable boxes for other devices and apps, a change that would boost competition and deliver a blow to companies such as Comcast who would suddenly be open to competition from companies such as Alphabet/Google.

Last month President Barack Obama came out in favor of the plan but that was soon followed by an opinion from the MPAA who warned that opening up the set-top box market to third party vendors would cause a piracy problem.

“No matter what you think about the pay-TV set-top box market, the FCC may not promote alternatives by taking the intellectual property of the content industry and giving it to some members of the technology industry, or by making it easier for pirate site operators to build a black market business by stealing that content,” the MPAA warned.

Part of the MPAA’s concerns center around the likelihood that new boxes will offer ‘cross-platform searches’, i.e mixing regular pay-TV content with that offered via the Internet. In other words, authorized premium content might potentially appear alongside pirate content in set-top box menus.

Those warnings appear to have resonated with two influential lawmakers who have written to FCC chief Tom Wheeler with their concerns.

Interestingly, the letter penned by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Congress’s longest-serving current member John Conyers doesn’t merely reference piracy in general – they have a specific concern in mind.

“As Members of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees our nation’s copyright laws, we recognize the harm to the American economy caused by the theft of copyrighted works,” the Congressmen begin.

“Creators have shared concerns that under the FCC’s proposed rule, future set-top boxes or their replacements could purposely designed to distribute pirated content obtained from sources that primarily offer stolen content.”

And the number one concern?

“For example, apps such as Popcorn Time that focus on providing access to piratical content have tried to match the format and ease of use of legitimate apps to mask the theft of copyrighted content,” they warn.

“Creators are legitimately worried about the prospect that future set top boxes, or their functional equivalents, could incorporate apps such as Popcorn Time or its functionality, or otherwise lead to the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works.”

At this point it’s far from clear what future set-top boxes and their software equivalents will look like but it is certainly conceivable that opening up such platforms to third-party vendors could potentially provide easier access to unauthorized content.

That being said, piracy-enabled set-top devices costing just a few dollars are already installed globally in millions of homes, a situation that is only likely to worsen in the months and years to come. Indeed, anyone with an Android phone or tablet already has their own nascent ‘piracy-enabled set-top box” complete with Popcorn Time functionality if they want it.

Public comment on the FCC’s proposals are open until May 23, so expect more pushback from copyright holders and their allies in the meantime.

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