Following a series of High Court orders, six of the UK’s major ISPs are required to block access to dozens of the world’s most popular ‘pirate’ sites.

The measures were supposed to make it harder for UK Internet subscribers to access these sites, but the effects on actual behavior are widely debated.

A new study published by Carnegie Mellon University and Wellesley College researchers aims to provide some empirical evidence on this issue.

The researchers investigated the effects of a 2014 court order that required ISPs to block an additional 53 pirate sites. Using data from a panel of 58,809 UK Internet users, they then reviewed the changes in browsing patterns among these users.

Not surprisingly, visits to the blocked sites dropped dramatically, 90% in this case. However, the researchers didn’t observe an increase in visitors to pirate sites that remained unblocked.

“We found that these blocks caused a 90% drop in visits to the blocked sites while causing no increase in usage of unblocked sites. This led to a 22% decrease in total piracy for all users affected by the blocks”

This suggests that the pirate site blockades are indeed effective to a certain degree. However, as anecdotal evidence has shown in the past, they also boost the interest in circumvention tools such as VPNs.

“Some users of the blocked sites, however, did seem to employ technical workarounds to continue usage of the blocked sites,” the researchers reveal.

The data show a marginally significant effect which indicates that “for every 10 additional visits to blocked sites before the blocks, a consumer increased their visits to VPN sites after the blocks by an additional 30%.”

In other words, while some pirates may drop out, there are also those who actively try to circumvent the blockades.

Overall, however, the researchers conclude that there’s a decrease in piracy and an increase in use of legal services. This effect is most pronounced for ad supported streaming services, and to a lesser degree (and only a 75% confidence level) for paid services.

“We also found that these blocks caused a 6% increase in visits to paid legal streaming sites like Netflix and a 10% increase in videos viewed on legal ad supported streaming sites like BBC and Channel 5.”

One should take into account that the results are based on data from 2014, after several large pirate sites were blocked already. This means that other pirates may have already dropped out after earlier blocks, while the more persistent pirates remain.

This may also explain why there was a stronger effect on visits to legal services in a previous study. That said, the additional blocking measures still change people’s behavior.

“The evidence suggests that blocking large numbers of sites can still ‘move the dial’ in terms of consumer behavior, but that there may be diminishing returns as remaining pirates may be more dispersed or else have lower willingness to pay for legal content.

“Nonetheless, such blocks can serve to mitigate the possibility of a long-term return to the prior status quo,” the researchers add.

The research was carried out as part of Carnegie Mellon University’s Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics, which received a generous donation from the MPAA. However, the researchers suggest that their work is carried out independently.

That said, the results are likely to be used by the entertainment industries to justify additional blocks around the world.

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

The UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) is probably best known for activities aimed at tracking down the operators of pirate sites and the release groups who frequent them.

Financed by the film industry, over the years FACT has forged partnerships with law enforcement agencies, including the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). But while in many instances FACT’s work is reactive, the group also works in precautionary roles.

In addition to preventing individuals from recording movies in theaters, for example, FACT also runs an accreditation system that aims to hold businesses providing services to the movie and TV sector to a set of high standards. The overall aim is to protect the intellectual property owned by FACT’s members.

The latest company to achieve FACT certification is Microsoft with its cloud computing platform Azure. Launched in 2010, Azure provides PaaS (Platform as a service) and along with Amazon Web Services is considered a market leader in Iaas (Infrastructure as a service).

“Microsoft is quite familiar with global anti-piracy efforts, and we believe that extending this attention to our customers’ environments is just as important as safeguarding our own intellectual property,” says Alice Rison, Senior Director, Microsoft Azure.

“That’s why I’m excited to announce Azure’s certification by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), making Azure the first public cloud to gain this accreditation.”

To get a flavor of what FACT is trying to achieve with its certification system one only has to look at the list of companies that have already gone through the process.

There are currently 110 businesses with FACT accreditation, such as those offering subtitling services. These might not immediately sound like piracy hotspots but TV shows have been leaked at this point in the chain before, such as the high-profile pre-release of several Doctor Who episodes in 2014.

Others, such as companies and hotels involved in pre-release screenings of movies present more obvious security holes, as do those providing courier, logistics, transport and storage services. All of these processes have been exploited in the past to get pre-release content onto the Internet and now FACT is determined to regulate them all.

A handful are a little more obscure. Alchemy Metals Ltd proudly display its FACT accreditation online, noting that the company utilizes “a variety of methods to ensure your sensitive product has been damaged beyond repair and re-use.” Precisely what Alchemy Metals destroys for the industry is unclear, but operations similar to theirs have been previously been used for the “granulation” of seized computer and video games hardware.

The inclusion of registered charity His Church on the accredited list is also of interest. That organization take counterfeit clothing, DVDs, CDs and other items and removes the illegal branding. These items are then shipped abroad for re-use, thus avoiding landfill.

For Microsoft, however, it is all about keeping those involved in the movie making and distribution process safe from hackers, pirates and other ne’er do wells. Accreditation means an independent security survey and both physical and digital tests, to include security of buildings, alarms systems and CCTV, access control systems, digital security, audit trails plus staff vetting.

All of this combined establishes whether an organization meets the high standards set by FACT partners such as Universal, Disney, Sony, The Premier League and TV giant BSkyB.

“The FACT certification is yet another demonstration of the investments we’re making in not only ensuring the security of your data, but in gaining your trust as a business partner,” says Microsoft’s Alice Rison.

Of course, all of this comes at a cost. The FACT Certification Fee for each UK site is £2,100 per year. For those outside the UK the fee is the same, plus travel and accommodation expenses.

Earlier this year Microsoft met the standards required by the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) cloud security guidelines. More details of the MPAA’s Content Security Model can be found here.

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

Earlier this year Netflix announced that it would increase its efforts to block customers who circumvent geo-blockades.

As a result it has become harder to use VPN services and proxies to access Netflix content from other countries, something various movie studios have repeatedly called for.

With the application of commercial blacklist data, Netflix already blocks IP-addresses that are linked to such services, something which also affects well-intentioned customers who merely use a VPN to protect their privacy.

This has resulted in a lot of complaints from users with over 40,000 people signing a petition to lift the VPN ban. In addition, several people claim to have ended their Netflix subscriptions due to the restrictive policies, while others have suggested a return to their old pirate ways.

Some analysts predicted that the outrage might have an effect on the company’s results, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. During the presentation on the first quarter results yesterday, the VPN issue was just a small footnote.

When asked about the impact of the VPN changes on the results, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings brushed the issue aside as a minor detail that doesn’t impact the bigger picture in any way.

“It’s a very small but quite vocal minority. So it’s really inconsequential to us, as you could see in the Q1 results,” Hastings said during the earnings call.

Jumping in, Netflix CFO David Wells stressed that Netflix enjoyed very strong growth in the United States, as well as a successful global expansion. So, overall there is no sign that VPN users are abandoning ship en masse.

While the impact on the company’s revenue turns out to be insignificant, there is of course also a user satisfaction angle which could create a possible PR backlash in the longer term.

Netflix’s management doesn’t address these issues directly. However, it’s clear that hundreds of thousands of people are affected and Netflix can’t be happy with the outpouring of complaints that continues day after day.

Nonetheless, Netflix continues to address the VPN piracy issue. TorrentFreak has spoken to several VPN service providers who have seen an increase in blocking efforts over the past several weeks.

Initially Netflix used static addresses for the geo-blocking checks. As a result, proxy and VPN operators could easily bypass these checks by forwarding this traffic to a ‘clean’ IP-address. However, Netflix recently updated its detection methods and now uses hundreds of regularly changing domains.

“They are now coming from a few hundred different possible subdomains” one VPN operator told us.

“This makes it much more expensive for us to circumvent because we would basically need to forward all Netflix traffic through our servers instead of just the packets that do the geolocation.”

Netflix previously said that, ultimately, it wants to make VPN banning obsolete by licensing all content globally. However, as long as the company still has to block access to some of its own content including House of Cards, there’s still a long way to go

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

After years of attempting to clamp down on piracy in 2015 entertainment industry companies in Australia finally had progress to report.

New legislation passed in the summer allowed copyright holders to apply to the Federal Court to have infringing sites blocked at the ISP level.

While previous applications have been made on behalf of the movie and TV industries, until now the music sector has remained quiet. That changed today when members of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and Australasian collecting society APRA AMCOS teamed up to file their first application.

Filed at the Federal Court under section 115A of the Copyright Act 1968, member labels Universal Music Australia Pty Limited, Warner Music Australia Pty. Limited, Sony Music Entertainment Australia Pty Ltd and J Albert & Son Pty Ltd, demanded that leading torrent site KickassTorrents (KAT) be blocked by the country’s ISPs.

Citing a government comment that KAT and others like it are the “worst of the worst” who exploit the “creativity of others” without giving anything back, the industry groups claim that millions of dollars are being made in illegal advertising revenues.

“Online infringement continues to be a major threat to the sustainability of the Australian music industry. Illegal offshore sites like Kickass Torrents show a complete disrespect for music creators and the value of music,” said Jenny Morris OAM, Chair of the APRA Board.

“Australian music fans already have access – for free if they choose – to the world’s repertoire of music via more than 20 legitimate licensed online music services. Blocking access to sites like Kickass Torrents is all about supporting those services and allowing the writers whose songs are available on them to be paid for their work.”

In addition to blocking KickassTorrents the labels have also applied to have related proxy sites blocked. This means that quick workarounds will be more tricky for the casual pirate. It’s a strategy already employed in the UK and one which has become a feature of two other cases previously filed by the audio-visual industries in Australia.

Those cases feature the movie division of Village Roadshow, Roadshow Films, taking on streaming portal Solarmovie. TV giant Foxtel is targeting The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and TorrentHound.

Due to the sheer number of proxies, mirrors and clones that are facilitating access to those sites, the studios had to contact 61 third-party sites to inform them of the action. None responded. No numbers have yet been published but there are dozens of KickassTorrents variants so a similar process will have to be undertaken in this case too.

Also potentially muddying the waters is KickassTorrents’ claim that they take down copyright-infringing content following complaints from rightsholders.

The site’s users will be familiar with thousands of torrents disappearing from the platform but whether that will be enough to differentiate it under section 115a from a site whose “primary purpose to infringe” is unlikely in a non-adversarial process.

“Last year ARIA welcomed the Federal Government’s passing of section 115A as a critical element in supporting the legitimate digital content market in Australia,” said ARIA CEO Dan Rosen.

“ARIA and its members believe that this case will be an important step to ensure Australians are accessing their music from sites which contribute to our local industry, so that we can continue investing in talent to make the music we all love.”

The video cases are due back in court during early May following discussions with ISPs over the technicalities of blocking. While those negotiations appear to have been somewhat drawn out, future cases should prove much smoother to handle.

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

With the recent Copyright Office consultation on the efficacy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ringing in the ears of many significant stakeholders, we’re informed that much is at stake in the online marketplace.

What began with opinions from a wide range of interested parties has now morphed into a battle of opposing forces, with annoyed copyright holders leading the charge on one side and Google and its supporters on the other.

Despite engaging in no infringement itself and doing everything the law requires, on a daily basis Google is now being described as the world’s greatest piracy facilitator. It’s getting pretty ugly.

The latest to weigh-in with a controversial opinion is veteran film producer Avi Lerner. Perhaps best known for bringing The Expendables trilogy to the silver screen, Lerner is pulling no punches when it comes to the blame game. In fact, he’s taken it right to the very top.

“The government, the president, is such a coward. He’s scared of Google so we are losing millions,” he told AFP.

As the founder of production companies Nu Image and Millennium Films, Lerner is of course no stranger to piracy. In 2014, a pristine copy of The Expendables 3 was leaked onto the Internet, much to the company’s dismay.

While police in the UK arrested two men in connection with the leak later that year, followed by a third in 2015, thus far no culprits have surfaced in the United States. So, in the absence of a direct bogeyman, Google – and the President – will have to do.

“It’s a major problem and it’s something that I don’t know if anyone can stop, because the government, the president, Congress are all scared of Google,” Lerner said.

The film producer says he feels that Google has no incentive to stop piracy because it generates revenue from it, but this kind of blame game is nothing new and largely misses the point. All piracy takes place outside Google’s ecosystem and would continue even if Google disappeared into thin air. Still, Lerner thinks he has the solution.

“They should tell Google to stop piracy. They should make a law that anyone helping piracy — and not helping to stop piracy — should go to jail or get penalized or whatever,” he said.

It’s not clear whether Lerner was just angry when he made these comments or whether he really doesn’t understand how the whole piracy thing works, but the notion of throwing people in jail for simply not helping to stop piracy is certainly food for thought.

Only time will tell if that kind of punishment should also extend to the President himself but he’ll be long out of office before anything (if anything) is done to tune-up the DMCA. Jailing Google executives is presumably much more distant on the horizon.

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