While relatively underreported, many U.S. district courts are still swamped with lawsuits against alleged film pirates.

Malibu Media, the Los Angeles based company behind the ‘X-Art’ adult movies, is behind most of these cases. The company has filed thousands of lawsuits in recent years, targeting Internet subscribers whose accounts were allegedly used to share Malibu’s films via BitTorrent.

Like all copyright holders Malibu collects file-sharers’ IP-addresses as evidence. They then ask the courts to grant a subpoena, forcing Internet providers to hand over the personal details of the associated account holders.

In most cases the courts sign off on these requests, but two recent orders from the Southern District of California show that matters aren’t always as straightforward.

In a recent case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Mitchell Dembin was not convinced that geolocation tools are good enough to prove that the alleged pirate resides in the Court’s district. As a result, he denied Malibu’s request for a subpoena.

“The allegation that the IP address at issue likely resolves to a physical address in this District is not supported in any of the declarations filed in connection with the instant motion,” Judge Dembin writes.

“In its Memorandum of Point and Authorities filed in support of this Motion, Plaintiff again asserts that it employed geolocation technology to trace the physical address of the offending IP address within this jurisdiction, and adds the name of the software employed, but again provides no evidentiary support for its assertions,” he adds (pdf).

Malibu had provided the court with a lengthy memorandum (pdf) explaining how it traced the IP-address to California. Among other things, the company pointed out that it uses a geolocation database from Maxmind, which it believes to be accurate 99% of the time.

Judge Dembin, however, concluded that Malibu fails to provide sufficient evidence, and he is not alone. Late last week Magistrate Judge Ruben Brooks issued a similar order against the adult media company.

“Plaintiff fails to offer any evidence to support its allegation that the infringing IP address was actually traced to a location within this judicial district,” Brooks writes (pdf).

“Nothing in the declarations Plaintiff submitted with its Ex Parte Motion explains what steps Plaintiff took to trace the IP address to a physical point of origin within this Court’s jurisdiction.”

In addition, Judge Brooks also raised questions about the accuracy of a geolocation tool to identify the ISP, concluding that the request for a subpoena should be denied based on a lack of evidence.

Geolocation tools are widely used in copyright lawsuits, so the reservations held by the judges could impact future litigation. Interestingly, when we compared the results of various geolocation tools for one of the IP-addresses involved, the results were different across several databases.

While the orders are good news for the defendants in these particular cases, copyright troll watcher SJD points out that several other local judges have granted similar requests.

That said, the recent decisions do offer hope to those who are targeted by Malibu cases in Southern California, as they now have some additional ammunition to fight back.

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

The European Union wants companies selling digital content to citizens in EU Member States to do so across the entire region. Instead, companies continue to ring-fence their content, making material available in one region and not another.

The practice is known as geo-blocking and is carried out by checking users’ IP addresses and other data against commercial blocklists. A decision is then taken by providers as to which country’s content to serve to the user. This means that when an England-based Netflix user travels to mainland Europe, he can no longer access the same content he can when he’s at home.

In part to discover more about geo-restriction, last year the European Commission launched its Digital Single Market Strategy alongside an antitrust sector inquiry into e-commerce. After sending out questionnaires to both retailers of physical goods and companies offering digital content, the EU Commission has now published its initial findings.

Responses from more than 1,400 companies from all 28 Member States reveals widespread geo-blocking. In respect of physical goods, the EU reports that geo-blocking is often based on the “unilateral business decisions of retailers”, i.e simply not wanting to do business abroad.

“Where a non-dominant company decides unilaterally not to sell abroad, that is not an issue for competition law,” says European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.

However, the situation with digital content supply is somewhat different. While the decision not to sell physical goods elsewhere is mainly the decision of the retailers, it was found that agreements between suppliers and distributors are often the cause of geo-blocking of digital content.

While 68% of digital content providers told the Commission that they geo-block users located in other Member States, 59% admitted that they are contractually bound to do so by their suppliers. The Commission says that these kinds of agreements have the potential to restrict competition in the EU Single Market and breach EU antitrust rules.

While all digital content covered by the EU inquiry was found to be affected by geo-blocking, the chart below clearly shows that worst offenders can be found in the fiction TV, films and sports sectors, with almost three-quarters of suppliers of the former engaged in contractual blocking.

“The information gathered as part of our e-commerce sector inquiry confirms the indications that made us launch the inquiry: Not only does geo-blocking frequently prevent European consumers from buying goods and digital content online from another EU country, but some of that geo-blocking is the result of restrictions in agreements between suppliers and distributors,” Vestager says.

“Where geo-blocking occurs due to agreements, we need to take a close look whether there is anti-competitive behavior, which can be addressed by EU competition tools.”

The Commission notes that if specific competition concerns arise it could open investigations into restrictive practices and abuse of dominant market positions. However, any enforcement measures would need to be carried out on a case-by-case basis.

Margrethe Vestager will offer a more detailed analysis of the inquiry in a preliminary report set to be published and opened for public consultation mid-2016. The final report is scheduled for publication in the first quarter of 2017.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Deadpool 3 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 BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(1)	Deadpool (HDTS)	8.6 / trailer
2	(2)	Kung Fu Panda 3 (HDrip)	8.0 / trailer
3	(…)	The 5th Wave (Webrip)	5.4 / trailer
4	(3)	IP-Man 3	7.6 / trailer
5	(4)	The Hateful Eight	8.0 / trailer
6	(5)	The Revenant (DVDscr)	8.2 / trailer
7	(…)	Zootopia (HDcam)	8.4 / trailer
8	(8)	The Big Short	8.1 / trailer
9	(9)	Spectre	6.9 / trailer
10	(…)	The Gigolo 2	4.4 / trailer

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

Every day dozens of millions of people share files using BitTorrent, willingly exposing their IP-addresses to the rest of the world.

For those who value their privacy this is a problem, so many sign up with a VPN provider or torrent proxy service. This is fine, but some people then forget to check whether their setup is actually working, which is not always the case.

Some torrent clients may be vulnerable to leaks, or people simply forget to configure their client properly, which may involve ticking a few extra checkboxes and disabling features such as DHT and PEX.

So how do you check if your VPN and proxy are working properly? While it’s easy enough to test your web IP-address through one of the many IP-checking services, checking the IP-address that’s broadcasted via your torrent client is more complex.

There are a few services that offer a “torrent IP check” tool but these are generally limited to responses from HTTP trackers. Luckily, a new project allows people to dive a bit deeper.

Doileak is free a service that runs IP-address checks to test for general leaks, but also more specific torrent checks.

After loading a test torrent it will report back the IP-address your torrent client is using to connect to other peers. In addition to an HTTP tracker, it also has an UDP version, which is crucial as UDP trackers are more likely to leak information.

Furthermore, Doileak also reports the various DNS requests your torrent client is using, which may also be a weak link for some.

Doileak torrent results

Everything is functioning properly as long as your residential IP-address or your Internet provider’s DNS server doesn’t show up in the torrent sections. For VPN users the web and torrent IP-address should be the same, but for proxy users the two IPs are different.

Talking to TorrentFreak, Doileak founder Tobias warns that not all VPN services are as effective as they should be, so encourages people to check their setup.

“BitTorrent support initially wasn’t on my todo list, but after some research it became clear that a lot of torrent users believe they are anonymous, while they are broadcasting their real IP-address,” he says.

In a separate article Tobias identifies several weak spots for torrent users, including UDP leaks and the DHT vulnerability.

Users who are interested in their setup can run the test over at Doileak.

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

These days there are essentially two ways to obtain music on-demand. One can buy MP3s from places like iTunes or for those looking to make their pennies stretch further, streaming solutions like Spotify are just what the doctor ordered.

Services that allow users to download MP3s are more expensive than streaming options and no wonder. Offline listening features notwithstanding, streaming is somewhat transient. Like a diamond, an MP3 is forever.

No surprise then that Spotify users squealed with excitement back in March 2013 when a new Chrome extension hit the web. Downloadify by Robin Aldenhoven allowed Spotify users to permanently download MP3s to their devices from the Spotify web interface, a move that sparked a frenzy of people doing just that.

Now, three years on, it appears that downloading MP3s from Spotify is a thing again. This time around it’s not quite as easy as installing a simple extension but for those with a PC and a modicum of patience it shouldn’t prove too much of a problem.

The original code for the aptly named Spotify Playlist Downloader (SPD) was created by Lordmau5 and has been kicking around for a few weeks. Given a few parameters it happily dumps playlists full of 160 kbps MP3s to the host machine in seconds and names them nicely too.

However, SPD requires people to fiddle around using a command line, something the majority simply can’t be bothered with. So, what SPD needed was for someone to come along and augment it with a nice Windows GUI to make the whole thing more user-friendly.

Thanks to dekiller82, Spotify Playlist Downloader now happily runs via a basic GUI, provided people also install NodeJS and Microsoft’s .NET framework up front.

Spotify Playlist Downloader

Admittedly it’s a bit clunky but it definitely works and does so with both premium and even free Spotify accounts. There are reports that free accounts can seize up after vigorous SPD use but eventually they begin to work again although no one seems to know why.

So with tens of millions of tracks now available to anyone with a PC, one might expect there are celebrations to be had. Indeed, in some quarters they’re probably going on right now.

But without the whole Spotify package, complete with recommendations, superb music discovery opportunities and a beautiful interface, the hand stacking, sorting and categorizing of MP3s feels somewhat primitive. Sure, the tracks come at a bargain price, but using them seems like a step back in time.

There’s little doubt that sooner or later Spotify will plug the hole exploited by SPD but in the meantime thousands of people will be greedily filling their hard drives with MP3s. For some it will entail grabbing some treasured classics but for others it will mean revisiting a life filled with soulless Windows Explorer folders that lead first to excitement and then musical dead ends.

Everyone knows that forbidden fruit is alluring but sometimes the realization dawns that while it’s definitely exciting, it’s not necessarily more tasty.

The license-bending, label-annoying Spotify Playlist Downloader project can be found here.

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