Straightforward availability of content is often cited as a reason for people pirating content. Whether it’s geo-locked movies on Netflix or TV shows premiering in the United States before less lucrative markets, reasons for obtaining content without permission begin to pile up.

One of the main availability issues is caused by theatrical windowing, the period in which the latest blockbusters play exclusively in theaters before hitting consumer platforms. During these weeks and months the public is expected to head off to the cinema and pay relatively large sums of money to watch the movie in the company of hundreds of others, or go without.

While this is an attractive proposition to millions of people every year, others prefer to enjoy content in their own homes but during the theatrical window there is only one way to do that and it involves breaking the law. However, if Napster co-founder Sean Parker has his way, watching first-run movies without leaving the couch might soon be an option.

According to Hollywood sources, Parker is currently working on a new project which will offer brand new movies in the home on the date they’re released in cinemas.

Called Screening Room, the project envisions the installation of a special set-top box in the home for a not unreasonable $150. However, when consumers want to watch a movie they will have to shell out $50 for the opportunity to view it once during a 48 hour period.

For the single person at home or those on a date, $25 to $50 each sounds like a lot of money. That being said, throw in a family with a few kids or a bunch of friends on a Saturday night, all of a sudden it’s much less than $10 each which is an altogether more interesting proposition.

Also on the upside is the avoidance of the other ancillary costs associated with visiting a theater. There’s no fuel to reach the location, no parking charges, no expensive food and drink, and no expensive movie memorabilia to spend money on. In fact, the more one thinks about it, the better value $50 sounds.

Of course, while all this money saving might be good for the public it sounds bad for theater chains. However, Screening Room is said to have a solution. According to a Variety report the company might be prepared to cut exhibitors in on the deal, handing them up to $20 per screening. Furthermore, customers who pay $50 to watch at home would then get two free tickets to watch the movie in the cinema, a clear opportunity to make some money on top.

Needless to say, distributors will also demand a cut and it’s being reported they would receive a 20% share of the $50 outlay. For their part, Screening Room is looking at taking just 10% ($5) from each viewing.

While still in the early stages of development, it’s reported that Screening Room representatives have been meeting with all the major studios with Universal, Fox and Sony showing a lot of interest. According to sources, the company is close to doing a deal with AMC.

But not everyone is happy, far from it. According to comments made to Deadline by a pair of major studio distribution executives, Screening Room’s proposals are of huge concern.

“This news is so damaging, I can’t tell you right now how unhappy I am,” said one.

Another expressed a more apocalyptic view.

“It would be the beginning of the end, and half of the theaters in this country would close,” he said.

So, on the one hand sits Screening Room, with plans to fill a huge gap in the market while disrupting it significantly. On the other sits some frightened industry players who see the fledgling company as the modern equivalent of the Betamax Boston Strangler.

At home sit hungry consumers, some looking to outlay $50 per shot and others wondering if the incoming movies will be easy to copy. Apparently Screening Room has secure anti-piracy technology in place – but they all say that, don’t they?

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

The Pirate Bay has been unreachable for more than a day now.

TorrentFreak reached out to the TPB team and we were informed that there’s a technical issue with the servers that should be resolved soon.

The Pirate Bay currently displays a CloudFlare error message across all domain names, confirming that TPB’s servers are unresponsive.

In addition to the main thepiratebay.se domain name, the .onion address and various proxy sites are also offline.

The Pirate Bay has had quite a few stints of downtime in recent weeks. The popular torrent site usually returns after several hours, but an outage of more than 24 hours is relatively rare.

With the raid of 2014 still fresh in people’s minds, some are quick to spread panic, but these concerns are unwarranted.

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

The IP Awareness Foundation (IPAF) is one of Australia’s key anti-piracy groups and has some serious heavyweight backing. Supporters include the Motion Picture Association, which counts all of the major Hollywood studios as members. That alone is enough to shape anti-piracy policy Down Under.

IPAF has produced a number of reports over the years, most recently one which concluded that piracy is actually decreasing in Australia.

But while progress is certainly being made, IPAF is already planning the next stages of its campaign and that begins today with a rebranding exercise and the placement of new management figures.

“The IP Awareness Foundation, the film and television industries’ peak body for the
promotion of copyright, creative rights, piracy research and education resources, has rebranded as ‘Creative Content Australia’,” the group announced.

In addition to adopting a softer and more consumer-friendly name, Creative Content has also made three new appointments, each of them heavyweights in their own field.

First up is Graham Burke, Co-Executive Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer of movie outfit Village Roadshow. Burke, who is perhaps the most outspoken individual in Australia on the issue of Internet piracy, will take on the position of Chairman.

Also jumping on board are Damian Keogh, CEO of Hoyts Group, a cinema giant operating 400 screens across Australia plus DVD and Blu-ray rental machines in 650 locations. He will be joined by Jo Bladen from Walt Disney Studios.

“The aim of our organization has always been to contribute to a more informed debate about legal access to film and television content,” says Creative Content Australia’s Executive Director Lori Flekser.

“Graham, Damian and Jo, along with our existing board members, are passionate about promoting the value of copyright. They are invaluable advocates of Creative Content Australia’s research, educational resources and consumer awareness campaigns. While we are starting to see a change in attitude towards piracy, there is still much work to be done.”

The adoption of the word ‘creative’ mirrors similar initiatives in both the United States and United Kingdom, where aggressive anti-piracy rhetoric targeting the consumer is slowly being replaced by softer tones which place more emphasis on supporting artists and other creators.

Incoming Chair Graham Burke says that changing the way the industry offers content will help that process to develop.

“[Our] research finds that Australians say they are now much more aware that the industry is increasingly making more movies and TV shows available in a timely and affordable way, and I’m looking forward to seeing Creative Content Australia produce new consumer campaigns to highlight the benefits of accessing content legally, as opposed to the great damage caused to our creative industry by piracy,” Burke says.

But despite the softer tones, it might prove difficult for Burke to completely abandon his previously aggressive stance. He has a core belief that pirates need to be held accountable and that pirating individuals are responsible for fueling crime. Indeed, comments to Forbes suggest that he still holds that belief, but that education rather than punishment might be the way forward.

“Some people have not considered that piracy is just plain wrong but when they understand it is not a victimless crime and other people will lose their jobs, they stop,” he said.

“Additionally these people are not aware they are part of a criminal underbelly with sites that carry advertising for gambling with no age limit, party drugs, hard core pornography and prostitution, as well as exposing themselves to nasty viruses.”

It seems the campaign to begin educating the masses could start as early as this summer but interestingly (and in common with campaigns in the US and UK) not much time will be spent on hardcore pirates.

“We are working out who to target: vulnerable people who are dipping in and out of piracy, those who are on the edge, or people who can’t resist the urge to get something for nothing,” says Creative Content Australia executive director Lori Flekser.

“We won’t target persistent pirates because only punishment or the threat of punishment will rein them in. This will be our most far reaching campaign. Graham has garnered enormous industry support to ensure the campaign plays out on the widest possible level.”

Only time will tell how the campaign will shape up but one thing is guaranteed. The entertainment industries – movies companies in particular – need to step up their game. The belief among Australians that they are being treated as second-class consumers on the world stage has not gone away and cracking down on their Netflix habits won’t help that perception.

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

When an anti-piracy company gets involved in issues that don’t include the protection of copyright, things always feel a little unusual. In this case, however, things have progressed well beyond that.

The story begins back in September 2015 when music meta-data site MusicBrainz received a rather unusual demand from (in)famous anti-piracy company Web Sheriff.

Instead of the baseless legal threats the site often receives when anti-piracy companies confuse it for a pirate site, Web Sheriff asked MusicBrainz to “correct” some data on its artist page for Taio Cruz, specifically his name.

The page lists three names for the artist including Taio Cruz, Jacob Milan Taio Cruz and a less familiar one, Adetayo Ayowale Onile-Ere.

While unusual to Western ears, Cruz has a Nigerian father, a fact celebrated in depth on various Nigerian discussion forums over the years.

Indeed, references to Adetayo Ayowale Onile-Ere can be found on webpages dating back eight years and is variously claimed to have been Cruz’s name at birth. However, according to the Web Sheriff, that is simply not true.

In correspondence seen by TorrentFreak, last year Web Sheriff informed MusicBrainz that it protects the online rights of Cruz including his “on-line security”. The company claimed that a news reporter had erroneously reported Cruz’s name as Adetayo Ayowale Onile Ere “some time ago” and the “error” had gained traction online. Entries on Wikipedia only made matters worse, Web Sheriff said.

Noting that they had been hired to correct all online references to the “bogus name”, Web Sheriff told MusicBrainz that the issue is causing Taio Cruz “unnecessary anxiety” so a “correction” would be appreciated. In principle MusicBrainz founder Robert Kaye agreed, but requested proof of Cruz’s real name.

“If you can provide us with some legal proof that [the name is false], we’ll consider making this change,” Kaye said in a return mail.

Some two weeks later in October 2015, Kaye received more correspondence from Web Sheriff, this time with a copy of a birth certificate said to belong to Cruz. However, Kaye was not convinced of the authenticity of the document, noting that although Cruz’s father is often reported to have been a lawyer, that term is not usually used in the UK.

“With this observation as my motivation, I rang up her majesty’s government to ask how I would go about verifying the validity of a birth certificate. I was told that the UK government could not verify the authenticity of a certificate, but that I could request a copy of the certificate myself since they are public record,” Kaye explains.

Then the bombshell. On November 8, 2015, Kaye received a letter from the government informing him that a certificate with the details he supplied simply does not exist and that his processing payment would be refunded.

Indeed, at least on the surface there does appear to be problems with the document, not least the spelling error in “Chelsea and Wes(t)minster Hospital” and the fact that the National Health Service reports the hospital as opening in 1993, eight years after Cruz was born.

All this leads to the MusicBrainz founder concluding that Web Sheriff sent him a fake and/or falsified birth certificate for a world-famous recording artist.

“This means that Web Sheriff provided us a forged birth certificate in order to accomplish its dirty deeds,” Kaye says.

Intrigued, TorrentFreak contacted Web Sheriff who told us that they acted in good faith.

“For your info, the relevant Birth Certificate was provided to us by the client / principal concerned. We have absolutely no reason to question its veracity (MusicBrainz’s comments notwithstanding),” the company said.

“As such, the posts by MusicBrainz that Web Sheriff ‘… forged …’ the certificate in question are entirely wrong / wide-of-the-mark and we shall, of course, be taking the matter up with them directly as well.”

In all fairness MusicBrainz didn’t accuse Web Sheriff of forgery, only of passing a forged document on, but if the certificate is a fake, one has to wonder what the motivation behind it is. Is it a case of genuinely wanting to correct the facts and making a mess of it? Or is there something more sinister at play?

In any event, faking a UK birth certificate is a criminal offense so Streisand Effect not withstanding, it better have been worth it.

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

In 2009, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, representing the movie and music industries, took News-Service Europe (NSE) – one of Europe’s largest Usenet providers – to court.

BREIN stated that NSE should delete all infringing content from its servers, and in 2011 the Court of Amsterdam sided with the copyright holders.

In its initial verdict the Court concluded that NSE willingly facilitated copyright infringement through its services. As a result the company was ordered to remove all copyrighted content and filter future posts for possible copyright infringements.

Responding to the verdict the Usenet provider said that it was economically unfeasible to filter all messages. The company therefore saw no other option than to shut down its services while the appeal was pending.

In 2014 the appeals court issued an interlocutory judgment ruling that NSE does not facilitate copyright infringement as long as it maintains a procedure through which copyright holders can send unlimited takedown notices.

Whether the Usenet provider could also be ordered to employ a keyword filter was something to be decided at a later date. This week the Court issued its second judgment, but while both parties had hoped for more clarity, the Court pushed a final decision back once more.

Instead, the Court is now questioning whether both parties are still willing to take the case forward, as NSE already ceased its services several years ago. If they continue, both parties will have to split the legal costs as the case will have no clear winner.

In addition, the Court is asking both parties to provide expert witnesses who can answer several outstanding questions regarding a keyword filtering mechanism.

Among other things the Court would like to know if a keyword filter is technically feasible (NSE says it is not) and what costs and resources would have to be invested to employ such measures.

The Usenet provider is disappointed with another delay, but former CFO Wierd Bonthuis is happy that the court didn’t rule against the company.

“I am pleased that the Court of Appeal has finalised its conclusion that News-Service Europe did not act unlawfully,” Bonthuis says.

“However, it is painful that we must now conclude that this means it has been established that in 2011 BREIN wrongfully forced News-Service Europe to cease its activities.”

For its part, BREIN stresses that the Court made it clear that Usenet services must maintain a proper takedown procedure, and possible more.

“Even if a Usenet provider is seen as a neutral intermediary, they still need to have an effective takedown procedure and take appropriate additional measures to curb the massive infringements,” says BREIN director Tim Kuik.

According to BREIN, services that “thrive on illegality” prefer not to take any effective measures against copyright infringement as that would hurt their business.

Neither party has commented on the future of the case, but considering the lengthy legal history it’s likely that they would both want to take it all the way.

While the Usenet provider doesn’t plan to relaunch its services in the future, a final decision on keyword filtering could have broad implications for similar services in the Netherlands and abroad.

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