After coming under pressure from decryption licensing outfit AACS LA, last week DVD and Blu-ray copy-protection circumvention company SlySoft shutdown.

It still hasn’t been made clear if studios including Warner Bros, Disney and technology partners Microsoft and Intel were behind the closure, but for now that’s the working assumption. Having SlySoft flagship product AnyDVD off the market would’ve been a huge feather in their collective caps.

But shutdowns of companies like SlySoft often prove troublesome and earlier this week the first signs of cracks in the closure began to show. With talk of a return under a new banner a hot topic, former developers openly discussed bringing AnyDVD and other products back online.

Making things more interesting was the revelation that SlySoft was not entirely based in Antigua but actually a decentralized operation with developers scattered in countries around the world. Developers who, it transpired, still had access to key SlySoft infrastructure and the will to reanimate the project. In the end, it didn’t take long.

Still sporting a familiar ‘fox’ logo, yesterday a reborn ‘RedFox’ rose from the ashes of SlySoft. Now hailing from Belize with at least some infrastructure in Latvia, the RedFox team delivered their first release – an update to AnyDVD, version 7.6.9.1.

“AnyDVD reborn! SlySoft is dead, long live RedFox!” declared the changelog.

“This is an intermediate release, so old customers can continue to use their existing AnyDVD license to watch their discs. This version can access the new RedFox Online Protection Database,” the group added.

Perhaps of most interest are the new features. In addition to some minor fixes and improvements, AnyDVD also supports new discs, a big first step for a product that just a week ago looked destined for the archives.

The release will only work if users already own a valid AnyDVD license, which suggests that RedFox have access to the old company’s licensing systems, another important step for keeping the business model moving forward. Additionally, old SlySoft products have also returned, including CloneBD and CloneDVD.

But while would-be pirates might find cause for celebration, not everyone in the new RedFox team welcomes being so closely associated with the practice. A developer identifying himself as ‘Peer’ says that comments made by release groups in an article published on TF at the weekend left him feeling “depressed”.

“Pirates were never the intended audience. If SlySoft could have shaken them off, they would have. In fact – some people seem to think, that without piracy, SlySoft wouldn’t have existed,” Peer explains.

For those that primarily used SlySoft’s products for piracy (and the MPAA and AACS LA seem to think that’s a whole bunch of them) the assumption seems reasonable. However, Peer sees things somewhat differently.

“Pirates only made a very small percentage of the AnyDVD userbase. And – given that they are pirates, it’s a valid question whether they were even paying customers,” he says.

“AnyDVD was created out of the frustration of a few people, who got fed up with the unplayability (yes! that word is fitting!) of DVDs and later on Blu-ray discs. So, of course, SlySoft could have easily done without the pirates – and had they, SlySoft might even still exist.”

While one can see Peer’s point (and presuming for a moment we can easily interchange the terms ‘piracy’ and ‘copyright infringement’), the fact that AnyDVD drilled a huge hole through the encryption efforts of AACS LA makes it a seriously infringing piece of software, if of course the trade groups and courts are to be believed.

So, one has to conclude that even without piracy SlySoft would’ve been in trouble, a point not lost on the developer.

“It’s not that the AACS-LA wouldn’t have gone to the same lengths trying – don’t mistake them to be fighting piracy, their goal is a more immediate one, which is to justify their existence,” Peer says.

“They have this huge money-making machine, collect fees for every [blu ray disc] ever being sold without having to really, well, do much (god, I wish I were the AACS-LA), while promising to protect the discs in return, which effectively doesn’t work – so they have no choice but to fight back.”

That fight includes taking down products like AnyDVD and DVDFab, both of which are closely connected (whether the developers like it or not) with DRM circumvention and ultimately piracy.

“You can’t deny that [piracy] is hurting the movie industry. And you can’t deny that we were involuntarily helping piracy. Just like the glass cutter involuntarily helps burglary,” Peer says.

“So, sorry MPAA, AACS and all you people with the fancy acronyms – we can’t help you with the piracy, but since no one is helping us with [playing and backing up] movies, we’re picking up things ourselves.”

Nevertheless, the intentions of the RedFox team will have little bearing on how they are perceived by the MPAA and AACS LA. They will be seen as outlaws with no respect for the laws that the industry groups worked long and hard to have put in place. On that basis alone, this battle is far from over.

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

A few days ago Kanye West released The Life of Pablo. The album subsequently ended up on various pirate sites where it was quickly downloaded by hundreds of thousands of fans.

A lot of media attention has focused on The Pirate Bay, where it is still listed as the most popular music download after two weeks, with thousands of people actively sharing the tracks.

Meanwhile, the news also reached Kanye West himself, who considered taking legal action against the notorious torrent site. While he would not be the first to try, a tweet posted a few hours ago made the whole situation a lot more ironic.

Kanye’s tweet

At first sight little appears wrong with the tweet, which comes with an image showing a YouTube video of Sufjan Stevens’ track “Death with Dignity.” However, taking a closer look at the other open tabs is quite revealing.

For example, the tab second to the left reads “”Pirate Bay Torrent Xfe..,” where the last part is likely a reference to Xfer Records.

Pirate What?

The tab itself is not from The Pirate Bay website, which uses a different title structure, but comes from a site that uses the TPB brand. This release blog, which lists a pirated copy of Xfer Records synthesizer software Serum, seems to be a likely candidate.

This suspicion is supported by another open tab pointing towards a Music Radar article listing the best VST/AU plugins, where Serum comes out as one of the winners.

Finally, the “MediaDownloader” tab completes the pirate circle, as that would allow West to rip music from YouTube so it can be used together with the pirated software to create his next hit.

Kanye’s tweet is a painful mistake, and one that didn’t go unnoticed.

DJ Deadmau5, who co-founded Xfer Records, saw the tweet and called out Kanye as a dick. Not much later he showed a bit more sympathy for Kanye’s circumstances, calling for a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a legal copy of the software.

Kanye Dick

The Pirate Bay team, meanwhile, is quite amused by the whole episode and says it welcomes pirates from all different walks of life.

“If he runs into difficulty he should try the forum for technical help and support,” TPB staff member Spud17 informs TorrentFreak, noticing the shift from the earlier agressive stance.

“Makes me wonder just how skint he claims to be, perhaps he’s ‘slumming it’ to try and regain some credibility,” Spud17 adds.

Of course, there’s a slim chance that Kanye is pulling off an elaborate prank, which would be a good one. If so, he managed to plug The Pirate Bay in the process, so it’s unlikely that he will take credit for it anytime soon.

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

More than two years ago The Pirate Bay revealed a plan to revolutionize its status on the web. Continually dogged by the threat of shutdown and blocking, the site’s operators said they were working on a plan to create their own P2P network.

The concept is certainly interesting. When a user loads a website on the network that data will be also be served to other users accessing the site from the user’s machine. In BitTorrent terms, people accessing the site (leechers) also serve the site (seeders) to other users, meaning that there is no central server and no one point of failure.

While The Pirate Bay’s plan hasn’t come to fruition, others have been working on a similar system. Based out of Budapest, Hungary, Zeronet offers “real-time updated, P2P websites using Bitcoin cryptography and the BitTorrent network.” The slide below describes some of the key features.

A full explanation of how the system works can be found here but for those looking to jump in at the deep-end the process is very simple. Visit Zeronet.io and follow the simple instructions and the whole thing is up and running in a couple of minutes.

Once Zeronet is launched (it appears in your chosen web browser), users are confronted not with a Google search box, but the Zeronet ‘homepage’.

Not only are Zeronet users viewing this website but they’re also hosting it too, so that when others join the network and ask for the page, they retrieve it from other Zeronet users. It functions in a similar way to sharing using BitTorrent, although as yet there is no ‘swarming’ technology in place. In the image below, 96 other people are sharing the page.

This piece isn’t intended to be a guide on using Zeronet, others can help there. However, what piqued our interest is what appears to be the very first torrent site to appear on the Zeronet network. It’s not exactly clear how long ‘Play’ has been in development but its existence has been made known in the past few hours.

‘Play’ is accessed via a Zeronet URL which only works if the Zeronet software is installed. Once on the site it is indistinguishable from any other similar site working on a central server. The site doesn’t offer a tracker (that would create new problems) but instead serves magnet links sourced from RARBG.

As one might expect, the site is the usual fare with the latest movies presented in varying qualities, along with YouTube trailer links where applicable.

As a straightforward website ‘Play’ wouldn’t get a mention here but the way it’s delivered to users is somewhat exciting, especially since this is what The Pirate Bay and indeed BitTorrent Inc.’s Project Maelstrom has been promising for some time. However, before users get too excited, there are some caveats.

While Zeronet sites won’t get taken down as long as someone is ‘seeding’ them, the Zeronet website-serving network is not anonymous. That means that users’ IP addresses are public unless they choose the Tor option or double up with a VPN. Additionally, torrent transfers function in an identical fashion to any other site and are just as public as they ever were.

From a legal perspective Zeronet itself has no issues but of course a site like Play infringes on copyright law just as any other similar site would, even if its operators can remain anonymous. Interestingly though, while someone, somewhere has created Play, its users (not a server company) are now effectively hosting it via their local machines. This raises questions of liability for torrent site hosting in the future.

Finally, Zeronet also offers users a one-click solution to site cloning. This sounds like it might be a real headache for copyright holders but it could also be an equally large headache for the Internet’s spam department. Time will tell how that will play out.

Zeronet’s homepage can be found here.

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

In recent years the music industry‘s battle against piracy mostly focused on torrent sites, cyberlockers and unauthorized MP3 indexes.

However, those are certainly not the only ‘threats’ it faces. Online radio stations, often operated by hobbyists, also remain a concern.

This has prompted a coalition of record labels to file a lawsuit against Radionomy, a platform that allows users to start their own online radio stations.

In their complaint filed at a California federal court Arista Records, LaFace Records, Sony Music Entertainment and Zomba Recording accuse the service of several forms of copyright infringement.

Radionomy, which also owns Winamp and Shoutcast, offers between 30,000 and 50,000 radio stations which are controlled by its users. These stations are freely broadcasted online through a variety of sites and apps.

“Defendants operate an online music service through which users can listen to music stations, or create stations, that Defendants stream to listeners worldwide,” the complaint reads (pdf).

“To program music stations on Defendants’ service, users can upload music from their own collection or use music from Defendants’ library of popular music and podcasts.”

In addition to picking tracks from the Radionomy library, users can also upload their own tracks and stream these online. Listeners from all over the world can then tune in by searching for stations by theme, genre or even artists.

While many users and listeners enjoy the service, the record labels point out that Radionomy fails to pay the proper licenses. As such, they argue that it’s promoting and facilitating widespread copyright infringement.

Searching Radionomy for pirate

The labels list hundreds of tracks that were used without permission on Radionomy including work from Adele, Bob, Dylan, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Elvis Presley, John Mayer, Michael Jackson, One Direction, Pink Floyd and Shakira.

“On January 12, 2016 a station on Defendants’ service, named ‘One Direction The Radio,’ played the recordings ‘Nobody Compares’ and ‘Something Great’ by One Direction, both of which are Plaintiffs’ owned or exclusively licensed copyrighted works,” one of the examples reads.

As an example, the labels further mention that Radionomy encourages its users to start popular stations offering rewards for the number of listeners they attract, while canceling the least popular stations.

“Defendants encourage users to include popular copyrighted recordings in programmed stations by offering to ‘reward’ users with cash payments if they create a station that reaches a large audience and threatening to deactivate users that fail to reach ‘minimum audience’ requirements,” the complaint reads.

Late last year the labels reached out to Radionomy, which is owned by the entertainment industry mogul Vivendi, who reportedly admitted that they had not paid royalties to SoundExchange since 2014. Despite these talks, no agreement was reached on the issue.

The music companies now hope to get help from the court and are requesting a permanent injunction against the radio service, as well as damages which can easily add up to dozens of millions of dollars.

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

Founded in 2011, Swefilmer was Sweden’s most popular streaming movie and TV show site. Research published last year by Media Vision claimed that 25% of all web TV viewing in the country was carried out on Swefilmer and another similar site, Dreamfilm.

All that began to change in July 2015 when one of the site’s operators, local man Ola Johansson, revealed that he’d been raided by the police who seized various items of computer equipment and placed him under arrest.

“It’s been a tough month to say the least. On 8 July, I received a search by the police at home. I lost a computer, mobile phone and other things,” Johansson said.

The gravity of the situation became clear when the Swede revealed in a video posted to YouTube that he’d been detained for almost four days.

Now, fresh news coming out of from Sweden is shining new light on the scale of the investigation which is already the largest involving a streaming site in the country.

While Johansson remains suspected of copyright infringement offenses, he is not thought to be the main person behind the site. A second man, believed to be the main operator of Swefilmer and the person who handled its revenue, has now been arrested in Germany.

According to Expressen he was first arrested in his absence last summer and was physically arrested in January 2016 after Sweden obtained a European arrest warrant. The existence of the warrant had previously been kept secret and news of the arrest only came to light last evening.

The man is reportedly a 25-year-old Turkish citizen resident in Germany. He is accused of being the site’s main operator and the person who setup the site’s deals with advertisers and accepted donations from users.

Court documents obtained by Expressen show that the European arrest warrant was obtained in Sweden on August 18, 2015. Signed by veteran file-sharing prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad, the 25-year-old suspect is accused of offenses including copyright infringement and aggravated money laundering.

The case involves a sample 1,400 movies that were allegedly made available without copyright holders’ permission between January 2013 and July 2015. In respect of the financial crimes the man is accused of receiving the equivalent of $1.7m in advertising revenue and donations into a Turkish bank account.

An order already exists to seize around $1.5m, which will be confiscated in preparation for any financial settlements when the case goes to trial. In January other seizures were made including a $77,000 car and properties worth $233,000.

The man remains in custody in Germany and it’s understood that his lawyer is campaigning for his release. Last month he filed an appeal which stated that no evidence had been produced to suggest the man was involved in Swefilmer. The appeal was rejected.

In the meantime Claes Kennedy, the lawyer representing Ola Johansson, expressed surprise that he had not been informed of the recent developments.

“It is strange that I was not informed about this,” Kennedy said. “Ola admits that he has been involved to some extent in the site Swefilmer, but his involvement was limited.”

While the prosecution is not expected to reach Pirate Bay-style heights, it does mark the most significant case against a streaming portal in Sweden to date. There is some way to go but it’s expected that the prosecution will demand the most severe sentences available.

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