SlySoft was a company that gained a reputation for producing software designed to circumvent copyright protection mechanisms. Among them was AnyDVD, a device driver for Windows which allowed users to decrypt DVDs and Blu-ray discs on the fly.

Under pressure from AACS LA, a decryption licensing outfit founded by a group of powerful Hollywood movie studios and various technology partners, SlySoft first went dark and then announced its closure this week.

And now, in the space of just a couple of days, another DVD/Blu-ray copying software company also appears to be feeling the heat.

Like SlySoft, China-based Fengtao Software has also been involved in a dispute with AACS LA and in 2014 was the subject of a preliminary injunction after a court found that DVDFab violates the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause. In 2015 a federal court in New York extended the injunction, further pressuring the company.

Then yesterday, just a day after the closure of SlySoft, Fengtao dropped a bombshell of its own. In a press release sent to Myce the company announced that DVDFab will not be updated to crack the Advanced Access Content System encryption that will be present in the next generation of 4K UHD Blu-ray discs.

“The next version of AACS Copy Protection accompanying those newly released Ultra HD Blu-ray titles is the version 2.0 of Advanced Access Content System. According to a document called AACS 2.0 Draft, the new copy protection requires the Ultra HD Blu-ray players to support two AACS 2.0 functionalities, one named ‘basic’ and the other referred as ‘enhanced’,” the company said in a statement.

“Fengtao Software Inc. makes it clear that the company will not decrypt or circumvent AACS 2.0 in the days to come. This is in accordance with AACS-LA, (which has not made public the specifications for AACS 2.0), the BDA and the movie studios.”

Noting that the debate over copying commercial movie discs for home use has “raged on for decades”, Fengtao says that the practice of decrypting copy protection technology has done so too and is not likely to stop in the foreseeable future. Even the fact that AACS 2.0 requires an Internet connection for Ultra HD Blu-ray discs to be played back for the first time is unlikely to stop the problem.

“Now here comes the question: will there be a solution to crack AACS 2.0? Likely, there will be, publicly or secretly,” the company says. Nevertheless, Fengtao insists that it won’t be behind the effort.

The company won’t be shutting down though. Fengtao says that it will concentrate its development efforts on DVDFab and its support for editing 4K/UHD content.

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

Last year a coalition of record labels including Capitol Records, Sony Music, Warner Bros. Records and Universal Music Group filed a lawsuit against MP3Skull.

With millions of visitors per month the MP3 download site has been one of the prime sources of pirated music for a long time.

Despite facing a claim of millions of dollars in damages the owners of MP3Skull failed to respond in court. This prompted the RIAA to file for a default judgment, describing MP3Skull as a notorious pirate site that promotes copyright infringement on a commercial scale.

Listing 148 music tracks as evidence, the companies asked for the maximum $150,000 in statutory damages for each, bringing the total to more than $22 million. After careful deliberation this request has now been granted by U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke.

“Plaintiffs are awarded statutory damages from Defendants in the amount of $22,200,000, for which let execution issue,” Judge Cooke writes in her order (pdf).

In addition, the Judge has issued a permanent injunction preventing the site’s operators from engaging in copyright-infringing activity in the future.

On paper the case is another big win for the RIAA, who defeated a Grooveshark clone in a similar fashion last year. Whether it will do much to stop the infringements has yet to be seen though.

After the lawsuit was filed MP3Skull hopped from domain to domain and currently it’s still online, operating from mp3skull.yoga without any noticeable changes.

Mp3Skull is still active

To stop future abuse the RIAA was granted a permanent injunction which allows it to seize control of other MP3Skull domains, or compel the associated registry to sign them over.

“Defendants shall immediately transfer the MP3Skull Domains to Plaintiffs’ control,” the injunction reads, adding that the domain registry should step in if the operators fail to comply.

“…the top level domain registry for each of the MP3Skull Domains shall, within thirty days of receipt of notice of this Order, change the Registrar of Record for each MP3Skull Domain to a Registrar of Plaintiffs’ choosing,” it adds.

The permanent injunction lists various domain names but not the one with MP3Skull’s latest “yoga” TLD.

This is likely to trigger a cat and mouse game, with MP3Skull switching domains, hoping to evade the reach of the U.S. court order, until one of the parties decides to throw in the towel.

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

Last October the most popular Popcorn Time fork and the one most-closely linked to the original project shut down its website PopcornTime.io.

With rumors flying the worst case scenario eventually reared its head, with confirmation that the MPAA had filed a lawsuit against the project’s developers in Canada. The legal threats triggered a domino effect and several other contributors ceased working on the platform.

However, earlier this month people with outdated versions of the PopcornTime.io software began receiving updates declaring “Hail Hydra”, and with that the application started working once again.

Surprised at this sudden reanimation, TF asked around to find out who was behind it but no one wanted to claim responsibility. That’s understandable – no sane person wants the MPAA’s lawyers monitoring their every move. However, just over a week later and we now have the first official statement from the people behind the reincarnation.

Noting that an explanation is long overdue, the team (located at popcorntime.sh) are now attempting to clarify their mission and point out where they stand in what has recently become an extremely confused and messy ‘marketplace’.

“After the ‘MPAA incident’, we’re a little diminished, and we’ve chosen a new direction: we’re shifting from an active development of Popcorn Time to a more or less resilience-driven development,” the team announced.

Although at this point the team aren’t being more specific, in this case ‘resilience’ appears to be avoiding the fate of the people who became known to the MPAA last year. Some of those people were quite open about their work on Popcorn Time and few measures were taken to hide identities, which in hindsight was probably their undoing.

This time around things seem to be taking a different shape. Instead of working on what is probably an illegal application, it appears that the software’s former developers are now working on ‘Butter‘, a relatively new streaming project with neutral technology and no illegal content.

However, the work and development that goes into Butter will then be leveraged by a separate team to power the variant of Popcorn Time using the .SH ccTLD.

“Most of our old teammates have left the ship to focus on a new technology, they called it Butter, and we use their platform as a base to make Popcorn Time,” the team says.

“The bonus is that we, as well as other existing and future projects, will indirectly profit from all the changes brought in Butter.”

So what we appear to have here is a line being drawn in the sand. On one side is Butter, a project that developers can work on (possibly) without fear of being tarnished with the stigma of Popcorn Time. On the other, people working on a Butter-based Popcorn Time who hope that they don’t suffer the same fate as their predecessors did last year.

The team behind the new variant has also addressed the question of monetization of the Popcorn Time platform. The founding ethos, which was only adhered to 100% by the original, original project, was to make no money. Generating money is seen as an Achilles’ heel by some and the PopcornTime.sh team say they will return to a zero revenue setup.

“We’d like to add that we do not accept any donation and have no interest in monetizing Popcorn Time by any way: our philosophy hasn’t changed,” they note.

But far beyond the dangers of monetization and the wounds inflicted on Popcorn Time by the MPAA, the ‘brand’ has been tarnished in recent months by a crowded marketplace filled with Popcorn Time clones, copies and wannabees. The new team also addresses these problems.

“The last four months have been chaotic. We’ve seem some forks keeping up the good work and others who just wanted to attract users into a trap of adwares & malwares. We would like to take a moment to thank the Reddit Community for taking things over while we were in standby.”

So what is the current state of play? Well the problem from potential users’ perspectives is that no one is really able to say absolutely definitively which forks are totally trustworthy and which ones aren’t, since everyone is keen to hide their identities and remain unaccountable.

As a result it’s no longer possible to publicly point to a set of trustworthy developers and use their credentials to give credibility to a project. Not to say that some haven’t tried, however.

A diagram that has been circulating on Reddit attempts to put the current mess into an easy to understand format but claims that the Time4Popcorn fork (which incidentally has offered the most consistent service throughout) is somehow untrustworthy have never been backed up by solid proof.

Also, since no one is prepared to confirm who is behind the .SH version, users simply have to take their word for it that they are somehow linked with and/or trusted by the .IO team that was taken down last year. That assumption does generally exist but since there is no consistency and no public face it’s almost impossible for anyone to give it an official stamp of approval.

Perhaps the most important point is no matter who one speaks to about any variant of Popcorn Time, there is nearly always an element of bias. Some point to open source being the yardstick, others suggest that making no money is they key. Most users simply don’t care as long as free movies appear. In future the proof of the pudding will probably have to be in the eating.

In any event, at least for now there appears to be three main editions of Popcorn Time (loosely PopcornTime.sh, Popcorn-Time.se and PopcornTime.ml), each with their own lines of development but only the former based on Butter. Whether it’s wise for them all to carry the same name is a matter for them but in any event confusion is likely to persist, as is the ever-looming threat from Hollywood.

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

Around the world there are periodic arrests of people who are alleged to have been involved in the running of ‘pirate’ sites but the general file-sharing public is usually subjected to much lighter treatment.

Often part of so-called ‘graduated response’ schemes, emailed warnings are the most common weapon of choice for copyright holders to get a “we’re watching you” message to relatively small time pirates. Japan, however, likes to do things a little differently.

According to an announcement by the National Police Agency (NPA), in recent days officers across Japan carried out raids against individuals believed to have downloaded and shared a variety of content without obtaining permission from copyright holders.

In a three-day long crackdown between February 16 and 18, police in 29 prefectures searched 93 locations, eventually arresting a total of 44 people. All are suspected of engaging in online piracy of either movies, music, anime, manga or computer software. All were detained under the Copyright Act.

A wide variety of heavyweight industry groups were behind the action including the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPAJ), the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), the Japan Video Software Association (JVA) and the Software Alliance (BSA).

According to the Association of Copyright for Computer Software (ACCS) the large-scale crackdown on Internet pirates is the seventh of its type since 2009.

Those detained include a 55-year-old office worker who along with the others faces fines between $1,785 and $89,200 (200,000 to 10 million yen) and jail sentences of up to ten years, depending on their offense.

Until 2012 only uploading was considered a criminal offense in Japan but in that same year local authorities upgraded mere downloading to a crime carrying jail sentences of up to two years.

It’s an important point then that police report the suspects as mostly using “shared folder” style P2P applications, a method of sharing that has remained popular in Asia despite the worldwide rise of software such as BitTorrent. Users of this software tend to both share and distribute content for extended periods of time, thus opening them up to the harshest sentences.

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

Earlier this month AACS LA, the decryption licensing outfit founded by a group of movie studios and technology partners including Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft and Intel, reminded the U.S. Government about the unauthorized activities of SlySoft.

SlySoft is known for selling various copyright protection circumvention tools including the popular AnyDVD software, of which it sold tens of thousands of copies over the years.

In 2014 AACS-LA won a court case against the software manufacturer in Antigua, where a local court found SlySoft owner Giancarla Bettini guilty of six charges under the 2003 Copyright Act and ordered him to pay a fine of $5,000 per offense. Failure to pay would result in six months in jail for each offense.

However, despite the win for AACS not much changed. SlySoft’s owner immediately filed an appeal which effectively put the convictions on hold. Meanwhile, AnyDVD remained widely available.

This changed yesterday when the site suddenly went blank as the domain’s main nameservers were removed. Initially it was unclear what triggered the downtime, but a few hours ago SlySoft put up a brief statement confirming an early Myce report that legal problems are the cause.

“Due to recent regulatory requirements we have had to cease all activities relating to SlySoft Inc. We wish to thank our loyal customers/clients for their patronage over the years,” the message of the site’s homepage reads.

Slysoft.com down

While there’s no confirmation on the exact reason for the sudden shutdown, it’s not unlikely that AACS-LA’s pressure to the United States Trade Representative had a significant impact.

In its request the licensing company asks the Government to place Antigua on its copyright Priority Watch List, effectively escalating it into an “international incident”.

“Circumvention through programs such as SlySoft’s AnyDVD HD is a source for widespread, large-scale and commercial copyright infringement by users located in the United States, as well as Antigua & Barbuda, and many other countries,” AACS wrote (pdf).

“Such circumvention also harms the legitimate consumer electronics and information technology companies that build compliant content playback devices that ‘play by the rules’.”

With or without an intervention from the U.S. Government, it’s clear that after more than a decade the legal pressure became too much for SlySoft and its owner. Whether the software will remain offline indefinitely or if it will perhaps reappear under a new label has yet to be seen.

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