There are many different ways that people are able to share files online and they broadly fall into two categories – public and private.

Public sharing is generally carried out using peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent. Anyone participating in a torrent swarm should be aware that unless they take precautions by using a VPN or proxy, their IP address is visible to all of the other people engaged in the same act.

Private sharing can also take many forms, from exchanging content via email to uploading and downloading content from invite-only servers, for example. While it has to be noted there are always weak leaks, this kind of sharing usually receives less interest from anti-piracy companies as it tends to be scattered and somewhat cost ineffective to police.

That being said, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has just managed to scare an unnamed number of pirates after they participated in a presumed-private sharing circle that utilized Dropbox for exchanging copyrighted content.

The story traces back to December 2015 when BREIN obtained an ex parte court order against a man they accused of being the administrator of a Dropbox account that was being used to distribute copyrighted eBooks.

It was alleged that the man was active on a number of Internet forums and on request granted fellow members with access to said account in order to download titles without paying. After a complaint from BREIN the court found this behavior unacceptable and ordered the man, in his absence, to cease his activities or face fines of 2,000 euros per day up to a maximum of 50,000 euros.

However, as previously reported, BREIN is now regularly striking private settlement deals with people it also targets in court. It’s not known if there was a financial arrangement in this particular case but quite clearly BREIN has been able to leverage its position to scare the individuals that had been downloading from the Dropbox account.

Since those downloading from the eBook-filled Dropbox folder were required to give up their email addresses to the person administering the account, they became vulnerable when BREIN discovered his identity. So, as part of the settlement deal, BREIN was then able to contact those individuals with a custom threat, direct to an email address they had previously considered private.

“BREIN has recently found that you are a user (or: Member) of the Dropbox account called ‘—‘, offered by ‘—‘. Your email address is visible to third parties and by BREIN for the purpose of sending you this email,” the email to the assumed pirates begins.

“Without permission of the copyright holders this account was used for sharing copies of eBooks, which is not lawful. The administrator was (as the owner and administrator) responsible for this and the judge has ruled that this person has infringed on the rights of the copyright holders BREIN represents.”

The Dropbox users are then informed that they too have almost certainly infringed copyright due to them downloading copyrighted content from an illegal source and they should therefore consider purchasing their content from legal sources in the future.

“BREIN received several positive responses to [these emails] and it also seems that the exchange of ebooks via the forums that BREIN found in its research has almost completely ceased,” the group said in a statement.

While there’s no suggestion that BREIN intends to take matters further, it seems clear that those sharing or obtaining copyrighted content even from a Dropbox account should be aware that if the person they’re downloading from caves in, their email address (at the very least) could be vulnerable to threats. If that email then correlates with other information available on the web, things certainly have the potential to escalate.

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

Despite sending notices requesting the removal of hundreds millions of links from Google’s search results, the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) consistently manages to do so without causing serious collateral damage.

While that accuracy is to be commended, the BPI is also famous for being involved in the wholesale blocking of hundreds of ‘pirate’ websites in the UK, regardless of the non-infringing content many of them index. It also has a reputation for being ruthless in prosecutions of people sharing files.

All that being said, the BPI’s anti-piracy team is one of the most effective out there so an announcement last December that there would be upheaval in the team came as something of a surprise. The heads of both its Copyright Protection Unit and Head of Internet Investigations would both be moving on following a restructuring exercise, the BPI said.

Now the industry group has revealed a key new addition to the team. On April 20, Tim Cooper will become the BPI’s brand new Head of Content Protection.

Cooper is currently Head of Operations at NetResult, a Thomson Reuters company doing business in the anti-piracy space. Established in 2000 and headquartered in London, NetResult describes itself as being active in the online monitoring and enforcement sector for intellectual property rights.

Cooper has spent a decade at NetResult and according to the BPI developed the world’s first anti-piracy service to combat live streaming and devised strategies to tackle live P2P networks and streaming platforms. Chinese operator PPLive was one of the main targets but since then web-based operations have swamped the market.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to look far to find instances of Cooper’s anti-piracy footprints on the web, in this instance threatening the operators of a site indexing clips of soccer games who sarcastically refer to Cooper as their “friend”.

But after 10 years with NetResult Cooper says he’s looking forward to working in the music sector.

“I am thrilled to be joining The BP‎I to head up its content protection work. I have worked in rights protection for over a decade and music has been a passion all of my life,” he said in a statement.

“I look forward to leading The BPI’s Content Protection team and working closely with its General Counsel to continue to develop and deliver The BPI’s world-renowned content protection services for record labels and performers.”

Interestingly, the BPI has also taken the opportunity to thrown down some general anti-piracy statistics concerning the UK, claiming it now has one of the lowest piracy rates in the world.

“The number of UK consumers visiting illegal sites has fallen to about half the global average, and is lower than any other technologically advanced country except the USA and Japan,” the BPI says.

However, as our article earlier today shows, pirate site blockades in the UK are faltering, at least temporarily, with key sites regained lost ground due to what appears to be technical issues at ISPs.

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

Following a series of High Court orders obtained since 2012, six of the UK’s major ISPs are required to block access to dozens of the world’s most popular ‘pirate’ sites.

Over the past several years the number of blocked domains has expanded to roughly 1,000, with popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents being the main targets.

While it’s hard to stamp out piracy completely, the measures were supposed make it harder for UK Internet subscribers to access these sites.

However, a recent review of current blocking practices shows that several ISPs including Virgin Media, BT, EE and TalkTalk are failing. It turns out that many subscribers don’t have to jump through technological hoops to circumvent the blockades, as many popular pirate sites are freely accessible on their regular connections.

With the help from several subscribers, TorrentFreak was able to confirm that the HTTPS versions of most blocked websites including The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, RARBG and Torrentz, are still freely accessible.

While regular connections are still blocked, many pirate sites have added a secure HTTPS variant which appears to be hard to block for many providers.

Blocked?

Some sites even force users to use the HTTPS enabled domain and as a result UK traffic has been picking up again. For example, KickassTorrents is currently among the 300 most visited websites in the UK, even though it’s supposed to be blocked.

The HTTPS issue is not new and it appears that many ISPs don’t have a countermeasure in place. According to our information, only Sky is structurally blocking secure versions of various pirate sites.

The precise technical explanation for the issue is unclear, but since HTTPS connections can strip HTTP headers it may be harder to detect that a blocked site is being accessed.

In theory ISPs could also block the site’s IP-addresses, but since many use shared IPs from CloudFlare this would also take down other unrelated websites.

Whatever the reason, most UK Internet subscribers are now getting a taste of a free and uncensored Internet once again.

The HTTPS issue is refreshing as blocking problems are usually the result of overblocking. For example, TorrentFreak has been blocked in the past by Sky, and the same ISP also restricted access to several other sites because they shared a CloudFlare IP-address with The Pirate Bay.

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

Last week the The Walking Dead’s sixth season resumed. As the second most pirated TV-show of last year, only trailing behind Game of Thrones, there has been plenty of interest in the new episodes on torrent sites.

However, there’s also been quite a bit of confusion and annoyance as many popular torrents have quickly disappeared.

Before the weekend pretty much all torrents for the ninth episode of The Walking Dead were gone from KickassTorrents (KAT), which is currently the most used torrent site.

The screenshot below shows that there’s currently just one torrent online for episode six through nine of the latest season. As far as DMCA takedown efforts go, that’s pretty effective.

Gone?

The same is true for the most used meta search engine Torrentz, where several recent episodes are no longer listed. A search for s0608 comes up empty, with a note that 80 results have been removed due to takedown notices.

Walking Dead?

The Walking Dead’s tenth episode of the season was just released a few hours ago and plenty of copies are still around, However, these torrents will soon follow their predecessors and disappear as well.

Of course, there are also plenty of places that are less DMCA-friendly. Many torrent sites including The Pirate Bay are removing torrents sporadically, or not at all, so persistent pirates can find a copy eventually.

That said, on KAT the aggressive takedown efforts are a cause of frustration. To counter this, users have come up with their own tricks to make the torrents available through backdoors, which are widely shared in the forums.

TorrentFreak spoke with an operator of a smaller torrent site who processes many takedown requests automatically, and he was surprised to see how effective they can be. So effective, that he had trouble locating a recent Walking Dead episode.

“It was quite surprising not to find the episode I was looking for. For the first time in my life I had to actually use a file locker, not by choice but by the effectiveness of DMCA,” the operator says.

“It literally made my life more annoying for about two minutes,” he adds.

While many links are indeed disappearing, and not just for The Walking Dead, the torrent site owner doesn’t believe that it will do much to stop piracy on a broader scale.

“The only thing the DMCA does well is annoy people. Well done DMCA,” the torrent site operator notes.

Perhaps copyright holders are banking on this annoyance to drive people to legal alternatives. Or, ironically enough, to other sites that simply ignore all DMCA and other takedown notices.

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

When mentioned by US-based entertainment companies, Russian social networking giant vKontakte is often portrayed as a poor copyright partner that does little to deal with the huge amounts of infringement on its platform.

Indeed, vKontakte faces regular criticism from both the RIAA and MPAA, with various affiliated companies having taken the platform – which has an estimated 80 million users per day – to court on a number of occasions. However, vKontakte is now under threat locally, a threat it needs to take very seriously indeed.

For the first time ever vKontakte has been reported to the Moscow City Court for its apparent failure to protect copyrights. This Court has the power to order a site to be blocked by local ISPs based on complaints from copyright holders. Should those complaints persist, the Court has the power to order a site – even vKontakte – to be blocked on a permanent basis.

In this instance vKontakte is under fire from AZAPO, the Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet. The anti-piracy outfit represents several book publishers but the current complaint involves just a single title, Zahara Prilepina’s “Resident”.

“There are Public and ‘My Documents’ sections, which we have cleaned and vKontakte has deleted files based on our claim. But in one of the cases we have found that the content has remained in place. It turns out that vKontakte is not taking proper protection measures,” says AZAPO Director General Maxim Ryabyko.

Previous claims against vKontakte have been processed through the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg however AZAPO has tried that before and feels the process offered by the Court is too slow.

“We have accumulated a lot of history with vKontakte, including negative experiences. We decided to appeal to the Moscow City Court as claims filed with the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg are long and expensive, and the procedure is not quite clear to us,” Ryabyko notes.

Given that the Moscow City Court has the power to render vKontakte inaccessible in Russia to its hundreds of millions of signed-up users, perhaps the big question is why no one has reported the site to the Court before. Interestingly, Russia’s Izvestia cites anonymous rightsholders who claim that telecoms watchdog Roskomadzor asked them not to. The government agency apparently said that vKontakte should be given space since it had been cooperating with entertainment companies on piracy.

Clearly AZAPO didn’t get the memo but it appears that the anti-piracy group is more interested in getting a fair deal for its members than having vKontakte blocked.

“I know that negotiations are actively underway with the audio and film industries, but the authors of books do not perceive themselves as participants in the negotiation process,” says Ryabyko.

“Our goal is to urge vKontakte to adequately interact with the book industry.”

It’s understood that AZAPO would like vKontakte to move in a number of ways, each of which allows content (in whole or in part) to be made commercially available on the platform. The first option would see a full subscription platform put in place while a second envisages an ad-supported model. The third would see vKontakte users getting access to a sample of a book which later diverts to the author’s own website.

For its part, vKontakte appears less than impressed at being reported to the Moscow City Court.

“Instead of a constructive conversation we see legal claims imposed. The true aim of the plaintiff, in our opinion, is not to protect their rights but to put pressure on vKontakte,” says spokesperson Evgeny Krasnikov.

“Obviously, only an open dialogue about the models and methods to monetize content for rights holders will help the development of legal content market in Russia. Such communication we have had with the largest local book distributors.”

Whether AZAPO’s negotiating technique will bear fruit will be revealed in the months ahead.

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