As one of the largest online file-sharing services 4shared is closely watched by copyright holders who find their content being made available on the site.

Recently the site also became the target of an ISP blockade in South Korea, where it was added to the national ISP blocklist by the Communications Standards Commission.

4shared was not happy with this decision as it locked out many of its legitimate customers, so the company responded with an appeal with help from Open Net Korea.

After hearing the arguments from both sides, the Korean court decided in favor of the file-sharing service. The court found that a blockade is not warranted simply because it contains “some illegal content.”

According to local law it is not sufficient to show that a subset of the site’s users engage in copyright infringement. For a site to be blocked it must be setup specifically to aid piracy, which is not the case with 4shared.

4shared is happy with the outcome and is glad to be open to the public again in South Korea.

“We think it is a good result. It’s the first time we tried disputing in court with a state Internet censorship body,” 4shared’s Mike Wilson tells TorrentFreak.

“We believe that 4shared does enough to protect intellectual property and disabling access to our service for an entire country is not lawful,” he adds.

As one of the largest file-sharing services on the Internet the company has adopted a variety of measures to limit copyright infringement. This includes a fingerprinting system that removes pirated music files based on a unique audio watermark.

Still, copyright holders including the RIAA and IFPI are not eager to team up. Instead, the music labels reported the site to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), which put it on its annual overview of notorious pirate sites.

4shared informs us that it is considering reaching out to the USTR to set the record straight. The company also reached out to various music industry groups but thus far without a positive response.

“We tried communicating with RIAA and IFPI, especially because of their possible participation in our music identification system,” Wilson says.

“We did not receive any assistance, so we started with music ID by ourselves and in just one year it helped to reduce the number of copyright complaints by 16 times, while the volume of stored information is actually still growing,” he adds.

For now 4shared is happy that all users can access the site freely again, but it is also confident that it can shake off the pirate labels in the future.

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

News that rightsholders have taken legal action to have several prominent ‘pirate’ sites blocked at the ISP level in Australia did not come as a surprise.

Following changes to the law last year it was always presumed that local TV and Hollywood-affiliated studios would take full advantage of the legislation in order to reduce the number of Internet subscribers being able to access unauthorized content.

Village Roadshow and Hollywood vs SolarMovie

This morning further details became available on two separate actions. The first was filed by entertainment outfit Village Roadshow supported by Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Columbia, Universal and Warner Bros.

The action names Telstra and 49 other local Internet service providers as respondents and contains demands for them to block a streaming portal called Solarmovie plus several of its domains including SolarMovie.ph, .is, .com and .eu.

Also listed are four IP addresses currently used by the site but the application indicates that the studios want to be able to block additional IPs and domains should the site begin to move around. The studios have requested both DNS and IP address blocking “plus any alternative technical means” as agreed in writing with the ISPs.

Future potential visitors to SolarMovie will be greeted with a special landing page which informs Internet subscribers that the page has been blocked following a court order. The page will be hosted by the studios will enable them to track the number of visitors to the site and even their IP addresses.

The application also states that should ISPs become aware that any URL or IP address is no longer being used for infringement, they will no longer be required to block it. Furthermore, if ISPs temporarily fail to block SolarMovie due to technical issues, they will not be in breach of the order.

Also of interest is a clause which allows SolarMovie to file an application to have the blockade lifted. There’s no sign yet of that happening but TorrentFreak has spoken with the site’s operator who says he’s surprised at all the attention.

“I’m actually surprised that Solarmovie has gained so much attention,” he informs TF.

In comments yesterday Graham Burke, the co-chief executive of Village Roadshow, described SolarMovie as “a particularly vicious bunch of thieves” but its operator rejects that assertion.

“It’s definitely not the biggest linking site available [SolarMovie is ranked #1,500 by Alexa] and it strictly follows the DMCA at least,” he says.

Burke also said the site was “making illicit millions” with “disgusting advertising”, adding that there were “sexual ads” on the platform. SolarMovie rejects that too.

“No sexual ads are allowed on the site for sure. Furthermore, logged in users don’t see any ads at all,” the site’s operator says.

Foxtel vs The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound and IsoHunt

The application filed by Foxtel is largely the same as the one filed by the studios and targets the sites listed above. The respondents are 17 local ISPs including iiNet, Telstra and Optus, and requires that each company’s subsidiaries also carry out blocking.

In common with the Village Roadshow application, DNS and IP address blocking is requested for The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound and IsoHunt but expands significantly with the addition of many alternative domains, mirrors, clones and proxies.

For The Pirate Bay alone the TV outfit demands a blockade of 37 separate domains and even more IP addresses. For Torrentz there are 11 domains and almost four times as many IP addresses listed, with TorrentHound and isoHunt weighing in at eight and five domains respectively.

Again, visitors to the sites will be redirected to a landing page and there are no penalties should ISPs have to temporarily suspend blocking due to technical issues. The application as it stands does not request that site operators should have the right of appeal.

Conclusion

Since the text of both applications has been negotiated with the ISPs, it’s expected that they will pass largely unamended and rubber-stamped by the court. The applications will then essentially become a template for future actions of which there will be many in the months and years to come.

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, with thousands of people actively sharing the tracks.

Meanwhile, the news also reached Kanye West himself, who is reportedly furious that he has potentially lost millions of dollars due to the leak. He sees The Pirate Bay as one of the main culprits and is now considering taking the notorious pirate site to court.

“Kanye is going to meet with his legal team to discuss the possibilities of starting legal action against torrent site Pirate Bay,” a source informed HollywoodLife.

“He’s going to talk to his lawyers and see where he stands, and hopefully Tidal will partner up with him in any legal proceedings because it was supposed to be an exclusive release.”

The Pirate Bay is not new to being the target of legal action. The site’s original founders stood trial in Sweden and late 2014 a new investigation into the site was opened after a raid on a local datacenter.

However, The Pirate Bay (TPB) is still around today and the current staff members are not impressed by Kanye West as a person, or worried about another legal battle.

“Kanye West is a blithering twat who has an incredible sense of self-importance. Even diehard fans are saying his new album sucks balls, but as for Mr. West suing TPB, good luck Kanye!” TPB staff member Spud17 informs TorrentFreak.

“Our legal department will be waiting,” he adds.

Needless to say, the TPB team has no intention of removing the album from the site. They have a clear policy not to remove any copyright-infringing material. The only files that are regularly deleted are those that link to spam or viruses.

Kanye, meanwhile, has reportedly been hard to be around and is determined to have someone pay for the damage he’s suffered.

“He’s touchy, angry and feels like his material was stolen. He hates the idea of people not paying for his music and feels someone needs to be held accountable for that,” the HollywoodLife source said.

Theoretically Kanye can sue The Pirate Bay in court and win the case. However, it is unlikely that anyone associated with the site will respond, so any potential damages that are awarded will be hard to cash in.

To a certain degree the unusually high piracy numbers can be attributed to the album’s exclusive release on the streaming service Tidal. Many fans don’t want to be tied to an expensive subscription, and even those who paid up had problems getting a copy.

Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, who is no longer actively involved in the site, has had plenty of run-ins with copyright holders in the past, He says that West should be happy that people are going to the trouble of checking out his music in the first place.

“The album was only released on Tidal, so I’m impressed it got leaked anyhow since fewer people pass by there than at Fort Knox. He should be happy someone cares enough to listen to it, so that they signed up for an account to stream the low quality music you get at Tidal,” Sunde says.

If Kanye does indeed move forward with a lawsuit he joins the company of several other artists who tried before, including the late Michael Jackson, UB40, Prince and The Village People.

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

The issue of online piracy is a political hot-potato in dozens of regions around the world but few developed countries have received as much attention as Australia.

Historically treated as second-class citizens when it comes to official content availability and pricing, Australians have frequently been labeled some of the world’s worst pirates, a stigma that has attracted much attention from United States entertainment companies.

To that end Australia has faced a huge effort to introduce two key anti-piracy mechanisms. On the one hand Hollywood studios, led by local entertainment outfit Village Roadshow, have campaigned for the introduction of web blockades against the likes of The Pirate Bay and other unauthorized media distribution sites.

On the other, entertainment companies of all flavors have lobbied hard for a so-called “three strikes” warning scheme that would see regular Internet users monitored by anti-piracy companies and then sent escalating warning notices by their respective Internet service providers.

Today there is news on both fronts and for Aussie file-sharers there is cause for both disappointment and cautious celebration.

Site blocking

Site blocking, which has been gaining traction in numerous other countries, is moving ahead at pace. Village Roadshow and local TV giant Foxtel have confirmed separate actions in the Federal Court to block several pirate sites.

Village Roadshow and partners Warner Bros, Universal, Paramount, Sony, Disney and 21st Century Fox are teaming up to target streaming portal Solarmovie, a site which is already blocked in the UK and has just been the subject of legal action in Singapore.

Foxtel’s complaint targets four other sites including (no surprises) The Pirate Bay.

“These websites already have a lot of malware and other dangers associated with them and as the big ones like solarmovie.ph are knocked own it will be hard for them to get back up again quickly,” says Village Roadshow co-chief executive Graham Burke.

If their applications to the Federal Court are successful, local Internet service providers will be required to block the sites so that their subscribers are unable to access them by regular means.

According to ABC, rightsholders and four or five of the country’s largest ISPs have been in negotiations for some time over how blockades will be implemented.

DNS blocking / cache poisoning is reportedly being requested by rights holders. Since it is also the method preferred by the Communications Alliance which represents most of the country’s Internet service providers, it’s likely blocking will move forward on that basis.

That could mean, however, that users of DNS systems not involved in the blocking system will be able to circumvent blockades in much they same way they currently avoid geo-restrictions put in place by Netflix. Furthermore, DNS blocking is entirely defeated by use of a decent VPN.

Three strikes

While many Aussies will be disappointed that their favorite sites are likely to be picked off and blocked in the coming months, there is something for individual file-sharers to cautiously celebrate.

After years of negotiations it looked almost inevitable that a so-called “three strikes” scheme would be implemented Down Under. The system would involve pirates being monitored and notified of their behavior via escalating warning notices, with legal action being the final step.

However, in somewhat of a surprise announcement Village Roadshow’s Graham Burke has informed CNET that the plans have been shelved.

“We reached the conclusion after having an independent audit firm evaluate the cost of sending out the notices, and we concluded that it was too much of an imposition to ask the ISPs, and also from our own point of view, the amount it would cost. So we decided not to push it forward,” he said.

Given the years of negotiations, government involvement, not to mention the trauma caused by the ill-fated iiNet legal action that came to a close in 2012, the turnaround is nothing short of spectacular. However, that the basis for the back-tracking is cost-based is no surprise whatsoever.

“At the moment, [the warning system] is manual,” Burke said. “And it’s just so labor intense, that it’s somewhere in the vicinity of $16 to $20 per notice, which is prohibitive. You might as well give people a DVD.”

But while costs are too high at the moment, it appears a more cost-effective automated system is somewhere on the horizon. Burke won’t say when it will appear, but he predicts that when it’s firing on all cylinders it would bring the costs of notices down to a few cents each.

While rightsholders should be expected to have another bite of the cherry in the not too distant future on the warning front, in the meantime Aussie pirates will have relative freedom to go about their business. The Dallas Buyers Club case has also collapsed, so it could be sometime before trolls raise their heads in the region. That leaves companies like Village Roadshow appealing to the public’s better nature.

“We are going to be mounting a massive campaign to reinforce the fact (to the public) that piracy is not a victimless crime and we have to continue to provide content in a timely way and at affordable prices,” Burke said.

Whether the studios manage to achieve both ‘timely’ and ‘affordable’ will be for the public to decide in the months to come. Most are not convinced thus far.

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

Week in and week out automated bots detect and report millions of alleged copyright infringements, which are then processed by the receiving site without a human ever looking at them.

Unfortunately this process is far from flawless, resulting in many false and inaccurate takedown requests.

For regular Internet users YouTube’s Content-ID is particularly problematic. We highlighted this issue a few years ago but in recent months opposition has been swelling.

Google recognizes the problems and recently offered to pay the legal bills of several people who argued that their removed videos are protected by ‘fair use’ legislation. However, this has had little impact on the Content-ID system which still flags a lot of legal content.

Most recently, Harvard Law professor William Fisher had one of his courses pulled from YouTube following a takedown request submitted by Sony Music. Ironically, the video in question has the rather fitting title: “The Subject Matter of Copyright: Music.”

The video in question

As pointed out by Techdirt, the course is still available on the CopyrightX project website. A more detailed look shows that it does indeed include some music clips, all covers of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing.

None of the tracks, which include covers by Joe Cocker, Santana and Stevie Ray Vaughan, are played in full. Instead, Fisher highlights small segments ranging from 15 to roughly 40 seconds.

Given the educational nature of the clip, this would be an excellent example of fair use. However, the video in question was flagged and subsequently removed from public view by YouTube’s system.

The ‘takedown’ is likely to be an automated one, but that doesn’t make it less of an issue. There appears to be very little oversight of YouTube takedowns, if any, and with more copyright holders joining the Content-ID program the problems may get worse.

Perhaps Professor Fisher could make a case out of this. His colleague Lawrence Lessig did the same a few years ago, with success, and apparently Google is interested in picking up the legal fees.

Ultimately, however, YouTube should consider giving its publishers more tools to counter inaccurate requests. As long as a cat purring is still flagged as copyright infringement, there’s plenty of room for improvement.

Update: The video in question is now accessible again. It was unavailable for more than a day, but apparently the mistake was corrected after it was pointed out in public.

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