Commissioned by the copyright TV industry group Alianza, research firm NetNames has just released a comprehensive report on the scope of online piracy in South America.

The study is a follow-up on the global “Sizing the Piracy Universe” report released two years ago. It combines data from various sources to estimate the local piracy landscape.

Analyzing data from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, the report concludes that nearly half of the population has visited pirate sites or services in the period of a month.

“Of the approximately 222.3 million Internet users in South America, nearly 50%, or 110 million, accessed a site that distributed pirated audiovisual content by means of either a cyberlocker, peer-to-peer network or illegal IPTV streaming site,” the report reads.

Contrary to the worldwide picture, direct download sites receive more visitors and generate more bandwidth than peer-to-peer sharing such as BitTorrent. This may in part be due to lower Internet speeds, which are not optimal for P2P transfers.

Per year cyberlocker traffic accounts for more than half of all piracy traffic, 442 petabytes, compared to 265 petabytes of peer-to-peer traffic. NetNames also includes data for pirated live IPTV broadcasts, which adds another 82 petabytes.

In total the South American piracy landscape generates 789 petabytes per year. Or put differently, a whopping 2.3 million gigabytes per day.

While these bandwidth numbers may look impressive they pale in comparison to other regions. For example, NetNames previously found that piracy accounted for roughly 20,000 petabytes of bandwidth per year in North America, and a massive 26,000 petabytes in Europe.

NetNames notes that it is nonetheless a considerable proportion, since the local Internet infrastructure is underdeveloped, and warns that copyright holders may face even higher levels of piracy if Internet penetration and speeds increase.

The report is expected to serve as an important lobbying tool to convince local lawmakers to take steps to prevent copyright infringement. Michael Hartman, Senior Vice President of DIRECTV Latin America, believes it is key to raise awareness.

“Online piracy represents a significant threat to the protection of intellectual property rights,” Hartman says.

“This is the first step necessary to raise awareness of the problem. It will enable Alianza members to educate others about the problem and develop strategies to combat this form of piracy.”

The full NetNames report is available on the Alianza website.

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

In common with many countries around Europe, Russia believes that the way to bring Internet piracy to its knees is to block pirate sites at the ISP level. The theory is that Internet users will get tired of trying to circumvent blockades and will begin to spend money on movies and music instead.

In addition to targeting individual URLs indexing specific content, Russia is now engaged in so-called “eternal blockades”, the blocking of allegedly infringing websites at the ISP level on a permanent basis. Last week telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor announced the blocking of 13 sites (listed below), including the popular RuTor.org tracker.

But yesterday came the big one, with authorities confirming the permanent blockade of torrent site giant RuTracker. The huge site has experienced problems with rightsholders for many years, but during the past few months things have been slowly coming to a head.

Last October, with a permanent ban looming on the horizon, the site mulled the deletion of several hundred thousand torrents to pacify rightsholders. However, after polling its members the site decided to leave the torrents in place and accept the blockade.

Following separate action from book publishers and music labels including a subsidiary of Warner, a Moscow City Court order to permanently block the site came into force on January 12 and was carried out yesterday. But rather than the effect rightsholders had hoped for, the action signals the start of a new era for the site.

While undoubtedly a huge index of infringing content, RuTracker has long-standing agreements in place with many copyright holders to keep certain content off the site. This kept the content creators happy while easing some of the legal pressure from the tracker. However, RuTracker says that since they are now being completely blocked, the gloves are coming off.

“For many years our tracker has worked with rightsholders, in this respect many of their representatives were present on the site. They were free to cover all distribution protected under copyright law. In this regard, many releases were either banned or not recommended for distribution,” a staff member explained yesterday.

“But today we put an end to these agreements, as users of the Russian Federation are now blocked from accessing our tracker. Therefore rights holders did not want to continue their cooperation, which allows us to do more and not adhere to it.”

As a result, special accounts given to rightsholders to enable them to swiftly remove content have been downgraded to standard user status and members are now being informed to share whatever they like.

In the past this would’ve meant that only Russians would have greater access to content, but RuTracker has also opened up its previously members-only site to the general public. While English speakers still need Google translate to navigate the site, ominously it is also testing an English language version.

Only making matters worse is that RuTracker has removed the so-called ‘private flag’ from its torrents. This means that the site’s hundreds of thousands of active torrents should now be accessible via BitTorrent’s Distributed Hash Table (DHT), which opens up the content to a worldwide audience.

Of course, all of this is of limited use if people can’t access the site. As expected, however, people are already working hard to circumvent the blockades. While VPNs and proxies do the trick, a new site called Dostup-rutracker.org now provides free plugins for all major browsers which transparently bypass the ISP bans.

And so far things are looking promising for the site. According to the owner of the site’s former domain, who says that he’s now just a regular user on RuTracker, as of yesterday more than half of the site’s users had already circumvented the blocks.

Only time will tell whether RuTracker will grow into an international giant, but it’s fair to say that thus far the ISP blockade has had very little success, quite the opposite in fact.

Sites permanently blocked during the past week

http://www.rutracker.org
http://www.bobfilm.net
http://www.dream-film.net
http://www.kinokubik.com
http://www.kinozal.tv
http://www.kinobolt.ru
http://www.rutor.org
http://www.seedoff.net
http://www.torrentor.net
http://www.tushkan.net
http://www.tvserial-online.net
http://www.wood-film.ru
http://www.kinovo.tv
http://bigcinema.tv

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

Piracy comes in all shapes and sizes and even large multinationals can sometimes cross the line.

According to Font Brothers, American toy multinational Hasbro did so when it started to use the “Generation B” font for its My Little Pony products, without permission.

The Generation B font was created by Harold Lohner and is commercially exploited by Font Brothers.

One of the best known uses of the font is for the popular My Little Pony toys and videos. However, according to a complaint filed at a New York federal court Hasbro failed to obtain a proper license, so My Little Pony is using a pirated font.

“Defendant Hasbro has used or instructed others to use unauthorized copies of the Generation B Font in the creation of, but not limited to, all products, goods, merchandise, television and film properties, and advertising materials connected with the ‘My Little Pony’ product line..,” the complaint reads.

“Defendant Hasbro has created unauthorized and infringing copies of the Generation B Font Software and impermissibly distributed the same to third parties,” it adds (pdf).

Font Brothers claim that the font is being used across a wide variety of products and the company list various examples.

While small differences can sometimes be tricky to prove that an unauthorized font is used, in this case it is also used on Hasbro’s website. The stylesheet of the website specifically mentions the Generation B and a copy of the font stored and distributed through Hasbro’s servers.

My Little Pony website using the Generation B font

In the complaint Font Brothers write that they contacted Hasbro about the infringing use, but the toy maker refused to license the font for My Little Pony products and merchandise.

“Defendant has refused to comply with Plaintiff’s reasonable request for appropriate software licensing fees given the services already rendered by Plaintiff’s GENERATION B type font software, despite several demands for such action.”

As a result, Minnesota-based Font Brothers are claiming substantial damages and requesting a jury trial to resolve the matter.

“Font Brothers has lost, and will continue to lose, substantial revenue from Defendant’s wrongful use, copying, distribution, and creation of unauthorized infringing works based upon the GENERATION B font software.”

Considering the scope of the alleged infringements, which affect pretty much the entire My Little Pony line, the potential damages run into the millions. In addition, Font Brothers demand the destruction of all products and material which utilize the infringing font.

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

As champions of less restrictive copyright law and advocates of greater online freedoms and privacy, the Pirate Party has stamped its mark on the online space in recent years.

As a niche political movement it has often taken a guerrilla approach to its activism, with strategies often designed to provoke a fierce response from perceived enemies.

In July 2011, the Czech division of the party did just that with a brave move designed to stir up sentiments against the Czech Anti-Piracy Union who had targeted a 16-year-old accused of posting links to infringing material on his website

Under the slogan “Linking is not a Crime” the Czech Pirate Party launched its own movie download site. Tipnafilm.cz had an attractive layout with links to content plus movie covers, embedded trailers, and links to reviews on sites such as iMDb. A second site, Piratskefilmy.cz, carried 20,000 links to more than 5,800 movies.

“We challenge the Anti-Piracy Union to stop bullying the under-aged and to aim its preposterous claims at the Pirate Party,” the pirates said.

Declaring “open war” on the anti-piracy outfit, the Czech pirates later launched TV focused site Sledujuserialy.cz (I Watch TV Series). With the previous two sites faded away, it is this site that has finally elicited the response the pirates had longed hoped for.

“A landmark political trial for Czech Internet is about to take place!” the party has just announced.

“On Thursday 21st January, the Czech pirate party was officially notified that it will be prosecuted in criminal court. The reason is their long-term political campaign “Linking is Not a Crime” in which the party ran a non-commerical website ‘sledujuserialy.cz’ highlighting an absurd interpretation of copyright monopoly law with regard to the Internet.”

Although it has taken more than four years to come to fruition, it appears the pirates’ plan progressed as predicted. Their taunting of the Czech Anti-Piracy Union resulted in the anti-piracy group filing a complaint with the police. The police are now prosecuting the Pirate Party over their TV piracy site.

Unusually for torrent site operators, the Pirate Party say they are glad they’re in trouble with the law.

“[The Pirate Party] welcomes the criminal case. Until now, the Czech Anti-Piracy Union has targeted only randomly chosen individuals with its bullying. The victims were in an unfair position as they faced expensive lawyers of lobby organisations which push the current repressive copyright monopoly regime. This time it’s different,” Czech Pirate Party chairman Lukáš Černohorský explains.

“Instead of teenagers, copyright industry lobbyists are now dealing with a political party which didn’t run the website for money but because of our conviction that linking is not and should not be a crime.”

The Party says it has been forced to take this action to fight the persecution of linking online, adding that sites including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube don’t face any action for doing the same, even though they operate their sites for-profit.

That being said, it’s unclear how Czech copyright law will draw a line between the party’s hand-curated TV show download site and user-generated content sites like YouTube, but finding out is clearly one of the party’s aims.

“Our goal is to change the copyright monopoly law so that people are not fined millions for sharing culture with their friends. However, until we achieve that, we will fight in courts over interpretation and enforcement of the law,” Černohorský concludes.

The Party says that in the coming days it will call on all organizations who care about the future of the Internet to join them in a massive demonstration against oppressive copyright regimes and recent proposals for increased online censorship and surveillance.

Pirate parties have a long history of supporting pirate sites, particularly The Pirate Bay.

At times the Swedish Pirate Party famously hosted parts of The Pirate Bay’s infrastructure which put them on a collision course with authorities there. Over in the UK, the local Pirate party was threatened with a lawsuit from the music industry after refusing to take down its Pirate Bay proxy service. It eventually complied in December 2012.

Most recently, last year the Norwegian Pirate Party announced its own DNS service to bypass ISP censorship of The Pirate Bay.

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

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Spectre is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(2)	Spectre	7.9 / trailer
2	(1)	The Big Short (DVDscr)	8.1 / trailer
3	(3)	The Revenant (DVDscr)	?.? / trailer
4	(5)	The Intern	7.4 / trailer
5	(7)	Black Mass (Web-DL)	7.1 / trailer
6	(6)	The Martian	8.2 / trailer
7	(…)	The Veil	5.0 / trailer
8	(4)	Bridge of Spies	7.9 / trailer
9	(9)	The Last Witch Hunter (WEB-DL)	6.0 / trailer
10	(…)	Legend	7.1 / trailer

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