Over the past several years few individuals operating in the anti-piracy space have received more press than Henrik Pontén. Loved by rights-holders and hated by many pirates in equal measures, Pontén has been a thorn in the side of dozens of file-sharing sites.

The chief lawyer of Rights Alliance, which counts major Hollywood studios among its members, Pontén has definitely made a unique mark on file-sharing history.

Deeply involved in the prosecution of The Pirate Bay, Pontén made many enemies. In 2009 a bizarre (presumed ‘pirate’) retaliation made headlines when his name was officially changed with Swedish authorities without his knowledge. To his disappointment, Pirate Pontén was born.

“The pirate movement have previously tried threats and when that doesn’t work, they do this,” Pontén said at the time.

In a new interview with IDG more than six years on, the anti-piracy chief acknowledges that his work has not always proven popular with the masses.

“A friend once said that if you want to upset anyone you should write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, wolf hunting or us,” Pontén says of Rights Alliance (formerly Antipiratbyrån).

Popularity has rarely appeared to been one of Pontén’s aims but somehow he has retained his dry humor. In contacts with TF over the years he’s always been polite and has often responded to our requests for comment with the tongue-in-cheek sign off “Sharing is Caring.”

But underneath the dry exterior is a man dedicated to his cause, one who has outlived many of the sites he’s targeted over the years. Not all have crumbled in his wake (not least The Pirate Bay), but the numbers are on the wane, he says.

“The trend is that the number of illegal services is decreasing. Two years ago, we looked at some 20 Swedish players, now it’s down to a few. They are distinctly uninterested in ceasing their operations because they earn good money from them,” Pontén says.

According to the anti-piracy veteran Rights Alliance contacts pirate sites before reporting them to the police. That gives them the chance to close down their operations before things get heavy, including raids, trials, potential prison sentences and millions in damages.

Pontén says that around half accept the offer to close. A few more stop after lawsuits are filed. Others, clearly, are much more persistent.

In the IDG interview Pontén is confronted with the fact that there have been a lot of court cases in Sweden against sites either run as hobby projects or generating marginal revenues. He counters by saying there is often a lag of several years between the filing of complaints and a prosecution.

Today, however, he suggests there are no more small fry in his home country.

“Of the services that remain in Sweden today, all are explicitly commercial and earn a lot of money,” he says.

“It’s a bit like the Internet in general. There are a few major players who are taking more and more space. The small sites disappear after a while,” Pontén notes.

Pontén is currently involved in a case against the operator of SwePiracy, a site that was first raided in 2012. The 24-year-old is accused of ignoring Rights Alliance warnings to close down and now faces claims for almost $3 million in damages from companies including Disney.

Also on the horizon lies the prosecution of SweFilmer, a site that was raided by police last summer. The site’s admin later revealed he’d been detained by police for four days.

Pontén says that those who believe that pirate sites are run by those who simply want to make content available for free will be surprised when they discover the commercial nature of that particular site.

“It will become clear,” he concludes.

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

For more than a decade researchers have been looking into the effects of online music piracy on the revenues of the record industry, with mixed results.

By now it’s clear that there’s no universal positive or negative effect of piracy on sales. The results depend on the type of artist, music genre and media, among other variables.

A newly published study by Jonathan Lee, researcher at Queen’s University Department of Economics, sheds an interesting light on these differences and unravels another piece of the puzzle.

In a working paper titled Purchase, Pirate, Publicize: The Effect of File Sharing on Album Sales, he examined the effect of BitTorrent piracy on both digital and physical music sales.

The goal of the study is to find out whether piracy’s sales displacement (piracy hurts sales) or the promotion component (piracy boosts sales) has a stronger effect.

“In theory, piracy could crowd out legitimate sales by building file sharing capacity, but could also increase sales through word-of-mouth,” Lee explains.

Drawing on a data set of 250,000 albums and 4.8 million downloads from a popular private BitTorrent tracker, he found some interesting effects. The overall results show a modest negative impact on album sales, as music industry executives would expect.

“From the results, I conclude that file sharing activity has a statistically significant but economically modest negative effect on legitimate music sales,” Lee writes.

Interestingly, however, this negative result is largely driven by physical sales. For many artists, piracy actually boosts digital sales, presumably because it serves as free advertising.

“This relationship varies by medium: file sharing decreases sales of physical copies but boosts sales of digital ones for top-tier artists, suggesting that the word-of-mouth effect is most relevant for the digital market.”

In addition, the popularity of the artists is an important factor too. More popular artists do relatively well as the boost in digital album sales compensates for the loss on the physical side.

“Top-tier artists lose sales, but the loss is partially offset by an increase in digital sales and the overall effect is small,” Lee writes.

Links between piracy and sales across various artists tiers

For their part, artists who are somewhat popular actually benefit from piracy while lesser knows musicians are hurt the most. The latter may be explained by the fact that these artists simply aren’t good enough for people to buy their work.

“Mid-tier artists are helped slightly and bottom-tier artists are significantly hurt by file sharing, which could indicate that file sharing helps lesser-known artists only if they are actually talented,” Lee notes.

The study adds to the never-ending debate on the effect of piracy on sales. It’s a good illustration that file-sharing can have both a positive and a negative impact.

One of the downsides is that the data itself is relatively old, from 2008, and the music industry has changed a lot since then. This means that the results may have been different today.

Also, it’s worth noting that the download numbers come from a BitTorrent tracker that counts a relatively high share of music aficionados. They may also act differently than the general file-sharer.

That said, the paper offers a unique and unprecedented analysis of BitTorrent piracy on music sales. It clearly disputes the general argument that music piracy exclusively hurts album sales, and suggests that BitTorrent piracy can act as promotion under certain circumstances.

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

During the past several days the issue of content geo-blocking has become a global hot potato after Netflix announced renewed efforts to thwart users who attempt to bypass its content-locking mechanisms.

Starting immediately, subscribers who attempt to access the Netflix service with a VPN or proxy in order to gain access to libraries in other regions will face additional roadblocks. The measures have been widely criticized by both VPN companies and consumers.

But while this kind of effort to protect copyright holders and licensing agreements is probably legal now, over in Europe a conflicting scenario is playing out via the European Commission.

Following the adoption last March of a new Digital Single Market Strategy which aims to improve consumer access to digital services and goods, the Commission presented plans to abolish geo-blocking and filtering restrictions across EU member states.

Describing geo-blocking as a “discriminatory practice used for commercial reasons” the Commission said that users should be allowed to access digital content services like Netflix all across Europe, no matter where they are.

In response to the Commission’s proposals the UK government has just launched a public consultation, aiming to gauge the public’s response to the idea of a geo-blocking ban in advance of any final decision by the EU.

“The European Commission has recently published draft legislation that is intended to ensure that all digital services are portable within the European Union,” the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) announced.

“This would mean that a person who lives in the UK, and who subscribes to a digital content service there, would be able to be confident they can continue to access that service when they are elsewhere in the EU, provided they have the right level of internet connection.”

The UK government itself is strongly in favor of the EU’s proposals and believes that both consumers and content providers will benefit from legislative change.

“The Government supports cross-border portability, and the Prime Minister welcomed these proposals on the day of their launch. We will now be working with other European partners to negotiate the detail of the Regulations so that they deliver the best outcome for businesses and consumers,” the IPO writes.

The proposals suggest changes to copyright law aimed at smoothing the way for providers such as Netflix to make subscriptions available in other EU countries by allowing them to apply the laws of the subscriber’s home territory.

“It is currently difficult to provide portability for some types of content because of territorial copyright agreements which govern where services can be accessed,” the IPO notes.

The government says that in advance of negotiations on the text between EU Members States it is seeking views from both businesses and consumers on the costs and benefits of the proposals, alongside suggestions of how the language of the legislation could be improved.

“In particular, we are seeking views from service providers, rights holder organizations, and consumers, in order to better understand how the proposals will affect them,” the IPO says.

The aim is to introduce content portability sometime in 2017 but those interested in contributing to the process need to be quick. The government’s consultation is effective immediately and will end on February 12, 2016.

Those interested in getting their voices heard can find further details here.

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

Last week Netflix announced that it would increase its crackdown against VPN and proxy users who circumvent the company’s geographical restrictions.

In an earnings interview Netflix CEO reed Hastings commented on this decision, admitting that it was made at the behest of copyright holders.

While VPN providers and users have criticized the tougher restrictions, Netflix itself doesn’t expect that it will cause an exodus of paying subscribers.

“I don’t think we will see any impact,” Hastings said.

“We’ve always enforced proxy blocking with a blacklist. Now we’ve got an expanded and enhanced blacklist, so I don’t think we’re going to see any huge change,” he adds.

According to Hastings it’s perfectly reasonable for copyright holders to demand tougher action against VPN and proxy users. However, this use is only a small fraction of the ‘real’ piracy problem.

“It’s not a big contributor to overall global piracy,” Hastings notes.

The real challenge is to convert those who use pirate sites and applications such as Popcorn Time. Netflix wants to be a carrot for these users which means that offering good content is high on the anti-piracy agenda.

“Overall global piracy is a big problem and we’re working with all the content owners, partially to be a great carrot, and also to have the other services like HBO and Amazon be great carrots,” Hastings said.

In a letter to the company’s shareholders Netflix notes that quite a bit of progress has been made in recent years.

Drawing on data from the broadband management company Sandvine, it shows that Netflix and other over‐the‐top services continue to grow their share of Internet peak traffic at the expense of BitTorrent.

“A closer look at the Sandvine data shows that the entire Over‐the‐Top category is growing as consumers increasingly embrace Internet TV and on demand viewing and, even better, this growth is coming at the expense of piracy,” the letter reads.

While blocking VPN users may not reverse this trend right away, it certainly doesn’t make Netflix a more appealing carrot. In fact, it looks more like a stick to scare paying subscribers.

In the long-term the company hopes to make the entire geo-blocking discussion obsolete by offering movies and TV-shows worldwide. Netflix is already doing this for its own originals, but whether Hollywood will come along for the ride remains to be seen.

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

In recent months Portuguese Internet providers have started to block hundreds of websites that allegedly link to copyright infringing content.

The voluntary blocking regime was formalized last summer through an agreement between several parties including the Ministry of Culture and the Association of Telecommunication Operators.

The agreement allows copyright holders to add new pirate sites without any intervention or oversight from a court, something which has now led to some rather unusual collateral damage.

This week several people noticed that the website of indie game developer Carbon Games was blocked as well. Instead of access to the company’s website, visitors in Portugal see the following message.

“The site that you’re trying to reach was blocked due to an order from the Regulator Agency”.

The blocking message

The issue was first reported by Revolução dos Bytes, which confirmed that the blockade is active across several large ISPs including NOS, MEO and Vodafone.

Generally speaking sites are added following complaints from copyright holders. The reported sites are then investigated by local anti-piracy group MAPINET and will end up on the blocklist if there’s enough evidence of systematic infringing activity.

Sites that fall into this category should contain at least 500 links to infringing material or have one-third of the site dedicated to facilitating copyright infringement. This doesn’t appear to be the case for the Carbon Games site.

The good news for Portuguese gaming fans is that the blockade is easily circumvented. In addition to using the non-www address which isn’t blocked, people can change their DNS to something that doesn’t rely on their ISP, such Google DNS or OpenDNS.

MAPINET has yet to comment publicly on the unusual blockade and we will update this article when we find out more.

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