Without doubt the biggest piracy story of December was the drama surrounding the relentless stream of movies hitting the Internet from release group Hive-CM8. All more-or-less perfect copies of awards screeners, the leaks attracted attention from studios and even the FBI.

As law enforcement presumably continues to track the release group, leaks from Hive-CM8 have faltered somewhat, with sources pointing to a potential security breach as the reason.

However, after maintaining almost total silence, the people behind Hive-CM8 have not only released a couple more movies but have also broken their silence.

Their statement, aimed at close colleagues in private channels, is surprising to say the least. It accompanies the release of the Christian Bale movie The Big Short and begins with an admission that errors have been made. (some typos/grammar corrected by TF)

“We held back this title till 1 week after [theatrical release] to give the movie a fighting chance to play in the budget, we learned from our mistake,” Hive’s statement begins.

“We didn’t plan to comment at all on recent events, but we feel now that we should.”

First off, the group attempts to dispel rumors that the leaked screener copies had been sourced after some kind of hack.

“We got the copies sold from a guy on the street, no decryption was needed. We were definitely not the only ones [to have obtained copies]. A couple of other movies had been on the net days before, not done by us,” they note.

While the group has certainly released content in the past for notoriety, this time around Hive said it wanted to help those too poor to get the movies through official channels.

“So we wanted to share [these] movies with the people who are not rich enough or not able to watch all nominated movies in the cinema. Of course [these files] are not representing the movies how they can be enjoyed in the cinema.”

It’s not uncommon for release groups to request that those viewing ‘their’ movies should support the producers by enjoying content through official channels and in the cinema where possible. Hive is no different, noting that creators “need the money from ticket sales to get back [their] production costs.”

However, what then follows is a clear apology to Quentin Tarantino and those behind his movie The Hateful Eight. Hive leaked this title before it had even opened in cinemas, something which they now regret.

“We feel sorry for the trouble we caused by releasing that great movie before [it’s release date] had even begun. We never intended to hurt anyone by doing that, we didn’t know it would get that popular that quickly,” Hive explains.

“The Hateful Eight is an excellent, thrilling and entertaining Western that combines terrific direction, a fantastic cast, a wonderful script, beautiful photography and a memorable score. All of those elements make The Hateful Eight an unforgettable film that is Quentin Tarantino at his best.”

But while acknowledging that tickets sales fund production costs and apologizing for their actions, Hive say they believe the leak of The Hateful Eight won’t do long-term damage to the title and has probably even helped it.

“Since everyone is now talking about this movie we don’t think the producers will [lose] any money [upon theatrical release]. We actually think this has created a new type of media hype that is more present in the news, radio and in the papers than Star Wars, and the promotional costs for this were free,” Hive says.

And here’s the math…..

“If let’s say 5% of the people planned to watch this movie at cinema date, due to this media push we unintentionally created, we believe that now 40% of the people will watch this movie in the cinema [because] everyone is talking about it and everyone wants to see the movie that created so much noise. This will push the cinema ticket sales for sure.

“We really hope this helped out the producers in the long-run, so that the production costs are covered and more.”

After thanking Quentin Tarantino for a “wonderful movie”, Hive notes that The Hateful Eight should be the top awards candidate and will “win by a mile” over its rivals. However, it’s pre-release will mark the last time that Hive leaks content before it appears in cinemas and for those waiting for the 40 leaks the group promised earlier, disappointment lies in wait.

“We won’t do another movie before its [theatrical release], and we definitely won’t go up to 40 as planned, we think we have done enough already,” Hive concludes.

That being said, two further screener releases have appeared in private channels during the past couple of days – The Big Short as previously noted and Golden Globe nominee Anomalisa. Both are now available publicly too, but without being attributed to Hive. Instead, both carry a generic ‘P2P’ tag.

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

Over the past several days more than a dozen high quality screeners of Hollywood films have appeared online, including The Hateful Eight, The Revenant and Steve Jobs.

Devastated Hollywood studios are now working with the FBI to catch the perpetrators, with some success.

Last week they traced The Hateful Eight leak back to a Hollywood executive and the feds are currently looking into additional leads.

The main targets in this case are individuals connected to the release group Hive-CM8. They’ve released the majority of the DVD screeners that are out at the moment and earlier promised to leak a total of 40.

However, it now appears that their releasing spree has come to an end.

Comments made by an insider on a private torrent site claim that a recent “expose” of a torrent uploader has something to do with it. This information was posted on various sites including KAT and in the TF comment section.

The person responsible for the expose, who uses the screen name Sup3rman, contacted TorrentFreak to provide his side of the story.

After reading an article about how easy it can sometimes be for law enforcement to catch movie pirates, he decided to test this theory on someone who uploaded many Hive-CM8 releases. To do this, he looked at the source of the movie screenshots and found that they were linked to an image sharing account with thousands of images.

All this info was (and is) rather public as the screenshots were posted with the torrent uploads. Also, everyone could see where they were hosted and figure out that the account name in question matched that of the torrent uploader.

However, not everyone close to the release group appreciated the “exposure” and as a result the public Hive-CM8 releases were halted. Hive-CM8 has not commented on the break but on a separate site he wrote that he won’t be available for some time.

On first sight the ‘leaked’ information doesn’t appear to be anything new or particularly private. However, it certainly appears that something spooked the group or uploader into halting the releases.

The reported break is confirmed by the lack of new releases over the past day or two, which is the longest gap since the first DVD screener was posted. Interestingly, however, The Big Short and Anomalisa have been published in private, or ‘internally’ as it’s known.

At the end of the day many questions remain. Could it really be that the exposed image account is the sole reason for stopping the public releases? Or is something else going on behind the scenes?

There’s no point in speculating any further at this point or drawing connections that may be totally irrelevant, but one has to wonder.

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

Amazon’s Fire TV stick is a great little device. Plugging nicely into an available HDMI port on most TVs, the device ‘smartens up’ the dumbest of devices and makes available the growing world of IPTV services.

The one currently plugged into my TV in the bedroom has mainly been used for the ‘free’ video streaming services bundled with Amazon Prime but the stick is equally at home streaming video from Netflix or any of the many services available from Amazon’s store.

However, Amazon’s little device has a trick up its sleeve. Being Android based, Fire TV Stick can run a much wider array of apps and services than Amazon offers through its regular on-screen interface. Of particular interest is Kodi, which together with a vast array of plugins offers access to all the latest movies, TV shows and live sports most people could ever need.

And news of just how special the Fire TV Stick/Kodi combo can be has been traveling fast in the past few weeks, particularly in the UK.

The first signs that something might be going on came very early December when even for Prime customers Amazon started advising that delivery for Fire TV Sticks was not the usual ‘next day’, but was actually nearer two weeks. For someone looking to buy two units as gifts, that was unacceptable. Other stores weren’t much help either.

After checking stock at nearly two dozen Argos and Currys retailers (both huge operations in the UK), just two units were found at the former 12 miles away. But the bizarre thing was that when I collected the items the lady behind the counter asked smilingly: “Are these for Kodi?”

Of course, I know about Kodi. We all know about Kodi. But for it to be mentioned without any prompting at the point of sale in a retailer was quite a surprise to say the least. And for a worker at a non-specialist retailer to know so much about it hints at the scale of the issue.

In case you missed it, Amazon banned Kodi from its store in the summer over piracy concerns but with the official APK plus adbFire and a loader like FireStarter, the software runs like a dream on Amazon Fire TV Stick.

“Everybody is buying these for Kodi, you can get everything on it. But that’s it now, we’re out of stock,” I was told while handing over the cash. Interesting…..

Intrigued, in the weeks that followed I monitored stock at Argos, Currys/PC World, Amazon themselves and several other big retailers including John Lewis and the nation’s biggest supermarket, Tesco. After an initial delay Amazon appeared to do the best in having stock available but all the rest really struggled.

Now, just days after Christmas, Currys/PC World have zero stock for home delivery and its the same situation at Tesco, John Lewis and Argos. Checking for local stock at the latter in the London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow regions reveals not a single unit available. Only Amazon themselves can offer anything (correct, 28 Dec).

Granted, it’s more than likely that Fire TV Stick has proven popular with consumers due to it working with Netflix and iPlayer, but Chromecast does that too and anyone can buy one of those devices at any of the above retailers anywhere in the next hour.

Admittedly, it’s a possibility that Amazon screwed up and didn’t make enough Fire TV Sticks. But if that’s the case, why is eBay awash with (ahem) ‘fully loaded’ Amazon Fire TV Sticks for immediate delivery?

Also, Google Trends can sometimes offer an insight into what people are interested in during a given period. So, we locked into December, did searches for both Kodi and Fire TV, and restricted results to the UK.

As can be seen from the image below, not only is Kodi even more popular than Amazon’s device, but the interest in both the software and the hardware follows similar waves.

There can be little doubt that interest in both Kodi and Fire TV are now at a high, not only in the UK, but also elsewhere. It’s also a further sign that piracy has really migrated out of the bedroom and onto the living room TV, something that Hollywood and other interested parties really wanted to avoid.

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

Last May the Stockholm District Court ordered the Pirate Bay’s .SE domains to be handed over to the Swedish state, a decision which is currently being appealed.

In a response The Pirate Bay decided to quickly redirect its visitors to a ‘Hydra’ of six new domain names in case the .SE domains were lost for good.

The notorious torrent site decided to use more than one domain name, anticipating that not all would survive pressure from copyright holders.

This was no unnecessary precaution as the first domain name was quickly suspended following an intervention from the associated registry, which soon chopped off the first head.

Today, the Hydra lost its remaining heads after TPB’s domain registrar took over all remaining domain names.

This morning ThePirateBay.la, ThePirateBay.gd, ThePirateBay.mn and ThePirateBay.vg were all listed as “clienthold” by the registry and the same is true for several other official TPB domains including those using the .FM, .SH, .MU and .TW extensions. This means they are no longer accessible, once all DNS entries are updates.

All affected domain names are linked to the same service and registered to Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij. According to ICANN the clienthold status is uncommon and “usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment, or when your domain is subject to deletion.”

Pirate Bay’s .LA Whois

As a result of the domain troubles The Pirate Bay is currently not reachable (cached DNS entries aside, but these will expire soon) through the usual ThePirateBay.se domain, which redirects to the domains listed above. However, the .org domain remains operational and the same is true for the .onion address.

At this point there is no official statement on the reason for the seizures/suspensions. The responsible registrar appears to be Idotz.net, which is a U.S. based 1api/Hexonet reseller. TorrentFreak has asked the company for a comment but at the time of publication we hadn’t yet heard back.

Not all domain registrars and registries are equally responsive to copyright complaints. Some suspend a domain name after a single complaint, while others require a local court order before taking action.

The Mongolian registry, which is behind TPB’s .MN domain name, previously informed TF that they will process potential complaints through ICANN’s Dispute Resolution Policy, suggesting that they will not take any voluntary action.

Still, that didn’t prevent the registrar from putting the .MN domain name on hold today.

Considering Pirate Bay’s defiant stance it’s likely that a copyright holder complaint triggered the current actions, but that hasn’t been confirmed. The TPB team has yet to make an official statement on the problems.

We will update this article should more information become available.

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

Site blocking has been one of the big anti-piracy themes of 2015, with hundreds of sites blocked by ISPs all around the world.

Given its generally poor record for cracking down on piracy, it’s perhaps somewhat of a surprise that Russia is now one of the front-runners when it comes to piracy blocking.

In September it was revealed that in some form or another, Russia had restricted access to around 280 ‘pirate’ sites since the introduction of a new law in 2013.

However, in an effort to move away from the cat and mouse game often played by unauthorized sites, Russian telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor has now thrown its weight behind a scheme to permanently block sites that persistently make available copyrighted content without permission.

RUTracker found itself sucked into that mechanism a couple of months ago, despite offering to take drastic action to avoid it. Now it appears that other leading sites are likely to fall foul of the legislation in the months to come.

According to predictions just made by Roscomnadzor, during 2016 rights holders will succeed in having the top 15 torrent sites permanently blocked. Of course, this kind of talk usually triggers talk of VPNs, proxies and other workarounds, but the watchdog says that the overwhelming majority of users won’t try to access the blocked sites.

“[The blocked sites’] traffic will be significantly reduced, because according to statistics 95% of people do not use tools to bypass locks,” the watchdog said in a statement on Twitter.

While the percentage of block evaders cited by Roscomnadzor is up for debate, the watchdog has just carried out a public survey which aims to provide a clearer picture on why Internet users turn to torrents. After conducting the survey via Twitter, Roscomnadzor published the results.

Marginally ahead with 37% of the votes were users who said they used torrents because “I do not want to pay”.

In second place with 36% were users who say they use torrents for “other reasons”, with many respondents noting that the content they are looking for is unavailable through regular channels.

In third with 17% of the vote were people who use torrents since they don’t know where to buy the content they’re looking for legally. The remaining 10% reported not using torrents.

In a statement issued after the poll closed, Roscomnadzor said that content providers need to find the right mix of pricing and availability. However, even that may not do the trick.

“In the current economic climate it is necessary to find a balance in which the content will be available, and the price will match the quality,” the watchdog said. “However, many simply do not want to pay.”

That’s where site-blocking comes in but only time will tell whether Roscomnadzor’s prediction of 95% efficiency will play out in the long term.

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