PayPal is widely known for its aggressive stance towards BitTorrent sites, Usenet providers and file-hosting services, and it appears that P2P software is now receiving the same treatment.

Most recently, PayPal took action against Soulseek, a file-sharing network that’s mostly used for sharing music. Soulseek has been around for a decade and a half, when Napster was still in its prime and years before BitTorrent came around.

The Soulseek client that was targeted had been using PayPal to receive donations for 14 years. It never ran into trouble and PayPal even sent personal Christmas cards to the operators, but a few weeks ago things changed.

“PayPal suddenly and unceremoniously decided to end a very friendly working relationship with us that lasted 14 years,” Soulseek’s Roz and Nir Arbel explain.

The San Francisco based Soulseek team tried to get more information on the sudden change of heart, but without much luck.

“We have asked repeatedly for an explanation of this behavior, but we have been stonewalled at every turn, and have received only form emails telling us that we needed to be ‘pre-approved’ for an account,” they explain.

While PayPal doesn’t want to comment in detail, Soulseek appears to be classified under the “file-sharing” category now. These type of sites and services have to adhere to strict rules.

This policy has been in force since 2012 and has resulted in PayPal banning many file-sharing related services.

In the case of Soulseek it would have been hard to ask for pre-approval as they were already a user many years before the policy came into effect.

That said, PayPal has made it clear that Soulseek is not allowed to use their services anymore.

“When we asked what we need to do to be pre-approved, they emailed back and said that they are ‘not granting pre-approval at this time’,” the Soulseek team notes.

Soulseek is not the first company to be banned by PayPal’s rigorous policy, and it won’t be the last. Another service that suffered the same fate recently is the TV-guide Myepisodes.com.

Even though the service doesn’t link to or host any infringing material, it was kicked off due to a “copyright issue” and because wasn’t “pre-approved.”

While PayPal hasn’t commented on the disconnections in public, it seems likely that it took action after complaints from copyright holders or industry groups, who fear that file-sharing related sites and services hurt their revenues.

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

In this second episode we discuss why pirates have always attracted extra-territorial law enforcement; the UK’s current anti-piracy campaign and the coolest anti-piracy campaigns of all time; and the cases again Libgen, Sci-Hub etc., and why they’re not just immoral, but also doomed to fail.

Finally we talk about a group of academics who are saying that file-sharing should be the future of knowledge creation – and are asking their peers to become peer-to-peers.

Steal This Show (STS) is a TF-supported initiative produced and hosted by Jamie King.

STS aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary and analysis.

The guests for our news discussions will vary and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the big innovators and minds, one-on-one.

Host: Jamie King

Guests: Lawrence Liang and Tomislav Medak

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Eric Bouthiller
Original Music by David Triana

Topics being discussed this week:

Custodians.online
Megaupload Programmer Already Freed From U.S. Prison
UK Anti-Piracy ‘Education’ Campaign Launched, Quietly
The Cases Against Sci-Hub and Libgen

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

In August 2015, BREIN announced that it had reached a private agreement with members of ‘Dutch Release Team’ (DRT), a group that had uploaded movies to torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents.

The deal entailed them deleting their files from Kickass, paying a cash settlement, and informing on remaining members of the group.

Now BREIN has announced a new development which should herald the final nail in the coffin for another release group. According to the anti-piracy outfit it first identified and then settled with the last active member of DMT (Dutch Movie Theater).

According to BREIN the man uploaded mostly movies and eBooks on an almost daily basis to sites including KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay. Revealing his alias as ‘ipod020′, BREIN says that overall around 5,000 torrents were uploaded.

On Kickass, where the man used to have an active account, all torrents have been deleted. In their place sits a warning message (Dutch, translated by TF) to other would-be releasers.

“Illegal uploading and downloading costs a lot of money to the film industry, but also to me. Do not do it. I had to settle with BREIN for thousands of euros,” the message reads.

Although BREIN hasn’t publicly made any connection, in November it announced that an injunction had been obtained following an ex-parte case against a 20-year-old student, who uploaded over 750 torrents to KickassTorrents.

He appears to have been connected to the same group and also reached a compensation agreement with BREIN. His KickassTorrents account displays a message too.

“We deal with increasingly prolific uploaders,” says BREIN chief Tim Kuik commenting on this week’s case.

“Some uploaders pretend it is a harmless hobby, while they’re causing extensive damage and illegal sites are profiting handsomely. If you run into trouble, it is an expensive hobby for sure.”

In closing, the anti-piracy boss warns of an active 2016 in which BREIN will continue to track down content uploaders.

“There are more investigations in the pipeline, and next year we’ll launch an even more comprehensive approach where we will use software to trace uploaders,” Kuik concludes.

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

This week the FBI announced that it had helped take down 37,479 websites, most of which sold counterfeit goods.

The enforcement action was a continuation of operation “In Our Sites” which began in 2010. At the time, several piracy related websites were among the prime targets including torrent search engine Torrent-Finder.com.

The torrent site, which didn’t host or link to any infringing content, had its domain name seized for allegedly infringing copyrights and the authorities announced that an investigation was ongoing.

Torrent-Finder’s owner Waleed Gadelkareem was genuinely surprised by the actions of the US authorities and became determined to fight the seizure. He had never run into copyright issues before and maintained that his Egypt-based business was perfectly legal.

With help from U.S. lawyer David Snead, TorrentFinder decided to appeal the seizure. The Department of Justice (DoJ) opted to do this outside of court, through an administrative enforcement process.

This process lasted nearly half a decade and a few days ago the authorities informed TorrentFinder that they would no longer pursue the case. The DoJ accepted the torrent site’s “offer in compromise,” which among other things states that it will comply with takedown requests.

The seizure banner

The Torrent-Finder.com domain was officially released late November and is now in the hands of the original owner again, who is redirecting it to the torrent section of his new search engine AIO.

While the authorities don’t officially endorse the site, it’s clear that their case against it wasn’t strong enough to follow-up with a prosecution.

Despite the positive outcome, Torrent-Finder’s former lawyer David Snead says that it’s disappointing that it took the authorities half a decade to reach their final decision. Avoiding a court battle actually slowed down the process.

“The procedure we used was presented to us as an alternative to litigation, and possibly speedier,” Snead told TF this week.

“The length of time that it took for this matter to be resolved is very troubling. It indicates that the domain name seizure process does not have built into it respect for due process that is the hallmark of the U.S. legal system.”

Due process is important as Torrent-Finder’s traffic was hit hard by the seizure, a drop many other websites may not have survived. The torrent search engine didn’t give up though, and it’s successor is still around today.

We spoke to Torrent-Finder’s operator who told us that he’s happy to have his domain back. Still, he’s not pleased with how the U.S. Government handled the case.

According to Gadelkareem the entire case was based on inaccuracies and mistakes. A lot of the evidence was factually incorrect, something he could only highlight after his domain was taken away.

“A child would have made a stronger case. I think they did not expect any response from my side. That is how they came up with the most hilarious evidence you could imagine,” Gadelkareem says.

The evidence summed up in the affidavit (pdf) was indeed weak. For example, Homeland Security’s Special Agent Reynolds cited several articles from Torrent-Finder’s news section as proof of criminal copyright infringement.

“I was able to view posts by the user ‘Torrent Finder,’ including ‘Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent,’ ‘Piracy in The Music Industry,’ ‘The First Episode of ‘The Walking Dead’ Leaks to BitTorrent,’ and ‘Piracy domain seizure bill gains support,’ he wrote.

Torrent-Finder allegations

The cited articles were actually copies of TorrentFreak news. These were automatically pulled from our RSS feed and of course did not link to any copyright infringing material.

While Torrent-Finder.com is now in the hands of its original owner once again, it was almost scooped up strangers. The DoJ remained sloppy until the end and simply let the domain expire instead of transferring it as promised.

“I kind of expected this to happen, so I created a backup account to catch the domain if it expired, and that is where the domain ended up,” Gadelkareem says.

“If I didn’t create that backorder then I would not have the domain name back right now.”

TorrentFinder’s operator is still frustrated about the trouble he’s had to go to but is glad that he can now put the matter behind him. Defeating copyright infringement claims from the U.S. Government is quite an achievement and seeing the feds run into problems of their own helped to ease the pain.

“Seeing scandals such as the NSA spying program brought me some peace in the end,” he concludes.

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

While downloading content for later playback has been the mainstay of BitTorrent aficionados for well over a decade, streaming of content continues to gain popularity with many users.

More recently, torrent users have been getting in on the act too, with the streaming abilities of the popular Popcorn Time application. However, this software uploads too, meaning that users can be exposed to claims of copyright infringement. Streaming directly from a single source (often a website) rarely carries such risks.

As a result a whole new market as flourished, one which has seen highly modified versions of software such as Kodi installed on set-top boxes, offering free and almost risk-free streaming of movies and TV shows to the masses.

This availability hasn’t gone unnoticed by Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, who have been taking action on several fronts against this unofficial market. As part of those efforts the group filed a copyright case against Moviestreamer.nl, a site that sells hardware for the purposes detailed above. BREIN asked for an injunction against the site, claiming that its actions constitute infringement.

However, in a decision published this week, BREIN was informed by the Midden-Nederland court that it would not be handing down a ban on the sale of devices offered by Moviestreamer. The problem (and indeed the answer) lies in a separate case BREIN has pending against Filmspeler.nl, another vendor of similar devices.

Filmspeler.nl sold media-players bundled with XBMC and pre-installed addons which provided hyperlinks to unlicensed sites offering movies, TV shows, live sports and music. Filmspeler was clear on the purpose of its devices, marketing them with slogans such as “Never go to the cinema again”, “Netflix is the past” and “Never pay again.”

Another claim made by Filmspieler is that its devices are legal. “Downloading (from illegal source) is illegal but streaming is not,” the site said. This appears to be a reference to a decision by the Dutch government last year which banned the downloading of content from illegal sources but did not specifically mention streaming.

BREIN disagreed and asked the court to rule that the trader infringes copyright by linking to illegal content and that the streaming of that content also constitutes infringement. Seeking clarification, the court referred several questions to the EU Court of Justice, including whether the legal requirement of ‘lawful use’ is met if a temporary reproduction is made during the streaming of unauthorized content.

Since the case against Moviestreamer is very similar to that against Filmspieler, this week the Midden-Nederland court found that as long as there is uncertainty over the legality of streaming from illegal sources, there would be no injunction against Moviestreamer.

The fact that questions are already with the EU Court of Justice shows that there is indeed “reasonable doubt” but that will necessarily change with a ruling. Indeed, the court said that if it is established that streaming from illegal sources constitutes copyright infringement, it is plausible that facilitating access to the same would also be unlawful.

Simply put, as long as streaming from illegal sources is not officially illegal, selling devices that offer that ability are not yet illegal either. While BREIN may prevail longer term after a potentially positive EU ruling, in the meantime the group intends to appeal.

“BREIN will appeal this verdict because it considers this facilitation to be very harmful, not only because it facilitates streaming from illegal sources but also because it facilitates the illegal offering itself and is therefore clearly unlawful,” the group said.

It is not yet clear when the EU Court will hand down its decision.

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