Last summer the MPAA sued several popular movie streaming websites which all operated under the MovieTube flag.

In their complaint the movie studios listed MovieTube.cc, TuneVideo.net, Watch33.tv, MovieTube.cz, Anime1.tv, MovieTube.pm, FunTube.co, MovieTube.la, KissDrama.net and several related sites.

The websites in question were typical streaming services, where users could watch videos and in some cases download source files to their computers. Since they used the same hosting facilities and design elements the studios believed that they were operated by the same people.

Several months have passed since the action was filed and the operators of the MovieTube sites have yet to appear in court. They were quick to pull the accused sites offline after the compliant was filed, but never responded to any of the claims.

Due to this inaction, the MPAA now requests a default judgment. In an affidavit submitted to a New York federal court before the weekend they point out that MovieTube made a healthy profit from its operations.

“Defendants’ aggressive promotion and search-engine optimization of the MovieTube Websites permitted them to profit off their blatantly infringing activities,” the MPAA’s attorney writes (pdf).

According to the MPAA the MovieTube sites attracted over 81 million estimated visits per month, including more than 60 million visits from the United States.

“Defendants’ advertising-based revenue model would have yielded them significant profits given their high traffic, little to no overhead, and the fact that, unlike legitimate digital content services, they paid not a single dollar to license the content on their websites.”

In a proposed default judgment (pdf) the MPAA requests a permanent injunction that would prohibit the accused from offering or linking to any copyright infringing material. In addition, the movie studios want the domain names to be transferred to them.

In addition, the MPAA requests statutory damages for willful copyright infringement in the amount of $75,000 per title, for a total of $10.5 million.

The proposed injunction no longer requires search engines, ISPs and hosting companies to stop linking or offering services to MovieTube. This request was dropped earlier after Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Yahoo branded it as a broad censorship attempt.

Without any opposition from the defendants the MPAA is destined to win this case. However, whether they will ever see any damages is highly doubtful. For now the true operators of the MovieTube sites remain unknown.

That said, the Hollywood group has already scored a victory by shutting down the MovieTube ring when the lawsuit was filed.

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

All around the world entertainment companies are augmenting their traditional sales with revenue generated from alleged copyright infringers.

Known as copyright-trolling, the practice sees companies monitor file-sharing networks for people sharing their content. They then use IP addresses to track users down via their ISPs. What follows are threats of legal action and demands for cash to make it all go away.

The UK has a long history of ‘trolls’ but in more recent times a company called Golden Eye International (GEIL) has been the most active. Run by the individuals behind the ‘Ben Dover’ porn brand, the company has targeted hundreds of people with allegations they downloaded and shared adult content without permission.

Last week it became evident that GEIL is back again when Sky Broadband began sending out warning letters to its subscribers. A copy obtained by TorrentFreak sent to us by a concerned Sky customer details the situation.

“We need to let you know about a court order made against Sky earlier this year that requires us to provide your name and address to another company,” the letter from Sky begins.

“A company called Golden Eye International, which owns rights to several copyrighted films, has claimed that a number of Sky Broadband customers engaged in unlawful file sharing of some of its films.

“In support of this claims Golden Eye International says it has gathered evidence of individual broadband accounts (identified online by unique numbers called IP addresses) from which it claims the file sharing took place.”

Sky says that it was not involved in gathering any of the evidence and cannot comment on its accuracy. However, since the company was presented with a court order, it must hand the subscribers’ personal details to Golden Eye International.

Of course, like everyone familiar with these kinds of matters, Sky Broadband is only too aware why Golden Eye is sending out these letters. The company wants hard cash from Sky’s customers.

“It’s likely that Golden Eye International will contact you directly and may ask you to pay them compensation,” the ISP warns.

As far as we’re aware, Golden Eye hasn’t yet contacted any Sky customers following this most recent warning from Sky but those letters probably won’t be too far off. However, the advance letter from Sky is already causing concern.

In the latter part of last week and over the weekend, TorrentFreak spoke with more than half a dozen Sky subscribers in receipt of the letter. We’re giving each one anonymity but most were concerned about what lies ahead. However, a couple had been reassured by an earlier article on the topic.

Michael Coyle, a Southampton-based solicitor with huge experience of these cases, says he’s also been receiving calls from worried Sky customers. Previously he’s handled such cases in return for a charitable donation but we understand that he’s now offering to help people for a fraction of the £400 to £600 usually demanded by GEIL.

Received a letter from Sky or GEIL? Contact us in complete confidence.

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

Trackers are a crucial part of the BitTorrent infrastructure, making it easier for downloaders and uploaders to connect to each other.

Technically speaking trackers are similar to a DNS provider, they function as a ‘phone book’ pointing people to content without knowing what it is.

Over the past several months Demonii became the largest torrent tracker online, handling requests from more than 50 million peers, resulting in more than two billion connections per day.

However, since this weekend Demonii is no more.

The tracker simply vanished without an official explanation from the operator. Since it’s connected to the now defunct YTS/YIFY group, it’s safe to assume that the tracker is not coming back.

In addition to the suspicions, a well-informed source has also confirmed that this is the end for the tracker.

Started in 2013 Demonii was a relatively young tracker that soon became the largest of its kind. After OpenBitTorrent and PublicBT suffered prolonged downtime earlier this year it was the only top tracker left standing.

Demonii’s demise shows that the MPAA’s legal action against YTS/YIFY will have an even larger impact on the BitTorrent ecosystem than expected.

Demonii’s growth over the past year

After a settlement the YTS.to domain name is now controlled by the MPAA, but as far as we can see the Demonii.com domain hasn’t yet fallen into the hands of the Hollywood group.

Although one of the largest trackers has folded, most torrents will still work fine thanks to DHT, PEX, and some other large trackers that remain online. That said, in some cases it may take longer to connect to peers.

With Demonii, YTS and YIFY gone there’s no doubt that the torrent ecosystem has lost one of its biggest players. However, this is not the first time that a large BitTorrent tracker has folded and historically others have stood up to take the strain.

OpenBitTorrent and PublicBT have been up and running again for a while, and other sizable trackers such as Coppersurfer.tk and Leechers-Paradise remain available as well.

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

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

Ant Man is the most downloaded movie for the second week in a row.

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	(1)	Ant-Man (Webrip)	7.7 / trailer
2	(…)	Another World/a> (Web-DL)	5.3 / trailer
3	(…)	Ronaldo/a>	6.7 / trailer
4	(2)	The Man from U.N.C.L.E.	7.5 / trailer
5	(7)	No Escape	6.9 / trailer
6	(3)	Inside Out	8.4 / trailer
7	(5)	Everest (Subbed HDRip)	7.3 / trailer
8	(…)	American Ultra (Web-DL)	6.1 / trailer
9	(4)	Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (Subbed HDrip)	6.8 / trailer
10	(…)	Unthinkable	7.3 / trailer

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

Anne Frank‘s Diary, if you haven’t heard of it, is the notes of a girl who hid in Amsterdam from the nazis toward the end of World War II. Sadly, she didn’t make it, and died at nazi hands in 1945.

Her diary has become a seminal work to understand what people in the occupied countries went through on a personal level, beyond the statistics. It was compiled after her death and after the war by her father, Otto Frank.

As Anne Frank died in 1945, this work would be elevated to the public domain in six weeks, on January 1, 2016 – 70 years after her death. However, the foundation that holds the copyright (and therefore collects a significant amount of money from this work) is now trying an obvious abuse of their monopoly, by suddenly naming her father Otto a co-author of her diary where he was previously just an editor. This move purportedly extends their own monopoly on the piece of heritage by decades – all the way through 2050 – out of the blue.

What’s really infuriating about this is how oldmedia doesn’t call it out as fraud at all, but takes a completely neutral stance. Most outlets seem to be rewrites of the New York Times story, which just neutrally reports “the book now has a co-author”, quotes a few people in the worst form of abdicative “he-said-she-said journalism”, and leaves it at that.

Let’s be clear on three points here: One, this is a fraud committed for the sole purpose of preventing the work from being elevated to the public domain; two, it is committed now as the book would otherwise be elevated to the public domain a mere six weeks from now — if Otto Frank was objectively a co-author, it would reasonably have said so from the beginning, and not when then monopoly was down to the wire; and three, oldmedia remains abysmally ignorant of how the copyright monopoly is used to punish and withhold, rather than the illusory encourage and reward.

Not one single oldmedia outlet has called out the fraud, even though it’s right in their face.

The tech outlets are less inhibited. BoingBoing is much more upright, calling it fraud in the very header.

The thing is that this ignorance is endemic to oldmedia. The Internet is the single most important piece of infrastructure we have, and policymakers are letting an old printing monopoly decide how it can and cannot be used – which should be cause for revolts and uprisings. Instead, oldmedia are collectively treating it with a yawn, while tech writers who understand the issue are calling a spade a spade.

What’s worse, it’s widely assumed that the cost of the monopoly is zero. But as BoingBoing observes, there have been two houses fighting in lockstep over petty monopolies to bring the story of Anne Frank to the world – and seeing how that number is typically limited to one, now that it’s evidently possible to have two, what sets a cap at two? Why can’t it be two hundred or two thousand?

That’s the harm of the copyright monopoly. Putting it differently, were it not for the copyright monopoly, we wouldn’t have had seven Harry Potter books but rather upwards of seven thousand, many utter crap but some outright stellar. There’s a real cultural cost, a real cost to our common heritage, right there. That’s how the copyright monopoly punishes and withholds us all.

And oldmedia is completely oblivious to it.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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