With its pretty interface there was never any doubt that brand new file-sharing app Aurous would be making headlines upon launch. It’s certainly lived up to that billing.

The software was tested here at TF a few weeks ago before it was available to the public. As a general rule we don’t ‘review’ sites or software, however with Aurous things felt different. Call it gut instinct after years of writing about copyright issues but this one had newsworthy – and litigation – written all over it.

Sure enough, on Tuesday the RIAA sued Aurous and co-founder Andrew Sampson. There was no surprise in TF’s virtual newsroom, only a sense of inevitability followed by a simultaneous “that was quick”. And the RIAA was definitely quick. In the space of 72 hours they tested Aurous, analyzed its code and briefed their lawyers.

That said, preparation had been done. Like thousands of others the RIAA would’ve noticed Andrew Sampson’s personal website detailing the open source projects he has on the go. And when they were done reading that they no doubt moved to his very public Github and Facebook pages. Hell, the guy even has a Wikipedia page dedicated to him.

So, unless the above amounts to seriously impressive decoy activity as part of a master plan in which Sampson leads the RIAA down a spectacular blind alley, we can presume that his true identity is well and truly out of the bag. And when you have the RIAA breathing down your neck, that must absolutely suck.

Yet aside from complying with a restraining order handed down on Thursday, Sampson seems totally unfazed. Maybe it’s his relatively tender age (he’s reportedly just 20) that gives him the strength to challenge the CEOs of the major labels to an arm wrestling match on Twitter. Maybe he’s insane. Maybe, just maybe, he knows something we don’t and he’s chuckling to himself right now.

If that’s the case, good for him I guess, but if not a miserable road lies ahead. Just thinking about what the Grooveshark guys had to go through year after year is stressful enough, not to mention the fact that Paul Geller, the company’s former EVP of Strategic Development, thinks Sampson’s fight “won’t be pretty“.

Worryingly Grooveshark had better odds of winning too. The service had a massive head start over Sampson, some licensing deals on board and significant dollars in the bank to put up a fight. Well, they started with dollars in the bank……

And that’s the thing. To many the idea of fighting the mighty RIAA will have a romantic ring to it, like David bringing down Goliath, like Hannibal inflicting huge losses on the Romans. But these are people’s lives were talking about and in the case of Sampson (and if his date of birth is accurate) it’s a life that’s barely out of the starting blocks.

So why the concern over a person I know little about getting himself into a fight with the RIAA? Well, quite apart from the fact that history shows us that no file-sharing developer has ever got into a proper war with the RIAA and truly won, I can’t stop thinking about someone who i’ve been in touch with for a year or so now.

I need to protect his identity but let’s just say he’s one of several people facing serious copyright infringement charges that will almost certainly change their lives forever. In our last exchange he sounded absolutely broken and I have no doubt whatsoever that given the chance he would’ve done things differently. I’ve been wondering how much that option would be worth to him today – probably every penny he has.

Sure, being a disruptor and fixing broken business models is the stuff of heroes and by its nature involves many risks, but are those risks really worth taking at 20 years old in 2015? Against the RIAA? A group that knows almost everything there is to know about copyright infringement lawsuits and one that can easily outspend you even if they can’t win?

Make no mistake, unless the RIAA decides otherwise Sampson is in an unwinnable fight that no lawyer will ever be able to turn around. Even Mike Masnick said as much on Friday and that is not a good sign.

Importantly, though, there’s no shame in walking away from an unwinnable fight because by making a strategic withdrawal without your own blood being shed, you’ve actually won. There’ll be another way for a bright and talented guy like Sampson to achieve his aims, if he makes the right decisions now.

Good luck Andrew, you know it makes sense.

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

Lawsuits against file-sharers are commonplace in the United States. Over a quarter million people have been accused in recent years, most after using standard BitTorrent clients.

The cases barely make the news anymore, but that changed this summer when the makers of several Hollywood films targeted a few dozen Popcorn Time users.

Since Popcorn Time also uses BitTorrent under the hood these ‘new’ lawsuits follow the same path as previous ones. The filmmakers ask the court for a subpoena to identify the account holders, and then their lawyers approach the accused for a settlement.

This week the makers of the Adam Sandler movie The Cobbler announced that the first Popcorn Time users have begun to settle.

The company sued 11 alleged pirates in August and according to a recent court filing five have admitted guilt already. As is usual in these so-called ‘copyright troll’ cases, the defendants chose to settle for an undisclosed amount.

Status report

In a status report lawyer Carl Crowell, who represents The Cobbler’s makers and several other rightsholders, notes that the settlement figure is below the statutory minimum of $750.

“Plaintiff discloses that for each of the above listed defendants any settlement sums agreed on have been at or below minimum statutory damages with apportioned costs and fees,” Crowell writes.

The total figure may well exceed $1,000 though as it includes an undisclosed sum for attorney fees.

Traditionally, settlement offers in these type of cases have been around $3,000 per infringed work, although we have seen agreements detailing settlements of up to $14,000.

However, even at a substantially lower amount the litigation campaign can be quite profitable. Since the cases are built on boilerplate filings there’s relatively little work involved.

This standardized nature is also apparent from the permanent injunctions that were submitted to the court (e.g. pdf), which are identical to those in the standard BitTorrent cases. In fact, they reference “BitTorrent clients” instead of mentioning Popcorn Time specifically.

Given the early success, we can expect more Popcorn Time related lawsuits to surface during the coming months.

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

Earlier this month several copyright holder groups submitted their overviews of “notorious markets” to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR).

The U.S. Government uses this input to provide an overview of threats to various copyright industries. The list usually includes well-known piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay, but last year it also mentioned Canadian domain name registrar Tucows.

This year the MPAA and RIAA kept up the pressure with their latest submissions. Both groups again identified domain name registrars as possible piracy facilitators.

The inclusion of domain name registrars is a dangerous development according to the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which counts Google, Facebook and Microsoft among its members.

The CCIA submitted a rebuttal to the USTR this week in which they outline their concerns.

“CCIA is deeply concerned with comments requesting that domain registrars be branded as ‘notorious markets’ and included on USTR’s list of notorious markets,” the group writes. “Domain registrars are not notorious markets.”

The tech companies explain that third party service providers enjoy broad immunity from copyright infringement claims, as defined by U.S. law.

USTR’s decision to include domain registrars was based in misleading input from copyright holder groups, CCIA notes. Copyright holders argue that ICANN’s RAA agreement requires registrars to take specific action against alleged abuse, but the tech companies refute that.

“Although some rightsholders have argued that ICANN should deputize registrars as copyright enforcement agents, USTR should not be giving credence, either directly or implicitly, to these misinterpretations of the RAA and the proper role of registrars,” they write.

The MPAA and RIAA went beyond domain registrars in their latest filings and also argued that other service providers should play a more active role in countering online piracy. This includes CCIA member Cloudflare, who has many “notorious” sites among their customers.

CCIA also opposes this request and warns against measures that would involve third-party companies in regulating and policing the Internet, drawing a comparison to the defeated SOPA and PIPA bills.

“Rightsholders have a wide variety of tools to reduce intellectual property infringement. USTR should not allow intellectual property enforcement efforts to interfere with fundamental Internet infrastructure, or undermine the intermediary liability limitations that the U.S. Internet economy is built on.

“Domain registrars, and other third party online intermediaries, do not belong on USTR’s notorious markets list,” CCIA concludes.

The rebuttal and other submissions will form the basis of the U.S. Government’s Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets, which is expected to come out later this year.

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

To the vast majority of technology enthusiasts the term ‘BitTorrent’ means one thing – the sharing of large files with like-minded individuals quickly and freely across the Internet.

Often confused with the file-sharing protocol of the same name, the organization providing the tools for much of that sharing is technology company BitTorrent Inc. Indeed, BitTorrent Inc. currently employs the brains behind uTorrent, the most famous P2P file-sharing software in the world.

While public torrents are without doubt the major bread-winner for BitTorrent Inc, for the past two years the company has attempted to realign itself as a privacy-focused enterprise. In 2013 it even went as far as launching a billboard campaign to alert the public over the prying eyes of the National Security Agency.

This week during a series of conferences to promote development of companies in Latin America, BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker reinforced his privacy agenda with a powerful message. According to Klinker, the privacy of the individual trumps even the security interests of nation states.

“I believe that the privacy of human beings is more important than the security of each country, but obviously governments tend to think differently and we respect the work they do,” Klinker said.

While noble, it’s a conflicting stance for the company to take. Its key products operate without any privacy protection whatsoever and the company has even rejected privacy services seeking to partner with the business.

Still, Klinker insists that his company’s support of privacy dates way back.

“For many years BitTorrent has been on the side of privacy,” he told the conference. “We have always believed that the Internet should be free and private, and that users should not have any fear of using it.”

Despite the wide open nature of torrent activity in general, it would be unfair to suggest that BitTorrent Inc. hasn’t been making privacy advances in other areas. Its chat application Bleep, for example, which allows people to communicate without relaying messages through an intermediary.

“Most of the applications that we use today, like WhatsApp, send messages to an external server, this means that third parties can review the content and know with whom they’re talking,” Klinker explained.

“It’s not that the Internet or the cloud aren’t safe, but a record always remains of who is speaking and what is being said. Maybe the information is not always important, but we still shouldn’t be exposed.”

And of course, BitTorrent Inc. also has its own Dropbox competitor, Sync. The tool has an enthusiastic following and just like Bleep, Sync allows people to communicate across devices without a middle man.

“Communication that is distributed through this software is more difficult to recover. Anyone who wants to spy on it would have it to do in a very specific way”, Klinker said.

In closing, BitTorrent Inc’s CEO said that the ultimate goal of his company is to help improve the Internet by making it possible for people to use technology without fear.

It’s of interest, then, that the most-requested feature for future versions of uTorrent is the inclusion of privacy and encryption tools. To date every one of those requests has been ignored.

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

According to stats released by comScore, Google sites led the search market in August with 63.8 percent of search queries conducted.

Google’s dominance is hardly a surprise. In recent years ‘Google’ has become a verb and many of the world’s Internet users have the site as their browsing homepage. However, there are other options, such as Microsoft’s Bing which took second place in comScore’s rankings with 20.6 percent of searches.

As market leaders both companies currently publish transparency reports and this week Microsoft issued an upgraded edition which includes the number of copyright takedown requests it received during the first half of 2015.

“Links to webpages containing material that infringe the rights of copyright owners may be removed from our search results provided we receive a legally sufficient notice of infringement from an owner or an authorized agent acting on that owner’s behalf. The following numbers relate to requests to remove links to webpages from our Bing search engine results,” the company announced.

As seen in the image above, Microsoft received more than a million requests in the first six months of 2015 which in total demanded the takedown of 24.5 million URLs.

The tech giant rejected more than two million URLs for reasons unknown but it’s likely that a large proportion were duplicate entries. Microsoft also says that it tries to consider when potentially infringing content is allowed under the law.

“We are committed to freedom of expression and the rights of users to engage in uses that may be permissible under applicable copyright laws,” the company said.

But what is perhaps most interesting about Microsoft’s data is how it can be compared to Google’s.

To give an idea of scale, Bing indexes largely the same content as Google. However, while Bing receives an average of four million URL takedown requests per month, Google receives more than double – sometimes treble – that number every single week.

In fact, Google received 51,472,940 URL requests last month alone, a number that Bing will take around 12 months to match. So, unless Microsoft is making it difficult for copyright holders to complain (and there’s no indication that it is), the suggestion here is that copyright holders consider Bing a disproportionately lower piracy threat than its visitor numbers might indicate.

That’s also interesting when it comes to how Bing’s search features operate. While Google has been censoring its auto-suggest and auto-complete features for some time, Bing appears to be much less constrained. Entering the text ‘thep’ happily completes to ThePirateBay.se and conveniently advises users that they’re accessing the official site.

While it’s unlikely that the company is attempting to be ‘pirate friendly’ with its auto-suggest, Microsoft has been under much less pressure than rival Google at the hands of Hollywood and the record labels. As a result it appears to be slipping somewhat (but not entirely) under the radar.

It’s also worth noting that Bing sometimes returns less results per site than Google. For example, Google reports 1,760,000 results for kat.cr while Bing offers just 1,220,000. On the other hand, Google reports 756,000 results for ExtraTorrent while Bing returns a bewildering 6,320,000.

Whether users searching for free content will begin to use Bing more often remains to be seen but one thing is for sure, browsing habits are very hard to break. On auto-pilot today this writer entered ‘bing’ into the Google search box several times when ‘bing.com’ directly would have sufficed. That’s never an issue with Google, ever.

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