With millions of visitors per day KickassTorrents (KAT) is arguably the most visited torrent site on the Internet, outranking even the notorious Pirate Bay.

After several domain hops KAT has been operating from the KAT.cr domain name. However, infrequent visitors have experienced trouble locating the site, as it disappeared from Google’s top search results.

Instead, entering the search terms “KickassTorrents” or “Kickass Torrents” lists several unofficial sites on top. While some of these sites are harmless proxies, others are outright scams.

This week the KAT team warned its users to avoid visiting non-official sites as they are exploiting the Kickass brand for malicious purposes.

“We wanted to share our concerns with you,” KAT’s staff says, noting that the site has a great community which has become very popular over time.

“But here is the dark side of this popularity. While we are doing our best in order to keep our site nice and cozy there are bunch of lazy bastards who have simply decided to copycat us.”

The scam sites are trying to confuse unsuspected users by “stealing” the site’s design in order to scam people. According to the KAT team this includes password stealing and selling expensive subscriptions.

“Some of them are selling ridiculously expensive VPNs on our behalf, some are throwing malicious ads, some are trying to sell various subscriptions, others simply gathering user passwords and so on. All of them are trying to cheat people in various ways,” they note.

KAT doesn’t mention any sites in particular but the kickasstorrents.eu domain must be one of them. This site has risen to the top of Google’s search results and prompts people to download shady software or buy a VPN subscription.

The site’s operators say they are working on a solution to ban the impersonators and copycats, for example, by preventing malicious proxy sites from mirroring KAT’s contents.

For now, however, they advise users to remain vigilant and make sure to use the official Kat.cr address or one of the official proxies. Finally – and quite amusingly – users are also encouraged to report scammy sites to their hosting providers.

“You can even report those questionable sites to their hosting service providers,” the KAT team says.

This is not the first time that proxy sites and copycats have caused trouble. In recent years various anti-piracy measures have made it harder to access the original sites, creating opportunities for malicious actors and scamvertisers.

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

This week the United States government continued its three-year-long effort to have Kim Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk extradited to face multiple charges including copyright infringement, conspiracy, money laundering and racketeering.

For the past several days the main extradition hearing has been hold to allow Judge Nevin Dawson to hear applications from the men detailing why the full hearing should be delayed or even stayed indefinitely.

For someone who has often been associated with great wealth, it’s ironic that much of the argument this week has centered around Dotcom’s poor financial situation.

Dotcom took the stand for the first time yesterday, explaining how in 2013 he’d sold his shares in Megaupload follow-up Mega for around $13m in order to fund his defense and then-fledgling Internet Party. After various grabs by Hollywood on his funds and other living expenses, little now remains.

However, simple lack of funds is not the only obstacle faced by Dotcom. Thanks to an ongoing U.S.-ordered freeze on the Megaupload defendants’ funds, any money freed to retain experts in the U.S. would be immediately seized. This means that appropriate experts cannot be hired and as a result the men are being denied a fair extradition hearing.

According to Dotcom’s lead lawyer, U.S.-based Ira Rothken, around $500,000 is needed to recruit U.S. experts in mass data storage and related technologies. However, even if that money was released it would take up to six months to prepare the experts to give evidence. Additional funds and time are needed, he argued.

But this morning in the North Shore District Court, Crown prosecutor Christine Gordon QC said that the Megaupload defendants actually need neither. Arguing on behalf of the United States, Gordon said that no amount of time and technical expertise could undo the incriminating Skype and email correspondence presented earlier in the hearing.

One such discussion, between Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, had the latter claiming that Megaupload’s growth was “mainly based on infringement anyway.”

The former operators of Megaupload believe that engaging a cloud storage expert would help their case but Gordon said that after paying known copyright infringers to upload illegal content, any testimony would be useless.

“No evidence about what other storage sites do destroys the evidence of what these individuals did and what they acknowledged to each other,” she said.

“[A stay is] only justified in the clearest of cases, and this is not such a case.”

The hearing is set to continue next week. If a stay is not granted and Dotcom and colleagues are extradited and subsequently found guilty in the U.S., they face the possibility of decades in prison.

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

In little more than a year Popcorn Time has amassed millions of users by offering BitTorrent-powered streaming in an easy-to-use Netflix-style interface.

The term Popcorn Time itself has also become a widely recognizable “brand,” something that hasn’t gone unnoticed in the movie industry.

Various copyright holders and anti-piracy groups have targeted Popcorn Time, with varying success. However, a new effort from film distributor Dutch Filmworks tops them all.

This June, Dutch Filmworks applied for Popcorn Time’s logo and word trademarks at the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property, which officially approved the registration last month.

This means that the film distributor now owns the trademark to the term “Popcorn Time” in various categories including software, as well as the official logo pictured below.

An interesting move in a number of ways, not least since the logo wasn’t created by the company but by Popcorn Time’s developers. Also, the trademark application itself was submitted long after the application became known to the public.

The logo trademark

The developers of the popular PopcornTime.io fork inform TorrentFreak that they are aware of the issue but choose not to do anything about it at the moment. In addition, they also highlight that Dutch Filmworks claim on the trademarks is rather dubious.

“What we find interesting is that they registered a trademark on something that’d already been around online for over a year and clearly wasn’t owned by them, and the fact that they happened to submit our logo and trademark it, even though they do not own copyright on it.”

Nevertheless, the developers don’t see the trademarks as an immediate threat to their software.

“For the most part, we are not worried. We are curious about what they think they’re doing though,” the Popcorn Time team notes.

A spokesperson for Dutch Filmworks informs TorrentFreak that they have no plans to actively enforce the trademarks – yet.

“We registered the Popcorn Time trademarks for the Benelux. Mainly because, to our surprise, it hadn’t been done by Popcorn Time itself,” Dutch Filmworks’ spokesperson says.

“At this time we don’t plan to actively enforce the trademark. However, looking ahead to anticipated steps the Dutch government may take against streaming piracy, it seemed sensible to deprive them of the trademark rights in our market already.”

Needless to say, this is quite an innovative approach. Time will tell whether the trademarks will indeed help to stop the distribution of Popcorn Time in the future.

There’s also a separate Popcorn Time trademark application at U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. This was requested last year by the developers of the aforementioned fork and is still pending.

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

California-based anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp is known for its pursuit of Internet pirates in the United States.

The company tracks infringements on BitTorrent networks and sends DMCA-style notices to ISPs in the hope they forward them to their customers. These notices have a sting in the tail in the form of a settlement demand, currently set at $30.

This year Rightscorp also began getting involved in litigation, with clients using the company’s monitoring and data gathering capabilities as the basis for John Doe lawsuits. In turn, these will almost certainly result in yet more (but substantially larger) cash settlements.

Rightscorp claims to have a sophisticated system which allows the anti-piracy outfit to profile Internet users and log them as repeat infringers. In fact, Rightscorp has even gone as far as patenting its system (1,2,3) in the United States.

It now transpires that the company has recently obtained a new patent (2012236069) from the Australian Patent Office, again titled ‘System to Identify Multiple Copyright Infringements’.

In a statement referencing comments by Attorney-General George Brandis that Australia is the “worst nation for piracy on the planet”, Rightscorp confirmed that the patent is the first registered to the company in Australia.

“There is a tremendous need in Australia for content protection. Our proven technology is effective, making it an ideal solution for artists and copyright holders in every region,” said CEO Christopher Sabec.

“Australia has been plagued by infringement over the years and is now taking key initiatives to curb piracy. We believe our technology will be an invaluable asset to the Australian entertainment industry.”

While Rightscorp has thus far refrained from announcing a full-on expansion into territories other than the U.S., the company did make a brief Canadian debut in January. That foray was marked by erroneous claims from the company that Canadians could be “liable for up to $150,000 per infringement in civil penalties.”

The claim immediately attracted the negative attention of the Canadian government with a statement that Rightscorp notices were “misleading” and couldn’t be used to demand money from Canadians. Surprisingly, Rightscorp appear to have made a similar faux pas in Australia.

The company’s press release announcing the Australian patent loosely advises statutory penalties “up to $150,000 per infringement”. While this position correctly reflects the U.S. market it has the potential to cause confusion locally since Australia uses a different dollar and statutory damages for infringement do not exist.

Rightscorp clearly views its “repeat infringer” patents as valuable assets for the future but in the short term the system has the company entangled in a costly legal battle between music industry client BMG Rights Management and U.S. ISP Cox Communications.

Filed in 2014, the lawsuit centers around the claim that despite Rightscorp advising Cox that the ISP has hundreds of repeat infringers as customers, the ISP failed to disconnect them from the Internet. The battle continues and it’s starting to get ugly.

Overall, Rightscorp sees disconnection of repeat infringers as the ultimate threat and one that can boost rates of settlement on its $30 ‘fine’ system. The big question now is when or if the system will arrive on Aussie shores.

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

For the past seven or eight years alleged file-sharers in the United States have found themselves at the mercy of so-called copyright trolls and right at the very forefront are those from the adult movie industry.

By a country mile, adult video outfit Malibu Media (X-Art) is the most litigious after filing over 4,500 cases in less than 4 years, but news coming out of New York should give this notorious troll pause for thought.

Events began in June when Malibu filed suit in the Eastern District of New York against a so-called John Doe defendant known only by his Verizon IP address, 98.116.160.61. The porn outfit claimed that the individual was responsible for 18 counts of copyright infringement between February and May 2015.

Early August the defendant received a letter from Verizon informing him that a subpoena had been received which required the ISP to identify the individual using the IP address on May 23, 2015. This caused the defendant to fight back.

“Since Defendant’s IP addresses were assigned dynamically by the ISP, even if Defendant was identified as the subscriber assigned the IP address, 98.116.160.61, at 03:31:54 on May 23, 2015, it doesn’t mean that Defendant is the same subscriber who was assigned the IP address at the other seventeen occasions,” the defendant’s motion to quash reads.

“If Defendant’s identifying information is given to Plaintiff, Plaintiff, as part of
their business model, will seek settlements of thousands of dollars claiming Defendant’s responsibility for eighteen downloads of copyright protected works under the threat of litigation and public exposure with no serious intention of naming Defendant.”

Case specifics aside, the motion also contains broad allegations about Malibu Media’s entire business model, beginning with the manner in which it collects evidence on alleged infringers using BitTorrent networks.

Citing a University of Washington study which famously demonstrated a printer receiving a DMCA notice for copyright infringement, the motion concludes that the techniques employed by Malibu for tracking down infringers are simply not up to the job.

“The research concludes that the common approach for identifying infringing users in the poplar BitTorrent file sharing network is not conclusive,” the motion notes.

“Even if Plaintiff could definitively trace the BitTorrent activity in question to the IP-registrant, Malibu conspicuously fails to present any evidence that John Doe either uploaded, downloaded, or even possessed а complete copyrighted video file.”

While detection is rightfully put under the spotlight, the filing places greater emphasis on the apparent extortion-like practices demonstrated by copyright trolls such as Malibu Media.

Citing the earlier words of Judge Harold Baer, the motion notes that “troll” cases not only risk the public embarrassment of a misidentified defendant, but also create the likelihood that he or she will be “coerced into an unjust settlement with the plaintiff to prevent the dissemination of publicity surrounding unfounded allegations.”

The motion continues by describing Malibu as an aggressive litigant which deliberately tries to embarrass and shame defendants in the aim of receiving cash payments.

“[Malibu] seeks quick, out-of-court settlements which, because they are hidden, raise serious questions about misuse of court procedure. Judges regularly complain about Malibu,” the motion reads.

“Malibu’s strategy and its business models are to extort, harass, and embarrass
defendants to persuade defendants to pay settlements with plaintiffs instead of paying for legal assistance while attempting to keep their anonymity and defending against allegations which can greatly damage their reputations.”

Following receipt of the motion, yesterday Judge Steven I. Locke handed down his order and it represents a potentially serious setback for Malibu.

“Because the arguments advanced in the Doe Defendant’s Motion to Quash raise serious questions as to whether good cause exists in these actions to permit the expedited pre-answer discovery provided for in the Court’s September 4, 2015 Order, the relief and directives provided for in that Order are stayed pending resolution of the Doe Defendant’s Motion to Quash,” Judge Locke writes.

If putting the brakes on one discovery subpoena wasn’t enough, the Judge’s order lists 19 other cases that are now the subject of an indefinite stay. However, as highlighted by FightCopyrightTrolls, the actual exposure is much greater, with a total of 88 subpoenas in the Eastern District now placed on hold.

As a result, ISPs are now under strict orders not to hand over the real identities of their subscribers until the Court gives the instruction following a ruling by Judge Locke. In the meantime, Malibu has until October 27 to respond to the Verizon user’s motion.

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