Every week movies appear online after being illegally recorded in cinemas using camcorders. Hollywood has blamed the phenomenon for eating into box office revenues and has spent years trying to stamp it out.

Pirates, on the other hand, download the illicit copies in their millions, despite them being of generally poor quality. Today, however, there is one less source for these so-called ‘cams’.

According to the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), a UK-based man in his thirties was arrested before weekend on suspicion of recording Hollywood movies in cinemas and then uploading the copies to the Internet.

The 33-year-old, from Nottingham in the East Midlands, was tracked down following a joint investigation carried out by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and the Government Agency Intelligence Network (GAIN).

FACT reports that it supported officers from both the East Midlands GAIN Disruption Team and EMOpSS during the execution of search warrants in the Hinkley area last Friday. Items including laptops were taken away for examination.

A man was arrested on suspicion of recording American Ultra and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials on the days they were released and then uploading that footage to the Internet. He was questioned and later bailed pending further inquiries.

“Over 90% of counterfeit versions of movies originate initially from a copy recorded in a cinema. Piracy not only costs the film industry millions of pounds but can also affect thousands of jobs, so it is crucial we act upon intelligence we receive about this activity,” says Kieron Sharp, Director General of the Federation Against Copyright Theft.

“With two big releases due to hit the screens in the next few months it is incredibly important we work to combat those behind illegal film recordings. We thank the East Midlands GAIN Disruption team for their support in this investigation.”

Earlier this year a leaked report shone light on FACT’s anti-camming activities in the UK. One of the slides references offenses taking in place in Leicester although its unclear whether they relate to Friday’s arrest.

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

Over the past several years hundreds of thousands of Internet subscribers have been sued in the United States for allegedly sharing copyrighted material, mostly video.

The cases are generally targeted at “BitTorrent” users in general, not focusing on any file-sharing client in particular.

Starting last month this changed, with two cases singling out groups of Popcorn Time users. The first case was filed by the filmmakers behind “The Cobbler,” quickly followed by Pierce Brosnan’s “Survivor.”

Today, the Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club enters the fray with a new suit filed at an Oregon federal court, accusing ten Comcast subscribers of using Popcorn Time to pirate their movie.

Through the lawsuit the filmmakers hope to reveal the identity of the alleged pirates so they can settle the case for a few thousands dollars, usually outside of court.

The anonymous Popcorn Time users

“Popcorn Time exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to steal copyrighted content,” the filmmakers write in their complaint (pdf), alleging that the defendants are fully aware of their wrongdoing.

Taking it up a notch, the complaint suggests that merely having the application installed could already be a crime under Oregon law.

“The mere possession with intent to use a software program like Popcorn Time is the type of conduct that the State of Oregon has criminalized,” they write, claiming that the software can be characterized as a burglary tool.

Illegal possession?

Interestingly, the filmmakers also note that many of the defendants have received warnings from Rightscorp, the anti-piracy company which launched a “Popcorn Time protection” service earlier this month.

Despite the illegality claims, the developers of the targeted fork of Popcorn Time maintain that their software doesn’t break any laws but admit that their users are at risk.

“Popcorn Time isn’t illegal. However, the use people make of the application can be illegal, depending on their country and local laws,” they previously informed TF.

“You’d think with all our warnings, the anti-piracy laws, the explanations given in the media and the common sense, users would be aware of their actions by now. Pinning a ‘Popcorn Time’ label over such a lawsuit seems a little inflated,” they added.

The Popcorn Time team has a point. In this lawsuit Popcorn Time could be replaced with any other file-sharing application that uses BitTorrent to pirate films, they all allow users to share from the same sources.

That said, Popcorn Time’s focus on pirated video does make it rather easy to do so, and significantly different from more neutral file-sharing applications that do not actively organize and select content.

In general, the Dallas Buyers Club complaint itself follows the same format as the previous Popcorn Time lawsuits and given the recent attention we can expect more of these to follow in the near future.

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

December last year The Pirate Bay went dark after police raided the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof datacenter built into a mountain complex.

Around the same time one of Pirate Bay’s moderators was arrested, fueling the idea that the site had been seriously compromised.

The events resulted in the longest ever period of downtime for the site, nearly two months, and led to a revolt among the site’s moderators.

While it was generally believed that Pirate Bay needed time to recover the site from various backups, TorrentFreak can now reveal that this was not the case. In fact, Pirate Bay’s servers were never raided by the police.

The police did raid the Nacka datacenter but instead of Pirate Bay’s servers they raided those of EZTV. Sladinki007 of the former EZTV team confirmed that their hardware was indeed taken, but the Pirate Bay team says they were barely hit.

Only one Pirate Bay related server was confiscated last December, which was hosted at a different location. This (crew.thepiratebay.org) was operated by the moderators and used as a communication channel for TPB matters.

The Pirate Bay team believes that it may not have been the prime target of last year’s raid, and if they were, then the police followed the wrong lead. Pirate Bay’s servers were and are hosted in the cloud, outside of Sweden.

But if TPB wasn’t raided, why did it have to go offline?

According to the TPB team they decided to pull everything offline as a precaution. It was unclear how much information was held on the crew server and if there was a breach of trust after one of the moderators was arrested.

The TPB team feared that the locations of the servers could have been compromised as well and prepared to move everything over to new cloud hosting providers.

Relocating the site proved to be harder than initially anticipated though. In fact, technical challenges were one of the main reasons for the long downtime. All the data was there, it just had to be setup correctly. So, at the same time the team decided to revise the backend code to better handle the new cloud environment.

The lack of data loss already became apparent when the site returned online in February, as all recent torrents and comments were still there.

TF also asked about the cryptic messages TPB communicated during the downtime, and we were informed that they were put there “for fun.” The messages were not a way to communicate with people, but simply a link to a Arnold Schwarzenegger “i’ll be back” montage video on YouTube.

In addition to The Pirate Bay, several related sites including Bayimg, Bayfiles and Pastebay also went dark. These sites are still offline today and we are informed that this is an issue of ‘resources’ and ‘priorities,’ not because any data is missing.

So why reveal all this now?

The TPB team says it waited this long to make sure that they were not compromised in any way. This was also the main reason why the site’s moderators were left in the dark for such a long time and why the Suprbay forums remained offline.

Since more than nine months have now passed, it’s finally time to reveal what really happened. Police may still believe that they have the encrypted Pirate Bay servers, but according to the people behind the site they have nothing substantial.

Given today’s revelations it’s unlikely that the raid will help police to mount a new case against The Pirate Bay, as they were planning. Time will tell whether the authorities will try to hit the site again.

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

Three-and-a-half years ago dozens of armed officers and a police helicopter descended on Kim Dotcom’s mansion in New Zealand, arresting him and colleagues Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk.

The raid was carried out by local authorities at the behest of the United States government, who claim that Dotcom and his co-accused masterminded Megaupload, the defunct file-hosting site now at the center of a massive copyright infringement and money laundering case.

Ever since, Dotcom and his former colleagues have been fighting extradition to the United States. To date their extradition hearing has been delayed ten times but this morning it finally got underway.

Dotcom arrived at court dressed head to foot in his trademark black attire. According to local news reports he was allowed to bring his own padded leather chair following a request to alleviate back pain during what will be a lengthy hearing.

Dotcom is hoping the hearing is rather shorter, however. After expressing “cautious optimism” last Friday, the hearing got underway this morning before Auckland District Court Judge Nevin Dawson.

Judge Dawson heard submissions on what evidence is admissible in court and the order in which it should be heard. As expected the hearing almost immediately became bogged down in complex legal argument.

An issue that has raised its head repeatedly is that due to the United States seizing all of Dotcom’s and his co-defendants’ funds, the four have not had access to adequate tools to mount a proper defense.

“Court orders made by New Zealand courts and Hong Kong courts have been frustrated by a deliberate tactical decision by the US to stop us accessing expertise that we need,” said Ortmann’s barrister Grant Illingworth.

Also at issue is the amount of time Dotcom’s new legal team has had to prepare. His new counsel has only been in place for a matter of months after his old representation inexplicably dropped out.

Aiming for a day one victory, the defense argued for a suspension so that various submissions can be heard before the extradition hearing begins. But U.S. authorities countered by insisting those applications should be part of the hearing or, failing that, included at trial in the United States.

“The issue at this stage isn’t whether they will have a fair trial when they are extradited, but whether they will have a fair extradition hearing,” Ortmann’s barrister said.

Only fittingly for what has been dubbed the largest copyright infringement case of all time, this morning Dotcom’s lawyer Ron Mansfield pointed out that under New Zealand copyright law, no criminal copyright offenses had been committed by Dotcom. As a service provider, Megaupload would have received ‘safe harbor’ protections.

However, Judge Dawson appeared to dismiss the claim, noting that the extradition application was being brought on the basis that the defendants had breached laws in the United States, not those in New Zealand.

While that is the case, a witness report submitted last week by copyright expert Professor Lawrence Lessig found that the defendants had committed no crimes under U.S. law either. The merits of that report will be considered later in the hearing.

Taking to Twitter before today’s session, Dotcom said much was at stake.

“This case is not just about me. This case is about how much control we allow US corporations and the US government to have over the Internet,” he wrote.

“The judges on this case can become the champions for billions of Internet users or a handful of US content billionaires.”

Judge Dawson reserved his decision on the order of proceedings but what he won’t have to decide is whether or not Dotcom and his co-defendants are guilty. His ruling will only consider whether the quartet should be sent to the United States to face trial.

If Judge Dawson doesn’t grant an immediate suspension as requested by the defense, the hearing will continue this Thursday and is expected to run for four weeks.

But even when his ultimate decision is made public, that almost certainly won’t mark the end of the case. Appeal options are available to both sides and could see the case head off to both the High and Supreme Courts. That could take another two years.

None of this comes cheap. According to an investigation carried out by NZHerald, thus far local taxpayers have already footed the bill for 29,344 hours of legal work spent on the Megaupload case, work that cost a cool NZ$5.8 million. Two-thirds of that amount has been spent on the extradition case.

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Avengers: Age of Ultron 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)	Avengers: Age of Ultron	7.8 / trailer
2	(2)	Minions (HDRip)	6.7 / trailer
3	(5)	Mad Max: Fury Road	8.4 / trailer
4	(…)	Vacation (Subbed HDRip)	6.3 / trailer
5	(…)	Pay The Ghost (HDRip)	5.5 / trailer
6	(3)	Entourage	7.0 / trailer
7	(4)	Fantastic Four (Subbed HDrip)	4.0 / trailer
8	(7)	Straight Outta Compton (Subbed HDRip)	8.3 / trailer
9	(6)	Self/less	6.5 / trailer
10	(…)	Tomorrowland (HDRip)	6.6 / trailer

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