All popular torrent sites heavily rely on uploaders. These people have a crucial spot in the ecosystem and without them torrent sites would have no content to share.

In recent weeks several prominent music uploaders appeared to have become the target of a legal campaign launched by the UK branch of Warner Music. In an email signed by the record label they were threatened to comply with the company’s demands, or face legal action instead.

TF has received a full copy of the message which was sent to email addresses associated with the uploaders’ torrent site accounts. In it, Warner Music urges them to delete all their torrents and terminate their accounts.

The email in question targets prolific uploaders at ExtraTorrent and KickassTorrents, among other sites. It claims to be sent from an official Warner Music email address, but this is not the case.

Warner music’s threat

First of all, the email contains several spelling and grammar mistakes and is clearly not sent by a native English speaker. In addition, it claims that ISPs reported the uploader, while it’s generally known that Internet providers don’t track file-sharers or reveal customer details without a court order.

The biggest tell, however, is revealed when looking at the full email headers. These show that the Warner Music email is spoofed. In reality, it was sent by amonymousemail.me, as shown below.

Anonymousemail…

Despite these tells, the email was spooky enough for several uploaders to throw in the towel. One uploader now lists on his profile that he’s “retired” and others have stopped releasing new content as well.

“Some of them vanished and stopped uploading,” ExtraTorrent’s Sam confirms to TF, adding that other uploaders continued their work after they spotted that the email was fake.

TF spoke to several uploaders and other people in the know and no one has a clue as to what motivated the sender.

What’s perhaps most worrying, is how this person got his hands on the uploader’s email addresses. Some hint at a security breach, but social engineering is a viable option as well.

Just a few weeks ago KickassTorrents warned its users against phishing attempts, in which malicious parties attempt to obtain the personal details of users.

Today the KAT team informs TF that they have high security standards and that none of the staff members has any idea how this may have happened.

“We are quite shocked as we have a tight community and only trustworthy people with whom we maintain close communication have the access to the user email info,” they say.

For now it remains unknown what happened in this case, but for uploaders the whole ordeal is a reminder that privacy is often hard to find. For their part, copyright holders may be pleasantly surprised to see how easy it is to stop some people from sharing pirated material.

A full copy of the Warner Music email is published below.

—

Dear User,

Warner Music has recieved a mail from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) that you are been evolved in sharing copyright materials on torrents sites. And we are going to take some strict actions against you for sharing our (c) copyright material. If you are ready for settlement then delete all our (c) copyright materials and delete your account from all torrent sites.

If you have any question regarding this notice, you can send a letter or email to:

Warner Music UK Limited
Legal Department
The Warner Building
Warner Music UK Limited, The Warner Building
27 Wrights Lane
London
W8 5SW

Sincerely,

Warner Music UK Limited

Ignoring the email would result in legal actions.

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

Early September the Oslo District Court followed in the footsteps of other courts around Europe by ordering local ISPs to block several pirate sites.

The action came after Hollywood studios including Warner, Paramount, Fox, Universal, Sony, Disney and Columbia successfully argued that The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent, Viooz, PrimeWire, Swefilmer, DreamFilm and Movie4K should be off-limits to Norwegian consumers.

While ISPs are yet to fully implement the international headline-grabbing blockade, it appears that the message that these sites are effectively banned hasn’t reached some prominent advertisers.

For example, in what is likely to be an embarrassment to local authorities, during the past few days adverts for NSB, the Norwegian government-owned national railway system, have been appearing on prominent unauthorized streaming portal PrimeWire.

Furthermore, ads for Norway’s leading tourist attraction, the Kristiansand Zoo and Amusement Park, have also being appearing on the popular and soon-to-be-blocked site.

Interestingly enough they feature a character known as Captain Sabertooth. The star of the most expensive children’s movie in Norwegian history, Sabertooth is also the country’s most famous pirate and the centerpiece of kids’ TV series, stage plays and books.

Speaking with NRK, the outlet that spotted the bloopers, Rights Alliance chief Willy Johansen says that legitimate companies are inadvertently helping to fund pirate sites.

“Illegal websites earn big money from advertising. This is not good at all,” the anti-piracy chief says.

“The media agencies around Europe are spreading ads to hit a certain number of people, without looking at where they’re placing them. In this respect media agencies need to sharpen their approach.”

The revelations are also proving a disappointment to the companies whose ads appeared on PrimeWire.

Annie B. Schjøtt, Sales and Marketing Manager at Kristiansand Zoo and Amusement Park, says it was never their intention to place ads on pirate sites.

“We totally renounce such [pirate] sites. We are a cultural operation ourselves, and we absolutely did not want to be involved in supporting people who copy other people’s work,” Schjøtt says.

A communications manager at government-owned railway company NSB described the situation as “regrettable.”

While no one is suggesting that the companies deliberately targeted pirate sites, somehow their advertising spend is being funneled to sites that have been deemed to operate illegally. So how did they get there? Apparently that’s the indirect responsibility of Carat, the media agency which handled the ads.

Digital Strategy Director Erik Solberg says that the ads were placed through an intermediary but the company is working hard to ensure there are no more embarrassments.

“We can only deplore this. We have closed all the activity of the subcontractor in the network,” Solberg explains. “We are working diligently to make sure this does not happen again. The supplier is a major international advertising network.”

The timing of these revelations could prompt a more urgent approach to tackling the pirate site advertising issue in Norway. Just yesterday in neighboring Sweden, Rights Alliance and national advertising association Swedish Advertisers announced new guidelines to help companies keep their ads off illicit sites.

“It appears that advertisers’ logos, trademarks and advertisements – often without the advertiser’s knowledge – are ending up on illegal sites,” said Swedish Advertisers legal advisor Tobias Eltell.

“It may be a question of sites that provide video, images, text and music without the rights holders’ consent. For serious advertisers, this may become a huge problem and therefore Swedish Advertisers have developed recommendations that may be helpful for advertisers.”

The guidelines (Swedish) include observing good ethics, boycotting advertising contracts that include bulk sales, and insisting that ads are not only targeted at a specific audience at a certain price, but also determining where those ads are ultimately placed.

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

This Saturday, Floyd Mayweather will conclude his professional fighting career with a match against Andre Berto.

Thus far interest in the fight is meager, especially compared to the fight against Manny Pacquiao earlier this year. However, this doesn’t mean that rightsholders aren’t interested in clamping down on pirates who intend to broadcast it illegally.

Through a complaint submitted at a Federal court in California (pdf), Showtime and Mayweather Productions hope to stop a site which is promising to provide users with access to the upcoming event.

The website operates from the mayweathervsandrebertolivestream.com domain name and heavily advertises a live stream, but according to Showtime it doesn’t hold the required license.

Instead of earning back millions of dollars in investment, the suing parties fear that the website owner will now profit from showing unauthorized live streams over the Internet.

“The Defendants are seeking to benefit from this high profile live Fight by infringing the rights of Plaintiffs,” they write.

“Plaintiffs are informed and believe and on that basis allege that Defendants know or have reason to know that one or more third parties will obtain the infringing stream from their websites and will redistribute it through other websites,” they add.

These anticipated pirated streams will cause “severe and irreparable harm,” Showtime and Mayweather Promotions note, while asking the court for damages and a restraining order to prevent this from happening.

Among other things, the suing parties want to take control of the domain name so it can’t be used for any infringing activity.

It appears that the lawsuit has already had the desired effect. The court has yet to rule on the request for a restraining order, but the website in question is already offline.

Of course, there’s little that stop the operator from starting a similar site under a new domain name.

This is not the first time that Showtime has gone after alleged pirates before they get a chance to commit an offense. Earlier this year the company teamed up with HBO to protect pre-pirated Mayweather vs. Pacquiao streams. Despite these efforts, there were plenty of unauthorized streams available when the fight started.

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

In March 2014, TorrentFreak interviewed an Argentinian designer known only as Sebastian. He had coordinated a project which would to some degree change the piracy landscape with a new piece of software called Popcorn Time.

“As a designer I love the challenge of simplification. Take something hard for the common user and make it usable. I have a lot of friends who don’t understand torrents and I wanted to make it easy and effortless to use torrent technology,” Sebastian told us.

Almost 18 months later Sebastian has now officially broken cover. His real identity has been known for some time, including here at TorrentFreak, but now the 29-year-old designer appears comfortable with identifying himself publicly and revealing his motivations.

Motivation

“Here in Argentina internet speeds are very slow. And movies are coming too late to the cinemas, up to half a year after the US premiere,” he told DN.no (Norwegian, subscription).

“If you hang out with a girl you can’t say ‘hey let’s see a movie’. You have to agree which movie you should watch the day before and start downloading it a day in advance. I thought there must be a better solution.”

Abad and friends set to work on giving piracy a facelift to make it acceptable to the masses – and his mother.

“It was just too geeky. My mom couldn’t use it. She couldn’t just click and watch the movie she wanted. When i’m designing something, she’s my case study. If she can’t use it, no one can use it. The whole idea was that you should be able to watch a movie by clicking just twice,” Abad explains.

Soon Popcorn Time began to gain traction and interest from fellow developers who wanted in on the action. That went well for a while but then the heat in the kitchen became too great.

Too big, too soon

“The project gathered so much attention that the developers completely freaked out. They said ‘this has become too big for us.’ The entire core team dropped out and I was left alone,” Abad reveals.

Not backing down, Abad managed to rebuild a team made up of contributors around the globe. Soon there were around one hundred people helping with Popcorn Time around the clock.

“We sat up all night and coded. I got scolded by their bosses, who thought that I had stolen their employees. They had concentration problems at work because of the project,” Abad recalls.

Abad also paid the price in his personal life. After devoting too much time to the project his girlfriend left. He made little attempt to stop her, instead spending time with the one he loved – Popcorn Time.

Importantly, money was never the motivation for the project. Abad says that it was “for the lulz” but there were others who recognized its potential.

Criminals wanted a slice of the action

“There were many criminal business offers. They said that we could earn up to $10,000 a week. They offered to give us five dollars every time someone installed spyware and malware that changed ads in a way that channeled the proceeds to them,” Abad reveals.

Others wanted to steal information about Popcorn Time users, including their passwords, and Abad estimates that had they gone along with the offers they could have made $100m.

“We rejected all the offers. We weren’t doing this for the money. We just wanted to provide a good service, not something that ruined people’s machines,” he said.

The end

Nevertheless, Popcorn Time had become much bigger than anyone expected and most of the team were nervous about what might happen if copyright holders became aggressive. But even after using false names and anonymization tools, it soon became clear that they were being watched.

All at the same time, developers on the Popcorn Time team noticed that their personal LinkedIn pages had all received an unwelcome visitor – a lawyer from film studio Warner Bros.

“We do not know how, but he had managed to track us down. We were quite put out. We thought it was a scare tactic. And we were frightened. None of us were anonymous anymore. They knew where we worked and where we lived,” Abad recalls.

Deciding that getting into legal trouble was a step too far, Abad and his colleagues abandoned Popcorn Time on March 14, 2014 and left it to the community to develop it further, should they wish. And develop it they did.

There are now several different forks of the popular software but Abad say he can support only one – the version at PopcornTime.io.

“That’s because the source code is public, I know it does not contain malware and that it works the way it was when we left the project,” Abad says.

Ultimately the Argentinian has no regrets, although his father reminds him he could have been a millionaire.

“No dad,” Abad told him.

“I could have been in prison. I’d rather be with you.”

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

Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress blogging platform, receives thousands of takedown requests from rightsholders.

Unlike many other Internet services the company carefully reviews each notice to see if they’re legitimate. This isn’t unnecessary, as nearly half of all requests are rejected.

This is also the case with a trademark violation Subaru reported earlier this year. The car company spotted a blog by WordPress.com users Sam and Jenna, which repeatedly uses the Subaru trademark.

Subaru informed WordPress that it doesn’t condone this kind of “infringement,” citing a violation of the Lanham Act.

“This use is clearly designed to cause confusion, deception, and mistake on the part of individuals visiting the site,” Subaru of America writes.

“This use of ‘Subaru’ name and marks in connection with this website violates [Subaru’s] rights and constitutes trademark infringement and unfair competition under the Lanham Act.”

In addition, the car manufacturer notes that the mention of Subaru in the domain name violates the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, adding that the domain registrant wasn’t helpful in resolving the issue.

“[Subaru] aggressively protects its trademarks and other intangible assets. To this end, we have informed the registrant of our complaint and have received no cooperation from them.”

The takedown request

It’s clear that the company is serious about protecting its trademark, but apparently not serious enough to carefully review its own request. As WordPress points out, the blog in question is far from a blatant infringement.

Quite the opposite, Sam and Jenna’s blog is a part of the application for the Subaru/Leave No Trace traveling trainer program. In the application Subaru said it’s specifically looking for people who can generate social media content via blogs, photos and videos, which is what the site does.

However, instead of being offered the position Sam and Jenna received a legal threat. In its takedown request Subaru said it was considering “appropriate legal action” against the blog owners while asking WordPress to take the site down.

WordPress refused and simply forwarded the request to the bloggers, explaining that it wouldn’t take any action.

“We passed along the notice to Sam and Jenna with the understanding that we would not be taking any action against their blog as their content does not constitute trademark infringement,” WordPress notes.

Perhaps overwhelmed by the threatening language, Sam and Jenna decided to remove most instances of “Subaru,” the brand which they looked forward to promote initially, from their blog. WordPress, meanwhile, awarded Subaru with a spot in its takedown “Hall of Shame.”

So, instead of a Subaru promo page showing up in the top search results, the company will now be associated with a “Hall of Shame” entry. Not exactly the best example of trademark protection.

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