Late last year leaked documents revealed that the MPAA helped Mississippi Attorney General (AG) Jim Hood to revive SOPA-like censorship efforts in the United States.

In a retaliatory move Google sued the Attorney General, hoping to find out more about the secret plan. The company also demanded copies of internal communications from the MPAA which are now revealing how far the anti-Google camp planned to go.

Emails between the MPAA and two of AG Hood’s top lawyers include a proposal that outlines how the parties could attack Google. In particular, they aim to smear Google through an advanced PR campaign involving high-profile news outlets such as The Today Show and The Wall Street Journal.

With help from Comcast and News Corp, they planned to hire a PR firm to “attack” Google and others who resisted the planned anti-piracy efforts. To hide links to the MPAA and the AG’s office, this firm should be hired through a seemingly unaffiliated nonprofit organization, the emails suggest.

“This PR firm can be funded through a nonprofit dedicated to IP issues. The ‘live buys’ should be available for the media to see, followed by a segment the next day on the Today Show (David green can help with this),” the plan reads (pdf).

The Today Show feature would be followed up by a statement from a large Google investor calling on the company to do more to tackle the piracy problem.

“After the Today Show segment, you want to have a large investor of Google (George can help us determine that) come forward and say that Google needs to change its behavior/demand reform.”

In addition, a planted piece in the Wall Street Journal should suggest that Google’s stock would lose value if the company doesn’t give in to the demands.

“Next, you want NewsCorp to develop and place an editorial in the WSJ emphasizing that Google’s stock will lose value in the face of a sustained attack by AGs and noting some of the possible causes of action we have developed,” the plan notes.

Previously, the MPAA accused Google of waging an “ongoing public relations war,” but the above shows that the Hollywood group is no different.

On top of the PR-campaign the plan also reveals details on how the parties would taint Google before the National Association of Attorneys General.

Through a series of live taped segments they would show how easy it is for minors to pirate R-rated movies, buy heroin and order an assault weapon with the help of Google’s search engine.

Finally, the plan includes a “final step” where Attorney General Hood would issue a civil investigatory demand to Google.

In its court filing (pdf) Google uses the information above to argue that the AG’s civil investigatory demand was not the basis of a legitimate investigation. Instead, it was another tool pressuring the company to implement more stringent anti-piracy measures.

Given this new information, Google hopes that the court will compel Fox, NBC and Viacom to hand over relevant internal documents, as they were “plainly privy” to the secretive campaign.

It’s now up to the judge to decide how to proceed, but based on the emails above, the MPAA and the AG’s office have some explaining to do.

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

This week we have two newcomers in our chart. Furious 7 came out as a DVDrip and made a comeback.

Insurgent 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)	Insurgent	6.6 / trailer
2	(back)	Furious 7	7.6 / trailer
3	(2)	Jurassic World (TS/Subbed HDrip)	7.7 / trailer
4	(…)	True Story	6.4 / trailer
5	(3)	Ted 2 (Subbed HDrip)	6.9 / trailer
6	(4)	Home	6.8 / trailer
7	(6)	The Longest Ride	7.1 / trailer
8	(…)	Terminator Genisys (TS)	7.0 / trailer
9	(7)	Mad Max: Fury Road (WEB-DL)	8.5 / trailer
10	(5)	Spy (Subbed HDrip)	7.5 / trailer

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

Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress blogging platform, has seen a steady increase in DMCA takedown notices in recent years.

Some of these are legitimate, aimed at disabling access to copyright-infringing material. However, there are also many overbroad and abusive takedown notices which take up a lot of the company’s time and resources.

To give the public insight into the effort it takes to process the requests WordPress regularly publishes a transparency report. In the report WordPress outlines the number of DMCA takedown notices, but also how many were rejected due to inaccuracies or abuse.

“We work hard to make our DMCA process as fair, transparent, and balanced as possible, so we stringently review all notices we receive to quickly process valid infringement claims and push back on those that we see as abusive,” WordPress explains.

The latest update covering the past half year shows that 4,679 piracy takedown requests were received during this period. What stands out is that content was removed in barely half of the cases reported.

In total, 43% of all notices were rejected, either because they were incomplete or due to abuse. February and April were particularly bad months, as more than half of all notices were rejected.

According to WordPress’ figures more than 10% of the notices were abusive, and the company highlights some examples in its “Hall of Shame.”

WordPress’ most recent takedown statistics

For the first time WordPress has also released information on the organizations that submit the most complaints. Web Sheriff is listed on top here, followed by Audiolock and InternetSecurities.

Commenting on the new data Stephen Blythe, Community Guardian at Automattic, informs TF that they have seen a significant bump in rejections over the past months. This increase has two main causes.

“The first is that we rejected a large number of abusive takedown notifications from Web Sheriff that related to a single site. The second is that we are constantly refining our processes to ensure that we catch and push back on as many of these misuses as possible,” Blythe says.

WordPress currently doesn’t publish the takedown notices in full, but the company plans to highlight more abuse cases on its website in the coming months.

“We see numerous instances of abuse of the DMCA takedown process, on a regular basis. We plan to publish these via our transparency blog in future,” Blythe notes.

While the number of takedown requests WordPress receives pales in comparison to larger Internet services, it’s good to see that the company carefully reviews all notices to prevent unwarranted censorship. It will be interesting to see how the volume of request changes over time and whether copyright holders will improve their accuracy.

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

Due to complex licensing agreements between content creators and distributors, movies and TV shows are often locked down to a specific region. A prime example is the U.S. edition of Netflix which offers a better selection than versions available elsewhere.

It’s a frustrating situation for consumers who are forced to jump through hoops to access the content they want to buy. The problem is amplified in Europe, where citizens of member states – sometimes located just a few miles apart – are regularly denied access to cross-border digital content.

This week, however, the European Commission sent a strong signal to the world’s largest movie studios and a powerful broadcaster that geo-restriction won’t be tolerated. Sky UK, Disney, NBC Universal, Paramount Pictures, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros. were all put on notice with the launch of an EU antitrust investigation into the practice.

When one considers the history it’s difficult to feel sympathy for these companies. Just as geo-locking, blocking and local release windows fuel piracy today, licensing and geo-restriction fueled massive movie and TV show piracy two decades ago.

Dr Markus Kuhn currently works as a senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. He made the headlines in 2010 when he was asked to analyze a controversial ‘bomb detector’ deployed in Iraq and concluded it could detect nothing. Twenty years ago, however, his skills were being deployed against content providers who simply refused to make their content widely available.

As a German citizen keen to view English language sci-fi content undubbed, Kuhn approached UK-based Sky TV in the early 1990s and offered to buy an official viewing smartcard from the company. Due to licensing conditions and their geo-blocking policy, Sky refused to sell him one. It was a move the company would later come to regret.

Faced with a completely inflexible market, Kuhn decided that if Sky wouldn’t provide its content for a price, then he would gain access to it for free. As a result the undergraduate began investigating the VideoCrypt encryption system used by Sky.

After what must’ve been hundreds of hours work, in March 1994 Kuhn debuted Season7, a piece of decryption software using a simple hardware interface that would enable viewers across Europe to watch Sky programming for free.

“This software was primarily written for European Star Trek fans outside Great Britain who don’t have a chance to get a regular Sky subscription and have no other way of watching the undubbed version of their favorite [sci-fi] series,” Kuhn said in a June 1994 announcement.

“I don’t want to cause any harm to Sky and I even asked them for a regular subscription some time ago, but they refused to sell one to Germany. So they have to live with the consequences of attracting the interest of high-tech freaks to the technical details of their access control system.”

Despite Kuhn’s best intentions, what followed was a Sky viewing free-for-all. With Kuhn’s software being spread between bulletin board systems and passed around on floppy discs, electronics enthusiasts across Europe began making and selling so-called “Season interfaces” for users to plug into their video decoders.

For those lucky enough to own a computer (a PC with a 12 MHz i286 processor was required to run a Season setup) what followed were some magical times. Satellite TV was a luxury item for most families so watching Kuhn’s software do its work (decoding was displayed live on-screen) was a hypnotic and exciting experience.

Sadly for Sky, however, Kuhn’s tools didn’t remain isolated in Germany where the company was doing zero business. Soon, large quantities of potential Sky customers in the UK and across Europe were also enjoying the service for free. That was exactly what Sky wanted to avoid but thanks to geo-blocking, that’s what it got.

Of course, like most hacks the fun eventually came to an end when Sky’s crypto experts threw a wrench in the works but the significance of Kuhn’s work lives on today. Rather than being driven by a ‘pirate’ ethos, Kuhn simply wanted to pay for a product that should have been freely available. When primitive licensing arrangements and restrictive business practices stopped him from doing so, Sky and its partners paid the price.

Today, more than two decades on, it seems that neither Sky nor its Hollywood allies have changed their ways. Still, it remains a possibility that the EU investigation launched this week will help them understand a thing or two about a free market while reminding them of Kuhn’s disruptive response to restriction 20 years ago.

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

Unauthorized movie streaming sites have been a thorn in the side of Hollywood for many years, and yesterday the MPAA decided to take one of the most prominent players to court.

MPAA members 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, Disney, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros filed a lawsuit against a group of MovieTube affiliated websites, which operate from more than two dozen domain names.

In the complaint, filed at a New York District Court a few hours ago, the movie studios describe MovieTube as a business that’s designed and operated to promote copyright infringement for profit.

The MPAA lists several popular websites including MovieTube.cc, TuneVideo.net, Watch33.tv, MovieTube.cz, Anime1.tv, MovieTube.pm, FunTube.co, MovieTube.la and KissDrama.net. These sites share hosting facilities and a similar design and the studios believe that they are operated by the same people.

The websites in question are typical streaming sites, where users can watch videos and in some cases download the source files to their computers.

“Defendants, through the MovieTube Websites, aggregate, organize and provide embedded links to extensive libraries of Infringing Copies of Plaintiffs’ Works,” the compliant (pdf) reads.

“…users can watch Infringing Copies without leaving the MovieTube Websites. The MovieTube Websites even allow users, in some instances, to download Infringing Copies by clicking on a selection from a menu built into the video player software supplied by Defendants.”

According to the MPAA, MovieTube’s operators are well aware of the infringing nature of their site. On one of their Facebook pages they write that it’s not a problem that many films are pirated, since they are not bound by U.S. laws.

The complaint accuses MovieTube of various counts of copyright and trademark infringement. This means that the site’s operators face millions of dollars in statutory damages.

Perhaps more importantly, the MPAA is also demanding a broad preliminary injunction to make it virtually impossible for the operators to keep their sites online.

Among other things, the proposed measures would prevent domain registrars, domain registries, hosting companies, advertisers and other third-party outfits from doing business with the site.

If granted, MovieTube’s operators will have a hard time keeping the sites afloat, but it appears that the injunction may not even be needed.

At the time of writing all MovieTube domain names are unreachable. It is unclear whether the operators took this decision themselves, but for now the future of these sites looks grim.

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The full list of sites mentioned in the complaint is as follows: MovieTube.tw, MovieTube.ph, TVStreaming.cc, MovieTube.sx, MovieTube.pw, MovieTubeNow.com, MovieTube.tf, MovieTube.co, MovieOnDrive.com, MovieTube.vc, TuneVideo.net, MovieTube.mn, MovieTube.cc, Watch33.tv, MovieTube.cz, Anime1.tv, MovieTube.pm, FunTube.co, MovieTube.la, KissDrama.net, MovieTube.so, MovieTube.click, MovieTubeHD.co, MovieTubeHD.net, MovieTubeHD.org, MovieTubeHD.tv, MovieTubeHD.us, MovieTubenow.in and TuneMovie.me.

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