Way back in 2013, Movie2K was not only one of the most-visited pirate sites, but also one of the most popular platforms on the entire Internet.

Offering all of the latest movies and TV shows in a convenient interface, during February that year Movie2K was the 240th most popular site in the world.

In Germany, where the site was particularly well-received, it was the 19th most popular site, period, pulling more traffic than Twitter, Amazon, Apple and PayPal. Understandably, the site attracted plenty of anti-piracy attention but suddenly, at the end of May 2013, the site shut down without warning.

In its wake appeared Movie4K, a site that bore more than a passing resemblance to its similarly-named predecessor, but it now appears that the authorities in Germany had not simply forgotten about Movie2K or bringing those behind it to justice.

According to the Attorney General’s Office in Dresden, two men aged 44 and 37 were arrested last Thursday in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Bavaria. The men are suspected former operators of Movie2K.

The men are reported to have distributed 880,000 copies of movies and TV shows between the fall of 2008 when Movie2K was founded and May 2013 when it closed down. They are also suspected of operating the streaming site Stream2K.com.

A spokesperson for the Prosecutor General’s Office told SWR that the man from Rhineland-Palatinate had been living there for some time and that extensive evidence had been seized including computer equipment, cell phones, cash and documents.

Investigators claim that the suspects generated “several million euros” from advertising and other methods via Movie2K, which stepped in to become one of the world’s largest illegal streaming portals after the demise of Kino.to. That site was shut down following one of the most significant anti-piracy operations in history.

The Attorney General’s Office further revealed that a third man was arrested in Berlin last week. He is described as a 37-year-old real estate entrepreneur who was detained under suspicion of money laundering offenses.

It’s claimed that the individual worked with the former operators of Movie2K in the fall of 2013, managing some of the revenues generated by the men by making financial investments and obtaining real estate in Saxony, Brandenburg and Berlin.

The numbers under discussion are significant, with the authorities claiming that the alleged money-launderer received more than 5.1 million euros from the other suspects through a Dutch mailbox company alone by mid-2016.

The home and business addresses of the defendants were searched with the support of officials of the Land Office of Criminal Investigation Berlin and the Criminal Investigation Police Bamberg.

As highlighted by Tarnkappe, the Prosecutor General’s Office was previously involved in the case brought against Kino.to. It’s suspected that there were links between that now-defunct site and the operators of Movie2K.

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Raids, shutdowns, legal action, settlements, and even technical issues have caused many sellers of ‘pirate’ IPTV to shut down in recent months.

The end to the problem for broadcasters, however, seems as far away as ever, with large numbers of providers and sellers managing to service the illicit market, despite serious setbacks.

Hoping to make a dent in the supply chain, police in Spain say they have carried out an operation to “dismantle” a service that sourced raw TV streams and distributed them, supplied VOD content, and then sold packages to clients.

The investigation began in 2017 when officers of the Central Cybercrime Unit became aware of a Facebook page where access to pirate TV was being offered.

Investigators determined that those behind the operation were capturing channels broadcast by the major TV outfits and uploading them to servers operated by different companies abroad. At the same time, they operated a sales and marketing division, to sell their product to the public.

In total, 12 people were identified as suspects, with four people said to have been in charge of capturing the broadcast signals and distributing them, managing access to content, attracting customers, and collecting the cash through various platforms.

The remaining eight were considered resellers of the services. These individuals obtained access to the main platform from the four operators at a reduced cost in order to market these subscriptions to their own customers in Spain and overseas.

The two-year investigation came to head last Friday when the 12 suspects were arrested when raids were carried out on addresses in Madrid, Toledo, Alicante, Murcia, Gran Canaria, Tenerife and other locations.

Seven websites and two social media profiles were shut down and 86 decoders, 15 hard drives, 10 computers, NAS drives, 17 mobile phones, a ‘high-end’ vehicle and more than 22,000 euros in cash were seized.

According to police, the as-yet-unnamed service generated an estimated 1,000,000 euros for its operators who are now charged with various offenses including intellectual property crimes, belonging to a criminal organization, and money laundering.

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UK entertainment giant Sky is widely known for taking a hard line on everything piracy related.

In recent years the company has chased vendors of pirate subscriptions and hardware, both in and outside of court.

These efforts are meant to signal to the public that piracy, streaming piracy in particular, will not be tolerated. However, this message has apparently not hit home with one of the company’s own stars, Karl Pilkington.

Pilkington is an actor, comedian, and presenter who is widely known for “An Idiot Abroad,” the Sky 1 travel series with a comedic twist. He also worked with Sky on the documentary “The Moaning of Life” and more recently he ventured into the sitcom arena with the series “Sick of It”, again at Sky.

Sick of It is about to premiere its second season and to give his 1.5+ million fans on Facebook something to get in the mood, Pilkington recently decided to share an episode of the show from last year.

That usually isn’t a problem. However, Sky doesn’t share the show for free and only offers it on-demand but that didn’t prove to be too much of a hurdle for the show’s co-writer, who found a freely accessible streaming copy on Vimeo.

“For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. Here’s an episode. Series 2 soon,” Pilkington wrote.

This clearly isn’t an official release. The tags on the video reveal that this copy was sourced from a ‘scene’ group, PLUTONiUM in this case, and reuploaded to Vimeo by someone named Gary. The same person also shared a copy of the first episode through the same account.

This means that Pilkington is effectively sharing a pirated copy of his own show with over a million people. And since Sky holds at least some of the rights, that’s not supposed to happen.

The ‘mistake’ didn’t go unnoticed. Commenters on Facebook highlighted that it was a pirate release and the same was pointed out on Reddit, where many appreciated the unusual move.

The question is, of course, whether this is indeed a mistake or some kind of PR stunt. Giving over a million people a free teaser may draw in some extra eyeballs and if that’s picked up by the news, it means even more exposure.

However, when we look closer at Pilkington’s previous engagement on Facebook we started to notice a trend. Apparently, he’s keeping a close eye on the comments. When someone said that she wasn’t familiar with Sick of It, but would like to watch it, Pilkington kindly shared a link.

And that wasn’t the first time either. The show’s co-writer has been doing this for weeks, sharing the same link to everyone who shows interest. In particular, those who don’t have access to it.

To us, it appears that Pilkington means no harm and simply wants to get people to see his show. That makes sense. As a creator, you want people to enjoy what you’ve made. The fact that he’s sharing a pirated copy may not have even entered his mind.

Whether Sky will like this is another question of course. At the time of writing all links are still online, but it wouldn’t be a massive surprise if they are soon taken down. Technically, Pilkington is now a repeat infringer so he could even lose his Facebook account.

Unless he takes action before Sky does, of course.

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Matt Lowne is a very popular YouTuber with a passion for the simulation game Kerbal Space Program. Since 2013 he’s amassed close to 56 million views but late last week, his video world was turned upside down.

In common with many YouTubers, Matt didn’t want any copyright issues on his channel. So, to play things safely, he obtained the track ‘Dreams‘ by Joakim Karud from YouTube’s very own audio library for use in his intro. Unfortunately, this strategy of obtaining supposedly risk-free music from a legitimate source still managed to backfire.

Very early last Friday, Matt says he received a “massive barrage” of emails from YouTube, targeting “pretty much all” of his KSP videos. The emails said that Matt’s videos “may have content owned or licensed by SonyATV, PeerMusic, Warner Chappell, Audiam and LatinAutor.”

A clearly exasperated Matt took to YouTube, noting that any ads that now show up on his videos “split up the revenue between all the companies listed” in the emails, with Matt himself “allowed to keep what’s left of that.” He doesn’t know what that amount might be, because he says there’s just no way of knowing.

After highlighting the vague use of the word “may” in YouTube’s emails to him, Matt then went on to describe the real “kick in the gut”, which revolves around the track itself.

‘Dreams’ composer Joakim Karud allows anyone to use his music on YouTube, even commercially, for free. And the fact that Matt downloaded the track from YouTube’s own library was the icing on this particularly bitter cake.

“So I guess this library can’t be trusted at all,” says Matt. “YouTube might just remove songs from it after the fact and then shrug off any consequences for videos that use that music as you know, shit happens.”

Matt said he had to time out to manually protest the automated claims against his account but he says his overtures were immediately rejected, “almost like it’s an automated bot or something.” But things get worse from there.

After contesting each claim and having all of those rejected, Matt says the only option left is to appeal every single one. However, if an appeal is lost, the video in question will be removed completely and a strike will be placed against his account.

It’s three strikes and you’re out on YouTube, so this is not an attractive option for Matt if the music companies somehow win the fight. So, instead, Matt is appealing against just one of the complaints in the hope that he can make some progress without putting his entire account at risk.

Matt says he won’t be able to risk putting any music in his videos in future, because even with the best intentions, a “billion-dollar corporation” can simply decide that they “would like to start benefiting off your blood, sweat and tears.”

Worryingly, searches online show that not only are other people affected by similar mass complaints, but there may – may – be an explanation for what is going on here.

“SonyATV & Warner Chappell have claimed 24 of my videos because the royalty free song Dreams by Joakim Karud (from the OFFICIAL YOUTUBE AUDIO LIBRARY BTW) uses a sample from Kenny Burrell Quartet’s ‘Weaver of Dream’,” a Twitter user wrote on Saturday.

Sure enough, if one turns to the WhoSampled archive, Dreams is listed as having sampled Weaver of Dreams, a track from 1956 to which Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. own the copyrights.

If the trend of claims against ‘Dreams’ continues, there is potential for huge upheaval on YouTube and elsewhere. Countless thousands of videos use the track and as a result it has become very well-known. Sadly, people trying to claim it as their own is nothing new but fingers crossed, common sense will sort out the present issues.

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This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

Angel Has Fallen is the most downloaded movie.

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 Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(…)	Angel Has Fallen	6.5 / trailer
2	(2)	Joker (Subbed HDRip)	8.8 / trailer
3	(…)	Gemini Man	5.7 / trailer
4	(1)	Dora and the Lost City of Gold	6.0 / trailer
5	(5)	The Lion King	7.1 / trailer
6	(…)	Klaus	8.5 / trailer
7	(3)	Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw	6.7 / trailer
8	(7)	Toy Story 4	8.1 / trailer
9	(…)	Lady and the Tramp	6.5 / trailer
10	(8)	Spider-Man: Far from Home	7.8 / trailer

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