For several years PayPal has been trying to limit how much business it does with sites involved with copyright infringement. Unsurprisingly torrent sites are high up on the payment processors “do not touch” list.

For that reason it is quite rare to see PayPal offered as a donation method on the majority of public sites as these are spotted quite quickly and often shut down. It’s unclear whether PayPal does its own ‘scouting’ but the company is known to act upon complaints from copyright holders as part of the developing global “Follow the Money” anti-piracy strategy.

This week Andrew Sampson, the software developer behind new torrent search engine ‘Strike‘, discovered that when you have powerful enemies, bad things can happen.

With no advertising on the site, Sampson added his personal PayPal account in case anyone wanted to donate. Quickly coming to the conclusion that was probably a bad idea, Sampson removed the button and carried on as before. One month later PayPal contacted him with bad news.

“We are contacting you as we have received a report that your website https://getstrike.net is currently infringing upon the intellectual property of Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.,” PayPal began.

“Such infringement also violates PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. Therefore your account has been permanently limited.”

It isn’t clear why PayPal waited for a month after donations were removed from Strike to close Sampson’s six-year-old account but the coder believes that his public profile (he doesn’t hide his real identity) may have led to his issues.

“It seems someone at the MPAA realized I took donations using PayPal from some of my other LEGAL open source projects (like https://github.com/Codeusa/Borderless-Gaming) and was able to get the email of my account,” the dev told TF.

While Sampson had regularly been receiving donations from users of his other open source projects, he says he only received $200 from users of Strike, a small proportion of the $2,500 in his personal account when PayPal shut it down.

“That money was earned through legitimate freelance work and was going to be used specifically for my rent/car payment so it kind of sucks,” he says.

While it’s going to be a painful 180 day wait for Sampson to get his money back from PayPal, the lack of options for receiving donations on his other projects could prove the most damaging moving forward. Sampson does accept Bitcoin, but it’s nowhere near as user-friendly as PayPal.

Of course, this is all part of the MPAA’s strategy. By making sites like Strike difficult to run, they hope that developers like Sampson will reconsider their positions and move on. And in this case they might just achieve their aims.

“I’ve allowed someone else to manage the site for the time being. It will operate as it normally does but I need a bit to clear my head and don’t want anything to do with it as it’s become quite stressful,” Sampson says.

“I think the MPAA is playing low ball tactics against a developer who just wanted a better search engine. I don’t condone piracy, but I sure as hell understand why it happens.”

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

Through various programs, such as the “six strikes” scheme in the United States and the fledgling Canadian program launched earlier this year, warning notices are delivered to BitTorrent users suspected of distributing content online.

While most are relatively benign, other warning notices come with a price tag attached. The most common are sent by anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp which routinely adds $20 settlement demands to ISP-delivered infringement notices.

The key with these notices is that Rightscorp and its clients don’t know the identities of the people they’re targeting so in the vast majority of cases these cash demands can be ignored. However, it now transpires that’s not always the best strategy.

In a lawsuit filed at the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, Rightscorp client Rotten Records is suing a Comcast user who allegedly downloaded and shared When the Kite String Pops, the 1994 debut album from sludge metal band Acid Bath.

In a second filed at the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Rotten Records is suing another Comcast user who allegedly downloaded and shared Definition, the sixth album from crossover thrash band D.R.I.

According to both lawsuits, Rotten Records hired Rightscorp to monitor BitTorrent networks for infringement. The company connected to the defendants’ BitTorrent clients and downloaded a full copy of each of the albums, later verifying that they were identical to the original copyright works.

Distancing themselves from any accusations of wrongdoing, the lawsuits state that neither Rotten Records nor Rightscorp were the original ‘seeders’ of the album and at no point did Rightscorp upload the albums to any other BitTorrent users. However, the company did send warnings to the Comcast users with demands for them to stop sharing the album.

“Rightscorp sent Defendant 11 notices via Defendant’s ISP Comcast Cable
Communications, Inc. from March 26, 2015 to April 4, 2015 demanding that Defendant stop illegally distributing Plaintiff’s work. Defendant ignored each and every notice and continued to illegally distribute Plaintiff’s work,” the Acid Bath lawsuit reads.

While eleven notices is significant, that number pales into insignificance when compared to the D.R.I case.

“Rightscorp sent Defendant 288 notices via their ISP Comcast Cable Communications, Inc. from December 14, 2014 to May 12, 2015 demanding that
Defendant stop illegally distributing Plaintiff’s work. Defendant ignored each and every notice and continued to illegally distribute Plaintiff’s work,” the complaint reads.

In closing, Rotten Records demands an injunction forbidding further online infringement in both cases in addition to the deletion of both albums from each Comcast user’s computer.

Unsurprisingly the record label also wants statutory damages (potentially $150K per work if any infringement is deemed willful) plus attorneys’ fees.

The cases are interesting ones for a number of reasons, not least the decision to target Comcast customers. The ISP routinely strips settlement demands from notices sent by Rightscorp, so it’s possible a message is being sent here.

The other angle is money. Sure, Rotten Records can probably come away with a few thousand dollars by way of settlement, but for Rightscorp the cases could prove much more valuable.

Despite warning that not settling for $20 could have a much worse outcome for an alleged pirate, it’s become relatively common knowledge that the company hardly ever shows its teeth. Victory in a case like this could be just what it needs to force settlements from greater numbers of notice recipients.

Keep an eye out for forthcoming (and noisily high-value) settlement announcements. They could make $20 sound like a bargain and boost Rightscorp’s failing bottom line.

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

At any given point in time, millions of people are sharing files via BitTorrent. The most used trackers process millions of requests per minute, serving between 15 and 30 million people at once.

Demonii is one of these top BitTorrent trackers. The standalone tracker offers no torrents but merely coordinates communication between people who share files via sites such as The Pirate Bay.

Technically speaking a tracker is similar to a DNS provider, it’s a ‘phone book’ which points people to content without knowing what it is. However, according to German lawfirm Rasch, trackers have a responsibility to block infringing hashes if they are asked to.

Earlier this year the lawfirm took action against the hosting companies of several standalone trackers after they failed to block “infringing” hashes. The operator of Demonii, currently the most used BitTorrent tracker, informed us that they were contacted too.

“First we received an email from Rasch asking us to remove about five torrent hashes for one music artist. Since the firm is merely an agent and not the actual copyright owner, I asked for proof that he is the lawful agent,” Demonii’s operator explains.

The lawfirm provided the requested paperwork and to avoid problems with the hosting company, Demonii blocked the five hashes. This was the first time that Demonii had ever blocked content, which is nothing more than filtering a piece of HEX string.

However, it soon became clear that Rasch was just getting started. In the weeks that followed the company filed complaints against 10,000 allegedly infringing hashes which pointed to content from various copyright holders.

Again, Demonii requested proof that the firms was acting as a lawful agent, but this time Rasch declined. Instead, Rasch lawyer Mirko Brüß told the operator that anyone can report copyright infringements.

“Anybody can notify you of an infringement, even if they are in no way affiliated with the rights owner. Please understand that we will not go above and beyond what is provided by the law in order to satisfy your personal requests,” Brüß wrote in an email.

“It is your decision to act upon the information sent to you. But with regards to blocking content wrongfully, the content owners could approach us with claims for damages for sending a false notice to you,” he added.

The Demonii operator disagrees with this assessment and calls out the claim as incorrect.

“If what he is saying is right, in theory, I can go send an email to his hosting provider to remove their site? After all I am not the owner and no way legally affiliated, but I can still claim the take down?! — No.. I can’t, and neither should he,” he tells TF.

However, with pressure shifting to the tracker’s hosting service (which had given the tracker 24 hours to comply), Demonii was eventually forced to block all reported hashes.

Describing the lawfirm’s tactics as “bullying”, the operator decided to move away from its hosting company to one that may be more resistant to this type of pressure.

“We have moved to a different hosting provider, one which we hope will take the matter more seriously and not just bend over backwards for any outrageous claim and takedown request where ownership can not be proven,” Demonii’s operator says.

The previous hash blocks have also been lifted, so Demonii is starting over fresh and uncensored again. The move hasn’t stopped the lawfirm from sending more blocking requests, but for the time being the tracker is opting to ignore these.

The tracker stresses that it respects copyright law. However, it will only respond to correct takedown notice and not to “bullying” tactics.

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

With regular competitions and frequent status updates ExtraTorrent has a very active community on Facebook.

Or had, we should say.

After sailing clear for nearly three years, Facebook decided to pull the plug on the site this morning citing a third-party copyright complaint.

“We have removed or disabled access to the following content that you have posted on Facebook because we received a notice from a third-party that the content infringes their copyright(s),” Facebook wrote.

According to Facebook the ExtraTorrent page was considered to be a repeat copyright infringer, but the staff of the torrent site refutes this characterization.

ExtraTorrent’s staff tells TF that they were careful not to link directly to infringing content after Facebook warned them two years ago. However, Google cache does show occasional links to pages that list pirated movies.

Facebook’s takedown message

The last notice ExtraTorrent received from Facebook came in yesterday. This takedown notice complained about a post from two years ago which linked to a torrent of the film Elysium.

“This post was published in 2013. It’s very curious. Looks like Facebook removed the ExtraTorrent Page because of a post from 2013,” ET’s staff tells us.

This is not the first time that ExtraTorrent has been kicked from Facebook. The same happened three years ago when the site’s official page had roughly 140,000 fans.

Despite the new setback, the torrent site is not giving up on Facebook just yet. They quickly launched a new page which quickly gathered thousands of followers, and many more are sure to follow.

Extratorrent’s new Facebook page

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

Earlier this month the long running lawsuit between the RIAA and Grooveshark came to an end.

Facing hundreds of millions in damages, the music streaming service settled the dispute for $50 million while offering an apology for the mistakes that had been made in the past.

The record labels celebrated the outcome as a victory, but after a few days they had a new Grooveshark problem on their hands. A person naming himself “Shark” had launched a new music service using the familiar Grooveshark brand.

Contrary to most press reports proclaiming a near-complete return of Grooveshark, the site itself appeared to be mostly an MP3Juices clone. However, the use of the Grooveshark name was enough to have the record labels worried.

In a complaint filed under seal at the Southern District of New York, the labels are now suing the people behind Grooveshark’s reincarnation.

The labels accuse the site’s operators of counterfeiting, trademark infringement, cybersquatting and copyright infringement and immediately applied for countermeasures to shut the site down.

Earlier this week District Court Judge Deborah Batts sided with the labels, issuing the requested temporary restraining order as well as a seizure order directed at the site’s operators, hosting providers and domain registrar NameCheap.

“There is good cause to believe that, unless the Defendants are restrained and enjoined by Order of this Court, immediate and irreparable harm will result from the Defendants’ ongoing violations,” the Judge writes.

Under the temporary restraining order the site’s operators are barred from using Grooveshark trademarks and logos and it also prohibits hosting providers from working with the site. In addition, NameCheap was ordered to seize the domain until further notice.

Letter to Namecheap

Namecheap swiftly complied with the order and as a result the site’s domain names including Grooveshark.io are now inaccessible.

The operator of the ‘new’ Grooveshark, however, is not impressed by the legal fireworks and will continue to run the site from the new Grooveshark.vc domain name that was just launched.

“I have one message for those responsible for this hostile take over: You will not stop us. We won’t give in to this type of bullying,” Shark informs us.

“On the contrary! The harder you come at us the stronger we’ll fight, and now after this hit we’re more determined than ever to keep Grooveshark alive and kicking,” he adds.

In addition to relocating to a new domain name Shark says he’s added several developers to his team. A few days ago the team released the much requested playlist feature and in the near future he hopes to make the entire project Open Source.

And so a new game of Whac-A-Mole has started.

Update May 18: The new domain has been nullrouted as well.

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