The Hawaiian company ’42 Ventures’ doesn’t immediately ring a bell with most torrent users. However, when we say that it owns the trademarks for ‘YTS’ and ‘Popcorn Time,’ interests will pique.

Founded last year, the company doesn’t operate a pirate site. On the contrary, it’s represented by Kerry Culpepper, a well-known anti-piracy lawyer who works with several Hollywood film companies.

Following its inception, 42 Ventures registered several piracy-related trademarks which it uses to target pirate sites and apps, including a popular Popcorn Time fork. The lawyer has used trademark complaints to suspend Twitter accounts, offering to lift the claims in return for a settlement.

As the trademark owner 42 Ventures can do this. However, the method is unusual, to say the least, and some wonder whether it would hold up in court. The Popcorn Time dispute was never litigated though and the developers didn’t pay a settlement either. The Twitter handle remains suspended.

A few days ago another trademark issue popped up. This time, 42 Ventures went directly to court where it filed an infringement lawsuit against the operators of YTS.ws, YTS.ms, YST.lt, YTS.tl, YTSag.me, YTS.ae, YTSmovies.cc and YTS-ag.com.

“Defendants distributed and/or streamed motion pictures in violation of US Copyright law to numerous individuals in Hawaii and the United States via their interactive websites under names identical and/or confusingly similar to Plaintiff’s registered trademark,” 42 Ventures writes.

The Hawaiian company obtained the YTS trademark earlier this year but wasn’t the first to use the YTS name of course. The name was first used by the original YIFY group which shut down years ago. Since then, others have used the brand, with YTS.mx turning it into one of the most-visited torrent sites.

Interestingly, YTS.mx is not mentioned in this lawsuit. This is noteworthy not just because it’s by far the largest YTS site, but also because 42 Ventures’ lawyer previously reached settlements with the torrent platform.

TorrentFreak contacted the lawyer to ask why YTS.mx was not targeted, but he prefers not to comment on the matter. We also asked how 42 Ventures uses the YTS trademark, but this question remains unanswered as well.

The legal paperwork doesn’t provide any further detail either. 42 Ventures simply write the following: “Plaintiff distributes licensed content to the public from a plurality of means including, but not limited to, websites.”

We previously learned that the company owns and operates Popcorntime4u.com through which it licenses and promotes YouTube videos. This site also includes a YTS link at the bottom, which links to the free app generator Appsgeyser. Perhaps that how 42 Ventures ‘uses’ the trademark.

Whether any of the defendants will show up in court is uncertain. The complaint lists them as being in Serbia, Russia, India and China, and all face a damages claim of $2 million for willful trademark infringement.

In addition to the damages, 42 Ventures also requests an injunction to prevent third-party intermediaries from facilitating access to the domains. This also applies to hosting companies, search engines, and domain registrars, which makes it likely that these sites will disappear if the injunction is granted.

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A copy of the trademark infringement lawsuit filed by 42 Ventures at a Hawaii federal court is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Last October, DISH Network filed a lawsuit in the United States targeting Boom Media LLC, a reseller of IPTV services sourced from a number of well-known ‘pirate’ suppliers.

Filed in a New York district court, the complaint also named John Henderson of New York and Debra Henderson of North Carolina as defendants, stating that the LLC was operated from John’s home (with him as the sole member) while his mother provided key support for the operation by receiving customer payments.

“The codes [DISH terminology for subscriptions] are designed and produced to enable a set-top box or other Internet-enabled device to access servers used to transmit DISH programming to customers of the MFG TV, Beast TV, Nitro TV, Murica Streams, Epic IPTV, Vader Streams and OK2 services,” the complaint read.

DISH claimed that subscriptions were sold to customers for between $10 and $20 per month with an option to buy a “pre-loaded” set-top box for $150. Boom Media’s sales efforts were high-profile, with DISH pointing to YouTube videos of John Henderson telling his customers that “[y]ou guys are buying pirated streams, this shit is not Hulu, it’s not Netflix, it’s pirated f**cking streams. It’s no different than buying f**king knockoff shoes. It’s black market shit.”

As reported in November 2019, John Henderson said he would take the case all the way to trial but to finance that he would need at least $250,000 in donations. In the end his fundraiser made just $1,029.

The case has simmered along in the background ever since but for all parties the show is now over after Boom Media and the Hendersons failed to mount a defense.

In a memorandum decision and order handed down yesterday by District Court Judge Mae D’Agostino, the Court found that the defendants violated Section 605(a) of the Federal Communications Act after they “retransmitted DISH Programming originating from DISH’s satellite communications to customers of the Services, or worked closely with others to do so.”

Additionally, the defendants were found liable under Section 605(e)(4), which makes it unlawful to distribute “any electronic, mechanical, or other device or equipment”, knowing or having reason to know that the device or equipment is primarily of assistance in the unauthorized decryption of direct-to-home satellite services.

“The Device Codes [IPTV subscriptions], which Defendants sold individually and preloaded onto a set-top box, were designed and produced for purposes of allowing access to the servers that support the Services, and thus are a ‘device; or ‘equipment’ for purposes of Section 605(e)(4),” the judgment reads.

Having established defendants’ liability in response to DISH’s request for default judgment, Judge D’Agostino turns to the question of appropriate damages.

Statutory damages of between $1,000 and $10,000 are available for each violation of Section 605(a) and up to $100,000 if the violation was committed willfully and for financial gain. Section 605(e)(4) allows for statutory damages of between $10,000 and $100,000 for each violation.

In the event, DISH sought statutory damages of ‘just’ $1,000 for each violation of Section 605(e)(4) but given that amount relates to each subscription, that figure was always set to explode. However, since DISH didn’t have access to enough information to put a precise figure on the number of subscriptions, it was forced to get creative.

Back in June 2019, John Henderson took to YouTube to complain that a credit card processor Boom used between February 2019 and May 2019 had refused to release $50,000 owed to Boom following the sale of IPTV subscriptions. Hoping to get revenge on the processor, he asked Boom subscribers to initiate chargebacks with their credit card issuers to get a refund, without risking the accounts they had with Boom.

“Defendants sold Device Codes [IPTV subscriptions] for an average price of $15.00 for each month of service. Accordingly, Defendant John Henderson’s statement that Defendants were waiting for $50,000 in payments owed to them for Device Codes previously distributed to customers is evidence of 3,333 Device Codes sold by Defendants,” the judgment reads.

“Given that Plaintiffs ‘are entitled to all reasonable inferences from the evidence they presented’ when seeking damages against a party in default…the Court finds that this number represents a fair approximation of the total number of Device Codes sold during this time frame (February through May of 2019).”

Multiplying 3,333 device codes by $1,000 damages per violation, the Court awarded DISH $3.33 million in statutory damages, with Boom Media LLC and John and Debra Henderson held jointly and severally liable.

The Court found this to be a reasonable amount, given that the $50,000 represented a fraction of Boom Media’s sales. Also, the Court acknowledged that DISH could’ve demanded much more, given the willfulness of John Henderson’s behavior generally and his comments posted to YouTube mentioning DISH.

While DISH did not seek attorneys’ fees or costs, it did demand a permanent injunction.

The Court was happy to oblige, enjoining all defendants and anyone acting in concert with them from “conducting the Rebroadcasting Scheme, or otherwise receiving or assisting others in receiving DISH’s satellite communications or the television programming that comprises such communications without authorization from DISH.”

The Court also ordered the defendants to stop selling IPTV subscriptions granting unauthorized access to DISH programming.

The memorandum decision and order can be downloaded here (pdf)

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In 2012, the short film ‘The Longest Daycare’ hit the big screen attached to screenings of the 20th Century Fox release Ice Age: Continental Drift.

At just five minutes long it’s much shorter than a standard The Simpsons episode but, according to Al Jean who has worked on the show for more than 30 years, it was a “thank you” note to Simpsons fans who had stuck with the show for two-and-a-half decades. And things went well.

The Longest Daycare was nominated for an Oscar and now, more than eight years later, is about to make its debut on the streaming platform Disney+. That was pointed out by Al Jean himself just an hour ago on Twitter, who posted the following in celebration.

While that presents nothing out of the ordinary at first view, those who take the time to scratch below the surface will find something amusing. Clicking on the image to expand it fully reveals that the screenshot was taken from a pirate release of the show that was released more than seven years ago on torrents and then uploaded to YouTube.

The release, Maggie.Simpson.in.The.Longest.Daycare.720p.HDTV.x264-2HD, is still being seeded today and can be found without too much difficulty on The Pirate Bay. The upload date on TPB is February 18, 2013 and the copy on Youtube, which currently has 88,337 views, was uploaded a day later on February 19, 2013.

We won’t embed it here but as the screenshot below illustrates, this is the exact pirate release showcased in Jean’s tweet, which is available all over the place for download albeit in much lower quality than will be available on Disney+ next week – hopefully.

The big question perhaps is whether this was intentional. The writers of The Simpsons haven’t shied away from the topic of piracy in the past, that’s for certain.

In addition to Bart scrawling, “I must not illegally download this movie” on a school blackboard as penance for his sins, he has also been seen surfing ‘The Bootleg Bay’ on his laptop. The writers of the show have also been happy to poke fun at the heavy-handed tactics of Hollywood in their mission to chase down TV show and movie pirates.

All that being said, it could have been a good old-fashioned blunder. After all, Jean couldn’t get a screenshot from Disney+ yet and YouTube is way more convenient, even if it does reveal a little bit more than perhaps intended.

DOH!

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

For more than half a decade, Popcorn Time has been a thorn in the side of Hollywood.

The ‘Netflix for Pirates’ offers an easy-to-use application that opens the door to a library of thousands of streamable movies and TV-shows.

The Motion Picture Asociation (MPA) recognized this threat early on and pressured the original developers to throw in the towel. That worked, but it came too late as the open-source project was swiftly revived by others.

Today, Popcorn Time lives on through many project forks. The most popular is PopcornTime.app, which like its predecessor, shares its source code publicly on the developer hosting platform GitHub. This allows others to download, modify, and share it.

The MPA is not happy with this and took action recently. The movie industry group informed GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, about the infringing nature of the software. According to the MPA, the application includes links to pirate sites, pirate APIs, and pirate torrent trackers, which are used to download pirated movies and TV-shows.

On top of that, the MPA suggested that GitHub itself may be liable for copyright infringement if the company fails to take action.

While the MPA’s interpretation of the law is likely not shared by GitHub, the company did remove the Popcorn Time code. In most cases that would be the end of the story, but Popcorn Time was not backing off without a fight.

The developers submitted a DMCA counternotice explaining that the MPA’s request is not legitimate. The code is owned by Popcorn Time, not the MPA, and Popcorn Time asked GitHub to restore access.

“The code is 100 % ours and do not contain any copyright [sic] material please check again,” the developer wrote.

The app’s developers made a good point here. The identified code (not the built app) is not directly copyright infringing and it contains no direct links to copyright-infringing material either. This means that a DMCA notice may not be the right tool here.

Faced with both requests, GitHub has now decided to restore full access to the Popcorn Time repository.

This decision doesn’t necessarily mean that it agrees with the app developers, however. The DMCA simply prescribes that, following a counternotice, content can be restored after two weeks, unless the claiming party files a lawsuit.

In this case, the MPA chose not to file a lawsuit against the Popcorn Time operators, so the code repositories are back online again.

Whether the MPA will follow-up with further action has yet to be seen. However, the whole episode highlights an interesting issue. There is little doubt that the Popcorn Time application is a pirate app. However, the code, as hosted by GitHub, is not infringing per se. As such, regular takedown notices don’t appear to work here.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The coronavirus pandemic has managed to spread its misery to every corner of the earth, with millions out there feeling there’s little to look forward to. For fans of Take That, however, there’s a little light at the end of the tunnel.

This Friday 29th May at 8:00pm, Take That’s Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, and Mark Owen – together with former band member Robbie Williams – will perform a charity concert directly from their own homes. The event is being put together by insurance company Compare the Market (Compare the Meerkat) at a reported cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds, without an official venue in sight.

Instead, the quartet will broadcast to fans via the Meerkat Music YouTube channel and Facebook Live and considering the absolute dearth of new programming currently on TV (not to mention the massive popularity of Take That and Robbie Williams), millions are expected to tune in.

That, however, comes with a caveat. The one-off event is reportedly only going to be available for residents of the UK, so for fans across the rest of Europe, the United States and beyond, the concert will be off-limits. This is already proving a source of frustration for international fans and there have been a number of complaints that restricting the show, especially at such a sensitive time, is really unfair.

Of course, people aren’t just going to sit back and accept that so, inevitably, there have been many people posting online on how to access the show on YouTube from outside the UK. VPNs are the logical choice since they allow people to change their online locations and convince YouTube that they’re in good old Blighty.

What was slightly unexpected was for Gary Barlow himself to give the movement his support. After receiving advice on VPN use from a fan on Twitter, Barlow gave a shout out to fans, asking “the army” to spread the word on how to bypass YouTube’s restrictions.

That Gary Barlow himself is encouraging fans to skirt geo-blocking is interesting for a number of reasons, not least that given the planned restrictions, music licensing is probably at the root of the issue. The details of the Compare the Market / Take That / Williams / YouTube deal aren’t public but if the concert isn’t planned for worldwide broadcast, it probably isn’t licensed for that eventuality.

Of course, millions of fans around the world could care less about that and it’s difficult not to have sympathy with them.

“How about just make it global like other artists are? You have fans worldwide. We want to support you. It’s sometimes like you don’t believe you have that many fans. It’s the same with gigs on iTunes. Can’t get them in NZ,” a fan wrote on Twitter. ”

“It’s a shame things like that are necessary for ‘the army’ outside the UK,” added another.

While the VPNs suggested in the tweet may very well do the job, there should be concerns that Take That fans who aren’t so tech-savvy will head off to Google Play to download any old VPN in the hope that they grant access to the event. That isn’t advisable.

Given the numerous reports that free VPNs can be a privacy and security nightmare, fans should exercise caution by doing their research before choosing one for long-term use.

In summary, Take That fans should never forget that picking the right VPN could help them rule the world, even if they do take a little patience to set up. These days, fortunately, most only take a minute, so for many fans Friday might turn out to be the greatest day after all.

I’ll get my coat…

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.