In an effort to make piracy less visible, copyright holders send dozens of millions of takedown notices to Google every month.

Unfortunately not all of these requests are as accurate as they should be.

Due to the high number of often automated notices and the fact that copyright holders don’t check the validity of all requests, there are many questionable takedowns.

This week BBC Worldwide reported a record number of infringing links to Google, targeting more than 25,000 webpages. We decided to go through the links and it wasn’t hard to find several URLs that are clearly not infringing.

For example, one of the notices targets the IMDb pages of Top Gear, The Game and Top Fails.

The Internet Movie Database is one of the prime sources for movie and TV fans to get information and doesn’t host or link to infringing content, so taking these pages offline only hurts the BBC.

Perhaps even more worrying is that the same notice also lists the British home of the video site Dailymotion as “infringing.” While this page may have linked to unauthorized material in the past, it’s certainly doesn’t warrant the removal of the entire homepage.

Unfortunately this notice is not an isolated incident. In recent years we’ve highlighted countless examples of takedown requests that censor legitimate content, often hurting traffic for the affected sites.

The good news is that Google appears to have white-listed several domains, including the IMDb and Dailymotion. This means that while the links reported by the BBC were not removed, less prominent sites may not be so lucky.

As mentioned previously the DMCA notice surge is a growing problem, with Google now removing more than a million links each day on average. Since Google and other websites can’t possibly verify every DMCA claim, the problem is only expected to increase.

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

In 2009 during the wake of the original Pirate Bay trial and the jail sentences for its operators, Swedish anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån sent out a batch of warnings to other sites hosted in Sweden.

One of the sites that initially decided to shut down was known as The Internationals, or TTi for short. In the event the closure was short-lived and just a month later the 26,000 member site was back online and operating largely as usual. The return lasted for more than two years, but then it all fell apart.

A police investigation led to November 2011 raids against TTi in two locations in Sweden, Borås and Växjö. In addition to the seizure of servers housing the site’s tracker and community data, two men were also arrested.

The man detained in Borås was the alleged operator of TTi but interestingly the second individual, Patrik Lagerman from Växjö, was the person providing TTi’s webhosting.

The owner of local web-hosting outfit Patrikweb, Lagerman previously gained worldwide attention for being involved in bandwidth supply to The Pirate Bay.

In the TTi case, Lagerman was handed a demand by Antipiratbyrån to disconnect the tracker. He requested a court order but none was forthcoming. The reaction almost a year later was an 06:30am alarm call carried out by five police officers followed by several hours of questioning.

“Trying to prosecute the hosting provider for assisting [in infringement] shows just how stupid they are,” Lagerman said at the time.

But this week that’s exactly what happened when Lagerman and the as-yet unnamed TTi sysop went on trial for their alleged crimes. The hearing lasted for two days.

“Two men were prosecuted,” prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad informs TorrentFreak.

“The alleged main administrator of the TTi site and the second one – Lagerman – was prosecuted for aiding and abetting the infringement, by renting out server space, Internet services etc, and helping the administrators in some other ways (as an intermediary).

“The rights holders contacted [Lagerman] and informed him of the site and the infringement, but he still continued with his services to the site owner,” the prosecutor notes.

Although the site tracked many more titles including plenty of Hollywood blockbusters, the case itself now involves just 28 Swedish films.

TorrentFreak spoke with Lagerman who said he’d hold back on a comment until the verdict is handed down in two weeks time. Fortunately for both defendants he should be able to do that as a relatively free man since the prosecution are not pressing for custodial sentences.

“Due to the long time that has passed since the crimes (the investigation unfortunately took a bit too long), I didn´t request for an unconditional imprisonment,” Ingblad says.

“I requested for a conditional sentence and community services for the alleged main administrator, and a conditional sentence plus fines for Mr. Lagerman.”

The case is an intriguing one and the eventual decision will be of great interest to other local ISPs in similar positions.

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

For years entrepreneurs around the world have listened intently to entertainment companies and their tales of losing billions to piracy. Given the scale of the alleged losses, serious riches must lie in wait for the company with a workable solution.

One of the outfits dreaming of piracy-into-profit alchemy are the folks at Rightscorp. They sign up rightsholders, track people sharing their content on BitTorrent, and send a bill to alleged pirates to make imaginary lawsuits go away. Unlike other ‘trolls’, however, Rightscorp only asks for around $20 per infringement, a relatively cheap deal considering the many thousands demanded elsewhere.

While it sounds simple enough, the company can’t seem to make it profitable. They argue that it’s still early days (the company only went public in 2013) but the figures don’t lie. Last year Rightscorp lost $3.4 million and during the first quarter of 2015 and despite sounding as optimistic as ever, the company burned through yet more cash.

In results published last evening, Rightscorp revealed that it had grown in several key areas during the first quarter, not least the number of copyrights the company has deals to protect. Including two new contracts signed in January for 250,000 copyrights, the company now has 1.5 million in its “authorized copyright catalog”. Currently, however, just 256,000 are in the full Rightscorp system.

The number of ISPs cooperating in the scheme is up too, from 50 ISPs in March 2014 to more than 233 ISPs in March 2015. With that uplift of 466%, Rightscorp says it now has access to 15% of all homes in the United States and in the past two years has closed 200,000 cases of copyright infringement

All in, the company reported revenues of $307,904 for Q1 2015, up 63% on the same period last year. But despite all the growth and positivity it also reported a $929,768 operating loss. The problem – a recurring theme for the company – are its costs.

For the first quarter Rightscorp’s operating costs were in excess of $1.2m, a far cry from the $300K it brought in. The company blames part of the losses on fees it pays to copyright holders (roughly 50% of revenues) but that only accounts for $154K.

On top the company has an expanding wage bill. In Q1 2014 that stood at $241,347 but in the same period this year those costs had increased to $335,073.

Legal costs are also on the rise. In addition to all the usual advice needed to run a company, Rightscorp is currently being sued over the methods it uses to collect cash from alleged pirates. As a result legal costs for the quarter were $182,543, up from $114,242 in the same period last year.

As the image above shows, the company’s current position doesn’t look good, a point raised last evening during a conference call with investors.

“What could you say about the fact that the stockholder value has gone down about 80% in the last year, in spite of the fact that you’ve done two private equity raises?” one caller questioned.

“We think this is a great time to get involved with a company as a shareholder,” Rightscorp COO Robert Steele responded.

“Fundamental investment thesis continues to be proven out. So with approximately 250,000 copyrights being monitored we generated $300,000 in top line revenue, there are 27 million Apple copyrights on iTunes, so this can be an enormous business.”

But despite the optimism the company’s latest filing paints a bleak picture of the future.

“The Company has not yet established an ongoing source of revenues sufficient to cover its operating costs and to allow it to continue as a going concern,” the filing reads.

“The ability of the Company to continue as a going concern is dependent on the Company obtaining adequate capital to fund operating losses until it establishes a revenue stream and becomes profitable. If the Company is unable to obtain adequate capital it could be forced to cease operations.”

Only time will tell if Rightscorp will eventually be able to turn piracy into profit, but if current trends continue, each notice sent will only generate a loss. The secret may lie in increased volumes and economies of scale, but if the company feels under serious threat it may seek to up its $20 settlement fee to something more practical. Keep an eye out for that.

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

Today sees the theatrical premiere of the highly anticipated Bollywood blockbuster “Piku.”

As is the case with most movies, unauthorized copies the film will eventually end up being made available from various websites. However, the makers of Piku hope that a recent High Court order will limit the fallout.

Multi Screen Media, one of the companies behind the movie, has obtained a restraining order against 13 websites and a blocking order against some of the country’s largest Internet providers (pdf).

Similar orders have been granted in the past, but this one stands out because of the sites it targets.

The order lists the following domain names: Vimeo.com, Thepiratebay.org, Torrentz.eu, Thiruttuvcd.biz, Merotv.net, Novamov.com, Videotanker.co, Cloudy.ec, Vidto.me, Zuzvideo.com, Video.tt, Kickasstoreents.com and Torrentfunk.com.

The owners of the domains are restrained from “making available” or otherwise distributing Piku without a proper license. In addition, India’s largest Internet providers are ordered to block access to the sites.

The most surprising target is the popular video sharing platform Vimeo, a site mostly used by independent filmmakers to share their work. While Piku’s makers describe the site as a piracy hub, the site rarely hosts infringing material.

However, there even more worrying issues with the order that will severely limit its effectiveness.

For example, it lists Pirate Bay’s .org domain even though the site is currently operating from thepiratebay.se. Similarly, the domain name of KickassTorrents is both outdated and misspelled as kickasstoreents.com.

As a result, the blocking order may not be as successful as the filmmakers would have hoped.

According to the order ISPs must block the mentioned domains within 24 hours. A new hearing is scheduled for July 31 where it will be decided if the measures can be lifted, or if they must stay in place.

At the time of writing no pirated copies of Piku have leaked online yet, but if one surfaces this current order will do very little to stop it from spreading.

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

Despite the growing availability of legal music services in many countries, record labels keep battling ever popular pirate sites.

In an attempt to prevent these sites from expanding their audiences, music industry groups BPI and RIAA send millions of takedown notices to Internet services every month. Most of these requests are directed at Google.

This week the two most prolific industry groups reached a new milestone after they notified Google of the 200 millionth allegedly infringing URL. This is up from 100 million little over a year ago.

According to the most recent statistics the BPI has reported over 138 million links in 295,730 notices with the RIAA adding more than 63 million in 19,569 requests.

While the record industry groups have little to complain about when it comes to Google’s response rate, they believe that removing links alone is not enough.

“The fact that BPI and RIAA have together removed 200 million illegal results from Google demonstrates just how much more needs to be done to clean up search,” a BPI spokesperson tells TF.

As highlighted in the past, the BPI and RIAA would like Google to go above and beyond processing takedown requests. According to them, the millions of reported links show that removing infringing links alone isn’t working.

“If the digital single market is to unlock growth, consumers need be directed to legal sources for entertainment ahead of the online black market. BPI alone has had to remove 7.5 million links from Google in the last month, protecting UK artists and musicians from sites that steal their work,” the BPI notes.

In recent years Google has slowly implemented several changes to appease the record labels. October last year the company implemented the most significant change to its search algorithm to date, aimed at downranking sites that often link to copyright-infringing material.

This significantly reduced the visibility of pirate links in search results and had a major impact on the traffic levels of some sites. However, the BPI believes that more must be done to properly address the piracy issue.

“The changes to Google’s algorithm last year represented a positive step,” the BPI says.

“But if further progress is not made swiftly to ensure that searches for entertainment content yield overwhelmingly legal results – for instance by boosting the ranking of known licensed sites for appropriate types of search – then the new UK Government and the EU Commission should intervene to make that happen.”

Both the UK Government and the European Commission are currently reviewing whether online intermediaries such as search engines should have a legal obligation to protect copyright holders.

Google, however, believes that it has done enough and repeatedly argues that the entertainment industries can themselves do more.

“Piracy often arises when consumer demand goes unmet by legitimate supply,” the company noted earlier. “The right combination of price, convenience, and inventory will do far more to reduce piracy than enforcement can.”

Based of the current standoff and the increasing rate at which pirate links are being reported to Google, the music industry groups will double the 200 million milestone by the end of next year.

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