Adult magazine publisher Perfect 10 is one of the most litigious publishers in the online space.

The company has made a business out of suing Internet services for alleged copyright infringement and in recent years has targeted Google, Amazon, MasterCard and Visa, RapidShare and Depositfiles, and even hosting providers LeaseWeb and OVH.

While Perfect 10 has secured several private settlements, court victories in contested cases have not been forthcoming. The publisher had hoped of success in its current and prolonged legal battle with Usenet provider Giganews but things are not going well.

In a November 2014 ruling the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found that Giganews was not liable for the infringing activities of its users. The provider now has further reason to celebrate thanks to a ruling from the same Court.

Rather than simply roll over under pressure from Perfect 10’s legal team, Giganews put up a vigorous and comprehensive defense to the publisher’s claims. During 2014 Giganews sought and obtained several discovery orders requiring the adult publisher to produce potentially huge amounts of data relating to its claim against the provider, including but not limited to:

– Information on all allegedly infringing URLs / Usenet Message IDs
– Information on all Perfect 10 advertising since Jan 2008
– All IP / email addresses used by Perfect 10 / affiliates
– All copyright registrations and ownership documents
– Details of every author / photographer of every work in the case
– All evidence of direct and indirect infringement
– Perfect 10 server logs and website metrics
– Documents detailing all previous Perfect 10 litigation plus settlements

In a 56-page ruling handed down last Thursday, Magistrate Judge Stephen J. Hillman details a laundry list of non-compliance by Perfect 10, from partial to complete failure to provide the requested documents to “misleading” representations and “intentional” non-compliance.

Perfect 10 didn’t even produce evidence related to the infringement at the heart of the case.

“Perfect 10 failed to produce any evidence supporting its claim of direct
infringement,” the Judge writes, noting that it also “failed to produce any evidence supporting its claim of indirect infringement.”

While the Court dedicates many pages of its ruling to the failures of Perfect 10 to comply with its orders, it comes as little surprise that the company did not disclose the private conclusions to its earlier litigation.

“Perfect 10 failed to produce its complaints from all its earlier lawsuits..[..]..and also failed to produce its settlement agreements from earlier lawsuits,” the ruling reads. Even complaints Perfect 10 relied upon for its damages opinion were omitted.

Perfect 10 witnesses were also singled out for criticism, alongside the company’s counsel who did not do enough to bring them into line.

“The fact that the Perfect 10 affiliated witnesses kept making the same mistakes over and over shows that Perfect 10’s counsel was not adequately supervising their efforts to ensure full compliance with the Court’s Orders,” the Judge explains.

“In the peculiar circumstances of Perfect 10’s conduct in this case, the Court can properly hold Perfect 10 and its attorneys responsible for the Perfect 10-affiliated witnesses’ conduct.”

In conclusion, Giganews won this one big and Perfect 10 are now going to have to pick up the bill.

“[Giganews] presented this Court with extensive evidence showing unjustified discovery noncompliance, numerous violations of this Court’s orders, and pervasive failures by Perfect 10, its attorneys, and the Perfect 10-affiliated witnesses. The court will proceed to determine the reasonable amount of monetary sanctions, and whether they should be assessed against Perfect 10 and/or its counsel,” Judge Hillman concludes.

In a statement sent to TorrentFreak, Ron Yokubaitis, co-Chief Executive Officer of Giganews, says his company welcomes the ruling.

“From the beginning, we rejected the veracity of Perfect 10’s allegations and believed strongly in our position. As a result, we forced Perfect 10 to litigate this case on the merits,” Yokubaitis says.

“Perfect 10’s response to our approach was to engage in a pattern of systematic abuse of the discovery process and outright disregard of the court’s orders,” added Yokubaitis. “We are pleased with the magistrate judge’s ruling and we look forward to the Court’s final determination on monetary sanctions to be assessed.”

The big question now is whether this legal mauling and promised monetary sanctions will lead Perfect 10 down a different path on potential future litigation. Giganews has certainly shown its teeth, so ‘softer’ targets could be on the horizon.

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

With millions of unique visitors per day KickassTorrents (KAT) is one the most used torrent sites on the Internet.

The site’s popularity has made it a prime target for copyright holders, many of whom would like to see the site taken offline.

To evade law enforcement and ease pressure from the entertainment industries, KAT has moved domain on a few occasions over the past several years. Most recently the site has been operating from the Kickass.so domain.

The Somalian .so TLD appeared to be a relatively safe haven, but today it’s apparent that this isn’t the case. About an hour ago the Kickass.so domain status listing was updated to “banned.”

As a result of the domain seizure, users can no longer access the site. The Kickass.so domain name is not resolving and at the time of writing neither are older alternatives such as kickass.to.

Kickass.so was seized by the .SO registry who also blacklisted the scam site kickasstorrents.so, which is not affiliated with the KAT team. It is likely that the registry acted following a complaint from copyright holders although this hasn’t been officially confirmed yet.

Previously The Pirate Bay lost several of its domain names, including thepiratebay.ac and and thepiratebay.sx, after similar complaints.

TF asked the .So registry for a comment on the situation but we have yet to receive a reply.

While KickassTorrents is down for the moment, it is expected that the site will move its operation to a new domain name later today, or revert back to Kickass.to.

Update: The KAT team informed TF that they are reverting back to Kickass.to.

Update: The site’s accessible to most people on the .to domain now.

—

Breaking story, we’ll update the article if more information comes in.

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

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

Big Hero 6 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 BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Big Hero 6	8.0 / trailer
2	(…)	Birdman	8.2 / trailer
3	(2)	American Sniper (DVDscr)	7.6 / trailer
4	(6)	The Interview	7.0 / trailer
5	(1)	Taken 3	6.3 / trailer
6	(…)	Dumb And Dumber To	6.1 / trailer
7	(4)	Wild Card	6.0 / trailer
8	(5)	Nightcrawler	8.0 / trailer
9	(3)	Interstellar (DVDScr)	8.8 / trailer
10	(…)	Whiplash	8.6 / trailer

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

The Internet is littered with torrent indexes and search engines, all offering a wide range of media content and other entertainment to their visitors.

For this content to travel from one part of the world to another, the BitTorrent ecosystem needs reliable trackers. Unfortunately, reliable public trackers are much harder to find.

In recent weeks prominent trackers such as OpenBitTorrent and PublicBT have been offline most of the time. Even more concerning, the associated websites also stopped advertising the tracker addresses in public, suggesting that they may retire in the near future.

Amidst all this trouble there is one tracker that stands out in a positive way. Founded less than two years ago, Demonii has grown out to become one of the largest and most stable trackers.

This week it broke a new record by serving more than 30 million people at the same time, which is a 100% increase compared to last year.

At the time of writing Demonii is serving 30,508,293 peers and 24,402,432 seeds, while tracking a total of 4,209,378 torrents. That’s more than the top three trackers were serving in 2013, combined.

TF spoke to the operator of Demonii who told us that they are keeping the tracker online with relatively few resources. It currently runs smoothly on ‘just’ three dedicated servers.

“At this moment we are hosting the tracker on three medium-sized dedicated servers which are linked up to each other and are synced to always be up to date. This adds redundancy if anything fails and also eases the load overall,” Demonii’s admin says.

Despite the modest setup, the number of connections it handles per day is mind-boggling.

The servers are processing a constant stream of data at the rate of 180 Mbit per second, and the graph below shows the UDP connections for one of the servers averaging around 600,000 per minute. Across the three servers this adds up to well over two billion connections per day.

The 30 million peer milestone and the connection statistics make Demonii the largest currently active BitTorrent tracker.

While some have argued that trackers are obsolete, as DHT and PEX allow peers to share the same information among each other, Demonii’s operator disagrees.

“PEX and DHT are ‘good enough’, but some people out there are looking for something better than ‘good enough’,” he tells us.

“Having trackers speeds up the initial peer finding significantly. Sure, it’s not an absolute must in order to download via BitTorrent but while there are functional trackers out there, I really don’t see and understand why people argue that they should be avoided and made obsolete,” he adds.

Aside from speeding up initial connections, trackers are also essential for those who use proxies, as they often have DHT and PEX disabled to prevent their real IP-addresses from leaking out.

In any case, Demonii is not going away anytime soon. The tracker is already on its way to another milestone. The 40 million peer milestone will probably come into view later this year, but first there are a trillion more connections to process.

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

When confronted with an outrageous story this week our immediate thoughts were to ignore it in the hope that it would quickly go away. Sadly that isn’t how things have played out.

Faced with the fantastic and outrageous proposition that The Pirate Bay’s return was facilitated by United States’ authorities keen to position the site as an FBI-run honeypot, the temptation to regurgitate the ‘news’ was just too great for several big publications.

As the week progressed, more and more sites reported on the doomsday scenario with varying levels of excitement and belief. For our part we dismissed the story as nonsense. But with Sunday here and time on our hands, let’s pretend that the allegations are true and that the FBI has indeed commandeered the world’s most notorious torrent site.

Operation Swedish Massage

After water-boarding login information out of the site’s former admin, Special Agent Phil Share takes control of TPB and begins gathering evidence on millions of users. The data volumes involved quickly become unwieldy. The site can log IP addresses but there’s only so many the feds can process. The feds start incurring expensive overtime pay and those holding the purse strings become unhappy.

IP address bonanza

In the face of rising costs, Agent Share has to justify the overtime to his seniors. He finds it extremely difficult. While he does indeed have every IP address of every person visiting the site, obstacles are many.

First, he has no idea who these people are without obtaining their details from their ISPs. Second, and perhaps most importantly, he can only produce a subpoena after reasonably showing that these people have committed an offense.

Then it dawns on him: browsing a website – even The Pirate Bay – is not a crime. He has millions of IP addresses but zero proof that any have committed any offenses, even those that download .torrent files from the site. There has to be another way.

The Pirate Bay is just the beginning

Eventually our friendly Special Agent comes to realize that if he wants evidence of infringement he’ll need to spread his wings a little. Sure, his access to The Pirate Bay databases may give him the IP and email addresses of the minority who signed up for an account, and that could even include information on big uploaders, but the former aren’t of much interest and the latter tend to hide their identities anyway.

No, proof of actual infringement is needed here and for that he’s going to need to connect to outside trackers or DHT, the mechanisms through which peers in torrent swarms are able to find each other and the content being shared. He heads back to his boss to ask for more resources and more money. He gets it.

Getting closer

With fistfuls of crisp dollars in hand, Special Agent Share starts exploring public trackers in order to find the IP addresses of people sharing illegal content. At last, here is the goldmine he’s been looking for. Over the course of the next few weeks he collects the IP addresses of individuals sharing infringing content and goes to court to obtain a subpoena against their ISPs. He’s now within reach of obtaining their identities.

More money please

With his project so near to completion, our Agent requests more funds to finally unveil the perpetrators. Just before signing off on yet more cash, the FBI’s chief purse-string controller asks: “These are Pirate Bay users, right?”

“Some are but not necessarily all,” he responds. “I pulled the data from a public tracker used by the site.”

Two words in the sentence interest the spy-funding accountant. “Public tracker?” he questions. “Aren’t those publicly available resources that ANYONE can get information from for FREE?”

“Yes sir,” Share confirms.

“And we needed The Pirate Bay for what exactly?” the accountant responds.

The Special Agent’s career flashes before his eyes. Then it hits him.

“To scare the shit out of the Internet sir?????????”

“You’re fired,” came the response. “They do that themselves. FOR FREE.”

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