Hollywood has a message to all those pirates who keep making excuses to download and stream films illegally.

“You have no excuse.”

The major movie studios have done enough to make their content legally available, launching thousands of convenient movie services worldwide, they claim.

“We need to bust the myth that legal content is unavailable. Creative industries are tirelessly experimenting with new business models that deliver films, books, music, TV programs, newspapers, games and other creative works to consumers,” Stan McCoy noted on the MPAA blog this week.

“In Europe, there are over 3,000 on-demand audio-visual services available to European citizens,” he adds.

So is the MPA right? Is “availability” an imaginary problem that pirates use as an excuse not to pay?

We decided to investigate the issue by looking at the online availability of the ten most downloaded films of last week. Since the MPAA’s blog post talked about Europe and the UK we decided to use Findanyfilm.com which focuses on UK content. The results of our small survey speak for themselves.

Of the ten most pirated movies only Gone Girl is available to buy or rent online. A pretty weak result, especially since it’s still missing from the most popular video subscription service Netflix.

Ranking	Movie	Available Online? Buy / Rent
torrentfreak.com
1	Interstellar	NO
2	American Sniper	NO
3	Taken 3	NO
4	The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies	NO
5	John Wick	NO
6	Into The Woods	NO
7	Fury	NO
8	Gone Girl	Rent/Buy
9	American Heist	NO
10	The Judge	NO

Yes, the results above are heavily skewed because they only include movies that were released recently. Looking up films from 2011 will result in a much more favorable outcome in terms of availability.

But isn’t that the problem exactly? Most film fans are not interested in last year’s blockbusters, they want to able to see the new stuff in their home too. And since the movie industry prefers to keep its windowing business model intact, piracy is often the only option to watch recent movies online.

So when the MPA’s Stan McCoy says that lacking availability is a myth, he’s ignoring the elephant in the room.

For as long as the film industry keeps its windowing business model intact, releasing films online months after their theatrical release, people will search for other ways to access content, keeping their piracy habit alive.

Admittedly, changing a business that has relied on complex licensing schemes and windowing strategies for decades isn’t easy. But completely ignoring that these issues play a role is a bit shortsighted.

There’s no doubt that the movie studios are making progress. It’s also true that many people choose to pirate content that is legally available, simply because it’s free. There is no good excuse for these freeriders, but it’s also a myth that Hollywood has done all it can to eradicate piracy.

Even its own research proves them wrong.

Earlier this year a KPMG report, commissioned by NBC Universal, showed that only 16% of the most popular and critically acclaimed films are available via Netflix and other on-demand subscription services. The missing 84% includes recent titles but also older ones that are held back due to rights issues.

Clearly, availability is still an issue.

So if Hollywood accuses Google of breeding pirates, then it’s safe to say the same about Hollywood.

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

For millions of people around the world the word of their particular God provides a moral compass for living life in an appropriate manner.

While there are plenty of variations, most faiths agree that it is unacceptable to steal, for example.

Inevitably there are gray areas and the issue of copyright provides a perfect example. Rightsholders constantly push the notion that infringement is theft so it’s no surprise that some people draw the same conclusion.

Over in Turkey the country’s top religious body has been handling the issue at the behest of citizens. Is downloading content without permission from rightsholders acceptable under Islam?

In response to a question asking whether the activity is ‘halal’ (permissible), the Religious Affairs Directorate, or Diyanet as it’s known locally, issued a fatwa (ruling).

Great value should be placed on labor and there should be opposition to “unjust enrichment” from the work of others,” Diyanet said.

“The Prophet also stressed the importance of paying for one’s labor on several occasions,” it said, warning that “[property] rights violations [are still common] as technology develops and human labor has started to appear in more diverse forms.”

“Such unfair acts [such as downloading pirated software] not only usurp the individuals’ rights, they also discourage people who work in those sectors from creating new products, turning the matter into a public rights violation in a broader sense,” Diyanet said.

But it wasn’t only followers of Islam that required guidance on file-sharing from religious bodies this week. The same question was also posed to the Catholic Church via the site Crux.

“My boyfriend is a tech geek, by profession and vocation. He was an early adopter of the Internet and believes strongly in its founding values — that ‘information wants to be free’,” the question from ‘Starving Artist’ began.

“I admire his geek credentials and tech skills, but there’s something he does, with pride, that bugs me a lot. He pirates everything.

“I am a writer, and can earn a living only if other people buy the things I write. I feel my boyfriend is undermining me — if not directly, then indirectly. Who is right?”

The response was predictable – the woman’s boyfriend is “stealing” – but the advice for negotiating the problem in the relationship is a novel one.

“Agree that whenever he spends $7.99 on a movie instead of downloading it for free, the two of you will put a few cents — representing the artist’s take — in a jar,” Crux wrote.

“When the jar is full, the two of you can go out to a romantic dinner and have the kind of human interaction that no download can provide.”

Crux contributor Chris McLaughlin was underwhelmed by the reply.

“The purpose of the copyright monopoly (which is a law of man not of God) isn’t to enable somebody to make money, and never was. Its sole purpose was and is to advance humanity as a whole. The monopoly begins and ends with the public interest; it does not exist for the benefit of the author and inventor,” McLaughlin writes.

“I wonder if the Church would have ever got started at all, if Matthew, Mark, Luke and John had demanded a royalty every time Paul set up in a new city.”

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

As the largest torrent site on the Internet, KickassTorrents (KAT) has become a prime target for copyright holders.

In terms of daily visitors KAT is comparable to The Pirate Bay at its height, but there’s one key difference. Unlike TPB, KAT accepts DMCA takedown notices so rightsholders have the option to remove infringing content from the site.

Thus far the popular torrent index has processed more than half a million requests. While that’s already a decent number, last week many KAT users noticed that content had started to disappear at an increasing rate.

“In the past 48 hours over 200 of my uploads have been removed due to the DMCA. In the past four years only 100 had been removed. Does anyone know what’s going on?” KAT’s “elite mod” Politux wrote a few days ago.

“I haven’t uploaded as much as you, but I’ve lost 6% of my torrents to DMCA,” another user replied, before many more joined in to count their losses.

Ironically, the thread where the discussion on the takedown purge started was quickly removed. But that didn’t stop the complaints from pouring in. In several forum posts and blog entries people started discussing the takedowns, with some even threatening to leave the site over it.

Looking at KAT’s takedown stats we see that there has indeed been a significant increase in DMCA takedowns. Over the past week KAT has removed close to 30,000 torrents, which is more than 5% of all files that have been removed in the site’s entire history.

While the spike may just be temporary, KAT admin Mr.Gooner has seized the opportunity to respond in style, declaring February 1st to be “KickAss Upload Day.”

“Due to a recent rise in Torrents deleted because of copyright reasons and the mass of users rightfully having a grumble I suggested we should have a day like this as a ‘fight back’ if you like,” Mr.Gooner writes.

“A way of encouraging everyone to upload and let these removals go over our heads, to work together as a unit & to continue enjoying each and every minute of KAT and one another’s uploads,” he adds.

The idea seems to be catching on as the call to action has already generated hundreds of replies, with many uploaders vowing to upload as much as they can. On an average day KAT lists roughly 5,000 new torrents, but there may be a few more today.

Whether copyright holders are planning a counter-response is unknown, but based on the reactions thus far the DMCA whack-a-mole won’t end anytime soon.

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

Early December The Pirate Bay was raided at the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex near Stockholm.

After being down for two weeks the domain came back online waving a pirate flag on its temporary homepage.

TPB later added a countdown to February 1st, alongside several hints that the site would reappear that day.

Today we can report that The Pirate Bay has lived up to the comeback expectations, with a comeback one day ahead of schedule.

A few minutes ago the site started serving torrents to the masses again, much to the delight of millions of users. The Pirate Bay’s homepage currently features a Phoenix.

The Pirate Bay doesn’t have any ads at the moment but the look and feel of the site is familiar, and the user accounts are working properly too. The “Contact Us,” “RSS” and “Register” links are not operational yet and result in a 404 error.

Based on the recent torrents it appears that data loss is minimal. The latest upload was on December 9 last year, the same day TPB’s servers were raided.

There is one quite significant change though. The Pirate Bay staff can no longer access the moderation panel.

Earlier this week TPB staff already told us that they would be locked out of the reborn site. This kind of streamlining would make the site easier to manage and reduce the risk of being brought down for a third time.

However, these planned “optimizations” caused mutiny among the site’s original staff members.

WTC-SWE, one of the lead admins of The Pirate Bay, told us that they are launching their own version of the Pirate Bay, which they believe will be the real one.

These “former” staff members will also relaunch the official Suprbay forums. Interestingly, Thepiratebay.se is no longer listing Suprbay in its links section.

To make the matter even more confusing, Pirate Bay’s downtime spurred the development of various spin-offs, all of which have steady userbases of their own. Isohunt.to’s OldPirateBay.org is currently the largest, with millions of visitors per day and the number one spot for the search term Pirate Bay in Google.

It will be interesting to see if thepiratebay.se can reclaim these visitors during the months to come.

Update: A former TPB staffer informed TF that the moderation interface is indeed gone.

Update: TPB has some connection issues every now and then, probably because of the huge amount of traffic.

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

Placing unreleased movies onto the Internet whilst located in the UK is a risky business and one likely to attract the attention of anti-piracy companies if done on a large-scale.

FACT, the Federation Against Copyright Theft, are particularly vigilant in this area and have launch numerous investigations into those it believes have infringed their movie partners’ copyrights.

On February 1 2013, FACT announced that they had joined police officers from the Economic Crime Unit to carry out raids in the UK targeting four addresses in the West Midlands.

Following a hearing in September 2014, the case was heard in Wolverhampton Crown Court this week. It’s the culmination of three years’ investigative work by FACT into the “source and supply” of copyrighted movies.

The accused are: Graeme Reid, 40, from Chesterfield, Scott Hemming, 25, and Reece Baker, 22, both from Birmingham, Sahil Rafiq, 24, of Wolverhampton and Ben Cooper, 33, of Willenhall.

In line with previous FACT-led prosecutions, copyright infringement is completely off the table. All men pleaded guilty to Conspiracy to Defraud a charge that previously saw SurfTheChannel’s Anton Vickerman jailed for four years.

In an earlier FACT press release the men were referred to as members of The Scene but one of the accused informs TorrentFreak that simply isn’t true.

“They say we were in The Scene – no, we were P2P,” he said.

Unless other connections come out in court, his claims appear to be true.

TorrentFreak has learned that the investigation spanned several BitTorrent-based release groups including 26K, RemixHD and UNiQUE, plus torrent sites Unleashthe.net (the site run by busted US-based release group IMAGiNE) and TheResistance.

Nevertheless, the case marks the first time that a group of movie releasers have ever gone to court in the UK and the signs are not promising for the men. Big numbers are being thrown around including the unauthorized release of up to 9,000 movies alongside claims that up to five million people may have viewed them.

At the end of the hearing the men were released on bail. They’re now in the hands of FACT’s private prosecution and whatever the court decides is an appropriate sentence following their guilty pleas. The extent of both will be revealed at a hearing later in the year.

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