Preventing or at least reducing the flood of pirated copies of movies and TV shows online remains a priority for entertainment industry companies everywhere.

In the current environment, most public activity is aimed at distributors, such as torrent and streaming platforms. However, hitting those who supply content from higher up the chain is a long-standing but lesser-publicized strategy.

News coming in from Italy indicates that the authorities there have been looking closely at players who they consider to be particularly big fish.

The Guardia di Finanza of Pesaro, a department under Italy’s Minister of Economy, reports a long and complex investigation to target the individuals behind a release group they name as ‘FREE / iNCOMiNG’.

Operating between 2010 to 2016, the group is identified as “one of the main groups operating on the Italian and international scenes.” According to the GdF, ‘FREE / iNCOMiNG’ collaborated with foreign groups to which it supplied copies of movies recorded in Italian cinemas, reportedly accounting for 66% of copies of such movies made available online.

The investigation sought to link camcorded copies of movies with players in the group, an effort that was carried out by the Public Prosecutor of Pesaro in coordination with investigators at the Federation for the Protection of Audiovisual and Multimedia Content (FAPAV).

This led to the identification of four suspects with house searches subsequently executed in four regions of Italy (Marche, Piedmont, Lombardy and Puglia) and the seizure of equipment including PCs, smartphones, and media containing an estimated 800,000 files.

“The subsequent analysis of what was seized allowed us to discover that the group members, after the acquisition of the successful films and the major television series broadcast on pay-per-view channels, took care of the assembly and coding for upload on powerful servers,” the investigators reveal.

“The modified files were advertised on websites that, upon payment, facilitated illegal downloading. The group in question also established significant contacts and collaborations with other foreign release groups, thus succeeding in diversifying the sources of income connected to the illicit copies.”

Anti-piracy group FAPAV welcomed the results of the investigation, particularly in respect of the disruption to the supply of movies illegally recorded in theaters.

“According to our estimates, as far as the first cinematographic releases are concerned, in nine cases out of ten the audio and video source of the pirated files is represented by the unauthorized recordings that take place by ‘release groups’ in cinemas,” said Federico Bagnoli Rossi, General Secretary FAPAV.

“Camcording is, therefore, the primary source of piracy, a phenomenon that should not be underestimated considering the huge damage it causes the entire sector. Such recordings, in fact, are usually realized in the very first days following the release of films in theaters or when the works are in their initial phase of exploitation.”

The cases of the four men, whose identities have not been revealed, are said to have been handed to the authorities for action under relevant laws. At least as far as public piracy release databases reveal, iNCOMiNG ceased releases under that specific name around 16 months ago.

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The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been protecting the interests of Hollywood since its formation in 1922.

It generates most of its revenue from contributions by the six major Hollywood studios – Disney, Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros.

But now, in a historic move, a significant new member has joined the movie and TV show trade association.

“On behalf of the MPAA and its member companies, I am delighted to welcome Netflix as a partner,” MPAA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.

“All of our members are committed to pushing the film and television industry forward, in both how we tell stories and how we reach audiences. Adding Netflix will allow us to even more effectively advocate for the global community of creative storytellers, and I look forward to seeing what we can all achieve together.”

The addition of Netflix to the MPAA fold doesn’t come as a complete surprise.

As reported in 2018, the MPAA faces a shrinking budget following Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox. Despite reporting revenues of $57m (including studio contributions of almost $50m) in its latest public filings, that figure was down from $73 million in the previous year.

Disney previously promised to pay Fox’s MPAA contributions for a year after the finalization of the deal but that still had the potential to leave the MPAA down one-sixth in membership dues. Presuming that the streaming service will pay an equal share, Netflix’s membership of the trade group should go a long way to filling the Fox-shaped hole in its budget.

The addition of Netflix to the MPAA is groundbreaking on a few fronts.

Perhaps most significantly, Netflix isn’t a Hollywood studio, so its membership breaks with almost a century of tradition. And, of course, this is the first time that a dedicated streaming service has become so closely aligned with the interests of the 97-year-old organization.

“Joining the Motion Picture Association further exemplifies our commitment to ensuring the vibrancy of these creative industries and the many talented people who work in them all over the world,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer.

“We look forward to supporting the association team and their important efforts.”

While Netflix settles in as the MPAA’s newest member, the streaming service is no stranger to working with the major Hollywood studios in respect of content protection.

In 2017, Netflix was revealed as one of the founding members of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment  (ACE), a global anti-piracy group featuring the studios of the MPAA and dozens of other companies. As a key member, Netflix was granted full voting rights on ACE business, including the approval of initiatives and public policy, anti-piracy strategy, budget-related matters, plus approval of legal action.

If the MPAA is looking to expand further still, it’s possible that Amazon could yet join the fold. Not only is Amazon a founding member of ACE, but the company was also touted as a potential new MPAA member during 2018.

Amazon, however, is still a member of the Internet Association, a pro-tech group organization that Netflix parted company with recently, just in advance of joining the MPAA.

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Watching most top-tier soccer or football is an expensive option in most regions. Billions are paid out by broadcasters for the rights to matches and this cost has to be passed down to fans.

While millions dig deep to fund what has become a pricey sport to follow, others seek a free fix, often in the shape of an unauthorized online stream. These come in many formats, from websites with embedded players through to IPTV and streaming torrent links.

While these are widely available online, having these sources listed in one place is much more convenient for the end user. Until two days ago, Reddit’s /r/soccerstreams subreddit aimed to fill that gap.

With in excess of 420,000 subscribers, /r/soccerstreams was undoubtedly popular but like similar sections on Reddit offering links to infringing content, the subreddit was also plagued with copyright infringement complaints from upset rightsholders.

According to the moderators of /r/soccerstreams, these recently reached “critical mass”, something which effectively shut down the subreddit.

“I regret to inform you all that a few days ago, the Reddit Admins got in touch with us about an impending ban of this subreddit if changes weren’t made,” moderator ‘notsoyoungpadawan‘ wrote in an announcement.

“The only way to save it, from our perspective, was to cease all user related activity here.”

Since the users of the subreddit were the ones posting the links, the announcement means that while /r/soccerstreams still technically exists, the lack of any streaming soccer links means that the show is effectively over. However, the subreddit will now act as a “home base for the official Soccer Streams mod team.”

With /r/soccerstreams being used for announcements and news moving forward, the mod team has revealed that two new subreddits have been created for Premier League content and content from other leagues. There is also a Discord Server for the former.

“The aforementioned two are, for the moment, temporary solutions. We are working on a more permanent solution, however, due to the short notice we’ve had to work with what we have,” the mod teams says.

The indication that these are only temporary solutions is unsurprising.

While it’s unclear which leagues filed copyright infringement complaints with Reddit, it’s more than likely that the Premier League was heavily involved so will take a dim view of any new section set up to carry out the same function as /r/soccerstreams.

There seems little doubt that if they gain any traction on Reddit or Discord, these new sharing venues will eventually be shut down too since both Reddit and Discord have policies that outlaw copyright infringement and the increasing importance of repeat infringer policies.

This voluntary shutdown features just one in a line of similar subreddits that have been shut down following copyright complaints in recent times. Last year /r/megalinks suffered a similar fate as did /r/crackedsoftware.

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IPFS, short for InterPlanetary File System, has been around for a few years now.

While the name sounds alien to most people, it has a growing userbase among the tech-savvy.

In short, IPFS is a decentralized network where users make files available among each other. If a website uses IPFS, it is served by a “swarm” of people, much like BitTorrent users do when a file is shared.

The advantage of this system is that websites can become completely decentralized. If a website or other resource is hosted with IPFS, it remains accessible as long as the computer of one user who “pinned” it remains online.

The advantages of IPFS are clear. It allows archivists, content creators, researchers, and many others to distribute large volumes of data over the Internet. It’s censorship resistant and not vulnerable to regular hosting outages.

It’salso a perfect match for ‘pirate’ sites. The decentralized nature makes IPFS sites virtually impossible to shut down. This aspect was already highlighted by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, back in 2016.

“IPFS is really good and if everyone started using that instead it would be great. It would be working perfectly with less centralization. The problem is that the big sites like TPB and KAT are not really good at using new technology,” Sunde said.

KAT was shut down shortly after Sunde commented and while The Pirate Bay remains online, it now suffers more downtime than ever. Still, none of the major pirate sites have shown an interest in IPFS thus far.

There are others who’ve taken up this challenge though. A developer going by the handle ‘Urban Guacamole’ recently launched Torrent-Paradise, a torrent index which is powered with IPFS.

“I feel like decentralizing search is the natural next step in the evolution of the torrent ecosystem. File sharing keeps moving in the direction of more and more decentralization, eliminating one single point of failure after another,” he informs TF.

To start the site Torrent-Paradise used a copy of The Pirate Bay database. This was transformed into a searchable index with help from ipfsearch.xyz and the site’s operator has a DHT crawler which, at the moment, adds approximately 20,000 new torrents per day.

This all sounds positive but there are also some drawbacks.

One of the main hurdles is that IPFS has to be installed and configured if you want to become a node. This is a relatively easy process, but the average web user may not be familiar with using a command line to set it up, which is a requirement.

However, there are also IPFS gateways available. Cloudflare, for example, introduced one recently. This allows anyone to access sites such as Torrent-Paradise through a custom URL, but these people don’t help to share the site.

Another downside is that the static index which the site relies on is only updated once a day. This isn’t a technical restriction, but more a practical one. In theory, it could be updated in near real-time.

At the moment there’s both a regular Torrent-Paradise website, accessible to all, as well as an IPFS version which will remain ad-free. The site itself is fairly basic, but the real point of it is to showcase the power of decentralization.

The decentralization of file-sharing has been ongoing for decades. The BitTorrent protocol is decentralized, for example. And The Pirate Bay moved this further by removing its tracker and torrents, relying on DHT and magnet links instead.

“Decentralizing torrent search is next,” Urban Guacamole says, who believes that IPFS could become more common among torrent sites in the future.

Torrent-Paradise’s operator sees ‘availability’ as one of the main advantages. In this case, that goes hand in hand with being censorship resistant.

“Because each update of Torrent Paradise is an IPFS hash, it is impossible for anyone, including me, to take down the site. As long as there’s someone pinning it (the IPFS equivalent of seeding), the site will be available.”

Since the site started out as a Pirate Bay copy, rightsholders may eventually come in with complaints. While the site will comply with DMCA notices, it can’t control the hashes that are already shared in the network.

For the time being, Urban Guacamole plans to continue his work on the site. With a free domain name and Cloudflare support, it only costs roughly $4 a month, so the cost is not a factor.

Perhaps something for The Pirate Bay to consider?

“It most definitely would help them keep their site available when their servers are down,” Urban Guacamole says.

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