South Korea has long been associated with some of the fastest average Internet connection speeds available anywhere in the world. The country topped the list in 2017 and is still a key player today.

While fast Internet speeds are great for average users, Internet pirates are always particularly grateful for speedy transfers and those in South Korea are no different. As a result, authorities in the country have been under pressure to do something about piracy rates.

In an announcement this week, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism revealed that specialist Intellectual Property Rights police shut down 25 pirate sites in 2018, adding that the operators of 13 had been arrested. Some will face criminal proceedings alongside claims for civil damages, reports suggest.

One of the largest targets appears to have been Marumaru, a local site that specialized in Japanese manga content. After being founded in 2013, Marumaru grew at an impressive rate, allegedly earning around a million dollars in advertising revenue while offering an estimated 42,000 copyrighted manga works.

Last November, however, the show came to an end after the platform was shut down. A month later, two alleged operators of the site were charged with copyright infringement offenses.

South Korea’s commitment to tackling piracy appears to be hardening. This week the Korea Communications Standards Commission said it had launched a special unit (Copyright Infringement Response Team) to tackle pirate sites in order to protect local industries.

In common with similar initiatives in other regions, the aim is to target platforms based overseas that are claimed to be out of local authorities’ reach. It’s no surprise that web-blocking is considered part of the solution.

The KCSC said that it blocked around 50 websites to 2014 but last year that total had risen to 2,338. A 2018 report from the MPA (pdf), that studied South Korea’s blocking regime, declared that the practice meant that “total visits to piracy sites declined following each wave of site blocking.”

It now appears that even more stringent steps will be taken to prevent direct visits to pirate sites. The ‘Response Team’ has been tasked with monitoring pirate sites “round the clock” in order to provide a “rapid and strong response” to infringement and evasive action by site operators.

Sites that spring up to facilitate access to previously-blocked sites, such as mirrors and proxies, will be dealt with within four days, with complaints from rightsholders actioned within the same time-frame.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is promising to continue the crackdown for years to come and indicates it will work also with foreign authorities to tackle all types of pirate sites.

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The Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright (BCBC) is a lobbying group which includes Canada’s largest ISPs Bell, Rogers, and Shaw, as well as Google.

The coalition doesn’t have a web presence but, behind the scenes, it’s making sure that the interests of its members are shared when major legislative changes are on the agenda.

This is currently the case. Canada is working on a Statutory Review of the Copyright Act, and together with more than a hundred other stakeholders, BCBC submitted several recommendations.

One of the items high on the agenda are the copyright notices which rightsholders send to ISPs. Millions of these are processed by ISPs every month, and they are obliged to forward them to their customers.

This notice-and-notice system caused quite a controversy, as some companies abused the system to send threatening settlement demands. This practice was outlawed with the recent passing of C-86 but BCBC believes that additional changes are required.

Under BCBC’s umbrella, the ISPs state that they are happy with the update, but they note that there’s no deterrent to stop rightsholders from sending settlement requests. Instead, the burden of excluding settlement demands rests with them, they argue.

“Bill C-86 makes it clear that ISPs will not be required to forward settlement demands to subscribers. However, the amendments contain no useful deterrent to dissuade rights holders or claimants from including settlement demands in their copyright notices.

“The onus for excluding settlement demands from copyright notices must rest solely with rights owners,” BCBC’s submission adds.

The group doesn’t give any concrete pointers on how to address the situation, but a fine or other punishment for those who continue to send settlement requests seems most logical.

The ISPs also highlight another problem. They are currently receiving millions of piracy notices per month, in many different formats. To process these requests more easily, they call for a notice standard so they can be processed automatically.

“ISPs are currently receiving millions of notices per month and
there is no way for these notices to be manually processed. Large ISPs have to adopt automated systems to process and forward the volume of notices they are receiving,” the submission reads.

The idea for a standardized notice template is not new. ISPs and members of the movie industry previously agreed on a standard computer readable format, ACNS, which is publicly available.

BCBC hopes that the Canadian Government will embrace this standard, not only to lower the costs for ISPs, but also to shield Internet users from receiving non-compliant piracy warnings.

“The Government should use its existing authority to enact regulations requiring that notices be submitted electronically in a form that is based on the ACNS 2.0. Mandating the use of these standards will eliminate the risk of ISPs forwarding non-compliant notices,” BCBC recommends. 

Aside from piracy notices, BCBC also touches on pirate site blocking. It is no surprise that the major ISPs are not against such measures, as last year’s site-blocking push revealed.

In their current recommendation, they don’t call for site blocking without a court order. However, they do stress that, if a court issues a blocking order, the CRTC should not be able to stop it from being implemented.

“The BCBC finds it unacceptable that an ISP could be ordered by a Court to block access to an infringing internet service and prohibited by the CRTC from complying with that Court Order.

“A telecommunications services provider should never have to choose between complying with a lawful Court Order and complying with theTelecommunications Act. This conflict must be resolved in favor of the Court Order,” the group adds.

A copy of the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright’s  Submission to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology regarding the Statutory Review of the Copyright Act is available here (pdf).

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As mentioned a few days ago, every year thousands of people are sued in the United States for online file-sharing, mostly through BitTorrent.

The bulk of these cases are filed by two adult content producers, which are often referred to as “copyright trolls” or “porno trolls,” specifying the nature of their works.

These companies target people whose connections were allegedly used to download and share infringing videos, in the hope of obtaining a significant financial settlement.

While many of the defendants may have done the deed, quite a few of the accused Internet subscribers have done nothing wrong. This is also what a John Doe, known by the IP-address 73.225.38.130, argued in a recent court filing in a federal court in Seattle, Washington.

The defendant in question was sued over a year ago by Strike 3 Holdings,  but he isn’t planning on settling. Instead, as the case progressed, the still unnamed man went on the offensive, helped by major law firm Fox Rothschild.

As it turns out, the adult company picked a fight with a 70+-year-old retired police officer. Following some initial pushback in court, Strike 3 Holdings was ready to let the case go. The company filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss all claims in August, but the “ex-cop” wasn’t willing to let them.

There were still several counterclaims pending and the defendant has built up a significant legal bill, which he doesn’t plan on paying himself. Instead, he wants to be found innocent and accuses the copyright holder of abuse of process. These counterclaims could go all the way up to trial.

With the tables turned, the retired policeman submitted amended counterclaims to the court last week, accusing the rightsholder of being engaged in a “perverse litigation campaign” against hundreds of defendants.

Strike 3 accused him of sharing dozens of copyrighted videos, but the man argues that he has never even heard of them.

“John Doe is a retired police officer in his 70’s. He has been married for over 40 years. Until he was sued by S3H, John Doe had never heard of the pornographic websites: ‘Blacked’, ‘Vixen’, or ‘Tushy’. John Doe does not know who downloaded these movies,” the document reads.

The man seeks a declaration of non-infringement, but also accuses the adult content producer of copyright misuse and abuse of process.

“John Doe, an ex-cop, seeks affirmative relief that he did not infringe the works at issue, that the works are unenforceable under the doctrine of copyright misuse, and that litigation model itself is actionable under the common law of abuse of process,“ the filing reads.

“What is clear is that the S3H litigation model is not what it claims, to protect itself from copyright infringement, rather S3H has a business model to use the court system to extract income using ‘sue and settle’ without resorting to the far less costly provisions provided under the DMCA.”

From the filing

The copyright misuse claims were dismissed previously, but Judge Thomas Zilly kept the counterclaims for a declaration of non-infringement and abuse of process alive. 

According to the attorneys of the former policeman, there is no real legal dispute with Strike 3’s lawsuits, but “only a scheme to extort.”

The accused file-sharer argues that Strike 3 has filed hundreds of lawsuits, but if it was really interested in enforcing its rights, it would also use DMCA notices to alert ISPs and their customers of any infringing activity.

“S3H’s intentional failure to send DMCA notices to the ISP addresses of alleged John Doe defendants evidences an ulterior purpose to accomplish an object not within the proper scope of the process: extortion through sham litigation,” the filing reads.

“Filing a lawsuit with no intention of litigating evidences an ulterior purpose to accomplish an object not within the proper scope of process: extortion through sham litigation,” it adds.

Based on these and other arguments, the former policeman wants the adult production company to be held accountable for abuse of process. In addition, it also requests the declaration of non-infringement, with all fees and legal costs being compensated.

The court has yet to rule on the requests but it appears that the retired policeman has the upper hand, as Strike 3 previously indicated that they are willing to let the case go.

Whether the court will grant summary judgment, or if the case will be resolved through an alternative route, possibly a trial, has yet to be seen.

This case is not the only setback for the adult content producer either. In several recent cases the company was requested to provide “something more” than an IP-address as evidence of alleged infringement.

In addition, the IP-address geo-location tools which are crucial in these cases remain controversial as well. Just last month, a California federal court dismissed a request for an ISP subpoena, as there wasn’t sufficient evidence that an IP-address was tied to the court’s jurisdiction.

A copy of the second amended counterclaims is available here (pdf).

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Millions of Internet video consumers favor the open source media player Kodi for its long history and unparalleled flexibility.

While perfectly at home playing legitimate content, the tool can also be configured, via third-party addons, to act as a powerful piracy tool.

This has led to Kodi being dragged into all kinds of controversies, none of which the official development team encourage or relish. Nevertheless, when a headline features the word ‘Kodi’ these days, trouble is rarely far behind.

The latest installment raised its head during the past few days, when the official Kodi team took to Twitter to berate electronics giant Sony. Owners of some of Sony’s latest Android-based TVs had complained of installation issues when attempting to deploy Kodi on their hardware and the feeling was that Sony wasn’t playing fair.

After various tests, the Kodi team felt that Android Oreo wasn’t playing a part, since the NVIDIA SHIELD runs on the same Android variant. Only adding to the suspicions were tests carried out by Kodi enthusiasts that suggested that Sony might be blocking Kodi’s Package ID.

Indeed, more detailed testing this week seemed to back up that claim, after members of the Kodi team ‘faked’ their Package ID and found that overcame the problem on Sony’s hardware.

TorrentFreak originally contacted Sony for an explanation but the company would only tell us that they do not curate apps and does not have the ability to block them. Since the statement was fairly vague we followed up with more questions and although they still weren’t directly addressed, the company has now provided an explanation.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” Sony Electronics told TF.

“After looking into the issue further, we’ve discovered a software issue on our end that is incorrectly classifying Kodi as a kernel object (‘ko’). We are working on a fix for this issue to include in our next software update,” the company added.

TorrentFreak shared the comments with the Kodi development team who appear skeptical of Sony’s explanation and have asked for additional details on the company’s “classification” algorithm.

“The real fun thing is: Just changing the PACKAGE_ID is proven to be enough [to solve the issue], so that this ‘classification’ won’t happen anymore,” says Peter Frühberger.

“Furthermore, the Fun-Fact: As we have shown, creating a different APK, not Kodi-related, but with the very same PACKAGE_ID Kodi had, causes the same issue.

“To be honest – as someone that did PHD studies with pattern classifications and data mining, this sounds really, really odd. I doubt this explanation, but if it’s true – their classificator most likely sucks,” Frühberger added.

While there will probably be much additional debate over Sony’s explanation, it does appear that Kodi won’t be blocked forever on the company’s smart TVs, which is probably the end result both the Kodi team and its users had hoped for.

TorrentFreak’s additional questions, concerning Sony’s promotion of Kodi on its website last year (which was later removed), remain unanswered.

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First announced in the summer of 2013, the City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) quickly declared its mission to tackle IP crime both at home and overseas.

In the more than five years since, PIPCU has tackled all kinds of infringement, closely aligning itself with the needs of the music, movie, and publishing industries. As a result, the unit has often been in the headlines tackling torrent and streaming piracy, as well as dealing with organized criminals who flood the market with counterfeit consumer electronics and clothing.

PIPCU’s 2013 launch was facilitated with £2.56 million in funding from the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO), funding that has continued since. During August 2017, for example, PIPCU said it had received an additional £3.32 million, to safeguard the unit until June 30, 2019.

However, in a report from UK tabloid The Sun yesterday, the publication suggested that PIPCU’s funding could be in question.

“[P]lans for industry stakeholders to fund the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit have fallen through and government funding runs out in June,” the paper claimed.

This was enough for Shadow policing minister Louise Haigh to weigh-in on the issue, openly criticizing the government for not doing enough to protect the public on the Internet.

“It’s about time ministers stopped short-changing the police and gave them the resources they need to keep people safe online,” she said.

To the best of our knowledge, PIPCU has always been funded by the government, so the suggestion that there were recent discussions for the creative industries to contribute financially comes as news to us. Speaking with WTR, PIPCU itself poured cold water on the industry-funding claim.

“PIPCU has always received two year rolling funding from the IPO,” PIPCU Detective Chief Inspector Teresa Russell told the publication.

“While PIPCU’s funding does expire in June, the funding will be extended by the IPO. There have been no recent plans for PIPCU to be funded directly by industry.”

The intention for the government to continue funding PIPCU was confirmed by Dr Ros Lynch at the Intellectual Property Office.

“We are committed to funding the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit beyond June 2019 when the current funding runs out,” Lynch said.

“The unit provides a positive impact on this type of crime and discussions with the City of London Police on future funding is already very advanced.”

The news that PIPCU will be funded beyond June 2019 comes on the heels of the unit receiving praise during the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global Innovation Policy Center’s (GIPC) 6th annual IP Champions event in Washington last year.

Two key players from PIPCU were handed the IP Champion for Excellence in Enforcement award. Detective Chief Superintendent Pete O’Doherty was recognized for his leadership at PIPCU while Nick Court, PIPCU’s former Acting Detective Chief Inspector, was credited for combating illegal online streaming and other digital piracy.

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