Four years ago, Singapore became the latest in a long line of countries to use copyright law to block access to ‘pirate’ sites. The amendments were passed during the summer of 2014 and took effect in December the same year.

After a break of almost two years, a request by the MPA(A) rendered Solarmovie.ph inaccessible in 2016. Several major ISPs were ordered by the High Court to block the streaming platform, the first such action in the country.

In April this year the MPA(A) chalked up another victory when its application to have 53 sites operating across 154 domains – including those operated by variants of The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents – was granted by the High Court. ISPs including Singtel, StarHub, M1, MyRepublic and ViewQwest blocked the sites shortly after.

The blocking process in Singapore appears to be thorough. The High Court must be satisfied that sites targeted are “flagrantly infringing”, i.e with a primary purpose of breaching copyright and generally showing a lack of respect for copyright law. Site operators are also able to defend themselves although thus far, none have done so.

With plenty of experience of sites around the world taking evasive counter-measures to avoid blocking, the injunction in Singapore allowed copyright holders to return to Court to request an amended order to block new domains and/or IP addresses. However, this model has proven cumbersome in the past so it’s no surprise the MPA(A) has now persuaded the Court to adopt a more streamlined approach.

After highlighting that several of the blocked sites changed their domains to avoid blocking, the High Court has now handed down a “dynamic injunction” which will allow the Hollywood studios to block any new methods deployed by the 53 sites covered by the earlier injunction.

“Without a continuing obligation to block additional domain names, URLs and/or IP addresses upon being informed of such sites, it is unlikely that there would be effective disabling of access to the 53 (infringing websites),” said Justice Lee Seiu Kin, as quoted by TodayOnline.

Under the terms of the new order, companies including Disney, Paramount Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox, will be able to liaise with ISPs M1, MyRepublic, Singtel, StarHub and ViewQwest to have additional domains and IP addresses blocked, if they facilitate access to the previously blocked sites.

According to Justice Lee, the new injunction “provides a practical means of ensuring the continued effectiveness of the original injunction since it provides an expedited process for the blocking of additional (piracy websites).”

The Judge added that ISPs will only have to block the new resources if they are satisfied there is enough evidence to do so but according to TodayOnline, this was highlighted as potentially problematic by local lawyers.

“It is questionable if this is a good enough safeguard when the most expeditious way for an Internet service provider to respond, upon receipt of a request to block an additional domain name, would simply be to comply with the request, rather than to incur the time and cost of disputing the matter with the copyright owner,” said representatives from the Bird & Bird law firm.

Nevertheless, the judgment was welcomed by Neil Gane, general manager of the Asia Video Industry Association’s Coalition Against Piracy.

“There is no one silver bullet to deterring online piracy,” Gane said. “What is required is a holistic solution to include enforcement; disabling access to egregious piracy websites through effective site blocking; cooperation with technology platforms and other intermediaries; and consumer outreach.”

According to a report published by the Motion Picture Association Canada earlier this year, at least 42 countries are now obligated to block infringing sites. In Europe alone, 1,800 sites and 5,300 domains have been rendered inaccessible, with Portugal, Italy, the UK, and Denmark leading the way.

In Canada this week, site-blocking efforts suffered a setback when local telecoms regulator CRTC denied FairPlay Canada’s application for a broad pirate site blocking scheme. CRTC cited a lack of jurisdiction under the Telecommunications Act.

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At the start of this year pirate streaming site 123movies was one of the largest pirate streaming sites on the web.

The site received millions of visitors per day which prompted none other than the MPAA to label it “the most popular illegal site in the world.”

For Hollywood, the blatantly infringing activity was a thorn in their side, so behind the scenes the movie studios did all they could to take the site offline, helped by US authorities.

In 2017, the US Ambassador to Vietnam called on the local Government to criminally prosecute the site’s operators on their alleged home turf. In addition, the site was also on the radar of the office of the US Trade Representative, which featured 123movies in its latest Notorious Markets report.

March this year, the MPAA sent its own people to Vietnam to expedite the issue. The movie industry group teamed up with the local Office of the Police Investigation Agency, hoping that this would lead to the downfall of the streaming site.

A few days later, 123movies shut down.

“Now it’s time to say goodbye. Thank you for being our friends and thanks for staying with us that long,” the 123movies team wrote, asking users to “respect” filmmakers by paying for movies and TV-shows instead of pirating them.

There was never an official explanation for this radical decision but it wasn’t hard to figure out that the ground had become too hot for the operators. Movie industry pressure was mounting and Vietnam also appeared to get more strict on copyright enforcement issues.

While 123movies never elaborated on its reason to shut down, the MPAA has now provided some more insight. In its latest list of “notorious markets” sent to the US Government this week, the group links it to a criminal investigation.

“An important development in 2018 was the shuttering of a ring of piracy services that had operated under the names 123movies, 123movieshub, gostream, and gomovies following the launch of a criminal investigation in Vietnam and significant industry engagement,” MPAA writes.

MPAA on 123movies’ demise.

TorrentFreak asked the MPAA whether this investigation resulted in any arrests, charges, or if it’s still ongoing. We are yet to receive a response.

It’s clear though, that the mounting pressure resulted in 123movies being shut down. This is arguably one of the major anti-piracy successes of the year so far, but the problem isn’t over yet.

Following the demise of 123movies, several clones and copies stepped up to take its place. However, the MPAA says that it has these on its radar as well.

“Since its closure, many copycat sites have emerged. This ring of piracy services had been blocked in at least eight countries prior to its shut down and efforts are underway to shut down the copycats as well,” the MPAA notes.

This is not a veiled threat, it appears. Last month, the biggest clone 123movieshub.sc suddenly went offline as well, as the site’s domain was deactivated by the domain name registry. As expected, other 123movies clones were quick to take over the top spot.

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Founded in 1876, the American Chemical Society (ACS) is a leading source of chemistry-focused academic publications. Founded in 1880, Elsevier is one of the world’s largest academic publishers.

Both companies have been very active in recent times, suing various platforms (1,2) that facilitate unauthorized access to their papers.

This week, in a lawsuit filed at a U.S. federal court in Maryland, the pair accuse scientist and researcher networking site ResearchGate of committing the same offenses.

“This action arises from the massive infringement of peer-reviewed, published journal articles (‘PJAs’). Plaintiffs publish the articles in their journals and own the respective copyrights. Defendant deliberately uses infringing copies of those PJAs to drive its business,” the lawsuit reads.

Based in Germany, ResearchGate promotes itself as a professional network for scientists and researchers. The site claims 15 million members, who use the platform to “share, discover, and discuss research.” It’s mission is to make research “open to all.”

According to ACS and Elsevier, however, that openness had led to serious infringement of their rights.

“The lawsuit is not about researchers and scientists collaborating, asking and answering questions; promoting themselves, their projects, or their findings; or sharing research findings, raw data, or pre-prints of articles,” the complaint states.

“This lawsuit focuses on ResearchGate’s intentional misconduct vis-à-vis its online file-sharing / download service, where the dissemination of unauthorized copies of PJAs constitutes an enormous infringement of the copyrights owned by ACS, Elsevier and other journal publishers.”

The publishers claim that the alleged infringement taking place on ResearchGate isn’t an accident, since the platform utilizes plaintiffs’ content to grow its traffic, content, and revenues. Indeed, they claim that ResearchGate not only induces others to upload infringing works but also does so itself. As a result, ResearchGate has turned into a “focal point for massive copyright infringement.”

ACS and Elsevier claim that when users upload a copy of a PJA to ResearchGate, the company stores them on its servers where they are made available for viewing or download as a PDF file. Users are also able to share links to these works on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

“ResearchGate consistently and successfully attempts to encourage and trick authors into uploading copies of PJAs that it knows should not be posted on the RG Website. One tactic is the combination of creating author profiles, publication pages, and journal pages, along with the ‘Request full-text’ feature,” the complaint adds.

However, in addition to user uploads, the companies claim that ResearchGate also adds content itself, using scraping techniques to acquire copyrighted works which are them uploaded to its website for viewing or download. The publishers say that ResearchGate hints at its own involvement in providing content with a statement on its website.

“Proprietary content generally appears on ResearchGate only when it has been uploaded by an author,” the statement reads. “So, if there’s already a full-text of your publication available on ResearchGate, the most likely explanation is that it has been uploaded by one of your co-authors.” (emphasis as per complaint)

Furthermore, the plaintiffs note that ResearchGate previously published a job posting in which it attempted to hire someone “with hands-on experience in building and maintaining web crawlers” to “build web crawlers to discover and index university websites.”

ACS and Elsevier state that before filing this lawsuit, they attempted to negotiate with ResearchGate to have it operate “within the law.”

Working through a trade group called the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers, the publishers say they asked ResearchGate sign up to a voluntary scheme to regulate article sharing but the company refused. The publishers do acknowledge that some infringing works were taken down but ResearchGate has not explained why.

With large numbers of allegedly-infringing works on the site, the publishers are now suing ResearchGate for direct copyright infringement, inducement of copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and vicarious copyright infringement.

In conclusion, ACS and Elsevier ask the Court to order ResearchGate to cease-and-desist all infringement of their copyrights, delete all content owned by the plaintiffs, and award statutory damages of $150,000 per infringed work.

This isn’t the only lawsuit ACS and Elsevier have filed against ResearchGate. In October 2017, the companies took action in Germany, claiming that since ResearchGate knows files are infringing, it has an obligation to remove them, even when they haven’t received a specific takedown notice.

The lawsuit is available here (pdf)

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In response to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), the Entertainment Software Association has submitted a list of so-called ‘Notorious Markets’ that undermine the interactive gaming market in the United States.

The ESA represents some of the biggest names in video gaming. From Activision, EA, Nintendo, and Ubisoft, to Capcom, Microsoft, Konami, and Square Enix, the group acts as a voice for companies turning out billions of dollars worth of content. All are reportedly under multi-directional threat, from sites that facilitate direct copying to those who undermine business models and the actual gaming experience.

Linking and Hosting

According to the ESA, linking websites (those that link to content hosted on third-party cyberlocker-type sites) are a key threat.

“These sites typically generate revenue from user donations and/or online advertisements,” the ESA writes. “The following links sites are notable due to their heavy traffic, high volume of infringing video game file links that are indexed, and non-responsiveness to rights holder [takedown] notices.”

First up is a site that most gaming pirates won’t have heard of, which could prove a little counter-productive. P30Download.com is based in Iran, a country that’s rarely linked with a sympathetic attitude towards United States copyright enforcement.

According to the ESA, in August 2018 the platform made available more than 3,000 links to infringing content belonging to ESA members, of which just 2.64% were taken down. Hosted in Iran and published in Persian (not an obstacle for Google Translate), the site is most popular in its home territory and is Iran’s 25th most popular site.

Another site that’s off the radars of most casual pirates is DarkSoftware.net. According to the ESA, the platform indexed almost 4,800 new links in August and is enjoying an upsurge in traffic due to its focus on “circumventing the technical protection measures” in games consoles.

The ESA notes that DarkSoftware uses the “services of a U.S.-based content delivery network” but doesn’t mention CloudFlare by name. It doesn’t mention where the actual site or its owners are based either but publicly available information points to an address in Florida, which may or may not be legitimate.

Of course, linking sites cannot function if they have nothing to link to so it’s no surprise that file-hosting sites are high on the ESA’s list. Its main candidate is the fairly low profile Rapidu.net, which is popular in Poland and also uses Cloudflare, although the ESA again hesitates to name the platform.

1Fichier, on the other hand, is a site with a much greater following. Hosted in France, the site has a global rank of 1,093 and reportedly hosts at least 2,700 links to ESA member content. This cyberlocker-type site is reluctant to respond to takedown notices, with just 0.59% of content removed following complaint, the ESA notes.

ESA Members

ROMs

Given the recent furore surrounding classic gaming ROMs (1,2,3,4), it’s perhaps no surprise that ROMUniverse.com appears in the ESA’s submission to the USTR. Claiming a catalog of 60,000 ROMS serving 375,000 members, the ESA says the site has enjoyed “significant traffic increases” recently due to offering downloads for the latest video games consoles.

Interestingly, given the fact that the USTR’s report focuses on overseas sites, the ESA notes that ROMUniverse is hosted in the United States at Frontier Communications. Similar US-based hosting is provided by GoDaddy for ISOsLand.net, another platform on the ESA’s list.

Torrent Sites

Few submissions to the USTR would be complete without a complaint about The Pirate Bay, and this entry from the ESA is no different.

“Despite some recent downtime, this site continues to be a major source of infringing copies of ESA member company video games,” the ESA notes. “Over 2,200 infringing URLs were found on the site in August 2018. It currently operates with the assistance of the U.S.-based CDN referenced above,” the trade groups adds, without directly naming CloudFlare.

While The Pirate Bay is certainly the highest-profile torrent site, the ESA appears to have bigger problems with a site called PeerTorrents. In August, the group found 8,100 infringing downloads available via the site, which the ESA notes is similar in appearance to LimeTorrents.cc. The site also uses CloudFlare.

Private gaming servers

In this section of its report, the ESA highlights threats to “free-to-play” games that generate revenue from micro-transactions, advertising, and subscriptions. Unauthorized third-party ‘private’ servers allow users to play such games, bypassing the original revenue model and stopping publishers from monetizing their content.

“Establishing and maintaining unauthorized game servers often involves multiple acts of copyright infringement as well as the circumvention of technological protection measures,” the ESA notes, citing Warmane.com and Firestorm-servers.com (World of Warcraft) as culprits.

Cheats and other digital goods

Over the past year, lawsuits against those who maintain and distribute game cheating tools have been frequently reported (1,2,3) so similar complaints in the ESA’s filing are not unexpected.

Established in 2000, Unknowncheats.me heads the ESA’s list, offering up to 10,000 cheats for around 100 gaming titles while generating advertising revenue from its 2.4 million users. Fellow cheat site MPGH.net is said to offer “several hundred thousand” cheats to more than four million users while Iwantcheats.net and Artificialaiming.net service around 720,000 users between them.

Several other platforms are listed in the report as locations to purchase in-game items, CD keys, skins, accounts, and even CD keys, with others offering online subscriptions sourced in cheaper regions of the world and sold in the US.

“We would like to underscore our appreciation to the U.S. officials who drive and administer the out-of-cycle review of notorious markets,” the ESA says in its summing up.

“The resulting Notorious Markets List provides important insights that allow national and local policymakers, as well as law enforcement officials, to evaluate and fairly demand accountability from those marketplaces and the services that support them,” the trade group concludes.

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One more day, with enough content to warrant a separate blog post – partly because people are still here for the most part, partly because of new stuff that’s been added to the agenda as we’ve gone along, and partly because of the topics that, despite our best efforts, managed to escape from previous days.

We began the day with a broad retrospective of the past year: for each person, what went well in the past twelve months, what could have been improved. As you might expect, we covered far too many topics to cover here, spanning as they did nearly every aspect of people, process and technology. However, it was a useful conversation that gave time to both be proud of the positive while reflecting on where we still need to focus more effort. We’ll work through and digest everything that was said and perhaps come back to it as a separate, future post, as the conversation will help shape where we go next.

Next up, lrusak took us through his experiences and presentation at both FOSDEM (Brussels) and Linaro Connect (Vancouver) this year. His talk was mainly aimed at shifting from vendor-specific or closed code (kernel and blob dependencies) to more universal, open source methods, specifically around windowing and rendering on embedded Linux (SoC) platforms such as Allwinner, Broadcom and Qualcomm. As well as simplifying our core code and removing the need for maintenance and use of platform-specific patches, this also has the potential to deliver performance advantages and broader platform coverage. Overall, there are some real benefits once we can tap into specific libraries via standardised kernel calls rather than depend on userspace code that’s in turn reliant on monolithic, all-purpose blobs that may include a whole load of code that simply isn’t needed for Kodi.

We discussed Kodi “remixes” – forks, feature branches, JeOS distributions, and similar variations – and how they link back to our trademark policy and support overheads: what’s allowed, what can we tolerate, what can we manage, how does it appear to our users. This is an area full of opinion and interpretation, rapidly wandering into genuine legal implications. While this is something we really don’t want to have to worry about, it’s something we must keep aware of, as historical experience has demonstrated. As such, we’ll be revisiting aspects of our practices to ensure that we protect Kodi while, at the same time, embracing the broader community where we can see that there’s positive intent and genuine common benefit.

lrusak then returned to the stage to give an update on LibreELEC. That team continues to streamline everything, reducing the maintenance overhead, slimming down the underlying OS overhead, and aligning the user experience more and more closely with core Kodi. He discussed some potential architectural changes that flow out of this goal: future platform support, what libraries could be removed and why (no longer supported or just not needed), what could perhaps be moved upstream so that it becomes part of Kodi and thus not some separate facet of LibreELEC.

And that’s it for day three. Thanks to everyone for their participation, and thanks to the entire community for making Kodi what it is.

One final comment as we close: we really need to offer very many thanks to Roza Zdravkova, who’s been invaluable as our local eyes throughout this DevCon. From helping with transport to pointing out where to go and what to do, she was fundamental to the event’s success. So, “thank you” from the team!

So… that’s it for DevCon 2018. Time to turn to a bit of hacking and development before all going our separate ways once more.

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