Over the years in their neverending fight against piracy, content owners have tried numerous strategies to limit the amount of infringing content reaching the eyes of consumers.

For almost two decades, that has involved targeting ‘pirate’ sites themselves but increasingly that tactic is taking a back seat. In vogue today is the move to force intermediaries and platforms to join the battle, hoping these Internet giants will use their influence to disappear unlawful content.

Over in Russia, legislation is already in place to force cooperation. When sites are deemed to be infringers and unresponsive to targeted takedowns, they can find themselves on a national blacklist and blocked by ISPs. Furthermore, sites that persistently refuse to cooperate can be permanently blocked, with additional consequences.

Sites in this category now face the prospect of being removed from search engines altogether. That has been happening in volume, as telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor reported this week.

“Since the beginning of the year, search engines Yandex, Mail.ru, Rambler, Sputnik and Google that have been operating in Russia have blocked access to 2,600 pirated Internet resources that were previously blocked on an ongoing basis,” the government body reported.

“Decisions on restricting access to pirated Internet resources on an ongoing basis are taken by the Moscow City Court and the Ministry of Communications.”

Since the search engine exclusion law came into force October 1, 2017, close to 4,000 sites have been permanently excluded from search results. However, this still isn’t enough for rightsholders who insist that companies like Yandex and Google need to do more.

In a sign of how fractious this battle has become, major broadcasters recently took action against Yandex due to the existence of ‘pirate’ resources in search results. In protest, Gazprom-Media, National Media Group (NMG), and others removed their TV channels from Yandex’s ‘TV Online’ service.

According to comments obtained by Russia’s Kommersant, the media companies will only allow their content to appear again if Yandex “purges the pirated versions” from its search results.

“This is the only way we can influence them to remove pirated content,” the source said.

Yandex began displaying the content of TV channels on its main pages back in March 2017 and agreements inked since then have allowed it to expand the feature. Now, however, the initiative has been set back, with media companies complaining that the revenue generated pales into insignificance when compared to the losses from piracy.

“The situation in which broadcasters promote Yandex media services, provide content, but have piracy ignored in search results, is destructive for the media industry,” a representative from NMG told Kommersant.

“[The revenues] are insignificant compared to the hundreds of millions of rubles of annual losses associated with the distribution of pirated content from broadcasters.”

Gazprom Media told the publication that for as long as piracy is a problem, the company won’t be offering its content via the search engine.

“Prior to resolving the issue of pirated content on Yandex services, we will not license our content in Yandex,” a spokesperson said.

With some media players describing Yandex as “the main pirate site in the country” it’s clear that bridges need to be built if progress is to be made. However, the rhetoric is strong right now with no solution in sight.

“[Yandex] interferes with the work of all and refuses to discuss this topic under far-fetched pretexts, so there will only be more [piracy]. They imagine themselves as an information intermediary, but it’s not true – they make money on content, interfere in content, and develop their own sites,” says producer Alexander Akopov.

Considering the general consensus that access to legal content is the best way to defeat piracy, the decision to remove legal content from Yandex is a little puzzling. The punitive measures used to starve pirate sites of their visitors – removal from search engine results – is now being deployed by rightsholders against themselves. Only time will tell how that will turn out.

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All around the world, rightsholders connected to often lower-tier media are generating revenue from people alleged to have pirated their content online.

The system is mostly uniform, with alleged infringers’ IP addresses gathered by the ‘copyright trolls’ and taken to court, in the hope that a judge will order ISPs to hand over their personal details. With this information in hand, copyright trolls demand a cash payment to make a supposed lawsuit go away.

It’s important to note, however, that if rightsholders cannot force ISPs to hand over alleged infringers’ details, their entire project is dead in the water. That’s now the position in Denmark after copyright trolls’ greed prompted ISPs to dig in their heels and refuse to cooperate.

After receiving demands to expose tens of thousands of their subscribers’ identities, ISP Telenor grew tired of the demands, with the company’s legal director framing the problem as a battle between the security of the public and law firms’ commercial interests.

Telenor, with the assistance of rival ISP Telia, prepared a case to protect their customers. Last October, however, the District Court ruled against the ISPs, ordering them to provide identities of alleged pirates to the copyright trolls.

Refusing to accept the setback, the providers took their case to the Østre Landsret, one of Denmark’s two High Courts. In May that effort paid off, with a resounding victory for the ISPs. The win meant that the personal details of individuals behind approximately 4,000 IP addresses targeted by troll outfit Copyright Collection Ltd (via law firm Njord Law) would remain private.

“In its order based on telecommunications legislation, the Court has weighed subscribers’ rights to confidentiality of information regarding their use of the Internet against the interests of rightsholders to obtain information for the purpose of prosecuting claims against the subscribers,” the Court said in a statement.

“The telecommunications companies are therefore not required to disclose the names and addresses of their subscribers.”

The decision was met with dismay by the copyright trolls, who framed the defeat as a blow to those who invest in the Danish film and television industries. But the ruling by the Østre Landsret would not be the final roll of the dice if the Supreme Court decided to hear the matter. Hoping that would be the case, Njord Law filed an appeal.

Unfortunately for the trolls, their hopes were shattered this week when the committee responsible for references to the Supreme Court said it would not be putting the case forward.

As a result, the May 7th decision of the Østre Landsret will stand, with Telenor and Telia no longer required to cooperate with parties involved in trolling cases.

Telenor Denmark’s Legal Director, Mette Eistrøm Krüger, welcomed the decision.

“Both personally and on behalf of our customers, I am really glad that we are being strictly ruled by the National Court’s decision, and we once again find that logging data should only be handed over to the police to combat serious crime,” he told Version2.

Krüger described the decision not to take the case to the Supreme Court has a victory for customers’ legal certainty, with citizens’ right to privacy trumping the copyright trolls’ commercial interests.

If disclosure is to be granted in future, online offenses will have to be shown to be serious enough to get the police involved, something that appears to rule out most copyright trolling efforts.

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Denuvo‘s anti-piracy system has been a sworn enemy of many gaming pirates for years. While it is no longer as unbreakable as it once was, the software is still seen as a major roadblock.

Earlier this year the company was acquired by Irdeto, a global anti-piracy company, which has also taken an interest in cheating.

The company recently conducted an extensive survey which revealed that more than half of all gamers felt the negative impact of cheaters. In addition, three-quarters of the gamers agreed that it was important for games to have protection against cheaters.

Game publishers and developers have recognized the problem as well, as is illustrated by recent lawsuits. And according to Irdeto, they’re taking cheating as seriously as piracy.

“Thankfully, we are finally seeing the industry taking anti-cheat as seriously as anti-piracy,” Irdeto’s Bob Hernandez wrote two months ago.

“To succeed, they’ll need to put anti-cheat strategies at the heart of game design, alongside smart technologies for cheat detection, data encryption and behavioral analysis.”

The cheating research and additional commentary exist for a reason. Today, Iredeto announced that they’re joining the Esports Integrity Coalition (ESIC). And perhaps more importantly, Denuvo will soon launch its own anti-cheat technology to help solve this problem.

“Denuvo’s Anti-Cheat technology, which is soon to be launched as a full end-to-end solution, will prevent hackers in multiplayer games from manipulating and distorting data and code to gain an advantage over other gamers or bypass in-game micro-transactions,” the company says.

With its anti-cheating solution, Denuvo hopes to help game companies protect the value of their games. But, unlike their anti-piracy technology, it’s also good news for gamers, and not just professional E-sporters.

Whether that will be good enough to restore some of Denuvo’s negative image, which even rubs off on game ratings, has yet to be seen.

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The entertainment industries are growing increasingly frustrated with major Internet platforms that, in their view, are not doing enough to tackle online piracy.

This was also the topic of a speech given by MPAA chief Charles Rivkin, during the TPI Aspen Forum yesterday.

The title of the speech is telling. Rivkin’s “Declaration of Accountability for Cyberspace” is a play on John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which was written 22 years ago.

Barlow, who passed away earlier this year, was an artist, an Internet activist, and one of the founding members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As an Internet pioneer, he repeatedly warned against stifling Internet restrictions, to keep cyberspace free and open.

According to the MPAA, however, Barlow’s vision of a cyberspace where inhabitants right any wrongs themselves has failed. Its chief instead argues that the future of the “healthy” Internet is in danger.

“I want to address one of the most vibrant and interconnected ecosystems in human history. That, of course, is the internet. And as we meet, the healthy and vibrant internet that we all want is in serious jeopardy,” Rivkin says.

“The title of this speech is ‘a declaration of accountability for cyberspace’ — a reference I’m sure is not lost on this audience,” he adds.

While the complaints about Internet piracy are not new, the MPAA ties piracy in with more recent debates about fake news, election meddling, and hate speech. From Cambridge Analytica to Infowars.

Rivkin calls for a national conversation on how to return the Internet to a place of vibrant but civil discourse. A place where fake news, hate speech, and piracy are properly dealt with.

Eventually, this leads the MPAA’s boss to Silicon Valley. Rivkin sees a major role for Internet platforms to do more to stop piracy and other types of abuse. If that doesn’t happen voluntarily, the US Government could step in, he suggests.

“The crescendo is rising within our ecosystem. The message is getting louder by the day: Internet platforms must bear responsibility. And they must do more to address the harms that, wittingly or not, they facilitate.

“Online platforms could increase their voluntary efforts to work with those affected to curb abuse of their services. Or perhaps Congress could recalibrate the online immunities to more explicitly require proactive steps as a condition of those protections,” Rivkin adds.

The widespread problem of online piracy is a sign of worse to come, the MPAA chief suggests.

“Online piracy is also the proverbial canary in a coal mine. The same pervasive theft that my industry faces is part of a continuum of toxic developments that harm all of us in this ecosystem – consumers, creators, and commercial operators alike,” he says.

In his speech, Rivkin refers to the “broken windows” theory to illustrate his point. This theory suggests that an atmosphere of lawlessness is created when small crimes are left unpunished. Seeing broken windows in the streets makes it more likely that others will start vandalizing as well.

This is also happening on the Internet today, according to Rivkin. When people continuously cross legal boundaries, by pirating, for example, others are more likely to follow suit.

To fix this problem, the MPAA has already started working with advertising companies, payment processors and other intermediaries. These companies have adopted a strict anti-piracy stance, and it is now time for the Twitters, YouTubes, and Facebooks to follow suit.

“If we want to bring back the internet we all want, it’s better to work together than cut each other off at the knees,” Rivkin says. “There are too many online windows broken and left unfixed for us to do anything but take collective action – and take it now.”

One of the major gripes of the MPAA and other rightsholder organizations is the fact that current laws shield Internet platforms from direct liability. This should be changed, if these platforms don’t work along, they argue.

Not everyone agrees that this is the case. Internet Association spokesman Noah Theran told Variety that the protections provided by laws such as the Communications Decency Act are a good thing.

“Without intermediary liability protections it would be harder, not easier, for online platforms to keep bad actors off the internet,” Theran notes, and many Internet platforms will share this view.

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Without adding any commentary, we would welcome everyone to contrast Charles Rivkin’s “Declaration of Accountability for Cyberspace” with John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”

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Over the past year there has been a wave of copyright infringement lawsuits against alleged cheaters or cheat makers.

Fortnite’s developers have launched a few cases in US courts, and so has Take-Two Interactive Software, the company behind ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ (GTA V).

The latter managed to score a success last week. The court granted its requested preliminary injunction, ordering David Zipperer to stop working on and distributing the ‘Menyoo’ and ‘Absolute’ cheats.

The dispute between Zipperer is not new as Kotaku highlights. Last year the game developer already sent Zipperer a cease and desist notice over the Menyoo cheat, which appeared to work.

The cheat was made unavailable at the website of the developer, who sold it for $10 a piece and said he would donate all the proceeds to a charity. Soon after, however, he began distributing another cheat titled ‘Absolute.’

“While Mr. Zipperer originally appeared cooperative and disabled access to the Menyoo program, it recently has come to Take-Two’s attention that Mr. Zipperer distributed a new cheating program titled Absolute,” GTA V’s developer wrote in its complaint.

This prompted the present lawsuit where Take-Two Interactive accuses the cheat maker of copyright infringement, among other things. Specifically, Zipperer stands accused of creating derivative works of GTA V without Take-Two’s authorization.

According to a court order issued late last week, the allegations are sufficient to grant a preliminary injunction. This means that, for the time being, Zipperer is ordered to stop creating, producing, and distributing any infringing works.

Zipperer opposed the request for an injunction arguing that the court lacked jurisdiction and that the issue was moot. He told the court that he already stopped distributing Menyoo and that he also stopped working on Absolute.

“I will not be performing any more computer programming for Absolute in the future. I have informed the individuals responsible for Absolute that I will not assist them in the future. I have no intention of working on any other ‘cheat menu’ for GTAV,” Zipperer wrote.

The court, however, concluded that this doesn’t make the injunction request moot, not least because the defendant previously continued his infringing actions, following a cease and desist order from Take-Two Interactive.

“Mr. Zipperer agreed to cease his activities and shut down Menyoo. But he then secretly started developing and distributing a different program called Absolute, which like Menyoo, alters GTAV’s multiplayer feature,” the court writes.

However, Zipperer’s comments suggest that he’s not the only person who has control over the cheats. This means that they may still be available elsewhere. For now, however, the Absolute website appears to be offline.

In addition to this lawsuit, Take-Two Interactive has a separate case pending against two people who are allegedly connected to “Infamous,” another popular GTA V cheat.

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A copy of the preliminary injunction and the associated order is available here (pdf).

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