Aussie Pirates Consume More, Site Blocking or Not


In recent years, entertainment industry insiders have often portrayed Australia as a piracy-ridden country.

To see if these statements hold true, the Government conducts annual consumer surveys to study local piracy habits. In recent years, this has revealed a steady decline in piracy.

The latest online copyright infringement report, released this week, shows that there’s been a decrease in the number of people who consume music, movies, and TV shows illegally, compared to the year before.

The only category where the percentage of pirates has increased is games, but the overall trend is clearly downward. In 2018, two-thirds of all Aussies consumed content through legal channels, compared to 57% three years ago.

Lawful, unlawful or both?

Interestingly, this pattern doesn’t automatically translate to higher spending. In fact, those who pirate and buy tend to spend much more on average, compared to those who purchase content 100% legally.

This is consistent with previous research indicating that “hybrid” consumers (who pirate and buy) are bringing in the most money, probably because they are the most content-hungry consumers.

Also, while fewer Aussies are pirating in 2018, they’re pirating more. The volume of illegally consumed digital content has grown across all measured categories, which includes music, games, movies, and TV shows.

“When the proportion of lawful and unlawful digital consumption is applied across the Australian population, it can be seen that the proportion of unlawful consumption has increased across all four content types from 2017 to 2018,” the Government concludes.

In other words, there are less Aussie pirates, but they’re pirating more.

Another noteworthy finding deals with the recent pirate site blockades ordered by Australian courts. The entertainment industry argues that these will decrease piracy, and the report appears to back this up.

Of all respondents, only 7% say they will bypass a blocked site if they encounter one. An impressive statistic, but also very misleading.

Blocking response

The 7% refers to all the people that were questioned. This also includes the 76% that don’t use pirate sites at all, who obviously have little reason to bypass a blockade. In addition, the graphic also leaves out the 10% who would find alternative pirate services.

In other words, of ALL respondents, 17% would continue to pirate. This is quite significant, considering that little over 23% of all respondents are pirates.

Finally, it’s worth looking at how Aussies would plan to bypass a blocked site. Among those who said they would, 30% would go for a VPN while 21% would opt for proxy sites. Google Translate, surprisingly, is the third most favored option with 15%.

Whether these people will actually do this remains to be seen. The survey also asked those who encountered a blockade what their response was, and less than 1% said they’d bypass the block. Finding other pirate sources was a more popular option.

All in all the report provides a good overview of recent media consumption trends, particularly where they apply to piracy. It shows that, increasingly, Australians are transforming into legal customers. The blocking efforts are somewhat effective as well, even though total piracy volumes have increased.

Blocking aside, it appears that a lot of progress can still be made on the supply side. Most pirates indicate that they would stop if lawful services were cheaper, if the content they’re interested in is available legally, and if legal services were better.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





Source link

/0 Comments/by

Nintendo ROM Fallout: EmuParadise Terminates All Game Downloads


Retro gaming is a pastime and passion for countless thousands of nostalgia freaks all over the world but for gaming giant Nintendo, it’s a huge problem – apparently.

Last month, the Japanese company flexed its muscles by filing a complaint at a federal court in Arizona, targeting LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co for copyright and trademark infringement.

The sites, believed to be operated by Jacob Mathias and his company Mathias Designs LLC, offered access to a wide variety of ROMs, including those relating to many Nintendo games.

“The LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites are among the most open and notorious online hubs for pirated video games,” Nintendo wrote in its complaint.

“Through the LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites, Defendants reproduce, distribute, publicly perform and display a staggering number of unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s video games, all without Nintendo’s permission.”

Both sites are currently down and displaying messages indicating they probably won’t be back. This development was met with disappointment from the emulator community but now there’s the inevitable problem of fallout and yet more bad news for retro fans.

In an announcement Wednesday, EmuParadise, one of the web’s longest standing emulator and ROM download portals, revealed that it will no longer be offering game ROMs for download. The news came in a heartfelt announcement by its founder MasJ, who explained that he’d pumped nearly two decades of his life into the project.

“Many of you are aware that the situation with regards to emulation sites has been changing recently. What you probably don’t know is that we at EmuParadise have been dealing with similar issues for all 18 years of our existence,” he wrote.

“From receiving threatening letters in the early days to our hosts suddenly shutting down our servers due to complaints, we’ve seen it all. We’ve always complied with takedown requests but as you can see, that is no guarantee of anything.”

MasJ says that having grown up in India, he never got to play any retro games. However, his love for the genre meant that he wanted others to join in, something which led to the creation of EmuParadise and the building of a like-minded team around the platform.

While the legal eagles out there might argue that ROM sites are illegal, this clinical view mostly fails to factor in the allure of retro games – many of them abandoned, many long forgotten – and the passion they generate among the faithful. MasJ highlights some of the feedback he’s had over the years and how people have been positively affected by his site.

“We’ve received thousands of emails from people telling us how happy they’ve been to rediscover and even share their childhood with the next generations in their families,” he writes.

“We’ve had emails from soldiers at war saying that the only way they got through their days was to be lost in the retro games that they played from when they were children. We’ve got emails from brothers who have lost their siblings to cancer and were able to find solace in playing the games they once did as children. There are countless stories like these.”

But now, thanks to gaming giants choosing to protect often decades-old games that a minority play, the ride at EmuParadise is over. MasJ says that despite his passion for retro gaming, he’s not prepared to risk the futures of his team members by continuing.

“It’s not worth it for us to risk potentially disastrous consequences. I cannot in good conscience risk the futures of our team members who have contributed to the site through the years,” he explains.

“Thus, we have decided to make a new start. We will continue to be passionate retro gamers and will keep doing cool stuff around retro games. But you won’t be able to get your games from here for now.”

There are still plenty of reasons to visit EmuParadise, not least the buzzing community that has grown with it over the past 18 years. And of course, many site members will undoubtedly have every game EmuParadise ever had, squirreled away somewhere, waiting for that inevitable rainy day.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





Source link

/0 Comments/by

P2P Piracy Is Alive and Growing, Research Suggests


In recent years Hollywood and other entertainment sources have focused their enforcement efforts on pirate streaming sites and services.

According to several reports, streaming sites get more traffic than their P2P counterparts, with the latter being almost exclusively BitTorrent related.

While the rise of online streaming sites can’t be denied, a new research report from anti-piracy outfit Irdeto shows that P2P remains very relevant. In fact, it’s still the dominant piracy tool in many countries.

Irdeto researched site traffic data provided by an unnamed web analytics partner. The sample covers web traffic to 962 piracy sites in 19 countries where P2P was most used. This makes it possible to see how P2P site visits compare to those of pirate streaming sites.

The data reveal that there are massive differences in the relative use of P2P versus streaming sites between countries.

In Russia, for example, only 2% of the visits go to streaming sites, while the rest of the traffic goes to P2P portals. P2P also outperforms streaming in other countries such as Australia, the Netherlands, and India.

This pattern is reversed in Germany, where 88% of all visits go to pirate streaming sites. Similarly, streaming is also the dominant web piracy tool in the United States, France, Spain and other countries.

Additional research in eight countries shows that piracy traffic has grown during the course of 2017. This growth also applies to P2P sites, in all but one country, Germany.

Looking at the sample as a whole, Iredeto notes that 70% of all pirate traffic goes to P2P sites, which appears to run counter to the popular narrative that streaming is more dominant today.

“While many expect P2P piracy to be taken over by streaming and direct downloads, it’s clear that this has not happened yet. P2P piracy is still a big threat to the industry, in which the overall piracy problem is growing,” Peter Cossack, Irdeto’s VP of Cybersecurity Services says.

“While the increase in bandwidth and social media has facilitated growth in content redistribution piracy, particularly around live sporting events, it is clear that other forms of piracy are not going away any time soon.”

Irdeto’s non-weighed data

While the data provide an interesting look at the regional differences it should be interpreted with caution. First, the sample only includes desktop visits. This might be a problem since streaming sites are arguably more popular on mobile platforms.

Also, the 19 countries were selected because they had the highest number of P2P downloads. That’s a significant selection bias that favors P2P sites.

Finally, and perhaps more problematically, the traffic data are not weighed. For example, nearly half of all visits in the sample come from Russia, which is significantly overrepresented.

That means that visits can’t simply be added to draw overall conclusions, something Iredto seems to do.

The company does make a few solid points though. With an estimated 800 million global monthly downloads from P2P sites in 2017, BitTorrent should not be disregarded.

The report also notes that P2P sites are mostly visited by “committed pirates” who don’t use legal streaming sites, while about half of the visits to pirate streaming are from “casual pirates.”

Finally, Irdeto points out that P2P sites are ‘content’ suppliers too. They often act as a source for streaming sites. In other words, the videos people watch on streaming portals were taken from P2P sources, which underlines that these play a vital role in the piracy ecosystem.

—

A copy of Irdeto’s report is available here. We asked the company several questions about the methodological issues we found, but at the time of writing we haven’t heard back.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





Source link

/0 Comments/by

Wrongfully Accused ‘Pirate’ Wants $62,818 Compensation


For more than a decade, file-sharers around the world have been pressured to pay significant settlement fees, or face worse in court.

The practice is particularly common in the United States. While there is only a small group of independent companies involved, thousands of people are taken to court each year.

These efforts, often characterized as “copyright trolling,” share a familiar pattern. After the film companies acquire a subpoena to get the personal details of an alleged pirate, they contact this person with a settlement request.

These cases are not intended to go to trial, however. Instead, the copyright holders often drop their complaint when the accused person fights back.

This was the case when Darren Brinkley was sued in a Utah federal court last year. In a complaint filed by Criminal Productions, he and 31 others were accused of illegally sharing a copy of the movie Criminal.

Brinkley denied these claims and rejected the settlement offer but the film company still didn’t back off.

“Plaintiff persisted, forcing Defendant to retain counsel and incur significant attorneys’ fees and costs. Yet Plaintiff had no intention of litigating its claims,” Brinkley’s lawyers write.

“Rather, these filings are shameless efforts to extort inflated settlements from infringers and non-infringers alike.”

The above is quoted from a recent motion for attorney fees, because things changed significantly when Brinkley lawyered up. While Criminal Productions initially refused to let the case go, recently it voluntarily dismissed the case.

According to Brinkley’s lawyers, the film company dropped the case like a hot potato when it discovered that the defendant was attempting to look into its business.

“As expected, when Plaintiff realized a Motion to Compel discovery was in draft, Criminal sought voluntary dismissal of both its affirmative claims and Brinkley’s counterclaims, which this Court granted, with prejudice, on July 6, 2018.”

The dismissal came after nearly a year and all this time Criminal Productions failed to produce any evidence. The defense argues that, while the filmmakers had no intention to litigate the “baseless suit,” their client was forced to run up significant costs.

The same also happened in other cases, where so-called copyright trolls quickly bailed out when defense attorneys sought discovery. Brinkley’s attorneys see this as a typical example of “cut and run” litigation, and argue that Criminal Productions must pay their client’s legal bill.

“These tactics should at minimum require that Defendant Brinkley be made whole for Plaintiff’s filing of litigation it clearly had no intention of pursuing and that may have had no basis in the first instance. This is the very definition of ‘cut and run’ litigation,” the motion reads.

The defendant requests compensation for the attorneys’ fees and costs to the tune of $62,818.35, providing a detailed accounting of the costs it made.

Fees and costs

This request is warranted and not unprecedented, the defense team states, pointing to a recent order in the District of Nevada where a defendant was awarded more than $48,000 compensation in a similar case filed by this same movie outfit.

Finally, the attorneys add that they see this case being part of the larger “BitTorrent litigation model,” noting that Criminal Productions had no basis for the lawsuit.

Companies such as Criminal Productions are “special purpose entities” (SPE) which are allegedly used to shield the true beneficiaries. The lawsuits are presumably being run by the German investigating firm Guardaley and the lawyers.

In a separate testimony, defense attorney Lisa Clay writes that Guardaley and the lawyers are the ones that benefit financially from these cases.

“In short, if this case had continued, Defendant is confident it would have established that Plaintiff lacked a good faith basis for its filing in the first instance, and that the claims were brought in bad faith,” the motion concludes.

—

A copy of the motion for attorneys’ fees and costs is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





Source link

/0 Comments/by

Steal This Show S04E03: ‘Printing A New Reality’, with Cory Doctorow


Cory’s most recent book, Walkaway, is a story of refusing a life of surveillance and control under a high-tech oligarchy and the struggle to live in a post-scarcity gift economy where even death has been defeated.

Over this one hour plus interview we discuss:

– Whether file-sharing & P2P communities have lost the battle to streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, and why the ‘copyfight’ is still important
– How the European Copyright Directive eats at the fabric of the Web, making it even harder to compete with content giants
– Why breaking up companies like Google and Facebook might be the only way to restore an internet — and a society — we can all live with.

—

Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing crypto, privacy, copyright and file-sharing developments. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Cory Doctorow

If you enjoy this episode, consider becoming a patron and getting involved with the show. Check out Steal This Show’s Patreon campaign: support us and get all kinds of fantastic benefits!

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Lucas Marston
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Eric Barch

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





Source link

/0 Comments/by

BBC Wants Microsoft to Expose ‘Doctor Who’ Leaker


Doctor Who fans all around the world are looking forward to the upcoming season, which will be the first to have a female lead.

While the debut is still a few months away, leaked footage of the first episode recently started to appear.

A short unfinished clip of the new season surfaced in several places. This frustrated some fans, who prefer not to see any spoilers, as well as the BBC which doesn’t want unapproved teasers of their hit show to be circulating online.

In an effort to track down the source of the leak the BBC has taken the matter to the US courts. Last month it obtained a DMCA subpoena from a California federal court, ordering the forum tool Tapatalk to identify the source of an infringing post.

Whether this resulted in any useful information is unknown, but a few days ago it became clear that BBC is still investigating the matter.

In a separate effort, BBC Studios have filed a request for a DMCA subpoena at a Federal court in Washington. This time it’s directed at Microsoft. According to the BBC, a user of Microsoft’s OneDrive stored and shared a copy of the leaked file, titled ‘IMG_ l563.TRIM.MOV.’

“The infringing material includes, without limitation, an unauthorized copy of copyrighted video content from Season 11, Episode 1 of Doctor Who, for which BBC Worldwide Limited t/a BBC Studios (Distribution) is the exclusive licensee,” the BBC writes.

According to the BBC, the footage in question was stolen from the studio. Through the subpoena, the company hopes to find out more about the source of this leak, to prevent similar situations going forward.

It asks Microsoft to hand over any relevant information that can help to identify the account holder who uploaded the video, which was added to OneDrive back in June.

This includes “any name, account name, address, telephone number, email address, birth date, profile photo, device information, browser info1mation, location information, information from others (e.g., Facebook or Google+) and time posted.”

Requested information

This is not the first time that the BBC has dealt with a Doctor Who leak. In 2014 a heavily watermarked and unfinished copy of Doctor Who appeared on The Pirate Bay months before the official premiere.

That was later followed by leaked scripts and episodes. The latter was not the work of skilled hackers, but rather the result of a catastrophic error at a BBC office in Miami.

According to the court records, it’s not clear whether the subpoena against Microsoft has been issued. However, DMCA subpoenas are generally signed off by a court clerk without any oversight from a judge, so this should be relatively straightforward.

—

A copy of the BBC’s DMCA subpoena request is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





Source link

/0 Comments/by

Major Labels Sue More YouTube Ripper Sites


While there are encouraging signs for the recording industry that piracy is being brought under control, there is no shortage of unlicensed music online.

This content is obtained in a number of ways but some of the key sources are effectively right under record labels’ noses.

Sites including YouTube, Spotify and Deezer are all exploitable and with the right know-how, music can be downloaded from them and permanently stored on users’ devices.

This escalating ‘ripping’ phenomenon is now viewed as a more serious threat to the industry than traditional piracy, mostly since it eats away at streaming revenues. On that basis, it’s no surprise that fresh legal action is underway in the United States.

A lawsuit reportedly filed Friday (but not yet publicly available at the time of writing) has Universal, Warner Bros, Sony and other major record labels targeting FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com, Billboard reports.

That these two portals have effectively become targets for the RIAA isn’t much of a surprise. Last year the music group submitted its list of “notorious” piracy websites to the U.S. Government, noting that it’s tracking 70 ‘ripping’ sites while detailing several, FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com included.

“The overall popularity of these sites and the staggering volume of traffic it attracts evidences the enormous damage being inflicted on the U.S. record industry,” the RIAA wrote.

The RIAA’s claim that these sites generate huge volumes of traffic is beyond dispute. According to SimilarWeb data, FLVTO.biz is a monster attracting more than 94 million visits per month, making it the #322 most popular site in the world. With almost 12% of that traffic coming from the United States, it’s no wonder the RIAA is concerned.

While 2conv.com is a smaller site, it too is extremely successful. Every month the site pulls in around 23 million visitors, giving it a global ranking of #1,021. Unlike FLVTO, 2conv is more popular in Poland, Brazil, and Italy than it is in the United States.

It’s reported that both sites are operated out of Russia but according to a report filed by the IIPA earlier this year, they’re actually connected and serving MP3s to the public from servers in Germany.

“The recording industry also notes many stream-ripping services believed to be sourced from Russia including Flvto.biz, 2Conv and Fly2mp3.org (all three are essentially the same service operating from different domains). The sites provide downloads of converted YouTube videos to users as MP3 audio files (from servers in Germany),” the IIPA wrote.

The hosting position doesn’t appear to have changed much since the IIPA report was filed in February. FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com are hosted on consecutive IP addresses handled by German-based hosting company Hetzner Online GmbH.

Supporting the claim that they’re connected by infrastructure, both sites provide the same email address in the event copyright holders want to get in touch. It’s reported that both the RIAA and IFPI did that but without success.

“These sites have no place in today’s music market where fans have access to millions of songs from dozens of legitimate services that pay creators and value their work, all at the tap of a finger,” the RIAA said in a comment.

“This action should serve as an unmistakable warning to operators of similar sites that schemes to rob music creators and profit from the theft of their music will not be tolerated.”

How these platforms will respond to the filing of a lawsuit in the United States isn’t clear. In their respective ‘Copyright Claims’ sections (which are identical), both point out that their cooperation under the DMCA is purely voluntary.

“Although we are not subject to United States law, we voluntarily comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Pursuant to Title 17, Section 512(c)(2) of the United States Code, if you believe that any of your copyrighted material is being infringed on the Website, we have designated an agent to receive notifications of claimed copyright infringement,” the sites state.

Perhaps surprisingly, both also have repeat infringer policies which note (in block capitals and in bold) that “any user for whose material we receive three good-faith and effective complaints within any contiguous six-month period will have his grant of use of the website terminated.”

Despite the major labels filing a copyright infringement suit against YouTube-MP3 in 2016, a YouTube-ripper case has never gone to trial in the United States. That case was settled confidentially, with YouTube-MP3 handing over its domain to the RIAA.

This lack of legal clarity previously prompted the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to inform the USTR that not all stream ripping sites facilitate copyright infringement by definition.

“RIAA’s discussion of ‘stream-ripping’ websites misstates copyright law. Websites that simply allow users to extract the audio track from a user-selected online video are not ‘illegal sites’ and are not liable for copyright infringement, unless they engage in additional conduct that meets the definition of infringement,” the EFF wrote.

While the case never went to trial, it seems unlikely that YouTube-MP3 would have survived the claims of direct infringement leveled at it. It was reported that YouTube-MP3 stored converted MP3 files on its servers long term so while the ripping and conversion may have resided in a gray area, the storage of infringing files would have been tougher to defend.

At the time of writing, both FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com remain online.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





Source link

/0 Comments/by

BitTorrent / TRON Partnership Raises Important Questions For File-Sharers


Last month it was confirmed that BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the uTorrent and Mainline clients, had been acquired by TRON.

This week TRON founder Justin Sun revealed that he’s considering building some kind of system, presumably into his uTorrent and Mainline clients, that will reward people if they’re sharing particularly well.

The theory is that if people are incentivized to seed for longer, they will share more and content will stay available for much longer. The big question is whether things will turn out that way once currency starts flying around.

Right now, the vast amount of sharing carried out on public BitTorrent networks is motivated by very little other than obtaining content. This is because large volumes of users jump onto torrents with the intention of getting whatever content they need and deleting the torrent soon after it reaches 100%.

Of course, they can’t do this alone, so other people just like them assist by default, with everyone’s BitTorrent clients busily uploading at the same time as they’re downloading. Others in the swarm, the rarer ‘hardcore’ seeders, stick around much longer than everyone else, making sure that the content is shared among all and then staying after everyone else has gone home.

So what happens one day, when these generous guys turn on their torrent clients and find a button saying: “Get your sharing benefits here”? Once they realize that there’s money (virtual or otherwise) to be made, it’s likely that many – if they can benefit anonymously – will take the opportunity. Why wouldn’t they? It’s absolutely free.

But there are issues. The happy volunteer – who up until now didn’t ask for a penny – is now signed up to a business relationship with this torrent client. He seeds a lot and he gets paid, but suddenly he has a robot boss counting the beans. It’s a significant shift in culture for what is currently a casual, altruistic, and effective system.

But let’s forget all that for a moment. Anyone can get paid for seeding you say? Right, let’s crunch numbers because this might be a decent business proposition. I’m awful with figures but shall we just get a couple of dozen fat-piped seedboxes on the case for the first month and see how this goes?

The point is that if there is money to be made, every man and his dog will want a piece of the action. Sadly, however, it’s likely that many will leave disappointed after being bullied out by the serious players with the heavy bandwidth artillery.

A similar phenomenon can be witnessed on some smaller private trackers when a few big guns step in with their fast seedboxes and no one with a regular connection is able to build a decent sharing ratio due to a shortage of leechers. Of course, public swarms are bigger but that just means more bandwidth for the professionals to supply.

This problem could be countered by not paying seeders too much but if the rewards aren’t useful, people might not bother to sign up in the first place. It will be a delicate balancing act for sure.

A more important question, perhaps, is how the introduction of financial incentives will affect the mindset of the regular user. Of course, some will try to jump aboard the paid seeding scheme too, but of those who don’t, what will their perception of the rewards system be?

Will they simply ignore it while grabbing content and seeding as usual, or will they suddenly perceive seeding as a business arrangement and therefore justification for ending all of their ‘unpaid’ torrents at 100%? After all, people are professionally seeding now while getting rewarded, so why bother to contribute?

Beyond the few details announced this week, we have no idea what plans TRON has for BitTorrent but considering its focus on currency, you can be sure that any plan involves generating wealth at some point. Until now, BitTorrent Inc. has done that too but they have never put the act of sharing at the heart of the action.

That the torrent sharing mechanism itself is being touted as part of TRON’s plans has the potential to stir up a hornets’ nest, particularly among ‘free’ file-sharing advocates. Not to mention that the protocol wasn’t designed with financial benefits complicating the formula in mind.

Then there’s the monitoring. If people are to get paid, their contribution to the TRON/BitTorrent ecosystem will need to be tracked and reported back to the TRON system. Only when all this data gathering has been carried out will anyone get paid, even if it is in an experimental currency. Is this the kind of intrusion most BitTorrent users expect?

The final big question relates to where this business model goes after paid sharing. If enough users can be incentivized to earn TRX tokens by seeding, isn’t it logical to presume they’ll want to start spending them too?

Sun has already hinted at the possibility of some kind of content marketplace where currency could presumably get spent. However, is anyone confident that these tokens won’t, at some point, be handed over in exchange for faster download speeds or other file-sharing features?

There seems to be a real risk that the introduction of financial reward into a previously free sharing equation will only encourage selfish behavior among others. That’s the last thing that the BitTorrent ecosystem needs so TRON will need to be careful where they take this and how quickly.

Of course, if things get too restrictive people will be free to jump ship onto other clients such as qBittorrent or Deluge, which will still work no matter what TRON decides to do. But could there be issues there too?

If one chooses to be alarmist and take a worst case scenario, there’s always the prospect of future changes that might see uTorrent favoring other uTorrent clients over those offered by outsiders. Hopefully, that will never happen, but few people believed that getting paid for seeding would ever be a thing either, so all options are open.

Finally, (and being rather more positive for a moment) there’s always the possibility that TRON is the shot in the arm BitTorrent needed. Perhaps it’ll be a roaring capitalist success with none of the downsides of other financially-motivated markets. We’ll have to wait to find out.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





Source link

/0 Comments/by

Sci-Hub Proves That Piracy Can be Dangerously Useful


Sci-Hub has often been referred to as “The Pirate Bay of Science,” but that description really sells the site short.

While both sites are helping the public to access copyrighted content without permission, Sci-Hub has also become a crucial tool that arguably helps the progress of science.

The site allows researchers to bypass expensive paywalls so they can read articles written by their fellow colleagues. The information in these ‘pirated’ articles is then used to provide the foundation for future research.

What the site does is illegal, according to the law, but Sci-Hub is praised by thousands of researchers and academics around the world. In particular, those who don’t have direct access to the expensive journals but aspire to excel in their academic field.

While publishers such as Elsevier convinced the courts that Sci-Hub is a force of evil, many scientists see it as an extremely useful tool. They don’t want research locked up behind paywalls, they want it to be read, to inspire.

Pro tip

Under the current system these researchers are often put in a position where they have to give up their copyrights, so large publishers such as Elsevier can exploit them. The researchers don’t see a penny of this money. What they see is their hard work ending up behind a paywall, out of public view.

It’s this system that prompted Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan to start Sci-Hub. She believes that it’s wrong to use copyright as a tool to shield important research from the public and hopes to tear down the paywalls.

“When Sci-Hub became known, I thought that it will provide a good case against copyright law. When the law prevents science to develop, that law must be repealed,” Elbakyan wrote in a recent blog post.

However, this was easier said than done. With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, the publishers fought back.

“Instead, Sci-Hub was quickly banished as an ‘illegal’ solution and projects like Unpaywall emerged and started promoting themselves as a ‘legal’ alternatives to Sci-Hub.”

Unpaywall is a useful search tool that helps researchers to find articles that are already freely accessible. However, this is not a Sci-Hub alternative, according to Elbakyan, as it does nothing to free the locked up research

Real change can only come when copyright law changes, she argues.

On closer inspection that may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. According to the US Constitution, copyright is meant to aid the progress of arts and science. Some would argue that Sci-Hub does exactly that. However, the US courts disagree.

Elbakyan is not giving up though. She wants the law to change and encourages anyone to support this goal, by supporting their local Pirate party, for example.

“Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science,” she notes.

While Sci-Hub’s call might not sway lawmakers right away, the platform continues to make an impact. Every month, the site helps researchers to access millions of articles, which are used as the building blocks for new researchers.

These researchers publicly share the latest working Sci-Hub domain names among each other and gladly pass on Sci-Hub links to those in need.

In fact, Sci-Hub has become such a commonly used tool for some scientists that they include Sci-Hub URLs in the references sections of their published papers. Ironically, there are even links to Sci-Hub in papers published by Elsevier, showing how dangerously useful it is.

To circle back to the Pirate Bay comparison, that would be the same as Netflix linking to copyright infringing torrents of other films in their movie descriptions…

Sci-Hub references on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect…

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





Source link

/0 Comments/by

‘Depraved’ City Builder on Steam Features ‘Pirate Hat’ DRM


For as long as computer software has existed in commerical form, pirates have been keen to reap the benefits without handing over cash.

This is particularly true for video games which have been enthusiastically copied for several decades no matter whether they’ve been made available on tape, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs or digital downloads.

Stopping pirates is no easy task although that doesn’t stop companies from trying. Denuvo is perhaps the most recognizable system and one of the most fiendish. However, there are other ways of stopping pirates in their tracks without completely alienating your customer base.

Earlier this week TF received a tip about a torrent on The Pirate Bay. It links to the city builder game ‘Depraved‘ which is ordinarily available on Steam. Interestingly, the top comment on the torrent indicates that the release may not work as intended.

“This copy contains the developers DRM whereby after building a warehouse, it will start to slowly fill up with pirate hats which are irremovable thereby making the warehouse slowly useless,” the comment reads.

Depraved is created by Germany-based development team Evil Bite, which was founded in 2015 and consists of just two individuals, Danilo and David Tondl.

Speaking with TF, Evil Bite confirms that the claimed ‘pirate hat’ DRM does indeed exist.

“The pirate hats protection is real. It is a really cheap protection, but what can I say, it works,” Danilo says.

“We wanted to give the player a kind of demo. So the game works a bit until the pirate hats appear with a nice tooltip ‘Please support our 2 man development team’.”

Despite describing the protection as “cheap”, Danilo doesn’t want to reveal too much about how it works. However, the idea wasn’t to completely stop pirates but to let them get to a point where they’ve at least had a chance to test the game, hopefully in advance of a genuine purchase. This also involved fooling those who remove the protection from games.

“The protection waits in the background and ‘blocks’ or informs the player later in the game. That way the cracker thinks: ‘oh, ok it is working’ and moves on to the next title. I guess no cracker has time to play the game a couple of hours to test if there is some other protection,” he reveals.

The practice of using copy protection to convert potential pirates is probably the only type of DRM that isn’t universally pilloried by legitimate and pirate players alike. Evil Bite is pragmatic about the situation and hopes that its light-hearted approach is able to win over those considering a purchase.

“We really believe that there are people in the world who don’t have the money for such a game but on the other side there are people have the money but never bought a game because it is so easy to ‘steal’ it and in the end of the day it is our money we are losing,” Danilo notes.

“For us this DRM is more a joke than a real DRM and ‘money saver’. And like I said earlier, it is more like a demo. A lot of pirates want to test a game first before they buy it even with the Steam refund system.

“Is it worth it? I don’t know. We had at least one player who thought it was funny and bought the game because of it,” he concludes.

Danilo is the first to admit that the concept of dropping some pranks into a copy-protection method isn’t new. Several other developers have done similar things in the past, with varying levels of success (1,2).

What’s absolutely certain, however, is that this kind of approach towards copy-protection is generally better tolerated than that taken by the infamous Denuvo.

With the system criticized for reportedly being resource-hungry, the company behind Denuvo recently resorted to filing a criminal complaint against Bulgaria-based cracker Voksi.

Until last week, Voksi had been dismantling Denuvo’s efforts with relative ease so if nothing else, the company’s actions suggest that there is actually no technological solution to the piracy problem. It also means that its piracy problems are likely to return, sooner rather than later.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eZmYBmmWEY&w=560&h=315]

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





Source link

/0 Comments/by