As the battle to prevent unauthorized content getting into the hands of the masses continues, Kodi remains one of the leading platforms for such consumption.

Completely legal as it leaves its official download platform, the Kodi software is easily modified to provide access to pirated movies, TV shows, and live sports. From here on in, usage of such a setup to infringe copyright is illegal in Europe.

With this established, anti-piracy outfit BREIN has been attempting to stem the tide of platforms offering ‘pirate’ addons in the Netherlands. One of those was XvBMC-NL, a repository which contained addons including the hugely popular Covenant and live TV addon IPTV Bonanza.

According to a report by BREIN, last month the Dutch developer and administrator of XvBMC-NL received an unwelcome visit to his home by bailiffs sent by the anti-piracy group. BREIN hasn’t made the precise contents of its message to ‘Z’ known but it’s clear that it views his work as illegal and contrary to copyright law. The developer shut down soon after.

Convenant as offered by XvBMC

“At the end of July, the Dutch developer/administrator Z stopped his Kodi repository XvBMC-NL after the bailiff delivered a summons from BREIN to his home address,” BREIN explains.

“The Facebook and Github sites [relating to XvBMC-NL] state that the closure is ‘on the order of BREIN’. The administrator made an infringement because his repository contained add-ons with access to illegal offerings of films, series, pay channels (including IPTV Bonanza and Covenant) and music.”

At the time of writing, XvBMC-NL’s Facebook page is down and its Github repository carries no mention of BREIN.

“‘XvBMC Netherlands’ has decided to shut down this page and lock it (as of 26-07-2018). Also the ‘XvBMC Repository’ is also offline, or emptied so that it will no longer be usable,” it reads.

“The ‘repo’ will only be retained to prevent hijacking in and under our name, in order to prevent possible abuses.”

IPTV Bonanza

While there is no mention of BREIN now, that hasn’t always been the case. According to a cached copy obtained from Google, the repository’s Github page previously indicated it had been shut down following BREIN action.

Many addon developers and operators of repositories insist that what they do is legal. They do not place any illegal content online themselves and do not take part in the actual transfer of illegal content among their users.

It’s a stance previously taken by XvBMC-NL but not one that stands up when faced with more recent rulings handed down by Europe’s highest court, BREIN notes.

“The Court of Justice of the EU ruled in its Filmspeler judgment of 26 April 2017 that the provision of pre-programmed software, such as Kodi with add-ons, infringes copyright if it provides access to unauthorized sources on the Internet,” BREIN writes.

“This was the case with the XvBMC repository through add-ons with links to illegal streams and channels. Due to his management of the repository, the manager was aware of this.”

Supplying addons in the knowledge that they provide access to illicit content is an important piece of the puzzle but as BREIN points out, under EU law the addons themselves are also infringing.

“The add-ons for the illegal sources are directly infringing and the offer of those add-ons is also directly infringing, i.e it is considered to be unauthorized making available of copyrighted works. This applies not only to the sale of media boxes with illegal add-ons but also to the illegal add-ons themselves and their offerings even without a media box,” BREIN notes.

While XvBMC now appears to be non-operational, BREIN isn’t quite done yet. The anti-piracy group wants ‘Z’ to sign an abstention agreement (with penalties for breaches) and pay a cash settlement of 2,500 euros. If this compromise can’t be reached, BREIN says it will launch legal proceedings against ‘Z’ with a view to recovering all of its costs.

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Todayish, The Pirate Bay turns 15 years old, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years.

While the exact launch date is a bit of a mystery, even to the site’s founders, August 10 was previously chosen as its anniversary.

What we do know is that the site was brought online in 2003 by now-disbanded pro-culture organization Piratbyrån, which is Swedish for Bureau of Piracy.

The group was formed by political activists and hackers in the same year, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral, and power structures.

One of the group’s unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyrån. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information.

The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time.

After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO, kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker.

The Pirate Bay server

The original idea of Piratbyrån was to create the first public file-sharing network in Sweden, but in the years that followed the site grew out to become a global file-sharing icon.

While The Pirate Bay team was proud of this success, it was not without consequence. Initially, various takedown messages from copyright holders were met with mocking responses, but the legal pressure became a heavy burden.

Behind the scenes, the US Government applied pressure on Sweden, urging the country do something about the taunting pirate site. At the same time, the site’s founders noticed that they were being shadowed by private investigators, who smelled blood.

The pressure eventually reached its first peak when The Pirate Bay’s infrastructure was raided.

May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The policemen had instructions to shut down the Pirate Bay’s servers, which was exactly what happened.

Footage from The Pirate Bay raid

Just as the raid was about to go down, Gottfrid noticed that something was up. He warned Fredrik who, as a precaution, decided to make a backup. This turned out to be a pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup, Fredrik and the rest of the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days.

The swift and deviant comeback turned the site’s founders into heroes for many. The site made headline news around the world and in Stockholm, people were waving pirate flags in the streets, a sentiment that benefited the newly founded Pirate Party as well.

There was also a major downside, however. The raid was the start of a criminal investigation, which led to a trial, and prison sentences for several of the site’s founders.

This became another turning point. Many of the early Piratbyrån members cut their ties with the site, which was handed over to a more anonymous group.

The outspokenness of the early years eventually gave way to the silent treatment. While the site’s moderators are easy to reach nowadays, the people who pull the strings at the top remain behind the scenes at all times.

This was made quite obvious when the site disappeared for weeks following another raid at a Stockholm datacenter in 2014. At the time, even the site’s staffers had no idea what was going on.

The site did eventually return though. And today, fifteen years after it first came online, the site remains one of the top pirate sources.

While the site hasn’t changed its looks in recent years, in many ways it’s an entirely different animal than it once was. The activist attitude is pretty much gone and there are few public updates.

Today’s ‘anniversary’ isn’t even mentioned…

That said, The Pirate Bay isn’t going away anytime soon. While it has regularly suffered downtime over the past several years, it keeps coming back, serving torrents to millions of users every day.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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