At the turn of the century, most online piracy was carried out using software applications. With their inbuilt search features, tools such as KaZaA and eDonkey were all the rage.

With the advent of BitTorrent, however, a dual approach was required. While the file transfers themselves still took place in torrent clients, the .torrent files (which contain instructions on where to obtain content) had to be downloaded from indexing sites such as The Pirate Bay.

These days that same system is still used by millions but pure web-based streaming platforms are also extremely popular. Alongside, there’s also a huge selection of software applications, many of them designed for mobile devices, that either utilize existing web resources or have their own infrastructure to supply content.

Thus far, tackling these tools hasn’t proven easy. Kodi-based tools, Popcorn Time, Terrarium TV, Showbox and many other platforms are still going great guns, despite several efforts to bring them down. Over in Russia, however, the authorities believe that new legislation will bring about the desired result.

This week the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, adopted in the first reading a draft law that will give authorities power to prohibit access to software applications through which pirated content is being distributed.

The draft is an amendment to anti-piracy legislation which currently refers to potentially infringing sites as “information resources”. The draft introduces the term “software application” which could refer to desktop software but is mainly directed at apps running on mobile devices including phones, tablets or set-top box variants.

The current draft envisions rightsholders filing complaints with telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor when copyright-infringing content is being made available through a particular piece of software. It’s then for Roscomnadzor to identify the owner of the software application and instruct him to remove the content in question. If that fails to take place, local ISPs will be ordered to render the software inaccessible.

While blocking regular websites isn’t particularly difficult, software applications present a much more challenging scenario, not least since they can be downloaded from thousands of websites and can change hands in seconds. They also tend to rely on several underlying systems, each with their own ranges of IP addresses that may, or may not, be exclusively used for illegal purposes.

All this means that the government is gearing up for what is likely to be a complex battle to block pirate applications. Only adding to the problems is the existence of applications that can be used to share copyrighted content but aren’t necessarily designed for that purpose. How these will be tackled will remain to be seen.

Ultimately the authorities understand how difficult and resource intensive this will be. Already there are calls for existing budgets to be boosted to accommodate the plans but currently, the draft contains no such guarantees.

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Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has targeted pirates of all shapes and sizes over the past several years.

It’s also one of the few groups to systematically track copyright infringers on Usenet, which still has millions of frequent users.

BREIN sets its aim on prolific uploaders and other large-scale copyright infringers. After identifying its targets, it asks providers to reveal the personal details connected to the account.

Not all providers are eager to hand over this information.

This is also true for Newsconnection. The Usenet provider was previously ordered by a Dutch court to hand over the IP-addresses, payment information, name and email addresses of three of its users. However, the company appealed the verdict.

Newsconnection argued that, among other things, it doesn’t have direct access to the users’ IP-addresses because it’s merely a reseller The company added that the relevant jurisprudence in this area doesn’t apply in this case, since the company operates as an intermediary.

In a verdict issued this week, the Court of Appeal rejected these arguments. The Court stressed that it’s not impossible for the Usenet provider to get access to the information BREIN demands.

For example, Newsconnection can request IP-addresses of suspected pirates from its hosting provider. If a hosting provider refuses to hand over this information, then the Usenet provider can find another hosting partner that’s more cooperative.

Furthermore, the Court also states that, even though it’s a reseller, the Usenet provider must hand over the personal details it has on file for the alleged pirates BREIN identifies. This includes the user’s name and email address.

There is also some good news for Newsconnection and its users. BREIN requested the Usenet provider to organize its administration in such a way that it can identify users more easily while keeping more detailed personal information. The Court of Appeal argued that this goes too far as it might potentially violate the privacy of innocent customers.

The Court made it clear that Usenet users have a right to privacy. However, those who are suspected of copyright infringement can’t be anonymous. Tweakers highlights that the court specifically notes that BREIN’s rights to protect creators prevail over the anonymity of Usenet users.

During the appeal, BREIN suggested several steps Newsconnection should take to verify the accuracy of user data. The Court argued that it’s not up to BREIN to decide what steps the provider should take, but agreed that Newsconnection must take measures to ensure that the personal information provided by its users is verified.

“The intermediary must take measures to verify customer identity. BREIN cannot dictate what such measures are, the intermediary must decide that itself,” BREIN director Tim Kuik informs TorrentFreak.

“Also, the intermediary cannot hide behind dependency on a third party that is unwilling to cooperate. They must secure cooperation contractually or find another business partner,” Kuik adds.

TorrentFreak reached out to Newsconnection for a comment on the ruling but at the time of publication, we have yet to hear back.

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A decade ago online piracy was mostly a habit of downloaders. While online streaming did exist, watching pirate broadcasts live over the Internet was a rather cumbersome niche activity.

Nowadays, that’s no longer the case. Live streaming pirate broadcasts, especially of sports content, is more popular than ever. And with dedicated set-top boxes, it’s pretty easy too.

This has triggered a new wave of enforcement actions, one of which came to its conclusion in Sweden a few days ago. In a landmark ruling, the Stockholm Patent and Market court found three operators of the IPTV service Advanced TV Network (ATN) guilty of copyright infringement and misuse of decoding information.

ATN’s owner Hamid al-Hamid, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. The owner’s son and another accomplice both received one-year prison sentences. In addition, they were ordered to pay over 209 million Swedish kroner ($24m) in damages to rightsholders, Reuters reports.

The case was filed by the Qatari company beIN Sports and the Albanian TV group Digitalb, who accused ATN of rebroadcasting its channels without permission. With help from the local anti-piracy outfit Nordic Content Protection, it filed a complaint against the IPTV operator two years ago.

This lead to a police raid at ATN’s office in Malmo office in 2016, where roughly 20 police cars appeared at the premises. Three people were arrested and servers were seized, which caused the IPTV channels of tens of thousands of customers to go dark.

While the verdict makes it clear that ATN broke the law, the company wasn’t operating as a typical pirate site. In fact, up until the raid it had been a rather successful business.

Founded in 2008, ATN was a fast-growing business which had 25 employees and over 70,000 paying customers at its height.

The company’s ATN box listed more than a thousand channels which allowed customers to view foreign content without satellite dishes. It was targeted at Arabian customers in Sweden, but also attracted people from abroad.

ATN was properly incorporated, paid taxes, and filed annual reports. This revealed that the company generated nearly 60 million Swedish kroner ($7m) in 2013, with a healthy profit margin.

While business was booming, it quickly came to an end when the company was raided and dragged to court. ATN eventually had to close its doors for good and in September 2016 SVT reported that the IPTV service had gone bankrupt. Two years later the three were sentenced.

“We are delighted that the Swedish courts have taken a strong stance against the industrial piracy perpetrated by ATN,” Anders Braf, CEO of Nordic Content Protection says, commenting on the outcome.

“The prison sentences and record fines handed down in this case send a clear message to broadcast pirates – the industry is taking action and we will use the full extent of the law to see offenders brought to justice.”

This is shared by Cameron Andrews, Senior Legal Counsel at beIN, who described the verdict as a significant victory in the fight against illegal TV pirates.

“TV pirates like ATN package hundreds, and often thousands of pirated television channels from around the world, and then make big money by selling subscriptions,” Andrews says.

“These businesses are parasites, making huge profits off the back of stolen content. The damages and prison sentences ordered by the Swedish court reflect the serious harm that piracy on this scale causes.”

While this is a clear victory for the copyright holders, the case is not over yet. At least two of the defendants, including ATN owner Hamid al-Hamid, intend to file an appeal.

Defense lawyer Jonas Nilsson previously stated that his client denied the criminal charges. In addition, a family member of ATN’s owner said that most of the channels were legally broadcasted.

Meanwhile, the ATN brand is not gone. While the Swedish company is bankrupt, the foreign-operated ATN Networks is around, listing Hamid al-Hamid as its CEO. There’s also still an ATN shop in Malmo.

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A copy of the court order is available here (Swedish pdf).

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ABS-CBN, the largest media and entertainment company in the Philippines, is continuing its legal campaign against pirate sites in the US.

The company has singled out dozens of streaming sites that offer access to ‘Pinoy’ content without permission, both in the US and abroad.

The company has already won several cases with damages ranging from a few hundred thousand to millions of dollars. However, the associated injunctions in these cases are perhaps even more significant.

We previously covered how ABS-CBN managed to get court orders to seize domain names, without the defendants getting actively involved. In another case, it expanded on this strategy by also going after advertising revenue.

This is also the case in a recent lawsuit, where a Florida federal court signed a temporary restraining order targeting more than two dozen sites. However, ABS-CBN takes it up another notch, going after the bank accounts of the sites involved.

Last week Chief United States District Judge Kevin Michael Moore signed a temporary restraining order directed at 33 pirate sites. The targets are predominantly niche streaming sites specializing in Pinoy content, such as pinoy.live and pinoybay.se.

While these sites serve a relatively small audience, the restraining order has broad implications.

It orders domain registrars and registries to make the sites unavailable, for example. In addition, advertising networks are compelled to stop doing business with the sites and freeze any outstanding funds.

Finally, and that’s new, the restraining order also targets payment processors. The court specifically mentions PayPal, but the order applies to other payment processors, banks, escrow services, and/or money transmitters as well.

The court orders these companies to “…immediately identify and restrain all funds, as opposed to ongoing account activity, in the advertising or PayPal accounts related to Defendants, and their associated payment accounts and e-mail addresses…”

From the TRO

The advertising companies, including Google’s Adsense, and the other companies such as PayPal also have to provide a detailed overview of the funds they hold for each of the respective sites.

Interestingly, the PayPal addresses were discovered through data provided by Cloudflare in response to a subpoena. The details of the relevant order are, unfortunately, being kept under seal.

It’s clear, however, that the media giant is using all the legal tools at its disposal to target these pirate sites.

The restraining order (pdf) will remain in effect until the court rules on ABS-CBN’s motion for a preliminary injunction. Based on previous cases it’s likely that the measures will remain in effect.

At the time of writing, most of the targeted sites are still available, either on their original domain names or through a backup location.

Some of the sites.

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Many moons ago, people started file-sharing sites for the simple purpose of sharing files with friends and other like-minded people. By volume, it was relatively rare for commercial interests to come first.

While a considerable number of smaller platforms will still fiercely protest their non-profit status if challenged, in 2018 there can be little doubt that generating revenue is the motivation behind the majority of public sites. The prevalence of ads and affiliate schemes is a testament to that.

Of course, sites don’t always start out this way. Many private torrent trackers, for example, were created with the intention of providing free, no-strings content for all. Some still achieve that today but the rising costs of running a site (including servers for hosting, proxying, seeding etc) can’t be ignored, not least since the rich benefactors of yesterday have mostly moved on.

To this end, most sites these days generate money in a number of visible ways, from ever-present ads and product affiliate schemes to ‘donation’ models that are little more than disguised subscriptions. Others accept donations in the traditional sense, with a begging bowl handed round each time a server bill is due.

But what happens when the ends no longer meet? The users of two formerly ‘free’ sites have been finding out recently. In a pair of monster discussion threads on Reddit (1,2), users of pirate anime site ‘Kissanime’ complain that they’ve been completely banned from the video platform.

Their unforgivable crime? Ad-blocking.

Users say that all they did was visit the site with Adblock Plus or uBlock Origin enabled in their browser and the next thing they were given a ban. We jumped aboard and found ourselves greeted by the notice creating all the fuss.

No ad-blocking allowed…

It’s not as if users weren’t warned though. A notice published on the site’s main page informs members that running any kind of browser addon could mean ejection from video platform.

“Using any extensions/plugins on KissAnime could lead to errors/suspension,” it reads.

Nevertheless, plenty of people appear to have ignored the advice and have suffered the consequences as a result. For their part, the operators of the site seem completely unrepentant.

“There is no way to lift the ban at the moment, if you got banned, please disable those adblockers on kissanime, never turn it on kissanime again and wait. Or you could use other anime sites,” an admin announced on Discord.

The situation is an interesting one. Like most pirate sites, KissAnime has costs that have to be met by those visiting the site. Short of asking for a “donation”, these costs are currently met by advertising revenue. However, many users don’t want to be bombarded by advertising so they block the ads.

This means that all adblocking users become freeloaders and therefore a drain on the site. As far as the site’s health goes, there’s literally no point in them being there so they’re best removed from the community. It’s an ironic situation best appreciated by the anime producers themselves who are also trying to make a living.

That being said, not all people block ads out of malice towards the site. Some users complain about porn ads corrupting their experience, so in response they block them all. Being selective is too laborious, they say.

For the site, a solution could be to remove the surprise porn ads. However, a source who asked to stay anonymous told TF that these sometimes offensive ads can be quite lucrative, hence the desire for them to stay visible.

But while one site decides to kick all of its adblocking users out for being a drain on resources, another has taken an even more radical approach to its making available of other people’s content.

FreeTutorials.us is a site that offers premium tutorials and other learning materials without permission from copyright holders. As its name suggests, it originally offered content for free.

Earlier this year, FreeTutorials.us made the headlines after being targeted in the courts by online learning platform Udemy, which took exception to its content appearing on the site for nothing.

In a subsequent interview with TF, the pirate site’s operator explained the motivation behind FreeTutorials (FTU) and affiliated site FreeCoursesOnline (FCO).

“We have been through that phase of life when we didn’t have enough money to buy books and get tuition or even apply for a good course that we always wanted to have, so FTU & FCO are just our vision to provide Free Education For Everyone,” he explained.

While having the ability to learn for free is appreciated by millions the world over, for users of FreeTutorials the dream is now over. Last month and with little fanfare, free download buttons were replaced with something else entirely.

Subscribe for free stuff

There’s little doubt that the prices being charged are much lower than those officially available, something which probably prompted FreeTutorials to change its tagline to the current ‘Affordable Education For Everyone’.

On this basis alone they’re likely to retain visitors. Indeed, a look at their traffic stats for the past few weeks suggests that visitor numbers have remained stable. If this translates to sales, no one should expect ‘free tutorials’ to return. Like free content, few people are turning down ‘free’ money.

FreeTutorials’ email addresses bounce so we can’t ask them why they shifted over to the pay model. However, one doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that in one way or another, a desire to make money is at the root of the change. Whether that’s simply to pay for hosting costs or to help cover living expenses is unknown and probably irrelevant.

The important thing is that whether it’s an enforced advertising model, donations, or a flat-out desire to charge money, pirate sites face similar commercial difficulties to those experienced by their legal counterparts. Everything costs money and needs to be paid for, and if the books don’t balance, that’s the end of the show.

Despite their differences, perhaps they’re quite similar after all.

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