Streaming set-top boxes have been selling like hot cakes over the past several years.

While these devices can be used to consume content legally, the entertainment industry also sees them as a potential threat.

For many copyright holders, the threat is viewed as a top enforcement priority, one that has already led to several arrests and lawsuits. Dragon Box is one of the devices that got into legal trouble recently.

Dragon Media and two of its resellers in Hawaii were added to a lawsuit by the rightsholders of the films “Mechanic: Resurrection” (ME2) and “Once Upon a Time in Venice.” This case started out as a ‘classic’ BitTorrent piracy case but switched focus to the streaming box.

The complaint describes how the Dragon Box can be used to access copyrighted material, including the works of ME2 and Venice. The defendants were well aware of this, it argues, adding that the defendants promoted the box with terms hinting at infringing uses.

“Simply put, Dragon Box is intentionally inducing infringement. Plaintiffs respectfully request that the Court enter a preliminary injunction that requires the Dragon Box Defendants to halt their flagrantly illegal conduct immediately,” ME2 and Venice stated.

Dragon Box and its owner Paul Christoforo, as well as the resellers Naino Bettencourt and Jason Barnhart, who run “The Dragon Box Hawaii” and “JB Dragon Box-Hawaii Kai” respectively, all stood accused of contributory copyright infringement.

While copyright infringement cases can drag on for years, this lawsuit was resolved rather swiftly.

Yesterday, ME2 and Venice dismissed their claims against Dragon Media and its owner Paul Christoforo. The dismissal follows a settlement agreement by the parties involved, the terms of which have not been publicly released.

The two resellers also resolved their dispute with the filmmakers. Both Naino Bettencourt and Jason Barnhart reached a settlement and signed a consent judgment. The latter includes an injunction, preventing both from infringing any of ME2 and Venice’s works going forward.

Since the settlement agreements have not been published, we don’t know whether any compensation was paid. The injunction issued against defendant Barnhart does suggest, however, that the Dragon Boxes he sells will be ‘modified.’

“Defendant is ORDERED to refrain from directly or indirectly selling any of said streaming devices made by Defendant Dragon Media, Inc. including but not limited to the Dragon Box DB4 and the Dragon Box DB5 until notified by Plaintiffs’ counsel that a software modification has been performed to said streaming devices.”

While this matter is now resolved, the trouble for Dragon Box is not over yet. After all, this isn’t the first lawsuit the company and its owner have been dragged into this year.

The company was previously sued by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), which represents several Hollywood studios, Netflix, and Amazon. That case is still ongoing.

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The stipulation for dismissal against Dragon Media and Paul Christoforo is available here (pdf). And here are the consent judgments of Naino Bettencourt (pdf) and Jason Barnhart (pdf).

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With pirate sites finding themselves squeezed by initiatives designed to deprive them of advertising cash, many have turned to more creative ways of generating revenue.

Last September, users of The Pirate Bay complained that their CPU usage increased dramatically when they browsed certain Pirate Bay pages. It was later revealed that the site had implemented a Monero cryptocurrency miner provided by Coinhive.

The development generated negative publicity which nudged the site’s operators to issue a statement.

“As you may have noticed we are testing a Monero javascript miner. This is only a test. We really want to get rid of all the ads. But we also need enough money to keep the site running,” they said.

Just a month later and after a short break, the miner was back again, to the disappointment of users. While many people objected to the mining overall, most seemed disappointed that they weren’t given the chance to opt out.

In the months that followed it was unclear whether TPB would abandon its mining efforts but developments in recent weeks have answered that question.

An initial report from an uploader, that TPB had added a miner to the upload page, was soon followed up with general complaints of a miner being implemented on other parts of the site.

Coin mining, once again

As the image shows, mining is throttled to 0.9 (in the past rates between 0.6 and 0.8 were used), but with reports of hot CPUs on record, it’s clear that people would prefer to have the option not to ‘donate’ their cycles.

Previously, TPB supermoderator Sid expressed disappointment at the existence of the miner and after the latest revelations he’s on record again and sounding rather less patient. The solution, he says, is to enable a good adblocker and spend as little time on the site as possible.

“All you require from TPB is a magnet link. Open the site. Find a torrent. Click the magnet link. Close the site. End of miner,” he writes.

“If you are ever on TPB for more than 5 minutes or so you’re doing it wrong. And if you’re ever on TPB without an ad blocker you’re doing it doubly wrong.”

While some ad-blockers can do the trick, dedicated coin mining blockers are available in the Chrome store, for example, which makes the process very easy indeed.

Knowledgeable users are also able to use such addons to whitelist sites they want to support.

The option to block TPB’s mining efforts was previously mentioned by the site’s operators in a blog post but novice users are unlikely to understand what’s happening to their machines, let alone do anything about it.

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Back in the 80s, I fancied myself as a half-decent 8-bit coder but of course, there was always someone who did it outrageously better. Like my idols in the C64 demo scene, for example, whom I eventually rubbed shoulders with.

They made computers do things they weren’t supposed to, like displaying graphics in places the machine didn’t natively allow or playing music on the heads of disc drives. The aim, at least in part, was to push software and hardware to breaking point. What they didn’t need, however, was help from self-professed experts.

Unfortunately for them, my clearly superior teenage coding knowledge (and access to their machines) allowed me to quietly ‘improve’ some of their work in progress, ‘fixing’ it here and there without needing to ask permission or mention what I’d done.

Luckily for the shape of my face, nothing broke down immediately and development on the ‘improved’ software mostly continued as if nothing had happened. And then people began swearing. A lot. I’m still sorry for that.

I imagine the cursing that went on back then, in the wake of my efforts to ‘fix’ problems that were none of my business, was similar to that recently uttered by Internet pioneer Vint Cerf and the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, in response to the Article 13 controversy.

These men, who were there at the very beginning, also had a vision for their creations that didn’t involve smart-asses interfering with their work. Just like my unwanted efforts to ‘improve’ perfectly good parallax scrolling, web-blocking and content filtering are added complications that don’t easily fit with the original vision for an open web.

No one wants complications. Most people – the vast majority of people – go on, 99% of people – do not want web-blocking, they don’t want filtering, and they don’t want expanded liabilities for intermediaries. But they’re mainly not being obtuse or pro-piracy, it’s just that their Internet (like a certain group’s scrolling) doesn’t need fixing because it’s just fine as it is.

Of course, this call for the status quo is easily countered by the pro-blocking and pro-filtering movement who claim that the measures they want implementing globally have shown to work thus far, without any serious collateral damage. On this basis alone, why should anyone object to more of the same?

Well, why shouldn’t they?

None of these restrictions improve Internet users’ lives and there’s a dramatically reduced chance that the “Internet will break” if it’s left alone. So why not leave it? It’s not as if the public is being offered an incentive to welcome restrictions with open arms – price reductions on movies and music alongside a promise to increase quality if restrictions are put in place perhaps? Hardly.

The point is this: it’s easy to frame this argument as one between those in favor of protecting copyright and those who want to pirate everything. In truth, it’s actually more fundamental. This is a clash between people who believe the Internet shouldn’t be tampered with – period – and those who believe that, because they’re potentially losing money, they should be allowed to tinker under everyone’s hood.

People should, of course, be allowed to protect their rights but not at any cost. In the same way the Internet has grown and developed beyond all expectations, we should expect that the movement to block, filter, delete, divert and otherwise meddle in the net’s inner workings will grow too, probably in ways we’d never envisioned 10 years ago.

That being said, it’s unlikely that any single filtering, blocking or liability-increasing effort will “break the Internet” and even a couple combined won’t herald the online apocalypse. After all, censorship machines are attacking as we speak, and most of us are still online with decent amounts of freedom.

But in the same way that the famous Doomsday Clock ticks and tocks inexorably towards midnight, it’s not one event under consideration here, but the interplay between many.

A restriction or web-block here, a content filter or a long-forgotten scrolling adjustment there. None of it really matters until that moment when history catches up with us and we wished we’d have been more careful over who was given control.

Should we really be letting people who don’t know what they’re doing mess around with something so important, even when they’re doing it for reasons they genuinely believe in?

If something really is properly broken, then perhaps we should consider sensible ways to fix it. However, when all the fixes become the very reason everything breaks down, we will have clearly gotten our priorities wrong and it will be too late. The big question is how long we’ll have to wait to find out.

Will it be ‘never’ as we’re reliably informed by the entertainment industries or ‘sooner or later’ as the technologists suggest? The truth is, none of us really knows. The Internet experts don’t know there will be a meltdown next decade and copyright holders can’t promise that everything will be just fine in 20 years’ time.

What we can say, however, is that our beloved Internet has served us pretty well up to now and despite much complaining and the existence of piracy, most people are doing very well out of it. No matter what happens it’s unlikely to break completely but there is a chance, at some point in the future, it will find itself being suffocated into submission.

So, the simple challenge for us today is to find ways to protect rightsholders without affecting the vision for the open Internet. Answers on a postcard, please.

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While torrent sites were once the next big thing, streaming is now at the height of fashion.

A shocking number of platforms now offer instant access to massive movie and TV shows libraries, something the authorities seem powerless to do much about. Over in Ukraine, authorities say they have made a start.

For the past nine years Onlainfilm has been serving up movies to the masses but this week all that came to an end when local cyberpolice shut the operation down.

Government and police investigators report that after detecting “members of a criminal group” behind the site, police carried out five raids in the city of Khmelnytskyi located in the west of Ukraine.

One of the searched locations

“Online movie theater ‘Onlainfilm’ was among the five most-visited sites in several countries,” police said in a statement.

“Every day, the site was visited by half a million Internet users, and the number of video views exceeded two million. The total amount of videos posted on the site exceeded 50 TB.”

While police haven’t yet announced how many people were arrested, the image below reveals that hardware, money, and other items were seized during their searches.

Like many other sites of a similar nature, Onlainfilm took precautions to reduce the chances of detection. Police say that its operators used a reverse proxy server which enabled it to relay visitors’ requests to other servers hidden elsewhere.

In such cases, prosecutors and copyright holders tend to lead up front with claims of millions in lost revenues caused by sites such as Onlainfilm. However, authorities say those figures won’t be released until “the necessary investigative actions” have been carried out.

Ukraine’s reputation for low levels of intellectual property crime protection has placed the country firmly in the crosshairs of the United States Trade Representative.

The country is currently on the Priority Watch List with the USTR recently reporting that Ukraine had failed to “implement an effective means to combat the widespread online infringement of copyright” in the country.

Although Ukraine was featured quite heavily for other reasons, Onlainfilm was not listed in the USTR’s 2017 list of Notorious Markets.

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Every year, the entertainment industries celebrate their stars in various award ceremonies.

From the Oscars, through the Grammys, to the Emmys, there’s no shortage of spotlights for the finest performers.

This week the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA) launched an award of its own, to praise those who protect the entertainment industries.

The group, which counts prominent media players such as BT, Canal+, Fox Networks, La Liga, Premier League and Sky among its members, issued its first Anti-Piracy Award.

The award ceremony took place at Europol’s Intellectual Property Crime conference in Budapest, Hungary. The anti-piracy division of the Spanish police came out as the big winner.

Police Nacional’s ‘Grupo de Antipirateria’ is led by inspector Marlene Álvarez Vicente, who personally received the award from the hands of AAPA’s Vice President Mark Mulready.

Together with AAPA member Irdeto, the Spanish Police played a key role in several successful operations. This includes the shutdown of an ISP in Malaga which offered unlicensed IPTV subscriptions, as well as “Operation Casper,” through which a large IPTV piracy ring was dismantled.

“Irdeto has been working with Marlene and her team on cases such as Operation Casper and Y-Internet and I can testify personally to the commitment, dedication and skills demonstrated by her and the team,” Mulready says.

Mark Mulready and Inspector Marlene Álvarez Vicente (Photo AAPA pr)

The runners-up for the Anti-Piracy award were a team from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, a branch of the Irish Police, and Bogdan Ciinaru of Europol’s IPC3 unit.

The AAPA is mostly concerned with audiovisual piracy so the new award has its limitations. The winners all directly protected the interests of several of the group’s members, which made them prime contenders.

“The work done by our three award recipients in fighting audiovisual piracy is of enormous value to the industry. It sends a clear signal that piracy will not be tolerated and law enforcement has the resources, skills and expertise to investigate this crime and bring the perpetrators to justice,” Mulready says.

“We hope that these awards will help encourage others to take up the fight against audiovisual piracy and we are ready to support those efforts,” he adds.

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