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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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While Kodi is a neutral media player, the name often shows up in piracy related headlines.

This is the result of dozens of unofficial addons, which can turn the software into a piracy tool, something the Kodi team can do little about.

In fact, the media player developers prefer to see their software used for legitimate purposes. While that’s already the case, they hope to expand their reach by offering support for DRM.

The Kodi team already announced that it was working on DRM support last year and with the “Kodi v18 Leia” release it’s now reality. This means that publishers can develop official addons which are capable of playing encrypted content.

Martijn Kaijser, Project lead of the XBMC Foundation from which the Kodi team operates, stresses that without DRM, mainstream adoption from publishers is not an option.

“In the past, we have talked to publishers and in almost all cases the first question was if we supported DRM. If not, that was the end of the talk. Others did have interest if we were going to add it and would come back to us if we would,” Kaijser says.

Mainstream adoption is a slow process though. Thus far there are no “official” addons using the DRM capabilities. However, the Kodi team hopes that these will come soon.

“Up till now, there is no official work or interest that I know of from providers. Our current motto is ‘if you implement it they will come’ so let’s hope this will indeed open doors,” Kaijser notes.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the DRM functionality is not being utilized. The Kodi team believes that several addons in their repository have it implemented already, including the Eurosport Player and the YouTube plugin.

The unofficial Netflix and Amazon addons, which are available elsewhere on the web, are confirmed to use the DRM functionality, according to Kaijser.

It has to be noted that DRM might not work perfectly everywhere, as the requirements can differ per platform and service. So there might be some restrictions.

“The first one we had working was Android because it has the system implemented in the Android API and has full 4K support depending on the license in place on the hardware. For Linux, we act as if we are a browser and then you are limited to what a browser can play,” Kaijser says.

That brings us to the main downside of DRM. For the end user, it is not always the most convenient option. However, in this case, it’s a choice between not having mainstream content available at all, or with limitations.

Let’s hope that users don’t get too frustrated by any of the possible DRM issues, as that may tempt them to look for alternatives.

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

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In recent years it has become much easier to stream movies, TV-shows and other media over the Internet.

Legal services such as Netflix and HBO are flourishing, but there’s also a darker side to this streaming epidemic.

Millions of people are streaming from unauthorized sources, often paired with perfectly legal streaming platforms and devices. This issue has become particularly problematic for Roku, which sells easy-to-use media players.

The company’s media players were banned from sale in Mexico last year, where the company has over a million users.

This ruling turned piracy into one of the company’s main priorities and it didn’t take for Roku to take action. It soon started building its in-house anti-piracy team and several pirate channels were banned from the platform, replaced by FBI warnings.

Today, roughly a year after Roku’s piracy woes hit the mainstream news, the company has released fresh details that show how effective its anti-piracy measures have been.

According to data collected directly from Roku’s platform this month, approximately 99.5% of all “streaming hours” come from channels with no links to ‘pirate organizations.’

In other words, the vast majority of the time spent streaming content on Roku is not related to piracy.

In Mexico, approximately 92% of streaming hours come from ‘legitimate’ channels, but Roku is confident that this number will align with the global average as time progresses.

While the new data show that piracy is relatively minimal, Roku doesn’t explain how this compares to a year ago. The company suggests, however, that there is a clear downward trend.

Previously, figures published by a Mexican market research firm estimated that forty percent of all Roku owners in the country use the device to access pirated content. However, that report didn’t look at the time spent viewing various channels.

The positive progress was achieved through a combination of enforcement efforts, Roku says.

The company says it tracked down more than 400 pirate organizations and removed all associated channels, for example. In addition, Roku also took action against thousands of social media pages that were used to promote allegedly infringing Roku channels.

These efforts have not been without controversy. They caused some backlash when legitimate YouTube and Netflix channels were accidentally replaced by FBI warnings, and recent bans of M3U playlist players are also called into question.

Roku, however, is not planning to ease up. Developers will now have to get certified before they can publish any channels and the company says it’s using automated technology to detect potential infringing content.

“Piracy hurts our business and the industry. We continue to devote considerable resources to fighting piracy by continuously improving our software, tools and detection methods to remove pirates from our platform,” Gary Ellison, Roku’s VP of trust engineering says.

“The data we are releasing today shows the effectiveness of our anti-piracy efforts. It is a top priority to ensure that our platform is closed for pirates and good for consumers.”

The data focuses on Mexico for a reason. Over the past several months, Roku has discussed its piracy efforts with Mexican government bodies and trade organizations and hopes its progress will eventually mean devices being welcomed back to local stores.

“Mexico can benefit greatly from legitimate TV streaming and should not let piracy stand in its way,” Matthew Anderson, Roku’s chief marketing officer says, commenting on the data.

“It’s time for all major leaders in the TV industry to work together to end piracy while giving consumers the wide choice of TV content they deserve,” he adds.

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

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