Back in April, pay TV company Foxtel filed the latest in a series of blocking applications, this time targeting more than two dozen domain names facilitating access to 15 torrent and streaming services.

To save on time and costs, Foxtel envisioned things going a little bit differently this time around. The company didn’t want to have expert witnesses present in court and asked whether live demonstrations of websites could be replaced by videos and screenshots instead.

Foxtel also said that if the ISPs expected to block the domains agree, it wouldn’t serve its evidence on them as it had done previously.

The company then asked Justice Nicholas to deal with the entire injunction application “on paper.” He declined, instead scheduling a hearing to take place today.

As hoped by Foxtel, events were indeed more streamlined. According to a ZDNet report, the hearing lasted for just an hour, with no live website demonstrations and the requested videos being allowed.

The application targeted 15 torrent site domains and ten streaming sites located overseas (a requirement for blocking under Australian law), each of which “unashamedly and flagrantly” infringes copyright.

ComputerWorld lists the torrent sites as ETTV, MagnetDL, Torrent Download (possibly TorrentDownloads.me), Torrent Room (TorrentRoom.com), and Torrents.me. A domain facilitating access to the previously-blocked Pirate Bay was also included in the application.

Also demonstrated in Court was a search bar that can be used to access content on torrent sites including 1337x and The Pirate Bay. No further details on the bar have been made available, but as a standalone item, blocking seems unlikely.

The streaming services targeted by Foxtel include HDO, HDEuropix, 123Hulu, Watch32, Sockshare, NewEpisodes, 1Movies, 5Movies, WatchFreeMovies and SeriesTop. They represent just a handful of the hundreds of similar domains offering streaming today.

Both the torrent and streaming sites stand accused of facilitating access to a range of popular TV shows including Game of Thrones, Grey’s Anatomy and Fear the Walking Dead plus movies including Jason Bourne, Pacific Rim, and Red Sparrow.

Under Section 115a of the Copyright Act, Foxtel wants the usual ISPs – Optus, Vocus, Telstra, TPG plus their subsidiaries – to render the sites inaccessible by the usual means.

None were present in Court today, and none turned up at the case management hearing on Friday either. It’s a pattern that’s likely to continue moving forward.

Due to no special systems or technology being deployed by any of the websites in question, the application is expected to run smoothly. Indeed, reports suggest that Justice Nicholas could hand down a decision as soon as 21 June.

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In this day and age, aspiring artists have access to a wide variety of tools they can use to create a decent product.

Creating something is easy, but the real challenge is to escape obscurity and get noticed by the public.

Traditionally, this task has been fulfilled by major publishers and other media distributors, but there are also alternative routes.

The stories of YouTube sensations who turned into their own media empires come to mind. But in darker corners of the web, which are mostly associated with piracy, there are success stories too.

This week we spoke to Italian author Wallace Lee, whose unofficial Rambo-prequel “Rambo Year One” received great reviews after relying on torrents as a main distribution channel.

Lee’s story starts several years ago, when he began publishing short Rambo stories on a personal blog hosted by WordPress. It was fan-fiction in its purest form, but the author soon realized that not everyone was happy with his work.

“Two years before free-sharing my first novel, I had a blog where I used to post my Rambo prequel short tales for free. And yet, a few months later, my site was shut down because the laws in the US allow copyright owners to stop fanfiction too, and even if it’s just for free.”

It turned out that a rightsholder objected to his use of the Rambo character. While Lee doesn’t recall the sender of the notice, it meant that he could no longer publish his work as he pleased.

Caught in a copyright stranglehold, the author felt limited in his creative expression. Ironically, he saw torrents as his way out. If he published his works on The Pirate Bay, copyright holders couldn’t touch him, he thought.

It was a defiant thought, which may have worked, but luckily for him, it didn’t get that far. Instead of becoming a ‘pirate writer,’ Lee received permission from David Morrell, author of the novel “First Blood” on which the Rambo empire was built.

“Frankly, I feel very lucky things ended up this way because I did not want to be at war with the same guys who owned Rambo in the first place,” Lee tells TorrentFreak.

With permission to freely share his book, the unofficial Rambo-prequel was finally released. While Lee no longer had to turn to piracy, he was still committed to using torrent sites to get exposure and escape obscurity.

That worked to a certain degree. The book was picked up here and there, but without a major publisher, it was hard to be taken seriously by literary critics.

“The prejudice was extremely harsh and lasted for a very long time. For one whole year at least, I was just ‘the crazy guy who was writing a Rambo-prequel saga for nothing’,” Lee says.

That changed when the author started to point people toward the historical accuracy of the book, which has the Vietnam war as the backdrop, and using that as one of the main selling points.

“Everyone was astonished by the idea that a Rambo prequel aspired to be a good historical novel too, and that was when important people decided to finally give me a chance. And when they did, they were pleased.”

This eventually led to more and more positive reviews, including a reading recommendation from the Calvino literary awards in Italy.

Recognition

Looking back, Lee doesn’t think he would have come this far without torrents. They helped, not only to keep distribution costs low, but also to make his work visible to an audience of millions.

“Torrents helped a lot, and they’re still doing so in terms of distribution. Distribution is the most important part of the success of ANY artwork: books, music, films, everything,” Lee tells us.

“Torrents solved the problem by making my work worldwide both visible and available at the same time. Without the torrents, thousands of people in the world would have never found my websites and novels on the internet.”

Now, a few years later, the book has been translated by fans into two more languages, German and Spanish. They are all available for free in Epub, Mobi, and Pdf format, and the author uploaded new torrents on several sites just last week.

Rambo Year One

In addition to public sites such as The Pirate Bay, 1337X and Ettv, Lee also uploaded the release to the Italian private tracker TNT Village, which helped him a lot over the years.

Looking back, the whole experience has been a great success. In addition to getting recognized internationally as an Italian author, he is now in talks with several publishing companies to publish his non-Rambo novels.

Lee currently accepts donations on his site, where people can also find his other novels, for free. He never made a penny from the Rambo-prequel though, and never intended to. What he got instead was worth much more than that.

“Receiving words of appreciation from actual US veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for your Rambo-prequel novels, has no price,” Lee says.

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With the online piracy wars about to enter their third decade, there’s an increasing emphasis on pressurizing influential third-parties to tackle the problem.

As a result, much blame is laid at the feet of companies like Google, who are regularly blamed for not doing more to tackle infringements carried out by individuals and entities outside of their control.

Search results are a particularly sticky subject. Google, Bing, and Yahoo, for example, wish to provide the most comprehensive indexes possible. On the flip side, entertainment industry companies insist that those indexes shouldn’t help people find pirated content. If they do, it’s argued that these companies act as piracy facilitators.

This familiar battle is now underway in Russia, where Yandex is in receipt of a strongly-worded letter which accuses the search giant of being a big part of the piracy problem.

According to local publication Vedomosti, the letter is signed by Leonid Agronov, general director of the National Federation of the Music Industry, Alexei Byrdin, general director of the Internet Video Association, Sergei Selyanov, director of the Association of Film and Television Producers, and Pavel Stepanov, president of the Media Communication Union.

The entertainment giants explain that due to ‘pirate’ search results appearing in its indexes, Yandex is contributing to the growth of online piracy. They want the company to show responsibility by adopting measures to both find and remove infringing links from search and related products.

“We urge Yandex to use all available methods to detect illegal content and eliminate it both from search results and from the applications and services of Yandex,” the letter reads.

It’s suggested that Yandex should take a similar path to that taken by search companies in the UK, via the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding which declares common interests in fighting piracy.

Yandex won’t be alone, however.

A spokesman for the Media and Communications Union, which is one of the groups behind the letter, told Vedomosti that a similar letter would be sent to Google in the near future. Needless to say, Google is no stranger to these kinds of allegations, whether in Europe or the United States.

In the letter, search engines like Yandex are accused of promoting illegal resources over legal content, resulting in revenue being siphoned away from legitimate players and into the hands of criminals. The search engine is also accused of taking down material in response to demands under the DMCA, but not doing enough in Russia.

“Yandex actively cooperates with copyright holders and is working to improve the culture of legal content consumption,” the company said in a statement, adding that it actually stands to benefit from ads promoting sales of non-infringing content.

“Yandex stands for an honest Internet, in which quality legal content is available to the user and rightsholders earn from that legitimate consumption,” the company said.

Unlike in the United States under the DMCA, content isn’t as readily taken down in Russia. Yandex also opposes filtering search results, warning that the system is easily abused by rightsholders and others looking to stifle competition.

That being said, Yandex says that rightsholders are welcome to take advantage of the local site-blocking mechanism which tackles both source sites and their mirrors. With these inaccessible, ‘pirate’ search results become useless.

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The UK has some of the toughest intellectual property legislation to be found anywhere in the world and rightsholders have plenty of options available, from civil action through to criminal referrals.

For the past several years the government has also shown a willingness to engage with the private sector in respect of online piracy. It has provided funding and resources to initiatives including the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit and the multi-faceted Operation Creative, a commitment that looks set to continue.

At the heart of many of these matters sits the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), the government department responsible for copyrights, trademarks, patents and designs. This week the IPO published two documents, one detailing its corporate plan for 2018-2019 and the other outlining its overall strategy to 2021. Both contain statements relating to online copyright enforcement.

“IP matters. It touches everything that makes modern life, easier, safer, prosperous and more enjoyable,” the IPO Strategy 2018 report begins.

“Our work gives researchers, inventors and creators, whether as individuals or businesses, the confidence to invest their time, energy and money in doing something new and making life better.”

The IPO says its aim is to help the UK become the most creative and innovative country in the world by providing excellent IP services, a world-leading IP environment, and by making the IPO itself a great place to work. Much of the information in the reports focuses on how that progress will be made in the broader sense, including via the reduction of IP crime and infringement.

The IPO believes this can be achieved in a number of ways, including by investing in enforcement and improving access to enforcement options for rights holders. Investment in intelligence and an increased capacity for strategic leadership are foreseen, in addition to spending boosts to convince everyone that infringement is unacceptable.

“We will work towards a time where infringement is seen as socially unacceptable by all,” the IPO writes.

Periodically over the past couple of years, the government has stepped into the middle of disputes between rightsholders and Internet intermediaries, suggesting that if agreements to curb piracy aren’t reached, legislation could follow.

The IPO sees this kind of work continuing over the next couple of years with an offer to “broker greater engagement from online intermediaries in the fight against infringement and IP crime.”

The IPO Corporate Plan 2018-2019 touches on similar issues, promising to ensure that appropriate resources are available to deliver on promises made as part of the government’s enforcement strategy.

“Reducing IP crime requires a multi-faceted approach. The UK is already a world leader in the enforcement of IP. We want to build upon what we are doing to create a paradigm shift around infringement,” the IPO writes.

“Before we can make this happen we need to improve our knowledge around consumer understanding of IP crime and infringement and what works to change behavior in this space. We need to understand the strengths and challenges of our enforcement approach, continue to invest in education and intelligence, and maintain and increase our capacity to lead.”

The IPO says it will consider if there are ways to reduce the costs of enforcement for rights holders, such as reducing the time taken to bring a matter to court and reducing costs once there.

The Office also wants to consider the possibility of more administrative approaches, including “administrative blocking injunctions”, something which it hopes to understand the “pros and cons” of by March 2019. But the plans don’t stop there.

“We will work with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport [DCMS] and industry to support the proposed program of roundtable discussions outlined in the Creative Industries’ Sector Deal.

“A key aspect will be ensuring they are used effectively to assess the evidence for, and where appropriate, to agree future action to tackle the infringement of IP rights online,” the IPO notes.

In conjunction with industry, the IPO hopes to develop “voluntary measures” to target online marketplaces, social media, and digital advertising, while continuing to co-fund the Creative Content UK (CCUK) educational campaign in conjunction with DCMS.

“To begin the work towards making the infringement of IP socially unacceptable, we need a better view of consumer attitudes to IP crime and what messaging changes behavior.

“We know that behavioral change is long-term and never easy, but we want to secure general cultural change where respecting IP is seen as the right thing to do. This work will link up with the messaging on IP’s economic and career impact,” the IPO concludes.

—

The IPO Strategy 2018 report can be found here (pdf)
The IPO Corporate Plan 2018-2019 can be found here (pdf)

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Former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde paid the ultimate price for his involvement with the notorious pirate site, by sacrificing his freedom.

Since his release from prison over three years ago he has been busy with several old and new projects, ranging from Flattr to his art projects, and even a TV-show in Finland.

However, even though he hasn’t been involved with TPB for nearly a decade, his past association still haunts him.

Previously, the District Court in Finland ordered him to pay €350,000 for 60 music tracks that were shared illegally by the site’s users, as well as a looming € 1,000,000 fine if he ever operated the site in future.

Sunde appealed this decision with help from his lawyer Herkko Hietanen, and not without success.

This week the Helsinki District Court decided to drop the million euro threat hanging over his head. Also, the record labels voluntarily abandoned their €350,000 damages claim.

The Pirate Bay co-founder doesn’t walk away completely unscathed though. While he doesn’t have to pay the legal fees of the record labels, the Court did order him to pay €7,769 in various costs that arose from the case.

The Court concluded that Sunde was liable for The Pirate Bay during the period 2010 to 2014. The reasoning behind this is that he opposed a request from a company that tried to trademark “The Pirate Bay” and its logo. Also, he used the word “we” and “us” when referring to the site in public.

Sunde doesn’t agree with this conclusion and has already announced an appeal.

The Pirate Bay’s co-founder says he saw it as his public duty to defend The Pirate Bay as a member of the public. And referring to TPB with terms such as “we” or “us” simply refers to his history with the site, he says.

“The ‘trademark’ of TPB belongs to the public, and not any individual or commercial entity. On a moral level, it’s important to oppose when commercial entities are trying to limit anyone from what belongs to the public,” Sunde informs TF.

“It’s like having been part of a rock band, I still care about the band, even if I split because I couldn’t stand the bass player. It’s absurd expecting that person to not use words as ‘us’ or ‘we’ when talking about that group anymore.”

Despite the dropped claims, music industry group IFPI is still happy with the outcome. The lawsuit was primarily needed to declare the Pirate Bay illegal, so it could demand that ISPs should block it. This blockade will remain in place.

“The most important thing was to stop The Pirate Bay’s operations in Finland, thus keeping the service blocked for Finns. It was the copyright owners’ real intention to start the trial in 2011,” Jaana Pihkala, head of the local anti-piracy group TTVK, told Svenska Yle.

Sunde, however, notes that the record labels may want to take a closer look at the people they employ, adding that this whole case was just another effort to censor the Internet.

“It’s time that the record companies start paying for their own injustices. Just two days ago a core member of the Danish anti-piracy organization, Johan Schlüter, got convicted to four years of probation after embezzling 100 Million Danish kroner from his clients.

“The same person has previously claimed that “child porn is great” because it opens up doors for copyright companies to censor the internet,” Sunde adds.

“This is exactly what the current case is about, censoring the internet. By suing an individual with little means to defend himself, the record companies found a backdoor into censoring a website. They don’t care about the damages to the individual, as long as they can get control of the internet.”

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