In 2016, adult entertainment publisher ALS Scan dragged several third-party Internet services to court.

The company targeted companies including CDN provider CloudFlare and the Chicago-based hosting company Steadfast, accusing them of copyright infringement because they offered services to pirate sites.

ALS argued that Steadfast refused to shut down the servers of the image sharing platform Imagebam.com, which was operated by its client Flixya. The hosting provider had been targeted with dozens of DMCA notices, and ALS accused Steadfast of turning a blind eye to the situation.

Steadfast denied these allegations. The hosting provider did indeed lease servers to Flixya for ten years but said that it forwarded all notices to its client. The hosting company could not address individual infringements, other than shutting down the entire site, which would have been disproportionate in their view.

With a trial getting closer, the hosting company submitted a motion for summary judgment, arguing that it can’t be held liable for copyright infringement. A few days ago California District Court Judge George Wu ordered on the matter, bringing good news for Steadfast.

Judge Wu dismissed all claims against Steadfast, including contributory copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and contributory trademark infringement, which is a clear win.

Dismissed

The order clarifies that hosting providers such as Steadfast can be held liable for pirate sites. This is also the case when these sites are hosted on servers that are leased by a company which itself has a takedown policy, something Steadfast contended.

In this case, it is clear that Steadfast knew of the infringements. It could have shut down imagebam.com but failed to do so, and continued to provide server space to known copyright infringers on the site. All these arguments could, in theory, weigh against the hosting provider.

However, in order to be liable for contributory copyright infringement, ALS Scan needed to show that Steadfast failed to take simple steps to prevent the copyright infringements at issue. This is where the adult entertainment publisher’s arguments failed.

Steadfast forwarded all notices to its customer Flixya which resulted in the removal of the infringing images. In other words, the hosting provider took simple steps that prevented further copyright infringements.

“Given these undisputed facts, the Court would find that Steadfast did not ‘[fail] to take simple measures’ to prevent the specific acts of infringement of which it was aware. Steadfast took simple steps that resulted in all of the at-issue images being removed,” Judge Wu writes.

ALS argued that Steadfast should have shut down the entire server of its customer to prevent future infringements, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Service providers only have to take measures if they know that infringements occurred or will occur in the future. The latter was not obvious here.

“As such, the Court is not convinced that Steadfast had any reason, legal or practical, to terminate Flixya’s account and power down its servers,” the order reads.

Steadfast founder and CEO Karl Zimmerman is happy with the outcome of the case. He agrees that hosting providers have a responsibility to respond to copyright infringement complaints, but stresses that his company already has the right procedures in play.

“We already check and assure the content is removed, and yes, if the content simply stays up, that is concerning and shows that more could be done,” Zimmerman informs TF.

“We took action in forwarding the complaints, tracking those complaints, and validating the content had been removed. We did what was required of us, which is why I thought it was odd we were in this case in the first place.”

Hosting providers should take measures to help curb copyright infringement, according to Steadfast. However, shutting down entire services of customers who take down infringing links when they’re asked too, goes too far. Zimmerman is glad that Judge Wu agreed with this.

“To me, it simply does not seem reasonable to have to shut down a customer just because future infringement of their users is possible, when every indication is that the customer is completely law-abiding and I’m glad the judge agreed with that,” he says.

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A copy of United States District Court Judge George Wu’s order is available here (pdf).

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Terms including “Kodi box” are now in common usage in the UK and thanks to continuing coverage in the tabloid media, more and more people are learning that free content is just a few clicks away.

In parallel, premium IPTV services are also on the up. In basic terms, these provide live TV and sports through an Internet connection in a consumer-friendly way. When bundled with beautiful interfaces and fully functional Electronic Program Guides (EPG), they’re almost indistinguishable from services offered by Sky and BTSport, for example.

These come at a price, typically up to £10 per month or £20 for a three-month package, but for the customer this represents good value for money. Many providers offer several thousand channels in decent quality and reliability is much better than free streams. This kind of service was offered by prominent UK provider ACE TV but an announcement last December set alarm bells ringing.

“It saddens me to announce this, but due to pressure from the authorities in the UK, we are no longer selling new subscriptions. This obviously includes trials,” ACE said in a statement.

ACE insisted that it would continue as a going concern, servicing existing customers. However, it did keep its order books open for a while longer, giving people one last chance to subscribe to the service for anything up to a year. And with that ACE continued more quietly in the background, albeit with a disabled Facebook page.

But things were not well in ACE land. Like all major IPTV providers delivering services to the UK, ACE was subjected to blocking action by the English Premier League and UEFA. High Court injunctions allow ISPs in the UK to block their pirate streams in real-time, meaning that matches were often rendered inaccessible to ACE’s customers.

While this blocking can be mitigated when the customer uses a VPN, most don’t want to go to the trouble. Some IPTV providers have engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse with the blocking efforts, some with an impressive level of success. However, it appears that the nuisance eventually took its toll on ACE.

“The ISPs in the UK and across Europe have recently become much more aggressive in blocking our service while football games are in progress,” ACE said in a statement last month.

“In order to get ourselves off of the ISP blacklist we are going to black out the EPL games for all users (including VPN users) starting on Monday. We believe that this will enable us to rebuild the bypass process and successfully provide you with all EPL games.”

People familiar with the blocking process inform TF that this is unlikely to have worked.

Although nobody outside the EPL’s partners knows exactly how the system works, it appears that anti-piracy companies simply subscribe to IPTV services themselves and extract the IP addresses serving the content. ISPs then block them. No pause would’ve helped the situation.

Then, on March 24, another announcement indicated that ACE probably wouldn’t make it very far into 2019.

“It is with sorrow that we announce that we are no longer accepting renewals, upgrades to existing subscriptions or the purchase of new credits. We plan to support existing subscriptions until they expire,” the team wrote.

“EPL games including highlights continue to be blocked and are not expected to be reinstated before the end of the season.”

The suggestion was that ACE would keep going, at least for a while, but chat transcripts with the company obtained by TF last month indicated that ACE would probably shut down, sooner rather than later. Less than a week on, that proved to be the case.

On or around March 29, ACE began sending emails out to customers, announcing the end of the company.

“We recently announced that Ace was no longer accepting renewals or offering new reseller credits but planned to support existing subscription. Due to mounting legal pressure in the UK we have been forced to change our plans and we are now announcing that Ace will close down at the end of March,” the email read.

“This means that from April 1st onwards the Ace service will no longer work.”

April 1 was yesterday and it turns out it wasn’t a joke. Customers who paid in advance no longer have a service and those who paid a year up front are particularly annoyed. So-called ‘re-sellers’ of ACE are fuming more than most.

Re-sellers effectively act as sales agents for IPTV providers, buying access to the service at a reduced rate and making a small profit on each subscriber they sign up. They get a nice web interface to carry out the transactions and it’s something that anyone can do.

However, this generally requires investment from the re-seller in order to buy ‘credits’ up front, which are used to sell services to new customers. Those who invested money in this way with ACE are now in trouble.

“If anyone from ACE is reading here, yer a bunch of fuckin arseholes. I hope your next shite is a hedgehog!!” one shouted on Reddit. “Being a reseller for them and losing hundreds a pounds is bad enough!!”

While the loss of a service is probably a shock to more recent converts to the world of IPTV, those with experience of any kind of pirate TV product should already be well aware that this is nothing out of the ordinary.

For those who bought hacked or cloned satellite cards in the 1990s, to those who used ‘chipped’ cable boxes a little later on, the free rides all come to an end at some point. It’s just a question of riding the wave when it arrives and paying attention to the next big thing, without investing too much money at the wrong time.

For ACE’s former customers, it’s simply a case of looking for a new provider. There are plenty of them, some with zero intent of shutting down. There are rumors that ACE might ‘phoenix’ themselves under another name but that’s also par for the course when people feel they’re owed money and suspicions are riding high.

“Please do not ask if we are rebranding/setting up a new service, the answer is no,” ACE said in a statement.

And so the rollercoaster continues…

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In recent years it has become much easier to stream movies and TV-shows 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.

Last week federal judges in Mexico City and Torreón decided that Roku sales should remain banned there, keeping last year’s suspension in place. While the ruling can still be appealed, it hurts Roku’s bottom line.

The company has more than a million users in Mexico according to statistics released by the Competitive Intelligence Unit (CIU), a local market research firm. That’s a significant number, but so is the percentage of pirating Roku users in Mexico.

“Roku has 1.1 million users in the country, of which 40 percent use it to watch content illegally,” Gonzalo Rojon, ICU’s director of ICT research, writes.

“There are 575 thousand users who access the illegal content and that is comparable to the number of subscribers a small pay-TV operator has,” he adds.

While this is indeed a significant number, that doesn’t make the Roku boxes illegal by default. There are millions who use Windows to pirate stuff, or web browsers like Chrome and Firefox, but these are generally not seen as problematic.

Still, several Mexican judges have ruled that sales should be banned so for the time being it remains that way.

According to Rojon, these type of measures are imperative to ensure that copyright holders are protected from online piracy, now that more and more content is moving online.

“Although for some people this type of action seems radical, I think it is very important that the shift towards more digitalization is accompanied by copyright and intellectual property protection, so it continues to promote innovation and a healthy competitive environment in the digital world,” he notes.

Roku clearly disagrees and last week the company told us that it will do everything in its power to have the current sales ban overturned.

“While Roku’s devices have always been and remain legal to use in Mexico, the current ban harms consumers, the retail sector and the industry. We will vigorously pursue further legal actions with the aim of restoring sales of Roku devices in Mexico,” the company said.

Meanwhile, Roku is working hard to shake the piracy elements off its platform. Last year it began showing FBI warnings to users of ‘pirate channels’ and just this week removed the entire USTVnow service from its platform.

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While Netflix is without a doubt the most used paid video streaming service worldwide, there are dozens of smaller players fighting for a piece of the pie.

Iflix is one of these companies. The service is available in 25 countries across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, streaming movies and TV-shows to 6.5 million subscribers.

In the coming years, the streaming service hopes to expand its reach by offering a better product than its competition. This includes the likes of Netflix and Amazon, but iflix sees piracy as its main adversary.

“That is really the big player,” Sherwin dela Cruz, iflix’s country manager, says in an interview with ANC’s The Boss.

“The sooner we get people to pay for our service and watch content in one of the real services, I think that’s when we can say that the market is really growing.”

Dela Cruz sees the music industry as a good example, where services such as Spotify offer a relatively complete alternative to piracy. As a result, illegal downloading has decreased in countries where it became available.

“That’s sort of like the aspiration for us – to get more people to have just one, two or three services and just watch what they want to watch on their mobile phones without really looking at pirated content,” dela Cruz says.

Interestingly, iflix doesn’t only see piracy as a problem that needs to be quashed. At the moment, they also use it as market intelligence to find out what content local audiences are interested in.

Iflix uses the German company TECXIPIO, which is known to actively monitor BitTorrent traffic, to track local piracy trends. In addition, they also buy pirated DVDs from street vendors to find out what people want.

This information is used to license the content people are most interested in, so it can offer the best possible alternative to piracy.

The company previously informed us that they believe that piracy is a signal from the public that they can’t get what they want through legal options. Going forward, Iflix hopes to grow its user base by directly competing with piracy.

“We believe that people in emerging markets do not actively want to steal content, they do so because there is no better alternative,” iflix concludes.

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This Saturday evening, Anthony Joshua and Joseph Parker will string up their gloves and do battle in one of the most important heavyweight bouts of recent times.

Joshua will put an unbeaten professional record and his WBA, IBF and IBO world titles on the line. Parker – also unbeaten professionally – will put his WBO belt up for grabs. It’s a mouthwatering proposition for fight fans everywhere.

While the collision will take place at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff in front of a staggering 80,000 people, millions more will watch the fight in front of the TV at home, having paid Sky Sports Box Office up to £24.95 for the privilege.

Of course, hundreds of thousands won’t pay a penny, instead relying on streams delivered via illicit Kodi addons, Android apps, and IPTV services. While these options are often free, quality and availability on the night is far from guaranteed. Even those paying for premium ‘pirate’ access have been let down at the last minute but in the scheme of things, that’s generally unlikely.

Despite the uncertainty, this morning the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit and Federation Against Copyright Theft took the unusual step of issuing a joint warning to people thinking of streaming the fight to their homes illegally.

“Consumers need to be aware that streaming without the right permissions or subscriptions is no longer a grey area,” PIPCU and FACT said in a statement.

“In April last year the EU Court of Justice ruled that not only was selling devices allowing access to copyrighted content illegal, but using one to stream TV, sports or films without an official subscription is also breaking the law.”

The decision, which came as part of the BREIN v Filmspeler case, found that obtaining a copyright-protected work “from a website belonging to a third party offering that work without the consent of the copyright holder” was an illegal act.

While watching the fight via illicit streams is undoubtedly illegal, tracking people who simply view content is extremely difficult and there hasn’t been a single prosecution in the UK (or indeed anywhere else that we’re aware of) against anyone doing so.

That being said, those who make content available for others to watch illegally are putting themselves at considerable risk. While professional pirate re-streamers tend to have better security, Joe Public who points his phone at his TV Saturday night to stream the fight on Facebook should take time out to consider his actions.

In January, Sky revealed that 34-year-old Craig Foster had been caught by the company after someone re-streamed the previous year’s Anthony Joshua vs Wladimir Klitschko fight on Facebook Live using Foster’s Sky account.

Foster had paid Sky for the fight but he claims that a friend used his iPad to record the screen and re-stream the fight to Facebook. Sky, almost certainly using tracking watermarks (example below), traced the ‘pirate’ stream back to Foster’s set-top box.

Watermarks during the Mayweather v McGregor fight

The end result was a technical knockout for Sky who suspended Foster’s Sky subscription and then agreed not to launch a lawsuit providing he paid the broadcaster £5,000.

“The public should be aware that misusing their TV subscriptions has serious repercussions,” said PIPCU and FACT referring to the case this morning.

“For example, customers found to be illegally sharing paid-for content can have their subscription account terminated immediately and can expect to be prosecuted and fined.”

While we know for certain this has happened at least once, TorrentFreak contacted FACT this morning for details on how many Sky subscribers have been caught, warned, and/or prosecuted by Sky in this manner. FACT told us they don’t have any figures but offered the following statement from CEO Kieron Sharp.

“Not only is FACT working closely with broadcasters and rights owners to identify the original source of illegally re-streamed content, but with support from law enforcement, government and social media platforms, we are tightening the net on digital piracy,” Sharp said.

Finally, it’s also worth keeping in mind that even when people live-stream an illegal yet non-watermarked stream to Facebook, they can still be traced by Sky.

As revelations this week have shown only too clearly, Facebook knows a staggering amount about its users so tracking an illegal stream back to a person would be child’s play for a determined rightsholder with a court order.

While someone attracting a couple of dozen viewers might not be at a major risk of repercussions, a viral stream might require the use of a calculator to assess the damages claimed by Sky. Like boxing, this kind of piracy is best left to the professionals to avoid painful and unnecessary trauma.

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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