The movie industry sees movies that are illegally recorded in theaters as one of the biggest piracy threats worldwide.

To combat this, audio and video watermarking tools are used to detect pirates and their favorite locations. In addition, night-vision goggles and other spy tech are employed to monitor moviegoers during high profile film premieres.

Despite these efforts, so-called ‘cam’ releases of hundreds of films still end up on pirate sites.

In fact, the majority of all new pirated movies that appear online can be traced to a digital recording in a movie theater. This can be the movie itself, the audio, or both. The good news for the movie industry is that the total number seems to be dropping somewhat.

According to statistics gathered by the MPAA, 447 illegal recording of its members’ movies were detected in 2017. This is down 11% compared to the year before when 503 titles were recorded. This suggests that enforcement actions and preventive measures are paying off. However, this is not visible everywhere.

This week Kevin Rosenbaum of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which represents various industry groups including the MPAA, informed the US International Trade Commission that camcording piracy is on the rise in Russia.

In his oral testimony, Rosenbaum signaled three key copyright issues in Russia that deserve attention from the US Government.

“First is to dramatically improve enforcement against online piracy, particularly piracy sites and services directed to users outside of Russia,” Rosenbaum said.

In addition, the country also has to address the problem with the Russian collecting societies, to effectively handle music licensing. These currently lack transparency or good governance, IIPA noted.

The third issue that needs attention is camcording piracy. According to IIPA’s statement, there has been a dramatic increase in illegally recorded movies over the past several years.

“Russia must address the problem of camcording motion pictures, which has risen dramatically over the past three years (200% since 2015) and fuels online piracy,” Rosenbaum noted.

In 2015 the movie industry traced 26 camcorded copies to Russia and by last year this number had increased to 78. These releases are linked to movie theaters around the country, from Moscow, Kazan, Tatarstan, St. Petersburg, all the way up to Siberia.

The Russian camcording piracy problem was also highlighted in IIPA’s recent Special 301 submission to the US Trade Representative.

“Russia remains the home to some of the world’s most prolific criminal release groups of motion pictures.” IIPA wrote last month. “The illicit camcords that are sourced from Russia are only of fair quality, but they remain in high demand by international criminal syndicates.”

With help from the Russian-Anti Piracy Organization over a dozen cammers were caught last year. In addition, four criminal cases were launched.

IIPA hopes that these will result in convictions, to create a deterrent effect. In addition, the group highlights that Russia could strengthen its laws, perhaps with a little push from the US.

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A copy of Kevin Rosenbaum’s statement before the United States International Trade Commission is available here (pdf). In addition to Russia, it also highlights issues in other countries.

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While doing business with clients and suppliers is the usual day-to-day routine for most businesses, companies in the entertainment sector seem keener than most to spend time with those in power.

Whether there’s pressure to be applied in respect of upcoming changes in policy or long-term plans for modifying legislation, at least a few times a year news breaks of rightsholders having private meetings with officials. Most of the time, however, the head-to-heads fly under the radar.

This week, however, the UK government published a response to a Freedom of Information Request which asked for details of meetings between the government and copyright owner organizations, enforcement organizations, and collection societies (think BPI, MPA, FACT, Publishers Association, PRS, etc) including times, dates and topics discussed.

The request asked for details of meetings held between May 2016 and April 2017 but the government declined to provide all of this information since the effort required to extract the information “would exceed the cost limit.”

Given the amount of data published, this isn’t a surprise. Even though the government chose to limit the response to events held between January 16, 2017 and April 17, 2017, the meetings between the government and the above groups number in their dozens.

January 2017 got off to a pretty slow start but week three and beyond saw a flurry of meetings with groups and companies such as ITV, BBC, PRS for Music, Copyright Licensing Agency and several other organizations to discuss the EU’s Digital Single Market proposals.

On January 18, 2017 Time Warner had a meeting to discuss content protection and analytics, followed a day later by the Premier League who were booked in to discuss “illicit streaming devices” (a topic mirrored in March during a meeting with the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance).

Just a few days later the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit held a “Partnership Working Group Meeting involving industry” and two days after that the police, Trading Standards, and the EU Police Agency convened to discuss enforcement activity.

January 26, 2017 saw an IP Outreach Workshop involving members of the IP Crime Group. This was potentially a big meeting. The IPCG consists of several regional police forces, PIPCU, National Crime Agency, Crown Prosecution Service, Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Trading Standards, HMRC, IFPI, BPI, FACT, Sky TV, PRS, FAST and the Publishers Association, to name just a few.

As the first month of the year was drawing to a close, Amazon met with the government to discuss “current procedures for removing copyright, design and trademark infringing material from their platform.” A similar meeting was held with eBay on February 1 and on February 20, Facebook had its turn on the same topic.

All three companies had come in for criticism from copyright holders for not doing enough to stem the tide of infringing content available on their platforms, particularly so-called Kodi boxes that provide access to movies, shows, and live TV.

However, in the months that followed they each responded positively, with eBay, Amazon and Facebook announcing restrictions on devices sold. While all three platforms still have a problem with infringing device sales, the situation appears to have improved since last year.

On the final day of January 2017, the MPAA attended a meeting to discuss the looming Digital Economy Bill and digital TV piracy. A couple of days later they were back again for a “business awareness seminar” with other big shots including the Alliance for IP, the Anti-Counterfeiting Group, Trading Standards and the Premier League.

However, given the dozens that took place, perhaps one of the more interesting meetings in terms of the mix of those in attendance took place February 7.

Titled “Organized Crime Task Force Meeting – Belfast” it was attended by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the National Crime Agency, Trading Standards, HM Revenue and Customs, the Border Force, and (spot the odd one out) the Federation Against Copyright Theft.

This seems to suggest that FACT (a private company) is effectively embedded at the highest level of law enforcement, something that has made people very uncomfortable in the past.

Later in February, there was a roundtable meeting with the Alliance for IP, MPAA, Publishers’ Association, BPI, Premier League and Federation Against Copyright Theft (again) to discuss Brexit, the Digital Single Market, IP enforcement and industrial strategy. A similar meeting was held in March which was attended by UK Music, BPI, PRS, Featured Artists Coalition, and many more.

The full list of meetings, which number in their dozens for just a three-month period, can be found here pdf. Whether the volume is representative of other three-month periods isn’t clear but it seems reasonable to conclude that copyright organizations have the ears of government officials in the UK on an almost continual basis.

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With 80 million streaming links to more than 700 video services, Alluc sold itself as the premier streaming link site.

It offered a wide variety of content and over the past thirteen years it grew out to become one of the largest sites of its kind. This week, however, Alluc surprised friend and foe by shutting down.

“The alluc search engine has been discontinued. After 13 years of alluc, we decided to take a break and focus on other projects,” a message posted on the site’s homepage reads.

That the site was popular is not a secret. People used it to find streaming links to nearly everything, from old movies to the latest hit series. The operators mention that they served a billion unique visitors over the past decade, which is an incredible achievement.

Alluc says farewell

What’s less clear, however, is why the site decided to stop now. In the past, we’ve reported on similar sites that threw in the towel because revenue was dwindling, but Alluc told us that is not the case here.

“The decision was not driven by monetary reasons. We started alluc when we were still in high-school and it became into something bigger and better than we could have ever imagined when we started it,” Alluc’s Sebastian tells us.

“But now it’s time for us to move on. We hope to have contributed a lot to the video space and to have helped out a lot of people during these 13 years of running alluc full time.”

While Alluc could be used to find both authorized and unauthorized content, the movie industry saw it as a blatant pirate site. This resulted in a site blocking request in Australia, among other things.

Alluc, however, always rejected the ‘pirate’ label and saw itself as an “uncensored” search engine. While they are shutting down now, they still see a future for similar services.

“There will always be a future for uncensored search and I hope us shutting down alluc can help to create the vacuum needed to incentivize new sites of similar quality and scope or even a decentralized solution to be created by others,” Sebastian tells us.

Time will tell whether another site will indeed jump in to fill the gap.

Alluc’s API, which is used by third-party apps and services to find streaming links, will remain available until the end of the month when it will shut down. Meanwhile, Alluc’s search engine framework lives on at pron.tv, an adult-themed site.

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For the past several years most of the world has been waking up to the streaming piracy phenomenon, with pre-configured set-top boxes making inroads into millions of homes.

While other countries, notably the UK, arrested many individuals while warning of a grave and looming danger, complaints from the United States remained relatively low-key. It was almost as if the stampede towards convenient yet illegal streaming had caught the MPAA and friends by surprise.

In October 2017, things quickly began to change. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment sued Georgia-based Tickbox TV, a company selling “fully-loaded” Kodi boxes. In January 2018, the same anti-piracy group targeted Dragon Media, a company in the same line of business.

With this growing type of piracy now firmly on the radar, momentum seems to be building. Yesterday, a panel discussion on the challenges associated with piracy from streaming media boxes took place on Capitol Hill.

Hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), ‘Unboxing the Piracy Threat of Streaming Media Boxes’ went ahead with some big name speakers in attendance, not least Neil Fried, Senior Vice President, Federal Advocacy and Regulatory Affairs at the MPAA.

ITIF and various industry groups tweeted many interesting comments throughout the event. Kevin Madigan from Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property told the panel that torrent-based content “is becoming obsolete” in an on-demand digital environment that’s switching to streaming-based piracy.

While there’s certainly a transition taking place, 150 million worldwide torrent users would probably argue against the term “obsolete”. Nevertheless, the same terms used to describe torrent sites are now being used to describe players in the streaming field.

“There’s a criminal enterprise going on here that’s stealing content and making a profit,” Fried told those in attendance.

“The piracy activity out there is bad, it’s hurting a lot of economic activity & creators aren’t being compensated for their work,” he added.

Tom Galvin, Executive Director at the Digital Citizens Alliance, was also on the panel. Unsurprisingly, given the organization’s focus on the supposed dangers of piracy, Galvin took the opportunity to underline that position.

“If you go down the piracy road, those boxes aren’t following proper security protocols, there are many malware risks,” he said. It’s a position shared by Fried, who told the panel that “video piracy is the leading source of malware.”

Similar claims were made recently on Safer Internet Day but the facts don’t seem to back up the scare stories. Still, with the “Piracy is Dangerous” strategy already out in the open, the claims aren’t really unexpected.

What might also not come as a surprise is that ACE’s lawsuits against Tickbox and Dragon Media could be just a warm-up for bigger things to come. In the tweet embedded below, Fried can be seen holding a hexagonal-shaped streaming box, warning that the Department of Justice is now looking for candidates for criminal action.

Neil Fried of @MPAA with one of the streaming Kodi boxes leading to big piracy problems during Capitol Hill panel talk. Says DOJ looking at ‘variety of candidates’ for criminal action. @Comm_Daily pic.twitter.com/aYIRA4wgTC

— Matt Daneman (@mdaneman) March 7, 2018

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What form this action will take when it arrives isn’t clear but when the DoJ hits targets on home soil, it tends to cherry-pick the most blatant of infringers in order to set an example with reasonably cut-and-dried cases.

Of course, every case can be argued but with hundreds of so-called “Kodi box” sellers active all over the United States, many of them clearly breaking the law as they, in turn, invite their customers to break the law, picking a sitting duck shouldn’t be too difficult.

And then, of course, we come to President Trump. Not usually that vocal on matters of intellectual property and piracy, yesterday – perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not – he suddenly delivered one of his “something is coming” tweets.

The U.S. is acting swiftly on Intellectual Property theft. We cannot allow this to happen as it has for many years!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2018

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Given Trump’s tendency to focus on problems overseas causing issues for companies back home, a comment by Kevin Madigan during the panel yesterday immediately comes to mind.

“To combat piracy abroad, USTR needs to work with the creative industries to improve enforcement and target the source of pirated material,” Madigan said.

Interesting times and much turmoil in the streaming world ahead, it seems.

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Regular Internet providers are being put under increasing pressure for not doing enough to curb copyright infringement.

Last year several major record labels, represented by the RIAA, filed a lawsuit in a Texas District Court, accusing ISP Grande Communications of turning a blind eye on its pirating subscribers.

According to the RIAA, the Internet provider knew that some of its subscribers were frequently distributing copyrighted material, and accused the company of failing to take any meaningful action in response.

Grande disagreed with this assertion and filed a motion to dismiss the case. The ISP argued that it doesn’t encourage any of its customers to download copyrighted works, and that it has no control over the content subscribers access.

The Internet provider admitted that it received millions of takedown notices through the piracy tracking company Rightscorp. However, it believes that these notices are flawed and not worthy of acting upon. It was not keeping subscribers on board with a profit motive, as the RIAA suggested.

A few days ago US Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin issued his “report and recommendation” on the motions to dismiss, which brings some good and bad news for both sides.

First of all, Judge Austin recommends granting the motion to dismiss the piracy claims against Grande’s management company Patriot Media Consulting, which is also listed as a defendant.

According to the order, the RIAA failed to show that Patriot employees were involved in the decisions or actions that led to the infringements, only that they may have been involved in formulating Grande’s infringement related policies.

“This is a far cry from showing that Patriot as an entity was an active participant in the alleged secondary infringement,” Judge Austin writes.

Moving to Grande Communications itself, Judge Austin recommends dropping the vicarious infringement claim, as Grande requested. To show vicarious infringement, the RIAA would have to prove that the ISP has a direct financial interest in the infringing activity. That is not the case here.

The record labels argued that the availability of copyrighted music lures customers, but the Judge found this allegation too vague, as it would apply to all ISPs.

“There are no allegations that Grande’s actions in failing to adequately police their infringing subscribers is a draw to subscribers to purchase its services, so that they can then use those services to infringe on UMG’s (and others’) copyrights,” Judge Austin argues.

“Instead UMG only alleges that the existence of music and the BitTorrent protocol is the draw. But that would impose liability on every ISP, as the music at issue is available on the Internet generally, as is the BitTorrent protocol, and is not something exclusively available through Grande’s services.”

While the above is good news for the Internet provider, the report and recommendation opt to keep the contributory infringement claim alive. Contributory copyright infringement happens where a defendant intentionally induces or encourages direct infringement.

Grande argued that Rightcorp’s notices were not sufficient to show that copyrighted material was ever downloaded, but Judge Austin disagrees. The RIAA has made a “plausible claim” that the ISP’s subscribers are infringing the labels’ copyrights.

“It would be inappropriate to dismiss the case based on factual allegations Grande makes about the Rightscorp notices and system, without any evidence to back those up,” Judge Austin’s recommendation reads.

In addition, Grande also argued that it’s protected from a secondary copyright infringement claim under the “staple article of commerce” doctrine, as “it is beyond dispute” that ISPs have numerous non-infringing uses.

Referring to the legal case between BMG and Cox Communications, Judge Austin says that this isn’t as clear as Grande suggests.

“The Court acknowledges that this is not yet a well-defined area of the law, and that there are good arguments on both sides of this issue,” the recommendation reads.

“However, at this point in the case, the Court is persuaded that UMG has pled a plausible claim of secondary infringement based on Grande’s alleged failure to act when presented with evidence of ongoing, pervasive infringement by its subscribers.”

The recommendation, therefore, is to deny the motion to dismiss the contributory infringement claim against Grande. If the U.S. District Court Judge adopts this position, it would mean that the case is heading to trial based on this claim.

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Judge Austin’s full report and recommendations filing is available here (pdf).

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