All Oscar Contenders Leaked on Pirate Sites, Again


The Oscars are the most watched awards show of the year, closely followed by hundreds of millions of movie fans around the world.

This weekend Hollywood’s finest are gathering on the red carpet once again. While they associate the celebration with eternal fame and recognition, online pirates are keeping an eye on it as well.

Traditionally, Oscar winners see a surge in piracy activity, so we decided to take a look at the availability of this year’s nominees through unauthorized channels.

Relying on data released by Oscar piracy watcher Andy Baio, we see that all nominated* films are now available on pirate sites, most in decent quality too. There are just three films that haven’t been released as a screener, Blu-ray or other high-quality rip, including the highly anticipated “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

That all films are readily available isn’t really new. This has happened consistently over the past decade. This year, however, that tradition was nearly broken. A pirated copy of “The Breadwinner” only leaked last week.

On the screener front, there’s not much movement. Like previous years, most of the leaked screeners have been released by Hive-CM8. A dozen screeners of Oscar nominees are available on pirate sites at the time of writing.

Screener leaks 2003 – 2018

There is another trend visible, however, one which we didn’t immediately expect.

The number of Cam releases, which are recorded in movie theaters, is on the rise. This year 20 camcorded (Cam) copies of Oscar contenders have leaked, which is a record high for the last decade.

As Cams usually come out early, when films are still playing in theaters, Hollywood sees these leaks as a great threat.

Cam leaks 2003 – 2018

The same increase is also visible for Telesync releases, which are higher-quality Cam releases that use a direct sound input. There have been 14 Telesync leaks for the 2018 Oscar contenders, which is a significant uptick compared to previous years.

While these releases reach millions of people they tend to originate from a small circle. As the Hive-CM8 situation has shown, one group can make an enormous impact on the numbers.

This also means that next year’s figures can easily turn around if one or two prominent sources are cut off.

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* – Foreign film and documentary categories are not included

– The high quality leak of Ferdinand was not included in Baio’s data at the time of writing, but it was included in the analysis above.

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TVAddons and ZemTV Should Stand Trial in the US, Dish Tells Court


Last year, American satellite and broadcast provider Dish Network targeted two well-known players in the third-party Kodi add-on ecosystem.

In a complaint filed in a federal court in Texas, add-on ZemTV and the TVAddons library were accused of copyright infringement. As a result, both are facing up to $150,000 in damages for each offense.

While the case was filed in Texas, neither of the defendants live there, or even in the United States. The owner and operator of TVAddons is Adam Lackman, who resides in Montreal, Canada. ZemTV’s developer Shahjahan Durrani is even further away in London, UK.

According to the legal team of the two defendants, this limited connection to Texas is reason for the case to be dismissed. They filed a motion to dismiss in January, asking the court to drop the case.

“Lackman and Durrani have never been residents or citizens of Texas; they have never owned property in Texas; they have never voted in Texas; they have never personally visited Texas; they have never directed any business activity of any kind to anyone in Texas […] and they have never earned income in Texas,” the motion reads.

Dish, however, sees things differently. Yesterday the broadcast provider replied to the motion, submitting hundreds of pages of evidence documenting TVAddons and ZemTV’s ties to the United States.

According to Dish, both defendants utilized US companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Cloudflare to facilitate their infringing activities. In addition. US residents were directly addressed in various messages on the TVAddons site and social media.

“Defendants used TV Addons to target residents of the United States and it was designed to appeal to United States television consumers. The TV Addons Home page stated ‘Whether you’re in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, India or anywhere else, Kodi Addons will work great for you!’,” Dish writes.

Furthermore, TVAddons own data showed that most of its users came from the United States, more than one-third of the total user base.

“The United States was Defendants’ largest market with approximately 34% of all TV Addons traffic coming from users located in the United States, which was three times the traffic from the second largest market.”

Dish points out that the Court has personal jurisdiction under the “Calder effects test,” because defendants knew that the focal point of the harm from their action was in the US, and because their actions connect the defendants to the US in a meaningful way.

The focal point of the harm from TVAddons and ZemTV was in the United States, Dish states, adding that both defendants were well aware of their infringing activities.

“Defendants’ boasting on TV Addons that their services allow users ‘to cut down your cable or satellite television bill substantially, if not entirely’ shows that Defendants were well aware that TV Addons and ZemTV were harming DISH and other legitimate, subscription television service providers in the United States,” Dish writes.

Without getting too deep into the legal jargon, Dish relies on an alternative basis for jurisdiction as the defendants did in their motion to dismiss, which means that they don’t have to address specific connections to the state of Texas.

The broadcast provider hopes that the Court agrees, and wants the case to proceed.

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A copy of Dish Network’s reply is available here (pdf).

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The Pirate Bay Suffers Extended Downtime


pirate bayThe Pirate Bay has been hard to reach for roughly a day now.

For most people, the site currently displays a CloudFlare error message across the entire site, with the CDN provider mentioning that the “connection timed out.”

No further details are available to us and there is no known ETA for the site’s full return. However, judging from past experience, it’s likely a small technical issue that needs fixing.

TPB 522 Cloudflare error

The Pirate Bay has had quite a few stints of downtime in recent months. The popular torrent site usually returns after several hours, but an outage of more than 24 hours has happened before as well.

The Pirate Bay team has a status page in the forums where people can check to see if an outage is affecting everyone or not. This also shows that the Tor version of the site is suffering downtime, although it briefly reappeared a few times.

As always, the TPB team advises people to be patient.

“If our sites are down we’ll already know and be working on getting them back up. We don’t issue estimates so don’t ask how long it will take,” the status page notes.

In any case, there’s no need to panic. But we expect that seasoned TPB users will probably know the drill by now…

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New PS4 Jailbreak Hits Firmware 4.55, Excites the Masses


Largely since the advent of the third generation of games consoles in the early to mid 80s, adventurous users have been interested in making their machines do things they’re not supposed to.

In common with the 8bit games-capable computers that preceded them, much emphasis was placed on piracy, with people seeking to cut console games costs with copies of what would otherwise be expensive investments. Alongside, however, was a rapidly developing “homebrew” scene in which often amateur coders sought to utilize their purchased hardware for non-conventional means.

These days the process of digitally cracking open a device is much more complex and has given birth to the term ‘jailbreaking’. It can be applied to devices as diverse as iPhones and PlayStations but it all means the same thing – the removal of restrictions put in place by manufacturers in order to control what can be done with a device.

These restrictions mostly relate to the running of software, with the big manufacturers wanting people to not only use ‘app stores’ that they control but also to pay for the privilege. The jailbreaking scene often aims to undermine the former but despite many good intentions, it often gets dragged into piracy as a result.

Yesterday there was cause for both homebrew coders and pirates-in-waiting to celebrate with the announcement that developer ‘Qwertyoruiop’ had released the full code for his PS4 firmware 4.55 kernel exploit.

While the release caused much excitement, the kernel exploit still needs a usermode entry point. As reported by Wololo, that could come via the Webkit exploit previously released by Qwertyoruiop for PS4 firmware 4.07 a while back.

So, to put things into basic terms, while the new exploit works up to v4.55, the user exploit only works up to those with PS4s running v4.07, at least until another usermode exploit for later firmwares is released.

But with anticipation in the air, a few hours later yet more exciting news appeared on the horizon. Taking Qwertyoruiop’s v4.55 kernel exploit and running with it, developer SpecterDev announced on Twitter that he’d published a full implementation of the exploit on Github.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

In other words, SpecterDev has released a fully-functional jailbreak of PS4 firmware 4.55, which opens up a whole world of opportunities for the homebrew scene – and beyond. That being said, he’s careful to note on Github that others will have to step up to fill in the gaps from here.

“[The implementation] will allow you to run arbitrary code as kernel, to allow jailbreaking and kernel-level modifications to the system. This release however, does not contain any code related to defeating anti-piracy mechanisms or running homebrew,” he explained.

Nevertheless, SpecterDev’s code has an inbuilt ‘ear’ that can take instructions (a so-called ‘payload’) and do something useful with them.

“This exploit does include a loader that listens for payloads on port 9020 and will execute them upon receival,” he explains.

Rumors suggest that there’s already some kind of payload being shared privately. We haven’t been able to confirm what it does yet but people seem excited by it.

Update: Confirmation of what it does from Wololo: “When run in combination with the recently released exploit for PS4 4.55, Holy Grail lets users install and run unsigned packages. In practice, this will let 4.55 owners install and run homebrews as well as, yes, pirated PS4 games.”

A video showing the jailbreak in action has been uploaded to YouTube and can be seen below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZuNWUoMIuU&w=560&h=315]

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Switzerland Hopes New Law Will Keep it Off U.S. ‘Pirate Watchlist’


In a few weeks, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) will publish its yearly Special 301 Report, highlighting countries that fail to live up to U.S copyright protection standards.

In recent years Switzerland was among countries that were placed on the ‘Watch List.’ In 2017, the US reported that the Swiss had made some progress, but not enough. Its policies towards online piracy were not up to par, according to U.S. standards.

“Switzerland remains on the Watch List this year due to U.S. concerns regarding specific difficulties in Switzerland’s system of online copyright protection and enforcement,” USTR wrote in its Special 301 Report.

One of the key issues the United States identified is the lack of enforcement against hosting companies that do business with pirate sites. Branding these as a “safe haven” for pirates, the US called for suitable countermeasures.

A second problem that was highlighted is the so-called ‘Logistep Decision.‘ In 2010 the Swiss Federal Supreme Court barred anti-piracy outfit Logistep from harvesting the IP addresses of file-sharers. The Court ruled that IP addresses amount to private data, and outlawed the tracking of file-sharers in Switzerland.

According to the USTR, this ruling prevents copyright holders from enforcing their rights, and they called on the Swiss Government to address this concern as well.

Today nearly a year has passed and it looks like the recommendations were not ignored. In a letter to the USTR, the Swiss Government writes that the two main complaints are dealt with in their new copyright law, which was introduced late last year.

“The draft bill, adopted by the Federal Council at its meeting on November 22, 2017, addresses both of those concerns. It aims at further modernizing Swiss copyright law for the purposes of the digital environment and steps up the fight against Internet piracy,” the Swiss write.

The new copyright law addresses the hosting problem by introducing a “take-down-and-stay-down” policy. Internet services will be required to remove infringing content from their platforms and prevent that same content from reappearing. Failure to comply will result in prosecution.

“The ‘stay down’ will prevent rogue websites from being hosted in Switzerland and will make the fight against Internet piracy more effective and sustainable. That should put an end to criticism directed against Switzerland as a host country for infringing sites,” Switzerland informs the U.S.

Similarly, the Logistep ruling will no longer be an issue either if the country’s new copyright law is implemented.

“[T]he draft bill clarifies that the processing of data for the purposes of prosecuting copyright infringement is permissible. With that, it puts an end to the debate that followed the Logistep decision about the extent to which the recording of IP addresses for prosecution purposes is admissible.”

Many copyright holder groups have also asked for ISP blocking of pirate sites, but Switzerland notes that this idea is off the table for now. There is not enough support in Parliament for an Internet blocking provision which may jeopardize acceptance of the entire draft bill, their letter explains.

While not mentioned in the letter, downloading and streaming copyright infringing content for personal use also remains unpunished, video games and software excepted. Uploading and other types of distribution of infringing content are not permitted, however.

Still, the Swiss hope that the newly proposed changes to its copyright law will be enough to have it removed from the Special 301 Watch List.

“Switzerland is confident that the revision of the Swiss Copyright Act will more effectively address the challenges posed by the Internet,” the Swiss Government writes, adding that it “looks forward to continuing to work with the U.S. to further clarify any issue relating to online piracy.”

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Switzerland’s letter to the United States Trade Representative is available here (pdf).

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MPAA Wants Filmmakers to Pay Licenses, Not Rip Blu-rays


Technically speaking it’s not hard to rip a DVD or Blu-ray disc nowadays, and the same is true for ripping content from Netflix or YouTube.

However, in the US people can break the law when they do this. The DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions specifically forbid it.

There are some exemptions, such as educational and other types of fair use, but the line between legal and illegal is not always clear, some argue.

Filmmakers, for example, are allowed to use small pieces of other copyrighted films under some conditions. However, this only applies to the documentary genre.

This is confusing and creates uncertainty, according to the International Documentary Association, Kartemquin Films, Independent Filmmaker Project, University of Film and Video Association, and several other organizations.

Late last year they penned a submission to the Copyright Office, which is currently considering updates to the exemptions, where they argued that all filmmakers should be allowed by break DRM and rip Blu-rays. The documentary exemptions have been in place for years now and haven’t harmed rightsholders in any way, they said.

“There is no reason this would change if the ‘documentary’ limitation were removed. All filmmakers regularly need access to footage on DVDs and without an exemption to DVDs, many non-infringing uses simply cannot be made,” the groups noted.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment though. A group of “joint creators and copyright owners” which includes Hollywood’s MPAA, the RIAA, and ESA informs the Copyright Office that such an exemption is too broad and a threat to the interests of the major movie studios.

The MPAA and the other groups point out that the exemption could be used by filmmakers to avoid paying licensing fees, which can be quite expensive.

“Many of the filmmakers who have participated in the rulemaking assert that license fees are often higher than they are willing to pay,” the Joint Creators and Copyright Owners write.

“While unfortunate, the fact that a copyright owner has chosen to make works available on terms that are not palatable to a particular user does not make that user’s proposed use fair or justify granting an exemption.”

If the filmmakers don’t have enough budget to license a video, they should look for alternatives. Simply taking it without paying would hurt the bottom line of movie studios, the filing suggests.

“Many filmmakers work licensing fees into their budgets. There is clearly a market for licensing footage from motion pictures, and it is clear that unlicensed uses harm that market.

“MPAA members actively exploit the market for licensing film clips for these types of uses. Each year, MPAA member companies license, collectively, thousands of clips for use in a variety of works,” the group writes.

The Copyright Office has limited the exemption to the documentary genre for a good reason, the creators argue, since non-documentaries are less likely to warrant a finding of fair use.

In addition, they also refute the claim that the documentary category is “vague.” They note that the International Documentary Association, which argued this, has an award ceremony for the same category, for example.

Finally, the MPAA and other creators respond to calls to extend the current exemptions to 4K content, such as AACS2 protected Ultra HD discs. They see no need for this, as the filmmakers and other groups haven’t shown that they suffer negative consequences in the current situation.

They have alternatives, such as regular Blu-ray discs, while allowing AACS2 circumvention could severely impact the Ultra HD ecosystem, they argue.

“No one has released a universal hack to all Ultra HD films protected by AACS2. The integrity of the AACS2 and Ultra HD technology is an especially important component of the ecosystem that is resulting in the increased availability of motion pictures.

“The Register and the Librarian should not undermine this integrity by authorizing widespread hacking, which could negatively impact ‘the market for or value of’ some of the industry’s most exciting products,” the Joint Creators add.

The Copyright Office will take all arguments into consideration before it makes a final decision later this year.

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A copy of the Joint Creators reply is available here.

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BMG Wants Appeals Court to Rehear Cox Piracy Liability Case


Earlier this month, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned the $25 million piracy liability verdict against Internet provider Cox.

The panel of three judges concluded that the district court made an error in its jury instruction and ordered a new trial.

The erroneous instruction said that the ISP could be found liable for contributory infringement if it “knew or should have known of such infringing activity.” The Court of Appeals agrees that based on the law, the “should have known” standard is too low.

As a result of the ruling, music publisher BMG Rights Management and Cox would have to go head to head again in a new trial. However, according to BMG, the Court of Appeals itself made a mistake.

A few days ago the copyright holder petitioned the court for a rehearing en banc, asking for a do-over before all the judges of a court.

The music publisher argues that the appeals court judges mistakenly reached their decision based on a legal principle that applies to “inducement” of liability, while BMG was pursuing a claim of “material contribution.”

“The panel’s unprecedented application of a heightened knowledge standard creates a conflict with decisions and pattern jury instructions from other circuits as well as with the common-law rules underlying contributory infringement.

“All of those recognize that BMG’s material-contribution theory requires only constructive knowledge,” BMG’s brief adds.

Even if the appeals court persists with its assertion that the liability standard is “willful blindness” rather than “should have known,” a new trial would not be warranted, according to the music publisher.

They point out that plenty of evidence was presented which proved that Cox was wilfully blind to the copyright infringements and describe the erroneous instruction as a “harmless error of the most benign kind.”

The music publisher’s request for a rehearing is supported by the RIAA, which filed an amicus curiae brief together with the National Music Publishers Association.

Both music industry groups back BMG’s arguments and ask the appeals court to consider a rehearing, stating that it would be in the best interests of artists, songwriters, and other rightsholders.

“The level of copyright infringement that takes place over the Internet is ‘staggering,’ and it is vital that copyright owners have effective mechanisms to address it. It is also critical that copyright owners can adequately address infringement that occurs in other contexts.

“If the panel’s decision is not corrected, it would threaten the very incentives of artists, songwriters, and others to create valuable works and distribute them to the public,” the RIAA and NMPA add.

For the RIAA the case is particularly important since it filed a similar lawsuit against Internet provider Grande Communications last year.

Given what’s at stake, we can assume that Cox will protest the request for a rehearing. And it wouldn’t be a big surprise if other telecommunications companies take the same position.

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BMG’s petition is available here (pdf) and a copy of the RIAA/NMPA motion can be found here (pdf).

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Pirate Site Operators’ Jail Sentences Overturned By Court of Appeal


With The Pirate Bay proving to be somewhat of an elusive and irritating target, in 2014 police took on a site capturing an increasing portion of the Swedish pirate market.

Unlike The Pirate Bay which uses torrents, Dreamfilm was a portal for streaming content and it quickly grew alongside the now-defunct Swefilmer to dominate the local illicit in-browser viewing sector. But after impressive growth, things came to a sudden halt.

In January 2015, Dreamfilm announced that the site would be shut down after one of its administrators was detained by the authorities and interrogated. A month later, several more Sweden-based sites went down including the country’s second largest torrent site Tankefetast, torrent site PirateHub, and streaming portal Tankefetast Play (TFPlay).

Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance described the four-site networks as one of “Europe’s leading players for illegal file sharing and streaming.”

Image published by Dreamfilm after the raiddreamfilm

After admitting they’d been involved in the sites but insisting they’d committed no crimes, last year four men aged between 21 and 31-years-old appeared in court charged with copyright infringement. It didn’t go well.

The Linköping District Court found them guilty and decided they should all go to prison, with the then 23-year-old founder receiving the harshest sentence of 10 months, a member of the Pirate Party who reportedly handled advertising receiving 8 months, and two others getting six months each. On top, they were ordered to pay damages of SEK 1,000,000 ($122,330) to film industry plaintiffs.

Like many similar cases in Sweden, the case went to appeal and late last week the court handed down its decision which amends the earlier decision in several ways.

Firstly, the Hovrätten (Court of Appeals) agreed that with the District Court’s ruling that the defendants had used dreamfilm.se, tfplay.org, tankafetast.com and piratehub.net as platforms to deliver movies stored on Russian servers to the public.

One defendant owned the domains, another worked as a site supervisor, while the other pair worked as a programmer and in server acquisition, the Court said.

Dagens Juridik reports that the defendants argued that the websites were not a prerequisite for people to access the films, and therefore they had not been made available to a new market.

However, the Court of Appeal agreed with the District Court’s assessment that the links meant that the movies had been made available to a “new audience”, which under EU law means that a copyright infringement had been committed. As far as the samples presented in the case would allow, the men were found to have committed between 45 and 118 breaches of copyright law.

The Court also found that the website operation had a clear financial motive, delivering movies to the public for free while earning money from advertising.

While agreeing with the District Court on most points, the Court of Appeals decided to boost the damages award from SEK 1,000,000 ($122,330) to SEK 4,250,000 ($519,902). However, there was much better news in respect of the prison sentences.

Taking into consideration the young age of the men (who before this case had no criminal records) and the unlikely event that they would offend again, the Court decided that none would have to go to prison as previously determined.

Instead, all of the men were handed conditional sentences with two ordered to pay daily fines, which are penalties based on the offender’s daily personal income.

Last week it was reported that Sweden is preparing to take a tougher line with large-scale online copyright infringers. Proposals currently with the government foresee a new crime of “gross infringement” under both copyright and trademark law, which could lead to sentences of up to six years in prison.

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When a Pro-Copyright Rant Goes Wrong….


At TorrentFreak, we keep a close eye on copyright debates and discussions. This includes the opinion pieces of musician and industry activist David Lowery at The Trichordist

While we don’t agree with his general style, which doesn’t shun rather outrageous personal attacks, everybody has the right to voice an opinion.

In Lowery’s case, this often comes in the form of discrediting people who, in his view, are a threat to the pro-copyright agenda. These people hurt the interests of artists and keep piracy alive, his message goes.

When Canadian law professor Michael Geist opposed efforts to block websites in his country, Lowery responded in his typical fashion, making it personal.

“So Canada’s most ‘internet famous’ copyright law professor Michael ‘Neville Chamberlain’ Geist is simply selling out Canadian artists for no apparent reason?!?” he wrote.

“And the beneficiaries of his tortured interpretation of facts and data is predictably the US Silicon Valley monopolies that indirectly benefit from the massively infringing pirate website operations?”

We won’t repeat the entire article here, which is best read in context, but there’s a sweet bit of irony in it all. We don’t make a habit of calling people out, but given the circumstances, we’ll make an exception.

To illustrate his opinion piece Lowery decided to use a photo of US tanks. Not massing at the Canadian border, as his title suggests, but other than that the imagery fits well.

What caught our eye, however, was the fact that the photographer wasn’t mentioned. Initially, we assumed that it might be a royalty free stock photo, but that’s not the case.

The blog post (© added by TF)

The photo in question was taken by photographer David Mdzinarishvili, who makes a living this way. We contacted Mdzinarishvili about the lack of credit, who told us that the copyright belongs to his employer Reuters.

So how did it end up on The Trichordist?

In theory, it’s possible that Lowery licensed the photo from Reuters, but even then, the news organization requires its users to credit both Reuters and the photographer.

“You agree that you will provide a clearly visible written credit to Reuters and to any Photographer credited in the caption of a Photograph which you publish..,” Reuters’ terms of use reads.

This is exactly what RT did when it published the same photo last year.

What Lowery did here is hotlink to the image on RT’s servers, without mentioning the copyright holder or the photographer. Without a proper license, some would equate that to “stealing” RT’s bandwidth as well as Reuters’ intellectual property.

Now, would The Trichordist license a 2016 premium news photo from Reuters and use it in an unrelated article without attribution and hotlink it from another unrelated site? No, it turns out that it was embedded without permission.

It’s hard not to see the irony…

Michael Geist, while being accused of “selling out” artists in the same article, does things differently. He has made a habit of using Creative Commons licensed images in his articles, with permission, and with a credit to the photographer.

We hope someone’s taking notes…

—

We reached out to David Lowery shortly before publication to ask for an explanation. He thought the photo came from a US Defense Department press release, but confirmed that it was hotlinked from RT instead.

Lowery initially said that us that Reuters or the photographer can contact the Trichordist, and that they will “gladly unlink the photo” if needed, but he decided to take it offline later.

At the time of publication the original article is still visible in Google’s cache.

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Copyright Holders Call Out Costa Rica Over ThePirateBay.cr


The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) has submitted its latest submission for the U.S. Government’s 2018 Special 301 Review, pinpointing countries it believes should better protect the interests of the copyright industry.

The IIPA, which includes a wide range of copyright groups including the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, and ESA, has listed its complaints against a whole host of countries.

Canada is prominently discussed, of course, as are Argentina, China, India, Mexico, Switzerland and many others. The allegations are broad, ranging from border protection problems to pirate site hosting and everything in between.

What caught our eye, however, was a mention of ThePirateBay.cr. This domain name which, unlike the name suggests, sports a KickassTorrents logo, uses the Costa Rican Top Level Domain .cr.

While it’s a relatively small player in the torrent site ecosystem, it appears to be of great concern in diplomatic circles.

ThePirateBay.cr

Previously, the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica threatened to have the country’s domain registry shut down unless it suspended ThePirateBay.cr. This hasn’t happened, yet, but it was a clear signal.

In the IIPA’s recent submission to the USTR, the domain is also brought into play. The copyright holders argue that Costa Rica is not living up to its obligations under the CAFTA-DR trade agreement.

“One of the key DR-CAFTA obligations that has not been implemented is introducing clear rules on copyright, liability, as well as providing meaningful legal incentives for inter-industry cooperation to deal with online infringements,” the IIPA writes.

“Instead, Costa Rica’s law offers largely unconditional liability exceptions to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and others, even allowing identified infringing activity to remain on their systems for as long as 45 days.”

Next, it puts a spotlight on the local domain registry, which it described as a safe haven for sites including ThePirateBay.cr.

“There are still many instances where the Costa Rican Top Level Domain (ccTLD) registry has provided a safe haven to notorious online enterprises dedicated to copyright infringement,” IIPA writes.

“For example, thepiratebay.cr domain is still online despite actions against it from ICANN and the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica. Costa Rica’s failure to deal effectively with its obligations regarding online infringement, more than six years after these came into force under DR-CAFTA, is a serious concern.”

The latter is worth highlighting. It claims that ICANN, the main oversight body for the Internet’s global domain name system, also “took action” against the notorious domain name.

While it is true that ICANN was made aware of the tense situation between the US Embassy and the Costa Rican domain registry through a letter, we were not aware of any action it took.

Interestingly, ICANN itself also appears to be unaware of this, when we asked the organization whether it took any action in response to the domain or letter.

“The Governmental Advisory Committee and ICANN Org took note of the letter but did not provide a response as it was not warranted. While the letter was addressed to the GAC Chair, it did not contain any specific question or request for action,” an ICANN spokesperson responded.

Whether ICANN got involved or not is irrelevant in the larger scheme though. The IIPA wants the US Government to use ThePirateBay.cr domain to spur Costa Rica into action. After all, no country would like a local domain registry to serve a Pirate Bay proxy.

Meanwhile, the official Pirate Bay domain remains operational from ThePirateBay.org, which happens to be using the US-based PIR registry. But let’s not bring that up…

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IIPA’s full submission is available here (pdf).

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