While most of the headlines relating to Internet piracy are focused on North America and Europe, there are dozens of countries where piracy is a way of life for millions of citizens. India, with its booming economy and growth in technology, is certainly one of them.
According to a recently published report, India now has 355 million Internet users out of a population of more than 1.3 billion. Not only is there massive room for growth, that figure is up from 277 million just two years ago. The rate of growth is astonishing.
Needless to say, Indians love their Internet and increasing numbers of citizens are also getting involved in the piracy game. There are many large sites and prominent release groups operating out of the country, some of them targeting the international market. Carry out a search for DVDSCR (DVD screener) on most search indexes globally and one is just as likely to find Indian movie releases as those emanating from the West.
If people didn’t know it already, India is nurturing a pirate force to be reckoned with, with local torrent and streaming sites pumping out the latest movies at an alarming rate. This has caused an outcry from many in the movie industry who are determined to do something to stem the tide.
One of these is actor Vishal Krishna, who not only stars in movies but is also a producer working in the Tamil film industry. Often referred to simply by his first name, Vishal has spoken out regularly against piracy in his role at the Tamil Film Producers Council.
In May, he referred to the operators of the hugely popular torrent site TamilRockers as ‘Internet Mafias’ while demanding their arrest for leaking the blockbuster Baahubali 2, a movie that pulled in US$120 million in six days. Now, it appears, he may have gotten his way. Well, partially, at least.
Last evening, reports began to surface of an arrest at Chennai airport in north east India. According to local media, Gauri Shankar, an alleged administrator of Tamilrockers.co, was detained by Triplicane police.
This would’ve been a huge coup for Vishal, who has been warning Tamilrockers to close down for the past three years. He even claimed to know the identity of the main perpetrator behind the site, noting that it was only a matter of time before he was brought to justice.
Soon after the initial reports, however, other media outlets claimed that Gauri Shankar is actually an operator at Tamilgun, another popular pirate portal currently blocked by ISPs on the orders of the Indian government.
So was it rockers or gun? According to Indiaglitz.com, Vishal rushed to the scene in Chennai to find out.
Outside the police station
What followed were quite extraordinary scenes outside the Triplicane police station. Emerging from the building flanked by close to 20 men, some in uniform, Vishal addressed an excited crowd of reporters. A swathe of microphones from various news outlets greeted him as he held up his hands urging the crowd to calm down.
“Just give us some time, I will give you the details,” Vishal said in two languages.
“Just give us some time. It is too early. I’ll just give it to you in a bit. It’s something connected to website piracy. Just give me some time. I have to give you all the details, proper details.”
So, even after all the excitement, it’s unclear who the police have in custody. Nevertheless, the attention this event is getting from the press is on a level rarely seen in a piracy case, so more news is bound to follow soon.
In the meantime, both TamilRockers and TamilGun remain online, operating as normal. Clearly, there is much more work to be done.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/arrest-feat.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2017-09-13 13:06:512020-08-09 15:10:15Indian Movie Actor Mobbed By Press After Arrest of Torrent Site Admin
In June 2011, police across Europe carried out the largest anti-piracy operation the region had ever seen. Their target was massive streaming portal Kino.to and several affiliates with links to Spain, France and the Netherlands.
With many sites demonstrating phoenix-like abilities these days, it didn’t take long for a replacement to appear.
Replacement platform KinoX soon attracted a large fanbase and with that almost immediate attention from the authorities. In October 2014, Germany-based investigators acting on behalf of the Attorney General carried out raids in several regions of the country looking for four main suspects.
One raid, focused on a village near to the northern city of Lübeck, targeted two brothers, then aged 21 and 25-years-old. The pair, who were said to have lived with their parents, were claimed to be the main operators of Kinox.to and another large streaming site, Movie4K.to. Although two other men were arrested elsewhere in Germany, the brothers couldn’t be found.
This was to be no ordinary manhunt by the police. In addition to accusing the brothers of copyright infringement and tax evasion, authorities indicated they were wanted for fraud, extortion, and arson too. The suggestion was that they’d targeted a vehicle owned by a pirate competitor, causing it to “burst into flames”.
The brothers were later named as Kastriot and Kreshnik Selimi. Born in 1992, 21-year-old Kreshnik was born in Sweden. 25-year-old Kastriot was born in Kosovo in 1989 and along with his brother, later became a German citizen.
With authorities piling on the charges, the pair were accused of being behind not only KinoX and Movie4K, but also other hosting and sharing platforms including BitShare, Stream4k.to, Shared.sx, Mygully.com and Boerse.sx.
Now, almost three years later, German police are one step closer to getting their men. According to a Handelsblatt report via Tarnkappe, Kreshnik Selimi has been detained by authorities.
The now 24-year-old suspect reportedly handed himself to the German embassy located in the capital of Kosovo, Prestina. The location of the arrest isn’t really a surprise. Older brother Kastriot previously published a picture on Instagram which appeared to show a ticket in his name destined for Kosovo from Zurich in Switzerland.
But while Kreshnik’s arrest reportedly took place in July, there’s still no news of Kastriot. The older brother is still on the run, maybe in Kosovo, or by now, potentially anywhere else in the world.
While his whereabouts remain a mystery, the other puzzle faced by German authorities is the status of the two main sites the brothers were said to maintain.
Despite all the drama and unprecedented allegations of violence and other serious offenses, both Movie4K and KinoX remain stubbornly online, apparently oblivious to the action.
There have been consequences for people connected to the latter, however.
In December 2015, Arvit O (aka “Pedro”) who handled technical issues on KinoX, was sentenced to 40 months in prison for his involvement in the site.
Arvit O, who made a partial confession, was found guilty of copyright infringement by the District Court of Leipzig. The then 29-year-old admitted to infringing 2,889 works. The Court also found that he hacked the computers of two competitors in order to improve Kinox’s market share.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/arrest-feat.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2017-09-12 22:06:152017-09-12 22:06:15KinoX / Movie4K Admin Detained in Kosovo After Three-Year Manhunt
With over a billion users, YouTube is the largest video portal on the Internet.
The site is a blessing to thousands of content creators, but there are also concerns among rightsholders. The music industry, in particular, is not happy with the fact that music can easily be ripped from the site through external services.
Last week the major record labels managed to take out YouTube-MP3, the largest ripping site of all. Still, there are many like it that continue business as usual. For many music industry insiders, who see streamripping as one of the largest piracy threats, this is a constant source of frustration.
In the UK, music industry group BPI worked hard to tackle the issue proactively. Last year the organization already signed an agreement with YouTube-MP3 to block UK traffic. This limited the availability of the site locally, but the group believes that YouTube itself should take responsibility as well.
Geoff Taylor, BPI’s Chief Executive, tells TorrentFreak that they, and several other industry groups, have asked YouTube to step up to help solve this problem.
“BPI and other music industry bodies have been urging YouTube for several years to take effective action to block access to its servers for stream ripping sites, which infringe copyright on a huge scale and also breach YouTube’s terms of service.
“There are more steps YouTube could take to prevent stream ripping but so far the music community has been forced to pursue the stream ripping sites directly,” Taylor adds.
BPI is not alone in its criticism. After we broke the story last Monday, many reports followed, including an opinion piece on the industry outlet Hypebot asking why YouTube didn’t take more responsibility. In the comment section, long-time RIAA executive Neil Turkewitz, who left the organization last year, came in with a strong opinion.
“This is something that Google/YouTube should have handled on its own. They were well aware of it, and didn’t need RIAA to step up to identify it as problematic,” Turkewitz notes.
The former RIAA exec speaks freely on the issue in his new role. He is now the head of his own Turkewitz Consulting Group, which fittingly focuses on expanding accountability in the Internet ecosystem.
“I should add, sadly, that Google is still steering people to stream rippers through auto-complete. If you search ‘YouTube,’ one of the first auto-complete recommendations you get is “YouTube to MP3!” Turkewitz states.
“C’mon Google, what’s with that? Not only have they not disabled access to available stream rippers, but they are driving traffic to them. That is inexcusable,” he adds.
Google’s “suggestions”
In YouTube’s defense, the company isn’t completely apathetic when it comes to the stream-ripping problem. They have threatened legal action against YouTube-MP3 and similar sites in the past and implemented some restrictive measures. Still, they never went to court and, restrictions or not, the problem didn’t go away.
TorrentFreak contacted YouTube to hear their stance on the issue, but at the time of publication we haven’t heard back.
While many of the frustrations are not played out in public, it is clear that the stream-ripping problems further complicate the relationship between the labels and YouTube’s parent company Google.
In recent years, rightsholders have called out Google on many occasions over copyright-infringing content on YouTube, in their search engine results, and on their cloud hosting services. While the company has made several changes to accommodate the concerns, the critique hasn’t gone away.
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In September 2015, U.S. authorities announced action against a pair of sites involved in music piracy.
ShareBeast.com and AlbumJams.com were allegedly responsible for the distribution of “a massive library” of popular albums and tracks. Both were accused of offering thousands of tracks before their official release dates.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) placed their now familiar seizure notice on both domains, with the RIAA claiming ShareBeast was the largest illegal file-sharing site operating in the United States. Indeed, the site’s IP addresses at the time indicated at least some hosting taking place in Illinois.
“This is a huge win for the music community and legitimate music services. Sharebeast operated with flagrant disregard for the rights of artists and labels while undermining the legal marketplace,” RIAA Chairman & CEO Cary Sherman commented at the time.
“Millions of users accessed songs from Sharebeast each month without one penny of compensation going to countless artists, songwriters, labels and others who created the music.”
Now, a full two years later, former Sharebeast operator Artur Sargsyan has pleaded guilty to one felony count of criminal copyright infringement, admitting to the unauthorized distribution and reproduction of over 1 billion copies of copyrighted works.
“Through Sharebeast and other related sites, this defendant profited by illegally distributing copyrighted music and albums on a massive scale,” said U. S. Attorney John Horn.
“The collective work of the FBI and our international law enforcement partners have shut down the Sharebeast websites and prevented further economic losses by scores of musicians and artists.”
The Department of Justice says that from 2012 to 2015, 29-year-old Sargsyan used ShareBeast as a pirate music repository, infringing works produced by Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, Beyonce, Kanye West, and Justin Bieber, among others. He linked to that content from Newjams.net and Albumjams.com, two other sites under his control.
The DoJ says that Sargsyan was informed at least 100 times that there was infringing content on ShareBeast but despite the warnings, the content remained available. When those warnings produced no results, the FBI – assisted by law enforcement in the UK and the Netherlands – seized servers used by Sargsyan to distribute the material.
Brad Buckles, EVP, Anti-Piracy at the RIAA, welcomed the guilty plea.
“Sharebeast and its related sites represented the most popular network of infringing music sites operated out of the United States. The network was responsible for providing millions of downloads of popular music files including unauthorized pre-release albums and tracks.This illicit activity was a gut-punch to music creators who were paid nothing by the service,” Buckles said.
“We are incredibly grateful for the government’s commitment to protecting the rights of artists and labels. We especially thank the dedicated agents of the FBI who painstakingly unraveled this criminal enterprise, and U.S. Attorney John Horn and his team for their work and diligence in seeing this case to its successful conclusion.”
Sargsyan, of Glendale, California, will be sentenced December 4 before U.S. District Judge Timothy C. Batten.
Demonoid has been around for well over a decade but the site is not really known for having a stable presence.
Quite the opposite, the torrent tracker has a ‘habit’ of going offline for weeks or even months on end, only to reappear as if nothing ever happened.
Earlier this year the site made another one if its trademark comebacks and it has been sailing relatively smoothly since then. Interestingly, the site is once again under the wings of a familiar face, its original founder Deimos.
Deimos decided to take the lead again after some internal struggles. “I gave control to the wrong guys while the problems started, but it’s time to control stuff again,” Deimos told us earlier.
Since the return a few months back, the site’s main focus has been on rebuilding the community and improving the site. Some may have already noticed the new logo, but more changes are coming, both on the front and backend.
“The backend development is going a bit slow, it’s a big change that will allow the server to run off a bunch of small servers all over the world,” Deimos informs TorrentFreak.
“For the frontend, we’re working on new features including a karma system, integrated forums, buddy list, etc. That part is faster to build once you have everything in the back working,” he adds.
Demonoid’s new logo
Deimos has been on and off the site a few times, but he and a few others most recently returned to get it back on track and increase its popularity. While the site has around eight million registered users, many of these have moved elsewhere in recent years.
“I want to to see the community we had back. Don’t know if it’s possible but that’s my aim,” Deimos says, admitting that he may not stay on forever.
Many torrent sites have come and gone in recent years, but they are still here today. Looking back, Demonoid has come a long way. What many people don’t know, is that it was originally a place to share demo tapes of metal bands. Hence the name DEMOnoid.
“It originally started as a modified PHP based forum that allowed posting of .torrent files. At some point, we started using a full torrent indexing script written in PHP that included a tracker, and started building the first version of the indexing site it is today,” Deimos says.
The site required users to have an invite to sign up, making it a semi-private tracker. This wasn’t done to encourage people to maintain a certain ratio, as some other trackers do, but mostly to keep unsavory characters away.
“The invitation system was implemented to keep spammers, trolls and the like out,” Deimos says. “Originally it was due to some very problematic people who happened to have a death metal band, back in the DEMOnoid days.
“We try to keep it open as often as possible but when we start to get these kinds of issues, we close it,” he adds.
In recent years, the site has had quite a few setbacks, but Deimos doesn’t want to dwell on these in public. Instead, he prefers to focus on the future. While torrent sites are no longer at the center of media distribution, there will always be a place for dedicated sharing communities.
Whether Demonoid will ever return to its former glory is a big unknown for now, but Deimos is sure to do his best.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/monitor-featured.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2017-09-11 01:02:502017-09-11 01:02:50Demonoid Hopes to Return to Its Former Glory
Dedicated Internet pirates dealing in fresh content or operating at any significant scale can be pretty sure that rightsholders and their anti-piracy colleagues are interested in their activities at some level.
With this in mind, most pirates these days are aware of things they can do to enhance their security, with products like VPNs often get discussed on the consumer side.
This week, in a report detailing the challenges social media poses to intellectual property rights, UK anti-piracy outfit Federation Against Copyright Theft published a list of techniques deployed by pirates that hinder their investigations.
Fake/hidden website registration details
“Website registration details are often fake or hidden, which provides no further links to the person controlling the domain and its illegal activities,” the group reveals.
Protected WHOIS records are nothing new and can sometimes be uncloaked by a determined adversary via court procedures. However, in the early stages of an investigation, open records provide leads that can be extremely useful in building an early picture about who might be involved in the operation of a website.
Having them hidden is a definite plus for pirate site operators, especially when the underlying details are also fake, which is particularly common practice. And, with companies like Peter Sunde’s Njalla entering the market, hiding registrations is easier than ever.
Overseas servers
“Investigating servers located offshore cause some specific problems for FACT’s law-enforcement partners. In order to complete a full investigation into an offshore server, a law-enforcement agency must liaise with its counterpart in the country where the server is located. The difficulties of obtaining evidence from other countries are well known,” FACT notes.
While FACT no doubt corresponds with entities overseas, the anti-piracy outfit has a history of targeting UK citizens who are reportedly infringing copyright. It regularly involves UK police in its investigations (FACT itself employs former police officers) but jurisdiction is necessarily limited to the UK.
It is possible to get overseas law enforcement entities involved to seize a server, for example, but they have to be convinced of the need to do so by the police, which isn’t easy and is usually reserved for more serious cases. The bottom line is that by placing a server a long way away from a pirate’s home territory, things can be made much more difficult for local investigators.
Torrent websites and DMCA compliance
“Some torrent website operators who maintain a high DMCA compliance rate will often use this to try to appease the law, while continuing to provide infringing links,” FACT says.
This is an interesting one. Under law in both the United States and Europe, service providers are required to remove infringing content from their systems when they are notified of its existence by a rightsholder or its agent. Not doing so can render them liable, if the content is indeed infringing.
What FACT appears to be saying is that sites that comply with the law, by removing infringing content when asked to, become more difficult targets for legal action. It sounds very obvious but the underlying suggestion is that compliance on the surface is used as a protective mechanism. No example sites are mentioned but the strategy has clearly hindered FACT.
Current legislation too vague to remove infringing live sports streams
“Current legislation is insufficient to effectively tackle the issue of websites illegally offering coverage of live sports events. Section 512 (c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) states that: upon notification of claimed infringement, the service provider should ‘respond expeditiously’ to remove or disable access to the copyright-infringing material. Most live sports events are under two hours long, so such non-specific timeframes for required action are inadequate,” FACT complains.
Since government reports like these can take a long time to prepare, it appears that FACT and its partners may have already found a solution to this particular problem. Major FACT client the Premier League now has a High Court injunction in place which allows it to block infringing streams on a real-time basis. It doesn’t remove the content at its source, but it still renders it largely inaccessible in the UK.
Nevertheless, FACT calls for takedowns to be actioned more swiftly, noting that “the law needs to reflect this narrow timeframe with a specified required response period for websites offering such live feeds.”
Camming content directly from cinema screen to the cloud
“Recent advancements in technology have made this a viable option to ‘cammers’ to avoid detection. Attempts to curtail and delete illicitly recorded film footage may become increasingly difficult with the emergence of streaming apps that automatically upload recorded video to cloud services,” FACT reports.
Over the years, FACT has been involved in numerous operations to hinder those who record movies with cameras in theaters and then upload them to the Internet. Once the perpetrator has exited the theater, FACT has effectively lost the battle, but the possibility that a live upload can now take place is certainly an interesting proposition.
“While enforcing officers may delete the footage held on the device, the footage has potentially already been stored remotely on a cloud system,” FACT warns.
Equally, this could also prove a problem for those seeking to secure evidence. With a cloud upload, the person doing the recording could safely delete the footage from the local device. That could be an obstacle to proving that an offense had even been committed when a suspect is confronted in situ.
Virtual currencies
“There is great potential in virtual currencies for money launderers and illicit traders. Government and law enforcement have raised concerns on how virtual currencies can be sent anonymously, leaving little or no trail for regulators or law-enforcement agencies,” FACT writes.
For many years, pirates of all kinds have relied on systems like PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa, to shift money around. However, these payment systems are now more difficult to deploy on pirate services and are more easily traced, even when operators manage to squeeze them through the gaps.
The same cannot be said of bitcoin and similar currencies that are gaining in popularity all the time. They are harder to use, of course, but there’s little doubt accessibility issues will be innovated out of the equation at some point. Once that happens, these currencies will be a force to be reckoned with.
The UK government’s Share and Share Alike report, which examines the challenges social media poses to intellectual property rights, can be downloaded here (pdf)
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ani-pirate.jpg2521200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2017-09-10 10:01:502017-09-10 10:01:50The Things Pirates Do To Hinder Anti-Piracy Investigations
YouTube is known to be a breeding ground for creators. At the same time, however, it’s also regularly used to share copyrighted material without permission, including full-length films.
If these “pirating” YouTube users are caught they generally get a slap on the wrist by Google, or have their YouTube accounts terminated at worst. Sometimes, however, rightsholders can take things a bit further.
This is what happened in Germany, where a German filmmaker went after three YouTube users. These account holders had uploaded two movies without permission, which were then viewed thousands of times.
Through a local court, the filmmaker tried to obtain the identity of the alleged infringers, presumably to take further action. It demanded that Google and YouTube should share the emails, IP-addresses, and phone numbers that were tied to these accounts.
Initially, this request was turned down by the Frankfurt District Court, but the Higher Regional Court recently ruled that YouTube has to hand over the associated email addresses. The video streaming service is not required to hand over the IP-addresses or phone numbers, however.
The reasoning for this decision (pdf) is based on Article 101 of the German Copyright Act. The law specifies that a service provider can be ordered to hand over the name and address of an infringer.
The legislation, put in place in 1990, specifically references “written” communication and while it doesn’t mention email, the court argued that email addresses are covered.
The same reasoning doesn’t apply to IP-addresses. Although they have the term “address” in the name, they can’t generally be used to send a written message to a person, at least not directly.
“In the case of IP addresses – despite the word component ‘address’, this is not an ‘address’, since the IP address does not have any communication function, and it serves solely to identify the terminal from which a particular web page is accessed,” the Court clarifies.
Unrelated pirated movies on YouTube
The judgment of the Higher Regional Court is not yet legally binding. Golem reports that, due to the importance of the case, the Federal Court of Justice has to review it first.
For the filmmaker, the ruling comes as a disappointment since an email address alone is probably not enough to identify the infringer in question.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no other options. In the United States, it’s relatively easy to obtain information from copyright infringers with a DMCA subpoena, for example.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/fea-stop.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2017-09-09 19:00:512017-09-09 19:00:51YouTube Doesn’t Have to Expose IP-Addresses of Movie Pirates, Court Rules
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Many users are aware of the tug of war being played between piracy add-on writers on one side and legitimate services on the other that are using Kodi as a platform. Far fewer are aware of the other battle the Kodi project is dealing with on a regular basis. For some reason, when we announced the name Kodi would be replacing the name XBMC back in August of 2014, a number of individuals with what appear to be less than altruistic motives decided to act as trademark trolls. They attempted to register the Kodi name in various countries outside the United States with the goal of earning money off the Kodi name without doing any work beyond sending threatening letters.
We are not entirely sure why the name change prompted this behavior. When we went by XBMC, nobody ever did the trademark squatting thing. So when it started happening with the Kodi name, we were caught flatfooted without any real plan for dealing with these trolls or even tracking their actions.
There have already been lawsuits involving these trolls, though none so far that we have been a party to. A few trolls, after being contacted by us, agreed to hand back their illegitimate trademark registrations. The ones who agreed tended to be helped along by ongoing piracy-related lawsuits against them.
At least one trademark troll has so far not agreed to voluntarily release their grasp on their registration of our trademark and is actively blackmailing hardware vendors in an entire country, trying to become as rich as possible off of our backs and the backs of Kodi volunteers everywhere. His name is Geoff Gavora. He had written several letters to the Foundation over the years, expressing how important XBMC and Kodi were to him and his sales. And then, one day, for whatever reason, he decided to register the Kodi trademark in his home country of Canada. We had hoped, given the positive nature of his past emails, that perhaps he was doing this for the benefit of the Foundation. We learned, unfortunately, that this was not the case.
Instead, companies like Mygica and our sponsor Minix have been delisted by Gavora on Amazon, so that only Gavora’s hardware can be sold, unless those companies pay him a fee to stay on the store. Now, if you do a search for Kodi on Amazon.ca, there’s a very real chance that every box you see is giving Gavora money to advertise that they can run what should be the entirely free and open Kodi. Gavora and his company are behaving in true trademark troll fashion.
We are writing this blogpost today for a few reasons:
First, we want to let the users know that in some countries, trademark trolls are actively trying to make Kodi no longer free. By this we mean that today any user can take a clean and untouched copy of Kodi and distribute it however they please. Sell hardware with it installed. Give it away on USB sticks or online. Or, heck, a person could even sell it if they wanted to. As long as users follow our basic trademark requirements, they can do with Kodi as they please. Trademark trolls want to stop this. They want to make it so that if you want to distribute Kodi, you need to pay them a fee first. Want to sell hardware with Kodi pre-installed? Too bad, fees first. Heck, if they wanted to, they could try to prevent Team Kodi from distributing the software in their country by suing us for trademark infringement.
Second, we want to let the trolls know that we have caught on to this game and will not accept it. We are actively taking the necessary steps to ensure that the Kodi trademark trolls are dealt with appropriately. There is no value proposition in trolling the Kodi name.
And finally, third, while our goal has always been to avoid going to the court to ensure Kodi remains free in countries where trolls are attempting to get rich off of the Kodi name, we will not back down from protecting the free, open source nature of our software. If that time comes for legal action, we hope to have the community’s support.
For the most part, this battle has been waged in lawyers’ offices, rather than on the front page of newspapers, but because the freedom of Kodi hinges on it, it is no less important.
Right now, there is no call to action. There is nothing most of you need to do, save for reminding people that Kodi is free. We only ask that you be prepared for the future, as we move forward in defending the freedom of this software that we all take for granted. And if you happen to notice someone trademark trolling Kodi in your country, let us know.
The UK’s Intellectual Property Office has published its annual IP Crime Report, spanning the period 2016 to 2017.
It covers key events in the copyright and trademark arenas and is presented with input from the police and trading standards, plus private entities such as the BPI, Premier League, and Federation Against Copyright Theft, to name a few.
The report begins with an interesting statistic. Despite claims that many millions of UK citizens regularly engage in some kind of infringement, figures from the Ministry of Justice indicate that just 47 people were found guilty of offenses under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act during 2016. That’s down on the 69 found guilty in the previous year.
Despite this low conviction rate, 15% of all internet users aged 12+ are reported to have consumed at least one item of illegal content between March and May 2017. Figures supplied by the Industry Trust for IP indicate that 19% of adults watch content via various IPTV devices – often referred to as set-top, streaming, Android, or Kodi boxes.
“At its cutting edge IP crime is innovative. It exploits technological loopholes before they become apparent. IP crime involves sophisticated hackers, criminal financial experts, international gangs and service delivery networks. Keeping pace with criminal innovation places a burden on IP crime prevention resources,” the report notes.
The report covers a broad range of IP crime, from counterfeit sportswear to foodstuffs, but our focus is obviously on Internet-based infringement. Various contributors cover various aspects of online activity as it affects them, including music industry group BPI.
“The main online piracy threats to the UK recorded music industry at present are from BitTorrent networks, linking/aggregator sites, stream-ripping sites, unauthorized streaming sites and cyberlockers,” the BPI notes.
The BPI’s website blocking efforts have been closely reported, with 63 infringing sites blocked to date via various court orders. However, the BPI reports that more than 700 related URLs, IP addresses, and proxy sites/ proxy aggregators have also been rendered inaccessible as part of the same action.
“Site blocking has proven to be a successful strategy as the longer the blocks are in place, the more effective they are. We have seen traffic to these sites reduce by an average of 70% or more,” the BPI reports.
While prosecutions against music pirates are a fairly rare event in the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) Specialist Fraud Division highlights that their most significant prosecution of the past 12 months involved a prolific music uploader.
As first revealed here on TF, Wayne Evans was an uploader not only on KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay, but also some of his own sites. Known online as OldSkoolScouse, Evans reportedly cost the UK’s Performing Rights Society more than £1m in a single year. He was sentenced in December 2016 to 12 months in prison.
While Evans has been free for some time already, the CPS places particular emphasis on the importance of the case, “since it provided sentencing guidance for the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, where before there was no definitive guideline.”
The CPS says the case was useful on a number of fronts. Despite illegal distribution of content being difficult to investigate and piracy losses proving tricky to quantify, the court found that deterrent sentences are appropriate for the kinds of offenses Evans was accused of.
The CPS notes that various factors affect the severity of such sentences, not least the length of time the unlawful activity has persisted and particularly if it has done so after the service of a cease and desist notice. Other factors include the profit made by defendants and/or the loss caused to copyright holders “so far as it can accurately be calculated.”
Importantly, however, the CPS says that beyond issues of personal mitigation and timely guilty pleas, a jail sentence is probably going to be the outcome for others engaging in this kind of activity in future. That’s something for torrent and streaming site operators and their content uploaders to consider.
“[U]nless the unlawful activity of this kind is very amateur, minor or short-lived, or in the absence of particularly compelling mitigation or other exceptional circumstances, an immediate custodial sentence is likely to be appropriate in cases of illegal distribution of copyright infringing articles,” the CPS concludes.
But while a music-related trial provided the highlight of the year for the CPS, the online infringement world is still dominated by the rise of streaming sites and the now omnipresent “fully-loaded Kodi Box” – set-top devices configured to receive copyright-infringing live TV and VOD.
In the IP Crime Report, the Intellectual Property Office references a former US Secretary of Defense to describe the emergence of the threat.
“The echoes of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous aphorism concerning ‘known knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’ reverberate across our landscape perhaps more than any other. The certainty we all share is that we must be ready to confront both ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’,” the IPO writes.
“Not long ago illegal streaming through Kodi Boxes was an ‘unknown’. Now, this technology updates copyright infringement by empowering TV viewers with the technology they need to subvert copyright law at the flick of a remote control.”
While the set-top box threat has grown in recent times, the report highlights the important legal clarifications that emerged from the BREIN v Filmspeler case, which found itself before the European Court of Justice.
As widely reported, the ECJ determined that the selling of piracy-configured devices amounts to a communication to the public, something which renders their sale illegal. However, in a submission by PIPCU, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, box sellers are said to cast a keen eye on the legal situation.
“Organised criminals, especially those in the UK who distribute set-top boxes, are aware of recent developments in the law and routinely exploit loopholes in it,” PIPCU reports.
“Given recent judgments on the sale of pre-programmed set-top boxes, it is now unlikely criminals would advertise the devices in a way which is clearly infringing by offering them pre-loaded or ‘fully loaded’ with apps and addons specifically designed to access subscription services for free.”
With sellers beginning to clean up their advertising, it seems likely that detection will become more difficult than when selling was considered a gray area. While that will present its own issues, PIPCU still sees problems on two fronts – a lack of clear legislation and a perception of support for ‘pirate’ devices among the public.
“There is no specific legislation currently in place for the prosecution of end users or sellers of set-top boxes. Indeed, the general public do not see the usage of these devices as potentially breaking the law,” the unit reports.
“PIPCU are currently having to try and ‘shoehorn’ existing legislation to fit the type of criminality being observed, such as conspiracy to defraud (common law) to tackle this problem. Cases are yet to be charged and results will be known by late 2017.”
Whether these prosecutions will be effective remains to be seen, but PIPCU’s comments suggest an air of caution set to a backdrop of box-sellers’ tendency to adapt to legal challenges.
“Due to the complexity of these cases it is difficult to substantiate charges under the Fraud Act (2006). PIPCU have convicted one person under the Serious Crime Act (2015) (encouraging or assisting s11 of the Fraud Act). However, this would not be applicable unless the suspect had made obvious attempts to encourage users to use the boxes to watch subscription only content,” PIPCU notes, adding;
“The selling community is close knit and adapts constantly to allow itself to operate in the gray area where current legislation is unclear and where they feel they can continue to sell ‘under the radar’.”
More generally, pirate sites as a whole are still seen as a threat. As reported last month, the current anti-piracy narrative is that pirate sites represent a danger to their users. As a result, efforts are underway to paint torrent and streaming sites as risky places to visit, with users allegedly exposed to malware and other malicious content. The scare strategy is supported by PIPCU.
“Unlike the purchase of counterfeit physical goods, consumers who buy unlicensed content online are not taking a risk. Faulty copyright doesn’t explode, burn or break. For this reason the message as to why the public should avoid copyright fraud needs to be re-focused.
“A more concerted attempt to push out a message relating to malware on pirate websites, the clear criminality and the links to organized crime of those behind the sites are crucial if public opinion is to be changed,” the unit advises.
But while the changing of attitudes is desirable for pro-copyright entities, PIPCU says that winning over the public may not prove to be an easy battle. It was given a small taste of backlash itself, after taking action against the operator of a pirate site.
“The scale of the problem regarding public opinion of online copyright crime is evidenced by our own experience. After PIPCU executed a warrant against the owner of a streaming website, a tweet about the event (read by 200,000 people) produced a reaction heavily weighted against PIPCU’s legitimate enforcement action,” PIPCU concludes.
In summary, it seems likely that more effort will be expended during the next 12 months to target the set-top box threat, but there doesn’t appear to be an abundance of confidence in existing legislation to tackle all but the most egregious offenders. That being said, a line has now been drawn in the sand – if the public is prepared to respect it.
The full IP Crime Report 2016-2017 is available here (pdf)
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/kodi-tablet.png363650Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2017-09-08 12:58:522017-09-08 12:58:52New UK IP Crime Report Reveals Continued Focus on ‘Pirate’ Kodi Boxes
While most of the headlines relating to Internet piracy are focused on North America and Europe, there are dozens of countries where piracy is a way of life for millions of citizens. India, with its booming economy and growth in technology, is certainly one of them.
In June 2011, police across Europe carried out the 
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In September 2015, U.S. authorities announced action against a pair of sites involved in music piracy.
