Terminator: Dark Fate is the most downloaded movie.
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.
RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/1580137827_worldfea.png2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2020-01-27 17:10:242020-01-27 17:10:24Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week on BitTorrent – 01/27/20
Indonesia has been very active on the anti-piracy front in recent months, with the government ordering Internet providers to block hundreds of pirate sites.
Despite these enforcement efforts, several high profile US entertainment industry groups see room for improvement in the Asian country.
The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which includes a wide range of copyright groups including the MPA, RIAA, and ESA, made this clear in a recent submission to the US Trade Representative.
IIPA advises the U.S. government to suspend Indonesia’s GSP trade benefits if the country fails to do more to protect the interests of US copyright holders. With many millions of dollars at stake, this is a serious threat.
In their submission, IIPA acknowledges that the Indonesian government has recently taken “significant strides” to combat piracy. However, it also adds that “more should be done.”
The group notes that the movie and music industries “worked” with the government to block hundreds of websites. This resulted in some success stories, such as the recent decision by pirate site IndoXXI to voluntarily shut down.
However, blockades are not always effective. In many cases, the initial drops in traffic that occur after a blockade are undone when sites move to new domain names.
“[T]hese drops in traffic are intermittent as most well-known piracy sites employ a strategy of domain hopping—redirecting domains to circumvent the results of site-blocking efforts,” IIPA writes.
The Indonesian government has already responded to this by blocking new domains as well, but IIPA sees room for improvement on this front.
“The government should streamline the process for rights holders to ensure access to infringing sites is disabled and to deal efficiently with the problem of domain hopping,” the group writes.
These demands are clear but it remains odd to see calls for these types of drastic measures from US companies that have yet to take any action to block a single pirate site in the US itself.
IIPA’s demands don’t end there either – the copyright holders have more suggestions. For example, Indonesia should prioritize enforcement efforts against illegal camcording in theaters as well as live streaming piracy.
“The government should issue clear guidelines and regulations on illegal camcording and live streaming piracy, and take the initiative to reduce instances of these illegal activities as a priority,” IIPA writes.
In addition, piracy apps and the distribution points for piracy-enabling set-top boxes should be dealt with as well.
“IIPA encourages the Indonesian Government to take steps to crack down on piracy apps and on device retailers who preload the devices with apps that facilitate infringement, and take action against key distribution points for devices that are being used illegally.”
This is just a small selection of the demands which also include a repeal of certain copyright exceptions and an extension of the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years.
According to IIPA, Indonesia was on the right track but in 2019 progress stalled and even regressed. The organization hopes that by listing a wide variety of improvement opportunities, perhaps with a nudge from the US government, progress can continue.
If the US Government doesn’t see any improvement, it should suspend (some of) the existing trade benefits for the country, the rightsholder groups conclude.
“If, at the conclusion of the review, the Government of Indonesia has not made adequate progress remedying the deficiencies outlined above, IIPA requests that the Committee suspend or withdraw Indonesia’s GSP benefits, in whole or in part,” IIPA writes.
This type of pressure is not new. In 2017 the US Government sanctioned Ukraine following a similar referral from the IIPA. This triggered a wave of copyright-related actions in the country, with President Trump deciding to lift the sanctions a few months ago.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/skullsfeat.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2020-01-27 07:09:202020-01-27 07:09:20Indonesia Faces Call for US Trade Sanctions over Online Piracy
First launched in 1993, France-based company AlloCiné aims to support the entertainment industries by providing information on movies and TV shows.
The company operates a portal located at Allocine.fr where users can research movies, TV series, actors and view a wide range of additional information such as release dates, for example. While less well-known than iMDb, for example, Allocine.fr is a huge draw with more than 46 million visits per month.
During December 2019 and for reasons that remain unclear, a new wave of DMCA takedown notices began appearing on Google’s Transparency Report, reportedly sent by AlloCiné and targeting a broad range of sites. All told and from a standing start, the company appears to have requested the removal of more than 6,300 URLs from third-party sites, claiming that they infringe AlloCiné’s rights.
Determining whether that’s actually the case is not easy since the notices submitted to Google don’t include links where original content can be found. The first notice, dated December 16, 2019, seems to target sites that give the impression of being streaming portals. They bear no close resemblance to AlloCiné and Google eventually rejected every single request.
This pattern largely continues across many copyright claims targeting thousands of URLs but then even more glaring errors start to appear.
While similar to those that preceded it, this notice asks Google to delete a page on rival entertainment database JustWatch featuring Game of Thrones. It also demands that a link to a Rotten Tomatoes page detailing The Mandalorian is deleted, just one of many targeting the site in the days that followed.
For reasons unknown, this notice targets the History Channel while another attempts to delist a Harley Quinn article published by Newsweek.
With Google refusing to take action for almost all URLs thus far, another notice persists by demanding the takedown of an information page relating to the TV series Asylum City published on the CanalPlus website. Another targets pages on both MetaCritic and Decider after they covered the Disney show The Imagineers.
Things only go down from here, with another notice targeting four more Rotten Tomatoes URLs, one belonging to Hulu, plus one owned by Paramount Network. Just a day later, another notice swooped back for another bite at Hulu (it is targeted in several notices) plus an attack on the site AllSeries.co.uk. While this might sound like a TV show platform, it is in fact a BMW-focused sales and repairs company in the UK.
Sadly, subsequent notices don’t offer any improvement, with one in particular standing out after targeting news site Le Parisien for writing about Netflix, Wired.com for reporting on The Witcher, and Vulture for recapping The Mandalorian.
Quite what AlloCiné is trying to achieve here isn’t clear but the very same notice also targets the New York Times, Netflix, KickStarter, IGN, Express.co.uk, Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, Wikipedia and – for good measure – AlloCiné’s very own domain.
TorrentFreak’s request for comment from AlloCiné remains unanswered.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/facepalm-featured.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2020-01-26 21:08:262020-01-26 21:08:26Movie & TV Show Database Bombards Google With Bizarre Takedown Notices
The lawsuit is in many regards similar to the ones against other ISPs, such as Cox, Grande, and Charter, which were all accused of failing to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.
According to the labels, RCN knew that some of its subscribers were frequently distributing copyrighted material, but failed to take any meaningful action in response. To compensate for this alleged inaction the music companies demand damages.
Last month we saw that the stakes are high in these cases. Following a two week trial, Cox was found guilty with the jury awarding a billion dollars in damages. This is something RCN wants to avoid.
Fighting back, the company submitted a motion to dismiss the lawsuit at the New Jersey federal court this week.
RCN starts by pointing out that the music companies don’t accuse it of hosting any infringing material. Nor do they argue that the ISP promoted its service to illegally share content.
“Instead, the thrust of Plaintiffs’ case is that RCN is secondarily liable because it did not terminate the internet access of subscribers accused of copyright infringement,” RCN writes.
The use of the term “accused” is important here. These accusations come from third-party outfit Rightscorp which sent huge amounts of infringement notifications bundled with settlement requests.
According to RCN, Rightscorp used the threat of legal action to extract settlements from subscribers. With this business model, more notices would generally result in more revenue.
“This means that Rightscorp is incentivized to send huge volumes of infringement accusations, without regard to the amount or frequency of any actual copyright infringement,” the ISP notes.
The music companies don’t claim that they used Rightscorp’s services themselves. Instead, RCN believes that the rightsholders acquired Rightscorp’s data after the fact, to pursue legal campaigns against ISPs.
In any case, the ISP has very little faith in the accuracy of Rightscorp’s piracy notifications and clearly disregards them as credible evidence.
“No reasonable ISP would accept Rightscorp’s copyright infringement allegations as credible, much less actionable. Rightscorp does not provide any evidence whatsoever demonstrating that a given internet user possessed or shared the copyrighted content in question,” RCN writes.
Continuing its motion, RCN explains step by step why the music companies’ claims don’t hold up, starting with the accusation of contributory infringement.
Liability for contributory infringement can only take place if an ISP is aware of direct copyright infringements and actively encourages or induces this activity. That’s not the case, according to RCN, as Rightcorp’s notices are not evidence of direct infringement.
“Rightscorp’s conclusory email allegations cannot confer knowledge of copyright infringement because they are unsupported and unverifiable,” RCN writes.
The ISP also emphasizes that Rightcorp’s notices are not DMCA compliant. They don’t provide sufficient information to disable or remove infringing content, nor do they properly identify the works, as there is no mention of copyright registration numbers.
In addition, RCN points out that its Internet service has substantial non-infringing uses, adding that the music companies failed to show that the ISP promoted or contributed to any infringing uses of its network.
“Plaintiffs only allege that RCN provided the alleged direct infringers with internet access. This is far too attenuated from the infringing conduct to constitute material contribution,” RCN adds.
The claim of liability for vicarious copyright infringement also falls flat, RCN argues. The ISP says doesn’t profit from any of the alleged infringing activity nor does it have the ability to control it.
Finally, the music companies’ claim of liability for direct infringement can’t be proven either, simply because there’s no hard evidence that any RCN subscribers engaged in piracy.
“Taking Plaintiffs’ allegations as true, they cannot show that any infringing content was unlawfully obtained over RCN’s network, or that any user of RCN’s engaged in conduct directly infringing Plaintiffs’ distribution rights,” RCN notes.
According to the ISP, the music companies failed to state a proper claim so it, therefore, asks the court to dismiss the complaint.
The music companies still have the option to reply to RCN’s arguments after which the court will rule on the matter.
In related cases, other ISPs have submitted similar motions, with some being more successful than others. Grande managed to have the vicarious infringement claim dropped, for example, but Cox’s attempt to do the same failed.
…
A copy of RCN’s motion to dismiss the music companies’ complaint is available here (pdf).
DMCA notices or their equivalents can be filed against websites, hosts, ISPs and other services almost anywhere in the world, with the majority of entities taking some action in response.
At Google, for example, the company receives DMCA notices requesting that allegedly-infringing URLs are delisted from search results and at this company alone, the scale is astonishing. At the time of writing, Google has processed requests to remove 4.43 billion URLs from its indexes across 2.77 million domains. These were filed by more than 196,100 copyright holders and 186,100 reporting organizations, which includes anti-piracy groups.
This week, one of those anti-piracy groups reached a historic milestone. French anti-piracy group Rivendell sent its 500 millionth URL delisting request to Google, breaking the half-a-billion barrier for a single reporting entity for the first time.
Hervé Lemaire is the owner of Rivendell’s sister company LeakID, a company he formed in 2006 after he left EMI/Virgin as Head of Digital. Speaking with TorrentFreak this week, he explained that Rivendell was launched in 2013 with a key focus to prevent unlicensed content appearing in Google’s indexes.
Lemaire didn’t provide specific details on Rivendell’s top clients but a cursory view of Google’s report shows many familiar names from the world of entertainment, including what recently appears to be a strong focus on sports content owned by the Premier League and Italy’s Serie A.
In common with all anti-piracy companies, Rivendell isn’t keen to give away its secrets. Lemaire did confirm however that patroling Google’s indexes is only part of the puzzle and that scanning piracy platforms to identify infringing material quickly plays a big part.
When it comes to dealing with Google itself, Lemaire bucks the trend by complimenting (rather than criticizing) the company for its anti-piracy work.
“We work closely with the Google team and we are very happy with them,” he told TF. “They are very cooperative and when we have a problem with a link we always have an answer and a solution from them.”
Google doesn’t impose any reporting limits on Rivendell either, with Lemaire noting that all Google wants is to work with “serious companies doing a serious job.”
While the sending of more than half-a-billion URL reports is certainly remarkable, it’s worth breaking down what type of action was taken in response to them. The image below shows what action Google took, with just under three-quarters of URL requests resulting in immediate removal.
That raises the question of why 25% of Rivendell’s URL reports failed to result in content being removed.
The red category – almost 20% – indicates content that didn’t actually exist in Google’s indexes at the time it was detected by Rivendell. The company suggests that because it acts so quickly, it can detect content before it appears in Google’s results.
“If you search the links only on Google, you have nothing to do with the protection of content,” Lemaire says.
“We do not expect Google to show us the pirated links [immediately]. To be effective we must go to where content is found before it appears on the search engine, especially for live content.”
This type of proactive takedown isn’t a problem for Google. As previously revealed, the company is happy to receive the URLs for content it hasn’t yet indexed for action when they do eventually appear.
“We accept notices for URLs that are not even in our index in the first place. That way, we can collect information even about pages and domains we have not yet crawled,” Google copyright counsel Caleb Donaldson previously explained.
“We process these URLs as we do the others. Once one of these not-in-index URLs is approved for takedown, we prophylactically block it from appearing in our Search results.”
Lemaire also has straightforward explanations for the other categories too. Requests labeled as ‘duplicate’ by Google have already been targeted by other anti-piracy companies while the 1% marked “No Action” can be the result of several issues including a lack of evidence, a homepage delisting request, hidden content, or even a ‘fake’ pirate website.
The big question, however, is whether all of these delisting efforts actually have any serious impact on the volumes of pirated content being consumed. Lemaire is clear: “It works.”
“For live events like football we were the first to work on removing links before, during and after matches. This is why several European leagues trust us in particular on this subject,” he says.
“In general, the removal of illegal links allows legal offers to occupy the top places in search results. There are still improvements to be made regarding the pagerank of illegal sites, however.”
Lemaire is brief when questioned on what measures are taken to avoid erroneous takedowns, stating that all domains are validated before they are notified to Google. Finally, he also appears to recognize the resourcefulness of his adversaries but says that countering them is enjoyable.
“Pirates are not stupid and are constantly finding new solutions. It’s up to us to work to outsmart them .. we love it,” he concludes.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/tv-closeup-feat.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2020-01-25 15:05:162020-01-25 15:05:16Rivendell Has Now Sent Half a Billion DMCA Takedown Requests to Google
In recent years, Swedish movie outfits and Hollywood studios, including Disney, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros, have been working hard to get local ISPs to block The Pirate Bay.
The first success came a few years ago when a blocking order was issued against local Internet provider Bredbandsbolaget. This was later followed by an interim order against Telia, Sweden’s largest ISP, which was struck down on appeal and sent back to the lower court.
During the second try of the case movie companies again requested a blocking order against The Pirate Bay, as well as three other sites, Dreamfilm, FMovies, and NyaFilmer.
Last month this case was decided in favor of the rightsholders, with the court not only issuing a blocking injunction but also one that can be extended
The Swedish Patent and Market Court ordered Telia to block access to the four pirate sites to prevent these from facilitating further copyright infringement. In addition, the rightsholders are also allowed to add new domain names and IP-addresses going forward.
The movie companies requested this expansion option since blocking orders are often circumvented through new domains and proxy sites. Telia objected to the request for such a “dynamic” blocking order, but the court sided with the copyright holders.
“It is clear that the services change domain names and URLs and that this is a quick, easy and inexpensive way to bypass the effect of a blocking procedure,” the court writes.
“A blocking injunction should, therefore, in order to effectively serve the rights holders’ interest in preventing infringements, not merely target specified domain names and URLs,” the order adds.
This effectively means that Telia must update its blocklist when it’s made aware of changes. Any new URLs and IP-addresses have to provide access to any of the four pirate sites, including The Pirate Bay.
Telia also objected to the general blocking order and questioned whether the rightsholders had shown any proof of infringement. However, the court refuted these arguments and stressed that, under EU law, ISP can be ordered to stop pirating subscribers.
The case resulted in a clash between several rights that are defined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In this instance, the property rights of the movie companies weigh stronger than Telia’s right to entrepreneurial freedom.
Hans Eriksson, Senior Associate at the law firm Westerberg & Partners, highlighted the case at IPKat, believes that dynamic injunctions, which can be updated regularly, will become more and more common.
“Dynamic injunctions like this one are likely to be the future for blocking injunctions in Europe,” Eriksson tells TorrentFreak.
The Market Court’s injunction is valid for three years. If Telia fails to properly implement the blockades, it risks a penalty of 500,000 Swedish Krona (€47,500). Telia is not happy with the outcome, however, and has already filed an appeal.
—
A copy of the Patent and Market Court’s order, in Swedish, is available here (pdf).
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/law-featured.jpg00Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2020-01-25 05:04:172020-01-25 05:04:17Swedish Court Issues ‘Dynamic’ Pirate Bay Blocking Order
When leading content companies and distributors plus Yandex, Rambler Group, Mail.Ru Group, vKontakte, and RuTube signed up to a landmark anti-piracy memorandum in 2018, new ground was broken in Russia.
Assisted by the creation of a centralized database of allegedly-infringing content, Internet platforms agreed to voluntarily query the resource in near real-time before deleting content from their search indexes. The plan was to make pirated content harder for users to find and within months, hundreds of thousands of links were being purged.
The end-game was to have the terms of the agreement written into local law but as some expected, things didn’t run entirely to plan. Early October 2019, with the memorandum a year old, it effectively timed out. Negotiations ensued and a short extension was agreed but a deadline of end October came and went without a draft being presented to parliament.
With another deadline missed, an automatic extension to end December 2019 came into play but it’s now clear that the plan to formalize the agreement in law is still a very long way off.
During a meeting at the Media and Communications Union, the industry association formed by the largest media companies and telecom industry players, the parties – with assistance from telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor – have now agreed to another extension. The voluntary agreement will now continue for at least another year, the clearest indication yet that this isn’t a straightforward matter.
According to industry sources cited by Vedomosti (paywall), the decision not to push ahead now towards legislation was taken jointly by the signatories and Roscomnadzor.
While many specifics aren’t being made public, sources indicate that the mechanism for resolving disputes between the copyright holders and Internet platforms has proven complex. Another area of disagreement centers around demands from rightsholders and content companies to have sites delisted on a permanent basis, if they are repeatedly flagged as offering links to infringing content.
Another key issue is that under the current system there is a clear bias towards video content and the largest copyright holders, while others have to take a back seat or are left out altogether. It will take a considerable period of time to overcome these hurdles, a situation that isn’t helped by a reported lack of time in the State Duma to deal with the legislation.
As a result, the memorandum will now be extended to the end of January 2021, to allow the parties and the government to come up with a credible framework before writing it into law.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/handshake-feat.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2020-01-24 19:03:172020-01-24 19:03:17Russia’s Anti-Piracy Deal to Delete Content From Search Engines Extended Until 2021
In Internet ‘piracy’ years, PortalRoms.com is pretty old domain, having first appeared as a very basic ROM download site way back in 2004, possibly even earlier.
Over the years it has undergone various transformations and possibly ownership changes too. Its now-dormant Twitter account was created back in 2010 but behind the scenes and after fairly slow initial growth, the last decade saw the site grow negligible traffic to become a decent-sized ROM, retro, and emulator player.
Up until just a few days ago, users of PortalRoms – who between them have been generating around four million visits per month – were able to download ROMs covering everything from arcade games to Dreamcast to Nintendo Switch. Rather than store this content on restrictive file-hosting platforms, PortalRoms created torrents instead, a rare move for a site of this type.
Right from the very beginning, PortalRoms operated from PortalRoms.com. However, for reasons that are not clear, last September or October the site made a surprise switch to the Swiss-based PortalRoms.ch domain. As data from SimilarWeb shows, most traffic managed to transfer to the new domain, with little to no disruption.
The same cannot be said of the past few days. With no public announcements to indicate the cause, PortalRoms went dark, leaving millions of users (especially in South America where the site was very popular) without their favorite download portal to fall back on.
When trying to determine the cause of the downtime, the site’s domain entries aren’t particularly useful.
TorrentFreak contacted the registrar in control of the .ch domain but the company advised us that the domain is actually controlled by one of their resellers – 1337 Services LLC. This is the business name of Njalla, the domain company connected to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, a company that strives to give up no useful information on any domain.
It remains possible that PortalRoms is experiencing yet another bout of domain problems but whether they are copyright-related is open to question. Indeed, one of the curious things about PortalRoms.com and PortalRoms.ch is that considering its extensive library and visitor count, anti-piracy groups working for gaming companies like Nintendo or Sony seem to be pretty disinterested.
Google’s Transparency Report reveals that PortalRoms.com received only 55 complaints targeting 115 URLs when it was in operation. Companies like EA, Rockstar, THQ and Activision got involved but never on any scale. For comparison, the relatively new PortalRoms.ch domain received only four complaints but those contained just over 1,000 URLs. All but a handful were filed by the Entertainment Software Association.
While it remains to be seen whether PortalRoms will ever return, it’s worth noting that its chosen method of content distribution (torrents, in this case) means that people will still be sharing the ROM and emulator files during the downtime. Indeed, a basic search for ‘portalroms’ on various meta-search engines reveals many active torrents with the phrase “visit www.PORTALROMS.ch for more games _.url” in their file lists.
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The grounds for the suspension initially remained unclear. However, after asking for clarification, 101domain explained to the site operator that it had received an injunction from a US court.
The injunction in question appeared to have been sent by the Motion Picture Association (MPA). It was signed by a federal judge at the US District Court for the District of Columbia and indeed targeted Popcorntime.sh.
Since the MPA had gone after various Popcorn Time forks in the past, this sounded somewhat plausible. However, the document clearly isn’t real.
At TorrentFreak, we received a copy of the same injunction two weeks ago. It was sent in by an anonymous tipster who urged us to report on it. While the story made some sense, on closer inspection we found that the injunction was obviously falsified.
For example, the court stamp and the signed date are from May 2019 while the document itself was filed in November 2019, according to the header. The case reference number also identifies a completely unrelated lawsuit and the paperwork shows several other signs of tampering.
Most telling, perhaps, is that the associated injunction is supposed to prevent “the immediate and irreparable harm will result to Microsoft.” Microsoft?
Some more digging showed that, while there is no such filing from the MPA, there is an almost identical order from last May in a case between Microsoft and several John Does who operated domains such as identity-verificationservice.info.
This case has nothing to do with Popcorn Time. Someone simply took the document and changed several details, making it look as if it came from the MPA targeting Popcorntime.sh.
Although this didn’t take much effort for us to uncover, the fabricated document was apparently sufficient to convince 101domain to suspend the domain. Popcorn Time shared a copy of the response it received from the registrar’s abuse team, which attached the falsified document.
We reached out to the registrar to verify this and also pointed out our suspicions but unfortunately, we didn’t hear back. Interestingly, a few hours later 101domain suddenly realized that the document was fabricated.
A Popcorn Time representative informs TorrentFreak that the domain suspension was lifted after 101domain confirmed with the US District Court that the injunction wasn’t legitimate.
While this is good news for Popcorn Time, it may never have happened if people had started asking questions sooner.
Perhaps surprisingly, 101domain was not the only registrar to fall for the falsified court document either. When Popcorn Time had its .sh domain suspended it switched to Popcorntime.app, a domain they registered through 1API.
It didn’t take long before that registrar received a similarly altered ‘injunction’ (pdf). The same Microsoft order was used as the basis again, but this time targeted the new domain Popcorntime.app.
In an email, which the Popcorn Time representative shared with TorrentFreak, 1API explained that Popcorn Time had 48 hours to respond, adding that the domain name may eventually be put on hold.
1API also revealed the request from the original complainant, which was sent from a protonmail.ch address, supposedly by a member of MPA’s legal team named ‘John Gibetstan’.
“Hello 1API, I am a representative of the MPA’s Legal Team. We have obtained an injunction to take control of a domain under your system. The domain in question would be popcorntime.app. You have 5 business days to take action on the injunction,” it reads.
Aside from the various flaws in the underlying document, this email doesn’t appear to be very professional. The MPA doesn’t use Protonmail addresses either, and there’s not even a John Gibetstan working there.
For now, the PopcornTime.app domain remains available but 1API’s 48-hour window hasn’t expired yet. We reached out to 1API requesting additional details and comment on the issue but, at the time of writing, we have yet to hear back.
All in all the whole episode shows that it’s surprisingly easy for malicious actors to fool some domain registrars, at least initially. Who the fake complainant is and why he or she wants Popcorn Time offline, remains a mystery.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/darkfea.png2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2020-01-23 13:00:172020-01-23 13:00:17Popcorn Time Domain Suspension Was Triggered by Falsified Court Document
Alongside the mass uptake of digital readers such as Kindles, phones and tablets, plus a relatively small filesize, downloading of eBook and magazine content has gained in popularity over recent years.
There are plenty of sites catering to this popular niche but in common with platforms specializing in other areas, a handful of dedicated sites have found their way onto the preferred lists of many pirates.
One of those is eBookee, a download platform that doesn’t appear to carry content itself but indexes content hosted on other sites, notably file-hosting services. Indeed, a cursory review of eBookee’s traffic referral stats reveals that large volumes of users are directed to platforms such as Rapidgator and Nitroflare, for example.
During the past 24 hours, however, visitors to eBookee.org (the site’s main domain) were greeted not by links to eBooks or magazines (and less frequently videos and audio), but by a blank page. While temporary site downtime is nothing new in this space, it appears that eBookee has experienced a more significant problem relating to its main domain.
In common with The Pirate Bay’s main domain, eBookee’s .org domain is ultimately overseen by the Public Interest Registry with day-to-day business controlled by India-based Public Domain Registry. As the image below shows, the latter has suspended the domain.
While it seems likely that a significant action caused the suspension, the specific issue (such as a complaint from a third-party, for example) hasn’t been revealed in public. PDR did not immediately respond to TF’s request for comment but it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if the issue was copyright related.
Companies including Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Cambridge University Press, Amazon, and National Geographic have all filed copyright infringement complaints against the platform with Google during the first few weeks of this year.
Overall, Google’s Transparency Report reveals that over the past several years, it has processed requests from rightsholders and anti-piracy groups to have 858,782 eBookee.org URLs deleted from its search results. Just 52% resulted in content being taken down, with the remainder either not in Google’s indexes or duplicate requests.
The eBookee.org domain was first registered way back in 2007 but it hasn’t been a trouble-free ride. In 2015, publishers obtained an injunction from the High Court in England to have the site’s domain blocked by local ISPs. That resulted in many proxy sites springing up to service the platform, none of which appear to be working today.
Finally, several social media pages claiming to be connected to or operated by eBookee.org are suggesting a new domain for the site. Checks carried out by TF suggest that the site is probably not connected with the official platform.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/warning-1.jpg2911200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2020-01-23 02:59:222020-01-23 02:59:22Popular Pirate eBook Site Ebookee.org Has Domain Suspended
This week we have three newcomers in our chart.
Indonesia has been very active on the anti-piracy front in recent months, with the government ordering Internet providers to block hundreds of pirate sites. 
Last summer several major music companies 
In recent years, Swedish movie outfits and Hollywood studios, including Disney, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros, have been working hard to get local ISPs to block The Pirate Bay.
Earlier this week registrar 101domain 
