With millions of views per day, ‘IndoXX1’ is of one the largest pirate sites on the Internet.

In the West, the site doesn’t ring a bell with most people. In Indonesia, however, it is among the top 25 most visited websites in the country, only beaten by Google, YouTube, and a few others.

The site’s popularity didn’t go unnoticed by Hollywood. Earlier this year the MPA listed the site in its yearly overview of notorious pirate sites submitted to the US Trade Representative.

“Indo 21” has emerged as the main brand for piracy in Bahasa throughout Indonesia and Malaysia. One of the related sites, indoxx1.center, has a local ranking of 40 in Indonesia according to SimilarWeb data with 23.85 million monthly visits in August 2019,” MPA wrote.

Today this information is already outdated. While IndoXX1 remains the most visited pirate brand in the country, it continuously relocates in order to evade local blocking efforts.

Most recently the portal was available through domains including idxx1.cam, indoxx1.art, and indoxx1.kim. However, a few days ago, Indonesia’s Information and Communications Ministry (Kominfo) stepped in to block these domains.

Kominfo’s actions coincide with the release of a new survey, commissioned by the Asia Video Industry Association’s Coalition Against Piracy (CAP), which shows that streaming piracy is rampant in Indonesia.

According to the study, 63% of Indonesians have accessed streaming piracy websites or torrent sites. In addition, 29% of consumers use set-top boxes that can stream pirated video content, with indoXXI(Lite) being the most popular app by far.

This isn’t the first time Kominfo has taken action against IndoXX1. Other domains have been banned previously as part of a national anti-piracy effort. In fact, the Government organization has blocked more than 1,000 domain names since July.

Revealing the gravity of the situation, Kompas reports that these anti-piracy efforts can also count on the support of the national police.

While it’s clear that the authorities are taking the piracy problem seriously, it seems rather hard to curtail. On social media, many people are pointing out alternatives and, when we checked, indoXXI mirrors or copies were indeed available.

Many of the site’s users don’t really seem impressed by yet another blockade, and a meme illustrating the ineffectiveness of the measures has been viewed over a dozen million times in a few days.

Pemerintah nutup indoXXIpic.twitter.com/Yfya9Eglvn

— Hary Susanto (@hafilova) December 21, 2019

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

Since blocking isn’t 100% effective, to say the least, it may also be worth looking at other means to address the piracy problem. At the supply end, for example. That’s where help from the Government may also be welcome.

Local news site Coconuts reports that Indonesia’s largest Internet provider Telkomsel currently blocks its subscribers from accessing Netflix. The state-owned ISP officially bans Netflix on censorship grounds, but some believe there may be financial reasons as well, as the company has ties to a local streaming service.

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Last week we reported that Strike 3 Holdings, the most active copyright litigant in the US, had stopped filing new lawsuits in federal courts.

A few days later we found out that the adult entertainment company hadn’t really halted its efforts. Instead, it had moved to a Florida state court where it targeted dozens of alleged copyright infringers at once.

This maneuver is controversial. Copyright cases are a matter of federal law and generally don’t belong in state courts. However, Strike 3 filed their cases as a complaint for “a pure bill discovery.”

This means that, instead of filing a copyright complaint, it asked the court to allow it to request subpoenas against ISPs to identify the alleged pirates. That information can then ‘possibly’ be used to file a federal case. Or it can be used to directly demand settlements from alleged infringers.

The advantage of the latter option is that Strike 3 can target dozens if not hundreds of alleged pirates in a single case. This saves tens of thousands of dollars in filing fees, as many federal courts only allow one defendant per case.

The move to state courts has prompted objections from various copyright attorneys. They argue that these cases don’t belong in state court and, as we highlighted a few days ago, the general belief is that Strike 3 is taking this route to save money.

The company itself sees things differently. Just days after we pointed out the lack of action in federal courts, the company filed a handful of new cases. However, these come with a twist.

The new cases we spotted specifically target IP-addresses that are associated with subscribers who objected to Strike 3’s state court shortcut. The timing, which coincides with our reporting, is interesting, and so are Strike 3’s arguments.

In the new complaints, the company states that it took its cases to state court to save “judicial resources” at the federal court. That the same move also saves tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs for the company itself isn’t mentioned.

“In an effort to conserve Federal judicial resources, Strike 3 originally moved to discover Defendant’s identity utilizing a state court procedure in Florida where Strike 3’s infringement detection servers are located,” Strike 3 writes (pdf).

“Defendant objected asserting that the action is more properly litigated in the federal court of his or her domicile. Because Plaintiff is amenable to litigating the matter in either forum, this suit was initiated,” the company adds.

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Strike 3’s suggestion that it merely wanted to help bring down the caseload at the federal court is something many skeptics will doubt. Whether it’s true or not, it does reveal that the company didn’t intend to file federal cases against all defendants.

After all, that would ultimately result in the same caseload for the federal court.

In other words, the plan was to reveal the identity of alleged pirates through the state court without filing a copyright case. The company could then use that information to extract settlements from these defendants, for a fraction of the time and costs at the federal court.

But apparently the costs reduction is just a by-product. The real goal here, according to Strike 3, was to conserve federal judicial resources.

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This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

6 Underground 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.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

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Most reports of copyright-based legal action in the United States center on the unlicensed downloading, sharing, or distribution of movies, TV shows, music and software.

Albeit at a slower rate, other less mainstream materials are also detailed in infringement complaints, notably copyrighted scientific and research papers, often with pirate sites like Sci-Hub or Libgen somewhere in the equation. This week a relatively rare complaint was filed in a US court protesting the illegal sale of copyrighted petroleum industry documents.

The application for a DMCA subpoena, filed at a Delaware district court by powerful oil and gas industry association American Petroleum Institute (API), claims that its authored standards documents are being made available online without its permission.

“For decades, API has authored standards for the safety and quality of products in the petroleum and gas industry. As author, API owns the copyright in these standards and has registered the copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office,” counsel for API writes.

“The copyrighted standards constitute a very valuable asset to API. Indeed, sales of the API standards to petroleum and gas industry professionals create considerable income for API.”

According to API, others are also benefiting from the sale of its standards. The application lists several problematic domains (e-standard.org, e-stds.org, pdfstandards.org) all of which direct to one main site located at e-standardstore.org.

“This company is not an authorized distributor of API’s standards. Despite not being an authorized distributor, these links display images of API’s logos. This unauthorized use of API’s logos falsely suggests to consumers that this company is an authorized distributor of API standards,” API adds.

The E-Standards.org ‘pirate’ site

As the image above shows, API’s publications are easily discoverable on the infringing site. API says there are at least 1,700 standards for sale in PDF format, which is problematic in itself since the association only offers physical standards which means the downloads must be copies.

“Additionally, API does not permit sales of its standards in PDF format (or any other electronic format) by anyone. Therefore, the sale of downloadable or e-mailed copies of API’s standards are clearly sales of unauthorized copies or scans of API’s publications,” API adds.

API says that after investigating the ‘pirate’ site’s IP addresses, they were determined to be operated by Cloudflare. As a result, API wants the CDN company to immediately terminate its services utilized by E-Standards.org while handing over the personal details of whoever is behind the platform.

From the API subpoena to Cloudflare

The Delaware court quickly signed off on the API subpoena so some type of action by Cloudflare can be expected soon. That being said, this set of domains isn’t only a thorn in the side of API but also various other specialist organizations that author their own standards.

According to Google’s Transparency Report, all of the redirection domains have been the subject of DMCA notices, some of which date back to 2013. The main domain cited by API (E-Standards.org) is also at the center of most additional complaints including those filed by safety company Underwriters Laboratories, International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the National Fire Protection Association, and American Water Works Association.

A copy of the DMCA subpoena to Cloudflare is available here (pdf)

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