In May 2019, TF discovered that the RIAA had obtained a DMCA subpoena which compelled CDN company Cloudflare to reveal the identities of several site operators using its services.
Among the several domains listed was DBR.ee, a file-hosting site that had was utilized by some of its users for hosting pre-release music leaks. This clearly didn’t sit well with the RIAA and within a month of the subpoena being obtained, DBR.ee shut itself down.
Initially it wasn’t clear if the subpoena and the closure were linked but soon after a message appeared on the site which advised that it had been shut down for copyright infringement following action by the RIAA, IFPI, and Music Canada.
The DBR.ee shutdown notice
Early September, however, a new site appeared. Sporting the DBREE name and graphics but located under a different URL (DBREE.co), the site seemed to want to pick up where the original had left off. It’s not currently known whether the same people are behind the resurrection but the RIAA appears keen to find out.
Late November the RIAA obtained a pair of DMCA subpoenas at a Columbia federal court, one targeting domain registrar Namecheap and the other CDN service Cloudflare. Their aim is to uncover the identities of several site operators, DBREE.co’s included.
“The purpose for which this subpoena is sought is to obtain the identity of the individual assigned to these websites who has induced the infringement of, and has directly engaged in the infringement of, our members’ copyrighted sound recordings without their authorization,” the subpoenas read.
DBREE.co stands accused of infringement on three tracks – Lover by Taylor Swift, Under the Graveyard by Ozzy Osbourne, and Thailand by Lil Uzi Vert.
FLACC.org, a music release blog that links to content hosted elsewhere, is also accused of infringing copyrights on three tracks from Celine Dion, Ed Sheeran, and Tech N9ne.
Hiphopeasy.xyz, an album, single, and mixtape indexing site, is currently offline. Nevertheless, the RIAA claims it infringed the rights of Post Malone, Travis Scott, and Ed Sheeran. Another platform, identified by the RIAA as operating from Ovzy.xyz and its subdomains, is also inaccessible.
As usual, the subpoenas require Namecheap and Cloudflare to give up every piece of information they hold on the site’s alleged operators. Both companies are also asked to consider “the widespread and infringing nature” of the sites to determine whether they are in breach of terms of service agreements or repeat infringer policies.
Whether Namecheap or Cloudflare have any useful information to hand over to the RIAA remains to be seen but they are both expected to comply.
The DMCA subpoenas are available here and here (pdf)
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/riaa-featured.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2019-12-09 04:02:472019-12-09 04:02:47RIAA Shut Down DBR.ee, Now Obtains Subpoenas to Target Replacement
Instead of the usual DMCA copyright notices, the music group asked the search engine to remove various URLs for alleged violations of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision.
This proved to be quite effective. After taking down the many links to FLVTO, 2Conv, Y2Mate, and Yout, the RIAA expanded its scope to other streamrippers. In total, the music group targeted hundreds of URLs in a few dozen notices.
And the RIAA is not alone. Other copyright holders are using the anti-circumvention route as well. This includes game companies such as Nintendo and Rockstar Games, as well as Netflix.
One upside for rightsholders is that there’s no official counter-notification option. This means that affected sites can’t easily complain when they are mistakenly targeted. However, there’s another major benefit as well.
Some sites that don’t infringe any copyrights directly, can be seen as anti-circumvention tools. This gives rightsholders an extra option to remove URLs. To illustrate this, we only have to look at the RIAA’s recent takedown efforts.
When the music group sent a standard DMCA takedown request to Google for several streamripper URLs in November, the search engine didn’t take these offline. However, a similar DMCA circumvention notice that was sent a few days later was successful.
This may be why there has been quite an increase in these anti-circumvention notices lately. While Google doesn’t list these by default in its transparency report, we used the Lumen database to find out how many notices were sent this year.
At the time of writing, Google has received 6,281 DMCA anti-circumvention notices in 2019. These notices can contain multiple links, sometimes even hundreds. The number of notices has increased significantly compared to last year when 2,960 notices came in.
In 2017 there were even fewer anti-circumvention notices, 921 to be precise.
While today’s numbers are still very modest, there’s definitely a visible upward trend that hasn’t been reported before. This increase is all the more interesting because Google now receives fewer standard copyright takedown notices.
TorrentFreak reached out to the RIAA to hear more about their motivation to use anti-circumvention notices, but the music group declined to comment on the issue.
Considering the effectiveness of their campaign to remove steamrippers from Google’s search results, we expect the efforts to continue. And when more rightsholders discover this option, we expect the number of anti-circumvention notices to grow further still.
Earlier this year, a group of companies including the makers of films such as “The Hitman’s Bodyguard,” “London Has Fallen,” and “Hunter Killer,” went after the operators of various websites.
In a lawsuit filed at a U.S. District Court in Hawaii, the movie companies accused several defendants of operating websites that promoted or linked to piracy apps including ShowBox and Popcorn Time.
The apps, which are used by millions of people, all provide access to a library of streamable movies and TV-shows. These are published without permission, the rightsholders pointed out, which results in massive piracy.
“Plaintiffs bring this action to stop the massive piracy of their motion pictures brought on by the software application Show Box,” the 58-page complaint began.
The lawsuit targeted several defendants, who were all suspected of having ties to one or more piracy-related sites. One of these stood out in particular – digital marketing agency Pebble Bridge – which is an Indian LLP with a listed ‘office’ address in New York.
The company in question was allegedly connected to sites such as showboxforipad.com, showbox.fun, and show-box.pro. The company was also listed as the owner of terrariumtv.life, moviebox.software and mobrdo.mobi.
In addition, the movie companies pointed out that an IP-address associated with Pebble Bridge was found sharing a copy of “London Has Fallen” via BitTorrent.
After the complaint was filed, several of the mentioned sites stopped linking to any of the pirate apps. While Pebble Bridge didn’t respond to the allegations in court, it did start negotiations with the movie companies behind the scenes.
A few days ago, this resulted in a consent judgment where the digital marketing agency, represented by two of its partners, admitted that it was indeed behind the mentioned sites. In addition, the company also took the blame for sharing a movie on BitTorrent.
“Defendant Pebblebridge Technologies, LLP admits to describing and providing links to the Show Box app as described in paragraphs 45-88 of the Complaint and reproducing copies of the motion picture London Has Fallen as alleged in paragraph 207 of the Complaint,” the consent judgment reads.
The judgment, which all parties agreed on, also includes a permanent injunction prohibiting Pebble Bridge and its partners from promoting or distributing any piracy apps going forward.
“Defendant Pebblebridge Technologies, LLP, its designated partners Udatala Vinay Kumar and Mangilipudi Vishnudath Reddy, and those under its control are hereby permanently enjoined from promoting and or distributing movie piracy applications,” it reads.
This specifically includes apps such as ShowBox, Popcorn Time, CotoMovies, MediaBox HD, Cinemabox, Moviebox, Terrarium, and Mobdro, as well as any software that’s affiliated with YIFY, YTS, RARBG, Torrentz2, NYAA.si, LimeTorrents, Zooqle; EZTV, and TorrentDownloads.
Interestingly, the consent judgment doesn’t include a settlement amount. It is possible that the parties agreed to deal with this outside of court, but it’s not part of the court order. The same is true for a separate and similar consent judgment that was signed by a Pebble Bridge employee.
This week’s orders are not the first in this case. Previously a Pakistani man agreed to pay a settlement of $150,000 for operating another ShowBox site, ‘latestshowboxapp.com’.
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A copy of the consent judgment against Pebble Bridge, signed by Hawaii District Court Judge Leslie Kobayashi, is available here (pdf).
There’s a high probability that most people reading this article will be familiar with the image on the right.
That’s because in computing terms, data compression tool WinRAR has been around for what seems like forever.
Indeed, with its 25th birthday coming up next April, WinRAR launched before many of its users were even born. Nevertheless, it has stood the tests of time and according to the latest estimates, now has around 500 million users.
Indeed, the company told us this week that WinRAR is the third most installed software in the world behind Chrome and Acrobat Reader. The reason for that, at least in part, is the company’s liberal business model.
Perhaps the most curious thing about this ubiquitous tool is that while WinRAR gives the impression of being free, technically it is paid software. Users get a 40-day period to trial the tool and then, if they like it, they can part with cash in order to obtain a license.
However, WinRAR never times out and relies completely on users’ inclination to pay for something that doesn’t need to be paid for to retain functionality. As a result, WinRAR has huge numbers of pirate users yet the company does pretty much nothing to stop them.
Those who do pay for a license get rid of a ‘nag’ screen and gain a couple of features that most people don’t need. But for pirates (and the tool is massively popular with pirates), an unlicensed WinRAR still does what it’s supposed to, i.e unpacking all those pesky compressed pirate releases.
Of course, there are people out there who would still rather not pay a penny to use a piece of software that is essentially free to use. So, in order to obtain a ‘license’ and get rid of the nag screen, they use a piece of software called a ‘keygen’ that generates one for them.
The company behind WinRAR doesn’t seem to care too much about casual piracy but it is bothered about keygens. This week we spotted a lawyer for the company Win.rar GmbH filing a complaint with code repository Github targeting such a tool.
“We have put in a licensing generation system that is impossible to decrypt (until now that is). This system works by our employees generating a unique .key file and the end user putting it in their WinRAR installation directory so in that way the product activates,” the notice states.
“It violates our technological measures by the repo holding the source code and the compiled application to a custom-created keygen which is built to bypass our licensing generation system and allows end users to create their own unique .key files for no charge which therefore bypasses our technological measures.”
The format of the DMCA notice is part of a growing trend. It doesn’t claim that the keygen copies WinRAR’s code but instead states that it violates the company’s rights by breaching the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. As such, the notice cannot be easily countered.
“This GitHub repository violates a section of 17 U.S.C. § 1201 which is a part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” the notice adds.
“Since 17 U.S.C. § 1201 doesn’t have a counter-notification process if GitHub does not provide one then appealing of this notice is improbable. GitHub is legally not required to provide an appeals system for anti-circumvention cases.”
Github didn’t waste any time taking the repository down but before it disappeared, this is what it looked like. Notice the Chinese text at the top, which is of special interest.
The author of the tool identifies as Double Sine or DoubleLabyrinth, hailing from Tianjin University in China. He or she seems to have created the keygen as a technical challenge but there is some irony to be found in the coder’s location.
Since 2015, WinRAR has provided a completely free version of WinRAR for regular users in China. This, the company said, was to thank people for sticking with WinRAR over the years.
“We are proud to announce that after years of hard work, we now finally provide a completely free Simplified Chinese version of WinRAR to individual users in China,” a note on the local website reads.
“You can now officially download and use WinRAR completely free of charge from winrar.com.cn, without searching or downloading cracked products, or looking for illegal versions, or downloading from unsafe websites at risk of security.”
Speaking with TorrentFreak, a representative from WinRAR’s marketing team couldn’t immediately elaborate on the specifics of the DMCA notice but noted that people shouldn’t really have a need to pirate its product.
“Indeed this is an interesting case, as we also don’t see the necessity of using a pirated version of WinRAR instead of our trial version. We know that our licensing policy for end customers is not as strict as with other software publishers, but for us it is still important that WinRAR is being used, even if the trial period might be over,” the representative said.
“From a legal perspective, everybody should buy at the end of the trial, but we still think that at least uncompressing content should be still possible as unrar.exe is open source anyway.”
The company also highlighted the existence of cartoons and memes on the Internet which relate to WinRAR’s indefinite trial, noting that “we like all of them and it meets our sense of humor.”
Perhaps more importantly, however, the company understands the importance of maintaining the positive image it’s earned by not persecuting users who use the product beyond its trial period. Going after them isn’t on the agenda but they would prefer people not to go down the piracy route.
“[I]n the field of private users we have always been the ‘good guys’ by not starting legal actions against every private user using it beyond the trial period, thus we also don’t understand the need of pirated license keys for WinRAR,” the company concludes.
Rival open source tools such as 7-Zip offer similar functionality for free, no keygens needed or nag screens in sight. But, for the majority of users, WinRAR remains the tool of choice, even after a quarter of a century. It’s a remarkable achievement backed up by an intriguing business model.
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After the TRON acquisition, uTorrent and BitTorrent’s social media channels have been predominantly ‘crypto’ oriented.
The core audience of the file-sharing clients, which still consists of millions of users, remains mostly interested in downloading and sharing files though.
This is something uTorrent still does well and the same is true for the BitTorrent Mainline client. However, new users of these clients have repeatedly been warned not to use the software by several leading anti-virus vendors.
In the past BitTorrent Inc. classified such warnings as false positives which it could resolve relatively easily. While that may be true, it appears that the problem is rather persistent and likely more structural than some would think.
After alarmed users reported the issue in uTorrent’s forums this week, we decided to scan the latest release for potential threats. According to VirusTotal, nine separate anti-virus vendors currently flag the software as problematic.
This includes the popular Windows Defender, which labels the torrent client as a severe threat. While that sounds scary, the detailed description shows that it may include “Potentially Unwanted Software,” a term commonly used for adware.
This is not the first time uTorrent has had this problem. Microsoft has flagged the torrent client in the past as well, as the dedicated Utorrent threat page shows as well. This flag was later removed, presumably after the software was updated, but now they are back in full force.
Other anti-virus tools that warn users against uTorrent include Comodo, drWeb, Eset and Sophos, as the list below shows.
It’s unclear what has triggered the recent warnings. According to VirusTotal, two anti-virus companies mention “Web Companion” as the problem. This likely points to Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware software, which is sometimes bundled with uTorrent.
The warnings are not limited to the uTorrent desktop client either. The BitTorrent Mainline client, which shares most of its code with uTorrent, is also flagged as harmful by eight anti-virus tools and uTorrent web by four.
When similar issues occurred early last year, uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. informed us that a “false positive” was triggered by one of their releases. However, if these are indeed false positives, they are recurring ones.
We reached out to the company for a comment on our findings, but at the time of writing, we have yet to hear back.
Any uTorrent users who receive the warning should proceed at their own risk. When we installed the most recent uTorrent we didn’t spot anything nefarious being installed but, in the past, we have noticed that the client was bundled with adware.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/featcaution.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2019-12-07 01:57:442019-12-07 01:57:44Anti-Virus Vendors Flag uTorrent and BitTorrent as a “Threat” Again
The Pirate Bay has been operating one of its original domains – thepiratebay.org – for well over 15 years. During that same period, it has also burned through countless others due to anti-piracy action all around the globe.
The Pirate Bay is also one of the most blocked platforms on the planet for the same reason, something that has led to the creation of hundreds of proxy sites, set up to facilitate access to the index, regardless of which official domain is in use.
Last evening the operator of a site that indexes links to some of these proxies told TorrentFreak that their owners had noticed that The Pirate Bay’s Onion site had been down for several hours, which is unusual. After further investigation, it was discovered that the site had switched from the extremely messy uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion to piratebayztemzmv.onion.
Accessible via the Tor browser, for example, Onion domains grant access to the so-called ‘dark web’, which is a fancy way of describing sites and services that aren’t visible using a normal search engine or accessible by regular means. In the case of TPB, being hidden inside the Tor network also provides extra security for the raid and lawsuit-prone index.
While there has been no official announcement from TPB’s operators about the Onion domain switch, the new address can now be seen when hovering over the ‘Tor’ link on the site. Exactly why the site’s operators made the change isn’t entirely clear, however.
The new Onion domain is certainly easier to read than the old one, but still not easy to remember. That being said, it is an improvement over its predecessor and now is probably a very good time to get everyone familiar with it.
As reported here recently, the Internet Society is in the process of selling the Public Interest Registry which currently controls The Pirate Bay’s .org domain. As a result, there are concerns that the new owners may throw the infamous domain overboard on copyright grounds.
If that does indeed happen, the Onion domain will certainly come in handy, as will the hundreds of pre-existing proxy sites currently doing a dance around dozens of blockades, all around the world.
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/featured-pirate_bay2.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2019-12-06 15:56:462019-12-06 15:56:46The Pirate Bay Moves to a Brand New Onion Domain
Last month Canada’s Federal Court approved the first piracy blockade in the country.
Following a complaint from major media companies Rogers, Bell and TVA, the Court ordered several major ISPs to block access to domains and IP-addresses of the pirate IPTV service GoldTV.
A few days after the order was issued the first blockades were active. These prevent GoldTV customers from accessing the IPTV portal directly, as intended. As we’ve seen in the past, however, not everyone affected is giving up that easily.
Faced with the blocking error, many users went looking for alternatives. Through various public forums, people asked for advice, which was never far away. At the same time, it appears that GoldTV’s operators also took action.
Instead of relying on the blocked domains, GoldTV is now accessible through a new portal, using a fresh domain name. Instead of the edge.tm URL, several resellers are now publicly directing users to the beex.me domain, which isn’t blocked, yet.
Whether that will last is doubtful, as rightsholders are also keeping a close eye on these changes. They previously added edge.tm to the complaint when GoldTV switched, and are likely to add the new domain to the blocklist as well.
The Federal Court order allows the rightsholders to request ISPs to update their blocklists. To do so, they have to file an affidavit. Internet providers then have ten business days to file any objections. If there are none, the Court may grant the requested update without any hearings.
This means that, in theory, this cat-and-mouse game can continue for months. This is similar to what we have seen with site blocking efforts in other countries. However, there are other workarounds being discussed as well.
IPTV Global Server, which describes itself as a GoldTV reseller, has created a detailed circumvention guide for customers. Aside from updating the URL, the company points out that switching to a VPN is a more permanent solution.
“As evident in the court case itself, bypassing this block is not difficult, and simply requires you to use a VPN when accessing Gold (Global) services. Alternatively the host can change the portal URL at anytime to bypass the block,” Global writes.
The reseller links to two VPN services which it has “partnered” with and provides affiliate links, which help the company to bring in some extra revenue as well.
While Global’s guide is useful to blocked GoldTV users, the company’s decision to create a URL that directly links to the latest access portal could potentially result in its own domain name being blocked as well.
The court order allows any (sub)domain to be added to the blocklists, as long as its sole or predominant use is to facilitate access to GoldTV’s services. While a generic VPN wouldn’t immediately fit that category, a dedicated ‘circumvention’ guide likely would.
At the time of writing it’s unclear whether any of the rightsholders have already submitted proposed additions to the blocklist.
What is clear, however, is that the blocking case is far from over. Last week, Internet provider TekSavvy filed an appeal. Among other things, the company argued that the Court’s order undermines the open Internet to “protect the profits and business models of a handful of powerful media conglomerates.”
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Whenever Library Genesis (Libgen) or Sci-Hub hit the headlines, what tends to follow is a fracturing of opinion on where these sites sit in the piracy landscape.
Both are best known for their massive archives of scientific articles and research papers. They are also notable for their absolute commitment to the spread of knowledge for the betterment of society as a whole. This means that even some otherwise staunch opponents of piracy pause for thought.
While huge publishing companies want them gone, support for these platforms among the knowledge-thirsty can be robust. Just over a week ago, the passion for keeping Libgen alive became evident in a Reddit thread (posted by a user known as ‘shrine’) titled ‘Charitable seeding for nonprofit scientific torrents’
“Libgen is a 33 terabyte scientific library with 2.4 million free books covering science, engineering, and medicine,” ‘shrine’ began.
“It’s the largest free library in the world, servicing tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals around the world who live in developing countries that can’t afford to buy books and scientific journals. There’s almost nothing else like this on Earth – they’re using torrents to fulfill World Health Organization and U.N. charters.”
However, the torrents used by Libgen were not in good shape so ‘shrine’ began a movement to boost the quality of their swarms. The project was quickly spotted and then supported by two companies (Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox.com) that offer ‘seedboxes’, effectively server-based torrent clients with plenty of storage space and bandwidth available – perfect for giving swarms a boost.
The project gained plenty of traction and as a follow-up thread details, considerable success. Today we catch up with ‘shrine’ for some history, background information, and an interesting status report.
“Ironically this all started when I saw the TorrentFreak article about [Libgen] mirrors getting taken down. I immediately decided I wanted to find a way to preserve and protect the collection,” ‘shrine’ says.
“I started out, but realized that the Plex server in my living room wouldn’t be enough to back up the largest free library in the world. That’s when I wrote my plea to /r/datahoarder hoping for a few guys to help out. Once the project exploded my role since then has been coordinating the hundreds of seed donations out of my Google Doc and answering as many questions as I can.”
Shrine is completely unconnected to the Libgen site but says he’s been a user for years. Before his project began he didn’t have a clear idea of how the site operated or what it took to keep it online but he’s now focused on two primary goals – back up Libgen and distribute the data so that people can find new ways to utilize it.
“The collection we’re seeding now is 32TB (18%) of [Libgen’s] total collection, so it’s just the first step in preserving the project,” he says, pointing to Libgen’s stats page.
We asked ‘shrine’ if any stats on swarm strengths were taken when the project began, so a comparison can be made today. He told us that an index for the collection didn’t even exist a week ago, so planning and coordination was difficult. However, some stats are available.
“The first thing I did was find a way to scrape the torrents to motivate seeders and track progress. I started collecting data on November 30th using a very cool open source indexer on GitLab,” he reveals.
Project data (Nov 30 to Dec 4)
While the previously-mentioned seedbox suppliers provided a huge boost to the project, there are plenty of anonymous donors and supporters behind the scenes too, even people who had no previous experience of using BitTorrent.
“I am overjoyed with the outpour of support. I have PMs from people who’ve never torrented before, have 1GB to spare, and want to know the best torrent client,” ‘shrine’ notes.
“Scientists in the Reddit threads are sharing stories of how LibGen made their research possible. Unnamed cloud providers have pledged 100TB allocation on their servers. The response has been overwhelmingly positive from everyone.”
Although ‘shrine’ regularly uses the term “we” in respect of seeding, he points out that he’s the project evangelist and there’s “nothing but Linux ISOs” on his own server. Nevertheless, the project has now turned into a movement, one that could have a profound effect on the overall free availability of scientific research.
“I only know there is no way to take the books back once they’ve been seeded. It’s a permanent library card for the world,” ‘shrine’ concludes.
Update: Seedbox.io reports they have some significant additional support for the project.
“Alongside our wonderful provider at NFOrce.nl we are going to sponsor up an entire server which will be big enough to hold the entire libgen project in full. Lets get this thing well seeded for the future so others can benefit from it!”
https://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/network.jpg2501200Dimitrologyhttps://dimitrology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/WEBSITE-LOGO-2020-SMALL.pngDimitrology2019-12-05 19:54:442019-12-05 19:54:44Meet the Guy Behind the Libgen Torrent Seeding Movement
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.
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Research released by the EUIPO last week revealed that pirate IPTV services generate nearly €1 million in revenue per year. That’s in Europe alone.
The figure confirmed that piracy remains a massive problem, but a second study also delivered some more positive news. From 2017 to 2018, access to pirated content across Europe dropped by more than 15 percent.
This headline figure was undoubtedly welcomed by copyright holders, but the broader report deserves more in-depth analysis.
For starters, the study only covers part of the piracy landscape. It is based on data provided by the piracy tracking company MUSO which solely looks at website visits. This means that apps, streaming devices, and IPTV services are not included.
This may shed a different light on the piracy drop, as these untracked piracy channels have grown explosively in recent years. According to some, these streaming tools are the largest piracy threat at the moment. As such, it’s entirely possible that overall piracy levels didn’t drop, or could even have grown.
When we asked EUIPO about this caveat, it informed us that MUSO’s data, together with that from the European Audiovisual Observatory and Eurostat, was chosen to get the most complete picture possible.
“The MUSO database was chosen as a source of data to enable us to get as full a picture as possible of online copyright infringement in the EU to which the methodology could be applied,” EUIPO informed us.
That makes sense, as the newer piracy tools are simply harder to track, so there may simply be no data available.
While EUIPO’s ‘picture’ only covers part of the piracy landscape, it is very detailed and suitable for comparisons over time, based on a wide variety of variables. This provided some interesting insights, especially when it comes to regional differences.
For example, total piracy, specified by the number of site visits per user per month, is by far the highest in Latvia and Lithuania. The relative piracy volume there is more than six times as high as in Finland, as can be seen below.
Total piracy by country and content type, 2018
The logical conclusion would be that piracy is far more prevalent in countries on the left. However, caution is warranted, as this only covers site-based piracy.
Last week, the other EUIPO study showed that IPTV piracy is below average in Latvia, while it’s high in this report. On the other hand, site-based piracy is below-average in Spain, where IPTV piracy is thriving. And we haven’t even considered streaming boxes and apps.
One major difference between site-based piracy and IPTV piracy is that the latter usually requires a subscription. In other words, people have to pay to pirate. That may, at least in part, be due to regional differences, as countries differ in their average income per person.
The money element was also considered in the EUIPO study. Following statistical analyses, the researchers found that a lower income per capita is linked to more piracy. Again, this is solely based on website visits.
“Among the socio-economic factors, the level of income per capita and the extent of inequality seem to have the greatest impact on consumption of pirated content: high per capita income and a low degree of income inequality are associated with lower levels of illicit consumption,” the report concludes.
The link between income and piracy is not counterintuitive. That’s also true for the link that was found between social acceptance of piracy and piracy volume. What is surprising, however, is that awareness of legal services and piracy is absent for some content.
EUIPO found that more awareness of legal TV services was linked to more TV piracy. For music, a similar trend was found, albeit not statistically significant. More awareness of legal movie services, on the other hand, was linked to less piracy, as expected.
“It appears that the relationship between legal offer and piracy is a complex one and merits further investigation,” EUIPO concludes.
Overall the EUIPO study provides some interesting views on the piracy landscape in the EU. While it only covers site-based traffic, it’s clear that piracy habits differ greatly from country to country, and that they’re not always easy to grasp.
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A copy of the report titled: “Online copyright infringement in the European Union” is available here (pdf).
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This week we have three newcomers in our chart.
