So, here we are, the third and final day of DevCon 2019. It’s likely to be a short list of topics this morning before some people head home while those who remain use the time together to write some fabulous code. So, let’s get straight to business.

 

We kicked off with kwiboo and jernej (from the LibreELEC team) talking about HDR support on Linux. This goes way beyond Kodi, as it’s kernel-level work to improve GPU support; this then ripples through the operating system before finding its way to Kodi via V4L2 and ffmpeg. We’ve been working mostly with the Intel team to complete support for their chipset, but there’s also basic work in place for Allwinner, Amlogic and Rockchip. This means that we’re well on the way to having a common implementation across all major chipsets that are likely to be running Linux. The industry-wide, concerted focus on V4L2 (driven significantly by Google/ChromeOS) also means that we can finally strip away large chunks of proprietary, vendor-specific code as all of these chipsets move to a common, standardised API model. We’ve grudgingly tolerated these for a long time, but they make maintaining and updating functionality so much more difficult when you need to consider dozens of different code paths, so we’ll be glad to see the back of them.

A couple of topics that took some time but didn’t really make it to the final sessions, so perhaps we’ll come back to them later: roles and responsibilities within the Board, the overall Kodi architecture and how it could be improved, potential for web browser support in Kodi. Just headings for the moment, so don’t get too excited.

Following this, we spent a chunk of time on introspective activities: admin rights, system and application access, social media access, password lockers, two-factor authentication, and similar. We also talked about Team matters: new members, absent friends, acknowledgements. Maybe not really interesting to the outside world, but still stuff we need to worry about if we’re to keep everything running smoothly.

And now it’s time for what a room full of developers (“a segfault of programmers”, perhaps?) with laptops does naturally. All around me, I can see screens scrolling as code compiles, the brightly-coloured syntax highlighting of IDEs, the transient flash of windows and terminal prompts as people cycle between them. The mob is talking animatedly about CODECs, rendering planes, operating systems, APIs, kernel calls. In the distance, a heated debate begins about the relative merits of Linux distros. There’s a constant murmur of noise, the combination of conversation, keyboard taps and error sounds. The mood for the rest of the day is set… let’s hope no-one breaks anything important… ¯_(ツ)_/¯

So, that’s it for this year. Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ve found these posts informative. More than that, though, thanks for continuing to support Kodi!

All the best,

Team Kodi.

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Alongside other entertainment industry groups, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) sends a yearly overview of notorious foreign piracy markets to the US Trade Representative.

These annual submissions help to guide the U.S. Government’s position toward foreign countries when it comes to copyright enforcement.

We previously covered the submissions from the RIAA and ESA, which both listed a wide variety of pirate sites including torrent, streaming, MP3-downloaders, and ROM archives.

The MPA’s submission was published later than the others but is worth highlighting nonetheless. In recent years it has solely focused on online threats with familiar names such as The Pirate Bay, Openload, and Fmovies reappearing time and again.

This year is no different. Many of the threats the MPA highlights are identical to last year. Aside from traditional pirate sites, this includes mobile apps, unauthorized IPTV services, and hosting companies. While not a foreign company, CDN provider Cloudflare is repeatedly mentioned as well, as it has many piracy sites as customers.

“The Pirate Bay, and other notorious pirate sites, remain Cloudflare customers despite repeated notices of infringement to Cloudflare,” the MPA notes.

A complete list of all the identified notorious markets is listed below, but we will zoom in on two entities added as new entries this year.

The first one is 1XBET, a gambling company known for its advertising appearing in ‘cam’ copies of movies. The casino, whose ads appear on more than a thousand pirate sites, is well known among people who frequent these platforms. Now, it’s on the MPA’s radar as well.

“1XBET is a Russian gambling site that has started to support some of the
earliest releases of infringing theatrical camcords and infringing streams of live television broadcasts. It has become the third most active online advertiser in Russia,” the MPA informs the USTR.

The MPA’s report cites research from Mediascope which found that only Google and PepsiCo ads are more prevalent online in Russia. While that covers all publications, the movie industry group draws specific attention to the embedded ads that appear in popular pirate movie releases as well as their titles.

“Reportedly, the online casino pays to insert visual and audio advertisements into new piracy content sources incentivizing camcord and livestreaming piracy. 1XBET’s watermark with promotion codes is ‘burned’ into the video files of infringing camcord recordings. Thus, piracy is used as a vehicle to support this online gambling giant,” the MPA notes.

What’s not mentioned by the MPA is that 1XBET also sponsored several major UK football clubs and Italian football league Serie A. Responding to some earlier controversy, a 1XBET spokesperson said that it takes the piracy advertising allegations very seriously.

Another newcomer in the MPA’s list of notorious markets is Baidu Pan, the file-hosting service operated by the largest search engine in China. According to the movie industry group, it’s often used to share copyright-infringing material.

“Large quantities of infringing content are stored on Baidu Pan with
links disseminated through popular Chinese social media platforms and piracy linking sites,” the MPA writes in its submission.

The MPA points out that Baidu has a market share of over 75 percent in China, which makes it the second-largest search engine in the world. As such, it is vitally important that the company has rigorous content protection standards and that it cooperates with rightsholders, the group notes.

Baidu has made some progress in recent years when it comes to its takedown tools, but takedown rates and timeframes remain inconsistent or too long, the MPA says.

“Baidu should be encouraged to do more, including improve implementation of its takedown tools, apply rigorous filtering technology to identify infringing content, and take more effective action to suspend or terminate repeat infringers to ensure all rights holders are treated equally and infringing content and links are removed expeditiously,” the submission reads.

The MPA hopes that its recommendations will be helpful to the US Government, but whether adding 1XBET and Baidu Pan will have any effect has yet to be seen.

The MPA’s full report is available here (pdf). The USTR will use this input to make up its own list of notorious markets. This will help to identify current threats and call on foreign governments to take appropriate action.



List of all the sites and services the MPAA identified as notorious markets.

Linking / Streaming

  • B9good.com
  • CB01
  • Cda.pl
  • Cimaclub.com & cima4u.tv
  • Cinecalidad.to
  • Dytt8.net and Dy2018.com
  • Fmovies.is/.to (formerly .se)
  • “Indo 21” (Indoxxi) and many related domains
  • Movie2free.com
  • MrPiracy.site and .xyz
  • Phimmoi.net
  • Seasonvar.ru

Cyberlockers / video hosting

  • 1fichier.com
  • Baidu Pan
  • Clipwatching.com
  • Gounlimited.to
  • Netu.tv
  • Openload.co/oload.tv
  • Rapidgator.net
  • Rapidvideo.com
  • Streamango.com
  • Uploaded.net
  • Uptobox.com
  • Verystream.com
  • VK.com

Illegal IPTV

  • BestBuyIPTV.com
  • Buy-IPTV.com
  • GenIPTV
  • ThePK.tv
  • TVMucho.com

Apps

  • RenRen Shi Pin
  • ShowBox
  • Unblock Tech (unblocktech.com)

P2P sites

  • 1337x.to
  • Rarbg.to
  • Rutracker.org
  • Tamilrockers.ws
  • ThePirateBay.org
  • Torrentz2.eu
  • Zooqle.com

Hosting services

  • Fishnet Communications LLC
  • M247
  • Network Dedicated SAS
  • Private Layer

Advertising

  • 1XBET

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Morning, all. It’s a beautiful day here, and we’re just waiting for the last few latecomers to arrive before another day of DevCon…

 

We kicked off with Python 3, following on from yesterday’s conversation. The general consensus was to get this merged and live with any minor breakage – we need to get this done, and can’t wait for absolutely every add-on to be updated before we merge. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, after all.

The conversation then quickly shifted to sarbes talking about features that would make life much easier from a Python developer’s perspective. These are really around how the core code handles items, lists and displays, and how this could be modified to improve the user experience (e.g. pagination of long lists). The obvious affect is on lists of Internet content, but it would also improve PVR/EPG display, searching, and others. Similarly, allowing add-ons to specify viewtypes or just know more about what views the user prefers would make things more consistent and usable. Other ideas included subtitle support for use within add-ons, and some kind of URI mechanism so an add-on could transfer a path from one Kodi instance to another – this would allow you to move playback from your ‘phone to the TV, for example.

Next up, jimcaroll stepped up to talk about Codegenerator, which is a core part of Kodi’s Python (and, in theory, other scripting language) API, auto-generating the C++ API code as required. The main purpose of this is to reduce code size and improve maintainability, but it could potentially scale to give a more flexible, standardised approach to supporting multiple different types of external module. Only a concept, but that would open up huge possibilities for add-ons in C#, JavaScript, Groovy and many others, bringing very different functionality, security models, and scope.

This was followed by an update on tvOS by kambala and fuzzard. Much of the Apple-specific code has been floating around for a while in various forks and branches, so this is a more concerted effort to bring it all back together, update and augment it to form a complete package for the Apple TV 4. Still a work in progress, but getting closer.

Next up, lrusak took the stage to lead a session on how platform specifics can block or delay overall development – for example, when a pull request affects all platforms but there’s some obscure issue on one particular operating system. Older versions of operating systems may come with different libraries or different development toolchains; different platforms might diverge totally or even miss out components that are business-as-usual on everything else; API calls can behave slightly differently even when they shouldn’t.

So, should we hold everything back because of one platform? Should we hold back all platforms because, say, an older but still maintained (e.g. LTS) OS release can’t support some aspect of newer functionality? Should we merge a change if it compiles on all platforms except one, effectively breaking that platform until “later”? This isn’t an easy issue: ultimately, we want to get new functions and fixes out there, and that may mean living with some dead code and platform-specific workarounds in the meantime; alternatively, we simply freeze older platforms at a previous Kodi release, and move on (as, indeed, many other application developers do). As always, though, if you’re a developer who could help here, you know where to find us…

After a break for lunch, kib and keith kicked off a conversation about Foundation responsibilities and costs – some activities are legal in nature, many of them administrative, all of them important. As a registered non-profit organisation, we’re obliged to submit certain paperwork on an annual basis to keep that status along with US tax declarations. Forget this, or get it wrong, and we face losing our status and either incurring significant taxes or else paying lawyers to re-submit and regain it – neither scenario being something we want. As such, we have an ongoing task to better document what people do and highlight the imperative tasks within that list: even as a bunch of volunteers, there’s a degree of professionalism required behind the scenes, and that means sometimes paying for help.

Time to return to more technical matters: jimcarroll once again took the floor, this time to talk about threading in Kodi. Given the history of Kodi, there was a lot of platform-specific threading mechanisms. That creates complex code, with dependencies and checks that just get in the way – so, can we collapse it down into a more platform-independent model, or, at least, a minimal set of variations? It turns out that you can slim down to two main models: POSIX and Windows, and that’s where the work has been heading. Some code will still need variations, though, although other code can be collapsed still further into newer, more standardised threading mechanisms that have been implemented on all platforms since the original code was written (e.g. as implemented in C++11).

Bringing the afternoon to a close, then, jimcarroll stayed on his feet to talk about DI – dependency injection. This is a mechanism to move away from a monolithic main() routine that directs all other application activities, and instead having a suite of dynamic dependencies between modules that are resolved at runtime. In this instance, the code can declare a constructor that has a dependency on some other component without explicitly knowing about that other component when the code is written.

 

And that’s it for Day Two. A few more topics to roll over until tomorrow, along with a hackathon while everyone is together – but, until then, that’s all for now.

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Piracy statistics can be tricky. Trends often go in different directions, depending on the region, the type of media, as well as the research timeframe.

One of the most elaborate datasets collected in recent years comes from the University of Amsterdam.

Among other things, it suggested that legal options are a better way to beat piracy than enforcement.

The underlying data forms the basis of a new research article where two nearly identical piracy surveys from 2012 and 2017 were compared. This allowed the researchers to look at changes in media consumption and piracy habits among the Dutch public over the years.

The respondents were asked about both legal and unauthorized consumption of music, movies and TV, games, and books. One of the overall findings was that between 2012 and 2017 the interest in physical goods plummeted.

For example, the number of people who bought physical music carriers was slashed in half to 20% and for movies/TV the decline was even more pronounced, falling from 45% to 20%. Physical books saw the smallest drop, with 60% still buying real books, down from 69%.

This trend coincides with a massive boost in digital sales. The number of people who bought digital entertainment increased across all categories, nearly tripling for movies and TV, which is likely due to Netflix. That’s a positive sign for the entertainment industries, which is also reflected in the piracy frequencies.

Results, in Dutch

The survey found that the percentage of people who still download or stream content from unauthorized sources decreased for nearly every category. This effect is most significant for music and games, while movie and TV piracy remained relatively stable.

The only category for which the piracy rate went up was Ebooks. Between 2012 and 2017 the number of Ebook pirates increased from 6.3% to 7.7%, which is marginally significant.

According to the researchers, this shows that these book pirates are missing something in the current legal offering. A good subscription service for example, where people can access an unlimited number of books for a fixed price.

“Looking at the other markets, access-based subscriptions appear to be the most promising, where a large increase in the number of transactions compensates a lower average return per transaction,” the researchers write.

While not mentioned in the article, the massive increase in Ebook consumers may also play a role in the increased piracy rate. The number of people who bought Ebooks, and thus have e-readers, increased by 80% between 2012 and 2017.

Part of this new e-reader userbase apparently showed an interest in pirated books as well, which likely impacted the piracy rate. With that in mind, the piracy increase is relatively modest.

The research also looked at various pirate demographics and how these changed over time. This shows that between 2012 and 2017, women started to pirate more books and fewer games and music. These changes are more pronounced than for men.

In addition, the data reveal that, overall, less educated people pirate less. This is the case across all categories but the biggest difference can be found in the books category.

If anything, the findings show that generic statements about piracy rates and the average pirate are relatively meaningless. It is the finer detail that helps us to understand what’s really happening.

The present survey data shows that physical media is quickly losing popularity as more people consume legal content digitally. At the same time, piracy rates are dropping significantly for music and games, at least in the Netherlands, while Ebook piracy slowly increases.

A copy of the paper (in Dutch) titled “Polderpiraten voor anker” written by Joost Poort, Martin van der Ende, and Anastasia Yagafarova is available here.

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This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw 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:
Movie Rank Rank last week Movie name IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1 (1) Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw 6.7 / trailer
2 (7) It: Chapter Two 6.9 / trailer
3 (2) Toy Story 4 8.1 / trailer
4 (3) Spider-Man: Far from Home 7.8 / trailer
5 (4) Crawl 6.4 / trailer
6 (…) Stuber 6.2 / trailer
7 (5) Dark Phoenix 6.0 / trailer
8 (…) Wonder Woman: Bloodlines 5.9 / trailer
9 (6) John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum 7.8 / trailer
10 (8) Avengers: Endgame 8.7 / trailer

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





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Last week, US President Donald Trump made headlines when he tweeted a short video meme aimed at discrediting political rival Joe Biden.

It contained a clip of Nickelback’s video ‘Photograph’ which resulted in the tweet being taken down for copyright infringement.

Soon after, a copy of the DMCA notice that caused the takedown was published on the Lumen Database, which revealed that the sender was Warner Music Group. However, TF has learned that wasn’t the only takedown notice to target Trump and his supporters over the now-controversial clip.

Trawling through the latest notices sent to Lumen by Twitter we can see that not only were some of Trump’s closest allies also sent takedowns for copyright infringement, but also that other music companies got in on the act too.

The original complaint against Trump’s account (here) was quickly followed by another against the account of his attorney, Rudy Giuliani. The notice was sent by Nickelback’s management at Union Entertainment Group on behalf of Roadrunner Records, which in turn is owned by Warner.

As the DMCA notice below shows, the cited copyrighted material is “The Master Recording of ‘Photograph’ by Nickelback and the accompanying music video.”

Two other DMCA complaints were also filed at Twitter detailing a pair of allegedly-infringing tweets posted Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. and Dan Scavino, the White House Director of Social Media and Assistant to the President.

These were sent on October 3, 2019 by anti-piracy company GrayZone on behalf of Warner Music. In common with the complaint filed against their father’s account, YouTube was cited as the source of the material.

Finally, the second son of Donald Trump, Eric, also received an additional notice from Union Entertainment Group, again on behalf of RoadRunner Records.

While plenty of other people tweeted and retweeted the allegedly-infringing video, a flood of additional takedown notices doesn’t appear to be in the archives at Lumen. That doesn’t mean to say they don’t exist, however, since it’s certainly possible Twitter doesn’t pass everything on.

Interestingly, there is an ongoing debate as to whether the use of the video in the clip was actually fair use, with many Trump supporters claiming that as a parody, it should be protected from takedowns. Countering firmly, former RIAA executive vice president of communications Jonathan Lamy believes otherwise.

“This one was a clear cut no-brainer,” he said on Twitter. “On copyright grounds and also perhaps falsely implied endorsement.”

Since Giuliani also got a notice and presumably a strike against his Twitter account, it would be very interesting if – as an attorney – he decided to send a counter-notification. As fair use battles go it might get a little messy but things are pretty messy already.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





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Last year the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the anti-piracy alliance featuring several Hollywood studios, Amazon, Netflix, and other entertainment outfits, sued Florida-based SET Broadcast, LLC.

At the time, the company offered a popular software-based IPTV service and also sold pre-loaded set-top boxes. These were portrayed as legitimate, but ACE and its members disagreed.

“Defendants market and sell subscriptions to ‘Setvnow,’ a software application that Defendants urge their customers to use as a tool for the mass infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted motion pictures and television shows,” their complaint read.

Soon after the lawsuit was filed the IPTV service went offline, leaving its 180,000 subscribers behind. But that didn’t mean the case against SET TV, its owner Jason Labossiere, and its employee Nelson Johnson was over. ACE pressed on, hoping to get a judgment in its favor.

Without any of the defendants putting up a defense, ACE booked its first victory a few months ago. The media companies submitted a motion for a default judgment against the company SET Broadcast, LLC, which the court granted.

In a ruling handed down last July, the court ordered SET TV to pay $7,650,000. This reflects the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each of the 51 works that were infringed by the defunct IPTV provider.

While ACE was pleased with the outcome, it wasn’t done yet. The default judgment only applied to the corporate entity, not the owner and its employee. With a new request, the anti-piracy alliance hopes to hold Labossiere and Johnson liable as well.

While the other two defendants initially responded to the court, they didn’t answer any recent requests. As such, ACE is now requesting a similar default judgment against Labossiere and Johnson, holding them jointly and severally for the payment of the $7,650,000 in damages

“Defendants Labossiere and Johnson are the individual Defendants who operated, managed, and ultimately profited from the willful, unlawful business of Set Broadcast. Settled law permits entry of default against willful infringers likeLabossiere and Johnson who refuse to participate in their own defense,” ACE writes.

“Plaintiffs therefore respectfully request that the Court enter default judgment against Labossiere and Johnson and hold them jointly and severally liable for the harm they inflicted upon Plaintiffs,” the Alliance adds.

In addition to the damages, ACE also requests a permanent injunction to prevent any future copyright infringement. Among other things, the defendants should be prohibited from operating the SetTV now service, as well as any website, system, software, or service that is substantially similar.

Without a response from the defendants, it’s likely that the court will grant the order.

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Two years ago, Epic Games decided to take several Fortnite cheaters to court, accusing them of copyright infringement.

Most of these lawsuits have now been settled, but there is one alleged cheater who is proving rather hard to catch.

The person in question, known in Fortnite and on YouTube as “Sky Orbit,” turned out to be a minor when Epic Games filed the complaint. This was made very clear by his mother, who sent a letter to the Court defending her son.

“This company is in the process of attempting to sue a 14-year-old child,” the mother informed the Court back in 2017.

The letter was widely publicized in the press but Epic Games didn’t back off. Due to his young age, the Carolina District Court ordered that the kid should only be referred to by his initials C.R. The case itself continued, however, albeit slowly.

Without any follow-up responses from either the defendant or his mother, Epic Games requested a default judgment. However, the Court denied this a few weeks ago, arguing that the underage defendant was never properly represented by a guardian. The mother’s letter was not sufficient to establish this.

This was a major setback to Epic Games but the company had no plans to drop the case. Especially not when it heard “Sky Orbit” had teamed up with another alleged cheater, CBV, and found other evidence that he wasn’t done cheating yet.

This week Epic asked the Court to officially appoint C.R.’s mother, Lauren Rogers, as a legal guardian, so she can officially represent her son. If that’s not possible, another adult should take this role, the game company argues.

“Defendant has ignored the appropriate orders of this Court. It is now appropriate for his mother or another adult to be appointed to officially represent him so that his interests can be protected and this matter can move forward,” Epic writes.

In an associated memorandum and declaration, the company explains that C.R. allegedly continued cheating over the past several months. Part of the evidence comes from a video titled “Fortnite Streamer Caught Aimbotting LIVE!” uploaded to YouTube by ShelbyRenae.

This video includes a captured video by another player, who’s allegedly cheating. Based on the voice of this person and several comments from people who watched the stream, this is C.R., aka “Sky Orbit.”

“The audio, including cheating player’s voice is available. On information and belief, the voice of the cheating player is Defendant’s,” Epic’s attorney Christopher Thomas writes.

“Although ShelbyRenae does not identify Defendant as the cheating player, at least 15 of the commenters separately identify ‘Sky Orbit’ – the name used by Defendant on his YouTube channel – as the player cheating in the Captured Video.”

From the declaration

The same voice also appears in another high profile video on YouTube. Epic argues that C.R. also appeared in the video where another teenager, CBV, responded to a separate lawsuit that Epic Games filed against him.

“You guys can eat my ass once again!” C.R. allegedly says in the video.

Based on this and other evidence, Epic believes that it’s important for the case to move forward so it can properly protect its rights. As such, the defendant should be represented by a guardian, which can be his mother.

In another video discussing the legal trouble, C.R. said that his mother “knew it all” and didn’t have to pay any lawyer fees, so appointing her as guardian would be appropriate, Epic states.

“Defendant’s statement that he and his mother got a lawyer but didn’t have to spend even ‘a little bit of money’ because his ‘mom knew it all,’ shows Defendant’s faith in Ms. Rogers. His comments also suggest that their decision not to answer in spite of the Court’s order was deliberate.

“His continued cheating, the foregoing and other public statements, and his open taunting of Epic all demonstrate that he thinks he is beyond the reach of this Court and is free to continue his unlawful conduct without consequence. This should not be permitted to continue.”

It’s clear that Epic Games is not letting this one go easily. The Court now has to decide whether it will appoint Sky Orbit’s mother or another adult as the guardian in this case.

A copy of Epic Games’ Memorandum to appoint Lauren Rogers as general guardian is available here (pdf).

In yet another video

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EBooks are widely available and relatively cheap in many cases but there is still a thriving market for pirated copies.

This can be down to straightforward convenience but when it comes to textbooks, titles aren’t always available digitally and in many cases are extremely expensive.

To fill this demand, various sites offer textbooks for free download but in some instances, members of the public provide more personal services to access them at reduced rates. The downside is that anti-piracy companies are sometimes lying in wait.

A student from Denmark was one of the unlucky ones. After he and some fellow students pirated a few books to save money, the 26-year-old went on to launch a company with a friend after leaving college. However, when that venture failed and he ended up on benefits, he found himself selling eBooks on Den Blå Avis (The Blue Newspaper), Denmark’s largest buying and selling site.

Unfortunately for him, Danish anti-piracy outfit Rettighedsalliancen (Rights Alliance) noticed his activities. Under the alias “Michael R”, he sold one of their investigators an eBook that he’d previously converted to a PDF. After paying using MobilePay, the anti-piracy group collected it from Google Drive and reported the case to the police.

A couple of days ago, Avisen obtained information indicating that following an investigation, the Court of Frederiksberg would hear the case this week. The former student, who is trained in IT and marketing, had been charged with selling 228 copies of pirated textbooks related to his specialties.

He reportedly sold the books on The Blue Newspaper for between $12.50 and $88.00 each, a crime for which the prosecution sought a jail sentence for copyright infringement.

On Wednesday, Judge Poul Bisgaard-Frantzen at the Court of Fredericksberg handed the man, who currently lives in Copenhagen, a 20-day suspended jail sentence for copyright and financial offenses, Politiken reports.

After admitting selling 155 copies of textbooks, the Court also ordered the confiscation of 27,640 kroner, around $4,075.

“[I]t is devastating for the copyright that the authors have, and also for the publishers, when the basis for their business is taken away. Therefore, the gain must be confiscated,” the Judge said.

During the hearing, the former student, who will now have to abstain from illegal activities if he is to avoid prison, entered into a settlement arrangement with Rights Alliance, agreeing to pay the anti-piracy group 34,870 kroner ($5,123) in compensation.

Wednesday’s verdict could be just the start as the police reportedly have several similar cases pending.

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