Along with the RIAA and several other industry groups, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) submitted its overview of “notorious markets” to the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) this week.

These submissions serve as input for the USTR’s yearly overview of piracy ‘markets’ which helps to shape the Government’s global copyright enforcement agenda.

The ESA, which represents video game companies including EA, Nintendo, Sony, Take-Two Interactive and Ubisoft, hopes that the interests of its members will be taken into account. In its report, the group lists various pirate sites that allow the public to download games for free.

Torrent sites are among the most significant threats according to the ESA, with The Pirate Bay being a key player. According to the game companies, TPB is a “major source” of copyright infringement that operates “with the assistance” of an unnamed U.S.-based CDN provider.

The less popular Skytorrents is the only other torrent site that’s included, while the list of ‘rogue’ sites also includes the linking sites oceanofganies.com and darkumbra.net, plus the cyberlockers rapidu.net, ltichier.com.

Pirate sites are not the only rogue actors. A special mention goes out to the so-called bulletproof hosting service FlokiNET. ESA reports that this company ignores its takedown requests, which allows the sites team-xecuter.com and sx.xecuter.co to operate freely.

“FlokiNET is a hosting provider that does not respond to notices of infringement or warning letters concerning their hosting and support of infringing websites. Despite attempts to send notices to FlokiNET’s abuse contacts pursuant to FlokiNET’s Acceptable Use Policy, the notices go ignored,” ESA writes.

These two FlokiNET hosted sites enable piracy of Nintendo Switch games and similar sites were previously blocked in the UK.

Finally, the ESA also highlights so-called “pirate servers” or “Grey Shards” that offer free access to subscription-based game services. Cloud-based games are less vulnerable to traditional forms of piracy but these “rogue” services circumvent the technological protection measures.

“When users are diverted to play on such servers, video game publishers are not able to monetize their online content on as described above and thus face reduced opportunities to recoup their investment in new distribution platforms,” the ESA notes.

As an example, the ESA lists Firestorm-servers.com and Warmane.com. The latter allows over 20,000 people per day to play World of Warcraft without paying the monthly subscription fee Blizzard requires.

While the purpose of the submission is to identify “notorious markets” that operate outside of the US, ESA frequently mentions that pirate sites are assisted by a US-based CDN provider. The provider in question is not named, but the game companies are clearly referring to Cloudflare.

In a footnote, ESA mentions that CDN’s have legitimate purposes, but that they also allow pirate sites to hide their true hosting location, while speeding up file transfers. Roughly half of the highlighted sites work with the unnamed CDN, they note, stressing that this has to stop.

“[I]t is important that all U.S.-based CDNs join ISPs, search engines, payment processors, and advertising services that have successfully collaborated with rights holders in recent years to develop reasonable, voluntary measures to prevent sites focused on copyright infringement from using their services,” ESA writes.

In a few months, the US Trade Representative will use the submissions of the ESA and other parties to compile its final list of piracy havens. The U.S. Government can then alert the countries where ‘rogue’ sites operate, in the hope that local authorities take action.

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A copy of ESA’s submission for the 2019 Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets is available here (pdf).

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This is part one of a two-part interview with Finn Brunton, author of ‘Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency’.

In this part we dig into the secret pre-history of Bitcoin, including the World War 2 origins of public/private key cryptography, how Proof Of Work was initially proposed as a means to fight spam,  and how the ‘Extropian’ movement – which, Finn explains, stood for ‘more life, more energy, more time, more space, more money… more everything! – collected an uncanny number of the early engineers contributing to what would eventually become Bitcoin.

If there’s one key takeaway from this episode, it’s that there’s no one Satoshi Nakamoto — Bitcoin’s a bricolage of math, technology and ingenuity stretching back at least seventy years.

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Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing crypto, privacy, copyright and file-sharing developments. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Finn Brunton

^{If you enjoy this episode, consider becoming a patron and getting involved with the show. Check out Steal This Show’s Patreon campaign: support us and get all kinds of fantastic benefits!}

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Lucas Marston
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Eric Barch

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The effects that legal streaming services have on people’s motivation to pirate can be quite confusing.

On the one hand, legal services have been known to lower the piracy rates in some regions, but too many exclusive platforms could boost piracy again.

In South Africa, Internet providers are mostly noticing the first. Netflix first launched there in 2016, and since then, Netflix traffic has dwarfed BitTorrent traffic, ISPs say. While it’s not entirely clear to what degree torrent traffic decreased, if it did, the companies have all noticed a massive Netflix effect.

In a report published by Mybroadband, several ISPs were questioned about the topic. Without exception, they say that video services, Netflix in particular, have made BitTorrent traffic relatively insignificant.

RSAWEB, for example, noticed that Netflix traffic surged and that peak time data usage doubles every six months. This is in large part the result of a streaming boom. At the moment, the volume of Netflix traffic is 20x that of BitTorrent traffic.

“The ratios have significantly changed compared to a few years ago,” a RSAWEB spokesperson said. “The current ratio would be for every 50Mbps of aggregated torrent traffic we observe 1Gbps of aggregated Netflix streaming traffic.”

Webafrica noticed a similar trend, but perhaps even more pronounced. The company noted that during peak hours half of all traffic is generated by Netflix. BitTorrent traffic follows somewhere in the distance t the extent it’s not even worth tracking anymore.

“The growth of Netflix in recent years has been truly phenomenal, to the point where we no longer track torrent traffic separately,” Webafrica’s Greg Wright said. “Google (including Youtube) and Netflix are dominating the content currently,” he added.

Paul Butschi, co-founder of Internet provider Cool Ideas confirmed this trend. Netflix makes up roughly 30% of the company’s peak traffic and he believes that the increased popularity of online streaming had a pronounced impact on torrent traffic.

These opinions were largely shared by rival ISPs Cybersmart and Supersonic, with the latter noting that video streaming services have “completely overtaken the need for torrent sharing,” and that things will only get better if more competing services enter the market.

The last comment is something that’s up for debate, especially if new services all come with exclusive content. Looking at the relative traffic market share in North America over the past decade, a word of caution may be warranted.

Less than a decade ago nearly 20% of all traffic during peak hours was P2P related, mostly BitTorrent. As Netflix and other video streaming services grew, this relative share quickly dropped, but more recently it started to show signs of growth again.

It could be that people have started to pirate again because they can’t afford to pay for several paid streaming subscriptions.

This notion is supported by a recent survey which showed that piracy rates could potentially double again if the video streaming market continues to fragment. This can affect BitTorrent traffic, bus also pirate streaming sites and services, which the ISPs were asked about. These are the go-to piracy solution for most people nowadays.

Overall it’s safe to say that legal streaming services do indeed limit the demand for piracy, as the South African ISPs observe. This is particularly true if they’re convenient and affordable while providing access to a great content library.

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Following intense pressure on local Internet companies, particularly search giant Yandex, last year an important meeting took place at the headquarters of Russian telecom watchdog Roscomnadzor.

Held between search engines and major copyright holders, the aim was to find a solution to the online proliferation of copyrighted content. By early November consensus had been reached, with Channel One, the National Media Group, Gazprom-Media, the Internet Video Association, the Association of Film and Television Producers, Yandex, Rambler Group, Mail.Ru Group, vKontakte, and RuTube signing up to a memorandum.

The voluntary agreement, which was timetabled to run until September 30, 2019, saw the creation of a centralized database of infringing content, maintained by rightsholders. Search companies agreed to query this database every few minutes in order to obtain the URLs of ‘pirate’ material so that they could be removed from search results.

Since the agreement was voluntary and time-limited, it was envisioned that the terms would be written into law, before the memorandum ran out. However, there have been a few points of contention, including a requirement from rightsholders that some continuously-infringing sites should be completely delisted from results, without a court process.

These things naturally take time to work out but in this case, too much time. On Monday, as per the original timetable, the memorandum expired. According to local news outlet RBC, the necessary amendments to copyright law were not submitted to the State Duma before that day, meaning that none of the signatories are bound by the agreement.

Sources at the companies involved told the publication that the memorandum has indeed timed-out but added that an informal agreement has now been reached by the parties to continue compliance for another two weeks. An extension of the agreement until December 31, 2019 had previously been agreed but its terms were not met by September 30.

According to Leonid Levin of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, the bill to write the terms of the memorandum into law was submitted to the State Duma in a non-finished form. There will reportedly be another meeting between the parties this week.

“As soon as we finalize the document, it will be submitted to the State Duma,” Levin said. “Until then, we hope that all interested parties will continue to adhere to those provisions that were enshrined in the so-called anti-piracy memorandum, which meets all the interests of the industry.”

Roscomnadzor declined to comment on the delay but the Internet Video Association said that it would be “very disappointed” if Internet companies stopped removing links to pirated content due to the memorandum expiring.

At the moment, it appears that the memorandum is surviving on goodwill but according to reports the issue is in the balance. The so-called ‘repeat infringer’ clause, which would see sites permanently removed from search results, is still a point of contention moving into this week’s planned meeting.

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Founded in 1994, Swedish Internet provider Bahnhof has been serving local Internet users for a quarter of a century.

During this time the company has fought hard to protect the privacy of its subscribers. This includes those who are accused of copyright infringement.

Unlike many other ISPs, Bahnhof aims to minimize its data logging practices only to the extent it is required to under the law. In recent years the ISP set up its logging policies in such a way that it can refuse requests for IP-address information from so-called copyright trolls, by deleting all relevant data after 24 hours.

The company based this practice on a European Court of Justice ruling which concluded that the European Data Retention Directive is invalid. However, data retention is now back under the spotlight.

After going back to the drawing board, Swedish lawmakers revised the Electronic Communications Act (LEK) to institute Swedish data retention requirements. This resulted in an amended law which goes into effect today, requiring all Swedish ISPs to keep detailed subscriber logs for at least 10 months.

For the Internet providers who already kept logs little will change, but Bahnhof sees it as a disaster. To minimize the privacy intrusions of its users the company has rolled out “Plan B.”

Starting today Bahnhof has no other option than to log individual IP-address allocations and other personal info for ten months. However, the company stresses that it will do so in a secure manner, making sure that it’s not available to the “copyright mafia.”

With the term “copyright mafia,” the company refers to the rightsholders who go after allegedly pirating Internet subscribers to demand settlements. Bahnhof has been a fierce opponent of this practice and ensures its customers that it won’t share any logs for this purpose.

“All Bahnhof customers can rest assured that their customer data is stored securely with us, that we delete after 10 months, and that we will never disclose information unless it’s in accordance with the Electronic Communications Act.

“This means that if someone else asks for customer data, including a court that handles civil litigation, we have nothing to disclose because our customers’ information is locked away as ‘safe intended for LEK’,” Bahnhof adds.

Not all ISPs have separated this data and that’s why many do comply with copyright holder requests. However, Bahnhof’s strict data policies ensure that only law enforcement agencies can request this info.

Still, Bahnhof is not happy with the mandatory data retention and will continue to protest the law whenever it can. In addition, it also points its customers to an alternative option through which they can ensure their privacy.

Bahnhof also offers a VPN service which is not required to keep any logs. If people use this, their IP-address information remains private. The VPN service was launched when earlier data retention requirements were put in place and is relevant once again.

“It is not enough to be a customer with us to be safe online, your subscription does not protect your data traffic automatically. You need to protect yourself and your data yourself with a VPN service as well,” Bahnhof writes.

While this sounds like a good opportunity to sell something ‘extra,’ the ISP is offering everyone a rather generous six-month free trial without any further obligations. After that, the costs are pretty reasonable as well, roughly $4 per month (SEK 40).

The six-month free VPN trial is open to anyone, which means that subscribers from other ISPs can try it as well.

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