Last week, chaos was widespread in the ‘pirate’ IPTV market after authorities in Italy took unprecedented action against the operators of Xtream Codes.

Undoubtedly prompted into action by entertainment and media industry groups, the same authorities are now tackling another perceived threat to revenues – piracy of daily newspapers.

In common with the IPTV crackdown, the latest effort is somewhat unusual in that it tackles fairly unconventional methods and techniques for distribution. Rather than above-ground and obvious websites, Italian authorities are chasing down suppliers to and users of various chat groups.

Authorities reportedly have three key individuals on their radar who are suspected of providing digital copies of daily newspapers to WhatsApp and Telegram groups with many thousands of subscribers.

Italy’s Postal and Communications Police recently provided the prosecutor of Cagliari a report with the details of the three men. According to La Repubblica, they include a man from Sardinia born in 1974 and another from Milan born in 1964.

The newspaper titles they reportedly distributed to the groups were available officially via monthly subscriptions costing a few euros. However, one of the suspects, an unemployed computer technician from Turin, somehow managed to crack or ‘steal’ the passwords used to access the newspapers.

After the discovery of this unlawful access and distribution, the publishers of newspaper L’Unione Sarda filed a complaint. Then, in collaboration with the Postal Police, the company placed ‘markers’ in downloaded copies of their paper which allowed them to see where the copies were being distributed.

After identifying two channels distributing their content, the investigators found a third, more important channel. However, when Telegram was approached for assistance, the company failed to respond, so the investigators carried out their own work, “cross-checking financial transactions” of paying channel users to uncover the identity of the channel operator/uploader.

Once identified, the alleged operator received a visit at his home in Turin and was reportedly caught in the act of uploading pirated copies of newspapers, accessed with ‘stolen’ passwords, to the channels being investigated.

But despite this apparent success, the problem of ‘pirate’ newspapers continues.

According to the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEG), Telegram is refusing to respond to its complaints about “repeat and massive infringement, meaning that there are at least eight additional groups still in existence, servicing an alleged 500,000 ‘pirate’ users.

In a follow-up and subscription-only interview with La Repubblica, Giuseppe Zafarana, general commander of Italy’s Guardia di Finanza (the force behind last week’s IPTV raids), wondered how many pirates would be reading his words without paying for them.

Estimating “several dozen thousand” illegal readers, Zafarana said that they will now be getting the message that they “will know no rest” and these types of anti-piracy actions are only the beginning of a drive to protect cinema, TV, sports and journalistic content.

“We will identify and we will seize the servers, wherever they are, that are used for piracy and we will hit and confiscate the assets of those who enrich themselves by violating copyright,” he said.

Finally, in addition to tackling those who supply pirate content, authorities are also threatening to go after those who consume it too. It was mentioned last week that customers of IPTV providers could be tracked down and given fines and it seems they feel the same way about consumers of ‘pirated’ newspapers too.

Whether that’s bluster will remain to be seen but prosecuting millions of consumers through an already under-pressure legal system is unlikely to be a simple prospect. Perhaps a handful of ‘show trials’ will be the more likely outcome.

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For as long as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as BitTorrent have existed, anti-piracy companies have been monitoring the activities of those who use them.

This is to be expected. Not only do the companies have a vested interest in keeping an eye on what’s going on, by their very nature P2P networks are open and easily trackable.

The rise of streaming piracy – computer servers streaming video directly to end-users – has presented a new problem, however. Unlike P2P systems, there’s no easy way for an anti-piracy company to get in between the user and the server to see what’s going on. Only ISPs can see that data, which is why a recent interview caught our eye.

Friend MTS (FMTS) is an anti-piracy company based in Birmingham, UK. They’re perhaps best known for their live IPTV blocking work carried out on behalf of the Premier League, for which they have to partner to a greater or lesser extent with ISPs in the UK. FMTS tells them which servers to block, and the ISPs carry out it, broadly speaking.

However, in a recent interview, Simon Hanna of FMTS spoke about a different type of collaboration with ISPs, one that has the potential to raise eyebrows among privacy advocates, especially those who hoped all of their Internet traffic would remain completely their business.

Quite soon into the interview, Hanna correctly points out that broad availability of pirated content online tends to give an indication of how popular particular content is but isn’t always a great indicator of how much is actually being consumed.

“Consumption is a much more valuable indicator than pure availability of content and consumption has always been very difficult to monitor. People often throw numbers out but they are guesswork at best and we don’t really put a lot of faith in the numbers that have been made available in the past,” Hanna said.

With this in mind, FMTS say they have developed a system that allows them to work with content owners and ISPs to form a greater understanding of the consumption of media from online ‘pirate’ sources. The company does this by first tracking the servers down from where the content is being streamed and handing this information to the ISPs.

“We can see through our monitoring activities the range of servers that are available globally delivering this pirate content and we can provide that information to an ISP who are monitoring the flows of data requests in and out of the networks all day long,” Hanna explained.

“They can use these lists of IP addresses to really focus on consumption of content from those servers by the broadband subscribers within the ISP network and that will then give information around the scale of the problem.”

That’s probably a bit of a “wow” moment for many Internet subscribers who believed that once their traffic entered their ISP’s network it wouldn’t be closely monitored until it left to access a BitTorrent swarm, for example.

If FMTS’ statement is what it seems, some ISPs might be following their customers’ broadband usage habits a little bit more intimately than previously thought.

On the plus side, at least as far as individual subscribers are concerned, FMTS say they don’t look at or care about “the individuals themselves”. They’re not looking for any personally identifiable information and are just trying to get a handle on the volume of content being consumed.

Whether dual broadband/TV supplying companies are more interested in this data remains open to question, however.

“Because inevitably, if a large proportion of the ISP’s broadband subscribers are actually consuming content, they are not paying for the associated operator’s TV services,” Hanna added.

In many cases, of course, the broadband provider/ISP is also a supplier of TV content to the same customers – Sky, Virgin Media, and BT in the UK, for example. There’s no claim that these ISPs are indeed teaming up with FMTS in this project but any and all might be interested in the information it reportedly makes available.

“We work with content owners to basically go out and find pirate sources of the content. We can then real-time update these lists, feed this information into the ISPs and the ISPs can then use this information to generate the reporting real-time but with the flow monitoring, more in-depth reports of three-months plus worth of data, to actually get a real picture of consumption habits, both of TV channels but also specific events and pieces of content,” Hanna revealed.

FMTS says that monitoring consumption is important because it allows action previously taken to reduce availability to be measured at the end where it really matters.

“If you can then reduce the availability, then inevitably you should be able to reduce the consumption but you keep monitoring to observe that you do actually have this effect. If you can reduce the availability and reduce the consumption, chances are you would expect you would then preserve and reinforce your pay-TV revenues,” Hanna concluded.

The full interview, which covers many aspects of anti-piracy activity, from general enforcement to fingerprinting and watermarking, can be viewed here.

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When pirate sites are taken down following legal action, it’s not uncommon for the plaintiffs to try and take control of their domains.

The practice has been going on for years, with domains like isoHunt.com and the affiliated Podtropolis.com still redirecting to an anti-piracy page operated by the MPAA.

More recently we’ve reported on the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (which is headed up by the MPAA or MPA America as it’s now known) taking over domains previously used to offer ‘pirate’ IPTV services. They include OneStepTV, TVStreamsNow and DoozerIPTV but none of these ‘seizures’ have been reported by the organization.

Behind the scenes, however, many more additional takeovers are taking place, all without fanfare.

Visitors to former IPTV provider BestTVStream, for example, are now being directed to ACE’s anti-piracy portal. The signs suggest that the service may have come to some agreement with ACE which included handing over its domain to MPA A, but no public details are available.

A similar scenario faces former customers of IPTV provider XCaliberTV who are now being informed that the service has been shut down due to copyright infringement before being diverted to ACE’s site in the same manner.

Exactly the same can be said of More Media Solutions, which operated from MoreMediaBox.com. One day last month it was working, the next it began diverting to ACE, with no one saying a word.

One of the more curious ‘seizures’ involves two domains with the same initial name – rveal.biz and rveal.xyz. According to a capture by the Wayback Machine, the former of these domains previously diverted to Rveal.com, which is a still-functioning site offering Android-style TV boxes. Previously, it appears that Rveal sold devices that claimed to provide access to premium content for free.

We contacted Rveal for comment a little while back but in common with similar inquiries placed with some former operators of other apparently ‘seized’ or ‘commandeered’ domains, we received no response.

We cannot draw any firm conclusions from that silence but not wanting to say much – if anything at all – does seem to be the norm in many of these domain cases, both before, during, and after ‘seizure’. The Vaders.tv and Minihosts.org takedowns were well-publicized, but many others are quietly being dealt with, quite probably with the agreement of the parties involved.

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