This week we have one newcomer in our chart.

Dark Phoenix is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

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Even when one has visited many countries around the world, subtleties of cultural differences can be difficult to grasp.

What’s funny or makes sense in one country may draw a blank expression in another, which is why a recent set of stories from Nigeria catch the eye.

Music industry group IFPI describes Africa as a whole as an emerging opportunity for business, with digital music services sometimes available alongside mobile phone services. Nevertheless, the physical music market, while dwindling, is still going strong – even if piracy remains a big problem.

Enter stage left popular musician and comedian Koffi Idowu, who in sits on the board of the Copyright Society of Nigeria. COSON, as it’s known locally, describes itself as Africa’s fastest-growing copyright collective management organization.

While ‘Koffi’ is known locally for his comedy, one might think that joking about piracy would be off-limits, considering his position. However, it’s almost impossible for outsiders to determine whether his recent comments are serious or not.

Content leaks from manufacturing and distribution processes can sometimes be tackled using watermarking, for example. However, Koffi is publicly advocating the use of a “modern technology” that actually debuted in the 1970s.

“Modern trends need to be applied by the right commissions to successfully combat piracy. People in the creative industry need to start barcoding their works,” he said, according to several local sources.

“We also need to start tracing these works from the sources where they were being stolen. We cannot monitor them physically but with technology, we can go a long way,” he added.

Without being disrespectful to Nigeria’s position as an emerging nation (and, of course, presuming this isn’t a joke that doesn’t translate across borders), it seems bizarre to think that a barcode could prevent music piracy in any way. One CD out, and it gets copied, barcode or not.

But then Koffi advocates getting the military involved to deal with the problem.

“When we discover warehouses where piracy is being carried out, arrests and sanctions can only be done by the appropriate officials,” he said.

It all sounds real enough, but it’s only when one takes a look at articles on Nigeria’s market published in the West that one gets a grip on just how different things are in the African nation. Not just different, but also bizarre.

An article in Billboard published in April describes how local digital music streaming service uduX is making progress in Nigeria. We’re all used to installing apps for music and banking, for example, but what if they were the same thing?

“Through GTBank’s Habari app, a platform for shopping and lifestyle content, uduX, whose name derives from a musical instrument played in Nigeria called udu, will gain access to a community of 16.8 million users,” the Billboard piece reads.

“Since consumers have already entered their banking information, they can subscribe to the streaming platform in a few clicks.”

Now while this makes sense on a basic level, the privacy-conscious among us might be thinking “what could possibly go wrong?” As it turns out, those fears appear to be not only well-founded but considered a feature in Nigeria.

That’s according to Chidi Okeke, the CEO of Groove Platforms, the company behind uduX.

“I want to get people to pay for my service and for that, I just needed to be close to where the money is,” Okeke said.

And thanks to the partnership with the bank, the streaming service can get information on the bank’s customers, including their ages and location, and perhaps a whole lot more.

“We know how they spend their money, so it’s easier for us to target people,” said Okeke.

That doesn’t sound like a joke. But the barcodes and military are up for debate, potentially. Or maybe not.

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Online piracy is an international problem for the content industries, one that’s particularly hard to curb.

Pirate site blocking appears to be the preferred countermeasure, which has been rolled out in dozens of countries over the years.

While industry reports and academic research have shown signs that this can indeed be effective, it’s certainly no a silver bullet.

With few other options to hand, rightsholders do see it as one of their best bets for now. As such, they frequently push lawmakers to lay the groundwork for ISP blocking, if that’s not available.

It’s also a topic of interest in South Africa at the moment, where the Government has been working on a new ‘Cybercrimes Bill. The proposed legislation doesn’t have any blocking requirements, but there have been calls from industry groups to require ISPs to block blatantly-infringing pirate sites.

While this doesn’t come as a complete surprise considering the global trend, local Internet providers are fiercely against any type of piracy enforcement. Speaking with MyBroadband, the Internet Service Providers’ Association of South Africa (ISPA) describes site blocking as ineffective and concerning.

“Blocking is technically complicated and subject to false positives, yet it is relatively trivial for consumers and content providers to bypass the blocks, bringing its effectiveness into question,” ISPA said.

“There are also complex freedom of expression concerns which are not for ISPs or copyright associations to resolve and which need to be properly ventilated through the courts,” the group added.

The ISP association points out that new technologies such as Encrypted DNS could render website blocking pretty much useless, without the need to use proxies or a VPN.

The group doesn’t deny that blocking may have a marginal anti-piracy effect but says that it’s unsure whether the positive impact of such as “blunt and limited” measure will outweigh the potential negative consequences.

“It is not clear that there will be any significant benefit to copyright holder associations and their members from this approach and certainly no indication that any positive impact will outweigh the risks to freedom of expression and access to information outlined above, as well as the cost of implementation,” ISPA noted.

There is currently no indication that the Government is seriously considering implementing any blocking-related obligations. However, it’s always possible that rightsholders will try to have such measures put in place through the judicial route.

ISPA didn’t comment on this option specifically, but going through the court will at least mean that the interests of the public at large will be carefully weighed.

Finally, ISPA also commented on some scaremongering which suggested that, under the new Cybercrimes Bill, ISPs will have to report all pirates to the authorities.

According to ISPA, this is an incorrect interpretation of the bill. The group stressed that current law makes it clear that ISPs don’t have to monitor their customers. In fact, doing so may be illegal.

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When there were few, if any, legal services available to stream movies and TV shows via the Internet, pirate sites had a virtual stranglehold on the entire market.

The obvious theory was that when entertainment industry groups came together to actually make their content both accessible and at a reasonable price (build it and they will come), visits to pirate sites would naturally decrease.

In Sweden, where The Pirate Bay and similar platforms have stamped their mark on the pirate landscape for at least 15 years, the market was crying out for legal options. Now there are a few to choose from, including Netflix and HBO Nordic, for example.

However, according to anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, the availability of legal services and indeed increased uptake of them among the public hasn’t had a negative effect on the numbers of people using ‘pirate’ services.

“Unfortunately, we do not see a reduction in illegal use,” Rights Alliance lawyer Sara Lindbäck informs Sveriges Radio.

“[Piracy rates] in Sweden are much higher than they are in the neighboring Nordic countries. We are at about 20%, so every fifth Swede uses an illegal service.”

The claim that the volume of people using piracy sites isn’t reducing in line with increased uptake of legal services will be a disappointment to the movies and TV industries. However, the big question is why this is the case. Lindbäck notes that pirate streaming sites are essentially free to use, which is a big attraction but there are other issues too.

Particularly in the case of movies, pirate sites are able to exploit weaknesses in the legal market. Theatrical and other windowing (such as the often extended wait for titles to appear on streaming services) means that pirate sites are the only option for early viewing of the latest content, something that keeps them relevant, even while people also subscribe to services like Netflix.

As reported last week, a very high percentage of pirates in Europe are also consumers of legal content, which means that improved legal options should mean that people turn to piracy less. In Sweden, there also appears to be a situation where people are happy to buy and pirate at the same time, with piracy supplementing legal consumption.

This inevitably leads Rights Alliance back down the enforcement route, calling for stricter penalties against pirate site operators and greater help from those supplying Internet connections to the public.

“[T]here is a proposal that awaits the government to [make piracy a] serious crime so that the sanctions will be greater and the police will have better tools to work against it,” Lindbäck explains, adding that improved collaboration with ISPs might help to reduce piracy rates too.

Finally, education about piracy issues is often touted as a means to keep people away from pirate sites. Lindbäck believes that progress is being made in this area, with people noting that the money being made by pirate site operators via advertising, for example, is associated with crime and money laundering.

“I think there is a maturity that continues, surprisingly, about the use of the Internet,” Lindbäck concludes.

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Visitors to ‘pirate’ sites are no strangers to the Russia-based gambling company 1XBET.

As reported back in May, the company’s branding appears on hundreds of so-called ‘cam’ releases, much to the annoyance of people hoping to enjoy a movie without unnecessary interruptions.

The mechanism through which these ads appear in ‘pirate’ releases isn’t clear. As we’ve previously pointed out, there’s no public information that 1XBET directly sponsors ‘pirate’ releases or whether over-enthusiastic affiliates are to blame. Nevertheless, things were bound to boil over at some point.

In August, we pointed out a bizarre situation in Italy, where top tier football league Serie A launched an anti-piracy campaign, decrying piracy of all kinds – of movies too – with 1XBET advertising directly underneath. In fact, 1XBET is an official presenting partner for Serie A which has its ads all over its site.

While Serie A currently seems untroubled by these developments, Premier League clubs in the UK – who are also quick to criticize pirates – have a bigger and more immediate problem.

Liverpool, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur – which all previously struck sponsorship deals with 1XBET – recently received communication from the UK’s Gambling Commission noting that after having its license revoked (in part due to its advertising on ‘illegal’ sites), the clubs cannot continue doing business with 1XBET.

“We recently wrote to Liverpool FC, Chelsea FC and Tottenham Hotspur FC to remind them that organizations engaging in sponsorship, and associated advertising arrangements, with an unlicensed operator, may be liable to prosecution . . . for the offense of advertising unlawful gambling,” the Commission reportedly told the clubs.

A few days ago, Tottenham announced that it had terminated its multi-million-pound sponsorship deal with the company. At the time of writing, Chelsea and Liverpool are yet to make an official announcement.

In response to the allegations, a 1XBET spokesperson said that is taking the matter seriously and, as such has, decided to stop operating in the UK, at least for the moment.

“We take very seriously the allegation that 1xBet’s brand has been promoted on prohibited sites, which is strictly against our policies, and we have launched an investigation. Pending the outcome…we believe it is responsible to temporarily suspend our advertising activity in the UK,” the company said.

With Matt Zarb-Cousin of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling describing the clubs’ lack of due diligence as “shocking” and an “absolute debacle”, TorrentFreak spoke with brand protection company White Bullet to find out if it had some additional data on the scale of 1XBET’s alleged advertising on ‘pirate’ platforms.

The company, which works with brands to identify websites and applications that damage brand reputation (including by funding online piracy), told us that it tracks around 10,000 ‘pirate’ sites, with that number depending on how many are online and have ad impressions to be counted.

“1,200 of those sites had 1XBET ads found on a regular basis over the last 6 months,” the company noted, adding that 25% were or still are on the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit’s IWL Infringing Website List (IWL).

Somewhat embarrassingly for Serie A and the above-named Premier League teams, 13% of the sites carrying 1XBET ads were ‘pirate’ sports streaming platforms and categorized as “high risk” by White Bullet.

All in all, this is an interesting completion of the funding circle as far as the clubs go, not to mention the Premier League’s constant complaints about piracy.

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