Spanish ISP Euskaltel is one of the few ISPs in the world to be putting up a fight against so-called copyright trolls.

These mostly movie-related companies obtain the IP addresses of computers said to be participating in BitTorrent swarms and then apply to the courts to force related ISPs to hand over their customers’ data for further action.

This usually takes the form of “pay-up-or-else” letters, demanding hundreds or even thousands of euros or dollars, to make supposed lawsuits go away. In Spain, however, things aren’t going as planned.

Euskaltel reports that the Commercial Court No. 2 of Bilbao has dismissed demands by producer She Fighter Ltd against a customer alleged to have downloaded and shared the movie Lady Bloodfight.

According to a detailed summary of the case, success rested on three elements: the existence of unlawful action, showing damages, and the causal relationship between the damages and the unlawful action. In respect of the damages element, the rightsholder opted for a “hypothetical royalty” but failed to provide evidence to justify why 150 euros was demanded. This is what caused the case to fail.

“This is one of the first decisions in the trials against those affected after being reported by various film producers for what they considered ‘illegal downloading of movies on P2P networks’,” Euskaltel said in a statement.

The ruling, which was handed down June 25, denies the producer an opportunity to appeal and requires it to pay the full costs of the process.

While the ISP has welcomed the decision, the battle against copyright trolls appears to be heating up in other areas of the country. Euskaltel is just one of the ISPs being targeted by movie companies and courts in other areas of the country have received similar requests.

“The fact that the first people affected have been clients of Euskaltel, is due to the fact that the Bilbao Courts – the headquarters of the Basque operator – have been the first in the State to meet and resolve these demands, for reasons of distribution and work management, while the Madrid courts – which deal with the demands of the clients of the operators based in the capital of Spain – are still in a preliminary phase of the process,” the ISP explained.

Meanwhile, Euskaltel says it will continue to fight to protect its customers’ rights. As reported last month, the ISP reported copyright troll Venice PI to Spain’s data protection agency (AEPD) after being forced by a court to hand over the personal details of subscribers said to have downloaded the Bruce Willis movie Once Upon a Time in Venice.

The ISP said that Venice PI’s use of that data, which involved contacting subscribers with demands to pay a 150 euro settlement, constituted a breach of Spain’s Data Protection regulations. According to Euskaltel, the movie outfit was not “free to decide what to do with the data” once it had obtained it.

In addition to the earlier Venice PI referral to the AEPD, Euskaltel says that on June 7 it referred Reliance Entertainment Productions LLC to the data protection watchdog. Then, just three days later, it filed a similar complaint against Wind River Production LLC, highlighting potential abuses of customer data.

“In the latter complaint, in addition to asking the AEPD to analyze the reported facts to verify whether the alleged administrative violations have incurred, the AEPD has also been requested to adopt provisional measures, consisting of ordering the production company to stop sending more letters to users,” Euskaltel says.

“In this complaint, as in the two previous ones, the possible criminal responsibility which the producers may have incurred has been placed on the table,” the ISP concludes.

Euskaltel has published advice to customers being targeted by copyright trolls, including that they should report potential data protection abuses to the authorities.

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This week we have five newcomers in our chart.

Dumbo 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:

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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Anyone involved in the piracy ecosystem could stake claim to being ‘in the scene’ but for those with a discerning interest in pirate matters, terminology is all important.

After decades of existence, The Scene has attained mythical status among pirates. It’s not a site, a place, a person, or a group. ‘The Scene’ is all of these things, combined in a virtual world to which few people ever gain access.

In basic terms, The Scene is a collection of both loose and tight-knit individuals and groups, using Internet networks as meeting places and storage vessels, in order to quickly leak as much pirated content as possible. From movies, TV shows and music, to software, eBooks and beyond. Almost anything digital is fair game for piracy at the most elite level.

These people – “Sceners” – are as protective of ‘their’ content as they are meticulous of their privacy but that doesn’t stop huge volumes of ‘their’ material leaking out onto the wider Internet. And occasionally – very occasionally – one of their members breaking ranks to tell people about it.

TorrentFreak recently made contact with one such individual who indicated a willingness to pull back the veil. However, verifying that ‘Sceners’ are who they say they are is inherently difficult. In part, we tackled this problem by agreeing for a pre-determined character string to be planted inside a Scene release.

With a fairly quick turnaround and as promised, the agreed characters appeared in a specific release. That the release had been made was confirmed by the standard accompanying text-based NFO file, which collectively are both widely and publicly available.

In respect of the group’s identity, we were asked to say that it has been active since 2018, but nothing more. We can confirm, however, that it already has dozens of releases thus far in 2019.

Our contact, who we will call “Source”, also claims to work with groups involved with so-called WEB releases, such as video content obtained and decrypted using sources including Netflix and Prime Video.

For security reasons, he wasn’t prepared to prove membership of that niche in the same fashion. However, the information he provided on those activities (to be covered in an upcoming part 2 of this article) is very interesting indeed. But first, an introduction to the basics, for those unfamiliar with how The Scene operates.

Basics of ‘The Scene’ – “Source’s” summary (in his own words)

• Topsites: Top-secret, highly protected FTP servers storing up to hundreds or thousands of terabytes of copyrighted material. Users have to be authorized to the topsite by pre-existing members, and the users can only connect from specific IP-ranges.
• Topsites usually always have an IRC channel where they announce the releases made on the specific topsite, alongside other things such as newly traded releases, requests and chat. These IRC chatrooms are encrypted using encryption tools on top of SSL.
• Topsites can either be home hosted or rented. Rented sites are avoided by members of The Scene who are higher up in the food chain, since those are generally riskier due to being located at hosting companies’ datacenters. Users of a topsite are usually one of the following:
  • Traders / Racers
  • Release Groups (Affiliates)
  • Site Operator: User who owns or administrates a topsite
• Release Groups (Affiliates): A single or group of users, who work together to download/rip, prepare, pack and pre a release. These groups usually compete against each other to get a release out as fast as possible, beating other groups.
• Traders / Racers: A user who moves releases between topsites. For example: As soon as the group -XYZ releases an MP3 album on topsite -ASD, multiple traders instantly grab the new release and transfer it to their other topsites. When the release lands on the other topsites, traders there start sharing it further and further until every single topsite has the release. In some cases it only takes minutes for every single topsite to have the release in question.

Becoming a member of The Scene

Despite “Source’s” own group being relatively new, he says his history with The Scene dates back three years. Intrigued at the possibility of becoming a member but with no prior experience, he contacted a Scene group using an email address inside an NFO, offering his coding skills.

“I was able to convince the group to slowly adopt me into The Scene by providing them scripts and tools to make their job easier and faster, alongside other programming related tasks. The thing with Scene groups is that they don’t trust outsiders,” he explains.

Given that not granting access to the wrong people is fundamental to the security of The Scene, we asked how this “vetting” took place. “Source” explained that it was conducted over a period of time (around four months), with a particular Scene group carrying out its own investigations to ensure he wasn’t lying about himself or his abilities.

“The groups who vet new members also often try their best to dox the recruit, to make sure that the user is secure. If you’re able to be doxed (based on the info you give, your IP-addresses, anything really) you will lose your chances to join. The group won’t actually do anything with your personal info,” he adds, somewhat reassuringly.

Once the group was satisfied with his credentials, “Source” gained access to his very first topsite, which he describes as small and tight-knit. Topsites often use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) for communications so from there it was a matter of being patient while simultaneously attempting to gain the trust of others in the channel.

“Most Sceners are very cautious of new users, even after being vetted in, due to the risk of a user still being insecure, an undercover officer or generally unwanted in terms of behavior. Once you’ve been idling in the chats and such for months, you slowly start gaining some basic recognition and trust,” he says.

Branching out

Once he’d gained access via the first topsite, “Source” says he decided to branch out on his own by creating his own Scene group and gathering content to release. From there he communicated with other users on the topsite in an effort to gain access to additional topsites as an affiliate.

As mentioned earlier, his own releases via his own group (the name of which we aren’t disclosing here) number in the dozens over the past several months alone. They are listed on publicly available ‘pre-databases‘ which archive information and NFO files which provide information related to Scene releases.

However, his own group isn’t the only string to the Source bow. Of particular interest is his involvement with so-called WEB releases, i.e pirate releases of originally protected video content obtained from platforms like Netflix and Prime Video.

“Content for WEB releases are obtained by downloading the source content. Whenever you stream a video online, you are downloading chunks of a video file to your computer. Sceners simply save that content and attempt to decrypt it for non-DRM playback later,” Source explains.

“Streams from these sites are protected by DRM. The most common, and hard to crack DRM is called Widevine. The way the Scene handles WEB-releases is by using specialized tools coded by The Scene, for The Scene.”

This is a particularly sensitive area, not least since Source says he’s acted as a programmer for multiple Scene groups making these releases. He’s understandably cautious so until next week (when we’ll continue with more detail specifically about WEB content) he leaves an early cautionary note for anyone considering joining The Scene.

“You can become Sceners with friends, but not friends with Sceners,” he concludes.

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Online advertising can be quite a nuisance. Flashy and noisy banners, or intrusive pop-ups, are a thorn in the side of many Internet users.

These type of ads are particularly popular on pirate sites. Many users tackle this by installing an ad-blocker. People who don’t, often have to navigate through a maze of fake download buttons and other misleading ads.

Increasingly, Google is trying to hide such ads from the public. Not just on pirate sites, but everywhere they pop up. The company, which derives most of its income from adverts, is generally not a fan of ad-blocking. However, it does employ various blocking initiatives that target third-party advertisers.

Two years ago the company announced that its Chrome browser would start to automatically block ads that don’t adhere to the  Better Ads Standards, for example. This was implemented early last year in several locations, including the US and Europe.

In a separate effort, Google has also started to banish abusive experiences. In Chrome its begun warning users about various deceptive practices, such as fake download and play buttons, while blocking unwanted redirects which are prevalent on some pirate streaming sites.

This wasn’t enough though. Last December, Google upped the ante when it decided to block all ads on a curated selection of sites with persistent abusive experiences. This includes the aforementioned fake download buttons, but also ads that promote or link to unwanted software.

This is a big step, as sites that have all ads blocked will certainly notice a significant dip in revenue. Thus far, however, little was known about what sites are targeted by Google, or how many there are. That changed recently. 

The latest release of the Vivaldi browser, which is based on Chrome, also implemented this blocklist. This was announced in a blog post by its CEO  Jon von Tetzchner.

“We’ve improved security by blocking advertisements on sites with abusive ad practices,” he writes. “We want you to be safe while on the web, and worry less about who’s abusing you with dangerous ads.”

Google’s list of abusive sites is available through an API, but not accessible to the public. However, Vivaldi has access to it and maintains a copy on its servers, as highlighted by Techdows which highlighted it in a recent report.

We should stress that this list of “abusive” sites is separate from the list of sites that violate the “better ads” standard, which Chrome’s built-in ad-blocker uses.

A quick review of the list reveals that it’s dominated by pirate and porn sites. At the time of writing, there are a total of 7,059 sites on the list including hundreds of pirate sites such as thepiratebay.rocks, eztvtorrent.net, filmytorrents.com, gostream.nu, songsmp3.org, and watchonlinemovies.net.

The targeted pirate sites are mostly smaller proxy sites or copycats, often designed to generate revenue. Interestingly, there are also several Blogspot sites on the list, such as the pirate release blog 4howcracked.blogspot.com.  Blogspot is, of course, a blogging platform maintained by Google.

In addition, we noticed that many domains are no longer operational, such as tehmoviez.download, and various others redirect to new URLs, as 0123movies.io does. 

When we first saw the list the relatively popular torrent site TorrentDownloads.me was listed as an ‘abusive’ site as well. The operator confirmed this and told TorrentFreak that he noticed a decline in revenue when that happened.

“Revenue dropped a few months ago when they put us on the abusive list. That’s why we are thinking to move our domain to new TLDs. I will also send a request for Google to review the site again and hope they will unblock it now,” the operator said. 

Apparently, this worked, as the site was unlisted a few hours later. No surprise perhaps, as the site doesn’t display any ads at the moment, so we must wait and see if this holds when the ads are put back.

Another site owner, who prefers to remain anonymous, informed TorrentFreak that his site was listed previously, but that the issue was resolved after he removed what Google flagged as ‘abusive’ code.

With billions of sites on the Internet and just a few thousand on this list of abusive sites, the impact of this measure is relatively minimal. And even on sites that are listed, some ads are still coming through, such as on the adult site 007zeed.com and pirate site Stream-Island.su. 

While the measure may not be perfect, Google sees it as an attempt to keep the web safe. While that’s an honorable motive, there may be a self-serving element to it as well. 

As said before, Google doesn’t want people to install ad-blockers. So, if its own browser blocks flashy ads on sites by default and bans ads on abusive sites completely, fewer people may see the need for a separate ad-blocker.

As a result, Google’s revenues increase. 

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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