Internet users who download and share copyrighted content are prone to being tracked.

If a copyright owner or its agents see such transfers, it’s possible they’ll follow this up to prevent further infringement, as is their right under the law in most major jurisdictions.

In Canada this is also the case. Under the country’s ‘notice-and-notice‘ regime, copyright holders are granted permission to send complaints to users’ ISPs, who are then required to forward them to their customers.

However, after abuse by some copyright holders, last year the government stepped in with new rules. Such notices can no longer contain offers to pay cash to make supposed lawsuits go away, via an embedded hyperlink or other means. Neither can they demand a user’s personal details.

Unfortunately the new rules – as predicted – are being abused by companies who feel the law doesn’t apply to them.

As reported by TF earlier this month, anti-piracy outfit Digital Millennium Forensics (a Canada-based company), in conjunction with Elevation Pictures, is continuing to send notices that breach all of the rules, especially the demands for cash settlement.

Since the publication of our article, TF has received numerous additional copies of notices sent to even more customers of Eastlink, the ISP featured in the piece. The government says that ISPs don’t have to pass abusive notices on but Eastlink told us they don’t have the capability to filter them out, since there are so many of them.

Since then, the flow has continued. TorrentFreak has received even more copies of abusive notices sent by Digital Millennium Forensics and forwarded by other ISPs. They include Shaw, one of Canada’s most prominent providers, through to Xplornet, the country’s “leading supplier” of rural high-speed Internet.

In Shaw’s emails to customers, the company acknowledges that “a notice does not necessarily mean that you have in fact infringed copyright or that you will be sued for copyright infringement”, adding that it is “unaware of the full details and merit of the infringement claim.” It also adds the following important text:

The Notice and Notice regime does not impose any obligation on an internet user who receives a notice of alleged infringement to do anything or to contact the copyright owner or its representative who is alleging infringement. More particularly, there is no legal obligation to make any settlement payment requested by a copyright owner. Such settlement proposals are sometimes included in a notice.

While this is perfectly accurate information, the company still forwards abusive notices to its customers when the law does not require it to do so. The same can be said of both Eastlink and Xplornet, with the latter noting the following:

In accordance with section 41.26(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is required to forward any notice received from the copyright holder in a work (such as music, videos, books or games) alleging infringement of that work in connection with the Internet or other digital networks.  As a result, we are forwarding to you the attached notification related to your account.

We are unaware of the details or merits of this infringement claim. If you have questions concerning this matter, please contact the copyright holder directly using the contact information in the attached notice.

This statement is problematic. While 41.26(1)(a) does indeed require an ISP to forward a notice, the notice must also comply with 41.25(2) and (3) to be valid – and parts 3(a) and 3(c) prohibit notices that include settlement demands or links to the same.

Furthermore, part 3(b) also prohibits demands for “personal information” (this is because the government wants to protect consumers) yet the advice from Xplornet is for customers with questions to contact the sender of the already abusive notice in person. This is not contrary to the law but does raise more problems.

While the ISP is correct in noting that it can’t help with the details of the complaint, subscribers who contact the anti-piracy company directly will invariably give up their anonymity and with claims like this, that rarely turns out well. The law is clear – consumers do not have to respond in any way to these notices.

Unfortunately, Xplornet did not respond to TorrentFreak’s request for comment. Shaw Communications did, however, and a spokesperson indicated that it’s aware of the issue and is calling for measures against senders of abusive notices.

“Unfortunately, some rightsholders and their representatives may continue to disregard the requirements of the notice-and-notice regime. Shaw makes it clear to our customers that they are not obligated to comply with settlement demands,” Shaw said in its response.

“At the same time, we are urging the introduction of measures in the Copyright Act to end this practice – such as monetary penalties applicable to rightsholders who issue notices that include settlement demands or other prohibited content.”

A deterrent is apparently necessary in this case since it seems clear that companies like Digital Millennium Forensics and Elevation Pictures have little respect for the new rules. Not to mention that ISPs don’t appear to have any choice but to keep sending abusive notices to their customers.

TekSavvy, an ISP with a reputation for standing up for its customers, told TF that the problem is so big and the potential liabilities so huge, ISPs are terrified to intervene in the notice-sending process.

The company says that it faces similar issues to those that have been highlighted in Europe recently – how is it possible to deploy copyright filters 100% accurately?

“TekSavvy receives hundreds of thousands of notices from scores of senders in dozens of formats that change frequently. In order to comply with the Notice and Notice obligations, ISPs have had to develop automated tools that can assess whether each notice is compliant before forwarding it, with potentially huge liability if we do not forward compliant notices,” a spokesperson said.

“Notice forwarding is an expensive and difficult service TekSavvy provides to rightsholders at no cost, and for which we are expected to provide a 100% service level. This has created a problem in Canada similar to the concerns we have constantly heard over Article 13 (now 17) in the EU.

“The obligation to filter out noncompliant notices amounts to a requirement that ISPs have perfect algorithms, but there is no standard right now that any algorithm could work from,” TekSavvy added.

Professor Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, agrees that there are issues with the system.

“The problem is that the government’s approach does not penalize sending settlement notices via this system. Instead, it merely states that ISPs are not obligated to send such notices,” Geist told TF.

“However, given that ISPs are still required to send compliant notices under threat of penalty, many ISPs will send all notices because it is too difficult to manually distinguish between compliant and non-compliant notices.”

Like the ISPs, Geist says there are potential solutions, such as the standardization of notices or establishing penalties for sending non-compliant notices, as suggested by Shaw. As things stand, however, things are likely to continue as they are.

“There is real concern that rights holders will continue to send settlement demands knowing that many will still be passed along,” Geist added.

There is hope, however. Canada is currently working on a Statutory Review of the Copyright Act, with ISPs such as Shaw, Bell, and Rogers – supported by Google – calling for (among other things) the standardization of notices.

“The Government should use its existing authority to enact regulations requiring that notices be submitted electronically in a form that is based on the ACNS 2.0. Mandating the use of these standards will eliminate the risk of ISPs forwarding non-compliant notices,” their umbrella group Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright (BCBC) says.

TekSavvy told TF that Internet users who want to contribute to this change should take the opportunity to write to their MPs and the Minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development, who oversees the Copyright Act.

Worringly, it also warned that customers who receive non-compliant notices in the interim may be having their privacy breached.

When copyright notices are sent to ISPs, they store information about that complaint in order to identify alleged infringers, should that be necessary in the future. Due to the problems highlighted above, this happens even when a notice is abusive and non-compliant. For concerned customers, there is a solution, however.

“To address that privacy risk, until a standard is adopted, customers can contact us if they receive a notice that includes a settlement offer or that is otherwise not compliant with the Copyright Act, and we can remove the preserved information from our systems,” TekSavvy confirmed.

In summary, Canada-based users who receive an offer to settle in a copyright complaint do not have to contact the copyright holder and do not have to pay any settlements. They should, however, contact their ISP to ensure that the notice is scrubbed from the record and deleted from their account.

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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After the EU Parliament rubber-stamped Article 13 (renamed Article 17 in the final text) this week, speculation began in some media outlets that this signals the end of The Pirate Bay, ‘pirate’ streaming sites, and ‘pirate’ Kodi addons.

Copyright law is complex, as the recent controversies over the Copyright Directive have firmly underlined, but a fairly detailed outline can be found in the adopted text (pdf) published this week.

Teams of professional lawyers working for legal and mostly corporate platforms will undoubtedly spend hundreds of hours going through the text to fully understand what the future holds for various platforms that will defined as Online Content-Sharing Service Providers under the Directive.

What is an Online Content-Sharing Service Provider?

To begin, we can presume that most public torrent sites that operate like The Pirate Bay do not store content (only links to content) and most illicit Kodi add-ons are reliant upon sites that do host content – some or potentially most of it illegal.

“The definition of an online content-sharing service provider laid down in this Directive should target only online services that play an important role on the online content market by competing with other online content services, such as online audio and video streaming services, for the same audiences,” the document reads.

One can argue, strictly in this context, that both torrent and hosting/streaming sites (especially with piracy ambitions) fit that definition, but let’s continue.

“The services covered by this Directive are services, the main or one of the main purposes of which is to store and enable users to upload and share a large amount of copyright-protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit therefrom, either directly or indirectly, by organising it and promoting it in order to attract a larger audience, including by categorising it and using targeted promotion within it,” the final text reads.

Again, while torrent sites organize and promote links to content, they tend not to store it, but hosting and cyberlocker-type sites do. On the other hand, most platforms commonly used by pirates in the latter two categories don’t always organize and promote content on their platforms. This obviously excludes dedicated ‘pirate’ streaming portals that often display content in a Netflix-style interface.

So how is it determined whether a platform can be considered an Online Content-Sharing Service Provider under the Directive?

“The assessment of whether an online content-sharing service provider stores and gives access to a large amount of copyright-protected content should be made on a case-by-case basis and should take account of a combination of elements, such as the audience of the service and the number of files of copyright-protected content uploaded by the users of the service,” the text adds.

Again, this is open to legal interpretation but it seems that most hosting platforms that are dedicated to piracy will have servers packed with pirated content. They will also be heavily frequented by pirates. As a result, such services will always be viewed as pirate sites by rightsholders and treated as such, i.e with contempt.

This means that even if platforms do appear to qualify to be labeled as an Online Content-Sharing Service Provider, major rightsholders will never legitimize them by striking content licensing deals as required under Article 13 (now 17). First-run movies, for example, are simply impossible to license.

On the flip side, dedicated ‘pirate’ sites themselves are extremely unlikely (even if they could) to begin full-scale cooperation with rightsholders to take content down and then demonstrate “best efforts” to keep it down “in accordance with high industry standards of professional diligence.” If they did, what would they offer?

While some hosting sites do have takedown regimes, in the majority of cases rightsholders see ‘pirate’ sites as criminal operations that unfairly compete with their businesses.

The bottom line is that under existing EU law, piracy-focused torrent and cyberlocker-type sites are already operating outside the law. One only has to look at the various blocking orders around Europe that have declared The Pirate Bay – and sites like it – to be illegal.

Scooping platforms like this into Article 13 (now 17) doesn’t seem to be the key intention of rightsholders. The idea was to close the so-called “Value Gap” and the gap between paying something (in YouTube’s case) and paying absolutely nothing (in the case of torrent and streaming sites) is a gap that cannot be bridged.

There may be some borderline cases open for legal debate and even negotiation but, at the moment, there are bigger fish to fry – YouTube and YouTube-like sites, in particular.

Additionally, the Directive also includes a note that “to ensure a high level of copyright protection” the liability mechanism in the Directive “should not apply to service providers the main purpose of which is to engage in or to facilitate copyright piracy. “

There is still a lot of water to go under the bridge before the dust settles on this momentous occasion but it seems safe to say that the operators of The Pirate Bay and similar sites won’t really be extra-worried about Article 13/Article 17, because they’re on the wrong side of existing law already.

TorrentFreak sought the opinion of Tim Kuik, the boss of Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, who has more experience than most when it comes to taking action against pirate sites.

We put it to him the theory that these kinds of platforms probably won’t be too affected by this week’s events, because they are already illegal under existing law, are unlikely to want to “go straight”, and rightsholders wouldn’t license or cooperate with them anyway.

“I’ll keep it short,” he said. “I agree.”

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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The story of pirate streaming sites Kinox.to and Movie4k.to is one of the most unusual on record.

Serving as a replacement for Kino.to, a site that was taken down almost eight years ago in one of Europe’s largest ever anti-piracy operations, Kinox.to quickly grew to become a potent successor. Three years later, however, things took a turn for the worse.

In October 2014, Germany-based investigators acting on behalf of the Attorney General carried out raids in several regions of the country looking for four main suspects.

Two of those were brothers, Kreshnik and Kastriot Selimi. Then aged 21 and 25-years-old, the pair were said to be the main operators of Kinox.to and Movie4k.to. They immediately went on the run.

In 2017, there was a breakthrough. Younger brother Kreshnik, who by this time had reached 24, was detained after handing himself over to authorities in Kosovo. Little has been heard of him since.

Now, however, a Handelsblatt report indicates the now 26-year-old has been released from prison after spending just nine months in custody, partly in prisons in the Balkans.

For a man who was originally being hounded down for alleged crimes include predatory blackmail, armed robbery, extortion, arson, copyright infringement and tax evasion, Kreshnik appears to have won over the authorities by being cooperative on the money front.

After making a confession, Kreshnik reportedly helped the German tax office recover around 1.75 million euros.

“We have therefore set the procedure for victim-offender compensation,” said prosecutor Wolfgang Klein. In this case, the victim is the tax office, Handelsblatt reports.

Kreshnik is now being described as playing the part of an “economically legitimate straw man” of two companies based in Hong Kong, which received funds funneled through Cyprus from advertising companies affiliated with the streaming sites.

As highlighted by Tarnkappe, much of the details concerning how the sites operated, under whose control, and when, is still up for debate. Nevertheless, both Kinox.to and Movie4k.to remain stubbornly online today, despite all the chaos several years ago.

What is clear, however, is that the authorities have never caught up with Kastriot Selimi, Kreshnik’s older brother. He remains on the run after four years with charges of predatory extortion, coercion, arson and tax evasion still hanging over this head.

Whether the police will ever detain the alleged pirate site operator will remain to be seen, but others involved in the site have indeed fallen.

In December 2015, Arvit O (aka “Pedro”) who handled technical issues on KinoX, was sentenced to 40 months in prison for his involvement in the site.

Arvit O was found guilty of copyright infringement by the District Court of Leipzig. The then 29-year-old admitted to infringing 2,889 works. The Court also found that he hacked the computers of two competitors in order to improve Kinox’s market share.

KinoX.to made headlines again in February 2018, for being the first pirate site to be blocked by ISPs in Germany. It’s been playing cat and mouse with the authorities ever since, using alternative domains and mirror sites to evade the blockades.

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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Piracy of TV content is an extremely hot topic at the moment, with IPTV and often associated card-sharing systems proving a huge thorn in the sides of content owners and broadcasters alike.

The latest news comes in the wake of raids carried out Monday in London by police, Trading Standards, and anti-piracy outfit the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

The action, described as targeting a “£3 million fraud operation”, came as part of an investigation to “download, encrypt and widely distribute TV content from Sky, Virgin and BT.”

Local sources in Ilford, where officers raided a shop, say the operation was carried out in partnership with Redbridge and Barking and Dagenham Trading Standards. Two homes were also raided and searched.

Two men were arrested on suspicion of fraud, with police claiming that the suspects generated £600,000 per year from their activities. A list of 3,000 subscribers to their services, which was found in the shop, is now in the hands of the authorities.

A figure of £3 million has been placed on the estimated fraud although it remains unclear whether that’s the total revenue of the ‘pirate’ business or the amount the broadcasters are claiming in losses.

According to the Ilford Recorder, equipment worth £100,000 – including computers, servers, and set-top boxes – was seized by the councils’ Trading Standards officers.

TorrentFreak contacted the Federation Against Copyright Theft for further details on the operation but at the time of writing, we are yet to receive a response. It therefore remains unclear whether the targets were running an IPTV operation alongside ‘pirate’ set-top box sales, or perhaps offering card-sharing services.

“This type of fraud, on this scale has an impact upon providers of TV channels, steals their income and can lead to increased costs for legitimate subscribers,” said Councillor Robert C. Littlewood, Cabinet Member for Crime, Safety & Community Cohesion.

“Investigations are ongoing and Redbridge Trading Standards are continuing with enforcement action to bring the offenders before the courts, including the seizure of illegal assets gained from the fraud.”

News of action against pirate TV providers has suddenly become an extremely hot topic recently.

Last week, three men from the UK were jailed for a total of 17 years for running a pirate TV operation, which more recently including illegal streaming.

Just a day a later, news broke that police across Europe had dismantled what they claimed to be the biggest illegal IPTV network targeted thus far in the region, worth an estimated eight million euros. Five people were arrested.

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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