Downloading music and movies in Japan is prohibited under the country’s Copyright Act, meaning that anyone who does so is liable to prosecution or civil suits.

Unusually, however, current legislation doesn’t offer the same levels of protection for creators of other creative works, such as still images (including ever-popular manga publications), software, and games. This disparity has prompted complaints from rightsholders who have been pressurizing the government to close the gap.

Last year it was reported that an advisory panel for the Cultural Affairs Agency was considering the possibility of rendering the downloading of a broader range of content as a criminal offense, roughly in line with laws passed in 2012 outlawing various forms of file-sharing. This week, those plans took a significant step forward.

According to local sources, a government panel adopted the new policy on Wednesday, recommending to the Cultural Affairs Agency that current anti-downloading legislation should be expanded to cover all copyrighted content. The Agency is now expected to submit a bill to amend the Copyright Act.

What remains unclear are the punishments to be handed down and under what circumstances.

The original recommendation of up to two years in prison and fines of two million yen (US$18,052) appears to be still on the table but a Mainichi report states that might only apply to those committing serious offenses, such as repeatedly downloading pirate content.

Additionally, these sentences would only be handed down in the event that victims of infringement file criminal complaints. However, the threshold for a criminal complaint is unclear and could cause issues for the legal system if there are large numbers of referrals.

Also of interest is that the government appears ready to tackle the issue of ‘pirate’ indexing sites, known locally as “leech sites”.

In September 2018, an advisory panel recommended that these sites should be outlawed. Carrying no infringing content themselves, these services provide hyperlinks to content hosted elsewhere and currently sit in a legal gray area.

There are an estimated 200 ‘leech’ sites in Japan and both the government and rightsholders wish to close the legal loophole that currently protects them. The aim is to criminalize those who knowingly link to content when they should “reasonably be expected” to know that the content is infringing.

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With more than a billion citizens, China is seen as both a great opportunity and a great threat to the entertainment industries, Holywood included. 

While China has traditionally been very reluctant to show ‘western’ movies, it has opened up in recent years much to the delight of the American movie studios. 

The problem, however, is that both physical and online movie piracy is rampant. Hollywood and the US Government have signaled this in the past, and with a booming local movie industry, China is now committed to taking action as well. 

Last week was the Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, which is generally a busy time at the box office. However, it’s also high time for pirates, which spurred the National Copyright Administration  (NCAC) into action.

“In recent days, after the joint action of multiple departments and rightsholders, the piracy of Spring Festival movies has been curbed. We will refer the serious infringements and piracy cases to the public security department to take criminal measures,” NCAC announced on the local social media site Weibo

The Copyright Administration called on the public to help and report instances of piracy through direct messages on Weibo, WeChat, and email. 

“Please provide infringement clues and clean up the online copyright environment. Let’s work together,” the Government outfit wrote.

Piracy is a growing concern among Chinese filmmakers, especially now that the local movie industry is booming. One of the widely pirated movies is the sci-fi blockbuster “The Wandering Earth.” The film premiered during the Spring Festival and broke records by grossing over 2 billion yuan (US$300 million).

The makers are obviously happy with this achievement. Over the past few days, however, they were preoccupied with taking down links to pirated copies. Gong Ge’er, who heads the movie’s anti-piracy unit, says that they complained to the Government as well, the South China Morning Post reports.

“In recent days, the staff of The Wandering Earth have not had time to celebrate the box office success, but have devoted almost all their energy to complaining to authorities about piracy and blocking pirated copies,” Gong told the Beijing Youth Daily.

Compared to last year there was a significant drop in moviegoers during the Spring Festival. This is partly due to online. In addition, leaked copies of The Wandering Earth and other blockbusters were also sold online, starting at one yuan per copy.

While piracy is certainly not a new phenomenon in China, it’s interesting to see that the authorities are calling on the public to help. And according to a recent update from the Copyright Administration, this has paid off.

“All the infringement and piracy reports received through Weibo, WeChat, email, and other channels will be sorted out and handed over to the relevant copyright law enforcement agencies. We hope that the majority of users continue to provide relevant clues,” NCAC wrote.

This will sound like music to the ears of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a trade group that also represents Hollywood’s interest. Just last week it informed the U.S. Government that China must step up its game to better protect the interests of copyright holders, listing some examples of problematic sites. 

“Traditional website piracy remains a major issue in China, causing significant damage to rights holders. Notorious piracy sites that disrupt the music and audiovisual marketplaces include zimuzu.tv, dytt8.net, 666c.com, sacdr.net, yymp3.com, musicool.cn, dy2018.com, xh127.com, b9good.com, dygang.com, loldytt.com, piaohua.com, bttt99.com, 80s.tw, meijutt.com, ygdy8.com, dysfz.vip, panduoduo.net, btbtdy.net, and lbldy.com,” IIPA wrote.

Perhaps IIPA can address their concerns to the Chinese authorities directly as well, via Weibo, WeChat, or email.

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When online piracy first hit the masses with Napster, Limewire, and later torrent sites, it wasn’t really a concern for sports leagues.

Most sports fans want to see their favorite players or teams live, not a day later when they already know the result.

Over the past years, live-streaming piracy has caught up with traditional media piracy. Pretty much every significant sports event can now be seen for free, through streaming websites or dedicated pirate set-top boxes.

This means that sports leagues have also taken an interest in anti-piracy enforcement. This became apparent once again last week when the Sports Coalition, which represents MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, and others,  sent an overview of piracy threats to the US Trade Representative (USTR).

The submission is part of the annual Special 301 Review, where the USTR uses input from various stakeholders to make a list of countries that could do more to protect the copyright industry. According to the Sports Coalition, live-streaming is one of the threats that should be highlighted.

“Sports organizations, including Sports Coalition members, are heavily affected by live sports telecast piracy, including the unauthorized live retransmission of sports telecasts over the Internet,” the submission reads.

Live streaming piracy is a persistent problem, according to the sports leagues, but also a global one. It involves “bad actors” in a wide variety of countries, they note.

“Pirate services and those complicit with them (such as content distribution networks and hosting services) are believed to be located in many nations including the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.”

The six mentioned countries are the worst offenders, the Sports Coalition writes, urging the US Government to take appropriate action in response. The Netherlands and Saudi Arabia deserve priority, they say, due to the prevalence or severity of the piracy problem in these countries.

The sports leagues identify several “infringing services” in the Netherlands, which contribute to the streaming piracy problem.

These include sportshd.me, strikezone.co, wiz1.net, vip7stream.pw, livebar.ow, 9stream.pw, ucasterplayer.com, Quasi Networks, Severius Holding, Leaseweb, Server Hosting Pty, and SNEL, which either pirated or provided services contributing to the piracy of a material number of Sports Coalition game and event telecasts.

This overview includes dedicated streaming sites and services, but also general purpose hosting providers. Leaseweb is an example of the latter. While the company may indeed have bad apples among its clients, it has many legitimate customers as well.

We see the same pattern with other countries, where both dedicated streaming platforms as well as hosting companies are mentioned among the infringing services.

Saudi Arabia is an outlier in this regard. The Sports Coalition mentions that the country deserves a priority mention because of BeoutQ. This service operates as a commercial venture offering “pirate “sports broadcasts through dedicated boxes.

“During 2018, an Infringing Service, beoutQ, operating either in whole or in part in Saudi Arabia pirated Sports Coalition game and event telecasts via unauthorized IPTV streaming devices and the beoutQ.se website,” the Sports Coalition writes.

BeoutQ is a thorn in the side of many other rightsholders as well. It launched in 2017 and for more than a year, various parties have tried to stop the infringing activity. 

The service is also mentioned in several other USTR submissions, including the one from Sky, which links it to ArabSat and the Saudi Arabian government.

“[T]he speed of proliferation of the illegal beoutQ service is particularly alarming, as is the evidence suggesting that the Riyadh based satellite operator, ArabSat, whose main shareholder is the Saudi Arabian government, provides satellite services to enable beoutQ’s distribution,” Sky writes.

Given the sheer volume of mentions, live-streaming piracy will likely end up in USTR’s 2019 Special 301 Review, which is expected to be released in a few weeks.

—

A copy of the Sports Coalition’s submission for USTR’s 2019 Special 301 Review is available here (pdf) and Sky’s version can be found here (pdf).

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ISP blocking has become a prime measure for the entertainment industries to target pirate sites on the Internet.

In recent years sites have been blocked throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America, and even Down Under.

The first blocking order was issued by a Danish court in 2006 against the music download store AllOfMP3 and, after two years, local ISPs were also the first to block The Pirate Bay.

These efforts were later followed by similar orders in the UK, Belgium and other European countries, with the rest of the world following behind. During an anti-piracy conference in France this week, Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association (MPA) provided an overview of the progress thus far.

Okke Delfos Visser, head of MPA’s legal department in the EMEA region, informed the audience that pirate sites are now blocked in 31 countries around the globe. As the map below shows, the list is dominated by European countries.

Together, Internet providers in these countries block a total of 3,966 websites and 8,150 ‘actual’ domain names.

The map above also reveals some blocking ‘holes.’ Africa, for example, is still completely blank. Similarly, the United States and Canada remain block-free as well, although there are calls to change this moving forward. 

Western Europe is the best-covered area. However, the MPA’s presentation revealed that there are significant differences in the scope of the blockades there. 

Portugal and Italy appear to be most thorough, with 944 and 855 blocked websites respectively. The Netherlands and Lithuania, meanwhile, are stuck on one site, as shown below. 

Not all pirate site blockades take place through the courts. In Italy, Russia, and Portugal, for example, there are administrative procedures in place through which sites are blocked. Roughly 42% of the global blocking proceedings take place through administrative procedures, and civil (53%) and criminal court cases (5%) make up the rest.

What’s clear though, is that site blocking is becoming more and more prevalent. During the first ten years there were less than 1,000 sites blocked, but over the past three years, more than 3,000 new sites were added to the global total.

The burning question is whether these efforts actually help to decrease piracy rates. It is no secret that dedicated pirates have plenty of options to circumvent them, but the MPA points out that, on the whole, site blocking works. 

In his presentation, Visser cited several studies and polls that back this up. While it’s no silver bullet, site blocking leads to fewer visits to the targeted sites, it decreases overall piracy rates, and drives some casual pirates to legal options instead.

The presentation and figures will undoubtedly be used to expand site blocking efforts even further. Canada and the United States appear to be the most high profile targets. But, history has shown that it’s a rather sensitive issue there, so it’s likely to meet some fierce resistance.

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Last September, international cyber-security firm Group-IB revealed that almost all movies released in 2018 had been leaked online.

While that isn’t particularly surprising, the company went on to highlight the activities of an organized group of “camcording” pirates in Russia.

“This group is financed by online-casinos, which support online-pirates as well. Online-casinos integrate their ads in the pirated copies and TV-shows in the form of logos, captioning or even as audio tracks,” Andrey Busargin, Director of Brand Protection at Group-IB, told TorrentFreak.

According to Group-IB, the major player utilizing this tactic is Azino777. The gambling service is unlicensed and therefore illegal in Russia. Under orders from the court, it is currently blocked by local ISPs along with hundreds of its own mirror sites. Nevertheless, the business is doing everything it can to recruit new customers.

In 2018, Azino777 was reported to be one of Russia’s top advertisers, outspending leading search engines Yandex and Google, and even Coca Cola and Pepsi. Now, however, a crisis could be looming following a blunder by a court in neighboring Ukraine.

Online casinos are illegal in Ukraine, so the authorities there have been taking a keen interest in Azino777. Following a criminal investigation by local police, it’s reported that the casino’s alleged offices in Kiev were raided in June 2018 and equipment seized.

This week, Russian news outlet The Bell discovered that a court in Kiev had failed to redact the name of 33-year-old Russian IT expert Albert Valiakhmetov from documents relating to that operation. The publication’s investigation, which references Ukraine court documents, indicates that the Russian is the suspected creator of Azino777.

While Azino777 is still operational, it’s clear that the heat is being turned up on the operation, both in Russia and Ukraine, which could have a potential impact on the piracy landscape in both countries.

Last week, TorrentFreak reported on data provided by Group-IB, which indicated that streaming piracy in Russia is dominated by professionals operating ‘pirate’ CDNs ( Content Distribution Networks) that not only supply movies and TV shows, but also additional services that make it easy to setup and maintain a pirate site. According to Group-IB, Azino777 is deeply involved.

“Azino777 has become an integral part of the existing ecosystem of pirated content in Russia. Azino777 closely cooperates with key pirated resources, placing advertising on such pirate CDNs as Moonwalk (the largest in Russia) and HDGO (second most popular),” says Dmitry Tyunkin, Deputy Director Anti-Piracy at Group-IB.

“In the case of Moonwalk, most often pre-roll and mid-roll ads are bought
(excluding ad inserts in the body of the video). In the case of HDGO, a unique precedent was achieved; the advertising network was built into the player. This meant that, apart from the classic pre-roll/mid-roll ads, all new content uploaded into the player is marked with a watermark and advertising within the video file itself.”

The amount of advertising in each title depends on the popularity of the release. Tyunkin says that the number of ads can vary between one and four, and can even include audio ads that are dubbed at the request of Azino777. Given the number of releases, the scale is impressive.

According to Group-IB data, in 2018 a total of 218 movies appeared in ‘cam’ format, with more than 90% of them containing advertising. TV shows posted with exclusive voiceovers exceeded 540 titles. Overall, the company believes that Azino777 is responsible for around 1,415 movie releases and 1,835 TV shows.

Group-IB says it can’t put a value on the revenues generated by these activities but says that the advertising format (via pirated content) is effective. The content spreads naturally and advertising on pirate sites is cheap – four to five times less than on equivalents in the US or EU – and the number of sites is huge.

“The estimated number of existing portals that are indirectly (through advertising networks and pirate CDNs such as HDGO) or directly linked to this casino is approximately 6,100 portals,” Tyunkin says.

Interestingly, Azino777 isn’t the only – or indeed first – company to embark on this kind of mass marketing. Group-IB says that JoyCasino was the first to experiment with the pirate model, with 1XBet trying the same in India and English speaking countries.

In short, there are takers around to fill the niche, even if Azino777 somehow falls.

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