When it comes to civil anti-piracy enforcement, BREIN is without a doubt one of the best-known players in the industry.

Backed by Hollywood and other content industries, the group has been active for more than two decades in the Netherlands.

Aside from shutting down sites and going after sellers of pirate streaming boxes, BREIN is also planning to go after BitTorrent users. By using in-house software that automatically gathers IP-addresses of seeders, hundreds if not thousands of copyright infringers can be easily pinpointed.

At first sight, this practice is very similar to the “copyright trolling” efforts that are common around the world. However, the Dutch anti-piracy group is taking a more reserved approach.

Instead of going after the IP-addresses of anyone who’s connected to a torrent swarm, BREIN is mostly interested in structural seeders who upload content for a longer period of time. In other words, the group wants to target those who frequently offer pirated content.

This decision was brought up by BREIN director Tim Kuik in the Dutch podcast “Met Nerds om Tafel” recently.  There, he explained that his organization represents a wide variety of rightsholders and not all of them support the idea of going after casual downloaders.

“Our enforcement efforts apply to all these copyright holders. Therefore, they all have to agree on how this takes place. At the moment there is no consensus within that group on how to deal with individual end-users,” Kuik says.

BREIN’s director believes that focusing on structural uploaders is the best approach in the case anyway.

“Personally, I have always had my doubts about going after individual downloaders. I believe you have to focus on the supply side,” he notes.

In theory, it’s possible for rightsholders to go after casual downloaders but that’s not something BREIN can do collectively. They work with funds that come from various parties who all have to agree on an approach.

TorrentFreak reached out to Kuik to clarify who the main targets are. Kuik says that pirate sites and services are the prime focus and that the planned mass settlement effort will focus on the most prolific uploaders in this ecosystem.

“We focus on early and large uploaders that function as a source of unauthorized content and we will expand that to frequent and prolonged uploaders that function as a lubricant keeping unauthorized content available over time,” Kuik tells us.

“Hit & run end users are at the end of the chain. We think they can best be approached with measures that raise their awareness, such as blocking access to illegal sites with referral to a landing page that explains why,” he adds.

Sending informative alert emails to users whose IP-addresses are linked to sharing pirated material is also an option. However, that’s something ISPs will have to cooperate with.

Enforcement may eventually shift to downloaders if there’s a situation where it’s impossible to go after the suppliers, Kuik notes. Then it makes sense to target downloaders as well.

This could also apply to torrent users. Kuik tells us that if other enforcement measures, such as site blocking or going after a hosting company, fail structurally the demand side could get more into the spotlight.

For now, however, uploaders are the targeted only. When BREIN plans start its campaign is yet unknown.  That said, Dutch torrent users have more to fear than BREIN alone.

Movie distributor Dutch FilmWorks (DFW) also received permission from the Data Protection Authority to monitor and track BitTorrent pirates. They are expected to target downloaders as well.

In the podcast, Kuik also provided some further insight and commentary on piracy in general. The issue of availability also came up. In particular, the fact that Game of Thrones is only available through a single telecom provider in the Netherlands, Ziggo.

This means that some people can’t access it legally, even if they wanted to. Kuik agreed that this is “strange,” but also noted that it’s one of the exceptions.

“That’s a particularly strange situation, in my opinion, but that’s something that should be taken up with Ziggo,” he says.

For BREIN’s director, it was never a preconceived plan to become a public copyright enforcement figure. After his law study, he took a summer job at a joint venture between the movie studios Paramount and Universal. This is where it all started.

“That’s when ‘E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial’  premiered in theaters, which was heavily pirated on videotapes. This also happened with other movies but E.T. made a lot of money and Steven Spielberg was extremely concerned. In a meeting, he burst into tears about it. Something had to be done,” Kuik says.

As a young legal expert, Kuik was called in to help. That would eventually turn him into a leading figure in the copyright enforcement world who helped to found dozens of local anti-piracy outfits around the world.

This work is appreciated by many rightsholders, but it also results in quite a few hateful comments from people who disagree with BREIN’s efforts. That doesn’t really bother Kuik much through.

“My fans are at the copyright holders. If you don’t have any enemies then you never stood up for something,” Kuik concludes.

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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In 2016, the U.S. Government launched a public consultation to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provisions.

In response, the Copyright Office received a lot of input, including more than 92,000 comments. Various rightsholders weighed in, as expected, and so did technology companies, law scholars and civil rights groups.

After a review of the initial comments, the U.S. Copyright Office found that that there was little agreement on how to move forward.

The MPAA, RIAA, and other industry groups called for extensive revisions including a ‘notice-and-stay-down‘ policy, for example. But, many service providers objected to this and said that the current system is capable of dealing with infringing content.

The Copyright Office reviewed the various positions, but more than two years have passed and nothing has changed. At least, not in terms of US policy changes. In the courts and other countries, things are moving forward quickly. 

To review these changes and developments, the Copyright Office has announced a new public roundtable on possible changes to the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions. This is scheduled to take place in April and stakeholders and the public at large are being asked to chime in. 

“The Office is now announcing that it will convene an additional roundtable to enable interested members of the public to address relevant domestic and foreign developments that have occurred since the close of the written comment period on February 6, 2017,” the Copyright Office writes.

The roundtable will have two sessions. The first will deal with US case law developments since the last meetings. This will include the BMG vs. Cox case, which touched on the appropriateness on repeat infringer policies of Internet providers. 

This “repeat infringer” issue cause quite a bit of uproar in the ISP community and several providers have tightened their policies in response. Those that fail to terminate persistent pirates, may be held liable. 

The second session will focus on foreign developments and how these relate to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Internet service provider liability. This includes the EU copyright reform proposals, such as Article 13.

“Since 2017, several other countries also have addressed issues of copyright infringement and online service provider liability. For example, in Europe, work towards a possible new Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market has been underway since 2016,” the Copyright Office writes.

The European Article 13 proposal, often referred to as the “upload filter” plan, creates new obligations for online service providers. This is closely related to ISP liability, and therefore relevant to the US Government’s DMCA review as well. 

Another sensitive but important topic is website blocking. While pirate site blocking was already commonplace in many countries at the time of the first roundtables, recent developments in Australia have brought it into the realm of ISP liability.

“[T]he Australian Parliament recently passed an amendment to its copyright law that provides copyright owners with additional tools to enforce their rights regarding infringing content online, including injunctions to block domain names,” the Copyright office writes.

The amendment in question allows copyright holders to apply for injunctions that will not only target infringing ‘online locations’ but also their appearances in searches. This means that Google and other search engines can be required to remove entire domains from their search results.

The US Copyright Office would like to hear from US stakeholders and the public with their thoughts on these developments. Specifically, if they are relevant to the ongoing DMCA review.  

“The Office is aware that such proposals have generated widespread debate, with stakeholders expressing a variety of views concerning the potential implications for copyright owners, online service providers, and members of the public.

“At the roundtable, participants are invited to identify and discuss recent law and policy developments in other countries that bear on issues related to the effectiveness, ineffectiveness, and/or other impacts on online service provider liability.”

Needless to say, the roundtable and the public comments will undoubtedly result in a wide range of opposing views again.

It’s not a secret that rightsholders would like to see site blocking and increased ISP liability in the US. However, these measures tend to trigger quite a bit of opposition from digital rights activists and the broader public,

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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While torrent sites are still important sources of unofficial content for hundreds of millions of users worldwide, streaming sites are undoubtedly eating into their market share.

Streaming platforms, easily accessible on the web and often sporting a Netflix-style interface, are enjoyed by expert pirates and the less savvy alike.

With a point-click-watch approach, streaming sites offer simplicity and convenience, features that regular torrent sites do not usually offer. As a result, a report shared with TorrentFreak by Moscow-based cyber-security company Group-IB indicates that 80% of pirated movies in Russia are now streamed, a figure that increases to 90% for TV shows.

Perhaps of more interest, however, is the supply chain and business model in place to get this content to the end-user while making a profit on the way.

In a report published earlier this week, it was revealed that in 87% of cases the first public copies of premiere titles appeared on torrent sites first, before spreading out to other platforms. While this underlines the continuing importance of torrent sites, Group-IB informs TF that “large monopolists” are now supplying content to thousands of websites via dedicated ‘pirate’ Content Delivery Networks (CDN).

“Much of the pirate underground has adopted advanced technologies of content distribution—pirate CDNs (Content Distribution Networks). CDNs store hundreds of thousands of files containing films and TV series,” the company reveals.

Group-IB says it has identified 15 ‘pirate’ CDN providers in this business while describing four as “major undertakings”. One CDN, for example, contains around 300,000 files sitting on more than five petabytes of server space.

While the storing of pirate content on servers is long-established, Group-IB says that these suppliers go an important step further by not only supplying video ‘wholesale’, but also additional services to help people set up their own professional pirate sites.

Running this kind of CDN is an expensive proposition. Group-IB estimates that the 300,000 file CDN mentioned above costs around $100,000 per month to maintain. This, however, is recouped via the content and services offered to pirate streaming site operators.

“Illegal videos are monetized via built-in CDN players. CDN platforms pay the pirate website owners on a CPM (cost per mille or thousand impressions) model. The CDNs are sponsored by bookies and online casinos, whose ads get ‘built-into’ the CDN players,” says Dmitry Tyunkin, Deputy Director Anti-Piracy at Group-IB.

“The CDN operators then become a kind of ‘wholesalers’ of pirated content that gets quickly and easily ‘fed’ to an almost unlimited number of pirate public-facing websites, such as movies and TV shows streaming portals.

“Some of these technical CDN providers also offer web modules that autofill sites with film posters and descriptions, and in some cases even supply unique reviews.”

Group-IB provided TF with details of a CDN named ‘Moonwalk’, which reportedly began operating in 2013. The company says it carries around 33,490 movies and TV shows via a maximum bandwidth of 400 Gb/s, paying out $0.60 per 1,000 views.

Given the size of these kinds of operations, we asked Group-IB whether they are a target for local law enforcement. The company said that while most developers are Russian-speaking, their infrastructure is now hosted outside the country.

“It’s not easy to take any legal actions against CDN providers for copyright owners in Russia, since CDN is a network of servers, which in most cases now are located outside of Russia,” Tyunkin says.

“Most of them in fact are located in Europe, and in the Netherlands in particular, close to so-called Internet backbones, the principal data routes between large computer networks and core routers on the Internet, for faster content distribution.”

Another interesting aspect of these pirate CDNs and the sites they service is that they appear to be undermining site-blocking efforts in the country.

While thousands of pirate domains are blocked in Russia under instruction of the Moscow City Court, the availability of CDNs behind the scenes means that any domain or site targeted for blocking can simply move on, with a minimum of disruption and with its content source intact.

“Nobody considers their domain or platform to be invaluable anymore, and the possibility of them being blocked is no real threat,” the company says.

“Pirates register dozens of domain names, content on these websites is filled automatically, and if the website is blocked, its search ratings are ‘transferred’ to a new website. This allows pirates to retain top positions in search engine results even if the original resource is blocked, which is not prohibited by the law.”

The end result is that while the number of blocked sites is increasing, there is also a trend of users who previously visited larger sites being spread over a larger number of smaller platforms. The anti-piracy memorandum signed last November by content and tech companies is having an effect, Group-IB says, but it’s “too early to talk about a complete victory.”

“Pirates know how to adapt to changing markets and are receiving support in the form of active sponsors among clandestine casinos and bookies. Not to mention creating a pirated website and moving content to it from a CDN provider is becoming increasingly easier and cheaper,” the company concludes.

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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LibreELEC 9.0 (Leia) has finally arrived after a long gestation period. Based upon Kodi v18.0, the Final 9.0 release contains many changes and refinements to user experience and a complete overhaul of the underlying OS core to improve stability and extend hardware support. Kodi v18 also brings new features like Kodi Retroplayer and DRM support that (equipped with an appropriate add-on) allows Kodi to unofficially stream content from services like Netflix and Amazon.

Settings Add-on:

• Changeable SSH passwords!
• Default firewall (iptables) with simple configurations for Home/Public networks
• Updates are moved to their own menu, other options are cleaned up a little
• Safe Mode boot when Kodi experiences startup problems

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Changeable SSH passwords and a default firewall configuration have been added to combat the increasing number of HTPC installs that can be found on the public internet. The increase is partly due to simple maths; our userbase has grown so the number of users inappropriately exposing their HTPC to the internet has also grown. The static password for libreelec is present on most/all password dictionary lists so it’s important we start encouraging users to change it (the first-run wizard will prompt when SSH is enabled).

More people are using VPN services for privacy without realising this exposes SSH/SMB/Web services. To combat this problem we have added simple firewall configurations for Home/Public networks; the Home configuration blocks inbound connections from non-private networks, e.g. traffic from the Internet to the public IP address used with the VPN connection.

As the Kodi piracy scene continues to decline we have seen an increase in users with outdated add-ons that cause problems during upgrades so “Safe Mode” counts Kodi startup crashes. After five startup failures it intervenes with a default (clean) configuration and prominent warning so users know there is a problem – but still have a working GUI to troubleshoot from.

Retroplayer:

Kodi v18 brings initial support for retro gaming and the ability to play hundreds of retro games directly from within Kodi. We provide a large number of emulator cores from our add-on repo, but no games (bring your own) although there are a couple of open source test game add-ons (2048 etc.) in our repo. In this first iteration of Kodi retro gaming support the user interface can be a little confusing and we still need to write-up some HOWTO guides for the wiki. Kodi developers are working on a game database (for Kodi v19) which will make the process of managing and using game ROMs easier in the future.

DVB Drivers:

We now offer a larger range of DVB drivers (depending on your platform) to choose from. The “DVB drivers from the latest kernel” option also includes the majority of Hauppage drivers which have been recently upstreamed into the kernel, which is great to see!

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Rockchip:

Despite the 8.95.1 release number our Rockchip releases remain in an Alpha state with limited support. The Kodi version is updated but there are no significant video/audio improvements to the Rockchip 4.4 kernel codebase – and none planned. Our work on Rockchip support has refocussed onto the Linux 4.20 kernel to use the modern kernel frameworks needed for the next-generation Kodi video pipeline. This work is progressing nicely, but it means the 4.4 codebase “is what it is” until a future kernel bump.

New Devices:

Amlogic

• Khadas VIM(1) – requires a clean install if using current community images
• Libre Computer LePotato

Rockchip

• 96rocks ROCK960
• ASUS Tinker Board
• Firefly ROC-RK3328-CC
• Khadas Edge
• PINE64 ROCK64
• PINE64 RockPro64
• Popcorn Hour RockBox
• Popcorn Hour Transformer
• Radxa ROCK Pi 4
• Rockchip Sapphire Board
• Mqmaker MiQi

If you experience problems, please open an thread at our forum. You can also open an ticket at our issue tracker.

Downloads

Click here to go to the download page.

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The Tribler client has been around for well over a decade and during that time it’s developed into the only truly decentralized BitTorrent client out there.

Even if all torrent sites were shut down today, Tribler users would still be able to find and add new content.

The well-funded project is managed by dozens of academic researchers, which is a guarantee for continued development. One of the challenges in recent years has been to make torrenting via Tribler anonymous.

The Tribler team addressed this problem by adding a built-in Tor network to the client, routing all data through a series of peers. In essence, Tribler users then become their own Tor network helping each other to hide their IP-addresses through encrypted proxies.

This works reasonably well but has some downsides.  A Tor-like network tends to be slower as files are shared through multiple connections. In addition, it relies on “exit nodes” whose IP-addresses remain visible to the outside world.

The latest Triber release, published today, aims to address these challenges in ways we’ve never seen before.

Professor Johan Pouwelse, leader and founder of the Tribler project, informs us that his lab at Delft University of Technology has bought 14.4 petabytes of Internet bandwidth. This bandwidth, provided by Leaseweb, will be used to scale-up the Tor-like privacy protection.

To pay for the bandwidth they sold a three-digit number of its Bitcoin stash. The University took an interest in Bitcoin in its early days and started mining years ago, and this money is now used for Tribler’s development.

While it’s certainly interesting to see that Bitcoin mining funded the bandwidth purchase, what Tribler is doing with it is even more important.

Tribler was the first torrent client to treat bandwidth as a currency. It added a blockchain which keeps track of people’s sharing habits and with the latest release users can now “mine” credits. The ultimate goal is to have a stable economy with users trading in bandwidth to ensure fast and anonymous downloads.

To kickstart this economy, Tribler will deploy “token robots” that can manage the bandwidth and operate exit points. This means that it’s easier for individual users to become anonymous.

“We create swarms of intelligent bots to manage bandwidth. These bots do as they are programmed, they can make smart decisions. We believe robots can’t be as easily corrupted as humans or forced to act against their own will,” Pouwelse says.

“They can autonomously buy servers using Bitcoin, self-replicate, operate a Tor-like exit node, and sell Tribler bandwidth coins to survive another month,” he adds.

More than 26 researchers worked on “terminator bots,” as they are called,  and Pouwelse says that they are among the most autonomous and smart software bots out there.

By default, users are not operating as an exit-node in the pseudo-anonymity network. This can be changed in the settings, but people who choose to be an exit-node should be aware of the consequences.

Over the past several years, millions of euros have been spent on Tribler and related research. Professor Pouwelse and his team will continue this work during the coming years. They see themselves as a unique project without commercial interests.

There are others working on similar decentralization goals, combining BitTorrent with the blockchain. However, professor Pouwelse is not a fan of these initiatives.

“We are seeing Bittorrent bundling malware and promoting a spammy ICO offering. It is sad to see rot inside our great community. We are the only non-profit team advancing decentralization from the tested foundation of BitTorrent,” Pouwelse says.

Today the researchers released Triber V7.2 and those who are interested can take it for a spin.

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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