Over the years we have covered dozens of piracy-related lawsuits, mostly from United States courts.

In many of these cases, defendants are foreign sites or services which don’t put up much of a fight.

That’s not true for the copyright infringement lawsuit a group of major record labels, backed by the RIAA, brought against Tofig Kurbanov last year.

The Russian operator of YouTube rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com fought back with a motion to dismiss. This request was granted last week. Judge Claude Hilton ruled that the court lacked jurisdiction over these types of sites if they are operated from abroad.

“As the Websites are semi-interactive, the interactions with the users are non-commercial, and there were no other acts by the Defendant that would demonstrate purposeful targeting, the Court finds that Defendant did not purposefully avail himself of the benefits and protections of either Virginia or the United States,” the Judge wrote.

The legal win is a modern-day David vs. Goliath story. The record labels, good for billions of dollars in annual revenue, were defeated by the Russian operator of the two stream-ripping sites. 

However, this battle isn’t over just yet. In his memorandum opinion, Judge Milton stressed that the labels are not allowed to refile their case in another district court. They can appeal the dismissal though, which is exactly what they’ve just done.

In a filing submitted yesterday, the record labels announce that they are appealing the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Via this route, they hope to overturn the dismissal.

“The court got it wrong,” RIAA spokesperson Cara Duckworth commented to Billboard.

“Its decision represents a big step backward in the protection of American culture and the creators that fuel it. We look forward to laying out our arguments in the weeks ahead,” she added.

During the appeal, the court will consider the arguments from both sides once more. 

The owner of the sites, Tofig Kurbanov, has hired a team of legal experts from and will continue to fight back. Kurbanov himself has never been to the United States and his sites don’t purposefully target either Virginia or the US.

Val Gurvits, one of the attorneys who represented the site operator, informs TorrentFreak that the defense already expected the RIAA labels to appeal. 

“We’re not at all surprised by the RIAA decision to appeal – this opinion really struck a blow at their strategy of suing people in places where they’ve never even visited, assuming that they’ll get a quick default judgment before the court ever realizes that there wasn’t any jurisdiction to begin with.”  

The attorney doesn’t believe that the record labels are going to succeed. The District Court made a thoughtful and well-reasoned decision and it’s going to be hard for them to overturn on appeal, he says.

If the fact that .com and .biz domains are administered by companies located in Virginia is enough to establish jurisdiction, as the labels argued,  then millions of foreign companies could be easily sued in Virginia, without any further presence there.

“At the end of the day, our client is an individual who lives in Russia, who has never been to the United States, and who had no substantive connection to the United States,” Gurwitz says. 

“If he could be subject to personal jurisdiction here, then there’s no reason that an American citizen couldn’t be subject to jurisdiction in China or Russia for typing out lines of code in his living room in Boston.  That would be a dangerous path to travel – the District Court wisely declined to go down that path and we think the 4thCircuit will similarly decline,” he adds. 

The record labels, assisted by the RIAA, hoped to resolve the matter quickly but it didn’t turn out that way. For now, it’s clear that the stream-rippers and their operator have won the first battle. 

During the month to come it will become clear whether the dismissal will stand or not. If the record labels lose the appeal as well, they could also choose to file a lawsuit in Russia. 

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 old enough to have enjoyed music before the dawn of the Internet will probably have recorded music from the radio.

Armed with C60 or more capacious C90 cassettes, it was a tradition in many countries to press play and record when the local chart shows were airing, thus capturing the pop hits of the day.

The resulting recordings were deliberately peppered with DJ chatter to reduce their quality but for many, this was the first step in enjoying music on repeat and on demand, without buying original vinyl.

These days music platforms are much more advanced but a service offered over the past few years by Germany-based ZeeZee presented a new take on these old traditions.

Users of ZeeZee.de were able to make requests to the service to provide music tracks for download. However, instead of licensing tracks like Spotify might, for example, the service scanned online radio stations while ‘listening’ out for the tracks to be played. At this point ZeeZee would record them before offering the user the opportunity to download.

This activity attracted the negative attentions of record labels in Germany, Universal Music in particular. As far back as 2014, the music giant discovered that the album Mit den Gezeiten by local band Santiano (which had been a number one hit) was being offered for download by ZeeZee.

Refusing to cease-and-desist out of court, in November 2014 the label filed for an injunction and damages at the Regional Court of Hamburg. During December 2016, the Court found in favor of the plaintiff and ZeeZee was ordered to stop its activities.

The case went to appeal but the outcome remained the same. In a ruling handed down by the Appeal Court of Hamburg earlier this month, ZeeZee was found to have acted illegally and to have no defense under Germany’s private copying exception.

The Court found that while users had requested the tracks, it was ZeeZee that fetched and reproduced them, later making them available for download. The infringing copies, therefore, had to be attributed to ZeeZee, not the end users of its service, in line with the limits on private copying highlighted in a 2017 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

The decision was welcomed by local music industry group, BVMI.

“Another clear signal from a German court: Anyone wishing to derive personal gain from another’s content by hiding behind the private copy rule must be prepared to be unmasked and suffer the legal consequences,” said René Houareau, Managing Director Legal & Political Affairs at the BVMI.

“A business model which does so is not in line with current laws. As the court states, ‘tapping’ internet radio stations in order to provide customers with an apparently free-of-charge copy from an unknown source, is specifically not covered by the private copying exception.”

On November 22, 2018, the Higher Regional Court of Munich reached the same conclusion in a case against stream-ripping service MusicMonster.fm, which also recorded tracks played on online radio stations to provide content to its customers.

The case, brought by Sony Music, also ended with a declaration that the service cannot rely on the private copying exception so is both unlicensed and illegal.

In Germany, exceptions for private copying attempt to balance the freedom to copy content with the right of rightsholders to get paid. While levies cover copies made at home for personal use, it’s now clear that sites like ZeeZee and MusicMonster need to obtain licenses to operate legally.

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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Russia has firmly established itself as one of the leading countries utilizing site-blocking to counter content considered unfavorable by the state or corporate interests.

Many tens of thousands of platforms are blocked for many reasons, from the promotion of terrorism to copyright infringement. Every week new sites are added to the country’s national blacklist which local ISPs are required to frequently check in order to prevent their subscribers from accessing forbidden platforms.

Given that blocking is supposed to reduce piracy, new research from Russian anti-piracy company WebKontrol throws up a few interesting angles on this online war.

For example, the company says that in 2017, the number of torrent sites offering content to the Russian market sat at around 1,300. However, last year – in the face of overwhelming blocking measures – that number grew to around 2,000.

In 2018, torrent sites accounted for just over a fifth of the ‘pirate’ market (streaming platforms dominate with more than 70%) but due to multiple links to the same content appearing on most platforms, torrent links accounted for around 40% of the available links to pirated material.

Further underlining the importance of torrents, despite a smaller share of the market, the company reports that in 87% of cases, the first public copies of premiere titles appeared on torrent sites first, before spreading out to other platforms such as streaming and hosting sites.

“According to WebKontrol’s, data, out of various website types, the number of streaming resources had increased by 2% – from 69% to 71% [2017 v 2018] – which placed the streaming websites in the leading position,” the company told TF.

“The share of torrent-trackers has also increased by 3% – from 19% to 22%. At the same time, the analysts have noted that the number of link sites and cyberlockers went down from 5% to 3%, and from 6% to 3% respectively.”

In 2017, the number of pirate sites offering content to Russian audiences dropped by 10% but in 2018, WebKontrol detected a 43% increase, amounting to an additional 9,500 sites. But despite this bad news, overall piracy appears to have dipped slightly, with the huge increase in sites put down to site owners’ responses to Russia’s aggressive blocking system.

“The overall traffic of pirate sites is decreasing notwithstanding the fact that the number of such sites is growing rapidly. Presumably, the main reason for this is the newly created mirror sites,” WebKontrol CEO Olga Valigourskaia informs TorrentFreak.

“Administrators of the pirate resources tend to create mirror sites as quickly as possible after their original domains are blocked. Rights holders, on the other hand, instantly block these mirrors using an administrative procedure, so there is no chance for these sites to gain any significant traffic. Some pirates simply stop creating new mirrors after a few blocking procedures.”

Meanwhile, Russia is further investing in site-blocking with the introduction of a new system. Telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor reports that to date, 660 large telecoms operators have switched to a new mechanism which allows sites to be blocked more efficiently.

“The new mechanism allows service providers to receive data from the Unified Registry [national blacklist] for only updated or changed entries instead of downloading the entire data set,” Roscomnadzor reports.

“Earlier tests have shown that the time taken by operators to reduce access to prohibited resources is reduced from 30–40 minutes to 4–6 minutes.”

Adoption of the new system is not mandatory but given the importance of site-blocking to the Russian government, ISPs are being encouraged to make use of it in order to “increase the effectiveness of measures taken to limit access to illegal resources.”

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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Last week the news broke that the Emmys will make the switch from physical DVD-screeners to online streaming screeners in 2020.

This transition comes with a lot of benefits. For one, it’s much cheaper for companies to put movies on an online screening platform than to manufacture and ship hundreds of thousands of DVDs.

Another advantage, according to some industry insiders, is that it’s easier to keep online screeners out of the hands of pirates.

In recent years there haven’t been many TV-screener leaks. However, if DVD screeners are eventually phased out by other awards shows, such as the Oscars, could that be the end of the screener season madness among pirates?

That’s highly doubtful. While it’s certainly true that online copies can’t get lost in the mail, there are other vulnerabilities. A login and password are easily shared and, once in, pirates can usually find a way to rip of capture a movie of TV-show. That’s what they’re good at, after all.

This is corroborated by pirate release group EVO. Short for EVOLUTiON, EVO has been around for years. The group has standing when it comes to screeners. Just a few weeks ago it leaked “Ralph Breaks The Internet,” one of the first DVD screeners this year.

According to EVO, online screeners are not necessarily more secure and the opposite may be true in some cases. The group mentions that it had access to a digital screener account last year which provided surprisingly little protection.

“We had access to digital screeners and they are indeed easy to leak. The DRM on it is a joke. We had an account last year with three screeners on it and they were pretty much MP4 ready to encode,” the EVO team informs TorrentFreak.

The group adds that online screeners have already leaked in the past, mentioning last year’s release of “Call Me By Your Name” as an example.

The Academy Awards have experimented with online streaming, but there is no sign of a switch yet.  The release group noticed, however, that DVD screener security has been increased. At least, for the disc they worked on.

“From what I’ve seen, doing Ralph, the DVD protection on it was increased, since it was a nightmare to crack,” EVO’s team member tells us.

The group believes that the current security measures around DVD screeners releases work fairly well. After all, there haven’t been too many DVD screener leaks this year. It further notes that the quality of screeners is intentionally kept low to decrease their value, in case they leak.

Legitimate screeners (for the SAG awards)

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Whether online or physical screeners are more secure ultimately depends on the type of protection measures that are implemented for each.

A highly secure DVD with watermarks is more secure than an online stream that’s only protected with a login, and a highly secure online streaming platform is more secure than an unprotected DVD. But none of these are 100% leak-resistant.

The safest conclusion is that piracy will likely remain a problem, no matter what the distribution platform is.

To get more perspectives we reached out to a variety of movie industry insiders, including those who offer secure online screening platforms. Unfortunately, none of them answered, suggesting that it’s a sensitive issue.

Based on previous coverage on the matter, we found that the movie industry hasn’t made its mind up on the security issue either.

Anthony Anderson, director of film security for Universal Pictures, previously told Variety that digital screeners will present new threats, which could make them less secure.

“Before, if you shipped a DVD to the home, you had to steal it from the doorstep. Now you can sit at home and attack the site, which presents a host of issues,” Anderson said.

The Television Academy’s decision to make Emmy screeners streaming only doesn’t come as a surprise though. In recent years many insiders have called for a transition and the major studios, including Warner Bros., have online “FYC” platforms in place already.

As far as we know, security concerns are not the main driver behind the switch. Variety’s coverage shows that streaming is simply seen as more practical, modern, and much cheaper by many. The downside is that not everyone likes streaming and that it’s harder to make titles stand out.

As for EVO, they don’t believe that the Academy Awards will follow the Emmys’ example anytime soon.  That said, the group prefers not to get involved with these type of releases too often, as it’s a security threat for them as well.

“Usually, we choose to stay out of the DVDSCR because it’s something that draws to much heat, and the studios are not happy about it. Every year people who actually leak them are arrested. No matter how good you are to erase the watermarks. There is always a trace,” EVO notes.

That’s true for both DVD and online screeners…

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 more than ten years in the game, RARBG is one of the most popular and resilient torrent sites on the Internet today.

The site took fourth spot in our 2019 list of most popular torrent sites, a position that has been earned through regular high-quality releases of everything from movies and TV shows through to music, games and adult content.

During the past few days, however, the site took a somewhat unusual step that has had some users scratching their heads. A quick look inside some new video torrents released by the site reveals not only the content itself, but also an initially mysterious file called ‘ RARBG_DO_NOT_MIRROR.exe’.

As a general rule, when video torrents contain an .exe file there is a need for caution. These executables can contain anything and in some cases may be malicious, such as a virus or malware. As a result, experienced torrent users never click them but the same can’t be said about novices.

In this instance, however, there is nothing for regular users to be worried about. Renaming the file to give it a .txt extension reveals that this is just a text file that displays the following information:

“This is not an .exe file. This is just a placeholder to prevent mirroring over other public sites.”

So if it’s just a text file, why would RARBG include it in their torrents? The explanation, it turns out, is pretty straightforward and not directed at users at all.

While the site makes thousands of releases every week, these are easily mirrored on other platforms. Since .exe files are viewed with suspicion by tools used to automate the crawling of the site (most sites don’t allow .exe files to be uploaded in video categories), their inclusion means less diffusion of RARBG torrents to other platforms.

“[The .exe file] is included in torrent files to stop distribution to other public sites,” RARBG confirms in a new addition to its FAQ.

Interestingly, the “.exe” experiment is also having a positive effect on the health of torrents tracked by RARBG. According to the site’s operator, the inclusion of the .exe file in torrents “reduces the average hit&run [people who grab a torrent and then fail to seed] by 35% !”

As mentioned earlier, there is nothing malicious with the .exe file as far as users are concerned and, as the site points out, people can easily ‘untick’ the file in their torrent client and it won’t even be downloaded.

That being said, their presence won’t be welcomed by people looking to mirror RARBG torrents elsewhere. Since the traffic to such platforms could be negatively affected following the rejection of torrents containing an .exe, the job of their operators becomes much more difficult.

Finally, it’s worth reiterating that real .exe files in any torrent – or indeed anywhere on the Internet – should always be approached with caution.

Running these kinds of files without due diligence can be a risky proposition so the default actions should always be to run up-to-date anti-virus/anti-malware software and/or ignore and delete unexpected content, just to be on the safe side.

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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