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UK Govt Pushes 10 Years Jail For Online Pirates

In early 2015 a study commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) concluded that criminal sanctions for copyright infringement under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA 1988) should be amended to bring them into line with offenses such as counterfeiting.

The report triggered a proposal from the UK government that the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement should be increased to ten years. The current maximum of two years is not enough of a deterrent, it was argued.

In July 2015 the government launched a consultation aiming to gauge opinion on boosting penalties to ensure that online piracy is considered as “no less serious” than offline infringements.

This morning the government released its conclusions while confirming it will indeed be asking Parliament for a ten year maximum sentence.

In a published statement, Minister for Intellectual Property Baroness Neville-Rolfe says that more than a thousand responses (pdf) helped to shape the government’s decision to stand by its earlier calls for increased penalties. Demands for additional clarity will also be addressed.

“As a result we are now proposing changes that include increasing the maximum sentence, but at the same time addressing concerns about the scope of the offense,” Neville-Rolfe says.

“The revised provisions will help protect rights holders, while making the boundaries of the offense clearer, so that everyone can understand how the rules should be applied.”

The minister says that a number of safeguards are already in place to “limit the risk” that a “very low level” infringer could be subjected to a high penalty, including that infringement must be proven to the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt.

Addressing concerns raised by the consultation that unwitting infringers might find themselves subjected to draconian sentences when they had no intent to cause any harm, the government references a system that has been in place for some time at the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU).

Without mentioning them by name, the report notes that “enforcement agencies and private prosecutors have a staged response system, encompassing education, ‘cease and desist’ notices, and domain suspension.”

In other words, those likely to be targeted by the ten year sentence are given advance warning by the likes of PIPCU, FACT and the BPI, that they’re treading on thin ice.

The government also addresses concerns that the term “affect prejudicially” is too vague when used to describe the extent to which a copyright holder needs to be affected before an offense is committed.

“It was argued that a single infringing file could fulfil this requirement in some circumstances (if widely shared subsequent to the infringement for example) therefore setting an unacceptably low threshold for committing the offense,” the government explains.

The government’s position is that minor infringement does not lead to a criminal prosecution but it does concede that the term “affect prejudicially” has the potential to “give rise to an element of ambiguity.”

Perhaps predictably the consultation raised concerns that a maximum sentence of ten years would place infringement alongside serious offenses such as rape, firearms offenses and child cruelty.

Nevertheless, the government feels the sentence is warranted and uses the case brought against several release group members last year as an indicator that while ten years is a maximum, it would only be utilized in the rarest of cases.

“The Government believes that a maximum sentence of 10 years allows the courts to apply an appropriate sentence to reflect the scale of the offending. An example where copyright infringement was deemed to warrant longer than a 2 year sentence is where five defendants received sentences totaling 17 years for releasing more than 2,500 of the latest films onto the internet,” the government writes.

“They were prosecuted under the Fraud Act, where the highest sentence was four and a half years. Capping the maximum available sentence at a lower level would unnecessarily limit the ability of the courts to apply appropriate sentences in the more serious cases of copyright infringement.”

The government says it will now introduce its re-drafted offense provisions to Parliament at the “earliest available legislative opportunity.”

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

Kim Dotcom Warns Mega Users to Backup Their Files

In 2012, a combined effort by the United States and New Zealand governments brought Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload empire to its knees. Coordinated raids in multiple locations carried out by heavily armed officers ensured that a clear message was sent to copyright infringers.

But despite the overwhelming show of force, Dotcom refused to lie down and just a year later he launched a brand new file-hosting service. Known simply as ‘Mega’, the platform launched to great fanfare in 2013.

Mega quickly became a force to be reckoned with in the hosting market, with Dotcom promoting the platform at every turn. Nevertheless, controversy was never far away.

In September 2014, Mega was branded a “piracy haven” in a Digital Citizens Alliance report into the activities of “shadowy cyberlockers.”

As a direct consequence and under pressure from the U.S. government, in early 2015 PayPal stopped processing payments for Mega. There can be little doubt that hurt the site.

But behind the scenes other matters were becoming a distraction. In May 2015, Mega’s bid for a stock listing fell through and just two months later Dotcom’s earlier praise for the company turned sour.

“Mega has experienced a hostile takeover and is no longer in the control of people who care about Internet Freedom. The New Zealand Government and Hollywood have seized a significant share of the company,” Dotcom told TorrentFreak.

“The combined shares seized by the NZ government and Hollywood were significant enough to stop our listing on the New Zealand stock exchange.”

Dotcom had already resigned as a director of Mega in September 2013 but now he was publicly warning people against using the site.

Today Dotcom repeated those calls, warning users of Mega over what he sees as the precarious position of the company.

“Mega had to survive without a credit card payment processor for almost 2 years now. The air is getting thin. Backup your Mega files,” he told users via Twitter.

But while a lack of payment processing options certainly won’t be helping Mega, Dotcom sees more danger in the reported controller of Mega, Chinese national and New Zealand citizen Bill Liu.

Back in 2009, Liu made headlines when it was revealed that despite being wanted for fraud in China, he was granted citizenship in New Zealand. Now it’s been revealed by kiwi Prime Minister John Key that Liu is ranked number five on China’s “Top 100” extradition list.

“I haven’t seen the list, but there is a list,” Key said.

“They’ve also put out a list worldwide of the Top 100. Bill Liu is number five on it,” he said of the Chinese government.

New Zealand police have already seized millions of dollars of assets that are believed to belong to Liu, including some held in Mega, although Liu denies all wrong doing. Dotcom, however, remains unconvinced.

“The 5th most wanted criminal in China is in control of Mega and he wants to float the business in HK? Good luck,” he said this morning.

As these situations go, the short history of Mega is utterly unique. Never before has a platform in the file-sharing space had two entrepreneurs each worth millions of dollars being pursued for extradition by two of the world’s most powerful governments for entirely different reasons.

It’s currently very late evening in New Zealand so we’re not expecting an immediate response from Mega to our requests for comment. We’ll add them here as soon as they arrive.

Update: Statement from Mega chairman Stephen Hall

“Mega has significant funding and strong support from shareholders so its financial position is certainly not precarious. Dotcom’s comment is factually incorrect and the motive is unknown,” Hall informs TF.

“Mega continues to experience strong growth which illustrates the global appreciation of the quality of its services. Mr Liu has a shareholding interest but has no management or board position so he certainly doesn’t control Mega.”

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

Pirate Bay Founder: Streaming Model Could Ignite New Piracy War

peter-sundeAfter signing up to Spotify several years ago one of my first tasks was to begin hand-crafting playlists of the thousands of 1980s and 1990s dance tracks I had previously bought on vinyl.

Once lovingly stacked and indexed in a spare room, these much-loved relics of a bygone era are now gathering dust in the attic, probably never to be played again. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Slowly but surely, tracks have been disappearing from my Spotify playlists with no explanation, including a rare Prodigy remix of a Praga Khan track that finally triggered me to sign up to Spotify in the first place. If Spotify had that they must have everything, I assured myself at the time.

While the disappearance of some music from the service is to be expected, it doesn’t make it any less of a disappointment when it happens. It also undermines confidence in the product. After all, if one had bought the track instead of streaming it, it would still be here today. It’s a situation that’s familiar to The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde who in a new interview with Germany’s FutureZone recalls similar experiences.

“I stopped using Spotify when suddenly overnight several titles disappeared from my playlist because the licenses for them were revoked. Someone else had decided which music I could listen to and which I could not. I had no backup, so I lost the music. I do not want that,” Sunde says.

To hear that Peter Sunde (by all accounts one of the world’s most infamous pirates) had placed his trust and his money with a legitimate content provider indicates that at its core Spotify had something good to offer. After all, it’s hardly an argument that Sunde was unable to obtain the music from elsewhere.

But what is perhaps most remarkable is that Sunde actually patronized a service which at its very core is the complete opposite of what The Pirate Bay stood for. Forget for a moment the notion of paying or not paying for media, that’s a distraction.

What the Pirate Bay did was empower its users to participate in a somewhat decentralized communications infrastructure which allowed them to build archives of music, movies, TV shows and software in their own homes. Not only did they ‘own’ that content but much more importantly they exercised complete, physical control over it. Licenses getting revoked? Not a chance.

For all their great qualities (and they have them by the bucket load), Spotify and other streaming services such as Netflix offer something quite different – total centralization and a complete lack of user control over the content they’re buying renting.

“When we look at the development of Netflix it is exactly the same as a Spotify for movies,” Sunde says. “What streaming has done is centralize the ownership of culture.”

And of course Sunde is absolutely right. At any point Spotify, Netflix and any other streaming service has the power to remove content, modify it, restrict access to it geographically or – heaven forbid – go bankrupt, shut down, and deny access to it altogether.

However unlikely, it is possible that people invested in these services could be blasted back to a world without music and movies in an instant, should economic (or Internet disaster) circumstances dictate it. Unless people have physical access to that content they are done. Sunde wonders whether people will continue to put up with this scenario in the future.

“Maybe in five years time we’ll have a new file-sharing fight because anyone who uses these services will consider that while having access to the content is good, it is not so great having no control and actually owning none of it,” Sunde says.

So the big question remains: what can be done about it?

In keeping with Sunde’s previous assertion that he believes that torrent technology has stagnated, the Pirate Bay co-founder doesn’t really offer much hope for those inclined to obtain their content from unofficial sources.

“I have more interesting things to do. One can not eat indefinitely a cake. It may be the best cake in the world, but at some point you have to throw up,” he says.

“I do not know how to fight it. Perhaps with better streaming piracy.”

With that an unlikely prospect, at least in music, legitimate streaming consumption will continue to grow, and with it the pitfalls of borrowing rather than buying music.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

Pirate Site Blocking Boosts Interest in VPNs, Research Shows

stop-blockedFollowing a series of High Court orders, six of the UK’s major ISPs are required to block access to dozens of the world’s most popular ‘pirate’ sites.

The measures were supposed to make it harder for UK Internet subscribers to access these sites, but the effects on actual behavior are widely debated.

A new study published by Carnegie Mellon University and Wellesley College researchers aims to provide some empirical evidence on this issue.

The researchers investigated the effects of a 2014 court order that required ISPs to block an additional 53 pirate sites. Using data from a panel of 58,809 UK Internet users, they then reviewed the changes in browsing patterns among these users.

Not surprisingly, visits to the blocked sites dropped dramatically, 90% in this case. However, the researchers didn’t observe an increase in visitors to pirate sites that remained unblocked.

“We found that these blocks caused a 90% drop in visits to the blocked sites while causing no increase in usage of unblocked sites. This led to a 22% decrease in total piracy for all users affected by the blocks”

This suggests that the pirate site blockades are indeed effective to a certain degree. However, as anecdotal evidence has shown in the past, they also boost the interest in circumvention tools such as VPNs.

“Some users of the blocked sites, however, did seem to employ technical workarounds to continue usage of the blocked sites,” the researchers reveal.

The data show a marginally significant effect which indicates that “for every 10 additional visits to blocked sites before the blocks, a consumer increased their visits to VPN sites after the blocks by an additional 30%.”

In other words, while some pirates may drop out, there are also those who actively try to circumvent the blockades.

Overall, however, the researchers conclude that there’s a decrease in piracy and an increase in use of legal services. This effect is most pronounced for ad supported streaming services, and to a lesser degree (and only a 75% confidence level) for paid services.

“We also found that these blocks caused a 6% increase in visits to paid legal streaming sites like Netflix and a 10% increase in videos viewed on legal ad supported streaming sites like BBC and Channel 5.”

One should take into account that the results are based on data from 2014, after several large pirate sites were blocked already. This means that other pirates may have already dropped out after earlier blocks, while the more persistent pirates remain.

This may also explain why there was a stronger effect on visits to legal services in a previous study. That said, the additional blocking measures still change people’s behavior.

“The evidence suggests that blocking large numbers of sites can still ‘move the dial’ in terms of consumer behavior, but that there may be diminishing returns as remaining pirates may be more dispersed or else have lower willingness to pay for legal content.

“Nonetheless, such blocks can serve to mitigate the possibility of a long-term return to the prior status quo,” the researchers add.

The research was carried out as part of Carnegie Mellon University’s Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics, which received a generous donation from the MPAA. However, the researchers suggest that their work is carried out independently.

That said, the results are likely to be used by the entertainment industries to justify additional blocks around the world.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

Microsoft’s Azure Awarded FACT Anti-Piracy Seal of Approval

microsoft-pirateThe UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) is probably best known for activities aimed at tracking down the operators of pirate sites and the release groups who frequent them.

Financed by the film industry, over the years FACT has forged partnerships with law enforcement agencies, including the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). But while in many instances FACT’s work is reactive, the group also works in precautionary roles.

In addition to preventing individuals from recording movies in theaters, for example, FACT also runs an accreditation system that aims to hold businesses providing services to the movie and TV sector to a set of high standards. The overall aim is to protect the intellectual property owned by FACT’s members.

The latest company to achieve FACT certification is Microsoft with its cloud computing platform Azure. Launched in 2010, Azure provides PaaS (Platform as a service) and along with Amazon Web Services is considered a market leader in Iaas (Infrastructure as a service).

“Microsoft is quite familiar with global anti-piracy efforts, and we believe that extending this attention to our customers’ environments is just as important as safeguarding our own intellectual property,” says Alice Rison, Senior Director, Microsoft Azure.

“That’s why I’m excited to announce Azure’s certification by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), making Azure the first public cloud to gain this accreditation.”

To get a flavor of what FACT is trying to achieve with its certification system one only has to look at the list of companies that have already gone through the process.

There are currently 110 businesses with FACT accreditation, such as those offering subtitling services. These might not immediately sound like piracy hotspots but TV shows have been leaked at this point in the chain before, such as the high-profile pre-release of several Doctor Who episodes in 2014.

Others, such as companies and hotels involved in pre-release screenings of movies present more obvious security holes, as do those providing courier, logistics, transport and storage services. All of these processes have been exploited in the past to get pre-release content onto the Internet and now FACT is determined to regulate them all.

A handful are a little more obscure. Alchemy Metals Ltd proudly display its FACT accreditation online, noting that the company utilizes “a variety of methods to ensure your sensitive product has been damaged beyond repair and re-use.” Precisely what Alchemy Metals destroys for the industry is unclear, but operations similar to theirs have been previously been used for the “granulation” of seized computer and video games hardware.

The inclusion of registered charity His Church on the accredited list is also of interest. That organization take counterfeit clothing, DVDs, CDs and other items and removes the illegal branding. These items are then shipped abroad for re-use, thus avoiding landfill.

For Microsoft, however, it is all about keeping those involved in the movie making and distribution process safe from hackers, pirates and other ne’er do wells. Accreditation means an independent security survey and both physical and digital tests, to include security of buildings, alarms systems and CCTV, access control systems, digital security, audit trails plus staff vetting.

All of this combined establishes whether an organization meets the high standards set by FACT partners such as Universal, Disney, Sony, The Premier League and TV giant BSkyB.

“The FACT certification is yet another demonstration of the investments we’re making in not only ensuring the security of your data, but in gaining your trust as a business partner,” says Microsoft’s Alice Rison.

Of course, all of this comes at a cost. The FACT Certification Fee for each UK site is £2,100 per year. For those outside the UK the fee is the same, plus travel and accommodation expenses.

Earlier this year Microsoft met the standards required by the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) cloud security guidelines. More details of the MPAA’s Content Security Model can be found here.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak