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Earlier this year Netflix announced that it would increase its efforts to block customers who circumvent geo-blockades.

As a result it has become harder to use VPN services and proxies to access Netflix content from other countries, something various movie studios have repeatedly called for.

With the application of commercial blacklist data, Netflix already blocks IP-addresses that are linked to such services, something which also affects well-intentioned customers who merely use a VPN to protect their privacy.

This has resulted in a lot of complaints from users with over 40,000 people signing a petition to lift the VPN ban. In addition, several people claim to have ended their Netflix subscriptions due to the restrictive policies, while others have suggested a return to their old pirate ways.

Some analysts predicted that the outrage might have an effect on the company’s results, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. During the presentation on the first quarter results yesterday, the VPN issue was just a small footnote.

When asked about the impact of the VPN changes on the results, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings brushed the issue aside as a minor detail that doesn’t impact the bigger picture in any way.

“It’s a very small but quite vocal minority. So it’s really inconsequential to us, as you could see in the Q1 results,” Hastings said during the earnings call.

Jumping in, Netflix CFO David Wells stressed that Netflix enjoyed very strong growth in the United States, as well as a successful global expansion. So, overall there is no sign that VPN users are abandoning ship en masse.

While the impact on the company’s revenue turns out to be insignificant, there is of course also a user satisfaction angle which could create a possible PR backlash in the longer term.

Netflix’s management doesn’t address these issues directly. However, it’s clear that hundreds of thousands of people are affected and Netflix can’t be happy with the outpouring of complaints that continues day after day.

Nonetheless, Netflix continues to address the VPN piracy issue. TorrentFreak has spoken to several VPN service providers who have seen an increase in blocking efforts over the past several weeks.

Initially Netflix used static addresses for the geo-blocking checks. As a result, proxy and VPN operators could easily bypass these checks by forwarding this traffic to a ‘clean’ IP-address. However, Netflix recently updated its detection methods and now uses hundreds of regularly changing domains.

“They are now coming from a few hundred different possible subdomains” Dave from LiquidVPN told us.

“This makes it much more expensive for us to circumvent because we would basically need to forward all Netflix traffic through our servers instead of just the packets that do the geolocation.”

Netflix previously said that, ultimately, it wants to make VPN banning obsolete by licensing all content globally. However, as long as the company still has to block access to some of its own content including House of Cards, there’s still a long way to go

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

Source: TorrentFreak

After years of attempting to clamp down on piracy in 2015 entertainment industry companies in Australia finally had progress to report.

New legislation passed in the summer allowed copyright holders to apply to the Federal Court to have infringing sites blocked at the ISP level.

While previous applications have been made on behalf of the movie and TV industries, until now the music sector has remained quiet. That changed today when members of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and Australasian collecting society APRA AMCOS teamed up to file their first application.

Filed at the Federal Court under section 115A of the Copyright Act 1968, member labels Universal Music Australia Pty Limited, Warner Music Australia Pty. Limited, Sony Music Entertainment Australia Pty Ltd and J Albert & Son Pty Ltd, demanded that leading torrent site KickassTorrents (KAT) be blocked by the country’s ISPs.

Citing a government comment that KAT and others like it are the “worst of the worst” who exploit the “creativity of others” without giving anything back, the industry groups claim that millions of dollars are being made in illegal advertising revenues.

“Online infringement continues to be a major threat to the sustainability of the Australian music industry. Illegal offshore sites like Kickass Torrents show a complete disrespect for music creators and the value of music,” said Jenny Morris OAM, Chair of the APRA Board.

“Australian music fans already have access – for free if they choose – to the world’s repertoire of music via more than 20 legitimate licensed online music services. Blocking access to sites like Kickass Torrents is all about supporting those services and allowing the writers whose songs are available on them to be paid for their work.”

In addition to blocking KickassTorrents the labels have also applied to have related proxy sites blocked. This means that quick workarounds will be more tricky for the casual pirate. It’s a strategy already employed in the UK and one which has become a feature of two other cases previously filed by the audio-visual industries in Australia.

Those cases feature the movie division of Village Roadshow, Roadshow Films, taking on streaming portal Solarmovie. TV giant Foxtel is targeting The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and TorrentHound.

Due to the sheer number of proxies, mirrors and clones that are facilitating access to those sites, the studios had to contact 61 third-party sites to inform them of the action. None responded. No numbers have yet been published but there are dozens of KickassTorrents variants so a similar process will have to be undertaken in this case too.

Also potentially muddying the waters is KickassTorrents’ claim that they take down copyright-infringing content following complaints from rightsholders.

The site’s users will be familiar with thousands of torrents disappearing from the platform but whether that will be enough to differentiate it under section 115a from a site whose “primary purpose to infringe” is unlikely in a non-adversarial process.

“Last year ARIA welcomed the Federal Government’s passing of section 115A as a critical element in supporting the legitimate digital content market in Australia,” said ARIA CEO Dan Rosen.

“ARIA and its members believe that this case will be an important step to ensure Australians are accessing their music from sites which contribute to our local industry, so that we can continue investing in talent to make the music we all love.”

The video cases are due back in court during early May following discussions with ISPs over the technicalities of blocking. While those negotiations appear to have been somewhat drawn out, future cases should prove much smoother to handle.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

With the recent Copyright Office consultation on the efficacy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ringing in the ears of many significant stakeholders, we’re informed that much is at stake in the online marketplace.

What began with opinions from a wide range of interested parties has now morphed into a battle of opposing forces, with annoyed copyright holders leading the charge on one side and Google and its supporters on the other.

Despite engaging in no infringement itself and doing everything the law requires, on a daily basis Google is now being described as the world’s greatest piracy facilitator. It’s getting pretty ugly.

The latest to weigh-in with a controversial opinion is veteran film producer Avi Lerner. Perhaps best known for bringing The Expendables trilogy to the silver screen, Lerner is pulling no punches when it comes to the blame game. In fact, he’s taken it right to the very top.

“The government, the president, is such a coward. He’s scared of Google so we are losing millions,” he told AFP.

As the founder of production companies Nu Image and Millennium Films, Lerner is of course no stranger to piracy. In 2014, a pristine copy of The Expendables 3 was leaked onto the Internet, much to the company’s dismay.

While police in the UK arrested two men in connection with the leak later that year, followed by a third in 2015, thus far no culprits have surfaced in the United States. So, in the absence of a direct bogeyman, Google – and the President – will have to do.

“It’s a major problem and it’s something that I don’t know if anyone can stop, because the government, the president, Congress are all scared of Google,” Lerner said.

The film producer says he feels that Google has no incentive to stop piracy because it generates revenue from it, but this kind of blame game is nothing new and largely misses the point. All piracy takes place outside Google’s ecosystem and would continue even if Google disappeared into thin air. Still, Lerner thinks he has the solution.

“They should tell Google to stop piracy. They should make a law that anyone helping piracy — and not helping to stop piracy — should go to jail or get penalized or whatever,” he said.

It’s not clear whether Lerner was just angry when he made these comments or whether he really doesn’t understand how the whole piracy thing works, but the notion of throwing people in jail for simply not helping to stop piracy is certainly food for thought.

Only time will tell if that kind of punishment should also extend to the President himself but he’ll be long out of office before anything (if anything) is done to tune-up the DMCA. Jailing Google executives is presumably much more distant on the horizon.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

In recent years the Popcorn Time application has gained popularity worldwide, mostly thanks to its ability to stream torrent files in a Netflix-style interface.

This development raised concern among many movie industry companies, who have been working hard to contain the threat by going after several forks and their developers.

Most recently, Norwegian rightholders reported a local Popcorn Time site to the local economic crime police. Responding to this referral, the authorities seized the Popcorn-Time.no domain name.

Unlike the name suggests, the site didn’t host the application itself but instead posted news articles, as well as links to sites that offered the application.

Many were surprised by the action and legal experts including Professor Olav Torvund of the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law openly voiced their concerns.

Not only is the legality of the site debated, but also the use of a far-reaching measure without a proper judicial review.

Responding to these concerns, two digital rights groups have now filed a lawsuit against the authorities. Electronic Frontier Norway (EFN) and the Norwegian Unix User Group (NUUG) want the court to decide whether the domain seizure was appropriate.

“We feel that this is an important case that addresses the limits of free speech,” EFN’s managing director Tom Fredrik Blenning tells TorrentFreak.

“If this procedure is found to be legal, domain name seizures will make it possible for the police to shut down a forum based on mere suspicion that a site discusses potential illegal actions.”

As far as the digital rights groups are concerned the Popcorn-Time information site was operating legally.

But even if there are legitimate legal concerns, they believe that domain name seizures should only be applied in extreme cases where lives are at stake. This was certainly not the case here.

“The decision to seize the domain name was made by a low-ranking lawyer employed by the police,” Blenning says.

“Our position is that this decision may very well be wrong, but even if it is a correct decision, it is one that should be made by a judge in a court of law.”

Through the lawsuit the groups hope to answer two main questions. Firstly, was Popcorn-Time.no violating the law even though it only offered links to and information about the application.

Secondly, is a domain name seizure proportionate when it’s not obvious whether a website is actually breaking the law?

According to the two digital rights groups, the authorities clearly went too far. They hope that the court will agree and that similar broad enforcement measures can be prevented in the future.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Deadpool is the most downloaded movie again.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

Well over four years have passed since Megaupload was shutdown, and as time passes people’s memories of the former Internet giant are fading away.

Interestingly, several copyright holders are keeping Megaupload’s spirit alive. Even though the site hasn’t been online for nearly half a decade, many continue to send out takedown requests targeting the former file-hosting service.

Take Paramount Pictures for example. Earlier this year the Hollywood movie studio asked Google to remove a Megaupload URL claiming that it hosted a copy of the The Big Short, a film that was released in 2015.

Impossible of course, since the movie didn’t even exist when the site was online, but apparently Paramount’s anti-piracy partner IP-Echelon thinks otherwise.

Paramount’s takedown notice

Ironically, the screenshot above also lists a Hotfile URL, another site that hasn’t been online for years. Just as bad, several of the other links point to content that’s unrelated to The Big Short including Nokia N97 firmware and a porn video.

Another takedown request targeting Megaupload comes from HBO. With help from its anti-piracy partner MarkMonitor, the company asked Google to remove a Megaupload link because it allegedly hosts a nude scene from Marisa Vitali in Bored To Death.

This video did indeed exist five years ago, but the URL hasn’t been active since the Megaupload raid, nor did Google index it recently.

It’s not just Hollywood outfits that make these mistakes. The prominent publisher Taylor & Francis is also frequently targeting the defunct file-hosting service. Most recently, its anti-piracy partner Link-Busters claimed that the site was carrying a copy of the book “Principles and Practice of Head and Neck Surgery and Oncology.”

So, while Megaupload has been offline for more than four years, copyright holders continue to target it. In fact, Google received more takedown notices targeting Megaupload after it was shut down than while it was still up and running.

This is strange, also since Google is no longer indexing any Megaupload URLs. At the time of writing a search for the site only returns four results.

Yes, rightholders are asking Google to remove links that were not even in Google’s index to begin with…

These mistakes are made by automated keyword filters that scour link sites and forums for links to hosting services. These bots don’t bother to check whether Google actually indexes the content, nor do they remove dead sites from their system.

This is not the first time this sloppiness has been brought to the forefront. A few weeks ago researchers from Columbia University’s American Assembly and Berkeley revealed that more than 28% of the takedown requests received by Google are “questionable.”

While the mistakes detailed above haven’t resulted in any serious harm, it’s easy to see how the same broad filtering techniques can also target content or sites that are perfectly legitimate and have a lot more to lose.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

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Source: Wired.com Top Stories

The Pirate Bay has been unreachable for more than a day now.

TorrentFreak reached out to the TPB team and we were informed that there appears to be a technical issue with the servers which should be resolved soon.

The Pirate Bay currently displays a CloudFlare error message across all domain names, confirming that TPB’s servers are unresponsive.

In addition to the main thepiratebay.se domain name, some proxy sites are also offline.

The Pirate Bay has had quite a few stints of downtime in recent weeks. The popular torrent site usually returns after several hours, but this time it’s taking a bit longer.

With the raid of 2014 still fresh in people’s minds, some are quick to spread panic, but these concerns are unwarranted.

In fact, the site is still accessible via various proxies and the Tor network (through their .onion address), including the popular Pirate Browser. The Tor traffic goes through a separate server and works just fine.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

If you have been offline, you may have missed porn site xHamster’s protest against anti-LGBTQ laws and AMC’s about-face on movie texting. Read up here. The post While You Were Offline: Did You Know the Internet Hates Movie Texting? True Story appeared first on WIRED.
Source: Wired.com Top Stories

At 86, Britain’s preeminent mathematical matchmaker is still tackling the big questions and dreaming of a union between the quantum and the gravitational forces. The post Mathematical Matchmaker Michael Atiyah Dreams of a Quantum Union appeared first on WIRED.
Source: Wired.com Top Stories