Month: September 2015

Rightscorp Lures Hollywood With ‘Popcorn Time Protection’

popcorntIn little more than a year Popcorn Time has become a household name on the Internet.

The software amassed millions of users by offering BitTorrent-powered streaming in an easy-to-use Netflix-style interface.

This attraction has drawn a lot of attention from the press, which makes the “Popcorn Time” brand an ideal tool for anti-piracy outfits to promote their work.

In recent months various movie studios have launched lawsuits against Popcorn Time users, for example. In practice these cases target the same BitTorrent swarms as the thousands of other lawsuits that have been filed in recent years, but a press release quoting “Popcorn Time” ensures mainstream coverage.

Struggling piracy monetization firm Rightscorp has the same idea. A few hours ago the company published a press release announcing their new “Popcorn Time Protection” service.

“The service includes 365x24x7 monitoring of the Popcorn Time network and associated data collection and reporting services,” the company announces.

While the name is new, the service does nothing more than what Rightscorp currently offers. After all, traditional BitTorrent pirates and Popcorn Time users are connected to the same swarms and are downloading the same files.

Rightscorp monitors these swarms and through Internet providers they send DMCA notices to the pirating IP-addresses, asking the account holders to pay $30 per copyright infringement. These IP-addresses can belong to both Popcorn Time and regular BitTorrent users.

The anti-piracy company nonetheless leverages the ‘brand’ to lure Hollywood studios into becoming customers. Warner Bros. is already on board and by focusing on Popcorn Time’s momentum they hope others will follow.

“Popcorn Time is a clear and present danger to Hollywood and directly threatens the right of the creators and owners of content to determine how their content is distributed,” CEO Christopher Sabec says.

The company cites Netflix’s warning against the application as well as other news items. In addition the CEO claims that the software is immune to some other anti-piracy measures.

“We believe our new Popcorn Time Protection service is the only scalable solution for this major threat to Hollywood. Popcorn Time is unaffected by domain blocking and by DMCA takedown notices,” Sabec notes.

This is where Rightscorp appears to misunderstand or at least bend the truth. Popcorn Time relies heavily on centralized third party services, such as the YTS torrent site, which accepts DMCA notices and can easily have its domain name seized or blocked.

In fact, Rightscorp published a blog post recently in which the company noted that Popcorn Time had stopped working for some people, an event triggered by a domain seizure.

This point is also brought up by the developers of the PopcornTime.io fork, who accuse Rightscorp of “using a popular name to surf the wave and impress the markets.”

“While there’s nothing new in what they offer, its name catched [sic] our attention,” the team says of the Rightscorp ‘product’.

Finally, the Popcorn Time team draws attention to VPNs, which render Rightscorp’s monitoring model useless. For some reason that’s a detail the anti-piracy company conveniently left out of its press release.

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


Source: TorrentFreak

Canada’s Mr. Robot Premiere Censored By False DMCA Notice

robot-smallNew York resident Elliot Alderson works as a security engineer at cyber-security company Allsafe. Through a window of mental issues, Alderson views the world with paranoia while using his undoubted technical skills to hack his targets.

After being recruited by an anarchist known as “Mr. Robot”, Alderson becomes part of a team known as “fsociety” with a mission to take down one of the largest corporations in the world.

The now-hit TV show Mr Robot enjoyed a somewhat unusual U.S. launch, with the pilot airing late May on a wide range of online platforms including the USANow app, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, plus Xbox and Playstation, to name just a few.

Chris McCumber, president, USA Network, said that the strategy provided a “unique opportunity” to get noticed and drive word-of-mouth promotion. It’s the kind of effort piracy has been providing unofficially for many years via leaked pilots (1) (2).

After enjoying huge success in the United States, this Friday evening Mr Robot will finally get its Canadian premiere on Showcase. And, in line with the U.S. strategy, Canadian geeks have already been given the opportunity to have an advance sneak preview of the pilot episode on Showcase.ca and ETCanada.com.

However, those attempting to use Google to find the pilot won’t be able to do so directly. Quite unbelievably, NBCUniversal in the United States have reported Showcase to Google, claiming that the copy of the pilot on the broadcaster’s website is illegal.

mr-robot-dmca

With episodes carrying titles such as eps1.1_ones-and-zer0es.mpeg and eps1.7_wh1ter0se.m4v (not to mention a quite fantastic website at whoismrrobot.com), there can be little doubt that Mr Robot’s creators are reaching out to those who spend their lives online. It’s therefore particularly disappointing that the same target audience will be only too aware of how ridiculous these kinds of careless takedowns are.

Also regrettable is that the bogus NBCUniversal takedown has somehow slipped past Google’s systems that often reject erroneous claims. As can be seen from the image below, the pilot episode page has been completely delisted from Google.

mr-robot-google

The first series of Mr Robot has enjoyed success and great reviews in the U.S. but only now have Canadians been let in on the fun. Those wishing to do so without relying on censored Google search results should follow this link.

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


Source: TorrentFreak