Month: April 2016

Take me out to the ball game—on Yahoo. The post Yahoo Is Now Streaming Live MLB Games, for Free appeared first on WIRED.

Source: Wired.com Top Stories

WeLive, which launches today, is a flexible apartment-rental service that handles the many hassles that come with finding and setting up your own home. The post Inside WeLive, WeWork’s Dorm-Style Take on Urban Housing appeared first on WIRED.

Source: Wired.com Top Stories

Well over four years have passed since Megaupload was shutdown, but aside from Andrus Nomm’s plea deal there has been little progress in U.S. proceedings.

Last December a New Zealand District Court judge ruled that Kim Dotcom and his colleagues can be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges.

This decision was quickly appealed by the defense and will be heard in August, so until then not much is expected to happen.

But there’s more legal trouble for the defunct file-hosting service. In addition to the criminal case, Megaupload and Kim Dotcom are also battling civil lawsuits against the major record labels and Hollywood’s top movie studios.

Fearing that they might influence criminal proceedings, Megaupload’s legal team previously managed to put these cases on hold, with permission from the copyright holders. However, when Megaupload’s counsel recently opted for another stay pending the extradition appeal, the movie studios objected.

In a new motion filed at a federal court in Virginia, Megaupload’s lawyers inform the court that the studios will only agree to the stay if they can get a copy of Megaupload’s data at Cogent Communications.

“Plaintiffs indicated they would not consent unless Defendants agreed to allow Plaintiffs to immediately serve a subpoena on a third-party, Cogent Communications, to obtain a mirrored copy of Megaupload’s users’ data cached on servers Megaupload had leased from Cogent,” they write (pdf).

Cogent was one of the companies where Megaupload stored its servers. While the original machines are no longer intact, the company has backed up all data which it will keep in storage pending the various lawsuits.

The Hollywood studios now argue that they “would prefer” to have a copy of the cached data as well, but this is something Megaupload has strong legal objections to.

“The cached data belongs to Megaupload’s users. Megaupload was an ISP to its users, who entrusted it with their data, and, by federal statute, Megaupload has certain legal obligations to its users, including confidentiality and privacy,” Megaupload’s legal team writes.

“As Megaupload explained to Plaintiffs in a lengthy meet-and-confer email, that there are numerous issues and legal risks implicated by Plaintiffs’ proposal to serve a subpoena on Cogent to obtain a mirrored copy of the cached user data,” they add.

Both sides discussed the matter in detail but were unable to come to an agreement they would feel comfortable with. Megaupload nonetheless, asks the court to freeze the case for another six-months.

If the court would find it appropriate that someone else other than Cogent gets access to the data, they believe that Megaupload would be the best suited party for this.

The movie studios are expected to submit their objection to the request and ask for a subpoena to copy Megaupload’s data at Cogent. A hearing on the renewed request for a stay is scheduled for later this month.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress.com blogging platform, receives thousands of takedown requests from rightsholders every year.

A substantial percentage of these notices contain inaccuracies and several are clearly fraudulent or abusive.

The company highlights some of the worst offenders in its “Hall of Shame” and has also sued takedown abusers in the past.

In a recent submission to the U.S. Copyright Office, Automattic’s General counsel Paul Sieminski explains that “enforcement robots” and the lack of human review are in part to blame for many of the inaccurate notices.

“While we recognize that the use of automated tools may be necessary with respect to some types of infringement on some types of websites, personal blogs are not the proper targets for enforcement robots.”

“Copyright holders have an obligation to consider fair use before sending a takedown notice, and robots simply cannot tell fair use from foul in any but the most obvious circumstances,” Sieminski adds.

Automattic does its best to comply with the DMCA but the company believes that more should be done to prevent this type of behavior in the future. The current regulations are not sufficient to deter the fraudulent and abusive, the company argues.

Among other changes, the company suggests the addition of statutory damages for DMCA takedown abuse, so the worst offenders can be punished appropriately.

With statutory damages, companies who are victims of DMCA abuse would no longer have to prove actual monetary harm. Instead, the law will prescribe a fixed damages amount.

“Damages from abusive notices of claimed infringement can sometimes be difficult to quantify. Thus, in order to further the goals of compensation and deterrence, statutory damages for abusive notices of claimed infringement and abusive counter notifications could be added either to section 504 or to section 1203.”

In addition, WordPress.com’s parent company suggests the introduction of bonds, as is common in other parts of the legal system. This would mean that copyright holders have something concrete to lose when they make false statements.

“Such a bond may be the only way to ensure that those who cause damage via misrepresentations are called to account for their misdeeds,” Sieminski writes.

Automattic’s comments (pdf) were submitted as part of the Government’s public consultation to evaluate the effectiveness of the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provisions. The U.S. Copyright Office will use the feedback to evaluate whether the DMCA law should be reformed in the future.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

It’s not always who you’d think. The post Search Reveals Who Cares Most About Red Hot Election Issues appeared first on WIRED.

Source: Wired.com Top Stories

Fueled by poor official content availability and unfair pricing, millions of Aussie citizens have turned to unauthorized channels to get their content fix, mainly via torrent and streaming sites.

As a result and after being stirred up largely by Hollywood in the United States, two anti-piracy strategies have emerged. The first involves local ISPs being ordered to block The Pirate Bay and similar sites.

The second is a “three strikes” style warning scheme that would see regular Internet users being monitored by anti-piracy companies and then sent escalating warning notices by their respective ISPs. The idea is that after receiving several these warnings, Internet subscribers will eventually change their ways.

But while site blocking is currently full-steam ahead with The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt, TorrentHound and SolarMovie being targeted in Federal Court, negotiations over the warning scheme have labored for years and yielded few results.

In February it was revealed that three-strikes (or graduated response as its often known) would not be immediately going ahead. As has been the case for years, rightsholders and ISPs simply couldn’t agree over who would pay for what was clearly going to be an expensive system.

This raises the somewhat extraordinary situation that having pleaded with the Australian government for “three strikes”, having submitted a draft to the Australian Communications and Media Authority a year ago, and having missed the government-mandated deadline for implementation last September 1, rightsholders and ISPs are now having to lobby the government to put it on hold.

According to ITNews, earlier today Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton told the CommsDay summit that rightsholders and ISPs were working on a joint approach to the government to ask for the “three strikes” scheme to be suspended for another 12 months.

“[The plan is to say] ‘given that the focus is on website blocking at the moment, let’s put that draft code into abeyance and not have the [Australian Communications and Media Authority] seek to further examine it for possible registration, and we’ll come back in 12 months and see whether it makes sense to try and reinvigorate those commercial discussions’,” Stanton says.

Stanton’s statement is clearly trying to focus on the potential gains to be had via a site-blocking regime but discussions on “three strikes” preceded blocking plans by several years and have always been favored by rightsholders. Indeed, even in countries where blocking is already in place, moves to bring in warning notices have continued unabated. But, as always, the real issue revolves around who will pay.

“Hopefully [the suspension] will give us at least a good holding position, and we’ll see in a year’s time whether there really is a problem of scale that needs to be dealt with by a costly and complex scheme,” Stanton explains.

The problem has always been about costs. Rightsholders strongly believe that ISPs should pay a large proportion of the scheme but that position is rarely supported by the ISPs themselves. Even in countries where notice schemes are going ahead, limits on the numbers of notices are often put in place. Which, given the projected cost in Australia, wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

“At the moment, [the warning system] is manual,” Village Roadshow co-chief executive Graham Burke said in February. “And it’s just so labor intense, that it’s somewhere in the vicinity of $16 to $20 per notice, which is prohibitive. You might as well give people a DVD.”

Reading between the lines it seems possible that rightsholders and ISPs will seek to come up with a more cost-effective automated system during the next year. The agreement to have some kind of system is now in place but it will all rest on the price tag. If that can be brought down to a few cents per warning then it will be all systems go.

In the meantime, troll activity and plans by Village Roadshow to take a few people court not withstanding, Australians appear to have at least another year of trouble-free downloading – if they can get round the site blocks.

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.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the most downloaded movie for the second week in a row.

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.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(1)	Star Wars: The Force Awakens	8.3 / trailer
2	(2)	Deadpool (HDrip subbed)	8.6 / trailer
3	(9)	Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Cam/TS)	7.5 / trailer
4	(4)	The Revenant (Web-DL)	8.2 / trailer
5	(3)	Ice Age: The Great Egg-Scapade (Web-DL)	6.1 / trailer
6	(…)	Hail Caesar! (Webrip)	6.8 / trailer
7	(6)	Kung Fu Panda 3 (Web-DL)	8.0 / trailer
8	(…)	Pandemic (Web-DL)	4.6 / trailer
9	(8)	The Hateful Eight	8.0 / trailer
10	(5)	The 5th Wave (HDrip)	5.4 / trailer

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

Source: TorrentFreak

For more than two decades online piracy has been a widely debated topic in the entertainment industries.

This problem has motivated several companies to sue downloaders or target them with takedown requests, which are sometimes bundled with settlement demands to extract some money in return.

In the United States and Canada a new player recently appeared on this front. The Swiss based outfit “Contra Piracy” is targeting local Internet users with hefty fines for allegedly sharing pirated movies via BitTorrent.

The company operates in a network of law firms and anti-piracy tracking outfits such as Canipre and Logistep. The latter is banned from tracking BitTorrent users in its home country, but has been very active abroad.

Contra Piracy is working with a variety of rightsholders and TorrentFreak has seen notices for several film titles including Anger Of The Dead and Turbo Kid. It’s also the first outfit to apply this scheme for games in North America, as shown by this settlement request for “Metro: Last Light.”

These notices are sent to ISPs who then forward them to their customers, often with the settlement demand included. Internet subscribers in the U.S. and Canada are among the targets, and with proposed settlements of several hundred dollars they are significantly more expensive than competitors such as Rightscorp.

Settlement Request

While it may appear otherwise, Contra Piracy uses DMCA or notice and takedown emails in order to contact subscribers via their ISPs. This is an easy way to get the settlement requests to thousands of alleged pirates at minimal cost but it also means that they don’t know who the subscriber is.

While copyright holders certainly have the right to protect their works, the Contra Piracy operation seems to be rather sloppy.

The company’s website is littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, which becomes apparent from the following quote taken from their questions section.

“You accept all legal risk shoudl a cause of action be issued at a court of relevent jurisdiction. If a claim is issued against you, you will be required to defend that action abd you may become subject to payment of attorney fees and costs associated through poursuit of civil enforcement.”

In addition, the settlement notices are sometimes sent months after the actual infringement took place. For example, a notice received last week lists a file that was allegedly pirated last September, which means that some ISPs will not be able to link the IP-address to a customer.

Finally, Contra Piracy appears to invest very little effort in gaining credibility. The company produced a video advertising how piracy may devastate the livelihoods of filmmakers. Judging from the video below, Contra Piracy itself is low on creative resources too.

Contra Piracy Promo…

Still, the company probably generates enough income to continue its operation in the U.S. and Canada. With a minimal investment, they are able to rake in substantial revenue.

Contra Piracy isn’t completely unknown to torrenting pirates in America. The same outfit was previously involved in a classic copyright trolling case which was thrown out of court.

With the new scheme this is no longer a problem, as the takedown notice approach helps them to bypass the judicial system.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

One might think that if a copyright holder would like to chase down alleged pirates in the UK it would be a relatively simple affair. Track their IP addresses and obtain their identities from ISPs, hire a lawfirm, send out the letters, and wait for the cash.

However, that’s been tried before and it has universally ended in tears for the lawfirms involved. As a result, copyright trolls are now deploying the new tactic of sending the letters via a limited company.

This is a pretty good idea. Not only do these companies avoid the scrutiny of the Solicitors Regulatory Authority but if it all goes wrong in a messy court battle, for example, the limited company can simply cease trading. It’s happened before.

The tactic is being employed by at least two sets of trolls and their partners in the UK. Golden Eye International, for example, is the front company acting for a number of porn copyright holders. By troll standards their operation seems relatively straightforward, but the same cannot be said of TCYK.

TCYK stands for The Company You Keep, a Robert Redford film that’s being used as a money generator by TCYK LLC, a US-based outfit attempting to turn piracy into profit. They’ve just accused an 82-year-old woman of being a movie pirate, which prompted intervention from her “disgusted” local MP.

However, instead of setting up in the UK themselves to chase alleged pirates themselves, TCYK employ the services of a company called Hatton and Berkeley. This is where things get messy.

According to the UK government’s Companies House database, the sole director of Hatton and Berkeley is a man called Paul Carter yet according to his various claims in the media and on his website, Robert Croucher says he is both managing director and owner.

In fact, according to public records Robert Croucher has never been listed as any kind of director of the company nor listed as having had any kind of shareholding. Croucher also claims to be personally based at 43, Berkeley Square in London while dozens of companies share the same address. It appears to be a virtual office.

Only complicating matters is that when alleged pirates receive ‘pay-up-or-else’ letters from Hatton and Berkeley on behalf of TCYK LLC, they aren’t told to pay either.

Instead they are told to send money to a third company called Ranger Bay Ltd, a company operated by a Marcus Auton. A former Bank of America employee and experienced accountant, Auton makes no mention of his copyright troll links on his Linkedin profile but TF has confirmed that his company is receiving money from suspected pirates.

Underlying the TCYK/Hatton and Berkeley/Ranger Bay operation are links with notorious copyright troll Patrick Achache, who is up to his neck in copyright litigation in the United States and elsewhere. Robert Croucher has made no secret of his affiliations with Achache, even posing with him for pictures while announcing a copyright troll invasion of the UK last October.

There can be no doubt that these kinds operations are set up in a complex manner, with some believing the tiered structure is deployed as a defensive mechanism in case everything goes wrong via a failed court action, for example. Of course, that is denied by those involved but not everyone is so keen to accept that at face value.

One of the most persistent troll-watchers in the UK is known as Joe Hickster. He runs the ACS Bore blog (Twitter) which was set up to undermine the activities of the now-defunct ACS:Law but has since expanded to cover any and all copyright troll-affiliated companies operating in the UK.

There’s no denying that Hickster is both persistent and at times abrasive, but he’s a man on a mission who feels it is his duty to help people wrongly accused by trolls. Indeed, Hickster is responsible for at least dozens (he doesn’t keep count) of people not paying companies like ACS:Law, GoldenEye and now Hatton and Berkeley/TCYK/Ranger Bay many tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of pounds.

Now, however, things are getting messy. It began last year when Robert Croucher weighed in on a four year old discussion on phone number database site WhoCallsMe about a company called Westone Business Services Ltd.

Westone (which has Hatton and Berkeley’s current director Paul Carter also listed as a former director) were being called out by reviewers as “scammers” who apparently took their money for business services and ran. Croucher stepped in with his opening lines.

“To whom it may concern, I am Robert Croucher. I have no affiliation to Mr Paul Carter,” he said.

As previous highlighted, Companies House begs to differ. In fact, the government database indicates the pair having been involved in several companies together – here, here, here and here.

All of this information came to the attention of Joe Hickster who stepped into the discussion on March 22 to add his opinion.

“Seems that CMI Business Group (t/a Hatton & Berkeley) are really a Speculative Invoicing outfit, in association with the notorious Patrick Achache, who assisted ACS:LAW and Tilly Baily Irvine, in their actions in sending thousands of letters to people in the UK demanding money for Pornography or other films and threatening to go to Court if they were not paid,” he said.

From there things went quickly downhill. People can read the full exchange here but in summary Hickster accused Croucher of being involved in a “smoke and mirrors” operation, Croucher took offense, and the gloves came off.

“Your previous accusations that Paul Carter is the owner and director of Hatton & Berkeley is flawed, I would advise scrutiny over any of your research from hereon,” Croucher said.

Again, Companies House lists Paul Carter as Hatton and Berkeley’s sole director. Nevertheless, Croucher continued.

“Due to the nature of your defamatory and unsubstantiated remarks above, I shall be seeking legal action against you should this continue,” he said.

The exchanges continued and then Croucher dropped the bombshell.

“You and others have been sending false and defamatory Tweets to myself and worryingly the more junior female members of my staff, this is being reported to the MET Police as it is continued harassment (see Malicious Communications Act 1988),” he told Hickster.

“I will be seeking that charges be brought against you should you not cease and desist from contacting myself, members of my staff or other officers of any of my operating companies. This is being taken very seriously and I believe you are underestimating the impact of your actions.

“To summarise; Please stop contacting me, any of my staff and certainly any of my clients, should you continue I will ensure that you are put to maximum task with respect to issuing legal proceedings against you for ongoing harassment and defamation,” he warned.

TorrentFreak caught up with Joe Hickster who denied harassment.

“I would not DREAM of harassing, ANY innocent person, whether they are young woman or men or pensioners. I would obviously leave that in [Croucher’s] more than capable hands, he has more experience at doing that than I,” he said.

While it’s not unusual for anti-troll activists to hold their battles in public, it’s quite extraordinary for their targets to duke it out on the Internet. Where this will go from here is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for certain. Robert Croucher’s business affairs (and those of the companies he’s involved with) seem far from straightforward and one way or another, with or without Joe Hickster, anti-troll activists in the UK remain intent on exposing them.

Robert Croucher did not immediately respond to TorrentFreak’s request for comment

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

Source: TorrentFreak

In the Internet Age we really do have an April Fools’ Week, don’t we? The post While You Were Offline: Hamilton’s Casting Call Doesn’t Go Quite as Expected appeared first on WIRED.

Source: Wired.com Top Stories