Alu Card

Well over four years have passed since Megaupload was shutdown, but all this time there has been no real progress on the legal front.

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, a decision that’s currently under appeal.

With the criminal case pending, the civil lawsuits against the major record labels and Hollywood’s top movie studios have been halted as well.

Fearing that they might influence criminal proceedings, Megaupload’s legal team have had these cases put on hold since 2014, with permission from the copyright holders. However, when Megaupload’s counsel recently opted for another stay, the RIAA and MPAA objected.

Instead of simply signing off on another extension, the movie and music industry groups asked for permission to subpoena Megaupload’s former hosting provider Cogent Communications. Suggesting that the data might not be safe, they asked to make a backup of some crucial evidence the provider has in storage.

“To avoid the risk of substantial prejudice to Plaintiffs from the potential loss of the relevant data in Cogent’s possession, the Court should carve out of any further stay of this case the permission for Plaintiffs to subpoena Cogent for a forensic copy of that data,” both groups informed the court.

The MPAA and RIAA even offered to pay the costs of such a backup, which they estimate to be in the range of $20,000 or less.

Megaupload’s legal team, however, rejected the proposal. Among other things, they argued that privacy sensitive data on their former customers should not be freely shared, and asked the court not to issue a subpoena.

Last Friday both parties presented their case during a hearing and after careful deliberation District Court Judge Liam O’Grady has now decided (pdf) not to issue a subpoena.

Instead, he decided that things should stay as they are, meaning that Cogent will be the only party that has a copy of the Megaupload data in question. RIAA, MPAA or Megaupload should, however, inform the court if they have concrete evidence that this data is at risk.

“…if any party gains knowledge that any potential evidence in this case, including digital evidence currently being held by Cogent Communications, Inc., is being or might be destroyed, it should notify the Court immediately.”

This decision can be seen as win for Megaupload and Kim Dotcom, as they have successfully averted an attempt from the movie and music companies to gain access to crucial evidence in the case before the official discovery process begins.

“We are pleased that the Federal Court granted the Megaupload defendants’ request for a stay of the civil copyright cases and denied the MPAA and RIAA plaintiffs’ request for early discovery,” Ira Rothken, Megaupload’s Lead Global Counsel, informs TorrentFreak

“The stay will assist the orderly conduct of parallel criminal related proceedings,” he adds.

As requested by Megaupload, Judge O’Grady agreed to put the civil cases on hold for another six months, after the appeal of the New Zealand extradition decision is heard.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

Search giant Google is facing massive copyright-related pressure in the United States on several fronts, not least the recent consultation on the efficacy of the DMCA and the FCC’s proposals to open up the set-top box market.

Over in Europe, Google faces other issues, including charges that it abused its web search dominance to push its own shopping products and its control of Android to corral users into using Google software. Piling on the pressure, Google is now set to face another European Commission grilling over alleged copyright infringement in Google Images.

This morning Washington-based Getty Images says it will file a complaint with the European Union’s antitrust commission over what it describes as Google’s piracy of its copyright content.

According to an FT report, Getty will accuse Google of undermining its business by harvesting Getty stock images in a manner that “siphons traffic” away from the company’s premium website.

The complaint says that pre-January 2013, Google displayed only low-resolution thumbnails of third party images in Google Image search. However, soon after the company switched to a large, high-resolution slideshow format. This, Getty says, was Google abusing its dominance of Internet image searches.

Getty general counsel Yoko Miyashita says Google’s reproduction of high-res images means that people searching for Getty content via Google have less reason to leave the search giant’s Images services, thus depriving Getty of legitimate traffic.

Google “promoted piracy,” Miyashita says, “resulting in widespread copyright infringement, turning users into accidental pirates.”

As evidence that it was Google’s decision, not outside factors, that caused the drop in traffic to Getty’s site, Miyashita says that traffic collapsed in 2013 immediately after Google made changes on its .com and .co.uk domains. However, Google did not immediately implement the features on its .FR and .DE variants from where traffic remained healthy.

Getty says that it reported its complaints to Google in 2013 but rather than make changes, Google told the company it could either live with the situation or completely opt out of its image search feature.

While offering a solution this is somewhat of a catch-22 situation. On the one hand Getty can accept Google’s use of its content in order to boost visibility on the web, or opt out altogether and face disappearing from search altogether.

In this instance Getty chose to stay on board with Google, describing a complete exit as not being “viable”. Today’s complaint envisions the EU leveling the playing field on Getty’s behalf.

“By standing in the way of a fair market place for images, Google is threatening innovation and jeopardizing artists’ ability to fund the creation of important future works,” Miyashita says.

In due course the European Commission will have to decide whether Google has broken competition rules. Google declined to comment on the case but denies any wrong-doing.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

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For millions of cable TV viewers around the world, the only way to access the content provided by broadcasters is through a set-top box. In many cases these boxes are provided exclusively by broadcasters, forcing out competition.

This consumer-unfriendly situation has attracted the attention of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States who report that 99% of pay-TV subscribers are chained to set-top boxes provided by suppliers at inflated rates.

“Lack of competition has meant few choices and high prices for consumers – on average, $231 in rental fees annually for the average American household. Altogether, U.S. consumers spend $20 billion a year to lease these devices,” the FCC announced in January.

According to the FCC, since 1994 the cost of computers, TVs and mobile phones has dropped by 90%. However, due to a lack of competition in the same period cable set-top box costs have risen by 185%.

“Congress recognized the importance of a competitive marketplace and directed the Commission to adopt rules that will ensure consumers will be able to use the device they prefer for accessing programming they’ve paid for,” the FCC said.

In February the FCC approved a proposal that would allow consumers to swap expensive cable boxes for other devices and apps, a change set to boost competition but deliver a blow to companies such as Comcast who would suddenly be open to competition from companies such as Alphabet/Google.

The proposal triggered a 60-day period in which cable providers and other stakeholders were invited to provide input and comment. Earlier this month President Barack Obama came out in favor of the plan but now the MPAA has weighed in with an unsurprisingly hostile opinion.

In a piece titled “It’s About Creators”, Neil Fried, MPAA Senior Vice President, Government and Regulatory Affairs, accuses FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and even the President of “gloss[ing] over the harm the proposal will cause the creative community.”

Noting that the MPAA’s members are not in the set-top box market, Fried says that they’re in the vital content creation business, content which gets licensed to cable, satellite and other platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon and AppleTV.

“These distributors then profit from the content through equipment sales, subscription fees, advertising, and the monetization of viewers’ online profiles,” the MPAA says.

According to the MPAA, the FCC proposals will ‘take’ the intellectual property of its members and “give” it to the technology industry, effectively ignoring copyright law.

“[T]he FCC proposal requires pay-TV providers to transmit to third-party device manufacturers and internet application developers all the content that pay-TV providers license from programmers, without requiring those third parties to seek consent from the programmers or to compensate them,” the MPAA writes.

Interestingly, not only is the MPAA concerned about competition from third-parties such as Google, but is also suggesting that pirate sites could take advantage of the situation to begin offering new unauthorized services.

“No matter what you think about the pay-TV set-top box market, the FCC may not promote alternatives by taking the intellectual property of the content industry and giving it to some members of the technology industry, or by making it easier for pirate site operators to build a black market business by stealing that content. Unfortunately, that’s what the proposal would do,” the MPAA warns.

Indeed, as one delves deeper into the MPAA’s statement, the scale of their concerns really becomes apparent.

The currently locked-down set-top box environment ensures that via strict licensing arrangements, entertainment industry companies have complete control over which content is offered to the subscriber. However, third-party set-top boxes are expected to provide content from both Pay-TV providers and also content being offered on the Internet. And according to the MPAA that can mean only one thing.

“We anticipate that video navigation device and application providers will rely on the proposed rules to offer ‘cross-platform searches’ and ‘recommendation engines’ that mingle pay-TV content with internet content,” the MPAA says.

“We are not contesting cross-platform searches of authorized content — but we must oppose any regulation that would import the piracy problem from the internet search world into the pay-TV world by mixing pirated content with authorized content, causing further harm to content creators and the creative economy.”

Of course, even if not referenced by name, no MPAA piece of late would be complete without a negative reference to Google. Hollywood blames Google for falling to curtail Internet piracy, a situation that could bleed into the living room with the FCC’s set-top box proposals.

“[O]n the Internet, search engines frequently prioritize search results for sites offering stolen content over those offering authorized content, and searches for film and TV programming almost always yield results that mingle the two types of sites,” the movie industry group complains.

Noting that some have suggested that if the content providers don’t like the situation they’ll just have to litigate under existing copyright law, the MPAA says that is “cold comfort” to content creators.

“[T]he regulation would fundamentally undermine copyright law, create a piracy problem that does not exist today, and place new burdens on content owners to police the app and device market for stolen copies of their works, forcing them to undertake time-consuming, costly litigation, and sustain additional lost revenue to piracy,” the MPAA concludes.

The FCC’s proposals certainly have the potential to open up a huge can of worms. That being said, it’s inevitable that the Internet will eventually dominate the living room, it’s only a question of how controlled – if at all – its pipe will be.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

While there haven’t been any breakthroughs in file-sharing technology in recent years, the piracy ecosystem is constantly evolving.

Torrent sites have traditionally been very popular, but according to a new report published by piracy tracking outfit MUSO, direct download and streaming sites have taken over.

Using data sampled from over 200 million devices by a leading data provider, the company compiled a detailed snapshot of the traffic that flowed to various websites last year.

In total MUSO monitored traffic to 14,000 of the largest global piracy websites, which were visited a dazzling 141 billion times over a 12-month period.

While overall visits remained relatively stable, there was a major shift away from torrent sites to more centralized streaming and direct download sites.

“Our data shows a rapid change in piracy behavior, with a large movement away from torrent usage, and growth in web based piracy,” MUSO informs TF.

The tracking company exclusively shared several interesting data points from the report with TorrentFreak. Zooming in on torrent sites it shows a clear downward trend in number of visits.

From January 2015 to December 2015 these sites saw a 24% reduction in monthly visits. There was still plenty of traffic left though, as the average monthly visits hovered around 3 billion, totaling 34.8 billion for the entire year.

All Torrent Site Visits

The traffic drop applies globally, with some notable exceptions and variation. In France, for example, visits to torrent sites actually went up.

“Our data can split the above traffic by country, and shows that most countries follow this downward trend. There are however some notable exceptions, such as France, where torrent usage increased throughout the year,” MUSO informs us.

The United States remains the country with the most visits to torrent sites, 3.6 billion per year, followed by India and Russia with 3.3 and 2.7 billion visits respectively.

Interestingly, the downward trend mostly applies to public torrent sites. Private trackers, which make up roughly 4% of all torrent site visits, are affected less.

“Unlike public torrent site usage, private torrent site visits started to increase again during the second half of the year, and ended the year with 8% fewer visits per month,” MUSO explains.

Private Tracker Visits

The data is part of a large study into the piracy ecosystem. MUSO publishes two commercial reports today, with the first focusing on music piracy, and the second on film & TV.

Overall, MUSO concludes that the piracy ecosystem is rapidly changing. Over the past year torrent sites lost a big chunk of traffic, but piracy remains relatively flat as the decrease in torrent traffic is offset by an increased interest in other web-based pirate sources.

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

Source: TorrentFreak

When a Pirate Bay server was raided late 2014 several related projects were pulled offline as well, including the site’s image hosting service Bayimg and Pastebay.

While the torrent site itself eventually returned after two months, the other sites remained offline. However, a few days ago something changed.

Without an official announcement Bayimg resurfaced as if nothing ever happened. Suddenly, former users could access their images again and upload new files, although the latter may not be wise.

TorrentFreak reached out to the TPB team to find out what the plans are, and we were informed that the comeback is only temporary.

The site will remain online for a week or so. This allows people to secure their files, if needed, but in a few days the site will close its doors again. Apparently, the TPB team prefers to focus exclusively on the torrent site.

Bayimg

This means that the image hosting service won’t celebrate its tenth anniversary next year.

Bayimg was founded in 2007 as one of many TPB side-projects and promoted as a censorship free hosting platform. It was particularly popular among torrent uploaders, who used it to host screenshots.

However, history has shown that not all Pirate Bay projects are finished, and they certainly don’t always survive. Responding to this criticism the Imgbay team listed a response in its FAQ, which still applies today.

“We do whatever we want, whenever we want. If it doesn’t suit you, you can start your own empire,” the team said back in 2007.

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

Source: TorrentFreak