Month: February 2016

Japan Police Arrest 44 in Nationwide Internet Piracy Crackdown

jailAround the world there are periodic arrests of people who are alleged to have been involved in the running of ‘pirate’ sites but the general file-sharing public is usually subjected to much lighter treatment.

Often part of so-called ‘graduated response’ schemes, emailed warnings are the most common weapon of choice for copyright holders to get a “we’re watching you” message to relatively small time pirates. Japan, however, likes to do things a little differently.

According to an announcement by the National Police Agency (NPA), in recent days officers across Japan carried out raids against individuals believed to have downloaded and shared a variety of content without obtaining permission from copyright holders.

In a three-day long crackdown between February 16 and 18, police in 29 prefectures searched 93 locations, eventually arresting a total of 44 people. All are suspected of engaging in online piracy of either movies, music, anime, manga or computer software. All were detained under the Copyright Act.

A wide variety of heavyweight industry groups were behind the action including the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPAJ), the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), the Japan Video Software Association (JVA) and the Software Alliance (BSA).

According to the Association of Copyright for Computer Software (ACCS) the large-scale crackdown on Internet pirates is the seventh of its type since 2009.

Those detained include a 55-year-old office worker who along with the others faces fines between $1,785 and $89,200 (200,000 to 10 million yen) and jail sentences of up to ten years, depending on their offense.

Until 2012 only uploading was considered a criminal offense in Japan but in that same year local authorities upgraded mere downloading to a crime carrying jail sentences of up to two years.

It’s an important point then that police report the suspects as mostly using “shared folder” style P2P applications, a method of sharing that has remained popular in Asia despite the worldwide rise of software such as BitTorrent. Users of this software tend to both share and distribute content for extended periods of time, thus opening them up to the harshest sentences.

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


Source: TorrentFreak

Popular Blu-Ray Ripping Software Shuts Down Following Legal Pressure

slysoftEarlier this month AACS LA, the decryption licensing outfit founded by a group of movie studios and technology partners including Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft and Intel, reminded the U.S. Government about the unauthorized activities of SlySoft.

SlySoft is known for selling various copyright protection circumvention tools including the popular AnyDVD software, of which it sold tens of thousands of copies over the years.

In 2014 AACS-LA won a court case against the software manufacturer in Antigua, where a local court found SlySoft owner Giancarla Bettini guilty of six charges under the 2003 Copyright Act and ordered him to pay a fine of $5,000 per offense. Failure to pay would result in six months in jail for each offense.

However, despite the win for AACS not much changed. SlySoft’s owner immediately filed an appeal which effectively put the convictions on hold. Meanwhile, AnyDVD remained widely available.

This changed yesterday when the site suddenly went blank as the domain’s main nameservers were removed. Initially it was unclear what triggered the downtime, but a few hours ago SlySoft put up a brief statement confirming an early Myce report that legal problems are the cause.

“Due to recent regulatory requirements we have had to cease all activities relating to SlySoft Inc. We wish to thank our loyal customers/clients for their patronage over the years,” the message of the site’s homepage reads.

Slysoft.com down

slysoft

While there’s no confirmation on the exact reason for the sudden shutdown, it’s not unlikely that AACS-LA’s pressure to the United States Trade Representative had a significant impact.

In its request the licensing company asks the Government to place Antigua on its copyright Priority Watch List, effectively escalating it into an “international incident”.

“Circumvention through programs such as SlySoft’s AnyDVD HD is a source for widespread, large-scale and commercial copyright infringement by users located in the United States, as well as Antigua & Barbuda, and many other countries,” AACS wrote (pdf).

“Such circumvention also harms the legitimate consumer electronics and information technology companies that build compliant content playback devices that ‘play by the rules’.”

With or without an intervention from the U.S. Government, it’s clear that after more than a decade the legal pressure became too much for SlySoft and its owner. Whether the software will remain offline indefinitely or if it will perhaps reappear under a new label has yet to be seen.

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


Source: TorrentFreak

Fancy an Anti-Piracy Threat….To Your Dropbox Email Address?

dropboxThere are many different ways that people are able to share files online and they broadly fall into two categories – public and private.

Public sharing is generally carried out using peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent. Anyone participating in a torrent swarm should be aware that unless they take precautions by using a VPN or proxy, their IP address is visible to all of the other people engaged in the same act.

Private sharing can also take many forms, from exchanging content via email to uploading and downloading content from invite-only servers, for example. While it has to be noted there are always weak leaks, this kind of sharing usually receives less interest from anti-piracy companies as it tends to be scattered and somewhat cost ineffective to police.

That being said, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has just managed to scare an unnamed number of pirates after they participated in a presumed-private sharing circle that utilized Dropbox for exchanging copyrighted content.

The story traces back to December 2015 when BREIN obtained an ex parte court order against a man they accused of being the administrator of a Dropbox account that was being used to distribute copyrighted eBooks.

It was alleged that the man was active on a number of Internet forums and on request granted fellow members with access to said account in order to download titles without paying. After a complaint from BREIN the court found this behavior unacceptable and ordered the man, in his absence, to cease his activities or face fines of 2,000 euros per day up to a maximum of 50,000 euros.

However, as previously reported, BREIN is now regularly striking private settlement deals with people it also targets in court. It’s not known if there was a financial arrangement in this particular case but quite clearly BREIN has been able to leverage its position to scare the individuals that had been downloading from the Dropbox account.

Since those downloading from the eBook-filled Dropbox folder were required to give up their email addresses to the person administering the account, they became vulnerable when BREIN discovered his identity. So, as part of the settlement deal, BREIN was then able to contact those individuals with a custom threat, direct to an email address they had previously considered private.

“BREIN has recently found that you are a user (or: Member) of the Dropbox account called ‘—‘, offered by ‘—‘. Your email address is visible to third parties and by BREIN for the purpose of sending you this email,” the email to the assumed pirates begins.

“Without permission of the copyright holders this account was used for sharing copies of eBooks, which is not lawful. The administrator was (as the owner and administrator) responsible for this and the judge has ruled that this person has infringed on the rights of the copyright holders BREIN represents.”

The Dropbox users are then informed that they too have almost certainly infringed copyright due to them downloading copyrighted content from an illegal source and they should therefore consider purchasing their content from legal sources in the future.

“BREIN received several positive responses to [these emails] and it also seems that the exchange of ebooks via the forums that BREIN found in its research has almost completely ceased,” the group said in a statement.

While there’s no suggestion that BREIN intends to take matters further, it seems clear that those sharing or obtaining copyrighted content even from a Dropbox account should be aware that if the person they’re downloading from caves in, their email address (at the very least) could be vulnerable to threats. If that email then correlates with other information available on the web, things certainly have the potential to escalate.

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


Source: TorrentFreak