Millions of people regularly pirate movies and music. While this is against the law, most don’t get into trouble.

Some people feel so comfortable about their piracy habits that they openly discuss them online. On Reddit , for example, where most people use a semi-anonymous handle.

Admissions of anonymous Redditors typically go unnoticed by copyright holders and, even when observed, it’s rare for companies to take matters further or ask any questions. A group of independent film companies in the United States set out to buck that trend last year.

The film companies and their attorney Kerry Culpepper say they’re not planning to take Reddit users to court. However, they do want to use public piracy-related comments as evidence in a lawsuit against their Internet provider.

These lawsuits don’t target individual pirates. Instead, the film companies have sued Internet providers including RCN , Grande , and Frontier , for failing to disconnect ‘repeat infringer’ customers.

Trying Once, Twice….

The independent film companies first reached out to Reddit roughly a year ago, asking the company to disclose names, IP addresses, and emails of various users. These people all made piracy-related claims in comments on Reddit, with several indicating that their ISP did little to stop this activity.

Reddit was unhappy with the subpoena, characterizing it as overbroad and more akin to a fishing expedition than regular evidence gathering. Reddit only handed over the details of one user whose comment mentioned RCN directly, denying the rest to protect users’ First Amendment right to anonymous speech.

The court eventually agreed with this defense, concluding that Redditors’ First Amendment right to anonymous speech outweighs the interest of rightsholders . According to Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler, the filmmakers have other options to obtain this type of information, including through RCN itself.

After this setback, the rightsholders filed an adjusted request in their case against ISP Grande. This second attempt wasn’t successful either, as Judge Beeler again concluded that the Redditors’ right to anonymous speech weighs stronger than the rightsholders’ need for additional evidence.

Third Time’s The Charm?

This week, attorney Kerry Culpepper returned to the California federal court with a request for Reddit to comply with another subpoena. This time, it’s part of the case against Internet provider Frontier Communications .

Broadly speaking, the request looks similar to those seen before. The film companies, Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures, highlight several comments from Redditors that could help to prove that the ISP didn’t take proper action against repeat infringers, or that lax enforcement acted as a draw to potential pirates.

“In the Reddit ‘Piracy’ forum, Reddit user’Cyb3rR****’ admits to using Frontier’s service to pirate from the notorious piracy websites 1337x and PirateBay and that ‘I’ve been torrenting unprotected for like a decade and never gotten [a DMCA notice]’,” the companies write.

Other Redditors made similar remarks, suggesting that using the ISP to pirate movies shouldn’t result in any trouble.

‘This Time is Different’

In common with the earlier cases, Reddit is refusing to comply. Last week, it objected to the subpoena, arguing that the request violates its users’ rights to anonymous speech. This prompted the movie companies to go to court again, with a new plan of attack.

The requested information is relevant and proportional to the needs of the case, they argue before the court. Contrary to the earlier cases, the subpoena no longer seeks any names and email addresses, only the IP address logs.

“Reddit asserts that the information Movants request is not permissible under the First Amendment. However, Movants’ subpoena does not request anonymous users’ identities.

“Rather, the subpoena is limited to requesting the Reddit users’ IP address logs. Accordingly, the analysis of Reddit I and Reddit II is not applicable,” the movie companies add.

‘Users Are not the Target’

According to the rightsholders, Reddit didn’t identify any potential harm to the affected users. They further note that there are no plans to go after these people directly.

“Movants are not seeking to retaliate economically or officially against these Reddit users. Rather, Movants wish to use their comments as evidence that Frontier has no meaningful policy for terminating repeat infringers and this lax or no policy was a draw for using Frontier’s service.”

Reddit previously sent a letter to the movie companies’ attorney questioning whether the IP-addresses are relevant to the copyright infringement claims. In addition, it suggested that there might be other sources of evidence available to prove the same.

The request doesn’t disclose why IP addresses are needed, since the anonymous comments are public. One theory would be that the rightsholders will check these addresses for repeat infringements, which might add extra weight to their claims.

Reddit has yet to respond in court but, based on its earlier responses, it will do all it can to keep users’ information private.

This results in a similar standoff as before, albeit with a twist. Since Frontier is not planning to disclose customer identification information, the filmmakers see these comments as important evidence, and this time they hope that the court agrees.

Ultimately, it will be up to the court to decide whether it’s indeed different this time, or not.

—

A copy of the motion to compel Reddit to respond to the subpoena is available here (pdf) . A copy of Reddit’s letter to the attorney can be found here (pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In recent months, rightsholders of all ilks have filed lawsuits against companies that develop AI models.

The list includes record labels, individual authors, visual artists, and more recently the New York Times. These rightsholders all object to the presumed use of their work without proper compensation.

Several of the lawsuits filed by book authors include a piracy component as well. The cases allege that tech companies, including Meta and OpenAI, used the controversial Books3 dataset to train their models.

The Books3 dataset has a clear piracy angle. It was created by AI researcher Shawn Presser in 2020, who scraped the library of ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik. This book archive was publicly hosted by digital archiving collective ‘ The Eye ‘ at the time, alongside various other data sources.

The general vision was that the plaintext collection of more than 195,000 books, which is nearly 37GB in size, could help AI enthusiasts build better models, which would spur innovation.

AI Boom Triggers Copyright Troubles

Presser wasn’t wrong, but the dataset didn’t just help garage AI startups. Several of the world’s largest tech companies discovered it too and used it to improve their own language models.

For years, Books3 continued to be freely and widely available, aiding AI researchers and enthusiasts around the world. However, when the AI boom reached the mainstream last year, book authors and publishers took notice, then took retaliatory action.

For example, Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance demanded The Eye to remove their copy of Books3, which it did. The dataset also disappeared from the website of AI company Huggingface, citing reported copyright infringement , while others considered their options.

As previously reported by Wired, Bloomberg informed Rights Alliance that it doesn’t plan to train future versions of its BloombergGPT model using Books3, and other companies likely made similar decisions behind closed doors.

Meta Admits Books3 Use

These are noteworthy developments but not all complaints can be resolved with promises. Several lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta remain ongoing, accusing the companies of using the Books3 dataset to train their models.

While OpenAI and Meta are very cautious about discussing the subject in public, Meta provided more context in a California federal court this week.

Responding to a lawsuit from writer/comedian Sarah Silverman, author Richard Kadrey, and other rights holders, the tech giant admits that “portions of Books3” were used to train the Llama AI model before its public release.

“Meta admits that it used portions of the Books3 dataset, among many other materials, to train Llama 1 and Llama 2,” Meta writes in its answer.

This admission doesn’t come as a massive surprise as several sources, including research papers, basically reached the same conclusion. While the use of Books3 is not contested by Meta, the question remains whether the company was in the wrong when it did so.

Meta Denies Copyright Infringement

Meta’s answer admits the use of Books3 but denies various other allegations and claims. For example, the authors alleged that Meta trained its AI on copyrighted works without permission. The answer doesn’t directly deny this but notes that consent or compensation is not necessarily required.

“To the extent a response is deemed required, Meta denies that its use of copyrighted works to train Llama required consent, credit, or compensation,” Meta writes.

The authors further stated that, as far as their books appear in the Books3 database, they are referred to as “infringed works”. This prompted Meta to respond with yet another denial. “Meta denies that it infringed Plaintiffs’ alleged copyrights,” the company writes.

Fair Use

Meta’s response doesn’t provide much additional detail and the full defense will be revealed as the case progresses. It is clear, however, that the company plans to rely on a fair use defense, at least in part.

“To the extent that Meta made any unauthorized copies of any Plaintiffs’ registered copyrighted works, such copies constitute fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107,” Meta notes.

The fair use angle is expected to be a key part of this and other AI lawsuits. This doesn’t only apply to ‘pirate’ sources but also to the use of content that’s published through official channels, but used without explicit permission.

These legal battles are still in their early stages, but may ultimately find their way to the Supreme Court if needed. AI companies have stressed that progress will be hampered if rules and regulations are too strict.

Earlier this week, OpenAI mentioned that fair use is both necessary and critical to building competitive AI models , noting that news organizations can opt out if they wish. Needless to say, this option didn’t previously exist, certainly not for the Books3 database.

We presume that when Presser created Books3, he never envisioned the dataset to be at the center of landmark lawsuits that could define the future of AI. However, the stakes have changed, and the well-intended ‘archiving’ effort is now part of a major copyright clash.

—

A copy of Meta’s response to the author’s first consolidated amended complaint is available here (pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In 2012, Google expanded its transparency report with a new section dedicated to DMCA takedown requests .

For the first time, outsiders were able to see which URLs were being targeted by copyright holders and in what quantity.

The decision to make this information public was in part triggered by a rapid increase in removal requests. The increased activity impacted the “free flow of information”, the search engine argued.

According to Fred von Lohmann, Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel at the time, the volume of DMCA notices was skyrocketing . At times, the company was processing over 250,000 takedown requests a week, more than previously received in an entire year.

Today, that weekly figure of 250,000 requests has increased to well over 30 million, a new record. While Google has set plenty of records in the past, the recent resurgence in DMCA takedowns is somewhat atypical.

From Millions to Over a Billion

When Google first made the numbers public it was processing a few million DMCA takedown requests in a year. That number swiftly increased to hundreds of millions and eventually reached a billion yearly DMCA requests in 2016.

The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017, the takedown volume started to decline . The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results.

By downranking pirate sites , infringing content became harder to find. As a result, Google processed fewer takedown notices, a welcome change for both rightsholders and the search engine.

DMCA Resurgence

Today, Google continues to make pirate sites less visible in search, but the reduction in takedown notices didn’t last. On the contrary, over the past several months, Google search processed a record number of DMCA notices.

Last summer, the search giant reached a new milestone when it recorded the 7 billionth takedown request and, five months later, it can add more than 700 million new ones to this tally.

The company is now handling removal requests at a rate of more than 1.6 billion per year; a new record. This is more than 30 million takedown requests per week and roughly 50 every second.

The graph below illustrates how these numbers have grown over time, with the most recent uptick on the right.

Will it Last?

We noticed that the volume of takedown requests had begun to increase again last August. At the time, we suggested that this could be a temporary uptick since the increase in volume could in large part be attributed to adult company MG Premium, which reported hundreds of millions of URLs in just a few months.

Since MG Premium scaled down its efforts last summer, volumes should have normalized. What we didn’t foresee was several other rightsholders stepping in to take over.

Over the past few months, takedown outfits Link-Busters.com and Comeso have increased their efforts. Together, they now submit roughly two-thirds of the recent DMCA notices to Google. If that persists, this would be good for a billion yearly requests.

The two companies work with a variety of rightsholders. Link-Busters mostly works with major publishers , including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Hachette. Comeso, in turn , has sent most takedowns on behalf of KakaoPage, a major webtoon publisher.

In the past, video and music rightsholders were responsible for the bulk of DMCA requests, but this has now switched to publishers. How Google’s takedown volume develops going forward, and if any new records will be broken in the near future, will largely depend on these players.

Then again, it’s also possible that an entirely new anti-piracy outfit will surface and take over. There’s never a dull moment in takedown land.

—

_{For background, this article refers to the number of URLs reported in DMCA takedown requests to Google. The search engine can remove the URLs from its index in response, or place them on a preemptive blacklist if they are not yet indexed. Finally, a small number of notices don’t link to infringing material, requiring no response from Google.}

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Vietnam’s approach to the protection of intellectual property rights has long been criticized by the United States, earning the country prominent placement in successive USTR Special 301 Reports.

With the world’s largest online piracy operations now publicly linked to Vietnam, Hollywood has been urging authorities to take meaningful enforcement action. A criminal complaint against the operator of Phimmoi.net had previously offered some optimism but for reasons that still aren’t clear, local authorities suspended the investigation.

News that police in Vietnam have just arrested three men behind an illegal streaming operation could be a step in the right direction, even if MPA/ACE had bigger fish in mind when they visited Vietnam last summer.

Alleged Leader Arrested

Reports that authorities had made three arrests first appeared on Tuesday. Information supplied by the Quang Binh Provincial Police Department and later reported by state-controlled media, claims that Phan Ngoc Tuan, a resident of Quang Ninh district, Quang Binh province, is the leader of a piracy group behind the websites bilutvt.net, tvhayh.org and animefull.net.

According to the authorities, 30-year-old Tuan sought to buy source code for the sites back in 2019. The aim was to launch services that would distribute movies to the public, without permission from rightsholders, for the purpose of generating illegal profits from advertising.

Hired Online, Two ‘Employees’ Also Arrested

It’s alleged that Tuan later went on to recruit two men, 24-year-old Ngo Quang Huy and 25-year-old Nguyen Thanh Nhan, both of Ho Chi Minh City. According to the authorities, the men never met in person, since all duties were assigned via Telegram.

Police say Huy and Nhan were tasked with downloading, editing and distributing movies, but offered no specific details in relation to that work. Images of all three men have since been published online, but the main focus is on alleged ringleader, Phan Ngoc Tuan.

Three suspects arrested (image credits: 1 , 2 )

Profits From Advertising

Information released by the authorities states that Tuan tried to stay in the shadows by using “anonymous intermediary servers” and rented movie storage servers located overseas. In total, police say that Tuan stored 188,322 movie files, around 40TB of data.

During the raid on his home, police seized two desktop computers, a laptop and a tablet device, a “high-speed wifi transmitter” and three mobile phones. Three bank accounts were also seized. No value was placed on deposits but its claimed that Tuan generated profits of 80 to 100 million VND per month (US$3,300 to US$4,100) to an estimated total of 3 billion VND (US$123,000)

The authorities are being especially clear on the alleged offenses and which laws apply.

The confirmed prosecution will be for “Infringement of copyright and related rights” under Article 225 of the Penal Code; when a person (without the permission of the copyright holder) intentionally copies a copyrighted work and/or distributes copies of the work to the public, that person can be criminally prosecuted.

Whether the type of advertising deployed on Tuan’s sites will form part of the prosecution is unclear, but illegal gambling ads are clearly visible on bilutvt.net, which for unexplained reasons is still online.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Over the past several years and especially over the past several months, major rightsholders’ interest in India appears to have risen.

India’s piracy rates provide the most obvious explanation but seemingly sudden and escalating use of India-based anti-piracy outfits is more difficult to quantify. Maybe they’re simply cheaper than the alternatives, or perhaps the jurisdiction has benefits. Certainly, Indian courts might already be providing access to one of the most powerful anti-piracy tools seen in years.

Cautious Approach Disappears Into History

Last May, the High Court in Delhi issued an injunction that among other things, required ISPs to block domain names that hadn’t even been registered. That was just another example of what can be obtained relatively easily from an Indian court today that would’ve been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Guided by the experience of courts in other jurisdictions, in April 2019 the High Court of Delhi issued the country’s first dynamic injunction , carefully crafted to deal with pirate site countermeasures such as domain hopping and mirror sites.

The Court acknowledged the “wide ramifications” of permanent site-wide blocking orders, the need to mitigate risk of over-blocking, and the corresponding need for judicial scrutiny. Justice Manmohan’s order also considered the importance of balancing the interests of rightsholders, ISPs, and the public, with a strictly proportionate response to online piracy.

Supercharging Site-Blocking

Having brought India right up to date, courts seemed happy to press ahead. Within months, a court ordered the preemptive blocking of over 1,100 websites , to protect a movie that hadn’t been released yet, while injunctions issued previously were updated to tackle the hydras .

In September 2022, the High Court of Delhi issued a site-blocking injunction that required domain registrars in the United States to immediately suspend a list of site domain names. The stated aim was to prevent an unreleased movie from appearing on those domains, at an unknown date sometime in the future. A month later another court handed down an order to block over 13,400 sites to protect another unreleased movie.

Major U.S. rightsholders could ask a court in the United States for something similar but for obvious reasons, have not. However, Indian courts are much more predictable and, when it comes to site-blocking injunctions, now seem receptive to new mechanisms being included to ensure compliance.

Suspending Domains Under Dynamic+ Injunctions

What we’re able to show today is that at least one domain registrar in the United States has suspended domain names under the instructions of the High Court of Delhi. The suspensions are part of a dynamic+ injunction issued in India last year, to protect the rights of several Hollywood studios and Netflix, ostensibly in India.

There are more than 70 domains in the injunction and orders for domain registrars to suspend them all have already been issued.

The most striking domain in the list is Aniwave.to, a site dedicated to anime that currently receives 317 million visits per month; roughly 40% from the U.S., 9% from the United Kingdom, 8% from Canada, 3.5% Australia, and 2.5% Philippines.

Whatever percentage visit from India, it’s less than 2.5% of the site’s traffic according to SimilarWeb stats. A domain suspension, meanwhile, has global repercussions.

MPA Requests Blocking Injunction

“In a continued effort to curb dissemination of pirated content and its availability on internet, the Plaintiffs who are well established Hollywood Studios have approached this Court seeking blocking and removal of their copyrighted content, from the internet, accessed through rogue websites,” an order handed down by the High Court of Delhi explains.

“The suit is filed against a number of rogue websites who are unlawfully disseminating and communicating a large quantum of copyrighted content of the Plaintiffs,” the order continues, adding that the content “can be accessed and viewed on a variety of devices including Televisions, Personal Computers, Laptops, Tablets, Mobile Phones, etc.”

The order notes that the “rogue websites” offer “illegal viewing almost on a real-time basis” of the studios’ content including Stranger Things, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Batman, Spider Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, and The Jungle Book.

Court Issues Dynamic+ Injnction

In light of the claims, the Court says it’s necessary to restrain the sites from streaming, reproducing, distributing, making available to the public and/or communicating to the public, in any manner, any copyrighted content owned by the Plaintiffs including any content they may own in the future.

The scope of the injunction includes all domains listed above, plus any mirror/redirect websites or alphanumeric websites or any variations thereof. At this point the scope of the injunction starts to become apparent.

“….websites identified in the present suit or any mirror/redirect websites or alphanumeric websites, or any variations thereof including those websites which are associated with the Defendants’ websites either based on the name, branding, identity of its operator, or discovered to provide additional means of accessing the Defendant’s website, and other domains/ domain along with their sub-domains and sub-directories, owners, website operators/ entities or even sources of content.”

Assumed association due to “sources of content” could be significant. The vast majority of movie and TV show piracy sites use the same pool of movie and TV show content by default. Arguing these sources of content are effectively the same wouldn’t be difficult in this type of court procedure, especially when arguing otherwise would require a pirate site operator to explain to the contrary.

Block Domains But Also Suspend Them

The order instructs local ISPs to block the domains listed above and as explained, any and all domains (plus “associated” domains) that subsequently appear to facilitate access to them, in perpetuity. However, it also goes further still by ordering domain name registrars to “lock and suspend” all affected domains while handing over domain owners’ details to the Hollywood studios.

“The Domain Name Registrars (DNRs) of the rogue websites’ domain names, upon being intimated by the Plaintiffs shall lock and suspend the said domain names. In addition, any details relating to the registrants of the said domain names including KYC, credit card, mobile number, etc. be also provided to the Plaintiffs,” the order reads.

Whether all registrars will comply remains to be seen but if they want to continue doing business in India, they appear to have little choice . Non-compliance could mean that registrars themselves will be blocked by ISPs.

TorrentFreak can confirm that at least two domains were suspended recently due to this action; fztvseries.mobi and mobiletvshows.net

“In the month of December, Namecheap suspended our domains based on the order from an Indian court,” the former owner of the domains informed us this week.

“The suspension was done without any warning or any sort of communication from either Namecheap or the plaintiff. It was only after noticing the suspension that we reached out to Namecheap. It took approximately five days for Namecheap to reply with an explanation for the suspension.”

Communication between the domain owner and Namecheap is included below.

Follow-up request for information

Eventual response from Namecheap

“Indian courts have a reputation of issuing broad orders that encompass thousands of websites in a single directive, often without thorough verification. Such practices could potentially cause significant global disruption, especially if domain registrars begin to comply with orders from various countries,” the former domain owner concludes.

The sites in question have moved to new domains (fztvseries.live and mobiletvshows.site) and claim that traffic levels have returned to 80% of the levels seen before the suspensions.

Given the nature of the injunction, those domains are vulnerable to being blocked at bare minimum or even seized again. The bigger question is whether Indian courts are now being viewed as the preferred option for enforcement moving forward.

The order issued by the High Court of Delhi can be found here ( pdf )

The domains affected by the initial order are listed below but according to the Court’s instructions, any domains that can be linked to these sites or their operators in future must also be blocked and suspended

fztvseries.mobi
mobiletvshows.net
www.stagatv.com
vexmovies.uno
coolmoviez.cloud
coolmoviez.com.de
coolmoviez.com.co
fztvseries.mobi
mobiletvshows.net
www.stagatv.com
vexmovies.uno
www.coolmoviez.cloud
www.coolmoviez.com.de
www.coolmoviez.com.co
aniwave.to
aniwave.bz
aniwave.ws
aniwave.tv
www.animehana.in
www.animesenpai4u.com
gogoanime.is
w7.123animes.mobi
anix.to
freemovies2021.com
freemovieswatch.tv
freemovieswatch.net
medeberiyaa.com
medeberiyaa.com
kinogo.biz
ridomovies.pw
lmoviestv.com
moviehax.me
ripcrabbyanime.in
moviehunt.us
mlwbd.rent
mlwbd.digital
mlwbd.love
mlwbd.me
mlwbdofficial.com
mlwbd.photos
www.mov.onl
nyafilmer.gg
02tvseries2.com
projectfreetv.one
raretoons.me
raretoonsindia.in.net
uflix.cc
waatchmoviess.top
waatchmovies.top
watchmoviiess.top
yifymovies.xyz
kickassanime.am
kaas.am
kickass.onl
wwI.kickass.help
hindimoviesonline.to
www.hindimovies.to
freedrivemovie.lol
freeseries.watch
hdmp4mania2.com
hdmp4mania I .net
genvideos.org
hdflixtor.com
www.24-hd.com
123serieshd.ru
anihdplay.com
nocensor.cloud
nocensor.click
www2.showbox-movies.net
moviestowatch.tv
moviestowatch.cc
torrentbay.net

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Despite the widespread availability of legal options, online piracy remains rampant. Every day pirate sites are visited hundreds of millions of times.

This presents a serious problem for major content producers, Hollywood studios included, who are working hard to shut down the most egregious piracy sources.

141 Billion Visits in 2023

Fresh data released by piracy tracking outfit MUSO and consulting firm Kearney suggests that piracy remains rampant nonetheless. In a report released today they reveal that there were 141 billion video piracy visits globally in 2023, a 12% increase since 2019.

It’s not clear why the report uses a comparison base this far out. The reported visits for 2023 are up roughly 10% when compared to previously released data for 2022.

The data covers over 730,000 films and TV titles and includes a wide variety of pirate sites. These include sites that offer software and music, but only visits to video content are counted. Traditionally, this is the most popular content category by far.

TV, Films, Anime, and Sport

Zooming in on the numbers we see that film and TV content are in the lead, good for 65% of the visits. Anime is in second place with a quarter of all video piracy visits, followed at a distance by live sports (9%) and live linear broadcasts (1%).

There are some regional differences in what type of content is most popular. In part, this depends on how easy or affordable it is to access legal content. In the Asia–Pacific region, for example, live sports accounts for 5.3% of pirate site visits, a figure that can reach 11.3% in the US.

In previous years we have repeatedly mentioned that the United States is the top country when it comes to the absolute number of pirate site visits. There was no change in 2023, but there is some serious competition now.

India Rises Through the Ranks

India is on its way to surpass the U.S. as the top piracy nation in the world. This isn’t a surprise as India is also the country with the largest population, over 1.4 billion people. However, the increase in Internet penetration is just as important.

Roughly 15 years ago, India only had about five million broadband subscribers. Today, there are more than 700 million. This massive increase in access has left its mark on society and, as predicted , proved to be a growth market for pirates.

The 2023 report places the U.S. and India as joint leaders, both with 11% of the global video piracy visits. However, the piracy rate in India has increased 80% year-on-year, which suggests that it will be the sole leader next year. The top four is completed by Russia (6%) and the UK (3%) at a respectable distance.

Comparing countries without taking the population size into account doesn’t say much, of course. If we look at the average number of visits per capita, a new region comes to the fore.

Europe leads the relative chart with 34 pirate site visits per capita, followed by North America with 26 visits. With 13 visits, the relative numbers are much lower in South America, dropping to ‘just’ 5 visits per capita in the Asia-Pacific region.

Piracy as a Goldmine

These numbers are not exactly uplifting for the video entertainment industry. However, MUSO and Kearney stress that understanding why people pirate, and responding appropriately, can help to convert some pirates into paying consumers.

“The global rise of video content piracy is concerning. However, with a slight adjustment of perspective, it also becomes an opportunity for those media companies that can change their approach to commercialize pirate users and plug the revenue leakage,” Kearney’s Christophe Firth says.

MUSO Founder and CEO, Andy Chatterley, adds that piracy today is more of a problem than ever, so understanding why people pirate is key.

“MUSO’s data is driving real transformation for entertainment companies to truly understand how their content can be better positioned, better marketed and better tailored towards a vast audience that is not currently being satisfied with legal offerings,” Chatterley says.

According to the press release, legal subscription services can earn billions extra if they convert just a fraction of these pirates. This messaging is in part out of self-interest, as MUSO offers piracy insights and solutions as a commercial service.

In closing, it’s worth highlighting that the numbers reported above only apply to regular pirate site visits. This means that a large and growing part of the piracy ecosystem, including dedicated piracy apps and illegal IPTV offerings, are not included.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Every day, millions of people from all over the world submit posts, comments, and other content to Reddit.

The social news and discussion platform has been around for more than 17 years and over time its popularity has only increased.

With Reddit about to reach adulthood, the site has certain responsibilities. In recent years, these have included the publication of a transparency report documenting how various legal policies affect the site’s content.

The report shows how Reddit’s content policy leads to the deletion of millions of posts per week, including spam, hateful content, sexualization of minors, prohibited goods, and harassment. As a result, more than five million user accounts were banned last year, either temporarily or permanently.

DMCA Notices and Takedowns Increase

The number is significant, especially when taking into account that it doesn’t include copyright-related complaints. Reddit’s responses to DMCA takedown notices and the site’s handling of excessive copyright infringement are listed separately in the “legal removals” section.

These figures have been steadily increasing, and last year was no exception, according to the transparency report.

“In 2022, we saw a 43% increase over the previous year in the total number of copyright notices received, a 126% increase in the amount of content reported for removal, and a 97% increase in the amount of content removed,” Reddit reports.

Compared to other content removals, copyright actions are relatively modest. In 2022, Reddit received 254,632 copyright notices, in which rightsholders asked the site to remove 1,668,452 pieces of content. Of these requests, close to 80% resulted in items being removed.

These numbers are relatively small compared to the dozens of millions of ‘content policy’ removals. However, they carry a different weight as the content is reported by third-party actors, instead of Reddit mods or bots.

User and Subreddit Bans

This increase is not limited to the copyrighted links and content removed, subreddits are affected too. Several popular Reddit communities have to jump through hoops to avoid getting banned but not all manage to do so. In 2022, Reddit booted 3,215 subreddits for excessive copyright infringement.

According to Reddit’s transparency report, this is a 105% increase year over year but this percentage seems a bit high, as the site already reported 2,625 subreddit bans last year. That said, the trend is definitely up. If we go back to 2020, ‘only’ 514 subreddits were banned.

A similar trend emerges for users banned for excessive copyright infringement. In 2020, 303 users were banned, increasing to 2,813 users in 2021, reaching 5,853 last year. That’s close to a twentyfold increase in three years.

Fan-Notices

Not all DMCA notices are accepted as true. As mentioned earlier, close to 80% are rejected for various reasons. This can simply mean that some information is missing, but there are also more notable rejections.

For example, Reddit reports that several of the notices received didn’t appear to come from the legitimate rightsholder, but from fans instead.

“The notices contained clear signals that they were submitted by the creators’ fans, who did not have express authorization from the creators to do so. A copyright notice must come from either the copyright owner or an expressly designated agent, so Reddit declined to process these notices.”

All in all, it’s clear that Reddit has its hands full complying with DMCA takedown notices. With billions of pieces of user-generated content, this isn’t a major surprise. That said, it’s good to keep an eye on these developments with help from Reddit’s transparency reports.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

As Nintendo’s official website for Switch game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom states, “The adventure begins on May 12.” Officially, at least.

The hotly anticipated sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will go on sale next month in digital and physical formats, with the latter also available as a special Collector’s Edition.

Targeted at Zelda connoisseurs, the special edition includes “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (physical version), Artbook, SteelBook® case, Steel Poster, and a set of four pin badges.”

Pre-Release Leak: February 2023

On February 20, 2023, Eurogamer reported that a 200-page ‘Artbook’ had been leaked online, containing details of new characters, enemies, enemy types, and new locations.

“It’s currently unclear how this art book managed to leak, so far in advance of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s official launch date,” the publication noted at the time.

Two months later, it’s clear that a) Nintendo is very aware of the leak and b) they have a specific internet user in mind as the potential leaker.

DMCA Takedown Sent to Discord

On February 21, Nintendo of America sent a DMCA notice to Discord. The complaint targeted a Discord channel named “Tears of the Kingdom Official Discord Server.”

The notice went on to target six specific URLs featuring images or links to images “from Nintendo’s copyright-protected and unreleased special edition art book for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom video game in violation of Nintendo’s rights.”

Just eight minutes after the takedown notice was sent to Discord, the platform acknowledged the complaint and told Nintendo that the content “will be removed promptly.”

Around ten hours after sending the initial takedown notice, Nintendo followed up with a request for “immediate review and takedown” of the Discord channel, noting that members were still distributing the pre-release artwork using direct messages and links.

“Additionally, some members have been assigned the role of ‘The PDF Pirate’ which identifies them as a source for PDF files of the infringing art book images. For your review, we have also provided screenshots from the server featuring four members and a brief description below highlighting their activity in the server.”

One of the direct download links

Around 18 hours later, Discord said it had “issued a warning to the server for the reported activity.” In its original notice, Nintendo had objected to the term ‘official’ being used in the server name since the “server is not operated or authorized by Nintendo.”

Discord said that if Nintendo was “concerned about potential consumer confusion,” it might want to file a trademark complaint.

Nintendo Goes to Court in California

On Friday, April 4, 2023, Nintendo of America’s attorneys filed an application for a DMCA subpoena at a district court in California.

Referencing the notices sent to Discord in respect of the “copyright-protected and unreleased special edition art book for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” the company highlights a Discord channel and a specific user.

“[Nintendo of America] is requesting the attached proposed subpoena that would order Discord Inc. …to disclose the identity, including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), and e-mail addresses(es) of the user Julien#2743, who is responsible for posting infringing content that appeared at the following channel Discord channel Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom..[..] .

Information available on other platforms, Reddit in particular, suggests that the person Nintendo is hoping to identify is the operator of the Discord channel and, at least potentially, the person who leaked the original content.

A two-month-old comment on the origin of the leak suggests the source was “a long time friend.” A comment in response questioned why someone would get a friend “fired for internet brownie points?”

Nintendo’s DMCA subpoena application can be found here (pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

It’s the summer of 2008 and the owner of a fairly new streaming site based in the north of England is on his way to a London hotel to meet a potential investor.

Two surveillance teams are already in place; one covertly video recording the meeting from a table in the restaurant, another monitoring the exits. After the meeting, the site owner returns to the north by train, a surveillance team in tow.

After getting off the train, a new surveillance team takes over and shadows the site owner home. No investment was forthcoming; the ‘investor’ was actually a private investigator working for copyright holders. A high-profile police raid followed just a month later, a lengthy prison sentence four years after that.

Piracy Investigations Take Place in ‘Real Life’

Fifteen years ago, covert piracy investigations were mostly the stuff of rumors and rarely documented in public. That the investigation detailed above was conducted by private companies, rather than the police, was controversial but not controversial enough to stop them.

Indeed, private companies conducting their own anti-piracy investigations today have the ability to peer into private lives as they go about protecting and enforcing their intellectual property rights. Since this necessarily involves the collection of personal data, companies like the Premier League sometimes disclose the type of information they collect as part of their privacy policies.

Documentation reveals that the Premier League collects and uses personal data about “individuals who have, might have or are likely to infringe the Premier League’s intellectual property rights.” Depending on the circumstances, that might also entail collecting personal data on others related to them.

Open Source Research, Third-Party Investigators

Given the wealth of information available online today covering billions of people, it’s no surprise that the Premier League leverages ‘open source’ data when defending its rights. The pool of information available online today is alarmingly deep and as long as there is a lawful basis to process personal data, companies are allowed to do so.

The Premier League’s ‘lawful basis’ for processing personal data mainly relies on its ‘legitimate interests’ when conducting anti-piracy investigations. This information spans the most basic of identifiers, such as a name, through to suspects’ leisure time activities.

Prime Data, Ripe for Collection

Being able to put a name to a suspected pirate is crucial in most investigations, but oftentimes it’s not the first piece of personal data to become available. Premier League says that it obtains names using open source research, “on-the-ground” investigations, and via discussions with potential defendants and other third parties. The same is true for contact details, such as email address and telephone numbers. IP addresses are also collected.

Other major pieces of information useful to an investigation include physical addresses, both residential and other premises. Open source research will play a roll but affiliates of infringers may also hand over location data, perfect for when the Premier League needs to hand over important paperwork regarding legal claims.

Affiliates and Social Media

While it’s not uncommon for pirates to operate in groups, any type of close affiliate risks having their information processed by the Premier League.

Friends, family and work colleagues may or may not be part of the scheme but to rule them in or out, the Premier League needs to “understand the relationship between them and who is liable, and to identify residential addresses for service of claims.”

Before identifying any colleagues, it’s possible the suspect’s job will have been scoped out in advance, but sequences of discovery aren’t determined in advance or set in stone. The goal here is to “establish level of involvement/extent of liability.”

Any photographs obtained from the internet, including those posted on social media, could help to “counter claims by individuals denying involvement, and to identify person to be served and prove personal service has occurred.”

Time to Get Personal

Other data that can be legally collected and processed include personal characteristics, such as physical descriptions of age, gender, height, stature, plus skin and hair color. This information helps to “counter claims by individuals denying involvement, and to identify person to be served and prove personal service has occurred.”

Other categories include lifestyle data – hobbies, interests, and expenditures. This type of information can be useful in many ways but Premier League lists only two purposes for collection. “To ascertain ability to make payments in respect of infringements and the scale of an infringer’s operation.”

Finally, in a document dated 2020, the Premier League notes that in order to successfully operate an enforcement program, personal data needs to be shared with third parties including its legal advisors, investigators (including anti-piracy companies Friend MTS and Irdeto), industry enforcement operators (FACT) and law enforcement authorities (Trading Standards and the Police).

Some involved in piracy have tried to challenge the collection, processing and/or use of this type of data. At least as far as we know, most (if not all) attempts were completely unsuccessful.

Image credits: Pixabay/Lenzatic / gerault / lobostudiohamburg

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.