In recent years, rightsholders of major sports events have repeatedly complained that piracy of live sports is getting out of hand.

Ideally, they would like to see updates to current legislative frameworks, so the problem can be targeted more efficiently. Site-blocking is high on the list of preferred options, particularly in the United States.

While ISP blocking is still a debated issue among U.S. lawmakers, the country’s enforcement authorities have a more direct option; domain name seizures. With the appropriate legal paperwork, the DoJ’s Homeland Security Investigations ( HSI ) has sporadically targeted ‘pirate’ domain names for more than a decade.

Streameast Domain Names Seized

This weekend, the feds appear to have carried out another round of seizures, this time targeting the pirate sports streaming website Streameast. This site, which has a strong focus on ‘American’ sports, has over 15 million monthly visitors, who were all sidelined by surprise.

Instead of the usual homepage with links to the latest streams of sporting events, Streameast’s visitors – most of which come from the U.S. – were welcomed by a domain seizure banner.

“This domain name has been seized by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) pursuant to a warrant issued by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana,” the banner reads.

“It is unlawful to reproduce or distribute copyrighted material including sporting events, television shows, movies, music, software, or games without authorization. Individuals who do so risk criminal prosecution under Title 18.”

The seized domain names include the main one; thestreameast.to, as well as popular backup domain options such as streameast.io, streameast.xyz, and streameast.live.

Streameast Makes ‘Instant’ Comeback

The authorities have yet to officially confirm the action, which can typically take a few days. However, all available signs suggest that this is a legitimate law enforcement action. For example, the nameservers were all changed to “seizedservers.com”.

Whether the seizures will be effective in shutting down the Streameast operation is up for debate, however.

Soon after the domain seizures started to populate across DNS servers, the site’s operators informed their followers on Discord that the site has no intention of throwing in the towel. Quite the opposite, the site remains available though alternative domain names.

“As you may know, many of our domains were seized by the US government last night. As the only free streaming site in the world that truly values user experience and quality, it was no coincidence that this happened to us,” Streameast admin ‘Quick’ writes.

There are many fake, fraudulent, and scammy alternatives that remain online but only ‘legitimate’ Streameast domains were targeted, according to the site’s operators. While this came as a disappointment, there was a backup plan in place.

The Streameast team says that it has hundreds of domain names ready to deploy, some of which came into play this weekend. More domains will follow, and the team vows it will continue until ‘affordable’ sports streaming options are available for everyone.

“They need to see that they can’t stop us this way. We own over 400 domains in total, and we will be activating and sharing most of these with you throughout the week,” they write.

“We will never give up the fight. Our fight will continue until sports become affordable for everyone. We promise that once this is achieved, we will permanently shut down all Streameast services,” Streameast adds.

Why, and Why Now?

The Streameast team kept their word and in addition to streameast.co, they also activated streameast.ec, streameast.fi, streameast.ms, streameast.ph, streameast.ps, streameast.sh, and streameast.sk. These domain names may also be seized in the future, but for now, they remain online.

Why Streameast was singled out as a target on this particular weekend is unknown. Typically, U.S. law enforcement plans their domain seizure operations around major sporting events, as happened with the Super Bowl and the FIFA World Cup . There was a big UFC PPV event over the weekend, but those take place each month.

With the Paris Olympics, there was a major sporting event earlier this month, but these seizures are a bit late for that.

As far as we know, there are no indictments against people associated with the site. That said, it is still early days and more information may come out later in the week. With Streameast being as defiant as it is, we don’t expect this to be the end of the enforcement efforts.

—

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

If 2009 sounds like it happened half a lifetime ago, many 30 year-olds would likely agree.

At the time the UK government was taking advice from the entertainment industries on how to tackle surging piracy via the BitTorrent protocol.

Presented as an entirely proportionate and reasonable response for dealing with habitual downloaders, disconnecting entire households from the internet loomed ominously on the horizon.

Yet in 2007, the band Radiohead had ventured quite bravely in the opposite direction, arguing that piracy shouldn’t be punished and file-sharing should be embraced. When the band released the album ‘In Rainbows’ online, its price tag competed with ‘free’ on terms that even pirates could understand.

The debate over Radiohead’s ‘pay-what-you-want’ model went global. Praised by some for allowing everyone to afford music, it faced heavy criticism from those who felt that the price devalued music, and would lead to artists – especially less successful ones – suffering the financial consequences of competing with free. Despite the polarized views, Radiohead hadn’t quite finished.

Music Industry & Government Had it All Wrong

In May 2009, Brian Message, a partner in Radiohead’s management company, did the unthinkable. After describing the plan to kick file-sharers (and their families) off the internet as unworkable, Message suggested a radically different approach.

“We believe file-sharing by peer to peer should be legalized. The sharing of music where it is not for profit is a great thing for culture and music,” Message said.

That wasn’t what the labels wanted to hear, to put it mildly. With the benefit of hindsight, legalization probably wasn’t the right solution to support what eventually followed, but anyone could see that the status quo simply wasn’t working.

Was It Really Happening?

In early August 2009, after Radiohead’s Thom Yorke had dropped hints about a “great idea” and a secret distribution plan, things were about to start get interesting again. Whether it was the band, people working for them, or someone else, when the yet-to-be-released Radiohead track ‘These Are My Twisted Words’ was uploaded to private torrent site What.cd, Radiohead and file-sharing were suddenly back in the news again.

For many file-sharers, Radiohead’s approach felt like someone was actually listening; an outreach of sorts, acknowledgement from people who mattered that things needed to change. In the end, changes implemented by the music industry were a revelation. Not only did the industry prove itself wrong by successfully competing with free, it had managed to do so without resorting to brute force.

The idea that file-sharers, fans, will only return to buying any type of content if there’s a credible threat of force, has never made sense to us here at TF. Loyal consumers are happy consumers; happy with the product, happy with the service, and happy with the price. Get any one of those wrong and consumers become unhappy; any plan to cheer them up by a) not fixing the problem and b) resorting to threats, will fail – period.

Radiohead not only understood this better than most, the band actually dared to try something different. Less than a week after the ‘leak’ of ‘These Are My Twisted Words’ on What.cd, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood took to the band’s Dead Air Space blog.

The Air Space blog, saved from extinction by the Internet Archive

In his post, Greenwood announced ‘These Are My Twisted Words’ officially for the first time. He then invited people to download it for free, including via a torrent hosted on Mininova, once one of the world’s most popular torrent sites.

And Back to Reality

For Mininova, the Radiohead release symbolized hope. Legal troubles with Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN meant that the site needed to change drastically or face extinction. In our 2009 article, co-founder Erik Dubbelboer celebrated Radiohead’s use of the site’s fledgling content distribution service and called on more artists to do the same.

By November 2009, the only content that remained on Mininova was content uploaded to the new distribution service. After losing its dispute with BREIN, Mininova was ordered to delete all other content , which in time led to the site’s demise. In common with similar sites, Mininova already had a policy of responding to rightsholders’ takedown notices but when a Dutch court found that insufficient, the end was nigh.

TorrentFreak also has a takedown policy. Our policy is to create all of our own content, obtain licenses for images where applicable, and if required, adhere to fair use norms. Because the policy works and nothing is infringing, nothing ever needs to be taken down. Unfortunately, some rightsholders and anti-piracy outfits occasionally disagree; on the plus side, on every occasion they are always wrong.

Wrongfully Targeted Yet Again

Around eight years ago, an industry shake-up saw Radiohead’s back catalog move from Parlophone to XL Recordings, which now operates as part of Beggars Group Digital. With assistance from anti-piracy company MUSO, attempts are now being made to purge Google’s search indexes of all links to unauthorized copies of Radiohead’s music.

A single notice dated August 8, 2024, presented here courtesy of the Lumen Database , is huge. Weighing in at over 9,600 URLs, hidden deep inside is one of our URLs which, according to the notice, should be disappeared by Google for the remainder of eternity, for violating copyright law.

That article contains no copyrighted material apart from our own, and doesn’t link to any infringing content either.

Coincidentally, the same generally applies to the takedown notice itself. Despite claiming to contain close to 10,000 pirate URLs across 1,643 domains, Google’s assessment indicates that just 4.5% are actually infringing.

Rightsholders never got to target individuals in the manner suggested 15 years ago, and that is a good thing; a very, very good thing considering the complaint detailed above. More importantly, people without internet can’t access YouTube, for example, which now generates billions of dollars in revenue for the music industry.

Instead, the focus today is on making life difficult for pirate sites, via site-blocking measures and by generating takedown notices on an industrial scale. When it comes to the latter, all people can do is try not to get caught in the crossfire, pray occasionally, and put faith in Google to shield your own copyrighted works from being rendered unfindable.

That’s exactly what Google did here, having done so many times before .

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

Over the past two years, AI developments have progressed at a rapid pace.

This includes large language models, which are typically trained on a broad datasets of texts; the more, the better.

When AI hit the mainstream, it became apparent that rightsholders are not always pleased that their works were used to train AI. This applies to photographers, artists, music companies, journalists, and authors, some of whom formed groups to file copyright infringement lawsuits to protect their rights.

Book authors, in particular, complained about the use of pirated books as training material. In various lawsuits, companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and NVIDIA are accused of using the ‘Books3’ dataset, which was scraped from the library of ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik.

After the Books3 accusations hit mainstream news, many AI companies stopped using this source. Meanwhile, anti-piracy companies helped publishers to take the alleged rogue libraries offline to prevent further damage.

These enforcement efforts aren’t limited to Books3 either, or the English language for that matter; earlier this week anti-piracy group BREIN reported that it helped to remove a Dutch language dataset.

Authors sued NVIDIA

Earlier this year, several authors sued NVIDIA over alleged copyright infringement. The class action lawsuit alleged that the company’s AI models were trained on copyrighted works and specifically mentioned Books3 data. Since this happened without permission, the rightsholders demand compensation.

The lawsuit was followed up by a near-identical case a few weeks later, and NVIDIA plans to challenge both in court by denying the copyright infringement allegations.

In its initial response, filed a few weeks ago , NVIDIA did not deny that it used the Books3 dataset. Like many other AI companies, it believes that the use of copyrighted data for AI training is a prime example of fair use; especially when the output of the model doesn’t reproduce copyrighted works.

The authors clearly have a different take. They allege that NVIDIA willingly copied an archive of pirated books to train its commercial AI model, and are demanding damages for direct copyright infringement.

Trial in Two years…?

This week, the authors and NVIDIA filed a joint case management statement at a California court, laying out a preliminary timeline. This shows that both parties intend to take their time to properly litigate the matter.

The authors expect that the parties need until October next year to gather facts and evidence during the discovery phase. An eventual jury trial is penciled in a full year later, November 2026.

NVIDIA doesn’t have a hard trial deadline in mind but stresses that the fair use issue is key, and should be addressed early and efficiently. For starters, the company intends to file a motion for summary judgment within a year, after which both parties should have more clarity.

Facts, Figures, and Statistical Correlations

Aside from the timeline, NVIDIA also shared its early outlook on the case. The company believes that AI companies should be allowed to use copyrighted books to train their AI models, as these books are made up of “uncopyrightable facts and ideas” that are already in the public domain.

The argument may seem surprising at first; the authors own copyrights and as far they’re concerned, use of pirated copies leads to liability as a direct infringer. However, NVIDIA goes on to explain that their AI models don’t see these works that way.

AI training doesn’t involve any book reading skills, or even a basic understanding of a storyline. Instead, it simply measures statistical correlations and adds these to the model.

“Training measures statistical correlations in the aggregate, across a vast body of data, and encodes them into the parameters of a model. Plaintiffs do not try to claim a copyright over those statistical correlations, asserting instead that the training data itself is ‘copied’ for the purposes of infringement,” NVIDIA writes.

Put differently, NVIDIA argues that its AI models don’t use the books the way humans do; neither do they reproduce them. It’s simply examining the ‘facts and ideas’ in the books, ‘transforming’ their original purpose to build a complex AI model. That qualifies as fair use, they state.

“Plaintiffs cannot use copyright to preclude access to facts and ideas, and the highly transformative training process is protected entirely by the well-established fair-use doctrine.

“Indeed, to accept Plaintiffs’ theory would mean that an author could copyright the rules of grammar or basic facts about the world. That has never been the law, for good reason,” NVIDIA adds.

Fair Use Battle

According to NVIDIA, the lawsuit boils down to two related questions. First, whether the authors’ direct infringement claim is essentially an attempt to claim copyright on facts and grammar. Second, whether making copies of the books is fair use.

The chip company believes that it didn’t do anything wrong and cites several cases that will likely appear in its future filings. They include the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit, where the court of appeals concluded that copying books to create a searchable database was fair use. As a result, Google Books still exists today.

NVIDIA is not the only company that will rely on a fair use defense in response to AI-related copyright infringement claims. Many other companies are taking the same approach so whether it succeeds will prove key for the future of AI model development.

What makes these matters more complex is that AI models and technologies have different applications; so what may be fair use in one case, could be copyright infringing in another.

For example, earlier this week, a California federal court ruled that a copyright lawsuit filed by visual artists against DeviantArt, Midjourney, Runway AI, and Stability AI, can move forward . These defendants are also accused of copyright infringement, but the lawsuit deals with images, and image outputs instead.

Given the parties involved and the potential damages at stake, these lawsuits will keep the courts busy for years to come. Even after the first ‘final’ verdicts come in, there will be appeals, and some questions may eventually end up at the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the actions of NVIDIA and other AI companies will be closely monitored by copyright watchers. This includes recent press reports accusing NVIDIA, among others, of scraping both videos and transcripts from YouTube, to train their respective models.

—

A copy of the joint case management statement in Nazemian vs. Nvidia is available here (pdf)

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

After filing copyright lawsuits against early peer-to-peer file sharing services and emerging mostly victorious, the global music industry found that any depressant effect, on pirate content availability and consumption, was insufficient.

Content was soon being consumed by an expanding pool of internet users, and relentless demand was met being met by increased availability and supply. Since robust peer-to-peer networks had few issues taking care of mass distribution, music industry lawyers switched to suing tens of thousands of music pirates instead. That eventually became unpleasant for everyone and as an anti-piracy strategy, also insufficient.

We Can Do This The Easy Way, Or The Hard Way. No Pressure

Having sued piracy platforms and their users, attention turned to residential ISPs. Approached as potential allies, progress over the years was rarely much more than a mixed bag. When it became increasingly clear that cooperation would involve ISPs suppressing their own customers – those that the music companies had previously failed to suppress – lawsuits against the internet’s gatekeepers were inevitable.

After music giant BMG sued Cox Communications for failing to take action against repeat infringer customers, the matter was settled in BMG’s favor via a “ substantial settlement .” With big money at stake, repeat infringer lawsuits are now widespread in the United States; in 2022, BMG hit the owners of Optimum with a similar lawsuit carrying a billion-dollar payload.

The Hard Way It Is Then

Filed in the Eastern District of Texas, the complaint featured plaintiffs BMG Rights Management, UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Concord Music Group, and Concord Bicycle Assets.

The defendants, Altice USA and CSC Holdings, were described as the operators of one of the largest ISPs in the United States. Sold under ‘Optimum’ branding and available in at least 21 states, high-speed connections made available by the defendants were allegedly being used by thousands of persistent pirates responsible for millions of infringements.

The plaintiffs informed the court that efforts to encourage the ISP to suspend or disconnect alleged infringers, had come to nothing.

“Rather than work with Plaintiffs or take other meaningful or effective steps to curb this massive infringement, Altice chose to permit infringement to run rampant, prioritizing its own profits over the Plaintiffs’ rights,” the complaint continued.

With David Bowie, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Keith Urban, and Lady Gaga among around 8,000 artists suffering the consequences of the alleged inaction, the stage was set for a billion dollar showdown.

After 18 Months of Litigation, Case Dismissed – Permanently

If obtaining a settlement was the plan, the next 18 months of litigation failed to give much away. The discovery process, for example, led to claims that certain materials were being withheld based on unsupported assertions of privilege. Deposition notices served on the CEOs of both BMG and Concord were challenged and eventually quashed.

Anti-piracy company OpSec Online, which had been hired by the plaintiffs to track infringement carried out on BitTorrent networks, was required to hand over considerable amounts of data. That included copies of its source code (23,693 files) and more than a million pages of documents.

Altice also sought to obtain information from the RIAA relating to repeat infringer lawsuits targeting other ISPs. Then on Wednesday this week, the parties suddenly advised the court that the lawsuit was over.

Having been dismissed with prejudice, the matter won’t see the light of day again, but the filing itself offers no information to explain why. Similar cases against other ISPs were dismissed just hours before trial , so that seemed the most likely outcome here.

Parties Agreed to Settle

Confirmation that the parties did indeed settle can be found in Altice SEC filings.

“On July 1, 2024, we and the BMG Plaintiffs settled this lawsuit and as part of the settlement we expect a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice to be filed by the parties on or before August 20, 2024. The settlement amount was accrued for as of June 30, 2024,” the document reveals.

No specific settlement figure is mentioned by Altice, but the company does reference its ongoing legal battle with Warner, Sony, and other members of the RIAA, which makes similar ‘repeat infringer’ claims while also seeking massive damages.

“We intend to and are vigorously defending against the claims in the Warner Matter. In addition to contesting the claims of liability, we have an affirmative defense under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that, if successful, would preclude or limit monetary damages against us in connection with some or all of the Warner Plaintiffs’ asserted claims. There can be no assurance as to the outcome of this litigation,” the filing warns.

The stipulation of dismissal (with prejudice) is available here (pdf)

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

Widening discussions on the seemingly limitless potential of AI suggest profound implications for most jobs in the future.

Of those with the greatest chance of surviving the AI revolution, fighting crime online must be one of the stronger candidates. With piracy close to ubiquitous, work opportunities exist, to put it mildly.

The realm of content protection may yet have an AI savior waiting in the wings, but until a model can accurately determine fair use and conduct complex, error-free investigations, humans retain the upper hand. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry has more content protection work than ever before, much of it with an ideal completion date of yesterday.

Larissa Knapp , the new head of content protection at the MPA, will undoubtedly meet challenges like these head on. This week the former FBI official revealed the culmination of an investigation in the United States where basic mistakes may have contributed to the services’ downfall. The press release itself includes some interesting presentational changes.

US-Based IPTV Services Shut Down

The anti-piracy profiles of the MPA, and more recently ACE, are without parallel in the United States. At least in part, high-profile lawsuits and in some cases criminal actions, have dampened pirates’ enthusiasm for becoming the next ‘victim’ of Hollywood’s piracy grinder. As a result, actions against IPTV providers in the U.S. are relatively rare.

On Wednesday, however, ACE announced the shutdown of at least four branded IPTV services on home soil; AnytimeTV (the most prominent), Cobra Servers, Elite Servers, and Lost Highway Media. Customers of some of these services have been complaining about their sudden disappearance since early June.

According to ACE, when combined these platforms had “thousands of subscribers” and “hundreds of thousands of domain visits annually.” The big question is whether the profit made on subscriptions will be enough to pay off ACE.

$2m+ Settlement Agreed

The closure of these services will be governed by a settlement agreement between ACE and three U.S.-based IPTV operators. ACE has mentioned reaching settlement agreements with platform owners in the past, but in this matter the financial aspect is given a much higher profile than usual.

ACE reports that the three operators have agreed to pay over $2 million in compensation; through unofficial channels TF has previously heard of settlement offers in the hundreds of thousands, but with so many cases, the sample is too small to predict the true range.

“These landmark settlements should serve as a warning to illegal streaming operators about the severe penalties they will face for breaking copyright law, including legal actions, substantial financial settlements and fines, and jail time,” Knapp says .

In most cases, settlements require domains used in connection with pirate services to be signed over to the MPA. Those specifically mentioned by ACE in this matter include anytimetv.us, anytimewebhosting.com, elite-servers.com, losthighway-media.com, and webhostsupply.com. Some already divert to the ACE seizure page.

Paying the Price for Zero Security

Groups like ACE never reveal exactly what makes one service more likely to face enforcement measures than another. Nevertheless, factors such as size or strategic position in the piracy market are typically weighed against prudent use of resources and prospects of success. Political considerations and matters related to overarching strategy may influence decisions too, but in some cases, enforcement action simply makes sense.

Services increasing in popularity, such as those recently shut down, may require more urgent attention. When that can take place on home soil, enforcement is likely to be more effective. When the domain anytimetv.us appeared in the mix, that may have made things much more interesting.

Unlike foreign domains, WHOIS records for .us domains cannot be hidden, with registrars facing potential repercussions for not following the rules. That’s why pirate sites usually avoid .us domains and prefer options such as .to, where the opposite is true.

In this case, public WHOIS records for anytimetv.us included a real name and a real physical address. With those details established, related information becomes easier to find.

On LinkedIn, for example, one service was presented by its owner as a regular business, using a name that can be cross-referenced with WHOIS records and other online databases. Similarly, engagement on Trust Pilot and other review platforms suggested that potential enforcement was hardly considered, if it was considered at all.

Whether ACE offered one or any of these services an early opportunity to shut down is unknown. What we can say with absolute certainty is that at least one of them was compromised years ago when legal action targeted an entity responsible for supplying their streams. A company name, banking details, and details of monthly payments made for streams, were obtained by an anti-piracy group as part of a much larger haul, which eventually entered the public domain.

Given the sheer number of platforms ACE has shut down since 2017, running a pirate IPTV service so openly with the above as background, makes zero sense. Even if we entertain the idea that identities, addresses, and profiles on social media, are simply elaborate fakes placed online for misdirection purposes, the bottom line still tells exactly the same story: services shut down and profits confiscated. And that’s just the lucky ones.

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

Late 2019, Internet provider Cox Communications lost its legal battle against a group of major record labels, including Sony and Universal.

Following a two-week trial, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for its pirating subscribers. The ISP failed to disconnect repeat infringers and was ordered to pay $1 billion in damages.

Cox challenged the verdict through several routes and earlier this year booked a partial victory. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed that the ISP was contributorily liable for pirating subscribers, but reversed the vicarious copyright infringement finding. A new trial will determine the appropriate damages amount given these new conclusions.

Following this ruling, Cox asked for the damages question to be put on hold, as there were other matters pending. Among them, a planned Supreme Court petition filed a few hours ago.

Cox Files Supreme Court Petition

In a public statement today, Cox warns that the current ruling jeopardizes internet access for all Americans, as it forces ISPs to terminate the accounts of subscribers who are repeatedly accused of sharing copyright-infringing content.

“Terminating internet service would not just impact the individual accused of unlawfully downloading content, it would kick an entire household off the internet,” Cox notes.

“This would have a particularly devastating impact on rural communities with only one service provider or where an alternative provider offers slow or unreliable connections — termination would leave a household with no viable access to the internet.”

After the Cox case was docketed, similar lawsuits were filed against other Internet providers, including Grande, Verizon, RCN, Bright House, Frontier and others. Some complaints were settled and others remain pending.

These cases have already changed how Internet providers handle repeat infringers on their networks and “terminations” are now more common. According to Cox, however, the current verdict goes too far.

Draconian Liability Regime

In its petition Cox writes that, in its view, the lower court’s ruling stretches service provider liability too far. As a result, ISPs find themselves ‘forced’ to terminate subscribers, who may have done little wrong.

“Cox Communications — which provides internet service to millions of homes and businesses — must either terminate internet connections previously used for infringement or else face liability for any future infringement.

“In doing so, the court installed the most draconian secondary-liability regime in the country, one that departs from three other circuits, defies this Court’s precedents, and threatens mass disruption across the internet,” Cox warns.

The Supreme Court petition aims to place the ‘repeat infringer’ issue into perspective, noting that pirating accounts represented roughly 1% of its total subscribers. Of this group, Cox was able to motivate 95% to stop.

The remaining ‘repeat infringers’ were able to continue. The music companies argued that the ISP could and should have terminated these accounts, some 57,000 in total, but Cox believes this is a step too far.

Universities, Hotels and Military Housing

Cox argues that subscribers shouldn’t lose their internet access based on unadjudicated third-party accusations; especially since the repeat infringers included business accounts with many simultaneous connections.

“In practice, the accounts that continued to rack up notices without termination were regional ISPs, universities, hotels, military housing, and other business accounts used by hundreds or thousands of individual users,” the petition reads.

Disconnecting universities and hospitals could have devastating consequences but Cox also continued to provide its services to many regular subscribers, who also continued to pirate.

While these examples are less dramatic, the company argues that disconnecting regular subscribers can also have serious consequences.

“Even with respect to individuals who did, in fact, infringe, loss of internet access is very heavy punishment for illegally downloading two songs. A person without internet might lose their job or have to drop out of school.”

Cox hopes that the Supreme Court will take on the case and limit secondary liability for Internet providers. The current Fourth Circuit ruling weighs heavily in favor of rightsholders, to the detriment of ISPs and their subscribers, the petition argues.

Two Questions

In recent weeks, Cox has put considerable effort into explaining its position to the press. When doing so, there was a strong focus on the potentially devastating impact on Internet users.

While this is undoubtedly an important issue, the matter at hand is ultimately about service provider liability. And the key questions presented to the Supreme Court don’t directly involve hospitals in rural areas.

This case is about who is responsible for Internet piracy. Is it only the users who actually share pirated material, or can ISPs be held responsible too?

The Fourth Circuit concluded that Cox “materially contributed” to the infringements of its subscribers, because the company knew about this activity and didn’t terminate their accounts.

That leads Cox to present the following question to the Supreme Court:

“Did the Fourth Circuit err in holding that a service provider can be held liable […] merely because it knew that people were using certain accounts to infringe and did not terminate access, without proof that the service provider affirmatively fostered infringement or otherwise intended to promote it?”

The second question is indirectly related to the damages award. The jury awarded the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work, which is typically reserved for “willful” infringement.

Cox questions whether simply knowing about copyright infringements of subscribers is willful, if the company didn’t know that its own conduct was illegal.

“Did the Fourth Circuit err in holding that mere knowledge of another’s direct infringement suffices to find willfulness under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)?” the petition reads.

Landmark Case

If the Supreme Court decides to take on this case, it will undoubtedly result in a landmark decision. The music companies also indicate that they may present their own petition to the court, which will make the matter even more crucial.

Both sides are expected to garner support from third parties, which are expected to file supporting briefs on their behalf. After that, the Supreme Court will have to decide whether to take on the case.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, Internet providers could certainly benefit from extra clarity on the “repeat infringer” problem. Whether they will like the eventual outcome, remains to be seen.

—

A copy of Cox Communication’s Supreme Court petition is available here (pdf)

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

More than twelve years have passed since Megaupload became the prime target in a high-profile law enforcement operation, which led to the collapse of Kim Dotcom’s file-storage empire.

While time moved on, the New Zealand-based ‘Internet personality’ was still waiting to hear whether he would be extradited to the United States where a criminal prosecution is pending.

With the stakes this high, no legal resources are being spared. Many millions of dollars have been poured into this legal battle since 2012, and the end is still nowhere in sight.

In 2020, the Supreme Court of New Zealand ruled that Kim Dotcom and his colleagues could indeed be extradited to the United States. However, this still wasn’t set in stone, as judicial reviews and appeals were still pending.

Megaupload defendants van der Kolk and Ortmann eventually opted for a deal. The pair pled guilty but were allowed to serve their respective 30 and 31-month prison sentences in New Zealand. Dotcom, meanwhile, vowed to ‘fight on’ .

“I’m now the last man standing in this fight and I will continue to fight because unlike my co-defendants I won’t accept the injustice we have been subjected to,” Dotcom said two years ago.

Justice Minister Signs Dotcom Extradition

In recent years, Dotcom hasn’t shied away from the public eye, often sharing controversial takes on political and societal events. In the background, however, potential extradition loomed, before reaching its conclusion earlier today.

According to Stuff , New Zealand Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith informed Kim Dotcom that he will be deported to the United States to stand trial.

“I have received extensive advice from the Ministry of Justice on this matter,” Goldsmith said. “I considered all of the information carefully, and have decided that Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial.”

“As is common practice, I have allowed Mr Dotcom a short period of time to consider and take advice on my decision. I will not, therefore, be commenting further at this stage,” the Justice Minister added.

Dotcom has always denied the charges and has left no stone unturned in support of his defense. This means that the latest extradition decision will be challenged as well.

‘I Have a Plan’

The Ministry of Justice confirmed the extradition order earlier today. Dotcom revealed the decision on social media earlier in the week, describing New Zealand as an “obedient U.S. colony”.

“[T]he obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload, unsolicited, and what copyright holders were able to remove with direct delete access instantly and without question. But who cares? That’s justice these days,” he wrote on Tuesday.

Today, Dotcom followed up , stating that he has “a plan,” “loves New Zealand,” and doesn’t intend to leave the country.

The nature of Dotcom’s plan is unknown but if the past twelve years are any indication, he won’t let any adverse decision pass without a fight.

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

People being arrested for pirate IPTV activities isn’t anything new, not in the UK or indeed anywhere else, but it is mentioned a lot more than before.

The terminology currently used to describe offenders seems to have changed too. Last month it was reported that 40 illegal ‘IPTV operators’ were served with official warnings, some via an in-person visit by police and anti-piracy group FACT.

For smaller players, subscription resellers, for example, the strategy makes complete sense. Yet the idea of having a similar doorstep chat with known wholesale suppliers doesn’t add up at all. Ambiguities such as this make it more difficult to determine the significance of new developments, all of which are currently reported by UK tabloids on a single level – extreme – regardless of the facts.

Five years ago, events were significantly less distorted, meaning that big events stood out as they should.

Action Takes Out Two Alleged IPTV Operators

In March 2019, raids in London carried out by police, Trading Standards, and anti-piracy outfit Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), targeted what was described as a “£3 million fraud operation” to “download, encrypt and widely distribute TV content from Sky, Virgin and BT.”

While the terminology could’ve benefited from a tweak or two, this had all the hallmarks of a raid against an actual provider of illegal streams, which is still relatively rare in the UK. Confirmation that searches of shop premises and homes had uncovered equipment valued at £100k – computers, servers, and set-top boxes – that reportedly enabled the operation, left little doubt that this was important news.

Two men were arrested on suspicion of fraud , with police claiming that the suspects generated £600,000 per year from their activities. A list of 3,000 subscribers to their services found in the shop, was reportedly in the hands of the authorities. As is usually the case, we asked a few questions about the event at the time to guide our reporting but, as is mostly the case, answers never arrived.

Five Years Later, Suddenly More News

In an announcement to the press on Tuesday, it was revealed that two brothers had been sentenced to “a total of 11 years in prison” for “operating an illegal streaming service” that offered subscriptions to premium television content, including Sky.

Amir Butt, aged 56 from Ilford, was sentenced to seven years in prison while his brother, Ammar Hussain, aged 39 and also from Ilford, was sentenced to four years.

Given the length of Butt’s sentence, clarity is obviously important. However, while the announcement clearly states that Hussain was “found guilty of conspiracy to defraud over a seven-year period” (August 2012 to March 2019), the offense or offenses for which Butt received a significantly longer sentence seem to be missing. (separation of statements below for illustration purposes) .

Of course, we could assume that all seven years were for conspiracy to defraud but at minimum, that wouldn’t account for Butt failing to appear, or indeed any other offenses, such as they exist. Offenses are normally described in fine detail, but not here.

The next paragraph covering the raids in March 2019 also raises questions. It notes that Butt was arrested at his home address and Hussain was arrested at a shop in Ilford, which had operated under various company names over the years including Tech & Sat Ltd, Techsat, and Tech + Sat.

“The pair sold annual subscriptions, which provided access to a range of sports and entertainment content, for £200 each,” the statement continued.

Other details presented to the media five years ago have been changed or reassessed, made less specific, or even removed.

Scale of the Fraud Diminishes

Having previously claimed to have seized a list of 3,000 subscribers, the announcement yesterday adjusted to “they were believed to have thousands of customers.”

The £3 million “fraud operation” is now described as “depriving legitimate tv providers in excess of £1m.” An early claim of “£600k per year” in revenue now reads “hundreds of thousands of pounds in revenue,” presumably in total.

It would be naive to believe that all evidence meets prosecution standards, so reductions should never come as a surprise. Equally, generating hundreds of thousands of pounds selling illegal access to a legitimate service’s content, is still a very serious offense, one that has custodial sentence written all over it.

The Nature of the Operation Remains Unclear

But even more difficult to square is the following statement:

Cash and a substantial amount of equipment, including Sky set-top boxes and viewing cards, were seized from the addresses for further forensic analysis.

Given that Sky set-top boxes are clearly visible in Google Street View images of the shop, the fact that some were seized along with some cash is hardly a surprise.

What the statement does not say is that the equipment was actually used to “download, encrypt and widely distribute TV content” nor does it make any attempt to reveal what the forensic analysis actually found.

These details are extremely important when attempting to weigh the significance of any enforcement action. The strong suggestion earlier, that a provider had been shut down, would mean actual content being removed from the market. Removing a reseller, no matter how big, would leave the supply intact and a gap in the market easily filled with minimal effort.

Unlike in the United States, where court records are mostly freely available, in the UK there’s a much greater reliance on press releases issued by those directly and commercially involved, despite prosecutions being funded by the public purse. Requests to see actual court records are always denied.

Prison Sentences For Two, One Had Better Things to Do

There’s no question that in appropriate cases, convictions are critical to deter criminality; indeed, during the last 24 hours all information we’ve managed to uncover suggests that custodial sentences were entirely appropriate and almost inevitable. Yet another surprise here is that the trial actually took place nearly a year ago and ran for four weeks.

While that indicates a plea of ‘not guilty’ for Hussain, it appears that Butt may have had something more important to do; for reasons that aren’t explained, he failed to appear for his own trial.

That somehow led to Butt being found guilty first, for whatever crime or combination of crimes that justified a sentence almost double that of his business partner, Hussain, who received his four-year sentence at Snaresbrook Crown Court just this week.

Finally, it’s worth highlighting that the overwhelming majority of news related to IPTV in the UK is managed as part of the BeStreamWise anti-piracy campaign . Viewed through that prism, there’s a clear incentive to only report news in a way that supports the campaign, rather than reporting the details as-is, warts and all.

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

Library Genesis ( LibGen ) is one of the oldest shadow libraries on the Internet, offering free access to millions of books and academic papers people otherwise have to pay for.

The site’s origins reportedly trace back to the Soviet Union’s underground publishing culture ‘ samizdat ,’ which was used to bypass state censorship in the last century.

LibGen launched around 2008 as a digital version of the same concept. In addition to bypassing ‘local’ censorship, it’s widely used to circumvent the paywalls of major international publishing companies, serving as a popular ‘pirate’ site for (text)books and academic works.

Rightsholders have attempted to take the site offline several times over the years, but none led to concrete results. Today, Libgen.rs, Libgen.is and Libgen.st remain online, but downloading pirated books turns out to be quite a challenge.

Inactive LibGen Admin and Downloads?

Starting last weekend, regular LibGen downloads suddenly stopped working. The outage suggests that there’s a problem with the storage servers, but there’s no official explanation.

The lack of communication doesn’t come as a complete surprise. A few months ago, the site already appeared to have some internal struggles. The person in charge of the site’s coding has reportedly been ‘inactive’ for a while.

This personnel issue may explain the database errors and technical trouble that resulted in broken functionality a few months back. It may also explain why new torrents are not being added on a weekly or daily basis. Presently, the latest torrent archive on the site dates back to April.

Whether these earlier reports are related to the current download problems is unknown, but without any official update or mention from the people behind the curtain, it could mean that LibGen is no longer actively managed.

Legal Troubles

Technical issues can admittedly have various causes. Aside from a lack of manpower, it’s also possible that servers were targeted by complaints from rightsholders. This seems less likely, however, as most parts of the website remain online.

LibGen has previously been the subject of legal action, however. Through court orders, LibGen is now blocked in several countries, but taking the operation permanently offline has proven quite the challenge, not least since the identities of its operators are unknown.

Last year, LibGen was also targeted in U.S. court by several prominent textbook publishers including Cengage, Macmillan Learning, and Pearson Education. The companies requested millions in damages and an injunction to shut down various domain names.

LibGen hasn’t responded to this complaint in court, and a request for a default judgment is currently pending. If that’s granted, LibGen can lose control over some of its domain names.

There is no indication that the current download problems are related to this court case, however. The domain names in question still work.

LibGen has many millions of monthly users, some of whom have shared their frustrations on social media, including on Reddit . This includes many students, who were hoping to pirate textbooks ready for the start of the school year, which is no longer an option today via any of the official domains.

Time will tell whether this is the end of LibGen, or just a temporary hiccup.

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