Press releases announcing the shutdown of yet another pirate site, more arrests, and what that means for the entertainment industry, are nothing out of the ordinary. In particularly busy periods, simply determining where one batch ends and another begins can present challenges.

Yet in many cases, even the most straightforward reports have much more going on just below the surface. An announcement published Monday by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment is clear, quite detailed, but also conservative in respect of reporting events behind the scenes.

The matter involves the oldest and most likely the largest torrent site in Thailand, a platform described by the most powerful rightsholders in the United States as a priority enforcement target for at least seven years. Yet only now, 18 years after the site first launched, have local authorities taken any visible action.

If policy recently changed in Thailand, there’s no obvious indication of when that took place or what it might be. The official page to provide tips about illegal services on the police website still doesn’t work and known complications simmering in this particular case haven’t been mentioned either.

ACE Outlines The Main Facts

The key details, as reported by ACE on Monday, read as follows:

The Royal Thai Police’s Economic Crimes Department (ECD), with support from the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), has raided four locations in Bangkok, Surin Province and Surat Thani. Four Thai nationals have been taken into custody and are expected to be formally charged with copyright offenses in the coming days.

Siambit.me was the largest torrent tracker site in Thailand with average monthly visits of 5.5 million, and which provided access to a huge range of Hollywood, international and Thai content.

The site had been in operation since 2005 and is known to regularly change its domain to avoid detection. According to statements by the Royal Thai Police, Siambit.me had over 100,000 VIP members and the operators were making an estimated 1.5 million baht (USD $41,000) on a monthly basis.

The 5.5 million visits reported here align exactly with data reported by SimilarWeb, so we’ll put that aside for now. The reference to 100,000 VIP members indicates those paying a fee each month. The lowest monthly fee reported recently was just 99 baht with the highest at 499 baht, so roughly $2.70 to almost $14.00 per month.

The higher monthly rate of $14.00 makes little to no sense in any context while the claim that 1.5 million baht was generated each month could in theory suggest around 15,000 members paying 99 baht each. If 100,000 members paid even the minimum rate each month, no figures from any source combine to produce a sensible total, so perhaps more information will emerge to clarify the situation.

Images of Police Action Emerge

Images that began circulating late last week seem to confirm that the authorities had good intelligence. Photographs such as the one featuring a server room below appear to have been taken at the home of the main suspect.

When trying to establish a timeline for the events reported a few days ago a confusing picture emerged. In fact, to make any sense of these events we needed to go back, not just days, but several weeks.

Thai Police & ACE Took Sites Down in January

On January 19, 2024, we provided background on an ACE announcement detailing the shutdown of 27 Thai-focused sites, each reliant on a common infrastructure provided as a service by the website IAMTHEME.com.

Around January 17, officers from the Central Investigation Bureau were preparing an operation to enforce the country’s strict pornography laws; in Thailand it’s illegal to distribute porn, possess it, or produce it.

The bureau’s target was the suspected operator of numerous sites including xxxporn678.com, 037movie-hd.com, dooball678.com, movie678.com, and 678-hd.com. The first domain seems to have majored on illegal adult content while the rest appeared to focus on pirated movies and pirated live football streams.

The common denominator for all sites was a) a reliance on services offered by IAMTHEME.com and b) offering porn illegally and/or generating revenue illegally from online gambling advertising.

Combinations like these are an effective way to attract Thai authorities, who will shut sites down and arrest their operators. And that’s exactly what happened here. Items seized included four computers, eight mobile phones, and more than a dozen bank accounts.

Dominoes Start to Fall

Not long after the operator of xxxporn678 and the other sites was arrested, police began investigating the operator of IAMTHEME. On or around February 2, he too was placed under arrest, most likely for similar reasons.

At some point, police determined that their latest suspect was either sourcing his porn and pirated movies from SiamBit or was otherwise connected to the site and/or its operator. That triggered a series of events that led to Thailand’s largest torrent site becoming the focus of the ACE announcement published on Monday.

A source who asked not to be identified said that police initially expanded their investigation to identify the person in charge at SiamBit. Armed with a search warrant dated February 7 issued by a local court, on February 9 they targeted the home of a man in his late thirties* suspected of running the group that controls the site.
*the suspect is believed to be either 38 or 40

According to the authorities, SiamBit had 10,000 VIP members, together paying around 1.5 million baht to its operators every month. For balance, we have also seen references to ‘100,000 members’ but without any mention of money. SiamBits’ tracker data obtained by TF shows a peak of almost a million peers while reporting over 200,000 members.

It’s possible that the focus will end up being a monetary value, but whether that will be linked to porn and gambling, copyright infringement, or both, is still unclear.

At least initially, police focused on suspected crimes under Section 287 of the Thai Penal Code. Section 287 makes it beyond clear that any kind of dealing in pornographic content is a criminal offense, punishable by a fine, a prison sentence, or both.

While we were able to positively identify all four main suspects by name and home address, details here are limited to their initials, arrest location, alleged role, and reported age.

CW : Sai Mai District. SiamBit operator and famous professional racing driver (38/40)
PB : Chatuchak District. Financial controller (54)
WNK : Surin Province. Website/systems administrator (42)
NSWW : Surat Thani Province. Administrator, community manager (53)

Several images made available by the authorities allegedly feature the suspected operator of SiamBits but whether all show the same person isn’t entirely clear.

On the top row, images one and two show the same person at the same location, dressed in a light blue t-shirt, face blurred. However, the person with his face obscured in image three at the bottom seems to more closely match press images of the racing driver named as the main suspect.

That raises the question of why the person in image three is wearing completely different clothes than those worn by the suspect in one and two.

Other apparent anomalies include the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment referencing the domain Siambit.me, which as far as we can establish is indeed the site’s main domain.

Locally there appears to be greater interest in Siambit.io, which at the time of writing redirects to Google. Meanwhile, the .me variant currently redirects to a Telegram channel with over 18,700 members.

Thai authorities confirm that their interest in SiamBit was raised due to complaints from companies in the movie industry. In its statement published yesterday, the anti-piracy group said that copyright infringement charges are expected in the next few days.

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

Thanks to a global pooling of knowledge and intelligence, answers to our most difficult questions are just a few clicks away on the internet today.

Since in many cases those answers aren’t necessarily right, or even right at all, that might explain why some seek advice from outer space. For a fee, astrology company Astro Vastu Solutions (AVS) reportedly supply all kinds of advice.

However, when DISH offered the owner of AVS some advice concerning the Sharma IPTV service allegedly being sold, the cease-and-desist notice got lost in the ether and the inexorable march towards conflict began.

Sharma IPTV Receives All The Wrong Signals

In a lawsuit filed at a California court late last week, DISH describes the owner of Sharma IPTV and his company AVS as traffickers of an illegal streaming service.

How DISH managed to link sales to Sharma IPTV is unclear but according to the complaint, flyers distributed in the Bay Area led to its investigators handing over $135 in exchange for an annual subscription.

“The Service is advertised on the flyer as a subscription-based service providing more than 10,000 live channels, sports programs, movies, and pay-per-view events, among other content, all for a low price ranging from approximately $10 to $15 per month,” the lawsuit claims.

“Users can access the Service with their own hardware or purchase a set-top box from Defendants for an extra fee. Defendants’ advertising emphasizes attracting users that may otherwise purchase legitimate television services such as the satellite-based services that DISH offers, stating for example, ‘NO Cable/Dish Needed’.”

DISH says that after signing up for 12 months, Sharma IPTV got in touch to say that the package had been activated. The company claims that it’s “the most sought after IPTV service provider” because its “data centers are strategically located in Danville [where Defendants reside] and across the USA and Canada to bring the live streaming without any delay or freeze.”

Who Supplies Your Content?

Whether the statement above aligns with facts on the ground is unknown, but answering a key DISH question well in advance of a lawsuit even being filed could be helpful.

No such information was provided proactively in respect of Sharma IPTV’s streaming sources, but you don’t have to be David Blane to see that at least some of its content originated from Sling.

“Plaintiffs’ Channels are retransmitted to users of the Service by circumventing the DRM technology that Plaintiffs use to protect the Channels from unauthorized access and copying. Upon information and belief, the circumvention targets at least the Widevine DRM,” the lawsuit notes.

“The Widevine DRM and the copy protection that it affords is circumvented using a specially developed computer program that emulates the behavior of a reverse engineered hardware device.”

Plaintiffs Predicted The Future

Having had a vision of what might happen in the absence of cooperation, the plaintiffs say they shared their prediction with Sharma IPTV in the form of a cease-and-desist, which appears to have proven unconvincing. How DISH and Sling managed to channel Sharma’s comments isn’t explained, but they shared them with the court nonetheless.

Despite an alleged plan to deflect attention elsewhere, certain actions with the potential to negatively unbalance the future were discontinued anyway.

DISH says that Sharma IPTV stopped accepting PayPal payments because “Dish and some other companies have been catching people” and requested online reviews to be deleted because the service “is not legal.” Subscribers were asked not to mention the IPTV service when paying for it, and in some cases were told to reference an astrology consultation instead.

DISH and Sling say Sharma and Astro Vastu Solutions willfully violated 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2) and 17 U.S.C. § 1201(b)(1) when they manufactured, offered to the public, provided, or otherwise trafficked in their infringing service.

Somewhat predictably they demand an injunction under 17 U.S.C. § 1203(b)(1) plus actual or statutory damages of up to $2,500 for each infringement under § 1201.
( The stars predict a settlement, however)

The complaint can be found here (pdf)

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

When Bram Cohen released the first version of BitTorrent in 2002, it sparked a file-sharing revolution.

At the time bandwidth was a scarce resource, making it impossible to simultaneously share large files with millions of people over the Internet. BitTorrent not only thrived in that environment, the protocol remains effective even to this day.

BitTorrent transfers rely on peer-to-peer file-sharing without a central storage location. With updated additions to the protocol, such as the BitTorrent Distributed Hash Table ( DHT ), torrent files no longer require a tracker server either, making it decentralized by nature.

In theory, it doesn’t always work like that though. People who use BitTorrent, for research purposes or to grab the latest Linux distros, often use centralized search engines or indexes. If these go offline, the .torrent files they offer go offline too.

Decentralizing Torrents

This problem isn’t new and solutions have been around for quite a few years. There’s the University-sponsored Tribler torrent client, for example, and the BitTorrent protocol extension ( BEP51 ), developed by ‘The 8472’, that also helps to tackle this exact problem.

BEP51 makes it possible to discover and collect infohashes through DHT, without the need for a central tracker. These infohashes can be converted to magnet links and when paired with relevant metadata, it’s possible to create a full BitTorrent index that easily rivals most centralized torrent sites.

Some centralized torrent sites, such as BTDigg, have already done just that. However, the beauty of the proposition involving DHT is that centralized sites are not required to act as search engines. With the right code, anyone can set up their own personalized and private DHT crawler, torrent index, and search engine.

Bitmagnet: A Private Decentralized Torrent Index

Bitmagnet is a relatively new self-hosted tool that does exactly that. The software, which is still in an early stage of development, was launched publicly a few months ago.

“The project aims to reduce reliance on public torrent sites that are prone to takedown and expose users to ads and malware,” Mike, the lead developer, tells us.

Those who know how to create a Docker container can have an instance up and running in minutes and for the privacy conscious, the docker-compose file on GitHub supports VPNs via Gluetun . Once Bitmagnet is up and running, it starts collecting torrent data from DHT, neatly classifies what it finds, and makes everything discoverable through its own search engine.

Decentralization is just one of the stated advantages. The developer was also positively surprised by the sheer amount of content that was discovered and categorized through Bitmagnet. This easily exceeds the libraries of most traditional torrent sites.

“Run it for a month and you’ll have a personal index and search engine that dwarfs the popular torrent websites, and includes much content that can often only be found on difficult-to-join private trackers,” Mike tells us.

After running the software for four months, the developer now has more than 12 million indexed torrents. However, other users with more bandwidth and better connections have many more already. This also brings us to one of the main drawbacks; a lack of curation.

Curation

Unlike well-moderated torrent sites, Bitmagnet adds almost any torrent it finds to its database. This includes mislabeled files, malware-ridden releases, and potentially illegal content. The software tries to limit abuse by filtering metadata for CSAM content, however.

There are plans to add more curation by adding support for manual postings and federation. That would allow people with similar interests to connect, acting more like a trusted community. However, this is still work in progress.

Another downside is that it could take longer to index rare content, as it has to be discovered first. Widely shared torrents tend to distribute quickly over DHT, but rare releases will take much longer to be picked up. In addition, users may occasionally stumble upon dead or incomplete torrents.

Thus far, these drawbacks are not stopping people from trying the software.

While Bitmagnet is only out as an “alpha” release it’s getting plenty of interest. The Docker image has been downloaded nearly 25k times and the repository has been starred by more than a thousand other developers so far.

Caution is Advised!

Mike doesn’t know how many people are running an instance or how they’re using them. Bitmagnet is designed and intended for people to run on their own computer and network, but people could turn it into a public-facing search engine as well.

Running a public search engine comes with legal risks of course. Once there’s serious traffic, that will undoubtedly alert anti-piracy groups.

Even those who use the software privately to download legitimate content might receive complaints. By crawling the DHT, the software presents itself as a torrent client. While it doesn’t download any content automatically, some rudimentary anti-piracy tracking tools might still (incorrectly) flag this activity.

There are no examples of this happening at the moment, but the potential risk is why Bitmagnet advises users to opt for VPN routing .

Impossible to Shut Down

All in all, Bitmagnet is an interesting tool that uses some of BitTorrent’s underutilized powers, which have become increasingly rare in recent years.

The idea behind Bitmagnet is similar to Magnetico , which first came out in 2017. While that no longer appears to be actively maintained, it remains available on GitHub . During these years, we haven’t seen any takedown notices targeting the software.

Mike hopes that his project will be spared from copyright complaints too. The developer sees it simply as a content-neutral tool, much like a web browser.

“I hope that the project is immune from such issues, because the source code contains no copyright infringing material. How people choose to use the app is up to them – if you access copyrighted content using a web browser or BitTorrent client, that does not make the vendors of those apps liable.”

“Bitmagnet cannot be ‘taken down’ – even if the GitHub repository were threatened by an illegitimate takedown request, the code can easily be hosted elsewhere,” Mike concludes.

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

Lawsuits filed in the United States targeting pirate sites usually focus on breaches of copyright law, typically direct and secondary infringement, or violations of the DMCA, depending on individual circumstances.

Allegations of copyright infringement also featured in a complaint filed at an Arizona court in 2023, which hoped to quickly shut down a popular pirate site. Somewhat unusually, however, federal trademark infringement and cybersquatting allegations also played a key role, alongside other claims including unfair competition.

Complaint Targets Kokoa TV

Plaintiff Wavve Americas Inc. (wA) describes itself as a joint partnership between SK Telecom and the top three Korean Broadcast Networks –KBS, MBC, and SBS. According to the company’s website, wA’s mission is to use its open video streaming platform Kocowa ( Ko rean Co ntent Wa ve) to generate value for its content partners while providing an exceptional user experience.

The company’s complaint filed last year targeted the unknown domain registrant of kokoatv.net, kokoa.tv, and vidground.com. All three domains were registered at Namecheap which requires registrants to consent to personal jurisdiction in Arizona when in dispute with a third party.

The complaint alleged that Kokoa TV provided access to Korean-based TV shows and movies, including those exclusively licensed to wA for distribution in the United States. The site targeted both Korean and English-speaking audiences, the complaint added, with video content sourced from platforms including vidground.com.

Trading Off Kocowa’s Goodwill (and its content)

Kokoa TV’s choice of branding was called out for its similarity to the plaintiffs’ service Kocowa, for which they hold a trademark. The aim, the complaint added, was to trade off the goodwill of Kocowa while cybersquatting a deliberately similar domain, to confuse users into believing that the defendant’s platform had links to the official service.

Once presented with official content without having to pay for any of it, users of the unlicensed service Kokoa would be deterred from using the official platform offered by the plaintiffs, the complaint added.

Kocowa holds an exclusive license to distribute around 1,100 shows in the United States, content created by the three major Korean networks. The sites operated by the defendant offered that content for free, leading to allegations of copyright infringement and contributory copyright infringement.

All three domains had their ownership hidden by a WHOIS protection service so when Namecheap refused to disable the domains or hand over the identity of the domains’ operator, Wavve Americas Inc. filed its complaint.

The company demanded a permanent injunction, an award sufficient to cover the costs of corrective advertising, an award of Kokoa’s profits, the transfer of its domain names, damages for both trademark and copyright infringement, plus attorneys’ fees and costs.

Plaintiff Prevails

Discovery directed at Namecheap revealed the same name behind all three domains – Tumi Max of Bangkok, Thailand – who was named in the plaintiff’s first amended complaint. The defendant was served September 22, 2023, but after failing to appear, the court’s entry of default was followed by a motion for default judgment.

Judge Michael T. Liburdi handed down his order on February 6, 2024. Since the defendant had accepted Namecheap’s terms and conditions, the Judge found that personal jurisdiction had been established. Since the websites were accessible in the district and likely to cause confusion there, venue was considered proper.

Since Tubi Max decided not to appear, he failed to produce rebuttal evidence related to the distribution of the plaintiff’s content. While the Judge found Kocowa a “conceptually strong mark” he noted that the complaint failed to demonstrate it was a “commercially strong” mark. However, after weighing several factors including the defendants’ absence, the broadcasters prevailed on their trademark, cybersquatting, and copyright infringement claims.

A permanent injunction followed soon after, comprehensively restraining Tubi Max from unlawful use of the plaintiff’s trademarks (image below) and any unlicensed use of its copyrighted works. It appears that the focus of the complaint was to shut the site down since the injunction notes that “wA does not seek monetary damages.”

As the above shows, Namecheap was instructed to hand over the domains to prevent any further infringement of the plaintiff’s rights. Visitors to those domains today will find themselves redirected to the plaintiff’s streaming platform where they will be able to compensate the rightful owners when consuming their copyrighted content.

In theory, at least.

The complaint and other filings cited above are available here

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

Apple is known to have a rigorous app-review policy that aims to keep piracy at bay. In the past, several BitTorrent apps have been rejected from the App Store , for example.

Despite these efforts, problematic apps slip through the cracks occasionally. We’ve seen piracy apps disguised as other tools getting approval and a recent report from The Verge shows that this trick still works today.

Apple was swift to patch this recent leak after it hit the newswire. The company booted the ‘vision testing’ app “Kimi” from the iOS store, disappointing many pirates in the process.

Apple’s App Store Isn’t Piracy Free Yet

Those determined to find a Kimi alternative still don’t have to look far. In less than a minute, we were able to spot another pirate streaming app that’s not concealed at all. The app in question uses popular piracy brands such as “Gomovies” and “123movies” in its name, and lives up to expectations.

Users who manage to crawl through a web of advertisements eventually have access to a wide range of popular movies and TV-shows. This includes blockbuster movies, Disney shows, and Apple exclusives such as the hit series Silo , shown in action below.

Apparently, Apple still has some work to do on the screening front. This includes fixing the link on its website through which people can report software piracy, as that currently goes to a 404-error page .

The app we found has been around since May last year and has more than 1,600 reviews. We don’t know whether it always functioned as a pirate tool and Apple didn’t immediately return our request for comment.

Apple generally has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to piracy. The company wants complete control over all installed apps and it previously noted that the ban on sideloading helps to prevent piracy as well. It’s clearly not perfect, however.

Piracy Brands (Legally) in Apple’s App Store

Our search also revealed that not all piracy ‘associations’ are off-limits at Apple. In fact, one could argue that piracy-related terms are actively used to promote some non-pirate apps in the official iOS store. Whether all users are happy with that is questionable.

Let’s look at a few examples, searching the app store for well-known piracy brands such as 123movies , Fmovies , Cuevana , and ShowBox . All these terms return apps that offer access to a large library of movies and TV-shows, much like their pirate counterparts.

These brands and logos may look exciting to prospective pirates, but those who install the apps will soon realize that entertainment is limited to trailers. The lucky ones may get links to legal streaming platforms as well.

In some cases, the apps allow users to keep track of what they’ve watched, which can be useful. However, most are riddled with ads. As such, it doesn’t take a genius to find out why their names, and in some cases logos, are similar to pirate streaming brands.

Unlike the real piracy apps, many of these ‘mockoffs’ have been in the App Store for years. That makes sense, of course, as they are not breaking the law. That said, it can lead to disappointing reviews.

Apple doesn’t seem to mind, or perhaps it isn’t privy to the problem. We assume that some anti-piracy groups are aware of these apps, but they should be fine with it. After all, it’s a great way to frustrate and annoy pirates.

Needless to say, real pirate streaming apps are a completely different thing…

Update February 15: The pirated app we spotted earlier is no longer available. Apple informs TorrentFreak that it was initially submitted as a movie trailer platform. After the initial approval, the app added pirated content. This is in violation of the App Store guidelines. Another app that used a similar tactic was removed as well.

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

There’s no shortage of reasonable arguments that support the existence of a comprehensive anti-piracy system in Italy, capable of returning revenue to broadcasters, local football clubs, and rightsholders in general.

On the other side of the debate, consumers of pirate IPTV services argue that a virtual monopoly, in which competition isn’t allowed to exist, is the very reason pirate IPTV services became so popular in the first place.

In the middle of this chasm of differences are those who warned that the supposed solution to piracy of live sports – the much heralded Piracy Shield system – could end up causing collateral damage without proper checks and balances. However, a soft launch in December passed without incident and following Piracy Shield’s full launch late January , no significant controversies marred the automated blocking system’s first two weeks on the frontlines.

Rightsholders Open The Firehose

After a sensibly tentative start, last weekend saw Piracy Shield put through its toughest test yet, DDAY.it reported Monday . After previously being asked to block just a handful of IP addresses, over 400 IP addresses were requested last Saturday.

Why Piracy Shield crashed in response isn’t especially clear. DDAY.it, which appears to have an insider somewhere in the system, believes that thousands of simultaneous requests may have been too much for an underpowered server. That’s not impossible or even unlikely but for rightsholders who claim to be losing hundreds of millions of euros every year to piracy, failing to commit enough resources is completely avoidable.

Of more concern was a claim that the IP address of an unnamed CDN company in the UK had been added to the blocklist. Since CDN IP addresses may be in use by more than one service at a time, the risk of overblocking is obviously a concern. In this case, however, the block reportedly did its job without any collateral damage. The same may not be true for new blocks reported this morning.

Zenlayer CDN IP Addresses Reportedly Blocked

One of the notable aspects of the first Piracy Shield actions reported by regulator AGCOM, was the targeting of web-based pirate services rather than the less visible IPTV platforms causing most disruption in Italy. After so many IP addresses were targeted last weekend, it seems likely that recent targets were indeed IPTV streams and related infrastructure.

According to DDAY, however, blocks that targeted web-based movie streaming sites were also placed on the platform in recent days and that may not have gone exactly as planned.

“About ten IP addresses belonging to the Zenlayer CDN thus ended up among the blocks and this caused the blocking of absolutely legitimate services and sites that were distributed by the CDN itself,” the publication notes. “ Cloud4C , a cloud provider, is unreachable from Italy and the same goes for the control panel of the [Zenlayer] CDN itself, which is also blocked.”

Establishing the existence of localized blocking from outside the affected territory isn’t always straightforward. However, an Italian user on Twitter soon confirmed that cloud4c.com could not be accessed from his connection.

A TorrentFreak source also confirmed the domain was inaccessible from a connection supplied by Telecom Italia, Italy’s largest internet service provider. Checking local DNS server responses for the domain cloud4c.com produced inconsistent results during tests carried out earlier on Thursday.

Italy Downgrades Transparency

For years, AGCOM has published every rightsholder blocking request and then once a decision has been made, published the official response on its website for public scrutiny. It’s a transparent system that may ultimately help to hide entire websites but does so while opening up administrative aspects for public scrutiny.

With the introduction of Piracy Shield, decisions are still published, but it seems fairly obvious that information made available to the public represents a mere fraction of action behind the scenes. The image below (translated) shows every blocking order published thus far. Each contains a single domain, so it’s clear that at a minimum, hundreds of IP addresses are going unreported, with last weekend a prime example.

The biggest problem is that IP addresses make up the bulk of the blocking while also producing the most errors. These errors can be devastating for innocent parties that unwittingly end up as collateral damage. Yet with no open reporting, holding perpetrators to account – if only to improve the system – could prove all but impossible.

Any argument in favor of secrecy necessarily fails, since IPTV providers know before anyone else that their IP addresses are being blocked. That means those privy to the details of IP address blocking include AGCOM, rightsholders, ISPs, and pirate IPTV providers.

The only people kept in the dark are those who become collateral damage through no fault of their own.

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

Given the ongoing shift in the TV market away from terrestrial and satellite delivery in favor of IP-based services, cloud recording services are no longer the big deal they once were.

When TVkaista launched in Finland way back in 2007, storing video in the cloud certainly wasn’t taken for granted as it is now. The service came with a program guide and allowed users to record and store TV shows from 15 local channels. TVkaista said video would be retained for a month, allowing users to watch their recordings at a time of their choosing.

At the time, similar services were also being offered by several of Finland’s internet service providers but for the members of the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC, also known as TTVK), this was a serious breach of copyright law. In letters sent to around 20 companies, TTVK warned that without proper licensing, these services were illegal and must be shut down.

TVkaista Faces Legal Action

In advance of TTVK’s letters being sent out, TVkaista’s CEO, technical director, and legal advisor, faced legal action for criminal copyright infringement and aggravated fraud. Claims that recording amounted to fair use were brushed aside, not least since the service actually recorded everything behind the scenes, contrary to customers’ belief that any recordings played back via the service were unique to them.

TVkaista said that since its service was similar to a VCR or a DVR, that would be legal under Finnish law since private copying is permitted for personal use. The TV companies whose content was being recorded and fed back to subscribers of TVkaista disagreed, arguing that no permission was granted for this type of use.

The broadcasters claimed that the TVkaista service effectively rebroadcast their content without a license. Copyright holders weren’t being paid for the use of their content and TVkaista wasn’t offering to share any revenue.

Service Deemed Illegal

The TV companies took TVkaista to court in 2012 and, in 2015, the Helsinki District Court deemed the service illegal, a decision confirmed by the Court of Appeal in 2017.

The CEO of TVkaista was convicted of criminal copyright infringement and embezzlement, and together with the service’s technical director and the company itself, was found jointly and severally liable for damages suffered by rightsholders. Financial issues would soon complicate the case, however.

In a statement issued by TTVK this week, the anti-piracy group says that after TVkaista was declared bankrupt in February 2014, the service actually continued, first through its Finnish .fi domain and later through a .com variant. The platform eventually shut down in 2015, but the bankruptcy estate had no funds available to pay the compensation owed.

“The trustee made a request to the police for an investigation into the ambiguities related to the bankruptcy estate. The suspect was the CEO of TVkaista Oy, who, however, could not be reached for prosecution before November 2023,” TTVK reveals.

Finally Held to Account

After the matter returned to court, it was determined that since 2011, customer payments to TVkaista totaling 1.8 million euros, including 380,000 euros after bankruptcy proceedings began, had been “diverted past” TVkaista’s accounting.

“The money had been transferred to the account of a company called Charm Noble Ltd in Hong Kong. However, since the contact person for all payment arrangements was the accused CEO, the court did not find credible his claim that the company’s business had actually been sold to a foreign person already in 2011,” TTVK reports.

“In support of its argument, the defense presented a deed of sale dated 2011, which had not been presented in previous TVkaista trials; however, they claimed that the business was sold already in 2009.”

On February 12, the district court of Länsi-Uusimaa found the former CEO guilty of all charges and sentenced him to serve three years in prison for gross accounting crime, gross dishonesty, and gross fraud as a debtor. He was also ordered to pay 409,600 euros (plus interest) to rights holders, plus 59,554 euros (plus interest) to other parties.

“The verdict confirms that copyright piracy is a planned and ruthless economic crime, the sole purpose of which is to collect as much money as possible for its creators,” says Jaana Pihkala, executive director of TTVK.

“Ever since the copyright infringement process started, the users of the TVkaista service paid large sums of money for the maintenance of content, while the authors, producers or legal intermediaries of which, have not been paid a single cent. This kind of activity weakens the opportunities to develop legal services and invest in new content, which is harmful not only to the rights holders but also to society as a whole.”

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

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment regularly announces site closures following enforcement action. Over the past seven years, hundreds of sites have fallen, but the supply of new threats currently seems inexhaustible.

The level of detail ACE makes available to the public varies, but it appears to be affected by several variables. Details of settlements are rare, as one might expect. Names of site operators even more so. In many cases, even the domain names of shuttered platforms receive no specific mention, at least beyond recognizable branding.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of information that ACE doesn’t officially release is the scale of presumably successful enforcement actions that receive no mention at all. The reasons for that are open for speculation but, since the complexity of the piracy landscape has grown out of all proportion in the last few years, there’s no shortage of options.

Yet Another New Batch Arrives

If ACE maintained a single public list of domains directly taken over, redirected, or otherwise commandeered, tracking them would be straightforward. As things stand the whole process is fragmented and, at any one point, the full picture isn’t always available from DNS, WHOIS, or similar records.

For example, a series of domains that recently began redirecting to the ACE portal don’t currently list the MPA as the domain owner. They include watchgameofthrones.co, watchfriendshd.com, watchhowimetyourmother.co, watchthesimpsons.co, and watchparksandrecreation.co.

At the time of writing, none of these domains use the MPA’s DNS servers either, which may (or may not) change in the days and weeks ahead. Indeed, it’s not unheard of for sites to redirect themselves to ACE for no obvious reason. In any event, visitors to these domains are currently redirected to the ACE portal, with an interesting anti-piracy side effect observed elsewhere.

People who visit Google hoping to ‘watch parks and recreation’ or ‘watch how I met your mother’ find themselves overwhelmed with former pirate links, all leading to ACE. In some cases, the links even outrank legal platforms like Amazon.

Other domains provably taken over in the past few days include typhoonlabs.tv and typhoonlabs.net. Both list the MPA as owner and both use the movie industry group’s DNS servers. However, back in November, the MPA was listed as the new owner of the domains when they were still assigned to the former owner’s DNS servers.

We can’t explain why that was the case and we don’t know why there hasn’t been an announcement regarding these seizures. One possibility is the existence of around 30 typhoonlabs and typhoonlabsiptv-branded domains still in rotation which may (or indeed may not) be connected to a similar service.

Since announcing the demise of one platform risks driving traffic to another with a similar name. In some cases, making no announcement at all may be the best option. Situations like this can’t be uncommon when attempting to tackle piracy on a global scale and may explain why so many cases go unreported.

MPA’s Domain Collection

Thanks to record numbers of domains being handed over to the MPA, the Hollywood group’s domain portfolio is larger today than ever before. The prospect of the collection growing exponentially isn’t off the table either.

While many pirate sites previously operated without issues from a single domain, today it’s not unusual for sites to have dozens, for reasons that include redundancy, obfuscation, and circumvention of measures such as ISP blocking and search engine downranking.

In contrast, some of the most iconic domains under MPA control, such as isohunt.com and hotfile.com, stand out in their own right, each with their own place in history. Spotting them among the other 3,100+ domains, reported by a Whoxy reverse WHOIS search, is still relatively easy. It’s unlikely to remain that way for long.

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

The name ‘Aylo’ might not ring a bell with many people but it is one of the leading players in the adult entertainment industry.

Formerly known as MindGeek, and Manwin before that , the company conquered the online adult market over the past decade by offering free porn to the masses.

Aylo is also the driving force behind free ‘tube’ sites such as PornHub, YouPorn, Redtube and Tube. It also owns many adult brands, such as Brazzers and Reality Kings, that charge for subscriptions.

Over the years, the company has built an impressive library of over 40,000 registered copyright works. The company’s enforcement arm MG Premium protects this content by various means; it sends millions of takedown requests per week and full-blown lawsuits often enter the equation.

Bizarre Goodporn Lawsuit

One stand-out lawsuit targeted the tube site, Goodporn. MG Premium sued the platform for widespread copyright infringement, hoping to shut it down, but after two years that had proven elusive.

Instead, Goodporn owner Amrit Kumar fought back hard. Among other things, he allegedly signed a contract to obtain the rights to MG Premium’s content in 2019, leading him to accuse his accusers of copyright infringement. Kumar went as far as ‘going after’ the pornhub.com domain .

It’s almost impossible to summarize this bizarre case, which comprises hundreds of filings. For example, it also includes Lizette Lundberg and Emile Brunn as defendants, who stood accused of working with Kumar and submitting inaccurate DMCA counternotices.

Ultimately, however, the court entered summary judgment and a default, for inducement of copyright infringement and contributory copyright infringement against all Goodporn defendants.

Millions in Damages and a Broad Injunction

Last December MG Premium asked a California federal court to issue a default judgment in the amount of $21.6 million. That was based on a $15,000 damages award for each of the 2,433 works in the lawsuit.

The $15,000 figure was reasonable, the company argued, as it’s just a tenth of the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work.

MG Premium also requested a permanent injunction that would order domain registries and registrars to sign over all infringing Goodporn domain names.

While these targeted requests are not uncommon, the proposed injunction went much further than that. Search engines, hosting and Internet service providers, domain registrars, domain registries and other service providers should be required to block the site’s domain names, MG Premium said.

“[The companies should] block or use reasonable efforts to attempt to block access by United States users of the Goodporn Websites by blocking or attempting to block access to all domains, subdomains, URLs, and/or IP Addresses that have as its sole or predominant purpose to enable to facilitate access to the Goodporn Websites.”

Court Limits Damages, Denies Injunction

After reviewing all relevant factors, the court agreed that a default judgment is appropriate. However, MG Premium won’t get everything it requested. The court settled on a substantially lower damages award, decimating the original request.

“Plaintiff has not adduced any evidence justifying why an award of $15,000 per infringement is reasonable and appropriate in this case,” the order reads.

“Weighing the authorities and arguments presented in Plaintiff’s brief, though unmoored by evidence substantiating Plaintiff’s position, the Court exercises its discretion to award statutory damages of $1,500 per infringement, that is, twice the minimum statutory damages available for willful infringement.”

The damages award, to be paid by Kumar, is substantially lower than the amount MG Premium hoped to get, but still adds up to $2,157,000. On top, $46,740 in attorneys’ fees, to be paid by all defendants.

The court further declared that MG Premium is the rightful owner of all works identified in the complaint but declined to award the requested injunction. This means that the domains will be neither seized nor blocked.

“Without any evidence to support the remedy, particularly evidence toward irreparable harm and the inadequacy of monetary remedies, the Court declines to find Plaintiff is entitled to the injunctions it seeks,” the order reads.

Despite the win, MG Premium likely hoped for much more than it got. That could mean this isn’t the last we hear of this case.

More to Come?

TorrentFreak spoke with Jason Tucker of Battleship Stance , who worked for MG Premium on this case. He is pleased that this important hurdle was taken but expects that there is more to come.

“This is one of the most bizarre cases I have ever consulted on and it is not over,” Tucker informs TorrentFreak.

“The Defendant displayed full-length movies with no license and completely ignored takedown notices. In response to a lawsuit, a person purportedly named Amrit Kumar claimed to own all of MG Premium’s past and future library of movies and images. His basis was a forged agreement.”

Whether MG Premium will fully recoup the damages remains to be seen. The fact that there are doubts about the identities of the defendants suggests that this might not be straightforward. That said, Tucker tells us that he is committed to helping his client enforce the judgment, while putting an end to the copyright-infringing activity.

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A copy of the order is available here (pdf) and the associated judgment can be found here (pdf)

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