Following a piracy crackdown in Denmark and the closure of the largest torrent sites as part of a joint Rights Alliance and police operation, content-hungry pirates dispersed to find new homes.

With DanishBits and NordicBits consigned to history, many ended up at Asgaard, a relatively young private members site happy to take on new members.

Opening up under these circumstances was a bold but risky move. Within weeks the site’s operators belatedly arrived at the same conclusion and decided to shut down before things got out of hand. They were already too late; multiple arrests, a string of prosecutions, and several convictions followed.

Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance is now reporting the details of yet another Asgaard-related conviction.

Sharing Pirated eBooks & Paywalled Articles

Asgaard announced its closure in mid-December 2020 but that didn’t stop at least one of the site’s staff spending Christmas in prison .

The announcement also failed to prevent Rights Alliance and Danish police from investigating offenses that took place months before Asgaard offered to take in new members. Or indeed, offenses that took place even after Asgaard shut down.

According to Rights Alliance, a member of Asgaard was also part of a piracy release group known as ‘Xoro6’. Between July and December 2020, the now 41-year-old man from Funen illegally copied and shared over 1,000 eBooks, audiobooks, newspaper articles and magazines with other Asgaard users.

Around 85 of the articles were obtained from a paywalled service operated by Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet. The anti-piracy group says that the man gained access to the platform using credentials belonging to legitimate subscribers to the service.

Six-Month Suspended Prison Sentence

On June 22, 2023, at the Court of Odense, the former Asgaard member was handed a six-month suspended sentence for sharing the eBooks and the paywalled articles obtained using the credentials of unsuspecting Ekstra Bladet+ subscribers. But that wasn’t all.

“The 41-year-old was also convicted of eight counts of fraud in online shopping,” a statement from Denmark’s National Unit for Special Crime (NSK) adds.

“Here, he had falsely claimed to the sellers that he had either not received the goods or had returned them. Therefore, he unjustifiably got his money back.”

Rights Alliance says the man defrauded online stores to the tune of DKK 17,229 ($2,524) but his offending didn’t stop there.

Plex Server Subscriptions

The man was reported to the authorities in January 2021 for the eBook and article-sharing offenses but despite the shutdown of Asgaard, infringement of other types of media continued.

“He then became involved in running a Plex server where at least 3,468 movies and series were made available to paying customers. A relationship for which he was also convicted in court,” Rights Alliance notes.

“Here he was responsible for advertising the Plex server on platforms such as Discord and also for registration, payment and guidance of the service’s customers, who could buy access to the server for DKK 100 [US$15] per month.”

The Slippery Slope

“It is not the first time that we see cases like this, where illegal sharing of creative content easily becomes a criminal slippery slope to more serious offenses,” says Rights Alliance director, Maria Fredenslund.

“It is therefore important to intervene early, so that we avoid rights holders as well as general consumers and companies being exposed to a wide range of criminal acts.”

On top of his suspended sentence, the man was also ordered to pay DKK 41,715 (US$6,111) compensation to Rights Alliance. Given the level of offending and the aggravating factors, that’s not much compared to similar cases elsewhere. Nevertheless, NSK deputy prosecutor Brian Borgstrøm says the outcome is acceptable.

“I am satisfied with the verdict, which emphasizes that organized and systematic infringement of copyright is a form of crime which the authorities take seriously,” Borgstrøm concludes.

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

When The Pirate Bay launched nearly 20 years ago, its main goal was to become a bastion of free and uncensored information.

The site categorically rejects takedown requests from copyright holders and allows anyone to upload almost anything.

Since its early days, The Pirate Bay has always been free to use and open to the public at large. Those who wanted to share files only had to register an account, which was easy enough.

Registrations Closed to Stop Spam

The last sentence is in the past tense, as user registrations were effectively disabled four years ago . The last ‘new’ user was added to the torrent site on May 22, 2019, and, after that, there were no signs that registrations would reopen anytime soon.

The TPB team initially said that registrations had been closed to stop floods of malware torrents. This type of abuse was a major problem for the site’s moderators who asked the main operator to temporarily disable registrations.

The plan was to address the problem by putting a limit on the number of torrents users could upload in a given timeframe. That would prevent hundreds of spam torrents from being uploaded at once, so TPB could accept new users again and continue business as usual.

This temporary fix stayed in place for four years but this week, registrations were opened once again. The recent closure of ‘rival’ torrent site RARBG played a major role in this development.

RARBG’s demise took out a major supplier of new torrents . There are currently only a few public torrent sites where users can register, so the TPB moderators were concerned that a generation of potential uploaders would be lost.

Manually Approved Registrations

The team shared their concerns with TPB operator “Winston” who came up with a solution that was officially deployed a few hours ago.

New Pirate Bay registrations are not completely automated. TPB administrator Spud17 informs TorrentFreak that new users must apply for an account at the official SuprBay forums, where moderators will manually create accounts using a new tool.

This hands-on approach will help to prevent scammers and spammers from flooding the site. Users will be able to register directly in future but all accounts will still have to be approved before they are activated.

“For those who have waited years to upload, they now have the chance to get an account,” Spud17 says, pointing to the SuprBay thread .

“Whether they want to upload niche stuff every now and again, or be one of the next big scene uploaders – all are welcome. Except for the nitwits who flood the site with crap, but we’ll just nuke their arses.”

Limited # Uploads

The Pirate Bay has shown signs of deterioration in recent years. In addition to closed registrations, the comment sections under each torrent have been disabled for years and are not expected to come back anytime soon.

Whether new users will trigger an inflow of more content has yet to be seen. New accounts are limited to 50 uploads per day but those who plan to be more active than that can request an exception.

“Should anyone have designs on becoming a prolific scene uploader, you can request the limit be lifted once your account is established,” Spud17 writes.

After years of legal trouble, it appears that The Pirate Bay has entered calmer waters. There haven’t been any prolonged outages like we have seen in the past. That said, the site will always remain a top target for law enforcement and rightsholders, so a sudden storm is not unthinkable.

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

On the surface there’s a world of difference between the crisp-suited executives of international corporations and the internet-dwelling swashbucklers intent on reappropriating their copyrighted content as swiftly as possible.

In reality, the closer one gets to the piracy front lines, the more difficult it is to tell the factions apart. They use similar tools and obfuscation techniques, need to innovate to stay ahead of the game, and even participate in the same discussions. Earlier this year a group of ‘pirates’ on Reddit obtained all kinds of information on at least a dozen pirate apps using ancient lost arts; opening accounts months earlier, pretending to be almost clueless, and then just blatantly asking.

Totally unsurprisingly, there was zero shortage of helpful pirates willing to answer, but these kinds of efforts are only useful in limited circumstances and can only yield so much useful intelligence. Technical information needs to be obtained methodically before being meticulously documented, potentially for use in future legal action against pirates themselves or intermediaries – or both.

IFPI – Content Protection & Enforcement

Global recording industry trade group IFPI has a sophisticated anti-piracy team tasked with mitigating threats, gathering evidence for use in legal action, and staying on top of the latest piracy trends.

In a job listing posted Monday, the group called out for a new technical investigator to join the team at IFPI’s impressive headquarters in London.

“The ideal candidate will have well-rounded technical knowledge and be capable of analyzing and testing infringing services and producing written reports in a clear and concise manner. The candidate will work closely with the technical investigators and analysts within the team, developers, operational staff, and lawyers, as well as law enforcement professionals,” the listing reads.

Responsibilities

While prosecutions are still carried out in the UK, most music pirates have moved on from selling pirate CDs at the local market. The role at IFPI seems to be a thoroughly digital affair, with investigations focused on pirate apps, social media platforms, and online streaming services.

The successful candidate will also have knowledge of ancillary technologies, including blockchain, decentralization, metaverse and gaming platforms, and of course, Artificial Intelligence. They will also have a blemish-free past, which IFPI will confirm via an enhanced background check. These checks go beyond convictions and include any information the police may have on record that’s considered in some way relevant.

OSINT & Technical Investigations

While techniques and tool availability have developed significantly in recent years, the basic questions requiring answers in any piracy investigation remain the same; how does the infringing service or platform deliver content to end users, where does that content come from, what type of infrastructure supports it, and who are the humans involved and what roles do they play.

Investigations can be triggered when a new app appears online. Whether iOS or Android (mostly the latter), the process is the same; find out how the app functions, and then determine where the content comes from and how. The IFPI job listing gives little away on the specifics but does state that the successful candidate will have experience with three specific tools – Wireshark, Charles, Postman.

In Your App, Sniffing Your Traffic

There’s no doubt that Wireshark is the best-known tool of the three. Launched in the late 1990s and originally called Ethereal, Wireshark is the leading network protocol analyzer by far and is used by millions of people worldwide.

Wireshark is also completely free of charge but for most novices, completely overwhelming too, at least in the beginning.

For those who persevere, Wireshark offers a window into the hidden world of protocols, packets and networking, and is as proficient at monitoring the communications behavior of a regular browser accessing YouTube, as it is monitoring a mobile piracy app, or sniffing out unauthorized BitTorrent traffic on a network.

Wireshark is an extremely powerful tool and as likely to appear in a pirate’s toolbox as it is an anti-pirate’s. In most aspects Wireshark is more powerful than Charles, or Charles Proxy as it’s often known, but sometimes a more focused piece of software is preferable to all-out overkill. Charles has some interesting tricks up its sleeve.

Charles cited in a piracy investigation

While Charles also monitors traffic, it’s a web-debugging tool rather than a packet analyzer. In a typical scenario where an investigator wants to know how a new Android music streaming app works, the smartphone running the app (or an emulator) can be made to connect to Charles before it goes about connecting to external sources to stream music or obtain covers etc.

Meanwhile, Charles acts as a ‘man-in-the-middle’ silently listening and logging all activity, even when pirate app traffic is otherwise ‘protected’ by encryption. Charles can decrypt SSL/TLS connections, obtain cookies and grab passwords.

It sounds like the kind of behavior pirates might enjoy but on the piracy war frontlines, the sides have more in common than either would like to admit.

IFPI’s job listing can be found here

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

Artificial intelligence has the potential to make our lives more efficient, entertaining, and productive. There are potential downsides as well.

Major recording label Sony Music is taking this advancing technology very seriously and has created a new executive position dedicated to AI and hired a familiar name.

According to a recent article by Billboard , Geoff Taylor takes the top position as the new Executive Vice President of AI. The news was announced in an internal memo sent by Sony Music’s COO Kevin Kelleher.

From Anti-Piracy to AI

These types of appointments rarely apply to our reporting niche, but in this case there is a relevant piracy tie-in. Taylor previously headed UK music industry group BPI, which has been at the forefront of the anti-piracy battle for several decades.

In his 15-year tenure at BPI, Taylor was a strong advocate of new anti-piracy measures. This includes website blocking, where The Pirate Bay was one of the early targets.

“The Pirate Bay is no more than a huge scam on the global creative sector. It defrauds musicians and other creators of their wages, and it destroys UK jobs,” Taylor said in 2011 , urging UK Internet providers to block the site voluntarily.

This voluntary blockade never came to pass but lawsuits initiated by BPI members eventually got the notorious pirate site, and many others, blocked across all major ISPs.

Taking on Google

After this success the music industry applied pressure to search engines, asking them to demote or completely remove known pirate sites from their search results. Again, Taylor didn’t shy away from making the matter personal.

“[Google] know very well what sites are illegal, because we send them notices, a million a week, yet coming on to search, very often those sites appear at the top of search results,” he said in 2013 .

Google initially refused to downrank pirate sites, arguing that this would only lead to a game of Whack-a-Mole. However, a few months later the search engine officially announced pirate site demotion as a new anti-piracy strategy .

AI Challenges

The examples above are just a small selection of achievements that were booked under Taylor’s lead. While this says little about Sony Music’s AI strategy, there are certainly plenty of challenges there too.

Dennis Kooker, Sony Music’s President of Global Digital Business, previously noted that AI is a potential tool to work smarter and gain new insights. However, he stressed that this shouldn’t happen at the expense of copyrights.

“In particular we have serious concerns about the potential for AI-synthesized voice technology to be used at scale to cover songs and attempt to replace artists. This is something that we need to watch very closely,” Kooker noted .

These AI voice models are a major concern for Taylor and his new AI team, which will work closely with Sony’s Digital Business & Legal Affairs divisions. In a sense, artificial intelligence may prove to be a new ‘ Napster moment ‘ for the music industry.

A Napster Moment?

While some music industry insiders would like to erase AI for good, a more balanced approach may be more fitting going forward. In this regard, it’s worth revisiting Taylor’s reflections on the Napster battle, which were originally published fourteen years ago.

In an op-ed, Taylor admitted that embracing Napster might have been a better option than treating it as an adversary.

“That’s probably true, and I, for one, regret that we weren’t faster in figuring out how to create a sustainable model for music on the internet,” he wrote.

“In 1999 Napster developed a great digital service, but did so at the expense of music, while the music business protected music at the expense of progressing online digital services.

“The invention of Napster and all that has followed may soon deliver its greatest legacy – a renaissance in artistic creativity for the digital age,” Taylor added.

Indeed, Napster paved the way for unlimited music streaming services that are common today. When Taylor wrote these words years ago, streaming revenue was virtually nonexistent. Today, it represents more than two-thirds of total global recorded music revenue.

If and how AI will drive change in the music industry is unknown at this point, but Taylor’s own Napster reflections show that it might be wise not to dismiss a technology outright.

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

Over the years, Z-Library established itself as a premier source of pirated books, serving an audience of millions of users.

Up until a few months ago, this all happened relatively quietly but everything changed when the United States launched a criminal case against two of its alleged operators.

Z-Library lost access to over 200 domain names late last year and, a few weeks ago, the authorities carried out a new domain seizure round . Despite these enforcement actions and the pending criminal case , the remaining Z-Library team has no plans to throw in the towel.

Bots and Scams

Besides the long arm of U.S. law enforcement, Z-Library also faces pressure from other angles. The lost domain names drove a lot of traffic to scammy Z-Library knockoffs , for example, which still enjoy millions of visitors a month.

The shadow library was also challenged by a massive attack by ‘bots’ earlier this month, which caused various technical issues. Among other things, registrations weren’t working properly and email delivery was interrupted too.

The site nonetheless managed to stay afloat and a few days ago its operators released new software that aims to make the site more resilient and easier to access.

Z-Library Desktop Launcher

Over the past few months, Z-Library users accessed the site through a dedicated URL, which redirected them to a ‘personal’ domain that provided access to the library. This worked well but the entire operation could easily be wiped out by yet another round of domain seizures.

The new desktop launcher, which is available on the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms, will automatically redirect users to the right place, without being tied to a single domain name.

“This launcher will save you the trouble of searching for a working website link, as it will handle everything for you,” the Z-Library team announced a few days ago.

In addition to simplifying access, the new Z-Library launcher software is able to connect over the Tor network. This can help to evade blocking efforts while adding an extra privacy layer.

The software may trigger a warning noting that it’s from an unverified developer. According to Z-Library, this is a standard notice but, aside from the copyright infringement angle, people should always treat third-party applications with caution.

Supporting Copyright Law?

It’s not often that we see a service going full steam ahead in the face of an active criminal case against two of its alleged operators. In that respect the situation with Z-Library is reminiscent of how The Pirate Bay positioned itself years ago.

The Z-Library team itself sees “free access to literature” as its main driver.

“The goal of Z-Library is to provide free access to literature to as many people in need as possible. Books are the scientific and cultural heritage of all humankind, and we strive to preserve this legacy and use its power for the benefit of our society.”

Perhaps somewhat confusing, the shadow library also stresses that it’s not advocating in favor of piracy.

“We don’t promote piracy. The work of authors and publishers should be paid for and valued,” the Z-Library team explains, adding that it supports copyright legislation and doesn’t aim to change any laws.

Interestingly, the U.S. Government used the same copyright law to seize Z-Library’s domains and arrest two of its alleged operators. The authorities highlighted that the service isn’t merely a non-profit outfit, suggesting that donations were also used to enrich the people involved.

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

The Ministry of Digital Development, Telecommunications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation is the government body responsible for the development and implementation of IT policy and regulation.

In common with other government departments, ‘MinTsifry’ is working hard to convince business leaders across the country that everything is going according to plan. Russia is fully capable of weathering multiple current and developing crises as long everyone pulls together, invests their own cash, and doesn’t expect any subsidies from the government, the sales pitch goes.

Ongoing projects include the development of domestic software to replace Western products now unavailable in the market, training schoolchildren to program in the summer holidays, encouraging sales of domestic telecoms equipment and compensating local buyers for the difference in price, and promoting the growth and importance of the local IT industry.

Late last week, MinTsifry tabled new plans to boost the entertainment sector but who is supposed to benefit and how isn’t clear.

Still No Answer to Western Companies’ Pull Out

Major Western entertainment companies began leaving the Russian market more than a year ago and since then the government has struggled to come up with any obviously viable solution. Plans to legalize software piracy , turn a blind eye to piracy of Western movies , put the state in charge of all online piracy to generate revenue , or legalize piracy like Belarus did in January, have done little to solve the country’s problems.

Speaking with local news outlet RBC last week, the Ministry of Digital Development confirmed that it has been discussing the possibility of “waiving restrictions” on access to sites offering unlicensed video content from Western companies. More bluntly, pirate sites whose activities were considered so persistent and egregious that all ISPs were ordered to block them at some point, may soon find themselves unblocked.

How the digital development of Russia will be furthered by such an unusual move isn’t clear but the current plans do come with some strings attached.

Pirate Sites Must Implement Content Restrictions

A representative of MinTsifry told RIA that if it decides that pirate sites can be removed from Russia’s blocking register, unblocking would only be available to sites that a) offer pirated content from Western countries and b) those who comply with additional restrictions laid down by the authorities.

“The Ministry of Digital Development, together with industry representatives, is working on proposals to abandon restrictions on access to sites that provide unlicensed video content of Western majors, on certain conditions,” the source said.

“Such video content should not be legally presented in Russian online services, should not be rented in cinemas, and should not contain extremist materials and LGBT propaganda,” the source said.

Pirates and Compliance Tend Not to Mix

It’s doubtful that pirate sites will be queuing up to take advantage of this scheme, even in the unlikely event it does come into force.

The proposition here is that pirate sites cannot offer any locally produced movies, which is the type of content Russian legal streaming platforms have relied on for more than a year. However, these platforms also carry some Western content, at least until current licenses expire, which means that content will be off-limits too, for as long as that lasts.

Pirate sites can offer unlicensed movies from Western countries with no issues, as long as they censor them to remove LGBT references, to a standard acceptable by the state. Good luck with that.

However, since some Hollywood movies have been making it through to Russian cinemas via unauthorized routes , the pirate sites may not be able to offer those movies on their sites either.

Compliance with these rules could have a serious effect on pirate site libraries but that may not be the largest obstacle to getting sites on board.

Russia Likes to Regulate and Maintain Control

One of MinTsifry’s current responsibilities is to ensure that IT companies in Russia register for official state accreditation following a decree issued in September 2023.

“State accreditation of organizations is carried out by the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media,” the documents read. “State accreditation of organizations is carried out in order to provide them with measures of state support.”

To qualify for accreditation, IT companies must provide information on their activities and any products under development, but the full list of requirements goes on and on. That raises the question of what standards pirate platforms would have to meet before being unblocked and what any regulation would look like moving forward, to ensure they meet the content requirements of the state, as agreed.

In summary, this appears to be another scheme that will ultimately come to nothing. Compliance with a government program that offers to unblock sites in exchange for a decimation of content libraries could never prevail when sites currently offer whatever they like and have measures in place to constantly undermine blocking.

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

IPFS is a decentralized network that makes it possible to efficiently distribute high volumes of data between peers while avoiding downtime associated with regular hosting outages.

The IPFS project describes the system as a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to preserve and grow humanity’s knowledge by making the web upgradeable, resilient, and more open . Anyone who values these qualities is invited to come along for the ride using free, open source tools .

IPFS Gateways

For those who prefer not to install software but would still like to access content stored on IPFS, web gateways provide streamlined access to IPFS with zero fuss. IPFS gateways tend to be run by supporters and enthusiasts who charge nothing for their time and usually pay all of the bills.

Examples can be found here but in broad terms, public gateways aren’t particularly numerous. As reported in March , Cloudflare offers a free IPFS gateway yet despite having nothing to do with the content hosted in the network, still received over 1,000 copyright complaints in the first half of 2022.

Figures for the second half are yet to be published but if recent events are anything to go by, those numbers could be significantly higher in the next report.

Avalanche of Copyright Complaints

UK-based programmer James Stanley has a project page to make any geek smile. It begins with SCAMP, a homemade 16-bit CPU with a homemade programming language, before moving on to a robotic chessboard (accessible via API), and a footwear-based chess computer that allows Stanley to cheat at chess “hands-free and without any third-party assistance.”

Stanley is also the brains behind Hardbin.com , an encrypted pastebin-type service that utilizes IPFS. Unfortunately, Stanley took Hardbin down this week after being targeted by an anti-piracy entity demanding the removal of thousands of allegedly-infringing URLs.

“I received 3 DMCA takedown emails today, covering 7350 URLs on my hardbin.com IPFS gateway. The URLs were allegedly serving infringing copies of books,” his blog post reads.

Heavily truncated sample notice

Stanley posted the complaints to GitHub, with all three following a similar format; a demand for the immediate takedown of thousands of pieces of content that have nothing to do with the programmer, that he has no ability to take down, even if he wanted to.

Who’s Behind The Takedown Demands?

All three complaints ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) were sent from “notice@ciu-online.net” but as Stanley points out, it’s hard to say who is behind the notices.

Each notice claims to have been sent by ‘Gareth Young – Internet Investigator’ but where Young works isn’t made clear. Instead, the notices carry the names and addresses of three publishing companies; Wolters Kluwer Health (New York), Knovel, a subsidiary of Elsevier, Inc. (New York), and IEEE (new Jersey).

Stanley’s research turned up a ‘Gareth Young’ who apparently worked for law firm Covington & Burling LLP. Young is also the author of a slideshow that describes methods and tactics for taking infringing content down and making people’s lives more difficult.

The page above contains numerous options, and just as Mr Young suggested, the 5th option did indeed prove effective.

“I have now taken hardbin.com down completely because dealing with this sort of thing makes it less fun to run and more like hard work,” Stanley says.

IPFS: Technical Resilience Against Censorship

That Stanley’s work on Hardbin can’t be enjoyed by him or anyone else shows that it’s still possible to have a chilling effect on IPFS, despite its technical resilience to censorship.

It’s also worth noting that the DMCA takedown notices were sent directly to abuse addresses at the programmer’s host, rather than to him directly. It’s the kind of tactic that’s easily justified when dealing with an uncooperative pirate site but entirely unhelpful when dealing with innocent parties.

And then there’s the interesting evidence uncovered by Stanley when cross-referencing the 7,350 URLs against his reverse proxy logs.

“I did some bash-fu to extract the IPFS hashes from the emails and grep for them in my nginx logs, and was surprised to find not a single match,” Stanley explains. “None of them have ever been accessed, and of the ones that I checked, none even worked.”

Other IPFS Users Targeted

Sean Lang has been keeping records on the DMCA notices he’s received related to his gateway since February 2022.

“I currently operate an IPFS gateway on ipfs.slang.cx. I don’t publish or pin any content there, it’s only a resolver for content that’s available on the rest of the IPFS network,” Lang writes on GitHub.

“I get a lot of DMCA requests from running this. Currently I’m blocking 12367 files. They’re almost all books, although I don’t have nearly enough time to go through them manually.”

Lang says that the takedown notices are usually sent by a guy called Gareth Young and have at least one familiar quality.

“The weird thing is, [the system used] doesn’t actually verify that a given file is available through my server before sending a DMCA request. I’ve looked through the traffic logs, and the vast majority of the files listed in these takedown requests have never been requested in the history of my gateway. I haven’t checked all of them, but I’ve checked a lot,” Lang says.

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

In recent years, many people have canceled their expensive cable subscriptions, opting to use cheaper Internet TV instead.

While there are plenty of legal streaming options available, there’s also a broad offer of IPTV services that are specifically set up to deliver content without permission from rightsholders.

These pirate IPTV services are often accessed through relatively cheap subscriptions. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s no money to be made. According to a recent report, income surpassed €1 billion in Europe alone.

Giving Pirate IPTV Operators Credit

This industry isn’t just run by digital vigilantes in dark attics. The money that’s at stake attracts and breeds criminal elements of all sorts. According to a new report from the Digital Citizens Alliance ( DCA ), some operators are even ‘stealing’ from their customers.

The report, titled “Giving Piracy Operators Credit”, details how taking out pirate IPTV subscriptions led to surprise charges from all over the world.

The starting point of the research was a clean credit card. DCA investigators used this to sign up for 20 IPTV services to see what would happen. The names and URLs of all the platforms were shared in the report.

A few weeks after making these payments, unknown charges from China, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Lithuania started to show up. While it’s not clear which service(s) abused the credit card details, it suggests that not all were safe.

“Within weeks of signing up for piracy subscription services, Digital Citizens investigators’ credit card was targeted for $1,495 in illicit purchases – purportedly for grocery delivery, women’s apparel, computer software, a cash advance, and a large mystery charge of $850 that, fortunately, wasn’t processed.”

Mysterious Charges

Below is an example of a $17.21 charge from “Affectioni”, which DCA links to a woman’s apparel store in Qingdao City, China. Other fraudulent payments ranged from a few dollars to over $200. The $850 charge was blocked by the Capital One bank, which requested additional approval.

These findings suggest that it’s not a great idea to hand over one’s credit card to a shady IPTV service. That’s not rocket science, but it’s worth reiterating. However, it doesn’t mean that all IPTV providers are piggybacking on subscribers’ credit cards.

Generally speaking, it isn’t a great business model to steal from customers, if you’re looking to keep subscribers for the long run. However, some services apparently prefer instant gratification over a long-term relationship.

Call for Action

DCA understandably cautions people to stay away from these services. That may be a good idea for all services that operate illegally. In addition, the group urges consumer groups, online intermediaries, and the U.S. Government to step up.

Payment providers, for example, shouldn’t do business with pirate IPTV services and consumer groups must warn the public about the dangers involved. These warnings can also be issued by the Federal Trade Commission, to carry extra weight.

Last but not least, DCA urges U.S. law enforcement to use the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act ( PLSA ), which passed at the end of 2020, to bring more cases against criminal IPTV streaming services.

“Given that the piracy ecosystem is now a $2 billion industry, the Department of Justice should use that authority to target piracy operators. Doing so would be consistent with the DOJ’s prioritization of cracking down on ransomware schemes,” the report reads.

Survey Confirms Credit Card Trouble

In addition to the IPTV mystery shopping results, DCA also commissioned a survey among 2,330 Americans which found that roughly one in three admits to consuming pirated content at least once over the past year. Of these self-proclaimed pirates, 10% paid for a subscription.

The survey results suggest that those who visited pirate sites are at least four times more likely to experience identity theft or issues with malware. While there might be other factors at play that can partly explain this difference – such as the frequency of Internet use – the report suggests a connection to piracy.

Adding to the credit card fraud angle, the survey also found that 72 percent of those who used a credit card to pay for an IPTV subscription experienced a credit card breach. Of those who never visit pirate sites, 18 percent reported similar issues.

—

A copy of the DCA report titled Giving Piracy Operators Credit is available here (pdf)

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

In 2021, the US Department of Justice launched a criminal proceeding against two men suspected of running a massive YouTube Content ID scam.

By falsely claiming to own the rights to more than 50,000 songs, the pair generated more than $23 million in revenue.

Last year, one of the defendants confessed to his part in the copyright swindle by pleading guilty. Webster Batista admitted it was a simple scheme: find Latin American music that wasn’t yet monetized on YouTube and claim the content as their own.

Guilty Pleas

In February of this year, the second defendant pleaded guilty. Jose Teran signed a plea agreement admitting that he was part of the conspiracy, engaging in wire fraud and money laundering.

As part of the deal, the defendant forfeited a house in Phoenix, several cars, and bank accounts totaling over a million dollars.

The Content ID scam was straightforward, Teran’s plea agreement revealed. The defendants simply identified unmonetized music and uploaded those songs to YouTube.

[W]e discovered there were recorded songs of musicians and bands on the internet that were not being monetized. We began searching and downloading these songs. Once songs were downloaded, Batista would then upload them to Y.T. as mp3 files.”

“We falsely claimed legal ownership over these songs to receive royalty payments,” Teran adds, noting that the scheme brought in millions.

To collect these payments Batista launched the company MediaMuv, which became a trusted YouTube Content ID member through a third-party company referred to by the initials A.R. As the scheme grew, more employees were hired and tasked with finding more unmonetized tracks.

Sentencing

Despite pleading guilty, both defendants face a multi-year stint in prison. Teran will be the first to be sentenced and this week, the defendant and the prosecution announced their respective positions.

According to the defense, Teran wasn’t the lead of the operation. As an aspiring musician he looked up to his co-defendant, who is portrayed as the brains behind the operation.

“While Mr. Teran admits to his involvement in the relevant criminal activity, Mr. Batista was the mastermind of the fraud scheme,” Teran’s attorney writes.

“Mr. Teran believed Mr. Batista to be a successful businessman in the music field with whom he could realize his dream of producing music, movies and music videos. Believing the co-conspirator to be a close friend, Mr. Teran was excited to be the recipient of the co-conspirator’s advice and partnership.”

This advice didn’t help Teran succeed in the music industry. Instead, it led him into a criminal conspiracy. This was clearly wrong but Teran believes that he will be a productive citizen going forward, so is asking the court for a lenient sentence.

70-Months in Prison

The U.S. Government also shared its sentencing position this week. The prosecution recognizes that Teran wasn’t the initiator of the scheme, but stresses that his role was significant.

Teran and Batista at one point had between five and eight people working for them. These employees used special software to find unmonetized music which they would then add to their catalog, to exploit YouTube’s Content ID system.

“Defendant, Jose Teran, engaged in a concerted effort—over nearly five years—to steal royalty proceeds from approximately 50,000 song titles, causing a loss of more than $23,000,000.00,” the prosecution writes.

“Teran personally obtained more than $6 million in personal profit, which he used to sustain a lavish lifestyle. In addition to the harm Mr. Teran caused and the exorbitant profits that he reaped; a significant sentence is warranted to deter future conduct.”

According to the sentencing recommendation, Teran continued to obtain fraudulent royalty payments after he was indicted. To send a clear message to others considering similar schemes, a serious prison term is warranted.

“A 70-month sentence is undoubtedly substantial but given Mr. Teran’s conduct and the need to deter future fraud, it is entirely warranted,” the Government’s sentencing memorandum concludes.

Jose Teran is scheduled to be sentenced later this month and Webster Batista will follow in August.

—

A copy of the U.S. government’s sentencing memorandum is available here (pdf) and the defendant’s memorandum can be found here (pdf)

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