The piracy ecosystem is more structured than most people assume. While anyone can upload a file online, the most popular content is distributed by a small number of uploaders.

ETTV and ETHD are in this top echelon. The groups, which have their roots in the defunct ExtraTorrent site, have shared tens of thousands of videos in recent years. This has resulted in a following of millions of people.

In reality, these ‘groups’ are little more than some lines of code, or bots. These pull videos from private sources to make them available to the public. It’s an effective system but one that relies on a central hosting facility that has to be paid for. That is where things went wrong recently.

Little over a week ago, avid torrenters began to notice that ETTV and ETHD releases had stopped appearing online. Not just on the main ETTVdl site but also on other torrent sites, including 1337x. It seemed like the groups had simply disappeared.

Initially, it wasn’t clear what was going on, but ETTV administrator ‘sidekickbob’ tells us that the outage is linked to the recent troubles at the torrent site. They started when the original operator disappeared and that situation still hasn’t improved.

Sidekickbob has taken it upon himself to salvage the situation. A few weeks ago, he moved the ETTV site to a new domain, fearing that it would become inaccessible. However, the hosting accounts are also at risk and that’s where the ETTV and ETHD bots were hit.

The hosting accounts of the bots expired as the bills were not paid and Sidekickbob says that funding remains an issue. However, he ordered new servers to get the bots up and running again in the near future.

“Just got new servers today and I will reinstall the script that will start uploading again on all sites it uploaded before. Should be back to normal by Thursday… or close to normal,” he says.

This is good news for ETTV and ETHD fans. That said, the trouble at ETTV is bigger than just the bots. As we mentioned before, the future of the site is uncertain and as the original operator remains missing in action, things could start to fall further apart.

ETTV’s official image hosting services, extraimage.net is down as well, including all content. This site was often used by uploaders to add screenshots. Sidekickbob says he still has access to snoopimages.com, but all older content on this site has gone.

“We lost all the previous content we had on both extraimage.net and snoopimages.com … because also those servers went down as they were on a hosting I didn’t have access to, or time to move it all… extraimage had a massive database of images, gone forever,” Sidekickbob says.

On top of that, the ettv.online domain is set to expire if the original operator doesn’t resurface. Sidekickbob managed to redirect that to ettv.be, which is under his control, but ettv.online might eventually disappear.

It is clear that the troubles at ETTV are far from over. This, despite efforts from the remaining team members who continue to do whatever they can to keep things afloat.

While we don’t want to speculate too much, there might be an even larger drama at play since the site’s operator hasn’t disappeared without a reason. Thus far, however, there is no further information on precisely what happened.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.

As of 2019, YouTube was playing host to 31 million channels, with the most popular specializing in music, entertainment and sports.

A growing number also dedicate themselves to ‘how-to’ or tutorial videos, which aim to help viewers improve their skills on everything from cookery and car maintenance to more niche pastimes such as ‘life-hacks’ and lock picking.

For one YouTuber in Brazil, the decision to help people obtain premium TV channels from illegal sources has now backfired.

Operated by Bruno Gustavo Januário, the ‘Jorge Dejorge’ channel is packed with technology-focused videos offering reviews, unboxing videos, tips and tutorials, most of which are entirely non-problematic. However, a decision to publish advice on how to obtain TV channels via pirate IPTV services attracted the attention of ABTA, the powerful Brazilian Pay TV Association.

ABTA, which represents the main cable TV and channel operators in the country, including Globosat, Sky, NBC Universal, Fox and Discovery, filed a lawsuit against Bruno Gustavo claiming that his instructional videos infringed their rights.

In his response, the channel owner described himself as an “ordinary person” with a YouTube channel and denied that he’d named any of the TV operators in his videos. In any event, he argued, they were informative in nature and did not aim to instruct people on how to break the law.

Nevertheless, in April 2018 a judge at a São Paulo court handed down an order that required hosting and search companies, including Google, to remove the videos in question and Bruno Gustavo was told to stop publishing such content in the future. Failure to comply would result in a fine equivalent to US$1,740 for each offense.

However, according to a Globo report, the judge held back from compensating the TV companies as he believed their trademarks had not been infringed.

This resulted in an appeal from both sides to the Court of Justice of São Paulo which was heard in April 2020. In its ruling, the Court found that the operator of the Jorge Dejorge channel must pay compensation to ABTA for breaching its members’ rights with his “fraudulent” videos.

The Court found that the videos improperly reproduced the channels’ trademarks, infringed their copyrights, and amounted to unfair competition against ABTA’s members.

The exact compensation amount is yet to be determined but the Court says that since the illegal content was first published in February 2017, 10% of any revenues earned by the channel since then must be handed over to the TV companies.

“It is certain the defendant benefited [financially] during the period in which he released the videos. This is because it is common knowledge that companies such as YouTube and Facebook, as well as their advertisers, remunerate members who obtain large volumes of followers and views”, the decision obtained by Globo reads.

The Jorge Dejorge operator must also pay R$50,000 (US$8,721) in compensation to the broadcasters adjusted for interest at the rate of 1% per month from the publishing of the first content in February 2017. In addition, the defendant was ordered not to publish any more content that infringes on the rights of the pay-TV stations and was told to pay the costs of the lawsuit plus attorney fees.

“We hope that large digital media companies will adopt a more responsive posture in relation to the publication of illegal content on their platforms. We are all responsible for preventing and combating illicit acts and crimes practiced on the Internet,” commented ABTA president Oscar Simões.

The matter is not over yet, however. Bruno Gustavo’s legal team say they will appeal to the Superior Court of Justice (Superior Tribunal de Justiça), the highest appellate court in Brazil, arguing that the judge in the first instance “made a more coherent assessment” in denying compensation to the TV companies.

This isn’t the first ruling of its type in Brazil. In 2017, a court convicted the operator of the Café Tecnológico YouTube channel for publishing tutorials on how to access pay-TV channels illegally. In 2018, the appeal was denied.

While this ruling is specific to Brazil, YouTube is awash with tutorials explaining how viewers can access pirate TV services all over the world.

In more recent times, savvy YouTube channel operators have been more cautious in the way these videos are presented, in particular by avoiding the inclusion of live video from the channels in question. However, the inclusion of trademarks in the form of channel logos remains commonplace and could potentially provide an avenue for future legal action.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

These torrent download statistics are meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This week we have two newcomers in our chart and the animation movie “Justice League Dark: Apokolips War” is the most downloaded movie. The Sequel to Justice League Dark, which is distributed by Warner, was officially released as a digital download on May 5. Soon after, it appeared on various pirate sites.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(…)	Justice League Dark: Apokolips War	8.1 / trailer
2	(1)	Extraction	6.9 / trailer
3	(2)	Sonic The Hedgehog	6.6 / trailer
4	(6)	Bad Boys for Life	7.1 / trailer
5	(3)	Birds of Prey	6.2 / trailer
6	(…)	Greed	5.7 / trailer
7	(3)	Fantasy Island	4.8 / trailer
8	(…)	Emma	6.8 / trailer
9	(9)	The Gentlemen	8.0 / trailer
10	(5)	Bloodshot	5.7 / trailer

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.

In years gone by, major movie and TV show companies would regularly team up under the umbrella of the Motion Picture Association of America to take action against pirate sites and services.

While that’s still the case today, the MPA (as it’s now known) is now heading up the Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment, a global anti-piracy coalition featuring a who’s who of global content companies. This means that ACE members’ interests can be handled in a centralized way, tackling platforms that often infringe many of the group’s rights.

ACE has taken a particular interest in ‘pirate’ IPTV providers and we can now confirm that another two have fallen after being targeted by the group’s lawyers.

T.KO TV appears to have been one of the many resellers of IPTV packages flooding the Internet today. Boasting around 3,200 channels, the supplier offered subscription access to premium TV backed up by “award-winning customer service,” words that are rarely associated with anything in the piracy world.

Whatever was going on at T.KO, whether that was flawless pirate streaming or scooping up awards for making pirate streamers happy, the show is now over. While the service previously sported a big fist on its Vimeo channel, the big fist of ACE has now shut the operation down. And, like so many similar operations, its domain is now owned, operated, and redirected by the MPA.

It’s a very similar story for DripTV, aka Drip Hosting. Where once there were offers of thousands of channels at a bargain price, the main domain of the provider now flashes up the ACE countdown warning before diverting to its familiar anti-piracy portal.

According to Whois records the domain was first registered April 9, 2019 but on April 23, 2020, just over a year later, it joined the MPA’s growing list of seized domains.

There will be some who will question the effectiveness of ACE spending time taking down some of this low-hanging fruit but as the domains mount up, together they represent many thousands of former IPTV subscribers who have now lost their money or, at the very least, have to find a new supplier.

If nothing else, ACE’s seizures will help to undermine confidence in the market and might also spook a few other suppliers too.

With noticeably more enforcement, it seems that IPTV is getting a little messier overall and in some cases, less accessible too. With sellers disappearing to Discord channels rather than easily targeted websites, the barrier to entry is slowly being pushed a tiny bit higher every few months. ACE will hope it’s soon out of reach for the average punter.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.

Following court orders and site blocking regimes worldwide, The Pirate Bay is blocked in dozens of countries.

The effectiveness of these measures is often a topic of debate.

Copyright holders frequently argue that blocking works, showing that traffic to targeted sites is plunging. However, opponents argue that these blocks are easily circumvented, noting that people find workarounds or other pirate sources.

For example, if thepiratebay.org doesn’t work, they can use a VPN to access the site, or pick one of the many Pirate Bay proxies that are freely available.

In response to this, so-called ‘dynamic’ blocking orders have become more common. These are blocking orders that allow rightsholders to continuously update the blocklist by adding new URLs and removing ones that no longer need to be blocked.

This is also the case in the Netherlands, where the court ordered ISPs to block the popular torrent site. Although this decision is not final yet, the measures have proven to be very effective according to local anti-piracy group BREIN.

BREIN director Tim Kuik informed TorrentFreak this week that 181 separate Pirate Bay domains are currently blocked. Most of these are not operated by The Pirate Bay team, but by third parties.

The anti-piracy group hasn’t published the list, but Dutch ISP Xs4all maintains a list of IP-addresses and domains that have been added and removed over the years. This list is not always 100% up-to-date but shows the wide range of domains that are targeted.

This includes mostly proxy sites, but also Pirate Bay-linked subdomains from Onion.link, which is a service that provides access to sites on the Dark Web outside the Tor network.

The big question is whether these blocking efforts are effective. While they are certainly not perfect, Kuik believes that blockades work.

In a survey, which research organization Kantar prepared for BREIN late last year, nearly 20,000 Dutch respondents were asked about their Pirate Bay browsing habits. It revealed that 80% stopped using the site after the blockades were implemented.

That’s indeed a big number and much more telling than previous reports in other countries which merely showed that visits to the blocked domains dropped.

However, questions remain as well. For example, did these people stop pirating entirely, or did they simply move to Pirate Bay alternatives?

Academic research shows that the latter is certainly an option. In a series of studies on the effect of UK court orders, researcher Brett Danaher and his colleagues found that blocking a single website has little effect, as people simply move to other sites that are still available.

Only when other websites were blocked as well do piracy rates start to drop while legal consumption increases.

In the Netherlands, the blocking efforts are currently limited to just one site. This would suggest that they are not as effective at all. At least not in the broader piracy ecosystem.

Then again, that’s not a great legal argument to stop blocking. On the contrary, BREIN will likely use the aforementioned research to request more site blockades, if the Pirate Bay blocks are upheld in court.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.