For almost two decades, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks have been a rich source of content for those who prefer not to pay the going rates for movies, TV shows, music, software, and video games.

For almost as long, entertainment industry companies and groups have been trying to stem the tide. Litigation against P2P software companies was soon accompanied by lawsuits against end users, with the latter gaining in popularity in more recent times after it became clear that money is to be made from the practice.

Over the years, hundreds of so-called ‘copyright troll’ cases have been reported and countless thousands of individuals have chosen to pay a settlement fee, in order to make a supposed lawsuit disappear. For some companies, the practice has proven lucrative but others have found it less so, with more knowledgeable defendants fighting back, causing costs to rise and profits to plummet.

In the UK, several companies have attempted to generate revenue from alleged file-sharers. The business model doesn’t appear to have varied much since its inception around 2006, with most players seemingly backing away in the face of adverse publicity and informed defendants fighting their corners.

In 2015, a company called Hatton and Berkeley entered the arena. Working with well-known copyright troll partner MaverickEye and several movie producers, the company threatened a huge wave of lawsuits. After an initial flurry of developments over several months, things went quiet. However, there are signs the company is eyeing the space once more.

In a recent email to TorrentFreak, Hatton and Berkeley founder Robert Croucher pointed us to a somewhat tricky to digest article, but with an undoubtedly interesting core.

“A ‘mutual assured destruction’ scenario was previously an inevitable outcome to any civil litigation in the UK, bringing with it the real risk of creating a zero-sum game where both claimant and defendant would be equally penalized financially creating an economic ‘non-solution’,” the piece reads.

“To counter the potential risk to rights holders, we opted for an attritional loss model, a proxy battle of sorts, designed to consolidate intellectual property interests – focussing combined efforts and greatly reducing adverse risk exposure to get over of the zero-sum hurdle.”

In common with previous announcements from the company, straightforward language is eschewed in favor of an elaborate overview. However, the main take-home from the release is that there is a new facet to be considered in the mass litigation landscape – Internet piracy insurance.

Offered via UK-based insurance broker Integro and sourced from an unnamed “‘A’ rated, multinational insurer”, Piracy Protection cover claims to assist copyright holders to recover lost revenues by making mass litigation against file-sharers (read: BitTorrent users) a less risky exercise.

“This Insurance is the first of its kind to cover the Rights Holder in their pursuit of Copyright Infringers against three main elements of risk: ISP Adverse Costs; Defendants Costs; Own Court Fees on Loss,” Integro writes (pdf).

“Previously Rights Holders have pursued defendants through court, however until now, they have had to bear the significant risk of Adverse Costs which in many cases would be too high to consider.

“By purchasing this Insurance, 1) you transfer all this risk to the Insurer, 2) you transfer the administrative burden to the Wrapper, and 3) our panel of Specialist
Tier 1 Intellectual Property Lawyers will pursue the infringers through IPEC (Intellectual Property Enterprise Court – A division of the High Court) on your behalf,” the broker adds.

Croucher informs TF that the ‘Wrapper’ is a limited liability partnership (LLP), an entity incorporated to run a business with two or members. Those members can be people or even a company.

“Hatton & Berkeley is the architect and manager of the insurance wrapper,” he explains.

“The LLP is a standard insurance wrapper model, if you can imagine it is similar to managing a fund, principally – multiple capital accounts, structured reporting to members, and generally reduced overheads as the rights holders consolidate and coordinate their efforts under one banner.”

Or, as the UK government phrases it, “Each member pays tax on their share of the profits, as in an ‘ordinary’ business partnership, but isn’t personally liable for any debts the business can’t pay.” Instead, liability is limited to the capital members invest into the LLP.

We put it to Croucher that while there have been plenty of threats to take file-sharers to court, in reality it rarely happens in the UK. It appears that this new type of insurance could be aiming to change that.

“The scarcity of applications to the Courts (specifically in the UK) are born of the high cost and risk associated with issuing litigious proceedings. This is something that rights holders have been battling against for years, and the core of our involvement to date has been to fix this very problem,” Croucher notes.

One of the key business areas of Hatton and Berkeley appears to be the formation of companies and indeed, LLPs.

The idea of piracy insurance isn’t new. More than a decade ago, a Swedish company offered insurance to file-sharers for around $20 per year, in the event they were ever sued for copyright infringement. It wasn’t particularly popular, mainly because people didn’t think they were likely to be sued. Croucher seems to believe the new product can be more successful.

“This type of insurance (Before The Event / After The Event / Legal Expenses hybrid) shares lots of commonality with litigation funding, which is essentially what it is.

“Attritional loss models are quite common, this is however the first in the world market like this that targets torrent activity specifically and is leveraged to fund legal action at court, and of course covers any adverse risk of loss to the rights holder,” he concludes.

Whether this type of approach will prove attractive to rightsholders will remain to be seen, as will its effectiveness under pressure. On the other side, the best risk management strategy for current and future BitTorrent users is not to get monitored doing something illegal in the first place.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Whether it’s for a school project, a funny meme, or a blog, many people use search engines to find fitting images.

Some of these are free to use, but in most cases, permission from the creator is required to publish photos in public.

The same is true for images that float around on news sites or social networks. It’s easy to make a copy of a photo and use it elsewhere on the web but more often than not, people are not supposed to do so without permission.

This is a cause of frustration for many creators and some are now drawing the line. In the past, we have covered several lawsuits filed by photographers against major news outlets that use their work without permission, but there’s another development worth noting – Pixsy.

Pixsy offers a dedicated product that helps creators to find where their images are being copied without permission. Optionally, they can then request to send a takedown notice, or take it up a notch and demand compensation from the infringer, via email.

The artists see the images Pixsy finds and can ‘submit’ the infringing one for further action. The site will then take care of the rest and only gets paid if the artist gets paid too.

“Once submitted our expert case managers handle everything. From preparation to evidence collection, negotiation, settlements, and payouts,” Pixsy notes.

Fight image theft

Pixsy officially launched its services in 2014 and has already processed over 55,000 cases worldwide. The company doesn’t specify how many licensing demands have been sent, but they appear to be quite common.

The Internet is littered with mentions of these emails with varying demands. In some instances they’re asking for $750, but we’ve also seen $575 and various other figures floating around, also in pounds.

TorrentFreak spoke to a person who was recently targeted by a Pixsy license request. He prefers to remain anonymous, fearing more repercussions, but we’ll call him Frank. He was utterly surprised when the email came in.

“I had no idea you could get in trouble for taking a picture off Google search results,” Frank told us.

The trouble, in this case, refers to an email requesting hundreds of pounds in licensing fees. The email stresses that the creator of the image hasn’t given permission, and there’s an “evidence report” that summarizes the findings.

The licensing request doesn’t come without a proper stick, however, as Pixsy warns that legal action may follow if the demands are not met within a set deadline.

What’s next?

“In the event that resolution with a license fee is not possible, our next steps are to forward this matter to a legal partner in your local area to secure the highest fees recoverable for copyright infringement,” Pixsy writes.

“These fees include actual damages or statutory damages, and can include legal costs, expenses, costs affiliated with filing a lawsuit, and ensuing litigation.”

The image Frank used wasn’t an actual photograph but a mocked-up Photoshop image that appeared rather generic. When writing this article a reverse image search revealed that it appears on hundreds of sites.

Interestingly, none of the sites credit the author, nor could we find any way to officially license the image.

Despite the strong language, Frank tells us that he has no intention to pay. And he’s not the only one. The letters have been described as an “extortion scam” by some, and others note that the legal threat may not be as imminent as it seems.

That said, it’s no surprise if many of the recipients choose to pay the license fee (as this woman did), if only to get rid of the looming threat of things getting worse.

While not everyone agrees with the tactics, the scheme certainly is a wake-up call that people should not randomly use images they find online. Many creators who struggle dealing with copyright infringing also see it as a useful service.

TorrentFreak also spoke to Pixsy which informs us that they “fight image theft” with the help of 26 different legal partners across the world. They stress that their service doesn’t target all websites randomly. They pick selected targets which seem to be professional businesses, major publications, or government agencies.

In Frank’s case, the professional business was a blog that was set up a few months ago, offering a certain service. Not a typical company, but Pixsy presumably saw it as a legitimate target.

Our source had no experience with creating websites and maintains that he had no clue that the image he used required a license. To avoid confusion, he urges search engines to make this more clear going forward. Most mention that images “may” be copyrighted, but a starker warning could be appropriate.

While Frank doesn’t deny that creators of photos and other images should be able to protect their rights, he’s no fan of Pixsy’s model.

“I think their email threats come across as a scam or extortion. Only after googling Pixsy I could see that other people have run into them and their methods, and most call them copyright trolls.

“I’ve not replied to their emails as I’m hoping they’ll go away to catch bigger fish than little old me,” Frank adds.

Talking about bigger fish – Pixsy recently offered help to catch one.

The company reached out to photographer Sean Heavey who is currently suing Netflix for the infringing use of a photo. While Heavey didn’t use Pixsy to find the infringing use, the company referred him to a legal partner, and is helping him to track other infringers through their service.

“I now believe all photographers need to have a service such as Pixsy as part of their normal business plan,” Heavey told Alpha Universe.

“We have taken action on not only the Netflix case but others as well — some of which I knew about and others I discovered while using the Pixsy platform,” he adds.

We’re pretty sure Netflix won’t be able to make that go away for $750…

Whether any infringements found through Pixsy have ever resulted in full-blown lawsuits is unknown. The company informs us that it can’t provide exact numbers on licensing requests and legal cases.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Most Internet providers do their best to keep the peace with copyright holders. Swedish ISP Bahnhof is not one of them.

The company has been a fierce opponent of copyright trolling, invasive data retention laws, and website blocking. At Bahnhof, user-privacy and unrestricted access to the Internet take priority.

Still, when the company published a detailed unblocking guide in a press release on Thursday, we were caught by surprise.

“There are Internet providers who have been ordered by the Patent and Market Court to block DNS, of The Pirate Bay site for example, and that means you can not access that page no matter how much you try,” Bahnhof begins.

These blockades, such as the one ordered against Telia last month, prevent people from going to The Pirate Bay, FMovies, or any other restricted sites. Ideally, that should stop them from pirating ever again, but Bahnhof has its doubts.

“This is how it’s supposed to work. Someone surfing to a blocked site thinks ‘damn, now I can’t access it, no more movie downloading for me’. But, of course, it does not work like that in real life. It’s easy to get around a blockade if you are using a VPN or change your DNS servers. Let’s explain.”

The ISP goes into detail about how people can set up a VPN to avoid censorship, offering a step-by-step guide. In addition, it points out that changing one’s DNS servers may already be sufficient to bypass simple site blockades.

Initially, we assumed that Bahnhof was only trying to be helpful, telling their competitors’ customers how they can access blocked sites. However, this perspective changed yesterday.

As it turns out, Bahnhof has also been ordered to block several ‘pirate’ domains. Following a lawsuit from academic publisher Elsevier, it now has to ban Sci-Hub and Libgen, among others.

As we reported previously, the company isn’t taking this lightly, to say the least.

While the company can’t evade the blocking order itself, it can point out how its subscribers can do so. And that’s exactly what their press release does.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

After several years of legislative amendments and technical deployments, Russia now has a fairly sophisticated site-blocking system. It targets blatantly-infringing pirate sites, unregistered VPNs, plus extremist and other material considered dangerous by the state.

While some sites are blocked temporarily, for not removing pirated content quickly enough, for example, others find themselves permanently blocked by local ISPs. Failing to remove pirate content after multiple complaints can trigger such a situation, with offending domains placed on a national blacklist of blatant infringers.

Legislation passed last year expanded this regime. With the creation of a centralized database to which ISPs and search engines must connect, URLs of permanently blocked resources can be preemptively removed from search results. However, while other search companies are following the rules, it appears there is an issue with Google.

According to local telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor, Google is in breach of federal law after the company failed to interface its systems with Russia’s ‘FGIS’ national blacklist. Roscomnadzor previously wrote to Google to request its compliance, noting that within three days the company should begin filtering its search results.

However, for reasons that are not immediately apparent, Google failed to comply with the request, meaning that it could now be subject to an administrative fine of between 500,000 and 700,000 rubles (US$7,611 to US$10,656).

Roscomnadzor deputy head Vadim Subbotin says that his organization is writing to Google and the company must respond with an explanation.

“The decision was made on the basis of [a recent] inspection. We are now sending the act of verification to Google. They have certain deadlines to object to our verification activities and send us their objections. We will see what their response is,” Subbotin said.

The final decision on the scale of the fine will sit with the courts and Roscomnadzor says it will decide on its next course of action after considering Google’s response. To date, no tech company has ever been fined for non-compliance.

Even if the fine is at the top end it will be a drop in the ocean for the search giant. However, Russian authorities are taking their blocking efforts seriously so resistance could prove a considerable irritant.

Last month it was revealed that following 17,000 complaints against pirate sites, 6,000 were eventually blocked by ISPs following orders form Roscomnadzor.

This week, Russia’s most powerful tech companies including Yandex, Mail.ru Group, and Rambler signed a Memorandum of Cooperation designed to rid their platforms of infringing content, without having to go near a courtroom.

In cooperation with major movie and TV companies, the agreement will see the formation of a central database of infringing sites within three weeks. This registry will be queried every five minutes by search engines and content platforms who will use the data to remove infringing content from search results and hosting services. Google has not yet signed but is being welcomed to do so.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

As a staunch defender of an open Internet, ISP Bahnhof has repeatedly spoken out against pirate site blocking efforts.

The company has also argued the matter in court recently, after academic publisher Elsevier applied for an order to ban a series of domain names, including Sci-Hub.

Today, Bahnhof announced that it has been ordered to block the sites in question.

This is the worst possible outcome for Bahnhof. TorrentFreak spoke to CEO Jon Karlung who describes it as a “horrifying” decision that “goes against the soul of the Internet.”

The result, starting today, is that sci-hub.tw, sci-hub.mu, sci-hub.se, libgen.io, and several other domains are being blocked by the ISP. But Bahnhof wouldn’t be Bahnhof if it went down without a fight.

The company has no faith in an expensive appeal, which another ISP lost last year in a similar blocking case. However, it does have another ace up its sleeve. Now that they are blocking anyway, they can easily an extra domain name to make a point.

So, in addition, Bahnhof has gone ahead and banned its visitors from accessing the official Elsevier.com website as well. Elsevier wanted a site blockade – it now has one.

Visitors attempting to visit the domains now see a 90s style website explaining what’s going on, complete with an old dial-up tone in the background.

“Bahnhof opposes censorship in every way, shape and form, but it looks like we won’t be able to dodge Elsevier’s blocking requirement. That’s why we have placed this barrier in front of Elsevier’s website – to make sure that they themselves also get a taste of the blocking they’re currently evoking against others,” it reads.

Elsevier.com banned

The page goes on to explain what Elsevier is, making note of the controversy surrounding the company’s role in academic publishing. This is one of the reasons why the blocked “pirate” sites have become so popular.

Bahnhof’s CEO informs TorrentFreak that the company sees no point in appealing the case. The Patent and Market Court, which handles these matters, is made up of people who are biased towards copyright holders, he believes.

To make another point, the Internet provider also decided to send the court a message. Starting today, users of the court’s network can no longer access Bahnhof’s website.

“The computer or network you are using belongs to the Patent and Market Court and is therefore blocked from the domain bahnhof.se. You at the Patent and Market Court have recently decided that operators should block certain domains so their customers can no longer visit them,” the message reads.

Court banned

While the ISP is clearly disappointed with the court’s decision, it will not stop its protests. It may not be able to undo the blocking order but the company will continue to make its voice heard.

“Bahnhof has repeatedly demonstrated how copyright law is being abused and exploited by greedy opportunists, and in the end it is always ordinary people who have to pay,” Bahnhof notes.

“This page you’ve got before you right now is the result, this is what awaits in a future where private interests can regulate community information. Is our legal system really being used in this way?

The ISP also hopes that its subscribers will help with its efforts. On the blocking page it provides a form allowing them to send a letter to Justice Minister Morgan Johansson, to share their outrage.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.