This week, police forces around Europe took action against what is believed to be one of the world’s largest pirate IPTV networks.

The investigation, launched a year ago and coordinated by Europol, came to head on Tuesday when police carried out raids in Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece, and the Netherlands. A fresh announcement from the crime-fighting group reveals the scale of the operation.

It was led by the Cypriot Police – Intellectual Property Crime Unit, with the support of the Cybercrime Division of the Greek Police, the Dutch Fiscal Investigative and Intelligence Service (FIOD), the Cybercrime Unit of the Bulgarian Police, Europol’s Intellectual Property Crime Coordinated Coalition (IPC³), and supported by members of the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA).

In Cyprus, Bulgaria and Greece, 17 house searches were carried out. Three individuals aged 43, 44, and 53 were arrested in Cyprus and one was arrested in Bulgaria.

All stand accused of being involved in an international operation to illegally broadcast around 1,200 channels of pirated content to an estimated 500,000 subscribers. Some of the channels offered were illegally sourced from Sky UK, Bein Sports, Sky Italia, and Sky DE. On Thursday, the three individuals in Cyprus were remanded in custody for seven days.

“The servers used to distribute the channels were shut down, and IP addresses hosted by a Dutch company were also deactivated thanks to the cooperation of the authorities of The Netherlands,” Europol reports.

“In Bulgaria, 84 servers and 70 satellite receivers were seized, with decoders, computers and accounting documents.”

TorrentFreak was previously able to establish that Megabyte-Internet Ltd, an ISP located in the small Bulgarian town Petrich, was targeted by police. The provider went down on Tuesday but returned towards the end of the week. Responding to our earlier inquiries, the company told us more about the situation.

“We are an ISP provider located in Petrich, Bulgaria. We are selling services to around 1,500 end-clients in the Petrich area and surrounding villages,” a spokesperson explained.

“Another part of our business is internet services like dedicated unmanaged servers, hosting, email servers, storage services, and VPNs etc.”

The spokesperson added that some of Megabyte’s equipment is located at Telepoint, Bulgaria’s biggest datacenter, with connectivity to Petrich. During the raid the police seized the company’s hardware to check for evidence of illegal activity.

“We were informed by the police that some of our clients in Petrich and Sofia were using our service for illegal streaming and actions,” the company said.

“Of course, we were not able to know this because our services are unmanaged and root access [to servers] is given to our clients. For this reason any client and anyone that uses our services are responsible for their own actions.”

TorrentFreak asked many more questions, including how many police attended, what type and volume of hardware was seized, and whether anyone was arrested or taken for questioning. But, apart from noting that the police were friendly, the company declined to give us any additional information, revealing that it was not permitted to do so at this stage.

What is clear, however, is that Megabyte-Internet is offering its full cooperation to the authorities. The company says that it cannot be held responsible for the actions of its clients so their details will be handed over as part of the investigation.

“So now we will give to the police any details about these clients because we hold their full details by law. [The police] will find [out about] all the illegal actions from them,” the company concludes, adding that it’s fully operational once more and working with clients.

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The Pirate Bay is arguably the most widely blocked website on the Internet.

ISPs from all over the world have been ordered by courts to prevent users from accessing the torrent site, and this week the list has grown a bit longer.

A Dutch court has ruled that local Internet providers KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile, Zeelandnet and CAIW must block the site within ten days. The verdict follows a similar decision from September last year, where Ziggo and XS4All were ordered to do the same.

The blockade applies to several IP addresses and more than 150 domain names that are used by the notorious torrent site. Several of the ISPs had warned the court about the dangers of overblocking, but these concerns were rejected.

While most Dutch customers will be unable to access The Pirate Bay directly, the decision is not final yet. Not until the Supreme Court issues its pending decision. That will be the climax of a legal battle that started eight years ago.

A Dutch court first issued an order to block The Pirate Bay in 2012, but this decision was overturned two years later. Anti-piracy group BREIN then took the matter to the Supreme Court, which subsequently referred the case to the EU Court of Justice, seeking further clarification.

After a careful review of the case, the EU Court of Justice decided last year that The Pirate Bay can indeed be blocked.

The top EU court ruled that although The Pirate Bay’s operators don’t share anything themselves, they knowingly provide users with a platform to share copyright-infringing links. This can be seen as “an act of communication” under the EU Copyright Directive.

This put the case back to the Dutch Supreme court, which has yet to decide on the matter.

BREIN, however, wanted a blocking decision more quickly and requested preliminary injunctions, like the one issued this week. These injunctions will only be valid until the final verdict is handed down.

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A copy of the most recent court order is available here (pdf).

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Last fall, Epic Games released Fortnite’s free-to-play “Battle Royale” game mode for the PC and other platforms, generating massive interest among gamers.

This also included thousands of cheaters, many of whom were subsequently banned. Epic Games then went a step further by taking several cheaters to court for copyright infringement.

While the initial targets were people who coded, used or promoted cheats to gain a clear competitive advantage, this week Epic sued a different type of cheater. In a complaint filed at a California Federal court, the game publisher accuses a New Zealander of creating an exploit that allows users to get free V-bucks.

V-bucks are the game’s currency and can be bought through an online store, starting at $9.99. The virtual coins allow players to purchase skins for their characteras well as other game tools.

According to Epic, people who create and use these kinds of free-money exploits are stealing from the game publisher.

“Players who search for and promote exploits ruin the game experience for others and undermine the integrity of Fortnite. Players who use exploits to avoid paying for items in Fortnite are stealing from Epic,” the complaint reads.

V-bucks

The alleged perpetrator is identified as Yash Gosai, who’s a resident of Auckland, New Zealand. Epic believes that Gosai developed the exploit which was then promoted through YouTube.

“On information and belief, Gosai developed an exploit for Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode that enables players to obtain V-bucks without paying for them. Gosai created and posted a video on YouTube to advertise, promote and demonstrate the exploit,” the complaint reads.

While the game company managed to get the video taken down, they’re not done with the New Zealander. They accuse Gosai of copyright infringement, breach of contract, as well as conversion.

“Defendant’s videos demonstrating the exploit infringe Epic’s copyrights in Fortnite by copying, reproducing, preparing derivative works from, and/or displaying Fortnite
publicly without Epic’s permission, the company writes.

Epic asks the court for damages and wants the defendant to destroy all Fortnite copies and any related works.

As mentioned before, this is not the first lawsuit Epic has filed against a cheater. Thus far, it has reached at least three settlements behind closed doors. Minnesota resident Charles Vraspir signed an agreement early December. Philip Josefsson from Sweden and Artem Yakovenko from Russia followed soon after.

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A copy of the complaint against Gosai is available here (pdf).

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When the original Torrentz site shut down during the summer of 2016, several copies jumped in to fill its shoes.

The most successful alternative, in terms of traffic, was the elegantly named Torrentz2.eu. Unlike many others, Torrentz2 has always been upfront with its users and never claimed to be an official resurrection.

This approach worked, as millions of users were drawn to the site. However, just before Christmas the site suddenly removed all links to external torrent sites. Instead of a metasearch engine, it turned into a database of torrent metadata, and traffic started to drop off.

The message on the site’s homepage changed as well. Instead of claiming to be “a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines,” it turned into “is a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine.”

As the weeks rolled by, many people thought that the links would never return. While the homepage was updated briefly to promote a freelancer ICO, not much happened. Until this week.

Just as abruptly as the torrent links disappeared last month, they were added again, returning Torrent2 to its former glory. At the time of writing, the site list links to 61,111,077 torrents on 82 domains.

Torrentz2 with links

So what happened here?

TorrentFreak reached out to the operator of the site to find out more. He replied, but at the moment he prefers not to comment on the disappearing links incident or the site’s future.

That leaves us with nothing else than speculation really. Perhaps there was a technical error, an operational change, a simple mistake, or outside intervention? We simply don’t know.

The only real conclusion we can draw is that, at least for the casual observer, Torrentz2 appears to be back where it used to be. For now…

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In 2017, anti-piracy enforcement went global when companies including Disney, HBO, Netflix, Amazon and NBCUniversal formed the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE).

Soon after the Coalition Against Piracy (CAP) was announced. With a focus on Asia and backed by CASBAA, CAP counts many of the same companies among its members in addition to local TV providers such as StarHub.

From the outset, CAP has shown a keen interest in tackling unlicensed streaming, particularly that taking place via illicit set-top boxes stuffed with copyright-infringing apps and add-ons. One country under CAP’s spotlight is Singapore, where relevant law is said to be fuzzy at best, insufficient at worst. Now, however, a line in the sand might not be far away.

According to a court listing discovered by Singapore’s TodayOnline, today will see the Coalition Against Piracy’s general manager Neil Kevin Gane attempt to launch a pioneering private prosecution against set-top box distributor Synnex Trading and its client and wholesale goods retailer, An-Nahl.

Gane and CAP are said to be acting on behalf of four parties, one which is TV giant StarHub, a company with a huge interest in bringing media piracy under control in the region. It’s reported that they have also named Synnex Trading director Jia Xiaofen and An-Nahl director Abdul Nagib as defendants in their private criminal case after the parties failed to reach a settlement in an earlier process.

Contacted by TodayOnline, an employee of An-Nahl said the company no longer sells the boxes. However, Synnex is reportedly still selling them for S$219 each ($164) plus additional fees for maintenance and access to VOD. The company’s Facebook page is still active with the relevant offer presented prominently.

The importance of the case cannot be understated. While StarHub and other broadcasters have successfully prosecuted cases where people unlawfully decrypted broadcast signals, the provision of unlicensed streams isn’t specifically tackled by Singapore’s legislation. It’s now a major source of piracy in the region, as it is elsewhere around the globe.

Only time will tell how the process will play out but it’s clear that CAP and its members are prepared to invest significant sums into a prosecution for a favorable outcome. CAP believes that the supply of the boxes falls under Section 136 (3A) of the Copyright Act but only time will tell.

Last December, CAP separately called on the Singapore government to not only block ‘pirate’ streaming software but also unlicensed streams from entering the country.

“Within the Asia-Pacific region, Singapore is the worst in terms of availability of illicit streaming devices,” said CAP General Manager Neil Gane. “They have access to hundreds of illicit broadcasts of channels and video-on-demand content.”

CAP’s 21 members want the authorities to block the software inside devices that enables piracy but it’s far from clear how that can be achieved.

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