Demonoid has been around for well over a decade but the site is not really known for having a stable presence.

Quite the opposite, the torrent tracker has a ‘habit’ of going offline for weeks or even months on end, only to reappear as if nothing ever happened.

Earlier this year the site made another one if its trademark comebacks and it has been sailing relatively smoothly since then. Interestingly, the site is once again under the wings of a familiar face, its original founder Deimos.

Deimos decided to take the lead again after some internal struggles. “I gave control to the wrong guys while the problems started, but it’s time to control stuff again,” Deimos told us earlier.

Since the return a few months back, the site’s main focus has been on rebuilding the community and improving the site. Some may have already noticed the new logo, but more changes are coming, both on the front and backend.

“The backend development is going a bit slow, it’s a big change that will allow the server to run off a bunch of small servers all over the world,” Deimos informs TorrentFreak.

“For the frontend, we’re working on new features including a karma system, integrated forums, buddy list, etc. That part is faster to build once you have everything in the back working,” he adds.

Demonoid’s new logo

Deimos has been on and off the site a few times, but he and a few others most recently returned to get it back on track and increase its popularity. While the site has around eight million registered users, many of these have moved elsewhere in recent years.

“I want to to see the community we had back. Don’t know if it’s possible but that’s my aim,” Deimos says, admitting that he may not stay on forever.

Many torrent sites have come and gone in recent years, but they are still here today. Looking back, Demonoid has come a long way. What many people don’t know, is that it was originally a place to share demo tapes of metal bands. Hence the name DEMOnoid.

“It originally started as a modified PHP based forum that allowed posting of .torrent files. At some point, we started using a full torrent indexing script written in PHP that included a tracker, and started building the first version of the indexing site it is today,” Deimos says.

The site required users to have an invite to sign up, making it a semi-private tracker. This wasn’t done to encourage people to maintain a certain ratio, as some other trackers do, but mostly to keep unsavory characters away.

“The invitation system was implemented to keep spammers, trolls and the like out,” Deimos says. “Originally it was due to some very problematic people who happened to have a death metal band, back in the DEMOnoid days.

“We try to keep it open as often as possible but when we start to get these kinds of issues, we close it,” he adds.

In recent years, the site has had quite a few setbacks, but Deimos doesn’t want to dwell on these in public. Instead, he prefers to focus on the future. While torrent sites are no longer at the center of media distribution, there will always be a place for dedicated sharing communities.

Whether Demonoid will ever return to its former glory is a big unknown for now, but Deimos is sure to do his best.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Running close to two decades old, the world of true mainstream file-sharing is less of a mystery to the general public than it’s ever been.

Most people now understand the concept of shifting files from one place to another, and a significant majority will be aware of the opportunities to do so with infringing content.

Unsurprisingly, this is a major thorn in the side of rightsholders all over the world, who have been scrambling since the turn of the century in a considerable effort to stem the tide. The results of their work have varied, with some sectors hit harder than others.

One area that has taken a bit of a battering recently involves the dominant peer-to-peer platforms reliant on underlying BitTorrent transfers. Several large-scale sites have shut down recently, not least KickassTorrents, Torrentz, and ExtraTorrent, raising questions of what bad news may arrive next for inhabitants of Torrent Land.

Of course, like any other Internet-related activity, sharing has continued to evolve over the years, with streaming and cloud-hosting now a major hit with consumers. In the main, sites which skirt the borders of legality have been the major hosting and streaming players over the years, but more recently it’s become clear that even the most legitimate companies can become unwittingly involved in the piracy scene.

As reported here on TF back in 2014 and again several times this year (1,2,3), cloud-hosting services operated by Google, including Google Drive, are being used to store and distribute pirate content.

That news was echoed again this week, with a report on Gadgets360 reiterating that Google Drive is still being used for movie piracy. What followed were a string of follow up reports, some of which declared Google’s service to be ‘The New Pirate Bay.’

No. Just no.

While it’s always tempting for publications to squeeze a reference to The Pirate Bay into a piracy article due to the site’s popularity, it’s particularly out of place in this comparison. In no way, shape, or form can a centralized store of data like Google Drive ever replace the underlying technology of sites like The Pirate Bay.

While the casual pirate might love the idea of streaming a movie with a couple of clicks to a browser of his or her choice, the weakness of the cloud system cannot be understated. To begin with, anything hosted by Google is vulnerable to immediate takedown on demand, usually within a matter of hours.

“Google Drive has a variety of piracy counter-measures in place,” a spokesperson told Mashable this week, “and we are continuously working to improve our protections to prevent piracy across all of our products.”

When will we ever hear anything like that from The Pirate Bay? Answer: When hell freezes over. But it’s not just compliance with takedown requests that make Google Drive-hosted files vulnerable.

At the point Google Drive responds to a takedown request, it takes down the actual file. On the other hand, even if Pirate Bay responded to notices (which it doesn’t), it would be unable to do anything about the sharing going on underneath. Removing a torrent file or magnet link from TPB does nothing to negatively affect the decentralized swarm of people sharing files among themselves. Those files stay intact and sharing continues, no matter what happens to the links above.

Importantly, people sharing using BitTorrent do so without any need for central servers – the whole process is decentralized as long as a user can lay his or her hands on a torrent file or magnet link. Those using Google Drive, however, rely on a totally centralized system, where not only is Google king, but it can and will stop the entire party after receiving a few lines of text from a rightsholder.

There is a very good reason why sites like The Pirate Bay have been around for close to 15 years while platforms such as Megaupload, Hotfile, Rapidshare, and similar platforms have all met their makers. File-hosting platforms are expensive-to-run warehouses full of files, each of which brings direct liability for their hosts, once they’re made aware that those files are infringing. These days the choice is clear – take the files down or get brought down, it’s as simple as that.

The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, is nothing more than a treasure map (albeit a valuable one) that points the way to content spread all around the globe in the most decentralized way possible. There are no files to delete, no content to disappear. Comparing a vulnerable Google Drive to this kind of robust system couldn’t be further from the mark.

That being said, this is the way things are going. The cloud, it seems, is here to stay in all its forms. Everyone has access to it and uploading content is easier – much easier – than uploading it to a BitTorrent network. A Google Drive upload is simplicity itself for anyone with a mouse and a file; the same cannot be said about The Pirate Bay.

For this reason alone, platforms like Google Drive and the many dozens of others offering a similar service will continue to become havens for pirated content, until the next big round of legislative change. At the moment, each piece of content has to be removed individually but in the future, it’s possible that pre-emptive filters will kill uploads of pirated content before they see the light of day.

When this comes to pass, millions of people will understand why Google Drive, with its bots checking every file upload for alleged infringement, is not The Pirate Bay. At this point, if people have left it too long, it might be too late to reinvigorate BitTorrent networks to their former glory.

People will try to rebuild them, of course, but realizing why they shouldn’t have been left behind at all is probably the best protection.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Dedicated Internet pirates dealing in fresh content or operating at any significant scale can be pretty sure that rightsholders and their anti-piracy colleagues are interested in their activities at some level.

With this in mind, most pirates these days are aware of things they can do to enhance their security, with products like VPNs often get discussed on the consumer side.

This week, in a report detailing the challenges social media poses to intellectual property rights, UK anti-piracy outfit Federation Against Copyright Theft published a list of techniques deployed by pirates that hinder their investigations.

Fake/hidden website registration details

“Website registration details are often fake or hidden, which provides no further links to the person controlling the domain and its illegal activities,” the group reveals.

Protected WHOIS records are nothing new and can sometimes be uncloaked by a determined adversary via court procedures. However, in the early stages of an investigation, open records provide leads that can be extremely useful in building an early picture about who might be involved in the operation of a website.

Having them hidden is a definite plus for pirate site operators, especially when the underlying details are also fake, which is particularly common practice. And, with companies like Peter Sunde’s Njalla entering the market, hiding registrations is easier than ever.

Overseas servers

“Investigating servers located offshore cause some specific problems for FACT’s law-enforcement partners. In order to complete a full investigation into an offshore server, a law-enforcement agency must liaise with its counterpart in the country where the server is located. The difficulties of obtaining evidence from other countries are well known,” FACT notes.

While FACT no doubt corresponds with entities overseas, the anti-piracy outfit has a history of targeting UK citizens who are reportedly infringing copyright. It regularly involves UK police in its investigations (FACT itself employs former police officers) but jurisdiction is necessarily limited to the UK.

It is possible to get overseas law enforcement entities involved to seize a server, for example, but they have to be convinced of the need to do so by the police, which isn’t easy and is usually reserved for more serious cases. The bottom line is that by placing a server a long way away from a pirate’s home territory, things can be made much more difficult for local investigators.

Torrent websites and DMCA compliance

“Some torrent website operators who maintain a high DMCA compliance rate will often use this to try to appease the law, while continuing to provide infringing links,” FACT says.

This is an interesting one. Under law in both the United States and Europe, service providers are required to remove infringing content from their systems when they are notified of its existence by a rightsholder or its agent. Not doing so can render them liable, if the content is indeed infringing.

What FACT appears to be saying is that sites that comply with the law, by removing infringing content when asked to, become more difficult targets for legal action. It sounds very obvious but the underlying suggestion is that compliance on the surface is used as a protective mechanism. No example sites are mentioned but the strategy has clearly hindered FACT.

Current legislation too vague to remove infringing live sports streams

“Current legislation is insufficient to effectively tackle the issue of websites illegally offering coverage of live sports events. Section 512 (c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) states that: upon notification of claimed infringement, the service provider should ‘respond expeditiously’ to remove or disable access to the copyright-infringing material. Most live sports events are under two hours long, so such non-specific timeframes for required action are inadequate,” FACT complains.

Since government reports like these can take a long time to prepare, it appears that FACT and its partners may have already found a solution to this particular problem. Major FACT client the Premier League now has a High Court injunction in place which allows it to block infringing streams on a real-time basis. It doesn’t remove the content at its source, but it still renders it largely inaccessible in the UK.

Nevertheless, FACT calls for takedowns to be actioned more swiftly, noting that “the law needs to reflect this narrow timeframe with a specified required response period for websites offering such live feeds.”

Camming content directly from cinema screen to the cloud

“Recent advancements in technology have made this a viable option to ‘cammers’ to avoid detection. Attempts to curtail and delete illicitly recorded film footage may become increasingly difficult with the emergence of streaming apps that automatically upload recorded video to cloud services,” FACT reports.

Over the years, FACT has been involved in numerous operations to hinder those who record movies with cameras in theaters and then upload them to the Internet. Once the perpetrator has exited the theater, FACT has effectively lost the battle, but the possibility that a live upload can now take place is certainly an interesting proposition.

“While enforcing officers may delete the footage held on the device, the footage has potentially already been stored remotely on a cloud system,” FACT warns.

Equally, this could also prove a problem for those seeking to secure evidence. With a cloud upload, the person doing the recording could safely delete the footage from the local device. That could be an obstacle to proving that an offense had even been committed when a suspect is confronted in situ.

Virtual currencies

“There is great potential in virtual currencies for money launderers and illicit traders. Government and law enforcement have raised concerns on how virtual currencies can be sent anonymously, leaving little or no trail for regulators or law-enforcement agencies,” FACT writes.

For many years, pirates of all kinds have relied on systems like PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa, to shift money around. However, these payment systems are now more difficult to deploy on pirate services and are more easily traced, even when operators manage to squeeze them through the gaps.

The same cannot be said of bitcoin and similar currencies that are gaining in popularity all the time. They are harder to use, of course, but there’s little doubt accessibility issues will be innovated out of the equation at some point. Once that happens, these currencies will be a force to be reckoned with.

The UK government’s Share and Share Alike report, which examines the challenges social media poses to intellectual property rights, can be downloaded here (pdf)

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

YouTube is known to be a breeding ground for creators. At the same time, however, it’s also regularly used to share copyrighted material without permission, including full-length films.

If these “pirating” YouTube users are caught they generally get a slap on the wrist by Google, or have their YouTube accounts terminated at worst. Sometimes, however, rightsholders can take things a bit further.

This is what happened in Germany, where a German filmmaker went after three YouTube users. These account holders had uploaded two movies without permission, which were then viewed thousands of times.

Through a local court, the filmmaker tried to obtain the identity of the alleged infringers, presumably to take further action. It demanded that Google and YouTube should share the emails, IP-addresses, and phone numbers that were tied to these accounts.

Initially, this request was turned down by the Frankfurt District Court, but the Higher Regional Court recently ruled that YouTube has to hand over the associated email addresses. The video streaming service is not required to hand over the IP-addresses or phone numbers, however.

The reasoning for this decision (pdf) is based on Article 101 of the German Copyright Act. The law specifies that a service provider can be ordered to hand over the name and address of an infringer.

The legislation, put in place in 1990, specifically references “written” communication and while it doesn’t mention email, the court argued that email addresses are covered.

The same reasoning doesn’t apply to IP-addresses. Although they have the term “address” in the name, they can’t generally be used to send a written message to a person, at least not directly.

“In the case of IP addresses – despite the word component ‘address’, this is not an ‘address’, since the IP address does not have any communication function, and it serves solely to identify the terminal from which a particular web page is accessed,” the Court clarifies.

Unrelated pirated movies on YouTube

The judgment of the Higher Regional Court is not yet legally binding. Golem reports that, due to the importance of the case, the Federal Court of Justice has to review it first.

For the filmmaker, the ruling comes as a disappointment since an email address alone is probably not enough to identify the infringer in question.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no other options. In the United States, it’s relatively easy to obtain information from copyright infringers with a DMCA subpoena, for example.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress.com blogging platform, receives thousands of takedown requests from rightsholders.

A few days ago the company published its latest transparency report, showing that it had processed 9,273 requests during the first half of 2017.

This is more than double the amount it received during the same period last year, which is a significant increase. Looking more closely at the numbers, we see that this jump is solely due to an increase in incomplete and abusive requests.

Of all the DMCA notices received, only 22% resulted in the takedown of allegedly infringing content. This translates to 2,040 legitimate requests, which is less than the 2,342 Automattic received during the same period last year.

This logically means that the number of abusive and incomplete DMCA notices has skyrocketed. And indeed, in its most recent report, 78% of all requests were rejected due to missing information or plain abuse. That’s much more than the year before when 42% were rejected.

Automattic’s transparency report (first half of 2017)

WordPress prides itself on carefully reviewing the content of each and every takedown notice, to protect its users. This means checking whether a takedown request is properly formatted but also reviewing the legitimacy of the claims.

“We also may decline to remove content if a notice is abusive. ‘Abusive’ notices may be formally complete, but are directed at fair use of content, material that isn’t copyrightable, or content the complaining party misrepresents ownership of a copyright,” Automattic notes.

During the first half of 2017, a total of 649 takedown requests were categorized as abuse. Some of the most blatant examples go into the “Hall of Shame,” such as a recent case where the Canadian city of Abbotsford tried to censor a parody of its logo, which replaced a pine tree with a turd.

While some abuse cases sound trivial they can have a real impact on website operators, as examples outside of WordPress show. Most recently the operator of Oro Jackson, a community dedicated to the anime series “One Piece,” was targeted with several dubious DMCA requests.

The takedown notices were sent by the German company Comeso and were forwarded through their hosting company Linode. The notices urged the operator to remove various forum threads because they included words of phrases such as “G’day” and “Reveries of the Moonlight,” not actual infringing content.

G’day

Fearing legal repercussions, the operator saw no other option than to censor these seemingly harmless discussions (starting a thread with “G’day”!!), until there’s a final decision on the counter-notice. They remain offline today.

It’s understandable that hosting companies have to be strict sometimes, as reviewing copyright claims is not their core business. However, incidents like these show how valuable the skeptical review process of Automattic is.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.