It’s been just over two months since Swedish police carried out a dramatic raid that took the infamous Pirate Bay offline. While the action certainly had an impact on its raid-proof reputation, the torrent site rose from the ashes two weeks ago with its databases largely intact.

While that resurrection must’ve been a blow to Swedish authorities, action against torrent sites is far from over. As the investigation into The Pirate Bay and former operator Fredrik Neij continues, police have struck again in the notorious torrent site’s backyard. In common with December’s raid, local authorities are providing a bare minimum of details.

“We have made ​​significant seizures, but I will not say more than that,” said prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist.

It is known that five people are in police custody under suspicion of being involved in the unlawful distribution of copyrighted movies. While it’s yet to be confirmed, the investigation will almost certainly have been launched at the behest of the major Hollywood studios and local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance.

One of the sites targeted is Tankafetast, Sweden’s second largest torrent site. It’s been hit before, at least a couple of times, but has always managed to reappear. This time the situation seems more serious.

Also down is torrent site PirateHub and streaming portal Tankefetast Play. The latter is currently redirecting to the same political site as its namesake.

Promotional image previously released by Tankafetast

While confirming that an investigation into PirateHub had been ongoing for some time, Ljungqvist did not reveal whether equipment such as servers had been seized in the latest operation. When quizzed about the downtime of the sites listed above, however, the prosecutor said that they’d been disabled by their operators.

“It is not us who have taken down the sites, it is they themselves who did so in order to prevent further crime,” Ljungqvist said.

If that is indeed the case, the development has clear parallels with the news last week concerning streaming portal DreamFilm.se. The operators of that site reported that after one of their admins was arrested the site did a deal with police to close down voluntarily.

While that didn’t go quite to plan, with some admins leaving to start a new venture with a similar name, it’s possible that the replacement URL won’t be reported on the old DreamFilm.se homepage for long. According to IDG, the prosecution in the case has now filed a motion at the district court in Linköping for that domain name to be forfeited.

As reported earlier this week, two Pirate Bay domain names are also under threat, with authorities targeting the Punkt SE registry with pioneering legal action to have the domains revoked and/or seized by the state.

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

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) has just published its latest submission to the U.S. Government, providing an overview of countries it believes should better protect the interests of the copyright industry.

The IIPA, which includes a wide range of copyright groups including the MPAA, RIAA, BSA and ESA, has listed its complaints against a whole host of countries. As in previous years, Canada was discussed in detail with the recommendation to put it on the 2014 Special 301 ‘watch list’.

One of the main criticisms against Canada is that the country offers a home to many pirate sites. The country recently revised its copyright law but that has done little to address this problem, IIPA believes.

“Although there has been some improvement in recent years, Canada still has far to go to rectify its reputation as a safe haven for Internet pirates. Indeed, a number of the world’s most popular Internet sources dedicated to online theft of copyright material retain connections to Canada.”

Among others, the report lists the popular torrent sites Torrentz.eu, Kickass.to and streaming portal Solarmovie.is as partially Canada-based.

Canada’s inaction against these websites has forced copyright holders to request website blockades in other countries, IIPA claims. In addition, these pirate sites hamper the growth of legal services.

“As long as these sites continue to use Canada as a base, efforts to provide a space within which legitimate, licensed services can take root and grow are undermined, not only in Canada, but around the world,” the report reads.

According to the report Canada’s current copyright law lacks the ability to motivate hosting providers to stop dealing with this sites. Instead, IIPA argues that the law gives these companies “overbroad safe harbors.”

“Clearly the legal incentives remain insufficient for Canadian providers of hosting services to cooperate with right holders to deal with massive and flagrant infringements carried out using their services,” they write.

Aside from hosting pirate sites, IIPA characterizes Canada as a pro-piracy country in general. Canadians download more than twice as much pirated music per capita, according the copyright group.

The “notice and notice” system that was implemented recently, where ISPs have to forward copyright infringement warnings to alleged pirates, is not expected to change much either they say.

“… while the Canadian “notice and notice” system requires service providers to retain records on the identity of subscribers whose accounts have been used for unauthorized file sharing or other infringing behaviors, multiple repeat infringers will be delivered the same notice.”

Ideally, IIPA would like to see a system where repeat infringers can be identified and punished if needed, similar to the “strikes” systems that have been implemented in other countries.

The above is just the tip of the iceberg for Canada. Among other things, the groups also call for stronger border protections and limiting the copyright exceptions for educational use.

The group ask the U.S. Government to “continue to press Canada” to address these and other issues that may hinder the growth of the copyright industry.

“[The U.S. Government] should encourage Canadian authorities to do what they can to give service providers greater incentives to come together with right holders to make meaningful progress against online copyright infringement; but further legislative change is likely to be needed.”

The IIPA’s full 2014 Special 301 recommendation report is available here. This also includes assessments from more than a dozen other countries, including Brazil, China, India, Russia and Switzerland.

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

Four years ago a new kind of torrent indexing site hit the scene. While most other sites were carrying a database of torrent files uploaded by their users or culled from elsewhere online, BTDigg took a different approach by using DHT.

BitTorrent’s Distributed Hash Table, to give it its full title, is a system supported by most major BitTorrent clients. It allows users to find peers sharing the same files without needing a centralized BitTorrent tracker. In December the system was relied upon heavily when most of the main public trackers went down unexpectedly before returning last month.

BTDigg offered a special search engine that allowed users to trawl DHT in order to find content and download via magnet links. It was even possible for users to find content that hadn’t been uploaded to public trackers yet but was just being shared in DHT-enabled torrent clients.

“We think that the Internet’s moving towards decentralized and distributed systems and we would like to contribute to it by creating BTDigg,” the site’s creator told TF in a 2011 interview.

But now, just a couple of weeks’ shy of the site’s fourth birthday, BTDigg is no more. The site has disappeared with users now confronted by a page that simply won’t resolve. All mail to BTDigg bounces and the site’s Twitter account has been dead for some time.

The shutdown comes as a surprise. Unlike RapidShare, for example, which will close shortly due to diminishing visitor numbers, in January BitDigg pulled in more traffic than it had done in the past 12 months, despite being subjected to web blocks in the UK. A site voluntarily pulling the plug during good times is a pretty rare occurrence.

But while BTDigg had been riding high and doing relatively well, the same cannot be said about file-hosting site BillionUploads.

After enjoying success its popularity began to wane, and in the past 10 months the file-hoster dropped from an Alexa global ranking of 2,000 to around 8,000 recently.

BillionUploads had previously proven itself a hit with many Internet users, often through their use of other services. As can be seen from the data below, much of the site’s traffic came from movie indexing and streaming sites such as Icefilms, Primewire and Movie4k. These sites offered movies with BillionUploads as one of the key sources.

Recently, however, users linking into BillionUploads via Icefilms, to name just one location, found that content wasn’t forthcoming and a visit to the site itself now reveals an ominous notice. It’s very low on detail, provides no explanation, and certainly doesn’t inspire confidence in any kind of return.

This sudden demise will be problematic for any users who stored content on the site and now expect it back, but to be fair this can’t really be compared to the unannounced shutdown of a Dropbox-type operation.

It’s fairly likely that many users of the file-hoster will have expected this kind of outcome and are already viewing movies on another site. For those looking to retrieve content, however, holding collective breaths for too long might be ill-advised.

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

Since 2012, Russia has had legislation allowing the country’s main telecommunications watchdog Roskomnadzor to maintain a list of domains to be blocked by ISPs in the country.

While the usual serious crime suspects such as child abuse and terrorist sites are included, more controversial resources are also filtered, including sites that feature content about drugs and suicide. Also present are sites that fail to remove copyright content in a timely manner and in the past couple of years plenty of torrent, storage and links forums have been blocked.

Of course, where there’s a block or filter there are people ready to circumvent them and it now appears that Russia is growing tired with the ease that citizens do so. Proposals from the Duma (lower house of parliament) now indicate that the country is considering how to further limit access to “banned” content.

Speaking at Infoforum-2015, Russian MP Leonid Levin, who is deputy head of the Duma Committee on information politics, indicated that access to anonymization and circumvention tools such as TOR, VPNs and even web proxies, needs to be restricted.

“One of the factors in the formation of the Internet environment in our country has become the authority for the pre-trial blocking of websites. It allows us to block sites banned in Russia quickly enough. At the same time the pre-trial blocking of anonymizing services deserves attention, such as access to the anonymous network Tor,” Levin said.

By introducing restrictions on these systems, Levin added, it would restrict citizens’ access to blocked content, stop people transferring content anonymously, and also help to reduce the commercial distribution of malware.

Levin also called for greater powers for the Roskomnadzor watchdog, an organization that also supports the idea of locking down anonymous networks. According to Vadim Ampelonskogo, Roskomnadzor’s chief press officer, the task won’t be easy but is technically possible.

Describing the Tor network as a “den of criminals” and “ghouls, all gathered in one place”, Ampelonskogo said Roskomnadzor would find a solution to block anonymous networks if it was supported by a relevant regulatory framework.

Levin’s proposals to block anonymizing tools and networks is not new. In 2012 the topic was raised but came to nothing and in 2013 an initiative was launched by the FSB and received support from the State Duma. However, there is a growing feeling that Russia will eventually do something.

According to figures cited by Russia’s RBC, 150,000 citizens use the TOR network with up to 25% of Internet users now using some kind of VPN.

While Russia’s attack on encryption won’t be a surprise to many, other supposedly more free societies are also looking to crack down on the anonymous. In the wake of the recent attacks in Paris, Prime Minister David Cameron indicated that users of private services such as WhatsApp could be blocked or monitored if his government wins the next election.

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

Week in and week out automated bots detect and report millions of alleged copyright infringements, which are then processed by the receiving site without a human ever looking at them.

Unfortunately this process is far from flawless, resulting in many false and inaccurate DMCA claims.

For regular Internet users YouTube’s takedown process is particularly problematic. We’ve highlighted this issue before, but an example that reached us this week attacks one of the Internet’s darlings, a cat.

Last March, YouTube user Digihaven uploaded one hour of video loops featuring his cat Phantom, purring, as cats do. The video didn’t go viral but appealed to a niche public, and more recently also two major music publishers.

Nearly a year after the video was posted Digihaven was informed by YouTube that Phantom is “pirate” purring. Apparently, part of the 12 second loop belongs to EMI Music Publishing and PRS.

In the copyright notice YouTube states that the cat purring is flagged by the Content-ID system as an infringing copy of the musical composition “Focus.”

Pirate purring

The video was not removed by the false claim, but according to Digihaven monetization was disabled. Luckily he’s not going bankrupt due to the loss of income, but it’s baffling how easy it is to hijack legitimate videos.

“I’m sure EMI/PRS made Phantom a sad kitty. It seems like companies such as EMI are pirating ads on people’s legit videos, so I’m wondering if they apologize to, or reimburse people for those false claims,” he tells TF.

Hoping to clear his cat’s name Digihaven decided to file a dispute. This was partially successful, as EMI lifted its claim shortly before publication of this article.

Phantom, meanwhile, is considering a career in the music business and is looking for compensation.

“Phantom is currently independent, but looking to sign on with an indie label. Phantom’s lawyer filed a complaint, looking for 10 lbs of catnip in damages,” Digihaven says.

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