Tuesday, 6 September 2016

UK Police Orders Registrars to Suspend Domains of Major Torrent Sites

By  at 00:26:00    No comments
The newly founded Intellectual Property Crime Unit of the City of London Police has scored its first victories. Several domain names of major torrent sites have been suspended by their registrars following an urgent request from the unit. SumoTorrent and MisterTorrent lost control over their domains and ExtraTorrent had its .com domain suspended. Not all registrars are caving in that easily though, as easyDNS is refusing to comply and sees the requests as abuse of power.
Earlier this year UK police began working with rightsholders on a campaign to shut down file-sharing sites. Many site operators received warnings that their activities were breaching copyright law as well as the UK’s Serious Crime Act.
The actions yielded some success as a few smaller sites closed their doors. However, the major targets were unfazed by the police demands and continued business as usual.
This week the newly founded Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) of the City of London Police stepped up its efforts and instead of targeting the site owners, they contacted their domain registrars. In a carefully worded letter the police warn that the sites in question may be copyright-infringing.
“The owners of the aforementioned domains are suspected to be involved in the criminal distribution of copyrighted material either directly or indirectly and are liable to prosecution under UK law for the following offences: Conspiracy to Defraud, Offences under the Fraud Act 2006, Copyright, Design & Patents Act 1988,” the letter states.
“Should a conviction be brought for the above offences, UK courts may impose sentences of imprisonment and/or fines. PIPCU has criminal and civil powers in UK law to seize money, belongings and any property in connection with these offences.”
There is no reference to an active court order that requires the registrar to take action, but the police unit instead points at the obligations the registrars have. Among other things, the letter lists a possible breach of ICANN policy and a violation of the registrars’ own Terms of Services as a validation for the suspension.
The letters were sent to the registrars of dozens of domain names and the fallout is already visible. TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of SumoTorrent.com who confirmed that his domain was suspended yesterday. The site quickly moved toSumoTorrent.sx, but lost a lot of traffic in the process.
MisterTorrent.me was also suspended after the registrar received the police letter, and ExtraTorrent’s .com domain presumably suffered that same fate.
With millions of visitors a day ExtraTorrent is the biggest casualty so far. TorrentFreak talked to the operator who couldn’t yet confirm that City of London Police are behind the suspension, but this seems very likely. For now the site has moved to ExtraTorrent.cc which is still operational.
Not all domain name registrars are blindly complying with the demands of the Intellectual Property Crime Unit. Canada-based easyDNS is refusing to suspend TorrentPond’s domain, describing the police request as overbroad and unfounded as there is no hint of due process.
“Who decides what is illegal? What makes somebody a criminal? Given that the subtext of the request contains a threat to refer the matter to ICANN if we don’t play along, this is a non-trivial question,” easyDNS’ CEO Mark Jeftovic responds.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to ‘some guy on the internet’ sending emails. While that’s plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn’t fly here,” he adds.
It’s unclear how many sites were targeted by the police letter but it’s not unlikely that more registrars will take action during the hours to come. The police letter recommends the registrars to act within 48 hours and asks the companies to “consider their liability.”
“Suspension of the domain(s) is intended to prevent further crime. Where possible we request that domain suspension(s) are made within 48 hours of receipt of this Alert. In respect of the information provided by us, we respectfully ask you to consider your liability and the wider public interest should those services be allowed to continue,” the letter states.
In addition, the registrars are being asked to effectively send the traffic of the torrent sites to a landing page with the City of London Police logo, as well as the logos of their entertainment industry partners. Again, all without citing a court order or specific legal mandate.
“We request that the aforementioned domain(s) are redirected to the PIPCU Warning Page located at IP address: 83.138.166.114,” the letter notes.
TorrentFreak asked the City of London Police for the comment on their latest actions but we have not heard back from them. It’s clear, however, that the cooperation between the entertainment industry and UK law enforcement is serious.
Whether the impact will be lasting has yet to be seen.
Update: The emails were sent to registrars of other “pirate” sites as well, including emp3world.com, full-albums.net and maxalbums.com. We will update this article when more information comes in.
Update: ExtraTorrent confirms that their domain troubles are related to the same issue.
“Our registrar and with no court order or due process got scared of the London Police email and did suspend the domain. We are communicating with the registrar to find a logical solution to this chaos,” TorrentFreak was told.

Top 20 Less Known BitTorrent Sites

By  at 00:24:00  , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  No comments
We all know about mininova, The Pirate Bay and Torrentz, but what few know is that there are a host of less known torrent sites that also have some great, and sometimes rare, content. Here are 20 of these less known torrent sites.
So what is “Less Known”? Well, we used the Alexa ranking as our criteria, all the sites in this list are not in the top 5000 (5000 most visited sites on the Internet). The order of the sites is random, and the list includes some meta search engines as well.
Do you know a relatively unknown public BitTorrent site that should be in this list? Put it in the comments.
12. nova9.org

ExtraTorrent Celebrates 5th Anniversary

By  at 00:23:00    No comments

The site has come a long way since it launched in the fall of 2006, and is currently one of the few well moderated torrent sites out there.
ExtraTorrent’s owner told TorrentFreak that the site’s users generate 250 million page views and download 50 million torrents a month.
Most users come from the US, followed by India and the UK.
The site is kept online by 9 servers in total, but this number is bound to go up with the ever increasing visitor count. Below is how the servers are setup.
– 1 firewall + load balancer
– 2 data storages + search index
– 2 main http
– 2 static
– 2 backup servers
In the 5 years the site has been online it gained a strong community, and the site staff is determined to keep it going.

Facebook Removes Extratorrent Fan Page

By  at 00:22:00  ,  1 comment
As one of the largest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, Extratorrent.com (ET) thought it would be a good idea to interact with “fans” through Facebook.
As of two days ago the page had more than 140.000 fans, but yesterday Facebook decided to remove it due to copyright violations.
“We have removed or disabled access to the following content that you have posted on Facebook because we received a notice from a third-party that the content infringes their copyright(s),” Facebook wrote.
The site owner is not pleased with the decision, and says Facebook is needlessly censoring the ET community.
“We use Facebook to have a place for ET community to meet, talk, debate, have fun and hang out with each other. Many ET users like to spend their time on their ET Facebook page.”


“We never used FB for the purpose of breaking any rules,” he adds.
However, Extratorrent also admits that they posted links to torrent files on Facebook. Some of these torrents pointed to copyrighted material, which explains the violation of Facebook’s terms of service.
The site owner nevertheless hopes to convince Facebook to reinstate the page. If this is not possible a new one will be created.

Wednesday, 15 May 2013

Fox Targets Pirate Bay Proxies With Bogus DMCA Requests

By  at 21:41:00    No comments

Hollywood movie studio Fox has asked Google to remove dozens of allegedly infringing links to Pirate Bay proxy sites but forgot to check whether the links even exist. The result is a slew of bogus DMCA claims, some for TV-shows that have yet to be produced. Another prime example of how automated take-down procedures lead to abuse.
google-bayLike many other copyright holders Fox isn’t pleased that their content is being shared for free on The Pirate Bay.
To make pirated copies harder to find the Hollywood studio asks Google to removelinks to Fox movies and TV-shows from its search results.
But targeting The Pirate Bay alone is not enough. Fox also has to send the same notices for links to Pirate Bay proxies. After all, all content on TPB is mirrored on hundreds of proxies.
To streamline the process, someone in the company’s take-down department came up with the brilliant idea of making a huge list of Pirate Bay proxy site URLs appended with the presumed location of the content on The Pirate Bay.
In other words, copy thepiratebay.se/search/tpb and paste it after pirateproxy.netsearch/tpband the other proxy domains.
The end result is a removal request that looks like one of these which lists nearly 200 Pirate Bay proxies. After every proxy URL the same search string is added, in this case related to the TV-series Wilfred.
While this may seem a clever approach, the way Fox has carried it out has resulted in many faulty DMCA notices.
proxy-takedown
The first issue is that many proxies specifically ask Google not to index their site, since being listed on the search engine usually means receiving thousands of take-down notices.
The owner of the Pirate Bay proxy hosted at Offpeat.com told TorrentFreak that this is also the case for his site, but that Fox still asked Google to remove these non-existent links that can’t be found through Google.
“The proxy is not indexed by Google. I tell crawlers not to go there and they don’t. Still, I received a complaint regarding a URL deemed infringing by Fox,” the proxy operator says.
And that’s not all.
Upon closer inspection it appears that the mistakes run deeper since the format of the search strings is incorrect. We couldn’t find a single URL in the take-down request that actually points to (searches for) infringing material. They all include ?search= which produces no results.
The Offpeat.com owner confirms that none of the links listed for his site point to copyrighted material.
“Neither Fox or Google even bothered to check if these URLs even exist. In my case they don’t and never did,” he says.

Copyright Trolls to Judge: Nope! We’re Not Coming to Scary Hearing

By  at 21:41:00    No comments

The copyright trolls of Prenda Law have kicked back against a judge who ordered them to appear before a Los Angeles court this coming Monday. The hearing has the potential to lead to prison for some of those involved but not if Prenda have their way. In a letter sent to the court, Prenda argues several points for canceling the hearing including that the judge lacks jurisdiction, they haven’t been given enough notice, and arrangements haven’t been made for them to get paid. The hole is getting bigger but they keep on digging.
trollAs reported yesterday the copyright trolls of Prenda Law been attempting to bully the owners and users of anti-troll sites FightCopyrightTrolls (FCT) and DieTrollDie (DTD).
They ordered WordPress to hand over the IP addresses of everyone who has used both sites for the last two years. But, after a little panic, WordPress stepped in to calm the nerves.
“No cause for concern. As a matter of policy, we closely review all subpoenas, don’t respond to overly broad requests, and push back on fishing expeditions,” WordPress’s Paul Sieminski told DTD.
“Here – dietrolldie has already let us know that the subpoena will be challenged. In cases like this, we don’t turn over any information until the user’s legal challenge has played out.”
What is becoming apparent is that for every heavy-handed and/or suspect action taken by Prenda, even more adversaries come on board. Lawyer John Whitaker from the Whitaker Law Group deliberately ‘outed‘ himself as a DTD and FCT user yesterday, and BitTorrent defense lawyer Robert Cashman is more critical than ever before.
As yesterday’s article outlined, Monday will see Prenda hauled before a Los Angeles court on the orders of Judge Wright after he appeared to become somewhat tired of the firm’s apparent shenanigans.
Well, that was the plan. Unsurprisingly, Prenda have other ideas.
In an ex parte application for relief filed by John Steele, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy and Angela Van Den Hemel, Prenda argue that they shouldn’t have to come to court on Monday. In their application, Prenda roll out a variety of excuses for not attending.
First, in a move that’s likely to further inflame an already irritated Judge Wright, Prenda claim that the Judge has no jurisdiction.
“Even where the court seeks to adjudicate issues between parties, it must have personal jurisdiction over them. Here, Steele, Hansmeier, Duffy, and Van Den Hemel are not parties and have not otherwise participated in this litigation. As such, the public policy behind the need to determine personal jurisdiction is arguably at an elevated level because, as individuals, they effectively have ‘no dog in this fight’,” the application reads.
Prenda go on to argue that since they’re not parties in the action they can only be witnesses. And since witnesses can only be required to appear if they are “resident within the state at the time of service” (and Prenda aren’t, apparently), then “the court lacks jurisdiction to order them to appear.”
Second, Prenda say that attending would be particularly inconvenient. They write that the court is being “fundamentally unreasonable” in giving short notice and that attending court could upset their clients.
Prenda go on to argue that they haven’t been told why they have to attend so cannot adequately prepare, a situation which deprives them of due process. They also complain that they are entitled to get paid for attending but the court order makes no mention of who will foot the bill.
“For these reasons, even if the court had jurisdiction over the parties, the notice would be unreasonable to them and the court would, at a minimum, have to withdraw the order and issue a new one for a future date that would afford Steele, Hansmeier, Duffy, and Van Den Hemel reasonable notice of the hearing, their rights, and the purpose for their appearance,” Prenda conclude.
Ken, a writer over at the respected legal blog Popehat, is not impressed.
“Considering they have had several days to put a brief together, I find this motion rather half-hearted and meager, particularly given the gravity of the situation and what they are trying to accomplish. If this is all they could pull together, I am surprised they didn’t file it sooner, like Wednesday,” he writes.
Ken adds that the record shows that jurisdiction is not an issue and Prenda are only making matters worse.
“The evidence clearly shows that Steele, Hansmeier, and Duffy have directed Prenda Law litigation activities in California. A federal judge has ordered them to appear here and explain those activities.
“By responding with a jurisdictional argument now, they have utterly eviscerated their credibility and the credibility of their enterprise permanently in every court in the United States of America,” he concludes.

SXSW 2013 on BitTorrent: 7.39 GB of Free Music

By  at 21:40:00    No comments

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the largest and most popular in the United States. For the ninth year in a row SXSW is sharing DRM-free, RIAA-safe songs of performing artists, totaling 7.39GB so far. All the tracks can now be downloaded for free in one go, thanks to BitTorrent.
sxsw-2013Since 2005 the SXSW musicfestival has published thousands of free tracks from participating artists.
For some of the first releases the festival organizers created the torrents for the artist showcases themselves, but since 2008 this task has been handed over to the public.
Luckily all of the SXSW showcase MP3s are still freely available on the festival’s site for sampling purposes, so it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running.
For the past four years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all the MP3s on BitTorrent, and this year two torrents containing 1,210 tracks have been released.
That’s 7.39 gigabytes of free music in total.
All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their iPod without having to invest thousands of dollars. The 2005 – 2013 archives are now over 45 gigabytes.
Every year the SXSW torrents are a great success, with many thousands of music aficionados downloading the gigabytes of free music from both established acts and upcoming bands in virtually every music genre.
This year’s SXSW music festival takes place from March 12-17 in Austin Texas.
For those interested in even more free music to fill up their MP3-players, there’s alwaysJamendo with nearly 370,000 free-to-download tracks. That’s a few terabytes of free music, good for years of continuous play.