Legal procedures against file-sharing related sites and services are regular events and hardly a week goes by without a handful of stories appearing online. Most are the usual affairs with sites hosting illegal material directly or, as is most often the case, offering links to material, or even links which link to material.

The latter is often spoken of in rightsholder circles as “structural” infringement and a case outlined by Numerama takes the concept to a whole new level.

In 2007, Sébastien Budin, the former administrator of Station-Divx.com, was arrested for his part in running the site. In September 2008 the court hearings against him began, based on allegations of contributory infringement.

In March 2009 the decision against Budin was eventually handed down. The then 26-year-old was ordered by a court to pay compensation to movie and TV rightsholders including 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, Disney Company, Paramount, Universal, Warner and Buena Vista.

The damages against him totalled some 130,000 euros ($185,000) and Budin was also handed a 3,000 euro fine plus a 1 year suspended sentence. Undeterred he lodged an appeal but this week the Court of Appeal in Lyon upheld the 2009 ruling.

Although one might get the impression that Station-Divx.com was a regular file-sharing site which provided links to copyright works, that wasn’t quite the case. While the site did list the names of popular movies and TV shows, it provided no hyperlinks to illicit content, no torrents and no direct downloads.

Instead, Station-Divx.com provided lists of keywords that people could type into search engines in order to find the movies and TV shows of their choice.

“My story boils down to running a site where we created an instance of keywords to find movies on eMule more easily. I did not offer any direct links, it was only information,” Budin explained.

This defeat is not the end of the road for Budin. He has confirmed his intention to lodge an appeal before the European Court of Human Rights.

Source: Site Admin To Pay $185,000 Damages For Providing Keywords

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In its quest to stamp out piracy, the MPAA continues to pump money into its lobbying activities in the hope of planting the seeds of legislative change.

While the debate over whether corporations should be allowed to lobby crime-fighting organizations such as the police and FBI will rage on, at least there is an enforced level of transparency which allows the public to see where lobbyists are spending their money.

The MPAA have just made their mandatory disclosure for the first quarter of 2011 and it makes interesting reading.

In total the member companies of the MPAA – Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Universal – spent $400,000 in the first three months of the year lobbying influential government departments. These included the office of Vice-President Joe Biden, a valuable MPAA ally in 2010 with his mantra of “Piracy Is Theft, Clean and Simple.”

In the filing, which covers the period from January 1st to March 31st, several government departments are listed repeatedly including the U.S Senate, House of Representatives, Homeland Security, Dept. of Justice, FBI, ICE, U.S. Copyright Office and U.S. Trade Representative.

On the back of moves to turn the activity into a felony, it’s no surprise that streaming illegal content featured heavily in the MPAA’s 1st quarter lobbying. Considering the huge effort already underway with domain seizures, many of them streaming-related, Operation in Our Sites remained firmly on the agenda.

Also listed is the issue of “Pay processors role in IP enforcement”, a reference to the developing strategy of strangling the revenue to sites that the MPAA believe are generating income from infringement.

In November 2010, file-hosting service RapidShare was among the first Internet services to be labelled by both the MPAA and RIAA as a so-called “Rogue Site”, a move which forced the cyberlocker service to initiate lobbying of its own.

In 2011 it is evident that Hollywood is continuing to pressure on the Swiss-based company. RapidShare is mentioned several times in the MPAA disclosure report under several headings, not least ‘Rogue Site Legislation’ and ‘Law Enforcement/Crime and Criminal Justice’.

Interestingly, ‘Graduated Response’ is also listed as a lobbying subject, although the U.S. appeared to rule out so-called “3 strikes” regimes earlier this month in response to a United Nations report.

On the educational front, the MPAA is keen to drive home the anti-P2P message to the country’s schools and universities. Equally it is pushing for anti-camcording activities in the Asia-Pacific region plus awareness of counterfeit movie usage at US military bases, a subject we’ve touched on previously.

The MPAA also discussed the anti-piracy company MiMTiD. A DMCA-related controversy connected to that company was covered by TechDirt in February.

The $400,000 spent by the MPAA in the first 3 months of 2011 represents a $30,000 uplift on the same period last year and a $60,000 increase on its spend during the final quarter of 2010.

Source: MPAA Anti-Piracy Lobbying Targets FBI, DOJ, ICE, DHS and Biden

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While all kinds of piracy are a thorn in the side of Hollywood, when illicit movies appear on the Internet at the same time as theatrical releases, this particularly draws the ire of studios.

Over the past decade an awful lot of money has been spent trying to mitigate the problem. Intense lobbying in the United States has transformed camming into a serious felony and pressure on other countries, Canada in particular, has significantly reduced the number of copies from these traditional sources.

But of course, there are always others ready to take up the slack and it appears that in recent times that role has been filled by Hungarian pirates. This year, probably using secret watermarks, the major studios including Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. have been tracing copies of first-run movies back to local cinemas.

While the problem has existed for some time, a source familiar with the situation believes it came to a head recently when Hangover Part II turned up online just after its premiere. Videoed in a Hungarian cinema, this copy initially had fairly limited appeal due to its dubbed local language audio. But as usual, pirates have innovative tricks up their collective sleeves.

Due to tough legislation (not to mention tools such as night-vision goggles) camming usually proves very difficult, say, in the United States. However, recording just the sound from a movie onto a small portable device is not. So, armed with the video to Hangover Part II obtained by a Hungarian release group and a soundtrack easily culled from an English-language region, pirates connected to the P2P release group ‘EP1C’ spliced the pair together producing an end product with massive appeal.

This illicit release, added to the many others coming out of Hungary this year, appears to have caused Warner Bros to run out of patience. The studio has now announced that in order to stop piracy, for the foreseeable future their movies will not be released locally, on or even close to US release dates. In addition, Warner are said to have banned midnight screenings in Hungary altogether, presumably since these quieter times are more popular with cammers.

In recent months many of the key illicit copies, including Hangover Part II, have been made available by a Hungarian release group known as CiNEDUB. Keep an eye on this group for the rest of the year for an indication of whether or not Warner’s strategy is working.

Source: Camcorder Piracy Epidemic Forces Studios To Delay Screenings

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By now the beginning of the Wolverine leak story is a well-worn tale. In April 2009 an unfinished ‘workprint’ copy of the movie appeared online and spread like wild fire, a month before it was due its official release.

Not surprisingly, Fox – the studio behind the production – went ballistic. The villain behind this crime would be made to pay dearly, they vowed.

Eventually the accusatory fingers began pointing at Gilberto Sanchez, a glass installer and musician from The Bronx. The now 48-year-old said he bought the movie for $5 from a Korean in the street. For the hell of it and against the advice of his friends, he then uploaded it to MegaUpload. A couple of weeks later the FBI turned up and by December 2009 Sanchez was under arrest.

So here we are, exactly 2 years to the day that Sanchez made his somewhat fateful ‘mega upload’ to MegaUpload (the FBI say he also posted two links to the file on public sites), and as expected he has kept his word by pleading guilty.

According to the FBI, Sanchez has admitted to “one count of uploading a copyrighted work being prepared for commercial distribution.” This felony charge carries a statutory maximum penalty of three years in federal prison. It could also be accompanied by “a $250,000 fine or twice the gross gain or gross loss attributable to the offense, whichever is greater.”

But while it took the FBI a matter of hours to arrest the people who uploaded a workprint of Star Wars Episode III after it was leaked in 2005, it took two weeks to track down Sanchez and a whole 8 months to arrest him. What the FBI were doing in that two-thirds of a year is anyone’s guess, but one might presume that given 20th Century Fox’s vow to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law “the source of the initial leak and any subsequent postings” that might provide a clue.

Yet Sanchez is the only person to be facing charges and he falls into neither category.

The post-production studio from where the workprint copy leaked would have been incredibly easy for the FBI to identify – even more so than Sanchez himself – yet they have never even been mentioned. Indeed, someone there must’ve been directly responsible for leaking the movie out (in Fox’s terminology “the source of the initial leak”) but there have been no arrests.

Unsurprisingly, though, the studios didn’t miss the opportunity to try and punish those allegedly making “subsequent postings” of Wolverine. The administrators of FileSoup were charged with conspiracy to infringe copyright on the movie but were recently acquitted.

It now seems almost inevitable that Sanchez will go to jail following his sentencing by United States District Judge Margaret M. Morrow on September 19th this year. However, the movie industry source of the initial leak can sit comfortably, safe in the knowledge that his or her paymasters rarely seek to punish their own.

They have a certain image to maintain.

TorrentFreak

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Check out TorrentFreak‘s new News Bits feed! .

Following two adjournments, the trial of file-sharing site operator Vincent Valade got underway in France today. Scheduled to run for 3 days, the Paris Criminal Court will hear evidence that claims between 2005 and 2006, Valade “provided films without the permission of copyright holders.”

Now aged 25, Valade was the owner of ed2K link site Emule Paradise, which at the time was one of the most popular sites of its type. Indeed, the claims from the movie company plaintiffs including Association of Film Producers, the National Federation of Film Distributors, the Association of Independent Producers, Universal, Galatée Films and Pathé Rennare, are that the site attracted around 300,000 visitors every day.

From this traffic, say the plaintiffs, Valade generated a sizeable advertising income. During the two year period in question it’s claimed he had revenues of more than 416,000 euros which were placed in bank accounts in Belize and Cyprus. Five other defendants including the Future Net (Net Avenir) advertising agency will appear alongside Valade at the trial.

Valade, now aged 25, is accused of facilitating the illegal distribution of 7,113 copyright movies, some of which were pre-release, between 2005 and 2006. He is also accused of the illegal copying of 19 films which were found on his computer following his December 2006 arrest.

It is by no means certain that Valade will lose his case. A similar case brought by 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Disney, Paramount, Universal and Warner against link site see-link.net failed last year after the plaintiffs presented no evidence to show that even a single infringement had taken place due to the site’s links.

“The underlying question is, can Vallade be held liable for links that are Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), and not Uniform Resource Locators (URL),” Guillaume Champeau of file-sharing news site Numerama told TorrentFreak this afternoon.

“That is, if there is no evidence that the referenced content was actually shared when the .ed2K files were created, can you say it is infringement? Even if the content is shared, is it second degree infringement?”

In addition, one of the core arguments of the plaintiffs is that eMule Paradise offered the eMule file-sharing software for download – complete with how-to guides – alongside links to infringing downloads.

“[The plaintiffs] say that given ‘the context’ of eMule Paradise, with lots of links enabling the downloading of infringing content, the act of offering eMule for download is criminal,” Guillaume explains.

“Since the DADVSI law passed in 2006, it is forbidden in France to ‘knowingly and by any form, publish, make available or communicate to the public a device clearly intended for making available copyrighted works and material without authorization’.”

If found guilty Valade faces a 3 year jail sentence, fines of up to 300,000 euros and damages payouts potentially running to millions of euros.

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After failing to do business with some of the leading companies in the entertainment sector, a developer has turned from gamekeeper to poacher. As a protest against what he describes as big business support for online piracy, the dev has transformed his anti-piracy system into a pretty snappy music download site and says he won’t turn it off until his demands are met.

Early today a software developer called Dominic contacted TorrentFreak with a very unusual story. Dominic says he has created an anti-piracy system which he believes has the potential to wipe out a significant amounts of online piracy.

Talking figures, Dominic believes his “patent-pending anti-piracy platform” could “eliminate up to 90% of music, film, TV, software and video game piracy” online. That’s a huge claim, even given the use of the all-important words “up to”, although hardly one not to have been made before.

No doubt excited by his product, Dominic says he has presented his platform to the world’s leading media companies. In the movie sector they include the MPAA, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, AFACT and Village Roadshow. In music Dominic told us he has spoken to IFPI and Australia’s MIPI.

For some reason none of them were interested in the platform. This rejection seems to have prompted a radical shift in Dominic’s strategy.

Dominic went on to explain to us that he has ad crawlers in 4 continents which are able to monitor specific sites to report on any controversial ad placements. He used this system to monitor advertising on “pirate sites” and claims that from his analysis he discovered that the bulk of the ads came from companies owned by InterActiveCorp. IAC is run by Barry Diller, the ex CEO of both Fox and Paramount films.

“Other prominent advertisers include Fox Sports and Fox Mobile, both owned by NewsCorp, who regularly sue end-users and websites for piracy,” says Dominic, while adding that he also traced US Government departments – smallstep.gov and mypyramid.gov.

But of course, this phenomenon is not new. We’ve seen many times before that adverts from all sorts of companies end up on sites without their knowledge because their ads are placed by 3rd parties, so we put this to Dominic.

“You are absolutely right about some companies ads slipping in because of ad agencies several layers down filling those spots, however the ads of IAC group companies account for upto 40% of all ads on these sites, TigerAirways over 5% of all ads on pirated sites for traffic coming from the Asia Pacific region and so fourth,” he explained.

“Also with such an industry and US legal push against advertising on piracy related sites at the moment, you would presume these companies/governments would ensure they themselves are not engaging in this practise, whether intentionally or not.”

However, Dominic is visibly annoyed that these companies are “funding piracy” so has decided to protest until something is done about it.

Turning somewhat from gamekeeper to poacher, Dominic has transformed his anti-piracy platform into a music search engine and download site. It seems to work pretty well and there’s even a list of top downloaded songs at the bottom of the page along with cover artwork.

“Each and every time a search is run or download initiated our servers locate a match on the web and serve it back,” Dominic explains. “Hence results could change every time you ran a search or downloaded a file. Even the popular results on the home page are not indexed on our servers, we go out and obtain this data EVERY single time our home page is loaded.”

Dominic wouldn’t reveal where his site is pulling music from but told TorrentFreak: “My platform has the capability to index, crawl, monitor and analyse any page/site it comes across,” and further claims that “this is the fastest and easiest way to download any song you can think of, on the web.”

However, it appears that Dominic is prepared to take down his MP3 free-for-all if certain conditions are met.

“When these organizations decide to stop advertising on pirated sites and stop funding piracy, and take responsibility for the problem, I have a platform that has the ability to counter almost all forms of piracy today, and will be happy to take this site down.”

Dominic explained to us that he’s not a supporter of piracy, but a supporter of innovation.

“I believe that the work of artists of all industries and classifications should not be ripped off without dues paid to the creators. However, I believe the monopolies behind these artists are themselves aiding the problem, and as such changes are needed. I would love a harmony between consumers and content produces, which is absolutely possible.”

Dominic’s protest site, imovi.es, can be found here and includes a list of 10,000 alleged “piracy supporting” advertisers. Whether or not his anti-piracy platform will ever see the light of day remains to be seen but from details shared with TorrentFreak it seems to be a fairly comprehensive affair, albeit one that does no tracking at all of file-sharers.

Finally, Dominic told us that he is quietly hoping for an incoming email from Ireland. If you’re reading this Bono, he means you.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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An unfinished copy of the upcoming Vampires Suck movie has been making the rounds on BitTorrent recently. Despite’s efforts from Fox to prevent people from taking a sneak peak at this upcoming Twilight parody, a leaked and possibly unfinished workprint version has been downloaded tens of thousands of times already.

It is no secret that every Hollywood production eventually ends up on BitTorrent, sometimes a few hours after it premieres in theaters and usually no longer than a few days. For this very reason movie leaks are hardly noticeable, but this changes when an unfinished copy of a movie appears online weeks before the official release date.

Last year this happened with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Three long weeks before the official premiere in the movie theaters an unfinished copy (Workprint) appeared online, and in advance of its release over a million people had already downloaded it via BitTorrent.

20th Century Fox wasn’t happy with this global sneak preview and asked the FBI and MPAA to investigate the case. This investigation eventually led to the arrest of a scapegoat, but the original leaker was never caught. Now, a year on from the Wolverine drama, Fox is again up in arms about a leaked and potentially unfinished movie.

Little over a month ago a workprint copy of Vampires Suck was uploaded to various torrent sites by the P2P release group KiNGDOM. This time around Fox wisely kept quiet about the leak. Behind the scenes, however, Fox’s legal department has been sending numerous takedown requests to torrent sites and Google. Interestingly, some of the URLs that were sent to Google are links to fake copies of the movie.

Vampires Suck, a parody of the popular Twilight series, premieres in the United States and Canada tomorrow, but despite Fox’s efforts the movie has already been downloaded over 100,000 times. According to commenters, the quality of of the audio and video is more than decent and the film appears to be complete, although one can not be sure if the scenes in the workprint will all be in the actual film.

It is not unlikely that Fox will be trying to find the source of the leak once again, and the first leads are presented to them by KiNGDOM. “Got this from a friend blurred the needed areas for security reasons and cropped others. It came in 5 reels at the beginning of each there was a countdown till the reel started so I had to cut them out too, as for filtering I did the normal,” we read in the release notes.

Whether the leak will end up hurting the success of the movie in the long run or not is open for debate. It might, if those who have downloaded the film don’t end up seeing it in the movie theater or on DVD, where they originally planned to do so. On the other hand, the leak might lead to some additional press coverage and thus serve as a useful promotional tool.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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Claiming that the site was a major source of pre-release cammed movies with links to piracy groups outside the country, on May 26th 2009 the Russian Federation Ministry of Internal Affairs Investigation Committee under the Ministry of Internal Affairs carried out a raid on the the Russian BitTorrent tracker, Interfilm.ru.

The action followed complaints from anti-piracy group RAPO, a founding member of the MPA which represents the interests of Universal, Paramount, Sony, Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox in Russia.

At Interfilm’s Moscow base the police arrested several staff and also the main targets, husband and wife team Ivan and Irina Podorozhnikovymi.

Just over a year later the Interior Ministry Investigation Committee has now filed criminal charges against the pair, known online as ‘Ripper’ and ‘Nadezhda’. The scope of the accusations are quite incredible. Domestic and foreign film companies claim that the tracker caused 38.7 billion rubles in damages – a mind-blowing $1.253 billion.

Although it has not been revealed how this astronomical figure was reached, if convicted the founders – who the authorities say moved house and took technical measures to keep the site up during the investigation – could be facing up to six years in jail under Part 3 of Article 146 of the Criminal Code.

In addition to action against the site’s founders, there is an ongoing investigation into some of the top users of the site. However, in order to prove that regular users committed any crimes, under Russian law it would be necessary to prove they profited from their actions on a large scale.

There are claims that some individuals downloaded fresh movie releases from Interfilm and then uploaded them to their own sites. Police are considering whether to launch criminal investigations in these cases.

Although Interfilm went down after the initial raid, it reappeared at LeaseWeb in The Netherlands. The site remains operational today with a Malaysian host but is perhaps preparing for trouble. In addition to using the Interfilm.ru domain, the site is also in operation from BitHouse.org. Russia’s biggest torrent site, Torrents.ru, recently had to change its name to RUTracker.org after its domain was seized by Russian authorities.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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Copyright is a double edged sword, and those who sharpen one side often get cut by the other. Two weeks ago we reported that the gadget blog Gizmodo was going after bloggers who copied their work without permission, while they were ’stealing’ from photographers themselves.

Now, one of the photographers has written in again, pointing us to a photo gallery of the Icelandic volcano eruption last month that was published on Fox News. Like Gizmodo, Fox News is also exploiting the work of Flickr user Orvatli without permission. This clearly violates his copyrights and Örvar is not pleased, to say the least.

“This was a once in a lifetime photo session for me and these big media companies are ruining the value of my images by publishing them. Each time the image gets published their value decreases,” Örvar told TorrentFreak. “Publishers generally want unique and unpublished images on their media so a rarely or unpublished image has higher value than those everybody has seen,” he added.

As with Gizmodo, Örvar sent an invoice to Fox News to get paid for his work. Although Gizmodo eventually paid half of his standard fee after he kept complaining, Fox News is not responding to his inquiries at all. Fox News is obviously not living up to its “Fair & Balanced” tagline.

Now, we probably wouldn’t have covered this issue if Fox News wasn’t owned by Rupert Murdoch. The multi-media tycoon is a known copyright evangelist who accuses Google and other search engines of copyright infringement for indexing the websites of his newspapers.

Murdoch’s News Corp. outfit also owns the film studio 20th Century Fox, an MPAA member that has launched several lawsuits against against torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay. It seems that Murdoch has a double standard when it comes to copyright infringement. Apparently it’s not that bad if he’s the one making money from it.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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In 2009, the founders of The Pirate Bay lost their court battle against the music and movie industries. Despite receiving heavy sentences, their site continued to operate and the appeals process could drag on for years yet.

Determined not to wait for this process to play out before crippling the site, in May 2009 music companies Universal, EMI, Sony and Warner applied to the courts for fines to be imposed on Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde for as long as they continue to infringe their copyrights through the operation of the site.

In July 2009, this lead was followed by the movie industry with Columbia, Disney, NBC, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner taking legal action against the same three individuals in Stockholm, demanding that the court stops the site from continuing to infringe their copyrights on more than 100 named movies and TV shows.

In common with the music industry action, the Hollywood studios also named The Pirate Bay’s bandwidth supplier, Black Internet AB, although that ISP is no longer involved with the site and is now presumably excluded from the action. However, there was another line of attack for the entertainment industries.

At the end of October 2009, the Stockholm District Court ruled that two of the site’s founding members – Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij – were now banned from operating the site in the future. If they failed to comply with this decision, they would face a fine of 500,000 kronor ($71,600) each.

Earlier this year the record companies wrote to the Stockholm District Court demanding that the penalties for the pair continuing to run the site were imposed. In a new application, the movie companies are also insisting that the Court makes good on its threats. But as with all things Pirate Bay, there are complications.

Not only do Fredrik and Gottfrid live outside Swedish jurisdiction, both of them insist that they have nothing to do with the running of The Pirate Bay anymore. They say they transferred the site to Seychelles-based company Reservella in 2006. Needless to say, the entertainment companies don’t believe a word of it and insist that the founders are still running the site.

“Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg should easily be able to present evidence showing that it is as they claim, namely that there are other people who took over control and operation of The Pirate Bay. They have not done so,” say the studios in the application.

In any event, what is clear is that in the eyes of the studios, little has changed, even after The Pirate Bay shut down its tracker last year.

“This change has no impact on file-sharing service function,” they conclude.

At this stage it is unclear where the burden of proof lies. Is it up to the founders to prove that they aren’t involved with the site, or is it up to the studios to prove that they are? If it’s the latter, this could be the hardest job in the whole world – even harder than the founders proving a negative.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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