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Mid-2010, nine sites connected to movie streaming were targeted by the U.S. government. They included NinjaVideo.net, at the time one of the Internet’s most prominent video streaming sites.

Hana Beshara, known online as Phara, was the first of the site’s founders to be sentenced. She has to spend 22 months in prison followed by 2 years of probation and 500 hours of community service.

After her sentencing Beshara was released to allow her to spend a few weeks in the outside world until a bed became available at a local prison. This is common procedure if a person is unlikely to flee and doesn’t pose a danger to the safety of any other person or the community.

Initially the authorities didn’t protest this decision, but a few hours after the verdict they changed their position. As it turns out, the Attorney’s Office was keeping an eye on NinjaVideo’s Facebook page where Beshara was blowing off stream and interacting with other members of the Ninja community.

“I never snitched, I never left Ninjavideo, and I will always be proud of this incredible world we built, this community that touched millions. I hold my head high. Always. Ride or die, no? THIS SHIT IS NINJA,” was the first of more than two dozen updates to which the authorities took offense.

Aside from joking about her time in jail – picking up a degree, earning pennies making license plates – Beshara encouraged people to spread the word about her sentencing. The NinjaVideo founder further solicited for photo shoots in men’s magazines, and made plans to create a documentary.

Prettier than the MPAA

The authorities were not amused by the outspoken convict, and immediately requested the court to detain her as soon as possible.

“Between Friday afternoon and this morning, Beshara posted more than 25 additional Facebook messages, which variously criticized the government, celebrated NinjaVideo.net’s copyright infringement, and sought to assemble a public relations team to engage media and documentary filmmakers to help her ‘fight back’ and ‘change [ ] history . . . again.’.”

“Beshara also posted several entries on what remains of the NinjaVideo.net forum boards, now hosted at www.ninjavideoforum.net, one of which belittled the sentence imposed by the Court and mocked the named victim of her crimes,” they write.

According to the authorities, the Facebook updates written by the NinjaVideo founder pose a danger to the community.

“Beshara’s post-sentencing actions demonstrate a clear lack of remorse over her illegal conduct and a disregard of the harm her actions have caused, and pose a danger to the community,” they write.

The question is what the authorities see as a threat. We assume that a comment like “IMA RUN MY FUCKIN CELL BLOCK. ,” isn’t taken too seriously. Even if it is, the comment wouldn’t be a threat to the community, and certainly not a reason to rush her to jail.

Another option is that the authorities simply don’t want Beshara to speak up in public and be critical or even sarcastic about her sentencing. Her motivation to get into the spotlight and have her say, may be one of the main reasons why the authorities wanted to speed up the detainment.

Despite opposition from Beshara’s lawyer, today the court sided with the prosecution and ruled that the NinjaVideo founder should be locked up effective immediately, taking away the few weeks she had left. Beshara was sent off to the Alexandria detention center where she will serve her sentence… and run a cell block.

Source: US Authorities Silence NinjaVideo Founder, Rush Her to Prison

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With 10 million registered users and more than a quarter billion page views each month, 4Shared is believed to be the largest file-sharing website.

Needless to say, a site of this size can’t possible avoid some of its users occasionally uploading copyrighted files. In common with most websites that deal with user uploaded content, 4Shared allows rightsholders to send takedown notices to remove copyrighted files that are posted without permission, but for some this is not enough.

Modulo Security Solutions has filed a lawsuit at a federal court in New Jersey in an attempt to reveal the identities of the person or persons who uploaded confidential documents to 4Shared. The security company told the court that it plans to take civil action against the alleged uploader(s) for copyright infringement related offenses, but that it can only do so if 4Shared hands over their personal details.

In the complaint Modulo states that while 4Shared took swift action to remove the infringing files from their website, it refused to give up any information on their users without a court order. This claim is backed up by a copy of an email 4Shared sent Modulo early December.

Interestingly, the lawsuit was filed “ex parte,” meaning that 4Shared will not be notified about the legal proceedings. Modulo says it chose to do so because it fears that the cyberlocker may destroy the information when they become aware of the suit.

“Petitioner submits this petition on an ex parte basis because the information that it seeks from Respondent is highly susceptible to deletion or otherwise may be destroyed, either intentionally or inadvertently,” the complaint reads.

Modulo further cites several paragraphs from the 4Shared site which indicate that the data they are after may be destroyed if the case is delayed significantly. Among other things, the 4Shared’s terms of service state that free accounts will be deleted 180 days after they were last accessed.

The cyberlocker also notes that it reserves the right to “disable or remove the accounts of users who infringe the intellectual property rights of others or may expose 4shared to civil or criminal liability.”

While the nature of the case is different from traditional media piracy, its outcome will be watched closely by copyright holders currently suing BitTorrent users. After all, if 4Shared is ordered to hand over customer information including names and IP-addresses, there is no reason why others shouldn’t try the same tactic.

In their complaint Modulo is only asking 4Shared to identify the uploader(s) of the files, not those who have downloaded them. This would make it harder to sue large groups of people as is currently the case with BitTorrent lawsuits, but it’s not unthinkable that other companies will cast a wider net.

At this point it’s unclear what type of information and logs 4Shared has of up- and downloaders, and perhaps more importantly, for how long this data is stored. TorrentFreak contacted 4Shared with a request to comment on their logging policy, and we will add a response as soon as it comes in.

Source: 4Shared Sued To Reveal Identify of Infringing Users

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Just before Christmas the MPAA published a blog post which looked at DNS filtering, why apparently it’s a good thing, and how it won’t break the Internet.

“There is nothing new about the techniques of domain blocking used to target criminals in the Stop Online Piracy Act,” the MPAA’s Paul Hortenstine wrote.

“They are currently used to protect consumers and combat all kinds of harmful behavior including spam, phishing, malware, viruses, copyright infringement and other forms of Internet crime,” he added.

But anyone with an understanding of the file-sharing space during the last decade will know that what SOPA domain blocking will actually bring is a whole lot more phishing, scams, malware and viruses. And here’s why.

Once SOPA kicks in, millions of people will suddenly lose access to potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of websites. Since people generally do not like being restricted online, particularly when they are stopped from doing something they were previously allowed to partake in, the market for circumvention solutions, such as VPNs, will go into overdrive.

Unusually, Hortenstine references a recent one in his article – the MAFIAAFire Firefox plug in. Even more surprisingly, its inclusion in the blog post actually shows the tool in a positive light, in an attempt to show that domain blocking workarounds don’t always have to “break the Internet”.

Indeed, the client created by Newzbin2 to nullify ISP blocks in the UK also achieves its purpose without breaking the Internet, but already we are witnessing the start of a trend – third party software being made available to counter a growing problem – web censorship.

Now, we’re pretty sure that the MAFIAAFire and Newzbin2 people can be trusted not to stab web users in the back, but what will happen as soon as sites start getting censored under SOPA is that software created by Gods-knows-who will come onto the market with grand promises of re-enabling access to sites.

Some of these new breeds of tools will do as they say and will definitely come with fairly innocent adware to generate some revenue for their creators. Many, however, will screw over anyone who dares to install them. Malware, scamware, viruses and phishing attacks will all play their part. These practices have been happening to a certain extent in the file-sharing space for a decade already, but domain censorship will give the conmen a much-needed boost.

Contrary to claims that domain blocking won’t affect trust in the Internet, users seeking to legitimately access domains that have done no wrong (DaJaZ1 anyone?) or that are entirely legal in their own countries outside the United States, will be redirected to sites that look just like the previously blocked ones, but with nefarious tricks up their sleeves.

There are already many ‘fake’ sites around, such as those trying to pass themselves off as The Pirate Bay, but since they aren’t the real deal the amount of traffic they currently get is limited. Should the real Pirate Bay disappear from Google, these fake sites will appear at the top of the search giant’s results, and pull in a hell of a lot of money. Real Pirate Bay is free to use, these others require credit cards.

There is a huge mess just waiting to happen and if SOPA passes we won’t have to wait long to experience it. The Internet may not completely break, but it won’t be a safer place, that’s guaranteed.

Source: Domain Blocking Will Encourage Yet More Fraud and Scams

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Over the past week we’ve had fun looking up what governments, Fortune 500 companies, and even the most dedicated anti-piracy groups download on BitTorrent. All we had to do is put their IP-addresses into the search form on YouHaveDownloaded and hit after hit appeared.

To our surprise, we found out that even IP-addresses registered to the RIAA were showing unauthorized downloads of movies, TV-shows and software.

This curiosity was quickly picked up by other news outlets to whom the RIAA gave a rather interesting explanation. Apparently these file-sharing transactions weren’t carried out by RIAA staffers, but by a third party who’s using the RIAA IP-addresses to share and distribute files online.

“Those partial IP addresses are similar to block addresses assigned to RIAA. However, those addresses are used by a third party vendor to serve up our public Web site,” a spokesperson told CNET, adding, “As I said earlier, they are not used by RIAA staff to access the Internet.”

This is all a bit confusing. First of all, the addresses are not similar, they are simply assigned to the RIAA. Everyone can look that up here, or here.

Secondly, while we are prepared to believe that RIAA staff didn’t download these files, we are left wondering what mysterious third party did. Also, is it even allowed by the official registry to register a range of IP-addresses to your private organization, and then allow others to use these IPs?

Also, just as a bit of friendly advice, it’s generally not a good idea to let others use your organization’s addresses to browse the internet. This time it’s “just” copyrighted material up for debate, but who knows what else they may be sharing online.

Considering the RIAA’s past of suing tens of thousands of file-sharers for copyright infringement, the excuse is perhaps even more embarrassing than taking full responsibility. When some of the 20,000 plus people who were sued by the RIAA over the years used the “someone else did it” excuse this was shrugged off by the music group’s lawyers. Can these people have their money back now? We doubt it.

Whois pirating?

Elsewhere, Henrik Chulu from the Free Culture blog discovered that someone at the infamous Johan Schlüter law firm downloaded the Danish movie ‘Dirch’. But Maria Fredenslund from anti-piracy group RettighedsAliancen had their excuse ready.

“We’re working for right holders, who obviously have given us permission to collect their material online as part of an investigative work,” she told Comon.dk in response.

Notably, Sarkozy is staying quiet and not attempting to justify any infringements carried out in his name. Perhaps a case of least said, soonest mended…

Source: RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP-Addresses

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Over the past week we’ve had fun looking up what governments, Fortune 500 companies, and even the most dedicated anti-piracy groups download on BitTorrent. All we had to do is put their IP-addresses into the search form on YouHaveDownloaded and hit after hit appeared.

To our surprise, we found out that even IP-addresses registered to the RIAA were showing unauthorized downloads of movies, TV-shows and software.

This curiosity was quickly picked up by other news outlets to whom the RIAA gave a rather interesting explanation. Apparently these file-sharing transactions weren’t carried out by RIAA staffers, but by a third party who’s using the RIAA IP-addresses to share and distribute files online.

“Those partial IP addresses are similar to block addresses assigned to RIAA. However, those addresses are used by a third party vendor to serve up our public Web site,” a spokesperson told CNET, adding, “As I said earlier, they are not used by RIAA staff to access the Internet.”

This is all a bit confusing. First of all, the addresses are not similar, they are simply assigned to the RIAA. Everyone can look that up here, or here.

Secondly, while we are prepared to believe that RIAA staff didn’t download these files, we are left wondering what mysterious third party did. Also, is it even allowed by the official registry to register a range of IP-addresses to your private organization, and then allow others to use these IPs?

Also, just as a bit of friendly advice, it’s generally not a good idea to let others use your organization’s addresses to browse the internet. This time it’s “just” copyrighted material up for debate, but who knows what else they may be sharing online.

Considering the RIAA’s past of suing tens of thousands of file-sharers for copyright infringement, the excuse is perhaps even more embarrassing than taking full responsibility. When some of the 20,000 plus people who were sued by the RIAA over the years used the “someone else did it” excuse this was shrugged off by the music group’s lawyers. Can these people have their money back now? We doubt it.

Whois pirating?

Elsewhere, Henrik Chulu from the Free Culture blog discovered that someone at the infamous Johan Schlüter law firm downloaded the Danish movie ‘Dirch’. But Maria Fredenslund from anti-piracy group RettighedsAliancen had their excuse ready.

“We’re working for right holders, who obviously have given us permission to collect their material online as part of an investigative work,” she told Comon.dk in response.

Notably, Sarkozy is staying quiet and not attempting to justify any infringements carried out in his name. Perhaps a case of least said, soonest mended…

Source: RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP- Addresses

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When seeking to build mutually beneficial partnerships, one might think that the way to best achieve that is via mutual respect. What seems clear from the latest report from the IFPI, is that the best way to nurture a relationship with Google is to patronize and criticize the search engine in public.

One Year Later: Google’s Report Card on Making Copyright Work Better Online is the embarrassingly patronizing title of a new report from the IFPI detailing Google’s progress on copyright infringement issues over the past 12 months. Unsurprisingly the whole thing reads like a school report, with the IFPI setting out what Google should have achieved and then noting what ‘grade’ the search engine actually achieved in each task.

“While Google has taken some modest steps to deal with copyright infringement online, the promises made by Google remain unfulfilled,” the report begins.

“Despite its steps, the simple fact is that Google continues to both (i) receive financial benefits from sites and applications that engage in piracy and (ii) place artificial road blocks in rights holder efforts to protect their content online, contrary to the DMCA.”

The report notes that Google made a promise to act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours and is commended for exceeding that. Nevertheless, a company capable of returning search results “in nanoseconds” should be doing better, IFPI suggests. Furthermore, the music group states that Google has put a limit on the number of infringement reports that can be filed each day that “do not scale to the scope of piracy online.”

Google is also criticized for not adequately screening apps for compatibility with the music industry’s interests before allowing them onto the Android Marketplace, and then profiting from them in the period before they are taken down.

Surprisingly, given the recent and wrongful Mega Song takedown, IFPI criticizes Google for giving users the right to issue copyright claim counter notices without them “having a clear understanding” of the rights issues involved.

“We find it disturbing that Google admonishes rights holders to ensure their claim is valid and warns them about penalties for false claims, but fails to hold the average user to similar standards. Is that neutral, or is that tipping the scales in a manner that benefits Googles bottom line?” the report asks.

On the issue of censorship of its AutoComplete feature it’s noted that some progress has been made but, no surprise, Google needs to do better. “For example, when “lady gaga mp3″ is typed into the search bar, Autocomplete directs a user to choose “lady gaga mp3 free” or “lady gaga mp3 download,” results that lead to illegal sites,” IFPI complains.

Referencing Google’s AdSense program, IFPI says that Google should proactively screen all sites to which it serves ads to ensure they aren’t “pirate sites,” a truly massive and almost impossible task given that music licensing is IFPI members’ responsibility and area of specialty, not Google’s.

The search engine is also criticized for not prioritizing “authorized” over “unauthorized” sites in its search results. Google’s YouTube doesn’t avoid criticism either.

“Increasingly, music-oriented videos posted on YouTube include links to download the sound recording associated with the video illegally. This is in violation of YouTube’s own policies. In addition, YouTube hosts videos explaining how to game the Content ID system and how to rip the audio content to create an MP3 file from a music video,” the report notes.

Overall, Google is told that it must do better if it is to meet the standards required by the music industry. However, what is also clear from the language in the report is that improved results will only lead to demands for even greater “grades” next year.

The school report ends with Google getting admonished for its negative attitude in class.

“While professing to agree that copyright infringement is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, Google raises alarmist, self-serving criticism to any legislative proposal to deter or thwart rampant copyright infringement,” notes the report (pdf).

“Google should stop engaging in destructive rhetoric and come to the table with constructive proposals to address this problem,” it concludes.

There’s no doubt that Google has its faults, but treating the company as if it is the one engaging in rampant copyright infringement can’t be a sustainable tactic. Admonishing and patronizing it in public won’t help either.

Source: IFPI and RIAA Patronize Google With Anti-Piracy “Report Card”

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Back in June this year, the biggest operation aimed at online movie piracy took place in Europe. The target for police in Germany, Spain, France, and the Netherlands was movie-streaming portal Kino.to and its affiliates. More than a dozen people were arrested and slowly but surely they are now facing the courts.

Last week, 33-year-old web designer Marcus V. was handed 2.5 years in prison by a Leipzig court for his role in the site. Today we bring news of another sentencing.

The defendant, named as 27-year-old Martin S., confessed to being Kino.to’s “main admin”. He stood accused of being jointly responsible for 1.1 million instances of commercial copyright infringement that allegedly took place via the site.

Reportedly the brother-in-law of former Kino.to owner Dirk B., Martin S. was also said to run a file-hosting site that contained more than 16,700 movies used as a source by Kino.to’s index.

The trained car mechanic from Leipzig allegedly brought in nearly 400,000 euros via site advertising and what were described in court as “subscription traps”, services that suck unsuspecting users into expensive recurring payments for otherwise free products.

Once site costs had been taken into consideration, it was claimed that between August 2009 and the closure of Kino.to in June 2011, Martin S. made around 230,000 euros for himself .

In his ruling Judge Mathias Winderlich said that the defendant was primarily motivated by the possibility of making “quick and easy money” and that his income “exceeded by far that of the general population.”

The District Court in Leipzig found Martin S. guilty of criminal copyright infringement and sentenced him to 3 years in jail, four months less than the time demanded by the prosecution. According to Bild, the state also confiscated his house, Audi A6 and bank accounts. There will be no appeal.

At least 5 other Kino.to suspects remain in custody, and another 20 people remain under investigation. The trial of another site admin will be heard next week.

Source: Kino.to “Main Admin” Sentenced to 3 Years in Jail

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Leading up to today’s hearing in Washington, there has been a lot of talk about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Aside from making streaming of copyrighted content a felony, the pending bill aims to make it easier to put sites that facilitate copyright infringement out of business.

Should SOPA become law authorities and copyright holders will have a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. Aside from domain seizures, they can demand that search engines remove ‘rogue sites’ from their results, order ISPs to block these domains, and cut off their payments providers.

One of the problems with the legislation is that the definition of such infringing sites is open to interpretation. Today we can reveal which sites are on the hit list of the RIAA, and it comes as no surprise that all the major BitTorrent sites are prominently featured.

The RIAA was kind enough to send TorrentFreak a copy of their latest overview of “notorious” websites that was sent to the Office of the US Trade Representative (the MPAA submitted theirs earlier). We were asked not to share the letter in full, but below is a rundown of some of the most prominent sites that are mentioned.

“RIAA members are excited about the potential of the internet and other communication technologies to provide an efficient means of distribution to music lovers globally. Regrettably, this potential remains largely unrealized—mired in a morass of piracy,” the letter addressed to the USTR reads.

The RIAA hopes that their list of sites will help the government to focus their anti-piracy efforts, and in a way it can be viewed as a priority “hit list” should SOPA become law. If it was up to the music group, this list would include all prominent BitTorrent sites.

“P2P file-sharing remains a huge problem for the record industry. BitTorrent, a P2P filesharing protocol, is responsible for approximately 50% of the industry’s global P2P piracy problem and in some international markets the figure is as high as 90%. BitTorrent sites and services, across the board, are high priority pirate markets,” the RIAA writes.

Based on visitor count, the number of pirated music files that are linked, and the sites’ failure to take steps to address the massive piracy problem, they arrive at the following list:

Under SOPA, all the above domains could be put out of business without due process, the only requirement is that the Attorney General has to sign off on it.

Aside from BitTorrent sites the RIAA also wants cyberlockers such as Megaupload, Filesonic and 4shared to be dealt with, as well as the search engine FilesTube, and the forum Warez-BB.org. And there is more.

The RIAA points out that there are also several foreign sites that have copyright infringing “features” such as Russia’s main social networking site VKontakte and the Chinese search engine Sougou.

“In some sense, services such as Russia’s VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, and China’s Sougou and Xunlei are the most reprehensible of actors given that they want to appear as legitimate actors, and have functions unrelated to piracy, yet operate network services that include features that intentionally and effectively induce infringement,” the RIAA explains.

This last example shows that the definition of infringing sites can become very subjective down the line. It only requires a little creative writing to make half of the websites on the Internet appear as a rogue site, and thus eligible to be shut down.

Aside from the copyright issues, there is a broader international censorship issue at stake here. SOPA would grant U.S. authorities to seize the .com domains of Russia and China’s top tech companies with a strike of the pen. We doubt that these countries will be very pleased with that – just imagine how the U.S. would react if the opposite was true…

That would mean war.

Source: RIAA Wants To Shutter Torrent Sites, And More

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In their lawsuit against Patricia McIlvaine (also known as P.J. McIlvaine) and Does 1-10, Hollywood giant Fox said it would be seeking damages and injunctive relief for copyright infringement and contributory copyright infringement.

The studio claimed that P.J not only “uploaded and made available to others via the Internet a script of Deadpool, the copyright to which is owned by Fox, and which is a script for a project still in development,” but also the scripts of 79 more movies and TV shows.

The infringements allegedly took place during 2009 and 2010, and Fox demanded statutory damages for each and every one. That all mounted up to a cool $12 million, a considerable sum for someone described as “a struggling screenwriter” who makes ends meet selling flowers.

When the news broke there was sympathy for P.J., not least because she was not the originator of the leaked scripts and allegedly only reposted material already available online. But now, just short of 12 months later, the whole $12 million drama is over.

“Well, it took almost a year to resolve–as the Fox investigators showed up on my doorstep the Friday before Thanksgiving last year,” P.J. told TorrentFreak, clearly relieved at the news.

“To say this turned my life upside down would be putting it mildly. It affected me on every level and some days it was hard to keep going. But I always tried to keep an upbeat, positive attitude. My family and friends supported me every step of the way, and my lawyers were beyond fantastic. To have this dismissed is a huge weight off my shoulders.”

And when P.J. describes the ordeal as “a rough time” one can’t help but agree – a look at the 27 documents filed in the case shows how seriously Fox were taking the issue. But thankfully the final document in that long list shows that the case is now dismissed without prejudice.

“Honestly, as to why Fox decided to dismiss the lawsuit now and why—that would be pure speculation and conjecture on my part, and I really don’t want to get into that,” P.J. told us.

While the decision is great news for P.J., it will also presumably spell good news for the mysterious John Does 1-10, who were allegedly responsible for supplying P.J. with the scripts. They have never been identified which leads one to question who they were, or indeed whether they ever existed.

The lawsuit itself, however, was very real indeed and clearly had a significant affect on P.J’s life. Will others take the risk of posting scripts in future when they see how far the studios are prepared to go in defending them? It seems less likely now than it did 12 months ago.

For Fox then, despite this dismissal, maybe it’s mission accomplished.

Source: 20th Century Fox Abandons $12 million Pre-Release Movie Script Lawsuit

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