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Monday, October 27th, 2014
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| 8:06a | Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 10/27/14
Let’s Be Cops is the most downloaded movie. The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 10:18a | Big Pirate Sites ‘Raided’, Admins on the Run
Ultimately several people went to jail and Kino.to disappeared, but it didn’t take long for replacement site Kinox.to to take up the slack. It’s been clear for some time that anti-piracy groups have had their eyes on the popular site and now action appears to have been taken. Last week investigators acting on behalf of the Attorney General carried out raids in several regions of Germany looking for four main suspects. A raid on a house in a village near to the northern city of Lübeck aimed to secure two brothers, aged 21 and 25 years-old. This pair, who reportedly live with their parents, are said to be the main operators of Kinox.to. According to Der Spiegel, the raid drew a blank. In total, six homes and businesses were searched and arrest warrants were successfully executed in Neuss and Dusseldorf. Two individuals, said to key players, were detained. According to prosecutor’s office spokesman Wolfgang Klein, a Berlin-based payment service used by the suspects was also raided to ensure their “tax liability” – a reported 1.3 million euros – is met. In addition to commercial copyright infringement and tax evasion, the defendants are accused of a range of other crimes including fraud, extortion and arson. Klein said the defendants had “made great efforts” to get rid of their competitors in the piracy market, utilizing verbal tactics and those of a more direct nature. “They used all means and also carried out threats,” he said. “Sometimes even a car burst into flames.” And from here the plot only thickens. According to a letter sent by anti-piracy outfit GVU to its members, the people behind Kinox.to are also behind a string of other sites including streaming giant Movie4K.to. The ring of services is said to extend to pirate linking sites Boerse.sx and MyGully.com, and GVU even connects file-hosting services FreakShare.com and BitShare.com to the operation. The prosecutor’s office says “lots of data” and “assets” were secured following the raids but at this point the location of the missing brothers remains unknown. Some reports suggest that they may have even left Germany a while back. Adding to the confusion, Lars Sobiraj at Tarnkappe says his sources suggest that the brothers in control of Kinox are in fact much older and 21 and 25. Nevertheless, whether it was published by the brothers or someone else, an update has appeared on Kinox.to mocking GVU and thanking them for the attention. “GVU: You make yourself more ridiculous than you are. But THANK YOU again for the extreme (priceless) advertising !!” the post reads. And that’s one of the key points. Along with all of the other mentioned sites, Kinox.to and Movie4K remain operational. In fact, as far as we can see, not a single site is down. Perhaps inevitably this has led to speculation that some kind of honey pot could be in operation, but according to lawyer Christian Solmecke, that seems unlikely. “From my perspective, the users of kinox.to have committed no offense, because the pure consumption of streaming services is not illegal [in Germany]. This is certainly the case whenever any copy of the stream is produced on your own computer,” Solmecke says. “In addition, the GVU – which here apparently launched the criminal complaint – is also known normally to tackle the problem at its root. This means that the company is going in against the big fish, which has been shown again with the current raids too.” Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 3:17p | MPAA Reports The Pirate Bay to The U.S. Government
TorrentFreak obtained a copy of the MPAA’s latest submission. The Hollywood group targets a wide variety of websites which they claim are promoting the illegal distribution of movies and TV-shows, with declining incomes and lost jobs in the movie industry as a result. These sites and services not only threaten the movie industry, but according to the MPAA they also put consumers at risk through identity theft and by spreading malware. “It is important to note that websites that traffic in infringing movies, television shows, and other copyrighted content do not harm only the rights holder. Malicious software or malware, which puts Internet users at risk of identity theft, fraud, and other ills, is increasingly becoming a source of revenue for pirate sites,” MPAA writes. Below is an overview of the “notorious markets” the MPAA reported to the Government. The sites are listed in separate categories and each have a suspected location, as defined by the movie industry group. Torrent SitesBitTorrent remains the most popular P2P software as the global piracy icon, MPAA notes. The Pirate Bay poses one of the largest threats here. Based on data from Comscore, the MPAA says that TPB has about 40 million unique visitors per month, which appears to be a very low estimate. “Thepiratebay.se (TPB) claims to be the largest BitTorrent website on the Internet with a global Alexa rank of 91, and a local rank of 72 in the U.S. Available in 35 languages, this website serves a wide audience with upwards of 43.5 million peers,” MPAA writes. “TPB had 40,551,220 unique visitors in August 2014 according to comScore World Wide data. Traffic arrives on this website through multiple changing ccTLD domains and over 90 proxy websites that assist TPB to circumvent site blocking actions.” For the first time the MPAA also lists YIFY/YTS in its overview of notorious markets. The MPAA describes YTS as one of the most popular release groups, and notes that these are used by the Popcorn Time streaming application. “[Yts.re] facilitates the downloading of free copies of popular movies, and currently lists more than 5,000 high-quality movie torrents available to download for free,” MPAA writes. “Additionally, the content on Yts.re supports desktop torrent streaming application ‘Popcorn Time’ which has an install base of 1.4 million devices and more than 100,000 active users in the United States alone.” The full list of reported torrent sites is as follows: - Kickass.to (Several locations) The mention of Xunlei.com is interesting as the Chinese company signed an anti-piracy deal with the MPA earlier this year. However, according to the MPAA piracy is still rampant, and there is no evidence that Xunlei has fulfilled its obligations. Direct Download and Streaming CyberlockersThe second category of pirate sites reported by the MPAA are cyberlockers. The movie industry group points out that these sites generate million of dollars in revenue, citing the recently released report from Netnames. Interestingly, the MPAA doesn’t include 4shared and Mega, the two services who discredited the report in question. As in previous submissions VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, is also listed as a notorious market. - VK.com (Russia) Linking WebsitesThe largest category in terms of reported sites represents linking websites. These sites don’t host the infringing material, but only link to it. The full list of linking sites is as follows. - Free-tv-video-online.me (Canada) The inclusion of Cuevana.tv is noteworthy as the website stopped offering direct links to infringing content earlier this year. Instead, it now direct people to its custom “Popcorn Time” equivalent “Storm.” Finally, the MPAA lists one Usenet provider, the German based Usenext.com. This service was included because, unlike other providers, it allegedly heavily markets itself to P2P users. Later this year the US Trade Representative will use the submissions of the MPAA and other parties to make up its final list of piracy havens. The U.S. Government will then alert the countries where these sites are operating from, hoping that local authorities take action. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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