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Monday, September 30th, 2019
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| 8:20a | Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week on BitTorrent – 09/30/19
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw 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 Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts. This week’s most downloaded movies are:
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 10:12a | Facebook Blocks Users from Sharing Pirate Bay Links  Ten years ago Facebook reached out to The Pirate Bay, asking the torrent site to remove the ‘share’ button from its site. At the time, the torrent site was at the center of a high profile copyright infringement lawsuit, something the social media network didn’t want to be associated with. Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Pirate Bay wasn’t very cooperative. The request remained unanswered which left Facebook with no other option than to block Pirate Bay URLs at its end. “The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook,” the company told us at the time. Today, more than a decade later, the “share” button on The Pirate Bay is long gone. Somewhere during this period, Facebook’s ban was also lifted. When the social media site started blocking several other torrent sites a few weeks ago, we noticed that TPB was not among them. However, this changed recently. When we reviewed Facebook’s blocking efforts a few days ago we noticed that The Pirate Bay is now blocked as well. Similar to the other pirate sites, it apparently violates the platform’s “community standards.” People who want to use Facebook to post a link to The Pirate Bay will see the following error message instead; “You can’t share this link. Your post couldn’t be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards.”  Similarly, all Pirate Bay links are blocked in Facebook’s Messenger chats as well, returning a similar notification. Facebook’s Community Standards and its Terms of Service allow the platform to take action against potential intellectual property infringements, which is likely what triggered this action. While The Pirate Bay is now blocked again by Facebook, the current ban is substantially different from the previous one. Ten years ago the site only prevented people from linking to actual torrent pages, while all URLs, including the homepage, are banned today. It is apparent that Facebook is gradually expanding its ‘piracy’ blocking efforts. In addition to adding The Pirate Bay, 1337x.to was recently added as well, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if more URLs will follow. Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 4:14p | Nintendo Takes Down Facebook-Tooled Donkey Kong Remake  If one took a broad overview of the entire history of video gaming, few would dare to argue Nintendo’s legend status over the past several decades. The Japanese company’s games, both old and new, are renowned for their brilliance and enduring characters. Arguably the most iconic is Mario, who first made his appearance as the hero in the timeless 1981 release Donkey Kong. Even today, dangerously close to 40 years on, countless players still enjoy this and other classics on emulators and similar tools but Nintendo’s tolerance is becoming increasingly fragile. Over the past couple of years, as players toil in the shadows to defeat Kong, Nintendo has become a litigation machine throwing takedown notices and even lawsuits (1,2,3) at sites and alleged infringers. The company’s latest effort came on Friday when it sent a copyright complaint to development platform Github. The target was a remake of Donkey Kong built with React Native, the open-source mobile application framework created by Facebook. Created by developer ‘bberak’, this React Native version of Donkey Kong isn’t an emulation, it was created from the ground up for iOS and Android and documented in a detailed post on Hackernoon in April 2018.  Perhaps a little unusually, given the risks associated with stepping on Nintendo’s toes lately, the original repo – which was now been taken down – basically acknowledges that parts of the project may infringe copyright. The game’s code may have been created independently but the visual and audio assets are undoubtedly Nintendo’s. And the repo happily pointed to the company behind the project too. “Copyright Notice: All content, artwork, sounds, characters and graphics are the property of Nintendo of America Inc, its affiliates and/or subsidiaries,” the repo read. “Get in Touch: We are Neap – a development and design team in Sydney. We love building stuff and meeting new people, so get in touch with us at https://neap.co.” The Neap website reveals that ‘bberak’ is Boris Berak, co-founder and Technical Director of the Australia-based company. TF contacted them for comment but at the time of publication, we hadn’t received a response. In hindsight, it was probably a mistake to use Donkey Kong as a technical demo since Nintendo has already shown an aversion to such projects in the past. Back in June 2017, the company targeted a Donkey Kong remake for Roku, also hosted on Github. Interestingly, the complaint filed Friday appears to have an artifact from that two-year-old notice. Stating the content being targeted most recently, Nintendo states: “Nintendo’s Donkey Kong video game, covered by U.S. Copyright Reg. No. PA0000115040 (supplemented by PA0000547470). The reported repository contains a recreation of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong video game for Roku, which was created and published without Nintendo’s authorization.” The text is an exact match with that in the earlier complaint, even going as far as referencing Roku, which appears to be an error. Nevertheless, those details are irrelevant to the claim and won’t be good grounds for a counter-notice. As Nintendo’s notice points out, at least another 30 developers forked this Donkey Kong variant on Github, so all those repositories have been taken down too. They could probably be restored if Berak removed all the original Donkey Kong references, graphics, and sound, but that seems unlikely. Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This week we have three newcomers in our chart.
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