In the early days he became somewhat of a cult figure thanks to his polite style and trademarked letterhead. This set him apart from other anti-piracy crusaders who usually sent DMCA takedown requests with a more aggressive lawyer-like style.

The Sheriff once had a lively discussion with The Pirate Bay folks, who then sent him this invoice fax. Not much later relationships deteriorated even further after Giacobbi announced he would sue the site’s operators in the US, France and Sweden, but not much came of that.

In recent years things have quietened down a bit, but The Web Sheriff and his deputies are still active. In recent years they have taken down over half a million URLs from Google alone. Most recently, the Sheriff has been targeting several Reddit.com pages.

In one of the most recent complaints the Sheriff demands the takedown of a submission in the r/megalinks subreddit, linking to two parts of the movie Nymphomaniac hosted on Mega.co.nz.

The request for removal was sent to Google last week but the search engine decided not to remove the URLs. It’s unclear why, but one reason for the inaction may be that the Mega links are no longer active.

Not all links reported by the Web Sheriff are “infringing” though. Another recent submission shows that he also tried to get this submission take down, which points to a perfectly legitimate news article from Variety.

This year copyright holders have increasingly targeted allegedly infringing Reddit links, Google’s data shows. The Web Sheriff is currently ranked second in number of URLs sent, placed after LeakID and before Disney.

Even the MPAA went after Reddit a few weeks ago. The Hollywood group tried to take down the subreddit r/fulllengthfilms, but failed and drove hundreds of thousands of eyeballs to the page instead.

Thus far the Web Sheriff hasn’t booked any real successs either, but Reddit users are warned. The Sheriff is watching and will shoot down your submissions whenever he can.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The site provides information on new content availability in the popular “release blog” format and covers all the main categories including movies, music, TV shows, games, eBooks and software.

Like all large file-sharing related domains RLSLOG has had its share of legal threats. It has been taken offline temporarily in the past due to complaints from outfits such as the Web Sheriff and record label Universal, and was reported to the USTR by the RIAA.

RLSLOG has always recovered, but this month the site has something apparently much bigger on its mind. According to the site’s operator, RLSLOG has received a threat of legal action from the same law firm that has just taken down NZBMatrix on behalf of the major Hollywood studios.

“I can tell you the company is called Wiggin LLC, the same that forced NZBmatrix to shutdown,” RLSLOG’s admin informs TorrentFreak. “Wiggin represent most movie studios. They asked us to remove all movie and TV shows represented by these companies.”

RLSLOG told us that the studios estimated that around 94% of all content listed by the site is material to which they own the copyright, an amount RLSLOG contests.

Although NZBMatrix have provided a few details on the threats made to them, largely they have remained quiet. However, it does appear that the threats they received are similar in nature to those now being received by RLSLOG.

“RLSLOG has always cooperated with DMCA requests, it’s just the fact we haven’t received so many of them in the past, lets say 10 or 15 per month, because we do not host the content, we just inform about it and post some links,” says the site’s admin.

“But Wiggin didn’t want us to remove particular posts/pages like its common with other DMCA requests but rather the whole thing. We are still in the process of negotiating.”

While discussions continue, RLSLOG have already taken the first step towards satisfying the studios.

Say, for example, RLSLOG announced that movie X or TV show Y was made available online today, they would post up an article including a link or two of their own to where they could be found. However, underneath the news article would be a section where site users could make their own comments, which in recent times mainly consisted of people posting dozens of links to the content on different file-hosting sites.

The site’s operator says he has taken the decision to remove these comments sections on every movie and TV show post to eliminate links to 3rd party sites hosting the content.

For now, the changes only affect the movie and TV show sections, but it is possible that the changes could spread to other parts or indeed all of the site, depending on how things pan out in the future.

“We started like that, not posting any download links, and it is possible we’ll return to this model,” the site’s admin concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Rather than hang lowly bloggers by the neck until dead for sharing the latest pre-release warblings from Beyonce or GaGa, the company prefers the gentle touch and the art of persuasion, often delivered with a sharpness of wit rarely seen in swashbuckling circles.

With most of the company’s targets the approach seems to work quite well. Unless you’re The Pirate Bay or RLSLOG that is, then you just ignore them.

Nevertheless, while anti-piracy companies such as MediaDefender have in their time been both loathed and despised, head sheriff and company founder John Giacobbi is secretly loved by all of his enemies.

His friendly tone, multitude of media appearances and comedic manner never fail to impress pirates. One only has to look at the company’s immaculately edited Wikipedia page (and the almost completely positive tone throughout) to realize this is a very well-loved and respected outfit.

It will come as no surprise, then, that others should want to emulate the Sheriff.

“A digital Cold War has manifested itself as Web Sheriff, www.websheriff.com, the world’s leading anti-piracy protection agency, fires the first shots in an international legal battle against an alleged Russian imposter,” said the Sheriff yesterday.

“The rogue website, operating under the WebSheriff.ru banner, has not only copied Web Sheriff’s trademark, but also poses to offer similar services.”

A quick surf over to the page in question reveals a shiny robotic cyber-sheriff, touting services which do indeed seem similar to that of the carbon-based humanoid Sheriff we all know and love. Name aside, we saw no other graphical or trademark similarities apart from a star they used in the middle of a sheriffs badge back in February 2008.

If it came to an age-related revolver shootout, Web Sheriff UK would be quicker on the draw. Giacobbi founded that company in 2000, Web Sheriff Russia came along 2 years later. Why it’s taken 9 years to spot these Moscow-based pirate-hunters is anyone’s guess.

In keeping with his usual style, we presume that Giacobbi initially sent over a cheerful email to his Russian counterparts in the hope that their dispute could be settled amicably and at minimal cost. If he did, however, it didn’t work.

“These Russian imposters have picked the wrong company to try and rip-off. They’ll be cracking rocks in Siberia by the time we’ve finished with them,” he declared yesterday with menacing tone and a glint in his eye.

Without a hint of drama Giacobbi adds that he’s hired lawyers in both the US and USSR Russia to launch an “intercontinental legal attack” on his .RU namesakes.

“Even though we have become established as the world’s Web Sheriff, ironically we’re now fighting the same battle as we fight on behalf of our clients – who said the Cold War was over?!”

In the meantime, users requiring the services of the UK-based pirate pin-up should Google “Web Sheriff”. Those looking for services thousands of miles away in Russia, in Russian, against Russian file-sharing sites, should search for this term instead.

“This town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” Giacobbi concludes.

Time will tell what XMediaDigital, the company behind the Russian WebSheriff, has to say about that.

Here at TorrentFreak we love the Web Sheriff but we can’t help but notice that a golden opportunity for getting some free exposure was missed here.

Note for next publicity stunt press release: Don’t release it on a Friday/Saturday. Most of the tech press have the weekend off, getting coverage during the week is much easier.

Fortunately TorrentFreak never rests, especially if there’s an intercontinental anti-piracy bloodbath looming.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

While the majority of these outfits do their job with a relative low profile, there are a few oddballs that continue to make the news due to their unconventional tactics. In the past we’ve covered the mysterious ways of the Web-Sheriff, and more recently the Indian based company AiPlex Software has been making a name for itself.

Last September Girish Kumar, managing director of AiPlex Software, admitted that his company DDoSed torrent sites that were not complying with their DMCA takedown requests. “We flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity,” he said at the time.

This revelation was not appreciated by everyone, and led to the start of Anonymous’ Operation Payback which took down the AiPlex website for days on end. A costly attack for the Indian multi-purpose firm that also specializes in medical transcription and search engine optimization.

Despite this setback AiPlex is not backing down, on the contrary. Although the DDoS attacks seem to have stopped the outfit has continued to harass torrent site owners, often incorrectly. Now Bitsnoop has alerted us to an interesting email conversation he had with AiPlex’s managing director.

A few days ago Bitsnoop’s owner received a takedown request for the following torrent, which linked to a copy of the Indian blockbuster Tees Maar Khan. The torrent site owner quickly took the linked page offline and thought the case was settled, but he was wrong. Yesterday, AiPlex’s general manager Girish Kumar sent a reminder for the file that was already removed.

For Bitsnoop’s owner these type of incorrect reminders are an annoyance, and he replied to AiPlex that similar unverified requests will be ignored in the future. Girish Kumar obviously failed to see the mistake he made, but quickly replied with an oddly worded, brand new and unprecedented threat.

HI,

In that case we may have pull the cat out of the bag & ban u completely…Anyways, if u don’t confirm to adhere to our Infringement notification requests, we will be forced send ur website details to the Indian Govt. to further ban ur site across pan India. In fact we have done this to several sites & u are given the last chance to comply the request…

Awaiting for ur earnest reply,
Best,

Girish Kumar N
Managing Director
Aiplex Software Pvt. Ltd.

Really?

It is hard to take any of the above response seriously and indeed Bitsnoop’s owner wisely ignored it. Needless to say, through these unusual threats AiPlex is not making themselves popular among site owners. TorrentFreak contacted Girish Kumar to hear more about their close ties and influence within the Indian authorities, but we have yet to receive a reply.

Of course this is just one side of the daily DMCA troubles torrent site owners face, there are also many agents that are more pleasant to work with, and these usually get more done. When the takedown notices are complete and properly formatted most torrent site owners will cooperate and take the infringing links offline quickly.

AiPlex has obviously chosen to go down another route, which makes it harder for them to succeed. But, this doesn’t matter much for them of course, they’ll simply ask the Indian Government to ban Bitsnoop and The Pirate Bay, making piracy a thing of the past.

And putting themselves out of the anti-piracy business in the process.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

RLSLOG has grown out to be the authority when it comes to news about, and links to, scene releases. Millions of readers visit the site every month, looking for the latest releases that are posted daily by the site’s editors.

After being pulled offline by a complaint from Universal Music in April, the site moved to a new host in The Netherlands. Initially it seemed that this move had ended the trouble but it turned out to be just a temporary reprieve.

“Shut down again, although we never hosted any files or copyrighted data on our server. Our site is strictly informative,” a message just posted at the site’s home page reads.

TorrentFreak spoke with RLSLOG founder Martin who told us that he’s working on getting the site back online as soon as possible, the first step being the discovery of a suitable hosting provider. After being thrown out by a German and Dutch host, he will now try his luck elsewhere.

The current hosting company refused to forward the actual complaint to RLSLOG, so it is unknown who is behind the request. Martin was told by the webhost that the “German government” and a local anti-piracy organization are responsible, but he has been unable to verify these claims.

RLSLOG has been targeted by rights holders several times over the last year. Previously, Web Sheriff sent a complaint to RLSLOG’s former host who then took the site offline and a few weeks ago Universal Music also managed to take the site offline.

RLSLOG, however, sees no wrong in what it does as the site does not host any copyrighted files on its servers. Although the site appears to operate in a gray area when it comes to copyright, a website doesn’t have to store any copyrighted files in order to be seen as a copyright infringement facilitator by the courts.

The court cases against isoHunt, Mininova and The Pirate Bay have shown that linking to files can be enough to be found guilty of, or liable for, infringements. As we’ve said before, RLSLOG might actually have an even worse case since the ‘links’ are selected and published by the site’s editors.

Thus far RLSLOG’s problems are only limited to finding a host that would allow the site to operate despite any complaints that might roll in. If everything goes well, the site should be back online in a matter of days.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Yesterday, however, its readers were shook up by an absence of news. Instead of seeing the regular homepage, visitors were welcomed by the following unpleasant message:

“RLSLOG.net was suspended by its German hosting company after removal request from law firm representing Universal Music, although we never hosted any files or copyrighted data on our server. Our site is strictly informative,” the message reads.

TorrentFreak briefly caught up with RLSLOG founder Martin who told us that he’s currently trying to find a new home for his site, hopefully with a hosting company that will not shut down the site so easily. The suspension came without prior notice, hence the downtime.

This is not the first time that RLSLOG is been put out of action by takedown notices. Last year, Web Sheriff sent complaints to RLSLOG’s former host and the host’s bandwidth provider, who then took the site offline. Also, Google has filtered several of RLSLOG’s pages from its search results after complaints from copyright holders.

These issues raise the question whether sites such as RLSLOG are acting within the law or not. Technically the site is not hosting any copyrighted material, but it generally does point readers to various locations where copyrighted material can be found. Legally, this is a gray area in most countries.

As we’ve learned from the cases against torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Mininova, not hosting copyrighted material on ones site is no prerequisite for the courts to find operators not guilty of assisting in copyright infringement. RLSLOG might actually have an even worse case since the ‘links’ are selected and published by the site’s editors.

Refraining from posting links to searches or files hosted externally might be the only option to avoid legal issues at a future host. However, for RLSLOG founder Martin, his primary concern is finding a new hosting provider so he can get the site back online again.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Sheriff’s resume includes big shot artists such as Prince and the late Michael Jackson, and in his high times Giacobbi went as far as taking a stab at The Pirate Bay founders, who have mocked his actions extensively in the past.

Although he might not be particularly well-liked by many operators of torrent sites, he and his team have earned respect over the years by staying polite where other representatives of copyright holders tend to display arrogance, frustration and hostility.

This week, however, the Web-Sheriff slipped up and dented his badge. Acting on behalf of Magnolia Pictures, a batch of take down requests was sent out to various sites, trying to take down torrents of the movie Warlords which will be released by the movie studio in a few weeks time.

In order to track down all infringing copies of the film, the Sheriff probably searched through a few dozen torrent sites to send DMCA notices for all infringing torrents. For some reason the ‘legal’ torrent site Legit Torrents was also included in the batch, wrongfully, because the “Warlords” torrent hosted there is one of a free MMORPG Kungfu game.

En3r0, the owner of Legit Torrents told TorrentFreak that he pointed out the mistake to the Web-Sheriff, but thus far hasn’t heard anything back. The notice was obviously sent out in error and the description of the files as well as the site’s url should have made some alarm bells go off.

This is the first time that legittorrents has received a DMCA notice, En3r0 said, and hopefully the last. The Web-Sheriff, who signs the notices with “the information in the notification is accurate” might have to reconsider putting that in, as he’s clearly off his A-game.

Perhaps it’s time for a new Sheriff in town?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Unlike the Pirate Bay operators, Oliver didn’t host any torrents on his website. No, he committed the crime of dressing in clothing similar to that worn by The Village People thirty years ago, but without their permission.

In a promo trailer for the show, Jamie’s American Road Trip, the British cook dressed up as the 70′s style icons. The clip ran on TV, accompanied with a poster campaign in the London Underground, all featuring Jamie dressed up as each of the six members of the hit disco band.

According to the Web Sheriff, Jamie Oliver’s actions are blatant trademark infringement, seriously hurting the revenues of the Indian chief, cowboy and the four other members of the band. “The Village People are still a huge, multimillion-dollar global business,” the Sheriff commented.

Much like the Pirate Bay, Channel 4, the broadcaster of Jamie’s show, is not impressed by the Sheriffs threats. “We are confident that the promotional campaign for Jamie’s American Road Trip does not infringe any copyright/trademark rights which the Village People may have. No parties have received a formal legal claim from the Village People and, if one is received, it will be vigorously defended,” a Channel 4 spokesperson said.

If the case does indeed come to court, it could be risky for the Web Sheriff to dress up in his usual outfit, as that is more than likely trademarked by a third party who might also wish to issue similar frivolous legal threats.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

After making threats to SceneReleases, the anti-piracy outfit turned its attentions to RLSlog, demanding that the site display a full apology to Franz Ferdinand on its homepage. Of course, RLSlog wasn’t about to apologize but did remove the links, as a look at Google’s cache of the ‘offending’ page reveals. However, that wasn’t enough for Web Sheriff, and he decided to teach RLSlog a lesson.

Two days ago, RLSlog went down. Initially thought to be the victim of a DDoS attack, the site fired off emails to its host in the Netherlands to find out what was happening. Since it was the weekend, responses were expected to be less sharp than during the week, but it took the host a full two days to reply. When it did, the news wasn’t good.

Following complaints sent to the host and the host’s bandwidth provider, RLSlog’s host completely disabled the site. There was no discussion and no checking the validity of Web Sheriff’s claims. If the host had bothered to check any supposed links to the album, they would have seen that the links were gone. Indeed, the links were all dead before we reported on the situation last Wednesday. Nevertheless, the host completely disconnected the site, with no warning.

At this stage it’s still unclear if RLSlog’s host will reactivate the site but if they don’t, it won’t be the end of the world. RLSlog is fully prepared for disaster recovery and has everything in place to simply move to a new host, should that prove necessary. Of course, this might take a little time but the site will return. In the meantime, although RLSlog is down, their forums are up at RLStalk. They are running a little slowly at times but appear fully functional.

This takedown is quite the metaphorical ‘feather in the cap’ for the Web Sheriff, using their pages of legal jargon to great effect and successfully intimidating a weak host into a knee-jerk takedown. However, there is an unintended side-effect to these ‘cut-and-paste’ warnings. While researching Web Sheriff’s attempted takedowns of ‘Tonight’, I discovered a very easy way to find dozens of release sites and music blogs that i’d never heard of before, using a simple Google search.

Despite being very active in getting links to the album removed, Web Sheriff’s old nemesis The Pirate Bay still tracks ‘Tonight’. As far as we know, they didn’t ask them to remove the torrent. No point really, they already know the answer.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Last year, the band were working on their yet-to-be-released studio album “Tonight”. Like many other albums, however, a copy of “Tonight” leaked out before the official release date, and it is now widely available online. Given the previous pro-piracy stance of the band, which got them on the front page of Digg, you wouldn’t expect that they would make a big deal out of it.

The contrary is true. The band, together with the record label, have instructed the one and only Web-Sheriff – who also works for Prince, Michael Jackson and Village People – to take on the sites that posted the album, or links to it. One of the sites that received a takedown notice recently is Scene Releases. Web-Sheriff wrote in an email to the site:

On behalf of Domino Records and Franz Ferdinand, we would kindly ask you not to post copies of ‘Tonight’ on your site. We do appreciate that you are fans of / are promoting Franz Ferdinand, but the label and artist would greatly appreciate your co-operation in removing your links to the pirate files in question.

Web-Sheriff, who sent similar emails to dozens of other sites, is known for his politeness – if you cooperate, that is. Normally, this takedown request would hardly be newsworthy, but this one is special. Only a few months ago, Franz Ferdinand openly encouraged its fans to pirate one of their new tracks, advocating downloading using LimeWire. They even confessed to being pirates themselves, by admitting copying CDs for use on their iPods – currently illegal in the UK. So, understandably, the partnership with Web-Sheriff comes as quite a surprise.

Faolan, one of the editors of Scene Releases, was as baffled as we are, and decided to ask the sheriff for an explanation. Instead of explaining why Franz Ferdinand performed this 180, Web-Sheriff replied with a list of threats, claiming that Scene Releases could be held liable for putting links up to the unreleased album. He replied:

Joking aside, you are currently acting as a de facto digital distributor of this (unreleased) album and, if you do not remove / de-activate the links that you have published, our clients shall be obliged to take legal action both to stop what you are doing and to seek compensation for the (extensive) commercial losses directly arising from your illegal activities.

Furthermore, the sheriff stressed that the email should not be shared with third parties, a tactic also employed by UK lawyers Davenport Lyons, in an attempt to stifle discussion. Faolan told TorrentFreak that the reply from the sheriff inspired him to keep the conversation going. He believes that he didn’t break any laws by merely linking to files that are hosted on other sites. In fact, the links that Scene Releases posted at the bottom of their article were already dead (removed by the associated hosting sites) by the time Web Sheriff sent his reply.

Scene Releases was not the only release blog that was contacted by Web-Sheriff, the conversation that he had with RLSLOG is just as entertaining. After RLSLOG pointed out to Web-Sheriff that he misspelled the domain name, he didn’t back off, and sent the following demands:

You must also arrange for the following apology to be published on the relevant page of the site for a period of seven (7) days : “RSLOG wishes to apologies to Franz Ferdinand, Domino Records and Web Sheriff for the disruption caused to their sales, marketing and promotion plans by our publishing of pirate file details relating to the unreleased album “Tonight”.

Yes, you’re reading it correctly, the Web -Sheriff is asking RLSLOG (or RSLOG) to make an apology, and he repeated his spelling mistake. The admin ignored all his requests, and replied with the following email:

Thanks for good laugh, i will probably publish this whole conversation somewhere, it’s too good to remain unknown! Once again, learn to type instead of drinking brandy in saloon.

Yours, Old Shaterhand

The question remains – does Franz Ferdinand know about the involvement of Web Sheriff and his threatening tone towards the site admins, or is it all orchestrated by the record label? We hope that it’s the latter, but thus far the band hasn’t responded to our inquiries. Franz Ferdinand’s new album Tonight will be available in stores on January 26th.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.