This means that camcordings of Cinavia-protected first-run movies, Blu-ray and DVDrips can be easily detected.

Support for the technology has been mandatory for all hardware and software Blu-ray players since 2012, which causes headaches for many pirates every day. Pirated movies protected by Cinavia work at first, but after a few minutes playback is halted and a warning notice appears on the screen instead.

“Audio outputs temporarily muted. Do not adjust the playback volume. The content being played is protected by Cinavia™ and is not authorized for playback on this device,” one of the notices reads.

Cinavia has been hailed as an unbeatable anti-piracy technology and up until today it was impossible to crack through a simple software solution. However, after several years DVD-Ranger has now solved the puzzle.

The company informs TorrentFreak that their Cinavia removing solution is now able to remove the play restrictions from pirated downloads in various video formats, something that was previously impossible.

“We have improved DVD-Ranger for use with torrent files. Now DVD-Ranger CinEx HD can remove Cinavia from downloaded torrent video files such as avi, mkv, mp4, mov and others,” DVD-Ranger’s Ingo Förster explains.

“The new module first scans the audio and then removes the Cinavia protection on the first pass. The contained video and subtitles will be handled pass-through, meaning that only the selected audio track will be re-encoded,” he adds.

On their website the software specifically targets BitTorrent pirates, many of whom have run into Cinavia protection in recent years. With DVD-Ranger’s “CinEx HD Advanced” software this is no longer a problem, although freedom doesn’t come cheap at $69.99 per license.

Förster and his colleague at DVD-Ranger have been working in the DVD-copying business for over a decade. For them, it was mostly the challenge that made them decide to break the Cinavia technology.

“Me and my partner are working both in science jobs and we were in contact with digital watermarks many years before Cinavia was born, so we know many things about digital watermarking. After we saw how many problems the major players such as DVDFab and Slysoft had with Cinavia, we started our own development,” Förster says.

Technically, Cinavia is not copy protection so the German based developer doesn’t believe they are breaking any laws. The files can be copied with and without a watermark, and their software only removes these “play” restrictions.

“In our country it is only forbidden to develop and sell software that circumvents copy protection. The law doesn’t mention digital watermarks. So is it legal? Definitely,” Förster notes.

In any case, DVD-Ranger’s breakthrough is likely to cause concern at Verance, the company where Cinavia is developed. Perhaps it’s the start of a new watermarking arms race?

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

Just lately a lot of torrent-related sites have been under DDoS attack so temporary disappearances have been nothing out of the ordinary, but when a site goes down and stays down for a few days or more, things begin to look more serious.

One site currently affected by prolonged downtime is XtremeTV.org but for users of this site there will be no happy ending. Along with related sites MazysMadhouse and ParadiseLane, XtremeTV has fallen victim to the long arm of Hollywood, reaching across the Atlantic via local anti-piracy group FACT.

“The domains listed [in your email] are part of our ongoing activity to disrupt pirate websites and to create an effective deterrent to operators of such sites,” FACT Director of Communications Eddy Leviten told TF.

Direct confirmation from FACT aside, signs that the anti-piracy group have shuttered a site are not too hard to find, if one knows how they operate.

In cases we’ve covered previously, FACT employees have turned up on the doorsteps of admins or staff demanding they close down sites. FACT has plenty of resources so obtaining an address to visit is not usually that difficult, if they set their mind to it.

However, for some unknown reason there are plenty of site operators who make it very easy for FACT. In several recent cases, queries on the affected sites’ WHOIS entries has revealed the site operators’ names and addresses, completely unprotected.

While revealing WHOIS reports can indicate that FACT might have been in town, there is another more obvious sign – FACT’s email addresses embedded into domain entries.

In previous cases as well as the one involving XtremeTV and MazysMadhouse, copyright@fact-org.uk is now listed as the site’s contact email. This is because FACT demands the sign over of the site’s domain as part of the settlement agreement. Once the domain is in FACT’s hands it is shut down, taking the site with it, if that hasn’t gone offline already.

“We continue to direct visitors to domains signed over to FACT to legitimate resources where they can enjoy films and TV programmes in the cinema, online and on disc,” FACT’s Eddy Leviten told us.

Finally, Usenet indexing site NZBRoyalty.com also fell to FACT pressure this month. It appears the closure didn’t require a home visit, just an email to the site’s operators.

“Investigators at FACT have been examining your site and have noted that it is predominantly infringing TV content that is being made available,” FACT Director of Investigations and Intelligence Peter O’Rourke told the site in an email. “FACT requests that you desist from this activity immediately. Failure to do so will result in further investigation which may result in criminal prosecution.”

The perfectly understandable response from the site was put personal lives first.

“We are no longer under the radar. And therefore we also need to dip out. Remember we have lives and families,” the site’s operator said in a statement. “Sorry folks. Hope you all understand that this is out of our hands.”

All of the sites listed in this article are now closed and signs suggest that FACT will continue to close more, as long as site operators can be identified or simply convinced that prosecution and/or imprisonment is a serious possibility.

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

The latest signs relate to Tankafetast, Sweden’s #2 torrent site and the 95th most popular site in the country according to Alexa. The site, second only to The Pirate Bay, specializes in movies and TV shows and has been an anti-piracy target for some time. With a motto of “We shall never surrender!” one gets a flavor of how that’s gone so far.

On October 1, 2012, PRQ, a webhost previously owned by Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, disappeared offline after Swedish police raided the facility. Many file-sharing sites went offline and it was later confirmed that Tankafetast was the prime target.

Just three weeks later it was back online, taunting the authorities and nemesis Henrik Pontén at copyright protection outfit Antipiratbyrån (Rights Alliance).

In April 2013 yet more action was taken against the site, with the arrest of one of the site’s admins. Yet again the site remained intact and online.

And now, according to the site’s operators, Rights Alliance and local authorities have had another go at shutting Tankafetast down.

“Once again, we fell victim to a Rights Alliance (Anti-Piracy Office) ploy to shut down TankaFetast! Our data centers have been raided,” the site’s operators report.

It appears that a continuing investigation led authorities to a location from where they believed Tankafetast was operating. While the raid last week may have unearthed something, the site was fully prepared for the event.

“Instead of sitting and waiting to see what the authorities want us to do we can move just anywhere to our other servers located abroad. Once again we will rise up again!” the site’s operators said.

And, a few initial problems aside, Tankafetast returned online this weekend. [Update: site has some stability issues]

“We’re going nowhere Rights Alliance, believe it!” the site declared.

Interestingly there was no announcement of action against Tankafetast last week from Rights Alliance or the police. Both are usually fairly quick to inform the press of their achievements but there are no reports from either. TorrentFreak contacted lawyer Henrik Pontén for comment but we have received no response.

It is certainly possible that the raid on the Tankafetast datacenter was expected to fail. Last Thursday a site operator revealed that the 2012 raid on PRQ didn’t net the site, just a gateway.

“We had some old empty dusty boxes with PRQ a few years ago but that was merely a proxy. When police got them there was nothing left in them anyway, since the memory was cleared for the least outside risk,” he revealed.

While in the ‘old days’ torrent site admins simply crossed their fingers and perhaps wore garlic to fend off attacks, it’s becoming clear that these days site setups are being hardened in preparation for what many believe to be an increasingly likely event. But these systems cost money and that has to be made somehow. Intrusive advertising is one way, according to Tankafetast.

“It is precisely because of pop-under advertising that we have been able to have servers around the world. Here you get a really good example. When one goes down we just move to another. The advertising that many find annoying saves us in situations like this,” they conclude.

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

Not surprisingly the music and movie industries remain keen to see action taken against errant subscribers and unlicensed sites that they blame for millions in lost sales every year. But while DEA implementation is still some time away, the government has been listening.

Behind the scenes negotiations are taking place on a voluntary “three strikes” style scheme and operating right now is a new City of London Police unit focused on making life difficult for unauthorized torrent and other file-sharing sites.

Then yesterday there was more news that strongly suggests that the government intends to take a tougher line on copyright infringement. Prime Minister David Cameron announced that he had appointed Mike Weatherley MP as his advisor on intellectual property.

Weatherley, who says he will focus on enforcement issues relating to the creative industries, is no stranger to the entertainment world. The chartered accountant was the former finance director of record producer Pete Waterman’s empire. He later became Vice President (Europe) for the Motion Picture Licensing Company.

The 56-year-old founder of Parliament’s Rock the House competition, is also a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Intellectual Property Group which was launched back in 2003 to raise awareness and rally against copyright and related infringement.

Given his background and support for the new Intellectual Property Crime Unit, there can be little doubt that Weatherley’s appointment signals a hardening of attitudes by the government against piracy and in support of the entertainment industries.

“I am honored to be been appointed as the Prime Minister’s adviser on Intellectual Property. The creative industries are incredibly important to Britain’s economy so it is only right that the Government focuses on enforcement issues,” Weatherley said in a statement.

“I look forward to working with the Prime Minster and my ministerial colleagues on addressing the challenges that face the film and music industries.”

While Weatherley’s new role is an unpaid position, he will no doubt work hard to ensure that his colleagues in Big Music aren’t remunerated in the same fashion.

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

The University of California (UCSF) is alerting students and staff to the risks of online file-sharing and has lost all touch with reality in the process.

“Downloading content without paying for it is stealing. It’s no different than walking into a store, grabbing a movie and leaving without paying for it. The practice is stealing,” the campaign website reads, pointing people to an informational video and a newly launched poster campaign.

The posters, prominently featured in the UCSF shuttle buses and elsewhere at the university complex, stand out by making a quite unusual claim. Showing a $50,000 box office ticket, it warns that piracy “directly affects the funding for research, education and patient care.”

In other words, when you’re sharing copyrighted material without permission patient care deteriorates, while research and education funding dwindles.

UCSF provides no evidence or rationale for the absurd claim. To the best of our knowledge there is no direct link between piracy and any of the examples given.

The other educational campaign materials do, however, point out that the university is liable for the piracy habits of students and staff. While this isn’t directly true, since UCSF has safe harbor protections, this may be what the campaign is hinting at.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) agrees that the messaging used is inaccurate and misleading, to say the least.

“It’s disappointing to see one of the most respected medical schools in the country is distributing misleading, inaccurate propaganda from the entertainment industry,” EFF staff attorney Mitch Stoltz tells TorrentFreak.

“Saying that copyright infringement ‘directly affects the funding for research,education and patient care’ is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence – evidence that UCSF’s IT department does not have,” he adds.

Unfortunately, the misinformation and threats don’t stop there. In an anti-piracy campaign video on the effects of unauthorized file-sharing, several UCSF employees spread more FUD.

Bill Chartier, a UCSF desktop support technician, highlights some disastrous legal consequences and notes that he will completely wipe the computers of pirates who get caught.

“You can get fined, you can get sued by huge record companies, they have a lot of lawyers. You can get put in jail, and the university is also liable for whatever you do on your university computer.”

“If you’re a UC employee using a UC computer to do that I come and take your computer and wipe it completely, and get all the copywritten (sic) stuff off it,” Chartier adds.

Chartier’s threats are accompanied by a comment from the campaign manager, who suggests that using BitTorrent is considered a crime, ignoring the many legal uses.

“If you [...] use BitTorrent and you’re downloading music, you’re downloading movies, you’re downloading software for your personal use and you’re not paying for it, that’s considered pirating and that’s also considered a crime,” Hooman Moayyed, UCSF’s Security Awareness Program Manager says.

The EFF is baffled by this comment and suggests that the people behind the anti-piracy campaign are the ones who need to be educated.

“I guess no one told researchers at the National Institutes of Health, who use BitTorrent to share large biomedical data sets. I suspect students and faculty at UCSF could teach their IT department a few lessons about academic honesty.”

It’s unclear why the university is using these extremely misleading and inaccurate messages in their awareness campaign. While universities in the U.S. are required by law to deter piracy, they also have a moral obligation to do this truthfully.

We did notice that former Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing is on the UC board of regents. But that must be just a coincidence.

TorrentFreak contacted UCSF for a comment but we received no response.

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

Many privacy-conscious BitTorrent users are well-aware of this kind of monitoring activity and take measures to remain anonymous. The preferred way for many is to use a VPN or proxy which conceals their ISP IP-address.

Another group of BitTorrent users prefer a free option in the form of a blocklist. These blocklists prevent a BitTorrent client from connecting to IP-addresses that presumably belong to anti-piracy outfits.

While these blocklists do provide some “security” they are not foolproof. Some anti-piracy groups are not recognized by the blocklist and therefore not blocked. This means that users who rely on them as their only means of protection are at risk of being logged.

In a new paper titled “The Unbearable Lightness of Monitoring: Direct Monitoring in BitTorrent,” researchers from the University of Birmingham try quantify this problem.

The researchers developed a methodology to detect which “peers” in a swarm are likely to be anti-piracy monitors. The research looked at 60 public torrent files and over a period of time they found 856 peers (on 5 subnets) that showed strong characteristics of monitoring agencies.

This data allowed them to compare their findings to the IP-addresses that are blocked by the popular i-Blocklist blocklist, to see how effective it is at keeping BitTorrent spies out.

Perhaps not surprisingly the blocklists doesn’t offer complete security. 69% of the IP-addresses of monitoring companies were blocked, but the other 31% were not. In other words, nearly one in three logging attempts bypassed the blocklist.

“Our direct monitoring analysis produced 593 peers (out of 856) that appear in subnets listed in the Anti-Infringement list. In addition, our analysis identifies 263 peers that, albeit displaying the same behaviour as monitoring peers do not currently appear in blocklists,” the researchers write.

“BitTorrent users should therefore not rely solely on such speculative blocklists to protect their privacy,” they add, suggesting that these BitTorrent users should add blocklists based on empirical research.

In addition to examining the effectiveness of i-Blocklist, the researchers also identified the prevalence of indirect versus direct detection methods.

In the past, indirect methods – where monitoring companies obtain lists of IP-addresses without connecting to the downloaders – have been heavily criticized. The main problem is that these lead to a high number of false accusations. For example, research has shown that due to shoddy techniques even a network printer can be accused of sharing copyrighted files on BitTorrent.

In the paper the researchers found that direct methods – where the anti-piracy group confirms that downloaders are actually sharing – are also widely used now. Their paper is first to provide evidence of direct monitoring, suggesting that monitoring companies are upping their accuracy.

For U.S. Internet subscribers the topic is relevant as the six-strikes anti-piracy scheme will be rolled out later this year. The Center for Copyright Information has yet to announce the names of the companies that will do the “spying” for the six-strikes system, and when they do it will be interesting to see what data gathering methods they use.

But whatever the answer, a blocklist alone is not going to prevent BitTorrent users from running into trouble.

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

Inevitably though, quality is sometimes a little lacking. A copy iPhone might look all good on the surface (until you use the OS), and a copied TAG watch might tell the correct time (twice a day at least), but sometimes buyers get a product that exceeds all expectations.

Over in Russia a computer engineer located near the Chinese border had quite a surprise when a customer brought a 500GB hard drive in for repair.

According to the casing it was a very nice Samsung product, but somehow it had ceased functioning. Indeed, it hadn’t functioned properly since the beginning.

The drive itself reported its full capacity and initially seemed to behave correctly when files were transferred to it. The owner had apparently copied a 1.5GB movie to the drive, but somehow only the last few minutes of the movie were being stored.

Time to open up the case and have a little look inside.

What you’re looking at there is a couple of large metal nuts (presumably for some authentic ‘weighting’) which are together caressing a 128Mb flash drive.

But here’s the clever bit. The drive cleverly sucks data in from the host computer until it’s full and then starts dumping data until all it’s left with is the last part of the file. All other files on the drive stay intact and the file size of the now incomplete file is reported correctly.

File-sharers are apparently buying these drives in good faith and are getting ripped off and left with nowhere to put their stuff. If we can find out the name of the domain selling these devices we’ll send it over to ICE so they can have it seized….

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

Unfortunately it’s gotten to a point where we choose to ignore most updates. Not because we don’t want to voice the concerns of the music industry, but simply because there’s rarely anything new to report. We’re hearing the same tired set of complaints year after year and every bit of progress is framed as being insignificant compared to the rampant piracy underway.

In this year’s Digital Music Report published by IFPI, the position is no different.

“The overall impact of digital piracy has been to contribute substantially to the dramatic erosion in industry revenues in recent years. Despite the surge by more than 1000 per cent in the digital music market from 2004 to 2010 to an estimated value of US$4.6 billion, global recorded music revenues declined by 31 per cent over the same period,” we read.

“The two figures powerfully illustrate how, in the face of piracy, even the most progressive strategy of licensing hundreds of digital music services has been unable to prevent the steady decline in the overall legitimate music market and that decline will continue unless action is taken,” IFPI adds.

The industry representatives conveniently ignore the massive format shift that’s happening, and simply blame piracy for the fact that overall revenue is down. We’ve pointed out before that this scapegoating is unjust, but the music labels stick to their mantra and even ‘dare’ to quote one of the worst pieces of BitTorrent research ever to make their case.

Hoping to convince governments to implement harsh anti-piracy laws, the report lists several studies that show how ‘illegal’ file-sharing services are killing the music business. Among the studies cited is the one one conducted by the University of Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory.

Yes, these are the researchers that managed to make extremely inaccurate claims about the BitTorrent landscape, not once, but twice. The part that’s quoted by IFPI claims that 89% of all torrents “from a sample” link to copyrighted material, but as we pointed out before this sample is not really representative of the content that’s available on BitTorrent.

Of course we’re not going to argue here what the accurate percentage should be, it may be much lower, or even higher. But the sad part is that IFPI is once again cherry-picking studies in an effort to influence the opinions of politicians while ignoring all studies and statistics that show opposite effects.

Those who take the time to read it will notice that the entire Digital Music Report is one big rant against piracy, and a twisted one at that. For example, aside from citing doubtful studies, IFPI claims that album sales of starting artists fell 77% between 2003 and 2010 due to piracy. That’s pretty bad, right?

What they leave out is that all album sales fell dramatically, and that the sale of singles increased by more than 1000% in the same time. The latter is a quite spectacular figure, but also one that’s totally ignored in the report. Perhaps there’s an alternative explanation?

The sad part is that even with stricter anti-piracy laws there’s probably not going to be much change. We’ve seen this in France where Hadopi was introduced last year and we’ll probably see this in other countries as well. Piracy will always exist, the trick is to make it obsolete.

And this can be done to a certain extent.

Take the European music streaming application Spotify for example. They’ve signed up 750,000 users in the first year and have already become the second largest source of digital revenue for the record labels in Europe. Also, note that these people don’t have to pirate anything, but they don’t have to buy any albums or singles either.

Indeed, why doesn’t the report mention Spotify as a reason that album sales are down?

The only way the music industry can save itself is when it acknowledges that music consumption is drastically changing, and that it has to seize opportunities instead of focusing on a threat that exists mostly in their imagination.

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

Despite the invasive ramifications for the movie going public, the efforts are paying off nicely for the theater owners. Night vision goggles helped to spot Batman and Bond ‘camcording’ pirates among others, but not surprisingly the movie industry continues to look for new ways to protect their movies from piracy.

One of the available anti-camcorder solutions is offered by Aralia Systems, an Orwellian company that specializes in monitoring services and technologies. Besides traditional CCTV cameras, Aralia Systems offers elaborate piracy tracking devices. One of their products is an anti-camcorder system that projects infrared light beams onto a cinema audience. These beams are reflected back off camcorders and will trigger several alarm bells.

In order for their technologies to further benefit the movie industry, Aralia Systems has been awarded a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Machine Vision Lab of the University of the West of England (UWE). The grant is good for more than £215,000, and will be used to build new capabilities into existing piracy tracking instruments.

TorrentFreak spoke with project leader Dr. Abdul Farooq from Machine Vision Lab, who told us that their main goal is to extend the functionalities of the current anti-piracy systems. Basically, it comes down to extracting as much information from movie goers as possible, by adding analytics software that can read people’s physical reactions as well as their emotions.

“We want to devise instruments that will be capable of collecting data that can be used by cinemas to monitor audience reactions to films and adverts and also to gather data about attention and audience movement,” Dr. Farooq said.

“Using 2D and 3D imaging technology we aim to do this in two ways. Obviously cinema audiences are spread out in large theatre settings so we need to build instruments that can capture data for different purposes. We will use 2D cameras to detect emotion but will also collect movement data through a 3D data measurement that will capture the audience as a whole as a texture,” Dr. Farooq further explained.

According to Dr. Farooq the project should make it possible to record and analyze the public’s emotions. These emotions will not be used to track down camcording pirates, but will serve as a market research tool for the movie industry and advertisers.

“Within the cinema industry this tool will feed powerful marketing data that will inform film directors, cinema advertisers and cinemas with useful data about what audiences enjoy and what adverts capture the most attention. By measuring emotion and movement film companies and cinema advertising agencies can learn so much from their audiences that will help to inform creativity and strategy,” Dr. Farooq noted.

Although the new project doesn’t focus specifically on anti-piracy efforts, it will be built into the existing anti-piracy tracking systems that are used in several theaters.

The main question that comes to mind is how far these systems can go without specifically asking for consent from theater visitors. What was once a relaxing evening out might be turning into an interactive consumer research lab, with cameras carefully analyzing, recording and storing your every move – while you’re being charged for the privilege.

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

A week later the U.S. Government took action against nine websites suspected of promoting copyright infringement by seizing their domains. The targets were mostly movie streaming sites, but it later became apparent the The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload had also been considered. They have escaped for now.

Taking the domains of suspected sites has proven to be a highly effective tool to shut down sites that are considered illegal, and today a group of US senators proposed legislation to make this a standard procedure.

If signed into law, the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (pdf via TL) would allow the Department of Justice to file a civil lawsuit against the domain owners. If the courts decide that a site is indeed promoting copyright infringement, the DOJ can order the domain registrar to take the domain offline.

“The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act will give the Department of Justice an expedited process for cracking down on these rogue Web sites regardless of whether the Web site’s owner is located inside or outside of the United States,” Senator Orin Hatch said.

According to Senator Hatch the new legislation is needed because the Internet has “become a tool for online thieves to sell counterfeit and pirated goods, making hundreds of millions of dollars off of stolen American intellectual property.” When and if the proposed legislation will be signed into law will be decided later.

Aside from the classic ‘pirate’ websites the proposed bill can be an effective tool to take the whistleblower site Wikileaks offline, the domain at least. After all, Wikileaks posted thousands of files that are owned by the United States.

If the proposal is accepted it will change the Internet and how domain names are controlled for good. Thus far, no central Government has the power to take over domains. This power belongs exclusively to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

As if he saw it coming, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom already warned against the legislation that was proposed by US senators today.

“If governance were to become the exclusive province of nation states or captured by any other interests, we would lose the foundation of the Internet’s long-term potential and transformative value,” Beckstrom said last week.

The other interests would be those of the movie studios and record labels in this case.

The MPAA has already applauded the introduction of the bill and offered their full cooperation. “In the coming weeks, we look forward to working with Chairman Leahy and the Senate and House committees to help strengthen the bill,” MPAA’s Bob Pisano said.

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