The broad anti-piracy measures were requested by small independent Italian movie distributor Eyemoon Pictures. The company complained that the sites in question distributed two films, “The Congress” and “Fruitvale Station,” before they were released in Italian cinemas.

Several sites affected by the blockade decided to appeal the order, and not without success. Fulvio Sarzana, who acts as lawyer for several of the accused sites including Mega, told TorrentFreak that the sites in question can now be accessed again.

The lawyer took up the case with the local Prosecutor, and pointed out that the blockades are overbroad. Instead of blocking access to a single file it makes entire sites unreachable.

In addition, Sarzana noted that the measures are not needed as the file-hosting sites have strict takedown policies in place which allow copyright holders to remove infringing content.

The Prosecutor was receptive to these arguments and after a settlement agreement with several of the affected services was reached last month, local ISPs were ordered to lift the blockades.

“For Mega we negotiated a court settlement with the Office of the Prosecutor of Rome, which recognized the legitimacy of Mega’s activities and ordered the removal of the blockade. The same is the case for other hosting services,” Sarzana tells TorrentFreak.

For another site, which prefers not to be named, it was necessary to take the case to the Appeals Court. In common with a similar case earlier this year, the Court held that the blocking order was indeed too broad. As a result this blockade was also lifted.

“The Court held that the ISP blockade of the website was disproportionate because the copyright infringement occurs on individual pages. The entire website can therefore not be blocked for copyright reasons,” Sarzana notes.

The lawyer expects that the Appeals Court ruling will have implications for the Communications Regulatory Authority (AGCOM), which currently has the power to block allegedly infringing sites without a court order.

Considering the recent Appeals Court decision, this procedure may be unconstitutional. This possibility has also been raised by several consumer groups who have asked the court to review AGCOM’s legitimacy.

Last week the Court of Rome referred these complaints to the Constitutional Court. Here it will be examined whether the current procedure violates right to freedom of expression and free speech, among other things.

To be continued.

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

An official copy of the album was posted on the cloud hosting service Mega, which is linked from Dotcom’s homepage. This has never caused any issues, until a few weeks ago, when various copyright holders started sending unusual takedown requests to have the content removed.

IFPI, representing the major music labels, submitted several DMCA notices to Mega claiming that the file infringed the rights of various artists. This resulted in a game of whack-a-mole in which the album was removed and reinstated a few times. Currently it’s unavailable yet again.

When we previously covered the issue, Mega stressed that the takedown requests were clearly mistaken. The company accused IFPI of not doing their homework and doubted the accuracy of their notices in general.

However, since the takedown notices kept targeting the same link, there was a good chance that these mistakes were orchestrated in some way. Assuming that someone was making IFPI and others believe that the link pointed to albums of other artists, we decided to do some research.

Eventually we stumbled upon a series of Pastebin pages where the URL of Dotcom’s album is linked to titles of other artists. Several of the artists mentioned in the pastes are the same as the one’s IFPI listed in their DMCA notices, so this would explain the mistakes.

The above is concerning for several reasons. First of all, it shows that IFPI and others don’t verify the legitimacy of their takedown notices. This means that pranksters can easily get them to censor legitimate content.

Secondly, Mega usually can’t check the validity of a claim, or it simply doesn’t know whether or not a user has permission to publish it. So they have very little options to stop the abuse.

“Mega aims to process all takedowns promptly, within a few hours. It is impossible to verify the claims as the files are encrypted so we don’t know the contents (unless the full link is provided with the key included), and we can’t verify if the person has a valid ownership/license or not,” a Mega spokesperson told us.

Despite these restrictions, the cloud hosting provider says it’s setting up a system where repeated takedowns can be flagged to prevent this type of abuse in the future.

“We are improving our systems to monitor the takedown process and will eventually be able to identify repeated incorrect notices,” Mega says.

Until then, Dotcom’s album will most likely disappear from Mega a few more times. Luckily for the fans, there’s also a copy hosted on the soon-to-be-released music service Baboom.

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

In recent years many of these sites have gotten a bad reputation as they are frequently used to share copyrighted files.

Today the Digital Citizens Alliance released a new report (pdf) that looks into the profitability of these sites and services. Titled “Behind The Cyberlocker Door: A Report How Shadowy Cyberlockers Use Credit Card Companies to Make Millions,” it offers insight into the money streams that end up at these alleged pirate sites.

The study, carried out by NetNames and backed by the entertainment industry, uses information from the busted Megaupload service to estimate the earnings of various other sites. Based on these and other assumptions it concludes that the top cyberlockers generate an average $3.2 million per site per year.

“Overall, total annual revenue across the thirty cyberlockers equated to $96.2 million or $3.2 million per site. One site gathered $17.6m per year in revenue,” the report notes, adding that it’s a conservative estimate.

The report brands these sites as piracy havens based on a sample of the files they host. All the sites that are listed are used predominantly for copyright infringement, they claim.

“The overwhelming use of cyberlockers is for content theft. Analysis of a sampling of the files on the thirty cyberlocker sites found that the vast majority of files were clearly infringing,” the report reads.

“At least 78.6 percent of files on direct download cyberlockers and 83.7 percent of files on streaming cyberlockers infringed copyright,” it adds.

Here’s where the researchers make a crucial mistake. The sample, where the percentage of allegedly infringing files is based on, is drawn from links that are posted publicly online. These are certainly not representative for the entire site, at least not in all cases.

For Mega the researchers looked at 500 files that were shared online. However, the overwhelming majority of Mega’s files, which number more than 500,000,000, are never shared in public.

Unlike some other sites in the report, Mega is a rather traditional cloud hosting provider that’s frequently used for personal backup, through its desktop client or mobile apps for example. The files that are shared in public are the exception here, probably less than one percent of the total.

There is no denying that there are shady and rogue sites that do profit heavily from piracy, but lumping all these sites together and branding them with a pirate label is flat-out wrong.

Aside from “exposing” the estimated profitability of the cyberlockers the report also has a secondary goal. It puts out a strong call to the credit card companies Visa and MasterCard, and hosting providers such as Cloudflare, urging them to cut their ties with these supposed pirate havens.

“They should take a hard look at the checkered history of their cyberlocker partners. Simply put, the businesses that simply exploit and expropriate the creative efforts of others do not occupy a legitimate place in the Internet ecosystem,” the report notes.

“Content theft is a cancer on the Internet. It introduces viruses and malware to computers, robs creators who rely on the Internet to sell their products, damages brands by associating them with illegal and inappropriate content and provides seed money for criminals to engage in other illegal activities,” it adds.

Hopefully future reports will have more nuance. At minimum they should make sure to have all the facts right, as that’s generally more convincing.

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

Considering the controversial reputation of its predecessor Megaupload, copyright holders have been keeping a close eye on the site. Thus far, however, the number of takedown requests received by the company has been relatively small.

Perhaps not completely unexpectedly, among the takedown requests that do come in are many that wrongfully request the takedown of perfectly legitimate files. This was illustrated earlier this week when Kim Dotcom’s official album Good Times was removed following a complaint.

The album was released by Dotcom earlier this year and he has been sharing it via his website ever since. The link in question points to Mega where people can download it for free, but a few days ago it suddenly disappeared.

To find out why the album was removed we contacted Mega for an explanation. The company informed us that music industry group IFPI requested the removal of Dotcom’s album through a takedown request sent on September 1.

Representing the major record labels, IFPI claimed that the link infringed on the copyrights of one of their artists. IFPI listed several musicians but Kim Dotcom was not one of them.

“It’s clearly an incorrect takedown request,” Mega’s Chief Compliance Officer Stephan Hall tells us.

TorrentFreak also contacted Kim Dotcom, who asked Mega to reinstate the album, which they did. All in all the album was unavailable for about a day.

While a mistake is easily made, this is not the first time that IFPI has tried to remove Dotcom’s album from Mega. A similar request was sent on August 18, this time claiming that it was a copyright infringement of Kimbra’s “The Golden Echo.”

IFPI’s actions have been sloppy, to say the least, and Mega’s Chief Compliance Officer has little faith in the accuracy of the music group’s other takedown requests.

“This is an indication that someone at the IFPI is not doing their homework and that their takedown notices in general cannot be trusted,” Hall tells TorrentFreak.

Unfortunately these kind of mistakes are not an isolated incident. For example, before Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload was shutdown early 2012 the site received many erroneous takedown notices.

“During the Megaupload days over 20% of all takedown notices were bogus,” Dotcom told us previously.

“We analyzed big samples of notices and most were automated keyword based takedowns that affected a lot of legitimate files. The abuse of the takedown system is so severe that no service provider can rely on takedown notices for a fair repeat infringer policy.”

A policy to punish copyright holders who make repeated mistakes, on the other hand, might be worth considering.

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

Today Mega announced that one of its major shareholders William Yan, also known as Bill Liu, is suspected of having connections to a large crime ring. Pending further investigation the police has put the 18.8% share held through Yan’s companies under restraining order.

Yan has not been formally charged and through his lawyer denied any wrong-doing. Mega itself is not believed to be connected to the alleged crimes.

“The Police have commented that their action does not affect any innocent third parties (such as Mega) who have had business dealings with Mr Yan,” Mega CEO Graham Gaylard says commenting on the news.

“Mega has been extremely diligent to ensure that all its operations are fully compliant with all legal and regulatory requirements. Mega does not undertake any illegal activities and does not wish to be associated with any such activity,” Gaylard adds.

Kim Dotcom says that William Yan was properly screened before he became a shareholder. The New Zealand entrepreneur, who himself is accused of money laundering by the United States, said that no alarm bells went off at the time.

“He is an investor who put money into Mega because he believed in it. I had no idea he had any problems or issues,” Dotcom told the Herald.

The news comes at an unfortunate time for Mega, which intends to go public on the New Zealand stock exchange through a backdoor listing. As a result of the restraining order the trading in shares of the backdoor listing vehicle TRS has been temporarily halted.

Despite the problems of its shareholder, Mega’s CEO doesn’t believe the company will be affected. Gaylard stresses that all funds received by Mega were paid by Yan’s lawyers through banks that operate under stringent anti money laundering policies.

“Mega has never had any reason to suspect that such funds resulted from any illegal activity, and the Restraining Order will not affect the operations of Mega,” Gaylard says.

“For us it is business as usual.”

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

This week Court of Rome Judge Constantino De Robbio ordered all local Internet providers to restrict access to 24 websites including Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz. The list further includes several other cloud storage sites such as Firedrive (formerly known as Putlocker) and even Russia’s largest email provider Mail.ru.

The broad anti-piracy measures were requested by a small independent Italian movie distributor Eyemoon Pictures. The company complained that the sites in question distributed two films, “The Congress” and “Fruitvale Station,” before they were released in Italian cinemas.

It appears that the injunction was issued without a very careful investigation of the true nature of the sites. Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz is known to be very responsive to takedown notices, and the targeting of Russia’s largest email providers is even more baffling.

In a comment Mega CEO Stephen Hall tells TorrentFreak that Mega views the blockade as disproportionate and illegal. The company operates an EU and DMCA compliant takedown process which allows copyright holder to remove infringing files swiftly.

“We believe that the blockade adopted by the Italian Prosecutor is illegal. The blocking order was placed on the basis of a complaint by a small distributor for two films and the effect of the total block is obviously disproportionate,” Hall says.

Hall further points out that the measures are easily circumvented by using Google DNS or any other non-ISP DNS provider. However, the company hopes that it can have the blockade reversed via soon-to-be-filed appeal.

“Mega is taking steps to ensure that our Italian customers regain access to their files without first having to fiddle with their nameserver settings by filing an appeal next week,” Hall adds.

TorrentFreak contacted Fulvio Sarzana, a lawyer specialized in Internet and copyright disputes, who told us that the scope of the preliminary injunction is rather broad.

“This is the second-largest website blocking order in Italy, but certainly the most important one considering the names involved,” Sarzana says.

The lawyer is opposed to the measures and welcomes site owners who want to appeal the blockades.

“I see website blocking through DNS and IP-address as a form of censorship. The block can not distinguish between licit and illicit files. It’s like using a bomb broad-spectrum to hit only one person, the collateral damage is very obvious,” Sarzana notes.

The sites affected in today’s actions have an option to appeal the Court’s decision, which has been done before with success.

Earlier this year Rome’s Court of Appeals recalled a blocking order against the video streaming site Filmakerz.org, arguing that it was too broad. In its order the Court specified that partial blocking of a specific URL is preferred over site-wide bans, and that copyright-infringing sites must have a for-profit angle.

—

The full list of blocked domain names is as follows:

cineblog01.net, cineblog01.tv, ddlstorage.com, divxstage.eu, easybytez.com, filminstreaming.eu, filmstream.info, firedrive.com, mail.ru, mega.co.nz, movshare.sx, nowdownload.ag, nowdownload.sx, nowvideo.sx, piratestreaming.net, primeshare.tv, putlocker.com, rapidvideo.tv, sockshare.com, uploadable.ch, uploadinc.com, video.tt , videopremium.me and youwatch.org

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

Exactly a year later Kim Dotcom made a comeback with a new file-storage venture. Together with several old colleagues and new investors, Mega was launched. The new service, which has a heavy focus on privacy and security, has expanded ever since.

This morning Dotcom posted an image showing how user uploads have increased more than 300% over the past six months. The graph doesn’t specify the scale, but the New Zealand-based entrepreneur told TF that the service now processes over half a billion uploads per month.

That’s more than 10,000 files per minute….

“We are experiencing massive growth. We can’t add new servers and bandwidth fast enough,” Dotcom tells us.

According to Mega’s founder there are several factors that have contributed to the increasing interest in the service. Ironically, Dotcom believes that the same people who destroyed Megaupload are now partly responsible for the success of Mega.

“There are several growth factors. People spend more time at the computer due to the cold weather, the lawsuits by MPAA and RIAA which advertised Mega, and the ongoing advertising from the dumbest ever U.S. Department of Justice case,” Dotcom says.

“Some users get pleasure from the fact that the US government and Hollywood hate Mega’s success and that I continue to expose them. The more people use Mega the more powerful our defense becomes. So, why wouldn’t Mega grow like crazy?” he adds.

The continuing debate about the NSA’s mass-surveillance is also likely to have helped Mega. Unlike other popular cloud hosting services, Mega encrypts all stored files so they can’t be snooped on. Similarly, the fact that former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined Dropbox may have also had an impact according to Dotcom.

During the months to come Mega will work on their recently announced backdoor stock market listing, which the company hopes to complete next year. In addition, the cloud hosting service will roll out many new features, all focused on counter surveillance.

“The people of the Internet love us. And we haven’t even launched our encrypted communication suite yet. That’s like a point-to-point encrypted Skype on steroids, running in your browser,” Dotcom tells us, teasing Mega’s upcoming tools.

With the ongoing legal battle against the U.S. Government and civil cases against the MPAA and RIAA, Mega is guaranteed a regular place in the spotlight. In any case, we certainly haven’t heard the last of Dotcom and his team yet.

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

In keeping with the complex life of the entrepreneur, the plans for the listing aren’t completely straightforward. Mega.co.nz says it will achieve a backdoor listing on the New Zealand stock exchange via a reverse takeover of an existing company.

Earlier this morning TRS Investments, an inactive investment company valued at NZ$2.2m (US$1.88m), said it had reached an agreement to buy Mega Ltd through a share issue to Mega shareholders.

TRS will acquire the shares for NZ$210 million via the issue of 700 million new shares to the shareholders of Mega at a price of 30 cents per share. This will result in those shareholders owning a 99 percent share of TRS.

Once the deal is completed, TRS will change its name to Mega.

While Kim Dotcom himself is longer a director of Mega having stepped down to concentrate on his extradition battle, musical career and political party, his wife Mona owns 26.5 percent of the company.

The acquisition requires TRS to obtain shareholder approval and necessary collateral on or before May 30, 2014.

“The rapid global growth of Mega has generated significant interest from potential investors. Listing on the New Zealand Stock Exchange will allow investors to participate in the ongoing growth of Mega,” said Mega CEO Stephen Hall in a statement.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the deal already has its controversy, with a report this morning that Paul Choiselat, a major TRS shareholder, is facing charges of concealing his interest in listed companies and alleged market manipulation.

Nevertheless, shares in TRS Investments soared to a seven year high, up 600 percent, following news of the takeover.

Mega reports that since its launch in January 2013 it has signed up around seven million users and is currently bringing on board more than 20,000 new ones every day. With encrypted chat video conferencing scheduled for the second quarter, Mega has big things ahead in 2014.

The full NZX announcement can be found here.

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

Pressure had been building within the project and rather than let things get completely out of hand, a decision was taken to move away. At the start of the weekend the Popcorn Time team called it quits and interest in the project expressed by a dev at YTS was later withdrawn by the site’s operator.

Earlier in the week there had been other complications too, including the removal of the Popcorn Time installer from Mega.co.nz, the hosting service chosen by the software’s devs. So what did Kim Dotcom know about that?

“I just woke up. No idea what happened,” Dotcom told TF at 03:50am local time Thursday. “I’m not involved in Mega’s day-to-day business since I resigned from Management to work on an alternative Internet concept called Meganet, Baboom and the Internet Party.”

Days later we’re still no closer to discovering why the files were taken down, whether that was due to Mega’s own decision based on a ToS violation or if the hosting service was pressured by the MPAA. What is clear, however, is that Popcorn Time, the most elegant unofficial movie-viewing application of recent times, has underlined that the destruction of Mega did little to ease Hollywood’s plight.

“I support innovation,” Dotcom told TF.

“Popcorn Time and countless similar applications show where the road ends for Hollywood. Ultimately it’s a cat-and-mouse game Hollywood can’t win by force but only with smarter Internet offerings.”

Interestingly, it seems that the people behind Popcorn Time actually understand where Dotcom is coming from.

In a file-sharing world dominated by the likes of The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, Popcorn Time came along this week and took what XBMC has being doing for some time and amped it up to eleven. They took the same content being offered by everyone else and made it more accessible and desirable.

Dotcom says this is what Hollywood should be doing, but instead their anti-piracy fixation remains.

“The destruction of Megaupload did nothing for Hollywood. Piracy is bigger than ever, despite overreaching law enforcement action & efforts by the MPAA and Chris Dodd to buy aggressive copyright laws and treaties. Hollywood made a mistake when they hired a powerful former Senator to run the MPAA in an attempt to fix their Internet problems with a sledgehammer,” he adds.

While Popcorn Time was hardly stealth with its public torrent sources and open source format, Dotcom says that the worst is yet to come.

“The innovators of today are working on fully encrypted parallel Internets which don’t rely on IPs. They are fluid oceans of homeless data that can’t be controlled by anybody. I know of several projects that will make it extremely difficult for Hollywood. How do you take things down that can’t be taken down?” he questions.

“Combine that with apps and sites that provide a no-takedown one-click high-speed content experience and Hollywood’s nightmare is complete.”

The signs indeed point to things getting worse. This week TF spoke to a developer who told us that work is already underway to bring a Popcorn Time-style experience to smart TVs, showing that not only is innovation far from dead, but soon even the likes of The Pirate Bay will have to do something to catch up.

According to Dotcom, however, there’s still time for Hollywood to properly open up.

“It’s not to late for Hollywood to embrace the Internet and offer more appealing services than those unauthorized services out there. Within three years Hollywood could double global income with an ingenious new online content service I have created. It’s so good that International license holders of content would join this offering in a heartbeat. I have offered my help in an open letter to Hollywood some time ago. They still prefer the sledgehammer,” he says.

“Hollywood has built a fortune on stories with happy endings, yet they don’t get it in the real world. The Internet has the potential to be the biggest happy ending for Hollywood – and I know how,” Dotcom concludes.

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

The company currently has around five million users who between them have uploaded close to half a billion files. With a just-debuted iOS app already in hand, encrypted chat and email services are already penciled in for release next year.

As 2013 draws to a close, news from TheDomains.com yesterday stated that following a sale in November, Mega.co.nz had become the proud owner of Mega.co, a Colombian domain that reportedly changed hands for $60,000.

The domain was apparently purchased by cloud-hosting company JustCloud before being acquired by Mega. However, there are serious problems with the story.

TorrentFreak spoke with Dotcom who told us he had “no idea” about the acquisition of the domain and immediately expressed concerns that the .co TLD is under U.S. control. We then spoke to Mega CEO Vikram Kumar who categorically denied the claims.

“Mega Ltd. does not own this domain name and was not interested in bidding for it when it was put up for sale recently. We strongly recommend that people interested in MEGA only visit mega.co.nz directly,” he told us.

Kumar appears to be referring the fact that Mega.co currently diverts to Mega’s payment page and as such is attempting to pass itself off as a genuine Mega domain, which of course it is not. Only adding to the controversy are claims by Andrew Rosener of domains broker Media Options.

“For the record, Media Options had Mega.co under signed contract exclusive agreement at the time of this sale. We had been marketing the name aggressively and likely the buyer was made aware of the sale through our efforts,” Rosener explains.

“However, the seller/owner sold the domain out from under us behind our back and refuses to honor our contract with him. We are currently evaluating how to best handle this and recover our commission that we are due.”

So why are JustCloud (presuming they still own the domain and haven’t re-sold it) now diverting it to Mega’s payment page, even for Mega users that are already logged in? Thus far, JustCloud have not responded to our requests for comment.

Interestingly, while Mega aren’t the owners of Mega.co, they do have another backup domain, Mega.is. The domain is the property of a wholly-owned Mega subsidiary in Iceland and provides food for thought on Mega’s plans and future opportunities.

“Both the subsidiary and Mega.is provide future options for Mega,” Kumar informs TorrentFreak. “In particular, it is possible that Mega.is becomes MEGA’s primary domain
name to better reflect its global operations.”

Causing concern for Mega is New Zealand’s Telecommunications (Interception Capability
and Security) Bill which comes into force in a few months time and could require companies like Mega to put in place an interception capability for surveillance agencies.

“Mega will not allow any compromise whatsoever to its core service values of protecting the privacy of MEGA users or changing its encryption model (end-to-end encryption with user-controlled keys),” Kumar says.

While Mega is taking a “wait and see” approach, the company is prepared to take drastic action to thwart attempts at forcing it to monitor users.

“One such option is to stop offering MEGA services to New Zealanders and thereby remove itself from the scope of the new law. Services to everyone else will continue as usual,” Kumar says.

“However, at this stage, this option is purely theoretical as the law itself is a few months away, its actual impact unknown, and there are several other preferred options for Mega that are far less drastic than that.”

Kumar says that a switch to Mega.is a possibility whether the new law bites in New Zealand or not. In the meantime the message regarding Mega.co is simple – don’t use it.

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