Two years later, however, the case collapsed and the men were free to go. Now, more than three years on, the FileSoup domain has been resurrected.

It’s a search engine / proxy, but not as we know it

The new site has no connections to the original owner, but there are several unique aspects to the relaunch of FileSoup that make for an interesting project.

On a basic level FileSoup acts as a meta-search engine variant. It covers four major torrent sites – The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, Torrentz and ExtraTorrent – each selectable via a drop-down box. It also acts as a reverse proxy for these sites to unblock them in countries where they are inaccessible, the UK for example.

Improving on search results

But FileSoup is no ordinary proxy. Instead of simply mirroring the content it finds on sites such as KickassTorrents, it actually attempts to improve on the results by caching third party site indexes.

“Let’s say Kickass.to receives a [DMCA] notice and deletes the content. We are not simply proxying but also caching the site. This means we can provide the page content even if Kickass.to has deleted the URL due to a DMCA complaint,” FileSoup informs TorrentFreak.

So in theory (and given time to cache – the site is still getting off the ground), FileSoup should be able to provide access to content previously taken down from other sites it proxies. To see whether it’s anywhere near to that goal, we conducted a search for one of the most talked-about franchises of the year – Expendables.

The images below show the results from FileSoup and KickassTorrents for exactly the same search. FileSoup returned 139 results while KickAss returned 115. Also notable, aside from the inserted ads, is the prominence of highly-seeded Expendables 3 results in the top placed positions on FileSoup.

Other searches produced varied results but since FileSoup is just getting off the ground it will need more time to cache significant amounts of taken-down content. But what happens when FileSoup itself is subjected to takedown notices of its own?

“When FileSoup receives a DMCA abuse notice we create a new URL address for the same content. After that this URL lives till the next DMCA abuse notice,” the team explain.

The Necromancer – using Google DMCA notices bypass Google’s takedowns

The operators of FileSoup also addressed indirect search engine takedowns. Every week rightsholders force Google to remove torrent listings from its search results. For this problem FileSoup says it has a solution, and a controversial one it is too.

The team behind the site say they have developed a web crawler designed to pull the details of content subjected to DMCA notices from two sources – Google’s Transparency Report and the Chilling Effects Clearing House. From here the links are brought back to life.

“We created a technology that crawls DMCA notices and resurrects the torrent webpage under a different URL so it can appear in search results again. It was rather complicated to sharpen it, but eventually it works pretty well. We will use it on FileSoup.com for all the websites we proxy,” FileSoup explain.

“It will lead to a situation when KickaAss.FileSoup.com (for example) will have more pages indexed in Google than the original Kickass.to because we will revive pages banned by DMCA within Google search results. We call this technology the Necromancer.”

The idea of manipulating publicly available sources of copyright notices to reactivate access to infringing content is not new but this is the first time that a site has publicly admitted to putting theory into practice. Whether FileSoup will be able to pull this off remains to be seen, but if it does it could signal the biggest game of whac-a-mole yet.

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

Ultimately several people went to jail and Kino.to disappeared, but it didn’t take long for replacement site Kinox.to to take up the slack. It’s been clear for some time that anti-piracy groups have had their eyes on the popular site and now action appears to have been taken.

Last week investigators acting on behalf of the Attorney General carried out raids in several regions of Germany looking for four main suspects.

A raid on a house in a village near to the northern city of Lübeck aimed to secure two brothers, aged 21 and 25 years-old. This pair, who reportedly live with their parents, are said to be the main operators of Kinox.to. According to Der Spiegel, the raid drew a blank.

In total, six homes and businesses were searched and arrest warrants were successfully executed in Neuss and Dusseldorf. Two individuals, said to key players, were detained.

According to prosecutor’s office spokesman Wolfgang Klein, a Berlin-based payment service used by the suspects was also raided to ensure their “tax liability” – a reported 1.3 million euros – is met.

In addition to commercial copyright infringement and tax evasion, the defendants are accused of a range of other crimes including fraud, extortion and arson.

Klein said the defendants had “made great efforts” to get rid of their competitors in the piracy market, utilizing verbal tactics and those of a more direct nature.

“They used all means and also carried out threats,” he said. “Sometimes even a car burst into flames.”

And from here the plot only thickens.

According to a letter sent by anti-piracy outfit GVU to its members, the people behind Kinox.to are also behind a string of other sites including streaming giant Movie4K.to. The ring of services is said to extend to pirate linking sites Boerse.sx and MyGully.com, and GVU even connects file-hosting services FreakShare.com and BitShare.com to the operation.

The prosecutor’s office says “lots of data” and “assets” were secured following the raids but at this point the location of the missing brothers remains unknown. Some reports suggest that they may have even left Germany a while back. Adding to the confusion, Lars Sobiraj at Tarnkappe says his sources suggest that the brothers in control of Kinox are in fact much older and 21 and 25.

Nevertheless, whether it was published by the brothers or someone else, an update has appeared on Kinox.to mocking GVU and thanking them for the attention.

“GVU: You make yourself more ridiculous than you are. But THANK YOU again for the extreme (priceless) advertising !!” the post reads.

And that’s one of the key points. Along with all of the other mentioned sites, Kinox.to and Movie4K remain operational. In fact, as far as we can see, not a single site is down.

Perhaps inevitably this has led to speculation that some kind of honey pot could be in operation, but according to lawyer Christian Solmecke, that seems unlikely.

“From my perspective, the users of kinox.to have committed no offense, because the pure consumption of streaming services is not illegal [in Germany]. This is certainly the case whenever any copy of the stream is produced on your own computer,” Solmecke says.

“In addition, the GVU – which here apparently launched the criminal complaint – is also known normally to tackle the problem at its root. This means that the company is going in against the big fish, which has been shown again with the current raids too.”

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

Under development at Github, SportsDevil’s aim is to present its tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of users with links to external video sources via a convenient interface, covering everything from live NFL, Basketball, Baseball, Hockey and motorsports, combat sports such as UFC and boxing, plus football and soccer from both sides of the Atlantic.

This week, however, SportsDevil’s reign on Github was brought to an end following action from UK-based anti-piracy group Federation Against Copyright Theft. While FACT is closely affiliated with Hollywood studios, it also represents the rights of major sports broadcasters and rightsholders including The Premier League, British Sky Broadcasting Ltd and BT Sport.

In its takedown notice, FACT explains what SportsDevil does and why it should be taken down.

“The files found at the following locations facilitate linking to sites known to provide access to streams of infringing content. The sites are subsequently scraped for links to various broadcasts including those whose copyrights belong to FACT members,” the group explains.

In addition to the ZIP files for the project, FACT targeted 47 configuration files enabling SportsDevil to pull links to content from sites such as FirstRowSports, Wiziwig.tv and Cricfree, a site that was targeted by PIPCU earlier this year.

TorrentFreak contacted FACT about the takedown and asked if this was the first piece of software to be taken down by the group.

“This is not the first time and with development of technology, we don’t anticipate it will be the last,” FACT told TF.

We also put it to FACT that although it’s pretty clear what SportDevil is designed to do, the tool itself is often far removed from actual infringing content and could be several steps down the linking chain. Does that present issues?

“That’s the point of what we’re doing. The tool is creating alternative ways of accessing content, and we view that as a likely offense,” FACT said.

Also of interest is the formatting of FACT’s takedown notice, which references neither UK law where its members are based nor US law where Github is located.

“Our takedown notices are modeled on DMCA notices. In this particular case, they were adapted to comply with Github DMCA policy,” FACT confirmed.

It’s worth noting that Github recently updated its takedown processes to give projects more time to ‘fix’ any issues following a DMCA complaint but it appears SportsDevil’s creators didn’t take up that opportunity.

TF spoke with an expert on this type of software who told us that while its removal from Github will be a setback, it won’t mean the end of the tool.

“If an addon’s repository is removed from GitHub, the addon author loses the ability to push further updates to the addon, so unless users install the author’s new repository (which they would have to do manually) further automated updates won’t take place,” he explained.

Finally, we asked FACT if it intends to target more software tools in future.

“Where we see a threat to our members’ content, we’ll continue to seek appropriate ways of dealing with it,” FACT conclude.

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

The country is currently grappling with its piracy issues and while there’s hardly a consensus of opinion right now, most of the region’s rightsholders feel that suing the general public isn’t the way to go. It’s painful for everyone involved and doesn’t solve the problem.

That said, US-based Dallas Buyers Club LLC are not of the same opinion. They care about money and to that end they’re now attempting to obtain the identities of iiNet users for the purpose of extracting cash settlements from them.

Yesterday additional information on the case became available. An Optus spokeswoman told SMH that it had been contacted by Dallas Buyers Club about handing over subscriber data but its legal representatives had backed off when it was denied. The movie outfit didn’t even try with Telstra – but why?

So-called copyright trolls like the easiest possible fight and through iiNet they know their adversaries just that little bit better. According to Anny Slater of Slaters Intellectual Property Lawyers, documents revealed in the ISP’s earlier fight with Village Roadshow show that Telstra could well be a more difficult target for discovery.

The business model employed by plaintiffs such as Dallas Buyer’s Club LLC (DBCLLC) requires a minimum of ‘difficult’ since difficulties increase costs and decrease profits. To that end, part of the job of keeping things straightforward will fall to DBCLLC’s lawfirm, Sydney-based Marque Lawyers.

Unfortunately for DBCLLC, Marque Lawyers have already shot themselves in the foot when it comes to convincing DBCLLC’s “pirate” targets to “pay up or else.”

In 2012, Marque published a paper titled “It wasn’t me, it was my flatmate! – a defense to copyright infringement?” which detailed the company’s stance on file-sharing accusations. The publication provided a short summary of cases in the US where porn companies were aiming to find out the identities of people who had downloaded their films, just as Dallas Buyers Club – Marque’s clients – are doing now.

“To find out the actual identities of the users, the [porn companies] asked the Court to force the ISPs to reveal the names and addresses of each of the subscribers to which the IP addresses related. The users went on the attack and won,” Marque explained.

And here’s the line all potential targets of Dallas Buyers Club and Marque Lawyers should be aware of – from the lawfirm’s own collective mouth.

“The judge, rightly in our view, agreed with the users that just because an IP address is in one person’s name, it does not mean that that person was the one who illegally downloaded the porn.

As the judge said, an IP address does not necessarily identify a person and so you can’t be sure that the person who pays for a service has necessarily infringed copyright.

This decision makes a lot of sense to us. If it holds up, copyright
owners will need to be a whole lot more savvy about how they identify and pursue copyright infringers and, perhaps, we’ve seen the end of the mass ‘John Doe’ litigation.”

So there you have it. Marque Lawyers do not have faith in the IP address-based evidence used in mass file-sharing litigation. In fact, they predict that weaknesses in IP address evidence might even signal the end of mass lawsuits.

Sadly they weren’t right in their latter prediction, as their partnership with Dallas Buyers Club reveals. Still, their stance that the evidence is weak remains and will probably come back to bite them.

The document is available for download from Marque’s own server. Any bill payers wrongly accused of piracy by the company in the future may like to refer the lawfirm to its own literature as part of their response.

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

After complaints to the police failed, STEF and SMAIS turned to web-blocking in the hope of achieving similar results to those netted by rightsholders in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark.

Following setbacks STEF decided to go it alone and earlier this month achieved the result they’d been looking for. The Reykjavík District Court handed down an injunction to ISPs Vodafone and Hringdu forcing them to block several domains belonging to The Pirate Bay and Deildu, a private torrent site popular with locals.

Just two weeks later and it’s now becoming clear that STEF won’t be happy until all of Iceland’s leading ISPs are blocking too.

Earlier this week the rights group demanded responses from ISPs including Sím­inn, Tal and 365 Media as to whether the companies will agree to block Pirate Bay and Deildu in the wake of the Vodafone decision. Threatening legal action, STEF gave the ISPs until Wednesday to respond.

According to local news outlet MBL, 365 Media informed STEF it was willing to at least consider the idea but both Sím­inn and Tal appear to have rejected voluntary blocking, preferring official action through the courts instead.

Sím­inn said that it is not the role of communications companies to decide which sites should be closed and which should remain open so it would need to be presented with a formal injunction in order to block Pirate Bay and Deildu. In broad terms, Tali said the same.

As a result, lawyer Tóm­as Jóns­son says that STEF will now press ahead with its efforts to obtain injunctions against the ISPs that have raised objections. Procedural issues aside, which have dogged previous efforts, it’s likely that sooner or later STEF will achieve its aims.

Finally, there has been a trend recently for under-pressure sites to look at Icelandic hosting and local .IS domains in the belief they offer improved security over those available elsewhere.

While that may indeed be true, Iceland’s domain registry has just canceled an .IS domain that was operated by people with links to Islamic State.

“This is in fact a sad day for IS­NIC. We are very sad over this. It was not an easy de­ci­sion to do this. We had a rep­utaion for never hav­ing sus­pended a do­main name. That is not the re­al­ity any­more. These peo­ple have ru­ined that for us,” said ISNIC director Jens Pé­tur Jensen.

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

The follow-up debacle involving ACS:Law was widely documented, with owner Andrew Crossley being forced to close down his business after being suspended by the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority for misconduct. After misleading the courts, bankruptcy was just the icing on the cake.

None of this was a deterrent to porn outfit GoldenEye International. They embarked on a similar scheme, sending letters to alleged file-sharers and demanding hundreds of pounds in settlements to make supposed lawsuits go away. However, GoldenEye learned from its predecessors by proceeding with caution and staying largely under the radar. But quite predictably and despite legal bluster and empty threats, the company took not a single case to court.

So today, quite possibly due to the tendency of the public to pay up rather than become linked with embarrassing porn movie titles, the porn trolls are back once again in the UK.

TorrentFreak has learned that last year four porn producers teamed up in an effort to force ISP Virgin Media to hand over the names and addresses of more than 1,500 subscribers said to have downloaded and shared adult content without permission.

The companies, none of which appear to be based in the UK, teamed up with Wagner & Co, the London lawfirm also working with GoldenEye. They are Mircom International Content Management & Consulting Ltd, Sunlust Pictures, Combat Zone Corporation and Pink Bonnet, Consultores de Imagem LDA.

Mircom International Content Management & Consulting Ltd are active in Europe, particularly when it comes to demanding cash settlements from alleged file-sharers in Germany. Sunlust Pictures is an adult movie company founded in 2009 by former porn actress Sunny Leone, who – entirely unsurprisingly – has featured in copyright trolling cases in the United States. Combat Zone Corporation is an adult movie company based in California. They’re no strangers to the cash settlement model either.

TorrentFreak contacted Mark Wagner at Wagner & Co to find out what his clients hope to achieve in the UK, but unfortunately our emails went unanswered. The company doesn’t appear to have a working website and its address relates to a house in residential area.

Fortunately, Virgin Media were rather more accommodating. In the past the ISP has been criticized for not doing more to protect its subscribers’ personal details but it turns out the battle with Wagner & Co has been going on for some time.

“We have contested the validity of Wagner & Co’s claims (ongoing for 12 months), asking the Judge to thoroughly review the application and the supporting evidence. We have challenged the reliability of the software used to obtain evidence of infringement (FileWatchBT) and the accuracy of the data collected,” spokesperson Emma Hutchinson told TF.

But despite Virgin Media’s efforts the High Court took the decision to side with Wagner & Co and order the ISP to hand over the details of its subscribers. While the situation is pretty grim, things could have been worse.

“The original request was for double the number of addresses than we have been forced to disclose, now fewer than 800,” Virgin explain.

“We advise any of our customers who receive a speculative letter from Wagner & Co, who also represented Golden Eye International in action against O2 customers last year, to seek independent advice from organizations such as Citizens Advice,” the ISP concludes.

Restrictions placed on GoldenEye in previous procedures indicate that initial letters sent to Virgin customers by Wagner & Co and its clients will not be as aggressive as the ones sent out by ACS:Law and will not contain a precise settlement amount. However, it is guaranteed that cash will be requested at some point.

Upon receipt of these “speculative invoices” there will be those who panic and pay up, and that’s their prerogative. But it’s highly likely that those who admit nothing and stand firm will pay what they’ve always paid in UK cases – absolutely nothing.

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

Last week these rightsholders were joined by luxury brand owner Richemont, which successfully obtained orders to block sites selling counterfeit products. The outcome of that particular case had delayed decisions in other blocking applications, including one put forward by the record labels. Today the High Court ended its hiatus by processing a new injunction.

The application was made by record labels 1967, Dramatico Entertainment, Infectious Music, Liberation Music, Simco Limited, Sony Music and Universal Music. The labels represented themselves plus the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) and PPL (Phonographic Performance Ltd) which together account for around 99% of all music legally available in the UK today.

Through their legal action the labels hoped to disrupt the activities of sites and services they believe to be enabling and facilitating the unlawful distribution of their copyright works. In this case the key targets were the 21 torrent sites listed below:

(1) bittorrent.am, (2) btdigg.org, (3) btloft.com, (4) bts.to, (5) limetorrents.com, (6) nowtorrents.com, (7) picktorrent.com, (8) seedpeer.me, (9) torlock.com, (10) torrentbit.net, (11) torrentdb.li, (12) torrentdownload.ws, (13) torrentexpress.net, (14) torrentfunk.com, (15) torrentproject.com, (16) torrentroom.com, (17) torrents.net, (18) torrentus.eu, (19) torrentz.cd, (20) torrentzap.com and (21) vitorrent.org.

As usual the UK’s leading Internet service providers – Sky, Virgin, TalkTalk, BT and EE – were named as defendants in the case. The ISPs neither consented to nor opposed the application but participated in order to negotiate the wording of any order granted.

In his ruling Justice Arnold noted that the sites listed in the application function in a broadly similar way to The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, sites that are already subjected to blocking orders. Perhaps surprisingly, efforts by some of the sites to cooperate with rightsholders meant little to the Court.

“All of [the sites] go to considerable lengths to facilitate and promote the downloading of torrent files, and hence infringing content, by their users,” Justice Arnold wrote.

“Although a few of the Target Websites pay lipservice to copyright protection, in reality they all flout it. Although a few of the Target Websites claim not to, they all have control over which torrent files they index.”

Also of interest is that Court didn’t differentiate between sites that allow users to upload torrents, those that store them, or those that simply harvest links to torrents hosted elsewhere.

“Thirteen of the Target Websites (bittorrent.am, btdigg.org, btloft.com, nowtorrents.com, picktorrent.com, torrentdb.li, torrentdownload.ws, torrentexpress.net, torrentproject.com, torrentroom.com, torrentus.eu, torrentz.cd and vitorrent.org) do not permit uploads of torrent files by users, but gather all their links to torrent files using ‘crawling’ technology. No torrent files are stored on these websites’ own servers,” Justice Arnold explained.

“Nevertheless, the way in which the torrent files (or rather the links thereto) are presented, and the underlying technology, is essentially the same as in the cases of the other Target Websites.”

The Judge also touched on the efficacy of website blockades, citing comScore data which suggests that, on average, the number of UK visitors to already blocked BitTorrent sites has declined by 87%.

“No doubt some of these users are using circumvention measures which are not reflected in the comScore data, but for the reasons given elsewhere it seems clear that not all users do this,” Justice Arnold wrote.

Speaking with TF the BPI said that the 21 sites had been selected for blocking on the basis that they are amongst the most infringing sites available in the UK today. BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor said that having them rendered inaccessible would help both the music industry and consumers.

“Illegal sites dupe consumers and deny artists a fair reward for their work. The online black market stifles investment in new British music, holds back the growth of innovative legal services like Spotify and destroys jobs across Britain’s vital creative sector,” Taylor said.

“Sites such as these also commonly distribute viruses, malware and other unsafe or inappropriate content. These blocks will not only make the internet a safer place for music fans, they will help make sure there is more great British music in years to come.”

Finally, and mirroring a decision made in the Richemont case, Justice Arnold said that Internet subscribers affected by the block will be given the ability to apply to the High Court to discharge or vary the orders. Furthermore, when blocked site information pages are viewed by ISP subscribers in future, additional information will have to be displayed including details of the parties who obtained the block.

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

Since its official launch in September 2013 the unit has tackled online copyright infringement from a number of directions including arrests, domain seizures and advertising disruptions. PIPCU has shut down several sports streaming and ebook sites plus a large number of proxies.

In June 2013 when the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills announced the creation of PIPCU, Viscount Younger of Leckie noted that the Intellectual Property Office would provide an initial £2.56 million in funding to the unit over two years.

However, this funding was allocated on a temporary basis and was set to expire in 2015, a situation which prompted the Prime Minister’s former Intellectual Property Advisor Mike Weatherley to call for additional support.

This morning the government confirmed that additional funding will indeed be made available to PIPCU enabling it to operate until at least 2017.

Speaking to the national crime unit at the Anti-Counterfeiting Group Conference in London, Minister for Intellectual Property Baroness Neville-Rolfe said that PIPCU would be boosted by £3 million of funding from the public purse.

“We’ve seen significant success in PIPCU’s first year of operation. This extra support will help the unit to build on this impressive record in the fight against intellectual property crime, which costs the UK at least £1.3 billion a year in lost profits and taxes,” Baroness Neville-Rolfe said.

“With more money now being invested in ideas than factories or machinery in the UK, it is vital that we protect creators and consumers and the UK’s economic growth. Government and industry must work together to give long-term support to PIPCU, so that we can strengthen the UK’s response to the blight of piracy and counterfeiters.”

City of London Police Commander Steve Head, who is the Police National Coordinator for Economic Crime, welcomed the cash injection.

“The government committing to fund the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit until 2017 is fantastic news for the City of London Police and the creative industries, and very bad news for those that seek to make capital through intellectual property crime,” Head said.

“Since launching a year ago, PIPCU has quickly established itself as an integral part of the national response to a problem that is costing the UK more than a billion pounds a year. Much of this success is down to PIPCU moving away from traditional policing methods and embracing new and innovative tactics, to disrupt and dismantle criminal networks responsible for causing huge damages to legitimate businesses.”

The news was also well received at music industry group BPI.

“The work of PIPCU to date has been invaluable in tackling piracy, which is recognized as a significant threat to musicians’ income, investment in new businesses and the growth of the UK’s creative economy,” said Director of Copyright Protection, David Wood.

“This funding demonstrates the commitment of the UK Government to promoting respect for intellectual property, which acts as the backbone of growth for our world-leading creative and digital media sectors.”

PIPCU, which is closely allied with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), is a 21-strong team comprised of detectives, investigators, analysts, researchers, an education officer and a communications officer.

The unit also reports two secondees – a Senior Intelligence Officer from the IPO and an Internet Investigator from the BPI. The latter role was previously filled by the BPI’s Mark Rampton but according to his Linkedin profile he left his position last month. No announcement has been made detailing his replacement.

While PIPCU is definitely leaving its mark, not all operations have gone to plan. In one of its highest-profile actions to date, last month the unit shut down what it described as an illegal and “industrial scale” sports streaming service in Manchester. However, in mid October all charges were dropped against its alleged operator.

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

In a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Texas, Voltage sought to identify illegal downloaders of the movie by providing the IP addresses of Internet subscribers to the court. Their aim – to scare those individuals into making cash settlements to make supposed lawsuits disappear.

Now, in the most significant development of the ‘trolling’ model in recent times, Dallas Buyers Club LLC are trying to expand their project into Australia. Interestingly the studio has chosen to take on subscribers of the one ISP that was absolutely guaranteed to put up a fight.

iiNet is Australia’s second largest ISP and the country’s leading expert when it comes to fighting off aggressive rightsholders. In 2012 the ISP defeated Hollywood in one of the longest piracy battles ever seen and the company says it will defend its subscribers in this case too.

Chief Regulatory Officer Steve Dalby says that Dallas Buyers Club LLC (DBCLLC) recently applied to the Federal Court to have iiNet and other local ISPs reveal the identities of people they say have downloaded and/or shared their movie without permission.

According to court documents seen by TorrentFreak the other ISPs involved are Wideband Networks Pty Ltd, Internode Pty Ltd, Dodo Services Pty Ltd, Amnet Broadband Pty Ltd and Adam Internet Pty Ltd.

Although the stance of the other ISPs hasn’t yet been made public, DBCLLC aren’t going to get an easy ride. iiNet (which also owns Internode and Adam) says it will oppose the application for discovery.

“iiNet would never disclose customer details to a third party, such as movie studio, unless ordered to do so by a court. We take seriously both our customers’ privacy and our legal obligations,” Dalby says.

While underlining that the company does not condone copyright infringement, news of Dallas Buyers Club / Voltage Pictures’ modus operandi has evidently reached iiNet, and the ISP is ready for them.

“It might seem reasonable for a movie studio to ask us for the identity of those they suspect are infringing their copyright. Yet, this would only make sense if the movie studio intended to use this information fairly, including to allow the alleged infringer their day in court, in order to argue their case,” Dalby says.

“In this case, we have serious concerns about Dallas Buyers Club’s intentions. We are concerned that our customers will be unfairly targeted to settle any claims out of court using a practice called ‘speculative invoicing’.”

The term ‘speculative invoicing’ was coined in the UK in response to the activities of companies including the now defunct ACS:Law, which involved extracting cash settlements from alleged infringers (via mailed ‘invoices’) and deterring them from having their say in court. Once the scheme was opened up to legal scrutiny it completely fell apart.

Some of the flaws found to exist in both UK and US ‘troll’ cases are cited by iiNet, including intimidation of subscribers via excessive claims for damages. The ISP also details the limitations of IP address-based evidence when it comes to identifying infringers due to shared household connections and open wifi scenarios.

“Because Australian courts have not tested these cases, any threat by rights holders, premised on the outcome of a successful copyright infringement action, would be speculative,” Dalby adds.

The Chief Regulatory Officer says that since iiNet has opposed the action for discovery the Federal Court will now be asked to decide whether iiNet should hand over subscriber identities to DBCLLC. A hearing on that matter is expected early next year and it will be an important event.

While a win for iiNet would mean a setback for rightsholders plotting similar action, victory for DBCLLC will almost certainly lead to others following in their footsteps. For an idea of what Australians could face in this latter scenario, in the United States the company demands payment of up to US$7,000 (AUS$8,000) per infringement.

_{Photo: Michael Theis}

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

In the 1980s, those with access to Bulletin Board Systems would download programs and share them with their friends, all with the full encouragement of the software’s creators. Shareware, as it was known, often encouraged users to send off a snail-mailed registration fee in return for a code to unlock premium features. Although basic, freemium had been born.

Today the concept has gone way beyond those humble roots. The App Store and Google Play are awash with free-to-play games with premium addons, and services such as Spotify and Dropbox offer decent free levels of service to get users onboard and primed to start parting with real cash.

If Joe Public was pressed into a snap judgment, Microsoft would probably be more associated with premium than free, with the company historically charging sizable amounts for its Windows and Office products, for example. However, speaking with CNBC, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that the company has always had an eye on the freemium experience.

The idea, the CEO notes, is to get people on board with a product they find useful. Then, when it becomes clear how users are utilizing the service, options to monetize become available alongside their demands for improved service. He uses the company’s cloud-storage service as an example.

“We want everybody to use OneDrive. And then when you are starting to use it for business, that’s when we want to monetize. So we do not want to have you only start using us when you have a business license or subscription. We want to have you use us when you just want to save any file or any document, any artifact of yours. And then have a natural way for us to monetize as you use more of it in the commercial context,” Nadella explains.

By now millions of people online are familiar with ‘freemium’ in one shape or another but comments from Nadella suggest that while this business model has been leveraged by Microsoft for quite some time, the company had it forced upon them.

“Well, we’ve always had freemium. Sometimes our freemium was called piracy,” Nadella reveals.

“[The] thing that I don’t want us as a company to shy away from is usage first. Because I think if anything, the new competition has taught is that, you know, what matters is do not try to equate revenue and usage day one.”

The ‘piracy is promotion’ angle is something rarely spoken about by company execs, probably in fear of endorsing an illegal activity and validating it in the eyes of piracy proponents. However, by speaking of it alongside ‘freemium’, Microsoft’s CEO appears to have confirmed what many have been saying all along, that getting people on board for free – via piracy if necessary – is one the first steps on the monetization trail.

Indeed, this belief his held so strongly in some quarters that there are some who insist that it’s preferable for people to pirate the software of company ‘A’ than switch to the opposition, whether paid or not.

That said, what Microsoft does not want is people selling pirated copies of its premium products – that kind of ‘promotion’ is never welcome. If people use a free sample of Microsoft products at home, the company isn’t likely to kick down the door. Do the same in a business environment, however, and things aren’t anywhere near as open-minded.

There are no signs that Microsoft is going soft on piracy but as business models change, as they have with Adobe’s Creative Cloud, free tiers attractive to would-be pirates will become more commonplace. And that can only mean one thing for piracy rates.

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