“When we detect a website offering a link or a download, we contact the server hosts and intimate them about the illegal activity. They issue a notice to the site owner,” said AiPlex’s Girish Kumar in an interview with DNA.

The above is nothing out of the ordinary, but where other content protection companies stop, AiPlex takes it up a notch. Uncooperative sites are not ignored but can expect to be taken offline by force.

“The problem is with torrent sites, which usually do not oblige. In such cases, we flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity.”

“At times, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating,” Kumar said.

In other words, AiPlex admitted to breaking the law by DDoSing several websites. This confession wasn’t received well by sympathizers of torrent sites, and under the name “Operation Payback” Anonymous took out the company’s website for several weeks.

Today, a year later, AiPlex is still claiming to be hurt by the unusual openness of their boss. In an attempt to make it all go away, they are trying to rewrite history by asking people who reported on the news to pull their posts. Several site owners forwarded us the same request, which is posted in full below.

“We kindly request you to deactivate the link as the article is defaming the company’s image & its prospects. It was mis-interpreted by the news agency which was blown out of proportion by some of the pirates across the globe,” the email starts.

It further notes that the company is still suffering immense losses due to threats and continuous attacks from pirates.

As we’ve seen before, the email from AiPlex also claims that the words of their boss have been misinterpreted. But this seems unlikely. The verbatim quotes can only be interpreted in one way and several torrent site owners told TorrentFreak that they were indeed threatened and attacked by AiPlex in the past.

Interestingly, AiPlex has yet to contact TorrentFreak with a takedown request. This is odd since we are the source of all the articles that AiPlex is desperately trying to pull offline. Also, the original DNA article on which we based our report still remains online, completely unedited.

The irony of it all is that Aiplex’s attempt to rewrite history have only resulted in attracting more attention for the mistakes they made in the past. For a tech company they seem to understand very little about how the Internet works, and they definitely have never heard of the Streisand effect.

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

Some like to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut while others try the more sensitive approach, negotiating in person and gently persuading sites to comply. Others, like India’s AiPlex Software, do things in a way which can leave onlookers completely bewildered.

Last September the company admitted DDoSing torrent sites in order to get their way, a tactic which backfired when Anonymous DDoSd them in response. AiPlex also made hollow threats to have torrent sites blocked all over India and told another site in a bizarre email they would get into trouble for paying users to spot fake files.

But the Indian anti-piracy companies aren’t finished with their wacky strategies, not by a long way. First up, movie distributor Dil Raju.

Dil Raju reported this week that he has filed what appears to be a preemptive complaint with the FBI against three dozen sites who he suspects will try to offer or link to his new movie Mr.Perfect sometime in the future.

The list of 36 domains includes famous torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor, ExtraTorrent, Vertor, TorrentHound and a number of lesser known ‘desi’ trackers. There are also a few surprises such as Google, GoDaddy and Netherlands ISP, LeaseWeb.

“Website owners who would like to distribute full length video of Mr.Perfect online through their official websites will get very serious punishments legally,” Raju sad in a press release. “Imprisonment up to 7 years, both users and the website owners.”

Raju goes on to warn that “websites which do not follow our rules” will be “blacklisted in all Organic search engines like Google, Yahoo! And Bing.”

Let’s hope that Google isn’t forced to ban itself from its own search engine, or things could get very messy indeed. It would also mean we couldn’t read about more crazy strategies, such as the one about to be introduced by filmmakers Prem and Rakshitha. And that would be a real shame.

According to Rakshitha, the producer of a new movie called Jogaiah, her company has hired an anti-piracy outfit called Shree Technologies to protect the movie’s soundtrack due to be released later this month.

“The software that we’ve used will help us track each person down, so that we can take action against them. It is much-needed in the film industry,” Rakshitha said this week.

Then, and without explaining exactly how the anti-piracy system will achieve its most extraordinary feat, Prem – the director of the film – drops the bombshell.

“All it requires is for someone to search for the keywords ‘Jogaiah music download’ and it automatically tracks them down,” he said. “If they have a webcam on their system and it’s switched on, it will also capture the photo of the offender.”

Time to scream in rage or laugh hysterically? We’ll let you decide.

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

In common with most torrent indexers and search engines, TorLock is committed to ensure that DMCA takedown requests from copyright holders are handled properly, but there’s one outfit for which this is not enough.

TorLock advertises itself as the “no fakes torrent site” and claims that it is nearly impossible to find a fake file among the 140,738 torrents that the site currently hosts. To illustrate the confidence the site owner has in TorLock’s “VeriPLUS” system, he has an open offer to pay $1 for every fake torrent users are able to find.

“Simply take the url of the fake torrent and paste it into the message box, remember to give a valid email where we can get in contact with you to discuss the torrent in question and arrange payment,” says a statement on the site. TorLock’s owner Jack told TorrentFreak that this offer still stands. “I’m sure that we are one of the biggest verified sources in the torrent world right now,” he said.

The offer is an interesting gesture, and it’s good to see efforts being taken by site owners to prevent spam and fakes from flooding indexers. However, the $1 per fake torrent offer is not liked by everyone, the Indian anti-piracy outfit Aiplex in particular. Yes, the same Aiplex that admitted to DDoSing torrent sites, to conspiring with the Government and signing contracts worth thousands of dollars to protect Bollywood films.

Aiplex claims the offer is highly illegal, which it pointed out in an email to the TorLock owner.

As always, the correspondance from Aiplex is not the most outstanding literary work, and even plain incomprehensible here and there, but the core message is clear. As can be read below, Aiplex believes that offering users money for their fake torrent reports is highly illegal. The reason they give is an odd one though, to say the least (note: verbatim quote).

We have seen u advertise in ur site that you give $1 for fake. We trust this is highly illegal and we will fight to protect our clients rights. You cannot pay people for other’s material, you do not own the rights. We have already ban ur site. Now we will come after u and the people who host ur illegal website… The Indian Govt wont take this and will suport us in the battle against ur and other sites. Other people dont pay users for helping piracy. U will get in trouble for this… u do not understand who u are dealing with. We demand u remove the offer and also adhere to the many requests we have sent u to delete illegal files… We will not ask again…

Aiplex seems to argue that TorLock’s owner can’t pay users for reporting fake files, because he doesn’t own the rights to these fake torrents. This makes no sense, right? If we follow this logic it would be illegal for TorLock’s owner to take down torrent files following a DMCA complaint as well.

We’ve read this and the rest of the email Aiplex sent a few times now but we have really no idea what it means. The only thing that’s clear to us is that TorLock’s owner Jack appears to be in serious trouble and Aiplex and the Indian Government have allegedly set the wheels in motion for a site-ban.

Too bad, TorLock seemed to be a promising site.

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

Founded by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson of Digg fame along with David Prager of TechTV, Revision3 serves up around 6 million downloads per month. However, their whole operation was turned upside down two years ago when the now-defunct MediaDefender abused Revision3′s tracker for their own ends and when denied access “threw an epic tantrum” which took down the whole site.

Since the demise of MediaDefender, anti-piracy companies certainly haven’t gone away and some have still resorted to DoS-style attacks. Trident Media Guard, the French anti-piracy outfit selected by the music and movie industry to track down French pirates under the new ‘Hadopi’ law, was recently spotted trying to pointlessly smother a user sharing via BitTorrent.

Most groups working in this field keep their techniques private but as we shall see, that’s not true for all of them. According to an India-based company working on behalf of Bollywood studios, there are a number of techniques they can use to deal with movie piracy, from the gentle to the particularly aggressive.

According to Girish Kumar, managing director of AiPlex Software – a company recently hired to combat piracy on the movie My Name is Khan (which trended at #1 on KickAssTorrents earlier this year) – they begin with a simple notice and takedown.

“When we detect a website offering a link or a download, we contact the server hosts and intimate them about the illegal activity. They issue a notice to the site owner,” Kumar explains. “If the site owner does not comply, the site is either suspended or dismissed,” he adds optimistically.

When a copy of the movie Peepli Live appeared on the private Desi tracker ICTorrent on August 13th 2010, AiPlex promptly ordered it to take down the torrent.

Although it’s reported that the site complied, TorrentFreak checked and the file is still there along with several others added in the past few weeks.

“The problem is with torrent sites, which usually do not oblige,” acknowledges Kumar. But AiPlex, which charges between $4,290 and $8,580 to ‘protect’ movies for a four-week period, have other tricks up their sleeve.

“In such cases, we flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity,” Kumar reveals. And it doesn’t stop there.

“At times, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating further,” he adds.

Given the nature of these pretty outlandish admissions, TorrentFreak contacted AiPlex (who confusingly list ‘Bram Cohen’ as a type of torrent client on their site) for comment but at time of publication we had received no response. We also contacted the administrators at ICTorrent but they were equally silent.

Although it’s long been suspected that ‘dirty tricks’ have been employed by anti-piracy groups in the past, it is very unusual for a company to openly admit using these type of techniques against torrent sites. Should AiPlex offer us a statement, we will update this post accordingly.

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