PI Newswire

This past Tuesday, a huge (and confusing) international police squad based in Sweden coordinated raids in 14 different countries, aiming to shut down one of the cores of piracy, known as The Scene. Three days later, the time has come to look around and evaluate the state of piracy–and it turns out, pretty much everything is just as it was.

Just about all of the major BitTorrent sites, including The Pirate Bay and BTJunkie, are back online, though What.cd, a private music site, is still out. Interestingly, though The Pirate Bay and What.cd either were down or remain down, leaders from both sites have commented that the downtime is unrelated to the raids. Specifics are vague (especially from What.cd, which currently sports a warning to “stop speculating” and little else), and The Pirate Bay claims they were merely upgrading servers. It’s pretty curious that these two major sites would just happen to go down for routine maintenance while an unrelated but massive piracy raid was happening, but that’s the information we have.

Users probably have noticed that their BitTorrent activity can continue just about as before–not much has changed, from the casual end-user perspective. But behind the scenes, the raid was surprisingly effective. Targeted specifically at members of The Scene, a shadowy nerd cabal of high-level pirates, the raid managed to take several key servers in Sweden, the Czech Republic, and The Netherlands offline, and at least 10 people have been detained as a result.

What does that mean for you? Well, releases from The Scene are certainly likely to decrease in volume, which should make Microsoft, Adobe, and other makers of oft-pirated software happy. It could well be harder to snag an up-to-date pirated copy of Photoshop or Windows in this post-raid world. But if you’re trying to get this week’s episode of Top Chef, you probably won’t notice much difference in your illegal, morally reprehensible routine.

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NEW YORK—Lucas Entertainment has filed a federal lawsuit against 65 unnamed individuals the company claims used a gay BitTorrent index to share illicit copies of one of its movies.

Filed July 19 in United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, the suit seeks monetary damages and a permanent injunction barring defendants from infringing any of Lucas’ copyrights.

According to documents filed with the court, each of the defendants, who are known only by their internet protocol addresses, participated in round-robin sharing of the Lucas title Missing after logging on to the BitTorrent index Gay-Torrents.net. The site is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

The piracy lawsuit is Lucas Entertainment’s first. President and Chief Executive Officer Michael Lucas said his company departed from other gay studios’ anti-piracy tactic—suing the websites involved or ganging several individual defendants in smaller actions—in favor of an approach that has worked for Hollywood and the recording industry: broad-based litigation against individuals. Lucas said mainstream lawsuits targeting hundreds or thousands of individual defendants at once have proved more efficient than repeatedly pursuing several smaller cases.

“While many sites are responsive and take down content once notified of a copyright violation, some are not and we have decided to take a more forceful approach with the more difficult sites and their users,” Lucas said. “Too many people assume the internet provides them with unlimited access to our content at no cost. Instead, it gives us exactly the tools and information we need for lawsuits like this one. I will be ruthless with those who are stealing my films.

“You only have to conduct a quick Google search to see the rampant piracy all over the internet,” he added. “I am always surprised that users would deal with torrent sites and all the hassle that requires instead of streaming through LucasEntertainment.com, but I guess there are many people out there who have endless patience. We appreciate our fans wherever they are, but business is business and we have to make some money off our content.”

The complaint is here.

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The Pirate Bay has been compromised by an Argentinean hacker who made off with usernames, email and internet addresses of more than four million people signed up to the BitTorrent tracker site.

KrebsOnSecurity.com reported yesterday that Ch Russo broke into TPB’s system and grabbed the info from the notorious website, which might amuse some pro-copyright groups

Russo had considered selling the private data, but in the end decided to go public about TPB’s shaky security credentials. He accessed the information via the site’s user database by exploiting its weakness to SQL injections.

“We wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well protected,” Russo said.

Meanwhile, it may be a coincidence, but The Pirate Bay is currently out of action and carrying the following message:

“Upgrading some stuff, database is in use for backups, soon back again.. Btw, it’s nice weather outside I think.”

Closing some holes in the system are you, boys?

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Los Angeles police this week arrested a pair of men charged with running one of the most organized and profitable counterfeit software rings on record through the popular online classified site Craigslist.

Duong Tran, 29, and Huy Nguyen, 27, are accused of downloading thousands of software applications from Demonoid.com, a rogue Web site and BitTorrent tracker.

After downloading knock-off applications from vendors, such as Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE), Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), Rosetta Stone, SolidWorks and others, the duo allegedly would create cracked serial keys and burn the apps onto recordable CDs, according to police and representatives from the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA).

Working out of an apartment near Chinatown in Los Angeles, the men would then market the counterfeit applications on Craigslist at below-market prices. They even designed authentic-looking CD sleeves and offered frequent customer coupons to buyers who repeatedly purchased the stolen goods.

They also included “very detailed” installation instructions along with the burned CD and the cracked key upon completion of the order.

“Tran and Nguyen probably thought Craigslist was an easy way to sell their illegal software, but now they’re in jail and facing huge financial penalties,” Keith Kupferschmid, the SIIA’s senior vice president for intellectual property policy and enforcement, said in a statement. “These arrests should serve as a warning to anyone distributing software on Craigslist — the next person you sell to could be a police officer or one of our investigators.”

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After a surprise visit to his home by lawyers and anti-piracy group executives earlier this year, the admin of a BitTorrent site has been hit with a large claim for damages. The 18 year-old operator of the EliteBits private tracker now faces a demand for more than $261,000, but will be assisted in his fight by pro-sharing group, Piratgruppen.

While public BitTorrent sites usually get most of the unwanted legal attention, earlier this year it was the turn of a private tracker.

In early January ‘Laeborg’, the Denmark-based administrator of the EliteBits BitTorrent tracker, was confronted at 7:00am on his doorstep by a man from the enforcement court accompanied by three men from Johan Schlüter Advokatfirma, a law firm that works with Danish anti-piracy group, Antipiratgruppen.

They showed Laeborg, real name Jonas Laeborg, screenshots from EliteBits while revealing information on the bank account used to collect site donations. In their possession was a warrant which they said gave them authority to gather evidence to show that Laeborg was involved in the illegal distribution of copyright works.

After accessing Laeborg’s computer and his admin account on EliteBits, screenshots were taken of all the staff profiles, the site’s Top 10 downloaders, Top 50 uploaders and uploaded torrents lists.

That case has now progressed to the point where 18 year-old Laeborg has been hit with a cash claim totaling some 1.6 million kroner ($261,150) from Antipiratgruppen. But he won’t face this battle alone.

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Thank TorrentFreak, a site dedicated to BitTorrent info, for lighting the fire.

Shortly after the iPad’s release, the site emphatically declared the onset of a tidal wave of e-book piracy. Just as the iPod led to a revolution in the music business, suggested TorrentFreak, the iPad may do likewise for the book business — and that could mean a fast slide into a world where piracy predominates.

Or maybe not.

This is a story that gets complicated, fast.

TorrentFreak is sticking by its initial reporting. Wrote site editor-in-chief Ernesto in an email last week: “In the first week after the US iPad release eBook piracy increased by 78 percent.” That number is based on a study of six best-selling books — The Tipping Point; Freakonomics; How We Decide, How Women Decide; Getting Things Done; and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — each of which saw an uptick in pirated copies downloaded from BitTorrent.

Accept two realities: E-book piracy is a topic about as popular with book publishers and the rest of the industry as Anything Google is at Apple HQ in Cupertino. Publishers flatly avoid discussions of e-book piracy.

On Wednesday last week, at the huge Book Expo America (BEA) tradeshow in New York, RR Bowker vice president Kelly Gallagher previewed the latest round of comprehensive e-book data arising from the Book Industry Study Group’s ongoing research into consumer e-book behavior.

The data is fascinating: E-book purchasing definitely ticked up hugely in the first quarter of 2010 (it now represents 5 percent of book sales dollars, a leap from the 1.5 percent registered in 2009). Even more telling is that a surprising 49 percent of book buyers “strongly” or “exclusively” prefer e-books, per BISG research. An unavoidable conclusion is that e-books are on the fast track to becoming the preferred medium.

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Researchers have devised a way to monitor BitTorrent users over long stretches of time, a feat that allows them to map the internet addresses of individuals and track the content they are sending and receiving.

In a paper presented earlier this week at the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats, the researchers demonstrated how they used the technique to continuously spy on BitTorrent users for 103 days. They collected 148 million IP addresses and identified 2 billion copies of downloads, many of them copyrighted.

The researchers, from the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, also identified the IP addresses where much of the content originated. They discovered the the vast majority of the material on BitTorrent started with a relatively small number of individuals.

“We do not claim that it is easy to stop those content providers from injecting content into BitTorrent,” they wrote. “However, it is striking that such a small number of content providers triggers billions of downloads. Therefore, it is surprising that the anti-piracy groups try to stop millions of downloaders instead of a handful of content providers.”

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20th Century Fox may be thrilled to see how well Avatar is selling on Blu-ray, but the studio can’t be happy about the film’s through-the-roof piracy rates.

TorrentFreak reports that the Blu-ray version of Avatar was downloaded more than 200,000 times within four days of release. At this rate, it should have no trouble becoming the most popular pirated Blu-ray download of all time.

Avatar’s Blu-ray version measures roughly 10 GB, and the number of downloads is small compared to the film’s DVD version, but no other Blu-ray film comes close on the BitTorrent charts. This makes sense given that the movie crushed day one Blu-ray sales records through legitimate outlets.

TorrentFreak notes an interesting trend, however: A “relatively high percentage of downloads” (the site didn’t give specific numbers) come from the United Kingdom and Australia. That may be because 20th Century Fox released the film in the United States on April 22, and in the United Kingdom on April 26. The time difference may have played a role in peoples’ decisions to download, especially given that a weekend passed between the U.S. and U.K. release dates.

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A block of 86 lines of C# code is creating a buzz online following claims it may make BitTorrent downloads untraceable.

The code, sweetly named SeedFucker, is actually an exploit discovered last November that would allow a BitTorent user to fake the IP address of a server from where a file could be downloaded. It could also be used to flood a BitTorrent with dozens of fake peers. The sudden interest in the exploit follows measures in a new UK law, passed last week, where ISPs may be obliged to provide IP addresses to the authorities of files that are said to be infringing copyright.

Since the Digital Economy Bill passed in a heavily criticised “wash-up” process in the final Parliamentary session before a general election, coders have been working hard on developing a new generation of download software that will make it impossible even for ISPs to identify where files are being stored.

It is unlikely that SeedFucker in its current form would achieve that goal, but the exploit itself has coders excited about the possibilities of a truly anonymous downloading system.

Of course, this is not the first time that heavy-handed action on the part of the authorities has caused a rapid evolution in software used to spread files around the Internet. Most famously, Napster was shutdown by the music industry because it allowed people to share and download music files. The weak point in that case was Napster’s own servers which made the connections between users and files.

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April 1st is traditionally a day for pranks and jokes, but the Russian-led torrent site Vertor has picked this day to inform the RIAA, MPAA and various other anti-piracy outfits that their bullying tactics are not appreciated. The Vertor team has shipped condom packs with a special message to the offices of six leading anti-piracy groups.

The pressure mounting on BitTorrent sites worldwide has increased dramatically over the last year. This worsening climate can be largely attributed to a handful of entertainment lobby groups that try to shutter these sites through legal actions and political influence.

One torrent site that has been floating under the radar, relatively speaking, is now pushing back at these outfits with a rather unusual action. The Russian-based team of operators behind Vertor.com has sent special packages to six of the leading anti-piracy groups through which they hope to send a clear message.

The packages, containing the local brand of Vizit Overture aroma flavored condoms, are accompanied with a note that doesn’t allow for much speculation. “We wish your parents had used it,” the message reads, venting the frustration of the Vertor team and many of the site’s users.

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Warner Bros. Entertainment UK is taking a new approach in its fight to stop illegal file sharing. The music industry giant is reportedly looking to hire a student intern whose year-long stint will entail trolling the interwebs to catch music pirates in the act.

The company posted a listing for the “Anti-Piracy intern” position in the University of Manchester’s career site. They’re looking for a student with experience in—what else—computers and the web. And though the goal of the intern is to seek out and even entrap people engaging in file sharing, the job requirements don’t mention anything about applicants’ own history with BitTorrent sites or other acts of file piracy. In addition to monitoring Torrent sites, the intern will be “maintaining and developing bots for Internet link scanning system (training provided); preparing sending of infringement notices and logging feedback; performing trap purchases of pirated product and logging results,” according to the job posting. Oh, and it’s a paid intern spot: 17,500 pounds (which converts to roughly $26,000) for a year’s worth of work.

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Faced with difficulties in dealing with those who share movies and music using BitTorrent, in recent months Swedish police have targeted those using more exposed file-sharing systems. As stats are revealed showing just how problematic these prosecutions have become, an anti-piracy group is calling for a change in the law.

Last month it became apparent that investigations by music industry group IFPI were leading to raids against file-sharers conducted by the Swedish police. All of those arrested were allegedly identified as major file-sharers due to their use of Direct Connect.

With millions of individuals using BitTorrent and a relative handful using Direct Connect (DC), many wondered why this smaller group were considered worth of police attention. The answer was simple – gathering evidence of mass infringement to be used against those using BitTorrent is a hugely complicated task compared to Direct Connect.

“They can try to download the movie and see a list of people who have the movie. But they can not get a list of everything you download,” explained uTorrent creator Ludvig Strigeus recently. “It is difficult to attack a specific person.”

In common with DC but on a much bigger scale, BitTorrent is not just one network – every single swarm is a new and separate network and the task of monitoring them all is massive.

“There is a huge apparatus needed to keep track on all torrents. I think it’s too hard to manage to do it and then get [the evidence] to hold in the District Court,” adds Strigeus.

Not to say that Sweden and its fledgling anti-piracy taskforce haven’t been busy, though. They just haven’t been getting that many results.

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