With the rising popularity of set-top boxes and an ever-growing array of streaming services, you might think that Netflix’s original business of shipping out DVDs in its iconic red envelopes is obsolete and outmoded. But as Emily Steel reports for The New York Times, Netflix’s DVD operation is alive and well. Approximately 3,400 discs are processed through the company’s rental return machine each hour — five times as many as when Netflix employees used to process them by hand. Steel reports that the machine, dubbed the “Amazing Arm” by the company’s engineers, symbolizes the way that Netflix has managed to maintain a profitable DVD operation, even as it builds a global streaming empire.

Netflix now has more than 65 million streaming members in more than 50 countries, and has concrete plans to expand around the world within the next 18 months. But the company projects that its streaming business will only break even globally through 2016 as it spends billions of dollars on content and on expansion. The often ignored DVD-by-mail operation still has 5.3 million subscribers — considerably fewer than the 20 million it had at its peak in 2010 — but continues to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual profit, augmented by engineers’ work to improve customer service and streamline the process of sorting and shipping millions of DVDs each week.

But why do users continue to subscribe to Netflix’s DVD service, when there are practically endless options of services to stream movies and TV shows instantly? It turns out, there are still some pretty compelling reasons for users to keep the company’s DVD-by-mail operation in business.

1. Access to a bigger library

One major reason to subscribe to Netflix’s DVD service is to gain access to the entire breadth of its selection of titles. The New York Times reports that Netflix has Netflix about 93,000 titles available for next-day delivery service to 92% of its subscribers. Additionally, the most recently released films tend to be available only on DVD, and not on Netflix’s streaming service, because of rights issues.

The licensing for physical rentals of DVDs or Blu-rays is significant simpler, and new movies are typically released within a month of them going on sale. By contrast, Netflix consistently removes titles from its streaming library as its licensing deals change and expire, even as it tries to make up for holes in its collection by producing original content. Many longtime Netflix users are familiar with the problem; they’ll watch a favorite movie once — or more than once — on the streaming service, and when they return to watch it again, it’s been removed. The ebb and flow of titles available for streaming happens all the time, and you can more consistently find the titles you’re looking for as a subscriber to the DVD service.

At the peak of the DVD service, Netflix operated about 50 distribution centers across the country; that number has since declined to 33. But the service is getting more and more efficient. The company’s introduction of automation technologies has enabled it to process more DVDs, and expand the areas where it offers the service. The company has also reworked its schedule to synchronize with new delivery standards set by the United States Postal Service.

2. Better video quality

Streaming-only customers may not realize it, but they’re actually missing out on the best video quality that Netflix has to offer. The company offers Blu-ray discs as part of its DVD service, and the video and audio quality of a Blu-ray is higher than what users are able to stream. As Home Theater Review explains, most streaming services, Netflix included, enable you to watch movies and TV show episodes at 1080p resolution, but resolution is only part of the story.

While you can stream a movie at the same resolution you’d get watching it on a Blu-ray that Netflix takes a day to mail to your home, the streaming service needs to use much more compression to deliver the movie to you than the Blu-ray disc because it has to compress the file enough to send it at a bit rate that’s equal to or lower than your broadband speed. Because Internet speeds vary wildly, Netflix has to aim for “the lowest common denominator,” and even Netflix’s Super HD 1080p service aims for a recommended target of just 7 Mbps for the best quality.

Even if your network’s speed surpasses the recommended standards, during times of heavy traffic, the speed and therefore the video quality can fall. Compression artifacts, like banding and softness, negatively impact picture quality. Additionally, Blu-rays offer better audio quality. Even when you’re getting excellent video quality by streaming, you aren’t getting the uncompressed multichannel audio that a Blu-ray can offer.

3. Unreliable Internet service

If you’re familiar with the slowdowns and annoyances that can happen when you’re streaming a movie and your Internet service slows down, you can likely relate to the problem of what happens when your Internet service goes down. DVDs and Blu-rays don’t require an Internet connection to work; in fact, as long as you have power, you can watch a movie or a TV show. In fact, if your computer has the proper drive, you can watch a DVD or a Blu-ray on a plane, or really anywhere, without needing an Internet connection.

Steel notes that a major part of the core user base for Netflix’s DVD service is comprised of customers in rural zones with lackluster Internet service. Netflix’s DVD service is a great choice for users with unreliable Internet connections, or even those who aren’t subscribers to an Internet service. The Pew Research Center reported late last year that census data indicated that nearly 25 million households have no regular Internet access.

Pew notes that in its own research, its researchers employ a different tactic, asking adults whether they use the Internet. At the time, 87% said they did. Among households with income over $20,000, most households have their own broadband subscriptions — but just having a subscription doesn’t guarantee a speed that’s conducive to streaming, or the reliability that would make DVD subscribers comfortable dropping their subscriptions.

4. Opportunities for pirating

An unfortunate fact about Netflix’s DVD subscription service is that it’s a target for pirating. A cursory Google search reveals numerous tutorials and pieces of software intended to guide users through the process of ripping rental DVDs or Blu-Rays from services like Netflix, and even as the service’s subscriber count declines, there is still likely a small contingent of users who still subscribe to the service in order to rip the DVDs that Netflix sends them.

Piracy is a potent force in the industry in which Netflix operates, and as The Cheat Sheet reported earlier this year, Netflix actually looks at what’s popular on top piracy sites when purchasing new content for its platform. But Netflix can’t bear the cost of offering all of the content that users want to watch, so many users also turn to service like Popcorn Time to pirate movies in a way that feels much less like pirating than ripping DVDs they borrow from a rental service.

As foreshadowed in a previous post in December last year, the Australian Parliament has now passed amendments to the Copyright Act 1968 to enable rights holders to apply for a court order requiring ISPs to block access to websites operated outside of Australia which provide access to infringing content (usually referred to as ‘site blocking’). The Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015 passed both Houses of Parliament on 22 June 2015 and received Royal Assent on 26 June 2015.

How does the legislation work?

The new legislation enables copyright owners (and exclusive licensees) to apply to the Federal Court of Australia for an order requiring ISPs to block access to an online location (outside Australia) that has the primary purpose of infringing copyright or facilitating the infringement of copyright. Site blocking orders apply to online locations that have the “primary purpose of infringing copyright or facilitating the infringement of copyright” (new section 115A (1)©).

The original draft Bill provided 11 mandatory elements that the Court was required to take into account in determining if an injunction should be granted. These factors included the proportionality of site blocking as a remedy, the flagrancy of the infringement, the impact on likely affected parties, and whether it is in the public interest to make a site blocking order. According to the Explanatory Memorandum (paragraph 6), these factors set an intentionally high threshold.

Parliamentary consideration of the legislation

The draft legislation was sent to the Senate Legal & Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee. The Committee held one public hearing, and provided its final report on 11 June 2015.

The Committee made 5 recommendations (including recommending that the bill be passed). The Committee’s substantive recommendations were adopted in the final version of the legislation:

an amendment to make the list of factors that are to be taken into account by a Court in assessing whether to make a site blocking order advisory instead of mandatory (ie, new section 115A(5) now says a court “may” take these factors into account);

an amendment to the Explanatory Memorandum to specify that when an ISP takes reasonable steps to disable access to an online location, this may include a requirement to post a landing page at the blocked online location, specifying that it has been blocked by court order and outlining details of that order;

that the Explanatory Memorandum be amended to provide greater clarity and guidance on the issue of services provider costs and liability for compliance with site blocking orders;

that the effectiveness of the legislation be reviewed 2 years after its enactment.

Controversial issues

The main debate on the legislation focused on three areas:

the appropriate legal threshold for the grant of a site blocking order;

the application of the legislation to VPNs and similar technologies; and

who should pay the costs of implementing site blocking orders.

Legal threshold

The draft Bill applied to sites where “the primary purpose” is copyright infringement. Rights holders argued that this threshold was too high, and argued instead that the legal threshold should be lowered, to allow site blocking orders to be made against websites that had “a substantial purpose or effect” of copyright infringement. It was argued that constraining site blocking to sites which had “the” primary purpose of infringement would be too difficult to prove, and would enable infringing sites to circumvent the purpose of the legislation.

Opponents argued that this alternative “substantial purpose or effect” threshold was too low for a remedy such as site blocking, and risked enabling site blocking orders to be made against websites that had substantial legitimate as well as infringing purposes.

The final legislation retained the legal threshold of “a primary purpose” of copyright infringement. However, an amendment was included in a Supplementary Explanatory Memorandum (paragraph 2) to clarify that an online location may have the primary purpose of infringing copyright, or facilitating copyright infringement, even if the operator of the location derives a commercial advantage of profit from the operation of the location.

VPNs and geoblocking

When the original site blocking policy was announced, the Government published a Frequently Asked Questions document, which included the following Q and A:

Q: Many Australians use a VPN to access Netflix in the US. Is it illegal for me to use a VPN to access Netflix?

The Copyright Act does not make it illegal to use a VPN to access overseas content.

While content providers often have in place international commercial arrangements to protect copyright in different countries or regions, which can result in ‘geoblocking’, circumventing this is not illegal under the Copyright Act.

This question was subsequently removed from the Government website, which led many people to question the legal status of VPN usage, and whether VPNs and other geoblocking avoidance technologies might be subject to the site blocking regime.

The Senate Committee considering the Bill suggested that the issue of whether VPNs could be caught by a site blocking order should be clarified in the Explanatory Memorandum (although the Committee did not make a formal recommendation on this point). The Australian Greens moved several amendments to the Bill in the Senate, all of which were rejected by the Government. These amendments included an attempt to clarify that the use of a virtual private network (VPN) and circumvention of geoblocking technologies did not constitute copyright infringement and therefore potentially subject these technologies to site blocking orders.

As a result, it seems clear that where VPNs and similar technologies meet the required legal threshold, they could be subject to a site blocking order. However, in practice, it is hard to see where the use of a VPN that has substantial non-infringing purposes (such as encryption for privacy reasons) would in practice meet this threshold.

Costs and indemnities.

In the original Discussion Paper announcing the site blocking reforms, the Government indicated that rights holders would bear the costs of ISPs complying with site blocking orders. This requirement was absent from the draft Bill as introduced into Parliament, and in the final version of the legislation as introduced. The Explanatory Memorandum (paragraph 11) says the estimated cost to ISPs of site blocking is $130,825 per year but states that any costs the copyright owners assume would be voluntary.

In relation to the question of whether ISPs require an indemnity to protect them from claims from parties affected by a site blocking order, clarification is provided by paragraph 5 of the Supplementary Explanatory Memorandum, which states that the reasoning of Perram J in Dallas Buyers Club LLC v iiNet [2015] FCA 422 at [20] indicates that services providers acting in compliance with a Federal Court order will not be liable to actions from subscribers from doing so.

Other developments

Site blocking legislation was only one limb of the Australian Government’s crackdown on online copyright infringement. The other was to require the ISP industry and rights holders to develop a code to address peer-to-peer piracy.

The draft code has been published and sent to the Australian Media and Communications Authority for review and approval. It contains a system of warning notices, but does not include any requirement for ISPs to throttle services or terminate customer accounts. It also contains a review mechanism available to any account holder who receives three infringement notices in a 12 month period. The draft code is currently silent on the critical question of who will pay for the scheme, and negotiations on this point appear to be continuing.

New piracy research released

On 24 June 2015, the Government released a research report on online copyright infringement commissioned by the Department of Communications. The report found that 26% of Australian internet users consumed at least one item of online content unlawfully over the first 3 months of 2015 (page 3). The most commonly cited influences for what would make infringers stop consuming unlawful content were reduction in cost (39% of infringers), legal content being more available (38%) and content being available as soon as it is released elsewhere (36%) (page 5).

The report claims to be “an authoritative foundation to assess the effectiveness of the measures taken to address copyright infringement” (page 8). The survey period was 23 March – 13 April 2013. Netflix launched in Australia on 24 March 2015, so it is unclear whether the results would be impacted by the rapid take up of Netflix in the Australian market, with some estimates suggesting that more than a million Australians subscribed to Netflix in the first 2 months of its local operations.

Further reform?

Another outstanding reform issue is how the Government will respond to a major review of copyright exceptions by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC). The centrepiece of the review’s recommendations was that Australia should adopt a fair-use style flexible copyright exception. As part of the Senate consideration of the site blocking legislation, the Opposition Labor Party and The Greens called for the Government to respond to the ALRC’s report by 17 September 2015.

The Internet has been, and still very clearly is, dealing with an issue that effects content creators, and therefore viewers. Any website that promotes the creation of content deals with the ever-looming shadow known as copyright infringement. The websites themselves aren't at fault for the copyright, but the user of their product needs to be responsible for what is posted and whether or not it does take footage or credit from material that wasn't theirs to take. Unfortunately, the method that these companies are given to deal with the copyright infringement themselves has been used for purposes other than protecting their intellectual property.

Back in October of 2013, a Youtuber who goes by "TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit," posted a video focused on bashing a game called Day One: Garry's Incident. This game is what he considered to be possibly the worst video game he's ever seen released. Being a frequent uploader of critiques on Youtube, he's well acquainted with the rules of posting footage from a show, movie, or game. He followed all the rules, and yet he was still issued a manual takedown notice for copyright infringement by the studio that created Day One: Garry's Incident, WildGamesStudio. After making an argument against takedown of his, and a few others, videos, claiming it had only been taken down due to the negative remarks towards the game's quality, WildGamesStudios apologized and removed the copyright strike from TotalBiscuit's account. Unfortunately, this is only one instance.

More recently, another Yoube critic who has an account called "YourMovieSucksDOTorg" posted a video dealing with what appears to be around five different videos that have takedown notices or have the monetization of the video go straight to the company affected. He is also all too familiar with the rules of copyright and fair use due to past experience, and even still he received a manually detected takedown notice on a recent review. He posted a whole video talking about what he could do, but is worried that if he files three appeals at the same time and all three get rejected, his account will be automatically shut down and can't be reactivated until he goes through a few weeks of emails between the studios and Youtube.

There are plenty of other instances of copyright infringement and takedown notices throughout the Internet, and the vast majority of them take place on Youtube. During his 7-minute semi-rant, the creator of YourMovieSucksDOTorg said something that came from his heart. This comment was meant to be both cynical and brutally honest, but when the question came up of if Youtube has fixed the current system of appeals and takedown/copyright notices, he responded "it's negatively impacting users and not corporations, so why would they?" Content creators live in a constant fear that something they post may, for some random reason, be flagged for copyright and then find themselves in the middle of a legal mess. Youtubers should be told what part of their video is being flagged and for what reason, but this system of corporations having full control on what they deem is copyrighted material regardless of the creators precautions isn't fair and won't last for long hopefully.

Wait! Did we forgot Summer holidays this year?

We are opening sign up on 10th of August.

Don't forget to tell all your friends and loved ones!

Following a European trend, an Austrian Court has ordered a local ISP to block access to The Pirate Bay.

The legal action, brought by copyright holders, resulted in an injunction which orders the ISPs to block access to several popular torrent sites and also affects Isohunt.to, 1337x.to and h33t.to.

As the bastion of online piracy, The Pirate Bay has become one of the most censored websites on the Internet in recent years.

Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site and the list continues to expand.

The latest blocking order was issued right before the weekend in Austria. Following a complaint from copyright holders the Commercial Court of Vienna ordered local ISP A1 Telekom to block subscribers access to The Pirate Bay.

In addition to the notorious torrent site, the court order also requires the Internet provider to block three other “structurally infringing” sites; Isohunt.to, 1337x.to and h33t.to.

The court allows the ISP to choose how to implement the blockade on a technical level but it is likely to involve DNS-blocking, an IP-address blacklist or a combination of both.

If A1 Telekom chooses a DNS blockade then users can easily circumvent the measures by using a non-ISP DNS server. A combination of a DNS and IP-address block is generally more effective, but with the wide availability of proxy sites and VPN services that’s not airtight either.

Franz Medwenitsch, managing director of the Austrian music industry association IFPI, welcomes the court order and notes that they are happy to assist with the implementation of the blockades.

“For the further development of the online music market it is a very gratifying decision. We call on the Internet providers to work together towards a legally compliant and straightforward implementation of site-blocking,” Medwenitsch says.

The current court order follows hot on the heels of another major blocking case in Austria, which came to an end last month.

After a round of appeals the Supreme Court ordered several leading Austrian ISPs to block the major streaming sites Movie4K.to and Kinox.to.

The Court further rules that the Internet providers will have to pay the costs for future blockades.

Given the recent successes, it wouldn’t be a surprise if more blocking requests will follow during the months to come.

Source torrentfreak.com

Harsher penalties for online piracy are 'not appropriate', warns paralegal

A government proposal to raise the maximum sentence for online piracy to 10 years would mean offenders could face the jail time as sex offenders.

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has launched a consultation aiming to determine whether the maximum sentence for online piracy should be raised from two to 10 years in jail, to match the current maximum prison time for physical piracy of goods, like bootlegging DVDs.

But other, more serious crimes carrying a jail term of up to 10 years include sexual assault, grooming a child for sex and then meeting them, and some firearms offences.

Affray and brothelkeeping carry more lenient maximum tariffs.

The consultation paper claims "there is no doubt that copyright infringement is serious and there is no strong case for treating online infringement any differently to physical infringement".

It adds that "the links to other criminal behaviour are clear; criminal gangs are making vast sums of money through exploiting the creations of others, causing real harm to those individuals, their industry and the wider economy".

The government also claims in the document that a change in sentencing guidelines "will send a clear message to rights holders and criminals that copyright infringement will not be tolerated".

But is this really a reasonable course of action?

A case of equivalence

That digital piracy could be put on a par with serious sexual offences shows the disproportionate way that sentencing for piracy is doled out, an expert told IT Pro.

"That the maximum sentence for online piracy would be the same as sexual assault is not appropriate," Natalie Reeves, a paralegal at the Citizen's Advice Bureau (CAB) said. "It shows that we value money above the welfare of people."

The IPO, however, disagrees, citing independent research commissioned by the government body last year, which concluded: "There is logic to placing serious online copyright offences into a more serious category. The precedents within the IP landscape are either to leave offences outside the criminal justice system altogether (as in the case of patents) or to set a maximum offence on conviction of ten years. Fundamentally, either online copyright offences are capable of causing serious harm, or they are not."

An IPO spokesperson also told IT Pro that the proposed elevation of the maximum sentence for online piracy "is made in the context of the recognition of the serious harm that commercial scale infringement, frequently linked to serious and organised crime, can cause to both society and the economy."

"The Annual IP Crime Report contains evidence showing the links between IP crime and other crimes including drug dealing, violence, people trafficking and prostitution," the body added.

Let the punishment fit the crime

In the consultation document, it is stated that potentially raising the maximum custodial tariff for online piracy to 10 years is "supported by the Conservative manifesto commitment that sentencing should reflect the seriousness of the crime".

Additionally, the Penalty Fair report, which was carried out last year, found a general consensus among industry bodies that stiffer sanctions for serious online infringement cases would be helpful.

"The argument is, perhaps, most persuasive when it comes from organisations such as FACT and BPI who have hands-on experience of the shortcomings of the existing CDPA 1988 provisions regarding online infringement (though they do of course represent organisations who are already convinced of the advantages of bringing prosecutions, and are funded in a manner that enables them to do so, at least occasionally)," the report added.

However, research has consistently shown that harsher penalties do little to dissuade individuals from committing a crime.

Research carried out by Andrew von Hirsch, Anthony Bottoms, Elizabeth Burney and Per-Olof Wikstrom, Criminologists from the University of Cambridge, for the Home Office in 1999 showed that "[while] results revealed negative statistical associations between certainty of punishment and crime rates ... the statistical associations between severity of punishment and crime rates are considerably weaker".

In other words, if a person is certain they will be punished for a crime they commit, they are less likely to carry out the act. However, the severity or leniency of the punishment is has no clear effect.

Anthony Doob and Cheryl Marie Webster, in their 2003 paper Sentence Severity and Crime: Accepting the Null Hypothesis, noted that "variation in the severity of sanctions is unrelated to levels of crime".

Looking at the American justice system, Valerie Wright, research analyst at non-profit organisation The Sentencing Project, wrote in 2010 that: "As a consequence of more punitive laws and harsher sentencing policies 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the nation's prisons and jails, and the US leads the world in its rate of incarceration."

However, in one of many studies referenced by Wright, criminologists David Farrington, Paul Langan, and Per-Olof Wikstrom "failed to find an effect for severity" when comparing crime and punishment trends across the US, Great Britain and Sweden.

"The statistical associations were weak and even when there was a negative relationship between severity of punishment and crime rates, the findings were not strong enough to achieve statistical significance. This finding is noteworthy because it reflected varying degrees of punitiveness in the sentencing policies of the three nations," Wright added.

All of these findings then raise an important question: why is an increase in the potential maximum sentence for online piracy being considered when it is unlikely to have an effect on the level of crime being committed?

Indeed, a positive correlation between incarceration and the likelihood of reoffending has been demonstrated repeatedly, particularly if the sentence is lengthy and there is little emphasis on rehabilitation.

Rhetoric vs reality

Should the consultation currently underway recommend that the maximum sentence is raised from two years to 10, and should the government accept the proposal, the impact on the criminal justice system, and prisons in particular, could be significant.

That prisons in England and Wales (Scotland has its own justics system) are currently overcrowded is a matter of public record. The latest report from HM chief inspector of prisons for England and Wales, Nick Hardwick, noted: "Overcrowding remained a significant problem across the range of prisons we inspected in 2014-15, particularly in local and category C training prisons, where most prisoners were held. As I have argued before, overcrowding is not simply a matter of two prisoners sharing a cell designed for one with an unscreened toilet - undesirable though that is. It means that a prison will not have the activity places, the support mechanisms or the rehabilitation programmes it needs for the size of its population. More prisoners cannot simply be crammed into the available space."

With regard to the sharp uptick in violence, deaths, self-harm and drug use in prisons over the past 12 months, as part of a longer five-year trend, Hardwick said: "It remains my view that staff shortages, overcrowding and the wider policy changes described in this report have had a significant impact on prison safety.

"I share the conclusion of the Justice Committee report: 'We believe that the key explanatory factor for the obvious deterioration in standards over the last year is that a significant number of prisons have been operating at staffing levels below what is necessary to maintain reasonable, safe and rehabilitative regimes'."

Could raising the sentence above two years for digital piracy, irrespective of where it is raised to, further compound this problem?

Reeves told IT Pro: "We don't know what this will affect the criminal justice system, because we don't know how many people will be prosecuted."

However, the figures for current prosecutions for physical piracy provide some insight.

The Crown Prosecution Service was unable to provide IT Pro with figures relating to convictions and sentencing for offences charged under the relevant sections of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988, but it did offer details of the number offences that had been charged, and they make for enlightening reading.

In 2012/13, the total number of offences charged and reaching a first hearing in a magistrate's court under all relevant sections of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988 was 137. In 2014/15, that number fell to 36.

As mentioned, this does not show how many people were convicted, or how long they were sentenced for. Logic would dictate, however, that the number of convictions was less than the total number of court appearances, that the number of custodial sentences handed out was less than that, and that the number of people sentenced to the maximum 10-year tariff would be even less and potentially none.

"If very few people are going to be prosecuted under the proposed amendments, then why are we wasting time and money changing the legislation?" said Reeves. "And if lots are prosecuted, are we really putting large scale dealing in media on a level with large scale dealing drugs?"

What we used to call television is changing before our eyes. Last week, Telstra announced it will shortly introduce a new streaming video set top box. For a number of reasons, this is a very smart move.

Australia’s largest media and telecommunications company has responded quickly to a series of local developments in a way that seems likely to consolidate its market-leading position. It is targeted at the 70% of Australian households that continue to resist signing up to Foxtel’s pay television service.

Some see this as as another nail in pay TV’s coffin, and an indication that Telstra is having an each way bet on the future of television given its 50% stake in Foxtel.

Others say it could benefit the beleaguered commercial free-to-air incumbents and “check Netflix’s encroachment”. The argument here is that the subscription video on demand (SVOD) services of the free-to-airs will be able to leverage Telstra’s customer base – 3 million broadband subscribers, or over 40% of the Australian market – and use Telstra’s well-developed billing and customer service operations to their advantage.

Telstra TV has already claimed one casualty, however. Telstra’s T-Box personal video recorder will cease to be sold, although the company is promising to continue to support its existing 800,000 users.

In September this year, Telstra plans to make the Roku 2 set top box available to subscribers to its Bigpond broadband service. The new platform strengthens Telstra’s greatest competitive advantage – its capacity to offer bundled services combining home phone, mobile, broadband, pay-television and SVOD.

While it is similar in look and feel to the Apple TV box, the Roku 2 is a much more open system. Its US and UK versions boast thousands of apps and many more services than Apple’s equivalent. Its interface is customisable, and it allows users to search for films or content across multiple services simultaneously.

Piracy not required

This may prove to be a major selling point, particularly if all three of the main SVOD services – Netflix, Stan and Presto – are offered on the new Telstra TV box. It may also address one of the industry’s major bugbears: content piracy. After the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringment) Act entered into law in June, commentators argued that making content more easily accessible could do more than blocking infringing websites in preventing piracy.

A recent survey conducted for the federal Department of Communications covering the three months just before Netflix launched in March estimated that roughly a quarter of Australian internet users over the age of 12 had streamed or downloaded content illegally. Of those surveyed who admitted to illegally accessing content, almost 40% said they would stop if content was cheaper.

Almost 40% said they would stop if more legal content was available. And more than 60% said they would sign up to a (legal) movie subscription service if it was priced at $10 or less per month. The SVOD service Stan costs $10 per month, while Netflix is currently $9. It is therefore conceivable that, as in the UK, easier access to content through SVOD services and platforms like Telstra TV, may well lead to a reduction in piracy.

Foxtel and sport in sight

As the Telstra TV announcement indicates, the popularity of new SVOD services is clearly having an impact on free-to-air and pay television companies’ business models and strategies. Telstra has a 50% stake in Foxtel, the company that may be most at risk. In June, Foxtel made a bid for 15% of Channel Ten, shortly after the latter’s CEO warned that falling advertising revenues could see free-to-air fold.

Foxtel’s move – widely considered to have been instigated by its other major stakeholder, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – will potentially allow Ten’s content to be included on Foxtel and Seven West’s flagging SVOD service, Presto. It could also place the three partners in the box seat to acquire the rights to major sports events, subject to the approval of various regulatory bodies.

And despite Telstra’s protestations that its interests in sports rights are confined to mobile, the Telstra TV box could indeed provide a platform for the company to launch future bids for online rights to major events. It has already been suggested that a “sports pass” will be offered to Telstra TV users that will provide access to Fox Sports channels. On one hand this could boost viewers of Foxtel’s flagship sports channels. On the other, it represents a further unbundling of the pay television service.

More than anything, though, the Telstra TV announcement reaffirms the company’s ambitions to be a major player in service provision, if not in content production. Just a few days ago, shareholders in the second largest Australian Internet Service Provider, iiNet, voted to approve a merger with the third largest ISP, TPG. The merged company will still have a smaller subscriber base than Telstra’s Bigpond, but it is a significant statement of Telstra’s intent that it has so quickly moved to unveil this new offering.

Police have arrested three information technology experts for online piracy, the Philippine National Police (PNP) said on Saturday.

The PNP Anti-Cybercrime Group nabbed three IT professionals in different locations from July 22 to 30 while inputing, updating, copying, and streaming the copyrighted teleseryes, movies and other programs from giant television networks.

The suspects were identified as Nico Angelo Rempillo of Dayangdang, Naga City; Jim Marcelino Bautista, Brgy Cagay, Roxas City; and Mark Marlon Millendez of Barangay Mintal, Tugbok District, Davao City.

Police Senior Superintendent Edwin Roque, acting director of PNP ACG, said thee IT experts created websites to upload teleseryes, movies and other TV programs and they earn on the number of visits.

Roque said the police operation stemmed from the search warrants issued by Maria Victoria Soriano-Villadolid, Executive Judge, Branch 24, of the Manila Regional Trial Court (RTC).

The warrants were issued due to the complaint of ABS-CBN about websites infringing the copyrighted teleseryes, movies and other TV programs of the network.

ABS-CBN representative Elisha Lawrence, Associate Vice President of Global Anti-Piracy & Content Security and Internet Fraud Watchdog, said the TV network loses millions of dollars of potential revenue from these websites.

“Every day that these continue to operate, is another day of revenue that ABS-CBN loses,” Lawrence said.

“The fact that websites allow viewers to watch ABS-CBN’s TV shows and movies, often where the viewing quality is inferior to ABS-CBN’s top quality viewing experience, the reputation of the company ABS-CBN and the brand itself, is damaged,” she added.

Roque advised the public that “visiting infringing websites could infect computers through malicious software that is imbedded on the videos of this websites.”

“Once the malware is downloaded on the computer, it can get confidential information saved from the computers like contacts, pictures, bank accounts, and can even activate the camera of the computer and the microphone.,” he said.

The police official said the suspects were charged for violation of Section 177 of Republic Act 8293 or the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines in relation to RA 10175 or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.

Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt adresses the 9th Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF2015), held in Riyadh, on January 26, 2015. Google recently sued Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, suspecting he was working with the MPAA against Google. (Getty)

A battle between Google and the MPAA took a drastic turn this week. A series of emails subpoenaed in a lawsuit revealed the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) planned a coordinated attack to discredit Google and help clear the way for a new SOPA-like initiative. Google discovered the plans when it sued Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, suspecting he was working with the MPAA to attack Google, Tech Times reported.

Here is what you need to know.

1. Google Sued Attorney General Jim Hood, Suspecting He Was Working with the MPAA

The emails were revealed after Google sued Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who has spent several years investigating Google for state law violations and claims of piracy. Google filed the lawsuit claiming that Hood was conspiring with the MPAA against Google in order to help revive the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Tech Times reported. The lawsuit claimed that Hood was influenced by the MPAA to issue an overly burdensome subpoena for accusations he did not have jurisdiction over, according to Tech Times.

Hood’s allegations against Google have been long-reaching. They included claims that Google’s auto-complete search feature encourages illegal activity and claims that YouTube ad revenue contributes to illegal drug sales, the Clarion Ledger reported. The emails were between two staff attorneys working for Hood and a lobbyist working for the MPAA.

2. The Emails Included a Plan for the MPAA to Fund Fake, Anti-Google Stories in the Media

The email conversations revealed an incredibly complex smear campaign that included having Comcast News and News Corp, among other media entities, issue anti-Google news reports, Tech Times reported. This would include a news segment about Google on The Today Show, which Comcast owns. The emails also stated that The Wall Street Journal, owned by News Corp, would write an editorial suggesting Google stock would decline if something wasn’t done about the attorney generals’ lawsuit, according to Tech Times. That editorial would also talk favorably about some of the claims in the lawsuit against Google.

3. The Plans Involved a Google Investor Coming Forward And Demanding Reform

After the paid-for segment on The Today Show, the emails revealed a plan to have a large Google investor come out and publicly state concerns about the segment, including a call for Google to make reforms and changes, Tech Times reported. A final step, outlined in the emails, would be to invite the media to a National Association of Attorneys General meeting and play videos that revealed how easily someone could use Google to purchase illegal drugs or firearms, Tech Times reported.

4. The Next Step Would Be to Have Hood Submit a Detailed, Complex Subpoena

Either as a backup plan or a final step, Hood and potentially other attorneys general would issue civil investigatory demands to Google, Tech Times reported. These demands are similar to subpoenas except they not only request documents, but also demand answers to questions given under oath, Digital Trends reported.

5. The Plan Called for a PR Firm to Handle the Details Under the Guise of Being a Concerned Non-Profit

According to the emails, a public relations firm would have been hired to handle the smear campaign. The PR firm would work pretending to be a nonprofit organization focusing on intellectual property issues, Digital Trends reported. Google has requested that the judge compel Fox, NBC, and Viacom to hand over any documents related to the secret plan, Torrent Freak reported. The MPAA has also recently been in the news for filing a lawsuit that shut down MovieTube.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent are in again.

'Hot Pursuit' tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Furious 7.' 'Insurgent' completes the top three.

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Hot Pursuit is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking (last week)

1 (…) Hot Pursuit

2 (2) Furious 7

3 (1) Insurgent

4 (…) Minions (HDTS)

5 (3) Jurassic World (TS/Subbed HDrip)

6 (8) Terminator Genisys (TS)

7 (…) Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (HDTS)

8 (5) Ted 2 (Subbed HDrip)

9 (6) Home

10 (7) The Longest Ride

Source torrentfreak.com

Of All The Ways The DMCA Takedown Process Can Be Responsibly Used, These Are None Of Them

The DMCA takedown notice is a powerful tool. With a minimum of effort, any person can ask for the removal of content or the delisting of a URL. Whether or not they succeed is based on two factors: the relative skill level of the person/bot making the request and the credulity/intestinal fortitude of the receiving intermediary.

In the interest of making the internet a slightly better place to be, here's some guidance of what not to do when submitting DMCA takedown notices.

DON'T MISTAKE "GOOGLE" FOR "THE INTERNET"

Andromedical -- despite its name -- makes a device that has little to do with proven medical science. There's no need to fully describe the device's purpose, as the description of the allegedly-infringing content provided by the company in its takedown request fills in all the mental blanks.

The ilustrations of the penis with a device and the final results in numbers. The ilustration of the cellular multiplication. The photographies of the doctors Dr. Hellstrom or Dr. Moncada or Dr. Gontero or Dr. Gomez or other members of Andromedical Medical Committee. Chart of several parts of the Andropenis device.

The "photographies" and "ilustrations" Andromedical wishes to have removed probably contain some of these (totally SFW):

As you can see, it's highly unlikely anyone would expect these photographs to be owned by anyone other than ANDROMEDICAL. And yet, here we are, watching in fascination as Andromedical asks Google to take down Bing's search results.

Because Bing has yet to offer any sort of transparency on takedown requests, we can't cross-reference this to see if it was just issued to the wrong search engine. But it's not uncommon for people -- even legislators and lobbyists -- to believe that Google is the whole of the internet. Or if not that, then at least one of the only doors.

DON'T BE THIS GUY

No one needs you to play Internet Batman and act as an anti-piracy vigilante squad. You're not just wasting your time, but you're wasting the time of others who could be assisting real rightsholders. You're accomplishing absolutely nothing.

You're not even making a dent in piracy, especially when your takedown requests veer suddenly from file lockers and torrent links to PBS.org and Genius.com. The real rightsholders have automated scripts that can generate bogus hits thousands of times faster than this person can.

DO NOT CREATE A BOGUS WORK-IN-PROGRESS NOVEL IN HOPES OF OBTAINING SOME SORT OF RETROACTIVE COPYRIGHT OVER ARTICLES DETAILING YOUR CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES BY COPYING-PASTING SAID ARTICLES ONTO YOUR PERSONAL WEBSITE, SURROUNDING THEM WITH "EXCERPTS" OF YOUR "BOOK" AND ISSUING TAKEDOWN NOTICES TARGETING THESE FACTUAL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE ACTIONS THAT GOT YOU JAILED

Meet Sean Gjerde. Convicted in 2013 of conspiring to commit mortgage fraud, he's now hoping to turn over a new leaf... by engaging in fraudulent behavior. In a DMCA takedown notice targeting multiple news articles about his conviction -- including the FBI's own press release -- Gjerde claims these news reports are actually excerpts from his upcoming novel.

Following the URL he provides, one is greeted by Sean Gjerde's inescapable name, a short bit of introductory material designed to throw off anyone trying to verify his takedown request and… entire articles pasted into the body of his single post -- which he is now claiming belong to him because he surrounded them with a few paragraphs he wrote himself. And the few paragraphs he did write portray him as the grammatically-challenged victim.

This is a excerpt from my new book "Grace Under Pressure" coming next sping as a Amazon exclusive for kindle.

I had always done what I thought was right. How could I have gotten caught up in all this. How is it possible that the Bar didn't see what I did, what I did for my client. I did what every attorney is supposed to do, keep quiet.

I kept my mouth shut, and my award was that they went after me. These people were supposed to protect me. I should be rewarded, not implicated.

Renee, she is my friend. They are accusing me of steeling from my friend. I took her to the movies and baseball games for heavens sake. I took care of her cats. I can't believe they would make this all up. I read the lies and could barely continue.

An Elk Grove lawyer already indicted in federal court for conspiracy to commit mail fraud was charged last month by the State Bar with 36 counts of misconduct in which his victims ranged from desperate clients seeking bankruptcy protection to a legal insurance provider.

SEAN PATRICK GJERDE (#217467), 35, misappropriated more than $80,000 from the beneficiary of a trust for which he served as trustee, engaged in a scheme to defraud a legal insurance provider, repeatedly violated a bankruptcy court order, performed incompetently, failed to return unearned fees, lied on court documents and even forged the names of his partner and a client, according to State Bar documents. Many of the charges involved moral turpitude, dishonesty or corruption.

Of course, his protestations of innocence and good intentions are largely undone by his stupid-ass attempt to fake his way into the "controlling rightsholder" position solely for the purpose of burying press coverage of his fraudulent behavior.

And, along those same lines, one more "don't" for DMCA takedowns.

DON'T IMPERSONATE A FEDERAL OFFICER

This is the United States Secret Service Washington Field Office requesting removal of false report against a federal agency is a federal violation which could put Google company out of business if this report is not immediately removes ripoffreport.com revews complaint/complaint against the united states secret serive. If not remove within 24 hours of this notice all through out the internet should be removed from Google,Yahoo,Aol.com,Altavista.com,Bing.com and all other sites. You are under major violation of infringment rights against a federal agency name. US Secret Service is a Federal Angency and any misuse of the Agencies name for advertisement or for whatever purpose is not allowed at all on the internet or otherwise by Supreme Justice Court Order Remove This Article At Once from all searches or face court violation charges. US SECRET SERVICE/Attorney General Of Va./The House Of Representatives/US Supreme Court

It's well-known that Ripoff Report doesn't humor takedown requests. So, if you wish to be taken more seriously, I guess you escalate until maximum ridiculousness is achieved. Not only does this person claim to be a federal agent, but he also claims to have the weight of Congress and the Supreme Court behind his badly-written, poorly-spelled demands.

And, as if asking for the removal of this link from the entire internet (including Altavista!), "US Secret Service Agent Joe Morrison" does it three more times. One includes ALL CAPS so you know he means business.

A Public Warning! Ed Magedson is a WANTED FEDERAL FELON AND SO ARE ALL THE AUTHORS OF THE SITE RIPOFFREPORT.COM JUST TYPE IN THE NAME ED MAGEDSON AND FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF ABOUT HIS CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES AND HIS ARREST RECORDS!!!!

These easy-to-follow rules should help keep rightsholders (or the severely-misguided, full-blown imposters, etc.) from embarassing themselves while simultaneously raising the estimation and visibility of the content they originally wanted removed. The takedown notice is a tool, not a toy.

(P.S. There is likely a far better way to let everyone know a certain former employee will no longer be welcome at company events/kids' birthday parties than sending a notice to Google, Inc.

Vincent Leahy no longer works for our company. He was arrested last year by the FBI on charges of possession and distribution of child pornography. His trial is underway. We do not want to be associated with this individual, as it may affect our business reputation and major losses could be incurred. The web site has already taken down his testimonial but it still appears on the Google search. Any assistance in correcting this problem asap would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Mike

[Note: this may not be an actual DMCA takedown notice. It's simply listed at Chilling Effects as "Other," which it certainly is.])

The Tor Project has announced, in association with the Library Freedom Project, a new initiative to put Tor exit nodes in public libraries, and help educate users and librarians alike, of the importance of Tor and its mission for user online privacy.

Because of the way Tor was constructed to work, Tor exit nodes play a crucial importance above of all Tor middle relays and bridges.

Tor exit nodes are the public spot from where traffic that enters the Tor network leaves back to the Internet, hiding the user's real identity from surveillance projects run like the NSA.

From these nodes, huge quantities of traffic spews out online, and these servers are usually where a law enforcement investigation comes to a dead stop.

The project is an attempt to avoid DMCA takedowns on Tor exit nodes

Because of this, many individuals and companies that have opted to run a Tor exit node have been in the past under a heavy barrage of questions from police officials, many times being forced to take their servers offline after official DMCA takedowns.

What the Tor Project is doing with its latest project is an absolute genius move, at least from a legal standpoint.

As a result of their activity and scope, libraries are generally protected by safe harbor provisions against DMCA takedowns and are also protected from threats and intimidation tactics, which some law enforcement agencies might use on lonesome individuals to force them to take down or give them access to the exit node.

This will draw a lesser degree of scrutiny from law enforcements, which will have a hard time differentiating actual research carried out from the library's computers from the Tor hidden traffic.

One library is participating in the project as a test subject, more will follow

In its pilot phase, Tor's recent undertaking is now testing an experimental setup in the Kilton Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where it currently set up a middle relay in the library's building.

The Tor team plans to upgrade this relay to an exit node in the following months, and if results are good and they smooth out procedural problems, the project will be expanded to more and more libraries across the world.

Libraries willing to participate in the project can sign up right now, using a special questionnaire on Library Freedom Project's website.

The qBittorrent project announced on the first day of August 2015 that the second maintenance release of their cross-platform and open-source BitTorrent client, qBittorrent 3.2, is available for download with major improvements.

According to the release notes, which we have attached at the end of the article for reference, qBittorrent 3.2.2 brings with it new features like support for forcing the reannounce of the DHT (Distributed Hash Table) function, an option that lets users disable the confirmation of rechecking torrents, as well as support for allowing the app to copy all the BitTorrent trackers using a keyboard shortcut.

The web-based user interface (WebUI) received numerous improvements as well, such as support for ports between 1 and 65535, new Web UI port UPNP option, API Content Types fixes, empty trackers addition fixes, better support for sorting torrents by queue number, torrent download from hash support, Content tab support for torrents that don't have metadata, and support for opening external links in a new tab or window.

Various cosmetic changes were applied to the application, such as an update to the color scheme of the "torrent completed" icon, the addition of a Force Resume icon, a few modifications to the Preview File dialog, support for counting unread items in the RSS tab label, as well as better support for printing of the copyright symbol in the application's About dialog.

There's now Python 3 support in the Search function

qBittorrent's built-in Search function received a lot of attention in the 3.2.2 release, as the developers added search status per tab support, added better Python detection and checks, added support for Python 3 on both GNU/Linux and Mac OS X systems, added a notification when Python is not detected, removed the 'torrent' word from the ExtraTorrent results, and updated the link to the Windows Python installer.

Many issues reported by users since qBittorrent 3.2.1 were fixed as well, including problems with torrent renaming, localhost address, the '&' character in the label name, HTTP header parsing, as well as installing search plugins from a local file or by dragging and dropping files. The build system has been improved, a Slovenian language translation was added, and the app not requires libtorrent 1.0.6/0.16.19 or higher.

On August 2, qBittorrent 3.2.3 was released to fix a crash that occurred when attempting to close a search tab during search, as well as to improve the built-in search functionality. Download qBittorrent 3.2.3 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows right now from Softpedia or directly from the application's website, whichever suits you best.

President of the Ghana Audio and Video Distributors Association, Mr. Peter Wilson Okyere says the increasing rate of piracy is forcing distributors to close down their shops.

He made this revelation while speaking on the challenges that have bedevilled the Audio and Video Distributors Association on Hitz FM's 'Showbiz Filla' with Amanda Jissih.

He said, “We are all not producing around this time and most people are running away from the business of selling music and videos to mobile phone distribution and other stuff.”

Asked why nothing has been done about the situation which has persisted for a while now, Mr. Okyere said there are executives who are being paid to run the affairs of the association but are not living up to expectation.

Piracy has existed in the Ghanaian entertainment industry for a while now with no signs of being tackled.

Mr. Okyere said, “The association sends its members to assist in arresting the pirates but after a week, the culprits go back onto the streets with the computers doing the exact thing they were arrested for."

He also complained that corporate Ghana appears to have neglected their industry even though it contributes to the growth of the economy.

The anti-piracy taskforce convened by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair has engaged the Primary and Secondary Education Ministry in a bid to address the problem of use of pirated books in schools.

Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association chairperson Blazio Tafireyi, who heads the taskforce, said investigations established as high as 64 percent pirated materials at some schools.

"Our investigations show that schools are the major consumer of the pirated books at the present moment," Tafireyi said.

"Some schools have registered as high as 64 percent pirated materials at their schools. These are, of course, purchased using public funds," he said.

"We have opened discussions with the ministry (of Primary and Secondary Education). However, these discussions need to shift into a more serious gear and must result in the reversal of this serious breach by the school authorities," he said.

Tafireyi called on booksellers and authors' associations to join publishers at the table to ensure that their point is heard clearly.

He also lamented that penalties imposed on copyright offenders are not deterrent enough to keep them from resurfacing on the streets.

He also requested that the anti-piracy focus group be tasked to look into the regional situation to establish why piracy was not as rampant in Namibia, South Africa and Botswana.

Earlier, in his opening remarks at the beginning of the ZIBF Indaba, Primary and Education Minister Lazarus Dokora urged stakeholders to contribute to the development of a book policy.

"Writing is a business. To this end, the question of copyright becomes pivotal," Dokora said.

"How do we protect ourselves against piracy? I urge you to make your voices heard in the process of developing a national book policy," he said.

Sibongile Jele, a lecturer with the National University of Science and Technology Publishing Department, said the fight against piracy was being lost in the failure to make books affordable and accessible.

She said the fact that the taskforce had managed to facilitate 15 arrests out of hundreds of cases demonstrated a basic flaw in its current approach.

Jele argued that publishers have priced themselves out of business, thereby facilitating piracy, only to battle it superficially.

Some parents said they had resorted to buying prescribed textbooks on the streets after failing to get them from bookshops.

Tafireyi insisted that inaccessibility of books did not licence parents to buy from wrong avenues as that amounted to complicity with pirates at the expense of publishers.

Freedom fighter and writer Ambassador Agrippa Mutambara (Cde Dragon.

Patiripakashata) said the legal dragnet must close in on both the big fish and the small fish.

He said he found it necessary, as a newcomer to the book sector, that measures be in place to protect legit players.

An eminent author told Herald Entertainment on the sidelines of the Indaba that writers were being used as human shields in the fight against piracy since publishers were not remitting royalties to the creators.

National Arts Council of Zimbabwe director Elvas Mari said stakeholders in the book sector needed to be adequately informed of their rights.

"Practitioners in the creative industries need to be capacitated in such areas as intellectual property rights, patents and copyrights, and related industry matters particularly in an environment where piracy has reached unprecedented levels," Mari said.

"The handbook may need to be translated into other Zimbabwean languages to enhance accessibility," he said.

The ZIBF convened the All Stakeholders Anti-Piracy Workshop in May 2013.

The workshop facilitated the formation of the taskforce whose tenure has since expired but it has maintained anti-piracy raids and awareness campaigns.

As this weekend’s Community Shield heralds a new Premier League season, more people than ever will be watching it online – without paying a penny. Is this plain old piracy, or just priced-out fans taking sport back from big business? And is there any way to stop it?

We are in a poky flat in a Scandinavian suburb, without a millionaire sportsman in sight. But if things go according to plan during the next 90 minutes, we will join the scourge of the richest sport leagues in the world.

Using Windows on a cheap laptop, with only rudimentary IT skills, we are about to upload a stream of a football match and broadcast it online. I am told it is easy, and we have a step-by-step guide. We also have the anonymity of the internet. What we don’t have, however, is permission: we paid none of the £5.1bn it cost Sky and BT Sport to screen Premier League matches in the UK.

In the eyes of some pretty powerful corporations, we are pirates, stealing copyrighted content and unlawfully profiting from its redistribution. As a result, my friend is touching the buttons and he will remain unnamed. However, others contend that we are simply freeing sport from the clutch of big business and returning it to the public who most deserve it. The cost of watching the action is out of control, they say.

During the past few years, as the cost of TV rights for sporting events has escalated apparently without limit, so has the ease by which conventional broadcast methods can be circumvented. Despite the best efforts of global authorities, including the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), the proliferation, accessibility and reliability of sport streaming sites have only increased.

On any game day in any sports league across the world, thousands of people do precisely what I have flown to Scandinavia to witness, and broadcast untold numbers of sporting events online. Meanwhile, in living rooms across the world, people are watching more live sport than ever, whether or not they have paid for it. The audience of unauthorised streams is estimated in the millions. As Sunday’s Community Shield heralds the start of another Premier League season, it’s a safe bet that more people than ever will be watching it illicitly. And as the idealists who first took on football’s behemoths find themselves increasingly hijacked by commercial operations with their eye on a quick buck, football’s black market will grow.

On 1 January, a site named Wiziwig – by far the most popular aggregation platform through which users could access thousands of streams – closed under the threat of legal action in Spain, where it was based. But other sites quickly stepped in to fill its role. Moreover, a senior Wiziwig moderator told me that they have no intention of remaining in the wilderness.

“All the Wiziwig moderators are still dedicated to our mission of a free and open internet, with free-to-air-programming for all,” the moderator said. He spoke on condition of anonymity – no one associated with Wiziwig has agreed to a mainstream press interview before – and used the language of the renegade that is familiar among internet libertarians: “All we have done and will do in the future is for sports fans anywhere in the world.”

The contention is that broadcasters are holding sport fans to ransom, and it means that this season, football stadiums will again host more than just the on-pitch duels between the nation’s top teams. The Premier League, among numerous other sports organisations the world over, will once again be forced to war against the online streamers. But if recent history offers much indication, they can hope to secure a score draw at best.

“There will always be alternative markets that will arise to provide services to consumers,” says Mike Carver, a network engineering student based in Scandinavia, who likens streamers to bootleggers during prohibition. “Cable and satellite broadcasters cling to their archaic business model that only worked in the pre-internet era. People hate restrictions and inconvenience. Online sports streams provide an open resource that doesn’t discriminate based on income and location.”

In August 2014, Carver (a pseudonym) set up a site named HTPC Guides that provides walkthrough guides for various advanced hardware and software processes, specifically focused on latest developments in home media technology. Two days after Wiziwig’s closure, he published an article listing alternative sites, which got 100,000 page views within a few months. “The goal of that page was to guide loyal sports fans towards getting unrestricted access to support their teams,” Carver says. “You will never be able to stop fans from supporting their team.”

Carver’s site neither hosts nor links to copyrighted material, but he is sympathetic to the streamers’ causes. “The UK is in a particularly weird situation because fans are screwed,” he says. “Games are not allowed to be shown on live broadcast at 3pm to push people into the stadiums, which increases demand and drives up ticket prices. For those who cannot attend the game live, they have literally no legal option to watch their team. The system is incredibly punishing to fans, who the sport should be all about serving.”

Authorities attempting to stamp out streaming tend to characterise those involved as profit-driven, organised criminals, possibly with links to even more serious crime and racketeering. But everyone I encountered who had experience of the streaming world considered that portrayal to be a gross distortion. Streamers, they say, are idealistic, computer-savvy sports fans working alone in suburban bedrooms, not terrorists or mafia operatives. They often speak in the vocabulary of the anarchist; committed to anti-capitalism rather than financial reward.

“I think authorities are just stereotyping,” Carver says. “The majority of streamers are doing it for the love of sports and ‘fighting the man’. I doubt the mafia have the desire to make large sites that put streams online for free.”

A hierarchy even exists within the streaming community, where disdain is reserved for so-called “re-streamers” – the parasites who take a “clean” stream from an idealistic “stream originator” and re-host it on another site, slathered in adverts. (The swarm of pop-up ads that assault users attempting to access streams is often the most effective deterrent for casual viewers.) Authorities, of course, are unmoved by squabbles within the streaming community, as they are by the claims of sites such as Wiziwig that they should not be regarded as pirates for merely indexing links to streams. They also reject the notion that most streamers are hobbyists, pointing to extraordinary volumes of traffic, the rash of pop-up ads, and the never-ending thirst for sports coverage.

“These are professional outfits now, getting money through various syndications, adverts, betting sites and so on,” says Tim Cooper, who has worked with the Premier League for the past decade in its attempts to stamp out streaming. Referencing a case against a popular streaming site named First Row Sports, Cooper adds: “It was rumoured that they were earning about £10m a year in terms of revenue through advertising. Gone are the days that it’s a kid in his bedroom re-streaming something from an HDMI splitter.”

In the early days of streaming, the battle against the sites resembled a game of cat and mouse through the internet, with Cooper among the original predators. What began as a manual process of seeking out infringing sites and bombarding them with cease-and-desist letters – many of which were ignored – has gradually become more automated, while streamers have grown more elusive.

Cooper’s company, Net Result, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2013 and now works under the company’s Mark Monitor anti-piracy banner, has widened its focus and employs numerous disruption tactics to combat streamers. Social media channels can be blocked and ISPs can be petitioned to stop access, starving the sites of traffic. PIPCU places sites on its Infringing Website List (IWL) and displays a warning notice to potential users. PIPCU told me that in two months after closing one popular streaming site, five million people had seen the generic warning page.

Disruption of this kind has proven to be far more effective than attempted prosecution in the battle against streamers, not least because sport streaming sites occupy a wide grey area in the eyes of the law.

Historically, most arrests and attempted prosecutions are made under the provision of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which prohibits the broadcast of material without the licence of the copyright owner. However, in February 2012, during a case between the Premier League and a pub landlady from Portsmouth named Karen Murphy, the European Court ruled that live sporting events could not be regarded as “intellectual creations”. They were instead “subject to rules of the game, leaving no room for creative freedom”. The court decided that “accordingly, those events cannot be protected under copyright”.

Although the same case ruled that logos, anthems and commentary overlaid on to the pictures of matches were copyrightable property, the prospect of gaining meaningful convictions for illegally broadcasting a logo is slim – even without the logo-blocking software that is being developed by some streamers.

In contrast to pirated films or music, whose files sit as evidence on servers somewhere, live streams are by necessity transient; an alleged copyright infringement is there one minute and gone the next, stored only briefly in computer caches. Anti-piracy campaigners also struggle even to build a moral case against sport streamers: while it can be alleged that torrent sites compound the struggles of starving musicians and threaten cinema closures, there is little public sympathy for spoilt Premier League footballers, nor employers rich enough to fork out £150,000 a week for their services.

More significantly, almost all streamers now place their servers in jurisdictions known to be more relaxed than the UK or US in their interpretation of copyright laws, or transmit images via a third-party data centre in similar regions. “If it’s in eastern Europe, or further afield than that, having the police in that jurisdiction kick someone’s door in to protect the industry of American music, or Sky TV here, is something they’re not keen to do,” says David Cook, a solicitor who specialises in cyber crime.

Cook describes a situation in which none of the police, the CPS, judges or juries fully understand the complexities of copyright law, allowing ambiguities to enter the process at all stages from evidence gathering through to trial and sentencing. “All of those different stages pose a problem,” Cook says. “And in terms of sport streaming services, we are barely at the first stage.”

Stream originators, sympathisers and users alike have another idea for nullifying their own influence: the lifting of restrictions governing online broadcast of games, coupled with a significant reduction in prices. Several sources suggested that the Premier League could enter the online market with its own channel, showing all of its matches to its enormous global audience with a low subscription fee and vast advertising revenue.

“I see a future where sites like Wiziwig are irrelevant,” the site moderator said. “When networks put all programming live and free over the internet, streaming sites – aggregators and originators – will disappear because they won’t be needed. Cable/satellite providers and broadcasters should realise this and develop new profit models accordingly.”

Back in our hideout in Scandinavia, we were busy proving just how easy the whole operation was. Our equipment worked smoothly, and Carver’s manual was meticulous. After a couple of small hiccups, we were able to email a link to a friend in London that allowed him to watch “our” stream of the Europa League Cup Final between Seville and Dnipro. The pictures were jerky and bandwidth wasn’t quite sufficient to support even two viewers, not to mention the fact that my friend could have watched it on his own TV for free.

But had we been prepared to invest further, or to make a few simple modifications to redirect a subscription-based channel, our operation would have been much the same as any that might appear on a site such as Wiziwig on a Saturday afternoon.

Carver later wrote in an email: “I think it’s fair to say that if you can do it, almost anybody can.” And with the Premier League starting again within a fortnight, it’s fair to say that plenty of people still will.

2015.08.02#update

1.H&R增加新规则，即同时满足3天内累计做种不足12小时且单种3天内分享率没有达到1的，才会计入H R;

2.种子页面CSS恢复，保留边框阴影，种子内容页面恢复到原来的简约风格

3.H&R的REMOVE测试加入

Translation

2015.08.02 # update

1.H & R to add a new rule that meet three days a total of less than 12 hours and do the kinds of three days of sharing a single rate did not reach 1, will be included in HR;

2. Seed page CSS recovery, retention border shadow, seed content pages restored to its original minimalist style

3.H & R's REMOVE test added

TsH needs help to survive........

As you may be aware we have further issues again with regard to taking payments to keep this site alive.

Staff are more than willing to cover the basic cost of the site in regards to keeping it running, but we will almost certainly have to lose the topsite access that we have and will be relying on Uploaders fully for the time being should we continue.

The above is actually the smallest and least important part of the problem we face. We can sort the above issues without to much of a worry.

Now to the point where we really do needs the help from the users of this site.

For longer than I can remember we have struggled with a coding team. The coders we currently have here sadly do not have the enthusiasm or drive to do the things that are needed for this site and therefore in order to keep going we are going to be forced to make some drastic changes.

In short we are in need of people who would be willing to code for this site. People who are willing to put in the time it needs in order to turn this site around and head it back in the right direction.

We have faced out current problem for the last few months and had we had someone with the will to help, we could have easily avoided ending up where we are now. For obvious reasons I cannot and will not go into the exact reasons.

In short, we don't need money, we don't need donations we just need coders. Those with talent and those with the time needed.

If we do not find people that are able to help then I honestly think the best option would be to close this site and perhaps find an alternative home together. As much as I hate to admit it, but it's impossible to run a site like this and keep it going without the correct personnel in place to make that happen.

I would rather go out on a high than fade into just another everyday tracker. :-)

Thanks for your time. Let's see what happens.

//Staff.

P.S. Should you feel you can help, please send a PM to a member of staff or use the staff PM function. Please only PM if you really can help. We have had to many people in the past offer help but have nothing to offer.

Discuss it here

Trivia Question Contest

We just opened up #ToT-Trivia on our IRC network, and as such we're looking for people to help out with adding questions.

For each question you submit you'll get 50 BP, and any multiples of 20 will be x2.

EDIT: Apparently The1AndOnlyNubs's power of deduction is about as strong as PlacidSigh, so I have to make this edit to say the questions should relate to TV only.

i.e If you submit 14 questions you'll get 700 points, but if you submit 20 you'll get 2000. (20*50=1000, x2 multiplier)

The top 3 submitters will also receive:

25,000 BP

12,500 BP

7,000 BP

We will be screening the submissions for bogus entries and questions that don't really fit, so be advised.

If you'd like to enter, post your submissions in this thread. But please keep it to ONE post.

This will end on Monday, August 3rd EST. For information on how to connect to IRC, check out this wiki article.

Teky's Quiz Hour

Every Sunday, starting August 2nd, iS will host a trivia hour (give or take).

Each quiz will be broken into three rounds. The winner of each round will be awarded a prize. The person who answers the most questions right across all three rounds will receive the grand prize. Prizes will change from quiz to quiz.

Each round will consist of 8 questions. Each question could be about anything from pop culture, science, to site history!

As with all of my quizzes, the question will be given over shoutcast first and then relayed into the shoutbox. The first person to answer the question correctly in the shoutbox will be awarded the point.

I hope to see you at the next quiz show. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to post them to this thread!

<Bluefire> I feel a but coming

<teky> no but ... i dont want to hear a damn thing more about IE though

Click Here For More Details

A service that helps users circumvent web-blocking injunctions handed down by the UK High Court has grown to become one of the country's most popular websites.

Unblocked.pw provides instant access to dozens of otherwise blocked domains and is currently ranked 192nd in the UK, ahead of both Spotify and Skype.

For citizens of the UK, web blocking is becoming a hot topic. Aside from the large and growing list of torrent, streaming and other downloading sites currently blocked by ISPs, netizens are now facing the specter of government enforced porn barriers.

That’s according to Prime Minister David Cameron, who this week fired off a broadside against adult content providers who he says are failing to control what other people’s children are viewing online.

“Our one nation government is working hard to make the internet a safer place for children, the next step in this campaign is to curb access to harmful pornographic content which is currently far too widely available,” the Prime Minister said. “I want to see age restrictions put into place or these websites will face being shut down.”

According to the government the UK’s top 10 adult sites account for over half (52%) of all site views so this is no trivial matter. The site’s aren’t mentioned by name so TF decided to look them up.

The most popular within the UK’s top 200 most-visited sites according to Alexa are Pornhub (#41), XHamster (#44), Xvideos (#47), RedTube (#92), TubeCup (#105) and YouPorn (#122). To give an idea of scale, PornHub is more popular than Netflix and YouPorn is more visited than Vimeo.

However, while compiling this list we stumbled across something else that’s both surprising on one hand and utterly predictable on the other. Occupying the position of the UK’s 192nd most-visited site is Unblocked.pw, a service entirely dedicated to unblocking blocked websites.

Breaking the top 200 is no mean feat for any site, especially when one considers the competition at that level. Nevertheless, after existing for much less than a year, Unblocked.pw is already more popular in the UK than both Spotify (#194) and Skype (#195).

While the skill of the site’s operator is no doubt a factor in its success, the huge popularity of Unblocked.pw is almost entirely down to restrictions being put in place by UK Internet service providers. Every time a blockade is put in place, Unblocked.pw provides a solution to the problem. It currently unblocks most major torrent and streaming sites plus the specialist ebook archives targeted in May.

“Fighting censorship has been the primary motivation behind running Unblocked,” the site’s operator informs TorrentFreak.

“It’s to show that whatever regulators do to censor things online, there will always be a way around it. The initial motivation came from when The Pirate Bay was blocked in the Netherlands. We set up Proxybay.co to maintain a list of Pirate Bay proxy sites and show people how to create their own.”

In respect of porn sites, Cameron’s office suggests that users could be required to validate their ages with a credit card, but the operators of overseas ‘tube’ sites will be extremely reluctant to introduce such measures since they will mess with their business models by reducing traffic and ad revenue.

That will leave web-blocking as Cameron’s only other option but as highlighted by the Open Rights Group, that won’t work.

“While the government can shut down UK-based sites, these are few in number and represent a tiny proportion of the global porn industry. Cameron needs to clarify how he wishes to achieve his goals, given that most porn sites are hosted abroad,” says ORG’s Jim Killock.

“To block them, the government would have to introduce a national firewall, which would censor sites for everyone, and would likely be widely circumvented.”

While there are currently no dedicated adult sites in Unblocked.pw’s repertoire (since none are currently blocked in the UK), there can be little doubt that if the UK government decides to order blockades, Unblocked and similar sites will quickly offer wordarounds.

If that does indeed transpire, expect a successful service to break the top 50 most-visited sites in the country while jockeying for rankings with the likes of Apple and WordPress. It’s a battle the government simply can’t win, but that won’t stop them from trying.

In the meantime the Internet continues to interpret censorship as damage, and routes around it.

Source torrentfreak.com