Hey, welcome to invitehawk, enjoy your stay here, feel free to ask.

Hey, welcome to invitehawk, enjoy your stay here, feel free to ask.

Hey, welcome to invitehawk, enjoy your stay here, feel free to ask.

Hey, welcome to invitehawk, enjoy your stay here, feel free to ask.

Hey, welcome to invitehawk, enjoy your stay here, feel free to ask.

Hey, welcome to invitehawk, enjoy your stay here, feel free to ask.

Hey, welcome to invitehawk, enjoy your stay here, feel free to ask.

Hey, welcome to invitehawk, enjoy your stay here, feel free to ask.

Hey, welcome to invitehawk, enjoy your stay here, feel free to ask.

Private torrent tracker BaconBits is pulling the plug after serving torrents for well over a decade. The site was relatively small but has a unique history, as it initially launched as a tracker exclusively for Reddit users. A near-catastrophic technical failure in 2017 hit the site hard. While the site returned, it never reached its old highs again and staffers lost their motivation along the way. baconbitsDuring the final stretches of the 2000s, a group of Reddit users decided that the community should have its own torrent tracker. The idea emerged during Christmas 2009 after some Redditors, in the spirit of ‘sharing’, posted pirated content on Dropbox and Amazon S3. When those services were swiftly targeted with takedown notices, a torrent-based solution was proposed. After a few hours of pooling resources, a small group of people managed to get a tracker up and running. That tracker was named “BaconBits”. BaconBits Rises Once all systems were running and stable, the staff officially announced their new sharing platform on Reddit itself, branding it the first private torrent tracker exclusive to Reddit users. “We’ve decided to make a tracker for only Reddit users! Its name is Baconbits.org It’s much like the S3 Dropbox that was started on Christmas, where Reddit users can share out of their hearts to the rest of Reddit,” the message read. After just one day, the site had already amassed thousands of users. This is all the more impressive since prospective users were required to have a Reddit account for at least three months, with some respectable link and comment karma. The swift rise of the site is a testament to the power of the crowd. Up until this day, it remains one of the most unique origins of a torrent site that we know of. The Beginning of the End In the years that followed BaconBits built up a small but dedicated community. It never ran into any legal trouble that we’re aware of. However, there was a massive technical failure in 2015, which nearly wiped out the site. While the site managed to make a comeback, restoring some of the content, a permanent scar remained. Things were never the same again and now, almost seven years later, BaconBits is shutting down permanently. “There is no easy way to say it, this site has been struggling since the great robot uprising nuked half our torrents. We’ve kept the lights on since then, but morale has been flagging, user and upload counts have never recovered, and developer bandwidth has been minimal,” staffer Blackfish explained. “Many of us staff have moved on to focus on other things, and unfortunately, the time has come when it’s clear that life support is the best we’ll be able to manage. We don’t want you to remember us like this, but nonetheless, it’s time to pull the plug.” Moving On… The shut down announcement was posted last month and yesterday BaconBits eventually pulled the plug. Over the years the site had changed quite a bit. BaconBits abandoned its Reddit requirements for prospective users and started to operate more like a traditional private tracker. While BaconBits was an iconic site for many early Redditors who were into file-sharing, traffic to the site was relatively modest. That, paired with the change of interests and motivation among staffers, probably made the shutdown decision a bit easier. When a tracker closes its doors there are always users calling for a restart. The closure of BaconBits is no different. However, if people want to keep the spirit going, they will have to start anew. The staff are not planning to hand over the code, period. “No, it will not be handed over to a random user with ‘good intentions’. That’s bad security. Any relaunches will be scams,” Blackfish notes.

Software available right now from the Microsoft Store claims to allow Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney+ subscribers and more to download movies and TV shows to their own machines, as a permanent DRM-free copy. In itself this raises legal issues but buried away in the software's fine print is something that all prospective users should know about. Streaming KeyLong before the advent of legitimate online video streaming services, torrent sites and similar platforms allowed users to download and keep copies of movies and TV shows. Building a local video library from unlicensed sources has its attractions. Even if we leave cost out of the equation, these copies come in convenient formats that will play on any device, play over a network, and can be organized to create a Netflix-type experience using legal tools such as Plex. They can also be transported from location to location and even shared among friends. Services like Netflix have sought to mimic some of these benefits by allowing content to be played on most devices and even downloaded for offline viewing. However, the key benefits enjoyed by pirates, such as maintaining permanent access to copiable DRM-free files, represent a threat to the subscription streaming model. People Want to Download and Keep Movies & TV Shows It is unlikely that these features will appear on a licensed mainstream service but that doesn’t stop subscribers from desiring them. Every week questions are posted on social media asking how videos can be downloaded from Netflix, for example, and the answers are usually the same: It is possible, there are quality issues, and people are better off grabbing a pirate copy ripped by ‘professionals’. Clearly motivated by this demand, a piece of software called StreamFab has been promoted for a while now, with claims that it has the ability to download and create DRM-free 1080p MP4 files from services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO (720p is only available for new content due to a DRM update), Disney+, Hulu, Paramount Plus, U-Next, Rakuten TV, and even YouTube. streamfab It’s available from the Microsoft Store in trial format but gets pretty costly if users want to cover all possible services. StreamFab All-In-One, for example, weighs in at a hefty $259.99 for a ‘lifetime’ license. Whether it always performs as advertised is up for debate but there are videos showing it in action on Amazon and other platforms quickly downloading files, rather than attempting to record the screen. streamfab netflix Aside from living up to the significant functional claims in its marketing, the big questions revolve around legality. Is it permissible to download and keep copies of movies and TV shows if you’ve paid for a legal subscription? Do the streaming services allow users to make copies and is this type of software legal? Subscriber Agreements Before tackling more serious matters, a quick look at legal streaming services’ subscriber agreements provides a wealth of information. Netflix, for example, is extremely clear that using tools such as StreamFab to make copies is expressly forbidden. 4.6. You agree not to archive, reproduce, distribute, modify, display, perform, publish, license, create derivative works from, offer for sale, or use (except as explicitly authorized in these Terms of Use) content and information contained on or obtained from or through the Netflix service. You also agree not to: circumvent, remove, alter, deactivate, degrade or thwart any of the content protections in the Netflix service; Disney’s subscriber agreement is equally strict. For reasons that aren’t exactly clear, the Disney+ website also denies visitors the ability to copy and paste the text of the agreement. Still, here’s the relevant section. You agree that as a condition of your license, you will not: i. circumvent or disable any content protection system or digital rights management technology used in connection with the Disney Product; ii. copy the Disney Product (except as expressly permitted by us); iii. rebroadcast, transmit or perform the Disney Product; There’s no real need to check out the agreements on other platforms since a basic rule tends to apply. If a service does not give users the ability to download and store DRM-free copies of videos as standard, the terms and conditions are guaranteed to forbid these actions. Anyone who breaches their legal agreement with a platform is, at a minimum, in breach of relevant contract law. We’ve never heard of a case where anyone has been taken to court but legal documents are named as such for a reason. Copyright Law and DRM Due to geographical issues, there is no perfect one-size-fits-all advice when it comes to copying content for personal use. Even when such copying is allowed there tend to be restrictions, such as owning an original copy and making a backup, or conditional on the payment of a blank media levy. That said, making a copy of anything from an illegal copy or an unlicensed source is generally forbidden. In the case of streaming services like Netflix, they are extremely clear that the license granted to the user outlaws any kind of copying beyond that expressly permitted in the subscriber agreement. Any copying outside that generates an unlicensed copy which is obviously a copyright issue. All of this, however, is already jumping the gun. All major streaming services are protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools that attempt to enforce the restrictions laid out in the subscriber agreement, i.e no circumvention of content protection measures and no unlicensed copying. This means that the use of software such as StreamFab is effectively outlawed by a legally binding document and also by copyright law. Rules in the United States are particularly clear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has provisions that make it unlawful to circumvent technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works, including movies and TV shows. This covers the decryption of an encrypted work or any other technique to “bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure” without the authority of the copyright owner. This applies to all of the streaming services mentioned above. The DMCA also makes it unlawful to manufacture, import, provide or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is “primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner.” Given the clarity, there’s no real need to highlight why a tool designed to circumvent DRM and make unlicensed copies likely falls foul of the above, even given the existence of a lengthy disclaimer. StreamFab is a Progression of DVDFab StreamFab claims to be a sub-brand of DVDFab, a popular piece of software used to copy DVD and Blu-ray discs. Following a lawsuit filed by AACS, the decryption licensing group founded by movie studios and technology partners including Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft and Intel, in 2014 a New York court ordered the seizure of DVDFab’s domains, bank funds and social media accounts. The order was handed down following claims by AACS that by providing tools to bypass disc encryption, DVDFab violated the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. In 2016, AACS told the Court that DVDFab had blatantly ignored its injunction and was continuing to conduct business as usual. StreamFab’s ‘Anti-Piracy’ Measures Finally, it should go without saying that uploading any copies of movies or TV shows to the internet carries risks but in the case of StreamFab users, things get even more complicated. Buried inside a lengthy statement on the StreamFab site is a warning that content ripped from services such as Netflix can be traced right back to the user – not by the streaming service but by StreamFab itself. “Please understand that whoever wants the same benefits, whoever wants to do the same cool high-resolution TV episodes as yourself, whether a friend, a coworker or someone else on the Internet, they all need to get their own streaming platform accounts and downloader license,” it reads. “Therefore we took one step further to help anyone who’s willing to share content to think harder before deciding to do so. We’ve included the customer/account id in the metadata of the files extracted from streaming platforms. For our majority of users, that understand that the files are strictly for personal use, that piece of info has no importance since the files never leave their own personal storages.”

Downloading pirated movies and TV shows is against the law in the United States. The same is true for those who operate a pirate streaming site. However, people who use these streaming sites to consume pirated content may not be copyright infringers. Law professor James Gibson explains why. watch nowThere are many options for people to enjoy movies and TV shows legally but millions still choose to pirate content instead. Up until a decade ago, this piracy landscape was dominated by torrent sites and direct download portals. Today, the vast majority of pirates use streaming sites. The entertainment industries have swiftly adapted to this shift. At the moment, most anti-piracy initiatives are streaming-related, spearheaded by the Alliance of Creativity and Entertainment (ACE). These efforts have resulted in the shutdown of hundreds of sites already. Despite the successes, many challenges remain as well. In a recent appearance on Reuters, MPA’s Senior Executive Vice President Karyn Temple points out that pirates can be pretty creative too. Especially when it comes to evading law enforcement. “The illegal pirates that we deal with and have to go after are almost as creative, in some sense, as our own creators,” Temple says. “They try to take advantage of new technology and new tools as soon as they are developed. We have to continually develop tools to stay out ahead.” The MPA and ACE have learned that DMCA subpoenas targeted at third-party services such as Cloudflare can be quite effective. While most site operators use fake information to sign up, some of the information is actionable. Going After Streaming Pirates Isn’t Straightforward It’s clear that rightsholders have the tools and legal backing to go after operators of streaming sites but going after the end-users of these sites is a challenge, for a variety of reasons. The first and most obvious problem is that rightsholders have no easy way to find out who the consumers of pirated streams are. Unlike BitTorrent transfers, the IP addresses of people who watch centrally hosted streams are not publicly available, so can’t be easily tracked. In theory, the site operators could monitor the people who use their platforms to watch videos but getting site owners to hand over user data would generally only happen if a site or service is compromised. That’s not impossible, but far from straightforward. There’s another more fundamental problem as well. Even if rightsholders could obtain the IP address or even a name of an alleged streaming pirate, they would have to prove that the person in question is actually engaged in copyright infringement. That’s easier said than done. Not Clear Whether Streaming is Infringing This is also what James Gibson, Professor of Law at Richmond University, hinted at. Unlike downloading pirated movies, consuming pirated streams isn’t a clear violation of copyright law. “It’s not at all clear that if you merely consume pirated streaming content that you’re actually engaging in copyright infringement,” Gibson says. As a result, rightsholders may not be eager to file complaints against consumers who stream pirated content. After all, if they lose one of these cases, it may empower streaming pirates instead of deterring them, which could only make the problem worse. “So it could be that the media companies do not want to set a bad precedent by claiming that it’s an infringement and then finding out that it’s not. That might embolden end users rather than make them more attentive to the legal aspects of streaming,” Gibson notes. The fact that downloading and streaming are handled differently under US copyright law boils down to the definition of copyright infringement. These infringements always require the distribution, reproduction, or public performance of copyrighted content. When someone downloads a pirated file a full and lasting copy is created, which fits the definition of reproduction. However, when someone watches a pirated stream this is typically not the case. No Lasting Copy Speaking with TorrentFreak, Professor Gibson explains the difference in a clear and concise manner. “In streaming, there’s no lasting copy made; the content disappears as soon as the stream ends. That means the copyright owner’s exclusive control over reproduction and distribution rights is irrelevant, because reproduction and distribution require the creation of a lasting copy. “Therefore, the only liability hook is the copyright owner’s exclusive control over public performance of the content. The piracy platforms are definitely engaging in public performance by providing the streams, but the end user is simply watching the streams, not performing them — let alone doing so publicly,” Gibson adds. Whether streaming can or can’t be classified as copyright infringement is ultimately up to the courts to decide. It is definitely less straightforward than downloading, but it might not be impossible. For now, however, Gibson is not aware of any cases where this has been put to the test. Site Operators Are Infringers For the operators of pirate streaming sites, the situation is quite different. They offer pirated content to a broader audience, which is a “public performance” and can therefore be seen as copyright infringement. Historically, these “public performance” infringements were seen as misdemeanors under criminal law but, with the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act, performances were updated to a felony, putting them on par with the penalties available against operators of traditional download and torrent sites. With all the hurdles involved, it’s not likely that the major Hollywood studios will crack down on users of pirate streaming sites. But that’s not really a surprise, as these companies are not involved in lawsuits against individual downloaders either. The lawsuits against BitTorrent users that are currently being filed are all coming from adult content producers or smaller independent film companies, in the US at least. Finally, we would like to stress that this article is obviously not meant to encourage or justify the use of pirate streaming sites. However, it is worth highlighting that not all forms of piracy are treated equally under current copyright laws.

Cloudflare is urging the EU Commission not to turn its bi-annual piracy watchlist into a summary of copyright holder grievances and extralegal demands. The CDN provider's letter is a response to various rightsholder groups that called out the company for not doing enough to stop online piracy on its network. eu flagFollowing the example set by United States, the EU started publishing its very own piracy watchlist in 2018. The biannual ‘Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List’ is put together by the European Commission. As in the US, it is based on submissions from copyright holder groups that report on problematic sites and services. Rightsholders are happy to contribute. In addition to pointing out sites and services that blatantly engage in copyright-infringing activities, they also use the opportunity to request broader cooperation from third-party services. In some cases, this leads to concrete suggestions that go beyond what the law requires. Listing Anti-Piracy Demands For example, in their latest submission, music industry group IFPI suggested that third-party services should implement robust “know your customer” policies. This also applies to the popular CDN and proxy service Cloudflare. “CloudFlare should exercise due diligence in confirming who its customers are and establishing their proposed and actual activities,” IFPI wrote. Other rightsholder groups made similar suggestions. For example, the movie industry’s MPA stressed that online intermediaries such as CDNs, domain registrars and hosting companies, should stop offering their services to customers who are not properly verified. These are understandable requests from rightsholders, who can use every bit of information to track down the operators of problematic sites. However, these verification demands are not cemented in EU legislation, so services are not legally required to vet all customers. Cloudflare Asks the EU to Focus on ‘Illegal’ Acts That last point was also highlighted by Cloudflare, which sent a rebuttal to the EU commission after it was flagged by several rightsholders as a potential candidate for the piracy watchlist. The San Francisco company has millions of customers all over the world. These include governments and copyright holders but also many smaller sites that take advantage of the platform’s CDN and security features. In its rebuttal, Cloudflare supports the watchlist initiative. However, it urges the EU to keep the listed sites and services limited to those that actually appear to act against the law, not those who fail to comply with all copyright holders’ wishes. “The Commission should not issue a report – even an informal one – that is simply a mechanism for particular stakeholders to air their grievances that entities are not taking particular voluntary action to meet their concerns or to advocate for new policies.” Listing companies such as Cloudflare solely based on complaints from copyright holders could give the impression that the EU supports these allegations, the company argues. That could potentially impact ongoing legal discussions and policy debates. “Our view is that the Commission’s staff document and Watch List should be limited to Commission-verified allegations of illegal behaviour, based on principled and fair legal standards,” Cloudflare notes. ‘Verification is an Indirect Security Threat’ In addition to this broader criticism, the company also argues that some of the demands from rightsholders could prove to be problematic. For example, an extensive verification process would involve significant costs which could mean that the company is unable to maintain its free tier. As a result, smaller sites may lose the benefit of the free protection that’s offered, because they can’t afford to pay for the service. “Altering this online sign up process, which is consistent with existing law, to require manual review of new accounts would make it impossible to offer these free services at scale, degrading the Internet experience for all users and making much of the web more vulnerable to cyber attack,” Cloudflare writes. The CDN provider also stresses that it already goes beyond what the law requires to help rightsholders. For example, it works with “trusted notifiers” who can request the origin IP addresses of problematic sites, when these are flagged. These and other voluntary measures were previously highlighted in a separate submission to the US Government as well. According to Cloudflare, the company is showing its good will while operating in line with all applicable laws. Several of the rightsholder groups complaining about Cloudflare are also “trusted notifiers”. While this indeed helps to find out where sites and services are hosted, they believe it’s not enough. IFPI, for example, mentions that Cloudflare apparently does very little to address customers for which it receives a large volume of complaints. “[N]otices or requests for information under the ‘trusted flagger’ program should result in meaningful action vis-à-vis the customer. The program needs to feed into a repeat infringer policy, yet in the case of CloudFlare, there is no evidence that it does.” It is clear that copyright holders and Cloudflare have different takes on how to tackle the piracy problem. Whether the EU believes that this warrants a mention on the piracy watchlist has yet to be seen. Cloudflare was mentioned in the EU’s first watchlist in 2018, but was taken off the next version. If it’s up to the San Francisco CDN provider, it will stay off the list in future. “The Watch List is not the appropriate place for advocacy on new policies as to what online service providers should collect on their users,” the company writes.

PrimeStreams is one of the most recognizable pirate IPTV brands but after dealing with a hacker attack in 2019, more serious troubles lie on the horizon. The operators of PrimeStreams are now being sued in the United States, with potential damages easily running to tens of millions of dollars. primestreamsMost suppliers, sellers and resellers in the pirate IPTV space face an interesting conundrum. On one hand, being unsuccessful dramatically reduces the odds of legal trouble but isn’t conducive to getting rich. On the other, a good product coupled with brand awareness can lead to commercial success, at least until that profile attracts the wrong type of attention. As one of the most recognizable IPTV brands around, PrimeStreams appears to fall into the latter category. In late 2019, the IPTV provider found itself being extorted by a hacker who claimed to have obtained the details of around 121,000 of its subscribers. To PrimeStreams’ credit, customers were immediately informed and somehow a total disaster scenario was avoided. Now, however, PrimeStreams’ operators have new adversaries to deal with, ones that will be demanding a lot more than ‘just’ $70K in bitcoin. PrimeStreams Sued in the United States In a lawsuit filed in a Kentucky court this month, US broadcaster DISH Network and streaming platform Sling TV accuse PrimeStreams of infringing their rights on a grand scale via their internet ‘rebroadcasting’ operation. The complaint names Daniel Scroggins, Steven Daugherty, and corporate entity Dscroggs Investments LLC as defendants, citing large-scale breaches of the Federal Communications Act and the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. “Defendants provide an illicit streaming service known as PrimeStreams that allows users to access, without authorization, Plaintiffs’ internet communications of television programming that were acquired by circumventing security measures implemented by Plaintiffs,” the complaint reads. DISH and Sling claim that Scroggins, a resident of Burlington, Kentucky, and Daugherty, a resident of Havana, Illinois, are the co-owners of PrimeStreams. It’s alleged that they used Dscroggs Investments LLC to process payments related to the PrimeStreams IPTV service. The PrimeStreams Operation The plaintiffs allege that Scroggins registered several PrimeStreams domains including primestreams.tv, primestreamstv.com, and primehosting.one. The service was marketed and sold to users via these domains and through social media platforms. “PrimeStreams was advertised as a subscription-based streaming service providing over 3,000 channels, movies on demand, pay-per-view events, and sports programming, among other content, all for a low monthly fee,” the plaintiffs note, adding that at least some of the content offered had been illegally obtained from their subscription services. “The Programming retransmitted on the PrimeStreams service was received from Plaintiffs’ internet communications. Identifiers unique to Plaintiffs’ internet communications were detected when viewing the Programming on the PrimeStreams service.” Circumventing DRM to Obtain Content DISH and Sling say their internet transmissions are secured using Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies including Google’s Widevine DRM, Apple’s FairPlay DRM, and Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM. Utilizing key-based encryption and decryption processes, these systems are deployed to ensure that only authorized subscribers can access programming and to prevent retransmission by unauthorized parties. The complaint alleges that the defendants (or someone acting in concert with them) circumvented these protections using “either a differential fault analysis attack where faults are injected into the DRM to disrupt its operation and create pathways to extract the keys necessary to decrypt the Programming, or a man-in-the-middle attack whereby customized software is used to bypass the DRM by intercepting the Programming passing from the DRM’s decryption library to the user’s viewing platform.” The plaintiffs claim that the illegally obtained content was subsequently made available via the PrimeStreams service on a subscription basis, in breach of their rights. Direct Sales and Resellers According to the lawsuit, PrimeStreams subscriptions were sold via the platform’s domains for roughly $10 per month, with longer periods and additional connections for multiple viewing devices sold at varying prices. In addition, PrimeStreams offered so-called ‘reseller credits’ to authorized resellers of the PrimeStreams service who service their own customers. Prices per credit (one credit for one month of access) varied between $2.50 and $4.00, depending on quantity. Payments for these reseller credits were made by wire transfer and checks to Dscroggs Investments LLC, with the latter being physically mailed to Daugherty. Some authorized resellers of PrimeStreams allegedly sold the service under their own brands, including Firesticksteve or FSS, Bing TV, and Better Than Cable TV. PrimeStreams Ignored Warning The complaint states that around September 24, 2021, the defendants were notified that their service violates federal laws and told to cease and desist. It appears that the warning was either ignored or rejected, and that’s what led to this lawsuit. The decision could prove costly. In addition to a permanent injunction to shut PrimeStreams down and prevent it from reappearing, the plaintiffs are requesting an order that will allow them to “take possession of and destroy” any item or technology that was used to violate the Federal Communications Act or the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. The order should also include a transfer of all PrimeStreams domains to the plaintiffs along with “all hard copy and electronic records regarding persons involved in the PrimeStreams service.” One of the domains sought by the plaintiffs currently shows a message dated May 13, two days after the lawsuit was filed. prime hosting Pinpointing an exact damages figure is impossible at this stage given the available information but when combining the alleged breaches of the FCA and DMCA, it could easily be tens of millions of dollars. Just recently, DISH asked a court to sign off an award of more than half a billion dollars for what appeared to be a lower level of infringement.

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Hey, welcome to invitehawk, enjoy your stay here, feel free to ask.