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      ISPs Say They’ll Happily Cut Pirate IPTV Streams as Quickly as Law Allows It

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Thursday, 8 February - 09:15 · 4 minutes

    iptv2-s In the early 2000s, powerful entertainment industry groups were demanding action to prevent “wholesale theft” of their content online, much of it at the hands of regular customers of the world’s ISPs.

    That very little content was available to buy legally online not only helped to fuel the crisis, in this underdeveloped market many ISPs still had just one key product to sell; internet access and the bandwidth it consumed. Broadly speaking, ISPs were concerned by the threats; on balance, however, putting customer interests last wouldn’t have been an ideal strategy in a rapidly growing market.

    Epic Battle For The Internet

    In 2004, Belgian music rights group SABAM made an extraordinary move designed to force ISPs into compliance. Targeting local ISP Scarlet, SABAM sought a declaration that the ISP’s subscribers infringed its members’ rights, demanding that the ISP should be compelled to filter and block all piracy traffic.

    For the next seven years, through local courts and the European Court of Justice, Scarlet fought SABAM and the notion that an ISP could be forced to proactively monitor, block and filter to protect SABAM’s members’ rights, but at the expense of internet users’ fundamental rights.

    Scarlet’s landmark victory in 2011 remains one of the most important of its kind but in the 13 years that followed, entertainment companies changed and consumption of pirated content changed. While the legal principles underlying Scarlet’s victory did not, attitudes towards acceptable filtering and blocking were on the move.

    ISPs Develop Tools to Block IPTV, Can’t Wait to Use Them

    In 2008, Scarlet was acquired by telecoms giant Belgacom Group, which later rebranded as Proximus.

    Today the Scarlet brand is associated with the cheapest prices available in Belgium but, for owner Proximus, the availability of cheap bandwidth shouldn’t be seen as a green light to consume cheap pirate IPTV services. Indeed, the company not only disapproves of pirate IPTV services, but it’s also eager to play a more active role to ensure that its customers can’t consume them. Right now, only paperwork is holding that back.

    “We are just waiting for the legal framework to be able to cut the streams. We don’t have the right to do that today. But we have the capacity,” CEO Guillaume Boutin revealed in a recent interview.

    “The cycle between when the link is spotted and when we receive permission to cut it takes too long. Afterwards it abounds in all directions. More links are coming. This procedure is of no use today.”

    Boutin says that if he spots an illegal stream, under the current framework he can’t simply decide to block it.

    “However, it is critical to be able to stem the phenomenon. Honestly, this IPTV situation is intolerable, for the rights holders, for the distributors, and for Proximus too. This is an enormous evaporation of value for the sector. This is unacceptable.”

    Hearing an ISP use language and reasoning typically associated with rightsholders is rare; in some regions, it’s completely unheard of. It suggests that these former rivals not only have much more in common, but may also stand to benefit from common policy in specific areas of business.

    Elsewhere in Belgium, another ISP appears to be singing from exactly the same sheet.

    CEO of Orange Completely Agrees

    Telecoms company Orange Belgium is a Proximus competitor albeit a little more expensive according to online comparisons. Yet in an interview with La Libre ( paywall ) published early February, comments by CEO Xavier Pichon are so closely aligned with those of Proximus chief Guillaume Boutin, there’s little to set them apart.

    “We have the technological means to massively block these streams, and the content publishers who lose money are just asking for that, but for the moment, it is blocked because of administrative and judicial consistency. But that will change,” Pichon said.

    “Illegal IPTV seriously threatens the entire economic model of publishers, copyrights and media. Telecommunications companies invest considerable resources in acquiring the rights to content and, at the same time, in the sizing and quality of the network necessary to carry content traffic over the network.

    “On the contrary, illegal service providers do not contribute to copyright and threaten the entire economic model of the media,” Orange’s CEO added.

    New Law in Place But Awaiting Royal Decree

    Both Proximus and Orange say that they’re waiting (impatiently, in the case of the former) for implementation through a royal decree of a draft law published in 2022 .

    The ISPs believe that the law will authorize the type of immediate blocking needed to properly tackle pirate IPTV providers. Pichon also believes that today’s ‘pirate IPTV’ platforms will eventually find themselves usurped; the term IPTV will live on, though, at least after work to polish its image.

    “But let’s remember that IPTV, which is a product of piracy, will be a product of the future,” he said, alluding to success for a legal alternative.

    “We will have to ‘unbrand’ the term IPTV.”

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      Silenzio! ‘Anna’s Archive’ Shadow Library Blocked Following Publishers’ Complaint

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Thursday, 4 January - 18:50 · 3 minutes

    anna's archive Over the past decade, platforms including Sci-Hub, Libgen and Z-Library have broken through a sea of movie, TV show, music and similarly unlicensed platforms to take their own places on the piracy front lines.

    In 2022, a platform called Pirate Library Mirror appeared on the scene, courting controversy right from the start after obtaining a full copy of Z-Library before the site’s legal troubles began.

    “We deliberately violate the copyright law in most countries. This allows us to do something that legal entities cannot do: making sure books are mirrored far and wide,” the team behind ‘PiLiMi’ wrote.

    In November 2022, PiLiMi team member ‘Anna Archivist’ founded ‘ Anna’s Archive ‘, a platform promising access to Z-Library and Libgen content from the same interface. Just over a year later, the site describes itself as the “largest truly open library in human history” mirroring Sci-Hub, Libgen, Z-Library, and other platforms, to offer 25.5 million books and 99.4 million papers for download.

    90% of Italian Publishing Market Behind Complaint

    Anna’s Archive is a relative newcomer to the world of online shadow libraries, but its impact has already ensured the inevitable. In common with its counterparts who are already blocked by ISPs in several countries, a year after its launch Anna’s Archive will receive the same treatment, starting in Italy.

    On December 4, 2023, the Italian Publishers Association (AIE) filed a copyright complaint against Anna’s Archive. Founded in 1869, AIE represents publishers of books, scientific journals, and digital content; together, these companies control 90% of the local market. AIE’s complaint lists over 30 books, but the association stresses this represents just a sample of the content distributed by Anna’s Archive to which its members hold the rights.

    A sample of books listed in the complaint AIE_Annas_Archive_Complaint_Dec_2023

    “The site annas-archive.org calls itself a mirror of various ‘shadow libraries’ and claims to have over 25 million books and nearly 100 million scholarly articles, which it makes available by disseminating numerous links to each work. Unauthorized reproductions of works belonging to Italian publishers number several thousand,” the complaint reads.

    Investigation Led to Ukraine

    An investigation by Italy’s Digital Services Directorate verified that the content listed in the complaint was actually accessible from Anna’s Archive. In view of the facts, that led investigators to believe that this was probably a case of “serious and massive infringement.”

    Official papers indicate that the operator of Anna’s Archive proved “unidentifiable” but with assistance from Cloudflare, Epinatura LLC – a hosting provider in Kiev, Ukraine – was identified as the likely host of at least some of the platform’s servers. Notifications were sent to various service providers warning that “spontaneous compliance” with a blocking request filed by the publishers was a potential outcome.

    Decision: Site Must Be Blocked

    With no counterclaims received from the contacted parties and having determined mass infringement on the site, an order to disable https://annas-archive.org through a DNS block was issued to Italian ISPs, to be completed in 48 hours. Visitors to the site are now greeted by the blocking page below in Italian. (translation on the right)

    While Anna’s Archive operates alternative domains that aren’t specifically mentioned in the order (annas-archive.gs, annas-archive.se), the site faces perpetual blocking measures against “all future domain names of the same site.”

    If the shadow library wishes to challenge the decision, it has until the middle of February to file a response before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court. At the moment, the site’s operator has no plans to do so. Instead, they note that people have options to bypass these restrictions.

    “We recommend people use VPNs or TOR (free!) to circumvent censorship,” Anna tells us.

    Update: added a comment from Anna .

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      Do UK ISPs Have Permission to Monitor IPTV Pirates & Share Their Data?

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Sunday, 10 September, 2023 - 11:35 · 6 minutes

    spy-small Anyone who uses the internet today should already be aware that privacy is all but non-existent.

    The quid pro quo for using any major online service, social networks in particular, is the surrender of extraordinary amounts of personal data.

    Even regular websites can deploy dozens of trackers and trying to surface those don’t, using a search engine perhaps, makes everything several times worse. The position today is simple: accept being tracked in some way, shape, or form, or stay off the internet.

    While the privacy-invading aspects of the wider internet are broadly discussed, much less attention is given to the companies that allow us to get online in the first place. Without broadband providers the internet would die but by default, all traffic generated by subscribers goes through them. There’s a much bigger conversation to be had on the role of ISPs and their handling of subscriber data but our focus here is on a very specific niche.

    When ISPs and Content Providers Collide

    All kinds of radical antidotes were up for discussion in the early days of file-sharing, but one often dismissed out of hand most was always destined to pose the biggest threat. In general terms, ISPs ‘owned’ the access tubes of the internet and rightsholders owned the content. Two decades later, these previously warring parties are frequently found under the same corporate roof.

    Content owners exercising total control over subscriber connections isn’t yet a reality but close working relationships and shared interests with ISPs suggest travel in that general direction. In 2019, it emerged that a UK-based anti-piracy company, known for its work against pirate IPTV providers, was sharing data with one or more UK ISPs to determine subscribers’ consumption of content from various ‘pirate’ servers.

    The arrangement was referenced again in October 2020 when it was revealed that traffic data from UK ISP Sky supported a successful UEFA High Court ISP blocking injunction. A year later it emerged that Sky had compiled data on high-traffic IP addresses accessed via its network to help an anti-piracy company working for the Premier League.

    At this point we should highlight how this work was framed. This wasn’t Sky spying on customers’ connections via the modem in the home, we were told. This was activity at completely the other end, i.e monitoring the levels of traffic flowing inbound from the pirate servers’ IP addresses. Some might argue that any type of monitoring is unacceptable but what if UK ISPs actually had permission to do more?

    Permission to Monitor Pirates?

    After receiving information suggesting that other ISPs may also be collaborating in similar anti-piracy work, we requested proof to show that is indeed the case. While that is yet to surface, we were invited to consider legal documents issued by two leading UK ISPs: Sky and Virgin Media, and for comparison, BT.

    These documents – customer agreements and their related privacy policies — reveal that when people sign up as customers to at least two UK ISPs, they do so on the understanding that piracy might lead to their information being shared with third-parties.

    Sky Privacy Policy

    Sky documentation contains several references to the protection or enforcement of its own rights, and of “any third party’s rights.” For example, in the ‘How we use it” section relating to contact details and account information, the policy contains the following:

    The same declaration appears in the ‘IP Addresses & Online Identifiers’ section where Sky notes that subscriber information can be used where it has a “legitimate interest” including the protection or enforcement of its own or any third party’s rights. “This may involve analysing activity on our network to help stop unauthorized access to content or publication of or access to unlawful content,” the company notes.

    As a content provider in its own right, much of the above will relate directly to Sky’s own delivery platforms and its ability to prevent unauthorized access to content under its own control. However, in the section titled “Sharing with third parties” statements become much more explicit.

    “We share your personal data, such as your contact details, financial data and other information described below, with credit reference and fraud prevention agencies and other relevant parties…for the prevention and detection of crimes such as fraud, piracy and money laundering,” the section reads.

    “Where we reasonably suspect that you are pirating Sky or third-party content, we may share information with other organizations with a similar legitimate interest in preventing, detecting and prosecuting piracy.”

    How these policies work in practice is unknown, but they are there for a reason. That Sky subscribers effectively grant these permissions shows once again that nobody reads the small print.

    Sky’s Privacy Policy is available here

    Virgin Media Privacy Policy

    The first mention of using customer data for anti-piracy purposes appears in section 4 of Virgin Media’s privacy policy.

    “We rely on Legal Obligation and Legitimate Interests Legal Bases to use your information to ensure we comply with our legal and regulatory obligations (these are our legitimate interests),” Virgin’s policy reads.

    “We use information about who you are and your use of our products and services to block unauthorized or illegitimate content on our TV platforms, respond to court proceedings and enforcement authorities, and help authorities and industry organizations with any security, fraud, anti-piracy, crime or anti-terrorism enquiries.”

    In the section where Virgin declares use of customer data to “develop, manage and protect” its business, the company says it does so “to identify and prevent piracy and other crime” and to “identify threats to our network that result in TV piracy.”

    The company further states that it collects information about its customers from third-party or external sources, including “fraud and anti-piracy prevention agencies.”

    Virgin also has a dedicated anti-piracy relating to its own TV services.

    Virgin Media’s Privacy Policy is available here

    BT Privacy Policy

    In contrast to competitors Sky and Virgin, explicit mentions of anti-piracy cooperation are absent from BT’s privacy policy . Elsewhere, however, BT goes into some detail on the information it collects and where that data can be used when a user is suspected of piracy.

    “We keep information about how you’re using your broadband to help us understand and manage traffic flows on our network, improve our services and tell you about products you might be interested in. That includes IP addresses and other traffic data including websites you’ve visited,” the ISP reports.

    “We are sometimes contacted by third parties who monitor illegal online file sharing on behalf of copyright holders. If we receive a claim that there has been illegal sharing on your broadband service, we may use your IP address to notify you. But unless we are required to by law, we will not disclose your personal information to the copyright holder or any party acting on their behalf.

    While these three leading UK ISPs all see piracy as problem to be countered, from these policies it’s evident that Sky’s approach is the most uncompromising, at least on paper. How much data it shares externally is unknown but having put that intent in black and white, one has to assume that anything is possible.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      The ‘90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 21 July, 2023 - 11:30

    The ‘90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

    Enlarge (credit: Banj Edwards | Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

    "When checking the system this morning, I noticed your account logged in for over 20 hours," begins a December 1998 email from the president of my dial-up Internet service provider (ISP) at the time. "Our service is unlimited, but we ask that you actually be using the connection while logged in."

    Today, when it seems like everyone is online 24/7 through smartphones and broadband, I'd be weird if I wasn't online for 20 hours straight. But 1998 in Raleigh, North Carolina, was different. In an age of copper telephone lines and dial-up modems, Internet access wasn't usually an always-on situation for a home user in the US. Each occupied telephone line meant another ISP customer couldn't use it—and no one could call you, either.

    But I'm getting ahead of myself—why do I have an email from 1998?

    Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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      Telefónica & Nagra Team Up to Identify & Disrupt Pirate IPTV Networks

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Wednesday, 19 July, 2023 - 12:01 · 3 minutes

    iptv-small Three-ish plus decades ago, telecoms companies were best known for installing analog telephones in people’s homes and sending paper bills through the mail to be paid by check.

    Many later branched out into the lucrative mobile phone market, but as operators of wired telephone networks, major phone companies all over the world would soon become the gatekeepers of a brave new world – the internet. While that was exciting for a while, with little opportunity for added value, selling a commodity product like bandwidth can be a race to the bottom.

    By providing bandwidth and profiting from the content that consumes lots of it, telecom companies today are able to add value to their base products and generate much more profit. In 2024, telephone company Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España will celebrate its 100th birthday. Under its modern-day branding, Telefónica is a telecoms and media empire with assets worth around $110 billion, significant interests in the pay-TV market, and lots of valuable content to protect from pirates.

    Telefónica and NAGRA Boost Partnership

    Anti-piracy company NAGRA has also undergone a transformation. From the 1950s onwards, NAGRA produced high-end portable tape-recording devices but is better known for the video scrambling system Nagravision, which aimed to prevent unauthorized reception of pay-TV signals and any subsequent recording. In that sense, NAGRA hasn’t changed its core market but thanks to the internet, content protection now faces significant challenges from increasingly sophisticated pirates.

    This week Telefónica and NAGRA announced an expansion of their existing relationship as the former works to counter the threat from pirate IPTV services. As it expands its anti-piracy operations in Latin America, Telefónica said its fraud prevention team sought access to advanced anti-piracy technologies and case file histories. While Telefónica has its own intelligence sources, a solution offered by NAGRA proved attractive.

    Pirate IPTV: Identify and Disrupt

    nagra active-1 A statement from Telefónica says that NAGRA’s product provides “innovative ways to identify, monitor and display pirate activity.” The system is supported by AI-powered analytics which will alert Telefónica to “illicit patterns of activity.”

    Madrid-based Delia Álvarez, manager of Global Fraud Prevention at Telefónica, says the relationship with NAGRA will provide vital intelligence as it seeks to identify and disrupt global piracy networks.

    “Content piracy is a major concern with a direct impact on our performance. To increase our effectiveness in this ongoing battle, we chose to expand our existing relationship with NAGRA,” Álvarez says.

    “They have a proven, global capacity to identify and remediate pirate activity. Their threat intelligence provides further value to our Fraud Prevention teams as they seek to identify and disrupt large-scale piracy networks.”

    NAGRA’s Active Streaming Protection framework ( pdf ) is already deployed at Telefónica and will supplement other content protection mechanisms such as watermarking.

    “We are proud to extend our partnership with Telefónica to now include more anti-piracy services.” said Pascal Metral, VP Anti-Piracy Intelligence, Investigation & Litigation, NAGRA. “Helping our customers tackle one of the biggest threats to both their revenues and their significant investments in content is our core focus and we look forward to our services unseating pirates across the Telefónica ecosystem.”

    Telefónica Developers

    Those with an interest in software development will find Telefónica’s official source code platform on GitHub with an impressive 261 repositories to trawl for interesting gems.

    These include GoSwiftyM3U8 , a framework for parsing and handling .m3u8 playlist files that also happen to be popular among IPTV pirates. There are many reasons why the company might be interested in App Logger for Android but seemingly fewer uses for its fork of CLA-Videodownloader , a web/REST interface for downloading YouTube videos onto a server.

    Telefónica’s developers are also the creators of HomePwn , billed as a Swiss Army Knife for Pentesting of IoT Devices. VpnHood , meanwhile, is an “undetectable VPN for ordinary users and experts” that’s able to bypass firewalls and circumvent Deep Packet Inspection.

    Finally, a big thanks to the ElevenPaths team at Telefonica Tech for FOCA (Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives), a tool that regularly makes document metadata a more interesting read than the documents themselves.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      ISP’s Dynamic Injunction Fears Fail to Prevent Lookmovie & Flixtor Blocking

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Thursday, 1 June, 2023 - 09:00 · 5 minutes

    finger in dam After well over a decade of pushing back against pirate site blocking applications, many European ISPs now see little value in putting up a fight.

    Earlier confirmation from Europe’s highest court, that site-blocking injunctions are legal when they proportionately protect third-party rights, is one of the key reasons for not contesting blocking applications today. In the Netherlands, where ISPs have a strong tradition of resisting site blocking injunctions, a recent application for a dynamic, shape-shifting blockade prompted ISP KPN into action.

    Movie Companies Want to Block Lookmovie and Flixtor

    In common with similar groups everywhere, Dutch anti-piracy BREIN is a proponent of site-blocking as part of an overall anti-piracy toolkit. The problem BREIN faces is a growing tendency for pirate sites to shift to new domains or receive assistance from proxy and mirror sites, in response to static site-blocking measures targeting specific domains.

    Hoping to reduce infringing access to pirate streaming sites Lookmovie and Flixtor, while reducing the potential for domain switching and proxy/mirror site countermeasures, BREIN took legal action at the Court of Rotterdam in April against ISP and fiber optic network provider, KPN.

    When presenting its case for the blocking of Lookmovie, BREIN explained that the platform provides free access to movies and TV shows, including some with Dutch subtitles, without any permission from copyright holders.

    As the traffic statistics for just one of its domains show, the site receives millions of visitors overall according to SimilarWeb data.

    BREIN notes that users who prefer not to watch ads on Lookmovie can pay a fee to avoid them, either on the site’s main domain, 13 others it also operates, or via a network of proxy and mirror sites.

    BREIN’s Request For a Dynamic Injunction brein-kpn-lookmovie

    BREIN’s case against Flixtor is broadly the same, with the anti-piracy company noting that the site is readily accessible from any of 11 domains and an unknown number of proxy and mirror sites.

    Countering Perpetual Domain and IP Changes

    To counter the growing phenomena of sites switching to domains and IP addresses not specifically mentioned in injunctions, BREIN asked KPN to comply with the terms of a dynamic injunction. When sites deploy new IP addresses, new domains or use sub-domains, dynamic injunctions are usually able to cope.

    BREIN believed that as long as any proxy or mirror sites were the same or virtually the same as the originals, KPN would be ordered to prevent its customers from accessing them in the same way it can be required to block the original sites. KPN begged to differ.

    KPN’s Site-Blocking Objections

    The District Court of Rotterdam’s judgment notes that KPN objected to BREIN’s site-blocking application on several grounds. The ISP took the position that blocking websites is not an effective response to infringement because the infringing websites themselves remain online. As a result, internet users are free to circumvent site-blocking measures using VPNs, for example.

    The Court agreed that circumvention takes place but said that isn’t an obstacle when awarding a site-blocking injunction.

    “Closing access to Lookmovie and Flixtor by blocking domain names, proxies and mirrors will prevent access to the protected works through those addresses. As BREIN also acknowledges, a blockade does not completely prevent unauthorized calls from protected works, as some internet users will find detours to access blocked websites,” the judgment reads.

    “It cannot be ruled out that internet users bypass blockades via VPN connections, but it is plausible that a blockade of the websites will lead to these sites no longer being accessible, at least considerably more difficult to access, for the normal internet user, as a result of which carrying out infringement becomes seriously complicated.”

    The Court further noted that since BREIN requested a dynamic injunction covering new IP addresses and domain names as they appear, these alternative routes of access will also be subjected to a permanent blockade. As a result, blocking can be considered sufficiently effective overall..

    Are Dynamic Injunctions Overbroad?

    KPN further argued that BREIN’s blocking request was too broad, with associated costs and the risk of over-blocking increasing over time as more proxies and mirror sites are added. The ISP also complained that injunctions should be time-limited but the Court wasn’t convinced.

    “KPN has been blocking domain names, mirrors and proxies for several years now, and it has not been found that implementation has led to major problems. On the contrary, BREIN has made it clear that it always sends updated lists of new domains to be blocked by e-mail to KPN, after which KPN implements the blockades within a short period, sometimes within an hour,” the judgment notes.

    The suggestion here is that blocking may have been automated by KPN and since detailed checks may not be carried out, any inconvenience is minimal. In any event, KPN’s historically speedy response to blocking also helped to satisfy the Court that BREIN’s request for a blocking response in five working days wasn’t unreasonable either.

    Dynamic Injunction Granted

    After considering the freedom to access information and KPN’s freedom to conduct a business, the Court found that BREIN’s application is compatible with these fundamental rights.

    “BREIN’s claims to block and block KPN subscribers’ access to the (sub) domain names and IP addresses through which Lookmovie and Flixtor operate or will operate are therefore granted,” the judgment reads.

    BREIN believes the Court made the right decision.

    “The measures requested by BREIN are judged to be reasonable; KPN’s freedom of enterprise is not unreasonably restricted. The defense that the blocking of proxies and mirrors would be too broad is also rejected: KPN has been implementing blockades for several years now and this has not led to any implementation problems,” BREIN reports .

    Injunction Implications Go Beyond KPN

    In October 2021, BREIN and several ISPs – KPN included – entered into an agreement known as the ‘ Covenant .’ Signatory ISPs promised that when a judgment is handed down against an ISP, requiring it to block websites following an adversarial process, the other ISPs would voluntarily comply with the same decision. As a result, blocking of Lookmovie and Flixtor will be deployed across the Netherlands.

    Another useful side effect for BREIN is likely to involve Google. As previously reported , when Google is presented with a court order that requires an ISP to block pirate websites, Google recognizes the injunction by voluntarily deindexing the listed domains, resulting in their complete removal from search results, in the territory where the injunction is valid.

    The District Court of Rotterdam’s judgment can be found here

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      A Decade of Pirate Bay Proxy War: Did ISP Blocking Slay the Hydra?

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Sunday, 21 May, 2023 - 19:20 · 3 minutes

    13hydra Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium and Brazil; just two letters of the alphabet and that’s already five countries that have implemented ISP blocking against The Pirate Bay.

    The growing list, which continues with Denmark and persists through Finland, France and Germany, doesn’t stop until it reaches the United Arab Emirates and finally, the UK.

    That’s around 30 countries overall, give or take, that have resorted to ISP blocking because no matter what’s thrown at it, The Pirate Bay simply refuses to die.

    At least in part, the site is still alive after more than a decade of widespread blocking due to the existence of proxy sites. These sites tend to look and feel like The Pirate Bay but operate from different domain names that aren’t yet on ISP blocklists.

    This means that otherwise blocked internet users get to enjoy broadly the same Pirate Bay experience as they did before. At least for a while.

    Rightsholders Also Block Pirate Bay Proxies

    As reported yesterday, one of the most popular Pirate Bay proxy indexing sites recently disappeared from GitHub.

    ProxyBay was a significant player, one that had helped dozens of millions of users gain access to The Pirate Bay by directing them to active Pirate Bay proxy sites. However, in common with The Pirate Bay itself, proxy sites are also subjected to ISP blocking, which can render some of them redundant, not to mention inaccessible.

    Given that proxy sites and proxy indexes contribute to the overall health of the Pirate Bay ‘hydra’, that got us thinking: Is the hydra alive and well? Or has it lost a few too many heads over the years?

    Data Sources Used

    While we’re aware that proxy sites face blocking in several countries, until today we’d never drilled into the details. It quickly became apparent that a complete overview would require significant time and resources but our short report today should help set the tone.

    To weigh rightsholders’ responses to strictly Pirate Bay proxy sites, we obtained domain blocking lists used by ISPs in the UK, Denmark and Italy. The original plan was to include Portugal, India and a handful of other countries but the volume of data was soon overwhelming.

    Instead of including those additional countries, we used data from the Infringing Website List (IWL) operated by the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

    Proxies Face Massive Blocking

    After merging data from all four sources, we removed any duplicate proxy domains, any domains that weren’t clearly dedicated or directed at the Pirate Bay, plus any domains where their key role could not be identified due to downtime or other reasons.

    The final total of Pirate Bay proxies, all of which are subjected to blocking and/or restrictions on business due to their appearance on the IWL, is 670 to 690 domains, give or take. While that remains a large number, including other countries’ blocklists would’ve inflated that number considerably.

    The big question is whether all of those domains are live, in business, and helping to unblock The Pirate Bay. The simple answer to that is ‘no’. While we were able to test whether sites were active in some way, we couldn’t determine exactly what they were doing, unless we visited every last one and took a screenshot for proof.

    …..So That’s What We Did

    The image below is comprised of roughly 670 screenshots featuring obviously live proxies (mostly white), a lot of seemingly dead proxies (dark), and a surprising number of domains up for sale (mostly blue). (click to enlarge)

    It’s not possible to determine the exact reasons why so many proxies appear to have thrown in the towel, in some cases on multiple domains. That being said, it’s highly likely that ISP blocking played an important role in dampening enthusiasm for spending more money on yet another domain.

    Since the data was at hand, we decided to throw all of the live domains at their DNS and then wait for a list of IP addresses to come out. We fed those into an IP location service which produced the map in the image below.

    The large blue blob on the left, representing the location where most Pirate Bay proxies point, is the home of Cloudflare and another kind of proxy – a reverse proxy.

    That means that in all likelihood, the Pirate Bay proxies are hosted somewhere else entirely, not unlike The Pirate Bay itself. At least for now.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      Comcast wanted $210,000 for Internet—so this man helped expand a co-op fiber ISP

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 17 October, 2022 - 12:48

    A worker prepares to install fiber conduits from a large spool.

    Enlarge / Fiber conduits being installed for Los Altos Hills Community Fiber. (credit: Los Altos Hills Community Fiber)

    Sasha Zbrozek lives in Los Altos Hills, California, which he describes as "a wealthy Silicon Valley town," in a house about five miles from Google's headquarters. But after moving in December 2019, Zbrozek says he learned that Comcast never wired his house—despite previously telling him it could offer Internet service at the address.

    Today, Zbrozek is on the board of a co-op ISP called Los Altos Hills Community Fiber (LAHCF), which provides multi-gigabit fiber Internet to dozens of homes and has a plan to serve hundreds more. Town residents were able to form the ISP with the help of Next Level Networks , which isn't a traditional consumer broadband provider but a company that builds and manages networks for local groups.

    Zbrozek's experience with Comcast led to him getting involved with LAHCF and organizing an expansion that brought 10Gbps symmetrical fiber to his house and others on nearby roads. Zbrozek described his experience to Ars in a phone interview and in emails.

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      Danish Pirate Site Blocking Updated, Telecoms Group Publishes All Domains

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Thursday, 29 September, 2022 - 07:15 · 3 minutes

    hole As pirate site blocking programs expand around the world, Denmark already has more than 15 years of experience in this branch of copyright protection.

    After blocking Russian MP3 site AllofMP3 in 2006, Danish rightsholders haven’t looked back. The big drive now is how to streamline the site-blocking process so that piracy platforms can be hit as quickly and as comprehensively as possible.

    Part of the problem is that to have pirate domains blocked, rightsholders need to have authorization from the court. This can be obtained by obtaining an injunction against an ISP but when a single ISP is the target, other ISPs are not legally required to do anything.

    In 2014, rightsholders and ISPs solved these problems by signing a Code of Conduct which ensures that when one ISP is ordered to block, others follow voluntarily. But in the world of site-blocking, there’s always more to be done.

    Dynamic Blocking….And Beyond

    Since blocking pirate sites is a commitment rather than a one-off effort, Denmark’s site-blocking regime also tackles domain switches and proxy sites. This so-called ‘dynamic blocking’ doesn’t require a new court process. Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance has the authority to identify any new domains and forward them to ISPs for blocking, a process that will now be accelerated.

    The Conduct of Conduct (CoC) that provides the framework for blocking has been revised over the years, to accommodate the changing piracy landscape. Earlier this month it was updated again, hoping to shut down domains more quickly than before.

    “[T]he illegal market on the Internet is constantly and rapidly developing, which is why it has been necessary to carry out a slight revision of the CoC agreement,” Rights Alliance explains.

    “This implies greater flexibility and automation of the processes in the agreement, which should make it easier for both the Rights Alliance and the members of the Telecom Industry to block illegal websites.”

    The plan is for ISPs to block new domains within seven days, using automation to retrieve updated lists before carrying out the usual DNS blocking.

    How Will The System Work?

    Both Rights Alliance and Teleindustrien (Telecommunications Industry Association in Denmark) have published copies of the new Code of Conduct but neither explain how the new system will work. Indeed, the CoC contains a paragraph that explains that a section detailing the individual steps, procedures and criteria, has been withheld “in order to achieve the purpose of the agreement.”

    Given that Denmark’s blocking program is DNS-based, it’s trivial for ISPs to modify local DNS entries to redirect pirate site visitors to Share With Care (SWC), a portal designed to encourage pirates back on to the legal path of authorized content services.

    Somewhat intrigued by the apparent need for secrecy, we took a closer look at Teleindustrien and to our surprise, found the complete opposite.

    Complete Blocking Transparency

    It appears that when ISPs are ordered to block domains for any reason, Teleindustrien goes public with three things: the laws under which the blocking was ordered, who ordered the blocking, and which domains were blocked in response.

    For example, the telecoms industry group details recent blocks associated with the Ukraine conflict (including RT.com and sputniknews.com) and publishes the domains to an easily downloadable .csv file – perfect for ISPs looking to implement DNS blocking.

    Another .csv file is published for gambling site domains deemed illegal in Denmark, 183 according to the latest batch

    The data relating to Denmark’s pirate site blocking program reveals how quickly it has expanded over the years. In 2017, Danish ISPs were blocking around 100 pirate sites , a figure that jumped to 478 in 2020.

    The latest .csv file containing the list of blocked piracy domains is dated September 27, 2022. It contains 892 URLs – some of them domains in their own right and others representing sub-domains on various sites dedicated to unblocking.

    It’s unclear how the new streamlining provisions in the revised Code of Conduct can beat pulling a plain text file from a website but Teleindustrian also provides the data in PDF format for the Adobe fans out there.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.