In the early days of file-sharing, many of those involved couldn’t believe that music could be downloaded for free. Today, many pirates not only expect more, they demand more, and get it too.

As a result, and when everything goes to plan, many of today’s piracy apps are indistinguishable from their legal counterparts. They are as easy to install and feature similar graphical interfaces, with all the latest movies and TV shows a couple of taps away.

Such is their prevalence, apps offering less are easily ignored. The most successful pirate apps offer access to superior content libraries than those available on legal services, without charging a penny. Hollywood, Netflix, and almost every other player in the streaming market would love to shut them all down, but that’s more easily said than done.

ACE/MPA Take Closer Interest

With finite resources, anti-piracy groups usually concentrate on higher-profile apps with larger audiences. This suggests a direct link between the success of an app and the chances of it being shut down. Piracy apps TeaTV, BeeTV and CyberFlix are clearly popular enough to warrant some extra attention.

Jan van Voorn is the Executive Vice President & Chief of Global Content Protection at the Motion Picture Association. He’s also head of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, the anti-piracy coalition that has shut down more pirate services in five years than most people knew existed.

Documents filed at a California court earlier this month are the first public sign that TeaTV and BeeTV are on the ACE radar. Signed by van Voorne, the DMCA subpoena application targets Cloudflare and requires the company to hand over whatever information it holds on the alleged infringers identified by ACE.

The subpoena requires Cloudflare to hand over the following: Information sufficient to identify the alleged infringers of the motion pictures described in the attached notification letter. This would include the individuals’ names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, payment information, account updates and account history.

The deadline to hand over that information is today, November 25, 2022, so it’s likely that Cloudflare has already complied. Whether Cloudflare had anything useful to hand over is unknown, but from the last five years of ACE operations, we know that DMCA subpoenas are only the start and the group never gives up.

MPA/ACE Target Github Repos

Exactly a week after the DMCA subpoena application, the Motion Picture Association sent a pair of takedown notices to Github – one targeting TeaTV and the other CyberFlix TV, a popular piracy app with similar functionality.

Representing Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal City Studios, Warner Bros., Disney and Netflix Studios, LLC, the MPA described both apps as engaged in “massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows” with infringement their “predominant use and purpose.”

The MPA also provided a document (Exhibit A) containing a “representative list of infringements” occurring via both apps. Those aren’t published by Github but it appears that the MPA wanted to present a clear case of infringement so that Github could see for itself that the apps needed to be taken down.

TeaTV is no stranger to publicity having hit the headlines following a high-profile article published by CNBC in Canada.

The situation for CyberFlix is also precarious. The app is reported to be a clone of Terrarium TV, which shut down in 2018 under legal pressure, widely attributed to ACE.

In 2021, the domain Cyberflix.app ended up in the hands of the MPA . No official announcement followed but seeing the CyberFlix app grow in popularity was always likely to result in a follow up from ACE.

Whether ACE was responsible for another recent shutdown is unclear. The developer of Cinema HD reportedly stopped pushing updates to the popular streaming app after facing “legal issues”, a not-uncommon event since ACE appeared on the scene.

Whether the same fate awaits TeaTV, BeeTV, and CyberFlix, remains to be seen but life in the spotlight has never been easy for piracy services. The only solution is to remain unsuccessful but that’s never been much of an attraction.

Court documents & DMCA notices can be found here ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 )

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

Late 2011, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom published a promo video that surprised even the most hardened file-sharers.

Produced by Printz Board, the catchy four-minute track featured personal appearances by stars including Kanye West, Will.i.am, Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather, Jamie Foxx, Alicia Keys, and Snoop Dogg.

Through carefully edited soundbites, the celebrities gave shining endorsements of Megaupload, with tens of millions watching the video, mostly on YouTube. Arriving just weeks before Megaupload was shut down by the U.S. government, it was an audacious move on a scale unlikely to be seen again.

Dotcom was rumored to have sunk more than a million dollars into that video, but it transpires that equally audacious stunts can be pulled off with a lot less.

PikaShow – Not Just Another Piracy App

PikaShow runs on most Android devices, including smartphones and tablets. It allows users to stream live TV or download movies and TV shows for use offline. PikaShow is popular worldwide thanks to its subtitle capabilities and for those who prefer bigger screens, casting is also available.

PikaShow’s biggest draw, of course, is the price. It’s currently available via free download and generates revenue from in-app advertising, some of it provided by Google according to a recent analysis .

How much PikaShow generates is unclear but when the MPA filed a complaint with the USTR in October, the Hollywood group put forward an estimate of 10 million downloads. Part of this success is likely attributable to the “smooth” and “lag-free” streams PikaShow advertises. According to the MPA, the quality can be explained as follows:

The application sources most of the content directly from the servers of copyright holders (live TV and VOD) by circumventing their technological measures and then hosts the stolen content on third party cyberlockers and user-generated content platforms.

TorrentFreak contacted PikaShow’s developer for comment on the ten million download estimate. We received no reply but considering recent developments, that wasn’t entirely unexpected.

PikaShow Markets to the Masses

The MPA believes that PikaShow’s developer can be found in India. Evidence online tends to back that up and given PikaShow’s recent stunt, location theories will remain intact.

In North America, the most popular wood vs. ball sport is baseball. While 500 million fans worldwide can’t be wrong, cricket’s two billion fans provide perspective. In India, few things are more important than cricket so when the Asia Cup 2022 cricket tournament began late August, millions of TV screens became the country’s focus.

Asia Cup 2022 drew an estimated 200 million viewers in its first week alone, with broadcasts beamed into Indian homes by Star India, a company known for its zero-tolerance approach to piracy.

These pictures, broadcast by Star India, must’ve gone down like a lead balloon.

What prompted this audacious move is unclear and since PikaShow is maintaining radio silence, we may never know the precise details. However, it appears that following negotiations with the Afghanistan Cricket Board during the tournament, “Digital Video Streaming Platform” PikaShow became the new official sponsor of the country’s national team.

At that stage Afghanistan had no chance of winning the competition but still had one remaining game on the big stage. With India as their opponents, a massive TV audience and considerable exposure for PikaShow was guaranteed.

MPA: Sponsorship Was “Controversial”

That PikaShow even considered such an outlandish scheme is remarkable, but actually going through with it raises the stakes significantly. Unsurprisingly, the Motion Picture Association is fully aware of events and describes the sponsorship deal as “controversial.”

The Board of Control For Cricket in India is probably aware too. Even if the takedown notices it previously sent to Google had been forgotten, messages the organization received on Twitter would have served as a reminder, including the helpful: “If u want live match then download pikashow app.”

Perhaps most importantly, Star India knows all about PikaShow.

Good/Bad Results From TV Stunt

According to SimilarWeb data, traffic to PikaShow’s website increased by 25% in September following its TV escapades. October’s figures were only slightly down, a suggestion that the sponsorship exercise may have boosted traffic, but not all publicity is good publicity.

In a DMCA notice sent last week to Github, Star India called PikaShow “a rogue standalone pirate application” that has plagued the industry, OTT platforms especially.

“Based on our investigation, we have found that ‘Pikashow’ is using your services for ‘app update check’ functionality on their application. Which is further indulged in the act of copyright piracy by providing unauthorized streams of digital content without consent of the copyright owner,” the company wrote.

Github responded as expected by taking the repo down but Star India is nowhere near finished.

Civil Lawsuit, Injunction, Criminal Investigation

After Star filed a copyright complaint against PikaShow at the High Court of Delhi, Justice Prathiba M. Singh responded with an injunction last week ( pdf ) directed at the country’s ISPs, numerous intermediaries supplying services to PikaShow, and PikaShow itself.

Gambling company 1XBET and Github India are required to disclose any information they hold, including payment information, bank account details, plus any contracts in place with PikaShow.

Domain name companies NameSilo, Tucows, and GoDaddy, must disable several domains (pikashows.com, strms.in, strms.one, jonahz-viccen-i-202.site, i-cdn-0.jonahz-viccen-i-202.site, cdn4506.jonahz-viccen-i-202.site) and hand over everything they hold on PikaShow’s operator. India’s ISPs must immediately block a list of PikaShow-related names.

Whether PikaShow has any regrets over these civil matters is unclear but future prospects look bleak. On October 27, 2022, Star India filed a criminal complaint against PikaShow and an investigation by Delhi Police is currently underway. A second criminal complaint, filed by Disney , has also been recorded.

The next hearing is scheduled for January 25, 2023. Whether PikaShow will still be online remains to be seen.

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

UK broadcaster Sky has never been particularly fond of people pirating its content.

It’s a battle that’s raged for more than 30 years, and despite there being no apparent end in sight, Sky keeps slugging it out, putting in the rounds, and hoping for a win on points.

From its roots as Sky Television through its teenage years as BSkyB, Sky has battled everything from box and smartcard hacking through to smartcard blocking and smartcard emulation . Not even cardsharing dented Sky’s enthusiasm for a piracy brawl.

Sky’s latest arch-nemesis is the commercial IPTV provider. Utilizing captured satellite and cable streams or even its own streaming service NowTV, today’s Sky faces the most organized pirates the company has ever seen, and in greater numbers too. But as that war rages in the background, Sky is careful to ensure that other aspects of internet-based piracy are taken care of too..

Small Apps, Major Irritation

Over the past decade, Android-based piracy apps have given Sky a migraine along with the rest of the entertainment industries. Popcorn Time , Showbox , Mobdro and Terrarium TV all played their part – at least before every last one succumbed to legal pressure.

The problem for Sky is that it’s easier than ever for today’s competent programmers to come up with an alternative. Despite anti-piracy groups claiming to have taken hundreds down , new apps or resurrections of old ones are never in short supply.

Indeed, despite several attempts by Sky to wipe out the same few apps, they always have a tendency to bounce back in one way or another.

Sky, MPA and ACE vs. TeaTV: Seconds Out, Round 6

Back in 2020, the Motion Picture Association decided to disrupt popular streaming app TeaTV. The app had featured in a widely-read article published by CNBC before disappearing offline , but a grand return was always on the cards.

The MPA tried to have TeaTV’s operator permanently banned from Github and since the MPA is behind anti-piracy group ACE (and Sky is a member of that coalition), the broadcaster would’ve given its full support. But despite four sets of correspondence with Github, the ultimate goal of killing the app remained elusive.

TeaTV turned out to be a pretty strong brew, despite the suspension of its Twitter account. Through strong branding it has managed to stay in the game, but whether today’s variant (of which there are several) is/are the same and/or operated by the original developer is a question for people with an abundance of spare time.

The key thing is that still exists and Sky still isn’t giving up. In a fresh move against TeaTV, an anti-piracy company representing Sky Group’s Sky Italia follows the familiar pattern of demanding the app’s removal from Github.

“We are writing in the name and on behalf of Sky Italia Srl, the exclusive owner of distribution and exploitation rights of the Sky IT channels. This IPTV App (TeaTV) includes illegal and unauthorized Pay Tv Sky IT tv series: Gomorra,” Kopjra S.R.L. writes.

In an effort to help Github understand the problem, Kopjra provides a tutorial detailing where to find the app, how to download and install it, and ultimately how to carry out a search to find the infringing content before watching it.

Whether Github took them up on the offer isn’t clear but Sky’s DMCA takedown notification was a success. The locations referenced in the takedown notice were either deleted or suspended by Github in response.

Sky vs. CucoTV: The Rematch

If TeaTV is an irritant to Sky, movie and TV show streaming app CucoTV certainly won’t be viewed any more positively. Anti-piracy group Kopjra S.R.L. asked Github to take down a TeaTV website and repository in May 2021, but even that required an additional complaint weeks later to hopefully finish off the task .

Somewhat predictably, ten months after that the job still wasn’t done, so yet another complaint was fired off to Github. Featuring a customary piracy tutorial, it prompted Github to respond with the necessary action.

Five months later, after a user called CucoTV switched to CucoTV2 and then to CucoappTV, a CucoTV-branded app appeared once again on Github. This time it was Sky UK’s turn to spoil the piracy party with another tutorial and yet another demand for the persistent piracy app to be taken down.

Spoiler Alert: CucoTV Reappeared

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, a user called ‘cucotv2022’ recently signed up to Github and proceeded to upload a CucoTV-branded streaming app to a similarly named repository.

Whoever it was also created a new website to promote the free software but the fun was short-lived. Another DMCA complaint filed on behalf of Sky UK successfully requested the elimination of both.

CucoTV doesn’t appear to have much of an offical presence on Github right now but its Twitter account suggests that Discord may have become the latest hot location. In the meantime, Sky maintains its search engine delisting campaign against dozens of sites claiming to offer CucoTV for download.

Organized Piracy Meets Disorganized Piracy

Whether Sky will follow up on Discord remains to be seen but the company remains vigilant as it identifies new threats on the back of existing ones.

Two days after the latest successful CucoTV takedown, a follow-up DMCA notice from Sky took down what appears to be the official repo of popular free streaming app CinemaHD, an app that also has links to similar services. In common with CinemaHD, they also have clones and copycats muddying the waters.

Saying that the piracy app ‘marketplace’ has become more complicated over the years is a bit of an understatement. If users put in enough effort and have enough patience, it’s possible to track specific apps over time. But factor in the disruption caused by takedowns, which sometimes results in developers ‘going dark’ and coming back with a similar app under a new name, not much is straightforward for long.

Opportunists deliberately sowing confusion to draw attention to their own tools is also a problem, especially for people who click on the first thing they find. Sky takedown notices sent to Google reveal dozens of sites claiming to offer CucoTV, albeit in a range of suspiciously broad filesizes.

Sky undoubtedly faces additional headaches due to this chaos, but if it’s any consolation at all, it’s not alone when it reaches for the painkillers.

Image Credits: Pixabay / meineresterampe

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