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Archive for May, 2010

May 31st, 2010 Uncategorized Comments Off

Collecting The Pirate Bay Fines is not Easy

The Pirate Bay team were ordered to pay the entertainment industries $6 million in fines,Due to several verdicts against them. As predicted, actually getting hold of the money is not going to be an easy job for them. Thus far, the debt collecting agency has only seized $30,000 of the total sum.

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King Kong Bay - TPB LogoThe Pirate Bay Four were ordered to pay nearly a million dollars each to compensate various music and movie companies for their alleged losses about a year ago.

Even though the case will be appealed later this year, Swedish Enforcement Authority has already started seizing the assets of the defendants. That was the plan at least.

In response to the fines handed down at the main trial, former Pirate Bay spokesman and defendant Peter Sunde earlier noted: “We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay if we could. If I would have money I would rather burn everything I owned.”

A year later and the total sum of money owed adds up to a massive $6 million. According to the agency that is tasked with collecting the money, the entertainment industries have only seen a fraction of it so far. It turns out that Peter’s prediction may have been right.

Of the total sum of outstanding fines just $30,000 has been collected, and this came from the wealthy ‘fourth’ defendant Carl Lundstrom, who actually had very little involvement with the site. The debt collectors have been unable to find any assets for Peter Sunde and Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm.

“We cannot find any assets when there are none,” Lars Grimby of the debt collecting agency told Swedish Radio in a comment. Grimby added that the movie and music companies find the loot that has been recovered so far a meager outcome.

One of the problems, according to Grimby, is that all the Pirate Bay associates have all emigrated from Sweden, either before or right after the verdict. Since the debt collector’s jurisdiction ends at the Swedish border, it is unable to seize any of the assets abroad.

Money isn’t the only issue the entertainment industries are dissatisfied with either. While awaiting the appeal of the main trial, currently scheduled to take place during the summer of 2010, The Pirate Bay continues to operate. Despite efforts from the entertainment industries to shut it down the site is now bigger than ever before.

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May 31st, 2010 Evil Next, Hot Topic, Legal Issues 2 Comments »

Piracy Will Earn Hurt Locker More Than the Box Office

Hollywood often complains that unauthorized downloads are causing the industry to lose huge sums of money. The makers of The Hurt Locker discovered that this doesn’t always have to be the case. Through an extortion-like scheme, The Hurt Locker is set to make more money from settlements with BitTorrent users than it ever made at the box office.

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Hurt Locker Poster

Two days ago, the makers of The Hurt Locker filed a complaint against the first 5,000 ‘unidentified’ BitTorrent users. Helped by the U.S. Copyright Group (USCG), the film makers are requesting the personal details connected to the IP-addresses that allegedly shared the film on BitTorrent.

With The Hurt Locker’s Oscar for the Best Picture of 2009, the case has received a lot of press interest, but it’s not the first movie for which BitTorrent users were targeted. Earlier this year, the USCG employed the same tactic for lesser known films. For one of these, Call of the Wild,  obtained the settlement papers.

With the document, alleged infringers have the option to settle the case for $2,500 and avoid further legal action. Because the case is similar to that of The Hurt Locker, we assume that a similar settlement amount will be proposed. This allows us to calculate how much money is involved in this case, and the results are quite interesting.

Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer at the USCG, earlier said that in the Hurt Locker case they could pursue tens of thousands of users. Let’s be careful with our estimate and assume that some 20,000 BitTorrent users will eventually receive a settlement letter in the mail. Of these, half will choose to pay the $2,500 without complaining, a number that seems to be fair based on the results of similar schemes.

With this $25 million the film makers would have collected more money from BitTorrent users than they did from U.S. movie theater visitors. Despite the recognition from Academy members and the huge success among downloaders, the U.S box office revenue has been relatively low at $16.4 million.

The settlement money is not net profit for the makers of Hurt Locker though, as they have to give up 70% of it to the USCG. Still, if they want to earn more they can simply continue to track down BitTorrent users and send out a couple of thousand extra settlement offers. Easy money.

This whole scheme is in no way intended to protect the copyrights of the Hurt Locker producers. USCG don’t want to go to court at all, they want to see money, as much as possible without too much trouble. Lengthy and costly court cases would only get in the way of this goal and could even bust the whole scheme if they lose. The ultimate goal is to ‘monetize’ piracy, this is also how the USCG pitched their scheme to rights holders.

A good example of this ‘money orientation’ is the letter that downloaders of the film Far Cry received from the USCG. Here, the alleged downloaders were offered an initial settlement amount of ‘just’ $1,500, but this would go up to $2,500 if they wouldn’t pay up within three weeks. A classic persuasion tactic, which was followed by a threat that going to court could lead to a fine up to 150,000.

Yes, it’s all about extracting as much cash as possible. We have to say, if they can beat the Box Office revenues of an Oscar winning movie with these threats, they sure delivered as promised.

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May 30th, 2010 File Sharing, Peer to Peer Comments Off

Police Probe Pair Over Phony Pirate Porn Privacy Plunder

Earlier this year, malware which purported to be an erotic PC game punished file-sharers who believed they were downloading the real thing. Instead of endless hours of digital titillation, unlucky pirates had their personal details published on the Internet and had to pay a fee to have them removed. Now police have arrested two men in connection with this unusual fraud.

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Cross Days Cover

After a endless delays, the pervy PC title Cross Days from developer 0verflow was finally released.

Compatible with some delightful USB ‘hands-free’ devices for experiencing ‘climax scenes’ (NSFW: male and female versions) many preferred to obtain the title via unofficial channels. Those that did were in for quite a shock.

A fake version of the game was widely available on file-sharing networks, but when installed it punished the would-be pirates. After gathering highly personal information from the victim’s computer, accompanied by a screenshot of his or her desktop and what they were doing at the time, the malware uploaded the whole lot to a public website.

It was possible to have the stuff taken down, but at a price. Not only would the victim have to apologize for downloading the ‘game’ for free, but they would also have to pay money to their tormentors.

According to a Japanese media report, this week two men were arrested on suspicion of creating the Cross Days malware and using it to extort money from victims.

Kenzo Oka, 27, of Tokyo, and an unnamed second man, 20, were arrested earlier this month on suspicion of defrauding several people out payments of around $64 each to have their personal details removed from the website.

While writing computer viruses isn’t a crime in Japan, extorting cash with them is. The pair become the first to be arrested in the country while using a virus as a tool to commit fraud.

As reported ,In March 2007,on another bizarre piece of Japanese code which taunted file-sharers, threatened to report them to the police and even threatened to kill them.

The author of that code was eventually arrested for breaching copyright – because he used cartoon graphics in the virus without permission.

But, as they say, what goes around, comes around & Its now on them.

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May 30th, 2010 Red Hot Comments Off

Interview with Team R Dogs

As the Newzbin resurrection sage continues, the boss of Team R Dogs has been answering a whole range of questions about the site’s return. More than $40,000 has been invested in the project so far, a coder hired and they aren’t scared of the MPA either. “We’ll just do a Pirate Bay on them,” they say. “We can run faster than them and shapeshift.”

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Newzbin Logo

Last week a group calling themselves Team R Dogs contacted ex-members of Newzbin with a message claiming that they would soon bring back the site.

That news was quickly followed by the revelation from an ex-director of Newzbin that the site’s domain names had been sold to a Seychelles-based company in order to clear debts. A couple of days ago the company, WCIS Limited, told  they did not wish to tell us about their intentions for the domains.

Run by an ex-Newzbin editor, the DeepSharer blog has now managed to secure an interview with Team R Dogs boss Mr White. Here are the main points, plus those from the later Q & A.

DS: How are you Mr White? May I call you Caesium/Freaky/Kalante now?

W: You can, but I think they might be a bit upset & I’d get confused, but I like the Bond reference ;) Srsly, we are not the Newzbin guys, I mean, the old Newzbin guys. But I guess you’ll never believe me till you get my phone number?

DS: which is?

W: (202) 456-1414

DS: yea, right. So how did you get the code?

W: We liberated it. Code just wants to be free. Specifics don’t matter.

DS: So you’ll opensource it?

W: No. That said, if we have to shut down at any stage we’ll try to opensource it.

DS: Why did you steal the code?

W: I nicked it initially just because I could, that was a while back. There was no real ‘plan’, I just kinda did it, but I didn’t want to copy the site and didn’t even really plan to use it. Then when I saw the legal news I thought Newzbin was looking like it really might fold. Since they didn’t say they would opensource the code I chatted to a couple of mates and we talked about running a site ourselves. We didn’t do anything for ages but when Newzbin suddenly closed without any warning at all we decided to make a move.

DS: So when are you going open this site? What’s the url going to be?

W: We’ll let you know the domain name later. The site is gonna open really really soon.

DS: Are you planning to change the way Newzbin works or is it going to be a straight clone?

W: We’ll be running a straight clone to start with but we want to change it eventually. Unfortunately the site backend is mega mega complicated so we’re concentrating on just getting the systems running with a minimum of falling over in the beginning. Plus, we also greatly underestimated the number & power of the servers needed to run this stuff so we’ve been trying to raise a metric fuckload of cash to buy gear.

DS: Doesn’t sound promising…

W: no it’ll be fine but I’m just saying that for a while it may all be a bit wobbly :)

DS: what are the longer term plans for the site?

W: we want to raise retention time. 240 days is a bit crap. We want to get it to at least 400 days soon and then up to 600+ days within the next 9 months. Kinda pulling figures outta my ass but something like that. Plus I want to do a redesign of the site. I reckon some people wanted the old site to have lots of features so it’s become complicated as thy added them in, but others want it simple & less confusing. It’s a tough design issue and we need to think how we can do this. We’ll probably do A/B testing on the site and maybe do polls, start a design/features discussion with users. We’ve also discussed adding non-Usenet search results to the site like torrent or Rapidshare results, but we’ve just kinda floated that idea and we don’t know how we’d incorporate it. Should all be fun.

DS: The MPA are gonna come after you. You got a plan?

W: :( yea, it’s inevitable, we’ll just do a Piratebay on them. We can run faster than them and shapeshift.

DS: Do you reckon users will return?

W: we hope to hell they do or we’re in a money hole. I reckon we’ll lose a few users of Newzbin1 but I’m hoping over time many will join us and if we can get increased retention and more services I think we may even improve over the old site in time. I’m certainly appealing to the editors and editor admins to join us, purty purty please!

DS: Good luck. I’m rooting for you. Make it come back soon.

W: a lot sooner than you think I expect ;)

After reiterating that they are nothing to do with the original Newzbin staff, Mr White said that since they already had the Newzbin code, bringing the site back after their legal problems was just the opportune thing to do.

At least to begin, the site will be a “straight clone” of the old site, but a redesign is on the agenda. This process could carried out with the help of users who could be asked to vote on the inclusion of new features. There is even talk of adding non-Usenet search features such as BitTorrent and Rapidshare. And the porn will return on Newzxxx too.

As for retention, the aim is to reach at least 400 days as soon as possible and then move to 600+ days within 9 months from launch.

So will ex-users of Newzbin return to the site? Team R Dogs certainly hope so as they say the whole thing is costing a fortune and quite frankly, they need the money.

“I have personally signed cheques for an $22,000 Sun server and 2 x $9,000 Sun servers to help run this site and I expect to sign more. I have hired a fulltime coder on good salary, I am recruiting another expensive geek to keep the site up,” explains Mr White.

Although the site will probably launch for free for a week or two, the site will revert to a pay venue.
“Let me be clear. We have a profit motive in this. We haven’t tried to ‘steal’ from Newzbin1 guys – they got shutdown by the MPA, not by us. The MPA have given us an opportunity to make money. Thanks MPA,” he continues.

“Does this mean we intend to shit on users & ex-Newzbin1 members? Fuck no. We want to provide a good service and take the same profits the Newzbin1 guys did. Yea sure we are using their works to do so but they have abandoned their works and they have SAID so themselves. There is no moral ambiguity here: they have dropped out of the scene and we are replacing them.”

Part of the support for ex-members will be the continuation of any credit they had on the site, although how far back that will go will remain to be seen. For those adding new credit, a 3rd party payment system will be used.

But let’s not forget about the fate of Newzbin at the hands of the MPA – how will Team R Dogs fend off that inevitable attack?

“We’ll just do a Piratebay on them,” they say. “We can run faster than them and shapeshift.”

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May 29th, 2010 Legal Issues, Peer to Peer, Red Hot, The Pircay Bureau 2 Comments »

'Hurt Locker' producer files massive antipiracy lawsuit

Few weeks ago, the makers of the Oscar-winning movie Hurt Locker indicated that they would sue tens of thousands of U.S. BitTorrent users. In a classic ‘pay up or else’ scheme, the first 5,000 victims have now been officially reported to court. If ISPs cooperate these can expect a settlement request in their mailboxes soon.

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Hurt Locker PosterIt’s official. “Hurt Locker” producer Voltage Pictures has declared war on 5,000 unidentified people who allegedly pirated the Oscar-winning film. The lawsuit was filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Hoping to recoup some of their claimed losses, the makers of Hurt Locker have partnered (TF) with the very lucrative ‘pay up or else’ money making scheme of the U.S. Copyright Group. The goal of the scheme is to identify as many infringers as possible, and threaten them with ruinous court action. Of course, they will also be given the offer to settle for a relatively low amount of money.

All infringers that are identified will then be kindly asked to settle the dispute, or face further legal action. In the UK these schemes have been highly criticized by the public, consumer organizations and politicians because of the intimidating tactics and lack of solid evidence.

n the U.S. this particular case has not gone unnoticed either and it generated many headlines before an official complaint was filed. Although the U.S. Copyright Group say that 75% of ISPs are cooperating, most of the bigger ISPs remain skeptical, with Time Warner publicly resisting (TD) U.S. Copyright Group’s demands.

The U.S. Copyright Group, on its turn, went on to accuse (TD) Time Warner of inducing copyright infringement because of the refusal to expose its users. The group claims that Time Warner’s refusal to cooperate is a publicity stunt to gain the favor of consumers concerned about their privacy.

Here’s the complaint. According to the lawsuit: “A Defendant’s distribution of even one unlawful copy of a motion picture can result in the nearly instantaneous worldwide distribution of that single copy to a limitless number of people. The Plaintiff new seeks redress for this rampant infringement of their exclusive rights.”
Keep in mind that the number of people being sued may not be a fixed number.
The plaintiff will soon subpoena ISPs to identify the individuals behind the alleged IP addresses used for copyright infringement. Once people have been identified as targets, demand letters will go out. According to a settlement website in one of the earlier, related lawsuits, the plaintiffs are demanding $1500 to release each alleged pirate from liability. The penalties go up further without response. Ultimately, if an accused copyright infringer goes to trial, the plaintiff could seek maximum statutory damages in the amount of $150,000 per infringement, attorneys fees, and costs.

We encourage people who receive a settlement request to contact TF or write to us, so we can look at the details and possibly assist in countering the threats of which many more are expected to be sent out in the months to come.

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