All the way back in 1996, the world of videogaming witnessed a massive event. Edge, the most adult, cerebral video game magazine available at the time, reviewed the Nintendo 64 title Super Mario 64 and gave it an unprecedented 10/10.

In today’s world where games publications saturate the Internet, it’s difficult to state the importance of that moment. Edge , without exception, had previously found fault with every other game ever reviewed and when other publications gave out 7/10 scores for average titles, Edge stubbornly refused to give a middling game any more than 50% approval.

That was 24 years ago and despite the massive technological changes witnessed during the last quarter-century, the warmth gamers feel towards Super Mario 64 has only grown. That’s why there were few dry eyes in the house when a fan-made PC port of the legendary title hit the Internet last weekend.

“The fan-made port, which was first shared on social media sites this weekend, was made possible by a 2019 recompilation project which saw fans reverse engineer the game’s source code,” wrote VGC, which first reported the news.

Unlike the emulated versions of SM64 that preceded it, this was a full-blown DirectX 12 port that enabled 4K resolutions, support for ultra-widescreen monitors, plus gameplay facilitated by modern interfaces such as the Xbox One controller. But while modern gamers and historians bathed in the sunshine of this N64 classic, many realized that dark clouds would eventually appear on the horizon.

Perhaps more than any other videogame company in existence today, Nintendo has become associated with a determination to vigorously defend its intellectual property rights and it didn’t take long for this PC-powered title to land on its radar. Despite most discussion forums such as Reddit suppressing links to the game’s executable, it soon began to disappear from file-hosting sites.

The action, at least in part, was taken by US-based law firm Wildwood Law Group LLC, a company known to work with Nintendo in its efforts to suppress the availability of modding tools and products. One of its complaints filed with Google this week and obtained by TorrentFreak from LumenDatabase reads as follows:

“The copyrighted work is Nintendo’s Super Mario 64 video game, including the audio-visual work, software, and fictional character depictions covered by U.S. Copyright Reg. No. PA[REDACTED],” the notice reads.

“The reported file contains an unauthorized derivative work based on Nintendo’s copyrighted work.”

While the registration number has been redacted in the complaint, the copyright registration number is almost certainly PA0000788138. That was also referenced in a complaint filed by Nintendo against Cloudflare in 2015 when the gaming company was attempting to remove a browser-based version of Super Mario 64 from the Internet.

At the time of writing, at least one of the recent complaints filed by Nintendo’s law firm has curiously failed to take down the content in question. We obviously won’t link to it here but the SM64 PC-port executable is very much alive on the targeted Google Drive URL, as the image below shows.

Other locations haven’t been so lucky, however. Copies uploaded to various file-hosting sites have now been removed and several Reddit posts linking to the game have been deleted too. Fans have been sharing hash values of the files though, which can still yield results with the right search techniques.

Attempting to spoil the fun for those who’d simply like to see the game in action, Nintendo has also been targeting YouTube videos featuring the title running on PC. One example, titled “[ Gameplay ] Super Mario 64 – DX12 PC Port – 4K” was deleted following a copyright complaint, as the image below shows.

In other news, Nintendo suffered a significant data leak this week which included the original Nintendo 64’s source code, among a trove of other data. The twist here is that according to sources familiar with the Super Mario 64 PC port, that data was leaked too and wasn’t yet scheduled for public consumption.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN .

In 2014, the application known as Popcorn Time burst onto the scene to transform the BitTorrent landscape.

Instead of accessing torrent files from indexing platforms such as The Pirate Bay to download them in a comparatively boring regular client, users were given a beautiful, Netflix-style, all-in-one solution.

Very quickly, Popcorn Time became a smash-hit sensation but it also attracted movie and TV show companies determined to shut it down. While some success was booked on this front, Popcorn Time’s open-source nature meant that it could be replicated by enthusiasts, such as those who ultimately ended up operating from PopcornTime.sh.

While there are other variants, Reddit’s /r/popcorntime considers the .sh domain as offering the ‘official’ version of PopcornTime and the site was previously linked from the official Github repository. As the image below shows, the website and associated services attached to the app via the .sh domain were working just fine on November 3, 2019.

All systems were functioning Nov 3, 2019

The situation today, however, is very much different. PopcornTime.sh and all the sub-domains which allow its app to work as intended have been rendered inaccessible.

According to WHOIS data, late on Monday the domain was updated. It isn’t due to expire for another year but its domain status is currently listed as “clientHold”, which can signal bad news.

PopcornTime.sh – clientHold

‘ClientHold’ status is set by the domain registrar, 101domain.com in this case, and informs the registry not to activate the DNS for PopcornTime.sh. As a result, the website in question has been rendered inaccessible.

“This status code tells your domain’s registry to not activate your domain in the DNS and as a consequence, it will not resolve,” ICANN’s official advice reads . “It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment, or when your domain is subject to deletion.”

We have been unable to officially confirm why PopcornTime.sh has been given this treatment but in the past, clientHold status has proven problematic for domains and has sometimes signaled legal issues. Information received earlier today adds at least some weight to that theory.

This afternoon we received an email from the folks at InternetProtocol.co who, citing anonymous police sources, claim that the site’s operator may (and that’s a pretty big ‘may’) have been arrested in Tunisia.

The publication also posted an image that supposedly shows items confiscated as evidence as part of a “raid” carried out in “cooperation with some international copyright organization.”

Unable to confirm the allegations from any other source and given its worldwide position on anti-piracy enforcement, TorrentFreak contacted the Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment seeking confirmation or indeed denial that it was involved in this alleged and as-yet unconfirmed action.

We were told by their spokesperson that at this point in time, he wasn’t able to provide us with any information.

Although the moderators of the official PopcornTime sub on Reddit claim to have no direct connection with the software distributed and maintained from the .sh domain, TorrentFreak requested comments from all of them. At the time of publication, however, we were yet to hear back.

Whether the domain issue will be solved in time is unclear but that seems largely reliant on whether the information about a supposed arrest in North Africa holds up as credible.

Similar action in that region is extremely rare, perhaps unheard of as far as popular applications go, so there will be a waiting game for the full picture to emerge, if it ever does. Last year, PopcornTime.sh was targeted by movie companies seeking the identity of its operator but what ultimately became of that remains unclear.

Source: TF , for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons .

Piracy settlement letters have become a serious threat in several countries.

Dutch Internet users have been spared from this practice, but local movie distributor Dutch Filmworks (DFW), planned to change that.

Two years ago the movie company received permission from the Dutch Data Protection Authority to track the IP-addresses of BitTorrent users who shared pirated movies.

However, that was only the first hurdle, as Dutch Internet provider Ziggo refused to share any customer data without a court order.

The case went to court, where the movie company requested the personal details of 377 account holders whose addresses were allegedly used to share a copy of the movie “The Hitman’s Bodyguard”.

Dutch Filmworks lost this case but swiftly announced an appeal. This ruling was initially expected during this summer, but the Court of Appeal postponed it due to the complexity of the case. After additional deliberation, the Court announced its verdict today .

The Court of Appeal in Arnhem sided with the lower court, rejecting the request for subscriber details. In its ruling, the Court explains that it must find a balance between the privacy rights of subscribers and Dutch Filmworks’ intellectual property rights.

In this specific case, copyright doesn’t outweigh the privacy rights of Internet subscribers. This is, in part, because it remains uncertain what the movie company plans to do with the personal data it obtains. Dutch Filmworks explained that it could either warn subscribers or request damages, but that it would decide this on a case-by-case basis.

“By not being transparent about the criteria it applies when carrying out its intended actions, the interests of the involved Ziggo customer are harmed,” the Court notes.

“In the opinion of the Court of Appeal, this leads to a disturbance of the [rights] balance, in particular in the situation that it is uncertain whether the Ziggo customer involved is actually the infringer,” the Court adds, noting that the subscriber in question may be a third-party.

In addition, it remains unclear how large the proposed settlements will be. An initial figure of €150 per infringement has been mentioned in the past, but this number could also be significantly higher. Transparency is lacking here as well, which means more uncertainty for the potential targets.

After weighing all evidence, the Court of Appeal concludes that the lower court made the right decision . Based on the presented information, the Court can’t grant the request to hand over the personal details of alleged infringers.

“There are no clear and comprehensible criteria based on which an estimate can be made of the consequences for the relevant Ziggo customers, if their personal data is disclosed. It cannot be checked whether the intended measures are in reasonable proportion to the importance that it serves DFW and the privacy interest of the Ziggo customer whose privacy is violated.”

In addition, the Court ordered the movie company to pay €4,000 in costs. Whether Dutch Filmworks will continue to appeal the case is unknown at the time of publication. For now, however, Ziggo customers don’t have to worry about a settlement letter from Dutch Filmworks.

Source: TF , for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons .

Last Friday, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN teamed up with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment to take action against a massive supplier of pirate movies and TV shows.

Moonwalk, as the Content Delivery Network was known, supplied an estimated 80% of known Russian streaming portals. These sites were able to embed a video player which presented not only movies and TV shows from Moonwalk, but advertising too. For this service, Moonwalk reportedly paid the sites $0.60 per 1000 views.

After bailiffs acting on BREIN’s behalf served ex parte court orders on five Netherlands-based hosting providers, which required them to disconnect and preserve evidence on Moonwalk’s operations, the CDN shut down, stating it would “ NEVER be up again “.

This week TorrentFreak spoke with cybersecurity company Group-IB . The Singapore-based firm, which is a partner of both INTERPOL and Europol, had previously supplied us with information detailing the activities of Moonwalk. It has now provided an interesting update on the fallout from last week’s legal action.

Group-IB says that at the time of its shutdown, Moonwalk was even bigger than the conservative figures published by BREIN last week suggest. While BREIN claimed more than 26,000 movies and 10,000 TV shows were stored, Group-IB says that 28,258 movies were being distributed alongside 14,549 TV shows at the time of the shutdown.

However, it’s the knock-on effect and the state of the market after the takedown that raises the most interest.

Group-IB informs us that another big “pirate-powered” CDN known as HDGO has also shut down following the action by BREIN and its partners. The cybersecurity firm believes that the closures are connected because HDGO used some of the same infrastructure as Moonwalk.

“Compared with other CDNs HDGO provided new content faster and guaranteed a higher income for pirate websites’ owners,” says Dmitry Tyunkin, Deputy Director of Anti-Piracy and Brand Protection at Group-IB.

A second “pirate-powered” CDN, known online as Kodik, has also shut down as a result of the Moonwalk action. Again, Kodik is believed to have used the same infrastructure as Moonwalk and HDGO, suggesting that the BREIN court orders may have had an even wider effect.

“The Kodik CDN used some of Moonwalk’s servers, especially the ones where TV show content was stored. According to our estimates, Kodik could have lost 8,000 out of 17,000 TV shows. It’s known that there was a pirated content ‘exchange agreement’ between Moonwalk and Kodik,” Tyunkin adds.

It’s estimated that Moonwalk’s CDN player could have been built-in into thousands of websites so the removal of the players could have an even more profound effect.

“In the short-term perspective, the shutdown of Moonwalk, HDGO and Kodik could mean a big blow to online piracy in Russia and can potentially contain pirated video content distribution for some time.”

But Moonwalk, HDGO, and Kodik weren’t the only players in the ‘pirate CDN’ market. Group-IB says that despite the magnitude of the recent efforts and initial fallout, in the long-term the “many competitors” of Moonwalk are likely to step in to facilitate supply.

The company believes there are 10 “pirate-powered” CDNs still supplying the market, including major players HDVB, VideoCDN, and Collaps.

“According to Group-IB’s data, 80% of pirated movies in Russia are now streamed, a figure that increases to 90% for TV shows,” the company says.

“The majority of Russian online pirates use CDNs because they store hundreds of thousands of files containing films and TV series, and offer a technical service that allows to automatically place this content on pirate websites.

“Some of these technical CDN providers also offer web modules that autofill sites with film posters and descriptions, and in some cases even supply unique reviews.”

Finally, in terms of impact on the global market, Group-IB believes the shutdowns have the potential to affect between 5 and 10 percent of worldwide supply but cautions that this is “definitely a temporary change.”

Source: TF , for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons .

Over the past few years, users ripping music from sites like YouTube has been portrayed by the industry as a bigger problem than torrent sites.

According to stats published by industry group IFPI last year, 32% of all Internet users were stream rippers, up from 30% in 2016. This, according to the group, made it the leading form of music piracy.

Last week, however, a new report revealed that the practice is actually on a downward trend , with 23% of those surveyed admitting to using stream-ripping services. Despite the big decrease, the RIAA isn’t likely to step away from its enforcement efforts anytime soon, as evidenced by a new application filed at a US court.

The application for a DMCA subpoena filed in the District of Columbia targets three sites that are either directly or indirectly linked to YouTube-ripping.

In common with several previous applications, this one also requires domain registry Namecheap to hand over the personal details of their operators, providing names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, payment information and more.

The first, YouTubeMP4.biz , recently suffered a drop in traffic according to SimilarWeb stats but that blip aside, has been pulling in up to 1.2 million visits per month throughout 2019. It is most popular in the United States, followed by the UK, Thailand, India and Turkey.

Next up is Keepvid.ws , which at around three million visits per month is the most popular in the application. Perhaps unusually given the close interest of the RIAA, the YouTube-ripping platform is most popular in South Africa, with around 16% of its traffic coming from the region. India and the United States follow with around 10% each.

The last of the RIAA’s latest targets is HDMP4.net , which on the surface seems different from the rest. When accessing the site’s URL directly, visitors are greeted with a blank page, which is unusual for a stream-ripping platform.

Furthermore, Google reveals that HDMP4.net has had just a handful of DMCA notices filed against it over the past several years, the last in 2015, with none coming from the music industry. However, checking in Google’s indexes reveals that the site isn’t indexed, so that makes sense.

The RIAA does mention some specific URLs carrying its content, including tracks by Cyndi Lauper and ZZ Top, which raises the question of whether other sites are using it in some way. Indeed, checks using various resources indicate that the site, which only gained significant traffic in June this year, seems connected to a number of other ripping services.

The big question remains whether the raft of DMCA subpoenas obtained by the RIAA against companies such as Namecheap and Cloudflare are having any direct effect on the operations of these platforms. While things are probably going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about, in the main most previously-targeted sites seem unaffected.

In May , the RIAA tried to extract the personal details of huge ripping site Y2Mate.com from Cloudflare and Namecheap. At the time the site had around 60 million monthly visits and despite the efforts, remains stubbornly online today.

The only real difference now is that SimilarWeb reports the site enjoying in excess of 130 million monthly visits, more than double the traffic reported back in May. The company recently changed the way it calculates traffic but it seems unlikely to have had this much of an effect, particularly since other online measurement sites also show a big upward trend.

On the flip side, a separate effort in May to unmask the operator of YouTubNow.com, a site with 15 million monthly visits, may have paid off. The site currently carries a “maintenance” message and its traffic has tanked to almost zero. That can probably go in the success column for the RIAA.

Back in June , the RIAA homed-in on 10Convert.com, Amoyshare.com, AnythingtoMP3.cc, IMP3Juices.com, BigConverter.com, YouTubeMP4.to, QDownloader.net, GenYouTube.net, Break.TV, DL-YouTube-MP3.net, ConvertBox.net, and Downloaders.io.

At the time of writing, only ConvertBox.net seems completely down while BigConverter.com might have resorted to blocking UK traffic for reasons unknown. The rest are operational, which doesn’t sound like a notable success rate. That being said, the RIAA may have other goals in mind so the bigger picture may play out in time.

By the industry’s own accounting, stream-ripping is on a downward trend but whether that’s attributable to the RIAA’s takedown efforts remains open to speculation. That being said, the RIAA will argue it has to do something , so the pressure is likely to continue.

The latest DMCA subpoena granted by the court can be found here (pdf)

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