The US Senate’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property is looking for better ways to tackle the ever-present threat of online piracy.

Specifically, it’s working with various stakeholders to see if the DMCA can be improved to better suit today’s online environment.

During a hearing yesterday , Senators received input from various stakeholders on the role of voluntary agreements and existing anti-piracy technologies. YouTube, for example, explained its Content-ID system and Facebook showed how its Rights Manager tool helps copyright holders.

Twitter Refused to Attend

Twitter was also invited to testify but the company refused to attend . This frustrated lawmakers, including Senator Thom Tillis, who repeatedly asked Twitter to join the discussion. When that didn’t happen Tillis sent a series of written questions, but the “non-answers” the company sent back only appear to have made things worse.

The lawmakers are not alone in their critique of Twitter. As expected, they were fully supported by the RIAA, which was present to represent the music industry. RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier specifically mentioned the social media platform in his opening statement.

Glazier argued that the current takedown system is highly ineffective and he used Twitter as an example. Over the past year, the RIAA has tried to keep a single music track off Twitter, but despite thousands of notices, it kept reappearing.

“As a result, over a 10-month period, RIAA had to send notices for nearly 9,000 infringements of that same track – let me repeat that. We had to send 9,000 notices over a 10-month period for the same exact track. Unfortunately, we must do this all the time for hundreds of tracks on many different services,” Glazier said.

Hiding Behind the Safe Harbor

The RIAA would like Twitter and other platforms to keep infringing files offline indefinitely. A so-called takedown and staydown policy. In addition, copyright holders should be allowed to effectively monitor and report infringements. However, companies such as Twitter prefer to do very little and hide behind their safe harbor protection, Glazier said.

“They could solve the piracy problem voluntarily tomorrow if they had the will and incentive to do so. Unfortunately, the DMCA safe harbors have been interpreted to apply so broadly that platforms do not have the business incentive to participate in a balanced system.”

The Twitter-bashing continued during the questioning round. Senator Mazie Hirono stressed that Twitter hasn’t shown to be a “willing partner” for copyright holders and asked Glazier to elaborate.

RIAA’s CEO gladly complied and said that the music industry has sent more than three million notices to Twitter over the past two years, identifying 20,000 works. That’s an average of 150 notices per track, and things aren’t improving.

Industrial Scale Piracy

“This is piracy on an industrial massive scale. This is not some small problem,” Glazier said. “Unlike Facebook and YouTube, they have done nothing to at least try to build tools, or to help prevent what is by its nature a viral system where piracy can spread literally in microseconds.”

The takedown efforts are complicated because the RIAA and its members don’t have an effective system to search Twitter for copyright infringements. The social media platform is willing to offer this, but not for free.

“They really don’t offer us the ability to search their universe for infringements. We have asked for it many many times and they want to charge us,” Glazier said.

“And then when we send them notices it can take anywhere between four hours and four days to take one thing down while we’ve got millions of pieces spreading at the same time. It’s a huge problem,” he adds.

Twitter was not the only company to be called out. Senator Mazie Hirono also asked RIAA’s CEO about the role of domain name registrars, which offer services to pirate sites. Again, Glazier said that this is a huge problem.

Domain Registrars Protect Pirates

“Domain name registrars and their role in allowing piracy to happen through their systems is a huge problem. Very few domain name registrars are doing very little. Both at the registrar and at the registry level.”

Glazier notes that there are voluntary agreements with a select group of domain registrars. However, most simply do nothing. They simply keep pirate domains online. And when copyright holders ask them to help identify bad actors, they refuse to cooperate.

“When we go to them and say: ‘help us to find the pirates’ so we can go against them directly, they won’t give the name of the pirate. They hide their identity and help them become anonymous and they say that it’s because of privacy laws. That they need to protect the criminals. Which is ridiculous.”

“Privacy laws are meant to protect consumers, they are not meant to protect criminals,” Glazier adds.

If Not Voluntary, Then…

The RIAA would like the law to make it clear that intermediaries, including domain registrars and registries, have to do more. The same is true for services that host content. The current takedown process simply doesn’t cut it, it’s a sham.

While the hearing was supposed to be about voluntary and private agreements to help fight piracy, the threat of stricter regulation may be needed.

The RIAA applauded the work of Facebook and YouTube but, reading between the lines, Glazier suggests that Twitter and other companies may need a bigger push from lawmakers to come to the table.

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

Just over six months ago UK-based anti-piracy company AudioLock announced The Music Mission, a new campaign to disrupt the activities of around 200 pay-piracy sites focused on music.

Unlike torrent or streaming sites, in many cases these platforms seek to emulate specialist legal portals such as Beatport, Traxsource and Juno, by offering the same tracks in similar polished interfaces. As a result, these paysites represent a more direct threat, since instead of attracting pirates who won’t pay, they attract customers who will.

Beatport v Pirate Platform

In this respect, it is believed that pirated downloads of this type are more likely to represent a lost sale. Indeed, investigations carried out by The Music Mission found that these sites were attracting significantly more traffic than their legal counterparts.

Multipronged Disruption Strategy

Headed by AudioLock and backed by music distributor Label Worx plus 800 additional supporters made up of labels and distributor platforms, The Music Mission has deployed a number of techniques to disrupt these pirate sites.

In November, for example, AudioLock CEO Ben Rush informed TorrentFreak that with the assistance of Traxsource, Beatport, Juno and Soundcloud, work was undertaken to remove API access from the targeted sites, with ongoing monitoring to ensure others didn’t take up the slack.

According to Rush, additional pressure placed on the sites (which included a search engine delisting campaign that removed close to 950,000 links in the early stages) meant that 61 domains offering music disappeared or suddenly began directing to non-music sites.

Others began to display fake error messages indicating they were down, while attempting to continue their business behind the scenes, but these weren’t missed by AudioLock.

Results From Early November

One of the early signs that the campaign was having a positive effect on sales was that older music, some of it released around four years ago, was beginning to reappear in the dance music charts, Rush explains.

“The most startling discovery has been content from as early as 2016 either recharting or more surprisingly charting for the first time during the period of the two phases of delisting carried out for the content being protected,” AudioLock’s CEO says.

“We think that it is possible there could be a lift on other releases at the same time as those protected by The Music Mission due to the legitimate stores being raised up in search, with many now in the first few results. This would, of course, increase traffic and thus music discovery and sales.”

Results After The Completion of Stage One

In an announcement this morning, AudioLock revealed additional details on the campaign and its achievements over the past several months. In total, 150,800 releases consisting of more than 0.5m tracks from 2,723 record labels were provided with protection.

After identifying and investigating more than 260 ‘pirate’ domains, connections between the sites, their owners, the content being made available, and supporting services (including hosting) were established.

As part of the project, AudioLock also sent requests to Google to delist 2.6 million URLs after crawling 20.4 million pages on the pirate download stores. The evidence data and audit logs for these links alone used a total of 2.8TB of storage.

At the time of writing, AudioLock says that 136 of the targeted domains are no longer acting as pirate download stores, taking access to 50TB of music with them. On top, 20 site operators have reportedly been identified.

AudioLock: Significant Effect in Global Dance Charts

According to data released by AudioLock, The Music Mission project has achieved some interesting results in respect of how long new tracks stay popular with fans.

This is reflected in the length of time the tracks remain in the global Top 100 dance music charts, with an average time of 26 days in September now boosted to more than 70 days for tracks protected during the campaign.

Meanwhile, unprotected music remained relatively stable by averaging around 30 days throughout, so with approximately 30,000 dance music releases every month, achieving over two months charted is significant, Rush says.

Data from the project suggests that tracks appearing in the top 10 best-selling releases initially comprised of around 30% protected by The Music Mission (TMM) but two weeks after the second phase of delistings, 80% of the tracks in the top 10 were covered by the project, with the majority appearing at the top of the charts.

A similar effect was also observed with older tracks in the Top 100 charts across other genres.

“Ordering the Global Top 100 Track chart by the age of the track showed that the density of TMM protected music reached 60% in the top 10 having started at just 10%. This shows that tracks are not only lasting considerably longer in the chart, but also from the TMM protection work, have grown to account for the majority of the oldest out of the whole top 100, benefiting from receiving that all-important increase in exposure to users,” the project announced today.

The Future of The Music Mission

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Ben Rush says that collaboration from the campaign’s supporters was the key to making the takedowns possible, something that will benefit the entire industry moving forward by making revenues from downloading a significant contributor to labels’ revenue.

“The work was focused on the pirate download stores however this is only one part of the pirate landscape,” he continues.

“For example, for dance music there are a great many DJ promo sites operating unlicensed yet charge subscriptions and for the wider industry, stream-ripping/click scam sites too, the latter we targeted through the delisting.

“We have early indications that stream plays have also seen growth, benefiting from The Music Mission which we are currently investigating further. There is clearly a lot more that can still be done here which benefits the industry as a whole, not just the dance music side.”

While the results of the campaign are certainly interesting, where the project will go from here remains unclear. Thus far, all work has been carried out by AudioLock at the company’s expense so although there appears to be a benefit to artists, labels, and distributors in terms of sales, outside funding will probably be needed if the intensity is to be maintained.

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

Back in June, Hurricane Electic, one of the major network providers and operator of the largest IPv6 backbone, took action to prevent damage to its business.

Hurricane provides services to large Internet-focused businesses, including ISPs, which in turn have thousands of customers, all of whom are free to use their connections as they wish. However, a group of movie companies, all of which are known for filing copyright complaints in pursuit of settlement, tried to argue that Hurricane is responsible for the actions of its customers.

After obtaining a subpoena, a law firm acting for the companies behind Rambo: Last Blood, London Has Fallen, Dallas Buyers Club, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, and many others demanded that Hurricane should hand over the personal details of its allegedly pirating customers.

In response to persistent demands, including to disconnect allegedly infringing customers and pay damages in excess of $500,000, Hurricane Electric filed two lawsuits , one in California and one in Nevada, seeking a declaratory judgment stating that it is not responsible for the infringements of its customers. Or those of their customers. Or their customers’ customers.

Amended Complaint Filed in August 2020

In August, Hurricane Electric (HE) filed an amended complaint which in part described the alleged business model of the movie companies targeting its business.

“HE is informed and believes and based thereon alleges that multiple Defendants, many of which share the same addresses, managing agents, and/or agents for service, are copyright assertion entities in the business of generating income primarily from threats of infringement lawsuits against legitimate technology companies that have nothing to do with any alleged infringements by unnamed end users of Internet connections,” HE wrote.

Describing the defendants as “mere shells” for generating income via threats of copyright infringement lawsuits, HE stated that the move companies have become frustrated by courts awarding limited damages against individual file-sharers so have adopted a new business model of suing entities, like HE, that are “higher up the food chain.”

With the main case still rumbling on, an interesting third-party complaint appeared on the docket this week. Featuring Killing Link Distribution LLC, one of the defendants in the HE case and the company behind the Nicholas Cage movie Kill Chain as plaintiff, it targets Sophidea Inc ., an Internet service provider.

Third Party Lawsuit Against a Hurriance Electric Customer

While the company was the subject of several headlines in 2014, little is known about Wyoming-based Sophidea. The third-party lawsuit (filed by Culpepper IP, the same law firm that obtained user data from YTS ) says that Sophidea is an ISP operating in California that buys Internet access, IP address and co-location services from Hurricane Electric.

The complaint further states that the ISP operates a VPN service through HE, enabling its customers to access the Internet via HE IP addresses. According to Killing Link, users of Sophidea’s VPN service accessed “illicit notorious piracy websites” to download and share pirated copies of movies.

“Particularly, Defendant’s users have used this VPN service to download torrent files of Plaintiff’s Work, and pirate Plaintiff’s Work on the Internet via the BitTorrent Protocol Client throughout the world,” the complaint notes.

Among the sites allegedly accessed by Sophidea’s customers are YTS, The Pirate Bay, RARBG, 1337x, Fmovies, Cimaclub, RuTracker, and Torrentz2. Interestingly, Killing Link further claims that users also accessed file-hosting sites Rapidgator and Uploaded, plus Russian social networking site VK “to engage in massive piracy”. How this information was obtained isn’t revealed.

“Defendant [Sophidea] continued to provide network connections to its users despite receiving notices indicating that Defendant’s users were using the network connection to engage in piracy via, for example, one or more of the above piracy websites,” the complaint reads.

The third-party complaint does not seek damages. Instead, the movie company requests preliminary and permanent injunctions to prevent Sophidea from continuing to provide customer access to “infringing material or activity residing at particular online sites.”

Complaint Quickly Concludes With Proposed Stipulated Injunction

On the very same day that the complaint was filed at a California court, a new document appeared on the docket revealing that everything had been sorted out between the parties. A quick turn around, certainly. But it’s the details of the agreement that are likely to raise eyebrows.

According to the stipulated injunction and dismissal, Sophidea provides a VPN service, manned by volunteers, for the purposes of providing uncensored Internet access to people in closed societies.

“Many of Defendant’s users are citizens in countries with internet censorship such as Iran, China, Russia and Vietnam, etc. Defendant depends on donations to provide this VPN service and does not make any profit. Defendant has recently operated at a deficit,” it reads.

“To protect Defendant’s users from their own governments, Defendant does not require users to log in to use Defendant’s services. Rather, users can download Defendant’s software for free without providing any personal information. To further protect them, and also due to the volume of traffic, Defendant does not log their users’ access, i.e. their IP addresses and websites visited.”

Given the background, it seems likely that Sophidea operates its service as a fairly ‘dumb ‘pipe, which means that people are able to access content of their choice, including pirated movies. The company acknowledges that it has been unable to distinguish between “unacceptable and acceptable” usage due to the vast majority of traffic being encrypted.

However, since it has respect for US intellectual property rights, it has offered to assist.

Sophidea Agrees To Block Pirates Sites Under the DMCA

In an agreement with Killing Link to conclude the lawsuit, Sophidea says it denies liability but acknowledges that its customers ‘may’ have used its VPN to pirate copyrighted content. As a result it will implement site-blocking pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §512(j) , with details as per the image below.

According to the agreement, Sophidea will be considered in compliance with the order if it blocks site domains, IP addresses, URLs, or any other technical means agreed between the parties. Furthermore, Killing Link will be able to update the block list with any pirate sites mentioned in the USTR’s review of ‘notorious markets’ moving forward, or any site found liable for infringement in a US court.

As reported last month, various copyright holders and industry organizations have already nominated Amazon, Facebook, Namecheap, Cloudflare and Peter Sunde’s Njalla service for the next notorious markets list, so life could become even more challenging for Sophidea’s already restricted users.

The third party complaint can be found here . The stipulated injunction (signed by the judge Thursday) is here (pdf)

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

Private BitTorrent trackers are niche sites in most parts of the world but in Denmark they are huge.

With millions of views per month, sites such as ShareUniversity and Asgrd are among the most popular sites in the country.

This was also the case with DanishBits until it suddenly went offline a few weeks ago. At the time, several sources informed us that the owner was arrested and, this week, official confirmation came in that this is indeed the case.

Danishbits Operator Arrested

Denmark’s State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime (SØIK) announced that a 33-year-old Danish man was arrested in Morocco. This followed an investigation by the authorities, which acted based on a complaint from local piracy group Rights Alliance.

The Danishbits investigation, which started in 2016, revealed that the site was run professionally and that the people involved did their best to hide their identities. Payments, for example, were made through cryptocurrency.

Despite these efforts, law enforcement officials managed to identify the operator, who was subsequently placed on Interpol’s wanted list. In October, the alleged ringleader of the site was eventually apprehended and jailed in Morocco, from where he will possibly be extradited to Denmark.

“It’s very satisfying that the investigation led to both the arrest of the suspected operator and shutting down the network. It succeeded thanks to the sustained collaboration between our specialized investigators, prosecutors, and IT experts,” says Deputy Police Inspector Michael Lichtenstein.

Nordicbits Shut Down, Operator Passed Away

Danishbits was not the only private tracker to disappear this fall. The same happened to Nordicbits. This site, which was smaller than its competitor, was also reported to the authorities by Rights Alliance in 2018.

After a detailed investigation, the authorities identified a 69-year-old Danish man as the operator. The man, who resided in Spain, was apprehended by local police in September.

After being questioned the Nordicbits operator admitted his involvement in the site and agreed to shut it down voluntarily. The Danish prosecution intended to take the operator to court. However, the man was seriously ill and recently passed away.

Targeting Users?

In both cases, law enforcement officials managed to seize data which will be used for further investigation. Deputy Police Inspector Michael Lichtenstein doesn’t rule out that users will be identified as well.

“The most important thing is clearly to stop the illegal services, but it can certainly not be ruled out that seized data can lead to the identification of the users of the two illegal networks,” he says.

Despite this warning, private torrent trackers continue to flourish in Denmark. The two sites that were shut down had roughly 45,000 registered users, many of whom went to other Danish trackers.

Rights Alliance says that the users of these sites know all too well that they are breaking the law. The anti-piracy group is also happy that the authorities will consider follow-up steps.

“We are pleased that the announcement of the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime also reflects the importance of an increased focus on users’ illegal behavior,” Right Alliance CEO Maria Fredenslund says .

Thus far, however, these users don’t seem to be particularly bothered. After the shutdowns ShareUniversity saw a 500% increase in visits , and Asgrd’s traffic jumped up by more than 750% .

Right Alliance informs TorrentFreak that they are aware of the growth of these sites and urges them to give up their illegal activities. If not, they will get the same treatment as DanishBits and NordicBits.

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

Back in 2016, police in New Zealand received information from the Inland Revenue Service in the United States that a movie piracy website was being operated by a local man.

According to the IRS, the man and his associates were using online international money transfer services to send remittances between the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Vietnam. What followed was a three-year investigation and a raid on the man in 2019.

Police Raid Alleged Movie Pirate’s Home, Seize Crypto Haul

In June 2019, police swooped on software programmer Jaron David McIvor, making two visits to his home in New Zealand. The then-31-year-old reportedly lived in a modest rental property with no obvious wealth or expensive assets such as luxury vehicles.

Several months later in November 2019, it was revealed that McIvor had cooperated with police, handing over the keys to access $6.2m in cryptocurrencies and NZ$6.2m (US$4.4m) and NZ$800,000 (US$568,320) in banked funds. The assets were seized under the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act.

Later that month, police seized a further NZ472,000 (US$335,308) in cryptocurrency and NZ377,000 (US$267,820) in cash from a McIvor ‘associate’, later revealed to be his brother.

At the time, Detective Senior Sergeant Keith Kay, head of the Asset Recovery Unit in Waikato, said McIvor had helped to create a movie piracy site (which has still not been named) from which he received significant funds.

The site allegedly operated in the United States and when funds were deposited into various bank accounts via wire transfers, Stripe, and PayPal, a money-laundering investigation was launched. After “suspicious activity” was discovered on an account linked to McIvor, the raids and seizures took place.

Court Orders Seizure of Cash and Cryptocurrency

In a brief judgment handed down by the New Zealand High Court this morning, it is noted the McIvor was investigated for his role in the movie piracy scheme and as a result, significant funds would be forfeited to the state after he admitted profiting from copyright infringement.

According to the Court, the Commission of Police ultimately restrained funds in McIvor’s bank account totaling NZ$818,000 (US$581,066) and cryptocurrencies now worth an eye-watering NZ$21 million (US$14.9m). Additional funds “found their way” into his brother’s account too – almost NZ$386,000 (US$274,195) and cryptocurrency now worth NZ$1.77 million (US$1.25 million)

“The brothers recently agreed to forfeiture of all crypto-currencies and all but $400,000 (US$284,140). I approved their agreement with the Commissioner on 16 November 2020,” the judge wrote.

“I was satisfied this outcome was consistent with the purposes of the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act 2009, and the overall interests of justice. I reached this conclusion because the overwhelming majority of restrained funds were forfeited, and litigation over the balance (of $NZ400,000) would be disproportionately expensive and time consuming.

“In short, I considered settlement met the public interest,” he concluded.

Movie Piracy Site Still Not Named

The High Court judgment makes no mention of any further legal action against McIvor and mentions no ongoing investigations or court cases in respect of his copyright-infringing activities. Neither does it mention the name of the site, which seems a little unusual given the apparent scale of the operation.

However, there are some similarities with a case in the United States, also based in movie piracy and involving large volumes of cryptocurrency. Just a month before the crypto seizures in New Zealand, United States authorities confirmed that they had seized around US$4 million worth of cash and cryptocurrency as part of an investigation into alleged movie piracy.

That investigation ended last November with a guilty plea from Oregon resident Talon White and the forfeiture of $3.9 million seized from his bank accounts, $35,000 in cash, cryptocurrency worth around $424,000, plus his home in Oregon, then valued at $415,000. On top, White was ordered to pay $669,557 in restitution to the MPAA and $3,392,708 in restitution to the IRS.

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

Under U.S. law, streaming and file-sharing are seen as two different offenses. Not just from a technical point of view, but also in the way they are punished.

Streaming is categorized as a public performance instead of distribution, which can only be charged as a misdemeanor, not a felony.

Lawmakers tried to change this with the Commercial Felony Streaming Act in 2011 , and later with the SOPA and PIPA bills. These bills were shelved after public outrage, with many people fearing that uploading copyrighted YouTube videos could possibly land them in jail.

As a result the gap between streaming and traditional file-sharing still remains today. This makes it hard to prosecute pirate streaming services. However, a new bill introduced by Senator Thom Tillis aims to change this.

The bill, titled the ‘Protecting Lawful Streaming Act of 2020’, has bipartisan support and was drafted based on input from copyright holders, tech companies, and public rights experts. This resulted in a final draft that is less broad than previously proposed bills.

In short, the bill proposes to amend US copyright law by adding a section that allows streaming piracy services to be targeted. It is tailored towards services that exploit streaming piracy for commercial gain, leaving individual streamers out of the crosshairs.

Specifically, the bill makes it unlawful to provide a service that’s primarily designed to show copyright-infringing content, has no significant commercial purpose other than piracy, or is intentionally marketed to promote streaming piracy.

The bill is targeting people or organizations that provide a “digital transmission service.” This means that it doesn’t apply to ordinary users who stream something on YouTube, Twitch, or any other streaming platform.

This distinction is crucial as the opposition to previous bills focused on the fear that new legislation would send ordinary people to jail for accidentally streaming a copyrighted video or music track.

Instead, the ‘Protecting Lawful Streaming Act of 2020’ intends to criminalize commercial streaming piracy services. Those who are caught face fines and a prison sentence, which for repeat offenders can extend to ten years.

Commenting on the bill, Senator Tillis notes that pirate streaming services are costing the US economy billions of dollars every year. The new legislation should help to change this without criminalizing regular streamers.

“This commonsense legislation was drafted with the input of creators, user groups, and technology companies and is narrowly targeted so that only criminal organizations are punished and that no individual streamer has to worry about the fear of prosecution,” Tillis said.

Lawmakers received input from rightsholders as well as the CCIA, which includes prominent members such as Amazon, Cloudflare, Facebook, and Google. The CCIA has previously been critical of streaming felony bills, but it will now remain neutral.

The same applies to the civil rights group Public Knowledge, which also helped in shaping the new bill. While Public Knowledge isn’t in favor of adding criminal penalties for copyright infringement, it sees the new proposal as a reasonable solution.

“[T]his bill is narrowly tailored and avoids criminalizing users, who may do nothing more than click on a link, or upload a file. It also does not criminalize streamers who may include unlicensed works as part of their streams,” says Meredith Rose, Public Knowledge’s Senior Policy Counsel.

With a more limited scope, the latest streaming piracy bill has a greater chance of passing than its predecessors. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s no opposition.

Aside from its contents, which not everyone will agree with, there is fierce critique on the process. Instead of letting the bill pass through the regular process, it will be added to the must-pass spending bill , together with other copyright proposals. That is not how copyright law should be created, opponents warn.

—

A copy of the text of the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act of 2020 can be found here . The bill is co-sponsored by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), John Cornyn (R-TX), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Chris Coons (D-DE), Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), and David Perdue (R-GA)

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

Without prior warning, Torrentz2 suddenly started to return a ‘ 503 Service Unavailable ‘ error two weeks ago.

From one day to the next millions of regular visitors were left in the cold, effectively disconnected from their gateway to dozens of torrent sites.

Torrentz2 Troubles Continue

After more than two weeks have passed, the situation hasn’t changed. The same error is still present on the side and official mirrors, including Torrentz.pl and Torrentsmirror.com have the same problem.

Since our coverage, we have reached out to the operator multiple times, without any response. This is quite unusual, especially since the emails are being delivered just fine.

This isn’t the first problem Torrentz2 has encountered this year. In June, the official Torrentz2.eu domain name was suspended by the EURid registry, an action that was taken following an order from the Belgian Public Prosecutor in Brussels.

In response, Torrentz2 quickly moved to the .is domain name. The current problems, which are technical in nature, don’t seem to be going away easily.

Torrentz2 .Onion Site Works

Adding to the mystery, we found out that the official onion domain still gives access to the full site. Not just that, the site’s backend is working too as the search engine continues to be updated with fresh links.

The domain ‘torrentzwealmisr.onion’ wasn’t promoted on the Torrentz2 site over the past months but during the years before it was prominently listed on the site’s footer. So it’s certainly not a copycat.

Through the .onion address people can still access Torrentz2 over the anonymous Tor-network , with the Tor browser for example. In addition, it’s possible to access it through regular browsers by adding .ly to the .onion domain.

Good News?

Avid Torrentz2 users may welcome this news but it’s unknown whether this is really positive.

There is clearly something ‘broken’ at the main site. In addition, the lack of communication and action from the operator is troubling. Yes, the onion domain works, but for how long?

The problems at Torrentz2 are not just affecting the site’s operator and users, third-party torrent sites are also feeling it too. Some smaller torrent sites received a lot of traffic from the meta-search engine. That traffic is now missing.

For now, it appears that the uncertainty around Torrentz2’s future will continue. We will keep an eye on the situation and if there’s any news we’ll report on it in due course.

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

After years of hype, rumor, speculation and excitement, everyone knew the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 would be something special.

As soon as the game went live on various legal distribution platforms this morning, gamers were activating their pre-installs and making new purchases on a scale rarely seen in the video game space.

According to stats available from Steam, at one point this morning 1,003,264 players were roaming Night City. For comparison, the massively popular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has an all-time peak of 1.3m, and that’s been around for eight years.

Of course, not everyone is lining the pockets of developer CD Projekt Red

Pirates Were Very Quick Off The Mark

Around 18:00 GMT last night, a good six hours before the game was released in the West, news began to circulate that a functioning pirate release may have already appeared online.

For several days now people have been uploading preload copies of the game to the Internet but none were viable without additional code. However, those necessary additions, which were quickly shared using file-hosting accounts and GDrive, were being passed around freely last evening, enabling people to play the game.

Infamous Repacker FitGirl Advises Against Early Downloads

In a Reddit thread where the release was vigorously discussed, infamous game repacker stepped in with some interesting tips which advised gamers not to bother downloading this early version.

The problem related to the extremely large patches being pumped out by Cyberpunk’s developers to fix various problems. The version that initially appeared online did not have these patches so anyone attempting to play would have a buggy version.

“My advice – don’t play dumb, you’ve waited years, you can wait for a few more hours and get a proper final game, not some pre-release,” FitGirl wrote.

Nevertheless, many reports suggested that some pirates just couldn’t wait, instead opting for a massive download in order to get into the action as quickly as possible. In the event, waiting a few hours would’ve been a better option.

CODEX Releases Improved Version, Download Frenzy Ensues

For those with the patience to wait another eight hours, a 55GB version by release group CODEX addressed the earlier issues by including the Day 1 patch, with the language packs (weighing in at 45GB) provided as an optional extra.

Even before release, the consensus was that not only would Cyberpunk 2077 be one of the highest-selling games ever, but also one of the most pirated. Early signs suggest it is well on track in both departments.

At the time of writing, a conservative estimate from public trackers alone indicates that around 100,000K people are downloading the CODEX release. Given that private trackers will have their own substantial audiences and that games are often shared through file-hosting platforms, there are likely to be tens of thousands more to be added to this rising total.

FitGirl Repack Likely To Provide Another Boost

As mentioned earlier, the size of the CODEX release represents a substantial download prospect for anyone and given the number of people trying to grab various torrents, it will take a while for those swarms to gain maximum efficiency. In short, most people are in for a long wait until those downloads complete.

What FitGirl does, as our recent interview highlighted, is make pirated game releases substantially smaller with sophisticated compression techniques.

While it is yet to be released, FitGirl is already predicting a 35GB download, a massive saving over the current offerings. But these things take time and there’s currently no indication of when the compressed version will appear online. It’s unlikely to be a long wait, however.

Meanwhile, developer CD Projekt Red is working with several anti-piracy partners to make these downloads harder to find.

Developer Sends Wave After Wave of DMCA Notices

Four days ago, DMCA notices began being filed by CD Projekt, initially to take down gameplay footage that had been leaked online. This notice , obtained by TorrentFreak from the Lumen Database, asked Vimeo to remove a video of the Xbox One S gameplay.

Soon after, however, notices began to flood in to remove pre-load files and anything else that looked like them. The image below shows just a small sample of the notices.

This appears to be an ongoing effort, largely to prevent users from finding useful download links via Google. However, it’s likely that the delisting program is being actioned behind the scenes too, in an effort to hinder platforms offering links to the much sought after game.

Such Popularity is Rarely Seen in Videogames

While the majority of games appear online eventually, the lack of obtrusive copy protection measures in Cyberpunk 2077 means that anyone who wishes to grab a copy for free can do so, with limited drawbacks – if time, bandwidth and malware-infested fakes are discounted, of course.

Nevertheless, the huge numbers of players on Steam alone suggest that this game is going to be a huge commercial success, which adds significant weight to the theory that good games will sell like hotcakes, despite piracy and despite the lack of DRM.

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

With millions of regular visitors, Torrentz2 is without a doubt the most popular torrent meta-search engine on the Internet.

Update December 4: Torrentz2.is remains down after a week. The 503 error is still the only thing that’s showing up. We repeatedly reached out to the operator without any response. This suggests that there may be more going on than a DDoS attack. When we know more we will write a new article. All proxies, mirrors, or alternatives that are online are unofficial.

The site took this spot from the original Torrentz site, which shut down unexpectedly during the summer of 2016.

Since then, not much has changed. The site has continued to operate quietly like its predecessor by indexing and linking to dozens of millions of links on external torrent sites.

Torrentz2’s Domain Issues

Earlier this year the site suffered a major setback. In June, the official Torrentz2.eu domain name was suspended by the EURid registry, an action that was taken following an order from the Belgian Public Prosecutor in Brussels .

Torrentz2 swiftly responded and moved to Torrentz2.is, while adding several backup domains such as Torrentz.pl and Torrentsmirror.com. While these domains still work fine, they also show the same error.

503 Service Unavailable

For more than a day, Torrentz2 has been returning a “503 Service Unavailable” error, as shown in the screenshot below.

“503 Service Unavailable” is an HTTP status code that typically indicates that the server of a website is overloaded. This is often a temporary issue but, in this case, it’s taking unusually long.

TorrentFreak reached out to the operator of Torrentz2 to ask whether the problem will be resolved in the near future, but we have yet to hear back.

Without an official comment, we can only speculate as to the reason for the ‘downtime’. It seems likely, however, that it is of a technical nature. That could include DDoS attacks, which are not uncommon for torrent sites.

Torrentz2 uses Cloudflare, which generally protects servers from DDoS attacks. However, if attackers know the origin IP-address, they can bypass that protection layer.

There doesn’t appear to be a connection to the domain issues from earlier this year, which appeared to be linked to Hollywood. Torrentz2’s main .is domain, which is managed by Iceland’s ISNIC registry, is functioning properly.

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