TorrentFreak Email Update |
- VPN Users ‘Pirating’ Netflix Scare TV Networks
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 03/03/14
- “Dallas Buyers Club” Makers Censor Comcast On Demand, By Mistake
| VPN Users ‘Pirating’ Netflix Scare TV Networks Posted: 03 Mar 2014 02:33 AM PST
Australia is often criticized for its appetite for unauthorized downloading but it’s a country with a better ‘excuse’ than most for engaging in it. Not only is legal content much more expensive than in the US, the region is continually under-served, meaning that locals resort to file-sharing networks for shows such as Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, turning Australia into a per-head piracy front-runner. Netflix is blocked in Australia, partly because the big US studios have an exclusive deal with media giant News Corp to show content. On the Internet, however, news travels fast. Googling “netflix australia” turns up dozens of articles explaining how to circumvent the Netflix geo-blocking mechanism to (shock, horror) actually PAY to watch Netflix in Australia using VPN services and proxies. Naturally there are no official figures on how many people watch Netflix this way but estimates range from 20,000 up to 200,000 subscribers. Highlighting how the TV networks view these people, an article this morning in News Corp-owned The Australian went as far as labeling subscribers as “pirates”, even though they are paying for the service. “There is concern at local networks about the growing impact of the US company flouting international regulations by accepting payments from Australian credit cards, despite maintaining a geo-block that is easily bypassed by VPN manipulation or spoof IP addresses,” the paper said. But do subscribers deserve to be called pirates when they are showing the clearest possible buying signals? In 2011, then Attorney-General Robert McClelland gave his opinion. "In relation to the use of VPNs by Australians to access services such as Hulu and Netflix, on the limited information provided there does not appear to be an infringement of copyright law in Australia," McClelland told The Australian, the same News Corp-owned publication now calling Aussie Netflix subscribers “pirates”. But with Netflix not having to go to the expense of setting up in Australia in order to service the region, rivals in the same market area are also feeling uneasy. "The studios have licensed Netflix to distribute content on particular terms in the US and other larger markets, they haven't licensed Netflix for Australia,” said Quickflix chief executive Stephen Langsford this morning. “I have no doubt that the studios are in discussions with Netflix about VPNs because it is blatantly in breach of terms and Netflix is essentially getting a free ride into Australia." Quickflix currently has around 100,000 full subscribers so if the highest estimates are to be believed, the company has potentially half the 200,000 “unauthorized” subscribers Netflix already has in Australia. The only real solution to the situation with Netflix, VPNs, piracy and the Australian content problem is to properly service the region with legal video in a timely fashion and at a reasonable price. By now it’s a stuck record, but anything else simply won’t work. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 03/03/14 Posted: 02 Mar 2014 11:49 PM PST
Frozen, which came available as Blu-ray rip a few days ago, is the most downloaded movie this week. The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| “Dallas Buyers Club” Makers Censor Comcast On Demand, By Mistake Posted: 02 Mar 2014 09:02 AM PST
One of the contenders is Dallas Buyers Club, which grossed over $30 million at the box office on a relatively small budget. Despite this success, the studio behind the movie fears that piracy may cannibalize future profits. Last month we reported that its makers, Voltage Pictures, launched a series of lawsuits in the U.S. against dozens of people who downloaded an unauthorized copy of the film via BitTorrent. This is not the first time for the studio – it previously launched a similar campaign against downloaders of The Hurt Locker. Voltage’s anti-piracy actions are not limited to the courts though. The company is also sending out DMCA takedown requests, one of which was directed at Google. While this isn’t something newsworthy per se, the takedown request does include some curious URLs which appear to be counterproductive. The DMCA notice lists 388 URLs in total. As can be seen below, these links are not all pointing to copyright-infringing content. On the contrary, Voltage Pictures asks Google to censor a perfectly legal Dallas Buyers Club page on Comcast’s XFINITY on-demand service. The notice also includes several other URLs which don’t link to pirated material, including an article on CNN and a page from Google’s own webmaster FAQ.  It appears that Google isn’t happy with the sloppy DMCA notice, as the search engine has decided to remove none of the links in the request. This means that the Pirate Bay links listed in the notice remain accessible through Google. Also of note, is that this is the first and only DMCA request Voltage Pictures has ever sent to Google. This suggests that the company might not be too worried about appearing in search results. Instead, the takedown notice may have been a preemptive action related to the BitTorrent lawsuits we mentioned earlier. With this DMCA notice Voltage can show the court that it took other anti-piracy efforts as well. Whether that is wise has yet to be seen though, since right now it mostly shows how weak the studio’s evidence gathering tools are. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This week we have four newcomers in our chart.
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