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Torrent Site Operators Face Jail For Sharing Warner, Disney Movies

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 02:10 AM PDT

While pressure is being applied to file-sharing sites all the time in various ways, overall there seems to be a reduced appetite for expensive litigation. In Sweden, however, direct prosecutions of file-sharers are still raising their head.

The latest involves two men who were arrested way back in 2011. They are the suspected operators of a private tracker called eXcelleNT, or XNT.nu as it was publicly known. The site launched in 2010 and in its first year accumulated some 17,000 users who between them uploaded around 30,000 torrents.

Among those torrents were copyrighted Hollywood movies and TV shows, something which triggered an investigation by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån. In May 2011, police in Borlänge, Sweden, arrested one of the men, moving on to Stockholm where they arrested another. Computers were seized locally, plus XNT’s server in Germany.

The men were soon released, leaving them to speculate on their fate.

“Since we haven't heard much from the police after being released, much of the information in this post is speculations,” one of the men wrote on the XNT blog.

“Anyhow, we'll have to assume that the police is running an investigation. Since they confiscated almost 10 computers in this bust it's probably going to take a while. For the time being, we are living life as usual. Minus all the tracker stuff of course.”

It did indeed take a while. Yesterday, almost three years after the raids, prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad announced that the men had been prosecuted and would be heading to court.

“This is one of the largest cases in terms of number of films distributed,” Ingblad told the Siren news agency.

The case, which received support from German authorities, centers around the unauthorized distribution of some 1,050 movies between March and May 2011, including content owned by Warner Bros. and Disney.

The men, now aged 23 and 24, face fines or potential jail sentences when they appear later in the year. Both are believed to have offered some level of confession.

In December 2012 it was reported that a man suspected of being an active XNT user was acquitted of copyright offenses after police were unable to decrypt his hard drive.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Google Patents Method of Keeping Pirate Apps at Bay

Posted: 04 Apr 2014 10:42 AM PDT

Regular users of the Google Play store will be aware that apps sometimes appear which are very similar to already established apps. These clones are often designed to take advantage of successful apps’ popularity by ripping off their code in order to generate advertising revenue.

These kinds of apps aren’t knowingly welcomed by most Android users, with people preferring the real deal if at all possible. That said, keeping them off the Google Play store is easier said than done, so they can get installed by significant numbers of people should they sneak through. Google, however, is planning to do something about that in the future.

Following an application in July 2013, Google Inc. has now been awarded a patent which should help the company keep pirated and cloned content off its Play store. The system itself is fairly complex, but the way it works is relatively simple to explain.

First of all, Google’s patent requires a reference database of all known ‘authorized’ apps that have already been uploaded to Google Play by legitimate software creators. It then compares submitted apps with the contents of the database in order to find instances where they contain assets that are already utilized by known software.

According to the patent the system won’t compare the submitted apps in their entirety, but will instead look for executable code, data files, images and audio files that appear in existing applications already on the store. Based on this a submitted app will receive a “similarity rating.”

Detecting a submitted pirated/cloned app GoogleApp2

However, Google has recognized that a blanket scanning approach could cause problems. If many apps use open source code or freely available images or audio libraries, for example, the likelihood of completely legal apps becoming labeled as infringing increases. To deal with this type of problem, Google says it will use a filtering system.

“In order to prevent false positive results, the systems and methods herein filter these types of assets from the comparison. The determination as to which assets are considered to be trusted assets can be made based on data associated with the known software applications,” Google’s patent reads.

The system for filtering and recognizing ‘trusted assets’ GoogleApp1

The complete patent, which doesn’t mention Google Play by name but clearly refers to it, is available here. In the meantime anyone who feels their app has been cloned will have to use the existing system to have unauthorized content examined and if necessary taken down.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.