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Warner Bros Fights Looming Exposé of Anti-piracy Secrets

Posted: 19 Mar 2014 04:15 AM PDT

To deal with the ongoing threat of online piracy, major Hollywood studios have entire divisions dedicated to tracking down copyright infringers. Exactly what goes on behind the scenes is a mystery, but if the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has its way, part of this veil will soon be lifted.

Last month the digital rights group asked a Florida federal court to unseal the filings Warner submitted in its now-settled DMCA abuse case against Hotfile.

EFF argued that the public has the right to know what mistakes Warner made. Knowing how Warner Bros’ anti-piracy system works will be instrumental in discussing the effectiveness of the DMCA takedown procedure and similar measures.

This week Warner opposed the EFF’s request. The movie studio fears that by exposing the sealed documents pirates will obtain an unfair advantage. According to David Kaplan, Warner’s Senior Vice President of Anti-Piracy operations, the information “would give pirates multiple routes for evading detection and copyright enforcement.”

"Persons familiar with Warner's methods and strategies for identifying unauthorized Warner content online could infringe without fear of detection if they knew how the detection worked," Kaplan informed the court.

The above is intriguing, as it suggests that there are ways to bypass Warner’s anti-piracy systems. While this may be as simple as using anonymizer tools, the studio clearly doesn’t want the public to know. The opposition filings themselves are heavily redacted, but Warner warns the court that exposing their secrets could allow more “criminals” to avoid justice.

From Warner Bros’ redacted filing wbfile

The movie studio asks the court to keep the documents under seal, and accuses EFF of having a secret agenda. Warner believes that the digital rights group is not so much interested in serving the public good, and suggests that the EFF mostly wants to use the information to their own advantage.

“Although EFF claims that this unsealing would serve the ‘public interest,’ EFF's motion is a thinly-veiled effort to gain access to Warner's confidential information for EFF's own tactical advantage in private litigation that EFF regularly brings against copyright owners to challenge their use of takedown systems,” Warner writes.

In EFF’s case, the public interest may of course be aligned with the interests of the group itself. However, the Hollywood studios believe that EFF is mainly interested in scandalizing.

“Plaintiffs' concern that EFF's true intentions are to exploit the sealed information in order to ‘promote scandal’ regarding Warner and other copyright owners is fully justified, and tips the balance even further toward continued sealing of the designated information,” Warner informs the court.

According to Warner, the EFF’s reasoning doesn’t trump their right to protect their anti-piracy secrets. This is not to avoid “embarrassment” as EFF suggests, but to prevent pirates from outsmarting them. If the sealed documents were exposed, this could severely damage Warner’s operation, they claim.

“As Plaintiffs have explained, this detailed information could be used by infringers to evade Warner's copyright enforcement efforts. That such disclosure would cause significant harm to Warner's copyright enforcement efforts is beyond serious dispute,” Warner stresses.

It’s now up to the court to decide whose interests weigh stronger. If Judge Kathleen Williams decides to unseal the documents, it will be interesting to see what Warner is so afraid of.

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

Google Refuses to Take Down Pirate-Movies-on-YouTube Sites

Posted: 18 Mar 2014 10:22 AM PDT

Earlier today news broke that Viacom and Google/YouTube have settled their billion dollar copyright infringement dispute, in which the former had accused the latter of hosting its video content without permission.

The precise terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, but the fact that YouTube has been trying hard to combat piracy in recent years can hardly have gone unnoticed. It invests large sums into Content ID, but this anti-piracy / monetization system can’t ever hope to solve the problem completely.

So, while the world is worrying about The Pirate Bay and other so-called ‘rogue sites’, through no fault of its own YouTube continues to be a pretty decent place to watch unauthorized content, not least hundreds if not thousands of Hollywood movies.

Finding that content is fairly easy too, via a title search (sometimes followed by “full movie”) and the activation of the “Duration Long” feature which only returns videos in excess of 20 minutes. However, spammers have been doing their best to pollute these results for some time, with fake video uploads of around two hours which claim to be the movie but are actually ploys to generate traffic to other sites.

If only there was a pre-moderated YouTube-movie-indexing site with a great Popcorn Time-style interface complete with reviewer ratings. Maybe looking something like this?

Actually there are already quite a few of these kinds of sites but MovieFork attracted our attention after it appeared in a complaint to Google penned by Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner and Disney – together the MPAA.

The complaint features three sites – MovieFork, FullMovies.cc and Otakhang.com, each dedicated to indexing Hollywood movies already available on YouTube. While many of the titles indexed by these sites are older classics, there’s no shortage of newer titles from the past year. Quality is half decent too, hardly the peer-through-a-letterbox experience of years gone by.

In its complaint the MPAA asks Google to take down specific URLs, including the MovieFork homepage. In another it asks for the FullMovies.cc domain to be delisted along with that of fellow YouTube movie indexing site Uflix.net.

But despite the nature of the sites, Google refused to comply with the MPAA’s requests. Google’s own Transparency Report shows it took “no action” in respect of the takedown notices and searching for the precise URLs with Google search reveals they are still indexed, with none of the sites’ homepages being delisted either.

Quite why Google is refusing to respond is unclear, but there are some interesting pointers. For example, similar requests to take down URLs that point to movies hosted on sites other than YouTube have been successful, such as the one for Man of Steel listed in this complaint.

It’s certainly possible that Google expects rightsholders to send their takedowns directly to YouTube, rather than shooting endless links and leaving the original content intact. Indeed, there are plenty of signs they are doing just that as some links are no longer available.

The scale of the free-full-movies problem is evident when one looks at Zero Dollar Movies, a site that claims to index 15,000 movies, all available for free from YouTube. It appears to use the YouTube Search API and even has its own ‘Instant’ feature for suggesting content that searchers may be interested in.

Other indexes, such as /FullMoviesonYoutube, a section of Reddit dedicated to just that, are pretty basic but show that not much infrastructure is needed in order to create a decent selection.

The movies-on-YouTube problem isn’t new in the same way that the torrents issue isn’t, but like Popcorn Time showed, it’s certainly got an awful lot prettier.

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