TorrentFreak Email Update

Sites to Be Blocked in Russia, Even if They Remove Pirate Content
Hosting Provider Plagued by DDoS Attacks on Torrent Sites
Student Wins Pirate Bay Domain To Protest Website Blockades

Sites to Be Blocked in Russia, Even if They Remove Pirate Content

Posted: 21 May 2014 03:18 AM PDT

Complying with elements of the DMCA and its European equivalents is an important measure in the operations of many thousands of websites. Not being held liable for infringements carried out by users has allowed entrepreneurs to develop countless user-generated content projects.

For many rightsholders, however, the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA and similar legislation are being abused by ‘pirate’ sites. While these sites take down content when asked thereby gaining protection, they are also accused of turning a blind eye to large-scale infringing content elsewhere on their indexes.

In Russia, rightsholders say they face similar problems, even though the country introduced tough anti-piracy legislation in 2013.

Following a legitimate complaint, current law allows for content to be blocked at the ISP level if site operators fail to respond to takedown requests in a timely manner. However, many sites – including popular torrent sites indexing huge amounts of infringing content – have been complying with the notices as required, thus avoiding punitive measures. The government now wants to close this loophole.

Amendments to copyright law being prepared by a working group at the Ministry of Communications foresee a regime in which sites can be blocked by court order, even if they comply with takedown notices.

“Unscrupulous illegal sites should be blocked entirely,” Ministry of Communications deputy Alexei Volin told Izvestia.

According to experts familiar with the discussions, rightsholders want the government to introduce the concept of a “malicious site”. However, the puzzle faced by the Ministry is the development of criteria which will enable it to classify sites into pirate and non-pirate categories.

One option is to classify a site as pirate when it violates copyright and distributes content for profit. Rightsholders say they want either element alone to be enough.

Other amendments under consideration would see site owners and hosting providers forced to restrict access not only to copyright-infringing content, but also to “information necessary to obtain it using the Internet,” a clear reference to torrents.

But according to Irina Levova, director at the Strategic Internet Projects Research Institute, this amendment goes too far.

“The wording in the law is incorrect,” Leva says. “Under it falls even ordinary hyperlinks, including those that are placed in search engines. We believe that this phrase should be abolished.”

But according to Leonid Agronov, general director of the National Federation of the Music Industry, hosting actual content or links to it amounts to the same problem.

“The business of a torrent tracker is not very different from the business of any site that hosts pirated content,” Agronov says. “They all offer access to content in exchange for viewing ads or paying for higher download speeds. For us, the rights holders, these sites are indistinguishable, regardless of their technical features.”

The amendments are set to be presented to the government on Friday.

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

Hosting Provider Plagued by DDoS Attacks on Torrent Sites

Posted: 20 May 2014 02:14 PM PDT

bad502 BitTorrent trackers are no strangers to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Pretty much all sites of a respectable size are targeted on occasion by unknown sources.

In most cases these attacks don’t last too long, but every now and then they get more serious. For example, in recent weeks several French torrent sites have had to deal with a serious flood of unwanted connections, rendering the sites and trackers in question unavailable.

The Morocco-based provider Genious Communications hosts several of the affected torrent sites, including smartorrent.com and cpasbien.pe. To find out more TorrentFreak contacted CEO Hamza Aboulfeth, who told us that the attacks come in all shapes and sizes.

“The biggest attack was on smartorrent.com where we had over 30 Gbit/s which gave us no choice but nullroute the IP at the moment of the attack,” Aboulfeth says.

The attacks range from common HTTP floods to UDP and SYN flood attacks and huge botnets. As a result, Genious has migrated several clients over to a specialized DDoS protection setup.

“We have our own professional DDoS protection system so we had to move some of our clients to it, the rest just moved to Cloudflare where they offer decent protection for a reasonable price,” Aboulfeth says.

The biggest challenge is to mitigate the attacks on trackers as these are not dealing with regular HTTP requests, but so far the company has managed to take the edge off the assaults.

The attacks started a few weeks ago and have been continuing ever since at varying intensities. They are all targeted at several of Genious Communications’ file-sharing related clients, but the identities of the individuals behind them remains a mystery.

Aboulfeth hasn’t heard of any cash demands, which excludes the extortion scheme several other sites were subjected to earlier this year. According to the CEO, it’s most likely that competitors or an anti-piracy group are behind the attacks.

“I think the attacks are most likely coming from competitors or some copyright agency,” Aboulfeth says.

“One common thing is they are all French torrent websites, and I know for a fact that I have been contacted by someone hosted somewhere else claiming that one of our clients is attacking him, and of course my client is denying that,” he adds.

In the long term the sites have no other option than to make sure that they can cope with the DDoS attacks. In most cases they eventually pass, without their victims ever knowing what their purpose was.

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

Student Wins Pirate Bay Domain To Protest Website Blockades

Posted: 20 May 2014 07:54 AM PDT

The Pirate Bay is one of the most popular sites on the Internet and has inspired the creation of many copycat sites, many of which play on Pirate Bay’s imagery, branding, name, or a combination of all three.

While some sites make it obvious that they’re paying homage to the infamous torrent site, others have malicious or financial motives in mind. As a result there are plenty of domains out there looking to capitalize on users’ naivety or simple inability to spell.

Ironically, while many official Pirate Bay domains are blocked in countries around Europe, these unofficial and often fake variants are allowed to continue business as usual. Occasionally, however, the authorities step in.

One such instance involves ThePirateBay.dk, a domain whose most recent registration occurred in August 2010. The domain was owned by a James McAvoy of Bristol, UK, who appears to be a prolific purchaser of domains, as illustrated below.

Over in Denmark, where The Pirate Bay has been blocked since 2008, a Danish student had been eyeing the domain. He felt he had a good chance of wrestling it from McAvoy’s control due to the Brit’s failure to adhere to Denmark’s domain name rules.

In his complaint the student told the Complaints Board for Domain Names that he doubted that the contact listed in the WHOIS was a “genuine or real registrant” and criticized the same person’s registration of many “typosquatter” domains (such as youtupe.dk) which are deliberately linked to “advertising traps”.

With Denmark’s Domain Names Act noting that “a domain name which typosquats another domain name may be suspended and subsequently blocked or deleted”, the student’s complaint appeared valid.

Next, the student complained that ThePirateBay.dk had been put up for sale. The Domain Names Act expressly forbids a registrant to “reserve, register and maintain registrations of domain names solely for the purpose of selling or renting to other parties.”

In contrast to the owner of ThePirateBay.dk who had no valid use for the domain, the student presented an argument to the domains board that he did.

“I want to use thepiratebay.dk to protest against Danish web censorship in the form of
the blockade of the address thepiratebay.org imposed on the Danish internet providers,” the student wrote.

“I want to create a support page for The Pirate Bay where I criticize the decision and show my support for the blocked page. I am a student, not a trader, and I act as an individual in what I would call a protest against the imposed blockade.”

The complaints board weighed the arguments and in a decision published a few days ago, agreed with the student’s position and upheld his complaint.

“The Board finds that there is hereby created a strong presumption that the purpose of the defendant’s registration of the domain name ‘thepiratebay.dk’ [..] was to gain financially by its reassignment. The Respondent, who has not replied to the Complaints Board’s [attempts at contact] , did not contradict that presumption.”

All things considered it was concluded that James McAvoy’s registration of the domain should be canceled and ThePirateBay.dk should be transfered to the the student by June 13, 2014.

Exactly what form the student’s protest will take using his newly obtained domain remains unknown, but it’s nevertheless interesting that the right to protest against a website blockade of the world’s most infamous torrent site trumps making ad money from a similar looking domain.

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