TorrentFreak Email Update

9% of French Internet Subscribers Accused of Piracy
Pirate Bay Traffic Doubles Despite ISP Blockades
Solarmovie Domain Gets Stolen by Mysterious Hacker

9% of French Internet Subscribers Accused of Piracy

Posted: 18 Jul 2014 02:25 AM PDT

France was one of the first countries in the world to consider implementing a “three strikes” style regime for dealing with online piracy. The system was implemented four years ago and ever since has been under scrutiny as both rightsholders and critics assess its efficacy.

Hadopi, the authority responsible for administering the scheme, has just published its latest report presenting its key figures to July 1 this year and they make interesting reading.

The cornerstone of the scheme is the warning system, with great importance attached to the first notices sent to subscribers. If the anti-infringement message can be successfully delivered at this stage, fewer follow-ups will be required.

Hadopi reveals that since it sent the very first warning notice in 2009, the agency has gone on to send 3,249,481 first warnings to Internet subscribers. It’s a sizable amount that represents almost 9% of all Internet users in France.

The big question, however, is how many took action to avoid receiving a second warning. According to Hadopi, during the same period it sent 333,723 second phase warnings by regular mail, a re-offending rate of just over 10%.

Those who receive first and second warnings but still don’t get the message go on to receive a third notice. Hadopi says that a total of 1,502 Internet subscribers received three warnings, just 0.45% of those who were sent a second.

The agency’s figures state that a large proportion of this group, 1,289 overall, had their cases examined by Hadopi’s committee. Of these, 116 cases went before a judge. Most received yet another warning.

Also of interest are the reactions of 31,379 subscribers who telephoned Hadopi after receiving an infringement notice.

According to the agency, 35% “spontaneously agreed” the accuracy of the facts set out in their warnings, with around 25% engaging or offering to take measures to avoid content being made available from their connections in the future. Reportedly less than 1% challenged the facts as laid out.

On the education front, over the past six months around 72,000 users have accessed an information video on the Hadopi website, while 49,000 sought information on what to do after receiving a warning.

The figures presented by Hadopi French, (pdf) clearly show a low re-offending rate, with an impressive gap between those receiving first and second warnings. Hadopi sees this as an indicator of the system’s success, although there is always the possibility that subscribers wised-up on security and safer methods of downloading after getting the first notice.

That being said, the agency counters this notion by citing figures from a small poll carried out among letter recipients which found that 73% of those who received a warning did not subsequently shift to another method of illegal downloading. However, that doesn’t mean they all jumped on the iTunes bandwagon either.

“Receiving a warning does not result in a massive shift towards legal offers,” Hadopi explains.

Overall, 23% of respondents who received a warning said they went on to use a legal service. That suggests that three quarters simply dropped off the media consumption radar altogether, which doesn’t sound like a realistic proposition.

Next year will see half a decade of graduated response in France. Will media sales have gone through the roof as a result? Time will tell, but it seems highly unlikely.

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

Pirate Bay Traffic Doubles Despite ISP Blockades

Posted: 17 Jul 2014 01:35 PM PDT

The Pirate Bay is without doubt one of the most censored websites on the Internet.

Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site and this list continues to expand.

Denmark was one of the first countries to block The Pirate Bay, but the biggest impact came in 2012 when major ISPs in the UK and the Netherlands were ordered to deny their users access to the site.

The entertainment industries have characterized these blockades as a major victory and claim they’re an efficient tool to deter piracy. The question that has thus far remained unanswered, however, is how Pirate Bay’s traffic numbers are being affected. Is the site on the verge of collapsing?

As it turns out, The Pirate Bay hasn’t stopped growing at all. On the contrary, The Pirate Bay informs TorrentFreak that visitor numbers have doubled since 2011.

The graph below shows the growth in unique visitors and pageviews over the past three years. The Pirate Bay chose not to share actual visitor numbers, but monthly pageviews are believed to run into the hundreds of millions.

Pirate Bay traffic

These numbers reveal that the torrent site is still doing quite well, but that doesn’t mean that the blockades are not working. After all, the additional traffic could simply come from other countries.

A better indication for the effectiveness of the blockades are the number of visitors that access the site through proxies. The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that roughly 9% of all visitors use proxies. This percentage doesn’t include sites that cache pages.

In other words, a significant percentage of users who don’t have direct access to the site are bypassing court-ordered blockades though proxies.

Interestingly, the United States is by far the biggest traffic source for the notorious torrent site. This is somewhat ironic, as American record labels and movie studios are the driving force behind the blockades in other countries.

All in all it is safe to conclude that censorship is not the silver bullet to stop The Pirate Bay. While it certainly has some impact, there are still millions of people who simply route around the blockades and continue downloading as usual.

^Photo

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

Solarmovie Domain Gets Stolen by Mysterious Hacker

Posted: 17 Jul 2014 07:10 AM PDT

With millions of visitors per week Solarmovie is a thorn in the side of the major movie studios. The site indexes links to pirated copies of movies and TV-shows, which can be streamed directly through third party sites.

Apart from the ISP blockade in the UK, Solarmovie hasn’t run into any significant trouble. However, that changed yesterday when the site’s owner found out that someone had stolen the Solarmovie.tl domain name.

An unknown ‘hacker’ gained access to the name.com registrar where the domain was held and quickly transferred it to another registrar. How this could have happened is a mystery to Solarmovie admin Chris, who notes that they used a secure password.

“We have no idea how the registrar was accessed. The account had a 10 character long randomly generated password,” Chris informs TorrentFreak.

“I wonder why the name.com registrar didn’t send a confirmation link to the account’s primary email when it was changed. Registrars shouldn’t allow changes to login details in such an easy way without triple checking against swindlers,” he adds.

The Solarmovie.tl domain was transferred to EuroDNS and the registrant name changed to Gabriel Vasilica of HAVARD THABO LLP. The stolen domain now redirects to Solarmovie.ag, which initially displayed a “coming soon” landing page, but is now hosting a copy of the Solarmovie website.

The ‘fake’ Solarmovie has put up a notification informing visitors that the .AG domain is the site’s new home.

The “fake” Solarmovie.ag

solarhijack

The ‘real’ Solarmovie, meanwhile, has reverted back to its old Solarmovie.so domain where it remains accessible as usual. They hope that the registrar can help them get the old domain back. Time will tell whether that’s possible.

“Currently we are talking to our registrar about possible measures we can take to have the domain returned. As for now, we revert back to solarmovie.so domain,” Chris says.

While it’s unclear who’s behind the domain hijack there are several signs that it’s the same person who stole the 1Channel.ch domain, which later became Vodly.to. For example, both vodly.to and solarmovie.ag use the same IDs for the Newrelic stats service.

Whoever’s behind the stolen domains and however they pulled it off, other streaming sites should be warned.

Update: Solarmovie’s Twitter account was hijacked briefly as well, but has been restored an hour ago.

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