TorrentFreak Email Update

U.S. Copyright Group ‘Steal’ Competitor’s Website
uTorrent Web Now Available on iPad and Android
BitTorrent Releasers Are The New Kids On The Piracy Block

U.S. Copyright Group ‘Steal’ Competitor’s Website

Posted: 30 Jul 2010 05:17 AM PDT

The U.S. Copyright Group (USCG) has been all over the news in recent months. The lawyer group sued thousands of BitTorrent users who allegedly file-shared motion pictures belonging to their clients, including the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker. However, it turns out that USCG are not copyright purists either, as they have blatantly copied the website of a competitor without permission.

During May this year the makers of The Hurt Locker filed a complaint against the first 5,000 ‘John Does’. Helped by the U.S. Copyright Group (USCG), the film makers are requesting the personal details of individuals behind the IP-addresses that allegedly shared the film on BitTorrent.

With these personal details in hand, USCG is planning to send out a batch of settlement requests asking the alleged file-sharers to pay amounts up to $2,500, or risk a full trial and a heftier fine instead. In recent months USCG has already sent out similar 'speculative invoices' to downloaders of other films, including the indie movie Far Cry.

It’s needless to say that the administrative process to handle thousands of settlements will involve quite a bit of work. To make this easier for themselves and the alleged downloaders, USCG recently put up a settlement website where visitors to their main website Copyrightsettlements.info are redirected to.

By itself the mere existence of this settlement portal wouldn’t really be newsworthy, but this changed when we realized that they had copied it from a competitor.

Six weeks ago a TorrentFreak reader alerted us that USCG was setting up a new website to deal with the settlements. Instead of coding the site themselves, they had simply copied the code (including the copyright statement) and images from a company in the same line of work. The images below show how both sites looked at the time.

Copied website (large)

Source (large)

Because the USCG site was hosted on a force.com subdomain, we weren’t able to verify the legitimacy of this site to find out if there was indeed a direct connection to USCG. To be honest, we simply couldn’t believe that USCG would be stupid enough to blatantly rip-off a website like this, so we assumed that someone had tried to pull off a prank.

A month after the email, however, the same site popped up again when we tried to access the website of USCG. Although the original layout was stripped down significantly over the past weeks, the website still uses code and images from the Copyright Enforcement Group.

Initially, USCG even listed their competitor’s phone number on their site, but they were wise enough to remove this and other texts that refer to the Copyright Enforcement Group. That said, there is no doubt that USCG’s website is ‘stolen’.

Both the source code and the copied image names clearly reveal that the code was blatantly copied from their competitors. Armed with this knowledge we decided to contact the victims of this apparent violation to ask if they had perhaps authorized this use. The answer we got was clear.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are not associated with the US Copyright Group and they are not authorized to use Copyright Enforcement Group materials,” a representative of the Copyright Enforcement Group told TorrentFreak in a response.

Another representative told the reader who tipped us off that the US Copyright Group and Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver will be receiving a cease and desist from Copyright Enforcement Group.

Of course, we’ve seen this type of behavior before. The UK’s ACS:Law, also writing to thousands of file-sharers demanding cash payments for alleged infringements, aren’t whiter than whiter either. They took sections of several news articles and tried, unsuccessfully, to pass them off as their own content on their company website.

So there we have it once again. An outfit that targets copyright infringers is actively infringing copyright themselves. They are so incompetent and probably blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes, that they can’t even put a website together without breaking the law themselves – copyright law.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

uTorrent Web Now Available on iPad and Android

Posted: 29 Jul 2010 01:44 PM PDT

After adding support for the iPhone last month, BitTorrent Inc. has now made the remote access 'Web' feature of its uTorrent Falcon client compatible with the iPad and Android devices. uTorrent users can now remotely control their downloads from wherever they are on their favorite mobile device.

This year BitTorrent Inc. has been very active with the development of uTorrent. The company pushed out two experimental clients, codenamed Falcon and Griffin, which are bundled in the latest uTorrent 3.0 alpha release.

Both projects add several new features to uTorrent. The Griffin branch of uTorrent adds Apps for uTorrent support, allowing users to easily install extensions and add custom features. The Falcon project enables users to stream torrent video files and access their client remotely through a secure web-interface.

With uTorrent ‘Web’, users can access torrents running on their PC from anywhere in the world, on any computer they have access to. Torrents can be added, paused and removed using an interface with a look and feel identical to that of the uTorrent application.

Initially, uTorrent ‘Web’ was only available on standard PC browsers, but last month iPhone support was added. Now, after many requests from uTorrent users, the remote control feature is now compatible with the iPad and Android devices.

“Since launching µTorrent Web for iPhone, users have been clamoring for something similar on other devices,” BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris announced. “So, today we are very excited to announce support for the iPad and Android platform – including the Nexus One and Google Ion devices. Now you can control torrents via your web browser on a PC, iPhone, iPad and Android.”

The response from users of the remote control feature has been quite positive thus far, but there’s also a group of people who are reluctant to try the service because of privacy concerns. The ‘agreement’ between the MPAA and BitTorrent Inc. is still not forgotten by everyone, even though that only applied to BitTorrent Inc’s now defunct search engine. Morris, however, ensures that users’ privacy is in good hands with BitTorrent Inc.

“Just like with µTorrent Web for iPhone, we continue to take users' privacy very seriously – all your private data is encrypted from the moment it leaves your browser right to the client on the other end. So, as before, users can rest assured that the private details of their µTorrent usage are never exposed to BitTorrent Inc. or any third parties,” he says.

In order to use the web interface, users will first have to download and install the latest Falcon release or uTorrent 3.0 alpha. In the client users can set a username and password that they can use to access their torrents remotely. After an encryption swipe and logging in, users will see the mobile compatible interface that gives them all the controls they are familiar with in their regular PC client.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

BitTorrent Releasers Are The New Kids On The Piracy Block

Posted: 29 Jul 2010 06:01 AM PDT

For many years movies have been released onto the Internet, trickling down the so-called 'piracy pyramid' from elitist and private sites. Now a new breed of release groups are starting to make waves, bringing media directly to the masses. Today we take a closer look at this scene and speak to groups on the frontline to see what makes them tick.

In our earlier article, BitTorrent Releasers Slice The Top Off Movie Piracy Pyramid, we took a first look at the growing phenomenon of blockbuster movies appearing on the Internet directly via BitTorrent. Traditionally, most movies have trickled down from ‘The Scene’, a network of highly secure servers and individuals with one critical flaw – everything they share privately leaks out to the wider Internet.

However, release groups inhabiting P2P networks such as BitTorrent are now sometimes managing to beat the old-schoolers to the punch, providing movies quicker and increasingly in better quality. So how are they pulling this off?

KoOlWaReZ, the admin of P2PElite, a new site currently under development with the aim of providing a home, profile and a central location for P2P release groups so they can interact with the public, says that while the Scene do a good job on quality and in many previous cases still get material first, times are changing.

“I’d say about two years ago, Scene had a nice grasp on getting things first, but lately anyone who has followed both Scene/P2P equally will know that P2P groups these days have more contacts,” he told TorrentFreak.

By default the super-secret nature of the Scene renders them hard to find. P2P groups, on the other hand, are a lot more accessible, which means that those who have access to movies can get them to these potential distributors a lot more easily. While in the past only the Scene could take credit for putting a first run movie onto the Internet first, increasingly those bragging rights are taken by P2P groups. So what motivates these individuals to do what they do?

Two groups, which asked to remain anonymous, were in agreement with the other groups in citing the overwhelming urge to share and the feelings of achievement associated with seeing tens of thousands of peers on torrents created by them. Others were prepared to speak on the record.

“My main reason aside from any other would be because of my affiliation with a certain community which me and other friends manage and run,” prolific releaser Noir told TorrentFreak.

However, altruism aside, there is another clear attraction for groups to release on P2P – an absolute lack of bureaucracy. Through years of tradition building, some of it well intentioned, some of it verging on the ridiculous, the Scene has accumulated a mind-boggling array of rules and regulations to which all members and releases must adhere. P2P releasers, on the other hand, are free to do whatever they like.

“[We release on P2P] because there are no specific rules to encode to,” release group PrisM told TorrentFreak. “We can encode to a better quality within our own standards, and try and make the best quality the source permits. We can also use all sources available.”

KoOlWaReZ also agreed that some of the grounds used in the Scene for a ‘nuking’ (an action taken against a release to disallow it) or even not nuking a release can affect quality and availability of releases. In the scenario below, a better quality version of a movie would be disallowed not due to lack of availability, but due to Scene rules.

“You pre a CAM [release a camcorder version of a movie], it doesn’t get nuked so the next group who has a much better CAM can’t use it now until they get direct line [for the audio track] to pre [release] a TS [Telesync - a cammed version of a movie with audio from a better quality direct source],” KoOlWaReZ explained. “What about the public? In the meantime we get to watch some funky flickering green tinted shit job.”

Others also agree that Scene rules have the potential to hold back the end product.

“The Scene has specific rules which diminish quality, while in P2P having no rules you see some encoders doing a little less than ‘masterpieces’,” says Noir. “You will see P2P putting in more effort into making a video look the same or better than the source itself with the use of filtering. So generally you will see better quality videos from P2P encoders.”

So does this mean that P2P release groups will eventually beat the Scene at their own game? Our contacts generally believed that over time that possibility definitely exists, but noted that P2P groups have a way to go and still owe a lot to their more exclusive cousins.

“The Scene is quite large, larger then P2P, and I have to say it’s more sophisticated,” notes Noir. “If it weren’t for the Scene, most of us in P2P at this moment would not be here.”

While Noir’s innumerable releases appear on both public and private trackers, PrisM favor private sites with acronyms such as TL, BB, THS, MH, SP, TA, PTF. Those with Google and 5 minutes spare and will find them easily. Other release groups we spoke with weren’t keen to say where they release first, but it’s clear that most releases end up on public trackers soon enough, just like the majority of Scene releases.

Inevitably we asked about security. PrisM told us that they tend to support private sites since they’re “more secure” and Noir told us that that although more open than the Scene, P2P groups take enough precautions to stay safe.

“Security on releasing P2P is at a very high standard now and a lot better than 3 years ago,” says PrisM. “The Scene has good security but it also creates ‘hotspots’ for companies like BREIN to investigate highly used servers which is a high risk.”

Two other groups contacted by TorrentFreak refused point blank to talk about their security and shrugged off suggestions that these days their work is very exposed. Questions about their sources went largely unanswered too, but a general theme was “from all the usual places, from all the usual suspects.” Noir acknowledged that things are getting more difficult, but said releases will continue to flow.

“I have been doing this for over 3 years now, and can gladly say I still enjoy it. P2P in general has changed quite a bit since. Although laws are getting harsher and things are getting harder, I’m still happy I can release a movie to a mass community which can entertain themselves for a few hours with family and friends. I’ll do this until I can’t anymore.”

As with all Scene vs P2P debates during the last decade, the comments below this article will inevitably contain arguments about who was really ‘first’ with a release, who stole what source from who, and who re-encoded someone else’s work, ad infinitum. While a few years ago P2P nearly always ‘stole’ the Scene’s work, these days it’s not unknown for the Scene to ‘steal’ the work of P2P groups. This has happened on a number of notable occasions recently, not least on the releases of Wolverine and the James Cameron blockbuster, Avatar.

But while the Scene always get uppity about this situation, it seems that most P2P groups don’t really care.

“We don’t really mind,” say PrisM. “After all, we do this to share with the world, so anyone is welcome to use what they want for whatever reason. We re-encode Scene releases, so they can feel free to do the same to ours. It’s what were about – sharing!”

It’s also probably fair to say that most BitTorrent downloaders don’t care about the source either, as long as the outcome is good. And two sources, as they say, must be better than one.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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