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Monday, September 13, 2010
TorrentFreak Email Update
TorrentFreak Email Update |
| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent Posted: 13 Sep 2010 12:46 AM PDT The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, 'Iron Man 2' tops the chart this week, followed by 'Robin Hood'. 'The Expendables' completes the top three.
The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Article from: TorrentFreak. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anti-Piracy Boss Denies DoS Attacks, Torrent Site Refutes Claim Posted: 12 Sep 2010 01:54 PM PDT Anti-piracy outfit AiPlex Software made the news last week when its boss was quoted in the press admitting that his company launched DoS attacks against uncooperative torrent sites. Although the reports and quotes were quite specific, the company is now trying to distance itself from the claims. However, correspondence obtained by TorrentFreak shows another side to these unorthodox Bollywood anti-piracy enforcers. "When we detect a website offering a link or a download, we contact the server hosts and intimate them about the illegal activity. They issue a notice to the site owner," said AiPlex Software’s Girish Kumar a couple of weeks ago. "If the site owner does not comply, the site is either suspended or dismissed. AiPlex, a company working for Bollywood studios and charging between $4,290 and $8,580 to protect a movie, go further than your average anti-piracy outfit when people don’t co-operate with them. "The problem is with torrent sites, which usually do not oblige," said Kumar. "In such cases, we flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity. At times, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating further.” Understandably there’s a bit of a ‘wow factor’ associated with these claims, not least that carrying out DoS attacks against sites is a criminal offense in many countries around the world, even if you do happen to be working for the all-powerful movie industry. Although TorrentFreak contacted AiPlex for a comment but never received a reply, others have had more luck. Last week AiPlex contacted the BitSnoop torrent site with a copyright takedown demand for a movie they are protecting on behalf of a studio. In their correspondence, BitSnoop took the opportunity to ask AiPlex about their unorthodox approach to dealing with uncooperative torrent sites. Surprisingly Managing Director Girish Kumar denied the claims. “Our claim with the Editor [of the publication originally publishing his comments, article still online, unedited] was pointblank that we go an extra mile in identifying the IP addresses & other contact info of such illegal sites & pass such information to the production houses to pursue with the cyber crime police,” he told BitSnoop. “Further if the govt. provides a permission to cyber police to attack such sites, Aiplex can help the cyber police in providing the technical inputs. That said, one of the common method one can bring down the site is DDOS attack is what was explained. This does not mean that we are doing such illegal activates while we are sending the copyright notices to Infringed sites.” So given this statement it was quite interesting to speak with the admins at ICTorrent, a private Desi tracker mentioned specifically as an AiPlex target in the original article. “This company has contacted us 100s of times in the past; None of their emails had a PROPER Copyright Infringement Notice,” TorrentFreak was told. Indeed, we saw copies of several emails where AiPlex demanded proactive action from ICTorrent to remove movie torrents that weren’t even on the site yet. But scrappy takedown notices aside, what happened when ICTorrent failed to comply with AiPlex’s demands? Did they DoS the site or not? “Yes, they have done it many times and failed,” an admin explained while showing us an email from AiPlex which stated simply: ict attack on. enjoy :) “We have been dealing with this shit since Dec/2009 from them. We usually get attacked Thursday night till Sunday as this is our primetime to release PDVDs. They DDoS attacked us by sending 1 million requests from 10 to 100 IPs, we had to block all IPs. Our servers are installed with all modules so they will block automatically.” “I have also made a call to the company and had talked to them to stop DDOS attacks,” an admin told us. TorrentFreak was also shown a particularly surprising email exchange where a member of AiPlex’s staff asked for a copy of a movie due to him being “a die hard fan” of a particular Bollywood actor. ICTorrent refused the request and told him to download it from the site instead. Another email clearly suggested that money could be made by both parties if an agreement was reached and ICTorrent was “helpful” with takedowns. ICTorrent also showed TorrentFreak other documents which showed which movie company AiPlex were acting on behalf of, but asked us not to publish them. Yet. Reading between the lines it seems that ICTorrent want to give AiPlex another opportunity to stop their DoS attacks. Article from: TorrentFreak. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This week there are four newcomers in the list. Iron Man 2 is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.| You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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Sunday, September 12, 2010
TorrentFreak Email Update
TorrentFreak Email Update |
| Privacy Ruling Won’t Save Large Scale File-Sharers Posted: 11 Sep 2010 12:54 PM PDT This week a ruling from Switzerland's Federal Court said that an anti-piracy company broke privacy laws when they monitored file-sharers and then used the collected data to extract payments from alleged infringers. While some may think this gives a green light to file-sharers, those sharing large amounts of media should think again - the police might just start showing an interest. This week an important ruling was handed down by the Swiss Federal Court. The majority of a panel of five judges decided that anti-piracy company Logistep breached Switzerland’s strict privacy laws when it monitored and gathered information on file-sharers. The ruling, which is final and cannot be appealed, made clear that it is illegal to collect IP addresses in Switzerland with the aim of later filing a lawsuit. While Logistep said that this would make the country a safe-haven for pirates, things may not be quite as safe as some people imagine. While obtaining evidence for civil lawsuits will be hugely problematic for private companies, the state can still take action against file-sharers. The police in Europe are only usually interested in file-sharers if they are deemed to be pirating media on a commercial scale or are committing other criminal offenses, and Switzerland is no different. Just this week, Swiss police closed in on a woman who made available thousands of music tracks on the Internet. The 21 year-old is suspected of sharing more than 3,100 music tracks without the permission of copyright holders. According to the police, the woman said that she had no commercial intentions and only downloaded the songs for her own personal use. However, the woman did not know that as well as just downloading music, by default her (unnamed) file-sharing software was also making the tracks available for upload. As we’ve seen in recent cases in Sweden, sharing a few thousand tracks is certainly enough to get the authorities to take action – if, of course, they are pushed in the right direction by the likes of the IFPI in the first place. Yet again, and in common with similar Swedish cases, this woman will have been using a ‘shared folder’ type application, possibly Direct Connect but more likely something like LimeWire or Bearshare. As we’ve pointed out here a dozen times on TorrentFreak, people using this type of software to share large quantities of music are a sitting duck for file-sharing investigators. In the music sector piracy investigators aren’t interested in petty file-sharers, they want to be able to prove to the police that their target is big-time and worth pursuing with state resources. By sharing their entire music collections in these type of programs – often many thousands of tracks at a time – people are playing with fire. People are drawn to ‘shared-folder’ P2P programs like LimeWire because they are easy to operate, but as illustrated above, that ease of use can come at a price. On the other hand (and as pointed out earlier by frustrated Swedish authorities), proving large scale infringement against a regular BitTorrent user is a much more complicated task, so much so that there have been no arrests to date. BitTorrent may have a steeper learning curve, but many will consider it to be worth it. As anti-piracy groups digest what has happened in Switzerland this week, the focus may well shift away from private cases but anti-piracy actions won’t go away. Groups such as IFPI will not give in, but instead change the way they operate. Rather than chase file-sharers through the courts themselves, they will probably identify large scale infringers and get the police to do their work for them. Article from: TorrentFreak. |
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