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Piracy and File-Sharing Traffic Surges Amidst Covid-19 CrisisErnesto, 08 Apr 09:16 PM The coronavirus pandemic has drastically changed the lives of

Piracy and File-Sharing Traffic Surges Amidst Covid-19 Crisis Ernesto, 08 Apr 09:16 PM The coronavirus pandemic has drastically changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world. In every continent, local governments have imposed restrictive measures, urging people to stay inside as much as possible. As a result of these restrictions, Internet traffic has gone up. More people are working from home over remote connections while others pass the time by looking for online news and entertainment. Traffic to several legal streaming services has gone up significantly. YouTube, in particular, has gained a lot of traffic. In March, traffic management company Sandvine reported a global 10% increase in traffic to the streaming site, which helped it surpass Netflix for the first time. The effects of the Covid-19 crisis are not limited to legal entertainment consumption, however. A few weeks ago we already signaled that interest in pirate sites had gone up in regions where a lockdown had been imposed. Using a variety of data sources, we can now show that piracy and file-sharing traffic is impacted around the world. We start with China, where the virus impacted daily life first. Mid-January the new coronavirus started to make headlines and on January 23, 2020, authorities in Wuhan announced a quarantine and prevented travel in and out of the region. In the days that followed, more restrictions followed in China. Looking at the number of Chinese visitors to pirate sites, from December to the end of February, we see that these measures had a clear impact. The data in question come from piracy tracking from MUSO and were kindly shared with TorrentFreak. The graph below shows that a sharp increase in pirate site visits started on January 24, reaching a peak on the 27th. Pirate site traffic started to drop off a bit after that, but at the end of February, it was still roughly 20% more than before the Coronavirus measures started. Chinese pirate site visits While MUSO's data are valuable, they only run to the end of February, while the measures in most other countries started around mid-March. To cover the global trend we, therefore, obtained the number of daily BitTorrent downloads, as measured by iknowwhatyoudownload.com. This service tracks millions of files that are available on public torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay and YTS. The worldwide torrent download estimates show a clear increase from March 6 to April 6. They started off by hovering around 12 million daily recorded downloads and went up to 16 million a month later, which is a 33% increase. Tracked torrent downloads worldwide This spike is also visible at the torrent tracker level. The operator of OpenTrackr.org, a widely used content-neutral tracker, informs us that he sees an uptick in the total number of connections as well as the number of connected peers. OpenTrackr.org recently implemented a technical change, which makes it hard to compare numbers over a longer period of time. However, the number of connected peers were increasing both before and after the change. As shown below, between March 31 and April 6, the peer count went up from little over 24 million to more than 26 million during the daily peak. Peer count on OpenTrackr The data presented throughout this article clearly suggest that the coronavirus outbreak is increasing piracy and file-sharing traffic. This is visible on a global level, but we expect the country-specific trends to be even more pronounced. We are still processing some additional data to shed some more light on local trends and hope to highlight these in a future article. Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review. Russia Wants New Fines For Platforms That Don't Remove Pirated Content Fast Enough Andy, 08 Apr 12:03 PM Given Russia's historically weak response to the availability of pirated content online, the past seven years have seen a dramatic turnaround. While the laws of the United States, Russia's most vocal critic, have remained largely static, Russia implemented new anti-piracy legislation in 2013 and has continually updated it. One of its major weapons is an expedited process to force platforms to remove content or face permanent blocking by ISPs. Under the current system and following a request by copyright holders, telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor can order platforms and hosts to remove or block access to pirated content. This action must be taken three days after a related court process and can result in fines of 700,000 rubles (US$9,240) or up to 3,000,000 rubles (US$39,600) for repeat offenders. However, some targets are not responsive enough, or responsive at all, so the government plans to make that a more costly option. According to a regulation filing spotted by Kommersant, the Ministry of Culture wants to address these issues with amendments to the law. The bills, precise details of which are yet to be revealed by the government, are tweaks to the Code of Administrative Offenses. They propose new fines for failure to comply with the instructions of Roscomnadzor to remove content and a reduction of the window of opportunity to remove content following a request. In comments made by a representative from the Ministry, Russia's anti-piracy legislation needs to be tightened up, with the department citing the length of the legal procedure to have content blocked as a concern. The issue of extrajudicial processes against anonymous site owners will also need to be addressed, since by their very nature they tend to be less responsive. Kommersant sources describe violations following Roscomnadzor's orders as "frequent". At this stage there is no detail on the scale of any new fines, nor is the government providing an indication on how quickly content should be removed in the future. Furthermore, while legitimate platforms can probably be forced to act more quickly, 'pirate' sites likely won't respond as required and won't be responsive to fines, critics say. "How can a pirate who is hiding his legal entity and identity be fined?" questioned one Kommersant source. Nevertheless, industry players are hoping that should new fines be introduced, they will be of a magnitude to act as a real deterrent against non-compliance. The government has already penciled in a date of December 20, 2020, for the new amendments to come into force, so more detail should become available in the weeks to come. Whether they will have the desired effect will remain to be seen. In the meantime, however, the anti-piracy memorandum continues in the background. The actions of the major companies party to the agreement don't render content inaccessible at the source but according to recent reports, they are having considerable success in making pirated material harder to find in search engines. Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review. ©2020 TorrentFreak | Office 21338 PO Box 4336 Manchester, North West M61 0BW United Kingdom Web Version   Preferences   Forward   Unsubscribe     Powered by Mad Mimi®A GoDaddy® company