Sunday, December 31, 2023

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2023 in Review: RARBG, Zoro, Z-Library, Flawless, IPTV and AI
Ernesto Van der Sar, 31 Dec 10:54 AM

12 o clockThe new year can't start without reflecting the current one, looking back at the major stories of the past 12 months.

For writers and readers, the news often passes by, with major headlines swiftly fading into the background.

At times like these, it's good to realize that for people who are featured or closely involved, those events are often life-altering. But perhaps i'm getting sentimental.

Below is a compilation of some of the key stories this year. It's by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, but a decent reflection of what can happen in a year. And it never stops.

RARBG Shuts Down

Pirate sites come and go, often without being noticed by the public at large. That was certainly not the case when RARBG said its goodbyes in late June.

The popular torrent site had millions of daily users spread across several domain names. This included the flagship .to domain, where the usual torrent index was replaced by a farewell message.

rarbg farewell message

The surprise shutdown of RARBG and its tracker was made worse by the fact that RARBG was also one of the most used torrent distribution groups, which secured a steady stream of movie and TV-show releases across the broader piracy ecosystem.

As is often the case, others tried to hijack or take over the RARBG brand in the months that followed, but none come close to the original. Other torrent sites did notice a big traffic spike though.

Flawless IPTV Prosecution

In May, five men behind pirate IPTV service 'Flawless' were sentenced to more than 30 years in prison, the result of a private prosecution by the Premier League.

Operating from 2016 until 2018, the Flawless IPTV service served over 50,000 UK households while generating millions in revenue by selling cheap subscriptions.

Follow-up reports revealed that the service itself costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to run. It further showed that Flawless invested significant resources to circumvent the Premier League's blocking program.

Z-Library's Resilience

Z-Library's very existence was put to the test last year when U.S. law enforcement seized over 200 domain names connected to the site. Two alleged Z-Library operators from Russia were arrested in Argentina as part of a criminal investigation.

The shadow library continued to operate from the dark web and made a full comeback on the clearnet in February. Since then, the site has launched a variety of new features and initiatives, including a dedicated desktop application.

zlibrary 2023 roundup

The legal problems are not over though. The U.S. Government continued to seize Z-Library domain names through the year. Meanwhile, the two arrested suspects continue to fight the criminal copyright infringement allegations and their requested extradition.

IPTV Scaremongering

The past year has seen no shortage of IPTV-related news. All over the world sellers and operators of pirate IPTV services were arrested, signaling that this activity is not without risk.

Meanwhile, users are put on notice as well. This includes obligatory warnings that people may not get what they paid for. But there are more direct threats as well, some of which border on the ridiculous.

Several UK newspapers warned that police were knocking on the doors of 1,000 suspected pirate IPTV subscribers earlier this year. This massive exaggeration, paired with the suggestion that police used special pirate stream detector cars, falls firmly in the scaremongering camp.

Police car stream trackers?

mail-detector cars

While watching pirate IPTV streams in the UK is definitely unauthorized, the suggestion that offenders will be prosecuted and jailed en masse, was a bit much.

AI Copyright Troubles

Over the past year, artificial intelligence enjoyed its mainstream breakthrough. The instant success of ChatGPT and follow-up releases of other large language model-based tools kick-started what many believe is a new revolution.

The AI boom also triggered a host of copyright issues. Several lawsuits were filed against OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others who used copyrighted materials to build their AI models. In some cases, these companies stand accused of using libraries from pirate sites as training materials.

Meanwhile, lawmakers around the world are trying to figure out how to handle this rapidly evolving technology from a copyright perspective. These efforts, and the associated lobbying, will continue in the new year.

In addition to lawsuits and lobbying, rightsholders are also keeping an eye on individuals who tinker with artificial intelligence. This included a widely popular AI Hub server on Discord which was pulled offline after repeated copyright complaints.

Pikashow Stunt

In January, rightsholders pulled out all the stops to take down the popular piracy app PikaShow. This happened a few weeks after its operators pulled one of the biggest stunts in piracy history.

During Asia Cup 2022, a cricket tournament watched by hundreds of millions of people, PikaShow was the official sponsor of Afghanistan's national cricket team. This resulted in hours of primetime pirate advertising, marketing the brand to a massive TV audience of millions.

PikaShow sponsoring

pikashow-sponsor

Fast forward nearly a year and PikaShow remains a problem today. According to the MPA, the application has been downloaded 10 million times across various app stores and Telegram.

IPTV Datacenter Raid

IPTV raids and arrests are nothing new but, last May, Dutch fiscal police (FIOD) was the first enforcement authority to shut down an entire datacenter.

Information obtained by FIOD showed that the pirate IPTV operation was run from the GLOBE Datacenter in Den Helder, where more than 1,200 servers were taken offline. Several people were arrested and the main suspect remains in custody according to the latest reports.

The authorities didn't mention any specific IPTV services but the operation was massive. Local anti-piracy group BREIN reported that TVs in hundreds of thousands of homes went dark due to the raids. Europol, which also assisted in the operation, said that the service had over a million users across Europe.

GLOBE Datacenter (via)

GLOBE servers

Faced with an operation of this size, law enforcement initially failed to see that the websites of innocent companies were also taken down in the process. The problem was addressed after TorrentFreak requested clarification.

Zoro.to 'Takedown'

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) shut down numerous sites and services this year. Their biggest victory came in July when it took over the domain name of piracy giant Zoro.to.

The anime streaming site was arguably the largest pirate site on the Internet at that time, with over 200 million monthly visits. However, ACE would soon learn that they secured little more than a domain name.

A few days before ACE stepped in, Zoro.to had been 'acquired' by an unknown party that rebranded the operation to Aniwatch. Unsurprisingly, that site is now one of the most visited pirate sites on the Internet.

Omi, EVO, Mega

We'll end this brief and selective overview with a few key cases that started earlier, but saw some (preliminary) conclusions in 2023.

In March, Bill Omar Carrasquillo, better known online as Omi in a Hellcat, was sentenced to 66 months in prison for several crimes related to his now-defunct pirate IPTV services. In addition, he was ordered to pay $11m in restitution while $30 million in possessions were forfeited.

Omi in a Hellcat

omi in a hellcat fbi

As mentioned earlier, this year we also learned that the alleged operator of piracy release group EVO was arrested in Portugal. This action is likely one of the main reasons why we haven't seen any leaked movie screeners this year.

Finally, 2023 also brought closure for two of the Megaupload defendants; Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk. The High Court in Auckland, New Zealand, handed down prison sentences of 31 and 30 months respectively. The pair avoided extradition to the United States by pleading guilty, which didn't help Kim Dotcom's position.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

DNS Block: Canal+ Sues Cloudflare, Google & Cisco to Fight Piracy
Andy Maxwell, 30 Dec 04:54 PM

The music industry obtained a pioneering injunction to compel Danish ISPs to implement site-blocking measures back in 2006.

The goal was to limit access to unlicensed Russian music download platform AllofMP3, but the action also represented the thin end of a site-blocking wedge still being tapped in today.

Broadcaster and site-blocking proponent Canal+ believes that when service providers implement technical measures to prevent access to pirate sites, that helps to reduce piracy rates. Unfortunately, online roadblocks reliant on technical tweaks always run up against other technical tweaks designed to circumvent them.

Protecting Live Sports

A report from the French news outlet l'Informé outlines a fairly typical framework adopted by rightsholders in Europe. To limit access to pirated live sports streams, this year Canal+ went to court in France arguing that local ISPs should prevent customers from accessing several pirate streaming sites.

Through Footybite.co, Streamcheck.link, SportBay.sx, TVFutbol.info, and Catchystream.com, internet users were able to watch Premier League and Champions League football, plus matches from the Top 14 rugby union club competition, without paying Canal+, the local rightsholder.

After the decisions went in favor of Canal+, ISPs including Orange, SFR, OutreMer Télécom, Free, and Bouygues Télécom, were required to implement blocking measures. This meant that when the ISPs' customers attempted to visit any of the above domains, the ISPs' respective DNS resolvers provided non-authentic responses, thereby denying customers access to the sites.

Circumvention and New Legal Action

The response to ISP blocking by increasingly savvy customers was to change their network settings to replace their ISPs' DNS servers with those offered by unaffected third-party providers. By switching to DNS servers offered by Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco (OpenDNS), the domains functioned as expected. This entirely predictable response is now being countered by another.

After tapping in the wedge just far enough to obtain the initial blocking orders, Canal+ has now returned to court hoping to resolve the blocking orders' shortcomings. After failing to achieve voluntary cooperation, l'Informé reports (paywall) that Canal+ is now suing Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco at the Paris judicial court, to compel similar DNS blocking measures.

Legal Basis: Article L333-10

According to Article L333-10 of the French Sports Code (active Jan 2022), when there are "serious and repeated violations" by an "online public communication service" whose main objective is the unauthorized broadcasting of sporting competitions, rightsholders can go to court to demand "all proportionate measures likely to prevent or put an end to this infringement, against any person likely to contribute to remedying it."

Proportionate measures include blocking, deleting or deindexing communication services (in this case pirate streaming sites) when they meet the above criteria.

The judicial court may order these measures to be implemented "for each of the days appearing in the official calendar of the competition or sporting event, within the limit of a period of twelve months." In respect of the competitions Canal+ hopes to protect, that means until May 19, 2024, for the Premier League, until June 1, 2024, for the Champions League, and until June 29, 2024, for Top 14.

How Serious is the Circumvention Situation?

According to detailed reports published by telecoms regulator Arcom, ISP-only DNS blocking measures have enjoyed massive success in France.

Published in May 2023, Arcom's report for 2022 noted that the overall audience for illicit sports broadcasts decreased by 41% between 2021 and 2022, down from 2.8 million internet users on average to 1.6 million.

Arcom-streams-2022

On circumvention of blocking measures, in May 2023 Arcom reported that when confronted with a blocked site, almost half of all infringing Internet users (46%) completely abandoned the idea of watching the content.

Of all infringing users, just 6% attempted to circumvent blocking measures using an alternative DNS, VPN or similar method.

>france-dns-vpn-blocking

While circumvention of blocking measures doesn't seem to be an especially big problem in France right now, Arcom notes that it will remain vigilant moving forward.

For the sake of curiosity, we searched for signs of blocking in France using data supplied by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI). The system appears to detect pirate site blocking in France as an 'anomaly' (yellow) rather than confirmed, outright blocking (red).

France blocking-circ

The green sections may indicate that a relatively small number of users are managing to access domains well-known for their links to piracy. Whether that volume warrants dragging third-party DNS providers to court is another matter.

However, it can't be ruled out that there's also a strategic element to the Canal+ complaint; another tap of the wedge, more incremental progress, and then ever-expanding DNS blocking in preparation for whatever comes next.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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