Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 17th, ’24

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002































Early Edition



February 17th, 2024












Reddit Can Shield Identities of Users Who Posted About Pirating
Mike Vilensky

• Film companies sought evidence for copyright claims
• Court: First Amendment rights of users online outweigh companies’ need

Reddit doesn’t have to comply with a subpoena seeking the log-in information for users who anonymously posted on the website about pirating movies, a federal magistrate judge said.

Film companies including Voltage Holdings LLC and Screen Media Ventures LLC filed proofs of claim against internet service provider Frontier Communications Corporation in a bankruptcy proceeding for allegedly allowing users to download their copyrighted materials. As part of that proceeding, the film companies have sought information about pseudonymous Reddit users who allegedly posted on the website about pirating movies on Frontier without consequences.

The need for the information about such users doesn’t outweigh the First Amendment rights of the anonymous speakers in this case, Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson, of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, said Wednesday.

Hixson analyzed the motion to compel under factors laid out in a similar case from the US District Court for the Western District of Washington and other district courts, saying a “dispositive question here is whether the information is available from ‘any’ other source.”

“Movants...cannot show that the information they seek here is unavailable from other sources,” Hixson said. “Frontier has indicated it will provide Movants with identifying information for those IP addresses upon receipt of a subpoena. If Movants sought further information, they need only subpoena the [internet service provider] for the subscriber information associated with that IP address, as the ISP does not share Reddit’s interest in protecting the anonymity of that user,” he added.

Hixson also concluded that to the extent the film companies are saying the Reddit posts themselves constitute evidence that Frontier allows users to pirate movies, "[m]ovants need not unmask the Reddit users to admit that evidence.”

Perkins Coie LLP represents Reddit. Culpepper IP LLLC and Clinton Firm represent Voltage and Screen Media.

The case is In re Subpoena To: Reddit, Inc., 2024 BL 40450, N.D. Cal., 24-mc-80005-TSH, 2/7/24.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litiga...about-pirating





How the Film Industry Is Letting Piracy Win
Robert Steiner

The movies might be coming back, but illicit film viewing never left.

Exclusive data provided to VIP+ by piracy-focused research firm Muso suggests that the current film industry landscape is an ideal environment for film theft to flourish.

The most pirated movies in 2023 closely overlap with the year’s blockbuster tallies, as Muso found “Oppenheimer” atop the list (15.4% demand for a stolen version), followed by “Avatar: The Way of Water” (14.6%). Notably, the two films also share the distinction of having the longest theatrical runs on the list — over 100 days each.

Past MUSO data has shown that long theatrical runs can sometimes deter piracy, but in the case of massive releases such as “Oppenheimer” and “Avatar: The Way of Water,” a long wait for official at-home releases combined with a large theatrical window seemingly created the opposite effect.

Although “Avatar” is available to stream on both Disney+ and Max, there was a nearly three-month gap between the film’s digital download and streaming releases. “Oppenheimer,” meanwhile, only hit digital and physical stores last November and isn’t streaming until later this month.

Too short of a window can also prove detrimental, however. “Shrek” spinoff “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” was a sleeper hit due to critical praise and word of mouth, but it only spent 16 days exclusively in theaters, giving pirates a high-quality version of the film just as it was gaining attention. Muso found that a huge initial spike in piracy demand for the film occurred just two days after it was digitally released.

Compare those films’ demand and theater runs with “Barbie,” the highest-grossing film of the year and the other half of “Barbenheimer.” Muso notes “Oppenheimer” had 83% more piracy demand than “Barbie,” which was exclusively in theaters for less than two months and hit the widely used Max during the holiday season, even offering an ASL version of the film. This combination of a shorter theatrical run, a faster streaming debut and extra accessibility likely tamed piracy demand.

The release timeline of “Barbie” also speaks to the correlation between piracy and availability. “John Wick: Chapter 4” is currently only streaming on Starz, “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” is exclusive to Paramount+, and “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” is now on Amazon Prime Video but initially launched on just Paramount+ and MGM+.

All three of these films are sequels to long-running, popular franchises and yet are only available on streaming services whose subscriber counts pale when compared with the likes of Disney+ or Netflix.

There’s also the issue of films such as “Puss in Boots,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Spider-Man” being subject to Universal’s 18-month shuffle with Netflix, where the films are passed back and forth between the streaming giant and Universal’s own service Peacock. As the streaming world is more crowded than ever, alienated and confused customers may be more inclined to pirate a film instead of paying for multiple services (especially as prices go up).

All of these factors have led to what Muso describes as “a gap in accessibility or affordability,” which, coupled with a given film’s popularity and cultural impact, is the main driver behind piracy. This issue is nothing new for the film industry, but it has only become more complex in a post-COVID world where standard theatrical windows are long gone and streaming services add, trade and purge content seemingly on a whim.
https://variety.com/vip/the-film-ind...in-1235906032/





Amazon Prime Video Drops Dolby Vision and Atmos Unless You Pay Extra

Confirmed: they’re now only available on the ad-free tier that costs an extra $2.99 per month.
Sean Hollister

Amazon has confirmed it’s not a mistake — your Amazon Prime Video subscription no longer includes Dolby Vision HDR or Dolby Atmos surround sound. That’s on top of the ads that Amazon injected into the service on January 29th. Now, when you pay $2.99 a month to remove those ads, you can get Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos back as well.

That’s the word from 4KFilme, which discovered that their smart TVs from Sony, LG, and Samsung were now displaying content in HDR10 with Dolby Digital 5.1 as opposed to the higher fidelity options they’d enjoyed previously.

Amazon spokesperson Katie Barker confirms to The Verge that it’s a deliberate move: “Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos capabilities are only available on the ad free option, on relevant titles.”

While price hikes are no longer remotely unusual in the streaming video space, where Netflix now charges $22.99 a month for its 4K tier, it’s a bit harder to compare Amazon’s prices to Netflix.

Amazon Prime Video was originally only available as part of an overarching Amazon Prime subscription — I have Amazon Prime because I primarily pay $15 a month or $139 a year to get free two-day, one-day, and same-day shipping. Now I’d have to pay an extra 18 percent to get the full Rings of Power experience without ads and in full fidelity.

Prime Video is also available as an $8.99-per-month standalone subscription; if you subscribe that way and add $2.99 per month, it’s more like a 28 percent price hike.

If you prefer ads, Prime Video’s $8.99-per-month is a dollar less than Disney Plus with ads at $9.99 per month, though Netflix currently offers its 1080p service with ads at $6.99 per month.
https://www.theverge.com/24071417/am...y-vision-atmos





Rampant Use of Tumblr Site for Filing False Copyright Claims with Google Under DMCA
Ronju Sarkar

Various entities, including organized crime rackets, criminals, scammers, fraudsters and even members of terrorist groups are randomly taking services of ‘Reputation Management’ firms in getting existing content links from Google search engine removed by filing false copyright claim under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), while these firms use Tumblr for creating back-dated posts on this site for their attempted copyright claims. Everyday, hundreds of such false copyright claims are being filed with Google by ‘Reputation Management’ firms thus dodging algorithms or Google’s bots by presenting fake references to back-dated Tumblr posts.

We found on Tumblr a notice stating: “Have your copyrighted works been posted on Tumblr without your permission? Sorry about that. Please complete the form below to submit a copyright claim and we’ll look into it”.

In the next paragraph, Tumblr says: “Also, this isn’t the right way to tell us about possible violations of our Community Guidelines or to submit other legal claims. Visit our Help Center to learn about those issues”.

On February 1, 2024, Tumblr in a notice said: “As a global platform for creativity and self-expression, Tumblr is deeply committed to supporting and protecting freedom of speech. At the same time, we draw lines around a few narrowly defined but deeply important categories of content and behavior that jeopardize our users, threaten our infrastructure, and damage our community. For more information on how we identify content and review reports, and the actions we may take in response, see here”.

It may be mentioned here that Tumblr is a free micro blog platform that allows users to post content to personal blogs online. The company was founded in 2007 and acquired by Yahoo in 2013. Today, Tumblr hosts 277 million blogs and serves content to more than 500 million visitors. Because of its popularity, blogs hosted on Tumblr tend to rank highly in search engines, especially if they include specific keywords like an individual’s name. Tumblr offers an excellent service and gives users an easy way to publish their ideas and develop a following. On some occasions however, individuals misuse Tumblr by posting negative, false, copyrighted, or defamatory information on the Internet. If this has happened to you, here are several ways to remove Tumblr posts.

According to our own investigations it has been revealed, whenever anyone looks for getting reports or articles removed from the Google search engine, they just copy the original entire content from the targeted site and republish it on Tumblr giving a backdate to establish their copyright claims by providing links to their backdated post on Tumblr.

We have found, individuals involved in visa scams and connections with controversial citizenship and passport selling ventures of Dominica and other Caribbean island nations, have been attempting to get news links removed from Google search by employing ‘Reputation Management Firms’ through pressing fictitious copyright claims under the under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

While searching information on Danhong “Jean” Chen (Jean Danhong Chen, age 54), alias Maria Sofia Taylor and her business partner Jianyun “Tony” Ye (Tony Jianyun Ye, age 51), the Google search result says: “In response to multiple complaints that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 results from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaints that caused the removals at LumenDatabase.org: Complaint, Complaint”.

According to the US Department of Justice (DoJ) Danhong “Jean” Chen (54), alias Maria Sofia Taylor and her business partner Jianyun “Tony” Ye (51) “submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) fraudulent documents that contained false signatures and falsely described how applicants would qualify for the EB-5 program”. They were charged under the US penal codes on allegations of visa fraud, obstruction of Justice, and aggravated identity theft.

Immediately after completion of investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and before being indicted by the US court, Danhong “Jean Chan (54) fled the United States and became a naturalized citizen of Dominica in October 2018. She might have used a different name – Maria Sofia Taylor while buying Dominica citizenship.

The Cases of abuse of Tumblr by organized crime rackets, criminals, scammers, fraudsters and even members of terrorist groups are huge. According to Samaa TV, an Indian businessman named Gaurav Srivastava used Tumblr’s backdating function to create posts that appeared to be from an earlier date, then used these posts as the basis for copyright claim to manipulate Google results for his name.

Tumblr said that the blogs and their posts were removed “for violating community guidelines” after they were used in an attempt to remove factual stories about the businessman, who abused the name of American secret service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to defraud a Dutch oil trader. The complex, international fraud carried out by Srivastava is the subject of increasing media interest after other allegations about Srivastava’s history of fraud came to light.

According to an investigation, Tumblr accounts linked to Gaurav Srivastava lied to Google to get two articles de-indexed and removed from Google’s search results by claiming that the original investigative stories were published on Tumblr and not on the journalistic platforms.

According to legal complaint repository the Lumen Database, complaints were made to Google citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The complaints claimed that the stories exposing the fraud and deceit of Gaurav Srivastava on how he cheated a Dutch oil trader were a copyright violation of the stories published on Tumblr site.

Gaurav Srivastava has a well-known history of using false copyright claims to shut down fact-based coverage of his malicious activities. After critical coverage is published, he copies the work to a new anonymous blog with no post history (often on sites like Tumblr or Medium), backdates the post, and files a complaint to Google under DMCA.

The parent company of Tumblr, Automattic, confirmed in a statement their assessment that the blogs were set up to raise fake DMCA claims – by people linked to Gaurav Srivastava – and have been “removed from Tumblr for violating our Community Guidelines”.

The statement added: “Tumblr and Automattic take legitimate copyright protection very seriously. We take great care to protect our users from fraudulent or otherwise invalid takedown notices, and similarly we have a zero-tolerance policy for blogs using our services to abuse the DMCA.”

Gaurav Srivastava first targeted Project Brazen, a US-based investigative journalism outlet run by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Bradley Hope and Tom Wright, in their original story about him, which contained their own original research and interviews.

Tumblr also confirmed that it had deleted the post published on its site used to raise a malicious claim against the Project Brazen investigation into Gaurav Srivastava’s fraud. Tumblr said: “Our team has reviewed EarlybirdtimeTumblr.

This blog has also been removed from Tumblr for violating Community Guidelines. Both Tumblr and Automatic take copyright protection very seriously. We will continue to manually investigate any reports of Tumblr blogs being used to publish content that is mentioned in these fraudulent takedown notices”.

Former Wall Street Journal reporters Bradley Hope, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and Tom Wright, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, revealed that Srivastava used a creative lie to complain to Google that the award-winning investigative journalism site had stolen the contents of story on Srivastava from another blog. By using Google’s copyright policy to his advantage, Srivastava used a fraudulent technique to get the story on himself de-indexed by setting up a fake Tumblr account and publishing the same content to claim it as his own – and then claimed copyright.

One of the reporters on the investigative story, Soobin Kim, tweeted: “Our @WhaleHunting story was removed from Google’s indexes due to copyright complaints. The complaints, saved on @lumendatabase, claim that we copied a backdated blog post, all content of which was lifted from our story. This is how fraudsters curate their online reputation”.

False copyright claims against Blitz contents

In February 2023, after learning about a notorious fraudster, who is patronized by the World Economic Forum (WEF), Atlantic Council and even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – as we began exposing his activities, this fraudster first attempted to get the items removed from Blitz by offering us bribes. Then he switched to an alternative option by engaging one or more reputation management firms which started filing false copyright claims with Google by presenting evidence from Tumblr posts. Although Google had initially deindexed some of the Blitz links being misled by the false copyright claims, we Blitz lodged counterclaim, eventually all of those deindexed links were back on Google search engine. But by that time, the fraudster was able to scam more people.

With these proven cases of using Tumblr for filing false copyright claims, either Google should totally blacklist Tumblr by flagging it as an untrustworthy source or the authorities concerned in the United States should impose heavy penalties on Tumblr for facilitating false copyright claimants. The third option is – Tumblr should make certain technical changes on its site, where no one can post any content by giving it backdate.
https://www.weeklyblitz.net/featured...le-under-dmca/





Apple Pulls Popular Movie Piracy App Kimi From the App Store

Before it disappeared on Tuesday, Kimi enabled iPhone owners to stream illegal bootlegs of popular movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Reece Rogers

Watching pirated movies on your iPhone just got a little harder. After climbing the charts of Apple’s App Store, the trendy Kimi app, with its collection of bootlegged movies, has just disappeared. Pretending to be a spot-the-difference vision-testing game, the widely downloaded app ranked above Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video in Apple’s charts this week for free entertainment apps before it was removed.

Without having to pay for anything or log in to any kind of account, iPhone owners could previously use Kimi to browse a wide selection of bootlegs for popular movies and TV shows. Many of the movies up for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars were on Kimi, at varying levels of quality.

Poor Things was included in a grainy, pixelated state, but a high-quality version of Killers of the Flower Moon was on Kimi to stream, although an intrusive ad for online casinos was splashed across the top. That definitely isn’t the viewing experience Martin Scorsese imagined for audiences. Not just limited to movies, viewers were also able to access episodes of currently airing TV shows, like RuPaul’s Drag Race, through the Kimi app.

Who was behind this piracy app? It remains a mystery. The developer was listed as “Marcus Evans” in the app store before Kimi was taken down, and this was the only app listed under that name, likely a pseudonym. WIRED was unable to reach Evans or anyone involved with the Kimi app prior to publication.

Apple is known for being meticulous and protective of its “walled garden” for safe-to-download apps, so it’s surprising to see a piracy streaming option, like Kimi, climb so high on the charts before being axed. Kimi received more than 100 user reviews in the App Store, many of which blatantly mentioned the free movies hidden within the app, and it had a four-star user rating. A representative for Apple did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

This isn’t the first a piracy app that has garnered tons of downloads in the App Store, though. In 2015, WIRED spoke with the developers behind Popcorn Time, a similar app. Security reporter Andy Greenberg wrote, “With Popcorn Time, the complexity of BitTorrent search engines, trackers, clients, seeds, decompression, playback, and storage is reduced to a single click.” It’s unconfirmed how Kimi was providing the streams, but the process of watching bootlegs was definitely simplified for users—just download the smartphone app and press Play.

The Kimi app’s saga is emblematic of a new resurgence in online piracy. A serious challenge for rights holders and movie and TV studios, piracy is once again on the rise. As streaming services crack down on shared passwords, and budget-conscious users search for cheaper entertainment options, the black market for bootlegs will likely continue to blossom.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-ap...piracy-movies/





Anti-Piracy Messages Encourage MORE Piracy — if You’re a Man
Thomas Macaulay

Threatening messages made to prevent piracy are more effective on women, according to new research

So say the cybercrime experts at the University of Portsmouth, who investigated efforts to deter illegal torrenting, streaming, and file-sharing.

To test the techniques, the researchers exposed 962 adults to threatening messages used in anti-piracy campaigns. They then evaluated potential changes in behaviour.

They discovered a cavernous gender gap. The messages led piracy intentions to decline by 52% in women, but they increased by 18% in men.

“The research shows that anti-piracy messages can inadvertently increase piracy, which is a phenomenon known as psychological reactance,” said lead study author Kate Whitman.

“From an evolutionary psychology point of view, men have a stronger reaction to their freedom being threatened and therefore they do the opposite.”

Unintended consequences of anti-piracy

The messages were verbatim copies of real-world anti-piracy campaigns. One was based on an advert by Crimestoppers, a national charity, which highlighted the risks of viruses, fraud, theft, and hacking.

Another reproduced a French government campaign, which threatened to terminate infringers’ internet access.

“We know already there are lots of gender differences in piracy as men tend to pirate more than women — they think it’s more acceptable and low risk,” Whitman said. “But what we wanted to look at in this research is whether the messages to tackle piracy had a different effect on men and women.”

They discovered that it did — in varying degrees. Among men with the most favourable attitudes towards digital piracy, the threatening messages increased their piracy even more.

Alongside the threats, the researchers also tested an educational message. Taken from the “Get It Right from a Genuine Site,” it emphasised the damage that piracy does to creators and the wider economy. Viewers were signposted away from piracy sites and towards legal platforms such as Spotify or Netflix.

It did not impact the behaviour of either men or women.

Whitman hopes the study influences policymakers, content creators, and anti-piracy advocates. She also warned them to avoid unintended consequences.

“There is clearly a need for a tailored approach in anti-piracy messaging,” she said, “but if messages can’t be accurately targeted to specific genders, they’re best avoided because they might send piracy soaring.”

You can read the study paper in the Journal of Business Ethics.
https://thenextweb.com/news/anti-pir...age-piracy-men
















Until next week,

- js.



















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