Anti-Piracy Gangs

File-Sharing Sites Unfazed By Takedowns, Bounce Right Back

During the last few weeks many file-sharing sites have been taken down by threats, legal action and police raids. From the mighty Pirate Bay to lesser known torrent sites across Europe and streaming giants around the world, the theme isn’t capitulation after a setback, but getting back online as quickly as possible.

Ever since file-sharing sites and services have existed, someone, somewhere, has been plotting to take them down. Some of the early and most high-profile actions were against relative giants such as Napster, KaZaA and Grokster. These resulted in expensive and prolonged legal battles which all but smashed their intended targets but as file-sharing fragmented – particularly with the introduction of BitTorrent – a handful of potential targets became dozens, significantly complicating anti-piracy actions.

Within a very short space of time, those dozens of new BitTorrent sites became hundreds, and the hundreds became thousands. The MPAA outwardly took this evolution in its stride, slowly but methodically targeting some of the most prominent venues, eventually more or less ridding the United States of notable torrent sites.

While takedowns such as those at LokiTorrent and the federal action against EliteTorrents had somewhat of a psychological impact worldwide, for torrent site admins it meant that the rules had simply been clarified. Time to leave the US and head abroad, an action largely carried out by site operators with a few keystrokes.

Ever since those particularly dark days back in 2005, there has been action taken against file-sharing sites of all sizes. Many sites have disappeared under varying styles of pressure, or become much less usable, Mininova an obvious example. But while rulings against file-sharing activities in general have created an impression of a tightening noose, it seems that along with the dawning of 2010 has come renewed confidence to fight back and treat takedowns of all types as an occupational hazard.

How many threats, takedowns, rulings, decisions, blockages and raids will it take to remove The Pirate Bay from the Internet? It seems that nothing can do the job. Threats didn’t work. Civil action hasn’t worked. Police raids didn’t work. Threatening ISPs hasn’t worked. Even the promise of jail sentences has produced no results.

The much-hailed assault against the market-leading Usenet indexer Newzbin and their recent defeat in court was meant to send a message to those hoping to utilize the increased usability of newsgroups and the possibility of profiting from the content found there. End result – the entire site back online with the same URL, movies being added by the dozen and the new owners openly announcing they intend to turn a profit on the site.

So with the leading BitTorrent and Usenet indexers proving adaptive, what about yet another attack on the leading release news site, RLSLOG? That was tried earlier this year and again just a short while ago and the end result proved as successful as the takedowns on TPB and Newzbin. RLSLOG was back up in a few days, business as usual and seemingly completely unfazed by the threats.

In June, Hungarian police tried their hand at smashing up the country’s BitTorrent scene with raids on a number of sites. The main target was the 900,000 peer nCore tracker and after initially hiding behind a proxy, it too was ultimately taken down. But as is the common theme at the moment, that site has also just bounced back, proudly displaying a phoenix graphic on their login page.

At the end of June there was outrage as Bulgarian police took down online library Chitanka.info, a valued source of user translated and submitted books, poems and other literature. Just 9 days after the operation to take down the site, creator Borislav Manolov has been speaking in an interview where he reveals, amongst other things, that the site is now back and fully operational with zero data loss.

And finally, last week saw unprecedented action by US authorities to seize the domains of a handful of sites connected to the streaming, linking to, and storage of, still-in-theater movies. While most remained down, immediately TVShack and Movies-Links returned with new URLs. Will the others return? Maybe, maybe not, but others will almost certainly fill the gap – outside the US, with non-US hosts and non-US staff.

It appears that while most file-sharing sites are aware that they run an increased risk of being monitored and targeted in 2010, many already have backup plans in place to recover in the event of action against them. By treating raids and ISP shutdowns as a disaster recovery situation no different than a hardware failure, file-sharing sites can in many cases mitigate the effects of action with careful planning, a handful of emails and a few minutes of keystrokes.

The question is, how will the copyright enforcers respond?

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Hurt Locker Lawsuit Doesn’t Affect BitTorrent Downloads

Despite a pending lawsuit against 5,000 Hurt Locker downloaders and the promises from its makers to sue even more, the film is still being downloaded by thousands of people every day. Interestingly, the makers do not seem to be sending takedown notices to torrent sites, most likely because that would ruin their business plan.

In recent years copyright holders have been trying to find creative ways to turn piracy into profit, with some success. One way to make money from file-sharers is to collect the IP-addresses of the people sharing a particular file, get a court to subpoena ISPs to reveal the identity of the sharers, and then ask the alleged sharers for a settlement of several hundred dollars to avoid a $150,000 fine.

These practices have been quite common in the UK and Germany for years, and in March this year the US Copyright Group imported this mass litigation “pay up or else” scheme to the United States.

The initial targets were relatively unknown indie films, but this changed when the makers of the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker joined in. After its Oscar victory the film was downloaded by millions of BitTorrent users, and in May the filmmakers sued 5,000 of these alleged downloaders all at once.

To find out whether the download rate for The Hurt Locker plummeted after the news of the lawsuit against BitTorrent users hit the mainstream media, we decided to take a look at last month’s download statistics. Interestingly, it turns out that people seem to be downloading the film undeterred.

In June, the film was downloaded little over 200,000 times, which puts it in the top 25 of most downloaded movies last month. Considering that the film has been available on BitTorrent for more than a year already, this high download number is quite an achievement and only a few percent less than the previous month.

Our statistics further show that 23% of all downloads come from the US, the territory where the US Copyright Group launched its legal action against BitTorrent downloaders.

Whether this means that BitTorrent downloaders are not easily scared by legal threats is hard to say. It could be that the people who downloaded the movie last month simply weren’t aware of the fact that their IP-address might have been noted by the US Copyright Group.

What we can say, however, is that the makers of the film don’t really mind people sharing the film now they might have found a way to make a multi-million dollar profit out of it.

At the time of writing, there are more than 200 torrent files linking to copies of The Hurt Locker floating around on hundreds of torrent sites. Although the makers of the film are quick to sue thousands of downloaders, no effort is being made to take the actual torrent files offline through a notice and takedown procedure.

Nearly every torrent site will remove a torrent file if the copyright holder complains, but clearly the makers of The Hurt Locker haven’t done so – they prefer to protect their newly found business model instead. Taking ‘their’ torrent files down could ironically result in implied losses of several million dollars in missed settlements.

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