piracy
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Google removes ‘View Image’ button from image search
Say goodbye to the "View Image" link in Google Images. Google announced a few changes to its image search today, one of which being the removal of its option to check out an image without visiting the site that hosts it. It might be a bummer for some, but since it was a stipulation of Google's settlement with Getty Images, it was only a matter of time before it happened. In a tweet, Google said today that the changes "are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value."
UEFA secures UK court order to block illegal soccer streams
Tearing a leaf out of the English Premier League's playbook, the Union of European Football Associations -- better known as UEFA -- has been granted the power to block illegal match streams by the UK's High Court. UEFA won't actually be doing any of the dirty work, of course. Rather, the injunction allows UEFA to instruct the UK's biggest ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE and Plusnet) to do the blocking on its behalf. Instead of targeting random websites hosting illegal football (yes, we mean soccer) streams, this particular anti-piracy measure stops the signal at the server level, effectively killing the weed at its root.
Hollywood strikes back against illegal streaming Kodi add-ons
An anti-piracy alliance supported by many major US and UK movie studios, broadcasters and content providers has dealt a blow to the third-party Kodi add-on scene after it successfully forced a number of popular piracy-linked streaming tools offline. In what appears to be a coordinated crackdown, developers including jsergio123 and The_Alpha, who are responsible for the development and hosting of add-ons like urlresolver, metahandler, Bennu, DeathStreams and Sportie, confirmed that they will no longer maintain their Kodi creations and have immediately shut them down.
Atlus tried to take down a PS3 emulator advertising 'Persona 5'
Atlus has been infamously protective of Persona 5 even before it came out, and it looks like that hasn't changed a bit. The game developer has submitted a DMCA takedown notice against the creators of the PS3 emulator RPCS3 and their Patreon crowdfunding page. Emulators typically fall within the legal gray area of copyright law -- they don't infringe on anybody's intellectual property, but they can run illegal ROMs that do. However, as Kotaku noted, RPCS3's Patreon included updates about how far they are on getting Persona 5 to run on the emulator.
Kodi box piracy case comes to anticlimactic end
A man arrested for selling "fully-loaded" Kodi boxes has suddenly backed down from fighting his case. Brian "Tomo" Thompson pleaded guilty to two charges under the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act earlier today. The charges are for advertising and selling devices — in this case, custom Kodi hardware — built for the purpose of streaming content illegally. It's a sharp U-turn from January when Thompson attended a hearing at Teeside Crown Court and plead not guilty to both offences.
EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales
In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them.
Pirate Bay 'borrows' visitor CPUs to mine virtual coins
Piracy websites can't really depend on ads, so how do they make money? By using your PC's processor cycles, apparently -- whether you want to or not. Visitors to The Pirate Bay have discovered JavaScript code in the website that 'borrows' your processor for the sake of mining Monero digital coins. It doesn't always happen (it mainly appears in search results and category listings), but you'll definitely notice the sharp spike in CPU usage when it kicks in.
Owner of YouTube ripping site settles lawsuit with record labels
Last year, record labels took the popular YouTube-ripping site YouTube-mp3.org to court seeking the pirating website's permanent shutdown and $150,000 per violation. Well, the labels, helmed by the RIAA, have, as of today, won with recent court filings pointing towards a settlement between the two parties.
Developers put game on Pirate Bay to help cash-strapped players
Game studios normally bend over backwards to discourage pirates and keep titles off of any piracy sites, but don't tell that to Acid Wizard. When the studio saw that a young player asked for a refund for its horror game Darkwood out of a fear that his parents wouldn't like the cost of the game, it decided to offer a safe, unprotected copy of the game on The Pirate Bay. It wants to offer you a chance to play Darkwood if money's simply too tight. There are only two requests: think about buying the game when you can, and don't buy it through key resellers like G2A.
Australian courts order ISPs to block 59 pirate websites
Australian authorities will make it much harder to keep up with the latest on Game of Thrones. They're expected to crack down hard on dozens of pirate websites that serve unauthorized movies and TV shows within the next couple of weeks. That's because federal courts down under have handed down rulings for two separate cases, both ordering major telcoms and internet service providers (ISPs) to block a total of 59 websites and 127 domains. That's a huge number to block in one go and might actually help mitigate piracy in the country.
Roku clamps down on pirate channels
When Roku introduced private channels, it meant them as a way for developers to try their content before setting it loose in public. Well, that's not quite how it panned out: pirates have been using the channels to stream bootleg material. And Roku isn't putting up with that behavior any longer. TechCrunch, Cord Cutters News and TorrentFreak have learned that Roku now pops up a largely piracy-oriented warning whenever you create a private channel. It stresses that you should use a channel to stream "only legal content," and warns that Roku can pull channels with illegal material "without prior notice." It won't actively scan for piracy, but don't be shocked if your movie rip channel disappears in the blink of an eye.
Facebook's latest acquisition is all about fighting video piracy
Facebook might be rolling out even more tools for video creators, but it still has a pressing problem: Folks passing off other people's video content as their own. To fight that piracy, the social giant has acquired Source3, a startup that will turn its IP-tracking powers to catch folks illegally sharing content across Facebook.
Google highlights pirate sites in search results
Google may have redoubled its efforts to downplay pirate sites in its search results, but it's clear that there are some bugs to work out in its strategy. TorrentFreak discovered that the internet firm's search results in the US are explicitly highlighting popular pirate outlets when you search for "best torrent sites," while looking for "streaming sites" spotlights pirate services alongside legitimate providers like Crackle or Hulu. You'll have to search from Google's US site (international pages turn up different results), but they're still visible as of this writing.
Kodi boxes 'threaten to undermine' the UK's anti-piracy efforts
Media centre software Kodi is once again taking flak for its role in facilitating digital piracy today. An announcement from the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has praised "innovative" services like Netflix and Spotify for keeping Brits on the straight and narrow, but notes that the scale of online piracy remains "stable" -- which is just a positive way of saying no gains have been made in tackling infringement over the past 12 months, following several years of decline. While not mentioning Kodi specifically (which isn't unusual), the IPO states that "illicitly adapted set-top boxes" are partly to blame for this, and "threaten to undermine recent progress."
Mexican court halts sales of Roku devices due to hackability
Roku's legal battle in Mexico has taken a hit. Last week, a judge ordered importation and sales of Roku devices to cease in the country, but Roku later won a suspension of that ruling. This week, however, a Mexico City tribunal overturned that suspension, reinstating the stop to Roku sales and distribution.
UK copyright body throws idle threats at Kodi box owners
Audio-visual enthusiasts know and recognise that Kodi is the swiss-army knife of media centres. But for lots of people around the world, the software is synonymous with movie and TV show piracy. "Fully-loaded" Kodi boxes have made the open-source platform a huge target for copyright authorities and rights holders, who are now using the courts to punish people who sell ready-made illegal streaming solutions. The end user has typically escaped punishment, but the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) is now warning UK owners that they too could see the long arm of the law tap them on the shoulder.
Europe's top court rules that ISPs should block The Pirate Bay
Even though its founders are long gone, The Pirate Bay remains one of the biggest piracy websites on the planet. Over the last decade, the torrent hub has been shutdown, reborn and consistently targeted in numerous lawsuits, of which one is only now coming to a close. In a landmark ruling, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) told Dutch ISPs today that they must block access to The Pirate Bay because it facilitates an "act of communication" by allowing users to obtain pirated material.
Netflix, HBO and 28 other companies form anti-piracy alliance
Today, 30 content creators and entertainment companies announced that they have teamed up to fight piracy. The coalition, called ACE -- Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment -- includes the likes of Amazon, HBO, Netflix and Twentieth Century Fox.
A piracy lawsuit is tearing Kodi's add-on community apart
Some of the biggest third-party Kodi streaming addons are no longer available. TorrentFreak reports that ZemTV and Phoenix have recently closed following a lawsuit from US satellite broadcaster Dish Network, with other streaming add-ons following suit. The add-ons, which offer on-demand and live streamed content free of charge, are accused of direct copyright infringement of various TV channels.
'Rime' creators will remove anti-tampering code if it's cracked
Game studios that use digital rights management (DRM) tools tend to defend it to the death, even after it's been cracked. It prevents 'casual' piracy and cheating, they sometimes argue. However, Rime developer Tequila Works is taking a decidedly different approach. It claims that it'll remove Denuvo, the anti-tampering/DRM system on the Windows version of Rime, if someone cracks its island puzzle title. This is an odd promise to make, especially since it amounts to an inadvertent dare -- find a way to break in and the developers will eliminate the need for that crack.
