Articles about Piracy

HBO has had something of a rough time of things lately, suffering not only a hack that led to a series of leaks, but also a Game of Thrones leak via a distribution partner. Police in India have now arrested four people in connection with the leak of the episode The Spoils of War.

Shortly after the leak occurred, HBO's distribution partner Star India admitted it was the source of the episode. Now three employees and one former employee of Prime Focus Technology -- a company which processes Game of Thrones ready for streaming on Hotstar -- are being questioned in relation to the leak.

Continue reading →

Season seven of Game of Thrones has been something of a disaster for HBO. Not in terms of interest or viewing figures, of course, but in terms of hacking, leaks, spoilers and piracy.

Last night saw the official airing of episode four of season seven but this particular episode, The Spoils of War, leaked some days ago. Distribution partner Star India has admitted the leak came from its website, and HBO has called in the FBI to investigate the hack that lead to a number of episode and script leaks.

Continue reading →

The fourth episode of the latest season of Game of Thrones has leaked online before its official air date. Download links to the episode -- The Spoils of War -- have been shared on Reddit and Twitter, and the video appears to be a low-quality internal version.

Earlier this week, HBO was the victim of a hack in which 1.5TB of data was stolen. In addition to full episodes of other shows, there were scripts and spoilers for Game of Thrones, and these were subsequently leaked. This time around, however, it does not seem that the hack was the source of the S07E04 leak.

Continue reading →

It has been hard to avoid stories about Kodi in recent months as broadcasters and copyright holders panic about the software's potential for piracy.  The controversial site TVAddons was the subject of a lawsuit from Dish Network, and shortly after this it disappeared from the web completely.

Rather than originating from the US as many people suspected, the lawsuit against TVAddons that led to its disappearance comes from Canadian telecoms firms Bell Canada, TVA, Videotron and Rogers. Now TVAddons is back, but the story about its legal battle -- involving claims of piracy of Game of Thrones -- is rather more complicated than just about anyone could have thought.

Continue reading →

This week's hack of HBO led to the release of stolen episodes of Ballers and Room 104, and the threat of Game of Thrones leaks. Now the hackers have made good on their threat and uploaded scripts and episode summaries for yet-to-be-aired episodes, and speculation is rife that it is just a matter of time before episodes hit torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay.

Season seven of the show is just getting underway, and details of episodes three and four have now been published online. Other files have also been leaked following the hack, including log in credentials for HBO staff.

Continue reading →

Any online platform must contend with the problem of piracy and intellectual property rights, and Facebook is no different. The social network gives content owners the opportunity to monetize their videos, but in order for this to work, owners' rights need to be protected; this is why Facebook introduced its Rights Manager tool a couple of years ago.

But it seems that Facebook's own weapons in the fight against piracy and content theft have not been as effective as the company -- and content owners -- would have hoped. As such Facebook is taking Source3 under its wing. The startup develops tools for tracking intellectual property to allow for the monitoring of unauthorized sharing.

Continue reading →

As the new season of any major series kicks off, torrent traffic for episodes clogs up internet pipes around the world. This has been true of everything from True Blood to Lost, and it's no different with season seven of Game of Thrones.

Clearly the networks behind shows that are shared via BitTorrent and through other means are keen to clamp down on piracy, and anyone planning to download Game of Thrones is cautioned that HBO is actively monitoring people pirating the series, and warnings are being sent out.

Continue reading →

Kodi itself isn’t illegal, but using third-party add-ons to watch copyrighted content is. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen some developers pull their add-ons in the face of legal action, and 'fully-loaded' Kodi boxes have been in the firing line for a while.

So far ordinary Kodi users have escaped scrutiny, but that could be about to change as a major anti-piracy organization has expressed its intention to come after end users in "the very near future."

Continue reading →

In recent weeks numerous Kodi add-ons have disappeared, and the popular site TVAddons also suffered the same fate. It had been presumed that the disappearances were related to a lawsuit taken out by Dish Network, and now the broadcaster has been granted subpoenas to help identify those developing the ZemTV Kodi addon and running the TVAddons website.

The subpoenas relate to a number of online services including Facebook and Twitter, and successfully identifying defendants will be key to the success with any lawsuits relating to copyright infringement.

Continue reading →

The Pirate Bay may be something of a battered ship after an onslaught of attacks over the years but, somehow, it remains afloat. The latest blow, however, comes from the European Court of Justice which has just ruled that the site -- despite not hosting any content itself -- can still be held liable for copyright infringement.

The landmark ruling means that the site could be considered to have broken the law for simply directing people towards copyrighted material. There are implications for a wide range of sites and services, but the focus is very much on that stalwart of the torrenting world, The Pirate Bay.

Continue reading →

The negative attention that Kodi has been attracting recently continues. A number of high-profile add-ons, such as Phoenix, have disappeared recently as interest in the piracy potential for the media player increases.

The latest victim appears to be TVAddons, a site which lists unofficial Kodi add-ons. The site was sued last week in a federal court in Texas, so the disappearance is not entirely surprising. But the removal of DNS records -- rendering the site inaccessible -- without any explanation is a little strange.

Continue reading →

Kodi -- built from the ashes of XBMC -- remains a popular but controversial streaming media solution. The beauty of the software is that it allows for the streaming of just about anything, and that includes contents of questionable legality (oh, OK... let's just admit there are a bunch of add-ons that can be used to stream pirated content).

There has been a great deal of legal interest in so-called "fully-loaded" Kodi boxes of late, and this has had something of an unfortunate side-effect -- for fans of certain add-ons at least. Seemingly fearful of the legal implication of what their add-ons make possible, the developers of numerous well-known plugins are closing down. One of the latest is the popular Phoenix add-on.

Continue reading →

Within the next few weeks the BBC is planning to introduce password protection to iPlayer. The system is intended to prevent people from using the streaming TV catch-up service without paying a licence fee.

The corporation says that it does not plan to introduce "mass surveillance techniques or ask internet providers for IP addresses," but is merely interested in ensuring people comply with the law. The system should also help the BBC to reduce the number of people from outside the UK using iPlayer for free.

Continue reading →

A new patent from Microsoft could enable the company to not only identify and block pirate material from being shared via cloud services, but also to identify repeat offenders and take action against them.

The patent specifically refers to the ability to identify and block the sharing of "prohibited content," and this could be used to mean copyrighted material, or files that a company simply does not want to be shared. The technology relies on a fingerprinting technique which makes it possible to identify files rather than having to worry about trying to track down and delete files to prevent further sharing.

Continue reading →

Like Google, Facebook places great importance on advertising. The social network not only earns money from ads itself, but also allows companies and individuals to do so by displaying ads in videos. Pirates were quick to spot an easy way to earn money -- steal someone else's popular video and watch the ad revenue roll in.

Now Facebook is fighting back in a way that has already been used to some extent by YouTube. There is a new "claim ad earnings" option in the Rights Manager tool which enables the owner of a particular video to bag the ad revenue when their material is pirated. But the update to Rights Manager are more far-reaching than this.

Continue reading →