The Crackdown On Torrent Sites Has Produced Many More Moles To Whac

from the getting-creative dept

If the ongoing battle between copyright infringers and copyright holders could be described in any simple term, that term would have to be whac-a-mole. Since the early days of piracy on the internet, the copyright industries have used their legal mallets to smack down any site or service whose head managed to rise out of obscurity. Napster was pushed into irrelevance, as were other similar apps. Then websites that hosted infringing files were slammed. At present, we are in the midst of a crackdown on torrent sites, with the copyright industries blaming them for widespread infringement.

However, those who are dedicated to sharing content illicitly are indeed dedicated. And so the game will continue into avenues of piracy that are fairly creative.

As crackdown on torrent sites continues around the world, people who are pirating TV shows and movies are having to get a little more creative. Cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Kim Dotcom's Mega are some of the popular ones that are being used to distribute copyrighted content, according to DMCA takedown requests reviewed by Gadgets 360.

Google Drive seems most popular among such users, with nearly five thousand DMCA takedown requests filed by Hollywood studios and other copyright holders just last month. Each DMCA requests had listed a few hundred Google Drive links that the content owners wanted pulled.

But what's notable about many of these DMCA takedown requests is that they target Google Drive links that don't actually host any content themselves, but instead have embedded YouTube videos within them. YouTube has long been accused of hosting copyright infringing content, but few people consider it a serious vector for pirating movies or television shows. That's because YouTube cracks down on piracy itself, and it is easily searchable, meaning that copyright holders can find their content and send takedown requests. Most infringing content is taken down quickly because of this, so what would be the point of these embedded videos?

It turns out that the pirates found a simple workaround - the videos are simply uploaded as unlisted, so they don't turn up in search results. The links to these videos are then shared as Google Drive links through discussion forums and other channels so it's difficult for the content owners to find the videos and get them taken down.

Popular video sites YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion are also being abused by distributing and hosting illicit content, DMCA takedown requests reveal, but the volume of such requests again implies that they are not being as widely used. Some pirates, getting creative, also turned to another streaming venue which is not used as widely - porn sites. For example, last year, news outlets reported an instance where all the songs of Kanye West's The Life of Pablo album were uploaded as a video to the popular website PornHub. You can still find a number of movies on the site, and oddly enough, also things like game trailers and music videos that could safely be posted on other sites as well.

While nobody would want to cheer this sort of infringement on, there is a certain aspect of creativity to it. That creativity nicely demonstrates the axiom: the internet is designed to route around obstructions. So too, it seems, are the communities dedicated to sharing copyrighted content. It seems that this war on piracy is whac-a-mole by nature, but it's actually worse than that.

What if the moles were hydras and every time you hit one on the head, two or more heads sprouted out as a result? Because it should be noted that the above strategy using Google Drive and YouTube to distribute infringing content isn't the only creative strategy that's sprouted out of the crackdown on torrent sites.

The most unusual service that is being abused for distributing content that we came across is My Maps. It's a feature Google introduced in 2007 to enable users to create custom maps. Anyone can visit the My Maps website, and create a custom map by pointing to a location on the map, adding a title, and filling up a description box. Google doesn't verify what kind of information users are sharing in description, so you can again easily share links to unlisted YouTube streams, or Google Drive files to download. What this means is that people can then share locations on maps, which lead to the pirated movies.

While Google's services are only the most abused of many for this sort of thing, you can already hear the content industries warming up their voices to sing a tune of how Evil Google is the pirate's tool of choice for copyright infringement. It's worth noting that all of this, however, has emerged despite Google's efforts at complying with copyright laws. It's also emerged as a result of this ongoing arms race waged primarily by the content industries, who could have expended this effort in figuring out new business models on which to make money from their content. Instead, we can mark time in the modern era by what the "piracy threat vector" du jour is. It seems tomorrow it may become Google Drive. Or My Maps. More years on it will be something we haven't even thought of yet.

Them moles keep coming, after all.

Filed Under: cloud, copyright, google drive, hosting sites, piracy, streaming, torrent sites

Do Pirate Sites Really Make That Much Money? Um... No

from the and-again dept

One of the key refrains from the supporters of PIPA and SOPA in pushing for those bills was about how "foreign pirates" were profiting off of American industry. However, as we've suggested plenty of times in the past, there's little evidence that there's really that much money to be made running such sites. Even more amusing, of course, is that the MPAA/RIAA folks have to both argue that "people just want stuff for free," and that these sites are raking in money from subscription fees at the same time -- an internal contradiction they never explain. I've asked MPAA officials directly (including on stage at the Filmmaker's Forum event last year) that if these lockers are really making so much money, why doesn't Hollywood just set up their own and rake in all that cash. The only answer they give, which doesn't actually answer the question, is that it's cheaper for cyberlockers since they don't pay royalties. But that's got nothing to do with why the Hollywood studios don't get this money for themselves. Of course, the real reason -- somewhat implicit from the MPAA's comments -- is that it knows these sites don't make that much money.

Researcher Joe Karaganis, who did the famed SSRC Media Piracy report, has just come out with a new report talking about just how little these so-called "rogue sites" actually make.

Now, some will immediately claim that this is ridiculous given the videos and photos we've all seen in the last week of police confiscating dozens of expensive luxury cars from the $30 million mansion owned by Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (er... Schmitz). However, as Karaganis points out, it really doesn't look like Megaupload made that much money from infringement, and even if it was, it seemed that widespread competition and the growing commodity of online storage would make the company less and less profitable. Even so, the actual details of the indictment show numbers much, much lower than what the industry has been claiming, and simply gives much more credence to the fact that Hollywood's estimates of "losses" are complete bunk:

It’s easy to see how Kim Dotcom got rich by being an early entrant in the cloud storage market, in the only part of the business that required a lot of large file transfers. (Much the same is true of broadband adoption, for which piracy has always been the early killer app—especially outside the US where legal web services are still underdeveloped.) As a subscription business selling a scarce commodity, Megaupload’s revenues were many times larger than the largest torrent or link sites. In 2010, execs at Paramount Pictures estimated (in testimony to Congress) its profits at between $41 million and $300 million per year, with the range reflecting different assumptions about its subscription rate. The Justice Department’s recent indictment put the number below the low end of the range—committing to only $175 million in total revenues since 2005–under $30 million/year–and reflecting a roughly 7-1 split between subscriptions and advertising. There are no estimates of how much of this came from legal sources.

In contrast, it’s hard to see how this model remains lucrative. Storage costs are falling rapidly, and there are no barriers to entry or significant network effects. For a comparable market, look to the highly competitive web hosting business rather than search engines or operating systems, which have more characteristics of natural monopolies. Many companies–including Megaupload–already give large amounts of storage away. Many compete for “premium” users, either with inducements or bundling with other services.

$30 million a year is still decent -- but for one of the largest sites on the internet, it's actually pretty dismal, compared to what other sites of that size can earn. The fact that Dotcom was an egotistical show-off who loved throwing around money doesn't really mean that much. Hell, it's pretty easy to find any number of entertainment industry folks who are just as bad, if not worse, in just how ostentatious they are with their wealth. But people don't automatically assume that Jay-Z is a criminal because he spends $1.5 million to close off an entire floor of a hospital for the birth of his daughter. Megaupload may have broken the law, but to automatically jump from saying that because it made some money, to it's all because of infringement, is a leap in logic without facts. But, more to the point, if Megaupload was such a huge portion of the problem -- as the US Chamber of Commerce has insisted -- the fact that we're talking about just $30 million in revenue (some of which is from legit sources) really suggests that very few are making much money in the "piracy" business (despite the horror stories about pirates rolling in cash and funding terrorists and organized crime).

Karaganis went looking for more detailed numbers, and in almost every case, it looked like being involved with such a service was not a particularly profitable endeavor:

• The Swedish trial of The Pirate Bay trial in 2009 became an occasion for all sorts of competing estimates of revenues. Record industry group IFPI estimated the site’s revenues at $3 million per year. The MPAA described $5 million in revenues. But prosecutors endorsed a much lower number: $170,000 from advertising (against what the defense characterized as $112,000/year in server/bandwidth costs and $100,000 per year in revenue). This is for a site that appears consistently among the top 100 visited sites in the world.
• NinjaVideo, a Brooklyn-based movie indexing site whose owners were arrested in 2011, was alleged by prosecutors to have made $500,000 in 2½ years. After the site began to make money, the four administrators split the revenue, netting around $33,000/year each after expenses. http://prospect.org/article/ninja-our-sites . Hana Beshara, the site’s primary owner, was sentenced to 22 months in prison under the US No Electronic Theft (NET) Act.
• Brian McCarthy, the owner of Channelsurfing.net, a Texas-based sports streaming site, was alleged by prosecutors to have made $90,000 over five years. http://prospect.org/article/ninja-our-sites He also faces jail time and fines under the NET Act.
• Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made some partial revenue estimates for targets of its 2010 domain name seizure program, Operation In Our Sites, based on information from advertising network Valueclick. According to ICE investigators, Torrentfinder, a BitTorrent site, made about $15,000 in ad revenue from Valueclick over a year in 2008-2009. Onsmash, a music link site, made around $2,500 in 2009-2010.

From there, Karaganis reached out to a number of torrent sites, to see if they'd share some data on how much money can really be made. And the results, again, showed very little money to be made. The sites all had decent hosting costs that they had to pay... and the revenue really isn't that impressive:

The picture that emerges from the survey is one of financially fragile but low cost operations, dependent on volunteer labor, subsidized by users and founders, and characterized by a strong sense of mission to make work more widely available within fan communities. Few such sites make or seek to make money. Many are specialized communities exchanging media of particular types, genres, or languages. A site like NinjaVideo began this way, but grew into a larger, revenue-making operation.

The key point here is that all of these efforts to "follow the money" or cut off the money flow probably doesn't matter all that much to many of the people running these sites. They're not in it for the money, but for other reasons. All in all, it seems pretty clear that there just isn't that much money in running a "rogue site" -- contrary to what the supporters of these bills will tell you.

Filed Under: cyberlockers, infringement, money, studies, torrent sites

BREIN Shut Down Hundreds Of Torrent Sites That Apparently No One Ever Used

from the if-a-file-sharing-site-that-no-one-uses-closes,-does-it-make-a-sound? dept

TorrentFreak has an article up about an announcement from the rather aggressive Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, insisting that it had shut down nearly 400 different BitTorrent sites in 2009, along with another 200 plus "illegal sites." However, as TorrentFreak notes, no one seems to know what the majority of these sites were. It had cataloged somewhere around two dozen sites that were shutdown, but didn't hear a peep from the users of the other hundreds of sites shut down -- which seems odd, since users of such sites are usually pretty quick to tell TorrentFreak of any shutdowns. So, did BREIN shut down sites that no one uses? Or did those users not tell anyone? Anyone have any answers?

Filed Under: shut downs, torrent sites
Companies: brein