Cyberlockers, P2P Networks Among Global Threats to Copyright Industry, Stakeholders Tell USTR
Copyrightholders asked that countries from nearly every continent be included in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative’s notorious markets list for piracy and trademark counterfeiting, in comments filed Friday. The copyright holders, including the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said cyberlockers, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and BitTorrent portals in Asia, Europe and North America are serious challenges to their industries.
MPAA and RIAA both cited a September report on cyberlockers, which are centralized file hosting sites for user-uploaded content and often used to infringe copyrighted material (see 1409190067). Online security company NetNames wrote the report, which was commissioned by the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), a consumer-oriented coalition focusing on the sale of drugs online and pirating of creative digital content. The report analyzed 30 cyberlocker sites -- split evenly between streaming and direct download cyberlockers -- saying they collected nearly $100 million in revenue in the past year.
MPAA said cyberlockers, P2P networks and various physical locations across the globe are havens for piracy and copyright infringement, in comments. “Online content theft poses a significant and ever-evolving challenge,” it said. “Content thieves are taking advantage of a wide constellation of easy-to-use, consumer-friendly online technologies such as direct download and streaming cyberlockers, which, in turn, have given rise to a lucrative form of secondary infringement on the part of ‘linking sites’ that index stolen movie and television content hosted on other sites,” said MPAA.
Some of the leading cyberlockers are in Russia (VK.com and Rapidgator.net); the Netherlands (Uploaded.net); and New Zealand (Firedrive.com), said MPAA. BitTorrent portals were cited in Sweden (Thepiratebay.se); Germany and Luxembourg (Torrentz.eu); and Ukraine (Extratorrent.cc), it said. Sweden’s Thepiratebay.se is available in 35 languages and has an estimated 43.5 million users, it said. It had more than 40 million unique visitors in August, said MPAA. Because of their distributed networks, many of the BitTorrent portals and P2P networks have several hubs and can’t be isolated within one country, said MPAA. Canada’s free-tv-video-online.me is among the “most popular websites for those wishing to link to illicit copies of first run motion picture and television content,” it said. Viewing and linking sites in Switzerland (Watchseries.lt and Putlocker.is) and Brazil (Megafilmeshd.net and Filmesonlinegratis.net) were cited as significant infringers. MPAA said Ontario is a problematic physical hub for the sale of infringing content, among other locations.
RIAA cited many of the same cyberlockers and other sites as MPAA, but also included non-P2P downloading sites and forums, in comments. RIAA said countries hosting such sites included China (Music.so.com and Verycd.com); Germany (Songs.to and Boerse.to); France (Wawa-mania.ec); the Philippines (Thedigitalpinoy.org); Spain (Bajui.com); Thailand (Todaybit.com); and Vietnam (Chacha.vn and Zing.vn). China’s Music.co.com is a music search engine with 3.5 million daily visitors, and Germany’s Song.to is a streaming-on-demand service that has more than 11,000 unique visitors daily, said RIAA.
ESA said it was surprised by the removal of Australia’s warez-bb.org, a linking site, from the USTR 2013 list. That site is “unwilling to comply with requests to remove infringing content identified in notices of infringement” and “continues to take steps to evade enforcement by changing Internet Service Providers,” said ESA in comments. Other countries said to host infringing linking sites included Poland (darkwarez.pl) and probably Pakistan, which is believed to host freshwap.me, it said. Canada’s kickass.to, a BitTorrent indexing site, was said to refuse any and all attempts at copyright compliance, said ESA.
Alibaba-owned Taobao, a Chinese e-commerce company, said it removed 99.23 million allegedly infringing website listings between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, in comments. Almost 94 percent of those takedowns were done “proactively,” it said. More than 33 percent of the takedowns were a result of a “special” campaign between Taobao and 1,208 copyright holders in the U.S., it said. That campaign resulted in penalties for more than 200,000 Taobao merchants, it said.