Tag: piracy

Somali pirates return, adding to global shipping crisis

As a speed boat carrying more than a dozen Somali pirates bore down on their position in the western Indian Ocean, the crew of a Bangladeshi-owned bulk carrier sent out a distress signal and called an emergency hotline.

No one reached them in time. The pirates clambered aboard the Abdullah, firing warning shots and taking the captain and second officer hostage, Chief Officer Atiq Ullah Khan said in an audio message to the ship’s owners.

“By the grace of Allah no one has been harmed so far,” Khan said in the message, recorded before the pirates took the crew’s phones. The company shared the recording with Reuters.

A week later, the Abdullah is anchored off the coast of Somalia, the latest victim of a resurgence of piracy that international navies thought they had brought under control.

The raids are piling risks and costs onto shipping companies also contending with repeated drone and missile strikes by Yemen’s Houthi militia in the Red Sea and other nearby waters.

More than 20 attempted hijackings since November have driven up prices for armed security guards and insurance coverage and raised the spectre of possible ransom payments, according to five industry representatives.

Two Somali gang members told Reuters they were taking advantage of the distraction provided by Houthi strikes several hundred nautical miles to the north to get back into piracy after lying dormant for nearly a decade.

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Pirate Streaming Sites Cost Hollywood $30 Billion Annually

“[P]iracy involving illegal streaming services as well as file-sharing costs the US economy about $30 billion in lost revenue a year and some 250,000 jobs,” reports the far-left Bloomberg.

That estimate comes from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center. “The global impact,” the report adds, “is about $71 billion annually.”

“Ever since taking on Netflix Inc. at its own game, old Hollywood has struggled to turn a profit in streaming, with the likes of Disney+, Peacock and Paramount+ losing billions of dollars each year[.]” This has Wall Street living with the fear that streaming services will never match the massive income generated by cable TV. And that’s because they won’t.

“But the age of streaming has been a boon for some unintended winners,” Bloomberg found. Primarily “pirates that use software to rip a film or television show in seconds from legitimate online video platforms and host the titles on their own[.]” These “illegitimate services … rake in about $2 billion annually from ads and subscriptions.”

Because these pirate sites don’t share the burden of the costs associated with producing the movies and TV shows they stream for their subscribers, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) believes their profit margins reach as high as 90 percent.

The MPA says there are about 130 illicit streaming sites earning five to ten dollars a month from each of two million subscribers.

“Some of these pirate websites have gotten more daily visits than some of the top 10 legitimate sites,” Karyn Temple, the MPA’s general counsel, told Bloomberg. “That really shows how prolific they are.”

Within two years, starting with 2022, the cumulative losses will climb to $113 billion.

The article gives some of the two million illicit subscribers the benefit of the doubt. The pirate sites are sophisticated enough to look legitimate, so people might not know it’s illegal. Still, there is a full-court legal press to put a stop to this. Millions of unvetted illegal aliens flooding over the border? Hollywood doesn’t care. But don’t you dare not pay full price for Squid Game.

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Reddit must share IP addresses of piracy-discussing users, film studios say

For the third time in less than a year, film studios with copyright infringement complaints against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to share information about users who have discussed piracy on the site.

In 2023, film companies lost two attempts to have Reddit unmask its users. In the first instance, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ruled in the US District Court for the Northern District of California that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech meant Reddit didn’t have to disclose the names, email addresses, and other account registration information for nine Reddit users. Film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium Media, had subpoenaed Reddit in relation to a copyright infringement lawsuit against Astound Broadband-owned RCN about subscribers allegedly pirating 34 movie titles, including Hellboy (2019), Rambo V: Last Blood, and Tesla.

In the second instance, the same companies sued Astound Broadband-owned ISP Grande, again for alleged copyright infringement occurring over the ISP’s network. The studios subpoenaed Reddit for user account information, including “IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address, and other account registration information” for six Reddit users, per a July 2023 court filing.

In August, a federal court again quashed that subpoena, citing First Amendment rights. In her ruling, Beeler noted that while the First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, the film producers had already received the names of 118 Grande subscribers. She also said the film producers had failed to prove that “the identifying information is directly or materially relevant or unavailable from another source.”

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Could YOUR neighbour report your illegal Amazon Firestick? Warning to law breakers streaming content on ‘dodgy’ devices as experts say officers might turn up at your door

People using Amazon Firesticks and other illegal streaming devices could soon face a knock at the door from police officers warning them they could be prosecuted, experts have warned.

According to data from cybercrime specialists Fact-UK, there has been a significant increase in the number of viewers using their Firestick to illegally watch subscription TV.

The copyright-protection organisation says these illicit streams could be funding organised crime and allowing gangs to profit off their personal data – as retailers crack down on the practice. 

Some households use the devices to watch content from subscription services such as Netflix or Sky Sports illegally for a fraction of the price. 

Intelligence unit officers working with Fact-UK have sent out ‘Cease and Desist’ letters and are conducting nationwide ‘Knock and Talks’ with those who take part in the illegal practice, informing individuals they face further action or prosecution if they do not stop.

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Homeless Pirates Pillage Leisure Boats In San Francisco Bay

There’s a new, maritime dimension to the scourge of rampant crime in northern California cities, as homeless creeps are now taking to the water and preying on houseboats and yachts docked on San Francisco Bay, reports Fox News. 

“Multiple vessels have been stolen and ransacked. Victims have had to resort to personally confronting the criminals to recover their property without the benefit of police support,” said former harbor master Brock de Lappe at a recent municipal meeting. “Is this appropriate activity for a 79-year-old senior?”

The 3,000-slip Oakland-Alameda Estuary has been particularly hard-hit, as thieves use small boats to burglarize or steal private boats on the waterway. The pirates use stolen boats or old, abandoned dinghies to carry out their raids. 

A boating school for children has seen four of its eight safety boats stolen and destroyed. The boats cost the school between $25,000 and $35,000 apiece. “We cannot run our program without these boats,” wrote Kame Richards, owner of the nonprofit Alameda Community Sailing Center, in a letter to his municipal commission.

“The response we received from APD (Alameda Police Department) was that they could do nothing, and a warning not to approach the perpetrators if we located our boats,” added Richards. Sounds about par for the course in a state where the Senate has advanced a bill that would criminalize retail-store policies requiring employees to attempt to thwart thieves. 

“We had all hands on deck to retrieve this stuff, and it took 35 hours to get a police report number from the Alameda Police Department,” said Richards during a municipal meeting. The school is on the verge of calling it quits.

Another woman scared a troubling tale, telling Fox that she recently heard faint cries of “help me, please, please, anybody help me” coming from the inky darkness of the estuary. She dared to venture out with her kayak and a headlamp, and found a sailboat with a “panicked and terrified young man” aboard. He said pirates cut his sailboat line and set him adrift after a confrontation. 

“If there had been any wind at the time I wouldn’t have been able to go out there and rescue this young man who had no motor and no ability to sail that boat,” said his rescuer, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. 

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Coast Guard deploys boats to deter ‘pirates’ taking over Oakland estuary, officials say

Pirates are taking over the Oakland Estuary Marinas. Yes, pirates. And local and federal authorities says it’s getting so bad – the U.S. Coast Guard is deploying help to patrol the area.

“Boat owners attacked by pirates,” said Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao. “There are no excuses for that.”

From shipwrecks to sunken sailboats to pirate attacks, the shoreline around the Oakland estuary is seeing a new level of violence that’s leaving the area torn up and trashed. The irony is it’s happening right in front of one of the agencies responsible for addressing it.

“I’ve heard it’s gotten to the point of near fist fights on docks,” said former Harbor Master Brock de Lappe.

The vessels abandoned are covered in graffiti – left like a battleground scene of an action movie.

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The Pirate Preservationists

Long ago, when telephones were attached to walls and Sam Goody clerks roamed the earth, I stumbled onto a website whose proprietor possessed some of the sessions that Bob Dylan recorded with Johnny Cash back in 1969. One of the songs had gotten an official release, but the rest had been left in the vault, for most fans little more than an enticing legend.

It was 1996. In those days, acquiring illicit music on the internet was a low-tech, largely analog process. I sent the man an email, he agreed to share the recordings with me, I mailed him a blank cassette, and two months later the tape came back. It now contained one great performance—a cover of Carl Perkins’ “Matchbox,” with Perkins himself on guitar—and several endearingly sloppy ones.

The music’s journey did not end there. I belonged to an email list for fans of the Kinks, and someone on it had promised to ship me some rare material by the band. In exchange for those tapes, I sent him copies of several items from my own stash of music, including the freshly acquired Dylan/Cash bootleg. Revisiting our 27-year-old correspondence, I see that at one point he told me that he could dub videotapes more quickly than audiotapes because he could copy the videos at his job.

Looking back from today, this process may sound absurdly inefficient. But it was much more efficient than the music-swapping subcultures that preceded it. With the internet, you could enter a few keywords into a search engine and find someone offering a recording that you knew only as a rumor. Or you could wander into a digital crowd of music nerds—not just the two or three you might happen to know in your day-to-day life—and discover what unknown wonders they had to share. The ethos was friendly and, for the most part, noncommercial. (When another member of the Kinks list offered me a recording that had been released in the U.K. but not the United States, I mailed her a blank tape and some cash to cover her shipping costs. She returned the money, telling me she didn’t feel right about taking it.) The network was sprawling yet intimate, flourishing somewhere in the zone between the online and the offline.

Over time, the network moved deeper into cyberspace. People started collecting MP3s along with their tapes and vinyl. Napster came along, and other peer-to-peer networks followed; the music available became more copious, and the people providing it became more anonymous. (Fans were also more likely to download songs they could easily buy at the store, as opposed to rarities and ephemera.) Soon we had YouTube too, and it gradually evolved into an enormous repository for the world’s audio/video odds and ends. The Internet Archive vastly expanded the kinds of material it collected, until it overflowed not just with replicas of defunct websites but with concert tapes, 78 rpm records, radio serials, video games, magazines, movies, and more. The official distributors of Content™ figured out how to make the internet work for them too: We got Spotify and Netflix and all the other streaming services that beam sounds and moving pictures to us today. The culture was digitized.

Then another mood started to emerge—part practical, part paranoid, part nostalgic. The streaming boom ended, or at least it started to recede; many companies started cutting back on their movie and TV catalogs, having calculated that the money they’d gain by offering as big a selection as possible was now smaller than the money they’d save by not paying residuals or licensing fees. (Sometimes there was the prospect of a big tax write-off too.) Even if you thought you’d bought something, you might lose access to it: A year after Sony’s PlayStation stopped selling movies, it informed customers in two countries that they “will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studio Canal content and it will be removed from your video library.” The digital world seems vast, but how long will it last?

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A Reddit User Admitted To Pirating a Movie 12 Years Ago. Movie Studios Want To Unmask Him.

In what appears to be an escalating incursion into a user’s digital privacy, a collective of film companies continue to implore the court to compel Reddit to surrender its users’ personal details. This move is part of an ongoing piracy liability case against Internet Service Providers. Reddit, however, steadfastly resists, staunchly defending its users’ rights to anonymous speech.

While governments and law enforcement agencies have increasingly sought user details from Reddit — with over 1,000 requests, 277 search warrants, and 582 subpoenas last year, Torrent Freak reported — Reddit has staunchly resisted, drawing a firm line in the sand to protect its users’ privacy.

The battle over privacy rights came to a head earlier this year when film companies, involved in litigation against ISP RCN, attempted to extract personal details of Reddit users via a DMCA subpoena. Reddit objected, criticizing the subpoena as a sweeping and excessive invasion of user privacy, rather than a reasonable search for evidence. Reddit made a stand, yielding the details of only one user and rejecting the rest, underscoring its commitment to the right to anonymous speech.

The court sided with Reddit, ruling that the right to anonymity outweighed the copyright holders’ interests. US District Court Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler further reinforced this stance, suggesting the film companies could obtain necessary information through alternative channels, such as directly from the ISP in question.

Undeterred by the earlier legal setback, the film companies are now making a similar push against ISP Grande, targeting a fresh group of Reddit users. Reddit, maintaining its position as a defender of user privacy, declined to release the requested information, triggering another motion to compel in court.

The film companies assert that they have exhausted all other options for evidence and insist on the need to reveal Reddit users’ identities. However, their earlier attempt to contact Grande’s repeatedly pirating subscribers failed to yield useful results, forcing them to resort to targeting Reddit users once again.

In response to this potential breach of privacy, Reddit has reiterated its commitment to preserving its users’ rights to anonymous speech. Reddit contends that the film companies have not presented a convincing case to justify the infringement of privacy, arguing that its users are not an “irreplaceable source” of evidence.

Reddit has further pointed out that the film companies already procured the identifying details of 118 of Grande’s most frequent pirating IP addresses. This action, according to Reddit, debunks the claim that violating user privacy is the only path to necessary evidence.

Reddit also questioned the film companies’ approach, noting they have yet to subpoena the Grande subscribers they contacted, an alternative step that could have been taken before pursuing Reddit users.

The film companies have singled out a Reddit user, “xBROKEx,” citing a 12-year-old comment admitting to pirating the movie The Expendables.

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Motion Picture Association wants online ID checks to curb piracy

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) wants stricter online identity checks to be part of the new trade agreement between the US and countries in the Indo-Pacific region. The film industry group also wants offline enforcement tools to apply online.

MPA is concerned that website operators use unconfirmed identities when signing up for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services. There are multiple types of IaaS services, but MPA narrows it down to CDNs, proxy services, domain registrars, and web hosting. Companies providing these services enable piracy by providing their services to piracy websites, MPA argues.

IaaS services providers are currently not legally obligated to carry out identity checks. MPA believes the new trade agreement between the US and Indo-Pacific region is an opportunity to introduce such a requirement, Torrent Freak reports.

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US To Bring Back Pirates To Seize Russian Yachts

Centuries ago, whenever Kings and Queens wanted to quietly wage an unofficial war against their enemies, they issued something called a “Letter of Marque” to private sailors known as Privateers.

The Letter would legally authorize these Privateers (which was just a polite way of saying ‘Pirate’) to seize other kingdom’s ships and cargo while at sea.

It was essentially government-sanctioned theft.

Well, the United States Congress is bringing back this practice.

A recent bill that was introduced would “authorize the President of the United States to issue letters of marque and reprisal for the purpose of seizing the assets of certain Russian citizens.”

So, if the bill passes, children can once again legitimately dream of becoming a pirate when they grow up.

The last time the US authorized privateers was during the War of 1812.

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