How NAGRA Fights Kodi and IPTV Piracy

Nagravision or NAGRA is one of the best known companies operating in the digital cable and satellite television content security space. Due to successes spanning several decades, the company has often proven unpopular with pirates.

In particular, Nagravision encryption systems have regularly been a hot topic for discussion on cable and satellite hacking forums, frustrating those looking to receive pay TV services without paying the high prices associated with them. However, the rise of the Internet is now presenting new challenges.

NAGRA still protects traditional cable and satellite pay TV services in 2017; Virgin Media in the UK is a long-standing customer, for example. But the rise of Internet streaming means that pirate content can now be delivered to the home with ease, completely bypassing the entire pay TV provider infrastructure. And, by extension, NAGRA’s encryption.

This means that NAGRA has been required to spread its wings.

As reported in April, NAGRA is establishing a lab to monitor and detect unauthorized consumption of content via set-top boxes, websites and other streaming platforms. That covers the now omnipresent Kodi phenomenon, alongside premium illicit IPTV services. TorrentFreak caught up with the company this week to find out more.

“NAGRA has an automated monitoring platform that scans all live channels and VOD assets available on Kodi,” NAGRA’s Ivan Schnider informs TF.

“The service we offer to our customers automatically finds illegal distribution of their content on Kodi and removes infringing streams.”

In the first instance, NAGRA sends standard takedown notices to hosting services to terminate illicit streams. The company says that while some companies are very cooperative, others are less so. When meeting resistance, NAGRA switches to more coercive methods, described here by Christopher Schouten, NAGRA Senior Director Product Marketing.

“Takedowns are generally sent to streaming platforms and hosting servers. When those don’t work, Advanced Takedowns allow us to use both technical and legal means to get results,” Schouten says.

“Numerous stories in recent days show how for instance popular Kodi plug-ins have been removed by their authors because of the mere threat of legal actions like this.”

At the center of operations is NAGRA’s Piracy Intelligence Portal, which offers customers a real-time view of worldwide online piracy trends, information on the infrastructure behind illegal services, as well as statistics and status of takedown requests.

“We measure takedown compliance very carefully using our Piracy Intelligence Portal, so we can usually predict the results we will get. We work on a daily basis to improve relationships and interfaces with those who are less compliant,” Schouten says.

The Piracy Intelligence Portal

While persuasion is probably the best solution, some hosts inevitably refuse to cooperate. However, NAGRA also offers the NexGuard system, which is able to determine the original source of the content.

“Using forensic watermarking to trace the source of the leak, we will be able to completely shut down the ‘leak’ at the source, independently and within minutes of detection,” Schouten says.

Whatever route is taken, NAGRA says that the aim is to take down streams as quickly as possible, something which hopefully undermines confidence in pirate services and encourages users to re-enter the legal market. Interestingly, the company also says it uses “technical means” to degrade pirate services to the point that consumers lose faith in them.

But while augmented Kodi setups and illicit IPTV are certainly considered a major threat in 2017, they are not the only problem faced by content companies.

While the Apple platform is quite tight, the open nature of Android means that there are a rising number of apps that can be sideloaded from the web. These allow pirate content to be consumed quickly and conveniently within a glossy interface.

Apps like Showbox, MovieHD and Terrarium TV have the movie and TV show sector wrapped up, while the popular Mobdro achieves the same with live TV, including premium sports. Schnider says NAGRA can handle apps like these and other emerging threats in a variety of ways.

“In addition to Kodi-related anti-piracy activities, NAGRA offers a service that automatically finds illegal distribution of content on Android applications, fully loaded STBs, M3U playlist and other platforms that provide plug-and-play solutions for the big TV screen; this service also includes the removal of infringing streams,” he explains.

M3U playlist piracy doesn’t get a lot of press. An M3U file is a text file that specifies locations where content (such as streams) can be found online.

In its basic ‘free’ form, it’s simply a case of finding an M3U file on an indexing site or blog and loading it into VLC. It’s not as flashy as any of the above apps, and unless one knows where to get the free M3Us quickly, many channels may already be offline. Premium M3U files are widely available, however, and tend to be pretty reliable.

But while attacking sources of infringing content is clearly a big part of NAGRA’s mission, the company also deploys softer strategies for dealing with pirates.

“Beyond disrupting pirate streams, raising awareness amongst users that these services are illegal and helping service providers deliver competing legitimate services, are also key areas in the fight against premium IPTV piracy where NAGRA can help,” Schnider says.

“Converting users of such services to legitimate paying subscribers represents a significant opportunity for content owners and distributors.”

For this to succeed, Schouten says there needs to be an understanding of the different motivators that lead an individual to commit piracy.

“Is it price? Is it availability? Is it functionality?” he asks.

Interestingly, he also reveals that lots of people are spending large sums of money on IPTV services they believe are legal but are not. Rather than the high prices putting them off, they actually add to their air of legitimacy.

“These consumers can relatively easily be converted into paying subscribers if they can be convinced that pay-TV services offer superior quality, reliability, and convenience because let’s face it, most IPTV services are still a little dodgy to use,” he says.

“Education is also important; done through working with service providers to inform consumers through social media platforms of the risks linked to the use of illegitimate streaming devices / IPTV devices, e.g. purchasing boxes that may no longer work after a short period of time.”

And so the battle over content continues.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Plex DVR live TV support: Plex adds live TV to Plex DVR

Plex is arguably the top media server software option available. In Septemper 2016, Plex added DVR capabilities to its already robust server software. In a June 1, 2017 announcement, Plex DVR live TV joined the comprehensive Plex featureset. [Read: How to watch TED Talks on Plex – TED Talks Plex channel install] Plex DVR adds […]

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Hollywood Sees Illegal Streaming Devices as ‘Piracy 3.0’

Piracy remains a major threat for the movie industry, MPA Stan McCoy said yesterday during a panel session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

After McCoy praised the collaboration between the MPA(A) and Russian authorities in their fight against online piracy, the ‎President and Managing Director of the MPA’s EMEA region noted that pirates are not standing still.

Much like Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their “business models” and means of obtaining content. Where torrents were dominant a few years ago, illegal streaming devices are now the main threat, with McCoy describing their rise as Piracy 3.0.

“Piracy is not a static challenge. The pirates are great innovators in their own right. So even as we innovate in trying to pursue these issues, and pursue novel ways of fighting piracy, the pirates are out there coming up with new business models of their own,” McCoy said.

“If you think of old-fashioned peer-to-peer piracy as 1.0, and then online illegal streaming websites as 2.0, in the audio-visual sector, in particular, we now face challenge number 3.0, which is what I’ll call the challenge of illegal streaming devices.”

The panel

The MPA boss went on to explain how the new piracy ecosystem works. The new breed of pirates relies on streaming devices such as set-top boxes, which often run Kodi and are filled with pirate add-ons.

This opens the door to a virtually unlimited library of pirated content. For one movie there may be hundreds of pirate links available, which are impossible to take down in an effective manner by rightsholders, he added, while showcasing the Exodus add-on to the public.

McCoy stressed that the devices themselves, and software such as Kodi, are ‘probably’ not illegal. However, the addition of copyright-infringing pirate add-ons turns them into an unprecedented piracy threat.

“The device itself is probably not illegal, the software itself is probably not illegal, the confluence of all three of these is a major category killer for online piracy,” McCoy said.

McCoy showing Exodus

McCoy went on to say that the new “Piracy 3.0” is not that popular in Russia yet. However, in the UK, America, and several other countries, it’s already huge, matching the popularity of legal services such as Spotify.

“The result is a pirate service operating on a truly massive scale. The scale of this kind of piracy, while it’s not huge yet in the Russian Federation, has reached epidemic levels similar to major services like Spotify, in markets like the UK, and other markets in Western Europe and North America.”

“This is a new sort of global Netflix but no rightsholder gets paid,” McCoy added.

The MPA chief stresses that this new form of piracy should be dealt with through a variety of measures including legislation, regulation, consumer education, and voluntary agreements with third-party stakeholders.

He notes that in Europe, rightsholders are backed by a recent decision of the Court of Justice, which outlawed the sales of devices with pre-loaded pirate add-ons. However, there is still a lot more work to be done to crack down on this emerging piracy threat.

“This is an area where […] innovative responses are required. We have to be just as good as the pirates in thinking of new ways to tackle these challenges,” McCoy said.

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HTPC News Roundup 2017 Wk 22: Best Nvidia Shield TV game emulators, LibreELEC 8.0.2 update, Kodi available as a snap app

Welcome to the htpcBeginner HTPC News Roundup 2017 Wk 22! This week saw the release of LibreELEC v8.0.2 with an update to Kodi v17.3, the best game emulators for Nvidia Shield TV, and Kodi released as a snap app. Read on for the latest in HTPC news and updates! htpcBeginner Recap In case you missed […]

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New “Out of Control” Denuvo Piracy Protection Cracked

Like many games in recent times, indie title RiME uses Denuvo anti-piracy technology to keep the swashbucklers away. It won’t stay that way for long.

Earlier this week, RiME developer Tequila Works grabbed a few headlines after stating it would remove the Denuvo protection from its game, should it fall to crackers.

“I have seen some conversations about our use of Denuvo anti-tamper, and I wanted to take a moment to address it,” RiME community manager Dariuas wrote on Steam forums.

“RiME is a very personal experience told through both sight and sound. When a game is cracked, it runs the risk of creating issues with both of those items, and we want to do everything we can to preserve this quality in RiME.”

Dariuas concluded that a Denuvo-free version of RiME would be released if the game was cracked. Within days of the announcement and right on cue, pirates struck.

In a fanfare of celebrations, rising cracking star Baldman announced that he had defeated the latest v4+ iteration of Denuvo and dumped a cracked copy of RiME online. While encouraging people to buy what he describes as a “super nice” game, Baldman was less complimentary about Denuvo.

Labeling the anti-tamper technology a “huge abomination,” the cracker said that Denuvo’s creators had really upped their efforts this time out. People like Baldman who work on Denuvo talk of the protection calling on code ‘triggers.’ For RiME, things were reportedly amped up to 11.

“In Rime that ugly creature went out of control – how do you like three fucking hundreds of THOUSANDS calls to ‘triggers’ during initial game launch and savegame loading? Did you wonder why game loading times are so long – here is the answer,” Baldman explained.

“In previous games like Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, NieR Automata, Prey there were only about 1000 ‘triggers’ called, so we have x300 here.”

But according to the cracker, the 300,000 calls to triggers was a mere “warmup” for Denuvo. After just 30 minutes of gameplay, the count rose to two million, a figure he delivered with shocked expletives.

One of the main points of criticism for protections like Denuvo is that they take a toll on both game performance and gaming hardware. Baldman, who speaks English as a second language, reports that in RiME things have got massively out of hand which negatively affects the game.

“Protection now calls about 10-30 triggers every second during actual gameplay, slowing game down. In previous games like Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, NieR Automata, Prey there were only about 1-2 ‘triggers’ called every several minutes during gameplay, so do the math.”

Only making matters worse, the cracker says, is the fact the triggers are heavily obfuscated under a virtual machine, which further affects performance. However, thanks to RiME’s developers making good on their word, any protection-related problems will soon be a thing of the past.

“Today, we got word that there was a crack which would bypass Denuvo,” Dariuas wrote last night.

“Upon receiving this news, we worked to test this and verify that it was, in fact, the case. We have now confirmed that it is. As such, we at [publisher] Team Grey Box are following through on our promise from earlier this week that we will be replacing the current build of RiME with one that does not contain Denuvo.”

So while gamers wait for Denuvo to get stripped from RiME and pirates celebrate, the company behind the anti-piracy technology will be considering its options. If what Baldman claims is true, it sounds like more than just a little desperation is in the air.

Worryingly for Denuvo, not even throwing the kitchen sink at the problem has had much effect.

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FUNimation Targets ‘Pirate’ Streaming Site KissAnime

American anime distributor FUNimation is no stranger to hunting down pirates.

Headquartered in Texas, the company targeted 1337 alleged BitTorrent downloaders of the anime series “One Piece” at a local court a few years ago.

While the company no longer targets individual users through the U.S. legal system, it now appears to have its eyes set on a higher profile target, the popular anime streaming site KissAnime.

With millions of pageviews per day, KissAnime is the go-to site for many anime fans. The site is listed among the 250 most visited websites in the United States, making it one of the largest unauthorized streaming platforms in the world.

This is a thorn in the side of FUNimation, which recently obtained a DMCA subpoena to unmask part of the site’s infrastructure. Like many other streaming portals, KissAnime uses Google’s servers to host videos. These videos are served through CDN links, presumably to make them harder to take down.

FUNimation traced a CDN IP-address, used by KissAnime to stream pirated “One Piece” content, back to U.S. cloud hosting platform DigitalOcean, and asked the company to disable the associated link.

“Through our investigations, we have a good faith belief that a web server for which Digital Ocean, Inc. provides service, located at 138.68.244.174, is being used for the unauthorized copying and distribution […] of digital files embodying the Property,” FUNimation lawyer Evan Stone recently wrote to the company.

“FUNimation hereby requests that Digital Ocean expeditiously causes all such infringing materials to be removed or blocked or freezes the account at issue until the account holder removes all infringing materials or disables access thereto.”

FUNimation DMCA notice sent to Digital Ocean

Although KissAnime isn’t specifically mentioned in the DMCA notice or the subpoena request, a source close to the issue informs TorrentFreak that the IP-address in question is linked to the anime streaming site.

Because the CDN links keep rotating, FUNimation now wants to know the name of the customer that’s connected to the IP-address in question. The company therefore requested a DMCA subpoena from a federal court in Texas, which was granted earlier this month.

The subpoena orders DigitalOcean to hand over any and all contact information they have on the customer linked to the offending IP-address.

The DMCA subpoena

To find out what FUNimation intends to do with the information, provided that DigitalOcean will hand it over, we contacted the company’s lawyer Evan Stone. He couldn’t confirm the target but noted that it’s not about an end-user.

“We are targeting someone associated with disseminating infringing content on a MASSIVE scale, for profit. This is not a prelude to an end-user lawsuit, nor does this involve your typical fan uploader,” Stone told TF.

It’s likely that Funimation will pursue further action against the DigitalOcean customer associated with the pirates KissAnime streams. Whether this will be a central player or someone only remotely connected to the site remains unknown for now.

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EU Piracy Filter Proposals Being Sabotaged Says MEP Julia Reda

After complaining about “rogue” sites and services for more than 15 years, the music business is now concentrating on the so-called “value gap”.

The theory is that platforms like YouTube are able to avoid paying expensive licensing fees for music by exploiting the safe harbor protections of the DMCA and similar legislation. Effectively, pirate music uploaded by site users becomes available to the public at no cost to the platform and due to safe harbor rules, there is no legal recourse for the labels.

To close this loophole, the EU is currently moving forward with reforms that could limit the protections currently enjoyed by platforms like YouTube. In short, sites that allow users to upload content will be forced to partner up with content providers to aggressively filter all user uploads for infringing content, thus limiting the number of infringing works eventually communicated to the public.

Even as they stand the proposals are being heavily protested (1,2,3) but according to Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda, a new threat has appeared on the horizon.

Ahead of a crucial June 8 vote on how to move forward, Reda says that some in the corridors of power are now “resorting to dirty tactics” to defend and extend the already “disastrous plans” by any means.

Specifically, Reda accuses MEP Pascal Arimont from the European People’s Party (EPP) of trying to sabotage the Parliamentary process, by going behind negotiators’ backs and pushing a new filtering proposal text that makes the “original bad proposal look tame in comparison.”

Reda says that in the face of other MEPs’ efforts to come up with a compromise text upon which all of them are agreed, Arimont has been encouraging some MEPs to rebel against their negotiators. He wants them to support his own super-aggressive “alternative compromise” text that shows disregard for the Charter of Fundamental Rights and principles of EU law.

Arimont’s text is certainly an interesting read and a document that could have been formulated by the record labels themselves. It tightens just about every aspect of the text proposed by the Commission while running all over the compromise text put together by Reda and other MEPs.

For example, where others are agreed on the phrase “Where information society
service providers store and provide access to the public to copyright protected works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users”, Arimont’s text removes the key word “store”.

This means that his filtering demands go beyond sites like YouTube that actually host content, to encompass those that merely carry links. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the potential for chaos there.

Also, where the Commission is happy with the proposed rules only affecting sites that store and provide access to “large amounts” of copyright protected works uploaded by users, Arimont wants the “store” part removed and “large” changed to “significant”.

“[Arimont] doesn’t want [filtering rules] to just apply to services hosting ‘large amounts’ of copyrighted content, as proposed by the Commission, but to any service facilitating the availability of such content, even if the service is not actually hosting anything at all,” Reda explains.

The text also ignores proposals by MEPs that anti-piracy measures to be taken by platforms should be proportionate to their profit and size. That being said, Arimont does accept that start-ups would probably face “insurmountable financial obstacles” if required to deploy filtering technologies, so he proposes they should be exempt.

While that sounds reasonable, any business that’s over five years old would need to comply and Reda warns that the threshold could be set particularly low.

“So if you’ve been self-employed for more than 5 years, rules the Commission wrote with the likes of YouTube and Facebook in mind would suddenly also apply to your personal website,” she warns.

But Arimont’s proposal goes further still and has the potential to have privacy advocates up in arms.

In order to check that all user uploaded content is non-infringing, platforms would necessarily be required to check every single piece of data uploaded by users. This raises considerable privacy concerns and potential conflicts with EU law, for instance with Article 15 of the E-Commerce Directive, which prohibits general monitoring obligations for service providers.

Indeed, during the Netlog filtering case that went before the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) in 2012, the Court held that requiring an online platform to install broad piracy filters is incompatible with EU law.

Nevertheless, Arimont sees bridging the “value gap” as somehow different.

“The use of technical measures is essential for the functioning of online licensing and rights management purposes. Such technical measures therefore do not require the identity of uploaders and hence do not pose any risk for privacy of individual end users,” his proposal reads.

“Furthermore, those technical measures involve a highly targeted technical cooperation of rightholders and information society service providers based on the data provided by rightholders, and therefore do not lead to general obligation to monitor and find facts about the content.”

But what should really raise alarm bells for user-uploaded content platforms is how Arimont proposes to strip them of their safe harbor protections, if they optimize the presentation of that content to users. That, as Reda points out, could be something as benign as listing content in alphabetical order.

Julia Reda’s article has some information at the end for those who want to protest Arimont’s proposals (pdf).

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