UK broadcaster Sky has submitted its report to the European Commission providing its overview of the latest piracy threats. These submissions guide the EC as it updates its 'Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List' and this time around some rightsholders want intermediaries to receive special attention. Sky's submission dedicates more space to Cloudflare than even the most egregious pirate IPTV hosting providers, and Facebook doesn't get off lightly either.
In an article published yesterday, we featured the Motion Picture Association’s submission to the European Commission (EC) for its next Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List.
While still calling out familiar targets, such as torrent sites, streaming portals, and piracy apps, the MPA clearly wants to draw attention to the role of third-party intermediaries in the piracy ecosystem. UK broadcaster Sky’s submission to the EC adopts an identical strategy.
Sky starts from the now-familiar position that large-scale commercial piracy isn’t just a problem for rightsholders. Organized crime has negative consequences for consumers and society as a whole, Sky says, including significant losses in tax revenues for EU Member States.
Non-Responsive & Infringing Hosting Providers (Outside EU)Sky begins by calling out several particularly problematic hosting providers. Not only do these operations have no qualms about doing business with pirate IPTV providers, requests to remove infringing content quickly aren’t processed speedily enough to be of practical use to the broadcaster; if they’re processed at all.
In common with the MPA’s submission, Sky says that some hosts do business with anonymity in mind, including anonymous registrations, payment via cryptocurrency, and offshore hosting.
Poor adoption of Know Your Business Customer (KYBC) processes among these hosts presents difficulties for rightsholders in the event they want to track pirates down. The options don’t improve with other hosts, some of which simply refuse to disclose any information.
The ‘top infringing host’ according to Sky is ‘RESERVED, ZZ'[AS27161]. Previously known as Litnics, Sky recorded a total of 284,454 unique ‘infringing incidents’ between January 1, 2024, and July 29, 2024.
DNS records reveal no shortage of pirate IPTV entities using this host, which Sky says is located in the United States, as opposed to the Middle East, Hong Kong or Macau like some of the others in the list. While AS27161 is clearly operational, whether it should be is up for debate.
Cloudflare: “One of the Top Infringing Hosts”When Cloudflare was nominated for the EC’s Watch List a few years ago, the company wasn’t impressed with its characterization as an infringer (pdf). The EC should focus on “Commission-verified allegations of illegal behavior,” Cloudflare said, not companies that have simply declined to take voluntary action.
Yet after a short absence, those same descriptions are back on the agenda. Sky says that it categorized Cloudflare as an infringing host in a 2022 list and according to data, Cloudflare remains “one of the top infringing hosts” today.
The broadcaster notes that in the same seven-month period this year, 107,307 unique ‘infringing incidents’ were identified at Cloudflare. Noting that Cloudflare is believed to provide DNS services to more than 15 per cent of all known global websites, Sky says that Cloudflare services are “easily exploited” by pirates to conceal their true hosts. But Sky goes further still.
“Many pirate services are believed to use Cloudflare. This was demonstrated in the 2019 Milan Court Order involving ‘EnergyIPTV’ and ‘IPTVTheBest’, with both services using Cloudflare’s infrastructure to distribute infringing content, without Cloudflare taking adequate steps to prevent infringement,” the broadcaster informs the EC.
Cloudflare hasn’t responded to Sky as part of the public process, but the company’s own submission to the EC may solve at least some of Sky’s problems. The company explains that rightsholder members of Cloudflare’s Trusted Reporter Program are granted access to pirate site IP addresses, which counters the “easily exploited” features.
Unfortunately, Sky’s alleged problems pertaining to legitimate United States-based companies don’t end with Cloudlare.
Facebook Marketplace & GoogleSky’s criticism of Facebook Marketplace contains some remarkable data for the six-month period between February and July 2024.
The company says that it identified and reported a total of 16,500 listings for piracy-enabling devices (including pre-loaded Amazon Firesticks), a figure that represents 96% of all Firestick listings identified across all online platforms in this period.
“Meta states that it has proactive measures in place to identify and remove piracy enabling devices as well as IPTV services from Marketplace, but the continued volume of these listings suggests that the measures are largely ineffective,” Sky’s submission reads.
“The relevant policies on Facebook Marketplace need to be updated and improved. While Meta is willing to engage, to date any countermeasures have not resolved the significant challenges faced.”
The statement that Meta is willing to engage seems unusual in the context of a piracy watchlist submission. Nevertheless, Sky says that Meta should implement “significant proactive measures” to stop infringing listings being uploaded while ensuring that users banned from the platform are unable to sign back up. That seems to suggest that deploying an effective repeat infringer policy may still fall short of requirements.
Google Has Done a Lot, But Not EnoughGoogle’s alleged role in assisting consumers to find infringing content is something that never seems to go away. Sky highlights organic search results and sponsored adverts as problematic but criticizes the search giant for not going above and beyond when requests are received to remove content.
“While Google will respond to take-down notices against specific infringing URLs, it will not take action against whole domains, meaning that illegal streaming sites can be the subject of numerous individual page takedown requests without any clear delisting impact against the overall site,” the broadcaster’s submission reads.
“Google will not accept delisting requests for pages/sites encouraging copyright infringement, such as sites that openly encourage the use of VPN technology to circumvent pay TV offerings. Google also fails to provide rights holders with functioning APIs for delisting, meaning that the process of submitting delisting requests is manual and time consuming.”
Like Cloudflare, Google offers advanced takedown tools as part of its Trusted Copyright Removal Program (TCRP), which allows “high-volume submitters that send high-quality notices” to bulk submit copyright removal requests on Google Search.
Why TCRP is not being used here is unclear but if the targets are sites “encouraging” infringement or championing the use of VPNs to circumvent geo-blocks, the DMCA is already the wrong tool, regardless of the submitting mechanism.
Other platforms in the Sky submission operate in the file-hosting/cyberlocker, live-streaming, and mobile app markets. All are listed below for convenience but covered in much more detail in the report linked below.
Sky’s submission to the European Commission is available here (pdf). The problematic sites and services by category are as follows:
Hosting Providers
ISTQSERVERSES (Jordan)
HHXYTC haoxiangyun (Hong Kong)
HBING (Great Britain)
YURTEH-AS (Ukraine)
VIRTUAL SYSTEMS (Ukraine)
NETSOLUTIONS (Macao)
RESERVED, ZZ (United States per report, possible BOGON)
CLOUDFLARENET (United States)
CLOUDFLARESPECTRUM (United States)
Marketplaces and Search Engines
Facebook Marketplace
Alibaba
Google
File-Hosting Sites (Cyberlockers)
chomikuj.pl
ddl.to
dood.so
doodstream.com
mixdrop.co
mixdrop.sx
mixdrop.to
nitroflare.com
orvidcloud.co
rapidgator.net
rapidrar.com
streamtape.com
voe.sx
File-Hosting Sites Live Streaming)
srv93221.tservone.lol
iptvtree.net
mteve.online
sansat.net
myvipmedia.com
www.sportp2p.com
azdouiptv.com
vodkom.net
tv.pro-ott.com
aziz.social
Apps (Official/Unofficial Stores, Premium / Advertising)
RepelisPlus Pelis Stream
Scarica film | VC
PTV Sports: Live Cricket TV
YACINE TV Store
Football Livestreaming HD TV
Live Cricket TV 2024
MovieFlex
Salama TV – Angalia Mpira Live
Magis – Peliculas y Series
Hotlflix
Social Media
Telegram