“No logs” VPN supplier TorGuard has reached a lawful settlement this month with above two dozen motion picture studios that sued the company for encouraging piracy and copyright infringement.
In the settlement, TorGuard has agreed to block BitTorrent site visitors for its users.
TorGuard VPN to block torrents utilizing firewall
Previous 12 months, over two dozen movie studios experienced sued TorGuard, declaring the VPN service provider preserved no logs and encouraged on-line piracy by its marketing endeavours.
The similar established of plaintiffs had before demanded $10 million in “damages” from another log-less VPN service provider, LiquidVPN.
According to court documents obtained by BleepingComputer, both the movie studios and VPNetworks, LLC d.b.a. TorGuard, have now agreed to access a settlement in which the VPN supplier will block torrents on its network.
TorGuard will “use commercially sensible efforts to block BitTorrent site visitors on its servers in the United States using firewall know-how,” reveal the documents:
TorGuard blames host for ignoring over 100,000 piracy notices
Considering the fact that June 2012, TorGuard had been leasing servers and IP addresses from hosting service provider QuadraNet, until late 2021 when the VPN provider notified QuadraNet that it was terminating the support.
Some of these servers had been employed by TorGuard to give SOCKS5 proxy solutions to its clients.
TorGuard’s Knowedgebase (KB) experienced in depth guidelines on how its proxy servers could be configured by customers to get the job done with existing BitTorrent clientele:
Take note, not like with VPNs, targeted traffic routed through SOCKS5 proxy servers is by default unencrypted, making it possible for middleman hosting suppliers to gain visibility into the community flows, should they select to.
Documents generated by the film studios show that 97,640 copyright infringement notices have been despatched to QuadraNet confirming cases of piracy at the SOCKS5 IPs assigned to TorGuard.
An extra, 47,219 notices confirmed piracy involved with other TorGuard IP addresses, by way of November 2021.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys shared an Excel spreadsheet with TorGuard showing 250,000 “strike dates of confirmed infringement.” Of these records, about 40% of copyright infringement instances were involved with one SOCKS5 IP address by itself that had been provisioned to TorGuard.
“Due to the fact website traffic on TorGuard’s SOCKS5 proxy servers is not encrypted,… QuadraNet could have used common community monitoring applications to capture data packets of the piracy and validate the piracy in the notices plaintiffs sent to QuadraNet,” argue the plaintiffs’ legal professionals.
The movie studios further more argue that network monitoring technologies like deep packet inspection could have been used to reply to piracy notices and block infringing flows.
TorGuard has blamed the mishap on its web hosting service provider, QuadraNet for failing to well timed forward copyright violation notices to TorGuard’s registered DMCA agent.
“TorGuard values intellectual home rights of other individuals, as stated in TorGuard’s publicly posted policies. Experienced QuadraNet sent these notices to our DMCA agent, TorGuard’s common business enterprise practices would have been to quickly take steps to halt additional piracy.”
When TorGuard notified QuadraNet that it was terminating its marriage with the web hosting service provider, “Quadranet experimented with to persuade TorGuard to continue on provider by providing different conditions,” state the court docket files.
It is a popular practice in the web hosting industry for a provider to “null route” a subscriber’s IP deal with, efficiently terminating a network link, the place it has received many notices of copyright infringement connected with an IP handle.
“If QuadraNet had null routed a person of the IP addresses assigned to TorGuard where plaintiffs sent notices or at minimum forwarded the notices to TorGuard’s DMCA agent, TorGuard would have taken immediate ways to quit further more piracy these kinds of as suspending end users and adopting a firewall to filter out BitTorrent targeted visitors as it has now started to do,” clarifies the VPN supplier.
In September 2021, the exact same group of movie studios experienced sued QuadraNet for not null-routing infringing VPN IPs. The good thing is even though, the plaintiff’s before grievance centered close to VPN (encrypted) visitors and designed no point out of SOCKS5 proxies.
As this kind of, the court docket experienced to dismiss the lawsuit and side with QuadraNet who claimed it had no visibility into encrypted VPN targeted traffic and “was by no means informed of the conclude users’ online action” on its servers.