"No logs" VPN provider TorGuard has reached a legal settlement this month with over two dozen movie studios that sued the company for encouraging piracy and copyright infringement.
In the settlement, TorGuard has agreed to block BitTorrent traffic for its users.
TorGuard VPN to block torrents using firewall
Last year, over two dozen film studios had sued TorGuard, claiming the VPN provider maintained no logs and encouraged online piracy through its marketing efforts.
The same set of plaintiffs had earlier demanded $10 million in "damages" from another log-less VPN provider, LiquidVPN.
According to court documents obtained by BleepingComputer, both the film studios and VPNetworks, LLC d.b.a. TorGuard, have now agreed to reach a settlement in which the VPN provider will block torrents on its network.
TorGuard will "use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic on its servers in the United States using firewall technology," reveal the documents:
In October 2021, VPN.ht had also "settled" with the same plaintiffs after fighting a legal battle and agreed to block BitTorrent and to log traffic on its U.S. servers.
Several other VPN companies, including Surfshark, VPN Unlimited, Zenmate, PIA, and ExpressVPN were also targeted in similar cases last year.
TorGuard blames host for ignoring over 100,000 piracy notices
Since June 2012, TorGuard had been leasing servers and IP addresses from hosting provider QuadraNet, until late 2021 when the VPN provider notified QuadraNet that it was terminating the service.
Some of these servers were used by TorGuard to offer SOCKS5 proxy services to its customers.
TorGuard's Knowedgebase (KB) had detailed instructions on how its proxy servers could be configured by customers to work with existing BitTorrent clients:
Note, unlike with VPNs, traffic routed through SOCKS5 proxy servers is by default unencrypted, making it possible for intermediary hosting providers to gain visibility into the network flows, should they choose to.
Records produced by the film studios show that 97,640 copyright infringement notices were sent to QuadraNet confirming instances of piracy at the SOCKS5 IPs assigned to TorGuard.
An additional, 47,219 notices confirmed piracy associated with other TorGuard IP addresses, through November 2021.
Plaintiffs' attorneys shared an Excel spreadsheet with TorGuard showing 250,000 "hit dates of confirmed infringement." Of these records, about 40% of copyright infringement instances were associated with one SOCKS5 IP address alone that had been provisioned to TorGuard.
"Because traffic on TorGuard’s SOCKS5 proxy servers is not encrypted,... QuadraNet could have used conventional network monitoring tools to capture data packets of the piracy and confirm the piracy in the notices plaintiffs sent to QuadraNet," argue the plaintiffs' lawyers.
The film studios further argue that network monitoring technologies like deep packet inspection could have been used to respond to piracy notices and block infringing flows.
TorGuard has blamed the mishap on its hosting provider, QuadraNet for failing to timely forward copyright violation notices to TorGuard's registered DMCA agent.
"TorGuard values intellectual property rights of others, as stated in TorGuard's publicly posted policies. Had QuadraNet sent these notices to our DMCA agent, TorGuard's ordinary business practices would have been to immediately take steps to stop further piracy."
When TorGuard notified QuadraNet that it was terminating its relationship with the hosting provider, "Quadranet tried to persuade TorGuard to continue service by offering different terms," state the court documents.
It is a common practice in the hosting industry for a provider to "null route" a subscriber's IP address, effectively terminating a network connection, where it has received multiple notices of copyright infringement associated with an IP address.
"If QuadraNet had null routed one of the IP addresses assigned to TorGuard where plaintiffs sent notices or at least forwarded the notices to TorGuard's DMCA agent, TorGuard would have taken immediate steps to stop further piracy such as suspending users and adopting a firewall to filter out BitTorrent traffic as it has now begun to do," explains the VPN provider.
In September 2021, the same group of film studios had sued QuadraNet for not null-routing infringing VPN IPs. Luckily though, the plaintiff's earlier complaint centered around VPN (encrypted) traffic and made no mention of SOCKS5 proxies.
As such, the court had to dismiss the lawsuit and side with QuadraNet who claimed it had no visibility into encrypted VPN traffic and "was never aware of the end users' online activity" on its servers.
Update March 14th, 00:12 ET: Added VPN.ht had also reached a similar settlement last year with the same group of plaintiffs and other VPN providers were also targeted.
Comments
ANTP - 2 years ago
How would they be able to differentiate between vpns anyway? How did they know specifically that people were using torguard as opposed to any other vpn.. They shouldn't have caved, but I understand that to torguard it's probably not worth risking being sued.
DrkKnight - 2 years ago
This just set a precedence for movie studios to go after all other vpn's that allow torrent downloads.
h_b_s - 2 years ago
"This just set a precedence for movie studios to go after all other vpn's that allow torrent downloads."
Not really a precedent, this is a settlement. US legal precedents are from court orders and trial outcomes, not settlements be they private or public. Sure, they can go to someone else that might be doing the same thing and say "these people settled", but that's about it. My lay opinion is the plaintiff had a very strong case already. They didn't really need precedent. They have the law on their side. But, they have nothing to go after a genuine no-log VPN provider.
The article title is a bit misleading. This has nothing to do with being a VPN provider, instead it's about the host providing an open SOCKS5 proxy. The plaintiff relies on a negligence "should have known" claim since it's easy to eavesdrop on the kind of traffic that passes through a SOCKS proxy. Better title would be "SOCKS 5 Proxy Provider Settles - Agrees to Ban Bittorent". But, that's a lot less clickbaity because fewer people care about open proxy providers these days. It was a Thing back in the day to hide addresses from attack, less so today for just this reason.
AxSharma - 2 years ago
Hi there,
Thanks for reading and for your feedback.
Our understanding is the SOCKS5 proxy server argument is quite likely merely being used by plaintiffs for a favorable legal outcome—which is in fact what happened in this case.
Previously, the same group of plaintiffs has pressured VPN providers like LiquidVPN, VPN.ht, Surfshark, VPN Unlimited, ExpressVPN, and others into logging traffic and cutting off pirates. These plaintiffs also reached a similar settlement with VPN.ht—who had to 'agree' to block BitTorrent traffic on its US servers and keep logs, without there being any mention of "proxy server" in the court case at all, to the best of our knowledge.
These examples have now been added to the article.
Drags - 2 years ago
Good old US of A, where companies can be forced into logging details that would be illegal in most of the developed world.
Then again, there is a reason why many countries and companies cannot have their data hosted in the USA as it's counted about as safe as China and Russia from a data security perspective.
Daniel15 - 2 years ago
Who uses BitTorrent via a VPN provider that doesn't offer port forwarding? There's no way to seed once you're done.
Also who even uses BitTorrent for movies these days given Usenet exists?
smdorsey42 - 2 years ago
Good luck with that. Usenet is a crapshoot of poorly managed, untrustworthy public indexes. Uploaded content constently violates the basic RAR packaging rules, downloads have to be validated ny 3rd party tools so that malware/trojans dont try to mine crypto on your machines, the regex on both public and private indexes are crap so good look using manual OR automated tools to find heavily obfuscated results you're looking for, and even if you do, the constant dmca takedowns on the public indexes ensure you rarely find what you're looking for in time.