14 DAY TRIAL // The owners of websites that were supposed to receive piracy notifications from Copyright Labs, were presented with an email that contained a message from Anonymous. Apparently, India’s anti-piracy organization has been hacked.
India is witnessing an ongoing battle between representatives of the media industry and websites that host copyrighted content.
Initially, all the websites suspected of being involved in copyright infringement were blocked. Since rights holders abused the power to instate blockades, the Madras High Court decided that Copyright Labs should contact website owners and ask them to remove specific URLs.
As part of this operation, torrent site BitSnoop received a number of URL removal requests. However, instead of the regular content, the emails from Copyright Labs came with a “We are Anonymous” message, TorrentFreak reports.
Here’s what BitSnoop and, most likely, other websites saw when they opened the piracy notifications:
Kudos to SFLC [Software Freedom Law Center] for following it up and trying to find out how the HC order was misused by ISPs and CopyrightLabs
We are Anonymous you should have expected us best of luck sorting thousands of mails
Get a life Nobody watches those [expletive] movies anyway they are flop
You are hated all over the internet With enough soap you can blow just about anything
So, how could this happen?
Anonymous simply hacked Copyright Labs’ systems and altered the tool responsible for sending out automated takedown orders.
Recipients of the emails were certainly not happy.
“Your email is blacklisted, don’t bother sending any more. We don’t care if you were hacked or whatever – not our job to read this crap,” the BitSnoop team wrote in response.
The CEO of the anti-piracy outfit started sending out emails, apologizing for the incident. It seems that the breach affected the organization’s activity quite a bit since their website is currently down and has been in this state for the past few days.