Külföldi torrent oldalak BTWorld Pirates using Change.org to spread pirated movie links

THE war on illegal file sharing has pushed pirates into some unlikely places, but perhaps none are as incongruous as popular online advocacy website Change.org which has become somewhat of a haven for illegal content sharing.

The petition website is dedicated to providing a platform to promote political change or raise awareness and attracts millions of visitors a day. If you spend much time online, you have no doubt come across a change.org petition before.

Last year more than 160,000 people signed a petition to help Aussie dairy farmers, prompting $500 million from the government. Another campaign got 100,000 Australians to sign a petition calling on the NSW Police to condemn a Sydney gathering of ‘neo-masculinists’ led by controversial figure Roosh V.

But underneath all the advocacy is a sneaky trend of using the site to spread pirated content such as movies and TV shows. In a bid to stay ahead of Google and take-down notices, the website has steadily become home to pirates in the past few years.

The pirates post links to the illegal content within a petition, which can be created by any user. But there is no petition it is just a link to the pirated content. Although strangely, they even have a number of signatories and comments.

In 2012, the parent company of the UFC complained to Google that the website had hosted an illegal stream of one of its pay-per-view events. Since then dozens of major studios including Columbia Pictures and Lionsgate have filed complaints. However according to Torrent Freak, complaints from rights holders related to Change.org have dramatically increased in the past month.

At the time of writing, we found 124 examples on the petition site, including pages featuring links to illegal copies of movies such as The Hunger Games and Straight Outta Compton. A number of the links take you to dodgy domains that likely host malware. Others have already expired, or the content has been taken down due to copyright complaints. But some pages host viable torrent links.

In recent years rights holders have ramped up their fight against file sharing which, in conjunction with the rise of legal streaming services such as Netflix, has lead to a slight decline in internet piracy.

Change.org would not confirm whether it has received an uptick in complaints from rights holders but said it relied on users to help remove such pages.

“We are subject to the same type of spam abuse patterns as any other platform with user-generated content,” a Change.org spokesperson told news.com.au. “On every single petition, there is an option for our users to report it to us as spam. Once we receive these reports and determine the petition is spam, it is removed from our platform.”