The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This week we have one newcomer on the list.

“In The Grey” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on June 08 are:

Note: We also publish an updating archive of all the list of weekly most torrented movies lists.

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Posted Tuesday 9 June 2026 at 7:55 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

RIP Matrix

Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet, hosting millions of books and academic articles that can be downloaded for free.

The site has defied all odds over the past years. It continued to operate despite a full-fledged criminal prosecution by the United States, which resulted in the arrest of two alleged operators in Argentina.

These two Russian defendants remain wanted by the United States. According to the most recent information we have, the defendants escaped house arrest in 2024, while awaiting their extradition, and vanished into thin air.

By now, however, it is clear that these two defendants were not vital to the site’s survival. Z-Library continued to expand its reach, despite their legal troubles.

Private White Label Mirrors

Over the years, Z-Library lost control over many of its domain names, in part due to several interventions from U.S. law enforcement. In addition, the site’s domain names are blocked by court orders in many countries, including the UK, France, India, and Germany.

Z-Library has numerous domain names in use, which helps to address these blocking and seizure efforts. In addition, the site allows its users to operate their own mirror domains. This functionality was first announced last summer and earlier this month a major update was released.

The shadow library now allows people to run a mirror with their own branding, which can be password protected to add more exclusivity.

“Mirror sites […] now support branding customization and optional login‑only access. In practice, this means you can run your ‘own’ version of the library at a separate domain, with your visuals and your access rules,” Z-Library notes.

Mirror updates

The new private white-label functionality allows anyone to launch their own custom-branded library. This is not without risk, as mirror operators could face criminal and civil repercussions.

Practically, the new functionality will also help to evade domain blocking efforts. After all, password-protected mirrors without any Z-Library branding are not easily detected by rightsholders.

20% Revenue Share, Paid in Crypto

The blocking circumvention feature was also mentioned as a key functionality when Z-Library first invited users to host their own mirrors last year. Interestingly, this also provided a revenue generating opportunity.

After registering the mirror domain, Z-Library promises to share 20% of the donation revenue through this site, which will be paid in crypto.

“As compensation, we will transfer 20% of all donations from your mirror to you to keep the mirror running. The funds will be transferred to your crypto wallet,” Z-Library’s mirror page announced.

The mirror page

This revenue share model is still on offer today, as shown above. The only major change is that Cloudflare-registered domains are not supported. Whether this is the result of an enforcement effort or a technical challenge, remains unknown.

Bracing for the Next Takedown

The mirrors are not the only sign that Z-Library is preparing for more enforcement actions. The site also rebuilt its main menu, which now lists every active domain in one place, alongside a downloadable file that contains the same links.

That offline file is noteworthy. By handing users a copy of its access points to keep on their own devices, Z-Library is hedging against the day many of its domains go dark all at once.

Access
 

All in all, Z-Library is making access to its site as resilient as possible, while also turning its own users into a distribution network that is harder to seize or block than any central set of domains.

This expansion continues even as the U.S. criminal case remains frozen. The two indicted operators remain fugitives after fleeing house arrest in 2024, and the docket has shown no public movement in more than two years.

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Posted Tuesday 9 June 2026 at 7:48 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

RIP Matrix

To protect rightsholders, YouTube regularly removes, disables, or demonetizes videos that contain allegedly infringing content.

For years, little was known about the scope of these copyright actions, but that changed in late 2021 when the streaming platform published its first-ever copyright transparency report.

This report and the subsequent updates have shown that roughly 99% of all copyright claims on YouTube are handled through the Content ID system. Since most claims are automated, without any human intervention, access to this powerful removal tool is restricted to a few thousand formally approved rightsholders.

2.5 Billion Claims

YouTube’s latest Transparency Report shows that the number of automated claims continues to rise. In 2025, the platform processed 2,502,941,368 Content ID claims, up 14% from 2.2 billion the year before.

Of the approved 7,626 rightsholders who currently have access to the system, 4,454 actively used it. These numbers are both slightly down from last year. YouTube doesn’t provide a specific reason, but notes that access can be revoked as part of regular evaluations.

“To keep the ecosystem safe, we regularly evaluate partners’ access to CID to ensure they demonstrate an ongoing need for scaled rights management. In some cases, these evaluations may result in removing a partner’s access to Content ID and matching them with a more appropriate copyright management tool,” the transparency report reads.

As clearly shown above, the number of rightsholders participating in the Content ID system pales in comparison to the 295,531 rightsholders who filed removal requests through the standard webform, or the 173,338 that used the automated Copyright Match Tool.

Nonetheless, Content ID’s 4,454 active rightsholders were responsible for 99.48% of all copyright actions on the video streaming platform. Compared to earlier years, the automated Content ID takedowns continues to increase, both relatively in percentages and in absolute numbers.

Takedown actions per tool

Millions of Disputed Claims

As with any takedown tool, uploaders and third-party rightsholders are not always in agreement. In fact, there are millions of Content ID disputes every year.

YouTube reports that of all Content ID claims, uploaders have disputed 12,840,608, or 0.51% of the total. That’s a relatively small percentage but still a rather large absolute number. For comparison, uploaders appealed 9.9% of all webform removals, which translates to little over 267,000 counter-notices.

In 2024, uploaders won 70% of disputes. In 2025 that figure dropped slightly to 67.42%. However, those who decided to challenge the rejection though YouTube’s process, won their appeal 75% of the time.

The flow chart on the right illustrates the full appeals process.

Not all disputes are resolved though YouTube’s internal Content ID process. If uploaders persist that their content was erroneously claimed, while rightsholders argue the opposite, YouTube will reinstate the video, at which point rightsholders have to take the matter to court.

In 2025, 10,698 claims reached this stage, but fewer than 1% of these resulted in a lawsuit, YouTube notes.

Outside the Content ID system, YouTube also flags abuse of its DMCA takedown webform as a problem. In 2025, more than 6% of all these removal requests were believed to be “a likely false assertion of copyright ownership” by YouTube’s review team.

“The attempted abuse rate through the webform was more than 10 times higher than the attempted abuse rate across all other copyright removal tools,” the transparency report notes.

A $12 Billion Revenue Machine

While YouTube’s Content ID can be a significant source of frustration for uploaders, it has become a substantial revenue stream for rightsholders. Instead of removing infringing content, rightsholders chose to monetize over 90% of all Content ID claims in 2025.

YouTube reports that cumulative ad revenue paid to rightsholders through Content ID has now exceeded $12 billion since the system launched. That figure includes data up to December 2024 and will likely be billions higher today.

It is clear that not being present on YouTube at all is no longer an economically wise decision. On the contrary, for some rightsholders a viral infringing upload is no longer a problem, but a revenue opportunity intstead.

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Posted Sunday 7 June 2026 at 7:06 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

RIP Matrix

Last month, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) issued its annual Special 301 Report, signaling which countries can make improvements on the IP enforcement front.

In the most recent report, the USTR applied the “Priority Foreign Country” status for the first time in thirteen years, calling out Vietnam for persistent failures to deter online piracy and counterfeiting.

In recent years Vietnamese authorities reportedly helped to shut down several pirate sites, including the massive Fmovies network, which served billions of visitors. However, the criminal prosecution of Fmovies resulted in suspended prison sentences, which lack a serious deterrent effect by U.S. standards. Meanwhile, many piracy operations continue to link back to the country.

Under the Trade Act of 1974, the Priority Foreign Country designation triggers a 30-day window for USTR to decide whether to open a formal investigation. Late last week, Ambassador Jamieson Greer formally made that call.

USTR Opens Investigation

The Section 301 investigation will examine whether Vietnam’s policies and practices related to copyright protection and enforcement are unreasonable or discriminatory, hindering U.S. commerce. Judging from the comments released by the USTR, it believes that Vietnam’s shortcomings are serious.

“While Vietnam has recently taken some steps toward addressing IP concerns that the United States has chronicled over many years in USTR’s Annual Special 301 Report, IP infringement in Vietnam continues to impair the competitive position of U.S. innovators and creators,” Ambassador Greer said.

“We need to see Vietnam resolve these long-standing concerns, including on a range of IP enforcement issues, in a manner that is sustained and that deters future IP infringements,” he adds.

With the announcement of the investigation, USTR also opened a consultation round, asking stakeholders to comment on their trade-related experiences with Vietnam. This includes the piracy challenges and concerns, which are highlighted as the primary concern in the federal register notice.

Piracy First

The notice mentions that Vietnam’s failure to provide effective enforcement against online piracy is the primary reason why Vietnam is designated as a priority foreign country. The USTR wants to see significant improvement on that front.

“The United States has repeatedly raised strong concerns about Vietnam’s role in online piracy worldwide,” the notice reads.

“Vietnam remains a significant source of online piracy and continues to host popular English-language copyright infringement sites and services that target a global audience. Some of these sites provide piracy services, including extensive libraries of pirated movies and TV shows.”

The USTR notice doesn’t mention any sites and services by name. However, its earlier Notorious Markets report flagged HiAnime, Myflixerz, and MegaCloud as key threats. Interestingly, these sites all went offline in the days and week before the USTR’s Special 301 Report came out.

Whether the operators of these sites are targeted in criminal investigations in unknown. However, USTR’s notice mentioned that pirate site operators in Vietnam have had it relatively easy in recent years.

There have been criminal prosecutions in high profile piracy cases, including the cases against the operators of BestBuyIPTV and Fmovies. However, these resulted in mild suspended sentences with relatively low fines. According to USTR, these lack a proper deterrent effect.

“Despite Vietnam having criminal laws that provide for substantial fines and years of incarceration for copyright infringement, the defendants in recent criminal prosecutions received suspended sentences and were only ordered to pay relatively low financial penalties,” USTR writes.

“The operators of these sites and services likely based themselves in Vietnam because Vietnam’s IP enforcement efforts have historically lacked the follow-through and substantial penalties needed to deter infringement.”

The problem runs deeper than lenient sentences alone. According to the federal register notice, rightsholders face informal pressure from Vietnamese enforcement authorities to file administrative complaints rather than pursue civil or criminal enforcement. These administrative proceedings carry no meaningful deterrent effect.

Tariffs are on the Table

The request for public comments asks stakeholders to weigh in on “what action, if any, should be taken, including tariff and non-tariff actions.” This means that different types of trade sanctions are now on the table.

The USTR must make its final determination within six months and right holders and other parties have a month to submit their comments.

Behind the scenes, USTR will also consult with the Vietnamese government to see if the concerns can be addressed before it makes a decision, in consultation with President Trump. If Vietnam engages, in order to avoid possible sanctions, we might see more enforcement actions taking place in the country.

In that sense, the recent disappearances of Myflixerz and MegaCloud, and the shutdown of HiAnime, may have been a primer for what’s to come.

—

The Federal Register Notice is available here (pdf). The USTR press release can be found here.

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Posted Saturday 6 June 2026 at 8:03 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

RIP Matrix

The Internet is full of cheap IPTV services that offer access to premium sports, films, and television content for a fraction of what legal services charge.

This has turned into a multi-million dollar business for several similar networks, which are typically more professional and organized than the ‘hobby’ pirate projects that emerged two decades ago.

The professionalism of these services is matched by the severity of the law enforcement response. The modern-day piracy networks, which are not easily threatened by a cease and desist notice, are now often targeted in international law enforcement operations. This includes KRATOS 2.

Operation KRATOS 2

The KRATOS 2 operation was coordinated by Bulgaria’s General Directorate for Combating Organised Crime (GDBOP), with operational support from Europol.

This wasn’t an isolated crackdown, but a months-long operation that ran from September 2025 to April 2026, Besides Bulgaria, it also involved Belgium, Croatia, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The results, based on their sheer numbers, appear to be substantial. Press releases report that nine criminal organizations were dismantled, 29 people arrested, while another 86 suspects identified. In total, investigators carried out 148 house searches.

From Europol’s press release
 

With 72 ongoing criminal investigations and 59 cases referred to judicial authorities, there may be further fallout in the future. However, while these numbers are significant, there is no concrete mention of any targets.

Reported Domains and Removed URLs

In the past, we have regularly reported on concrete actions, where domain names were seized, such as the Streameast and Fmovies crackdowns. However, the press release issued by Europol and others is more carefully worded.

There is no mention of domains that were seized or taken down. Instead, it mentions “169 reported domains”. Similarly, it mentioned that 27,332 URLs were removed, without disclosing where these URLs were removed from, and if these belonged to one or more domains.

The list of operational statistics adds that 722,961 infringing objects were identified since September last year. While that sounds impressive, we recently reported that Google removes nearly 10 million URLs from its index every day, following requests from the takedown outfit Link-Busters.

Private sector partners including ACE/MPA, LaLiga, UEFA, Friend MTS, beIN, and Irdeto, helped identify an additional 4,370 piracy-linked domains, 18,331 associated IP addresses, and 397,384 URLs that were flagged for suspension.

Again, these numbers are significant, but relatively modest compared to traditional DMCA removal campaigns.

No Names?

Interestingly, the press release does not mention any names either. There are no platforms mentioned, no operator names identified, and no seized domain names cited. This stands in sharp contrast to the exact figures that are reported on the broader operation.

It is possible that the authorities don’t want to interfere with ongoing investigations, but some more context on the targets and what was actually achieved in terms of deterrence, would be helpful.

With the information at hand, it is essentially impossible for journalists to independently verify the operation’s impact. Whether the 27,332 “removed” URLs represent meaningful anti-piracy disruption, or whether these links were immediately replaced is unknown.

Many news outlets repeat the headline figures, without giving any context or asking any questions. While that may be what’s intended by the authorities, it’s not particularly helpful from a news providing perspective.

Europol’s press release does offer one explanation for the lack of names. Instead of focusing on seizing consumer-facing domains, the operation deliberately targeted the ‘wider criminal ecosystem’ and its underlying technical infrastructure.

Bulgaria’s Removal from the U.S. Piracy Watch List

The KRATOS 2 operation follows the original operation, conducted during the summer of 2024. That action targeted a piracy network that catered to 22 million users. It resulted in 11 arrests, the seizure of 29 servers and 270 IPTV devices, and the takedown of 100 domains.

TorrentFreak covered that operation under its Italian name, Operation Takendown. No piracy platform name was disclosed in that case either but Bulgaria also had a leading role there.

Most Bulgarian coverage on KRATOS 2 cited the same figures and details that were covered by the Europol press release. However, they also add a specific note that went unmentioned by the official communication channels.

A few weeks ago, the United States Representative (USTR) removed Bulgaria from its Special 301 Piracy Watch List due to “significant enforcement actions” and “criminal prosecutions.” This included a torrent tracker crackdown, but the KRATOS operations likely played a key role as well.

According to Europol, KRATOS 2 is part of an ongoing enforcement campaign so it’s possible that a third phase will follow. Whether that will include names in addition to numbers, has yet to be seen.

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Posted Friday 5 June 2026 at 7:51 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

RIP Matrix

Link-Busters is the preferred anti-piracy partner for many of the world’s largest book publishers, including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins.

The Dutch company is also the most active DMCA sender at Google by a wide margin, flagging billions of ‘pirate’ URLs in the search engine, mostly from shadow libraries.

6.5 Billion and Plateauing

Google recently updated its search transparency report, showing that Link-Busters now accounts for more than 6.5 billion delisting requests. This is more than a third of the nearly 18 billion requests Google received in total.

The 6.5 billion is also more than four times the volume of the next-largest reporting organization, Rivendell, which sits just under 1.5 billion. MG Premium, the enforcement arm of Pornhub parent Aylo, follows with roughly 1.26 billion removal requests.

Top reporting partners
 

These mind-boggling numbers are all the more impressive when you realize that the company only started ramping up its takedown efforts less than three years ago. In record time, its output dwarfed that of all competitors. However, its takedown activity no longer appears to be growing.

Looking at Link-Busters’ takedown activity, we see a near-vertical rise through 2023 and into 2024, which flattened into a plateau in the 60 to 70 million weekly range about a year ago. The volume is enormous, but it is no longer growing.

Plateauing?

The shape of the data suggests a hard ceiling rather than a coincidental drop in infringing material to report. To find out what is keeping these URL reports on a plateau, we reached out to Link-Busters, but the company did not respond to a request for comment.

“The Quantity They Need”

TorrentFreak asked Google directly whether it enforces a daily cap, and if so, why. A spokesperson for the search engine did not confirm or deny the existence of a hard cap. Instead, they pointed out that trusted rightsholders get what they need.

“We offer a Trusted Content Removal Program (TCRP) that provides a path for bulk submissions from trusted partners, and work to ensure the accuracy of these submissions and that these partners can submit the quantity they need,” a Google spokesperson said.

The response did not directly answer our question. It is, however, more reserved than the response we received in 2013, when Google said there was “no limit on the number of DMCA notices” rightsholders may send in.

At the time, Google was accused of enforcing a cap of 10,000 URLs per day per rightsholder, which anti-piracy group BREIN was trying to raise to 40,000. In that context, a ceiling of roughly 10 million reported URLs per day for a single reporter would be a 1,000-fold increase.

3.5 Billion Reported URLs a Year….

At the current rate, Link-Busters is reporting roughly 3.5 billion URLs per year. The company has a good standing when it comes to the accuracy of its notices, with less than a percent being duplicates or other errors. That’s well below the average error rate.

Finally, it should be noted that nearly 8% of the reported URLs were not indexed by Google, yet. Google removed these URLs proactively to accommodate rightsholders.

Whether the 70 million weekly figure is a deliberate limit, a technical bottleneck, or simply the point at which Link-Busters’ own crawling capacity tops out, remains a mystery for now. What is clear is that the line was drawn nearly a year ago and appears to be holding.

Ceiling or not, Link-Busters remains comfortably the largest DMCA sender Google has ever seen. No other company comes even close to hitting the same 70 million ceiling.

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Posted Wednesday 3 June 2026 at 7:50 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

RIP Matrix

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This week we have one newcomer on the list.

“Mortal Kombat II” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on June 01 are:

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Posted Tuesday 2 June 2026 at 7:23 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

RIP Matrix

There are a handful of traditions we have at TorrentFreak, and remembering the first raid on The Pirate Bay is one of them.

It was not only the first major story we covered, it also shaped how the piracy ecosystem evolved over the years. And it changed the lives of the site’s co-founders, who were eventually convicted.

What many people may not realize, however, is that without a few keystrokes in the site’s early days, it would be a distant memory today.

This is what happened.

On May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. They had instructions to take the site’s servers offline as part of a criminal probe, following pressure from the US government.

As the police were about to enter, Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij knew something wasn’t quite right. Both men said they had noticed being tailed by private investigators. This time, however, their servers were the target.

At around 10:00 in the morning, Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office. He asked his colleague to head down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence’, although none of it, whatever it was, related to The Pirate Bay.

A Crucial Backup

As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized the problems might be linked to their torrent tracker. Just in case, he decided to make a full backup of the site.

When he arrived at the co-location facility, those concerns turned out to be justified. Dozens of police officers were floating around, taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.

Footage from The Pirate Bay raid

In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik’s decision to back up the site was probably the most pivotal moment in its history. Because of that backup, the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days.

“The Police Bay”

The entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for.

Unimpressed, the operators renamed the site “The Police Bay”, complete with a new logo shooting cannonballs at Hollywood. A few days later the logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes.

Logos after the raid
 

Instead of shutting it down, the raid propelled The Pirate Bay into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. The publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike, exactly the opposite of what Hollywood had hoped for.

The US Pushed Sweden

Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind the scenes. For many years the scale of that involvement was unknown. However, information obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2017 helped to fill in some blanks.

The trail started with a cable sent from the US Embassy in Sweden to Washington in November 2005, roughly six months before the raid. The Embassy wrote that Hollywood’s MPA met with US Ambassador Bivins and, separately, with the Swedish State Secretary of Justice. The Pirate Bay was one of the top agenda items.

“The MPA is particularly concerned about PirateBay, the world’s largest Torrent file-sharing tracker. According to the MPA and based on Embassy’s follow-up discussions, the Justice Ministry is very interested in a constructive dialogue with the US. on these concerns,” the cable read.

From the US Embassy Cable
 

The Embassy explained that Hollywood would like Sweden to take action against a big player such as The Pirate Bay.

“We have yet to see a ‘big fish’ tried, something the MPA badly wants to see, particularly in light of the fact that Sweden hosts the largest Bit Torrent file-sharing tracker in the world, ‘Pirate-Bay’, which openly flaunts IPR,” the cable writer commented.

Fast forward half a year and, indeed, 65 police officers were ready to take The Pirate Bay’s servers offline. While there is no written evidence that US officials were actively involved in planning the investigation or raid, indirectly they played a major role.

This is backed up by further evidence. In a cable sent in April 2007, the Embassy nominated one of its employees, whose name is redacted, for the State Department’s Foreign Service National (FSN) of the year award. Again, The Pirate Bay case was cited.

“REDACTED skillful outreach directly led to a bold decision by Swedish law enforcement authorities to raid Pirate Bay and shut it down. This was recognized as a major achievement in Washington in furthering U.S. efforts to combat Internet piracy worldwide.”

We don’t know if the employee in question received the award. In hindsight, however, the raid did very little to deter piracy.

The Aftermath

The swift comeback turned the site’s founders into heroes for many. The story made headline news around the world, and in Stockholm people waved pirate flags in the streets, a sentiment that benefited the newly founded Pirate Party as well.

The raid eventually resulted in negative consequences for the founders. It was the start of a criminal investigation, which led to a trial, and prison sentences for several of the site’s key players.

This became another turning point. Many of the people involved from the early days decided to cut their ties with the site, which was handed over to a more anonymous group, ostensibly located in the Seychelles.

The outspokenness of the early years was replaced by the silent treatment. While some moderators have spoken out, the anonymous operator nicknamed ‘Winston’ remains behind the scenes at all times.

This was made obvious in 2014, when the site disappeared for weeks following another raid at a Stockholm data center. At the time, even the site’s staffers had no idea what was going on.

The Pirate Bay recovered from that second raid too, and remains seen as a piracy icon by many. These days the site bills itself as ‘the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site’, a title it arguably earned on May 31, 2006.

For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 7:28 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

RIP Matrix

With millions of regular users, YTS is arguably the most visited torrent site on the internet today.

The current operators ‘unofficially’ took over the YTS brand in 2015 after the original group threw in the towel. Since then, it has amassed a rather impressive user base.

After adopting one of the most iconic piracy brands, YTS faced its fair share of legal troubles. In 2019, the popular torrent site and its operator were accused of mass copyright infringement in multiple lawsuits filed by filmmakers in the United States. Surprisingly, YTS managed to settle these lawsuits to live another day, although that came at a price, also for its users.

More recently, the site dealt with a string of domain troubles. Last November, its long-standing YTS.mx domain abruptly stopped resolving, prompting a move to YTS.lt before the operators settled on the current YTS.bz domain earlier this year.

Extended Downtime

This week, YTS.bz went dark again. Starting a little over a day ago, YTS users noticed that the popular torrent site became unreachable.

The domain currently returns a Cloudflare “504 Gateway time-out” error, with the diagnostic page showing that Cloudflare is working fine, while the origin server does not respond. That typically points to hosting problems.

Whether the downtime is the result of an enforcement action is unknown. Rightsholders have previously targeted YTS and its infrastructure, however, so it is an option.

‘Gateway time-out’
 

The site’s other official domains, including YTS.lt, all redirect to the .bz domain and logically point to the same Cloudflare error. For now, there is no working version on the site, besides copycats.

No Official Response

Adding to the confusion, the status tracker ytsproxies.com continues to list the official domains as online. These reports are inaccurate, as each of the listed domains resolves to an error page.

The operators, meanwhile, have not responded. YTS’s official Telegram channel was last updated in March, and the new X account @YTSreal has not mentioned the recent downtime.

This leaves users without an explanation, leaving a vacuum that’s quickly filled by rumors, with unofficial mirrors and copycat sites lining up to fill the demand.

Extended stretches of downtime are not unusual for YTS, however, and the site has so far always resurfaced after previous troubles. Whether that will happen again has yet to be seen.

Whatever the cause, the downtime takes one of the most prominent piracy targets offline, at least for now. If more information becomes available, we will update this article accordingly.

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Posted Sunday 31 May 2026 at 10:53 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

The FIFA 2026 World Cup officially kicks off on June 11, hosted across Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

As the largest sports tournament in the world, and with multi-billion-dollar broadcast rights, these events typically increase the demand for pirate streaming sites.

World Cup Host City Raises Piracy Alarm

The organizers of the tournament are also aware of this. This includes Mexico City’s host committee, which published an alarming letter on X a few days ago. The letter, sent to the federal consumer protection agency (Profeco), flagged online piracy as a severe problem that deserves the government’s attention.

The letter explains that social media and news reports have alerted them to the increased popularity of pirate apps and sites, including KaelusTV, ThunderTV, Telelatino, Sunset TV, and PopTV, which operate from a wide variety of domain names.

Social media promotions, including the TikTok ad for one of the many Sunset TV apps, are indeed not difficult to find.

Sunset TV promo on TikTok
 

Aside from obvious copyright infringement concerns that put commercial profits at risk, the host city points at another issue. These piracy apps and services can put the personal data of Mexicans at risk by stealing passwords and other info, while also raising malware and fraud concerns.

Consumer Awareness

Mexico City’s host committee argues that a government-backed consumer protection campaign is warranted. The letter offers no public evidence for the fraud claims, and says the platform names themselves came from news reports and social media.

“I most attentively request that the Federal Consumer Protection Agency implement an informative campaign, which we will gladly support, to alert consumers in Mexico about the risks they incur when accepting to contract the services of this type of providers, which can even lead to financial fraud, theft of personal data or passwords, as well as banking data housed on their devices,” the letter reads.

The letter (part 1+2)

The letter flags piracy as a broad problem, but its only ask is for a government-backed awareness campaign. Despite its targeted message, the response was broad, ranging from anonymous football fans to the country’s president.

Piracy & Commercial Interests

Posting the message publicly on X resulted in a wave of commentary that’s not in favor of FIFA and the rightsholders. Several cited the high costs of the ticket prices, and merchandise, as well as the fact that many World Cup matches are behind a paywall.

In Mexico, where Televisa is the main rightsholder, streaming most matches through its paid ViX Premium service for subscribers with a 499-peso World Cup pass. Mexico’s national team matches will be available freely, but the paywall is likely to increase the interest in pirate services among fans.

“Piracy isn’t the problem; it’s the consequence of the real problem, which is the attempt to elitize football,” one commenter noted.

Not the problem

A negative response from the public, whose interests the host city is partly trying to protect, is somewhat ironic but not unexpected. Instead of talking about malware threats, the entire discussion is dominated by cost issues and commercial interests.

The consumer protection agency, Profeco, responded through César Iván Escalante, who noted that this request has not been made in the official FIFA working groups, which it is already taking part in. Instead, it appears to be an isolated request from the Mexico City host committee.

Escalante notes that the letter, which was sent personally by the director of the stadium hosting the Mexico City matches, asks the government to help protect commercial interests.

“Regarding the transmission rights, what they want is for us to take part in protecting the transmission rights that belong to Televisa, to prevent these platforms from being able to use them,” he said, suggesting that this is more than a simple consumer protection issue.

President Responds

The consumer angle is particularly striking when considering that the Mexican public has been rather critical of the commercial interests.

To a degree, that also applies to Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who also responded to the matter. Sheinbaum would personally prefer the broadcasts to be open, while acknowledging that FIFA has sold them to commercial platforms.

“The broadcast should be open, that’s what I think, but FIFA decided a while ago that the matches are only shown on certain platforms. So, those platforms have to be accessible so that people can watch the matches,” Sheinbaum said, while noting that it is not correct to complain via social media while you are in official meetings with the same people.

Instead of launching an anti-piracy campaign, the president stated that the government will set up massive screens in public squares around the country, so people can watch for free. It is unclear whether the authorities have secured a public rebroadcasting license for these screens.

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Posted Wednesday 27 May 2026 at 5:28 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This week we have three newcomers on the list.

“Mortal Kombat II” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on May 25 are:

Note: We also publish an updating archive of all the list of weekly most torrented movies lists.

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Posted Tuesday 26 May 2026 at 8:12 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Law enforcement operations against pirate streaming networks have been a regular occurrence, particularly inside the EU.

This includes Italy, where the financial police, Guardia di Finanza (GdF), has routinely cracked down on the “pezzotto,” the term used for selling IPTV streaming boxes and subscriptions.

This week the financial police in Ravenna announced something they say is different. In an operation named “Tutto Chiaro” (“All Clear”), coordinated by the Bologna prosecutor’s office, around 200 officers carried out more than 100 searches and seizures across Italy, with parallel action in France and Germany.

At the center of the crackdown is an app called CinemaGoal. The GdF calls the technology behind it “highly advanced and previously unseen”.

“The operation, which stemmed from social media monitoring, uncovered, for the first time, the existence of an innovative technology,” GdF explained, noting that the app offered superior viewing quality while the anti-piracy detection rate was minimal.

How the GdF Says It Worked

According to the GdF, CinemaGoal was installed on a customer’s device, connecting it to a foreign server that decrypted the premium content. This included content from premium broadcasters such as Sky and DAZN, but the authorities also named Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify as targets.

Pirate streaming
 

The police explain that, every three minutes, virtual machines captured the “original” codes of legitimate subscriptions and instantly relayed them, sending a “clear” signal to pirate subscribers. Those legitimate accounts were registered to fictitious names, as well as some who have been identified.

Because the system tapped into the official streaming feeds, GdF says the quality of the streams was superior. Paired with a low anti-piracy detection rate and relative anonymity for its subscribers, the more than 70 identified resellers had little trouble selling these subscriptions.

New Anti-Piracy Tech?

The “previously unseen” framing relied on a broad description by GdF, referencing “Original codes,” a “clear” signal, a foreign server that “decrypts” content. This is press release language, not a technical explanation. But just how “new” is this technology?

The few concrete details shared by authorities are reminiscent of one of the oldest piracy tricks. For over two decades, pirates have hijacked pay-TV by copying the constantly changing key that unlocks a single legitimate subscription and sharing it out to everyone else. This is typically known as card sharing.

GdF video

However, with card-sharing, keys typically change every few seconds. The GdF suggests that CinemaGoal refreshes codes every three minutes, which is significantly slower.

That timing, together with the claim that CinemaGoal actually looked better than an ordinary pirate stream, hints at something more modern. This would be largely in line with CDN leeching, which is an emerging problem that anti-piracy outfits have been referring to over the past years.

In 2024, anti-piracy group Irdeto noted that this technical breach is particularly popular among operations that use piracy-enabling devices.

“Typically, they will reverse engineer video applications to understand how to access and extract the CDN content, enabling them to distribute pirated material more efficiently,” the blog post explained, while also referencing the quality improvement.

“Pirates leverage CDN infrastructure to deliver pirated content more quickly and with lower latency, thus enhancing the streaming experience for their illicit users,” Irdeto added.

What type of operation was targeted by operation “Tutto Chiaro” remains unclear for now. The police reportedly have the source code, however, so more information may come out in the future.

Perhaps that will also explain a more straightforward problem with the official press release. Currently, the same “grab the codes every three minutes” description is used for all streaming services, from live sports on DAZN to on-demand video on Netflix, to music on Spotify. These platforms do not all work the same way, however, and cannot all be unlocked by a single trick.

Subscribers in the Crosshairs

Interestingly, public searches show that CinemaGoal has left no notable public footprint. TorrentFreak found no app store listing, APK mirror, reseller storefront, or forum thread predating the operation. Every reference dates to the announcement by the Italian police.

The GdF says the investigation began with “monitoring social media,” and, according to Italian outlet Il Post, the app was promoted through networks such as Telegram, with agents selling online or meeting customers in person. This would confirm that there was no public sales outlet mentioning the CinemaGoal app.

Through Eurojust, the authorities seized foreign servers holding the decryption data and the app’s source code. The same investigation found that the same operation also relied on the more traditional IPTV “pezzotto”, in addition to CinemaGoal.

Rightsholders have welcomed the latest streaming piracy crackdown. Sky Italia’s CEO Andrea Duilio thanked the GdF and the Bologna prosecutors, and warned that people who choose illegal streaming risk fines and expose their personal data to theft and fraud.

Whether the enforcement actions will effectively end the operation is unclear. There haven’t been any reports of arrests of the people who ran the operation.

GdF’s press release does suggest that many pirate subscribers are at risk. It notes that fines will be issued to the first 1,000 identified subscribers, who will receive claims ranging from €154 to €5,000. The GdF puts the total involved in the “thousands.”

This is not the first time that pirate streaming subscribers have come in the crosshairs of the authorities. Last year, thousands of subscribers, connected to an IPTV crackdown, received similar fines in the mail.

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Posted Tuesday 26 May 2026 at 8:11 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

This weekend features the final round in the Premier League football season, but the league’s anti-piracy enforcement machine is showing no signs of slowing down.

On Wednesday, the Premier League took its legal concerns to a California federal court. Specifically, it requested a DMCA subpoena to compel domain registrar Tucows to identify the operators of a fresh batch of pirate sports-streaming sites.

Premier League’s Subpoena

The legal paperwork lists a web of pirate sports streaming domains and redirects, identifying 25 targets. Many of these sites use well-known sports pirate brands, including Totalsportek, Sportsurge, and Rojadirecta, which are not necessarily linked to the original operations.

Futbollibre.org was one of the most trafficked domains, with more than 12 million monthly visits last month, according to Similarweb. The domain, along with several others on the list, was already suspended and placed on “clienthold” roughly two weeks before the Premier League’s subpoena request, a registrar-level status that disables the domain.

Whether these suspensions were connected to the Premier League’s complaint is unknown. Other domains in the list remain online at the time of writing.

‘Disable Access’

According to the Premier League, these sites all streamed football matches without permission. This was also made clear in a copyright infringement notification that was sent to domain name registrar Tucows by the Premier League’s legal team at Hagan Noll & Boyle.

This notification is mandatory in order to obtain a DMCA subpoena and asks Tucows to disable the listed domains.

“Tucows is asked to remove or disable access to Premier League’s copyrighted works, which, based on the infringement that has occurred to date through the websites and domain names identified above, will continue to be infringed in this same manner throughout the Premier League season and into future seasons,” the letter reads.

Copyright infringement notification

Additionally, the legal paperwork includes a detailed investigation into the infringing nature of the sites. According to the Premier League, this paperwork is sufficient for a court clerk to sign the DMCA subpoena, without putting it before a judge.

Exposing the Operators

If the proposed DMCA subpoena is granted, it would require Tucows to share all personally identifying information it has on the registrants of these domains. That includes names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, emails, addresses, payment information, and account history.

Proposed DMCA subpoena
 

At the time of writing, a court clerk has yet to sign off on the subpoena, which is typically a formality.

Whether DMCA subpoenas can reach intermediaries that don’t store infringing content has been contested before. Last year, the Ninth Circuit ruled that this route was not valid when movie companies used it to demand data from internet provider Cox, because it was a mere conduit for its subscribers’ traffic. How this logic applies to a registrar has yet to be tested.

The Streams Use Amazon and Google

At this point, it is worth pointing out that the pirated streams are not hosted on the domain names that are targeted in the subpoena. This is also evident from the Premier League’s own investigation package, which points to other American tech companies.

For example, the antenasport.org domain streamed the match between Fulham and Aston Villa from a backend link at Amazon Web Services. As shown below, the .m3u8 playlist was loaded through s3.dualstack.us-east-2.amazonaws.com. The same applies to content streamed from other domains.

From the evidence package
 

Amazon is not alone, as Google’s cloud storage URL “storage.googleapis.com” also appeared in the evidence package, linked to a pirated stream for the Sunderland vs Nottingham Forest match.

Whether the Premier League also attempted to get information through these companies is unknown.

From the notice
 

Regarding the Premier League’s DMCA subpoena request, Tucows informed TorrentFreak that it complies when legally required to.

“Tucows is a staunch advocate for free speech and the freedom of expression on the Internet however, when served with valid due process, like any business, Tucows complies,” writes Reg Levy, the company’s Associate General Counsel for Domains.

Tucows declined to comment further, citing potential ongoing or active investigations. For now, the Premier League’s request awaits a clerk’s signature. Whether the operators behind these sites are eventually unmasked is another question.

—

The Premier League’s DMCA subpoena request is available here (pdf), along with the notification of claimed infringement (pdf), which were both filed at the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

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Posted Monday 25 May 2026 at 8:29 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

In February, the Commercial Court No. 1 of Córdoba labeled VPN services as “technological intermediaries,” ordering them to actively block IP addresses that host illegal LaLiga matches.

The “dynamic” injunction specifically targeted NordVPN and ProtonVPN and it was granted without the companies being heard. In addition, there was no immediate right of appeal either.

Both VPN providers questioned the Spanish court’s jurisdiction, as they are both incorporated outside the EU. NordVPN called the approach unacceptable and warned of overblocking.

LaLiga, in its turn, pointed out that NordVPN failed to fully implement the Spanish interim order, and it asked the court to punish the VPN provider with fines.

Fines Rejected

According to NordVPN, the court declined this request. In a blog post published today, the company says the Córdoba judge dismissed LaLiga’s request for coercive fines, because it could not conclude that NordVPN had deliberately and without justification breached the February order.

The technical evidence that NordVPN presented in court relied on two points.

1. The flagged IP addresses changed frequently, often within hours, so the provided lists no longer matched the live addresses by the time blocking could take effect.

2. The blanket IP-level blocking demanded would have resulted in broad overblocking, rendering thousands of lawful websites inaccessible to users in Spain and beyond.

“What the ruling does is confirm something we said openly from day one — the technical concerns are real and evidenced, and a Spanish court has now recognized that,” the blog post reads.

The court’s findings, as described to TorrentFreak by NordVPN, are more measured. The company says the judge accepted its technical evidence as relevant to compliance but stopped short of ruling its experts right and LaLiga’s wrong, instead finding that the two reports deserved “the same consideration” while reaching “the opposite conclusion.”

For a closer look, TorrentFreak asked NordVPN for a copy of the order, but the company said it could not share it at this stage.

Update: Shortly after publication, LaLiga informed TorrentFreak that it couldn’t share a copy of the order either. The league confirms that the decision merely sets aside the coercive fines while the proceedings continue, stressing that it does not exempt NordVPN from implementing IP blocks where LaLiga can prove piracy is taking place.

Not the Final Word

By NordVPN’s own account, the decision is narrow. The company describes it as a procedural ruling at the preliminary stage, not a judgment on the merits. This means that the main proceedings are still ahead.

At the same time, the VPN provider also points out that there is broader opposition growing against the Spanish blocking effort, where overblocking affected legal sites and services at Cloudflare, Vercel, GitHub, Docker, and elsewhere.

“Inside Spain, the consequences of indiscriminate IP blocking have become almost impossible to ignore,” NordVPN writes.

The friction has reached parliament. On April 29, a congressional committee passed a non-binding motion urging the government to reform Spain’s Digital Services Law, introducing a principle of “technological proportionality” to address and limit overblocking.

For now, however, the original February injunction remains in place and the underlying case continues. Whether the technical objections that NordVPN presented in court will also hold up when they are reviewed on the merits has yet to be seen.

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Posted Saturday 23 May 2026 at 8:11 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has been the driving force behind pirate site blocking around the world for more than fifteen years.

With blocking powers in more than 50 countries, the group sees the enforcement option as a key anti-piracy tool that it hopes the United States will also adopt soon.

Last year, for example, the MPA’s Senior Executive Vice President Karyn Temple discussed an overview of site-blocking ‘best practices’ at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Among other things, this includes the inclusion of dynamic blocking, automated processes, all with proper safeguards.

For the upcoming 18th WIPO session next month, the MPA has also prepared a presentation on site blocking. Delfos Visser’s contribution discusses the role of intermediaries. This includes the gradually expanding role of ISPs, search engines, VPNs, DNS resolvers, domain name registrars, and content delivery networks.

The involvement of these intermediaries is regularly discussed, both in and outside of courts. However, the MPA’s presentation also includes a notable new site-blocking angle that has not been covered in the press, until now.

UK’s New ‘Omnibus’ Blocking Order

In his contribution, Delfos Visser highlights a new UK High Court ruling that has not yet been published publicly on BAILII or the National Archives. The case, Columbia Pictures and others v British Telecommunications and others, was filed in December 2025, seeking broader site-blocking powers in the UK.

The MPA notes that this case resulted in a new judgment on May 7, which will reportedly allow rightsholders to better respond to evolving piracy threats.

In the MPA’s framing, the ruling represents a new generation of UK blocking orders. Traditional applications under Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 required studios to identify specific pirate sites by domain name and ask the court to order the major UK ISPs to block them.

A 2022 ruling by Mr. Justice Meade extended that to also include orders covering “pirate brands,” which allowed rightsholders to also target mirror and copycat domains with similar names.

The new order goes even further. According to the MPA, it allows Hollywood studios to seek blocking of any “structurally infringing audiovisual piracy services that meet defined criteria, without having to bring a fresh court application for each new domain or site name available in the future.”

From the MPA contribution
 

The order remains in place for six months, with the option to request an extension. To qualify for a renewal, the studios are required to submit reports on the implementation and effectiveness to the court.

Shapeshifting & Agentic-AI-Powered Pirate Sites

The MPA presentation notes that these expanded blocking capabilities are much needed to be able to handle the ever-evolving piracy threats. Delfos Visser notes that this could include AI-amplified piracy tools in the future.

“While fully autonomous “agentic AI” systems are not yet known to be widely used in the piracy ecosystem, several technological developments are already materially lowering the barriers to large-scale domain hopping and evasive schemes,” Delfos Visser writes.

The submission points out that services such as bulk registration APIs can make it easier for pirates to counter blockades. Operators can rapidly deploy new streaming sites and rotate through networks of new and non-brand-related domain names to evade standard blocking orders, the MPA writes.

“As a result, infringing services increasingly operate through rotating networks of domains, including generic or non-brand-related names specifically designed to evade traditional domain-specific or brand-based blocking measures,” Delfos Visser writes.

This framing matters, as traditional s.97A orders and the more recent pirate-brand orders both require some link between a target domain and a previously identified pirate operation. The new order, as suggested by the MPA, breaks that link. Sites can be added to the blocklist based on whether they meet structural-infringement criteria, not whether they share a name or branding with an existing target.

Limited Transparency

While this does indeed read like a significant court order, the full text remains unavailable. We reached out to Delfos Visser and Wiggin, the law firm that represented the studios in this case, but neither responded to our inquiry. None of the targeted ISPs have publicly mentioned the order either.

The ruling will eventually be published online, and we will update this article accordingly when that happens. However, going forward, it would be welcome to have more transparency from the get-go.

Questions also remain about the transparency of these types of court orders. TorrentFreak has previously documented how dynamic blocking orders are quietly updated to add new domains. This makes it hard for outsiders to check the accuracy of these measures.

This transparency concern will be further elevated when rights holders can add new domains to existing orders that seemingly have no link to the domains that were initially targeted.

The MPA does not address the transparency angle in its WIPO submission. Last year, however, the group told the same forum that it is “of paramount importance that site blocking injunctions are rendered in the most transparent way possible.” For now, the new UK order falls short of that standard.

—

A copy of the MPA’s WIPO contribution, WIPO/ACE/18/26: Involvement of Intermediary Services in Site Blocking, is available here (pdf).

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Posted Friday 22 May 2026 at 9:02 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This week we have three newcomers on the list.

“Project Hail Mary” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on May 18 are:

Note: We also publish an updating archive of all the list of weekly most torrented movies lists.

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Posted Thursday 21 May 2026 at 6:16 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Earlier this month, a group of high-profile publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, asked a federal court in New York for a broad default judgment against Anna’s Archive.

The publishers argued that, in addition to sharing links to pirated books with the public, the shadow library is serving as a primary training data hub for AI companies like Meta and NVIDIA.

Because the site’s operators failed to show up in court to defend themselves, the publishers requested the court to rule in their favor.

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff signed a default judgment granting the publishers exactly what they asked for. This includes a multi-million-dollar damages award and a far-reaching technical injunction to take out the site’s surviving domain names.

A $19.5 Million Paper Victory

At first glance, the damages award is the headline figure. Judge Rakoff granted the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each of the 130 “Works in Suit”.

This brings the final damages bill amount to a staggering $19,500,000. However, as with the $322 million judgment won by the music industry against Anna’s Archive in the related Spotify case, it’s highly unlikely that this money will be recouped.

$19,500,000

For now, the operators of Anna’s Archive remain strictly anonymous, which doesn’t help either. The default judgment addresses this and requires the operators to unmask their identities and provide a sworn statement with valid contact information to the court within 10 days.

However, since the operators have previously stated they hide their identities to avoid “decades of prison time,” it is safe to assume that the operators will simply ignore this request.

Targeting Global Intermediaries

The true power of this default judgment lies in the permanent injunction. Anna’s Archive is known to evade enforcement and change domain names when needed, so the injunction targets the technical intermediaries that keep the site online.

Specifically, the injunction orders “all domain name registries and registrars of record” to permanently disable access to Anna’s Archive’s domains and prevent their transfer to anyone other than the publishers or the music industry plaintiffs in the related case.

In addition to domain name services, the order also extends to international hosting providers, who are also ordered to stop working with the site.

Leaving no room for interpretation, the order specifically names more than twenty companies and organizations. This includes familiar names like Cloudflare, Njalla, and DDOS-Guard, as well as the domain name registries of the site’s current active domains:

– TELE Greenland/Tusass (managing the .gl domain)

– PKNIC (managing the .pk domain)

– National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (managing Grenada’s .gd domain)

The names include some intermediaries that were already listed in the Spotify default judgment, as well as new ones.

Named intermediaries
 

Unlike the Spotify scrape, which Anna’s Archive removed after the music industry’s lawsuit, the publishers’ books remain actively available on the site. That distinction may make this injunction harder for intermediaries to ignore.

The injunction will be most effective against American companies that are subject to the jurisdiction of the New York federal court. That includes Cloudflare and OwnRegistrar, among others.

However, most of the intermediaries are foreign entities. Whether they voluntarily comply with a U.S. court order remains to be seen. While some foreign companies have taken action following U.S. injunctions, others have historically ignored them, citing a lack of local jurisdiction.

For now, however, the publishers have gotten everything they asked for from the court, which gives them a chance to take action against the shadow library’s current setup. If history is any indicator, Anna’s Archive will likely have a new batch of backup domains ready to deploy.

At the time of writing, Anna’s Archive’s three domain names remain active and online.

—

A copy of the default judgment, signed by Judge Rakoff on May 19, 2026, is available here (pdf).

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Posted Thursday 21 May 2026 at 6:05 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Last August, Irishman David Dunbar consented to a €480,000 damages judgment after Sky exposed his illegal IPTV operation.

This legal action effectively shut down the “IPTV is Easy” service. However, Sky Ireland wasn’t done yet, and had also set its sights on the service’s subscribers.

This was no veiled threat. In March, we reported that, based on Revolut records uncovered during proceedings against the operator, Ireland’s High Court had ordered Revolut to hand over the details of 304 IPTV subscribers connected to the now-defunct IPTV service. At the time, Sky said it intended to take legal action against some of those named.

While no lawsuit has been filed yet, this morning The Irish Independent reported that Sky has indeed sent out its first legal demand letters.

‘Prepared to Take Legal Action’

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Sky confirms that roughly 200 people have been targeted. Most of them are located in Wexford, but letters have also gone to people in Carlow, Clare, Cork, Dublin, Galway, and various other counties.

“Sky can confirm it has issued a first wave of cease-and-desist letters to c.200 individuals who paid for an unlawful subscription to the illegal IPTV is Easy service,” a Sky spokesperson informed us.

“Where an individual does not engage with us following receipt of this letter, Sky is prepared to pursue legal action. This may include seeking an injunction, damages arising from the infringement, and recovery of legal costs.”

Sky’s Notice of Copyright Infringement

While the paperwork is directly tailored to Sky, the text explicitly mentions local sports rightsholders. It notes that Clubber TV, LOITV, GAA+, and Premier Sports are ‘wholly aware’ of the situation and warns that failure to sign leaves them ‘with no other option but to take firm action’ independently.

14 Days to Sign Settlement

The letter, posted in full below, is sent by Sky’s Legal Litigation and Anti-Piracy Division. The recipients are told that they were identified as a subscriber of “IPTV Is Easy”.

Importantly, the cease-and-desist urges the former subscribers to sign and return a legally binding settlement agreement within 14 days.

With this settlement, recipients promise to “immediately and permanently disable” all IPTV subscriptions, to “never again infringe Sky’s copyright in any way including by watching any of its content or channels without paying the correct subscription fee,” and to never again subscribe to an illegal IPTV service.

From the letter
 

If recipients comply, Sky says it will not name them publicly. If they do not, the company says it is “fully prepared to take further legal action, including issuing court proceedings.” In addition, a breach of the agreement might also result in follow-up legal action.

Deterrence Over Damages

With these warning letters, Sky likely hopes for a direct and indirect deterrent effect. By announcing publicly that IPTV subscribers are not untouchable, Sky hopes that IPTV subscribers will reconsider their habit.

In any case, the letter notes that Sky will retain a permanent record of the infringer’s name, address, and signed undertaking for as long as necessary. This means that signing the settlement will effectively place someone permanently on Sky’s radar.

The letter also warns recipients that their activity ‘may also involve criminal offences’ under Ireland’s Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000.

Sky is not seeking monetary damages, which stands in sharp contrast to recent approaches in Italy and France. Earlier this year, a French Public Prosecutor’s Office fined 19 IPTV subscribers between €300 and €400 after their identities were exposed through a reseller bust.

In Italy, the Guardia di Finanza identified thousands of subscribers following the dismantling of a pirate network, and rightsholders subsequently sent requests for €1,000 in damages on top of the criminal fines.

Sky’s approach is softer, at least for now. The Irish Independent’s technology editor Adrian Weckler told Newstalk Breakfast this morning that Sky had deliberately chosen not to pursue full civil prosecution, which would have been a more costly endeavor.

“They’re trying to walk a bit of a tightrope,” Weckler said. “They hope users will be freaked out by the letters and simply stop using them.”

Whether that strategy will work has yet to be seen. At the same time, it also remains unclear how Sky plans to verify whether the targeted users do indeed stay away from pirate IPTV services going forward.

In any case, the 200 letters represent a tiny fraction of an estimated 400,000 dodgy box households in Ireland. This means that there are plenty of targets remaining.

—

A copy of the official template for Sky’s cease-and-desist letter is available here (pdf)

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Posted Wednesday 20 May 2026 at 7:00 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) established itself as the world’s leading anti-piracy coalition.

The Motion Picture Association-led organization united rightsholders from all over the world, forming a united front against online copyright infringement.

While much of the enforcement work takes place behind closed doors, DMCA subpoenas are a staple information-gathering tool of ACE. Through these subpoenas, the organization requests third-party intermediaries to hand over information they have on various alleged pirate sites.

Earlier this year, ACE obtained a DMCA subpoena, compelling Discord to identify the operators of community servers attached to pirate streaming portals HDFull. This was paired with a broader subpoena, asking Cloudflare to share details on HDFull’s domain operator, as well as those of other sites.

DMCA Subpoenas

A few days ago, ACE requested a new DMCA subpoena against Cloudflare, targeting 29 new domain names. The legal paperwork is filed by the Motion Picture Association and names Columbia, Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros., who are all ACE members too.

Specifically, the subpoena demands identifying information, such as physical addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, payment information, and account history, related to the Cloudflare accounts associated with these sites.

The list of domain names is a testament to the global nature of the anti-piracy coalition, targeting French, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Spanish, and Hindi-language sites, among others.

A Young French Torrent Tracker

One of the targeted domain names is la-cale.space, a French private BitTorrent tracker that launched in late December 2025. The site stands out because it’s a relatively new invitation-only community whose reach is more limited than public torrent or streaming sites.

Private Port, No Mercy for Informants
 

The private tracker has grown quite significantly recently, particularly after the collapse of the French YggTorrent tracker. The subpoena will test how well the operators have shielded their identities.

Domains, Works & URLs
 

The subpoena request lists “Moana” and “Gladiator 2” as two titles that are shared on the site. The legal paperwork also lists the private URLs, suggesting that the anti-piracy group has access to the private community.

A Veteran Chinese Torrent Forum

ACE’s subpoena also targets another pirate community that is the opposite of the French tracker in many ways. The Chinese forum known as “BT Home / 1LOU Station”, currently operating from 1lou.me, is far from a newcomer.

The veteran community has been operating in various incarnations for around two decades, hopping through domains including BTBTT, BTBBT, 1lou.icu, 1lou.pro, and now 1lou.me. It was one of the first torrent-oriented communities and remains online today, with millions of monthly visitors.

BT Home

The long-running Chinese forum is also an unusual target, as it is predominantly popular in mainland China. As far as we know, ACE does not have any members there. That said, the Hollywood movie studios have commercial interests around the globe.

Vietnamese APIs & Other International Targets

The list of domain names also includes kkphim.com, ophim17.cc, and phim.nguonc.com, which are not typical pirate streaming sites. Kkphim.com openly markets itself as a developer API, supplying movie metadata, posters, and m3u8 stream links for use by third-party streaming sites.

Technically, these sites can also be used directly by end users, but they are marketed as a “Piracy as a Service” platform, allowing others to easily launch their own pirate sites.

The international nature of the subpoena targets doesn’t end in Vietnam. The legal paperwork also lists the Russian site Kino.pub, the Thai nanamovies.org, various domains of the Indian streaming portal Movierulz, the Polish wizja.cc, and several Brazilian streaming outlets, including rrrv.lol.

To top it off, ACE also brings back a familiar target in the form of series.ly. The Spanish-language streaming portal has been around for over a decade, and its admins were acquitted twice over the past few years, in part because linking to copyrighted content wasn’t a crime in Spain when the alleged offenses took place.

At the time of writing, the subpoena has yet to be signed by a court clerk, which is typically just a formality. After it’s signed, ACE will have to wait and see how accurate the information is that Cloudflare has on file.

Operators of pirate sites are known to use false data with their hosting and infrastructure providers, which often limits the value of these subpoenas. That said, ACE had success with this enforcement tool in the past, and even minor leads can be useful when paired with information from other sources.

—

A copy of the MPA’s §512(h) subpoena application is available here (pdf), along with the associated declaration (pdf) and the notice to Cloudflare (pdf).

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Posted Tuesday 19 May 2026 at 5:03 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

The Radio and Television Commission of Lithuania (LRTK), the Baltic country’s media watchdog, has been one of Europe’s most active anti-piracy enforcers.

In recent years, it blocked hundreds of domains and thousands of IP addresses, fined users without going to court, and froze bank accounts tied to pirate operations.

Next month, LRTK will share some of its hard learned lessons in Geneva. At a meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE), LRTK’s Andrius Katinas will describe the Lithuanian approach as a template for other countries.

According to the contribution, which is publicly shared in advance of the June meeting, copyright enforcement in Lithuania is no longer just about copyright. It is “a method of hybrid warfare,” which can also counter Russian disinformation and safeguard the privacy of citizens.

Russian Disinfo as a “Hybrid Threat”

The hybrid-threat framing rests on two separate claims, which both are unrelated to copyright infringement. The first is that pirate IPTV services can, willingly or not, be used as distribution channels for Russian propaganda.

LRTK explains that many of the IPTV services it monitors operate from hostile countries and retransmit Russian state channels, which are sanctioned and formally banned by the European Union.

“Those channels include EU-sanctioned outlets that not only spread propaganda and disinformation, but also broadcast numerous national channels and live sports without the consent of the rights holders.”

“In blocking broadcasts because of copyright infringement, the Commission also blocks access to hostile information (and vice versa), which is a method of hybrid warfare,” LRTK’s abstract of the upcoming presentation reads.

A Blocked IPTV channel

As a direct neighbor of Russia, Lithuania has been very active in taking down Russian disinformation. In addition to blocking numerous sites and services, LRTK also fined hosting provider UAB Melbikomas €10,000 for breaching EU sanctions by hosting more than 50 sports channels.

Filmai.in and other Privacy Threats

Pirate site blocking can also serve another purpose, as it prevents potential security breaches. Lithuania has experience with this, as user data of the popular local pirate site Filmai leaked online, including 645,000 email addresses, usernames, and plain text passwords.

This breach happened more than 5 years ago, and blocking the site does not remove the leaked data from the darknet. However, it may help to limit the fallout of future breaches at Filmai or other pirate sites.

These privacy issues are a serious concern, LRTK notes, stressing that pirate sites generally don’t have the best security.

Leaked credentials end up on the dark web, with LRTK suggesting that they can be picked up by hostile-state cyber groups for use in operations against state institutions and strategic companies. And since credentials of government officials have also been found in the Filmai leak, state security might become an issue.

“It has even been found that Government officials had registered on the Filmai website using official email addresses, creating security concerns, such as the potential for unauthorized access to State institutions, the signing of documents, or responding to residents’ inquiries,” LRTK writes.

Filmai is blocked now, and one of the administrators of the site was convicted in 2023. However, the site itself remains online and, according to Similarweb, it remains among the top 100 visited sites in the country.

The Lithuanian Model

LRTK explains that it has broad experience with fighting piracy threats, using a wide variety of OSINT skills. It specifically mentions tools such as domaintools.com, oxylabs.io, epieos.com, Wireshark, and SimilarWeb, which help to identify perpetrators or monitor for illegal activities.

In recent years, the watchdog has blocked more than 400 domains and 7,000 IP addresses. In addition, it imposed fines in over 250 cases since 2023.

Much of this blocking system is centralized and automated. When LRTK identifies a new site, or a mirror of a previously blocked site, a blocking instruction is sent to all Internet service providers. Within twenty minutes, the domain or IP is blocked across the country.

LRTK has also frozen bank accounts linked to pirate operations, delisted URLs from Google Search, removed advertisements from pirate sites, and suspended illegal IPTV apps from Google Play and the Apple App Store.

The Dutch Export Problem

According to the presentation, Lithuania’s experience can “serve as a model for other national authorities and rights holders”. While that may be true, a Dutch example should show that blocklists should not be copied blindly.

In December 2025, the Dutch ISP trade association NLconnect tried to help ISPs by compiling a master blocklist, to comply with the EU’s ban on Russian disinformation. Because the Dutch government did not provide guidance, it compiled a reference blocklist of 797 domains, using blocklists from regulators in Germany, Austria, Estonia, Finland, and Lithuania.

As we reported at the time, this effort resulted in some unexpected blocks. Dutch users of Ziggo lost access to ShareChat, India’s largest homegrown social media platform with hundreds of millions of users. The same applied to Odysee.com, online radio aggregators Streema and Viaway, and various pirate IPTV domains including IPTV-home.net, Ottclub.tv, and Limehd.tv.

Most of those domains traced back to a single source: LRTK’s blocklist.

Responding to the issue, the Dutch regulator ACM informed us in December that it does not monitor the actual execution or the content of the sanctions list. However, after ISPs started to complain as well, ACM formally investigated the matter, concluding that LRTK’s blocklist is too broad for the Netherlands.

As reported by Tweakers in February, ACM eventually concluded that the Lithuanian list had been compiled under both the EU sanctions regulation and a broader Lithuanian national law banning Russian-financed television content.

This means that the Lithuanian list is not usable outside Lithuania, and NLconnect dropped the entire Lithuanian source list, shrinking their reference list from 797 domains to 335.

The Dutch overblocking example can’t be blamed on Lithuania, but it shows that when it comes to cross-border blocking efforts, caution is warranted. In any case, it is clear that blindly copying third-party blocklists is not the best approach.

—

The WIPO contribution, “Combating Digital Piracy: Strategic Enforcement through DNS/IP Blocking and OSINT Tools,” is available here (pdf).

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Posted Monday 18 May 2026 at 7:43 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

For more than two decades, pirates have used the Internet Movie Database, better known as IMDb, in ways its operators never intended.

Back in 2005, for example, there was already a popular Greasemonkey browser script called “IMDb torrent linker,” which added links to torrents directly on the site.

Similar scripts still exist today and, with streaming sites being far more popular now, the IMDb connections have evolved as well. Instead of linking to torrents, IMDb URLs can now be tweaked to stream pirated content directly in the browser.

Add ‘Play’ to the URL

One of the sites that openly uses the IMDb connection is Playimdb. This site can be used by simply adding the IMDb link to a search box, which then redirects users to a pirate stream.

PlayIMDb
 

In addition, people can also use the official IMDb site as their main navigation tool. Then, they can simply “add” play to the URL, which will then trigger the redirect.

Add Play

“Just modify the URL and start watching instantly,” PlayIMDb’s operator explains.

And indeed, at the time of writing, Playimdb points visitors to pirated movies that are streamed through streamimdb.ru, which loads the video from vidapi.ru.

Aside from the usual malware concerns that always come with untrusted sites, movie studios and other rightsholders are not happy with this ‘playful’ use of IMDb, which infringes the copyrights of their movies.

Indian Block, Suspend, and Expose Order

This prompted Universal City Studios to take action against the site and similar pirate portals. At the High Court of Delhi, the movie studio requested an injunction that targets PlayIMDb, StreamIMDb, and a cluster of associated embed and streaming domains from several angles.

Universal complained that, through these sites, pirated copies of its films, including “Fast X,” “F9: The Fast Saga,” and “The Secret Life of Pets 2” were widely shared.

Justice Tushar Rao Gedela granted the interim injunction against the sites’ operators last week. In addition to copyright infringement, the order notes that these sites exploit the goodwill of IMDb.

“The material on record demonstrates that the defendants have devised a mechanism whereby users are redirected from legitimate IMDb title pages to unauthorized streaming interfaces merely by altering the domain structure while retaining the same IMDb Title ID.”

“Such conduct, coupled with the use of domain names incorporating the expression “IMDb”, prima facie reflects dishonest adoption intended to exploit the goodwill and recognition associated with IMDb and to induce users into accessing infringing streams under the guise of legitimacy,” the order adds.

The order targets 17 unique domain names, and it directs Indian ISPs to block access to all of them within 72 hours. This also applies to several popular embed services, including VIDSRC and MoviesAPI.

As we have seen before with these types of broad court orders, the injunction also expanded to domain name registrars, including American companies such as NameSilo, Namecheap, and Tucows, which are instructed to suspend the associated domains.

At the time of writing, Namecheap has indeed suspended the listed domain names by placing them on Clienthold. The other domain names remain active.

Clienthold

The Indian court order also requires all the named registrars and registries to share the available personal details of the associated account holders, including credit card information and mobile numbers, within 72 hours.

Dynamic Injunction Extends to Mirrors

As with previous blocking orders from the Delhi High Court, the injunction is dynamic. If Universal identifies additional domains while the lawsuit is ongoing, it can request additional blocks through the Department of Telecommunications without going back to court.

Among others, it covers any “mirror/redirect/alphanumeric website which appears to be associated with any of the rogue defendants, either based on its name, branding, the identity of its operator, or source of the content..,” the order explains.

From the Court Order
 

Through this dynamic extension process, the Indian Government quietly approves hundreds, if not thousands, of new domain blockades every month.

For now, the effect of the IMDb-themed order is limited. While local ISPs in India are blocking the site, most foreign domain registrars have not taken action, likely because they fall outside the jurisdiction of the Delhi High Court. This means that these domains remain operational.

—

A copy of the Delhi High Court’s order in Universal City Studios Productions LLLP v. Playimdb.com & Ors., CS(COMM) 492/2026, is available here (pdf). Thanks to Bar and Bench for sharing the order.

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Posted Saturday 16 May 2026 at 7:46 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This week we have two newcomers on the list.

“Project Hail Mary” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on May 11 are:

Note: We also publish an updating archive of all the list of weekly most torrented movies lists.

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Posted Friday 15 May 2026 at 7:35 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Real-Debrid is a French-operated premium link generator that can download files from cyberlockers and cache torrents for instant streaming.

The service has long been a key tool for many Stremio and Kodi, and is also widely used as unlimited cloud storage by Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby users who pair it with Sonarr and Radarr.

At the end of 2024, the service made headlines by implementing far-reaching anti-piracy measures, including hash and keyword filters. These changes were made to appease rightsholders following a formal notice from the Fédération Nationale des Éditeurs de Films (FNEF), the French film distributors’ trade body. Despite user backlash, Real-Debrid retained much of its user base.

A few days ago, complaints about Real-Debrid’s filtering started rearing their head again. Now it appears to be worse. Cached torrents that previously played without problems now return an error message: “File was removed from debrid service due to copyright infringement.”

Stremio error
 

Real-Debrid has taken action, whether voluntarily or not, but the operators have not commented publicly and did not respond to our request for comment either. The company’s most recent public communication, on its official X account, is close to six months old.

A New and Broader Piracy Filter

According to user reports circulating on Reddit and elsewhere, the new filter does not target specific torrent hashes, as the 2024 measures did. Instead, it appears to screen against filename patterns common to almost all scene and P2P releases.

ElfHosted, a managed hosting provider that offers Stremio and Plex stacks, among others, has published a documented list of names that it linked to the new Real-Debrid filter. The list includes names of release groups such as [rartv], [rarbg], and [eztv], as well as source markers including WEB-DL, WEBDL, WEB-Rip, WEBRip and AMZN.

This suggests that the removals are based on characteristics that are not directly triggered by the content itself, but by the filename. This means that files without ‘forbidden’ keywords or tags should survive, for now.

That theory is confirmed by a r/Piracy user who notes “only 4k or 4k HDR kind of streams have been removed and not 1080p ones” for the same shows. This does not mean that lower-quality releases are safe by definition; it all depends on whether the keyword filter is triggered.

“Most Users Lost 50-70% of Their Libraries”

ElfHosted built a tool called LitterBox that checks a user’s Real-Debrid library and counts how many cached torrents now return the infringement error. The company’s founder commented on Reddit that “most users have lost 50-70% of their libraries.”

Litterbox
 

ElfHosted has a commercial interest in the matter, as it points users to the bundles it sells for a Real-Debrid competitor. However, it is also the only named third-party source publishing technical details.

Exactly how bad users are impacted appears to differ per setup. Stremio users don’t appear to be hit as hard as those using Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby with Sonarr and Radarr. The latter try to load cached files, which has been removed.

Real-Debrid’s Corporate Restructure

While the user impact is serious and undeniable, it is not immediately clear why Real-Debrid took this action. There is a largely unconfirmed and unverified report on an anonymous Netlify subdomain that appears to offer a timeline and context. While we can’t confirm most of it, the mention of a corporate restructuring is correct.

Information obtained by TorrentFreak from the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI), which maintains the French company registry, shows that Real-Debrid’s parent company, XT Network, underwent some legal changes recently.

On April 27, the registered office had already moved from Levallois-Perret to Montreuil. Ten days later, on May 7, the company was converted from a société à responsabilité limitée (SARL) to a société par actions simplifiée (SAS).

XT NETWORK

The two founders no longer appear as managers of the new company. Their roles are now held by holding companies: HOWLOO, a single-shareholder SARL based in Saint-Avertin, and DEVIUS, a single-shareholder SARL based in Saint-Herblain.

These types of restructuring operations can be done to change the liability of the persons and entities involved. What the reason is in this case is unknown, but it happened mere days before the renewed piracy crackdown.

The legal page on Real-Debrid’s website confirms the change and now identifies the owner as “XT Network SAS, Société par Actions Simplifiée au capital de 7000€, 86 Rue Voltaire, 93100 Montreuil,” where it previously listed XT Network SARL as the owner.

What’s Next

There has been no shortage of speculation or user complaints. Initially, the Real-Debrid subreddit ran a megathread covering the situation, but this has since been removed, and the posts now require approval from a moderator.

The discussion continues elsewhere, but real answers can only come from XT Network. If those come in, we will update the article accordingly.

For now, however, it appears that Real-Debrid is starting to toughen its stance against piracy even further. Last time, its actions only resulted in a relatively mild drop in traffic, but if the current situation continues, that will be much worse this time around.

—

A copy of the INPI attestation for XT Network, dated May 14, 2026, is available here (pdf).

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Posted Friday 15 May 2026 at 7:13 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

In June 2024, Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, Elsevier, and McGraw Hill sued Google over Shopping ads that promoted pirated copies of their textbooks.

Last month, Google asked the court to throw out the last surviving copyright claim, arguing that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Cox Communications v. Sony Music had effectively killed the publishers’ theory of liability.

The publishers clearly disagree. In the opposition brief filed a few days ago, they accept the Supreme Court’s Cox framework and argue that their facts fit the stricter requirements anyway. They also note that an effort by Google to limit advertisements for pirated ebooks had the opposite effect.

Inducement

Under the new Cox standard, contributory copyright infringement applies if one of two conditions is met. This includes inducement, which requires evidence that a defendant actively encouraged copyright infringement. According to the publishers, that is the case here.

The publishers argue the entire Google Shopping platform fits that description. For each of the 7,359 textbooks they identified, Google created an ad promoting an infringing copy, placed it at the top of search results, targeted it at users it predicted would click, and linked it to a pirate site that delivered the book.

Google previously noted that the shopping platform is largely automated and content neutral, which would disfavor inducement. However, the publishers’ brief cites several examples of “specific acts” by Google that “actively encourage” infringement.

‘Ad Ban Only for Legitimate Sellers’

The first act is what the publishers describe as Google’s inverted ebook advertisement policy. Google banned ebook ads from its Shopping platform in 2021, citing piracy concerns. According to the publishers, the ban didn’t have the desired effect.

The publishers say that the ban worked as advertised against legitimate ebook sellers, who were blocked from promoting licensed copies through Google Shopping. Pirate sellers, meanwhile, continued to advertise infringing copies on the same platform.

“Google was well-aware (including because Plaintiffs told Google) that its ‘ban’ was not really a ban, since Google was blocking ads for legitimate ebooks, but running ads for pirated ebooks, thus showing consumers only pirated ebook products,” the opposition brief reads.

The publishers don’t go into detail on how pirate sellers were able to circumvent the ban, but the result is that people were shown ads for pirate books, not legitimate ones.

Running ads for the very products a policy was meant to block, the publishers argue, is evidence of the intent that inducement requires. A company that flouts its own anti-piracy ad policy cannot then claim it had no idea what was happening on its platform.

‘No Neutral Conduit’

Google positioned itself as a neutral conduit that simply displays advertisements that are supplied by third parties. However, the publishers reject this and note that the search engine has a much more active role.

“Google is not a list-serve or modern-day bulletin board like Craigslist, passively allowing users to post listings. Google is a sophisticated ad agency at scale, actively deciding what to advertise, how to advertise it, and to whom to target the advertisement,” they note, in favor of their inducement argument.

No Craigslist
 

As a third category, the publishers stress that Google had the required knowledge of the allegedly infringing activities. They sent Google “hundreds of notices” identifying thousands of specific infringing ads and pirate merchants. These ads allegedly stayed online after the takedown notices were sent.

When the publishers complained to Google, the company allegedly flagged notices as “duplicative”, while threatening to stop reviewing all the publishers’ infringement notices for up to six months.

Tailored to Infringement

While satisfying the inducement prong would be sufficient, the publishers also argue that the second Cox element applies here. They argue that Google’s ads were “tailored to infringement” and not capable of “substantial or commercially significant noninfringing uses.”

Google’s motion applied that standard at the platform level: Google Shopping overall has obvious non-infringing uses, so it cannot be ‘tailored to infringement.’ The publishers, however, counter that the standard applies one level down.

The publishers note that each shopping ad for pirate ebooks was individually tailored. These ads, created by Google, were used to promote pirate books and served no purpose other than to induce copyright infringement.

“Plaintiffs are suing Google for knowingly creating and serving specific advertisements for known pirate sellers that include links to known infringing products, thereby inducing infringement. That Google also advertises non-infringing fishing-poles and garden-hoses does not exempt Google from liability for advertising infringing ebooks,” they write.

Redactions and Reply

Google’s argument that much of its shopping platform is automated should also be rejected, the publishers note. They stress that there are still decision-making humans involved in the process.

The opposition brief includes large portions of redacted text, so there is likely more evidence than what’s shared in public.

Redacted text in the publishers’ brief

Overall, however, the publishers ask the court to deny Google’s motion for partial judgment on the pleadings. This decision will determine whether the final copyright infringement claim survives. Before that decision is issued, Google will get the chance to reply.

—

A copy of the publishers’ opposition to Google’s motion for partial judgment on the pleadings, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is available here (pdf).

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Posted Thursday 14 May 2026 at 7:10 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

In Malaysia, Astro has been the dominant pay-TV operator that held the FIFA World Cup broadcast rights since the early 2000s.

During the previous tournaments in Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022), the company marketed itself as “the Home of the World Cup” but that changed for the 2026 tournament this summer.

Last week, Malaysia’s Minister of Communications, Datuk Fahmi Fadzil, announced that the 2026 World Cup rights had gone to public broadcaster Radio Televisyen Malaysia and IPTV service Unifi TV, which is operated by Telekom Malaysia.

This means that, with help from the government, which paid RM24 million for the rights (~$6.1 million), many Malaysians will have access to free streams.

Shortly after the deal was announced, Astro confirmed that it lost the rights. While the company said that it remains determined to be the home for Malaysian sports fans, paying millions of dollars for the broadcasting rights was not economically viable.

Astro: Piracy Devalued Broadcast Rights

Unlike the publicly funded broadcaster RTM, Astro would have had to recoup its investment in the World Cup rights commercially. That’s a significant challenge, according to the broadcaster, which explains that rights costs and piracy are both on the rise.

“Rising costs, driven by inflation and escalating international sports broadcasting rights, have significantly increased the financial investment required,” the company wrote.

“Meanwhile, rampant piracy has diminished the value of such rights to all legitimate platforms. In particular, the 2018 and 2022 World Cup were extensively pirated events in Malaysia,” the broadcaster added in its press release.

It is rare for a major broadcaster to publicly cite online piracy as one of the reasons why their bid for the licensing rights has reached a clear ceiling. They clearly believe that at the current price point, piracy has eroded the value of the broadcast rights too much.

Piracy Might Drop Now

Intriguingly, piracy could drop significantly now that Astro no longer has the FIFA World Cup broadcasting rights. Through MyTV, matches will be publicly available to millions of Malaysians rather than sitting behind a paywall. That removes one of the strongest piracy incentives: the costs.

Competing with piracy is much easier for a public broadcaster with government funding, which can offer matches for free. As a result, people who pirated the World Cup in 2018 and 2022 may now move back to freely available licensed broadcasts, lowering the piracy rate.

Of course, those piracy rates could easily pick up again when matches end up behind a paywall in the future.

Piracy Incentives in China, India, and Elsewhere

With roughly a month until kickoff, FIFA has reportedly finalized broadcast deals in more than 175 territories, but final agreements have yet to be signed in China and India.

Reports suggest that disagreements about FIFA’s licensing fees have proven to be a stumbling block. With billions of views at stake, these countries are two of FIFA’s most important markets in terms of audience demand.

This demand would not simply disappear when there are no formal broadcasters. Instead, it would redirect to unofficial streaming, including pirate ones. This adds an interesting element to the negotiations, as rightsholders and FIFA certainly don’t want to breed piracy habits.

For now, the FIFA World Cup begins on June 11, with broadcasts through both legal and pirate channels. Whether 2026 turns out to be the most pirated World Cup yet has yet to be seen.

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Posted Wednesday 13 May 2026 at 7:21 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix