In a complaint filed at a Nashville federal court in 2023, Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI and others, accused X Corp of ‘breeding’ mass copyright infringement.

The social media company allegedly failed to respond adequately to takedown notices and lacked a proper repeat infringer policy. The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) claimed it had sent over 300,000 formal infringement notices, many of which didn’t lead to immediate removals.

The battle escalated in January, when X Corp. filed a landmark antitrust complaint against the NMPA and a coalition of major music publishers, accusing them of coordinating a “weaponized” DMCA takedown campaign to coerce X into industry-wide licensing deals.

These explosive allegations set the stage for a high-profile legal battle. However, it didn’t get that far.

Last week, both lawsuits ended without any further fanfare. Joint stipulations of dismissal were filed in the Middle District of Tennessee and the Northern District of Texas on the same day, with identical terms. In both cases, all claims dismissed with prejudice, with both sides paying their own fees and expenses.

Dismissed
 

The coordinated timing and matching language leave little doubt that these cases were resolved as part of a package deal.

From ‘Maximum Pain’ to Package Deal

The settlement ends a legal battle that took several dramatic turns.

In 2024, X scored a partial win when the court dismissed the music publishers’ direct and vicarious copyright infringement claims, and partially dismissed claims of contributory infringement.

Judge Trauger concluded that X can’t be held liable for making it ‘very easy’ to upload infringing material or for monetizing pirated content. These characteristics are not exclusive to infringing material and apply to legitimate content too, she argued.

The reduced lawsuit continued and by June 2025, X filed a heavily redacted motion to compel, alleging that the NMPA had used its takedown notice campaign to inflict “maximum pain” on X’s business, to motivate Elon Musk’s platform to sign music licensing agreements.

This revelation appeared to bring a potential settlement closer last year, but an agreement was not reached at the time.

Evolving Legal Claims

Instead, X responded with a countersuit. In January, it filed an antitrust complaint accusing the NMPA and the major publishers of a conspiracy to weaponize the DMCA, alleging that a flood of “baseless” notices targeted over 200,000 posts and suspended 50,000 users to coerce licensing deals.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Cox v. Sony this Spring, the landscape changed again. X argued that the music publishers’ surviving contributory infringement claim now failed as a matter of law.

The publishers responded with a Second Amended Complaint, reframing their case as an inducement claim, but X called this an attempt to “retrofit” the case, without proper backing. Meanwhile, the publishers moved to dismiss X’s antitrust suit, pointing at weak evidence.

With both sides looking at weakened claims, settlement suddenly seemed a rational exit.

SpaceX Subsidiary

While neither party commented in the reason for the settlement, there may be another reason why the timing made sense for X. The breakthrough follows just a few weeks after the company went public again through its new parent company SpaceX.

SpaceX went public on June 12, raising a record $75 billion at a $1.8 trillion valuation. While X may only be a small part of the new conglomerate, the lawsuit posed a serious uncertainty for investors.

In a pre-IPO prospectus filed with the SEC, SpaceX listed the music publishers’ copyright case as one of seven significant litigation matters. Across all cases, SpaceX reported $399 million in accrued litigation losses as of March 2026. These are probable estimated losses that pose a risk to the company’s finances.

From the pre-IPO prospectus
 

On August 4, SpaceX will announce its first-ever quarterly earnings as a publicly traded company. That’s also the date when several insiders can start selling stock. With that in mind, it doesn’t hurt to have a major liability resolved.

There is no evidence that SpaceX’s IPO directly caused the settlement. Both sides had other reasons to settle after Cox weakened the publishers’ case and the publishers’ dismissal motion threatened X’s antitrust claims. However, it may have played a role nonetheless.

Explosive Claims Fade Out

With both cases now dismissed, the explosive claims from both sides will never be tested in court.

That applies to the music companies’ mass piracy allegations against X, as well as X’s claim that the NMPA used its takedown campaign to inflict “maximum pain” on the social media company. Both claims remain unproven.

Whether the settlements include any financial arrangements remains unknown too. There is no mention of compensation from either side and no licensing deals have been announced either.

When the NMPA settled a similar dispute with Roblox in 2021, it publicly announced an industry-wide licensing deal. In that light, the silence on the X settlement, after more than a week later, is notable.

For now, the three-year legal war between X and the music industry is over. Whether more details will show up in future SpaceX SEC filings or industry disclosures has yet to be seen.

—

Copies of the joint stipulations of dismissal are available here (copyright claim – pdf) and here (antitrust suit – pdf).

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Posted Saturday 25 July 2026 at 7:17 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

Canada’s approach to pirate site blocking has evolved quite a bit since the Federal Court issued the first ‘GoldTV’ order in 2019.

That original order targeted a specific service and a fixed set of domain names. If rightsholders wanted to add a domain to the blocklist, they had to go back to court.

Later orders against Soap2Day and, more recently, various stream-ripping sites, went a step further. Instead of targeting specific operations run by the same people, they allowed rightsholders to update the blocklist with alternative domains that would pop up, as well as copycats of the already named brands.

These new orders streamlined the site blocking process. Rightsholders no longer had to file a new case for every domain that popped up. They did, however, still have to go back to the Federal Court, which had to issue a new order before anything new could be blocked.

Rightsholders say these types of blocking orders are needed to effectively curb piracy. However, they are not without criticism. Opponents including the Canadian ISP TekSavvy have previously complained that site blocking is a slippery slope, where more sites might eventually get blocked with less oversight.

Hollywood Seeks Broad Blocking Order

Thus far the global trend has indeed been to expand blocking powers and the latest Federal Court order, issued earlier this month, is no exception.

The blocking order, requested by Rogers, TVA, Netflix and various Hollywood studios such as Disney and Warner Bros., targets thirteen named piracy brands. This includes existing domain names, but also any future domains that use the same brands, whether these are linked to the original operation or not.

The order requires Canadian ISPs, including Bell, Rogers, Telus, and TekSavvy, to block an initial list of 18 domains and subdomains. It is also the first Canadian blocking order to cover both IPTV subscription services and public streaming sites in a single proceeding.

The Canadian Blocking Order

The order splits its targets into two groups. Six are IPTV subscription services: Apollo Group TV, Diablo IPTV, GLO TV, IPGuys, Jio TV, and Smart4K/Platinum. The other seven pirate streaming sites are 123Movies, Cineby, FMovies, HydraHD, Putlocker, TheTVApp, and WatchSeries.

The initial blocklist
 

After the first site blocking order survived several appeals, there hasn’t been any significant opposition from ISPs to the follow-up orders. That also applies here, as the most recent blocking order was approved without any notable pushback.

Schedule 1 lists 13 domains and five subdomains. With more than 50 million global monthly visitors, 123moviesfree.net is one of the prime targets. However, the value of this order lies less in what it blocks today than in what it can block tomorrow.

The Catch-All ‘Expanded Scope’ Order

The blocking order adds a new feature which is framed as an “Expanded Scope.” Earlier Canadian orders reached a single brand and its copycats. The latest blocking order goes further, as it also covers “similarly infringing platforms operating under other brands.”

This effectively means that the movie studios and other rightsholders can add new pirate sites and services to the blocklist. Justice Southcott agreed that this is needed to deal with the piracy whac-a-mole problem where new pirate sites swiftly take the place of blocked ones.

“[W]hen access to infringing platforms is blocked, other similarly infringing platforms appear and/or increase in popularity,” the order reads.

To justify the expansion, Justice Southcott looked at a recent UK High Court order, described as an “omnibus order,” which we covered in May. According to the Motion Picture Association, which represents its member studios in site blocking efforts, this order makes it possible to block any “structurally infringing audiovisual piracy service” without naming it in advance.

The UK judgment itself has still not been published on BAILII or the National Archives, as far as we know, but it is clearly seen as the new frontier in site blocking efforts.

Adding New Brands

The order explains how new brands are added through what it calls a “Simplified Procedure.” To add a platform, rightsholders must file an affidavit which confirms that the new target meets the order’s conditions.

In this case, it means that the target’s sole or predominant purpose is the unauthorized distribution of the studios’ film and television works, that it operates like the IPTV or open-web services already named, that it is reachable in Canada, and that the operator was sent a notice of infringement and given seven days to respond.

Some of the conditions
 

If no targeted ISP files a notice of motion to object within five business days, the updated list takes effect without any hearing and no further order from the court. These new submissions can be made every ten business days.

That last part is a subtle but notable change. Under the stream-ripper order issued last month, ISP silence meant the Court “may grant an Order amending Schedule 1 as proposed by the Applicants without further proceedings.” A judge still signed off, even if nobody argued.

Under the new order, silence alone is enough. The proposed list “shall be considered Schedule 1 under this Order,” with no involvement from the court at all.

Together, the two changes remove both limits that applied before. The court no longer has to sign off on blocklist updates, and the additions no longer have to involve a brand that was already named in the case.

Justice Southcott describes this as “an incremental modification to precedent site-blocking orders.”

A Judicial Guardrail

Justice Southcott did not grant everything the studios asked for. The rightsholders wanted the new order to also apply to “any works for which the Applicants own the copyright.”

The order limits its scope to “the Applicants’ Works,” meaning the specific titles mentioned in the judgment. In practice, that prevents the studios from using copyrights they acquire later to justify new additions, without first going back to court.

Not everyone is convinced that the safeguards go far enough.

TekSavvy, which previously fought back against site blocking in Canada, published a critical compliance page for the order. While the company did not oppose the current order, it remains highly skeptical.

“[W]e see blocking orders as a grave violation of network neutrality and a fundamental change to what we do as an ISP. The principles of common carriage and network neutrality mean ISPs carry traffic to and from end users in as neutral a fashion as possible,” TekSavvy notes.

The latest order runs for two years, with the blocklist starting at 13 domains and five subdomains. The more telling figure may be how many names get added before it expires.

—

A copy of the site-blocking order, issued by Justice Southcott, is available here (pdf). The full domain list can be found here (pdf).

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Posted Friday 24 July 2026 at 7:46 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

At the height of the cyberlocker boom in the early 2010s, Uptobox was already an established name.

The platform remained online despite a fierce anti-piracy crackdown that led to the demise of Megaupload, Hotfile, and many other file-hosting services.

Uptobox eventually met its fate in September 2023, when a coalition of entertainment companies including Disney, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Paramount, and Warner Bros. obtained a court order to seize its servers at various data centers.

Uptobox Crackdown

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment claimed responsibility for the operation, which was carried out simultaneously in France and the UAE. While Uptobox put up a fight in court, hoping for a comeback, the courts disagreed and kept it offline.

Behind the scenes, Disney was pursuing a parallel case against a French national residing in the UAE. Local news site L’Informé previously identified the defendant by his X.com pseudonym “Starouille”, who previously described himself as the CTO of Uptobox.

In October 2023, Disney obtained an order from a Paris enforcement judge, authorizing seizures of up to €16.127 million against his personal bank accounts. In the legal paperwork, Disney described the defendant as one of the “founders, operators, and de facto co-directors” of Uptobox.

When the seizure was executed at the BNP Paribas bank, it froze approximately €197,000. Two additional seizures followed under separate orders. These seized assets are not damages awards, but they are kept as a security while the case is fought on its merits.

Not a Director

Starouille, who is identified in the legal paperwork as ‘M. [U]’, did not agree with the way Disney described him. His lawyer Me Damien Faupin argued that he was a technical contractor who managed server infrastructure, not a co-director. The CTO title on social media did not reflect reality, the lawyer clarified.

In January 2025, the enforcement judge agreed that Disney could not prove the defendant’s director role, ordering the seized funds released. However, Disney objected and requested a stay of execution while they appealed. This decision eventually came this month.

After considering all evidence, the Court of Appeal upheld the finding that Disney failed to prove Starouille was a de facto director. The evidence showed he began as a freelancer in 2012, but there’s no evidence that he actually had a managerial function.

“The fact that [the defendant] presented himself on social media, notably on his Facebook and Twitter accounts, as ‘Chief Technical Officer’ (CTO) of Uptobox does not in itself constitute, even assuming this title to be accurate, a sufficient element to establish that, beyond operations of installation, maintenance, and upgrading of servers, he was more generally engaged in management or technical development of the service,” the court said (all quotes are translated).

The Court of Appeal noted that there was insufficient evidence to prove the defendant was engaged in the general management of the service. Instead, his role was strictly limited to operations, maintenance, and server upgrades. This was corroborated by evidence seized at hosting provider Opcore, which listed him as “interlocuteur technique N1” (Technical Liaison Level 1).

While the court concluded that Disney failed to prove that the defendant had a director role, it ultimately ruled that the funds should remain frozen for another reason.

DNS Tweets Keep Funds Frozen

The court order notes that the defendant was not ignorant of the alleged piracy-facilitating activities of Uptobox. In fact, his own social media posts showed that he was aware of site blocking efforts and shared information on how these could be bypassed.

For example, in one of the X/Twitter posts that are no longer public, Starouille wrote (translated): “for those who can no longer access Uptobox/Uptostream, change your DNS on all your devices (procedure here: uptobox.info/dns). You can also use uptobox.link.”

When a user asked whether this was about “yet another court order,” Starouille replied: “yes, where Uptobox is not condemned, just 4 ISPs. As usual…” He later posted specific instructions for changing DNS settings in a Freebox router’s download manager.

According to the Court of Appeal, these posts show that the defendant was aware of the blocking orders, as well as the copyright-related reasons for these blocking measures. His defense that the DNS instructions were meant to help rightsholders contact the service was dismissed.

“[The defendant] cannot validly maintain that his message, far from enabling the circumvention of an institutional block, was solely intended to allow users, rightsholders such as the appellant, or any other natural or legal person to be able to contact the company or the service, in particular to report a copyright infringement problem.”

This was not the first time Starouille’s social media activity was used against him in court. As L’Informé previously reported, a since-deleted tweet showing a car entering a parking lot tagged “@online DC2” helped entertainment companies locate Uptobox servers at Scaleway’s second data center in Vitry-sur-Seine, facilitating the September 2023 raid.

Importantly, this is not a finding on the merits. Starouille is not held liable, the court merely concluded that Disney’s claims are plausible enough to keep the funds frozen for now.

From €16 Million to €306,000

The defendant also booked a win, at least on paper. Disney previously calculated its claim using the lost Disney+ subscription revenue over 2020-2023, applying its 15% streaming market share to Uptobox’s estimated one million monthly unique visitors.

The Court of Appeal adjusted this number downward, citing a study which concluded that roughly 80% of pirates already subscribe to legal streaming services. This means that these would not necessarily result in lost revenue.

Additionally, the court found that Starouille’s alleged wrongful conduct was limited to his July-August 2023 social media posts, which further limits the claim.

Ultimately, this shorter ‘liability’ window and the reduced lost subscriptions, slashed the authorized asset freeze of more than €16 million to €306,000. However, since this is still more than the €197,000 that’s frozen at BNP Paribas, nothing is returned yet.

For now, Starouille’s savings remain frozen and the merits case is pending. No piracy damages have been awarded yet, but the ruling shows that publicly instructing users to circumvent court orders can be used to justify piracy-related asset seizures.

—

A copy of the Paris Court of Appeal ruling is available here (pdf).

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Posted Wednesday 22 July 2026 at 5:37 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

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.

“Backrooms” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on July 20 are:

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

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Posted Wednesday 22 July 2026 at 7:48 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

Earlier this month, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security announced it had dismantled the network behind the high-profile HiAnime piracy ring.

While the associated site already closed its doors in March, the action is vital for Vietnam since the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) recently classified it as “Priority Foreign Country,” because of its lacking anti-piracy enforcement.

Last month, USTR formally started a Section 301 investigation which opened the door to potential trade sanctions. As part of this process, stakeholders were requested to provide input on Vietnam’s alleged shortcomings. This includes the piracy challenges and concerns, which are highlighted as the primary concern.

One of the key submissions for the USTR investigation comes from the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents the major Hollywood studios, Netflix and Amazon. The MPA has vast experience in the country through its anti-piracy arm ACE and assisted in local copyright enforcement efforts for years.

This cooperation resulted in the takedown of the Fmovies piracy ring, for example, and ACE also provided key intelligence for the recent HiAnime action. While the MPA is pleased with the enforcement efforts, it hasn’t been pleased with how Vietnamese courts and prosecutors deal with the matter.

MPA: ‘Mild Sentences are the Problem’

When MPA submitted its commentary the HiAnime arrests had not been announced yet. The MPA has since applauded the arrests, but its USTR filing suggests that the eventual sentences will be crucial.

Previously, the prosecutions of key defendants in the Fmovies piracy ring, dubbed the largest piracy operation ever, resulted in suspended prison sentences and relatively low fines. The same applied to the operator of the popular BestBuyIPTV service.

MPA’s SVP Global Policy and Government Affairs, Gail MacKinnon, informed the USTR that the lack of deterrent penalties in Vietnam are the main reason why online piracy remains a significant problem in the country.

“Without sentences and monetary penalties that outweigh the financial gains from copyright infringement, online piracy operations originating in Vietnam will not be sufficiently deterred,” MPA’s submission reads.

“There needs to be visible and credible consequences to effectively deter infringement and counter the perception that piracy is a low-risk, high-reward activity,” MacKinnon adds.

Copycats, Successors, and Resurgents

MPA notes that, as a result of the mild sentences, major takedowns are often only a short-lived success. Pirate brands or operations often reappear swiftly, a problem India’s High Court previously likened to a “hydra-headed” threat.

In its recommendations to the USTR, MPA urges Vietnam to make sure that such copycats and successors are also addressed properly.

“Take effective and deterrent enforcement action against the notorious piracy services identified by MPA, including timely follow-up actions against any successor, mirror, or copycat sites that emerge”

“Criminal enforcement action must be taken against the operators of these pirate syndicates to ensure that they do not resurface. Consistent enforcement is also necessary to deter the emergence of copycat
services that fill the gap left by these shutdowns.”

MPA’s recommendations

Much of the same critique is shared by International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which highlighted the same problem in their submission to the USTR’s Vietnam investigation.

The IIPA documents the same pattern in more detail, tracing a rather obvious branding shift that started in 2023, when Zoro.to was shut down by ACE, but not before it was rebranded as AniWatch. A year later, Aniwatch became HiAnime, which eventually went offline this year.

IIPA’s submission, which also predates the HiAnime crackdown announcement, also calls for tougher enforcement and deterrent sanctions.

“It is critical for responsible enforcement authorities, including the relevant police units, the MPS, and the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism (MOCST), to follow through on infringement complaints, take meaningful and effective enforcement actions, and impose deterrent sanctions against infringing websites.”

Dispatch 38

Both the MPA and IIPA acknowledge that Vietnam has started to take the piracy problem more seriously. In May, the Vietnamese government issued Official Dispatch No. 38, asking agencies nationwide to intensify IP-related enforcement efforts, including actions against piracy websites.

Dispatch 38 also requests prosecutors and courts to prioritize serious copyright cases, improve prosecution timelines, and to strengthen deterrence. The MPA separately notes that the Ministry of Public Security is drafting amendments to the Penal Code to better address high-tech crimes and cyber offenses.

Whether the recent wave of enforcement actions and policy signals will be enough to change Vietnam’s piracy image has yet to be seen. The HiAnime arrests are recent, and the planned prosecution of the site’s operators will be the first real test of whether the judicial system is ready to move along.

—

The IIPA’s Section 301 comments are available here (pdf). The MPA’s filing can be found here (pdf).

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Posted Tuesday 21 July 2026 at 7:23 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

As the FIFA World Cup is gearing up for the grande finale in New York this weekend, international law enforcement offices look back at one of the largest anti-piracy efforts in sports history.

With help from private and public partners from all over the world, authorities seized well over a thousand domain names of pirate sports streaming sites. In the United States, the effort was branded “Operation Offsides”, which initially targeted nearly 400 domain names offering unauthorized World Cup streams. That turned out to be just the start.

Operation Offsides

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Operation Offsides on June 26, targeting pirate sites that streamed World Cup matches. The seizure warrant was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, but this appears to be sealed, as we were unable to locate a copy in the court database.

The DOJ and Homeland Security Investigations ran a similar crackdown during the 2022 Qatar World Cup, seizing 78 domains at the time. The 2026 action is at least five times larger, however, and was the result of international cooperation.

The domains were identified with assistance from FIFA, beIN Media Group, NBCUniversal, ACE, the UFC, and Warner Bros. International coordination through the DOJ’s ICHIP network extended the operation’s reach to Peru and Bulgaria, described in the announcement as known centers of online piracy activity, with supporting actions in Croatia, Romania, Poland, and Colombia.

The authorities did not mention any domains by name but TorrentFreak traced many through passive DNS data, with the current tally at 627 identified domains (listed below). While the seizures hit several major sports streaming sites, other popular sites operating under foreign-registry TLDs outside U.S. jurisdiction managed to survive.

Visitors of the blocked domain names, meanwhile, ran into the following splash banner, listing many of the partners involved.

The seizure banner

The “Operation Offsides” seizures came in waves. Last weekend, more than 100 additional domains were seized, many of them fallback domains that pirate sites had switched to after the initial round. That same report also revealed that several operators switched to Iranian .ir fallback domains, in an effort to switch to infrastructure that is harder for U.S. law enforcement to reach.

Colombia Leads “Operation Red Card”

Two days before the World Cup final, Colombia’s Fiscalía General announced the results of a separate multinational enforcement effort it had coordinated under the name “Operación Tarjeta Roja” (Operation Red Card).

The international action brought together prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, and public ministries from nine countries: Colombia, the United States, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Chile, with support from private-sector audiovisual and sports organizations.

In Colombia alone, 1,140 domains and URLs used for unauthorized sports streaming were ‘suspended’. Across all participating countries, the total reached 1,840. Similar to the U.S. operation, the authorities did not name any domains.

“While the planet focused on the FIFA World Cup 2026, a group of nations went after the structures that profit from counterfeiting and theft of digital content,” said Fiscalía’s Raúl González Flechas, commenting on the news.

The Colombian operation, which targeted both counterfeiting and piracy, also resulted in 15 arrests. Four suspects in Soacha, near Bogotá, were accused of hacking into a telecom company’s platforms to offer cheap ‘pirated’ cable TV, posing as employees of the company. Two of the four accepted the charges.

Separately, 11 people running shops selling counterfeit World Cup merchandise were charged with trademark infringement and related offenses. Authorities seized 4,223 counterfeit sports items, 11,353 fake logos ready to be applied to garments, and 2,150 counterfeit Colombian Football Federation shields during raids in Bogotá, Itagüí, Cali, Acacías, and Bucaramanga.

Argentina Blocks FútbolLibre

Argentina also contributed to Operación Tarjeta Roja earlier in the tournament. In early July, the country’s UFECI cybercrime unit opened investigations against three platforms: Stella TV, Tele Latino, and sites associated with FútbolLibre, one of the most widely used pirate sports streaming brands in the country.

FútbolLibre had already been under investigation since 2022. This time, complaints from rightsholders DirecTV and Personal Flow provided additional evidence.

Three federal judges ordered ENACOM, Argentina’s communications regulator, and NIC Argentina, the country’s domain registry, to block access to 14 platforms and sites. However, as is often the case, there is no shortage of copycats using the same brands.

Pirate Ad Revenue Targeted

The enforcement wave was not limited to government action. The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) previously announced that it had cut off advertising revenue to 1,376 sites that illegally streamed sports or offered other World Cup content, through its Pirate Domain Exclusion List.

Rather than targeting domains directly, TAG aims to starve pirate streaming site operators of the ad revenue, so they will eventually give up.

“Global sporting events like the World Cup are prime targets for criminals who try to intercept legitimate ad dollars by stealing popular streaming content,” said TAG COO Rachel Nyswander Thomas.

More Results Expected

With the World Cup final set for this weekend, additional enforcement results from other participating countries may still be announced.

Whether these combined efforts have had lasting impact on pirate sports streaming availability has yet to be seen. The disruption certainly has an effect, but the enforcement efforts have also shown that some pirate site operators are resilient.

The success of these and future enforcement efforts will largely depend on how far the reach of the international authorities goes, and whether pirate site operators can still find unblocked fallback infrastructure. By the next World Cup in 2030 we should know more.

—

This article will be updated if more results from participating countries or partners come in.
 

—–

Below is a non-exhaustive and non-verified list of 627 domain names that, according to information gathered by TorrentFreak, were seized as part of Operation Offsides.
 

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Posted Sunday 19 July 2026 at 12:16 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

Belgium’s Department for Combating Online Infringement (BAPO) continues to build out the country’s site-blocking regime at a steady pace.

Since the framework officially launched in 2025, a series of orders have targeted sports streaming sites, shadow libraries, movie piracy portals, and pirate IPTV services.

The official blocklist has grown to more than 1,000 domain names and a new order, issued by the President of the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels on July 3, classified 113 additional domain names as copyright infringing.

French Piracy Portals

BAPO published its implementation decision on 10 July, without revealing the names of the requesting rightsholders. However, since the targeted sites mostly deal with movie and TV piracy, it would not be a surprise if it comes from Hollywood, Netflix, and Apple again.

The implementation order does not mention any of the domains by name, but TorrentFreak obtained a copy of the full blocklist, which shows that 113 domain names were added through the latest order. Most of these domains are connected to the French-language download portals Zone-Telechargement and Wawacity. Others include Lookmovie, Movix and KissKH.

Blocklist update
 

The order requires five of Belgium’s large ISPs, including Telenet, Proximus, Mobile Vikings, Orange Belgium, and DIGI Communications, to block these sites. Unlike one of the earlier orders, it does not require third-party DNS resolvers to act.

The French-language orientation makes sense given it was issued by the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels, but it also connects this order to a much older enforcement cycle in a neighboring country.

Blocks are Outdated Already

The list of all new domains, which is available below, shows that Zone-Telechargement and Wawacity use a wide variety of largely identical novelty TLDs. This appears to be a direct response to site blocking orders issued by France’s ARCOM.

Each time French ISPs implement a new round of DNS blocks, the operators register a fresh domain name and redirect their user base through dedicated landing pages and Telegram channels. These updates happen so frequently that the Belgian site blocking order was already outdated before ISPs got the chance to implement it.

To illustrate, the order includes 37 Wawacity domains and 36 Zone-Telechargement domains. However, both sites have been operating from a .poker TLD since July 9th, and several of the previous iterations such as .codes and .expert are not in the Belgian blocklist either.

The rightsholders are aware of the domain hopping habits of these sites, as they specifically requested the court to block “signpost” information pages that help people to bypass blockades.

Blocking Info Pages With No Infringing Content

For example, the blocklist includes wawacity-info.com and zone-telechargement-info.com. These sites do not host copyrighted content and do not link to any infringing files. They are simple landing pages that tell visitors what the current active domain is, and how blocking measures can be bypassed.

Signpost page (translated)
 

Rightsholders asked the court to block these domain names as well and this request was granted by the court and also approved in BAPO’s implementation order. While the signpost pages don’t link directly to infringing material, they are facilitating access.

“facilitate access”
 

This would fall under the Belgian blocking powers and the “facilitate access” language is specifically referenced in the implementation order, as shown above.

Whac-A-Mole

The two blocked signpost pages are nearly identical, suggesting that Wawacity and Zone-Telechargement are run by the same operation. This also explains why they change their domain names in tandem.

Whether the operators plan to change the domain names of their signpost pages is unclear. They also update tens of thousands of followers through Telegram, where the messaging is again identical, which points to a joint operation.

Telegram updates

These sites are not the only ones that regularly change domain names either. Movix, which is also targeted in the same order, has already moved to a new TLD as well and remains accessible.

If anything, the Belgian example shows that site blocking itself is far from a perfect remedy. Although BAPO’s blocking order can be updated weekly with up to 50 new domains, pirate site operators often only need a few minutes to direct traffic to a new TLD.

It would not be a surprise to see rightsholders target the Telegram channels next, hoping to further limit the exposure. Whether these and other measures will eventually break the morale of pirates has yet to be seen.

—

A copy of BAPO’s most recent implementation decision is available here (pdf). The full Belgian piracy blacklist is published on the FPS Economy website.

A list of all newly added domain names is available below:

– animepahe.pw 
– animepahe.com 
– animepahe.org 
– anime-sama.to 
– anime-sama.pw 
– anime-sama.org 
– anime-sama.si 
– anime-sama.tv 
– kisskh.co 
– kisskh.do 
– kisskh.id 
– kisskh.la 
– kisskh.ovh 
– kisskh.at 
– kissdl.eu 
– lookmovie.foundation 
– lookmovie.pn 
– lookmovie0.to 
– lookmovie2.la 
– lookmovie2.pe 
– lookmovie2.to 
– lookmovie4.to 
– lookmovie5.to 
– lookmovie6.to 
– lookmovie7.to 
– lookmovie8.to 
– lookmovie9.to 
– lookmovie.com 
– movix.cash 
– movix.chat 
– movix.cloud 
– movix.golf 
– movix.club 
– movix.llc 
– movix.online 
– streamex.net  
– streamex.sh 
– voir-anime.to 
– watchseries.bar  
– watchseries.best 
– wawacity.tours 
– wawacity-info.com 
– wawacity.beauty 
– wawacity.click 
– wawacity.cv 
– wawacity.diy 
– wawacity.energy 
– wawacity.farm 
– wawacity.futbol 
– wawacity.golf 
– wawacity.gratis 
– wawacity.im 
– wawacity.ing 
– wawacity.irish 
– wawacity.lat 
– wawacity.lifestyle 
– wawacity.motorcycles 
– wawacity.news 
– wawacity.party 
– wawacity.pet 
– wawacity.pictures 
– wawacity.pizza 
– wawacity.promo 
– wawacity.rent 
– wawacity.rodeo 
– wawacity.run 
– wawacity.shop 
– wawacity.supply 
– wawacity.surf 
– wawacity.taxi 
– wawacity.team 
– wawacity.tips 
– wawacity.today 
– wawacity.tools 
– wawacity.town 
– wawacity.win 
– wawacity.zone 
– zone-telechargement.tours 
– zone-telechargement-info.com 
– zone-telechargement.beauty 
– zone-telechargement.cv 
– zone-telechargement.diy 
– zone-telechargement.energy 
– zone-telechargement.farm 
– zone-telechargement.futbol 
– zone-telechargement.golf 
– zone-telechargement.gratis 
– zone-telechargement.im 
– zone-telechargement.ing 
– zone-telechargement.irish 
– zone-telechargement.meme 
– zone-telechargement.monster 
– zone-telechargement.motorcycles 
– zone-telechargement.news 
– zone-telechargement.party 
– zone-telechargement.pet 
– zone-telechargement.pictures 
– zone-telechargement.pizza 
– zone-telechargement.promo 
– zone-telechargement.rent 
– zone-telechargement.rodeo 
– zone-telechargement.run 
– zone-telechargement.shop 
– zone-telechargement.supply 
– zone-telechargement.surf 
– zone-telechargement.taxi 
– zone-telechargement.team 
– zone-telechargement.tips 
– zone-telechargement.today 
– zone-telechargement.tools 
– zone-telechargement.town 
– zone-telechargement.win 
– zone-telechargement.zone 

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 17 July 2026 at 6:09 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

The Diary of Anne Frank is widely regarded as one of the best-known literary works in history.

While the diary’s importance is universally recognized, the accessibility of its digital manuscripts has been at the center of a Dutch copyright battle that eventually made its way to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

The legal dispute was triggered by differences in copyright protection terms in the EU. Parts of Anne Frank’s manuscripts remain protected in the Netherlands until 2037, while the same material entered the public domain in Belgium and many other EU member states years ago.

To navigate these conflicting laws, the Dutch Anne Frank Stichting published a scholarly edition online using “state-of-the-art” geo-blocking to prevent Dutch residents from accessing the site. Visitors from the Netherlands and other countries where the work is protected are met with a clear message, informing them about these access restrictions.

“The scholarly edition of the Anne Frank manuscripts cannot be made available in all countries, due to copyright considerations,” is the message blocked visitors get to see.

Despite these blocking measures, the Swiss-based Anne Frank Fonds was not pleased. The Fonds essentially argued that if a block isn’t 100% bypass-proof, the content shouldn’t be online at all.

The Dutch lower court dismissed this argument, stating the defendants had taken reasonable measures to prevent access from the Netherlands. The Fonds appealed, without result, and the case is now heading back to the Dutch Supreme Court, which referred several questions to the EU’s top court to decide the fate of VPN neutrality and the sufficiency of geo-blocking.

State-of-the-Art Geo-Blocking Is Good Enough

In January, Advocate General Rantos published his opinion concluding that geo-blocking is a sufficient measure and that VPN providers are neutral intermediaries. That opinion was not binding, but it set the tone for what followed.

Last week, the CJEU’s Second Chamber delivered its final judgment. The Court ruled that a work that’s in the public domain in some EU member states, but still under copyright in another, can be published on a geo-blocked website without being considered an infringing “communication to the public” in the protected country.

The Court recognized that geo-blocking can be circumvented with a VPN, but that is not the decisive factor. If a publisher specifically chose to use a state-of-the-art geo-blocking to block visitors from a specific country, it is clear that these people are not the intended audience.

“While it is true that geo-blocking measures, including state-of-the-art measures, can, like any technological measure, be circumvented, particularly through the use of a VPN or similar service, the possibility of such circumvention cannot, in itself and in all circumstances, be a decisive factor in finding those measures to be inadequate and, therefore, ineffective,” the judgment reads.

The Court also rejected the idea that publishers should be required to use stricter access controls, such as subscriptions or login requirements. Imposing those measures would disproportionately restrict free access for users in public-domain countries.

The Anne Frank website also uses a self-declaration barrier, shown above, asking visitors to confirm that they are accessing the site from a public-domain country. The Court found that this type of measure, on its own, is not sufficient or effective.

VPN Providers Are not Liable

VPN providers are not liable if they are used to bypass state-of-the-art geo-blocking measures. The same logic also holds if the geo-blocking measures are ineffective to begin with.

The EU’s top court sees VPN providers as neutral intermediaries, referring to previous rulings where YouTube and Uploaded were not held liable for pirating users. As an intermediary, a VPN itself simply acts as a secure, neutral routing tool that’s not communicating anything to the public.

“The provider of a VPN or similar services that are used in order to circumvent an ineffective geo-blocking measure and are lawful technical tools which users may legitimately use cannot be regarded as also having communicated the work to the public,” the judgment reads.

The Court explained that a VPN provider “does not give end users access to a protected work” and added that it “does not play an ‘indispensable role'” in any act of communication.

This conclusion is significant. It effectively confirms that the EU’s highest court does not see VPN providers as copyright infringers simply because their technology enables users to bypass geographical restrictions.

The Broader Fallout

The CJEU ruling means that VPN providers are not held directly liable under EU law. However, this finding still has to be interpreted by local courts.

In this case, it goes back to the Dutch Supreme Court, which still has to decide whether the geo-blocking system deployed by the Anne Frank Stichting actually meets the “state-of-the-art” threshold.

The ruling comes at a time when the status of VPNs in copyright enforcement is also being tested from the opposite direction. In France, for example, VPNs are required to block pirate sites, as they are seen as key intermediaries, similar to ISPs.

The CJEU ruling is not in direct conflict with the French court orders, which are issued under the French Sports Code. However, these blocking orders are actively contested too and may eventually find their way to the EU’s top court as well.

—

A copy of the CJEU’s judgment in Case C-788/24 (ECLI:EU:C:2026:559) is available here.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Thursday 16 July 2026 at 7:43 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

Founded in 2010, AnimeFLV has been a dominant player in the anime piracy ecosystem for years.

The Spanish-language site is particularly popular in Latin America and served more than a billion annual visits at its height.

This popularity didn’t go unnoticed with rightsholders. The site has been on the anti-piracy radar for years and the Motion Picture Association (MPA) flagged the site in its most recent report to the U.S. Trade Representative.

According to the MPA, AnimeFLV’s operators are believed to be located in Peru, Chile, and Mexico. In the latter two countries, the anime portal is also among the 100 most-visited websites. However, due to recent changes this traffic rank will likely drop.

“There are currently no videos”

AnimeFLV ran without significant issues for years, but that changed in mid-June. While the site remained online with the content listings intact, the video player categorically returns the message “Actualmente no hay videos,” informing visitors that ‘there are currently no videos.’

In other words, the popular anime site has effectively become a ghost directory of series and movies.

Actualmente no hay vídeos (there are currently no videos)

Initial hiccups were reported in April already but the site recovered from those. By late June, however, bug reports on GitHub from the Aniyomi anime app’s extension tracker confirmed that AnimeFLV’s player returned no video sources at all.

The site’s operators have not issued any statement to this day. No anti-piracy organization has taken credit either, but the video disappearance comes at a time when several major anime and manga operations were dismantled.

A Wave of Pirate Site Shutdowns

In April, we reported that TuMangaOnline, also known as ZonaTMO, was shut down following an enforcement action from Korean rightsholders.

Also in April, the backend infrastructure of many prominent pirate sites was knocked offline. These sites were linked to the popular “Piracy-as-a-Service” operations such as MegaCloud and VidCloud, that also acted as a hosting platform.

A few weeks earlier, the massive anime pirate site HiAnime had already closed its doors. While this action long remained unexplained, earlier this month Vietnamese authorities eventually launched a criminal prosecution against seven people associated with the piracy ring.

While AnimeFLV’s issues fit in this bigger picture, we can’t independently link it directly to these earlier crackdowns. The mid-June date doesn’t directly link to any other known enforcement actions either.

A Valuable Ghost Directory

What makes AnimeFLV’s situation unusual is that the site hasn’t disappeared. The front end remains fully functional, and the ‘ghost’ directory is still being updated.

Why the operators remain silent on the video issues is food for speculation. However, the fact that they keep the site online suggests that it may not permanently close its doors. Whether it will continue as a directory-only site or something more has yet to be seen.

While AnimeFLV still gets plenty of residual traffic, Leiinad World notes that potential successors were quick to enter the scene too. This includes a newer site called AnimeAV1, which references the more modern AV1 codec, instead of the outdated and largely obsolete FLV (Flash) container format.

Source

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Posted Wednesday 15 July 2026 at 7:48 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

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.

“Obesession” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on July 13 are:

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

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 14 July 2026 at 5:41 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

With the FIFA World Cup nearing its conclusion this week, the crackdown on sports streaming sites continued this weekend.

As part of the “Operation Offsides” enforcement action, led by U.S. authorities, more than 100 domain names were seized over the past days.

These new seizures came more than two weeks after the U.S. Department of Justice officially announced the action. While no new announcement was released, the recent seizures in part target fallback domains that pirate sites switched to following the initial crackdown.

For example, when the buffstreams.plus domain name was seized, ibuffstreams.app took its place, pointing to the same server infrastructure. This backup domain did not go unnoticed and was subsequently seized, pointing to the now-familiar banner.

The seizure banner

These secondary domain seizures also targeted many other domains and brands, including sportsurge.ws, footybite.app, totalsportekz.app, and istreameast.app. A longer list with more examples is available below.

Iranian Fallback

As long as the people running these sites are not caught, they will often launch new domain names. This is not new, but a recent series of domains caught our eye, as it is using seemingly more resilient fallback: Iran’s .ir country-code top-level domain.

OSINT data gathered by TorrentFreak found that buffstreams.ir, sportsurge.ir, and footybite.ir are all active and operational. These domains resolve to the same Ukrainian IP-address, which was previously used by the now seized buffstreams.plus, ibuffstreams.app, and sportsurge.ws domains.

The Iranian domains are paired with Iranian nameservers, ns1.pars.cloud and ns2.pars.cloud, which are also new as the earlier domains relied on Cloudflare nameservers. This suggests that the operators are intentionally moving away from American infrastructure.

Three Years in the Making

Iranian WHOIS data doesn’t reveal when the domains were registered, but SSL certificate logs tell us these .ir domains are not recent emergency registrations.

Both buffstreams.ir and sportsurge.ir received their first SSL certificates on September 22, 2023, within six minutes of each other. Their certificate chains have been renewed without interruption every 90 days since.

In other words, the .ir domains were set up nearly three years before Operation Offsides was announced. All this time they were presumably kept in reserve as a fallback and following the recent seizure actions they were brought to the fore.

The same certificate information also shows that, a few days ago, these .ir domains moved away from the Google SSL certificates they have been using for years. Instead, they switched to certificates from Let’s Encrypt.

More Iranian Links

The three domains on pars.cloud are not the only pirate streaming brands using .ir. Our investigation identified at least 20 additional streaming-related .ir domains spread across several operator clusters.

This includes Totalsportek, nflbite, and nflstreams branded sites with .ir domains, which are all share the same Cloudflare nameserver pair, indicating that they are run from the same account. There is also a separate .ir-linked mlb66 and nhl66 operation, which has been in use for a while.

These .ir domains are not necessarily a response to the recent U.S. domain seizures, as they’ve been around for much longer, but they show that more operators have discovered the .ir ccTLD.

In fact, we have also seen a cluster of Iranian sports streaming domains that are registered, but are not serving any content. These include nbabite.ir, nbastreams.ir, nhlbite.ir, mmastreams.ir, nflstream.ir, stream2watch.ir, and streameastt.ir. These may be waiting to be deployed at a later moment.

Political Tensions

Iran’s .ir country-code TLD is managed by IRNIC, which is part of the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, an academic institution based in Tehran. This makes it essentially unreachable for U.S. law enforcement.

Because of American sanctions, U.S. domain registrars are not allowed to resell .ir domain names. At the same time, given the current state of U.S.-Iran relations it is unlikely that IRNIC will voluntarily cooperate with U.S. authorities to target these domain names.

For pirate sites operators, .ir domains are also appealing due to a revision of IRNIC’s WHOIS policy in 2023. As a result, public queries no longer return registration dates, registrant names, or other contact information. For outsiders, these domains are essentially anonymous.

Notably, Iran’s copyright laws do not cover works from outside Iran, as the country is not a signatory to the Berne Convention, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, or a member of the WTO. This further complicates enforcement actions.

Of course, there are plenty of downsides to using .ir domain names. The international sanctions will make it challenging to monetize these domains, while Iranian domains are more complicated to register, and may also seem less trustworthy to the broader public.

Also, if an Iranian domain name gets millions of monthly visits, including a large American audience, the U.S. authorities may try to target these operations from alternative angles.

—

Below is a list pirate sports streaming domains that were seized this past weekend. This is addition to the domain names that were seized earlier.

– 247sports1.live
– 4kstream.online
– 808score.net
– acrli.org
– alamalkoora.info
– alphastreams1.online
– arkooora.live
– articletech.info
– asyallakora.live
– bally-sports.click
– bintv.net
– bracupgi.org
– buffstreams.app
– coollkoora.live
– cupshots.live
– daddylive.org
– daysports.online
– deporte-libre.live
– deporte-libre.online
– dingdongsport.org
– dosenow.net
– dotsport.online
– embedhd.org
– exorbitantprivilege.net
– extremesportstv.online
– falconstreams.org
– firstrowsports.org
– foorja.live
– footfytv.live
– footstreams.link
– footy100.net
– footybite.app
– footybitez.app
– fotoklikk.live
– funteam.info
– futbollibre.gratis
– goal-koora.live
– goal2.live
– goto-matchat.live
– halastream.net
– ibuffstreams.app
– kkooora4live.net
– knatech.info
– kooora4live.online
– kooora4lives.net
– koora-yallashoot.live
– kooraiive.info
– koorastar.org
– kora24.online
– kora999live.org
– korahnet.live
– koralives.mov
– koralivetv.online
– korallive.online
– koratcity.info
– koratonline.net
– korats.net
– korax90.net
– korralive.info
– livehd7.online
– livehd7s.info
– livesoccers.live
– livesyria.info
– livevss.net
– livevstv.net
– mjumbo.dad
– movish.net
– okkora.live
– onesportsworld.online
– onionstream.live
– openphacts.org
– pelotalibreargentina.org
– pirlotvs.app
– powerstreams.online
– qiuke.app
– qiuyou.live
– ripplenetwork.forum
– rojadirectahd1.club
– rojadirectatvenvivo.click
– score-808.net
– shahid-koora.live
– shazysport.click
– shazysport.live
– shd247.info
– shd247.live
– shstream.live
– sigmastreamer4th.online
– siir-tv.live
– smartcric.click
– sportplus.live
– sports-x.net
– sportsfeed24.org
– sportsonline.click
– sportsonlline.click
– sportssonline.click
– sporttsonline.click
– streamcenter.live
– streamcorner.fyi
– streamcraft.click
– streameast.mov
– streamfree.link
– streamiz.click
– streamninja.online
– streams.center
– streamsports99.fun
– streamthunder.org
– stremonsport.net
– strm01.app
– syria-live.net
– syria2011.net
– syria2012.net
– syrlive.net
– tarjetarojaonline.net
– tarjetarojatv.click
– tarjetarojatvenvivo.click
– techbugs.info
– techiguides.info
– the-tv.app
– therealone.online
– thetvapp.link
– transitionnorthfield.org
– trendgola.org
– tvsportslive.org
– ukdaddy.online
– us-cap.org
– vipbox-tv.live
– yalla-play.net
– yalla4.live
– yallagoolz.net
– yallaksa.live
– yallalive.fun
– yallashoot.fun
– yallashot.life
– yallasnap.net

link to .ir sites.

(buffstreams.ir and sportsurge.ir resolve to 45.12.1.108, as do/did uffstreams.plus, ibuffstreams.app, the-tv.app, sportsurge.ws)

cluster 1 infra to avade US seizures

iran interesting choice as it’s not likely to volunrarily cooperate with US authorities considering recent tensions

more examples, not necessarily reactive /// “24All” and “66” brands already had .ir domains for years

We can expect more seizure action as the World Cup comes ot its end,

Pirate Sports Streaming Operation Switches to Iranian Domains as U.S. Seizures Continue

U.S. Domain Seizures of Sports Streaming Sites Continue with an Iranian Twist

buffstreams.app Jul 12, 2026
footybite.app Jul 12, 2026
footybitez.app Jul 12, 2026
ibuffstreams.app Jul 12, 2026
pirlotvs.app Jul 12, 2026
qiuke.app Jul 12, 2026
strm01.app Jul 12, 2026
the-tv.app Jul 12, 2026
mjumbo.dad Jul 12, 2026
koralives.mov Jul 12, 2026
streameast.mov Jul 12, 2026
808score.net Jul 12, 2026
bintv.net Jul 12, 2026
dosenow.net Jul 12, 2026
exorbitantprivilege.net Jul 12, 2026
footy100.net Jul 12, 2026
halastream.net Jul 12, 2026
kkooora4live.net Jul 12, 2026
kooora4lives.net Jul 12, 2026
koratonline.net Jul 12, 2026
korats.net Jul 12, 2026
korax90.net Jul 12, 2026
livevss.net Jul 12, 2026
livevstv.net Jul 12, 2026
movish.net Jul 12, 2026
score-808.net Jul 12, 2026
sports-x.net Jul 12, 2026
stremonsport.net Jul 12, 2026
syria-live.net Jul 12, 2026
syria2011.net Jul 12, 2026
syria2012.net Jul 12, 2026
syrlive.net Jul 12, 2026
tarjetarojaonline.net Jul 12, 2026
yalla-play.net Jul 12, 2026
yallagoolz.net Jul 12, 2026
yallasnap.net Jul 12, 2026
streams.center Jul 11, 2026
rojadirectahd1.club Jul 11, 2026
bally-sports.click Jul 11, 2026
rojadirectatvenvivo.click Jul 11, 2026
shazysport.click Jul 11, 2026
smartcric.click Jul 11, 2026
sportsonline.click Jul 11, 2026
sportsonlline.click Jul 11, 2026
sportssonline.click Jul 11, 2026
sporttsonline.click Jul 11, 2026
streamcraft.click Jul 11, 2026
streamiz.click Jul 11, 2026
tarjetarojatv.click Jul 11, 2026
tarjetarojatvenvivo.click Jul 11, 2026
ripplenetwork.forum Jul 11, 2026
streamsports99.fun Jul 11, 2026
yallalive.fun Jul 11, 2026
yallashoot.fun Jul 11, 2026
streamcorner.fyi Jul 11, 2026
futbollibre.gratis Jul 11, 2026
alamalkoora.info Jul 11, 2026
articletech.info Jul 11, 2026
funteam.info Jul 11, 2026
knatech.info Jul 11, 2026
kooraiive.info Jul 11, 2026
koratcity.info Jul 11, 2026
korralive.info Jul 11, 2026
livehd7s.info Jul 11, 2026
livesyria.info Jul 11, 2026
shd247.info Jul 11, 2026
techbugs.info Jul 11, 2026
techiguides.info Jul 11, 2026
yallashot.life Jul 11, 2026
footstreams.link Jul 11, 2026
streamfree.link Jul 11, 2026
thetvapp.link Jul 11, 2026
247sports1.live Jul 11, 2026
arkooora.live Jul 11, 2026
asyallakora.live Jul 11, 2026
coollkoora.live Jul 11, 2026
cupshots.live Jul 11, 2026
deporte-libre.live Jul 11, 2026
foorja.live Jul 11, 2026
footfytv.live Jul 11, 2026
fotoklikk.live Jul 11, 2026
goal-koora.live Jul 11, 2026
goal2.live Jul 11, 2026
goto-matchat.live Jul 11, 2026
koora-yallashoot.live Jul 11, 2026
korahnet.live Jul 11, 2026
livesoccers.live Jul 11, 2026
okkora.live Jul 11, 2026
onionstream.live Jul 11, 2026
qiuyou.live Jul 11, 2026
shahid-koora.live Jul 11, 2026
shazysport.live Jul 11, 2026
shd247.live Jul 11, 2026
shstream.live Jul 11, 2026
siir-tv.live Jul 11, 2026
sportplus.live
streamcenter.live
vipbox-tv.live
yalla4.live
yallaksa.live
ukdaddy.online
therealone.online
streamninja.online
sigmastreamer4th.online
powerstreams.online
onesportsworld.online
livehd7.online
korallive.online
koralivetv.online
kora24.online
kooora4live.online
extremesportstv.online
dotsport.online
deporte-libre.online
daysports.online
alphastreams1.online
4kstream.online
us-cap.org
tvsportslive.org
trendgola.org
transitionnorthfield.org
streamthunder.org
sportsfeed24.org
pelotalibreargentina.org
openphacts.org
kora999live.org
koorastar.org
firstrowsports.org
falconstreams.org
embedhd.org
dingdongsport.org
daddylive.org
bracupgi.org
acrli.org
futbollibre.gratis
streamcorner.fyi
yallashoot.fun
yallalive.fun
streamsports99.fun
ripplenetwork.forum
tarjetarojatvenvivo.click
tarjetarojatv.click
streamiz.click
streamcraft.click
sporttsonline.click
sportssonline.click
sportsonlline.click
sportsonline.click
smartcric.click
shazysport.click
rojadirectatvenvivo.click
bally-sports.click
rojadirectahd1.club
streams.center

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 14 July 2026 at 8:06 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

Google rarely addresses pirate site blocking in public, but it is a significant concern now that these measures directly impact the company’s own infrastructure.

The American tech company has been ordered to block access to pirate domain names through its DNS resolver in France, Belgium, Italy and Portugal, for example.

In a recent submission to the European Commission’s call for evidence on the review of the Copyright Directive, Google lists its site blocking critique in detail. The filing is marked “Privileged and Confidential” but it was posted publicly on the commission’s website, alongside other submissions.

Blocking Harms Outweigh Benefits, Google Argues

Google’s submission addresses a variety of topics, including the company’s opposition to broad site blocking measures. This includes VPN and third-party DNS blocking, which is seen as disproportionate and ineffective. The same applies to IP-address blocking, which risks targeting infrastructure of legitimate sites and services.

“Blocking DNS resolvers, IPs, VPNs, is ineffective, as it does not remove content at all and is easily circumvented by using alternative DNS resolvers. It is disproportionate, catching lawful services, raising extra-territoriality concerns and blocking entire domains,” Google writes.

“Similarly, blocking IP addresses neither removes the content nor achieves proportionate outcomes, as many lawful services may be using the same IP address,” the company adds.

From Google’s EU Submission
 

The submission cited several real-world examples to support these claims. It mentions that Italy’s Piracy Shield blocked a Google Drive subdomain, as well as IP-addresses hosting over 42 million domains of Cloudflare customers. Meanwhile, in France, CISCO stopped offering its OpenDNS service after a local court ordered DNS resolver blockades.

Google also highlights a December 2019 incident in Portugal where ISPs blocked Google-hosted Virtual IP addresses, disrupting “core Google services and cut off legitimate traffic for other innocent Google Cloud customers sharing the same virtual IPs.”

These concerns are not incidental. A large-scale empirical study published by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) recently found that following a LaLiga blocking order in Spain, more than 554,000 domains were blocked at least once during football match broadcasts. This included website from Amnesty International and the ACLU, UNICEF, UNHCR, the Australian Senate, Stanford Law Review, and Amazon S3 endpoints.

Clear Guardrails

In addition to the overblocking concerns, the submission notes that any expansions of the blocking regime in Europe should be proportional and keep the safeguards in mind that are already provided by EU law. Google specifically notes that courts “should not serve as mere rightholder ‘mail boxes’, by simply rubber-stamping blocking demands.”

Google believes that blocking injunction should only be used as a last resort if regular takedown options failed. These injunctions should be transparent, limited in time, while both rightsholders and the intermediaries share the implementation costs.

The submission shows that Google is not outright opposed to site blocking, as long as it’s restricted to targeted and proportional measures. The real solution to piracy does not lie in enforcement, Google argues, but in creating superior legal alternatives.

“In our experience, unmet consumer demand is a key driver of piracy. That is why one of the best ways to combat piracy is to provide better, more convenient, and legitimate alternatives,” Google writes.

U.S. Site Blocking Gains Momentum

Google’s EU filing was submitted a few days before U.S. lawmakers doubled down on their site blocking intentions. On June 30, the House IP subcommittee held a hearing on copyright protection and enforcement on the Internet, with planned site blocking legislation as a key topic.

Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa told The Capitol Forum that he planned to introduce a site blocking bill that week. While there is no record of an introduced bill, it suggests that momentum is building.

This was also confirmed during the hearing, as Issa closed by signaling that the educational phase of the lawmaking process is over.

“Language is being distributed on what we’ll believe is final compromises to get to legislation,” he said. “It’s going to be my intention, with the help of my chairman and old friend, Mr. Jordan, that we will move it out of this committee.”

IP Subcommittee Chairman Issa
 

Rep. Issa is retiring at the end of his current term. Whether the bill has been formally introduced since his stated deadline is not clear. TorrentFreak has reached out to Issa’s office for comment, but we didn’t hear back.

Issa’s bill isn’t the only proposal. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who introduced the competing FADPA bill last year, told The Capitol Forum she is negotiating a bipartisan, bicameral “four corners agreement” with Issa and Senators Blackburn, Coons, Schiff, and Tillis. That formally confirms out earlier reporting.

Meanwhile, the hearing made clear that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Cox v. Sony only intensified the call for site blocking. The Supreme Court concluded that ISPs cannot be held secondarily liable for user piracy unless they actively induce or tailor their services for infringement, which means that rightsholders will need an alternative enforcement tool.

Google is Silent on U.S. Plans

Google has not commented on the U.S. site blocking plans yet, but it is a member of the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) whose president, Chris Mohr, did testify at the recent subcommittee hearing.

According to Mohr, his members are “genuinely split” on site blocking. At the same time, he stressed that a U.S. blocking bill should have robust judicial backing, while the technical measures should be precise enough to prevent overblocking and protect shared infrastructure.

The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (I2Coalition), which represents major tech companies including Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google, has previously critiqued broad blocking plans. Last year the organization launched its DNS at Risk campaign, warning the public about DNS blocking threats.

Google’s EU submission is also quite outspoken. While it does not refer to the American plans, Google is clearly opposed to requiring blocking measures from third-party DNS resolvers, while noting that blocking is ineffective, disproportionate, and harmful to lawful sites and services.

Whether the company will make the same arguments publicly as the American bill moves forward remains to be seen.

—

Google’s submission to the European Commission’s consultation is available here (pdf).

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Posted Sunday 12 July 2026 at 7:36 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

Paul Deitel is a best-selling programming textbook author whose books, published by Pearson Education, are used by students and developers worldwide.

The author’s personal GitHub account includes a widely referenced repository that hosts the official example code for titles including Java SE 8 for Programmers, C++ How to Program, and Python for Programmers.

These code examples are a key reference, but for a few weeks they have been unavailable due to a DMCA takedown notice. The notice in question was sent in April by Pearson’s anti-piracy vendor Link-Busters, which is the most prolific DMCA takedown sender in recent history.

Takedown notice
 

Apparently, Link-Busters confused the educational code repository with an illegally posted copy of the book, which it clearly isn’t.

Deitel Files Counternotice

While Link-Busters generally has a decent track record, this notice caused clear collateral damage. In a counternotice that was sent to GitHub yesterday, July 9, Deitel requests his repository to be restored.

GitHub redacted his name in the published counter-notice, but the identity of the filer is clear from the context. The author explains that the targeted repo does not contain a copy of the book, but important code examples.

“I am the [private] of the book and [private] [private] GitHub page is where ALL [private] readers worldwide get the example code that goes with [private] books,” the counternotice reads.

“Whoever this [private] organization is has no idea of the damage they’re doing by automated scanning and sending of removal notices.”

“Had they done even the simplest bit of research they would have seen that the book was not posted in [private] GitHub repo and that it was just the supporting materials, and that [private] am the [private] of the book!”

The counternotice
 

The counter-notice stresses that access to the GitHub repository is “CRITICAL” as readers worldwide depend on it to access the example code that accompanies the book. Without it, the textbook’s code exercises are effectively inaccessible.

Waiting for Restoration

At the scale Link-Busters operates, sending billions of DMCA takedown notices on behalf of major publishers, mistakes are perhaps unavoidable. However, this example shows that even a minuscule error rate can result in real damage, even for the very people these notices aim to protect.

The contested April takedown notice covered roughly 25 book titles. Most of the targeted repositories did contain unauthorized PDF copies of textbooks, uploaded by students to “books” collections on GitHub. The Deitel companion code repo was the clear outlier.

At the time of writing, Deitel’s GitHub repository is still offline, pointing to the removal notice shown below.

Repository unavailable
 

Under the DMCA’s counter-notice procedure, GitHub has to restore the disabled repository within 10 to 14 business days unless Pearson or Link-Busters file a federal lawsuit to keep it offline. Since the takedown appears to be a clear mistake, it will likely be restored soon.

TorrentFreak reached out to Deitel for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication. Link-Busters has yet to respond to our request for comment too. We will update this article if responses come in.

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Posted Saturday 11 July 2026 at 7:35 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

Bulgaria was one of the first countries in the world to consider pirate site blocking nearly two decades ago.

As part of a crackdown on local torrent trackers, the government ordered ISPs to block access to the ArenaBG tracker in 2007.

The blocking actions resulted in public outrage and street protests. Some Internet providers pushed back as well, questioning the legality of the requested measures, and the blocking instructions were eventually withdrawn.

Today, nearly twenty years have passed and Bulgaria continues to struggle with site blocking. This, despite being part of the EU, where site blocking mechanisms are widely authorized.

Blocking The Pirate Bay and Zamunda

In February 2020, the Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP) and IFPI launched a civil lawsuit against three ISPs, seeking a court order requiring them to block The Pirate Bay and Zamunda, the country’s most-visited torrent site.

Two of the three ISPs fought back hard. They described the claim as “inadmissible” and “baseless.” One, identified only as ‘N.1’ in court documents, pointed out that Bulgarian law does not recognize a claim “for blocking access to Internet sites,” and argued that EU law requiring member states to ensure access to injunction applications against intermediaries would not apply because Bulgaria had not yet transposed those provisions into national law.

The Sofia City Court disagreed. In May 2023, it ordered the three ISPs to block both sites, including all mirrors and proxies, within six months. BAMP called it “a major step forward” in the fight against music piracy. IFPI chief executive Francis Moore welcomed the ruling. It was, by all appearances, a landmark win.

However, the first Bulgarian site blocking order wasn’t final yet, as the ISPs appealed.

ISPs Win Blocking Appeal at Supreme Court

Earlier this year, Bulgaria’s Supreme Court of Cassation (SCC) issued its final ruling in the blocking case, siding with the ISPs. The court held that under current Bulgarian copyright law, rightsholders cannot obtain pirate site blocking injunctions in standard civil proceedings.

EU law, specifically the Enforcement Directive (IPRED), requires member states to provide mechanisms for injunctions against intermediaries. However, the court found that Bulgaria has not fully transposed those provisions into its national copyright legislation in a way that makes permanent blocking injunctions an option.

The court noted that ISPs are seen as mere conduits. Without clear national rules balancing freedom of information and proportionality, courts cannot issue site blocking injunctions based on current copyright law.

This effectively means that Bulgarian lawmakers have to address the shortcomings with new legislation, before site blocking orders can be granted.

BAMP Wants EU to Step In

The Supreme Court appeal concluded earlier this year but largely went unnoticed, as local press didn’t pick it up. The only public mention was a brief client bulletin published by Sofia law firm Dimitrov, Petrov & Co., which is intended for corporate clients rather than the public.

The ruling came on our radar last week, when BAMP submitted its response to the European Commission’s Call for Evidence on a targeted initiative for a better copyright environment. The Supreme Court ruling shows that the EU must require its members to implement existing EU directives.

“The Court identified a legislative deficiency, holding that the existing provisions of the Bulgarian Copyright Act do not provide a legal basis for granting final website-blocking injunctions against intermediaries on the merits and that this deficiency can only be remedied through legislative action.”

“This illustrates the importance of ensuring the full and correct implementation of the existing EU acquis across all Member States before considering further legislative initiatives,” BAMP’s submission adds.

From BAMP’s submission

It’s Not Over Yet

The Bulgarian ruling means that, after all these years, local rightsholders are still without site blocking options. This doesn’t mean that the country isn’t making any copyright enforcement progress. With help from the U.S., Bulgaria shut down the country’s largest torrent trackers earlier this year, including ArenaBG, Zamunda, and Zelka.

Not much later, the U.S. Trade Representative removed the country from the “Watch List” category in its annual Special 301 Report. The U.S. praised the country for its significant enforcement actions, among other things.

The Supreme court ruling presents a clear setback for rightsholders. However, they are not without recourse. As highlighted by Dimitrov, Petrov & Co., the Supreme Court noted that rightsholders that are harmed by Bulgaria’s failure to fully implement EU requirements, could potentially sue the state for damages.

Meanwhile, Bulgarian lawmakers have been working on an amendment to the Copyright and Related Rights Act that could potentially address the shortcomings. The amendment has been in preparation since at least 2022 but, as of today, it has yet to be approved.

—

A copy of BAMP’s submission to the European Commission Call for Evidence is available here (pdf). TorrentFreak did not have access to the Supreme Court’s full ruling. The reporting here is based on the BAMP submission and the coverage from Dimitrov, Petrov & Co.

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Posted Thursday 9 July 2026 at 7:44 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

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.

“Obesession” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on July 06 are:

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

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Posted Wednesday 8 July 2026 at 7:39 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

Last December, the High Court in New Delhi, India, granted a broad pirate site blocking order in favor of American movie industry giants, including Apple, Warner, Netflix, Disney and Crunchyroll.

In addition to targeting residential ISPs, the order also lists global domain name registrars and registries as defendants, compelling them to suspend domains.

By January, several registrars had indeed taken action. Domains linked to the American registrar Porkbun, the UK-based WHG Hosting services, and the Lithuanian registrar Hostinger were all fully suspended, suggesting that these companies complied with the Indian order. However, many other domains remained online.

For example, the long-running German websites S.to and BS.to, which both have millions of monthly visits, remained online. This did not come as a surprise. Tonga’s .to domains have generally been considered a safe haven for pirate sites, as it generally would not comply with foreign court orders.

From the December 2025 order

Rightsholders, including the MPA, have repeatedly complained about the .to registry and last year anti-piracy company Warezio even threatened to sue ICANN over .to domain piracy. And then something changed.

.To Domain Names Suspended

Yesterday, the operator of SerienStream informed us that S.to and BS.to were suspended. The operator mentioned that ‘Tonic’ informed him that the domains were suspended in response to an Indian court order. Indeed, that is the December order, which was amended a few times over the past months.

The suspensions are also apparent from the WHOIS information, which shows that the domains are put on clientHold. This is an EPP status codesstatus code that is set by the domain name registrar, often in response to legal disputes.

WHOIS
 

The WHOIS result is telling in more ways than one. It clearly identifies the Government of Kingdom of Tonga as the domain registrar. This indicates that Tonga applied the clientHold status code, presumably in response to the Indian court order.

At the same time, the WHOIS data confirms that the .to domain management changed drastically. The ccTLD was previously managed by the US-based Tonic Domains Corporation, which did not offer a WHOIS service, nor could it apply EPP status codes.

Tonga Domains Restructured

Since last year, however, the Canadian domain name company Tucows is managing the technical registry backend for .to domains, with the Government of the Kingdom of Tonga being listed as the ccTLD manager or sponsor.

The structure change is more than a simple backend swap. Old IANA delegation records show that the .to registry was previously operated by Tonic’s US-based co-founder Eric Gullichsen, who was listed as both administrative and technical contact, working from the Tongan consulate address in Burlingame, California.

Gullichsen has since been replaced and the administrative contact is now Justin Kaitapu in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, while the technical contact points to Tucows in Toronto.

Tonic’s old system has been in operation since 1997 and did not support EPP status codes such as clientHold. The current Tucows-powered platform does. In other words, the infrastructure that made .to a safe haven for pirate sites simply didn’t have a suspension button. Now it does.

As mentioned earlier, the clientHold status code suggests that the Tongan registrar took action. However, when we reached out to the hostmaster address at Tonic.to, we were brushed off.

“With reference to your recent inquiry, we regret to advise that Tonic has no interest to discuss or make available the details of it’s [sic] actions or internal policies,” Tonic’s hostmaster told TorrentFreak.

We also reached out to Tucows, which handles .to’s registry services now, but the Canadian company informed us that the action was taken by the domain registrar, without providing further detail. That brings us back to the Government of the Kingdom of Tonga, which is the registrar on record.

No Safe Haven

While we were unable to get a comment on the record, it is clear that .to domain names are no longer the safe haven they were once considered. This conclusion was also drawn by the operator of SerienStream.

“In the long term, this will result in significant financial losses for Tonga and its .to domains, if they are no longer considered to be stable and safe,” the operator informed TorrentFreak.

“The Indian court has no jurisdiction in this matter, nor should an Indian judgment be binding on a German-language website,” he added.

SerienStream (translated)

As shown above, SerienStream now points its users to a backup (serienstream).to domain name, which was not listed in the Indian court order. These orders are regularly amended, though, so it might only be a matter of time before this one is suspended too.

In addition to S.to and BS.to, all other .to domain names listed in the Indian court order were also put on clientHold over the weekend. This includes yflix.to, anigo.to, watchflix.to, and 24drama.to and confirms that it is indeed linked to the Indian order.

Whether rightsholders will now target .to domain names en masse has yet to be seen, but the infrastructure to suspend them is now in place.

—

A copy of the paperwork shared by SerienStream’s operator, including the December order from the High Court in New Delhi and several additions, is available here (pdf).

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Posted Wednesday 8 July 2026 at 7:30 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

With more than 150 million monthly visits, HiAnime was one of the most popular piracy portals to ever exist.

The site, which was a prime destination for many anime pirates, surprisingly shut down in March without offering an explanation for the sudden move.

HiAnime has been a major target for rightsholders for years. The operators were believed to reside in Vietnam, which was highlighted in the U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR) Notorious Markets report just days before HiAnime said its goodbyes.

American rightsholders and the U.S. Government urged the Vietnamese authorities to take action against the site. These calls were serious, as the USTR doubled down in May with its latest Special 301 Report classifying Vietnam as a “Priority Foreign Country,” opening the door to potential trade sanctions.

Vietnam Arrests HiAnime Piracy Ring

The Vietnamese authorities take these concerns seriously. Late last week, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security announced that its anti-corruption and economic crime unit (C03) has charged seven suspects with copyright infringement and money laundering in connection with a pirate streaming network that operated more than 100 websites.

The written reports don’t mention any sites by name, but a broadcast of the government operated state broadcaster Vietnam Television clearly identifies footage of HiAnime.to, which is crossed out.

VTV broadcast HiAnime
 

The investigation identified four alleged ringleaders, Nguyễn Đình Minh Khoa, Nguyễn Trung Anh, Nguyễn Đình Xuân, and Nguyễn Hoàng Thanh, who were arrested and charged with copyright infringement and money laundering. Three others, Nguyễn Phước Toàn, Doãn Thành Luân, and Nguyễn Khương Duy, were charged with copyright infringement only.

According to C03, the group operated from 2020 until April 2026, offering more than 26,000 unlicensed titles across their network of sites. The operation allegedly generated roughly $12.8 million through advertising revenue.

HiAnime has already been inactive since March and in a VTV broadcast investigators browse through the Wayback Machine, which clearly identifies HiAnime.to as the target. No other domain names are mentioned.

Wayback Machine

ACE and HSI Cooperation

The investigation was not a purely Vietnamese effort. According to the Ministry of Public Security, C03 acted on intelligence provided by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the MPA’s anti-piracy arm.

The U.S. involvement comes as no surprise as both countries have been discussing the piracy problems for years. In addition to the USTR’s recent diplomatic escalation, ACE has been seeking identifying information about the operators of HiAnime.to and related sites for years.

The American intelligence eventually helped the Vietnamese authorities to locate the suspects and dismantle one of the largest piracy rings that ever operated.

Crypto and Real Estate

The seven suspects are all relatively young and some are described as recent IT graduates. The four ringleaders remain in custody while they await their trial and the others were placed under travel restrictions.

The suspects
 

The national broadcaster featured interviews with several suspects including Nguyễn Đình Minh Khoa, who managed relationships with advertising platforms and was responsible for driving traffic to the sites.

Khoa reportedly confessed on camera to earning approximately 50 billion Vietnamese đồng (roughly $2 million) in revenue from 2019 onward, which he spent on cars and personal expenses. The other ringleaders, who reportedly worked on website design or IT infrastructure, also generated substantial revenue.

According to investigators, the suspects received payments in cryptocurrency from foreign advertising platforms. These funds were then laundered through multiple intermediaries, after which they were transferred to personal Vietnamese bank accounts.

From there, the money was used to purchase real estate and vehicles, which prosecutors allege was intended to legitimize the illicit proceeds.

‘Deterrent Prison Sentences’

This is not the first time that Vietnamese authorities shut down a large piracy operation with help from ACE and U.S. law enforcement. American intelligence also helped to shut down the Fmovies piracy ring in 2024.

Two Fmovies operators were eventually prosecuted and, while both confessed in full to all alleged crimes, they received only suspended prison sentences. This means that, similar to previous convictions in Vietnam, they did not have to serve any prison time.

These relatively mild sentences are a thorn in the side of rightsholders. The USTR also highlighted it as a problem in its recent report, urging the Vietnamese authorities to seek “significantly more criminal prosecutions against online piracy operations” while “seeking deterrent-level prison sentences”.

The first part of this request already appears to have started. On May 5, Vietnam’s Prime Minister issued Urgent Telegram No. 38, ordering a nationwide crackdown on intellectual property violations. The Ministry of Public Security followed with its own classified directive the next day.

During the following weeks, Vietnamese police reportedly opened 90 cases involving 142 suspects across various IP crimes, and shut down hundreds of infringing websites, including eight pirate film sites and 159 unnamed pirate football streaming platforms.

Whether the prosecution of the HiAnime-linked defendants will result in more deterrent sentences has yet to be seen, but it is clear that American rightsholders and U.S. authorities will be watching it closely.

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Posted Tuesday 7 July 2026 at 8:32 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

Most torrent sites that were active in 2005 are long gone and the same applies to the software project from that era.

The academic torrent client Tribler is a notable exception and if it’s up to the people running it, it will go on indefinitely.

Tribler is part of a research project at Delft University of Technology, headed by associate professor Johan Pouwelse. Over the years, Tribler found itself to be a safe haven for pirate site channels, a decentralized music streaming platform, and an AI-powered search engine, among other things.

The core idea always revolved around decentralization. The software and the network should be impossible to shut down. While academic achievements are not always picked up broadly, the research project’s output is highly valued and just secured funding through 2032.

Ironically, the development of the decentralized BitTorrent client is highly centralized. It’s run by a university team and paid for by subsidies. However, its own research may offer an eventual solution to that problem, starting with a self-replicating seedbox.

The Self-Replicating Seedbox

One of Tribler’s latest projects is a self-replicating seedbox called Mycelium, named after the underground fungal networks it is meant to resemble. This is part of a larger superorganism experiment into a decentrally governed community.

The Mycelium
 

In simple terms, the seedbox starts a single server. When community members fund the project with bitcoin a new VPS server launches a fresh seedbox, after which the process will repeat itself. This results in an ever-expanding service as long as sufficient funds come in.

The content being seeded is Creative Commons material, not copyrighted works. The BitTorrent seeding is managed by libtorrent and the Bitcoin mechanics by a standard wallet. Once it’s set up, it can function independently.

The combination of all these elements, including voting and payment, could do more than replicate seedboxes. The same technology and framework can also be used to set up mirror websites, to replicate URLs, or to register new domain names.

A Decentralized Digital Democracy

The seedbox project isn’t completely decentralized, as it relies on GitHub and the VPS provider SporeStack. The researchers acknowledge this and in a recent master thesis, Stan Verlaan described this as the “governance paradox of decentralized systems”.

While there is no immediate solution, the thesis does offer a solution for how a community can help decide on the future of a project, while also funding it.

The proposed solution is a TwoStepDemocracy. In the first step, users vote on which problems are worth solving or which feature needs to be implemented. Based on these votes, the developers can then submit solutions.

The community then votes on whether the proposed solutions or changes should be implemented. If a solution passes that community vote and enough users have pledged Bitcoin to fund it, the developer gets paid.

This setup sounds straightforward, but it is significantly different from how software development usually works. A project’s evolution doesn’t rely on a group of gatekeepers who decide, but on the votes of a broader community, which in turn is independent of the funding.

The Utopian Dream

The researchers don’t understate their ambitions. On the superorganism-experiment GitHub page, the project’s future vision, or “Utopian dream”, is described with little reservation

“We are creating our own society. A place citizens have FULL control, have their own MONEY, have AI that serves THEM, and CONTROL together. Unstoppable by design, self-replicating, self-hosted, self-evolving, and human oversight with democratic governance,” the description reads.

That framing isn’t necessarily limited to software. Tribler’s Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak that the project has been collaborating with the Dutch tax authority and the authority for the financial markets on trust, identity en governance isues. At the same time, he’s increasingly finding an audience among European Commission officials as well.

Tribler’s voting experiment
 

The connection makes sense. In recent years, Internet infrastructure and AI development have become further concentrated in the hands of a few large American companies, so Europe has a growing interest in public, decentralized alternatives.

Tribler’s research doesn’t propose any groundbreaking new technologies. Its strength lies in the combination of technologies. Whether this can scale into anything concrete remains highly uncertain.

For now, the TwoStepDemocracy idea remains a technical proof of concept. The thesis itself acknowledges this, and stresses that a larger study is needed to combine all elements, from voting to payment to development, to see how it functions.

The Tribler team isn’t letting the self-replicating seedbox loose on The Pirate Bay either, for those who are wondering. But they may have planted a seed.

—

The Superorganism repository is available on GitHub. The TwoStepDemocracy thesis can be found here (pdf).

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Posted Monday 6 July 2026 at 7:23 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

YggTorrent was France’s largest torrent community, with more than 10 million registered members when it shut down in March following a major hack.

The hacker, known as Gr0lum, breached the site’s infrastructure, exfiltrated 19 GB of data, drained its crypto wallets, and wiped its servers.

That proved to be too much to come back from and YggTorrent decided to throw in the towel instead. In many cases, that would be the end of the story. However, the French Gendarmerie nationale had other plans in the works.

Twelve YggTorrent Arrests

This week, the police announced that it dismantled ‘the structure’ behind YggTorrent. This wording is carefully chosen and avoids taking direct credit for the site’s shutdown, which took place months earlier.

The police operation was conducted by the UNCyber unit from the Montpellier Section de Recherches, under the direction of the JIRS and JUNALCO in Paris. Twelve people have been arrested and put under investigation.

The press release suggests that not all reported arrests are recent, noting that they were carried out since late 2023. The twelve people are suspected of organized copyright infringement (contrefaçon), money laundering, and operating a platform facilitating illegal transactions.

In French legal terms, the suspects have been placed under formal judicial investigation (mise en examen), which signals that prosecutors believe there is serious evidence of criminal involvement.

The investigation was initiated following complaints from SACEM, ALPA, and the French Video Publishing Union. SACEM’s enforcement interest in YggTorrent dates back to at least 2018, when one of its complaints forced the site to abandon its .com domain.

The scale of YggTorrent’s operation may explain the severity of the charges. According to data in the Gr0lum leak, the site generated an estimated €8.5 million in revenue in 2025, allegedly routing payments through dozens of fake e-commerce storefronts to disguise transactions from payment processors including PayPal and Stripe.

‘Dismantling The Site’?

The police note that searches across France uncovered crypto-assets linked to the site’s revenues and approximately €45,000 in computer equipment.

These details were proudly shared on social media too, with a notable exaggeration.

The Gendarmerie’s tweet
 

As shown above, the French police claim to have dismantled the “#YGGTORRENT download site”, which is not exactly true. The site itself has been offline for months, after all, and was directly linked to the hack.

The police press release does not mention the hack at all. Their investigation already started years earlier, but it is possible that the leaked information may have been useful as added intelligence.

When YggTorrent’s hacker came forward in March, they explicitly noted that the data could be “of interest to law enforcement.”

Wider Fallout

The arrests appear to have triggered a wave of closures across France’s broader warez community.

According to KultureGeek, the former leaders of release groups Forward (FW) and TFA, both specializing in WEB-DL rips of streaming content, have been arrested, along with a community member known as Fervex. Several former YggTorrent moderators were also detained.

Forward, which was responsible for an estimated 35,000 torrents before being banned from YggTorrent during the Turbo Mode controversy last December, confirmed its permanent closure. Predb FR, a release indexer, shut down. Nexum, a private tracker, was destroyed by its own operator as a precaution, while Usenet indexer UNFR also went dark.

Whether the FW and TFA arrests are part of the Gendarmerie’s twelve or whether they are part of a separate investigation remains unclear. Other community reports on Reddit and elsewhere could not be immediately verified either, but it is clear that the French piracy scene is in turmoil.

For now, the investigation remains ongoing, and the Gendarmerie has not ruled out further arrests.

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Posted Friday 3 July 2026 at 5:19 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

Twenty-five years ago today, a young, little-known programmer by the name of Bram Cohen fired off a short message to a mailing list for peer-to-peer enthusiasts. “My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here,” Cohen wrote, followed by a link to his personal website.

“What’s BitTorrent, Bram?” the founder of the list asked in response.

Cohen never bothered to reply. The world would find out soon enough.

In the following years, BitTorrent quickly became the world’s most popular file-sharing app, unleashing a massive wave of piracy that upended Hollywood forever. At one point, BitTorrent was said to be responsible for a huge amount of internet traffic — some widely cited metrics peg it at half of P2P and one-third of all internet traffic in 2004. And while the entertainment industry succeeded in shutting down file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, it largely failed to curtail the massive flood of BitTorrent piracy.

What stymied movie studios and record labels alike is exactly what makes the story of BitTorrent’s 25th anniversary a gripping one. There’s BitTorrent, the app that Cohen unveiled in July 2001 and which continues to attract tens of millions of monthly users to this day. There’s BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol, which has been adopted and advanced by hackers and developers from around the world, and which helped birth an entire cottage industry of piracy websites. And there’s BitTorrent, the company cofounded by Cohen, which struggled for years to make money with its technology.

“Going into it, my plan was not to start a business,” Cohen recalls. “My plan was to start a revolution.”

This is the story of that revolution, and all that remains of it today.

Cohen started working on BitTorrent soon after leaving Mojo Nation, a startup that had ambitious plans to combine file sharing, distributed computing, and micropayments, only to shut down in 2002 without ever really getting off the ground.

Cohen helped Mojo Nation improve the efficiency of its file-sharing technology. His approach was to use something called swarming distribution: Instead of swapping large files between a few users at a time, the app would divide each file into lots of little chunks, and then allow large numbers (or swarms) of users to trade those chunks among themselves. The ethos of sharing was built into the software, insisting that users would help upload files instead of just downloading them selfishly.

Cohen was disillusioned by the failure of Mojo Nation but not ready to give up on the underlying technology just yet. “I decided to make a tool that very narrowly just did swarming distribution and nothing else, because that was a thing I knew how to do,” he says.

All this happened as P2P and file-sharing companies were facing massive headwinds. The music industry sued Napster at the end of 1999 and ultimately forced it to shut down around the time Cohen first released BitTorrent. A few months after that, the entertainment industry sued Kazaa and Grokster, followed by legal claims against Audiogalaxy, LimeWire, eDonkey, and other file-sharing systems.

Despite some significant differences in their P2P architecture, all these apps ultimately lost in court or folded ahead of a likely legal defeat. Their Achilles’ heel: They offered users a way to search for copyrighted files and then helped them find others to trade those files with. Courts deemed this contributory infringement, pointing to the fact that the owners of these services knew exactly which files their users were trading.

BitTorrent was different. From the start, Cohen built the app without search functionality, instead relying on third-party websites for content discovery. He also didn’t run a centralized server to help users discover other BitTorrent clients to trade content with, and instead outsourced that piece of the puzzle to so-called tracker servers. Websites dedicated to BitTorrent file sharing would offer a metadata file (the torrent file) for every download, which in turn pointed users to tracker servers that matched up users to facilitate the sharing. Simply put, BitTorrent was an app to help people trade data, but its developer had no way of knowing what that data was.

That structure effectively shielded Cohen and the company he would eventually found from legal liability. To this day, BitTorrent remains the only major publisher of file-sharing software that hasn’t gotten sued by Hollywood and the major labels. However, Cohen insists that the decision to outsource content search and client discovery wasn’t primarily a shrewd legal maneuver, but a simple necessity.

After all, he was just one guy. “My hands were somewhat tied,” he says. “I was writing stuff on my own.”

Despite lacking the resources of much bigger P2P companies, Cohen’s BitTorrent app quickly gained traction in tight-knit communities looking to trade large files. Among the first adopters was Etree, an online community of jam band enthusiasts. Bands like Phish and the Grateful Dead had long encouraged their fans to trade bootleg recordings of their shows with each other in the offline world. Etree brought this idea online with the help of BitTorrent, which allowed fans to share show recordings using high-resolution audio files that were simply too big to distribute any other way.

But pirated videos were like rocket fuel. “When it started getting used for anime was when the numbers took off,” Cohen says. Granted, that early success didn’t quite measure up to the tens of millions of users apps like Kazaa were attracting at the time. “It was like, Oh, look, we’re getting a thousand downloads a day, that’s massive,” he recalls.

Things changed significantly with the emergence of major torrent sites, which allowed anyone to quickly find and download movies and TV shows. In 2002, a Slovenian high school student launched Suprnova.org, which reportedly attracted up to a million users a day before its closure in 2004. And in 2003, a ragtag group of hackers founded The Pirate Bay in Sweden. With its open embrace of illicit content and an F-you attitude toward Hollywood, the site turned into a kind of lightning rod for self-described pirates and copyright enforcers alike.

While these sites quickly became household names, countless others sprung up all across the globe in their shadows. Some catered to specific interests like anime, porn, or ’70s B movies, while others simply welcomed everyone and everything. And while copyright holders were able to shutter some sites, others survived, or reemerged under different names or domains. Plus, all those lawsuits generated countless headlines, effectively promoting BitTorrent to new audiences. By 2004, BitTorrent traffic exploded.

The surge of interest didn’t just alarm rightsholders. It also put some significant strain on BitTorrent’s infrastructure, including the tracker servers that helped users discover each other. One popular tracker, Denis.Stalker.H3Q.com, was run by a trio of German hackers associated with the local Chaos Computer Club.

Initially, their tracker ran server software Cohen had written in conjunction with the BitTorrent client app. But as BitTorrent gained in popularity, their server, which was just a single computer humming along in a kitchen somewhere in Berlin, was bombarded with hundreds of requests per second, slowing it to a crawl.

That’s when Dirk Engling, a member of the trio who is also known as Erdgeist in German hacker circles, decided to build a better-performing tracker software from scratch. He dubbed his server software Opentracker, and the difference was like night and day: While the Denis.Stalker server previously always ran hot, Engling’s code put a sudden stop to the near-constant fan noise. “It was so fast that we initially thought something was broken,” he says.

Engling is not as well known as Cohen. But back then, he made a fateful decision that ultimately helped BitTorrent scale to surpass all other file-sharing networks in popularity. Instead of just using his code on the Denis.Stalker tracker, Engling published it online, free to download for anyone.

Opentracker quickly took off and was adopted by major torrent sites like The Pirate Bay as their tracker solution of choice. Many of these big sites relied on third-party tracker servers like Denis.Stalker, but for years also ran their own trackers as fallback solutions. Every torrent file can point to multiple tracker servers, so sharing continued when one server went down. (Eventually, BitTorrent added further decentralization to allow trackerless trading, but tracker servers remain to this day an important part of the ecosystem.)

“Back then, it was a radical political idea,” Engling says. The thought was to allow anyone to distribute large amounts of data without having to rely on expensive servers — and if some of that was used for piracy, so be it. “It was a movement to democratize [file sharing],” he says.

Engling, for one, wasn’t in it for the money. He distributed Opentracker as “beerware,” an open-source license guided by the notion that anyone who found it useful should buy him a beer, as he half-jokingly explained in a 2007 talk. “I thought: A lot of people are using BitTorrent, so…”

Back in the United States, Cohen quickly realized that relying on the goodwill of others — especially people who used his software to download content for free — didn’t pay the bills. In 2004, he founded BitTorrent Inc. to transform the revolution he had started into an actual business. “That didn’t work so well, unfortunately,” he now concedes.

BitTorrent raised $8.75 million in funding in 2005, followed by another $20 million round in 2006. The money helped the company to staff up, but it also put pressure on Cohen and his teammates to somehow turn an app that was beloved by pirates into a legitimate business.

As part of these efforts, the company struck deals with Hollywood to launch a movie download store called the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, which launched with thousands of titles from Warner Bros., Paramount, and MGM in early 2007. However, the company quickly realized that selling DRM-protected movies to an audience that already had access to the same titles for free was a fool’s errand.

“That didn’t work at all,” says a former senior BitTorrent employee who declined to be named in this story because of fear of repercussions from his current employer. Not only did people not want to buy movies from BitTorrent, but minimum guarantee provisions in its contracts with Hollywood also forced the company to fork over millions of dollars for content no one wanted to buy. “It kind of worked out for the studios,” the former employee says.

“There were gotchas [in those] deals that made them essentially unworkable,” Cohen agrees. “The big copyright holders were perfectly happy with where things [were], and basically didn’t want to create the streaming systems that we have today.”

BitTorrent closed the download store less than two years after its launch while also laying off half of its staff amid a recapitalization. In the years that followed, the company kept trying to figure out other business models, from P2P CDNs to decentralized chat clients — only to hit roadblocks at every turn.

The big issue was always piracy. BitTorrent successfully avoided legal liability, but it couldn’t get rid of its outlaw image. That made it impossible to strike deals that were open to others, Cohen says. “When you’re doing slightly sketchy things, the world doesn’t want to give you a nice off-ramp.”

One thing that worked was advertising. In addition to including ads directly in its products, BitTorrent would also bundle third-party tools with its installers and get a small cut when someone installed a browser toolbar or a similar app alongside the BitTorrent client. But while the ad money was paying the bills, it wasn’t meeting the expectations of BitTorrent’s investors looking for a lucrative exit.

“The [app download] numbers kept growing, but a lot of the use cases were never going to be the kind that you could legitimately either IPO or sell to another company,” the former employee says.

BitTorrent Inc.’s struggles were in stark contrast to the success of Cohen’s technology. “We were moving an exabyte of data every month,” the former senior employee estimates. BitTorrent owed much of its popularity to the wars around file sharing, which got a new poster child when Swedish authorities raided The Pirate Bay in 2006.

The battle between rightsholders and The Pirate Bay is perhaps the best-known part of the BitTorrent saga. The site was up and running again days after the raid, thanks in part to BitTorrent’s distributed architecture. The Pirate Bay didn’t run a file-sharing network, and taking its servers didn’t stop people from downloading BitTorrent’s client, or finding each other via tracker servers. All the raid took offline was a public list of downloadable torrent files, and all it took to get that back online was a recent server backup.

Undeterred, rightsholders and law enforcement continued their crusade against BitTorrent pirates and their alleged enablers, including the three cofounders of The Pirate Bay. After getting charged with criminal copyright infringement in early 2008, in April 2009 they were each sentenced to a one-year prison term and ordered to pay financial damages. Much to Hollywood’s chagrin, their site nonetheless stayed online. The exact identity of The Pirate Bay’s new operators remains a mystery to this day.

Hollywood’s fight against pirates also had repercussions for the German hackers responsible for much of BitTorrent’s tracker infrastructure. Used by a number of big torrent sites, the Denis.Stalker tracker attracted around 100 million daily peers at its peak, which were trading a million files every single day, according to Engling.

One day, the Berlin police’s economic crimes unit raided the apartment of one of the three people involved in running the tracker server, confiscating every piece of equipment they could find, according to Engling. “They couldn’t imagine that anyone was running something like this without making any money with it,” he says. However, money was the last thing on the trio’s mind. In the same aforementioned talk, held during the Chaos Computer Club’s annual conference between Christmas and New Year’s, they explained their motivation with three simple words: “Because we can.”

Charging them for knowingly facilitating copyright infringement wasn’t possible either, as tracker servers simply match users by hash values and never see the actual files being traded. Ultimately, the case was dismissed, according to Engling.

“Those were the wild early days,” he says.

Things changed rapidly in subsequent years. Unable to put an end to torrent sites and trackers, rightsholders shifted their focus to end users. In some jurisdictions, including Germany, this can be extremely lucrative. Law offices can effectively send cease and desist letters that double as invoices for hundreds of euros per traded file to alleged offenders, threatening them with full-blown lawsuits if they don’t pay up. Germany’s Stern magazine estimated that local file sharers received claims for around €120 million in 2010 alone.

That led to end users embracing VPNs to protect themselves — and torrent sites cashing in on that trend by adding ads for privacy services to their sites. With that, torrent sites were starting to become a major moneymaker. One 2014 study estimated that torrent sites generated around $114 million in ad revenue that year. In addition to VPNs, torrent sites have long been hawking anything from porn to dating to online casinos, with the occasional malware download thrown in for good measure.

These days, some sites also use elaborate schemes to hijack otherwise legitimate advertising and affiliate revenues. One such trick: When someone uses a torrent site, their browser opens an Amazon page for an extremely random product in the background. Toothpaste, maybe, or perhaps a totally unremarkable sweater. The goal isn’t to sell those specific products, but to plant a cookie on the visitor’s machine. If they order anything from Amazon in the following 24 hours, the pirates earn some affiliate revenue — a tactic known as cookie stuffing.

“It’s whatever the latest scam is,” says Engling, sounding disillusioned about what has become of the BitTorrent world he helped create. “The idea of democratization got lost,” he says.

But while Torrent sites were making bank, BitTorrent Inc. continued to struggle. “I did a good enough job of keeping the wheels from falling off the bus, keeping our core product working,” Cohen says. Efforts to move beyond file sharing, however, kept failing.

That included Cohen’s next big bet: For years, he worked on adapting the company’s tech for low-latency livestreaming. BitTorrent Live, as the initiative was called, even shipped consumer apps, and the company was briefly working on building a kind of live online TV service. In 2017, the company pulled the plug on those efforts and laid off almost the entire BitTorrent Live team. “This is part of the world being out to get you,” Cohen says, clearly still bitter that the project wasn’t given a chance. “That was a product that worked great and was ready to go, and was just outright fucking killed.”

Soon after, BitTorrent Inc. got sold to controversial crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, who went on to shutter the company’s SF office after a few very tumultuous years and now operates the company from overseas. (BitTorrent did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) “It eventually got an even sketchier exit than it had been all along,” Cohen quips.

Looking back, Cohen believes that many of BitTorrent’s troubles could have been avoided if he hadn’t gone down the typical path of a VC-backed startup. Perhaps he should have just done his own thing — not unlike the path Engling chose, except more focused on modest revenue and less on free beer.

“I never should have brought on anybody else at all,” Cohen says. “I could have simply gotten enough money off of doing the slightly sketchy stuff just on my own.”

How many people still use BitTorrent today is unknown. The days of it making up a third of all internet traffic are clearly over, with one estimate suggesting that it now contributes less to residential upstream traffic than iCloud and FaceTime. BitTorrent Inc., the company cofounded by Cohen and now owned by Sun, claims that its clients still have 54 million monthly users. Popular third-party clients like Transmission, BiglyBT, and qBittorrent likely attract millions more.

I know what you download, a website that tracks usage across multiple torrent sites, estimates that about 0.25 percent of all internet users download torrents on any given day. “The number of torrent users [has been] pretty stable over the last eight years,” says the site’s admin, Andrey Rogov. Data Rogov shared with The Verge shows Russia, where Netflix and other streaming services aren’t legally available due to sanctions related to the Ukraine war, as BitTorrent’s biggest market. The United States ranks second.

Engling doesn’t have any data on the total usage of Opentracker, but he does at times look at the publicly available reporting dashboards of popular torrent trackers running his software. That data suggests we may be seeing a resurgence. “In absolute numbers, it has gotten more,” he says.

One reason? Streaming is getting awfully expensive these days. For a while, people were fine paying for Netflix and Disney Plus instead of downloading movies and shows for free. “At some point, it flipped,” Engling says. “An increasing number of consumers who previously paid are dusting off their pirate hats.”

Amid that resurgence, he still sometimes tinkers with Opentracker’s code, reenergized by new technical challenges. And just last month, a Spanish anime fan took him out for beers in Berlin to thank him for his contribution to BitTorrent’s global infrastructure.

Cohen, on the other hand, is more than happy to leave that chapter of his life in the past, and instead focus on his blockchain startup Chia Network. “I don’t really care to revisit BitTorrent too much,” he says. Except, if you start a revolution, some of it always stays with you, whether you like it or not. What haunts him to this day are the struggles that came with turning BitTorrent Inc. into a venture-funded startup, and ultimately a profitable business.

“You know how people say they wake up their whole lives with nightmares that it’s the morning of a final exam in grad school? I never had those,” Cohen says. “I do get nightmares about board meetings.”

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Posted Friday 3 July 2026 at 7:46 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

The European Commission is reviewing the Copyright Directive, with a legislative proposal for a ‘better copyright environment’ to follow next year.

As part of this process, the Commission launched a public consultation, inviting rightsholders, intermediaries, and other stakeholders to weigh in.

We previously reported that the submission of European ISPs argued that rightsholders should be held accountable when site-blocking orders result in avoidable overblocking. The same submission also warned against IP-address blocking, as that could more easily affect legitimate services.

Blacklist for the ‘European Internet’

Not all stakeholders share this cautious attitude. In fact, many rightsholders believe that the European Commission could do more to block pirate sites and services. For example, by facilitating the creation of an EU blacklist for rogue hosting providers.

The blacklist idea is proposed in the submission of broadcaster beIN Sports, which holds sports media rights across several continents. The company specifically argues for broader blocking powers, not narrower ones.

BeIN’s proposal goes beyond IP-address blocking and suggests creating a blacklist of problematic hosting providers. These companies can be identified by their autonomous system number (ASN), which is a collection of connected IP-addresses.

“beIN proposes that the Commission should establish a means for rights owners to report offshore noncompliant hosting providers, identified by their ASNs,” beIN writes.

“A competent authority would assess these providers based on criteria such as failure to comply with takedown requests, involvement in illegal content, non-compliance with legal obligations, and location outside the EU.”

From beIN’s submission

Blocking the Tubes

BeIN envisions a European blacklist that would be enforced by ICT providers which would cover data centers, transit providers, internet exchanges, ISPs, among others. These companies would be required to block the associated traffic, with the goal to keep these rogue providers out of the European Internet ecosystem.

“‘Designated providers’ IP addresses and ASNs would be placed in a public database, which compromises [sic] a ‘blacklist’. European ICT providers would then be under a legal obligation to stop providing services to, or transmitting data from, these identified entities, thereby limiting their ability to operate within the European internet ecosystem,” the submission reads.

The Internet is a global network, which typically doesn’t stop at the European borders, so these measures could potentially introduce new overblocking concerns. However, beIN stresses that it is needed to curb online piracy.

The company’s vision is supported by the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA), which also represents other sports rightsholders, including the Premier League, LaLiga, DAZN, Sky and Viaplay. Like its member beIN, AAPA’s submission explicitly mentions blocking hosting providers on the network level

“Provide a regulatory means for a competent authority, on application of rights owners, to designate ASNs and IP ranges associated with off-shore non-compliant hosting providers,” AAPA notes.

“This information should then be communicated to European Information and Communication Technology (ICT) providers, who would be obliged to cease carrying traffic from, and otherwise deny services to the designated ASNs and IP ranges.”

Porn Industry Agrees

The ASN blacklist proposal isn’t limited to sports and broadcast interests. Adult content producer Aylo, the company behind Pornhub and brands such as Brazzers and Reality Kings, filed its own submission backing a similar ASN blacklist.

Aylo proposes a central European blocking scheme. This would include a framework where an appropriate authority can “designate the ASNs and IP ranges of offshore non-compliant hosts.”

In addition to the European blacklist for rogue hosting providers, rightsholders also made various other suggestions. For example, beIN asked for a strict 30-minute takedown window for hosting companies, real-time dynamic blocking orders, and “know your business customer” obligations for key Internet infrastructure companies.

Whether any of these recommendations will be picked up has yet to be seen. However, the submissions show a clear divergence between rightsholders demanding tougher measures on the one hand, versus intermediaries cautioning against overbroad blocking powers.

—

A copy of beIN’s submission to the call for evidence is available here (pdf), AAPA’s version can be found here (pdf), and Aylo’s copy is here (pdf).

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Posted Thursday 2 July 2026 at 5:56 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix

More than fourteen years have passed since Megaupload became the prime target in a high-profile law enforcement operation, which led to the collapse of Kim Dotcom’s file-storage empire.

The U.S. accused Dotcom of being the leader of a criminal “Mega Conspiracy,” which it claims earned many millions of dollars by profiting from copyright infringement.

With the stakes this high, no legal resources are being spared. Many millions of dollars have been poured into this legal battle since 2012, with Dotcom doing everything in his power to avoid being extradited to the United States.

In 2020, the Supreme Court of New Zealand ruled that Kim Dotcom and his colleagues could indeed be extradited to the United States. After further challenges, New Zealand’s Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith approved Kim Dotcom’s extradition in 2024.

By then, Megaupload defendants van der Kolk and Ortmann had already opted for a deal. The pair pled guilty but were allowed to serve their respective 30 and 31-month prison sentences in New Zealand. Dotcom, meanwhile, kept fighting.

Court of Appeal Rejects New Zealand Prosecution

Dotcom’s latest opposition targets two decisions. The first is the Police Commissioner’s refusal to charge Megaupload’s founder in New Zealand, and the second targets the Minister’s order to surrender him to the United States.

The High Court rejected these challenges in September 2025, but as expected, Dotcom appealed again. Today, New Zealand’s Court of Appeal ruled on the matter, rejecting all challenges.

Dotcom argued that the Police Commissioner should have charged him in New Zealand, pointing out that his co-defendants signed plea deals with the authorities in 2022. These deals allowed them to avoid extradition to the U.S.

The Court of Appeal concludes that there was a proper basis for the Commissioner’s decision.

The Commissioner previously refused to charge Dotcom, who did not offer to plead guilty, noting that his position as Megaupload’s ringleader differed from the other defendants. More importantly, the U.S. would not be willing to cooperate.

“Most critically of all, however, the US was not prepared to withdraw its request for extradition of Mr Dotcom in the way it was for the others,” the Court of Appeal writes in a summary of the order.

30 Years to 150 Years in Prison

The second challenge deals with the severity of the sentence Dotcom faces in the United States. A court can block an extradition request if a foreign punishment is so severe that it would “shock the conscience” of properly informed New Zealanders.

Before signing the extradition order, the Justice Minister heard from an expert that Dotcom faces an estimated sentence of 30 to 150 years, if he’s convicted in the United States.

While that is substantially higher than the comparable sentence in New Zealand, which would fall in the range of 12 to 15 years, the Minister concluded that it would not “shock the conscience” of properly informed New Zealanders given the scale of the alleged offending.

Dotcom argued that the comparison should factor in the actual sentences his co-defendants received. The Court of Appeal disagreed, finding that the correct approach compares the likely sentence in the requesting country with the likely sentence in New Zealand for the same conduct, not the sentences of his co-defendants.

Dotcom separately argued that the U.S. sentence would likely amount to an “irreducible life sentence,” which could violate international human rights law. However, the Court of Appeal rejected this, noting that the U.S. system allows for both compassionate release and executive clemency, which allow sentences to be reduced.

All in all, the Court of Appeal dismissed the challenge in its entirety, with Dotcom ordered to pay costs. However, this isn’t necessarily the end of the legal challenges yet, as Dotcom and his lawyer Ron Mansfield KC could still take the matter up with the Supreme Court.

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Posted Thursday 2 July 2026 at 8:14 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

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.

“Masters of the Universe” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on June 29 are:

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

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Posted Tuesday 30 June 2026 at 9:07 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 year, EuroISPA warned the European Commission that site blocking was becoming disproportionate.

Fast-forward a year, and the providers’ concerns have only grown.

In a new filing to the Commission’s ongoing assessment of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, EuroISPA once again sounds the alarm, pointing out that the piracy blocking climate in some countries is getting more extreme.

EuroISPA starts by explicitly referencing the Commission’s own conclusions. Its evaluation of the 2023 Recommendation on combating piracy of live events concluded that the measures had “limited positive effects” and did not lead to a substantial reduction in piracy.

“This finding is an important baseline for this consultation: it suggests that in many cases the problem lies in the enforcement of existing law, not in a gap in the legislative framework,” the ISP organization notes.

The European Commission should prioritize the implementation of current law, instead of introducing any new enforcement obligations, the filing argues. That doesn’t mean that everything is functioning fine now. On the contrary, the ISPs flag a myriad of overblocking incidents.

Blocking Goes Beyond ISPs

In recent years, site blocking orders have expanded to other intermediaries, including DNS resolvers and VPN providers. This is problematic, EuroISPA argues, as these services have no direct link to the infringing content and often lack the technical means to implement geographically restricted blocks.

This expansion, combined with various overblocking incidents throughout Europe, is problematic, the ISP association notes, while listing various examples.

In Italy, Piracy Shield’s IP-level blocking caused collateral damage to over 7,700 domain names. In addition, a Portuguese hosting provider lost email connectivity with Italian customers for 16 days. When Cloudflare declined to comply with blocking demands, Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM fined it 14 million euros.

In Spain, LaLiga obtained a blocking order that targeted shared IP addresses, which were also used by thousands of legitimate sites. EuroISPA says that millions of Spanish internet users have lost access to banking apps, developer tools, and payment platforms, as a result of the site blocking measures.

In Belgium and France, site blocking is also expanding. Cisco pulled OpenDNS from France in 2024 and Belgium in 2025, after being ordered to block pirate sites. It resumed its service in Belgium when it appealed this decision, which could have far-reaching consequences.

“The outcome of that appeal may have significant consequences for the scope of future blocking orders across the EU, as the trend of extending obligations to DNS resolvers and VPN providers continues to grow across Member States,” EuroISPA notes.

Overblocking Accountability

The ISP organization cites the CEPS report published in April, which cautioned against IP-address blocking.

The same report also recommended that rightsholders should be held liable for overblocking damage. EuroISPA is now making the same demand directly to the Commission. This doesn’t require any new legislation, as EU’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) supports it.

EuroISPA argues that “rightsholders should be held accountable” for “collateral damage caused by overbroad blocking actions, with compensation mechanisms that are clearly defined and enforceable.”

Accountability
 

The ISP organization also argued against the rapid blocking requirements, which require services to implement blockades in a short timeframe. That would include Italy, where providers have to take action within 30 minutes, which can be problematic for smaller companies.

“The current absence of such mechanisms creates a structural burden that falls disproportionately on smaller providers,” the submission notes.

Whether the Commission will pick up these suggestions has yet to be seen. For now, the CDSM review continues, which will undoubtedly also see calls from rightsholders to further expand the current site blocking powers.

—

A copy of EuroISPA’s submission to the European Commission’s CDSM review is available here (pdf).

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Posted Tuesday 30 June 2026 at 8:59 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 company says that it discovered the compromise on June 17 and responded immediately by blocking the attacker and implementing defense measures.

The investigation determined that the hackers exploited a vulnerability in an unnamed third-party software that KDDI Corporation used on its system.

“Although technical defensive measures have already been implemented for the system, there remains a possibility that customers' email addresses and passwords were obtained by unauthorized third parties as a result of the incident,” KDDI warns.

Scale of exposure

KDDI is one of Japan’s largest ISPs, with 45,000 employees and an annual revenue of $32.4 billion. It is a public entity that has operated since 2000, following the merger of IDO, DDI, and KDD, Japan's former state-monopoly international telecommunications provider.

The company says that the incident impacted the following five ISP operators and their email services:

1. STNet, Inc.
2. JCOM Co., Ltd.
3. Chubu Telecommunications C., Inc.
4. NIFTY Corporation
5. BIGLOBE Inc.

Although the investigation into the incident is still underway and the exact number of impacted accounts has yet to be determined, KDDI said it may have exposed the email addresses and passwords of up to 14,22 million customers.

This figure includes current and former customers, as well as inactive accounts that may no longer be in use.

Another mitigating factor, according to KDDI, is that some passwords were stored in hashed and/or encrypted form, meaning that they cannot be readily abused for account hijacks even if exposed.

However, KDDI did not specify what type of encryption was used or what percentage of accounts had passwords stored in plaintext.

KDDI says it has been contacting affected ISPs since June 17 and has also notified Japan's Personal Information Protection Commission and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

The company is currently working with affected ISPs to implement additional security measures to mitigate the risks arising from this exposure.

Meanwhile, customers who may have been exposed are advised to reset their email account passwords as soon as possible. If two-factor authentication (2FA) is available, it would be prudent to set it up as well for additional protection.

Source

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Posted Monday 29 June 2026 at 7:59 am AEST (my time).

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