With an impressive 185 million visitors in May this year, Mangajikan was one of the largest piracy sites on the Internet.

The site’s popularity did not go unnoticed by manga publisher Shueisha, which took legal action at a California federal court this summer to uncover the operator’s identity.

Shueisha filed a request for a DMCA subpoena, directed at Cloudflare, hoping to expose the operator. This appeared to yield results right away, as mangajikan.com and the related domain alammanga.com were voluntarily taken down soon after.

Motion to Quash / Protect

While Shueisha must have been pleased with the quick result, the publisher was still eager to identify the culprit. The operator, in turn, filed a motion to quash, hoping to protect their identity.

In court, the parties disagreed on whether Cloudflare is a proper recipient for DMCA subpoenas. In October, the California federal court eventually ruled that Cloudflare’s caching made it a valid subpoena target.

As a result, Cloudflare is required to share all information it holds on the pirate site operator. However, before any information was handed over, the court instructed the pirate site operator and Shueisha to agree on the terms of a protective order. That’s easier said than done.

Recently, the parties failed to reach an agreement on what Shueisha is allowed to do with the operator’s identifying information. To resolve this new dispute, they are now back in court, seeking a breakthrough.

Pirate Site Operator Seeks Privacy Fortress

Seeking maximum privacy, the pirate site operator wants the information handed over by Cloudflare classified as “Attorneys’-Eyes-Only”.

This restriction effectively means that the operator’s identity would only be revealed to Shueisha’s external U.S. lawyers. The information would be explicitly hidden from Shueisha’s own employees, in-house lawyers, and executives in Japan.

The proposed protective order would forbid Shueisha’s lawyers from sharing the identifying information with anyone else, including other copyright holders, who may have had their pirated content appear on the site.

Importantly, Mangajikan’s operator proposes a 180-day ultimatum to use the obtained details to file a U.S. copyright lawsuit. If Shueisha’s lawyers don’t take action within this timeframe, they must destroy all copies of the identifying information.

Shueisha Wants Broad and Global Action

In its submission, Shueisha fiercely opposes these strict limitations. The company argues that an extreme protective order rewards concealment efforts and obstructs enforcement. Their proposal is the polar opposite, and aims to facilitate a global enforcement strategy.

Specifically, Shueisha is demanding the right to share the name of the operator internally, including with its employees in Japan. This ‘confidential’ information may also be used for legal action abroad, not just in the United States.

In addition, Shueisha should be able to share the name with law enforcement and other affected parties when that’s appropriate.

“Shueisha must be free to use identifying information to pursue claims wherever appropriate, coordinate with law enforcement, seek additional subpoenas if the identifying information in the production is insufficient, or notify others whose works were infringed,” they note.

The Court Decides

Since the parties failed to reach a compromise, the terms of the protective order will be determined by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

This isn’t just a procedural squabble. The judge’s ruling will set a precedent for how much power a DMCA subpoena can truly hold. Are they only designed to help U.S. legal efforts, or can information be used globally?

Needless to say, other rightsholders will monitor the outcome of this battle with great interest. The same holds for pirates who may want to put up a similar defense in the future.

—

A copy of the Joint Discovery Letter, where both parties explain their respective positions to the court, is available here (pdf). The associated proposed protective orders can be found here (operator) and here (Shueisha)

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Posted Tuesday 18 November 2025 at 2:42 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

Today’s internet is arguably better than it’s ever been. Yet there are significant privacy and security concerns that, despite best efforts, only seem to be getting worse.

Calls for governments to get much more involved carry the not insignificant risk of them doing just that. Not necessarily to tackle the issues that led to the cordial invitation, of course, but when blocking and access restrictions are heavily promoted as the solution to one problem, suddenly everyone has a problem. Governments looking for solutions unsurprisingly have many times more.

The Normalization of Blocking

A little over fifteen years ago, there wasn’t much appetite for online blocking, at least beyond abusive images and videos, for which blocking still receives overwhelming public support. Today it doesn’t really matter if the public approves or not, site blocking is permitted almost everywhere. Whether for suppressing piracy or silencing perceived overseas propaganda, or brandished as punishment for non-compliance with local rules, the potential seems unlimited.

Yet the majority of content blocking experienced day-to-day isn’t imposed, it’s a personal choice. Most browsers have an option to block popups, for example. Blocking intrusive advertising is increasingly popular too, since without some type of defense, any veneer of online privacy quickly heads south, taking usability with it. For many, the browser-based uBlock Origin remains the gold standard but thanks to ISPs’ site blocking efforts, running software like Pi-hole takes care of the ads and with its own DNS, simultaneously unblocks the pipes.

For those averse to tinkering under the hood, personal blocking performance is almost completely reliant on the decisions made by third-party blocklist maintainers. Make the right decisions and deploy reputable blocklists, overall things can go very well indeed. That doesn’t necessarily mean everything always goes according to plan, but with the right approach, getting back on track is simplicity itself.

Blocklists Always Contain Errors

The standard lists bundled with uBlock Origin and Pi-hole are generally perceived as very good. Indeed, many view uBlock as an indispensable first line of defense against the endless appearance of malicious ads. On GitHub, all kinds of DNS blocklists are available from Hagezi’s repo, all with a common and genuine mission to keep the internet as ‘clean’ and as safe as possible.

Essentially a one-man labor of love crammed into his spare time, by many accounts Hagezi’s main lists strike a fair balance between blocking unwanted trackers and not breaking websites, which for most people is the sweet spot. For those with more specific needs, there’s no shortage of choice.

The threat intelligence-led blocklist has been used here without any issues, likewise the feed for NRDs (newly registered domains) which often contains new streaming site domains, purchased as replacements in the wake of anti-piracy blocking. Others clearly have specific goals in mind, one in particular.

The ‘Anti Piracy – Protects Against Piracy!’ Blocklist

This blocklist contains over 11,000 entries, in theory blocking access to just as many pirate sites. In practice, it may block a few thousand but since domains come and go quickly, only well-funded anti-piracy groups have the necessary resources to stay anywhere near up to date, and the list naturally reflects that.

No third-party list will ever be comprehensive, and this one makes no claims to the contrary. Indeed, a disclaimer concerning all lists notes that the ultimate responsibility for using or not using a blocklist lies with the user. We completely agree, and we’ll return to that in just a moment.

The fact that many domains on the list today fell out of action a decade or more ago, presents issues. These issues are not unique to this blocklist; they also apply to any region where enthusiasm for pirate site blocking isn’t matched by corresponding unblocking when domains are repurposed.

The key differences deserve early emphasis: Pirate site blocking lists are imposed and either fully closed or open to limited scrutiny. Hagezi’s blocklists are free, voluntary, and transparent. While that means errors get pointed out (see below), that’s what gives open source its strength.

Welcometothescene.com was home to The Scene, a drama miniseries set around the topic of piracy. Created by Jun Group, the show was free to watch online, including on peer-to-peer networks, under a Creative Commons license. Released to a pre-YouTube audience in 2004, the last episode aired 20 years ago.

Long since repurposed, the domain appears both dead and alive in DuckDuckGo’s search results, and very much alive in the Anti-Piracy Blocklist.

How the domain got onto the anti-piracy blocklist is anyone’s guess, likewise why it’s somehow still there today. Other problematic entries are more current and at times, quite puzzling too.

A Few Examples

We’ve highlighted a few obvious blunders below, but the context means that when compared to similar blunders made elsewhere, these are much less serious. Mistakes are inevitable, yet transparency and the ability to put things right make a world of difference.

Open Source Projects

 

torrent.fedoraproject.org | torrent.ubuntu.com | fosstorrents.com | tracker.parrotlinux.org | tracker.parrotsec.org | Webtorrent.io | Instant.io

 

Free Music / Independent Artists / Pro-Sharing Bands

 

Jamendo.com | bt.etree.org

 

Anti-Piracy | Transparency Database | Piracy News

 

Alliance4Creativity.com | Lumendatabase.org | Torrentfreak.com

 

Government | Satire

 

Parliamentlive.tv | Southparkstudios.com

These issues shouldn’t detract from the quality found elsewhere in the project, where most of the attention is focused. While an erroneously blocked domain is still one too many, the open nature of these blocklists is undoubtedly one of the most important things to consider when weighing the pros and cons of any kind of content blocking.

Try not to spend too much time looking, small sections like this are entirely accurate but seriously headache-inducing.

Transparency, Accountability, and the Future of Site-Blocking

With absolutely no charge to the end user, Hagezi’s entirely open approach allows the individual to make their own choices about what happens on their networks and on their machines. Some errors will exist, they always do, so if anyone feels that a blocklist isn’t for them, so be it – nobody is being forced to do anything they don’t want to.

It’s about personal choice and striking a balance between the expected end result and the likelihood that it won’t ever be perfect, but probably good enough. And when things do go wrong, the person responsible is always around.

Formal anti-piracy blocking regimes, on the other hand, are mandatory for everyone within their increasingly broad jurisdictions. In most countries they are the antithesis of open source, despite having a direct effect on the majority of internet connections.

There’s no element of personal choice, and any balancing exercise involves someone else’s vision of a good end result. It won’t ever be perfect, but “probably good enough” takes on different light when things go wrong in this context.

Opacity as a Feature

Overblocking is not subject to public reporting and since members of the public have no direct access to blocklists, errors can’t be caught early or even caught at all. For victims of overblocking seeking answers, the almost impossible challenge is to a) prove it b) find out who’s responsible c) report it to the body set up to deal with overblocking and d) come to terms with the reality that the system protects rightsholders and ISPs, period.

If a court authorizes blocking, all parties point to each other and ultimately back to the court in the event of overblocking; bodies to deal with overblocking don’t exist, because effectively, overblocking itself doesn’t exist. That’s clearly evidenced by the lack of complaints, despite that being directly attributable to reporting opacity.

The lack of transparency is often explained as a necessary component of site-blocking strategy, in that secrecy prevents site operators from knowing that their domains are being blocked. The idea that they don’t already know only makes sense if the impact was too limited to notice. In any event, transparency with a 24-hour delay would be sufficient for the public record but unlike the imposition of secret blocklists, publication isn’t mandatory.

While Hagezi’s lists are open source and offer significant benefits for those who choose to use them, company records are proprietary. This is the future of site-blocking and the realization that it won’t arrive tomorrow, requires acceptance of a difficult truth:

For the last 15 years, it always arrived yesterday.

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Posted Monday 17 November 2025 at 3:44 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

In 2004, the online piracy epidemic was becoming more serious for the movie industry, largely due to the spectacular growth of bandwidth-efficient torrent sites.

This concern was recognized by the Motion Picture Association (MPA[A]) and its renowned CEO, Jack Valenti, who had been in charge of the Hollywood group since 1966.

“If we don’t react promptly to an ascending curve of illegal uploading and downloading soon to be reinforced with dazzling speeds rising from file-trafficking networks, we will live with an intense regret,” Valenti said in June 2004.

Valenti’s warning came two weeks before his official retirement. As the founding father of the MPA’s anti-piracy division, he saw a combination of increased enforcement, new legislation, and public awareness campaigns as the key to tackling the piracy scourge.

You Wouldn’t Steal a Car

These words were put into action as the MPA worked on an aggressive educational campaign. At the ShoWest industry conference, held in Las Vegas in March 2004, attendees were shown a preview of two new PSAs that equated movie piracy to other types of stealing.

The now-iconic “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” PSA was created under the MPA’s wings, but the group never promoted it publicly through its main website. Via various international partners, however, the PSA soon became a global phenomenon.

“You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” PSA

As far as we know, the first public mention dates back to July 12, when the Industry Trust for IP Awareness launched a broad campaign at the piracyisacrime.com website. This effort was partly funded by the main Hollywood studios, including MPA members.

The “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” PSA wasn’t just featured by the UK campaign, it also inspired its name and logo.

Piracyisacrime.com
 

The MPA obviously didn’t mind the global exposure. In fact, a few days after the UK launch, the MPA teamed up with Singapore’s Intellectual Property Office to share the “you wouldn’t steal” mantra there as well.

Who Created the PSA?

While the MPA’s role is clear from historical documents, neatly preserved by the invaluable Internet Archive, the true origins of the campaign always remained a mystery. None of the public announcements mention who created the iconic PSA. That is, until two French journalists dove into it.

Nicolas Delage and Christophe Wilson embarked on a two-year investigation that they summarize in a YouTube video. Ironically, even the MPA seemed to have forgotten that the PSA idea originated at an MPA meeting, as they pointed to the UK anti-piracy group FACT instead.

The French journalists persevered nonetheless. They discovered that the PSA was filmed at the Paramount backlot in Los Angeles, and after numerous inquiries, they eventually learned that Warner Bros. was behind the production. They spoke to several people who were involved, including creative director Ricky Mintz.

“When we made that video, I thought it would play in theaters for a week, maybe. In a million years, I never would have imagined it would end up on almost every DVD in the 2000s. Until my kids told me, I had no idea,” Mintz recalls in the video.

Ricky Mintz (from the video)
 

Speaking with TorrentFreak, journalist Nicolas Delage says that he and Christophe reached out to over 70 people during their investigation. Many people declined to talk, and those who did could often only fill in some of the blanks.

“The studios and the MPA were such large organizations that no one really seemed to know who was responsible for what, which made things a lot more complicated when we started digging for specific information.”

“For the team at Warner Bros. in charge of producing it, it was apparently just a quick gig between two movie trailers,” Nicolas says.

The documentary includes many more intriguing details that we won’t spoil here, and it is a must-watch for those who are interested in the history of the iconic PSA. The journalists deserve all the credit for finding many missing pieces of the puzzle, which greatly help to update the historical record.

The ‘Stolen’ Font Controversy

There is one key element in the video for which we would like to provide some additional context. This relates to allegations that surfaced earlier this year, which suggested that the piracyisacrime.com website used a ‘copied’ font in their campaign PDF material.

The French journalists note in the video that “piracyisacrime.com has nothing to do with the Piracy It’s a Crime ad” and that the PSA had “zero connection” with piracyisacrime.com. That’s a bit of an overstatement.

While piracyisacrime.com was not involved in the creation of the PSA, it did promote the video in its campaign material and hosted the videos, with permission from the MPA. This makes sense, as the UK website was funded by MPA members through the Industry Trust for IP Awareness.

From the piracyisacrime.com campaign PDF
 

As we mentioned in our earlier coverage on the font controversy, there is no evidence that the PSA video itself used the ‘copied’ font, so in that sense the creators are not “connected” to these allegations.

More History, To be Continued

Needless to say, after more than two decades, the “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” PSA continues to intrigue. Or should we say the “Downloader” PSA, which was the official title for the online piracy ad, as mentioned by the French journalists.

While researching the various claims for this article, we stumbled upon a form from the movie theater organization NATO (now Cinema United), where members could order copies of the PSA to show before films. This form confirms the “Downloader” name and also lists the name of the counterfeit DVD version: “Street Vendor“.

NATO’s order form
 

The same document, published in August 2004, also confirms that the MPA provided these videos, offering theaters the option to order a DVD if they had trouble accessing the copies online.

It appears that there are still plenty of intriguing details to uncover about the iconic PSA. The French journalists realize this too. At the end of their video, they tease a follow-up about the PSA’s music. This will likely cover the debunked claim that the music was “pirated”, a certain Prodigy track, and much more.

We’re looking forward to it already.

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Posted Sunday 16 November 2025 at 6:01 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

In July, adult content producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta.

The complaint accused the tech company of using adult films to assist its AI model training. Similar claims have been made by other rightsholders, including many book authors.

This latest case specifically focuses on Meta’s BitTorrent activity. That’s no surprise, as plaintiff Strike 3 is the most active copyright litigant in the United States, known for targeting thousands of alleged BitTorrent pirates.

Meta Wants Lawsuit Dismissed

In late October, Meta responded to the allegations by filing a motion to dismiss at a California federal court. Taking a page from the BitTorrent piracy defense playbook, Meta argues that the IP address evidence presented by the plaintiffs is meaningless without context.

The porn producers had linked numerous Meta IP addresses to unauthorized sharing activity. According to Meta, however, there is no evidence that the alleged activity on its corporate network was centrally orchestrated by the company. In fact, it countered that many alleged downloads predate Meta’s AI training activity.

In addition to denying the allegations, the tech company offered an alternative explanation. Meta suggested that employees or visitors may have downloaded the pirated videos for personal use.

“[T]he small number of downloads—roughly 22 per year on average across dozens of Meta IP addresses—is plainly indicative of private personal use, not a concerted effort to collect the massive datasets Plaintiffs allege are necessary for effective AI training,” Meta wrote.

Porn Producers Counter Personal Use Defense

The plaintiffs responded to Meta’s defense this week, characterizing the “personal use” explanation as implausible, given the amount of data involved and the piracy patterns they observed.

“Plaintiffs provide data demonstrating unique patterns of Meta’s piracy suggestive of a centralized algorithm coordinating the infringements. Meta’s excuse that employees must be infringing Plaintiffs’ copyrights for ‘personal use’ does not fit the facts,” they write.

The rightsholders point out several download patterns that they believe suggest non-human involvement. Interestingly, these patterns are not linked to their own works, but to those of other rightsholders.

For example, they highlight data from June 29, 2024, suggesting that Meta’s corporate, residential, and “hidden” IP addresses all downloaded multiple different versions of Microsoft Office within hours of each other.

“No reasonable person needs this many versions of a word processing software,” they write.

Additionally, the rebuttal mentions that on April 7, 2024, various IP addresses downloaded content linked to the word “origin”, without any other obvious connection. This includes Dan Brown’s book “Origin” the game “Origin Offline Start,” and the 2023 movie “Origin”.

“This is the kind of systematic, hyper-literal search consistent with an algorithm, and not just a person casually searching for files,” the adult companies note. They suggest that downloading data for AI training, as Meta previously admitted in the books lawsuit, is the ultimate goal.

The “Tit-for-Tat” Motive

The rightsholders also offer a secondary motive to explain why Meta might want to use its videos as part of the broader AI training scheme. They suggest that the tech giant allegedly used popular adult films as ‘BitTorrent currency’.

The companies allege that these downloads would benefit BitTorrent’s reciprocal “tit-for-tat” mechanism. They previously explained in their complaint that this could boost Meta’s other download efforts.

“Meta does not produce popular creative works and thus has no ‘currency’ for the swarm of peers in the BitTorrent network. As a result, Meta must steal someone else’s cachet to stay in these swarms so that it can download files,” the opposition brief reads.

“Plaintiffs’ works are ideal. Not only do they serve as unique data for AI training, they are popular both commercially and in the BitTorrent network, ensuring that Meta could stay in swarms and download even more files,” they add.

While this is an interesting argument, our understanding of the BitTorrent protocol is that the reciprocal “tit-for-tat” advantages are limited to single torrent swarms. This means that the “currency” benefits do not extend to other downloads in different swarms. We assume that Meta’s legal team will have some thoughts on this as well.

All in all, the porn producers believe that Meta’s defenses are not up to par. They argue there is sufficient ground to survive a motion to dismiss and move the case forward, so it can be argued on its merits.

“Meta’s Motion is an attempt to thwart the protections Congress enacted in the Copyright Act. Respectfully, Plaintiffs simply ask for their day in court and ask this Court to deny the Motion.”

—

A copy of the opposition brief Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed in response to Meta’s motion to dismiss is available here (pdf). A hearing on the motion to dismiss is scheduled for January 21, 2026.

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Posted Sunday 16 November 2025 at 4:50 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

When a US-based web host receives a credible DMCA takedown notice, it’s often a sign that action is required to resolve the complaint. That usually means taking down allegedly infringing content uploaded by a third party.

Having met its obligations under the DMCA, compliance typically means that the host avoids liability for third-party infringement. Some overseas hosts operate somewhat differently, however, embracing non-compliance as a beneficial service feature.

DISH Network vs. Virtual Systems, LLC

In the world of ‘offshore’ and ‘bulletproof’ hosting, DMCA non-compliance typically comes as standard. Ukraine-based Virtual Systems, LLC (also known as VSYS Host) advertises itself as a ‘DMCA-ignored’ host, meaning that when DMCA notices instruct the company to take content down, no action is taken.

In October 2024, a lawsuit filed at a Seattle district court accused Virtual Systems, LLC, and its alleged owner and CEO, Vyacheslav Smyrnov, of doing just that.

Filed by broadcaster DISH Network and supported by the International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy (IBCAP), the complaint alleged that pirate IPTV services used Virtual Systems’ servers to illegally ‘transmit’ linear streams and VOD content, to which DISH owns the rights.

“Users accessed the Works through a set-top box (STB) or a website that links to the Works or provides a playlist used to access the Works. Users often had to purchase a subscription to view the Pirate Services’ content, in addition to purchasing any required STB. DISH did not authorize the Pirate Services to distribute or publicly perform the Works and received no compensation from them,” the complaint alleged.

DMCA Takedown Notices Universally Ignored

At least in part, the lawsuit targeted unfinished business. Three of the IPTV providers hosted by Virtual Systems were on the losing end of previous legal action in the United States. They were restrained from further infringement under a permanent injunction with the same applying to Virtual Systems. DMCA non-compliance was an additional aggravating factor.

“Virtual Systems and Smyrnov, collectively, were the recipients of at least 512 Infringement Notices. Virtual Systems did not respond to the Infringement Notices and did not take any measures to stop the Pirate Services’ infringement occurring on its servers and network. The Pirate Services kept infringing DISH’s copyrights in Works aired on the Channels, even using the same IP addresses and URLs previously reported to Virtual Systems,” the complaint continued.

In May 2025, a DISH status report[1] running to 370-pages described work to comply with the requirements of Ukraine, with Smyrnov reportedly served under the Hague Convention. Local issues included what appeared to be an attempt by Smyrnov to file a pro se answer to the DISH complaint. But with no signature and other critical shortcomings, the complaint officially went unanswered.

$41.8m Judgment in Favor of the Plaintiff

A default judgment was perhaps the most likely outcome from the beginning and with no direct contact and no answer on file, a win by default seemed all but inevitable.

An order issued this week dated November 12 notes Virtual Systems’ policy on DMCA compliance, which seems to strongly favor the customer, including those with “occasional” copyright issues.

The court also restated the three willful secondary copyright infringement claims in the original DISH complaint, the company’s request for damages, plus a permanent injunction.

Count I – Materially Contributing to Copyright Infringement;
Count II – Inducing Copyright Infringement; and
Count III – Vicarious Copyright Infringement.

 

Damages up to $150,000 for each registered work infringed.

Finding no obstacle to granting a default judgment, the court considered DISH’s request for maximum damages of $150,000 for willful infringement of each of the 279 copyrighted works listed in the complaint.

A Reasonable Request for a Significant Sum of Money

Noting that a judgment of $41,850,000 is expressly authorized by the Copyright Act, the court nevertheless described the eight-figure claim as “a significant sum of money.”

After weighing various factors, including DISH’s withdrawal of claims for profits attributable to the infringement, plus attorneys’ fees and costs, overall DISH claimed for less than it was entitled. As a result, a judgment of $41,850,000 was viewed as reasonable.

DISH was also granted a permanent injunction, which includes “a prohibition on providing any servers or network used in streaming or transmitting the material and requires termination of any current or future accounts of customers that stream or transmit the material.”

Chris Kuelling, executive director of IBCAP, welcomes the judgment and notes that failing to comply with takedown notices can prove expensive, including on a personal level.

“This ruling against Virtual Systems and its owner is another example of the consequences for hosting providers that choose to ignore takedown notices from IBCAP,” Kuelling says.

“IBCAP does not tolerate hosting providers and content delivery networks that disregard the law and fail to comply with our takedown notices. The result of such noncompliance is not only a permanent injunction, but also significant monetary damages, in this case more than $41 million, personally owed by the owner, Mr. Smyrnov.”

In comments to TorrentFreak, Kuelling says that the Ukrainian courts “seem to be in session and working despite the war” so IBCAP are ready for the next stage.

“With this order now in hand the attorneys will turn their efforts to collection and enforcement of the injunction,” he concludes.

The order granting default judgment is available here (pdf)

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Posted Saturday 15 November 2025 at 4:14 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

For the third Oct/Nov period, three years in a row, once again it’s Fire Stick Crackdown Malware Armageddon Month in the UK.

The annual event begins with the usual publications finding inspiration to write about the most popular streaming device in the UK, with drama injected into the mix by any means available to ensure maximum engagement.

If only there was some way of measuring interest in these articles or related searches, it could potentially provide valuable information on the UK piracy landscape, or even help to achieve behavioral change.

The news surge coincides with the anniversary of the BeStreamWise anti-piracy campaign, which launched around September 2023 and is still going strong. Published just this week, the campaign’s latest research is an important part of the puzzle that begins (but won’t end) with the new policy from Amazon.

Amazon and Sideloaded Apps

While we have yet to see any evidence that a campaign is actually underway at any scale, this recent statement from Amazon concerning Fire TV and sideloading is indeed genuine.

Amazon’s statement:

Piracy is illegal, and we’ve always worked to block it from our Appstore. Through an expanded program led by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a global coalition fighting digital piracy, we’ll now block apps identified as providing access to pirated content, including those downloaded from outside our Appstore.

Apps that somehow made it through Amazon’s vetting process or changed their behavior afterward, have been blocked on several occasions in the past. However, the new policy seems to go much further than that, by effectively signaling the beginning of the end for mass piracy via Amazon devices

How it will make its presence known at the consumer end, where loyal Amazon customers can often be found, is currently unknown. The manner in which the news has been released suggests that awareness is an accepted and important part of the equation, and preferred over a formal announcement alongside ACE, of which Amazon is already a member.

AFTVNews reports that the new approach will launch in Germany and France before rolling out globally to what is believed to be over 250 million devices. At least at this stage, there are no indications that the policy will apply retroactively, i.e by disabling apps already sideloaded to users’ devices.

Amazon could do that with the flick of a switch but probably won’t. Fire TV products also generate revenue for Amazon and partners including Netflix, so a gentle migration across to the piracy-restricted Vega OS-based Fire TV Stick 4K Select, seems the least disruptive option.

Unnamed Apps, Unclear Parameters

Apps deemed suitable for initial blocking haven’t been named and given the existing site blocking policy at the MPA (of which Amazon is also a member), it seems unlikely that apps will suddenly find themselves named in the media. That being said, “providing access to pirated content” is open for interpretation.

Self-contained apps that proactively present infringing content to the user, seem to be the most obvious candidates for blocking. Open apps, essentially video players that require users to provide their own playlists or login to a remote system, aren’t so easily defined.

They’re easy to identify and at the point of download, usually completely legal too. Whether Amazon sees itself splitting hairs over legality is unknown, but in a second statement, slightly different from the first, Amazon does seem to hint at a particular type of app being of particular interest.

“[Blocking piracy apps] builds on our ongoing efforts to support creators and protect customers, as piracy can also expose users to malware, viruses and fraud,” Amazon notes.

There’s no indication that piracy apps with or without any of these three features will be treated differently than any other. However, from the company’s perspective, blocking apps for being malicious would be much more straightforward than defending its position based on the semantics of copyright law.

Zero tolerance of malware and fraud is also widely accepted, even among consumer-level pirates. Yet in theory, this gives them no reason to stay in the Amazon ecosystem. As a result, they will have important decisions to make.

Buy a Brand New Fire TV 4K Select?

From today’s piracy perspective, Amazon’s latest device is an unattractive proposition and, at some point, older devices will be viewed that way too. That leads to a scenario where anti-piracy campaigns based on the threat of malware and fraud will likely become even more relevant.

While yet to appear on the official website, this week BeStreamWise has been circulating some basic information on what it says are the results of a new study. The premise is straightforward: Around 40% of people who stream content illegally suffer some kind of financial fraud as a result.

The research – among more than 2,000 Brits – found that, of those that have accessed illegally streamed content in the past 12 months, an alarming four in ten (39%) have suffered financial losses after being targeted by criminals. The average amount stolen was £1,680 – more than half of the average monthly gross salary in the UK – while one in 10 (11%) people lost more than £7,500.

Countering these claims seems pointless for two key reasons. Firstly, victims of this type of fraud typically have no idea who was responsible. They can try to narrow things down, but it rarely amounts to much. It’s self-reported guesswork at best; 65% of respondents said they had “near misses with hacking attempts whilst watching content illegally online” but what a near miss is supposed to look like depends on what the respondent believes they saw.

A Genuine Crisis

The second point is more important: studies like this are easily criticized, but there is mounting evidence that large parts of the world are under attack from malware known as infostealers. There’s no substitute for reading about the issue directly but the headline figure today of 33,411,241 machines infected speaks for itself.

There clearly is a significant problem with some pirate streaming sites and that is not going away.

HudsonRock.com obtains data stolen from user devices that have been compromised by infostealers and through this data it can see what the hackers had access to. This includes logins and passwords for the sites users visit. The site’s search engine can therefore show how many users of a certain domain have been compromised.

This does not mean that the site in question was the infection vector or that visiting the site is now unsafe. It simply means that those credentials were likely obtained when the user was compromised. The data is terrifying.

People will shrug and declare it doesn’t affect them, but one look at the set-top device crisis Brazil faces right now really puts things into perspective. Read Microsoft’s reports and Google’s lawsuit, which attempt to shut down pirate set-top box botnets that are typically delivered from China with malware already installed.

So, when Fire TV bites the dust and pirates migrate away from what was a relatively safe option, what devices will they buy next? Perhaps more to the point, through what mechanism will pirates be discouraged from doing so?

Because it’s likely that, by then, nothing printed in the media will have any credibility among pirates, and it will be years before they even start listening again.

By then, it might already be too late.

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Posted Friday 14 November 2025 at 4:01 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

Pirate site blocking is a common practice in dozens of countries around the world, and the Netherlands is no exception.

After a decade-long legal battle between anti-piracy group BREIN and three local Internet providers, the latter were ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay in 2020.

This was a pivotal moment, as it opened the door to more blocking requests targeting other torrent sites, streaming portals, and shadow libraries. A year later, the blocking process was further streamlined when all major ISPs signed a covenant where they agreed to block pirate sites when rightsholders obtain a blocking order against one of their fellow providers.

Blocking Music Pirate Sites

Today, BREIN obtained a fresh site-blocking injunction at the Rotterdam Court. The order requires Internet provider Ziggo to block access to music piracy platforms ‘newalbumreleases’ and ‘Israbox’ that reportedly had 100,000 monthly visits in the country.

Ziggo was one of the ISPs that previously pushed back against BREIN’s blocking requests in the Pirate Bay case. This time around, the ISP also objected, again without the desired result.

In court, Ziggo argued that the underlying Pirate Bay jurisprudence should not apply to this case, as the targeted music sites rely on cyberlocker links instead of torrents. The court firmly rejected this line of reasoning. It ruled that the technology doesn’t matter as long as a site “deliberately and with a profit motive” links to unauthorized content.

New Album Releases
 

Ziggo also argued that BREIN failed the “subsidiarity” test by not doing enough to stop the sites before it requested the injunction. Again, the court disagreed and concluded that BREIN had “done more than was expected” based on the agreed covenant.

The legal paperwork reveals that BREIN reached out to the owners of both sites. The anti-piracy group also contacted their hosting providers, domain name registrars, several related cyberlockers, and the registrants and registrars of various proxies and mirror sites, among others.

Finally, Ziggo’s concerns over effectiveness and proportionality were also rejected. The court sees DNS blocking as a “clear and verifiable” measure with sufficient protections against overblocking. While blockades can be circumvented by subscribers, they are “sufficiently effective” to block casual pirates.

Blocklist Expands for All Major ISPs

The injunction requires Ziggo to block the ‘newalbumreleases’ and ‘Israbox’ domain names within five working days. This is a dynamic order, so any new (sub)domains, proxies, or mirrors that BREIN reports to the ISP will be added to the blocklist too.

Under the agreed covenant, these blockades will also apply to other Dutch Internet providers, including KPN, DELTA, and Odido. This means that, without workarounds, the two music piracy sites will soon be inaccessible in the Netherlands.

While Ziggo is likely disappointed with the outcome, in a comment to TorrentFreak a spokesperson for the company indicates that it will not fight the ruling.

“We have taken note of the verdict of Rotterdam Court regarding the blocking of several unauthorized music websites. We respect the ruling and will comply, in accordance with the agreements in the Website Blocking Covenant,” Ziggo informs us.

‘Site Blocking Is Essential’

BREIN director Bastiaan van Ramshorst is pleased with the outcome, and he frames these types of measures as a necessary last resort.

“When illegal services ignore takedown requests… and hide behind non-cooperative foreign hosts and domain registrars, there is no other option than to block these via Dutch access providers,” van Ramshorst says, adding that ISPs are the ‘best placed’ party to effectively counter these infringements.

Following this victory, BREIN will likely share the court order with Google, which has an unwritten policy of voluntarily removing court-ordered blocked domains from its Dutch search results. That further increases the scope of the injunction.

—

TorrentFreak has seen the injunction, but a redacted copy of the court order has yet to be published online by the Rotterdam court. We will update this article accordingly when it is available.

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Posted Thursday 13 November 2025 at 1:45 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

Twenty years ago, the first post was published on TorrentFreak.

At the time, I was a young graduate student, eager to learn and research. My interest soon exceeded the academic world and was drawn to a vibrant digital playground: the Internet.

In the early 2000s, new technologies and communications channels were suddenly at everyone’s fingertips. There was a whole new world to explore. Being somewhat of a digital late bloomer, I was completely fascinated by it all.

When torrents first crossed my path, they felt like a genuine revolution. Earlier file-sharing technologies already shown what was technically possible, but the web-based nature of torrents spawned online communities everywhere. This was a time when “pirates” were still seen as digital revolutionaries, who freed information from physical shackles such as CDs and DVDs.

TorrentFreak Est. 2005

The rise of public torrent sites and private torrent trackers was fascinating to watch. In 2005, it eventually led to the launch of TorrentFreak. There wasn’t much in-depth coverage of the file-sharing space at the time, and the goal was to document the developments in this ecosystem with a strong focus on news.

In the mid-2000s, copyright industry groups were already quite vocal and their anti-piracy messaging was generally repeated in the media without question. TorrentFreak’s goal was to critically assess the information and add, in our view, more balance to the discourse.

In hindsight, the timing for TorrentFreak’s launch was perfect. The Internet had torn down the information barriers. Writing news and opinions was no longer exclusive to companies that had access to a printing machine or a TV channel; everyone could become their own news publisher.

This self-publishing power may seem obvious today, but, in 2005, it felt both empowering and liberating.

TorrentFreak in 2007
 

In the early years, TorrentFreak had a strong focus on the rapidly growing file-sharing landscape. We never endorsed piracy in any shape or form but did try to fill information gaps, offering a counterweight to polarized claims and unbalanced studies.

A Changing Landscape

TorrentFreak started as a solo journey, but after a year, Andy Maxwell joined. While many others have contributed to the site along the way, today the two of us work independently and are still the site’s backbone, writing all news stories for the site.

As the years passed, the file-sharing ecosystem itself changed. The name of the site still includes ‘torrent’ but most of our coverage today is on the broader piracy ecosystem and related copyright challenges, which are nothing like they were twenty years ago.

The ‘pirate’ hobbyists of the early days were increasingly replaced by individuals and groups trying to make a quick buck — or even millions. This introduced more criminal elements to the piracy scene, which continue to run rampant today, as is evidenced by the many lawsuits and criminal prosecutions we report on.

Rightsholders and anti-piracy groups have also become much more active, both on the enforcement and lobbying fronts. They point out various threats and concerns, demanding action. At the same time, their anti-piracy actions and enforcement efforts cause concerns for legitimate companies and the public at large.

As time passed, TorrentFreak has mostly adopted the role of a neutral, yet critical, observer. We don’t shy away from highlighting extremes on both ends of any issue. Because if I’ve learned anything over the past two decades, it’s that there are always multiple sides to a story, and the most extreme positions are usually the least effective.

TorrentFreak’s Next Chapter

If I look back at the past two decades, I realize how much luck played a role in getting TorrentFreak to survive. The key to building a lasting site is to keep writing, but that would not have been possible without the help and advice from the many people who crossed my path along the way. Not all would appreciate a public callout, but you know who you are.

I would like to thank all readers who followed us on our journey. The same is true for all sources, tipsters, and other friends we made along the way. You all served as a key motivator that helped TorrentFreak to get where it is today.

Today, the 20-something-year-old person who started TorrentFreak is a few years away from turning 50. That’s a scary thought, but a blessed one at the same time. The countless hours of work have taken their toll at times, but the writing spark is still there.

This brings me to the next chapter….

In a way, I feel that TorrentFreak has already accomplished its mission. That’s a reassuring thought, but I intend to keep the site online indefinitely. It’s a life’s work, not just for me but also for Andy.

Regular readers may have already noticed that our article output decreased over the past year. This helped us to cope with the regular writing pressure while focusing on the topics where we can add value. We were never fond of regurgitating press releases or rewriting mainstream news. Instead, we prefer to follow our interests and expertise.

TorrentFreak thrives in its own small niche, and we hope to keep our spot for the next few years, documenting whatever crosses our path at our own pace. We’re grateful for every reader who follows along, as you are ultimately what makes our work count. Thank you!

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Posted Thursday 13 November 2025 at 1:24 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

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 four newcomers on the list. “Frankenstein” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on November 10 are:

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

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Posted Wednesday 12 November 2025 at 1:02 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

Every day, millions of clips from movies and TV shows are shared on social media and other online platforms.

These short clips may qualify as fair use when used as part of memes or parodies, for example. Depending on context, they can also trigger a criminal investigation, as happened in Denmark.

In 2023, police started looking into a dedicated subreddit called ‘SeDetForPlottet’ (WatchItForthePlot) that shared sexually explicit scenes of actresses taken from movies and TV series. This community was highlighted by the local radio program “Kulturen,” where over a dozen actresses complained about it.

While the actresses were fine with the original sex or nude scenes, they never intended for them to be displayed online, without context. Some reported feeling molested or abused after seeing the curated clips that were clearly intended to be consumed in a sexualized way.

Criminal Conviction for Nude Clips and Superbits Uploads

The controversy motivated anti-piracy group Rights Alliance to report the issue to the police on behalf of the Danish Actors’ Association, broadcasters DR and TV2, and other rightsholders. The group noted that copyright protection extends beyond financial considerations to encompass moral rights – including the right to respect and integrity.

Danish police launched a criminal investigation and apprehended a now 40-year-old man from Valby. Known as “KlammereFyr” on Reddit, he was the moderator of ‘SeDetForPlottet’ where at least 347 clips featuring over 100 actresses were shared and viewed millions of times.

The man, who uploaded the clips to redgifs.com, eventually confessed to the charges last month, including the moral rights violations. This week the Court of Frederiksberg handed down a 7-month conditional prison sentence, as well as 120 hours of community service.

The criminal conviction wasn’t just for the nude clips shared on Reddit. The man was also found guilty of sharing over 25 terabytes of pirated content via the private torrent tracker Superbits.org.

Landmark Moral Rights Copyright Conviction

The verdict is unique in Denmark as it goes beyond typical piracy charges. It’s the first criminal conviction based on the copyright law’s “right of respect” (respektret), which protects an artist’s integrity.

The prosecution successfully argued that by taking scenes out of their original artistic context and sexualizing them, the defendant violated the integrity of the actors and directors. This includes edits such as cropping the clips and changing the lighting to accentuate certain features.

One scene featured actress Signe Egholm Olsen in ‘Nordkraft’ (© movie still, Nimbus)

Commenting on the verdict, special prosecutor Jan Østergaard says that he is pleased with the outcome, as it confirms that the court takes these types of offenses seriously.

Maria Ventegodt, director of the Danish Actors’ Association, is also happy with the outcome, as it confirms that the moral rights of their members were violated by these clips.

“The decision is also important for the art of film and the opportunity to make good stories on film, because the actors can now have confidence that the authorities will crack down hard on the screening of nude scenes out of context,” Ventegodt notes.

Future Consequences

It’s not immediately clear how this sentencing will translate to other countries, such as the United States. While Hollywood’s sex scenes are generally less explicit, there are entire subreddits and other communities dedicated to sharing nude clips from American productions too.

Rights Alliance Director Maria Fredenslund notes that the Danish verdict clearly signals that the integrity of actors can be protected. This will also be important in the future, where deepfakes and other manipulated content will become increasingly common.

“Respect for artists’ rights is a fundamental prerequisite for a well-functioning digital society, and in a future where we expect far more AI-generated and manipulated content, it is crucial that the legal system, as clearly as is the case here, marks where the line is drawn,” Fredenslund commented.

The case isn’t completely over. On behalf of the rightsholders, Rights Alliance also sought 15,000 to 30,000 Danish kroner ($2,300 – $4,600 USD) in damages per nude clip. That request will be handled in a separate civil lawsuit.

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Posted Wednesday 12 November 2025 at 12:58 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

The Supreme Court case between several major record labels and Internet provider Cox Communications is one of the landmark copyright battles of this decade.

The outcome will determine how Internet providers should deal with pirating subscribers on their networks.

Should alleged pirates be disconnected from the Internet after repeated third-party allegations of copyright infringement? Or does that go too far?

In its opening brief, Cox argued that the company should not be held liable for contributory copyright infringement because it failed to terminate subscribers after multiple warnings. The U.S. Government, various tech companies, and other interested parties, supported Cox’s position.

Last month, the major record labels, including Sony and Universal Music, countered these arguments in their response brief. Describing Cox as a company that willingly prioritized profits over piracy, they argued that the $1 billion verdict against the ISP should be upheld. They also received broad support, including from lawmakers and legal experts.

Cox: Labels Must Defend Two-Strike Rule

Before the Supreme Court Justices hear the case, Cox took the opportunity to have the final word. The Internet provider submitted a reply brief where it doubled down on its earlier arguments while accusing the labels of distancing themselves from the “two-notices-and-terminate” rule that won them the $1 billion verdict at trial.

The labels wrote in their response brief that they are not pushing for a “two-notices-and-terminate theory,” nor are they asking for mass terminations of subscribers. Instead, they characterized Cox as a hypocritical bad actor that should take responsibility.

Cox suggests that, with this positioning, the labels are effectively trying to reframe the judicial history. The ISP argues that Sony’s brief confirms this, noting that the labels sued over subscribers with “at least three notices,” which legally means Cox is being held liable for failing to act after the second piracy notice.

This relatively low threshold would lead to mass suspensions, according to Cox, and the labels should effectively defend this position at the Supreme Court.

“For years, Plaintiffs have deluged the nation’s ISPs with automated notices, then sued those ISPs on the same flawed theory: Once an ISP receives two notices for any internet account, it must terminate the account—or become a willful contributory infringer
for all future infringement,” Cox informs the Court.

“They cannot deny that the courts below applied this two-notice threshold uniformly across 57,000 homes and businesses. The record unquestionably shows that included ‘hospitals’ and ‘senior citizens,’ dorms and barracks, and even regional ISPs.”

Cox forces the labels to own the most extreme version of their argument. If they do so, the ISP can point out that this will lead to many disconnections of innocent users. Alternatively, if the labels abandon the “two-notices-and-terminate” rule, Cox can argue that the $1 billion verdict should be invalidated.

Knowledge vs. Culpable Purpose

At the core of the Supreme Court battle is the question of whether ISPs can be held liable for having “passive knowledge” about infringements or if liability requires “culpable intent” to facilitate those infringements. Cox argues the latter.

The reply brief reiterates many of these arguments, and as a sign of strength, Cox explicitly mentions that it has the U.S. government on its side.

“Cox and the Government have laid out a simple culpable-conduct rule derived from this Court’s copyright and aiding-and-abetting cases: Contributory liability depends on proof of an affirmative act demonstrating a culpable intent to further infringement,” the reply brief reads.

Not a Bad Actor

The brief also addresses the record labels’ bad actor arguments. This includes an email in which a manager responsible for the company’s DMCA compliance told his team, “F the dmca!!!”. Cox notes that these frustrated, private emails do not suggest that the company actively encouraged or fostered copyright infringement.

Similarly, Cox also dismissed the profit-related bad actor argument, including the accusation that it failed to disconnect pirates to retain revenue. The ISP points out that the Fourth Circuit already rejected the profit argument when it threw out the separate vicarious liability verdict.

Finally, the ISP points out that it did have a graduated response system in place where subscribers suspected of piracy were issued with warnings. This had a 98% deterrence rate, Cox argues, which directly contradicts the ‘bad actor’ narrative.

“Cox’s anti-infringement program suspended over 67,000 accounts during the claim period alone, and deterred 98% of infringers,” the reply brief reads.

“If Plaintiffs can now vilify that program as a failure to ‘tak[e] any serious effort to stop these infringers from infringing,’ no ISP is safe.”

Government Agrees It’s Not “Willful”

In addition to the liability question, the Supreme Court will also review whether Cox’s actions were willful. This is relevant to the damages calculations, which ultimately resulted in the $1 billion verdict. Here, Cox again uses the government’s position as a key argument.

Cox argues it cannot be found “willful” just for knowing its customers were infringing if it did not believe that its failure to act was unlawful. That was a reasonable belief, Cox argues, especially since the U.S. Government now agrees with it.

“Plaintiffs are also wrong in repeatedly conflating an ISP’s knowledge that a specified user is infringing with knowledge that the ISP is itself illegally ‘facilitating’ the misuse unless it cuts the cord. If the United States Government rejects that equation, then surely
an ISP can reasonably reject it.”

With the final reply brief filed, all the key written arguments are now on the record. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments from Cox, the record labels, and the U.S. Government, in a few weeks. A final decision in this landmark case is expected next year.

—

A copy of Cox’s reply brief, filed with the Supreme Court, is available here (pdf)

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Posted Tuesday 11 November 2025 at 12:45 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

Investigations, prosecutions and substantial prison sentences are an important part of the anti-piracy arsenal. The public downfall of a prolific pirate provides the kind of deterrent messaging that can put people off before they even get started.

At least, that’s a possibility, if everything goes according to plan.

Sky Investigates TikTok Star

UK man Simon Hannigan is a popular food and cooking star on social media. Active on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, his ‘DadtheDish’ account on the latter has over 523,000 followers and 6.4 million likes.

At what point Sky’s investigation linked Hannigan to piracy is unclear but at his sentencing last week, his Facebook groups – including one with 4,775 members – were described as “shop windows” for his sales of pirate IPTV subscriptions. Reportedly using streams sourced from an operation in Europe, Hannigan’s Android app provided 3,500 channels (including those belonging to Sky) for £28 for six months or just £50 per year. Payments for subscriptions were recorded as “paid adverts.”

According to local news outlet MEN, business was good.

“The court heard how Hannigan had previously gloated about his success in text messages, claiming that ‘business was booming’ and ‘phones were blowing up’.”

Sky Investigates, Police Step in to Make the Arrest

On March 23, 2022, what’s described as a Sky-led investigation culminated in Hannigan’s arrest. He reportedly confessed to providing ‘links’ but denied breaching copyright laws, “arguing he wasn’t in control of the system,” MEN reports.

“One of the ‘mother systems’ used to facilitate the operation was based in Europe, serving 50 million people globally,” the publication continues.

The investigation eventually traced 2,644 payments made directly into Hannigan’s bank account, together worth around £152,000.

His arrest in March 2022 apparently came as a relief; the now 35-year-old said being a ‘downstream middle man’ was ‘very difficult’ and took its toll. He was reportedly glad to see an end to the stress it had caused him but with a potential prison sentence looming at his sentencing last Thursday, would the stress return?

Sentencing

At Preston Crown Court, Hannigan received a two-year sentence suspended for 24 months, and was told to carry out 250 hours of unpaid work. So perhaps some stress, but nothing compared to the stress of a Manchester prison. For a legal system that currently hands down years in prison for offensive tweets, Hannigan might consider himself lucky.

He pleaded guilty to offenses that began in 2019 and only ended upon his arrest three years later; participating in a fraudulent business, concealing and transferring criminal property, and providing a service contrary to copyright law.

Local news reports published Friday following Hannigan’s sentencing are notable for something else; the complete absence of official commentary.

No statement from Sky is unusual, something that also raises questions about the nature of the prosecution. In common with the Premier League, Sky often carries out private prosecutions and the mention of a Sky-led investigation does seem to point in that general direction. If that’s indeed the case, balancing the prospect of future prosecutions against community service may be a difficult exercise.

The absence of any commentary from regional police is unusual too, even when considering the lack of a custodial sentence. The absence of both Sky and police is even more unusual but whether the suspended sentence dampened enthusiasm is unknown.

Whether Hannigan’s mitigation tipped the scales is unclear, but a closer look at his portrayal in the media is certainly interesting.

Get Knocked Down, and Keep Getting Back Up Again

Even before his arrest in 2022, Hannigan had appeared in national media. In April 2021, an interview with prominent broadcaster ITV revealed how 11 years earlier, Hannigan found himself homeless and living in a second hand £250 car.

A 2023 interview with national newspaper The Sun revealed that those days were long gone.

“A chef who makes thousands from sharing recipes online used to be homeless and living out of his car,” the interview begins.

“Simon makes between £2,500 – £5,000 per post, collaborating with some of the UK‘s biggest supermarket and homeware brands for sponsored content. His creative endeavor began as a bit of fun two years ago when he set up an Instagram teaching people how to cook during lockdown.”

The article also mentions how Hannigan made the leap from sleeping in a car to selling lots of them. Hannigan told The Sun he sold the car after being motivated by a kind stranger and then immediately launched a new business.

“I turned that one car into eighty cars with six months, buying and selling them, for £2,000 each,” he said, adding that landed him a job at Ford and at just 24, he became “head of business” at Ford UK on a salary of £150,000. Then he started his own recruitment company, a a post on LinkedIn reveals.

A Changed, Copyright-Aware Man

During mitigation, the Court heard that prior to the pirate IPTV business, Hannigan had been hospitalized with a burst appendix. When he returned home, he discovered that his partner had left him for his friend, and once again found himself in ‘dire financial straits’. Looking for work, he reportedly posted on Facebook and stumbled into IPTV sales, initially catering to family and friends.

MEN reports that Hannigan is now proposing to “assist Sky News and the British Copyright Council” to help deter others so that they don’t end up in a similar predicament. Yet as deterrent messaging goes, his case may not be the best example.

Instead of news that Hannigan will be sampling prison food for the next few months, any hope of sending a deterrent message on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, lies in shreds. Even Hannigan’s entrepreneurial spirit and never say die attitude may not be especially motivational, at least according to the paperwork.

From a car retail business, recruitment company, clothing and vodka businesses, to Dad the Dish Limited and his latest venture, Munch Box, the overwhelming majority were incorporated and then dissolved by the government for failing to file even their first set of accounts.

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Posted Tuesday 11 November 2025 at 1:52 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

In May 2024, the Paris Judicial Court ordered Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to block access to several pirate sports streaming sites.

The move was a major enforcement escalation by French rightsholders, but in hindsight it was only the beginning.

In the months that followed, additional rightsholders such as DAZN and beIN joined in on the action with similar requests, while more DNS providers were added as targets, including Quad9 and Vercel. This pitted notably smaller players against these billion-dollar companies in court.

An Existential Threat

Quad9 was no stranger to site blocking requests, having previously dealt with a similar legal battle in Germany. That said, for the small Swiss non-profit organization, these proceedings are more than a legal disagreement. They present an existential threat.

For billion-dollar tech companies Google and Cloudflare, dealing with these legal challenges is a nuisance, but they have the means to fight back. In a recent blog post, Quad9 explains that its foundation doesn’t have this luxury.

“For large commercial players such as Google, Cloudflare, or Cisco, these costs — legal, lobbying, or engineering — are absorbed as part of their business overhead.

“For small, mission-driven nonprofits like Quad9, they represent an existential threat,” the DNS provider adds.

Ideally Quad9 would like to defend itself in these blocking cases, as Google and Cloudflare have done. However, since it doesn’t have the financial resources to do so, it chose not to make an appearance in one of the recent site-blocking cases.

Breaking the Internet’s Plumbing

Quad9 argues that copyright holders are increasingly trying to hold neutral intermediaries liable for piracy. Instead of going after the infringers directly, ISPs, VPNs, and DNS providers have to take on the enforcement burden.

This is particularly problematic for smaller operations that, according to Quad9, simply don’t have the means to do so indefinitely. Not only that, by going after DNS providers, these orders also directly affect key internet infrastructure providers.

“Instead of targeting the platforms that profit from infringement, IP owners are increasingly going after the neutral infrastructure providers that simply make the internet work,” Quad9 writes.

Breaking the Internet’s Plumbing
 

In response to the French blocking efforts, Cisco decided to leave France, so the effects of these measures are already being felt.

Other companies, such as Google and Cloudflare, have the technical means to restrict the blockades to France, but not all providers can do so easily. That includes Quad9, which had no other choice than to apply the French blocking request worldwide.

Big Questions

In France, the courts have clearly decided that these blocking orders are warranted, and while some are under appeal, there’s no indication that they will be reversed anytime soon. That said, Quad9 believes that a broader discussion is warranted, and it poses several questions that go to the heart of how the internet should function.

In its blog post, the foundation asks, among other things:

“Should neutral, technical infrastructure be held responsible for the actions of others?”

“How far should courts reach across jurisdictions to impose national laws on global networks?”

“Can small nonprofits survive under legal obligations designed for global corporations?”

“What happens to privacy and resiliency when only a handful of corporations can afford to comply?”

“At what point does legal compliance become de facto censorship?”

These are not just rhetorical questions for the Swiss non-profit. After fighting and winning a multi-year, costly legal battle against Sony in Germany, Quad9’s “existential threat” has reemerged in France.

Ultimately, Quad9 warns that these blocking battles may lead to a less open, less private, and more centralized internet, leaving the “plumbing” in the hands of a few corporate giants who can afford to pay the legal bills.

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Posted Monday 10 November 2025 at 12:44 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

At the start of the year, TorrentGalaxy was one of the most-visited torrent sites, welcoming millions of users every day.

Launched by former members of ExtraTorrent which had shut down in 2018, TorrentGalaxy soon established itself as one of the most stable torrent sites.

TorrentGalaxy’s Mystery Shutdown

In the summer of 2014, things changed when the original founders sold the site to a new, undisclosed party. The handover was immediately noticeable to outsiders, as the typically stable site suddenly began experiencing repeated stretches of downtime.

The site’s troubles escalated in January 2025, when the new operators posted a message claiming they were in “financial difficulties“, asking users to chip in for server costs. In late February, the site became unreachable, and by March, the site’s popular upload bots also stopped working.

The reason for the sudden shutdown was a mystery and couldn’t be explained by financial issues. The site’s staffers were also left in the dark, and there was no farewell message of any kind to officially mark the site’s ending.

In March, the staffers still had hope for a miracle comeback, but the chances of that were not seen as very high and dramatically shrank in the passing months. Meanwhile, what truly happened behind the scenes was still unknown.

A Memecoin Promo

Today, the TorrentGalaxy saga gets an unexpected new chapter. The main torrentgalaxy.to domain is suddenly operational again. However, it does not list any torrents.

Instead, it now promotes a memecoin project for a token named $1 on the Solana network. Whether TorrentGalaxy’s new owners are connected to this or if the site changed hands is unknown.

Needless to say, this has nothing to do with the original TorrentGalaxy site. We can’t guarantee that the site is free of trouble, aside from the inherent crypto risks, so potential visitors should tread with caution.

Memecoin

A look at the site’s source code reveals it is powered by a standard configuration script that’s used for memecoin projects. For now, most links on the page are not functional either. They simply point to a “#” placeholder, suggesting that it is still work in progress.

We see no point in scrutinizing this memecoin in detail, as there are better outlets for that. However, the sudden TorrentGalaxy comeback does strongly suggest that the torrent site has been abandoned completely, marking the end of an era.

Source

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Posted Monday 10 November 2025 at 3:13 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

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•     Global temperatures rising faster, sea levels increasing rapidly
•     Coral die-off marks first climate tipping point, Amazon and Atlantic current at risk
•     US climate work hit by Trump plans to cut, but other countries still spending on science

BELEM, Brazil, Nov 9 (Reuters) - With the pace of climate change speeding up, extreme weather and other impacts are taking an increasing toll on populations and environments across the globe. Here are some of the developments this year in climate science:

WARMER, FASTER

Global temperatures are not just climbing, they are now climbing faster than before, with new records logged for 2023 and 2024, and at points in 2025. That finding was part of a key study in June that updated baseline data used in the science reports done every few years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The new research shows the average global temperature rising at a rate of 0.27 degrees Celsius each decade – or almost 50% faster than in the 1990s and 2000s when the warming rate was around 0.2 C per decade.

Sea levels are rising faster now too – at about 4.5 millimeters per year over the last decade, compared with 1.85 mm per year measured across the decades since 1900.

The world is now on track to cross the 1.5 C warming threshold around 2030, after which scientists warn we will likely trigger catastrophic, irreversible impacts. Already, the world has warmed by 1.3-1.4 C since the pre-industrial era, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

TIPPING POINTS

Warm-water corals are in an almost irreversible die-off from successive marine heatwaves - marking what would be the first so-called climate tipping point, when an environmental system begins to shift into a different state.

Researchers in October also warned that the Amazon rainforest could begin to die back and transform into a different ecosystem, such as savannah, if rapid deforestation continues as global warming crosses 1.5 C, which is earlier than previously estimated.

They said meltwater from the thawing ice sheet atop Greenland could help cause an earlier collapse in the ocean current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, that keeps winters mild in Europe.

In Antarctica, where ice sheets are also under threat, scientists are worried about declining sea ice surrounding the southernmost continent. Similar to what is happening in the Arctic, ice loss exposes dark water that can absorb more solar radiation - which amplifies the overall warming trend. It also jeopardizes the growth of phytoplankton that consume much of the world's CO2.

LAND ON FIRE

Along with heatwaves and drought, wildfires still threaten to be frequent and severe.

This year’s State of Wildfires report led by a group of weather agencies and universities, counted some 3.7 million square kilometers (1.4 million square miles) as having burned between March 2024 and February 2025 - an area about the size of India and Norway combined.

That was slightly less than the annual average burned for the last two decades. But the fires produced higher CO2 emissions than before, as more carbon-dense forests burned.

DEADLY HEAT

Researchers are working on ways to assess heat-related health risks and tolls, as U.N. health and weather agencies estimate about half the world's population is already struggling.

The agencies also estimate worker productivity dropping 2-3% for every degree above 20 C, while another study in the Lancet journal in October estimates global losses of more than $1 trillion from that lost productivity for last year alone.

There is no consistent international definition for a heat-related death, but technology advances are helping scientists to bridge data gaps and compare conditions from place to place.

For example in Europe, one team at the UK's Imperial College used mortality trends to estimate more than 24,400 deaths this summer related to heat exposure across about 30% of the European population. They attributed up to 70% of those deaths to climate-fueled heat, based on the same mortality trends applied to a model of Europe without global warming.

For last year's record-hot European summer, another team used computer modeling to examine mortality statistics along with temperature data and health parameters, estimating more than 62,700 heat-related deaths across 32 countries, or about 70% of the continent's population.

SCIENCE UNDER ATTACK

The U.S. administration under climate-denying President Donald Trump is hoping to slash funding for agencies that collect and monitor climate and weather data, worrying a scientific community that says U.S. leadership will be hard to replace.

Trump's 2026 budget request, yet to be approved by Congress, proposes halving the annual budget for NASA Earth Science to about $1 billion and cutting NOAA's spending by more than a quarter to $4.5 billion while eliminating its climate research arm, among other cuts.

Elsewhere, however, public science spending is increasing, with record budgets for science research in China, the UK, Japan, and the European Union. The EU also last month opened its real-time weather data monitoring to public access.

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There’s a common belief that people pirate content to save money, whether on another streaming subscription or a pricey box office ticket.

That said, movie theaters still draw millions of visitors, many of whom may also turn to pirate sites occasionally.

Since piracy isn’t going away, understanding what drives a person to choose the theater over a ‘free’ pirate option, and vice versa, is crucial for the industry.

A new paper aims to take on this task. Through a structural econometric model that relies on real-world data from 2014 to 2019, it tries to quantify the choice between the movie theater and piracy. It considers the quality of piracy releases, but also the price and quality of the movie theater experience.

Accepted peer-reviewed paper
 

The study was conducted by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California, Davis, and Boston University. The paper will be published in the Manufacturing & Service Operations Management journal, but an early copy was already published through SSRN, which allows us to take a look at the results.

Instead of conducting surveys to model consumer behavior, the researchers use official box office figures, demographic data, and piracy data, covering both volume and quality, differentiating between low-quality (e.g. CAM) and high-quality (e.g. HDRip) releases.

Through a series of simulations, the researchers looked at what types of movie industry interventions could help to address the piracy challenge and which ones proved futile.

HDRips Are a Bigger Threat than CAMs

The study largely confirms the intuitive notion that quality matters. If high-quality pirated copies are available within a week of a movie’s theatrical release, it leads to an average 7.9% reduction in box office revenue over the first 8 weeks, compared to a scenario where only low-quality “cam” rips are available.

This finding isn’t all that surprising. After all, high-quality releases are much more popular among pirates, resulting in many more downloads and streams. This logically draws more people away from the box office.

Interestingly, the paper shows that the revenue decrease caused by high-quality piracy is most problematic for “smaller-grossing” movies. Films that earn between $100M-$200M face a 9.4% revenue loss, which is more than double the 4.3% loss for blockbusters.

“This result implies that high-quality unauthorized content may hurt creativity in film production in the motion picture industry, as it does greater harm to smaller-budget movies and independent movies,” the paper reads.

Box Office Discounts Are Not the Answer

Pirates often cite high costs as a reason to pirate, so it would seem to make sense that lower prices reduce piracy rates. Indeed, that is what the researchers found. However, lower prices eventually reduce overall revenue, so that’s not the answer.

The researchers found that cutting box office prices by 10% reduces overall revenue by 4.6%, as the increase in sales doesn’t cover the per-ticket loss. Similarly, efforts to reduce travel costs by increasing the number of screens had no meaningful effect either.

“Based on our results, we argue that theaters and/or studios can not effectively compete against “free” by reducing the costs of consuming legal content in the theatrical channel,” the researchers note.

Competing on Quality Works

Instead of competing on price, it appears movie theaters are better off competing on quality; investing in better seating, improved audio-visual technology, or other theater features, for example.

The study’s simulations show that a “modest improvement” in the quality of the movie theater experience can completely evaporate the negative effects of early high-quality piracy releases.

Specifically, the researchers found that a 3.7% increase in the consumer’s preference (utility) for the theater experience is enough to fully offset the 7.9% revenue loss.

“We therefore recommend that theater chains and studios prioritize investments in upgrading equipment and in-theater technologies to create a more immersive, comfortable, and engaging environment,” the paper concludes.

The study’s findings offer a clear opportunity for the movie industry. While theaters can’t compete with ‘free’, they can win by offering a premium experience that pirates can’t replicate.

A copy of the forthcoming paper, which discusses several additional findings and methodological limitations, is on SSRN.

—

Zeng, Helen and Huang, Yan and Burtch, Gordon and Smith, Michael D., Operational Decision-making Around Movie Piracy & Theatrical Release A Structural Model of Movie Piracy vs. Legal (in-Theater) Consumption (October 08, 2025). Accepted at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.

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Posted Sunday 9 November 2025 at 5:44 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

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Filing lawsuits against internet users who allegedly shared copyrighted content online without permission, has led to countless cash settlements over the years and for some, a lucrative business model in its own right.

There’s also no shortage of cases going wrong for all kinds of reasons . A recent case in Canada, seeking “extraordinary equitable relief” upon which cases like this either live or die, collapsed in dramatic fashion at the very first hurdle, and went further downhill from there.

Background to a Familiar Claim

Hellboy Productions, Inc. filed its statement of claim at Federal Court in Toronto on March 4, 2025. The basis for the claim was very familiar, having made hundreds of appearances in cases previously filed at courts in Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and beyond.

Anonymous for now….

The movie in question, Hellboy: The Crooked Man, fits the profile for an appearance in a settlement lawsuit. Hellboy movies have never performed well at the box office and after generating just $1.4m worldwide, the latest outing continued the trend.

While many fans of the Hellboy brand still wanted to watch The Crooked Man, average reviews of 4.5/10 most likely dampened enthusiasm for paying to do so. That can lead to activity on pirate sites for as long as it lasts and in this instance, long enough for the copyright holder to capture ~2,400 IP addresses linked to three Canadian ISPs – Telus, Cogeco, and Bell.

Turning IP Addresses into Names and Physical Addresses

In common with the UK, Ireland, and Australia, unmasking alleged pirates in Canada typically requires the plaintiffs to obtain a Norwich Pharmacal order, or simply Norwich order for short. Obtained from a court, Norwich orders compel a third party, who for various reasons have become unwittingly involved in someone else’s wrongdoing, to disclose information (usually documents/records) that can help a plaintiff identify an alleged infringer.

In this case, the claimant (Hellboy Productions, Inc.) alleges that infringers used internet connections provided by Telus, Cogeco, and Bell to pirate the movie. If served with a Norwich order, the ISPs would be required to match the IP addresses and timestamps provided by the plaintiffs, to activity logs that identify the corresponding account holders.

A small sample of the IP addresses collected by the plaintiff

Once in the hands of the movie company, this information triggers a process to contact as many account holders as possible, on the assumption that they (or someone close) are infringers, and therefore liable to pay compensation for any damages caused. The amount tends to vary but whether the demand was CAD 1,000 or more, the potential revenue from 2,400 subscribers would easily exceed worldwide box office sales.

At least, if all went to plan.

Does the Claimant Have a Bona Fide Claim?

In an order and reasons issued last week, Case Management Judge John C. Cotter notes that Telus did not oppose the order requested by the movie company, while the positions of Cogeco and Bell are simply unknown. The absence of ISPs doesn’t mean that a claimant automatically wins, however.

“A lack of opposition from an ISP is not sufficient on its own to grant the motion. The Court must be satisfied that the applicable test has been met. This is important given the privacy interests of the unidentified alleged wrongdoers,” Judge Cotter explains.

Before those interests are weighed against those of the rightsholder, the plaintiff must show that it has a bone fide claim for copyright infringement and can show, on balance, that the alleged infringers used the ISPs’ services to infringe its rights.

According to the Judge, the plaintiffs failed to produce sufficient evidence to show either.

Insufficient Grounds for Asserting Copyright Ownership

“An analysis of the merits of the claim in this case includes some minimal analysis of whether copyright subsists in the Work, and whether the plaintiff has standing to assert a claim for copyright infringement. In the context of this case, the issue of standing is whether plaintiff is the owner of the copyright in the Work, which is asserted in paragraph 4 of the statement of claim,” Judge Cotter writes. (see screenshot above)

“The plaintiff’s evidence did not include a certificate of copyright registration. The plaintiff’s evidence on copyright subsistence and ownership is limited to the following in the Law Clerk Affidavit (which is the same for each of the three motions):”

Plaintiff’s name appears in the credits (Law Clerk Affidavit)

Showing the company name in the credits above means that the plaintiff relied on presumptions available under Section 34.1 of the Copyright Act that a) copyright subsists in the work and b) since its name appears in the credits as the maker of the movie, it should be presumed that the plaintiff is indeed the maker.

According to Judge Cotter, those presumptions do not apply when the plaintiff has requested a Norwich order. Section 34.1(1) sets out a precondition for the engagement of the presumptions.

In this matter, the 2,400+ plus defendants are currently anonymous and without knowing who they are, it’s impossible to show that a defendant had “put the existence or title of the copyright in issue.”

Unable to trigger the precondition, no reliance could be placed on the presumptions available under Section 34.1. The Judge dismissed the evidence shown in the Law Clerk Affidavit as “at best, hearsay evidence for which the source is not specified,” and with no copyright certificate there was no way to prove ownership. Moreover, there was no evidence to show that copyright subsists in the movie.

With no bona fide copyright claim, the Judge dismissed all three motions for Norwich orders. He then addressed a few additional issues in need of an airing.

Evidence Should Be Organized, Easily Understood, Easy to Verify

In his order and reasons, Judge Cotter emphasizes that the Court is entitled to demand the “best available evidence” when granting the “extraordinary equitable relief of a Norwich order.”

While failure to establish copyright ownership proved fatal for all three motions, the image of the movie credits page also fell short of the expected standard. The Judge also criticized evidence presented in the affidavit of Thomas Nowak, the CEO of anti-piracy/BitTorrent monitoring company Maverickeye UG, the supplier of evidence in this case and scores of others in the past.

Showing that Telus, Cogeco, or Bell is the ISP for the alleged infringers was a requirement to obtain a Norwich order. Deficiencies in the example below and a series of issues detailed on pages 17-21 of Judge Cotter’s order, led to the conclusion that the plaintiff had failed to show that, while also failing to meet the evidence standard expected by the Court.

Deficiencies in the example above and a series of others detailed elsewhere, plus the failure to show ownership of the copyright it aimed to enforce, meant the plaintiff’s requests for Norwich orders were denied. As a result, the anonymous alleged infringers remain anonymous, but for how long is unknown.

Despite significant criticism, dismissal of the plaintiff’s motions, and denial of its request for an award of costs, Judge Cotter notes that his order does not preclude further motions by the plaintiff.

As sure as day follows night, those motions will arrive, only the timing is in doubt.

The original claim can be found here (pdf), Judge Cotter’s order is available here (pdf)

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Posted Saturday 8 November 2025 at 3:39 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

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Every year, the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes the National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers.

The report is compiled based on input from key industry players. This includes submissions from copyright industry groups that frequently highlight piracy challenges that in their view act as barriers to trade.

In previous years, for example, the MPA and others have called for more site-blocking efforts to counter the piracy threat. Interestingly, however, other American companies now inform the USTR that foreign site-blocking measures are becoming a significant trade barrier.

Cloudflare Sees Piracy Blockades as Trade Barriers

To share its concerns, Cloudflare decided to participate in the annual trade barriers consultation for the first time this year. The company describes itself as a “leading connectivity cloud company” running one of the world’s largest networks, providing security, performance, and reliability services.

According to Cloudflare, several foreign countries disproportionately impact U.S. technology providers, with many concerns relating to site-blocking measures that aim to deter online piracy.

Spain

Cloudflare writes that Spanish courts allow rightsholders to request “overbroad court orders” that authorize IP address blocking. Since a single IP address can serve thousands of domains, disrupting pirates often means that many legitimate sites and services are blocked too, causing widespread collateral damage.

“This practice results in the widespread and repeated disruption of tens of thousands of unrelated, legitimate websites, as well as the disruption of digital services, with no judicial opportunity for remedy,” Cloudflare writes.

“These actions, designed to protect a narrow set of commercial interests, have caused significant collateral harm to businesses and users who are not the intended targets, without recourse or the possibility for affected parties to challenge the underlying order.”

The Spanish Government is aware of the problems, which Cloudflare says are at odds with international standards, but has chosen not to intervene in the issue. Therefore, it continues to present a significant trade barrier.

Italy

Cloudflare reports similar concerns in Italy, where the “Piracy Shield” site-blocking law has a direct effect on American companies. This blocking regulation requires network providers, including CDNs, to comply with blocking notices within 30 minutes.

“The failure to include adequate safeguards against collateral damage has led to the inappropriate blocking of shared services of large cloud providers, which are disproportionately American businesses,” Cloudflare notes.

“For instance, the blocking of a Cloudflare IP address resulted in tens of thousands of non-targeted websites being blocked in February 2024. Furthermore, the blocking of the domain “drive.usercontent.google.com” in October denied Italian users access to Google Drive for over 12 hours.”

Cloudflare on Italy

Efforts to expand Piracy Shield to public DNS resolvers and VPN services only make the problem worse, Cloudflare says, noting that some U.S. companies have already decided to leave the European country.

Automated piracy blocks are not the only reported trade barrier in Italy. Cloudflare also notes that the country allows rightsholders to “abuse” the courts to disrupt U.S. businesses by granting ex parte blocking orders without giving the companies a chance to oppose them.

“This coercive, penalty-based approach to removal of content, without adequate judicial review or due process protections, is a significant barrier to doing business in Italy,” Cloudflare writes.

France

In France, Cloudflare highlights Article L.333-10 of the Sports Code as a key problem. This has resulted in several pirate site blocking orders that go beyond regular Internet providers, requiring DNS resolvers and VPN services to take action as well.

Cloudflare notes that some services lack the technical capabilities to implement these orders and as a result, several U.S. companies have already left the country.

Cloudflare on France

Recently, France passed a new anti-piracy bill that opens the door to automated IP-address blocking, similar to Italy’s Piracy Shield. This is a major concern for Cloudflare, which fears that this will only lead to more collateral damage.

“It increases the risk of overblocking legitimate content or mistakenly targeting websites that operate lawfully, potentially disrupting cross-border digital services,” Cloudflare writes.

South Korea

South Korea has also created trade barriers due to its site-blocking measures, Cloudflare reports. A revision to the Network Act in 2023 now requires “CDNs to restrict access to illegal content”.

As a result, Cloudflare and other American companies are required to maintain detailed and regularly updated blocklists.

“The South Korea Communication Commission (KCC) sends U.S. CDN providers a ‘block list’ of over 1.5 million URLs (with 30,000 new additions monthly),” Cloudflare writes, noting that this places an “unprecedented compliance burden” on companies.

Conflicting Demands at the U.S. Trade Office

Cloudflare urges the USTR to take these concerns into account for its upcoming National Trade Estimate Report. Ideally, it wants these trade barriers to be dismantled.

These calls run counter to requests from rightsholders, who urge the USTR to ensure that more foreign countries implement blocking measures. With potential site-blocking legislation being considered in U.S. Congress, that may impact local lobbying efforts as well.

If and how the USTR will address these concerns will become clearer early next year, when the 2026 National Trade Estimate Report is expected to be published.

—

A copy of Cloudflare’s submission for the USTR’s 2025 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers is available here (pdf)

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Posted Friday 7 November 2025 at 3:30 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

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The action in Argentina two months ago was announced with a reasonable level of detail. Targeting dozens of IPTV services with an estimated eight million global subscribers, Spanish football league LaLiga described the operation as “historic” and as the dust settled, its importance wasn’t in doubt.

Targeting a Network with Eight Million Subscribers

Following an investigation by the Cybercrime Prosecutor’s Office of San Isidro (UFEIC), most likely fueled by investigations carried out by LATAM anti-piracy group Alianza, MPA/ACE, Nagravision, and others in the region, local police raided four office buildings in Vicente López, Buenos Aires.

The raids were conducted under the authority of San Isidro Guarantees Court No. 4 and images of DDI agents and tables covered with cash were soon circulating online. Publishing a statement containing a long list of branded and ‘dismantled’ IPTV services can end badly; however, LaLiga seemed unusually confident that resurrection wouldn’t play a role here.

LaLiga Seemed More Confident Than Usual

While there were no immediate reports of an existential IPTV crisis in Brazil, complaints about service issues were still quick to arrive and only seemed to increase throughout September.

Services Start Shutting Down

On-screen notices announcing a service’s demise aren’t especially common but since early September, IPTV subscribers in Brazil have been exposed to quite a few of them.

An early casualty was ‘My Family Cinema’ which had been one of the most recognizable IPTV brands in the region. The notice reportedly came via a set-top box update; some reports implied that updates were probably required to get back in the game.

End of the road for “this brand”…

LaLiga’s presumed confidence that services wouldn’t rise from the dead seemed to look a little precarious given the terminology in the shutdown announcement. Indeed, some former customers claimed that My Family Cinema was subsequently “taken over” by another service called VELA.

Intermittent service and other errors were reported there too, at least for a while.

Easy come, easy go….

Reports that My Family Cinema was still partly operational continued through October but perhaps more ominous news had already began to surface.

People keen to renew their subscriptions to various services complained that was no longer possible. Some said that after ‘upgrading’ to VELA and upgrading again to another substitute service (Konex), payments were successful. Or rather, payments went through as expected but resulted in either no service or a service with ads.

With some users preparing to dust off their torrent clients and others mulling the pros and cons of YouTube, heated discussions over consumer rights – including the possibility that the services were executing some kind of exit scam – helped to descend the situation further into chaos.

From a rightsholders’ perspective, mistrust and declining confidence in piracy are valuable commodities. Few things focus the mind more than throwing good money after bad, and if pirates pick up the blame, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Consumer rights failure…

Two Months After the Raids – Why Now?

Official news on how the case is progressing appears to be almost non-existent.

A comment from anti-piracy group Alianza confirmed that the legal process is indeed under seal. The practical issues observed on the ground are probably linked to advances made by the Argentine Public Prosecutor’s Office in its ongoing investigations against the platform’s operators, the theory goes.

Other information provided by Alianza clarifies that the eight million subscriber estimate concerns the network’s peak worldwide. Working on the basis of 6.2 million subscribers more recently, Alianza claims that 4.6 million subscribers can be found in Brazil, together generating between US$150 million and US$200 million.

As for the network’s operational structure, Alianza president Jorge Bacaloni says that management, IT/technical, and financial matters are handled in China.

The investigation in Argentina reportedly concerns a ‘command center’ that controls/coordinates pirate services across the region. An office in Buenos Aires was reportedly responsible for marketing the services and for what could be over US$100m in global piracy sales.

Common Denominator For Popular Brands

Since there are signs that new services are easily launched and if necessary, devices with subscriptions to defunct services can be remotely updated to access another service, common ownership/control seems a reasonable explanation, in broad terms at least.

Proving that’s actually the case to a criminal standard is quite rightly a matter for the prosecutor’s office. However, if there’s a central marketing/sales operation common to some or even all of the named services, that should be much easier to discover.

Since Alianza provided no real clues, we cannot say whether the marketing company apparently used by some of the IPTV services is just a marketing company, or whether it’s THE marketing company referenced by Alianza.

What we can confirm is that in this instance, zero effort was expended to hide the connections, despite that being technically trivial. What that says in the bigger picture, if indeed it says anything at all, is for the prosecutor’s office to determine.

Other signs that the overall business was approached from otherwise legitimate angles, include the trademark applications for ‘My Family Cinema’ filed in Paraguay.

Given that there are copyright complaints filed against several branded services and other entities with links to them, why it took around six years to take action is unclear. Perhaps timing and opportunity are still the most important factors.

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Posted Thursday 6 November 2025 at 3:01 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

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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. “The Long Walk” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on November 03 are:

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

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Posted Wednesday 5 November 2025 at 4:16 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

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Anna’s Archive is a meta-search engine for shadow libraries that allows users to find pirated books and other related sources.

The site launched in the fall of 2022, just days after Z-Library was targeted in a U.S. criminal crackdown, to ensure continued availability of ‘free’ books and articles to the broader public.

In the three years since then, Anna’s Archive has built up quite the track record. The site has been blocked in various countries, was sued in the U.S. after it scraped WorldCat, and actively provides assistance to AI researchers who want to use its library for model training.

Despite legal pressure, Annas-archive.org and the related .li and .se domains remain operational. This is a thorn in the side of publishers who are actively trying to take the site down. In the absence of options to target the site directly, they ask third-party intermediaries such as Google to lend a hand.

749 Million URLs

Google and other major search engines allow rightsholders to request removal of allegedly infringing URLs. The aim is to ensure that pirate sites no longer show up in search results when people search for books, movies, music, or other copyrighted content.

The Pirate Bay, for example, has been a popular target; Google has removed more than 4.2 million thepiratebay.org URLs over the years in response to copyright holder complaints. While this sounds like a sizable number, it pales in comparison to the volume of takedowns targeting Anna’s Archive.

Google’s transparency report reveals that rightsholders asked Google to remove 784 million URLs, divided over the three main Anna’s Archive domains. A small number were rejected, mainly because Google didn’t index the reported links, resulting in 749 million confirmed removals.

The comparison to sites such as The Pirate Bay isn’t fair, as Anna’s Archive has many more pages in its archive and uses multiple country-specific subdomains. This means that there’s simply more content to take down. That said, in terms of takedown activity, the site’s three domain names clearly dwarf all pirate competition.

Top targeted domains (Google)

5% of All Google Takedowns, Ever

Since Google published its first transparency report in May 2012, rightsholders have flagged 15.1 billion allegedly infringing URLs. That’s a staggering number, but the fact that 5% of the total targeted Anna’s Archive URLs is remarkable.

Penguin Random House and John Wiley & Sons are the most active publishers targeting the site, but they are certainly not alone. According to Google data, more than 1,000 authors or publishers have sent DMCA notices targeting Anna’s Archive domains.

Yet, there appears to be no end in sight. Rightsholders are reporting roughly 10 million new URLs per week for the popular piracy library, so there is no shortage of content to report.

With these DMCA takedown notices, publishers are aiming to make it as difficult as possible for people to find books on the site using Google. This works, as many URLs are now delisted while others are actively being demoted by the search engine for book-related queries.

That said, the Anna’s Archive website is certainly not unfindable. Searching for the site’s name in Google still shows the main domain as the top search result.

Search: Anna’s Archive

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Posted Wednesday 5 November 2025 at 4:09 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

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This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas.

History of the Internet Archive

Kahle has been striving since 1996 to transform the Internet Archive into a digital Library of Alexandria—but “with a better fire protection plan,” joked Kyle Courtney, a copyright lawyer and librarian who leads the nonprofit eBook Study Group, which helps states update laws to protect libraries.

When the Wayback Machine was born in 2001 as a way to take snapshots of the web, Kahle told The New York Times that building free archives was “worth it.” He was also excited that the Wayback Machine had drawn renewed media attention to libraries.

At the time, law professor Lawrence Lessig predicted that the Internet Archive would face copyright battles, but he also believed that the Wayback Machine would change the way the public understood copyright fights.

”We finally have a clear and tangible example of what’s at stake,” Lessig told the Times. He insisted that Kahle was “defining the public domain” online, which would allow Internet users to see ”how easy and important” the Wayback Machine “would be in keeping us sane and honest about where we’ve been and where we’re going.”

Kahle suggested that IA’s legal battles weren’t with creators or publishers so much as with large media companies that he thinks aren’t “satisfied with the restriction you get from copyright.”

“They want that and more,” Kahle said, pointing to e-book licenses that expire as proof that libraries increasingly aren’t allowed to own their collections. He also suspects that such companies wanted the Wayback Machine dead—but the Wayback Machine has survived and proved itself to be a unique and useful resource.

The Internet Archive also began archiving—and then lending—e-books. For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project to create a “National Emergency Library” as libraries across the world shut down during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project eventually grew to 1.4 million titles.

But lifting the lending restrictions also brought more scrutiny from copyright holders, who eventually sued the Archive. Litigation went on for years. In 2024, IA lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over the Archive’s Open Library project, which used a novel e-book lending model to bypass publishers’ licensing fees and checkout limitations. Damages could have topped $400 million, but publishers ultimately announced a “confidential agreement on a monetary payment” that did not bankrupt the Archive.

Litigation has continued, though. More recently, the Archive settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. A settlement in that case, reached last month, was similarly confidential. In both cases, IA’s experts challenged publishers’ estimates of their losses as massively inflated.

For Internet Archive fans, a group that includes longtime Internet users, researchers, students, historians, lawyers, and the US government, the end of the lawsuits brought a sigh of relief. The Archive can continue—but it can’t run one of its major programs in the same way.

What the Internet Archive lost

To Kahle, the suits have been an immense setback to IA’s mission.

Publishers had argued that the Open Library’s lending harmed the e-book market, but IA says its vision for the project was not to frustrate e-book sales (which it denied its library does) but to make it easier for researchers to reference e-books by allowing Wikipedia to link to book scans. Wikipedia has long been one of the most visited websites in the world, and the Archive wanted to deepen its authority as a research tool.

“One of the real purposes of libraries is not just access to information by borrowing a book that you might buy in a bookstore,” Kahle said. “In fact, that’s actually the minority. Usually, you’re comparing and contrasting things. You’re quoting. You’re checking. You’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel for Public Knowledge, told Ars that the Internet Archive’s Wikipedia enhancements could have served to surface information that’s often buried in books, giving researchers a streamlined path to source accurate information online.

But Kahle said the lawsuits against IA showed that “massive multibillion-dollar media conglomerates” have their own interests in controlling the flow of information. “That’s what they really succeeded at—to make sure that Wikipedia readers don’t get access to books,” Kahle said.

At the heart of the Open Library lawsuit was publishers’ market for e-book licenses, which libraries complain provide only temporary access for a limited number of patrons and cost substantially more than the acquisition of physical books. Some states are crafting laws to restrict e-book licensing, with the aim of preserving library functions.

“We don’t want libraries to become Hulu or Netflix,” said Courtney of the eBook Study Group, posting warnings to patrons like “last day to check out this book, August 31st, then it goes away forever.”

He, like Kahle, is concerned that libraries will become unable to fulfill their longtime role—preserving culture and providing equal access to knowledge. Remote access, Courtney noted, benefits people who can’t easily get to libraries, like the elderly, people with disabilities, rural communities, and foreign-deployed troops.

Before the Internet Archive cases, libraries had won some important legal fights, according to Brandon Butler, a copyright lawyer and executive director of Re:Create, a coalition of “libraries, civil libertarians, online rights advocates, start-ups, consumers, and technology companies” that is “dedicated to balanced copyright and a free and open Internet.”

But the Internet Archive’s e-book fight didn’t set back libraries, Butler said, because the loss didn’t reverse any prior court wins. Instead, IA had been “exploring another frontier” beyond the Google Books ruling, which deemed Google’s searchable book excerpts a transformative fair use, hoping that linking to books from Wikipedia would also be deemed fair use. But IA “hit the edge” of what courts would allow, Butler said.

IA basically asked, “Could fair use go this much farther?” Butler said. “And the courts said, ‘No, this is as far as you go.'”

To Kahle, the cards feel stacked against the Internet Archive, with courts, lawmakers, and lobbyists backing corporations seeking “hyper levels of control.” He said IA has always served as a research library—an online destination where people can cross-reference texts and verify facts, just like perusing books at a local library.

“We’re just trying to be a library,” Kahle said. “A library in a traditional sense. And it’s getting hard.”

Fears of big fines may delay digitization projects

President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services have put America’s public libraries at risk, and reduced funding will continue to challenge libraries in the coming years, ALA has warned. Butler has also suggested that under-resourced libraries may delay digitization efforts for preservation purposes if they worry that publishers may threaten costly litigation.

He told Ars he thinks courts are getting it right on recent fair use rulings. But he noted that libraries have fewer resources for legal fights because copyright law “has this provision that says, well, if you’re a copyright holder, you really don’t have to prove that you suffered any harm at all.”

“You can just elect [to receive] a massive payout based purely on the fact that you hold a copyright and somebody infringed,” Butler said. “And that’s really unique. Almost no other country in the world has that sort of a system.”

So while companies like AI firms may be able to afford legal fights with rights holders, libraries must be careful, even when they launch projects that seem “completely harmless and innocuous,” Butler said. Consider the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which digitized 400,000 old shellac records, known as 78s, that were originally pressed from 1898 to the 1950s.

“The idea that somebody’s going to stream a 78 of an Elvis song instead of firing it up on their $10-a-month Spotify subscription is silly, right?” Butler said. “It doesn’t pass the laugh test, but given the scale of the project—and multiply that by the statutory damages—and that makes this an extremely dangerous project all of a sudden.”

Butler suggested that statutory damages could disrupt the balance that ensures the public has access to knowledge, creators get paid, and human creativity thrives, as AI advances and libraries’ growth potentially stalls.

“It sets the risk so high that it may force deals in situations where it would be better if people relied on fair use. Or it may scare people from trying new things because of the stakes of a copyright lawsuit,” Butler said.

Courtney, who co-wrote a whitepaper detailing the legal basis for different forms of “controlled digital lending” like the Open Library project uses, suggested that Kahle may be the person who’s best prepared to push the envelope on copyright.

When asked how the Internet Archive managed to avoid financial ruin, Courtney said it survived “only because their leader” is “very smart and capable.” Of all the “flavors” of controlled digital lending (CDL) that his paper outlined, Kahle’s methodology for the Open Library Project was the most “revolutionary,” Courtney said.

Importantly, IA’s loss did not doom other kinds of CDL that other archives use, he noted, nor did it prevent libraries from trying new things.

“Fair use is a case-by-case determination” that will be made as urgent preservation needs arise, Courtney told Ars, and “libraries have a ton of stuff that aren’t going to make the jump to digital unless we digitize them. No one will have access to them.”

What’s next for the Internet Archive?

The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library, which is “a free, open, online compendium of government research and publications from around the world” that will be conveniently linked in Wikipedia articles to help researchers discover them.

The Archive is also collecting as many physical materials as possible to help preserve knowledge, even as “the library system is largely contracting,” Kahle said. He noted that libraries historically tend to grow in societies that prioritize education and decline in societies where power is being concentrated, and he’s worried about where the US is headed. That makes it hard to predict if IA—or any library project—will be supported in the long term.

With governments globally partnering with the biggest tech companies to try to win the artificial intelligence race, critics have warned of threats to US democracy, while the White House has escalated its attack on libraries, universities, and science over the past year.

Meanwhile, AI firms face dozens of lawsuits from creators and publishers, which Kahle thinks only the biggest tech companies can likely afford to outlast. The momentum behind AI risks giving corporations even more control over information, Kahle said, and it’s uncertain if archives dedicated to preserving the public memory will survive attacks from multiple fronts.

“Societies that are [growing] are the ones that need to educate people” and therefore promote libraries, Kahle said. But when societies are “going down,” such as in times of war, conflict, and social upheaval, libraries “tend to get destroyed by the powerful. It used to be king and church, and it’s now corporations and governments.” (He recommended The Library: A Fragile History as a must-read to understand the challenges libraries have always faced.)

Kahle told Ars he’s not “black and white” on AI, and he even sees some potential for AI to enhance library services.

He’s more concerned that libraries in the US are losing support and may soon cease to perform classic functions that have always benefited civilizations—like buying books from small publishers and local authors, supporting intellectual endeavors, and partnering with other libraries to expand access to diverse collections.

To prevent these cultural and intellectual losses, he plans to position IA as a refuge for displaced collections, with hopes to digitize as much as possible while defending the early dream that the Internet could equalize access to information and supercharge progress.

“We want everyone [to be] a reader,” Kahle said, and that means “we want lots of publishers, we want lots of vendors, booksellers, lots of libraries.”

But, he asked, “Are we going that way? No.”

To turn things around, Kahle suggested that copyright laws be “re-architected” to ensure “we have a game with many winners”—where authors, publishers, and booksellers get paid, library missions are respected, and progress thrives. Then society can figure out “what do we do with this new set of AI tools” to keep the engine of human creativity humming.

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Posted Tuesday 4 November 2025 at 5:04 am AEST (my time).

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The major Hollywood studios of the MPA, which in recent years now includes Netflix and Amazon, are well known for obtaining site blocking injunctions at the High Court in London.

While blocking of new domains continues at a considerable pace, applications for all-new injunctions are relatively rare. Since they tend to operate in groups while adopting familiar branding, the most persistent pirate sites are identified quite quickly, and then blocked under the scope of previously obtained injunctions.

Outliers certainly exist, but the recent addition of Cloudflare shows that the landscape can shift quite quickly and in unexpected directions. New rightsholders are also getting involved.

Warner Bros. Discovery & TNT Sports

During the past few years, surging interest in live sports coupled with rising prices for already expensive official packages, have combined to give pirate IPTV services the conditions in which they thrive. Pressure on the European Commission increased last week with demands that include the introduction of pan-European blocking orders.

In the UK, the Premier League has been going about its blocking business relatively silently, with parallel action from Sky targeting persistent IPTV providers. Following an application for a Section 97a blocking injunction at the High Court in October, a pair of established albeit rebranded rightsholders will soon enter the fray.

Known as BT Sport until 2023 and now owned by Warner Bros. Discovery and BT Group, TNT Sports is a group of premium TV sports channels operating in the UK and Ireland.

The six defendants are instantly recognizable as the UK’s leading internet service providers. Having been put on formal notice that their subscribers are accessing pirate sites and services offering TNT Sports content illegally, they will be required to block the illicit platforms under Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Specific Content Currently Unclear

WBD Sports has an impressive range of sports rights; the Olympics, tennis Grand Slams, cycling Grand Tours, PGA Tour, World Snooker, FIM Speedway GP, plus various winter sports.

In the UK and Ireland, TNT Sports airs everything from the Premier League and FA Cup to UEFA Champions, Europa, and Conference Leagues, to Premiership Rugby, MotoGP, Cricket, UFC, and boxing.

Which of these assets the companies aim to protect is currently unclear. As the exclusive rightsholder, Premier League has been obtaining site blocking injunctions in the UK since 2013, initially targeting platforms including First Row Sports, Drakulastream, and Rojadirecta. Running parallel to its work blocking IPTV providers under the authority of renewable blocking orders, more recently Premier League began blocking web-based platforms including TotalSportek, FootyBite and VIP League.

A similar picture emerges for UEFA; also an exclusive rightsholder, UEFA obtained its first injunction in 2018 and returns to court to ensure rolling protection whenever the granted period is due to expire.

With a deal that secured exclusive live broadcasting rights for TNT Sports until the end of the 2030/31 season, Premiership Rugby seems among the most obvious candidates for piracy protection.

Worth around £84 million, the deal comes at a time when average audiences are reportedly up 10% in the current season, where live-to-live scheduling with Premier League matches is reportedly driving a 39% audience increase over events with no lead-in.

The World is Getting Smaller

Several of the defendant ISPs have direct interests in sports broadcasting remaining as piracy-free as possible. British Telecommunications owner BT Group owns claimant TNT Sports in partnership with claimant Warner Bros. Discovery.

Those interested in watching TNT Sports channels can do so via streaming platform Discovery+. Or, if they prefer, via defendant EE Limited’s EE TV platform, or using satellite and cable broadcasts made available via defendants Sky and Virgin Media’s networks respectively.

The TNT Sports package available via defendant TalkTalk includes the four main TNT Sports channels, leaving Plusnet the only defendant ISP without a TV offering. It’s ultimately owned by BT Group, however.

A wider plan to obtain blocking injunctions valid all over Europe is the type of consolidation we’re likely to see more of in the coming months and years. Rightsholders are becoming increasingly averse to duplication of effort in multiple member states but whether the European Commission believes that’s appropriate remains unclear.

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Posted Tuesday 4 November 2025 at 5:03 am AEST (my time).

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The Internet is littered with cheap IPTV services that offer access to a lot of content, for very little money.

These deals often seem too good to be true, and in most cases they are, at least for those who prefer to stay on the right side of the law.

The operators of these services often remain in the shadows, but anti-piracy groups are actively trying to pin them down. For example, members of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) identified Mechanicsburg resident Brandon Weibley as the alleged operator of several commercial IPTV services offering pirated streams.

Studios Sue U.S. IPTV Operator

In a complaint filed at a Pennsylvania federal court in March, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, Paramount, and other major Hollywood studios accused Weibley of widespread copyright infringement through various IPTV brands. The companies alleged that Weibley has a long history of illegally profiting from pirated content.

The operator’s infringing activity dates back to 2017, when he allegedly registered the domain beastmodebuilds.com and began selling subscriptions to infringing streaming services. In the years that followed, the defendant was linked to various IPTV brands, such as Beast Mode Live, BTV, Viking Media, and GreenWing Media.

While the defendant made efforts to conceal his identity, investigators followed a digital trail that led to his personal email address.

The movie studios used this lead to confront Weibley in 2023, but instead of shutting down, he switched the operation to a different domain name, vonwik.com. Meanwhile, he continued to offer thousands of TV channels through the rebranded services ‘Shrugs’ and ‘Zing’.

Shrugs and Zing (Vonwik.com)
 

“Weibley now provides subscribers to the Current Infringing Services with access to more than 9,000 pirated channels, featuring Plaintiffs’ television series and movies, as well as international content and live sports events. This is infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on a massive scale,” the plaintiffs wrote in their complaint.

Defendant Ghosts Lawsuit, IPTV Services Remain Online

Weibley was served in person but filed no answer and failed to appear in court. As a result, the movie studios have now requested a default judgment and $9 million in damages.

In a motion submitted to the Pennsylvania court earlier this month, they note that, despite the lawsuit, the infringing IPTV services remain operational.

“Weibley has known since at least 2023 that his services infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights, yet he continued to operate them. Indeed, even after being personally served with the Complaint and knowing about this action, Weibley continues to operate the Current Infringing Services,” they write.

In an associated declaration, MPA Chief Content Protection Officer Larissa Knapp noted that the defendant is still believed to be in charge of the operation.

From Knapp’s declaration

The plaintiffs hope that a default judgment will change the status quo but if that’s not sufficient, an injunction will help to take the IPTV services offline.

Studios Seek $9 Million and an Injunction

The movie studios request the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work for a small sample of 60 copyrighted works, totaling $9,000,000. This is the maximum statutory penalty for “willful” infringement, which they argue applies to Weibley’s conduct.

According to the plaintiffs, the operator made the decision not to put up a defense. Therefore, the infringing activity was willful and punitive damages are appropriate.

$9,000,000 (proposed order)
 

The rightsholders realize that the lack of response is an indication that the defendant might not be inclined to pay any damages. Therefore, they also request a permanent injunction to compel domain registrars and registries to sign over vonwik.com and related domains.

In addition, the proposed injunction compels all related hosting providers to stop serving the IPTV services.

“Plaintiffs similarly seek an order directing the hosting providers of the Infringing Domains […] to suspend services to such domains and to prevent the content on the websites associated with the domains from being transferred to another domain name or hosting service,” the studios write.

At the time of writing, the court has yet to sign off on the motion for default judgment. It will be up to U.S. District Judge Yvette Kane to review the arguments and decide whether the $9 million award and permanent injunction are warranted.

The current lawsuit is one of two parallel cases filed by the ACE coalition back in March. The defendant in the other lawsuit, ‘Outer Limits IPTV’ operator Zachary DeBarr, also failed to formally answer the complaint. In August, a California federal court granted the studios’ motion for default judgment, awarding them $15 million in statutory damages.

—

A copy of the memorandum in support of the motion for default judgment is available here (pdf) and the proposed order can be found here (pdf). Knapp’s declaration is available here (pdf).

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Posted Sunday 2 November 2025 at 3:34 am AEST (my time).

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In October 2022, over 100 rightsholders, powerful media groups, and various organizations, demanded decisive action from the European Commission to tackle IPTV piracy of live sports and similar events.

Familiar names, including the MPA, UEFA, Premier League, Sky, beIN, LaLiga, and Serie A, demanded legislative change from the European Commission to ‘End Live Piracy Now’. That didn’t happen, and with no legislative instruments or European-wide regulation on the table, the EC launched a new consultation. Advice on how to use a ‘toolbox’ of existing measures appeared in a subsequent recommendation.

In October 2025, a full three years after their initial demands failed to elicit the preferred response, a coalition of rightsholders is once again demanding urgent action from the European Commission.

Coalition Demands New Legislation

In a letter addressed to Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen and Commissioner Glenn Micallef, top-ranking executives representing some of the most powerful corporations, sports leagues, broadcasters, and other rights holders make it clear that patience has run out.

After emphasizing their significant contribution to European entertainment, culture, and the wider EU economy, the coalition reports that the investment required to produce content of the highest quality, is still under threat from criminals operating illegally in the market.

“Our investments continue to be threatened by organized criminal enterprises. For years, rightsowners have raised the alarm. Today, piracy has reached scales that can no longer be ignored,” their letter to the EC notes.

“While we acknowledge the important work undertaken by the European Commission in addressing this challenge through the 2023 Recommendation on combating online piracy of sports and other live events, its implementation has yet to deliver tangible results. We therefore look forward to seeing further legislative steps being taken to achieve the objectives set out in the Recommendation.”

Billions of Euros in ‘Losses’

The scale of the problem is highlighted with reference to estimated losses to rightsholders running to many billions of euros. In most cases these figures concern revenue predictions for a hypothetical market free of piracy, so not actual losses per se, but still unrealized potential, in part due to unlicensed and illegal competition.

These ‘losses’ include €1.5 billion in France (actually €1.2 billion according to official data), where recent reports indicate that under existing legislation, IPTV piracy has already been contained.

The inclusion of €2.2 billion in estimated ‘losses’ in Italy appears to run counter to the claimed success of the Piracy Shield blocking system. That said, the figure receives at least partial support from reports that damages are soaring because Piracy Shield isn’t effective.

The letter also references a recent report indicating that the effectiveness of takedown notices has plummeted to an all-time low. As previously reported, the report seemed positioned to demand more action from EU lawmakers against intermediaries.

A deterioration in compliance rates would’ve been useful in negotiations, but taken in context, the figures paint a different picture.

Demands for Legislative Change

To tackle the threat posed by criminal competition, failing anti-piracy measures, and a EC Recommendation that had no measurable effect, the coalition is demanding the European Commission to urgently implement the following:

1. Ensure that, upon receipt of a notice, infringing content is taken down as near to immediately as possible and in all cases within a maximum time frame of 30 minutes. The urgency of live event piracy justifies a far shorter timeframe which is further supported by the fact that such removal can already be effected in a significantly shorter timeframe using the technology solutions available today.

 

2. Ensure EU-wide live dynamic blocking orders (including IP blocking) that address mirror sites and successor domains are made available in all Member States.

 

3. Ensure intermediaries (including but not limited to platforms, hosts, VPN, CDN and app stores) introduce and maintain robust Know Your Business Customer (KYBC) policies.

The Proposals: Good For Rightsholders, Bad For Everyone Else

Proposal 1 doesn’t appear to demand much from a legal perspective. It aligns with existing copyright law, the principle of rapid action to mitigate harm, and discards ambiguous terms in existing legislation (such as “expeditiously”) by defining a specific timeframe.

If we assume that the coalition wants the 30-minute maximum enshrined in law, that’s a fairly clear sign that in the absence of prosecutions against the operators of pirate IPTV services, liability would likely shift to intermediaries.

The significant burden of compliance warrants a reference to Piracy Shield’s 30-minute requirement and the fact that since its inception, ISPs have received nothing in exchange for compliance and have paid all costs from their own profits.

Proposal 2 concerning EU-wide live dynamic blocking orders, is much more complex than a short paragraph of text could ever hope to explain. On one hand, EU law already obliges member states to allow rightsholders to defend their rights, but specifying the means through which that should be achieved is something new.

A broad, results-based definition might work, but the fact that the coalition is insisting on legislation, suggests potential pushback from governments and/or local ISPs against implementing such measures. The reasons behind the reluctance may be quite complex, but it’s possible that aspects of national copyright law that align with the requirements of the EU cannot (or are not required to) accommodate the specific requirements of the major rightsholders.

The demand for IP address blocking to be enshrined in law disregards the findings of a highly competent study which details the failures of Piracy Shield. The study found that IP address blocking caused significant levels of collateral damage, with the knock-on effects still continuing today.

Proposal 3 calling for “robust KYC policies for intermediaries” is nothing new, but once again, intermediaries face the burden of compliance.

Based on the assumption that compliance would be enforceable, new legal obligations would ensure that the cost of compliance would come right off intermediaries’ bottom lines. Or, more likely, increase the costs for the 99%+ of customers for whom formal identification would be of no benefit, leaving less than 1% of potentially criminal customers to identify using fake or stolen documents, as many do already.

It’s important to note that the proposals in the letter are exceptionally brief and lack key details and nuance that will only develop in time. That being said, at face value the most cynical part of the proposal concerns app stores, CDNs, and VPNs.

Since app stores already require developers to comply with rules under the Digital Services Act, the mention here raises questions of who the proposal targets. The prospect of ~740 million European citizens having to show their papers to gain access to mobile apps would be an extraordinary proposal. The negative effect on privacy, amplified by increased risk of data breaches and other cybersecurity threats, would be unquestionably disproportionate.

Introduce the same concept to many VPN providers, for whom the privacy model plays a central role in everything from hosting choices to online marketing, mandatory KYBC rules would undermine their entire business and the privacy of millions of customers.

The requirement would almost guarantee that subscribers would immediately seek alternatives and spend their money outside the EU.

None of the proposals directly specify their targets, so may be subject to change or interpretation. But for the purpose of identifying a vanishingly small number of potential bad actors, each with a limitless supply of stolen data to identify as someone else, the proposal seems destined to fail.

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Posted Saturday 1 November 2025 at 3:06 am AEST (my time).

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