TorrentFreak

The extraordinary online popularity of Japanese manga comics shows no sign of retreat, with pirate site-based consumption at unprecedented levels fueled by billions of visits.

Japanese publishers are pursuing pirate site operators all around the world but no matter where they’re physically located, the majority have some kind of infrastructure directly behind a reverse proxy at Cloudflare. All rightsholders have to do is obtain a DMCA subpoena, serve Cloudflare, and sift through the resulting mountain of logs for clues and, in an ideal world, signs of an operator security blunder.

Shueisha Targets ~25 Domains

Shueisha’s appearance at a U.S. court this week adds to a growing list of actions in the United States by Japanese publishers including Shogakukan, Kadokawa and Kodansha.

Shueisha’s subpoena target is Cloudflare and having already served DMCA takedown notices as required, Shueisha should receive data for around two dozen pirate domains.

All listed domains are accused of infringing Shueisha’s rights in ONE PIECE, a manga series featuring a search for mythical treasure and a chance to become the next King of the Pirates.

The domains of interest to Shueisha look broadly familiar; most feature the word ‘manga’ and the term ‘raw’ (a reference to unmodified comics in their original language) is quite common too. Beyond that, the list represents a typical example of domains that probably won’t be in use for very long. At some point they’re likely to be replaced by others that in many cases will look confusingly similar to their predecessors.

It’s Manga Time

For those outside the manga piracy community, keeping track of these changes can become a real chore. A site with a new domain, assisted by various means, may appear out of what seems like thin air, before becoming one of the world’s most popular pirate sites in a matter of weeks. Others may disappear into obscurity in what seems like an instant.

The screenshot above shows the site at the top of Shueisha’s list. Mangajikan, or ‘cartoon time’ in English, was registered in May 2024 and for the first couple of months of 2025, attracted very little interest from rightsholders.

In early March, everything changed.

DMCA takedown notices for Google search initially tripled, and then around two weeks later, doubled in volume. Traffic of ‘just’ a few million in January kept increasing; in March, Mangajikan received over 104 million visits, then in April a surprise reduction to ‘just’ 90 million.

Then, in May, Mangajikan more than doubled its existing traffic; in just four weeks, 90 million visits became 185 million.

This surge made Mangajikan the most popular site in SimilarWeb’s ‘Animation and Comics’ category for the whole of Japan, and the 17th most popular site in the country overall.

In such a short period of time, that type of growth could be mistaken for magic. Sleight of hand probably shouldn’t be ruled out, or indeed, a few extra domains up a sleeve donating unwanted traffic.

Whatever the technique, Mangajikan was more popular than Facebook, and more visited than ChatGPT. Lagging behind in 24th position, Pornhub didn’t even make the chart.

Bye. Website Closed

After taking the internet by storm in the blink of an eye, Mangajikan.com’s apparent retreat into the ether was even more swift. The site’s goodbye note is functional, even bilingual, but fairly brief by most standards. The same message appears on mangajikan.to

So did the site really shut down or did it just change shape?

Organized Instability

If we refer back to Shueisha’s list, traffic to most of the domains has either fallen dramatically in the last three months, or increased in much the same way.

One of the Mangaraw-branded domains in the list had 27.5 million visits in March but just 7 million in May. Another with the same branding saw visitor numbers fall from 28.4 million to 19.4 million in the same period. A third Mangaraw domain had 20.4 million visits in March, 8.4 million in April, and 3.8 million in May. Visits seem unlikely to have simply dried up.

Overall, Vietnam-focused domains may be the biggest movers in the DMCA subpoena application, two in particular. Both had zero traffic in March but during May, one had 27.5m visits which made it the 24th most popular site in the whole of Vietnam.

SimilarWeb data shows that the second grew even more quickly – zero visits in March to 77.2 million in May, allowing the domain to take the #9 slot in Vietnam’s most-visited website list with relative ease.

A Disappointing Ending For Some

There are clear signs that visits to Mangajikan found their way to other domains, one with identical branding and another with a more generic name. According to Semrush data, the latter had a significant visitor boost in May after receiving close to 40% of Mangajikan’s outbound traffic.

While that domain also makes an appearance in the DMCA subpoena application, Semrush data reveals that around 20% of outbound traffic went directly to a more suspicious looking domain. For obvious reasons we’re not naming it here.

URLQuery reports that Quad9 flagged the domain as ‘malicious’ and then sinkholed it, protecting users of its DNS from what appears to be a Chaturbate-linked or Chaturbate-branded popunder affair, followed by whatever surprises came next.

We have no information about the outcome but on the balance of probabilities, it’s unlikely to have involved free Japanese comics. And if there’s no new manga involved, in practical terms that translates to zero interest shown by those eager to consume it.

That’s a problem for all current major anti-piracy campaigns globally, regardless of the content they aim to protect.

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Earlier this month, dozens of rightsholders and copyright groups urged the European Commission to pave the way for more robust measures to tackle live-streaming piracy.

Two main themes in many of these submissions were broad pirate site blocking powers and effective Know-Your-Business-Customer (KYBC) requirements for online service providers.

Ideally, this would enable rightsholders to swiftly block pirate sites while allowing them to track down the identities of those responsible. According to the MPA, IFPI, beIN, Eurocinema, FEVIP, Premier League and others, blocking and/or KYBC are essential to combat piracy.

ISPs are Deeply Concerned

These calls for broader enforcement are neither new nor unexpected. At the same time, they are not without opposition either. Among the many rightsholder requests, EuroISPA, the world’s largest association of Internet Service Providers, urges caution.

“We are deeply concerned by the approach taken by some European rightsholders and certain Member States, who have implemented disproportionate network blocking measures,” the association writes.

EuroISPA represents over 3,300 ISPs, including several of the largest European providers. The group is particularly concerned about regimes where over-blocking and collateral damage have damaged many innocent parties.

Despite previous overblocking incidents, the rollout of increasingly broader blocking regimes continues. Where the initial orders were targeted at local ISPs, more recent blocking requests have included DNS resolvers, which operate globally. This introduces fallout well beyond EU borders.

“Despite numerous over-blocking incidents, certain Member States continue to escalate their efforts and have therefore taken increasingly aggressive measures to expand blocking orders beyond local ISPs,” EuroISPA writes.

Problematic Blocking Efforts

The ISP association lists several concrete examples of collateral damage caused by overblocking. This includes an intervention in Italy, where a Cloudflare IP-address was blocked, rendering tens of thousands of websites inaccessible for Italian users.

Italy’s blocking regime, known as “Piracy Shield“, also added the drive.usercontent.google.com domain, which made Google Drive unavailable in the country for more than half a day. This error was the result of reports from “trusted flaggers”, EuroISPA notes.

Case study: Italy

In Spain, there were similar overblocking issues related to third party service providers, including Cloudflare. One blocking order targeting CDN infrastructure, requested by the football league LaLiga, was approved in court while the owners of the servers were not informed, leading to collateral damage.

This led to many outages for legitimate websites without any advance warning for those affected, EuroISPA says.

“LaLiga secured the blocking order without notifying cloud providers, while knowingly concealing from the court the predictable harm to the general public. This blunt approach not only demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works, it also violates the principle of net neutrality.”

The ISPs worry that ‘expeditious’ blocking requirements, including an often mentioned 30-minute timeframe to take action, will lead to more errors. There are concerns that smaller service providers are simply not equipped to properly analyze the accuracy of blocking requests in such a short timeframe.

When done properly, EuroISPA believes that blocking remains an option. In this light, EuroISPA mentions an order in Belgium under the Copyright Directive framework, that offered “clear guidance” and “legal certainty” for ISPs, enabling them to take prompt and appropriate action.

Guidelines and Cooperation

EuroISPA isn’t ruling out all blocking efforts, it’s concerned that the current blocking push is disproportionate and a threat to the open Internet. Instead, of expanding the European Digital Services Act, which has yet to be implemented in many member states, the EU should foster cooperation.

“EuroISPA believes that collaborative approaches between rightsholders and intermediaries are more effective than relying on court orders and invites rightsholders to engage directly with ISPs rather than pursue legal action against them.

“The ultimate goal should be to bring together stakeholders – despite their potentially conflicting business interests – to collaborate on finding practical and sustainable solutions to piracy online.”

The call for voluntary cooperation is not new and, in some countries, this is a reality today. However, this also requires both sides to reach common ground, which can be easier said than done.

KYBC, DNS and VPN Expansions

While EuroISPA opens the door to future agreements, it’s also clear that the European Commission should not burden internet service providers with further anti-piracy obligations.

The association notes that expanding the current KYBC provision will introduce extra risks for the ISPs, which could potentially undermine the Internet as a whole.

The same is true for the suggested addition of DNS and VPN providers as site blocking partners. While EuroISPA doesn’t rule that out, it notes that the legal and technical aspects of these measures should be carefully analyzed before any action is taken.

All in all, the ISPs urge the European Commission to tread with caution and keep the interests of all stakeholders in mind when deciding what steps to take next.

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A copy of EuroISPA’s submission in response to the European Commission’s assessment of the May 2023 Commission Recommendation to combating online piracy of sports and other live events is available here (pdf).

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In countries where protection is granted automatically, it’s possible for ordinary people to become copyright owners in a matter of minutes.

For the lucky few with a sudden viral video on their hands, a general understanding of the ‘rules’ governing what can, can’t, or should be done next, could be of benefit.

What those ‘rules’ cannot do is prevent 500, 1000, or 5,000 unauthorized copies appearing in a matter of minutes. The best on offer in that respect is a potential means to remove them.

Mass Takedowns Every Day

Japan-based anti-piracy group CODA represents the world’s leading manga publishers.

The company’s comprehensive knowledge of ‘the rules’ extends from Japan, to China and the United States, through South America and across Europe. But, preventing content from appearing on all pirate sites is effectively impossible.

And once there, pirated copies are consumed in enormous quantities.

Along with its animated cousin anime, manga content is pirated to the tune of billions of times every year. When not working on prevention, CODA’s job includes taking pirated content down. In its annual business report published this week, CODA provides relatively rare insight into how three dozen platforms responded after receiving a takedown notice.

Covering known pirate sites hosting platforms operating in less clearly defined waters, and household names like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, CODA’s report contains some interesting surprises.

The Big Picture

The data relates to the period April 2024 and March 2025. Takedown requests are reported by the number of URLs requested for removal (URL notifications) and how many were removed in response, for notices mostly based on human-based monitoring.

For the 37 platforms mentioned in the report, CODA filed a total of 677,269 requests of which 652,071 were human-generated. Of the 677,269 in total, the targeted platforms responded with 545,870 deletions, for an overall compliance rate of 80.6%.

The platforms that received the highest number of URL notifications during the year were:

#1 Facebook (social media) 176,610 notifications #2 MP4upload (video hosting) 116,563 notifications #3 Streamtape (video hosting) 75,789 notifications #4 Okru (social media) 38,173 notifications (also known as Ok.ru) #5 Bilibili (manga/anime community) 35,849 notifications. Data source: CODA

The platforms that received the lowest number were Internet Archive (111), Iqiyi (54), followed by Instagram, Himado, and Weibo, all with less than 47 notifications each.

Takedown Compliance

A number of notice recipients achieved a perfect 100% compliance rate. Internet Archive and the others at the bottom of the list responded by taking everything down, albeit after receiving relatively few notices.

Perfect scores were also achieved on bigger numbers.

Mixdrop, a hosting platform regularly branded a pirate service and blocked by ISPs in some regions, received 6,944 URL notifications and took every piece of related content down. File hosting platform Mega acted similarly, removing 11,066 URLs in response to a request to remove an identical number.

When moving on to the bigger numbers, we see the highest compliance rates:

#1 MP4upload: 116,563 notifications, 100.00% compliance #2 Streamtape: 75,789 notifications, 100.00% compliance #3 Bilibilitv: 28,485 notifications, 99.99% compliance Data source: CODA

Like its counterpart Mixdrop, Streamtape is also considered a ‘pirate’ site by several rightsholders and blocked by ISPs in some jurisdictions.

For comparison, Facebook’s compliance rate was 93.97% (from 176,610 URLs), YouTube achieved 97.84% (20,453), while TikTok fell just short of a perfect score with 99.87% (14,328).

Why compliance rates are so high at sites with a reputation for piracy is unclear. The likelihood of getting blocked in another region may be a factor, or perhaps by taking content down, there’s a belief that might make them less of a target for enforcement action.

The unwelcome prospect of takedown notices being sent to hosting companies can’t be ruled out, since in theory they would have no choice but to take some kind of action, or else face action themselves.

For some hosts, however, these rules don’t amount to much; the same applies to some pirate sites.

Total Non-Compliance

When looking at platforms with low compliance rates there are several that also received a considerable number of notifications. Based on the data, three entities scored 0% compliance, despite receiving a minimum of 11,000 notices.

#1 Dramacool: 35,214 notifications, zero deleted (0% compliance) #2 Videokvid: 12,583 notifications zero deleted (0% compliance) #3 9anime: 11,625 notifications zero deleted (0% compliance)

Other non-responding platforms include gogoanime, voiranime, anitubebiz, and gogoanime_tv, all with zero deletions and 0% compliance.

Compliance Weighed Against Perceived Intent

While some of these pirate sites have huge numbers of visitors, they’re no competition for the likes of Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. So while some achieved the perfect 100%, their overall traffic is lower and the amount of infringing content on their platforms outweighs the volume of licensed/legal content.

That’s the all-important ratio that will keep them in the anti-piracy spotlight for many years to come, regardless of compliance, which admittedly may buy some time. How much is impossible to say.

CODA’s full 2024 Business Report is available here (PDF, Japanese) with the data featured above starting at page 11 and spanning the next few pages.

The single table below shows the same data, with text translated from Japanese.

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Despite the widespread availability of legal options, online piracy remains rampant. Every day, pirate sites are visited hundreds of millions of times.

Website visits are only part of the full piracy picture, as IPTV streaming is popular too. Nonetheless, traffic trends can provide valuable insight, especially when there are clear divergences across content categories.

216 Billion & America First

Fresh data released by piracy tracking outfit MUSO shows that pirate sites remain popular. In a report released today, MUSO reveals that there were 216 billion pirate site visits globally in 2024, a slight decrease compared to the 229 billion visits recorded a year earlier.

TV piracy remains by far the most popular category, representing over 44.6% of all website visits. This is followed by the publishing category with 30.7%, with film, software and music all at a respectable distance.

Piracy by Category

Pirate site visitors originate from all over the world, but one country stands tall above all the rest: America. The United States remains the top driver of pirate site traffic accounting for more than 12% of all traffic globally, good for 26.7 billion visits in 2024.

India has been steadily climbing the ranks for years and currently sits in second place with 17.6 billion annual visits, with Russia, Indonesia, and Vietnam completing the top five.

Visits per country

As a country with one of the largest populations worldwide, it’s not a complete surprise that the U.S. tops the list. If we counted visits per internet user, Canada and Ukraine would top the list.

Manga Piracy Booms

While pirate site visits dipped by more than 5% in 2024, one category saw substantial growth. Visits to publishing-related pirate sites increased 4.3% from 63.6 to 66.4 billion.

The increase is largely driven by the popularity of manga, which accounts for more than 70% of all publishing piracy. Traditional book piracy, meanwhile, is stuck at 5%.

The publishing piracy boom is relatively new. Over the past five years, the category grew by more than 100% while the overall number of global pirate site visits remained relatively flat.

Publishing piracy growth

Looking at the global demand, we see that the U.S. also leads the charge here, followed by Indonesia and Russia. Notably, Japan, the home of manga, ranks fifth in the publishing category. This stands out because Japan is not listed in the global top 15 in terms of total pirate site visits.

Music & Film Piracy Tank

In the other content categories, MUSO’s data shows a dip in pirate site visits. The changes are relatively modest for TV (-6.8%) and software (-2.1%) but the same isn’t true for the music and film categories.

In 2024, there were 18% fewer visits for pirated movies compared to a year earlier. MUSO notes that this is due to a “lighter blockbuster calendar” which reduced piracy peaks. “The drop in demand is as much about what wasn’t released as it is about access,” the report explains.

The music category saw a 19% decline in piracy visits year over year, with a more uplifting explanation for rightsholders. According to MUSO, the drop can be partly attributed to “secure app ecosystems” and the “wide adoption of licensed platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.”

Piracy Leads The Way

MUSO’s business model is to market these piracy data to rightsholders so they can use piracy as a market signal. Piracy is not necessarily triggered by unavailability; legal channels, pricing, and fragmentation are also key drivers.

“Piracy continues to reveal unmet demand: where audiences want content, but legal channels are too slow, too fragmented, or too expensive,” the company explains in a blog post.

There’s also a more practical application for the piracy data. Since MUSO tracks which pirate sites are most popular, rightsholders can use the data for their site blocking efforts.

“With monthly updated insights at the country and category level, alongside access to site-level intelligence, our data empowers rightsholders, regulators, and ISPs to prioritize action where it has the most impact,” MUSO writes.

Whether blocking access will stop people from trying to find piracy alternatives is up for debate. Perhaps pirate site blocking plans in the U.S. will provide more insight, if they come to fruition.

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A copy of MUSO’s 2024 Piracy Trends and Insights report can be requested through the official website.

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In late 2022, music industry giants including Warner Bros. and Sony Music secured a victory in their lawsuit against Internet provider Grande Communications.

The record labels had accused the Astound-owned ISP of failing to adequately address its subscribers’ copyright infringement, specifically by not terminating repeat offenders.

This resulted in a Texas federal jury finding Grande liable for willful contributory copyright infringement and $47 million in damages.

While the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals later upheld the infringement verdict, the lower court’s decision on how damages should be calculated was overturned, meaning a new trial is needed to determine the final amount. Meanwhile, Grande continues to contest the core liability ruling.

Grande Petitions Supreme Court

In March 2025, Grande took its fight to the Supreme Court. The ISP petitioned for intervention, arguing that existing law offers no clear guidance for providers on how to handle copyright infringement notices or when to terminate subscriber accounts. Grande’s petition specifically asked the Supreme Court to address two key questions:

“Whether an ISP is liable for contributory copyright infringement by (i) providing content-neutral internet access to the general public and (ii) failing to terminate that access after receiving two third-party notices alleging someone at a customer’s IP address has infringed.”

Grande’s petition is similar to one filed by Cox Communications last year, but it’s more tightly focused on the termination threshold. Specifically, it requests clarity on how ISPs are to respond when they receive more than one third-party allegation of copyright infringement.

Record Labels Highlight “Egregious” Infringement

Where Grande is distilling the matter to its basics, the music companies responded by pointing out that the ISP has a “never terminate” policy. The question of how ISPs should respond to two third-party copyright infringement notices is a mere “hypothetical,” they countered.

“Grande refused to terminate service under any circumstance, even after receiving thousands (or tens of thousands) of credible infringement notices about a single customer,” the music companies responded at the Supreme Court.

The rightsholders stress that Grande was well aware of the fact that many of its subscribers were engaged in “egregious” copyright infringement. Instead of taking action to stop this activity, the ISP allegedly did nothing. Therefore, the music companies asked the Supreme Court to deny the petition.

Grande: What Does Egregious Even Mean?

Before the Supreme Court decides whether to take on the case, Grande took the opportunity to have the last word. The ISP vehemently disagrees with the record labels, arguing that they’re trying to dodge a Supreme Court review by mischaracterizing the central legal question and the factual record.

Grande argued that the core issue is, and always has been, whether an ISP can be held liable for contributory copyright infringement simply for providing internet access to subscribers who are merely known (i.e., received two or more infringement notices), rather than proven “egregious,” infringers.

They accuse the music companies of inventing the “egregious infringement” standard that was never part of the case, to make their victory seem less controversial. According to Grande, the judgment against it was based on the broader, lower threshold of two or more notices.

“Respondents have no basis for contesting the obvious certworthiness of this question. So they instead try to dodge review by blatantly rewriting the record,” Grande notes, adding that the appeal court “did not say anything about ‘egregious’ infringement because respondents’ case was not limited to egregious infringement.”

Maybe 10 notices? 20? 50? 500?

The Internet provider stresses that current copyright law isn’t clear on the threshold for repeat infringement. This was simply not defined by Congress in the DMCA and, after being a non-issue for years, has now resulted in multiple lawsuits with billions of dollars on the line.

The music companies’ argument citing “egregious” infringement is not what this case boils down to, the ISP notes, as providers have been held liable for subscribers that allegedly infringed twice. Grande adds that it isn’t even clear what “egregious” means.

“Aside from being divorced from reality, respondents’ new theory is also half-baked. What exactly is ‘egregious’ infringement? Respondents never say. If not two notices, where is the threshold? Maybe 10 notices? 20? 50? 500?” Grande writes.

“Respondents never even try to define where their line exists. And the reason for that failure is obvious: any number above two is inherently arbitrary. If the point is that ISPs are aware of specific users engaged in specific infringement, then any notice should suffice.”

10 notices? 20? 50? 500?

In addition to disputing the number of infringements that qualify for liability, the ISP also highlights the Supreme Court’s recent analysis of secondary liability in Twitter v. Taamneh, suggesting that providers may not be secondarily liable for subscribers at all.

Cox and the U.S. Amicus Brief

Grande has made many of these arguments before, but it now sees itself strengthened by an amicus brief the U.S. Solicitor General sent to the Supreme Court, encouraging it to take on the related Cox petition. That case also revolves around liability, with music companies taking on the ISP.

The U.S. opinion referenced the aforementioned Taamneh ruling, questioned ISP liability, and warned that the current precedent may lead to disconnections for many innocent subscribers. While Grande’s petition has different nuances, the company says that it would serve as an “ideal companion” case.

“The government has confirmed that Cox should be granted — as it plainly should. This case remains an ideal companion to Cox. It presents the purest form of the question on the cleanest record,” the ISP writes.

With all arguments now on the table, the decision rests with the Supreme Court. The Justices will decide whether to grant Grande’s petition, a move that could have profound implications for the entire ISP industry and its role in battling online piracy.

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A copy of Grande’s reply brief, which was submitted to the Supreme Court a few days ago, is available here (pdf).

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In 2006 alone, Russia-based AllOfMP3 reportedly banked $30 million from sales of an unauthorized music product for which the major labels received no payment.

The unlikely stage for the industry’s response to global sales of cheap, unlicensed DRM-free music, was Denmark. Under pressure from industry group IFPI, ISP Tele2 blocked AllofMP3’s domain, an event that will soon celebrate its 20th anniversary.

While never likely to threaten the site’s overall traffic, the Danish block was at once symbolic and historic. Nineteen years later, Denmark has almost 2,800 domains on its current blocklist, a figure that’s easily eclipsed by the tens of thousands of domains and subdomains blocked globally every month, largely without report or fanfare.

ICANN Publishes DNS Blocking Report

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the non-profit organization whose management of the internet’s name and number spaces (domains and DNS / IP addresses) helps to provide a stable internet. In a recently published report, ICANN provides a comprehensive view of the Domain Name System (DNS) and the effects of its antithesis: DNS blocking.

Published by ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), ‘DNS Blocking Revisited’ aims to raise awareness among all internet users, but especially those whose decisions can make a real difference. For those considering DNS blocking as a potential solution, to the authorities with the power to permit or deny its use, ICANN’s message is clear. Full comprehension of the potential repercussions of DNS blocking is a prerequisite to limiting harm.

“The aim of this report is to advise the Internet community, and especially policymakers and government officials, of the implications and consequences of using DNS blocking to control access to resources on the Internet,” the report begins.

“DNS blocking can have serious side effects. A block may affect users outside the jurisdiction of the party doing the blocking. Users may not know that a block is in place, and can interpret it as a site outage or other error, encouraging potentially insecure behavior to ‘fix’ it. A block may affect domains that provide services for other domains, causing collateral damage beyond the intended scope of the block.”

Motivation and Expectation

ICANN takes no position on whether DNS blocking is good or bad, or whether specific motivations to block tip the scales one way or another. Whether supported by local law, justified on morality grounds, or mandated by governments purely for the purpose of censorship, the report focuses on the technical aspects of DNS blocking, the consequences, and advice to limit harm.

The report defines DNS blocking as an approach to regulating or restricting access to information on the internet by interfering with the normal process of responding to DNS queries about domain names or IP addresses.

This is usually achieved by “denying that a name or address exists or by providing false information about it.”

While easy to implement, DNS blocking is only effective against users of the DNS where blocking is implemented, and has no effect on the existence of the targeted content, which remains accessible by alternative means.

These limitations should be well understood since they help to determine whether DNS blocking can fulfil the stated objectives. Having weighed the benefits and considered the implications, DNS blocking may not be needed at all.

“It is important that any entity mandating or implementing DNS blocking understands the implications of the technology. For example, DNS blocking in one jurisdiction can affect the accessibility of content in another jurisdiction. Legal authorities should form technically informed views about DNS blocking, and understand if, or the extent to which, DNS blocking may accomplish their goals and how it may affect parties outside their jurisdictions,” the report adds.

Bad DNS Blocking is Bad

DNS blocking often amounts to the protection of business interests, yet blocking for security reasons is encountered by millions of internet users every day. They include shielding minors from harmful or adult content, use of domain blocklists by major web browsers to warn users about unsafe sites, and DNS filtering to prevent exposure to malicious domains. An example cited by ICANN suggests that DNS blocking may even be a less restrictive alternative to avoid the global consequences of suspending an entire domain name.

Yet, regardless of motivation, DNS blocking measures of any kind should have clearly defined scope.

“While one jurisdiction may find that it is allowable and desirable to block a domain name, another jurisdiction may consider blocking that domain to be a violation of human or civil rights,” ICANN says.

The report highlights legal action by rightsholders against Quad9 and Cloudflare. Where DNS blocking by ISPs targets a specific, clearly defined local ‘audience’, DNS blocking at public resolvers used by a global audience risks overblocking on a much bigger scale.

In a case involving Quad9, a court order to block specific sites on copyright grounds offered no guidance on key technical issues, leaving Quad9 to block the sites globally, to avoid being held in contempt.

DNS Blocking Weakens The Battle Against Security Threats

ICANN’s report highlights issues involving internet security that are either caused or exacerbated by DNS blocking measures. For example, redirects due to DNS blocking can cause browser TLS errors that ordinarily signal a potential security threat. ICANN suggests that over exposure effectively ‘trains’ users to ignore certificate mismatches.

In the wider fight against global threat actors, DNS block circumvention reduces visibility of both traffic patterns and security threats.

“DNS data gives Internet Service Providers (ISPs) an important and accurate picture of both traffic patterns and security threats on their networks,” ICANN reports, adding that DNS data can help ISPs diagnose denial-of-service attacks, identify infected hosts, compromised domains, and vulnerable customers.

“When users turn to alternative DNS servers, some network operators, ISPs, and enterprises may experience decreased ability to manage security threats and manage certain network operations. For example, if a user accesses the third party recursive resolver via an encrypted connection using DNS over HTTPS (DoH) or DNS over TLS (DoT) and is infected with malware, the user’s ISP may not be able to detect that and notify the infected user, since DNS telemetry is being diverted away from the ISP.”

Disclosure, Transparency, Blocking Infrastructure

While reduced visibility of threats is cited as a concern, the view of DNS blocking itself is often obscured by a lack of disclosure and limited transparency.

“[DNS] blocking policies and actions are often not disclosed to affected parties, including to end users. This can make it difficult for end-users to understand when they are being blocked, or why,” ICANN warns.

“Absent some level of transparency, DNS blocking can be difficult to recognize for what it is. It can be misdiagnosed as a hosting outage, a misconfiguration, or a malicious attack.”

Before concluding with ICANN’s recommendations, an issue touched on briefly in the report but worth highlighting again, concerns the construction and embedding of online infrastructure to facilitate blocking of piracy, fraud, ransomware, and botnets.

Citing a 2023 open letter written by TCP/IP co-developer Vinton Cerf, “Concerns Over DNS Blocking” warns that the same infrastructure could be easily adapted “to suppress internal dissent, censor outside information, and surveil dissidents and journalists.”

ICANN Recommendations

Listed here verbatim are three rock-solid recommendations from ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee.

Recommendation 1: SSAC recommends that any entity implementing or mandating DNS blocking understand the implications of the technology.

Recommendation 2: SSAC recommends that DNS blocking implemented by any entity — by a government or any organization that has policy, legal, or operational control over a network or service—follow these guidelines:

A. The entity should determine whether DNS blocking will fulfill its objectives. B. The entity should have a clear policy about what and how it will block, with well-defined review and decision-making processes that minimize risk. C. The entity should implement the policy using a technique that minimizes overblocking or collateral damage that could affect its users. D. The entity should not affect networks or users outside its administrative control.

Recommendation 3: SSAC recommends that operators of recursive servers use DNS Extended Error codes (see section 6.6 Extended DNS Error) to indicate to end users and troubleshooters that DNS blocking is taking place

The report DNS Blocking Revisited is available here (pdf)

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Two years ago, the European Commission published a non-binding recommendation to tackle the problem of live-streaming piracy, sports in particular.

For instance, the EU encouraged member states to introduce measures to facilitate prompt takedowns of live streams, while service providers and rightsholders were encouraged to tackle challenges through collaboration.

To the disappointment of many rightsholders, the recommendation required no mandatory action by EU member states. So, when the Commission recently launched an evaluation asking stakeholders to share their views on the recommendation, many asked for more robust legislation.

Advanced piracy blocking systems are high on the agenda. Semi-automated mechanisms capable of blocking sources quickly are preferred. These should be implemented by ISPs, but rightsholders see a role for DNS services and VPNs too.

Variations on this type of mechanism are currently active in Italy, Spain and France. Rightsholders, including the MPA and DAZN, mentioned this in their responses to the Commission, calling for expansion in the EU. However, not everyone agrees that broader and more automated blocking efforts are the right path forward.

Cloudflare Issues Stark ‘Blocking’ Warning

American tech giant Cloudflare, which provides CDN, proxy and DNS services, is fiercely against automated blockades. The company has been at the center of various blocking actions in recent months, as its infrastructure was targeted in Italy, Spain, and France.

In some instances, this has led to overblocking where legitimate Cloudflare customers (and their users) were hit as collateral damage.

“Over the past two years, we have witnessed disproportionate and damaging efforts by rightsholders to use blocking measures to tackle piracy online, particularly in relation to unauthorized live streaming of sports,” Cloudflare writes.

From Cloudflare’s submission

Cloudflare notes that pressure from rightsholders has led some European national governments to implement “problematic and imprecise” blocking mechanisms. It says that these blocking tools “often lack due process” and result in “significant collateral damage” for legitimate internet users and businesses across the EU.

As an intermediary, Cloudflare’s infrastructure and IP-addresses are used by pirate sites and services. However, since these are shared with innocent sites, blocking renders those inaccessible too.

“Blocking one IP address, thus can render thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of domains unreachable,” Cloudflare warns.

Italy, Spain, and France

Cloudflare specifically highlights Italy, Spain, and France as countries where problems have emerged. The Italian “Piracy Shield” law has resulted in “overblocking on a massive scale,” the company says, adding that it violates the Charter of Fundamental Rights and EU law.

In Spain, blocking orders also caused substantial collateral damage. Cloudflare explains that, due to a broad court order that included Cloudflare IP-addresses, millions of Spanish users were blocked from accessing thousands of non-targeted websites.

“This blunt approach not only demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works, it also raises significant questions about compliance with the European Union’s Open Internet Regulation,” Cloudflare writes.

In France, meanwhile, courts have ordered VPN providers and DNS resolvers to block pirate sites. At the same time, there are plans to update the law to enable blockades of pirated live sports broadcasts in real-time, which also raises overblocking concerns.

No VPN and DNS Blocking

Cloudflare urges the EU to tread with caution going forward. Instead of updating the law to enable broader blocking powers, it calls for limiting the blocking efforts.

For example, it argues that blocking orders should never extend to core, global Internet technologies such as global DNS resolvers and VPNs. These services operate globally and can’t easily restrict blocking measures geographically, the company notes.

“Blocking applied to an ISP-owned DNS resolver will have a geographically restricted effect, since an ISP typically only serves users in one country. In contrast, public DNS resolvers or VPN providers operate globally.”

Aside from the technical challenges, Cloudflare notes that VPNs and proxies are widely used to protect free expression. Interfering with these services through onerous regulation could amount to a violation of privacy and freedom of expression.

Transparency, Safeguards and Compensation

Cloudflare recognizes that piracy is a real problem that needs to be addressed. However, it believes that more extensive blocking is not necessarily the answer. Instead, it calls for more transparency, proper safeguards, and cooperation between all stakeholders.

Cloudflare’s suggestions include the following (abbreviated and summarized).

– Last Resort Only: Blocking should only be used as a final option to reduce local access to pirated content.

– Protect Core Internet Technologies: Blocking orders must not apply to essential global internet technologies like global DNS resolvers and VPNs.

– Prioritize Notice-and-Takedown: Rightsholders must first attempt notice-and-takedown procedures with hosting providers before requesting blocking.

– Independent Verification: All blocking requests need formal justification and independent verification by a designated governmental or independent regulatory body.

– Transparency: Transparency reports should detail the blocked domains, implementation times, and the identities of requesting parties.

– Rapid Rectification: Publicly available rapid response systems should be in place to quickly correct any incorrect or overly broad blocking measures.

– Independent Dispute Resolution: An independent body should hear appeals from any affected parties, ensuring legal review and procedural fairness.

– Liability for Overblocking: Rightsholders should be held liable for any economic or reputational harm caused to non-targeted third parties due to overblocking.

EU Urged to Resist One-Sided Blocking Calls

More drastic blocking demands are not the way to tackle piracy, according to Cloudflare. Instead of drafting new legislation, the EU is encouraged to facilitate healthy cooperation where all stakeholders are heard.

“The European Commission should resist excessive requests to expand network level blocking as a means to tackle piracy,” Cloudflare writes.

“Effectively dealing with piracy of live events will depend on multiple solutions being deployed simultaneously, combining sharing of data, law enforcement measures, industry cooperation, and measures for distribution of legal content that better satisfy the demand.”

This can all be done without new legislation, Cloudflare says. While that may be true in theory, previous calls for increased collaboration haven’t led to concrete progress. And with tensions rising to the point where disagreements are fought out in public, cooperation between some parties might be a challenge.

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A copy of Cloudflare’s submission in response to the European Commission’s assessment of the May 2023 Commission Recommendation to combating online piracy of sports and other live events is available here (pdf)

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In common with many services provided by Google, its search engine is wide open and free of charge at the point of delivery.

The quid pro quo is the user’s consumption of Google ads, placed by millions of advertisers for all kinds of products.

Given the scale, it’s no surprise that some offer products of dubious origin. The question is who can be held liable beyond the seller, and under what specific circumstances.

Textbook Pirates

In June 2024, some of the world’s largest publishers came together in a joint lawsuit targeting Google. In a complaint filed at a New York federal court, companies including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, Elsevier, and McGraw Hill bemoaned Google’s ‘systemic and pervasive advertising’ of infringing copies of their copyrighted textbooks.

The publishers’ allegations concerning Google Shopping describe ads that use unauthorized images of the publishers’ genuine textbooks, some with visible trademarks, to promote sales of pirated copies. A ‘bait-and-switch’ by Google, the publishers allege. More generally, the publishers claim that Google searches for their textbook titles return piracy-heavy results, making their original products more difficult to find.

The publishers claim ‘pirate’ ad takedown notices were sent repeatedly to Google, but to little effect. Notifications identifying specific ‘pirate sellers’ as repeat infringers didn’t lead to Google terminating their accounts “within a reasonable time, if at all.”

Google’s Motion to Dismiss

In a recent motion to dismiss, Google sought to thin out the publishers’ claims, which include vicarious copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and violation of New York’s deceptive business practices law.

In an opinion and order handed down this week, United States District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon analyzes the publishers’ claims and relevant legal precedents. Google believes the publishers’ vicarious copyright infringement claim should be dismissed; the Judge put that to the test.

A vicarious copyright infringement claim must contain two elements:

• The right and ability to supervise the infringing conduct and • Direct financial interest in the infringing activity

Google moved to dismiss based on the publishers’ alleged failure to plead both elements. The Court had no need to go further than the first.

Ability to Supervise or Control

A finding of vicarious liability in this case turns on Google’s relationship to the pirate textbook sellers (direct infringers), not just the infringement itself. The first element must show that Google had the ability to supervise or control the third parties’ infringing activity yet failed to do so.

Google says that because the alleged direct infringement (sales of pirated textbooks) took place on the pirate sellers’ third-party websites, it’s clear that its ability to supervise or control doesn’t extend that far.

Citing precedents such as Perfect 10 v. Amazon and Perfect 10 v. Visa, Judge Rochon agrees with Google.

In these cases, the ability to terminate an advertising or payment processing relationship, which might indirectly reduce infringement on third-party websites, was not considered to be the ‘direct control’ over infringing activity required for a claim of vicarious liability.

In cases including Napster, the opposite was true due to the infringement taking place on a system under Napster’s control, where it had the right to terminate access.

Indirect Effect is Insufficient

The Court accepts that the removal of infringing ads and the termination of accounts may have an indirect effect by reducing traffic to the pirate sellers’ websites. However, that doesn’t mean that Google has any control over the websites where the infringement takes place, or that any measures applied to search would change that.

“The fact that ‘search engines [can] effectively cause a website to disappear by removing it from their search results’ is not enough to give rise to vicarious liability,” the order reads.

“Plaintiffs have not adequately pleaded that Google has sufficient ability to control or supervise the Pirate Sellers’ infringement, and therefore, Plaintiffs’ vicarious copyright infringement claim fails to state a claim.”

Court Denies Request to Dismiss Trademark Claim

Google’s request to dismiss the publishers’ trademark claim was rejected.

The publishers’ claim under 15 U.S.C. § 1114(1)(b) relates to “advertisements intended to be used in commerce upon or in connection with the sale, offering for sale, distribution, or advertising of goods or services” when such use is likely to “cause confusion or deceive.”

The plaintiffs claim that Google included unauthorized reproductions of their trademarks in the pirate sellers’ ads, having acquired the images containing the marks from the sellers themselves. Google denied that, insisting that it only displayed images where the marks were already applied.

The Court found that the publishers had sufficiently pleaded their direct trademark infringement claim, so this element of Google’s motion to dismiss was denied.

The case will continue with the trademark claim intact, alongside a contributory copyright infringement claim that was not included in Google’s motion to dismiss.

Judge Rochon’s opinion and order is available here (pdf)

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The original Napster service was launched by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker on June 1, 1999. Had it not been sued into oblivion by the record labels, it would’ve celebrated its 26th anniversary last Sunday.

In reality, Napster didn’t live for very long at all. The service was shut down by court order in July 2001 and in this month 23 years ago, Napster Inc. filed for bankruptcy.

Napster Brand Lives On, Legally

For more than two decades, the Napster brand has lived on. The company’s assets were initially acquired by Roxio, which led to its PressPlay music service relaunching in 2003 with Napster branding. After a fresh start as a legal music store, Napster was later acquired by Best Buy. In 2011, streaming service Rhapsody became Napster’s new owner and a few years later, Rhapsody itself reappeared with Napster branding.

These changes in Napster’s ownership offer very little excitement, a sign perhaps that Napster’s pirate roots were ancient history. Yet, starting in early 2017, the RIAA began sending DMCA notices to Google containing requests to have Napster URLs deindexed from search results. In January 2022, that suddenly stopped, only to suddenly start back up again, exactly two years later.

What exactly triggered these complaints is unknown but, earlier this year, a complaint filed in Italy went further still. Characterizing Napster as a platform of mass infringement, the complaint requested measures that would effectively prevent Napster from doing business anywhere in the country.

“Massive Copyright Violations”

The Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE) is one of the world’s largest collection societies. According to its website, it represents over 100K members, administers 62 million Italian and international works, and has “reciprocal representation agreements” with 184 authors’ societies around the world.

On March 24, 2025, SIAE filed a complaint with Italian telecoms regulator AGCOM, containing a long list of allegedly infringing URLs linking to songs by mainly local artists. The complaint described the list as an example of infringing content offered by Napster, so should not be considered exhaustive.

A sample of the allegedly infringing tracks (translated)

SIAE’s complaint noted that “the massive nature of the copyright violations” is highlighted when SIAE’s repertoire index is used as a reference.

Having confirmed that the content reported by SIAE was actually available on Napster.com, these alleged violations of copyright (Law 633/41 (pdf)) were sufficient for AGCOM and any linked bodies to examine the complaint more closely.

In this case and those similar, a step-by-step process resulting in an adverse decision usually leads to domains being blocked by ISPs nationwide. Pirate sites tackle blocking with new domains and other circumvention tactics. Legal streaming sites aren’t typically confronted with that kind of problem.

AGCOM Launches Investigation

Checks revealed that the domain Napster.com was registered at Cloudflare “on behalf of an unidentifiable customer” with hosting services for the platform also provided by Cloudflare.

A preliminary investigation carried out by the Directorate for Digital Services and Protection of Fundamental Rights confirmed the alleged violations, so the complaint wasn’t considered inadmissible or unfounded.

Since Napster’s servers were deemed to be located overseas, “personal communication” advising the start of a procedure against it was described as “overly burdonsome”.

Instead, a notification via AGCOM’s website and via email (most likely to Cloudflare) were considered sufficient. The communication raised the possibility of Napster “spontaneously complying” with SIAE’s requests, which usually means taking down the content in question.

No Defense by Napster, Disaster Looms

AGCOM reports that no counter-arguments were received in response to its notifications and the recorded music listed in the site blocking application remained accessible on the pages reported by SIAE. Of course, that’s potentially problematic in copyright cases generally, so when AGCOM found that under Italian law no exceptions applied to the content in question, its continued online presence was “believed to be unjustified.”

All of the above taken together, especially in light of the overseas servers, led to the conclusion that service providers could be instructed to block access to Napster in Italy, to prevent ongoing copyright infringement. Or rather, that’s typically what happens to pirate sites. Here, various factors took the matter in a different direction.

Before issuing a blocking order, AGCOM must consider adequacy, necessity, and proportionality; i.e whether the measure is suitable for the task in hand, is necessary or can the same effect be achieved by less restrictive means, and is a reasonable response under the circumstances.

Blocking Would Be Disproportionate

Based on the report of AGCOM commissioner Elisa Giomi, who happens to be an outspoken opponent of Italy’s Piracy Shield blocking system, AGCOM concluded that disabling access to the entire Napster website was not an option.

[T]he website http://napster.com/ reported by the applicant is a paid music streaming service which features a very high number of songs (110 million, as reported on the site’s homepage ) which are not limited exclusively to the sound works referred to [in the blocking application],” AGCOM’s decision reads.

“Considering that the violation ascertained concerns a limited number of works compared to the content of the reported site, the adoption of a measure to disable access to the entire website would be a disproportionate measure on the basis of the principles detailed above.”

The Right Decision But a Very Strange Case

In borderline cases, subjective assessments could go either way but, in this case, it’s obvious that AGCOM made the appropriate decision under the circumstances. However, there’s an unusual element to this blocking application that raises the question of why it even exists.

Under Italian copyright law, two entities are responsible for “preventing and ascertaining” certain violations within their competences. The first entity is telecoms regulator AGCOM, the second is the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers, the same entity listed as the applicant in the blocking case against Napster.

Even after a fleeting view of the paperwork, blocking was always the incorrect response in these circumstances. Miracles aside, the application was always likely to fail against a substantially non-infringing licensed music streaming service based in the United States, where a failure to license usually ends in a mauling from the major labels.

So, on the basis that AGCOM came to the same conclusion very easily, that raises a question;

Why did a public economic body founded 140+ years ago, with a key role in Italy’s Permanent Advisory Committee on Copyright, and recognized as the institution representing the interests of Italian authors, press ahead with a blocking application that had virtually no chance of success?

More fundamentally, success would’ve prevented the alleged infringement, but presumably would’ve denied the artists and companies behind Napster’s 110 million track library any opportunity to make money via that platform in the Italian market.

Any responses to our requests for comment will appear here in due course.

AGCOM’s decision, which denies the blocking request but refers the alleged violations of copyright to the judicial police, is available here (pdf)

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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After a decade of focusing efforts overseas, the push for website blocking has landed back on American shores.

Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced a new site blocking bill, titled: Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA).

With piracy blocking efforts expanding globally, the introduction of a U.S. site blocking bill was perhaps only a matter of time. But it took time. The new bill arrived more than thirteen years after the previous SOPA bill was shut down. Interestingly, however, the bill is not alone.

In addition to FADPA, Representative Darrell Issa is also working on his own version of a pirate site blocking bill. While it has yet to be formally introduced, a discussion draft framework seen by TorrentFreak lays out the intended framework in great detail.

It’s important to keep in mind that this is a preliminary draft of the framework, not the final bill. Several changes in the text may take place before it is formally introduced, if it’s introduced at all.

The American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA)

The draft American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) proposes a streamlined court procedure for U.S. copyright owners to block access to foreign pirate sites, or those whose U.S. operators cannot be found after reasonable investigation.

The site blocking process would involve four phases. First, a court determines if a target website qualifies as a “foreign piracy site” based on evidence presented by a copyright owner. This evidence would include proof of ongoing copyright infringement, details of the site’s foreign ownership (or inability to find a U.S. operator), evidence that piracy is its primary purpose and it has no significant non-infringing purpose, or is marketed to induce infringement.

In the second phase, the court could issue a blocking order requiring service providers, such as ISPs and DNS resolvers, to take “all reasonable steps” to prevent U.S. users from accessing the target website. These orders would remain valid for up to 12 months but would not prescribe specific blocking technologies.

The draft outlines third and fourth stages which cover how a blocking order would be maintained and modified, if necessary. The deadline for implementing a blocking order would be set at 10 days, but copyright owners could request a shorter timeframe when targeting live events.

ACPA vs. FADPA

The broad description of the new bill doesn’t differ much from the previously introduced FADPA legislation. Both target ISPs and DNS resolvers, for example, but there are several key differences and nuances.

For example, ACPA proposes that the Judicial Conference of the United States would maintain a list of specific district judges to hear all judicial piracy blocking cases, with at least one judge per regional circuit. Blocking requests would then go through the previously mentioned four-phase process.

The FADPA bill, on the other hand, relies on standard U.S. District Court jurisdiction and would establish a ‘preliminary order’ through a proposed Copyright Act amendment at section §502A.

The new ACPA draft further mentions that the Act would preempt state and local laws, with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) providing reports to Congress on the Act’s effectiveness and impact.

Transparency and Protections

The draft also has some explicit transparency provisions. For example, it tasks the U.S. Copyright Office with maintaining a public website where all active blocking orders are listed. In addition, copyright owners must demonstrate they attempted to notify the target site’s operator and domain name registry of the infringement.

The proposed bill also places restrictions on the service providers that can be named in a blocking order, excluding those with fewer than 50,000 annual users or, for ISPs, those representing 1% or less of U.S. market share. Operators of coffee shops, libraries, universities, and other premises, would be excluded.

Finally, overblocking is addressed directly in the draft. While this should be prevented, if a third party’s site other than the pirate site was blocked due to an error caused by the copyright owner, the third party could request up to $250,000 in compensation from the copyright owner.

DNS ‘At Risk’

Rep. Issa’s proposed framework excludes blocking measures against the root nameservers and TLD nameservers. Additionally, DNS resolvers providing services to fewer than 50,000 users annually would be exempt under the general exclusion for small providers. However, based on commentary in response to foreign DNS blocking efforts, the proposal can expect to meet some pushback.

Root nameservers excluded

This week, the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (I2Coalition), which represents major tech companies including Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google, released a detailed report and website warning the public about DNS blocking threats.

DNS at Risk

The report details various examples of DNS blocking efforts around the world, including pirate site blocking actions in Italy, Spain, and France. According to Christian Dawson, Executive Director of the i2Coalition, the report is a wake-up call.

“DNS resolvers are neutral infrastructure—not censorship tools. When governments use them to enforce content policies, the result is overreach, disruption, and long-term harm to the open Internet.”

“We’ve built dnsatrisk.org to document these incidents and to help the global community push back with evidence and clarity,” Dawson adds.

Immunity & the DMCA

Companies running DNS servers are not alone in their concerns. Internet providers will likely want to ensure that their concerns are heard too. Previously, we reported that ISPs would like to have retrospective immunity.

The discussion draft does indeed mention immunity when it comes to liability for any blocking related actions, plus immunity from copyright claims by rightsholders who request blocking orders, insofar these apply to the blocked sites.

“A named service provider in a blocking order that is implementing the order in good faith is immune from all claims of copyright infringement by the copyright owner who obtained the blocking order based specifically on allegedly infringing activity on the foreign piracy site occurring on or after the date when the blocking order was issued, or when the provider was added to the order after issuance (whichever is later).”

The proposed immunity would not carry over to other claims of copyright infringement, meaning there would be no impact on the subscriber-related piracy liability lawsuits currently faced by Internet providers such as Cox and Verizon.

The draft framework explicitly and clearly states that the bill would not affect any existing DMCA liability claims, nor would it impact DMCA safe harbor protections.

“Except as expressly stated in this Act, nothing in this Act shall be construed to change or affect any determination under the DMCA, or modify or expand any existing claims, liability, or immunity under the DMCA, including the scope, protection, and requirements for any safe harbor under section 512. Nothing in this Act shall be construed to provide for any new liability or immunity with respect to the DMCA or any other provision of law outside of this Act.”

Although it’s still unclear what type of retrospective immunity ISPs are looking for, the draft framework doesn’t provide any additional detail.

Overall, the discussion draft describes a well-thought-out plan, with some important transparency provisions and accountability for overblocking. That said, the inclusion of DNS providers and potentially ‘other intermediaries’ is already causing opposition before the final text is ready.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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As online piracy continued to cause headaches for South Korea, in 2023 key media entities formed the Video Copyright Protection Council.

The VCPC coalition adopted a unified “stronger together” strategy for operational efficiencies and greater governmental leverage, swiftly putting its first target on notice with a criminal complaint and a $3.7 billion damages claim.

NunuTV / NooNooTV

Popular in the local market, streaming site NunuTV (or Noonootv based on domain name format) had been servicing tens of millions of visitors per month and was reportedly responsible for 1.5 billion views of pirated movies and TV shows.

With billions of dollars worth of damage allegedly suffered by legitimate platforms, NunuTV became a clear candidate for aggressive site-blocking measures. The authorities blocked domain after new domain but nothing seemed capable of significantly reducing the site’s popularity.

Coupled with a warning from the coalition, an announcement that the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, would create a new piracy investigation unit, in hindsight signaled the beginning of the end for NunuTV.

Less than two years after its launch in June 2021, the site announced that it would shut down on April 14, 2023, citing “outrageous” bandwidth costs and “pressure on the site from all directions.”

Site Down, Legal Subscribers Up, Hail Blocking

The site’s closure was cause for cautious celebration. In a July 2023 report published by subscription streaming platform Tving, a growing subscriber base was attributed to customer loyalty and the closure of NunuTV. In the United States, the tactics used against the site highlighted were seen as important.

After nominating the site for ‘notorious market’ status in 2022 (pdf), the MPA’s 2023 submission (pdf), attributed the site’s demise to the success of site blocking and the and the Ministry of Culture’s announcement regarding its investigation team..

Season 2: Surprisingly Short

In the background, the emergence of a new site just weeks after the disappearance of the first, had already prompted an announcement by the government.

Aggressive site blocking was back on the table, with blocks updated several times each day. It remained to be seen what other “strong measures” could be taken that hadn’t been tried before.

Quite quickly, however, the problem found its own solution.

“Hello, this is NunuTV Season 2. After careful consideration, the NunuTV Season 2 site is closed. Although it is a short period of time, we sincerely appreciate your interest.”

With over 1,300 domains containing “noonootv” registered and ready for use, copycat sites were always likely to be a problem. Yet, minus the features that made the original so popular, few if any could expect anything like the same success.

As is often the case with site resurrections, only those behind the original site could realistically deliver the same experience. Late last year, the chances of that happening collapsed in an instant.

Operator of NunuTV Arrested in South Korea

In November 2024, Korean authorities announced the shutdown of TVWIKI, a popular streaming piracy site with millions of users. A special unit under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism arrested the site’s alleged operator, who according to reports, was also behind streaming platform OKTOON.

A takedown notice hosted on GitHub revealed that the individual, identified only as ‘Person A’, was also the operator of NunuTV.

Concerns that the raids and arrest were an of elaborate hoax were soon dismissed by Korean authorities.

According to local news reports, law enforcement authorities seized assets worth 2.6 billion won (US$1.9m) including two luxury cars, and a total of 14 bitcoin.

Six months later, ‘Person A’ appeared before a court in South Korea to discover how his immediate future would be playing out.

Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison, $500K Fine

On May 26, Judge Koh Young-sik at the 9th Criminal Division of the Daejeon District Court, sentenced ‘Person A’ for offenses under the Copyright Act.

“The nature of the crime is bad because it systematically infringed on property rights over a long period of time for profit-making purposes such as obtaining advertising revenue,” Judge Koh said.

To avoid the effects of site blocking and other government action, Person A continued to operate using dozens of domains and overseas servers, including in the Dominican Republic and Paraguay. Virtual private networks (VPNs), overseas credit cards, and cryptocurrencies were also used in an effort to avoid being tracked down by investigators.

To obtain content from legal webtoon platforms, Person A reportedly obtained official accounts from an unspecified number of people before posting illegal copies online. A diagram supplied by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism provides an overview of the operation.

Image credit: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (text TF)

“Copyright crimes not only infringe on the copyright holder’s ability to generate revenue, but also discourage creative desire, ultimately hindering cultural development,” Judge Koh continued.

“In addition, the defendant admitted his wrongdoing, and his criminal record was taken into consideration when determining the sentence.”

For the illegal distribution of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted videos and webtoons via NunuTV, TVWiki, and OKTOON, the former pirate site operator was ordered to serve three years in prison and pay a fine of 700 million won (US$512K)

Odds of Evasion: Slim

Reports claim that NunuTV’s operator was “meticulous” in his efforts to remain anonymous but when local government and law enforcement agencies team up with international partners, that may not be enough. Person A was the target of a joint investigation by the Copyright Crime Scientific Investigation Unit of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and the International Criminal Police Organization, better known as INTERPOL.

In January 2025, INTERPOL announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding and launch of the second phase of INTERPOL-Stop Online Piracy (I-SOP), an international collaborative anti-piracy project to crack down on illegal online distribution platforms.

The initiative receives funding from the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) (2.8 million euros) with support from the Korean National Police Agency.

In addition to the dismantling of NunuTV, successes during the first phase include the arrest of individuals behind P2P release group EVO.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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In recent years, the European Commission has proposed and adopted various legislative changes to help combat online piracy.

The Copyright Directive and the Digital Services Act both envisioned tighter copyright takedown rules for online service providers.

Many rightsholder groups felt that the new rules were insufficient to target live streaming piracy, sports content in particular. They wanted more incentives for online service providers to act faster and more diligently, as suspensions are useless after a live broadcast ends.

The EU Commission heard these calls and published a targeted recommendation ‘on combating online piracy of sports and other live events’, encouraging member states to introduce measures to facilitate prompt takedowns of live streams. At the same time, service providers and rightsholders were encouraged to collaborate, to tackle the challenge together.

Over two years later, the European Commission recently launched a call for evidence, asking stakeholders to share their views on the recommendation. Based on its assessment, the Commission will evaluate whether further EU-level measures are needed to tackle the issue.

MPA: Site Blocking is Key

Last week, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) submitted its comments on the effectiveness of the 2023 recommendation. Representing prominent movie industry players including Netflix, Disney, and Warner Bros. Discovery, it has a significant stake in the matter.

Overall, the MPA is positive about the EU legal framework, noting that it provides valuable tools such as site blocking injunctions. However, implementation of these measures across EU member states is inconsistent and in some countries, cumbersome or completely absent.

Site blocking measures have been available under EU law for more than two decades, but not all EU countries implemented them correctly, MPA says, mentioning Germany, Poland, and Bulgaria as examples.

“Despite the Commission’s Recommendation, Europe is missing effective and appropriate implementation of these provisions across all Member States. Germany has not correctly implemented Article 8(3) InfoSoc nor Article 11 IPRED, whereas Poland and Bulgaria have not implemented these provisions at all,” MPA writes.

In Germany, for example, copyright holders must take steps to identify the operator of piracy sites before they can request blocking measures. In some cases, this requires pursuing legal action against hosting companies.

This is a barrier that makes site blocking unnecessarily complicated or costly, MPA says. That’s counterproductive in an environment where pirate sites and services are quick to adapt their strategies.

“Swift action is needed to limit the dissemination and damage of copyright infringement,” MPA stresses.

Automated Real-Time Blocking

Automated solutions already exist in some countries. The MPA is particularly interested in site blocking schemes that allow rightsholders to automatically add new piracy domains in realtime.

This is especially important for live broadcasts, including sports events, as these have a small blocking window. The MPA says that these broadcasts require dynamic siteblocking and fast-track legal procedures in order to be protected.

“MPA is therefore supportive of automated effective siteblocking mechanisms that can be updated in realtime with appropriate safeguards to address emerging infringing streams. In Italy, Greece, Portugal and Brazil automated dynamic systems are available to rightsholders allowing effective real-time blocks.”

Automated blocking measures also help to combat circumvention. Pirate site operators are generally quick to circumvent blocking measures with new domain names. Their users can typically find new pirate sites though search engines and social media.

“When a pirate service is blocked, pirate infringing operators register and activate a new domain—often with a similar name—allowing users to regain access, therefore circumventing the initial blocking order,” MPA writes.

CDNs, VPNs and other Intermediaries

Collaboration between Internet providers and copyright holders is essential to implement effective blocking mechanisms, MPA says. However, other intermediaries should also be brought into the fold.

MPA suggests a more active role for reverse proxy providers, content delivery networks (CDNs) hosting providers, VPNs and search engines. These were also highlighted in the EU Commission’s 2023 recommendation.

The group notes that cooperation with CDNs (e.g. Cloudflare) is key to properly enforcing dynamic blocking.

“Intermediaries such as CDNs also have the technical capability to implement targeted blocking at the infrastructure level, which can be a highly effective complement to traditional siteblocking, especially where operators rely on CDN services to deliver pirated content at scale.”

“Their engagement tends to be necessary to make targeted and technically feasible siteblocking possible. Failing to involve these actors undermines the effectiveness of dynamic injunctions, as pirates increasingly rely on them to obscure their infrastructure and evade enforcement.”

Identifying Pirates

In addition to helping on the blocking side, MPA also sees a role for these intermediaries when it comes to identifying pirate site operators. To achieve this, rightsholders should be able to use “Right of Information” requests to swiftly identify potential targets.

These information requests should be made available under EU law and, just as importantly, the EU should expand Know Your Business Customer (KYBC) requirements to online intermediaries. At the moment, KYBC rules only apply to online marketplaces.

“To effectively allow the identification of the source and repeated misuse of their services, intermediaries need to ensure that they obtain accurate and complete customer information,” MPA writes, adding that KYBC requirements are an “ideal tool” with “minimal burdens” for the intermediaries involved.

All in all, the MPA believes that Europe is largely on the right track with its anti-piracy efforts and policies, but with the suggested improvements, ideally formalized in legislation, the process can be further improved.

Rightsholders United

The MPA is not the only stakeholder making these types of demands. A wide variety of other rightsholder organizations, representing various sectors of the creative industries, echoed the call for more robust anti-piracy measures with legislative backing across the European Union.

For example, MFE-MEDIAFOREUROPE, which controls major broadcasters like Mediaset, stressed that hosting providers, CDN providers, and payment services need to take more decisive action.

Meanwhile, DAZN described the DSA as a missed opportunity to specifically target entities like VPN providers, dedicated server hosts, and CDN services that play a role in facilitating online piracy. Both DAZN and MFE joined the MPA in calling for KYBC obligations to be extended to more intermediaries.

Ultimately, these submissions paint a picture of rightsholders acknowledging the EU’s efforts, while highlighting a clear need for further, stronger action at the EU level. The European Commission will typically take its time to evaluate this feedback, while also keeping an eye on those that are more critical of recent anti-piracy efforts.

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A copy of the Motion Picture Association submission in response the EU Commission’s assessment of the May 2023 Commission Recommendation to combating online piracy of sports and other live events is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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From TorrentFreak via this RSS feed

BREIN has just published its latest annual report, providing insights into the priorities of the organization and the progress being made.

This was BREIN’s first year under new leadership. After Tim Kuik retired in 2024, Bastiaan van Ramshorst became the new director flanked by Birre Büller, the new head of legal affairs.

BREIN’s 2024 Annual Report

Last week, the group published its 2024 annual report which shows that anti-piracy activities continue undeterred. BREIN completed 339 cases last year, of which 179 were marked as extensive investigations. As a result, 40 settlements were reached, including 7 “knock & talks”.

In addition to these dedicated investigations, BREIN also continued its regular operations. This includes updating the pirate site blocklist used by local ISPs, to which 525 unique domains were added last year. At the end of 2024, 574 domains were blocked, up from 208 at the start of the year.

The new target domain names were also reported to Google, which voluntarily removed these 525 domains from its search results. That comes in addition to the 166,945 individual Google search results BREIN asked the company to remove.

IPTV Action Intensifies

The voluntary cooperation of Google is noteworthy and doesn’t stop at delisting blocked domains. The company also helped to prevent the promotion of pirate IPTV services through its advertising business. This led to the drastic decision where Google updated its policy to no longer allow ads for the search term “IPTV”.

As a result of this policy change, BREIN reported fewer IPTV advertisements last year. According to BREIN, action by Google was in part taken in response to complaints from the Dutch anti-piracy group.

These restrictions are part of a broader theme in which IPTV is increasingly recognized as a major piracy threat. According to BREIN, IPTV is now considered the biggest threat to the audiovisual content industry.

“The Dutch fiscal police (FIOD) officially designated IPTV as a phenomenon in 2024. This means higher priority and more budget for combating illegal IPTV. As a result, there is more room for investigation and ultimately more criminal cases,” BREIN writes

“Illegal IPTV also has the full attention of Europol, Eurojust and the EUIPO. Among other things, this regularly leads to criminal actions in the Netherlands at the request of foreign investigative agencies. Where possible, BREIN and foreign sister organizations of BREIN contribute to this.”

Criminal Action and Boots on the Ground

The added attention to the IPTV problem has resulted in several new criminal referrals by BREIN last year. The group expects that this will lead to new arrests and potential prosecutions in 2025, but as these investigations are ongoing, further details are currently unavailable.

“These cases are expected to result in arrests in 2025. Because of ongoing criminal investigations, BREIN can only make announcements about them after arrests have been made,” BREIN writes.

These IPTV actions are not limited to online operations; they also extend to offline marketplaces. Since the Beverwijk Bazaar is seen as a hotspot for this activity in the Netherlands, BREIN has signed an agreement with the market to tackle the problem.

If stalls are caught selling illegal IPTV services and devices, in the first instance they receive a warning. If the activity continues, they can be fined, and if that does not solve the issue, tenants can lose their lease.

“Two tenants had their lease terminated in 2024 based on the agreements made,” BREIN writes, adding that “repeated checks and purchases at the Beverwijk Bazaar remain necessary to identify and deal with IPTV traders.”

AI, NL and More

In addition to the strong focus on IPTV, artificial intelligence is also flagged as a major threat. The group has identified several Dutch datasets that partly consist of copyright-infringing material and successfully shut these down.

“BREIN conducted extensive investigations into infringing datasets on which Generative AI models are trained and turned into unlawful AI models and was able to successfully complete the first AI investigations,” BREIN writes.

Another series of Dutch-focused achievements came after the registry for .NL domains updated its policy to no longer allow intermediaries to register domain names. The EURid registry (.eu) has a similar policy which enabled BREIN to make 16 .NL and 7 .EU domains inaccessible.

These changes are part of broader efforts to involve more intermediaries in the anti-piracy fight. For example, BREIN says it signed a confidential agreement with several Dutch hosting providers who will enforce a proper know-your-customer policy. That could lead to more enforcement action in the future.

All in all, it’s been a productive year for BREIN. The full annual report with more detail on specific actions and an overview of the key numbers, as summarized by BREIN, is available below.

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• 339 files closed • 179 investigations completed • 155 illegal sites/services/platforms stopped • 11 platforms, 9 IP addresses and 525 unique domains dynamically blocked at DNS level • 525 illegal websites completely removed from search results by Google iv • 160 proxies/mirrors stopped • 46 illegal traders IPTV/VOD subscriptions stopped • 14 IPTV ads removed by Google • 47 streaming sites taken offline • 3 major uploaders, administrators and/or scripters investigated and stopped • 166,945 Google search results removed • 3,677 interventions involving removal of online ads for illegal copies • 40 settlements, including 7 ‘knock & talks’ • 3 judicial ex parte orders obtained • 10 online cases involving physical media were handled • 14 checks conducted at record fairs • 16 .nl and 7 .eu domain names taken offline

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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From TorrentFreak via this RSS feed

If Hollywood studios, major record labels, broadcasters, and sports organizations stopped publishing their own piracy research, the scale of the phenomenon and potential solutions would likely be less clearly defined than they are today.

What we have instead is a largely unified response across multiple industries, featuring broadly similar claims on the scale of the problem, what needs to be done, and by whom. Everyone pushing in the same direction, no wasted energy.

The messaging is notable, not for just its clarity, but for the almost complete absence of conflicting opinions on who is to blame and how various goals can be achieved. It’s as if the dozens of major companies involved, many of them rivals operating in the same market, conducted their own independent research, arrived at the same conclusions, then brainstormed identical solutions totally independently.

New Report, No Additional Friction

A new report from Enders Analysis published on Friday was quickly covered by news outlets all over the world. Tackling the illegal streaming of live sports and premium TV, the report found that “industrial scale theft of video services” costs broadcasters and sports companies “billions” while posing a “direct threat” to the “UK creative industries.”

Company founder Claire Enders, CBE, told the Financial Times that “piracy is costing content originators, pay-TV and streaming companies, many billions globally,” a conclusion drawn from various data, including that provided by various European TV companies, such as Sky in the UK.

Impactful phrases of the type mentioned above are an immediately recognizable component of the anti-piracy vocabulary. After appearing in dozens of studies and countless press releases, over the years they may have lost some of their shock value.

At a time when the unstoppable proliferation of pirate services seems to be causing genuine problems, that’s certainly unfortunate. Nevertheless, contributors to these adverse conditions are called out in the report; they may even sound familiar.

Video Piracy: Big Tech is Clearly Unwilling to Address the Problem

The sub-heading above is the title of the Ender’s report, which signals its direction right from the start. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are variously described as not doing enough to prevent piracy, or in the case of the former, actively fueling it as an “enabler”.

“Big tech is both friend and foe in solving the piracy problem. Conflicting incentives harm consumer safety by providing easy discovery of illegal pirated services, and reduced friction through low-cost hardware such as the Amazon Firestick,” the report notes.

The soaring popularity of Amazon’s devices was obvious almost 10 years ago and thanks to a recent campaign, unprecedented media coverage raised awareness of the Amazon brand, at zero cost to the company.

Enders’ view of the ‘Firestick’ issue was in part based on data provided by Sky, which found that 59% of pirates active in the previous 12 months using a physical device, said they had consumed pirated content via an Amazon Fire device. It’s an interesting statistic, some might even consider it an opportunity to be exploited.

Yet, if Amazon chooses not to respond in the manner the industry expects, there’s no legal Plan B available. Amazon doesn’t promote its products for infringing uses. It’s also a major rightsholder, not to mention member of both the MPA and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. Calling the company out in court as a piracy enabler isn’t just unrealistic, it’s much worse than that.

When a legal device is framed as a threat, not just by the video industry but also here in the Enders report, all that does is divert attention away from the core issues. Specifically, one of the main reasons that premium content from the UK is so readily available from pirate sources. According to the Enders report, Big Tech must take some responsibility for that too.

Google and Microsoft Refuse to Engage on DRM

Widevine and PlayReady, owned by Google and Microsoft respectively, are anti-piracy solutions that allow authorized users to view video streams while preventing downloading and unauthorized copies. Widely used to secure premium content, Widevine is used by major streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Sky. But, after its weaknesses were exploited several years ago, protection from determined pirates isn’t what it used to be.

“Over twenty years since launch, the DRM solutions provided by Google and Microsoft are in steep decline,” the Engers report notes.

“A complete overhaul of the technology architecture, licensing, and support model is needed. Lack of engagement with content owners indicates this a low priority.”

Put more directly, it appears that Google and Microsoft have no interest in supporting or updating 26 and 18-year-old software/systems and, as a result, content pours rather than leaks out, fueling an entire pirate ecosystem. As quite literally the ‘source’ of a significant part of the UK’s piracy problem, the Enders report quite rightly gives it a mention, although with framing clearly suggesting yet another Big Tech failure.

“The research by Enders Analysis accuses Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft of ‘ambivalence and inertia’ over a problem it says costs broadcasters revenue and puts users at an increased risk of cyber-crime,” coverage by the BBC reads.

That the Enders analysis views the piracy problem from the same long-standing positions of entertainment companies shouldn’t come as a surprise.

A History of Championing Intellectual Property Rights

Enders Analysis is known for its reports and generally speaking, receives praise for its work, in particular its focus on technology, telecoms and media. In 2009, founder Claire Enders told the Guardian that a prediction in 2001 that the music industry would have piracy under control by 2005, was a “Titanic” mistake. Yet, control was indeed being regained a few years later, leading to the record figures we see today and an industry in rude health.

How much of the credit for that can be attributed to Enders is hard to quantify, but her company’s position is clear, and as a staunch supporter of the UK’s Digital Economy Act, her personal position on piracy is extremely clear.

“It has been a decade since I first started to work for an industry-led anti-piracy regime, whose delay is detrimental to the creative economy,” Enders said at the time.

That the report once again highlights the scale of piracy in the market isn’t a surprise, and importantly, isn’t inaccurate either. That Big Tech comes under fire for reasons identical to those of the affected industries, is no surprise either. Yet, it may be that when voices are so unified as one, there’s no opportunity for fresh ideas that might provide a solution, in the absence of Big Tech suddenly waving its magic wand.

Surprisingly, especially given its target audience and subscription model, an article in the Financial Times covering the report has a mountain of comments from subscribers that may be quite useful.

The overwhelming majority see the piracy situation quite differently, but whether opposing views are welcome is another matter.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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From TorrentFreak via this RSS feed

In recent years, music and movie companies have filed several lawsuits against U.S. Internet providers, for failing to take action against pirating subscribers.

One of the main allegations is that the ISPs failed to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers in ‘appropriate circumstances’, as the DMCA requires.

These lawsuits resulted in multi-million-dollar judgments against Cox and Grande. Meanwhile, other companies remained at risk, including Frontier Communications which emerged from bankruptcy three years ago.

Frontier Settles Twice

Frontier was fighting not one, but two legal battles. The troubled company faced a pair of similar piracy liability lawsuits filed by movie and music companies. Both cases were scheduled to go to trial this spring, but that didn’t happen.

Last month, we reported that the movie companies’ lawsuit had been settled on undisclosed terms. As a result, demands for pirate site blocking were also off the table.

This week, the music companies, including UMG, Sony Music and Warner Music, also reached a settlement with Frontier. In a notice submitted to the New York federal court, they informed the court that all claims are settled and can therefore be dismissed.

Settled

The case was settled “with prejudice” so the dismissed claims cannot be refiled in the future. It’s a final resolution of the dispute, preventing all parties from bringing the same claims against each other again.

The settlement terms are not mentioned, so it’s unknown whether there was any financial compensation; however, when it comes to the court proceedings, all parties agreed to bear their own costs.

Change Afoot?

The settlement arrives in the same week the U.S. Government took a position in a legal battle between Internet provider Cox and several record labels. The U.S. recommended the Supreme Court to hear Cox’s case, which seeks to overturn a liability ruling in favor of the music companies.

There is no reason to believe that the U.S. position impacted the Frontier lawsuit in any way. However, if the Supreme Court does indeed take on the matter, the eventual outcome will affect other piracy liability lawsuits against Internet providers.

Another recent development could also impact these cases. In the U.S., several lawmakers are working on site blocking legislation under which ISPs would be tasked with blocking access to pirate sites. According to recent information, some ISPs are open to this idea, provided they’re granted “retrospective immunity“.

The details of these background discussions are sparse, but ISPs may not see the benefit in voluntarily working towards a blocking plan if they’re dealing with piracy liability lawsuits at the same time.

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A copy of the notice of settlement, submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Wednesday, is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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From TorrentFreak via this RSS feed

A complex case that had dragged on for years, in part due to the global pandemic, concluded last summer with the conviction of five men behind pirate streaming service Jetflicks.

The court heard that Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi and Peter Huber, generated millions of dollars in revenue through what was described as one of the largest pirate sites in the United States.

The Case That Refuses to End

Last summer, a jury found all five men guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Dallmann was further convicted on two counts of money laundering by concealment, plus three counts of misdemeanor criminal copyright infringement. No sentencing date was announced at the time, but the reported maximum sentences suggested that the defendants were in for a tough ride.

Four of the men were told they could receive up to 60 months in prison, but the Department of Justice highlighted that group leader Kristopher Dallmann could face a much higher sentence

The justification for this extraordinary estimate isn’t easily explained. The current docket has close to 700 filings and indictments that date back to 2019, for conduct that concluded in 2017. It’s a case in which two additional defendants pleaded guilty six years ago, one regarding conduct at Jetflicks, the other in connection with Jetflicks and rival streaming service, iStreamitAll.

Argument Over Sentencing Continues

Over the years, sealed filings regularly interrupted the flow of information, a trend that continues today, some 10 months after the defendants’ convictions. None of the five men are currently incarcerated, and after fighting for every inch of ground for the last six years, Kristopher Dallmann isn’t ready to back down now.

In a supplemental sentencing memorandum dated last week, counsel for Dallmann contest the sentence proposed in the Presentence Investigations Report. Since access to the document is restricted, only limited details are available. However, language used by Dallmann’s counsel conveys a strong reaction to the government’s proposals, with an alternative sentencing proposition from the defense helping to establish a best-case scenario.

“Mr. Dallman respectfully asks that the Court to impose a sentence of one-year on the misdemeanor counts, 3 and 4, and a total sentence of thirty-six-months on the felony counts; each count running concurrent to each other,” the memorandum reads.

“This sentence is reasonable and ‘adequately reflects the seriousness of the offense, affords adequate deterrence, promotes respect for the law, provides just punishment for the offense, and protects the public.”

And then the teardown begins.

Government’s Loss Calculations: “Facially Absurd”

Counsel for Dallmann note that their primary focus is to dispute the PSR and the government’s infringement loss calculations, “which are, and this author does not say this lightly, facially absurd,” the submission notes.

“Nor is the Office of Probation any help in conducting these calculations as that agency has relied solely on the government’s facially problematic, and unduly enigmatic, calculations.”

Describing the sentencing guideline calculations as “unresponsive to the actual facts of the case,” the defense says the draconian end result should give the court significant pause.

“The fundamental error of the infringement loss calculations is that, in addition to being almost comically speculative, it ignores the business model at issue. This case does not involve the retail purchase of individual television shows. At issue is a streaming service that the government alleges failed to acquire the proper reproduction licenses from the actual copyright holders.”

Users of Jetflicks Were Not Victims

The memorandum states that Jetflicks users can’t be classed as victims; they paid for a service and received one. The victims, “to the extent there are any,” are the copyright holders.

“The loss at issue is the licensing fee those holders would have received had Jetflicks acquired the right to stream from those entities. What this amount would have been, if the copyright holders would have even consented, is unknown and undeterminable. What is known is that the government’s loss calculations bear almost no resemblance to actual copyright holder losses.

“The problem with the calculations, lies in the government’s pedantic reliance on the concept of retail value when that concept applies to physical counterfeited items,” the defense argues. Again, no exact figures are provided but the defense says that the “government’s proffered infringement amount dwarfs, by a literal order of magnitude, the total gross receipts of Jetflicks over its entire lifespan.”

An attempt by the government to explain its calculations lacked reliance on case law, data, or expert analysis; “Indecipherable,” according to the defense.

“To the extent one can tell what the government is attempting to argue, it appears to be counting the same streaming content over and over again.”

MPA Request for Attorney Fees

Counsel for Dallmann highlight several points to explain why the MPA’s suggestion of attorney fees is “inappropriate.” Since the MPA is not a litigant in the case, it can’t be considered a prevailing party. There’s no itemized attorney bill to show costs directly related to the case, and there’s nothing to show which fees are permissible costs.

“If the MPA is the victim in this case, as it claims to represent all impacted copyright holders, that entity has made no effort to determine its losses. Instead, it relies on the government’s facially invalid loss theory,” the memorandum continues.

As far as any costs incurred while assisting the government’s prosecution, “those are not allowable losses as the costs of prosecuting a case are not recoverable as restitution.”

The Trial Tax Problem

In December 2019, Darryl Julius Polo (aka djppimp) pleaded guilty to charges of copyright infringement and money laundering for helping to program Jetflicks and for founding and operating rival platform iStreamitAll. Polo was sentenced to 57 months in prison, with a $1 million forfeiture order covering the proceeds of his offending.

According to Dallmann, the appearance of unproven allegations from Polo’s indictment in the PSR is problematic. Polo is described as a co-conspirator, whereas Dallmann maintains that Polo was a competitor operating a similar but entirely separate business. In practical terms the difference is important; as a co-conspirator, Dallmann can be held vicariously liable for Polo’s infringing business, in addition to conduct directly attributable to his own.

The U.S. government’s headline-grabbing description of Polo’s platform iStreamitAll contained a claim that it had a bigger library than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime. That wasn’t necessarily a statement of fact, it was a claim copied from iStreamitAll’s sales pitch.

Nevertheless, it’s consistent with iStreamItAll offering a huge library of movies and TV shows, in contrast to Jetflicks which offered TV shows only. According to the defense, a comparison of the services and contrasting government-calculated infringement amounts, show that Dallmann is being punished more severely because he exercised his right to stand trial.

“The government represented in Polo’s signed plea agreement that the infringement amount under § 2B3.5 should be between $250,000 to $500,000. This calculation was based on the value of Mr. Polo’s inventory of infringement materials as found during the execution of search warrants,” the memorandum notes.

“Yet for Mr. Dallmann, because he failed to plead guilty, the government devised an entirely new way of calculating infringement value that increased the figure by literally more than a factor of sixty.”

The government-calculated figure in Dallmann’s case, presented in the still-restricted PSR, is $37,478,436.

“This is not a question of normal plea-bargaining concessions such as whether acceptance of responsibility reductions apply or whether the government would bring additional charges,” the memorandum continues. “This is a wholesale reformulation of a previously embraced sentencing theory. This raises the appearance, if not the specter, of undue retribution and punishment for the exercise of a constitutional right.”

Argument over calculations and various points of law continues for several pages but the easily missed bottom line, is the government’s position that Dallmann’s offending warrants the most severe sentence ever handed down in an online piracy case.

The government’s conceptual corruption has resulted in a computed Sentencing Guideline range that is stunningly severe. It is reasonable to assert that a white-collar offender should not face a Sentencing Guideline range of twenty-five to thirty years for what is essentially a victimless crime; as the government has failed to show any actual victim losses.

The government’s theory dramatically increases the sentencing exposure of Mr. Dallmann. This conclusion is reinforced by looking to the calculations utilized for the co-defendants, such as Daryl Polo, where the infringement loss is approximately 1.5% of that advanced against Mr. Dallmann despite the fact the government describes Jetflicks and iStreamitAll as being similarly situated.

“Given Mr. Dallmann’s history and characteristics, which a host of mitigating factors as previously briefed under seal, a probationary sentence is warranted in this matter. If incarceration is deemed necessary by this Court, Mr. Dallmann respectfully asks this Court to consider a three-year sentence,” counsel for Dallmann conclude.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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From TorrentFreak via this RSS feed

Over the past few years, stream-ripping service Yout.com has fought legal battles on several continents.

The most prominent lawsuit was filed by the site’s operator, American developer Johnathan Nader, who took the RIAA to court in an attempt to have the site declared legal.

Criminal Prosecution

The RIAA case is still under appeal and Yout.com remains available in most countries. Not in Brazil, however, as the site was effectively blocked several years ago after the Public Prosecutor’s Office of São Paulo, Brazil, filed a criminal complaint.

As part of the criminal proceeding, Yout.com was preemptively blocked by Brazilian ISPs. Unsurprisingly, this made the site’s traffic in the country tank. Perhaps even more concerning is a looming criminal sentence for the site’s American operator.

Nader doesn’t believe that his site is illegal, but if a Brazilian criminal court decides otherwise, criminal copyright infringement can result in a prison sentence of up to four years. Despite this pressure, Nader continues to stand behind the site.

Deal Rejected

In 2022, the prosecution offered Yout.com a way out in the form of a deal. In exchange for reaching an agreement on several predetermined terms, the public prosecutor was willing to suspend the criminal prosecution. This would come at a cost, however.

Under the proposed terms, Yout’s operator would have to pay the authorities 1.9 million Brazilian real, roughly $400,000, to be allocated to a special fund earmarked for social programs.

The deal also required Yout.com to actively block Brazilian visitors and delete their accounts, while ensuring all local payments were blocked. In addition, the site would have to log access attempts from Brazil and share the details with the authorities twice per month.

Nader and his legal team gave the proposal some serious thought, but eventually decided to decline the offer. Instead, they tried to turn the case in their favor through the court.

Court Rejects Yout’s Motion to Dismiss

In the 12th Criminal Court of the Central Criminal Court Barra Funda in São Paulo, the defense tried to have the complaint dismissed, citing a lack of just cause and insufficient evidence. The request was rejected earlier this month.

After reviewing arguments from both sides, the Court ruled that the prosecution’s criminal complaint is sufficient for the case to continue.

The prosecution alleges that Yout’s operator violated article 184, paragraph 3, of the Penal Code by offering an Internet-based tool to allow users to select and download a copyrighted work without obtaining permission from the rightsholder. This was allegedly motivated by profit.

From the order (translated)

Complaint Sufficient

The Court found that the complaint meets the requirements of article 41 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

“The indictment is based on minimal evidence, consisting of documents and expert reports, which, at this stage, are sufficient to support a judgment of admissibility. Although the defense presented strong arguments, it was unsuccessful in deconstructing the elements presented by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and further evidence was required in the criminal investigation,” the order reads.

Yout typically describes itself as an Internet DVR. It does not store any copyright infringing material and does not know what files its users select to ‘format shift’.

However, the Court reiterated that the conditions for accepting a complaint concern evidence of authorship and materiality, not the full proof that will be developed during the investigation. Arguments about lack of evidence are not enough to reject the complaint at this initial phase.

“According to the consolidated understanding of the Supreme Courts, receiving a complaint only requires evidence of authorship and materiality, and does not require full proof, which will be produced during the investigation,” the order adds.

Prosecution Goes Ahead

Ultimately, the court concluded that the requirements for criminal prosecution are present and there are no defects that would warrant a dismissal under article 395 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Therefore, the judge upheld the prior decision to accept the complaint.

The case will now move forward at a hearing set for August 9, 2025, for instruction, debates and judgment.

Since Nader lives in the United States, the hearing will be held virtually and won’t be required to appear in person. The prosecution is expected to present several witnesses, including a representative of the music industry.

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A copy of the (translated) order of the 12th Criminal Court of the Central Criminal Court in São Paulo is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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From TorrentFreak via this RSS feed

Three years ago, pirated Blu-ray copies of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” began circulating on pirate sites, weeks before its official release.

Such high-profile leaks are rare, and the source of the breach remained unknown until earlier this year.

In February, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted 37-year-old Steven Hale from Tennessee, a former employee of a disc manufacturing and distribution company in Memphis. While working at the unnamed company between 2021 and 2022, Hale allegedly stole numerous “pre-release” DVD and Blu-ray discs from his employer.

These stolen discs contained many high-profile movie titles including “Spider-Man: No Way Home”.

Hale Pleads Guilty

Hale initially pleaded not guilty to two criminal copyright infringement charges and an additional charge of interstate transportation of stolen goods. This week Hale changed his plea, admitting guilt to one of the charges, and signing a plea agreement with the prosecution.

Hale entered his guilty plea to Count Two of the indictment. The charge relates to his distribution of ten or more copies of copyrighted works, including pre-release movies, for commercial advantage and private financial gain. This includes the pre-release ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ disc, which is likely the source of the leak.

The other films covered by this count are ‘Jungle Cruise,’ ‘Venom: Let There Be Carnage,’ ‘Encanto,’ ‘Eternals,’ ‘The King’s Man,’ ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,’ ‘Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City,’ ‘Marry Me,’ ‘Sing 2,’ and ‘The Matrix Resurrections.’

Plea Agreement

Lower Sentence, Limited Damages

As part of the agreement, the prosecution agreed to drop two other counts and the Justice Department will recommend that the court awards the maximum available sentence reduction because Hale accepted responsibility. It will also recommend that the defendant is sentenced at the low end of the guideline range.

For the remaining count, Hale faces a potential maximum penalty of five years imprisonment, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. In addition, he has also agreed to pay restitution to all identifiable victims who suffered losses due to his criminal conduct.

Interestingly, for sentencing guideline purposes, the plea agreement puts the “infringement amount” between $15,000 and $40,000. That’s lower than the tens of millions of dollars in estimated losses mentioned in the indictment related to ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home. The final damages amount has yet to be determined by the court.

1,160 Blu-rays and DVDs

The plea agreement doesn’t add much detail to what is already publicly known. Importantly, however, it does reveal that law enforcement seized approximately 1,160 Blu-rays and DVDs from the defendant on or around March 14, 2022.

This means that the authorities had tracked down Hale as a potential suspect just days after the ‘Spider-Man’ movie leaked online. After that, it took nearly three years before the defendant was indicted.

Why the indictment took so long is unknown, but the case may have been part of a broader ongoing investigation.

Speculation and Sentencing

While one can only speculate beyond this point, it is worth pointing out that the early online leaks of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” were shared publicly by the infamous release group EVO. This group was known for distributing pre-release content.

A few months after the authorities tracked down Hale, EVO was dismantled by the Portuguese authorities. There is no evidence to suggest that these two cases are connected, but it’s not impossible either.

What we do know for sure is that Hale will be sentenced by the District Court of Tennessee later this year. This sentencing hearing is scheduled to take place at the end of August.

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A copy of the Plea Agreement, signed by all parties and submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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Describing Sweden as a country with a serious pirate IPTV problem is technically accurate, but lacking in all-important context.

As a member of the European Union, Sweden is among 27 member states experiencing broadly similar difficulties. The main drivers usually boil down to lots of content being accessible from one supplier, at a price people can afford or are willing to pay.

There are variables across the bloc, from consumer demand for specific types of often expensive regional content, to rightsholders’ ability to take action, and/or convince local governments to commit scarce resources towards solving the problem.

In broad terms, the problem today is worse than it was pre-2020. No combination of industry measures, legal amendments, or government investment, has delivered anything close to a solution, anywhere in the EU. Even when positive news does arrive, it’s often met with cautious suspicion.

60,000 Swedish Households Say “No” to IPTV

Stockholm-based consulting firm Mediavision conducts regular surveys to assess consumption trends in the Nordic countries. Its report for Sweden covering several months in 2024 could hardly have been worse.

In the period bridging spring and the fall of last year, pirate IPTV subscription rates increased by a record 25%, with an estimated 700,000 households (one subscription = one household) regularly consuming from illicit sources. On face value, however, the numbers in Mediavision’s latest report seem to indicate progress.

“The use of illegal IPTV is still high and it is now estimated that 640,000 Swedish households pay for illegal IPTV services,” says anti-piracy group Rights Alliance (Rattighetsalliansen).

When a 60,000-household reduction warrants such a frosty reception (Rights Alliance says it’s too early to celebrate), the rest of the figures may not be encouraging either.

2.3 Million Swedes Use Illegal Source Every Month

The new Mediavision survey estimates that 2.3 million Swedes aged 15 to 74-years-old, consume movies, TV shows, or live sports, from illegal sources, at least every month. Sweden is a relatively small country where 2.3 million people represent 30% of the population.

Studies regularly show that infringement rates are higher among younger people; Sweden continues the long-standing trend here.

Among citizens aged 15 to 34, over half say they regularly use content from illegal sources. As expected, piracy rates are highest among younger men and when every other person is already a subscriber or regular viewer, word tends to spread especially fast.

Organized Crime

The Rights Alliance graphic below shows that another large number is also causing concern.

In 2019, the European Union Intellectual Property Office estimated that pirate IPTV services were generating close to a billion euros in annual revenue, in the EU alone (pdf). At the time, the Netherlands and Sweden had the highest percentage of IPTV users in the bloc, with 8.9% and 8.5% respectively.

To put Sweden’s pirate IPTV growth into perspective, today’s 640,000 households can be placed alongside 616,700 individuals in the six-year-old EU report. In 2018, revenue generated by pirate providers from Swedish sales was an estimated 490,000 euros.

The 1.4 billion figure above is in Swedish Krona; at today’s exchange rate that’s €137.6 million (US$154.8 million)

“1.4 billion SEK directly from Swedish households into the criminal economy is unacceptable. Organized crime is fueled, and the damages to rights holders are much bigger than this,” Rights Alliance says.

An investigation launched in Sweden a year ago is still ongoing. Alongside an assessment of financial damage to the film and TV industries, advice on whether action against IPTV subscribers is required (including a ‘ban’ on IPTV itself) is expected in the final report. Rights Alliance believes that more can be done immediately.

“There is a need for increased resources and enhanced expertise among police and prosecutors,” says Rights Alliance lawyer and former police IP crime investigator, Alma Shawwaf.

“Several actors can also do more to make it harder for criminals, not least payment providers and search engines such as Google.”

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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In 2019, Internet provider Cox Communications lost its legal battle against a group of dozens of record labels, including Sony and Universal.

Following a two-week trial, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for its pirating subscribers. The ISP failed to disconnect repeat infringers and was ordered to pay $1 billion in damages.

This case is one of many. Other ISPs have been accused of being similarly lax in their stance against alleged piracy. Rightsholders believe that ISPs are motivated by profit, while ISPs typically argue that they shouldn’t be held liable for the alleged wrongdoing of subscribers.

Landmark Piracy Battle

Cox challenged the verdict through several routes and last August filed a petition at the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to hear the case. The Internet provider stressed that the current verdict ‘jeopardizes’ internet access for all Americans.

Around the same time, the music companies filed their own petition, hoping to strengthen the verdict at the Supreme Court. Specifically, the record labels argued that the ISP should also be held liable for vicarious copyright infringement.

Both petitions essentially boil down to questions on liability. Are ISPs liable for copyright infringement if they don’t disconnect subscribers accused of copyright infringement? And can ISPs be held liable for infringing subscribers, even if they don’t directly profit from their activities?

Last November, the Supreme Court suggested that it is indeed interested in the questions. Before deciding, however, the U.S. Solicitor General was invited to share the Government’s view on the matter.

The Solicitor General is a high-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Justice who serves as the federal government’s primary lawyer before the Supreme Court. Needless to say, their input weighs strongly for the Supreme Court’s decision whether to accept these petitions or not.

U.S. Backs Cox’s Petition

Yesterday, the Solicitor General submitted its amicus brief in this matter, clearly siding with the Internet provider.

The Solicitor General argues that the Fourth Circuit’s decision, which held Cox liable for contributory infringement, “departs from this Court’s contributory-infringement precedents” and is in “substantial tension” with the Supreme Court’s recent analysis of secondary liability in Twitter v. Taamneh.

“The Taamneh Court’s reasoning reinforces the conclusion that imposing liability on Cox for copyright infringement committed by its users, based on Cox’s failure to terminate service to IP addresses associated with infringement, is incompatible with traditional common-law limitations on secondary liability,” the brief reads.

The U.S. also cites the Sony and Grokster cases, which make clear that contributory liability for copyright infringement requires more than knowing about pirating activity. Instead, it requires “culpable intent” to cause copyright infringement.

“If Cox had explicitly or implicitly marketed its service as being particularly useful for infringers, or if it had encouraged subscribers to use Cox’s internet service to infringe, liability might be appropriate,” the Solicitor General writes.

According to the view of the U.S. Government, an ISP is not automatically liable for copyright infringement if it fails to terminate subscribers after receiving copyright infringement notices. This is a strong statement that targets the central issue in many similar lawsuits in U.S. courts.

Not Liable

Innocent Subscribers at Risk

The amicus brief goes on to state that the current verdict of the Court of Appeals can have broad implications for ISPs and their subscribers.

Cox previously argued that, based on this precedent, ISPs find themselves ‘forced’ to terminate subscribers who may have done little wrong. The U.S. Solicitor General acknowledges this potential threat.

If copyright infringement notices from third parties can trigger liability, Internet providers may take more drastic action to avoid legal trouble.

“Given the breadth of that liability, the decision below might encourage providers to avoid substantial monetary liability by terminating subscribers after receiving a single notice of alleged infringement,” the Solicitor General writes.

“Losing internet access is a serious consequence, as the internet has become an essential feature of modern life. And because a single internet connection might be used by an entire family—or, in the case of coffee shops, hospitals, universities, and the like, by hundreds of downstream users— the decision below could cause numerous non-infringing users to lose their internet access.”

No Willful Infringement

Aside from the liability question, the brief also criticizes the Fourth Circuit’s finding of “willfulness” against Cox, which led to the enhanced statutory damages.

The Solicitor General argues that the jury instruction was “erroneous” because it allowed a finding of willfulness based on the notion that Cox knew its subscribers’ actions were unlawful, even though Cox believed its own response was lawful.

The Solicitor General notes that “willfulness” generally requires knowledge or reckless disregard that the defendant’s own conduct was unlawful. Simply knowing about third-party infringements should not be sufficient.

This broad interpretation would essentially undermine the Copyright Act’s two-tiered damages scheme, which reserves higher damages for willful copyright infringement than for non-willful infringement.

Music Companies’ Writ Should be Denied

While the U.S. supports Cox’s petition, it has asked the Supreme Court to deny a related writ from the opposing music labels, who argue that Cox should also be held liable for vicarious copyright infringement.

Defendants can be held vicariously liable if they had the right and ability to control the infringing activities and a direct financial interest in those activities. According to the Solicitor General, the lower court correctly concluded that is not the case here.

“There was no evidence that Cox would be forced to collect a lower fee if the users of its internet service ceased to infringe; that subscribers were drawn to Cox’s internet service because of the ability to engage in copyright infringement using that service; or that Cox had used the opportunity for customers to infringe to lend credibility to the service it offered,” the brief notes.

All in all, it’s clear that the U.S. Solicitor General, and thus the U.S. Department of Justice, supports Cox’s attempt to overturn the piracy liability verdict. While the Supreme Court has yet to formally decide whether it will take on the case, the brief suggests the chance is now significantly higher.

Conclusion

While Cox will be pleased to see the supportive brief, there are no guarantees that the Supreme Court will agree with the U.S. Solicitor General, should it ultimately decide to take on the case.

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A copy of the U.S. Solicitor General’s Amicus Curiae brief for the United States is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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When rightsholders, broadcasters, and ISPs have a shared interest in the success of a multi-billion euro broadcasting rights deal, there’s no dispute over the need for a blocking order.

With formalities out of the way, who argues against asking the court for anything less than the full measures the judge is prepared to authorize?

When Telefonica spent billions acquiring broadcasting rights from LaLiga, the companies received full backing from ISPs/TV providers to protect their collective revenues. According to LaLiga’s reading of the piracy blocking order subsequently obtained from the court, it authorizes the applicants to take whatever blocking actions are necessary to prevent access in Spain to around 130 pirate sites.

That many of the sites used Cloudflare IP addresses, each shared among hundreds or thousands of sites with no connection to piracy, came as no surprise to the applicants. Unlike blocking orders obtained outside Spain where similar issues are dealt with differently, LaLiga began instructing ISPs to block Cloudflare IP addresses used by pirate sites listed in the order.

Outlawed By Some Courts, Unprecedented Blocking Ensued

Some estimates claim that over two million innocent sites were affected by blocking but whatever the true number, the decision to block Cloudflare at scale was unprecedented.

LaLiga’s claim, that the injunction authorizes blocking of Cloudflare IP addresses, seems to be confirmed by the text of the order. It’s only when attempting to reconcile LaLiga’s intellectual property rights with the general and indeed fundamental rights of third parties does the situation become unfathomable. So we asked LaLiga about something else instead.

Since everyone seems to be on the same page concerning the blocking of shared IP addresses, we put it to LaLiga that when compared to site-blocking measures that aim to avoid collateral damage (most blocking worldwide), knowingly ‘overblocking’ must introduce new risks. Did LaLiga conduct a risk assessment before it started to block Cloudflare in February?

“At LALIGA we are fully aware that any blocking measure —even when legally justified— requires a cautious and proportional approach,” the league responded.

“That is precisely why we do not act indiscriminately, and why all our blocking actions are backed by judicial resolutions that assess the proportionality and potential impact before being authorized. It’s relevant to highlight that these blockings are requested and implemented once there are clear proofs of piracy signals and content.”

The Importance of Definitions

LaLiga’s position as stated here appears to stand on its definition of proportional, indiscriminate, and its grounds for blocking. It seems safe to assume that the IP addresses it reports are indeed being used by pirate sites offering its content illegally. Grounds for blocking don’t get any better than that.

If we place a tight definition on the word indiscriminate, it’s reasonable to assume that the IP addresses identified by LaLiga are obtained scientifically rather than randomly pulled out of hat. So with indiscriminate set the side for a moment, we have ourselves a question.

When a rights holder with legal standing demonstrates a genuine need to block, has obtained authorization from a court, and has no other immediate options available:

Does a proportional approach to infringement include blocking an IP address when there’s a risk that dozens, hundreds, or thousands of innocent third parties are using it too?

Herein lies an even bigger problem, directly linked to the biggest question of all.

Does TV Subscription Data Reveal Any Positive Effects of Blocking?

Establishing whether blocking has a positive effect on sales often prompts charts showing fewer people visiting blocked sites. Data cited by CEO Javier Tebas indicates that blocking suppressed piracy on a grand scale.

“Weekend piracy has decreased by 40%. That doesn’t mean everyone has already switched to paid channels, but… how do we know this? Barcelona-Inter semifinal in Spain: 1,200,000 viewers and a certain amount of data usage. El Clásico, four days later, had a much larger audience—two million—and resulted in 60% less piracy in consumption. In other words, it made a difference: more viewers were seen, much less illegal consumption as a result of the blocks we’re implementing,” he explains.

If this is an accurate picture, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that such large percentages are likely to have some impact on Spanish football’s bottom line. The immediate problem concerns the type of blocking used to achieve these results and whether similar authority would be granted again.

That leads to another complication.

No Evidence to Show Overblocking

Back in March when Cloudflare and RootedCON separately attended court hoping to end LaLiga’s ability to block, neither was successful, in part due to evidential failures. In short, information presented to the court was deemed insufficient since it failed to show “specific, quantifiable damage to third parties.” It’s a theme that still interests LaLiga.

“LALIGA has implemented a dedicated mailbox for complaints related to the blocking measures. This mechanism allows any third party who believes they’ve been unintentionally affected by a blocking action to contact us directly, provide technical evidence, and request a review,” Laliga says.

“To date, we have not received any formal complaints through this channel nor received any formal complaint through other legal channels, which reinforces our position that the system is working as intended: focused, precise, and without collateral impact on legitimate services.”

At Soccerex Amsterdam last weekend, Javier Tebas said that while LaLiga’s critics describe the court order as “useless” and “make a lot of noise,” it’s an example of what can be done.

[The order is] dynamic and should be implemented country by country. It’s very important that rights holders, UEFA, and national leagues become more united and more convinced that this is the way forward.”

The controversial order is available here (pdf, Spanish)

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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Last September, Apple removed the popular music streaming app Musi from its App Store, affecting millions of users.

Apple’s action wasn’t completely unexpected. Music industry groups had been trying to take Musi down for a long time, branding it a ‘parasitic’ app that skirts the rules.

Musi Sues Apple

Delisting from the App Store put the future of Musi directly at risk. The company initially hoped to resolve the matter with Apple behind closed doors, but since the tech giant was unwilling to reverse its decision, Musi took the matter to court.

Musi claimed that the App Store removal was the result of “backroom conversations” between Apple and key music industry players. The app developer alleged this was an “unfair” and “tainted” removal process designed to put it out of business.

Musi requested a preliminary injunction to reinstate the app, but that attempt failed. In January, a California federal court denied the injunction, ruling that Apple did not act unreasonably or in bad faith when it removed the app following complaints from music industry players and YouTube.

Apple Calls for Sanctions

With the underlying lawsuit yet to be resolved, a few weeks ago Apple fired back with a motion for sanctions. According to Apple, the court should sanction Musi for false or misleading allegations, which include the remarks concerning the alleged “backchannel scheme”.

According to Apple, discovery in this case clearly revealed that there were no backroom deals but Musi nonetheless included these claims in its amended complaint.

“[D]iscovery thoroughly disproved Musi’s baseless conspiracy theory that Apple schemed to eliminate the Musi app from the App Store to benefit ‘friends’ in the music industry,” Apple notes.

Apple further alleged that to get its app reinstated after an earlier removal years ago, Musi allegedly faked an UMG email. These alleged misrepresentations are sanctionable, Apple argues, while reiterating that it had received numerous complaints about Musi from various parties over the years.

Musi Fires Back, Requests Sanctions

Last week, Musi responded in court by opposing Apple’s motion and, in turn, requesting sanctions against Apple. The app creator notes that sanctions motions are often used as a tactic of intimidation and harassment and describes Apple’s motion as “a member of that shameful lineage.”

From Musi’s motion

A motion for sanctions is warranted if there are no facts to support the allegations but Musi contends that its claims are supported by credible evidence obtained during discovery.

“None of Musi’s challenged allegations are factually baseless, and all are based on a reasonable and competent inquiry by Musi’s counsel. Apple’s motion should thus be denied, and Apple should itself be sanctioned and required to pay Musi’s attorneys’ fees for opposing its baseless motion.”

‘Not a Simple App Removal’

Apple previously argued that there was no need for backroom discussions as Apple could simply remove Musi under its own terms, with or without previous complaints from rightsholders. Musi doesn’t deny that, but it notes that evidence indicates this isn’t what happened.

Based on evidence gathered through discovery, Musi suggests that there were ongoing discussions behind the scenes to discuss the potential removal of the app. The timeline below reflects Musi’s perspective and interpretation of these events.

– April 11, 2024: A Sony Music Entertainment executive, Jeff Walker, emails senior Apple legal personnel (Elizabeth Miles and Robert Windom) requesting Apple’s assistance in removing the Musi app from the App Store. Specifically, Sony asked for help to “identify a path forward” to “have the Musi app removed from the Apple app store”.

A Path Forward

– May 20, 2024: Apple’s Elizabeth Miles holds a call with Sony’s Jeff Walker about the Musi app, at Sony’s request.

– May 24, 2024: Following internal Apple discussions, Apple’s Chief Counsel of Content and Services, Robert Windom, instructs Apple in-house counsel Sean Cameron to “please try to get that meeting set up”. Musi implies that this was a meeting with YouTube.

– Around May 29, 2024: At Cameron’s direction, Apple’s YouTube liaison, Arun Singh, contacts YouTube’s Kelvin Paulino by phone. Musi argues Singh inquired about a March 2023 YouTube complaint that Apple had previously considered “resolved”; Singh testified Paulino initially seemed unaware of Musi or the complaint.

– July 15, 2024: The Call: Apple and YouTube legal teams meet. According to Musi (citing Apple’s own witnesses), Apple counsel Sean Cameron stated Apple considered YouTube’s 2023 complaint “resolved” and, after mentioning other “music industry” complaints, asked YouTube if it wanted to “continue with the [2023] complaint”. YouTube allegedly confirmed ongoing API violations by Musi and expressed intent to pursue the complaint, requesting Apple send an email to formalize this.

– The “Re-Open” Email: Post-call, Apple’s ‘AppStoreNotices’ emailed YouTube Legal: “Per request from the YouTube Legal team… If you would like to re-open your claim against this app, please specify the rights you believe are being infringed…”.

Re-Open

– August 20, 2024: Apple’s Elizabeth Miles has a call with National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) representatives regarding Musi, at the NMPA’s request.

– September 11, 2024: The NMPA sends Apple a letter supporting YouTube’s complaint against Musi.

Turning the Tables

Musi believes this is sufficient to back up its claim that the app’s removal was the result of “backroom conversations” between Apple and key music industry players. In any case, it argues that a motion for sanctions is not warranted, as this wasn’t a simple removal process.

To strengthen its claim, Musi cites an email from Apple’s Elizabeth Miles who, after Musi was removed, noted that it was a “complex process”.

Complex process

According to Musi, Apple’s motion for sanctions is baseless and should therefore be denied. Turning the tables, the app devloper asked the court to sanction Apple for improper use of a sanctions motion.

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A copy of Musi’s opposition to Apple’s motion for sanctions, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf)

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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Portugal now has a decade of experience with pirate site blocking measures, which were made possible through a voluntary agreement

In 2015, the country’s blocking scheme was formalized through a deal between several parties, including the Government, rightsholders, and Internet providers.

Under the blocking regime, many thousands of domain names have been blocked over the years. To strengthen the impact, advertisers joined in on the action by preventing ad placements on these sites.

Portugal: A Leading Site Blocking Example

The relative ease of this rollout, which received little pushback overall, was swiftly embraced by Hollywood. In 2016, Portugal served as a leading example of how other countries, including Spain and France, could implement their blocking plans.

A year later, a Hollywood-commissioned study confirmed that traffic to blocked sites had decreased significantly. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, as these domains are blocked after all, but it was seen as a great accomplishment nonetheless.

While site blocking is effective at blocking specific domains, it typically boosts traffic to unblocked sites. The effect wasn’t considered in the initial study, but the problem was previously documented in related research. And it’s visible today too, as Portugal’s piracy woes are far from over.

Blocking Pioneer and Piracy Hotspot?

Earlier this year, Apritel, the association for Portuguese Internet providers and telcos, flagged pirate streaming and IPTV services as a major problem. The group didn’t mention blocking as a solution, but suggested that the authorities should enable financial penalties for users of these services.

These piracy concerns are shared by many rightsholders and were also a topic at the Colloquium on Digital Piracy of Audiovisual Content, which took place in Lisbon last week. Here, many stakeholders discussed the ongoing piracy challenges.

With more than 3,000 blocked domain names, Portugal has strict anti-piracy measures in place. However, data from piracy tracking firm MUSO, prepared for last week’s meeting, shows that piracy remains popular in Portugal, even by European standards.

“Portugal’s piracy rate per user is 33% higher than the European average, marking it as one of the most active territories for unauthorised content consumption,” MUSO explains.

The higher piracy rates are also reflected in the number of visits to pirate sites by Internet users. These visit numbers are higher than in any other country in the region, despite the existing blocking measures.

“This pattern of high engagement has remained consistent across several years, indicating a need for ongoing and more refined enforcement strategies,” MUSO writes, aligning with the call for stronger enforcement.

Since MUSO only reports data on website visits, the growth in the use of pirate IPTV services is not reflected in these numbers. Instead, it appears that Portugal’s piracy numbers are in large part due to a seemingly overlooked content category.

Manga / Anime Blindspot?

After years of site blocking, many pirate sites are known to temporarily evade measures by switching to new domain names, which are eventually blocked again, resulting in an ongoing cat and mouse game. Tugaflix, for example, has been blocked for a decade, but new domains continue to show up.

MUSO data shows that a ‘Tugaflix’ domain has appeared in the list of ten most visited pirate sites in Portugal over the past 12 months. The domain has since been blocked and has already moved to a new location.

Pirate sites with most visits (MUSO: April 24 / March 25)

The list also reveals another interesting insight. The list of most visited piracy sites includes many Manga and Anime sites, including the hugely popular Asuracomic.net, as well as Hianime and 3xyaoi. According to our blocklist data, these remain accessible in Portugal.

In fact, we don’t see any Manga or Anime related website in the list of 3,000 blocked domain names we have access to, which was updated a few months ago. Apparently, this is somewhat of an enforcement blindspot.

This means that the relatively high piracy rates are not necessarily the result of lacking anti-piracy measures. Online piracy doesn’t magically disappear merely because anti-piracy tools exist; these tools must be actively and properly utilized by rightsholders.

Whether this was also a topic of discussion at last week’s anti-piracy colloquium is unknown.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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LaLiga’s 2024/2025 season is officially over. FC Barcelona were actually crowned champions on Thursday after it became mathematically impossible for Real Madrid to conjure up seven points or more from the six points available.

The final matches of the season were played on Sunday but with the championship settled, would LaLiga show restraint and taper down its blocking activity? Or perhaps it would continue under the authority of judge, despite the widespread collateral damage inflicted on innocent internet users since February, a scandal now known as #laligagate.

In For a Penny?

The early signs did little to inspire confidence. Protest website LaLigaGate.com was hit by a total blockade but whether the site was targeted deliberately or succumbed to collateral damage is unknown.

Intentional and Unintentional Blocking Look Identical

As the latest data suggests that mass blocking of Cloudflare in pursuit of 150 piracy platforms has negatively affected millions of innocent websites, use of the term ‘collateral damage’ may be running out of scope.

Unintentional overblocking became inevitable overblocking some time ago, a point certainly not lost on Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince.

Posting to X last week, Prince asked if anyone wanted any general feedback, declaring that he felt “in an especially truthful mood.” The first response contained direct questions about the LaLiga controversy, the blame for which LaLiga places squarely on the shoulders of Cloudflare.

For the first time since Cloudflare legal action failed to end LaLiga’s blocking campaign, Prince weighed in with his assessment of the current situation and where he believes it’s inevitably heading.

“Bonkers” Blocking Strategy

“A huge percentage of the Internet sits behind us, including small businesses and emergency resources in Spain,” Prince explained.

“The strategy of blocking broadly through ISPs based on IPs is bonkers because so much content, including emergency services content, can be behind any IP. The collateral damage is vast and is hurting Spanish citizens from accessing critical resources,” he added.

Earlier this year, various comments and statements by LaLiga suggested that its relationship with Cloudflare had reached rock bottom. It transpired that LaLiga had obtained an injunction which allowed it to tackle Cloudflare and Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), but had done so without Cloudflare’s knowledge, effectively denying the company a right to respond.

Alongside other attacks delivered via the media, LaLiga slammed Cloudflare for refusing to cooperate. What action LaLiga had demanded still isn’t clear, but the league said that if there was any overblocking as a result, Cloudflare would have to shoulder the blame.

The Potential for Deadly Consequences

The scale of overblocking reported in Spain is unprecedented but since LaLiga has a court order that effectively gives Cloudflare blocking a green light, it has been doing so in bulk, every single week since February.

Depending on who addresses the overblocking issue, with whom and when, the league claims that collateral damage a) doesn’t exist or is minimal and/or b) is Cloudflare’s responsibility. Prince appears to have grave concerns over the scale and type of blocking taking place, warning that a worst-case scenario is inevitable.

Football Piracy Blocks Will Claim Lives

Despite LaLiga’s unshakable claims to the contrary, Prince believes that it’s not a case of ‘if’ disaster strikes, it’s ‘when’.

“It’s only a matter of time before a Spanish citizen can’t access a life-saving emergency resource because the rights holder in a football match refuses to send a limited request to block one resource versus a broad request to block a whole swath of the Internet,” Prince warned.

“When that unfortunately and inevitably happens and harms lives, I’m confident policy makers and courts in Spain and elsewhere will make the right policy decision. Until then, it’ll be up to users to make politicians clear on the risk. I pray no one dies.”

The suggestion that LaLiga’s demands were too broad, doesn’t mean that Cloudflare is refusing to help, Prince suggested. On the contrary, there’s a process available, LaLiga just needs to use it.

“We’ve always been happy and willing to work with rights holders in conjunction with judicial bodies to protect their content. We have a clear process that works around the world to do that, Prince explained.

LaLiga Targeted Cloudflare and Others During the Weekend

Live blocking data provided by hayahora.futbol has proven invaluable to those documenting #laligagate in recent months and this past weekend was no different.

As the small sample of Cloudflare IP addresses blocked on Sunday seems to show, concerns that every IP address blocked would inevitably result in collateral damage, seem to have been trumped by the authority of the now-famous court order.

The importance of strict adherence to the law was underlined by LaLiga’s Global Content Protection Manager in a recent interview.

José Ignacio Carrillo de Albornoz told El Confidencial that without the collaboration of intermediaries, piracy will be impossible to beat. Carrillo de Albornoz concluded with a “statement of responsibility” which notes that real progress will require all parties to work together and go beyond compliance with the law.

“It is necessary that all links in the digital chain act legally and ethically,” he said.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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If it was possible to strip away the roles and behaviors that inevitably lead to head-on clashes, in some cases pirates and piracy fighters might find ways to get along. In some cases they may love the same things.

Yet back in the real world, the insatiable appetite for pirated content owned or protected by the latter, means the war never ends, only the shape changes. Whether South Korean publishing company Kakao Entertainment had always intended to do something different isn’t clear, but when it comes to presentation, no equivalent approach to fighting piracy exists at scale anywhere else.

The Krew

Launched in 2021 to proactively protect Kakao Entertainment’s ‘webtoon’ comic library, the new ‘P.CoK’ anti-piracy unit’s name was inspired by the ‘eyes’ on a peacock’s feathers.

“We’re always on the lookout for illegal use of Kakao Entertainment’s exclusive content worldwide,” the Kakao ‘Krew’ explained in 2023.

P.CoK conceded that it couldn’t yet put a figure on the scale of the piracy it was addressing or the monetary value of any losses attributable to it. Of course, even the wider industry has to settle for best estimates, so a fairly blunt but honest admission was fundamentally credible, yet also quite rare.

At the time, forming a complete database of pirate sites responsible for sharing Kakao content remained a work in progress. On the prevention side, P.CoK reported working with watermarking, image recognition, and usage pattern analysis, which helped the team “keep an eye on things and nip illegal activity in the bud.”

Complete the Quest, Level Up

Like much of the corporate world, anti-piracy work and how it’s presented to the outside world may at times undergo a little cosmetic filtering, to send the right message or benefit from being seen in a particular light.

Due to the nature of the work there may be an element of misdirection, especially when the target audience are those the company and often the police are determined to catch.

In P.CoK’s case, some things that are so neat and perfect, you really, really want them to be true. Maybe they are.

Piracy Culture, Videogame Culture? No Problem

As presented, there are three people in the team, all quite young with great names – Xeno, Hani, and Jeno. These people undoubtedly understand Kakao’s audience, especially those who prefer not to pay—on sites where they’re also active members.

P.CoK also enjoys webtoons and without getting too personal, one spent a number of years as a webtoon artist. Then the icing on the cake – at least two are gamers. One likens shutting down a site to “clearing a stage” in a game and the other focuses on anti-piracy strategic planning and then “leveling up after completing a quest.”

Documenting Progress

The publication of an anti-piracy white paper every six months (Sixth Edition here) provides an overview of progress and challenges in Kakao’s fight against piracy.

As reported in February’s edition, a total of 240 million illegal content removals worldwide in the second half of 2024 contributed to a grand total of 740 million removals overall. This was made possible by Kakao’s Trusted Copyright Removal Program (TCRP) status at Google, and the small matter of filing 30,000 takedown requests every day.

Some rightsholders use their takedown notice volumes as a proxy for progress in the fight against piracy; at least in the beginning, the removal of a million links to pirated content tends to speak for itself. Yet when Kakao mentions a 10.9% decrease in takedown notices in its sixth White Paper, compared to the number cited in the fifth, the reduction represents progress instead.

The decline was largely attributed to P.CoK’s long-term monitoring and the subsequent shutdown of a “major domestic” pirate site. Kakao identifies the platform as site “A”, almost certainly a reference to Agitoon and the linked Agitoon Novel sites shut down in a law enforcement operation last August.

“The case underscores the critical role of site shutdowns in reducing overall piracy activity,” Kakao noted in February. “Kakao Entertainment has consistently emphasized that shutting down a site by identifying its operator is at the core of its response to illegal distribution.”

Rare outlier examples aside, when a site operator’s anonymity is compromised, that can forever change the game. Anti-piracy outfits tend to keep unmasking details secret for operational reasons. P.CoK likes to tell those stories on social media.

Raising Awareness, Recruiting Informants

The theory that raising awareness of piracy discourages illegal consumption, is being tested in several ongoing campaigns. Spreading the message that piracy hurts everyone involved in creating webtoons, is one of P.CoK’s responsibilities.

The day-to-day platform of choice for raising awareness is Twitter. At what point spreading the gospel of Kindness to Creators began its transformation isn’t clear, but today the P.CoK account on X is much more than that.

Acting as a notice board for P.CoK’s anti-piracy activities and the availability of legal content, the channel also encourages webtoon fans to report links to illegal content, wherever they exist online.

For fans and supporters prepared to go further, P.CoK’s channel on X acts as a recruitment office for informants. After obtaining useful information from piracy circles, they head back to base where the information is relayed to P.CoK for enforcement purposes.

Having gathered a number of willing informants over the last couple of years, P.CoK claims to have built an underground network that actively supports its One Point Response System.

Shutting Sites Down Using Any Legal Means

Traditional wisdom suggests that revealing details of an anti-piracy enforcement plan up front may introduce unnecessary risk. Yet having shared the details of its One Point Response System with TorrentFreak recently, at face value P.CoK probably thinks otherwise.

P.CoK’s response to infringement begins with TTT: Targeting, Tracing, and Takedown. It’s at this early stage that the technical aspects, operations, revenue streams, and community details of pirate sites are gathered together, and cross-referenced with P.CoK’s databases of illegal site operators and the networks they operate in.

After combining and analyzing all available information, a shortlist of suspected site operators is compared with a list of actual operators. After final verification, the next stage can begin.

P.CoK says that it reaches out to the operators of pirate sites and services via “legally effective communications” such as email or physical documents. From the information available to us, the strategy seems to rely on operators believing there’s a credible threat of escalation, but they hold none of the cards.

Anonymity Gone – Choose a Poison

With the clear emphasis being placed on removing all anonymity, proving that to be the case will likely support efforts to convince operators that anything other than total capitulation is already a lost cause. Those who push back could face civil or criminal action.

Those who decide to comply and throw in the towel are expected to post a public announcement, shut down their site, and pledge never to infringe again. These final ‘goodbye’ statements are also posted on X, where the consequences of non-compliance are on display, presumably for the benefit of others in a similar position. It’s the modern-day equivalent of a severed head on a pike, with a comfortable chair and maybe a beer as a tempting potential off-ramp.

Of course, there are no restrictions on who can read these types of notices, which range from members of the public curious about content being made available for free, to lower tier pirate site staff and uploaders nervous about maintaining anonymity.

Even those daydreaming about launching a site of their own one day might stumble upon one of the statements below and take a different course.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Anti-piracy outfits aren’t typically known for seeking this type of attention. That being said, we assume P.CoK only has to take Kakao’s interests into account and having agreed the parameters, it simply gets on with the job. We’re informed that the total number of sites shut down has risen to 28 following the sudden closure of Reaper Scans announced this week.

A ‘goodbye’ message posted by the operators of Reaper Scans revealed that the demise of the 10 million visits per month site was triggered by a cease-and-desist notice received via email. It transpires that P.CoK had identified three Reaper Scans operators in as many countries (United States, India and Croatia) and for good measure, addressed them personally using their real names.

Why Reveal the Plan and Who Benefits?

While the plan is quite detailed, specific, and at times, fairly elaborate, it contains no information useful to pirate site operators. Equally, there’s no sign of anything that undermines P.CoK or Kakao or the strategy itself. That naturally leads to the obvious question: who benefits from the details being made public?

Assuming that this is a true representation of P.CoK’s plan, it’s fundamentally solid; identify the suspects, leave no space for maneuver, provide an exit strategy, and work hard in advance to ensure that despite the presence of choice, site operators have only one viable option.

Indeed, by being unambiguous about how things are likely to play out, at all times there’s a tacit understanding over where this will inevitably end up for the freshly deanonymized. The joker in the pack concerns the informants; how many actually exist, or do any exist at all? Are they effective? Who are they?

To the extent that answers to any of those questions are in any way helpful, pirate site communities have been known to self corrode from excessive suspicion alone.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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