The French Supreme Court has confirmed that Société Générale rightfully terminated a payment processing agreement with file-hosting service 1fichier. The cyberlocker failed to monitor and prevent the storage of pirated material, which it had contractually agreed to do. When Mastercard raised red flags, the bank was therefore was within its right to take action.
File-hosting platform 1fichier.com appeared around 2009 and since then has seen no shortage of copyright complaints.
Most recently, it was highlighted by the U.S. Trade Representative as a notorious piracy market. The site’s response to takedown notices is seen as insufficient by rightsholders, the USTR concluded.
These allegations are nothing new to 1Fichier and parent company Dstorage. However, where other services typically evade legal threats, 1fichier has defended itself in court, albeit with little success.
Nintendo previously sued the file hosting company ...
The CCIA, which represents global tech firms including Amazon, Cloudflare and Google, is sounding the alarm over Italy's "Piracy Shield" blocking scheme. The group's European branch urges the EU Commission to step in to prevent overblocking and to promote transparency. Additional measures requiring Internet services to actively report illegal activity on their networks are seen as problematic too.
Launched last year, Italy’s elaborate ‘Piracy Shield‘ blocking scheme was billed as the future of anti-piracy efforts.
To effectively tackle live sports piracy, broad blocking powers aim to block piracy-related domain names and IP addresses within 30 minutes.
While many pirate sources have indeed been blocked, Piracy Shield is not without controversy. There have been multiple reports of overblocking, where the anti-piracy system blocked access to Google Drive, Cloudflare, and other legitimate sites and services. Meanwhile, calls for more transparency and accountability a...
Following the surprise arrest of founder Pavel Durov in France last year, Telegram's suddenly improved attitude towards content complaints was unexpected, and appears to be holding. After channels operated by Z-Library and Anna's Archive were shut down recently, Russian media outlets are reporting the suspension of a channel operated by RuTracker, one of the most resilient torrent trackers in history.
The arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov by French authorities in August 2024 was unexpected, the basis perhaps even more so.
The mere suggestion that social media operators in the United States could face arrest overseas, for the alleged misconduct of a minority of users among more than a billion, would not be well received.
According to reports, France accused a subset of Telegram users of committing a range of very serious crimes. Extending the blame to Durov personally, inaction in the face of complaints rendered him complicit, the authorities said.
Telegram’...
Reddit finds itself in court once again as movie companies continue to seek information on the site's users. After several rejections, the case is now before the Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals. The rightsholders argue that the IP addresses of six users who discussed piracy related matters are key evidence in a lawsuit against ISP Frontier. Reddit counters, stressing that the users' First Amendment right to anonymous speech is at stake.
Reddit has gone head-to-head with a group of filmmakers over the past two years, aiming to protect the privacy of its users.
In three separate cases, the filmmakers subpoenaed Reddit for details of users who commented on various piracy related topics.
The movie companies said they are not planning to go after these people in court but want to use their comments as evidence in ongoing piracy liability lawsuits against Frontier Communications and other internet providers.
For example, the rightsholders argued that the Redditors’ comments are key evidence to show ...
Meta is among a long list of companies being sued for allegedly using pirated material to train its AI models. Meta has never denied using copyrighted works but stressed that it would rely on a fair use defense. However, with rightsholders in one case asking for torrent client data and 'seeding lists' for millions of books allegedly shared in public, the case now takes a geeky turn.
Over the past two years, AI development has progressed at a rapid pace.
This includes large language models, which are typically trained on broad datasets of texts; the more, the better.
When AI hit the mainstream, it became apparent that many rightsholders had concerns over the unauthorized use of their copyright works. Creatives including photographers, artists, musicians, journalists, and authors, responded by filed copyright infringement lawsuits to protect their rights.
Book authors, in particular, complained about the use of pirated books as training material. In ...
A man who ran an IPTV piracy operation from his home in Birmingham, UK, has been sentenced to two years and nine months in prison for fraud offenses. The case is a rare example of a seller sourcing their own content but may have been slightly overhyped. Following raids in 2021, "hundreds of thousands" were said to use the service, a figure quietly rounded down to just 2,000.
Official figures on exactly how many people have been arrested, prosecuted and sentenced for piracy-linked offenses, are not easily obtained in the UK.
Indeed, disclosure in response to FOIA requests seems to become more difficult when petty offending results in no arrests, or when suspects are later released without charge.
When it comes to those who sell or resell subscriptions or operate illegal IPTV services, the last couple of years have seen a fairly dramatic uptick in successful prosecutions and convictions. At this point even the term ‘major crackdown’ is ...
Despite blocking thousands of illegal streaming sites, Italy's 'Piracy Shield' anti-piracy program has failed to deliver increased viewership for legal services like DAZN. This revelation appears in data provided by telecoms regulator AGCOM, which oversees the blocking regime. It adds fuel to the already heated discussions, which divide stakeholders and copyright representatives.
Nearly a year has passed since Italy officially implemented ‘Piracy Shield‘, a system that aims to deter and decrease live sports streaming piracy.
Since last February, Piracy Shield has blocked access to thousands of IP-addresses and domain names associated with unauthorized broadcasts.
This massive blocking operation is seen as a grandiose success by the authorities and many participating rightsholders. There were some mishaps, including repeated instances of widespread overblocking, but these were regarded as unavoidable teething problems.
‘Piracy Shield’...
Those capable of quickly bypassing video game copy protection are revered by impatient pirate players. On average, games protected by anti-tamper tech Denuvo enjoy 68 days crack-free before succumbing to piracy. Yet new research focused on MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and video game preservation, reveals that a sample of 712 protected games, released as far back as 1979, took an average of 10.6 months each to crack. Total cracking time: 628 years.
With the next cutting-edge big-budget AAA masterpiece never too far away, thousands of 8bit and 16bit classics dating back almost 50 years sit quietly by, waiting for the arrival of the next wave of curious explorers.
The magic of emulation makes all of this happen and for many retro gaming enthusiasts, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) rules them all. First released on February 7, 1997, development of this open source giant continues to this day, supporting a wide range of systems popular with millions of gamers of the past, and millions more today in pursuit of nostalgia....
In 2024, legal action taken by Spain's top-tier football league led to telecoms giant Telefonica disclosing the identities of alleged pirates among its own subscribers. Telefonica's cooperation was to be expected, as it just obtained the rights to broadcast LaLiga matches for 1.2 billion euros. In contrast, details of an anti-piracy agreement between the two companies, one that seems to operate in the opposite direction, wasn't expected at all.
After steadfastly protecting the privacy rights of subscribers, usually against aggressive rightsholders determined to unmask them, ISPs today are more likely to view disclosure from a different perspective.
At a time when internet subscriptions paid most of the bills, protecting customers accused of illicit file-sharing led to prolonged litigation. Cases were fought up to the highest courts in the United States. In Europe, further still.
When rights organization Promusicae sued Telefonica in 2005, demanding the identities of customers accused of using KaZaA to pirate music, ...
This week, several domain names of the Japanese adult pirate website MissAV were redirected to seizure banners. The legal basis for these confiscations wasn't initially clear, but new information ties the action to a U.S. court order. In addition to losing their domain names, the MissAV defendants must pay $4.5 million in damages.
With billions of annual visits, MissAV ranked among the top 60 most-visited websites on the internet.
For years, the site appeared to operate without any significant setbacks, but that changed a few days ago, when several domain names including MissAV.com and ThisAV.com were seized.
Initially, it wasn’t clear how permanent these seizures were, as the domains briefly became accessible again. However, that changed a few hours ago when the Japanese adult entertainment producer Will Co. LTD announced that these actions are backed up by a U.S. federal court order.
T...