Polish streaming service CDA has once again been accused of being a notorious piracy market by the Motion Picture Association (MPA). CDA sent a rebuttal to the US government, dismissing the claims as false and misleading. In addition, the company points out that the MPA was provided with a direct takedown tool but has never used it.
Every year, the US Trade Representative (USTR) asks interested stakeholders to identify ‘notorious’ foreign piracy markets.
Responses typically list the Pirate Bays of this world, but they also mention websites and services that don’t see themselves as pirate markets.
Polish video-on-demand (VOD) platform CDA.pl falls in the latter category. The video platform has been flagged as a notorious pirate service by the MPA since 2018. While CDA has filed several rebuttals, the movie industry group continues to double down on its claims.
In the most recent recommendatio...
After blocking Cloudflare to prevent IPTV piracy just a few months ago, on Saturday the rightsholders behind Piracy Shield ordered Italy's ISPs to block Google Drive. The subsequent nationwide blackout, affecting millions of Italians, wasn't just a hapless IP address blunder. This was the reckless blocking of a Google.com subdomain that many 10-year-olds could identify as being important. Reckless people and internet infrastructure, what could possibly go wrong next?
Italy has an administrative blocking mechanism and a technical blocking platform, Piracy Shield, operated by rightsholders in the private sector.
Up until now, AGCOM, Italy’s independent telecoms regulator, has been Piracy Shield’s greatest supporter, at least of those not already benefiting financially from the activities of football league Serie A, currently the only beneficiary of Piracy Shield blocking.
To the extent there’s much of a ‘public’ component to Piracy Shield’s activities in Italy, the ‘private’ absolutely domina...
The ESA, which represents several major gaming companies, has shared an updated list of notorious piracy threats with the U.S. Government. One of the notable newcomers is FitGirl-Repacks, which has been a dominant player in the game piracy landscape for years. Meanwhile, ESA's report no longer mentions malware, cryptocurrencies, or Scene release groups, which were previously seen as 'growing trends'.
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has submitted its latest overview of “Notorious Markets” to the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR).
These submissions serve as input for the USTR’s yearly overview of piracy ‘markets’ which helps to shape the U.S. Government’s global copyright enforcement agenda going forward.
The ESA, which represents video game companies including Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, and Ubisoft, hopes that the interests of its members will be taken into account. In the report, the group lists various pirat...
The Court of Rome has ordered Cloudflare to take action against one of its customers, pirate streaming site 'Guardaserie'. Cloudflare is required to disconnect the site and block related domain names, including those that are registered in the future. In addition, the company must share information that can help to identify the operator.
Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare provides a range of connectivity and security services to millions of customers around the globe.
In addition to Fortune 500 companies and governments across various continents, the American company also provides its services to pirate sites.
In recent years, rightsholders have urged Cloudflare to take a more proactive stance against piracy. Their primary concern is that Cloudflare ‘hides’ the true hosting location of pirate sites, making enforcement actions more cumbersome.
Cloudflare takes a neutral stance, but ...
The Court of Justice of the European Union has handed a historic victory to Datel, the company behind video game cheat device Action Replay. For well over a decade, Sony argued that modification of game generated code amounted to copyright infringement. The CJEU judgment holds that there was no violation of Sony's rights, since Action Replay ran alongside Sony's game code, only modifying values in RAM while leaving object code untouched.
The legal battle in Germany between Sony Entertainment Interactive and cheat cartridge seller Datel has been ongoing for well over a decade.
Sony had hoped to end sales of Datel’s Action Replay PSP and Tilt FX. These products enabled users of Sony’s PSP console to modify gameplay by tweaking code, thereby obtaining extra ‘lives’ and similar ‘cheat’ features.
According to Sony, Datel’s software intervened in the ‘program flow’ of its games and, by changing the flow, Sony’s copyrighted game code was modified. Therefore, the softwa...
Popular torrent site TorrentGalaxy is suffering downtime again today. While the site no longer spooks its visitors with cryptic messages, the repeated issues are somewhat unusual. TorrentGalaxy reportedly changed owners, which could partly explain the recent troubles. This is another chapter in the unusual history of the site, which originated in the 1337x chatbox after ExtraTorrent shut down.
TorrentGalaxy has had its fair share of issues over the past few months.
In June, many users feared that the site had thrown in the towel, displaying only a cryptic message that read “4ever?” to visitors. This came as a surprise, even to the site’s top staffers, who had no clue what was going on.
The site eventually returned as if nothing ever happened and resumed its operations. The purpose of the downtime was never clarified and most people forgot about it until the site went offline again in September with another cryptic message.
With the rumor mill in full s...
City of London Police say a man was arrested this week as part of an operation to disrupt the supply of pirate IPTV subscriptions in the UK. After targeting a residential address and four business addresses in the West Midlands, police say a 38-year-old man was detained on suspicion of copyright and money laundering offenses. Police also shared photos taken during the operation, a relative rarity these days but a welcome source of additional information nonetheless.
Police and anti-piracy groups in the UK appear to be following through with a pledge to keep cracking down on those involved in the pirate IPTV ecosystem.
Most arrests recently have targeted IPTV subscription resellers, i.e those who buy subscriptions and sell them on to friends, family, and increasingly anyone on social media, at a profit.
A report from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) at City of London Police suggests that a different type of player was targeted in an operation earlier this week. Photographs taken during the operation appear to back that ...
A lawsuit filed at a Seattle court this week targets Ukraine-based hosting Provider Virtual Systems. Coordinated by the International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy (IBCAP), the lawsuit focuses on Virtual Systems' self-promotion as a 'DMCA-ignored' host. After allegedly ignoring over 500 DMCA-style infringement notices relating to dozens of pirate IPTV services, the lawsuit demands over $42m in copyright damages.
As famously pointed out by The Pirate Bay’s Anakata in response to a Dreamworks takedown notice 20 years ago, the DMCA does not apply to countries outside the United States.
While technically correct, ignoring takedown notices isn’t risk-free; inaction can increase risk where none previously existed.
DMCA notices and equivalents issued under the EU’s E-Commerce Directive, for example, not only aim to counter infringement. They also support ‘safe harbors’ that protect hosts from incurring liability for customers’ infringements. In general te...
Korean game publisher Nexon is using the U.S. legal system to address online copyright infringement. The company obtained a DMCA subpoena that requires Discord to hand over the personal details of suspected pirates. While Discord has shared information in the past, it doesn't plan to cooperate any longer, refusing to play the role of 'anti-piracy police'.
Under U.S. law, rightsholders have an option to identify alleged copyright infringers, without directly having to file a lawsuit.
Instead, they can request a DMCA subpoena. These documents are typically signed by a court clerk and don’t require any judicial oversight. Specifically, they allow rightsholders to obtain the personal details of anonymous alleged infringers through third-party service providers.
Foreign companies are also aware of this discovery ‘shortcut’. For example, Korean game publisher Nexon previously used it to identify people who alleged...
After the world's largest streaming piracy network was shut down in Vietnam recently, sites like FMovies, 123Movies, and Soap2Day should in theory be a thing of the past. Yet as recent MPA blocking measures in the UK show, that's far from reality. Hundreds of domains with similar branding are scooping up millions of visitors, but who operates them and from where, is currently unknown.
Six years ago when attention was focused elsewhere, the MPA warned that lacking legislation and rising broadband penetration would eventually transform Vietnam into a major online headache for rightsholders.
Yet perhaps not even the MPA expected sites like FMovies and Aniwatch to attract hundreds of millions of visitors every month. Coupled with a complex and politically sensitive environment in Vietnam, where established anti-piracy principles seemed to carry little to no weight, at times Hollywood’s prospects of countering this unique threat seemed uncharacteristically hopel...