Latest Torrent News

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

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

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

According to the MPA, AnimeFLV’s operators are believed to be located in Peru, Chile, and Mexico. In the latter ...

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

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

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

For example, when the buffstrea...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, nearly twenty years have passed and Bulgaria continues to struggle with site blocking. This, despite being p...

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

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

By January, several registrars had indeed taken action. Domains linked to the American registrar Porkbun, the UK-based WHG Hosting services, and the Lithuanian registrar Hostinger were all fully suspended, suggesting that thes...

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

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

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

American rightsholders and the U.S. Government urged the Vietnamese...

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

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

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

The core idea always revol...

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

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

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

Twelve YggTorrent Arrests

This week, the police anno...

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

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

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