An AI contributory infringement lawsuit against NVIDIA can proceed, even under the Supreme Court's recent Cox v. Sony framework, a federal judge ruled this week. The court denied NVIDIA's motion to dismiss in large part, concluding that some of the company's scripts had no purpose other than to enable infringement. The chip maker's request to strike all BitTorrent references was also denied, with Judge Tigar noting that "BitTorrent is merely a tool."
Chip giant NVIDIA has been one of the main financial beneficiaries in the artificial intelligence boom.
Revenue surged due to high demand for its AI-learning chips and data center services, and the end doesn’t appear to be in sight.
Besides selling the most sought-after hardware, NVIDIA is also developing its own models, including NeMo Megatron models. These were trained using their own hardware and with help from large text libraries, much like other tech giants do.
Authors Sue NVIDIA for Copyright InfringementThis includes authors, who, in various lawsuit...
Reddit's latest transparency report shows a sharp jump in account bans for repeat copyright infringement, while the number of banned subreddits dropped significantly. The data, covering the latter half of 2025, also shows rightsholders reported 425,471 pieces of allegedly infringing content, of which Reddit removed roughly half.
With over 120 million daily users, Reddit is undoubtedly one of the most visited sites on the Internet.
The community-oriented social sharing platform, founded twenty years ago, has since transformed from a hobby project to the publicly traded multi-billion-dollar company it is today.
This growth also brought added responsibility. In addition to the billions of casual, insightful, and heartwarming messages, Reddit’s popularity was also embraced by those who color outside the lines of the law, including copyright infringers.
Reddit’s Transparency ReportTo show ...
For the first time in thirteen years, the U.S. government has placed a trading partner in its most serious category for intellectual property concerns. The USTR's latest Special 301 Report classifies Vietnam as a "Priority Foreign Country," opening the door to potential trade sanctions. The country's failure to combat pirate sites and services, including Fmovies, is cited as a key reason.
Each year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes a new update of its Special 301 Report, highlighting countries that fail to live up to U.S. copyright protection standards.
The annual overview is meant to urge foreign governments to improve policy and legislation in favor of U.S. copyright holders.
The process has shown itself to be an effective diplomatic tool and has helped to kick-start copyright reforms around the globe. Not all governments are equally susceptible to critique, and Canada once described the process as flawed. Still, no country...
Adult entertainment company FlavaWorks has launched one of its largest legal campaigns this week. The company filed a detailed complaint centered around the long-running private torrent tracker Gay-torrents.org. The lawsuit targeted hundreds of users, the site's alleged operator, a French uploader, as well as a Bulgarian shell company through which millions of dollars in VIP donations were routed.
FlavaWorks is an Illinois-based adult entertainment company specializing in content featuring Black and Latino men.
The company has pursued copyright infringers aggressively for years, including a $1.5 million damages award against a defendant who shared its films on BitTorrent and a high-profile clash with an unnamed television executive that was eventually settled.
This week, the company continues its legal pressure with a complaint filed last week at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit targets the owner and administrators of private B...
A new report by the Digital Citizens Alliance and IP House argues that piracy has become more organized and sophisticated over the years. In some cases, it has been linked to other criminal elements, including drugs, weapons, and the mafia. The report calls for site-blocking legislation and urges Congress to act. How site-blocking would affect other criminal endeavors remains to be seen.
Links between piracy and organized crime have been around for several decades.
The framing first emerged in the late 1990s, when the IFPI raised concerns about transborder smuggling of pirated CDs by criminal networks. Back then, most piracy took place offline.
A terrorism angle was added to the mix in 2003, when the U.S. House held a hearing on piracy’s “links to organized crime and terrorism.” Four months later, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble told Congress that intellectual property crime had become “the preferred method of funding for a nu...
As lawmakers in U.S. Congress advance their pirate site blocking plans, the Motion Picture Association is publicly reiterating the need for such legislation. In a World IP Day post, MPA Global General Counsel Karyn Temple frames live sports piracy as an urgent threat. She argues that a U.S. site blocking law is overdue, pointing out that more than 55 countries already have blocking regimes in place.
For a long time, pirate site blocking was regarded as a topic most U.S. politicians would rather avoid.
This lingering remnant of the SOPA debacle drove copyright holders to focus on the introduction of blocking efforts in other countries instead, and not unsuccessfully.
More than 14 years after the last serious try, site-blocking calls have gained momentum once again.
As we reported in early April, lawmakers, including Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Senator Tillis (R-NC) are working on a unified, bipartisan site-blocking bill. Both sides initially started worki...
DNS4EU, an EU-funded initiative that aims to offer a secure and privacy-focused DNS resolver for Europeans, is the latest intermediary to get caught up in the French anti-piracy crackdown. In a series of orders in favor of Canal+, the Paris court ordered search engines, ISPs, DNS providers, VPNs, and other intermediaries to block pirate streaming sites.
Since 2024, the Paris Judicial Court has gradually expanded France’s piracy site blocking orders beyond residential Internet providers.
First, it required Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco to actively block access to pirate sites through their own DNS resolvers, confirming that third-party intermediaries can be required to take responsibility. Not much later, VPN providers were added to the blocking roster, as well as search engines.
These intermediaries were targeted because they could help pirates to bypass other blocking measures. If these alternative routes are cut off a...
A group of independent film companies has dropped its long-running piracy liability lawsuit against U.S. Internet provider RCN. The joint stipulation, filed in a New Jersey federal court, follows the Cox Supreme Court ruling. In addition to dropping a multi-million-dollar damages claim, the requested U.S. pirate site blocking injunction is also off the table.
In 2021, a group of independent movie companies, including the makers of The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, London Has Fallen, and Rambo V, sued RCN Telecom Services at a New Jersey federal court.
The filmmakers alleged that RCN failed to disconnect repeat infringers on its network, making the ISP liable for its subscribers’ copyright infringement.
The lawsuit was one of several filed by the same group of filmmakers against U.S. Internet providers, including Grande Communications, Frontier Communications, and Verizon. These all alleged that the ISPs failed to ter...
Google is trying to put an end to the copyright liability claim in its textbook piracy battle with several academic publishers. In a motion for partial judgment filed in a New York federal court, Google argues that the recent Supreme Court ruling in Cox v. Sony has effectively killed the copyright liability arguments. That is, unless the publishers can prove Google specifically "induced" infringement or built a service "tailored" exclusively for piracy.
In June 2024, major publishers, including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, Elsevier, and McGraw Hill, filed a copyright lawsuit against Google in federal court in New York.
The companies accused the search giant of running Shopping ads for so-called “Pirate Sellers,” merchants who used Google’s platform to promote infringing copies of their textbooks.
The lawsuit has been narrowed significantly since it was first filed. Last June, Judge Jennifer L. Rochon dismissed the publishers’ vicarious copyright infringement claim and their alleged violation...
A Spanish content creator who ran a film preservation website together with more than a dozen others, is now the sole defendant in a prosecution where he faces a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence and €870,000 in damages. "El Feo," as the defendant is known online, fought back at trial. Among other things, he stressed that the film archive was a non-commercial project he was no longer actively involved in at the time of his arrest.
Launched in 2015, Zoowoman was a popular Spanish non-commercial film repository.
The site did not store any movies, but it hosted links to approximately 11,000 titles before it was shut down.
The site was purportedly operated by a group of people, including film enthusiast “El Feo,” who is also the creator of La Filmoteca Maldita, a YouTube channel with over 400,000 subscribers dedicated to film analysis and criticism.
El Feo told TorrentFreak that the site focused specifically on films that were out of circulation commercially, discontinued, or otherwise ...