Pirate Streaming Portal Series.ly Has Domain Suspended, Rebrand Surfaces (Updated)
Series.ly was once one of Spain’s best-known pirate link sites. The original operation dropped its piracy links in late 2014. In 2021, the domain was bought at auction by a new team, which says it isn’t part of the original one. The new Series.ly, which requires a login to access, became pretty popular on its own, with nearly two million monthly visits, and nearly 90% of its traffic coming from Spain. That popularity didn’t go...
Cloudflare Keeps 1.1.1.1 Out of Piracy Blocking, Escapes Penalties in France
Over the past two years, French courts have ordered a growing list of intermediaries to block access to pirate sports streams. In addition to regular ISPs, the orders now target public DNS resolvers, VPN services, search engines and CDN providers, all of which can help people bypass existing blockades. Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has received several of these orders. In April, the Paris Judicial Court ordered the...
Pirate App MovieBox Passes 300 Million Downloads as Rightsholders Alert EU
Last year, Nigeria’s copyright watchdog celebrated the suspension of MovieBox.ng, a pirate streaming site that drew tens of millions of visits per month. The site swiftly moved to a new domain, as we reported at the time, and its Android app remained widely available. However, the app is now drawing attention in Brussels. In submissions for the European Commission’s 2027 Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List, both the Motion Picture...
Denuvo Asks Court to Unmask Game Cracker ‘voices38’, Reveals Crypto Transactions
Last month, Denuvo filed a DMCA anti-circumvention lawsuit against the anonymous game cracker ‘voices38’ at a federal court in California. The Irdeto-owned company accuses the cracker of bypassing its Anti-Tamper protection on 26 games, including Hogwarts Legacy and Black Myth: Wukong. For now, Denuvo does not know who it is suing. The complaint listed voices38’s Discord user ID, a Reddit account, and seven Steam profiles, but no...
DNS Resolver Quad9 Rejects French Piracy Blocks, Weighs Exit as beIN Seeks Up to €580K a Day
Since 2024, French courts have repeatedly ordered public DNS resolvers to block access to pirate sports streaming sites. Not every provider accepted this. For example, OpenDNS suspended its service in France in response to the first blocking order. Quad9 stayed in France. The Swiss non-profit foundation said that it had to block the targeted sites for all users worldwide to remain in compliance, and announced that it would appeal....
Two U.S. Site-Blocking Bills Compete Over VPN Rules and ISP Liability
For more than a decade after the SOPA protests, pirate site blocking was a subject U.S. lawmakers preferred to avoid. That changed last month, when two site blocking bills were introduced in Congress within ten days of each other. The first, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa, is the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) which would allow courts to order ISPs, DNS resolvers, and VPNs to block foreign pirate sites. The second is the...
