‘Destroyed’ Usenet Provider NSE and BREIN End 16-Year Battle With Secret Settlement
The long-running legal battle between News-Service Europe (NSE) and anti-piracy group BREIN has quietly come to an end. NSE was once one of the largest Usenet providers, but its legal troubles started in 2009, when BREIN took legal action on behalf of the movie and music industries. In an early verdict in 2011, the Court of Amsterdam concluded that NSE willingly facilitated online piracy through its services. As a result, the company...
Live Sports Piracy: EU Commission Admits that Anti-Piracy Advice Had Limited Impact
For years, powerful rightsholders and media groups have demanded urgent and decisive action from the European Commission to tackle IPTV piracy of live sports and events. From the MPA, to the Premier League, Sky, LaLiga and Serie A, the message couldn’t have been clearer or more consistent. It didn’t change after the EC’s rejection of their call for urgent legislative measures in 2022, and remained intact following a consultation and...
Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 11/24/2025
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources. This week we have two newcomers on the list. “One Battle After Another” is the most shared title. The...
Cloudflare Says Piracy Liability Ruling Has Global Implications; Publishers Disagree
Services offered by U.S tech giant Cloudflare improve the performance and security of millions of websites, amounting to a significant contribution towards the health of today’s internet. Those hoping to benefit from Cloudflare’s services find few, if any, barriers to entry. Typically a working email address is sufficient to gain access, meaning new users can protect their websites in a matter of minutes. Cloudflare Held Liable For...
Anna’s Archive ‘WorldCat Scrape’ Lawsuit Drops $5M Claim, Pivots to Takedown Tactic
Anna’s Archive is a meta-search engine for shadow libraries that allows users to find pirated books and other related resources. In late 2023, the search engine expanded its offering by making data from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database available online. Anna’s Archive scraped several terabytes of data and published over a billion unique metadata records. The records contain no copyrighted books or articles, but they help ‘shadow’...
Piracy Liability Dispute Between Universal Music and Cloudflare Reaches EU’s Highest Court
Pirate sites have proven to be quite a headache for Cloudflare and have landed the San Francisco-based tech company in court on several occasions. These legal battles include a case in Germany, where the local branch of Universal Music sued Cloudflare for offering its services to pirate site DDL-Music. The origins of this case date back to June 2019, when the German branch of Universal Music sent a copyright infringement notice to...
