Fake News is Coming? Game of Thrones Pirates Are Going to Jail
In case anyone hadn’t noticed, a new series of Game of Thrones started last week. That meant hundreds of articles about the show, especially since this is probably its last hurrah. We too did our bit, writing earlier this week how the first episode in the series had resulted in a flood of downloads via torrent sites. We’ve been writing about the show in this context for years, so the latest installment probably...
Omniverse Wants “Scandalous” Claims Removed From ACE’s Piracy Lawsuit
In February, several major Hollywood studios, Amazon, and Netflix filed a lawsuit against Omniverse One World Television. Under the flag of anti-piracy group ACE, the companies accused Omniverse and its owner Jason DeMeo of supplying pirate streaming channels to various IPTV services. Omniverse doesn’t offer any streaming boxes but sells live-streaming services to third-party distributors, such as HDHomerun,...
EFF Backs Stream Rippers in Legal Battle Against Record Labels
Last year, a group of prominent record labels filed a piracy lawsuit against the Russian operator of YouTube-ripping sites FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com. The labels hoped to shut the sites down, but this effort backfired. In January, US District Court Judge Claude M. Hilton dismissed the case due to a lack of jurisdiction. The Court carefully reviewed how the sites operate and found no evidence that they purposefully...
The Pirate Bay Lives On, A Decade After ‘Guilty’ Verdicts
On the morning of March 3, 2009, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were all waiting for the final day in the now-infamous trial featuring The Pirate Bay. The night before the original ‘notorious site’ had gone offline, worrying the masses. But as it had done countless times before, the site reappeared once again after Fredrik (TiAMO) worked his magic – from inside the halls of...
Huge Video-Hosting Site Openload Stops Paying Uploaders
Earlier this month we reported on the plight of Rapidvideo, a popular file-hosting site that specializes in hosting videos. The site previously allowed visitors to view content uploaded by other users for free, with the system funded by advertising. However, interesting market conditions forced the platform into a surprise announcement. “We can’t finance ourselves from internet ads any longer,” the company said while...
Movie Studios Are Suing Canadian BitTorrent Users, But That’s Nothing New
This week Canadian news outlets are reporting about a supposed new legal campaign against people who pirate movies and TV-shows via BitTorrent. This includes an article from CBC, which featured a still from Game of Thrones, suggesting that downloaders of the popular HBO series are at risk too. The coverage comes a bit as a surprise, because there is nothing new to these lawsuits. “Reverse class-action” suits...
