Internet Provider RCN Asks Court to Dismiss Piracy Liability Lawsuit
Last summer several major music companies filed a lawsuit against Internet provider RCN. Helped by the RIAA, they argued that the ISP turned a blind eye to pirating subscribers. The lawsuit is in many regards similar to the ones against other ISPs, such as Cox, Grande, and Charter, which were all accused of failing to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. According to the labels, RCN knew that some of its subscribers were...
Rivendell Has Now Sent Half a Billion DMCA Takedown Requests to Google
DMCA notices or their equivalents can be filed against websites, hosts, ISPs and other services almost anywhere in the world, with the majority of entities taking some action in response. At Google, for example, the company receives DMCA notices requesting that allegedly-infringing URLs are delisted from search results and at this company alone, the scale is astonishing. At the time of writing, Google has processed requests to remove...
Russia’s Anti-Piracy Deal to Delete Content From Search Engines Extended Until 2021
When leading content companies and distributors plus Yandex, Rambler Group, Mail.Ru Group, vKontakte, and RuTube signed up to a landmark anti-piracy memorandum in 2018, new ground was broken in Russia. Assisted by the creation of a centralized database of allegedly-infringing content, Internet platforms agreed to voluntarily query the resource in near real-time before deleting content from their search indexes. The plan was to make...
Swedish Court Issues ‘Dynamic’ Pirate Bay Blocking Order
In recent years, Swedish movie outfits and Hollywood studios, including Disney, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros, have been working hard to get local ISPs to block The Pirate Bay. The first success came a few years ago when a blocking order was issued against local Internet provider Bredbandsbolaget. This was later followed by an interim order against Telia, Sweden’s largest ISP, which was struck down on appeal and sent back...
Mystery as PortalRoms Disappears Leaving 4 Million Gaming Visitors in the Dark
In Internet ‘piracy’ years, PortalRoms.com is pretty old domain, having first appeared as a very basic ROM download site way back in 2004, possibly even earlier. Over the years it has undergone various transformations and possibly ownership changes too. Its now-dormant Twitter account was created back in 2010 but behind the scenes and after fairly slow initial growth, the last decade saw the site grow negligible traffic to...
Popcorn Time Domain Suspension Was Triggered by Falsified Court Document
Earlier this week registrar 101domain suspended the Popcorntime.sh domain name. The grounds for the suspension initially remained unclear. However, after asking for clarification, 101domain explained to the site operator that it had received an injunction from a US court. The injunction in question appeared to have been sent by the Motion Picture Association (MPA). It was signed by a federal judge at the US District Court for the...
