Pirate Bay Proxy Defeats Police’s GitHub Takedown with DMCA Counternotice
Various courts around the world have come to the conclusion that The Pirate Bay is a copyright-infringing website. As a result, Internet providers in dozens of countries are required to block access to the site. This works well, but blocking measures are also quite easy to circumvent. Some people may resort to VPN services, for example, or replace the default DNS resolver provided by their ISP with independent alternatives. Dedicated...
Yout.com Reignites RIAA Stream-Ripping Dispute at Court of Appeal
YouTube’s terms and service prohibit users from downloading audio and video, but there are numerous ‘stream-ripping’ sites available on the web that do just that. These services are a thorn in the side of recording labels which consider them a major piracy threat. Some operators of these stream-ripping tools disagree, pointing at the variety of legal use cases instead. At the end of 2020, the operator of one of the largest...
ACE Delivers Major Blow to Spanish Private Torrent Site Scene
After building their sites almost from scratch and then populating them with the right kind of users, private torrent site owners understand the long haul. Private tracker users also tend to be more invested, partly due to a community spirit mostly absent from public sites. For these reasons and more, merging two private sites into one is a fairly rare occurrence. Private torrent trackers HDCity and HD-Spain did have things in common,...
Omi in a Hellcat “Said He’d Kill Me” Pirate IPTV Co-Defendant Tells Court
When the federal government shut down pirate IPTV services owned by Pennsylvania and New Jersey man, Bill Omar Carrasquillo in November 2019, it became one of the most high-profile anti-piracy operations ever conducted in the United States. Under handles including “Omi in a Hellcat” and “Targetin1080p” Carrasquillo publicized almost everything he did on social media, from selling pirate subscriptions and devices, to banking the...
Top Russian Official Thanks Pirates For Enabling Access to ‘Enemy’ Content
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine coupled with retaliatory measures and dangerous brinkmanship threatens to destabilize the entire planet. When a broad coalition of countries imposed sanctions on Russia last year, the goal was to limit Putin’s ability to wage war without resorting to war itself. Sanctions were ostensibly crafted to curtail military capability while meting out punishment to Russia’s elite. They were never likely to deliver...
U.S. Identifies Top Pirate Sites and Other ‘Notorious Markets’
Every year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes a list of ‘notorious markets’ that facilitate online piracy and related intellectual property crimes. Drawing on input from copyright holders, the report includes a non-exclusive overview of sites and services that are believed to be involved in piracy or counterfeiting. For more than a decade we have covered the online part of the report. Traditionally,...
