Yout Counters RIAA in Court, Quoting Lyrics & Highlighting YouTube’s Absence
At the end of 2020, the operator of one of the largest YouTube rippers took the unprecedented step of taking the music industry to court. Yout.com’s Johnathan Nader was fed up with a bombardment of DMCA takedown requests and alleged defamatory claims. In response, he sued the RIAA, asking the federal court in Connecticut to declare his service non-infringing. The RIAA and other music groups had been actively trying to remove so-called...
Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 05/29/2023
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources. This week we have three newcomers on the list. “John Wick: Chapter 4”, which came out as a high-quality pirate release, is the most downloaded title. The most...
Music Company Asks Google to Delist ‘YouTube Downloader’ Wikipedia Article
A few years ago, the RIAA started targeting YouTube ripping sites by sending relatively rare takedown requests to Google. Instead of the usual DMCA copyright notices, the music group asked the search engine to remove various URLs for alleged violations of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. The delisting requests are supposed to make it harder for people to find ‘YouTube MP3 download’ sites in search results. However, the...
A BitTorrent Client WebUI Shouldn’t Be Shared With The Entire Internet
The word ‘open’ in a connected world can be something positive. Open source, for example, or open library. On other occasions the opposite can be true; unnecessary ports left open on a router springs to mind. For millions of people using devices that appear to configure themselves, whether something is open or closed is irrelevant. If a device immediately works as promised, oftentimes that’s good enough. The problem with some...
2.5 Billion Visits: ACE Targets 9anime Among Several Pirate Anime Sites
In the face of legislation designed to thwart its growth, seizures, prosecutions, dozens of arrests and countless prison sentences have done little to prevent piracy. Anti-piracy enforcement actions, including dozens by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, have taken hundreds of sites out of the game. That’s a solid base for arguing that piracy volumes could’ve been much worse without so much enforcement. The reality is that...
Court Orders Instagram to Expose Pirates, Boot Their Accounts, and Purge URLs
Similar to any other online platform that deals with user-generated content, Instagram processes copyright complaints on a daily basis. Most of these arrive in the form of DMCA notices, in which rightsholders requests the removal of a specific image, video, or URL. The number of removals runs in the hundreds of thousands during a typical month, without getting noticed by the public at large, but if Instagram users continue to post...