Paris Court Kicks Off New Football Season with Multi-Intermediary Piracy Blocking Orders
While site blocking efforts were a novelty in France a few years ago, they have since transformed into a streamlined annual ritual. Ahead of each new football season, broadcaster Canal+ goes to the Paris Judicial Court, requesting site blocking orders to stop pirate streaming sites and services. Over several years, these blocking requests have grown from simple ISP blocks to cover DNS resolvers, CDN providers, VPN services, and search...
EU Study: Block Live Sports Piracy in 30 Minutes, Across DNS Resolvers, VPNs and CDNs
For years, rightsholders have demanded urgent and decisive action from the European Commission, to tackle live-streaming piracy of live sports and events. The EU heard these calls and in 2023 it published a targeted recommendation, “encouraging” member states to introduce measures to facilitate prompt takedowns of live streams. This advice was largely seen as a disappointment by rightsholders, since it was not binding. While some EU...
Japanese Police Arrest NYAA ‘First Uploader,’ But Not by Watching the Swarm
For many years, NYAA has been heralded as one of the top sources for anime content, serving an audience of millions of users. The site was launched more than two decades ago and the brand is still going strong today, as it’s traditionally one of the most visited torrent sites. NYAA’s popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed by rightsholders. The MPA previously targeted the site’s GitHub repo, although that was later restored. Additionally,...
YggTorrent Teases a Comeback in September, Weeks After Arrests
YggTorrent was France’s largest torrent community, home to more than 10 million registered members before it shut down in March following a devastating hack. The operators threw in the towel, and in July the French Gendarmerie arrested twelve people it accused of running the operation. However, someone apparently still sees value in the brand. Until recently, visitors to yggtorrent.org landed on a domain sale pitch. The domain name,...
Broadcaster Wins Broad U.S. Blocking Injunction Covering Pirate Sites That Don’t Exist Yet
While the U.S. doesn’t have a dedicated site blocking law yet, it is certainly possible to take out pirate sites and services through court-ordered injunctions. A recent federal lawsuit filed in a Florida federal court, shows that this can result in a sweeping piracy blocking that does real damage to the targeted platforms. The case was originally filed by the Mexican broadcaster TelevisaUnivision (TU) in early June. The case was...
European Space Agency Website Exploited to Advertise Shady IPTV Services
The Cosmos portal is one of the most active corners of the European Space Agency’s website. Run by ESA’s Science Program, it hosts mission-support pages and public data archives for Gaia, Euclid, XMM-Newton, and dozens of other missions, backed by a science archive that now runs to more than a petabyte of data. European Space IPTV Recommendations This valuable archive provides key information for researchers and, more recently, it...
