Anna’s Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction
Anna’s Archive is a meta-search engine for shadow libraries that allows users to find pirated books and other related sources. The site launched in the fall of 2022, just days after Z-Library was targeted in a U.S. criminal crackdown, to ensure continued availability of ‘free’ books and articles to the broader public. Late last year, Anna’s Archive expanded its offering by making information from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database...
Cloudflare Blocks Pirate Sites After Web Sheriff Filed Laundry List of Violations
Retelling a few funny stories about the early antics of Web Sheriff might be quite fun. At least until the realization that was around sixteen years ago when the internet wasn’t facing a serious threat of censorship and regulation. So much has changed since then it would be difficult to recapture the essence of those stories today. However, the Web Sheriff’s plan to board and then scuttle The Pirate Bay stands out as a watershed...
U.S. Universities Warn Students about Limewire and Kazaa… in 2024
At the turn of the century, piracy was booming at university campuses across America and far beyond. Seemingly unlimited broadband connections and the presence of many tech-savvy students provided an ideal breeding ground for the rapid expansion of the file-sharing craze. Napster provided the spark and when that shut down, other software applications including Kazaa, LimeWire, and BitTorrent, fueled the fire in the years to come. HEOA...
Sony’s Ancient Lawsuit vs. Cheat Device Heads in Right Direction – Sony’s Defeat
When today’s home video gaming market took its first tentative baby steps thanks to more affordable hardware in the early 1980s, the details of Sony’s lawsuit against Datel would’ve been dismissed as outrageous. This was a time of experimentation; one that thrived on the energy of pushing unimaginably incapable hardware by today’s standards, to perform in unexpected ways that often exceeded manufacturers’ expectations. In some cases,...
Popular Pirate Site Animeflix Shuts Down ‘Voluntarily’
With dozens of millions of monthly visits, Animeflix positioned itself as one of the most popular anime piracy portals. The site also has an active Discord community of around 35k members, who actively participate in discussions, art competitions, even a chess tournament. Target: Animeflix While rightsholders take no offense at these side-projects, the site’s core business was streaming pirated videos. That hasn’t gone unnoticed; last...
OpenAI Wants New York Times to Show How Original Its Copyrighted Articles Are
Starting last year, various rightsholders began filing lawsuits against companies that develop AI models. The list of complainants includes record labels, book authors, visual artists, and newspapers, including the New York Times. These rightsholders all object to the presumed use of their work to train AI models without proper compensation. The New York Times lawsuit targets OpenAI and Microsoft and is steadily moving forward. OpenAI...
