Supreme Court Blow: ISP Bill Payers Aren’t Piracy Police or Instantly Liable
Voltage Pictures and parent Voltage Holdings are among the most active companies in the file-sharing settlement market, and by now, the model is well known. 1. Begin by monitoring BitTorrent swarms where the companies’ movies are being shared without authorization. 2. After capturing the IP addresses and other relevant data relating to alleged infringers, persuade a court to order local ISPs to hand over their customers’ personal...
Sony Music Goes After Piracy Portal ‘Hikari-no-Akari’
Hikari-no-Akari (HnA) is one of those specialized pirate sites that has managed to build up a dedicated audience over the years. The music download portal, which links to externally hosted files, has been operating for well over a decade and currently draws more than a million monthly visits. In addition to the public-facing part of the site, HnA also has a private forum and Discord channel. These have been notoriously difficult to...
DoodStream’s Traffic Takes a Battering as Hollywood Lawsuit Takes Its Toll
In 2022, it was public knowledge that the MPA had its eye on video hosting and streaming service DoodStream. When the MPA’s top lawyer called the site out a year later, DoodStream’s operators may have underestimated how significant that was. What followed was a copyright infringement lawsuit, filed at the Delhi High Court in India, DoodStream’s home turf. DoodStream Ordered to Remove All Content Owned By The Plaintiffs The details of...
LaLiga Demands €450 After ISPs Log Subscribers’ Visits to Pirate Servers
When news began to break in early March, indicating that Spain’s most powerful football league had been authorized by a local court to track down people who simply viewed pirate streams, the story made for puzzling reading. Claims in the media, that this related to pirate IPTV subscribers, spread like wildfire. That benefited LaLiga’s deterrent messaging campaign but lacked any basis in truth. That prompted a corrective statement by...
Pirate Streaming Giant FMovies Hasn’t Updated in a Week
With more than half a billion site visits in just three months, pirate streaming site FMovies is seen as a major threat by Hollywood. The pirate site rivals legal streaming platforms such as Disney+ in web traffic and has become the poster child for rejuvenated site blocking proposals in the U.S. Congress. Pressure Mounts To illustrate the brazenness of the site, lawmakers in Congress got a demo of the site from MPA’s Senior Executive...
UK ISPs Blocked 7,000+ Piracy Domains in the First Six Months of 2024
Next month will mark the 13th anniversary of the first site blocking injunction in the UK. Action by the major Hollywood studios against Usenet indexing site Newzbin led to ISP BT being ordered to block the service. That was just the beginning and in most cases today, major UK ISPs including BT, Virgin Media, and Sky, are supportive of site blocking requests and happily carry them out, despite increasing complexity. UK Site Blocking...
